Tag Archives: twitter

Twitter’s curation of ‘top news’ and impact on content and publishers

A few days back I was contemplating on this blog “Will facebook and twitter offer curated content channels in future ?”. Well, within 2 weeks or so twitter seems to quietly debut this feature as “Top News” . So if you searched for a topic on Twitter, it will show the most popular story related to that topic (screesnshot)

Poynter explains this change, exactly what I was discussing in my blog post:

With this change, Twitter also moves from being a passive conduit for messages toward actively curating Web content based on tweets. Many third-party services already attempt to analyze Twitter data to find trending news stories, but this is the first time Twitter is doing so itself.

Twitter is simultaneously testing a similar “top people” results section that shows a popular Twitter user matching some search results. This may largely serve celebrities, but journalists may also benefit if, for example, a Twitter search for “Kristof” highlights Nicholas Kristof’s profile and makes it easier for people to follow.

It’s not surprising, twitter always had this data with them and it makes perfect sense for them to feature these results in front of the users. The interesting thing to note would be “when would twitter build channels or streams of such curated topics or categories”.

Can twitter provide better real-time search results than search engines ?. May be not in the volume, but in quality may be yes.

What is the impact on content and publishers ? If this new feature is adopted really well by the users and according to my assumptions if it is standardized as permanent curated topics and channels. It makes situation more worse for the publishers.

  • The life of an aggregator will become more difficult as twitter is the new aggregator
  • The original content publisher with breaking news and immediate viral effect might get exponentially rewarded from what they are receiving at present.
  • OR not on the merit of content but just by the benefit of twitter integration and early adoption, even syndicated content users or sheer lucky publishers might receive handsome rewards.
  • The expertise formation or the new qualifier for top expert around particular topic can be this new feature. Again, good in some cases but over a period of time top doesn’t necessarily denote what’s fresh, current and original.

Such curation might sound very open, fair and publisher agnostic and twitte has proven that in terms of breaking stories or ad-hoc unique content purely emerging out of twitter but my worry is that – in the long term for established or general topics dues network by pure sense of the science behind the social networks aligns itself and shows polarity towards the handful few.

The topics which are popular and much in use from a long time, in that particular pool of content there will always be a particular set of publisher and users (re-tweeters) who would exist and form a dominance. The more they stay the more difficult it becomes for a new entrant (publishers / users ) to change that power equation.

The most positive impact is on the ad-hoc and fresh topics those will be formed on the internet and spread via twitter. The second most impactful change would be “how facebook reacts to this change”. It too, shows the spread of the share on what’s popular within users own network.

Although, facebook is not much search oriented right now and the popularity is through spread of content amongst strong-ties (friends and family). It is moving towards subscribers module and again logically the next step which follows “top topics” in your network and if they do it smartly – the definition of network can encompass not just the friends and friends-of-friends but the information that you provide in your profile – city and country.

Will facebook and twitter offer curated content channels in future ?

There’s no debate on the fact that facebook and twitter are the biggest content sharing platforms on the planet today. Traditionally, all the content sharing platforms have evolved into creating curated channels in some shape and form. Be it… the most latest example of Tumblr or the old and not-so-popular-now like Digg and Delicious. Would facebook and twitter take the same path in the near future ?

In my view, they won’t… or more appropriately… they shouldn’t. In past, the crowd-sourced examples of curation or filteration have not worked for long. Due to the inherent architecture of the user generated content, of all the users on the network… very few share and most of the people,  just consume. So if I am right, at one point in time, the home page of Digg was controlled by very small subset of the users which of course didn’t represent whole universe. The same centralized filtering structure was adopted by Flickr, Delicious, Digg and others. They all faded primarily due to this centralized, managed by few – index of popular category of content channels.

When there are 1000s of new curation, filtering and sorting apps for facebook and twitter and they seemed be mostly adding the UX layer on top of backend data collected from users own connection on these platform – why doesn’t it make sense for facebook and twitter to come up with their content curation channels. Why they don’t show- What’s hot in news, sports, entertainment and lifestyle from facebook and twitter.

Twitter already provides a little bit of this through trending topics and knows twitter users by their category – then why not curated channels. Twitter  has the direct connection with the content, access to t.co and bit.ly analytics and much more powerful collection of the data. The same is true with facebook – it knows the content format, knows the individual domains from the publishers and already has the facebook (data) insights.

They might have plans to do it in the future. But if the actually do it, will it solve the problem or add to the chaos. Here’s why…

Digg tried to become a go to site for the fresh and the interesting. Directly competing with portals and news providers – made very few publishers happy. It became a game and competition rather – if you are on the home page it’s great otherwise you recieve almost zero. There was no metadata or communication or thought captured besides the action ‘Digg’. Twitter RT are slightly different, limited by 140 characters but Re-tweet accomodate or may pass a comment besides a simple +1 vote. Facebook adds layers through share, recommend and like variations and capacity to accomodate comments along with it.

The beauty and appeal to the publisher is the popularity qualifier is not ‘featuring of content on yet another property – highly controlled by few users’ but rather ripples of viral effect spreadable through their existing audiences who are most likely to exist on these platform and getting popular with small incremental exposure through users own six-degrees of seperation.

So basically, ‘I wish this could feature on the Digg home page today’ to the effect of ‘total number of impressions on publisher network & click throughs of likes and tweets’ and then the spread on social networks with the same logic – ‘further impressions based on users network and further click throughs obtained in multiple small ponds of closed groups’.

The publisher might not get ‘you have been digged or slashdotted effect’ but receives a steady stream of traffic through facebook and twitter engagements and derives seasonal spikes in good times. I am not sure if some publisher really enjoyed this kind regular and some default-nature traffic from centralized sharing networks like digg and others.

For facebook and twitter knowing this information but not sharing with public is actually good and favourable.

  • It doesn’t generate the competition within publishers to aim for some coveted top slots. It’s not ‘works or doesn’t work’ kind of situation. They always find that content works and can work better with their continued engagement and efforts. Just like SEO.
  • If facebook and twitter are becoming the de-facto platform – why would they break their relationship with application providers – news readers, social media management tools and such. These application providers add UX layers, provide continual access to evolving devices and access points, solve business case or use case scenarios – which might not be of their existing product development priorities. If they concentrate on doing all the things themselves – they would have multiple points of failures.
  • The ambiguity of multiple closed content channels and networks is much more promising than creating master channels. The users blinded by what’s surfacing on top – try to act upon their liking or aligning themselves with their network likings works much for benefit for publishers and these networks. This way users create their own personal home page (profile) – replicating their individual digg home page and the comments and action received is that user’s gratification first and the publishers traffic next.
  • An openly exposed curated channel (by machine or humans) would give the same product a different twist. Suddenly the user might not feel important or altogether out of place or slight frustrated that his/her content didn’t claim the top slot. After all, we all run our own content channels on twitter and facebook. The other way to look at it is – a set of users by the sheer design of the feature or sheer coincidence of social network alignment – may form dominance and defeat the purpose of entire curation. Curation on a daily basis on the merit of content is highly unlikely romantic wish-list of a product manager – the community will always act towards making it a standard sample of small set of aligned users. The digg home page effect so to speak.
  • This also makes publishers unhappy. They now have to wait for blockbuster events on these social networks rather than regular audience continuously acting upon their content and bringing the steady state traffic.
  • Curation and channels cannot also be explained in standard format. The events like ‘occupy wall street’ – where should they feature ?. Is it important to slot them into general categories like news and politics or they merit a hashtag of their own to be directly exposed to the network. Or simply spread on it’s merit via non-categorized or keyword tagged taxonomy agnostic facebook.
  • This can also be explained via ‘The Long Tail Effect’ theory – the unlimited long tail permutation and combinations of users networks and their individual curation or filtering networks are much more precious than top blockbuster content featured on home pages of Digg and Google News.

Due to the above, it might be unlikely that twitter and facebook will come up with their own curated content channels or if they come up… what problems they need to solve. Actually I am getting worried with the un-necessary killer talks centered around Google+, and facebook with the new list feature and with change of content display logic – it suddenly looks more generalistic and not a space of personal raves and ransts. If people have just started ‘more’ likes and shares on facebook – that might be temporarily good for the publishers in terms of traffic spikes but in the long run looses users personal touch and opinions from closed networks.

People spending more time is good but people spending more time due to more content and more processing of information is not.

Haven’t you noticed that you are suddenly seeing more funny pictures and videos on facebook ? . Would you prefer being a friend or a subscription ?. News from people or yet another replacement for news feeds with faces. Twitter is already that, isn’t it.

Twitter, Tweets & The Stock Markets

Sentiment Analytics applied to stock analysis : Technische Universität München (TUM) – School of Management releases this study
: SSRN-Tweets and Trades: The Information Content of Stock Microblogs by Timm Sprenger, Isabell Welpe.

Abstract: Microblogging forums have become a vibrant online platform to exchange trading ideas and other stock-related information. Using methods from computational linguistics, we analyze roughly 250,000 stock-related microblogging messages, so-called tweets, on a daily basis. We find the sentiment (i.e., bullishness) of tweets to be associated with abnormal stock returns and message volume to predict next-day trading volume. In addition, we analyze the mechanism leading to efficient aggregation of information in microblogging forums. Our results demonstrate that users providing above average investment advice are retweeted (i.e., quoted) more often and have more followers, which amplifies their share of voice in microblogging forums.

Download the pdf here

Is twitter a social network or news media ?

Well everyone of us involved in media has been asking this questions and let’s see what Haewoon Kwak, Changhyun Lee, Hosung Park, and Sue Moon have discovered:

Twitter, a microblogging service less than three years old, commands more than 41 million users as of July 2009 and is growing fast. Twitter users tweet about any topic within the 140-character limit and follow others to receive their tweets. The goal of this paper is to study the topological characteristics of Twitter and its power as a new medium of information sharing.

We have crawled the entire Twitter site and obtained 41.7 million user profiles, 1.47 billion social relations, 4,262 trending topics, and 106 million tweets. In its follower-following topology analysis we have found a non-power-law follower distribution, a short effective diameter, and low reciprocity, which all mark a deviation from known characteristics of human social networks~cite{Newman03}. In order to identify influentials on Twitter, we have ranked users by the number of followers and by PageRank and found two rankings to be similar. Ranking by retweets differs from the previous two rankings, indicating a gap in influence inferred from the number of followers and that from the popularity of one’s tweets. We have analyzed the tweets of top trending topics and reported on their temporal behavior and user participation. We have classified the trending topics based on the active period and the tweets and show that the majority (over 85%) of topics are headline news or persistent news in nature. A closer look at retweets reveals that any retweeted tweet is to reach an average of 1,000 users no matter what the number of followers is of the original tweet. Once retweeted, a tweet gets retweeted almost instantly on next hops, signifying fast diffusion of information after the 1st retweet.

To the best of our knowledge this work is the first quantitative study on the entire Twittersphere and information diffusion on it.

Download the PDF (4.8MB) and here’s quick summary from slideshare.

Digital power and its discontents, an Edge conversation between Morozov & Shirky

Recently, Edge.org  invited Evgeny Morozov (blog | twitter) and Clay Shirky (blog | twitter), to sit down for a debate on the subjects of dictators, democracy, Twitter revolutionaries, and the role of the Internet and social software in political lives of people living under authoritarian regimes.

The dreams of network utopians vs. the realists. Is the Internet is a medium of emancipation and of revolution — or a tool of control and repression? Did Twitter and Facebook have stoke the flames of rebellion in Iran, or did they help the authorities unmask the rebels? — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

There is certainly a lot of excitement within governments — both democratic and authoritarian ones — about using the Internet to advance their political agendas, both at home and abroad. The kind of assumptions that politicians need in order to decide their policies all have to come from somewhere. And much of what has been said about the Internet in the past seems intellectually invalid today.
— Evgeny Morozov

The Burmese example of communications use during their political struggle, followed by panicked shutdown, or the Ukrainian example from the Orange Revolution, or the successful Moldovan protests of last year, suggest to me that conditions under which a public that can self-identify and self-synchronize, even among a relatively small elite, is in fact a threat to the state. … This is one of the things I want to understand about your videos, because while you and I are not polar opposites, we obviously have very different points of view about this. Do you believe that the synchronizing effect among a politically engaged public is (a) possible, and, (b) political, and if it is, what should the U.S. reaction to that be?
— Clay Shirky

Some cool Twitter Lists from India

This is the list of some twitter lists from India – brands, celebrities, journalists, social media folks, non-profts and NGOs and more…

Lists maintained by me @santoshmaharshi

Indian Twitter Lists maintained by others

The million followers myth on twitter – measuring influence & spreading the spreadability

influencers The connections and the links in social media carry multiple meanings – from intimate relationship to casual chit chat or just common interests. These connections allow flow of information and indicate a user’s influence on one another. The report “Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy(pdf), a collaborative research paper by Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabrıcio Benevenuto, Krishna P. Gummadi presents an analysis of twitter data and comparison of influence: indegree followers), retweets and mentions. The investigation highlights the dynamics of user influence across topics and time and comes up with interesting observations:

1. Popular users who have high indegree are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions.

2. Most influential users can hold significant influence over a variety of topics.

3. Influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort such as limiting tweets to a single topic.

More details on dataset and data sharing plan can be found on the project site http://twitter.mpi-sws.org/. The project used a dataset of 2 billion follow links among 54 million users who produced a total of 1.7 billion tweets

Adi Avnit- @dotmad had suggested something similar last year through his blog post- The Million Followers Fallacy. He practices what he preaches and not got into “follow and be followed” game on twitter, in last 8-9 months he has just followed 100 or so more additional people. In the blog post he describes how “The Reach” (follower count) can be manipulated and how it doesn’t mean that people are actually engaged with you, listening and passing along the message.

But why is this influence thingy such a matter of great research and study. ? Well our Marketer friends believe that certain messages have a great chance of spreading if they are sampled and passed along through key influencers in the society. And the challenge is that, this is really very difficult to identify or attribute in the offline world, whereas online connected ecosystems like Twitter now allow you to do that.

The traditional view assumes that a minority of members in a society possess qualities that make them exceptionally persuasive in spreading ideas to others. These exceptional individuals drive trends on behalf of the majority of ordinary people. They are loosely described as being informed, respected, and well-connected; they are called the opinion leaders in the two-step flow theory (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955), innovators in the diffusion of innovations theory (Rogers 1962), and hubs, connectors, or mavens inother work (Gladwell 2002). The theory of influentials is intuitive and compelling. By identifying and convincing a small number of influential individuals, a viral campaign can reach a wide audience at a small cost. The theory spread well beyond academia and has been adopted in many marketing businesses, e.g., RoperASW and Tremor (Gladwell 2002; Berry and Keller 2003).

In contrast, a more modern view of information flow emphasizes the importance of prevailing culture more than the role of influentials. Some researchers have reasoned that people in the new information age make choices based on the opinions of their peers and friends, rather than by influentials (Domingos and Richardson 2001). These researchers argued that direct marketing through influentials would not be as profitable as using “network”-based advertising such as collaborative filtering.

In yet another study Henry Jenkins talks about Media Viruses and Memes. Though it talks about the spreadability of media or content, it can be applied to brands and marketing as well. In the connected world i.e. on the social networks brands themselves are acting as influencer through evangelism and whatever that they are doing there if that content, media or message if that itself is not spreadable, it won’t be passed along no matter what their follower count it. Thus looking at both these studies will help a better understanding of who is the influencer, what is influence and how to influence. Here’s the video if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead’

Like the gene, the meme is driven to self-create, and is possessed of three important characteristics: 1. Fidelity — memes have the ability to retain their informational content as they pass from mind to mind; 2. Fecundity — memes possess the power to induce copies of themselves; 3. Longevity — memes that survive longer have a better chance of being copied.


Image Credit – From Flickr – Illustration © 2009 Jonathan Boehman and David Weigelt. Taken from Chapter 7 of Dot Boom: Marketing to Baby Boomers through Meaningful Online Engagement

New Twitter hashtag #blogroll – Good Blogs To Read, Every Wednesday

Jenna McWilliamns, a Doctoral student in Learning Sciences at Indian University was searching for a ‘good blogs to read’ version of #followfriday on twitter. I jumped off and suggested  #blogroll #blogpicks #blogrecco or just #gbtr (good blogs to read) . She picked up #blogroll  and wrote a short and sweet intro to the new hashtag on her blog.

May I and Jenna McWilliamns invite you to join us every Wednesday to have your blog recommendations flowing in on twitter. The idea is to keep our love for great blogs to read alive and kicking.

Please spread the #blogroll

blogroll

 

Pic Courtesy: Jenna McWilliams

Supernovas, Twittersphere, Blogosphere & the lostosphere

Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang, Steve Rubel any many others on the web are chatting over the a)  benefits of going back to blogging, b) changing the way they blog or c) twittering less as its more noisy.

Well I have been a fan of their blog and follower of their tweets and across all their other social footprints on the web and this is my take on the “method in the madness”. I am a pathetic blogger & have maintained this status successfully from a long time. I consume so much content on a daily basis and I enjoy it so much. Most of the time I consume or curate but creation is very less. I have also worked on the social web – portal, social networks & community qna and some more social sites as a product manager. Here, I go now.

SuperNovas experiences are not consumer experiences – all of the guys mentioned above are the supernovas of the social web. Through their journey of social web they discover something, but that doesn’t mean that those experience would also be happening with their followers. Robert Scoble may get 10,000 answers to his 1 question and he still complains that he can’t sort or archive those. Person like me following him, may post 10,000 questions on twitter and receive absolute zilch. On the other hand a closed group of 10 friends on twitter must be partying hard.

Size of the network Vs The Circle of Intimacy – While Supernovas enjoy the size, spread and reach of the network. The fans are not necessarily within the circle of intimacy. While I continue to get excellent updates from Jeremiah Owyang on Twitter, he is getting all kinds of spams from me. And I don’t even want to get into how Robert Scoble manages and filters his tweets. Does he have a life ?. In short intimacy is the function of the value in the conversations and exchanges and not in the number of followers.

Mr. Robin Dunbar follows us everywhere – I had mentioned this before and you can find more on Economist – about the magical number 150. From his studies Mr. Dunbar had concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. And for humans it was 148, rounded off to 150. If this is true and proven, then it’s going to follow you everywhere – facebook, orkut, feedreaders, twitter, friendfeeds and any “social web joint”. So while Supernovas are going to like 150 to 1m500 to 15,000 to 150,000 to 1,500,000… connections on social properties, they are going to invest a lot of time in lifestreaming maintenance and saying “Hi”. They do enjoy some traffic to their blogs or boost to their overall social reputation, personality, career and business but the Signal Vs Ratio noise is surely overwhelming & flooding.

Social web geeks do not live a simple life and as early adoptors they have to pay the higher cost – Why are we even discussing this, there will be thousands of examples of people enjoying the social web in their life, career and business. These not so hot or not in A, B, C list of the blogosphere or tweetsphere are enjoying the social web and not writing on/for the social web. They live a very simple and humble social web life and would be happy about it. To blog or to tweet or to lifestream is not the question a commoner will face. Geeks and early adopters of the social web have this big Q in front of them because their engagement levels and quest drives them to pay a bigger price for attaching or disengaging with the tools.

 

This was about the problems supernovas face, now some issues with the social web

The problem with the  social web – It’s not that the web in the previous avatar was anti-social. It’s just called social web because it’s really getting crowded in here. In the past we went to our emails, clicked on the names we liked, read it, replied for forwarded. There were some too social friends / business people who spammed us but it was still some what controllable. We went to more open and social environments like Forums, messengers and chat rooms on a need basis or to find some cool ASLs in the neighborhood, but still some what controllable and manageable.

Now the social web properties like facebook and twitter allows you to do much more and with plethora of rich control options, but man that’s some work. Common how good can you be good at housekeeping if there are 2000 friends, 20,000 followers and 20,000,000 @mentionsofmyname.

Lifestream flow catch up and flooding – Everyone social web site is introducing lifestream feature and gazillion ways of managing it. My fav Steve Rubel has already turned his blog into a lifestream. Now he is not a 10 posts per day person so I can still manage, but imagine if more people, like him turn to lifestream. Steve Rubel has a day and may be one or two posts to publish, but his users are consuming more such content through feedreaders, aggregators, twitterers and facebookers. How much lifestream can a average person catch up with. But at the same time I really like the value he will be creating for himself, it will become his true journal – a mass archive of his wonderful thoughts and that has both personal value and the social value. Even if no one visits Mr. Rubel’s blog, still it cannot be undervalued as it has a “personal value” for him, as anyone else would have with a personal diary. But again if more people take to lifestreaming it’s not going to solve the problem; for their users at least.

See my point of view as a user – I may follow you through twitter /facebook /feedreaders but I am still “following you all” – You + All are the two words which make big difference when they come together. As a user my life can only be easy if I follow Mr. Dunbar’s circle, but the moment I cross it, I am in a mess. And yes you all are important to me. I love to visit you to all your presence points.

So how do we all manage our social presence and be more useful for us and for our social circle

Divide and rule – you can’t be talking the same stuff on twitter, facebook, linkedin, youtube, blog and so on. Segment your audience or for that matter your publishing activities.

Adjust your speed – become a slow blogger, do not make twitter your delicious, do not make facebook your twitter and do not make linkedin your facebook. The thought of “speed” should give you an idea of which road to take.

Real world scenario – I should not miss what you said last month when I am on your blog, I should not be at a loss if I miss you for a day on twitter, what you curate and spread should be delicious and interconnected, you should guide me a little where should I follow you on facebook/linkedin/twitter/friendfeed.

Clickable #hashtags on Twitter

Clickable #hashtags – now on Twitter.

Wow !!! I request @ev to make the #hashtags on twitter to be clickable on 29th June and on 2nd July it’s available. It’s just the timing or Twitter was really listening to me :) .