3 posts tagged “business”

This is a continuation of my earlier post on Twitter, and hopefully (one of) my last.  People frequently ask me what Twitter is all about and why someone would want to use it, so here is my answer for them.

What is Twitter?
Twitter started as a microblogging concept, a personal blog where your entries have to be 140 characters or less.  While some people certainly still use it as thus, it appears to have evolved into something else.  I see Twitter now as a hybrid between IM and email with a little IRC thrown in for good measure.  My guess is this comes from the push nature of twitter, where bogging is generally pull: you send emails and IMs, but you visit blogs or pull in RSS feeds.  Now that it is being used as a communication platform, it feels like a worldwide chat room where instead of having to mute people you don't want to hear, you unmute people you do want to hear. 

Why would you want to use Twitter?
I'm frequently impressed with how the publicity of Twitter as a communication platform exposes its best features.  You can watch stock tips being exchanged, you can get trickle-down publicity from the power users by engaging them in conversation.  I only wish I had started using it more seriously when I first created the account.  I can attribute multiple signups at MarketOutsider.com to my use of Twitter.  If nothing else, whenever I'm downtown, I can usually find some people to grab lunch with me via Twitter.

You do still have to monitor your own quality of service with Twitter.  Some users follow as many people as they can, which in my mind is crazy, as you would just inundate yourself with noise.  I follow about 70 people, which is about all I can handle.  Luckily many of them only say 1 or 2 things a day.  I'm told if you have too many followers, it can also be burdensome; every time you say something you get hundreds of replies.

Power users
The users that get the most out of twitter are its elite power users.  These are people like @JasonCalacanis who have tens of thousands of followers.  These users serve as a sounding board, a set of free labor, a market test group, or any other of a myriad of uses.  A few weeks ago Jason asked for comments on a design mock-up for Mahalo, and he got over 500 comments within a couple hours, for FREE.  When @therealdvorak couldn't find something on google, he asked his followers and instantly got five messages with exactly what he was looking for, again, for FREE.  The ones who are using it well are pulling off the ultimate in marketing, perfectly targeted $0 CPM advertising.

Corporate use
It might be interesting for a large corporation to use an internal version of Twitter to help relay ideas.  It's publicity would help keep things open, and encourage others with input or related tasks to be informed where email wouldn't.  I wouldn't want to be the first one to accidentally send a message to the public Twitter that was intended for the corporate one, though.

Bots
Twitter's API has made for some interesting bots.  @StockTweets follows stock traders on Twitter who share their watchlists and trades.  @lotd is a club for people to share song lyrics.  @winetweets is a bot that shares people's wine reviews.  My feeling is the best twitter bots are still to come.

Summize
The public nature of twitter makes for some interesting analysis.  You can use Summize to watch a search term as it happens in Twitter, or get the sentiment expressed by twitter users for a particular subject.  Any time you can watch the thoughts and activities of a large group of people in real-time, you can get some interesting network effects.

What is the future of twitter?
I have a feeling that if the concept that makes twitter so viable really starts making it to the mainstream, the concept will have to leave the confines of Twitter's servers.  Whether this is in the form of an open standard like email, or an open-source replacement, or what, a single company--especially with Twitter's technical problems--can't and probably shouldn't own a communication platform.

Revenue stream?
Twitter can't operate without income forever, so they will need to find a revenue stream.

There is a potential for an Ad-based revenue model, given users are providing them with information that could be used for targeting, maybe with a potential for mobile location-based advertising to those using twitter over SMS.

They could also consider a freemium model, where those users with high numbers of followers, maybe >10,000 pay a fee.  These users will probably be fine with that, as they are the ones who can most easily get value out of Twitter, as described above.

The last option I've considered is having a corporate version that they license for companies to set up their own private Twitter networks.  I'm not sure this would really make sense with the whole Twitter concept, but it has potential.

Last summer I signed up for twitter while at OSCON, I was there with a group of coworkers, and we thought it would be a good way to keep each other appraised of where everyone was having lunch/drinking beer/etc.  It worked pretty well despite some technical issues twitter was having at the time.

A $30 charge for text messages and a month later I pretty much stopped using twitter.  At 8:51 on November 28th, 2007, I sent a message: "Wondering if I'll ever use Twitter again" intending that it would be my last twitter message. I had given up on twitter.

Fast forward four months and twitter seems to have a new life.  It has really come into its own as THE forum for quick broadcasting and link dissemination.  After following @JasonCalacanis I saw the ability of twitter to communicate, feed, and especially mobilize a social network.  When he can post a link and within a minute have over 200 people watching him broadcast live video, that is power.

So I've begun using twitter again.  Mostly I don't have much to say, as I don't post here enough to broadcast my new posts.  I do, however, feel I've found more of the pulse of the tech world again.  It is interesting to see people carry on instant-message style conversations in the public domain.  Sending each other links and replying with more links in a forum which will cause tens if not hundreds of uninvolved viewers to follow along.  It seems like this is a win-win situation; those being followed are feeding their social networks and driving traffic, and those who are following get to be a step ahead of everyone else.  These conversations end up being elaborated upon in blog and news stories the following day.

I wonder where the pulse of the tech world will move next...

When you are working in a startup of two, you are doing everything: the coding, the business work, the planning-- and all of it sits there on your TODO list with a status of overdue.  Everything has to be done, even (especially?) the stuff that you don't want to do.  A few weeks ago that begrudging task was scoring training data.  (Supervised Data Mining techniques require you to mark up some data with what you expect it to score; it then uses some of this data to learn how to score, and some to evaluate how well it preforms.)

At MarketOutsider we're bootstrapping as leanly as possible.  That means, unlike many companies that might outsource a somewhat menial task like this, I got to spend over a week doing it.  Every day, as I'd score data, I'd hear my other tasks calling to me, but I managed to stay focused on the scoring. 

In the end, I feel doing it myself provided some value, and I'm glad that we didn't out-source.  Beyond the costs of outsourcing and having to train someone and rely on their ability to do it correctly, I also reaped the following benefits:

• I have a much better understanding of the data we're scoring
• I have a list of potential over and under-fitting errors to expect
• I was able to get a better idea of how our customers will use our product
• I was able to identify bugs and flaws in other systems that led up to this system
• and others...