Twitter may be changing but that doesn’t mean you have to.

The premier micro-blogging service is no longer the starry-eyed startup it used to be but if you think it can possibly stay the same as in its early days then you are sorely mistaken and looking back with rose-tinted spectacles.

A business must adapt to survive

To survive in the competitive online world you are looking at achieving mass adoption and what appeals to the mass market invariably differs from the interests of the early adopters.

Having joined in 2006 I welcome that twitter is now used for more than just social media navel gazing. In June 2008 I performed an experiment on FriendFeed where I created a second account, completely separate from my ‘geek’ self in order to gauge the use of the service outside of the ‘Echo Chamber’ – the results were not encouraging. Fast forward 2 and a half years and the public at large now understand social, they get it!

There are only so many that will use a service like Twitter to talk tech. We may not appreciate much of the banality that passes for conversation but we cannot deny that twitter is a much stronger, and more influential, place now that the conversation has diversified. Be it news or sport, it’s good to be able to keep up with things in easy bite size pieces.

Macro v micro

Remember, we control the tweets we see by controlling the list of people whose tweets we subscribe to. Just because Lady GaGa or Snoop Dogg are on twitter doesn’t mean I have to follow them. Brands seek celebrity endorsement in order to spread their message and it is unfortunately a necessary evil in today’s celebrity culture.

As individuals, we do not drink from the firehose. We create our own secular networks, predominantly isolated with small points of intersection; from day-to-day the rest may just as well not exist. I need not alter my online behaviour or connections simply because the population has grown.

Fear of change

Twitter has been compared to the adolescent teenager throwing a tantrum over the API usage issues but, ultimately, it is doing what it needs to survive. As I mentioned before, the timing and nature of Twitters announcements may have been handled better but the decisions have been born of necessity.

Has it lost touch with early adopters? Really? What else would early adopters be using it for?

Tools may be changing but core usage remains the same. We tweet, we share links and images. We have lists and hashtags. None of this has changed.

People may say that they don’t like being told what they can and cannot do but those same people will be using Facebook and iPhones – two of the most closed environments around. They have just gotten used to Twitter being more open and are throwing tantrums themselves.

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When it comes to the world of social media one thing guaranteed to start a discussion is rumor, true or otherwise, of any move by Google to don its gloves and step in to the ring. Google Me, social layers, redesigned Google Profiles and now Google Circles have all set tongues waging.

Google lives in a constant state of denial as any attempt to add social functionality to its existing services is heralded as the possible arrival of the next great social network designed to go toe-to-toe with Facebook.

Traction

Facebook is without a doubt the undisputed heavyweight champion of social and will – unless there are drastic changes – remain undefeated.

Recent figures show that despite a very high awareness of Twitter in the US (as high as 92%) the actual adoption rate is relatively low with only 9%. If an established service such as this should be have such a low conversion rate from awareness to adoption it does not bode well for any new challenger to the title.

We must be realistic and accept that any new network will not threaten Facebook and take years to grow to any appreciable size. Gaining traction is a slow process as it is painful for the end-user to migrate their circle of friends to another service.

It is, therefore, no wonder that the focus of Google’s efforts appear to be with adding social features to their existing products and the first major step in this direction is the recent redesign of the Profile.

In May of last year I wrote:

“I feel that, with some careful work, Google could build on its Profile system and integrate the services you use into one coherent offering despite them being independent applications. If you only use a single app then great, that’s all you are shown but for those using multiple services everything would be held in one place – a tab for each. Keeping each of Google’s services independent is a distinct advantage in my opinion.”

They have taken the first step by adding a Picasa tab – hopefully there is more to follow.

Identity

Within the space of a day Google Circles went from “imminent release” to “it exists but will be released later” to “a social extension of existing services”. The impact of Circles seemed to be decreasing hourly.

It would probably be foolhardy for Google to launch a brand new network when a significant hurdle is public confidence. There have been so many social false starts that people are loath to invest their time and social connections in a service for fear of it being just another pet project that gets abandoned when Google are bored with it.

While Orkut has succeeded in markets such as Brazil and India it was dismissed as a failure elsewhere due, in part, to very poor site performance. Google Wave seemed like a tool looking for a purpose and was quickly killed – most people just couldn’t find a use case for it. Buzz seemed a natural successor to Friendfeed but was hampered by initial privacy concerns and by being constrained within Gmail.

It would, therefore, be logical to see Google Circles as a social layer rather than a separate product and as the natural extension of work that has been ongoing for some time. In August last year, Google announced Groups for Orkut which enabled you to interact with different groups of friends for different scenarios – work colleagues, college friends, family etc.

As part of the Google Me and +1 rumours group functionality morphed into what was known as Loops. By creating smaller, more manageable groups of friends you would be able to keep specific social circles “in the loop”. Both Loops and Orkut groups are obvious precursors to the rumoured “Social Circles” functionality which Google has so far only admitted to being a research project.

This post on the Orkut Blog gives a good overview of the type of functionality we could expect to see which would provide Profiles with a much-needed boost to their abilities.

Where next?

If Google Profiles become a social hub incorporating your activity in other services then it could be reasonable to assume that, as they grow and become more useful, they could become a type of social network by default. Rather than specifically launch a product Google could morph Profiles to fit the predominate use case.

Google could enter the business of running a successful social network via the back door.

Image by Graham Triggs

The social landscape is changing. It is changing because of the services available, its reach and those using it. It is even changing because those using it are altering their behavior.

The services we use are changing, adapting, morphing and even changing the rules.

This post has changed

Shel Israel recently commented that a lot of the personal touch had gone; instead of people saying ‘I’ it was becoming ‘we’ in the business sense. The language is changing, becoming more corporate.

Dana Twichell expanded on this thought and called it “the fear”. I think it’s a matter of scale that is bringing the fear back.

In the past the social web wasn’t taken seriously as a business tool and little notice was taken of it by many. In that “no pressure” environment it was easier to be less formal, to take a few risks; if it didn’t work out there was little consequence.

We have a completely different scenario now where social media is big business and people are paying attention – not just to what you say but also to what you don’t. There are those also deliberately looking for slip-ups in order to use them to their advantage.

When it’s a smaller group of “friends” you can be less guarded but now that the conversation is in front of the whole world some are playing it safe.

As the line goes in the film The Social Network: the internet isn’t written in pencil, it’s written in ink. We must be careful what we say online as anything could potentially come back to haunt us at a later date but we must, however, not forget what made social media work in the first place: the social aspect rather than just becoming another forum for the same old pitches.

But, it’s not just those using the networks that are changing.

Rewriting the rules

Twitter now seems to be fighting to come to terms with its own success. It has been rewriting the rules for using its API for a little while now but the latest official party line is causing some consternation amongst developers and tech journalists alike.

We have seen Facebook rewrite the rules a number of times but, despite initial outcry, it has become what we expect from the social behemoth.

The key difference is that Facebook applications exist within the site itself, taking advantage of the large userbase in order to succeed whereas Twitter applications exist outside within the extended ecosystem and rely on that most precious commodity: data.

Gone is the cavalier, come what may attitude of yesteryear – Twitter is now big business and they want control. They want their data back.

This is one area where Facebook must be congratulated (believe it or not) – consistency. By being more closed and resisting the temptation to allow devs to build outside of the ecosystem we all know where we stand with Facebook – there are no broken promises in this regard.

Jesse Stay posts it’s about time and, while he has a point that Twitter should control their ecosystem the problem is that it is possibly too late to start being so draconian. If Twitter wanted to take control they should have done so earlier but this was before the days of Dick Costolo and Twitters business plan.

I saw a post recently asking when the founder of a startup should be replaced by a professional CEO. I feel, this is as clear illustration as any you will get, that it must be done as soon as possible once you know you have a viable entity.

Money changes everything

As Rob Diana argues, Twitter is finally giving its ecosystem, and the developers that build on it, some much-needed direction but after 5 years of openness can they really close the doors and still expect people to be queueing up outside?

Ever since Twitter experienced an extended period of outages it has been said that we should not be placing our online lives in the hands of just one company. Many, spearheaded by the likes of Dave Winer, have been calling for an open, federated Twitter alternative – those calls have suddenly got louder.

Could Twitter’s success threaten to also be its downfall? It can be argued that the exponential growth of twitter was due in no small part to the fact that the ecosystem was so open. The ability to read or post tweets from just about anywhere fueled the imagination.

Twitter encouraged developers to build on the platform in order to extend its reach and establish itself as the premier micro-blogging service. The API was written in such a way as to enable full use of data from anywhere but the realization has hit that this is not the way to be profitable.

Getting away with it

We have so much invested in the service that Twitter will get away with this new clamp down, just as Facebook has gotten away with a number of controversial events in its own history.

We don’t have to like it, and may not agree with the approach taken, but the landscape is changing and we may no longer recognise all the landmarks on the way.

All that remains to be seen is if the new direction ultimately improves the ecosystem, if the new rules for a more consistent approach bear fruit; despite some initial pain we may be pleasantly surprised by the outcome.

Update: since posting this I have seen Mathew Ingram’s post over at GigaOm which I urge you to read.

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There have already been many column inches (or pixels) devoted to the new implementation of the Facebook comments box plugin – some good, much bad.

We have seen Facebook extending their reach out to the rest of the web with likes, shares and instant personalisation so comments would appear to be the next logical step. As Rob Diana says “Facebook wants all of the conversation“ and many are asking if the sheer power of Facebook, due to number of registered users, could displace the likes of Disqus and draw more of the web into the Facebook universe.

Control

The arguments about conversation ownership and fragmentation have been rattling on since the emergence of social media as a force du jour; so far there has been no simple way to gather and arrange conversation threads about the same topic from across the social web. With their commenting plugin Facebook are looking to gather comments in one location and do away with the fragmentation by removing the need for other avenues of conversation. The phrase “all roads lead to Facebook” has never seemed more true.

They will no doubt come under fire for trying to corner the comments market but it is hardly surprising that this be a target when you look at how the service operates in other areas. The ‘closed system’ criticisms have been leveled at them for some time and this is just another target.

Comments hosted directly on a blog are firmly within the control of the blog owner, useful in that regard but of little use outside of the blog itself. This is where services such as Disqus come in to play. Control is shared between the blog owner and the commenter and the ability to automatically tweet those comments or post them to other services, as well as being able to look up an individual commenter’s history, gives greater utility beyond the confines of the host blog.

Ease of use

Bloggers want traffic; bloggers want external links to their content to generate that traffic, otherwise why blog in the first place? Services which feed comments to other locations are extending the reach of any given site. By Facebook placing comments in the user’s feed a blog has ’potential’ exposure to 600 million people with minimal effort – just one line of code.

Anyone looking to implement Facebook comments will most likely have already placed a like button on their site and, consequently, have a Facebook App ID. This makes the addition of the comments box plugin a very simple affair; in fact, I added it to this blog last night as a test in less than 5 minutes. It was removed almost immediately and I shall explain why below.

Options (or lack of)

The single biggest drawback with Facebook comments as they stand is the lack of options for logging in or identifying yourself. Currently, the comments plugin only allow you to sign in using a Facebook or Yahoo account – Facebook say they are currently working with other services to extend these options.

Not everyone either has, or wants, an account with either of these providers or wants the comments they make associated with them. Unlike Disqus, the Facebook plugin does not give the option to identify yourself by entering the usual name/email/url triumvirate but this is open to abuse and, interestingly, Robert Scoble argues that the removal of anonymity in comments greatly improves their quality – he could be on to something.

The debate will no doubt rage as to whether a blog owner  should dictate to their readers how they must use the site in order to participate in the conversation.

The tie-in

Having control of your comments is actually overrated until such time as you may want to change your commenting system. Disqus and Livefyre are currently the winners here in that the ability to implement or remove either system while retaining the comments is fairly straight forward. This is not the case with Facebook although TechCrunch indicate that an API is forthcoming to allow for the exporting of comments hopefully into a format that it easily transferable back to your blog.

As Facebook have already made it possible to export your profile (albeit, most likely, begrudgingly) it will probably not take too long for the export functionality to be implemented but if this is not done in a useable fashion can we justify the tie-in?

Blocking social media

Employers see the value in social media but the majority see it either as a time-sink or distraction and even a security risk (understandable in some professions) so sites like Facebook and Twitter are blocked. Needless to say, this greatly reduces the effectiveness of Facebook as a commenting system.

Although Facebook commenting has been available for quite some time the official launch of this new version has reignited the discussion as to how far Facebook should go in their spread across the web and how far we should let them.

Image by AxsDeny