Twitter | Skeptic Geek

Google Buzz + Reader + Twitter + Facebook = Noise

On February 12, 2010, In Social Web, By Mahendra

I’m having a hard time deciding whom to follow on which network with duplicate shares everywhere. The problem is compounded further by folks who auto-share from one network to another. There is no value in following people who share the same thing on Reader, Buzz, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. Duplication simply amplifies noise and reduces signal.

This is a real problem with social media today. Everyone wants maximum likes, shares, retweets on each and every thing they share. Their hope, understandably, is that each morsel they throw into social media becomes a feast on which everyone will drool.

Well, count me out. If someone is auto-feeding the same thing on all networks, it doesn’t add any value to me to follow them on all networks. Especially if they are not engaging in conversation where their content is landing.

I have written before about why I do not use auto-tweeting tools like Reader2Twitter, because I take as much effort as possible to attribute my sources. If you are using such tools, it makes sense to auto-tweet to a different Twitter account, like some folks do. This gives your followers the choice whether to follow you on Reader or Twitter.

Enter Buzz and FriendFeed and Facebook. Each of these is capable of pulling items from multiple sources for each person. FriendFeed can further be imported into Facebook and Buzz. This is not just aggregation, it is super-aggregation or aggregation-squared. This amplifies signals to such enormous proportions that all this noise is deafening.

Each of my shares on Twitter, Reader, and Facebook are hand-picked and manual. It takes extra effort but I believe it adds value to those who follow me. I am happy not being a social media superstar with thousands of followers if even a single person likes a single share of mine in a day. My value is not in the number of retweets, number of likes, etc., but in the feedback I get from even a single @reply or comment.

Neither of the companies behind each of these social networks are working with each other to design better filters for all of us. Each simply wants us to use them exclusively. There lies the problem. We hop on to each new social network bandwagon, immediately discover tools that allow us to auto-share and auto-propagate our shared content down stream, up stream, cross stream, life stream, etc., ultimately drowning our followers in the flood.

I am skeptic this problem will go away soon. As a curator, this is a challenge. The only way I see to successfully filter the signal out of this noise is to be brutal in curating sources. Auto-sharers, auto-tweeters, auto-feeders, or whatever these tools are called, will be the first on my radar as likely candidates to be unfollowed.

As a follower, I am a human. When you auto-share, you’re not a human on that network, you turn into a bot. Bots are what we call spam.

New RTs with @Replies and Localized Trending Topics

On January 26, 2010, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

This post is a collection of small observations that may not be individually “post-worthy”.

New Style ReTweets with @Replies

We all know that @Replies to you are visible only in the home timeline of those following both you and the sender. Thus you will not see the following tweet unless you were following both @ScepticGeek and @LayeredByte:

Now, if I do an old style ReTweet by prefixing it with RT as below, my ReTweet is visible to everyone who follows me, even if they don’t follow @LayeredByte.

But what if I do a new style ReTweet? A new style ReTweet will not prefix anything, and is effectively the same as an @Reply. The question in my mind was:

Are new style ReTweets of @Replies visible to everyone who follows you (and not only to those following both)?

Some quick searching on Google did not yield an answer. Twitter’s help on @Replies and ReTweets does not clarify this, nor does Evan William’s post explaining organic RTs. So with the help of my colleague @MadLid, I performed a quick test.

I retweeted her @Reply to me from my @ScepticGeek account, and checked if the new style ReTweet appeared in my @Palsule account from which I was not following her:

Voilà! Even if @Palsule is not following @MadLid, her @Reply to @ScepticGeek appeared in @Palsule’s home timeline when @ScepticGeek did a new style ReTweet of her @Reply.

If you’re wondering “what’s the big deal?”, there is none. This is what geeks like me who like to experiment and pay attention to detail do. I did not find it documented anywhere, hence doing it here.

Note that this is how RTs should work, and Twitter has implemented them in the correct way. When you ReTweet, you want all your followers to see it, irrespective of whether they’re following the original tweeter or not. Thus, in a way, I am also applauding Twitter’s developers for bypassing the @Reply visibility restriction when they implemented organic RTs.

I also find it amazing that people are already using what is actually a “feature”, without realizing it.

Localized Trending Topics

Last week, Twitter started rolling out localized trends. On November 9th last year, Twitter announced its Trends API. Here is what I had tweeted hours before that happened, while it was still November 8th in the US:

Disclosure Policy

Just a note that I have added a disclosure policy on the blog.

Tagged with: localized trends • organic retweets • Twitter

Is Seesmic With Ping.fm Attractive For A Twitter Acquisition?

On January 12, 2010, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

At the start of this year, Seesmic bought Ping.fm enabling status updates across 50 social networks. Mark Hopkins elaborated on why this is a threat to Twitter.

Scobleizer talks about Twitter’s declining traffic and offers suggestions for improvement, which people commenting on the post say would turn Twitter into FriendFeed/Facebook.

Seesmic’s Ping.fm acquisition had led me to wonder if that makes it a perfect candidate for a Twitter acquisition. Marshall Kirkpatrick seemed to agree.

Would it make sense for Twitter to acquire Seesmic and Ping.fm?

Does Twitter want to build its own social network and fight against Facebook? Contrary to what you might think, Evan Williams says Twitter is not a social network.

Twitter’s strategy is to be the “Pulse of the Planet”. What better way to become that pulse than be the conduit that people use across 50 social networks? This would bolster Jack Dorsey’s vision of Twitter’s success as Twitter becoming infrastructure.

When the goal of a service is to become the nervous system of the real-time web, the traffic to its website doesn’t matter. The pulse of the online world lies in status updates people make on various social networks. I am sure that Seesmic, with Ping.fm’s half a million users, looks a very attractive option for Twitter to grab that pulse.

The scenario can look gloomy for the open web, with the social graph of users in the hands of Facebook, and real-time pulse in the hands of Twitter.

Tagged with: seesmic • Twitter

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

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

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

HootSuite Throws Seesmic Desktop Out Of The Ring

On August 5, 2009, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

I have two Twitter accounts – @SocialGeek, which I use for tech stuff, and @Palsule, which is personal and everything non-tech.

I have been using Seesmic Desktop since Seesmic Web doesn’t support multiple Twitter accounts yet. I am not a Facebook fan so don’t need Facebook support in my Twitter client. I used Tweetdeck initially because of the following features:

Support Multiple Twitter Accounts
Support Groups with ability to sync across browsers and platforms (I dual-boot between WinXP and Win7 and use all browsers since I write tech stuff)
Support creating Groups mixed with people I follow from both accounts
Create custom Search columns
And several others like trends, video, etc. that I didn’t use

Tweetdeck was very slow, so I switched to Seesmic Desktop. It was lighter and faster, but didn’t support Group Sync.

Now, I’m using HootSuite in a dedicated full-screen Chrome window. It supports all the above key features and:

Takes half the memory – Seesmic with AIR 110K, HootSuite in Chrome 55K (see attached screenshots)
Provides stats for those who’re interested
And finally, I can get rid of Adobe AIR

Now, I’m waiting for Seesmic Web version to support multiple Twitter Accounts.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via from SkepticGeek’s Posterous

Tagged with: hootsuite • seesmic • Twitter

Skeptic Geek

Impartial Observations on Technology and the Social Web