A Swipe Too Far: Twitter Mobile Stresses Follower Count Over Bio & That Makes Me Sad

As I've said before, I'm tough on Twitter because I love the service. Twitter is more than a broadcast tool for me. It's a way to discover interesting people who I might not otherwise meet, especially those who take the time to follow me. However in the latest iOS update, Twitter made a subtle change that sacrifices its meritocratic spirit and emphasizes the scoreboard aspect of follower count. The screens above are the paginated view of a Twitter profile. When you click on an individual in the feed you're taken to the screen on the left which displays their picture, potentially a background image and then prominently, their count of Tweets, Following and Followers. Images are nice looking but for the average person who I don't know, tell me very little about who they are.

For example, some guy named Elie who seems to be sitting at a desk. No background image. And his follower count is really low. Snooze, I guess this guy is some loser, next.

But when I swipe over to see his bio... Oh cool, he's the founder and CEO of a company I've heard of (Oyster - a travel startup) and he's located in New York, a place I visit often for work and family. Hey he could be interesting and maybe I should follow him too. Or message him and we can grab coffee next time I'm in town.

BUT NONE OF THAT HAPPENS BECAUSE THE BIO IS HIDDEN BEHIND A SECOND SWIPE.

I'd love to hear some of the design thinking from Twitter on this one. To me it emphasizes pictures and follower count, both of which are more important to branded or celebrity accounts. Even if unintentional, this changes makes Twitter a bit less human for me and more about accounts where the entity would already be recognizable (Lady Gaga! NASCAR! Odwalla!). C'mon Twitter - bring bio back to the default view!

[edit: titled the post "A Swipe Too Far" based on Rohit's Tweet]

Tech Reporters Should Disclose Whether They Actually Used The Product They Reviewed

A canned demo. A press release. A few screenshots. All too often a tech reporter gets some combination of these to write their post about a new product or feature. Sometimes though the product is already available but it feels as if the reporter didn't even use it before rushing to file a story. These paper-thin posts usually provide very little insight into the product and rarely make a case for why it will or won't be successful.

Earlier today I bemoaned on Twitter that tech reporters should publish their user name along with a review. That way we can publicly check out their usage and interactions. If not applicable perhaps state how long they used the product.

Trevor Gilbert of Pando Daily stepped up and committed to doing this more often. That's awesome and I hope more journalists follow his lead. And that founders & PR professionals respect these sorts of actions as proof they'll get a fair shake from someone who gets hands-on with their product. Trevor is one of the hardest working young reporters out there and I applaud his hustle. 

Who Will Speak for The Normals?

Pando, GigaOM, BI, TechCrunch, Verge, D, someone, anyone, please steal this idea...

We need to cover The Normals beyond the occasional (and anecdotal) "These Five 11 Year Olds Love Instagram" posts. An ongoing series where a tech blog or YouTube channel talks with people outside of our demographic about how tech is changing their lives. You know, let's see the iPhone home screen of a 42 year old nurse in Dallas. Or how a family of four in Charleston incorporates tech into their lives.

Early adopter used to narrowly suggest someone who had the disposable income and interest to jump on new tech trends -- starts in the metropolitan areas and CS departments, then spreads. But did Pinterest, Farmville, textPlus breakthrough in Palo Alto? Nope, it was the normals, the teens, the middle class. The people who weren't at TechCrunch Disrupt, who aren't tracking their Klout scores. At Google we do lots of user research with these segments (and I'm sure other large tech co's have similar programs) and I can tell you, the insights are fascinating.

I'd watch these videos, read these articles, etc. Would you? My journalist friends, what do you think?

update: @nichcarlson from Business Insider pointed me to their "man on the street" style feature: http://www.businessinsider.com/category/man-on-the-street

How Working for Google Impacts My Blog

"If you didn't work for Google, would your blog posts be more controversial?" That was the question posed to me Saturday night by a friend who thinks pretty deeply about technology news. Holding aside the fact that I think he just called my blog "vanilla," it caused me to pause and consider how my writing is impacted by my employment.

The summary? If I didn't work at Google, I don't think my posts would be more controversial. I think they'd be more constructive.

While there are many tech bloggers who are consistently high quality, many test the theory that enough loud noise can be mistaken for signal. Oh they're outraged at something quite often. They love Company X vs Company Y pronouncements. And there's certainly a bubble forming or popping at every moment. Although the Internet seems to reward this in the short-term with traffic and prominence, it self-corrects over time. I don't think I've ever been this type of writer as I find it difficult to fake passion. There'll be occasional bursts of frustration expressed on this site, but it's overall not my thing (pageviews be damned).

So while that's a personal style, there are two conscious decisions:

1) I generally avoid aiming the #fail cannon at Apple or Facebook, since they seem to be the companies externally thought of as Google's most direct competitors. While I'm not a real believer in zero-sum tech (we're growing pies rather than carving them up), there are obviously some strategies which bump into one another. Do I largely not blog about these companies because of fear that Google management will fire me if I do? No, rather it's the way these sorts of posts get summarized in a Twitter-world. My 1200 word balanced post on why Ping didn't work or how frustrating Facebook's privacy settings are gets summarized as "Google Executive Slams Apple." And that's an unfair annoyance for Google's PR team when they could be working on bigger issues. [a. see what I did there abt Ping and FB privacy ;-) b. the tendency to conflate anyone who works at Google into a "Google Executive" is maddening but frankly also self-inflicted by the fact that everyone in tech these days seems to have a "Head of ___" title. c. If Owen Thomas turns this into a Business Insider post I'm breaking up with him]

2) Beyond perhaps writing slightly more often about Apple and Facebook, the biggest change to my blogging would be actually trying to help companies solve problems they're having or put out specific product/strategy recommendations. Today I only do this at the fringes when there's something I really really want to share, but even then I hope no one at Google pings to ask why I'm helping Twitter find and fix bugs. Why? Because as a user of a product - Google owned or not - I want it to be great.

Cynically this could be interpreted as "Oh if only Hunter was able to drop all this knowledge, wouldn't the world be amazing." Now to be sure I don't claim my musings are manna - it's less about Wise Hunter showing off, and more that the Internet is a wonderful place for collaborative ideation. Maybe the words could be sediment that someone else builds on top of to a better place. Fine, still worthwhile. Maybe I'd just be plain wrong - it happens. While being outside of a company gives you fresh eyes it also can cause you to be totally ignorant. So what. Put it out there the best you can and see what happens.

And thus if the day ever came where I wasn't working at Google, don't expect to see an increase in flamebait or picking fights. Expect to see more PRDs. Because that's the type of nerd I am.

[Updated w Comment from Paul] Why Paul Graham published Black Swan Farming

Update: Paul Graham was kind enough to respond on Twitter letting me know, well, basically that i'm wrong :)

 @hunterwalk Actually not. I only skimmed the book and didn't remember that bit, and I never saw the VF article.

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From the minute Paul Graham hit "publish" on Black Swan Farming two streams of response emerged. First was praise for the essay. Second was the question "why write this now?" There was some speculation he was signaling to the marketplace (and YC companies) that some of them might struggle to find funding, and that this was expected (if not desired). But there might be a simpler answer: he wanted to tell the story before Randall Stross did.

Vanity Fair just published an except from Stross' book "The Launch Pad" which will be available later this month. It's a fairly detailed look at Y Combinator, which has been one of the most influential forces in startups over the past five years. Not just for the companies they have helped create but as the straw which has stirred the drink with regards to incubator models, funding terms and hacker culture. The section they chose to publish includes the following:

Six years after Y.C. had made its first investments, Graham attempted to tote up the value of the fund’s investments. Excluding the most recently funded start-ups and looking only at the 208 start-ups funded from 2005 through 2010, he reported that five Y.C.-funded companies had been acquired for over $10 million each, and 20 more had been sold for less. Graham also added up the valuations of the 21 most valuable Y.C. companies that had not exited and came up with a total of $4.7 billion. Most of that came from two companies: Dropbox and Airbnb. Paul Buchheit, a Y.C. partner and an early employee of Google’s credited with creating Gmail, points out that in Y.C.’s portfolio “the number one company is worth more than [the] next 199 companies combined, while number two is worth more than [the] next 198 combined, and so on.”

One could say that the outliers—Dropbox and Airbnb—are the only ones that matter to the Y.C. fund. Perhaps it would be better to say that Y.C. is in the hits business, and uncertainty about which start-up will become the one monstrous hit benefits many founders who are funded. Graham and the other Y.C. partners tell the founders that start-ups fail only when founders give up. It is not necessarily in the interest of founders to follow that advice indefinitely, however. At a certain point, surely the personal price paid by founders to attempt to resuscitate a failed start-up is simply too high.

Sounds a lot like a condensed version of Black Swan Farming, but without the logic and the emotional searching that Graham was able to express on his blog. My hypothesis is simply that Graham knew this was the section coming out in Vanity Fair and wanted to speak more broadly and personally to this question of "winner take all." What it means for him and YC, what it means for the companies in the YC classes, and what it means to founders thinking about applying to YC. So he wrote Black Swan Farming and preempted any of the mischaracterization that might result from people just quoting Stross' book.

Evaluating Talent: False Positives Way Worse Than False Negatives. Agree?

At brunch today was talking with some folks about talent evaluation within larger companies. Started riffing on false positives vs false negatives.

False positives could generally be described as folks who are recognized and rewarded beyond their actual value. They might not be horrible failure, but generally they receive more accolades than they should.

Conversely false negatives would be talented employees who receive less kudos, responsibility, or compensation then they should.

While the best companies are thoughtful about both of these issues, it was pretty unanimous that false positives are way worse than false negatives. Why?

• Peter Principle - False positives will be elevated to areas of more strategic importance with greater impact to hurt the company, more opportunity cost
• Corrosive to culture - Other employees will start to model the behaviors of the false positives given that the company is signaling what matters to them
• Best employees will leave - Blocked and disgusted by false positives, good employees may leave, even if they are being fairly recognized themselves

Of course false negatives aren't great either - you likely increase attrition of those people directly - but no where near as sad as false positives. Do folks agree or disagree?

Pandora: The Unsocial Music Station (& why this may be a good strategy)

Pandora's July 2011 redesign was greeted with pretty unanimous enthusiasm from its loyal community. They even added music feeds via Facebook Connect, a step which led to Wired magazine proclaiming that Pandora became a "social network."

A year later, while Pandora's business has experienced tremendous growth, it's fair to say that their social feeds haven't. How many times do you think to use social discovery on Pandora? Or encounter a link to Pandora via a 3rd party service?

What's at the core of these challenges - does Pandora "not get social?" (oh how i hate that phrase) The problem isn't in their DNA but rather their business arrangements. As a service which relies upon compulsory license agreements, they can't play songs on demand, but rather abide by a set of rules governing digital radio services. In exchange they don't need to negotiate agreements with the record labels and instead pay a flat fee per song.

But this same bind prevents them from creating a great social service. Why? Because songs are the unit of sharing for music. Not stations. And if you try to share a song on Pandora all others can do is listen to a sample of it. A small, not satisfying sample. And so, people don't share.

Instead Pandora must rely upon being broadly distributed (access) and creating great single-user experiences (personalization). You want to share a song? Fine, go to YouTube or Spotify. But you want to listen to an hour of great tunes without having to do anything but press play? That's Pandora.

And it's working - Pandora gets the strong majority of my "time to tune out" listening time. But that's when I've already decided that I'm going to listen to music. If I'm just surfing around, I more often come across single songs shared via competing services and those potentially pull me away from Pandora. The more casual user has no opportunity to be pulled into Pandora via any site/app other than Pandora. For example, look at "pandora" vs "spotfiy" on Twitter. People are huge evangelists for Pandora but no links. Spotify on the other hand not only has users, but also brands, promoting its service with links to songs and playlists.

Does Pandora management think this is an issue? Probably, but not one they want to take on right now. They could negotiate with the record labels to allow for limited on-demand streaming, which would enable me to share an individual song from my Pandora station and play it back once for friends who click on it (after which of course Pandora would use that song as a seed for shifting seamlessly into personalized radio for them -- get 'em with a song, hook em' w an experience). However that would require starting to negotiate with the labels and putting the renewal of compulsory licenses at risk a few years down the road.

This door may need to be opened regardless if Pandora ever wants to launch in countries which lack internet radio licenses, but as we've seen with their Australia launch, they don't seem to be in any rush to try out new models. And why should they? With last quarter's growth exceeding expectations and smart homes/smart cars/smart phones rolling out, they've got plenty of positive momentum. But outside of the opaque blackbox tuning that's Pandora's secret sauce, I don't spend as much time thinking about my music there - that's actually one of their strategies. On Spotify however I'm creating and subscribing to playlists. Checking out what songs my friends are listening to. It's more work and right now it doesn't steal from my Pandora time (I pay for both services), but it's certainly an alternative approach to music which is either complementary or competitive depending on your POV.

So at the end of the day Pandora may actually never be social, finding themselves in a small group of successful products which can ignore the Like button, but with a sharing flank exposed to their competitors.

I want my clothing to be smarter...

I'm a pretty utilitarian guy when it comes to my wardrobe and on most days, a t-shirt and jeans will do me just fine. But even I want my clothing to be smarter....

Why can't a virtual wardrobe of clothing items I own live for me in the cloud based on taking photos of my sales receipts?

My phone knows where I am, where I'll be and the current weather forecast, can't appropriate items be recommended to me? Whenever I travel somewhere I end up having to Google the weather, largely to determine what to pack. Why can't I just get told what I'll need?

Using image recognition, why can't I easily find pictures of other people wearing a garment I own in order to get ideas for outfits?

Why won't retailers offer 'gift tag' options where a gift message is sewn into the shirt next to product information tags. I'd love to personalize in this fashion and think it'd be neat to pull a shirt out of the closet and be reminded that my wife bought it for me.

Once an item is in my virtual wardrobe, can I be told where to purchase more of the same item, or recommendations for items like it?

Soon my shirt will be able to monitor my health metrics and give me reports over time. Cross-reference that with my calendar and I'll be able to figure out what activities and people stress me out the most.

How'd you like to see your clothing improve?