Last week I speculated that the new Twitter's native Retweet feature was about search, but it looks like maybe I was wrong; it a may be all about advertising, with search playing a supporting role. Robert Scoble says that at today's TechCrunch Real Time Crunchup, Dick Costolo - Twitter’s COO, said that Twitter will introduce an advertising model. Scoble speculates that this will be done through metadata. He believes the metadata would be revealed when you mouse over a given tweet. I think that the metadata will be used to instantly generate an advertisement and it will be the ad that is revealed when you mouse over the tweet not the metadata.
Continue reading...12 November 2009
I would like to speculate a bit about why Twitter has chosen to architect the new “Retweet feature” without the ability to edit, and why they chose to call it Retweet even though it does not serve the same function as the cultural convention that we currently call Retweet. Retweet as a Cultural Convention Retweet, as a [...]
Continue reading...1 November 2009
The act of creating lists may result in a dual class of Twitizen - Those who are on lists of influential people and those who are not. To some extent lists may freeze the status quo of power structures within Twitter as they exist today, Give those with influence even more, and may make it much harder for new users to be discovered which may hinder engagement by the long tale of users
Continue reading...1 May 2009
Everyone who has used Twitter for more than a couple weeks has surely seen and likely participated in #followfriday -- Don't! The once productive and effective way to recommend to people to follow has turned into an unsustainable self promotional orgy that is clogging the arteries of twitter. Instead, tweet whenever you interact with an individual that adds significant value and tell your followers why. Use #rec as the hashtag
Continue reading...28 April 2009
This post discusses what we learned about power dynamics in social media as a result of Unfollow Ashton Kutcher Day. In summary, Ashton Kutcher was partly right — the little guy does have a voice, no matter how many followers they may have. And this voice has the potential to engage and influence others to take action. It is just that the voices of a “popular few” have much greater reach. The fact that we were unsuccessful does not mean that an individual with relatively little influence cannot generate a social media groundswell that could have viral impact on a mass scale but rather that this attempt did not succeed in achieving its stated goal. This was an imperfect experiment but nonetheless I believe we succeeded in demonstrating both the amazing democratizing effect of social media, as well as, its inherent power imbalances.
Continue reading...17 April 2009
1 million twitter followers means a shift of power balances from corporate media to individuals and denotes a coming of age of social media. With that comes new concerns of power imbalances.
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20 November 2009
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