Best foot Sideward

Twitter, what's next? (The first of a series of rapid publishing experiments)

This is the first of what is hopefully going to be a long series of rapid publishing experiments. Posts thought, written and published within an hour or less. So you are entering a hard hat area. Things are a little rough here ;)

Twitter is destined to be a great company, very soon. So obviously, in this post, I attempt to think through what's next after Twitter.

What has Twitter done?

1. Made conversation itself the content
2. Created one way relationships
3. Achieved a remarkable balance between fully synchronous and fully asynchronous communication
4. Lowered barrier to entry for blogging. 140 characters requires much less thought!
5. Has become the conversation platform thus enabling several applications to run on top of this data

What next?

A personal gripe with Twitter is that it doesn't enable discovery of conversations as much as I'd like. Think of the following scenarios. They are all about discovery of similar things, but through your Twitter feed.

• Chris sees a news article about a whale that has washed ashore. Chris wants to stay abreast of developments in this news item. He finds a "Tweet me with Updates" button on the news article. He clicks this. The author of the news article is then able to tweet on this account with updates on the news. Chris gets these updates on his Twitter feed. A few days later when the whale is all well, Chris is able to disconnect from the whale Twitter feed.
• Bob is viewing an album on Flickr. He like a particular photo of Mt. Rainier. Bob finds a "Tweet me similar pictures " button next to the picture. He clicks on this and is able to set the frequency of updates. Bob now starts getting regular updates on his Twitter feed with links to similar pictures. These pictures seem to magically come from all over the web. Not just Flickr, but SmugMug, Picasa Web etc.
• Tanya is reading a blog when she sees an advertisement for a laptop with a 20% off coupon. There is a "Tweet me similar deals" button next to it. After she clicks on it, she starts seeing deals coming to her in her Twitter feed regularly.

Next, think of the following scenarios. Here your Twitter feed becomes more of a radio station of sorts :)

• Tony wants to learn more about high def TVs. He is able to create a Tweet station with the keyword hdtv. The system now starts sending him tweets related to hdtv. He is able to thumbs up, thumbs down on these tweets to personalize the station. He is also able to choose from a number of personalized stations (personalized by other people).
• Ram wants to start a Tweet station. This is like a radio station, except you tweet instead of playing songs. Ram then solicits others to start broadcasting through his station. A small group forms who start tweeting on topic through the station. The group is also able to make decisions when a certain member is not playing nice and removes that person. Tweet stations have ownership, partnership and boards of directors can be created. Tweet stations are able to insert ads into their feeds as a way to monetize their feeds. Think of them as mini media companies.

Next, think of the following scenarios. These focus on being able to build media out of tweet streams.

• Ditch RT! Add ability to link to any given tweet. This link (a URL) takes the user to a page with the tweet and all related posts . Of course the owner of the tweet gets access to analytics information about the tweet. Number of user visits, number of retweets, number of spawned conversations etc. This is automatic media creation and naturally advertising follows. Allow corporate Twitter accounts to advertise their feeds on pages through contextual relevance.
• Now, make these links the currency of Twitter search. PageRank and other search algorithms can apply on top of this data to be able to extract the most pertinent information.
• Enable Wikipedia to pull in the most pertinent Tweets on any given page. This adds a real-time effect to the otherwise static pages. Extend this to pretty much anywhere in the static web. Add ability to pull in pertinent conversations to static web sites.

If you are interested in coding any of this with me, do ping!

Photo credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/arjunpurky/2435896643/

It's a noisy world

Photo credit - Binkiexxx

There is way too much information in this world. This is good in a way. It means we as a human race are constantly thinking, debating, inventing and documenting. It also means that finding the right information to consume at the right time by the right person is difficult. The curve of good/useful information grows significantly slower than the curve of all information. This means the problem of finding the right information to consume at the right time by the right person is only going to get worse as time progresses. This leads to an inevitability –

Information has become and will increasingly be a commodity. But the information aggregator has become and will increasingly be invaluable.

Think about it. Here are some examples,

You may write all the blog posts you want and can. But you’re at the mercy of Google to surface it to potential searchers.

You can create all the niche art/music you want and can. But you’re at the mercy of Amazon to surface it to potential searchers.

You may tweet all you want and can. But you’re at the mercy of Twitter search to surface it to potential followers.

Here are the ways we consume information online,

Search (pull) - Google search and Amazon search. Include paid listings. Google is an aggregator.

Stay informed through request (push) - RSS, Twitter & Facebook feeds, IM status updates. Google Reader, Tweetdeck etc. are aggregators. Magazines you subscribe to. AllTop for example is an aggregator. Radio stations you create/subscribe to. Pandora and Rhapsody are aggregators. Mailing lists you opted into.

Recommendations (pull) - Sites like Digg where you get recommendations from a community. Digg is an aggregator. Amazon’s recommendation engine and product reviews. Amazon is an aggregator. Techmeme and blog recommendations. Techmeme is an aggregator. YouTube's recommended videos. YouTube is an aggregator.

Stay informed (push) - Email and other “inbox” solutions where you don’t control what information arrives. Gmail is an aggregator. It helps you manage your email and spam. Your snail mail address.

Advertised to (push) - Contextual & display advertising. Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter are aggregators.

OK, so information can get commoditized. What you tweet could be tweeted by someone else. There could be a 1000 good marketing related blogs. Your country music album would be one of thousands enjoyed by people. Your product review will be one of hundreds on Amazon. OK, so information does get commoditized :). Will information aggregators get commoditized?

No. Not if you intentionally create network effects! Aggregators will not get commoditized if there’s possibility of a network effect.

Google and Gmail have already successfully created network effects for search, advertising and IM. Amazon has done so for niche products and product reviews. Digg has done so for link recommendations. YouTube has done so for user uploaded videos. These products have become the first choice for their respective categories due to network effects.

Now, is there a repeatable formula for network effects? Sure there are. Here is one. What do you think?

1. Look at the information you are aggregating.
   
2. Find one operation on that information that will be useful to both the operating user and the world.
   
3. Enable that operation on your aggregator. 
4. Enable the operator to identify themselves using a identity solution
   
5. There you have a network effect!

Example: Take Google News. How do you make a network effect? Enable readers to mark news stories as interesting. Make the system inform the reader of updates to the story they marked (the marking reader gets value). Enable other readers to see how many readers have marked any given link. Enable a Gmail reader to see their Gmail friends who have marked a given news link. This helps readers pick what they want to read. This induces a network effect!

News paY per

Newspapers have traditionally enjoyed huge advertising dollars in the print business. It is no secret that this business model is going away slowly albeit surely. When the Seattle Post Intelligencer went up for sale, reality felt a little closer to home. The 10% issue seems to explain the woes in very clear terms. Even though online penetration of newspapers is usually 10 times that of print, their online revenue is 1/10 that of print. Online advertising is an inherently more efficient marketplace than print advertising -- resulting in advertising rates being closer to their true value. This results in online revenue being unable to offset costs of traditional content creation and distribution. This is in spite of online distribution being significantly less expensive than print distribution. But then, this is usually what happens when there is a fundamental change in business models. There is inertia to change. Employees and employers heavily skilled in the earlier business model resist change. Spending time and resources on a revenue stream that is 10% of the main revenue stream is looked down upon. Besides that, print newspapers were able to charge for the newspaper as well as ads. But online, they can charge only for advertising.This appears to be subject to change.

Of late, some folks have been questioning whether content online should be free. There was even a Daily Show episode on this topic. Read Jon Austin’s column on micropayments for news. It’s long, but you can read a synopsis here. The idea is rather simple. Charge people a few cents (yes 3 or 4 cents) to read any given article. The notion is that people will be OK to pay that little to get to read an article they won’t get elsewhere. The often given argument is – If it worked for iTunes and music, it must work for the news. In the rest of this article I discuss, why this will or will not work.

News content doesn’t get re-read

Music can be listened to again and again. News/articles, not so much. You read once, you understand, you move on. Will you really pay for it? An alternative way of thinking -- this is like taking a sip of milk. If you buy a carton of milk for $3. And if you take a sip a day to finish it in 30 days, that costs about 10 cents a day. If you think of micro paying for an article as consumption as opposed to owning, it could work! But then I’m not sure most people think about it that way.Especially given the iTunes model is owning. You own the music you buy. Would you want to own the news articles you buy? What does it mean?

News gets stale fast

If you wanted to read an article about the US Airways plane landing on the Hudson within 10 minutes of the accident, you get information known at that time. Within a half hour, the news will be that ferries are headed toward the plane and passengers are getting out. Within an hour, the news will be that all passengers got out alive. Now if it were up to me will I pay for each of these stories? Maybe a model where you pay for a stream (where a stream is defined as news stories covering a certain incident) and you get news updates for one single payment may work.Maybe even have updates pushed to me once I register for a stream?

News articles are often forwarded

If I like an article I paid 4 cents for -- and want to forward to someone else. Will they or will they not pay to read? Or will I need to pay to forward it? Viral spread of stories will come to a standstill. Does the news provider really want that? One of the reasons for online news being able to reach farther is viral spread.

Free news and articles

Will free news and articles ever disappear even if some news sources start micro charging for their content. How will micro paid news ever compete with a plethora of free news? How does one reverse commoditization? News has become commoditized. People have come to expect it for free or really cheap. How does one go about reversing that? One idea is to make micro payments really easy to carry out. Now imagine this. A news article that after a paragraph contains a button “Read more for 3 cents”. You click the button and if you are already logged into the micropayment service, you are automatically accounted and you get to read the article. Fairly low friction and 3 cents poorer isn’t a bad state especially if the article is good.

Variety and Opinion

When I read some news article, I follow links and read more about the specific issue. I also read more opinions etc. Even with micropayments being micro, will people ever feel like reading onto other news sources? Or will the need to read other points of view drop off?

The world knows the cheapest news

It's safe to assume that a majority of the population will gravitate toward the cheapest news. The knowledge base of the world will now be news, opinions from the cheaper news sources. This can't be good.

Antitrust

Imagine two news corporations X and Y, both using micropayments for their news. Now X could drop their price a little bit below Y through donations from a certain organization Z in return for favorable articles about Z. This can't be good either.

Policing copyright infringement

What prevents someone who micro paid for an article from copying it onto their blog? Once word gets out, will anyone else micro pay for the original? iTunes had DRM. DRM for news?

Overall, here's my belief on micropayments for news. You cannot charge people to read news that is common knowledge. They just get it from another source that is free instead. However you can charge for news based on information that isn't supposed to be public, or is difficult to obtain, or requires special skills/research to produce, or are so niche that no one is writing about it yet. Also, you can charge for news on upcoming media where free content isn't taken for granted yet. Examples,

1) Investigative reporting
2) Finance news based on models/research not commonly available
3) High risk photography and documentaries
4) Opinion that goes beyond normal talking points

New ways to get the news on the iPhone, Kindle, cell phone could be paid for as well.

Thoughts?

Photo credit, PreciousRoy

Facebook feature request

Facebook has successfully made conversation a feature as opposed to a destination. Let me explain. Earlier, one could write on a friend's wall to kick off a conversation. The wall was the destination for conversation. Then came the fun wall, super wall etc. Now, Facebook has made everything (almost everything) conversation ready media. Your photos, videos, links, notes, status updates are all commentable. Every "media" (in a loose sense) in Facebook is commentable. This is exactly the promise of social media.

Now, here's the feature request. Make all comments taggable. Notice in the image above, I have commented referring to Kevin Rose. Now, if only I could tag that text with the Facebook profile for Kevin, multiple things become possible. Readers of this comment are able to find who Kevin is. Kevin can be notified that he has been tagged in a comment. And he may find it appropriate to join in on the conversation. It also helps Kevin keep track of his reputation within the social network. Just thinking out loud. What do you think?

Note that Twitter already does this by using the @(username) paradigm.

Consume, Communicate, Comment, Convey, Create, Collaborate?

Web applications such as Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg, Twitter etc. clearly thrive on user generated content. Let's sidestep the issue of actually monetizing these for this post. And look instead at what drives the ecosystem. There appear to be 5 Cs in motion. Consume, Communicate, Comment, Convey, Create. And these are actions users take in these applications in increasing order of difficulty/time consumption. I believe there is one C missing (if you haven't gotten a hint from the title) and that is to Collaborate.

Most users obviously consume information. At least one web search a day of mine goes into Wikipedia. I read and exit the website. On Facebook, I consume my friends' pictures, status updates, whereabouts etc. This is the easiest at the same time the most valuable per time spent.

Quite a few users communicate on these sites. We write on friends walls, we send each other messages and we setup event pages. In Twitter, we communicate our state at the moment. This is one where the fruit of the action is not realized until/unless someone reads our communication and/or takes action. Communication is a basic need of a social being and thereby is a common action.

Commenting takes time, takes thought and takes courage. I'll get to why it takes courage in just a second. We comment on friend's status updates, posted items, photos. We comment on Flickr photos. We comment on blog posts. Commenting takes time and takes thought. To comment usually means to have consumed, understood and created opinion. And to state one's opinion publicly takes courage.

One way of defining Conveying in this context - To take information from one point and paraphrase (or not) into a different context. We post news article links/video links/opinion links on Facebook. We Digg links we like, thereby conveying information to a different audience. Conveying happens after consumption, but requires the almost extraordinary step of wanting to share. Now, there can be several reasons to share (excitement, breaking news, altruism, known external interest, attention wanting, spamming prone). But the prerequisite is to have consumed information outside the medium we are posting in. And this takes a lot of effort and time.

Creating is no doubt the most difficult, time consuming of these all. We create notes on Facebook. Developers creat applications for Facebook. Developers create Twitter apps. Wikipedia contributors create/edit articles for free. Wikipedia moderators keep the noise out. Creation is several levels more difficult than even conveying as it requires original thought (in most cases) and the creative ability to put it in a consumable form. Also, by creating a user displays extraordinary courage and conviction in their work and is open to criticism.

I believe there is a 6th C that is yet untapped in all of these. That is to collaborate. Wikipedia taps it to a certain extent as users can edit others posts. But think of the possibilities here! Think of Facebook users coming together to collaborate on a thesis/invention. Think of Twitter users coming together to collaborate on raising money for the poor. Imagine if in Digg, I could customize my news stories to only include Diggs from certain clans of users who form through an overlaid social network. Imagine Orkut users in a certain neighborhood coming together to setup a neighborhood watch. All of these are not impossible. But they need a collaboration engine to be created that has incentives for such activities to take place. An analogy - Wikipedia created an engine to let creation and moderation be a breeze. Facebook created an engine to let online application development and usage a breeze. Now, can we create an engine that makes instant, productive (1+1 > 2) and results driven collaboration possible?