There are quite a few twitter ad networks in existence who claim to let you make money doing what you are already doing: tweeting. Some promise to pay you while you tweet about the links they provide, others simply pay you to tweet about stuff, stuff from advertisers in the ad networks. To avoid the negative “soul selling” public images of “tweeting for money (a.k.a, spam tweets)”, 3rd party twitter ad networks have been getting sophisticated on its ways to give users options to choose what to tweet, when to tweet. Although small, TweetROI.com is very particular about it, founder Brian actively blogged about ethic sides of tweeting for money. The two kinds of twitter ad networks, big or small, old or new, are differentiated mainly by the transparency they give back to twitter-er. Following is the a list of such ad networks that worth looking at. (notice that I left out tweetbucks.com, due to its affiliate commission payout mechanism being completely different from other players listed below)
Leading twitter ad networks: RevTwt and TwittAd 1. RevTwt.com
Previously known as TwtAd, RevTwt is the biggest twitter ad networks to date. RevTwt lets you tweet about info and links from advertisers in its network. For example, one ads offered to me is “World of Warcraft – Auction House Mastery ($0.050/click): World of Warcraft – Get Mayley Winter’s Warcraft Auction House Mastery 34pg Free Report Here!”.
It’s understandable that these ads are hardly relevant to what I usually tweet. It remains a challenge to date to find the advertisers that will fit people’s tweeting style. If RevTwt as the biggest twitter ad network can not get my favorite airline to be the advertisers so I can tweet about my last trip, I don’t know who else has more suitable advertisers. Then, of course, if I am a WoW fanatic, it would have been match made in heaven, for 5 penny though.
TwittAd.com
TwittAd is 2nd largest twitter ad network. I like its legitimacy, two options to choose.
Option1: Choose the advertiser, post their tweets, get paid
Option2: Opt-in campaign based on what interests you.
I feel Option 1 has more control for me than option 2. I will definitely give it a try just to have a taste of it.
Both ad networks let you tweet for advertisers during a time slot you choose for the day. Ad cause has been around, possibly the earliest player in this space. However, either the payout amount or inherent marketplace efficiency not as good as top guys, they have quite a catch up to do.
Newcomers, reformers
I consider Sponsoredtwts.com from IZEA (still in beta, lot of hypes from TechCrunch), TweetROI, maybe Paymetweets.com new comers and reformers. All of these sites try to build a relevancy into tweets-as-ads, or recommendation tweets based on twitter-er experiences and interest. I often get a “Thank you” note from product owner accounts on twitter when I tweet about their products, for free. For example, when I twitted I saved $400 a year switching from esurance to progressive, their account manager @progressive dropped me a notes saying “Thanks for switching to Progressive! Glad to have you as our customer!”.
You have seen it all, all the interviews filled with buzz words, until this one conducted by Journalist Danny Sullivan, the founder of one of highly regarded blog site: searchengineland.com. The interview covers some extremely important topics such as thoughts on repositioning Twitter, Search Ads, The Twitter Ecosystem & More. I suggest you to take half hour, sit yourself comfortably and absolutely do not take call from your girlfriend during the reading. Ok, let’s read!
Last Thursday, I talked with Twitter cofounder Biz Stone on a variety of issues about Twitter but especially focused around search. In the interview, he discussed: how Twitter may redesign its home page to better reposition itself as a sharing and discovery service; how discovery might be enhanced by perhaps by allowing people to share “groups” of friends with each other; how the Twitter ecosystem of third-party software and services have helped people have “patience” with the service by adding features it couldn’t yet develop; the importance of SMS and more.
The Hotness Of Real Time Search — But What Is It?
All the major players are reported to be talking to Twitter about everything from buying the service to getting its “firehose” datastream of tweets. What types of deals are being discussed? Stone said that it’s all still talk, that no one quite has figured out how they should work together.
Certainly there’s much discussion that “real time” search is hot, with Google’s Larry Page saying last week that Google knows “they have to do it.” But what exactly is real-time search to Twitter? Does that mean just getting Twitter’s information or gathering information from other places where people post immediately?
Stone acknowledges that Twitter is a big part of real-time search, in the sense of helping people find out immediately what’s going on — but he also thinks Twitter’s used for more than that, such as a communication tool between people. And if it’s the biggest fish in the real-time pond, he expects many more will be jumping in.
“I imagine more and more people will be interested in this,” he said.
He also said that the existence of Twitter putting out information so quickly has caused everyone to reconsider what else should go out at real-time speed.
“Twitter has changed the pace or has alerted us that there is a pace at which we can operate in real time. And then, how can everything else follow suit, and do we want everything to follow suit? So like you said, there’s content being uploaded to YouTube right or Flickr right now, there’s tons of stuff being uploaded. That doesn’t mean you necessarily just want everything as it’s coming in. I think there’s still tons of learning to be had here, what’s relevant, when does real-time make sense?,” he said.
The video below has him discussing these points:
Does Real-Time Need A Pause Button
After watching how the mistaken news that the law in California against gay marriage had been overturned spread so quickly on Twitter, I wondered if Stone ever wished he could push a big “pause” button to slow people down or perhaps issue systemwide “Amber Alert” style messages to everyone on Twitter.
Stone said that even before Twitter, rumors could spread quickly just through blogging. But he acknowledged that Twitter can spread information fast and “balloon out,” though rumors can also be put to rest just as quickly. Still, “that doesn’t mean we don’t want to address that in some way” he said.
The video below has him discussing these points, along with the advice that you should take cover in an earthquake first, then Twitter:
A Twitter Genius Button For Discovery?
Where might search go? One key area is to help people discover other people and information that they might not have actively known about.
“I think you can zoom out even more from search. You think of search as a box and a button, but when you think of trends or even an @ reply, those are all exciting queries. Those are all leading to more and more discovering. It just took us long enough to say ‘Here’s search in the web UI.’ There’s a lot more that can be done with Twitter to help people help each other. Right now we have this follow model, but even personally. I’ve been following the same people. Is there a way twitter can show me more interesting stuff? Trends is a rudimentary version of that. OK, everyone’s talking about American Idol. There can be more,” he said.
Of course, Twitter faced criticism when it removed an option allowing people to see replies from those they follow to those they don’t. While Twitter said few used this option, there was plenty of vocal outcry on blogs, from those who found this a great way to discover new people. But those people were having to depend on this due to Twitter’s failure to recommend new people to them more intelligently, he explained.
“Because we don’t actually offer good ways to do that, that was like a hack for people. But I think we could do a better job of serendipity. I agree with that. I wish I could go to Twitter and hit a [iTunes-like] genius playlist button. What information am I not seeing?,” he said.
Friends As Playlists?
Speaking of playlists, Stone also said Twitter’s considering a way that friends could almost be grouped into categories:
“One of the things people have been asking forever for is a way to create lists of accounts, a way to swap lists around,” he said.
He stressed there are no immediate plans for this — it might not even happen. It’s one of many ideas that Twitter is discussing. But it’s an interesting one. In a way, it would turn groups of friends on Twitter into playlists that you could share with others.
For example, I follow a long list of people who are related to search, others who are involved with newspapers and yet others who cover the technology space. Want to follow my search engine people? Get my Twitter “playlist” of people on that topic.
Integrating Keyword Searches Into The Twitter Stream
Early on, Stone said those at Twitter recognized the power of letting people track tweets based on matching keywords, providing an option to get alerts through SMS and instant messaging. “But that’s as far as we got with search,” he said — the company then hooked up with Summize that was doing stuff “light years ahead” of where Twitter was at, leading to the purchase of Summize last July.
Now keyword tracking is fully integrated with Twitter through saved searches, though there’s still an issue to me — matching tweets don’t show in your main Twitter stream. Instead, you have manually click to see the latest results. That doesn’t seem the best experience if Twitter’s trying to promote discovery more fully.
“You’re right. I don’t know where we’re at in terms of the product development, but I agree with you that showing and getting this stuff in front of me, I would like that,” Stone said.
“The the great thing for now is that the people who are really the power users have these things they can go to, but that’s no reason why we shouldn’t figure out better ways to enhance our web experience,” he said.
In the video below, Stone talks further about how the ecosystem around Twitter has reinforced it, noting at one point, “It helped a lot of people keep their patience with us as we took a long time to get ahead of our scaling issues. At least there were other products creating innovative, interesting new UIs for Twitter that kept people happy.”
Old School Twitterer
Talk of clients made me wonder what Stone uses. As it turns out, nothing, at least for when he’s on the web.
“I’m kind of old school. I use Tweetie on the iPhone. I also use Summizer, a dedicated trends tool. If I’m in line at the supermarket, I find myself using it all the time. Other than that, I use SMS and the Twitter.com web site,” he said.
How about others in the Twitter office. Is there any predominant tool or method used?
“It’s all mixed up,” he said, noting the person he sits next to with uses Tweetdeck but all the panels it shows kind of freaks him out. “I think a lot of folks are liking Tweetie around here,” he added.
SMS Is Growing, The Future, Not The Past
Being an iPhone user, it simply never occurs to me to use SMS to access Twitter. But Stone said usage is growing, and that it’s very important.
“For me, SMS is this extra cool thing. It’s not just where we started but it’s also the future. There are 4 billion phones that are Twitter-ready, and Twitter is just as useful on them. That people can use it for access to this real-time network is really inspiring to me,” he said.
The Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck that tweets where it will be in Southern California is a well-known example of Twitter’s real-time network being used by a business, but plenty of others do, such as a bakery in New York that keeps people updated on what’s out of the oven, he said. And SMS can help others do the same.
“Street vendors in India could do it, or places where they aren’t going to have internet access any time soon,” Stone said.
He noted that Twitter struck a deal to bring SMS to Canada a few weeks ago and that overall, “SMS usage is growing like crazy,” especially as more people are getting unlimited SMS packages. Twitter, of course, has also been looking at tapping into some of the SMS fees for revenue, though it doesn’t actually charge users directly for them.
Search Ads “Make Sense”
Last week, a Reuters article quoted Stone saying that the company wasn’t pursuing advertising for a variety of reasons, including that “it’s just not quite as interesting to us” and him noting that “there are no people at Twitter who know anything about advertising or work in advertising.”
That caused many to assume that Twitter either didn’t like ads or wouldn’t do them, which in turn produced an official Twitter blog post saying that Twitter doesn’t hate ads but that taking traditional banners ads is low on the list of ideas.
The reaction to his quote caught Stone by surprise. He’d assumed people understood he was talking about banners.
“People are always asking us, ‘Are you going to put banner ads up?’ We’ve been saying over and over that we’re not going to put those ads on the site. I came to work and saw all these new articles [suggesting Twitter would take no types of ads at all] and said ‘That’s not what I meant. I clarified and said, ‘There’s tons of good opportunity. If you’re on Twitter and looking for something, we’d want to do it in some smart, relevant interesting way.”
So any leading candidates on where ads might go, and how they look?
“The one thing that might make sense are search results pages, but I’m not sure we know exactly yet what that might look at,” Stone said, though stressing there are no immediate plans to ad these.
Twitter Search Versus Integrated Search
Back to search, how have the changes been going? Personally, I find myself constantly going to the dedicated search.twitter.com search page, since until recently, I didn’t have search integrated to my Twitter pages. I also like the cleaner page and bigger search box there. But now that Twitter Search is built into Twitter, are people doing more at Twitter itself?
“We’re still at the beginning of it. People who had been using Twitter use it in a certain way,” Stone said, noting that he has tended to go to Twitter Search himself. “I’d trained myself. But the truth is that there will be more people that join Twitter this year than are on Twitter now. The decisions we make now will have a huge impact going forward.”
Not “What Are You Doing” But “What Do You Want To Find Out?”
This led to Stone’s observation that Twitter’s home page isn’t prepping new users for the service as well as it could, something he hopes may change soon — though he also stressed there’s no set date for this.
“Our front page still says keep up with your friends and family. But Twitter is the place for sharing and discovering right now. I think there’s crazy room for improvement. ‘Welcome to Twitter, what do you want to find out?’,” Stone said.
Indeed, it’s been well noted that plenty of people are turning to Twitter itself, in addition to Twitter Search, to find out information (see How We Search With The Twitter “Help Engine”? for more on this). And that ability to discover things is often the hook that helps people “get” Twitter, rather than the concept that they can Twitter things themselves.
“We had to learn that lesson over again. At Blogger, we used to demo the Blogger UI to people [the control panel to create blog posts and manage blogs]. People wouldn’t get it. Then we thought, ‘Wait a minute, what if we show them blogs first?’ We’d get a reaction like, “Oh, I have a bakery, could I make a blog for that?’,” he said.
Search As Key To Understanding Twitter
With Twitter, it’s the same. People see the Twitter interface and don’t really get it, he said.
“Then you show them search. ‘What do you want to know is going on? What’s your business? What do you do?’ We show them that, and they say whoa, this is crazy. Wait, I disagree with this guy. How do I talk to him?’,” he explained. “We need to reposition the product in a way that’s more relevant to people. That’s just obvious. We’ve focused so much on dealing with the popularity and the technical scaling needed that we didn’t have time for the forehead-slapping part,” he said.
But while Twitter might be repositioned to stress the ability to share and discover, Stone also says it needs not to define itself too much.
“There’s actually a certain awesomeness to not putting too much fidelity on twitter early. To say use it for this is to block out a whole realm of possibilities. We got lucky because we built an API early, and that blossomed into an ecosystem,” he said. “One of those key sentence [of what Twitter is] is that we don’t know. We need to leave in some mystery and the concept of emergence. A big mistake would be to think we’ve figured it all out.”
In the video below, Stone talks more on the subject — better positioning the home page to users and repositioning Twitter as:
A place to share
A place to discover
The “don’t know” mystery aspect
A platform with an extended ecosystem of tools and services
Finally, after the interview, attention was focused on Louis Gray’s article about problems with Twitter Search — how sometimes tweets are delayed in appearing or won’t appear at all if date-range filters are applied. I asked Stone about the issues, and he replied that Twitter’s aware that problems happen from time to time and is looking at the issues.
“Sub-second indexing is brave new world, and we’re in the trenches inventing it as we go,” he said.
I started twitter account 2 years ago, thought it was brilliant because it captures one of the nature of human: laziness. Typing into a few words on twitter not only record my life/thoughts in a quick way, it also immediately get my voices out there. It’s a quick way to create a personal diary without much effort.
1. How I started to gain followers
Only 3 months ago I started using twitter more actively to advocate TRX suspension training(@TRX_Fitness) because I had become of fan for it. In order to connect with fitness minded people, I did the unthinkable: mass followed about 500 people with keywords “fitness” in their profile using some tools. Almost 70% of these people followed me back, within a few days I got a few hundred followers.
but Things have changed.
2. The shift of interest, hence, tweets, hence, everything
As I developed deeper interest and knowledge about twitter, connecting with entrepreneurial bug deep within, my tweets have changed. I realized although twitter has become BIG, it has NOT yet started its new economy like Google did back in 2001/2002, and twitter WILL create a whole new economy pretty soon. This is THE opportunity that I am deeply passionate about and don’t want to lose on. I immediately stopped tweeting about fitness, taking down my profile photo with bare naked six-packs (of mine), changed my twitter username to @theReviewGuy, started tweeting more about twitter eco system; Of course, my goofy personality always shoot out a few daily mundane tweets from time to time, along with my profile pic;
3. The decline of # of followers
I immediately noticed followers started to bail out, a dozen after another. That hurt my ego. Nevertheless, it is understandable. These followers are mostly interested in fitness, hence their tweets/interest are fitness related. Once my tweets are about social media, twitter, they were like: WTF and hit the highway. At the mean time, I am also bored by the tweets about how many push ups people are doing everyday. I want to find out knowledgeable people, developers, business owners, entrepreneurs to connect with, see their thoughts, opens up my own horizon. I immediately went to the action to remove people I follow in hundreds. As the results, my # of followers continue to decline.
4. The rise of # of relevant followers
I found the best way to find people that I am interested to follow, is to find it on your own through “referral”. How can you ever have time to do that? Well, I cheated – I started out by identifying a few high profile people with deep knowledge about twitter and technology, using an auto follower tools to follow the top people they follow. Just imagine this, if you are twitter founder Ev, who would you follow? Of course people he respects. This way I created a pool of people that MAY interest me.
5. STOP adding people in mass
Once I started following these brand new people, I stopped adding more people in mass. I decided to see if their tweets are indeed interesting to me. In a week or so, I continued removing people that tweeted irrelevant stuff, and adding more people one at a time through referrals, @mentions etc. Since this is an ongoing process, over the time I have subscribed to many interesting people that helped broadening my horizon, learning new things, acquiring more knowledge. Of course, I always keep a few amusing people in my pool since they make me smile and appreciate daily average life.
6. Start to communicate, the # of followers will increase
Twitter really is a real time story sharing tool. People started to find my tweet/blog entry interesting, and first time in a long time, # of my followers continue to grow organically. Using Grease monkey’s firefox add on tool, I was able to examine new followers and add them immediately to groups, such as “twitter app founders”, “business owners” etc. The best of all is that 95% of the time the communication is two way. Take this blog for example, twitter app founders I approached have been extremely open and willing to share their in depth start up stories. Hence it created my own “twitter app founder round table series” interview – which gathered quite a lot of attention and more followers. At the same time, I continued to lose “fitness” people.
7. “40 days later, 1800+ followers, steady traffic to my blog, and more interesting stories”
Yes, that is where I stand now. Twitter has shown me a new way to gain knowledge, share stories with wildly interesting people. I had the opportunity to talk/meet with exciting founders/developers/business owners, the experience/knowledge gained from such interaction worth a MBA degree from top business school. And really, twitter is not about # of followers. It’s about keeping it interesting to yourself. Everything else will follow.
Verdict was out, for now. Twitter sees tools, not ads, for revenue.
Many people argue that twitter is or will become a dominant real time search engines. Given Google’s success with search engine ads, it should be easy for twitter to simply replicate Google’s model, putting Bid based ads up along with live stream of tweets on search.twitter.com. Why bother to create “intangible”, “premium” tools?
Twitter has One Solid Reason not to quickly jump into pure Ad-supported business model: people behavior, simply put, how people search. Let’s take a good look at how people use search on Google and twitter.
Majority people search Google to find information they don’t know, because Google gives relevant web results to our immediate needs for information. Businesses find it enticing to show their ads with highly relevant Google search results (links). Google then makes money by charging businesses for showing ads along side with these relevant results. Google was born a utility tool for consumers (as opposed to businesses). Ad model and Google make a perfect couple.
Twitter is different. Majority people come to twitter to share the information, NOT search We tweet about things we are doing, news we just heard of, thoughts bugging us etc…Most of the time we do not search twitter. While search is the ONLY thing we do on Google.com. Who search on twitter? Businesses. Not consumers. Over and over again, we have seen businesses use twitter to FIND consumers followers on twitter, expand customer base, facilitate communication, spread words, compliment customer service etc. Improved Twitter’s search will play a crucial role for businesses to do that by presenting relevant consumers to businesses in search results. The alternative (for businesses to grow on twitter) is for twitter to present businesses in front of consumers when consumers tweet or search. However, showing ads in tweet stream is intrusive, because people are here to share, not search (like Google). Showing ads in twitter search results are not scalable, because majority people spend majority of their time on twitter to share, tweet, NOT search. Therefore, businesses will not benefit from paid ad from twitter as much as they do from Google.
To summarize:
- Consumers search on Google, hence business ads makes sense for Google
- Consumers tweet and social on twitter, hence ad model does not make sense.
As previously mentioned, Businesses find twitter incredibly useful due to its intimate, real time relationship with consumers/customers. However, businesses also have experienced tremendous difficulty to effectively increase their circle of influence on twitter due to lack of tools. This is where twitter can step in and excel:
- Build a kick ass real time search for businesses to proactively reach out to consumers
- Build kick ass “circle of influence” tools to make it easy for businesses to track, measure, manage their follower base and communication stats.
Twitter founders may not have thought this process like written here, but their gut feeling and access to real time data have already guided them to the right track: a business model built on tools to facilitate communication. After all, twitter is the ultimate social sharing utility.
The questions left to ask is: what does this mean for twitter eco-systems? I have some thoughts to share in the future.
More than a month ago, businessInsider.com published an article outlining 5 reasons why Google should offer to buy twitter for 1B, although I have previously written many times that Twitter won’t sell anytime soon for $1Billion, the author brought up the real value of twitter in this article: 1. Twitter is a hell of a lot more relevant to Google’s business than other big Google ideas 2. Twitter could conceivably threaten Google’s cash cow–search
Author also mentioned Larry Page’s crazy talk 2 years ago about Google’s saving world’s energy crisis: could not agree more. Hats off to Steve-Espinosa
If Google isn’t in talks to buy Twitter, it should be.
Specifically, it should offer the company $1 billion, cash.
Why?
Five reasons:
Google needs a huge new growth engine and Twitter might just fit the bill. The current search product cycle is coming to an end. Google needs an “Office” to go with its “Windows.” It hasn’t found one yet. Twitter–and real-time search–could end up being a monster. If Google waits around to see whether it really WILL be a monster, Twitter will be a hell of a lot more expensive. Remember when Yahoo’s Terry Semel whiffed on buying Google?
Twitter is a hell of a lot more relevant to Google’s business than other big Google ideas, such as YouTube or Larry Page’s plan to have Google solve the world’s energy crisis (see his crazy talk of two years ago). Twitter is also about communications, which is the one part of the content-communications-and-commerce Internet tripod that Google is still weak in.
$1 billion is couch change for Google. Google generates $1 billion of cash every two months. If Twitter ends up being worth $0, as some people persist in thinking, Google can just say “oops” and take a minor write-off. If Twitter ends up being worth a lot more than $1 billion, however, as we and others think is likely, Google will make money. If it ends up being a monster, Google will make a lot of money.
Twitter could conceivably threaten Google’s cash cow–search. This “real-time search” meme is actually a compelling story-line. If you want to know what people are talking about right now, you go to Twitter, not Google. Twitter hasn’t figured out how to make bank off that yet, but it may well do so. Remember how much ridicule was heaped on Google’s worthless “search engine” in the early days?
Like Google, Twitter is already a verb. What company do you know of that owns two verbs?
Would $1 billion be enough to get the Twitter boys to part with their baby? It might, actually. $1 billion is still a lot of money, especially for a company with no revenue. And Google’s global distribution and technology infrastructure would be a help to Twitter. So they’d be silly not to take the offer seriously.
In its battle for success, Twitter just made what looks like a minor change, but it could actually transform the lifecasting networking site in terms of increased relevance, and also turn it into a very powerful tool. The microblogging service added "search" and "trending topics" boxes to everyone’s homepage.
Doesn’t sound like a big move does it–especially since the facility was available before, just tucked way down on the bottom of the page in tiny text. While the change is subtle, it adds a whole new dimension to Twitter.
Before Twitter was merely an easy way to keep in touch with your friends, learn interesting facts from politicians [1], Silicon Valley types [2], or maybe even to find out amusing trivia [3], follow what your fave celebrity [4] is up to and promote interesting stories on the Web. But remember: Twitter has a life blood in the millions upon millions of users who pour information into it on a per-second basis. That information may be trivial, incorrect, or nonsensical–but it also contains real gems of "live" information. And the general topics that people are talking about, in a hive-mind [5] style, also reveal what’s going on in the world.
All of this information is now available, live, in real-time, via every Twitterer’s home page. It’s a speedy, socially-relevant search engine that surpasses Google, in some ways. Want to find out what people think about a movie, and even chat to them about it? Just search for the movie’s title, and respond to the Tweets. Want to see if traffic is bad on the freeway? Search and see if anyone is twittering from a traffic jam. The other day we covered how swine flu news is being spread via Twitter–as I write this swine flu is still the number two and three "trending topic". But "happy may day" is number one, with much of Europe on public holiday. And the new X-Men movie Wolverine is number four. And that’s just as I type–the list has changed already.
This new information is useful for every Twitterer, and also has massive potential for sociologists, psychologists and social-network analysts who want to investigate different aspects of public thought in real-time. It may even be useful to marketing types who want to figure out how to best spread their latest advert most efficiently.
On its quest for ways to make money, I suspect Twitter has just taken a very positive step.
Today, ReadWriteWeb.com posted a great article about “Twitter Crowns Bit.ly As The King of Short Links; Here’s What It Means”., as they put it simply about the truth about “Bit.ly”, the URL shortening service, is that its not a URL shortener, its a trend management and metrics platform. It says that
“People share links to pages in the following ways: by email, on Facebook, on Twitter and through countless other methods. The company that does the best job analyzing that sharing activity and creating a compelling user experience based on it is likely to become a very big deal”
It further concludes:
We don’t want to argue that Bit.ly is the next Google, but the technology it’s brought to market could be very important in the indexing of the social web.
Pulling out Google card got me thinking, thinking hard and way back to pre-Google era, and how searches/indexing/analyzing social web could possibly introduce another Google to the world. Following is what I was thinking out loud, and posted as comment to ReadWriteWeb’s blog post (too long, I know). I hope it can speak to the average Joe.
Let me think out loud: before Google, we searched the web and never could find the relevant website for the keywords. Google came out combing through it with page-rank (algorithms involving huge linear/non linear algebra metrics), then the web became an orderly place when we came to Google’s site.
Now imagine the social web, to simplify the matter, imagine social web being only twitter (which is a good assumption), is it a place with order? Are we frustrated that we can’t seem to find the right…hm…tweets with the right link pointing to the website linked upon by social web? For example, Maybe I am looking for the right tweets pointing me the right resources about Portland since I am about to visit (not really) there, search.twitter.com does not rank the resulting tweets on its search page so I have no way to know which one is a good tweet, maybe with a resourceful link. With Tweepz.com, search results show people with “Portland” in their profile, and you can filter the results in a variety of ways, such as # of followers, join dates etc., but it’s not enough, the filter is too minimal, I still can not find the right people/tweets/links. So let’s try twazzup.com, which is much more advanced as it pulls up most recent tweets with “visit portland” along with “top tweets”, “most popular links”, although I have no idea how they are placed/indexed/sorted. Nevertheless twazzup is one step closer to ideal results about “visit Portland”
With a super smart Bit.Ly, tons of data can be pulled out through its API, service like search.twitter.com or Twazzup could aggregate that “link” data, slice/dice it and present along with the search results which will be better than currently served, which also makes me think: would URL shortening service become the engine of next “social web page ranker”? Or will search engines such as search.twitter.com, twazzup, or tweepz (if they catch on soon) be the driving force? Maybe a solution completely new will emerge, or maybe one will acquire another to form a joint force to present an ultimate “social web Page ranking machine”, and that machine will be key to finding the right information.
So, would the next big player be Bit.Ly, or someone else combining the analysis seen on bit.ly, along with semantic analysis of the tweets?
I hope I am making sense for you of this social web search phenomenon, and through which we will understand where to focus our energy.
An American student is arrested in Egypt, and manages to send a brief text with a single word – “ARRESTED” – which is picked up around the world, and leads quickly to his release, helped by a lawyer hired by his university back in the US. In Britain, the prime minister’s office decides people should be able to find out what their premier is doing; as of today, more than 2,000 people do. During an interview at the SXSW festival in March, audience dissatisfaction with Sarah Lacy’s interviewing style with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spills over into silent but powerful discourse among the audience: one calls it a “train wreck”. People fleeing from fires in California say where they are; that proves more useful and timely than official goverment information.
The common factor? Twitter, the free (at present) service which lets you send a 140-character message, or “tweet”, to a site where anyone can read it, though it will only be sent directly to those who have chosen to “follow” you (though if you want, you can pick and choose who you allow to follow you). Twitter’s first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly that August. It has only been a company since May 2007, but its growth has been explosive – so much so that it constantly struggles to keep running as a growing number of people sign on, sending more and more tweets.
One of the first questions people ask is “what is Twitter for?” As with any social network, the answer is the same: whatever you make of it. Some think that its immediacy makes it ideal for spreading news. Others find it useful to ask questions of their peers; still others, for following what people or topics they’re interested in. The BBC and the Guardian, for example, already offer Twitter services for breaking news (check out the Guardian Technology Twitter feed). It will be surprising if IBM does not offer a Twitter service with results from the All-England Tennis Club Championships in July.
Hitwise, the web measurement company, notes that traffic to Twitter has risen eightfold in the past year, more than doubled in the past three months and up 60% in the past month. By Hitwise’s measure, it’s only ranked 439th in social networks – outside the mainstream – but Heather Hopkins, senior Hitwise analyst, adds quickly that: “Twitter’s size is notoriously difficult to measure as there are so many access points (mobile phones in particular).”
That is a key point. Measurement companies like Hitwise tend to rely on browser-based metrics to see where samples of people are going. But whereas Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Habbo Hotel are only usable through a web browser, Twitter has broken free of the web; its text message-length “tweets” can be received on a mobile phone or other device. You don’t have to visit the web page to use Twitter; in fact, doing so may be one of the slowest ways of using the service. And many of the systems that are built around Twitter use web pages to interface directly to its database (via a published API). Twitter didn’t respond to a request asking how many active users and how many tweets are sent each day; but it’s a safe guess that both are in the millions. TwitDir, a Twitter directory, suggests there are now 1.05 million Twitter users – up from 518,000 in October.
With Twitter thus poised to enter the mainstream, we offer here our list of the best tools presently available on, and built on, Twitter. As ever, this is a moving target: within months we expect there will be even better ones. And we will watch our Twitter feeds for your responses and suggestions.
First steps
Twitter.com obviously. You don’t need to sign up; you can watch the flow of messages from a particular user at their username (eg Guardian Technology’s, which is at twitter.com/guardiantech). However, Twitter only becomes useful once you can sift through the huge volume of posts. Signing up is free and you’re not obliged to follow anyone, or post anything, or let anyone follow you.
Next steps
You can follow Twitter at the website, but that’s inefficient. Smartest moves: get a program for your PC, Mac or Linux box to watch the flow.
Whoshouldifollow.com answers that simple question. Given your username, it will look for other users with some overlap with the people you follow, and suggest them as people for you to follow. Add some of the names there and then repeat the process, and you’ll quickly build up a large network.
Twitdir.com, a directory. Find people, and quickly see the top 100 most-followed and busiest twitterers.
Twitterholic.com, the top users and accounts: choose, then repeat as above.
Searching and organising
Summize.com, search for a word or phrase across the entire Twitter feed. Interested in Scotland? Explosions? Burma? Plug the search in and view the results; or take an RSS feed, which will automatically update when new tweets match your search.
Quotably.com creates threads of discussions between people. Terraminds.com, another search engine, for users or phrases. Tweetscan.com, search by user and time.
Look, if we truly knew the answer to the question of how to monetize the newspaper mainstream media, we’d be drinking mai tais on the beach of our very own island in the South Pacific. That said, we do know enough to suggest some ways the MSM, at least, slow the decline in profits.
OK, so what CAN the print MSM do?
1. Dump Print.
After staff, newsprint is the biggest cost factor for newspapers. But sure, we read the CNet story the other day that said only 3 percent of newspaper reading is happening online. So a lot of people are still reading the print edition. How is it, then, that circulation is tanking? (Sure, customer service and delivery problems account for some of that, but not nearly all.)
The people reading papers are getting their information from a wide variety of sites. Some of which are online-only. Some of which, sure, steal from print sites. But if “newspaper” sites made their content available in varying formats that were optimized for reading on a desktop PC, a laptop, an iPhone and a Kindle, among others, that would make the online experience far more palatable.
Let’s face it – the core newsprint audience is getting old. You can’t rely on that audience to be around forever. And providing new ways for them to get their content is only going to make them happier, too. Mrs. Wizork is getting too stiff in the joints to wander down to the end of her driveway each morning, no matter the weather, to pick up a (possibly soggy) newspaper? It’s getting harder to read the typeface? What if you gave her a Kindle or other e-book reader that converted the printed word into speech and she instead subscribed to an electronic version delivered to her reader in her nice warm (or cold, maybe she lives in Arizona) house each morning.
Print is dead. Everyone says it is. To hold onto reasons why it’s not is to shortchange your readers.
2. Hire Ariana Huffington?
OK, few can afford to hire an independently wealthy Internet entrepreneur. But follow her lead.
Hire people who can write who are experts on what they’re blogging about. Heck, some of ‘em will do it for the exposure and minimal payment. Don’t make your existing staff keep doing all the daily journalism they have to do for the core product and ALSO blog. Make some of them purely digital journalists. Their blogs are their beats. Don’t try to do more with less, because you can’t. Well, you can, but you can’t do it well. You know it. And, more importantly, your readers know it. Use the people you have left in your newsrooms to cover what they cover well. If you simply still must have a print edition, have editors take their blogged content and make it fit whatever format you need for the dead tree edition.
Explore new revenue channels through blogging – find sponsors for blogs. If the blog’s about music, get a venue to sponsor. If the blog’s about that particular topic…do outreach, engage your community. Create an army of bloggers with the sanctioned trust of a major newspaper.
3. Allow users to design their own home page.
Every other news aggregator has been doing this since the dawn of the internet. Why can’t you customize a newspaper website’s layout?
To attract a more hardcore audience, you should use a Custom CRM for max web integration. Expand your reach and allow other newspapers to be imported (pass linkjuice onto them as well and they’ll just do the same). Allow third parties like Yelp to integrate their services into the paper. The more customized content that you allow your customers to have access to, the more eyeballs will get to see it. Also, make sure your articles are easily shareable and transferable back to you … and allow people to tweet directly from your site.
Think of your home page like a Google homepage. Let users add RSS feeds to their favorite content around the web and choose their favorite comic strips that you purchase from syndication. Make users able to turn your homepage into their homepage, so they don’t have to go anywhere else.
4. Do breaking news. Or do longform. Don’t try to do both.
When you try to do longform, you get sidetracked by the breaking news of the day. When you do breaking news, you get sidetracked by trying to figure out what longform pieces you’re gonna write about the event. Plus, there’s always some hotshot reporter working on a major longform piece you just can’t pull her off of, so instead of giving your all to the breaking news of the day, you put who you have on the story, rather than who you need.
Breaking news: Own it. Incorporate Twitter streams into the breaking coverage. Monitor the Tweets and comments and follow up on leads from them. Sure, not every day has a major breaking news story. But if you cover your area well, you’ll find far more breaking news than you ever imagined.
Long-form: Do it right. Be the written version of NPR. Delve into your subjects. Cover angles no one else is. Be the site that people go to when they want to know the story behind the story.
You know, do journalism.
5. Stop Interrupting, Start Interacting.
Broadcast media is no longer the accepted form of communication between user and provider. People expect to learn, respond and react to news. You can no longer broadcast something and then ignore its repercussions…the FCC would crucify you for one thing, but more importantly? So would your readers.
Take the example of Colonel Tribune and actually meet, talk and hang out with your audience. Also, take the approach that your story isn’t done once it has been published look at it as if it has just begun.
This by no means is a complete list and MSM has a long way to go. What would you suggest?
In this Interview with NBC, Sarah Lacy and Jack Dorsey, the twitter inventor, covered both the essence and “Money talk”
The essence of twitter:
Sarah Lacy:”…I think twitter is a culture movement”
Jack Dorsey:”…it’s how you made out of it……twitter makes it more human…”…”our goal (for twitter to be stable, scalable)…you turn it on like electricity…without thinking about it…”
The money talk:
Sarah Lacy:”…what is the magic price for twitter to sell?…”
Jack Dorsey:”You sell when you feel finished…We don’t feel finished, we have a lot to do…”
Toward the end of the interview, Sarah Lacy touched point on friendfeed, an overly engineered system that is little known to main stream, yet, twitter wins with simplicity.
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