Jonothan Stribling

Malcom Gladwell must be wondering what went wrong.

In October 2010 the award winning New Yorker writer penned a piece that tried to address the hyperbole about so-called twitter revolutions and suddenly he was the most hated man on twitter.

The response was spectacular. Twitter erupted into outrage, Biz Stone co-founder of twitter responded with a thoughtful but dense piece in The Atlantic Monthly that promoted twitter as a force for fostering relationships and creating meaningful change. For Stone the power of twitter lies in its ability to empower people through communication. He finishes his defence with:

Rudimentary communication among individuals in real time allows many to move together as one–suddenly uniting everyone in a common goal.

Now the idea of “rudimentary communication” happening in “real time” seems to me to be no different from me having a conversation with a stranger whilst waiting for my morning coffee, but I think I know what Stone was getting at – there is power is connecting heterogeneous conversations and rapidly distributing information. This is after all one of the revolutionary aspects of the Internet.

Interestingly, as far as I can tell, the Zuck and the gang at Facebook were too busy making money to respond.

What interests me about this is how thin-skinned the twitter fans appear to be. Gladwell was the subject of many vitriolic and hateful tweets that accused him of being part of old-media player and a right bastard. The debate was reminiscent of many techno-religious debates like Apple vs. PC or. NET vs PHP. Now the reductive fissure is social media vs. history, or twitter vs. Facebook.

Gladwell’s piece is problematic. He deliberately collapses issues with tools so as to be controversial saying:

Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools.

I don’t think anyone could have easily missed what the activists in Egypt were rallying for or defined them merely assuming Facebook fans. It just so happened that Facebook was the most useful tool for communicating and organising the revolutionaries. In fact the only one defining activists by their tools is Gladwell.
Gladwell also takes issue with the claim by the US State department that cyber-activists are “the best hope for us all” dismissing the role of social media in the Moldovian and Iranian protests.

It is important to note that The New Yorker article was published in October 2011, well before the Egyptian or Tunisian revolutions.

Gladwell was right that about soneof the grandiose statements being made about how social media was enabling dissidents to protest in new ways. Whilst acknowledging that twitter was not the magic bullet against dictators, Time Magazine breathlessly proclaimed

But there’s no question that it has emboldened the protesters, reinforced their conviction that they are not alone and engaged populations outside Iran in an emotional, immediate way that was never possible before.

Wow. Little old twitter did all that? How’s this comment about a post in techmeme:

If Twitter stumbles, dictators, totalitarians and other thugs the world over will rejoice. The losers will be the people under their thumbs.

Clearly there was some hyperbole about twitter and social media that spurned Gladwell to write his slightly antagonistic piece.

Gladwell’s basic thesis is that social media creates what he calls weak ties. He did this after conveniently setting up the concept of social activism being dependent on what he called strong ties. He builds a lovely binary opposition of social activism = strong ties vs. social media = weak ties. Therefore social media is not a useful tool for activism.

That social activism is a dangerous activity involving much personal risk that requires courageous feats is not in dispute here. What is wrong with Gladwell’s approach is the overly simplistic and reductive dualism of real world vs Internet world. For Gladwell the Internet is a transient, temporary place whereas the physical world is real, robust and trusted. He seems to ignore that the Internet exists and is a reflection of the “real world”.

As a journalist Gladwell is blinded to the politics of information. For him politics is big boy stuff where information is controlled and disseminated by journalists, academics, politicians, and judges. Information is something formal which is produced and passively consumes. The idea of a heterogeneous sphere where information is distributed at the speed of light and old-world models of producer-consumer are obliterated are an anathema for a journalist whose strong ties have built an influential career.

Information, like power is always local. We are all subject to it and entwined within its grip. It can be distributed in multiple heterogeneous ways like a whisper on the street, by a bloke with a placard, by a blog, by a newspaper, by a teacher, or by an angry mob protesting against a repressive regime. Technology like the phone, the Internet, twitter, facebook, and mobiles can transform how information is distributed and transform structures of power.

I do feel to Gladwell, he has become the pinup boy for ludittes everywhere who bemoan the democraticisation of the distribution of information as being an irritating leach on corporate profits and political control. However, he really only has himself to blame, as he has acted the genius contrary clown in order to prove himself an original thinker. A debate on the true transformative and revolutionary impacts of technologies deserves better.

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Last night I was watching the ABC news and checking our twitter when I was some mention of an #alpspill.

I searched for #spill, tweeted something inane and waited for the ABC to report something.

It came in the 7.30 report and it amounted to guesswork by Kerry O’Brien about Julia Gillard being in Kevin Rudd’s office.

Apart from the Twitter gossip there really wasn’t any news. Crikey was silent, The ABC was relatively silent, The SMage was relatively silent. Some “star tweeters” like @bernardkeane simply said “I can’t comment”.

What there was on twitter though was a lot of chatter. The 50 tweets a second about the #spill were not really news. It was a conversation between a whole bunch of people with very little authority.

The types tweets amounted to:

• An opinion about either Rudd or Gillard
• A joke about Rudd and the world cup or Malcom Turnbull
• A reference to Laurie Oakes who was appearing on Channel 9
• A comment about somepeople being in Rudd’s office

It was beguiling, fascinating and entertaining.

And entirely useless as news.

It wasn’t news it was a meta-conversation in a virtual pub. Everybody trying to be clever, funny and witty at the same time.

Twitter has a long way to go to become a viable news source as it lacks the authority that comes with being an established media institution or blog.

However, twitter demonstrated that it could deliver opinion about the news faster the the news could be published.

What is needed is an authority. What would enable this is a live curation where authoritative tweeters and sources are selected and promoted. This could be because of content or metadata like location, status or relationships with others.

This would mean that when something big happens twitter can continue to be a platform that provides real-time and more importantly, meaningful news.

Of course this could be just sucking the fun out of watching the conversation unfold.

Once watching the TV was a complete passive act of slovenly consumption. The evening show was watched while slumped on the couch all senses dulled by the blue rays of the box.

Now watching the TV is only one part of watching the TV. In face “TV events” can be enjoyed by hooking into the Twitter firehose and looking for the right hashtag.

During the Logies, an Australian TV award show for all US folks, I noticed that the digital hipsters at the event were tweeting, that people on the couch were tweeting, that journalists were tweeting.

Everybody was talking at the same time about the #logies. Cracking gags, being outrageous laughing at “the stars”.

And what for?

Comedian Wil Anderson (@Wil_Anderson) attempted controversy by alluding to John Mayer, herpes and his “white supremicist cock”. He passed comment about Michael Slater doing jokes, Sigrid Thornton looking like gollem and something about the Rogue Traders.

It was pretty nasty stuff. Funny when you’re pissed and wearing a dinner suit, not so funny the next day.

Wil Anderson wasn’t the only one trying to be real funny on twitter for free.

Catherine Deveny (@catherinedeveny), Melbourne comedian, satirist and athiest offered such gems as:

“Rove and Tasma look so cute … hope she doesn’t die, too”

“I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid”

She now claims that she has been taken out of context.

I am not massively offended by any of the logies comments by Anderson, Deveny or anyone of the other clowns.

In fact I think it’s great that celebrities can be taken down to size by anyone with an attitude, a twitter account and the right hashtag.

And this is just the start.

Twitter TV commentary is taking off in Australia.

The latest series of Masterchef has seen continuous tweeting.

Such was the volume of tweets during ABC’s live discussion show Q and A, that it now publishes selected and topical tweets as a way of engaging the home audience.

It is all a little fun.

What concerns me is that the greater the volume of tweets, the greater the tendency for some commentary to be mindless and involve badly executed irony, cruelty and thoughtless aphorisms.

There are gems to be found, but as Twitter grows they are harder to find.

According to Deveny, Twitter is

“a great challenge for us, to have a sophisticated response to the evolution of communication.”.

That implies that people are actually listening and engaging.

But they aren’t. They are too busy talking shouting.

As a means of cultural commentary Twitter is more like talk radio than the smart coffee chat. They only difference is that rather than being between a moron host and a moron caller there are a gazillion morons all saying the same thing, all crying out for attention, all hoping for a retweet from a celebrity.

If everyone in the room is talking loudly then the conversation is useless and boring.

Perhaps there needs to be a stop tweeting and listen campaign, real-time curation of TV and cultural events and an education program about satire and irony for Twitter to stay fascinating, beguilling and delightfully stupid.

Without that Twitter is doomed to become just a million moronic conversations.

You’re a small start-up. You’ve invested heaps of time and money in your twitter client which will be supported by advertising and suddenly Twitter throw a spanner at your well greased wheel.

What do you do?

Last week Twitter announced that they had acquired atebits, the folks behind the Twitter iPhone app tweetie.

As soon as they did there were a heap of tweets lamenting that Twitter had done so and saying “I feel sorry for all devs”.

There are people forming unions and grabbing the pitchforks to storm the barricades. They are talking about creating a new open platform to better Twitter.

The feeling was that Twitter had sucked the creativity out of being a twitter hacker and acted in a unilateral and nasty corporate way.

I think it is a great story. Some smart people developed a great application and have now sold it and made some money.

The developers complaining that Twitter is cutting their lunch should take a deep breath and start developing products that are better than any alternative so they attract eyeballs or acquisition. And perhaps work with open standards so they are not vulnerable to the whims of a corporation running a closed system.

Founder of Seesmic, Loic Le Meur writes that the competition should create innovation, although his post pre-dated the Tweetie acquisition.

Twitter obviously realise that owning the eyeballs and the experience across multiple platforms will ensure potential monetisation opportunities from advertising are not lost.

And given that last year the Twitter COO, Dick Costolo promised a new advertising platform that “we would love”, all evidence points to Twitter, that large and very popular start-up, growing up.

I do hope the advertising is as smart as Robert Scoble breathlessly writes that is going to be. As an online marketer, the idea of an advertising platform that people love is fantastic, and very likely fantastical.

What will be very interesting is whether Twitter becomes a start-up success story with super smart advertising, clever acquisitions and careful nurturing of their developer segment, or if they crash and burn having created a new paradigm for communication.

Google just released Google Buzz which has demands that we “go beyond status messages”.

To me this appears to echo the feeling many people had, including me, when confronted with micro-blogging sites like Twitter – so what.

It represents a profound misunderstanding of what a status message actually is. Status messages are really:

• part of a conversation
• the start of a conversation
• a cry for help
• a complaint
• a grandiose aphorism about what’s wrong with the world
• a proclamation of love
• and of course a comedy.

Whilst twitter and Facebook might appear to a Google engineer to be merely a system that accepts, validates and publishes status messages, these sites are much more than than that.

They are communications systems that helps people connect.

Much like email does.

I can see why the Google engineers and product marketing folks decided to use focus on doing more than updating and reading status messages. It is a good spin and a great reflection on Gmail’s strengths, which are that it’s very bloody easy to use and has a huge base of installed customers who are already having conversations.

What is missing from Gmail is a an ecosystem of third party applications which can help me share anywhere I like from practically any device I like.

Of course this wouldn’t sell any advertising.

And this is why I reckon Google wants to “go social”. The more people tweet or exchange Facebook messages the less they email and of course  Google has a reduced audience to display advertisements to.

After a long break from blogging which was sandwiched by two overhyped product releases, one from Google and one from Apple, I am feeling a little fatigued with product releases that are thinly masked market share grabs and do nothing to solve my problems.

And let’s not forget that Yahoo and Microsoft have had similar features for quite some time.

My first impressions from Buzz are that is pretty cool. The user interface is very slick and it is easy to do stuff like attach images, add people, comment, like, post links and browse posts.

My big complaint is that  I cannot update Twitter from Buzz although I can see my tweets in Buzz.

Last Friday when Oprah tweeted that she was joining the 21st century some Twitter folk lamented the gentrification of twitter. If Oprah tweets then her legion of middle American fans will tweet and suddenly I don’t look so cool or edgy anymore. Bugger!

The truth is that twitter was already mainstream – Ashton Kutcher and Brittney are not quirky underground artists, they are celebrities through and through.

The concern appeared to be that with Twitter becoming more mainstream it would be harder to become a twitter star. You would actually have to do something in order to be famous for more than 15 tweets.

That’s right there is a real tangible world outside the twittersphere.

In this real world people do stuff, they are experts because they really know a lot about a particular topic like open heart surgery. In this world people engage in business transactions that hopefully make each of them money.

Twitter is simply the brand new thing, and soon it will be yesterdays news. When it is the Warholian twitter experts suspicious and envious of Oprah will need to find another way to be famous.

I first came across Twitter in 2007 and dutifully created an account. Then I looked at the question “What are you doing right now?” and thought “I am mindlessly looking at Twitter”.

The question was a tough one, being a somewhat private person the idea of venting my most personal thoughts online was unthinkable.

A friend joked that the best response would be “having a shit”. He may have been right.

That Twitter could evolve into a rather nifty PR tool, a DM tool (sorry but it’s true) and customer engagement tool did not occur to me. I wish I could demonstrate that I’m smarter than the average bear by having amazing foresight for the Twitter trend, but I can’t and there are enough people doing this already.

I’ve been experimenting with Twitter a little more recently and here are my quick tips.

Work out what you want from Twitter

Is it a research tool, a PR tool, a customer service tool or a tool to tell your mates you’ve been drinking Long Island Iced Teas and need to be picked up from a pool of vomit. Who you follow and the tools that you use will be dictated by your objectives. If you want to use Twitter to research stuff you will have to search for the thought leaders in that field and follow them. Twitter search is a great way of finding interesting stuff.

Don’t be a slut

The tendency for those intending to use Twitter as a PR and lead generation vehicle is to follow as many people as they can in the hope that 50% will follow back and grow their audience. This is SPAM. Looking at the type of businesses engaging in this activity there are a bunch of self-proclaimed gurus, affiliate marketers and get rich quick drop-kicks. These folks have a legitimate place but I don’t want to look like one of them online or on Twitter. I reckon that the old fashioned way is the best way to build your Twitter audience.

Give people a reason to follow you and you will generate better results.

Twitter is not email

If you do a lot of direct mail the tendency is to approach Twitter as a really fast direct marketing tool. This is quite legitimate but needs to be handled in a slightly different way to email. Tweeple expect something instant and of real value. Expecting tweeple to complete a lead gen form on the back of a post will not work. Offering something really engaging and of real value with a lead gen form probably will work.

Variety

Vary your posts so that the people following you are amused, engaged, interested, alerted, informed, alarmed and tickled. The Tweeple following you are just like your website audience and are a bunch of different personas and each will be persuaded differently. Unfortunately I do not know of a great many tools that will help you find out who’s clicking on what and when they do it.

Play nice, but don’t obey the ‘rules’

Twitter is really very simple. You post stuff in under 140 characters and people read it. A grammar has been created by various tweeple to make communicating more effective. Hashtags (#haiku) and retweeting are great examples of creative responses to optimising those measly 140 characters and making twitter more useful. Some people can be a little uptight about the ‘correct’ way twitter should be used. Forget them, there is no bright shining path of correct twitter usage. The only thing you need to remember is that just like you play nice in life you should play nice in twitter.

Twitter has created yet another online diversion. Whilst it can be a great way of putting work off it is also an extremely flexible platform that allows you to quickly connect with an audience, find out information or just be amused.

Tweet you later.