Twitter, the bus

The real power of Twitter is that with its viral spread it may provide an excellent delivery mechanism for meaningful information that will enable the next generation of services. Of course the hype is in posting meaningless tidbits of life that have little value to anyone but the poster and a few close friends, but nonetheless widespread adoption is an important step for the next phase to become feasible.

Steve Rubel asked how people are using Twitter and from his post it seems most people perceive it as a micro-blogging platform. But imagine the following evolution of this service:

• Web applications start to report state of their users to Twitter via its API. Although authentication is required, many web application could built in this information into the user profile, making it transparent during the session.


• A simple tag microformat built into Twitter evolves as the de-facto standard to organize this neverending stream of data.


• Twitter itself or some other provider will implement a service for aggregating Twitter feeds that share the same tags, allowing subscribers to subscribe to the RSS of specific events


• A particular subscriber will sniff all these posts and react when a particular "event" is triggered

This breakdown is a bit abstract, but the paradigm of even-driven programming may provide a better idea for those familiar with it. With Twitter you should be able to build applications that react to events triggered by people.

A couple of years ago I wrote the Birth of Cool. While at the time I was convinced that a certain electronic device would be at the core of such scenario, the basic premise works with Twitter. The binary breadcrumb is left behind allowing anyone to build up interesting services around it.

Now imagine a service that warns you every time you're about to purchase an item that exists elsewhere at a discounted price. Or being offered a discount in a good restaurant when you land into another city.

Update: Michael Parekh, Tara Hunt and Kathy Sierra have their own opinions about how to best leverage (or not) Twitter, but I'm surprised using it as an event trigger (as in event-driven architectures) is not one of them yet.

Calculating visitors

In my last post I talked about the increase of subscribers to my feed. From Google Analytics I get the total number of visitors to the site. So the question is how to combine these two metrics to produce the real picture of growth. The flaw with the total number of visitors is that a big proportion bounce back as soon as they realize that they landed in the wrong place. This porportion can be captured easily by discarding all visits that last less than 10 seconds. They are on the opposite side of the scale to those that have subscribed to the feed. In between these two extremes we'll find all other meaningful visits that lasted enough to merit some attention or were done by returning visitors.



In this graph I've accumulated data from the first 9 months of the blog, using the three groups I discuss above:

• Feed Subscribers: these are visitors that will keep coming back for more. Since the number varies day to day, I take the maximum number for each month. This accounts for the fact that not all subscribers read their feeds every day, but when they all do, you get the best snapshot of their size.


• Returning Visitors: these are only those visits by visitors who had been to the blog before. They are important to me because they are likely interested in the content. While nothing can guarantee that they will come back, the fact that they were able to come back once indicates that they are capable of coming back again. They are for now the largest group in this breakdown.


• Other Readers: Those users that have just discovered the blog (first visit), but spent over 10 seconds are my final group. While they may not come back again, the fact that they invested time suggests that there is interest. While this is not an absolute rule, notice how this group provides a general idea of how much the other two groups will grow next month. Therefore they represent the potential for growth.

This is far from a precise method, but it is much better than settling for the total number of page views or visitors in a given month. If I was just looking at visitors to the blog, I would assume that there was no growth in February, when in fact it was an important month.

Feedburner stats

It is motivating to see how all the time spent on the Global Culture blog is paying off. I've been using FeedBurner to deliver my feed, at first hoping that I would be able to isolate the noise caused by the myriad of robots crawling the site. But the stats is what kept me interested.

Up until the end of November subscribers were loyal but few. Then came the nomination for Best Culture Blog on the Weblog Awards. Then at the end of January the Bloggies in the category of Best New Weblog. As if that was not enough, Google fixed a problem with how they were reporting subscribers, which led to the jump seen in February.

However, it is only fair to assume that those who are now subscribed to the blog were at some point visitors to the site, which got me thinking about how to combine these statistics with the analytics of the site to see the real picture. Feedburner is on the right track by providing Site stats, but they are not mixing these two. I'll explain the approach I'm taking to calculate total number of visitors and potential growth expected... In my next post.

Déjà vu

In an attempt to forecast what the growth of Internet users may be over the next few years, I came up with a very simple realization after analysing the data from Gapminder: the current (2004) distribution of Internet users resembles the distribution of phone users back in 1996:



Notice how after making a selection of 12 countries with significant populations and grouping them, the distribution in both cases is very similar with the U.S. & Canada leading the pack.

The reason I make this comparison is because we know exactly how the number of phone users grew over the last 10 years and if we consider that the type of infrastructure development that is required to acquire new Internet users follows a similar path than the one that was required to acquire phone users:

• Backbone infrastructure
• Last-mile connectivity
• Device deployment
• Cultural adoption of technology

And the same corporations are in charge of both operations, so it is to be expected they would follow a similar business plan to the one that already worked a few years ago.

So, take a look at how the story ends for phone users after 8 years:



The obvious conclusion is that China will have the predominant user base with half of their population plugged-in, assuming over 35% of the total Internet user base. A recent story from BusinessWeek showcasing the Best Leaders includes Robin Li, CEO of Baidu.com, is probably hinting at the fact that the natural evolution of the web is to migrate all the tools we know to chinese and massively add users. Baidu is a success story because it was able to beat Google at their own game in the Chinese market.

However, there are more dramatic consequences to the evolution shown above: the web that we know today can not be the same web that will serve half of the population of China. Such a large user base will likely be quite influential to shift the technology to address their needs. A few more observations from this analysis:

• Most Chinese living in urban areas will likely be users of the web


• It is hard to imagine that they will all have access to a computer as we know them, so technology is probably going to scale-down to allow for very cheap and simple models for low-end users. (Think the One Laptop per Child project)


• Such a huge segment will likely promote innovation and "connected to the web" will likely be accomplished in other ways than opening a browser a navigating through web pages. It has to be easier than that for so many people to adopt it this fast

Originally posted in the Global Culture blog

lonelytv

The December issue of Wired Magazine devoted its cover page to Lonelygirl15 with the article The Secret World of Lonelygirl by Joshua Davis. While this phenomenon is hardly new, I think it provides important cues as to how the well established medium of TV is facing its biggest threat.

In the summer of 2006, as the Lonelygirl15 video series gained popularity on YouTube, a growing collection of fans became obsessed with cracking the mystery of lonelygirl15. The Hunt for Bree became a major internet phenomenon that captured the attention of many YouTubers and was heavily covered in the mainstream media.

It is not just the fact that an alternate channel to TV, such as YouTube, has gained enough attention to be valuated in over $1.65 billion dollars or even that certain enterpreneurs have already exploited the medium. I believe the relevance of this story is that it demonstrates clearly the birth of a new medium.

McLuhan had established decades ago the consequences of TV as a new medium that would return society to its tribal ways, pushing the literate man back to an "acoustic" world where oral tradition is the preferred mechanism for cultural transfer. "Acoustic" was mostly used as a metaphor for "many things happening at once". I believe that his position is even more accurate today to describe the transition from TV to a more fluid medium.

First consider the fact that TV is mostly an exercise of serializing and organizing a complex story in a way that can be digested by the masses with little effort: from the rigidity of weekly schedules, seasonal programming, series of predefined length to the organization of several threads of action into a cohesive sequence that eliminates any possibility of misunderstanding the story. It's not too different from the organization of a novel in a book that must address several tracks in a way to keep the reader engaged. The advantage of this approach is accessibility. Very little effort is required to consume.

However, for a new generation of viewers, viewing is not enough. Participation is a must. The Lonelygirl15 phenomenon provides a preview of the type of interactivity that the audience is demanding. Unscheduled snippets of action, very short, cuasi-serialized but easily interchangeable, many different levels of stories that may appeal to different participants, alternate channels to get involved whether providing comments or producing additional snippets of content and endless hooks to plug-in their own ideas into the story. In this new medium there are no rules on how to consume the message, which distorts the message itself and provides creative license to the audience. Assuming there are smart producers listening to all the feedback, the evolution of such a venture is largely based on what the audience wants.

In the near future, watching Lonelygirl15 or its next incarnation will allow the audience to react to the story while endless threads of stories become available, allowing every single person to experience it in a different way, requiring a strong oral tradition among those participants to maintain a global cohesion and ultimately realize the vision of this new medium. The "accoustic" approach would require not just watching all the snippets associated with a particular thread of action, but also catching up on what others have to say about the snippets they have uncovered. The story as a whole exists only when the community comes together to share their experiences consuming their individual versions.

In the end of television I had already stated my position around the dimishing participation of TV in our daily lifes, but mentioned that we still needed the mechanisms to make the few tricks used by the techno-savvy elite available to all layers of society. If you can imagine YouTube with advanced interactive features that allow each user to follow a specific story as in those well-produced DVD's that contain extra footage at the click of your remote, you'll realize the mechanisms are becoming simple enough for a larger group of people to consume them. Expect your TV to be very lonely.