The Way It Was Then

8:00 AM
Celebrity sent to hospital

10:00 AM
Celebrity pronounced dead

6:00 PM
Local TV announces death

Next Morning
Story printed on page 9 of the local newspaper

The Way It Is Now

8:00 AM
Celebrity sent to hospital

9:30 AM
Celebrity news site announces celebrity death

9:31 AM
Traffic on Twitter begins to explode with suspicions of drug related cardiac arrest

10:00 AM
Celebrity pronounced dead

10:30 AM
Rumors of other celebrity deaths spread on Twitter and other sites

10:45 AM
Celebrity tributes to dead celebrity begin

11:35 AM
Cable news networks announce death on network

12:00 PM
Cable news networks announce death on their web sites

Twitter is a great tool, still lacking business model.  What I hate about Twitter is that a huge percentage of tweets are about Twitter.  What I love about Twitter is that it’s an open canvas; a new medium for creativity and USEFULNESS.  I’ve seen Twitter used as a platform for news, customer service, “interactive” PR, and even an author’s new medium.  What is the best human-powered use of  Twitter?  Please send your nominees, and we’ll hold a vote.  As you comment, I’ll bring the nominee list up here.  Please recommend.  And please share this link to get as many quality nominees as we can.

PLEASE nominate a use, and if possible, a tweep:

140-character short stories / @arjunbasu, @twirledview @mrichtel
Breaking news situations / (If you have a list of accounts, comment and I’ll link)

I’ve been in the web publishing industry for a dozen years, and yet, I hadn’t started blogging until…well…a couple weeks ago.  Sure, I thought about it.  I even dabbled with LiveJournal as a personal open journal, but stopped abruptly when I realized my ex-girlfriend shouldn’t have been reading my outpouring of pain from losing her.

As a software development manager and product manager, I had plenty to blog about, but I chose not to.  I’m not the best writer (although I’m far from the worst), but that didn’t stop me.  Why did I wait until now?

It’s simple.  Who would want to read my blog?  And if I got a ton of readers, would I just be duping them?  Could I live with that?  Sure, I felt that I was very good at what I do.  But was I an “expert,” and wouldn’t blogging be inappropriately declaring myself as one?  How much experience did I have?  Was my opinion or experience relevant?

But in this new age of social media, loaded with blogging, microblogging, user-generated content, social bookmarking, etc., I’ve finally realized I missed a very important point.  It doesn’t matter if I’m an expert or not.  The beauty of this world is the ability to spur conversation and thought.  It doesn’t matter so much whether my opinions or “right” or “wrong,” but instead it matters that it triggers thought.

This is why all of these Twitter ranking services make me a little ill (although I’ll admit that I always know my Grader Twitter grade).  Self-proclaimed experts are the worst kind, and unfortunately, the most common kind.  So, while I certainly believe that I’m great at what I do, I’ll let you decide whether or not I’m an expert.  And if you follow me on Twitter, thereby increasing my Twitter Grader or twitterrank, does that make me an expert?

No, it does not.

But should that stop me from blogging?

No, it should not.

And so, here I am.  Please send me your non-expert blog links, and I’ll be happy to add you to my blogroll.  And please, let me know what you think about what I’m saying here.  That’s the whole point.  Waiting for your comments…

I’m feeling inspired, after ready Marty Cagan’s “Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love.“  Marty describes some clear best practices for success when creating a new product, or updating an existing product.  He references segmentation, and points out the importance of using personas when planning features and releases.  I finished the book last night, and I immediately started to think about whether or not I truly know my user base.  Truth be told, I don’t know as much as I need to about the users who come and quickly leave.  But new tools such as Twitter and Facebook make it possible to understand your users better than ever before.

Peter Steiner created a famous cartoon, captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”  Well, this is simply not true anymore.

Copyright Image from New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner.

Take Facebook, for instance.  I know more about my real life friends than I ever did before.  Just the other day, on Facebook, I got notified with what must be quickest spreading Facebook content ever; “xxxx tagged you in the note 25 Random Things About Me.”  I read, in awe, that years after being the best man at his wedding, I still didn’t really know him.  And here I was, learning more about a real life friend.

Twitter has a tremendous amount of following.  People follow complete strangers to get them to follow back.  People follow others they think might be interesting, and yet others that are accepted thought-leaders.  If you analyze someone’s posts, you can quickly learn a great deal about them.  And some tweeple’s fingers are like loose cannons,  allowing you to even learn about their personalities.  Take this rant from a well-followed Tweep, for instance.  With some tools doing some basic analysis on a user’s tweets, you can learn an awful lot about this user.

This is where social media and social networking start to close the gap between a publisher and it’s users.  With new features such as Facebook Connect, site publishers are gaining a lot more access to this valuable insight available based on users’ contributions to your site, and to others as well.  This insight will really help to identify one or two of the personas you will undoubtedly need to create to ensure you’re building your product for the audience.

Truth be told, on the Internet, everyone knows exactly who I am.

Aspirations.  Aim high.  Reach for the clouds.  Thing big.  Take over the world.

Not anymore.  More than ever, I’m seeing businesses with small ideas.  Niche ideas.  Some that have symbiotic relationships with other small businesses.  Perhaps there are bigger ideas they haven’t let out of the bag yet?  Here are some examples, and why they might be onto something.  And why they may not be.

1. ShareThis
   This site offers a social sharing button.  An API.  And a Sharebox for users.  That’s it.  At its core, this is a button.  I love it for a few reasons.  It offers the publisher reporting, an API and customization.  Also, if you don’t want to keep up with every sharing service, ShareThis takes care of it for you.  For ShareThis, they own the data on usage of social sharing sites.  Business model – perhaps advertising, perhaps sharing data, perhaps a tiered pay model?  Who knows.  But they got $15 million in funding in March ’08.  Still seems niche and small to me, and it’s dependent on all of the sharing services – which do not yet have a proven business model either.
2. TweetDeck
   This application is a Twitter client.  Twitter is still fairly niche, although many are betting for it to go mainstream this year.  There are also a large number of Twitter clients out there.  And Twitter doesn’t even have a viable business model yet.  Yet, TweetDeck closed an angel funding round at $500k.  I highlighted TweetDeck, but there are a ton of Twitter piggy-backers, like Qwitter, who’s only feature is notification of tweeps that stop following you.   That’s about as niche as you can get.
3. Plinky
   One of the newest entrants into the micro-blogging arena (kind of), Plinky managed to get a lot of hype before finally making its premise known yesterday.  They ask a question each day, and you provide an answer.  They basically just prompt you for something to write about, and allow you to share your response on the social grid.  This managed to get a $1.5 series A.

Is this niche company phenomenon due to the recession, or is this a bi-product of Web 2.0?  I think both.  There’s no question that a bad economy triggers more start-ups.  Enter Web 2.0, and we have all of these opportunities for apps with symbiotic relationships.  If you can run a small business and make a little more than you made working for someone else, why not do it?  As long as these businesses are reasonable to support with small teams, they have a good chance to bring in more than they cost.

But the risk is high.  Twitter, and even the major social networking sites still don’t have proven, viable business models.  If these businesses fail, the ecosystem of apps that are dependent on them also fail.

I love the idea of these small businesses, although finding the apps you want becomes difficult in this crowded app environment.   Enter twitdom.com to solve that problem, too.

TTFN.  I have to go start a micro-biz

If you’re like me, you’re not in the top 5% of Twitter users (regardless of which system you decided is the best at rating you).  Most likely, you follow more than you’re followed.  Perhaps you follow @scobleizer, @davewiner, @skydiver, @mashable, @guykawasaki, or any number of tweeple that have 10,000 to 50,000+ followers.  Have you tried keeping up with the tweets?  I check every half hour or so, and realize that I still can’t keep up with everything that’s been posted despite following only about 150 tweeps.  @scobleizer follows over 20,000.

I remember the Inbox Zero project; epic fail for me.  But what would be the equivalent for Twitter, rather than just missing all the tweets I simply can’t keep up with?  Well, my honest and disheartening opinion is that I have no alternative.

Not today.

But, perhaps, there is some hope?  Let’s take inauguration day as an example.  At least 60% of my friends’ tweets were about the inauguration.  If  my Twitter client could group tweets on similar topics, perhaps this would have saved me from having to read tons of similar posts.  Sounds simple, although I know in practice it’s quite challenging.  Wouldn’t it be a great start, though?

In the meantime, here are some tips:

1. Continue to follow people who follow you.  It’s not social media if it’s not social.
2. Use an application like TweetDeck, that let’s you create groups.  I have one group for people I actually know, another group for news, and another group for social gurus.
3. Perhaps you can’t keep up with all of your friends’ tweets, but make sure you read replies and direct messages.

Want to know how to be interesting enough for people to follow you?  I can’t help you there   But perhaps the @scobleizer and these other folks can.