Twitter... a search engine?

Being in SEM, this is a dangerous post for me, but I do not think that search.twitter.com in its current form is the next big thing in search as John Battelle and many others do.

Look at one of Twitter's current most popular queries today: Bobby Jindal...

How valuable is this information from Twitter;
vs. this information from wikipedia;
or this information from Google Blogsearch;
or this information from Google News;
or this information from YouTube;

I think it is more fair to say: Twitter has developed an index of real-time thoughts and opinions. The value of Twitter is the data; but like any raw data it needs context, understanding and intuitive display.

An interesting application using Twitter's index was developed by Yahoo engineers combining Twitter with Yahoo News on the Yahoo Boss system - TweetNews Search. I find this information superior to the information above because it meets the user requirements of in-depth information, smart user interface and also delivers on the promise of real-time information and timely data sorting.

I look forward to seeing what else the other search engines (including search.twitter.com) can do with Twitter data...

Update 3/6/09: Bill Simmon's take on Twitter: "In 15 years, writing went from "reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts" to "reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible" to "reflecting on what's happening as it's happening" to "here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you," or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome."

Update 3/9/09: I was just getting an error when trying to sign into Windows Live Messenger. The error I received said that the service was unavailable. That seemed strange and I thought to myself, "How do I verify this?" I first thought about Google News, but decided that was too slow. So I went to Twitter... lo and behold, others are having problems too. So, that was a pretty cool search experience (though it would have been better if Microsoft had tweeted, "We're working on it".

Update 3/13/09: More thinking on Twitter after I read Chris Copeland's article on Search Insider. The other search app not covered by the search.twitter.com app is the Q&A aspect of tweeting questions, thoughts or comments to friends. Unlike email where users force their random emails into someone else's inbox, Twitter has an elegant passiveness to it. If you want too participate, you can. If you want to just sit on the sidelines and watch, you can. If you want to ignore tweets altogether, you can. The Q&A aspect of this is certainly interesting angle on search, you just have to make sure your friends are more reliable than Google!

Update 3/31/09: Good article from a fellow Jeeviant alumni, Peter Hersberg, on the Q&A aspect of Twitter.

Short Feeds vs. Full Feeds

I have been using Google Reader for a few months now and have enjoyed the experience. The one thing that I have decided that I do not like is when publishers publish a short feed. The experience is not seamless when I am constantly clicking and opening up new browser windows. I want to read my content in one location and the short feed interrupts that. Worst is the news sites that publish a one sentence teaser.

To this day, I have published abbreviated feeds for Marin Modus. This means that if you read Marin Modus content in a feed reader, you would be to read the first paragraph and then would need to click through to the site to read the rest. I did this for two reasons:

1. I was afraid people would steal my content if I published my full feed. It is very easy to convert a feed to content on one's website. So long as you have the feed address, you can convert the content onto your own website. This happens a lot and it is very frustrating to see your content published on an automated website trying to make money by tricking people into clicking its ads.
2. I wanted people to come to my website. I have an ego and watching the stats on Google Analytics and Feedburner can be very addictive. Seeing which topics spiked the most visits and which topics have hardly registered is always interesting. It is also interesting to see which keywords people used to find the site. Mostly, I just liked it when people came into my environment.

I have realized that the experience of the short feed is not as good for users as the long feed and because my content gets stolen no matter how long the feed is, it does not make sense to punish my readers.

So today, I enable long feeds for Marin Modus and I will be methodically unsubscribing to short feeds over the next few weeks... while I might miss great content, I want a more seamless experience.

Post-Script: The news sites and blogs who do publish short feeds probably have similar reasons as me. They also have to make ad revenue and to do so requires building and retaining your audience. However, they should consider RSS feed advertising (display and text ads embedded in the feeds)... it might help them make some more money and open a new channel during this tough time.

UPDATE 2/24/09: Ouch... Hearst is going to close or sell the San Francisco Chronicle. Maybe SFGate.com should try RSS ads and release full feed formats? I do like their columnists and bloggers, but can't stand the one line teaser in the feed.

UPDATE 4/3/09: News Corp is investing in a mobile reader. Now we're talking! I don't need my news to be free. I just need it to be up to the minute and easily accessible. I'm not sure I love this idea, but at least someone is trying to innovate technology to see how to solve the problem. In the same article, Rupert Murdoch, "questioned whether the newspaper industry should continue to allow online news aggregators, such as Google Inc., to aggregate newspaper content without being compensated..." I think the news organizations should want products that send traffic direct to their site to continue doing that; it is free marketing and search engines are not going away. The issue content producers face is when their content is not original (eg. it is an AP article) or someone else scoops them or outright steals the content. I think the latter issue is the real problem. Anyone can appear in Google News, but the issue is not with Google because they enable it, it is with the content producers who are being scooped or being out optimized or having their content stolen.

An exposition on my decision to root for Bay Area sports teams

Ouch... some scathing responses from friends about my decision to change sports team allegiances. Of course, these friends are spoiled; they can walk out of their house on any given day and go watch one of their favorite teams live and in person. I can not do that.

In any given year, I can watch the Cardinals once, Suns once and maybe ASU (football) once... so while I can go to 2-3 games in a two-year span, someone who actually lives in Arizona can go to 120+ games (not including playoffs and other hometown team sports).

Sports is about watching the games, marveling in the athletic ability and rooting for your team to win. Sports is not about reading stats online after the fact or watching the 15 seconds of highlights on Sportscenter. Those things are great, but without the game itself, there is nothing to root for and the pure enjoyment of the sport is lost.

I have great memories of rooting for Arizona teams, but those memories are all more than 10-years old. The players are gone, the coaches are different, the playbooks have changed. There is nothing about the teams today that resembles the teams I rooted for except for their uniforms.

I have no qualms about shifting allegiances. I do not owe Arizona anything and I am not changing because the teams are better. I am changing so that I can take my kids to games, root for the home team and build up a new set of fond memories. What's wrong with that? It's exactly what people in Arizona would do.

Live in the moment and always look forward.


Post-Script: How does it feel to attend a Cardinals-Cowboys game or Cardinals-Bears game or Cardinals-Steelers game and have more people rooting for the opposing team than for the Cardinals? "What's wrong with those people?" we used to ask. Now we know. They are torturing themselves.

Post-Script II: What is the bond between a fan and their team? The uniform? The players? The coaches? The history? When the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore to become the Ravens, should the Cleveland fans have rooted for the Ravens because that was their team, players, coaches, owners and history just playing with a different uniform? Or should they have waited for the expansion Browns with nothing tied to the historic past of the Browns except the uniforms? Should St Louis fans not root for the Rams because the Cardinals used to be their team? In fact, should Chicago fans also be rooting for the Cardinals considering that is where they started? Watching games and experiencing the sport in person; that is the root of being a fan.

A Longiloquent Farewell to Arizona Sports

I have lived in the Bay Area for 10 years. When I moved from Arizona, I was a fan of the Arizona State Sun Devils, Arizona Cardinals and Phoenix Suns. The Diamondbacks did not exist and since I never was a fan of hockey, the Coyotes did not strike my fancy (though the old IHL Roadrunners were fun).

After I moved out here, it was easy to immediately become a fan of the Giants. The Phoenix I lived in had no team, the Giants AAA team was the Phoenix Firebirds and the Giants spring training was in Scottsdale. We essentially grew up following them. It did not hurt that at the time I moved here they were good and that one of their most memorable games in the past 20 years happened to be on my 13th birthday - October 17, 1989. So, when I was an assistant media planner being entertained at these games, it was natural that I would start to root for them.

For most of my formative years watching sports (ages 10-18), the Suns were really good. They had a good core of players in the late 80's and early 90's that could contend with the best in the West. Then when they traded for Sir Charles, they took it to the next level and lost a heartbreaker finals to none other than Michael Jordan. A few years after those finals, the team was completely different and I started to lose interest in the NBA. I don't remember if the Suns were any good during the late 90''s, but I expect that they were not as good and it made it easier to ignore them. I did attend some games (most memorably Sir Charles first trip back to Phoenix as a Houston Rocket -- he had 18 points and 33 rebounds; the crowd gave him an ovation when we was announced and then playfully booed him throughout the game.) Anyway, fast forward to 2009 and I still don't love the NBA like I did in the late 80's and early 90's... But as I watch the Warriors and attend their games I'm coming around.

I attended Arizona State and had season tickets each year I was there. One year, we were seconds away from winning the National Championship until David Boston of Ohio State (and future Arizona Cardinal flameout) caught a last second TD to take the game and championship away. But what a season! Growing up in Arizona, I had flip-flopped between UofA and ASU until I finally decided that because I lived in Phoenix (and ended up attending ASU), the Sun Devils would be my team (though I never really followed any other sports including basketball which they weren't good at and baseball which they were good at - and on which team Barry Bonds played college ball). I have followed Arizona State football pretty closely for a long time and there have been several great seasons and many not so great seasons. I try to attend games in the Bay Area and in Arizona when visiting family and watch Saturday nights when I am home (paying the extra $2/month to Comcast for the Pac10 sports package). Readers of this blog know that college football is a sport I enjoy watching and Arizona State has been an entertaining team for quite some time, but...

The Arizona Cardinals are a whole other story. They moved to Arizona in 1988. I met Neil Lomax, Bob Clasby, Ron Wolfley and Al del Greco just by walking down the street in our area and knocking on their doors. Every single one let us in, hung out with us for a few minutes and gave us an autographed picture. That was super cool and I was a signed and sealed fan ever since. I will say that before 1988 I rooted for the Giants and Bears. The Giants because I had moved from New York only a few years earlier (though my grandfather wanted me to be a Bills fan) and the Bears for the '85 super bowl because Jim McMahon and I have the same last name (I was 9, ok?).. anyway, with the Giants and Cardinals in the same division it became difficult to have dual loyalties (though they rarely were close in the standings) and I eventually moved my fandom to the Cardinals. In college, I had seasons tickets and went to every game I could. When I graduated and moved to the Bay Area, friends and family would make fun of me when I would talk about how the Cardinals were an up and coming team. Around that time, they beat the Cowboys in the playoffs and I was feeling pretty confident that they were on the rise. So confident that I predicted they would be in the Super Bowl withing 10 years... always to an audience of jeers and laughing. Soon thereafter, the Cardinals fell back on their typical losing ways and the bet/prediction was forgotten -- until this year. You know that story so I won't belabor it. However, before we reached this point, I almost had dropped the Cardinals from being one of my teams because being in the NFC East, I never saw there games and I did not want to pay for the NFL package (fall Sundays in Marin are too nice to stay inside)... then the NFL realigned and the Cardinals were playing the 49ers 2x per year and the Raiders 1x either in the pre-season or regular season. And the NFL and Cardinals lured me back in.... until now.

Today, I am announcing, to no one in particular, that I am officially resigning from the fanbase of the Arizona Cardinals and Arizona State Sun Devils (and all other Arizona sports for that matter). From this point forward, I will root for the San Francisco 49ers and Cal Bears. I have been here 10 years and am not returning to Arizona. I have many fond memories of rooting for Arizona sports, but what is the point of being a fan of a team that you can not easily follow and to who's games are difficult to attend? So, with regret but great anticipation, I say, "Go Giants! Go Warriors! Go Niners! and Go Bears!"

3/9/09 UPDATE: I changed my mind about Arizona State University football. I could not step aside so easily. Though I still stand by my declaration to root for the Cal Bears, I do not want to ditch out on the Sun Devils. That said, I have had absolutely ZERO regrets about moving on from the Cardinals. I've been following the Niner's exploits in free agency over the past few weeks and have found myself rooting for them and not caring about the news coming from Arizona. So, my gut told me to stay with the Sun Devils and move to the Niners. OK, that's settled.

Three thoughts for the day... Layoffs, Cloud Computing and California/Arizona budget shortfalls

For a company facing 10% layoffs: Should companies offer employees the option to vote on:

• 10% layoffs
• 10% paycut + no raises for the next two years
• 1 day/week furlough (ie. unpaid day off) staggered so the company is always production ready

There is a certain fairness to letting employees determine their own destiny. It would not work in all cases (for example, the restaurant who does not have customers and therefore there are less tips to share or a factory with 50% less output). It would seem to set up an interesting prisoner's dilemma. The main reason to not do this is probably the politics involved with the actual decision making; that said, it would be interesting to see a company ask employees (maybe it has been done before?).

2/18/09 UPDATE: I guess I'm not the only one thinking about this. NPR did a story on this topic earlier this week.

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The major problem I see with Cloud Computing right now is that there are many clouds in the sky. The dilemma for the consumer is that they do not know which cloud to choose. Using social media as an example, the consumer has to choose between Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn and Plaxo just to name a few. None are really compatible with each other in terms of data portability. New services are coming out to help the user manage their data and privacy, but its not there yet. Some may not think of social media as cloud computing, but what else is it? It's basically a hosted software as service which allows the user to store data online instead of on their desktop. Another example is online photo sharing. When consumers log on to each, they are now responsible for managing a different set of data (photos) on each. Adding photos to Kodak is a different data set than photos shared on your blog which is different than photos shared on Facebook and on and on.

While, in many ways, cloud computing is already on its way to achieving critical mass, the next step needs to be horizontal integration that opens up data across closed platforms and the ability for the user to manage one set of data.

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In speaking with my father over the weekend, he described the budget deficit that Arizona is facing... $1.6B this year. In California, we are facing a $41B deficit over the next 18 months (so let's say $30B/year). With 5M people in Arizona, the total budget there is $9.9B (which means that they have a 17% budget shortfall). With 31M people in California, we have a $100B budget (and a 30% shortfall). I am not sure of Arizona's plans (besides job cuts at the government), but California is going to borrow $10B, cut spending by $15B and temporarily raise taxes (sales and gas) by $15B over the next 18 months.

So who is in a better situation - Arizona with collections of $8.4B and a budget of $2000 per resident or California with collections of $70B ($80B after the changes) and a budget of $3,000 per resident? Is more money a better starting point? Or is it just wasteful excess?

The NFL Pro Bowl: Brilliant Marketing

Next year (2010), as a test, the NFL Pro Bowl will be played the weekend before the Super Bowl (during the off week after the conference championship games). What a brilliant idea! Besides adding some excitement to game (because the season is just hitting its climax), this is great marketing. I love this decision... let me count the ways:

1. Pro bowl players are going to get a lot more recognition than they do playing the week after the Super Bowl... good for the players, good for their teams and good for merchandise sales and sponsorships... cha ching
   
2. Host cities get two events, not one. That means they will bid more for the event... cha ching
3. More travelers and more early arrivals to the host city means more money for retail and hospitality... cha ching
4. The game will be watched by more viewers who are still excited about the season and looking forward to the upcoming Super Bowl... cha ching
5. Commentators will have more to talk about on TV and Radio and Newspapers which will sell more ads... cha ching
6. You might even sell more pro bowl and Super Bowl merchandise... cha ching

Some people have complained that the new timing of the game eliminates the super bowl players from the game... but who cares? They will still be honored with Pro Bowl status and who was watching before? Football was the only major sport to not have its all-star game during the season and it is no coincidence that it is probably the least anticipated and watched all-star game of the major sports. Yes, super bowl players will not participate, but that is OK, because THEY ARE PLAYING IN THE SUPER BOWL the following Sunday... which would you prefer to play in?

PS - While playing the week before the super bowl is probably the smart move, it could have been cool to make Super Sunday a double-header...