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Pornstars, was just a naughty reference – it actually meant that people should be able to play with their identities and take a persona whatever they want to.

Google+ is backtracking from Real Names and Brands also allowed.

Sometimes I might not be really funny, but can be right. But most importantly is it a challenge to Facebook ? Not yet, but keep watching. Anyways, Facebook is not what it used to be.

Poynter explains this change, exactly what I was discussing in my blog post:

With this change, Twitter also moves from being a passive conduit for messages toward actively curating Web content based on tweets. Many third-party services already attempt to analyze Twitter data to find trending news stories, but this is the first time Twitter is doing so itself.

Twitter is simultaneously testing a similar “top people” results section that shows a popular Twitter user matching some search results. This may largely serve celebrities, but journalists may also benefit if, for example, a Twitter search for “Kristof” highlights Nicholas Kristof’s profile and makes it easier for people to follow.

It’s not surprising, twitter always had this data with them and it makes perfect sense for them to feature these results in front of the users. The interesting thing to note would be “when would twitter build channels or streams of such curated topics or categories”.

Can twitter provide better real-time search results than search engines ?. May be not in the volume, but in quality may be yes.

What is the impact on content and publishers ? If this new feature is adopted really well by the users and according to my assumptions if it is standardized as permanent curated topics and channels. It makes situation more worse for the publishers.

• The life of an aggregator will become more difficult as twitter is the new aggregator
• The original content publisher with breaking news and immediate viral effect might get exponentially rewarded from what they are receiving at present.
• OR not on the merit of content but just by the benefit of twitter integration and early adoption, even syndicated content users or sheer lucky publishers might receive handsome rewards.
• The expertise formation or the new qualifier for top expert around particular topic can be this new feature. Again, good in some cases but over a period of time top doesn’t necessarily denote what’s fresh, current and original.

Such curation might sound very open, fair and publisher agnostic and twitte has proven that in terms of breaking stories or ad-hoc unique content purely emerging out of twitter but my worry is that – in the long term for established or general topics dues network by pure sense of the science behind the social networks aligns itself and shows polarity towards the handful few.

The topics which are popular and much in use from a long time, in that particular pool of content there will always be a particular set of publisher and users (re-tweeters) who would exist and form a dominance. The more they stay the more difficult it becomes for a new entrant (publishers / users ) to change that power equation.

The most positive impact is on the ad-hoc and fresh topics those will be formed on the internet and spread via twitter. The second most impactful change would be “how facebook reacts to this change”. It too, shows the spread of the share on what’s popular within users own network.

Although, facebook is not much search oriented right now and the popularity is through spread of content amongst strong-ties (friends and family). It is moving towards subscribers module and again logically the next step which follows “top topics” in your network and if they do it smartly – the definition of network can encompass not just the friends and friends-of-friends but the information that you provide in your profile – city and country.

Thank God ! Facebook, Google Reader & Gmail got G+d.Finally I can spend some quality time with my friends and family now – send them a sms or a tweet, build tumblr with my daughter or say hi to my friends on messenger. I love you all. If you really want to save your friends from spam, copy and paste this quote on your wall. There are only handful friends left on your fb, rest are brands, lists and subscriptions

Why Google reader, why ? I was completely faithful to you for last 4-5 years or so. I used to praise your beauty like anything and facility of the scanability of 1000+ daily feeds. You were essential to me in my ny resolution along with my weight loss plan. Remember, I used to tag you, label you, subscribe some, unsuubscribe some. We had so much good time together – those serendipitous late night readings with you. Twitter, I still hate you but can’t live without you now. #life of an infovore.

But I am not the only one. This is what Ex-Google Reader PM says “Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision?”

In the name of visual consistency, Google has updated the visual style to match Gmail, Calendar and Docs. I have nothing against visual consistency (and in fact, this something that Google should be doing), but it’s as if whoever made the update did so without ever actually using the product to, you know, read something.

When you log into Reader, what the hell do you think your primary objective is? Did you answer “stare at a giant header bar with no real estate saved for actual reading”? Congrats, here’s your prize:

Read more on his blog.

My biggest complain about this change is (or may be I need to get used to it ), earlier it was so easy to scan, read and act upon numerous feeds. And yet it was very soft on eyes. It doesn’t feel like that any more. Somehow my belief is that when there’s too much information, the design has to be as low-key and low-fi as possible. It should be present without declaring itself and making it presence felt.

Why Quora, Twitter and Facebook have a particular inclination in design aspects. Points to think about.

Secondly they need brands and pornstars. Yeah! Pornstars. When you see pornstars following you – that’s ‘the real social network’ success criteria. Google + in future or for any other social network to be successful needs brands and / or pornstars.

The above scenario is distinct for the users wall. At publisher side – the standard ‘like’ button can be changed to ‘Recommend’ or be used with ‘Share’ instead.

As a content sharing platform, may be facebook needs to find out more appropriate way of depicting the emotional aspect of actions. ‘Unlike’ is also not an option because its not neutral. ‘Recommend’ might look okay at the publisher’s side but would you recommend a post containing the personal tragedy of a friend ? Not likely.

Or is is that ‘Like’ has already become an emotionally detached action.

Like is not the like it used to be.

In my view, they won’t… or more appropriately… they shouldn’t. In past, the crowd-sourced examples of curation or filteration have not worked for long. Due to the inherent architecture of the user generated content, of all the users on the network… very few share and most of the people,  just consume. So if I am right, at one point in time, the home page of Digg was controlled by very small subset of the users which of course didn’t represent whole universe. The same centralized filtering structure was adopted by Flickr, Delicious, Digg and others. They all faded primarily due to this centralized, managed by few – index of popular category of content channels.

When there are 1000s of new curation, filtering and sorting apps for facebook and twitter and they seemed be mostly adding the UX layer on top of backend data collected from users own connection on these platform – why doesn’t it make sense for facebook and twitter to come up with their content curation channels. Why they don’t show- What’s hot in news, sports, entertainment and lifestyle from facebook and twitter.

Twitter already provides a little bit of this through trending topics and knows twitter users by their category – then why not curated channels. Twitter  has the direct connection with the content, access to t.co and bit.ly analytics and much more powerful collection of the data. The same is true with facebook – it knows the content format, knows the individual domains from the publishers and already has the facebook (data) insights.

They might have plans to do it in the future. But if the actually do it, will it solve the problem or add to the chaos. Here’s why…

Digg tried to become a go to site for the fresh and the interesting. Directly competing with portals and news providers – made very few publishers happy. It became a game and competition rather – if you are on the home page it’s great otherwise you recieve almost zero. There was no metadata or communication or thought captured besides the action ‘Digg’. Twitter RT are slightly different, limited by 140 characters but Re-tweet accomodate or may pass a comment besides a simple +1 vote. Facebook adds layers through share, recommend and like variations and capacity to accomodate comments along with it.

The beauty and appeal to the publisher is the popularity qualifier is not ‘featuring of content on yet another property – highly controlled by few users’ but rather ripples of viral effect spreadable through their existing audiences who are most likely to exist on these platform and getting popular with small incremental exposure through users own six-degrees of seperation.

So basically, ‘I wish this could feature on the Digg home page today’ to the effect of ‘total number of impressions on publisher network & click throughs of likes and tweets’ and then the spread on social networks with the same logic – ‘further impressions based on users network and further click throughs obtained in multiple small ponds of closed groups’.

The publisher might not get ‘you have been digged or slashdotted effect’ but receives a steady stream of traffic through facebook and twitter engagements and derives seasonal spikes in good times. I am not sure if some publisher really enjoyed this kind regular and some default-nature traffic from centralized sharing networks like digg and others.

For facebook and twitter knowing this information but not sharing with public is actually good and favourable.

• It doesn’t generate the competition within publishers to aim for some coveted top slots. It’s not ‘works or doesn’t work’ kind of situation. They always find that content works and can work better with their continued engagement and efforts. Just like SEO.
• If facebook and twitter are becoming the de-facto platform – why would they break their relationship with application providers – news readers, social media management tools and such. These application providers add UX layers, provide continual access to evolving devices and access points, solve business case or use case scenarios – which might not be of their existing product development priorities. If they concentrate on doing all the things themselves – they would have multiple points of failures.
• The ambiguity of multiple closed content channels and networks is much more promising than creating master channels. The users blinded by what’s surfacing on top – try to act upon their liking or aligning themselves with their network likings works much for benefit for publishers and these networks. This way users create their own personal home page (profile) – replicating their individual digg home page and the comments and action received is that user’s gratification first and the publishers traffic next.
• An openly exposed curated channel (by machine or humans) would give the same product a different twist. Suddenly the user might not feel important or altogether out of place or slight frustrated that his/her content didn’t claim the top slot. After all, we all run our own content channels on twitter and facebook. The other way to look at it is – a set of users by the sheer design of the feature or sheer coincidence of social network alignment – may form dominance and defeat the purpose of entire curation. Curation on a daily basis on the merit of content is highly unlikely romantic wish-list of a product manager – the community will always act towards making it a standard sample of small set of aligned users. The digg home page effect so to speak.
• This also makes publishers unhappy. They now have to wait for blockbuster events on these social networks rather than regular audience continuously acting upon their content and bringing the steady state traffic.
• Curation and channels cannot also be explained in standard format. The events like ‘occupy wall street’ – where should they feature ?. Is it important to slot them into general categories like news and politics or they merit a hashtag of their own to be directly exposed to the network. Or simply spread on it’s merit via non-categorized or keyword tagged taxonomy agnostic facebook.
• This can also be explained via ‘The Long Tail Effect’ theory – the unlimited long tail permutation and combinations of users networks and their individual curation or filtering networks are much more precious than top blockbuster content featured on home pages of Digg and Google News.

Due to the above, it might be unlikely that twitter and facebook will come up with their own curated content channels or if they come up… what problems they need to solve. Actually I am getting worried with the un-necessary killer talks centered around Google+, and facebook with the new list feature and with change of content display logic – it suddenly looks more generalistic and not a space of personal raves and ransts. If people have just started ‘more’ likes and shares on facebook – that might be temporarily good for the publishers in terms of traffic spikes but in the long run looses users personal touch and opinions from closed networks.

People spending more time is good but people spending more time due to more content and more processing of information is not.

Haven’t you noticed that you are suddenly seeing more funny pictures and videos on facebook ? . Would you prefer being a friend or a subscription ?. News from people or yet another replacement for news feeds with faces. Twitter is already that, isn’t it.

What Is Kauhuna? (Fatboy Slims’s Smell The Kauna Mix) and R.D. Burman’s – Dhanno Ki Ankhon Mein.