Myspace. Why I Love Twitter - O'Reilly Radar. If you care what I think, you know that Twitter is just about the best way to learn what I’m paying attention to. I pass along tidbits of O’Reilly news, interesting reading from mailing lists and blogs I follow, and of course, tidbits from the twitterers I’m following. These are all the things I could never find time to put on my blog, but that I spray via email like a firehose at editors, conference planners, and researchers within O’Reilly. A lot of my job is, as we say, “redistributing the future” – following interesting people, and passing on what I learn to others.
And twitter is an awesome tool for doing just that. Like a lot of people, I tried out Twitter early on, but didn’t stick to it. Most of the early twitter conversation was personal, and I didn’t have time for it. I came back when I noticed that about 5000 people were following my non-existent updates, waiting for me to say something. Twitter is simple. What’s different, of course, is that Twitter isn’t just a protocol. Twitter’s Intelligent, Welcome to Web 3.0 « emergent by design - Is Twitter a Complex Adaptive System. I’ve seen a bunch of posts bubble up over the past few days that are really sparking my curiousity about what is really going on with Twitter, so I need to do a little brain dump. Bear with me. Insight #1 An article by Rosabeth Moss Kanter was just published today on the Harvard Business Review website, titled On Twitter and in the Workplace, It’s Power to the Connectors.
In it, she highlights the fact that there is an organizational trend moving away from the hierarchical networks of the 20th century, and towards complex, distributed, non-hierarchical structures of business organization and leadership. She also points out that success today is based on a person’s ability to leverage power and influence within their social networks, to act as “connectors” between people and information, and in turn build social capital. She leaves the evaluation of the significance of Twitter open-ended, but she lays out a few characteristics of Twitter that I found most interesting: Insight #2 Insight #3. On Twitter and in the Workplace, It's Power to the Connecto. By Rosabeth Moss Kanter | 1:00 PM November 16, 2009 In the World According to Twitter, giving away access to information rewards the giver by building followers.
The more followers, the more information comes to the giver to distribute, which in turn builds more followers. The process cannot be commanded or controlled; followers opt in and out as they choose. The results are transparent and purely quantitative; network size is all that matters. Networks of this sort are self-organizing and democratic but without any collective interaction. The significance of Twitter is yet to be determined; it is a simple, impersonal, and transient application of technology. America in the 20th century was called a “society of organizations.” Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders.
This changes the nature of career success. Venessa: Is Twitter A Complex Adaptive System. I've seen a bunch of posts bubble up over the past few days that are really sparking my curiousity about what is really going on with Twitter, so I need to do a little brain dump. Bear with me. Insight #1 An article by Rosabeth Moss Kanter was just published today on the Harvard Business Review website, titled On Twitter and in the Workplace, It's Power to the Connectors. In it, she highlights the fact that there is an organizational trend moving away from the hierarchical networks of the 20th century, and towards complex, distributed, non-hierarchical structures of business organization and leadership.
She also points out that success today is based on a person's ability to leverage power and influence within their social networks, to act as "connectors" between people and information, and in turn build social capital. She leaves the evaluation of the significance of Twitter open-ended, but she lays out a few characteristics of Twitter that I found most interesting: Insight #2 Insight #3. Twitter Data Analysis: An Investor’s Perspective. This is a guest post by Robert J. Moore, the CEO and co-founder of RJMetrics, a on-demand database analytics and business intelligence startup that helps online businesses measure, manage, and monetize better.
He was previously a venture capital analyst and currently serves as an advisor to several New York startups. Robert blogs at The Metric System and can be followed on Twitter at @RJMetrics. A few weeks ago, my former employer led a $100 million investment into Twitter and I must admit that I was quite jealous of my former colleagues. Rather than wonder about what I missed, I decided to figure out what I could from the outside looking in. Twitter's user growth is no longer accelerating.
Read on for some detailed charts a deeper dive into the data. How We Did It In most cases, this kind of outside-looking-in exercise wouldn't be possible. In the end, our sample size consisted of about 85,000 users and just over 3 Million tweets. Number of Twitter Users Hockey, anyone? Number of Tweets. The Speed Of Share. Facebook has a problem. One of its main goals now is to be the center for sharing everything on the web, but the key to that is to make the process as quick and easy as possible.
And in that regard, its rival Twitter destroys it. That’s a problem. Now, Facebook isn’t in any immediate danger because of this, it can coast on its sheer size (300 million users). But eventually, if those users find their way to Twitter, I would bet that they’ll start sharing more there, because it’s just so much easier. And while ease and speed may be what the user cares about, traffic is what publishers care about. A Tale Of Two Buttons The reason I bring this up is because this weekend, TechCrunch installed a new Facebook Share button on every article, next to the Tweetmeme Retweet button. The first time I clicked on the Facebook button to test it out, I could not believe how long it took to populate the information to share.
A Need To Connect Sharing Is Caring Traffic Doesn’t Lie. Twitter CEO on the Future of Twitter. The co-founder of Twitter unveiled new innovations on the horizon for the popular social networking site, including user-generated lists to follow tweets from many originators on a particular subject, and geographical location datelines to show where tweets are coming from. Evan Williams, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who co-founded Twitter, also said Twitter is working on a reputation validating system to address isues of credibility for the site. Twitter became a major newsmaker this year when Iranians sent tweets about the brutal Iranian government crackdown on protesters. Williams said the role Twitter played in showing the world what the Iranian government was doing was "clearly gratifying. " But he said he understood the concerns of news media in how to handle such information, which is essentially unverified and reported by anonymous entities. Williams said Twitter is working on several things which will help give the network more credibility as an information source.
What Ashton vs. CNN Foretold About the Changing Demographics of. Google: Beware the eBay Curse. There's a reason why cocky Silicon Valley startups fancy themselves the "The Next Google. " The search giant embodies Silicon Valley at its best: product developed by nerds in a Stanford dorm room; humbled venture capitalists who turned down the chance to invest, declaring Web search "done;" now-defunct companies such as Excite that refused to buy Google (GOOG) for peanuts when they had the chance; and of course, a storied initial public offering, stellar balance sheet, market dominance, and entrenched, multiyear position as the tech stock darling.
In a downturn that's ravaged every industry and most companies, Google is holding up quite well. Turn back the clock to the last recession, and you could have said almost all of those things about another company: eBay (EBAY). No one says Google is headed for a rapid descent any time soon. It commands 63.5% of Web search and none of its rivals has been able to mount a credible threat for years. 1. The marketing capabilities are clear as well.