Two Years On…
Jan 5th
January 5th 2009: I joined Twitter.
It was when Twitter was just beginning to hit the media in a big way. Stephen Fry and Jonathon Ross were busily evangelising the service on BBC1. Every newspaper was carrying stories about it. My friends both on- and off-line were beginning to talk about it. So I signed up.
Since then the journey has been pretty incredible. I’ve made many new friends, met hundreds of people, found work, discovered events, and forged relationships in a series of more than 22,000 messages limited to 140 characters. Thinking back on it now it’s a little bizarre.
It’s great fun, and it’s very useful, for a consumer like me, but the most fascinating thing about Twitter is where its value lies as a business. Recent estimates (and investments) have put a figure of $3.7billion on it. Twitter has been going 4 years and it’s never turned a profit so that sounds ludicrous at first, but there’s a vast amount of as yet untapped potential in the service. Assuming just a quarter of its 175million strong userbase is active the current estimates place a value of $84 per user. That’s rather high in terms of standard advertising reach cost, but Twitter has the advantage of knowing exactly what each user is interested in. That sort of intelligence makes the users very valuable indeed. $84 sounds almost cheap.
It’s no wonder Twitter’s directors turned down a $500million offer from Facebook back in 2008.
Vibefeelr
Jan 3rd
Continuing the delightful trend of new web apps* with daft names, I’ve been trying out the beta of “Vibefeelr”. Vibefeelr is essentially the same as Twitter but with added feelings (the “vibes” in the site’s name). Each short post is limited to a whopping 421 characters and comes tagged with a particular vibe from a selection of hundreds.
Everything works as you’d expect it to. There are lists (called ‘circles’), there’s DMs (sending someone a vibe), and there’s an odd horizontal rainbow thing that tallies up the percentage breakdown of the vibes logged on the site in the previous 24 hours. That particular aspect of the site could be very interesting once there are a decent number of users – any global ‘feeling’ based on a significant event should show up very noticeably. Whether or not they’ll ever get to that number of users is debatable though. The site doesn’t really offer a great deal more than Twitter. Indeed, it offers a good deal less if you factor in Twitter’s phenomenal userbase. Vibefeelr does connect to both Twitter and Facebook to automatically post on those sites if you want it to though, so it’s something that you can use alongside the usual social networks.
This is the first in a number of new social networks/microblogging tools that are popping up in 2011 that are augmented with features that go beyond simple messaging. There are already photosharing networks (Path, Instagr.am, etc). Mood/feeling/vibe sharing is the next step. I wonder what’ll be after that.
If you’re interested in sharing your feelings, check out http://www.vibefeelr.com/, or email me for an invite. When you’re there, feel free to add me (http://www.vibefeelr.com/onion2k/) as a contact.
Group hug!
* When did we stop calling them websites?
Cupcaking.us
Dec 30th
Cupcaking.us is a slightly strange idea for a photosharing social app. You can share photos, videos, text and audio. But there’s a catch. You can only share with one other person. It’s essentially taking the idea that Path has pioneered in a social app with a concentrated network audience, and taken it to it’s logical conclusion – a network of 2 people.
It’s not live yet, but it’s makes you think. What sort of people would use that? Not me, certainly, and not just because I’m single. It’s just so unnecessary. Facebook gives you everything that Cupcaking gives you, plus a huge amount more. You can easily set pictures, videos, and updates to be visible to just one person. You can set that to be the default. Facebook can essentially be Cupcaking if you set it up right.
Perhaps there’s going to be more to Cupcaking than they’re advertising on the beta sign up page. There needs to be.
Plus, Cupcaking.us is a very silly name. Not as silly as honeybuff.com, another “social network for couples”, but pretty silly nonetheless.
Path adds Facebook. Instagr.am adds FourSquare.
Dec 21st
In a new update Path have attempted to fix the problem of needing to know everyone’s email addresses by adding Facebook Connect integration. It’s a wise move. When I first registered on the network the difficulty of adding people was my main complaint, and I imagine it was other people’s too. Good one Path.
That’s not all the update brings though. There’s a new web interface now (www.path.com/chrisneale) although it lacks any update feature so it’s strictly for consuming Path pics at the moment, and there’s things for viewing photos fullscreen and looking at who’s been looking at them. Minor updates, but nice to have.
All that aside, I still don’t quite ‘get’ Path. The limited number of contacts on there is it’s selling point, but with so few people in my social networking circle actually using Path that number actually seems quite high. An artificial limit is pointless if no one is hitting it.
Much more interesting in the social-photo-sharing-app space at the moment is what’s going on with Instagr.am. People are definitely using the app that gives you a variety of quick effects that you can apply to pictures you share with friends, to the point that they’re achieving 3 photos uploaded per second. Plus, with Facebook, Flickr and Twitter integration, and yesterday’s announced FourSquare check-in feature, there’s much more reason to use Instagr.am over Path. Rumours abound that they’re looking to raise more money in a second round (Instagr.am raised $500k in their first round).
Between the two Instagr.am looks like the clear winner, but the social photo sharing space is growing fast with apps from Treehouse, Clixtr, picplz, Pegshot, Shutterfly, Steply and many more hitting the marketplace this year. To call the race won already would be somewhat premature.
Facebook in 2010
Dec 16th
It’s been a pretty good year for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Not only did he win Time Person of the Year* and sign up to give away half his fortune, his company generated some pretty staggering numbers:
Facebook in 2010
Pageviews = ~ 2.7 trillion
The number of page views on Facebook.com is a bit complicated given the nature of the website. There’s a lot of background loading of additional content, apps etc. According to Alexa, Facebook serves 7.4B pages per day at the moment.
Adverts served = 1 trillion
Facebook’s ad platform is very successful, but it’s not the only string to their bow. Facebook Credits (the virtual currency used in apps and games) is generating vast sums of money. FB rake in a 30% commission on every dollar spent in games like Farmville. That’s a lot.
Peak company valuation = $35 billion
Putting a value on FB is tricky, as demonstrated by the reports that fly about the place with number anywhere between $12B and $50B. Shares are actually being traded (eg, people are actually paying real money) based on a valuation $17B.
Company turnover = ~$2 billion
Facebook’s reported revenue was $800m in 2009. They’ve well and truly trumped that this year with a more than 100% improvement. Given the popularity of the site though, that’s not really surprising.
Users = 550 million
Facebook’s userbase is essentially a snapshot of the internet itself. Every demographic, almost every country, slightly more women than men. What’s more, more than half of all those users use the site on a daily basis. And they’re adding about 700,000 new users every day. That’s 8 every second.
Sources: http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics; http://www.insidefacebook.com/; https://www.google.com/adplanner/; http://mashable.com/; http://venturebeat.com/
* The criteria for “Time Person of the Year” is “for better or for worse, the person who has done the most to influence the events of the year.” Past winners such as Hitler, Stalin (twice), and Ayatollah Khomeini, and runners up such as Osama Bin Laden, weren’t necessarily picked because they were good people. Whether Zuckerberg won for better or for worse is a matter for debate. 
The ads are coming.
Dec 15th
Twitter has updated it’s business website to include a form to register interest in buying adverts promoted content. The make up of the form makes it clear that that, for the time being at least, Twitter are targetting major advertisers and brands. The lowest option for “Monthly Budget” is “< $10,000″. Another interesting point of note is that the registration of interest form expects you to have an existing Twitter account specific to the brand you’re promoting. Generic accounts that promote lots of things don’t appear to be welcome. As a user I think that’s a positive sign.
Whether the shift to a monetised Twitter timeline changes Twitter significantly only time will tell. It’ll depend on how obnoxious the ad content is, and whether or not it’s pushed out to the third party apps. I’ll be watching with interest.
Twitter’s new ad registration form can be found here: http://business.twitter.com/advertise/start
The Buzzword for 2011: “Magazine”
Dec 13th
Pinning down the number one theme for 2010 is a bit hard. “Cataloguing” certainly came to the fore; “social” grew up a bit; “semantic”, “Web 3.0″ and “cloud” were mentioned a lot, and “curation” started to hit the radar towards the end. For me none of those were really the defining buzzword for the year though. I think the key term was “trend”. 2010 was all about finding and highlighting trends in search, social networking, and apps. Every major graph provider opened up their APIs for app developers to sift through all their data and find what we were talking about. Some interesting projects came out of it.
Trying to work out what will be the big thing next year is even more difficult, but I’m going to hazard a guess. 2011 will be the year of the “magazine”.
It’s not actually a terribly insightful guess. It’s already started. Magazine style websites and applications are popping up all over the place: it started with the awful Wired iPad app, the interesting Zinio magazine marketplace, and Virgin’s “Project“. The trend will continue with Apple rolling out their new subscription payment service allowing user’s to pay for monthly content downloads for their favourite magazine apps very easily.
It won’t just be iPad and phone apps though. The magazine graphic style will start to permeate through web design. The design and layout ideas that we’re used to seeing when we’re flicking through our favourite periodicals will become recognisable on our favourite websites. Big images, gorgeous typography, elements extended outside of the grid, tons of whitespace, and so on.
Finally, we’ll see more “magazine” services that can take our lifestream (social, news, blogs, etc) and craft it into a beautiful and accessible format. It started this year with the amazing Flipboard, but more services are going to be becoming available in the next 12 months. One to watch in that regard will be TweetMag who’re going to be turning Twitter streams into magazines.
Threadspotting
Dec 8th
Location check-in websites have started becoming pretty popular over the last year or so. Most of us have at least heard of Foursquare and Gowalla, and perhaps Facebook Places and the Google backed SCVNGR. Where you are is an obvious thing to catalogue. Those sites work*.
More recently other sorts of check-in sites have cropped up too. There’s the strange GetGlue that let’s you check-in what media you’ve been consuming, and Foodspotting that combines photos of what food you’ve been eating with which restaurant you’re at.
Foodspotting is an interesting idea. It almost works. The problem, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that I don’t eat out enough to make it worthwhile checking in and uploading a photo when I do. Who wants to spend time looking to see where I’ve been out if I’m only updating every month or so. I imagine that’s more to do with the fact I fall a little way outside of the target group that Foodspotting is aimed at (affluent 20somethings who eat in fancy restaurants a lot). The idea is sound, it’s just not for me. But it has got me thinking.
What do we all do, everyday, that we might be interested in sharing with our friends? The answer I’ve come up with is “wear clothes”.
The idea of sharing your “look” with your friends is far from new. Lookbook.nu has been doing it for years. Fashism.com started quite recently (with money supplied by the likes of Ashton Kutcher). People are interested in fashion. By combining the location-awareness of a photo sharing app people could take snapshots of items they’re seen in their favourite store to ask their friends if they like the look. For businesses that’d be a good thing – it’d drive people to the stores where they’ve seen things their friends have shared. A discount or special offer could be given to people who share enough pictures in store. News about items and offers could be sent directly to people who have checked-in to the store’s location (with the added advantage that no personal data would need to be passed from the user to the business owner).
I’m actually rather surprised no one has launched anything like this already. It’s that obvious.
* Or worked if the latest stats are to be believed. Their popularity appears to be waining.
TwitTip: The right reply.
Dec 6th
It’s lovely when we get a nice complimentary message on Twitter, and lovelier still to say thank you to whoever sent it. But next time you do, take a moment to craft your tweet for maximum impact.
There are 3 levels of messages on Twitter. There’s the DM (Direct Message), public reply, and public message. A DM is straightforward. It’s a message between you and the recipient. No one else can see it. They’re intended for private messages. As a rule, they’re not much use for promoting things but they’re great for conversations.
The other two sorts of messages are very similar but with a single very important difference. A public reply is a message to someone that begins with their twitter username (prepended with an @ symbol). Here’s an example. Twitter user @usrblog tweets;
“@onion2k Thanks for popping in today. Come back soon!“
This sort of message will be highlighted in my Twitter stream as it’s directed at me. The only other people who will see it will be followers of @usrlab who are also following @onion2k. In the form of a Venn diagram that would be:
The second sort is a public message. Using the same account as before, @usrblog might post;
“Thanks for popping in @onion2k. Come back soon!“
This message will have the same effect for me; it’ll be highlighted in my timeline like any other public reply, but it will appear in the timeline of everyone who is following @usrblog. If you’re posting a particularly positive message that’s a big win.
Social Networking 101: It’s not about you.
Dec 6th
The definition of the word “social” is interesting. For something to be “social” it should be aware of the collective co-existance of other organisms. That’s certainly very interesting as far as anthropology goes, but how does it apply to a business using social media?
Many businesses use social networking as a way to get their message out. They see it as an advertising platform. You tell people what you’re doing, and they come to your business and buy things. Simple. It works. But, and this is important, it fails to make good use of the time investment required to get your business to the point where it’s visible on social networks. If all you’re doing is broadcasting there are other things that you could be investing your time in. Social networking has the singular advantage in that you can actively engage with potential customers before they’ve even set for on your premises or clicked on your website.
This is where the “social” definition comes in.
Social networking is a way of utilising the co-existance of business and customer rather than having a one-way relationship. Social networking websites enable businesses to talk to customers (either existing ones or potential ones) in a way that the customer is happy with because it’s both personal and informal, and, for the moment at least, the customers are still impressed by. A business using social media as an engagement tool is a rare beast, and doing things in the right way before everyone else still impresses. You only need to read some of the testimonials that customers who have had good experiences post for their friends to read to understand the potential social networks have as a way of fundamentally improving how we work.
The social engagement aspect of social networking is where you can set yourself apart.
Five tips for being a better business with social websites;
- Separate the personal and the business messages. Particularly if you’re a sole trader, have two accounts if you use social networks for fun as well as business. People will notice your business tweets more if they’re not interwoven with what you think of the latest episode of your favourite television show.
- Don’t wait for your customers to come to you. Seek them out. Social networking software has search functions that let you look for people who have mentioned your business directly, the name of your products, and just things that you sell. By looking for people who want to talk about the thing you’re great at you can advise them and engage with them in ways that would be impossible with any other medium.
- Build relationships with your social network friends and followers. Communication has to happen in both directions if the person you’re talking to is to become a customer and evangelise your service with their friends.
- Don’t ignore your critics. It’s easy to spend time on the people who’re being nice about your company, but sometimes you need to take time to deal with the tricky ones. People who’re being nice aren’t going to be extra nice if you talk to them. People who’re being nasty can be turned into nice ones though.
- “Switch off” when you’re doing something else. Come back to it later. You don’t have to answer everything within seconds. So long as you’re checking in regularly, and replying to people who have asked you something, everyone will be happy. It’s as important to make sure social networking doesn’t get in the way of other business functions as it is to use social networking properly.
