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…