A small christmas diversion (sang to the tune of “The 12 days of Christmas”):

On the first day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
A like and a retweet too

On the second day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the third day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the fourth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the fifth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the sixth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the seventh day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the eighth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the ninth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the tenth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
ten wordpress entries
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the eleventh day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
eleven google +1s
ten wordpress entries
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

On the twelfth day of Christmas
my social web gave to me
twelve youtube videos
eleven google +1s
ten wordpress entries
nine quora thanks
eight reddit comments
seven HN upvotes
six klout perks
five foursquare badges
four tumblr links
three vimeos
two instagrams
and a like and retweet too

Happy holidays.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The 12 days of Social. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It’s been two months since about 100 people started occupying a small park near Wall Street and from there, the seeds of what appears to be a growing movement has hatched. I’ve written in the past about the Occupy Wall Street movement but have continued following it since. Strip out the political content and what you have here is one of the fastest growing startups in America and one that could redefine how business is run.

The active class

As many people have mentioned, the movement was initially made up of younger people, primarily recent college graduates who could not find jobs. But what none of the commentary appreciated (and something I was also not fully aware of) was that this was the first massive movement led by a generation that had not known a time when the internet did not exist. In my previous note on the subject, I had highlighted how much of that movement had the feel of internet philosophy brought into the real world but it wasn’t until more recently that I realize that #OWS is a breakdown of the boundary between virtual and real world.

As a whole generation has learned to chat, exchange ideas, create content, and spread messages over the online medium, they have been affected in a way that many had prognosticated but few had seen: one of the fascinating thing about the internet’s lack of ownership is the fact that it leaves all of us as owners of the internet.

Whereas some activists, myself included, once worried that it was only left up to a few to protect this wonderful public sphere that had been created, the truth is that support for an open internet, and by extension a more open society, is strong. Witness, for example, what happened last week when SOPA threatened this opennesss: not only did net people rise up and confronted their lawmakers on this but users of those services also did, generating thousands of calls to Congress.

Two things happen when someone makes that first call to Congress: first, they feel a sense of kinship with the other people who are fighting for the same cause, and secondly they feel they have a say and can have an impact in changing the system, making them more likely to be socially and politically active in the future.

For over a decade now, many have talked of internet activism but we also need to think about the longer impact that such thing has. I’d venture that the activism created by the ability of quickly sharing political stories or quickly reaching out to politicians is creating a more active political class on all sides of the spectrum: on the right, we’ve seen the rise of the Tea Party, and on the other side, we’re seeing the rise of #OWS.

What has traditionally been known as the left (the side that wants a more active government instead of a less active one) is also more in line with the model set in place by the early founders of the internet. Remember that the net has largely been administered as a common, with all parties involved being given more or less equal rights. There has been tensions when some parties have tried to reach for more rights, as can be witnessed in the recent fight over SOPA.

The people’s microphone

So what does this all have to do with #OWS? Well, let me get to that. In order to do so, we must look at the people’s microphone. What started as a way to get around laws requiring a permit to use amplification equipment has become a key component of this new movement.

A few days ago, I tweeted that “Mic Check is the RT of #OWS”. What I meant by that is that it’s becoming clearer to me is that through those words, #OWS are asking the rest of the crowd to spread a message.

From a messaging standpoint, there are a few components at play here. First, there is the use of simple words to trigger attention. To paraphrase Will Rogers, belonging to the left is not belonging to any organized movement. But the “mic check” changes that: it opens up a request for the crowd to lower their message and agree to amplify someone else’s. A basic assumption here is that while there may not be agreement as to what is being talked about, there is an agreement that the message will be relayed forward.

This is in line with the current principle of “net neutrality” many fights have arisen about online: there is a general agreement between all parties on the internet that no matter what the traffic is, every internet service provider agrees to carry it without discrimination. So “Mic Check” can be seen as a request to open a web page or application on the internet, with the assumption that communication will continue until the message has been communicated.

Psychologically, this type of agreement already primes the brain to be more receptive to an idea. The next step in what happens with the people’s microphone is the amplification, or the repeating of that other message one has agreed to carry. Here again, some interesting components happen: Because the message is to be repeating by a large crowd, who repeats it to the people behind them, it enforces an oratory style that requires something in line with the type of pithy statement that would fit in the 140 characters allowed for a tweet.

By repeating the idea, however, something else might happen in people’s brain (and this is based on the kind of psychological primers that are used in many videogames): having opened up to a mike check (and thus agreed to carry the message), the brain is more receptive to the message being amplified. When the message is repeated, a certain sense of ownership of the message is conferred on the person amplifying the message.

That sense of ownership is something that probably translates into a sense of belonging and lasts longer than the meeting the person has attended. I suspect that, through the use of the people’s microphone, #OWS is increasing the overall number of converts to its movement.

Large orgs and #OWS

Having built a relatively leaderless movement and managed to get a large amount of supporters, #OWS has attracted the attention of many established players in the political world. And on this part Thursday’s anniversary events at Foley Square, many organized labor members could be seen with placards for their own causes.

However, what is becoming increasingly clear is that while #OWS is a very inclusive movement, it is not a movement that will be easily hijacked. The unions may be allowed to voice their message but they will not be allowed to lead the leaderless movement, nor will anyone else. Partnerships and inclusive behavior is something that has been more common in the technology industry (though that is, unfortunately, starting to change among some of the bigger players) and there may be a lesson here for all organizations as to how to balance their own interest while working together with other groups (Yes, Wall Street, even you can learn from #OWS!)

Foley square may have been an organized event for the second anniversary of #OWS but the use of amplified equipment seemed to have given it less fervor, with more people milling about and having different discussions about different topics. The cohesion that arose out of gatherings of thousands at Zuccotti Park did not appear to be there at Foley Square and seemed more in line with what traditional political rallies look like than the kind of effort seen around #OWS.

However, political organization of all stripes have a lot to learn from #OWS. For example, looking at the people’s microphone I mentioned above, there may be value in considering how to drop amplified equipment from smaller gatherings (sub-10,000 people). In an age of retweeting and sharing, political images and hashtags are also extremely important. The hashtag, that weird # symbol before a specific term is a unifying force between different efforts. It has been widely adopted across most content sharing services and can serve as a way to aggregate and integrate content from many different services into a single place (or allow users to search for said content in a consistent fashion). Here, #OWS did some of its own learning: in its early days, they were gathering around the tag #occupywallstreet, which is fairly lengthy and thus steals away from the rest of the message when dealing with a service with limited character availability, the shorter #OWS has allowed the movement to recapture precious characters. How that learning was incorporated into their ongoing efforts could be seen with the selection of #N17 as the date of November 17 to celebrate their anniversary.

The tents may be gone from Zuccotti Park and many other #OWS encampments but I suspect that the movement will continue growing because, at the end of the day, what made it strong was not a set of tents and tarps but a sense of ownership of the future by all its members and that, as a society, is something we all need more of.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Re:Occupied. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Methodology

One of the first thing in this effort was to get a decent list of sites. Unfortunately, it seems that it has become increasingly difficult to get a sense of which sites are the most popular when it comes to number of visits. I eventually settled down on Alexa’s Top Sites list because it featured most of the sites people think of when considering what large sites are and includes a few non-US sites.

I then used the W3C Validator against each of the top 25 sites. This allowed me to get 3 different pieces of information:

• Doctype: This is what the site declares as its HTML code version. In other words, how the site identifies what version of HTML it supports.
• Encoding: This is the language the site uses, which gives us a better understanding as to whether they are targeting a particular language or trying to offer a global site.
• Validation: This is how the site validated when tested for errors relating to the HTML version it purported to be offering. It gives us an idea as to how compliant with the standards the site truly is.

Surprisingly, a number of popular Web 2.0 sites were not in Alexa’s Top 25 so I created a separate list for them.

Top 25

Looking at the top 25, here are the results:

Looking at the data, the first thing that is interesting is how many sites have made the switch to HTML 5. Of the top 25 sites, 14 have made the switch to HTML 5. This means than in the last year, 56 percent of the largest sites on the internet have completely modified their code base to comply with a new standard. 6 sites are still left on the old HTML standard and 5 are sticking to the somewhat more recent XHTML standard.

However, it is also interesting to note that none of the sites which have made the transition comply with proper HTML standards. In fact, of the top 25 sites in the Alexa list, only MSN was found to provide completely valid code. Maybe Microsoft could point those people towards their other properties. Amazon was the worst offender, with 516 errors in their code, showing that disregard for standard compliance does not seem to have an impact on economic performance. However, Ebay and Yahoo came closely behind with hundreds of errors in their code, maybe highlighting Amazon as an exception.

Another interesting phenomenon is that most of the large sites have adopted UTF 8, the encoding type that support most languages, as their default language. Once again, over half (56%) of the sites have switched with Amazon and Google being among the rare exceptions. An interesting aside here is that the W3C validator may have issues when it comes to validating chinese sites as it was not able to finish the job.

Web 2.0 Companies

Looking at Web 2.0 companies, the data was surprising:

I captured the data for companies other than those in the top 25 and a few interesting trends seem to pop up. The first thing that came as a surprise is that there seems to be that a lower number of sites have made the transition to HTML 5, with only 5 sites out of 11 (or 45 percent) having completed the transition. There seems to still be a strong preference for XHTML as the way to encode pages.

Also of note is that all sides have plans for globalization, encoding their page in the UT-8 format that can support both western and non-western alphabets.

However, none of the sites successfully validate in any of their preferred standard. It looks like there is still much room for improvement in the world of HTML validation.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The state of HTML validation. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Privately held companies numbers

For this exercise, I focused on the three largest privately held social media properties. This was largely to ensure that the companies I’m comparing are closer to maturity (and thus somewhat more similar to publicly traded ones) than other companies one could look at.

I’ve also decided to focus on the same numbers as I did in the previous post to ensure some level of consistency. The data was pulled from public sources.

Looking at this data, it may be clear that we are dealing with 3 companies at different levels of revenue maturity.

If the revenue projects for Facebook are correct, the business may be at a point where it is extracting more value per user across a wider base of users than some publicly traded companies (or companies that have filed to go public). This could make for an exciting IPO when the company does decide to go public.

Twitter and Foursquare, on the other hand, are still working on a model that is early in terms of revenue generations. The two companies are still working on figuring out how to turn their products into money-generating offerings and have yet to really turn on their revenue engines.

Comparing to publicly traded companies

The data becomes a lot more interesting when you put it next to similar data for publicly held (or soon to IPO) companies:

What is most interesting here is is that publicly held companies seem to put a higher premium on per user valuation and average revenue per user.

The later is easy to expect (one would assume that, as a company matures, it is able to attract a higher amount of dollars per user) but the user valuation is interesting, at least to me, because I would have expected it to be more constant from one funding event to another. It seems that private investors see a lower lifetime value on a user that public ones (in facts, the number almost doubles from private to public markets).

When I first ran the numbers, I thought I would end up with a higher valuation on the front end (lower revenue but still strong valuations) but it seems that private investors smartly look to other factors than just users. However, the data may also serve as a note of caution to investors in public companies: focus on the revenue and a company’s ability on deriving good revenue from its user base and spend less time thinking about the overall number of users.

After all, which might be better to you: a company that get $10 per user on 10 million users or one that gets $1 per user on 99 million users?

I know which one I’d bet on. What about you?

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title User worth: Public vs. Private. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Google vs. Twitter

With 750 million users, most of Facebook’s time is supposedly spent on pictures and games. In its initial iteration, Google+ does not seem to support those core components of the platform, which may make one wonder if Facebook really is the target. What it does support today, however, is a better version of Twitter, complete with specific status updates. So, in its current iteration, I would venture that the target for Google+ is Twitter.

Which may lead one to wonder why Google is so aggressively going after Twitter. I believe it is doing so because Twitter search may be starting to steal traffic, and potentially revenue from Google search. In a somewhat unsurprising move, Google decided to not renew its revenue agreement to get access to the Twitter stream. I would venture that this is an attempt to kneecap Twitter and ensure it doesn’t become a serious threat when it comes to advertising revenue.

While the company is generally considered as one that tries to do no evil, Google is also keenly aware that its success relies largely on two near monopolies: search and online advertising. With Twitter emerging as the first serious competitor in the space in a long time, rumored to be racking in $60–70 million a year in advertising revenue that could easily be targeted based on tweets, Google is seeing red and acting accordingly against the threat.

Google vs. Facebook

Meanwhile, there is the fight against Facebook. Facebook presents a different problem for Google in that it has taken an increasing share of online users time and put it in their walled garden, away from the web that Google mines for revenue. This trend is largely built on the back of games and photos so Google+ will try to tackle those things next.

While it is clear that, within the code, are hooks that will allow for games to be hosted on the platform, it is unclear whether that strategy can succeed. The main challenge they will encounter is that, as the owners of slide, Google is not just a provider of platform for online gaming but also a major player in the space. As such, some of the smaller players may be worried that the platform could sway in ways that me be less than beneficial to them. Zynga, because it needs to get rid of its current dependency on Facebook will probably hedge by putting some of their games on the platform but it is unclear as to whether other companies might join in.

On the picture end of things, Google is leveraging its Picasa offering, however, it is clear that it could do more by integrating it better in the + platform.  The mobile integration is a nice piece and may actually do collateral damage to a number of mobile photo hosting applications link instagram, for example.

But the picture offering is not enough. A proper merging of YouTube in the offering might give it some extra power by leveraging their strong presence in the video space to offer something that doesn’t yet seem to exist on Facebook.

Google vs. Apple

Apple integrated the new version of iOS with Twitter, basically matching one feature that has existed on many Android phone for a few years. They have yet to integrate with Facebook but I would not be totally surprised if they were to do so in future versions of their device. Android already supports both Facebook and Twitter integration and is supporting Google+ through an added application.

In order for this integration to work, Google will have to integrate Google+ at a much deeper level than it does today. However, with a social network and a mobile offering, Google is in the interesting position of being able to become the social network for mobile devices. On the other hand, the approach they have taken to date leaves much to be desired. By installing two different apps on the device, the experience feels tacked on rather than integrated. The Android team has to do some serious work to really rethink things over and tightly integrate Google+ into the OS, making the experience seamless.

The acquisition game

With a rumored 4–5 million new users in the past couple of weeks, Google is off to a good start with Google+ but still only reaching one percent of the Facebook world. Building on the back of Gmail may be a solid strategic move at this time, as Gmail can get Google to roughly 200 million users. What what about the more than tripling of that number required to get to parity with Facebook? For that, Google is going to have to do a lot of hard work and it’s unclear how they will go about acquiring more accounts going forward.

It may just be that Google will try to require every user of every service they provide to create a Google profile account moving forward. Today, Android users are required to create a gmail (or google apps) account to sync up their device. This represents one acquisition channel that none of the other players in the social media space have and could be one big area for growth.

Another area for potential growth is in the enterprise space: looking at the Google hangout feature, it seems to me that circles could become a useful way to organize a company and get quick online meetings. In fact, it may be more useful as a working tool than as a merely social one.

Still, at this time, it is hard to see a case where Google could topple Facebook. But the history of social networks is riddled with the bodies of players that were once at the top and eventually superseded by new entrants (think Friendster and MySpace) so it is not totally impossible that Facebook could find itself in hot competitive waters.

What about reputation rating systems?

Last but not least is the question around reputation rating systems like Klout or Peerindex. Those companies have built their model on the back of Twitter and Facebook and must urgently adapt to include Google+. With many early adopters spending more time on Gooogle’s property, the reputation rating game has a new entry point that will need to be urgently included in their calculations if they want to continue being relevant. When I first mentioned this, many people replied that those services are just not good enough as is and it seems that they have yet another challenge to deal with if they want to establish themselves as relevant in the future.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Some thoughts on Google+. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Twitter tweets expiration

The foundation story of Twitter claims that the first tweet was made by Jack Dorsey and was “Just setting up my twttr”. But what was his second tweet? Or his third one? What was his first @ message? Today, it’s impossible to answer any of those questions because neither the Twitter search engine nor scrolling through the complete list of tweets from someone will provide you with all the results.

The Twitter search engine apparently expires content after a few days. Tweets become inaccessible after 3200 tweets or roughly three and a half days if you are tweeting at the top rate allowed on the service (users of Twitter are allowed a maximum of 1,000 tweets, which may explain why there have been so few uses of Twitter as a fully interactive type of service).

With Twitter now claiming an important role in events like the 2009 Iranian uprising or the 2011 events in the rest of the middle east, it seems that expiring tweets is a bad idea as it deletes an important historical record. At the current time, Facebook claims that developers can access “all of a user’s status” which might imply that their retention policy is stronger that Twitter’s.

Fun with Google searches

But social media may be the exception and not the rule so I decided to start looking at web pages, which have been around for almost two decades now. Searching the internet of the past is an interesting thing. For example, let’s look at the tech industry:

The Netscape IPO seen as the first big internet IPO, happened on August 10, 1995. Doing a search the week before and after returns 7 results.

Microsoft’s introduction of Internet Explorer was in August 1995, with a second big announcement in December of that year. A search for “Microsoft introduces internet explorer” in 1995 returns 40 results.

Some may claim that I am being unfair, picking events that happened before Google’s creation. So I decided to look at events after 1999, at a time that would be contemporary with Google’s existence.

For example, the presidential election of 2000 was one of the hottest political contest in American history. It pitted Al Gore (421 Google results between January 1, 2000 and January 1, 2001) against George Bush (418 results for the same time period) and left the country wondering who was the winner for several days. There wasn’t a 24 hour news channel or newspaper in the country that did not cover the events extensively. And yet, we are left with less than a thousand pages from the period.

Some of those pages in the Google index may not even be from that time period. For example, the last page in my search for “George Bush” in the time range of January 1, 2000 to January 1, 2001 returned a site called celebritytweet.com. Considering that twitter wouldn’t exist for a few more years, I have doubt that the site existed in 2000.

If politics may be too narrow a topic, maybe something like the attacks on the World Trade Center might have more impact. So doing a search for pages relating to the week it happened (I did a search with a date range between September 10, 2001 and September 18, 2001) would probably returns TONS of pages. The result, according to Google is 461 pages.

Let me repeat that figure: 461 pages of historical record for what is widely agreed as one of the most important historical event in our lifetime.

For a quick comparison, I decided to take a somewhat less important event from the past week. Sure, I could have gone for the raid on Bin Laden but instead I decided to go for something a little more inconsequential: Lady Gaga’s deal with Zynga. A search limited to the last week has returned 477 results.

So if Google is the arbitrer of what’s important and the repository of most of our collective memory, a visitor from another planet looking at it could easily conclude that Lady Gaga cutting a deal with Zynga was more important that the attacks of 9/11. I’m not one to pass judgment on the cultural importance of Lady Gaga but something tells me that either the Google algorithm is wrong here or the Internet tends to be a very forgetful place.

Conclusion

As more an more media becomes digital, the concept of media retention is becoming increasingly important. It should become a growing area of concern for most historian and archivists to see that large portion of the late 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century may be leaving behind a smaller footprint of data than previous era. Efforts like the Google Book Search project are making great strike making things like physical books more accessible by creating digital reproductions of that content but they should also start considering making more recent, already digitized data archived in some fashion. Otherwise, the lack of a past may make us more susceptible to creating a less perfect future.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Forever is a long time. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The following are based on observations of how people I know have handled the issues around content ownership and online presence. I’m not going to endorse any of them in particular as I think that those type of things differ based on many social factors, including but not limited to your work situation (some people may, by law, not have a choice), your age (it appears to me that, the younger you are, the more comfortable you are with disclosing more), the country you live in (my European and Asian friends tend to be more reserved).

So, without further ado, here are five ways I’ve witnessed people and companies using to manage their online presence:

1. Obscurity: No participation is a form of management
2. Controlled: Heavy use of controlling mechanism to parse communication.
3. Broadcasting: Mainly using the services as tools to market one’s content in other areas.
4. Additive: Sharing content on social networks that is not shared in other realms.
5. All-in: Abandoning other forms of media distribution and exclusively leveraging social networks

Obscurity

We are now roughly half a decade to a decade into the social web phenomenon so few people or companies can claim to not have heard of the phenomenon. And yet, some do not appear on social networks. In my discussion with people or companies that do not participate, it seems that many people are simply choosing to not participate. In some cases, it is because they do not see the value: for example, Tina Fey recently explained that she’s not using Twitter by saying “I guess I feel if I had any jokes, I would just hold them”.

So the people who are not present on social network by choice often decide on that lack of presence for economic reason (figuring they may not want to share their content with the services’ owners).

Others have decided on obscurity as a way to avoid dealing with any issue that could arise out of conflicts due to their social media presence. This category of people may actually create more problems for themselves as they let others define them in the online social realm.

Last but not least is the pseudo-obscurity used by some, for example hiding their identity behind a pseudonym or something that does not link them to the non-online world. Many teens, for example, no longer use their real names on the likes of Facebook, for fear that college admission bureaus or potential employers could find them. This group is acutely aware of the fact that online records tend to be pretty permanents and that whatever is posted online by or about them can have a long term impact. This sub-group is an interesting one to observe because it shows a high level of engagement with social media while maintaining a similarly high level of anonymity.

Controlled

This category of users tend to be more sophisticated when it comes to articulating arguments about their handling of social media. Some define broad categories and associated rules based on the services they use (for example, one may consider that LinkedIn is for work only but refuse to “friend” co-workers on Facebook or follow them on Twitter). A lot of teenagers also fall in that category, using finely tuned privacy controls on facebook, for example, to decide on who does and doesn’t see what they are up to.

This group of people is acutely aware of the image they want to project in the online world and works hard on sculpting a presence that is finely tuned to each of the micro-audiences they are trying to reach, whether they are friends, colleagues, schoolmates, or other communities of interest.

The level to which one does or does not exert that level of control over their online persona is often hard to discern as people who claim to belong to one of the other categories may actually be sculpting an image of themselves that mirrors the attributes of that category.

Broadcasting

In the real world, one might called this persona a self-promoter. Any information they publish is related to themselves or their own product: come see my presentation, test out my product, buy my book, read my blog entry, vote for me in such and such poll, etc…

This also appears to be the model generally taken on by a lot of established corporation. The engagement here is not engagement but marketing, spewing out messages that barely differ from the type of marketing one might do with a billboard or a TV commercial (but, as some of the proponents of this approach would say, social media is cheaper than those other forms).

Sometimes, this behavior is merely the first sign of a beginner, trying to figure out the new medium but clinging to old models. Over time, one hopes, this persona can abandon the relentless me-me-me focus of their offerings and start participating in conversations with other actors in the space, while at the same time providing information from other sources in the community.

Additive

This persona tries to extend their offering by leveraging social media in a brand new way. For example, Andy Carvin appears to be pioneering a new form of journalism through Twitter, less based on his own reporting and more focused on curating and aggregating topic-specific content (in his case, the current uprisings in the middle east).

In the past, such a persona may have written pieces on blogs that would present a rounded view of a day’s event but now, thanks to services like Twitter or the Facebook status stream, providing pointers to content has become easier than ever.

In other cases, the social media services become a way to share things that may not fit anywhere else, maybe because they are not organized in a particular way or they are too small to share in a different forum.

For example, in my own use, a lot of what I initially posted on Twitter was links to stories or blog posts I had found interesting. Because I have a wide number of things I’m interested in, there is no overriding organizing principles to those links beyond the fact that I found them interesting. This can be frustrating to some of the people who try to follow as the lack of correlation may make the content unclear.

All-in

Think of this persona as the social media equivalent of Tourette syndrome. The idea here is that this persona engages in radical transparency by sharing everything, from where they are at any given time (using Foursquare and the likes), to what they’re eating, to how their bodily functions are doing. People in this category are often seen as oversharing by some of their readers.

One question that I have is whether this category truly exist or whether it is not more of a subset of a controlled experience. For example, it is fascinating to see how people who claim to be part of that category bristle at the idea of sharing some particular details of their lives: everyone has a line they will not cross when it comes to transparency. For some, it is about money; for others, it is about sex; for yet another group, it is about certain friends.

I’d venture that the all-in persona is mostly an invented one, pretending to create a high level of intimacy with followers/friends (fofriends?) in order to extract financial value out of that pseudo-intimacy. It is the kind of things that allows media stars to entertain their fans and retain them in the period between two revenue generating events, whether they are talks, conferences, concerts, books, movies, or other. It gives the fans a sense of closeness to the stars, while keeping them well at a distance.

Bonus category: Mixed

Ultimately, I suspect that a lot of people end up in a space that is actually a mix of the different personas I’ve highlighted above. For example, I’ve seen some people who are opting for obscurity in certain realms become broadcasters in others. And I’ve seen people pretending to be all-in pull back when it comes to certain subjects.

I suspect that there will be a continued discussion in the online space for the next decade at least as more people trying to define and understand what online personas are and where they would like to stand when it comes to their own persona in the online realm.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Five social media presence strategies. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Twitter and your content

Twitter, one of the most popular social services today, has one of the most enlightened Terms of services: They try hard to give you as many rights as possible and to take as few things as possible for themselves… and yet, you find things like this (emphasis is mine):

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

So, if Twitter decides, in the future that all private tweets are now public, they can legally do so. Or if they want to compile a book of your tweets and sell it without giving you a dime, you’ve granted them those rights too. And then (emphasis mine again)…

You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.

So if you said you liked a particular product on Twitter, the company can then partner with the maker of that product to use your endorsement in their ads, once again without giving you anything for is. In fact, the matter of compensation is clearly stated in that TOS:

You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.

… and of course, Twitter is making sure that anything they’ve given you can be taken back:

We reserve the right at all times (but will not have an obligation) to remove or refuse to distribute any Content on the Services and to terminate users or reclaim usernames

… and all this from one of the friendlier services out there (for the record, I picked Twitter because it’s often been painted as a friendly service compared to Facebook.

Did Facebook become the good guy?

So this brings up to the big difference between Twitter and Facebook. Many have decried Facebook’s push to shatter privacy settings for users of the service. So let’s take a look at their TOS.

Facebook initially seems to point to a policy that seems to give you more control of your content until you re-read the statement (emphasis mine):

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

First of all, I want to say thank you to Facebook for limiting their rights to the current times and not getting rights for method of distribution that could be created in the future. However, this portion about “unless your content has been shared with others” destroys the rest of the argument: one posts content to Facebook to share it with others so what you seem to be saying here is that if it’s been on Facebook, we can use it.

The rest of the contract actually seems to offer friendlier terms than Twitter does and of course, highlights that they can turn your access to service off at any time (once again, emphasis is mine):

If you violate the letter or spirit of this Statement, or otherwise create risk or possible legal exposure for us, we can stop providing all or part of Facebook to you

Any lawyer will tell you that possible legal exposure can be created in a lot of cases, so this seems to give an almost blank check to Facebook to turn off your access.

Compare and Contrast

What was most interesting to me, in reading the terms of both Facebook and Twitter is that it seems we, as users, are giving up more rights when we are using Twitter than when we are using Facebook. Whether this is a function of Facebook having been at the center of a few firestorms regarding user rights and therefore forced to change its terms to make them friendlier to users or some other factor regarding corporate culture is not something I can assess. All I can tell is that it seems that one gives up more by publishing content on Twitter than they do by doing so on Facebook.

Does that mean that Facebook should get a free pass? Absolutely not. The pressures consumers have exercised on the service have probably had some impact. What it does mean, however, is that Twitter may have been getting by with an easier treatment than Facebook and I suspect that, as its user-base grows and its impact increases, the service may find itself forced to revise some of the terms of its services.

I am no lawyer but I suspect there is wording that could be friendlier to users of the service and I would encourage the company to look at that wording before it becomes a firestorm.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Your rights on Twitter and Facebook. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Five years ago, people worried that the acquisition of YouTube by Google for a staggering 1.65 billion dollars was the first sign of a bubble inflating. At the time, I looked at the M&A activities and showed that the YouTube deal appeared to be an outlier.

This year, worries are popping up again, this time due to the kind of valuations many of the leaders in the space are getting. As my friends Jon Battelle and Fred Wilson point out, there is a substantial gap between what happened during the dotcom era and what is happening today.

As someone who believed the same thing, I decided to do a little research to get a sense of what valuation, revenue lines, and user base looked like. I did research on Google to get the valuation, revenue, and number of users of the most talked about companies. And it looked like this:

The first thing that becomes apparent here is that, outside of Twitter and Foursquare, we’re dealing with companies with strong revenue flows. But does that justify their valuation? Let’s take the data and look at what else we can learn from it:

All and all, the valuation themselves actually look quite low when you look at them through the lens of revenue (once again, I’m making exception here for Twitter and Foursquare, which are both still working on developing their revenue models — and I hear that the current valuation of Twitter in this round is dependent on their publishing a revenue model).

The other thing to look at is potential. GroupOn has outstanding revenue per user (more than twice the amount that Google gets for its users) so it seems that its ability to get more users would allow it to become as big, if not bigger than Google if it can maintain this average. Facebook, on the other hand, has a lot of growth opportunity in its average revenue per user. As one of the largest internet companies in the world, even something as simple as a couple of extra dollars in average revenue per user could generate billions in extra revenue.

But how do those compare to existing publicly traded internet companies. Thankfully, some of that data is available (Apple data is here):

So is there a bubble? I would say that if those companies are representative of the rest of the industry, there isn’t.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Doesn’t feel like a bubble. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Refiner: Apple

It’s always been fascinating to see the fight between geeks over the role of Apple as an innovator in the tech field. On one hand, people will argue that Apple pushes the envelope by introducing revolutionary new products; on the other hand, people can point out that what Apple does is just implement a different version of what already existed.

For example, there were MP3 players before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone, and tablet computers before the iPad (in the same vein, there has been ways to get the internet on your TV from a variety of devices before the AppleTV). But in each cases, Apple came out with products that changed the public perception of those categories, leaving the mainstream feeling that Apple was introducing revolutionary products.

The truth is a little more complicated: both side of the argument are valid because what Apple does is not so much introduce new product categories as it simplifies them. One could argue that the model of Apple ought to be “innovation through improvements.” Whereas other companies look to throw new technology at a problem, Apple tends to look at solving the problem through reduction: less is more.

An example: Dialing on iPhone and Android phones

An example of this is the iPhone vs. Android discussion. As the owner of both types of devices, I can easily say that the iPhone is a more polished product.

A simple example is how either phones handles the quick dial feature on the phone. When presented with a list of callers you selected, you click on the name of the person and the phone dials. By contrast, on my Samsung Vibrant, a short click on the image of the person brings up a list of actions I can do (call, text message, send a picture, etc…), a short click on the name or start brings up the whole detailed information of the person. A long click brings another set of options. However, I’ve yet to find a single click that will dial the person.

It’s a simple distinction but it is hundreds of such little distinctions that make the iPhone a tighter experience. I know Android fans will tell me that I can customize the phone in a much better way and that is great if you’re a geek like me but, to the general public, such customization is an impediment, not a feature.

Don’t innovate, improve

So the offerings of companies that most look like Apple are not revolutionary in the sense of breaking new grounds but rather are following an ethic of improvement. Their focus is less on brand new features that have never been seen before and more on improving the user experience around a pre-existing approach.

Seen through that lens, Tumblr, Posterous, and Twitter can be seen as an evolution of the blogging models set previously by SixApart, Automattic, and Blogger.

It’s a really important model to follow if you want to reach a mass market and are attacking a marketplace with some established players.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Which company are you: the Refiner. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The Cultural Impact Cycle

Most successful companies go through a 6 steps cycle where their cultural impact on society as a whole can be felt. For my purpose, I call it the mindset cycle and it works as shown in the figure below:

Alphaworld

In Alphaword, the first step, a few early adopters are aware of the company and its products and test them out. This is generally a stage most companies do not get out of.

There are many reason for companies not getting out of this space. Their product could be bad; their product could be targeted at the wrong market; their product could be too early in the market; the company might have failed to explain its relevance to users; etc…

Ultimately, the main reason a company gets out of this stage is that its team has done a very good job executing on the implementation of a product and company strategy, creating value for its investors, and delivering even more value to its users.

Those that make it out will be prosperous and those that don’t will die.

The Land of Mass Adoption

The land of mass adoption then represent a steep climb as a company starts getting noticed by people outside of the technology world and non-technologists start using the application.

The majority of companies that made it out of alphaworld spend a very long time in that area and can profit by targeting niches without having to move on to the next stage.

The land of mass adoption is an area where companies are forced to shed some of their more technical attributes (or hide them away) in order to appeal to a mass audience. The mass audience is not as forgiving as people in alphaworld so the company has to properly adapt to the market. It’s a great balancing act where the company has to show early adopters that it can continue delivering cutting edge for them while talking to the mainstream and figuring out the right timing and hand-holding to get mainstream users to start using some of those new attributes.

Mainstream Mountain

Mainstream mountain is where most companies want to be. At that point, a company achieves great economic success and is at close to the peak of its cultural relevance, impacting not only its own product but the industry it’s in. Very few companies achieve that stage and even fewer stay there for a long time. The great majority of people look to the company as the main provider of direction and believe it can do no wrong.

In the 80s, IBM was there with its personal computers. In the 90s, Microsoft was there with its Windows operating system and Office Suite. In the first decade of the 21st century, the spot was held by Google with its dominant search engine, online advertising model and YouTube video site.

Apple is currently at the apex of mainstream mountain, having redefined the PC industry (computers as consumption), the music industry (digital as default) and the telecom industry (phones as computers). Facebook, with its social network is currently climbing that mountain, having become the largest site in the world, built solely on the back of relationships.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to stay in that arena and the fall seems to eventually come for most companies.

Disgruntled Hills

In the disgruntled hills, the public perception of a company starts to turn. What was one seen as a benevolent force for good is now being questioned. People start questioning whether the company is holding too much power and the mention of anti-trust comes up more often. Early adopters start looking for alternative providers and any misstep by the company is seen as a major example of how flawed the company is. Over time, the mass start turning their back on the company, reluctantly using its products but no longer imbuing them with the kind of magic attributes they granted to the company.

At this point, it seems the company starts having problems pleasing customers. No matter what it does, the public looks to the company as only protecting its own interest and not those of its customers. The company can claim that it loves its customers but suspicion seeps in and people get cynical about such claims.

I would venture that Google is currently in that stage as people start worrying about its dominance in the search space while making fun of its attempt at trying to get more social so it can go back to mainstreaming mountain. Questions around its privacy practices, mentions of antitrust around search and advertising, and other negatives seem to be applied to it with increasing frequency.

Canyons of Cultural Irrelevance

Of course, Google doesn’t have to worry as much as Microsoft, a company now steeply going down the hill of cultural irrelevance. At that stage, a company’s product are no longer seen as relevant to large swath of people.

Companies that reach this stage were once seen as the most important companies in the world. Oftentimes, such companies also suffered legal setback as they were taken to court and found guilty of monopolistic practices. Such was the case for IBM in the 80s and Microsoft in the 90s.

To say that a company is in that space is not the same as saying the company cannot be profitable. In fact, Microsoft an IBM are still very large players with established customer bases and diversified product portfolios. But their impact on the industry is mainly felt when they acquire a company positioned in one of the earlier mindset stages. Their ability to deliver internally-created product to an audience that finds a particular attachment to such products seems hindered and the companies take a cautious approach, offering product that attempt to mirror features created by other players (eg. Zune v. iPod, Windows phones vs. iPhones, Microsoft Kinect vs. Wii).

This stage can last decades or even centuries but, at that point, the company is no longer having a significant impact on consumers’ mindsets.

Plains of Corporate Death

In some cases, a company can flash through a lot of the earlier stages, be seen as extremely relevant for a while and then disappear because their products and ideas are no longer valid in the marketplace at all.

This is a case where companies have cash or assets that are no longer valuable in any ways (eg. Buggy Whip manufacturers) and, in those cases, companies completely fold and return money to their shareholders, stopping to exist due to cultural irrelevance.

Few companies enter that stage as the previous one allows them to morph into something different (eg. Nokia comes to mind, changing from being a fishing boots manufacturer to a phone company; or WPP going from being a wire and plastics company to one of the largest advertising groups in the world).

Takeaway

There are many stages in the cultural impact of successful companies but ultimately, every large tech company has found itself displaced and replaced. Today, Apple sits at the apex of the tech industry, having achieved economic and cultural dominance, but the Antennagate brouhaha (around claimed issues that the iPhone 4 antenna fails when the phone is held without a bumper) and the gizmodo incident seems to point to some anxiety within the early adopter community. Perception of the company appears to be turning and, for the first time since Steve Jobs came back to Apple, there seems to be some level of unhappiness with its products. Will the release of free bumpers help the situation? Only time will tell.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title 6 Stages of Cultural Impact. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Found in the twitter archives from July 4, 1776:

• independence would be a good idea. #independencenow http://bit.ly/usdoi

• The government should not mess with our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. #abolishgov http://bit.ly/usdoi
• No one’s above the law #kinggeorge #fail #iblame http://bit.ly/usdoi
• He’s neglecting us #kinggeorge #fail #omgthatssotrue http://bit.ly/usdoi
• He wants us to give up our rights in exchange for help #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Tweetup was too far #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Our friends were pushed out #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• No representation for us #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• The king’s stealing our money and not letting us run things #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Judicial representation now! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Stop gov corruption #kinggeorge #fail #gov20 http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Stop gov abuse #kinggeorge #fail #gov20 http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Why is there an army on my street? #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Why is the military not independent? #kinggeorge #fail #gov20 http://bit.ly/usdoi
• England armies out of colonies now! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• stop english army abuse now #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• let our markets be free #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Stop english taxes in the colonies #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• We want juries of our peers #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Don’t change jurisdictions on us #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• We are not Canada #kinggeorge #fail #blamecanada http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Give us our laws and charters back!!! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Give us our legislature back!!! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• You want war? Then we quit! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Say not to death and destruction #kinggeorge #fail #dead http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Mercenaries out of the colonies now! #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Friends should not be forced to turn on friends #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• The king’s not fostering law and order #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• We’ve tried talking this out but he won’t listen #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• We called, we wrote and only received insults as replies #kinggeorge #fail http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Our friends in the UK also tried but no one listened so war it is #politics #uk http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Independence now #politics #tweetup #gousa http://bit.ly/usdoi
• Let’s hope this works out #gousa http://bit.ly/usdoi

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title #140 Independence. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

It has a relatively low but highly dedicated audience and is garnering good press both in the blogging community and the mainstream media.

The service is suffering from growth related issues which force it to be down at unexpected times but users put up with it because of its supposed transformational nature.

The service allows people to build things on top of it, offering external parties a greater chance to generate revenue than the company providing the service.

And, establishing further proof that service is going to be important in the future, a lot of mainstream stars are establishing presence quickly, only to slowly abandon those points of presence after a while.

But those stars are no different from most of the service’s users, which tend to abandon it only a month of two after trying it out.

What is that service called?

If you said Twitter, you are clearly reading this in 2009. But, only two years ago, the answer would have been Second Life (something I learned first hand, having been part of the hype around it back then).

of course, I have no doubt that this post will probably receive a high amount of flames because supporters will tell me how Twitter is different. But is it?

The Coral Reef

I’ve always had an affinity for Dave Winer’s Coral Reef analogy. However, even the coral reef analogy seems to eventually break down, leaving people like Winer to think of ways to move out (in a way, Winer fell into the same trap with Twitter as Scoble did with Friendfeed).

The issue here is that a lot of energy gets poured by developers into supporting an ultimately closed system. While artificial coral reefs exists, they are generally part of the larger ocean and tend to be pushed into creation by sinking boats or subway trains. But an important distinction is that the creator of an artificial reef is generally present at the creation but then lets the ecosystem take over and doesn’t try to control anything.

In the tech field, the best analogy for an artificial coral reef would be opening sourcing an important source of code (for example, the apache web server) or making a set of protocols or ideas open to all (eg. HTML or RSS) without requiring that the implementor cede any control to the party which made the code or idea available. Today, you can fok the httpd server if you feel like it or you can adapt parts of HTML or RSS to your heart’s content.

Fauxpenness

But there’s a different set of ecosystems out there that becomes more of a venus flytrap of technology. I would describe this as fauxpenness:

Fauxpenness: Calling a system or platform open while it is, when more closely scrutinized, under the tight control of its provider.

Fauxpen system (or fauxpen platform): a system or platform that claims to be open but, upon closer examination, isn’t.

It’s the kind of approach that pretends to be open but provides some level of lock-in.

In 2006–2007, we saw that happen with SecondLife, as many developers (myself included) built software code that could run within the SecondLife world but was ultimately stuck there because you could not run it outside that world and/or run SecondLife servers on your own machines.

in 2007–2008, we saw that happen with the F8 Facebook platform, which locks your applications inside of Facebook and, while many developers have pushed to force the company to open up, tends to stay there. In 2007-today, we’re seeing the same thing with Twitter, which allows you to build whatever you want on top of it but doesn’t decentralize their approach, leaving developers potential slaves to the whims of the company. The same is true of the iPhone, which provides unusual access to the phone operating system and allows to develop interesting software on top of it but still keep developers away from being able to access basic things like calendar information via an SDK.

The endless cycle

Interestingly enough, it’s not an unusual phenomenon in the technology world. It works like this:

It happened with SecondLife; it happened with F8; it will happen with Twitter and it will happen with the iPhone at some point. It appears that the natural course of locked API is to get to a point where the developers get so annoyed that they decide to go look somewhere else.

But there’s hope.

Breaking Free of Fauxpenness

Because of the lock-in, it is possible for companies to break free of the cycle. In order to do so, two things need to happen:

• First, the company needs to find a way to establish a business model that does not require lock-in
• Then, the company needs to start removing the lock-in components it offers.

I’m not saying that either of those step is an easy one. In fact, few companies have successfully managed them and, even when they do, the developer community will keep asking for more.

For example, Microsoft’s history is one of establishing initial lock-ins, weeding out the competition and, when its lead is established enough, relaxing the choke-hold it has on the developer community and playing a little nicer until it tries to enter another market. That was the case with Windows; it was the case with Office; and it is the case with IE today.

IBM also took the same approach, initially being a provider of proprietary systems and slowly, over the last 15–20 years, moving to become one of the largest supporters of the open source movement.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Fauxpenness. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.