Web 2 Voice

There are days when I feel like a Fred Wilson portfolio fan boy.  I am seriously high on Twitter (their vision of what’s to come, I think is impressive).  But I also love Disqus, the comment system I use on all my blogs.

Both of these technology companies do something that is both an obvious need and difficult to accomplish.  Simply put, that’s making the conversation more interesting.  One of Fred’s common themes in his blog is that the comments are much more interesting than the actual posts.  I don’t know that he gives himself enough credit, but the underlying point is accurate.  There is real value in the conversations that are going on on blogs, on tweets, and other places.

I really value technology that brings those conversations to new audiences, and allows for more conversations. Disqus just released a new version (which will be appearing here shortly).  Go check out Fred’s post, and the official Diqus post.
You can follow me on Twitter here.  My Disqus profile is here.

My favorite VC blogger, Fred Wilson has a post today “The Lazy and Smarter Web.”

He talks about how great social media is because you can ask almost any question, and get great answers.  I commented that it’s great for Fred, because he has thousands of followers in his social net.  For regular people, not so much.  And thanks to Disqus, you can see the back and forth it generated here.

Anyway, his reply is that sooner or later, people will start following places (and presumably things and concepts).  So the limitaiton in followers (at least for Twitter) will go away.  This particular solution is limited to Twitter (I’d love to see something like dynamic rooms in FriendFeed).  But it’s a step in the right direction.

That’s yet another reason why Twitter is a big part of the future.  It’s really the best way to track the Internet Zeitgeist.  It’s a fast moving, reactionary, real time conversation.  We’re not quite there yet, but it’s getting closer.

Another reason Twitter is great is that someone now added voice to it.  Go check out Phweet.  It’s very cool - developed by Stuart Henshall and David Beckemeyer .

I had a meeting with a smart prospect yesterday.  We had a short talk about  how our companies might work together, got to know each other, complain about the weather.  At the end of the conversation, he said “so, you blog a lot huh.  I google everyone I talk to.”

It was the first time anyone had admitted to Googling me before we talked.  It was validating in a way.  A big reason I blog is to raise not only the profile of my employer, but my own personal profile as well.  And when I did an ego search, it was pretty interesting.

I have two main blogs that I write on in a professional sense, this one and IfByPhone’s.  When I googled my name, the first two pages were filled with a guest post I did at VoipSupply.  That’s great, but it would have been much better if I had been paying attention to what people were going to see when they searched for me.  You see, my prospect thought I was a VOIP guy, which I am not. The reason it shows up all over is because I blogged there under my full name, not just my first name.

So a short lesson is that if you’re going to build a personal brand, you might want to make sure to:

• Ego search every once in a while
• Market your full name

In the last few weeks, I’ve been spending a decent amount of my social networking time over at Plurk (here is my page).  My first reaction is that it is much better than Twitter for conversations (with much less down time).

They solved many of the problems that Twitter has - threaded replies being the biggest.   You post a plurk and see as direct replies what people have to say.  It ’s a real conversation instead of the hunting and pecking that is involved with Twitter.  If you go back to a plurk from yesterday, you see the entrie conversation.  With Twitter, you have a serious problem with that.

Then I noticed Karma.  The general idea is that the more you contribute to conversations in a positive way, the more karma you get.  The more karma you get, the more options (avatar, keywords, emoticons) you have available.  And on the face of it, it seems like a good idea.    In theory if you spam the community you’d be penalized.

But what it ends up doing is creating conversation for conversation’s sake.  If you want karma, you have to plurk all the time.  You go to sleep you lose karma.  Which irritates people.  And really, what is karma but a way just to keep people on the site?

Really what they should be focusing on is the utility.  The ability to bring the conversations to other devices, sites, applications, etc.

Twitter has that.  In a post on TechCruch today, Arrington notes that Twitter is branding itself as a communicaiton utility.  The real power of Twitter is that you can use it for so many different purposes and from so many different devices.  The threading will work eventually.  They’ll figure it out.

And soon enough, you’ll see Twitter being used as an integration platform by players trying to tie together different forms of communication.  Meanwhile, Plurk will be a glorified chat room.

One of the reasons I’m interested in Social Media is because it’s using the Internet to bring people together. Humans are social animals, and the Social Media is constantly finding new ways to allow people to find each other and have interesting conversations.

I really like Twitter. Not just because it’s a great way to find new people, but because it also is extremely extensible. Sure, you can use it just like it’s intended. Since it has the ability to be a public broadcast system, you can use it to keep groups of people in touch with each other. Fred Wilson had been posting lyrics to Twitter every day. So he asked for someone to create a Twitterbot that would rebroadcast lyrics to everyone who followed the Twitter account LOTD.

Whitney stepped up and did exactly that. And thankfully he posted all the code he used. It’s actually pretty simple, even for someone who doesn’t know programming. So, partially because I’m more of a movie guy than a music guy, and partially because I just wanted to, I copied the code and created the Movie Line of the Day Twitter bot.

So it works exactly like the LOTD Twitter bot. Subscribe to MLOTD on Twitter to receive the notifications. Then post a movie line starting with @mlotd. If you have room at the end, say which movie the line is from.
Hopefully other people will find this interesting as well. But expanding on my original point I don’t really see Twitter so much as a product that can be sold It’s just a specific, easily accessible communications channel. It’s use is only limited by your creativity.
My next step is integrating my company’s technology with Twitter. I’ve already successfully posted to Twitter after receiving a voicemail, but I still need to tweak it a little bit. Should be done soon.

I read this post at How to Split an Atom, on the recent problems with Twitter and participated in a nice discussion.

Twitter is a nice little service. I hesitate calling it a product, even though it has some high profile investors. A product, by my own definition is something you can sell. A service is something you can use. I use Twitter, but I can’t figure out how they’d make me want to pay for it (or as an alternative, monetize my use).

I really like aspects of Twitter. I see conversations that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen, and I meet new people (in the online sense at least). It’s a great tool to keep in touch, and learn what’s going on today, and what’s important to people you have things in common with.

Beyond the obvious “how is it going to make money?”, the question I have with Twitter is: What makes it sticky? What prevents people replacing it with something else? Nothing that I see. Would there be pain if I left Twitter, and wanted to ‘take my audience with me?’ Probably. But is that pain enough to stop me from paying more attention to FriendFeed each time I get an API Error in my Twitter client? No. I’m sure you can use the API to help port users to another service if you wanted.

Twitter is in a similar position to Tivo. I love Tivo. My experience with DirecTv has been significantly worse since they replaced my Tivo box with their in-house branded DVR. But, am I going to cancel DirecTv and go with the more expensive cable just to stick with Tivo? No.

Twitter has to be more sticky if it wants to survive. I think it needs to understand that it is a transport mechanism first and foremost. The 140 character limit, the lack of threading, the concept of followers, all those are interesting but completely replicatable.

But if you look at it as a communications gateway to and from my phone\blog\sms\rss\blog comments\friendfeed discussions\etc, then it becomes indispensable. As Fred Wilson quotes a friend in this post: “It’s not so much the data that’s so valuable, it’s the flow of information through it.”

When Twitter becomes the defacto transport of data through the various social media outlets THAT is when it gets sticky.