DISQUS

Great points Robert, which in part also seem to mirror some of what Steve Gillmor is saying in his TC post today (in his usual wonkish way, though still pretty readable):

"Whoever conquers Track will be like those who made music and pictures come out of thin air, coursing over invisible wires and virtual rabbit ears. The big networks emerged out of that soup, and to this day they remain powerful beacons. Now the social media clouds are forming, and they have no choice but to confront and conquer the microstream."

techcrunchit.com/2009/03/22/please-stand-by/

You've been working on conquering Track via Friendfeed as you describe. It's definitely one of the main if not THE problem of our time, since attention has already become the only truly scarce resource in this information economy. For the same reason of I've recently been experimenting with using Thunderbird to import my Twitter "with Friends" RSS stream and use simple (email client) message filters to accomplish similar things.

On a much lighter note, whenever the topic turns to the "true" meaning of Facebook friends, it might help to remember the following (as per Dickipedia):

"In 2004, Zuckerberg debuted a primitive online social networking site called Facebook, named for the annual publication that collegiate upper classmen use to identify attractive freshmen girls with low self-esteem. At the time, Zukerberg planned to offer the service only to students within the Ivy League, because, as is widely known, Ivy League students have long had problems finding ways to network with one another."

Cheers!

Robert, I think you somewhat undermined your own argument in this post:

The misgivings that people are likely to have about things like keyword based solicitations in response to "intimate moments" are likely to be so strong that FB users would react VERY negatively. Remember what happened with Beacon?

Because the entire service was started on the premise of a Walled Garden where it was safe and private to connect with your (mostly real) friends and acquaintances (Facebook still has terms of service that theoretically bar anyone from engaging in overt commercial behavior from their profile), it seems unlikely that they can sneak these things in through the backdoor.

Social context implies social trust, and any violations of that trust tend to backfire worse than the average corporate/PR faux-pas. Read Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" Chapter 4 on "The cost of social norms".

Social CONTEXT is also the explanation of why FB's own "social ads", and similar attempts on MySpace, etc. have monetized much, much worse than even internet average. Once people are in a certain context, it's difficult to yank them out of it.

And for the same reasons I would guess that the opening up of Facebook search (presumably still honoring people's privacy settings) is well behind Twitter's potential for monetizing search: Since most people aren't Internet Marketers or Social Media hounds, they are pretty unlikely to open up their profiles to public Google search (for SEO reasons etc.) OR Facebook Search. If you all of a sudden send them "Track"-based solicitations/spam they will freak out (beyond the current "Social ads" which FB users rapidly train themselves to ignore).

On Twitter, there basically has never been such a supposition of privacy, indeed, it tends to attract those that do not mind, do not care, or WANT to overshare... :) Incidentally, Facebook's by now massive adoption/size makes it so that any attempts/missteps in the way you describe might be greeted by howls that quickly reach into every corner of the internet.

Only 1% of 170 Million is still 1.7 Million users. If they make their displeasure known (as they just did with the rather wonkish/innocuous TOS issue), Facebook will likely be on the defensive every single time.

A huge problem with Tweetdeck right now is that you cannot input more sophisticated queries on the "with Friends" stream, asf. And that the filters/searches and their results are not saved within the app.

I've been experimenting with using my "with friends" RSS feed to Thunderbird (Mozilla Email client) to get this permanent filter effect, plus archiving of all tweets by keyword, and from there on down to the "with links" and "RT" examples you provide.

Basically going from the very specific to the non-specific, and ending up with a residual pool of link-less, asf. tweets that can be sliced & diced for research purposes, but that has to be deleted every so often to not slow T-bird down too much (I've had up to 150k tweets in that residual folder, and it was getting too slow to search). All your targeted tweets are archived though, and T-bird does NOT have an issue using up the Twitter API limit too fast, or hogging massive memory and then crash and lose your current tweets every so often.

Follow me on Twitter, I follow back:
Twitter.com/AlexSchleber

Uhm, no offense, but isn't that what "block" is for? Saves your friends/followers the weirdness of the temporary "Private" setting. Plus "block" withholds your tweetstream from the blockee permanently, unless they go to the trouble of viewing it via Search.twitter.com etc.

Most re-follow spammers unfollow you automatically after a bit if you don't refollow (else they get hung up at the 2k "following" limit trap). Still good to go through your "Followers" pages (the recent ones) manually to immediately block (and thereby semi-report, though you can do more with "d spam @username messages) the usual suspects.

Note the pretty useful stats view for followfriday you can get from hashtags.org:

http://3on.us/followfri-stats

When hashtags.org is up and functioning, that is... ;) We might break the 10,000 mark today. #followfriday has been trending up each week since its inception except for the Friday before Valentine's, when it was flat, slightly down.

I tried this too for a while, but it was just too disjointed to be of real value to people. And to import from FriendFeed in the way described (a sidebar widget has been doable for a long time) doesn't seem to help much. Especially since the majority of FF content still comes from Twitter.

Nonetheless, figuring out ways to make all sorts of Social Media activity, that, while useful and increasingly inevitable/necessary, does take time away from writing "old-fashioned" blog posts, is a key concern:

For a while I played with the idea of adjusting Twitter Tools "Digest" feature to create more intelligent short posts on the fly using hashtags (e.g. #s for start, #e for end, #t for title, etc.), but the reality is that moost of your Twitter followers would not take too well to such extended soliloquy.

So the problem remains, one idea I have seen is the integration of a mini-blog like Tumblr or Posterous into the main blog as shown in this example http://longtail.com under "Tidbits". Pretty smart, and I might try this out myself.

One thing that greatly disappointed me as Google's recent announcement that they were shuttering GoogleNotebooks for the most part. In my view a big mistake, since some version of this form of quick capture (some of the other similar bookmarklets tend to be somewhat slow by comparison) if integrated more fully with other properties (Blogger comes to mind...), could have stolen the show.

So I'd say the race for the ideal short/rapid publishing platform is still on. Twitter and FriendFeed mentions seem from their length constraints more apt to be used as a form of commenting, as in the "social comments" system you guys just launched.

While the new features are to be applauded in principle (what took THIS long?), the real question will be whether Twitter Search will continue to allow for full time range on back-searches. Currently, during (presumably) heavy day-time server loads, you may notice that search results only go back 7 days or so.

Is this a precursor to Twitter selling the deep data-mining to 3rd parties for a substantial fee? Will additional usage of search through the main interface make it necessary for Twitter to throttle the results permanently?

If so, the reason this would matter is that it would effectively make it hard for you to e.g. get your own data back out in a useful way, e.g. by searching over all your past tweets by keyword + "filter:link", making it in essence a personal bookmarking system.

And on keywords/topics of interest to you, you would need to pipe the search results continuously into a separate repository in case you wanted to archive them somehow for later availability.

Follow me on Twitter, I follow back:
Twitter.com/AlexSchleber

Doesn't make much sense to set your account to private b/c of this. I see the problem less as a one of content ownership (once you put something out on the Web, expect it to be replicated in some way, and to never be able to be completely taken back), and more as one of increasing sneakiness:

If the spammers, who now have crappy accounts use scraping to create accounts that are somewhat real in appearance, they will be harder to detect at first glance (it's still pretty easy, though time wasting to do now). What if they have "normal" accounts made up almost entirely of repurposed content, which is really only there as a filler to embed their sales stuff into?

(I am having even some additional ideas of what they could do which I won't discuss here so's to not encourage them.)

Good thing is, most of their spam will never work (it's annoying/time-wasting though). They don't get the social in Social Media...

Or you can just straight go Powerpoint to Camtasia to YouTube (possibly via TrafficGeyser/TubeMogul). The real power is in YouTube search and YouTube's high Google rankings (self-servingly so).

SlideShare seems to be more useful for getting influencers, etc. to take notice of you. Of course still useful for embeds on your own blog as you previously described.

Some pretty sage advice in that slidedeck. Could stand a bit of tightening up for getting to the goodies faster, no? Maybe some color/images... images are nice.

Particularly liked the one about "If you're not taking notes... your choice." I'll have to steal that sometime for something, maybe some of my own course slidedecks. I'd put it AT THE BEGINNING though :)

Reminds me of a T-shirt one of my SEO teachers, Andy Jenkins of StomperNet, likes to wear: "When I am speaking you should be taking notes"... yeah, he's a wallflower like that.

Some good points here, especially re: Twitter's simplicity being a major factor, both in adoption rates as well as the endless stream of Twitter integrations, 3rd party add-on services, and other ideas (including the novel linguistic creations!). There is clear power in the Twitter brand name: short, evocative of its purpose, & people somehow like saying/repeating it.

For more on why simplicity usually wins in business, check out this post:

http://businessmindhacks.com/post/assorted-robert-scoble-posts-prove-simplicity-wins

All good points, though I would add that Google sometimes is falling short on moving the ball forward from early adopters to mainstream adoption (e.g. with Google Notebook). Engineering-centric "build it and they will come" is quite often simply not enough anymore in today's attention economy.

Follow me on Twitter, I follow back:
Twitter.com/AlexSchleber

@Cannonball - I would have to disagree with your assertion "textual content still rules the roost when it comes to search rankings and nothing is going to change that".

In fact, it is a lot easier to rank with video content QUICKLY if you know what you are doing in terms of SEO (partly because Google for obvious reasons favors its own video property, YouTube...). Go check out TrafficGeyser.com, those guys are going great guns over there.

You might lose ranking again fairly quickly as well, like a few days or weeks (have to throw a good bit of Social Bookmarking at it to make it stick longer), but then it's easy to just re-release the same video with slightly tweaked text parameters.

Also, as was said further up, video views is still growing strongly, and YouTube searches have already overtaken Yahoo to become the #2 "search engine" in the U.S. So this is powerful stuff, especially SEO wise.

BTW, the reason why I have no problem giving away these strategies is that 1) 95%+ of people don't take action, and 2) the fear/confidence barrier with video content creation will keep most people over say 30 out for a good long while, while the kids that are eminently comfortable with it are too young to care about the marketing aspects of their skill...

That and the fact that most people regardless of age don't know what it takes to create compelling video content using SPEED as I explained further up.

As was said further up, people have different preferred perception systems, but about 40% are supposed to be visual (20% auditory, and 40% audio-digital, which basically means text).

I would tend to agree with Robert that video CAN be very successful (not least of all because Google favors its own YouTube property for SEO, etc.), but it has to be done RIGHT to work well. This introduces an additional barrier that is less pronounced for text.

Check out this graph I just saw on AlleyInsider.com the other day:

http://loosebusinessdata.tumblr.com/post/698749...

Shows how quickly audience drops off for videos (basically of all types, even though their point was about How-To videos). The reason besides basic relevance is likely that the content/audio/etc. in the video is not delivered FAST enough. Our brains are trained to expect such rapid-fire, dense editing at this point, that if video falls below a certain threshold it is perceived as unbearably boring. So we stop watching, unless there is another factor that has us pay attention (like having a specific personal interest in what is shown, such as video of a family outing).

I would say that in part Chris Pirillo's and Gary V's success comes from being high-energy, fast-talking people that can keep the attention due to what Gary calls the "Hoopla Factor". Video + Speed = Win...

The problem is that unless you are doing interviews like Robert (in which case he is basically held hostage by the speed of output of the interviewee) where the content basically flows/develops somewhat naturally from the conversation, almost no one is basically good enough at talking from the hip to keep a good, dense, and fast flow of ideas and attention-keeping content going.

Which is where scripting, teleprompters (including totally rigged ones like text on cardboard taped near the camera :), and fast, animated delivery comes into play. You really don't have to be very brilliant to do this, few people are (basically everyone on TV, all actors, etc. work from scripts...). You can find a good example of what is possible at

www.stomperf5.com
(you may have to opt in to view this - easy to unsubscribe later, this is NOT an affiliate link and I am not specifically endorsing this, though there is some useful free marketing advice here)

I would say that this is the minimum speed to deliver content, that is to say, a relatively fast pace. Notice that Andy Jenkins, the guy in the video, is working from a well developed script with some pretty sophisticated sales copy woven into the seemingly casual delivery. But the basic fact remains that you want to talk fast, or else you're putting your audience to sleep.

This has been an interesting conversation both on TC and your response here as well. Possiblly one of the better and deeper ones all year, right to the heart of most Web 2.0 issues.

That said, I wanted to relay this rather hilarious quote from a commenter over on TC:

(my posterous title) Great Comment on TechCrunch - Robert Scoble, King of the Echo People

"wonder if 10 000 years from now, just one month’s worth of all Twitter content, if preserved, could provide an interesting historical clue to future generations of how life on earth was….like a Pompeii or Rosetta Stone unlocked secrets of past civilizations and languages. And who could blame them upon discovering such a treasure for thinking Robert Scoble the God of the Twitterverse?"

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/22/im-sorry-r...

http://alexschleber.posterous.com/comment-on-techcrunch-robert-s

Robert, that live stream link can make you dizzy...

would you agree that FriendFeed is badly in need of a "track"-like filtering functions for individual users/user-groups/rooms/etc.?

I think that whoever is first in authoritatively figuring out how to bring the aggregate feeds back to a compact/manageable/meaningful/value-added level will win big-time next year.

Back-end improvements are many and were badly needed after the 2.5-6 disaster in that regard. I haven't upgraded yet, but will consider it beginning of next year if I find the time.

Glad to see that they listened to the complaints about waste of vertical screen real estate (they did some real world user testing this time). Get a detailed rundown of the previous problems (including screen shots) here:

http://businessmindhacks.com/post/wordpress-25x-design-issues-why-i-am-staying-with-my-233-renegade

Is that a rhetorical question? MSFT has always had a speed problem...

Robert, give people some time to adjust, the mainstream adoption of Twitter has only just begun (that is EARLY mainstream after the early adopters). Many people play with Twitter for a few hours and conclude its a waste of time for them.

Also, would you agree that Facebook's new design turns it into somewhat of a FF already (while having a bit more of an actual friend social graph - though not by that much anymore...)? Theirs and FF's, MyBlogLog's, etc. aggregation designs are still quite clunky and visually inelegant, to the point that, you're right, it gives most people somewhat of a headache...

It's best to first step back and get clear on the underlying psychology of all this. Without this step, you are simply going to continue to cycle through those fear-laden neural networks again and again, becoming ever more tightly wound and fearful.

Without first stopping the cycle, you will not be able to exert leadership. Part of getting there is breaking through reflexive responses like denial, depression, and anger as quickly as possible, so that you can be once again free to act without those distortions.

And to do so, it's best to first understand those responses.

Learn about the broader psychological issues driving this crisis here:

http://businessmindhacks.com/post/psychological-aspects-of-the-financial-crisis-in-warren-buffett-we-trust

Robert, very perceptive about the possible MSFT angle.

Love how someone further up said they "cuiled" themselves... and the image mix-up thing is downright comical (you'd think they would have checked at least that bit, apparently they served up even quite a few X-rated images next to unsuspecting poeple's bios, etc. ).

Just finished an in depth look at the Cuil branding disaster (with Knol hot on its heels):

http://businessmindhacks.com/post/cuil-knol-and-other-crimes-against-branding

Either MSFT or Google need to buy Twitter and fast, before the pretty significant mind-share they have accumulated evaporates.

Frankly I am very surprised that MSFT hasn't moved already, unlike GOOG with Jaiku, they don't even have Micro-blogging in their arsenal.

Now there would be a worthy project for them to hone their skills at cloud computing and search (Twitter is badly in need of more useful NATIVE search/tag/filter/sort facilities to make the onslaught of potentially useful data, well, useful...

(What if Scoble could subsegment his follower/following lists, with e.g. "all followers who have ever used the term "branding" in a tweet", right now it's either all of Twitter with "track", or single user on Tweetscan. Also note that the overview of one's follower list is almost completely useless right now, since there is no way of sorting them in any predictable way, e.g. last-in, # of followers, etc. etc.)

Alas, since MSFT still doesn't get the Internet much less Web2.0, it's more likely that Google will move eventually after seeing that Jaiku has already missed the boat as far as mind-share/branding/positioning is concerned. Twitter(ing) has already become "the verb" for micro-blogging. Would be same as the Google Video vs. YouTube story, except that Twitter can still be had for, what, $100M or less (given their recent problems?).

Twitter already integrates with GTalk, it really seems like a no-brainer.

Or... possibly... can you say "bidding war"?!?

Two things worth pointing out:

1) Loic Lemeur has 4455 friends, so unless he actively took steps to stop the event creation from his Facebook feed (would be interesting to know either way), this got pushed out to up to 4455 of his friends as an action he took.

So the comparison with upcoming.com may be apples and oranges.

2) Facebook pages currently are public and spidered by Google. Presumably that will stay that way. As such, they represent a better way than FB goups, which are not spidered as far as I can tell, and also don't allow any additional apps other than the default (while pages have the same Discussion and Wall app as the groups). Plus FB groups shut down your "Message All" after you gather more than 1,000 members.

Check out this Google query for the keyword that I happen to know a coach has both a FB Group and Page for (NOT trying to promote this in any way, just the only example I know where someone has both under the same name).

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22get+paid+for+...

The Page shows, the Group doesn't. (The link to the Group is on the Page in case you want to verify that it exists.)

This already makes a lot more sense than the initial Scoble-Arrington shouting match... (love the shower while on conf call thing BTW)... even though I think it had the beneficial effect of greatly accelerating this discussion.

(Even the privacy/data portability pro's from various standards bodies seem to see it that way!)

As for the data privacy itself, the expectation that your (video/image/etc.) data should somehow be safe in FB is quaint, ANYTHING can currently be downloaded out of Flash players, etc. or taken as screen captures (there are FF plugins for the former and Camtasia, etc. for the latter). This will be true unless a prevention of this were built into your operating system.

In the case of a Vista follow-on, judging from MSFT's track-record, you're talking years away... so you might as well get used to it now: If you put it out there, it's pretty much gone/out there forever. Pictures, videos, everything...

I strongly agree with Scoble on the Email address issue: Since FB's messaging doesn't use it, the only reason a thinking person could have left it showing on their profile is for others to use it in some sort of Email client. It's not for decoration, though FB got close by making it into a GIF :), presumably to protect us from our "friends" copy pasting it?!?!? Silly...

Now what is true is that FB should have a much better messaging system, and the recent addition of chat is no substitute. What it should do is allow those email notifications about "xyz sent you a message on FB" it sends out to be replied to within one's own email client. To do this, use a one-time key, avoiding any email addresses having to be used at all.

Note how Craigslist handles the anonymous email thing for it's ads, they disintegrate again when no longer needed. Something like that would at least make sense. It would allow a temporary channel that can be turned back off.

If you have a (regular) email address, that creates a channel to send you messages. In the case of “old school” email, it is actually quite hard to turn that channel back off, other than killing the entire account. Blocking can mostly only occur at your end through filtering rules, etc. (sure your Internet Provider or Hosting Company might do a bit of it as well, but they actually tend to overreach). So if someone “possesses” your email address, that’s pretty much it…

The basic email protocol was always incredibly weak from a security standpoint, since the sender is not even authenticated, much less the question of whether the recipients had really given permission to be contacted.

Think about it: By giving out your email address, anyone can now claim to be you in the eyes of the email protocol. I always laugh when I get the occasional spam that claims to have been sent from my own address.

Or when someone cries over privacy when using email. If you want privacy, don't use it. Period. It was never secure. Only in people's illusions...

Andy,

you have likely thought/written more about this than almost anyone, and as always, there is good stuff here.

One thing I might disagree with is the idea that comments should be blacklisted due to referral from search, DoFollow blog link collection, etc. Here's why:

You clearly are using DoFollow as a strategic form of advertisement for your blog (and rightly so, it took me a while to come around to your point of view on DoFollow vs. NoFollow ruining the social graph). So what is wrong with someone advertising this for you somewhere else, and people responding by heading over here?

The only thing that counts in my mind is the quality of the comments. If it's there, than it's a fair trade: User generated content in return for a link, and possible further feedback effects down the line. Win-win.

In an attention economy, you are "pre-paying" for the attention with the promise of a link. In a way it's way more honest than the old ways of link-dealing. If you get hundreds more SEO-savvy bloggers to parade past your blog and take a look, that has to be good.

[Personally, I tend to refuse to comment on (and thereby put my work into) a site that treats the comments with disrespect, like CNET.com among others. Shows they don't get Web 2.0.]

Similarly for deep linking, if it's relevant, so what? That doesn't take any more link juice from you than a domain link, no?

If someone is on Bumpzee.com/no-nofollow, you'd think the reason is that they want people to head on over from there, no?

Like you said, you can always take the link back/delete the comment, didn't know that SPAM Karma pretty much forces you into declaring things SPAM or not (rather than just delete).

Personally, I have quite enjoyed the "public shamings" that you dole out every so often, they only reinforce your image as someone who gets it and pays attention on a deep level.

All this said, I have been working on getting the DoFollow and related issues worked out on my own newish blog for a while, and have gotten most things to work to my satisfaction. Especially the YAWASP plugin seems to have killed off bot spam comments. That may solve the CommentKahuna issue without a captcha.

I am still trying to implement a comment ratings system similar to the "SezWho" that you use (though I didn't really like their to me overly complex implementation). Then tie this to links getting turned off based on e.g. 3 separate "SPAM" votes by readers.

Talking to Lester Chan to port his "post ranking" plugin over to comments.

What has your experience been with SezWho so far? Does it have a way to "bury" or turn-off spammy comments?

Best - Alex