Month: April 2009

The news that Facebook will allow users to log into Facebook with a 3rd party OpenID may sound alike a technical detail but it is a really big deal. One of the crippling aspects of the Facebook Connect strategy is that it welded together user authentication with every other Facebook service available to developers. And it gave unto Facebook the ability to aggregate individuals authenticated actions across the web. This bargain leaves everyone dealing with Facebook feeling used – developers give up far too much, and end users give up far too much.

By supporting OpenID, Facebook decouples authentication from the providing of services. This gives more power to developers, and more power to end users. And, by enabling a more win-win relationship, increases the chance that Facebook will take advantage of its position at the core the big social graph to offer immensely valuable network infomediary services.

When the #amazonfail kerfuffle hit over Easter weekend, I wanted to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt, at least a little bit. It was clearly outrageous that books about gay and lesbian themes were classified as “adult”, and removed from main search results, including kids books like “Heather has Two Mommies”. But the tweets and posts assuming organized homophobia on Amazon’s part were premature. The braindead customer service response simply citing policy didn’t convince me that malice was behind it either. Customer service people are trained to use existing documentation to respond to questions, which is often correct and sometimes lacking in common sense.

If you’ve worked at an organization, you know that things go wrong, sometimes badly. When this happens, people need to figure out what went wrong, and coordinate a response. When the rain of wrathful posts was falling on #amazonfail, I was imagining Amazon folk being pulled from family dinners around the world to investigate what happened and figure out how to respond, including fixing the problem and communicating to people affected. Socialtext is much smaller than Amazon but this process is painfully familiar.

Amazon’s response fell short of what it could be. Their first public response was that it was a “glitch.” This may be technically true, but it doesn’t consider the genuine and valid outrage that a powerful service like Amazon was marginalizing a group of people that faces real discrimination. Even if was a technical accident, the right response was “I’m sorry that this glitch has the affect of suppressing books by GLBT authors, we have no intent of discriminating, we support gay rights, and we will fix this as soon as humanly possible.” Their next response was posting a form letter to the comments section of a few blogs. What they should have done instead was to have spokespeople talking like human beings. It’s hard to do. It’s easier to post a form letter. It’s much harder to be human and nondefensive in the face of customer outrage. Amazon missed an opportunity to respond in a human way, and earn back the respect of angry customers with interest.

Watching the GetSatisfaction crew handle the complaints about their policy about non-company sponsored pages, and improving their service with the criticism, and watching Rashmi at Slideshare handle customer anger at a misunderstood April Fool’s prank provided inspiring examples of companies really engaging in a professional and human manner with angry customers.

A couple of weeks ago, Jay Rosen asked whether this was the dumbest newspaper column about Twitter ever. A game critic blogger at the New Orleans paper makes fun of Twitter by attempting to write his review of an xbox game in 140 character increments. The reason this is idiotic is that the author misses the complementary relationship between Twitter and blogging. You don’t write your review itself on Twitter. You write a normal essay, and then share the link on Twitter with a catchy phrase.

The conventional lament is that Twitter is killing blogging, since bloggers are now spending their time and sharing their ideas on Twitter. As Robin Hamman observed last fall in this Headshift post, Twitter (and Facebook) are siphoning off a lot of the energy from personal diary blogging – the proverbial sandwich post – or simple link sharing. Bloggers observe that they post less frequently because they tweet ideas more often.

While Twitter may be siphoning blog energy from very short posts, Twitter also increases interest in more substantive blog posts and discussion around blog ideas. An increasing amount of blog traffic is driven from Twitter and Facebook status (good stats welcome). Through link posting and retweets, the social network is used to share and spread interesting posts and call attention to good bloggers. Essentially, Twitter is the new headline. Blogger Louis Gray takes this a bit too far, I think, when he recommends that bloggers change their headlines into catchy twitteresque phrases for SEO purposes. A good blog title is catchy enough to be interesting, and explicit enough to make sense in search results months later. A good Twitter callout is catchy, makes sense in the current social context, and doesn’t need to be as explicit. There’s no reason to make all blog titles into Twitter callouts.

Reactions and conversation about blog post ideas take place in Twitter, Facebook status, and Friendfeed. Journalism professor Jay Rosen is developing a phased process for developing ideas, using Twitter for mindcasting short thoughts and links, Friendfeed for assembling links and ideas together with discussion, and blog for long-form essays. Update: Science blogger BoraZ writes about a similar social journalistic workflow, carrying the process all the way through composing articles and books. Christian Crumlish has actually used the workflow from twitter through book composition, with a wiki as tool for book editing and feedback for O’Reilly’s Designing Social Interfaces.

The relationship between social messaging and blogging can be particularly handy in the workplace, where social messaging is used to call attention and discuss timely and relevant work-related posts and updates. The ease of sharing and discussion motivates people to write useful things, because they will be shared, discussed and used.

In summary, Twitter and blogs are highly complementary. The role of Twitter isn’t to limit thoughts to what can can be expressed in 140 characters or less, it’s to call attention to longer-form writing, and discuss the ideas through the social network.

Josh Porter makes a good observation: “a big difference between Facebook & Twitter is serendipity. Stuff “happens” all the time on Twitter. Not really so much on FB.” Twitter’s serendipity is an outcome of its design. Twitter asymmetrical, mostly-public, searchable network creates serendipity. Facebook’s mostly-private symmetrical network doesn’t.

Twitter generates serendipity with visible mentions and searches in your extended network. You can see replies from people you aren’t following. This allows you to expand your contacts and knowledge beyond people you already know. When someone asks an interesting question, you can do a search and watch the answers and responses unfold, bringing you to references and people you didn’t know before. By contrast, Facebook’s mostly-closed, symmetrical network makes it hard by design to see outside of your social network.

Handles and hashtags also help with serendipity. Handles are unique, so you can do a search for @bokardo and see the stream of references to Josh Porter, much more easily than if you searched for Josh Porter. This is a major advantage of Twitter over Facebook and LinkedIn, where searches for common names yield enough results that it’s nearly impossible to find a person with a common name. Hashtags make it easy to generate a topic by social convention and follow the thread. It is doubtful that Twitter intended handles to be useful for search and serendipity – they just used a convention that’s ubiquitous in consumer web services. Twitter doesn’t even have any explicit support for hashtags – they arose as social convention in the community. But as search became an integral part of the Twitter experience, handles and hashtags help.

My favorite thing about Twitter serendipity is that “pivot search” on people and tags kicks in when you get actively engaged in a topic. Most design patterns intended to support serendipity do a query for you, and deliver “recommended results” using some algorithm. An article about bank bailouts has several other suggested articles on the same topic. When you’re reading, you may or may not be reading more. Personally, I’m more likely to follow hand-picked links the author has chosen within the context of the article. The human mind is a better filter than the algorithm.

By contrast, when a person or topic is interesting in Twitter, you can easily pivot on the person or topic and explore. A twitter hashtag search is likely interesting — more interesting than generic tag searches — because a tag points to an active conversation created in a social context, rather than an abstract topic. When you get interested in something, you can easily pursue it and discover interesting results. This “pivot search” design pattern may be ideally suited for infovores like me, and too implicit for people with other styles, but I really love it. It would be interesting to find out how many others use Twitter for pivot searches in this way.

In sum, there are properties of Twitter’s design: asymmetrical, mostly-public, searchable, easy-pivot, that foster serendipity. Some of them were probably designed by Twitter designers on purpose, others may be sweet side effects. As part of the evolutionary experiment in social software, they provide great lessons to learn from.

There’s a nasty hidden cost of the Geithner-Summers plan to buy distressed assets for more than they’re worth. A commenter on the Balloon Juice blog points out that by keeping mortgage assets on the books for more than they are worth, the owners of foreclosed properties have an incentive not to sell them. “If a mortgage is worth $400K and the house sells for $200K, the Title Holders would have to write down that $200K loss immediately. But, keeping that house abandoned and unsold means they don’t have to write down any losses.” Empty homes sit vacant, attract vagrants and copper-strippers, and cause neighborhood blight.

The obvious cost of the PPIP is taxpayer ripoff. The Public Private Investment Partnership plan from Obama’s financial Tim Geithner and Larry Summers has investors take bad assets off of banks’ books for more than they’re worth, leveraged by taxpayer dollars. If the assets aren’t worth inflated prices, taxpayers bear the loss. If the assets go up, taxpayers get only half the profit. The hidden cost is creeping social decay caused by squelching the market in the real houses beneath the mountain of fantasy investments.

To arbitrage this market failure, nonprofits have been creating schemes
to house the newly homeless in abandoned properties (the topic that
started the Cole thread) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/us/10squatter.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

A few days ago, the LocalTweeps service reached my Twitter social network. To sign up for LocalTweets, you tell it your zipcode and it broadcasts your signup on Twitter. LocalTweets hopes to be come a local directory with information organized by zipcode. This could be handy, but it doesn’t yet take advantage of an important aspect of geography, where the internet has a unique advantage over traditional directories. Geography is social and contextual.

Where am I? The downtown neighborhood of Menlo Park, on the Peninsula, in the Bay Area, in Northern California, and so on zooming outward. We use these different markers depending on context. Neighborhood is important for convenience and neighborhoodly socializing. The Bay Area is big, so the regions are important when considering the travel radius for an event. The relevant geographical category sometimes coincides with political jurisdiction (e.g. San Mateo County), and sometimes they don’t. That’s why it would be cool to be able to use tags, not just zipcodes, to identify events and places. A barbeque at a local park would be tagged with the neighborhood. An event at a venue is tagged with a local region. Broader organizing would refer to larger regions, e.g. “Central Valley.”

In a medium with limited physical space, it makes sense to use a single criterion like zipcode to categorize locations and events. But on the internet, there’s no reason to limit. People can, do, and will select the subjective geographical categories based on context.

A couple of years ago, I attended a meeting hosted by the unlamented hyperlocal startup, Backfence. Attendees at the Palo Alto meeting were frustrated because the service would not let them post news in neighboring Menlo Park, even though there are close ties between the towns: people are likely live in one town and work in the other, and to shop and do cultural things the next town over.

So the recommendation for LocalTweets and other internet geography services: free your taxonomy. Let people tag events, and designate them according to what’s socially relevant. The address (and zipcode) will identify where it is on the map. And the tag will identify where it is in people’s cultural context.