Source: GMail Blog

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Blog, Twitter, Facebook: Now, where's the magic?

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I asked myself: “What percentage of my followers are purely spam accounts”? If you consider that I lost 147 followers that day and that I show an average growth of about 30 followers a day, twitter probably killed around 180 accounts that were following me that day. It actually is 4% of my followers. Add on top of that the spammy accounts that weren’t removed because they were too new or things like that, we probably end up with a 5-7% (if not 10%) of followers being spammy.

There’s more spam

You know, we end up with 5-7% being purely spam accounts that were STILL following me, but there’s more to include in the equation. I probably get a dozen new followers each day that eventually end up unfollowing me because I’m not following back. I haven’t really looked at the numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 20% of the new follower notifications I receive were spam. That’s how ridiculous it is.

I’ve been complaining about the spam on twitter since day one and things are only getting worst. But you know, it’s good to see twitter taking actions like that and killing accounts: they are actually doing something about it.

So, what percentage of your followers do you think are spam accounts?

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I stumbled upon an article on Mashable that express my feeling about “list posts”: Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools!

I understand the funny reference to twitter with the 140 tools, but what really is the added value of such posts? I highly respect Mashable, but they do post a lot of similar articles and they spread viraly and I’m sure you know a lot of other blogs doing so. It’s not an isolated case.

I mean, what is the benefit of listing 140 tools, do you really expect me to try all of them? Of course not. That’s why I want an analysis. It’s easy to break down this post into 10 other posts that could be called something like “10 twitter clients compared”. Now that’s a useful post. But more work.

I can’t take any action with 140 twitter tools listed in a post, but I can surely take action after reading a comparison of 10 twitter tools. I don’t want to know every tool that is available to me, I want to know the best tools and why.

That’s the same reason why companies are ready to pay a lot of money for experts’ advices: they don’t have time to evaluate every single solution, they simply pay someone to do the evaluation and give them the top 3 options in a nice report.

You know, there are reasons why lists are popular and you might like them, but I just prefer a good analysis.

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The Google PageRank

As you all know, more than 10 years ago, Google solved the problem of indexing the Web in a relevant way with their PageRank algorithm. It was sure a clever idea, but when you really think about it, that is how life works everyday: you become an expert in something when people begins to call you an expert. Well, it’s the same for websites: your website becomes important the more people link to it. That is all based on credibility.

The first metric was clear: backlinks.

Social media equivalent to PageRank

The real time web is synonymous with social media. Real time web exists because we create content in real time mainly though social networks like twitter, facebook and friendfeed. While backlinks is a very good metric for a website’s credibility, what is a good metric for content produced by individuals?

This is going to be the next challenge as we will want to search the real time Web at some point. Google admitted that they’ve done a poor job when in comes to creating stuff that works on a per-second basis and that twitter is clearly leading the way. While twitter index things in real time, I don’t think they’re doing a very good job at the moment when it comes to providing quality search results: spam is still a problem and anybody can appear in the search results for a trending topic just by mentioning a popular #hashtag.

We are exactly where we were 10 years ago, it is possible to appear in search results just by using certain keywords. So, how to index the real time Web in a way that is relevant and provide accurate search results?

This is a fairly complex problem because the real time Web doesn’t just involve websites, it involves people. We need an equivalent to PageRank that work just as well, but for content produced by individuals on personal profiles.

Moving towards a PeopleRank

Whether it’s going to be through OpenID or a unique profile service, there will be a need for a single identity online. Just like you build your credibility in real life, building your credibility online will be just as important. If we want to index the real time web and people’s conversations, then index it and make it searchable, we need metrics to decide what content is really relevant and what content might be spam or just plain irrelevant.

I used the term PeopleRank here and I know it’s scary to rank someone on a scale from 1 to 10, but that’s not what it is. I’m referring more to a way that could take various forms and that would allow us to filter information based on people’s credibility and reputation.

Breaking the platform barrier

This has to go beyond the twitter reputation or Facebook reputation, if we really want to build something as useful as the current Google Search but for real time Web, we have to break the platform barrier. In fact, this is where the real challenge is: breaking the platform barrier, linking different profiles together and establishing metrics to rank these profiles.

What do you think? What are the big challenges when it comes to real time Web and how would you solve them?

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My favorite feature is by far the “How many of your followers are online” which gives you, as you expect, how many of your followers are online at the moment. Pretty useful if you want to share a link or one of your post and want to maximize exposure. Of course, that’s only one of the many features of twitter analyzer.

Features

Here are the main features from the Twitter Analyzer website:

• See how many of your followers are OnLine Now!!!
• Want to know how many readers have been exposed to your messages?
• Want to see your Tweeting Habits?
• Who Retweets Your Messages?
• Want your Twitter follower stats?
• Want your expected Twitter Followers growth rate?
• Want to increase Twitter following?
• What other people are writing about you?
• How popular are you (and your friends)?
• Can’t keep track of all the Tweets sent to you?
• Who the close friends of your friends are?
• What are your friends’ occupations or job positions?
• How big your Twitter audience really is?
• What are your followers doing right now?

Try it

It’s pretty simple to use and very straight forward so try it and let me know what you think!

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Web 2.0 and not making money

Then came this new social web trend or the Web 2.0 as some people like to call it. Google quickly jumped into this with “Blogger”, “YouTube” and a couple of other social networking initiatives like Orkut, to eventually find out it wasn’t as profitable as they first expected. To date, YouTube is still not making money (profit), despite its HUGE user base. But still, social media is so big, it’s important to be part of the game, no matter how much money you lose.

Then, social media exploded. But I mean, exploded. Still, social media is not as lucrative as everyone expected even though the user base is huge. Take Facebook for example, which is probably the biggest social network at the moment, they are failing at monetizing the service. They do make money, but for a 200 million users service, they’re not. It is the same story for a lot of social networking sites: lots of users, no money.

Back to search engines

About three years ago, a service called twitter came out and quickly became the “standard” of micro-blogging. Today, twitter is growing at a rapid pace and while it is still not making money, most people agree that twitter will be extremely profitable because of one single thing: their realtime search engine (search.twitter.com). More than 10 years later, after a lot of trials and errors, could the best way to monetize social media be a search engine?

I think search engines are the answer to a big problem on the Web at the moment: filtering information and giving a purpose to social networks.

Social networking with a purpose

Personally, with twitter, this is the first time I see such an interesting opportunity for businesses. There are a lot of benefits for a company to be on Facebook,  but twitter is offering a lot more value with the search engine. In fact, LinkedIn also understood this “added value” concept by providing paid services for recruiters. Via a search engine, recruiters can rapidly find interesting people and get in touch with them. With twitter search engine, businesses can rapidly find customers, learn about their needs, get their feedback and get in touch with them. On top of that, twitter’s search engine offers an added value to “average” users as well with trending topic and the possibility to find more about “what’s happening NOW”.

You see the similarities between the LinkedIn business model and the twitter business model? Search and giving a purpose/added value through this search service.

Filtering information

Filtering information is the biggest challenge at the moment on the Web because of the uncontrollable flow of information. Being able to filter information with an added value and bringing people together all at the same time is the key. So, more than 10 years after Google changed the Web with a search engine, are we about to see some big changes and another very profitable company based on the search engine business model?

The search engine business model might just be the best and most profitable business model for the Web.

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The article mainly says you should follow only the people you find interesting and that there’s nothing wrong with unfollowing people because you don’t care about what they have to say. While I agree, here’s the side effect I find ridiculous.

Mass unfollow

After this article was published, a lot of people started to “mass unfollow”, just so they could  “start over” with their twitter account. The idea is:

I have 20K followers, but only find 100 of them interesting, so let’s unfollow the rest.

The concept I have problems with is not the “follow only people you find interesting” concept, it’s the “Let’s get 20K followers, then realize I don’t give a crap about them, un-follow them and get a killer follow/followers ratio” concept. What most people say after this is that they are “starting over” with their twitter account because they only want to follow “interesting” people.

Starting over mean starting over

That’s not what I consider starting over. Starting over would mean starting a completely new account with 0 followers and then only following people you find interesting. If you don’t want to follow back people, don’t follow them back, that’s fine with me. Would you still reach 20K followers just by doing that? No, because let’s face it, unless you’re Guy Kawasaki, you need to share, interact and follow people to get some of that twitter juice. That’s how it is. So, either you start over and accept the fact you won’t reach 20K or you accept the fact from the start that you are not Barack Obama and won’t attract 500,000 followers unless you share, interact and follow.

It’s the way the followers were acquired

My main problem with the “mass unfollow” to “start over” idea is the way the followers were acquired in the first place. Let’s face it, there are ways to get new followers easily and most people I’ve seen “mass unfollow”, followed me in the first place so I could follow them back and get more followers. That’s a perfectly fine technique, it works and a lot of people do it. Here’s why it doesn’t make sense at all to “start over” in this situation:

1. YOU follow someone with the only goal of getting more followers (you already don’t give a crap)
2. That person follow you back so both are happy
3. Then you realize you can’t follow ALL conversations (what did you expect?)
4. Finally, mass un-follow people YOU first followed because you don’t really give a damn about them. (Wait, you didn’t give a damn in the first place, so why did you follow?)

Is it just me or this scenario doesn’t make sense? You’re the judge, but I strongly disagree with this practice.

It’s OK to only follow people you like

Again, don’t get me wrong. It’s OK to only follow people you find interesting, it’s the process of mass following and then mass unfollowing that I think is wrong. What are your thoughts? Let me know.

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