Still working on modifying that habit to posting here instead… :)

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Key excerpt: More proof that (c) copyrights are mostly only killing your ideas – these stats are shocking, the question is, will you heed their message and Move The Freeline?
• Excerpt: Smart take from Scoble on the coming #geo-location service wars – (Geo)-Location was all the rage at SXSWi this year, and will be for the rest of the year into the future. Are you staying on top of this?
• Key excerpt from: “Dear Google Buzz team..” + my footnotes – Google Buzz made a lot of mistakes on launch, so many that it may yet damn Buzz to obscurity. Here are some thoughts on what needs fixing YESTERDAY.
• Key excerpt from: “Twitter Ad Platform Imminent” – We didn’t get the much inticipated news on this from SXSWi, so the question of what it will look like is still the Elephant in the Room…
• My comment on: “15 Features Apple Must Build Into iPhone OS 4 -> An Amazing Mobile Ad System” – Everyone thinks a sort of gimmick will fix digital advertising (whether mobile or regular internet doesn’t really matter). The only thing that can work is…

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

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.

iPad/iSlate/iTablet/etc., heir to the iPhone, destroyer of lesser technology gadgets?!

The name is not the only thing that has been a closely, and purposefully guarded secret:

The blogosphere and assorted Old Media outlets have over the last few months progressively worked themselves into a tizzy over the key questions surrounding Steve Job’s next mysterious, almost Grail-like product.

Like, how big will it be? How much will it cost? How many men died during its construction?

Kidding on that last one, though not by much…

All of this is of course utterly predictable in light of Apple’s tightly constructed Archetype Branding strategy that I’ve been writing about since the iPhone wave. Secrecy is such that the Tablet so far as only appeared indirectly, as a quasi digital ghost.

Pairing Steve Job’s “Wizard of Oz” character (The Wizard archetype, coming out from behind the curtains – i.e. secrecy – with the newest technological marvel), with The Enigma archetype inherent in this elaborate charade, is creating a launch atmosphere unlike just about anything else in current business, or show business for that matter.

Of Wizards, Grails, And Zeigarnik Effects?!

Not only does mystery draw on this powerful archetype, but, just in case you prefer more scientific approaches, the so-called Zeigarnik Effect also explains the draw of an unresolved, “open” loop that has entered your consciousness. Somewhat dependent upon personality, you are likely to feel a strong urge of just having to know.

This explains why even many months ago, bloggers and journalists alike could seemingly not help themselves but to write about the mystical Tablet. And of course from the very beginning, that is just how Apple wanted it.

Even now, well after midnight in the U.S., there are thousands of tweets on Twitter every few minutes expounding one rumored aspect or the next:

Some have even argued that Apple will deliberately sprinkle out little bits of information mixed with misinformation to stoke the fire.

Whatever Jobs will be presenting on Wednesday, and by whatever name it will be called, all eyes will be simultaneously oriented toward “The Great Unveiling”. Compare this natural feeding frenzy to the rather humdrum affairs that Google or Microsoft had given us of late.

Google’s Nexus One Android smartphone launch a few weeks ago was hardly the stuff of legend with its persistent minimalism. And by the time Windows 7 was finally officially launched, so many public Alpha, Beta, and minor tech celebrity testers had already rummaged through every nook and cranny of the operating system AND written about their findings, that it was hardly news anymore.

Now, a sheer endless parade of blog posts and articles has already been written about the Apple Tablet. But those have all been speculation, rumor, and innuendo! (“Will it be a Kindle killer?” “Will it be a Play Station Portable (PSP) killer?” etc. etc.)

The open loop was NEVER closed!

As if any more titillation were necessary, the issue of Jobs’ ongoing illness/recovery and speculation that this may well be his last new product launch as Master of Ceremonies… I mean CEO. And that he therefore will have brought all of his human and, some would speculate, super-human powers of invention, design obsession, and stage craft to bear in this his final Magnum Opus.

Even now we hear whispers: Did he really say that this Tablet “will Be The Most Important Thing I’ve Ever Done.” Did he? Would he? Can the poor computer thing possibly live up to this level of hype?

Robert Scoble indeed asks if the event can even still be covered in ways that news media, journalists, and bloggers have become accustomed to over the years. Or if we need an entirely new, “curated”, meta-experience to fully appreciate the unfolding of this new reality.

And therein lies the only drawback and potential danger of such a tightly choreographed affair:

All of the pieces have to be in place (when Jobs got sick and was absent from one of these launches, the magic was clearly lacking). And when they are, a deep connection and expectation is formed in people’s psyches that may prove difficult, if not impossible, to live up to.

Beware the pitfalls of this form of powerful Archetype Branding!

We get into the subjectives of what makes natural-born blogger [NBB]. Here are some of the ideas.

1. An natural-born blogger doesn’t wait for permission.

2. A NBB explains things, even when they don’t understand. An NBB is often proved wrong, to which the NBB shrugs his or her shoulders and says something like ["So what"].

3. NBBs go first. If there’s an NBB around you don’t have to wait for a volunteer.

4. NBBs err on the side of saying too much. If you find yourself wishing someone would just [shut up already] you’re very likely looking at an NBB.

Note: Small edits for colorful language… :)

At first sight, it would appear that these points, while well taken, apply only to blogging. And almost in a too-obvious fashion at that.

Unless you have concerned yourself with all manner of business building and entrepreneurship mindset issues, like I tend to do, and take a second look.

Then it becomes clear to you that these are among the most important guide posts for all entrepreneurial activity, and by extension for success in life in a more general sense:

1. Successful people don’t wait for permission

They don’t wait for someone to appoint them to something important (which almost never happens anyway). They give themselves permission to go ahead, they self-appoint.

If you’re uncomfortable with that idea, then you have just identified an important mindset block that is very likely massively holding you back in your business building efforts or aspirations.

I guarantee that almost no one will ever appoint you the expert of your market niche, you have to give yourself permission to be that expert. Of course, you have to make sure you can back it up, else a self-proclamation will ring hollow over time. But the initial catalyst lies within you alone.

2. Successful people shrug off failure

Successful people shrug off failure as if it means nothing, because… well… it doesn’t. All you ever get is a result, all subsequent meaning of that result exists almost entirely in your head.

Any misstep means only that you must be getting closer to your goal than you were before (when you didn’t take any action at all). And of course hopefully you learned something in the process.

The only thing that truly IS tragic is not failure, but being caught in paralysis due to fear of failure. It keeps you suspended in an infinite “possibility loop”, never wanting to find out the truth by either getting proof-of-concept, or not, and moving on to the next concept. It’s a form of addiction to and idea or ideas we have come to hold dear.

Best to find out this week, this month if that idea is only robbing you of precious psychic and other energy…

3. Successful people are ahead of the curve

In branding/positioning there is the well-proven concept of “first mover advantage”, which tends to bestow disproportionate rewards on those that “show up early to the party”.

While the inventor doesn’t always get financial rewards, the Category Leader, the person or business that can install themselves as first for that category in the minds of the consumer (to be taken in the broadest possible sense of a marketplace here), almost always does.

Hence we get Microsoft being more or less unassailable in the business and consumer desktop computing space, while Apple became nearly as dominant in new categories that it either early and decisively jumped on (the iPod), or more or less created (the iPhone).

Anyone else piling into those categories is fighting an uphill, near impossible battle.

And all of this applies to your small business, or solopreneurship as well: Be first, or at least VERY early in something. Ideally by creating a whole new category, which is otherwise known as innovating.

4. Successful People Move The Freeline

While Dave Winer does not explicitly state it here, the idea of erring on the side of saying too much implies the principle I like to call “Moving the Freeline”:

You have to say AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE about what you are trying to get across to people, which means that you have to, in a sense, give your best ideas away!

You can’t hide them behind a Pay-Wall (and even $1 may be too much for people to begin to listen to what you have to say, what you have to offer).

You can’t operate in a way that says: “Once you pay, I’ll tell you something useful or important”.

You can’t drop mere hints about what you have to offer, you have to give away A LOT of the real thing.

Most marketing copy gets this wrong when it merely focuses on trying to persuade, rather than just showing a lot of the goods.

You have to give every possible reason for the other party to do business with you by telling them (nearly) everything you know that could apply to them, free of the irrational fear of being ripped off or plagiarized somehow.

Only then do you have a real chance.

And in order to be able to do this, you have to apply a mindset that most successful people have, what Eben Pagan would call “feeling wealthy right now”.

You see, unless you get to that point of feeling abundant in your ideas right now, you will hold yourself back from getting the business you deserve, because the other party cannot ascertain whether a transaction would be worth their risk.

Does Moving The Freeline Make You Nervous?

In case this kind of openness makes you nervous, you can calm yourself by understanding a few key truths:

The fear that someone wants to rip off your ideas is nearly always an illusion, usually you have the exact opposite problem, that of getting ANYONE to give a dear about you, your business, and your ideas.

Also, the so-called “Curse Of Knowledge” has you systematically underestimate how far you are leaving the non-expert audience behind as an expert in a given arena (see Heath & Heath, Made To Stick).

Even if they wanted to, almost no one would be in a position to replicate your deeper ideas from scratch, without incurring a very significant learning curve.

Of course, if they REALLY wanted to (which is a big if), they could catch up eventually. Which is where the “show up early” principle comes in.

But in the interim, you can, as a consultant say, tell a prospective business EVERYTHING you might do for them in great detail. And it still would be much more likely that they would hire you to work with them, rather than trying to turn around and execute all of these details themselves, cold, from scratch.

To finish up with an example, a prolific tech blogger like Robert Scoble is constantly giving his best ideas away. And certainly a lot of people would say that he can err on the side of saying too much. But that is also how he creates massive value up front, and keeps people engaged with his idea process.

Money and profit become side-effects of his massively “Moving The Freeline” in this way day in and day out. Do thou likewise…

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Key excerpt from FEED 2009 Report: "Digital Primacy..connected consumers are the new mainstream". It looks as if "geeky" interests, tools, and toys are no longer geeky anymore, they are what everyone is using.
• My comment on: "Was the Twitter Retweet Feature Designed to Bring Value to Google & Bing Search?" Twitter has stirred up a hornets nest with its recent feature upgrade, the question is, are the gains worth messing with their archetype branding?
• Key excerpt from interview with Tech VC Peter Thiel: The U.S. debate on gov’t size has a mindset issue. Is everybody asking the wrong question?
• Must-read, & some of this worries me: "What Twitter’s New Geolocation Makes Possible – RWW". There goes what little of your privacy was left. Is the brave new world of geolocation going to be worth the sacrifice?
• My comment on: "Twitter to turn on advertising you will love -> SuperTweet – @Scobleizer" Twitter is about to finally monetize their service, could the new ads they’re invisioning be a game changer?

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

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 ]

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Twitter Lists as a new form of linking – this could be huge Despite some flaws, the new feature is a potential game changer. Note: I am working on a longer, comprehensive post on the new Twitter Lists as well, stay tuned.
• Key excerpts from: "Behind Closed Doors: What’s On the Mind Of Chief Marketing Officers – Jeremiah Owyang" + my footnote The times they are a-changing when it comes to the relevance of social media for business, only Old Media remains defiant/in denial.
• Key excerpt from: "What Startups Are Really Like" – this applies to ANY business Guard yourself against pointless competitive/scarcity mentality thinking.
• Key excerpt from Robert Scoble’s Posterous about impacts of the new Twitter Lists + my footnote First impressions, and some glaring feature omissions are already apparent.
• Key excerpt from reader comment on: "Jason Pontin: How to Save Media" + my footnote A sharply worded reader comment sums up Old Media’s crisis in a great analogy.

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

(Read my original post on why 100 Day countdowns are meaningful and actually work here.)

As you may have noticed, I’ve taken an extended hiatus from blogging this summer. This was large due to my Dad passing away a few months ago, and things being quite topsy-turvy and sometimes emotionally exhausting since.

But I am back, and determined to finish out the last 100 days of 2009 STRONG, which includes posting regularly again.

BTW, since the beginning of this year, I had experimented with capturing shorter, "Quick Hits" Business Mindhacks posts to my Posterous blog at

http://alexschleber.posterous.com

Bringing key excerpts along with quick comments and footnotes through Posterous to my Twitter followers has proved useful and popular (feel free to peruse the archive).

And it also helped me keep the "blogging flame" alive in the past few months, when I didn’t have the energy, or Tech/Business World events moved too rapidly, to work on the kind of longer, more integrative posts that had been the staple of this blog so far.

Combined with my other social media activities on Twitter and FriendFeed, my Posterous posts in some way closed a gap between "micro-blogging" and "long form". Call it mini-blogging.

But the experiment also has come with real drawbacks:

Because Google penalizes duplicate content, I didn’t want to simply forward my Posterous posts to this blog. And this over time has led to too few posts for Business Mindhacks, and too much of my content "held hostage" on a service I don’t control.

Now mind you I have been an early fan and evangelist of Posterous, and I still believe that it is a great service to get anyone started with blogging and/or what has been called "lifestreaming". And I congratulate Garry Tan and Sachin Agarwal on all of their success so far (they finally unveiled "themes" and customization in the last few days).

But the small team has taken longer to add functionality than would have been preferable in my view (in part holding themselves back by wanting to control everything a little too tightly), and in either event many issues around the ideal blogging/lifestreaming/curation platform still remain, as Robert Scoble rightly pointed out yesterday.

So, I’ve decided that as of next week, and after finally updating my blog from my custom/rogue Wordpress 2.3.3 version to the latest 2.8.4, I will create those Posterous style posts in my own blog instead, using Wordpress’ "Press This" bookmarklet to do so.

This will mean more frequent posting, and more raw, immediate, and shorter posts. Which, given the pace at which things are moving, should be a good thing:

One example, I have long promised the follow-up to my "Search Literacy" post, covering FriendFeed Search and Google Search in depth tricks and techniques.

While I was also side-tracked by personal events as mentioned above, things have changed so rapidly (FriendFeed was recently acquired by Facebook, mostly for its founders’ engineering talent, putting its continued long-term operation into some doubt), that some of the content I had already written became outdated before I could even publish it.

So, the lesson is:

Rapid, shorter posting = good.

Outsourcing it away from your self-hosted blog = likely bad.

(Of course I’ll still make time for the longer-form posts every week or two. And yes, the Search Literacy Post, Part 2 is coming as well.)

OK, back to the 100 Day Countdown and finishing the year out strong:

Decide right now what you want to accomplish until then in your business and/or personal life, and you’ll be doing yourself a much bigger favor than if you were waiting around to making those typically flimsy, rapidly forgotten New Year’s resolutions on December 31.

As SelfGrowth.com editor David Riklan recently wrote in a newsletter email:

What if I were to follow you with a camera crew for the next 100 days while you went for your goals? I bet 3 things would happen…

1) You would START doing the things you say you need to do.
2) You would STOP doing the things you know you shouldn’t be doing.
3) You would MAKE monumental performance gains and change your life.

Here’s to your finishing strong!

Best wishes

- Alex Schleber

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!

Then an interview by Silicon Alley Insider’s Peter Kafka with Cuil’s CEO  Tom Costello today reminded us of everything that went wrong with the would-be Google competitor’s lauch, as well as everything that is still wrong with it.

While apparently the outages of the first days have subsided, many of Cuil’s search results are still low on relevancy, and still juxtapose seemingly random images from other websites with a given search result (prompting some cries of copyright violations).

There was much discussion over on FriendFeed involving Robert Scoble and others as to whether this "launch" was done just to position them for a buy-out by e.g. Microsoft for the technology. I tend to agree, given how obviously poorly everything was executed.

They had to have known results weren’t going to be very good, even more so about the sometimes outright embarrassing "false image" issues.

If they didn’t, this would constitute a formidable case of group think, against which one would think there should have been at least some push-back/reality-checking from the venture capitalists that put $33 Million of funding into Cuil.

Then again, they let Mr. "I’m Irish, it seemed natural enough, and works for me" Costello get away with naming the thing "Cuil".

When prompted about the questionable brand naming choice, Mr. Costello attempted a weak defense by saying "[i]t’s hard to find a four letter name…". Why did it need to be a four letter name? Were they trying to defeat Google through shortness of the domain?!?

(Incidentally, very short domain names haven’t really worked out particularly well for anyone, just ask Ask.com, Buy.com, and others.)

Too-cute-by-half "Cuil" comes across like a development code name (like "Longhorn" for Vista, etc.), not like the final product of a well-thought-out branding exercise. Which of course would lend further credence to the idea that this "launch" may have simply been a "buy us already" plea.

It gets even funnier now that a number of sites have posted strong evidence that the Gaelic word "cuil", while leaving the company open to all manner of misspellings and mispronunciations, really doesn’t mean "knowledge" (as still claimed by Costello and Co.) after all.

Given all of these "shenanigans" (sorry, couldn’t resist… and who did these guys have for Gaelic teachers anyway? :), it comes as little surprise that Cuil has now apparently lowered their target from Google slayer to Google backup:

it’s not supposd to be better than Google – just an alternative…

Another similar "crime against branding" name for a start-up recently went to the "deadpool": News personalization site Thoof.com. Their CEO probably also thought that the name was intuitive and "worked for them"…

Today, some not so minor controversy erupted in the blogosphere in reaction to the news that Facebook had just shut down Google’s FriendConnect on its platform. There were a lot of details being discussed re: data privacy vs. data portability between still largely "walled garden" social networks, all of which are quite relevant to a larger discussion on the future of the Web.

And Robert Scoble of Fast Company and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch got into a bit of shouting match on Twitter, a "GillmorGang" teleconference call, and their respective blogs.

I am not going to get into the finer points of the data issues here (but you should by all means read the above posts and commentary if you are into this sort of thing). But once again it appears that some larger strategic issues are being lost in the shuffle.

Check out what I wrote in a comment on a Silicon Valley Insider Micro-hoo post about a week or so ago:

While nothing is certain, this [Microsoft-Facebook deal idea would be] already a much better idea than the Yahoo deal. Given what’s going on right now with MySpace adopting Google’s OpenSocial, and making deals with Twitter, Yahoo, et al. to use MySpace data/resources in their systems, MSFT could actually try to preempt Google from running away with social networking:

Buy Facebook and VERY QUICKLY throw weight behind Facebook’s API as a competing standard to OpenSocial in opening up the "walled garden" of Facebook in strategic ways. Facebook apps are starting to lose developers from what I hear, many of which may be moving to OpenSocial API app development. Such a move could stop the slow-down/bleeding, if developers had a sense that big MSFT dollars were now gearing to put the pedal to the metal…

The longer term question is not IF social data will become complete openly exchangeable on the Web, but when. There is no need to have the same things stored/replicated in 1/2 dozen or more places/systems.

Alternatively, MSFT/Facebook could just adopt OpenSocial, and then look to gain more influence on the standard, trying to out-flank/out-innovate MySpace/Google. No good if MSFT let’s Google run away with it in yet another area.

(I took the liberty of adding a few links and minor grammar improvements into the quote.)

And this, in a nutshell, has been exactly the underlying dynamic of what has been playing itself out since yesterday. Leave out MSFT for a moment (though they are certainly lurking in the background), and the Facebook vs. Google/OpenSocial/MySpace battle lines were clearly being drawn…

This shut-down of Google’s FriendConnect application on Facebook, for which both sides have already offered various rationales, justifications, and rebuttals as to the true facts, is just the first salvo in what is sure to be a prolonged war, with Microsoft’s next actions being the potential wild card.

Not that their entry into the fray would guarantee anything one way or the other, but $45 Billion in mostly loose cash can have interesting effects to say the least, especially if Microsoft could get over themselves on this one and make a true attempt at unbridled innovation for once.

The social network issue in itself is very telling by the way how far Yahoo has been falling behind, and how Micro-hoo would have been far from a sure bet to getting any traction in this area: Go check out Yahoo’s two in-house social developments, Yahoo 360, which is hanging in limbo (view their more or less orphaned developer blog here), and Mash (their dev blog also apparently abandoned).

And as I mentioned before, I have it from inside sources that Yahoo also killed another very innovative social-cum-wiki type project (presumably different from Mash) in its early alpha mock-up stages just before the MSFT bid occurred, apparently that was too forward-thinking as well.

Facebook has certainly built up a lot of sophistication in their platform, there is a lot more there technically for those with the eyes to see it. I am not arguing that anyone should therefore like/love Facebook, but they deserve at least a little credit for things they have innovated.

Also, in regards to the Micro-hoo visions of better competing with Goolge in the ad serving realm, Facebook social ads do have quite a bit of potential as there are so many more demographic targeting angles available. In throwing up ads with social properties or (YouTube) videos, context is everything.

Get the context just right, and someone might actually click on an ad. And the key to the context outside of search (which in itself gives you an idea of what the querent wants), is to have the demographic and other semantic context. And that’s where social networks in principle have the chance to shine.

If Microsoft wants to be in ad serves at all, which they clearly still do, it would be better to figure out how to do it right on Facebook instead of a smaller stage. So, all in all, a Microsoft-Facebook play could be a decent idea, though it would all be in the execution… and MSFT not trying to rename things "Windows Live Facebook".  :)