Twitter’s New Election Site

Twitter recently added new Election 08 features to their site:

During the first presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi and each subsequent debate leading up to and beyond election day, Twitter will be performing real-time algorithmic analysis on millions of unedited public reactions. These trending topics along with a live ticker of continuously fresh opinions are available now at election.twitter.com.

There are some terrific features that came along with this new election site; the best might be the “auto-stream” of tweets that scroll by one after another. On the night they unveiled the new site, during the first Obama-McCain debate, the tweets scrolled by so fast, they were reaching The Matrix speeds!

What’s smart, though, from a business perspective, about these new features, is the value-add Twitter is realizing over the competing Twitter clients (such as Twitterific). As an example, today in the “hot topics” link on twitter.com, I noticed “Bruce Springsteen.” Wondering what Bruce had to do with the election, I clicked on it, and it took me here:

Turns out, Springsteen and Billy Joel are doing a concert for Barack Obama. This is something you just don’t see when using Twitterific, and makes Twitter’s web site something worth visiting.

Now, if they would only add the Matrix-like scrolling to my twitter page, they’d be on to something! Hopefully these new features will be rolled into the main site after the election.

Blog Equation

Thesis + Heat of Campaign Season = No Blog Posts

More on Web 2.0 Expo

My previous post summarized Clay Shirky’s presentation, which was definitely one of the highlights. What follows here are my overall impressions of the conference.

When I attended techpresident’s PDF2008, I called it “technopoligeek culture,” remarking on the utopian nature of it all. Well, if that was utopia, I have no idea what Web 2.0 Expo was — utopia on steroids.

What was most striking about the proceedings was the contrast between the subject matter, and what was being said. Here is “web 2.0,” the hottest technology around, and, for the most part, what I heard was the same language I heard 14 years ago, when I went to school for an MBA. I heard things this week like “do things that matter” (Tim O’Reilly) and “brand is important” (Gary Vayerhchuk of winelibrary.com) and “business is about customer connections” (Deborah Schultz). I was told businesses should “grow slowly,” and they should “know their market.”

Um, yes. That’s all textbook.

That said, some of the speakers were quite good. I was impressed with Jason Fried, of 37signals.com, who advised *not* doing everything your customers asked, and avoiding scope creep and bloat at all costs — in a nutshell, know how to tell your customers, “no.” In an age of the ever-expanding Office Suite, that’s good advice. I also thought Joshua Schachter, who started delicious, made an interesting point when he said he purposely designed his system to not encourage or allow users to communication with each other. While he’s not sure whether or not it’s a good idea, it’s an interesting premise in the everything-connected age of Web 2.0

But, especially on the first day, those were the exceptions. The conference, which is primarily geared to web start-ups and developers, was mostly an exercise in crass entrepreneurial capitalism. And the king of New York’s entrepreneurial scene is Fred Wilson. He’s a venture capitalist who’s essentially built the NYC tech scene, and his talk was a celebration of the industry he’s help build, lots of stats about how many start-ups this and that…

For all the business-minded utopia at work in the Javits Center this week, for all that I heard about how Web 2.0 is going to change the world, or has already changed the world, what I didn’t hear was a new business model. What I did hear was the same model that appeared in the late 1990s tech bubble: Build a site, get an audience, sell company to a large media conglomerate. Today, with Web 2.0, that formula has shifted slightly: Build a shell of a site, get users to fill in all the content, sell company to a large media conglomerate.

For all the talk I heard, I saw nothing new, really. It’s a bubble in formation, a wannabe bubble in the making, nothing new except in the world of Web 2.0, your users do all your work for you.

I should add here, lest I be accused of communistic tendencies, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with making money. My particular concern is that we need to have public spaces for discourse, spaces free of commericial interests, spaces where what we say and think aren’t open to data mining and marketing ploys and crass entrepenuerial capitalism.

And nothing I heard this week at Web 2.0 Expo lessened that concern in the least bit.

Shirky’s Filter Failure

I’m here at Web 2.0 Expo, and heard Clay Shirky give an interesting presentation on what he calls, “filter failure.” Here’s a summation from my notes:

His general premise is that, by thinking about our Web 2.0 in terms of the oft-cited “information overload,” we’re looking at this problem in the wrong way. Here is IDC’s graph of the growth of information:

IDC information overload chart

Shirky contends this is the same graph that’s been in play since the invention of the printing press. By the 1500s, the cost of publishing a book, and the (relative) ease of creating one was the start. Gutenberg introduced the “up front risk.” That is, the publisher takes on all the risk because books have to be printed before they can be sold — to mitigate this risk, the publisher took on the role of ensure quality. By being a gatekeeper, the publisher ensured the risk was as low as possible. And prior to the web, all forms of media, radio, television, worked within this same “up front” economic model.

The web, of course, changed all that.

With the Internet, there is no economic model that says you need to filter for quality before publishing. (See: Livejournal, according to Shirky.) So, going back to the chart, what we’re seen now is not information overload, but a change in the filter. Thinking about information overload is not the problem — thinking about filter failure is the right approach.

Shirky pointed to spam — it’s not that spam represents a large percentage increase in the amount of email. The problem with spam is keeping it out of the in-box. Spam requires different kinds of filters, and all of them are temporary — “there is no set it and forget it for spam.”

This is a general system design problem, and not computer system, but social system.

Shirky then told a story about privacy on Facebook. A friend of his broke off her engagement, and had to deal with the inevitable change in status on Facebook. She wasn’t a casual user — her dissertation was about Facebook. And even after changing all the privacy settings, after changing the status, everyone she knew had received the update.

Shirky’s point is that privacy settings through a software interface isn’t at all a natural thing. We’ve lived most of our lives not in the “bubble of privacy or the glare of public life.” We used to have this thing called a “personal life.” Now, it’s like every word we ever say is recorded for posterity.

In our prior life, we could be walking down the street, talking to someone, and while others around you can hear, they really can’t. “The inefficiency of information flow wasn’t a bug — it was a feature.” And now that we have a world of explicit privacy settings, we have a problem.

He also related a story about a college student in Canada put up for expulsion because he started a Facebook group, calling it a form of cheating. Here, the “real life” world of the college campus clashed with the “online” world of Facebook. Again, filters — two different messages crashing into each other.

We’re breaking the system of filters we’ve had for so long. Using metaphors like “real life” and “online” don’t cut it. Our current way of thinking assumes “we are to information overload as a fish is to water,” but if we’ve had the problem of information overload ever since the 1500s, it’s about time we realize that it’s not a “problem,” but a fact.

Some of the solution is tags, bookmarks. But some is rethinking, “which filter just broke?” When you start asking that question, we’ll get some clue as to where to put the design effort.

(Shirky’s slides (brief as they are…) can be found here.)

Narratives

I have a post over at Dave Parry’s new blog, “It’s The Narrative, Stupid.”

It’s a blog about how narratives affect political campaigns, and examines why Democrats are so bad at this important facet of campaigning, and how they can improve. Andy Famiglietti is another contributor, and I know both him and Dave through Twitter.

My first post is titled, “Politics and the Myth of Capitalism.”

Please stop by and take a look.

Simple Answers

Did the Twittered Funeral Take Things Too Far?

Yes. Yes it did.

TV Coverage of the Conventions

After the first night of the DNC, it was clear the news network commentators were much more interested in listening to themselves talk, than listening to the speeches at the convention:

We’ve only seen one night of the Democratic convention, but already critics are chastising the broadcast networks for only covering one hour of the proceedings each evening.

On Monday, it was the missed opportunity to cover the tribute to, and speech by, Senator Ted Kennedy…NBC, ABC and CBS showed Senator Kennedy’s speech when they came on the air at 10 p.m. Eastern time, shortly after the address had ended.

The networks also failed to cover an important speech from Senator Kerry, as well as Republican-turned-Obama supporter Jim Leach.

So what happened the next week, when the GOP took its turn?

During their September 2 and September 3 coverage of the Republican National Convention, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News each dedicated more on-air time — significantly more in most cases — to speeches and other official Republican convention programming during the most-watched portions of their coverage than each channel dedicated to official convention programming during the same times on comparable nights of the Democratic National Convention one week earlier.

I had noticed this the first night, on MSNBC, as the speeches from the President (by video), his wife, Fred Thompson, and Joe Lieberman were covered completely in full. And according to Media Matters, I was correct:

MSNBC dedicated 1 hour, 19 minutes, 52 seconds to scheduled convention programming during the 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET hours of its September 2 Republican National Convention coverage; by contrast, MSNBC dedicated 56 minutes, 13 seconds to scheduled convention programming during the same hours during its August 25 coverage of the Democratic National Convention, and 59 minutes, 28 seconds during its August 26 coverage.

This is not to say that it’s “media bias” — I really don’t at all believe the media is ideologically for or against either party. I think the difference in coverage can be explained by two things. First, I am sure all the networks took heat from viewers for the coverage of the DNC. Then, to compensate, they made sure they adjusted their coverage the next week.

Second, this is, as always, about ratings and money. Rather than listening to the speeches, the news networks spent all their time creating the illusion of drama, about Hillary Clinton’s speech, about whether or not Bill Clinton would support Obama, and, most of all, overplaying the extent to which Hillary Clinton supporters would not support the nominee.

No drama up on the stage, in those boring speeches about the “issues” and “policies.” No, the drama could only be created on mic.

The RNC, on the other hand, had all its drama up on the stage.

Sarah Palin was picked for the VP slot just days before, and received a thorough vetting — by the blogs. And as scandal after scandal emerged, the real question, from the networks perspective, was, “How will the party react?” That is, how will the major players in the party bring this newcomer into the fold? How will they spin what could only be seen as a disasterous first few days of Palin’s candidacy into a positive?

The Sarah Palin phenomenon was so new, the pundits needed those speeches to fill in the gaps, and provide fodder for more commentary. (As opposed to Biden, for example, who was a known entity.)

One other final thought is that this is why “home field advantage” is important in politics. Having to go first at the conventions seems to be an incredible disadvantage, especially considering just how much these events are scripted, media-driven affairs.

The solution? Next time, watch them on CSPAN.