"Twitter" A Social Radar! - Pros and Cons

Jeff Pulver's 140 character conference will be taking place in New York City on 16/17 of this month. Various characters from the worldwide twitter community will be descending into NYC to talk about what twitter means to them. They will share their thoughts on subject of twittering and making sense out of 140 characters.

Twitter has been talked about much in the past few months starting from the interesting episodes of "Student who twittered out of an Arrest in Egypt" to the "Hudson crash-landing incident" and many other daily trending topics. I personally use twitter to rant about various things from technology to finance and pretty much everything else in between. I have made a few friends through twitter and though I have never met them in real life I have conversations with them on meaningful topics from time to time.

As an entrepreneur working on technologies that merge presence and leverages micro-expression, I believe that this conference will bring together a meeting of wonderful minds and provide an unique opportunity to interact with people who are thought leaders in the area of applications built around twitter.

I want to list out the pros and cons of twitter here and see what other people have to say about it at the conference.

PROS:

1) Ambient Awareness: Twitter like updates, though seen as mundane by many is interestingly termed "ambient awareness" by technology writer Clive Thompson. Read his Sixth Sense article here. The process by which you follow quick, abbreviated status updates from the constituents of your extended social network.

2) The Power of Brevity: I believe @biz once called twitter, "the messaging service we didn't know we needed until we had it". I think in some ways the brevity of input to any status updated and the creative ways in which people fine tune their limit of 140 characters to get their point across has shown that communication can occur effectively in micro-expression. Can a twitter like system be expanded to get rid of the clutter of email? Maybe!!

3) A customized newsfeed: Twitter has become a "Social-Radar" for me as it gives me an instantaneous view of what is going on with the people that I follow. I am also aware of breaking news from various parts of the world as I follow tweets from people and organizations of locations I am interested in. Twitter has become my listening device. It provides a source stream of information that when appropriately filtered gives me more specific information than random rants at the water-fountain. The trending topics section gives me an idea of what is the topic of discussion at the moment in the outer reaches of twitter and whether I should listen in and contribute if necessary.

4) A Marketing/PR tool kit: Twitter is an automatic system/tool-kit for marketing and public relations. You can reach out to your customers and ask them about products or features and get their feedback instantaneously. Product roll out information, recall notices, links to announcements and other information that needs to be quickly disseminated publicly can be done via twitter with a link to the main article leading people back to the company website. Having a presence on twitter is powerful for companies in many ways.

CONS:

1) Quality of Information: A Harvard business publishing article by by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski states that the top 10% of prolific twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. Many of these top tweeters could just be using twitter as a quicksand to lead people away to their websites or businesses. You will have to filter and prune your following list from time to time for the sake of sanity.

2) Vulnerability: Earlier this year at Soccomm, Jeff Pulver stated that it was important to share the human side of yourself in the social network that you belong to. This vulnerability as he defined it further as, "You have to put your guard down when you want to connect to people so that they do not doubt your true intentions and see you for the person that you are". One should be careful in what they reveal about themself on twitter or elsewhere on the web. Recently an AZ twitterer alleges that his home was robbed because he tweeted about where he was on vacation. Be vulnerable to earn people's trust, but not vulnerable to cause you harm.

3) Chatter effect: Twitter tends to create a lot more noise than signal at certain times. For example, I find there is a lot of duplication of info when you are following a trending topic especially as people start re-tweeting (RT) other people's information. This can sometimes cause mis-information as unverfied information can get propogated and pushed. I experienced some of this misinformation when I was following the mumbai terror attack on twitter.

4) Twitter Safety: Don't tweet your way into an SEC investigation and don't tweet your way out of a job. Companies whose employees tweet must be aware of the limits of what their employees can or can't talk about in these public forums. Then there is the good example of that potential Cisco employee who tweeted himself out of a job by making a lame comment on twitter. Also another famous example of notorious tweets is that of @keyinfluencer whose tweet about Memphis was picked up by a Fedex (based in Memphis) employee and sent up the chain. Read Peter Shankman's post on the same.

In the end, I conclude by saying twitter and the very concept of micro-expression is a valuable tool. A plethora of twitter based applications are available and listed at the conference site as well. Use it wisely. Some of my favorites are "stocktwits", "tweetdeck" and "twitpic".

Hope to see some of you fellow tweeters at the 140 conf.

The Viability and Monetization Potential of Social Networks

Is there money to be made in social networks (SN)? Well if you are interested in SN’s and are a developer or an entrepreneur building tools that leverage SN’s in the web 2.0 world, or for the mobile arena, then that is a very important question for you. As an entrepreneur myself developing products for the mobile presence space, I am constantly quizzing myself with the single question “Can the business model work or sustain in this changing eco-system”? Well, if you are interested in finding out more, you should set aside the last Monday of this month (July 28th 2008) and come to the Mobile Monday event at the Samsung Experience Center (10 Columbus Circle, NYC) for an expert-panel discussion. Lubna Dajani of Stratamerge™ and Co-founder at mobilemonday-NY, will be moderating a panel of experts, entrepreneurs and others with the discussion centered on the subject “The Viability and Monetization Potential of Social Networks”. She does plan to share some of her initial findings of Stratemerge™’s study on social networks and debate the findings and potential market implications.

Current methods of monetization come from two areas. One is the advertisers, who flock to the sites despite the anemic response rates. The second method involves the user who pays for some premium service. SN operators, who rely solely on ad based revenue models, have to convince their customers that there is continued value in advertising on these networks.

A recent BusinessWeek article titled "Generation Myspace is Getting Fed Up" revealed certain shocking advertisement metrics; Response rates of 0.04% (on SN’s) compared to a 0.2% in general on the web. Response rate numbers like 0.04% to 0.2% cannot continue to be an acceptable ROI number for those who spend money on advertisements on the web. One industry executive put it right when he said, "it’s really hard to make money when the click through rate is that anemic". Read my article "Ad Deluge on our senses" written earlier this year. Another report in "VentureBeat", reported flat to falling ad revenues for June 08. What is interesting to note in that report is the pubmatic's ad price index of web publishers by site type. One can clearly see that SN sites have the lowest ECPM's among the other site types. You can find more details on the report at pubmatic's site.

Will consumers pay to play in a SN? The value of the extended social network fades over time unless there is a continued exchange of relevant and contextual dialogue. One has to ask the question, “What is my network’s NET-worth”? How exactly am I benefiting by participating in the SN’s? SN’s will need to continue to provide overall value to the community and unique value to each user. If this duality is not satisfied, the users will leave.

In my personal opinion, as the world moves toward mobile gadgets and phones, factors such as relevance and context become more important. Desktop centric SN users’ initial euphoric experience of finding and reconnecting with old friends is usually followed by information overload and eventual disillusion. The ad model will also have to change and provide users with a meaningful experience as opposed to pure product promotion. It is imperative that new applications provide a platform for intelligent information delivery, one that provides immense value to the user in their daily activities.

SN sites will also have to control spammers and unwanted business solicitation that irritate users. Twitter (a microblogging site), a service that I use, is an example where this happens. Many businesses hide their real identity, get accounts on twitter, try and get people to follow them so that they can spam them with the irrelevant material. As for me, my current rule is to periodically scan my followers and delete/block those who have no profile information. I try and control what’s relevant and contextual to me. Recent reports by bloggers and other SN site users have evidenced the fact that some of the SN application sites are resporting to spam themselves in an effort to increase their user base leaving a very bad user experience for the end user.

SN’s will have to create new forms of attention aggregation and inform, entertain and allow for fulfilling content consumption to effectively provide a platform for monetization.

Are We done yet?

Recession (the "R" word) is a word easily bandied about these days by everybody. It seems that it has become the most used word for Q1-08 already. With job losses in the US, the sub-prime slime, and the recent Bear Stearns Circus, we seem to have our hands full with financial news on a daily basis. Some have started to use the other "R" word, Recovery and have predicted that we have hit the bottom and that Q2 and the second half of 2008 will lead to a recovery. As i thought about this, I just wanted to take a quick snapshot of how our markets have fared over the last 6 months v/s other major markets. So I did a quick computation of percentage drops of
1: % drop 52 week highs v/s the closing numbers for 4/4/08 and
2: % drop of index value at open on Jan 08 v/s closing numbers for 4/4/08.

Here's a rolling snapshot from East to west of some major market indices. Note the numbers are approximate. (All graphs & Numbers from Yahoo Finance)

The worst preforming index:
Shanghai Composite down almost 44% since its 52 week high and down 34.5% YTD

The best (of the Worst)
Dow Jones Industrial Average down 11.7% since its 52 week high and down 7.13% YTD

You decide if US markets have reached the bottom. I know there is no sense in comparing some of these indices directly, but still I thought it was interesting to show the difference in the percentage drops between the majors.

(JAPAN) NIKKEI 225 Index Value: 13,292.22 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 11,691.00 - 18,297.00 [% total drop = 27.35%]

Year open at 15,155.73: [% drop YTD 2008 = 12.29%]

(CHINA) SSE Composite Index Value: 3,446.24 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 3,271.29 - 6,124.04 [% total drop = 43.72%]

Year open at 5265: [% drop YTD 2008 = 34.5%]

(HONG KONG) HANG SENG Index Value: 24,264.63 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 19,386.70 - 31,958.40 [% total drop = 24.07%]

Year open at 27,632.19: [% drop YTD 2008 = 12.18%]

(INDIA) BSE SENSEX Index Value: 15,343.12 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 12,904.80 - 21,206.80 [% total drop = 27.64%]

Year open at 20,393: [% drop YTD 2008 = 24.76%]

(GERMANY) DAX Index Value: 6,763.39 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 6,167.82 - 8,151.57 [% total drop = 17.02%]

Year open at 8,045.97: [% drop YTD 2008 = 15.93%]

(U.K.) FTSE 100 Index Value: 5,947.10 @ close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 5,338.70 - 6,754.10 [% total drop = 11.94%]

Year open at 6,456.89: [% drop from start of 2008 = 7.88%]

(U.S.A.) DJIA Index Value: 12,609.42 @close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 11,508.70 - 14,280.00 [% total drop = 11.70%]

Year open at 13,261.82: [% drop from start of 2008 = 7.13%]

(U.S.A.) NASDAQ COMPOSITE Value: 2,370.98 @close on 4/4/2008

52wk Range: 2,155.42 - 2,861.51 [% total drop = 17.16%]

Year open at 2653.91: [% drop from start of 2008 = 10.67%]

Well I sincerely hope that we have reached a bottom in some sense here. I say this because if U.S. markets continue to fall further to be more in line with India and China we have a long way to go to the bottom. Well is the economy in a recession? I was at an Apple store today and the place was humming. Kids and parents buying more gadgets. Heck I myself bought a few items.

As for India, Food Prices Drive India Inflation., rapid inflationary pressures recently forced the government to stop the export of all non-basmati rice. The finance minister even lashed out at western nations regarding the use of corn for ethanol production when the world's poorer countries were going hungry. The rise in food prices is not just in India, it's a worldwide phenomenon. Q&A Rising World Food Prices.

While the inflationary pressures are not so high in the U.S, the prices of wheat and other staples have increased in the past few months. Americans only seem to relate to prices of fuel with increasing urgency, but respond with the "Boiling Frog Syndrome" mentality with respect to the rise in the cost of food.

But some do notice and it's not the poor. It is real surprising that the ones who do notice are the real wealthy. One such person recently came back home after a long vacation and complained about the increased cost of a bagel (from a micro blog post that I follow). Maybe that's why they get wealthy in the first place.