Unlinking my Twitter Feed from Facebook
A number of months ago I linked the vast majority of my social media presence (Tumblr, Flickr, Twitter, FourSquare) to Facebook. I was a bit reluctant to do so at the time as I have over 1,200 Facebook ‘friends’ and was not sure how many of them would respond to the increased presence, especially those on the margin. But I decided to go ahead and give it a shot.
I quickly realized that my FourSquare check-ins were overwhelming my feed and I did not want or need every one of my Facebook friends to know where I was at every moment.
The Foursquare guys have done a great job however of adding very easy to use functionality in their iPhone app that allows me to selectively push check-ins to Twitter and/or Facebook. I use this religiously and it is the best implementation I’ve seen yet. I want it incorporated in all my web and mobile services.
In the absence of that functionality and after a few further months of experimentation, I’ve now heard enough rumblings about excessive posting from a number of my Facebook friends to call it quits.
I am officially de-linking my Twitter feed from my Facebook feed (at least for now).
Part of the problem here is that multiple of the same posts often go to Facebook. For example, Tumblr posts will feed directly to Facebook but will also come in through my pushing them to Twitter. Flickr photos often have a similar issue. A pervasive FourSquare-style selective push feature would help solve this problem as well.
As for Tumblr & Flickr, I’m going to keep them linked for now as I feel those services most closely reflect what I want to share with ‘friends’ and what Facebook is best for sharing (photos, content, etc.). But I guess we’ll see.
A number of my friends have taken the additional step of paring back their Facebook networks to only include true friends who would not feel spammed by the additional posting. I have done a little bit of paring and will continue to do so, but like having a somewhat wider network on Facebook as I find it very interesting to see what my outer circles are up to.
This has all left me with a profound sense of the difference between friend and follower relationships and the distinctions even in friend circles in terms of whom I want to share specific things with.
Along with the character restriction, the unidirectional follow relationship is the genius of Twitter. It’s ease of turning anyone on or off makes it unique and will continue to do so. Facebook is a broad-based social network geared towards selective sharing with friends and acquaintances. And Foursquare is for sharing location information with a different and smaller group.
These differences make each of these services unique and are why I believe they all have an important place in the ecosystem.
Community is Organic, not Manufactured
We’ve seen a lot of the web giants attempt recently to move into growing areas dominated early by young upstarts.
Google Buzz has of course been all the rage these past couple days, with it’s Twitter/Facebook-like feed integration into Gmail. Prior to that it was Yelp taking a swipe at FourSquare with their check-in addition. Even Yahoo launched Meme recently to compete with the likes of Tumblr.
All of these recent moves reflect a desire on the part of these larger companies to incorporate more of a sense of community into their already successful platforms. The inherent problem with this is that community (like entrepreneurship — more on that another time) can’t be manufactured. True community is organic, and it usually builds around a very simple, clean premise. And once it begins to tip, it has a life all its own usually very difficult to stop.
Bijan has a great post today on Google Buzz and trying to do too much. What’s so powerful about the simplicity he espouses is that it is precisely that initial use case simplicity that generates natural community.
For many years, when looking at acquisitions or building businesses, I worried about the likes of Google, or Yahoo before that, and their ability to move into the market we were going after and destroy us.
While this fear is grounded and often a very real threat, it is usually only so in the cases where the area you are playing in is fundamentally strategic to the respective 800 pound gorilla.
Community is something they all want, but not fundamentally strategic to what they currently have. Google is a search and advertising business. Yelp is a user-generated content and advertising business. Neither of them begin or end with community.
Communities are natural. They have a power all their own. Tumblr, FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook — they are who they are because of the power of their communities, not the other way around.
So while Yelp and Google may finally have some success with their attempts at community, to think that they can uproot or halt the growth of natural, social, viral communities is just not right.
The Twitter Times
I received the following email from a friend yesterday:
Wanted to let you know as much I’ve found twitter useful, this weekend with all that’s gone on in Iran it’s really shined. Still unsure about how you eventually monetize it but clearly an extremely useful and unique value proposition. As much as there is a lot of noise to screen out, Twitter continually pointed to new and interesting data sources that no one else had. The news that flowed out of Twitter was better than the Times, Drudge, CNN, etc.
This is not a unique perspective, of course. As per my post yesterday, Twitter is enabling the type of open, global communication that can start revolutions and topple regimes.
This location-specific Twitter search for tweets coming from within 15 miles of Tehran is all you need to understand the power of the platform. Even Ahmadinejad can’t hide.
The bottoms-up, user-revolution that is the Internet is the best enabler of democracy we have. And as it turns out, Twitter and its community of users may be its most powerful tool.
#TwitterTees
I’m really impressed with the latest offering from the Threadless crew: TwitterTees. They nailed it on a number of levels.
1) Crowd-sourcing - Threadless is smartly leveraging their crowd-sourcing expertise across the expanded Twitter network, using Twitter to surface and gather votes on shirts and thereby greatly expanding their reach and viral spread. And using the 140 character meme as an initial anchor is perfect for t-shirts.
2) Own your Vertical — Threadless is staking an early claim to their retail vertical on Twitter. I would expect them to expand their use of Twitter for surfacing and creating all kinds of offerings over time, deepening their presence on the platform. Similarly, there are a number of other interesting categories where Twitter can play an extremely important role, including local and travel as two big ones. Early movers here will have a tremendous advantage.
3) Twitter Press — Threadless also very smartly used Twitter as the vehicle for announcing and promoting the new initiative. Staying within the medium and using it’s inherent viral capacity is spot on.
Well done guys. Keep the innovation coming.
Paid Content Interview
I did an interview recently with Paid Content. The full post is below:
Interview: Mo Koyfman, Principal At Spark Capital, On Why Twitter Won’t Fail
By Rory Maher - Thu 07 May 2009 04:30 AM PST
Spark Capital has had a busy few years. It launched in 2005 after raising $260 million, raised another $360 million in July 2007 for a second fund, and announced a funding initiative five weeks ago to focus on smaller bets in the $250,000 range. Spark has invested in a range of digital media companies, from thePlatform, which was sold to Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) for $100 million, to buzzy startups including Twitter, Veoh, Boxee and Tumblr. The firm has invested heavily in online video, which has come under pressure the last year because of the tough ad environment and has steep operating costs. Last week, I sat down with Mo Koyfman, principal at Spark, who came to the Boston-based VC fund from IAC (NSDQ: IACI) where he held a variety of strategic, transactional and operational roles. We talked about VC culture, Twitter (in which Spark is an investor), and the Asian gaming industry, among other topics. Below are excerpts from our conversation.
A Sanford Bernstein analyst published a report recently in which he called out Silicon Valley for having a culture where large Internet companies are often wooed by VCs into buying buzzy startups that have no real business model. What is your response to that?
There are certainly deals you can point to where businesses were bought that performed poorly, yet there are many other examples where they have performed tremendously well for the acquirer. It’s hard to speak in generalities. But what I will say is that big companies in general often have a very hard time innovating from within. So it is very important for the larger companies to look externally to acquire innovative businesses and technologies. Often with these acquisitions they’re not just buying the businesses, but are buying entire teams of employees – tech teams, business teams – that often will stay around for a long time and add tremendous value. But also some of the larger companies that make these acquisitions don’t always make the best home in terms of environment, support, etc., which is important in understanding why these acquisitions succeed or fail, and how much it’s a function of the acquirer versus the acquiree.
Twitter seems to be the “it” startup these days. Some of the other “it” companies of the past few years have either gone out of business or are rumored to be looking for a quick sale. How is Twitter different?
What Twitter has done is create a concept that seems very simple but is very smart in a couple of fundamental ways in terms of the character limit of instant messages and the notion of following someone online rather than the traditional friend relationship. And it’s an incredibly powerful tool because it constrains what you can put out and allows you to singularly determine who you want to follow at any time and allow others to do the same, yet not force that reciprocal relationship.
In terms of them maintaining their position in the marketplace, one of the most important things the team decided early on was to keep the platform open and to allow lots of different folks to build on top of the platform in interesting ways. And what you have now is a rich, robust ecosystem being built around Twitter, and that’s a very powerful thing. It’s not just Twitter, it’s everything that ties into Twitter. It’s the entire universe that Twittter sits in, and the more that continues to happen, the more it’s difficult to upset that ecosystem.
Digital-music startups have huge cost challenges because they have to pay the labels to get access to the music. Doesn’t Twitter have a similar issue because it has to pay a fee to the cellphone companies every time someone Tweets?
We’ve got some great folks on board that are helping us navigate those relationships, and we don’t see it continuing to be a prohibitive cost of the business going forward.
Do you think Twitter’s revenue growth is going to come mostly from advertising or commerce (i.e. sales or subscriptions, virtual goods, etc.)?
I won’t speculate on where it will come from and the mix, but I will say that they are smartly and deliberately thinking through all the monetization options. You’ll see Twitter launch some initial stuff in the near future and continue to do more over time.
You’ve invested in a few different online video companies, including Veoh and Next New Networks. Veoh is a video aggregator, while Next New Networks produces its own programming; and Veoh sells mostly banner and pre-roll ads, whereas Next New Networks sells more custom sponsorships and syndicates its content. As a VC, do you see these companies as different types of bets?
I think that there are certainly two different sides of the content/distribution video landscape, but video is an area that we believe is going to be valuable long-term on the web and we’ve placed a number of bets – from Veoh to Next New to Boxee – to try and capitalize on the video explosion we’re seeing on the web. It’s a challenging marketplace because the cost of hosting and streaming video is still expensive, but the costs will come down and advertisers have been a bit slower to take to the medium than we may have hoped, exacerbated by this economic environment. So it’s not a space without its challenges, but it’s one that over time will have some real winners.
Who will be the biggest winner – the aggregators or producers?
I think there will be winners on both sides.
You’re an investor in OMGPOP, which said it plans to make money by selling premium subscriptions and virtual goods. Some of the Chinese gaming and internet companies have been doing this well for the past year.
More than the past year, and not just in China – Korea and other nations. And by the way, Facebook by some estimates has sold in the hundreds of millions of dollars in virtual goods themselves over the past year.
Let’s talk about virtual goods—why is that market growing so rapidly?
At the end of the day, virtual goods are purchased either for status or to enhance performance or for gifting purposes – all the same reasons we buy these things in the real world. And the more time we spend in the virtual world, it follows very clearly to me that we’ll be willing to spend money to fulfill those basic human needs and desires in the virtual space as we do in the real world.
As we spend more time racing cars in the virtual space we’re going to want more stuff for those cars. As we spend more time living in the virtual space with our avatars we’re going to want to make sure they are dressed the way we’d like them to be. As we spend more time on Facebook and MySpace we’re going to want to give people Valentines’ and birthday gifts in those worlds as well. When you get down to the underlying psychological motivations for buying and giving goods many of those are transferable to virtual goods and fulfill the same need. You’re not just paying for the underlying product, you’re paying for the experience.
Putting Yourself Out There
A very close friend recently complained to me that he found Twitter to be nothing more than a vehicle for narcissism.
I’ve been chewing on his point for a few days now as my rebuttal at the time didn’t feel particularly inspired. While I implicitly knew that Twitter was so much more than that, I was having trouble cogently explaining why.
So I was delighted to see an amazing post today by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh entitled How Twitter Can Make You A Better (and Happier) Person. In it, he points to four ways in which Twitter has helped him grow personally:
- Transparency & Values: Twitter constantly reminds me of who I want to be, and what I want Zappos to stand for
- Reframing Reality: Twitter encourages me to search for ways to view reality in a funnier and/or more positive way
- Helping Others: Twitter makes me think about how to make a positive impact on other people’s lives
- Gratitude: Twitter helps me notice and appreciate the little things in life
Rather than a vehicle for narcisism, Twitter is simply a window into you…whomever you may be. So, if you’re a narcisist, that’s how you’ll come across on Twitter. And if you’re real, it’ll be just that. The key to Twitter (and life incidentally) is being authentically you.
Twitter actually helps you be even more authentically you as it forces you to consider at all times how you’re perceived by others. Tony rightly and profoundly points out:
If you were always on camera, then everything you did would go towards shaping your personal brand, whether positive or negative. What are your personal values, and what values do you aspire to?
Well, today we are always on camera. And for those of us who want viewers to regard us positively, Twitter actually helps better you as an individual. That’s why I love it.
You can follow me on Twitter @mokoyfman.
