Category Archives: Microblogging

The Events of the Last Few Days

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I stay in the Northern Suburbs of Mumbai, about an hour from downtown where the terrorist attacks of the last few days occurred and left over 150 people dead and many more injured.  The last few days I’ve stayed holed up in my apartment and the office (3 blocks away), and aside from ruining my thanksgiving dinner plans, I’ve been largely unaffected.  It will take some time to put together all the pieces and figure out how and why this happened.  I’m not one of political commentary but here are some observations:

  • I haven’t been downtown since, but everyone’s saying the streets are empty.  This is inconceivable in a city of over 15 million people.  Even up here the roads are not car to car with traffic, for the first time since I’ve been here.
  • People are complaining about the slow response time of the Indian government. I’m not sure why this ordeal took over 3 days, maybe it had to do with fear for the hostages or the inexperience of the local police rushing in.  What I’m wondering though is how is it that the anti-terrorism squad chief and commissioner of police were killed within the first few hours of the operation?  While I don’t know anything about them, and I’m sure they are hero’s and extremely brave, if you are in a position of command, isn’t it your job to lead your forces and not rush into battle?  Could the poor response have something to do with confusion over who was giving orders?  This is total speculation.
  • This is a really great article describing the importance of the Taj to Mumbai and it’s people.
  • It’s awesome to hear about the bravery of the hotel staff.
  • With India’s general elections coming up in May, the recent attacks throughout India have set off speculation that national security will be the campaign focus and shift the political landscape.  I don’t know anything about local politics, but I just hope that people here do not elect hawkish leaders, who are jumping at the opportunity to go to war with Pakistan.
  • My brothers in Israel tried to convince me to come to there for a few days till things blow over.  I never thought that I would consider going to Israel to escape terrorism.
  • Lastly, it’s amazing the power the new media outlets (Twitter, Wikipedia, Blogs) have at disseminating information.  I was following the Mumbai Twitter channel before any of the major news outlets caught wind of the situation.  There is something hypnotic about reading first hand accounts mixed in with people’s reactions of the traditional media news accounts.  While this is definitely great and a step in the right direction towards empowering the masses, it is also extremely dangerous.  People were tweeting information that blatantly wasn’t true and had potential to cause panic (not that this is any different from the incorrect accounts reported by the sensationalist, traditional news outlets).  I was also shocked at how quickly the wikipedia page for the event was put it up and how well researched and referenced it was (sourced from over 130 accounts).

My friend Mary is currently living abroad in Thailand (and experiencing a coup first-hand).  In a recent post, she asks, “What is going on in the world? Or am I just seeing it with wider-open eyes by virtue of my location outside of my home country? Tragedies are occurring around the world with alarming frequency, but perhaps we don’t pay attention unless our loved ones are affected? Is this part of what we seek when we travel and live abroad – an expanded perspective that can only be obtained as an eyewitness to such occurrences?”  While I’ve only been in Mumbai a month, consider my perspective expanded.  Over the last few days family, friends, colleagues in India around the world have all shown extreme concern and support.  Often overcoming difficult situations leads to a renewed appreciation of what you have.  Thank you all for your kind words over the last few days, please continue to stay in touch.

The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report

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Every year Ave A/Razorfish puts out a yearly report highlighting research and trends in digital marketing. The focus this year is on the expanding role of social apps and how people use them. Not only is the report extremely insightful and provides a glimpse of where the internet and it’s users are headed, it also is beautifully put together.

There are 13 articles including, Designing Experiences for the Facebook Generation, How Micro-Interactions are Changing the Way We Communicate Online, How Tiny Applications are Remaking the Future of the Web, A Look at Games as Tools Not Toys, and Data Visualization for the Online Era. Below are some key takeaways – this is not meant to be a complete summary, just an excerpt to give you an idea of the contents.

Meet the Connected Consumer

  • All signs point to the continuing disintegration of “one-stop” digital destinations… We’ve found that [consumers] don’t want a one-size-fits-all solution for their needs. Consumers prefer using multiple destinations, and then aggregating media and services, via simple tools like RSS, into a highly personalized view of their digital world.
  • We were most surprised to see widespread acceptance and frequent consumer usage of Web site widgets… This development reinforces our belief that distribution of content and services will trump destinations, as both consumers and Internet technologies continue to evolve. Additionally, it will provide significant challenges for publishers (primarily media and entertainment companies) who currently have no clear path towards monetizing content distribution across the Web.
  • Digital Behavior Defies Age: We found today’s connected consumers equally distributed across all age ranges, with a slight skew to older segments. No longer are we seeing Internet technology adoption rates limited to only certain segments. Our study found widespread acceptance of these new service offering and finds older consumers much more likely to spend money online.

Designing Experiences for the Facebook Generation

  • What is happening is that the concept of social networking is evolving and morphing. It’s now about making the entire Web social instead of just creating a ghetto of destination sites where people have to go to socialize (a la Facebook Connect).
  • People want to feel special and tend to reach out to the things that make them feel that way. So, it’s no surprise that people flock to social networks in droves; they make users feel like the star of their own lives.
  • The most recent rapid expansion on the Facebook and MySpace sites came when they opened up their systems and allowed developers to make applications for their sites
  • Design for multiple levels of participation
    • Low-level: rating, poking, tagging, commenting, subscribing
    • Mid-level: writing statuses, twittering, playing games, adding widgets, uploading photos
    • High-level: making videos, writing blog posts and reviews
    • Expert-level: moderating groups and message boards, creating applications, running feeder businesses on the social network’s “economy”

Putting Jakob Back on the Shelf

  • Stop launching your design activity around pages as the medium… We need to build frameworks that power both storytelling and answer-seeking to occur.
  • Design the new customer experience as a map of interactions. The new experience might be a conversation; it might be a series of decisions made by the user; it might be an interactive storytelling session. Understand what the customer needs, and just design that.
  • Let’s not limit our vision to effective Web editorial styles, properly ordered Cancel and Save buttons, and left aligned lists of mixed capitalization blue links. Let’s design customer experiences that start and end with, well, the customers’ goals and needs—and let’s start with a blank slate. Use storytelling and interaction building blocks—not the building blocks of desktop publishing.

How Micro-Interactions Are Changing the Way We Communicate Online

  • At the heart of micro-interactions is the belief that immediacy, simplicity, voyeurism and constant communications matter. The success of the tools lend credence to the notion that quick, possibly frivolous, short bursts of communication are just as useful as more measured, reflective communications.
  • Web experiences will need to support communication dynamics that allow users to engage in something and report back to their communities in a Twitter-like fashion. Because they have the portability of a social graph, these micro-interactions will take place anywhere on the Web as people interact with their friends in more locations.

How Tiny Applications Are Remaking the Future of the Web

  • One could argue that we are seeing a third wave of software properties—propagated by RockYou—that is differentiated from previous waves based on customization, interactivity and viral distribution.
  • We believe that widgets provide the purest glimpse into the new, improved networked future. It’s an interconnected world where people will select, personalize, share and consume Web services wherever and whenever they choose. Effortlessly.

A Look at Games as Tools, Not Toys

  • Get to know the product by imagining it as a game… Use game-inspired techniques to create a better experience in non-game products.
  • People love instant feedback. It creates a sense of reward through a series of small, doable steps. In games, the steps to “winning” are visually represented and easily accessible. This may look like a coin-counting meter, a halo around your avatar or many other things. Mint.com’s dashboard provides instant feedback on your financial goals. It monitors how every swipe of your card affects your budget and net worth, and even how your spending compares to others in the same city.

Data Visualization for the Online Era

  • The next time you are tasked with providing users with consumption or performance information, or a way of comparing the past, present and future, think of the questions the users are trying to resolve. Then get creative and provide the answers visually. Consider how quickly they can use the information to decide to buy, change, stop or reconsider. Ensure the style of the visuals reinforces a brand personality. The result? Users who will feel empowered, engaged and appreciative that you have saved them precious time and allowed them to make a decision with confidence.

In case this report isn’t enough reading for you can download last year’ report: Desigining for Constant Change.

Ways to improve Twitter – Special Interest and Contact Groups

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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:

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

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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.