Ways to improve Twitter – Special Interest and Contact Groups

Posted on September 26, 2008 by amit

The first part of this article described why people microblog and the current problems with Twitter. There were two questions:

How can you quickly find and engage in conversations around topics you are interested in?
How can you identify which notifications are important and send/receive them in the appropriate method and frequency?

The answers: special interest and contact groups are discussed below.

Special Interest Groups

There’s a lot of people constantly engaging in dialogues I want to be a part of, but just don’t know about. I love that the advanced search is able to filter tweets based on words, people, places, dates, and attitudes, it allows me to, for instance, find all people within 15 miles of lower Manhattan talking positively about the Mets. The problem is once I have the results, what can I do with them? Sure I can subscribe to an RSS feed but that takes me out of the whole call and response flow that makes Twitter so engaging. Hashtags is a 3rd party service which allows you to create and track tags.

A couple of problems with hashtags:

It’s a third party service and not integrated into Twitter.
No way to subscribe to a specific hashtag and see it in my stream.
There is a lot of redundancy (i.e. Barack, BarackObama, Obama, Obama08, Obama-President)
There is no taxonomy (#family:genus:species)

Recently Twitter released a special strem for the elections. This is awesome and I hope a sign for whats to come. Here’s my wishlist for special interest groups on Twitter:

Be able to subscribe to any advanced search result.
Give a short name to the result and have a list appear underneath your followers.
Be able to specify if tweets from a specific group appear in your stream.
Be able to click on any of the groups and have a real-time, updated page of the results (like the Election Page):

Allow for the custom insertion of dynamic filters within a group. (For instance if election is the main keyword you are searching, be able to add/delete dynamic filters like Obama, Biden)

Special interest groups would allow new users to quickly ramp up their involvement and allow long time users to filter all their messages into clearly discernible buckets by specifying a combination of people, topics and location. Some examples of what this could to do:

Allow Obama to identify and address all people who were positively supporting Hillary in Virginia during the primaries.
Allow Apple to follow the launch of their newest product. Combine this with trending topics within the group and identify most active complaints. Send a notifications to all those afflicted with a message that the most recent update solves their issue.
Allow me to find all people who have discussed Twitter improvements in the last 2 weeks, and ask for their suggestions.

Contact Groups

The premise here is that some users I really care about, and some I only care about if they have something really, really important to say (to me). Currently Twitter allows you to receive all messages, or messages directed to you via SMS. They also let you turn it off during certain hours:

This is nice but there’s a lot more that can be done. Here’s how I would structure contact groups:

Allow users to create unlimited contact groups and easily add and remove users and special interest groups. These groups are private and cannot be seen by other users.
For each contract group allow the following receive options:

Delivery Method: Modify the settings for how you would like to receive different types of messages including: all messages, messages directed at you, and high priority messages (discussed below). The following options are: Twitter Stream, SMS, Email, IM (allows multiple select)

Frequency : Modify how often you would like to receive messages from this group: Real-time, Daily, Weekly (daily and weekly would send aggregated list of all messages)

For each contract group allow the following sending options:

Private Messaging – Select which contact groups this message is sent to. Specify if messages to this group appear in your public stream (twhisper).

Priority Alerts – Allow users/services to send messages they deem as critical (breaking news, emergency messages). There would need to be a system in place for people who abuse this (similar to flagging comments?), but this could be immensely powerful.

There are also (at least) 2 new revenue streams here:

Give personal accounts a small number of priority messages, while offering more for pay
Create customized reports of keyword trending for your particular market/product/campaign. (update: stumbled on this site: http://twist.flaptor.com/freq?gram=twitter%2C%20friendfeed%2C%20facebook)

In summary, special interest groups would allow anyone to identify and engage with user’s who are discussing a particular topic. Contact groups would allow full control (privacy and frequency) of how messages are sent and received. In combination, Twitter would much more attractive to business by being able to analyze the abundance of opinions being shared and individuals by customizing their Twitter experience to fit their schedules and habits.

Why Twitter? and Problems with Microblogging

Posted on September 24, 2008 by amit

I was asked recently to take a look at microblogging and suggest improvements to Twitter. First off…

Why Twitter?

It’s a difficult question to answer, even for those who do it regularly. You start off tepidly following your in-the-know co-worker and soon you are fanatically telling your 513 followers that you are:

Recently the NYTimes Magazine had a great article Brave New World of Digital Intimacy, which describes the growth, stigmas and motivations of microbloggers:

“Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye…

The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world…

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.”

The article continues to describe how these short updates allow you strengthen your relationship with loose acquaintances. When that cute friend of a friend you once met at a party posts pictures of their trip to Buenos Aires, or that guy you met at a conference starts ripping apart the Mets bullpen, they are essentially reminding you they exist and offering you an opportunity to connect. Microblogging also provides an opportunity for following breaking news, a targeted audience for marketing your product, and (as opposed to blogging) requires little to no commitment.

Problems with Microblogging

Though Facebook still dominates (38.2 million unique visitors in August vs. 2.3 million for Twitter) Twitter is blowing up. I will never, ever, forget, the reason Twitter is so successful is because of it’s open API. Twitter’s popularity has grown because it has allowed 3rd party developers to build a whole world of enhancements to its core services. At first, finding ways to improve seemed like an impossible task. My initial thoughts about geographical, social and keyword visualization was already done. So was any enhancements to messaging attachments including, events, pictures and videos (a la Facebook Wall).

Rather then try to identify new features that Twitter could add, I took a step back and tried to identify the problems with their core service. When you first join Twitter, it’s not fun. You can follow the 5 people you actually know and search for the people you want to know (i.e. Henry Rollins, Kevin Rose), but you still aren’t involved/committed in the Twitterverse. Then there’s the reverse: Barack Obama is following 83k people. Given his busy schedule, how can he slice and dice all the updates he receives to, for example, reach out to all the Hillary supporters in NY who recently pledged allegience to Palin? Problem #1: How can you quickly find and engage in conversations around topics you are interested in?

Ok, I’ll be honest, some of my “virtual” friends I don’t really like. I’m not sure why I agreed to your Facebook friend request but I don’t want to receive any more emails inviting me to your poetry reading and I’m too lazy to defriend you. On the other hand, when my friend gets arrested I want a text message asap. Problem #2: How can you identify which notifications are important and send/receive them in the appropriate method and frequency?

Part 2 of this article will discuss the solutions to the problems above: special interest and contact groups.

10^100 – Why Google still isn't Evil (yet)

Posted on September 23, 2008 by amit

While Google was making headlines today with the launch of G1, I came across another article describing their Project 10¹⁰⁰. The project is described as, “a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible.” You submit a brief description of the problem you are trying to address, your solution, and who would benefit the most. The proposals are divided into categories (i.e. Community, Energy, Health, Shelter), Google will select the best 100 and then let the public vote on the top 25. A final advisory board will select 5 winning ideas and $10m will be given to the organization in the best position to implement.

A lot of companies donate $50m to charity and organizations, but it’s awesome that Google reaches out and let’s anyone submit ideas. Recently, Google’s shine is beginning to wear. It’s fun to root for the underdog, but when the underdog is worth $135B and is dominating search and advertising, people start to get nervous. Google has a ton of cool projects that remind us that they want us to still be around when the machines take over.

My favorite part about the site though was at the end of the FAQ: “(h) Any text or speech in the video must be in one of the following languages: English, German, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Korean, Russian, Swahili, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Arabic, Hindi, Greek, Czech, Hebrew, Danish, or Thai.” Pretty much allows anyone entry (except of course for Native Central Siberians).

Check out the (cliche) video:

why im moving to india

Posted on September 22, 2008 by amit

a few months ago i was feeling stuck. i started plateauing at my job, my social life was fun but unfulfilling and my only hobbies were ballin’, readin’ and drinkin’. i was restless. i traveled a lot growing up and always wanted to live abroad. on a whim i started researching agile software companies, interactive agencies and fast growing companies in india. i emailed the ceo’s directly letting them know i was motivated, charismatic and relentless. i setup a few interviews and bought a plane ticket. i was there for two weeks, had 7 interviews and accepted an offer in mumbai.

my short trip to india reinforced my desire to go there. sure it was dirty, crowded and i almost died every time i crossed the street, but there is a huge amount of energy and excitement. sometimes when you get to a place it just feels right – i felt an immediate connection to mumbai and the people i met there. also the ability to travel in the region (i have friends in vietnam and thailand) was particularly appealing.

why india? as india continues to play a more important role in the global economy i figured the experience gained working there and the connections id be able to make, will one day prove invaluvable. culturally i’ve always been fascinated by india and out of the worlds largest emerging economies (BRIC), it’s the only one where language isn’t really a barrier. obtaining a work visa (with a u.s. passport) is also easy. finally there’s an amateur basketball scene, a prerequisite for any place i would consider living.

hello worldl