Locker Project on GitHub

The Locker Project.

I’m a big fan of Jer, ever since we first met back in ’98, and concocted a partnership that sponsored and supported the growth of Jabber. His new start-up, Sing.ly (where the locker meets the cloud?), is sponsoring the Locker Project, which (I hope) means it gets the benefit of his careful and reasoned approach to open platforms and his vision about a “better open stack”.

On a connected theme, I’d go deeper in Doc Searl’s decade of passion for inverted markets, emerging through and above the awkwardly labeled VRM.  I’d love to have the time to soak up where these guys see things going, but there’s just not enough room in my calendar or (especially) in my brain for this right now!

Color.

So, a part of me winces at the way this product has come to market – it feels contrived and forced, blasting onto the scene with $ugar daddy infused gusto.  Part of me wants more brain cycles to understand the genius(?) behind making an app that only gives users value when/if it’s used by a group, and why it doesn’t leverage the hundreds of millions of geo-tagged base of images stacking up all over the web already.  But, let’s put that “if it were me” musing and grumbling aside.

A bigger part of me would dearly love to have time to be a student of the patterns that a really smart team with a lot of money will instigate into formation, and put a small smart team on the API [I hope, please say it's so, Color people!] – because the value will be in the derivatives, not the app.  A serious run at creating a living geo-social visual collective record of the world is to be admired and deconstructed!

Personally, I’m more intrigued with the notion of my personal location graph of place and time, and doing my own stacking and visualization mashing.  However, that’s in part because I am commercially intrigued with how this might combine with my interest graph to become a superior foundation for local shopping.

But, alas, by brain is happily full, so I’ll just enjoy the ambient awareness that Twitter & Quora occasionally bring to life on these highly divergent new construction zones – one by a craftsman, the other by a master developer.

I'm here with all my friends! (from Barfly)

tag, you’re here

Facebook views the success of photo tagging as one of the most brilliant product moves behind its’ growth. Continuing to seek out and expand on personal hooks that take it deeper into the life and times of users is a central goal of FB’s new product development.  The feature of letting any person check-in their friends to a Place (the way you can tag people in photos) is the most controversial of the released features.  IMHO, Facebook is very unlikely to back off this functionality unless user backlash becomes a ton more prominent.

While the first thing I did when the product lunched was turn off the ability for friends to do this, I think it’s a very smart feature.  I learned awhile ago that the slope towards open life sharing is downward facing and indeed slippery. Facebook gleefully applies just a little more grease with every product release.

From a product viewpoint, the potential for place-based gathering and collaboration is tremendous, and bringing active friend sharing into the mix is a high quality product move – no matter how much I personally view some elements to have stepped over the line [notably, the pre-selected opt-in for applications your friends are using to have access to your location status.]

fun vs. function

Dennis Crowley is right in calling Facebook Places boring, when viewed side-by-side with the engaging experience of Foursquare. For me, Foursquare was JUST beginning the get interesting – it was beginning to reach a level of critical mass to occasionally find a friend unexpectedly nearby, and the content in “tips” was shifting from lame to mildly interesting.

I think it’s already game over for friend discovery.  However, the current user experience of FB Places for attaching comments and “stories” to a place is pretty stale. The “inside Facebook” user experience of Places may be an impediment to success, particularly for such a new visual user experience.

So, will FourSquare’s ability to engage consumers via competitive and fun user experiences be sufficient to sustain its’ growth and create the preferred place for check-in?  FourSquare will have to step up their game on user engagement (over monetization).  How new users introduced to location sharing via FB choose to adopt or ignore the service is mission critical.

Facebook’s Places API presents a double-edged sword in this equation.  On one hand, it allows the aggregation of all check-ins to Facebook’s Places, effectively giving FB the trump card of check-in data consolidation. On the other hand, it opens up a way to “layer” the fun and (potentially) commercially interesting activities on top of location notification to friends outside of Facebook Places.

turning off your friends

Google researcher Paul Adams’ epic discourse on real life social networks nailed what I consider to be a significant shortcoming of the current generation Places check-in. I have a couple of hundred Facebook friends, probably only half of which live in my state, and of those only a fraction of which could give a rat’s derrierre about where I am located day by day.

I’m interested in a more personalized way of sharing my location with friends and businesses I like (and trust); there are a group of friends who I’d like to know where I am when I choose to share it.  Until now, the concept of grouping friends into sub-segments seemed like an intangible effort with little or no return. Perhaps this changes that dynamic.

So for now, Places misses the mark for me as a blunt instrument that fails to capture the nuance of personal location sharing.

*as a sidenote, I’ll blog separately on blog.closely.com on the business impact of Facebook Places.

We’ve grown up to view online business reviews and recommendations as something that gets accumulated into organized sources of browsable content. TripAdvisor and Yelp represent two highly successful cases-in-point of the power of critical mass to reviews.

The dominating model of shopping behavior goes something like this…

search > initial select > search again for opinion to test your decision > transact

As noted in Search Engine Watch, “the search continues because search engines aren’t the consumer’s most trusted source of advice”. As we all know, we’re spending more and more time socially connected.  This creates a new whole stepping off point for shopping behavior. In theory, the potential exists to invert the experience and infuse trust and recommendations into the front end of shopping.

when your friends are always live

So, as the new generation of  live + social + local approaches – will it make these models increasingly obsolete?  It’s creeping up on us – perhaps the most visible example today is seeing your friends instantly react to your Facebook posts from their desktop and mobile positions. Clearly, your social graph is a live organism, becoming more and more ready to add value to your shopping experience every day.

But, do we really believe NextWeb’s headline? “Facebook Acquires NextStop, It’s Lights out for Yelp“. The message is basically that once Facebook turns up it’s Question application for organized Q&A, it will begin accumulating opinion at a breakneck pace, and facilitate personalized opinion content and live Q&A with your social graph.  Combining this initiative with the team who created Nextstop, and you begin to get a picture of how Facebook aims to collect and apply a richer model of relevant opinion content.

inside or out?

Facebook’s bold Open Graph move, to invert itself and be embedded into any web site or service, implies that it’s a neutral party in the question of “where will the consumer prefer to engage”.  To their credit, Yelp boldly stepped forward, with a Microsoftesque “embrace and extend”  approach with this new dev utility.  Yelp is clearly aiming to extend the lead it has with a large base of consumers and their organized opinions. It’s model will allow you to integrate your own social graph and sift and interact with your friends viewpoints, whenever you want.  Best of both worlds is the theory.

Facebook will ratchet up its owned and operated product approach to live question services. As NextWeb implies, Facebook will probably aim to convince consumers to not bother “stepping outside” to the Yelp consumer experience, employing low resistance user experience techniques together with some new tricks (virtual currency, etc.).   Since opinion content is most valuable for a few months to a couple of years (depending on the category) an advantage today can systematically fade with time.

The evolution of both of Yelp and Facebook  on the parallel inside vs. outside paths will indeed be worth watching closely, as a bellwether for the evolution of socially-engaged local shopping.  And, it will presumably shed a leading light onto Facebook’s “neutrality” position and business model.

A few people have been asking about my thoughts on GroupOn.  This post presents some general observations on their business model and the impact on local promotion marketing.  Soon, I’ll take a look at how we view and apply this learning in our business model at Closely.

As a consumer, and as an entrepreneur, I love GroupOn.  They have build real velocity into a large market need and space, executing exceptionally well on a quality business model.   I also am impressed how they have backed their brand strategy with real attention to customer service.  For those not familiar with GroupOn, explore here.

perfect timing

In 2008, consumers began a mega-shift to conservative behavior with their discretionary income.  GroupOn’s proposition hit at the right time, aiming straight into the heart in this shift – offering urban consumers a new way to treat themselves again.  Creating a model of daily deep discount savings to interesting local restaurants, salons and activities, they struck a chord. Delighted by the great new bargain venue, consumers connected themselves together into a large and powerful consumer social list.

GroupOn connects this consumer desire together with lead-starved local businesses who are anxious to pump up their volumes, but cringe at the risks inherent in traditional media spending.  Their business-side innovation comes in the form of a compelling performance-based model, where a business pays out of the proceeds of customer purchases.

social light

Industry analysts point to GroupOn as a next gen social media company.  To me, GroupOn feels more like a contemporary version of a traditional media model.  Let me explain.  Social media is certainly the foundation upon which GroupOn engages their vibrant consumer base.  However, to the participating merchant this is a performance based media buy.  Advertisers buy a distribution slot to GroupOn’s list, which is opaquely retained by GroupOn.  The business gets leads and it’s up to the business to convert those leads into customers and onto their own social lists.  This is a classic third party lead generation proposition.

the group that became an audience

On a related theme, I also don’t consider GroupOn to be about group buying, at least not anymore.  At the outset consumers were socially engaged to share deals with friends in order to hit a purchase threshold before everyone got to share in the deep discount.  Those days are long gone, GroupOn now has a mass local audience in most major metros, removing all group volume “risk”.

There is no disputing the company’s ability to aggregate substantial purchase behavior against deep discounts to interesting places.  However, GroupOn’s scale now positions it as a predictable engine for large scale purchase of discounted products/services. It’s a powerful weapon to be used by a business perhaps once a year, maybe 2-3 times at most.

the new local tour bus?

I find it interesting that GroupOn describes itself as a City Guide of sorts – viewing its product to be the impetus for people to get out and explore more new places. The brand is aiming at a somewhat curatorial style of their featured discounts. At the recent Kelsey conference, GroupOn’s CEO innocently snubbed Valpak with a comment to the effect that those kind of deals wouldn’t fit their brand.

Some restaurant and salon operators have voiced concern that GroupOn is creating a troubling behavior pattern with consumers that works against their ability to convert the GroupOn lead into repeat customers. Will they drop in and never come back, as the move on to the next deal? Is the GroupOn consumer more into drive-by consumption than loyalty?  While it’s probably just too early to judge, one thing is certain. The growth in GroupOn’s consumer list, combined with the rapid proliferation of copycat companies will most certainly give the consumer the opportunity to collect a drawer full of deep discount offers.

In some ways, GroupOn feels like the next Yelp, but with a dramatically better business model. It must be pretty annoying to Yelp investors to see their 10X audience generate revenue that is probably no more than 20% of GroupOn’s.  It’s highly predictable that Yelp and MANY local media companies are looking jealously across the GroupOn bow, with an intent to flatter the company with their own form of replication.

too much of a good thing?

From one lens, GroupOn is arguably doing too well.

A brief browse through recent deals show a scale of buying that is a runaway success in lead generation. However, the success formula relies on a deep margin risk to the participating merchant. The merchant appears to be averaging a net of 25-30% of the retail price on the consumer products and services, in low operating margin businesses.

To make the deal math work, the business has three critical ways to make the offer participation a smart decision.

1. Ensure that the average bill paid extends beyond the coupon’s value,

2. Convert the new leads into repeat clientele, and

3. Handle a deluge of reservations without sacrificing cost and/or consumer experience.

GroupOn appears to do a good job in working with their customers to ensure they understand this formula. These parameters, however, do make it more appropriate for some segments than others.

As a personal observation, I’m seeing more deals aiming for lower price points ($10 for $25, versus $20 for $50) which I suspect is a technique to drive achievement of goal #1. Perhaps it also signals a growing frustration with the “tour bus effect” of the GroupOn clientele.

In my experience Issues # 2 and #3 represent the things that many small businesses are ill- equipped to manage. If businesses cannot handle the scaled volumes, or cannot make the math work, GroupOn’s model will be challenged to evolve, perhaps in ways that make them vulnerable, competitively.

is this the google moment for local direct marketing?

There is one other piece of the business case that GroupOn is quick to point out to the merchant.  The size of GroupOn’s email list is now sufficient to deliver business visibility that is comparable to the scale of major placement in a leading local newspaper or zine.  This “budget savings” argument may well carry the worst news for incumbent media players.

If GroupOn (and their clones) continue to perform, the impetus to spend marketing dollars on newspaper, coupon services, and local magazine display could be stunted.

Traditional local retail and direct marketing spending feels like it is on the cusp of being challenged, hard, by a performance-based lead gen model. Sound familiar?

Out with “fan”, in with “like”.

So, Facebook is officially mothballing the terminology of Fan, in favor of the kinder, gentler Like.  According to All Things Digital, the decision has been made.

Sometimes subtle changes in terminology can drive meaningful impact and unintended consequences.  My commentary below  is on how this might impact a Business’ Fan Page marketing.

a soft handshake?

Fan has always felt like a term derived of celebrity worship, that has morphed unnaturally into business and brand following terminology.  While I do believe Fan is far from a natural term, the act of fanning a business feels like a more meaningful statement of support than does the term Like.  When you Fan a business, it feels like an implicit statement of loyalty.  Saying you Like a business is akin to a soft handshake, positive but less committed.

As pointed out in Mashable,

The change could make it easier for brand advertisers to accumulate fans quickly. But it also means that users might not totally understand what they’re opting in to.

While building a larger social graph is arguably good news for brands and businesses, I tend to be in the contrarian camp.  This creates a new problems that I feel will make it more difficult for businesses to know how far they can go in leveraging their Facebook connections. It will likely raise the overall noise, and it introduces uncertainty as to the implicit contract with your social connection.

i <heart> follow

Personally, I prefer the Twitter term Follow, when it comes to business-consumer relationships.  To a marketer, a follower feels more like a genuine opt-in consumer than someone who likes you.  It feels like an implicit request to expect offers or news. I feel this is most acute for small and local businesses, where the majority use case for your social network interaction is around promotion and simple information sharing.

Could this move potentially cede competitive ground to Twitter when it comes to small business marketing?  Perhaps.  As the Facebook user base revises their behavior, the new ambiguity will present challenges.

Meanwhile, Twitter followers feel like a more predictable lot, when it comes to their intention.  At the end of the day, business value will be driven by performance, and predictable intention in marketing is a definitive edge.

You may know I’ve been working on a new start-up for the past 6 months, pretty much heads down – stealth by default, not design.  Actually we’ve been very active in our market, just totally focused on product, not business cards or websites!

In a couple of days, we’ll be taking the wraps off.  We’ve been chosen to launch at the DEMO Conference, which is a great venue to jump off the ledge with new products.  I’ve done this once before; it’s a pretty intense and fun launch pad!

the evolution of an old idea

I was fortunate to be around for the formation of Jabber, with a group of visionary friends whose ideas still inspire me – guys like Doc Searls and Tim O’Reilly.  A decade ago they started my mind spinning about the future of the real-time web, where real-time data and geo-presence empower applications, people and crowds.

Over the past few years, I’ve been deeply entrenched in the local search space, as local advertising evolved through the lens of search services.  In the back of my brain, I’ve always been curious about the “other side” of local – direct marketing.  While the whole industry was busy adapting to the Google search ecosystem, promotion marketing seems to have been pretty much ignored, chugging along capturing tens of billions in local marketing spending.

With the emergence of the Twitter ecosystem, Facebook’s rise to ubiquity, and the mobile local world finally showing real formation, I knew it was time to put my energies in a new direction.  With my prior business operating nicely in good hands, I was so ready for a new adventure.

marking our territory

I’ve become a big fan of GroupOn, along with a few million other consumers! GroupOn has done a tremendous job of creating an audience for daily local offers, to which it sells placement slots.  It’s really a traditional direct marketing business, smartly pimped up with time-limited offers, social sharing, and the illusion of group buying. [Earlier on, you had to gather up your friends to win buying power].  To me, the real magic is in deep discount deals to cool places – it delivers a way for consumers to feel great as they save money getting out to interesting places.

I’m also a big fan of Twitter – not for its’ current consumer proposition, but for the budding beauty beneath.  This awkward teenager will continue to blossom into a central role in content distribution and following.  And, of course, Facebook, as commander-in-chief of the social graph, is equally critical in driving live consumer + friends connections.

I’d be remiss to not mention email marketing pioneers, Constant Contact. I’ve watched them since the early Roving Software days, admiring their tenacity in engaging small businesses, winning over 300K users on the value in maintaining constant contact with your customers.

Finally I’d bracket our space with the LBS darling, Foursquare.  I salute their bright discovery of game-based ingredients that triggers consumers to share their location and favorite places.

deep roots, firmly planted

I’ve pulled together a 7-person team, that I’m very lucky to be working alongside.  My two co-founders, Tom Bender and Karyn German both have worked with me before in the Jabber era.  Tom, engineering lead, is a serious math brain who has led engineering teams and architecture in Jabber/Webb, Digital Globe and Tendril Networks.  Karyn fearlessly led Product Management at Jabber followed by a four-year stint leading Product Development and Client Services at Newsgator.  The rest of the team, Jeff Davenport, Scott Davis, Brian Doyle, and Noel Graham all bring deep engineering and design chops rooted in small business marketing, real-time messaging, feed networks, email platforms, mapping and social media. It’s a wicked smart team, with a matching sense of humor, as you might expect!

I am also very excited to have the support of a group of top tier Angel investors and advisors who bring wisdom and insight to the space, led by Kendall Fargo, who remains very active with the company.  Kendall most recently ran Small Business Marketing Tools at Intuit, after their acquisition of his previous start-up, Step Up Commerce.

we’re close.ly

So, to pull this all together, Closely, Inc. is engaged around this problem/opportunity…

How will businesses create, disseminate and engage with local consumers around live offers?  How does a business reward their best customers, their customer’s friends and their neighbors for coming in or buying product when their demand is most valued.  How will consumers follow and and swarm around these specials?

Ultimately, live socially-connected marketing will extend deeply into the tens of billions in direct marketing media spending. It promises to turn direct mail, promotion advertising, and email marketing on their collective heads.

We chose the brand Closely because it captures the shared desires of local consumers and businesses – the desire for a business to be closely followed, and the desire for a consumer to stay close to offers that fit their interests.

Next week we launch our first step into this emerging world of live marketing.

If you’re interested, do follow closely

I was pleased and excited to see this week’s launch of Public Earth’s website.  Not just because it’s the home of a small cadre of friends that I knew would build something very interesting, but because I believe in the fundamental premise underlying Public Earth.

The Twitter synopsis of Public Earth sums it up nicely.

We’re the Wiki For Places, dedicated to delivering interesting, unique, and up-to-date place information in a personalized way.

after world domination

The scale of product investment and advancement commitment from Google and Microsoft in mapping these past five years has been truly impressive.  These brands deservedly unseated MapQuest’s sleepy position by moving the ball forward on user experience, on multi-dimensional content, and on developer tools.

Fact is though, we’re still at the utilitarian consumption stage in geo-experience, and the very thing that creates their current world domination could well be what weighs down their forward progress.  The “Anchor Tenants” of the consumer geo universe, perhaps. [for fun: Google = Walmart, MapQuest = Kmart, and Microsoft so wants to be Target].

deep ruts in the road

The major map services have build their positions on consumption of maps as created and presented by them to the consumer.  While Google can legitimately point to the MyMaps success, I’d suggest that 1) this is pavlovian behavior driven by the necessity/greed/leverage of SEO, way more than it is socially energized participation, and 2) as I’ve written before, Google is so poor in social user experience, it’s just painful to watch.

The real action on the horizon inverts mapping into a paradigm of user creation and crowdsourcing the collective knowledge of places, and creating maps that are at once personal and shared.  There is a thriving new ecosystem in formation that is decidedly different and unique, and it’s natively social and participative.

Sites as deeply entrenched in consumer habit as MapQuest and Google can be severely challenged when it comes to materially morphing their brand. Orkut was indeed a fine piece of social technology.  Nuf said? 

Google’s mapping pathway seems to be driven by its dominating mastery of a fully owned and operated local advertising stack. Undoubtedly, this is core to their investments in local map content.  The route that elevated Google Maps to its front line position could very well be what holds it back from jumping the next shark.

the people’s voice recorder

Someone has to step up and power the collection of the true local voice. Yes, Google is well positioned to be aggregating this content, but (my sense) is that the developer community is 1) on to the impact of Google’s increasingly controlling hand and squashing foot, and 2) leaning forward for an open alternative. This is unlikely to be “one place” that forms this, but rather a connected collective.

The people have not yet spoken, and the businesses that unlock and turn loose this voice will indeed become major playas in the mobile/social/local ecosystem.

under the earth

Public Earth has taken a long cycle of development to do many things that are elegantly tucked behind a nice user experience.  The back office is much more interesting than the presentation, in my opinion.  To developers using their API, it presents what I consider to be a deep and well thought out geo content management system. As Google educates the world on the concept of a Place Page, Public Earth sits ready as the engine for a parallel path, powered by the people.

I’d posit that each and everyone of us has “50 maps inside” of us. You have history, you have local context, you’ve got highly tuned very personal experiences. All but a minute sliver of this has been recorded. Opening this up feels very unlike what we do in mapping services today.

In the massive collective “mother earth reclamation project”, Public Earth wants to take a lead role.  I hope it finds a place of active cooperation with Open Street Map and a dozen related open initiatives quickly gathering steam.  If it does, it will be indeed be one to watch.

We’ve all done it, we’ve googled our name.  And, in the process, we’ve found all the other Perry Evans’ of the world.  There’s Perry Evans in Hollywood, Perry Evans the gospel singer (my favorite alter ego) and Perry Evans the family practice physician in Cleveland, and so on.  This practice has even been the subject of an indie documentary film named, appropriately “Google Me“.  Problem is, all name matches are “correct search answers”, but the consumer isn’t well served for meaningful people search on today’s Google.

This week, Google launched “Google Me”, a new feature that let’s you claim your profile, which will then be integrated into the search results for matches to your name.  It’s the first time individual consumers have really been able to have any control over any placement on the SERP.  Yes, your photo and summary info will show up in a special new Google Profiles section (currently) located at the bottom of the first page results.

it’s natural

As many have pointed out, the consumer pull of such a concept is compelling. It’s a very safe bet that this will become a mass participation model, if for no other reason than the implicit feeling of having some control over the black box of Google search.  In today’s world of identity fear and loathing, consumers naturally gravitate in these directions. Thus, by default, Google is placing itself more squarely into the forefront of personal identity.  By default or by design?

fear factor

ReadWriteWeb nicely captures the big brother issue – should you stop and think before giving Google even more personal context? Will their artful data miners convert this into all sorts of ingenious models of “improving your personal search experience” by applying this deep profile content?

Of course you don’t have to fill out anything, and when you claim your profile, it can be a simple name, rank and serial number.  However, being the naive social beasts that we are, the average joe will probably continue to fill in Google’s profile form with all sorts of interesting nuggets of interests, personal links (think of the derivative deeper mining!).  Copied from the RWW article, this is the form. Think about the marketing value that can be derived from parsing this content AND the content on the personal links you provide, and perhaps a few things they may already know from your search history and DoubleClick’s asset trove.

who, me?

On the surface, this is a smart search quality move.  It improves the people search value of Google.  Not the best time to be in the people search business, I’d suggest.  It’s also an ingenious method for Google to put themselves into the middle of personal profile collection.  Given Google’s rabid focus on personalized search, this feels like a carefully contemplated move in that chess game.

As quoted in RWW, Google’s Joe Kraus responsed on this bigger picture issue, attempting to dispel the notion of a bigger agenda.

“Google doesn’t do a lot of forward looking things; we serve our users’ needs and then we iterate.”

Gimme a break, Joe, this kind of BS really backfires.  Own up to the treasure trove you’re building, and be transparent about how you intend to use it.  Anything less just adds to the growing pile of reasons for consumers to begin fearing the brand as an opaque, too-powerful monolith.

Denver, CO April 14, 2009 – A spokesperson for the US airline industry today announced that the Inter-airline Technology Standards Committee has paved the way for solving a congestion problem that has plagued the industry for decades.  “Consumer frustration over the inflight contention for open restrooms has been mounting.” Our Restroom Contention Task Force met with our Social Technology Platform team, and eureka!,  we discovered the perfect solution, building on our new WIFI plans – Twitter!” stated Sally De Bain, industry spokesperson.

“We envision connecting bathroom sensors to Twitter – passengers simply follow the #flightnumber to be alerted when a restroom is available.  “We’re still discussing whether to trigger the alert when the door is open, when the toilet flushes or when the sink is activated.  Before launching the beta trial, we need to determine how we support premium flier models (code named “Royal Flush”), such that alerts from toilet flushes go to frequent fliers, ahead of door alerts for  economy passengers.”

heh – hey, it could happen!

The industry buzz is rapidly forming with the possibilities for Twitter to be the real time alert engine for just about anything and everything that changes state.

If you haven’t seen the marquis local small business example it’s worth a quick read.  Bakertweet profiles a London-based bakery that worked with their creative agency (located across the street) to apply Twitter to alert followers as fresh baked goods come out of the oven.

My point with the tongue-in-cheek airlines example is to point out two emerging realities of the rapidly morphing Twitter ecosystem:

1. Twitter has a meaningful shot at become the “alert engine” for a plethora of trigger events – theoretically, whenever you have a group of people who have an interest in immediate knowledge of an event, and
2. The signal-to-noise problem potential gets staggering.

I don’t have time now to really dissect the latter, but it’s near and dear to where my head/passion is these days.  Filtering and tagging of streams of conversations and alerts is a VERY BIG THING.  Both in terms of scale of problem and potential of opportunity.

In the meantime, I’d point you to a thought provoking post by Twine CEO Nova Spivack, and the ensuing debate stimulated in the comments. Clay Shirky’s astute comment also rings very true: “the problem isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure“.

Twine Blog Post: Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It?

So, fasten your seat belt, there’s some potential for turbulence in Twitter’s open blue skies!

]]> http://www.evansink.com/2009/04/airline-industry-adopts-twitter-for-inflight-restroom-alert/feed/ 0 http://www.evansink.com/2009/03/twitter-the-new-thing/ http://www.evansink.com/2009/03/twitter-the-new-thing/#comments Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:50:25 +0000 perry http://www.evansink.com/?p=258 I’m not sure if John Battelle started the momentum with his “Twitter=YouTube” prognostication, but that catchphrase now sits alongside dozens of high profile blog posts hailing the arrival of the new 2.0 messiah, suggesting even a fundamental threat to Google.  So, is this just more valley wagging or something more?

twitter: much (much) more than “what am I doing now”

image credit

It’s too easy to be dismissive of Twitter as simply an extraction of the “status update” that became the backbone of social interaction at Facebook. While the concept originated with this, it has rapidly evolved into THE place where an increasing flock of consumers AND publishers post real-time information (over 6 million users, currently).  More importantly, it’s the place where consumers congregate to consume and converse around this eclectic treasure trove of real-time information. It’s a noisy, disorganized commons, yet it feels very much the place to be.

Increasingly, you’re seeing Twitter capturing a pivotal role in content distribution, threatening to siphon the traffic position of consumer portals, newspaper websites and RSS feed readers in consumer’s news consumption habits.  Most major publishers and bloggers now immediately push content updates to Twitter as soon as the information goes live.

Might this become as impactful as to challenge Google’s dominance in Search?  Pfft, of course not.  However, as John Battelle suggests with his analogy of YouTube – it’s capturing a new dimension of consumer content consumption and participation that is drawing very real momentum.  Google doesn’t capture real-time content of any scale today, and it certainly does not feel like a conversational medium capable of engaging the consumer-consumer conversational thread.

Like YouTube, Twitter’s underlying financial model is yet to be demonstrated.  I suspect, like all conversational applications (Chat, IM, Facebook,…) ads running alongside conversations will appear as distractions, and under-perform compared to commercial search.  However, also like YouTube, Twitter’s position seems to be forming into a critical new dimension of the media landscape. Undoubtedly, the big boys are onto this, and are actively considering “taking it out” before it gets snapped up by someone else. The synthesis and leverage of the growing “conversational knowledge base” is definitely a part of the appeal of Twitter’s position.

The debate over the underlying revenue model of Twitter is driving a feeding frenzy of blogger speculation, and even triggering open competitions for the best proposal.  The founders promise it’s around the corner, and the outcome of this will be very instructive as to “where might Twitter go?”.

twitter and local media

Greg Sterling makes an interesting case for Twitter as a working example of  “social directory assistance“. Essentially, the concept is to ask a question of your followers, and receive near real-time opinions from your circle of friends.  Unlike Facebook, where your “friends” are a filtered and approved list, Twitter differentiates itself by the fact that anyone can become an interloper into your postings.  I’d guess that I probably only know 20% of the people who follow me on Twitter, versus 100% of FB friends. We are seeing very dramatic follower volumes with celebrities and celebrity VC’s. To me, extrapolating the virtues of this real time “answers from your tribe” model works “for them but not me”.  While Twitter helps you build a larger tribe, the trust factor of “near strangers” is to be questioned. Most of my followers do not live/consume in the same locale as I do, so this leverage is further limited in local value. Very few consumers have the “tribe pull” to get anything but spotty answers to many local questions in this model, I’d posit.

Bridging the gap between “friends and neighbors” you’re seeing new Twitter-like services emerge with interesting potential, such as BrightKite (the product of a couple of Local Matters’ alumni!). This expanded tribe model perhaps makes the social directory assistance model more achievable.

Twitter zealots (hey, when your blog is called MrTweet, you know it’s a fan boy thing!) point to increasing anecdotal evidence of Twitter being employed by local businesses to drive tangible growth, such as this local coffee shop story. Added participation by merchants and a growing cadre of “coupon tweet” start-ups are fueling this buzz.

I certainly am a big believer that the world of real time promotions will be reinvented in the next decade, and it will be founded on social and conversational media. However, whether this logically fits into the Twitter delivery model it a very big TBD.

ginzu steak knife or swiss army tool?

Today, the tech world is granting Twitter the birthright to a world of possibilities.  However, as succinctly pointed out by Tim O’Reilly, the simplicity of Twitter is a very key ingredient to it’s success. The bright shiny world of possibilities most commonly buckle under the real life challenges of morphing from simple products to major ecosystem players.

Perilous navigation is definitely ahead, as Twitter expands into the search dimension of real time conversations, deals with the overwhelming noise of commercial models and choking spam, and contemplates a platform role.  Wherever it ends up, it’s the deserved poster child in one of the most important dimensions of online consumer behavior.

Twitter demands careful attention and active participation.

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