Is Twitter just for the techies?

It's a question we get posed a fair bit, and probably fairly, because with any new technology or social network the initial core audience will always be full of early adopters. We only need to review Facebook phenomenal growth in the last 12 months to see that (there are now over 700,000 Australians over 50 on Facebook each month, many of whom have signed up during 2009).

Thankfully, and perhaps surprisingly for some it seems that Twitter is following Facebook in to the mainstream. We know this part through the celebrity craze that has long been publicized (Kutcher is up over 2m followers now) but more so through Twitters Trending Topics, which is basically the most talked about words and subjects on Twitter at any one time. And with c.18m tweets in a day it’s not inconsequential.

 A quick look at todays shows that it is mainstream news, entertainment and culture that is forging the main content:

• True Blood (TV series)
  
• Iran Election
  
• ‘Music Monday’
  
• Vegas
  
• LA Station Fire
  

And whilst I don’t have the trending topics from a year or so ago I think it’s a fair assumption to say these will have had a far more technological and digital marketing feel to them. Definitely good news as it is further confirmation that Twitter is a valid channel for many brands, and dare I say it – here to stay (for a while at least).

Mind you, as more and more Aussies jump on board we should remember to practice safe social networking. A study in the UK has shown that many Facebook and Twitter users are telling the world they are going on holiday, giving burglars easy pickings. You have been warned.

Cheers

Nic

 

The question is, why does Facebook want Friendfeed?

Facebook bought Friendfeed for an undisclosed amount of money. Mountain View, Calif.-based FriendFeed was started by co-founders Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor and Sanjeev Singh, all ex-Googlers, and raised $5 million in Series A funding from Benchmark Capital and its founders. Facebook is said to have paid up to $50 million for the company – $20 million in cash and rest in stock.

The question is, why does Facebook want Friendfeed?

No, this deal is not about Twitter. It is about Google — to be more precise: Google vs. Facebook.

The reason behind the deal is twofold: ability to publish more and more information in real time and the resulting explosion of data on the web. These two trends will soon make it nearly impossible to deal with the resulting information overload. As a result, the current seek-search-consume popularized by Google will eventually hit its outer limits — and when that happens…

In 303’s last blog (http://303digital.blogspot.com/2009/08/content-is-king-but-who-is-going-to-pay.html), content creation, distribution and consumption are amid a sea change. Whether it’s photos, videos, tweets, status updates or whatever…the content is getting constantly atomized. In order to consume it all, we need to find smarter tools for content consumption. FriendFeed is one of them.

If you look at the rapidity with which many of us are uploading information on Facebook — 1 billion photos a month, a billion pieces of content shared every week, 30 status updates a day — you know that the problem of plenty is only going to get worse.

The good news is that Facebook bought a solid team to solve this problem.
The FriendFeed team — ex-Google programming rock stars — just out-executed Facebook and kept launching new features at a breathtaking pace.

FriendFeed’s unique ability is to foster conversations — not a massive user base. If Facebook can take this capacity to “converse” and marry it to its mobile clients, what the company will have on its hands is a true interaction platform, befitting today’s always-connected life. This will give it a further boost against Twitter, a small, but fast-growing, micro-messaging company.

FriendFeed has built a real-time information aggregation platform that is impressive, to say the least. Facebook’s news stream will benefit from FriendFeed’s real-time expertise.

Facebook, after having copied so many of FriendFeed’s features, buying it was the right thing to do.

The history of the web in Australia

I wanted to share with you a stunning representation of the history of the web in Australia, courtesy of Nielsen and AIMIA. It shows the development of user numbers online since 2001.  Check out the video or for a richer experience go here http://avant.interactionconsortium.com/australian_internet/#

It shows how quickly our web habits have changed in terms of the most popular sites. Take Ebay for example, it leaps from 700,000 unique monthly visitors in 2001 up to a peak of over 6m in 2006 before dipping off to today's 3m. This compares to Facebook which didn't even register as late as the end of 2006, then had 400,000 monthly uniques in early 2007. and now, 2 years later has over 6m uniques! That's 48% of the total online population, and 28% of the country as a whole. Staggering.

Spare a thought for sites like Alta Vista (remember them?), over 1m uniques in 2001, gone by 2003.

Anyway, that's enough excitement for me for one day. 

Take a look and have a play for yourselves - there are multiple axis to play with. 

This is a great one to share with clients.

Cheers

Nic

Content is king, but who is going to pay for it?

Rupert Murdoch made big headlines this week with the announcement that he plans to charge for content across his digital portfolio by mid 2010.

 

“Quality journalism is not cheap,” said Murdoch. “The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites.”

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/07/2648972.htm?section=entertainment

 

Ultimately, Murdoch is spot on with his assessment here, he and news organizations around the world are providing daily and immediate content for every man, woman and dog; people who can simply elect not to pay for it by going online. Not only do you not have to pay for it, but the experience you have with that news is more engaging, more involved (through video, comments and forums) and most importantly of all – real-time. Ironically, you only have to look at this story itself to prove this point - it has generated over 5,000 stories online and 15,000 blog posts in the past few days. Hard for a newspaper to deliver that!

 

It is this web 3.0 (sorry) thirst for real-time information that is driving more and more people online for their news, and why the likes of Murdoch have seen a 30% drop in revenue for their offline properties. 

 

At some point in time, users will have to pay for content online because the advertising model doesn’t support the investment the publishers are making. But it takes a brave man (And I think we can say Rupert is that) to lead publishers in to a new pay revolution because there’s little doubt it’d be easier if they all did it together… 

 

The flaw in his argument is that the news he is presenting isn’t particularly specialist, so we could all simply get our news feeds from the good old ABC and BBC. Rupert references the Wall Street Journal who has been charging for content for years, but news.com.au is hardly on the same page as them. Financial comment and political news from the Economist or Fin Review - yes, Rugby League player naked in a hotel or Paris Hilton breaks a nail – no. 

The great ‘pay for music’ debate is a good guide too, no-one pays for music anymore – over 95% of all music downloads are illegal, which shows the uphill battle Murdoch and peers face with todays online audience.

Please post your comments, it'd be interesting to hear your views.

 

Nic