The most valuable real estate on OldTwitter, and why it's important to NewTwitter

My Twitter account hasn't been upgraded yet, so I haven't been able to look at the "#NewTwitter" but in absence of that I'd like to comment on my what I think is the most valuable web real estate Twitter has in the old Twitter.

It's the dialog that comes up after a user clicks the official Tweet Button:

There's a few reasons I like this dialog and think it's smart in the way it is designed compared to some of it's ilk, and really think Twitter will benefit from this button, the fact that it seems to be getting more use notwithstanding.

On Techcrunch, posts are always tweeted more than buzzed, liked, or dugg.

Specifically I like it because:


1. The user has just finished an action - that is, reading a story, and decided to share it - so the chance they will begin a new action is greater than if they were in the middle of reading that story and doing anything else.

Because they have the user's undivided attention here, the chance the user will execute the "conversion", which in this case is to follow the publisher from which this story came, is greater than average.  Another way to say this is if you consider this an "ad" to follow this publisher, I think there's a good chance it will get a click.

Most people think that internet ads are all pretty much the same, but the reality is that there is actually a huge difference in how an ad performs that is dependent on the intent of what the user is doing at that very moment.  Many display advertisers that put their medium rectangles in the middle of content don't actually expect you to click on that ad, but just see their brand and campaign while you are reading.   Search advertisers, on the other hand, know you are "ready to buy" and thus advertise accordingly on search result pages.

These are relevant and at an attention break, so I think they will work.  

2. This dialog is converting transient search users to followers, and a follower is worth more to the publisher (and Twitter) than a transient search user.

Why?  If a publisher is in the game of tracking their CPM for the ads on their page, a search user is registering 1 impression, while the chance that a follower will see more than 1 impression over time will be pretty great, because now this publisher is pushing many links per day at this user into their timeline.

In this case above, I had never really heard of Amp Magazine, but I found them via a Google Search, and seeing they have some pretty cool content chose to follow them.   Now I get a whole lot more content.

Applications that can take traffic from Google Search and turn it into something else, tend to do pretty well.   Look no further than Google AdSense for content as an example.

So where does this all go?

Well, if you view Twitter as both an underlying protocol and an application that will use that protocol that will help "level the playing field between creators and consumers of content" we can see the value Twitter thinks they get by easily providing a way for these publishers to reach these consumers.   The more of these creator/consumer relationships they create, the better.

I will also mention though, that although "you don't need to tweet to get value from Twitter"  - there are indeed a lot of people tweeting and it's important that they continue to do so, so that they can be in the very same environment as the content publishers, and the pure content consumers.  In fact, the "tweeters" are the ones that need to be the foundation of the content consumers.

This allows Twitter down the line to offer advertising in #NewTwitter (revenue share TBD) and also, perhaps more importantly, push their own search, and sell their own search advertising.   If you are converting search users to followers, and they are spending more time in the NewTwitter, then you begin to have a chance to compete for that small section of search traffic that is looking for what is happening now.

In the "economy of attention" - every little bit of time spent on the platform helps, and that's what this dialog does - gets consumers to incrementally spend more time on this platform, and less time in others - such as Facebook and any other future platforms that may start competing for user's attention.

Of course, this is all conjecture, but it's fun to get out the crystal ball and make predictions nonetheless.

Why Flipboard and Twitter for iPad are profoundly significant

I think Flipboard is absolutely fantastic. Every day when I pick up my iPad, it's continually the application I always look at first. Previously, and before the release of Flipboard, I wrote about how news on the iPad was innovating on presentation and Flipboard does this and more at a personalized level.

Yesterday, Twitter released the newest rev of their iOS client, Twitter for iPad, which also does a lot of innovative things, while still keeping the feel of a "traditional" Twitter client.  I doubt I'll be picking up my iPad much without spending a few minutes inside the app.

But Flipboard and Twitter have done something else more profound that may not be obvious to the average user:

1. The apps reinforce something that I've thought for a long time, that Twitter is really just a protocol; a 140 character packet with a payload.  It will eventually get pushed down the stack just like RSS has been, becoming the infrastructure that exists for publishers to connect with subscribers .
2. These apps highlight some of the differences between the Twitter/Social ecosystem and the RSS/feed reading ecosystem, the largest one being that in the RSS ecosystem, the publisher was king, but in the Twitter ecosystem, the user is king.  

Let me explain a little more what I mean by these statements.

To the large majority of Twitter's users, the platform is an ego based application that allows them to broadcast to the world what they are thinking right now.  The interact directly in the bounds of the medium which is a 140 character text message.  For a large number of users, they interact directly with this 140 character message at one level above the protocol level, that is, an application that reads and displays those 140 characters.

Now, this isn't that much difference than how RSS was traditionally used, except this 140 character limit doesn't exist in RSS.  You can put as much content as you want in an RSS message.  However,  users of RSS rarely interacted directly with the protocol at on the publishing side, though they certainly did on the subscriber side, that is an RSS reader that pretty much displayed the content of the RSS description field. On the publishing side, users usually use a blogging platform to create content, and this is reformatted as RSS usually through some type of software adaptor in the blogging platform.

Now, because of this 140 character limit in Twitter, developers quickly figured out how to encode the same types of content that they might have with a blogging platform, that is in a URL, and more specifically a shortened URL to allow for as much text metadata along with that message as possible.  This made it possible for "publishers" - those sites like New York Times and  mega-bloggers like Techcrunch to also distribute stories using Twitter, again, encoded in a shortened URL.

The Twitter web client, with encoded URLs

However, for users acting directly at the protocol level, this is a bit of messy experience.  You essentially have to leave the application by clicking on the embedded URL, and let your browser go somewhere else to decode the content of the message.  If I learned anything from working with millions of RSS users over the last few years:  they will leave their reading application if they have to, but they generally don't like to. 

Brizzly Twitter client, showing destination URLs

Brizzly, pictured above, was one of the first clients to start to "unpack" these shortened URLs and show the user where they might go by displaying destination URLs, and in cases of photos, even go fetch and embed those photos.  [disclosure: I am an investor in ThingLabs, which makes Brizzly]

Flipboard

Twitter for iPad

Flipboard and Twitter for iPad take this a bit further, by actually fetching and displaying the encoded content encoded in the shortened URL in the large majority of the cases.

Suddenly, as a user, you aren't interacting at the protocol level at all, but interacting with the content that the original publisher wanted you to interact with, all without leaving the application in which the user is consuming the content.  These applications, though the presentation is certainly prettier, are starting to have a lot in common with popular RSS readers, but are also doing a lot more just as a function of the application platforms that allow some richer experiences.

But there's something more profound going on here - and why the Twitter ecosystem is different from the RSS ecosystem is that we've seen a fundamental shift from the publisher being in control to the user and the delivery platform being in control.

In the RSS ecosystem, if a publisher wanted their content to be displayed in 140 character chunks (and many did and still do through partial feeds) that was the way it had to be displayed.  There were feed readers that tried to go fetch and essentially "unpack" this content, but when they did, publishers screamed bloody murder that these feed readers were "stealing" their content.   If a feed reader tried to monetize themselves without giving the publisher a cut, again, publishers generally tried to make sure these feed readers failed.   You wouldn't believe the number of publishers that constantly asked FeedBurner to provide a way for them to block their content from being delivered to specific feed readers, because they didn't like the way it displayed their content.  The publisher was king and the ecosystem generally listened.

In the Twitter ecosystem, this type of sentiment has never really been allowed to exist, possibly because usage reached the tipping point before publishers realized they absolutely had to distribute via Twitter to even continue to be viable.  Twitter is going to monetize the timeline, the publishers aren't going to share that revenue, and I don't think that is going to change.  Twitter apps and clients are going to monetize outside and around the timeline and I don't think that is going to change. Twitter is going to start encoding all your URLs so that they have the data on all your distribution, and I don't think that is going to change.  They'll be in the position to provide this data to publishers, but have no obligation to do so.  

Now, Twitter for iPad bringing in the entire page of publisher content, so the publisher is going to get ad impressions (see the ads in the FourFourTwo page above) in addition to distribution in that case.  Publishers are still getting the distribution they were hoping for, even if it is no longer a "click" back to their site from the timeline.

But for sure, Flipboard is not just displaying the content that exists in the the Twitter 140 character format, and is "scraping" the content and redisplaying it.  They're still showing the protocol level message, but then the content (though not always full) and the conversation around it.  I think publishers will see that applications like this are scraping their content and using it, but I don't think in this ecosystem there's a damn thing they can do about it.  Sure, they can stop publishing via Twitter.  Good luck with that.  

All the smart publishers will realize it's actually better for them to have more users engaging with their content, wherever it may be, than not engaging at all.

For the user, this is fantastic.  When you marry this with a similar view of content from Facebook, arbitrary feeds, and other aggregated content sources - it's exactly what I want as a user.  I can, for the most part, stay in my aggregator application and experience the real time stream in a way that totally makes sense.

If I've learned one thing from working at Google from combing through mounds of data that my job entails - when the user is king on a popular platform, the platform on which those users operate wins.  The scale of internet users is always greater than the number of publishers, so when you can start adding users at exponentially high numbers you can never extract the underlying platform, for myriad reasons too long to list here.

My prediction is that while Flipboard was certainly one of the first to take this step of scraping and stitching together content, they certainly will not be the last.  I think you are going to see a whole crop of innovative clients sprout up here that take advantage of what the Twitter (and other social media) ecosystem allows for.  It will reach a tipping point before the traditional publishers are able to object, even though I can tell you that from all the data I have seen in the last five years, they shouldn't.  More distribution means more net page views which means more revenue.

In fact, as I push the "Publish" button here in Blogger, this content is going to go within seconds to PubsubHubub to FeedBurner to FeedBurner Socialize to Twitter  (and Google Reader and thousands of other places) and then guess where - right back to the page on where this content is hosted.  It won't all come back here, but my analytics tools will show me that's okay, especially for a small fry publisher like myself.

News on the iPad: innovating on presentation

There's a great scene in Pulp Fiction that can only be found in the Director's Cut where Mia Wallace asks Vincent Vega if he is an Elvis man or a Beatles man.  I'm paraphrasing, but her point was that you can only be one or the other, really, and that one preference tells you a lot about a person.

I think the same is true for magazines and newspapers.   I have always loved magazines and hated newspapers.  Magazines are shiny and attractive to me, newspapers are dull and ugly.  And that effects how I enjoyed them.  As such, reading news in a newspaper has never been interesting to me.

I think that's why news on the iPad has me excited:  newspaper content is presented real time in the form of digital magazines.

As a function of my job, I spend a lot of time looking at content in various generic newsreaders, and I won't really touch too much on those here.  Because competition has mainly come from social media platforms, we haven't seen a lot of total innovation on presentation from these readers in some time.

That's why I find the newsreaders from the news agencies or media companies on the iPad interesting: they are creating newsreaders which are innovative in presentation, and in my opinion, very useful and engaging.   The clever and efficient use of image and video resources succeeds where previous attempts at general standardization have failed.  Certainly we've been able to mark up feed content like this for some time, but most news readers and feed processing platforms haven't been able to make smart decisions on what to do with such tags.

For instance, the BBC News reader is great, feels like a digital magazine to me, and draws you in first with a standard headline + picture.  The content itself has inline video that just works on the iPad platform, and it just seems really easy to browse the news and share it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the publishers which never had a printed newspaper are the ones that aren't encumbered by that format, and are the most innovative.  I've mentioned the BBC, but Thomson-Reuters has a great app as well.  In one view, you just start with pictures and jump to the content.

So how do the newspapers do in this endeavor?  Well, it certainly varies.  My favorite news app is probably the USATODAY app, which still looks like it's paper copy, but is a lot more interactive and, well useful.  I'd note that almost all of these things immediately ask for your permission to get your location and try to localize as much as they can.  USATODAY does this with it's weather, AP gets a bit more hyper-local with the news stories themselves.

The WSJ, well, looks like the WSJ - why they took this route, I am not sure since I think their original iPhone app was a bit more innovative in this regard.  I guess they are just hoping that the old men on the train who read the WSJ will see this iPad app as a straight replacement.  For their users, the snippet on the front page is part of their brand and I suppose they are staying with what works, but still, it doesn't seem to utilize the iPad platform at all.

Again, back to my original premise - I'm excited here because some of these news agencies are turning what was traditionally the fodder for boring newspaper presentation into the arguably sexier presentation of a magazine - so I really hope that this space continues to innovate along these lines.

Twitter traffic via FeedBurner Socialize now represents majority of time on this blog

Recently, over at Google we've done two interesting things that allow you to get a little more information out of referral traffic to your site. FeedBurner can now automatically tag your feed to make it compatible with Google Analytics, and we now also allow you to automatically distribute links to Twitter. The combination of these two services is even a little smarter than that, because when FeedBurner knows it's sending the feed out via Twitter, it marks it as such, so you can actually tell the difference between traffic that is organically distributed via Twitter versus traffic that originated from the feed.

In the case of this blog, and like most weight loss pitches, these results may not be typical - traffic originating from the feed and coming from Twitter seems to be of better "quality" than other traffic, as is now resulting in a majority of time spent by users on the site.  

From a standpoint of just comparing the medium from which this time on the site comes, Twitter is the clear leader. In this case, the difference between "Twitter" and "feed" is simply those clicks that came from the socialize service from the feed, and clicks from feed readers. The big caveat here though, is that I publish full content feeds, and most of those views happen in Google Reader, so there is little incentive from for the user to come here and spend time on this site.  As we've noted many many times before, users of Google Reader and other feed readers tend to be a separate audience that stays in their RSS reader when reading content.  Many won't even subscribe to partial feeds.  The combined aggregate view of time in Reader plus this site would be much more interesting and something we'll have to work on providing.

From a Source point of view, you can see that most of this time, including the traffic from Twitter originated from the FeedBurner feed.   Look at the big yellow PacMan in the picture below.

Breaking this down a little more, you can see even more that the Twitter traffic itself is divided between the twitter.com site  (Twitter) and other non-web Twitter clients ("not-set"), which I've confirmed via other analytics on this site are mostly iPhone and Android Twitter clients.  According to PercentMobile, about 7% of my traffic is mobile, and I think that's all referrals from Mobile Twitter applications such as TwitDroid, TweetDeck and Tweetie.

We're working on ways of being able to display this breakdown as well so it's not marked as "(not set)".

Finally, looking at both the Medium and Source together confirms that the majority of traffic on this site is coming from the Socialize service - that's the "twitter/feedburner" combo.

Again, these are just results for this particular site, and may or may not be meaningful for the larger ecosystem, but they definitely hint at some larger trends.  They are interesting nonetheless in showing that how that part of my audience interacts.  Clearly, Twitter users do click through on links and are somewhat more engaged than what is otherwise  "anonymous" traffic.  It's yet another audience that needs to be tracked and analyzed separately from search and other referrals, and separate again from those who consume content in feed readers.

I like that facebook is eliminating features

There are always reasons for changes like this that you don't see behind the scenes, but this letter from Mark Zuckerberg where he re-announces that they are adding more privacy controls at the post level and killing regional networks at least shows one thing: Facebook is being smart about killing things that don't work or won't scale.

I see too many products continue to support features that don't make sense just because they have millions of users, when in many cases the right thing to do is deprecate the feature as soon as you realize the feature is of little value to the long term strategy of the business.

This is always tough, because you have to balance between doing what a large number of users want versus executing on the goals of the business - and deprecating features are usually met with internal friction at companies where people have put a lot of time and effort into adding the feature to begin with. But Facebook has never been shy about making decisions like this and the moment we see them not deprecate features like this is the marker virus for the company getting too big.