A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective

This week’s storm in the blogosphere focused on the question of “authority” on twitter and other social networks. It all began when welebrity Loïc Le Meur suggested that twitter searches should be filtered by a measure of authority. This immediately elicited critical responses from other high profile members of the online world, such as Robert Scoble and Dave Winer, only to have Mike Arrington leap to Loïc’s defence.

So what is the kerfuffle all about? I’ll start at the beginning, with twitter. I’ve written about twitter many times before, but there may be a few readers who still don’t know what it is. Twitter is microblog. It is one of many, but currently the most popular. A microblog allows users to post very short messages and links to all of their “followers” (also known as “subscribers” or “friends”, depending on the site). While it is possible to make these message private on twitter, most people keep their messages public. As with anything publically published online, this means that these messages are visible to anyone, not just followers. In particular, they are amenable to searching. A twitter search is a powerful tool. A good example is using twitter to keep track of rapidly unfolding current events. Over the last few days, many twitter users have been posting photos, news links and opinions about the bombings in Gaza, tagging them with label “#gaza” which makes them easy to find on twitter. In amongst the predictably partisan rhetoric from both sides, it is possible to stay a step ahead of reporting in the mainstream media and gain some genuine insight into the crisis. Not so long ago, a search for #mumbai provide a similar window the Mumbai terrorist attack.

As valuable as these searches are, Twitter’s strength is also its weakness. The number of twitter users worldwide is now estimated to be approaching 6 million, which means that the amount of information flowing around in “tweets” (as twitter messages are commonly known) is enormous. However, as twitter grows the signal-to-noise ratio is likely to drop and more and more tweets are likely to be spam, inflammatory bile or just nonsense. So from this perspective, having an ability to filter search results to the most “relevant” tweets (in some sense) is appealing. The problem, however, arose with Loïc’s suggestion that filtering should be based on a notion of “authority”, possibly defined in terms of the number of followers each user has. Not unreasonbly, many took issue with this measure of authority. As Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) argued:

Here’s why it’s a stupid idea: everyone is gaming the number of followers. And, even if everyone weren’t, popularity on Twitter isn’t a good way to measure whether a Tweet is any good or not.

From there discussions moved on to the distinction between the number of followers and the quality of the people you follow.

The ensuing debate leapt from blogs to twitter to FriendFeed, but to my mind part of the reason for the controversy is that a number of different issues were being conflated:

1. Is there merit in being able to filter search results based on characteristics of the user posting the tweet?
2. Is the number of followers you have a good measure of the quality of your tweets?
3. Is it valuable to have a large number of followers?

Most people debating the issue combined the first two questions, only allowing answers “yes and yes” (the Loïc/Arrington perspective) or “no and no” (the Winer/Scoble view). My own answers are, respectively, “yes”, for the reasons outlined above, and “no”, as I agree with Scoble on that mere follower count is a poor measure of “authority”. And the conflation doesn’t end there. Most people answering “no” to question two means that attempts to cultivate a large number of followers are misguided. But I don’t agree with that either.

While having a large number of followers may not give any indication of your authority, it does give you access to an extremely powerful mechanical Turk. The original mechanical Turk was an 18th century machine that purported to be able to play chess. It was, however, a hoax as a human hidden inside the machine was actually doing the thinking. The term has had a new lease of life online to refer to the practice of crowdsourcing, which involves harnessing the power of large numbers of networked humans. Now that I have over 850 followers (a very modest count by twitter standards) I have begun to sense the crowdsourcing power of twitter. If I post a question to my followers (aka my “tweeps”), the responses are impressive. Over the last couple of days I used twitter for two different pieces of use for friends. The first was to seek advice on the best wireless broadband providers in Sydney. The responses were immediate. Here is an example:

My next task was to find out about fertilizer for azaleas and camelias. This was a more obscure question, so I was less optimistic. Yet, here is the response I received.

Later I had to clarify what the numbers meant (amounts of Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium, if you were wondering), but was extremely happy with the effectiveness of my own personal mechanical Turk. Of course, quality is as important here as well as quality. If I had not been following @pazaq, my question would still be unanswered. Nevertheless, as my follower count increases, I expect my Turk to become more and more useful.

So while growing your follower count certainly comes behind developing a community inside twitter and engaging in thought-provoking conversation and debate, there is no doubt that there is strength in numbers.

Back in August, muxtape, a popular music playlist site, was forced to close by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Now mixwit have announced that is is closing too. The only explanation offered was as follows:

We’ve put a year of work into Mixwit so this choice wasn’t taken lightly. I won’t go into the details of our situation but state simply that we boldly marched into in a position best described as “between a rock and a hard place.”

Reading between the line, it looks as though they too have fallen at the hands of the RIAA. Under the cover of claims to be protecting artists, claims that do not bear close scrutiny, the RIAA is building an impressive track-record of stifling innovation. While it is possible to take comfort from the fact that attempts to stem the tide of progress always fail in the end, it is neverthless frustrating to see the suffering of victims of this pernicious organisation in the meantime, whether those victims are single mothers sued for file-sharing or the creators of sites like muxtape and mixwit.

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As is probably evident from past posts about twitter or identica, I am something of a Web 2.0 junkie. Over the last few years I have signed up for countless services and I am sure I have forgotten about far more of them than I actually use. And therein lies a problem. The rate innovation online of late has been extraordinary, but the result is a proliferation of services that is not sustainable. With the Global FInancial Crisis progressing outside the financial sector to the broader economy, venture capitalists will be tightening their purse-strings and this will inevitably lead to a period of consolidation in the online landscape.

Early signs of this phenomenon appeared today with announcements that the social networking site Pownce, to-do list manager I Want Sandy and virtual Post-It note site Stikkit  will all be closing down.

Twitter is a common theme behind these closures. Despite the backing of welebrity Kevin Rose and rich media sharing features, Pownce ultimately failed to grow at the same rate as twitter. When initially launched, the mystique generated by the invitation-only private beta version of the site attracted attention for a while, but interest seemed to wane after the site went public. Personally, I have been using twitter more and more and pownce less and less over the last year, but I will miss the friendly alien (pictured above) who appeared on pownce pages when something went awry. Somehow he is more endearing than twitter’s “fail whale”.

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What with buying a new house, going on holiday and now trying to sell the old house, it has been a while since my last post. Here is a quick reflection on blog comment spam to ease myself back into my blogging regimen.

Those who have never written a blog may not be away of the phenomenon of blog comment spam. The basic idea is the same as email spam: to drive traffic to websites featuring pornography, viagra or worse. Fortunately, spam filtering software works as well, if not better, for blog comment spam as it does for email spam.

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I feel I am due for a break from the GFC* and so will instead return to the subject of Web 2.0.

Whenever I come across a new Web 2.0 site/application/service I cannot help but sign up. A quick search for the phrase “welcome to” in my gmail archives throws up about 100 messages, representing only some of the debris of this obsession: sites I have signed up for, explored briefly and mostly never visited again.

Among these, however, is a recent discovery that has quickly become an indispensable tool. Alongside gmail and google calendar, Dropbox is now one of my favourite examples of “cloud computing”. In a nutshell, it provides synchronised offsite storage in an extraordinarily seamless way. For a new service, still only in beta, it is very impressive.

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Readers of comments on the Stubborn Mule and other blogs may have noticed the little avatars like the one pictured here. Some may even have wondered how it is that some commenters manage to display a picture of themselves. If you are one of those people, or you are now curious, read on.

These avatars are known as “gravatars”, or globally recognized avatars. Gravatars provide a clever mechanism for frequent blog vistors to have the same image appear with their comments across all gravatar-enabled blogs. To create a gravatar of your own, you simply sign up at gravatar.com and upload an image.

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In my recent post on the future of Microblogging, I expressed concerns about the viability of twitter given that they are yet to find a business model. But perhaps I just wasn’t thinking laterally enough: earlier this week I stumbled across a novel approach to monetising microblogging. The new site Blip.fm brings music to microblogging in a way that initially had me scratching my head, but it is gradually starting to make more sense. Based on a recent post on the Microblogger’s blog, 140char, others are responding in much the same way.

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In a recent post on his Sprechblase (”Speech Bubble”) blog, Cem Basman examines a number of different forms of communication that have evolved on the web: chat, forums, wikis, blogs and microblogs. Although the boundaries can be blurred, Cem’s summary of the key features of each of these forms is a useful one.

The original post is in German and, with the help of Google translate and my own rusty German, I have adapted it to produce an English version. I am publishing it here with Cem’s blessing. Cem couches his discussion in terms of his notion of “die Sphäre” (the “Sphere”), by which he means the totality of communication in all its forms on the web.
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I have been an enthusiastic user of twitter for quite some time now, but I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it is unlikely to survive, at least in its current form. This is partly because they will struggle to build a business model to start paying off their venture capital backers. But more importantly, it is because twitter is a closed system and that will ultimately constrain its potential.

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I recently came across the OECD Factbook blog written by Jérôme Cukier, who works as a data editor for the OECD. He has an excellent post on publishing charts in blogs.

As regular readers of the Mule will know, I don’t mind posting the odd chart and in the process I have grappled with the less than ideal results that the Excel to image production-cycle can produce. Jérôme’s process discusses these challenges and illustrates the results of different techniques (although I had more luck with copying as a picture and saving to PNG format than he had, so perhaps the choice of picture editor is a factor as well). As far as possible, I try to avoid using Excel altogether for producing charts and instead use the statistical package R, which can produce charts directly to a number of image formats including JPG and PNG. Although Jérôme doesn’t mention R, it does crop up in the first of the comments on his post.

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