Category: Social Networks

Mental Exercise: Who Wins When Twitter Stumbles?

In continuing my short sell of social media, I’ve been imagining Twitter and Facebook as holdings in a hedge fund manager’s portfolio.

In my amateur understanding of hedge funds: the goal is to reduce risk and maximize returns by investing in assets that move in the opposite direction. The magic is in finding the complimentary assets.

A very simple example: if you see long term growth in the US stock market – a hedge would have 50% of your investment in the bond market, for stock and bonds prices often move in the opposite direction.

How does this metaphor extend to social media?

I’ve got a couple projects that would be interesting within a service like Twitter and I’d like to hedge my investment (development time). The question is – where are the complimentary assets?

Or, who wins when Twitter stumbles?

If people stop sending messages via Twitter – where does that communication flow?

Facebook? WordPress.com? Movabletype? Tumblr? Posterous ?

Maybe. While they all offer a similar capability – they fell to similar (private, hosted, silos) to be complimentary.

WordPress.org – feels closer (free, open source, well documented, mature API). But, I have a hard time imagining people mass-installing WordPress in their own web space after having everything taken care of for them.

My favorite answer so far: Email.

What would your Social Media Hedge Fund portfolio be made of?

Shorting Toxic, er, Social Media

Over on the Twitter the other day, I wrote:

“Yes, that giant sucking sound you hear is me buying up CDSs against UGC-backed securities. #shorting_social_media”

Right now, the similarities between the overheated real estate market of a few years ago and the current chatter around the marketing potential of Twitter and Facebook are uncanny.

Turns out, I’m not alone in seeing the parallels.

“[Facebook] has consistently behaved in ethically questionable ways regarding all three of its customer sets: consumers, developers, and advertisers. Today, that behaviour seems have infected entire components of the media value chain. Entire networks are, it seems, brokering stuff of dubious quality. Sound familiar? It’s just like Wall St 2001-2008.” – Umair Haque

“What if the social internet as we know it is being built on sand, on ads that almost no one looks at now and fewer will look at in two years? ” – Ethan Zuckerman

Please Exit the Silo in a Calm and Orderly Fashion

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In my world – Twitter and Facebook streams seem to be slowing down, while I’m hearing rumors of more people “using” both services – it’s not translating to me seeing new faces. Hell, I’m even seeing fewer familiar faces.

And half expecting to hear Whit Stillman‘s next project is titled “Social Network”.

Not a bad thing. Scenes change. The exciting pieces turn bland.

We know that. One of the first social networks – Geocities, launche in 1994, recently closed down. Five years from now it could easily be – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FourSquare, or Tumblr.

“I can’t blame Myspace, YouTube, Facebook or any of these sites for creating such a genius trap. I mostly blame myself for relying on these things like everyone else has for so long.” – Brian, musician

“But we don’t have NEA1 with Twitter, and that’s why tweeting is starting to stagnate, and developers like Dave are working on getting past it.” – Doc Searls

1. Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them and Anybody can improve them

Dr. Sheepthrow Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Social Media

A while ago, I heard Someone Influential1 arguing that the problem with social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc, is that they are inherently interpersonal spaces designed and built by asocial people.

Who else happily spends that much time between-chair-and-keyboard rather than out, with, um, people?

As the argument goes, our actual social relationships are like good wine: built over time by an amalgamation of interchanges, contexts, signaling, emotions, subtly, nuance, and complexity.

All of these characteristics are lacking in online social network destinations. It’s almost if the current batch of social network sites has all the nuance and complexity of a junior high home room class:

“Are you my friend?’

“Do you like me?”

“Do you like me like me?”

The argument continues by declaring the risk with model: younger generations could see these social networks as models for actual social relationships – rather than the mediated relationship they are – and we have a generation of sociopaths who require every aspect of every relationship to be explicitly declared to simply feel loved and wanted.

I’m sympathetic to the argument and I’d be all up for grabbing the pitchforks and torches except….

Have you watched a program (drama, comedy, talk, ‘reality’, ‘news’, anything really) on television or watched a movie lately?

Pick anything.

Guilty of the exact same crime.

And so much worse.

At least online – the people have a chance at changing the system to more accurately describe their relationships. They have a chance to use online interactions as a compliment and extension of offline interactions.

In broadcast media – there’s no chance. All the dysfunctional, psychotic, asocial behavior is frozen in. Ready for replaying over and over again. Never changing, learning, or improving.

While it once made me cringe to imagine a generation growing up on throwing sheep at each other in Facebook, it now terrifies me to imagine a generation of people modeling their social relationships off Power Rangers, daytime dramas, ’24’, Oprah, American Idol, and just about anything sold on a DVD.

Bring on the friend requests and thown sheep.


1. I think it was Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling, Clay Shirky, or someone similar. I can’t find a link right now, does this sound familiar to you?

Short URLs Re-defining SEO

It’s conventional search engine optimization wisdom that URLs should contain words, separated by either dashes or underscores. This approach improves the readability of the URL – making it more usable for people while simultaneously giving internet robots something to work on.

But with people sharing URLs within places – like Twitter and Facebook (and … and … and …) – places with a default social context, we’re seeing a URL’s context trump its readability as a significant usability factor.

Who is sharing and how they describe what they’re sharing is more important than the readability of the shared URL itself.

Leaving the search engine robots blocked out completely (disallow, nofollow, etc) or piecing together a pile of redirect URLs (which may or may not exist tomorrow, e.g. RE07.US).

Additionally, the share-er’s pays for each URL with their social capital. ‘Good’ URLs (as deemed by each individual follower) raise the share-er’s capital while ‘bad’ URLs lowers.

Throw in the proliferation of other difficult to index assets like images and video – and we’re talking about an internet that’s not Search Engine Optimized, but Social Engagement Optimized.

Pownce, Exit Here.

While, I wasn’t kind to Pownce a year ago, twice even. There are many unfortunate things about the shuttering of Pownce.

Halfway down the list is making the mistaken assumption that the same shuttering couldn’t happen to Twitter (or any other centralized, free, web service). Remember Evan sold Blogger to Google 6 years ago – before Blogger had a sustained, cash flow positive, revenue model.

Something about leopards and spots.

If Pownce was a publicly traded company that just closed up shop – the price of Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed would have just tanked (then again, I’ve been shorting ‘social networks’ for a year).

Perhaps Pownce’s greatest success was simply all the press and publicity it got. For a service around for maaaaayyybe 24 months – much enk was spilled.

So congrats to Leah – on a successful exit.

Oh, and Leah, perhaps you could join us for a MinneDemo or MinneBar?

Sharing is Caring

Like yourself, I travel in a number of personal and professional circles; dad’s open gym night, neighbors, this project team, that project team, peers via podcasting, peers through information architecture, peers through visual design, etc. Each circle has different values and finds different things relevant. The chances of something I find interesting being relevant to more than one of these circles in almost zero.

Preschools and potty-training schedules are off-topic in a project meeting.

Separate but equal.

Overarching tools with a ‘share’ gesture but lacking a notion of these distinct circles is simply rude. A privacy concern? Maybe – in the same way sharing anything on a publicly accessible URL is a privacy concern.

A complete disregard for how real people live multi-faceted lives? Absolutely.

You’re Worth $294.12

“I WANT to be enthused about things like Myspace, and Facebook, and Second Life, and iLike…In every case, I feel like people are blindly giving away value, and not getting enough in return. What do you get from these websites that you can’t get on your own? What do they do for you that you can’t do for yourself? The real purpose of all of them seems… to me, to be convincing people to give up personal information so that information can be sold to businesses, or otherwise used to market products. They are SPAM factories.” – Rusty Dubose

Rumor has it that Microsoft is about to purchase 5% of Facebook for $500 million.

Let’s put those numbers against the stats on Wikipedia’s Facebook page:

($500,000 * 20) / 34,000,000 active members = $294.11764 / active member.

No, I don’t think most “active members” get $300 of “free” value out of Facebook, MySpace, or Pownce.

Maybe LinkedIn….more likely Twitter.

The free blog their cousin set up for them on the server in his basement – absolutely.

Assuming a Silo?

My only issue with A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web is that it seems to assume a silo.

Cause, why else would it be needed?

If I always have full control (i.e. installing and maintaining a wordpress install on my own servers – not at wordpress.com) why would I need beg for freedom?

Just asking.

I support the premise, but I’d rather see “social”-ness added to existing open software.