31 Dec 08 Twitter: Massively parallel self-organizing points of view

There is no shortage of speculation about Twitter’s future, particularly its business model.  Just search on monetize Twitter.   The company’s site describes it as “a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices.”  Snore.  Also this: The idea arose when “Jack Dorsey had grown interested in the simple idea of being able to know what his friends were doing.”  Less of a snore, but not a business, but a focus.  The companyalso describes itself this way: “Twitter solves information overload by changing expectations traditionally associated with online communication.”  On track, but still very broad.

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.

Tags: headlines, point of view, self-organization, twitter