Feedonomics

I wasn’t expecting this kind of a response from Robert Scoble to my comments on Mathew Ingram’s Blog regarding Twitter and their architectural issues. I really honestly appreciate the feedback on Grazr, even if it’s painful for me to hear as one if it’s creators.

First, I want to say, Grazr is still here. We have lots of users, just not as many as we’d like and not on the growth curve we’d been hoping for. We’ve been trying to evolve and iterate our service to find the elements of it that are compelling, what it “wants” to be. One of the truths of startups is that you rarely “hit it big” with your initial idea. Twitter had no idea what they were onto when they first launched the service. Flickr started as an online game for girls and it took them time to find their niche. The key is accepting feedback and looking for the aspects of your technology that people find interesting and moving emphasis. We are still very much in this process.

Robert, thanks for the feedback. What you’ve pointed out is pretty much an exact list of the issues we’ve identified as we’d planned for our next version of Grazr, one we intend to launch in a few months. The strength of our core team is the technology skill-base, which in a lot of ways gives us the opposite problem as Twitter. Our architecture, services and scaling are extremely solid, but at the same time we’ve brought in some new people to help us redesign, re-articulate and relaunch the service in ways we’re confident are going to be much more consumer-facing and understandable.

I’ll be very interested in your thoughts on the new version. I’ll let you know when we’re ready, I would love to get more (albeit brutal) honest feedback

What a relief to read Brian Solis’ TechCrunch post on the role of PR in Web 2.0. I’m sick of the “how dare you try to contact me” attitude of so many A-listers. The “just be cool and hang out at Valley parties” approach is not only elitist, it is damaging to the active economy that we need to develop on the Web. Companies have a right to try and get their message out to potential customers, and to use professionals to help them do it. That doesn’t excuse sloppy PR efforts, but as Brian shows, there are acceptable ways of doing it, and being paid to do it for others is a job that deserves more respect. A-list bloggers forget that they are supposed to act as conduits for information flowing to their readers, not gatekeepers blocking anyone who doesn’t meet their standard of coolness. That is why I find the following advice from Brian to be the most important part of his post:

The best communications strategies will envelop not only authorities in new and traditional media, but also those voices in the “Magic Middle” of the attention curve. The Magic Middle, as David Sifry defined it, are the bloggers who have from 20-1000 other people linking to them. It is this group that enables PR people to reach The Long Tail and they help carry information and discussions among your customers directly in a true peer-to-peer approach.

You know, the people who pay for things. Last week I started working with an old friend of mine. By friend I mean someone I actually know in the real world. He’s been part of the software business since the mid-Eighties, but he hasn’t been following the Web 2.0 movement as closely as I have. I wanted to get a new perspective on what we should do with all the feed technology we’ve built. It’s been an interesting and sometimes embarrassing week. He keeps giving me the kind of advice I used to give him when he started 20 years ago.  My first software company in 1981 was a software mail-order business. It doesn’t get more entrepreneurial than that. We were selling things we didn’t even have in inventory. I can see just how much Kool-aid I’ve been drinking.

It’s only Saturday of a three-day weekend, and the storm is gathering on Techmeme already. The mob is screaming “Kill Twitter,” “Kill Google, Reddit and Digg.” Is that what Web 2.0 supposed to be about? I thought we were going to all hold hands and reach a higher state of consciousness through continuous exchange of memes. The irony is that the site at the center of this bloodlust has the innocent name of FriendFeed. Are we really heading to a social network apocalypse, or is this just a duel of competing tech gurus linkbaiting for all they’re worth? How will we know when FriendFeed has killed everyone else? Will Twitter make less money than the zero revenues they have now? This is getting really silly. Why can’t anyone get excited about a business model that works? You can’t have zero sum when there is no sum to measure.

The Twitter API allows clients to retrieve messages and social graph information, and also to post directly back to Twitter. The obvious problem with this architecture is that Twitter is at the center trying to handle the load. The Twitter user base is not going to “leave Twitter” for a different product, even if it is owned by Google who can add all the server capacity needed to remain stable. The answer is somewhere in the middle of this mess. Twitter clients aimed at a central Twitter server won’t survive. A Twitter ecosystem with multple centers and a cloud of users all sharing data is the only solution that will be acceptable. The dBASE ecosystem survived for 12 years using this model. As one participant failed, another picked up the slack. Users were able to continue running their applications across the collection of products. A labor force existed to support these applications. One key point, everyone got paid.  

The cries for a better Twitter are getting louder, but the paradox is that nobody wants to leave Twitter. Dan Gillmor’s post is a perfect example. After Dan makes a plea for someone to build a replacement for Twitter, the first commenter agrees and then says he “tried Pownce during one of the recent outages and couldn’t get into it. Aside from the fact that no one I know is on Pownce, which is a big issue, it lacks something, I don’t know what, that Twitter gets.” How do you replace Twitter while keeping it Twitter? Is an outright clone the answer? Should there be a federated infrastructure that allows multiple products to act as Twitter relays? Do all the members of this federation also have to be completely free?

Read this on Grazr.com

Louis Gray has a great roundup of the debate over comments on blog posts moving away from the post’s point of origin. He uses the clear parallel of bloggers adjusting to full text RSS feeds that also reduced control over their content.  If anything, feeds have increased the spread of blogging’s influence, and feed aggregators have allowed new bloggers to be exposed to readers who already suffered from subscription fatigue. Louis is one example, since my exposure to his writing has been almost entirely through Techmeme. New aggregation points for comments will be equally positive, but the transition will certainly be bumpy.  

After the pointer from Jeff Jarvis, I’ve been reading back through the archives of blogger Leisa Reichart, and I found this post in which she begs designers and users of social networks to turn down the noise. She seems to have gone through a transformation when it comes to noise. Here is what she was asking for a year ago:

If you’re designing a social application at the moment, think about how you can be quiet. This is just one of a million pleas from socially networked people everywhere who are going to great efforts to manage the noise that their networked applications are generating at times when they really need some quiet time to focus.

Leisa’s shift to embracing noise a year later is an interesting effect of continued use of Twitter.

The idea of noise as a positive aspect of Twitter is gaining traction. Jeff Jarvis quotes blogger Leisa Reichelt on the benefits of noise:

“Isn’t this all just annoying noise?” Reichelt asks and answers: “There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like. Knowing these details creates intimacy.”

When I took a journalism course at the Shorenstein Center a few years ago, professional news people in the class were still speaking dismissively of bloggers. I wonder how long it will take before reporters are assigned to Twitter as their beat?