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I attended the "Real time! Search meets Social" event / panel last night hosted by SEMPO (as part of Social Media Week). It was a more enjoyable event than the super-crowded-bars-filled-with-media-girls events I attended earlier in the week (that's a personal bias: I hate crowded spaces where I have to shout to speak with the person right next to me).

One thought I had last night was, aren't brands overinvesting in Twitter? If you think about it, the most valuable tweets fall into two categories: breaking news and links to interesting content. And the former is only valuable right now — 2 week old breaking news isn't very "breaking" anymore. So the real value comes from giving people on Twitter content worth sharing: it's word-of-mouth and it's free! Furthermore, if you look at dollars spent as a result of search versus Twitter, search is larger by orders of magnitude, so shouldn't brands be focused on creating content (including blog posts) that gets indexed by search engines and passed around on Twitter / IM / email / Facebook?

I asked this question of the people on the panel, who represented StockTwits, HootSuite, Shorty Awards, Trendrr, and Collecta, a very Twitter focused bunch (other than Collecta). I didn't get a very clear answer from any of them, but generally it seemed like they agreed with me, which is ironic considering how Twitter-centric they are. 

When brands get back to questions of ROI and metrics when investing time and resources into social media, I think we will see a resurgence in blogging and multimedia, because at the end of the day, people need something to tweet about and share. Better to be talked about, than simply talk.

I attended the "Real time! Search meets Social" event / panel last night hosted by SEMPO (as part of Social Media Week). It was a more enjoyable event than the super-crowded-bars-filled-with-media-girls events I attended earlier in the week (that's a personal bias: I hate crowded spaces where I have to shout to speak with the person right next to me).

One thought I had last night was, aren't brands overinvesting in Twitter? If you think about it, the most valuable tweets fall into two categories: breaking news and links to interesting content. And the former is only valuable right now — 2 week old breaking news isn't very "breaking" anymore. So the real value comes from giving people on Twitter content worth sharing: it's word-of-mouth and it's free! Furthermore, if you look at dollars spent as a result of search versus Twitter, search is larger by orders of magnitude, so shouldn't brands be focused on creating content (including blog posts) that gets indexed by search engines and passed around on Twitter / IM / email / Facebook?

I asked this question of the people on the panel, who represented StockTwits, HootSuite, Shorty Awards, Trendrr, and Collecta, a very Twitter focused bunch (other than Collecta). I didn't get a very clear answer from any of them, but generally it seemed like they agreed with me, which is ironic considering how Twitter-centric they are. 

When brands get back to questions of ROI and metrics when investing time and resources into social media, I think we will see a resurgence in blogging and multimedia, because at the end of the day, people need "something" to tweet about and share. Better to be talked about, than simply talk.

In the last 2 years, a few different sites have implemented some very successful social designs. I’ll lay out 5 social design patterns here and then follow up with case studies in subsequent posts. These apply to sites with user-generated content where the content is the primary object.

Public Timeline

I’m starting with the public timeline because, while it’s not the sexiest thing on this list, it’s critical for new users as a solution to the cold start problem. The public timeline is the first place new users will look for new content. It’s also how they will determine if they wish to join your community – the size, the tone, the cultural-norms, and the freshness of your community is easily communicated via the public timeline. And, of course, it’s also where new users can find other interesting users, which leads me to my next pattern.

Asymmetrical Follow

This has been written about before, so I won’t say much. Asymmetrical follow means I can follow the updates of a user without their permission. They, in turn, could follow me back but it’s not required. This allows for the kind of preferential attachment characteristic of scale-free networks, and it’s scale-free networks that are primed for viral propagation. When the goal is content distribution powered by network effects, it just doesn’t matter if you actually know the person or not. All that matters is if the person if a reliable source for interesting content. This is why social networks have failed to become anything more than social networks. Remember this graph from Brad Horowitz?

Only 1% of a community are content creators

Most people’s social networks aren’t large enough to contain more than a handful of super-star content creators. I believe the average Facebook account has 300 users. 1% of that is 3 – not enough to be a valuable source of content. If you think Dunbar’s number is a more accurate group size – which I do not with regard to online communities – then you’re only left with 1 or 2 people (1% of 150 = 1.5). Yes, you can argue that Facebook has done very well for itself living off of soap-opera like content – who is dating whom, who got drunk at what party, what was she wearing?!?) but there are natural limits to that growth. Their commenting feature will help drive page views, but there isn’t a whole lot of new value being created there.

Newsfeed

Nothing shocking about this. Now that your users have gone out and followed their friends and other interesting users, their homepage should now be the newsfeed that aggregates all of that content into one place. But it’s not sufficient just to include the stream of content. You need to also show who contributed that content (and, in the case of re-blogging, the other hands it passed through). Why? Because that’s how you can evaluate the people you are following (and, with re-blogging, discover new people to follow).

Re-blogging

I’m a huge re-blogging fan. It’s the engine that drives the content diffusion through the network. The concept is simple: if someone I’m following shares something interesting, I can easily push that same interesting piece of content out to everyone who is following me while providing proper attribution. Someone who follows me can do the same, and again, and again. This is really powerful, as the people who follow me are most likely not the same as the people I follow. Re-blogging provides a transport device for great interesting content to travel through connected components of the network (which are generally much larger than your immediate social network).

Social Proof

While judging the content someone shares is a decent proxy for evaluating whether or not to follow that person, social proof can help. Show how many followers the person has. Better yet, calculate their influence (like PageRank does for websites). Or, show how many favorites their posts have accrued or re-blogs their posts have had. It’s a quick and easy way for users to ascertain the reputation of a user in the context of your site.

Bonus: APIs and RSS

I promised five, but here’s an extra. Use APIs and RSS to amplify your power. Provide APIs so that others can build tools that extend your reach. Publish RSS feeds so that users can incorporate your interesting content into their existing routines. Make use of other companies’ APIs to publish your content out to them (like publishing to Twitter). It’s very difficult to create new habits, but it’s much easier to go where your users already are (Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader in my case).

Like I said at the start, I’ll be back soon with some commentary on how well (or not) various sites are implementing these ideas. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking about Blip.fm, bit.ly, and Soup.io. I’d love to talk about Etsy, but I feel like it wouldn’t be appropriate.

Om Malik wrote an interesting post about twitter pricing yesterday, but I think he’s a little off. I don’t blame him, considering his background is not computer science. And besides, it started a really interesting conversation. Before we start talking about Twitter pricing plans, we need to come to an agreement about what technically is hurting Twitter. Ideally, scaling issues should be orthogonal to your business plan; if you are successful, lots of people use your product, and that’s a good problem to have. Generally, you don’t want to tax your best users.

So on to the technology. Here’s the clue that we’ll start with:

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system.

From Twitter’s post on architecture and the problems they are facing 

When I read “content management system”, I’m thinking “blogging platform”. My guess is that Twitter is built to be a massively multi-user blogging and blog reading system – every user gets a blog to publish posts with and a blog reader to aggregate the posts of their friends. Considering Evan Williams was the founder of Blogger, I think it’s pretty reasonable.

So if you think of it that way, then the obvious way to architect the system is publishing via RSS and aggregating via RSS. When you write a new tweet, your message gets stored in the database. (Yes, shoving all of that data into a database is a really difficult engineering problem in itself. Assuredly they will partition across multiple databases if they don’t already.) The massive pain comes in when pulling in what your friends’ tweets are. Let’s talk through how it works. Your twitter homepage is acting like an RSS reader, so first it will lookup all of the feeds it needs to check – all of the people you follow. Then, for every person you follow, an RSS feed will be read or generated. The resulting set of RSS feeds will be merged back together and sorted chronologically. The result is your Twitter homepage.

Notice here that this is what is called a “pull” or “poll” model – you are checking for new posts whether there are new posts or not. This can generate a ton of unnecessary load on servers and databases, not to mention network traffic costs. With the advent of Twitter applications, these applications are constantly polling Twitter to see if there is anything new to publish. Ping, ping, ping. All to see if there is something new afoot.

Which brings us around to pricing. It is not, as Om suggested, Scoble’s fault for having 25,000 people following him. The cost is not sending one of his messages 25,000 times. No, actually it’s Scoble’s fault for following 21,000 people and constantly checking for new tweets from those people. It’s also the fault of power users like him using applications that aggressively use the Twitter API to check for new tweets – most likely the same people who use those applications are following large numbers of people.

As with all scaling problems, the first idea is “cache more!”. And sure, you can cache the heavy Twitter producers. But Scoble isn’t following just the big twitter users – he’s following everyone he can, because that’s how he believes he can get an edge on news and trends. Can the long tail be cached? Doubtful – there are too many users who fall into that category. Can you charge those who follow more than, say, 1000 people? Maybe $10 a month for every thousand people you follow, with the first 1,000 free? That could work, but it’s risky. Would Scoble, in the face of paying $210 a month, permanently switch to Pownce? Or Friendfeed if they built a twitter clone? How many would follow?

The solution, of course, is to do exactly what Twitter says they are doing – switch to a different model and scale horizontally (“throw more machines at it”). I’m interested to see how it turns out for them.

I think the best innovation from twitter was messaging with @username. If I remember right, Twitter didn’t support that at first – it was a grassroots invention by Twitter users that was picked up and officially supported. Facebook did something similar even before Twitter: when you wrote a post on your Facebook blog (haven’t seen much uptake there), you can choose from your friends list which friends are mentioned in the post. Kinda kludgy solution though, since you have to scroll through hundreds of people and click a bunch of checkboxes.

It’s obvious from the evolution of @replies on Twitter that this is something very organic and natural to humans. The internet is not a solitary vacuum; all software is social.

So here’s a thought: let’s bring @replies to the rest of the web. Whether I’m writing a post on my blog or commenting on a Flickr photo or sharing an item on Google Reader, I should be able to use @username. This serves two purposes.

1. Who is being referred to?

One is to give everyone reading your comment to understand who you are talking to. This is a basic tenet of face-to-face group communication – you turn to a specific person in the group, address them by name, and speak. Sometimes, like at a big dinner party, you might not know all the guests, leaving you guessing as to who is whom and what their background is. On the internet, we can do better. By linking to some kind of profile, the comment reader can read up on who is being pulled into the conversation and better understand context.

2. Who is referring to you?

Here’s something the internet can do that can’t happen in real life – being able to read the record of all conversations that made reference to you. Twitter does this with their “Replies” page. Why not off Twitter as well?

How #1 could be implemented

This is a really difficult engineering problem, and I won’t pretend like I’ve got all the answers. So I’ll do my best. There are a number of existing web sites that vend OpenID accounts, including Yahoo, Blogger, and LiveJournal. Here’s the list. All of these services support some kind of “Profile” page, where the user can publish information about themselves. So we have a decentralized way of naming people (OpenID) and we have a way to lookup information about that person (hosted profile). So what’s missing is browser support for interpreting the @reply markup.

What’s that you say? No one is going to use awkward OpenID URLs to name people? You’re right. So, browsers will also need hooks into your Address Book, so that they know which “John” you are referring to. This could have the same auto-complete UI that email clients already support – as soon as you start typing @John, a small drop down appears next to your cursor showing the various people you know who match “John”. You pick the right one, and the markup is entered for you, linking to John’s profile.

How #2 could be implemented

The last bit of this is discovering all the places people are referring to you. This is tricky, and the two ideas I have have weaknesses. One idea uses another open technology called XMPP, the Jabber protocol. Here’s how it could work. When your browser publishes “@John”, it will use XMPP to send a message to John’s OpenID server notifying John of the reference to his name. When John logs into his OpenID-supporting service of choice, he can be shown all of the messages that have been pushed to him.

The other idea is for the OpenID server to support an HTTP POST whose payload would be the URL where the reference was made. The OpenID server would log all traffic to that special URL and pass it on to John once he logs in.

Thoughts?

Anyone have thoughts on this? Obviously to big (some might call it “unlikely”) changes need to happen. First, browsers need to add support for OpenID based @name markup. Second, browsers need to know how to send XMPP messages (or, invoke a hidden URL hosted by the OpenID server, which might be easier.) Lastly, OpenID servers need to process these incoming messages and present them to the user in some helpful way.

Naturally, I imagine there are a host of security concerns to work through, especially with browsers pushing URLs around. Still, I think this would create a very interesting social ecosystem. What do you think?