for all those coming to this site and wondering why i haven’t updated in a while… i’m posting here.
(first: I don’t know Cody, nor is this intended as a personal attack on him. He is probably a very smart person, much smarter than myself. This is simply a counter-argument to his stance on Twitter)
In Cody Brown’s blog post “Myspace is to Facebook as Twitter is to ________” he force fits an anecdote “Scale is Everything” to fit his personal belief that Twitter will fall the way of MySpace. The problem is that he doesn’t even get why MySpace fell apart, more or less where Twitter’s weak points are (I’ll give you a hint, RSS is not one of them).
—-
How Cody Is Wrong: Point 1
Cody: MySpace failed due to segmented user groups and the inability to maintain a 3 front war (social networking-facebook, music-lastfm, entertainment-blogging)
Reality: MySpace failed due to an atrocious user experience.
The problem with MySpace has nothing to do with the fact that it’s user groups are segmented. In fact, when given the choice people prefer to get their whole experience in one place (just ask the Walton family). The problem is when that experience is lackluster, then people look for anything as an improvement over what’s annoying them.
MySpace let it’s users create their own pages from scratch. Which meant horrid color combinations, flashing backgrounds, auto-start music and videos, giant page sizes causing often minute long load times. You’d wince as you clicked to each new page, unsure of what terrors laid before you. MySpace’s problem is they have absolutely no control over the user experience, they let the animals run the zoo. The question shouldn’t be, why did MySpace die? It really should be, how did MySpace last this long?
—-
How Cody Is Wrong: Point 2
Cody: Facebook became what it is because Zuck started with a small group and through incremental evolution ended up with a broad-appealing product.
Reality: Facebook became what it is because Zuck started with a walled garden, let buzz reach a breaking point in that garden, then tore down the walls.
This difference while subtle, is vitally important. Facebook didn’t become a world-wide phenom due to it’s gradual evolution. What made facebook so cool at its inception is that it was only for college students, and only a couple colleges had it. This created a walled garden within a walled garden. First you couldn’t join unless you were in college, and even if you were in, you had to be in the select few ivy league schools to get it.
Then, instead of opening up to all colleges at once, Zuck started opening up to colleges one by one. It became such a big deal when your college finally was added to facebook I remember it actually interrupted one of our lectures when someone in class realized that we could sign-up. This created a buzz in the college community. And it bred a feeling of ownership to this service. It was ours, not our parents and not those high school kids.
Well you can imagine that buzz grew more and more as people outside the college community heard about it (probably those just outside the walls- recent grads and seniors in high school) and wanted to join in on the fun. This buzz kept growing and growing at a frenzied pace as more and more blogs and companies talked about Facebook. Then, one day, they opened the doors for everyone. At that very same time MySpace was dealing with news about nude pictures of high school students, and peodphiles. MySpace didn’t stand a chance.
I guess if you want to boil this down even further you can say that Facebook won because it was easier to use, easier on the eyes, and got all the cool kids on board.
—-
How Cody Is Wrong: Point 3
Cody: MySpace was popular for a use they didn’t anticipate, and they failed. Twitter is also popular for a use they didn’t anticipate. Therefore they will fail.
Reality: That’s a hasty generalization there sir.
Ask any successful startup founder, your first idea is never the one you end up with. And how you imagine users to play with your application is almost never how it’s used in actuality.
Do me a favor. Read up on the creation of Flickr, PayPal, The Internet, Viagra. Did any of these founders anticipate how their products would eventually be used? Not a chance.
—-
How Cody Is Wrong: Point 4
Cody: Twitter will eventually be replaced by multiple service providers much the same way MySpace was. One being a product with minimal centralization (RSSCloud for example), the other will be centralized but better organized.
Reality: Your Retarded.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume Cody means that for our individual twitterers and tweets we’d be using the decentralized RSSCloud (or similar) service. This would allow content creators to keep their data and use it however they’d like. Allowing different apps/readers, as well as different ways to display the tweet-equivalents. Then the centralized product would be for news organizations, as a method of making it easier for us to find legitimate news from legitimate sources.
First, decentralization will never happen. The reason is simple. Why would anyone want to join a decentralized group? Name one incentive for Oprah, Ellen, Shaq, Ashton or anyone else to move from Twitter to a decentralized source? Exactly. The only way Twitter loses ground for our daily conversation is if they restrict their usage in any way. That catastrophically bad idea aside, decentralization can’t kill Twitter. Only Twitter can kill Twitter.
Oh and the idea that a product with better organization is going to take down Twitter is laughable. The more likely scenario is that someone will come up with a way to better organize and display Twitter’s pipe and become the next TweetDeck.
Face it, Twitter is the only source of micro-blogging. Not only that, it still has a long way to grow. Twitter may eventually be overtaken, but not while it’s still surging forward like this.
—-
The answer to your question is, this: MySpace is to Facebook as RSS is to Twitter. (fixed your question).
Facebook is dying.
It doesn’t look sick now, but it also doesn’t look well. It can be fixed, but it won’t be. Mark my words: by 2012 Facebook will be a footnote.
——- What’s The Problem? ——-
Where do I begin? Facebook isn’t a service anymore, it’s a disaster. It’s trying to replace instant messaging (Facebook Chat), Twitter (status updates), and even email (Facebook messages). It’s neither fish nor fowl.
Facebook can’t seem to figure out who it wants to be when it grows up. If you take the past 6 months as any indication you would be convinced that they idolize Twitter and, like a 7th grade girl, Facebook will do anything to look, act, and sound like Twitter. It’s sad really.
Before that it looked like Facebook wanted to be a real-life version of the Sims or World of Warcraft. With it’s bumper stickers, pins, gifts, flair, top-friends, zombies… etc. It felt less like a community and more like a f*cking flea market.
So what I’m trying to say is that the problem is, Facebook’s leadership doesn’t seem to understand why people love/use it.
People use Facebook to maintain their network of people they almost know but don’t care enough to call. It allows you to play voyeur with your quasi-friends.
Facebook is not the next wave of communication, it never was. It’s big sell is that it allows you to (barely) keep in touch with people you otherwise would never speak to again. That’s it.
They need to lose these grandiose plans for world domination and accept what they really are. A portal that greases the wheels of communication between you and one-off friends.
——- How Would I Fix It? ——-
First I would immediately stop working on anything that the majority of users don’t get gratification from. What I’m saying is I want to cut the bullsh*t.
So this means I’d cut:
Now that I’ve cut the fat, I’m going to stop this inane obsession with beating Twitter. It’s not going to happen. Facebook and Twitter are social, that’s where the similarities end. Twitter lets me see and share public thoughts and discussions in real-time. Facebook lets me catch up with friends, check in on acquaintances, and gives me another way to flirt. On my own time, privately.
So with that I would change the homepage. No more obsession over the status updates and more concentration on pictures, wall posts, and profile updates.
I would then add the following:
Facebook has a real chance to make something of itself. It’s the biggest (and arguably the best) social networking site out there. It has over 250 million users, and still can’t turn a profit.
Maybe someday down the road they’ll realize the error of their ways, but my guess is that Facebook will be the Webvan of the post-dot-com-bust.
Maybe it’s because more people are out of work and trying to make money. Maybe it’s because VC firms are having trouble raising funds as big as they have been in the past. Maybe it’s simply because there’s a huge market. Whatever the reason, entrepreneurialism and Series AA funding has suddenly become cool.
Just a couple years ago if you didn’t have an angel in your pocket and didn’t need over $1m your funding options were limited to those in your bloodline. In the past 5 years or so this has changed dramatically.
Read up on the individual ventures about what they offer, there’s something here for every flavor of entrepreneur. I personally am going to stick with bootstrapping for my current idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one of our other ventures ends up taking one of these routes.
Series AA Providers
1) Ycombinator
2) TechStars
3) SeedCamp
4) YEurope
5) LaunchBox
6) AlphaLab
8) Bootup Labs
9) Bootphase
11) Charles River Ventures: QuickStart
12) Start@Spark
Update (7/20): Forgot a couple
14) Founders Fund
15) Prototype Invest
—-
Let me know if I forgot any.
Ok so now you know the basics, that’s good. Gotta start somewhere. Time to add to your lesson plan. Next up, growing your followers and learning the true power of Twitter plus one big no-no.
1) Embrace the Retweet
A retweet is simply where you copy and paste someone else’s tweet with “RT @username” in front of it. The purpose of a retweet is twofold.
First, you get to associate your name with the person you are retweeting. Which is why it’s usually a good idea to retweet a big name person, or at least someone on the up and up.
Second, you build good will/twitter capital (twapital… write that down) with the person you are retweeting. This is a great way to have that big name, mentioned above, notice you and possibly start opening up their communication more to you. They’ll be more likely to respond to your replies, and possibly even retweet something of yours.
Anytime you can get a big name to even mention you it’s a big deal. Because now all of their followers will see your username, giving you free exposure to thousands of people thanks to a couple of keystrokes.
2) Learn Who To Follow
This is important. There are thousands of very powerful and important people on twitter, but honestly we only have the personal bandwidth to handle 100-200 people… at most*. So who do you pick, and where do you find out who is even on twitter to follow?
I personally use two different services for this. Guy Kawasaki’s (blog/twitter) Alltop and Kevin Rose’s (blog/twitter) WeFollow.
First both Guy and Kevin are big deals in social media, so they know what they’re doing and what works. Second, the sites are incredibly easy to use.
Alltop (link) is a website that compiles blogs and other social media lists by category. As far as twitter is concerned there are two links of importance, Twitterati and Good Tweet. Twitterati is a list of some of the top twitter users, and Good Tweet is a list of blogs that come up with great material for you to twitter about. You can (and should) also use Alltop to find the top bloggers in your areas of interest, you can then go to their blogs and see if they have twitter.
WeFollow (link) is a list of twitter users by category. The categories are arranged based on the number of followers someone has. It’s a little thin when it comes to breadth of categories but it’s new and it’s growing. You can also add yourself to the list.
* - I feel if you twitter for fun then you shouldn’t have more than 100-200 people you follow. If your twitter is your companies/organizations or you are your own brand then I highly recommend auto-following people that follow you and just using TweetDeck to separate the signal from the noise.
3) Dress Up That Profile
You may not know it, but you have a profile for twitter. It is wee but it is mighty. When I look at a twitter page that is the very first thing I notice (ok second depending on the quality of the picture). Some do’s and don’ts for profiles.
Do: Quickly and Simply explain who you are and why I should care.
Don’t: Be overly “cute” or metaphysical about who you are. Wit is fine, but you have to be good at it. Otherwise you’ll just come off as immature and trying too hard.
Do: Put your blog/website on the blog/website line.
Don’t: Put your link anywhere else in your profile. It just looks spammy.
4) Don’t Use “Text-Type”
I don’t care about your BFF Jill, neither does anyone else. If you LOL keep it to yourself and I want a youtube video as proof of you ROTFLMAO. Aside from the occasional WTF or leetspeak you should be using full words. And really if you had to click on the link for leetspeak, you shouldn’t use it, ever.
Every time I see someone write “Going 2 bed, C U all later” or something to that extent it just screams “hey look I’m hip, I’m up on how you kids speak yo”. Instead, summon your inner Hemingway to fill those 140 characters. And if you can’t say it in 140 characters then it’s not meant to be tweeted. It’s just that simple.
DON’T: Cross The Streams (link)
Don’t sync your facebook with your twitter feed. In fact, never use facebook as a compliment to twitter. It’s not. This is a relatively recent problem, but a problem none the less. I can’t believe those in charge of facebook don’t understand their own product enough to realize this.
Facebook is for connection at a distance. It’s for keeping up with the day to day events and activities of someone via pictures, relationship status updates, and wall posts. Facebook is voyeurism, Twitter is talking (sometimes to yourself).
Twitter Version: Facebook is a person’s highlight reel, Twitter is the live-game.
When I’m on Facebook I could not care less about what blog article you are reading or if your coworkers loud chewing is annoying you. I want to see you in drunk pictures, I want to see what people are saying on your wall, and that’s about it. Adding your twitter feed to facebook just clutters my newsfeed and will probably put you on my “annoying” list.
—-
Do yourself a favor, stay off the annoying list.
If every twitter user read this before even considering their first tweet, the world would be a much less annoying place.
Consider this your “Idiots Guide to Twitter”. In 7 easy steps I plan on taking you greenhorns from Twitter n00b to a slightly less embarrassing Twitterer.
1) Get the Right Hardware
First off, no one really uses the website to tweet, “via the web” is the scarlet letter of twitter n00bs. Use a service. For your desktop Twhirl and Tweetdeck are amazing. For the iphone Twitterfon is great, and free.
These applications will make it much easier for you to engage in conversations with others. They take the guess work out of direct messages, replies, sharing pictures, and shortening URLs.
2) Follow the Leader
The most important thing to remember about Twitter is this… Above all else Twitter is a community. It’s about engaging in conversation, exchanging ideas, promoting yourself and others. It’s organic.
The single best way to learn what is and isn’t acceptable in any community is to shadow a leader. So your very first move (after getting the right hardware) should be to follow all/some of the following Twitterer’s:
Follow these people for a week. Read what they have to say. Check out the links they post. Notice the different strategies they all employ. Try to figure out why they have as many followers as they do.
Do this all without tweeting once. Take one whole week to just absorb this, and learn. You, and the community, will be much better for it.
3) Conversation Basics
The following are the basic commands and what they mean in twitter.
@username - This is a reply, it lets you respond to someone’s tweet. If done properly the username should become a hyperlink in your timeline, and they’ll get a notice of this reply. Replies are how conversations are born. You can also use this to reference someone in your tweet (i.e. “hanging out with @biz in Union Square”).
d username - This is a direct message. It doesn’t show up on anyone’s timeline and only the user you sent it to can see it. It’s essentially a private tweet.
url shorteners - The two best are bit.ly and is.gd. They shrink unruley URL’s (just look at the one for this post) into something that can actually fit into a tweet.
share pictures - Twitpic allows you to post and share a picture via twitter. Great when you’re on your iphone/crackberry.
#keyword - These are hash-tags. They allow you to link your tweet to a particular keyword. Making it easier for people searching for tweets on that particular keyword. Like for this post I might say #twitter_basics or just #basics.
4) Remember: this is not a billboard
This is a common error for Company’s/Organizations. They get on twitter and assume that the best way to get out their message is to literally, get out their message.
Every single tweet is some link to an article about them saying “look at what the wall street journal said about us (link)” or “new york times announces that the _____ (insert business market you are in) business is on the rise”.
Allow me to be perfectly clear, STOP THAT!
Remember, this is a community. This is like having dinner with a family friend that happens to be an insurance salesman, and all he talks about all dinner is how you “really should get some supplemental health insurance, I can get you a great deal”. Would you talk to that person ever again?
Promoting yourself or your business is fine… in moderation.
5) Tweet like you eat
I like to follow a “food pyramid” tweet strategy.
The base (starches + fruits + veggies) should be filled with unique, personal content. This should be your opinions on current events/articles, what you’re doing (only if it’s noteworthy), and replies to other people’s comments. The kind of stuff that shows your personality 140 characters at a time. The majority of your tweets should be of this variety.
The middle (meats + dairy) should be links to cool articles/videos/websites. These are things that are good a couple times a day, but when done regularly can really clog up your system. They add flavor and are what many people look forward to. So even if people don’t like your opinions they still might follow you for the funny links alone.
The top (sweets and fats) should be self-promotion. These need to be USED SPARINGLY. Done on rare occasion they make for a great treat, and can really get a great response. Unfortunately these can easily be abused.
Keep your tweets on a strict diet and you’ll at least not annoy the sh*t out of your followers.
6) You Don’t Have To Be Cool
Unlike anywhere else, on Twitter, you don’t have to be cool to converse with a celebrity. Shaq, Ellen, Martha Stewart, Diddy, Jimmy Fallon… all are on twitter.
And unlike other scenarios involving celebrities, twitter has no faux pas for randomly joining a convo. Every conversation is an open forum, so if Shaq says something that strikes you, feel free to reply to him. He may not answer, but it’s not because you broke some unspoken rule that only cool people can talk to cool people, it’s simply because he’s Shaq and he probably gets 1,000 replies a minute.
7) Don’t Be That Guy
That being said… don’t be that guy. We all know that guy (in this case “guy” is not gender specific, it just flows better than “person”). That guy that has a comment for everyone and an opinion on everything.
It’s fine to be opinionated or to have a lot of views, just don’t impose them on people. Twitter isn’t about deep conversations. It’s about interesting quips, picking sides, adding color commentary. If your explanation takes more that 1 tweet, you’re doing it wrong. If you often find yourself in long drawn out arguments via twitter… you’re doing it wrong.
——
You just have to understand twitter as it is. It’s not some great marketing platform for you to reach hundreds of thousands of new people every day. People really don’t want to know about “what you are doing” every single minute of the day. And it’s not a place to forge amazing alliances or to boost your network.
While all these things might happen, that’s not the point of twitter.
The point of twitter is to bring everyone down to the same level, and essentially hold a dinner table conversation, with everyone.
Tell about what you learned today, or a funny thing someone said at work, or something you heard on tv that pissed you off. That’s what twitter is for. That’s what social media is about. Anything else that comes of it is an unintended bonus.
Haven’t posted in a while but absolutely was compelled to. This is one of the most genius Guerilla Marketing tactics I’ve seen in a long time. So good I’m actually planning on trying this sometime in the near future for one of my various retarded ideas.
Wonderful.
[emphasis added by me]
Hulu get’s it. Not only are they a kickass site (and great sign that media conglomerates aren’t complete idiots), but they get it.
When it comes to my interaction with their site, I really don’t need an up to the second update on the status of the connection buffer. In fact having an up to the second update (see: youtube) will only make me obsess over the buffer. In the grand scheme of things this doesn’t matter one iota to Hulu as far as “saving resources or money”, but it adds to my user enjoyment (if only a little).
Hulu gets that every extra bit of user enjoyment only adds to the addictiveness of using their site/service, making me that much more likely to come back.
Takeaway: If your business relies on enjoyment > information, every single detail of your product should reflect that.
