Maybe Jack McCambridge - never met - is not the microfinance messiah, but a visit to his blog yesterday helped me gel a thought. I must have a soft spot for white guys who end up in India: I am half Indian. I found his blog at the blogroll of Slice Of Grice a few days back.
I think of microfinance the way I think of software/hardware/connectivity, biotech, nanotech. I fantasize of a day when the world pours a trillion dollars into microfinance instead of pouring trillions into housing bubbles in rich countries like just happened.
Top tech entrepreneurs expect to make billions. People who will help the world pour a trillion dollars into microfinance should fall into that same category. The return from microfinance is twice as that from US treasury bonds, more. But China gave an American president almost a trillion to fight a wrong war instead.
The near transparency at all levels that IT will make possible will help that goal of major league microfinance. But ultimately it is for individuals to step up to the plate.
I only follow about 200 people on Twitter now, and it is not like I read every tweet by every person I follow. You log in, and most of the time you skim through that first page. You spend some time in the stream. So the best way to have a more representative stream might be to follow a large number of people.
But I also like the idea of having a smaller group of people. For that I think I got TweetDeck. There I can create a group for the current 200 people. That way I can get the best of both worlds: TweetDeck to follow a small, intimate group, or two, or three - I also have a group with only 20 people there - and Twitter as a marketing tool.
I am also driven by a desire to jack up the traffic for this blog.
A few minutes back I read this article by my friend in BangaloreBhupendra Khanal, the top Tweet in that city measured by the number of followers he has - he is also from Nepal like me - and he kind of made me think.
Kristi Fundu Intro on Facebook: "For all the long lost friends, a brief synopsis of the last decade: graduated from BC in 2000, returned to Macedonia in 2002, started my own business in 2004, one brief marriage 2006."
Ashton Kutcher just became the first Tweetizen - Twitter citizen - to have more than a million followers. He was in a race with CNN, and he won. And I think in the interest of full disclosure it is kind of important that I come out making it clear to the world as to my relationship with Ashton Kutcher which is that Demi Moore and I signed up on Twitter the same day: I Get Twitter.
Yes, it is. Only Oprah can do something ridiculous like that. And I got the Oprah-On-Twitter news from a woman whose middle name is 8 and who is one of the more prolific litterers of my Facebook stream, no complaints. Yes, 8. Yes, the digital age 8. She is so digital. No surprise she dates a Googler. (Craig Silverstein)
I think Twitter has arrived. What do you think? I mean, what is more mainstream than getting Oprah's attention? The Twitter people's gonna celebrate.
I have to admit I have never watched a complete Oprah show. But I think the woman is fascinating and lovely. She has an amazing life story. She is my idea of an out of the box thinker. She has said if she had been given a dollar for every time she was told not to do something but she did it anyways, she would have made a billion. I think she did make a billion.
Take the links away, and Twitter is not going to be fun no more, at least not for me. And I don't see what's micro about full blown webpages, news articles, blog posts, pictures, video clips. When I envision a tweet, I don't envision 140 stale characters. I envision a few words that point me to a weblink, more likely a tiny URL, that I might have the option to click on. That is not to say I don't enjoy tweets that are all words and no links. I do. But they are in the sea of links. That is why I enjoy them. It takes seconds to skim through an all words tweet, and usually another with a link is right below.
That is not to say I am a link clicking monster blindly clicking the links away. I pick and choose. But then that is why you carefully choose to follow people. Your library of Twitter contacts should be such that whenever you jump into your stream you find at least a few links to click on. I find that every single time. So when I go online, of all the places I could go to, Twitter ends up being the one with the greatest pull. You have to convince yourself it is not distraction, it is education.
Twitter is not micro. Twitter is smart. Can't do without Twitter in this day and age of information overload. Twitter allows for a smart consumption of information. You swim in the Twitter stream for half an hour, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 10, and you feel like you are in the loop, with the world. You know what's going on. You know all the right people. Heck, you follow them. They can't say no.
The tweet is the ultimate equalizer. Some of the fanciest names in tech put out tweets that are not that different from the kind of tweets I put out. I feel level with them much of the time.
After I have a new blog post, I tweet it, I don't submit it to Digg, or any of the similar services. I do use Delicious for bookmarking. But often time I just tweet an interesting link. I know I can track it with one Twitter search down the line. So I use Twitter also for personal bookmarking.
Twitter keeps my blog fresh. I guess there you could argue Twitter is indeed microblogging. But then, is it? My tweets tend to be link rich.
Demi Moore and I joined Twitter the same day. I have 230 followers, she has 520,738 followers. I am guessing she is better looking.
I must admit there have been times when I have struggled with doing a Guy Kawasaki on Twitter: follow everyone who follows you. Should I? Should I not? I decided against the idea. For Guy Twitter is a broadcast medium. Noone else does that part better than him. His tweets get retweeted more times than that of any other. He is numero uno.
And there is Bhupendra Khanal, the top tweet in Bangalore, as in the one with the most followers:
He is a software guy, a CEO, who has come up with this program that allows you to follow or unfollow people about 50 at a time. He is brutal. He sees no point in following those who don't follow him. His following shot up to over 20,000 in a matter of months.
I decided I am biased towards an organic growth of my following, so I did not go down the Bhupendra route either, although we were and are good friends.
I found at Twitter what I did not find at Facebook. After I signed up at Facebook I realized my number one urge was to say hello to people I had never met before. Next thing you know I had about 1500 friends there. Then I signed up for this Facebook group that shall stay unnamed, and started emailing people in that group. Facebook deleted my account. 1500 friends gone. That was unfollow Facebook style.
I got another account, and now I have 500 friends, almost all of whom I personally know. Some are online friends I have never met in person, but we have interacted online enough that it feels like friendship. And I have over 40 friend requests and counting that I have decided to not accept, not decline either. If I end up chatting some of those and becoming online friends, I might still accept some of them.
At Twitter not only do you get to follow absolutely anyone you wish to follow, my number one dig has been this idea of being able to follow luminaries in the tech industry. Once in a while you come across this blog post or that which has recommendations of the people you get tempted to follow.
And clicking on the follow button is not enough. How well do you know them? Could you recognize them in your stream two months later? Could you name the company they might be associated with? Can you remember at least one blog post of theirs you have read?
How do you do all that? You spend some time on the profile pages of the people you follow. You read their intro. You reply to some of their tweets. You go read a few posts on their blog. You get to know them well enough that the next time they show up in your stream, their tweets look extra interesting to you. Each tweet by that person helps you know them a little better.
If you do that well enough, you just might strike a two way friendship, or rather followship, with a person who until recently was a distant celebrity to you. Like Craig Newmark, or Darren Rowse.
Jerry Yang, David Filo. That is a count of two. No wonder they got beat by Google. But if the count were not two but a billion, or even 200 million like Facebook which is what Twitter will have to hit on its way to the magic billion? Then what? Then are we talking some serious competition? I think so.
Twitter does not pay anybody to tweet. Twitter is the ultimate crowdsourcing application. I think humans are going to take over the world. Unless machines fundamentally innovate.
If I were to take a really long view, I think this thing is going to be cyclical. Humans 2, Machines 1.
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