Paul O'Flaherty

Google Hasn’t Built A Twitter Killer: Goolge Buzz

FYI: I started writing this before the Google announcement today and am writing it as I watch it live and as a product GBuzz looks great.

Google doesn’t want to build, nor is it trying to build a “twitter killer”. What Google wants is your information in order to better target advertising.

Every time you send an email, update your status, chat on Goggle Talk, share an item on Google Reader, post a video to YouTube or a picture to Picasa, Google gets a little bit more information about you that it can use to better tune the advertising you see in the hope that you will click on one of those ads.

Information like your status updates disappear as soon as they are used but by offering timelines where you can see the status updates of your friends Google  can keep you on in their service a little longer and in front of their advertising a little longer.

By associating Facebook and Twitter id’s with your Gmail contacts Google learns a little more about both you and your contacts. They have already announced that you will be able to import RSS streams from other services, connect with twitter, and there was a hint of facebook connect. It was driven home that the platform will be made as open as possible and noted that if you tweet and it gets imported into GBuzz then it could end up on somebody elses recommended list.

GBuzz is shaping up to be a wonderful looking social experience, but it boils down to being a content gathering service. It will allow you to pump information into Google from all your other services, consume information there and ultimately spend more time in from of Google advertisements while providing it with the information necessary to fine tune those advertisements to you and your friends.

At the end of the day it all boils do to gathering more information about you in order to target advertising. They don’t need to build a Twitter killer. Twitter and Facebook already do a great job creating the information that Google wants.

What they have built however, is a marvelous looking social experience for those people who already use Gmail and Googles mobile services and given them the means to pour information about themselves and others into Googles servers.

Twitter Can’t Remember Lists?

I’ve been running into the phenomenon of people who are not on Twitter lists showing up in the results when the lists are clicked.

Have a look at the screenshot below and you will see what I mean. None of the people above @John_C are on the “Daily Shite Authors List” yet there they are on the list page, clear as day.

I’ve also been seeing something similar happen when I view my @ replies, where there are results that quite plainly are not replies to me in any way, shape or form.

Facebooks Privacy Changes Help To Criminalize Us All

A right to think?

You might not think it was possible to be arrested for a joke you made on Twitter, but that is exactly what happened to Paul Chambers.

He was due to fly to Ireland on January 15th but after the extreme bad weather on January sixth which resulted in the closing of the airport he was to fly from, he jokingly posted the following:

You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!

We’ve all done it. We’ve all said and though things similar to this, but for Paul Chambers it resulted in being arrested by police to whom he had to explain what Twitter was because “they’d never heard of it”. It resulted in having to pay to be bailed out, being suspended by his employer, having his laptop, iPhone and home computer taken away and he is still waiting to find out whether or not he will charged with conspiring to create a bomb hoax.

It’s overkill, it’s ridiculous, it displays a complete misunderstanding of the law (by the police no less) and it is about to become the “norm” in our society.

Everyday we make statements such as the one Paul Chambers made. While watching a match on TV – “I’ll kill him if he doesn’t score”. Parents – I’m sure you’ve said “I’ll kill (enter child’s name here) if he’s late home” and other such things.

We do it on blogs,  on social networks and we do it in our day to day conversations. If you need convincing just do a search on twitter for “I’ll kill” or “I’ll blow up” and watch the comments scroll by.

What people and police don’t understand is that expressing the desire to do something does not mean that we *will* do something.

I have a desire to throttle Hugh Grant. I can’t stand they guy. I’ve expressed that desire verbally and in writing a number of times. However, expressing the desire to do something does not mean that I would, have or will. I have (apparently) the ability for rational thought, for self control and to know the difference between right and wrong.

Just because I don’t have much money and say that I would love to “rob a bank”, it does not mean that I will do it or ever had any real intention of doing it. I know it’s wrong and desire aside, I will be driven by my own moral compass. Or to put it another way I know it’s wrong so I won’t do it!

As I said, these types of arrest are about to become the norm rather than the exception.

As governments and law enforcement agencies continue their futile attempts to crack down on terrorism (lets be honest, if you want to do it they can’t really stop you until it is too late) they continue to disregard the difference between “thinking about doing something” and actually “doing something”.

While arrests like these are becoming more common place, we continue to be ourselves, to use social networks and forums, expecting to have the right to think what we want. At the same time companies like Facebook continue to make our previously private data open in the name of data-mining, page views and advertising revenue, providing law enforcement agencies, which are supposed to be protect us, with the means to criminalize use because we choose to think and express ourselves.

To quote civil libertarian Tessa Mayes, an expert on privacy law and free speech issues:

Making jokes about terrorism is considered a thought crime, mistakenly seen as a real act of harm or intention to commit harm.

The police’s actions seem laughable and suggest desperation in their efforts to combat terrorism, yet they have serious repercussions for all of us. In a democracy, our right to say what we please to each other should be non-negotiable, even on Twitter.

Anything Can Happen At A Tweetup

And the answer is...

You’ll never guess what happened last night! Okay, maybe you will, considering it was all over Twitter and Facebook within minutes.

Last night, surrounded by friends, Sara and I took one more step on the road of being together that we have been traveling for so long now.

We still have a long way to go. Visa’s need to be applied for and moves have to be made, but with both of our divorces over the time was right to move one step closer to being together permanently. To take a step that we have both been waiting so long to make a reality.

Surrounded by friends armed with cellphones, last night I stuttered and stumbled my way through and asked Sara to marry me.

You can watch the video below (captured by Alli)  to see Sara’s reaction and her answer

Picture taken by Ke4mur.

Is Social Media a Cry for Help?

Social media is an odd thing. Well, to be more precise how we use Twitter and other microblogging platforms is odd.

Have you ever stopped to think about how much inane crap we pump out everyday. Every little detail of some peoples lives are shared for the world to see without a jot of thought spared for decency, privacy or the simple considerations of T.M.I (too much information) or “who gives a crap?”.

Yet we continue to pump this digital diarrhea out into the ether in hopes making some sort of a connection in this, perhaps, over connected world.

Have you ever wondered how people from a time before the interent would react to concept of a service like Twitter? Wondered what they would think of us today as we tweet about our latest bowel movement instead of actually doing something productive.

I’m thinking about that tonight because of the picture below, which I unfortunately have no source to credit.

Have we lost our collective minds?

We spend all day online looking for a connection to others, or pimping ourselves and our “brand” while the people that we really need to be talking to, meeting and connecting with, are in our homes and passing by on the street right outside our front doors?

Is the popularity of social media an addiction or a massive cry for help?

Is it a long drawn out wail in the night at the despair and depression at the increasingly lonely and isolated lives people lead in this ever more digitally connected world? A world where we are pseudo friends with everyone but know nobody. A world where we talk to 100’s of people a day but connect with no one.

Could Twitters New Retweet Feature Make Twitter Less Valuable?

Shut up!

Having read Evan Williams description of how and why the new retweet function of Twitter works I find myself torn between liking the idea and downright hating it.

My issue lies with the idea of redundancy as described by Evan:

And because they’re trackable, we can take care of the redundancy problem: You will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow.

It might sound like a wonderful thing that I will not be inundated by 20 rewteets of someone claiming to see Elvis alive at a Taco stand in Guatemala but in many ways this is the key to what makes Twitter great.

We pay attention to things because we see them multiple times.

If one of my Twitter buddies retweets something awesome I might miss it because I spend most of my Twitter life in Seesmic, so tweets are constantly scrolling by even if the application is in the background (just like it is as I’m writing this post).

As Twitter will now only show you the first instance of your friends retweeting something, I will have missed the fact that Aliens have landed on the North Pole and are systematically slaughtering polar bears and Eskimos alike. It won’t matter if all 600+ of the other people I’m following retweet it, I won’t get to see it because it scrolled by while I was still wiping my backside in the bathroom.

Most of the value in Twitter is wrapped up in the ability to see the latest news and what’s going viral because all of your friends are talking about it or retweeting it. The more of your friends retweet something the more likely you are to pay attention to it. The more likely there is to be conversation about it.

That value is about to severely curtailed because most tweets that would other wise be retweets many hundreds or thousands of times won’t even be noticed because they scrolled by once.

That is going to have a major effect on traffic for everybody.

After A Little Crowd Control

Lost in the crowd?

I’m constantly amazed by the sheer numbers of people on Twitter that follow you back just to keep you as a number.

Yesterday I reduced the number of people that I was following by over a 1000. That meant wading through the list of people I was following and removing anybody who hadn’t updated recently (not many of them as I regularly run tools to remove people who haven’t tweeted in the past 30 days and gone stale), who offer nothing to the conversation (as in are simply pimping links or affiliate schemes and such, the entire time) and who I simply don’t talk to anymore.

I expected to take a huge hit in my follower numbers after the cull and I wasn’t disappointed by people.

My numbers dropped by over 200.

It’s blindingly obvious that a lot of the poeple I’ve followed over time only followed me back because they were only interested in how awesome it looks to have 30,000 followers and actually have no interest in really talking to people.

The like to talk at people.

I thought that social media was supposed to be a platform for communication or more specifically for conversation. That’s why it’s called “social media” after all.

For a lot of people social media platforms such as Twitter appear to be just another soap box from which to yell their message at the unwashed masses in the hopes that their brand/scheme/message will be heard amongst the background noise.

These people treat platforms like Twitter as if it was advertising on TV and have yet to realize that the smart money is to be made by engaging the audience rather than repeatedly yelling at them in the hopes that something will sink in.

Looking Back At 5 Billion Tweets

5 Billion. That’s the kind of  mind boggling number that the mind can’t really visualize. We have a conceptual idea, like the notion of our planet being like a grain of sand on the beach in comparison to the numbers of stars on the planets in the universe. We get it, we just can’t “get it” if you know what I mean.

Regardless, 5 billion is a huge number that also happens to be equal to the number of tweets we’ve all spewed forth since the first person first hit update.

What have we been tweeting about all this time? What has this mass of verbal textual diarrhea amounted to? I’d love to see a proper breakdown of what daily minutiae has most resulted in causing  ADD released by twitter, but for the moment this graph will just have to do!

5 Billion Brain Farts Captured In Time!

There are a few things missing from this chart though. For one there is no mention of “toilet tweets“…

(Via The Daily What, via Late Night With Jimmy Fallon)

Service Lets You TuneIn To Twitter

TuneIn to Twitter

I’ve spent the last few minutes checking out TuneIn a cool new web based Twitter client that has some great new features such as separating the media out from you stream so your can see it more easily (see the screenshot below) and allowing you to make lists of people you follow and have them all available on your page. Here’s my page if you want to check it out.

Perhaps the coolest feature of the service that I’ve discovered so far is the ability to search within the tweets of the people you are following. Normally when you do a search for something on Twitter it searches within the entire twitterverse, but searching on TuneIn, you can limit to search to only the people you are following which is very cool indeed.

Below is a screenshot of TuneIn and a video  the presentation and real-time demo from CrunchUp 2009.

The service is still in alpha stages of development but it looks like it could have a bright future ahead. May be worth keeping an eye on.

The TuneIn Interface

How Do You Gauge Credibility?

Trust me!

An interesting question was inadvertently raised by @SabrinaDent (Sabrinas blog) earlier when responding on Twitter to my post “The FCC, TSA, @MyBottlesUp And Why Bloggers Can’t Be Trusted”.

How do you judge credibility online?

Credible bloggers are taken plenty seriously – TheStory.ie is an example. This woman has no credibility and never built any.

How do you judge the credibility of someone you’ve never heard of?

It’s relatively easy to judge the credibility of someone you’ve been following online for a long time. You get to know them, get a feel for them and you usually can see them being mentioned by other people who you also associate with online.

If you’re part of the same community you’ll see their name appear in the same forums, see other people linking to them and mentioning them and generally they become known to you by word of mouth.

The more you see someone mentioned (in a positive light) and the more you see people you know interacting with them the more likely you are to take them as a credible source.

The best gauge of credibility for me is the interaction of my peers. I tend to give a lot of weight to the those who have the ear and attention of my peers.

It’s a very different story when you don’t know the person and don’t move in the same circles. So how do we judge?

Well, you could do a search on the person and see what other people are saying or read through multiple posts on their blog and try and get a feel for them, but seriously who ever does that. Most of us are just clicking through to something that caught our eye and moving on, with perhaps a quick press of the retweet button.

The sad fact of the matter is that the internet has a sheep mentality. People will follow you just because other people are. It has a knock on effect and is something that bloggers (as one example) have been using for the longest time to get you to subscribe to them.

Almost every blogger proudly displays their RSS subscriber count and sometimes their email subscriber count. The reason for doing this is simple. It’s like saying : “Hey look at me, I have 2000 followers, you should follow me too” and sadly enough, for a lot of people that is enough.

Sometimes you will have more information to go on. A good design helps to put us at ease as it makes us feel like someone is at least being diligent and doing their housework with regards to their blog!

On Twitter a high follower to following ratio gives a good impression as it eases suspicion that the user may be a spammer and that other people are paying attention to them.

A good Pagerank and a good Alexa rank are indicators that people may be linking to them and that their traffic is descent which reinforces the idea that they are credible, but at the end of the day they are all only indicators in a situation where most of us make a snap decision about credibility.

I’ve met some high profile bloggers in my time who appear to be very credible but in real life I don’t think I would trust them to organize dinner never mind consult or run a business. There are others like Steven Hodson, who could blog that the moon had been stolen by little green men and I probably wouldn’t go to the window to look out and check, I’d just take him at his word because since I’ve known him he’s proven to be sincere, trustworthy, cranky and credible.

So how do we judge if someone is credible or not! Most of us have neither the desire nor time to really dig into the details of someone online before deciding to retweet their post. Most of us make this snap decision many times a day?

What indicators do you use to judge if a post or blogger is credible in what they say? Or how about a twitter user, especially one with a blog?

The Social Media Guru (Video)

Trust me!

Social media experts, gurus and witchdoctors! You can’t turn a corner on the internet without running into 10 of them. Each and every one of them pimping their own regurgitated brand of “unique” insight that will do everything from save your business to turn you into a superstar with all of the perks and track marks as proof!

They’re like pigeons around old people at the park -- annoying, everywhere and covering the place in shit.

Have you ever wondered what it is most of these so called “social media experts” actually do for companies? This video tells all…

Hat tip to “New Pair Of Goggles“