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    By Admin | September 7, 2008

    Endless Conversation: The Unfolding Saga of Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Social Sites

    "EvolutionIt wasn’t long ago that to be a credible participant in social media one only had to have a decent blog and keep it updated fairly regularly. The rise of social media was an astonishing and novel enough development that most people still don’t blog today, despite the enormous influence that blogging and other forms of social media continue to have. One reason is that blogging takes time and takes some skill, both in writing and using blogging tools effectively. Another is the rise of online social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Hi5, which add a personal dimension to online interaction that many find more rewarding and relevant for them.

    But just like blogs made two-way conversations on the Web relatively cheap, easy, and quick for the masses compared to previous methods (such as personal Web sites), conversational models on the Web have continued to evolve. Recently, microblogging and social aggregation platforms like Twitter and Friendfeed have emerged to offer alternative models that are compelling for a number of significant reasons. For one, contributing to them doesn’t take much time. To achieve this, they either have radical limits on the amount of content that can be posted at a time (140 characters for Twitter), or they do the posting work for you and automatically centralize your social activity on other sites into a single feed, as in the case of Friendfeed. They also tend to work very well on mobile devices –an incredibly fast growing channel for experiencing anything on the Web these days — as well scale conversation well, are extremely easy to use (even easier in general than blogs), and allow you to keep track of a large numbers of contacts socially.

    And vitally, both Twitter and Friendfeed are open platforms, not just mere tools. A key factor in their success is that they offer open APIs to allow others to add the features and capabilities that are missing for various specialty needs that would otherwise clutter the product for many users. This creates a far richer overall feature set than any single product could offer on its own, while at the same time leveraging the innovation of the user community. Blogs have been able to do something similar with badges, widgets, and plug-ins for some time but haven’t seen the same directed results as we’ll see below.

    The sheer volume of 3rd party add-on activity for these platforms is impressive. Best-of-breed applications like Twhirl for Twitter (and now Friendfeed) and AlertThingy for Friendfeed extend these new social media experiences onto the desktop and provide real-time monitoring of your “Twitterverse” or friend’s feeds. To get a full sense of the depth and scope of the innovation of the Twitter community, which is certainly still a niche compared to the blogosphere, though an increasingly impressive one, you have only to look at some of its more compelling 3rd party applications:

    Common Twitter Applications

    This only a small list of the most popular Twitter applications and they don’t even include the product offerings that are stand-alone in their own right, but work much better in conjunction with Twitter and Friendfeed, such as Brightkite and Natuba.

    Understanding How Conversations Are Changing

    The challenge today is that while the size of individual contributions to online conversations is getting smaller, the frequency of conversations are increasing on these new social media platforms. Making this point, Sarah Perez over at Read/Write Web wrote this morning that there are too many choices, and too much content. Users of the latest social media tools are far more likely to post several times a day, more likely dozens of times, each one forming a new conversational beachhead. This can be overwhelming, but it can also be enormously stimulating and rewarding, as a form of collaboration, cross-pollination, brainstorming, serendipity, news gathering, and countless other activities provide one with a continuous connection to the broader world.

    To get a handle on how people are using these next generation social media platforms, I ran an online survey this week which I pushed out across my Twitter followers, Friendfeed contacts, and a random sampling of my personal contacts via e-mail (the latter without much regard if they used these tools.) The results largely reflect many of the points above, but there were some interesting write-in results as well.

    Here’s how the Twitter survey results broke down:

    Results Of This Week’s Twitter/Friend Usage Survey

    1. Do use Twitter or Friendfeed on a regular basis? (Multiple Answers Allowed): 96.1% Twitter, 25.2% Friendfeed, 3.9% Neither
    2. What things do you like about Twitter, Friendfeed, or your write-in choice from question #1: (Multiple answers allowed):
      • My friends and/or colleagues use it. 65%
      • A good selection of 3rd party apps are available. 26.2%
      • I’ve built up a set of followers which I’ve come to know and with which I socialize. 42.7%
      • It’s easy to use. 71.8%
      • It works well with my mobile devices when I’m on the go. 43.7%
      • Contributing doesn’t require much time. 69.9%
      • Easy to socially interact with a large number of people. 59.2%
      • I can publicize my activities from other Web sites. 37.9%
      • Useful way to acquire news and information. 71.8%
      • It’s better than e-mail for quick communication with contacts. 35.9%
      • Actually, I don’t think Twitter or Friendfeed are that great. 4.9%
    3. What do you like LEAST about Twitter, Friendfeed, or your write-in answer for #1: (Write-In. Representative Samples.)
      • “Twitter lacks a feature to filter or an easy way to group.”
      • “Twitter is yet another thing to keep up with, I much prefer the all-inclusive nature of Facebook.”
      • “downtime”
      • “I get a lot of noise, that is, useless information from people I’m following.”
      • “Poor support for conversations. no threads, don’t see other half if not following all involved.”
      • “I’ve found it’s hard to get some of my friends to adopt it.”
    4. Do now, or are you planning to, use Twitter or Friendfeed for business purposes?
      • Yes. 66%
      • No. 12%
      • Considering it. 22%

    One of the biggest surprises of this survey (there were 103 respondents total) was the amount of those who are thinking about using Twitter for business purposes. Whether that’s just expanding their personal brand or actually leveraging it for business collaboration, marketing, and other uses is hard to tell and will be the subject of a further survey.

    Interestingly, in terms of being used as Enterprise 2.0 platforms by businesses, both Twitter and Friendfeed fly in the face of the underlying pull-based models that make social media more effective that traditional collaboration tools and it’ll be interesting to see how well they will function in the workplace, something that seems a way off for most organizations right now. And it may be that in the end that social networking for business platforms like Google’s new Friend Connect may be the best answer. One thing is for sure, we’ll find out soon as the living laboratory of the Web validates the best approaches.

    Most other responses were within expected norms though it was interesting to see that, at least explicitly, users don’t value 3rd party apps that much. They are also using these social media tools as a replacement for traditional e-mail. But it was ease-of-use and the gathering of news and information which were listed as the aspects that respondents appreciated the most in these emerging platforms. Which highlights that crowdsourcing of news via Twitter in particular continues to be a fascinating topic as a Paul Bradshaw wrote recently as he explored the news tweets coming out of China about the recent earthquake disaster.

    All of this highlight that the unintended uses and emergent outcomes that we continue to see with with these platforms is demonstrating that they have the power to achieve compelling results of a wide variety, from news and learning to staying in touch and achieving business goals. But the biggest challenge will continue to be the challenge of scaling our attention and time, something that’s always in finite quantity. The product creator that can successfully aggregate conversation without losing the social value will be the winner as these endless conversations spin around us, informing, educating and enriching us.

    You can track me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/dhinchcliffe and on Friendfeed at http://friendfeed.com/dhinchcliffe.

    Where do you see conversation online headed? Will it be microplatforms like Twitter or SNS like Google Friend Connect? Or something else entirely? Note: Use wiki markup below to embed links.

    The Habits of Highly Effective Web 2.0 Sites

    The next Web 2.0 Conference will be upon us in early November and things are busier than ever in the Web 2.0 world. Along the way, I’ve managed to miss the one year anniversary of this blog, which I began back in late September of last year. There have been over 2.5 million direct hits on this site since inception, a large percentage of it due to my Web 2.0 lists such as last year’s Best Web 2.0 Software List , but I also get e-mail frequently from die-hard readers as well. Most importantly however, from all my conversations with people all over the world, it’s clear that Web 2.0 remains more than ever a topic of major popular interest and industry fascination.

    While the general understanding of Web 2.0 is improving all the time, we have a ways to go before we have a concise, generally accepted definition. My favorite is still networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects. But while most of what we ascribe to the Web 2.0 name falls out of these definition, it’s fairly hard for most of us to extrapolate meaningful ramifications from this.

    People that read this blog know that I’m in the camp of folks that try to look beyond Ajax and the visual site design aspect of Web 2.0, and try to capture the deeper design patterns and business models that seem to be powering the most successful Web sites and online companies today. Though concepts such as harnessing collective intelligence and Data as the Next Intel Inside, as described by Tim O’Reilly , most directly capture the spirit of the Web 2.0 era, it does seem to me that there are a few other elements that we haven’t nailed down yet.

    "Highly

    At the AjaxWorld Conference and Expo earlier this month, I gave my usual talk about how to formally leverage Web 2.0, with plenty of examples coming from things happening out on the Web. If you accept that it’s the power and size of the Web today , particularly the number of highly interactive network nodes (who are mostly people), give them extremely low-barrier tools, and we should be able to find plenty examples of emergent behavior; significant events happening suddenly and unexpectedly. Tipping points are getting easier and easier to reach as site designers learn how to create better network effect triggers, draw large audiences suddenly, and as those same audiences increasingly self-organize spontaneously

    , such as in the KatrinaList project (suddenly) or Wikipedia (slower but bigger).

    And it’s the arrival of Web 2.0 “supersites” like YouTube , which appear suddenly, often riding the coattails of other major Web 2.0 site’s ecosystems, and apply aggressive, viral network effects that show us the true, full scale of the possibilities. Building a Web site worth over one billion dollars in 18 months is a very impressive result, but it’s really only a single axis upon which Web 2.0 can be applied successfully. Another axis upon which to apply Web 2.0 focuses less on pulling in every single user possible with a horizontal network effect, but on building a difficult to reproduce but highly valuable data source, such as the Navteq mapping database, or Zillow’s real estate database. One might argue that these are still very horizontal but these are merely just well known examples.

    Thevariety and depth of the Web is such that not every Web 2.0 site will have tens of millions of users, nor should it. An effective Web 2.0 site is largely powered by its users, whose feedback and contributions, direct and indirect, make the site a living ecosystem that evolves from day to day, a mosaic as rich and varied as a sites users would like it to be. In other words, creating a high quality architectures of participation is becoming a strategic competitive advantage in many areas.

    I’m often asked, particularly after one of my presentations on Web 2.0, to articulate the most important and effective actions a site designer can take to realize the benefits of Web 2.0. As a result, I’ve created the list below in a attempt to catpure a good, general purpose overview of what these steps are. My plan in the near future, is to dive into each one of these as much as time permits and explain how they makehighly effective Web 2.0 sites not only effective, but often possible at all. In the meantime, please take them for what they’re worth, I believe however that they are instrumental in making a Web site or application the most successful possible.

    The Essentials of Leveraging Web 2.0

    Of course, there a lot of work in the details and these are just some of the important, general essentials. Unfortunately, a lot of carefulthinking, planning, and engineering goes into any effective Web 2.0 site and it’s having these ideas at the core of it, which can help you get the best results.

    Final Note: I’ll be on the road the next two weeks and will be at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco from Nov. 7th-9th. I’ll be there writing coverage for the Web 2.0 Journal and here as much as possible. If you’re going to be there, please drop me a line if you’d like to meet.

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