The sphere is abuzz with today's news that AT&T is suing Verizon over those apparently quite effective ads which borrow heavily from Apple's tagline - "There's an App for that..." Verizon has created a map that compares AT&T 3G coverage to Verizon's, and then uses the tagline "there's a map for that." (Above is the commercial, here's the map.)

Well, I've been ranting about a real carrier mapping application (executed as a marketing campaign, natch), for nearly three years, and while I've told just about everyone I can about it, so far it's still not done (I know, I know, we should make it ourselves, right? Well, maybe we will!).

Meanwhile, here's the idea. If any of you brilliant coder/UX/marketing geniuses want to go do it, just credit FM and I, ok?

The main value of the program? It provides a place where anyone can put a pin on a map and annotate (with four part ranting harmony if they'd like) where their calls are dropped. A service like this exists - deadcellzones.com - but it's not quite what I had in mind. It's got the guts of what I've suggested, but not the scale, interface, community feel, conversational dialog, or program backing. And by program, I mean a major carrier practicing the true principles of conversational marketing, and owning the dialog - listening, responding, and acting upon the input.

I imagine the program working something like this. A major carrier - let's say AT&T, since it's in the news today - decides to build this app. It then announces the app in a major marketing program via a traditional marketing platform (web, TV, etc.). Say you're on Boing Boing, and you see a STAMP execution that announces the new service - perhaps the ad itself is a widget that allows you to push a pin into the map based on a zip code, or whatever. One thing I know, everyone I've ever talked to has a story about how frustrated they are about dropped calls, and everyone has a list of places that are always dropping calls (for me, it's the tunnels around the GGBridge, Sand Hill Road area, and on and on...). So give them a platform to vent about it.

But wait, there's more! Venting is nice, but what'd be nicer is if your venting actually created change in the world! Imagine that! Well, if you're a major carrier, you *can* do something about it. In fact, folks are always giving carriers grief for not putting up more cel sites, but in many cases, the real reasons they can't have nothing to do with profits, and everything to do with the local city council, or geography, or other factors.

So, here's the play: As the pins pile up, those areas which have the most pins start to get "hotter" in a visual way on the map. And then comes the key part: The carrier promises, in its marketing, to address the top ten "hot spots" each quarter (or month, or whatever period of time makes sense). Note I said "address" and not "fix." Why? Because in some cases, there is no fix. For example, coverage at the North end of the Golden Gate Bridge is permanently bad, because, I am told by folks who know, it's very hard to get permission to place cel sites in the right places (the area is a national park *and* part of Sausalito, a notoriously unfriendly place when it comes to outside companies like cel carriers).

So in a case like the North end of the Golden Gate, AT&T "addresses" the problem by responding on the map itself, providing an explanation of why the company can't fix the problem, and suggesting that if consumers are upset, they might write a note to the Sausalito city councilmembers and/or the supervisors of the national park (and provide links, of course!).

The application is a mashup of sorts, blending Google Maps, crowdsourcing, geolocation, and commenting systems.

The plane is about to land, so I have to post and run. I'll revise this when I get back on terra firma. But I believe that whichever carrier actually executes on that map will, in my mind, really win the game. More on why as I update this.

Last week was big for Twitter. After years of speculation about whether the company was going to have a business model, Twitter announced two deals at our Web2 conference - first with Microsoft's Bing, and second with Google. Details of the deals were not disclosed, but as Google's Marissa Mayers admitted onstage, there were indeed financial terms.  

What those terms might be strike me as secondary to the fact the deals got done in the first place. Sure, they probably consist of some combination of data services fees and revenue sharing, but the fact remains that monetizing a real time search result remains an elusive art, and one that honestly, Twitter does not want to cede to either Google or Microsoft. So while the two battling search giants may toss a not-insignificant amount of Adwords or AdCenter revenue into Twitters' coffers, what really matters is the the traffic these deals potentially represent, and the validation of Twitter's role in the real time universe. That, I'd argue, is priceless.

Now, did Microsoft and Google do these deals simply to lay claim to a hot new service, or were their actions driven by the time-honored principle of "embrace and extend"? More on that in a future post, because I think the question begs consideration in light of where the culture of search and communication is headed.

The fact that both giants have validated Twitter's role in search led me to reflect on the role that Twitter plays in our culture. "To Tweet" is a verb in the process of becoming - not unlike "To Google" in 2002-3, or "to Xerox" in the 1960s. So what does "tweet" mean, really? Or perhaps more to the point, what *should* it mean?

At the moment, "to tweet" means something along the lines of "to broadcast a thought, in real time, using 140 characters of text or less." And while confining tweets to this creative box has been seminal to the service's early success, I'd argue that continuing to do so will most likely consign Twitter to the status of a verbal footnote in our ongoing cultural conversation.

What I'm struggling to say is that definitions matter. Words matter. My anthropological spidey senses are tingling right now, because we're in a cultural moment where we are redefining how we share a moment. Facebook knows this. Google and Microsoft know it as well. And we all know it - explicitly or implicitly, as a culture we are learning to share our moments in real time, irrespective of geography or traditional social boundaries.

So allow me to suggest what I believe the definition of the verb "to tweet" should become: "To share a moment."

In other words, to truly scale, "Tweet" - the verb-in-process-of-becoming, or, alternatively, the verb-that-could-have-been-but-became-instead-a-footnote-in-history - needs to be defined by more than 140 characters of text.

If you abstract what we're really trying to do with the creative box Twitter has imposed upon us, it's this: We want to share a meaningful moment in time. Sure, we don't all manage to do that so well, but I think the essence of what we're trying to do - "share," "meaningful," and "moment" - can easily be abstracted from the creative box in which Twitter is currently confined.

If you've used a tool like Brizzly, Power Twitter, or any of the many other services that unpack and contextualize your Twitter stream, it's clear that a tweet is much more than text. It can be an image, a video, an overheard snippet of speech. In short, it's a moment, captured, imbued with meaning, and shared.

As long as it remains those things, it's a tweet. And as much as I love the SMS-inspired roots of Twitter's origin, it's time for the service to branch out and embrace its essence, and not get stuck in its own creation myth. If it fails to do so, I think any number of its competitors - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or an unborn startup - will recognize and exploit that failure.

So live in the moment, Twitter, and move outside the text box.

PS - I think the same applies to the interface of search - breaking out of keyboard-driven text and more into a conversational interface. I'll have a lot more to say about this in the coming months, as I think it's starting to come together in my head - "The Moment" is a good organizing principle for where I believe things are going in search, culture, technology.

If ever there was a strong meme in search, it's the impact of social: Everyone is talking about how Facebook and Twitter are threatening Google for what I've called the "oxygen" of the web: distribution of attention.  

A little background. Google rose to prominence as the absolute winner in the Internet's distribution game. The de facto interface for knowledge navigation, Google brought signal to the noise of Web 1.0: Sure, nearly everything worth publishing was now on the web, but how on earth could you find that ONE thing that mattered to your query, NOW?

A hundred billion plus dollar business ensued: we all now use Google to find that which we want to find on the web. In particular, Google is great at delivering authority on the web for those things that had already been published and ranked: In a way, Google has become the reference librarian of the web.

But...just searching a reference library is one thing. What about finding things people are talking about right now? And wouldn't it be great if you could cross index that reference library with your social graph, so that people you trusted helped you go from query to decision?

Twitter and Facebook promise that next step in search. Let's tease this out a bit.

We have different modes when we search. Sometimes we are looking for that perfect reference point - an article on how to train a dog, for example, or a how to guide on building a treehouse. But then we hit a critical inflection - we want to validate our reference material with a real live human connection. And Google can't really do that. In short, we want to cross reference what we've learned with the experience of someone we trust.

Before the rise and ubiquity of social networks, the ability to do this was pretty serendipitous - sometimes in our reference search we found humans with whom we could connect and then learn (this happened to me in 1995 as I was searching online for my birth mother, but that's another story).

But it's happening more and more online now, thanks to our ability to use Twitter and Facebook to query our social graph. Through status updates or tweets, we can ask real people that which before we asked Google. And, by reading through the lifestreams of our network, we can discover that which we might never has asked, but nevertheless find interesting.

It's late and I'm working way too many hours to do this line of thinking justice. But I will simply state it this way: Facebook and Twitter, you need to get better at mixing traditional web search with what you've already got. And Google/Microsoft, well, vicey versa. You need to get better at mixing social into your traditional web search.

Whoever does it best, wins.

Update: A new study on the interplay of search and social media can be found here.

Whoever is running these chattering teeth ads, cursing the Internet to another round of Punch The Monkey crap creative and all the consequences therein, STOP IT.  

But it's really all our fault, isn't it? Premium sites run remnant ad networks, and crap like this gets through faster than we can beat it back. We really do need some kind of crowdsourced feedback system so ads as annoying as this one get beat down, quickly, and never show up again, except to those who really want to see them. Who, I imagine, are the same folks who buy Chia pets late at night off infomercial programming.

Oh, wait, there is a feedback button here! But clearly, it's not being used! Why? Because it requires you fill out a multiple choice, ten question form! Which I did, but then returned an error message. That's doubly annoying - I took the time to inform CBS that this ad sucked, and my time was wasted. ARGH!!!!

Hey CBS (and all of us - including FM, which has run this ad due to our relationship with ad networks) these ads SUCK. Stop it!!!!

I had an extraordinary day yesterday, in terms of who I got to talk with. Not only did I meet with several of FM's partners - two Fortune 500 marketers, a major platform partner, and a major blogger - I also got to watch the launch of Ad Stamp and the complete schedule for the Web 2 Summit. But a highlight of the day had to be my chance to steal 30 or so minutes with the founder of DigitalGlobe, Dr. Walter Scott.  

Now why was I talking to Dr. Scott? Well, he's presenting at the Web 2 Summit this year, and I get to work with him on how Digital Globe fits into our theme of WebSquared.

In Dr. Scott's case, this task pretty much a layup.

Now, Web 2 is known for in depth interviews with titans of business like GE CEO Jeff Immelt, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, or former HP CEO and pending Senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina - all of them are coming this year. And it's known for having the stalwarts of the Internet industry represented as well - leaders from Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AOL, Newscorp, and Microsoft will also be there.

But Web 2 is also known, I hope, for the High Order Bit - the short, mind blowing presentation of a new idea or new data that makes you step back and just say Wow.

To me, that's what happened when I really grokked DigitalGlobe, a company with a billion dollar market cap that successfully went public in the midst of the worst recession since 1931.

What the company does is pretty simple, actually. It sends super expensive satellites into space, and takes high resolution, geographic-data tagged pictures of every square foot of the earth. It then makes these images available to anyone willing to pay* (and sometimes to those who can't but really need the data, as it did with the recent LA fires).

Those images are, of course, digital. And they comprise, to echo my writing about search, nothing less than a database of surface reality, albeit from the point of view of outer space. This reality is objective, factual, and indifferent to politics. It can inform a mind bending number of new use cases. If you think about this database from the point of view of an Internet entrepreneur, well, It could become, to wax into a bit of hyperbole, fuel for a whole new ecosystem of value.

Allow me the use of a metaphor, one with which you are all quite familiar.

So think of search. What is search? Well, search is a database of everything that is worth knowing about on the web. It's made by a crawler that pings web real estate and creates an index/database of what it finds. It's served up as an application through a user interface that takes your queries and matches them to the best results in that database.

Simple, but that simplicity largely fueled Web 2 as we know it.

Now consider a new dataset for search, the dataset owned by DigitalGlobe. The "crawlers" are DigitalGlobe's satellites. The "real estate" being pinged is every square foot of the earth. As with the web, some parts of the world are worth pinging more often than other parts. ("We don't hit Greenland very often," Dr. Scott told me. But during the Olympics, the company took a picture of Beijing *once every 8 seconds.* Imagine if this technology was around during Tiananmen). The data that satellite crawler captures is stored in a vast index/database. And that index is served up as a product through a UI, though in DigitalGlobe's case, the UI is not yet scaled to a mass consumer use like Google.

Wait, check that, it is, in a way. DigitalGlobe provides the imagery you see in Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. And while that information is really cool, and provides the foundation for a huge number of interesting applications (and controversy), things get really interesting when you bring two key pillars of search into the equation: Freshness and comprehensiveness.

Freshness is what is sounds like - how often does the crawler check back to the source and see what might have changed? And Comprehensiveness is equally self-describing - but in the case of satellite imagery, it's not so much how *much* of the earth you have in your database (that would be the whole darn thing), but rather, how high the resolution of that data can be.

The data fueling Google and Microsoft's web applications is good, but it's not very fresh, and it's resolution is limited. But that doesn't mean DigitalGlobe doesn't have far fresher data and way better resolution. It does. It just doesn't sell it to Google. (And as I think about the company, I can't help but think Google or Microsoft must be sharpening their pencils, sketching out scenarios for how they might acquire DigitalGlobe. But I get ahead of myself).

Imagine a time when DigitalGlobe's crawlers scale across every square inch of the (interesting bits of the) earth at second-by-second freshness - the way Google's crawlers do for the Web. And imagine a time when the data from this crawl becomes available to all of us, in near real time. Is it possible? Of course it is. You need more satellites, more CPUs, more storage, and some pretty amazing UI and use cases.

Far as I can tell, we have those components already made, just like Google's infrastructure was not so much about its component parts as it was about how they were put to work in the service of a culture changing service.

Is your mind blown yet? Mine is, but then again, that happens a bit more frequently than your average bear, I'll admit.

Back here on earth, I asked Dr. Scott two questions that bear repeating. First, who are DigitalGlobe's largest customers (and how did they use the data)? Far and away, he said, the company's largest customer is the US Government. Why? Well, they buy high resolution data of, say, a particular Afghan village, datestamp yesterday. Then they give that data to soldiers on the ground, who go into that village and ask folks questions like "What were those heavy loads being moved around in the town square by these five men at around noon yesterday?"

Why, might you ask, why doesn't the US use its super secret spy satellites to give ground troops this data? Well, because the information on those spy satellites is classified. It's super secret. But DigitalGlobe's information is commercial, and unclassified. In essence, the US Government uses DigitalGlobe for the same reason it uses FedEx to move military supplies around the world: it's just faster, better, cheaper, and easier.

OK, so there's the answer for why the US Government is such a big customer (and it's not just military, of course. There's NASA, there's NIH, there's Agriculture, you get the picture, no pun intended). What was my second question?

Well, my second question was informed by the concept of search and my rhapsody around the implications of the world as a database. Might DigitalGlobe consider offering a fresh, high-resolution database of its imagery to developers world wide - replete with business rules for commercialization? Imagine the use cases - for the images are not simply images, they are laden with latent meta-data - interpretive data on everything from how crops are growing to how traffic is moving to how governments are treating their citizens.....might DigitalGlobe consider doing such a thing?

"That would be cool," was Dr. Scott's only answer (he is an officer of a public company, after all.)

It sure would be. That would be so WebSquared.

###

*From the company's own product descriptions:

DigitalGlobe’s CitySphereTM product features 60 cm or better orthorectified color imagery for 300 pre-selected cities worldwide. These GIS ready cities are available as off the shelf products and ready for immediate delivery.

With over 37 million km2 of 3 inch to 2 foot resolution color imagery of select American and international markets, DigitalGlobe’s Orthorectified Aerial Imagery is part of our complete offering of the most current high resolution aerial and satellite imagery and the largest library of earth imagery available anywhere. In addition to the largest library of aerial imagery anywhere, we maintain a complete, highly accurate USA basemap at 1 meter resolution or better, with major cities at 6 in to 2 ft resolution.

Regarding this story in the New York Times:

With Bloggers in the Bleachers, Leagues See a Threat to Profits

(and related, my post on "Don't Be a Player Platform Hater"):

I have such a rant in me on this topic but I simply cannot write it now, I'm way too Supposed to Be On Vacation. But suffice to say, you can do two things if you "own content" - like, say, football games (yep, that's content). One, you can cut it all off and hoard it. Or two, you can be the oxygen in the ecosystem. The first allows you to profit but it kills your long-term community ecosystem and prevents, entirely, your product from growing as your supporting community wants it to grow - because in essence, you are refusing to allow your community to have a voice and point of view about your product. It's YOURS, and you'll LIKE IT THE WAY I WANT TO GIVE IT TO YOU!

The second makes you a crucial, life giving element of an ecosystem, but one that is as dependent on that ecosystem as it is upon you. Yes, air is unbreathable without oxygen, but then again, it ain't air if it's ONLY oxygen.

Anyway. Read this piece, and really think about it. Cutting fans off from blogging (or Tweeting, since there are ads there now and will be more*) about the games they go to because they might be getting paid by SBN, or AdSense, or whoever? Are you F'ING NUTS?

Pull your head out, sports guys. It's way better to be the oxygen in the ecosystem. It's a bigger profit opportunity, for one. And it's just a way more fun approach to business, one that feeds more than just your bottom line.

OK, back to vacation.   

*PS, oh yeah, and Facebooking, because, shit, Water Cooler is on Facebook, isn't it?! Yikes, thousands of people talking about football AND WE'RE NOT MAKING MONEY ON IT DAMNIT! And doesn't Facebook show ads next to fans' personal pages? Time to get me a cut of that revenue too, I hear Facebook is making hundreds of millions!

** PPS I am NOT saying that businesses who make it their business to cover and profit from covering sports should not have a revenue model that pays content owners, far from it. I AM saying that content should have an API - and a set of business rules around use of that API. Duh.

Hey, I really like the soundtrack. And it's f*ing true as well.

My beef with this is this simple statement, about 3:42 in. "Social Media isn't a fad, it's a fundamental shift in how we communicate."

True, to a point. What it really is, is the release of how we already communicate, but now at scale. It's not a shift in *how* we communicate, it's a step function in our *ability* to communicate. There's an important difference there. One could argue that means a fundamental shift, but such a statement can be easily misinterpreted as meaning "something totally new in how humans think/work/communicate", and I think that's not quite right. It's us, squared.

I've been meaning to post a long-ish rant on the importance of celebrities taking control of their own platforms, but never gotten to it, in part because I'm not that enamored with the incessant selling of celebrity that occurs in our culture. Yeah, I sound like a grumpy old man, but I can't help myself. It bums me out - not because I don't like celebrities, but because the current approach strikes me as driven by short term thinking.  

If, instead, more celebrities actually used their fame to take control of their own destiny and build a platform for themselves, they'd last longer, be happier, and make more money - perhaps not as much all at once, but more over the long term. And what do I mean by "taking control of their own destiny"? Well, in a phrase, I mean "building themselves a platform through which they effectively communicate with, build, and deliver value to their fan base."

Until recently, those platforms were controlled by others. But now, celebrities can roll their own. And that changes the game, if they chose to play.

Before I explain what I mean by that, let me state for the record that I believe the same is true for all marketing brands. But I get ahead of myself (more on what it means to build a platform for brands in a future post.)

Let's start at the beginning. What, after all, is a celebrity? Well, if you do a Google Image search for the term, you're bound to believe a celebrity is an attractive, well endowed woman. Wikipedia defines the concept thusly: "A celebrity is a person who is famously recognized in a society....There are degrees of celebrity status which vary based on an individual's region or field of notoriety. While someone might be a celebrity to some people, to others he may be completely unknown."

That last part is important when it comes to social media. I've noticed that the class of folks we might call "minor celebrities" have taken to social media far more quickly than those who Wikipedia calls "global celebrities." In fact, the extraordinary embrace of Twitter by A-lister Ashton Kutcher (there, I wrote his name for the first time ever) serves as the rule proving exception - big time celebrities don't often expose themselves in an honest dialog with their fans. Instead, they are handled. They are managed, marketed and controlled like packaged goods, sold through the supermarket aisle distribution outlets of sports arenas, movie theatres, network television, and arena tours.

And because they are treated as product by their managers, they are discouraged to do anything that might smack of honest dialog with their fan base - anything that might feel like "routing around" the manicured image laid out by the business of celebrity.

Case in point is the approach major sports leagues have taken toward both Facebook and Twitter. Recently the NFL and ESPN have banned or curtailed use of either Twitter or blogging or both. (As much as I appreciate ESPN's product, I consider it to be a product of the leagues, not an independent platform for players. From their policy: "The first and only priority is to serve ESPN sanctioned efforts..." Follow the money, after all...).

Following that money explains why these new policies are being put in place. Leagues like the NFL and distribution outlets like ESPN make their money by controlling the output of the product on the field. If that product starts to have a conversation outside of those lines, money, connection, and reputation might be made on those conversations, value that is not being harvested by the NFL or ESPN. That's a threat, and they are treating it as such.

It's no coincidence that the most prolific and natural celebrity users of social media platforms exist outside those manicured boundaries - in sports like tennis (Roger Federer) and cycling (Lance Armstrong, who started tweeting around the time of his appearance at last year's Web 2 conference). These are celebrities who are not handcuffed by powerful leagues or networks, and who naturally gravitate toward platforms that allow them to connect directly to their fanbase.

Does this sound familiar? It should if you're a marketer struggling with how to take your brand online. After decades of manicuring your brands through one-way mass media platforms like television, it turns out millions of people are now talking about your prized possessions online, and you can't directly control the conversation. But a new set of brands have sprung up who seem agile in this environment, and they feel threatening: Think JetBlue and Virgin, over American and Delta. Whole Foods over Lucky. Comcast over AT&T. These "new" brands have taken to social media and are embracing it, warts and all.

I think when it comes to celebrity, the same is also be true. The celebrities who are "minor" now are swarming to Twitter and Facebook, much as unknown bands swarmed to MySpace. Those who have direct, honest connections with their fans will endure. Those who don't might catch the flame of fame briefly, but they will not endure as brands. Why? Because no matter what, the "packaged goods" platforms of movies, networks, and sports leagues are still important, and it will soon be the players and celebrities with a guaranteed base of hard core fans - or followers - who can call the shots with those powers that be. You think Brooke Burke won't get a better deal now that she's in dialog with over a million fans on Twitter? Owning and cultivating your own platform means you no longer are in thrall to "star makers" - together with your community, you make your own star. That's a kind of celebrity I can get behind.

Last week I wrote a post in which I opined a bit about Facebook search. In it I wrote:

Facebook is way more than its newsfeed, and its search play is key to proving that value, and extending it....No doubt building Facebook search today is akin to building Google ten years ago - bigger, most likely, in terms of data, algorithmic, and platform challenges.

If only I had waited a few days, I could have pointed to Fred's piece in Wired, out this week. He profiles the ongoing feud between the King of Search, Google, and the upstart, Facebook. In his piece, he writes:

For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

I agree that of all the contenders out there right now (including Twitter), Facebook has the most data, position, and potential to upset Google's dominance of the web. But I disagree with one premise of the piece, which is that Facebook's proprietary approach to the data it stores presents a blind spot to Google that gives Facebook a competitive edge. Fred writes:

Together, this data comprises a mammoth amount of activity, almost a second Internet. By Facebook's estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information—news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. But anyone wanting to access that stuff must go through Facebook; the social network treats it all as proprietary data, largely shielding it from Google's crawlers. Except for the mostly cursory information that users choose to make public, what happens on Facebook's servers stays on Facebook's servers. That represents a massive and fast-growing blind spot for Google, whose long-stated goal is to "organize the world's information."

I think it's a major strategic mistake to not offer this information to Google (and anyone else that wants to crawl it.) In fact, I'd argue that the right thing to do is to make just about everything possible available to Google to crawl, then sit back and watch while Google struggles with whether or not to "organize it and make it universally available." A regular damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario, that....

For an example of what I mean, look no further than Twitter. That service makes every single tweet available as a crawlable resource. And Google certainly is crawling Twitter pages, but the key thing to watch is whether the service is surfacing "superfresh" results when the query merits it. So far, the answer is a definitive NO.

Why?

Well, perhaps I'm being cynical, but I think it's because Google doesn't want to push massive value and traffic to Twitter without a business deal in place where it gets to monetize those real time results.

Is that "organizing the world's information and making it universally available?" Well, no. At least, not yet.

By making all its information available to Google's crawlers (and fixing its terrible URL structure in the process), Facebook could shine an awfully bright light on this interesting conflict in interest.

(image) The way some folks' numbers are blowing up on Twitter, it seems to me perhaps we might create two types of Twitterati - those who have purely "earned" audience base, and those whose base has been wildly inflated due to their inclusion in Twitter's suggested users feature, which I wrote about earlier last week.

I'm not usually one to talk about this stuff, but for whatever reason, it's been bugging me. I remember when I started this site, and it started to get noticed by people whose opinion I respected. Then concentric circles of folks found out about it, and it built organically, to the point of being one of the largest blog sites focused on tech and media (that was 04-05, before I abandoned covering news and started pointing folks to Danny and Mike). That felt good - I had earned the respect of an important audience, and my numbers showed it. The same is true of Fred at A/VC, Mike at TC, and many, many others.

But that's not how it's playing out on Twitter lately. I've spoken to a number of folks whose Twitter numbers have recently skyrocketed, and they all have said the same thing - followers may have increased dramatically, but engagement - folks who reply, or click on a link in your tweet, or Direct Message you - increased only marginally. In other words, the system is creating what we used to call, in the magazine business, "junk circulation" - numbers for numbers sake, without a lot of value.

That's a game many have played, and continue to play, in our Comscore obsessed Internet world, but it never ends well. Ever.

And I don't think that is in any way good for the Twitter ecosystem.

Just my two cents.

I've spent a bit of time going back in time lately, at least as far as Twitter is concerned. In short, I created a new account, as if I had never used the service before.

Why? Well, as Twitter hits inflection, it struck me that there was something really, really important that had to happen, in terms of how the service works. As millions of new users try the service, it's crucial that they find something useful when they arrive. If they don't, well, they'll leave.

And leaving they are, if this report from Nielsen is to be believed. Widely picked up last week in the Twitterverse, the report does the math and finds that 60 percent of those who try Twitter abandon the service within a month. That means no matter how steep the inflection, Twitter will soon burn through its available fuel (new user attention) and could fail to hit escape velocity (where escape velocity = a scaled platform at the level of Facebook, Google, or Yahoo).

That got me thinking. What do new users do when they first log into a service like, say, Facebook? Why, they search, of course.

For old friends, for the names of their colleges or high schools, for any kind of social connection that might make sense of the very large universe that is Facebook.

So when Twitter integrated search last week, it was, as I said, a very big deal.

But to my mind, it's not enough.

To explain my point, let me go back to the experience I recently had of creating a new account - going back in time, so to speak, and pretending to be a newbie to Twitter. The service is very easy to sign up for (see the screen shot at left). Once you pass this screen, you can check to see if

your friends are on the service. This is a pretty standard email database lookup, and I have no idea how many folks go through it. I don't have email at any of those services (at least, none with any real contacts), so I passed. (I'd be interested in how many folks do use this service, and how many hit the button to skip this step. If it's a high percentage that use this step, I'd also be interested in what

the experience is like in terms of making Twitter more useful, but I'll have to be blind to it for

this post. I think my conclusions will be valid in any case....).

Next comes the step that I find most interesting, and in its current iteration, most frustrating. This is where the new user gets a

list of folks that Twitter suggests he or she might follow. It's a pretty random list of interesting folks, including (as I write this) John McCain, Fred Durst, Chris Anderson, Oprah, John Legend, and so on. It changes from day to day, but anyone who's ever made it onto the list reports that their followers skyrocket - sometimes by an order of magnitude.

Why? Well, turns out most newbies to Twitter simply hit "follow all" and end up with the list of twenty or so suggested Tweeters as their first set of folks they are following.

Therein lies the problem. Ah, the dinner bell is ringing, when I come back, I'll explain why, and suggest a better way. I'm sure many have already thought about this, but I never claimed to be original, just persistent. And...I really want Twitter to get

escape velocity...because every time a rocket makes it out of the Valley and into the Rest of The World, it feels like the work we all do is worth it.

(Back from Dinner). So why is following twenty or so interesting people a problem? Well, while I am sure these folks are chosen for their general interest and lively tweets (for more, see Twitter's blog post on suggested users), it turns out that it's simply not very

compelling, in the main, to watch these guys tweet. It's certainly not as addictive as finding an old friend on Facebook, for example. It's neat, but it's not going to get folks to come back, over and over again.

What *is* interesting, or could be, is watching folks tweet who you care about. Perhaps they are friends, or family, or leaders in your line of work, or entertainers you love. For whatever reason, they are *your* leaders, and finding them, at least during the sign up process, is entirely too hard.

But it doesn't have to be that way. It strikes me that a few more structured steps in the sign up process could really pay significant dividends for Twitter. Perhaps a "follow wizard" that asks a few questions, and makes suggestions based on input

from the new user. Let us drill down by category: Business:Technology:Internet, or Health:Diseases:Cancer. The ontology isn't very complicated - mapping users to it is a bit more complex, but not impossible.

And encourage folks to put in the names of their friends via search - that's magic when you find a friend who's already on Twitter, and might act as a sherpa of sorts.

There are already a lot of third party services that help users find folks worth following, but new users are never going to find them in their initial interaction with Twitter. incorporating this kind of a service into a newbie's initial experience - even if it's very, very simple - could pay huge benefits in turning around that 60% abandonment number, and soon.

In short, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and right now, Twitter's initial impression does not add enough value. But with a few tweaks, it most certainly could.

I'm a student of history. OK, maybe more like, I am a getting-older journalist following a youngish history, of companies like Apple, a company I covered in the 80s, Microsoft, (late 80s to present), AOL, Yahoo (mid 90s to present), Google (late 90s to present), Facebook (early 2000s to present), and on and on (yes, Twitter is my most recent obsession as a story).

So when I saw this tweet today, well, heck, it brought me back. To this. I first saw the Google Master Plan whiteboard when I went to Google in early 2002 to meet with Eric Schmidt. Love the idea that Twitter now has a whiteboard with its revenue plans, and prominently declared is that wonderful mandate we've all written in the corner; DO NOT ERASE!

Yes, that's a good idea. Don't erase (see my previous post on why).

PS - Google's Master plan also had a "Do Not Erase" in the top left hand corner. So did the "Don't be evil" whiteboard moniker put up across campus in the early days.

The Times runs a piece today citing a media analyst at Sanford Bernstein claiming:

...monetizing Twitter “would be difficult at best and likely unsuccessful.” People who sign up for free services tend to resent a company for trying to wring revenue from the business later. Subscription fees are out of the question, they said, and advertising-based revenues don’t seem to have yielded enough cash flow to make a Web 2.0 property viable.

I agree about one thing - building ad platforms like Tweetsense will be difficult. But nothing valuable is ever easy. Adwords was not easy. Overture was not easy. What Facebook is building is not easy. And TweetSense won't be easy.

But that's the point, isn't it? If it was easy, everyone would do it.

To be entirely clear, Twitter has at least three major potential revenue streams.

1. Tweetsense - AdWords and AdSense like platform for Twitter. This has major scale potential.

2. Branded licensing. This is stuff like Stocktwits, where Twitter could promote and perhaps gets licensing fees.

3. SMS/carriers - deals with carriers to split revenue driven by mobile tweeting.

And there are plenty more.

Analysts who write stuff like this are clearly not thinking very hard about the potential of services like Twitter, nor do they understand the appetite for risk the venture capitalists backing such ideas have. Check this quote:

"Whoever buys Twitter, they wrote, “will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool Web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more.”

Utterly ridiculous on so many fronts it's hard for me to summon the energy to refute it. The idea of the tweet as the query, the idea of brands wanting to have a commercial "response" to searches (and tweets) on Twitter, these are not small ideas. The idea of real time search, conversational and social search, real time "AdWords" - these are not minor new wrinkles. They are here to stay. Twitter is a very promising service directly in the center of these trends, trends the "analysts" at Sanford Bernstein clearly do not grasp.

Just off the phone with the folks behind Aardvark, a (relatively) new service that will most likely be the talk of SXSW this week. I'll have a longer riff on the company shortly, but suffice to say, I find it fascinating. The service rides between your social network(s), search, and the web, cleverly leveraging each to provide a platform for asking and answering the kinds of questions for which traditional search usually fails: the kinds of questions you ask a friend (or a friend of a friend, the real sweet spot here).

Many things make this company worth watching, its backers, its model, and its approach. Particularly noteworthy to Searchblog readers: a large group of the founders are from Google.

More soon.

I will never forget that quote, from Alta Vista founder Louis Monier, as he bemoaned the devolution of his creation into Yet Another Portal. He was devoted to the idea that Alta Vista would do one thing - search - and do it well. But Alta Vista was instead turned into a bawdy image of Yahoo, AOL, Lycos, Excite, and all the other portals of the late 90s.

And along came Google, which by 2000 had gained a reputation as the Best Search on the Web. And Yahoo, eager to appropriate all things Best on the Web, was more than happy to give Google what Netscape had given Yahoo in the mid 90s: a font row seat to Becoming the Next Big Thing.

Oops.

This is all a throat clearing to Think Out Loud about Twitter and Facebook. (Like I've been doing anything else lately.)

The folks at Facebook are not ignorant of web history. As many of you have noticed, and I have posted about earlier, the relationship between the two companies is not exactly bidirectional. Sure, your tweets can show up as Facebook status updates. But can your Facebook status updates show up as Tweets? Nope.

Why not? Well, if you could use Facebook as an instance of Twitter, well, that would feed the Twitter ecosystem, would it not? It'd validate Twitter and drive Twitter adoption and traffic. Just like Yahoo's adoption of Google did back in 2000-2002, or Netscape's adoption of Yahoo did back in the late 1990s.

Facebook has realized it has an ambient awareness problem. And instead of cutting a partnership deal, Facebook first looked to simply buy Twitter. We've seen that movie before, a few times - Yahoo tried to buy Google before eventually buying Inktomi and Overture, for example.

Unfortunately, Twitter said thanks, but no thanks. In response (and quite quickly, to its credit), Facebook last week announced, in essence, that if it can't buy Twitter, it's going to outcompete it.

But I'm not sure that's going to work. Why?

Because Twitter is a pencil. Facebook, on the other hand, is Photoshop. There's so much you can do with it, the pencil function gets lost. It's not a primary use case. (Yet.)

Back in 1997, Yahoo was a pencil to Netscape's Photoshop. In 2000, Google was a pencil to Yahoo's Photoshop. Today, Twitter is a pencil as well.

Will history repeat itself? That, I think, is one of the more interesting questions of the year.

I'm still looking for comparative statistics to help answer that question - the relative size and growth rates of each party at the time of the deals would be really, really interesting. Any researchers out there who want to take a look with me?

I've been in journalism a long, long time. Twenty four years, to be exact. I have a pretty clear sense of how the game works, how it's changing, and how it's played. So when I read the (very) recent dustup around Eric Schmidt's quote regarding Twitter, well, I decided to take a step back and think about it a spell. Especially given my own experience on both sides of the ledger (but more on that later).

Some background: Eric was quoted widely today saying that Twitter, a service I and many others have speculated might be a fit for Google, was "a poor man's email."

That's pretty incendiary, and it fits a sometimes eagerly applied characterization of Eric, who has at times be criticized as dismissive (I reported as much in The Search back in 2005). But the more I think about it, the more I think Eric was actually speaking "as a computer scientist", which, in fact, is the preface he used before issuing the aforementioned poor man's quote.

It seems that Eric has not studied Twitter deeply, or, quite possibly, he has, and this statement was the equivalent of a studious head fake. Either way, I'm not going to jump on the band wagon and declare this incident proof of Google's arrogance. Eric went on to praise Twitter for its growth and community, and then take the view that Twitter is an interesting development worthy of notice.

Sounds like the right point of view for Google to have at this juncture. Keep paying attention...and pounce in one way or another when the time is right.

Somewhat related (insofar as quotes can be read in many different ways), I was quoted in a story about Google's Marissa Mayer in the New York Times this past Sunday. My quotes, which are spare, come late in the story, but they don't lack punch:

“She clearly has what it takes to be a great manager at Google, but I don’t know if that translates into being a great manager at Hasbro.”

and

“You get comfortable being wealthy, getting attention, living in the bubble,” Mr. Battelle said. “It will be interesting to watch at which point they declare ‘who am I?’ by their definition, not Google’s.”

Well, through a couple backchannels, I've been told those quotes are not sitting well over at Google. And I can understand why. After all, I spoke to the reporter, who I like, for nearly 45 minutes, and the conversation was boiled down to those two quotes, neither of which are particularly gushy.

That said, I think each has a point, albeit not elaborated upon in the piece. On the Hasbro quote, well, it's pretty self explanatory. I'm not sure Marissa would ever want to manage a team at Hasbro, a point that probably did not translate - tone of voice is usually not reflected within quotations. I picked Hasbro because Meg Whitman worked there, but my point was more broad: Marissa (and many others) have worked at just one place their entire career, a place that, to be blunt, is very unlike nearly any other company on earth.

Which leads me to the second quote, in which I was talking about a class of folks at Google, and not Marissa in particular. (I was in the back of a car driving to an appointment when the reporter called, and I'm not sure exactly when I said this). My point was not that executives who have been at Google a long time are out of touch (they certainly are wealthy), but rather, that at some point they will look up from their work and ask the question: Who am I outside of Google? I've watched this happen with a number of executives who were early leaders at Google, and I think it will happen with Marissa, if it's not already happening.

When you work inside a bubble, and working at Google is certainly that, an essential skill becomes being able to see outside of your own work. I worked at two fast-growing companies that lived inside bubbles, and I lost that vision - briefly - twice in my career - first at Wired, and second at the Industry Standard. When I realized I was living in something of a reality distortion field, I quickly moved outside of it, and on to the next thing. Perhaps that's not the case with Marissa, and perhaps I'm wrong about the same kinds of forces being at play at Google as have been at play at companies like Wired, Netscape, AOL, Microsoft, or even today's darlings like Twitter or Zappos.

But for the record, I don't think so.

I love my Blackberry Bold. I've had it for two months now and it's a very good phone. My only gripe is the battery life is a bit sparse, but hey, I've had Macs for years, I can live with that. But I have to say, much as I've been impressed with the Bold's speed and features, I've been equally unimpressed with the 3G network it came with.

The pitch was that the Bold's network partner - AT&T - was way faster, allowing me to do stuff like download large files, watch videos, and stream data even while on the phone. In nearly every use case I've had so far, I've found this not to be the case. Half the time, in fact, I am not even on AT&T's 3G network, but rather am kicked over to Edge, AT&T's lower bandwidth older sibling (which is actually more stable, but I digress).

Now my initial reaction to all of this was to complain about how terrible AT&T's 3G network is, but then again, that complaint is pretty uninteresting - seems everyone complains about their network, right? But a funny thing happened a couple of weeks ago. I found myself at a conference having dinner with a group of colleagues. The fellow next to me had an iPhone on the very same network as me - the AT&T 3G network (in fact, that's the only network you can get for the iPhone...a fact that makes me suspicious about what was about to happen. But I get ahead of myself....).

The dinner conversation turned to music, and we all got stuck trying to name an 80s soft rock ballad that the restaurant's rather hapless piano player was busy slaughtering. Someone across the table, who also had an iPhone, loaded up Shazam, an iPhone music app, and pegged the song on the second try (that's pretty damn cool, but not the point of this story.) Once we had the song, folks started trying to recall the lyrics (thankfully, the piano man was not singing). As the table kept guessing, the fellow next to me was busy on his iPhone. Within about ten seconds, he raised his phone up and silenced the table. There on his screen was a YouTube video of the original singer, belting out the tune.

It was a very cool search-meets-media-meets-popular-culture-meets-dinner-conversation moment, and there's a ton to be said just about that, but here's where the story gets irksome, at least to me. "Hey!" I thought to myself as the fellow next to me enjoyed the social capital of being first to find and stream the YouTube video. "I've got the cool new Bold, and I have the same 3G network! I wonder if I can do what he just did?"

The answer: A very decided no. It took so long for the video to load I finally just gave up. And no, it was not a javascript, data plan, or browser issue. It was simply speed (at least, that's how it seemed to me). Meantime, the other guy with an iPhone (Mr. Shazam) replicated my seatmate's success, streaming the same video on his iPhone within seconds.

I've tried now a few times to get YouTube videos to work, in various parts of the country, and I've come to a hypothesis: The AT&T network discriminates packets and prioritizes them for iPhones. Am I nuts here, or is something wrong with my phone?

This is a placeholder of sorts, but I have a long piece in me about the idea of "contentsense" - content on a website that reorganizes itself around your declared intent - a search refer, behavioral cookie data, etc. it's close to being a reality (some argue it's here) and it's driven by a nuanced ballet with Adsense, or its functional equivalent. The idea has been with me for a long time, but a meeting earlier this week with an entrepreneur from Holland who has worked here and abroad really drove it home, as did my earlier discussions with Demand Media. More soon...

So I write a longish post, thinking out loud, and tweet it. Then as an afterthought, I tweet that my cat was bad today, and I had to punish it. Do I spank the cat, I asked? Well, the response was pretty funny. Twitter is connected to my Facebook account, and most likley the longest comment thread ever on my "status" ensued. Within a minute, I had two status updates: One of my tweets is about the future of publishing, business, culture, the economy. Heavy shit. The other is about spanking a cat.

Which one do you think won in terms of comments and engagement? Yup. Lesson learned. When looking for traffic, spank your cat.

(And by the way, fix your permalink lameness, Facebook. It keeps you from being part of the real web).

Update: This is NOT ME spanking the cat! I mean, really. The video is hilarious, but it's a bit....twisted too.

When I saw this Mashable post, I almost spit my wine (yeah, I am drinking wine, hell, it's 8.50 pm) onto the screen. Here's the headline:

Did CNN Live Snub Twitter in Favor of Facebook?

"What the f* are we, in high school?" was my first response. Then I realized how important it is to some folks that "traditional" or "old" media like CNN validate "new" media like Facebook or Twitter.

Honestly, I don't get it.

And then again, I do get this: that absent a centered strategy, a network like CNN is going to cast its lot on any given day, or story, with whoever seems to be best suited to give it the most appeal, the most cred, and the most, well, arm candy.

And then it hit me. When it comes to the media business, we're in high school all over again. The CNNs are the jocks, and the hot apps like Facebook and Twitter are the Cute Girls.

Now, it all makes sense.