Its been interesting to read reactions around the blogosphere on facebook’s announcement of their adding usernames and the inevitable land grab that will begin tomorrow night when the system goes live.

Chris Messina thinks its all about facebook trying to own your digital identity, and he has an interesting post along those lines over on his blog.

Anil Dash has a comic take on things. His timeline of events stemming from the facbook identity launch ends in OCtober of 2010 when AOL decides to add a usernames project to their AIM and Bebo 18-month roadmap.

My take is a little different:

It’s about getting you PUBLIC:

My personal take after having spent the last year working on a communications product is that the username announcement is really less about owning your identity and much more about finding a way to get your facebook status updates public in order to compete with twitter.

Twitter is public by default and that is what makes it such a powerful system. There are no barriers to information moving from one user to another. If anyone in the system has anything important to say (like for example if you happened to see a terrorist in a hotel in mumbai, then that information spreads throughout the system in no time.

That is what makes twitter such a powerful system for transmitting news and information and it’s what has set off so much discussion about the real-time web.

The problem for facebook at the moment is that a very strong expectation has been set that information posted there is only available to your friends, and not to anyone in the public.  Facebook first added public posts back in March, and then opened them up for celebs and public profiles last month. By most accounts the response was muted at best and posting frequency has declines in places where posts are public.  This must be scary for facebook.

By making a big announcement about a new public facing feature and forcing user’s attention over to what their public facing page should be is a great way of shifting expectations slightly towards accepting a public stream of information from you coming out of facebook.

I would bet that within a few weeks of the push, you will be able to publish status items to your public page and within a month or two updates will be public by default.

As I am spending more time inside of twitter it’s become clearer and clearer to me that the “retweet” (RT) is by far the most powerful gesture in the twitter universe.  So powerful that I think it’s likely to replace newspapers.

It is the simple pointing of your finger towards an idea and saying that is interesting.  Any one or two people pointing to an idea means nothing, but if there are ideas that are powerful enough to get hundreds or thousands of people pointing at them, then they must be interesting.

I think that twitter is now processing information much like a giant brain, with each person acting as a single neuron. If you follow that metaphor, then re-tweeting is the equivalent of a neuron firing.

This is essentially the original crowdsourcing insight behind so many companies, most notably digg.  In the twitter universe its much more pure.  It can be done from anywhere anytime.  Ideas themselves are often very easy to put into 140 characters or less, and if they take somewhat more than 140 characters, it’s easy to reduce them into something that is just a few characters long and then include a link back to the longer bit.   But even the links can be nearly 140 characters, which is why we need URL shortening services so that the URLS themselves take up as little room in the message as possible.   That is why we now have a variety of newly URL shortening services fighting to the the URL shortening service of choice for the twitter world.  tinyUrl and Bit.Ly and is.gd might have a very interesting role to play in the twitter ecosystem.

And if you look at the streams of popular URLs that are being shared on twitter at the moment, you will see that they do indeed feel a little bit like a people magazine cover.   One with a decidedly geeky twist, but still…

At the moment, the top five is as follows:

1. http://bit.ly/uVKNA (3,026) 10 Most Extraordinary Twitter Updates
2. http://bit.ly/QfMeA (2,134) First 100 Days | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
3. http://bit.ly/5hnAd (2,761) Homeless To Phase Out Dimes By 2011 | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source
4. http://bit.ly/7pNe (2,083) Church puts Passion of Christ on Twitter — newsday.com
5. http://bit.ly/HFJyd (1,904) The New Bebo: 50 Percent Growth in One Month

There are two from the onion (each shared more than 2,000 times in the last hour, and then some geeky news stories including one about twitter itself.   (If you find this interesting, you can get a list of these stories sent your mobile device as they happen.  How?  By following BitLyNow on twitter of course).

There are even services now organizing the popularly shared URLS by category and updating them every 5 minutes.  Have a look over here at Tweetmeme for example which is doing a very nice job in that department.

Perhaps the most interesting thing though is that often you don’t even need a link to convey a big idea.  In fact, that top URL being shared this hour (3026 re-tweets according to BitLy).  Shows a list of the ten most extraordinary tweets that by themselves contained important information.  Examples include news of water on mars, the recent crash of Continental airlines 737 in devner, the breaking news of the earthquake in china, and the mumbai terrorist attacks.  The list goes on.  In these cases, you have both the speed of entry and the power of the re-tweet to focus in on the important content.

So to rephrase all that, twitter (or some other system that contains streams of short updates) will completely replace breaking news coverage because it is both faster to get word of new events, and more transparent in the way it amplifies important messages.   It will also partially replace the more thoughtful editorial journalism by sussing out the best content from millions of writers through simple re-tweeting and the wisdom of crowds and then presenting it in real-time steams.  Crazy, right?

And of course this now goes without saying, but…


if you found this interesting, please share (or re-tweet) it!

The data is now starting to trickle in.  Here, is a recent Neilson study, for example, that shows that email is starting to slip behind social networks in terms of “active reach”.  Here’s the key exhibit:

I can’t say I’m terribly surprised.  The sad fact of the matter is that the companies that lead the market in consumer email (Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Google in that order) simply can not evolve their products in the ways that the need to evolve in order to address the needs of today’s users.

It would be too upsetting to the existing users to have the products change as drastically as they need to if they want to remain relevant in this new world.   The new Yahoo Mail Beta and the Gmail labs efforts are marginal adjustments that amount to little more than window dressing on an experience that is still 40 years old at it’s core.

As I’ve said before, the future of email is way better email.

Given the recent twirtermania sweeping the nation, I couldn’t help but take A close at the transmission mechanisms built into facebook, MySpace, twitter and some other new communications systems.  The whole process has been very interesting and it has really illustrated to me just how big and profound twitter is as a system for collecting, processing and transmitting information.

One thing that has really stuck with me is the follower/following model that twitter users to distribute information.  I’m struck by how similar that mechanism is to a neuron, and because anyone can follow anyone else the entire twitterverse is in the process of wiring itself up like a big brain.

With Neurons, you have incoming signals travel in through the dendrites.  In twitter, this corresponds to incoming messages coming in from the people you are following.  In the brain, if enough of the incoming neurons “fire”, then the receiving neuron will also fire, transmitting a pulse down to the neurons to which it is connected to.  In twitter, this essentially means that if enough of the people that you are following are tweeting about an idea, then eventually you will start tweeting about it to and the people who follow you will catch word of it and they too may pass it on.

This is how information moves through a brain.  It’s also how information moves through twitter.  It’s why information on the Mumbai terrorist attacks spread around the world in just a few minutes after people started twittering about them.  In fact the “RT” convention for retweeting is precisely this sort of derivative firing.

Just to keep the metaphor going, I think its interesting that some of the most influential twitterers are acting like a sort of sensory organ, constantly scanning the horizon and tweeting away all of the new things they see.  Their followers sort the wheat from the chaffe.   Its not unlike the eyes simply passing along the fact that something looking like a bus is moving quickly towards you.  It’s up to the cerebral cortex to do something about it.

I think Tim o’Reilly (with 100k followers) and Dave Morin (with 150k) are great examples of this.  I wonder if the optic nerve has more neural connections than other parts of the brain?  Anyone?

The O’Reilly people have been putting on a series of conferences and newsletters that go by the name “Graphing Social Patterns” (GSP). When I first heard that there was going to be a “Graphic Social Patterns” conference, I was excited to learn more. I love data visualization, and the idea of seeing some of the patterns emerging from the social media explosion sounded really interesting. Turns out that the conferences have exactly nothing to do with actually graphing social patterns. The series should really be called “Building Facebook Applications”, as you can see from the schedule of the last show. I think that O’Reilly is probably making more money on facebook applications than any single application developer.

The people who are REALLY exploring social patterns are over here at Orgnet. Valdis Krebs is the founder and lead researcher. They have a series of interesting case studies posted on the site, which are definitely worth a look. My favorite is this one, which shows an average online community in a picture and also explains why the different kinds of users look different when it comes to connectedness.

Orgnet suggests that the contributions break down like this:

1. Blue dots on the outside are lurkers. Not contributing any meaningful content and not connected. They are 60% of the average community
2. Green dots are transitional guys not yet truly engaged – 20%
3. The red core are the guys making the whole community happen -20%.

My experience as the general manager of epinons.com and as a board member at thisnext.com tells me that the average online social community is even more concentrated than the 20% number than Orgnet identifies. I think the bulk of the community content and engagement comes from less than 5% of the users, and lurkers are more like 75%.

I just saw the VideoEgg press release that they paid out more than $1.5MM in the first 5 months of the eggnetwork, their facebook video ad network. Mashable doesn’t think that $1.5 million over five months amounts to much, particularly since VideoEgg is working with some of the biggest Apps out there including Flixter, Vampires, and Scrabulous. That may be true, but there is some interesting discussion below the post. The most interesting tidbit is from someone who claims to be Troy Young from VideoEgg who says:

The offering continues to grow and receive great response for the ad community. We are running at about $1 million a month which is pretty good for a product that is just a few months old.

I think $1M a month is pretty good, particularly since that is just the portion they are paying out. That probably means they are doing something like $1.2 or $1.3 even on Facebook alone.

But then I took a look at the actual Ads and I must say I am a little confused. Unlike Sony’s clever sponsorship of the vampires app, the stuff I am seeing on the Egg Network isn’t really targeted to the application, it has no social elements to it at all, and it looks like it’s just one of many players trying to monetize these Apps. I took a look at the http headers and there are a ton of companies serving ads inside of scrabulous including the EggNetwork, SocialMedia, Advertising.com and Google to name a few.

Here is a Screenshot of a Microsoft EggNetwork ad running on Scrabulous.

Hit refresh and the ads get a little bit more spammy. Here are some google diet ads on the next page load.

And then even more spammy with a ringtone ad pretending to be a facebook button:

I’d love to know where the real money is coming from for scrabulous.

Helping big brands find their way through the online advertising thicket is one of the biggest revenue opportunities for almost any kind of online media property outside of search.

Every brand is a snowflake.  Each one is unique and has distinct needs and a precious soul that the brand guys call the “brand essence”.   While they all want to connect with their consumers online,  they want to do it in a way that supports the “essence” of the brand.  At the very least, they don’t want to anything that might jeopardize the brand equity that they have spent decades building.   That leads them to try to control almost everything about how and where their brand is presented, and who can blame them.

The problem is that its a wild and woolly world  out there on the world wide web.   Youtube is almost all user generated video.  Myspace and Facebook are full of crazy kids writing on each others walls and god knows what lurks out there in the blogosphere.  Thats scary stuff if you are used to spending 98% of your brand budget offline where you can do stuff like sponsor a PBS series.

So it is nice to read that Sony spent some brand money to great effect on facebook through RockYou.  It was a promotion for their new vampire movie, 30 days of night.  They did it by sponsoring the existing “vampires” application that has more than 3 million installs on facebook.   The price wasn’t disclosed, but it looks like they got millions of impressions and tens of thousands of sweepstakes entries.

Good for Sony, good for RockYou and good for Facebook.   It’s a step in the right direction.  An eensy weensy minuscule little step in the right direction.