What Twitter Really Is

Twitter is a distributed link-sharing system – much like reddit or digg are centralized link-sharing systems. Sure – much like it happens with facebook updates – sometimes people use those 140 characters to talk about something without linking to anything, but for the most part it’s links that keep twitter alive. In this regard, I would go as far as to say that twitter is somehow more similar to trackbacks (links) than to blogs (and content) themselves. Delicious, while we’re at it, is both distributed (my page) and centralized (the homepage). But neither the distributed nor the centralized features are much used to share links, which might as well explain why delicious slowly faded away as twitter started to soar…

Your company’s urge to tweet

is wrong.

Have you not noticed? Every time something new comes up – be it newsgroups, the commercial web, portals, blogs, facebook, twitter, whatever – your company wants to do ever more talking. And all it has to say is “we’re the market leaders” and, in the end, “buy our product”. How interesting.

So, more likely than not, you spammed newsgroups, created uninteresting brochure-ware websites when the commercial web came around, then bought banner ads like you couldn’t live without, perhaps even created a lame corporate-blog, as if you were not producing enough stupid pr.

All this is so wrong and so stupid. It seems to misunderstand the fundamental change we have witnessed: that on the web – not just on so-called “social media” – everybody can talk. All you need to do is be interesting, and then get out of the way, and your customers will do the talking for you.

So here come Facebook and Twitter, and now you want to have a fan page, and friends, and followers. You would never dare say you need to change that lame corporate site of yours, but on “web2.0″ you want to be perceived as hip and friendly and down to earth. I know, it’s a lot more fun.

And so you push hard until you are allowed to launch “a twitter initiative” and “a strategy for facebook”. You bring in funny-dressed “web2.0″ types as consultants, then you set up “a plan” and “goals”, and carefully determine who should be twittering and what he/she should and should not say.

Sometimes, you even totally outsource your “social media” activities to some “web2.0 agency” that will do the talking for you and try to make you come out as web-savvy and friendly. And when you reach a couple thousand friends or followers, you declare it a success. Mission accomplished. Yeah.

A couple thousand people willing to receive – not necessarily read – the 140 characters messages coming out from Big Corp. to its millions of customers is considered “a success”. Wow. Gotta love this “web2.0″ thing. No need to change anything inside the company, and it’s impossible to fail.

And you get a lot of press, too, and you can go on and say in your CV that you took care of Big Corp.’s “presence on twitter”. How different is it from what online marketing managers were doing with Second Life a couple of years ago? Does it really add any value to the company? I doubt it.

In the meantime, beneath the friendly “web2.0″ pose, life goes on as usual at Big Corp. Pr flacks push hard to sell their story to newspapers, and perhaps put on hold ad spending if the paper does not comply; negative blog posts are more often than not dealt with by lawyers; and nobody inside the company gets to do any talking except those who have long forgotten how to speak in a human voice. But you have a tagcloud on your website, and a thousand fans on Facebook, and followers on Twitter. Life is good, and there’s no need to change. No need to change Big Corp’s company culture; no need to confront the market; no need to be open and down to earth and accessible; no need to fearlessly show on your website what is being said about you online on blogs and Twitter and no need to let your employees take part in the conversation; no need to be interesting and friendly so that thousands of people will happily spread the good news about you to thousands of their real friends and followers. With a nice “web2.0″ mask on you can fool yourself that there’s no need (for now) to face up to the fact that Obama, not Eisenhower, is now President and we’re not in 1950 anymore.

As much as I love Opera…

I’d rather have space for my bookmarks (as in Chrome) than a brown bar at the top.

Google Public data

Google is launching a Public Data tool. I see hard times ahead for Swivel, the self-proclaimed YouTube of data. Life is hard when Google comes charging your way…

10 years after the dotcom bubble burst

10 years after the dotcom bubble burst, the NASDAQ is still worth less than half of what it was (supposedly) worth back then. And yet, we’re still crazy after all these years :-)

- Paul Simon

In praise of Adblock

I find it hard not to agree with Brian. Simply put, if your business is based on annoying people with ads, that’s your problem — not our problem. We can do without ads.

The New Iomega

As your data, your contacts, pics and life reside more and more in the cloud, someone had to step up and provide a way to back them up. Backupify is the Iomega – or the Dropbox, if you prefer – for your web2.0 lifestyle. And its founder is brilliant.

Facebook mobile. Smart.

You log out. “So, you’re leaving?” Take us on on your mobile! Smart.

Toto, we’re not in Topeka anymore

The capital of Kansas is now called Google, Kansas. Remember Half.com, Oregon?

Movie reference: Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.

Joel Spolsky on company blogs

What a great post! (even though I’m not sure I agree that quitting blogging is a good idea for Fog Creek Software). Most “web2.0″ company blogs do indeed look like the press releases dotcoms were sending out a decade ago. Now, isn’t that surprising? ;-)