broadstuff

I haven't, and I object to this in The Guardian:

At first glimpse, it seems vacuous and empty: just another "look at me" service like blogging or MySpace - and likely to draw derision from mainstream users or those snorting fuddies who think the kids are an alien species who will eventually grow up to be Just Like Them.

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Can't something draw derision just because at first glance its vacuous and empty and a "just look at me" service

(btw I have kids - and they are an alien species, they all chat on World of Warcraft - the twitterbugs ain't the kids any more either!.)

My view is probably echoed most closely by M Parekh here:

To younger internet users and European/Asian cell phone users, Twitter may seem as nothing special at first glance, given that those groups are already huge adopters of instant messaging and SMS text messaging respectively, for some time now.

i.e the current "good enoughs" are good enough for now - in Europe, anyway. In all seriousness, I think at some point a usable combined sms/IM/mail service will have a use, but I don't think this one scales that easily, especially if ones' friends twitter like canaries about the incredible lightness of their being. I think Dave Winer puts it well when he says:

At the very least this is a good sandbox for experimentation. As I said yesterday, what matters is that there are users.

Or Matthew Ingram:

I also think it is another piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding how we relate to each other in an online world, and how those relationship mechanisms are changing.

There are benefits to being late Early Adopters sometimes

As noted in our earlier (exceedingly witty and erudite) posts, for Twitter to glittr, it has to:

- Get a better Signal to Noise Ratio

- have more to recommend it than being the vehicle du jour of the chatterati - nearly all the use cases to date were once advanced for email, sms, egroups rss etc etc

However, we have decided to make available our incredibly valuable blog content on Twitter - as a public service, you understand! I was influenced mainly by this post and the above, i.e. lets start playong with it and see what else we can make it do apart from filling empty heads with vacuous stuff.

But give it a go, make your own mind up. But I don't want to know what you had for lunch thank you!

Thought sparked by a post from Kathy Sierra

To recap, Shannon's law states that in a communication channel of limited capacity, useful information is transmitted at:

C = W log2(1 + S /N ),

where C is the channel capacity in bits per second, W is the bandwidth in hertz, and S /N is the signal-to-noise ratio.

So, cometh the Broadband 'Net, and C rises by an order of magnitude.

Surely Shannon's Law would predict a huge jump in the amount of useful information available. How then, does it explain the emergence of stuff like Twitter?

It's all in the S/N ratio - more C allows more S, and more W.

....but also more N.

Ergo, Twitter et al are the unintended consequences of the Broadband Revolution

But why stop at Twitter...why not a system where I can for eg have my 'phone log where I am, and every time I say anything, make a transaction (or take a pee or whatever) little RFID's in situ broadcast it to all my friends - saves me the trouble of actually writing anything.

Hey - maybe I should patent that

(In other words, as bandwidth goes up, cost of a comms transaction goes down, and the barriers to editing disappear. Self Published becomes User Generated becomes Stream of Consciousness becomes Torrents of cr*p - It may even be that the S/N ratio goes down, as the effort required to generate drivel is << than that necessary to generate intelligent thought)

As an aside, reading the blogs re twitter it seems that many people don't only read their friends on twitter but sub to A list blogslebs to get their every digestive accomplishment etc - so maybe its just Hello! magazine for geeks ?

Shannon would be turning in his grave........Orwell would just be smiling mischievously

Postscript...the Reverse Shannon's Law of Twitter as measured in Uncertain Cats

Postscript....even GigaOm is wittering on about twitter now!

Tara Hunt has written an interesting post about Twitter...

Now, I am one of those who just cannot see the point of Twitter - not because I don't see what its trying to do, but because I just don't need yet another river of data in my life - maybe its just me, but I already have IM, Skype, email, groups, sms, mobile and rss already - I am busy managing down my data deluge, not up.

However, Tara's post is useful because she lays down what she gets out of it in a structured way, and she starts to contrast the original Twittr with the Twitter of today, though sadly she doesn't say which she prefers:

I’m not trying to say that I’m uber cool ’cause I was part of Twitter before others are, but I would like to stand up for the service in the face of the multitude of naysayers and hype machines that appear hell-bent on taking it down before understanding why it has become so popular in the first place. Those of you who are arriving here now are experiencing a very different Twitter than the Twttr I fell in love with ages ago.

'nuff said

Then she goes through what Twitter means to her, and it is interesting - and I had to respond:

1. Twitter is a representation of my stream of consciousness

Exactly! And I don't want my friends streams of consciousness - give me edited thought, high signal to noise ratio anyday.

2. Twitter is incredibly useful for tracking my attention data -

But I don't want my attention data tracked!!! Maybe its just me, but I'm already concerned about the level of privacy that is being compromised by the behavioural analysis from my digital footprint. I can't wait for the first Twitverts and Twitspam......

3. Twitter is incredibly useful for tracking my activity

Now this is an interesting application, but it can be done in less intrusive ways, Sony for e.g. does this, but this is a valid point imho

4. Twitter helps me keep track of my friends

Hmmm....there were some interesting notes about how it helped at SXSW, ie in a closed environment. Overall though, maybe its just me again - but I just don't want to know at that level of detail. I can find them when I want them via the IM, Skype, email, mobile et al. And sometimes I also want to be able to move around without everybody knowing where I am all the time.

5. Twitter has led me to making more friends. (Tara later notes it has more helped her to increase her relationship as well).

This I can see, but I would argue its not Twitter per se, its the comradeship of pioneering a new thing with like minded enthusiasts (before the masses rush in ?). Email, chatrooms, blogs etc all did this in the early days.

This is kind of implied above in her comment about Twittr v Twitter, and when she notes that:

There are many more reasons why I love Twitter and Twittering. I love the common language emerging from this less than 140 character medium. That people come up with clever words to describe Twitter phenomenon, which become a shared language between us.

This also happened to email, where a style emerges in text to show emotions :-{ - and in sms, where a txt language emerged partly because of the clunky interface and partly to facilitate 1 liners - of course now txt is mainstream, and more used by marketers 2 lk cool than n e thng else.

But to me, I think the most telling comment is this:

Do I think Twitter scales? Nope. I don’t think community ’scales’, either. I look at my long list of friends and feel I need to start switching some off (although it’s an insanely difficult decision because I’m actually interested in learning more about the people who update rarely as well).

I feel the same....10 friends wittering away is one thing, 100 is.....another! And its happened every time - lots of email buddies, groups joined, IM friends, rss feeds...and than after a while we start to manage it down again.

So, will Twitter evolve into something where the chatter moves above the level of drivel, or will it, like IM, move to just another flirtr device

And as for the name..............

Postscript...NY Times has an article on Twitter over here, Tara is quoted:

Twitter's expanding popularity has frustrated some users. "I'm a little annoyed by some of these newbies," said Tara Hunt, a 33-year-old marketer in San Francisco who complains that many users seem to be focusing on quantity over quality in their updates. She blames the influx of new users on Mr. Scoble, a Twitter user who began writing frequently about the service on his blog earlier this year. She removed him from the list of people whose posts she follows, turned off by his frequent notes about the service itself. "He Twittered about Twitter," she said.

Levels of quality in streams of consciousness - who would have thought......maybe Twitter will develop as an art form like haiku

Or maybe not.

However, it does seem from this that Twitter is a fad, and now the barbarians are at the gates the Cool School will be looking for the next Social Network Differentiator.

Post Postscript - there is a whole article on Web Worker Daily eulogising Twitter. All I can say is every one of the points raised has been used for sms, email, mobile, egroups, the altnet, and IM in the past. I suspect its all due to the points I made in 4 and 5 above. These twitterbugs are really addicted!

I will be running the Digital Home workstream at STL Partners Limited's Industry Brainstorm (see here ) on 28 April 2007.

The Telco 2.0™ Industry Brainstorms series is designed to catalyse change in the industry by bringing together senior practitioners to openly and effectively address the question of */how to create sustainable long-term growth in an increasingly IP-based world/*. It is a 3 day event, running from 27 - 29 March 2007 in London.

On the 29th there will be a session going through our collaborative work on the Telcos’ Role in the Advertising Value Chain report where Broadsight collaborated with STL Partners Limited, contributing some of our research on Interactive Media and Marketing.

Sadly owing to other commitments we cannot make that day, but it should be good value for anyone looking at how Operators deal with the "ad supported" service models.

Picked up this post from Richard Beddard over at the interactive investor blog, pointing to this site at Worldmapper showing the world map adjusted for various features.

Here, for example, as a predictor of where Web TV may take off, here is the Home Hours index for men (Aka Couch Potato Count)



Unfortunately the Internet Penetration one isn't linkable, but as a subsitute here is the growth of science research 1990 - 2001



Richard also put me in touch with Graeme Pieterz financial "Superglossary" - its an interesting concept, a glossary of terms that points on to other definitions. Graeme's points to his site, but I was thinking it would be interesting as a concept if it then also linked to other sites as well

Postscipt - there is another similar idea here at Gapminder

From the Economist....

Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham of UCL ran a test on 60 people divided into 4 groups, and shown various permutations of sexy ads, non sexy ads, sexy shows (Sex in the City episode with nudity and sex scenes) and non sexy shows:

Group 1 - Sexy Show, Sexy Ad
Group 2 - Normal Show, Sexy Ad
Group 3 - Sexy Show, Normal Ad
Group 4 - Normal Show, Normal Ad

Results were (trying out a Powerpoint rendered page into JPEG here....)

Results in a nutshell

- Sexy shows take the mind off ads
- Men recall sexy ads but less so if the show is sexy
- Women don't like sexy ads.

So, one subroutine for those interactive Ad systems is to only push the sexy ads for men who are not watching porn.....

Putting it here so I don't mislay it, may be useful for others too.

1. Web autopsy

2. Set up and Run Costs

3. Here is the Download of Autopsy and this of the Figures Behind the Apps

Thanks to Sean Ammirati of MSpoke on Read/Write Web for those.

4. This is Andy Calvin on balancing UGC with editorial content

5. Clickable Culture on Virtual Worlds, Virtual Humans

6. Scot Hacker's Foobar has lost of articles in sequence, here's future of online magazines

7. Rachel Clarke (Licence to Roam) also took copious notes, here's Web 2.0 to Web 3D.

8. Minezone has a list of another 6 blogs

9. Rexblog also has a good set of notes, starting with this on WoW/2nd Life

10. Good sets of notes here too at In Transit starting with moving from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

11. Muffin Research, kicking off with Ajax vs Accessibility

12. The Mobile Web at Hellonline

Mo' Later...keep tuned

So, the debate is joined on Freemiums, the viability (or not) of the Free Business model and so on.

(Saw this on GigaOm, had to respond)

Three points.

1. As we have noted before, in the early days of a a market, especially one where the value of the offer is unclear, Free grabs users like nothing else. Ten years ago when we ran business models in this sort of space for Web 1.0, the "give it away free and grab market dominance" really worked. It also has the benefit of dissuading the large, well funded competitor from entering as it forces them to cannibalise their market.

2. At some point you have to make money, either via Advertising / Sponsorship or Subscription or a combination of both. Studies of TV show that in general we want to consume a higher value of content than we are prepared to pay for, ergo advertising, like death and taxes, is here to stay.

In general, Sponsorship tends to be used in the early days of an Ad supported media - think "soaps", podcasts and so on, and is replaced by Ads as the service becomes more accepted.

3. In general, in older media, there are no mass market pure-play subscription services (except where mandated, eg the BBC). Subscription usually brings the promise of premium content / access / notification etc. The Web 1.0 datesites and satellite / cable TV providers are very good at this, mixing free with various grades of membership.

Advertising is effectively a micropayment for content, whether it is valued as a CPM, CPC or CPA. It is a generic promise by the audience overall to pay enough to keep the show on the road (or Web).

So...conclusion - Free is a valid approach, especially in early market formation, but at some point a part of the service has to be premium driven, or ad supported.

Met up with a friend of mine from the Web 1.0 days yesterday, and we were talking about today's bubbles - and we had both come to the observation that Tech Bubble 2.0 was small beer compared to the GreenScam.

To explain - The Web 1.0 bubble was essentially the parting of the mass consumer from their money via IPO and dotcom trading fever of ludicrously overvalued small tech companies that had made no profits. "Web 2.0" is still essentially about the parting of large corporates from their money via acquisition of........

But (as yet) the consumer's dumb money is not involved, except if they hold shares in said corporates.

No, the real consumer scam today is the GreenScam, where by a combination of playing on their altruism and guilt, consumers are being plundered anew.

And not just consumers - we have seen a rise in the number of "Green Consultancies" visiting our clients, promising penances, salvation and Marketing Goodness via Carbon Neutrality in terms that would make even the most ardent web 2.0 PR blush. Some of the presentations are just laughable* - as the Sunday Times noted on the weekend, this is largely just another unregulated Financial Services business. (Can't ref that article online, but here is the Beeb on the subject). Nothing new there then.....Double Glazing by another name.

And Politicians seem keen to get in on the act today, legislating away on politically popular but extremely irrelevant things - or just doing it plain wrong. Take the Air Travel Green Tax...to quote the Sunday Times again

The Stern review noted that air travel is responsible for 1.6 per cent of global emissions; companies operating to and from this country are blamed for 0.1 per cent of the total. This is not a large number and it pales into insignificance when compared with the amount of household energy that is wasted. The notion, which Mr Osborne apparently holds, that airline emissions could account for a quarter of Britain’s carbon sum by 2050 requires extrapolation that Thomas Malthus on speed could not come up with.

By the way, did you know these numbers:

Total Manmade % of Global Emissions - c 5% - or 0.1% if you include water vapour as the main contributor to the greenhouse effect
Total UK proportion of that - c 2% (The US is about 25%, China 15% etc etc)

Of the UK's proportion, the bit the consumer is responsible for (directly plus indirectly) is about 180 M tons out of about 550 for the UK overall - i.e. c 33% (being very generous, this is direct plus indirect after a ll) - so where is HMGov putting its weight today - right...that 33% who can't hire lawyers, lobbyists etc to escape - i.e YOU. And the "£$%^ Media comes out with supporting stuff like this.. When there is an obvious 80/20, clearly a focus on the 20 is the key!

No, the way to really do it is to cut Industry's output - and that really means not buying the products they so desperately want you to buy - or, more accurately, not replacing them at such a high rate.

Take cars. You want to be a really green driver? Just don't buy a new car. The energy involved in manufacturing a brand new "green car" absolutely dwarfs the energy you will save by driving it on its lower fuel consumption. But for some reason the government seems less keen on that path, in fact some years ago this same Govt. froze the year in which classic car status was given (this allows you a few economic benefits eg no road tax). Go figure...

And this is all bad for us NetHeads, because every buck spent on the GreenScam is not being spent on Bubble 2.0! And if one really is going to close down all that energy guzzling industry, we need stuff to make money from, and consume all that Green electricity.

The problem is, we are not organised. Web Workers of the World, events will overtake us unless we unite our Social Networks into one large Open ID Brotherhood.

We need a Manifesto!

We demand tax benefits for 'Net companies as we are greener than green!

All airline taxes should be used to fund Web technologies

Ditto car emission taxes

Lattes should be tax deductable

(Addendum after an email exchange - the serious point being made behind the flippancy is that the Green Web is potentially a major part of the solution, but its benefit is being drowned out by a host of other parties, many seeking s[ecial benefits for themselves which will skew investment )

So, do your bit for the Green Web - generate some User Content to your MP! Celebrate the Geek! We are one of the greenest industries around - an hour on the World of Warcraft is an hour not travelling and polluting (though easy on the Second Life, OK?).

* For my sins I studied Mechanical Engineering as my 1st degree, a few quick calcs on the back of the presentation allows me to work out that many of these schemes - much like wind farms when "externalities" are considered - pay back outside a human lifespan - talk about long term investments......

(A footnote - in my student days being "green" rivalled being a computer geek for social nerdiness (yes, I read all the Club of Rome stuff, E F Schumacher etc etc). But in the last 5 or so years the pendulum has totally flipped, and the amount of commercial humbug now being generated in the name of "greenness" is as scary as the commercial antipathy was then - a lot of the greenstuff being pushed today is at best ineffective, much is downright scandalous - but to say so risks putting oneself again beyond the Social (and Religious?) Pale. It seems impossible to have policies that tread the happy medium. Maybe the social media side of Web 2.0 will enable the the Wisdom of Crowds to surface, but... )

Saw this on Informationweek

Despite all the news and analysis that claims that mobile Web use is higher in Europe and Asia, a new survey claims that mobile Web penetration and use in Europe and the U.S. are on par. In fact, the survey claims that use of the mobile Web in the U.S. is higher.

The survey from the Online Publishing Association targeted a roughly equal number of respondents in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. Some of the samples were weighted to reflect the mobile populations in each country. Now to the findings:

76 percent of respondents in both the U.S. and Europe have access to the mobile Web while 32 percent actually use it.

71 percent of U.S. respondents have mobile Web access and 41 percent are mobile Web users.

* 77 percent of Europeans have mobile Web access and 31 percent are users.

Good...hopefully shake up the Eurocomplacency a bit....we've been saying for a while now that the US looks like it's catching Europe up rapidly and that more startup development seems to be happening there now - the trend to all fixed rate pricing has helped hugely, we believe.

Hmmm..not seen much about Mobile at SXSW except for Dan Applequist's post