From the category archives:

Social Media

Networks: A Fundamentally Different Exchange

September 10, 2009

Last month, Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures wrote this about ‘free’ Web services:

Free is not a pricing strategy, a marketing strategy, or the inevitable consequence of a market with low variable costs…

Services are not offered for free at all. There is an exchange of value between users, the creators of the raw material – data, content, and meta-data, and the network where that data is converted into insight.

I’ve written before that ‘free’ a marketing strategy rather than a business model but that is quite clearly inaccurate or at least incomplete (and I’ve realized my error). Brad sees beyond our traditional understanding of sellers providing services to individual buyers, individually.

Lots of Web services connect users to one another to create networked services. In these cases, the relationship between buyers and sellers has been fundamentally changed to something more like infrastructure/context providers and data contributors.

It means that not all ‘free’ is created equal. Free trials, cross-subsidies, free content and even free Web services targeted at individuals, individually, are completely different to free services that result in networks. Without a network, free is just marketing. It’s an expense incurred by a company in order to generate revenue some other way within the existing framework of buyers and sellers.

In contrast, free services that are designed to connect users to one another and build networks do not operate within that existing framework. Users contribute data for their own utility but also, and perhaps more importantly, in exchange for access to the network – the data provided by other users.

For every additional user that joins a network, the value of the service increases for everyone else. A byproduct of networks is that they also seem to produce something new, interesting and hopefully valuable at the center, often based on aggregated user data, actions, gestures or behaviors.

In these cases, free is clearly not an enticement to use a service. It is marketing in the sense that it involves a price – free – but I think free is the market price for contribution, probably because it creates the least friction. I’m not sure it has anything to do with falling marginal costs.

The difference between free networks and free stuff may offer a fresh perspective on the turbulence in content industries like music and news. For example, it could be argued that users want ‘free’ as in networks but publishers only see ‘free’ as in stuff.

Within the traditional framework of buyers and sellers, free content is a giveaway and unlicensed use of content is piracy. But, I’d argue that users don’t expect to get ‘free stuff’ online. Instead, with all the social tools now at their disposal, they want to alter the exchange altogether.

If there is a problem with offering free content online it’s that publishers are not capturing the other side of the exchange, which in this case, is providing an infrastructure and a context around which networks can form.

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Posted on September 10, 2009

Social Gesture Index

July 27, 2009

Social gestures have started to emerge from the most popular Web services. A critical mass of users can create a collective understanding of some new action that is often coupled with a product-specific term. Social gestures add context to content through our common understanding of each gesture and our relationship or perception of the people that express them.

I wanted to map out existing social gestures and what they mean so I made a list. It includes a description of each gesture’s stated function and in some cases an attempt to understand its implicit meaning. Gestures are ordered (very roughly) by strength, starting with strong positive gestures and ending with strong negative gestures.

I realize that every aspect of this list is highly subjective, not to mention incomplete. It is very much a work-in-progress but I hope it can provide some food for thought in the short-term and a marker that can be revisited, expanded and improved over the long-term.

Retweet: The act of republishing someone else’s tweet. What separates it from reblogging (below) is that users republish complete messages. Although, edits might be made to focus on one element of a Tweet or in order to add a comment and/or to fit the 140 character limit in Twitter. It is the most powerful gesture because users deem retweets important enough to insert into the feed of their followers.
Reblog: The act of republishing some or all of a blog post on one’s own blog or feed. This is more powerful than simply sharing a link because it inserts some portion of the content into rebloggers’ followers/subscribers (like retweet, above). It can and often does include comments by the reblogger.
Like: An explicit signal that indicates interest, agreement or affection for a piece of content. Present in some form in many social services. It is sometimes used to insert content into feeds for followers/subscribers which makes it similar to retweet and reblog. It is less likely to include comments.
Bookmark: The act of storing or publishing a link in a public place or within a feed of content. It’s not as powerful a gesture as reblogging, retweeting or liking because it does not push the actual content of the bookmark into a new stream. Bookmarks can be considered useful to the bookmarker or a recommendation for others but is less intrusive upon followers/subscribers and as a result it represents a less powerful endorsement.
@: A way of referencing another user directly with a comment, reply or more general message. It has spread beyond Twitter to comment streams but has not been incorporated into the fabric of other services.
Comment: A specific reaction, thought or piece of knowledge or advice posted in direct response to a piece of content. Comments occupy an odd space among social gestures. They are completely free-form and the gesture or ideas or opinions are included within the free text. Comments can express agreement or disagreement and anything in between. Because of the broad scope, it’s unclear what the individual act of commenting means. The aggregate number of comments attached to a piece of content often provide some measure of popularity or controversy and perhaps, as a result, relevance.
Follow: The act of opting-in to receive updates from a specific person or entity on a service. Following t is ostensibly the same as subscribing but services with ‘follow’ functionality usually result in content that is associated more closely to the author. Supporting other social gestures also increase the humanity of content updates over subscribing to a feed of content.
Subscribe: The act of opting-in to receive content updates from a website or blog, usually via RSS feeds but also via e-mail updates and dashboards if content ‘readers’ are integrated into the same service used to publish content. There is a often a weaker tie to authors’ identity.
Unsubscribe: The act of opting-out of receiving updated from a previously selected source under a subscribe system.
Unfollow: The act of opting-out of receiving updates from a previously followed source. Both unsubscribe and unfollow are somewhat private, or at least unnoticed acts although they do alter following/follower/subscriber numbers.
Block: The act of proactively preventing someone or something else from receiving your content updates. This is also a somewhat private act. I’m not sure how service providers use ‘Block’ data to filter out spam accounts and other inappropriate uses.
Report: The act of actually reporting another user for posting inappropriate content or using social media services in an inappropriate way.

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Posted on July 27, 2009

Twitter and RSS

July 20, 2009

One of the most intriguing parts of the stolen Twitter documents published by Techcrunch last week was the notes on RSS. The people at Twitter don’t want Twitter to become “just a vehicle for RSS feeds.”

The notes suggest RSS might become prohibitively expensive to support and that seems reasonable given the amount of online content available in RSS format (although the notes also reveal the company’s ambition to become the first service with 1 billion users!) But I don’t think Twitter is in any danger of becoming just a feed reader or alert system, it’s already too vibrant a place, but RSS is one of the many natural and growing uses of Twitter.

The notes on RSS end with “Monetize?” It reads as though RSS feeds are not desirable and so perhaps it’s something Twitter should charge for which sounds strange to me. It’s important to reiterate that the Twitter documents were stolen and represent fragments of internal discussions with no context whatsoever. I bring it up here in order to make a more general point that applies to any company, not just Twitter.

Charging for RSS feeds in Twitter sounds odd to me because it would be more like the way governments generate revenue than businesses. It instantly made me think of the London congestion charge. It makes sense when you think of Twitter as infrastructure or “plumbing” for all of the online communications it has fostered and I don’t disagree with the analogy. The main difference is that Twitter is a private company.

Charging for behaviors you are trying to curb can be a powerful tool to change behavior but it doesn’t sound like a winning business model for a private company. It runs the risk that the customers that become the most valuable to you are the ones using your product in the exact way you don’t want it to be used and then you’re in a corner because you’ve suddenly created something completely different.

In this specific example, I’m not sure RSS-fed content could be so easily distinguished from “original” tweets anyway. For example, I use Twitterfeed to import bookmarked links from Delicious. The message that appears in Twitter is the comment I write in Delicious, not an auto-generated title or description of the feed item so it’s no different than any other Tweet that includes a link.

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Posted on July 20, 2009

Statistics on Retweet

July 1, 2009

I’m a little late picking up on this but Dana Boyd, Scott Golder and Gilad Lotan of Microsoft Research recently posted a draft version of their study on the retweet function in Twitter. They collected several independent samples of tweets and produced some interesting statistics.

Statistics

One sample consisted of 720,000 random tweets from 437,708 unique Twitter accounts and produced the following statistics:

22% of tweets contained a URL.

36% contained an @reply.
- 86% of these started with the @reply and were therefore presumed to be direct replies to other users.

5% of tweets contained a #hashtag denoting some topic, event or group.
- 41% of tweets with a hashtag also contained a URL (which was almost double the overall percentage of tweets with URLs).

3% of tweets were retweets.
- Of these 88% used the ‘RT’ syntax, 11% used ‘retweet’ and 5% used ‘via’.

Retweet is Messy

Initially, I didn’t think tweets containing ‘via’ should be classified as retweets, particularly if they contained links. Original tweets that acknowledge the source of a link are different from retweets that echo the message of a another user (whether they contain links or not).

However, the authors describe the use cases they encountered for each retweet convention (more than the three listed above) and state convincingly that retweet is a very messy function precisely because so many conventions are used in so many different ways.

Measurement becomes even more complicated by retweets that are shortened, paraphrased or otherwise altered either because users want to add commentary, express something differently and/or are constrained by the 140 character limit.

These difficulties are one reason users might ultimately benefit if gestures like retweet became part of the meta data rather than part of the content of each tweet, but that’s a separate topic.

More Statistics

Another sample (independent of the first) was comprised of 203, 371 tweets from 107,116 unique Twitter accounts and revealed the following:

51% of retweets contained a URL.

11% of retweets contained an encapsulated retweet (i.e. it was a retweet of a retweet).

The paper also includes more data and an excellent discussion of what and why people retweet and Dana et al are accepting feedback before publishing a final version. If you like to analyse social media, I recommend you read the whole thing.

The Allure of Retweet

Retweet is an interesting social gesture for several reasons:

The gesture and syntax of retweet was invented by users. It has been subsequently adopted into the functionality of popular Twitter clients but there is still no retweet functionality built into Twitter.com.

Users’ ability and desire to retweet and be retweeted in their entirety turns the idea of copyright on it’s head.

Retweet is exciting to marketers, advertisers and anyone else wanting to spread messages. The top-level statistics produced by this research indicate that users hoping for retweets might increase their chances by including a link given that 51% of retweets (versus 22% of overall tweets) contained links but a causal relationship wasn’t established.

There will likely be further research into all of these topics (and more) because the motivation to understand them is too strong for there not to be.