On Iran, Technology and Social Media
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 | Innovation | Comments
There is a reason we value art and those who create it. I could write 3 or 4 hundred words about how technology and Social Media are making it impossible for despots to control the message… or I could just point you to the justSignal FreeIran site and get out of the way and let Peter Himmelman (who I’m proud to know) use his art to say just about everything that needs to be said.
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Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 | Analysis, Uncategorized | Comments
You would assume – since I’m the founder and CEO of a company that is selling a Social Media product, justSignal – that I’m a huge fan of “Social Media”. Perhaps I’m even a Social Media Expert. You’d assume I was going to tell you that Social Media will change everything. You’d assume that I’d tell you that Social Media will force companies to fundamentally change how they do business – they will all have to love their customers, engage them in conversation, make sure their every need is met. You’d assume that I’d be creating products that were directed at companies willing to make the culture change required to excel at Social Media – variously described as a culture of listening or a culture of engagement. You might assume any or all of those things… but you’d be wrong.
Social Media is mired in a massive hype cycle. All of the benefits are massively overstated, the value proposition is stated in only the most vague of terms and everyone is certain they know exactly what the outcome will be – the problem is, they can’t all be right. So, what is someone supposed to think, and why?
So, in an effort to clarify my position for you (and me) – I’m going to walk you through my point of view. You don’t need to like it, and you certainly are not required to agree; but I do hope this gives you some things to think about.
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Friday, May 15th, 2009 | cosinity | Comments
I’ve been tracking FollowFriday for a while now and using justSignal to power FollowFridays.com – and today it really, really looked like FollowFriday had jumped the shark.
Here’s the thing. If you compose your FollowFriday tweets like:
#followfriday @joe @mary @steve @beth
You really aren’t adding any value to FollowFriday – as a matter of fact I’d argue you are just creating noise. Here is why. The simple reality is that I only follow about 10 or 15 people who I know well enough, trust enough, and have enough of a complete relationship that I would simply follow someone they told me to. And odds are I’ve been following those people for some time now and follow nearly everyone they would recommend.
So your @username missle for FollowFriday has no effect on me. I’m not following them… my guess is very few others will either.
But, if you compose your FollowFriday tweet like:
#followfriday Follow @micah because he came up with this and @strebel because he has mad design skills
I can determine if I want to follow those people based on WHY you follow them… not just because you said so. Even more powerful is the ability to head over to FollowFridays.com and enter a filter on the Tweet Stream (click on “filter this content”) for “cool” or “design” or whatever it is you are looking for and see JUST the FollowFriday Tweets with that word in them.
Today, based on what I was seeing and hearing it appeared that the majority of the tweets for FollowFriday looked like the first example. If that were the case – I’d have to say FollowFriday had outlived it’s usefulness.
Conveniently – because we us justSignal to track FollowFriday – we have access to each and every tweet sent about FollowFriday. So I decided to rely on data… and here it is:
NOTE: Tweets of Value is defined as any tweet that does not contain all @names and hash tags. Raw hour by hour data posted after the jump.
As you can see – while a significant number of the tweets (about 20% overall) were just hash tags and @names the vast majority actually contained useful words (hopefully) describing why we should follow the people being recommended.
I’ll grant you that we did not perform any kind of semantic analysis on these tweets trying to determine intent to state why someone should be followed, but I’m still pleasantly surprised that a consistent 80% of the tweets were not all @names and hash tags.
Make sure you tell everyone – only do FollowFriday recommendations with reasons… it is much more effective and keeps FollowFriday valuable.
One other thing I’ll take a moment to mention (shameless plug) – How cool is it that you can think of something interesting to discover from Social Media data and immediately be able to go answer that question? That is part of the power of justSignal… check it out.
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Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 | cosinity | Comments
Twitter made a change to how @ replies are handled yesterday and the response has been, well, loud. Essentially you used to be able to see @ replies to everyone you followed, even if you didn’t follow the sender. Under Twitter’s new rules you only get to see @ replies to people you follow IF you follow the sender.
To many this may seem like a trivial change, but to those who use Twitter to discover interesting people… it is a very big deal. There has been rampant speculation (ignited, near as I can tell, by this post from Jesse Stay of SocialToo) that this change “kills” Follow Friday.
I’m including my comment on Jesse’s post here:
Ok… just to clear this one up. I checked (as you know I use justSignal to track Follow Friday for http://followfridays.com).
I have every Follow Friday tweet from 4/13 – 5/13 (last 30 days). There are a total of 771,244 Tweets. Of those 220,166 BEGIN with @username. That is 28.5% of the Tweets.
So definitely NOT most… but a very significant percentage.
Also, we’ve added User Filters to justSignal on FollowFridays. What does that mean? You can filter the total Follow Friday Tweet Stream by what it is about people you want to discover. Want to find PR folks to follow… add a User Filter for PR…
Follow Friday is most certainly NOT dead.
The short version of my take on this is that there are much, much better ways to find interesting people to follow than to rely on the people you follow to tell you about them. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the power of recommendations, but I also believe in the power of context.
You see, my fictional Twitter Friend Joe is really, really into late 13th century birth control. I – for whatever it is worth – find his updates about walrus skin condoms entertaining. Beyond that Joe and I don’t have much in common. There is nothing atypical about this Twitter relationship… in fact, if I had to bet with my own money I would guess that 90% of Twitter relationships are pretty similar to this. So, Joe’s Follow Friday recommendations are only valuable to me in a very, very narrow window of my interests… so if I don’t see them all am I really missing anything?
What I really want is to see the recommendations from the 10% of the people I follow with whom I have a much broader affinity AND people recommending others because they are really smart about (CONTEXT). Whatever my context of interest happens to be right now.
That is why we’ve added User Filters to the justSignal Tracker on FollowFridays to allow you to filter the live Twitter Stream for your context, your 10%, or whatever else makes Follow Friday work for you. That is what we call – Getting Signal.
Multicasting & @ Replies:
UPDATE: 05/13/2009 @ 4:10PM Pacific Time
I blew it… the below examples misrepresent what the @ reply option did. I’m not going to redact it or change it… because:
- I blew it… and that happens and is ok with me.
- The example of Tweet distribution as it relates to a multicast system vs. a non-multicast system is still 100% relevant and correct.
END UPDATE
Biz made an update to the Twitter blog letting us know that the change to the @ reply system wasn’t really about user confusion – but a technical issue. This is a reason that actually makes sense. It makes sense for one simple reason – the “web” and Twitter were not built to efficiently implement multicasting. The problem with these @ replies is they create a burst of Tweet traffic… why?
If you create a normal Follow Friday tweet like:
#followfriday @joe @mary @steve @mike @larry @meg @biz @wally
That tweet will be sent to joe, mary, steve, mike, larry, meg, biz and wally. Let’s say each of them are followed by 400 people. And let’s say 60% of those people have “show me all replies to those I follow” checked.
This tweet will be sent 1,928 times:
- 8 – The original 8
- 240 – Joe’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
- 240 – Mary’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
- 240 – Steve’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
- 240 – Mike’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
- 240 – Larry’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
- 240 – Meg’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
- 240 – Biz’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
- 240 – Wally’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
Now lets say we create the following Follow Friday tweet:
#followfriday @scoblizer @mashable @aplusk @oprah @cnnbrk
Again, let’s round things off and say each of these people are followed by 700,000 each and 60% have “show me all replies to those I follow” checked.
This tweet will be sent 2,100,005 times:
- 5 – The original 5
- 420,o0- – Scoble’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
- 420,000 – Mashable’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
- 420,000 – AplusK’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
- 420,000 – Oprah’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
- 420,000 – CNNBRK’s followers who’ve checked show me all replies
YIKES!!! Now imagine that tweet getting re-tweeted a couple hundred times. This is both why Twitter (I’m speculating here but with a high degree of confidence) “edited” trending topics to exclude Follow Friday AND why the @ reply change was made.
Why Multicast Matters:
Today Twitter (because they don’t implement efficient multicasting and instead rely on publish/subscribe architectures) has to effectively send each of those 2,100,005 tweets serially, one at a time. This consumes massive amounts of computing resources.
Multicast would allow them to send it once to many destinations – thereby removing that bottleneck from their scalability and tweet processing systems.
Those of you who are familiar with large scale real-time communications systems (i.e., VoIP) will immediately recognize this problem – it was central to creating a large scale VoIP service platform in the late 1990’s. The VoIP community resolved it (not without much effort) and now a very small system can efficiently multicast hundreds of millions of status updates/changes per hour.
I totaly buy Twitter pulling @ replies due to technical issues – as exposed by Follow Friday combined with celebrity adoption and massive follower counts. But if you are going to be the real-time web backbone disabling useful things because they create too much load instead of implementing a more efficient architecture isn’t the right answer.
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Thursday, May 7th, 2009 | Innovation, cosinity | Comments
I’ve gone through another one of those spells where I just didn’t write anything here – and to say I’ve been busy isn’t enough – hell I’m always busy.
I also can’t claim lack of interesting content – I could write six really compelling pieces on ASU Startup Weekend alone.
So we’ll just agree that my energy for writing posts took a bit of a vacation… but now I’m back.
Before I get back to my regular banality I need to get a bunch of housekeeping taken care of, so this post will catch you up on the justSignal updates, upgrades and new features.
Details after the jump…
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