EightBlack.

I saw a useful application of Twitter yesterday during the very first session of Web 2.0 Expo.

Rob Hayes and Jeff Clavier, 2 well regarded Venture Capitalists, ran a rather lengthy (3hr) workshop on Financing and Growing Your Web 2.0 Start-Up.

For the very first session out of the gate, the attendance was impressive (easily 300+ people).

To promote questions, Jeff and Rob had set up their own Twitter account and anyone in the audience who wanted to ask a question, simply sent them a “tweet”. They had one of their laptops plugged into the projectors and the entire group could see the questions come up in real time. Which was actually quite cool. And more importantly, useful. Because you could ensure that the same questions weren’t asked twice.

I have an admission to make though. I probably arrived 10 minutes into the session and missed the whole “just send us a “tweet”" thing. By the end of the session, I still for the life of me, couldn’t figure out how to send a question. Sure, I know how to “follow” someone on Twitter but the whole “messaging” between each other still has me stumped.

Maybe its the jetlag. Or the bottle of wine we drank the night before.

Maybe Twitter isn’t designed for people over 40. Maybe it’s just me.

Never mind. Most of the audience got it. And it was probably the best use application of technology, that was 100% spot on, for the time and place.

Ok, so call me old fashioned. Or technically challenged. My 7 year old son would agree on both counts.

One of the things I’m going to make a concerted effort to explore and understand at Web 2.0 is Twitter. No doubt, they’ll have plasma screens plastered all over the joint, showing “live” Twitter conversations.

And until last week, I was sort of trying to ignore it. Along with a hundred other things. Then I got this email from Dave Taylor, one smart dude and one of the founders of the highly successful Blogworld Expo event.

Anyway, much clearer now. Thanks Dave.

I’ve re-printed his email below. See if it makes sense to you…

The world of blogging proceeds apace, and there are even new
Fortune 500 corporations jumping into the blogging space in these first few
months of 2008, which either means that it’s a great validation of the
marketplace or a proof that things are getting a bit musty and unexciting.
Or maybe both.

Truth be told, some of the old guard in the blogosphere are finding that
it’s harder to stay focused on creating so-called long-tail content because
they’re being sidetracked by new microblogging systems out there, most
notably Twitter.

Blogging started out as personal diaries, and even now when I speak with
different organizations about blogging, someone invariably says “isn’t that
just personal diaries and stuff?” It’s not. Just for the record, blogs are
tools and more sites than you realize are now using a blog backend to manage
the publication of their information and pages.

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to go back in time a decade and be one of the
very first bloggers out there? Unfortunately, I can’t turn back the dial on
your clock, but in a very similar way, Twitter is at its early stage and
jumping aboard now can reap rather surprising benefits.

The big difference is that Twitter is like blogging one sentence at a time.

No worries about being too long-winded but rather the challenge of conveying
interesting and fun concepts, engaging ideas in less than 140 characters.
Ten to fifty times a day. Or more!

Most people are using Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/ - to send out daily
updates on their personal life (remember, I told you it was like the early
days of blogging) but some of us are figuring out that it has far greater
potential to communicate with a core audience of engaged followers, of
people who pay attention to you and who want to know what you’re doing and
what’s new with your business.

My Twitter account is http://Twitter.com/DaveTaylor and if you look at my
page, you’ll see I have over 700 people who pay attention to what I’m
sending out. That means that when I write a blog post now, I promptly
twitter about the new page and instantly see dozens to hundreds of thought
and opinion leaders hop over to my blog and read it, add comments, and often
blog about my postings on their own weblogs.

Let me say that again: when I publish blog entries, I update the hundreds of
followers I have on Twitter and *instantly* see a spike in traffic.

There’s so much more to Twitter, which I’ll talk about in the next issue of
Blogsmart News, but for now, sign up and start following people who are in
your marketspace and start sending out short updates of your own to
demonstrate you’re an engaging member of your community!

See ya online. Both on Twitter and my blogs, of course!

Dave Taylor
——————————————————————–
Intuitive Systems: Online Strategies and Communications
——————————————————————–
Innovative Business Thinking @ http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

ps: Want to connect with me on a social network? Here’s how:

Facebook: http://profile.to/d1taylor
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/DaveTaylor
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/d1taylor
Digg: http://digg.com/users/d1taylor
Twitter: http://Twitter.com/DaveTaylor

Something happened over this past weekend that caused the hair on the back of my neck to stand up and simultaneously, the blood drain from my face. I’ll tell you “why” in a minute. But first some background.

Some inventive 16 year old unwashed youth, who lives Melbourne’s outer suburbs - decided to have a party. No big deal. It is but the stuff that pubescent dreams are made of. Beer. Girls. More beer. A lot of swearing. And a lot of running around after girls, wondering why they won’t talk while being grunted at.

Mum and Dad were conveniently interstate. Which is sort of really where it all went pear shaped. Any parent, who leaves a 16 year old boy with access to the internet and his mobile phone and then says in the most sternest of voices on the way out “Now, listen, your father and I love you very much and we trust you”, is a complete moron. Saying, “Do not have a party and no more than 2-3 friends over to visit, okay?” is like asking Britney Spears not to do anything stupid when she leaves the house.

Or something as equally pathetic.

However this was no ordinary party. My take on it was that it was decided at the last minute. And all done with a few strokes of a keypad.

You’ve got to give the 16 year old some credit. Because he managed to get 500 of his closest “friends” to come over.

Naturally, 500 teenagers, all battling puberty (lets face it, they have no clue as to what’s happening inside their body and some are just grateful for the ride), and all together in the one place, is a recipe for disaster. In this case, a teenage “Tsunami”.

And now the police are all up in arms because a couple of their cars got all beat up, the airwing had to be called, the dog squad, and a lot of other teams with long, politically correct names - all arrived to dispel the mistaken youths exuberance.

Our beloved Police Commissioner, who is connected to todays youth in much the same way as George Bush is connected to the english language, has launched a full scale investigation into how this could happen. The silly cow even wants to send the bill for the damage to the parents. In fact, the headline in todays paper read,

POLICE are investigating how social networking websites, email and SMS messaging may have been used to draw a crowd of up to 500 teenagers to a house party, hosted by a 16-year-old boy while his parents were interstate.

How it happened? You’re not serious.

It’s sort of why they call it social networking isn’t it. And you can bet Optus and the other carriers in Australia were laughing all the way to the bank as their SMS meters ran like they were powered by Uranium. The “Twitter” server in Australia would have been lit up like a Xmas tree on Saturday night…

But I digress.

The police are fools. What they should have done is when they first arrived on the scene, is to grab a couple of these pimple faced twats, given them a damn good thrashing, tied them to the bonnet of the police car and paraded them around the streets saying that there would be plenty more of where this came from if they all didn’t pull up their pants from around their knees and go home.

Or something like that.

And don’t lie to me - I know you’re all nodding your heads in agreement, even if in this politically correct world, you won’t admit it.

It was scary for me because I have a 7 year old and 4 year old. The 7 year old son is the easy one. But the daughter is the worry. This is the sort of stunt that she would pull. But she would invite 500 people round for the “before” party. Just to give her old man the shits.

Which is why we’re moving back to the US when the kids are teenagers. Because in the US, houses have things called basements. And basements have poles in them where fathers can handcuff their teenage daughters to for several years. And when they are 32, then, they can go and have a party. All 3 of them.

It’s hard for a teenage daughter to get pregnant on their first date when they’re having to talk thru one way bullet proof glass to their date…

Wish me luck. My wife reckons that I’ll be happy living on my own in a one bedroom apartment, sleeping on the floor…

I get Mahalo. (I think).

I get Facebook. MySpace. And any other “social networking” site out there.

I get Google Apps. I get Android. I get Ning.

In fact, I get (but perhaps don’t agree with) most “Web 2.0″ properties. I get why Google is prepared to spend a Saudi King’s ransom on wireless spectrum.

But here’s what I don’t get.

Twitter and Second Life.

Let’s take one at a time.

Let’s talk about Twitter. Now I know it’s caused a stir in the digital world and has become something of a darling within the social networking hemisphere with countless imitators popping up everywhere but I just, for the life of me, can’t get my head around it.

Maybe I’m too old. Maybe 41 is the wrong age in this industry.

Anyway.

Twitter refers to itself as a “micro-blogging” site where, by using what is essentially a text based interface capped at 140 characters, you tell people what you are doing every waking minute of the day. You can do it via the web. Via your mobile. Anywhere you are connected.

Here’s what my Twitter account looks like.

You could probably assume a couple of things looking at this.

One is that I’m a Twitter loser and don’t have many friends. In which case, you’d be right. The other is that my friends on Twitter are losers and need to get a life. Which is probably also true.

I get the whole communicating via SMS thing. Three years ago, we built an SMS gateway for a telco client. It’s still in use today and they have, quite honestly spent a small fortune on this, for which I am eternally grateful. And there is no better way, in this day and age to communicate with a large group of people instantly than SMS. Forget email. Forget calling. SMS wins hands down. Everytime.

What I just don’t get is rattling on about what I’m doing every bloomin’ minute of the goddam day. I mean, my own family don’t care what I do, so why would my friends?

Take for instance the writing of this blog post. I’m sitting in a trendy pub, glass of wine in hand, listening to the thing called “life” going on around me, while connected to the internet, writing this. Now some would argue, you ARE a loser, sitting on your own in a pub, the week before Xmas, looking into the screen of you MacBook.

Perhaps.

But the last thing I want to do is tell my virtual Web 2.0 friends what I’m doing. Hell, I’m grateful for the peace and quiet. No email. Can’t hear the damn phone over the desperate “touch rugby” wankers trying to pick up drunk women. Just peace and quiet in a sort of noisy Thursday night, Prahran pub type of way.

Those Melbournians who read this will understand. Those of you who are in the US, will just have to imagine your favourite bar, with the Cornhuskers playing Texas A&M the on the big screen. Same women. Same drunk “touch rugby” wankers or their equivalent.

Or something like that.

Look, if I have a screw loose, then email me and tell me. No doubt, my 7 year old son gets Twitter. But I don’t. So there.

Right then. Let’s move on to Second Life.

Look, all I’ll say is that I have enough trouble coping with my first life than to worry about a second one. This is one gig I clearly don’t understand. Maybe don’t even want to.

You go into the site, take on the persona of someone else, interract with other people who do the same and use the word “avatar” a lot. Whatever the hell that means. If you ask me, it reminds me of marriage. Ok, that’s a bit cyncial. And I hope my wife doesn’t read this. Strewth!

Here’s the official description of the site:

The insane part to all this is that people buy and trade just about everything, from real estate to cars to commodities, in their own currency, called “Linden dollars”, which apparently can be converted into US dollars at a Nigerian Currency Exchange booth at your local flea market.

Madness!

In a year where Google got stronger and bigger, Yahoo! got smaller and more confused, Facebook became the overnight $15 billion dollar darling, and the VC’s got smarter and ran away, some things still continued to perplex even the most rational of people.

That’s Second Life. And that’s normal in this digital day and age.

As 2007 draws to a close, maybe it’s time to look back and reflect at what the internet has created. The sad thing is this. Perhaps only 20% of business really gets it. One things for sure. Digital properties like Twitter and Second Life might last and they might not. One thing is certain though. They’ve ruined every textbook case study out there about creating niche markets .

Which promises for an exciting year ahead, don’t you think?

Ok, I’m a bit behind with posting. Man, there’s a lot going on. Here’s a quick snapshot and I’ll elaborate in more detail later.

Straight after Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Marissa Mayer from Google gave us an overview on Google Health. This brief session was disappointing - and I’m a big fan of Google as readers will know. I’m also totally convinced that Marissa is a great presenter (and apparently not a harder worker you will find within Google). However, this wasn’t her best day.

Anssi Vanjoki from Nokia was up next. He was one cool customer and a serious heavy weight within Nokia (Executive Vice President and General Manager of Multi-Media). There’s something about the finnish accent that enables you to listen to them all day.

In many respects, Nokia had to be given ample opportunity to pitch their product and their company, given that they were the Platinum sponsor of the Web 2.0 event. Vanjoki talked about the mobile phone needing to be “context aware”. Can you imagine that Nokia have shipped over 1 billion phones already. In typical Nordic understatement, Vanjoki regarded this massive number as only just the beginning…

Next Evan Williams, the founder and CEO of Twitter. I don’t quite get this mini social networking phenomenan yet, but I reckon it’s here to stay.
Questions he posed to the audience, “What can we add to make something better?” and “What can we take away to create something new?”
Twitter in many ways, is a blogging app.

Evan is ex Google, worked on Blogger. Very smart. Very unassuming. Key message: “What can you create by taking something away?”

Mike Moritz, Sequoia Capital (and Mike was one of the early investors in Google, along with John Doerr) and a Google Board Member for many years. Key quote, when talking about the search behemoth.

“I wish that every company that we had been involved with had made the mistakes that Google had…”

When asked “What makes them great?”.

He responded with…”The leaders of the company worry all the time – and this is one of the great things about the company. This is not a complacent group of people. They never rest”.

Quotes I’ll remember and use for a while…

“We’re going online because that’s where our customers are…” Philippe Dauman, CEO, Viacom

“The Platform race is over. The internet has already won”. Jeff Huber, VP Engineering, Google.

More to come as soon as I dissect everything. One thing I have noticed since the start of the year, the corporate giants are starting to wake up to the internet and Web 2.0. Nokia, HP, Viacom, NBC, and a whole host of other Fortune 500 companies are all here. And apparently, all now listening.

When I was at Web 2.0 Expo earlier this year - there was something that kept catching my eye. I don’t really know why.

At one of the hallways into the session rooms, there was a lonely plasma screen, displaying “Twitter” messages. To be honest, I never really got the hang of it but due to fear of missing out, I duly created and set up a Twitter account when I got home.

The first thing that impressed me is that that creators of Twitter quickly understood that there were other humans living to the west of San Francisco and to the East of New York. They enabled Twitter to handle international mobiles.

But let me back the truck up a bit.

Just what the hell is it?

Okay, according to the Twitter website:

“A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!”

For some strange reason, the Web 2.0 evangelists are in love with Twitter. And while it’s still in early adoption phase, the thing appears to be growing like an outbreak of the ebola virus. But then again, there’s a lot of techno geeks out there.

Here’s how it works in plain english.

(Side bar - if you are a techno phobe, hate mobile phones, hate texting, and long for the good old days when teenagers could actually string a real sentence together or would actually use a phone to talk on - then Twitter is going to tip you over the edge). You will, most probably, by the end of this post, lose the will to live entirely.

Anyway, here’s what happens.

The basic tenet to Twitter is it assumes you have friends. Or at least people who acknowledge you exist and who pretend to care about your meaningless life.

For example, I have just logged into my Twitter account and can simply write a text message into the 140 character message box that says: “I’m writing a blog post about Twitter”.

If you have friends - or people in your network via your Facebook, MySpace or Linked In accounts, they can see what you are up to, minute by every freakin’ agonising minute. And don’t worry, if you actually step outside of your window-less room, you can keep “twittering” on your mobile phone. You can link you GMail account, connect to Facebook and there are a heap of other applications developed or being developed by the day.

Unfortunately, social networking is here to stay. Whether or not I get it (at 41 years of age) is completely irrelevant. My 6 year old will. As will his 4 year old sister. And they are both sure to laugh at me - actually they do that already.

One thing is for sure, the mobile operators will make out like bandits with applications like Twitter because most people will use it when on the move. It will drive SMS/Text revenue through the roof. Kids have already figured out that a carrier with a good text plan rather than a voice plan is way more important to them. Kids I know (the ones that can still speak English) are capable of texting 30-50 messages a day. Not once though did they actually pick up the phone and press the send button. Which I think is utterly bizarre.

Twitter also has a very important local search spin to it - and perhaps this is what the founders of Twitter (and other apps like Pownce, & Frazr) are hoping is their big pay dirt moment. If you’re in a new city and looking for a restaurant, you can simply post the question to your network of “cyber friends” and hopefully get a response. It works if you are a famous blogger with a wide audience. But to the average Joe, you might go hungry. That’s when the “Almighty Algorithm” steps in (Google) and offers you suggestions. Voila, problem solved and Larry and Sergey are yet another click closer to nirvana.

Actually, one of the smartest things the lumbering old carriers could do is to acquire a Twitter like service (before a search company does). They have a subscriber base, an ability to scale (when they want to) and any application which drives revenue across a sunk cost infrastructure is highly desirable. The challenge is, I used to work for the big telcos, and many of them have a lot of senior people older than me, who struggle to switch on their PC’s in the mornings. Go ask them what the “zeitgeist” is and they’ll look at you with a blank expression, or say it is a Steven Spielberg movie about the Holocaust. Or something like that.

Reluctantly I think, Twitter will continue to accelerate. It’s the future (or a big part of). For some strange reason, there’s a generation of folks who want to communicate this way, and who feel the need to tell other people what they are doing at every waking moment of the day. Obviously, these people don’t have children. Or aren’t married.

But I just can’t wrap my head around it. When I’m in San Francisco next month at Web 2.0, I know everyone will be “twittering” like crazy. I promise to try and embrace it - but I’m warning you that it could all go pear shaped.

Maybe it already has. For me at least.