Apr
3
What would Google want with Twitter?
Filed Under Social Media, Web | 18 Comments
I think most of the coverage is missing the point on the value of a potential Google-Twitter deal. The base microblog technology is dead simple to recreate. My team created working Twitter clone for use inside the firewall in less than a month. A fully working and better performing microblog could be put on App Engine for peanuts. The idea that Arrington put forth yesterday that Twitter “holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet” misses the point. The real Keys that Twitter holds are the users.
Simply stated, Google learned their lesson with Google Video. They built a product that was just as good as YouTube, yet hardly anyone used it; the simple solution was to buy the users. Just like the YouTube deal, the only things Google needs from Twitter are the user base and the brand name. The biggest difference between the two deals is that I don’t think Google will want to take on the “fail whale” technology that twitter is running on; It wouldn’t surprise me if they already had a fully functional and integrated microblog platform ready to go on Google infrastructure with the same API, just waiting for this deal to be done. The deal would enable Google to instantly get back in the game with Facebook and leave Microsoft in the rear-view mirror.
Jan
23
One Billion Served
Filed Under Web | 48 Comments
I would like to congratulate the Internet on serving over a billion unique visitors in December. While this is a tremendous milestone (and I am sure that the Internet’s parents are very proud) I must point out that this is less than 15% of the total world’s population so there is plenty of room to grow.
For all of us cloud developers, there is some interesting information contained in the comScore research report as well. For starters, China has surpassed the US in internet visitors and Asia Pacific as a region accounts for 41% of all Internet users. I am not sure what you are thinking about, but if I happened to be developing a SaaS solution that was targeting this vast audience, I might think twice about how I can enable said application to provide its service to the 84% of users that live outside the United States.
Jun
18
Clicks to Cliques
Filed Under Social Media, Trends, Web | 20 Comments
It should be of no surprise that on twitter very close knit groups of people band together who have similar interests (e.g. friends, work colleagues, etc.), because twitter was designed to allow social groups to stay on top of what each other are doing. What intrigues me are the public cliques that form dynamically from people who have similar interests.
In my own effort to gain a twitter following, I have surfed twitter profiles by clicking on profiles of people I know and looking at who my friends are following on twitter. If those people look interesting (e.g. Interesting twitter posts or a good blog) I follow them and then click through to people that they follow and do the same thing. The act of doing this has led me to find several distinct groups of like-minded individuals who form what I call a twitter clique.
There are some obvious cliques like the Tech Podcasters (Laporte , Scoble, Veronica, et al), the Web 2.0 crowd (Rose, Calacanis, Arrington) and pro bloggers like Joy Wang, May Woo and Erica O’Grady. There are a lot of people who simply use Twitter for self promotion and there is a big clique of book authors who take every opportunity to pimp their next signing and tell us about how their current projects are going. However, the most interesting cliques are very unexpected like the 120+ people who follow the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association (Roller Derby). I have found that Cliques can swarm around any subject and don’t seem to be limited to one social cast, for example I cannot image more diverse groups than work at home moms (Mommye), adult cam girls (Stacie Adams) and Obamamainians (Barack Obama).
It surprised me at first that most of the self organizing groups have formed around women or issues that are important to women, but then I realized that most men who are early adopters of technology are generally introverted geeks; therefore the early adopter women became the driving force behind clique swarms like raw food evangelists (emilyraw, 1rawgirl), Expat ESL teachers (Mleec), and wannabe actors who are always off on auditions. Eventually, I think that marketers will pay a lot of money to mine conversations of these cliques to better understand and market to specific demographics, but for right now I just am enjoying the conversation.
Your Turn
I am sure that the 500+ people that I am following just barely scratch the surface of the many cliques that intersect on twitter and other social media sites, what are some of the unique clique swarms that you have discovered?