Startup Toolbox

Jay Parkhill October 23rd, 2007

I was in college when the first Gulf War happened, and I remember the school setting up a TV to show the round-the-clock (a new concept then) coverage on the upstart CNN network. People more media-savvy than I credit CNN’s rise in esteem and viewership to that coverage.

The fires tearing through Southern California are relevant to a much smaller population, to be sure, and I doubt Twitter will benefit to even 1% the same degree in absolute terms. However, many people- and media outlets- that previously dismissed it as a toy or a distraction are going to start paying attention because it is actually a convenient vehicle for distributing news in disaster environments. It is:

*Lightweight. It works nicely even on a mobile browser. No TV or computer required from the sending or receiving ends.
*Easy to update. It’s type-and-go. No setting up cameras or preparing to broadcast.
*Easy to aggregate. Tracking makes it possible to pull in tweets from lots of sources on the same subject.
*And perhaps most important, short (or “pithy” if you prefer). The problem with reporting disasters is that there usually isn’t much to report from minute-to-minute. Twitter lets networks broadcast tidbits as they become available.

Imagine if the news crawl at the bottom of a network broadcast was actually a Twitter feed. They serve basically the same purpose, and then there would be a place to find the crawl text one missed because one was watching the top part of the TV screen.

I’m not saying Twitter is suddenly going to be on everyone’s lips everywhere, just that people are going to realize it can be a really useful adjunct to other media distribution systems.

• Web , social media

Jay Parkhill October 10th, 2007

I had a bit of an “aha!” moment today. I read Kara Swisher’s “is this it, then?” posts about Facebook this morning, then attended a meeting of the parents’ association at my kids’ school and found a breadcrumb trail connecting the two.

One of Kara’s points was that Facebook has an amazing ability to draw together people, induce them to create “groups” around issues of mutual interest- and then do absolutely nothing of interest together. She has a good point. Facebook groups seem to exist only so that people can self-identify with various areas of interest; they certainly allow for only the most minimal forms of interaction.

With this in the back of my head, I went to the school meeting. My kids’ elementary school is fairly young and still very much growing in population and in the forms and richness of “community systems”. We have evolved several modes of intra-school communication, but the foresighted among us (I do not include myself on this list) are looking forward to how we can use communication tools to develop closer bonds as a community.

Email is the unnamed villain here. No one likes being bombarded by messages and if a certain group of people develops an informal email list around a certain activity then there are always a few people who would have loved to be included if only they had known about it. These aren’t new problems, to be sure. The school has the chance to do things differently, though.

All of which made me think: what if the school could take the good parts of Facebook groups- that anyone can create a group and all the interactions are there for the public to see- and use it to augment *offline* community-building? Now that sounds interesting- because frankly I’d rather go for a hike with fellow school parents than superpoke them.

• social media

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 24th, 2007

Maybe this goes without saying. Twitter is fascinating beause it is such a proto-social network. It does almost nothing, but I probably use it more than any other network I am on.

Still tring to figure out what twitter is “about”, I’ve been thinking about the posts that grab my attention. I follow basically three kinds of twitterers: friends, news outlets and tech experts/celebrities. I like getting little vignettes of my friends ‘ lives that tell me what’s going on with them. This is less true from strangers, though the occasional trenchant comment can be fun.

What gets me to follow people I don’t know is really the same as what I get out of news tweets- teasers that make we want to learn more. I don’t think I am alone in this. Loic le Meur has twittered repeatedly about certain aspects of the new product his company is developing, but without explaining what the product is at all. In the same vein, Evan Williams posted a couple of tweets this morning about “namestorming”- for a new product? Inquiring minds want to know.

• Web , social media

Jay Parkhill September 18th, 2007

I wrote recently about different visualization techniques used by Digg, Lijit and Twitter. I wrote that I didn’t think the Twitter Blocks developer, Stamen Labs, got it quite right. They did a brilliant job with Digg’s visualizations so I’m sure they’ll work out Twitter as well.

The challenge in creating visual representations of text data, it seems to me, is to capture the essence of what the site does. Digg Stack beautifully captures both the flow of news across the Digg site and the voting element that (partially) distinguishes Digg from traditional news outlets.

Twitter is captivating for a couple of reasons. The “random discovery” element is fun- seeing what’s on people’s minds around the world. The more engaging element is following one’s friends.

Twitter Blocks goes after the latter, which is probably the harder nut to crack. Meanwhile, Twittervision hits the discovery nail right on the head. Watching the posts flow across the globe is mesmerizing.

A couple of requests, though- I’d like to see the tweets persist a little longer instead of fading out immediately when a new one comes up. I’d also like to see the history- it doesn’t seem to follow the Twitter timeline precisely and I can’t necessarily find interesting tweets easily.

If Stamen Labs can figure out how to combine Twittervision’s hypnotic visual timeline with the social relationship aspect that makes Twitter so engaging they will capture the full scope of the site perfectly. It’ll be fun to see.

• Web , social map , social media

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

Jay Parkhill August 14th, 2007

I have posted before about my wish for a centralized place to manage profiles, invitations and other aspects of online accounts, but started to think it was unrealistic given the privacy and walled-garden issues involved in allowing one service control to the account information for a user at another service.

It may still be a pipedream, but at least I am not the only one having it. I just watched an interview on Wallstrip with Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress/Automattic where he talks about the same thing. This pleases me to no end. If people like Matt are worried about the balkanization of online identity, I have to think a solution will emerge sooner or later.

• Blogging , Web , social media

Jay Parkhill August 8th, 2007

I recently tuned in to Barack Obama and John Edwards’ Twitter feeds, which offer somewhat interesting, informal glimpses of the candidates. Shortly after, I discovered what is really a fake Bill Clinton Twitter feed. Someone reserved the BillClinton user name and posts asinine garbage that might be malicious if it actually had any relevance to anything.

Still, this got me thinking about “user name squatting”. It is pretty well established that someone with a “famous” name can oust a squatter from a domain name, but I wonder if they same is true of user names on social networks? If I went around and registered “RudyGiuliani” (to pick a famous and unusual name), would he have rights against me? My gut tells me that the larger the platform, the more likely name-squatting would be deemed impactful on the famous person (e.g. Mr. Giuliani). I also suspect that the nature of the platform would be relevant as well- fake Rudy Giuliani on MySpace is potentially more damaging to the candidate than fake Rudy Giuliani on Digg.

I’m going to poke around a little on this one to see if anyone has actually tried to bring “user name squatting” actions. I’ll update if I find anything interesting.

• Blogging , Copyright , Defamation , Intellectual Property , Web , legal , social media

Jay Parkhill August 1st, 2007

I have written previously about my wish for a social network dashboard that will let me manage my presence on multiple platforms. It is admittedly a pipe dream since no service I am aware of publishes an API for account management information- and probably never will for fear of privacy issues.

Still, I was intrigued to see ProfileBuilder’s launch this weekend and I checked it out. Unfortunately it looks as though they weren’t really ready to launch at all. There’s no explanation of what the site actually does and the text is rife with typos. More to the point, it doesn’t work whatsoever with Firefox on my Mac. Maybe the traffic they picked up from the TechCrunch crowd will stay with them until they get the site working properly, but it sure seems like a shaky start- the downside of the “Launch Early and Often” ethos.

As far as I can tell, the site aggregates content from whatever feeds I add to my profile. Aggregation is useful- Lijit is a nice tool that offers cross-platform searches of my content. It would be really great if I could aggregate (or maybe even just search) comments I have made across the internet in one location, but I don’t see the value of piling up all my content in yet one more dead end. If I can’t post from it and I can’t administer my other various presences with it, then I definitely don’t need another place to send people. Lijit is useful because it works inside my existing networks.

I am scaling back my wish. For now, all I want is a single point from which I can send out social network “friends” invitations. I list which networks I want to invite someone to, then they can check the boxes to accept one or all in one fell swoop. Should be simple, right?

• Web , social media