Nothing smacks more of ADD in a Web 2.0 world than micro blogging and microcontent. “Flow Apps” as Stowe Boyd calls them. As such, the last session I’m blogging on day two of Web 2.0 Expo is appropriately named: “Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia”
The cast of characters in this session includes: Greg Narain of Blue Whale Labs who moderated, Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research, Brian Solis from Future Works and PR 2.0 and Stowe Boyd of The /Messengers.
Follow these guys on Twitter and you may learn an awful lot about this space:
@gregarious
@jowyang
@stoweboyd
@briansolis
While you’re at it, feel free to follow me as well: @leeodden Not sure how much you’ll learn there but you may be entertained 🙂
I’ll admit that it was a pretty silly thing to blog this session because like the ADD reference above, it took new directions each moment and never stayed on any one topic for long. Not a conducive environment for blogging. But then again, that’s appropriate for the topic.
The late entrance of Robert Scoble drew some interesting humor from the audience, some of which instigated by Josh Bernoff. 🙂
Who uses Twitter? Whole audience pretty much raises their hands.
@gregarious informs us the audience gets to control the presentation by following @micromedia2 and suggesting topics, messages or sharing images. Posts to @micromedia2 displayed on the projection screens with some pretty funny as well as insightful contributions.
@jowyang says microcontent applications like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and FriendFeed are on par with email.
@stoweboyd talks about buddy gopher that pulled in all the responses from your friends on AIM. Behaved somewhat like Twitter. cThe emergence and popularity of the Facebook mini feed is not too unlike Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce.
@jowyang Shows a graph from Compete with Twitter experiencing hockey stick growth and Pownce/Jaiku staying fairly level. A small group of influentials contributed to the success of one service, even though there are three services with very similar features.
@briansolis uses microcommunities to engage in real time conversations, share content. With posts on his old blog, he gets more responses on Twitter than on the post itself.
@gregarious Talk about the notion of streams and flows as well as what it means to be a real time participant:
@stoewboyd Contrast reading blog posts or RSS feeds compared to consuming a torrent of information coming from individuals. You can pay attention to it or not. Complete attention to a large quantity of text is a very differnt thing than checking in to a stream or thread of information when you want.
It’s the difference between being at a church service and being at a cocktail party.
Interesting phenomena that much of conversation that happens on blogs is shifting to Twitter and microblogging platforms.
@jowyang Cites a report with Peter Kim. Twitter users are early adopters.
@gregarious How can we use Twitter for business?
@briansolis Cites Dell using Twitter as a customer service tool. Monitors issues and solves them before the competition can take advantage.
@jowyang Did anyone talk about taxes on Twitter? Did H&R Block reply? H&R Block monitors Twitter for people talking about taxes and contacting them to bring them closer to the brand.
@stoweboyd People can see the immediate benefit of using Twitter based on current features. He shares that he is working on workstreamr – a workflow information transfer and sharing application.
There is a IM behavior to Twitter plus the 140 character limit. Shared a story about being disgusted with email pitches and he started referring them to do a “twitpitch”, which is essentially doing a pitch via Twitter. Stowe received some good pitches and is re-posting them online.
@jowyang Ways to message someone with Twitter. @username is one way. Another is to use hash tags #tag. You can also use Tweetscan.com to search brands, products etc.
@gregarious LA Fire Department is using Twitter as an emergency broadcast system and shouldn’t.
@stoweboyd The government nationally or regionally should build something stable to provide a digital air raid siren.
Audience: How can companies are monitoring micromedia?
@briansolis Twitter is great, but there are other tools such as seesmic, Friendfeed and others to consider.
To monitor micro-content, come up a list of keywords and terms, search them and create RSS feeds – you’ll be notified when there are mentions of those phrases in your RSS reader.
@jowyang Uses Google Alerts to monitor and mentions that social media monitoring tool, Radian6 monitors Twitter.
Twitter launched an advertising model in Japan today
@stoweboyd The thing that was scary about Andrew Baron selling his Twitter account on eBay is what if people hired others to build up an account – fake. There’s something horribly wrong with that.
@jowyang It’s becoming clear that content is moving off of Twitter and over to apps like FriendFeed.
@stoweboyd Twitter and the like: Flow Apps. Twitter is many to many.
Audience: Is micro-content still a nascent space? Is Twitter “it”?
@Stoweboyd There’s still a lot of opportunity.
@jowyang Browser client is the most active way to access Twitter. Second is Twhirl (which is being purchased by Seesmic)
@jowyang Polls the audience: How did this session go? Most people thought the format went well.
Overall, the session was entertaining and went very fast. I suspect that the panel expected a savvy audience, so there wasn’t unnecessary time spent on “What is Microblogging” or “What is Twitter” although there is certainly opportunity for that.
At Tweetscan you can see the thread of posts from the audience as well as posts made by people not at the session. It was interesting to see the initial audience comments and then people elsewhere in the world and Twitterverse noticed their friends making @ comments to @micromedia2 and started to post as well. The effect of the session was felt round the world and in real time. That’s powerful.
