The Praized Blog

Remember my Twitter is the new “Facebook” post from last March where I posited Twitter was going to be the next darling in terms of social tools? It seems my gut feeling was right on that front as shown by Compete’s report on Twitter’s traffic and online attention growth in the last 3 months.

Highlights:

• “In terms of U.S. visitors, Compete has seen Twitter traffic nearly double from February to April, currently attracting nearly 1.2 million people per month.
• In terms of time spent on site as a share of all time spent online, Twitter has grown dramatically - more than quadrupling over the period.
• Twitter is a weekday event – (…) On any typical weekday, Twitter is receiving more than twice the attention as a weekend day.
• Nearly one quarter of all twitter visitors to the site are heavy users (6+ visits/month)
• Splitting age demographics based on usage intensity shows that heavy users tend to skew older than visitors who only hit the site once a month. This could indicate that while the younger segments are more exploratory, the 25-44 year old segments have found more value in Twitter and started to ramp up usage.”

What it means: based on Rogers’ innovation adoption curve, I think we’ve seen the arrival of early adopters on Twitter. The first wave, innovators, had joined the service at SXSW 2007. The weekday usage and the older demographics make me think there’s a lot of work-based usage and that most people in the Weberati have discovered Twitter’s value.

Saturday, I was reading an article in Montreal’s La Presse regarding McDonald’s entry into specialty coffee shops and how it’s a direct attack on Starbucks. I was especially intrigued by comments from Bryant Simon, a teacher at Temple University in Philadelphia. As a history teacher, he’s interested in the social phenomenon that leads us to pay a premium to belong to the Starbucks community.

Quoted in the New York Times in 2004, he said: “Starbucks has become the corner bar of the 21st century. (…) It symbolizes the hunger for community in today’s atomized world. Starbucks has tapped into people’s desire to be with other people. It’s become a new public space where people can go to be with other people. That’s the genius of the place. That’s why I resist the demonization of Starbucks. Who else is building these community spaces in America today?”

As we know, since then, Starbucks has lost its cool factor, and many of its early enthusiasts are now drinking better coffee at local places, behaving almost like wine connoisseurs. It made me thing about my “Twitter is The New Facebook” blog post, about the reasons why innovators/early adopters are very fickle and the increasing speed at which they switch brands.

(chart found here)

I believe the introduction of social tools on the web gives early adopters access to better information than they used to have before. It’s easier to find out if your peer “tribe” is adopting new products & services. And if they are, you trust that your tribe is right, you pick up your friends and you just leave (what I call “Brand Nomadism”). Combined with low switching costs online (the next site is only a click away), it creates a situation where we see the rise of many new “next-big-thing” Web properties (Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, SocialThing, etc.).

I was first exposed to that phenomenon when I saw a presentation by Bill Tancer from Hitwise at the Web 2.0 Expo last year. He showed the attendees the YouTube early adopter adoption curve. In it, you clearly see that it took only 4 months for YouTube to really explode on the scene.

As for Starbucks, I think they lost a lot by standardizing their product offer through the introduction of automatic coffee machines. By becoming a “middle-of-the-road” brand, they’ve basically positioned themselves in the no-man’s land between big brands like McDonalds (or Tim Hortons) and small local coffee shops, effectively being attractive to no one in particular. I believe this innovator/early adopter curve is critical to the future success of a new venture and I think that, if you want to build a sustainable long-term business, you’ll want to remember who put you in the driver seat. Make sure there’s always a place for your first customers in your strategic plan.

Back in December, in “A look back at 2007“, I wrote that I believed early adopters’ interest in Facebook had peaked and had even started to decline. Recently, the blogosphere echoed that sentiment with news of “Facebook fatigue”.

1. In January, The Register started by saying “Whisper it, but numbers from web analytics outfit comScore have confirmed what the chatter in bars and cafes has been saying for months - people are, just, well, bored of social networks.” About Facebook, they added that “behaviour seems much the same; join, accumulate dozens of semi-friends, spy on a few exes for a bit, play some Scrabulous, get bored, then get on with your life, occasionally dropping in to respond to a message or see some photos that have been posted.”
2. A few weeks later, Techcrunch also looking at ComScore data said “The number of people who visit Facebook has been leveling off over the past few months in the U.S., and even dipped by about 800,000 individuals in January. (…) Maybe all that friend spam has something to do with the decline. Will the Facebook fatigue get worse, or is this just a temporary dip?”
3. Adding his grain of salt, Rory Cellan-Jones from the BBC added: “The general feeling is that the kids, with their minute attention spans, have already tired of the social networking site and moved on to something more hip and happening. I think the opposite is true - that Facebook’s new wave of older users have decided it is just not worth the bother and are now leaving it to the kids.”

I agree. My personal experience with Facebook is that its relative utility for me has decreased drastically in the last few months. There used to be a lot of “friend” activities in my newsfeed and in my status updates. Even though I have more than 550 “friends”, I suspect that only 20% at most are using it regularly. As I wrote two months ago, Facebook is just a game. Industry pundits are looking for utility and, for a while, it certainly felt like Facebook was IT. But not anymore. Has something replaced it? Yes. Today, I’d like to say it’s Twitter. It’s all anecdotal, mind you, based on my brain filtering a massive quantity of articles and blog posts I read every day. You’ll have to trust me on this. Should you still care about Facebook? A resounding YES! As Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures Partners says “The digerati, with their Outlook address books and social network friends lists in the 1000s, bloated by people they met at conferences several years ago, are edge use cases. Their experience is atypical. Normal users of social networks use Facebook apps in the same way that middle America forwards emails to one another.” Those millions of users are not going away and Facebook is still a formidable platform to broadcast your brand and content.

But back to Twitter, what is it? Twitter is a micro-blogging application that allows you to send text messages of up to 140 characters. It really exploded on the Web scene last year at the SXSW Interactive Festival. People started using it in drove but I wasn’t sure what to do with it (and I’m sure I was not alone), until Facebook taught us how to “Twitter” through its “Status Update” feature. Along with the newsfeed, it is one of Facebook’s killer apps but I think most people found it too limited in functionality. It was really just about broadcasting information.

Twitter is much more. It can be a:

1. Broadcast tool. Send information to your network of “followers”, your latest blog post, a breaking news, a summary of a conference you’re attending, the boring stuff of your daily life, etc. Best of all, you can share clickable URLs.
2. Conversation tool. Using the @ symbol followed by the Twitter alias, you can ask questions, join an existing conversation and contribute to the community.
3. Early warning system. Breaking news seem to pop-up on Twitter much more quickly than in other media. I’ve learned about different breaking news more quickly in the last few weeks using it. Some people have already created specific channels for breaking news, which you can start following. See BreakingNewsOn or the Techmeme firehose.
4. Proxy conferences. Recently, I was able to follow updates from the TED, a very coveted invite-only conference. You could obviously follow it in real time, but through structured data standards called hashtags, you can also see what people have been reporting about TED here.
5. Subscribe to people. Where else can you follow updates and insights from industry luminaries like Pierre Omidyar (eBay’s founder) or Paul Kedrosky (famed Canadian VC)? There are hundreds of interesting people to follow in Twitter.

Howard Rheingold of SmartMobs fame offers even more reasons to like Twitter.

Twitter obviously has flaws:

1. It hasn’t announced a business model yet and people are afraid its introduction will break the utility.
2. It suffers from many well-documented technical interruptions.
3. You can’t segment your “tribes”, allowing you to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, as you start following more people.
4. Most of my (and possibly your) contacts are not on Twitter yet, which reduces its intrinsic value.
5. It’s a huge time-waster, looking at the conversation feed and making sense of it all.

But even with these flaws, I expect Twitter to really catch fire in the next few months, with more people joining, trying it out, finding utility and transforming it into a vibrant worlwide conversation-based community. Even my Praized Media partner, Sylvain, is organizing the first TwittYul, an informal event for Montreal Twitter users and fans You could read about it first … on Twitter. BTW, if you join and want to follow my “tweets”, I can be found here: http://twitter.com/Praized

In the last ten days, I have actively started using Twitter (you can follow my tweets here) and have a written a bunch of personal notes about how I think “Twitter is the new Facebook”. I can’t wait to write that blog post but I don’t have time to write it today (this week?). One insight: here’s one way Twitter intersects with local search:

Wow! Local merchant reviews and micro-blogging. You can find the original tweet from Tantek here.

To finish this week’s series on business models atomization, I’d like to address the situation where media has been completely atomized. I think that happens when individuals start becoming media themselves, broadcasting “news” through their blogs, Twitter tweets or their Facebook status updates. That concept, explored last summer in my famous “I am Media” blog post really resonated through the blogosphere. What I missed at the time was the corollary:

If I am Media, I am also Advertising.

I remember being very annoyed by the first Facebook Beacon implementations. I gave them a good scolding and wasn’t happy with the way I was depicted, becoming a “Blockbuster spokesperson”. My friend Perry challenged us to think further about these experiments. In my blog post comments, he said: “In order for them to win, urgently, they need to push the envelope on new ad product models. I think the model of stepping “meaningfully” over the line and then back gets them more forward motion.” He was right but I’m not sure the Facebook folks have learned anything yet…

Facebook Beacon is an amazing idea but it’s really badly executed. In a world where individuals can become media, Beacon could be the “AdSense for People” but it needs to be completely reversed.

Facebook should:

1. Give user control over which ad appears in their newsfeed (i.e. which brand/service you’re endorsing) and when it appears.
2. Share revenues with the user using a performance-based model.

There are obviously a couple of massive challenges with this model. The first one is Facebook does not yet have the inventory of word-of-mouth ads to make it really interesting for users. The second one is “spwom”, individuals “selling out” to brands they don’t believe in, which would be the equivalent of spam for word-of-mouth recommendations. But I believe there might come a time when recommenders get rewarded for talking about their favorite products or places…

As most product managers will attest, the temptation is always great to add new features when building a product. Evan Williams, Twitter’s founder, did a short presentation yesterday afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit to talk about how we can build better products by removing features instead.

Knowing that Williams created Blogger at Pyra Labs, he defines Twitter as a blogging application with a maximum of 140 characters and no formatting. But he says that Twitter does not compete with current blogging applications as it offers a different experience. They originally built their technology to use with an already existing ubiquitous friend status network: the SMS, and SMS basically come with a command line.

They quickly realized that the majority of people went directly to the Twitter web site, many of them using 3rd party apps built on their API. They now have hundreds of applications today because “text integrates well with everything”.

He offered additional examples of sites or technologies that kept things simple (or that should keep things simple):

• YouTube has a 10-minute limit for uploaded videos. This definitely had a beneficial impact on the service as it created addictive, ready-for-the-web content.
• Podcasts would certainly benefit from a time limit to become a more successful phenomenon.
• What about a social network that limits you to 10 friends?
• What about a dating site with only a picture and a yes/no button? (Hot or Not)
• What about an e-mail tool where you can only have 20 messages in your inbox?
• What about a competitor of MySpace where only college students are admitted? (Facebook)
• What about a competitor of Yahoo with only a search box on white page? (Google)

TechCrunch reports on a secret meeting that happened at Google in the last few days. It looks like Google is about to “out open” Facebook by allowing developers to leverage Google’s social graph information.

The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform - meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

And that is a potentially killer strategy. Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open - allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications.

That big rumor comes on the heels of another big announcement from Six Apart about open sourcing the Web’s social graph (a la OpenID). If you thought the Web was fragmented, wait until you can start building application on top of Google, Yahoo or MSN’s social graphs…

Many people wonder about the utility of micro-blogging using Twitter, Pownce or the Facebook Status Update. It’s difficult to explain but I’ve found a philosophical answer from Douglas Coupland, famous Canadian writer, in his book Life After God (published in 1994):

“And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection– certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real– this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.”

I’ve been using Facebook intensively for about 4-5 weeks now and it has become an important staple in my blogging/media strategy. Here’s how it complements what I’m currently doing in the Praized blog:

1) Facebook Status Updates: I use the “status update” function as a micro-blogging tool (a bit like Twitter). It helps me put in words what’s on my mind in that specific moment and it captures my personal zeitgeist. It only takes a few seconds to write but people react to it. I usually receive one message a day from friends/readers reacting to my status update line. Don’t forget it’s a status update that triggered the Save Business 2.0 efforts.

2) The “Post a Link” function in the Posted Items page: I use that function when I want to share with my friends/readers an interesting article I just discovered that might not be completely within my pre-defined blogging topics in the Praized blog (i.e. social and local). Examples in the last week include the Skype outage and the Google browser rumors. I always comment on the article to add value and I often end up my comment with a question to trigger additional reader comments.

3) I import my blog posts within Facebook Notes using the Import a blog function. You just need to plug-in your RSS feed URL. I’ve tried using the MyBlog app but it does not work well (I have to manually update the RSS feed to get my blog posts within Facebook). My readers get warned I’ve imported a note (in their newsfeed) and they see an excerpt from the post. They can also comment within Facebook or go to the original post.

One caveat: don’t abuse your friends’ trust by posting too many links or importing too many notes every day. Unless you’re always interesting, they’ll shut you down and change the channel. That’s what happened to Robert Scoble last week with some of his Facebook friends. Tomorrow, I’ll offer five suggestions to improve Facebook. BTW, don’t hesitate to add me as a friend on Facebook if you’re interested in reading/discussing social media.

I read with great dismay this morning the possible demise of one of my favorite magazines, Business 2.0 .

According to the New York Times article, even though the magazine has a circulation of 623,000, there’s a couple reasons why this might happen:

Aside from the overall downturn in the magazine business, current and former Time Inc. employees point to what appears to have been an ill-advised move this year to combine the advertising sales teams of Time Inc.’s finance and business publications, which include Fortune, Money, CNNMoney.com, Fortune Small Business and Business 2.0. Consolidated under a single banner, Time Inc.’s Business and Finance Network (or Tibfin, as it is known inside the company), Time sales representatives stopped pitching the distinct appeal and audience of Business 2.0 to focus on the larger titles like Fortune. That often turned Business 2.0 into an afterthought; big advertisers like Microsoft and Intel were offered discounts on other Time Inc. business titles if they would also buy pages in Business 2.0.

I’ve been a reader for many years and even though I read multiple blogs and online news sources daily, I always find interesting stuff in the magazine. It also helps me synthesize what I’ve read on the Web in the last few months. I’ve also found it’s a great media vehicle to introduce non-web business people to new web initiatives.

I then posted a short status update in my Facebook micro-blogging feed that said “Sebastien is sad to think Business 2.0 magazine might fold in September…”

45 minutes later, I get an e-mail from one of my new “friends”, Colin Carmichael, who’s inviting me to a new group he’s created to save Business 2.0. He told me I had tipped him off to the demise of Business 2.0 and he wanted to do something. I obviously joined the group and invite you to do the same if you like the magazine.

What it means: it’s my first opportunity to experience first-hand the power of micro-blogging, those small atoms of information written in new communication tools like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and Facebook (via the status update section). Very powerful tools. On another note, I believe print magazine usage growth (and by extension revenue growth) will come from specializing, not becoming more generalist. By consolidating their sales force, publishers run the risk of abandoning their specialty titles and future growth. The same debate takes place all the time in the directory business. Should publishers use a different sales force for Internet products or for vertical publications? I think you need to take a good look at where you think your growth will come from in the future and support adequately those initiatives.