Skeptic Geek

Facebook’s Non-Portable Data Portability

On January 11, 2010, In Social Web, By Mahendra

A few thoughts about Zuckerberg’s revelations about changes in Facebook privacy, how it relates to data portability, and why this matters.

Facebook is officially part of the Data Portability project. Neither does Facebook allow you to backup or archive your data, nor does it permit any third-party applications to do so. If Facebook was so far using user privacy as an excuse for not allowing data portability, that excuse no longer exists. If Zuckerberg worried about his credibility at all, we should soon see legitimate ways of exporting your Facebook social graph. But obviously, we won’t.

When you own the world’s largest social network with over 350m people, credibility is not an issue.

Facebook supports Data Portability. Surprised? Facebook’s implementation of data portability is called Facebook Connect (italics mine):

These are just a few steps Facebook is taking to make the vision of data portability a reality for users worldwide. We believe the next evolution of data portability is about much more than data. It’s about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings.

We look forward to working with other leading identity providers to develop the best policies and standards for enabling the portability and protection of users’ information.

In contrast, the Data Portability Project’s vision is: “Data portability enables a borderless experience, where people can move easily between network services, reusing data they provide while controlling their privacy and respecting the privacy of others.”

By allowing Facebook to claim that it’s part of the data portability project while preventing any data from being ported anywhere outside it’s walled garden, Facebook is making a mockery of open standards. Should groups like the Data Portability Project expel Facebook from its ranks?

Louis Gray has highlighted the issues we have faced for two decades because we did not have OS and Application-neutral data, but were locked-in to the Apple/Microsoft/Google ‘big-three’ silos. In the coming decades, the data that holds the greatest wealth is your social graph data. And instead of big-three, just one company is well on its way to owning it, controlling it, and making money off it.

Google Reader vs. Twitter for Discovery and Sharing

On January 4, 2010, In Social Web, By Mahendra

I started using Google Reader and Twitter for discovering and sharing content at roughly the same time in April last year. I share and tweet almost exactly the same content. After about 8 months, I have over 1100 followers on Twitter vs. 133 on Google Reader.

How do these two stack against each other from a discovery and sharing perspective? As a newcomer to the social web, my experience can be illustrative of any new user of these services.

A Glace At Follower Stats

In less than a year, I have 1100+ followers and am on 130+ Twitter Lists. Neither did the #FollowFriday or @MrTweet recommendations I received lead to any increase in followers, nor did being a Techmeme Editor lead to any surge in followers. My Twitter following has increased organically, steadily, without any positive disruptive event, like a recommendation by an influencer in any blog post or tweet.

On the other hand, I have promoted my Google Reader shares on my blog in a sidebar widget, tweeted and written about Google Reader often, commented on other blog posts discussing Google Reader, and shared my Reader feed on FriendFeed earlier. The only positive disruptive event that increased my Google Reader following was when I was recommended by Holden on TechGeist (the blog is no longer active).

Geographical Perspective

The people I follow on both networks are in US/EU. Even if I live in India, most of the people following me on both networks are also from US/EU. I overcome the local limits of real-time by using Google Reader for discovery. One may expect my Twitter following to be more local and my Google Reader following to be global, but interestingly, this is not the case.

I can tell from my engagement and Retweets on Twitter that my audience is largely global and not local.

The Discovery Angle

There are two aspects of discovery: content and people. It is clear that Google Reader remains a great tool for discovery of content, especially for a non-US/EU person like me. However, Google Reader sucks at discovering great people to follow.

It is easier to find the Twitter profile of a person with a search on Google, than finding his or her Google Profile. FriendFeed remains the best bet for finding Google Reader profiles.

You can easily crawl an influencer’s network on Twitter and use Twitter Lists for discovering great people to follow. Ever tried finding out who an influencer is following on Google Reader?

The Sharing Angle

My shares on Twitter get retweeted and often lead to conversation. Some kind folks practice thanksgiving via attribution when they tweet content they discovered via my Google Reader shares. Both these lead to psychological payback on Twitter in terms of increased followers, mentions, and list memberships.

On Google Reader, my shares disappear into a black hole. I never know when my share was re-shared by others. These re-shares also appear on other user’s FriendFeed and Twitter accounts without any attribution to the curator. Sharing on Google Reader has virtually zero psychological payback, unless you are an established tech celebrity.

Closing Thoughts

Google Reader was designed as a personal RSS feed reader and social features have been added as an after-thought. I was always a skeptic of claims that Google Reader will replace FriendFeed. Google lacks a social network of people, and prefers taking an algorithmic approach to social relevancy. There is no psychological payback for sharing on Google Reader because fundamentally, Google perceives you not as a person, but as a data element whose shares can be indexed and ranked. Is this a reflection of Google’s engineers lacking emotional intelligence or simply a technical limitation? That said, it still remains a great tool for discovery of content, because of RSS.

As a result of all this, I see the influencer-ordinary user pyramid on Google Reader remaining more or less the same in the years to come. There will be a few tech influencers who will get engagement and drive traffic via Google Reader, but its opaque approach to social networking will remain its Achilles’ Heel for ordinary users. This weakness has even given rise to parallel feed-based social networks like Toluu and PostRank. The fundamental problem of monetization of Google Reader also persists.

What this also means is apps and services that use RSS and relevancy algorithms for discovery and ease sharing of content to other social networks (Twitter & Facebook) are well-positioned to diminish Google Reader’s dominance of the feed reader market. Apps like LazyFeed, my6sense, and RSSOwl are some examples. In my opinion, it would be a good strategy for apps like Feedly to disassociate themselves from the Google Reader platform.

Twitter is a great tool for discovery of content, and its transparency makes it a unique tool for discovery of people. This means that the influencer pyramid on Twitter is constantly evolving, unlike Google Reader. Lastly, Twitter rules over Google Reader when it comes to payback for sharing.

Tagged with: google reader • Twitter

A Year of Change and New Beginnings

On December 24, 2009, In Personal, By Mahendra

The year end is a good time to share a bit more about myself, about this blog, and learn more about you. Skeptic Geek started four months ago. Discounting FriendFeed, Feedburner says there are already about 100 “true” subscribers. This really is a surprise.

I come from a world of cubicle farms in the software outsourcing industry and am a complete newbie in the social web. I joined:

Twitter on April 3rd, 2009
Facebook on April 7th, 2009
FriendFeed on May 4th, 2009

My last stay in the US during ‘06-‘08 was to manage the development of a website for the largest automaker in America. The project was to provide 5 million+ auto financing customers with an account self-service website in order to reduce call-center costs. More recently, I worked in embedded software, working with real-estate developers in India to build intelligent digital homes.

My career has been in project management (requirements gathering, people management, scheduling, risk management, etc.), competitive research, proposals, business development and so on. I lived amidst J2EE, EAI, and RFPs. Two years ago, I had not even heard of Twitter or FriendFeed.

In other ways, by some standards, I am a veteran. I sent my first email in ‘89 from India when there were no ISPs here, and browsed the web with Netscape Navigator for the first time in ‘95 from Berlin. The first “computer” I handled was a Sinclair ZX-81, and the first PC in my home was a PC-XT with a 20 MB hard disk. In college, I learnt assembly language programming with the 8085 and 8086 microprocessors.

As you can imagine, this year has been a change in many ways. Taking a break from the enterprise software world, I ventured as a freelancer on the web. My experience is indeed useful to my work, but I found that I had to make a fresh beginning. You might manage a million dollar software project within budget on time, but a high-school tech enthusiast may be better informed, better networked, and write faster blog posts than you.

I started my personal blog on Wordpress.com in Apr ‘07. For the past two years, my personal blog has been an enjoyable hobby for expressing my varied interests. I was a complete stranger in the tech blogging world when I started writing for MakeUseOf.com in Apr ‘09. After a few months, I joined Techmeme. It has been a good year and I feel grateful.

The social network I am most indebted to is FriendFeed. It offered me some of the best and brightest tech minds to network with on a platter. My networking journey, if it were to happen via any other network like LinkedIn, might have taken years. FriendFeed accelerated it to a few months. I have made many good friends there and elsewhere, many of whom have kindly added me to their Twitter Lists.

Road Ahead

These are my humble beginnings this year. I started this blog as a parking lot for my thoughts about online tech developments. My writing at MakeUseOf is for a non-geeky audience, and I wanted a place to pen more insightful posts. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that there would be anyone interested enough to subscribe. While I don’t want to write blog posts under any obligatory pressure, I do want to write regularly, at a slower pace of about a post per week or ten days. At this moment, it’s a long road ahead, and I don’t know what’s lying in store after the next bend.

Are you really out there, dear subscriber? If you would be so kind to let me know, I would be obliged. Do you have any feedback about my posts so far or about the blog in general? Would it be interesting if I bring an occasional India-specific tech angle in my writing that might be amusing or interesting to western audiences? Should I continue writing at all?

Finally, here’s wishing you a Very Happy Christmas and New Year! May we all enjoy a peaceful, connected, and exciting 2010!

Tagged with: blogging • career

The Race Towards A Relevant Real-Time

On December 13, 2009, In Social Web, By Mahendra

I have written earlier about the advantage Google has over Facebook in achieving relevance in real-time. There have been many interesting developments since:

The battle for online identity intensified with the fight between Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect.
Facebook changed its privacy strategy but later retracted making Friend Lists public.
Google introduced real-time search.
Google Suggest included instant answers and universal search results.
Twitter declared that it will open its firehose to all developers.
Most importantly, Google personalized everyone’s search results, something that deserves extraordinary attention says Danny Sullivan.

Looking at these developments together, it is clear that both Facebook and Google want to become indispensable by providing you with relevant information in real-time.

This race is becoming a war. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had mentioned a “shift from an information economy to a social economy”. Mike Arrington clearly understands this war, as he asked Google’s VP Marrissa Mayer about moving from search to discovery of content via social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Quite predictably, Mayer talked about Google Social Search and Real-Time search in response.

My thoughts:

Facebook is on a quest for Searchability, Google is on a quest for Relevancy. Facebook has already pocketed relevancy with its social network, while Google has already pocketed search. Real-time is no longer a technological challenge.

Google is taking an algorithmic approach to social relevancy. Google’s personalized search results and enhancements to Google Suggest reveal its algorithmic approach to finding relevance in the absence of its social network. Because you do not have friends in Google, it is using your browsing patterns, Twitter follows, and search patterns of billions of its users to ascertain what may be socially relevant to you.

Steve Rubel predicted that Google will start promoting Google Profiles heavily. In the meantime, with personalized search results, Google has a stealth profile of everyone already.

Facebook keeping Friend Lists private may be to retain its exclusive access to your social graph, rather than a response to privacy criticism. Facebook must realize that if it hands over your social graph to public search engines, Google will have a huge lead in this race. I suspect that its retraction has more to do with continuing to be a strategic player in this race, and less with privacy. At the minimum, Facebook should expect significant financial benefits out of sharing Friend List information.

Twitter wants to be equated with real-time information. With Twitter opening up its data, expect Facebook apps to work with Twitter. Search engines are already integrating Twitter like mad. Whether you are a user, search engine, application or developer, Twitter wants to be your real-time channel. Kent asked why does Real Time always equate to Twitter? Because that’s exactly what Twitter wants to be.

Tagged with: facebook • google • real-time • Twitter

The Local Nature of Real-Time Means RSS Rules Forever

On December 13, 2009, In RSS, By Mahendra

I wanted to make an observation about real-time and the Google Reader vs. Twitter war, about which Louis excellently summarizes the advantages of both in this post.

While real-time technology is removing all barriers to instant communication and information flow everywhere, there are geographical and biological limitations that it has not overcome yet. While announcements and press releases are being made from Silicon Valley, half the world who lives on the other side of the planet is sleeping.

Scoble, who doesn’t use Google Reader anymore, compares Techmeme with Twitter Lists, also noted:

If you don’t read tweets for eight hours, don’t worry, all the big stuff you missed will be on TechMeme.

My point exactly. Most of the world sleeps anywhere between 6-9 hours a day, and does many other things besides being on Twitter. When they wake up and want to get updated with the major tech news of the day, Twitter is of no help. This is not a limitation of Twitter, it’s just the local aspect of real-time.

When I observe who follows who on Twitter, sure there are millions of cases where people follow folks from around the world. But if someone were to make a statistical analysis of everyone on Twitter, I think it would be clear that the majority of follows are within their own country. The same may not be true of their Google Reader subscriptions or the links in their blogrolls on Wordpress.com. This is why, RSS will continue to rule, as long as the earth keeps rotating, we have nights and days, and need to sleep.

A real-life example encapsulating all this happened yesterday, when I felt earthquake tremors at home here in India. I tweeted about the earthquake from my personal Twitter account where I occasionally indulge in India-specific news, did not tweet from my tech-focused ScepticGeek account, and obviously did not bother to blog about it even on my personal blog.

There was no need for the rest of the world to know about those mild tremors, and it did not hit Techmeme. The Twitter feed of my personal account was filled with tweets about the earthquake, but this would have been “noise” to others. Those who follow me on Google Reader did not get any such noise.

This is the local nature of real-time. This is also why I agree with Mark Dykeman, who noted the difference between a reasonable time web and a real-time one.

Tagged with: google reader • real-time • RSS • Twitter

Why LinkedIn Should Have A Virtual Currency

On December 1, 2009, In Social Web, By Mahendra

The news of Facebook discussing plans for its virtual currency made me wonder about the social network where a virtual currency really makes sense: LinkedIn.

First, a quick recap of LinkedIn demographic data (see this TechCrunch presentation from last year, and this recent RWW post):

50 million professionals worldwide (25 US, 11 EU)
Affluent (Average Income $89K, 24% have Portfolios of $250K+)
Highly Educated (95% College Educated, 37% Post-Grads)
Own more electronic gadgets than users of any other network
Decision Makers (Business, IT, Consulting, Marketing, Travel, etc.)
Interested in Gambling (12%, against average 7%)

If LinkedIn introduces a virtual currency model, it can allow Users to purchase or win “Credits”, while Businesses can make deals with LinkedIn to run surveys, campaigns, and quizzes (gasp!) to enable users to win credits. Here are some ways how it can be beneficial for LinkedIn, its users, and businesses:

Get Product Roadmap Feedback: It has become a trend to gather user feedback to prioritize new features and help define the product roadmap. But seriously, how many times have you offered feedback for a product you don’t use in the first place? This strategy doesn’t help to increase your market share and attract users who don’t use your product.
On LinkedIn, businesses can offer credits to users at a nominal cost for giving feedback on product feature set and roadmap.
Increase LinkedIn Ad Revenue: LinkedIn users spend an average of 6 minutes on the site. LinkedIn launched its own advertising network last year, but it’s still not effective. Now imagine a LinkedIn with quizzes and polls where you earn credits in return.
Credits will incentivize users to spend more time on LinkedIn, thus increasing the efficacy of its overall advertising.
Direct Access to Crowd-Sourced Wisdom: Want to know Android market penetration in the US by mid next year? Windows 7 adoption in enterprises by Q2 2010? Today, you need to purchase expensive forecast reports by analysts that often contradict each other. If you ask LinkedIn users in a poll, you won’t need that analyst report, further accelerating the death of the middleman.
Businesses get direct access to crowd-sourced wisdom if LinkedIn users are incentivized with credits.
Know Your Users & Target Market: Whenever LinkedIn users opt to participate in a poll or survey, their profile information can be shared anonymously. Age, Sex, Professional Experience, Industry, etc. can be vital feedback to marketers for branding, positioning, and advertising.
Marketing can get access to user and market demographics if LinkedIn users are incentivized with credits.
Event and Conference Planning & Feedback: Through surveys and polls, users interested in attending a conference can vote on venues, agenda, content, etc. Quiz winners can win free tickets to the event. Feedback from conference attendees is usually minimal due to lack of incentive, another area where LinkedIn users can help improve the quality of the next event.
You can have focused Events & better Conferences by availing LinkedIn user feedback.
Value Added Features for Elite Users: Currently, LinkedIn offers paid accounts meant for businesses, staffing agencies, and search firms. The problem? Features like Profile Organizer remain largely underutilized even if they may be extremely useful for individual professionals not willing to shell out $25 or more for paid accounts.
”Elite Users” with sufficient credits can access premium features of the site, thereby increasing its value to users and further increasing engagement.
Enhance LinkedIn Question & Answers: The LinkedIn Answers feature promotes you as an “Expert” if you provide best answers to questions. If users were incentivized with credits for becoming Experts, many more users will engage with this LinkedIn feature.
If Experts are rewarded with credits, more users will answer questions, and the overall efficacy of the feature will improve.

These are just some of the examples of why it makes sense for LinkedIn to introduce a virtual currency. Share your thoughts in the comments!

Tagged with: linkedin

Thanksgiving via Attribution

On November 27, 2009, In Social Web, By Mahendra

I am a prolific sharer on social networks like Google Reader and Twitter. On this Thanksgiving, let me share some of my observations about attribution, and how I try to practice it. Specifically, I discuss attribution while sharing on social networks, not while writing blog posts, which has fairly well-understood practices.

Attribution while sharing in social media, as I understand it, is crediting the author who created or the person from whom you discovered, the content that you share with your network.

When I Discover Content

If I have discovered the article, I share it on Google Reader without any additional effort. On Twitter, I try to include the author’s Twitter handle “by @authorname” while sharing it. In this way, users reading my tweet can easily follow the author if they like the content and wish to do so.

In many cases, ReTweet buttons on blogs do not generate a tweet that includes author names. If I happen to know the Twitter handle, I insert it myself. There are times when I don’t, and here I fail to attribute the author.

Tech Blogs Auto-Tweeting Posts

I like how TechCrunch and The Next Web append “by @authorname” to their automated tweets. This is the blog’s way of attributing content to their authors, possibly increasing their author’s Twitter followers and influence.

I observe that other blogs like Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, and MakeUseOf don’t do so. This may be to shorten the number of characters to make their tweets easier to retweet, or simply an act of omission.

Sharing from Google Reader to Twitter

If I discover a post shared by someone I follow on Google Reader and share it on Twitter, I try to include both the author of the post (by @author) and the person thanks to whom I discovered it (via @source). This of course, assumes that the person has a Twitter account (true in almost all cases), and is very easy to do.

Most tools that ease transfer of your RSS share to Twitter don’t credit the intermediary. Thus, if you share on Twitter via Feedly, FriendFeed, Reader2Twitter, etc. your followers on Twitter have no clue from whom you discovered your content. Ease of automated sharing is at the cost of attribution. This is why I do not use any such tool. I try to include my source in my Twitter shares, and my “via @source” tweets are my way of saying “Thanks to”.

Sharing from Twitter to Google Reader

When I discover something via another’s tweet, and share that in Google Reader, I find it extremely difficult to attribute the source. Because Google Reader was not developed as a social app from the ground up, attribution is incredibly difficult. This is an element that I think has not been discussed in the dozens of blog posts surrounding the Google Reader vs. Twitter war. Twitter makes attribution very simple, Google Reader doesn’t.

There are many additional factors and complications involved when you bring Facebook into the discussion, which I will not discuss here.

Is Attribution Important?

It depends on you. I personally believe in Thanksgiving as a way of life, not something to be done once a year. Also, sharing your sources helps your network discover good sources, which in turn increases your relevance and influence as a curator of content. Your sources value your attribution and this positions you as a Trust Agent in their eyes.

This is how social media thrives and I try my best to practice attribution diligently. Sure, it takes additional effort, but then who said it was all easy?

Tagged with: attribution • google reader • Twitter

How to Search Twitter Lists using FriendFeed

On November 18, 2009, In How To, By Mahendra

Searching Twitter Lists can be incredibly useful. What are the most influential tech people saying about Droid vs. iPhone? What are leading tech blogs saying about the Microsoft Azure platform? What do experienced investors think of the economy? The possibilities are endless, limited only by your imagination.

The problem? Twitter’s Advanced Search doesn’t support specifying Lists as a “From” parameter, because Twitter’s Search Operators don’t support Lists as of this writing. Neither do third-party search engines like Searchtastic, Twazzup, Topsy, etc. I came up with a workaround to this problem using FriendFeed and it works like a charm! Follow these two steps just once for each Twitter List you want to search.

I will use my Techmeme Leaderboard 50 list as an example.

Step 1: Get the RSS Feed for the Twitter List

Go to Twitter Lists To RSS and enter your Twitter List URL.

Get the RSS feed for your Twitter List and save the link.

Step 2: Create a Group on FriendFeed

On FriendFeed, create a Group with a suitable name. You can choose to keep it private or make it public to share it with others.

Add the RSS Feed created for your Twitter List in Step 1 as a Service of the Group.

Search Your Twitter List!

You are all set. You can add the Group to your FriendFeed sidebar for quick access, and search any keywords as shown below.

Here is how you will see the results, including the links in the tweet you can jump to directly.

Found several “tech pundits” lists and you can’t decide which is the best one to use as a search reference? Simply add the RSS feeds for all of them to your FriendFeed Group! This way, you can become a “super-curator” of Twitter Lists created by others.

FriendFeed Groups are a powerful way to follow, search, mix, and share Twitter Lists. But we already knew FriendFeed was incredibly powerful, right?

Tagged with: friendfeed • Twitter • Twitter Lists

Analyzing Twitter Lists-Follower Ratio As An Indicator of Influence

On November 8, 2009, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

Since the introduction of Lists in Twitter, there has been some speculation about how Twitter Lists could help indicate Influence. See the following for some background:

It is clear that interest focuses on the ratio of your Lists to Followers.

I decided to assess whether this new metric correlates in any way to existing influence measurement tools. The objective was to assess whether the metric has any correlation with influence ranking algorithms that do not use Lists information. For my experiment, I considered influence measurement tools like Twinfluence, Twitalyzer, and Klout.

Is this a Big Deal?

Not for casual users. There can be important implications for serious users. Since the advent of Twitter, the number of followers has been considered to be a rough indicator of influence. As a result, very few have taken pains to actually filter their followers and weed out spammers and bots. In 12 Tips to Enhance Your Twitter Reputation, I had discussed how you should do this. If the Lists-Follower metric is widely used for influence measurement, you will see people actually scanning their Followers.

This can also become important because your influence may determine the ranking of your tweets in search results.

Influence Ranking Tool

My tool of choice was Klout, for the following reasons:

Speed. The tool had to process and rank influence for each member of my sample set quickly.
Twitalyzer gave unlikely influence ranks for some people I knew.
Klout is transparent in revealing what factors it considers and changes to their algorithm. This will be useful in revisiting this after it incorporates Lists information.
Klout Score uses 25-30 variables to be comprehensive, unlike Twitalyzer, which uses only 5.

Sample Selection

I used 40 Twitter users I follow for creating my dataset. I only considered accounts that represented people, and not brands. For my dataset, I selected:

Those with more than 10,000 followers
Those with a ratio of Followers:Friends > 10:1
Some more users at random to form a long tail for the analysis, all of whom have more than 1000 followers
I couldn’t resist including myself, as one user with <900 followers

The result of my experiment looks like this, with the accounts ordered by decreasing no. of followers:

(more…)

Tagged with: Influence • Twitter • Twitter Followers • Twitter Lists

Timeless vs Real Time

On November 6, 2009, In Social Web, By Mahendra

If I were a book, you will put me in a bookshelf after you’ve read me. Later, I’ll probably lie in an attic and find my way to a library. My life would span a few decades, or even more. If I’m exceptionally good, I’ll be a timeless classic.

If I were your personal diary, I will probably last your lifetime, even if you stop using me after a while. You’ll keep me under lock and key, and no one else will read it. You will always treasure me.

If I were a real greeting card, you must have looked at me fondly, caressed me as if I were precious. You may not look at me again for many years, but I’ll be stashed away in some drawer of “memories”. Some day, you will enjoy nostalgia going through that drawer.

If I were a photo from your childhood, I will be stuck in some family album. This family album will be a great source of joy during holidays when the whole family is together.

If I were a blog post, I will live for a few years at best. That is, unless my blog is hacked or accidentally wiped out. I will be happy if your children know the name of my blog.

If I were a JPEG, I’d be one among the millions on Facebook or Flickr. Some people you’ve never met in real life may look at me and write comments. If I offend the sensibilities or political opinions of the owners of such social networks, I may be deleted.

If I were an email, my life in your inbox will be a few hours. After you’ve read me, I will be deleted or archived, and forgotten forever.

If I were a status update on a social network, I’ll be real-time, one among many that flow like fallen leaves in your friends river of feeds. If I’m good, I might be “liked”, extending my life by a few more minutes.

If I were an IM or chat conversation, I am real-time. I exist for a few fleeting minutes. I am usually used just to say Hi, or pass a link. Nobody ever looks at me again, as I vanish from this universe usually without leaving a trace.

If I were a tweet, my value usually lasts a few minutes. I may be short, but I am real-time. If I am any good, I will be passed around, shared among people who don’t know much about each other beyond their 140 character bios.

Tagged with: real-time

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Impartial Observations on Technology and the Social Web