Tag: microblogging

  • The clique friendly web

    In spite of the last post, I’m a bit ambivalent about Vir Sanghvi’s column.

    On one hand, I am in complete agreement with the rebuttals that I have read – Lekhni, Amit, Rohit. Rational and well articulated.

    And yet, over the years, that’s almost 7 of them, I can confidently say that blogger cliques have always been around. They may not have been formed with that intention, but over a time frame, many have developed that way, and this is a phenomenon I see on twitter too, where ‘followers’ tends to be taken literally. Will I name any? No, simply because they are cliques, and these days, cliques to mobs is a single click conversion. Heh.

    Simplistically put, many news channels and newspapers started out as a means of expression. Those who produced good content realised that many were paying attention to what they had to say. They looked around and noticed that there were others of their kind too. Mutual acknowledgment was a bit difficult because of business considerations, but they still stuck together, broadly, in terms of stances towards issues. The adoption of the medium rose, bringing new audiences. Somewhere, the quality of content became iffy. Sometimes because it had become a business, and sometimes because the content creators lost objectivity and started dictating norms, because they believed their audience was THE only audience that mattered. Of course they had measurement tools. Heh. (Just a small detour to say that even media planners trash the TAM and IRS/NRS methodology, yes, go on, take a poll)

    And then the web happened, and became a force to be reckoned with. It brought with it, blogs, which took less than 5 minutes to create. Some of the creators spent exactly that much of time. But others stuck on. Time and effort brought them recognition, and even some fame. They looked around, saw others of their kind. There were hardly any business consideration, linking to each other became the norm. The audience was being built all this while, and unacknowledged, a herd mentality too. Personal branding crept in. In many cases, the quality of content might have dropped with time – rehashed content using previously successful templates, link-baits, these are just online manifestations of things we see in newspapers and television. But though the posts were not as funny as they used to be or not well thought out, the audience stuck on, it was after all, a cool community to be in. There’s nothing wrong with it, its human nature to seek out kindred souls. The unfortunate part is the increasing intolerance for contra-views among many bloggers. You can see enough comment wars if you look around. At some point, perspectives became dogmas.

    And then came twitter, and microbloggers. It became all the more easier – from the simple RT to #followfriday and lists, there are multiple tools available, to build audiences, and cliques. And as I’ve written before, we on Twitter are famous for mobs. 🙂

    So,  my point is Mr. Sanghvi, relax. We’ve seen it all before, its only the medium that has changed. The people remain. This too shall give way to something else. If all goes according to the way it has before, in a few years, you can chuckle over post like yours by some blogger, who thinks someone in what is then the new media has been judgmental to a senior blogger. Heh.

    Meanwhile, the good part is, the web makes content production and distribution very easy, so you can ignore people if you personally think they’ve ‘lost it’. You will always find a contra-voice, it might be brow beaten sometimes, but it exists.

    until next time, sanguine 😉

  • Birds of the same feather…

    When he entered the place, there was already a crowd. All he wanted was to be able to have some decent conversations. He realized that he’d have to find a handle if he were to make any headway. And then he found her and realized it was possible to have a conversation amidst 140 characters.

    until next time, my second anniversary dedication to Twitter. 2 days from now 🙂

  • Micro Ambassadors

    The recent twitterguru polls conducted by itwote was a neat social experiment. The idea was to choose the person on twitter (in India) most loved by all. In that sense, the number of followers a person had or the number of tweets did not, though i did feel that the person with more followers did have a distinct advantage. Incidentally, the person with the maximum followers did win, though I’m still debating my point, with myself.

    However, the social experiment for me was completely different. It had to do with what I think would be the long tail of twitter popularity. While the final nominations were only 5 people, the amount of nominations were much larger. It made me realise that in the vast set of twitter users, many of us look up to others, pay attention to what they have to say, follow the links they share, in essence, extend to microblogging, the milieu of blogging.

    But there is a crucial difference – the twitterstream. Which means that in some ways it is also a broadcast medium. So, while I may not follow a blog because it predominantly covers stuff I’m not interested in, and therefore end up missing an interesting conversation that happens there, such a scenario is less common on twitter. So, my reach on twitter would most likely be more than my blogs.

    So, I was wondering about the concept of micro ambassadors. Let me show you through an example. The movie Dasvidaniya. We had a lot of discussions around it – the origin of the word, the website, and thanks to chupchap, I realised that the dasvidaniya website had, in addition to the Facebook and Orkut groups a very cool application, that tied in with very well with the movie – a Thing To do list, and by connecting friends, it could’ve made a very good social viral. Yes, there are many such apps, but this one has a context. I know at least 4-5 more people who were equally interested in the movie. And we were playing out the role of micro ambassadors. Now this might be a small number to begin with, but with an interesting app, and the long tail of twitter popularity, we sould’ve convinced at least a few to watch the movie.

    The value add here is that as a regular twitterer, I know other twitterers who’d be interested in a particular subject. What does it take – a few free tickets, in other words, product sampling. The duration of the micro ambassadorship should be decided by the kind of product, and the experience time it requires. In the case of the movie, it would be say, a couple of weeks.  A group of people passionate about a product./service, convinced about the value, spreading the news to others who’d be interested. While there are many stories of blogs being used for a viral spread, I haven’t come across many on twitter. It perhaps is a lack of awareness.

    But it raises a question for me. While I believe that both blogging and microblogging have their unique place on the web, does twitter, because of the way it is used, lend itself more to brand usage than blogs? Micro ambassadors, because they may not have the ‘star value’ of bloggers, and are relying on the long tail of popularity on twitter. Is it even better than social networks, where there perhaps might be constraints like viewership being limited to real life friends? I’m also wondering about new networks like Afinito (via Startup Meme), a service that connects you to other people with similar interests, or Orbius, a ‘safe and controlled environment for brands and companies to connect with their customers’.

    What do you think?

    until next time, now for a revenue model 😉

  • Twitter – the official version

    There were some pretty interesting new things that came out at TechCrunch50 last week. TC50 was a conference that took place from September 8-10, 2008 where 52 of the ‘best’ startups were launched in front of an audience that consisted of the industry’s most influential venture capitalists, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs, and press. I guess that would be bleeding edge. I followed it, thanks to some excellent coverage by StartupMeme. And that’s where I read about Yammer.

    Yammer intrigued me because of its utterly simple premise of ‘Twitter for business’. Where Twitter asks ‘What are you doing’, Yammer asks ‘what are you working on?’ I was even more intrigued because that’s a question LinkedIn has been asking for sometime now.  While the premise is simple, it does create some interesting new propositions – it only allows logins through official mail ids, making it quite secure, it lets users start their company network, invite people, and then serves as a database with individual profiles and conversations. For any user, it would be like a Twitter limited to his colleagues. All this is free, and if the organisation wants to play admin, it has to pay. Yammer already has Blackberry and iPhone apps. Apparently its demand was such that about 10,000 people and 2,000 organizations signed up for the service the day it launched.

    And then Yammer just went ahead and won TC50. Chris Brogan smartly notes that the Twhirl client + a laconi.ca backend would amount to the same thing, with the added advantage that Twhirl also allows tabs of Twitter and Friendfeed. RWW just ripped the Yammer model threadbare.

    Now, I see some contradiction in all this. Twitter’s popularity lies in its simplicity, and a quite transparent way of communicating, and sharing. There is no officiating, there is nobody looking over your shoulder. To me, Yammer sounds a lot like Intranet 2.0, and assuming that organisations do allow it, later, if the organisation takes admin charge, I don’t know how many employees will still be comfortable using it. And why would organisations want control in the first place, if the idea is conversation? I’m wondering whether the existence of Yammer will make a Twitter enterprise solution irrelevant.

    There’s been some stuff happening over at Twitter too. The recent coverage of a funeral via Twitter led to questions about privacy issues. (via RWW) My take is that in a social environment, you avoid people whose conversations you don’t like, just like in the real world. In the long term, it will help people decide what they talk about and how. I’d mentioned two tools in my last Twitter post. A cool tool for marketeers – Twitterise, and Twiggit, a good mashup of Twitter and Digg. I came across two more tools – Tweetburner, a sort of feedburner for Twitter which could be a great tracking tool for brand and PR guys. Read more about it here, and Dwigger, another Twitter+Digg tool, but different from the earlier one i mentioned. In this you can paste a twitter message URL, or a new Dwigger only message, all in the by now familiar 140 characters, and submit it to Dwigger, to be voted and commented on. Hmm, more on that here. I also found a personally useful tool, which gives an analysis of your Twitter usage. They have done it using Yahoo Pipes, and rendered it using the Google Chart API. Very interesting. Check it out here. Meanwhile, Mashable has just posted their review on Fidj.it, ‘a micro-blogging service that’s like a Twitter and Pownce mashup.’ Shall check it out soon.

    To conclude, there are more and more twitter tools being developed for different user needs. If Yammer actually becomes a huge success, through some radically fresh employer attitude, I’d like to see a bridge between Yammer and Twitter. One service that allows absolute transparent conversations within the organisations, and another that allows brands and organisations to be transparent with its end users. It could be quite an awesome combination.

    until next time, feeling fidgety already?