Calling BS on the Real-Time Web

The tech world is full of the real-time web. Google seems to have missed it, Twitter is on top of it but sucks at indexing it, Friendfeed is the aggregation king, and Facebook might get there by copying Twitter and Friendfeed all along.

Personally I think it is not worth the hassle. Real-time web is a publisher’s thing, not a consumer thing. There are few situations, usually disasters,  where I might be in need of a real-time web. The geek will tell you that it is great to be able track what people are saying when a plane crashes, Obama is inaugurated, or a famous pop star dies. The problem I have with those examples is that life isn’t like that every day. Most of the times we get along quite well without the ability to track these rare situations, and when they do emerge we’ll find out about it quickly enough.

Another argument is real-time search. That’s a lot of BS too. there is so much twittering around that it is impossible to get valuable real-time results in search. Google Pagerank uses an algorithm to decide what could be relevant. You may not like the algorithm, but it does attempt to ensure that there is a reasonable objective approach in getting you valuable results. Chit chat isn’t the way to do that. There currently is no algorithm when real-time search is running. There is only people, and the things they publish right now. It leads to a lot of clutter and near-zero value in search.

The Friendfeed crowd will argue that it isn’t about real-time search, but about real-time conversations. I don’t buy that for a minute. Have you ever seen a discussion on Friendfeed? the service gets praised for their ability to let people interact over content. It’s the best service out there. Personally I find many of the “discussions” hardly interesting or useful. There is too much content, too many people, too many comments, no structure in discussions, too many geeks. But most important hardly anyone  is actually listening (the basis for ANY good conversation is the ability to listen). A Friendfeed discussion isn’t an interaction, it’s a mob screaming out loud. A voice lost in 2000 other voices. I get much more value out of the posts that are aggregated in Friendfeed than the discussions that take place below them.

The real-time web currently is a geek’s wet dream.  I’m sure it will eventually get to a point where people will find aspects of a real-time web useful enough to incorporate it in their lives. But for now I don’t think it is worth all the hassle. I don’t have a “need” for the real-time web. There are more important things in life then having access to a fire hose of unfiltered nonsense. How about getting me the right information at the exact right time!

The real value of Twitter’s ‘Suggested users feature

Jason Calacanis has a long post up about the value of a Twitter suggested user. He explains that being a suggested user on Twitter is more valuable than buying a superbowl ad:

Everyone loves a timely or fascinating question and, in my estimation,
I would get a one percent clickthrough rate on each question. If I was
able to reach three million followers, and kept half of them (1.5m),
that means every tweet would get 15,000 visits. Five a day means
75,000 daily visits, and over two million visits a month–or close to
50m visits of two or three years. Some percentage of those two million
would participate in Mahalo by asking or answering questions, and if
that number is also .5 to 1%, that means I would get about 250,000 new
members for my service.

He goes on and explains why Twitter is so disruptive:

What is so disruptive about Twitter
————————–
From my perspective, the most disruptive thing about Twitter is its
presence. It’s everywhere at all times in a way that only an AT&T “You
Will”-style commercial could have predicted in 1995 (or could explain
in 2009–funny how that goes huh?). People get and give Tweets from
the time they wake up until they fall asleep.

Twitter is a giant, open email box that we all hang out in every day.

I don’t really get it. I may be ignorant, but what Jason is actually doing is pretty much old-school web 1.0 thinking. He is thinking eyeballs, traffic, and getting some users from that traffic and monetizing it. He knows Twitter is growing fast, and he has seen that being on the suggested friends list of Twitter gets you ten thousands of followers every day.

What he fails to mention is that the quality of the followers is below zero. You don’t get a targeted group of people you can communicate with. You get everything, including thousands of spammers and bots invading the Twitter network. You get engaged people, listeners, people that signed up and have no activity, people with 20K followers and 2 tweets, etc.etc.

It makes the reach you have on Twitter as good as any spammer that hijacked millions of e-mail addresses. There is always a sucker that falls for it. The real-time effect is pretty much worthless when put into comparison to the nr of followers and the spam being produced. To me the only benefit, if you can call it a benefit, would be that the audience that follows you remains persistent. How many people have you seen closing their Twitter account actively? Before Jason knows it he is addressing 2M Twitter accounts of which maybe 1% may provide some real value. The rest is like with display ads. Not targeted and a waist of money, space and effort.

If anything, social media evolution should have taught us by now that it isn’t a numbers game. It isn’t about quantity, but about quality. And frankly, quality is hard to be found these days on Twitter with their suggestion list, spammers and bots. It seems to me that 9-10 new followers fall in that category at the moment. Could be that I attract the wrong crowd, but I doubt that it is different for others. Jason is betting on quantity, and that might just cost a lot of money with mediocre results.

Don’t just take my word for it. Check out this perfect example of a discussion that Robert Scoble started on Friendfeed, a service that is supposedly the best around when it comes to engagement. Forget it. It performs as bad or good as any other service out there. Most people aren’t engaged (are they even people?). Most are publishers, some are listeners. A few engage, and those are the types that would engage everywhere. The rest are just people that signed up to promote. They don’t care much about engagement.

We may be getting to a real-time web and a more social media place. But I doubt human nature is changing with the same speed. It’s all over hyped and we need to relax a bit about it. To reduce the web’s future to status updates and refer to this as email 2.0 is more than idiocy. It’s mediocre. And it is scary to think that all our creativity, technological progress, and plain smartness has lead to this ultimate achievement of mankind. Is the real value of Twitter’s ‘Suggested user’ feature really $500K as Jason says? I’d say that there are far easier ways to burn money than that.

Why the real-time web isn’t important

I have been thinking a bit about this notion of a real-time web. Having access to real-time information, as soon as it is published, seems to be a possible Achilles heel for Google according to some (here and here). People who say that do not understand the real strength of Google or it’s possible innovator’s dilemma. But the question that interests me is the user value question. Does it provide us value to have access to information, the moment it gets published? The answer is that it isn’t nearly as important as something else (will get to that).

I guess there are cases where this can have value. An area that comes to mind is big events. The Obama inauguration, a plane crash, earth quakes, the super bowl final.

I’ve tried to use Twitter search and Friendfeed’s real-time options, and honestly, I find the experience mediocre. A bit of nuance might be in place here as we are only discovering the first potential of such services. However, I am trying to grasp what the specific real-time component adds to the experience. And I can’t put my finger on it. I can think of a few reasons why:

1. Life doesn’t jump from one big event into the next one. When watching the Obama inauguration, seeing the Twitter community discussing and commenting it gave a sense of added value. The information added value to the experience at that moment. If I look for Obama on Twitter now I get an incredible amount of useless information. The context defines value. Currently is no context in which real-time search results on Obama now provide me much value. There are times when there is such a context, but most of the time life goes on.
2. Immediate knowledge doesn’t always add value. If there is an earthquake in San Francisco (or anywhere else for that matter) we now see Tweets reporting in within seconds. But that information is only relevant if you are in it (you didn’t need a Tweet to tell you about it), you have people you know live in that area, or you need to know it for professional reasons (e.g a reporter). The randomness of the waterfall of information getting through makes it hard to understand what is really happening out there. A recent plane crash in Amsterdam appeared within a few minutes on Twitter. It gives people a reason to discuss it (terrible tragedy) at the coffee corner, but did it really provide value? Not unless you had a relative in that plane crash.
3. Real-time information is hard to verify and trust. People are saying a lot of things on services like Twitter. Without context or understanding more about the people tweeting, it can be really difficult to understand the trustworthiness and accuracy of the information. You can already see the algorithms being drawn up that take reputation, reliability and trust into account, but this problem can’t be solved easily. Reputation, reliability and trust aren’t real -time characteristics. They take years to build. The only way these characteristics can be determined on information is for that information to be published, read, and responded to by large amounts of people. A blog post can build up trust, reputation and reliability if it has been exposed to readers, critics etc. But a tweet that appears in seconds doesn’t follow that process, no matter what the reputation of the person is that sends it out.

Does all of this means that the real-time web and search has no value. Off course not. Getting the news out fast is important, and it has caused many of he traditional media to get online to join this rat race. But in my opinion speed really isn’t the most important factor.

I do think that it becomes increasingly difficult to find information with enough relevance. There is just too much out there. Google can’t index the entire web fast enough, nor is it able to display the most relevant links in any particular situation. Aggregators, no matter what kind, tend to do a pretty poor job of aggregating relevant information timely for us (yes that includes Friendfeed, Digg, Reddit, and most of the major tech blogs). If you want to know more about that, then read this excellent post by Paul Graham who talks about his experiences with setting up and running the Hackernews community. Excellent read.

It seems we do a much better job at storing and retrieval of information that doesn’t lose value as time passes by. Encyclopedia’s, history, arts, dictionaries, etc. There are however some experiments that try to approach the problem of information organisation very differently. I’ve always been very font of the work that Jonathan Harris is doing this area. Check out his universe demo, and his “We feel fine” project. Seriously, give it a spin and then come back. I’ll hold.

Jonathan’s work proves to me that we haven’t reached the depth of possibilities to handle information. I’ve said this before, but if I were Google or anyone else interested in organising the world’s information, I would definitely get someone like Jonathan on board. His work actually makes me crave for more information. I can get lost in the universes he has created and I return frequently to dive in for some more.

The real-time web sounds cool, but right now it isn’t much more than another technical capability. I don’t really get passionate  about that. Instead I’d like to see what happens if we let non-tech people like Jonathan redefine the way we would be able to access information. I’d say we would find some more ground-breaking and relevant ways of information organisation and retrieval than the “real-time” web. I’d take this one step further and say that it isn’t relevant if published information gets indexed  and found in real-time. The only relevance we should be focusing on is getting the user the right information at the exact right time!

The network effect in web 2.0 is also its biggest tragedy

Side effects of using steroids

Robert Scoble, nicely served by his friend Loic Le Meur, started a discussion on Friendfeed in which he states that Twitter is broken and that unfollowing everyone might be the only solution. You can find it right here. The story got picked up immediately. Loic triggered this because he unfollowed everyone in Twitter and then build up a much smaller list of friends.  Loic has a good post up about his reasons for unfollowing everyone and starting with a clean slate.  Valid arguments and Loic states to have improved his Twitter experience tremendously.

I’m going to ignore thoughts about Robert and Loic following thousands of people themselves and using the strength of Twitter for their own needs as well. Following people by default leads to exposure to spam. I won’t discuss the topic of everything getting posted on 20 different places thus leading to a whole lot of duplication and pretty much useless aggregation. It is sufficient to say that this duplication increases the perceived growth of a service and it fuels our attention on size and growth.

Diving a bit deeper into what is going on leads to another discussion on Frienfeed, where we can read that Twitter itself is playing a questionable role in the way they have implemented a friend recommendation scheme. From that it seems that Twitter hasn’t put a lot of effort in getting rid of the bots populating the service right now. The underlying reason seems simple enough. Spam is profitable and the metrics we use to measure web service successes are flaky.

What are the most important external measures to determine the growth and success of web services? Things like traffic, page views, unique visitors, registered users. As a result, the more spam bots Twitter has in its network, the higher each of these measured variables. Getting rid of spam bots equals value destruction for them. Can you imagine a headline at the major tech blogs  stating Twitter traffic drops dramatically, only to find out this has happened because Twitter did its community a service by removing spammers. It’s not going to happen. And that is where Twitter and the rest of this web ecology are taking a wrong turn.

We're a bunch of Chimpanzees

The constant pressure to perform towards the outside world, the Tech blogging community, investors, traditional media, is caused by this stupid growth rat race. Fueled by the initial successes of companies harnessing the network effect, we are now all drilled as a bunch of chimpanzees to measure the success of a web service by its millions of page views, visitors, registrations. Every month the major tech blogs give us the ‘Compete’ or ‘Comscore’ benchmark. Are you in or out? Who has the biggest …(you can fill that in yourself). You do not have millions of visits daily? Fail! Web 2.0 on steroids.

It is sick. I can’t think of a better way of expressing this. This whole rat race towards world domination is one of the worst aspects of the network effect. We like to think of the network effect in a positive way. A service gets better as more people use it. There is a major downside to it that we seem to ignore. The network effect causes the network to be more important than the users in it. It is more important to acquire and lock in new users than it is to keep existing users happy and satisfied. Users have become statistics in Google Analytics. Our performance dashboards for the valuation of companies do not include anything other than growth figures. Installations, registrations, page views, visitors, bounce rates, uninstalls etc.  And that sucks, big time.

I do not want to be reduced to a number, a statistical value. I want service providers to care about me. I want them to spend more time on keeping me satisfied in their service than spending time on getting more users in the network. I want large companies to act small and personal. I want the growth of a service to be truly organic, instead of getting ‘orchestrated’. I want investors and entrepreneurs to stop feeding web companies steroids to grow big. I want them to start holding companies accountable for generating revenues. I want people to stop caring too much about what TechhCrunch, Compete, Comscore or anyone else has to say about the growth of web services because it only keeps this rat race going. I want CEO’s and journalists/bloggers to start talking about customers instead of taking about the growth of their network (check a few interviews and you’ll see what I mean). I want the web to be the place where user value is more important  than network value.

I realize I am an idealist in many ways. I’m fine with that. But I have enough experience to know that focus on user value delivers the best type of business and revenues. All it takes is a bit of courage and to stop ‘competing’ on growth and world domination. Focus on users and give them the best experience you can deliver. If Twitter would be doing that these spam bots would be gone in days. But Twitter is trapped in this steroid growth race. So they won’t be doing that. See how this leads to wrong decisions? Value destruction instead of creation.

If you deliver user value, you can scale using the opportunites the web brings you. If your strategy is ‘growth first’, then user value can never be added later. And don’t think focus on user value can’t be combined with growth! There are enough good examples of that. Amazon can do it. And so can you.

The praised network effect is also web 2.o’s  biggest tragedy.

Friendfeed may be the early adopter RSS king, but Twitter is king of 140 characters

Already in 2006 Time Magazine voted the most important person on the planet to be YOU. They were dead wrong of course. In that year it wasn’t YOU that was important, it was THEM. Them meaning all of your friends you brought along to the different social networks that rose like volcano’s in a flat landscape. 2006 might have been the break through of many social networks and their FREE business models. These business models didn’t make YOU important, it made the network important (or social graph, only they didn’t use that terminology then).

Advertising networks gained momentum too. Everyone trying to get a piece of the Social Networking Walhalla harassing the user (that’s you) with advertisement. $ BLN dollar valuations of companies who’s main objective is to get those advertisement dollars rolling. The user gets his service for free, but as a result he has to put up with advertisement. That has got to be by far the worst nightmare of any Marketeer right? You have a potential customer, according to all of the semantic and contextual data the Social Networking site has collected for you. You show this potential customer an advertisement, making sure it fits the profile. Only to discover that this potential customer does the same thing he did in more traditional media, he ignores it. It is the catch 22 of web 2.0. Everyone trapped in the FREE business model where advertisement money is pumped around but the only one paying the bill is the advertiser who doesn’t get much value for his dear advertisement budgets. The social networking site is the laughing third party who collects the dollars. It’s a business model that can’t hold up much longer. At some point the advertiser should be doing his math and discover that he is paying an awful lot of money for social experiments that aren’t very effective. The nature of the business model is what is wrong with it. It is a business model based upon lock-in, upon force instead of freedom. You get a free service so you MUST put up with advertisement.

There is no end to the optimism of both web entrepreneurs and advertisers when it comes to the promises of web 2.0. Advertising, uhm I mean engaging with you customers, being able to use contextual and semantic information to serve him even better. The Über social graph is already being build by Facebook and the likes. And once the user is being tracked and traced across every destination he goes, the exploitation of that data surely will lead to the promised land.

The data collection going on on the web is immense. It is nearly impossible to visualise the amounts of data being collected by Google and everyone else. I’m betting the actual web and it’s data is probably an infinite small fraction of what is being stored on data hogging servers around the world. I can understand why it is being done (given what I just said above). But I can’t help but feel that it’s a rush to fool’s gold. I haven’t seen a computer algorithm yet that has mastered free choice. I don’t know any data profiling scheme that can make people behave like their profiles suggest.  Human nature isn’t that simple. That doesn’t mean no one is going to make a lot of money on this. I’m just saying that I doubt that all of this profiling will provide the advertisement world much benefits. You can’t make me like your message, just because the data says so.

We see this behavior now already. Even though this data analysis is in it’s infancy and much better algorithms will be thought of. Ever clicked on a Facebook ad served to you? Well, not many have. Ever bought some product because when it got in the way of you interacting with a friend, you thought, “hey, that’s convenient, gotta get me one of those”. It just doesn’t work that way.

I tried out the Friendfeed recommendation that has just launched and the Friendfeed community is wild about. It will serve you the “best” of Friendfeed of the last day, week or month. Using it brought me 2 important lessons:

1. I gotta get me some friends that aren’t Friendfeed fanatics. Almost every recommendation was a piece of content or discussion concerning this tool. Man these early adapters aren’t doing Friendfeed any favor with it. Hailing their trumpets, predicting the conquering of the entire world with a tool. Idiots in my opinion. Friendfeed is just a tool, and a nice one. But they are on to the same data collection I talked about earlier. Instead of just computer alogrithms, they try to use friends recommendations and discussions to filter out the important stuff. Too bad 90% of the discussion on Frienfeed is about Friendfeed itself. That data collection isn’t going anywhere for a while (Crossing the chasm is pretty difficult isn’t it). Or maybe it’s just me and my Friendfeed friends, I don’t know.
2. I gotta get me some friends that aren’t discussing the “downfall” of Twitter. Yep, that is where the other pieces of content were talking about. Same early adopters. Same boring stuff. Morons of course. The early adopters might have jumped the Friendfeed wagon,  Twitter is king of 140 characters. They don’t have to come up with noise filters, ranking algorithms, friends recommendations, semantic data collectors, or anything of the sort. They aren’t in the business of data collection and serving advertisement on that data. They are in the field of interaction. And interaction is the only thing that matters in web 2.0. Social Media consumption, creation, participation, it is all interaction. Sure they have stability issues and an angry early adapters mob against them. But they rule the 140 character world, and given the $ 1Bln spent in mobile SMS in 2007 I say Twitter has a better chance of becoming a successful social utility than Friendfeed.

I don’t like the sitting back and let the feeds come to you mechanism anyway. RSS has brought us really great ways to distribute content. But it has also killed the adventuring sprrit of the web user. Instead of wandering around this marvelous world of content and people waiting to interact, we sit back and let the feeds bring it to us. Such a waist of creative processes, of discovery. And such an incredible noise generator. We are screaming for noise filters, ranking algorithms, trust filters (who the hell thinks up this stuff), all to get a grip on the never stopping river of information flowing to us via RSS feeds.

Honestly, I don’t need filters to trust people, to know who ranks high or low, to know who is producing great content or noise. And I have serious doubts that ANY consumer outside the top web elite is dealing with that problem either. RSS is convenient but lazy. It brings you everything you always wanted, and a whole lot of noise with it. It needs noise filters, raking algorithms and all that other stuff. Computer algorithms telling me what to like or not. RSS is unintentional, it is sharing because we can. If there is no intent in sharing it pretty quickly becomes less valuable. That is why we all still love it to get an old fashioned letter or postcard in the mail. It is intentional and therefore so much more valuable. Try subscribing to less RSS feeds if you keep complaining about noise. It will solve your problem instantly.

I always have felt the Internet should evolve around you. Making you and the things you want to do most important. Not the data hogging, or the social graph. But that doesn’t mean that you can sit back and enjoy the ride. It also implies that you have a responsibility in this. You have to be willing to look around, to discover, to make choices. Not just let that RSS juice flow to you. I’m convinced it will work out in the end.

The way RSS is used now is a bit like us reading great books on well known museums. It’s fine.  But actually discovering a new museum, going there, seeing the things that are there, engaging, talking about it, that is where the value really is. And that is more valuable than any RSS feed I could possibly imagine. Friendfeed may be the early adopter king of RSS feeds for now. They are there to collect data, to see if a new kind of “Google” can arise out of social media. And I suspect they will be digging in the same hole where all social networks are digging into. But it’s content right now is a museum we have all seen already. And the discussions of the early adopters are running around in circles right now.

But Twitter is the king of 140 characters. They don’t need all that. They support a basic human need. They need more stability and a well executed business plan. But these 140 characters will be infinitely more valuable to us than any RSS feed with comments and likes will ever be.

How User Interfaces can make or break a new service

Small Update: Just saw that Joshua Porter wrote a nice post in which he states that design (not just UI) is becoming increasingly important. Ties in nicely with this post

One of the most difficult things to get right as a designer is the User Interface of a product or service. Getting the UI right is a key success factor in any development. To me the UI isn’t just the look, feel or the interaction. To me the UI defines the identity of the product or service. It is the only thing a user ever sees (unless he peeks under the hood, but then it’s not your average user anymore, it’s a geek ).  When confronted with a UI I find myself (un-)consciously making all kinds of assumptions about the product, it’s capabilities, it’s difficulty or ease, but most of all it’s identity. The UI defines the product or service so to say. I’ll show you a few examples later on.

There are many factors that make the development of a great UI incredibly difficult. You have to think about the function of the product (what is it for), how it is used, where it is used, physical dimensions, material, color, all possible human senses, the form factor, consistency, complexity, in and outputs. This list goes on and on.

When I was working on my PhD in the field of Industrial Design, I met quite a few designers, both professional and those that were educated to become a designer. It seemed to me that the best UI designers had the ability to consequently apply certain design rules they formulated for themselves before they started a design. These design rules were typically inspired by that long list of requirements I mentioned above. They would spent a lot of time formulating such requirements, because they knew that it would help them design more effectively once these requirements and design rules were formulated.

One of the most difficult aspects of UI design is that the designer needs to play hardball with the other developers once development started. Not only does everyone have his own expert opinion on what a UI should look and feel like. it also turns out that in the process of creation there is less time and less budget available to do things right. As a result, shortcuts are taken and the overall design suffers. This is also the phase where the feature war takes place. I have yet to see a project that implements just the features that were specified initially. More often, developers start freewheeling using their own or alpha user’s feedback and add features to the original design.

Why am I discussing all of this on a weblog about media and technology? Because, in my opinion, a UI can make or break any new product or service. Web 2.0 has brought us the (re-)invention of the Beta release. Every startup that creates a new service starts with a Beta release (sometimes Alpha). This has several advantages of which time to market is most important. Instead of having a development cycle of years, the pressure in the market we now call web 2.0 has reduced that cycle to months, sometimes weeks. It’s more important to be out there, testing the functionality with Beta users, than to spend a lot of time on specification, design and implementation only to find out you are either too late, or you created a great product no one was really waiting for. There is a huge trade off here. Developing with your potential user group shortens the development cycle, but at the cost of stability and usability. But that isn’t the only thing. The Beta period is often also used to test the initial value proposition of the new service. Features are added during the test period and the final release v1 often provides a different service than the Beta release did.

In my opinion the usability and User Interface are often not well thought through. And that is too bad, because it inhibits the user to understand and use the essence of the product or service. This factor can literally break a service from becoming mainstream (along with many other things). UI design is very personal, it’s hard to say in general a design is good or bad.

Let me provide you with a few UI designs I like/dislike. That doesn’t imply that they are good/bad, it’s just my personal opinion. There isn’t any ranking involved, I just selected a few examples, I could have chosen any other really.

The iPhone

An interesting example. The iPhone UI is definitely revolutionary. It is one of the best UI’s I have seen in any handheld computer. The touch screen and the simplicity and consistency of the design are incredible. But to give you an idea how incredibly complex UI design really is, I believe the UI of the iPhone also makes it one of the worst mobile phones I have ever used. Actually, I should have probably said MOBILE device. Steven Hodson asked if I had a kevlar vest when I posted that, and many of the readers disagreed with me. But hte people that disagree are likely looking at it from a handheld device, not from the concept of a mobile phone. The reason for my bold statement is that that very same interface everyone loves doesn’t function well when you are mobile!

Try making a phone call while you are walking around, literally. The touch screen provides no tactile feedback, the buttons displayed are way too small for selecting contacts, letters or numbers, and the amount of actions needed to select a contact and actually make the call are too much. In my opinion,  the design is optimized for an immobile user (meaning standing still). The touch screen forces the user to use his eyes as the main sense. The UI sucks you and your attention into the device, and shuts off a number of other senses. All that is left is a tunnel vision. Try it, you’ll know what I mean. Walk, start trying to type an SMS, listen to your surrounding, try not to hit anything etc. It’s Impossible. A regular phone allows tactile input and feedback. I can type blind on a GSM that has buttons because I can find the buttons without looking. I can walk and still perform basic tasks. in other words, I can use the mobile phone while i’m mobile. That’s impossible on a touch screen. The same thing goes for messaging (SMS).

Twitter

Twitter is one of the communication services I use on a regular basis. While I have tried several Twitter clients, one flashier then the other, I’m still reasonable fond of the Twitter home page. Why? Because it is deprived of too much functionality. The basic features, Tweeting and looking at tweets are presented in a simple and elegant way. The profile images make sure tweets are personalized because I can recognize images faster than names. The content is presented in a tidy way, and maybe most important of all, Twitter enforces the rule of only 140 characters, a brilliant move to keep things simple and concise. I don’t mind at all that I have to hit the refresh button of the browser (unlike with the different twitter clients). I also don’t mind missing tweets pass by as I forget to refresh. Most Twitter clients decrease in usability really fast because they minimize the space they occupy (Twhirl is a great example of this, it looks cool, but it’s UI  isn’t nearly as good as the default Twitter home page). Instead of making the service convenient when using such small client, it actually gets in the way of usability and readability for me.

Not everything is great about Twitter’s home page. I don’t like the method of adding new people to follow. And I don’t like the fact that pressing options or links make me go somewhere else. I’d rather stay where I am and do the thing I wanted to do there. Going somewhere makes me mentally leave the service, and that’s not right.

Minggl

This service has gotten a lot of great press from A-list bloggers. Minggl integrates a number of social networks into your browser. It sounds like real handy, but I am afraid I don’t like the UI very much. There is a lot of cluttering when all my friends are displayed on the sidebar. There are many buttons in the toolbar that are not clear on sight what they do. There is actually only one button that could have made sense (it is the Minggl button) all the way on the left). But instead of turning the toolbar on and of as I expected, it merely sends me to the home page of Minggl, a place where there is nothing to do for me.

To me the Minggl UI in its current form provides no value, making it a service that sounds next-gen, but will probably not attract me enough to try it out. This is a struggle for any social networking service. Most users have more friends than can be displayed in one overview. As a result a compromise is sought to provide the user with a better view of his friends. But it proves to be very difficult to get that right. In most cases the solution would probably be to buy a flat screen of 2×3 meters, but since not every user has one of those, designers tend to scale down, instead of limit.

Wixi

I have written about this service before. I tried it as a Beta user, only to never return to it. The UI was non-appealing to me. Interestingly enough the home page which I revisited just now seemed to indicate they had improved the UI, but when I logged in, nothing much has changed. It isn’t a difficult interface, but for some reason it is non-inviting for me. I find the folder icons floating around a bit loose from the rest. As if they don’t belong to the service. An example of a new service with a UI that for some reason  gave me no reason to actually try it out. That may not be fair, but it is the truth.

Flock

What can I say. Flock is a web browser that has it all. But not for me. I find the UI incomprehensible. I don’t like it that they have chosen different icons for pretty standard functions, the icons aren’t self explanatory to me, but most of all, it is just too much. Be honest, without reading a manual or hoovering with your mouse over any of the icons shown on the left. How many of them can you assign an action to? There are at least 10-15 icons displayed there that I don”t have a clue what they do.

The main screen isn’t much better. I can’t believe how much information is screaming for my attention on this one screen. My brain melts down if I remotely try to grasp what is displayed there. Flock may be a browser that integrates social networks for me, but it suffers not just from a cluttered UI, but from a cluttered concept.

In my personal opinion Flock is a good example where the UI defines the identity of the service (or the other way around). I have great respect for Chris Messina (I believe he is one of the original designers of Flock). But I find that too much functionality in one concept makes the overall service and its usability far too complex, and therefore hard to use for me.

Friendfeed

I’m pretty impressed with the design of Friendfeed. It’s a pretty complex service with an incredible amount of information (if you start subscribing to a lot of users). They try to keep the screen from getting cluttered by using a simple and elegant design. They try to reduce the amount of information (text), it is pretty obvious where the comments and the likes are. The channels are depicted with icons so that you can guess where the info came from. There are tabs at the top that allow you to see other views. I’m not so fond of the extra options a user has when he looks at an entry. He has the option to like, comment, hide , or more. Especially the hide and more links are a bit confusing to use sometimes. Below the more link are a bit technical terms such as “link to this entry” and “reshare”. Not sure what they do, unless you try it out. Friendfeed will have a lot of UI challenges coming to them. The users are already crying out for filtering or ranking algorithms (hey, they are early adopters right). Extra functionality leads to possible UI difficulties. It will be interesting to see how the team can resolve that.

In conclusion

Getting the UI right for a product or service is a nearly impossible task. There are so many factors to take into account. It is often the place where a service suffers most when implemented. At the same time there are examples where the users in general find a UI well implemented. Most likely because the designer (or team) has not thrown their design rules out of the window when the development takes place. I’m not pretending to be an expert on the matter in any way.

But I’m a user. And these UI’s are designed for me, and all other users. That gives me the right to have an opinion on them. And that is what it is, nothing more, nothing less, it’s my opinion. And while I’m probably not easily satisfied, I have the deepest respect for the UI designers in this world. It is one of the toughest jobs there is. And it takes the best of them for a service to have a chance of being successful.

Never, ever, compromise on UI design. You don’t have to get it right from the start, but you have to have a clear vision where it is supposed to be going to. You have to have a set of design principles that you carve in rock and don’t easily step away from. In my opinion the UI is one of the most important fail factors for any new product or service.

I’m interested in hearing your opinion on this. What UI do you find really great or really awful?

On Twitter and the missed opportunity to execute a social utility business model

Bernard Lunn has written a good post on the (lack of) a social media business model. He writes about the difficulties for social networks to monetize using advertisement. Although he builds his storyline a bit different from me, he is saying a lot of things I believe too. A few days ago I wrote about the same subject in a post called “Advertisement holds web 2.0 in a death grip”. A nice quote from Bernard’s post:

If social media is not funded by advertising, it must be funded by subscriptions or transactions. Neither is easy.

Social media is fundamentally different – it is few to few, not one to one like telephone or one to many like traditional media. There is also a fundamental problem for advertisers. We are focused on communicating with each other, not looking at content with some hopefully relatively relevant ads attached. Any advertising in that context is an annoying interruption, unless we learn to tune out the ads so effectively that it becomes useless to advertisers.

Bernard analyzes what three major social networking sites could do. They all have 2 options, remain a walled garden, or open up and become a utility. Both paths, or fork in a road as he calls it, could lead to value creation. But if a social network remains closed it will become a niche. Bernard’s preference (as is mine):

The mass-market utility model will win out in the end for 3 reasons:

1. The social graph is so closely linked to communications, which has always been a utility model.
2. The ownership issues around the social graph are murky. A utility skates past that problem, saying “you own, we manage.” AT&T does not own your Rolodex, or insert ads when you are calling Mom because they own your connection to Mom.
3. The social graph has to be monetized in creative ways and the best way to make that happen is make it available to all the entrepreneurs and established businesses, on clear and simple terms.

I believe that Bernard nails it. Social interaction is something of all times. It is the most vital element of our on-line experience. Content creation and consumption isn’t nearly as interesting if there isn’t interaction. The interaction itself shouldn’t be supported by advertisement. Advertisement trespasses when I’m having interaction with my friends. I once, jokingly, said I started a countdown for the downfall of Facebook.  The reason for this countdown is that they are executing a wrong business model. They aren’t near that downfall yet, but if they choose to remain closed then the slow decline as Bernard also calls it will happen. They just don’t own enough of the Internet to make that work. They have a walled garden of 100M users, Google works on a walled garden of the entire Web population. They are different measures.

We have seen already one example of a very successful social interaction utility. Unfortunately this example is not a great example for a successful utility business model. It’s Twitter of course! Twitter has commoditised the 140 char message more effectively than anyone could ever dream of. It has the capability to become mainstream due to its addictiveness, interactiveness, fun. But it also has serious operational problems (which I don’t want to emphasize, they are really hard working on it and I wish them all the best). But to me Twitter is also the example of a missed opportunity for a social utility business model.

Twitter should have taken its popularity and become a social utility service other social networks could implement. By doing that they would not only have become the standard for short social communication messages in any social network, but they would also be able to execute an Amazon-S3 type of business model. There would also be opportunities to charge users for the utility they use. Maybe not in the web domain (although I could see premium and freemium services appear), but definitely in the mobile domain. That is where the growth of Twitter should lie. That is where the money is! And if they can think of a way to stop cluttering the inbox of a GSM, then they could make the crossover to mobile and become one of the most successful paid mobile services. They have taken the immense popular SMS (100 BLN revenues in 2007), and socialized it using the Twitter service. An incredible opportunity, missed by a long shot.

I sure hope that the utility model thinking will gain momentum in VC land. I also hope Twitter will make a turnaround in terms of operations and business model. I would hate to lose that service. I want it to become successful as a social utility business model. It will help us create the User Centric Web.

We don’t need more information or aggregation, we need inspiration

Being able to pass relevant information from one person to another has always been part of the evolution of mankind. When there was no technology we used storytelling. People would listen to the oldest, wisest, craziest people in their community to hear about the past or the future. Families used storytelling to teach children their heritage. Slowly drawings were added to this information passing, possibly starting with the earlies cave drawings. Where storytelling was used for 1 to 1 or 1 to a few connections, the ability to draw lead to more persistent information passing. From symbols we went to pictures and written language. Storytelling remained as an important way of sharing information but we added letters and manuscripts to it. Manuscripts were copied by writing them down again. Each manuscript was unique in its own.

With the introduction of printing technology things changed rapidly. Now books could be copied much quicker and at much lower costs. Again, the storytelling remained, but books and newspapers made the information passing process faster and simpler. The technology developments that lead to the telephone lead to the possibility to share information real-time without the need of being at the same location. Much later, the mobile version was created, allowing communication without a fixed position. These different technologies allowed 1 on 1/few/many information passing.

Computer technology gave us the ability to communicate electronically via chat and e-mail. And with the introduction of Internet technology, the possibility to make information accessible to anyone on the net became a reality. The first version of the Internet was a static library of information. Web pages were added and the most important problem to solve was how to find the right information. Information became clustered in web portals, and finding information using search was invented. The cost of information creation/storage dropped to nearly zero and left us with infinite amounts of information, creating the problem of finding the right information.

Web 2.0 provided us technology to tackle this. Partially by clustering people and information into communities. It also gave us user generated content. Instead of companies or professionals, everyone could now create information, video, audio, pictures, and share it with the whole world. the Internet changed from a static library of information into a dynamic world of opportunities. Everyone can now become a storyteller by simply starting a weblog. The subscription to a magazine or newspaper has now been replaced by RSS subscriptions to weblogs. And to structure this world full of dynamic information we need new ways of finding the relevant stuff.

Search engines work to a certain extend but cannot deal with our urge to have instant access to something created right now. the information flow needs to be real-time. The response of web companies is to provide near real-time tools for information flow. With services like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, we get real-time many to many conversations. And for our convenience of finding the right information we now have content aggregators that find all relevant content for us. Often specialized for a specific content type and using a computer algorithm (e.g. TechMeme provides us with the latest in Tech news using a special algorithm). Facebook providing us near real-time access to what our friends are doing. Or Friendfeed, a content aggregator that lets people do the content aggregation. By subscribing to people we know, find interesting or trust, Friendfeed provides you with the content those people like.

But the problem of finding the right information is of all times. Just look back into history (not just my short, inaccurate, and incomplete summary ) and we can see that finding the right stuff is a problem of all times. We now have nearly unlimited computer power and storage capabilities, but that leads to nearly unlimited (and often unclassified) amounts of information too.

So the question becomes, what is next? I can’t look any better into the future than you can, but I have a tendency to look at the past and try to see if human nature can provide us with clues for the future. I believe that we haven’t seen the end of content aggregation or search engine algorithms yet. Simply because the web business model drives us there.

All that content aggregation really does is reposition, reclassify or reorganize content that is already out there on the web. Whether it is done by a computer algorithm in the case of TechMeme, or done by people, in the case of Friendfeed. But you can easily spot a few problems with aggregation. First of all, if content aggregation tries to be complete, all it does is try an attempt to get all the content out there back into one place. The more content it aggregates the more difficult it becomes to find the interesting stuff from the pile. The signal to noise ratio drops to the level of the entire web. We quickly need search algorithms and noise filters to get to the good stuff.

If content is aggregated using people, then we get a “democratic” version of the web. It filters out the stuff that the community likes best, leaving the more obscure or less liked stuff behind us. But I’m no so sure that the stuff that comes up this way is always the best stuff. If anything, democracy principles to select information, also leads to predictable and similar content. There isn’t room for obscurity or weird stuff. The people that are in such communities will end up selecting only part of what is out there, governed by themselves and the social community they are part of.

Web 2.0 technology and business models are aiming at the masses, large communities with millions of members, enormous content aggregators with uncountable amounts of content. But I believe that a large part of the Internet population will end up getting lost in this new digital universe. It is like the Star Trek computer that Captain Picard can talk to. It has all the information, but what if we simply don’t know the right question to ask?

Content aggregation is the new thing now. But the problem we should be solving isn’t the many to many flow of information. It is the one to a few, or few to a few that needs to be tackled. I doubt I’ll ever need to know about all the content that is out there. It is just a small part of it that I’m interested in. Content aggregation, no matter what form is used only leads to more content leading to noise, filtering and search. Social networks allowing us to connect to the entire world leave us with too many connections and too much information. It leads to more than we can handle. It leads to so much information, tagged and targeted, that the information itself becomes less valuable.

And when people get lost, they will simply return to their human nature. They will look out for the oldest, wisest, or craziest people out there. I don’t think the world needs more information. We don’t need any more or better content aggregation, search algorithms or noise filters. We need more inspiration. We need storytellers (and that will be the topic of another post).

What do you think? Where do you get your inspiration from? Are there any storytellers out there we should know about?

Friendfeed stats show its just Twitter with bookmarks

Yesterday I looked at the latest Friendfeed stats using the nice Friendfeedstats tool build by Benjamin Golub. I looked up which feeds are aggregated most in Friendfeed in the last 30 days. In 30 days approximately 1.3 Mln items were shared on Friendfeed.

Turns out there is a clear winner, but it might not be what you think. It isn’t links to sites, blogs, content, video, pictures, or shared Google reader items. It’s Twitter! 54% of all content aggregated on Friendfeed is Twitter (that’s almost 740.000 tweets a month). The second place is taken by Blog posts, leading to 15% of all content aggregation. The top feeds aggregated into Friendfeed now looks like:

1. Twitter (54%)
2. Blogs (15%)
3. Google reader (9%)
4. Tumblr (4%)
5. StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us all score (3%)
6. Flickr, YouTube score (2%)
7. Friendfeed, Gmail/GTalk, Last FM, Jaiku all score (1%)

24 other services score less than 1% of the total content aggregated. The amount of content being generated increased fast after launch. While January and February of 2008 showed less that 50.000 entries being shared, in March the number of shared items reached 1 Mln, and April shows 1.3 Mln entries. I don’t know exactly how many users generated these items.

I went to compete to compare Friendfeed, Twitter and TechMeme and got the following results:

It’s a bit unfair to compare Friendfeed to services that have existed a bit longer. It’s hard to draw conclusions yet, but looking at the number of visits Friendfeed is quickly nearing TechMeme, while Twitter is still in another league. Looking at the attention data however, TechMeme does a lot better than Friedfeed.

I looked at the Friendfeed stats earlier and concluded then that it was an echo chamber of things we already know. Most bloggers seem to like Friendfeed for 2 things:

1. The filtering of information that is done by the people they follow
2. The ability to comment on entries

The statistics seem to suggest that only a marginal number of people comments on entries, as Friendfeed input only makes up 1% of all content aggregation. It’s fair to say that I am not sure how Benjamin calculates the Friendfeed statistics. It could be that comments and likes aren’t part of his analysis (will ask him).

I wrote a post earlier in which I stated that Friendfeed seems capable of becoming a competitor for TechMeme. The main reason for this assumption is that right now Friendfeed compiles mostly blog posts and Google blog reader shared items (if we forget about Twitter). If we assume that Friendfeed is used mostly by the early adaptors, then it shows the most important blog posts for this tech group. Friendfeed has some advantages over TechMeme. It allows anyone to post his or her blog, whereas TechMeme complies only the most popular ones (using some algorithm). Within Friendfeed you can comment on entires, so it provides more interaction than TechMeme does.

At the same time, TechMeme probably reduces the noise level as on a typical day only some 150 posts even make it to TechMeme. Friendfeed aggregates anything that is fed into it, leading to 10000 blog posts per day. TechMeme might be a bit strict, but Friendfeed doesn’t make any distinction. You receive everything the people you follow decide to share.

While the Friendfeed team did an incredible job implementing so many different feed sources that can be imported, it becomes clear from the data that the Tech Elite requires only 3 sources right now. Twitter, blog entries and Google Reader.

The Friendfeed founders had a pretty clear idea what Friendfeed should be (from the Friendfeed site):

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

It becomes obvious that the early adopters are not filling in this promise. To this community, Friendfeed is nothing more than a new distribution platform for blog posts. It is precisely for this reason that I am not so optimistic about Friendfeed being able to deliver on the consumer promise made above. Right now it offers a technical solution for the import of many different feeds into one place. But I believe that the setup offers non-tech people too much functionality. I doubt that consumers are interested in so many different feeds. The fragmentation in web 2.0 is pretty clear within Friendfeed. Just because they can import so many feeds doesn’t mean that people will actually do that. I think Friendfeed could easily become the most important tool for the tech community. I can think of two simple improvements:

• Instead of showing me all duplicate shared entries (echo, echo), why not show or search the statistics (N people have shared this blog post) This allows me to see what is shared most, or is most read right now)
• Same thing for comments. Which entries gets the most comments or likes. Show me the entries that are discussed most right now, that’s the place where a tech blogger wants to be.

With a few minor improvements Friendfeed could become a much better news source than TechMeme, Technorati, etc. But in its current form it won’t easily break out of the tech community into the consumer market.

Friendfeed might be a novel way to aggregate content in one place. But right now it is just Twitter and bookmarks. Nothing more, nothing less.

The Tech elite creates its own web 2.0 bubble

Kara Swisher created a little storm on TechMeme with a post called “Twitter, where no one knows your name“. In it she noted that no one really nows what Twitter (she asked a few friends). This created the usual river of replies. I liked the replies from Steven Hodson and Frederic at the Last Podcast best. The post isn’t a masterpiece of fundamental research, but Kara hits something that I have been thinking for quite a while now.

The web 2.0 industry, I thin we may call it an industry by now, is becoming a mature and therefore inert industry. The speed of innovation is dropping fast, just look at the number of truly innovating or new services you have seen the past few months. There are thousands of startups working on great idea. But most of these ideas are small improvements or tiny nuances in things that already exist. I tried to compile a list of services that fundamentally changed the way things work right now, but couldn’t make it a long list.

This is a pretty normal phenomenon. Someone starts the cycle with a great idea, starts killing the “old school” market leaders, and then others jump on the bandwagon and a new industry is born. This is a pretty healthy way of working.

The thing that I find interesting about this is that the web 2.0 industry differs a bit from that. I believe there is a web 2.0 industry (the massive amounts of people and companies working on it), but I am not so sure there is an equally large market. There are a few huge players making loads of revenues, but the rest is burning up venture capital. The web 2.0 industry in my opinion is by large a bubble that needs deflation pretty quickly. There are way too many startups working on the same ideas, the same services, the same small problems that need solving. Too many of these initiatives are based mostly upon technological capabilities, not so much on user value. It leads to an incredibly fragmented playing field where everyone tries to survive. And this whole thing is pretty much fueled by the Tech Blogosphere.

There isn’t a single day without “breaking news” or  a “cool” new startup being mentioned on TechMeme, TechCrunch, or any other news source. Everyone, eager to be the first, jumps up to review and write about the next thing, which often turns out to be the same thing. Everyone copies the same stories, brings it as their own. It’s a death grip fueled by traffic, advertisement, personal glory, whatever.

It seems venture capitalists don’t know where to invest their money anymore. There is too much and at the same time not enough of it. We get all crazy about the next idea concerning video, pictures, social things, desktop air thingies, aggregators, aggregators of aggregators, which all ad up to the same “freemium” business model. Everyone looks at traffic (wow, Friendfeed just saw a huge spike last month), only to find that it is that same Tech circus creating that traffic. Most innovations don’t get to leave Silicon Valley. They start there, using the tech blogging elite to build up pressure and create the “aura of success”. But very few of them actually get to leave this bubble and conquer the rest of the world. Most of them remain in the bubble, buidling up pressure with traffic created by the Tech Elite. Never making a buck from a real customer outside this bubble.

And who is paying for all of this? To me it seems that the old industry ends up paying for this mess. Venture capital is used to take the risk, to create the pressure. But the main ingredient of most business plans isn’t customer value. It is getting prepared for a take-over. You can’t build an industry on that premise. If a company’s sole purpose is to get investment after investment in order to get sold at the highest bidder, then there isn’t any value created. There is only destruction. And the sucker that buys it last is the one that pays for the mess. Often old industry trying to become hip and cool in the new world, only to discover that they didn’t really understand this new world and bought something quite useless for too much money.

Does that mean that all efforts in this web 2.0 industry are futile, that if you are in a startup there isn’t value being created. Of course not. I’m pretty sure there are lots of great teams out there working their heads off to create the next miracle. But before you think about leveraging the Tech Elite Blogosphere for your own success you might want to think again. Getting into the web 2.0 bubble might be an easy thing to do. But the question is, who is going to let you back out into the real world and real customers? You might see lots of attention in the blogosphere, venture capital poured into you company, traffic spikes. But can you make it outgrow Silicon Valley? Can you break through the barriers of the web 2.0 industry and make the jump to the consumer or business market? Can you resist the tech blogosphere screaming hurray, or demanding new functionalities that any normal person would never need. I hope so. Because in the end, in the outside world is where the real value is being build. The rest of it is just a lot of money and hot air being pumped around the same isolated web 2.0 bubble.

Does anyone have a needle

Our fear of not being there when it happens

Several posts drew my attention the past few days. Their scope entilily different, but the underlying social behavior seems to be the same.

First there was Robert Scoble writing about “Not productive enough? Turn off the Internet”. He has been able to process massive amounts of e-mail (over 5000) in a short time because he was disconnected from the Internet. That proved fro him to be an enormous distractor. Not being connected allowed him to be productive (Then again, who says processing 5000 mails is productive ).

Josh Catone wrote an interesting article entitled “Why we need web apps on the desktop”. One of the reasons Josh feels there is a need for web apps to come to the desktop is that the browser is no place for multitasking. He shows an impressive list of applications he is running all at the same time and concludes that his browser (Firefox) would probably not be able to cope with a similar set of web applications. In his words:

There might be a day when the web truly is our operating system, and when browsers really will be designed to run multiple applications. But that day hasn’t arrived, and until it does, bringing web apps to the desktop is another important step in their evolution and the way forward in pushing the idea of hosting data in the cloud out to the mainstream.

Then there is Hugh Mccleod, who announced that he would stop using Twitter and that he has deleted his account. As expected a lot of bloggers reacted in defense of Twitter, with Tony Hung leading the pack, trying to show Hugh what he would be missing now that he has taken such a definite step.

What do all of these things have in common? In my opinion there is an underlying social behavior that we are all part of. You might think it is interaction, that is one of the main themes in my weblog. But I don’t think that explains it all. It is the fear of not being there when it happens.

Just think about that for a minute. Why do we need to be in 10 different places at once. Why does the web have to become a ubiquitous interactive environment that connects us to millions of friends across the globe. Why do we have aggregators that aggregate news and content from other aggregators, who in their turn aggregate etc. etc. Why is it so hard for us to turn of the computer at night and leave that never ending conversation. Which is sort of stupid, as this conversation is never ending. It’ll be there in the morning again.

We have a need to be part of something. We need to be there when it, whatever it is, happens. That is why we multitask. Why we are part of a gazillion social networks. Why we Twitter, Friendfeed, Pownce all day. What if the news breaks and we are not there? What if something hits the fan and we have missed it? It might be explained by the fear of not being there.

Robert Scoble didn’t turn of the distraction. Robert Scoble accepted that by letting go of the conversation, he wasn’t missing out. He was simply dealing with his fear of not being there. It happens to the best of us. Letting go sets us free. The conversation will never stop. So why not take a break from it every once in a while. the world will go on, and you will play an import part of in it.

Why I don’t like Friendfeed as much as I wanted, it lacks intention

Webware writes about Friendfeed this morning. A quote from the article that drew my attention:

The vision

FriendFeed is currently a “social-network aggregator.” It picks up the stuff you do online and tells your friends about it, saving them the hassle of visiting all your online hangouts to see what you are up to. But as many people have noticed, this leads to social overload. It’s too much information to process. Buchheit and Taylor were clear with me that they have more work to do on FriendFeed to make the core aggregation feature more useful. In particular, they want to add intelligence to the service so it highlights what you’re interested in, not every last thing your friends are doing.

 I have been using Friendfeed irregularly the past few weeks. I was thinking about this the other day. Why am I less enthusiastic about the service than a lot of bloggers (here and here for example) out there? The service gets full attention of the blogging world and seems to be the new pet for tech geeks (I wonder how many non-techies are on Friendfeed?). I have had a few good times on Friendfeed, but these times were characterized by the interaction that took place over there. People commenting on something and replying to each others comments. Interaction is what I like most in any kind of service. I like Twitter for just that reason. While Twitter was made for people to answer the question “what are you doing?”, I like Twitter much better when an uncontrolled , unexpected, funny and often surprising @conversation starts (that is, people actually addressing each other on Twitter instead of addressing the whole world). It’s interaction and it makes the service work for me.

Based upon my own experiences I’ve come to a pretty harsh, untested, unfounded conclusion about social network aggregators.  They are based upon the wrong assumption. And the founders of Friendfeed seem to understand this pretty well. There is one major flaw in such services, they lack intention.

Let me explain what I mean by that using a quote from that webware article.

“It picks up the stuff you do online and tells your friends about it, saving them the hassle of visiting all your online hangouts to see what you are up to.”

This quote says it all. Friendfeed and the like are build to save us the hassle of finding out what our friends are doing. They assume that it brings us value to sit back in a lazy chair to find out what our friends are doing. But the problem with that assumption is that it doesn’t bring us enough value.

Just think about it for a minute. Off all the things you do in a day, all the people you meet, all the things you read, write, think. How much of that stuff is actually interesting for your “friends” to know about? Would you bother to tell them about it if Friendfeed didn’t exist? I bet that more than 90% of your experiences in a day aren’t really worth mentioning to your friends. But Friendfeed and the likes can’t make that distinction. They publish everything you have imported into Friendfeed, making the rest of the world look at 90% useless information to dig up perhaps less than 10% good stuff. Why? Not because there is too much information. it’s because of a lack of intention.

By now each Friendfeed user probably has imported 10-20 RSS feeds and isn’t even remotely aware of all the stuff he is sharing automatically. Because of this lack of intention most of the shared stuff is worthless. If I see something that I know my friend really likes and then share it intentionally with him, it provides us both with value. But if I spill my guts to the world without thinking about what I’m sharing it makes most of the things I share pretty worthless.

Precisely for this reason I believe that services such as Twitter are far more valuable than Friendfeed. If someone posts a Tweet, he or she is using intention. It is a conscious act to say something out loud. Does that mean all Tweets are valuable. Off course not. But if intention is there, then you will see value far more likely than when something is aggregated automatically.

Friendfeed might look great to us tech geeks and bloggers. Mostly because the service is being used to draw attention to blog posts, tech info, breaking news, etc. It is a way to get attention for something, to draw traffic to your site. Friendfeed is becoming a traffic driver as Fred Wilson points out. Instead of getting RSS readers to you blog, which takes a lot of time and dedication from a blogger, we can now all post our stuff to Friendfeed. And some folks are likely to click on the link out of curiosity.

But I have serious doubts that such a social network aggregator provides non-tech people any value.  What if we could see all “social” activities of our friends without them having the intention of sharing something specific with us? The information value, fun or surprise factor would diminish rather quickly. It is like the Facebook news aggregator. I am not a heavy Facebook user, but I can’t say that I get a lot of value knowing my friends just took a movie quiz, played a game of scrabble, poked or zombied someone. Call me old-fashioned, but it just doesn’t provide me value. But if one of my Facebook fiends intentionally sends me a personal message, it immediately provides me with value.

Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor came from Google, and did a great job technically aggregating everything into Friendfeed. They did an even greater job drawing venture capital and getting the blogosphere to really get hyped over Friendfeed. But honestly, they should really rethink the basic principle of Friendfeed. They should stop  trying to figure out what is valuable to me as a user, as shown in this quote:

 Buchheit and Taylor were clear with me that they have more work to do on FriendFeed to make the core aggregation feature more useful. In particular, they want to add intelligence to the service so it highlights what you’re interested in, not every last thing your friends are doing.

There isn’t an algorithm that will filter out the garbage and show me the valuable stuff. The principle is simple, garbage in means garbage out. And Friendfeed has made it very simple for its users to draw in anything at all. I never INTENDED to have all that stuff shared

I’ll keep reminding myself when new services arrive that interaction is what it is all about. Forget aggregation. Aggregation is for convenience,  for the unintended. Interaction is intentional and therefore always more interesting!

Friendfeed a destination site, that is soooo web 2.0!

Michael Arrington writes this morning about the fast growing aggregator service called Friendfeed. After launch, just one month ago the ex-Google founders already see a steady climb of users. Most likely because a number of power users like Robert Scoble and Michael himself have joined the service and brought along their network of tech followers.

I joined Friendfeed too a few weeks ago (here) and was surprised to see its simplicity. Friendfeed allows you to import news or messages left behind by your friends. But it aggregates them(using RSS) from all kinds of different sites. Friendfeed currently allows you to import feeds from some 28 sites like Twitter, Jaiku, Digg, Google Reader, Delicious, StumbeUpon, Flickr, Youtube. Friendfeed also allows you to react or comment to things shared on other sites. So if Robert Scoble posts a Twitter and I am subscribed to his Friendfeed, then I can comment his Twitter inside Friendfeed. Unfortunately the comment doesn’t appear on Twitter, only on Friendfeed.

And that is probably precisely why I don’t use Friendfeed as often as I use Twitter for example. While it does a great job aggregating all the feeds for me into one place, it is quickly becoming a destination site. And honestly, that is so web 2.0.

I hate it when I need to go to my Friendfeed site to view all the feeds and comment on them. It sucks that my comments or ratings don’t leave Friendfeed but remain on that portal, only to be seen by those that are currently logged into the same site. And that makes Friendfeed provide us with great aggregating functionality in an old-fashioned web 2.0 destination site.

It makes me feel locked-in, puts up walls around me. Friendfeed is the most hypocritical of them all, literally feeding off the success of other sites (just look at Michael Arrington stabbing at Twitter). But when it gets interesting, when I get my chance to interact with something I discovered on Friendfeed, I don’t get to leave the Friendfeed walled garden.

So excuse me if I’m not nearly as enthusiastic as all the first mover bloggers that have written positive articles on the service. Yes, it’s a great aggregator fo feeds. Yes, it is incredibly easy to use, uncluttered, and fortunately ad free.

But they have missed the opportunity to create something unique, something that goes beyond web 2.0 thinking. They have missed the opportunity to make Friendfeed a service centered around its users, instead of centered around their own portal and database. And with the new search functionality added, they are locking in users even more to the Friendfeed site. And that is too bad.  It could have been a user-centric web 3.x service. Instead they stopped at old fashioned web 2.0.

The crazy thing about that is that if everyone is finally attracted to Friendfeed and locked into their service, there will be nothing left to aggregate from other places. Robert Scoble asks himself how many services we actually need. Well, with Friendfeed we don’t need any other right? Everyone loses, and that is too bad. So follow me on Friendfeed if you like. But for interaction, I’ll will probably also hang around other places, for example at my Twitter account

With great power comes great responsibility

I read about the fuzz generated around an interview Sara Lacy held with pop star Mark Zuckerberg. Sara was slaughtered on-line with several blog posts and numerous tweets that called her all sorts of things. Michael Arrington called it right when he spoke of a witch hunt, blaming a few in the crowd making some noise and the “press” picking up on it.

Brian Solis wrote a nice blog post on what really happened and talked with Sara on her own experiences. Several bloggers spent time on the issue, including Robert Scoble, putting the blame on a few Twittering assholes, and Steve Hodson who makes a right point in saying:

It doesn’t matter that Robert Scoble suggests that the SXSW audience is unlike any other. That still doesn’t excuse lack of respect and believing that one’s own overblown ego gives you the right to be insulting and intentionally hurtful to anyone let alone some-one who was just trying to do a job that they had been hired to do and requested by the person who was being interviewed. I will say that Robert’s title for his post today on the matter is an equally perfect way to end a post – Audience of Twittering Assholes. You would have thought your parents would have taught you all better manners than what you showed to the world yesterday.

I remember reading about a similar incident here in the Netherlands where Joseph Pine was giving a presentation. The organizers had opened a twittering back channel where people could react to the presentation. It turned out the channel was mostly used for making jokes, not even at the expense of Joseph Pine. Unfortunately he couldn’t see the back channel screen himself and was faced with a crowd laughing about things unrelated to his presentation.

The thing that interests me about it is the way technology sometimes enables the darker side of human nature without a penalty. Current web advocates always talk about the greater good that web 2.0 is bringing us in terms of interaction. Instead of a one way communication stream, the technology allows everyone to to interact by open up 2-way communication channels. It also allows every person to have a voice and be heard. We can all have blogs, join on-line conversations like Twitter, be journalists, write books. Any kind of professional, wheter it is a journalist, book writer, blogger or CEO for that matter are all feeling the pressure of the voice of millions of people joining the conversations in their domain. While setting the conversation free is a good thing it also provides us with several side effects that show the worst in human nature.

1. Sensational journalism. You know what I’m talking about.  Right now there is a storm blowing through the Netherlands. The last time it happened, the national weather center issued warnings about dangers. As a result every news reporter went out to different locations within the Netherlands to report live from the scene. We heard interviews all day about possible dangers, what if scenario’s, possible casualties, damage etc. Nothing happened! Sure there was wind, rain and even some damage to a few buildings here and there. But the media hype was way over the top making everyone look ridiculous (which was of course covered in lengthy “lucky nothing happened” reports on TV.
2. If there isn’t news, we simply create it. Just look at the way we get reported on the US presidential elections. Zephoria wrote a nice post about that called “Enough already”. In this post she describes how the media, when one candidate seems to pull ahead of another, the media immediately start creating stories from nothing. Just for the sake of keeping the competition going, or getting people to tune into their “sensational” stories.
3. The person is more important than his actions. The world has become a public media place allowing no one to have some privacy. As soon as someone draws attention through his actions, the first thing that happens is that we start to focus on the person itself, instead of the things he is doing. Just look a the way the blogosphere reports about Mark Zuckerberg. He is the CEO of Facebook, and yes, people do discuss the work he is doing over there. But how many posts were about his looks, his slippers, his geekyness, and all other kinds of personal traits? Another example in general would be the reporting on the Eliot Spitzer case. Although ZDnet has some interesting angle on it here, in general the reporting was more a tabloid type “ooh we caught a public person in an embarrassing situation”.
4. The breaking news factor. With everyone being a “professional” journalist these days we can only drive traffic by providing a possible audience with “Breaking News”. Even if there isn’t any. Or if at least a 1000 other people have reported on the breaking news too. Just look at TechMeme on any particular day and you will see what I mean. Especially the biggest blog sites like TechCrunch, GigaOM, etc.  use that technique. I haven’t actually counted the number of times “Breaking News” was in a blog post title. But I do know that I rarely visit those sites first. Everyone copies each others stories, often without factual checking, but who cares. There is no penalty on it. Personally I don’t care much about the breaking news, I’m way more interested in the analysis afterwards. Of course, for a good analysis you need smart people. So at that point I find myself  reverting to the experts, instead of the eager beaver traffic driving personalities.
5. The “I can shout things out and that makes me important” factor. This is what happened during the Sara Lacy interview with Mark Zuckerberg and the example I provided with the Joseph Pine presentation. There are always jerks around. Before Twitter, back channels, blog sites,  these people only had close proximity tools to show off that they are jerks indeed (i.e. direct conversation or afterward complaining). But the current technologies allows us all to join in on the conversation, by writing blogs, twittering, shouting out in back channels. It provides everyone a voice, including people that aren’t really there to join the conversation and add to it. The thing about it is that it really doesn’t matter if anyone is listening to them. It is the power of being able to shout that makes people focus on their own importance, instead of on the contribution to the discussion they want to make. They really don’t care if anyone is actually listening. They simply do it because now they can.

I believe that setting the conversation free is a great thing in itself. It is important that everyone has a voice. It is also great that the technology not only enables us to speak out loud, get into the conversation, but that it also helps us to find an audience, to get into interaction. I’m thankful for it. It allows me to blog even though I’m just an amateur. I’m surprised and thankful for the number of people that are willing to take the time to read my writings, even if they are often quite lengthy

But this freedom also unleashes some of the worst in us, sometimes making ourselves more important than the other. There is no way around that. It’s called human nature. But we don’t have to accept it just because it happens. The same power that is granted to those that shout out to (intentionally) hurt others is in our hands to call them to order. Instead of blindly copying their behavior, or ignoring it, we should be addressing it directly. In a democracy we need to feel responsible and take care of those who are weakest or most vulnerable at any time.

Wasn’t it Ben Parker in the Spiderman movie  that said “With great power comes great responsibility”?

Big brother is watching me

A lot of different, seemingly unrelated, things are happening right now in the tech world. Looking through different feeds most of the discussions are about:

The mash-up of content seems to be important right now. I see it everywhere. People love the idea of taking different, seemingly unrelated, bits of data to mash it up into something new and unexpected.  The latest example being the Google – Twitter super Tuesday election mashup. My tech friends all talk excitingly about the possibilities of mash ups. I seldom get enthusiastic about these development. Just because it is technically possible to combine data doesn’t mean I have to like it. It takes more than technical miracles to make me start using this stuff, daily, and integrate it into my life.

Thinking about that I realised that in one area I do like mash-ups. I often write blog posts that way. I read a lot of stuff, have all kinds of experiences with family, friends, at work, and after a while a story seems to develop itself until it draws enough attention to be written down. Often triggered by observations from the people I follow on blogs, an observation or analysis can kick start a series of thoughts that lead to a new post. And I’m not talking about the stories on TechMeme, TechCrunch or any of the other major “breaking news” blogs. No, these things happen most of the time on blogs where people actually analyse behavior, and have something to say about that.

Why am I writing all of this down? Well, because a series of unrelated events and stories I have been reading the past days have led me to write down the title of this post “Big brother is watching me”. It started with a post from one of my favorite pattern hounds, Rolf Skyberg (I’m not anywhere near his capabilities to analyse and detect patterns), who talked about an identity theft that happened to him. In a post called “W3Top.org is stealing Twitter updates” Rolf wrote:

Apparently, W3Top.org thinks it’s perfectly appropriate to take my Twitter updates, post them as part of their “100% Free online dating and matchmaking service for singles”, and create a bogus account for me with bogus friends and an even more bogus location.

He goes on and asks himself the following question:

So this leaves us with the question, who really owns my Twitters? I wrote them, posted them to Twitter, and merrily went long my way.

Twitter is quite clear about copyright of twitters in their Terms of Service:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours.

According to the Berne copyright convention, anything privately created is held in copyright by the creator. Brad Templeton explains this here on his page of 10 copyright myths:

For example, in the USA, almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not.

So we have a copyright violation (I never granted permission for Xasa/Bitacle to republish my works), but we also have something bordering on identity theft.

By republishing my content along with my known username and avatar image, they are implying that I support and endorse their service. This is, by the way exactly what they want people to think.

Because who wants to use a dating service that nobody else actually uses?

I went on and was overwhelmed by the number of “breaking news” posts about the Microsoft bid on Yahoo, the consequences and possible counter-strikes of Google. Ways for Yahoo to get out of a possible deal with Microsoft, US elections with Google and Twitter doing all kinds of data mash ups. Both Google and Yahoo going after Microsoft Outlook with their own upgrades of e-mail packages. Google entering the mobile market in China, and so on and so on.

So the major companies are fighting it out in the open again. A lot of suggestions have been made about the  strategy behind it all. I even made some observations about that myself suggesting that Microsoft and Yahoo could easily build the largest social network ever via integration and innovation of their e-mail services and that even Google might get a bit nervous about that. Robert Scoble seems to think different. He suggests that Google is stirring up the fire to draw attention away from their attempts to jump into the lucrative mobile market.

Then I came across a really good post by Zephoria. In her post called “Just because we can doesn’t mean we should” she talks about the ease at which techies are creating mash-ups without thinking about the possible consequences for the user. She says:

I am worried about the tech industry rhetoric around exposing user data and connections. This is another case of a decision dilemma concerning capability and responsibility. I said this ages ago wrt Facebook’s News Feed, but it is once again relevant with Google’s Social Graph API announcement. In both cases, the sentiment is that this is already public data and the service is only making access easier and more efficient for the end user. I totally get where Mark and Brad are coming at with this. I deeply respect both of them, but I also think that they live in a land of privilege where the consequences that they face when being exposed are relatively minor. In other words, they can eat meals of only chocolate because they aren’t diabetic.

Read her article, it’s well worth your time. The clashes between the big companies is a fight over two things. Data and control. Who has most data and who can control it best. It is what makes Google a fortune, it is what Yahoo wanted to make a fortune out, and it is what Microsoft wants to get his hands on. And if you thought things were all quite with Facebook, it turns out they have added a few new “features” below the radar. One of them is a feature that can suggest friends to you. Facebook can do this because they “own” everything we naive users put into our Facebook accounts. I think it is a pretty meaningless feature. If I needed advice on who should be my friend, I might as well join a dating service.

But it also helps me remind myself that free always comes at a cost. Behind every free service there are hurdles of eager beaver marketeers paying huge amounts of money to collect and mash up your personal data. This giving them the false illusion that if they have access to my personal data in the social networks I participate in, their message will reach me more effectively. Marketeers are idiots of course. They shouldn’t be thinking about that. they should be thinking about providing me value, but that’s another story.

If this era on the web is to be characterised then I would say it is the era where everyone is fighting over data and data control. Big brother is watching me, with the difference that there isn’t one big brother. There are uncountable big brothers, with a few major ones that have their claws into probably 80% of our web experiences. I agree with Zephoria that this is all happening too fast without enough thinking about the consequences for the user. She ends her article with:

Just because people can profile, stereotype, and label people doesn’t mean that they should. Just because people can surveil those around them doesn’t mean that they should. Just because parents can stalk their children doesn’t mean that they should. So why on earth do we believe that just because technology can expose people means that it should?

I don’t think the collecting and mashing up of personal data can be stopped anymore. We have all been drawn into an addiction of “free”services and we are unable to get out of that advertisement trap. Web entrepreneurs can’t think up any new buisness models to compete with the free model. But it might come at great cost. I want the right to own my own data, and I understand that it comes with my own responsibility to control and use that data. I doubt any of the data hoggers is really there to protect my privacy. That is fine really. As long as we all understand the consequences of this, and we all make sure to expose only those parts of ourselves that we feel comfortable with. Remember, big brother is not only watching me, but he is also on to you!

The problem with Twitter is its lack of a consumer to consumer appeal

Mark Evans starts a new Twitter discussion this morning in his post “Taking Twitter Seriously”. He notes that Twitter is gaining attraction from people communicating about serious stuff like politics. The question becomes whether or not Twitter can grow up from being used by a small tech savvy community to a mainstream tool.

I think it will become more mainstream. Not because the tech community walks away with it, but more because it is a brilliant, dead simple, easy to use and fun communication tool that allows you to share your thoughts with others instantly. Twitter only has 2 problems to solve. They need a more sustainable business model, preferably decentralised to ensure Twitter keeps working. And they need to make it the standard for any social application on the web, so that non tech people can try and experience the power of Twitter communication.

Twitter isn’t breaking out of the tech community yet as this community is overwhelmingly narcissistic. We all have overlapping tech friends, follow the same tech guru’s (so who isn’t following Robert Scoble on Twitter yet?) and have a hard time explaining our Twitter time to our (non-tech) family members. I seriously doubt that there are many Twitter users that have family members, friends, or other non-tech industry people following them on Twitter. Twitter has become the main B2B communication stream.

Sad thing about that is that the tool is much more usable in a C2C context. The Twitter messages I like best aren’t the “breaking news” tweets (yawn) or the “Steve I have another cool gadget Jobs” sessions that break down Twitter easily.

No, it is the tweets where people free-flow express their thoughts that makes Twitter such a great communications tool. I have seen Tweets that made me laugh, think, become quiet, sometimes even a bit emotional. I have had a few conversational thoughts where people get into a Tweet flow together and send each other some really funny, amazing, or serious tweets back and forth, interacting in a way they won’t do when they are in a room together.  It is that what makes Twitter really worthwhile. Twitter wasn’t meant to be a B2B tool, but the tech community has been using it that way most often. Which is fine, but isn’t what makes it work for me. Only when Twitter breaks out of this tech community into the main stream it will become a great tool. The tech people complain about down times, about the lack of technical options, about the lack of a business model. I say, lets start using Twitter for what it is. A simple, easy to use, fun, and brilliant messaging system.

Let’s start using Twitter for what it is

A lot of talk this morning about the downfall of Twitter servers during the Steve Jobs Keynote speech. Apparently the Twitter servers couldn’t handle the traffic that build up. Especially people who were depending on Twitter to live blog the event complaint about this.

Dave Winer suggests that Twitter ought to be decentralised, to prevent it from breaking down. And at the same time he thinks it might be rebuild using the rss technology to make it more sustainable. From a user perspective this is probably a good thing to do. By decentralising it would seem that Twitter would never break down like this, allowing people to continue to use it, even during a hail storm of Tweets.

Scott Karp rightly says that the people that have invested in Twitter will not be too keen on decentralisation. The major asset Twitter, or any other web service, has is their centralised user database. And they won’t be willing to give that up so easily. If the Twitter team ever wants to be able to execute a positive business case, they need it to be centralised. The decentralised version will appear, no doubt about it, but there is another strength that Twitter now seems to have. It’s current brand strength is high. There are already other Twitter-like services around (Ponce Pownce, Jaiku), but even though these services have sometimes cooler features, they aren’t nearly as successful as Twitter.

I think that the current Twitter business model isn’t sustainable. It depends on the centralised user database and has already shown that this centralisation comes at great cost and reliability. I suspect that Twitter was designed to be bought by Google. That would make a lot of sense. Not only does it fit Google’s business model very well, I also think that Google is probably one of the few companies that could actually scale Twitter to a global level. Let’s not forget that Twitter currently has less than a million active users. It isn’t a big service. It’s users are mostly tech savvy people working in web 2.0, Internet or media companies. Bloggers make a great fuss about it, but my children, wife or family friends have never heard about it. Since they failed correct execution of their business model (get bought by Google, Google bought Jaiku instead), it is time for them to rethink what Twitter should be about. The Twitter team needs to reconsider how to start making money out of the service.

Twitter is a simple, cool, easy to use, messaging system allowing people to share their thoughts and follow other people’s thoughts anywhere and anytime. It is in that sense one of the most simple, yet brilliant, (mobile- and) web services around right now. It has enough critical mass now to scale it to much larger amounts of customers. Now all the Twitter team needs to do is start building a sustainable business model., and fix a few minor issues in the service. Not one that depends on a centralised database, but one that monetises user value. That is the only asset in the end that will make Twitter tick. They will need to find a way to decentralise it, and still make loads of money. I could imagine Twitter becomeing the new messaging system for any web 2.0 service. Why build your own, get it wholesale fromt he Twitter team. And remember, people are always willing to pay for value they receive.

I will keep on twittering and not minding it breaks down every once in a while. It is not a life depending communication service. The bloggers out there screaming in outrage should start using Twitter for what it is. A simple, easy to use, fun, and brilliant messaging system.

BTW, if you are interested, you can find me here on Twitter

The usability of mobile phones could be so much better

A few days ago I realised (yet again) that the mobile phone could be made so much better. In such a way that the interface would start working for me as a user, instead of me having to work the interface of the phone (disclosure: I use a Nokia N95, but previous phones from Nokia, Samsung, SonyEricsson gave me very similar experiences). (Another disclosure: yeah, I’m one of those suckers that hasn’t got an iPhone).

It started when I wanted to SMS something to Twitter after I woke up. The following happened:

I pressed the icon for SMS. Started typing “twit” in the address field, the N95 understood Twitter and I could continue to write the actual SMS. Started typing “Woke up early this morning, about to go to the office”. The display showed “Wolf up das?”. Darn, wrong language set. Pressed options, arrow up, arrow up, arrow up, enter, arrow down and selected “English”. Then pressed c,c,c,c,c and started typing “e”, pressed * to change the word “Wolf”into “Woke” and continued the sentence. Had to change “in”into “go” and finished the sentence. Options, then send. After approximately 100 key presses I was able to send away my 53 character message. An overhead of almost 100%.

Next thing I did was get into my car and drive to the office. I decided to turn on the Twitter message stream to my mobile so that I could see who was doing what. So every few minutes I would get an SMS notification from Twitter. I’d pick up the phone, pressed new message and read it while driving. After reading the message I would immediately press options, arrow down, delete message,enter and then the big red button to get back to the main screen while I was still driving. I need to clean up Twitter SMSes immediately as they clutter my inbox way too much. On a typical drive of about 1 hour I get as many as 30-40 messages, and when there are a lot of people on-line even more.

Naturally I wanted to respond to a few Twitter messages, so while driving, I typed a few short messages to Twitter friends. It takes 7 presses to get the @ sign needed in Twitter. I had to switch 3 times back and forth between languages as I follow Dutch and English speaking Twitter friends. In the mean time I answered a few calls, and I got behind in reading the Twitter alerts who would come in during the calls. I ended up with some 10-15 unread Twitter alerts, not to mention the irritating signalling of the alerts during my call.

I wanted to check something on-line, so I fired up the web browser to go on-line. I needed to type in the web address, which is pretty lame to do while in the car. Took me a few minutes, then waited for the web site to appear, only to find out it was too big to see on my mobile display. So I ended up scrolling the site to reach a point where I needed to enter text for a search. Of course I was typing in the wrong language. Ended up wiping out a lot of pressed characters and entering them individually, with spaces between them, which I then erased again to prevent the phone from thinking for me. The Twitter alerts kept coming in.

By the timeI got to the office I was about 20 messages behind. It took me a lot of time deleting them (reading them too me too long). Twitter produces enough alerts to overflow my inbox. I finally switched off Twitter by sending an off message and then I could start work.

Later that day I wanted to check something on my weblog using my mobile phone. I fired up the web browser, tried to connect to a WiFi access point only to discover I didn’t have access. Reverting back to UMTS I typed in my web log address and waited for the content to appear. The site is too big for the screen so Nokia provides me with a cursor to scroll back and forth. This is not nearly as cool as the iPhone does it (you can zoom in/zoom out and move around with your fingers on a touch screen), but at least I can get to the place I wanted to look at. I tried to open and stream a video embedded in the weblog. The phone started a video player which was hopeful, but the video never showed. Unable to grasp why it didn’t work I pressed the big red button to get to teh main phone screen. I saw a nice sunset from my office window and decided to take a picture of it. I opened up the camera at the back of the phone and wanted to take a picture. I got a “not enough memory, please close other applications first” message. It took me a while to figure out that the Internet connection was still there and I needed to close that off explicitly. Closed the camera, and opened it again to activate it and finally took the picture. Luckily Shozu worked fine and I could upload the picture with one press to my Flickr account.

That very same day the phone froze up on me once, and resetted itself (nice). I used it for another 20-30 SMSes or so, browsed the web about 3 times more and finally drove home again.

So what is the moral of this story? Well, there are a few things I realised once I got home and started thinking about the experiences I had that day:

1. The average overhead in terms of user actions, button presses, menu choices etc. is on average anywhere between 50 and 100%
2. The inbox-outbox principle of the mobile phone for messaging is a real mess and is not capable of handling 50-100 messages a day without tremendous overhead for the user
3. Web browsing sucks. The screen is too small, entering data takes too much time, a lot of the content doesn’t display, and no matter how nice the interface is, browsing on a mobile phone screen just isn’t any good. No, not even on an iPhone, sorry.
4. Multi langual input is a pain. it takes a lot of switching between dictionaries to get it to work for me. Turning the dictionaries off doesn’t work either because then I have to press way too many buttons to type.
5. Multitasking on a mobile phone is nearly impossible. Try web browsing while receiving SMSes, phone calls, and trying to take a picture in between. The phone can’t cope with it.

There is actually one functionality for which the mobile phone is optimised. It works just fine for making and receiving calls! One could easily argue that I’m trying to do things on the phone that are not normal. But, I described a pretty average day for me as a mobile user. Yes, I use the phone in the car. I do all these things, and preferably in parallel. Have you watched (your own) kids lately. They multitask even more than I do. And they deal with the complexity, just as I do. Grow up and deal with it.

But that doesn’t mean that we should be satisfied with the product. It basically is not fit for the job. Most of the mobile OSes are based upon mimicking the desktop PC interface, which sucks. The inbox/outbox principle for messaging is as old as e-mail and is not fit for today’s messaging needs. The interfaces haven’t really radically improved. We have gotten more applications, more possible connections, and ultimately more complexity. The iPhone’s major improvement is the touch screen and some really cool UI inventions. But even with the iPhone trying to do the things I decribed earlier aren’t easy.

I have said it before, we really need people to start thinking out of the box when it comes to the mobile user interface. We need people that first think about what, how, and why people are using it during a typical day. And design a user interface that works for the user to get his things done, not the other way around. With Google Android on its way there lies an opportunity to do just that. Why? Because it is open (how open remains to be seen). If it can overcome the Mobile OS es the mobile phone manufacturers ship with it, then there is hope. We might get to see some great designers rethink the mobile interface and update it to support the multitasking, multicontent, multi messaging and browsing world most of its user are in right now. The usability of mobile phones could be made so much better.

Update: just saw that there is another discussion now about the iPhone producing a lot of data traffic. That could imply that its usability has improved over other types of mobile phones, allowing the users to access the Internet easier. At the same time iPhone users are mostly tech savvy, and capable of handling the complexity provided by mobile phones. But the iPhone, with all its incredible UI novelties is still based upon the idea of browsing the way we browse with a desktop. The browsing paradigm hasn’t changed, it has justgotten a better interface. We will have to wait and see if that is good enough. I doubt it. We haven’t seen a real revolution yet, just a fast improvement over something that was really bad in the first place.

Tweeterboard: Yet another useless leaderboard tool

What is this obsession techies have with leaderboards. Everything we do gets rated. Everyone needs to be reassured who is most influential, who gets the biggest audience, who has the largest (whatever). Come to think of it, it human nature to try and figure out who is in and who is not. Not just a tech thing. But it really isn’t a big deal.

Today we see the announcement of a new leaderboard, this time in Twitterland. ReadWriteWeb reports it and they are excited about it, as is Jeremiah Owyang.

Marshall KirkPatrick of ReadWriteWeb writes about the importance of Tweeterboard:

On Tweeterboard you’ll find not only a list of the top 100 most influential users on Twitter – you can also look up any of almost 2000 users and see who they are conversing with and get some idea how much influence they carry in the Twitter ecosystem. Only a small portion of Twitter users are being tracked so far – but if indexing can be automated (!) then this could become a very important service.

Jeremiah has a much better angel at it:

Why is understanding who talks to me and vice versa important? Because you can see who influences me, and who I influence.

I like that argument already much better, because it isn’t about who has the biggest. It is about who influences you and who do you influence. Making it a personal tool. I actually have written a similar suggestion before in the blogosphere. Instead of Techmeme leaderboards I would like to see Newton’s Universal Law of Blog Attraction getting implemented.Now, lets think about this for a minute. Twitter is a tool that helps people to get into on-line conversations, although in probably 50% of the cases it is more a 1-way publishing tool of thoughts no longer than 140 characters. I like Twitter as much as I hate it.

I like it because it is a whole lot of fun getting into 140 character conversations with other people. I like it because it allows free flow of thoughts no longer than 140 characters. I like it because the people you interact with are likely to say smart or funny things when they have little space to use.

I hate Twitter because it isn’t opt-out. I want to be able to interact with the people I follow on Twitter, but if I follow a person, he doesn’t automatically follow me. That makes me a groupie instead of a friend and it sucks. Now this other person might just choose not to follow me (which is fine), but I’d rather have him actively block me (as would be needed in opt-out) than have him ignore me (which is now the case).

So why is Tweeterboard another useless tool? Because it helps you look at Twitter in a way it wasn’t meant to. Twitter isn’t about who is most influential, it isn’t about us all tracking the “whole”conversation. Tweeterboards leads to two unnecessary behaviors:

1. It is narcistic for those who want to know how important they are (disclosure: I’m not important enough to be on it, I checked immediately ). Fun, but useless all together
2. It gives those that want to analyse stuff the false illusion that they have a grip on who is influential and what they are talking about

Forget it. Not interesting. The Twitter population isn’t representative of the Web community. It isn’t even representing the techie community. It is only a subset of geeks and other weirdo’s like myself that are out there.

If a popular soccer player in the Netherlands says something weird on TV it’ll have more impact than the most influential Dutch Twitter geek. If Mr Bush decides to go to another war in some foreign country he’ll get more attention than Robert Scoble, on of the most fanatic Twitter users. BTW, I like Robert better than any other influential Twitter user. Why? Because he follows everyone that follows him, and he actually responds to tweets I or anyone else sends him. He is in the conversation, not above it.

Before you know it we are all looking at the same “influential” people again and then Twitter becomes a room with a lot of echo in it. And that would be sad, for it is a perfect way to interact.

But most importantly. I really don’t care that much what “influential” Twitter users say. I care about what Twitter friends say, that is, the people I follow and that take the interest to follow me.

Tweeterboards, TechMeme Leaderboards, who needs them. If you are interested in me or the things I write, you can find me here onTwitter. And I always follow you back

Twitter needs to be opt-out instead of opt-in

Scott Karp leads a TechMeme discussion when he confesses he has stopped using Twitter. Not because he doesn’t like it, but because there are downsides to it that outweigh the upsides. The addictiveness and relative ease to post and follow tweets lead to distraction of work. Furthermore he doesn’t like the signal-to-noise ratio, or in other words, the number of silly or non-interesting tweets outnumber the number of relevant and interesting tweets. Scott also notes that you often can only follow half of a conversation, as you might see the tweets of someone you follow, but you don’t see the tweets of the people that follow the person you are following.

It is this asymmetry that I do not like about Twitter either. It is very similar to hearing someone talking through a mobile phone in a public area. You can hear half of the conversation (even if yu don’t want to) and this becomes annoying. Better to hear nothing than half a conversation.

Twitter has another annoying feature build in. You can follow anyone you want, but the other person can chose not to follow you. Although this sounds the social thing to do, letting the user decide who he follows and who not, it has the drawback that you can become a groupie instead of a friend. Not much fun in that. I follow some really interesting people on Twitter but because they do not follow me, I’m unable to participate or react to anything they tweet.

You might now say, grow up dude, the guy doesn’t want to follow you because he doesn’t know or like you. But I don’t think that is always the case. The follow request can easily get lost or ignored in tons of mail. Leaving me with the fan status.

I am not a fan of opt-out as a default option but in the case of Twitter I would argue opt out is much better than opt in. By default everyone who decides to follow another person should be followed back by default. This has the advantage that true interaction is possible if wanted. At the same time the possible dislike or misbehavior of a person following you can easily be mended by blocking that person.

Twitter is a micro messaging tool. It allows free flows of ideas, words, sentences and conversations. If you don’t want to be part of that, simply ignore it. And if someone is a nuisance, just block him. But don’t ignore a follow me message. It is a compliment if someone is willing to listen to what you have to say! You can find me on twitter, and I ALWAYS follow you back!