Dopp Juice Archive

First, the news. Flickr announced a new service that allows you to post videos up to 90 seconds long.

Next, the response. Flickr Video is getting a lot of criticism, mostly because the 90 second limitation is unusually short for an online video service in 2008.

Now, the joke. In the spirit of Internet humor, the Twitter-based peanut gallery has decided to turn its griping about Flickr Video into a parody of the Barack Obama is your New Bicycle website (which is a parody in itself).

Now, the real joke. Who’s griping about Flickr Video? Oh, right. Twitter users! As Barb Dybwad points out, these are people who love the creative restriction of 140 characters in text, but just can’t yet fathom an equivalent in video. Hey Twitterati! You thought Twitter was stupid when you first heard about it, too. Either give creative restriction a chance, or use Vimeo. Flickr isn’t trying to be the next YouTube. It’s trying to do something new.

Okay, but back to the joke. Even though I don’t support the goal of this protest, I think its execution is brilliant and hilarious. Here’s a sampling of some of the gems I’ve picked up via the Tweet Scan:
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A new-to-Twitter friend just emailed me asking what she should do about the strangers who are suddenly following her tweets.  And I don’t think she’s the only one who’s experiencing an influx of spotlight attention because of SXSW.

Like any social networking website, people use twitter for different things, so no one suggestion is going to fit everyone. Here are my Personal Twitter Policies:

• If someone follows me, I will click the link to their profile and see if I recognize them. If I don’t, I will see what I can learn about them in less than two minutes, silently thank them for caring about what I write, and leave it there.
• If I do recognize them, then I check in on the following things:
  • Have I met them?
  • Am I ready to put energy into nurturing a relationship with them?
  • Do I want to read what they’re tweeting?
• If they get a “yes” on all three of those, then I’ll follow them. If not, then I have to stop and think about it a little more.
• If I’m not sure if I recognize them and I can’t figure it out in two minutes, then I usually won’t follow them.

This is all a function of how I use my incoming twitter stream: as a feed for ongoing conversation. There’s a murky grey area downside in my policy: there are real people who watch my twitters and care about what I have to say, and I’m not returning the favor. This makes me wince a lot, but still, for me it’s more important to protect my relationship feed than to look like everyone’s best friend. My policy is less open than some and more open than others. For the most part, it works for me.

But this does bring up another one of my Twitter Policies…

I use my most recent tweets to update my Facebook status, Skype status, and the “Last Splash” which appears at the top of this blog. Because of this, I try to avoid using the popular “@” reply convention unless I can articulate a thought that will stand alone. Otherwise, I’m just as annoying to the outside world as someone talking loudly on a cellphone; displaying only half of a conversation is a disservice to eavesdroppers.

There are lots of ways to use Twitter, and I know a bunch of people who take completely different (and totally legitimate) angles on the “follower thing.” For example:

“I’ll follow anyone who follows me and who is clearly not spamming people. If they take the time to read my content, the least I can do is show them I care about theirs.”

Or, “I’m not trying to pick up stalkers, so when people I didn’t know started following me, I switched my tweets to private.”

Do what works for you.

Last night the newly-freewheeling Susan Mernit and I attended the SD Forums meeting on Using the Social Graph / Social Platforms to Enhance Search at the Yahoo campus. The panel included representatives from Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Chirp, and they grappled with questions about what the Internet is going to do with all of this information about who is connected with whom. Here are a few of my takeaway notes:

• When we search, we find things we were looking for. When we participate in social networks, we find things we didn’t know we were looking for.
• To subscribe to someone on Twitter is to use them as a media source.
• Our public content and our public statements about our social graph are a kind of performance. (Dopp Juice is a kind of performance.) This stuff needs to be treated differently than private conversations (messages, emails, IMs), which are meant to be off-stage.
• One-way connections (e.g., following someone on twitter) articulates what you’re interested in. Two-way connections (e.g., an email conversation) articulates who you’re interested in.
• Direct search has been nicely monetizable (see Google’s Massive Empire) because it involves a direct interest, but social search is the new frontier for monetization.
• Social networks SHOULD NOT ASK PEOPLE FOR THEIR GMAIL AND YAHOO MAIL LOGIN INFO. (i know, we’ve talked about this already, but it was nice to hear it on the panel from the Yahoo rep, too.) His reasons: our email address books include everyone we’ve ever emailed; not just the people we have valuable relationships with. The tactic is spam-producing and relationship-damaging.
• Facebook’s style of social networking sometimes creates lightweight friendships that obfuscate the value of networks. Knowing who my 20 best friends are is often more valuable than knowing who my 500 best friends are.
• There is an ongoing tension between privacy and portability. How do we keep our information safe, versus how do we carry our information with us?
• True portability involves both the ability to extract your information in a way that can be used elsewhere and the ability to delete it from the system so that it’s no longer in the first network’s hands.
• There can never ever be a privacy surprise. If the user sees you publicly displaying something that they thought was private, you just lost their trust in a very big way.
• There’s user-generated content and then there’s information about the user’s social graph. These are separate things. To do cool things for fun and profit on this next frontier of social media, you’re gonna want access to both.