January 2009 Archive

Has Twitter (Finally) Tipped?

Ignore my byline. This is a guest post by my husband Geoffrey "Mr. Lacy" Ellis. If you'd like to write a guest post for sarahlacy.com, email me at sarah at sarahlacy dot com.

Twitter has tipped. This may seem like an obvious statement to those who have been using Twitter for a while. But even though I live in San Francisco and have to hear about startups all day long, I'm not really a Web insider. I'm an artist. And many of the people who I know are just now getting it.

It's a familiar story, only one I'm more excited about this time around. Back in 2005, when I joined MySpace, I felt like I was late to the game. I had to play catch up with dozens of people and build my friends up. I made a lot of connections there and found it useful for promoting my photography and keeping people up to date on my shows and zine releases. A while later, when Facebook opened up to old people like me - who didn't have a school network - I joined as soon as I had the chance. I saw a few friends make the jump from MySpace to Facebook, but in the early days I only had about 12 friends. I couldn't find anyone my age (37) and especially not anyone I had gone to high school or college with. Most everyone else I know told me it was a site for kids they'd never join. (And most of them are on there now.)

I joined Twitter in April 2007 after meeting Evan Williams and his now wife Sara at a conference in Phoenix. I wasn't sure how to use it or what I was joining for, but I decided to give it a try, mostly because I liked Evan. I didn't use it very much until we spent time with Evan and Sara again in November in Paris. I got to see how it could be useful - especially in a foreign country where our phones didn't work very well for calling, but worked fine for direct message and tweets. I became a more regular user, but I wasn't sure it would ever catch on. It was hard to explain to people and most of them had no interest in using it anyway. I began to feel the same way about Twitter as I did about Facebook. If people only understood why it was a useful tool, they would end up loving it. But you had to use it to know. And the concept sounded hopelessly trivial to non-Web friends.

I knew the shift was on from early adopters to medium adopters (is there such a thing?) when companies and political candidates started Twittering. Comcast, Barack Obama, Southwest Airlines, Rick Sanchez on CNN, etc. I was excited every time I started seeing Twitter mentioned in the mainstream media. It was even more interesting to me when people stopped having to explain what Twitter was. It was like a younger sibling who was becoming successful. Flash forward to the past 2 weeks. I have friends joining and following me at an alarming rate. By that I mean 3-4 per week, but these are people I never thought I'd see on Twitter. People I figured had no interest; people I figured never would get it.

Interestingly, my friends have been migrating, not just adopting more daily must-reads. I haven't gotten a legitimate MySpace friend request in more than three months, and my own interest in Facebook is waning as more friends join Twitter. People accuse early adopters of rushing to the next shiny site, but it turns out my friends do it too, only later than everyone in the Web scene.

Others may not be, but I'm convinced that Twitter has finally tipped and is about to explode. For someone like me, who is outside of the Web 2.0 demographic and has "regular" friends outside of Silicon Valley and the web scene, it's an amazing thing to see.

Typhoid Sarah

It's another one of those up-early-because-I-can't-sleep-but-yay!-the-house-is- quiet-enough-to-blog mornings. The reason I'm up too early is because I was horribly ill last night from taking the pill form of the Typhoid vaccine. I'd felt so bad-ass that I'd found a way to avoid the Typhoid shot several days ago. Now, I'm dreading the fact that I have three more to take this week and wondering if the shot might have been a better option. Hint: When they say drink several large glasses of water; they mean it. Every bit of moisture seems to be sapped from my body. I can barely even blink without my eyelids sticking! (TMI?)

All the vaccines signify a change in my travel plans for 2009. While I'm having to be coy on exactly what they are, let's say there's a significant project or two brewing that's going to involve some extended international travel. While some of the projects are new, the growing obsession with studying entrepreneurship around the world isn't.

I grew up in a family of seven with parents who are teachers; we had no money for international travel. When I got my first reporter job for $21,000 a year-- I wasn't exactly flush with funds either. More than ten years of being a beat reporter with two weeks vacation hasn't helped matters. So ever since I quit BusinessWeek to write my book, I've been making up for all that lost travel time. Last year, I went to Israel, Cannes, London (twice) and Mexico, but the bulk of my traveling was my 15-city-book tour.

That book tour was amazing, but exhausting. Part of what made it so exhausting was that I was wedging tons of small trips into my already packed schedule. So I'd wake up at 5 a.m., go shoot at Yahoo all day, hop on a plane to, say, Omaha, go to a late night tweet up, get up for a few more events the next day, stay out talking to entrepreneurs until 2 a.m., wake up at 4 a.m. for a flight home, write a BusinessWeek column on the plane, then race into Yahoo to shoot more. I'm not exaggerating.

So this year, as my job switches from book promotion back to reporting, my new travel plan is focus, especially because most of my travel is self-funded. I am only doing two types of trips: Ones where there is a very specific reporting ROI-- where I am following a specific, amazing story that has not been written-- or ones with a more literal ROI-- ie, where I'm getting paid to speak to support the former travel.

This means, I'm cutting out most conferences. It's a hard call, because conferences are fun. I'm sad watching via Twitter right now as all my friends arrive in Munich for DLD while I suffer through mini-Typhoid fever on my couch. But I can't be on the road as much as I was in 2008, for the sake of sanity, health, my marriage and my work and that means something has to go. And if I study my travel in 2008, I got way more out of trips where I filled my time meeting with new people without all the distraction and noise of a conference around us. Conferences are great for connecting with people and deepening relationships with people I already know. But increasingly I don't meet a lot of great new sources at them, and I don't get great new stories ideas. By definition, being at an event with a hundred other reporters keeps you in the echo-chamber.

That was the reason I reluctantly skipped Le Web in December. And why I'm on my couch, not in Munich right now. It also means I won't be attending SXSW; I'll be in another country instead. If you read my BusinessWeek columns you know I never attend Ted, and this year is no different. I will still attend AllThingsD and The Lobby (assuming there is a third Lobby), but those are two of the only ones set in stone on my calendar.

So you won't be getting conference circuit news, fun videos and photos here in 2009. But you will (eventually) get genuinely new and different stories that could never come out of a conference. Some of those will appear on the blog, some may appear in my BusinessWeek column, and some you won't read about for quite a while. But I'm pretty sure you also won't read about them anywhere else. And that sort of makes the Typhoid stomach-ache worthwhile.

Michael Lewis: Sounds Like a Jerk, Makes a Good Point

I have some love/hate issues with Michael Lewis as a writer. He's clearly insanely talented at finding and telling a great story. On a structural level, I heavily borrowed from Moneyball to organize Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good. If you look closely-- and I don't know why anyone ever would-- Max Levchin = Billy Beane as the spine of the book. The different various entrepreneurs rotate into the narrative the way, individual A's players rotate in to Moneyball. The philosophy of Web 2.0 provides the narrative glue, the way the philosophy of A's baseball provides the narrative glue of Moneyball. It's really borderline shameless.

But one thing I do not borrow from Lewis is his love of putting himself in his books. Ever since Liar's Poker I've found it incredibly self-congratulatory. I know people think I love to promote myself, but note there are about four occurrences of first person in my entire book and each is a passing reference making a bigger point about one of the subjects. Bottom line: If you come to a blog called SarahLacy.com, expect to read about me. If you pick up a book about entrepreneurs, expect to read about them.

So it's not surprising I had mixed feelings about Lewis' recent interview in The Atlantic. (Which, BTW, I'm subscribing to, because I keep getting linked to awesome Atlantic pieces.) The delightfully sassy reporter asked Lewis about the magazine industry, a timely topic, give that ad pages were horrific in the fourth quarter. Lewis smugly responded that he was faring just fine. Exact words below, the reporter in bold:

"And so I wonder what you think about that industry changing over the next couple of years. Especially since you're a guy who does long-form journalism and books, and those are arguably things that translate less well to the internet.

Well my personal experience has been very nice. The market for me has only gotten better!

[Laughs] That's not terribly helpful.

Well it makes it a little hard for me to prophesize doom. And I hate spinning theories to which I'm an exception. So my sense is, there'll always be a hunger for long-form journalism, and that it's just a question of how it's packaged. And that people will always figure out how to make it sort of viable. It's never going to be a hugely profitable business: it's more like the movie business or the car business in that there are all sorts of good non-economic reasons to be involved in it. The economic returns will always probably be driven down by too many people wanting to be in it.
 
But I don't feel gloomy about the magazine business at all.

Well that's nice! I feel pretty gloomy.

It's always inherently in a state of turmoil of one form or another. But let me put it this way: when I write a long magazine piece that gets attention I feel like it's more widely read now than it was ten years ago, by a long way. In fact, it feels excessively well read. Twenty years ago I might get a couple of notes in the mail and I'd hear about it maybe at a dinner party. And that would be the end of it, and it would go away very quickly. Ten years ago it would get passed around by email, and it would seem to have a life to me that would go on a little longer. Now the blogosphere picks it up and it becomes almost like a book: it lives for months. I'm getting responses to it for months. And I don't think the journalism has gotten any better. It's just the environment you publish it in is more able to rapidly get it to the people who are or might be interested in it. They're more likely to see it. So the demand side of things is not a problem. People really want to read this stuff. The question is how you monetize that."

Oh, it's just how to monetize it? Phew, I thought the industry had a real problem. Here's the thing: Lewis isn't wrong about his career; he's wrong to think it in any way reflects what media is facing in the aggregate. Yes, he is doing well and his pieces are more widely read, but that's because Lewis is one of the top writers in his field, and his fame just happens to parallel the increasing media calamity of the past few decades. Business being good for him is a reality, but it has zero to do with the state of media. 

So it comes across as incredibly smug to shrug off the widespread problems that almost all journalists who don't happen to be Michael Lewis are facing. Yes, even incredibly talented and successful ones.

That said, there's an important lesson in what he says: Even in the bleakest economic times, people at the top of their game still do well. While good times lift all boats, the inverse isn't true. It's a reminder to me to stop looking around at the broader economic collapse and panic. Rather, focus on content, content, content and pretend I'm living in my own Michael-Lewis-like bubble, until my income tells me otherwise. It's that fine line between letting panic hobble you and uttering famous last words you'll come to regret.

Commenting Problems :(

Hey everyone. A few people have complained that they can't see all the comments on my posts without adding a new one. I complained about this to Six Apart several days ago when I first noticed it, and they've assured me they are looking into it. No one seems to know why it's not giving a "Page 2" option.

Anyway, just want to let you know that I'm on it and I'm sorry! It's a shame because there have been so many great comments on the Google post. Oddly enough this hasn't happened before with this many comments. But I just upgraded to the new TypePad and there are a few things that need to get worked out.

[UPDATE: TypePad has not only fixed the problems, but added all kinds of new commenting sexiness!! Check it out and post a photo with your comment!)

Attack of the Sarah

The Attack of the Show folks were kind enough to have me on Friday to talk about tech layoffs and my recent Google post. Business shows I'm used to, but I've actually never been on TechTV/G4 before, so I was thrilled to be asked. Here is the clip:

The Morning Don't: Benjamin Buttons? Really?

After such an uplifting, auspicious day on Tuesday, it's time we returned to the usual fare on MD: grouchiness. Current target: the Oscar nominations- which left both Geoff and I scratching our heads.... 

Presidents! They're Just Like Us!

I am posting this here so I'll have it handy to show Mr. Lacy every time he gets annoyed when I stop walking, talking or anything else and freeze into Blackberry mode. "But Obama does it!"

It's nice to have someone in the White House who you feel is living on the same planet, isn't it? (Also, sorry, but *swoon*)

Google Dethroned?

There's a truism in Silicon Valley that Peter Thiel describes in my book: No publicly-traded Internet company stays on top for more than four years. We saw it with Netscape, Yahoo, eBay, and I think we started seeing the beginnings of it with Google at the end of 2008. The company reports earnings later today, and as Paul Kedrosky and I discussed on TechTicker, analysts have been slashing growth estimates, although it's still in double-digits, and clearly outperforming other Web names.

But, truth be told, in this Darwinian Web cycle, the financial results are a lagging indicator when the king-du-jour of the Internet gets dethroned. If you look closely, we're already seeing loads of signals that Google is losing its grip on Web supremacy.

• The Inauguration: I flicked to this in my daily Yahoo "ValleyBuzz" post yesterday, but it bears noting again. Look closely at the Web stats on Inauguration day. While Obama was taking the oath of office and delivering his speech, Google's stats shows a decline in search activity. Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook usage soared. This speaks volumes for two reasons. One: It proves why Twitter and Facebook are ultimately more powerful sites, and paradoxically it's the same reason they are so tricky to monetize. They aren't about "transaction" they're about "connection." People went to Google to find specific information about the President-Elect and the ceremony. People go to Twitter and Facebook to share the experience with one another. That means, Twitter and Facebook are delighting users more than Google, because they are keyed into natural human needs and emotions that trigger far greater and more addictive endorphin rushes than just finding a piece of information. But far more telling and troubling was the explanation on Google's blog about why their numbers went down: Because people were obviously glued to the TV. Maybe. But they were also on other sites. Google no longer gets where the Web and its audience is going.

• Hulu/YouTube: Ok, we all thought Hulu was at utter joke when the networks first talked about it. But it's amazing, and its traffic hasn't dipped after the election as many thought it would. Sure YouTube is bigger in volume. But so many of the videos are user generated content in which I don't have any interest. They're like the thousand of listings for "Buy It Now!" socks on eBay. But Hulu isn't just better because it can have professional content: It's the technology. The last three times I've looked for a video clip, I've spent half an hour scouring Google and YouTube only to get a flood of inaccurate results. Each time, I've tried Hulu as a last result, and found the clips within minutes. Hulu has better fields, parameters and user interface for searching videos than Google, which still appears to search for video the way it would for text. Hulu won its own game (content) and shockingly in video beat Google at its own game (search).

Peter says in the book that there are two reasons for this four year curse. The first is that the farther a company gets from its big IPO moment, the more rapidly it loses its smartest employees, which is basically the only asset that matters for a Web company. See this TechCrunch post on why people leave Google, but really it's the same story with any company that's on top for this long. Its heyday has passed in terms of the well-understood stock option game of Silicon Valley.

The thread on that post, leads me to point two: Hubris. In the case of AOL, Yahoo, eBay and Google, each company became deluded they could do no wrong, they would always grow, and were smart enough to continue to lead the market. But not a single one has successfully anticipated the next big thing online. Amazon is the only Web company to come close, even if it's still mainly known as a bookseller. The examples above-- and many more out there-- point to the same hubris now strangling talent and innovation at Google. The assumption that if people weren't searching, they were watching TV on Inauguration day. The assumption its video search and technology would naturally be better than that of a media joint venture. And the haughty hiring process.

This is not to say Google won't continue to dominate what it does well, the way Yahoo does as a mass content-aggregation portal. This is not to say Google doesn't still have an amazing business model, just like eBay still has an amazing business model. But its golden child, do-no-wrong reign is ending. Reporters have been saying for four years that with more than 90% of its revenues coming from search, Google is a one-trick-pony; it's just been one phenomenal trick. And despite the billions spent on acquisitions and hundreds of beta projects thrown at the wall, the reality is Google hasn't been able to find a solid second trick.

Now that it's 2009, Google may be a bit past the four year mark of Thiel's curse, but not for long.

Morning Don't: Epic History and Epic Bed-head

How do you know I'm fully committed to The Morning Don't vision of capturing people as they really are in the morning? Because I actually posted this video of my puffy face and epic bedhead. What can I say? It was a night of tossing and turning. At least you'll appreciate all the work that goes into making me presentable for TechTicker now.

Oh yeah: GO OBAMA!

Press-ing Woz about Steve Jobs, Mobile and Kathy Griffin

I'm thrilled to be a regular contributer on a new NBC show called "Press:Here." It airs locally after "Meet the Press" and is the same format, but for tech. The producers are hopeful for more national syndication soon, but it doesn't practically matter because the episodes are online in their entirety and that's probably where a lot of the natural audience would watch it anyway.

It's an interesting change of pace to be on "real TV" and a luxurious change of pace to be a guest and not a host! As opposed to TechTicker, I just show up, talk and leave. Ahhhhhhhhhhh. I will be on any week I'm in town/ not conflicted, so that means seldom-to-never. I kid, I kid. But for those interested, I am missing the next few weeks, reappearing on Press:Here Feb. 22 and definitely the three Sundays after that. I have some inklings as to future guests and topics and the lineup is pretty impressive.

Of course, the Press:Here gang booked a perfect first guest in Steve Wozniak, especially given the sad news this week about Steve Jobs and his leave from Apple. In this clip, Matt Richtel and I press him more on just how important Jobs is to Apple:

I am having trouble embedding, but if you go here, we ask him about Kathy Griffin. See! I listen to my Twitter followers ;)