Grokking Twitter: Presence, Scope, and Permanence

Should we care about twitter? I addressed this question back in February over on my IP Inferno blog but I think I did a lousy job. Since then I have used (and thought about) the service a lot more. And I have increasingly found myself in conversations with my fellow over-40 digerati trying to explain why they should care about twitter...

And in the last week both the San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today have published articles about twitter and neither of them really get to the heart of why twitter is important and why we should care.

Stowe Boyd offers an amusing rant on the USA Today article but while he correctly points out that author Andrew Kantor does not "...understand the benefits -- or even the possibility -- of moving to a flow state of interaction..." Stowe doesn't explain what this means or why it is important.

So in the spirit of Time Magazine's Person of the Year I have taken it upon myself to explain twitter...

As the Internet has moved from obscurity to a staple of our society over the past two decades there has been an explosion in new communications tools. A useful way to think about this explosion is to think about communications around three characteristics: presence, scope, and permanence. Each of these characteristics, as I will go on to explain, has a continuum of modalities and each communication tool has optimized for performing within a particular part of that cube.

PRESENCE
Is it necessary for the participants in the communication to be present at the time the communication is created? For example if you are taking a class, you need to be present in the classroom to get value from the lecture. But you can read a book thousands of years after it was written. The recipient must be present to receive the lecture but is usually not present when a book is written. Similarly, a phone call is a synchronous form of communications -- both speaker and listener must be present. Voice mail is asynchronous -- the listener need not be present at the time the recording is made and the speaker need not be present at the time of listening.

SCOPE
Classrooms engage a defined group of people in a conversation, newspapers engage an undefined group, a phone call typically involves just two people. Scope is about the number of people involved, the relationship between those people, and the privacy of the communication.

PERMANENCE
Information has a shelf life (or even a half life). Some information is valuable for thousands of years, other information is valuable for only a moment.

Think about the kinds of communications tools that we commonly use, applying these three characteristics:

PHONE CALL
Synchronous communication (presence required), the scope is typically one-one, and (short of a recording) it is a medium best used for information of little permanence.

EMAIL
Email is asynchronous, allowing for long delays between exchanges. The scope can be one-one or one-many but there are few facilities for managing complex many-many communications on a topic. As information can be stored and retrieved for later use, it can be used for topics with some permanence though various limitations generally cause users to move to another medium for longer term storage of documents or issues of more permanence.

IM
Instant messaging is mostly synchronous, though it can have delays in replies. It is typically a one-one communication and the information usually has a very short period of value.

BLOG
Like email, a blog is asynchronous. The scope is typically one-many although commenting facilities can make them into more of a conversation. Information of value for a long time (though perhaps not decades) can be stored on blogs and accessed by a wide variety of readers.

So what is twitter? It is asynchronous (although there can be more value if both speaker and listener are present); the most valuable uses are when the communications are within a particular defined group (friends, a company); and the information has a very short term value.

Examples:
I might tweet "Headed out for a soy chai, anyone want to go?" -- this emphasizes the value of presence, the fact that I am broadcasting to people within a defined group (my office), and has a very momentary value (miss it by 5 minutes and I am already gone).

Another example (from Stowe Boyd) Chris Pirillo points to an article written by Paul Graham claiming Microsoft is dead: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html -- this is completely asynchronous, anytime I find out about it, it is valuable to me. There is little definition in the group (other than perhaps interest), and the information has some permanence.

So two things that emerge in looking at twitter in this way -- First it has an interesting ability to be useful over a range of states but tends toward group communications that are impermanent and where presence can add value but isn't necessary. Second that it complements other communication types without replacing them -- indicating that there is a place in the ecosystem for this type of communication.

Another interesting thing that you can ask about twitter is whether you can compare the role it serves in online communications with some similar off-line communication. Within every social group there are adhoc communications that serve the same purposes that twitter serves in an online world. Announcing that I am going out to get a cup of chai tea, or people sharing an interest in an article happens all the time within social groups. The difference online is that time and space become less of a constraint for allowing these group communications to occur. This is the role that twitter is serving.

Cult Of The Amateur

Perhaps it is the poet lost inside me, aching to be free. But I find this post, at so many levels, to be the perfect response to Andrew Keen's hopeless "cult of the amateur" and a subtle message to the industrial media complex about what they don't get about how the Internet is changing everything...

http://illuminaught.livejournal.com/29278.html

Get it?

SF Chronicle You Have Our Attention

A case of cause and effect? Just a week ago, Tim O'Reilly was opining that the SF Chronicle was "in trouble." Noting that he hates to "...play Valleywag..." Tim goes on to say that Phil Bronstein (editor-in-chief at the Chron) held an emergency meeting with staff in which he stated that the "news business is broken, and no one knows how to fix it."

And then this week, he started to fix it.

What is it that local journalistic endeavors can do better than anyone else? Provide coverage of whatever makes their own local scene special and different. The San Jose Mercury News could have (but hasn't) made the tech industry their special beat. But in the last week, the SF Chronicle has been making this weird thing called "web 2.0" and what author Andrew Keen is calling "the cult of the amateur" their special beat.

Today it was a story about something just 11 days old -- justin.tv -- which is capturing the interest of the technorati but who would of thought that mainstream news readers would be interested? The Chronicle made their story on Justin and his fellow nerds front page news.

Crazy? Or brilliant? Sure, most San Franciscans are like people in the rest of the country -- interested in the Iraq war, local politics, and weekend sales. But what makes this area DIFFERENT from the rest of the country is people like Justin and the crazy new companies that get created from their ideas. This is the future of local journalism -- uncovering and writing about what is special and unique about their local area.

As one of my old journalist friends used to say "three is a trend" -- the article about Justin.tv wasn't the only interesting piece in the Chron this week.

On Monday it was Dan Fost's article on phenom twitter.

On Thursday it was Dan's coverage of Kathy Sierra.

For me, this kind of coverage makes the Chronicle relevant again. It makes me visit their website and talk about them and maybe even spend $.25 to buy the paper as I make my way onto BART in the morning (the current discount for BART morning commuters).

And I think it shows the way for other local papers -- dig into what YOUR region is known for, or what you think is special. Maybe you can build an online audience, maybe you can get your local readers interested again, maybe you can be relevant again in a world where you can no longer just re-run AP articles that we are already getting on our Blackberrys...

New Communications Forum

Listening to Shel Holtz wrap up the "New Communications Forum" event in Las Vegas. By all accounts the Society for New Communications Research has put on a great show -- numerous attendees have said to me that it is the most useful and interesting conference that they have attended in years.

A few attendees, however, have said to me "gee, not much new here." An observation -- there are two kinds of attendees at this conference: a group of people eager to learn about social media and a group of people who are already engaged in inventing social media. For the first group, this was a great conference and exactly what conferences should be about -- getting enthusiastic experts in front of eager learners. But the conference didn't do as well at serving people who are already engaged and who want to take ideas and debates deeper by interacting with their peers.

This last point does not detract in any way in my mind from the value of the conference and the high quality speakers, sessions, and organization of the event. But rather, it is an observation that as an industry we still are struggling with how to create the right kind of event for experts to cooperatively advance knowledge and initiatives in their industries.

FooCamp, BarCamp, and Social Media club are good experiments, but here is a challenge to conference organizers -- can a single show serve both audiences? I would argue that it HAS to in order to work -- because you need the experts in order to have interesting content for the learners. But the experts then have to derive value from their participation.

Elimination of Time and Space

Great post by Doc Searls on what he calls "giant zero journalism" but which might be better understood by saying that the Internet is in the process of eliminating time and space as issues for journalism, get used to it.

Ostensibly the piece is about citizen journalism -- is it good, bad, or just different. But really it is about the mechanism by which the Internet as a technology disrupts existing businesses by changing the very laws of physics by which they operate.

In other words, when time and space are issues in the gathering and dissemination of a news product, the role of professionals and institutions is much more important than in the world we are moving toward... one in which every person can report instantaneously to everyone else on the thing that is right in front of our faces.

So what is the role of the professional and the institution when space and time drifts into inconsequential inconvenience rather than defining dominance for an industry? At best, it is a role that will change dramatically...

China Basin

Just walked through the China Basin building down on Berry Street (down by AT&T Park in SF). The last time I was there was in 1996 when I was working for CMP Media on a project called NetGuide Live:

"Building off NetGuide Magazine's reputation for expert information and quality delivery, CMP launched the first true guide to the Internet, NetGuide Live..."

or as we fondly called it back in 1996 "Project Gulliver." Ah, a trip through memory lane indeed. Whatever did happen to Beth Haggerty? Google says... InfoSeek, president of InfoRocket, CEO of LiveAdvice, and then it sort of runs out... Newt Barrett? SCORE Volunteer, Senior Vice President of the Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce... He had left CMP to buy and run Southwest Florida Business Magazine, which he apparently sold to Gulfshore Media in 2001. So many other folks from those days. Still in touch with Dan Ruby and Dan Brekke anyone else out there reading this?

2 Stars for Peace

Just heard about this incredible idea -- make Israel and Palestine into US States... Here is a brief article explaining the idea and pointing to a book by Martinne Rothblatt -- The Case for Using U.S. Statehood to Achieve Lasting Peace in the Middle East

Party like its 1999

Revision 3 @ Slide
Originally uploaded by valleywagprime.

One of the things that is different this time around is that Silicon Valley has its own party venues... during the bubble we had to crash established silicon valley or san francisco haunts with our Internet craze... now people like Jonathan Abrams have started bars like slide... leading to Internet parties like the one I attended last night for Revision 3 (some sort of "new" Internet TV thing)... But some things stay the same. A bunch of geeks standing around in a bar trying to talk about technology over loud music looks the same in 2007 as in 1999...

Matt Damon == Capt Kirk ?? WTF!

Please say its not so. Please say that they have it wrong... Could it really be true that they have cast Matt Damon as Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise!!?? Ahhh... he hasn't been cast yet! Shooting hasn't begun!! Its not too late for us to launch a "please not Matt!" campaign... IGN writes:

Confirming rumors that have been making the rounds for some months now, IGN has learned that Oscar winner Matt Damon is indeed in talks with Paramount about playing the role of Jim Kirk, previously immortalized onscreen by Emmy winner William Shatner.

In TALKS... ok. Deep breath. Titanic boy [oops Dan reminds me this is Leonardo...] Good Will Hunting Boy [doesn't have the same ring to it] doesn't necessarily get to sinkshoot [huh?] the Enterprise... and what else did they say? King Kong's Adrien Brody as Spock!? WTF!!?

For the part of Kirk's Vulcan first officer Mr. Spock, IGN has been told that none other than Oscar winner Adrien Brody (King Kong, The Pianist) is in talks with Paramount to play the role. If cast, Brody would succeed Leonard Nimoy in a role that forever marked Nimoy's career.

OK... "if cast" the said... deep breath... OK now the campaign is "Please NOT Damon and Adrien!"

Jim Zumbo Dixie Chick'd

I am not a hunter. But I respect their right to hunt. And to express their views about hunting. That seems to be what sets me apart from the "mainstream" of the gun culture in this country.

Jim Zumbo has been a lifelong hunter and a spokesperson for this sport. Recently he decided to express his opinion about assault rifles. On his blog (on Outdoor Magazine's website but here is a link since that site has been removed) he wrote:

I call them “assault” rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I’ll go so far as to call them “terrorist” rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are “tackdrivers.”

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I’ve always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don’t use assault rifles. We’ve always been proud of our “sporting firearms.”

Because of his comments, reports the Washington Post, Jim Zumbo has been attacked by the hunting community, he has lost his job as a writer for Outdoor Magazine, Remington has canceled their business relationship with him, the Outdoor Channel has canceled his show... and the NRA has severed its ties to him.

What happened to an America in which we are willing to accept differences of opinion, embrace diversity, defend each other's right to free speech?

This week my wife and I watched "Shut Up and Sing" - the documentary on how the Dixie Chicks were treated by the country music industry when Nicole, their lead singer, said on a stage in London that she "...was ashamed that our President is from Texas." The personal attacks included death threats. Worth watching, by the way, if you want to see an ugly side of America.

I am personally very disturbed by this lack of tolerance. I believe it is the greatest threat to our way of life -- not "terrorism."

Why People Wear Suits

Blog Maverick Mark Cuban has hit a nerve with his post "Why I Don't Wear a Suit and Can't Figure Out Why Anyone Does!" I know I couldn't help but respond but I was shocked to see that I was comment number 328... So I thought I'd post my comment here as well:

A few years ago, after the dot com bubble burst, I was in New York City and someone there said to me "I hear that people are wearing suits in Silicon Valley again." He said it in a very smug superior way, as if this was proof that some deviant culture (Internet, Silicon Valley, tech folks, etc) had been entirely wiped out by the civilized world. So I think you are dead-on that wearing a suit has become, for some of those that wear them, a symbol of superiority.

But there is another simpler explanation -- inertia. Suit wearing evolved in an age when most people had to do hard physical labor that would destroy nice clothes -- so people that wore them were saying "I don't have to do hard physical labor." Clothes as an indicator of class. Over time, suits became the uniform for office workers and as these ranks grew, the reason changed from the initial objective of differentiation to one of assimilation.

What is interesting is that in whatever culture you visit, people tend to dress alike -- Its what the anthrophologist Victor Turner calls liminality. Human beings want to be included. There is safety in being part of the pack. So we dress alike (speak alike, eat alike...) in order to show that we belong and are not dangerous outsiders.

I bet your employees dress like you.

Internet Explorer Losing Ground?

As someone who has struggled to make web pages look beautiful on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, I found this story on ars technica hard to avoid reading... "Internet Explorer loses ground to Firefox, Safari... but "the rest of the story" as Paul Harvey liked to say is that there are conflicting numbers from a variety of tracking efforts and so no one really knows...

Suffice to say that Microsoft's Internet Explorer is still somewhere around 80% of the market for browsers. The introduction of IE 7 hasn't helped them, but they are still the dominant player.

But in a related note on the ars technica site there is data that shows that Firefox isn't growing either. So who is gaining marketshare? Safari.

How could that be? The only people that use Safari are Macintosh users. Could this be an early indication that Apple is finally gaining marketshare? And how long before these users abandon Safari -- I like to complain about Internet Explorer but Safari's support for W3 standards is even more abysmal.

On a related note, I have some advice for people trying to decide which browser to support when working on their web site compatibility tests. Don't forget to test Firefox on Mac. Just testing Firefox on Windows isn't sufficient. And while the total number of users of Firefox on Mac OS X may be small - they are a very influential group. I just met with a company yesterday that has a very popular website and they have done NO testing on Firefox for Mac OS X. How can that be, I asked? And I showed them a very nasty bug that they have in their product -- just on that platform... They thought they were done when the tested on Windows. Don't get caught in the same trap!

Twitter: An interesting experiment

I have been playing with a new web service called "twitter" today -- http://www.twitter.com

The interesting (obvious?) idea behind this service is that people want to blather about what they are doing all through the day and that other people want to know... So you can create a stream of your comments, thoughts, or reports on your activities and this creates a stream. Here is mine:

http://www.twitter.com/tshelton

Then other people can subscribe to your stream and get reports on what you are up to... you can even "nudge" other people who haven't updated and find out what they are up to

The Road Ahead (Looking Back)

At Davos this week Bill Gates predicted that broadcast television as we know it today will be radically transformed over the next 5 years. It reminded me of something Bill said about technology and predictions...

"People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten."

So said Bill Gates at the beginning of the Afterword for the revised edition of his mid-1990s book "The Road Ahead." It was in part an apology that some of the things he had predicted in his book hadn't happened... yet.

Looking back at the book today is interesting though. Elsewhere in the book he wrote:

"Within twenty years virtually everything I've talked about in this book will be broadly available in developed countries..."

With few exceptions (electronic wallets anyone?) the predictions made by Bill turn out to be too timid 10 years later. So in half of the 20 years everything he predicted has come about.

Does this mean that 5 years is too short or too long? Either way, if I were in broadcast television today, comments like this from Bill Gates would scare the s** out of me. Even 10 years isn't very long to rethink your entire industry.

Berkeley Local News

At the Personal Bee we are experimenting with local news aggregation. Here is a first experiment, for Berkeley California:

http://www.personalbee.com/berkeley%20buzz

Pumpkin Launching: Time's Person of the Year

Since Time has named me (and You) the person of the year for all the great videos we have uploaded, I thought I'd better do my part, so here is a video of Andy's Halloween party:

http://one.revver.com/watch/123185

Yes, that is a trebuchet - we built it the weekend before the party. It is designed to have as much as a 1000 lb counterweight, able to hurl small pumpkins 700 feet! We never achieved the optimal configuration (couldn't get enough weight) but still were hurling pumpkins between 500 and 600 feet...

STOP CALLING ME

And I mean YOU Mr. Candidate! I am SO TIRED of having my phone ring with a recorded message from one candidate or another. DON PERATA YOU JUST LOST MY VOTE. And I am keeping track. Anyone who dares to use an automated message dialing machine to harass me LOSES MY VOTE. Join with me in this campaign. Let's send a message to these idiots that spamming us with phone calls doesn't pay!

Google Enters Another Market (Custom Search)

Everyone on the Internet fears the day that Google will enter their market. Today the fear was tangible for Rollyo and Swicki. The Financial Times reported that Google will launch tomorrow (Tuesday) "...a customisable search engine that users can carry on their own blogs and other websites..." and compares the new service to Rollyo.

Matthew Ingram carries the photo of a shark on his post about this development. Ingram points out that when Google entered the calendar market, competitor Kiko gave up and sold themselves. He asks whether or not this was the right decision -- pointing to Paul Graham's post at the time "Google Does Not Render Resistance Futile."

I find myself agreeing with Paul and Rex Hammock puts his finger on it when he writes:

There’s a social networking aspect of Rollyo that probably won’t be a part of the Google product, however the Google product will likely offer publishers, including bloggers, an instant way to monetize narrow search in the Adsense program they’re already participating in.

For all of the things that Google has done right in technology, they have done very little well in the category of social. It isn't too late for them to learn but if history is any guide, they will miss the importance of the social network in search as well.

And frankly having a strong competitor forces you to do the two things which you most need to do in any case when you are a small business -- innovate constantly and be 500% better than your larger competition. Then Google can educate the market about why the market needs your product and then you can deliver on the market's expectations. That is what YouTube did.

Please help with your critique

Stop what you are doing.

Click on this link to the Personal Bee home page:

http://www.personalbee.com

Then email or comment on this message with your thoughts about what we are doing right and wrong. Tell me, from looking at the home page, what business you think we are in. Tell me how you would use this and how you would get others to use it...

thanks!

Ted

Diebold Delivers Georgia for Republicans

In a follow up to his story on the 2004 election, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen," Robert Kennedy brings us, in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, specific details on how Diebold has rigged voting in Georgia, with the confessions of a Diebold employee, Chris Hood. "Will The Next Election Be Hacked," is a frightening article that shows exactly how far some corrupt politicians are willing to go to insure that they keep control of our government out of the hands of the people. Folks, our democracy is in danger.