Charging companies for Twitter - what could it involve?

You’re probably aware that Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders, told Marketing magazine on February 10th that:

“We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts”

How to decode this quote? It’s fairly vague, but I can think of a few possible charging models that Twitter might adopt. I’ve listed three of them here:

1) “Twitter tax”

Twitter will try to identify accounts that are run by companies rather than individuals. It will then attempt to extract money from the owners of these accounts. Failure to pay will result in closure of the account.

I don’t think this is very likely, however:

• Distinguishing companies from individuals would be extremely difficult. A lot of anger come from those who felt they’d been unfairly classified (e.g. if you’re a consultant and you discuss professional topics on Twitter, are you a “company”?)
• No value would be added for those who pay
• A lot of genuinely handy and non-revenue-generating information services would vanish from Twitter, diminishing the value of Twitter as an information utility
• This diminishing of Twitter’s usefulness would lead many people to desert the service.

2) “Singling out the marketers”

Like the first option, Twitter will identify accounts that are run by companies. However, it will draw a line between companies that use it for information services and those who use it as a sales channel. Companies who use it as a sales channel will be penalised while those who use it for information services will not.

This is a bit more viable than option 1:

• Distinguishing sales from servicing would be easier than distinguishing companies from individuals. Rules could be defined, e.g. if you are seen to link to product pages or talk about offers or sales then you’ll be penalised
• It would allow services that people find useful to continue – e.g. getting news updates from the BBC
• It would encourage companies to use the service in an “ethical” way while heavily penalising spammers
• As a result, there would be a lower risk of people leaving the service.

3) “The enhanced service”

Twitter will not try to distinguish companies from individuals. However, it will create an “enhanced” account which will provide additional features at a cost. Companies will be free to keep using the “basic” service if they want to.

This is the most likely option, I’d say:

• The challenge would be to come up with features that would make a paid account compelling
• These could include things like offering brand protection (the account is marked as ‘official’), ecommerce features (people being able to pay over Twitter), advanced analytics (see reports on your followers and their behaviour etc), tracking abilities (find out how many people clicked the link in the last message you sent, etc)…
• This would add value for people who chose to pay
• There would be no need on Twitter’s part to pay people to detect and penalise companies
• Things like news feeds and so on would continue to operate, meaning that the usefulness of Twitter wouldn’t be too diminished.

Most of the commentary I’ve read so far seems to assume that something akin to the first option, the “Twitter tax”, would be introduced. But Twitter surely realise that it would be costly to implement and would seriously impact their growth rate. An enhanced service for which companies or individuals could pay is far mroe likely.

In particular, keep an eye out for commerce features. Pay-by-Twitter might seem far-fetched at the moment but as the service becomes ever more pervasive a compelling user need for that service will begin to emerge.

Missing the point of social media

I’ve just been reading an article on Netimperative (What’s the future of search?) which features the following quote:

…if you find that very negative results at search engines show up following queries for your brand, products, services, you should evaluate if you’re doing enough PR in the social media space to counter it.

This statement suggests that if a company’s customers are unhappy with its products or services the best thing to do is to spend money on social media PR. But doesn’t this miss the point somewhat?

I’d suggest an alternative method for companies whose customers dislike their products and services: “improve your products and services”. If you do that, the conversations your customers have about you online will take a turn for the better.

That’s not to say that companies shouldn’t take part in these conversations. I just think that approaching social media as another PR channel is missing the point of that medium.

Another Twitter visualisation

I promise I’ll stop posting links to these one day. Anyway, this is from a series of Superbowl-related interactive visualisations produced by the New York Times:

Unlike the visualisation of #inauguration posts I linked to recently, this isn’t based on hash tags but instead uses moving tag clouds to illustrate the volume of Twitter posts on various subjects during the Super Bowl.

Examples include “Cardinals vs Steelers” (I know the Steelers are from Pittsburgh but from this animation I’d guess the Cardinals are from… Las Vegas? San Diego?), “talking about ads” (it’s vaguely depressing to see how much conversation the ads inspire) and player names (a guy called Fitzgerald obviously does something notable in the fourth quarter).

This is maybe the most effective use of Twitter data I’ve seen so far, as it is centred around a single event but tracks various subjects of conversation related to that event. A far simpler and less interesting animation would have simply flagged every post with the hash tag #superbowl.

Googlewatch - updated

Before Christmas I suggested that Google may have reached its apex during 2008, especially as it had, for the first time, allowed a dubious new feature - SearchWiki - to infiltrate the product that sits at its core - search.

And over the weekend, Google spent an hour saying that every site in its index was potentially harmful. This was the result of human error - namely, someone listing a harmful site with the URL “/” and this being treated as a wild card across the whole index.

I don’t really subscribe to the view that this was an apocalyptic error on Google’s part, but I do think that, like SearchWiki, it’s a small but significant example of the fallibility of Google search. And for a company with Google’s visibility, perceived fallibility can be every bit as harmful as actual fallibility.

Ergonomics for interaction designers

This series of articles from Rob Tannen at Designing for Humans discusses how a knowledge of ergonomics can be increasingly helpful to people working in interaction design.

Ergonomics considers the suitability of physically extant products to the human form in all its varieties. As a result it’s not historically been very relevant to interaction designers, who have worked in a more abstracted space than those who design chairs, computer mice, monitors and keyboards. But Rob Tannen argues that the advent of ubiquitous computing and the resulting diversity of form factors (netbooks, phones, touchscreens, kiosks, etc) require interaction designers to develop their understanding of this field.

The three-part series of articles makes for easy reading, an interesting and engaging introduction to the field. It’s also rich with links to more rigorous and in-depth materials for those who want to explore it further. If you want to be able to talk knowledgeably about anthropometrics, satisficing and the flaws of the Proctrustus approach, you’ll find Rob’s writings more than helpful.

Presidential inauguration - Twitter visualisation

This animated map from FlowingData shows the global location of each Twitter post tagged as #inauguration between Monday and Wednesday this week.

Although the world map isn’t shown, over time the US and the UK become almost perfectly defined by the density of Twitter post markers. You can also see outlines of south America and western Europe.

http://projects.flowingdata.com/inauguration/

The big flurry happens when the US wakes up on Tuesday morning…

links for 2008-12-31

• The Museum of Lost Interactions… About MoLI
  "Welcome to the museum of lost interaction; a timeline of innovation. Nine exhibits ranging from 1900 to 1979, comprising audio recording machines, wireless morse communicators, portable video to the precurser behind iTunes. The museum holds an inspirational array of invention, guaranteed never to have been found, documented or exhibited ever before…"
  (tags: design technology history museum)
• 10 Futuristic User Interfaces | Inspiration | Smashing Magazine
  "Good user interfaces are crucial for good user experience. It doesn’t matter how good a technology is — if we, designers, don’t manage to make user interface[s] as intuitive and attractive as possible, the technology will hardly reach a breakthrough…"
  (tags: webdesign ux)
• Evolution of game controllers « www.designblog.ch
  "This is a collection of small multiples of game controllers of the main gaming systems from the past 25 years, spanning from the Atari 2600 to the Nintendo Wii. The images have been normalized, and the hands are all approximately the same size as each other, and thus the controllers all to scale…"
  (tags: visualisation design graphics videogames)

2008 - the year Google jumped the shark?

As the year draws to an end and I retreat home to wrap presents and eat mince pies, I find myself wondering if 2008 will go down as the year in which Google’s fall from grace began.

Don’t get me wrong - there’s no way I’m forecasting doom for Google. It’s not Woolworths. But a large part of Google’s advantage in its decade of existence has stemmed from the unparalleled reputation it enjoys. Indeed, earlier this year it was named as the world’s most powerful brand for the second year running.

Why is its brand so strong? Google has always been a good example of a business that diversified without corrupting its core offering (in Google’s case, search). Yahoo! is a counter-example. As it acquired companies like eGroups and GeoCities, expanding its set of available services, it lost its central focus and gradually became bloated and flawed.

The increasing clutter of its homepage was a visual manifestation of this strategic drift. Google’s remained an appropriate distillation of its focus on search - even as it added mail, news, calendar, maps and other successful services.

Yahoo! and Google’s homepages from 1996 to 2005

But I think that this year might mark a turning point and that future historians might go as far as saying that Google jumped the shark in 2008, even though it saw off the laughable challenge from Cuil. Let’s look at some of the things that Google’s launched this year:

• Google SearchWiki - I’m listing this first because out of all Google’s product launches this has been the first to really impact its core offering, search. The idea is that users of the feature can manipulate and personalise their search results. Someone suggested to me that it heralded the end of natural search optimisation. My prediction? The feature will be gone within 12 months.
• Google Knol - Google’s “Wikipedia killer”. I don’t like basing conclusions on anecdotal evidence but, well… have you ever used it? The press hype around the Knol launch was driven more by negative attitudes to Wikipedia than positive ones towards this competitor. I don’t think Knol will be going away any time soon but I think it’s been something of a damp squib. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who uses it regularly.
• Google Chrome - Google’s “Firefox killer”. Like around 3% of the internet I installed and started using Chrome when it came out. However, I’m not among the 0.83% of the internet who are still using it. The only good thing about it is its start-up time. Apart from that I think Google should spend more time going after the likes of Apple and Microsoft rather than Wikipedia and Mozilla.
• Google Lively - Lively was full of fail. Launched in July as a competitor to Second Life, people who know about such things (e.g. not me) were immediately critical of Google Lively. Generous souls waited for subsequent releases to deliver improvements, but instead the service was officially killed in November 2008.

Oh yeah - there’s Jaiku as well, but I’m tired of writing bullet lists. It’s Christmas after all!

Google has a far from perfect track record when it comes to product launches and its policy has always been to develop experimental projects and see how they fare in the market. However I think 2008 has been different for two core reasons - one, that it has started to alter its core search offering (in the form of Search Wiki) and two, that many of these other launches do actually seem to be strategic as opposed to whimsical.

If it’s true that these releases have indeed been strategic, then the underlying strategy - whatever it is - is failing. Google is in danger of its brand being tarnished by failure. 2008 has been the year in which it’s become possible to at least envision a future Google that’s not a million miles from AOL or Yahoo!.

links for 2008-12-17

• xkcd - Flow Charts
  A guide to understanding flow charts, presented in flow chart form
  (tags: visualisation humour)

links for 2008-12-10

• "You wouldn't buy our shitty cars. So we'll be taking your money anyway"
  Satirical advert about the impending bailout of the three largest American automobile manufacturers
  (tags: images politics)
• The three laws of great graphs - Seth Godin
  I've got a big presentation coming up this Friday and am elbow-deep in Powerpoint. In this post Seth Godin proposes three rules for Powerpoint presentations - tell just one story, don't use bar charts and make use of motion.
  (tags: visualisation tips presentation)