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What I Learned at 140 | The Twitter Conference (part 4)

May 28, 2009 by admin · 1 Comment 

“Twitter business start-ups are combination socialist and radical markets.”
Jason Calacanis
Computer History Museum
Mountain View, CA
May 26, 2009

calacanisI caught the last part of Jason Calacanis (@JasonCalacanis), day one lunchtime keynote “How Twitter Will Make a Billion, and How You Can Make a Million.”  (Given my lateness, I guess I only have about $100,000 coming my way).  Jason had lots of great anecdotes, assertions and observations given his background, experience and implementation with Mahalo and @answers.  He believes (as much of the audience did by show of hands) that Twitter will be more valuable than Facebook in 5 years.

The first afternoon panel focused on Twitter Strategies:  Real-World Success Stories, and featured Jeff Pester (@UniqueVisitor), Bryan Rhoads (@bryanrhoads), @WarrenWhitlock and a substitute for Justin Kan from justin.tv. Some highlights:

  • People don’t want 20 tweets a day. Moderate your subject matter expertise.
  • Focus on giving. Help and promote others.
  • Find others close to you. Use TweepSearch for geographic-based search of users.
  • Twitter is a process.  Consider it as a long-term investment <damn, I was hoping to get 10,000 followers overnight – wonder if I can get my $’s back?>
  • Don’t try to get 100k followers. Instead find 100 people with 1,000 followers who are interested in you and your tweets – they will distribute you.
  • Examples of small local business.   Tweeting daily specials: “cookies just out of the oven, come and get ‘em’.”
  • Avoid an ROI discussion around Twitter.  Rather need to reframe as R&D or “Return on Engagement”.  (Sarah Evans suggests 15 Ways to Measure Return on Engagement (ROE) of Social Media in her blog.)

I’m buzzin’ . . . more later.

  1. The Power of Presence. Insights from Alex Payne, Twitter API Lead.
  2. I am a Twitter God(ess) and So Can You! The View From Twitter Stardom with @ijustine, @missrogue and @davepeck.
  3. Don’t Take the Drive to Manic Feature Explosion. What Makes a Good Twitter App.
  4. Twitter business start-ups are combination socialist and radical markets.   Twitter Strategies:  Real-World Success Stories.
  5. WTF, No Twitter TV!? Direction from Anamitra Banerji, Twitter Product Management.
  6. Even with a simple hash tag, there is a learning curve. Soren MacBeth, Co-Founder / CEO of StockTwits.
  7. You can’t own social media. You can only interact with it. Corporate Use of Twitter by @JetBlue.
  8. Twitter will transform conferences & events. Surprising takeaways from an in-person Twitter conference experience.

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What I Learned at 140 | The Twitter Conference (part 3)

May 27, 2009 by admin · 2 Comments 

Don’t Take the Drive to Manic Feature Explosion.

140 | The Twitter Conference (#140tc) held a session on day one titled “What Makes a Good Twitter App.”   It could have been titled “Don’t Take the Drive to Manic Feature Explosion.”

iphonedevcamp_logoDom Sogalla (@dom) helped create Twitter and runs @iPhoneDevCamp.  This is where software developers come together and build an iPhone application over a weekend.  The lessons he learned there apply to developing Twitter applications:
  1. Simplicity – do one thing very well
  2. Clear focus on specific type of user
  3. Craftsmanship
  4. Open source

tweetie_480x280Next panelist was Loren Brichter (@bits), founder and developer of much-beloved iPhone app Tweetie (which reminds me to finally try it out).  He was asked why did Tweetie become so successful.  His initial response:  ”I don’t really know.”  After some probing, he offered up the following:

  1. Luck
  2. Quality
  3. Marketing
  4. Listening to user feedback

This last point let to a rich discussion (debate?) as to the role that user feedback should play in defining a product roadmap and feature requests.  This is something I’ve witnessed at many a product company – often times, companies and product teams can’t strike the right balance.  This panel advised that user feature requests must be balaced with need for overall simplicity / usability.  Here here!

They all noted the struggle it is to prioritize a plethora of features and how to best utilize or focus their limited time.  (But then again it is a nice problem to have if you are Twitter or even Tweetie that users care enough to request/demand alterations to your product – many/most start-ups would love to struggle with this dilemma).
Lastly the panel suggested caution and “don’t take the manic drive to feature explosion.”  Words to live by!
I’m behind . . . more later.
  1. The Power of Presence. Insights from Alex Payne, Twitter API Lead.
  2. I am a Twitter God(ess) and So Can You! The View From Twitter Stardom with @ijustine, @missrogue and @davepeck.
  3. Don’t Take the Drive to Manic Feature Explosion. What Makes a Good Twitter App.
  4. Twitter business start-ups are combination socialist and radical markets.   Twitter Strategies:  Real-World Success Stories.
  5. WTF, No Twitter TV!? Direction from Anamitra Banerji, Twitter Product Management.
  6. Even with a simple hash tag, there is a learning curve. Soren MacBeth, Co-Founder / CEO of StockTwits.
  7. You can’t own social media. You can only interact with it. Corporate Use of Twitter by @JetBlue.
  8. Twitter will transform conferences & events. Surprising takeaways from an in-person Twitter conference experience.

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What I Learned at 140 | The Twitter Conference (part 2)

May 27, 2009 by admin · 2 Comments 

I am a Twitter God(ess) and So Can You.

y-tara-huntThe 2nd panel on day one of the Twitter Conference (#140tc) was titled:  ”I am a Twitter

ijustine_wears_the_videocam

iJustine

God(ess) and So Can You.”  It featured Tara Hunt (@missrogue), ijustine and Dave Peck (@davepeck) – I think I figured out which one was the “god”.

The panel was entertaining and engaging (although left me wanting some more practical advise for us that are short of god-like status).  Highlight was @missrogue’s list of 40 remarkable tweets, drawn from her list of favorites found here.

There was some debate around automating functions within Twitter – auto-reply, scheduling tweets, etc.  Dave Peck has experimented with this, with mixed results.  Consensus seemed to be to tread carefully around automating communication or avoid altogether.  @missrogue: “Automating tweets is a loss of opportunity.”

My takeway (even if I don’t have 1/2 million followers) is that Twitter should be used to build relationships with conversations, not to spam.

I’m feeling tweety . . . more later.

Also check out Tony Zanders blog post on 140 | The Twitter Conference Overview.

  1. The Power of Presence. Insights from Alex Payne, Twitter API Lead.
  2. I am a Twitter God(ess) and So Can You! The View From Twitter Stardom with @ijustine, @missrogue and @davepeck.
  3. Don’t Take the Drive to Manic Feature Explosion. What Makes a Good Twitter App.
  4. Twitter business start-ups are combination socialist and radical markets.   Twitter Strategies:  Real-World Success Stories.
  5. WTF, No Twitter TV!? Direction from Anamitra Banerji, Twitter Product Management.
  6. Even with a simple hash tag, there is a learning curve. Soren MacBeth, Co-Founder / CEO of StockTwits.
  7. You can’t own social media. You can only interact with it. Corporate Use of Twitter by @JetBlue.
  8. Twitter will transform conferences & events. Surprising takeaways from an in-person Twitter conference experience.

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What I Learned at 140 | The Twitter Conference (part 1)

May 27, 2009 by admin · 3 Comments 

Well I survived day one of the Twitter Conference (#140tc) at the Computer History Museum in Mtn View.  Some of many highlights:

  • 90%+ of the attendees pounding laptops furiously while speakers did their thing – a site for geek eyes
  • Seeing my first “webeletrity” (@ijustine) in person – now @GuyKawasaki has been relegated to some 50-year-old Hawaiian I happen to play pick-up ice hockey with
  • Witnessing @Scobleizer live – he’s taller but just as friendly and noteworthy as I imagined – I’m not sure why people are so obsessed with the size of his camera lens though
  • Meeting many cool and interesting people in person
  • Noting the irony of the first Twitter Conference in a building that used to be SGI and is now the Computer History Museum

I think I’ll go back for day two.

One of the day one highlights came early:  Alex Payne (@al3x), Twitter API lead was up first.

He noted how Jack Dorsey (@jack) truly recognized the power of “presence” in IM buddy lists and extended it into Twitter.  Interesting for me as an ex-AOLer to see how it took someone who wasn’t super close to the ICQ/AIM franchise (as far as I know) could see the opportunity and extend the seed of this idea into a new form.

I loved hearing Alex share how minimalism is a guiding design principle at Twitter.  Twitter looks remarkably similar today as Jan 2007.

twitter-20071

Twitter UI 01/2007

Alex is in a unique position to see what’s coming as he is actively working with external organizations that are developing applications on Twitter’s API’s.  Some of the things he sees coming:
One of the potentially biggest ideas he mentioned was that of a “portable identity.”  The major portals – AOL, Google, MSN and Yahoo! all have many years of efforts in building up their own user identity credentials that, in theory, travel around the Internet with a user unlocking a myriad of services as they go.  Facebook surely belongs with these firms as well now.  In the end, I’ve (perhaps cynically) viewed these efforts as self-serving.  The more one vendor is successful, the more they lock out their arch-rivals.  Without setting out to do so, Twitter may be actually be in a position to deliver some notion of truly portable identity.  Proof?  Well 10,000 applications built with their API’s to date is some evidence of momentum.
I’m sleepy . . . more later.
  1. The Power of Presence. Insights from Alex Payne, Twitter API Lead.
  2. I am a Twitter God(ess) and So Can You! The View From Twitter Stardom with @ijustine, @missrogue and @davepeck.
  3. Don’t Take the Drive to Manic Feature Explosion. What Makes a Good Twitter App.
  4. Twitter business start-ups are combination socialist and radical markets.   Twitter Strategies:  Real-World Success Stories.
  5. WTF, No Twitter TV!? Direction from Anamitra Banerji, Twitter Product Management.
  6. Even with a simple hash tag, there is a learning curve.   Soren MacBeth, Co-Founder / CEO of StockTwits.
  7. You can’t own social media. You can only interact with it. Corporate Use of Twitter by @JetBlue.
  8. Twitter will transform conferences & events. Surprising takeaways from an in-person Twitter conference experience.

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