On Marines and Twitter

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve been reading a book about maneuver warfare as practised by the US Marines. This is based on principles such as focus, surprise, flexibility, tempo and boldness. In each chapter examples are given and what I have found interesting is they give examples on either side. On the face of it one may think that boldness would emphasise taking action over not doing so.

Applied to the current rumours of Google buying Twitter it may seem like the bold move is to go ahead and buy, but it is not. The bold move is to pass. There is no question that Twitter is the hot startup at the moment. It gets the Daily Show mentions, the celebrity tweets and the avalanche of tech blogosphere coverage. People urge Google into doing the deed and that $1bn is nothing against the cost of missing out. It is true that Google needs another giant revenue stream to continue its growth and that it hasn’t really diversified away from its original idea despite many attempts. The problem is that Twitter is not yet a business. And Google has already been burnt spending 10 figures on another not to be missed startup when it bought YouTube.

If the bold move is to pass the really bold move is to buy delicious from Yahoo. I noticed that Google has added a ‘bookmark this’ button. It is hardly well publicised and I suspect nobody uses it. Unlike Twitter whose value is in the immediacy of its content, delicious has quietly built an alternative index of the web. It doesn’t matter that it is far smaller than Google’s robot built index, its value is that it was built by humans. I only bookmark a few pages each day, on a good day, but those I do have far greater value than something indexed by a robot because I can understand the content of the page far better.

Each page I bookmark links me to a group of likeminded individuals and I am always interested to see what they have bookmarked under the same heading. This is in embryo a ‘PageRank for web users’ rather than links. It has the potential to be a powerful search engine but delicious is not hot any more. It got swallowed by Yahoo and left to rot.

The bold move? Pass on Twitter and buy delicious. They already have Schachter, might as well rescue his creation.

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On Vote Report

I’m torn on the value of Twitter. For a long time I have thought it largely useless because I don’t know anyone who uses it and dismissed it as a phenomenon of the tech blogosphere echo chamber. However as with Flickr I have started to see the value of it now I can see it presented in a way I actually find useful.

My basic criticism of the service was that it will never cross to the mainstream as most people don’t want to continuously broadcast their status to the world. Now I still think that the number of people who update their statuses is relatively small but I realised I was missing a much larger class of users who never actually sign up for the service itself.

What changed my mind was Twitter Vote Report. This service gives a realtime update of useful information such as wait times on election day. Combined with Plodt this gives a stream of valuable realtime information that could not come from anywhere else. It does not matter that most people aren’t Twitter users – there are enough of them to continuously monitor what is happening and with the right tools that info can be turned into something valuable to non-Twitter users like me.

Now I can’t immediately think of the other applications this could have but for the first time I have seen a glimmer of why Twitter’s devotees are so enthralled with it.

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On early adopters

The nearer we get to finishing our software I start to think more about our marketing plan. None of us has a background in marketing or PR so when we were working on Zoimusic we commissioned a plan from Spark PR, one of the top technology agencies. What came through to me more than anything else is that the technology press is a massively crowded field and cutting through all the noise is extremely difficult.

As well as getting a plan I started to read all the recent marketing books like Purple Cow, Beyond Buzz, Made to Stick, Crossing the Chasm etc. etc. Now there is a well known graph in Crossing the Chasm which shows a gap between the early adopters and the mainstream users. This may have been true in the past but now I would go further and say that there is almost no connection between the early adopter and mainstream user when it comes to web applications.

In the past technology had to be paid for. A new gadget or a new piece of software cost a significant amount of money so the early adopter had to choose between several different options and think carefully about which one to buy. Money down, the early adopter had an investment in a product so in persuading others they were also persuading themselves that they hadn’t wasted their money. Now most web applications are free. Early adopters can try absolutely everything and anything, it entertains them for a short while then they move on to the next thing. It’s why you see a spike on Alexa for companies featured on TechCrunch as people take a look, decide they don’t like it and move on.

Inward facing

Even for those applications which do grab their attention the early adopter tends to be inward looking. Twitter is a classic example of this. There are a core group of early adopters who use it obsessively because it solves a problem that is unique to their group. For anyone outside it there is not much point to Twitter in its present form. Neither me nor any of my friends use it because it simply isn’t useful to us. So in the past their non-tech friends would listen to early adopters because they acted as some kind of filter but now that group looks in on itself, as Morrissey said, it says nothing to me about my life.

It struck me yesterday when I was reading Mike Butcher’s post about a new Spinvox add-on. In it he says:

So is this new Spinvox add-on of any real value? Does it make sense to call a number and suddenly update 30 social networks at once with “I’m on the train, looks like I’ll be late for that meeting” or similar?

Here’s the deal – most people are one one or maximum two social networks. I use Facebook and Linkedin. Twitter has passed me by and seems like a total waste of time for most people in its present form. Spinvox have added a solution that is only a problem to tech early adopters. As Kryten would say its a great plan with two minor flaws: most people don’t need to update their status across multiple networks because they don’t belong to multiple networks and they never update their status.

The first lesson of all those marketing books is build something that people actually want to use. To get attention it will also have to be distinctive. Take facebook itself. They didn’t try and get any press in their early days, they just built something useful for college students and went direct to the mainstream user. Coverage from journalists and bloggers is the icing on the cake, not the cake. You have to bake that yourselves.

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On Seesmic

By rights this post should be a video but I should confess that I am going to review a product without trying it. Lazy I know, but I think I understand Seesmic well enough not to bother actually using it.

I think it’s fairly obvious that Seesmic has stalled. Despite TechCrunch’s best efforts it just doesn’t work as a video commenting system because a) It’s too much bother for commenting and b) Most people like to retain their anonymity online. This is not to say it can’t be saved with a small tweak. I was reading Paul Carr’s book and in it he relates a tale about a company called Pleasure Cards (as opposed to business cards – geddit?). The idea was that designers would upload fruity designs, people would choose them to be dispatched on small cards and hand them out to friends.

Unfortunately this didn’t catch on but the company had all the infrastructure in place. What they did was ditch the designs and let people upload their own images onto the flipside of the cards. And they changed the name to Moo. The company is now a success and it shows the value of being honest when the busniess is failing and that a relatively small tweak can turn failure into success.

Popularity is simplicity

Which brings us back to Seesmic. At the moment it is a video microblogging web application(?), the ‘Twitter of video’. The problem is that nobody wants or needs a Twitter for video. Twitter’s popularity is its simplicity. Adding video destroys that simplicity and with it the point of the application. Just like Moo the underlying technology is good and if it was redirected in the right way then it could be very useful and popular. Arguably far more than Twitter itself which I think will find little traction outside the tech crowd.

Seesmic should reinvent itself as a web based video voicemail service. Video does add something when sending messages between loved ones and people don’t have the anonymity block to contend with on a wholly private service. People would record messages, enter the recipients email and send. A message with the link and a password would be sent so that only the intended person saw the message. If you want to see the service in action go and watch Aliens or Starship Troopers.

I think people would pay for this. To make payment simple the user would open an account and credit funds into it, if the charge to send a message were low enough then people would not even think. Plus you have the pull on the recipient to sign up if they want to reply. To make it even more painless you could credit their account so they could have a few free goes before paying. If the coming recession makes startups think more seriously about what users actually want and would pay for then it will be the best thing that ever happened.

Pic: edans

On 100 posts

I started writing this blog on 8 May 2008 and this is my 100th post. I had thought about starting a blog for a while but I never really wanted to write about the day to day travails of a startup which has been covered to death a million times elsewhere. As I have a general interest in technology regardless of whether it is a field we are working in ourselves it gave me the opportunity to write, and more importantly think, about the subject more broadly.

The funny thing is that doing that thinking led me to come up with another idea which will now become our first product. I remember reading something that Evan Williams said about your side projects ending up being the most interesting. He started Blogger that way and Twitter also began when he was working on Odeo. Having now experienced it this is true. What you also need is the ability to adapt quickly and accept that something you have been working on a long time should be put to one side.

Doing a startup is all about launching a product. If you don’t have any track record that is actually the easiest way to succeed. There will always be pressure to do market research and business plans but my experience is that you are better off focusing your attention on getting the product out. Nobody ever reads your plans anyway.

Predicting the future

We spent a lot of time on this for our first project and I think you need to have the necessary skills to put a forecast together. That said the revenue numbers in the plans are going to be largely guesswork. Nobody can foretell the future and that is in essence what you are being asked to do.

No startup is going to put together a financial forecast which shows the company burning cash and going bust but that is what happens most of the time. Yes you need to budget for near term costs because that is what you can analyse with any degree of accuracy but not the rest. Putting together a competent forecast shows your general understanding of business, demonstrates you can think of the main cost centres and that you will be competent when the cash comes in. Understanding cashflow is the most important thing in the early days and we’re lucky to have an accountant as one of our original investors.

It’s the same with market research. There’s always great pressure to read marketing reports and describe what is going on. The problem with that approach is that market reports can only tell you what happened in the past. They can’t tell you how to build a great product. Both our products came from hunches inspired by looking at people’s behaviour on the Internet. I always think if you spend too long with market reports you end up persuading yourself that something like Spiralfrog can work. Market reports can’t tell you what to build, you have to decide that for yourself.

Ultimately what really counts is product. To me the best stuff is intuitive and simple, the greatest ideas always are. But nobody outside your friends and family will back a good idea. You need to build it. Getting anyone to use it is the next big step. If you get there you are a long way down the road and then people might start to take notice.

On remotes and messages

The most interesting iPhone app I have seen so far is one that turns it into a remote for Apple TV. Judging by the activity from Apple and MS in this area both agree that integrating currently separate devices is they way forward. And what better way than to control your TV with your phone. I always wondered why I ended up with six different remotes.

The added benefit is that you can use the expanded functionality of a phone to integrate currently separate services. Euro 2008 has just finished, as England were not involved I watched a lot of the games at home alongside my laptop. I would watch the game and discuss it with my friends online and using texts. What struck me was that it would be much easier to have these comments streamed down the side of my TV screen rather than relegated to separate devices.

Mainstream twitter

And this is where the iPhone/Blackberry type remote comes in. It would allow me to add my comments quickly using the remote if it was designed like this. I think it favours a fixed keyboard rather than a touchscreen but it is Apple which has got there first. Admittedly there is no integrated Twitter like service for sports games at the moment but this is the most likely way for Twitter or an equivalent service to go mainstream.

The fact is that most people don’t want to let everyone know what they are doing all the time. There will be specific events like sports events or conferences where people want to use it but most of the time they won’t. Microblogging will change as its users change. In the early days the twitterholics twitter about everything but later adopters won’t do this. Watercooler moments will still happen, they’ll just be liberated from the watercooler.

Pic: Vincent Brown

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On friend bankruptcy

In 2004 Lawrence Lessig declared email bankruptcy and I think at some stage people will start to declare friend bankruptcy.

There’s a reason you are friends with someone and a reason you lose touch. I remember when friends reunited launched a few years ago. I joined, paid my fiver and it resulted in a flurry of emails & meetups shortly afterwards. Then we never met again and I went back to my runnings, to quote Mike Skinner.

Some of my facebook contacts have 200+ friends. I spoke to one the other day and he admitted that he isn’t friends with most of his facebook friends. Facebook used to have a limit of 5000 friends which they have recently abolished. I do not know why. Folks, nobody has 5000 friends. Nobody.

My arbitrary definition of a friend is someone you have contact with outside work at least every month or so. You can be friends with someone at work, but only if you voluntarily spend time with them on a semi-regular basis. In my case that means 20 or 30 people at most. I think what is needed on a social network is a way to differentiate friends from contacts. To avoid giving offence it wouldn’t have to be apparent to the other person but it would be a good way to change privacy settings so people you know less well did not have complete access to all your information. I would also cap it at 50.

The new AltaVista

The problem for facebook is that it has no way to discern the importance of connections between people so its value as a database is diminished. I have wondered whether facebook is the new Google or not. Maybe we are still in the early days of social networks and facebook is AltaVista, the current leader but nothing that makes it truly outstanding in the way Google was. Yes facebook has a nice simple design but there is nothing inherently superior about it beyond that in the way Google was. And yes switching social network is harder than switching search engine, nevertheless the rapid adoption of Twitter (which is essentially a mobile version of facebook’s newsfeed) shows it is possible. My own feeling is that someone will design another SN with that Googlesque special sauce and, like Google, they will have learnt from the mistakes of existing networks like FB et al.

So it made me think that perhaps facebook’s vulnerability lies in its departure from its original simplicity. What are the functions people really need in a social network? I would say:

• Photo sharing
• Email
• IM
• News feed
• Favourite books/tv/movies
• Event organising

I can’t think of much more than that. Write your minimalist social network feature manifesto in the comments. All you need to do is give a list of the features you actually use, I’ll be interested to see what you think.

Read more:
On useful advertising
On the future of social networks

Pic: Crazy Talk