Good design can’t fix …
February 8, 2010 by Nikos Anagnostou
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Consumers Trust Their Friends Less
February 8, 2010 by Nikos Anagnostou
…social networks themselves may be contributing to the decline in trust. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed people to maintain larger circles of casual associates, which may be diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks. In short, the more acquaintances a person has, the harder it can be to trust him or her. Mr. Edelman believes the Facebook component has “absolutely” played a role in diluting trust levels.
I subscribe to this
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Lists bring sanity back in twitter use – Part I
November 24, 2009 by Nikos Anagnostou
I have been a big opponent of the vanity twitter use (aka harvesting followers, hoping that “followers” equals “audience”).

In practice, this meant that from a point on, I completely stopped looking who is following me, did not reciprocate at the cost of being perceived as arrogant and kept my follower/following ratio to 4.
Still not content, I unfollowed quite a number of twitterers (some of them pretty big names) on the grounds that they were either producing too much noise, or were talking about things I found irrelevant to me.
For over two years now, I keep experimenting with twitter:
- In the beginning, it was conversations. But as people kept flocking around twitter, conversing became hard, if not impossible.
- Then it was news tracking which, although useful, it was far from complete. Yes, the news came to me, but not the news I was always interested. And with it came a lot of repetition and nonsense.
- Then, based on retweets, it was content discovery and evaluation.
- Occassionaly, it was polls, mini-crowdsourcing, asking questions etc
- Grouping people allowed to create filters: filters for news, for content, for community info.
- Finally, there came mindcasting. The most interesting use of twitter. The one I subscribe.
The grouping feature offered by many twitter clients, has, for a long time, being the single organizing factor that brought some order into chaos.
But, lately, we have another one, far too important: Lists!
Although lists look pretty much as the groups of twitter clients, they are not the same: groups are for the people we follow or those that follow us, while lists are for everyone! This difference is a game changer.
Already people use how often they are listed as a measure of importance, influence or popularity.
But lists have another function: they are metadata. The criteria we use to classify twitterers in lists, describe what they are or how we view them.
Also, lists, unlike groups, can be public, can be viewed and subscribed by others. And as such, they bring focus and attention from another angle.
“Ok”, you might say. “Lists bring new features. So what?”
Lists can bring back the sanity in twitter. They can undermine the follower fallacy, they can bring value to ordinary users as well as to businesses and marketers.
How?
By allowing us to make a fundamental distinction: following is an action of trust and, to some extend, intimacy. Subscribing to a list is willingness to be informed.
So if you are on twitter to spread your message (be it news or offers or corporate messages) seek to be listed, not followed. Your very intention implies that you most likely want to use twitter for broadcasting and not for creating relationships. That is fine. You won’t have to pretend you are a ‘friend’ from now on. You aren’t. You never were. But now message spreading can be done without undermining the everyday experience of ordinary users.
—– end of part I —–
Posted in social media | Tagged groups, lists, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
The partial feed sacrilege and the ad benefit
November 15, 2009 by Nikos Anagnostou
I remember a time (not so long ago) when people were disgusted by partial feeds and most of the major blogs and bloggers abided by this unwritten law. Publishing a partial feed was synonymous to cheap exploitation, putting ad revenues over readership, alienating your readers etc.
I, myself, am guilty of accusing blogs for this kind of ‘malpractice’.
But things change.
I see more and more probloggers publishing partial feed and very few readers complaining.
Why?
Because the way we read and follow blogs has changed too. Information is coming to us. And usually it comes in the form of a short sentence with a link in it, something especially true for twitter.
So the trend of reading everything in the coziness of our feed reader is in decline, while reading from the source is back with a vengeance. Twitter and Facebook are the benefactors of blog ad revenues.
Posted in social media | Tagged facebook, feed readers, feeds, partial feed, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Is Social Search a threat to SEO?
November 5, 2009 by Nikos Anagnostou
I think it is, and I tweeted so yesterday. And the reason is obvious. What is SEO about? Ultimately, it is about one thing: the ‘website’. It’s about making a website and its pages discoverable, ranked favorably in search results, described appropriately so that searchers hook on the description etc.
But ‘websites’ are not ‘in’. Check the diagrams from Google trends for websites below.
While the overall number of people online is increasing, the visits to the web sites keep falling.
At the same time the volume of searches for these brands shows a completely different picture.
In the last 12 months CG companies see a volume increase or remain steady (amidst the crisis) while, for IT, a longer perspective reveals a mixed picture that has to do with what these companies are and technologies they offer:
- oracle and ibm are gradually decreasing,
- apple is increasing,
- dell increases too although less quickly,
- and hp seems to hold its ground or slightly decreasing.
But there is an equally important movement undergoing: people shift their reliance from search to peers for news, recommendations and answers.
I don’t remember how many times and about how many things I have asked my twitter friends’ advise. And it always comes. And most of the time it’s good too. Not so abundant as search results, but who reads search results past the first page anyway?
Enter social seach. Google injects results in search from our social graphs (opt in). I don’t have to reason the usefulness of this.
What should we expect? What else than these two inversely related trends accelerating? Less reliance on search, more reliance on peer recommendations.
There are some interesting implications here: SEO consulting and search advertising have profited from our reliance on search. Search won’t go away anytime soon, especially with the social element in it. But what would be the need for SEO? And what would be the need for adword advertising, if the important factor in search results turns out to be our peers?
Is Google shooting its own foot? So it seems. But I am sure they have figured it out already and they are thinking of alternatives.
Posted in business, technology | Tagged google, Google Trends, peer recommendations, search, SEO, Social Search | 10 Comments »
What is this in Google Wave?
October 8, 2009 by Nikos Anagnostou
Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »
People will react to anything :)
October 6, 2009 by Nikos Anagnostou
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Web 2.0 without javascript?
September 30, 2009 by Nikos Anagnostou
A couple of days ago I came across this terrifying presentation from John Graham-Cumming.
Although the topics covered weren’t entirely new to me, put together in one presentation, had an impact. I came to wonder if and how would the major web 2.0 sites work, if javascript was out of the picture.
I decided to make a little test to find out: I disabled javascript from my browser and started logging in such sites to see how would they behave.
Here is the outcome for the three most important for me.
a. Twitter
Most of the functionality was in place: the timeline, friend and followers. From the various buttons on the tweets and the timeline pages, the reply did work but not the fav button.
The direct message and delete buttons did not work either. Same with the drop down where you select a follower to dm, and finally, the followers and trending topics buttons.
But all these are rather trivial. Because most of the tweet buttons replicate user behavior (putting the @ sign in front of another user name for a reply, or the d letter for a direct message).
Not being able to fav, or, more importantly, to delete is a loss, but not a major one.
b. Facebook
Things are worse in Facebook: while Home, Profile, Friends and Settings are accessible, the inbox and chat are not.
Also, from the bottom bar, the applications menu is inaccessible. Most of the edit links and buttons don’t work either and finally the status updates, link sharing , photos etc cannot be submitted.
c. Youtube
Here things are disastrous: without javascript you cannot see the videos! On top, you cannot access your account settings or you mailbox. There was no point looking for more.
A small gallery with pics of the failure areas of the above web applications follows
Posted in social media, technology | Tagged facebook, javascript, security, Twitter, youtube | 2 Comments »
What twitter considers as spam
September 13, 2009 by Nikos Anagnostou
The recent update of twitter’s Terms of Service, brought to my attention this page from twitter support : The Twitter Rules. Is it not a long read but it is quite educative as to what twitter considers as spam or spamming behavior.
It is interesting to note that there is no rigid definition of spam:
What constitutes “spamming” will evolve as we respond to new tricks and tactics by spammers
Instead, the following 14 points list of spamming behaviors is cited.
- If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;
- If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn);
- If you repeatedly follow and unfollow people, whether to build followers or to garner more attention for your profile;
- If you have a small number of followers compared to the amount of people you are following;
- If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates;
- If a large number of people are blocking you;
- The number of spam complaints that have been filed against you;
- If you post duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account
- If you post multiple unrelated updates to a topic using #
- If you post multiple unrelated updates to a trending or popular topic
- If you send large numbers of duplicate @replies
- If you send large numbers of unsolicited @replies in an attempt to spam a service or link
- If you repost other user’s content without attribution.
- If you have attempted to “sell” followers, particularly through tactics considered aggressive following or follower churn.
The one in bold has a special interest.
If your updates contain mainly links you are considered a spammer!
Well this is news!
There’re thousands of accounts in twitter that do just this. How? By linking a blog feed to a twitter account. In such a case all twitter updates are links back to the blogposts. Leaving aside the fact that these might not be appealing accounts to follow, considering link-posting as a spamming behavior contradicts the presence of major media organizations in twitter and there are no signs that twitter actually objects their presence.
But if link-posting is ok for, say, CNN why would that be bad for blog xyz with the 20 followers? The rule becomes a size discrimination.
Another notable notion in this rule is that twitter seems to still attribute value to the personal updates. For me personal updates are irrelevant but that is not the issue. The issue is that one should have the right to write about the things he truly cares. If drinking coffee with his spouse is one of them, that’s fine. But if not, that should be fine too.
Besides, in order to have personal updates you must have a person too. With all these business accounts, what sort of personal updates is to be expected?
Posted in social media | Tagged spam, terms of service, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
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Is the Salmon protocol tasty enough?
October 18, 2009 by Nikos Anagnostou
Conversations on the social web are mostly performed through comments. But comments are so fragmented! Consider this example:
Obviously the post has stirred some interest and generated a conversation. But the conversation is dispersed in many different places. Publisher looses track of many aspects of the conversation around the post. Commenters also mostly ignore what happens outside their area of interaction with the content: Facebook users ignore the FF commenters etc.
This situation has fired some intense debates. Many publishers think this situation is not in their best interest as potential traffic to their sites is deflected to an ‘aggregator’. Especially publishers that have a financial interest in their site traffic and do not just want their opinions spread, find this particularly not appealing.
To mend this situation, a group in Google is working on a new protocol that will allow comments to ‘return’ back on the original publisher site. The protocol is called Salmon
Salmon protocol logo
and you can get a basic idea of its workings from this presentation.
Salmon does bring back the comments to the publisher site but it does not solve the publishers’ problem. As you can see from slide 4, once a comment is back to the publisher’s site, it is republished back to all its subscribers (including the aggregators). What this would mean is that each aggregator has a full picture of the comments around the post, regardless of origin. From the user’s standpoint there is no need to move to the publisher’s site or to another aggregator for any reason, as the full picture will be available in whatever site the user prefers to frequent. The publishers may object it, but in what right? The publishers’ protests imply they OWN the comments which is hardly the case. The user owns his comments.
But let’s leave aside the publisher’s concern for a moment. Is slamon a good thing for the user? I would argue it is. He can have access to a discussion in its entirety without much hassle. And therefore he might be tempted to engage or engage more.
But there is something still missing: the user does not have easy access to his own comments for ALL pieces of content he has interacted with. And he has no control either. They can disappear with a site that closes down. Or in the simplest case, the can be deleted by the site moderators. This is the problem that systems like disqus, intense debate and JS-Kit are aiming to solve. But they won’t. Because it is very unlike that one of them will become ubiquitus.
I think the problem should be approached from another angle. A comment is a piece of content. There is no distinction in form from any other piece of content. They are both text (or audio or video in some cases). What subordinates a comment-content to the original post-content is notional and semantic: the post-content preceded the comment-content and actually the post-content was what aroused the commenters interest in the issue. But the same applies to a post that pingbacks to another post. So a comment is a piece of content and should have independence.
The question is how?
The issue is related to our digital identities: if in the web -to-come we can have a unique independent central point for our digital identities, this central point could be the originator and hoster of our comments.
A modification of the salmon protocol could easily let this happen: whenever a user comments on a publisher site, the site will send the comment back to the users digital identity home. Likewise, whenever an aggregator receives a user comment, the aggregator sends the comment back to the user home, as well as to the publisher.
I do not think this is difficult to implement although I can predict the frictions about who controls the user’s digital ‘home’. But that’s another issue.
Read also Louis Gray’s post on Salmon
Posted in technology | Tagged Aggregator, atom, comments, digital identity, protocol, salmon | 10 Comments »