We seek components that better our experience: better meaning, better gifts, icons, making devices our own, seeking our own gratification. Seeking better environments and experiences. (Giving people a better thing to post on their FB status by giving them a better experience.)
Some of us seek to share and create in an autobiographical sense (writing about me and my experiences). We create when we make experiences for others.
Q1: What are the basic bare-bones components of yor business? What do you do and what value you create? The smallest words, the smallest sentences.
Q2: “How” do we share?
Q3: How do we extend relationships. Physical to virtual to physical. People to people. Dependent to Independent to Interdependent.
Q4: How do we collaborate? How do ALL of our media collaborate?
Q5: Are we addicted to our own comments?
Q6: How do we extend the network; how do we take the network with us? You live and die by your database. How do we touch people outside of the platoforn du jour?
Q6: How do we make new distribution? Read ‘Value-chain desegregation’ chapter from ‘The World Is Flat’ – Thomas Friedman. How do we extract more value from the distribution chain?
Q7: How do we develop relationships that yield? How do you separate your community experience from how you make money? ROI?
Q8: In a flat world, there are still street hustlers, so how do we extract value after flattening?
Discuss. 
Today I learned about Twitter’s new “Project Retweet,” an initiative by which Twitter will proactively adopt retweeting functionality into their platform. Twitter’s being proactive about bringing more features into their service is on the surface a good thing, but once I delved into @Biz’s description of how the new feature will work, I realized how poor the approach that they seem to be taking might be.
Here’s how I understand it to work: on the Twitter website a retweet function will appear near the existing reply function on each tweet you see in your timeline. Using the retweet function will echo the original tweet, appearing as a tweet for the original poster rather than a tweet from you.
The new post will appear in your follower’s timelines as if it were posted by the original author complete with that author’s avatar and username instead of yours with only a small notation at the bottom of the tweet that it was retweeted by you. If I’m following you but I’m not following the user whom you’ve retweeted, essentially what will happen is that a stranger’s tweet will show up in my timeline.
If I’m following just a handful of users whom I’m familiar with, then it may be obvious that the stranger’s tweet was reposted by someone I follow, but I don’t follow a handful of users; I follow a thousand users. I don’t even recognize many of the people I follow who are appearing in my timeline; I don’t keep track of whom each of the people I follow is.
I follow a core group of people whom I trust partly because of the information they retweet; their retweets help me “discover” more valuable things — people, facts, ideas, issues, opportunities, etc. To me this is exactly how Twitter creates value: enabling individuals to rapidly create and spread weak knowledge and relationship connections across a broad landscape, connections that make sense to me and are relevant to me and enable further connections.
As soon as the source or origin of the connection begins to erode, the connection begins to lose value. In other words, if I don’t know why a particular user’s tweet is showing up in my timeline there’s a high probability I’m going to skim right over it and ignore it; whereas, if a tweet appears from my core group whom I recognize there’s a high probability I’m going to read it.
The way retweets are currently passed around allows me to identify a potentially new and valuable connection originating from a user whom I already trust and whom I’ve already chosen to follow because they are doing just that: providing new and valuable connections. Disconnect the tweet from the trusted source and the connection won’t be created. Twitter’s discovery value will erode.
A few months ago Twitter eliminated the option to see @replies by people you follow to people you don’t follow. Seeing whom my trusted core group was talking with allowed me to discover new people to follow — another example of relying on the people you follow to present new and valuable connections. Once this disappeared Twitter began turning into a much bigger echo chamber with a much smaller opportunity to discover and create new, valuable connections.
In fact, I rarely add new followers anymore at all because Twitter broke the connection thread I relied upon to discover new people to follow.
The user backlash was tremendous and the founders were contrite yet they did not restore the functionality they took away. They only gave us a vague promise of a new method, saying, “the use cases that folks loved about this setting will return in a new and improved form,” which has yet to materialize.
If Twitter proceeds with “Project Retweet,” Twitter will break another valuable connection mechanism, the echo chamber will reverberate even more loudly and the opportunity to discover new value through Twitter will be eroded even further.
How will we find new connections via Twitter then? Will Twitter’s discovery value completely disappear? I don’t have the answers to those questions, and until I do Twitter’s future value to me is rapidly approaching zero.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Around 3:30pm today I noticed that Facebook’s chat application had been upgraded. I wasn’t aware an upgrade was in the works, but the features they’ve released are extremely useful.
Your friends are now grouped by the list you assigned them to, and you can choose which lists you want to appear in the chat application.
Facebook Chat Groups Interface
You can also appear online selectively to these lists while appearing offline to others via a very iPhone-like toggle switch to the right of each list’s name. Re-order your lists, show Feed stories in the chat window and suppress avatars in the online user list.
Facebook Chat Options
Active chat sessions appear at the top of the online user list, although it seems new chat message notifications do not appear with the proper section. New message notifications are all showing next to the first session listed.
Facebook Chat Bug
The best feature is that the entire chat app can now pop-out of the Facebook webpage, just like Google’s web-based Gtalk. I had just told @MCGSTUDIO and @longbrook this past Friday how nice this feature would be!
I’m not sure if every user has access to the new chat features. What do you think of the new features? Did I miss anything? What would you add to the featureset?
