Quickthink

From NYT today after Twitter’s first developer conference called “chirp” by JeremiahOwyang

(Twitter has) gone from a data play to a platform play. You’re seeing the same behavior that Facebook, Google and other online communities have done. This is a natural evolution of a Web company.

Here is the link.

FOLLOW - I really enjoyed Om Malik’s article comparing Twitter and Facebook development trategies.  Here is the link. Why is this important? Om argues

(Facebook and Twitter) are the Kane & Abel of our new pulsating two-way, near-real-time Internet. Together, they dominate the zeitgeist. They are the future of communications and interactions. They already have a large portion of our Internet attention. To put it simply, they are competing for essentially what is the next evolution of the Internet: The People Web.

A while ago I posted on Jay Rosen’s idea about collective intelligence. Jay notes that no single journalist can have greater expertise in any area than his collective audience over time. Here is the link. With that idea in my head, I started to notice how people use the web to build layers of collective intelligence. Here are two simple examples.

Example 1 - Fred Wilson does this all the time. Most recently, Fred was scheduled to give a presentation on how to be your own boss. So he posted this on his blog with a proposed slide show and he asked for ideas from his readers. Here is the link. Fred usually gets over 100 comments per day to his posts, so he was guaranteed to get some good suggestions. You might wonder how did Fred get to the point where he has over 100 comments a day. Well, that I suppose would be the topic of a follow up series of posts.

Example 2 - A few days ago, Sam Sifton reviewed a hotel bar/restaurant called Faustina in New York. In itself, this is not that unusual. But while doing so, Sam created a category of places that he called “hotelish” and he asked people what their favorite hotelish bars and restaurants are. And people started to think and respond. Voila, a list emerged. Here is a link  to Sam’s article.

There are at least two larger points here. First, if the request for input generates good ideas, it also generates the possibility of building a new platform to follow up those ideas (ie - dar be gold in dem dar commentary). The new platform could become a sort of incubator for product development. For example, Seth Godin has already produced an ebook out of comments that he got using a similar technique. Second, as the influence of social media tools grows, we are likely to see a corresponding increase in the use of conversation threads rather that than just assertions of opinion and provision of information (like current newspapers). These will be much more nuanced than the threads one finds now in comments to blog posts or question and answer forums one finds in web platforms. Fred posted the other day on some of the current trends in managing commentary. Here is the link. After a while, we might even demand this of all our media, rejecting one way blah blah blah posts …. errr …. like this one.

Ok, here’s your chance …. so what do you think about that? Huh? I dare you ! Tell me I’m wrong. Come on! Bring it on! Oops. Sorry. Got a bit carried away there.

Stage direction - Polite cough, clear the throat.

As always, your comments are most welcome.

A thought from Mary Meeker’s presentation at Google stuck with me. She posits that social media has replaced email as the tool of choice to make contact with people. Here is a link to my post on this.

The idea has an odd resonance for me because I can still remember what it was like to work in a law office before the fax machine was invented. The preferred way to communicate in those days was by post. BTW, it was a rather civilized way of getting things done. All the important stuff was put into letters (and letters were carefully crafted because they comprised a permanent record). When letters arrived in the office, we took the time to read them carefully, and then we would forward the letters to our clients with our cover letter commentaries, and proposals for next steps. This took time. But the slowness offered advantages. At each step along the way, one had time to think, plan and build relationships rather than just rant and rave.

The fax machine changed this. The little devil was quiet most of the week. But on Friday afternoon it would start going kerchunk kerchunk, and a stream of faxes would roll in, all demanding responses within 48 hours. Ho hum. Silly. Even more silliness arrived when clients started trying to telephone me using their mobile phones while they were driving. The conversation threads lost coherence when traffic heated up, and I remember at least one client having a fender bender after he heard a bit of bad news. A bit later, I saw even more silliness with emails composed at lightning speed that were almost unintelligible.

So now email’s days are numbered and we will start up with social networking tools. I like one aspect of this. When you start building a digital thread of conversation (as opposed to writing an email), you commit to a modular format that creates a permanent record of the ongoing train of thought. This means individuals in the group have an incentive to focus on pieces of the thread rather than having to swallow the whole elephant at once and instantaneously report on their digestive processes. Fred Wilson writes about the benefits of using comment threads this way in his post at A VC. Here is the link.

Will this bring back the elegance of postal exchange? I doubt it. But that is a metric that software developers have never heard of.

Still scratching your head about freemium?  I liked Joel’s post on Strategy Letter V on the idea. Joel’s basic point —- to understand freemium, you need to understand the idea of complementary products. Products are complementary when the use of one means you need more of the other. For example, when I buy a computer, I am likely also to buy software. When I buy a car, sooner or later I will be buying car repair. Joel shows how freemium pricing often opens the door for increased demand for complementary products.  Here is the link.

BTW, the grand daddy of all complementarity pricing strategies came from McDonald’s. When you eat a hamburger, you are likely to buy a soft drink to wash it down. So the McDonald’s brothers sold its burgers at cost and made a fortune on soft drink sales. Ray Krock then turned the idea into a franchise.

The news just broke. Twitter will start introducing paid advertising into tweet streams. Twitter users will for the first time start seeing tweets from people that they do not follow. Will this work? John Battelle has some interesting thoughts on this. Here is a link to his post.