This week my supervisor, two of my office mates (Amir and Payam) and I have been working hard putting together a presentation we’ve recorded for a conference in Algeria on Sunday.
I laid out the slides in Keynote, using my color scheme (luckily the others were OK with the pink). We’ve been impressed with how easy it has been to record in Keynote, although I think due to the number of takes there are some glitches where the audio doesn’t quite match with the slides.
It’s taken longer than expected – I think we all got quite perfectionist, and when checking it the playback always started from the beginning – meaning with each additional person it took longer to check everything was working OK! Also – I hate listening to myself present. I say “So…” at the start of every slide!
The slides are available on slideshare (I’ve embedded it below). You may notice that my section is very similar to the presentation I prepared the other week, although I’ve had to add some text to the slides. You can also download the QuickTime movie here (it’s Benyoucef.mov and note – the first section is in French) my section starts at around 32:30.
I’m going to start this by saying that if you’re thinking about using Twitter to communicate with your friends, that’s a job that can be done fine by Facebook. Especially if you have a smart phone.
Of course your friends who are using Twitter are probably using it differently from Facebook (danah boyd has some commentary on that here). I definitely use these services differently, I tend to post more frequently on Twitter, share way more stuff, and Facebook I use to communicate with people who aren’t on Twitter, or for statuses that are too personal for public consumption.
Anyway, the other day one of my friends said that he was quitting Twitter because it was pointless and Facebook did everything Twitter could do (and more). And so I directed him to my Why Twitter isn’t a Pointless Waste of Time post and said – how do you replicate information gathering on Facebook. And he said – groups.
I disagree, because I think Twitter gives you so much control over your stream, and you can’t have that in a Facebook group. And my friend said, no you can be the administrator and then you can have that much control.
And I guess he is right. I could be the despotic dictator who says who can be in my group and subject them to rules depending on who they are. So friends can post anything, but people who I’m following for inspiration can’t say anything depressing (or religious) or they’re gone. Techies can’t wax lyrical about Windows 7 otherwise I’ll get bored and kick them out. And there’ll be an eclectic mix of people – techies, atheists, newspapers, academics, friends and the people who relay what’s hot right now. But they’ll have to coexist peacefully and I don’t expect to see much cross-subject discussion – this isn’t an exercise to encourage them interacting (unless they already are), nor can they complain if I get bored and get rid of someone else. And they have to be posting regularly, I want to see perhaps 200 posts a day.
But somehow I don’t think people would participate under these conditions, and even if they did that it would work as well as Twitter does. Do you?
I’ve created my slides for my presentation (abstract) following a Presentation Zen (Amazon) approach. So there are basically no words on any of my slides. I’m going to lay them out one by one, with narration. Let me know what you think!
Title Slide
I’ve gone for a blank template. I wonder if this is too plain and could use some background color? Let me know what you think. The color of the lettering matches the color scheme for my soon-to-be-launched website.
This is where I introduce myself and what I’m talking about. I don’t really like this bit of presenting, so I’ll keep it brief.
The World Wide Web
Image from iStockPhoto
I’m going to start off by talking about the “World Wide Web” and trying to provoke a bit of thought about it. It’s relatively recent, and yet it’s game changing. How many of us could live without it? I certainly couldn’t. Whilst the internet has been around since the 1960’s, the web as we know it (with hyper-linked web pages) has only been around since 1989. But within 20 years we’ve got to the point where the web is basically infrastructure…
… like electricity. For more on how I think the internet is just infrastructure like electricity, running water, or roads, see this post.
Clay Shirky – Why I Ignore 5 Year Plans
Clay Shirky – giving us some needed perspective. I think when we reflect on what’s changed, and how recent it is, we realize that this is really just the start of it. I remember life-before-Facebook but I can’t imagine living without it, even though I’m not always sure that the level connectivity it gives us is a good thing (for more on my mixed feelings about Facebook, read this post).
Near-Universal Authorship
A couple of hundred years ago, all the information your average person had came from the Bible, if they could even read. Now, not only are rates of literacy very high but the internet gives everyone the ability to be a publisher of content too. There’s a fascinating article on this here.
How Web 2.0 is Changing the Way we Comminicate
I put this graphic up in this post. What I want to show here is that there’s a shift to newer technologies and that it’s a process. This diagram captures what I’m thinking and finding now, but no doubt in a year it will be different. Also important, is how many arrows are going into Twitter – it’s simplicity and flexibility mean that it’s a great way to do a whole variety of things. There’s definitely stuff that’s missing from the diagram – the thing is to balance what’s important with trying to include everything and making it impossible to follow.
Serendipitous Connections
Image from iStockPhoto
Something that isn’t represented in the previous diagram though, is the possibility of serendipitous connections. By lowering the bar to communication, and through ambient awareness we can have more “weak-tie” relationships. Think about how many people you’ve lost touch with but found (or had find you) on Facebook, or the number of people you “follow” on Twitter but have never met.
I don’t think Twitter is a Pointless Waste of Time, but a lot of people do. If you do think Twitter’s pointless, why do you? Have you tried it? Over the next couple of slides I’m going to talk a bit about the impact that Twitter has had on events and the reasons why I think it’s useful.
In the aftermath of the Iranian election, the US government intervened to change Twitter’s maintenance schedule so that it wouldn’t be down during the day in Iran. Twitter allowed Iranians to communicate with the outside world and express their distress at the rigged election. The governent’s reaction to this did not help their case.
I was working in Shanghai during the summer, and when the riots started they shut down Facebook and Twitter (at the time, I wrote this post). When I was there in 2007, you couldn’t access Wikipedia – but this time I could. This makes me think that the government is no longer afraid of information – it’s afraid of the conversation.
What's the Connection Between the British Parliament and an Irish Pop Star?
As a Brit, I tend to follow the news over there and the other week two things happened. The first one that a law firm got an injunction to prevent a newspaper reporting from a question to be asked in parliament regarding some toxic waste and a firm called Trafigura. The newspaper (the Guardian – read their story here) could only report that they couldn’t report anything about the MP asking the question or the question itself. However some smart people soon worked out what the question was and soon #trafigura was trending – causing the very awareness that they had sought to prevent.
The seond thing that happened was that this pop star died, of a heart condition. However he was gay, and with his husband at the time so it was enough to get some vile columnist in the Daily Mail to write a homophobic diatribe about him. Her name was soon trending as people expressed outrage (interestingly the Wikipedia article on Jan Moir consists of little more than the story of this).
I think what these two events show, is that Twitter provides a forum for people to express their frustration with all kinds of things – whether it’s concern over restrictions of reporting on parliament or just celebrity gossip. It also captures what people are getting angry, or excited about. Trending topics can answer what’s hot right now – Apple trends whenever it has an announcement, Windows 7 and even Ubuntu 9 were trending on their release.
Trend Graph for #trafigura and "Jan Moir"
Trendistic is a service that allows us to graph how often words are occurring in Tweets. We can see that #trafigura rapidly became popular and disappeared again quickly once the injunction had been lifted. “Jan Moir” has a wider curve, and there was another flurry of mentions when she released an apology a week later.
Information Gathering
Image from iStockPhoto
Information gathering is the best use I get out of Twitter, and I feel it’s something that it would be hard to replicate anywhere else with as little effort. Follow leaders in your field, or just people who work in a similar area to you who tweet interesting stuff they found, or people who inspire you. I get so much information this way, and it doesn’t take very long to go through it. I’m literally crowd-sourcing my news! And if someone I’m following tweets too much or I lose interest I can un-follow them. Lists are going to make this even easier.
Ambient Awareness / Ambient Intimacy
Image from iStockPhoto
Ambient Awareness is like the Facebook newsfeed. It’s passively letting information about your friends lives come to you. But on Twitter, people often update more often – so if it’s someone you’re really fond of it can be better than Facebook for staying in touch with their lives. Two of my good friends live in London and I love the little bits of their lives that I see on Twitter and we definitely use ambient awareness to stay in touch. I was having a lousy day last week and I tweeted about it and one of my friends sent me a message just saying “*hug*”. When another friends released his work project (Google Sync) and it hit the trending topics, it was really nice to share his excitement about it in real time.
Twitter is amazing for overhearing what your customers are saying about your business. There was actually a paper published earlier this year analyzing brand sentiment on Twitter. Businesses (and non-profits, like @kiva) that get it are on Twitter seeing what’s being said about them and taking part in the conversation.
I wrote more about customer relationship management in this post.
Conversations on Twitter
Image from iStockPhoto
I think conversations are a great way of measuring engagement on Twitter, and this is what I’m working on at the moment. If your a brand, how engaged are you with your community? If you’re an individual, how engaged are you with the people you’re following? Are you passively absorbing content or are you sharing, adding value? If you’re a spammer, no-one’s talking to you!
Who's Following You?
Image from iStockPhoto
It’s possible to have a large number of followers by either paying for them, or by following people in the hopes they’ll follow you back (and unfollowing those that don’t) until eventually you have several thousand people “following” you.
But are they listening? Or are they just spammers? If they were listening you’d expect at least some of them to be talking to you.
Is Anyone There?
So I decided that follower/following counts were basically meaningless, and wrote a program that will graph your conversation network (more on that in this post).
And it’s fascinating, because someone’s graph really says a lot about the kind of user they are. Are they a power-user? A regular user? A spammer? A light user?
My Conversation NetworkSpammer Conversation NetworkPower User Conversation NetworkModerate User Conversation NetworkLight User Conversation Network
It’s nice how you can see the different networks that he’s a part of here. I hope to use a clique finding approach to draw out this kind of information for bigger and busier networks.
This one is interesting – the network is fairly connected, if it wasn’t for the big ball of purple in the middle (@NonaCobbzea) it would look pretty normal. She’s sending unwanted @ messages with the same link in each one to a weird “blog” that’s a overly descriptive of certain aspects of her life I’d rather not know about. But is it working? Most likely it’s driving traffic, but no-one’s talking to her and hopefully Twitter will kick her off soon.
There’s a bit of an Ottawa focus, so I wonder if the connectedness in the graphs is a result of that.
I got another irrelevant @ message. The content of this one was a link to … you knew where I was going with that. I don’t need to say it! Check out the graph for the originator – @BaileyWolfeaem:
@BaileyWolfeaem's Twitter Conversation Network
Again, lots of one way links to “normal” Twitter uses (who have reciprocal conversations). the graph is huge (goes way off the screen) and quite sparsely connected.
Another spammer, this one better disguised, brought to my attention by @smiffy:
Again, the one way links and a fairly small graph. Obviously for this spammer what I really want to graph are who’s following who – I have a theory that there is a clique of bots all following one another and spewing out spam – but this is difficult because of the way the API works and the limitations on calls. I’m working on it, though!
Finally, below is the graph for @connectcreators – I don’t think they’re a spammer, in fact what they’re doing looks like a good initiative but I do think they need to “connect” more!
I used Twitter’s new “Report as Spam” feature today for the first time, after I got a bizarre @ message from @billy_Napper_ (Following 0, 0 Followers) about the top 10 hosting sites. I don’t pretend to know all the different kinds of spam on Twitter, but there are those spammers that follow you in order to get you to follow back and click on their links (I talked about them in this post) and then there are the kind that send you unwanted @ messages.
Notice the one way links (purple) and the disjointed network (although I’m surprised it’s not more disjointed). The graph is also large relative to the number of people he’s following/being followed by.
Gives you something to think about, huh? This stuff that’s so natural to us is new and game changing. Who knows what will be different in 5 years time? I can’t wait.
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