Startup Toolbox

Jay Parkhill August 2nd, 2008

Fred Wilson’s tumblog pointed me this morning to a post about why Twitter has been so successful and is so well loved despite all its problems and downtime.

Why Twitter Still Wins | chrisbrogan.com

Chris makes the point that Twitter’s openness has saved it.  He says:

One way to win in software is to make your application fertile for building upon. Open your API. Give people tools to build an ecosystem around it. And it becomes a lot harder to pull away and go elsewhere.

Unfortunately, in Twitter’s case the last sentence should be followed by the phrase “no matter how badly the service behaves”.  Twitter has definitely become successful despite itself.

A commenter on Chris’s blog made an even better comment.  Michael Durwin points out that Twitter created something completely new. This struck a chord with me.  I attended a social web event put on by Niall Kennedy in late 2006 or early 2007 where Twitter presented.  The company was still focused on Odeo, the product it launched around.  Biz Stone talked about staffers inside the company thought it was funny when people posted clever notes in their IM status- “hung over” or “shouldn’t have eaten the whole burrito” instead of merely “busy” or “available”.

The point is that Twitter arrived on the scene when the idea of micro-messaging was embryonic at best. (On hearing Biz’s talk my own response was that Twitter sounded like the dumbest, most narcissistic thing imaginable, and I continued to feel that way for about 8 more months until I completely fell in love with the service)

The title of this post is about Twitter’s advantages and disadvantages as a first mover.  As Michael Durwin points out, Twitter created a new genre of communication.  its advantage is that it is the first and best known product in its category and has the most users.

On the other hand, Twitter’s problem is that its developers had no idea how micro-messaging would grow.  Its architecture was apparently not designed to accomodate many of the things people would like to see, like threaded messaging, photos, video and comments.  Newer entrants in the field such as Friendfeed can use all this knowledge to build more flexible platforms (taking note as well of why rivals such as Jaiku and Pownce have largely failed to captivate). 

So to sum it up, Twitter’s situation today is basically this:

Advantages: best known, well developed community/social graph, lots of great third-party extensions

Disadvantages: needs to rebuild platform now that we know what people want from micro-messaging platforms

I’m rooting for Twitter.  I sure hope they can rebuild fast enough, but people aren’t going to wait forever.

• Twitter , social graph , social media

Jay Parkhill June 6th, 2008

I don’t totally get the point of FriendFeed- or maybe I just don’t like it. I consider it a meta-social network because it doesn’t do a lot that is totally new. It aggregates my contributions across the web (and those of people I follow), but there isn’t very much to actually do on the service.

At the same time, I would love a social web “home base”- a place I where I could both aggregate and contribute. I use Twitter and Brightkite a lot, but one friend might post often to Flickr and another to Yelp. Home Base would be a single place from which I could both keep track of my friends’ activity, and also interact with their photos, tweets and reviews.

Friendfeed lets me post to Twitter, but still isn’t as dynamic as that platform and it ends up being just another place for me to check, but not to post from.

In the end, it comes down to where most of my friends are. I have the most contacts on Facebook currently, but interact with people less there than any other other social network I’m on. That’s just me, I know. Plenty of people have entirely fulfilling internet social lives on Facebook.

I’ve realized that the place I interact with friends the most is Twitter. In addition, many other services feed into Twitter easily, so I can add a new service and not have to rebuild my social graph there before it becomes useful.

I’m close to the point of putting my Twitter ID on my email signature because it’s such a good way to get in touch with me, but at the same time I’m afraid of getting any more attached to Twitter because of its reliability problems. It’s really a shame. The service is so easy and so valuable. I sure hope they can overcome their “we built the wrong platform at the outset” issues and become the powerhouse they deserve to be.

twitter.com/park3

• Twitter , social graph , social media

Jay Parkhill March 31st, 2008

Clearly it is “social networks on the brain” day. Here’s my third and final post of the day on the topic.

I just read Brad Feld’s post about Loic LeMeur’s post (whew!) about his distributed social graph.

Loic penciled out a kind of map of his online life and concluded that he would rather have it all run through his blog than live in 10-15 different silos devoted to specific types of communication (video, short-form blogging, long-form blogging, etc.). Brad tied this to his firm’s principle of investing in companies that form the “glue” among internet presences.

I realized that there is an idea in here that is a component of why so many of my friends are on Facebook but I find it unsatisfying. I posted my thought as a comment on Brad’s post, and I am re-blogging it below.

—

I just listened to an interview with Clay Shirky (http://tinyurl.com/3y72d5) where he identified a big gap between “famous” and not famous people- the difference being (online and off) the ability to respond symmetrically to every conversation directed to a person.

Loic wants everything on his blog because he produces a lot of content, gets a lot of attention and can’t respond equally to all of it- i.e. he’d rather respond in comments on his own blog than click through to other platforms, log in, comment, etc. He wants a magnet more than he wants glue.

People with more symmetrical graphs may be happier using something else (eg Facebook)- or lots of places- as the hub(s) of their social graphs depending on how they respond to others as well as what they produce. A layer of glue would work better here.

The glue metaphor is breaking down for me. I wonder if “synapses” is more accurate- not sticking things together permanently, but constantly forming and re-forming connections, getting stronger and smarter as it goes.

. . . mmm, glue still has a better ring.

—

I am not a “famous” person on the Internet. I can respond in kind to everyone who reaches out to me. I do produce a lot more long-form content than most of my friends, though. This puts me in the middle. I don’t need to run everything through a single point like Loic, but I do find a limit at around 5 social network outlets to check in with regularly.

The glue that works best for me links networks, but doesn’t replace them. I like Disqus because it sits on top of my blog and Tumblog, but doesn’t replace them. I can’t get excited about Friendfeed or Plaxo because they just create more places for me to visit.

• social graph

Jay Parkhill March 31st, 2008

I write this blog, I have a tumblog/lifestream at www.park3.org, a Twitter account and a Facebook page.  These are my principal forums for self-expression on the web.  I’ll come right out and say that I don’t like Facebook very much.  I’ve tried to find value in it, but I have mostly failed.

I like to write, which is my I like to blog.  Facebook isn’t about that at all.  Fair enough.  I like music a lot and FB lets me pull content from Last.fm, Pandora, Sonic Living and the Hype Machine, but I can do less in the applications on my FB page than I can on the original sites themselves, so there’s no draw there either.

I tried using Facebook to aggregate content from my other online outlets, but it does that poorly because each aggregation source is siloed in an application box on my profile and the whole thing gets cluttered pretty quickly.

Photos are one of Facebook’s strongest suits.  I continually tell myself to take more photos.  Maybe if I can do that I will start using FB photos more.

Groups and fan pages are useless- nothing ever happens on them that I can tell.

That leaves the other Facebook-native features: Wall, Poke, Zombies, etc. I know a lot of people who have fun poking one another and leaving wall messages.  That’s great, but I find it unfulfilling.  Messaging is good and I use Wall, but chest bumping, fish-slapping etc. don’t appeal to me at all.

All that said, I have connected with more real-life friends online through Facebook than anywhere else.  What this means, practically speaking, is that I get the most value on Facebook from status updates.

Why is this the case, though- why are more friends on FB than anywhere else?  I think it’s because it is so easy.  Twitter and Flickr do a much better job at status updates and photos, respectively, but Facebook brings them together and does them both just well enough to be a single point of focus, and throws in the quick-touch poke stuff to help people feel close even when they aren’t in real life.

I didn’t mean to end this post so cynically- saying that Facebook is really a lowest common denominator that does enough things just well enough to be appealing to the broadest segment of the population- that’s what it seems like to me, though.

• Facebook , social graph

Jay Parkhill March 18th, 2008

This is a great read. The author penned a scathing Linkedin “recommendation” of another user, pointing out in the process that Linkedin is built only to allow positive reviews, which makes the system less than valuable.

tartley.com » The Long Overdue LinkedIn Backlash

What to do then, when one thinks that a person should not be trusted with a pencil, never mind a job? Be honest or let the matter drop? It would be nice if our “trust networks” let us trust the collected wisdom, but it is a hard nut to crack. Ebay has worked hard at it, but it still requires egregious conduct to merit a negative review.

The problem, in my opinion, is endemic to virtual communities. Written text (email or site-based) is tone-deaf. Nuance is lost completely and context is nearly so. Compare this with a private conversation in which negative points can be explained and put into accurate context, and couple it with the adage that negative feedback outweighs positive by a factor of 10:1 or so, and the problem becomes apparent- no one wants to be dissed, and few are willing to risk the fallout from posting a negative opinion of someone else. VentureBeat has extensively chronicled thefunded.com’s efforts to create a fair and honest feedback system. It’s not easy.

This is not to say that the nut can’t be split, but capturing the real meaning
and reasons behind someone’s negative comments and framing them accurately may require extreme fact- and situation-analysis. Thefunded has it easier than most in this regard, since the VC-entrepreneur relationship is well-defined.

When all is said and done, though, Linkedin is among the worst at producing meaningful feedback. They should take comments like these as the must-fix issues they are. Get after it, Linkedin. You are too useful to be sidelined by a lack of trust in your recommendations.

• Uncategorized , social graph , social media

Jay Parkhill December 19th, 2007

I’ve recently started to receive a surge of invitations to yet another professional social network (which shall remain nameless). I still haven’t figured out how Open Social or anything like it will actually affect life in the real world. Will I suddenly be on people’s networks in lots of places after making one uber-connection? That seems desirable and undesirable at the same time.

Still, I know this. I checked out the social network for which I am currently receiving invitations. I can’t figure out if it is useful or not. However, I do know that building my “social graph” on any network is time-consuming. As a result I am accepting these invitations on the off chance that the network turns out to be valuable someday. Is the alternative to Open Social just to be “easy”?

• Web , social graph

Jay Parkhill October 12th, 2007

Update:  Linkedin apparently agrees with me.  They just announced a developer-API program to create widgets that allow “business functions like conference organization or travel planning”.  But no superpokes.

There’s been lots of talk about walled gardens in social networks. Plenty of people seem to be asking for “network portability”- the ability to move one’s social graph of contacts and connections across platforms. Given that the revenue stream for most social networks depends almost entirely on advertising, which depends on page views, I am starting wonder if that puts the cart before the horse.

Also like many people recently, I have been thinking about how I and my friends really use social networks. My conclusion is that they are a nice adjunct to offline communications- they can help me deepen connections with people I don’t see regularly- but they don’t actually *do* much.

For example, my Facebook news feed is almost entirely full of “___ became friends with ___” and “___ added the ___ application” updates. Do people actually do anything meaningful other than friending, adding applications, joining groups and updating status?

What about “___ beat __ in scrabblicious”, or even “Brad Fitzpatrick nailed his 95 theses on the opening of the social graph on Facebook’s door”?

Facebook seems to be mostly a tool for casual, superficial interactions and ways to show off one’s interests and affiliations- joining groups, marking favorite movies/music/books, showing where one has been, etc.

I’d love to see the platform and the feed represent real activity, not just connection-forming. Maybe the “next Facebook” (which may or may not be Facebook itself) will be the one that lets us really collaborate and not merely connect.

The next question, though, is on what we want to collaborate. I suspect it is probably different for different people and groups. That thought leads me back to the open social graph issue- maybe the open social graph is the horse after all and useful (as opposed to entertaining) applications are the cart. Oh dear, thinking in circles again. Time to quit.

• Web , social graph

Jay Parkhill October 3rd, 2007

(this post started as a comment on Nate Westheimer’s blog, but got too long so I decided to put it here instead)

Nate says that Facebook could disappear tomorrow and it would be replaced in about a week with other web services.  Likely true enough, but it begs the question what would make FB disappear.  It doesn’t happen on its own- people need to stop using it.

Nate’s implicit answer, I think, and that of a number of other people, is that internet users crave openness- they want their content to be distributed, mixed and mashed up as they see fit, not as the platform decides.  One-way openness isn’t good enough either.  Content should flow freely both ways, and when someone offers that up Facebook could start to suffer.

It sounds as though the nascent FriendFeed does this.  Plaxo also does it to a certain degree. I don’t think mere openness is enough, though, and I say that for two reasons:

1)  There needs to be a “there” there.  Plaxo is free-flowing, but also empty.  Maybe I just haven’t connected with enough people, or they haven’t “turned on” enough feeds (or maybe that’s the point- it takes too much effort). 

A variant of this point was made by Adam Elend from Wallstrip.  He said that just putting content out isn’t enough- it needs to fit the platform on which it is being distributed.  As applied to the open/closed platform discussion, the argument is that mere aggregation easily leads to clutter and randomness.

2)  There needs to be an ad strategy.  Most content on the social web is ad-supported.  Totally open platforms make it hard to monetize the traffic.   

Maybe these two points offer an answer” provide a compelling place for people to aggregate and they’ll congregate.  Becoming and then remaining the “coolest” platform seems like it would be an increasingly difficult task, though.

• Web , social graph , social media

Jay Parkhill September 3rd, 2007

Creating ways to visually represent the social map seems very much in vogue. It makes sense in a certain way; there is a lot of dispersed content on the web and good business to be had aggregating it. Visually presenting the relationships among pieces of content- and the users that put it there- can help people sort through it all.

Lijit and Twitter both just launched visualization tools that are interesting and have neat animation, but also point to how hard it is figuring out what kinds of data are can be visualized well.

Lijit’s visualizer shows linking relationships between a user and the rest of the Internet. Lijit’s focus is on bringing out content that might be hard to aggregate otherwise, so I can understand the value in trying to bring together inbound, outbound and mutual linking relationships on one page.

The resulting animation isn’t hugely meaningful, though. For example, this blog isn’t really linked from anywhere, so there is no benefit to the animation- it just shows what is in the blogroll on the page. The other blog I write, Startup Review for doesn’t link to anything else, so it only shows a handful of inbound links. And a very popular blog like Brad Feld’s has three different clusters of lollipops, but they’re still just lollipops. They don’t offer any information that you couldn’t get from a simple list and they are a bit cluttered to boot.

Twitter’s blocks are similar, though not quite as intuitive. There is a nice animation that creates a stair-step effect and I get that the center line is my recent timeline and the paths branching away are the timelines of other users in my timeline, but I’m not sure this is actually a better way of discovering other users. The bricks themselves don’t say anything until I zoom in on them, so they don’t save me time or present more/better data than linking through user pages directly. I.e. I can “explore” just as easily on the main pages.

For me Digg has set the gold standard here. Its swarm, stack, bigspy and arc all show what is happening on the site in a way that shows off Digg’s core competence- aggregating and ranking news- while letting users easily scan the news items flowing through the site without having to do anything.

Guy Kawasaki blogged an interesting article about data visualization methods. It’s an interesting read and some techniques definitely seem to do the job better than others, or maybe some data is just much harder to present visually.

My personal favorite is a time-sequence graph of Last.fm listening habits, If it was actually a dynamic graph it would nose out Digg for “best in class”. It isn’t though; it is a “snapshot” of a particular moment in time for the developer.

Still it is gorgeous and presents the information in a way that would take many more words to explain, and be far less interesting, and that is the point. The web is still mostly about words because words work pretty darn well. If the picture isn’t worth a heck of a lot of them, it doesn’t really add enough value.

• Web , social graph , social map

Jay Parkhill August 19th, 2007

Suddenly this week I’ve started hearing the term “social graph” all over. Brad Feld has been talking about it and so has Fred Wilson, though it looks like they both read the same piece published last week by Brad Fitzpatrick, developer of the LiveJournal blogging platform. As I understand it, the social graph is the glue that ties people together over the web- whether it be a set of Outlook contacts or MySpace friends.

I hadn’t heard the term before so I googled it and got a bunch of hits going back at least a few months, though it seems to have gained more currency in the last month or so. It’s a decent phrase, though a little wonky and hard to pin down (compared to say, “web 2.0″, ha!). Wikipedia doesn’t seem to recognize it officially and refers readers to the entry on “social network” instead.

Substantively, social graph is a much broader idea than the social network dashboard I have blogged about previously. Fitzpatrick’s article is essentially a manifesto for an open source framework that all networks could use as a backdrop for contacts and organization, among other things. It’s a cool idea for sure and I’d love to see it happen.

As I think about it, though, the work required for a user to flesh out a set of contacts on any social network is part of what keeps the user loyal to the platform. Loyalty means, largely, pageviews and advertising click-throughs, i.e. the main source of revenue for most networks. If my contact set becomes a “commodity” I can drop in to any network, will I jump around among networks more readily?

Maybe, or maybe not. Lots of people belong to six zillion networks already so it isn’t like we would suddenly all switch off Linkedin and turn on Facebook- maybe we just gravitate more toward one or another as featuresets evolve. More to the point, I read Fitzpatrick as saying in part that developing the social graph-building tools is hard work that essentially reinvents the wheel every time. An open-source social graph “standard wheel” would free up companies to focus more on the content. Actually, commoditizing the contacts would require networks to focus on differentiation of their content/platform/benefits rather than just locking in users.

As I write this, I realize that idea sounds a lot like Facebook’s F8 platform, but without the “inbound only” traffic flow that so many people have expressed frustration with. No wonder Fitzpatrick’s idea hit a nerve with Feld and Wilson.

• Web , neologisms , social graph , social media