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Why Twitter Could Really Be Gone In A Year

OK, I really don't think Twitter will be gone in a year, but I needed a flashy headline to attract some attention. So sue me.

However, I do think the Twitter clock is ticking....

I was having my morning cup of coffee this morning whilst reading the last several hours of my Twitter feed, when I saw one of my Twitter Friends comment on how they thought the Twitter acquisition of Summize might speed up a Google acquisition of Twitter.

While I think that this was an important feature for Twitter to add, I don't think Google is even remotely interested in Twitter. Lest we all forget, Google acquired Jaiku last year. The same Jaiku that was being lauded as a "Twitter Killer" when it was barely out of the gates. Since the acquisition, there's been very little-to-no news on what Google plans to do with the technology. But let's not kid ourselves here: Jaiku is an activity stream service just like Twitter, and it's hard to believe that they would use it for anything else. From the Jaiku/Google FAQ:

Q: Why did Google acquire Jaiku?

A: Activity streams and mobile presence are important areas where we believe Google can add a lot of value for users. Jaiku's technology and talented team are a great addition to Google's current application and mobile teams.

It's no secret that Twitter is battling infrastructure issues, and they are basically trying to repair a 747 while it's in the air. A lot people are bailing on Twitter and trying services like Friendster and Plurk, among others. But what all of these other services are missing is the simplicity of Twitter. There's either just too much "noise" or the interface is too cumbersome to use on a regular basis. The vast majority of people I know are just plugging away on Twitter, and hoping that they get their act together. The Summize acquisition is a step in the right direction, but is it enough?

I have a pretty lousy track record when it comes to my prognostication skills - just ask my bookie. But I think that within six months you will see Google relaunch the Jaiku service in some fashion. My odds are on:

• A simple activity stream
• Integration with a number Google applications & services (gmail, gtalk, gcal, maps...)
• Activity streams that can be shared among a group of users (Jaiku Channels)
• Archive capabilities that will allow users to search dialog streams from Day 1

So, once the Google bomb drops I think we will see a very viable alternative to Twitter. It will certainly be a more reliable and feature rich alternative. And while there will always be loyal Twitter users, Twitter as we know it now probably will be gone, as in acquired, within a year. They simply can't continue to burn money with zero revenue to show for it, regardless of how many users they sign on. Maybe Yahoo! can find a place for them in their left-hand navigation under OMG!

What's the value of social networking?

Yesterday, I published a post that questioned the amount of time we put into social networking and whether or not we're actually getting anything out of it.

Shortly after I posted, a friend sent me a message on Twitter, with a link to a very similar thought process, "Are Social Networks just another MMO Grind?"

I don't think I would have come up with this analogy in a million-years, primarily because I never really played MMO games, but I know exactly what he's talking about. There's a lot about social networking that feels like you are just working to get to the next level. And then when you get to that next level, you have to work harder.....to get to the next level. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Brilliant...I couldn't have said it better! Which leads me to my original point: Where's the true value in social networking for the vast majority of people who aren't on the grinding away on the treadmill?

I would suggest that we haven't really seen the "killer app" for social networking yet. It still feels like we are building out the infrastructure a bit, but waiting for someone to get it right. I'm showing my age here a bit, but I can remember when the Internet had very little value except for the power-users that knew how to navigate it...and then along came e-mail and all of a sudden the infrastructure become indispensable.

There are already a few applications that I think might give us a glimpse into what that killer app will look like:

ChaCha: These guys have taken some heat in the Web 2.0 world for their original model of human-powered search on the web, but they have recently embraced the mobile application and I expect big things. They still use the notion of "guides" right now, but I would expect that this might evolve as well.

GetSatisfaction.com: This is simply a great application of exposing the social infrastructure for something truly valuable: customer service. If you have a problem using  a product or service, who would you rather reach out to: a) someone being paid $10/hour to answer the phone, or b) other consumers of that same product or service who are willing to collaborate to help solve your problem? This is currently the customer support model for Twitter, and you can see several other companies getting on board.

The common thread here is that these applications are starting to show us how to leverage the wisdom of crowds in a valuable and productive way. Hopefully, we'll see more attention given to these types of applications in the Web 2.0 world as the infrastructure starts to plateau.

How much time do you put into social networking?

I've been thinking a lot lately about how and why people use social networking communities like Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, etc. At the end of the day, what do you really get out of  all the time that you put into it? For me, my time is probably my most precious commodity, and I find that I have very little of it to spend on activities that don't show some form of a "Personal ROI". In other words, I need to get something out the process; mentally, spiritually, physically, financially, whatever.

I came across a post recently called "How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take?" on a site called "Museum 2.0". According to the site, the purpose is "to explore the ways that the philosophies of Web 2.0 can be applied in museums to make them more engaging, community-based, vital elements of society."

It's a really nice post, written for an audience that is not a bunch of social networking junkies. The gist is to try and explain how "normal people" can participate in social networking activities based on how much time they have to invest.

(image courtesy of Museum 2.0)

This feels about right to me, although there are a few holes and the far right can be left to interpretation. Twitter is a fairly low-impact activity on my time, and I seem to get a lot out of it right now, so my Personal ROI for Twitter is pretty high. Blogging certainly takes more time, but it's a creative outlet for me and seems worth the effort.

How many hours a weeks do you spend on social networking, and is any of it generating a Personal ROI for you?

The Idiocy of Crowds

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!"

"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" - Charles Mackay, 1841

One of the most amusing pastimes for me the last few days, is to follow what has been going on at SxSW via some of my Twitter friends. Actually, I haven't had a lot of say in the matter because that's just about all I have heard over Twitter. The sonic boom of the interactive portion of SxSW was the Mark Zuckerberg keynote, which was moderated by author Sarah Lacy.

I wasn't at SxSW and I obviously didn't attend the keynote. All I know is what I've read in various tweets and blogs, and what I can glean from watching the video, but my first reaction is that this is was a ridiculous overreaction.

I won't defend Ms. Lacy for a second, but what I heard via Twitter and what I watched in the video were two different things. She obviously went for the whole "casual fireside chat" route, and it failed miserably. But then again, Zuckerberg is notorious for being a very difficult  subject to interview and he clearly could have opened up a bit more and actually answered some of the tough questions, but that's not his style. In the end you have what seems to be a rather boring interview of  someone who doesn't want to be interviewed in the first place, and the crowd goes ape shit near the end because they don't like how the session is going. Boo-farking-hoo.

(Memo to the Web 2.0 crowd: If this story winds up being the hottest news to come out of the biggest conference in your space, you might want to knock the dust off of your résumé.)

I found it even more entertaining to hear about even worse behavior at a panel  on analytics. Second verse, same as the first. You have a bunch of people backchanneling in the audience, and they start revolting as soon as they don't like where the session is going. The difference between the keynote backlash and this one, is that these geniuses were intentionally disrupting the session on queue. Fortunately, the panel ended before the crowd got to close with their big finish by dropping their pencils off their desk at the same time.

Look, I get it. Backchanneling a live event isn't exactly a new concept, and tools like Twitter and Meebo are huge enablers for this, but it doesn't give you a free pass to act like you're twelve. Conferences on the scale of SxSW are a logistical nightmare to put together, and it's incredibly rare that every speaker will nail each topic to the satisfaction of the crowd. The only thing that these petty backchannel outbursts accomplished is that they will make it harder to round up speakers next year that are willing to put up with it.

Do we still need professional critics?

I was stumbling my way around the Internet yesterday, and ran across a company called Critical Metrics. They are apparently still in "stealth mode", but not sure what that even means these days, as they have working site and their first application is open to the public. I think the trendy thing to do is call the company in "beta"!

At any rate, it's a fairly interesting idea: By now, everyone knows about the value of the voice of the consumer, and using consumer reviews and ratings as a selling tool. But the Critical Metrics value prop is based on making recommendations based on the collective wisdom...er, tastes of professional critics, and not the general public. Their first application of this algorithm is in music playlists, but their site alludes to future applications as well. I'm not entirely sure I'm sold on this yet, as the whole music recommendation market seems pretty crowded to me, and they have an uphill climb to make this a success.

The bigger question for me, is what value do professional critics have in the media today, especially the Internet? When is the last time you bought music on the advice of a review in Rolling Stone, SPIN, or Blender? Or went to see a movie because Roger Ebert gave it four-stars? Perhaps this is where my version of reality is somewhat skewed by what I do for a living. I spend all of my time on the Internet, so my exposure to consumer reviews is about 100x my exposure to professional critics. The only exception to that rule might be with food and wine, but I think you get the point.

But maybe, just maybe, this is the genius of Critical Metrics: perhaps they recognize that the role itself of the professional critic is gradually shifting to that of a "highly trusted reviewer", and they are not simply aggregating the recommendations of a group of random people, but a group of people who are perceived to be experts at what they are reviewing. Take the collective wisdom of professional critics, and expose them to a customer that may have long-forgotten what value their opinions actually hold. An interesting evolution of the role of "critic", and time will tell as to how this will play outside the context of mainstream media.

On a side-note, the guy behind the idea is a familiar name to those of you that remember the early days of the Internet: Joey Anuff, co-founder of Suck.com. Now that I've dusted that memory off for you, try not to spend the rest of your day reading the archives!

Community-Driven Commerce in Real Time?

I'm "thinking out loud" a bit in this post today, so please bear with me...

Since I've been involved with E-Commerce and the Internet in general, there has always been this school of thought that you need too make your site "sticky". This can mean many things to many people, but in terms of selling on-line, you typically want to build long-term relationships with your customers, and provide content to keep them on your site longer. The obvious net result is that repeat visitors buy more often and have a higher AOV. And certainly the longer you can keep them kicking around on your site, the more opportunities you have to merchandise relevant product to them and ultimately increase your conversion.

Sounds simple, right?

Wrong. The two biggest problems that I have encountered are that:

1, ) Not all of your customers really want a relationship with you. They may be very loyal to your brand, and they could be frequent shoppers on your site, but the vast majority of them probably choose to express their loyalty in a very simplistic way: they are buying from you instead of someone else. Yet, there are no shortages of E-Commerce sites that are designed only for their own definition of  a customer relationship: you either have to be a part of their loyalty program, or choose to submit yourself to building some flavor of "My Something", which is typically nothing more than profile building.

There's certainly nothing wrong with this approach, except that while it works great for the roughly 20% of your customers that choose to participate in this process, it's typically done at the expense of the long tail of your customer base. What are you doing to foster a "relationship" with your customers that don't want one? Pounding them over the head with your loyalty program or repeatedly asking them to build a profile isn't the answer.

2) Your customers probably don't trust you as much as you think they do. No matter how powerful your brand equity or market share is, there's very little that the customer will take at face value. One of the biggest hurdles that any on-line retailer has to face, is building trust with the customer at every inflection point in the shopping process. We can't really communicate with the customer while they shop, so all that we can do is try to anticipate potential problems and address them as often as possible on our site.

Enter the concept of community-driven commerce and word-of-mouth marketing. While your customers may not trust you all that much, their trust in the collective opinion of other consumers is on the rise. According to an Edelman study earlier this year, consumer's trust in "a person like me" has gone from 20% in 2003 to 68% today.

“We have reached an important juncture, where the lack of trust in established institutions and figures of authority has motivated people to trust their peers as the best sources of information about a company,” said Richard Edelman, president and CEO, Edelman. “Companies need to move away from sole reliance on top-down messages delivered to elites toward fostering peer-to-peer dialogue among consumers and employees, activating a company’s most credible advocates.”

(And just to beat someone to the punch on this....yes, the irony of quoting Richard Edelman on the subject of trust is not lost on me.)

I'm a long-time proponent of this trend myself. We have been displaying very rudimentary customer ratings and reviews on our site for several years. This year, we handed off the management of this functionality to BazaarVoice, as it had grown far beyond our ability to manage it effectively in-house, not to mention our inability to truly measure the impact it was having on our site.

While I think that it's imperative to harness the voice of your customer, and I believe that this is arguably the best approach available today, it's still based on predictive behavior. You have to encourage your existing customers to rate products and write reviews, and then place that content where it will have the most impact on future customers.

As I was reading this post on TechCrunch today, it struck me that there could be an application here for E-Commerce. In short, Geesee is an embedded chat service, that allows consumers to chat about any subject, across multiple sites.

The social marketing implications of this concept aside, it immediately struck me that perhaps this could be the next step in community-driven commerce. What if there was a way for your customers to communicate in real-time with other customers who are also shopping your site, in a relatively controlled environment?

Shopping on-line has always been a fairly solitary exercise, but that doesn't mean that it has to be.  It's clear that consumers value the opinion of other consumers, so wouldn't the next logical step be to remove the lag in putting them together?