Twitter Ungets it, yet again
All right, deep breath, count to ten, and all that: Twitter’s fooling with the community dynamics again, and again they seem to completely miss the main point in a wash of secondaries. At least Evan Williams mentions the essential problem, which is that annotation during retweet is the real value. Indeed, many of us are searching for some way to utterly block the unannotated retweet, from anyone at all … which would include blocking any retweet using the new retweet mechanism, since it completely prevents annotation.
Evan clearly understands the point (see his paragraph, way way down near the bottom, that begins “The other thing some people will not like…”). And he’s clearly heard the outcry already rising over this (that paragraph notes that “it’s possible we’ll build that,” and ends with the plea “This point should not be missed”). OK, Even, we didn’t miss the point, but “it’s possible we’ll build that” isn’t much reassurance.
I think I know why they keep missing what seems to me to be the primary point. Here’s a completely convincing and authoritative graph, composed of numbers I totally made up on the spur of the moment:
The horizontal axis of the graph represents the average value of a given person’s tweets. The height of the graph represents the number of twitterers whose average value is in this range.
To the left, we see the famous long-tail effect of all those who tried it and abandoned it. We all know there are many of these folks, but really, it doesn’t mean anything, and we don’t bother with it much. You can tell whether a given journalist understands anything at all about Twitter by whether they talk about this (loser), or anything else at all (worth attention). If there’s anything that needs doing about these folks, it would be general “creature comfort” improvements to keep them from bailing out.
In the middle, you easily notice a huge hump of people with moderate-value tweets. These are mostly the social tweeters, the people who flood the @public_timeline with helpful stuff like “Yay, no school,” or “eating second spoonful of ice cream.” This population grades up into music reviews, odd thoughts, man-on-the-street news reporting, and other stuff that has increasing probability of interesting at least one other human on earth (or even, in the twitterverse).
At the right, you have the Tweeters who’ve learned how to get real value out of Twitter. Maybe they’re taking care of a community, maybe they’re organizing a political movement, maybe they’re just actual interesting personalities. Their numbers are much smaller than the middle group, as a few moments browsing the public_timeline will convince anyone, but they’re the real pay-off of Twitter, the thought leaders who’ll keep the traffic going while Twitter works out a business strategy.
The problem I seem to see is that the changes Twitter are making seem to focus on the middle group rather than the right-end group. Twitter should be working to draw the middlers into more dedicated, more continuous involvement. But instead, they seem to target these middlers, making it as comfortable as possible to neither get nor give value, but just dabble.
When Twitter were fixing performance and scalability issues, when the Fail Whale was our best friend, that made sense: go with the numbers. But that stuff’s pretty stable now; Mr. Whale hasn’t left the building, but he’s only a minor visitor these days. Now, Twitter can afford to build tweetership, loyalty, and face-time. Twitter changes should be guiding the middlers into more effective communication, not boxing them into current bad habits.
Filed under: Toys | 3 Comments
Reality Check?
The White House – Blog Post – Reality Check has some interesting thoughts on the on-going health-care debate. And I’m afraid I don’t really mean that in a nice way.
First, the blog points out that a recent survey from WellPoint uses obviously “flawed” techniques to make an unsustainable point, as part of a “misinformation campaign designed to confuse and distract attention from those who are seeking real health care solutions.”
Then, the blog responds to “one novel argument worth noting”: the survey claims that “imposing fees on health insurance providers and drug and device makers represents a tax on individuals and families” (because the costs will be passed along to customers). The blog discounts this notion with three arguments:
- The bookkeeping necessary for insurance companies to pass these costs along would be prohibitive. But, excuse me: too much bookkeeping for an insurance company? They live and die, quite properly, on extensive, exhaustive, constantly revised bookkeeping. You think they can’t divide a fee based on their number of subscribers, by the number of subscribers?
- Even if they took the trouble to pass the fee on, other parts of the plan will save them money, so obviously they’ll pass the savings along, too. Again, excuse me? The very people using trumped up surveys to block progress are suddenly going to turn all nicey-nicey? We have what reason to expect this?
- And, anyway, consumers save because of the reduced hidden tax currently paid in care for the uninsured. But this “hidden tax” is paid through the mechanism of providers spreading costs to paying customers—i.e., insurance carriers—and ultimately of course to consumers (the legendary $100 slippers and all that). This last blog argument is so vague, I’m not even clear whether it foolishly supposes health care providers are not actually businesses, or whether it’s just reapplying that faulty logic to the insurance carriers. But either way: the current debate, the very survey that occasions this blog, provides all the evidence you need to know it ain’t so.
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Bing and Google are going to start indexing Tweets. They haven’t said so, but I’m guessing they’ll start using tweet insights in their search rankings as well–they already use every byte the can grab in half a dozen ways. The Google blog talks about “the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation,” which is no doubt a part of it all, but the infamous noise factor of Twitter clearly means that G & B will need to be clever about choosing which tweets to present; why not also, use Tweets to be clever about content from other sources? You know they’ll do it: search ranking is a huge point of competition for them (see BlindSearch for more details on that).
This all resonates in my head (like sticking my head in a church bell) with my experience of the “Balloon Boy” story, last week. You know the one:
- Boy reportedly, may be trapped in accidentally released helium balloon (I heard it on Twitter)
- Parents search their house frantically but hopelessly (I heard it on Twitter)
- Authorities track the balloon (I heard it on Twitter)
- Authorities search for helicopters and ultra-light aircraft to snatch the boy from the basket (I heard it on Twitter)
- Balloon comes down in a field — but no boy! (I heard it on Twitter)
- New search for boy (or, frighteningly probably, remains) along the route over which the balloon had floated (I followed it on Twitter, house by house, block by block)
- Woops! Uh, oh … naughty naughty boy was hiding in the attic! (I heard it on Twitter)
- Authorities let out that they’re pursuing legal action, for perpetrating a hoax (Yup, heard it on Twitter)
- And then Yahoo! News picked up that “a boy, reportedly, was trapped in a helium balloon”!
Hard not to believe that maybe Twitter’s on to something here, don’t you think?
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Well, no one ever doubted AT&T knows where the money is …
Back in May, there were rumors that AT&T might reach out to the iPhone crowd with lower rates. Laterly, though, we’ve heard that AT&T views iPhone customers as “problems,” because they use the 3G services they’re paying for.
Now we find that AT&T’s discovered a more lucrative market: the Amazon Kindle. Because the data charges are hidden inside the book costs, Kindle customers are lulled into believing that their data plan is “free.” But it’s not! Not to the customers, who pay through their book purchase price, and not to Amazon, who actually writes the checks to AT&T. But this party-game of finger pointing serves the necessary smoke-screen role for proper consumer gouging, in a way that the iPhone data plans do not.
When AT&T starts making noises about throttling iPhone data usage, when AT&T is undismayed by a call drop rate deep in the double digits, when your iPhone suddenly, ridiculously claims you’re “not subscribed to a cellular data service,” as mine has ever since last Friday, then as an iPhone user, you know who you’re paying for this service failure, and you’re able to do all those annoying things like calling customer service. This apparently raises expenses at AT&T, presumably because they have to hire many actual people to ignore the calls, instead of a limited few, or perhaps just a little redirect to /dev/null, to presumably ignore Amazon raising similar complaints, if any.
How about you, iPhone user? Are you using more than your fair share? Yes, I know, your data plan says “unlimited,” but apparently “unlimited” stops somewhere, perhaps at the $2 to $8 per MB Amazon’s passing along (I’m guesstimating one book at about one MB)?
Easy to check:
- Go to Settings
- Go to General
- Go to Usage
- Look down at “Cellular Network Data”
- Divide by how much you’ve paid during the same period for your data plan
Are you “hogging” more bandwidth than 1MB/$8? I’d be interested to collect results in the comments section.
Unfortunately, I can’t contribute my own numbers, as I lost all my history, settings, and downloads hard-resetting the device, hoping to clear the “not subscribed” problem. Fruitlessly.
Filed under: Mythoi, Toys | 3 Comments
Nice one, AT&T!
AT&T has collected a lot of flame, this year, for delaying availability of cool new features in the new iPhones released in June.
Today, AT&T officially enabled one: MMS (notably, sending pictures along with text messages). I say “officially,” because they’ve actually been enabling it for a few weeks, as some users learned by receiving a text from AT&T, and others learned by turning it on and trying. But today was announced as the official roll-out, and today was the day the necessary “carrier settings” became available from iTunes, no tricky developer voodoo required.
AT&T has explained all along that this delay was so they could upgrade their network to handle the traffic. I believe that story, by the way, I’m not casting doubt in that direction. But there does remain the question of why they didn’t do the upgrade before Apple’s launch.
And there also remained the question of whether they would upgrade enough to really carry the load. A fair, not to say urgent, question, given the service problems all AT&T users have been reporting since the explosive growth of iPhone users and 3G network use. For instance, from me.
So, how’d it go?
Painless. Apparently flawless. Googling about just now, I find multiple breaking-news articles with subjects like “AT&T Survives …”. Not a very cheery slant on the news, I grant you, but still very good news. Provacateur that I am, I tweeted my tweeps, fishing for complaints, and no one had an unkind word to say.
It just works.
Nice work, AT&T!
Now, about that “tethering” business…
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Kindle again (or, not)
Another installment in my continuing musings over the Amazon Kindle.
I’ve just started reading Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. You can find my reactions to the book over in Communities are founded on trust. But there’s a Kindle tie-in here as well, that made me think.
When I decided to pick up this book, I pondered whether to buy it in physical or electronic form (of course it’s available for Kindle!). As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t have a Kindle, but I do have the Kindle iPhone app. While the real Kindle has a much bigger, and arguably nicer, screen, it fails my “pocket bloat minimization” requirement.
It occurred to me that Trust Agents might be just the sort of book I’d want to read electronically. It’s very easy reading, it’s interesting and substantive, and yet I don’t quite see myself treasuring it for ages, passing it on to my grandchildren. I hope I don’t break any hearts, but I expect I’ll move on to other books, hopefully just as helpful, in a year or so.
But, I didn’t get the Kindle edition, I got the physical edition. Here’s why:
I expected (and have not been disappointed) that this book would have lots to think about. I’m a tactile thinker. I mark books up. I’m just getting started with this book, but there are marks on nearly every page so far: underlinings, marginal references to similar thoughts in other books, quibbles and arguments and wild disagreements. Truth is, the way I work, I may never go back and read any of these (at least, not once I’ve blogged them), but they help me engage the text and remember the points.
I did not expect, did not think about, my love of physical books, of their physicality itself. But it’s there. I peeked into my mail slot every morning, to see if the book had arrived. I snatched the box and scuttled to my desk, trying not to look too conspicuous. I ripped off the tape. And then, I performed that marvelous, evocative, familiarizing ritual of loosening the binding: opening to several pages, gently spreading the leaves, bending every so gently beyond the tightly pressed rigidity, peeking at a word or paragraph here or there, opening the object and the thoughts and the time all together.
If you want to read Chris’s words, you can get them on line. You should. If you want to get to know Chris, you should buy him a cup of coffee, or dinner, or invite him to speak at your next company off-site. But if you want to clear your mind of distractions and enter into this engaging, enlightening exploration of a new way of socializing, get the book.
The actual book.
Filed under: Toys | 2 Comments
While trying to re-re-re-reschedule a meet-up, I sent my friend this SMS from my iPhone:
I don’t hate you. But maybe I’ll expect you to pay…
When we finally did meet up, he asked, in extreme bafflement, “Did you really type in all those @’s???” I said “wha … … … ?” He showed me his Crackberry:
@I@ @d@o@n@’@t@ @h@a@t@e@ @y@o@u@.@ @B@u@t@ @m@a@y@b@e@ @I@’@l@l@ @e@x@p@e@c@t@ @y@o@u@ @t@o@ @p@a@@y �
Yikes! Since he’d shown me his, I showed him mine, and then we did some experiments and determined that he wasn’t getting Unicode, or apparently anything beyond US-ASCII. If I message him something Latin-1-able, like “Jürgen”, the accent gets stripped: “Jurgen”. But the real kicker in the original example appears to be the “horizontal ellipsis,” Unicode code point #2026. This apparently got past his de-Unicodifrator and left all those UTF16 nulls-before-ASCII-codepoints as “@”.
“But, I have the new Tour World Phone,” he cried!
“Yes, so long as the ‘world’ will condescend to speak only US American, apparently.”
So I went googling. Actually, we both went googling, but his Crackberry was too slow, too small, and couldn’t display all the pages we found most interesting anyway, so we did it all with my iPhone.
I found ample substantiation of Crackberry Unicode incompetence, in the form of questions in many forums. There are a few responses of the form “choose the right language” (Uhhhh … which language would “…” be? I thought the whole bleedin’ POINT of Unicode was to handle all languages???). But the directions for doing that didn’t work on his Tour (they were evidently for some other model), nor could we find any analogous configuration screen.
C’mon, RIM! Unicode’s hardly “cutting edge.” In two thousand bloody THREE, Joel on Software was chastising web developers for ignoring Unicode.
Can anyone help my friend Unicode-enable his BlackBerry Tour?
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The folks at Twitter continue to strive to provide the best service possible. I say that with no irony what so ever. I mean it literally. Even though I’m about to dis their latest effort!
They’re formalizing the notion of the “retweet.” Check Twitter Blog: Project Retweet: Phase One. There are some pretty pictures there, which is nice, but I think the whole effort is going in the wrong direction.
The twitterverse seems to me to be divided into roughly three groups.
- Newbies and casual users, tailing off to the “haven’t visited the site in two years” crowd
- Experienced, frequent, social users
- Business and social-media users
I’m a lowly newbie in category #3. I think Twitter is making a significant difference in how I do my job, providing significant benefit for my company, and saving me significant time (or providing me significant information I couldn’t have gained by any efforts without it). I’m a fan!
But this “retweet” business, now … In the category-3 community, and maybe the cat-2 crowd as well, we’re kind of “over” the retweet thing. Simple retweeting has, with increasing frequency, been discouraged. Rather, we think you should add some value to the conversation, not just boff off someone else’s remarks. We usually refer to these “value-add” repetitions as “via”, because of the most common formats for the two techniques:
- (Retweets) RT: @someone I’m worried about http://wherever.com/
- (“via”) This may be worse that it first looks: http://wherever.com/ (via @someone)
In the retweet (RT:) case, all you do is forward the same remarks. In the “via” case, you add your own reactions, maybe even completely rewrite the comments, but give “via” credit to whoever pointed the original out.
Feeling is widespread that literal retweeting is more often annoying than helpful, and it certainly does very little indeed to help your readers get to know you, only whoever you’re quoting. Adding value, providing comment, rewording, even completely disagreeing, are all more substantive. And if you can’t think of anything to add, you maybe shouldn’t even be forwarding this stuff.
Certainly, there are some legitimate cases for the simple retweet:
- Helping to spread word of some breaking news
- Mega-follower superstars widening the distribution of info originated by us commoners
But for the most part, a little thought, a little added value, seem well worth encouraging.
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Lokis Net – OReilly Radar
In Lokis Net – OReilly Radar, Jeff Carr spins a Trickster myth to encourage Government 2.0 fans to use appropriate caution. It’s good story telling, except that I think he’s used the wrong central character. It should have been Odin.
Jeff’s myth features Loki, the Norse god who fills a role often known as the “Trickster.” There are several great references in Jeff’s post if you’d like to get to know Trickster better, but in short form: most indigenous myth systems include at least one identifiable Trickster character. Trickster is never one of the Big Boss Gods, but an imp: clever, often perverse, by no means always in the right, a counter-example more often than not. In Jeff’s myth, Loki spins a net that the other gods then use to trap him.
But Jeff’s warning, that we must not spin the web by which we are caught, is not the sort of story I would expect to find told about a Trickster. Trickster tales more often caution against hubris than mere folly. A simple oversight like this would not happen to Trickster, because he never does anything so simple as casual knitting. Trickster has plans, Trickster has dreams, Trickster’s plots are deep and convoluted, or they are brash, or greedy, or devious. Never casual. And Trickster’s downfall is foreshadowed and visible to us all from the first word of the tale.
The sort of mistake Jeff warns against, rather, usually falls to another character, the true boss-god, the one who bears the responsibilities of the world, and tries to execute them faithfully. This is the character whose slips cause disaster.
Consider, for example, Elder Brother of the Tohono O’odham, in his role as The Man In The Maze:
In ancient times, Se-eh-ha, who is also Elder Brother, needed a safe place to live. He still had a lot of work to do getting the world ready for the Pima and Papago people but he could not do his work because his enemies were always following him. …
Finally he decided to build a home underground in the center of a mountain. At the edge of the mountain, anyone could see the opening that led into his house, but … anyone who wanted to find Seeh-ha had to follow many narrow winding paths that went around and around. His enemies did not know which path to take. … The only trouble was that he wanted his friends to be able to come to him without getting lost. He made a map for them, and anyone who followed the map could make his way in without getting lost.
What’s the catch? Where’s the mistake? Take a look at the link and study the maze. It’s unicursal: there’s plenty of twisting going on, but only one path. Friend or enemy, you have only to keep going, and you reach Se-eh-ha. Sometimes, I worry about Se-eh-ha and the Tohono O’odham: their intended defenses are only a path for their enemies.
In Government 2.0, it’s not the advocates of openness who risk the future: they, like Jeff, are aware of the risks, and discuss them openly. Some may overstep their abilities, but others will be able to see, warn, and protect.
The danger to power is the arrogance of power, the one who supposes that his secret map is what keeps him safe.
Filed under: Gov 2.0, Mythoi | Leave a Comment
It’s about one week after “The Great Twitter Reply Farrago of ‘09.” Time for a check-up: how we doin’?
- My timeline does indeed seem to have fewer replies in it. That’s basically no surprise, given the announced compromise implementation. The Twitter team didn’t actually say that “reducing messages sent” was the goal (rather something about the internal costs of their processing), but I can’t judge that, and I can judge this, so FWIW: yes, to the best of my ability to judge, they seem to have accomplished their “reduce the load” objective.
- I have not seen a single reply and thought “hey, that other person might be interesting to follow.” Again, not surprising, since Twitter has already told me they won’t be sending me such things any longer. Well, a teeny surprise: the twitterverse-at-large had quickly invented a way to get around the Twitter changes, but it appears that no one in my twitterverse is bothering with that. Too bad: people who take the time to spread the community sound like they might be interesting folks to know, but I guess I never will
- It might be more than 3%! Browsing through the Twitter trends for #fixreplies, I find some people saying they used to turn the option on and off, so Twitter’s count of “those with it on at some particular moment” might be a bit off. Probably not much, I suppose.
- Now this surprises me: I believe that my own twittering habits have changed. Used to be, when I replied, I took a bit of time to make sure the reply was interesting: self-explanatory, or at least self-intriguing, maybe adding something to the discussion. I notably don’t do this any more. I’m sure my tweeples will confirm that my reply tweets are not as interesting as they were a week ago. Unless they care to allege I was never very interesting in the first place, of course.
I’m inclined to take this as spectacular vindication of my clap-of-doom review of the original change: I think the original, non-default behavior was crucial for community building; I think its low usage (only 3%) must mostly be because nearly 97% of people never bother with options anyway.
On the other hand, I’m also inclined to accept Twitter’s claim that supporting the option was too expensive to live. (I’m grumpy about their particular choice of which universal behavior to preserve, but supporting options? Yeah, that can hurt.) And I do believe (I do I do I DO) that they’re all about community building, and are working on some good community building facility that doesn’t hurt.
And once again, I gotta say: I’m impressed as all get-out, both with the Twitter team and with the twitterverse, for responding so quickly and effectively. In less than 24 hours, there was a big mistake, a coordinated reaction, some overcoming of hurt feelings on all sides, a compromise negotiation, a short-term palliative, and at least the beginnings of a long-term strategic reassessment. It really was a spectacular accomplishment!
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Recent Entries
- Twitter Ungets it, yet again
- Reality Check?
- Twitter, Facebook noticed by Bing, Google: The End of The Fly-by
- AT&T Pits Kindlers against iPhonies
- Nice one, AT&T!
- Kindle again (or, not)
- I’m sorry, what? BlackBerries can’t do Unicode?????
- Twitter Blog: Project Retweet: Phase One
- Lokis Net – OReilly Radar
- It’s a week later … do you know where your replies are?
- Twitter Blog: We Learned A Lot
