What is Twitter? Thoughts on communication and media part 1.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the tide pools near our house with some other parents and their kids. A couple of the moms were talking about Twitter, and knowing that I stay up on the current stuff in technology, they asked me if I used Twitter and they wanted to know what it was. I said that I had been using Twitter for 3 years and was one of the first 1000 users (actually user number 590. ) @Derrick . That was the easy part of the question. The harder questions was What is Twitter? I don't recall exactly but I mumbled something about it being a broadcast communication facility to share information with friends. I guess at some level that is technically correct but really punts on the question and sounds dumb. I thought a more worked out answer would be interesting to help my understanding and and to share some of the broader implications with some friends. Hence this post.

In the fall of 2004 I was involved in the podcasting meme of the moment and as a result helped found a podcasting music association with a bunch of fellow indie music podcasters called The Association Of Music Podcasting (which is still going strong here.) We had some discussions with Adam Rugel from Odeo about working with them and somehow during one of my travels I managed to have a meeting with Evan Williams and Biz Stone to talk about podcasting sometime late in 2005. When I met with them, they were actually more interested in talking about what I was doing with Intercasting and Rabble. We talked for a long time about mobile and I have to say it was an enjoyable chat.

A month or two later one of my friends told me they were working on some kind of sms based messaging service called Twitter. I thought that was interesting but I knew that some of the services that had done this previously had hit some roadblocks. Not knowing the specifics I didn't think about it much. A little while later Adam sent me an invite when the service launched. Right off the bat, I thought of a service called UPOC.

UPOC was launched in 1999 by a number of guys including friend Greg Clayman and was interestingly also backed by Fred Wilson. UPOC stood for universal point of contact and the company did a great job of building out the infrastructure to send and receive messages and to organize discussions into groups. They of course also did a great job of getting carrier traction and gained great presence on deck. So why no Twitter? Not sure and frankly I never asked Greg or anyone else but my firsthand experience with UPOC circa 2004 was a very high noise to signal ratio and the use of the chat rooms or channels as the primary communication mechanism. They did get to the millions of users level but never went viral or anything like that.

Twitter at first seemed like a web 2.0, less crowded, less organized version of UPOC. I invited a handful of friends and turned on phone alerts and away I went. I didn't run into anything too out there but it was generally a quiet experience. I have to point out at this juncture that the comparison to UPOC is completely lacking any acknowledgement of the Twitter as platform, Open APIs, and other things that have helped make Twitter the juggernaut it is today. In any case Twitter to me seemed to quietly hum along until SXSW 2007. That was the first step function in growth. One on the most interesting things about community is the concept of inventory. A community without any users/inventory is nothing. SXSW helped to jump start the community aspect in a big way. This year as shown on this chart has really shown the true epic inflection of Twitter. Make sure you adjust the settings to max to see the whole chart.

There are two main concepts that I think are important to consider in thinking about Twitter. The first concept is the evolution of communication. The second concept is around the evolution of media. I will try to hit the first one in the rest of this post and follow up on the second in a following post and also outline some implications I think fall out from all of this. So what do I mean by the evolution of communication? As it relates to the two concepts mentioned there is the method by which information flows between people, and there is the actual content that flows. For the purposes of this post I am talking about how things have changed in terms of the method by which we transfer information. In many ways the changes have been subtle, but the impact is pretty profound.

Most of us who started using technology on a broad scale in high school or earlier depending on our age, are pretty familiar with email. In the pre Mosaic world, text was king and the highest value activity on the "Internet" was either sending text and files back and forth over email or arguably using some form of bbs or chat like channel to interact in a more real time way. Email went on to pervade pretty much all of our lives in the industrial world. Email on my computer, my Blackberry, my phone, are all meaningful time drains on anyone who lives a connected life. It is also how most of us manage our day and how we process information. It is the drum beat of our day.

Email has reduced the amount of faxes in our life. It has reduced a lot of the paper. I think I get one to two pieces of dead tree each day and on average 200+ emails. With the victory of email has come spam. If this is the main way one interacts with the "Internets" then it is the best place to get you to respond to Viagra ads, or Nigerian wealth scams, or whatever. And so we arm ourselves with tools and methods to defeat this but in general realize we have probably reached a peak utility for email for now and many of us look for new/better replacement mechanisms. In the work environment I would offer that there are no obvious better alternatives and we are left with efforts to lock down the enterprise and barricade off the spam. But what if you are a consumer? What can you do?

Some choose IM. Don't get me wrong, instant messaging is by no means a replacement for email, but I do know that for the legions of kids behind computers all day, and for the many kids carrying around devices like Sidekicks, instant messaging is a primary method of communicating. I started using IM in 1999 at MP3.com and over the years it became the primary way for me to keep in touch with my staff when I am on the road which is always. the more interesting part about IM is that it has a different mode of communication that email. Email is sprawling, comprehensive and something that you actually have to process. Instant messaging is fast, specific, and to the point. IM is for when I don't want to send an email and I don't want to pick up a phone and call you. How r things? Good? Kewl.

Another short bursty method of communication that started big outside the US and is now every bit as big here is SMS. SMS is very much like IM to me with a shorter back and forth. Call me when you land. Dude that was a riot. etc. While these things are all very different (Email, IM and SMS) they are all very much at their core communication functions and they are used to carry on certain types of conversations or information exchanges. The different forms are also used by different groups although I would argue that over time there aren't going to be strong demographic differences like kids only texting etc. My wife's aunt is really into texting right now. I smile when she sends me messages.

So to continue this thread of evolution of communication I think the next logical step is to talk about blogging. While Twitter is most like SMS to many, I think the lineage of some other modes is important to get a better feel for Twitter. So back in the late 90s buys like John Hiler at Xanga, Brad Fitzpatrick at Live Journal and Evan Williams at Blogger created tools for simple publication of thoughts ideas etc. This was/is huge for a big chunk of the youth demographic. Actually I would argue it has crossed from youth to people of all ages. Blogging is something I picked up back in 2004 and have been at with the exception of about a year hiatus since. I found blogging an interesting way to share my thoughts with friends and to document things for myself. I gained a ton of satisfaction when seeing friends and they knew what I had been up to as a result of my blog. Time well spent.

Blogging as communication? Absolutely. It is one way but you do have comments and are able to carry on conversations around topics, ideas or funny stuff. Blogs can be link blogs, dense theme based blogs, or just silly random stuff. One of the big downsides of blogs though is that they are a one person party in general. There are not people hanging out at your blog. Since the time of Friendster, those people have been congregating at the social networking sites of the world which are what I would argue are the next steps beyond blogging.

Social networking sites as communication tools. Most of the big popular social networking sites today have email, chat/IM and the ability to share posts or content not unlike blogs. For many kids, they may check email once a week and check their profile pages on Myspace or Facebook 10 times a day. This has made the sites extremely important in the battle for things like search and advertising. If we live our digital lives on a specific site, then that real estate is obviously of some of the highest value and I would argue that today that still remains the main battlefield in terms of Internet monetization and opportunity.

Twitter when originally launched was described as micro-blogging. A lot of this was driven by the constraint that SMS message only allow 140 characters which is the limit Twitter implemented. The big thing though that Twitter did in my opinion was the developed API framework. If blogging was my party at my house, and Facebook and Myspace is THE party that I need to be at to have my friends here me, then Twitter is an electrical plug that can be plugged into anywhere. I can update it from my phone. I can use a Twitter IM client. I can use the web. Not only can I send stuff to Twitter for others to see, but I can get Twitter data and consume it other places.

It is an interesting concept. Email and IM and SMS are point to point communication. Blogging is broadcast, social networking is broadcast. Twitter is broadcast but also re syndication and the development of a framework construct around pure message flow. There are whole pieces of ecosystems that have popped up around this. Twitpic and Twitgoo for photos. URL shortening like Tinyurl for sending links. A whole semantic language around topic organization using #.

I would stop here and go to the next post but I think the last important mode of communication evolution that should also be touched upon is the idea of site information aggregation. I think I mentioned before that I was an advisor and board member of Socialthing which AOL acquired last year. They are very similar to Friend Feed which is a storied Silicon Valley startup from one of the former top guys at Google. These sites both create a one stop shop for people to view all their friends across a ton of services and to also create content there to send out to the various services. I know that I use socialthing everyday to monitor about 7 different services and have to think that there is a movement from centralization, to decentralization, to reaggregation that consumers will ultimately want as they fatigue the constant introduction on new services. Hard to say but definitely something to also watch.

Post 2 to come...

Me on Local Radio

On July 11th I was on a local radio show that profiles San Diego based companies. Head to this page and click on the July 11th segment. I am the first person on.

The Rabble Tribe

Two weeks ago at a conference I spoke about the different consumer archetypes in the Rabble community. Anastasia from Ypulse graciously reposted some excerpts. If you are interested the whole deck I used can be found here.

Travels and Sex::Tech

This week is the first travel week of the year for me. While I have already been to San Francisco and Los Angeles, I don't think of those as travel days since they are short trips. This week includes a trip today to Seattle, down to San Francisco later this evening, an appearance at a conference called Sex:tech and then a journey out to NYC.

The Sex:tech conference is going to be interesting for me in that it is not the usual speaking engagement. When Shawn or I are out it is usually to talk about the mobile industry, or social networking or something that is more business focused.

Several weeks ago I was invited to participate in an Aspen Institute conference that was focused on social implications of mobile technology. I was one of the industry folks in attendance along with Steve Chen from Youtube as well as a lot of people from the non-profit sector.

One of the interesting people I met at this conference was Deb Levin who heads up ISIS in San Francisco. Their mission (or at least my interpretation) is to get out information around sexual health to youth in a manner that is authentic and focused on places where the kids are. Our discussions led to me discussing what we are seeing with Rabble in our community and some of the interesting findings that we have encountered as a result.

While I don't usually talk about these things for competitive reasons, I will be discussing some of those findings tomorrow with Anastasia Goodstein from Ypulse (A blog I love) and Janet Kornblum from USA Today. I have a light deck that I will post a link to on my blog tomorrow. It should be interesting and am I excited to meet Anastasia who I am a fan of.

Digital Hollywood Podcast Interview

While at Digital Hollywood the week after CTIA I was interviewed by website Digital Podcast which can be found here. It is a longer version of what I said on the video interview posted previously. Link can be found here.

Intercasting/Rabble in USA Today

While I was in Rome we had a bunch of news. I will recap links later today as I catch up on email. Here is a link to the USA Today story which mentioned both Rabble and Intercasting.

Video from CTIA

I am way behind on posting but expect to catch up soon. Right. In any case here is a video of me rambling on about what we do from bnetTV at CTIA. Link is here.

Anthem named a Top 10 Application

Fierce Wireless named Anthem as a top 10 mobile application for 2007. Blush. Link can be found here.

Anthem Launches On Boost

We issued a press release this morning announcing our launch on Anthem on Boost. The release is here. We have been working with the folks at Boost for a long time and are extremely excited to launch with them. They are one of the most successful MVNOs and are some of the most savvy marketing people in wireless. More announcements coming soon.

Mobile Monday Silicon Valley

I will be speaking about some of our lessons learned on Monday night at Silicon Valley's Mobile Monday meeting. Details here. It's a great collection of speakers including Jordy from Bebo and Sam from Loopt. Both are great guys. Can't say that I know the Nokia guy. It will be my 3rd Mobile Monday (San Diego, Austin) and it should be a lot of fun.

Anthem Goes Live on Virgin

We announced here that we have launched Anthem on Virgin Mobile with Black Planet, Asian Avenue, Mi Gente, Glee, Faith Base, Xanga, Vox, Live Journal and Rabble. We technically Rabble has been there a while but we have switched the underlying client architecture to a single client that interfaces with the above mentioned communities. More to come.

Rabble at Comic Con

Well sort of. This morning I grabbed the paper and was immediately drawn to the picture of zombies on the front page. I realized quickly that one of our employees was quoted on the front page and mentioned Rabble. Link here. Very cool. I am in fact headed down today to take my son. I had tried to get out of it because it is such a zoo, but he insisted. So I will be there wearing my fancy new Rabble T-shirt with pride.

Congrats to Jennifer who organized the parade. An added bonus is a quote by Howard Rheingold of Smartmobs fame who cites the zombie parade as a sort of flash mob.

Anthem on Sprint

Today we announced the launch of Anthem on Sprint in this press release here. It has been a lot of hard work from our team but we think that the end product is something that will help define communities on mobile devices. What exactly is Anthem? From a user perspective, it is a donwloadable application that will allow people to interface with existing web based communities they use on the web. At launch we are rolling out Xanga, Live Journal, Vox, Rabble, Black Planet and several other properties from Community Connect. What the user sees is a web like experience on their phone. They have full read and write access just like they do on the website.

We expect to announce a number of additional carriers very soon as well as a number of additional social networking sites/communities. One of the great things about our approach with Anthem is that it will lead to preinstalled applications on the handset that bring the flexibility to add communities in the future.

On the Rabble front this brings us to 9 carriers with deck support from the carrier. We are working with the three largest carriers, Sprint, ATT, Verizon as well as Virgin, Cricket, Metro PCS, Cellular South, Claro Puerto Rico and Centennial Puerto Rico.

Europe

Europe was a blast. It was a really busy trip and I had a bad time with jet lag. The purpose of the trip was all business development (carriers, offdeck, community sites). We arrived in London, which was 40 degrees and raining the day we arrived. Glad it was almost summer, I can't imagine what winter is like. ;-)

Our meetings went well and I only have a couple of observations about London. First, the US dollar is in a really sad shape. The last time I had been to London was 3 1/2 years ago and I was blown away by how expensive everything was. I guess those deficits in the US aren't helping.

Second, WIFI is a joke. By that I mean that it was either a. obscenely expensive, or b. it was metered by the minute. Yes by the minute. I guess in some ways that makes sense but for something that probably doesn't have any variable cost it seemed like a big joke.

Third, I love Carphone Warehouse. What a great concept/store. Their selection was amazing and their ubiquity was impressive. I am excited to see what they do with Best Buy over here in the US.

Fourth, transportation in and around London is a pain. Granted transportation is amazing, but to get from one meeting to the next seemed to consume around twice the time that you spend in NYC doing similar things. It could be how we planned things out.

One really funny story. Right after we get to London, we showered, changed and headed to the Express. As the train pulled up, the car that stopped in front of us had a familiar face. It was Tasso Roumeliotis from Wavemarket. Now the odds that a couple guys from the west coast, who happen to work in mobile, happened to be in London at the same time, and just so happened to be on the same train, which just happened to deposit us right in front of each other was beyond comprehension. In any case it afforded us some time to catch up, compare notes and chat. They have been doing some good things with their Kid Finder application and it was good to hear that they are doing well.

In addition to the strictly business aspects of the trip I got to spend a little time with Russell Buckley from Admob who is one of the bloggers at Mob Happy.

London was a bookend on both sides of the trip and in the middle we took some of the exploding Southwest style budget airlines in Europe to Germany for meetings in Dusseldorf and Bonn. I had been to Germany back in 1997 in Munich and really liked it at the time. This time I truly fell in love with Germany. The weather was beautiful and the scenery in the Rhineland reminded me of the Pacific Northwest in summer, or something like North Carolina. Everything was very organized and clean and people spoke a lot more English than I recall.

When I returned home I had some observations about differences in the US and European market in terms of wireless coverage and services but I think I am going to hold off on that editorial until after my next trip when I have more data.

London Calling

I am in Boston about to hope on a plane to London. This week includes trips to London, Dusseldorf and Bonn. Should be busy. I think it's been 3 1/2 years since I have been to Europe so it's definitely overdue. Trip report later. I have a feeling that there will be more than a few trips to Europe this year...

We raised a $12 million Series B

The press release is here. We are extremely excited to be working with Venrock. They are a firm with a great tradition of working with entrepreneurs to create great companies. We had met them when we were out raising our Series A, and are glad that we are now in business with them as we move forward in a growth period of our company.

We are also excited to have our previous investors, Avalon and Masthead, involved in our Series B as well. Both firms have been great supporters of ours and I'd like to send my thanks out to the various partners at each firm. We really appreciate their insight, support, and continued involvement in the building of our company.

Without the great team we have built, we wouldn't be able to accomplish the things we have so far, nor would we be able to deliver on the vision we have going forward. A big thanks to our team for all their hardwork and dedication. We expect to do big things in the coming year.

We started this company with the intent to work closely with the carriers to develop a category of applications and to work to build this category in unison with them. We appreciate the support we have had from all of our carrier partners so far and look forward to delivering on the promise of an exciting revolution in mobile data applications.

Most important to me though, has been the support of my wife and my kids. My wife has been a world class startup wife, raising our kids, running the house, and continuing to work 75% time as an attorney. I can't thank her enough for her belief in what we are doing and her strength in helping to make that a reality. Without her, none of this would have been possible.

We have a lot of exciting announcements coming very quickly and we look forward to sharing the news as it becomes available.

Rabble Schwag

We are going to be getting some new Rabble wear for our community in the next couple of weeks but in the meantime we rolled out some stuff on a CafePress storefront that you can see here.

Talking Head

I am hitting a stretch of travel and speaking over the next 6 weeks. Next week I am speaking at the iHollywood Forum on Tuesday. Details here. I am on a panel entitled "From Mobile Networks to Mobile Networking". Paul Smith from Mpulse, who I spoke on a panel with at SXSW last year will be there as well as Michael Grossi from Helio. I have been particularly excited by some of the new Helio phones as well as an apparent move towards the early adopter, gadget freak consumer which is what I thought they were going to originally go for when they launched.

A bunch of friends and acquaintances will be there as well including Jim Kaskade from Eyespot, Joe Hurd from Video Egg, and Matthew Evans from NBC/Universal who worked with me back at Vivendi.

A couple of weeks later on March 26th I will be speaking in one of the Ask the Experts sessions at Billboard Mobile Entertainment at CTIA. Link the the show here. Other friends and acquaintances in attendance include Greg Clayman from MTV, Ted Cohen, Paul Palmieri from MillennialMedia, Craig Thole from Boost, Rio Caraeff from Universal Music, and Bryan Biniak.

Later in April I will be speaking at the Dow Jones Wireless Innovations Conference. Details here. More details on that later.

Rabble on Virgin Mobile US

Last night Rabble rolled out on Virgin Mobile. We have known the Virgin folks for a long time and are excited to welcome Virgin into the Rabble community. Check it out on your Virgin phone.

Rabble Wap

Sometime last summer we rolled out a read only version of WAP kind of as an afterthought at the time but primarily to look at offdeck conversion opportunities. In addition to the read only Rabble site we also experimented with some promotions with big artists at bands.rabble.com and were toying with some indie artist stuff at Wapbands.com.

So early this week we rolled out a full WAP version that can do just about everything our thick client can do within the limitations of WAP. You can check it out at mobile.rabble.com. We are pretty proud of how well we have been able to capture the look and feel of the Rabble 2.0 client. A couple of caveats. First, we haven't rolled out international registration yet. It shouldn't be too far off but we made the choice to get something live sooner rather than later. Second, there are some style improvements we will roll out shortly as well.