Sweet Child of Mine Cover Version

i'm a sucker for metal covers

How YouTube Uses Twitter...

Given all the stir that google's new official twitter account has caused (@google), i thought it might be fun to give a bit of history on our YouTube account (@YouTube) while we can still claim the title of "google product with the most followers." 

We first got our Twitter account, jeez, must have been back in early 07? I know some of the Twitter guys from their Blogger days and pinged Biz about cool stuff we might do together. My initial idea was that we'd tweet out the URL of a YouTube video automatically when it passed 1,000,000 cumulative playbacks. But when i did the math it turned out that we have a tremendous number of videos that hit this milestone each day. It would be too much for even the most dedicated tweeters! So we put that idea aside but there's a few similar ones that we're thinking about doing - some which i know @sacca wants to see. Would people want something as simple as a "Tweet this video" button?

So in 08 we decided to jump on the Twitter bandwagon and start sending out interesting videos, links to new blog posts, links to new features and even the occasional bug report. We follow a few folks from the YouTube community and hope to add more each day. Overall i'd say we're excited about the immediacy (and brevity) of the platform. Users are increasingly coming to services like YouTube and Twitter to search for breaking news so we're learning from watching how users discuss these events on Twitter.  And of course, share their great YouTube videos plus give us feedback.

The feedback itself is actually what i'm most impressed with these days. After we do a new code push our engineers are all monitoring Twitter to see what users are saying. Oh sometimes there's hilarious drama but generally the community is awesome about giving us their views. In fact one engineer built a little google app tool which allows you to graph tweet traffic over time for a specific query. We use it to see when there was a particular spike in YouTube related tweets. Usually around a new feature release or when someone notices a bug. 

So YouTube users - know that we are listening to you and sometimes we'll jump in if we think we can help. Tweet @YouTube and definitely follow us if you want the latest YouTube updates.

Oh, and btw, i'm @hunterwalk if you want to follow me.

Twitter will need filters in order to thrive longtern

New communication channels often get praised because signal:noise ratio is way higher than mature channels. Email was fantastic - then came spam and 10,000 people having my address. Part of the love for Twitter is that it still has a pretty high signal:noise ratio. But this changes over time as you add more followers - people will ruin their own experiences by introducing noise due to social pressure and design failures (see my posts "Psychology of the Salad Bar" and also how this is impacting FriendFeed).

So what does this mean for Twitter? IMHO their continued growth and longterm utility will be based upon filters - both explicit user controls (such as groups) and implicit prioritization (order by "interesting" not chronology). If Twitter doesn't do it, certainly the ecosystem of developer apps will nail it. Ev has talked about designing with constraints - he famously fantasized about a social network which limits you to only 10 friends. Well, that's one way to keep high signal, low noise. Another is to treat data intelligently, and my bet is that's the way Twitter (or the ecosystem) will go.

Here's some of the filters i'd find potentially useful:

Explicit (ie dependent upon me)

• groups/folders
• deprecate/mute tweets containing kw= or #=
• Google Reader integration - if i already subscribe to someone's feed, i don't also need to see their tweet announcing they just posted

Implicit (ie do it for me)

• sort by interestingness (based upon # of retweets, how often i tweet @ that person, etc)
• collapse dupes - turn retweets among those i'm following into a single group
• conversation view a la TweetTree

btw, if you want to follow me: http://twitter.com/hunterwalk

Blog design is dead: the sites i like the most, i see the least

For blogs is it possible that web design doesn't really matter any more? The sites i like the most are the ones i visit the least. Why? Because i'm pulling their content to me and consuming in Google Reader. I couldn't tell you if they're red or blue, two column or three, dynamic or static. Doesn't matter - i never go to them directly.

Now i know this isn't true for non-RSS crowd and site templates are important ways of projecting your personality - Matt at Wordpress could tell you tons about the premium template ecosystem which has evolved over there - but for me save the time and just publish a full text feed.

Coinstar: when you're right, you're right

So, uh, hey, CSTR is up 23% since i recommended it as a good recession play. Dow is down 5% in that same time. Maybe i've got a second career as swami? 

Why is Marriott Tweeting at Me?

There are many geek versions of a social media "first kiss." Remember when you started sending email? I don't recall mine but Mike Harkey insists I was the recipient of his first back in 1995. Last year when i learned about a friend's divorce via Facebook newsfeed it was the first time that something so previously private and serious became an update item alongside superpokes and friends for sale.

So this week when i got my first unprompted but relevant commercial tweet i gave it a bit of pause. After tweeting about my attempts to priceline a cheap room in napa, NapaMarriott @'ed me an offer to stay with them. I can imagine that at scale this turns into spam -- i don't want contextually relevant offers based on all my tweets - but in this case an employee working excitedly to attract new customers in the midst of their research/purchase cyle? Pretty cool....

Why i <3 Joss Whedon

From today's NYTimes interview with Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) re: his new show "Dollhouse"

Q. What was your thinking behind “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”?

A. Twofold. On one hand I wanted to set an example of the creative community making something without any help from studios of any kind and actually getting it out to the public and making a profit on it. And the other half was my feeling that there are not nearly enough supervillain musicals.

'Because of This Thing, People Think They Are in Hell'

Amusing article in WSJ today about split opinions of the demonic horse statue near the Denver airport.

"It looks like it's possessed," says Denver resident Samantha Horoschak. "I have a huge fear of flying anyway, and to be greeted at the airport by a demon horse -- it's not a soothing experience."

Curiously enough, the statue crushed and killed its designer during assembly.

Jimmy Buffett helps launch Google Ocean

Attended the press event for the launch of Google Earth 5.0 containing several new features including Google Ocean. It was an inspiring event - great to see technical innovation turn out such a usable and immersive product.

For me it was especially fun to see Jimmy Buffett talk about Google, debut his new YouTube channel and perform. MG over at VentureBeat has some nice coverage as well as capturing a photo of me talking with Buffett after the event. I'm a longtime Buffett fan so looking forward to more collaborations.

Oh and what did YouTube do to support this great launch? We now support altitude in our geotags, which will help you tell us whether your video was shot at the top of a mountain or below the surface of an ocean.

When is a start-up not a start-up?

Somewhere along the way the moniker "start-up" shifted from meaning a new business in its first years of growth to merely "pre-exit for its investors." With liquidity paths clogged more companies are entering the adolescent phase of their existence where start-up doesn't really resonate for me as a description.

A company like Linden Lab has been around since 2000 and is very profitable. Are you a start-up? No, you're an ongoing concern, or actually technically just a small-medium business.

And most SMBs don't have exit events so what does this mean for early venture investors looking to return their fund? Are we going to see more conflicts between company and investors where the latter push for a growth acceleration strategy or roll-up in order to get public or find liquidity? Will more CEOs just buy out their investors at reasonable prices in order to take control of their business? Will we see CEOs cease saying they are start-up entrepenuers and recognize that they are, gulp, small business owners (not that there's anything wrong with that, but it seems the tech execs i know equate that moniker with the guy who owns their dry cleaner. Not sexy enough for them).