Alpha Mind Blog

In the FIR FriendFeed room, Dan York asks:

Surprised to not yet see a thread about Facebook aquiring Friendfeed… Anyone care about it?

Most of the comments in reply to Dan’s question focus on what we as social media users might do given the uncertainty about the future of the two channels. In reply Andrea Vascellari (in the 9th comment on his own blog post) takes note of the engineering-heavy team at FriendFeed, but other than that this conversation hasn’t dealt much with the strategic implications of the purchase and the long-range possibilities they suggest.

I”m trying to tease out those implications.

I haven’t tried to study the issue in depth, but I’ll put forward some tentative conclusions anyway.

First, I don’t think facebook’s management are likely to merge the two channels into a single hybrid. In fact, I believe part of the strategy may be to let them live on as quite different tools.

Second, I do believe that the heavy hitters on FriendFeed’s development team may have been a juicy temptation to the acquirer, but I don’t believe this means any great change in the development paths of the two.

Why do I believe these things?

Mostly, my thinking focuses on key differences in the paradigms of the two channels. Facebook is a walled garden. Google does not crawl it and cannot deliver its pages. In response to the growth of Twitter, facebook’s management has taken some steps to make the channel more Twitter-like, but these steps haven’t generally been well received. For example, there’s been considerable annoyance expressed over the change that made the fully public profile the default. The purchase of FriendFeed may well arise out of an understanding on facebook’s part that the walls of the garden may be desirable. And not just because so many users say so, but, more importantly, because the walls, coupled with facebook’s phenomenal growth, mean that there’s an increasingly important part of the web which Google can’t reach, read, deliver, or monetize.

So, while Twitter with its openness threatens facebook with its walls, and while those walls themselves are valuable, what’s their owner to do? I think the correct answer is: Build its own open property, so that its closed property may safely be kept fenced. Only by keeping the walled and unwalled paradigms separate can facebook hope to take on Twitter while also claiming territory from Google.

Another clue to this is the APIs of facebook versus FriendFeed. I myself don’t know much about APIs, having given up coding years ago (beyond fairly simple Perl scripts). But I trust Dave Winer’s judgment on these things. Winer said, in the August 17th episode of Rebooting the News, that the FriendFeed API is far more approachable and usable than that of facebook. My thinking is that while this may in part be an accident of FriendFeed’s having a superior development team, it’s very likely that the difference falls out from the open versus closed paradigms that have been architected into the two tools from the beginning. Like Twitter, FriendFeed has established itself as a platform, while facebook is a closed channel. In keeping with these paradigms, the API for Twitter and FriendFeed will have been built with an eye toward application to be built around the platform, while that for facebook looks for applications to be built within the channel. The first sort of API has to be far more structured, robust, and flexible than the second, which can afford to be something of an afterthought.

So, like Meghan Keane, I believe the greatest value of FriendFeed to facebook is in search: but I go farther in believing that this value can’t be delivered unless the two tools are kept separate and different. This means that each must be faithful to its own paradigm.

Here is a first cut at a table of some features of the two paradigms.

This post expresses an opinion loosely held. I put it forward because I believe FriendFeed and facebook are both important tools (or channels, as I’ve called them here), and that their future matters. I believe strategic use of them in marketing and PR will depend on the user’s theory of their future, and I offer this as the beginnings of a framework for building such a theory.

I’d love to hear what others think.

So I resisted Twitter for as long as I could. Then after I got through resisting, I still didn’t use Twitter because I was too busy to use social media at all. Just when I thought I was ready to launch my podcast in earnest, I discovered my house needed massive rework in order to provide me with a usable office. I had a recording studio, but the office was more important.

Well, the house is redone. The office is pretty usable. And I’ve almost mastered using my iPhone as a PDA, and I’m reasonably productive again. I have enough client work to keep me fed and not enough to break my back. So, no further excuse exists not to use Twitter.

Except that Twitter drives me mad.

But now I’ve used it enough to love it, so I need to do something with my madness other than avoid Twitter.

Solution: CCCHHHIIIIRRRRPPPP!

Given that what drives me mad is the infernal terseness of it all, I’m reserving to myself the right, starting today, to make enormous tweets here on my blog, and then use Twitter to point to them.

Actually, the concept is a little more refined than that. My hope is that, about once a week, I’ll take a single tweet of someone else’s, and riff on it here in a way that 140 characters wouldn’t permit.

My next post will demonstrate.

Some good weekly Twitter chats have arisen that draw public relations pros. I want to take part in them when I can.

I’ve found that looking up their starting times takes a little longer than I think it should.

To resolve that problem, I’ve made a simple list of PR-related hashtag chats, showing nothing but the hashtag, the day, and the time (Eastern Time).

Please let me know if there’s anything I should add or correct.

Shel Israel, discussing how BuzzLogic Calculates Influence, says:

What I liked was that this was a simple, straightforward measurement designed to see a monetary return on a hard dollar investment.

But, much of social media’s goals is less tangible.

(emphasis mine)

What he’s referring to at the start of the quote is Kami Huyse’s wonderful work calculating the ROI of the Sea World San Antonio campaign that launched their new roller coaster. It was a great case study by a fast-rising star of social PR.

But I’m struck by that last sentence of Shel’s quote (and not only by the grammatical gaffe.) When I heard Shel Holtz discussing Kami’s work on For Immediate Release, as soon as he mentioned measurement of ROI, and before he got into the meat of the segment, I remember thinking “Who measures the ROI of having a desk or wearing decent clothes?”

Yes, when you launch a social media campaign, you ought to think about how you’ll define and measure success. But if you’re still on the fence about using social media at all, I believe it’s time you started thinking about having a presence (on Twitter and a blog at minimum) in much the same way you think about basic office equipment and your business wardrobe. No, a social media presence isn’t a minimum requirement of doing business, not just yet, but that corner will be turned so soon, so suddenly, and so quietly, that you’re safest–by far–turning the corner yourself as soon as you can.

So, to stay with the same topic for a while:

Bryan Person  blogs about Comcast’s efforts to use Twitter to improve customer service.

He makes the point that Comcast is paying attention to everyone, not only to A-list bloggers.

Apparently that is a real, rather hot issue. Note the number of comments on Scoble’s post suggesting that, because he’s an A-list blogger, Robert is trying to bully Facebook.

I’m pretty sure companies take a blogger’s Technorati influence score into consideration when they think about how to respond to a blogger. It’s good to know other are treating the social media more democratically.

And I salute Bryan for pointing it out. Companies that behave this way deserve as much love as we little people can send them.

A bit more about Rodrigo Sepulveda’s little problem with Facebook:

Last week, through PRobecast, I learned about the 2-word pitch. Very simply, it’s a pitch consisting of “‘Google’ + [one other word]“. Of course, you can only use it if you ensure that the second word is a search term which, when entered into Google, will bring up your site.

It may be a solution for over-zealous scanning algorithms on over-yenta social media sites that don’t want you ever to send one of their users out to another domain. Rodrigo is probably right that Facebook, like YouTube, scans messages and disallows URLs (although YouTube practices prior restraint–it scans as soon as you hit the “post” button, and disallows the comment if it contains a URL).

The solution, of course, is not to use the URL, but to tell your friends what to Google. And of course, it doesn’t have to be a single word. If your site contains a unique combination of terms (remember GoogleWhacking?), Google will bring folks to your site. And YT and FB will probably let you do it without whinging.

Scoble says Facebook still sucks. His evidence: The eviction of Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda from the social site’s hallowed halls.

Herewith a continuation of what will surely be a series about how and why technology doesn’t work. Why so SO SO much of technology doesn’t work.

Soon, I hope, I’ll start writing about why everything’s busted. For this post, though, in addition to the above links, I’ll only note that after Lee Hopkins asked his readers how to manage personal information, and the comments ran 3 to 0 in favor of low-tech, he has gone with the new flow and shopped for the proper configuration of pen and paper. 

A couple of hours ago I tweeted thus:

Tempted to start blogging every piece of hard/software that doesn’t work. Could be a full-time job. Why do we put up w. so much rubbish?

Well, I’ve decided to go ahead and start doing it.

In no order whatsoever, here are just a very few of the broken, incomplete, badly designed, badly supported, just-plain-sucky things I’ve had to deal with in the past couple of weeks:

1. Blogger. I don’t think Google has made a single improvement to this mess since they bought it. It’s a rudimentary, feature-deficient, ugly, lousy blog platform.Today I blogged a post by a Blogger blogger (oy, that clause is a mess), and of course I couldn’t send a trackback, because Blogger doesn’t believe in trackbacks. But they’ve got this possibly-spiffy feature called “create a link,” which I hoped would be a simple interface for manually creating a trackback. Such a feature would have been a baby step out of the dark ages. But no, it’s a process by which, despite my already owning too many blogs, Blogger tries to compel me to create one using Blogger, so I can write a single post that links to the post I want to track back to. After I’ve already written my post that links.Later, of course, I learned that my link will show up automatically, after Google Blog Search finds it. But I learn this after I waste a good deal of time trying to understand a feature that should have been, but wasn’t, designed to follow existing standardsI remember an old joke:

   Q: How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light build? A: None. Bill has declared darkness a standard.

   Maybe it’s time to dust that one off and make a couple of substitutions on the names?

2. Windows Live Writer, about which I said something quite positive just a few days back. Here’s a post I put on one of my other blogs yesterday:

   And here’s what Windows Live Writer wanted me to deal with to get that post written:

   

   ‘Nuff said, I think.

More non-functioning junk coming in next few posts, including but not limited to:

• my Giant bicycle: four months after purchase, it’s at death’s door, but trying to kill me first…
• BlogTalkRadio: lots of time wasted with support people who provide absolutely no support…
• a GE can opener that sprays the whole kitchen with can juice.
• OpenOffice Writer: doesn’t permit Windows Vista to index contents of document files…
• Skype, whose SkypeOut service is absolutely unsuitable for business use…
• the city of Berkeley, which I love but is the most incompetently managed municipality I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen way too many municipalities)

And we might just get around to exploring the burning question:

With everything sucking this much, how long can the Kool-Aid last?

I’ve had prospective clients tell me they find it refreshing that I don’t gloss over any of the difficulties of blogging. The challenges are real, and I always point them out.

But I generally put things in a positive light. The way I see it, some of the hardest things about blogging are also the very best reasons to do it.

Prime among these is the openness it engenders. Simply put, to succeed at blogging, one must establish oneself as trustworthy. Notice I didn’t say “gain trust.” One must really be worthy of it.

My friend Robert Levering has made a career out of teaching one simple fact: The greatest single determinant of workplace quality is trust. And if corporate blogging can teach a firm or its manager a thing or two about trust, the entire organize benefits.

So I encourage companies to think of blogging as a tool, and not just a tool for marketing, for PR, or for ego-gratification. But as a tool for teaching one of the great corporate disciplines: authenticity.

I’ve been wanting to write the above paragraphs for months. I was spurred to do it by two posts on other blogs today which, I believe, form a pair.

1. Matt Cutts points to a Q&A with Udi Manbur, and quotes exactly the part of the article that also grabs me:

At Google we do not manually change results. For example, if we find for a particular query that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it. We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm—we have to go and actually change the algorithm. That is, we have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution. That makes the process slower, but it puts a lot more discipline on us and makes it more unbiased.

2. And Andrew Cline suggests that news organizations start calling each other out on published inaccuracies.

I’m sure you see the common theme. What Google does, and what newspapers generally don’t do, is set themselves a hard row to hoe. A row that, if you dare to hoe it, will have the long-term result that you’ll do more things better.

I believe the practice of blogging is a lot like both of these examples. Doing it will compel you to develop methods, not for giving good search results, but for designing micro-messages on the fly. And it will also invite the scrutiny of others, including one’s rivals, which will teach you habits of honesty and diligence.

Both disciplines–crafting messages well and cultivating those messages in the soil of authenticity, are important for any company. And the key fact of social media is that, for every organization, sooner or later, these skills will be not simply what differentiates the best, but matters of outright survival. Because the key fact of social media is that scrutiny is coming. Organizations of all kinds will need to learn to deal with it.

So why blog when it’s so hard? Because sooner is much better than later.

I started a new blog yesterday. Or maybe it was the day before; blogging does that to my sense of time.

I’ve decided to convince restaurateurs in greater Sacramento how easy and valuable it is to blog. I’ve started a pretty bare-bones site, Eats4Sacramento, which I intend to invite others to participate in. We’ll see how it goes…