Another under-reported fact, however, is that lists are also Tags. They are a great way for Twitter to learn how Twitter users are perceived and grouped (As a side note, they are also great for people to see how other people perceive them – one of my favorite lists in which I am listed: @chadcat/unreasonably-talented haha).

One could easily see an algorithm that can determine accurate APML data about each user not just by looking at their Tweet history, but by also checking their Bios and the Tweet History/Bios of the people they are listed with. The list name itself, in fact, is a very concentrated form of topic/tag data.

Do lists double as Twitter’s user tagging feature?

Who will be the first to ship an automated user discovery directory based on analyzing the relationship between users who are on the same lists?

I hope MrTweet is already working on this!

Twitter’s number one asset is its control and allocation of namespaces. Those little things we call ‘Usernames’. @chrissaad is not just my Twitter Name, it is a short form addressable identity that concretely links to my Twitter inbox any time someone uses it in a Tweet.

Addressable, convenient namespaces that can be used in a sentence like this are so interesting and important that facebook went to great lengths to copy them. Nothing on the open web has yet come close to this simplicity and effectiveness. Which is not to say there won’t be an alternative soon.

The important fact with Twitter usernames, though, is that they are unique. There is a finite and shared ’space’ in which ‘names’ can be allocated.

The result is that early adopters end up with all the best names and squatters rush to lock up all the best phrases. Late comers to the system end up with names like chris2423.

Twitter Lists, however, are different. They include the list creator’s username. For example my JS-Kit list is “@ChrisSaad/jskit“.

As you can see, the list ‘JSKIT’ is attached to my username. This means means that each user has their own namespace.

This result: There can’t be a landrush for List names because the list naming convention sits on top of the username. It also means that no one can own a definitive list on a subject because each list is subjective.

This is an important design decision for Twitter. One that has both pros and cons for the community. Overall, however, I think the decision was a correct one. Lists can rise and fall organically (or at least based on the influence and popularity of their creators) without the pain and pressure (for Twitter) of maintaining yet another shared namespace.

Twitter’s username namespace, however, is just rife with and waiting for all sorts of headaches. I don’t envy their position and I can’t wait for an open alternative.

They are called Stalqer and, as Techcrunch writes, they are basically Foursquare on steroids.

I think that’s a pretty good description. The fact is, however, the most impressive thing about Stalqer is not what it does but how it does it. Rather than approaching acquisition and retention of users like any typical app , it uses data portability, viral loops and network effects to on-board and engage users on an ongoing basis.

Not enough app developers consider this when engineering their user experiences and the result is usually a big ‘Techcrunch’ launch and a big flame out as users flock for a 5 minute road test and never return.

Mick (CEO of Stalqer) and his team, however, have almost turned virality and network effects it into a science.

Here are some of the highlights of their product decisions.

1. Instead of building yet another registration and friending system, they simply import your Facebook Friends.
2. Instead of being content to be confined by Facebook’s data licensing limitations, they merge and mingle FB data with other data sources (in this case, your phone’s address book!) to access email addresses and phone numbers.
3. Instead of assuming that their app lives in a vacuum, they are using other data sources (Facebook, Phone Book and eventually others) to aggregate location data and make a best guess at friend locations even if they aren’t using the app.
4. Instead of being limited by their active user base, they encourage existing users to manipulate and optimize profiles of non-users – the effect being that even if you don’t use Stalqer, chances are one of your friends is doing the work of checking you in. Don’t like where they put you – then sign up and get back control!
5. Instead of letting the multitasking limitations of the iPhone limit their background tracking capabilities, they innovated their way out of the problem using amazing email tricks.

The list of innovations goes on and on.

The Stalqer team have done an amazing job of baking in the right workflows to ensure maximum adoption and engagement based on their primary use case (discovering people around you) without resorting to raw gaming tricks like points and badges.

I can’t wait to see how the app performs and what they do next!

As a side note, I too have been experimenting with non-obvious network effects in my day-job. More on that later…

When I first moved out to Silicon Valley (starting with a short trip in 2006) I already knew (by reputation) many of the names and personalities that made up the ecosystem. I read them on blogs, listened to them on podcasts and generally admired their work and learned from their ideas.

Once coming out here, I got to know many of them personally. Some let me down, others surprised me with their generosity and still others became wonderful friends.

I’d like to highlight just a couple of those today because they’ve been on my mind.

Jeremiah Owyang (and his new partners Deb Schultz & Charlene Li) has/have always struck me as one of the hardest working and smartest people in the valley.

Most recently I’ve had the pleasure to get to know Jeremiah on a personal level but had never actually worked with him 1:1 on anything serious before.

That changed last week when we sat down for a real ‘business meeting’. He blew my mind. That doesn’t happen often. His blog posts only show a fraction of the mans thinking. Not only does he think 5 steps ahead, he manages to find a way to package it on his blog in a way that even laymen can understand.

I am so happy for his collaboration at Altimeter. Jeremiah, Debs and Charlene are the nicest people and are all wicked smart.

Those that have been around me in the last 12 months have probably heard me talk about the need for an Altimeter group style firm and I’m glad that they are the ones to pull it off. They’ve done it with grace, style and stunning execution.

Can’t wait to see what they do next.

Stephanie Agresta is another of the people that I got to know as a friend once moving out here. For some reason and on some level we connected as kindred spirits who love to smile.

I’ve always felt like she had an undeserved level of faith and affection for me – but I accepted it gladly because it meant she wanted to hang out!

She too has recently made a move that not only befits her stature as a connector and thinker, but also rewards her kind spirit and positive attitude.

She gave me her new card at her birthday the other day – it says EVP of Social Media, Global – Porter Novelli (or something like that hah). EVP, Global, Porter Novelli. Are you serious!?

This is such wonderful news for our community because it means that someone who not only gets it, but loves it and is one of us, is in a position to help the brands we all know and love.

These are just two of my friends who have gotten what they deserve lately – in the best meaning of the phrase possible.

Congratulations peeps.

If I can help any of you reading this to achieve your goals, please let me know. This whole ecosystem, worldwide, is built on pay-it-forward. And I have a lot to pay forward.

Here’s the first 5 things that came to mind.

1. Conversation is not a buzzword
   They call it a ‘conversation’ – the meaning is literal - not figurative. Someone speaks, you listen, and you respond appropriately. You try to add value to the dialogue not shout your message. The most common mistakes people make in social media are the same mistakes they make at a dinner party. They don’t listen. They don’t add value. They don’t have something interesting to say. They are not authentic. They are not humble. They don’t listen and learn because they are too busy talking.
2. Have something worth saying and say it with Authenticity.
   Talking about your product only gets you so far. You need a point of view. What is the underlying philosophy that makes you wake up in the morning? What drives you? Why do you make the decisions you make? They want to know how the sausage is made just as much as they want to have a BBQ with it.
3. Build something worth talking about and get out of the way
   The best thing you can say is nothing at all. Instead ship something worth talking about and have others do the talking for you. That means you need to listen to what your customers want, build something they will love and facilitate their interaction between each other. Do not fear negative feedback – you can not control your message or your brand – you can only discover, engage and learn. If and when you do, you will turn critics into brand/product evangelists.
4. Don’t build a social network
   “Having a social networking strategy for marketing is like having a muscle strategy for smiling” - Tony Hsieh, Zappos. You don’t need to build a social network to have a social media strategy. In fact that’s a bad move. The conversation is already happening on existing social tools – you just need to search for it and jump in (carefully).
5. Time and ROI
   If you don’t think you have the time or can’t work out the ROI then you don’t understand business. Business is about people. It’s about relationships. It’s about creating value for others. Social Media is not something your marketing department should do. It’s something your whole company should do. Just like they all answer the phone and send email, they also need to exist in the global conversation about your products and services. Get involved. Find the time. The return on your investment will be nothing short of staying relevant as the world changes around you.

What are your top 5 Social Media Marketing ‘tips’?

You see, a couple of months ago there seemed to be an awakening that blogs are the first, best social networking platforms. This realization seemed to be driven by many converging factors including…

1. Twitter Inc decisions that have not reflected the will of the community – particularly changing the @ behavior, changing their API without informing developers, making opaque decisions with their Suggested User List and limiting access to their Firehose.
2. Facebook’s continued resistance to true DataPortability
3. The emergence of tools and technologies that turn blogs into real-time, first class citizens of the social web. Tools like Lijit, PubSubHubBub and of course Echo.
4. A broader understanding that blogs are a self-owned, personalized, tool agnostic way to participate in the open social web.
5. FriendFeed selling out to Facebook
6. A flurry of great posts on the subject
7. The broader themes of the Synaptic Web

Instead though, it now seems that many bloggers are holding on desperately to the notion that FriendFeed may survive or that Facebook may get better. They continue to pour their content, conversation and influence into a platform that does not hold their brand, their ads or their control. We all seem desperate to see what next move these closed platforms make.

I have news for you – FriendFeed is dead. The team has moved on to work with the core Facebook team.

At best, FriendFeed will go the way of Del.icio.us and Flickr – stable but not innovating. At worst, it will go the way of Jaiku or even Dodgeball.

It’s time we start re-investing in our own, open social platforms. Blogs. Blogs are our profile pages – social nodes – on the open, distributed social web.

Blogs missing a feature you like from FriendFeed? Build a plugin. There’s nothing Facebook or FriendFeed does that a blog can’t do with enough imagination.

Our job now, as early adopters and social media addicts, should be to build the tools and technologies to educate the mainstream that blogs and blogging can be just as easy, lightweight, social and exciting as Facebook. Even more so.

All that’s need is a change in perspective and slight tweaks around the edges.

Blogs are back.

Who’s with me?

I couldn’t agree more. It looks like his sentiment is starting to propagate.

When I say Blogs are Back I mean that the balance between other forms of social media (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed etc) are now finding their rightful balance with the first and foremost social platform, Blogging.

This is not to suggest that other forms of interaction are going away, only that there is a natural equilibrium to be struck.

There are a number of factors that are helping this trend along.

They include:

1. Twitter Inc decisions that have not reflected the will of the community – particularly changing the @ behavior, changing their API without informing developers, making opaque decisions with their Suggested User List and limiting access to their Firehose.
2. Facebook’s continued resistance to true DataPortability
3. The emergence of tools and technologies that turn blogs into real-time, first class citizens of the social web. Tools like Lijit, PubSubHubBub and of course Echo.
4. A realization that blogs are a self-owned, personalized, tool agnostic way to participate in the open social web.
5. The broader themes of the Synaptic Web

I also discussed this with Dave Winer, Doc Searls and Marshall Kirkpatrick the other day on the BadHairDay podcast.

You can also see previous references to this in my ‘What is Echo‘ post. I’ve also posted a more detailed account of how Echo fits into this notion on the JS-Kit blog.

Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have also posted on this. I also registered ‘BlogsAreBack.com’ (what should I do with it?).

I look forward to see what this new trend brings!

On Friday the 10th of July, 2009, the JS-Kit team launched Echo. Here’s the video. It is the clearest example yet of the potential of the JS-Kit team that I spoke about back in my Who is JS-Kit post.

I wanted to take this opportunity to explain what Echo means to me personally. But first, I’d like to make something very clear. Although much of this will be about my personal opinions, feelings and philosophies on Echo and the trends and tribulations that bore it,  Echo is the result of the hard work and collaboration of a stellar team of first grade entrepreneurs that I have the pleasure of working with every day (and night).

From Khris Loux our fearless and philosophical CEO who lead the charge, to Lev Walkin our CTO who seems to know no boundaries when it comes to writing software, to Philippe Cailloux, the man who turns our raving ADD rants into actionable mingle tickets, to our developers who worked tirelessly to turn napkin sketches into reality. We all scrubbed every pixel and will continue to be at the front lines with our customers. This is the team that made it happen.

For me, Echo is the next major milestone on a journey that only properly got underway in November 2006 when I visited Silicon Valley for the first time.

I was at the Web 2.2 meetup. It was set up by one of my now friends Chris Heuer. There was a group discussion about social networking and how we, as individuals, might communicate in ways that were independent of the tools that facilitated such communication.

I was sitting in the back of the room in awe of the intellect and scope of the conversation. Could you imagine it, for the first time in a long time I (a kid from Brisbane Australia) was in a room full of people who were just as passionate about this technology thing as me – and they were actually at the center of the ecosystem that could make a real impact on the outcome of these technologies.

I shyly put my hand up at the back of the room and squeaked out (I’m paraphrasing and cleaning up for eloquence here – I’m sure I sounded far less intelligent at the time).

“Aah… excuse me… aren’t blogs the ultimate tool agnostic social networking platforms?”

What I meant was that blogs use the web as the platform. They produce RSS. They have audiences. They illicit reactions. They create social conversations over large distances. They essentially create one giant implicit social network.

I got some “oh yeah he might be right” reactions and the conversation moved swiftly along to other things.

For me, a light turned on. One I’ve been chasing ever since in various forms and to varying degrees of success (or failure as the case may be). For me, Faraday Media, APML, DataPortability and now JS-Kit have all been an exploration on how to create a tool-agnostic, internet scale social network that has notification, filtering, interoperability and community at its heart.

As I said at the start of this post, Echo is the next step along that journey. For me, Echo represents an opportunity to making Blogging not only ‘cool’ again, but to make it a first class citizen on the web-wide social network. To make all sites part of that network.

Much has been made of its real-time nature. Even more about its ability to aggregate the fragmented internet conversation back to the source. These are both critical aspects of the product. They are the most obvious and impactful changes we made. But there is much more to Echo than meets the eye. Much more in the product today and much more we hope to still add.

Our choice of comment form layout. The use of the words ‘From’ and ‘To’. The language of ‘I am… my Facebook profile’. The choice to treat the comment form as just another app (as shown by the use of the ‘Via Comments’ tag) and more. The choice to merge the various channels into a unified stream (comments+off-site gestures). These were all deliberate and painstaking choices that the team made together.

Echo is based on a theory we call the ‘Synaptic Web‘. This is the frame of reference from which all our product decisions will be made. It is an open straw man that I hope will eventually be just as exciting as any given product launch. It states in explicit terms the trends and opportunities that many of us are seeing and is designed to help foster a conversation around those observations.

In the coming hours and weeks I’m also going to record video screen casts of the specific product decisions that have already made it into Echo – hopefully these will further illustrate how each pixel brings about a subtle but important change to the space.

In the mean time, I’d like to reiterate how humbled I am by the reaction to the product and how excited I am to be working with the JS-Kit team in this space at this time in the Internet’s history.

I look forward to hearing from each of you about your thoughts and feelings on our direction, and shaping our road map directly from your feedback.

I’ve been mildly successful at it. Observe a pattern here, define a trend there. It’s all been quite fun and fascinating.

What I’ve fallen behind on, however, is understanding individuals. Understanding details.

In one on one interactions from the professional to the romantic there is a clear gap in my understanding that I’ve started, in the last 6 months, to try to rectify.

Some people I’ve encountered have suggested it’s a game. Some of those are referring to an implicit thing that all people play with each other – most without even noticing. Some are actually talking about a real, concrete game that they study and learn.

I’ve struggled with this. While I am perfectly happy to play a game with a crowd, observe trends and try to shape or leverage them, I find myself vacillating between exhaustion and guilt at even the prospect of playing individual people like a game.

I feel exhaustion at the realization that I’m just no good at this, and I have a long way to go to learn and become natural at it. Somewhere along the line I seem to have miss-learned some signals and the prospect of unlearning and re-learning new things is daunting for me right now. It’s clear though that, from the reactions I sometimes get, and the suggestions I’m afforded, there’s something I’m actively doing wrong.

I also feel exhausted because it seems like much of these games, explicit or otherwise, involve a whole host of preamble and pretense that adds such complexity and conscious effort to a conversation.

I feel guilt because I like to think of myself as honest and genuine. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. Or at least that’s what I intend to strive for. Often the advice I get feels at best petty or at most manipulative.

I’m probably wrong about all of this though. Maybe the real answer is that people just need simple things from each other. They need a framework for discussion. They need to feel wanted. They need to feel acknowledged and accepted. They are also attracted to those who are interesting and exciting and communicating that (through words and actions) is usually done in a very particular way. A way that is either instinctual (for most) or learned (for people like me).

I’m not sure yet exactly how microcosms fit into this, but I think they do. I believe a great deal in the truth of microcosms. For me they suggest that the way you behave in the smallest incident reveals how you think and behave in all incidents – large or small.

Do you let people out of a car park before you drive by them? Then you will always let people in front of you in lines, in conversation, in thoughts and feelings.

Do you have a clean house but a messy basement? Then you are probably more interested in your outward appearance than your internal mental health.

These are observations that might be useful and prove predictive, I think, but I don’t make them in day-to-day interactions. Once again I am oblivious.

So for now, I continue to listen and learn and take from these lessons the parts that I can map to my own personality without corrupting my core.

Right now I feel like I am failing at these life lessons – I have so long to go. I’m not even clear on the path right now. But as usual, writing a blog post about it makes me feel better and helps to parse out some of my thoughts.

How do you feel about ‘the game’? Is it a natural talent or a learned skill? Is it ordinary human behavior – are we all playing games or is it manipulative and deceitful? Is it both? Perhaps it’s advantageous to abandon the game and find others like you who have abandoned it too? Is abandonment giving up on the path of least resistance or is standing up for some moral standard? Is the perception that it’s immoral itself a misconception?

As you can see – too many questions yet to answer…

It feels wonderful.

The iPhone interface feels authentic, polished, robust and reactive in a way that few other software interfaces do. Many Apple interfaces do in fact.

I started thinking about other examples of this and I’ve come to realize that todays users seem to be rewarding feeling over function in their software. Google, FriendFeed, iPhone OS, MacOS, BaseCamp, Omnifocus, Flickr. These are all applications that feel good.

In many cases, they are far less functional than their counterparts, but that doesn’t seem to matter.

I also recently came across the Facebook Design Team’s Facebook Group.

This is from their group description:

We love clean and simple. We are passionate about enabling the user to connect and share what they want, fast. We design for users of all ages and demographics. We don’t believe in reading a manual to understand how something works. We care about details down to the pixel. We are a small team of 20, and we design the homepage, profile, chat, inbox, platform, and every part of the Facebook experience.

I especially like this sentence:

We care about details down to the pixel.

I don’t think anyone was under any illusion that Facebook did not care about pixels. Their interface is so clean and consistent that they have actually killed category of personal branding – self expression through design.

I was recently lobbying for something to be simpler to use. At the end of my description of how it might work, I was told that I contradicted myself, because the implementation I described was more complex.

The reality is that simple, intuitive and good feeling design is not about a simpler implementation – it’s actually about a more complex implementation. It’s usually an implementation that takes more thought, more time, more pixel pushing and ultimately more business logic for the developers.

Apple didn’t need to make their home screen bounce when you tried to push pass the end. But they did. It makes it feel great. I sit there playing with that little bouncy effect all the time (yes I do have a life). It took more time, more complexity and more work. But that’s not the point – the end result felt and behaved like a real-world object. It feels nicer and is ultimately a more intuitive way to signal the end of the list than ignoring the user input or jarring the user with some brute force notice.

Pixels matter. Animation Matters. Layers of additional business logic that try to consolidate and simplify the user experience matter. More than most engineers and product managers know.

Product managers need to give engineers the time to polish the pixels. They need to consider that getting a product ‘feature complete’ does not mean it is ‘user complete’. Engineers should also lobby for product managers to give them the time needed. When they are writing code and presenting things to the screen they also need to take the initiative to consider the pixels because the pixels matter.

As a product guy I’ve been guilty of pushing for feature complete instead of user complete. And I am going to try to find the patience and the process to change that.

Engineering is not just about building something that works – it’s about building things that belong in people’s lives. Things that people want to use not because they have to, but because it makes them feel good.