Please realize that none of that was criticism.  I’ve been a founder, manager and advisor to many startups over the last 20 years, which led me to think quite a bit about the natural tension between creative invention and focused follow-through.  Solving a broad problem often drives popular new technology at first.  The challenge Twitter faces, like any startup that gets this far, is to find a market focus.  This is hard and relatively rare for startups because the kind of people who are good at inventing stuff are usually unsatisfied, often bored, at using their inventions in just one or two markets when they can see dozens.  However, a market focus is almost always essential to success.  Or as Paul Dali once said memorably, the five most important things for a startup are focus, focus, focus, distribution and focus.  So, Twitter, where to focus?

The old saw in developing a business plan is to ask yourself what business you are in.  Twitter has some interested uses that are probably not revenue makers.  For example, knowing that my friend Dale is making goat cheese is interesting, I’m not at all sure there’s revenue there.  Let me be clear – I have a deep appreciation for the non-commercial value of the Internet, the gift economy in which we are all collaborators.  But it doesn’t pay the electric bill.

What business is Twitter in?  As the headline above says, I think Twitter’s revenue business will arise from the part of it that is a people-driven, massively parallel headline organizer. It helps me learn things that interest people who I think are interesting.  The people I follow are people who I choose to allow to influence what I read; they are people who have interesting points of view.  Not interesting facts.  I can usually uncover facts without much trouble.  Developing tools that help people find valuable points of view is much harder and far more, well, exciting.  It has been the goal of much of my career.

Ten years ago, Jakob Nielsen wrote a piece on “microcontent,” with arguments for why web  headlines, page titles and subject lines should not be written like newspaper headlines.  His advice is mostly on target for Twitter, but with one big difference – Twitter headlines come in the context of somebody’s point of view.  It’s not just anybody’s point of view, but somebody who Twitters often enough, interestingly enough, but not too often or too dull, so that you’re willing to follow them.  

I am reminded of a conversation I had a couple of years ago (about the war in Iraq, where a member of my extended family was killed in action) with Mike Honda, my representative in Congress.  Mike said that he doesn’t meet with constituents to get information.  He has a staff for that.  They can dig up just about any information he wants.  Constituents give him something more valuable – stories that energize him to go back to Washington and keep working despite all the obstacles and the temptation to do something that pays better and yields faster results.

If Google is like my research staff, Twitter is like my constituency… but the metaphor breaks when you consider that the U.S. government is democratic, but the Internet is as different from democracy as democracy is different from a monarchy.  A democracy is self-regulating, the Internet goes one step further – it is self-organizing, so there is no equivalent of a member of Congress.  We are all each others’ research staff and constituencies.

When I decide who to follow on Twitter, I’m looking for strong points of view.  The words “check out” are a big ho-hum, but they sure are heavily used.  Please ban “check out” from your Twitter vocabulary.  Show me, don’t tell me, as every writing instructor says.  I promise to do my best to write tweets that reveal more than just facts.

Looking through my recent followees, here’s a tweet that really works for me, from Tim O’Reilly (who keeps popping up in my viewfinder as somebody who uses Twitter well).  It works because it starts with the word “Love,” so I know there’s a strong opinion there.  It also mentions another Twitterer I’ve heard of, which helps raise my interest.

I’m not sure how hashtags fit into this model.  They represent a number of peoples’ point of view of categorization by topic.  Although I am a fan of topical organization, I automatically think of trees and directed graphs, yet hashtags are one-dimensional.  I don’t know if that works.  Structure can be implicit in tags, but that’s hard even when each message has several tags and there isn’t room for that in Twitter.  Perhaps out-of-band tagging would work better.  The only hashtag that I have really appreciated was #svtweetup, which got me to a pretty good face-to-face networking event.

Why organize points of view?  I see these benefits:

• Helps keep me informed about the hot topics and buzz so that I’m staying current.
• Is a “serendipity engine” that leads me to find things I didn’t know to look for.
• Stimulates creativity by helping me see the same old stuff in new ways.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be Twitter that does this.  But of everything that the Internet has spawned, Twitter seems to have the most potential.  As I work with the APIs and data, I’m starting to get some ideas about where revenue might be, but I’ll save that until I’ve done a bit more work with it.

The problem of cyber-bullying hit me hard last week. As I wrote last week, I volunteer as a critical incident stress management debriefer. Most of the debriefings I do are with first responders – fire, EMS, police, dispatchers and similar workers. But our team also reaches out to the community; when you hear on the news that grief counselors are available to an organization after an incident, that’s us. The reason cyber-bullying is on my mind is that over the last few weeks, I have spent quite a bit of time with teenagers who are trying to cope with the suicides of friends.

Confidentiality is paramount, so I cannot offer any details of any incident I’ve been involved in. But imagine a middle school or high school student who learns that a friend has committed or attempted suicide, who goes to that friend’s MySpace, Facebook or other social media home page and finds mean and horrible things written about them. What’s worse, imagine if those things were written after their friend took that awful step.

I came away from one recent set of debriefings absolutely convinced that if there is any possible way to do it, the industry should figure out a rapid way to disable, freeze or at least moderate the pages of any minor who has been a victim of violence. I emphasize “rapidly” because word gets around fast (a whole separate problem; texting is not a good way to find out your friend is dead) and cyber-bullies can post unbelievably nasty messages in no time at all.

While I agree with those who argue that the best solution to cyber-bullying is education, in this kind of situation, it is too late to teach new behavior and the consequences are too severe. Any solution to this problem faces great technical and political challenges, but I have little doubt that the work will be worthwhile.

I occasionally marvel at the fact that people are reading and writing far, far more than they did even years ago – trillions, trillions, of emails, SMS messages, blog posts, Twitter tweets and so forth. Even if 80 or 90 percent of it is garbage, that is still a huge social change. Why were the cynics wrong? I think the answer is simple – people have been starved for connections.

The western world invented a lot of things that disconnected people from one another in the 20th century. Radio and television let us be entertained solo. Suburbs spread the population apart. Freeways isolated sections of cities. Nursing homes, for all the good they do, broke generational connections. School consolidation and integration, along with long commutes, meant that many schoolmates’ parents didn’t know each other any more.

I headlined this post “Everything you know is half-right” because we tend to miss things right in front of us (“We don’t know who discovered water, but we are pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.“). Social ROI is far squishier to define than “real” ROI, measured in revenue. Yet if we really want to understand the “why” of social networking, it is a mistake to ignore any of its drivers. The one word I choose to describe why people are writing and self-publishing so much is “acknowledgment.” People want to be acknowledged.

We don’t all need praise, advice, instruction and other human connections that might somehow improve or encourage us, but we all have a deep need to be acknowledged. Instead of trying to explain that, I’ll describe it in a completely different context.

A few times a month, I put on a very different hat as a volunteer with the Bay Area Critical Incident Stress Management Team. When you hear about “grief counselors” who are available to responders and victims of bad stuff, that’s us. Long ago I worked as a paramedic and so I often debrief first responders – medics, fire, police, dispatchers – but also the public. Recently, these included middle school children after one of their friends shot himself, a search team that found the body of a drowned baby, a fire crew that responded to a particularly bad fatal auto accident. It is grim stuff and wildly different from my day-to-day work. Except that is isn’t. It is social networking, face-to-face, when it really counts.

We start debriefings by telling people that we are not there to fix things or make them better, we’re there to help them live with what happened and support each other. In other words, we acknowledge that they have been through something really awful. That sounds simple, but it is profoundly powerful. I will never forget a family my wife and I debriefed after their father and husband was murdered, saying that although they obviously knew it was a terrible thing, it was so comforting to hear someone say so. Acknowledgment.

What does this mean for social media? If you, er, acknowledge that acknowledgment is a basic human desire, you realize that as the tools become available, you’re either part of it or you’re a Luddite. It means that the fundamental demand is broad and deep, but it also means that the tools that satisfy this hunger are likely to become commodities rapidly. Combine deep demand with network effects that make each added user more valuable (v. the “law” of decreasing returns) and the first-mover advantage is enormous. And yet perversely, the first-move advantage has a limited life because people will demand open systems. That is good news for open identity standards, portable reputations and such.

I’ll wrap this up by saying that as I see it, this is a wonderful time to be alive. I think history will look back at our time, despite occasional economic hiccups, as a period in which the modern world regained something important that it had lost.