May 26, 2009
The dirty secret of social media: quantity trumps quality
That's an understatement.
The one thing common to feedreaders, Twitter and Friendfeed: they order
articles by time, and so incent people to post often. Keep posting, and your
stuff is more likely to show up on people's screens. They become more likely
to click on it, retweet it, share it on google reader, like it on friendfeed.
It can't be complete junk, of course; if you spam people they'll unsubscribe.
But keep posting mediocre stuff and they won't.
In fact, people grow more tolerant of mediocrity in their feedreaders.
Subscriptions have a way of getting out of control. Past half a dozen sources
people lose track of what they're reading, and of who they've subscribed to.
You can slip lots of crap by their eyeballs before they take the time to
reorganize.
Some of your readers will give up on the medium for a time. They'll jump to
the next great thing, somewhere
along the facebook-twitter-friendfeed trajectory, and they'll find it works
so much better! They'll think it's because of some shiny new feature
in the new tool. They'll never realize it's just that they're subscribed to
less crap. So they'll start subscribing to crap again, and the cycle will
repeat.
A cynical strategy to game this world: write one smashing post every week or
two, use it to get new readers. Interleave the smashing posts with hundreds of
short, simple, unique pieces. They will keep you in the eyes of your
readers once they've subscribed.
Even if you aren't this cynical, these are powerful and subtle forces. Most
of us aren't pushing a brand or an agenda, and may not think we care much
about clicks and links and shares. But we respond to social feedback. If more
frequent posts yield more feedback, we post more frequently. It's easy to see
the benefits, harder to see the ill-effects.
And ill-effects there are. When our reading is sorted by time, nobody reads.
A conversational medium requires that its participants be good listeners. The
alternative is monologuing, the realm of exhibitionists, clueless
advertisers, and spam. When we're incented to post more frequently, the
world gradually degrades to an advertising free-for-all. A garbage-in
garbage-out world; fewer people saying interesting things; less diversity in
what we read and who we read.
By shirking our reading we're poisoning the well for ourselves.
Things must improve.
Improvements
It's amazing how settled time-order has been in Web 2.0. Twitter is entirely
realtime. Facebook has lots of filtering options; it's unclear who uses them.
Friendfeed's 'best of day' view is a big improvement, but it is hamstrung in
two ways. First, it isn't the default, so most people never see it. Second,
it changes slowly and you can't page past the first page, so there isn't as
much to read. If you read a lot of stuff you will find yourself returning to
the time-ordered view.
Friendfeed has a second mechanism to manage volume: it allows you to organize
your subscriptions into 'lists'. Google Reader's folders are analogous.
Folders help manage the volume/value tradeoff; make sure you read the low
volume feeds, then dip your toes into the torrent to taste. They're still a
static organization, though. Removing a feed from a folder isn't easy to do
while reading, so we put it off, and our folders pile up cruft (if we ever
bother cleaning them up).
The cynical blogger gaming the system to stay in his reader's feedreaders
need change nothing when feedreaders get folders. For the reader, removing a
feed from a folder is as static and as hard as unsubscribing.
The good news is that things are easy to improve. When I built my own feedreader, it was amazing how quickly I
preferred it to Google reader. A simple policy of fairness—I never show
two stories from the same source—sufficed to compensate for nifty UI
features, search, and social recommendations. One can do much more.
Update May 19: Gabor Cselle's built an iPhone
app with a prioritized order for email! Leaving time order behind is not
just for web 2.0 social tools.
Update Jun 6: Fred Wilson's comment points out several twitter apps
to sort by popularity.
Thanks to Jonathan
Nelson, Simha
Sethumadhavan, Adrian Perez, and
Shawn O'Connor for reading drafts of this.
comments
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May 24, 2009
The future of RSS: smart search engines
Over at Mashable, Ben
Parr wonders, "What is the future of RSS? Is social media a better
alternative?" I believe the world is groping towards a better solution than
either.
In two years I have switched several times between feedreaders like Google
Reader and social news sites like Reddit, Twitter and Friendfeed. Feedreaders
amplify the volume of my reading. Social news helps me find the highest
quality stories. The tension between quality and quantity keeps me switching.
With growing volumes of news in an increasingly-online world, feed readers
and social news are each incomplete.
But I am an extreme case; most people read far less. Do power users matter?
They can help highlight a trend. Every reader online wants relevant news;
some just go to greater lengths than others. Perhaps the migrations of power
users between feedreaders and social news sites can teach us how to serve all
readers.
Feedreaders assume you want to read everything by everyone you subscribe to,
and nothing by anyone else. Subscribe to too many, and those assumptions
start to break down. Chronological ordering starts to suck. Frequent writers
drown out the rest, regardless of who you care about. Sifting through the
noise becomes a challenge.
The popularity of social news is largely explained by this challenge. 10% of
the users on a social news site vote on stories, and only 1% comment. The
rest of us are all using social news purely to find interesting stories, often
because the feedreader didn't work out.
But using a social news site has its own drawbacks. You can't find as many
stories. Stay at the front page or in a small community, and filtering works.
Lower down the list, quality drops. A larger community provides faster
turnover, but it's also susceptible to lowest-common-denominator effects -
think pictures of lolcats or youtube videos.
Even when filtering works, you only find stories your friends find
interesting. Over time, you start to ignore interests that don't overlap with
your network. You risk spending time reading low-quality comments or flame
wars. Echo chamber effects suppress dissenting voices, though those are often
the most interesting.
In a healthy community people do their reading in private, and come together
to discuss what they read.
If neither works, where does that leave us? Competing incomplete interfaces
create false dichotomies. Asking readers to provide favorite sources is a
good start, and so is voting on stories for your friends. Accepting
recommendations from friends is a part of the puzzle, but a small part, lest
you risk endlessly regurgitating each other's recommendations. There's no
reason these signals can't be combined.
The essential property of both feedreaders and social news sites: they
aggregate content from many sources before presenting it to the
reader. We need a better aggregator, a feedreader that can handle firehoses.
One that can rank stories smarter than just chronologically or
alphabetically, perhaps even adapt to our changing interests.
What would such an aggregator look like? It would have scale, to discover
feeds quickly, and to crawl all the feeds out there. It would have smarts, to
connect you up with only the stories you find interesting, and to prioritize
them. These are big changes; the new tool looks nothing like its forebears.
What it resembles most is a search engine. It crawls and indexes everything
it can find. Rather than responding to queries, it knows you and your tastes
and alerts you to interesting pages. It can be consumed in multiple layouts
wherever you go - facebook, twitter, your feedreader.
This is our vision at MeeHive.
(Thanks to Tracy Lou and Jonathan Nelson for reading drafts of
this.)
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May 23, 2009
Realism in simulation
"The goal of simulation is not to simulate reality as closely as possible.
With an accurate model you cannot find commonalities."
— Tom Slee
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May 18, 2009
Start a startup, become a low-income household
“You look at assets and liability to judge the strength of established
companies, but when you have a startup, you look at cash flow. Low-income
families are the same way. When we talk about poor people living on a dollar
a day, you don't get a dollar every day. It is a lump sum, and it is very
irregular. The poorest households can recall their cash flows a month
ago.”
— Daryl Collins
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May 17, 2009
“The general sequence of friction-reducing inventions is thought to have been
runners, rollers, rollers held in place by guides, rollers held in place by
guides and thickened on the ends to make them roll straighter, the wheel and
axle. The wheel appears to have been first used in
Sumer
around 3500 BC, whence it spread across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. This
orderly diffusion pattern makes it conceivable that all the wheels in use
today are directly descended from the invention of a single gifted
individual."
—
Cecil Adams
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Apr 23, 2009
Newspapers and personalization
Bruce Kasanoff thinks personalization could save newspapers, and here's how: Generate custom
front pages for each user. Avoid echo chamberi effects by providing alternate views. To make money,
don't advertise. Instead, generate targeted leads for the most influential of your readers. Above
all, focus on making your readers smarter. Remember information for them, not just about them.
Personalization holds promise for newspapers, and also feedreaders, online aggregators, and social
news sites. Get it right and you can win the attention of lots of readers. It's a traumatic change
for newspapers to attempt, though. People change; tuning for individual users implies adaptation
and learning. Newspapers would require ongoing manual attention, expensive and culture-altering
manual attention. Attention to take away from journalism and content-generation.
There may be an alternative. Personalization is important if you face customers, but perhaps
newspapers needn't face customers. The alternative is a division of labor (and revenues) between
writers and publishers. Let newspapers focus on original research and writing, and take a share of
ad revenues from the aggregators that send them traffic.
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Apr 22, 2009
Oswald Garrison Villard in 1918: Few industries maintain so many unprofitable enterprises as
newspapers. A newspaper owner gets a place at every table, access to all the top politicians' ears,
and the power to impose his worldview on his readers—or, at least, the illusion of such influence.
Clay Shirky: Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. And journalism has
always been subsidized.
Jack Shafer: What's gotten many newspapers in trouble today is poorly timed acquisitions. At the
height of the bubble, no price was too high if a newspaper claimed to be the dominant daily in a
market. Newspaper owners who overburdened themselves with debt are more vulnerable than the
medium itself. Most struggling newspapers will survive at lower but handsome profit margins.
via
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Apr 10, 2009
Three books
Here are three books with the same fundamental substance:
Vedanta,
7 habits,
Flow.
But there's huge variation in the form. Vedanta, written in antiquity,
states the truth baldly in dictums. 7 habits, from the late 80s, avoids
putting the reader off by phrasing its dictums as choices. Flow
synthesizes cognitive research to describe how the changes we make within
ourselves lead to external improvements. That's an appealing formulation to me
after 20 years of the self-help cliches spawned by 7 habits.
These books exemplify a trend: knowledge gets progressively more accessible,
not just by ubiquity
but by the form in which it's consumed. When knowledge was scarce readers were supplicants,
happy to take it in any form. Now it is abundant, writing is a buyer's market
with greater emphasis on form. The filters readers create—against the
preachy, against cliches—coevolve
with the gimmicks of sellers and the skill of writers.
Credit: conversations with dad
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Apr 9, 2009
“Children even as young as three and four years old often know that stealing is wrong, even without
being explicitly told by adults. They don't need us to define the goal. That's easy. The problem
is actually
living by those values day to day. We need to help them develop a deep, abiding
commitment to these values, a commitment that can override other needs and goals. The hard part
isn't moral literacy; it's moral motivation."
—
Richard Weissbourd
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Mar 31, 2009
“GM might be the latest casualty of the distorted incentives created by our employer-based health
care system. The whole idea of Social Security is that people do an inadequate job of saving when
left to their own devices. But companies, even companies as big and proud as General Motors, are
overly concerned with the present as well."
—
Nate Silver on the limitations of corporations
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