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Why have you joined twitter when you are already on facebook?

Judging by the often overlooked question on the Twitter page, “What are you doing?” the original intention when twitter’s layout was designed was to resolve the presence problem. That is the problem that we want to know what somebody is doing, before we interrupt them. It is why we don’t call people on their cell phone when they are away from their desk in an office environment and is a major barrier to the flow of effective business communication.

Status indication, even from your phone, is already available on facebook but in practice that isn’t what Twitter is being used for. Twitter is being used for water cooler conversation. It is a business social environment with minimal profile information. Like linkedIn it has no photo sharing or cluttered graphics resulting in a more business acceptable presence. As a result it has attracted a more professionally chattering classes demographic.

Lifeblogging, the logging in diary fashion of what you are doing,  is uncompelling for others and the popular accounts are in reality supplying a little relationship building chatter such as Jeff Pulver’s discussions of the Miami sunrise, together with short form URLs which push their or other’s material. So maybe this is the long awaited push media. Maybe we accept push media from a friend or somebody we chose to follow.

Is it just an inefficient version of Digg? Possibly. Or maybe the network building features on delicious. As such, Twitter is very inefficient. I can’t quickly see a list of Scoble’s links for the day. Or a ranking of links from CES this week. So, if it is so inefficient, why are people using it?

While for most people spending too much time at the water cooler is an indication that they need a different role, for some it is an important element of their work. Journalists want to know what the current topics of chatter are and PR people need to create awareness and chatter in a forum where journalists spend time. But what about the general users of Twitter?

I think the answer may be in the prominence given to the number of followers. It is feeding into the need for social affirmation by giving people a ranking. Telling people they are influential or even that they have authority.  It has in many ways become a game where people compete to have the highest number of followers or the highest ranking on Twitter ranking sites. The high score seeking is a driving attraction. We are told when every new follower begins following and bad news is overlooked as they leave without any direct indication on the site.

That isn’t the end to the bad news. Many of the accounts are silent, but worse, many people subscribed to a large group, were overwhelmed, and never logged in again.  If you read the 2000th page of Scoble’s followers exactly 50% haven’t published in the last month and half of those haven’t published in the last six months. The unanswered question is how many of the silent accounts are inactive. Significantly there is no last login date shown.

The other issue is that many may not be reading those they follow. Anybody following more than 200 people isn’t reading the content. The accounts with large numbers of followers inevitably make up a large proportion of the following. Could it be that other than the PR world and journalists others are not really reading twitter? That they are self selecting out and that is why we see so many bloggers and marketing people left. Well, there are readers. With some of the short link sites used on twitter it is possible to track the number of clicks on the short URL and the click through ratio of these links is often as much as 10% of followers.

One possible benefit of Twitter is that people are more effectively selecting who they follow based on the chatter and as a result getting more effective results than on Digg or delicious. This is difficult to judge. A lot of focus around Twitter is on the most followed accounts. It is noticeable that the most followed accounts, not driven by external fame, have extremely short bios. This is probably because the short bio does not cause anybody to self select out and a high proportion follow. Some of the most followed such as the Digg Nation team have acquired their followers as a fun club ranking tool rather than for, or as, a result of any tweets they have communicated over the site.

Twitter needs to become more compelling to read. A user interface where the regular columnists are in sections as they would be in print. A ranking can be included and preferably driven by ones self selected network. Then twitter becomes an index to the short form, shall I call them headlines? which lead one to occasional reading of links into more in depth discussion on a blog or at an established media site.

I was struck by a recent tweet in response to another: “Was that really a necessary tweet?”. Well I’m not sure I have ever seen a necessary tweet. Or rather, I haven’t seen an important tweet but I have enjoyed many frivolous tweets. It is indeed more entertaining than delicious. It is water cooler conversation and occasionally one needs to turn away from ones work and have some social context. The clicks generated by the 10% of followers have a value but readers with things to do will only spend occasional time at the water cooler and if that time is too occasional they won’t play this game.  For that reason the site needs to continue to evolve to be more readable or be replaced.

The real question is “How should it evolve or where should we go?“

Marketing, Technology digg, presence, twitter

I have noticed a reasonable number of recent web sites which are syndicating content and republishing it on twitter or allowing it to be searched on their site. Often without publishing any kind of license or terms which would indicate that they had rights to the material.

Given the recent experiences that people have had with Getty Images you have to worry that the site operators are exposing themselves regardless of the use of a RSS feed to retrieve the data or the fact that the data was available for free in the original context. While linking to content has been held to be acceptable by some courts, hosting the content in your database and presenting it is likely to be argued to be an infringing use.

For example twitter content has the copyright retained by the original individual authors but people still pull it down from Twitter via RSS and use it. Some of the content is actually being republished from news services via RSS to Twitter services and the rights owner, a news agency, could easily come after anybody in the chain using it as part of their business. Many RSS terms only permit personal use, or use on a personal web site, not commercial use. A clearer problem with using personal use licensed RSS feeds are the  bargain hunting applications and staffing companies who are scanning the RSS syndication of craigslist and republishing it beyond the published personal use license and would appear to be putthing themselves at risk of legal action as a result.

Most rights holders aren’t going to mind but by building web sites around content you don’t own and which is being received from an RSS feed you are running a greater risk of the content not belonging to the person creating the subscription. As a result you are exposing yourself to future legal action in some countries and in other jurisdictions you need to respond to take down notices about user submissions promptly. If you ever have money worth pursuing you could even find yourself involved in the same kind of potential defenses as YouTube have experienced.

IP copyright, craigslist, IP, legal, licensing, rss, twitter

A quote from a paper prepared for presentation at the American Economic Association meetings in San Francisco this coming Saturday, January 3, 2009 by Carmen M. Reinhart, University of Maryland. NBER and CEPR and Kenneth S. Rogoff Harvard University and NBER:

Broadly speaking, financial crises are protracted affairs. More often than not, the aftermath of severe financial crises share three characteristics.

First, asset market collapses are deep and prolonged. Real housing price declines average 35 percent stretched out over six years, while equity price collapses average 55 percent over a downturn of about three and a half years.

Second, the aftermath of banking crises is associated with profound declines in output and employment. The unemployment rate rises an average of 7 percentage points over the down phase of the cycle, which lasts on average over four years. Output falls (from peak to trough) an average of over 9 percent, although the duration of the downturn, averaging roughly two years, is considerably shorter than for unemployment.

Third, the real value of government debt tends to explode, rising an average of 86 percent in the major post–World War II episodes.

Finance economics, Finance, markets, wallstreet

I’m glad to see a bit more variety in the ventures wanting to present at this month’s NY Tech. We still have over half the ventures being related to the social web which I think is representative of the software related startups in town at the moment. Of course most software ventures are more general. Everything from stock control to trading software and it would be good to see a broader range getting in front of the VCs who attend. I was particularly heartened to see TrialX wanting to present. They are “a healthcare information technology startup that is developing a groundbreaking technology to automatically match patients to clinical trials of new treatments.”

I care about this, not because there is anything wrong with social media, but because there are opportunities for technology startups which New York is uniquely positioned to take advantage of. This is not so much in the technologies which are created in relative business isolation purely from an idea but those which are created by lighting fires under elements of the major industries of New York: advertising, publishing, pharma, health and financial services. There are many ventures in these fields which require expertise or integration into business relationships and a New York venture is in a better position to realize success than a startup in the pure technology space of The Bay Area.

In many cases these ventures also have clearer real business models even if they can’t achieve the same number of eyeballs by next Monday. At the moment I would take a plan leading to cash rather than eyeballs every time.

New York, Technology newyork startups nytech ventures

A former NYU lecturer, Jack Sandler Bloom, has published a community around a Business Strategy course. The course is an effective start (currently two classes) of a business strategy course. His vision is of a broader educational platform where participants can make available for free, educational materials. He also offers a marking and feedback process for a charge. The two current classes are of good quality offering very interesting content.

At present the content is little more than a video blog and a lot is needed to realize the goal of large scale distribution of free educational content. Several other organizations have tried. At one time CompuServe started CompuServe University and a number of national education departments make a modest amount of material available for free.

As young potential students and parents start to understand how much material is available for free and the extent to which many so called universities in the US are just teaching commoditized courses from the major educational publishers the model of paying exorbitant fees has to come into question. The social network of like minded people is something which is available online at little or no cost and accreditations in varies certification forms are available at much lower cost.

The remaining niches retained by universities are brand and the ability to sanction grants and low rate loans. The micro lending platforms could easily tie in to certification agencies as a way of providing loans to finance the team people are able to spend educating themselves. The university brands themselves are extremely over vallued but this has been a factor in education for centuries. The openness provided by technology will slowly undermine it just as the invention of printing and the translation of the bible into lay languages greatly undermined the authority of the church.

There are bigger questions about the effect of the certification style training as a substitute for education and the effect it has on stifling creativity or even thought. Moving to greater certification and a closer link to people’s future earnings through commercial loans does hamper the ability to provide a rounded eduction for the good of the individual themselves.

Society education lending strategy universities

This is unfortunately a necessary political gesture. There is going to be increasing political pressure unless we clarify that it is a bailout OF some institutions, not FOR the institutions. People want to know that tax payer money is being used to support the economy, not bonuses. So despite the fact that Goldman Sachs has honestly earned its money, doubtlessly through many hours of hard work, in the current climate it is an appropriate leadership action to be showing that we are not lining our pockets when many are suffering financial hardship and additionally having their tax dollars used to support market liquidity. If politions or regulators received bonuses we should be asking the same of them. Of course they don’t receive bonuses even in the good years.

Governance goldman bailout

NY governor, David Paterson, has release a web site showing the expected impact of the economic downturn. The budget deficit is projected to grow from $1.5B in 2008-09 to $12.5B 2009-10 which is truly staggering. Putting that in perspective though is the projected Wall Street bonus drop, a very important source of tax revenue, down from $48.2B in 2008 to $27.6B in 2009. It could easily be far below that as there are a reduced number of employees as well as drastically reduced bonuses per individual. Wall Street represents 20% of NY state tax revenue.

To give a wider perspective on the actual, rather than projected, economy the actual tax revenue from the top 20 corporate taxpayers is down 38% for the first two quarters of 2008.

New York nystate tax deficit wallstreet