Results tagged “twitter”

Twitter's Bootstrap framework for creating web sites and apps is the culmination of half a decade's work by the web design community in creating CSS resets, grid systems and toolkits for easily building flexible, adaptable websites. While Bootstrap is only a minor evolution over past efforts such as Blueprint or the 960 grid from a technical standpoint, Bootstrap's polish, rapid adoption, endorsement by Twitter, and vibrant community leave it poised to have more significant impact than perhaps all such previous efforts combined.

From our own Federal Social Media Index at Expert Labs to interesting experiments like Jeremy Grosser's Exporter (which lets you export social networking data) and Brad Fitzpatrick and Nick O'Neill's Eight22er (which lets you access your Twitter DMs through POP email clients), nearly all of the most interesting projects I've seen in recent days are using Bootstrap.

As a result, I wanted to outline a few of the traits that I believe have helped Bootstrap reach an unprecedentedly rapid adoption rate, as well as the infrastructural investments that the Bootstrap community should make to enable its long-term success.

Bootstrap Basics

First, the fundamentals: Bootstrap is a free, flexible open source framework for building websites and web apps. You can simply include some basic CSS and Javascript in your web page and have full access to all of the design and UI components that make up the framework. For additional customization, developers can modify its Less-based CSS to change nearly any key part of the framework's appearance, extend the core capabilities with a well-curated set of Javascript plugins, or dive into the explosively-popular GitHub project, which has risen in a short time to become the most-watched project on the entire site.

So why has Bootstrap worked so well? There are a few fundamental choices that were made particularly well:

• Reflect Current Practices: Bootstrap has the benefit of learning from a design community which has been iterating around shared CSS and HTML resources for a decade. Conventions around which browsers to target, which capabilities are commonly required for building sites, and informal traditions around everything from typography to navigation have all evolved to become de facto standards for consumer-facing sites. While many other past frameworks had preferences, they were still biased towards providing open-ended capabilities to developers; Bootstrap learns instead from the "convention over configuration" revolution that's happened in the other tiers of web development and is fairly prescriptive about many common design elements without being presumptuous about a developer's goals.
• Better Infrastructure: When early front-end frameworks such as YUI arose, the backing of a big commercial vendor such as Yahoo was a significant endorsement of the long-term sustainability and stability of a framework, though as that company's technological relevance faded, its framework suffered as a result. Similarly, early frameworks relied on collaboration through sites such as Google Code or Sourceforge, using the first iterations of source control on the web. By contrast, Bootstrap earns credibility from its affiliation with Twitter, which is still a vibrant and growing powerhouse in the tech industry and confers a halo of trustworthiness on the framework even if it's officially just a side project for its creators. And as GitHub has completely surpassed Google Code and Sourceforge in its brilliant, socially-driven dominance as the version control platform of choice for cutting-edge developers, Bootstrap's evolution gets better as the GitHub network gets richer (See also: Forking is a feature) and developers benefit from the efficiency of asking questions in communities such as Stack Overflow (Disclosure: I'm on the board) rather than having to wade through traditional Google Groups mailing lists for every issue, though of course the list is an option, too.
• Excellent Documentation: The homepage is the documentation. The clarity of the examples acts as its most effective marketing. The roadmap is in plain English.

What's Needed

Okay, if Bootstrap's doing so well, then everything must be fine, right? Not so fast: Lots of frameworks have enjoyed a temporary popularity, only to fade over time as requirements (and fashions) change. To that end, here's a wishlist of things I'd like to see — and some opportunities that are wide-open for any developers who want to make the most of them.

• A Bootstrap Zen Garden: While Bootstrap's current aesthetics are inoffensive and pleasing, the framework's success may be its own weakness, as users (or more importantly, designers) see more and more sites featuring its signature graphical elements. If someone in the community steps up to provide simple, lightweight, easily-switchable replacements that users can download, modify and share to update the looks of their Bootstrap-powered sites, this will be the single biggest amplifier to the framework's longevity. I'd contrast this to the acclaim that WordPress' default "Kubrick" template had when it was first released to the almost charmingly retro feel is has now when you look at a blog like Clay Shirky's. These things age pretty fast.
• Documentation that covers the why, not just the how: For early-adopter developers, the current documentation is wonderful in its straightforwardness. But as the developer audience for Bootstrap goes, a more thoughtful examination of how to apply Bootstrap's design patterns thoughtfully to common user experience challenges will be necessary not just to guide developers, but to expand the audience for the framework overall. Somebody's going to make a killing on a Kindle single about this.
• A larger curated set of jQuery plugins: The current small set of scripts which can be used to enhance Bootstrap are fantastic, but I'd expect a radical increase in the number of people expanding the framework's capabilities through scripting. The dev team should officially bless jQuery as the scripting framework of choice for extending Bootstrap (this is already the default choice, but being prescriptive again here can probably only help) and then make tough choices about which carousel script or form validation plugin is preferred by the framework. Given that the jQuery plugin community's infrastructure has regressed from poor to "under construction" of late, there is a good opportunity to positively direct the energy of the community that lives in the intersection of Bootstrap and jQuery without negatively impacting the overall jQuery ecosystem.
• A user gallery: I don't generally care that much about who else is using a given framework if it meets my needs, but as Bootstrap broadens its audience, many developers will want the reassurance of being able to point to other big, successful users of the framework. This could also work alongside the Zen Garden to provide inspiration for people who want to find new ways to use the framework.

Of course, there are many other elements that will help Bootstrap reach its greatest potential; We can expect templates for most popular blogging systems and CMSes, along with the requisite spate of Illustrator and OmniGraffle templates for designing with the framework. Some more ambitious community members might even make "Bootstrap site generators" that will let you drag-and-drop elements to create your HTML, though I'm still a bit skeptical about those sorts of efforts.

In all, though Bootstrap is a triumph for Twitter in general and for its creators Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton in particular. It's always fun to see a particular technology toolkit take off, and since I'm sure I've missed some key parts of Bootstrap's future in this roundup, I can't wait to hear what everyone else thinks of its future as well.

By request, a bit of explanation of how and why I favorite things on the internet. (Or favor them. Or like them. Whatever.)

First, where do I favorite? On Twitter, certainly: I love lots of tweets! On Facebook! That's mostly for liking things outside of Facebook, around the web. I like lots of videos on YouTube and on Vimeo, the latter of which probably has the most satisfying like/favoriting animation on the web. I judiciously like things on MLKSHK. I suppose I still favorite things on Google Reader from time to time, which always involves me starring, sharing, +1ing and clicking 10 other buttons in their UI, since I don't really know which one does what. YouTube has both liking and favoriting, too, but somehow that redundancy doesn't bother me as much.

And, perhaps more visibly than anywhere else, I star all kinds of things on Stellar, which is also where many of these favorites get aggregated and shared with others; It's my, erm, somewhat enthusiastic use of favoriting on that service (I'm by far the most prolific star-giver in these early days of the awesome little site) which has inspired the most recent "dude, what the hell?" responses from many of my friends. As of 6 weeks ago, Jason showed me stats where I had about 1/3 more favorites than the next-highest person on the site.

Why am I so prolific with the stars? Well, one part is that I am just an enthusiastic person: I like lots of stuff! There's also social expectation; My favorite (see what I did there?) friend David Jacobs is a master of favoriting and taught me the wonders of the form years ago. In the early days of (now-defunct) Vox, David was specifically called out when the app added favoriting:

By popular demand, we've introduced the ability for users to mark posts, photos, audio, video and books -- from their own blog as well as other Vox blogs -- as favorites. We've nicknamed this feature the "David Jacobs" after friend and Vox user, who, at last count has favorited 1,677 photos on Flickr. It's a great way to keep track of good stuff you've seen on Vox, as well as keep a record of your own things that you particularly like.

Do me a favor

Despite my enthusiasm, my habit of enthusiastically clicking stars and thumbs-up all over the web is not unconsidered. Instead, my intention is fairly consistent, though I'm aware the semantics of these functions are slightly different in all these various services. A few common themes:

• Acknowledging good work: When someone writes a tweet that makes me laugh or think, or produces a video that's worth the time to watch it, I favorite it or like it as a "reward" of sorts to them. I don't know anyone who doesn't check the number of likes/faves on a work they've made at least some of the time, and that way they know I was rooting for them.
• Retaining for the future: Favoriting items increases my ability to retrieve them later. I've got Instapaper and Readability and Pinboard all hooked up together so that things I star get saved as bookmarks that I can retrieve later. Similarly, ThinkUp can show me a rough version of the links that were shared in tweets that I've favorited. Basically, I'm more likely to favorite something if I think it's worthwhile enough to return to later.
• Implicit sharing: These days, this may be my main motivation for favoriting lots of stuff on the web. Truth is, I often miss the curation and editorial fun of the link blog that I used to publish on this site. (Give me a shout if you remember that — it's been seven years since I stopped doing it, old-timer!) By judiciously favoriting good things across the web, I can share them with my friends, assuming they're on services like Stellar and Favstar and Facebook with me.

Now, there are a couple of factors that make my favoriting behavior unusual, compared to normal web users. (Beyond the fact that I probably waste even more time on the web than most people.) First, my social graph is extremely distorted. I have a lot of Twitter followers, so many apps and services that use "popular" Twitter accounts as fodder for link/tweet popularity factor in my favoriting behavior disproportionately. I'm not quite a suggested user on Stellar the way I am on Twitter (since Stellar doesn't have that concept), but I do have an exaggeratedly prominent placement on that site, too, so the impact of my favoriting is amplified.

In short, favoriting or liking things for me is a performative act, but one that's accessible to me with the low threshold of a simple gesture. It's the sort of thing that can only happen online, but if I could smile at a person in the real world in a way that would radically increase the likelihood that others would smile at that person, too, then I'd be doing that all day long.

Further reading

• ToRead is To Be Human, from 2007, was about the fundamental optimism people have when they tag an article as something they intend to read in the future. Many people use favoriting this way today.
• An Interview with Paul Bausch that I did on the old Six Apart blog back in 2003. I've assigned the epithet "father of the permalink" to Paul for years, but in reality, just before Paul was implementing permalinks in Blogger, Jason was experimenting with them on Kottke.org. I think it's no accident that both are innovating on favoriting, Jason with Stellar and pb with continued experiments (some inane) on MetaFilter. Favoriting is the most fundamental, natural action to perform on the permalink, which is the atomic unit of content on the web.
• The Power of the Audience, from early last year, was the first time I really explored the idea of favorites as social, gestural feedback for creators. The situation here hasn't gotten much better since then.
• Actions are the Body Language. Back in 2008, I'd made a page to capture my social actions like favoriting, and wrote a bit about why. (The page of those actions is totally broken now, sadly, but being able to archive those gestures is one of the reasons I'm so passionate about making ThinkUp work well.)
• Matt Haughey's post on his feedback loops that he relies on online, from early 2010.
• And finally, last year at Web 2.0 Expo NYC, I asked API head Ryan Sarver why favoriting is an afterthought on Twitter, at 7:27 in this interview video.

I wish there were a website that just had "favorite" (or "like") buttons you could embed, without it being all tied in to all the other crazy stuff Facebook does. But I'd settle for someone hacking ThinkUp to better support archiving my Facebook "likes" so I'd have a record of all the things I enjoy on the web. Actually, what the hell: $500 to the charity of your choice if somebody wants to make that work. Plus, if you tweet about doing it, I'll favorite your tweet.

I've been waiting a year for someone to write about this, but my laziness has not yet paid off, so here are a few things that we all know about everybody's favorite Cupertino fruit company:

• Apple has client app software on hundreds of millions of devices in the form of iTunes on PCs and Macs and, well, all of the bundled software on iOS devices.
• Apple has an extremely large-scale realtime messaging service, in the form of Apple Push Notifications, which has scaled with high reliability to what must be an extremely large number of messages, certainly on the order of hundreds of millions a day.
• Apple has account info for every person receiving those notifications, usually including credit card information.
• Apple has lots of experience making client applications for short-length interpersonal messaging.
• Apple has a proven ability to get the attention and interest of artists and tastemakers who influence culture and inspire a following.

And here are a few things which Apple doesn't have:

• Any success or demonstrated ability in making compelling clients for social networking, whether in the form of Game Center or Ping.
• A usable API for developers to build on this realtime networking infrastructure in a lightweight way in web apps, or in languages other than Objective C.

To some degree, third parties like Boxcar address some of the need for a generic push notifications client; Services like Urban Airship solve a good bit of the API problem as well.

But in short, the hardest, most expensive technical part of building a web-scale Twitter competitor already exists in Apple's infrastructure. What's missing, in an odd reversal of Apple's usual pattern, is a well-designed, simple user experience that makes people want to participate.

Could a small team of developers and designers within Apple make a credible realtime messaging service with first-rate native clients on every important platform? Could they graft on a simple, REST-based web-style APIs to the complicated, old-fashioned API that enables push notifications right now? It'd be a lot like building a usable, delightful user interface on top of well-established, but complicated, technological underpinnings, wouldn't it? I wonder if Apple has those skills.

Related:

• Delivery as a Service
• The Pushbutton Web

Clive Thompson's newest Wired piece argues that the flow of short-form messages as we see on Twitter and Facebook is encouraging longer meditations in other media. I've been thinking about this phenomenon for a while in terms of the impact that it has on me and other bloggers, with the simple premise that I'd like to be writing the content that everyone links to in those media, instead of merely passing around links to other people's work.

I alluded to that concept in the lengthy conversation I had with Clive for the piece, and he captured one of the key points I was trying to make:

“I save the little stuff for Twitter and blog only when I have something big to say,” as blogger Anil Dash put it. It turns out readers prefer this: One survey found that the most popular blog posts today are the longest ones, 1,600 words on average.

Now, while I'd like to self-servingly pretend that everything I say here is "big" in the sense of being important, really what I meant is that some ideas are just bigger than 140 characters. In fact, most good ideas are. More importantly, our ideas often need to gain traction and meaning over time. Blog posts often age into something more substantial than they are at their conception, through the weight of time and perspective and response.

And blogs afford that sort of maturation of an idea uniquely well amongst online media, due to their use of the permalink (permanent link), which gives each idea a place to live and thrive. While Facebook and Twitter nominally provide permalinks as well, the truth is that individual ideas in those flow-based media don't have enough substance for a meaningful conversation to accrete around them.

Felix Salmon touches on this point well in his recent post about the evanescence of Twitter debates. In the particular case he cites, Twitter is the medium that hosted important disclosures that could be material to a case that a current Supreme Court justice has said could impact a future ruling on free speech.

This means that, in an upcoming court case with the highest possible stakes for self-expression in our country, we may be relying on content that will soon be unretrievable by design. (That linked page shows that Twitter will only let you retrieve your last 3200 tweets.) If Kevin Poulsen decides to write 3000 more tweets between now and the time this theoretical case hits the Supreme Court, then we're relying on the (admittedly likely) chance that Twitter, Inc. makes an exception to its policy in order to provide this evidence.

If You See Something, Say Something

But usually, the stakes aren't as high as the future of free speech in America. Sometimes, we just have ideas we're pondering. Maybe we aren't sure of the full implications of something we've noticed, but we want to help catalyze a conversation. It's that sort of brainstorming that led David Galbraith to invent the most popular form of autobiography every created. I get to experience small versions of it myself, as when I noticed a small trend in people's observations about Google lately, which seems to have helped to promote the idea that maybe there has been an inflection point in the evolution of Google's ability to search the contemporary web.

Here's the important thing: The only reason I was able to synthesize those few perspectives is because they were blogged. Certainly, Twitter helped bring those ideas to my attention, and Facebook or any other stream-based service could have played that role as well. But because these points were raised by people I don't always read immediately, the persistence and permanence of their words, as uniquely provided by blogging, is what made it possible for a pattern to emerge.

Capturing those ephemeral moments of observation in a permanent and persistent form is essential for the ideas to mature into something larger. I'd hoped, when I first recommended that everyone consider Twitter a few years ago, that Twitter would emphasize those traits about tweets sent on the service, but until and unless their current design choices change, there's an enormous amount of cultural data that gets lost every day, simply by having been shared through a platform with those constraints.

The Perils of a Low Stress Environment

Now, Twitter and other stream-based flows of information provide an important role in the ecosystem. Perhaps the most important psychological innovation of Twitter is that it assumes you won't see every message that comes along. There's no count of unread items, and very little social cost to telling a friend that you missed their tweet. That convenience and social accommodation is incredibly valuable and an important contribution to the web.

However, by creating a lossy environment where individual tweets are disposable, there's also an environment where few will build the infrastructure to support broader, more meaningful conversations that could be catalyzed by a tweet. In many ways, this means the best tweets for advancing an idea are those that contain links to more permanent media.

Keeping Time

So, if most tweets are too ephemeral to reach their full potential as ideas, what do we do about it? Well, obviously, one big step would be to simply make sure to blog any idea that's worth preserving. It's perfectly fine to tweet about trivialities — I do it all the time! But if you're tweeting about your work, your passion, or something meaningful to you, you owe it to your ideas to actually preserve them somewhere more persistent.

And, of course, I should make a pitch that this is part of the reason I am so enamored of the work the ThinkUp community is doing. A free, thriving, powerful, relatively accessible app that archives Twitter and Facebook updates with a mind towards incorporating them into more persistent and meaningful media is an essential part of the ecosystem. This is especially true as political, social and artistic leaders start to rely on these ephemeral media, without realizing the cultural costs to those choices.

Given enough time, and without substantial changes to the way the big social networks work, if you didn't blog it, it didn't happen. In fact, I first wrote about this idea a bit on Twitter a few years ago. See if you can find it.

I love blogs. Nick Denton wrote over on Lifehacker about the pending redesign of Gawker's blogs, with a lot of great insights into the leading edge of web publishing today. As with any thoughtful, provocative writing of such length, it inspired some great responses, including two of my early favorites:

• Joel Johnson, in 133 characters, offered up "Gawker Media is the size of a moderately successful local McDonalds franchise. So I guess it's a compliment that it's so interesting."
• Felix Salmon, at 6000 words, covers Hungary and the Cayman Islands, Kinja and Blogwire, and probably other stuff that I missed.

Finally, Nick Bilton did a follow-up on the NY Times Bits blog today, which talks about this evolution of Gawker's design (which you can see for yourself at beta.gawker.com and then quotes me:

“I think Nick [Denton] is eager to declare this a post-blog design as a sop to advertisers,” he said. “It’s still a blog, it’s just the blog is in a narrower column.”

This is true! I do think this — Gawker is still, and always has been, just a nicely designed blog. Same goes for its sister sites. But what neither Nick mentioned is an idea that I've shared with them both, that Gawker's redesign to me shows an interesting convergence around a pattern that is best exemplified by, of all things, the new Twitter design.

River On One Side, Party On The Other

Let's consider the core elements of a reverse-chronological headline flow, accompanied by a sort of "content well" where rich media items sit. I mumbled about this a bit a few months ago in Twitter, Transclusion and Trust, but basically a half-decade after RSS readers failed to take over the world, major media sites are all converging on the idea of a two-paned reader, with a river of news of headlines that can be clicked to yield an embedded article reader that prominently features video, photos or other rich content. Here's a side-by-side comparison, with the bloggy parts highlighted:

Interestingly, this sort of seems like blogs have finally adopted elements of web applications as part of their fundamental design. Many have noted how the new Twitter on the web seems influenced by Twitter on the iPad (though the order of the two platforms' release may not have been the order of their creation), but in chatting today Nick Denton mentioned that there has seemed to be a sort of convergent evolution around these ideas between Twitter's work, Gawker's redesign, and other apps as well. Nick specifically mentioned the Mail app on the iPad, and added, "When we saw Reeder on iPad, we thought: oh, wow, same thinking".

The relative widths of the columns accurately reflects the priority of the media companies that host them: Twitter is mostly about the stream, but also about the content; Gawker is primarily about the content but needs to have the stream.

In this way, blogs are emphasizing the trait that's always defined them, the fact that they're an ongoing flow of information instead of just a collection of published pages. By allowing that flow to continue regardless of which particular piece of embedded content has caught your eye, Gawker and Twitter are just showing the vibrancy and resilience of the format.

Here are some articles that have recently gotten attention amongst media obsessives. They are all fundamentally flawed:

• A list of the Top 25 newspapers on Twitter from Journalistics
• An expanded list of 200 U.S. newspapers, sorted by their Twitter follower counts
• A piece in MediaWeek about Elle UK's popularity on Twitter

The problem with all of these pieces? The data that underlie the assertions are fundamentally flawed.

Each story uses the advanced research technique of looking at a publication's Twitter account, then reading the sidebar of their Twitter profile and copying the number of followers listed there. This methodology is useless for determining how many people have chosen to follow a publication, and instead is indicative primarily of whether or not that publication is one of the suggested Twitter accounts that users encounter when signing up for the service. It's also correlated to how long that publication has been on Twitter accruing those incidental followers.

Big Follower Counts Are Horseshit

I covered much of this topic at the beginning of this year in a post called Nobody Has A Million Twitter Followers. While the literal point of that headline may no longer be true (I'm sure Justin Bieber or Nicki Minaj has actually earned a million organic Twitter followers), the point still stands: Being suggested as an account to follow when users sign up for Twitter so distorts the meaning of follower counts that citing such follower counts without disclaimers is either ignorant or misleading.

In the case of screaming headlines that say "The New York Times has more Twitter followers than subscribers!" we actually veer from misleading to so distorted it's absurd. Subscribers are people who have, in one way or another, indicated intent. They filled out a form, sent in some money, and established a relationship with The New York Times. The majority of followers of the New York Times on Twitter, however, only established a relationship with Twitter itself, and the Times came along for the ride. MediaWeek actually uses the headline "Elle has a hit with Twitter feed" and this cannot be proven — being on the list myself, I gain users at almost the same rate as Elle UK, and I'm no hit among fashionistas. All we're getting a measure of is Twitter's popularity.

If any of these articles included explanation of the fact that the publications with the biggest number of followers were merely those chosen by Twitter to be so, then we could start to have an honest discussion about impact or influence or popularity or whatever the hell it is these writers want to weigh in on. By analogy, if a publisher went and threw its paper on the doorsteps of millions of people without any conscious action on their part, and then crowed about how it had a bigger subscription base than someone else, we'd consider them ridiculous.

So statements like "Maybe The New York Times has such a huge Twitter following because it was the first of the Top 25 to join Twitter, way back in March 2, 2007. " (from the first article linked above, on Journalistics) show a fundamental misunderstanding of the very numbers they're trying to report on. If we're going to make a splash with articles based on numbers, let's at least pretend to know what the numbers represent.

As ever, the best thing about blogging is the conversations it kicks off. Some nice responses to recent posts here and around the web:

• In a follow-up to Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences, Mathew Ingram of GigaOm ruminated a bit about magazine apps as walled gardens. Overall, Mathew's got a strong skepticism about a lot of efforts in this area, but I was pleased to see him say "About the only magazine that has taken any kind of creative steps in this direction with its iPad app is Gourmet magazine". Ron Mwangaguhunga of eMedia Vitals continued the conversation as well.

• A few weeks ago I was quoted in the New Yorker talking about Facebook and its impact on culture. In this week's issue of the New Yorker, I pop up again, but this time quoted in Ben McGrath's lengthy profile of Nick Denton. Spoilers: The piece closes with me asking, "Who has more freedom in the media world than Nick Denton?" People seem to like lines like that, as the quote popped up in The NY Times Dealbook blog and elsewhere.

• I argued with Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that social media can't be tools for real change. Eric Harvey offered a thoughtful, well-reasoned counterpoint to my piece, which is well worth a read.

• Last week, Twitter changed CEOs with Ev Williams focusing on product and COO Dick Costolo becoming the new CEO. ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick examined the transition, with a nod towards my piece on ten years of history behind Twitter's senior execs.

• At Web 2.0 Expo here in New York last week, I did an interview with Mac Slocum of O'Reilly. While I included the video here in an earlier post, Mac revisited the interview on the O'Reilly Radar blog under the title "Why blogging still matters", focusing on one of the points that came up later in the conversation. It had been a long day with lots of different ideas flowing, so I'd nearly forgotten that we even talked about that, but now I'm pretty glad that part of the conversation was captured.

• I was a judge in the Apps 4 Africa contest which ended last week with some amazing winners, including my favorite iCow, which came in first place. You can listen to an interview I did with Future Tense about the competition, or check out this video of Secretary of State Clinton congratulating the winners:

• This past weekend, I attended the Open Web Foo Camp hosted by O'Reilly. While the camp itself is off the record, Scott Rosenberg did an admirable job of documenting one of the key themes of the event — whether the present "open" phase of the web is merely an aberration. I tried to use my access to influential open web advocates at Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other big web companies to push them to make their employers more open and to resist the urge to compromise on their principles despite the understandable pressure they must be under. Hopefully a little friendly urging can give them the support they need to make the right choices.

• Finally, with ThinkUp well into beta-testing and Expert Labs supporting its first deployment by Code for America, Gina Trapani and I joined John Moore on The Lab for a brief interview about Expert Labs and where ThinkUp is headed.

Okay, that's enough roundup of Other People's Content. We'll return to original content here again shortly.

In my blog here, I'm mostly a textual dude. I've made a few little video clips or animated .gifs over the years, but basically, I'm a writer. But today, today! We're going all futuristic streaming internet video with it. If you like it, then maybe I'll do more.

I got to be on The Pipeline, Dan Benjamin's awesome tech interview podcast (subscribe in iTunes, or download the MP3) and join the company of some amazing people that Dan's interviewed. I'm really pleased with how it came out, and if you've got an hour to waste, please do give it a listen. Tip: You can listen at double-speed on your iPod and only waste half an hour.

Then today, I had a great conversation with Ryan Sarver, who's Director of Platform for Twitter, as a keynote Q&A at the Web 2.0 Expo here in New York. We only had a short period of time, but I feel like we covered a lot of really interesting technical questions while considering them in a larger context.

Right after that, we continued the conversation by having Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook, join Ryan and I. There, I tried to ask broader questions that applied to the efforts of both of these social networking titans.

Finally, I followed up with an interview about our work at Expert Labs, describing the mission a bit and hopefully offering a note of optimism about where Gov 2.0 is headed.

I like to play Words With Friends and Scrabble! Other folks do too. Sometimes I play well.

Finally, here's Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake with a medley of great moments in hip hop history. I'm not involved in this, but I thought it'd be good if people could see why I like these guys, and also there should be something in this post that I'd actually enjoy watching.

The new Twitter is here! The new Twitter is here! Besides sowing discontent in our household by giving me access to the new user interface before my wife's account has been upgraded, the big new feature of the update to venerable old Twitter.com is a sidebar that lets you view media that's been mentioned in a tweet. Videos! Photos! Kickstarteros!

Unfortunately for readers of this blog, I have a years-long fixation on transclusion of hypertext documents. Transclusion is technically defined as "when you put that one thing in that other thing". In its current implementation, Twitter has declared that media which is shown within the Twitter interface comes from selected partners. But actually, the technology to allow embedding of rich media from almost any site already exists, using a system called OEmbed. Geeky stuff, but it's made by nice people who are pretty smart, and it lets any site say, "Hey, if you want to put our thing in your thing, do it like this". It works. Lots of sites do it.

Nobody's getting rich off of it, but nobody's getting sued, and in between those two extremes lies most of what makes the web great.

What Twitter Could Do

So, is Twitter using OEmbed to do its new sidebar media thing? Dunno. It's unclear. They probably are building on top of OEmbed in some way, but if that's the case, then it hasn't been documented anywhere. Update: Yep, they are!

But if Twitter did declare they were using OEmbed, that would let them say either one of two good options:

1. If your site supports OEmbed, and someone tweets a link to it, it'll Just Work! (This would be awesome, but tricky.)
2. If you have a site that supports OEmbed, and want it to Just Work in Twitter, submit your link to us in some simple way. (This would be less gee-whiz but still great.)

Even better, if Twitter adopted smart use of OEmbed in this way, and if they went one step further and published the list of services that had registered with them as offering their content up for embedding, we'd have a great registry of all the media that was ready to be transcluded onto other websites. I am pretty sure "transcluded" is a word. I would play it in Scrabble.

That's a whole new world of remixing the web that has been technically possible, but practically a pain in the ass, and Twitter could catalyze some really fun ways to combine content from different sites. YouTube owes some significant part of its overall dominance in video on the web to its popularization of simple embedding of media in other sites. There have been a few efforts over the years to popularize the embedding of widgets across the web in various ways, but except for promotion (Digg, Twitter and Facebook "Like" buttons) and ads (Google!), they haven't really caught on in terms of functionality.

There are, of course, little companies and projects doing some of this stuff on their own. Embed.ly has a whole directory of different kinds of content they'll help you embed. Widgetbox is still around, though they predate the use of the omnipresent Libyan domain name suffix. oohEmbed seems nice, though its name wins the cautionary award for why you shouldn't let coders do marketing, just as you shouldn't let marketers code.

But none of them has the traction, or the market influence, that Twitter does. If Twitter embraces OEmbed as the way to get into its sidebar in a seamless way, it could finally move this stuff from the esoteric fringes of web hackers into a capability that every media publisher would want to support. Oddly, even some major web widgets we see today, like Google AdSense, don't support OEmbed for easy incorporation onto other sites. (YouTube and Flickr do.)

I'm In Ur Blog &c.

For my part, I hope Twitter makes their own ecosystem more open by offering this standard way to get one's own media built into the Twitter.com experience when someone tweets a link to it. I hope Twitter also allows tweets to be sent out through OEmbed, so that it's easier to embed them (instead of using the casual Blackbird Pie tool they'd thrown together) in other sites. And most of all, I hope more people experiment with seeing how we can combine content from our sites together in new ways. Imagine if someone could just skim previews of your blog posts inline if a friend had tweeted a link to your site. It'd be cool!

To help figure out how this stuff could work, I've reinstated the ability to embed excerpts of my blog posts into other sites, and I'll be watching to see if any interesting results come of that. (I don't yet support OEmbed for my blog posts here, but if I have time next week, I'll add that.) A little more background:

• Embedded Journalism: A few years ago, I added the ability to embed an excerpt of my blog post into other sites. It kicked off an interesting discussion.
• Reinventing Copy & Paste: See, I really wasn't kidding about the transclusion thing. I think it's a big deal.

Last week, Twitter announced its new advertising system, called promoted tweets. I was at Twitter's Chirp conference as a speaker, so I got an up-close look at the reaction to the big news, along with the (frankly, more interesting to me) announcements for developers and media.

But from the New York Times to CNBC to the dozens of other media channels that covered the story, there was no mention of the essential fact that Twitter's senior executives have all made similar advertising and monetization systems in the past.

Why does it matter? Because looking at the decisions Ev, Dick, Biz and other senior Twitter execs have made in the past could provide valuable insights to anyone trying to understand the roadmap of how the company got to this point, and what they're going to do next. And because innovation happens in the tech business not because of who you know or how much money you have (though those things help, of course) but because, fundamentally, you know your shit. The tech trade press wants to focus on personalities and funding, but for the developers I met at Chirp, or who are making their way to Facebook's F8 conference today, success comes from recognizing industry patterns.

So, some examples:

• PyRads, launched in November 2001, was a self-service text ad system built by Pyra CEO Ev Williams, now Twitter's CEO, to provide an advertising system for users of Pyra's signature application, Blogger. (Trivia: PyRads was named by Jason Shellen, now CEO of Brizzly.) PyRads actually launched between Google's rollout of AdWords and its later introduction of AdSense, alongside similar efforts like Matt Haughey's TextAds and Phil Kaplan's HttpAds.
• SpyOnIt, launched in 1999, was led by its CEO Dick Costolo, now COO of Twitter, as a realtime notification system for changes on websites. In addition to sending instant messages when a site had updated, the SpyOnIt team stayed at 724 solutions after it acquired their company, with one area of focus being the delivery of realtime notifications through partnerships with mobile service providers. Dick and his SpyOnIt cofounders would later go on to create Feedburner. You know, that thing that does realtime delivery of feeds with ads in them?
• A bonus one: Xanga, launched in 1999, was one of the earliest large-scale blogging services, and its initial marketing efforts were led by Biz Stone, now Creative Director of Twitter. While Biz was at Xanga, they launched one of the first pages to aggregate media consumption in a blogging community, creating an Amazon shopping portal of the most popular books, music and movies amongst their users.

There are dozens more examples, but if you are going to compete or succeed in the Twitter ecosystem, shouldn't you know exactly what choices these men made when in nearly identical circumstances a decade ago? Because I'm friends with these guys, I can just ask them. But none of the developers I've talked to at events like Chirp seem to know this legacy, and they don't have the access and privilege that I do to ask questions directly. That's not really a criticism — a lot of them are young or inexperienced or simply arrogant and don't think history matters, so they are disinclined to listen to an old-timer like me rant about ancient times when they were in junior high school.

And while the brashness of youth can be a powerful driver of innovation, a blind devotion to the narratives as presented by today's tech press is incomplete at best. Without the whole story, today's startups are going to be sitting around surprised when industry cycles repeat themselves. It doesn't have to be that way. All you have to do is Know Your Shit.

Don't worry, I'm not 100% Grumpy Old Man yet; Here's video of me improvising a PowerPoint presentation to slides I'd never seen at the close of the first day of the Chirp conference. Caution: The jokes are nerdy.

Update: The video works now.

A few weeks ago when I started writing about what it's like to be on Twitter's suggested user list and the fact that nobody has a million followers on Twitter, I thought it might be a good opportunity to try to collect some useful data since I'd been logging my account's activity using Gina Trapani's ThinkTank application. So I offered an Amazon gift certificate as a little token prize to encourage everybody to chip in ideas of how to analyze that data.

As my follower count crept past 300,000 a number of you responded with suggestions of what information you were curious about, submitting your ideas by using the #sulidea hashtag.

Before I reveal who's won an Amazon certificate, here's a list of all of the suggestions that I found, sorted by Twitter user name.

casey: I wonder what the rate of increase of followers for those on the SUL is—i.e., is there a spike on day 1 and then dropping each day?

Alex Guest: How many followers from pre-list days are still following and what is the decay curve?

Carol Hagen: Interested in stats on new followers & avg number of tweets from lists vs those of engaged followers

Nate: How many of your SUL followers have less than 10 total tweets after their first three months on twitter?

Chris F. Nicholson: How many of your followers follow a given number of your other followers (how deep is the network between them, and thus, you)

Chad Colgur: How many follows were reciprocated?

Denton Gentry: Of the followers gained each day via the SUL what % stop sending tweets within a week? Within a month?

Tim Maly: What proportion of your followers go on to become disabled accounts? We're looking for spammers.

Doug Benson: We need a way to know who is an expert and who is a twitter fool. Is there any kind of feedback metric other than followers?

Ekalavya: Wonder how many users who've followed you after you got listed on the list will send in suggestions?

Phil Wolff: How are the people who followed you before & after different, adjusted for time on T? # of followers, tweets, followeds?

Phil Wolff: How are trending tweets among people that add you different from the overall trending tweets?

Phil Wolff: If a follower doesn't unfollow you within N minutes of following you, they never will. Solve for N.

Peggy Dolane: how about looking at stats on your followers using @via vs. old/new RT methods?Or trends for tweet favoriting?

Ricardo Guerrero: I'd be keen to know how many of your followers haven't updated at all in the last 1-3 months. Also % who've replied/RTed.

Gabe Audick: Maybe see if writing Please retweet or Reply to or if asking a question increases conversation.

Juan E. D.: How many users ONLY follow people in the SUL

Jay Neff: What % of follows gained are actively tweeting? Would love to see a breakdown of active to inactive over x amount of time

John W. Furst: Average time people keep following (on monthly basis.)

John W. Furst: Average time people keep replying/retweeting (on monthly basis.) before they unfollow or account becomes dormant.

John W. Furst: Is there a best time to tweet?

Jon Paul: another how many of your followers are following exactly 20 people? another way to measure how many are probabaly not active users

Jon Paul: punk your followers with outrageous tweets w/ links, and see how many take the bait. Determine if lack of clicks was them or you ;)

Katie Kimball: How did YOU get on the list?

K Kishbaugh: How many new followers from suggested list R active on Twitter beyond a couple weeks? Do many never find the value in Twitter?

Michael Kubler: Are new followers not clicking/retweeting cause they are new? Do old followers used to Twitter do better?

Leonard: analysis of followers quantifying activity percentiles / current activity also would be pretty useful

Leonard: clickthroughs need to be corrected against users' avg tweeetstream rate/following and maybe age/activity

Mark J. Hulme: Improve twttr's suggested user list - make retweets a part of the calculus 4 inclusion - how so w/out encouraging gaming?

Matthew Glidden: Are you tempted to prune away non-engaged followers?

mizminh: How many people who don't follow arrived at via Seth Godin's blog about Anil Dash's blog?

natasha: What are the sort of followers you get. any specific country wins? many bots? young/old/new people?

Nathaniel McNamara: I would like to know which people are clicking on my own links (who are they?) -

Nathaniel McNamara: I would love to know the number of clicks generated from links posted by accounts on the SUL in the past week/month/year

Laura Conaway: Did the account's # of tweets go up after it got added to Suggested User List?

Peter J. Hester: Anil, Of your total followers, what other SUL accts are they following? Is there a trend?

Peter J. Hester: does the frequency of interaction from new followers increase/decrease over time?

Peter J. Hester: Of the available SUL accts., how many does the avg new user elect to follow when signing up. What criteria is used to decide?

Sharon Henry: Breakdown of your followers: Those following fewer than 50,100...being 1 of 50 greater influencer than being 1 of 10,000

Greg: I wonder what the distribution is for the amount of time people follow twitter celebrities before they they stop following them

esteban contreras: wonder what the real / lessthanreal follwr ratio is for companies vs. individuals & celebs on twtr suggester user list

Jason Staten: A ratio of tweets with a link to RTs of them might be an interesting statistic. Most linked tweets want to be shared.

Tyler Crowley: how much has the average CTR of your bit.ly links or twitpics changed since joining the list?

Carol Doane: What I want to know (it's not about users) when THE LIST goes away & followers drop, what is psychological affect on you?

George Eapen: Check out how many of your followers actually use the hashtag to figure out how many real users you have.

Alex Rose: Let's see a graph showing # of RTs over time by user. Anyone regularly RT on a weekend at least 5 days later?

Vojt?ch Turek: Idea, pt1#2: It might be interesting to have a chart of your most active followers (highest RT/reply/mention count) [...]

Vojt?ch Turek: Idea, pt2#2: [...] from back then & whether it's changed significantly after you'd been added to the Suggested User List.

David Wertheimer: Idea 1: I wonder how many silent followers are newbie abandonments. Good read: http://bit.ly/sulidea

David Wertheimer: Idea 2 re : maybe isn't seeing responses because his tweet volume is neither as offensive or as obvious as celebrities'

David Wertheimer: And idea 3 (best) re : I suspect the average Suggested User user is simply more likely to be a lurker than 's usual coterie

J. D. J.: I'd be interested in knowing what percentage of your followers have ever @mentioned you.

Since there were lots of good ideas, I've decided to give out two awards, one for the most universal, and one for the most thought-provoking.

Nate Chenenko asked, "How many of your SUL followers have less than 10 total tweets after their first three months on twitter?" I think this is the fundamental question. Are people who follow someone on the suggested user list interested in posting to Twitter at all? Is it just a passive experience for them? Ricardo Guerrero formulated this in terms of time period of activity instead of tweet count, which is similar but slightly less indicative, when he asked, "I'd be keen to know how many of your followers haven't updated at all in the last 1-3 months. Also % who've replied/RTed." And Jay Neff phrased it as, "What % of follows gained are actively tweeting? Would love to see a breakdown of active to inactive over x amount of time" So Ricardo and Jay get Honorable Mentions, along with a few others who asked similar questions, while Nate gets a prize.

And Sharon Henry gets a prize for articulating another common theme in an interesting way: "Breakdown of your followers: Those following fewer than 50,100...being 1 of 50 greater influencer than being 1 of 10,000 ". That seems eminently doable, so I really found it appealing. In short, what I'm hoping for is two core bits of data from which we can extrapolate a lot of meaning:

• How many followers do each of my followers have?
• How many tweets do each of my followers have, and when was the last time they were active?

Those are pretty straightforward requests to make with the Twitter API. So, there's still a chance to win another prize. If you're a coder, commit either of those queries as a feature built onto ThinkTank and I'll send you a 500 GB portable hard drive.

Thanks to everybody who participated! I'll try to make the data from these requests available as soon as possible, and the few questions above that I have answers to will be replied to shortly.

Last week, I wrote a bit about what it's like to be on Twitter's suggested user list. The response to that post has been really gratifying, and I wanted to share a bit of what I've learned, as well some of the more interesting responses.

First, to recap: I had about 18,000 followers of my own back in October, when I got added to the suggested user list. (Let's call these "organic" followers.) If I'd have continued my normal rate of growth, i'd have about 25,000 followers today, but thanks to being on the list, I've got close to 300,000 followers. Surprisingly though, I only get as many retweets and replies as I'd get with my organic number of followers.

I thought at first that maybe the list wasn't valuable to me because I'm not a celebrity; maybe I'm just noise, but could bigger brands find some value by having a large number of followers?

The Results Are In

As I hoped, my initial post about my experiences inspired others on the list to chime in with their findings.

• Creative Commons, despite being a stalwart organization at the intersection of technology and intellectual property, saw no increase in responses after being added to the suggested user list.
• NBC's Today Show is one of the signature brands of broadcast media. But being on Twitter's list? Didn't do anything.
• What about Starbucks, one of the definitive examples of a powerful worldwide brand? Nothing.

I mentioned in my earlier post, that Kim Kardashian is being paid $10,000 a tweet to promote sponsors on her Twitter account. But what are those sponsors paying for? Because, while she clearly has influence over a certain community, and her Twitter page says she has about 2.7 million followers, I think the reality is obvious: Nobody has a million followers on Twitter.

Does that mean Twitter's follower counts are lying? No. Instead, Twitter accounts that have over half a million followers listed actually represent (at most) a few hundred thousand people who've chosen to become organic followers of someone, along with millions who are passively along for the ride. Some of them are inactive users, some are spammers, some just ignore the noise of the accounts that don't interest them, like spam in an email inbox. But they can't count as "followers" in any meaningful sense.

A few people have asked what my goal is in writing about the experience of being on the list, and why I am offering up prizes to encourage asking questions about it. Well, perhaps the best way to articulate it is that I think the list is being used as a useful fiction for distorting the value and promise of this new medium.

The Million Dollar Gift

There are incentives to promoting the fiction of the suggested user list, of course. If I were the brand manager or Chief Marketing Officer for some big company that got on the list, I bet I'd be proudly trumpeting to senior management that "our social media efforts are bringing us thousands of new followers a day on Twitter". Somebody's gonna get a huge bonus for being the beneficiary of an act of random benevolence. Hell, I'm a pretty persuasive guy — if I found the right (i.e. sufficiently desperate) media outlet, I could probably have sold my Twitter account to somebody for half a million dollars. Well, at least I could have until last week.

And the list preserves a certain amount of power and influence for Twitter itself. (Twitter the company, not twitter the medium.) Because, for every one of the organizations i quoted above mentioning how the suggested user list provided them no value, I got a private message from another list member confirming these findings but not wanting to be quoted on the record.

People being afraid to publicly state their opinion about something of little value for fear of antagonizing a particular company is a clear sign of a completely unhealthy dynamic. I don't think the folks at Twitter would retaliate for public criticism by removing people from the list, because Twitter execs are both extremely busy and fairly thick-skinned, but it shows how insecure people feel about having won the follower lottery. (And how pageview-obsessed publishers are: Every entity that was afraid of being removed from the suggested user list is in the business of publishing content online.)

Fact Check

CNN famously reported on Ashton Kutcher beating them to be the first to get a million followers on Twitter; Today's celebrity reporting often includes a mention of a celeb's follower count as a matter of course. But I'm hoping to encourage some skepticism, to provide a basis for fact-checking that demonstrates these pronouncements are inherently suspect. It's a bit like when I worked at a newspaper: Every reporter thought "Well, our circulation is a million copies, that must mean a million people read my column." Facing the reality that only 10,000 of those people read the column, or that perhaps only 1,000 of them were reading the advertisement on the opposite page, forced a useful and important reckoning into some false assumptions that were underpinning that industry's workings.

The truth: Nobody has been able to point me to a single Twitter account that's earned over 250,000 followers on its own. Nobody's been able to point me to a Twitter account on the suggested user list that's gotten favorites, replies, retweets or responses from a larger number. And nobody's been able to demonstrate why the inflated follower count numbers should be used as a measure of anything but the growth in signups to the core Twitter service itself. [Update: I had suspected some popular artist like Nicki Minaj, the Lil Wayne protege who has famously rapped about her Twitter following, might exceed these numbers. As it turns out, the highest organic follower count I've found is from teen pop heartthrob Justin Bieber with over 800,000.]

That leaves an inescapable conclusion. Nobody has a million followers on Twitter. And being on the suggested user list doesn't add value to a Twitter account, regardless of whether you're a regular guy like me, or one of the biggest brands in the world.

---

Reminder: I'm running a contest for ideas about how to get more data from my being on the suggested user list. I've been running Gina Trapani's smart little Twitter application ThinkTank since before I was added to the suggested user list. As a result, I have an archive of all my followers, tweets and replies going back for months.I'll provide a prize to one random person who suggests an idea of what information we should query from that data set, as well as one random programmer who contributes code to help.

Here's the prizes and how to participate:

• Have a question or specific bit of data that you'd like to know about an account on the Suggested User List? Submit it to Twitter with the hashtag #sulidea and one random person who makes a suggestion will get a $25 Amazon gift certificate.
• If you're a programmer, watch ThinkTank on GitHub, commit any updates you have to the project, and one random person who commits code to the project will win a 500 GB portable hard drive.

I'll be picking winners for both prizes on January 15th.

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, I'll have gained another follower or two on Twitter. Within an hour, I'll have added more followers than 99% of Twitter users ever have. On a typical day, I'll have averaged 100 new followers every hour. It's not that I'm great at writing tweets or because of any effort or merit on my part; It's because I'm part of Twitter's list of suggested users.

The Suggested User List has been one of the most controversial and misunderstood parts of the explosive growth of everybody's favorite cerulean social service, though the company has loudly hinted that its life is limited. So I thought I'd explain a little bit about what Twitter is like when you're on the list. I'll explain the surprising impact that being added to the list has on replies and retweets. And at the bottom of this post, I'm even offering up a chance for people who are curious about being on the list to win some prizes, too.

What is the list?

Twitter's Suggested User List works in a fairly simple way. When a new user signs up for Twitter, they're presented with a list of about 20 "default" accounts to follow. These recommendations are a random subset of a full list of over 400 suggested users. In addition, the full list appears on the Twitter site itself, so if any user clicks on "Find People" at the top of their Twitter page, they're only one click away from choosing to follow some suggested users.

It's obvious why the team created these suggestions; If you just signed up for Twitter and weren't following anyone, it'd be a pretty boring service. Social applications have provided plenty of precedent for the practice of suggesting content or connections, but Twitter's exceptional success and the fact that tweets are seen more as a new medium rather than merely a feature of the Twitter service have made the suggested user list into a polarizing reminder of the company's power over the service.

What's not obvious is why I was picked as a suggestion. I have a number of friends at Twitter, including about half a dozen let's-grab-dinner-when-you're-in-town level of friends. As Biz noted, I was an early an enthusiastic fan of the service. And I'd like to think I'm not a terrible tweeter — my updates are a mix of interesting links that I find, random thoughts, brief reviews/mentions of music and media that I like, and promotion for the projects I'm working on. But I'm obviously not a better tweeter than 99 million other Twitter users, I never asked to be on the list, and it's never been explained to me why I was chosen. Ultimately it's clear that the decision of whom to feature is essentially an arbitrary choice by Twitter , and that at best, I represent something they'd want to show new users.

A list of suggested contacts makes perfect sense when a service has about 10,000 users, to help them get started in an unfamiliar space. But it's a system that starts to strain a bit once a service reaches 10,000,000 members. (Or even, as it appears, nearly 100 millon members.) Of course, the folks at Twitter had no way of knowing they'd leap from a five-digit user count to a nine-digit one faster than anybody else on the web ever has. Combine Twitter's support for user-defined lists on the service and the criticisms of the list that have surfaced, and it's easy to see why Twitter's announced that the list's days are numbered. I'd be shocked if it doesn't disappear entirely in 2010.

So, I don't have any real issue with the fact the list was made in the first place; If I were a Twitter shareholder, I'd fully expect the team to design the best possible experience for new users. (If I were a substantial Twitter shareholder, I'd buy a round bed and fly it through space like Snoop Dogg. But I digress.)

I do have some misgivings about the effect of the list, though. In addition to showing how much control Twitter has over the medium they've created, the list also causes some pretty uncomfortable and awkward distortions. It conveys remarkable privileges to the few hundred of us who are members. A lot of celebrities, some past their prime, have pointed to their enormous numbers of followers on Twitter as evidence that they still command some sort of passionate following online. Other nascent talents have had their profiles raised by becoming "Twitter stars", with their thousands or even millions of followers held up as proof of strong demand for their ideas.

A Dutch kid sold his Breaking News account to MSNBC, and Kim Kardashian is famously selling her tweets for $10,000 a pop. But I've been able to determine that having hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers is basically only a measure of having been on the suggested user list, and doesn't consistently indicate any intent from Twitter users at all. So, not to take away from Breaking News or Kim Kardashian, but there are people making a significant amount of money simply by virtue of having been on the suggested user list.

And it turns out, those suggestion-heeding followers might not actually be paying any attention at all.

The Power of Suggestion

I had no advance notice I was going to be added to the list. I went out for coffee with a friend, and returned to find a few hundred emails in my inbox, all of them notifications from Twitter that someone had followed me.

To my surprise, and to the disbelief of nearly everyone who's asked me about it since, I wasn't immediately excited or thrilled to have won the Twitter jackpot. For the first weekend, I wasn't sure what to do with all these new followers, and I didn't update my status at all for 2 or 3 days after I first got added to the list.

Now, that's pretty unusual behavior for me — I've been blogging for ten years, and I'm fairly public within the tech industry. I don't get nervous standing in front of thousands of people when speaking, and over the years my blog's gotten a pretty significant number of subscribers as well, yet I never had any similar concerns here. So what changed? Well, I tend to use social services in a more personal way than my public blog post. And, honestly, the sheer rate at which people follow a suggested user on Twitter's list is overwhelming. Let's look at the velocity with which a suggested account accrues new followers.

Here's a chart of my new followers, courtesy of TwitterCounter;:

The small flat area at the extreme left of the graph is what my growth rate looked like before I was on the list. It doesn't seem like it, but that was actually an uncommonly high rate of new followers. For contrast, I did a comparison with Chris Messina, who accrues new followers at about the same rate I had been, writes about similarly geeky topics as I do, and actually started wtih more followers than I did:

Yes, compared to being on the suggested user list, a very popular normal Twitter user's growth looks pretty much flat. That's how different it is. Nevertheless, after a few days of being on the list, I decided I was going to just tweet the same way I always had, and not overthink things too much.

Finding Meaning

People who accept the suggestions of the list are almost all new Twitter users, and have barely formed a model of how Twitter works. In some cases, due to the extraordinary amount of hype around Twitter, they've barely formed an idea of how the web itself works before signing up for Twitter and becoming one of my ostensible followers.

There's precedent for this sort of "bundled content", of course. The crappy "shovelware"; programs that come with most Windows PCs are a perfect example — they often nag users, are frequently of little value, and often detract from the experience. I often update with non-sequitirs about stuff like peanut butter jelly time, so I have to imagine that a regular Twitter user seeing my updates must see me like a notice that their new Windows computer has cleaned up the icons on their desktop.

Of course, services like Amazon and iTunes feature content as well, but these are usually pretty straightforwardly analogous to endcap displays in retail spaces like a grocery store or Walmart; The stores sell placement and brands that want exposure pay for the real estate.

After just a few days of being on the list, though, I made an interesting discovery that offers a dramatic distinction from buying featured position in an online store: Being on Twitter's suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get.

Once in a while, I get confused replies from people asking who the hell I am, but for the most part they don't interact with me at all. The replies, retweets and conversations that happen for me on Twitter have the same frequency and volume that they would have had if I'd never been added to the list. I'm sure celebrities (whether on the suggested user list or not) get a disproportionately high number of people trying to catch their attention, but for a normal person, being on the list just adds followers, not real connections.

Twitter followers who come from the suggested user list don't form real relationships or respond to the suggested users like "normal" followers do. If I'd have continued gaining followers at the rate I had been before being on the list, I'd have about 10% as many followers, but I suspect I'd have exactly the same number of replies and retweets. Before being on the list, a typical link that I tweeted would get between 250 and 500 clicks; After being on the list that hasn't changed at all.

And for me, that's a little off-putting. I feel very much like I've earned the readers who subscribe to this blog. When I meet someone at an event and they tell me they've read a post of mine, or that they regularly read my blog, it's still a thrill, even after a decade, because there is some core sincerity to the exchange, a real basis to the relationship. With Twitter, it's hard for me to tell whether someone's made a decision to follow me because they find my ideas interesting or entertaining, or if they just were too lazy to change the defaults when they signed up.

I'm not complaining; I know a lot of people would love (or think they'd love) to be on the list. I've had some remarkable bits of serendipity, like my next door neighbor discovering me on the list. But I also missed the notification that my cousin was following me on the service because there's too much noise for me to turn on notifications. For the way I use the web, I value meaningful connections much more than I do sheer volume of followers.

Adding to the feeling that these aren't "real" connections is that almost nobody has gotten more than 200,000 followers or so without being on the suggested user list. I'd be curious to know the most popular account that's never been on the list, but at the very least the combination of prominently featuring follower count as a "score" on people's profile pages while also having the only path to earning a high score being an arbitrary selection through an opaque process is a recipe for leaving a lot of people frustrated or mystified. Indiscriminate followers might be of some value for a business that just wants to have a lot of people to talk to, but for an individual, being on the list only has value to those who want to brag about the number. I'll admit I've been tempted to use my follower count as a credential in my work lately as it's taken me to less tech-savvy corners of Washington, D.C., but the fact that the number is meaningless made me feel it'd be dishonest and would misrepresent my actual influence.

Because I've been privileged enough to be on the list, I've tried to use the power for good. I am very happy that I'll be able to promote my work with Expert Labs to a larger audience, though I don't think I have any way to translate this audience into followers of @expertlabs. I have also tried to promote worthy efforts by my friends or to support charities. But there's also generally a continuous stream of requests from spammers and schemers and just plain icky hustlers who want, expect or even demand that I promote their work to my large follower base. Explaining to them that these followers don't click on links, reply or retweet requests does nothing to dissuade them, unsurprisingly.

So if I had a choice in the matter and knew then what I know now, would I choose to be on the list? I'm not sure, but I think probably not. But, since I am, I wanted to try to do something interesting before either the suggested user list disappears or I ask (As Jay Rosen did) to be removed from the list.

Open to Suggestions

I want to see what interesting information we can tease out of my place on the suggested user list. There are a number of questions that immediately pop to mind, which I don't have specific answers for:

• Has the rate of replies or retweets per day (or per week) increased as much as my follower count has?
• Do I get more favorites from users, proportionate to the number of new followers?

I suspect there are lots of other bits of data that I think could be compelling, and the good news is that we might have a way to process some of that data. I've been running Gina Trapani's smart little Twitter application ThinkTank (formerly Twitalytic) since before I was added to the suggested user list. The app can pretty easily be customized to return whatever data queries we're interested in. As a result, I have an archive of all my followers, tweets and replies going back for months. So I'm proposing a simple contest to solicit ideas for what information people are interested in mining from the account of someone on the suggested user list, and I'll provide a prize to one random person who suggests an idea, as well as one random person who contributes code to help.

Here's the prizes and how to participate:

• Have a question or specific bit of data that you'd like to know about an account on the Suggested User List? Submit it to Twitter with the hashtag #sulidea and one random person who makes a suggestion will get a $25 Amazon gift certificate.
• If you're a programmer, watch ThinkTank on GitHub, commit any updates you have to the project, and one random person who commits code to the project will win a 500 GB portable hard drive. It's really cute!

I'll run the contest until January 15th, and then just pick a winner at random from people who tweet or submit code. I think there's great potential to discover some surprising insights about how the suggested user list really works.

Update: We've got some results already! Joseph Scott at Automattic mentions in the comments that he's added RSD support for the Twitter API to WordPress.com. I should also make clear that I am very confident that we'll be building apps on top of this API at Expert Labs, so insofar as I'm the Director of the labs, I've got a vested interest in seeing efforts around an open API succeed.

---

Twitter's API has spawned over 50,000 applications that connect to it, taking the promise of fertile APIs we first saw with Flickr half a decade ago and bringing it to new heights. Now, the first meaningful efforts to support Twitter's API on other services mark the maturation of the API as a de facto industry standard and herald the end of its period of rapid fundamental iteration.

From here, we're going to see a flourishing of support for the Twitter API across the web, meaning that the Twitter API is finished. Not kaput, complete. If two companies with a significant number of users that share no investors or board members both support a common API, we can say that the API has reached Version 1.0 and is safe to base your work on. So now what?

How We Got Here

Like a lot of folks, I've been thinking out loud and pondering the future of Twitter and open web APIs pretty much all year. Some key ideas have bubbled up:

The Pushbutton Web:

[A]ny site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook.

The Web Way vs. The Wave Way

• Upgrades to the web are incremental.
• Understanding new tech needs to be a weekend-sized problem.
• There has to be value before everybody has upgraded.
• You have to be able to understand and explain it.

Those posts from this summer show that the ideas behind the Twitter API's "overnight" ubiquity have been kicking around in developer circles for months, if not more than a year. Finally, though, we have shipping examples of broad adoption of an API that's lightweight and suitable for today's most interesting applications. It's not just that Twitter's realtime, though of course that is compelling, but also that these APIs are simple enough for weekend hackers to build interesting projects on, and that they're easy to implement even on mobile devices and in almost any programming language.

So, today, we have support for the Twitter API from Twitter (of course), WordPress and Tumblr. I know I saw folks working on this for TypePad's free service when I was at Six Apart, so I'd assume they just wanted to finish OAuth support before supporting it as well. (See below.)

Of course, I don't need to make any suggestions to developers about what to do with these APIs — I'm sure the gears in everybody's heads are turning about cool new applications to build. Instead, I'd like to make a series of suggestions for the entire Open Twitter API ecosystem, based on what we've learned from past successes and failures in APIs around blogging.

What Server Developers Should Do

• Please please please support OAuth: It's egregious that the newest implementations of the Twitter API are stil encouraging people to share their passwords with third-party sites. Five or ten years ago, this was common practice in APIs because we didn't have better options. Twitter started out using shared passwords, but mercifully has started to bring OAuth support online. But for new services to be encouraging the horrible practice of users entering their passwords into every application willy-nilly is just unacceptable. I think we have a two-week window or so within which the new services supporting the Twitter API could announce their intention to support OAuth and really catalyze client developers into doing the wrong thing, but I fear we may lose another generation of API evolution to this terrible practice. If just one or two services announce intent around OAuth by the end of the year, client developers will follow — if you use WordPress or Tumblr, encourage your service provider to do this. (This is usually where I'd insert a dozen examples of how sharing passwords screws users, services, and the ecosystem, but I know that developers often just use shared passwords because they're lazy. Do the right thing, guys. The client devs will follow along.)
• Support Really Simple Discovery: The RSD format isn't sexy by today's standards, but grew organically out of some smart thinking from when blogging APIs were at the same state of maturity as today's tweeting APIs. Instead of reinventing the wheel, developers should look at supporting RSD and looking for something like a "tweetsapi" endpoint for these new services. That way, any arbitrary site can advertise that it supports the Twitter API, or even future versions of an open MetaTweets API. Pay attention to which APIs are listed as "preferred".
• Think about overloading of source: The source element of status updates in the Twitter API is very interestingly open-ended, and supports use of URLs. Instead of merely advertising your client app, smart use of rel attributes and URLs here could help bootstrap some very interesting new potential.

What Client Developers Should Do

• Support RSD: Same logic as above.
• Start sharing parsing libraries: Client devs going to be doing a lot of duplicate work to parse out URLs and usernames and hashtags and maybe even slashtags. But almost every scripting language supports some similar variation on regular expressions, and if you're using that method to tease out meaning from short messages, then lighten your burden by sharing the load. John Gruber's work to share his URL parsing rules should be a model for a dozen other GitHub projects — compete on features and execution, but not on these fundamental interpretations of text.
• Build in the big services, but support the little ones: You'll naturally want to offer menu options for users of the big, centralized hosted services. But (perhaps as part of supporting RSD), you should allow for all of us to have arbitrary Twitter API endpoints on our own domain names — this is good for the web!

What Every Developer Should Do

• Think about piping Twitter API endpoints together: I think it will be common for some kinds of applications that support the Twitter API to be both clients and servers, supporting piping content through, and perhaps applying transformations to the updates. This idea of daisy-chaining services together is likely only going to happen if a lot of parts of the infrastructure support OAuth well, but has the potential to be truly revolutionary if the ecosystem allows it to happen.
• Start looking at people's firehoses: Twitter's firehose of all status updates is about to be broadly available for developers, I know about the free TypePad firehose from my time at Six Apart, and I think WordPress will sell you access to theirs, but I haven't yet been able to find a reference for one for Tumblr. No matter — we should assume that free, open versions of these are coming, and start to figure out how to encourage similar collaboration around the reading side of things, now that the writing side of things is getting hashed out.
• Consider adopting a "+2 Rule": The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here's my recommendation: Don't. Don't do any of that shit, and don't run off to make membership badges for the Treehouse Club quite yet. Instead, just iterate and ship. Keep making new apps and see what you can do to stretch the limits of the existing methods and structures. I love the new geocoding and contributor aspects of the Twitter API, but as I said at the top of this post, I think the period of rapid iteration on the core Twitter API is ending, as new efforts going forward will have to reach consensus.

The good news is, consensus around evolution of the Twitter API can happen simply by saying to each other, "If two application developers who share no common investors or board members can reach agreement around an extension to the API, and between them they have a significant enough number of users to be relevant, then we should all just adopt their work."

This is important because it reframes the conversation from being about technical merits, and all the boys who like to play with APIs always think they know what's "better". I'm sure if I wanted to waste an afternoon, I could tell you a dozen ways in which the Twitter API could be "improved". But guess what? That shit does not matter. Adoption matters, and I'm heartened by the fact that people seem to be getting that.

So, get to work! Please give me feedback if I'm wrong or being stupid about one of my recommendations, but if not, then just start hacking. Stop encouraging people to share passwords, start encouraging services to share tweets, and let's all join in a hearty session of finger-pointing and mockery in Facebook's general direction for their sense of Not Invented Here having overshadowed their opportunity, because they could have really clearly done an "embrace and extend (and extinguish)" on the Twitter API if they hadn't wanted to make their own system a year ago, and now they've lost that power.

Finally, thanks a lot to Dave Winer for essentially inspiring a lot of players in blogging to move towards embracing the Twitter API. Sure, lots of us had the idea, and I've spent a lot of times in meetings arguing for this stuff across the industry, and Automattic and Tumblr and others were brave enough to embrace it. But I don't think anybody's done more to publicly advocate for an open Twitter API than Dave. I'm glad we've evolved as a community to the point where these kinds of breakthroughs aren't the contentious, immature shitfests they used to be.

Humans create the web, but we've largely abdicated the act of organizing web content to software. That could change.

• Twitter this week made its new Lists feature broadly available. As they've been described, Lists, allow you to enumerate a collection of some of the Twitter accounts that you follow, and then easily read updates from just those accounts. Others can view your lists, and choose to subscribe to them as well. But Lists are also available for other applications to use, modify and share. Looked at from a slightly different perspective, this means Lists are a way to tag an arbitrary set of realtime web feeds. You could look at the lists that I've been added to as a set of tags describing my Twitter feed.

• Much of the precedent for the idea of sharing (non-realtime) feeds comes from the world of outlining, and in particular Dave Winer's work here in creating OPML. Though it was designed to generically exchange outlines, OPML is the most popular format today for sharing arbitrary lists of feeds. (The computer science folks balk at some of the technical aspects of OPML but it's a bit like Churchill's comments on democracy — it's the worst format, except for all of the other alternatives.) What's interesting about having an established format for exchanging feeds is that there doesn't really need to be any changes in order for the format to accommodate realtime feeds like Twitter accounts. In fact, a few weeks ago, I moved about 150 the noisier, less pressing Twitter accounts I follow into Google Reader, by exporting them as an OPML file. Twitter became more pleasant to use, and I could still keep up with all of those folks by dipping into my feed reader whenever I want to.

• Lists have a few traits that make them more interesting than they seem; we can think of these as the Laws of Lists. First, you have to be signed in to Twitter with a valid account in order to create them. (This seems obvious, but it's important.) Second, by adding a Twitter accounts to a list that you create, you follow that user's updates, at least while viewing that list. This combination of authentication and requirement of relationship is a very good recipe for reducing spam.

• One of the earliest hopes for organizing web information was the human-edited directory. Efforts like the Open Directory Project still exist, but the model focused a lot on having defined editors for topics and a hierarchy of who could edit the site. That's a stark contrast to the default-open editing permissions of projects like Wikipedia, and is probably the most significant difference between the "human-edited" and "user-generated" eras of the web — we've always had people contributing content, the difference was in how much we trust them. Similarly, more outline-focused directories of content emerged, like Halley Suitt's Top Ten Sources, which is now defunct, but was based upon the idea of curated lists of feeds by topic. In each case, trying to scale a team of editors to keep up with the rate of growth in new sites on the web has been a losing cause. But we've seen sites like Delicious demonstrate the value of tagging individual pages or posts on a site — a new generation of directories could demonstrate the value of tagging entire streams of posts, or as we call them, feeds.

• Of course, you can't talk about directories and lists on the web without talking about Yahoo. Yahoo's original sin was in trying to create a human-edited directory of the web, and before they unfortunately achieved their goal of becoming the only successful web portal, the directory was Yahoo's signature element. (Until recently, Yahoo had maintained a page with the directory in a format resembling its original state, but even that is basically a blog now.) Instead of embracing authentication and relationships to prevent spam submissions from overwhelming the site, Yahoo leaned heavily towards requiring payment for inclusion of companies in the directory, limiting its utility. Human edited directories became mostly a footnote in both Yahoo's, and the web's history.

That fundamental history of being made by humans is some part of Yahoo is trying to evoke with its Y!ou and Yahoo campaign. But of course, it's a pretty good sign that a campaign isn't going to hit its mark when a completely unknown brand like HTC can launch virtually the same campaign as a household name like Yahoo, yet both companies think their message is going to resonate.

The truth is, if Yahoo wanted to help people reimagine the web stalwart at its best, they would do well to look to their roots in a human-edited or user-generated directory. Thinking of Yahoo at its peak of influence a decade ago, it becomes clear that instead of trying to insert their ubiquitous exclamation point into you, Yahoo should look at the story of The Matrix. I don't know if the brothers Warner or Wachowski would be inclined to license the property, but the only way to truly resonate with people in a narrative of Yahoo vs. Google is by adopting this theme: Man vs. Machine.

Just as in the Matrix the humans had originally created the machines that undermined them, to some large degree, Yahoo begat Google. And Yahoo would do well to suggest that the most human way for the web to evolve is if we all work together to organize it ourselves — a mission that happens to fit in well with Yahoo's largely-mishandled acquisitions of Flickr and Delicious. I'm not sure that the marketing folks at Yahoo are going to embrace that narrative, but an interesting opportunity definitely exists around the larger concept.

We all have the ability to create and exchange curated collections of feeds, using hubs like Twitter's Lists as connection points. We can extract the descriptions from those collections to form tag clouds about individual feeds. If we want to embrace hierarchy, we can organize the collections into a hierarchy by inheriting the category structure of sites like Wikipedia. If we're worried about spammers, we can now use widely-available systems of authentication and defined relationships to define who has the authority to create lists in a particular context. And of course, the ability to aggregate all of the distributed content from a defined set of feeds in realtime has now been commoditized, where i would have been exorbitantly expensive a decade ago.

In short, we can learn from Twitter's Lists to resurrect one of the web's original ways of organizing itself: Human-curated directories. We're used to exploring photographs or individual web pages by clicking on tags that were assigned by the creators or their community, and it will be just as valuable and useful to be able to explore entire feeds the same way. Open formats and APIs for exchanging this data already exist, so I can't wait to see a few enterprising hackers build the tools that let us revisit the idea of web directories. I love computers and robots, but I love humans even more, and I think we can do a pretty good job of guiding each other to the most interesting feeds around.

There have been another spate of interesting conversations around the tech industry about what goals a tech company should have, and how they should achieve those goals. Right now, most venture capital organizations and the majority of trade press support an infrastructure that's optimized towards a certain set of results; The question is how we accommodate those who are trying for a different set of results.

One great conversation came from Ev Williams tweeting about tech conferences, and how Twitter would have been received:

I don't think Twitter would have done well at TC50 or Demo. (Likely response: WTF?) Wonder if Google would have. (Search? Yawn.)

I replied, "But @ev, response at TC50/Demo can be determined by reputation & ability to tell a story, both of which your team has." and Ev responded in kind with "Perhaps. But are reputation and ability to tell a story determining factors of success?". At that point, I realized we may have been talking about slightly different things, closing out with the brief observation " Narrative & experience are necessary but not sufficient. They're useful when creating a product, not just onstage."

And the core of it is that TechCrunch 50, Demo, and other tech industry showcase events are really optimized for a certain model of business, following a traditional path of venture capital funding, a certain amount of buzz or attention within a particular community, and (these days at least) an exit route that involves selling to a large incumbent that's interested in that area of innovation. I have lots of friends who have followed this path, and I don't begrudge them their success with it, but I think the logical extension of this path having become well-trodden is that we end up with events that as I mentioned last week, can be fairly criticized as insufficiently world-changing.

Interestingly, that last bit of criticism from Sarah Lacy on TechCrunch, saying that companies that had demonstrated their wares at the TC50 conference had for the most part not been very ambitious, was followed by a thematically similar post by Vivek Wadhwa, asking what value VCs have really brought to the world of innovation. I think the answer to Vivek's question is "It depends." but it's a very healthy sign if TechCrunch itself is questioning the fundamentals of the VC model and startups, and perhaps that skepticism justifies my tentative endorsement of the reigning regime of tech pundits.

But the crux of what I see as this reckoning point for the venture capital industry and venture-backed startups is that VCs are starting to look a lot like record labels. That's not a criticism — I used to work in the record industry, and I've enjoyed collaborating with a number of venture capital firms over the years. In both cases, though, the majority of their work is optimized for a certain model of success. This neatly mirrors Trent Reznor's analysis of what it takes for a new band to succeed:

If you are an unknown / lesser-known artist trying to get noticed / established:

• Establish your goals. What are you trying to do / accomplish? If you are looking for mainstream super-success (think Lady GaGa, Coldplay, U2, Justin Timberlake) - your best bet in my opinion is to look at major labels and prepare to share all revenue streams / creative control / music ownership. To reach that kind of critical mass these days your need old-school marketing muscle and that only comes from major labels. Good luck with that one.

If you're forging your own path, read on.

• Forget thinking you are going to make any real money from record sales. Make your record cheaply (but great) and GIVE IT AWAY. As an artist you want as many people as possible to hear your work. Word of mouth is the only true marketing that matters.

As it stands right now, the VC model is optimized for creating new Lady GaGas. I happen to like her work, so it's good that there will be more of those, both in the tech and entertainment worlds. But some people just want to be indie rockers, making a living with the work they love. It's that goal that is underpromoted in our tech trade press, and that perhaps inspires some of the skepticism around what gets hyped up.

That leads, naturally, to Jason Fried's post on 37Signals heralding their new $100 billion valuation. (At least on paper)

37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.

Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The financing round was led by Yardstick Capital and Institutionalized Venture Partners.

In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money. That way, the sky’s the limit!”

I had talked to Jason a few weeks ago when he was planning to write this post, and though timing had it being published at the same time as Twitter's just received $100 million in funding, it wasn't designed to be a pointed critique of any particular company or funding event, so much as an overall pattern of not questioning particular narratives in the tech industry. And perhaps even more, it's a criticism of the fact that we don't question the values and goals that those narratives express.

And that was perhaps the point that was missed in Jason's rant about Mint's sale to Intuit which I blogged about last week. People got distracted by the speculation of whether Mint sold at the behest of the founders or investors. (As it turns out, it was likely the decision of the company's founders.) But the larger point was that, by selling to an incumbent from the last generation, Mint's team was expressing a desire for incremental improvement in an industry, instead of radical revolution. There are merits to both goals, but I know that a lot of us who truly love technology and have had our lives and companies transform by it are hungry to see more people be ambitious and shoot for creating revolutionary change instead of evolutionary change.

It's reassuring, though, that despite coming out on opposite sides of a VC funding story this week, both Ev's questioning of how tech conferences and media evaluate startups, and Jason's questioning of how VCs fund and (over)value startups come from the standpoint of asking: Can't we do more? Can't we do better.

It seems clear that the answer is, yes, we can support different outcomes, ones that optimize for more ambitious or radical changes. But we can't keep following the same path and wondering why it doesn't lead to a different destination.

I've long been a fan of playing the dozens, as is to be expected from anyone who loves language. Last night, in a fit of my usual insanity, I thought it'd be fun to throw out some "Yo mama" snaps themed around this year's election on my Twitter account:

• Yo moms such a ho they set up robocalls for all her booty calls.
• Yo moms so fat Russia can see her from their house.

Things took off pretty quickly from there. Lore Sjoberg (you remember him from Brunching Shuttlecocks and his writing for Wired) picked up the meme and ran with it. His were some of the first, and funniest responses:

• Yo mama so fat, McCain refers to her as "Those Ones."
• Yo mama so fat, she got an endorsement from General Mills. (I would have gone with Colonel Sanders here; That's why Lore is a genius!)
• Yo mama so fat, her other biography is called "The Audacity of Hardee's

Around the same time, a number of other fantastically funny folks joined in the fun:

• Fernando Rizo offers up "yo mama's such a ho, she said she'd sit ON Ahmedinejad with no preconditions"
• Matt Haughey added "yo mama so ugly, the RNC spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup"
• One of my personal favorites, Guillermo Esteves absolutely slayed me with "yo momma’s so fat, John McCain looked into her eyes and saw three letters: KFC." Absurd, obscure, specific — perfect!

As these were taking off, Xeni Jardin, who was dropping some snaps of her own, featured the thread in progress in a post on BoingBoing. Fun! The comments there have lit up with more suggestions, and a Twitter search for other replies now offers up, well, dozens more. I've marked a lot of the best as my favorites on Twitter.

While this is all in good fun, what's startling to me is that none of the jokes I've seen mention, or even allude to, race. Playing the dozens is a uniquely and explicitly African American tradition, and we obviously have an African American candidate favored in the race for the first time ever, and yet it hasn't come up.

Some of this, of course, is selection bias due to the audience that Twitter reaches. (At least so far.) But as these jokes from last night are already making their way around online as email forwards and apparently getting quoted in offices across the country, it seems to me like the playfulness of the language and the absurdity of the medium may have masked something timely and fitting. This obviously and instrinsically black tradition has been adopted by a community like Twitter that is, frankly, disproportionately not black. You could see it as the deracination of the tradition, or even worse as a deliberate omission of cultural context in its appropriation. But I actually see it as something positive.

A running joke on Twitter is all in good fun, but I find the unselfconsciousness of this little political gag to be a comforting reflection of the way that the larger trend around this election is moving as well. Like Barack Obama, playing the dozens is obviously black but we're able to just include that implicitly in our participation without having denying or diminish it. That feels like progress.

And best of all, even if it is just a bunch of jokes on Twitter, making these jokes is something that anyone can take a turn with. Just like your mama.

Sometimes if you do something very difficult, and you do it really well, the end result is that your achievement becomes completely invisible.

I mentioned a year and a half ago that I like Twitter. That was a little bit less common a position to take back then, but in the months since, tons of people have taken to the little messaging service, so clearly this was no great insight on my part -- it's just a useful, fun service.

But of course, that popularity has not been without its problems. Twitter's gotten a reputation for being unreliable, as a result of its rapid growth. In fact, in many ways, the Fail Whale and its related frustrations has come to define Twitter's brand more than almost anything else.

I'm no expert at these things, but there are a lot of reasons startups fail, and the reasons almost never include the fact that thousands of users clamoring for a service. Indeed, it seems to me that most companies (whether they're tech startups or anything else) fail because of being poorly managed. Put another way, execution is everything.

With that in mind, it's worth pointing out how particularly well-executed Twitter's recent acquisition of Summize has been. I don't know any of the deals of the financial or business arrangements, except that I'm a little disappointed that Twitter isn't maintaining a presence in New York City, instead moving all of the employees to San Francisco. That nitpick aside, the public face of this transition was extremely well executed.

Ev Williams, co-founder and the most public face of Twitter, speaks about the deal at some length in this excellent, candid interview with Techcrunch. (Which site, by the way, may rank as my "most improved" blog of 2008.)

Rumors of the Summize acquisition leaked a few weeks ago, but both companies kept discipline around communications and didn't acknowledge or respond to the conversation. And then, when it came time to announce the deal, the sites had been fully integrated, a lengthy and personable blog post complete with a sketch of some future ideas for integration was posted, consistent branding was in place on the acquired site, and the roadmap for what was going on with employees affected by the acquisition was clearly communicated.

In all, that's a formidable amount of coordination to happen across the country, while business deals are being worked out, and while maintaining secrecy about the fact that it's taking place. And, all of that was done with an eye towards providing a good user experience to their shared customer base.

There are a lot of things to criticize in such deals most of the time, though it seems likely that this will be a successful acquisition, from an outsider's point of view. But what's striking to me is that, as quick as so many are to criticize Twitter (fairly) for technological problems, people haven't been as eager to acknowledge a remarkable discipline and execution on the business side of the company. Frankly, all of those who'd suggested that Twitter should be sold to a larger company seem to have forgotten that almost none of the big companies suggested as acquirers have a history of consistently pulling off this kind of execution. And that's even more true for the smaller innovative companies that they've acquired.

If you haven't been following my Twitter account, you're missing all the fun! In between going aggro on teakettles, taking an unseemly joy in crude wordplay, and in general trying to channel my incessant nattering into an attempt at being entertaining. But now I've tried to do something a little bit different, starting a little Twitter contest with some simple rules of entry:

Okay, everybody, it's Ctrl-V time! Paste into Twitter whatever text you copied last, and @anildash me. Best paste gets a prize.

Amazingly, I got 160 responses from over 150 different people, and I've assembled the results into a few categories here for your enjoyment. I removed the date stamps and other clutter from the responses, and formatted the (many!) links into readable formats with some very brief descriptions appended. The categories I've grouped them into include mundane, passwords, links, links with text, actually working, nerds and coders, explainers, jokers, WTF, and pleasant. And then, finally, from all these submissions, I name our winner, along with the surprise prize. Enjoy, and please feel free to mention your favorites in the comments.

Mundane

These were, of course, the perfunctory entries in the contest, people who had the misfortune to have been doing something simple and ordinary when the contest launched. They're all exciting, talented individuals, but just had bad luck at the time with what was on the ole' clipboard.

• alexhutton Herrera, Javier
• beuwulf g8 timing....
• blackbeltjones sizewell B
• blogdiva @lolololori ...seriously, i always need to cut and paste twitter names
• davidmohara Walnut Hill and N Central Expy
• DeanLand something tells me this will not win. here goes: (hit ctrl-v) ok (guess who has been IMing)
• gfmorris Massey, Ed; Cagle, Chris --- was sending emails and needed to move some people from To: to Cc:. Lame, I know.
• mdclements May 7, 2008no_watch_me Oops.
• popgloss Go to Sam French and get the play...I have to be at Idol by 3pm. (I had to copy and paste because the 1st text didn't send)
• rcphq "yes!!! twitter im reboot (delete and readd the bot) worked for my IM notifications"
• rey I'm only giving updates to friends. Add me.
• shaneomack ... (I'd paste something, but I just started my computer...no clipboard data to paste! That's good for something, right?)
• torrez 1Z1A715V0355643267 1Z1A715V0355643267
• underoak ?
• USSJoin Kibbutz Hanaton
• vanderwal V

Passwords

I don't have any proof that all of these random strings are actually people's passwords, but I'd like to think we can hack all their accounts with this information.

• bgilham lHE)urEfB8!U
• centrs it's confidential.
• cvodb batmarlowe
• jonpederson This could be dangerous, but here it goes... "1237"
• peterme YmHgujE2
• randysouza wETpfAp4
• rayners I can't, it's a password.
• ruby X5PueOOefU

Links

Ah, the bread and butter of Twitter. A surprising number of wacky or topical news stories, along with the detritus of people passing along links to their friends. Almost all of these were originally TinyURLs; I rewrote them with brief summaries for convenience, but may have sacrificed some accuracy in the process.

• aaronbailey Paste happens to be a MT URL =) [unreachable test URL]
• arnor [CNET TV podcast feed]
• Assertagirl [seed and plant exchange]
• bigjim [ESRI support forum]
• capndesign [Pizza story from The Onion]
• cshirky [http://SFZero.org]
• danyork [Microsoft Live Mesh post on ZDNet]
• dbarefoot I'm so embarassed by the URL in my copy/paste buffer: [IndieShopping blog]
• dims [SourceForge Java WSDL project]
• djchall [unreachable test URL]
• dwitzel [Scott McNealy video on sharing]
• EffingBoring [http://www.hillaryis404.org/]
• elroy [Chicago Tribune story about ribs fire]
• ericagee [http://bustedtees.com/wikipedia]
• gen [Professional photographer's blog]
• ImGenie [IHT account on Twitter]
• innonate ctl-v this: [political commercial on YouTube]
• jetsongreen my control-v: [Redfin real estate listing page]
• lavidalibre [http://www.scienceandartsacademy.org/]
• Leftsider [ReadWriteWeb post about redesign]
• marywallace [link] [LiveScience story about food appeal]
• mediajunkie [Fortune story on tech guys with beards]
• michellej [Obama shirt on Etsy]
• mortennorby [Hillary political cartoon]
• ndaniel [Nina Hagen video on YouTube]
• nuin [RSS feed for the Cladistics journal]
• openskymedia [Logo for Clearwire]
• pbausch [Amazon thumbnail for Talking Heads album cover]
• Perryesp [Philly.com story about Pittsburg fans plotting against Rocky statue]
• plasticmind [A Skitch image of an illustration]
• raghus [http://feedflix.com]
• rodbegbie [Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra on MusicBrainz]
• ryankuder [http://waiting-for.com/]
• smalljones [http://nccbi.wiki.is]
• smartsculture [NY Times story on concert halls]
• steyblind [unreachable development URL]
• sugeneris [Diversion Wednesday blog]
• tenuto [NYTimes story on a lost Stradivarius]
• timoni [Wuthering Heights Roleplay]
• tombiro [a box of "stop talking" cards]
• tonx [Photo of eating a coffee cherry] #ctrl-v
• tysoncrosbie [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh]
• watters [Amazon page for iPod Shuffle]

Links + Text

Same thing as the links, but these folks had something to say about their links.

• akshayjava http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/feed/atom here is an opportunity for a shameless plug! :-)
• amil "Wow, Barack!...That ain't your &%?! name. Your momma ain't name you no damn Barack." DMX: http://www.xxlmag.com/online/?p=20332
• clamhead http://www.flickr.com/photo... ...Photos from my stepson's birthday party.
• fuzzy Onomatopoetically

Actually Working

The brief snippets that showed up from a few folks indicated they were actually in the middle of doing productive work when the contest began. I take no small satisfaction in having interrupted their productivity.

• Bash photography? scheduled for 19 May 2008
• jaysavage Believe me, I sympathize, but IT has no role in this process. ITs role is limited to making sure the computers are plugged in.
• jreighley Vivain called back to check the status on this...
• mat Water flume tests were used to assess the effects of passive drag
• meyerweb Coming to Boston on June 23-24, San Francisco on August 18-19, 2008, and Chicago on October 13-14.
• nichcarlson Jackson's ire this time: the Yahoo board's insistence on $37 a share after Microsoft upped its bid to $33 rather than looking ...
• pamslim Coaching agreements are constructed around specific objectives such as: * Defining the kind of work that you love .. (too big)
• shifted "I hate email like this"
• sighclub here's my Ctrl-V: Should I? Is that a good idea to explore the conversation or would it stifle it?
• tenuto not really sure what that is, actually
• thoughtfarmer After looking at six or eight products last summer, [Hicks Morley] settled on ThoughtFarmer (www.thoughtfarmer.com), server-based
• wayneyeager - Ctrl+v = automateyourbusiness
• wfreds external link to eDM case topics
• zackgonzales Franchise Development 78 Product Engineering 77

Nerds and Coders

Some of these could easily have fallen under the Actually Working category, but I know a lot of geeks, and that manifests itself as a lot of code, errors, system messages and the like showing up in people's copy-and-paste tweets.

• Asfaq SL is in the down cycle that precedes slow disappearance or phoenix like re-emergence. Hope its latter
• atonse well i don't want to go to a coffee shop cuz we do the whole find-an-outlet dance
• banky use master go CREATE LOGIN PPENGUIN WITH password = 'PPENGUIN', CHECK_POLICY = off, DEFAULT_DATABASE = siebeldb go use siebe
• bsdeluxe stopping after explicit exit
• chrisfullman 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 (Yeah, seriously.)
• coffeechica insomnia who has long be a voice of reason, passion and technical knowledge here in the world of LJ...
• DanielLight somafm
• elbrackeen Boolifyha3rvey help my PC is way too old and the headphone jack is not working
• intabulas delete from reality where acronym like 'soa%'; - note, credit to @snoopdave since I was copying hiw tweet to email to someone
• JeromeGotangco 33126 1 root 0.0 1164 pause nginx: master process /usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx
• jperkins update_pacing_and_reports
• kevinshay Profile::Templates::template_keys()
• knowncitizen Error Type: KeyErrorle_mous "2 hours, 11 minutes, 10,611 files examined, 1,851 duplicates at 77.0 Gb in size. Duplication scan is 1% complete."
• LoganTwedt -- Main.LoganTwedt - 07 May 2008 (my user/date stamp from the internal dev Twiki)
• LoriHC 1777381. thrilling, I know! (it's a bug number.)
• markpasc uh: body{background:#1d1815 url(new-electro.png);} body,h1,h2{color:#ccc;} a{color:#99f;} #pagebody{background:rgba(0,0,0,0.8);}
• marshallyount cgTrackContainerExportScale
• mickmel miz_ginevra (pasting) • Ability to have a blog
• nathantwright $19.99
• outtacontext (index page) [from a wireframe I was designing]. Maybe I'll do better next time, Anil.
• randomfreak clusterflock
• richardwinchell #farRight { border-top:solid #9bc 1px; }
• rk header = "#{i.to_s(36)} #{t.to_i.to_s(36)} #{o.to_s(36)} #{l.to_s(36)} #{h} #{flags.to_s(36)}"
• sarahsosiak -- [binary image data]
• TheBrad
  

Explainers

These folks were unsure about what they sent along, so they had follow-up tweets to offer context.

• asimaythink "Portishead veröffentlichen nach 14 Jahren ihr erstes gutes Album"
• asimaythink Which translates to "Portishead finally release their first good album after 14 years".
• digitalstew -------------------------------------
• digitalstew Seriously, what are the odds?
• dunq Hi guys In the last couple of hours I've become pretty impressed with postfix, and rather less so with courier.
• dunq I hope I don't win with that one.

Jokers

I suspect that not all of these were the actual content that would have been pasted into Twitter without some editing taking place. But I don't mind so much.

• elbowdonkey command-V says: that'd be a donkey=
• essl pregnant mothers in mexico give birth to stillborn monster babies hideous deformed two-headed monsters
• fimoculous No more fucking models.
• ghostwhispers Anil was working late again. Hey let's GTD, said a voice. It was Merlin, his hair mussed seductively. Anil's heart raced. At last. ...
• gknauss Crtl-V: Man, that Anil Dash guy is just a complete bastar--
• theonetogoto Okay, everybody, it's Ctrl-V time! Paste into Twitter whatever text you copied last, and me. Best paste gets a prize.

WTF

Delightful non-sequitirs.

• aburnett23 Sonoran hot dog
• AndrewCrow "Dude, I'm sure the burning will subside."
• camworld Mercedes 380K: Only one with removable Hardtop and orig specs. No car like this. Made 1934, Black, Leather. Price: 3,500,000 Euro
• ckolderup oh no, semantic polysemy! we've never had to deal with that before!
• csessums patched with rat stubble from a barber's dust pan
• cwaxler civil case Tiffany brought against eBay
• drothschild iT WAS A QUEER, SULTRY SUMMER, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York
• jessamyn Personally, I'm after the uncontrolled growth of pubic hair. Great hedge rows, barely contained by trousers. I try to get onto th
• joeks "Stop tainting the waste stream with pieces of wood and old underwear!"
• lowery a chewy malbec
• mattl Ctrl-V: the freedom to wear shoes whenever your pinky toes are not hooked up to transcutaneous electrodes
• miketempleton orange_botline
• skampy - AIM IM with zoestoe. 9:48 AM is pregnancy an STD? i'll bring the dental dams just in case.

Pleasant

Consider all of these runners-up in the contest. Almost all could have fit in one of the other categories, but they ended up here because they put a smile on my face.

• akselsoft I hope I'm mistaken.
• avemii 10k Monkeys w/ Typewriters
• brandonmeek every good boy does fine
• cookthink This stripped-down non-Sicilian, non-caponata caponata came out as my favorite.
• DaveTitle INT. EMPTY STAGE CASTING DIRECTOR Ok, number sixteen please. Jon shuffles meekly onto the stage, clearly uncomfortable, barel ...
• fauverism Ctrl-V (Shitting a brick)
• jacklail ATLANTA (AP) _ People who sleep fewer than six hours a night -- or more than nine -- are more likely to be obese.
• jbrotherlove my last Ctrl-V = are you a good kisser
• jeffarena and by kick butt, i mean getting stomped by 12yr olds online.
• kenlotich sootiest
• KnowMiracles Jake Warga's
• lisaphillips o/~
• Lossofmemory "suckit Rob - you are not as good as you think you are...in fact you suck"
• MaryHodder fifteen/fifty-one: a num neologism used to describe the optical illusion creatd by "cool-mom" who look 15 from back, 50 from front
• melissagira Faithful readers know there is but one thing that will make me crawl over broken glass, head down, ass up, and that thing is Jarv
• oski huey lewis and the news - the power of love
• patricking "waitaminnit. you expect your readers to want access to your last hundred printed pieces? i'd reconsider that."
• racerrick I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You want answers? You can't handle the truth!
• Zotnix groggy
• zuhl Here's what on my clipboard right now: "Obi-Wan Kedoofus"

Winner!

And finally, ladies and gentlemen, our winner, Jessamyn West! Her WTF entry was:

jessamyn Personally, I'm after the uncontrolled growth of pubic hair. Great hedge rows, barely contained by trousers. I try to get onto th

Jessamyn offers up, after an apology to the rest of her followers, that the full quote she had copied was from a mailing list that she belongs to, and reads in its entirety: "Personally, I'm after the uncontrolled growth of pubic hair. Great hedge rows, barely contained by trousers. I try to get onto the N-Judah one day and my furry rose bush of a hair bloom parts the crowd, greeted by great choruses of outrage."

It's a striking, vivid, and moving image. And one that's well-deserving of an award, in the eyes of this judge.

In Jessamyn's honor, thanks to Donors Choose, we've funded Whoooo, Whooo Ate What? This will provide 15 owl pellets for dissection by a group of kids in 4th grade . Let's just not tell them what the winning quote in our little contest was, shall we? No need to scar them for life.

As it turns out, there's more to say about kitty pidgin, and thanks to all of those who've emailed and commented with additional links.

First, a great example of prior art for the commercial use of lolcats is Twitter's various error messages. That's the first place I've seen the grammar used in official (albeit informal) communications for a company.

More important is some of the additional understanding I've gained about why some forms of kitty pidgin are so delightful. Take, for example, invisible bike and its variations. Part of the delight of invisible item cat pictures is the element of surprise, the realization of where the missing item fits into the picture yields an "a-ha!" moment that's much more satisfying than a more literal image would be. This isn't surprising -- a lot of humor relies on the element of surprise.

But there's something more subtle going on here. If you've ever read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, you might be familiar with the concept of "closure". There are many meanings for the word closure, of course, but in comics, it represents the crucial construct of allowing your reader or viewer to make the final connection with your media. This is wonderful for many reasons -- it's trusting the intelligence and creativity of your audience, knowing that they'll make the mental connection in their minds. It's also allowing for spontaneity and inspiration, instead of constraining the ideas (or humor) of an image to merely whatever the original author created. And most importantly, leaving space for your audience to interact with something as prosaic as a cat picture is just plain fun.

Closure has long been part of the vocabulary of comics.

"See that space between the panels? That's what comics aficionados have named "the gutter!" And despite its unceremonious title, the gutter plays host to much of the magic and mystery that are at the very heart of comics...If visual iconography is the vocabulary of comics, closure is its grammar."

Of course, other media make use of closure as well -- in movies, our minds effortlessly connect each frame to those preceding and following it -- but comics requires conscious (or semiconscious), high-level closure between every frame.

You need an example. Let's go to the world's worst humorous cat pictures: The Garfield comic strip. Fantagraphics has an astounding writeup of why Garfield sucks so bad, despite what your 9-year-old self thought back in the day.

I was impressed to find that Eric Burns and The Strip Doctor broke down what is most fundamentally flawed with Garfield's humor. Redundancy. The problem with Garfield is redundancy. It's redundant. The humor is. Redundant.

I could tell you about this, but that would contradict the premise. Take a look:

Invisible captions! LOL.