Hashtags give us context

As we try to understand and organize our online lives, we’re realizing that tagging is essential. Hashtags bridge the gulf between human writers and machine readers. They tell us what the content we’re reading is about, making it easier to categorize and process.

But there’s no standard set of hashtags. This is because information architecture must balance rigidity and flexibility: too formal, and nobody will use it; too variable and it’s hard to categorize and understand. Imagine you had to use only approved hashtags in a message or photo. You’d seldom make the effort to look them up, and few people would adopt them, undermining their usefulness. Just look at these guidelines for hashtags around the Haiti quake, designed to make them machine-readable. They’re a great effort, but hardly easy for casual users to pick up.

On the other hand, many hashtags are meaningless and inconsistent, making them unreliable. Along with the immense creativity that comes from an open system comes tag sprawl. That gives us a tradeoff: easy for people, or easy for machines:

Sentiment matters

Now consider sentiment. If Twitter is a human message bus, alerting us to what the online planet thinks providing us with ambient awareness, then understanding the planet’s sentiment is valuable.

What companies really care about when analyzing things online is a combination of the clout or credibility of the speaker, and the sentiment (see Tara’s breakup with Delta, for example.). A very angry person with no influence might be less of a concern than a mildly disgruntled one with legions of online minions. The formula probably looks something like this:

Because sentiment matters so much, there are dozens of firms trying to infer it from what happens online. They look for keywords — “good”, “sucks”, “idiot” — and perform natural language parsing in an attempt to discern meaning and ferret out false positives. This is hard work, because computers don’t do sarcasm very well. If I say, “oh, great, my house is leaking,” that’s not a very positive sentiment, but it contains the word “great”.

Without a formal taxonomy for sentiment, machines have a hard time inferring true sentiment. But formalizing any system will reduce its adoption by the world at large, which is rather the whole point of this Internet thing in the first place.

Is there a standard for emotions?

There’s at least one de facto standard for emotion online: emoticons. Put aside the really complicated ones, and most people know what means. As with Twitter’s Retweet and @name conventions, emoticons were initially devised by users. But today, most online tools understand them — just type one into Skype, or Google Chat, or AIM, and it’ll replace it with artwork.

So it’s surprising that we haven’t combined hashtags (giving meaning and context to a message) with emoticons (a relatively standardized taxonomy of sentiment.)

There are technical impediments to this: some of the characters in emoticons are interpreted as word breaks, and others are blocked to prevent certain security exploits. But there are also lots of reasons to love this approach:

• Hashtag smilies are the best working standard we have for sentiment.
• They’re multilingual and multicultural (assuming we can read them in either direction).
• They’re human-readable.
• They consume just four precious characters of a message.

Ultimately, by combining hashtags and emoticons we could tag sentiment explicitly–making it much easier to process and analyze online communities, collections of links, comment threads, and photo galleries.

And that makes me #:-)

Which can have some awkward consequences.

Syndication is a land grab

Every online platform I use is desperate to pull in data from elsewhere. In the land grab for social media, each site wants to be the consolidator of my digital life. To do this, it needs content. So Facebook pulls in activity from all over the web; Linkedin, Friendfeed, and dozens of other sites all syndicate one another.

When I first enroll in a social platform, I link it to other sources of data. Initially, that system may be something personal; but online applications have a habit of changing, and something I once thought was just for me may one day become a shared system, dragging with it all of the links between systems that I once set up.

Inadvertent sharing

These forgotten social links show up in unexpected places. I was reminded of this–somewhat forcefully–when, a few months ago, I left myself logged into Flickr at a friend’s house. He thought it would be funny to upload something inappropriate (Really, really inappropriate. Don’t try to find this. Trust me.) to my account, not realizing it was linked to other social services:

Soon, Jesse Robbins let me know about the problem. I was unaware of how intertwined all these services were beforehand: a breach in one site can have far-reaching repercussions across all others.

This is happening right now with Google Buzz. Our email and Google profile was fairly private and controlled. GMail and its related services were for managing our own data, or sharing it with a small part of the world. In terms of social networks, Google was a walled garden. Social relationships were symmetric, in contrast to the asymmetry of a microblogging site like Twitter, where stalking is easy and even encouraged.

Twitter’s growth has encouraged many other social sites to open up. Facebook has made profiles public, amidst much furore over privacy controls. Google’s Buzz is having a similar effect. Here’s an example of Mathew Ingram inadvertently buzzing something he’d uploaded a year earlier:

This is a new kind of opt-out marketing for which we don’t have good guidelines.

(A bit of background on opt-out marketing: When you sign up for on less scrupulous sites, a box saying you’re willing to receive emails from them is already checked. You have to remember to opt out of receiving a message in order to avoid mails. It’s generally considered sleazy: opt-in marketing, where you need to explicitly declare your willingness to hear from them, is the right way to do it.)

Being transparent about what’s shared

Some of the big players have built a degree of control into their tools. Here’s what Google Buzz does:

And here’s Facebook’s configuration:

To their credit, both companies make it pretty easy to see what’s being shared and where it comes from, and to stop it. It’s not clear how many of their users know these screens exist, however. We’re not forced to look at them when we enroll. In our eagerness to help computers understand what we’re doing, we may inadvertently be telling the rest of the world more about ourselves than we realize.

While the two screens above are commendable, remember that these are the big, legitimate social networks–and even then, it took considerable pressure from users to get Facebook to properly enforce privacy.

Some guidelines for republishing syndicated feeds

We live in the Overshare Generation, and smaller, less established sites, desperate for attention, may take advantage of that in ways that are hard to track down. Just as marketers have set up guidelines for good mailing practices, so social sites need guidelines for linking vestigial social feeds to newly-public features. Some suggestions:

• The buck stops at the publisher: all third-party feeds should be turned off initially as new features are introduced.
• Be transparent about what’s shared: there should be a clear overview of what feeds are connected to a social site and whether they’re published.
• Make it possible for users to trace & troubleshoot: online platforms need a consistent API so a user can crawl them and determine any links that exist.
• The permissions need to live with the content, not the republisher. I want to flag an image as private once, and have those permissions travel with the content regardless of where it winds up.

In the social media rat-race, that sounds like wishful thinking. It may take legislation similar to the CAN-SPAM act to make it a reality.

Back in mid-2008, Twitter was just another Web 2.0 application. Industry watchers were beginning to take notice of its million or so users and speculate if it might be the start of something bigger, but most people hadn’t heard of it or didn’t “get it”. Here at Bitcurrent we pondered the rise of microblogging and the scaling problems ahead, noting a few teething problems along the way.

Towards the end of 2008, people outside of tech circles began to take notice, especially when it became a key form of communication during the Mumbai terror attacks in November. In December it became clear that Twitter was not just another social site, but a protocol for a new form of communication. By the end of the year, people were exploring all sorts of new uses for Twitter, and the Twitter pantomime was born.

But 2009 was the year that Twitter really took the world by storm.

We didn’t imagine that we’d be writing so much about Twitter in 2009, but being focused as we are on technology and how it changes society, it turned out to be inevitable as Twitter became more and more a part of our online lives and went mainstream. Here’s a look back at 2009 through the eyes of Twitter, including all the Twitter stories we covered across the year:

January 2009

Twitter became part of another major news event in January as an airliner ditched into the Hudson River.

On Watching Websites, Sean Power wrote the Twitter New User Survival Guide.

February 2009

Twitter was now experiencing 1,382% growth and surpassed 7 million unique visitors.

March 2009

After Facebook’s failed attempt to buy Twitter we, like many others, pondered the apparent lack of business model for Twitter and Alistair Croll contemplated a pay-to-follow model for the growing class of celebrity Twitterers.

April 2009

Celebrity Twitter madness peaked as Ashton Kutcher challenged and beat CNN to 1 million followers. Twitter also made headlines at the G20 summit in London.

On Bitcurrent, Sean wrote about how Twitter search was next to useless and that Twitter needed a ranking algorithm.

May 2009

May saw astronaut Mike Massimino the first tweet from space and the US Center for Disease Control use Twitter to communicate with the public about swine flu.

June 2009

Twitter was one of several technologies that helped Iranian citizens challenge the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and keep open channels with the west despite the Iranian government’s attempts at censorship (which we learned more about at Bitnorth later in the year).

Michael Jackson’s death caused a doubling of traffic on Twitter as the world talked about it.

In June, Twitter traffic passed 20 million unique visitors per month, then began to stabilize

July 2009

In Chicago, Horizon Realty Group sued a former tenant over her tweet about a mouldy apartment.

When the film Bruno opened on July 13th, its box-office takings tanked after the first night. The general reaction to the movie on Twitter was very negative and most people now believe that that the speed at which the bad reviews spread was directly responsible for the drop in takings. Twitter has changed the dynamics of opening weekends at the movies forever.

August 2009

Georgian blogger Cyxymu became the target of cyber attacks trying to silence his voice online, leading to the biggest recorded outage of Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. I wrote on Bitcurrent about the problems this highlighted in terms of entrusting our online identities and communications to single companies.

The US healthcare debate spread into a global debate thanks in large part to Twitter, as the American right described the UK’s National Health Service as “evil” and Brits from around the world (including the prime minister and his wife) leapt to its defence via the #welovetheNHS hashtag.

A study dismissed 40% of Twitter traffic as “pointless babble”, or, as the rest of the world like to call it, conversation.

September 2009

In September, Sean wrote on Watching Websites about how Twitter temporarily suspended a number of legitimate accounts including himself and Tim O’Reilly.

There was much discussion on Twitter about another new form of communication launched that month, Google Wave.

October 2009

The Internet won a small battle for free speech as discussion of UK Member of Parliament Paul Farrelly’s question about oil traders Trafigura, broke out on Twitter and in the blogosphere. The courts were forced to overturn the injunction that had prevented the press from naming the MP, prompting suggestions that in the age of Twitter, there are no secrets any more.

Alistair wrote about the social pressure created by reading tweets from others in his post on “Status Update Anxiety”. Alistair also wrote about how Twitter has hit the mainstream and become an integral part of our everyday lives.

November 2009

In November the biggest mainstream Twitter stories were about Tiger Woods, but the tech industry was entering a lively debate over Twitter’s new implementation of the Retweet feature, something invented by the users of the service. On Watching Websites, Alistair wrote about how a formalized retweet mechanism gives Twitter a “PageRank for humans”. Alistair and Sean presented a bootcamp at Web 2.0 Expo on the new science of Communilytics of which this is just one part – measuring the spread of your marketing messages through social networks like Twitter.

Meanwhile, I wrote on Bitcurrent about how Twitter had failed to consider how people were really using Retweets with their new design, which removes the ability to add a comment or tailor the message for your followers. I proposed a better retweet design, which meets both Twitter’s needs for tracking as well as maintaining user functionality.

December 2009

On Bitcurrent, I wrote about how the use of Twitter for backchannels at conferences is starting to go too far, and how Twitter should never take center stage.

Elsewhere, a Twitter campaign in the UK saw Rage Against The Machine beat Joe McElderry to the coveted Christmas number one spot, despite the backing of Simon Cowell and the X Factor “music machine”, another testament to the people power of Twitter.

Stephen Fry, one of the most popular celebrity twitterers, announced he is giving up Twitter for a while in order to focus on writing his next book, reminding many of how distracting a constant stream of public conversations can be.

2010 – Where next?

It seems the hype around Twitter and its rapid growth is starting to die down, but it is clear that it is here to stay.

I expect we will see Twitter used in more and more fields in 2010, and it will continue to enhance people’s ability to connect globally, share ideas and breaking news, and influence others.

The events of 2009 have also shown us that we should be wary of our over dependence on Twitter the company – or risk redesigns, outages and company actions impacting our ability to communicate effectively. We have also seen how Twitter can bring the conversation right into the current moment – but we should control this carefully or risk damaging the integrity of our news reports and public speaking events.

I hope that 2010 will bring a growing awareness of the need for electronic communications around open protocols like e-mail, XMPP and Google Wave, leaving control and choice with us, the people who use them instead of in the hands of companies like Twitter and Facebook. I also hope that the news industry will worry less about what people are saying on Twitter and get back to reporting the news.

For more on 2009’s Twitter news events you can read this BBC News article, which was a source for this post.

From all the Bitcurrent team, we wish you a happy and prosperous 2010!

Backchannels are all the rage at tech events these days, connecting presenter and audience like never before. They allow audiences to get more value from a presentation by communicating with each other about it. And the audience can feed back to the presenter, which helps him stay on track and know that he is being understood.

But there’s a point where a backchannel goes beyond adding interactivity to an event and begins to undermine the event itself. In November, I witnessed this at the launch of UXMTL, a community for user experience design in Montreal.

Twitter has made setting up backchannels trivially easy — with or without the consent of conference organizers — since anyone can start a Twitter backchannel simply by using a hashtag. Unlike Google Moderator or Backnoise, no specialized software is needed. At UXMTL, the event organisers simply announced that audience members should use the hashtag #uxmtl on Twitter, and all tweets for that tag were displayed on a large screen behind the panelists, using Twitterfall. For me, this completely changed my experience of the event, both as an audience member and a backchannel contributor.

Why are backchannels popular?

Olivia Mitchell has explored the popularity of backchannels in depth, and many insights can be gained from discussions about them. For the audience it’s mostly about being able to communicate with each other in context – seeking clarity, sharing insights and innovating or building upon what is being said.

Where backchannels really come into their own is when presenters can receive feedback and and adapt to it while the event is still ongoing. We experienced this for ourselves running the Enterprise Cloud Summit back in May. Thanks to the #ECS hashtag we were able to discover sentiments like this and address them quickly on stage, averting any possible audience backlash.

Problem #1: Self-censorship

Usually when I’m listening to an interesting session, I’ll tweet frequently, quoting key points or sharing my own insights and musings. But knowing that my tweets would be on center stage was paralyzing. My first reaction was one of fear: “I don’t want my tweet on stage, I’ll feel self-conscious”. After a while, I made a conscious effort to rebel against this and resolved to tweet as normal. But it wasn’t the same. Every tweet had to be much more carefully crafted, and knowing that a tweet could steal the focus of the audience, carefully timed. This was a bizarre new experience for me.

Problem #2: Breaking the flow of the event

It wasn’t just my behavior that was affected, but that of the panelists too. Often, I saw them zoning out of others’ answers, leaning over their shoulders to read the screen, overcome with curiosity at what the audience was saying and looking at.

The tweet stream was a distraction to everyone. Sometimes someone would crack a joke on the backchannel, and the audience would burst out laughing, interrupting the speaker’s flow and causing the conversation to go off topic. I found myself hitting send during moments of laughter or applause so as not to interrupt a key point or distract the speaker.

Problem #3: Breaking the flow of the event

In the backchannel, new social games began to emerge, like rating the panelists while they speak or pointing arrows to panelists’ heads. These tweets took attention of other audience members away from the speakers. People were starting to engage more with the conversation than the content. There was a funny side to these games, but it wasn’t the right time.

As a commenter notes here, backchannels can become a problem when both the presentation and the backchannel are cognitively demanding. We only have so much attention to give, and despite the trend towards multitasking, humans are not wired for dividing our attention, and some studies suggest it can even be harmful.

The start of a worrying trend?

I was dismayed to learn that SAP have launched a tool to let you include a Twitter stream in your presentation. I cannot see any benefit to including this kind of distraction. There are a number of recent examples of presenters being humiliated by their audiences via backchannels. Danah Boyd was recently chastised by the Web2.0 Expo audience, who used the projected backchannel (or “frontchannel”) to effectively talk behind her back. This can bring out the very worst in human behaviour, and with no feedback to the presenter, the balance of power is shifted too far towards the audience.

As a presenter, you’re responsible for the results. You hold the mic, you have the authority. But having a backchannel take center stage gives that away. The audience have the authority but none of the responsibility.

Scott Berkun writes about speaker/audience power dynamics in “Confessions of a Public Speaker”:

“When you allow someone in the audience to speak, you are giving him the floor and with it, some of your power… You are judge, jury and executioner… Never be afraid to enforce the rules the room wants you to follow… When you enforce a popular rule, you reengage everyone… You restore your power and earn the audience’s respect… So don’t hesitate to cut off a blowhard or silence the guy on his cellphone.”

The Conversation is not the Event

Allowing the audience to take control from the presenters is a step too far. We need to draw the line here. Twitter is great for getting news out instantly, but it seems now it’s going even further, and the commentary is becoming part of the event itself. Already we see Twitter comment streams on CNN and “photos from our viewers” on the BBC. I believe that to be fully absorbed content needs to be left unadulterated by others comments or views, so that we can form our own opinions before being influenced by others, or worse, before the presenter is forced to change tack.

And that’s not to mention the creative aspect. We would never interrupt a concert pianist, magician or performance artist, so why should public speakers be any different? Allowing the conversation to dominate steals the creative freedom of the presenter, forcing them to bend to the will of their audience.

So how should we use backchannels?

What we need is careful control in the ways we use backchannels, so that presenters can get feedback without being distracted or losing control. Here are some examples:

• Only display moderated highlights from the backchannel, at the times you choose (or better still, never show the backchannel at all. Keep it separate).
• Check the backchannel during scheduled breaks (which is what we did at ECS) and take necessary actions in the next session.
• Have a colleague monitor and participate in the backchannel on your behalf, bringing important sentiments and questions to your attention – a sort of “ombudsman for the audience“, as Alistair did for Sean at Web2Expo (shown above).
• Have regular “Twitter breaks,” as Robert Scoble suggests.
• Use software like keynotetweet to send triggered tweets into the backchannel as you hit certain slides. This can help keep the backchannel conversation on track.
• Include live polls in your presentations with software like PollEverywhere. This is a good example of inviting audience feedback but keeping control.

These are the ways that I think work, and are effective, adding value for presenter and audience alike. But of course there are always risks with any backchannel. The crowd may turn against you, especially if they become more interested in the discussion than what you are saying. There is more pressure for you to deliver value. This is particularly  a danger in classroom situations, where audiences may be less motivated. But in most cases this can be managed by ensuring someone is attentive to what the audience is saying, moderating and guiding the discussion, and feeding important things back to the presenter.

Above all, keep control, and keep focus. Do not use backchannel technology just because you can. Use it wisely and sparingly, only when it will enhance your audience’s experience.

I’d like to reiterate that I am not criticizing UXMTL. I enjoyed the event and look forward to getting involved with the community and attending future events. The purpose of this post is only to discuss the wider issues the situation raised for me. What do you think? Are backchannels worth the effort or should they be avoided?

Further reading:

• Joel Dart – Backchannel in Your Classroom
• Josh Waitzkin – The Multitasking Virus and the End of Learning
• Claudia Wallis – The Multitasking Generation
• Learning to multitask (PsyBlog)

This week, many people have been given beta access to Twitter’s new Retweet feature. Unfortunately, rather than seizing the opportunity to pave the cowpaths by building a feature that reflects the way users are currently retweeting each other, Twitter have launched something which behaves quite differently.

You have to change your retweet behavior to use the new feature. This has angered many users, myself included, so I’d like to explain how I think the new feature should have been designed. To start with I’ll look at where retweeting came from, I’ll then explain some of the problems with the way it works currently, how Twitter are trying to address these problems with the new feature, and finally how I think the problems could be better addressed.

Why do we need a retweet feature anyway?

Up to now, retweeting has been done purely through syntax – by editing the original message and adding notations like RT @alexbfree or (via @acroll). Often people will add a comment too, as seen in this example:

There are a number of problems with this current approach, most of which are explained by Twitter founder Evan Williams in his explanation of the new feature. Let’s look at each in turn:

1. Attribution confusion

From my tweet, you can’t tell that this was originally a tweet by @CBCMontreal, to which @zoonini added “This is troubling”. It might appear that @zoonini was the original poster.
This is because I had to remove her “RT @CBCMontreal” to make room for my “RT @zoonini” and my own comment.

Evan believes the solution is to show the originator’s avatar in place of the retweeter, and credit the retweeter with a tiny link at the bottom:

Ultimately, this is a value judgement about whether as a retweeter you want to credit the person who passed on the information or the person who first posted it. Personally, I want to credit both, but given a choice I err towards crediting the person I know who passed the link on. I’m sure this judgement will be different for everyone, and the new system doesn’t allow for this.

2. Identity protection

There’s another issue with attribution, that anybody can claim to be retweeting you by writing RT @yourname before any kind of message, and then it looked like you said that thing, which could be something you disapprove of, such as advertising spam. There is a clear need for retweets to be attributable and for it to be harder for people to misquote others, intentionally or otherwise.

Here we see a loophole in the design of the new feature – since we can still retweet “the old way”, there is nothing to stop this behaviour continuing. If Twitter had got the redesign right, they would have the confidence to block the use of RT @name syntax in messages. I think they know that people won’t use the new feature, so they had to leave this option open – which can be used for good or bad purposes.

3. Messy

There’s no denying that my example tweet above is messy and hard to read. RT syntax is not intuitive (as I was reminded recently when explaining it to a new Twitter user). I wholeheartedly agree that there is a need to take the metadata about this being a retweet and from whom, out of the message. It’s a no-brainer that having a retweet button you can click to do it for you would also enable this metadata to be captured.

4. Untrackable

At the moment, you can’t follow the history of retweet back to its source – you can’t see how many people are retweeting a particular message. Why is this important? Because we are moving towards a social, real-time web. In the same way Google revolutionized search by looking at who was linking to a particular site (PageRank) and looking at the authority of that site, the next challenge is to build a PageRank equivalent for the social web.

Companies like Twitter need to determine what is most popular based on how many people are talking about it, and more importantly who are the people who are the most important generators of content. Looking at how many people retweet a message, and whose messages are the most retweeted, give a direct measurement for both of these. These are needed to make real-time social search a viable option.

Alistair Croll has been taking a look in more depth at the idea of a PageRank for humans over on Watching Websites.

5. Noise and Redundancy

Evan goes on to mention Noise and Redundancy as two other issues with current retweeting – that you see repeat too many retweets or too many copies of the same retweet. I don’t think these are major issues – if a tweet shows up more than once, that means more than once person thought it had value, so it is right that it should get more visibility. A “mark as read” option would be more useful than grouping all occurrences of the tweet. As for people who retweet too much, I think the solution is simple – unfollow them!

This is the point where Evan stops, and offers the new feature as the best way to combat these six issues. I think there is one other key issue he has failed to address though:

6. Freedom to comment

Possibly the most frustrating thing about retweeting today is having to tweak and edit the message so that you can fit in the RT credit and more importantly your own comment. The comment is the key part of the retweet, it’s what makes the content tailored and relevant to your audience. It’s hard at the moment – this is often done with a “<” or “<==” at the end of the tweet, followed by a comment. But there are often few characters to play with. This is completely overlooked by the new retweet feature. In the new feature, you cannot add your own commentary at all:

Clicking Yes posts the retweet. A retweet becomes a verbatim quote, with no personalization or commentary applied.

Changing the nature of retweets

And this is the most controversial thing about the new features. It changes the nature of a retweet into the granting of permission to another person to send their message out to all of your followers as well. You might even call it a new form of spamming.

In any medium, the message should be tailored to the audience. On Twitter, every person has a different audience. Untailored retweets are undesirable because they take away the context of the retweet. You don’t get to see why the person you are following retweeted – and this may be different for each retweeter. Some may retweet things they are impressed by, others may want to retweet things they want to ridicule. This is where grouping all retweeters together breaks down. The new design fails to accomodate the variety of tweeters and their audiences and makes Twitter more like an advertising platform than a forum for conversations and diverse opinions.

At the very least, it’s reducing a retweet to a version of Facebook’s “Like” feature rather than an opportunity to comment and add context to the content.

An alternative solution

This brings me to my proposed solution, which I believe solves all the problems mentioned above, while also preserving our right to make a retweet our own with commenting.

I propose that instead of retweet being a one click operation, it should include 2 steps:

Step 1: Click retweet on the tweet you want to share

This is exactly the same as in the new feature.

Step 2: Add your comment

The key difference I am proposing is that clicking Yes would then give you the opportunity to add a comment – a special kind of tweet which references an existing tweet:

In effect, the link to the existing tweet is additional context, much like the “in reply to” links today.

Viewing the retweet

The final difference would be how the retweeted message is displayed. The comment of the person you are following should the primary thing visible, with the original message shown underneath in context. (clicking “retweeting” would show/collapse the retweet history)

This would allow content-centric conversations to happen on Twitter, much like they do currently on Facebook wall items, forum threads or Flickr photos.

Does it solve the problems?

I believe so, and it does so in a way that preserves current user behavior. Let’s look at each problem in turn:

Attribution – the originator of the tweet and the originator of the comment are separated and clearly identified, and credit is given equally to originator and retweeter.

Identity protection – this model would allow old style RTs to be blocked, eliminating the possibility of false attribution.

Messy – the original content, the retweeter, the originator, and the comment are all separate and distinct

Untrackable – this method allows just the same sort of tracking of the spread of the message and the influence of different tweeters

Noise – I think this will make Twitter streams much easier to digest, because every message will have a context you can dig into if you wish

Redundancy – Much like Gmail’s conversation threads reorder mails to show history, the RT threads would group related comments on the same retweet together, avoiding redundancy while still preserving each retweeter’s right to add their own perspective.

Freedom to comment – The retweeter can not only add a comment to the retweet, they now have the full 140 characters available to do so.

I would be interested to know why Twitter did not come up with a design like this, which seems a fairly obvious all-round win. Did they really not think of this or not notice how people use retweets? Or do they want to change Twitter into more of an advertising network? What do you think? Add you comments below

Recently, I noticed something equally mainstream about a new class of technology: its appearance in movie and TV credits. As this screencap shows, the credits for @bbcgoodnews (which, I’m pretty sure, features @notrusshoward) include Twitter usernames.

Which got me thinking:

• Whether it’s thanking someone, or simply footnoting to give credit (literally) where credit is due, Twitter’s model fits the way we endorse others. We didn’t put emails into movie and TV credits, because email is private. But asymmetric-follow social networks like Twitter handle celebrity well, and acknowledgments build social capital for both parties. You don’t need someone’s permission to give out their Twitter name the way you do their email.
• The ubiquitous @ has become as universally understood as the “www” was when studios first embraced it — and Twitter is the ICANN of those names, handling assignment and investigating fraudulent behavior. Notice the Twitter name above — “bbcgoodnews” includes both the organization (BBC) and the show name (Good News). There’s no structured standard the way there is for DNS (goodnews.bbc.co.uk) but there surely will be.
• PageRank-like algorithms within media will become possible: some future IMDB could scrape video content to determine who gets thanked the most, in a form of new media social capital leaderboard. While there might be a hundred Russell Howards in media, there’s only one @notrusshoward (particularly if he’s verified officially), so the Twitter account serves as a unique identifier around which relationships can be analyzed.

Websites changed movie promotions dramatically, putting trailers only a click away and letting studios share more than a thirty-second clip with their audiences. But early web-based marketing was still one-way, promotionally focused, and built on monetization. By contrast, the two-way social web changes change how shows are created and credited, with producers getting their inspiration from audiences, then curating and augmenting that input into future shows.

Want to see this in action? Check out the Reddit threads on Geek jokes, leading Reddit users to wonder whether that’s where writers of the Big Bang Theory get their ideas.

Right now, one of my online contacts is cooking; one’s hiking in Nepal; one’s mixing music; one’s boarding a flight to Europe; one explained an idea I had better than I ever could; and one just launched some software I wish I’d built. At least, that’s what their status updates remind me.

Call it Status Update Anxiety.

Happiness is relative, as Alain de Botton so eloquently tells us. We compare ourselves to our peers, and use this as the basis for our self-esteem. In a TED presentation he gave, he makes the point that few people envy the Queen of England — after all, she’s not that like you and I, with her funny accent and strange family rituals — but we all envy the latest tech wunderkind, the classmate who flipped a house, the brother who made some smart investments.

These objects of our disaffection are just like us. Every time Sergey Brin gets up on stage in jeans and a T-shirt, he reminds us that we could have been him if we’d only thought of Pagerank. This is, of course, a gross misstatement — but the mainstream media can’t convey the underlying complexity of achievent. Many inventions seem simple in retrospect, and the one-page writeup in Wired Magazine can’t do justice to the years of hard work. As Sheryl Crow said, it takes a long time to become an overnight success.

Envy is worst in first-world meritocracies. When you’re a pauper in a caste-based community, you seldom question your place in the world. But in a society where you can be anything, the nagging question is: why aren’t you? Social networks make it much, much worse. There’s always someone, somewhere in my online peer group doing something fascinating. If I have 99 friends, and one of us is doing something really interesting at any given time, then 99 percent of the time, I’m dull.

Asymmetrical social network models like Twitter feed this dismay. Our Facebook relationships are mutual, so the people we befriend are our peers. On Twitter, however, we also follow those we aspire to be. And behold! They’re just like us! They drink coffee, miss busses, stub their toes — they’re mortals too! Why can’t we be like them?

Comparing ouselves to others is human. Just as adaptation is the basis for natural selection, so aspirations are the basis for social advancement — and we get our aspirations from those we envy. We like to think we’re civilized, but the reality is that millennia of tribal training have programmed the jungle-surplus wetware on which we operate. There’s a status-obsessed animal lurking beneath our thin veneer of social decency, and now it has to deal with an overload of status updates from peers. It’s no wonder we’re anxious.

As more of our lives are lived online, many social mechanisms will need adjusting. Unchecked, Status Update Anxiety can lead to envy and a sense of missed opportunities. It takes a Zen-like, love-the-one-you’re-with attitude to survive the onslaught of interesting. We can’t all be fascinating all the time, after all.

It’s likely that our online peers only blog, Tweet, and upload the good parts. Like a dysfunctional high school reunion where everyone puts their best foot forward, it’s not a healthy way to form a picture of oneself. The most grounded people I know are the ones who enjoy their lot, recognizing that theirs is the slice of life they’ve chosen, and enjoying it for what it is.

Now if my friends would just stop traveling to so many fun-sounding places.

We use Dropbox, a clever product that effortlessly synchronizes and backs up our files. We’ve discovered it does a lot more than this though; it gives us an ambient awareness of each other’s work, and it makes us more effective because we no longer have to think about versions, file locations or lost data.

Ambient awareness

Status sharing is not a new idea. The IM world invented it. Facebook made it social. Twitter made it famous as an activity in its own right. More recently the likes of Yammer, Socialtext and status.net made it available inside the enterprise. But what is new is the idea that it can happen all by itself.

First let’s remind ourselves why status sharing is useful. The idea has been heavily criticized in the media of late – especially Twitter, which many have dismissed as pointless babble. It’s important to realise that social software is actually a lot more useful for work than it is in our personal lives. I may not care that a schoolfriend has “had a cracking night out”, but it’s very useful at work to know Fred has “just put together presentation for XYZCo”, especially if I know XYZCo will love the new feature I’m working on and Fred hasn’t seen it yet. It’s even more useful to find out that someone is working on something that directly benefits my own work.

One thing that Yammer, Twitter and Facebook all have in common is that you have to break away from your current task and actively declare what it is that you are doing. The beauty of Dropbox is that you just save your file as normal, and Dropbox announces it for you. You can focus on your work.

Dropbox’s notifications (and its RSS feed – shown above) do something that we haven’t seen before – they give us an ambient awareness of what others are working on before we even talk about it. This can trigger useful conversations. One morning, I saved an partial draft of a document. Ten minutes later my two colleagues had both read it and given me suggestions on how to improve it, before I’d even finished typing or mentioned it to them. Now that’s collaboration.

An end to version hell

Have you ever experienced the headaches of trying to merge different versions, figure out which change came first in a file, or tried to decide whether you should be using “Proposal v2 with comments.doc” or “Final proposal – reviewed.doc”?

With Dropbox, there is only ever one version of the file. Every time you make a change it is saved as a new version and synched to everyone’s machine. Old versions are there if you need to go back, but more importantly there’s only ever one “latest version”. If edits do clash, Dropbox intelligently resolves the conflict and ensures nothing is lost.

By moving our Dropbox folders to a common path, you can make it easier still. We did this and can now exchange links like file:///Dropbox/MyFile.txt to our communications instead of attaching files which quickly get out of date and out of sync.

Effectively, Dropbox lets us use our folders as a wiki–a co-edited, shared resource–but using the software we’re used to and without having to learn new habits or special syntax.

Edit and delete with confidence

Who doesn’t find an Undo feature useful? Who hasn’t been frustrated by overwriting or deleting a file or paragraph you meant to keep? Word processors made it much easier for us to chop and change our text, but unlike typewritten copy, discarded text is lost for ever. It’s easy to become hesitant to make changes in case you make it worse and can’t go back, and there’s often a fear of losing your work.

With Dropbox, provided you get used to saving regularly, every edit you make can be undone. As a writer, I find this incredibly liberating. I am no longer afraid to delete huge chunks of text and re-write them. I just save-then-delete, and I know I can always recover text from an earlier version.

What’s more, every file you delete is stored forever(*) and can be recovered. This is a healthy antidote for data-hoarders like me. It’s great to know that I can clean up folders by deleting the old notes and temporary files, safe in the knowledge if I really needed them I can still get them back.

Work together more effectively

In my office, Dropbox has helped us become more efficient at collaborating. It doesn’t seem like they were trying to build social software (and were unavailable for comment on this question when I asked). But it’s clear that what was designed as a personal online backup solution has inadvertently morphed into the beginnings of a very powerful shared workspace for teams and small businesses. As it is now, it’s highly useful for office productivity. With the right tweaks and enhancements, it could easily take on such stalwarts of enterprise collaboration as Groove, Socialtext and Confluence.

Christian started by reiterating that social experience design is about the interaction between people rather than the interface between the human and the computer – and that while you can fairly well control one person’s experience with a system, you cannot predict or control how people will choose to interact with each other.

As such, when you design a social experience, all you can really do is provide a framework. You can set the basic rules and capabilities, but the participants will finish the design for you.

Five steps of social experience design

1. Give people a way to be identified
Without a name, profile or avatar they cannot maintain relationships across sessions.

2. Give people a way to distinguish themselves from others
For example, the MIT personas art project cannot distinguish between people who share the same name. This is also why Facebook added usernames.

3. Give people something to do
Friendster failed because people had nothing to do besides accumulate followers. Attempts to create groups through “fakesters” were blocked by Friendster as TOS violations. They failed to recognize the users’ attempts to interact in new ways.

4. Enable a bridge to real life events
People want to take what they are doing online into the real world, talk about it and bring it back again. Research has shown that bringing social interaction into the offline world enriches the content and strengthens the relationships of all involved.

5. Let the community elevate people & content they value
A good example is Flickr “interestingness”, which is derived from the amount of user activity around each image.

Five design patterns you can use

1. Pave the cowpaths
There is an often quoted story about an architect who couldn’t get agreement on where to lay the paths between the buildings on new site. So he grassed everywhere, allowed people to form their own paths, and then came back and paved those. The moral of the story is that you shouldn’t try and push people towards the behavior you expect – you should instead react to the way they use the space. An example of this is Twitter RTs and @replies, which were both created by users and later adopted in the platform.

2. Talk like a person
There is no point in hiding the fact that there are humans behind your product or site. Flickr, Dopplr and GetSatisfaction are examples of sites that have benefited from setting a very human, conversational tone and avoiding engineering speak or business speak.

3. Be open. Play well with others.
Enable data portability in & out. Don’t build the whole ecosystem when you can plug into existing third party components. Provide APIs for interoperability. Use open source where possible.

4. Learn from games.
People like to collect, share, compete, rate, challenge and all sorts of other fun activities. Sometimes, a work activity can be made to feel like a game. Enable game-like activities and your community will flourish. Make sure users can create their own games too. Would you prefer to use a spreadsheet or a game?

5. Respect the ethical dimension
Recognize that wherever people interact, they will build relationships and may betray or harm other people. Be prepared to encourage good behaviour in the society you create, and discourage the bad. Also recognize the trust the users put in you to treat them well and protect their information. Be conscious of the consequences of your actions on your users.

Five design anti patterns to avoid

1. Cargo Cult
This is a reference to Pacific islands where natives build model airplanes when the US bases were deserted after WWII. They believed the presence of these planes would encourage cargo and supplies to be delivered once again. In the electronic world, this means you cannot just copy an interface from a successful social site and expect the same results. There may be other underlying differences.

2. Don’t break email
Recognize that people have existing habits, the most common of which is email. Let new habits evolve from people’s existing behaviors rather than forcing people to shift wholesale to new paradigms. Allow conversations to take place across mediums, For example. Basecamp fixed this with their “reply above the line” feature.

3. The Password Anti-Pattern
This refers to the practice of requesting user’s credentials to pull in contacts from address books. This trains users to give away their passwords, and creates issues of trust. Instead, use alternatives like OAuth, Facebook Connect or OpenID.

4. The Ex-Boyfriend Bug
While it is usually true that communication networks reveal relationships, recognize that sometimes there are good reasons why two people with 35 friends in common might not want to connect. As Rex Sorgatz put it, “the ‘people you should know’ list on Facebook is actually a list of people you hate.”

5. Potemkin Village
This refers to the Russian minister Potemkin who created fake villages to fool Empress Catherine II on her visit to Crimea in 1787. In a social site, you shouldn’t have lots of categories for conversations you hope will happen – this will divide your audience and hinder growth. Instead, put all your users in the same place, and wait for them to tell you when they want a separate area. This is what happened with Grateful Dead fans in the net.music group in the early days of Usenet.

Christian and Erin followed up this session with an opportunity for attendees to try out their new Social Mania game which educates about the things that need to be considered when designing from a social perspective, and can be used as an ice-breaker with teams or clients.

He divided social sites into five types of social model:

1. No relationships declared (e.g. Amazon reviews, blog comments)
2. A community site (e.g. YouTube, Yahoo Answers)
3. A group (e.g Yahoo Groups or a Flickr Group)
4. Symmetric/2 way “personal” relationships (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn)
5. Asymmetric/1 way/fan/follow relationships (e.g. Twitter, IM, Flickr)

The focus was on the latter four – sites where users can interact with each within that site other through messaging or collaboration, leave visible traces of behavior and manage their identity.

(It was noted that even for the first type where no relationship is declared, some grouping of users can be done by techniques such as geo-location, technology (device/OS/browser/preferences) or even by looking at browser history.)

Here are some highlights from the observations and findings presented:

• 1.8% of Wikipedia users write 70% of the articles. There is a commonly cited model for community sites like these – 1% are creators, 10% are curators, and 100% are consumers.
• On Twitter, 10% of users produce 90% of the content. In contrast, 10% of Facebook users produce 30% of the content. This suggests that among active users, 1 way relationships lead people to produce three times more (perhaps because they know their audience is interested).
• One way follow relationships like Twitter are more flexible because they support multiple relationship structures
• On average, the YouTube community produces 58,000% more content per user than Facebook!

Luke also highlighted a number of other insights gathered from the research:

1. Relationship limits exist in all models. The average number of friends on Facebook is 120. 92% of those on Twitter follow less than 100 people. This is in line with Robert Dunbar’s work showing people can maintain stable social relationships with a maximum of 148 people.
2. Tight-knit circles flourish. An HP Labs study showed that 92% of Twitter users have 13 “friends” (defined as two-way @reply type contact occurring twice or more)
3. Communication reveals relationships. The same HP study showed that Twitter “friends” (as above) relationships were 90% reciprocated. Studies have shown 95% accuracy for detecting real friends using mobile call logs and location records. Interfaces such as Motoblur and HTC Hero’s friend aggregation interface are starting to arrange communications around relationships.
4. More attention, more contribution. The number of daily Twitter updates increases from 3 to 6 when followers increased by 1000. Yahoo Answers showed a 480% increase in contributions when the number of relationships increased to 20.
5. Less attention, less contribution. Similarly, as interest(followers) reduced, contributions become less frequent.
6. There is a limit to contribution in all models. More relationships than 20 on Yahoo Answers did not lead to an increase in contribution. Similarly gaining several thousand Twitter followers does not lead to additional increases in contributions.
7. 1-way relationships optimize for reach. In other words people are more willing to commit to 1 way relationships that allow them to stay connected with topics or people of interest via a lightweight subscribe. Facebook Fan pages are another example of this.
8. Real relationships drive production. People are more likely to collaborate online and produce content with “real life friends” thanks to something he calls the “0-1-2″ effect.
9. Better tools yield more content of a higher quality. MySpace gives poor control and so people invest less. The game Spore owes a great deal of its success to the tools it gives to users to create something attractive and interesting.

Luke also observed that current relationship models are crude. He expects that in the future we will be able to do things like “follow Todd but only his thoughts on prototyping, not his fashion tips”