Many people for many a year, have got fn pissed at me for not being the most receptive to email or phone. Fair enough : I’m not saying I’m right, as the customer is supposedly always right an MBA will teach u, but a DBA will also posit that customers are often oblivious to progressions forward + much innovation is non-customer led engineering generated. And if u work in social media, it might be an indication that… The most lauded posterchild of non IRL customer service is the leader of the online world - Google, didnt even want to have phones in its offices but had to because of fire regulations goes the xoogler mythology, and that a recorded voicemail message saying ‘this phone number is not checked so dont expect much‘ is in accordance with my views on phone. Now it’s also not to say that google is right.. as it increasingly builds revenue in areas where customer service - even a crappy version of it - will have to be provided. As Bill Gates found, the solution to world hunger was not algorithmic or putting a Windows Vista desktop in every 3rd world person’s hut. But on the flipside, people that call with no warning at a time convenient to them - but not vice versa - Often outside 9-5 business hours - only says in pretty simple action analysis - u r a low priority for me but I expect an immediate cordial response. ahem. Anyway I’m not getting personal just eating the dog food of the industry I work in; Social Media. I’m not trying to sell landlines.
And email, well email is pretty close to busted. With spam, or its antidote spam filtering that creates blacklists which exclude emails with no warning or method of verification etc so yer emails/proposals/invoices/rescheduling invite never arrive, and even worse the CC creating email overload : So u receive mail not to be actioned by you. Either way via my Blackberry-Curve which is where I clear 95% of my “messages” - other than ones where I have to author and send an attachment - In this holistic “One Inbox” Blackberry Messages World : A missed call, sms, email, twitter dm, blog comment, facebook message, new twitter follower, new flickr contact : are all algorithmically treated equal by virtue of being displayed by recency.
But equality of approach by sender ends there. For starters on blackberry u can program the device to only make a noise when it’s an SMS or direct twitter message : Which leads to those 2 mediums becoming the priority message. Emails and missed calls are far behind, except when dealing with old skool people who resort to a 1.0 Luddites Existence. (characterised by lack mobile internet, rely on voicemails, use mobile phone for voice, office desktop landline important, some even have an assistant for scheduling assistance) I’ve been looking 4 awhile to one of those old school voicemail conversion services which takes your audio messages where people ramble for 2 minutes and makes them into 140 character action based text. I wish Optus would bring out a Spinvox type service… Much better. But each to their own, but for me the way to deal with information overload is good filtering and a touch of ruthlessness.
Immersive Blackberry Image by Capture Queen 2009 on Flickr. Click2View.
Poor man’s Email
Venture Beat + SXSW dont seem to disagree with me btw. Even though the way old baby booming, my PA organises my schedule, no im not a txt_addikt Google CEO - Herr Schmidt - who dubbed twitter a ‘poor man’s email’ (just as he was never going to buy YouTube for 10 figures yeah right, he’s not downplaying twitter so they can buy it.. well try to.. for which they will have to hit the 10 figures fo sure, making it geocities/broadcast.com bought by yahoo type deal that made cuban $’sB_rich) - What he’s missing is the different levels of communication that are happening around, driven I think largely by Blackberry + Iphone unlimited internet plans and UI that integrate messages whether they be voice, sms, email, notifications. My Twitter followers for example, are getting close to be as important maybe more than my email contacts. Got a question on anything : Do u do a google search ? Maybe/probably - But u have to navigates billions of dollars of search engine optimisation + algorithmically generated junk. With carefully selected followers and pervasive microsearch filters - the likely answers to my questions can come from tweetpals in 140 characters not the first 10-100 google search results.
Google havent’ yet recognised publicly this, even with Grand Central acquisition + Google Voice launch, that email, texting is all morphing, and layers of communication around the individual are coming in, and the social groups dimension is also being reenergised (Facebook is good for finding old school mates if thats yer kill myself thing… twitter on other hand after initial hurdle - can give people hope, a little microcosm of followers that feel like friends, maybe:) As Dare says : “Where things get interesting is in trying to bridge the gap between active and passive sharing. Sending an email about your latest vacation pics may be too intrusive but you also may not want to just relegate them to being shown in your friends’ feeds to be gone from sight if your friends don’t log-in in time. David Sacks of Yammer mentions Twitter’s @reply feature as one way to bridge this gap. On Twitter, you can push content out into the ether not caring particularly if your friends read it or not but when you do it is just a special character away to send a directed message to them. It will be interesting to see if other services figure out a feature that provides the same functionality as Twitter’s @reply and is similarly lightweight.”
Seeking Alpha also have a made me laugh outsourcing yer life to Google and Apple piece on this : “Google (GOOG) is taking another step towards taking control of more and more of your life. I wonder when the company makes the switch from “friendly giant” to “Microsoft-like scary dominatrix”… not yet at least. The Google Voice is part genius, part scary. Below is an interesting offer from the company; one phone number for your entire life and calls are free.* Now we know why they wanted that wireless spectrum so badly. In 10 years, I will just be napping 22 hours a day, and hand over my life to Apple and Google to run.”
"Spinvox converts your voice to text." So simple. So powerful.
5 Levels of BB Message Importance Thus :
1. SMS : Important, I need to get you now, Late Night Flutters, Directions, Locations, Where are You, I am Here!
2. Twitter DM : I cant get u on email, Ill try a Twitter DM. Only used when vimportant/establishment trust b.w parties etc. Most messages can be @replies.
3. Twitter Replies : I thought u might find this interesting, Im not a stalker
4. New Followers : Have a quick look if possible, decide to follow or not
5. Everything Else : Emails, CC’s, Missed Calls… this is where the google ceo’s rich mans email fits. And I was a hardcore gmail user from daydot, buying an account for $7USD on ebay when they came out. Well now I would pay $7 to get a post twitter client, that filtered twitter and all my messages 
Email 2.0
What R U Working on ? Yammer Screenshot
David Sacks not being content to found the kickass trace yer family tree Geni and spinoff the enterprise Twitter Yammer, coined the term Email 2.0 for the microblogging services : At SXSW “Feed Me: Bite Size Info for a Hungry Internet,” - which sounds like it was an awesome panel… Damn if there’s one conference to go to each year SXSW is the one.. Even if Sacks buzzword progression builds on Herr Schmidt’s smugefest poor man’s email comments re twitter to the Morgan Stanley analysts the other week : It still progresses where we position previously microblogging services. But email misses the whole SMS precedence. Anyways.. I’ve gotta run so rest of my points bulletpointed below : May finish/clean up this piece later but I have a proposal to do and a doctor to see first.
What Caused Twitter to Kick Downunder ?
1. First a Pretty Please Request to Sandra Hanchard at Hitwise :
Sandra, I riffed the above on twitter and would be very interested in your thoughts/data/charts/explanation I’m thinking really finite such as certain celebrities/politicians joining… events that occurred and so on, cross referenced by date and ideally traffic, any of the linking activity - previously Facebook helped drive traffic is that still the case ? any smaller trends we can help uncover in terms of referrals ? That would be a kewl A3 chart to track how Twitter really took off downunder that could be compiled amongst every1. Every1 should folow the brilliant Sandra Hanchard at Hitwise (her twitter). The first step was Sandra’s gr8 Mid-January 09 research on Twitter Australian growth which in light of recent hypergrowth, seems out of date, or put more positively I would love to see the daily/weekly uptake trend for the first 2.5 months of 2009 ? Pretty please Sandra.
Twitter Downunder from Hitwise 14th Jan-09 : "Visits to Twitter had a short term dip between September 2008 and November 2008, but have steadily climbed again to January 2009, and were at an all time high for the week ending 10 January 2009. Twitter has maintained its phenomenal yearly growth rate, increasing year-on-year in web visits by 517.9% (w/ending 10 January 2009 compared to the same week last year). Twitter's recent growth is due to a resurgence in referrals from Facebook, which is also maintaining a strong following amongst Australian Internet users. The linked growth highlights the continued rise in the use of the Internet as a networking tool in social and business contexts vs the consumption of information."
2. Twitter has hit mainstream.
Well is early in on the cycle of going from many single digit millions to probably double digit millions and maybe more. It’s also as Twine founder points out below (his words, read his whole piece its great) got some scaling issues to deal with if it’s to succeed :
Can Twitter Survive What is About to Happen to It? by Nova Spivack
- Hypertweeting. Some Twitter users tweet legitimately, but far too much. Or the content they tweet is just innane. In doing so they market themselves and dominate everyone’s attention with their presence.
- Hashtag Spam. For example, an advertiser could easily pump out tweets that market their products, and simply attach popular hashtags to them, thus spamming those “channels” with ads. Similarly, clueless users could do the same thing.
- @reply Spam. Another way that spammers could create annoyances in Twitter is by doing @replies to people, with ads for products, or simply to make trouble.
- Notification Overload. Another issue is the rise of Twitter bots from various services, whether benign in nature or deliberately spammy:
- It won’t be long before every social network starts pumping updates into Twitter.
- News and content sites are starting to pump updates into Twitter for every article they publish.
- Games and MMPORG’s are starting to pump notifications for things that take place in their worlds, into Twitter (e.g. player x just defeated player y in a battle)
- A variety of other desktop, online and mobile apps will be pumping notifications into Twitter
Darken Rahl vs Caitlin the Confessor in New Zealand made very good Legend of the Seeker is akin to the Facebook vs Twitter showdown. Blood Rage ensues.......
3. The 175m user strong leader, the most engaged site in the world Facebook, now ahead of Yahoo, is totally dropping its pants to Twitter
Sad to see the leader copying The Odeo* Side Project like a Microsoft minority shareholder loon, with its potentially alleged idea steal Harvard facebook user preferring to use Twitter than Facebook for status updates. (i wonder what % of twitter’s users have heard of/know what odeo is/was? hehe : very few i assume) Even Ari a Facebook engineer not talent agent at SXSW sounds a bit twitter_curious : ““You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn’t know if your friends even wanted to see it. “Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it.”
4. Who doesnt prefer twitter with a bit of friendfeed on the side to facebook for status updates ?
Although the friendfeed founder Paul Buchheit would rightly think they provide some valuable alternatives (which they definitely do especially - message threading, leniency on 140 character limit, embedded picture embedding, private rooms, nice realtimeness n uptime:) via BBC :
Friendfeed RealTime Window is Good Coz there isnt the same latency or API limits as Twitter has when 3rd parties develop (and Twitter obvs doesnt provide a solution themselves (which i think they should) like friendfeed does) I actually have to install their new Notifier, which u can click to read a little bit about.
Paul Buchheit : “I think it’s a new form of communication; not quite e-mail, more lightweight and more real time, often with little bit of a publishing flavour to it,“
That said I do prefer Zebr air app above to view my old school pals gee i miss them not Facebook status updates.. altho I wish there was a one column 2 way publish/read ability to view in one column with a small font:) all my twitter follower updates, twitter search topics, replies, dms, facebook friends status updates + mails, plus friendfeed updates - Currently I run 4-5 air apps on my desktop to view all that (if u include google reader app snackr which i havent thrown my 4k of feeds opml but on 140 feeds for client pitch it was/is really kewl).
Maybe Ill try PeopleBrowsr today as ppl say it does much of above.
Rather than running Tweetdeck (tracking search topics is so important but u need a whole screen coz it doesnt have an fn aggregate 1 column view or ability to reduce font size which is miles too fn huge) + Twhirl (best UI + easy to publish to unlike tweetdeck which is frustrating) for Twitter depending on space i want to allocate, Friendfeed Realtime Window and Zebr for Facebook and Snackr (thx4tip) for Google Reader.
Snackr + Google Reader sitting on a Tree : Every1 needs an air app and Snackr works on google reader as advertised (for the 140 feeds test).. Lets hope it can take my 4k feeds opml:) If u cant see it, its the black strip down bottom running horizontal.. it can also be quickly morphed into a vertical desktop feed.. wonder how its indexing works ? How frequently it pings the source etc. That said, as Fred Wilson suggested eons ago, there needs to be an aggregate air app for all the air apps… does that exist already ?
Are the Pauline Pictures Real or Fake as she says ? Click2read : She Should Twitter.
5. Australians are majorly taking to twitter coz they are so damn good at texting.. now they get to put it to group use.
6. Celebrities Downunder are grokking Tweeting is like Texting :
As well as global mainstream, it is at the start of hitting mainstream in Australia. Dave Hughes @dhughesy has gone from zero to 5k followers in a fortnight. The best interview question today with Kings of Leon came from a twitter user “One of my twitter users wants to know ‘How do u smell?’”
So : Why the heck has Twitter become so big in Australia now ?
What were the trigger points… Why now… What was our SXSW moment ?
Back2Work Monday
Super, Alife, Rockstar, Supra, UBoat, Clarks, Clae… u know the drill.
Super, Alife, Rockstar, Supra, UBoat, Clarks, Clae... u know the drill.
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