Paul Papadimitriou

You are so unfollowed.

The race to zero has started. A race towards quality. A race toward real connections. A race towards intimate yet broadcasted bridges. To a real social architecture on the web.

Twitter is on the verge of becoming a huge link machine, a vast broadcast microphone. I’m not sure it’s lost some if its appeal that brought me there in the first place, but it’s certainly changing, making me alter the way I’m using it.

Like many, I’ve tried auto-following people that were following me for a very short while -when SocialToo appeared –I even tried the auto-dm, what a nightmare. It was unsatisfying. I ended up not knowing the people I was following and those didn’t seem to be interested in what I was writing.

That was in 2008.
Fast forward today.
I was right. Somewhat unknowingly.

Here’s the rub: who you follow defines you.

Robert Scoble’s views about endorsement are correct. As far as last week, I was trying to convince myself that following someone on Twitter wasn’t a gesture of endorsement.

It is.

It definitively is. And how can I endorse random people connecting to me without even really knowing them? Without having a sense of who they are.

True, Chris Brogan has a point when he goes into explaining his endorsement strategy. It’s valid, however only to those who see it that way:

the line between endorsement and friending varies on a person-by-person case

I might not consider a follow an endorsement, I might not consider a LinkedIn connection an endorsement, but if the other thinks it is, my point is lost.

The major shift for Twitter is when it became a massive discovery machine with both its search engine and the users embracing retweets (I’m on the fence about hasthags, though).

I don’t need to follow people to find content anymore, I don’t need to follow people to be listened.

Will listen only those interested. Will listen only those who care. Nice if mutual care, but with both overlapping and different interests every person possess, there is actually no need for reciprocal follow.

I don’t care if people I’m interested in don’t follow me. It doesn’t matter. I can still interact with them, there’s no limiting factor as in the Facebook reciprocal world –which is why I’m moving towards a Page, whatever people think about it. Point is:

I’m getting smarter again so want to share what I’m seeing with other people.

Sorry, if you’re some affiliate marketer promising me massive returns, I’m not interested. You might have a valid message. But not interesting enough to me.

You might even have an interesting message buried in so many updates, but I’m not willing to cope with the noise. And I ask you to do the same with me.

This all boils down to noise and absence of context.

I had a debate over noise with Rick Martin. His blogging, like mine, is sometimes all over the place –again, because of many interests. He said that it was hard to know where I resided online and he was right.

Joseph Tame even jokingly mentioned my numerous domains.

Yet, what I want is only what Rick rightly points out:

you can be on as many social networks as you want — but if you’re not taking the time to share the shit that matters most to you, then you really aren’t being very social at all.

It was an attempt to cut the noise. By allowing people to chose amongst my blogs, I wanted to filter my outputs through various prisms.

Most of the current tools, from Feedly reading to the hide function in Friendfeed puts the recipient in the noise-fine-tuning cockpit. It shouldn’t be this way. It’s up to everyone of us to define our own social architecture. It should be the responsibility of the sender to sort his messages.

That’s today biggest flaw about lifestreams platforms. The output can be overwhelming, to the point of becoming useless.

Same goes for Twitter, a lifestream of sorts. Do you really care about everything I say? You probably don’t:

What can be said in 140 characters is either trivial or abridged; in the first case it would be better not to say it at all, and in the second case it would be better to give it the space it deserves.

The evolution of blogging is a necessity, but it has to go further than Posterous (for all the love I have towards this service). Having a central command to share news is only the first step.

The second step will be more complex. The tools will have to evolve with better management of tagging or labels, to allow selective content to be displayed to selected recipients and the bloggers and lifestreamers alike will have to responsibly use them.

tweets are broadcast indiscriminately. I think this further devalues them

Context doesn’t need endorsement. Only people do. By freeing yourself of the 140 character limit from time to time, you’ll allow your content to be the endorser and reduce the noise.

It’s not enough to create content. As you know, anyone with an opinion, a keyboard, camera, or microphone, fueled by the desire to freely and perpetually share it, can do so at will nowadays. The question is, how do you as an authentic and genuine aficionado or maestro convince me that you’re believable, qualified, and ready to lead? Build the bridges that connect you to those whom you can soundly advise… Once we understand how to build the bridges that connect knowledge and aspiration, we ultimately become accomplished and experienced social architects.

–link: Building Bridges Between Knowledge and Aspiration | PR2.0

To be honest, I still haven’t found the appropriate way to cut my own noise. Until I do, please accept my apologies.

What a day it was. What a week it was.

Last Friday, the launch event of TEDxTokyo was held in the Japanese capital. The independently organized TED talks was months in the making, by a great team of highly-dedicated people that wanted to add new voices to the Ideas Worth Spreading.

Andrew and I were contacted in the days leading to the May 22 event and volunteered to implement its social web presence. In a matter of days, we used all our expertise to define objectives, setup a strategy and choose the correct technology tools.

The idea was to allow people that couldn’t physically attend TEDxTokyo at the Miraikan to be able to follow the events of the day live via social media tools and a live stream.

Gotcha Media kindly offered the live casting of the event, with their very high quality stream technology. From there, we wanted to tell people to tune in to the live page that was being built.

As we wanted the conversation to get going, but also to facilitate the following of the event for those who couldn’t watch the stream -Friday was a working day after all-, we got our friend and technology enthusiast Steve onboard to run an English Twitter stream. We quickly decided on an official hashtag to get people to expand on the official presence. Moreover, we took the decision that while the event was to be run in English, the Japanese audience was key. The stellar Fumi joined us to run the Japanese Twitter feed.

We then worked on a Facebook presence, creating two Pages for the bilingual audience, as to accomodate an audience that is not using Twitter and because it would allow “Fans” to receive updates after the launch event, TEDxTokyo being a on-going experience.

Then again, we thought. Reading about it and watching a stream is one thing. Feeling like being there is another. We hence decided to record live moments with a small camera and upload them to YouTube and Facebook throughout the day. Live snapshots, via pictures on Flickr, were added to the bunch and people were encourage to share their own moments via a group.

By means of an announcement on the official blog, crowdsourcing began. Using our networks, communities and friends, only 1 day before the event, we shared about the Idea Worth Spreading of a TEDx in Tokyo.

What a day it was.

The team worked like clockwork. Fumi, Steve and Andrew were on the scene, reporting and engaging. I was in Manila, living the experience as anyone else would, giving feedback, ensuring quality control. Steve and I were updating the English channel. People joined the conversation. People tuned into the live stream. People shared. Our hearts were beating with excitation. Our minds were filled by the marvelous stories of the speakers.

We got 3500+ people watching. For a live page that didn’t existed the day before…
We went to #3 in the Twitter trends. For a hashtag and Twitter accounts that didn’t existed 2 days prior…

Wow. Thank you. Thanks to the community for having been there with us. You made our day.

Todd Porter and Patrick Newell deserve my utmost respect for their labor of love -and sweat- of setting up the whole TEDx in Japan. Creating the echo-chamber and the conversation online is all about having something interesting to share. I had the best material to work on.
Huge thanks also go to Cara, it was an honor working with you. Garr for being his stellar-self.
Carolyn, Erik, Jason, Bastian, David, Steve: what a pleasure to collaborate with you all!
…and f I forget anyone, please comment, you deserve it.

Finally, I would like to thank Andrew, Steve and Fumi for being such a fantastic team to work with. I’d do anything to relive that day with you. Wait… we will! TEDxTokyo is a new chapter in a enchanting story.

I was reading this Slate article today, and it struck me once more: people love Facebook, yet they tend to find the service “creepy”. Pardon me, but it’s just naive.

150 millions users, apparently logging in at least once a day. Yes, Facebook is a runaway success. It has made a long way since it’s college-alumni model to a friends-everywhere network.

While some would say that its catch is the mix of voyeurism and exhibitionism, I beg to differ.

Why people join Facebook?

You know what’s the first reason people use Facebook? To reconnect with old friends. And that’s why they keep coming back.

That’s also why I signed in in the first place and certainly why you did too.

I was curious to see how people did interact and who I could find. Well, past colleagues, alumni, long-lost friends, I could find them all and it’s been a rewarding experience to reconnect.

Voyeurism?

Does that make you, me and the 150m others a community of voyeurs?

Well, of course, you could spend hours watching people putting their family pictures, but do you really care? Do you really have the time to do that? And, more to the point, is it Facebook’s fault?

Let me remind those who enjoy criticizing that Facebook is only a platform. No one is forcing you to join and no one is certainly forcing you to put your life online!

And even if we can all admit that procrastinating by staying far too long on the platform happens to the best of us, it’s, again, not Facebook’s fault.

Just stick with one motto, discipline, and you’ll be fine.

Privacy is a choice

Now, if people finding Facebook “creepy” are not actually spending their time watching others’ online lives, their claims must be based on a feeling of others’ prying on their online activity.

Another reminder: it’s all about what you put online. Don’t start adding drunken-parties pictures and then lament that a employer was able to catch them. Don’t engage in touchy subjects like politics and religion if you don’t want others to find out.

Don’t be naive, everything you put online will be found in a way or another. Be smart about it.

Then, come on, Facebook has maybe the best privacy settings management there is, as far as social networks go! You can decide, on an individual level, who is going to have access to your pictures (or set of pictures), the events you’re creating, the notes your writing, to the links you’re sharing.

People that don’t try these and then complaint are just lazy. Full point.

Friends v. Friendship

Another often-heard critic is about the “Friend” term. Are all the people connected with you really “friends”?

It’s just semantics, not a real debate. Friends, in the social networking space, means network. And it’s up to you to decide how you consider the term. If you want to connect with only the people you know, just don’t accept random friend invites. Be coherent.

In my Facebook network, some “Friends” are people I’ve met, some are business partners, some are people I share an interest with and some, the minority -real lasting friendships are scarce- are my real friends.

And like in life, I don’t share the same debates and interests with all of them. On Facebook, I simply use the friends’ list option and privacy settings to fine-tune the activities I display to those different breed of friends.

When not a single business-related “friend” ever gets access to my private pictures, the service does not “creepy”. That’s as simple as that.

Ok, I’ll admit it, there’s one fault-line in my argument: people putting pictures of me without my consent.  That’s where you should be attentive. Being on Facebook gets you more public. Having worked in a highly public job in the past, I deal with it with manner: directly contacting the person. In 99% of the cases, the problem is solved.

Facebook 2.0

Now that you’ve got all this false-debates out of your mind, you can go to the next step and learn that Facebook is not only to reconnect with friends. It also can be a very good tool for networking, telling people about your business or events.

Take me: I came to Japan not knowing a single soul and I wanted to set up my consultancy business. I wanted to learn, I needed exposure and I needed a network.

Searching for people with shared interests, looking at fan pages, exploring and creating groups, browsing through events did put me on the map

That’s bullet-proof: it’s what you want to do with it that will decide how you feel about Facebook. Don’t just be passive. Be proactive.

Trust me, with the current game-changer worldwide trend of a Facebook adoption by a more mature audience, there’s a lot to ponder beyond just listening to people telling you how “creepy” Facebook is.

Look at your Twitter feed. Retweet is the new Twitter trend, but there’s no cohesion on how it’s done.

Until Twitter decides to implement the feature directly, the developers are having a innovation field day on how to do it:

Retweet @, RT @, via @, etc.

Since we get only 140 characters to get a message through and because the acknowledgement is both necessary and polite, many tend to think there should be no question about it:  go the TweetDeck way, use RT @.

It’s short, effective and to the point. Is it really?

Have your say and comment!

[poll id="2"]

iRovr.com, a social media experiment launched on the iPhone/iPod Touch only, is having lots of trouble lately. It goes without saying that competition is hard these days in the social media sphere.

Legacy gone

The founder recently sent a message to all the iRovr users, both on the service and by e-mail, explaining that financial difficulties were forcing him to cut down on the service.

From now on, entries without comments won’t last more than 30 days on the server, to “cut the fat”

In line with the industry?

Well, the founder says that this decision is in line with the industry. It’s true to a certain point. But such a massive scale-back has other roots.

Lack of mass adoption first. iRovr.com was a great idea from the start, but what was touted as an iPhone-only experiment might also be the reason of it’s current slump. Most services do not rely on a single platform, they exist on the web, then branch out to the iPhone and other mobile platforms (usually with a simple web application in that latter case). iRovr doesn’t even have a web presence to market itself, making it even more difficult to attract users.

Lack of native application, secondly. With the success of the Apple handset, most services have started creating platform-specific applications (or relied on others to do so for Twitter). If Friendfeed and Plurk are the striking examples of tools not yet natively ported, they have some time on their side for they do not rely on the phone exclusively. iRovr doesn’t and hasn’t been able (for lack of Apple’s promise to blend web apps into a kind of MobileSafari less experience) or willing (for lack of money, certainly) to create one.

No ROI

If the iPhone-only approach clearly did cut iRovr.com from a whole market of users craving to use fun social network services, the monetization is the other big issue. With all current services scratching their heads about monetization (or having gone the way of massively attracting user to leverage future income), iRovr.com was never in a good place: the founder explained on an iRovr entry that the ads clickthrough, his only source of revenue, were paltry.

I’m personnaly sad to learn about iRovr’s woe, for it is very innovative and fun to use. If a good idea doesn’t always makes a good business, let’s hope, for competition sake, that the service doesn’t disappear altogether.

I’m papadimitriou on iRovr.

I stumbled upon an interesting read today, comparing Twitter and Plurk.

Ed Rowan mentions in his latest blog post that Plurk in content-centric while Twitter is user-centric.

While true to a point and besides the technical difficulties that Ed relates, I won’t be going to Plurk for my daily interaction. Here’s why.

Audience

In all certainty, Plurk is a sleeper in the micro-blogging today. It is the tool that has gained the more traction behind the heavyweight master that Twitter is. Does it make it a success? I doubt it.

Just read the taglines of the two services. Twitter gets to the point: “What are you doing?”. It’s a conversational tool, for friends and co-workers. Wishful thinking maybe, but it gets the job done. It’s simple, to the point. 140 characters and nothing more.

Plurk, on the other hand, defines itself as a social journal and only mentions what can be described as the fun part of micro-blogging. Yes, Facebook did that too when it started, but has now gone from a pure college-friendly tool to a more complete service where mostly everyone wanting to can find a niche.

Design

No fuss for Twitter, did I just mention. Calls for more have not been answered, except from search (and maybe some OAuth coming soon after the phishing debacle permitted mostly, it must been said, by naive Twitter user -since when do you give your credentials in the wild?-). Everything else rests on what I call the Twitter Economy, services ranging from trending to retweet ranks, from attempts to define authority to feeding services, from desktop & mobile apps to grouping tool.

Even FriendFeed gets more and more users for the commenting synchronization that it allows.

When you take a look at your Plurk page, it’s another story. You get Karma, you get a nice-looking, if somewhat difficult to follow, “stream” of entries. Yes, I do love the fact that entries and answers are, in a way, threaded, or content-centric, like Ed says, but the whole thing around is distracting. It’s fun to be there, but doesn’t allow me to get my job done, which is broadcasting and communicating not only with friends, but mainly with people interested in the same area as I do.

Where’s the money

In the end, the fate expecting all the micro-blogging platforms will depend on their ability to monetize their services. Twitter is the only one I see that actually gets a shot, for its network effect (the sheer number of users is growing day by day) but also for the whole array of services it has allowed to be created around it.

It’s not rock-solid, but it’s a whole economy that people wish to use, whatever the complaints coming along every second day.

Niche

Maybe, just maybe, Plurk could find a niche market for itself. Since it has not profiled itself towards any business use, I would say that the whole corporate world is off. The Plurk funny way of micro-blogging might attract a young audience and, in the end, allow it to be bought by a bigger player wishing to either jump on the micro-blogging bandwagon or integrate a status-like service to what it’s already offering.

Time will tell.

You can find me on Twitter, Plurk and Friendfeed.