How to force friends use Twitter?

When a new person gets inside Twitter he usually faces a problem that he doesn't actually know anybody out there. That's actually a huge problem for Twitter going mainstream. When you join Facebook you actually can just upload your photos and tell your friends you have a new album there or if somebody is already registered you can write a mail and the person will be notified, or you can just join some groups, see the photos of people you don't quite know add some apps. The point is that a person joining Twitter feels lonely with 0 followers and doesn't really have much to do. Due to some stats Twitter has something like 10.000.000 people registered but less then 10% ever come back.

What is vital for Twitter is to make use of your own contacts so your friends can be notified on what you write. Plaxo made exactly the same thing, the only difference is they were sending too much emails without people actually knowing all of their contacts get spammed. If it's a weekly or daily e-mail - it's a service, if you get a notification on everything without a chance to easily change settings it's spam.

But lets get back to the question of getting your friends use Twitter. Even if you make them register it won't help. A couple of services are still needed to make this work and I'll add the needed ones. At first give them your RSS feed to integrate as a live-bookmark or in their news-reader. Then explain that they can generate such a feed and can just update Twitter via IM, e-mail, SMS. The right way to get real friends inside Twitter is actually not to force them, but let them watch you and reply to you without changing their habits and the way of life they are used to.

Facebook's new design. One small step...

TechCrunch published an article with a screenshot of the future facebook's design.
Removing the left menu could be seen as a small step, however it isn't.

I actually expected this redesign since facebook started it’s app-platform. Keeping the left menu bar eats the space that could be used by apps. Now you have the chat with you and you are free to go anywhere. That's exactly the layout I use for my current project (mine is different of course, but i also keep all of the page free).

It can grow really big if facebook makes an effort to promote good apps made for it. Right now it’s not that interesting for serious developers, as promoting an app on facebook is almost as hard and expencive as promoting a standalone app. So if you don’t have a product that is designed to spam the contacts on facebook making an app for facebook or go standalone is a question. That leads to the fact that good apps are burried in tons of crappy apss making it hard for users to find them and moving serious developers away from making facebook a “platform of choice”. The very same mistake that google made launching it's i-google homepage. Services should be pre-selected and the user should have the possibility to switch it if they like the other one better. For example the micro-blogging button leads by default to twitter, but can be changed by the user to jaiku or pownce. Why force each user to check all the garbage to find a dimond he needs?

The web operational system.
As more and more apps are developed for the browser the importance of which PC you are using is going down. That's a real threat for microsoft and the current opportunity for the next Tech Star.
Though i really admire Yahoo I think Facebook is the only company right now that makes everything right. If microsoft wanted to ensure it's future business it should really buy facebook but with the team included. Without a team facebook is just a site that doesn't make huge profits now. Well I guess the search button will lead to live-search ) But that's not enough. Techcrunch is absolutelly right that google has the tech to make it's operational system, but they really mess the thing making everything a standalone project. You just can't drag-drop a note made in google-notebook to google-docs for example and a comfortable client to work offline is missing. My bet is that Facebook will be the most important web destingation soon if it actually improves it's messaging system.

The "walled garden".
I won't say Facebook should open up ) But the possibility to contact a person that is using Facebook from outside is vital. The thing is there are lots of people that don't want to be that public and we still write our e-mails on our business cards instead of the facebook/linkedin profiles. A business card could have an additional profile information, but without the possibility to contact a person that is registered in Facebook without having a profile there and a descent mail interface it just won't become a standart de-facto of internet messaging which is vital for the web operational system. You will be where all your contacts are.

The future in the world of thousends social networks :)

Some History
When people speak about social networks names like Facebook, Myspace, Hi5 and Friendster come in mind. However the idea isn't that new. Long before that, a site appeared on the web with a simple idea and a great domain name: classmates.com. The difference from the actual networks was is they actually charged money for their services and it was a very sucesfull site. Well... why was :) It is still very sucessfull and actually buys lots of advertising meaning it is profitable for them to advertise. In 2002 I was discussing with one friend a possibility to open a social network in a country that wasn't covered by classmates.com and we came upon a $1,5 Millions in advertising expences per country to gain enough momentum to become widely used. Unfortunate for us we couldn't get more then $750k together and we don't have a lot of venture funds nearby (3 in europe). Well it surely sucks doesn't feel great to know about the next big coming and watch it happen, but i got used to the fact that after 10 years in web I am better at predicting things and developing projects rather then pitching VCs and that's not the point of my post ) The point is that there are lots of companies that actually have the money and each of them wants an own social network. The calculation is simple who owns the means of communication, that owns the traffic that is then distributed to all the other projects. Let's leave alone Google with it's entry point strategy and huge media support making it near to impossible for any other search engine to establish itself regardless of the technology used. So what we are seeing now is that finding and contacting people gets tricky as they spread between social networks.

Why the hell do people use social networks?
An easy question for social network addicts is a hard thing for internet professionals. Exchanging photos and arranging meetings is great but it could be easily done via e-mail or IM. The thing all of the big companies missed in the battle over the best e-mail with the hugest mailbox size is actually that people don't know the e-mails of each other. Search engines meant to find people didn't establish and couldn't fullfill a basic need as it is impossible to advertise them - people rearly come back and don't bring the money spent on ads back. Right now Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are desperatelly searching for a way to gain control over the contacts that previusly lived in theirs hotmails, y-mails and gmails while the solution is just in their hands.

What's next
As the number of social networks will grow more people will be trying to "break free" and that's exactly what Facebook and others don't want. Well... GMail is really better then facebook's internal crappy messaging system and other companies like ZenBe roll out great solutions too. I won't even write about the usability of the home of thousends ugly pages where i spend 2 hours once a month (it is in my ToDo calender) trying to understand what people are doing there and keep up with the web. Last week Google, MySpace and Facebook all rolled out some solutions named simular to "DataPortability" and making exactly the other thing - send your visitors our way to login (or sign up) and you could have a fancy iframe on your site. Thanks for a generous offer, but i humbly reject ;) Many newspapers and blogs are atacking social networks to open the data and talking about it's the only way for survival however opening data is a straight way to the grave. This time social networks just made a move that's not too sweet for web developers, they have to roll out something better.

Will the "walled gardens" survive?
I guarantee not :) It's a del.ico.us piece of cake lots of companies and web-developers including me want to cost and work hard to make it happen. And we will ) Leading to a decentralised social web. Whoever loses, users win.

no © you can keep all the mistakes found in this text

What features do twitter users want?

In this post I'll gather links to posts and info about twitter feature requests.
10 Features I Wish Twitter Would Implement
Twitter Tools Wishlist

HashTags and Groups on Twitter.

Thinking about grouping and tagging on Twitter I have stumbled upon two interesting posts about this:
- Twitter Hashtags and Groups
- Why I Unfollow People Who Use Hashtags On Twitter

Theoretically HashTags could be a solution, but given that "#" signs actually eat up space in short Twitter messages I think that simply "not displaying" them by clients and twitter is not the best option. And acutally often you need to tag the message with a word that doesn't appear in the text.

My idea is to make an open database where Tags are stored.
So you can just press TAG on any message and assign a TAG to it.
Later on you can check posts of a special person, your friends or just everybody TAGed by you and the comunity with a special tag. So you can even navigate your own posts based on the tags assigened by your friends.

I would love to hear if you think that tagging is usefull for Twitter.
Fell free to drop me an email, reply here or make a blog post and notify me to link to it.

How do people update Twitter?

In this post i want to focus on the stats I gathered about the distribution of twitter updates. The data simply represents % of the posts made with each service. Twitter-addicts usually use clients and update more frequently so if we would want to track unique users instead of posts ammounts I expect the weight of web-updates would rise dramatically. I'll digg more inside the stats as i move on with my project.
Please note, that "TwitterFeed" actually updates Twitter automatically without user interaction. So as i move on in this post, I'll break data into smaller sections.

update method popularity web 46,83% im 5,83% txt 5,17% twitterfeed 6,67% twit 6,50% twhirl 6,33% twiterrific 5,17% P3:PeraPeraPrv 2,33% twitterfox 1,83% twinkle 1,67% movattwitter 1,50% other 10,17%

Let's see how it looks like if we compare the services that twitter owns vs. 3d party clients. RSS updates are excluded from the calculation.

update method Twitter + TXT + IM 3d party clients popularity 62% 38%

And the most popular Twitter clients in May were:

update method popularity twhirl 17,84% twiterrific 14,55% twit 18,3% twitterfox 5,16% P3:PeraPeraPrv 6,57% movattwitter 4,22% twinkle 4,69% other 28,63

Japanise language Twitter clients got an impressive 10,33% share.