Online Media Cultist

Twitter is hugely popular, growing quickly, and has attracted lots of funding and worldwide buzz and all the other things a wildfire-on-the-way-to-greatness web start-up could ever hope for.

But how’s it ever going to make money?

That’s something that people have been discussing for a long time now. Aidan Henry, who I know from MappingTheWeb but is also now writing over at ReadWriteWeb these days (CongratsAidan!), posits a few interesting theorems today. In short, Aidan suggests doing contextual ads that run in Twitter feeds, an adwords-like system that auctions off ad space, or a tiered model with a free level of access and a subscription-level that allows people to get the site ad-free.

Personally, I like doing things simple and easy whenever possible. Although many people access Twitter through a mobile device or through applications like twhirl and twitterrific, there are large numbers who access it on the web, through twitter.com. Why not just put a leaderboard banner ad across the top of the page and perhaps a skyscraper ad underneath each person’s friends in the right column?

That way, each time anyone refreshes their page to receive new messages, and each time someone clicks around the site to browse, a new ad impression is created. Geotargeting or some other means of sending contextually relevant ads could further increase CPMs.

I think introducing ads into Twitter feeds could be a dangerous move. Even clearly labeling tweets as “sponsor messages” will annoy many people. It will also open the floodgates for more spam to be introduced. For example, if Twitter is sending sponsor messages, why can’t I send sponsor messages of my own? This could have an overall negative effect on what is currently a great and thriving and growing community.

Clearly these are all things that the people at Twitter are pondering. It’s a tough problem, adding a revenue model into the mix of an existing free service. I hope that Twitter can eventually figure out a system that works and does minimal harm to what is now a pretty special community.

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0, one of the crazy-smartest people writing about the interwebs and what-it-all-means today, continues his exploration of the over coverage of breaking news stories with a piece called The Declining Value Of Redundant News Content On The Web. In this case, Karp uses the Microsoft-Yahoo non-merger aftermath as a means to display how “it’s a problem to have 2,000 stories about the SAME THING,” showing a numbing sampling of Google News results as a visual example of how many publishers offer nearly the same thing about the same story.

I agree that this over coverage creates a glut of stories that are nearly identical to one another, that it presents a disservice to readers who are trying to make sense of it all. But I think it’s important to explore why publishers jump on the bandwagon in the first place. Karp likens mass coverage of breaking news stories to 100 newspapers and 50 TV stations covering a factory shutdown in one single Midwest city. It’s an interesting analogy, but I’m not sure that it quite works.

The global nature of the web coupled with a 24/7 publishing environment creates a never ending chase for page views and ad revenues. In other words: publishers aren’t all covering the same story to provide a public service; they’re doing it because there’s a marketplace for huge stories – massive interest for a brief window of time – and everyone is desperately trying to cut themselves in on a piece of the action. That doesn’t mean that everyone will get rich doing this, but obviously there’s some payoff in hopping on the bandwagon.

The conclusion that Karp comes to is that everyone should “BE ORIGINAL.” Of course, this is harder said than done, and everyone will have a different definition of “original.” Scott likes to use Google News when showing examples of over coverage. And Google News is a great news search engine.

But I would argue that “the answer” – if there’s indeed an answer to this problem – is smart content aggregators and smart people networks to help individuals filter out what is the most important, the most original, the most valuable stories in a fluid environment.

The best example I can think of in terms of a smart content aggregator is Techmeme, as well as Memeorandum when it comes to general news and politics. Mixing in individual trusted websites and blogs along with a smart content aggregator or two is a great way to stay on top of breaking stories without getting lost in a sea of sameness.

And what I mean by smart people networks: this can come in many forms, but I’m particularly thinking about Twitter and Friendfeed when it comes to breaking tech and online stories. Building trusted friend/contact networks allows links to get distributed from trusted people to individuals in real time. Social networking sites like Facebook and instant messaging applications like AIM or GTalk can also provide a basis for a smart people network.

So in conclusion I don’t see the deluge of over coverage ending anytime soon. The potential to get in on the action is simply too tempting for publishers. Or, alternatively, many publishers will feel like they’re not legitimate if they don’t write something about a story that everyone else is talking about.

However, over coverage can be combated through a combination of smart content aggregators and smart people networks.

Just as speculation was heating up that Twitter is considering abandoning its Ruby on Rails framework for PHP or Java, it hit another big service downtime snag this afternoon and into this evening.

Interestingly and not surprisingly, chatter about Twitter switched over to Friendfeed, which does a lot of business – and quite well at that – in aggregating Twitter posts anyway.

If people are looking for an excuse to simply switch over to Friendfeed, this could be the kind of the thing to send them over the edge. I don’t think that will happen – at least not anytime soon – as the two services compliment each other pretty nicely and, more importantly, most of the “early adopter set” have been on Twitter longer and therefore have spent a lot of time and energy building up friend networks there.

Hopefully, Twitter will resolve its ongoing technical issues soon enough and can then continue to reap all the rewards of hyper growth.

There’s been a debate going on the last few days about how “important” Twitter is, about how many regular people (read= non-geeky non-web-obsessed folk) know about it, whether or not it will ever hit a mainstream audience, and so on.

Regardless (and I think it will hit the mainstream, probably in 8-12 months), Twitter is important in the daily lives of many people. So much so that, like me, people such as Louis Gray use Twitter as a way to start the day, to see what’s going on in the world, to collect useful links that trusted “loose” connections have already collected and shared and commented about in short tidy snippets, and to simply check in with the digital universe to say hey y’all, it’s gonna be another day of interwebs tom foolery, now isn’t it.

My own personal Twitter habits have caused me to wonder how others use the service as well. In particular, I’m curious as to where people “start.” In other words, when you choose to follow someone on Twitter, you receive ongoing updates of their Twitter posts. When you do human things that require leaving a computer, such as sleeping, Twitter posts accumulate all the while.

When I have the time, I’ll go back to the last time I was on Twitter, and “read forward” through all the posts that were made from that time. More often though I’ll only have the time to read through more recent posts that were made before I reentered the Twitter vortex.

This again brings up a new feature suggestion for Twitter: add a checkbox next to every “tweet” so that logged in users can mark their place – kind of like slipping a bookmark into a tome before going to sleep – and easily find it again the next time they check back in.

I was a little bit surprised to see that busy people such as Mathew Ingram were inclined to at least try to read all of their Twitter friends’ posts as well. Phillip Winn does the same, though he starts with replies and then “works backwards” from most recent posts to the point at which he last signed off. To this, I replied: “Interesting - I have a neurotic need to read tweets “in order,” except when on blackberry.”

Surely not everyone is as engaged (obsessed?) with Twitter to do this, however. And for people like Jason Calacanis and Robert Scoble, who follow upwards of 20,000 people each, it would be simply impossible to follow updates made while they were offline.

So to recap, the stages of Twitter addiction are:

* You’re a regular person
* You know about Twitter
* You use Twitter
* You use Twitter but don’t read every single post
* You use Twitter and try to read every single post
* You’re Jason Calacanis or Robert Scoble

Please note: with the exception of the Calacanis and Scoble stage (Stage Scobacanis?), it’s all too easy to accelerate through the stages of Twitter addiction!

Recently, I’ve been trending toward using Techmeme, a content aggregator and “meme tracker,” and Twitter, a communications aggregator and “people knowledge tracker” of sorts, as a way to bring news and information that’s relevant and valuable to me. Fred Wilson of A VC seems to be of a similar mind but theorizes that the “average audience member” may still be more focused on single content publications rather than these kinds of platforms.

In other words, it’s a question of content aggregation versus visiting a single publication as a place to consume news and information.

As evidence, Fred uses a Compete chart that shows a spike in TechCrunch’s traffic while Techmeme’s growth has been relatively more modest:

Wilson goes on to state:

I have moved away from reading individual blogs. I want to read aggregation services like techmeme, hacker news, reddit, twitter, delicious popular, digg, etc, etc. I find that they give me a much better view of the top stories of the day than reading individual blogs does.

But once again, what I do doesn’t map very well to what the average audience member does. I think I need to remind myself of that fact on a daily basis.

I agree with Fred, but I might take a slightly different conclusion. I personally find following the massive volume of posts that TechCrunch and Mashable publish to be difficult. Further, the stream of product announcements, rumors, and tech business news can be exhausting to sift through.

I wonder if the massive growth of Twitter and relative popularity of sites like Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit, and StumbleUpon tell us that people are looking for a combination of algorithm-based and influence-tracking sites (Techmeme) and community-powered content aggregation (Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg) as a way to:

* Relay the most important/compelling/interesting/breaking stories in close to real time - Traditional media websites aren’t efficient at telling us what’s going on in technology and the Internet in real time. Blogs and community-powered sites are clearly filling that gap. And I would argue that “intelligent communities” like Twitter are the next step in this evolution.

* Provide analysis/commentary/meaning/value to news - Again, the blogosphere emerged as a means to fulfill a desire to bring credible opinions and commentary to the news of the day within the online medium. Because blogs are now such an essential part of distributing the news itself – and TechCrunch and Mashable are critical pieces in this – content aggregators and content-centric communities (as opposed to social networking communities such as MySpace) are becoming ever more important in aggregating stories, getting them to the right place at the right time, and relaying what communities are saying about them and think about them.

This is all to say that smart content aggregation and community-based content sharing will become an ever more important part of information consumption. I believe that that’s part of the reason why Twitter is seeing amazing growth (as well as more funding, maybe they’ll tack on a business model one of these days!) and why a range of sites, including Techmeme, are popular within the tech-obsessed crowd.

In other other words: maybe Fred Wilson’s “average audience members” aren’t quite there yet, but I bet they will be in time.

And if you’re looking for one ring to rule them all… it just might be Friendfeed, a service that aggregates Twitter conversations, blog posts, Google Reader shared stories, comments made via Disqus, social news “diggs,” and a host of other services. As bhc3 writes: “FriendFeed is emerging as the one lifestream platform to rule them all. The ability to see and interact across a range of services is proving addictive. And it may inadvertently disrupt a few other services along the way.”

For a great insider’s view of how one blogger is handling his social media consumption workflow, check out Louis Gray’s piece. It’s a great step-by-step on where things are headed.

I binged out on thwirl and Alert Thingy this morning, desktop applications that send you alerts from people you’re following on Twitter and Friendfeed.

Originally, thwirl was developed for use with Twitter and Alert Thingy for Friendfeed, but both thwirl and Alert Thingy now support both services, so it really comes down to which one you like better and in suiting your needs. This all assumes of course that you’re obsessed enough with Twitter and/or Friendfeed to want to sync your desktop up with ongoing alerts. If you are such a person (like me), step on forward!

twhirl and Alert Thingy run on Adobe AIR, which allows for a very easy and quick download and installation. Both apps are clean and extremely responsive, and the UI and design intuitive and very slick.

I’m a little bit more familiar with twhirl at this point, and really like a lot about what it offers. From an aesthetic standpoint, I like that the twhirl window becomes transluscent when you’re not using it, and brightens when you click on it. I also really like that it incorporates Twitter’s profile pic thumbnails, and adds a sweet “picture in picture” wrinkle when displaying a reply message.

twhirl makes it really easy to toggle between incoming “tweets” or messages from people you’re following and your archive, direct messages, replies, and favorites. Personally, I like to use Twitter and Friendfeed in different ways (I go into this in some detail here) so I like that twhirl allows me to open two windows and have my Twitter messages coming through one and Friendfeed messages coming through the other.

One of the best things about Alert Thingy, which is a little bit more Friendfeed-centric, is that it displays thumbnails of shared photos from Flickr. Visually though, I find Alert Thingy to be a little bit harder on the eyes than twhirl. Trying to find new comments being made on Friendfeed posts confused me a few times, for instance. And since it doesn’t let you split out Twitter and Friendfeed feeds into separate windows, it’s difficult for me to use it in the way that I would most prefer. I do really like the sound effect that Alert Thingy uses though!

I’m not sure if I’ll use either twhirl or Alert Thingy on an ongoing basis. I may be “old school” enough that I actually prefer to simply use the web-based versions of Twitter and Friendfeed, and refresh the page when I want to see the latest posts.

One great addition for the web-based version of Twitter that I would love to see: put a little checkbox next to every post that allows you to “mark your place” (this can either be done by default or could allow the user to mark it him/herself). That way you can always easily know “where you were” prior to the most recent refresh of the page.

Michael Arrington wrote something that I related to in the comments section of a story about Twitter’s recent technical problems: “Friendfeed is great for keeping track of an information stream. Twitter is about conversations. very different things.”

Somewhat by accident, or so I thought, that’s how I’ve come to look at my use of Twitter and Friendfeed as well. I think it may have something to do with the fact that like most people I discovered Twitter before Friendfeed. As Arrington also notes, “Twitter has created a de-facto monopoly in the micro-blogging space” (and complains semi-seriously that I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me).

Because it has become such a great place to quickly get a read on what’s going on amongst dialed-in and diverse people throughout the world, I find that I’m somewhat discriminate on who I choose to follow on Twitter. If someone is kind enough to follow me, I’ll check them out if I can to assess if their micro-blogging “tweets” are something that I’d like to add to my daily informational plate. (My profile is here – and if I missed your Twitter profile of excellence for some reason, please feel free to hit me up and demand that I follow you!). It’s not that I want to shut anyone out, it’s that I’m trying to take some care in lining up a valuable collection of people to interact in the so called Twitterverse.

I’ve come to think about Friendfeed somewhat more casually, meaning that I too use it as an “information stream” as opposed to a place where if I miss something, I’ll feel anxious or guilty about it. Because people on Friendfeed can choose to share stories they’ve read on Google Reader, stories they’ve voted for on Digg and Reddit, or submitted to StumbleUpon amongst many other things (including Twitter posts), it’s a platform that encourages massive information distribution by its very nature. Therefore it’s a really nice place to check out to get a top level view of what’s going on in the world.

Maybe it works out well this way – or at least for me – because the relatively smaller community on Friendfeed seems to be intelligent, tech-savvy, and wildly active sharers of news and information. That’s not to say that the people on Twitter aren’t all of those things, but it’s a much bigger crowd, and it’s a more conversational place where you can say things like what I wrote on Twitter late last night when I was tired and loopy and clearly on the cusp of going insane while flipping through the channels before passing out to bed:

News Alert: Ferris Bueller has been absent *nine times* this semester. Thank you.

Susan Mernit has an interesting take on this as well, writing that Twitter “is a key tool in supporting” a global community that is in contact with each other 24/7, while Friendfeed as well as blogs, IM, skype, e-mail, and flickr all play a role as well.

My friend and popular blogger Steven Cohen also is attempting to manage his relationship with Twitter, and interestingly notes that Twitter is his first foray into “social networking,” which recalls my earliest thoughts on Twitter and other services like MyBlogLog, and how they’re sort of helping to cross the blogging and social networking divide.

And to add an even further layer on top of all this madness, Louis Gray passes along his thoughts on FriendFeedMachine, “which lets helps you filter between your true “Close Friends” and those you just want to follow, and gives a new approach to making comments, open items within the Web page, and even marking items as previously read.” Because Twitter and Friendfeed have open APIs, they encourage application development by their fans that create more value around these services.

So while clearly both Twitter and Friendfeed can soak up a lot of your time and attention, they can be extremely valuable, depending on what you’re looking to get out of each and how you choose who to follow.

It’s often been said by myself and others that Twitter, amongst many other uses, is a great tool for live event coverage and for keeping groups of people informed during an emergency.

Now in what could become a story that makes Twitter much better known throughout the world, we’ve learned that it has helped rescue a UC Berkeley grad student from an Egyptian jail. After being hauled off by police for photographing a demonstration, James Karl Buck “tweeted” the word “Arrested” from his cell phone, alerting his group of followers around the world to his situation.

By the next day, the combination of pressure from the US Embassy and an Egyptian attorney hired by UC Berkeley had forced Buck’s release. (Buck’s friend and interpreter, Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, remains behind bars.)

Peter Kafka of Silicon Alley thinks something is “off” about the story, that having a cell phone handy was far important to Buck’s release than the use of Twitter.

Either way, I’d think that having the ability to quickly disperse information (I’ve been arrested, please help) to a group of influential people during a time of crisis is incredibly powerful. And of course, a “Twitter effect” is that those people who have been notified have the ability to rally that message across an even wider network.

And I agree with Chris Brogan, who writes: “Twitter has a powerful ability to move people to action, to deliver help where it’s needed, and more. If a messaging platform can free a man from prison, what else can it do for YOU?”

I’ve added James Karl Buck to the group of people I follow on Twitter. You can find his profile here.

A few days ago, I noticed that a story I wrote musing about whether Twitter had become the new RSS reader had been linked to from a site called Shyftr. Clicking over to Shyftr, I noticed that the full text of my article was included on the site. My first reaction was that this was a “splog” site, or a site designed to “steal” the content of my site and then trick people who stumble across it via Google search into clicking its ads. (Yes, apparently there’s good money in this if you can pump out thousands of such sites before you get shut down.)

But Shyftr’s not a splog site; it’s something else. It does “pull” full text RSS feeds onto its site, but with the benevolent intention (I’ve come to understand) of creating a community around it. There were a bunch of lively and positive comments around my Twitter/RSS story, for instance.

Louis Gray is a fan and supporter of Shyftr, writing that it’s a “a next-generation RSS feed reader that enables comments within its service.” In Louis’ opinion, enabling community around full text RSS feeds is where “things are going” and what readers want. That may be true, but in all respect to Louis and the people behind Shyftr, it doesn’t necessarily make it right.

Louis is further involved in this story as I threw out a question on Twitter last night to the effect of “what’s up with this wacky Shyftr thing?” which initiated a rather fascinating and far reaching conversation that took place on Twitter, Friendfeed, and later across a number of blogs, including Tony Hung, Mathew Ingram, Mark Evans, and even Robert Scoble.

I think my original question which set up the argument and discussion still holds: Shyftr pulls full text from your RSS feed and creates community around it. Doing that without the publisher’s notification or participation doesn’t seem right to me, but I’m willing to listen to counter-arguments.

Communities built around pulling RSS feed are different than social news sites like Digg, different than meme trackers like Techmeme, different than social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, and different than specialized search engines like Google News.

Taking full text from publishers without permission (or even any communication or acknowledgement) and building a platform and community around it hurts publishers in several ways, even if that was not the intent.

* Publishers lose control over their audience – Yes, I understand in our new distributed age this is going to happen in part. But think about it: when a story is posted to Digg, submitted to del.icio.us, and so on, the idea is always to have a link and description text “tease” people back to the original story. It’s all promotion for the original story and the source website in essence. What Shyftr does is wrong as it removes any need at all to go anywhere except for Shyftr

* Publishers have no opportunity to engage the audience – If a publisher doesn’t know people are commenting on his/her work, it’s a huge disservice to both the writer and to readers. Most bloggers write with the intent to answer questions from commenters, moderate follow-up discussions, and pull future ideas for stories out of the comments. The way that Shyftr is set up does not allow this to happen.

* The difference between Shyftr and full text blog RSS feeds – But wait, you plead. Publishers already “give away” their content via full text RSS feeds. Doesn’t that break your core argument? Not really, I’d answer (throwing in a solicitous sir a la Paul Giamatti playing John Adams) because an RSS feed still has elements of control. Publishers can advertise on their RSS feed for one, readers can click back to the original story to comment, and importantly publishers can track RSS feed subscribers and count those numbers against their overall “reach” in the blogosphere and on the Internet.

Tony Hung seems to agree, writing: “I think there is a moral and ethical obligation to obtain content from the content owners about reproducing feeds in their entirety.” And Mathew Ingram sums up the big picture well as he so often does: “I think RSS gives people the right to read your content — but not to build a business around it.”

The “lifestreaming” phenomenon streams onward and upward, or at least a few companies in the venture capital space hope so.

Ustream.tv is announcing that it is raising $11.1 million, which is on the heels of Qik’s $3 million round.

In late March I noted this about Ustream: It’s a potent and timely mix, video and social networking and a real-time communications experience. I’m curious to see where this will go.

In my view, Ustream is a lot stronger and healthier platform as compared to Qik, which centers around live video streaming from mobile phones. I think this space will be huge in a few years (and perhaps less, who knows?) but the quality of the video I’ve watched on Qik has been bad enough to make me shut it off. Whereas with Ustream it’s a lot easier to “get”: (watchable) live video broadcasting with a suite of easy-to-use social networking and chat features built around it. Great place to go if you want to set up your own video chat show. Host impromptu live meetings by making an announcement on Twitter or another real time communications application where you can reach a lot of people immediately. Get it, makes lots of sense.

I haven’t played with Qik a lot so don’t want to be totally unfair to it, but I sense that it has a ways to go before it can attract a huge audience. And perhaps it’s unfair to compare Ustream and Qik directly as they are not exactly the same. If Qik can improve video streaming quality (no easy task!) it could be a killer app. And for all I know it just might be anyway: people love using their mobile phones to do so, and if you can stream live video and create an audience around that, that will certainly catch on.

Other lifestreaming-type services include Kyte.tv and Justin.tv. I haven’t head a lot about Justin.tv of late, but it seems to be quietly streaking up the Alexa rankings at the least, clocking in under the 1000 mark yesterday.

So that might help us to understand why there’s a spurt of funding going on round the lifestreaming junction at the moment.