Feedonomics

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?

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?

I don’t always agree with Scoble, but his post on noise as a positive factor on Twitter is worth paying attention to. Techies usually seek solutions with a high signal to noise ratio, but Scoble identifies himself as a “noise junkie.” Noise is the opposite of memes or zeitgeist. Instead of condensing masses of random information into a concise epiphany, the randomness of the Twitter stream is what counts. A New Yorker would recognize the visual equivalent when they walk out onto a crowded street. The energy level of everyone doing their own thing is the rush. In LA everyone is in their own movie and the other people are their audience. In New York everyone is in their own head and the other people are noise. Trying to add noise to news is something I’d like to do in Grazr. We’ve got the news part down, now we have to look to Twitter for the noise.

Jennifer Leggio makes the reasonable argument that Twitter users are acting out of a sense entitlement when they demand better service but reject the idea of any form of monetization. The idea of boycotting a free service as a form of protest is a “group tantrum” as she correcty points out. How about organizing a group brainstorming session to find ways to distribute Twitter’s load instead?

I can’t believe all these newspapers have staff members assigned to the task of creating and updating a Twitter account. But here it is, black and white and read by cbasturea, who made a Grazr widget out of newspaper tweets.

Grazr blogger jcorbett came up with a cool use for Grazr. He collects the names and twits of people who say they’re going to Ireland, and subscribes to their Twitter feeds.

It looks like Fred Wilson has also drunk the social graph kool-aid. Admitting that you didn’t get something or even mocked it at first, and now grok it is a sign of a healthy skepticism combined with an open mind. I went through a similar transition over the summer with Twitter, starting from my refusing to be a curmudgeon up to my current love of what Twitter has to offer. I now use Twitter’s social graph to work on the beta of Grazr, go to dinner with people, discuss cross-cultural slurs, lose weight, and even to watch TV. I now believe that the social graph will be the long-term contribution of Web 2.0 to society. But is the social graph new? Trebor Scholz has a great set of slideshows that demonstrate the social thread passing through the entire history of the Internet. (via Francis Shepherd) Like any overnight success, the social graph has always been here. It has just crystallized as a concept and a catch phrase now. Trebor’s presentation should give us enough historical perspective to realize that it also has a long way to go.