Tag Archives for twitter
Brian Stetler, the NYTimes journalist who made his name by covering the Arab Spring via Twitter, lost 90 pounds by tweeting about the food he ate.
This confirms two suspicions — losing weight is not about a special diet or a special technique. Weight and body image is an almost entirely social construct that depends on how we think others see us. The other thing it confirms for me is that people hire social media to get jobs done that are at first blush antithetical to our perception of social media as a mere broadcast channel for our thoughts and the media we consume.
Social media, as Whitney Johnson eludes to in her examination of how we hire social media, is only a tool because of “how” we use it. It is nothing on its own. You can find that article at our Jobs-to-be-Done Quora board.
Angry commenters get a lot of air time, and they can drain you. But what if you are looking for just smart and helpful people?
Imagine if you could conduct a global search for anyone commenting on anything in any comment field on any blog or web site with a content engine built into it. Imagine if you are not looking to have an argument about baseball or truffles, but you are actually looking to start a business, or figure out a line of code?
Can you do that by trawling through the billions of comments on the web? Maybe you will soon.
Type in your search query in a search box, and then suddenly you see all of the people who have commented on, say, “education.” You not only see who said what, or where they said it, but you also see the commenting context around it.
It’s coming. William Mougayar has created the beta test for this in engag.io. And it’s remarkably prescient design, as it focuses on what I believe will be the central task of web engagement in the next few years — finding experts you know you want to know, but whom you don’t know you know.
I interviewed him today to figure out what is going on with engag.io. In short, they are soon to move from beta to something more global, though specifics are scant. What I can say is that he’s the inspiration for my thoughts here. I include some writing about what we talked about, and at the end I tack on a Q&A I sent him.
Before you read on, here is the nut graf: I think that’s what is happening to Twitter is not a competition with Sina Weibo — different countries, different folks; different economies of scale. I think the engineers and developers at Twitter are just trying to find a broad base on which most people can be happy, while the people at Twitter try to get done the jobs they want done, which, on a guess, must be: rake in advertising dollars; spread Twitter; spread the user base; incorporate more information.
Image via CrunchBase
Now read on if you would like the reason why I don’t think Twitter is just adapting to look more like Sina Weibo.
Bloggers typically reach for shorthand techniques when describing developments in the tech landscape. This writeup of Sina Weibo and Twitter is not an exception. I respect the folks at Penn Olson, but I think there is a fundamental flaw in writing about tech.
The platform we are describing cannot describe the user. It only describes the platform. Why is distinction important?
Because, even if Twitter was doing things to look like Sina Weibo — which I kind of doubt — the users are the ones that determine what the platform does. The way around this is to interview and talk to Sina Weibo users, and Twitter users, to get some idea of how they are using the platforms to get jobs done.
That being said, Steven Millward at Penn Olson says that Twitter is becoming more like Sina Weibo. Perhaps, structurally. But when you read through the blog post, the claim is rather shaky, since the changes that have been coming to Twitter also mimic those of other social platforms.
Finally, Twitter’s side pane now shows more information, such as suggestions as to who to follow, and some of the hottest trends. Of course, Facebook has been doing this for even longer, as part of the way it draws you in to the service.
Having said all that, I really like the redesign, and I like how it follows Twitter’s ethos whilst also adding some much-needed features.
I think it’s more likely that there is a universal way of presenting information that works for the granular user — that there are no universal users but there are techniques that designers can acheive that make those multi-various users experience the social platform in a cogent way.
At the heart of this I think is that we are all learning that there is no power user who can be the holy grail for how people use a social platform. Everyone’s needs are different.
I always think about this stuff in terms of relationships: we could all go forward and say I want a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. Most of us, if we swing that way, could make that happen. But I bet the percentage of people who are really happy in that setup is small compared to the percentage of people that are a little uncomfortable in that setup but can get along in it.
I think that’s what is happening to Twitter. I think the engineers and developers are just trying to find a broad base on which most people can be happy, while the people at Twitter try to get done the jobs they want done, which, on a guess, must be: rake in advertising dollars; spread Twitter; spread the user base; incorporate more information.
Does that make sense? What would you add to this framework?
