First of all, an apology for bombarding my Twitter followers with news tweets.  I made the mistake of experimenting with my personal account and learned the downside of “open-air” product development.  The spigot has been turned off. 

This past week we’ve been experimenting with Twitter feeds and automation with the aim of solving a growing industry problem.  Ironically, the aim of our Twitter development work is to increase the SNR of industry news rather than decrease it.  We also aim to improve a news stream’s utility for the rest of the industry while overcoming a common user behavior.

There is a very large number of sources of news and valuable opinion to track in our industry.  The Xuropa platform gathers about 80 streams from across the industry which often yields over 400 items per day.  And the number of sources is actually growing - more blogs covering narrower and deeper segments of knowledge; and new neighboring industries such as Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) are starting to become of interest.  (By the way, if there’s a source that you think is important to the community you can add it yourself.)

And here’s the reason for the development:  While having all of your news in one place helps (a feed reader, or a customizable page like iNews on Xuropa, for example) , there is still an awful lot of news out there to scan through and know what is and is not of value.  Everyone is busy, and time is getting more scarce.

The most effective way to get the insight of what should be read is to leverage the community (”crowd sourcing“).  What the community reads is likely to be what is most valuable to read and should bubble up to the top for others to read. 

This is the basic principle behind Digg, but Digg doesn’t help electronic design.  We simply do not have a large enough community to compete with the volume of Consumer Electronics readers, for example.  “Using OCP and extensions to support system-level cache coherence” is never going to get to the top of Digg.  But it is currently #6 in today’s Top News in Xuropa.  ie. If you go to Xuropa iNews you’ll get a good idea of what news is being read and what you should maybe read yourself.  (There are still some discrepancies that we’re working on as we’re increasing the sophistication of the system, but you’ll get the idea.)

So, why Twitter?  This is all part of the “dissaggreated web”.  Specifically, you shouldn’t have to go to a particular website to get a utility it offers.  It sounds counter-intuitive, but that’s the way things are going. 

You shouldn’t have to come to Xuropa to read the article, but we need to make a note that a particular article has been read and that contributes to the ranking of that article.  The bigger the dataset we have to work on, the better the results we can present to the community.

While this is just the start of a small piece of what we’re doing on Xuropa, I hope this explains a little bit about where we see this going.

So, we’ve learned a lot in this past week.  (Unfortunately for some I did not learn fast enough.)  As always, any input, suggestions, or requests you may have, drop us a line, tweet, email, or comment.  Just no letters please - save the tree.

And finally, thank you to all those that provided feedback on this project.

- James

Posted under Community, Features, Xuropa, industry

I’ve been writing a lot about Twitter recently, as have a lot of other people as it continues to charge into the mainstream.  Read What is Twitter, and Why Should I Care? and you’ll get an idea of where this is going, but we have some recent data collected by The Nielsen Company that talks to its increasing relevance as a communication channel:

It’s growth in terms of users is astronomical:

As Nielsen note, this growth does not take into account the number of mobile users, which could increase these stats incredibly.  Twitter’s use-model lends itself to mobile use perfectly, and is a very valid platform.

There is one piece of this story that I’d disagree with though: the title, “Twitter’s Sweet Smell of Success“.  While Twitter has raised an impressive $55M since its founding, it has yet to find a business model.  I’m sure there’s one out there, and it does not have to be solely ad-driven.  But until they have found the secret sauce to generating revenues, the sweet smell of success is still only appreciated by its users.

Posted under industry, marketing

Great - another acronym.  As twitter grows I expect more of these to come along.  Anyway, I saw it this morning on Harry Gries’ blog, and it stands for “Yet Another Social Network”.

Harry painstakingly gathered tweets from a thread and tied them all together into an interesting conversation.  You would not have got this conversation if you a) had not been “following” every member of the conversation and b) not been on Twitter at the exact time it was going on.  So, thanks Harry!

I put a pretty long comment on Harry’s blog, but there’s a point I’d like to emphasize.

JL Gray was wondering if “we” needed another social network when it came to Xuropa.  Of course, my answer to that is - he’s right, we need a professional network.  At the same time he was making that comment he added that using Cadence tools on Xuropa was “cool”.  And that’s the whole point - using the actual Cadence tools with no downloads, plug-ins, or license agreements is very cool.  But more to the point - it’s useful.  Xuropa is about providing a community that is useful and specific to your career and work.

Within a Xuropa Online Lab you can use the tools and ask questions of the tool’s application engineer directly; read the manual, or watch a video about how to use the tool.  At the same time, if you want to twitter about it, great!  Write a blog post, wonderful! Write about it on someone’s “wall”, knock yourself out!  Each of these social networks has its purpose and focus (or not).

Here’s a video introduction to one of the Cadence MIPI Labs on Xuropa:

This is what Xuropa is about.  Connecting engineers with technology.  The rest is up to you.

Posted under Community, Features, Xuropa, industry, marketing

My blog post about “What is Twitter, and Why Should I Care?” had not been up more than a few hours when the Twitter stream offered up this perspective from John Stewart of the Daily Show.

As usual, it’s hilarious, made funnier by the more-than-grain of truth to it.  The clip highlights the extremes of the Twitter spectrum.  Of course, the reality lies somewhere in between.

Twitter can (and is) used for banalities.  And Twittering while attending an important speech broadcast simultaneously worldwide says more about the Twit(terer) than anything else.

Mass communication tools, like email or SMS, can be used for spam.  But, that does not mean that they don’t have their place and their appropriate business use models.

Some basic professional uses:

• Product announcements (linking to a demonstration or blog post)
• Instant polls
• A low-cost help-line
• Focus groups
• Event announcements and simple coordination
• Build and simply engage your users
• Live streaming (of something that is NOT broadcast worldwide!)
• Event (seminar, presentation) question submission (can be very effective)

How have you used Twitter professionally?

Posted under industry, marketing

Twitter has been around for a couple of years, and is now starting to creep into the “main stream”.  There are regular mentions of it on TV programs like The Daily Show.  And now the CEO, Evan Williams, has been interviewed by Charlie Rose. 

This must mean something, but what?

Outside of the “web world” and the fringes of many demographic groupings (politics, technology, weather, physics, games, real-estate investment, you name it!) it is still looked upon with great puzzlement.  Many veteran executives that I run into either haven’t heard of it, or briefly wonder what it is.  Others are more recently dabbling in the technology with an open mind wondering how it can be leveraged as an effective communication tool.

So, what is it?

Essentially I describe it as “broadcast SMS messaging”.  Or you could think of it as a network of people with walkie-talkies….with everyone on the same frequency.

Well, it’s not quite “everyone”, it’s only those people you “follow” (think “tag” or “connect”).  So it is manageable at that level.  But other than that - that’s just about it.  There really is no magic to it.

You search for people or run across them, and “follow” them if you think they’re interesting.  Then you start receiving their messages (”Tweets”) in your Twitter feed reader.

There’s not much you can say within the 140 word limit, so there’s not going to be blinding insight delivered through this mechanism.  So what’s all the fuss?

There are potentially two aspects of Twitter that are attractive - immediacy and its egalitarian nature.  Specifically, as soon as the people you follow enter a message into the system it appears in your feed (well almost immediately most of the time).  And you can follow anyone - Barack Obama, Guy Kawasaki, Richard Branson…if they’re on, you can follow them.  So, when Richard Branson enters “Back in London having gone around the world for the first time on Virgin. It was great. Come fly with us and try it yourself” (he did) you can reply to him, (which I did.)

Real or not, and quite counter intuitively, the combination of these two aspects of the tool gives the user a sense of intimacy.  And there is its power as a marketing tool.

Why Should I Care?

There are lots of anecdotes of people that have twittered things like they needed a mac power cord (Guy Kawasaki) and he got one delivered to his door in an hour.  And they heard about a layoff before their manager did.  But as a marketing professional, why should you care?

The allure of intimacy is very powerful.  To be able to build a rapport with your market through high-frequency small messages that are essentially free is attractive. 

To write a thought provoking blog post can take time (I’ve spent a while working on this not counting the time thinking about it ).  Jotting out 140 characters or less takes a few seconds.  And because it’s so short it’s not really open to interpretation.  It’s clear, concise, and therefore open communication.

Because of this, the communication tends to be trusted.  Which again lends itself to building loyalty that can enhance your brand.

The Draw Backs

There are many reasons why I’m still not completely enamored with Twitter.  Mostly due to efficiency and focus.

Once you’re following over a couple of dozen people it’s hard to see the wood for the trees.  And you need to follow a lot of people before you start getting people to follow you.  (There are maybe half a dozen people I’ve come across that have more followers than people they are following.  It usually works reciprocally.)

There are some people that will insist on telling you they have “just got up”, but that’s down to you choosing who you follow.  (Don’t follow blindly, but look at the quality, frequency and type of tweets they post before you follow them.  It’s quality over quantity in my book.  However, how do you get people to follow you if you don’t follow them?  How do they know you exist?  There are methods, but that’s a different topic.)

This brings me to another drawback - if you’re only following interesting people, all of a sudden your tweet stream becomes quite a distraction.  You add into the mix the blog posts that people point to within tweets and you can be distracted very quickly.

The tweet “cache” is very small.  Meaning, your Twitter feed isn’t really an “inbox” that you can effectively scroll through and search.  If you missed something that was twittered while you slept… you’ve probably missed it.

Finally, filtering and search capabilities need to be enhanced to really make it effective.  But that’s just a matter of time.

Having said all that though, I need two things to really integrate it into my work day.  A process: a disciplined approach to its use.  A tool: something that can better draw upon this global stream-of-consciousness and harness it efficiently.  Sound familiar?

Conclusion

Twitter shows great potential as a means of mass communication and building intimacy within a community.  But as with all new social media technologies, it takes a different approach and different tools to make effective use of it.

It was only recently that “to blog” became a “normal” thing to do, even though it had been around for years.  The rate of change is increasing.

Posted under business, industry, marketing