THE MOST PRODUCTIVE thing I’ve done this week is to use Gmail’s “More Actions/Filter items like these” to rid my inbox of spam and bacon emails, which makes my inbox much more useable.[...] I so want this same feature for Google Buzz. Imagine if you could say “get rid of Scoble anytime he talks about Twitter.” Or, if you could filter out something like any message that includes the words “Tiger Woods.”

Wouldn’t you want this too?

I’ve been thinking about filtering a lot since I became a regular user of Twitter and Friendfeed in 2008/2009. Here is my riff on this question, expanded from my initial comments over on Buzz:

Yes, intelligent filtering is the future. If Google Buzz can pull off per keyword, per user (or per group) filtering, they will win. It is a huge flaw in Twitter that I basically still have to view all (follow) or nothing (unfollow or block) from a given user, and if I choose “all”, then everything arrives with the same priority.

This is simply not how we’re going to overcome information overload. Remember that in an information economy, attention becomes the only scarce resource. So it is worth saving and protecting your attention. On Twitter or any other social media or wider “information stream”-type of service.

(Yes, that includes Email as well. Your email is simply yet another inbound information stream you consume. Sometimes you reply to something, sometimes you forward something.)

Whoever does the best job in helping you to do this has a true business proposition, and will be rewarded by the marketplace. (Here is a nice summation of the problem by Louis Gray in slide deck format.)

Now the reverse case is also important: Per user (or per group) surfacing (“track”) of keywords, that pops items of key interest to you to the top of the heap of your inbound stream, past all others.

E.g. when Scoble talks about “Twitter Lists”, on ANY service I am aggregating, I want to know.

(For the purposes of this discussion, I am assuming for this to happen on Buzz. But it could be anywhere else as well. Buzz just happens to be in a position of being able to 1) be relatively unencumbered by ingrained user habits, since it is so new. And 2) have the assembled computing and engineering power of Google behind it.)

Now Friendfeed was getting close, but never put all of the pieces of the puzzle that they had together in a truly usable form. Specifically, it was (really is, as it’s still running, yet not being developed anymore) not letting saved searches be piped back into its “Friend Lists” (their name for their grouping of users).

And the saved searches (“filters” really if you think about it) themselves were stripping too much usable meta-information from the results items, as to then still be as useful in a “high priority inbound” stream. E.g. no Twitter avatars imported from Twitter Search keyword feeds, asf.

There is much heated discussion on Buzz right now on whether people’s Twitter streams imported into Buzz are polluting Buzz with noise. But this discussion is really missing the point, as information overload is never a failure of the sources, only of the FILTERING!

Because there are likely to be important items coming from Twitter that I absolutely do want to see right away, only on Twitter it’s still near impossible to manage that.

(Twitter has shown little interest in providing a more granular search experience, e.g. search on your friends only, or per List only. A current workaround is ListiMonkey.com Alerts, but that goes to your email inbox, hardly a real-time environment. And desktop clients like Tweetdeck are also of limited help, because their search/filter function for groups/Lists requires that you have those opened up as a column.)

Have you yourself experienced instances where you saw a link to a story days or even weeks after it was first published, and felt that you really would have wanted to see this information right as it became available? Tons of really useful stuff is floating by us, as we simultaneously complain about too much noise in our inbound social media.

EVERYTHING is potentially polluting your Buzz inbound stream, IF it has you miss some key item you really did want to see right away.

I am currently only following a little less than 200 users or so on Buzz, and there is already way too much to scroll through (even without Twitter items) to not waste a lot of time, and keep me from seeing the things I could/should be seeing instead.

Robert Scoble deserves thanks for tirelessly bringing this stuff up, he was already at the forefront of the discussion over on Friendfeed, back before that service was bought out by Facebook and for all intensive purposes “mothballed”.

I believe that Buzz itself will thrive or wither based on whether they can outdo the baseline that Friendfeed set with their attempts at filtering. And on how quickly they can move to iron out the considerable feature lag and mistakes before people lose interest.

Again, one would think Google could pull it off on the engineering side of things, as long as they listen to and learn on the social, user centric side as well.

While on the subject of filtering, productivity, and Email (since Buzz is – sort of – integrated with Google’s Gmail) that Robert raised, how would it be if key inbound emails on a per user basis would pop into your Buzz stream (e.g. your direct reports, bosses, key clients, spouse, etc.)?

It would really just be another surfacing filter as described above. Who cares that the text/images/content was sent to you via email/SMTP protocol. It could be just another Buzz source (like your Twitter, flickr image, and Google Reader RSS streams right now), only these email “posts” would have to be private.

You can already create Buzz posts by emailing them to buzz@gmail.com from your attached Gmail account, which is a standard that started with the mini-blogging services like Tumblr and Posterous. You can also click “email [this]” on any Buzz post, and while the interface is still a little clunky, your a Gmail message write box will insert itself under the post for you to send the message:

You can see that it is not very far from there to place your key emails (by surfacing filter) into your Buzz stream. The key to making things really usable is that Buzz would need to offer handling options intelligently based on what the inbound source is.

For email, show reply/forward/etc. but also maybe a “Rebuzz” (with caution, assuming it’s appropriate), asf. The latter could speed up the current lag of moving stuff from email systems back onto the Web.

That’s where Friendfeed was failing, because it didn’t have a Retweet button on Twitter items, etc. If Buzz were to become a better Twitter client than Tweetdeck or Seesmic, WITH good persistence, archiving, detailed discussions beyond 140 characters, WHITESPACE in comments (thank you Google!), and powerful search of everything you aggregate into it, then who’s going to stop them? They could run the table.

For right now, one has to improvise, e.g. with a little application called BuzzCanTweet.com to send one’s Buzz posts back over to Twitter. This kind of thing had really already become fundamental, and yet Buzz doesn’t have any outbound forwarding besides email to start. Instead, a young guy from Sweden had to set up this work-around.

OK, back to the integration issue: While we’re at it, why not have your Google Alerts pop into your Buzz stream, instead of emailing you as it does right now? (Or have a filter set to pop those Alert emails into your stream as described above.) The possibilities for integration of various Google services appear wide open.

If Buzz can keep driving deep integration with other Google services, and thereby out-innovate the competition, it will go far. Filtering and the email integration could make Buzz the near undisputed inbound stream to manage your social media attention, and really possibly most of your online attention.

For that to happen however, the Buzz team will have to put on the afterburners. Google should be able to pull it off engineering-talent-wise. The question is, will they have finely enough tuned social sensors & vision to do this?

The opening salvo of misjudged privacy issues, urgently missing features, or unthinking adoption of some of the most problematic features from Friendfeed, certainly made one wonder if Google can ever get social right. Is there a social tone-deafness that jinxed all of its previous attempts besides the YouTube purchase (Jaiku, Dodgeball, Orkut, Wave, etc.)?

Let’s hope for our scarce attention’s sake that Google can get it right this time, and apply its unquestioned engineering talent in ways that actually become truly useful to social media. Filtering will be the key.

The attribution problem: In order to get rid of the attribution confusion, in your timeline we show the avatar and username of the original author of the tweet—with the person who retweeted it (whom you actually follow) in the metadata underneath. The decision is that this:

…is a better presentation than this:

No fault of @AleciaHuck’s but the first is simply easier to read, and it gives proper credit to @badbanana. Even if you know @AleciaHuck, there’s no benefit to having her picture in there.

 

So here is the big problem: That last half sentence (my BOLD highlight) shows complete ignorance of the way that Twitter works as a social engine and calculus.

Twitter users, whether consciously or not, are with each tweet putting a little bit of previously accrued social capital they have with their "followers" (Twitter users that are subscribed to them) on the line. So the act of forwarding another, often third party user’s tweet is significant in that it is a form of a micro-endorsement for this user that their followers are themselves typically not even subscribed to.

If the text of the forwarded tweet or (in many cases) the link to further content that it contains is ill received, the retweeting user in some sense is held accountable by their followers. At best, only a little bit of "social capital" is deducted, at worst, some will unfollow completely.

The user has put their stamp of approval on the retweeted content, and if it contained a link, it is largely expected that by extension the content at the end of that link was read and approved of as well.

(There are some exceptions to this when the news contained in a tweet is considered "breaking" enough so that the timeliness criterion overrides the need for checking out all of the content at the end of a link first. But, as most Twitter users have discovered before, the risk of forwarding something that turns out to be of questionable quality or outright bogus or even harmful goes up exponentially. "Blind" retweeting of links should be avoided.)

So, because of this micro-endorsement element, a Retweet has always gone well beyond a mere surfacing mechanism. Social media statistician Dan Zarrella in a prescient post a few months ago warned that the proposed RT formalization would do away with this form of social proof inherent in the RT convention ("Using the orig­i­nal poster’s pic & name in my time­line destroys any social proof the ReTweeter may have lent the Tweet.").

Known Avatar = Benefit

Back to the example given in the excerpt, there is in fact a GREAT benefit inherent in the picture/avatar of a user you have been following for any length of time: It is known to you, it is far less of a stranger all things being equal.

You have imbued it in your mind, by way of repetition (active Twitter users may be seeing the profile pictures/avatars of other active followed/friended users hundreds or even many thousands of times), with some trust and social capital.

It has been pointed out by multiple people that the surprise of seeing a "stranger’s" avatar in one’s Twitter inbound stream is downright shocking to some people, so strong is the identification with known people one has been following.

This has been one of the 1st rules of Twitter: You see only who you elect to see (i.e. follow).

If the avatar is now switched out to show that of the original author of the forwarded tweet, this trust is gone, unless the recipients (your followers) also happened to be following that same user. But even if they were, you, the Retweeter, are now cut out of the equation!

The social capital you put on the line is now not really rewarded anymore by having you be clearly associated with the surfacing of the information for the benefit of your followers. This can, especially over time, have several unintended consequences:

1) You might RT less because of this (largely unconscious) calculus, after all, why primarily boost the other person when you are taking most of the risk.

If the feature is used less, it would go the way of another Twitter feature that has withered on the vine, Twitter Favorites, which because of a lack of a meaningful social feedback cycle have languished as a form of a somewhat dysfunctional personal tweet bookmarking. Incidentally, the new feature could have been subsumed into and under the name of the old Favorites.

Paris Lemon of TechCrunch just wrote a post (see below) where he predicts that Twitter will have to allow people to turn off all inbound Retweets (per user shut-off is already supported) due to the "stranger shock" factor mentioned above.

He also thinks the feature if left to stand as is, will lead to a bifurcation of the use of Retweets into "old-school" and "new", with possibly unintended or of yet unforeseeable consequences. Which would certainly not be a desirable state of affairs for Twitter.

The control it hoped to gain from the Retweet implementation would largely be void if say half of all Retweets can’t be counted by their scheme.

2) You might retweet less carefully than before because you begin to think by way of 1) that your retweeting has become less meaningful to your followers in the sense of you having done the surfacing.

Other services like FriendFeed (FF) have had features that are similar to Twitter’s new offering for a while, e.g. on FF it is called a "Like". But the "Likes" there never quite had the social touch, mostly they’ve been used as just a surfacing mechanism, with the social element coming from FF comments.

It has also been pointed out by Robert Scoble and others that all Twitter had to do to avoid some of the angst surrounding the new feature roll-out, was to name it something different than "Retweet". Which makes sense, once a "brand name" of sorts is established in people’s minds, they are very loath to rearrange that in their mental real estate (lesson for all business great and small inherent here).

3) Context is clearly lost without the Retweeters avatar, and because the new Retweets presently cannot be annotated as you were/are free to do under the old "RT @username: …" convention.

This means you cannot express why you decided to forward the information if so desired. But intention and context go a long way in all social interactions (just think of the nuances inherent in most inside jokes, popular culture speak, sarcasm, asf.), and to cut it out is to misunderstand the social in social media.

The small annotations, even just 1 or 2 words, or a glyph or an acronym, can make all of the difference between sterile copying and the kind of mild embellishment or emphasis that we all use when telling each other stories or news in our social circles.

Are You A Good Little Retweet Automaton?

The new Twitter RT wants you to be a good, anti-septic, little forwarding automaton. Big mistake, think about what would it would be like if all of your social interactions used primarily direct quotes when relaying what a third party said.

TechCrunch’s Paris Lemon in a good, detailed post about the New Retweet conundrum titled "Simple Is As Simple Does: The Risk Of Retweet", echoes some of the points above:

The second point may actually be even more problematic for Twitter: Users want a way to include their own statements in Retweets. The new way of doing this does not allow for that. The fundamental principle behind this should be obvious: If you share something, there’s a natural desire to explain why you’re sharing it. That’s what a lot of people do with current retweets. Even if they just add “LOL,” it shows that they think the tweet they’re sharing is funny.

We’re also vain. Sometimes retweeting something is more about getting your say in rather than simply highlighting what someone else has said. Or, maybe you’re even retweeting something because you disagree with it. With the new Retweets, you can’t let that be known.

Social media had just given us all a voice, why would we want to give some of it up again to satisfy Twitter’s data management needs?

Lance Ulanoff wrote a great post on some of the awkwardly Orwellian language used by Twitter in the new Retweet implementation and in some of the explanatory PR that has gone along with it.

It appears as if the entire feature change is primarily cooked up for the benefit of Twitter’s ability to easily count Retweets and maybe make money off of the emergent surfacing derived from it. Strange, since they have already been doing something just like that IN FREE-FORM with Twitter "Trending Topics". Why the hand-cuffs now?

Williams (@ev on Twitter) claims the new feature’s goal is "helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible." But the cognitive dissonance you may experience with this fundamental change will at best only slow things down for you.

All of these points taken together would explain the so far decidedly negative reception of Twitter’s new Retweet feature. By the way, the oft-repeated excuse that users will reflexively react negatively to any kind of change is a poor fig leaf here:

Twitter users so far have enthusiastically embraced the new Lists feature, a rather substantial change, since a few weeks ago. This obviously isn’t the case with this new RT feature.

And Twitter could have really seen all this from a mile off, since around August when the intentions for the new RTs were first announced. As already pointed out above, back then Dan Zarrella and others created some amount of buzz in the community for "saving" the established, user-borne, well-liked format, using among other things the ominously named "#SaveRetweets" tag.

Why not listen to your users, Twitter? They’re the reason for your success.

[Will social media services finally begin to understand that their very existence has changed the game? See what I wrote here:

Social Media Lessons: Controversy Erupts Surrounding Facebook’s “Twitterization” Redesign ]

Given the overwhelming, ever-exponentially-growing flood of information in the age of the Internet, being able to perform sophisticated searches is becoming so important that it isn’t too far-fetched to call it a literacy issue. Without these skills, you are in a sense in danger of becoming functionally illiterate in this brave new world.

Those individuals (and by extension businesses) with advanced search skills will be running circles around those without, because it saves so much time to search intelligently, and because a lot of answers can be found that are simply impossible to find otherwise. In a way, this separation into the search haves and have-nots has already been occurring over the last 5+ years.

And by the way, all of this isn’t simply about Google. Not at all. In a moment, I am going to walk you through a number of examples of advanced searches, and some of the tricks and techniques underlying them. But before I do, let me stress one other thing:

Even if you do only the most simple of "everyday" keyword searches, you are already going in the right direction. In fact, if you aren’t doing it already, make it a point for the next two weeks to stop yourself at every turn and ask: "Could I be doing a search right now to speed this up?"

I think you’ll find that the answer is almost always YES, and that it will be well worth your while to develop this as a new habit (a habit takes about 30 days of repetition to form).

Simply search for everything, and avoid using "manual" searching, i.e. avoid scrolling through documents, web pages, and lists both with your mouse and visually, asf. to find passages/names/etc. you’re looking for. Search options exist in Word, in your browser, on blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook, everywhere. Yet often we don’t use them, and the authors of software/Web tools don’t put sufficient front-and-center emphasis on search capabilities/ease-of-use.

For example, in your browser, never again manually search through long Blog comment threads or other large pages/articles manually, use your browser’s "Find" function and type the first few letters of your name or keyword, etc.

Granted, Gen-Yers on average are likely far ahead of all older generations when it comes to matter-of-cause use of Google, etc., however I doubt that even they know in large numbers about the kind of in depth, advanced search I am about to show you.

General Search Operator Considerations

Let’s first consider the most important search techniques by way of the so-called search operators. These may sometimes be accessible indirectly through a Web form under the heading of "Advanced Search", but originally they represent a kind of mini-programming language for telling the Search Engines what you want them to bring back. (Search Engines from here on shall include the "Search Function" in Web services other than stand-alone search engines.)

These are the "logical"/Boolean operators you may remember from math class or Logic 101 (fun, I know, but you really want to know a leetle bit about this, at least in these practical applications). Why know about these when you could also get most of the same results from using the Advanced Search forms?

Remember, this is about LITERACY. You want to become fluent in a secret language of sorts, and true command and mastery only come from truly delving into the heart of the matter. Plus, you will find that it is almost always faster to type queries into one search box than typing bits and pieces into Advanced Search forms which tend to look a little different for each service.

So let’s get started. I have made all of the examples clickable links, so that you can study the results. All results should be very similar on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing (formerly Live):

1) Nearly any search engine will assume by default that any separate words you type into the search box are meant as a logical AND, as in "show me all results matching BOTH this word-1 AND this word-2", though it may be in any order, and the words may be quite a distance from each other in the actual text.

You can usually place an AND operator without making a difference, e.g. for clarity in reading your search query, but mostly it will just look like this:

personal branding tips

2) To get a true phrase, a FIXED sequence of several words to match, you have to use ” ” (quotes) around the multi-word search term. Note that some search engines including Google will often bring a direct hit for a phrase to the top of the results heap, even if you didn’t use the quotes. But it’s not guaranteed, so using quoted phrases is much more precise, assuming that is what you are looking for. E.g.

"personal branding expert"

vs. personal branding expert

You can verify for yourself that this is more precise, by clicking both the quoted version and then the non-quoted one in Google, and comparing the number of results returned, in this case about 12,500 vs. 10 Million results (the count is in near the upper right corner in Google):

3) To get a logical OR (also called "inclusive OR"), as in "show me ALL the results matching this word-1 OR this word-2 OR this word-3", you simply type in "OR" between the keywords, or between keyword phrases in quotes:

"personal branding" OR "social branding" OR brand

Some search engines like FriendFeed’s Search also use a "," (comma) to represent an OR. (Either way, be sure to distinguish this OR from the so-called "Exclusive OR", which in essence says: Find only those results that have either Word-1 or Word-2, but not both". As far as I know, none of the search engines support this. Basically it would be like running to separate searches.)

4) Many search engines have an exclusion function using the "-" (dash/hyphen) operator followed by the keyword, phrase, or sometimes additional operator that you want excluded from the results. This in essence says: "Find all of the results for this word-1 except for those also containing word-2". E.g.

Yahoo: branding -"personal branding" -skin

Google: branding -"personal branding" -skin

would find all results containing branding, but not those also containing "personal branding", or those likely referring to skin branding instead of the marketing related kind. This would be a good search to narrow down results to those talking about corporate branding only (though you might find more exclusion terms to refine it even further).

By the way, there is typically no limit to the number of exclusions, though there may be a limit to the overall length of the query string you can submit to the search engine.

OK, with these preliminaries out of the way, let’s dig into the finer details of various key search engines or search functions on key services. Let’s start with Twitter, since it currently has the most buzz around its "Real-time Web Search" possibilities:

Twitter Search

Twitter Search is for now referring to search.twitter.com, as the Twitter Web interface integrated version is currently still somewhat limited/buggy in the result sets it returns. You are basically searching over every single public status update ("tweet") by any user, starting from the current moment and going backward over Twitter’s timeline. (If you are unfamiliar with Twitter or Twitter Search, read up on it here.)

Twitter Search allows all of the search operators already discussed, and additionally for the following:

1) "keyword(s) filter:links" – will seek out tweets containing the keyword or phrases and 1 or more links only. Nearly the same can be accomplished by searching for “http://”, though that will miss the few live links that Twitter recognizes from “www.domain.com/extension” type links.

It can largely be assumed that a tweet containing a link is more useful than one without, more likely to be chatter, unless the tweet is so sharp/witty/deep/inspirational that it would qualify as a quote (of course sometimes you may want to specifically look at the conversational chatter only – example of that further down):

"personal branding" filter:links

2) "from:username" and "to:username" – both of these can be very useful to query over your own tweetstream by topic/keyword, e.g. to find old tweets that you know you wrote, you know you wrote to somebody (containing certain link resources, etc.). Of course you can put any username you choose, and can therefore in principle back-trace all conversations between two users (each can only be used once in a given query).

You can also see if two users have been talking via Twitter’s so-called "@ replies" at all. If there’s no result returned, there was likely no direct communication, or at least recently:

from:unmarketing to:missive

As long as Twitter keeps back-data fully available in Search (currently, Twitter is unfortunately only letting you search back anywhere from 7 to 30 days depending on server loads), you could also use Twitter as a natural form of personal bookmarking this way. Nearly all of the “tags” are applied without extra work, simply as part of your tweets. A workaround to this problem of the backwards time limit is to also use FriendFeed and import your tweets there. FriendFeed currently places no such limitation. More below.

3) Searching for so-called hashtags – a keyword prefixed by "#" (pound sign) – is a way of detecting additional intentionality about tweets. Either it serves as a point of emphasis/visibility by the author (since a common keyword like "#branding" or "#quote" would still show up in a search results even without the specific # prefix), or more commonly, if the hashtag is a unique abbreviation, it serves as a sort of code to be specifically searched for by those that know about it.

This is most commonly done for conferences (recent examples are #140tc and #twtrcon), for ongoing weekly Twitter-based discussions around a given topic, e.g.

#journchat

is for journalism discussions on Monday evenings U.S. Time, or as a meme that becomes self-replicating enough that people participate, and the hashtag gets into the Top 10 "trending" keywords/phrases on Twitter for a while.

Either way, the authors of tweets using hashtags went to the trouble of using the # symbol and/or created a hashtag to highlight something. Use that knowledge to your advantage when searching.

4) "since:timestamp" and "until:timestamp" will allow you to segment out tweets from a specific day or number of days, as needed. This can be useful if you wanted to e.g. view only those tweets for a conference that were actually sent during the duration of the conference, and leave out the chatter before or after, which is e.g. less likely to contain "twitter-casting" of the actual conference panels.

#140conf since:2009-06-16 until:2009-06-17

5) "near:city-name" – this operator will find tweets that originated from a user account that Twitter thinks is the city name you are referring to. Since this is going off of users’ self-reported location field in their profile (and NOT off of some precise geo-tagging a la iPhone location, though Twitter is reportedly working on that), which is free text, and for some contains things like multiple cities, "everywhere", "The Interwebs", asf. this is not particularly precise, but it can still work in aggregate. E.g.

#140conf since:2009-06-16 until:2009-06-17 near:sf

will find all tweets about the TwtrCon Conference that were placed by users based out of San Francisco, though Twitter has no idea (yet) whether they were at the conference in New York or just talking about it.

5) To bring it all together, and for a special tip, we should also consider the so-called Retweet convention on Twitter, a format which allows one to quickly copy & paste a given (useful, funny, etc.) tweet from another user, and forward it on to our own Twitter network of followers, while giving credit to the original author. E.g. I tweeted

"RT @mvolpe: New Blog Post: Are Your Compelling Offers Actually..Compelling? http://tinyurl.com/mlbzw4"

giving credit to user @mvolpe, and used the "RT" prefix to signify the retweet. This is actually a convention that spontaneously arose from the user base (another format uses "via @username", used most often if the tweet text is sufficiently altered, but credit for the find is still meant to be conveyed).

What this means for our searches is that we can either search specifically for "RT OR via" to find tweets that were deemed worthy of retweeting (there are actually entire third-party services set up keeping track of these counts, and thereby surfacing tweets according to their presumed repetition popularity), or, we can exclude those tweets to avoid a lot of duplicates!

So here is a great way to cut down on overly large result sets, taking out most "link-less" chatter and Retweet duplications, as well as "psychology jobs" related postings:

psychology filter:links -RT -via -job -jobs

[As an aside, though still search literacy/awareness relevant:

I use this very example query above, and then pipe the RSS feed from the result into a somewhat more permanent receptacle such as FriendFeed or a Tumblr mini-blog. Remember, Twitter might (and currently does) cut off the backwards reach of your result sets, currently during heavy daytime loads it’s at most about 7 days back. This presents a real problem for your own research/archiving purposes.

Part of the reason may be that Twitter is thinking about making long-range backward data mining a “for pay” feature that large corporate marketing agencies, etc. may pay them a lot of money for (obviously not if they could access everything for free through Search.twitter.com). Only time will tell, though I think it is definitely important for the community to be aware of this possible issue.]

Or, here is another complex example to search for the term "mashable" while excluding tweets from the username "mashable", any @ mentions (or replies to) username "mashable", and tweets with links. Remember how I said earlier that you could do exclusions on some operators? This is an example of that:

mashable -from:mashable -"@mashable" -filter:links

This could be used so that you see what people are saying about Mashable, the blog, that is NOT one of the countless retweets of @mashable, not a tweet from "@mashable" himself, and doesn’t include links to further content. In other words, what people are saying about that brand the most raw and unvarnished form.

FriendFeed Search

OK, upon writing this section on FriendFeed power search, I realized that this post was getting to be really long. So rather than overload everyone, I figured I’d push this and the section on Google search tricks into a follow-up post in a few days.

I hope you found this enlightening, and that you take the time to practice advanced search. To become "fluent" and fully "search literate", you will need to practice. I know that saying this in our ADD world is somewhat of a bummer, but the payoff, especially for your business, can be tremendous. Remember, running circles around your competition and all of that…

If you’re not on Twitter yet, you should be, if only to see what’s going on, and to grab any usernames (for your own name, your company, and your products/brands) that may still be available before someone else does.

(If you are completely new to Twitter, first watch this brief video, and click though this presentation slide deck.)

Even if you decide that you don’t have the time to invest in maintaining an active profile on Twitter, you should at an absolute minimum understand that the new "real-time Web" that is emerging due to Twitter’s popularity is changing the game in many ways:

Not only is it causing redesign changes and opening-up at Twitter’s rival social media services such as FriendFeed and Facebook. Search of Twitter’s massive real-time stream of "Tweets" (the micro-messages that users send to their follower lists), is now being called "the pulse of this society" by wine merchant turned Social Media guru Gary Vaynerchuck. And I would agree:

Should you know what 10 14 Million people (yes, it grew by nearly 50% in the last month), many of them sought-after influencers and early-adopters are saying about you, your company, your brands, your products, your market, and your business’ target keywords on Twitter?

Of course you should. Twitter’s recent geometric growth proves that it is finding itself right at the inflection point from early to mainstream adoption in these last few months. And therefore searching at Seach.twitter.com has become an absolute goldmine of marketing relevant information, one that must almost be considered indispensable at this point:

So much so that there has been much rumor and speculation lately regarding a possible acquisition of Twitter by either Google or Microsoft. In Google’s case, it would be mainly a way to preempt Microsoft or other competitors from disrupting its search dominance. In fact, I have recently argued that acquiring Twitter may well be Microsoft’s last best hope at getting back into the search game in earnest.

This is because Twitter’s so-called Timeline makes its search results extremely, well, timely and time-bound, unlike Google’s and other search engine’s authority models that can feel stale in comparison to Twitter in many circumstances (and don’t allow for a clear sorting by recency of e.g. the 1,000 top results).

A good recent example were searches for SXSW Interactive Convention  panel attendee notes: The results via Search.twitter.com taken from Twitter’s Timeline are much fresher & more pertinent, especially during and right after the conference (one caveat is that Twitter will currently at times cut off backwards results beyond 7 days, apparently due to server load issues).

Google on the other hand will serve up mostly results from SXSWi 2008, 2007, asf. due to its authority model (the pages obviously had much longer to gather links from everywhere on the net, through blog post mentions, social bookmarking, etc.).

So again, one could easily see how Google simply cannot afford to let anyone else walk away with this whole new category/aspect of "real-time Web" search, which in itself has a strong component of recommendation filtering: Twitter users mostly only pass on those items and links that they feel would add value to their followers.

That’s because in a sense their reputation is on the line with every tweet they post. They know that almost instantaneously dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people might hold them accountable if they send them garbage. Compare that to Google, where the ever-evolving practices of search engine optimization (SEO) have already greatly distorted the results that Google will spit out for most commercially relevant keywords.

In a way, Twitter is succeeding, to some extent by seeming accident, at crowd-sourced search models where the likes of Jason Kalakanis’ Mahalo and recently Wikia Search (started by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales) have failed, largely because they could never get enough users and user buy-in to scour enough content. On Twitter, content recommendation happens naturally, as a side-effect of the ongoing conversations or (more or less helpful) "stream of consciousness broadcasting" (sometimes referred to as "life casting").

And incidentally, each tweet containing a link to further content tends to also have a good amount of semantic/meta-data accompanying that link, without much of the nuisance of formal methods such as tagging, because the descriptors are added naturally as I already mentioned.

Are you beginning to see why Twitter is so special? Why you should start running searches at Search.twitter.com today if you haven’t done so up to this point? Go do it, right now. Go there and input queries for your most important keywords.

As gary Vaynerchuck says, (rough quote) "if your business is selling soup, you should go there and monitor the pulse of soup in society"…

(A follow-up post "10 Deep Points About Twitter" is on its way, stay tuned…)

While I personally am all for that change, having been an ardent Twitter user since early last year, there has been plenty of backlash from Facebook users about the extent of these changes. And all of the usual suspects of the blogosphere are weighing in, with heavy-weights like TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble siding with Facebook’s right to basically do what it wants with the free service it provides.

Even going so far as arguing that listening to your customer too much can be counterproductive. Here is a quote from Mike Arrington’s piece "No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook.":

In an interview last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked with me about how users are willing to accept change over time, and that Facebook would continue to push things along. Suddenly, though, they surrender because a few users have a belly ache over a redesign.

If they wanted to make these changes anyway, they shouldn’t have titled their blog post “Responding to Your Feedback.” They should have just continued to ignore the ranting, and announced further changes. Showing that you’re listening to feedback just invites more of it.

Someday, if they’re not careful, someone is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace, who in turn did it to Friendster. Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner.

While I can see their point to a degree, social media represent a whole new ballgame in many ways, which it makes it harder to predict what will happen. While these “A camel is a horse designed by committee" ideas may have validity in the realm of physical product design (Scoble is using a quote from a mentor about the problems with crowd-sourcing the design of a Porsche), I would hold that things may not be so straight-forward in the digital/social media realm:

1) Facebook already had several cases where it needed to retreat in shame from changes to the Facebook platform, the biggest among them the Beacon activity-tracking system that caused such privacy concerns and general outrage among Facebook users that it had to basically be abandoned.

More recently, the above-mentioned Facebook Terms of Service (TOS) debate around changes that appeared to give Facebook almost complete, irrevocable control over a users data and images even PAST the closing of an account, brought forth a similat swift user community response, and backing off by Facebook (for now to the original TOS, with supposedly a crowd-sourced version being on the way).

So with this partial retreat by Facebook, incidentally again due to privacy concerns, they’re really batting 0 for 3. One would think that they would be wising up on the PR front by now. And so much for "Zuckerberg never backs down"…

2) Much of this is not really surprising since Facebook’s users are perfectly empowered through Facebook’s platform:

Perfect for sharing photos with your friends, and throwing virtual sheep at them, but also perfect as a virtual soapbox to… complain about changes to Facebook’s platform.

With Facebooks recent full-scale mainstreaming, bringing it’s rate of new user adoption to well over 1 Million a day, one of the side effects is that now, even if only 1% of users strenuously object to something, that’s still close to 3 Million people howling.

And after all, it is called SOCIAL media, so most controversial/high impact messages have a tendency to spread virally, aided by speed of light technologies, AND Facebook cannot come off as looking patently anti-social.

So while Steve Gillmor is arguing that inertia would tend to win out, I’d say that he may be underestimating the righteous indignation that can come with perceived violations of SOCIAL trust.

Certainly there is room for back and forth here, but at some point, if the rubber band is stretched too far, it could snap. Users could turn their collective backs on Facebook, especially since the internet all around Facebook’s so-called "Walled Garden" is always continuing to hustle, and to add to the functionality available with quantum-leap innovations all of the time, making it less and less necessary for users to be locked into Facebook.

3) Which brings me to my last point: Facebook, having started from an, admittedly elegant (especially in comparison to MySpace) but mostly static, user profile page, has already been changing in response to "the rise of feeds". First the profile was redigned to look and feel more like FriendFeed, leaving a lot of the social apps to languish and whither on a back tab when compared to before (I certainly haven’t used many anymore since that point).

Next, the meteoric rise of Twitter, and its persistent "attention hogging", especially with the "hip early adopter" crowd, prompted an attempt by Facebook to buy Twitter (though the offer was mostly in hard to value Facebook stock), and now the redesign of the user’s homepage to look suspiciously like Twitter with it’s realtime feed of friends’ updates and activities.

But the truth is that Facebook users may not be ready for this level of speed, which Twitter users have already "living and breathing" for months or years at this point. Since I’ve been piping my Twitter updates to Facebook status updates, I’ve always worried that it was overloading my Facebook friends, and have recently throttled the pass-through way down.

So the jury is out whether Facebook users are en masse willing to take it to that level, or for that matter make use of the new possibilities of opening up one’s updates to the world (and thereby to Google to index). And since everyone all around Facebook is sharing things (like photos, which Facebook already just said in its TOS attempt it wants to hoard for itself), it may be hard to both maintain the Walled Garden, as well as open up Facebook in ways that could steal Twitter’s thunder.

So no, I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg has a completely free hand to play anymore. The ghosts that the sorcerers apprentice has called may prove harder and harder to call back. The monster that is Facebook is becoming harder and harder to control.

This should be fun to watch…

Love him or hate him, no one could accuse him of not getting his hands dirty with actually using Web 2.0, including in the service of the creation of countless interview videos with both start-up and established players in the Tech Industry which he posts over on FastCompany.tv. His above mentioned participation actually does appear to border on the super-human, and he seems to at times be simultaneously asking, AND himself be a guinea-pig for, the question of where all of this technology usage might lead us next.

An astute commenter over on the aforementioned TechCrunch "Intervention Post" stopped to

wonder if 10 000 years from now, just one month’s worth of all Twitter content, if preserved, could provide an interesting historical clue to future generations of how life on earth was….like a Pompeii or Rosetta Stone unlocked secrets of past civilizations and languages. And who could blame them upon discovering such a treasure for thinking Robert Scoble the God of the Twitterverse?
 
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/22/im-sorry-robert-but-its-time-for-a-friendfeed-intervention/#comment-2575369

Given all of this frantic Web 2.0 activity and the constant exponential expansion of information and information processing in all of its forms, I found it instructive that several of Robert’s recent posts appeared to confirm a theme that I usually try to drive home with many of my coaching clients: Simplicity wins. Or at least tends to confer an unfair advantage to those companies and entrepreneurs practicing it.

First, his post on his personal discovery of the joys of the dead-simple and low cost "Flip" video camera ("The best gadget I stole in 2008") – the one with the fold-out USB plug arm obviating the need for an extra cable, and one of the gadget sales hits of 2008 – reminds us that users want things to just work, without having to first navigate a dizzying array of menus, settings and options. "Do one thing and do it well" (enough), without requiring training just to do the average use case of that one thing, is the operative mantra.

The Flip starts and stops video recording with one large/obvious button, and records in formats that are immediately uploadable to YouTube et al. without further video processing. I opted for similar simplicity this past Christmas when I selected a Casio Exilim digital camera for its one-button video function and YouTube friendly formats over other possibly more feature-laden, but more complex offerings. Simplicity wins.

Next, Robert wrote on what he sees as the promise of rapid growth in 2009 for Tumblr.com ("Tumblr’s lead dev: Scoble doesn’t know what he’s talking about"), a Web 2.0 "micro-blogging" service (really I consider it "medium blogging") that thrives on a simple posting mechanism (via browser bookmarklet that simply works, and fast) for clipping and reblogging Web content, as well as reblogging the "Tumble blog posts" of other Tumblr users one follows – all with automatic attribution. Tumblr may well be the currently fastest way for a complete novice to get a simple blog up and running, and then actually post to it frequently because it can be fast, easy, and fun.

Notable competitor Posterous.com pursues a similar strategy by making simple email-based submission and intelligent/automatic media handling its main mechanism. I hope both services continue to push/copy each other’s innovations, add a few more useful features, and above all, keep things simple. Because if they do, they are very likely to win (Tumblr’s bookmarklet post submission already prompted the addition of a PressThis! feature in Wordpress blogging software for example).

Last, Robert did a half-in-jest-fully-in-earnest piece on the comparison of the Twitter and FriendFeed services mentioned above ("10 Reasons why Twitter is for you and FriendFeed is not"). Despite having been one of Twitter’s heavy users with tens of thousands of followers, he had started to really kick things into high gear on FriendFeed since about Q2 of 2008, and may have almost single-handedly driven early adoption of this startup aggregator service conceived by a handful of ex-Googlers.

But while FriendFeed has just won the Crunchies for Best 2008 Startup, Robert makes the case that it has features sufficiently complex that they may prove a turn-off for non-techy users, and could prevent wide-spread mainstream adoption of the kind that Twitter is now experiencing (besides nightly mention and some crowd-sourcing uses by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the likes of Shaq, Lance Armstrong, Hodgman of the Daily Show and Mc vs. PC ads fame, and ex-Saturday Night Liver Jimmy Fallon have recently adopted Twitter to communicate with their fans).

Whether or not sophisticated users like Robert feel that FriendFeed’s advanced features are useful or not is besides the point: What counts is that Twitter’s single-minded focus on 140 character "micro-blog" updates makes it immediately accessible and understandable, whether or not a prospective user ultimately decides that they find the service useful or not (I had previously described how Twitter’s branding also aides in people rapidly "getting it"). This has also made Twitter somewhat of the "Swiss Army Knife of the Internet", prompting hundreds of third-party services, extensions, and uses based on its simple infrastructure in often ingenious ways.

So, three different examples of simplicity wins, all just from one blogger’s posts. I hope they have you convinced that simplicity indeed provides a competitive edge, and that with each additional layer of complexity (each additional step in the use of your product or service), you tend to lose say 50% of your residual audience, prospects, or users. You can do the math as well as I can: You want to keep the number of those additional steps to a miminum. Less really can be more after all.

So my prescription for you, your business, or your new product launches in 2009 obviously is: Keep it simple!