Is Twitter a fad? Teens seem to think so

One of the first lessons of strategy is to ask yourself: “What is the job to be done for this product / company?” You know you’re in trouble if you can’t find a clear answer. And the answer to this question for Twitter today is at best, ambiguous. I found today’s TechCrunch study very illuminating in this respect. The author examined the reasons behind why teens are not heavy users of the service. First, it debunked the myth that teens are under-represented in the population with Twitter istalls. Turns out, there are more teens registered with Twitter than with Facebook. But teens are not tweeting. Why?

I find the commentaries in the margins of the article very telling. Teens are commenting: “I’m a teen, I tweet. But the reason I tweet is for web development purposes, if I was a ‘regular’ teen, why would I need to? Theres no reason. Facebook does the job.” Another one chimes in: “I picked up Twitter to see how “BIG” the thing actually is when everyone was talking about it.. i never hook up to it and now i tweet once awhile when i felt i like to but i facebook everyday, every moment”. So there you have it. If you are a teen and want to update your friends, you go to Facebook. If you want to follow celebrities and musicians, you do it on MySpace. And if you want to stay current on news… well, the article claims teens are not interested in news as much as older generations, so they don’t use Twitter for that.

News is pretty much the only “job” I could think of for Twitter. For me at least. The last time I twitted, it was about a fire raging across the street from my house. I dislike tweeting personal details, mainly because I don’t know most of my followers and anyone smart enough to type my name into Google can read it all. But where Twitter is irreplaceable is cases like Iran or California wildfires where the situation is developing by the second. Then Twitter becomes your on-site live-stream reporter. A news stream.

So, is Twitter a fad? The teens seem to have deemed it so, given their apathy towards current news. But for those of us still interested by what’s happening in the world, it may have its purpose. Quite different from pure social networking, but still a purpose.

What chickens and plum trees have in common with high school reunions

Something interesting is happening to me these days while playing Farmville. The game knows who in my 320+ extended network plays the game too and allows me to add them as neighbors. Two of my high school classmates who I haven’t seen in over ten years are playing the game. Ok, so what, you may say. We see all kinds of past classmates and co-workers on our social networks but that doesn’t mean we’re sending a message to everyone or writing on their wall every day.

But wait! Farmville, in its infinite wisdom to drive virality, has built in incentives for people to gift farm animals and trees to each other. And because the gifting screen is the first thing you see when you log in, a very curious thing is happening. My high school friends and I started sending each other farm stock every day. It’s like all of us discovered the same addition, something we are doing in common TODAY despite having led separate lives for a decade. I log in every day with the anticipation of seeing what gifts my friends from home have sent me (we have a 10 hour time difference). It’s become such part of our routine, we recently emailed each other to reconnect. What’s more, we’re using the Farmville application to reconnect with more of our high school friends by dragging them in as neighbors and sending them sheep and apricot trees. I wouldn’t be surprised if I see the same faces in other games on the Zynga platform – it’s already happened in Fashion wars, where some of my girlfriends from back home are my “posse”.

So what does that mean and why am I writing about it? Put simply, social games are a huge departure from the old hardcore gaming concept, which was a niche. These games are viral and they transcend platforms and social networks. Moreover, they help bring people together in unexpected, surprising, yet simple ways. And in our global world, where people live thousands of miles apart from friends and family, the more of that the better. One day, we may even see virtual highs chool reunions on social gaming applications. Complete with chickens and plum trees.

Farmville is addictive – is it organic?

So I finally discovered a game that suits my personality! No violence, no people to kill or blow up. Sweet. Plus, it jives with my strong interest in good wholesome food. I recently took up going to the farmers market at 6am on Saturdays (yep, you read that right). I feel like a kid in a candy store, grabbing everything from kale to lemon cucumbers and organic peaches. My juicer works overtime for the next three days.

I am currently trying to figure out a way to grow my own plants in the city. For lack of space and the prevalence of fog in San Francisco, I’m limiting myself to a pot of basil and mint on the window sill. So you can imagine my delight when I got the opportunity to grow my own farm (albeit a virtual one) on Farmville. The jingle is addictive, and so is the game – you come back every few hours or so to check on your produce and prevent it from spoiling.

In playing the game, I had some ideas for Zynga. I thought it would be really cool to introduce organic vs. conventional farming. Maybe you pay more for seeds that have not been genetically modified? Or you buy organic cow manure from your neighbors as opposed to commercial fertilizer? That would be a really cool way to introduce some more variety into this fun game. Ok, off I go, time to harvest my strawberries…

Can your blog help you in recruiting?

As a freshly minted grad still finalizing my next steps, I was curious to read today’s WSJ post on bloggers who have used their blogs in their job searches. The verdict – it helps as a conversation starter and in one case, as evidence of “social media savvy”, but it useless for job leads.

It makes sense – think of how many bloggers there are. In its report “State of the Blogosphere” Technorati estimates the number of blogs at over 133 million. And this number does not include blogs that are not indexed by Technorati. That shows you that blogging, like twittering, can have a one-way “broadcasting” direction that lets the author express him- or herself but does not necessarily lead to a conversation. To have a conversation, you need to engage people, to be timely in your topics and to have a purpose.

The WSJ bloggers had a purpose – to find a job. However, because this purpose was more about the process of finding a job, rather than about anything that may have been of tangible value to companies (i.e. sales expertise, marketing clout, innovations in product design), it did not lead to a conversation with recruiters. It probably had as much relevance as saying you took yoga classes on the weekends. Nice, so what? Blogs help people be perceived as experts or, at least, voices of opinion in a domain. Being a domain expert in looking for a job is probably not an expertise you want to retain forever.

A new idea for Amazon’s Kindle

I love my Kindle. Correction – I’m addicted to my Kindle. Ever since I received the shiny package in the mail, it’s been my constant companion. I have also turned into an unsolicited and unpaid saleswoman for Amazon – my guess is that I’ve shown the Kindle to at least a dozen of my friends, demonstrating cool features that I liked to a chorus of “ooohs” and “aaahs”. The first thing people say is how surprisingly book-like the Kindle looks. Of course, I say, explaining the feature that got me to buy it in the first place – “it’s not back-lit”.

For all its benefits, the Kindle has one major drawback. It has not embraced the social aspect of the media. Not yet, at least. You can download books in seconds – it’s so easy that I got concerned and called Amazon to inquire if I could turn off the one-click buy in case someone stole my Kindle (no, you can’t). However, once downloaded, there is no way to share the book with anyone. No lending, no sharing, no nothing. Reminds me of the early days of downloadable music files – once downloaded, you were stuck with listening to them from that single computer.

However, one thing Amazon should consider doing (if they are not already) is having some sort of “friends and family plan” where you can share the book for a lower price with other people who have the Kindle. Or maybe do a package deal – 1 copy for $9.99, 2 copies for $13.99, 3 copies for $15.99, etc.

Just an idea… Because I really can’t wait to start sharing my books, and even better, some personalized notes I’ve made in those books. Can’t wait!

Amazing new start-ups

Today was the last class for Competing with Social Networks – an innovative course at HBS, led by Prof. Misiek Piskorski, which has truly inspired me. As a last hurrah, we had a few of our classmates present some companies they are either working with or starting themselves. Check them out!

Imagine Election is a company providing information to voters on candidates in local and national elections, so that when you head to the ballot box next time you can look up the candidates and what they stand for. No more guessing!

Cookum allows you to buy and sell home-made food from people in your community. Vegan? Gluten intolerant? Find out who can whip up a tasty home-made meal for you that meets your requirements. Take-out just acquired a new meaning!

ZinchAre you a high-school student who’s applying for college? Too young for LinkedIn but don’t want schools browsing through your party and bikini pictures on Facebook? Then Zinch will help you showcase your profile in a professional format that will connect you with all the schools you’re interested in. Where was that when I was applying?

Twitter – more followers than producers

One of my good friends and classmates, Bill Heil, is a multi-talented individual with a special proclivity for all tings computer science and Internet-related. He recently demonstrated in our Competing with Social Networks class some very interesting data on Twitter.

He had pulled a lot of basic data off of Twitter’s API, based on a pretty large sample (hundreds of thousands) over a period of time longer than a year. What he found was both surprising and not.

In its early days Twitter was full of people producing tweets and following others – the net number of people you followed exceeded the number of people following you. As time passed, you saw the net number of followers minus people you followed turn positive. That has really happened only over the past few months and indicates the evolution of Twitter from a niche place where early adopters “tweet to their heart’s content” to a place where few people broadcast and a lot more people passively follow them. Just think about Oprah – the day she set up her twitter account, she had north of 50,000 followers even before she sent a single tweet!

The data is also really spread out in that there are quite a few twitter accounts with tons of activity and few people following them (marketers? spammers?) and also some people with lower activity but a large number of followers (Oprah probably skews this side a bit).

The surprising reason people use social networks

One point of disagreement I have with Charlene Li concerns one the reasons that she lists for people participating in the “groundswell”.  On page 60-61 of her book  (“Groundswell”) she lists nine reasons people produce content, write reviews and submit responses – keeping up friendships, making new friends, validation, creative impulse, etc.  One of the reasons is “the altruistic impulse”.  As I wrote in the post “the ego-centric web” I see people’s desire to be seen and heard as dominating the content that is online.  It may look like altruism: “I want to write a review for this product on the mommy blog because I want other moms to find out about it”, but in the end of the day I also cherish the fact that I am the “expert” and the one who people approach for advice.

In addition, Prof. Misiek Piskorski in my CSN class submitted very compelling evidence that shows the main reason why people use social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is voyeurism.  This is based on data that shows that over half of the activity involves checking out people’s profiles, and specifically profiles of strangers.  Because of some confidentiality concerns, I cannot share the specific numbers on this blog.  Basically, people gravitate to places where they can check each other out.  Some of us have a deep desire to be knowledgeable, respected, admired, followed…  And those are the impulses that drive our producing behavior online (I am no exception).  Others cannot be bothered to produce active content, but engage in reactions and reviews or just observe – checking out what’s going on and what’s hot.  In the end, what these different groups have in common is the curiosity factor, a very human side which drives a lot of our behavior on social networks.

A vision for a brave new SOCIAL world – Charlene Li

Yesterday Charlene Li (www.altimetergroup.com), author of “Groundswell”, visited our CSN class via webcast.  I had read her book and we had some chapters assigned for class.  Her basic premise is that we are at the doorstep of a new era – the internet will transition from disjointed applications to an interconnected environment where we can take our various identities and various subgroups of friends and do everyting (shopping, finding information, etc) in the context of the knowledge and power of our social network. 

You can get a very good summary of Charlene’s premise in her presentation from a month ago

SXSW09: The Future Of Social Networks

I have  to say that I thoroughly enjoyed Charlene’s book and found it a practical guide for any company to think about “social networking” from a strategic perspective rather than as “we need to do this because our competitors are doing it”.  In our video-cast at HBS she outlined again that social networks will be like “air” in the future.  What this implies is that it probably doesn’t make sense to recreate networks from scratch as people are already suffering from “network fatigue”.  Whoever has staked their ground to capturing our identities is in a quasi-monopolistic position (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn).  What it may make sense however is leveraging connectivity to these existing networks (Facebook Connect) to build out activity- or interest-based communities.

Twitter’s peeping Toms

My CSN professor turned out to be right again – men tend to follow women online. Since I started my twitter account, I have slightly more people following me than people I follow. What is starting to get spooky, however, is that lately the vast majority of my followers are for the most part males I’ve never met in my life. Tweeting all of a sudden gives me a similar felling to letting myself be watched by a group of peeping Toms… I’m not sure what to make of it. One thing I’m not doing is synchronizing my Twitter with my Facebook feed – that would just be TMI for my male fan base on Twitter.

Update:  I figured out the culprit.  Ever since I stopped following Guy Kawasaki because he was flooding my twitter feed, random males have stopped adding me to their “follow” list.  I guess who you follow has a much larger influence on who follows you than I suspected!