Guest Post: A Facebook Addict Gets Twitter Religion

This is a guest post by Eric Nam, of Boston College, who I met on the school's "TechTrek" to Silicon Valley a few weeks ago. We had a debate about Twitter just before Facebook changed their site to be more Twitter-like. I'd anticipated the changes would cause kids like Eric to find even less reason to start using Twitter. On the contrary, he's had quite a different experience. I found his thoughts interesting, and I thought you would too, so I asked him to write up a guest post for us. Enjoy!

Within the past two weeks, Twitter has successfully started a civil war of sorts within my closest group of friends. The argument: Twitter is pointless, a stalker’s paradise, and its services are already covered by Facebook. I completely understand this sentiment, as I was a cynic myself up until two weeks ago. However, within this short period of time, I have become a Twitter evangelist and a staunch believer in Twitter’s ability to fill a niche in the social networking world.

During a recent dinner with Sarah, my Boston College Tech Trek peers and I asked Sarah about her opinions on Twitter. Until this point, we were all skeptics, cynics and nonbelievers of the Twitter world. However, Ms. Lacy articulated the reasons as to why Twitter was so great, presented in her last Business Week column. Convinced, many of us joined the Twitter world as soon as we got back to our hotel.

Upon my entrance in to the Twitterverse, I was criticized by my friends who claimed that I had stalker tendencies by following @johncmayer, @gallaugher, @terrymoran @the_real_shaq and others, however I went ahead, unashamed and tweeted to my best ability. Since then, my number of “victims” has increased to 60 and includes a select group of friends that I care to keep up with, as well as my favorite websites and news sources such as @nprpolitics, @cnbctv, @theeconomist, @cnnbrk. What Twitter has done is capitalize on Facebook’s status update and transformed it into an incredible tool that keeps me connected with people and the stories that I am actually interested in.

As a deeply invested and long time Facebook user, I appreciate Facebook for providing me with embarrassing photos, easy ways to create events, and connections to my long lost friends. However, throughout my years of Facebook use, I have accumulated ‘friends’ who I am close with, but many more that I don’t care to keep up with, or are merely my acquaintances. 

Though Facebook’s newest platform attempts to preemptively negate Twitter’s allure, the real-time updates on my Facebook friends doesn’t draw me in. Honestly, I don’t care to be updated on what Billy from the 3rd grade is doing or how Susie wrote on Kimberly’s wall. Some may argue that I should “de-friend” them, but really, let’s think about how that’s perceived. Either 1. Sorry I don’t like you anymore 2. I don’t care about you anymore or 3. Who are you? Yeah, it’s not the greatest of feelings.

Furthermore, Facebook’s design has gotten out of control.

How Celebrities Are Bringing Twitter to the Normal People (Guest Post from Paisano)

Twitter founder Evan Williams predicted on Charlie Rose that his service would be popular with "Normal People" in five years, but it's beginning to look like he was way off. It appears as if incredible amounts of common every day non-tech types are starting to join Twitter and the reason for this massive increase in adoption is ironic. Apparently, celebrities using Twitter has generated a great deal of interest by their fans and viewers of TV shows.

It's becoming clear that the more that celebrities talk about using Twitter, the more people become curious about this oddly named service and actually join to check it out. Some of the most well-known celebs on TV that are sharing their addiction to Twitter are Kelly Ripa, Ellen Deneres, Jimmy Fallon and American Idol host, Ryan Seacrest. By the way, Jon Stewart from The Daily Show recently went on a hilarious rank on this whole Twitter phenomenon.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The problem with all of this is the fact that Twitter is the least user-friendly service when it comes to new members. I've heard countless new members grumble and complain about the confusion they experience when they join and see nothing there. Most don't realize that they need to start adding people to follow, including their beloved celebrities.

Thankfully, Twitter has an improved search tool and a Find People area that can help a little bit. Also, their new Recommended Users tool can help newcomers find people to follow. While these certainly help to come degree, it still isn't enough to fully enhance the Twitter experience.
 

Anyway, one of these new members is my wife. She's not interested in blogging or Sillicon Valley and merely wants to follow some of her favorite celebrities on Twitter and wasn't having much luck with Twitter's built-in tools. So I went on a quest to find some cool third party tools to help her and other fans find real celebrities that use Twitter.

Twellow has been around the longest in this roundup. It's basically a yellow pages for Twitter members and includes sections for all kinds of categories much like the phone book.

WeFollow  is a new service from Kevin Rose and the folks at Digg. It looks and smells like a Twitter directory powered by hashtag categories for the type of people you want to find to follow. This includes celebrities.

Twitterists is a little different because it's not just trying to be an all-inclusive directory of all types of Twitter members but instead focuses on the famous folk that use Twitter. It allows members to add new famous twitter users much like Mahalo counts on its members for content. The service doesn't have much data at this point and the user interface can be much better.

Valebrity is the best service that I found when it comes to finding actual celebrities that use Twitter. Ok, I must confess that I did not find this service. It was my Twitter newbie wife that discovered this excellent service! Talk about humbling, here I was the big time blogger of all things new and my rookie spouse finds a service that was much better than any I could find.

 

Anyway, the reason why Valebrity is better than the others is because of the way that it validates each and every celebrity account on Twitter and other social networks.

There's also a handy list of "confirmed fakes" which can save you lots of time by not bothering to follow accounts that pretend to be the real deal. The list is updated all the time which makes it a useful resource to check on a regular basis.For example, Valebrity has confirmed that the Tina Fey twitter account is indeed a fake despite the fact that most people seem to believe it's really her. Tina actually commented on this by saying I don't know who it is but they're very funny.

Members can also contribute to the listings through the Contribute section. Also, celebs or their people can add them thru the Get Added section. At the bottom of every entry there's a "How we validated" link that will show you how Valebrity validated the account or confirmed that it was a fake.

Final Thoughts
Twitter is getting a ton of love these days so it doesn't really matter how people find it anymore. Whether it's for marketing your business or personal brand or simply just to follow the tweets of your favorite celebrity, the end result is that the Twitter network is growing which is only a good thing. The fact that there are already services in place like Valebrity that go to the trouble of validating the identities of certain accounts is another valuable tool for all members.

Please share some other services you like to use that help identify whom to follow on Twitter, celebrity or otherwise.

Doriano "Paisano" Carta is a writer for several blogs including ThePaisano.com and Chris Brogan's Dadomatic.com where he is also Editor-in-Chief with a staff of over 70 daddy-bloggers. He's also an I.T. Professional that is very interested in social media and Enterprise 2.0. He's a devoted husband and proud father of three wonderful children.  

UGC: Just a Loss Leader in the End?

Back in the late 1990s, dot coms were all about the land grab. The idea was the more eyeballs and shoppers you got- POOF!- the more valuable you were. Never mind, the advertising market wasn't quite there yet and you were selling bags of dog food at a loss. The common wisdom has been that this was irresponsible, and truth be told, none of these companies had any business being publicly traded. But, more than half of the companies started during this time, actually stayed in business-- incredibly high odds for startups. To many, that proves that the problem wasn't that too many companies were started and nor was it their unfounded business models. It was that too much money was wasted on each one, and that it was never a game the public markets should have been playing.

There was, of course, one very important benefit to that land grab and wasted millions in investment capital: All those free services and cheap bags of dog food did bring a ton of people online. And they stayed online, even as many of the companies that did survive did so by charging realistic prices and shipping if they were in ecommerce, or switching to premium services and subscription fees if they were in content or entertainment. In fact, throughout the post 2000s, nearly every Web startup pitching venture capitalists or reporters were all talking up their premium services and subscription fees. You can still see vestiges of it with The Wall Street Journal's stubborn resistance to giving away content for free and early Web 2.0 companies like LinkedIn that didn't wait for an ad market to develop, but rather charged fees for things like job posting and "InMail."

As the wet blanket of recession has settled around the Valley and startups have come under pressure to monetize what they've built, I've wondered when we'd see the same flight to subscriptions and fees. Instead we're starting to see something similar but with a Web 2.0 twist: The rejection of user generated content in favor of professional content that's more consistent, reliable and palatable to advertisers.

This is bold shift, as the whole Web 2.0 movement was predicated on user generated content and the engineer-centric idea that you could build an easy to use platform, everyday people would create content for free, and other everyday people would navigate it, consume it and push the very best up to the top. It was rooted in the conviction that you didn't need the kind of doomed content partnerships of the past between New York, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, because Web 2.0 was democratizing media and entertainment and ultimately that platform was the future, not the content gatekeepers.

This was clearly the most pronounced on YouTube, where the viral sensations like the Evolution of the Dance and the Grape Lady (ow! ow! owwwwww!) became the lexicon of an entire generation and the myth sprung up that everyday stars of viral videos would become household names with their own movies and HBO shows. (They never did.)  Sure there were whispered claims that as much as 50% of YouTube's views were actually of copyrighted material. Still, the company never would have sold to Google for $1.65 billion without UGC.

In other words, user generated content was to Web 2.0 what free-bags-of-dog-food was to ecommerce.  But flash-forward to 2009, and there's still no clear way to monetize user generated content, either from the sites themselves or the would-be stars.

Guess what? The Web has evolved to the point where you can monetize professional content. And that's why you see most of the smarter members of the Web 2.0 elite doing the very content deals they would have rejected a year ago. First, there was YouTube's rumored deal with the William Morris Agency, and now Slide has teamed up with the Valley-addict Ashton Kutcher and his company Katalyst Media. Katalyst also launched its site The Blah Girls at TechCrunch50 and produced 24-hours-at-Sundance with Kevin Rose last month, to mixed reviews.

Under the deal, Slide's FunSpace application on Facebook will be the exclusive distributor for Katalyst's reality show about its own company, KatalystHQ. Cheetos will sponsor the show. (What's that? ACTUAL REVENUES!? Between Cheetos and BlahGirls' sponsor Vitamin Water, Ashton's poor fans are going to need gym memberships, stat.)

Liz Gannes over at NewTeeVee questioned the logic in limiting distribution to an application within a site, even if it is the highly popular FunSpace on the highly popular Facebook. That was my first question too. But, Ashton's approach to all things Silicon Valley is very hat-in-hand, you-guys-are-the-experts, teach-me-your-techy-ways. He wants to learn what works as much as he wants to make each particular project a raging success. I think that's smart. And Max, with his metrics-watching obsession, knows what works online.

I talked to Ashton and Max yesterday, and while they noted the shift from UGC to professional partnerships was real, both said "loss leader" was too harsh a term for User Generated Content. They were both careful to extol UGC's virtues. Max talked it up as an unparalleled way for sites to get a volume of cheap and frequently highly viral content, and Ashton said that professional content had learned a lot from more on-the-fly lifecasting and the interactivity of user generated video. Indeed, the content of KatalystHQ is little more than Ashton's receptionist shooting video of life around the office.

But the inconsistency and unpredictability makes UGC nearly impossible to monetize. Said Max, "It's a much easier ad sale to do product placement in professional video where advertisers can control how they want it to be. They don't really want to rely on thirty second clips of people slamming into trees."  So UGC is a tool for bringing in users and content, but not very monetizable. Hmm...Sounds like the very definition of a loss leader to me...

But I grant their point that the shift hardly means that the move to democratize content is over. It's very possible there is still a genius way to monetize UGC, we just haven't found it yet. Remember how long it took the industry to come up with paid search ads? Back when Google was founded, many VCs deemed it too late to an already mature market with no good business model. It's also very possible a huge star does arise from YouTube and actually does cross-over to traditional media. But just like in the post-March-2000-era, companies need to focus on where advertisers want to spend money now, versus trying to sell them on the future. The future, simply put, will still be there when the economic crisis is over.

But why should we believe ties between Hollywood and the Valley will finally bear all that much-promised fruit? Max pointed to nearly every broadcaster voluntarily making content available online, the surprising success of Hulu, and viewers increasingly choosing the Web as the place to consume even long-form content. "A year ago, I think (Slide's sassy head of business development) Keith (Rabois) would have spit in the face of anyone suggesting a content deal with us," Max said. "Now you can't argue against it." The wake up call for Ashton? Five years ago, if you made people chose to get rid of their TVs or computers, most of the ones he knows would have said computers. "Now, you ask the same question and hands down everyone would get rid of the TV. You don't need it anymore."

When I teased Ashton about his third splashy Valley press tour in just a few months, he added, "By the way, I'm not going away so people can brace themselves for that."

Is a deal with Twitter next?

I Love TwitPic

Well, now that they've taken down the creepy guy doing pushups, I do! Look at the cute picture Erica O'Grady just took of Olivia and I during our fab coffee and cupcake time at Ritual. And it's already up! Funny how the real time web enables a quantum leap even from Flickr which seemed a quantum leap from everything else. (This is this shortest blog post I've ever done!)
 

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.

Let's End Mediocrity in Social Media Too

Om has a great post today about how the U.S. has not only become OK with mediocrity in 2008, we actually started rewarding it. See: auto bailout, banker bailout and every other kind of bailout our politicians are approving. Typically Silicon Valley gets no bailouts-- companies fail, and nimble startups replace them. But that doesn't mean there hasn't been the same mediocrity here in 2008. I'm talking about social media promotion and monetization. Link baiting to goose traffic, following any and everyone on Twitter so they'll follow you back, and the forced vitality that ran rampant in the early days of Facebook's platform. The cheap and meaningless obsession with forcing some metric to show that you are popular, at the cost of actually building something great.

As Scoble and others have been pointing out today, it's now Twitter application developers' turn. A rash of services ask you for your Twitter user name and password and send a Tweet for you when you try out their service. Twply is just the latest example. When you try out the service it sends a Twitter that says: "Just started using http://twply.com/ to get my @replies via email. Neat stuff!" Notice, it's even written in a conversational way, to hide that it's coming from the company. Or hide it for about ten seconds until you see that suddenly all your friends have started to use the phrase "Neat stuff!" Really, Twply?

Make no mistake: This is sleazy and annoying spam, and it's guaranteed that I try far fewer Twitter apps and immediately click away when a site asks for my user name and password. I did a keynote earlier this year where I talked about the incredibly low tolerance for spam on Twitter, because of the intimate nature of the conversations. Also because Twitters are frequently being pushed to your desktop or phone, it's far more disruptive than other more passive social media sites. People give Twitter permission to buzz their phones, because they can control who they hear from. When third party developers step in and usurp that right, it's far more offensive than a piece of spam delivered via email or even via Facebook. It's a sloppy, cheap and obnoxious way to spread the word about your product.

Here's an idea Twply: JUST BUILD A GOOD PRODUCT. Worse than the fact that it's spam itself is how mediocre it is at being spam! Tricking people into letting you use their Facebook or Twitter accounts to send unwanted promotional messages to their friends may get you a near term gain, but that's all it gets you. The startups that succeed in Silicon Valley do so because they come up with a newer, better way to build a business or solve a problem. They find hacks. They innovate. They build something that goes up and to the right for years-- not the next 30 minutes.

Thank God Loic Doesn't Run Twitter

Another weekend, another blog post where I disagree with Loic LeMeur. I swear, I really do like Loic and think Seesmic is one of the last original Web 2.0 ideas of the Web 2.0 wave. But he's completely wrong in this idea that you should rank search on Twitters based on "authority," i.e. how many followers you have. So wrong that I'm guessing this is another stunt to gin up "controversy." No one could be this nakedly egotistical and self-serving. Ok, no one would admit to being this egotistical and self-serving. From Loic's post:

"We're not equal on Twitter, as we're not equal on blogs and on the web. I am not saying someone who has more followers than yourself matters more, but what he says has a tendency to spread much faster."

That's actually exactly what you are saying. "Not equal" pretty much by definition means "one matters more than the other." Others have already blogged about why this is inherently anti-Web. And Scoble had a nice piece on how it's not even helpful when it comes to functionality on Twitter, with the great ending line, "Since when did 'authority' have anything to do with 'popularity?' "

But my point is it's also bad for Twitter as a business. Why? It keeps the service wedded to the Silicon Valley echo chamber, which has always been one of the biggest knocks on Twitter. The people who have the most followers on Twitter now aren't by default the most interesting or influential people, because the service is simply too new. Frequently, top Twitterers are people who already had a big platform in the techworld or were just early adopters. Twitter is far too young of a service to lock in advantages and set up fiefdoms based on that, especially now that mainstream media, actors and non-Web celebrities are just starting to discover it. Guess what Valley hoi palloi? Not everyone in the world who is searching something on Twitter cares what we think or knows who we are. Yes, as someone with nearly 7,000 followers, I include myself in that. If someone wants to know what only the most followed people think, he or she can just follow those people. That's how the service works.

The beauty of Twitter is the same thing that created some of its famous technical problems: No one's Twitter stream is the same as anyone else's. We all pick and chose who we want to follow for a variety of inherently individualistic reasons. For some people it's news sources, for others it's just their close friends, for a PR person it may be all journalists. More than any other communication and information tool, on Twitter "authority" is completely in the eye of the beholder. As we've glimpsed already with disaster coverage, the Tweets of people on the ground-- who may have no followers -- are far more powerful, informative and moving than a newscaster who may have the traditional media imprint of "authority." This is why the acquisition of Summize was so transformative for Twitter. No longer are you tied to who you follow, you can just watch trending topics and get a real time stream of what everyday people are thinking about, well, anything.

And as Twitter seeks a way to make money, it's paramount that the voice of "real people" continues to be front and center. Why? Because Twitter is likely going to develop premium services based around how companies like Zappos and Comcast and JetBlue and Dell are using Twitter now. The entire point of "ComcastCares" isn't just saving Michael Arrington's cable, but making anyone with a cable outage feel "cared for" at the moment they are most angry.  My guess is Dell doesn't care how many followers you have; "authority" to them is whoever wants to buy a PC at that second. Loic's description of Sprint responding to him and not someone with fewer followers doesn't prove his point. It proves Sprint doesn't get how to use Twitter as a customer service tool. For Twitter to grow in importance as a tool companies want to pay for, it needs to become more mainstream and flat, not less.

I think we can all agree that there needs to be better filters on Twitter. Twitter CEO Evan Williams included. We're going to see that. And you know what? I'm not worried it'll go the direction that Loic suggests because Evan has shown time and time again he's more loyal to the democratic spirit of Twitter than what Valley early adopters say. He's already refused to add other features the likes of Scoble and Arrington suggested. And more to the point, he's just a better businessman than that.

Why Evan Made a Smart Move

Om and I seem to be of the same mind. Biggest gamble on this deal: What the currency of Facebook stock is worth. That, and I take Evan at his word that he wants to keep building Twitter. After all, it's not all about money, particularly for people who've already made money. Twitter is a one of the biggest ideas in Web 2.0 and the team knows that doesn't just come around because you decide, "Ok we sold that one, what next?"

I think they made the right call. More in my Dirt segment on TechTicker today below:

Quick Hide Your Women and Children! TWITTER IS COMING!

OK, let's just say a lot of things have gone well for me since this whole author gig began:

• I got to quit my grueling staff reporter job
• I make a jillion percent more working for myself (factor in here how little many journalists make and that "jillion" isn't really a number and that sounds way less braggy.)
• I got to live my lifelong dream of walking in a bookstore and seeing my book on the front table
• I've gotten thousands of letters from people the book inspired
• I got under the skin of a New York Times Book Reviewer
• I pissed off a whole army of geeks at SXSW, torches and pitchforks ensued
• I got to travel to 15 different cities and meet thousands of entrepreneurs on an off-the-wall book tour

Pretty exciting year, right? Well there was one thing that didn't go as well as I'd hoped: I hoped that enough parents would read my book that they'd realize how absurd all the fear mongering about Web 2.0 is. You know, the idea-- nay, belief in some quarters-- that their kids would be stalked by pedophiles on MySpace and one drunken Facebook photo or YouTube video would mean the end of their professional lives.

See, the year I was writing my book, I'd take gym breaks during The View, where I'd hear frightened mothers talking about the grave dangers of MySpace and YouTube and Facebook and how they were killing our society and endangering our children. (Nevermind few of them had actually used these sites.) Worse: I actually met lots of high school kids whose parents and schools banned them from using sites like these.

I've long had a problem with our fear based culture in this country. But this was just stupid. Keeping your children from using some of the most socially transformative tools modern technology has ever seen was at best wildly overprotective and at worst setting them up for a lifetime of disadvantages. It's like homeschooling, cutting off all access to pop culture and self expression, and not allowing them to participate in anything that might advance future career-networking all rolled into one. Ok, maybe that's extreme. But, in some households and cultures, maybe not.

If nothing else, these tools provide more fun and connectivity and benefits than they do dangers. And just like sex or drugs, if your kids want to use them, they'll find a way. I met plenty of kids who'd worked out inventive hacks-- even your cheerleader types.

So, I guess in the culture we live in, it's a feather in Twitter's cap that it's gotten mainstream enough that it's being deemed a tool for terrorism. (You know, terrorists!! Those guys who are always fist-bumping!!)
So the argument goes terrorists just love Twitter because they can communicate in real time. 'Cause you know, they couldn't do that with SMS or chats or any other technology before. I'm sure they also used email and cellphones, and say cars to get around in planning their attacks. BAN ALL THE TERRORIST TOOLS!!! Are you kidding me? No wonder Silicon Valley is hungry for regime change.

More Fun with Paul Kedrosky

You too can be like Buffett!

...and a bad time for peer-to-peer lending

As a side note, I really like my pirate-y shirt/vest ensemble today! It was actually the result of Twitter. Diane Von Furstenberg Twittered a link to the site with a big sale on shoes and - duh- I clicked. I didn't buy shoes but did buy this shirt and vest and a few other things. Later tonight, when Mr. Lacy looks at me exasperated and says, "Where did THAT shirt come from??" I plan on blaming Twitter. Hot outfit AND an alibi? Don't tell me there's not a business model in there somewhere...