Twitter

Spend Money on TWTR or Spend Time on Twitter

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I was really excited about the IPO of Twitter today. This is one company/service that I have used consistently over the last 5+ years, and I expect to continue using it for the foreseeable future. Which is why I really like Felix Salmon’s advice on how you can invest in Twitter without spending the cash:

So how is the individual investor supposed to navigate these treacherous waters? It’s actually incredibly easy. And it works like this. Twitter’s profits, if and when they ever appear, are going to be some fraction of its revenues. Its revenues, in turn, are going to be some fraction of the value it provides to its users. I have personally already extracted many thousands of dollars in value out of Twitter, over the past five years, and it hasn’t cost me a penny. On an ROI basis, I’m doing unbelievably well — and my returns are only going to keep on growing into the future.

Here’s my advice, then: take the amount of money you were thinking of investing in Twitter, and divide it by the rate at which you value your own time. So, if you were going to invest $5,000 and you value your time at $50 per hour, then you’d end up with a figure of 100 hours. Then, instead of spending the $5,000 on Twitter stock, spend 100 hours on Twitter: the cost is the same. The value you get from being on Twitter — from interacting with people you admire, from learning new things, from being able to express yourself so easily and concisely — will be much greater than the value you’d ever get from buying $5,000 of Twitter stock. And you’ll still have $5,000 left over to do whatever you want with, whether it’s putting it into some other investment or spending it on something awesome — a holiday, perhaps, or a gift to a friend, or even some fine wine.

I estimate my time is worth $100/hour and I wanted to invest $1,000 into Twitter. So that’s 10 hours I will be spending on Twitter in the next few weeks.

(As an aside: my limit buy order at $30/share didn’t go through this morning as TWTR opened at an astronomical $45.10/share).

On the Metadata of a Tweet

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On the day of the Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) IPO, Paul Ford has a great piece about the metadata that is associated with every single tweet. There are 31 publicly documented data fields (number of favorites, number of retweets, and many more you probably weren’t familiar with):

This is the sort of combinatorial work that defines the modern Web: There’s so much data that there’s a very good chance that you will be the first of all humankind to find something interesting or unexpected. Whether you find something valuable is another question. But it’s surprisingly easy to become an expert in a very tiny niche as a developer—to become a world-leading expert in Android video or a specialist in Twitter geography—and charge accordingly for your services.

For all the possibilities of APIs, there are also limits. Another tweet field, “withheld_copyright,” if set to “true,” lets you know that a tweet is in trouble—that its content has raised flags and hackles over copyright. The text of the tweet, in that case, may be suppressed. The “withheld_in_countries” field can provide a list of the nations in which the tweet is banned. Another field has a telling name: “possibly_sensitive.” It’s set to either true or false. The field indicates whether a tweet links to potentially offensive things such as “nudity, violence, or medical procedures.” (If ever you wanted a snapshot of our world’s anxieties in three terms, there you have it.) As a user you can check a box on your profile so that the media you link to is automatically flagged this way. If you don’t, you risk having your pictures of your medical procedure marked as objectionable by an offended reader and thus put “in review,” the Twitter version of limbo.

A field like this indicates the inherent difficulty of managing an enormous platform like Twitter. The only way the company survives is if it can safely ignore most of what’s said on Twitter. If it had to use employees to monitor tweets, it wouldn’t last a day. But in order to attract as many users as possible, it must find ways to avoid horrifying them.

There’s a great deal of hedging in both the words “possibly” and “sensitive.” The end result is that Twitter is putting the moral burden on the user. One person’s art is another person’s smut, and Twitter is not going to decide which is which—nor is it going to force you to look at the stuff. This position is both somewhat noble for its acceptance of the range of human expression and also highly expedient, putting the responsibility back on the user: We told you the picture was “possibly sensitive,” so why did you look at it?

Much of the rest of the metadata contained in a tweet is familiar: The number of times people have starred, or “fav’d,” a tweet, the number of times it’s been retweeted. The value for “user” contains a whole huge bundle of stuff—the user’s name, a link to an avatar image, the user’s number of followers, the number of people the user follows, and whether the user is “verified” and deserves one of those blue checkmarks. It’s a pretty full portrait of an individual, given that this portrait is attached to every tweet.

From a single tweet and with no other information, you can extract a sense of social influence—how big a voice an individual has, the number of people they reach, the number of people who engaged with this particular tweet. Tweets themselves are just regular text (although text on a computer is anything but regular; there are dozens of abstractions that make it possible for an “a” to appear on a screen—but it’s safe to gloss over that). Here it is, 140 characters, a plain little beastie. You might be fooled into thinking there’s hardly anything there.

Read the rest here.

 

The Story of How Twitter was Founded

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Nick Bilton pens a fascinating piece in The New York Times on the origins of Twitter and the roles Jack Dorsey, Evan WIlliams, and Noah Glass played from the company’s creation to becoming one of the top social media sites in the world.

On Jack Dorsey’s luck in discovering Ev Williams in a coffee shop:

In 2005, Jack Dorsey was a 29-year-old New York University dropout who sometimes wore a T-shirt with his phone number on the front and a nose ring. After a three-month stint writing code for an Alcatraz boat-tour outfit, he was living in a tiny San Francisco apartment. He had recently been turned down for a job at Camper, the shoe store.

His luck changed one morning as he was sitting at Caffe Centro off South Park. As Dorsey looked up from his laptop, punk rock blaring through his earphones, he noticed a man about his age. Evan Williams, then 33, was a minor celebrity on the San Francisco tech scene. A few years earlier, he sold the Web-diary service he co-founded, Blogger, a word he popularized, to Google for several million dollars. Now Williams was using some of his Blogger money to finance a new company, Odeo, that made podcasts. Odeo was co-founded by his neighbor and friend, Noah Glass. Its dingy loft headquarters happened to be located around the corner, a block from South Park. Williams had stopped in and ordered a coffee.

He sent a resume, got hired immediately, and the rest, as they say, is history. The idea for Twitter came a bit later, after the company Dorsey was working for, Odeo, became obsolete when Apple unveiled podcasts on iTunes:

One night in late February 2006, around 2 a.m., Dorsey sat in Glass’s parked car as rain poured down on the windshield. The two were sobering up after a night of drinking vodka and Red Bull, but the conversation, as usual, was about Odeo. Dorsey blurted out that he was planning his exit strategy. “I’m going to quit tech and become a fashion designer,” Glass recalls him saying. He also wanted to sail around the world. Glass pushed back: He couldn’t really want to leave the business entirely, could he? “Tell me what else you’re interested in,” he said. Dorsey mentioned a Web site that people could use to share their current status — the music they were listening to or where they were. Dorsey envisioned that people would use it to broadcast the simplest details about themselves — like “going to park,” “in bed” and so forth.

On how the name Twitter was born:

Soon, the question of a name came up. Williams jokingly suggested calling the project “Friendstalker,” which was ruled out as too creepy. Glass became obsessive, flipping through a physical dictionary, almost word by word, looking for the right name. One late afternoon, alone in his apartment, he reached over to his cellphone and turned it to silent, which caused it to vibrate. He quickly considered the name “Vibrate,” which he nixed, but it led him to the word “twitch.” He dismissed that too, but he continued through the “Tw” section of the dictionary: twist, twit, twitch, twitcher, twitchy . . . and then, there it was. He read the definition aloud. “The light chirping sound made by certain birds.” This is it, he thought. “Agitation or excitement; flutter.” Twitter.

One of Twitter’s early problems was the question of who was leading the company? Williams or Dorsey?

Dorsey raced home to try to figure out a plan for his resignation, but the Twitter board instead offered him a three-month window to fix the site and its issues. Not much changed, however, even as text bills mounted, and the site continued to crash. Before the three months were up, Dorsey recalled, Sabet and Wilson took him to a breakfast at the Clift hotel and told him that they were replacing him as C.E.O. with Williams. Dorsey sat before a bowl of uneaten yogurt and granola as he was offered stock, a $200,000 severance and a face-saving role as the company’s “silent” chairman. No one in the industry had to know that he was fired. (Investors would not want to be seen as pitting one founder against another anyway.) But Dorsey had no voting rights at the company. He was, essentially, out.

On Ev Williams ignoring the advice that it’s bad to hire your friends in a start-up:

He [Williams] saw his success as the result of a lot of hard work and also a fair bit of luck, and he wanted to give the people he knew the opportunity to be a part of it. He hired his sister, to stock the kitchens at Twitter; his wife, Sara, was hired to design the new offices; and he employed numerous friends from Google. Among them was Dick Costolo, who had recently sold his start-up for $100 million. After they bumped into each other at a party in 2009, Williams asked him to be Twitter’s chief operating officer. On his first day, Costolo, a former improv comedian, thumbed his first tweet: “First full day as Twitter COO tomorrow,” he wrote. “Task #1: undermine CEO, consolidate power.”

In the end, this is a familiar story in Silicon Valley:

In Silicon Valley, most companies have their own Twitter story: a co-founder, always a friend, and often the person with the big idea behind the company, who is pushed out by another, hungrier co-founder. 

Twitter is my favorite social network, so I highly recommended reading this piece in entirety.

A Hotel Room With 140 Characters

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I can’t decide whether this idea for a “140 Character Hotel” is genius (or ridiculous):

The first “Twitter experience hotel” (aka Sol Wave House) was introduced this summer in Majorca, Spain, where guests can ping requests to a “Twitter concierge” using hashtags like #fillmyfridge; flirt from poolside Bali beds by tweeting numbers printed atop the beds, like “How’s it going #balibed10?”; and sip cocktails while checking their smartphones for a live feed of virtual conversations bubbling up from every corner of the hotel.

Meliá Hotels International, which owns more than 350 properties, including Sol Wave House, is pioneering the concept amid the still rising popularity of smartphones and social networking. The Internet is in more pockets today than ever before. In July the International Data Corporation, a research group, said the worldwide smartphone market experienced 52.3 percent year-over-year growth. (In the United States, 56 percent of adults own a smartphone, up from 35 percent in 2011, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project surveys.)

That sandbox includes a Twitter concierge that guests can instruct via tweet to “Get the Cava on ice” followed by “1 bottle, 4 glasses to the solarium,” as one visitor did last month. There are images of mustaches on mirrors in the rooms, encouraging guests to tweet goofy selfies. And on Friday afternoons at the height of the season, the concierge uses a pool party hashtag (#twitterpoolparty) to summon sun worshipers.

On second thought: the few times I’ve stayed in hotels and had a negative experience, tweeting something publicly was the fastest way to get an amicable resolution.

This is an actual line used in the Times article: “For the foreseeable future, though, the Twitter hotel is #heretostay.”

Why Twitter Parody Accounts Should Stay Anonymous

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I completely agree with Matt Buchanan’s piece in The New Yorker:

Parody accounts are, oddly, one of Twitter’s most distinguishing features. Anyone can have virtually any username on the service, as opposed to Facebook and Google Plus, which require users to display their real names. While fake Twitter accounts are sometimes created in an attempt to deceive, they’re just as often meant to be humorous, and have become a routine reaction to practically every news event, a fact lamented by Alex Pareene in The New Republic. Most fake Twitter accounts are, in fact, unfunny; some are in poor taste, like the fake Tsarnaev brother accounts that emerged almost immediately after the two were identified as suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. But at their best, they ascend to “the highest cultural rung” of “the making-fun-of-others department,” as Louis Menand wrote of parody in the magazine in 2010. “Part of the enjoyment people take in parody is the enjoyment of feeling intelligent,” Menand noted. “Not everyone gets the joke.” The highly self-selected audience necessary for parody presents itself automatically on Twitter, which allows its users to choose exactly whom to follow.

 So why does the unmasking ultimately happen? Buchanan concludes:

Yet Twitter also constantly undermines the parody it creates. The primary currency of social media is fame, and it is fame that drives the authors of popular parody accounts to uncloak themselves, destroying the account in the process. If fame is all the authors of parody accounts care about, as @MayorEmanuel wrote in one of his last tweets, “it’s pretty clear that the party’s over.”

Do you have a favorite parody account on Twitter? I am a fan of @TheTweetOfGod and Lord Voldemort.

The Facebook Hashtag

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The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook is working on incorporating the #hashtag, mirroring the use on Twitter:

Facebook is testing whether to follow Twitter’s lead and allow users to click on a hashtag to pull up all posts about similar topics or events so it can quickly index conversations around trending topics and build those conversations up, giving users more reason to stay logged in and see more ads. Instagram, which Facebook acquired last year, already uses hashtags, allowing users to sort photos by the symbol.

Facebook’s work on a hashtag is a sign of the heightening battle between Facebook and Twitter, as both compete for mobile users and fight for advertising dollars. For years, Twitter and Facebook seemed to occupy different poles of the social-media spectrum. While Facebook was the home of close friends and family, Twitter was the real-time broadcasting device for the rest of the world.

Facebook’s already copied Twitter in the status people fill out (the more casual “what’s on your mind?” is close to Twitter’s “what’s happening?”), so this latest move isn’t all too surprising, in retrospect.

On Twitter, The Expanse and Beauty of #NYTBooks

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The best thing on Twitter today was the sudden proliferation of the #NYTbooks hashtag. I don’t know who started the tag, but I participated in the festivities and loved reading through what others had to share. Here were some of my favorites:

And a couple by yours truly:

Did I mention I love Twitter?

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Update (11/1/12): The #NYTBooks meme began by Mother Jones’s Timothy Murphy, according to Poynter.

Jack Dorsey, Charlie Chaplin of Technologists

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I love this Wall Street Journal profile of Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square. The Journal likens him to Charlie Chaplin of technologists, and based on what I’ve read about him, the analogy seems apt:

[Jack Dorsey] works standing up at an immaculate, clutter-free table in the center of the wide-open office, typing alone on his iPad, easily accessible to colleagues who can informally sidle up and ask him questions. His daily uniform includes dainty Repetto shoes from France (because, as he recently tweeted, they are “light” and “graceful”) and special open-collared shirts, the provenance of which he refuses to identify (“halfway between a Nehru and a priest’s collar,” as he describes them). This allows him to convey enough formality for meetings, yet frees him from the constriction of wearing ties. He encourages midday strolls outside Square’s offices as a means of inspiration. He leads groups of employees on exploratory excursions to museums or across the Golden Gate Bridge.

A man of widely varied interests, Dorsey is a genuine eccentric—not a mere collector of affectations. He treats his obsessions more as callings than as hobbies. When young, he studied botanical illustration under the tutelage of a master at the Missouri Botanical Garden, gazing for hours at the contours of gingko leaves. He later became fascinated by bespoke denim and enrolled in fashion design classes. Perhaps most bizarrely, he devoted himself for a solid year to the art of massage therapy, after dealing with sore wrists from too much coding. “I was ready to do massage for the rest of my life,” he says. “I tried to convince a nightclub owner in St. Louis to let me give people chair massages at the edge of the dance floor, wearing all white clothes and white clogs. He thought it was a terrible idea, so I went back to programming.” To protect his wrists, he trained himself to type in Dvorak—a keyboard alignment that is ergonomically superior to Qwerty.

Dorsey delves deeply and intensely into whatever piques his curiosity, on the theory that innovation happens when disparate thoughts mesh. “It’s important to demystify the term. Innovation is just reinvention and rethinking. I don’t think there’s anything truly, organically new in this world. It’s just mash-ups of all these things that provide different perspectives—that allow you to think in a completely different way, which allows you to work in a different way.”

One of the most fascinating men in Tech, I appreciate Dorsey’s curatorial ability:

Thus he carefully curates the cultural intake of his employees, in hopes that unfamiliar concepts might be distilled into something new. It’s why he screens films: Modern Times for its economy of expression; Bullitt for its stark, empty compositions; Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory for its depiction of a company that packages delight and surprise.

In a prominent spot near Square’s welcome lobby stands a communal bookshelf where employees place reading material for their colleagues to peruse and borrow. Most titles lining the shelves cover subjects you might expect at a high-flying tech startup: inspirational CEO biographies, trend-gazing futurist tomes and guides to effective management technique. And then there are books placed on the shelf by Dorsey. He offers up Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers—an explication of the Japanese concept of serendipitous beauty. He suggests Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea for its concision. (Papa Hemingway might have thrived under Twitter’s 140-character constraint.)

Read the whole thing.

Jack Dorsey

Having redefined the communications and payments industries, Dorsey wants to tackle health next. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with. It’s bound to be brilliant.

Did Geoffrey Chaucer Coin the Word Twitter?

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The Oxford English Online tweeted the word cloud below to showcase a few of Geoffrey Chaucer’s contributions to the English language, among them, womanhood, fattish, caterwaul, sluttish, poppet, dotard, and crude. But also, the word twitter:

Chaucer word cloud

The Atlantic Wire summarizes:

Chaucer provides our earliest ex. of twitter, verb: of a bird: to utter a succession of light tremulous notes; to chirp continuously.” On their Oxford Words blog they add that though Chaucer is frequently considered “the venerable but crude uncle of English poetry, always ready with an inappropriate story, quite likely, even when it seems as if his tale can’t get any funnier or more scurrilous”—that bawdy poet our high school English teachers assigned us to read—he was much more.

Dryden dubbed him ‘the Father of English Poetry,’ and while it’s debatable whether he really did invent English poetry as we know it, Chaucer remains considered one of the formidable, formative masters of English language and literature. He’s the man behind expressions like “Love is blind,” “Love conquers all,” “Time and tide wait for no man,” and “shaking like a leaf” or, Right as an aspen lefe she gan to quake. Also, “Marriage is a wonderful invention; but, then again, so is a bicycle repair kit.” Like Shakespeare, he was unafraid to play with words, and to create new ones: “There are around 2,000 words for which the works of Chaucer currently provide evidence of first use in the Oxford English Dictionary. Just over half of these borrowings are from French or Latin roots (mostly French), almost all the rest are new formations based on existing English words,” they write. We still use quite a lot of those words today, tweeting or not, and others are just kind of great: messagery, mishappy, whippletree, corny, poop, Martian, bodkin, bragget, vulgar, snort, scissors, and more.

Interesting.

You should follow me on Twitter here.

On Food Trucks and Twitter

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Nick Bilton, writing for The New York Times, comes up with a great metaphor for Twitter:

In 2006, a small restaurant called Twitter opened for business.

This wasn’t your typical restaurant. Twitter didn’t have its own chefs creating food. Instead, it invited anyone from the public to come into its kitchens and freely use the stove, pots, pans, plates and knifes. There, they could make little scrumptious bites for anyone to consume.

Soon, word spread, and Twitter was bustling with people making their own food. Others, hearing about the wonderful bite-size snacks being made at Twitter, came in to consume them.

Twitter grew so quickly that it started to have major problems dealing with all the customers. Twitter’s lights would often go out. Plates and silverware were often dirty. There was never enough room for people to sit. Sometimes, unable to handle all the customers, Twitter would just be closed for hours at a time.

So Twitter came up with a plan: it told people that they could take the food being made in Twitter’s kitchen and give it away by creating new places for people to eat. Twitter called this the application protocol interface, or A.P.I.

Soon there were food trucks, delivery services, meal messengers, all taking what was coming out of Twitter with its A.P.I. and redistributing it to people all around the world. Some of these distributors gave away Twitter’s stuff free. Others who had hired much prettier and reliable waitresses and delivery boys than Twitter started charging. As things grew, some decided to take hefty sums of money from investors to build specific businesses around Twitter.

Everyone seemed happy.

But now those food trucks are facing a problem: Twitter wants to cut them off. Read the conclusion to Nick’s piece here.