I came across the following article just now, in which Twitter founder Biz Stone hinted at the company’s plans to generate some Benjamins in 2010 and beyond. Apparently they’re not in much of rush to do so.

Wired Article: Twitter To Make Money In 2010 With ‘Non-Traditional’ Ads: Biz Stone

Stone stressed the company mantra was that it was in no hurry to come up with a business plan, and needn’t be.

“There are no dates when we need to break even. We have plenty of money in the bank,”

Ok, I get this. You need a plan before you can go out and start generating revenue. But the general tone seems to indicate that while they’re doing all of this planning, the rest of the world is going to sit around and wait for them. I know that there aren’t that many direct competitors with the big T, especially those that have as deep pockets. I just don’t know if this seemingly laissez-faire attitude is the right way to go though. It doesn’t take long for the lions to realize there’s slow moving prey on the savannah.

Granted, Twitter’s recently acquired another 100 million dollars in funding without breaking a sweat. That beats my recent efforts by… about 100 million (you know, give or take). I’m definitely going to be keeping an eye open to see what their “non-traditional” advertising model is all about. Personally, I’d like to see something along the lines of flyers being dropped from giant neon zeppelins shaped like blue, fire-breathing Twitterbirds.

Just a few quick thoughts about URL shortening services, like the explosively popular Bit.ly, and it’s lesser known rivals Ow.ly, TinyURL and others.

They’ve become the standard mechanism by which people share links via microblogs like Twitter, and they’re even being adopted on forums, and other social networking sites.

As fantastic as they are for compressing unwieldy links that can end up being hundreds of characters of long (think driving directions from Google Maps), they can also be somewhat dangerous. See, I used to be (and still am) one of those people that would visually inspect a link and try to deduce whether or not I’d be clicking through to something interesting, or if I’d be greeted with flashing neon backgrounds and promises of “sexy singles in my area.” This is actually quite helpful in avoiding links that are most often, inadvertently sent through instant messages or email, by users that have fallen victim to a worm or a virus of some sort.

But with a nice, neat, short URL, there’s no way to tell the difference between the benign and malevolent. I realize that some of the bigger players are offering up ways to preview the contents of the URL beforehand (see TweetDeck’s preview URL function as an example of this.), but this does little to deter the average user from blindly clicking on a link from someone that’s considered a “trusted” source.

I see a lot of room here for 3rd party developers to hook into URL shorteners to expand preview functionality in order to minimize the clickthroughs for these virtual wolves in sheep’s clothing. Perhaps making more use of alt-tags to display long URLs, or color-coding the short URL in such case that it’s been reported as malicious/dead. Those of us in the digital space have spent years being indoctrinated against the use of “mystery meat” navigation. Links (image or otherwise) should be clear enough so as to eliminate, or at least minimize ambiguity for the user. URL shortening in its present incarnation just seems like a step away from that.

[I apologize to any Bjork fan who reads the title of this post and now has that song stuck in their heads. ]

It’s no secret that I’m fairly liberal when it comes to my views on online privacy, so long as a few important caveats are considered. Be conscious of what you post online and where you post it. Where possible, make sure that you have a copy of all information you post online. Resign yourself to the fact that once you post something online, it is PERMANENT, and chances are slim that it will ever really disappear. Falls into the realm of common sense when you think about it, but it’s usually the case that we start freaking out whenever we’ve posted something online and one of those tenets have been ignored.

This isn’t me by the way… I swear

So that being said, I was wondering, where do you draw the line, when it comes to protecting your privacy online? How far do you go to make sure that photo of you doing the Elaine Benes at last year’s office Xmas party doesn’t spread further than desired? Think about this. You’re at said party and you’ve had a drink or two, and you start to bust a move on the dance floor. There are a couple dozen people around, and there’s a good chance that most of them have a cellphone that can snap a sub-par image of you kickin’ those heels at awkward angles. There’s also a good chance that some of those cellphone shutterbugs have access to a Facebook/Twitter/Blog account of some sort. Further, with almost frightening ease, that same image can be online and available to hundreds of thousands of people before you’ve had a chance to stumble off the dance floor.

Realistically speaking, unless you’ve instilled the fear of God in all of those around you, there’s actually nothing you can do to prevent your submission to become the next iconic YouTube star. Now sure, should you become aware of embarrassing content, you can always go through the process of trying to have it removed from the internet. That’s always worked in the past, right?

This makes me think about the intense amount of effort that’s going into making behemoths like Google and Facebook try to conform to privacy legislation. Presumably the point of such legislation is to ensure that when you sign up for services provided by the Goog et al, that you are explicitly made aware of what information you’re providing and how it could be used in the future (which, as you’ll recall is related to one of the caveats that I listed above).

Even if this is accomplished, it does nothing significant to allay peoples’ actual fear of unwanted information being released/exposed to other people. The reason for this remains the same; people post information online without full realizing what they’re doing, for whatever reason. A recent by-product of this type of behaviour is the “Texts From Last Night” (TFLN) website (link), a site which allows anyone to submit text messages that they’ve received, to be broadcast to the world. Names and other personally identifying information are usually unattached, but it’s an example of how the onus should always be on the user to monitor and control the information that they make available to others, and to accept (or at the very least be aware of the consequences of doing so).

And yet, we still give our credit cards to complete strangers and watch them disappear from sight when we purchase things offline.

As I fell asleep last night, a thought began to coalesce which accurately summed up what I’ve learned so far from being on Twitter. About a half hour later I woke up in a daze and wrote down that thought, hoping to expand on it at some point today. Of course, when I looked at that note this morning it was apparent that my moment of clarity was anything but (hence the title of today’s post – 2 points to anyone who gets the reference):

Fortunately, with a little caffeine and some online radio tunes, I’m able to recover some of the highlights. The early-adopt / early-abandon method was definitely taken by a LOT of people, as evidenced by several accounts that only 1 or 2 posts in the first couple of days since joining. There’s a strong, active community of people (celebs and non-celebs alike) that post no less than a half a dozen random thoughts per day. And then there are some that post one or two well-crafted thoughts with attached links whenever the mood strikes. Of course, there’s a healthy number of hybrid Twitterers (Tweeters? – forgive me, I still haven’t really absorbed the clique-lingo) that fill out the scatterplot as well, of which I consider myself to be one of.

From what I gather, people haven’t come to a consensus about exactly WHAT Twitter is. To some it’s a blog, to others it’s a megaphone, and still yet to others it’s like some sort of lasso, used to corral the random thoughts of others for later processing. As I posted some time ago, it’s not unique, but I suppose all that matters is that it’s still standing.

Some other random highlights:

Brent Spiner – Still amusing, still weird, still strangely compelling to read.
Alan Cross – Yet another channel to follow one of radio’s most knowledgeable and entertaining personalities.
@EverySpam/PornBot that has ever added me to their list – Perpetual proof that there will always be a mechanism out there to add noise to balance out the signal.

I’ll keep this (kinda) short, because I expect that among the people reading this, there will be some who know me, and some who don’t. Of course, that expectation presupposes that a lot of you actually read this blog. Hah. We’ll see I guess. Oh, and for those of you that don’t know me, don’t get scared off by the title of this blog. I’m not trying to sell you anything.

I signed up for Twitter a few years ago when a friend (@joanna) introduced me to it. I hadn’t used it since. I’ve posted quite a bit about it in the past, but I’ve never actually used it.

As time went by, I heard about more and more people hopping on, but I never took to it. I just didn’t get it. In fact, I still don’t. As far as the communication angle is concerned, I’m already waist deep in instant messengers, websites, message boards, text messages and a cellphone. So why am I here/there then?

Well, I’ve noticed that like with many mechanisms of communication, people use Twitter in very different ways. Some people are letting the world know about their breakfasts, some are self-promoting, some are staying in relatively close circles of communication, and some people are actually engaging in conversations with, well, just about everyone. This is something I didn’t expect, and in retrospect it should have been obvious.

One look at the list of people that I’m following, and your next question is probably…”WTF?” Well, there’s no semblance of order there, really. In addition to the few people that I know, I just started going through the lists of people that were following others, and adding names that I recognized. I will admit that I was rather surprised when I was notified via email that “Richard Moll is following you on Twitter!” Now, this is likely due to the fact that some people return the favour of a follow-action in order to expand their own networks. But hey, I thought it was kinda neat regardless. Thanks Richard!

So I guess I’m here to [attempt to] join the conversation. I’ll be blogging (here) about some of the things that I really can’t cram into 140-characters, but I’ll also be in and amongst some of you, trying to be somewhat entertaining, but mainly trying to figure this whole Twitter thing out.

Cheers!

The first thought from many of you is going to be “Yup, he’s on the sauce again.”

10am Drambuies notwithstanding, hear me out on this. I was thinking about the way technology is moving forward and how we’re all collectively responding to our innate need to find stuff. The internet is built on a system of requests and responses. The very first “computerized” searches came in the form of relatively crude algorithms that were designed to brute force their way through reams of information to return the closest match to a given query. Present day search systems are much, MUCH more sophisticated. Predictive algorithms, organic search mechanisms, and multi-modal search engines (voice search for example) are just some of the ways that we’ve attempted to make “finding stuff” easier.

There’s just one problem. Finding stuff isn’t really easier because overall, people still don’t know how to search. Think about it. There’s still a massive disconnect between the way that the average person thinks, and the mindset that’s required to search for something “properly” online.

Take for example, a question that’s the de facto litmus test for a search scenario; “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” Now, if *I* were to start searching for the answer (and yes, I am somewhat snobbishly excluding myself from the general public in that I think differently when it comes to online searches), I would go to Google, make sure I’m cookied for Canada by signing into my Google account, and then I’d type something like the following into the query field:

The first result is a rather simple site, but it’s a list of lots of restaurants with links to their website. For a general query, it’s not that bad. However, if you type in a much more natural query like: “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” (still signed into my google account mind you), the results are markedly different. The first result is a Yahoo Answers page from Australia:

http://au.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071130191037AAZmpb2

Now, there are of course some very valid reasons for the differences between the two sets of results. My question is a qualitative one, for starters. By asking a natural question, I wasn’t explicitly asking for a list of restaurants. How would the system know which restaurant I “should” go to? It doesn’t necessarily know what I like (yet). The system also doesn’t really know where I am unless I tell it (either through the query itself or via GPS if I’m using a mobile to execute the search). There are in fact a lot of variables that make “natural search queries” quite difficult to handle by a system that doesn’t know who you are.

A ha. Therein lies the reason why the current method of search engine optimization (from the search engine’s perspective) is flawed. It starts off by assuming that the system is completely disconnected from the person asking the question. The goal is to provide enough information to this blind user in order to make the search result more relevant. Queue meta-tags, content strategies, and any other number of mechanisms to make this happen, and make “possibly relevant” results float to the top.

Well, why bother with that assumption in the first place? The only other activity that rivals searching online, is social networking. Ok, fine. It’s actually porn, but we’ll just assume that’s a given and continue on with the story. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone with access to the internet that didn’t have some kind of profile or identity online. Between Facebook, Twitter, … and all of those other communities, nearly everyone is linked to one of them. Everyone’s got some kind of profile online, and most of those will continue to evolve as they accumulate history. Now, before I go on I’d like to clarify that I know the reasons why profile-related search results are perceived as a scary concept to some. Regardless of the fact that many are quick to enable things like search histories and information-sharing between websites, there are some that focus on the potential dangers of doing so. There is merit to these concerns, but it also represents a whole other series of potential material to cover. So for now we’ll move forward.

Think about it like talking to your Doctor or your Lawyer, your Accountant or even your friends. All of these people could be considered systems which are profile-aware. They know you in some specific context and as a result, they can provide you with answers to pretty vague questions (“I’ve got like…a thing on my arm, and it hurts. What’s wrong?”). With the exception of your friends, they’re legally bound to keep your information private but if you think that they all adhere to those regulations 100% of the time, I’m sorry but you’re fooling yourself.

Now think about how this translates to an online search. All of a sudden, “Where should I go for dinner tonight?” doesn’t seem all that unreasonable, does it? If there is a shift in focus from making disconnected information “possibly relevant”, to making relevant information accessible, the way we all “find stuff” could drastically change in the next few years. All of the pieces are already there. The same sophisticated search mechanisms I mentioned above wouldn’t have to change at all. Social networking is already set up to gather information about us. The only bit that’s left to do is to connect the two properly.

Though, I guess the whole thing is really going to get weird when you start seeing stuff like this in response to a dinner selection query:

Thoughts?