Category: Twitter

Monday, 19 January 2009

Thursday, 1 January 2009

Collapsing Space

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on Collapsing Space

“But I can’t imagine that blogging and Twitter won’t fully merge, and I expect that to happen soon.” – Dave Winer

I’ve been posted to Twitter from Cullect since Cullect launched. Cullect.com/Garricks-Friends probably has as many blog feeds as Twitter feeds (yes its more about the people than their choice of publication).

This is a long way of saying I don’t see a difference between these two printing presses (I’ve said this before).

One of the projects on my Not Until 2009 List is to eliminate the space between things like Twitter and a weblog. Agnostic indeed. Feels like some things in WordPress 2.7 will make this even easier.

Hmmmmmmm.

Wednesday, 3 December 2008

Pownce, Exit Here.

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off on 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?

Monday, 10 November 2008

Failing to Scale

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on Failing to Scale

Years ago, Google did something brave, bold, and innovative. They opened up GMail to a miniscule number of people and gave them a couple handfuls of invites to share with others. At the time, I assumed that strategy was as much about marketing as about scaling the service up. These days – when the tiniest, most obscure, single-use web apps are ‘closed’, invite-only, betas – this pure marketing strategy has become a parody of itself.

Cause every web apps thinks it needs to manage hockey stick growth out of the gate. Um. No.

When Twitter started, they did something more innovate and bold. They didn’t go invite. They went Fail Whale.

Open the doors, let everyone dance. When the servers stop, restart them.

No need to build and manage a temporary invite system – put those energies into solving performance problems.

“Building something people want is much harder than scaling it….If you solve the what-people-want problem, they’ll use you no matter how bad your interface is, how slow your site is, just give them somewhere worth waiting for.” – Matt Mullenweg

Invite-only launches aren’t a marketing strategy or a scaling strategy. It’s an arrogant strategy betraying how useless the actual web app is.

If the strategy is to be arrogant – at least charge for it.

Friday, 20 June 2008

Diversified Rhino Guarding

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on Diversified Rhino Guarding

“If you’re building on someone else’s platform, whenever they are down, you are down. There is no way around that.” – Brian Breslin on why TwitBin development is stalled.

A year ago, I wrote about my hesitation of building on someone else’s platform. Since then, I launched Cullect. Which is nothing if not built atop OPP [1].

When I first started development on Cullect – it only supported OpenID. Only. Less popular and less understood than many other services. Today, Cullect extends 3 different platforms (4 if you count OpenID). Feels right. Feels successful. Tomorrow, I see that number increasing.

Will some services fall away? Maybe. I’m not married to any of them.

So, Cullect doesn’t care if you stop using your Twitter account and move to Tumblr. As I wrote then, I’m not interested in building on a single platform. There’s plenty of rhinos to guard.

Elsewhere:

“On top of that, there aren’t all that many rewards for building things on top of Twitter. Sure, there are tons of active Twitter users. But with all the outages and the arbitrary changes in the API limits, I just haven’t been feeling the love. Tweeterboard’s gone from a fun diversion to a distraction.” – Gene Smith

1. Other People’s Platforms 😉

Tuesday, 10 June 2008

Twitter: Build a Revenue Stream on Dunbar’s Number

by Garrick van Buren 6 Comments on Twitter: Build a Revenue Stream on Dunbar’s Number

The problem with many of the suggestions on how Twitter should charge1,2,3 is they put the emphasis on the wrong problem. The problem isn’t on the publication side (number of ‘tweets’ written by any individual), it’s on the distribution side (delivering the ‘tweets’ to their ‘followers’).

A simple equation to understand this ‘spew’ problem.

Message x Number of Followers = Total Number of Messages Sent

As of this writing I have 521 followers, so everytime I hit ‘update’ I’m sending 521 messages. and I’m no Scoble (>26,000 followers as of this writing). 26,000+ messages with each update.

The same math applies to email4 – why it’s a bad idea to send large attachments to a large number of people – but, due to the distributed nature of email, it’s less of an issue.

Unlike email, the message senders aren’t the ones specifying recipients. The recipients are initiating the relationship.

Scoble isn’t to blame. If anyone is, it’s each of the 26,000+ people that have explicitly clicked ‘follow’ on Scoble’s profile.

I’m a big fan of charging at the point of value, and the point of value here is real-time updates from Scoble.

Amie Street determines the price of a song by it’s popularity. Get in early – it’s free, be the last to hear it and pay $0.98.

It’d be interesting to implement the same model on Twitter.

Since Twitter is about personal connections, I’ll propose tiering the price on multiples of Dunbar’s Number. $1/150 followers, starting at #151.

Here’s how that breaks down:

  1. Greg Swan; 838 followers, $5.59 to be the next follower
  2. Chris Brogan; 9,104 followers, $60.70 to be the next follower
  3. Dave Winer; 10,282 followers, $68.55 to be the next follower
  4. Scoble; 26,842 followers, $178.95 to be the next follower

Me? I’m a bargain at $3.48. 😉

Three things I find very interesting about this idea:

  1. it turns following into a market – which at these volumes is what it is – more on that here.
  2. it might result in getting more of these kind of Twitter accounts and fewer of these
  3. Like all cool things about Twitter, they don’t need to build this for it to exist.

Elsewhere:

“Well I’ve got [a solid business model for Twitter], and it’s quite simple. Allow accounts to charge to be followed. A one time fee, or a subscription. Twitter takes a cut, say 30% like the Apple app store. ” – Jim Gilliam

1. “In Twitter’s Scoble Problem”, a Business Model by Om Malik
2. Possible Twitter Business Model: Charge Leets, Not Tweets!
– Bex Huff
3. “A business model for Twitter: Pay up” – Dan Farber
4. This is probably why Twitter won’t be supporting payloads anytime soon.

Monday, 9 June 2008

Thursday, 24 April 2008

…And They Asked 4 Followers, And They Asked 4 Followers

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on …And They Asked 4 Followers, And They Asked 4 Followers

Something I wrote on Twitter a couple weeks ago:

“…2 questions: a) What if there was an open source, more effective alternative to Google search? b) What if Twitter is that alternative?”

Today, Four Reasons Why Twitter is the Next Google writes:

“Not only has Twitter inadvertently taken crowdsourcing to search, it has actually taken it a step further into friendsourcing. In fact, it has created the first personalized and trusted search engine in the world.” – Mr. List

The interesting bit is that Twitter doesn’t even offer ‘search’. Search engines like Summize (how I tracked down my above tweet) et. al, are building search atop Twitters API.

Steve Gillmor was absolutely right to cut off Dan Farber. Pasting text ads (a la Google) onto Twitter is boring. That’s why we haven’t seen it. And won’t.

As more vendors like H&R Block, Joyent, and even Comcast start to invest themselves in Twitter, we get much much closer to a VRM world. A world where both customers and vendors are smart people speaking intelligently to each other.

Sunday, 13 April 2008

What Andrew Baron Should Be Selling: Following

by Garrick van Buren 1 Comment on What Andrew Baron Should Be Selling: Following

There’s lots of chatter today about Andrew Baron auctioning off his 1500 Twitter followers.

As of this writing, the auction is just over $500.

Standard ad-based media play: aggregate eyeballs and sell them off to the highest bidder.

Yummmm. Eyeballs.

“This stunt may spark some copycatters, but it is essentially meaningless.” – Stowe Boyd

I suspect I’m not the only one that unfollowed prior to the outcome, not because of the auction specifically, I just didn’t enjoy his messages and this development was a fine enough reason to dump him. :p

That’s what made me think Andrew is selling the wrong asset. He can only sell his followers once. What he should be doing is auctioning off his ‘following’, the people he’s paying attention to.

“Will the new Andrew Baron, unlike the old one, follow me?” – Stephen Baker, Business Week

Andrew is the advertisement anyway.

This has a couple benefits for Andrew that his current stunt doesn’t:

  1. It’s an ongoing revenue stream. If someone wants Andrew to pay attention to them, this makes it real easy, pay him.
  2. It puts a dollar figure on attention. I suspect Steve Gillmor would love that
  3. It reduces Andrew’s information overload.

Elsewhere:

“There’s nothing wrong with stunt income, but it can only work once at best.” – Ewan Spence

“Don’t care, don’t believe it proves anything one way or the other except this: It proves the shallowness of at least a few folks who actually care to waste $1500+ dollars on something that means exactly nothing.” – Karoli

And to lighten things up a bit:

…I also participate in another telephone number over on my cell phone so I’m thinking I’ll start taking more calls over there and start up a new phone to do what I want to do next…. – Alexander Muse