We are all sold on location, and for the right reasons. But random connections as a space is not garnering the same respect, and I am going to call that a case of adultism. Because the founder of Chatroulette is a 17 year old, a lot of people are having a lot of fun talking about penises that supposedly sprout out during the Chatroulette experience. Guess what, sex is in the mind. Penises sprouting out do not take away from the basic Chatroulette promise, that random connections is a new web space, and Chatroulette has a bright business future.
Once I got a hang of Twitter, I said many times you can take Facebook away. I feel like both a high school and a college dropout. Most people on Facebook remind me of two institutions I do not want to be particularly reminded of. I liked it that on Twitter I could interact with people I did not know. Chatroulette takes that to a whole new level. Note: I have not tried Chatroulette yet, but I don't have to, I am sold on the space.
Chatroulette has to iterate. It is already at 30 million hits. That is a great point at which to roll out the future versions, to add new features. What could some of those new features be?
Once I roll the dice a few times, and I find someone I like interacting with, I should be able to bookmark that person, but only if that person agrees to get bookmarked. Once I build a library of a certain number of bookmarked people - and I don't need to know anything about them to that point - I should have the option to roll the gun only inside my library.
On the other hand, I should also have the option to block people. If I see a penis, and I don't like it that I had to see a penis, I hit a button that says Block For Nudity, and if a person accumulates 10 or more such blocks, they should enter a special zone. As in, people should have the option to say keep me away from people who have been blocked for nudity 10 times or more.
Voila. The penises are gone.
When I am thinking Chatroulette, I am thinking world peace. Seriously. We need more people talking to more people to get at that utopia called world peace. I want Chatroulette on all Israeli and Palestinian screens. Get those buggers talking to each other. And let them show penises to each other when they are pissed instead of blowing each other up. The 2010 version of make love not war?
Ever heard of people to people interaction programs run by governments? This is it. Chatroulette is the ultimate people to people interaction program.
But it is important to keep the randomness intact. You should be able to bookmark me, but I should not have a profile on there, no name, no location, nothing about me. If people volunteer such information to each other during conversations, fine, but Chatroulette should keep the randomness very much intact.
The next big filter jump would be to allow for geographical filtering. So I go on Chatroulette and I want to meet random people from Africa, I should be able to do that. (Nfodjo, is that you?) Or go to the country level. Or maybe even city level. I feel like meeting people from Moscow, how about it? Hello Olesya.
Just a few filters and the bookmarking and blocking options, and a lot of the caricature of the service vanishes.
Look at this article from Time 1937. The richest man in the world at the time was an Indian. Hello Bill Gates. It was empowering to get to read the article in the raw. I think this is the model I have in mind when it comes to Twitter. What is being said right now in real time is important. But the Twitter archives are also important.
This is not Twitter giving the farm away. This is Twitter bringing in Google to enhance the value of every single tweet. Suddenly every tweet in the Twitter archive has become worth so much more. This is a huge boost to Twitter's monetization efforts. (Twitter Does The Deed: Ads)
Being able to search every tweet ever is great. But there is one missing link: visualization. Tweets are not meant to be read one at a time. And visualization is perhaps the best way to read many tweets at once. Google has work cut out for it in the presentation department. Searching through tweets is not the same as searching through webpages. Tweets are a different animal.
What I say today about Obama's victory in November 2008 is a different animal from what I said about Obama's victory as it happened. It is still me saying it, but real time is a different dimension.
This ability to dig through the Twitter archives is going to be a great tool for many players to go out there and see what people are saying about them, or how what they have been saying has changed over time.
Right now the archives go back only to February. It has to go all the way back. And Google has not even started work on doing the best possible job on presentation. Don't treat tweets like they are webpages. They are not.
If I have five friends, and all of them are on Facebook and all of them have my number, and we party every other week, we are talking. But what if I have 500 friends? What if I have five friends and 5,000 fans? What if I have two friends and 20,000 online contacts? What if I am being followed by 50,000 people? What if I end up with five million followers?
Twitter has to make sure that at no point do the signals turn into noise for me. At no point should I get overwhelmed. I might have 500,000 followers, and if all of them tweet me, I should still be able to hear what they are saying. (Twitter Visualization: Reading Many Tweets At Once)
The power users will tell you, if you really want to make the best of Twitter, you got to wade into the ecosystem and find all the right apps for you. I am cool with that suggestion, but Twitter should not be. If Twitter envisions a billion users, as it should (Goal: A Billion People On Twitter April 2009) - heck, I think Twitter could beat Facebook to that magic number, but not the Twitter of today - then Twitter has to make sure all the action is at Twitter.com. Twitter bought Summize, Twitter bought Tweetie, it could easily buy 20 more such companies today. Buy or build, buy or build, buy or build.
(I was writing this as a comment at his blog, but it became long enough that I decided to make a blog post out of it.)
Social networking has surpassed email, search and is doing great in the news department. Those three were just three of the biggest web activities before these social networks came along. That is really something. (Email, Search, News)
But don't count out the inbox. I'd say location, random connections and the inbox are the three big things to look for this year. There is some interesting stuff going on in the inbox territory, I just have not had the time to figure out who the leader there is.
The inbox will rebound. That is not to say it will take back its lead. China was once the leading country on the planet.
The email inside Facebook is still Facebook. It is not email. Only people in your network can email you, for the most part, and do. And they do so rarely.
I don't mind being on mailing lists as long as they have a one click unsubscribe option at the bottom of each email they send out. If I am going to delete without reading anyway, why bother sending it to me? But then those dictators in Nigeria just seem to need 0.1% to respond, and that keeps them in business. So.
Even in social networking I don't believe Facebook has the final word. I have a feeling we will see a swing from the we to the me in a few years. (The Next Big Thing In Social Networking)
I gave a talk last night at the Science HouseMeetUp. The NY Tech MeetUp is the best big MeetUp in town. I like to say the Science House MeetUp is the best small MeetUp in town. After my talk was over I learned from James (@ScienceHouse) that Esther Dyson will also be talking in a few weeks. I was floored. I think so very highly of Dyson. I can't believe I got to talk in the same setting. That is what I was thinking.
@gabidewit @habiteer @chrisharwood @BrainiacDating were some of the people in attendance. Two Indians showed up, one a doctor, another a software guy who said he quit a 150K job to get started with his startup. His idea had oomph, but he came across as in the very early stages of gelling the idea. When you start out, you end up thinking at an industry rather than a company level. Not a bad place to start. But then you have to whittle it down so you can have a starting point.They went to MeetUp.com, did a search on "social media" and showed up.
I showed up earlier than usual, and the event did not start right at 7 PM. We take the first 10-15 minutes to kind of warm up. That is the Science House way. I got to meet the guy who is doing the iPhone app for Science House. What I liked best was the back end. Gabi (@gabidewit) gets to add new info to a Google Spreadsheet and it shows up in the app.
I started with a survey. If you are on Twitter, raise your hand.
Most hands in the room went up most times and I said I was not particularly qualified to be talking about social media to the group, but that I was going to share my personal social media story. There were a dozen people in the room, roughly.
Then I introduced myself. I said my name. I passed out my business card. All it has is my first name: Paramendra. Because that is my name on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Gmail. And you can look me up on Google. My parents must have seen Google coming. I never met anyone who shares my first name. I said I was a tech entrepreneur and a social media guy on the side.
Having corporate clients that need help with social media
I talked briefly about JyotiConnect Inc. The IC - Internet Computer - vision is that it is the meeting ground between the so-called First World and Third World. The rich countries have to move beyond the PC to the IC: the Netbook is half way there. The poor countries have to come online in large numbers.
I gave out some personal story. I moved to NYC in 2005 to work on my startup but got sucked into working full time for the democracy movement in Nepal for over two years. My primary work was my blog and sending it out across the largest Nepali mailing list in the world I had created. The list had penetrated all the leading political parties in Nepal, the media, all the top human rights NGOs. Like they said about Arkansas when Bill Clinton was Governor, if you knew 1500 people you pretty much knew everyone who mattered.
I got to meet the Prime Minister of Nepal in person for the first time a few weeks back, but he has been calling me a friend for a few years now. It is because of my Nepal blog. And Nepal is the poorest country outside of Africa. And this was in 2005 and 2006. Social media mattered back there, then.
While giving time to Obama as one of his earliest supporters in NYC, I also started raising money for my startup. The goal was to raise 100K and I did raise that. But most of the investors walked away with most of the money en masse in February this year reacting to the bad economy: "We still believe in you, we still believe in the vision, but we have to go!" I relayed the story of how I raised that 100K in the first place and the role my tech blog played in that. Also, if I sit on the Board Of Advisors of PayCheckr, it is because of this particular blog post: New York Times, Don't Die, Live. The founder of PayCheckr first met me in the comments section of this blog post. I have met him in person only once.
Twitter
I said one site had me number 12 on the NYC Twitter elite list. Wycleaf Jean is number 11. That guy has more than one million followers. I have about 30,000. To be right behind him, they must be measuring my influence some other way. Maybe they like the quality of my stream. And I am number 90 in NYC in terms of those with the most followers, Donald Trump is number 50. Globally my rank there is 1960. After I hit the top 100 in NYC, I sent out my first tweet from the phone. Otherwise before that Twitter was an all-web thing for me. (My First Tweet From My Phone)
Work on creating a good stream, I said. TwitterFeed.com can be helpful. More than 600,000 people use it. I also tweet when I am out and about in town because I know NYC fascinates the people out there, out in the country, out in the world.
Follow people you know. That includes friends, but also famous people you know and admire but who don't know you back. I have exchanged quite a few tweets with Craig Newmark.
When you are not famous, the way you end up with a lot of followers is what I call the politician model. You shake 1,000 hands hoping maybe 200 of them will vote for you. But for that to happen you need to have a really compelling stream.
I used to use Facebook the way I use Twitter. I ended up with 1400 friends and then Facebook went ahead and deleted my account. I started again and now have 700 friends, but these are now people I know. Either they are friends from a while back, or online only people who feel like friends.
My privacy setting is to Everyone. You don't have to be my friend to see my Facebook page. I already have 130 outstanding friend requests I have not accepted.
I have refused to integrate my Twitter stream into Facebook. I like to keep the two separate. They serve different purposes.
LinkedIn
I signed up for LinkedIn not long after the site got launched because I read about it in the news, but then I kind of forgot about it. And then I met James and Gabi at a NY Tech MeetUp for the first time only a few months back, and the following day Gabi sent me a connect request on LinkedIn, of all places. That is when I rediscovered the site. I went ahead redid my LinkedIn page. LinkedIn is really the unsung hero of social networking. It is extremely valuable but we don't talk about it as much as Twitter and Facebook. Now I am working to get 500 contacts. I have 415. And the news is they are about to revamp the site.
Blogging
I said blogging was my personal favorite platform. A blog to me is like a blank canvass to an artist. You get to write a few paragraphs, insert tens of links, embed a YouTube video perhaps. And, boom, you have a blog post.
In February 2006 Madhav Nepal, then leader of the largest political party in the country, was put under house arrest by the royal regime. A month later he managed to come online wireless. His brother lived in the house next to his. The first person he contacted was me. We chatted on Google Talk. Here's the transcript: Madhav Nepal. A few months back Nepal became Prime Minister. Nobody in the Nepali diaspora put as much time, effort and talent into the democracy movement in Nepal as I did.
April 2006 saw the democracy movement, but January-February 2007 and February 2008 saw the Madhesi Movement. I am a Madhesi. This was like our own civil rights movement. Upendra Yadav has been the face of that movement in Nepal. When Upendra Yadav, now leader of the largest Madhesi party and fourth largest party overall after the April 10, 2008 elections to the constituent assembly in Nepal, landed in Los Angeles in July 2007 for the annual conference of Nepalis in America, his first words were "Where is Paramendra Bhagat?" They took him to the hotel. He again asked, "Where is Paramendra Bhagat?" They had to fly him over to NYC to meet me. We had never met before. He went on to become Foreign Minister.
Both of them got to know me through my blog long before they finally met me in person. That's social media for you.
YouTube
I said I had uploaded a total of two videos so far on YouTube, but I forgot to mention I have uploaded hundreds on Google Video, now defunct. About 700, to be precise. But I do habitually embed YouTube videos into my blog posts. My blogs are multi-media.
Ustream
I was at a Nepali poetry festival in Jackson Heights a few months back. There were 40 people in the room and 2400 online, and that was before the event started.
Josephine Ancelle, French Singer, Songwriter
I met @josephinea at a social media event. The old media way was she needed to hit big and that was it. But the social media way is she can gradually expand her fan base from a few hundred to a few thousand to tens of thousands to more, and she will feel the fan love and have the music sales every step of the way.
Q & A
With that I concluded and opened the floor. By the way, I announced in the very beginning anyone could just interrupt me at any point in my talk. That was the social media way. And many did.
After some floor talk on social media, the topics shifted. One of the Indians present talked about his business idea.
@BrainiacDating said he had managed to get 13,000 people on Brainiac Dating primarily through AdWords. How could he hit the big leagues? Could social media help? Today I sent him an email. Mashable beat TechCrunch and became the most visited tech blog a few months back: Twitter was their primary marketing tool. I also signed up at the site. It is really good. I sent out emails to about 20 beautiful women with a message that said something like this:
Hello. I met the founder Lawrence yesterday at an event where I gave a talk on social media. That is when I first heard about the site. I wanted to try it out because I realized I am interested in dating someone smart. Smarts turn me on. So I signed up today and did a search and you showed up. I looked at your picture and read your profile top to bottom and really liked what I saw. I am interested in you and would like to get to know you better. I feel like I connect to you at a few different levels. I would love to hear from you and meet you in person because I feel that is the only way to really figure out if someone is the right person for you.
For the next three hours or more @habiteer and @chrisharwood had a rather animated discussion on if or not some day virtual reality will get so good that the "real" reality will become unnecessary. My position was that virtual reality does not have to get that good, but even if it gets close, that would be great for my workspace, but face time will always be necessary. There are emotional needs to be met.
There was also a lot of talk about physics, about singularity, about the possibilities of intelligent life out there.
When the group dispersed it was close to one in the morning. I walked over to Grand Central. @habiteer kept walking.
The social has been all the buzz on the web for a few years now. And it is still going strong, for good reason. You might not remember Friendster, but that came along before MySpace. And MySpace was all
the rage. Then Facebook took over. Like Sam Walton claimed, you can reinvent retailing "again and again and again."
The social has been the web maturing. It is not about technology, it is about people. That is the message.
The joke at my high school back in the days was trousers narrow at the bottom and then go wide again a few years later. How else could the fashion pendulum swing? The social is the trousers going wide
The next generation of social networking is going to be about the individual. That well defined individual's social interactions online will reflect the ones offline. You are closer to some people than others. You share more with some than others. Everybody on Facebook being your general friend is going to start looking bland.
But first Facebook has to run its course. Twitter already stole a lot of its buzz. Google Wave will likely steal a lot of buzz from both Twitter and Facebook. But Wave is still the pendulum swinging in the same direction. And Wave might remain a great way to collaborate on projects.
At what point will have the pendulum swung all the way? Perhaps when Facebook hits 600 million people? More?
~ The way of the world is meeting people through other people. ~ Robert Kerrigan
~ It's not what you know but who you know that makes the difference. ~ Annonymous
~ It isn't just what you know, and it isn't just who you know. It's actually who you know, who knows you, and what you do for a living. ~ Bob Burg
~ More business decisions occur over lunch and dinner than at any other time, yet no MBA courses are given on the subject. ~ Peter Drucker
~ Informal conversation is probably the oldest mechanism by which opinions on products and brands are developed, expressed, and spread. ~ Johan Arndt
~ It's all about people. It's about networking and being nice to people and not burning any bridges. ~ Mike Davidson
~ Position yourself as a center of influence - the one who knows the movers and shakers. People will respond to that, and you'll soon become what you project. ~ Bob Burg
~ In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology. ~ Vinton Cerf
~ Social networking sites like Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook have literally exploded in popularity in just a few short years. ~ Mike Fitzpatrick
Katherine Berry at Pajamas Media discusses social networking: "Having just spent another morning of my life reading the most boring details of other people's mornings, I've realized how very little things like Twitter, FaceBook, or FriendFeed actually contribute to one's life: it's more like sitting in a room full of over-caffeinated narcissistic Tourette's patients with ADHD who are all trying to be the most entertaining. And, really, what's so social about a monologue?"
TechCrunch: Searchtastic Throws Its Hat Into The Twitter Search Engine Ring What makes the search engine interesting is the ability to pull up Tweets from weeks or months ago, which Twitter’s own search engine doesn’t allow you to do. Twitter’s search currently lets you see Tweets from a week and a half back
The tweet is the atom at Twitter, the building block. The update is that building block at Facebook. But the Facebook wall is opaque. Once an update - and that includes links - goes down the wall, it is pretty much lost. Only the fresh content counts. And it should not be that way. And I have yet to come across a decent Twitter search engine. How hard can it be? Twitter hosts all the tweets on its servers. It is not like you need to send out spiders out there to forage the world wide web.
You should be able to search through all your tweets and all your Facebook updates. But Facebook has never even attempted to facilitate that search. Only the fresh content counts. That is sad.
The archives are the repository, the archives matter. How about being able to search through your updates and the updates of your friends as well, or at least of those who don't mind?
Facebook buying FriendFeed has been one of the more exciting developments in tech as of recent. There has been much speculation as to if Facebook did it for the talent or the product. It has to be both. Facebook had been copying little features here and there from FriendFeed. So why not go all the way and acquire?
If you think social media is a sideshow, possibly even a distraction, then this is hum-ho news. But if you think social media is no hype, that it is a big deal, like I do, this is a huge deal. This merger is a big deal.
But this is not a Twitter killer merger like some have been suggesting. Twitter is in a slightly different space. FriendFeed was half way between FriendFeed and Facebook in terms of functionalities. It was a choice between imitating Twitter and acquiring FriendFeed. Facebook made the right choice.
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