Corvus Consulting

The Ancients talk of a time before memory, before 1990, where, here on the west coast of Canada, coffee culture did not exist. The world then was a flat wasteland of instant coffee, reconstituted from crystals, sitting for hours on a sad Tim Hortons’ hot-plate. Like cave-folk, only with less to live for, we stumbled about knowing nothing of espresso, machiato or latte. The only reason to drink that grim brew was to bitterly pinch oneself for a moment out of a mumbling, lurching existence.

Things are different now.

Today, serving coffee means having an industrial espresso machine, knowing and boasting the bean supplier, and not daring to let an espresso shot live outside the cup for more than a minute. What changed?

One thing: Starbucks.

Serious coffee drinkers may wave Starbucks aside, but deep down they know that they owe the flourishing of their love to the green mermaid. Starbucks cracked the secret of bringing coffee as way of life, with all of culture’s refinements and diversity, to places where it didn’t exist. They bridged the gap between specialist and general consumer. They raised the bar everywhere they went, changing perceptions and democratizing the elite language, tastes and enjoyment previously isolated to eccentric cafes.

Like any large business there are bound to be practices and effects that aren’t so great, but what I want to focus on is how Starbucks took the tastes of an elite group into the mainstream, and in doing so changed the minimum expectation and demands of the mass market. Leaving coffee, let’s look at the state of Web 2.0.

Hey, Spaceman, How’s the Weather Up in Space?

Chances are that if you’re reading this blog, you know that user-generated content can be more surprising, compelling and often trustworthy than ‘the news’. You wield feeds to give yourself a god’s-eye awareness of change across a custom chain of islands producing news, images, opinions, and funny cats. You know how to find your friends on any website and how to make new ones purely on the basis of shared interest. You know how to weave your awareness and presence through a network of devices, and how to make the threads vibrate to communicate your most casual and profound thoughts. And you know that the world without the connectedness seems dark and stale.

Web 2.0 is our coffee, and we’re the oddballs who sip from tiny cups in out of the way cafes while everyone else thinks that Folgers and Maxwell House are the real deal. We might get small thrills from knowing we’re on the cutting edge, but we also know that it would be more fun if more people understood how much they were missing. And deep down, we know we’re failing to bring the most exciting fruits of Web 2.0 to the world at large.

Try explaining a folksonomy or a wiki to an average web user. It’s hard. How about social bookmarking, or lifestreams? It’s usually hard to get the concepts across, and our enthusiasm for this or that innovative startup comes across as almost alien. With our interest in the web, it’s easy for us to pick up new ideas and words and run with them. For the rest of the web world, it’s not so easy, and we do a terrible job at communicating the value of what we’re doing. To really cross over into the mainstream, Web 2.0 needs its Starbucks.

Blue is the New Green

This weekend I got to meet and work with Scott Kveton up here in Vancouver. While waiting for the rest of our group at breakfast, Scott told me that the night before, he overheard a pair of 30-something women talking outside a pub, and these words especially caught his ear:

“You’re not on Facebook? Oh my god you have to get on Facebook, you just have to.”

What Scott heard was akin to a Starbucks opening on a new street. Only it’s not called Starbucks and it doesn’t serve coffee.

But when that friend goes home, possibly drunk, and gets herself into Facebook, she’ll learn in a short time much of what we’ve been building and enjoying on the web’s edge for the past few years. She won’t be socially networking, she’ll be finding friends and checking out people. She won’t be posting user-generated content, she’ll be making jokes, whispering to friends and talking in a group of people. She won’t raise an impressed eyebrow at some AJAX-fu, but she will be pleased for a second that her message appeared in a thread without reloading a page. She’s not joining an elite crowd of aficionados, she’s joining a party in progress, where it’s easy and safe to move from room to room.

In talking about this, Kris Krug noted that Facebook excels at taking only the most useful and central feature patterns from Web 2.0 websites and making them flow well into the central app. I think he’s dead right, and that’s how Facebook blue will become the Starbucks green for Web 2.0 concepts.

There are things that weird me out about Facebook. There’s a strong streak of Disney-like sanitization running through it, and any hub that links so many personal details together in a persistent space makes me wary. But there’s also no denying the power of a smooth user experience and especially of making contact with people you haven’t spoken with in a while. It’s not the most advanced, it’s not the best, but it just works and works well.

Like Starbucks, there are lots of Facebook members who have discovered a whole new world through one well-crafted and infinitely repeatable experience, and after a while they’ll move on to something more specialized and refined. But most will stick with Facebook for their daily fix of the social web, barely remembering the time before time, when the gossamer-thin channels of email and instant messaging and websites that weren’t about us were the whole online world. But no matter where they end up after Facebook, they’ll expect certain things and a certain quality of experience that didn’t exist for them before.

Like Starbucks, Facebook won’t steamroll every plucky startup and well-loved, if small, service. Niches will still have their place, and in their innovations have a better chance of being understood and adopted with the post-Facebook web user, much like the ex-Starbucks customer has been schooled enough to seek out and embrace niche providers that suit a more refined taste. Makers of the new and cool will soon have more people than ever who get what they’re doing and want a piece of it.

The tide is rising, and all boats are floating higher with it.

The second of two posts on Twitter, where I’ll share how we’re using Twitter to enhance communication with the Ma.gnolia member community.

In the last post’s apologia petite (pardon my faux French) for substantial meaning in Twitter posts, I held that despite being tiny, Twitter posts can carry very significant meaning when read in the context of an established social relationship. That notion immediately suggests that micro-blogging is best done between friends and family who know each other well. It turns out though, that this isn’t strictly the case.

At Ma.gnolia, we’ve put Twitter to good use as a means of keeping in touch and staying relevant to a core group of our membership. Not all our members are using Twitter, obviously, but those who use Ma.gnolia every day are heavy web users, and as such are much more likely to be able to tame and enjoy Twitter with ease. So our expectation is not to reach all our members with Twitter, but just those who are very regularly connected.

It’s worth telling how we got started. During a big upgrade in January, we spent a couple of days getting the kinks worked out, but some of those kinks blocked access to the site from time to time. Since our blog and wiki are integrated pieces of Ma.gnolia, we couldn’t use those channels to keep members informed. And it’s not like we could send out a newsletter for each change, primarily because these momentary changes in status didn’t affect everyone and people would start to wonder if we’d lost it.

So we started using Twitter, making posts whenever there was a change worth reporting. We updated our standard error pages to point people to Twitter as a source of status updates. That got us through the rough parts, but it was a suggestion from factoryjoe that took us to making status updates a daily thing, and to maybe even throw in a cool link of the day.

All in 140 characters?

Messages for the Medium

Twitter demands that you be concise, a brown belt in précis. It also demands that you be somewhat innovative with your words, not just to get in under the character limit but also to keep your communication interesting. Seeing ‘Status OK’ almost every day would be informative, but it gets old quickly. We try to mix it up by finding new phrases to say that all is well, and when it’s not well we have the fun of fitting an artful description into a tight space.

Adding the cool link of the day is the other part of our Status OK posts. We have two advantages here. The first is that Ma.gnolia produces a short link to each bookmark we save. The second is that Twitter takes that short link and makes it even shorter, getting us in under the limit almost every time. Moreover, we make a point of thanking the person who saved the bookmark.

Today’s post was a good example.

Ma.gnolia thinks that spring has sprung, and it feels great. Live large with today’s link http://ma.gnolia.com/zalayo (Thanks fabioassis)

And 3 characters to spare! Rock on. The feedback on how we’re using Twitter has been good and folks say they like a cool link of the day. Hunting a new link down each day is a great exercise for me because it’s one more chance to explore the community and see what people are up to, but with specific purpose – I need a cool link and I need it now! It makes me enjoy the fruits or our own work even more.

Of Course We’re Friends!

Almost as soon as we got the word out that Twitter would be a status update channel for us, people started to add us as friends. Though we hadn’t seen other companies using Twitter do the same, we almost immediately started to reciprocate. We made a point of doing so as soon as we saw the notification that someone had added us, as quickness is in line with the Twitter experience and it shows people that we’re here and engaged, and that they matter to us outside Ma.gnolia as well. Our approach produced an unexpected benefit in that Twitter is a two-way channel, and before long members began posting publicly and directly to us about service interruptions or other issues that needed attention. Without barely trying, we had opened up a lightweight support channel with a super-low barrier to use.

I’ll admit that it’s flattering to watch the numbers of friends grow, but for me that’s the lesser part of the fun. The real thing is in the posts that people share with us, and how it allows us to understand where they’re coming from.

Unexpected Benefits

I’ve already mentioned that Twitter opened up an unexpected way for members to let us know when the service needed some kind of attention.

A greater, though less tangible benefit, came in the insight into what our members are up to. Scrolling through the posts of our friends gives us a Gestalt of what they deal with, what excites and frustrates and amuses, what little successes and failures they face. In short, it enriches how we see our members and understand them as people. No specific features have changed or been planned in response to what we see. Instead, the payoff is that we can think and talk about our members in a more informed way.

What started as a need for a way to keep members posted through a rough update has turned into a vital extension of how we communicate with our members, and how they can talk back to us. All in 140 characters per post. Not too shabby.

This post is the first of two about Twitter and its potential to be an effective and meaningful way of communicating. Today I’ll share some thoughts on objections to the micro-blogging groove, and try to show how Twitter does achieve meaningful communication because of, and not in spite of its format. Tomorrow I’ll talk about how Ma.gnolia is using Twitter to help us keep in touch with our members.

Pretty much anyone who has heard of Twitter has an opinion about it. Not just the casual, evaluative kind where we give a thumbs up/down or numeric rating, but a serious consideration of whether it’s somehow bad for us. The arguments go along one or both of these lines:

Objection 1. Twitter is noisy, and as such adds a high frequency interruption channel to our environment. With so many interruptions, getting focussed and into a productive state becomes more and more elusive, and we end up with something like late-onset ADD. Perfect instance: Kathy Sierra’s pondering if Twitter is the end of attention.

To hear that Twitter is noisy makes me point to the name and raise an eyebrow. It feels like it’s supposed to be a little noisy, and while that can be part of the fun it also has to be managed. Outpacing email and instant messaging, the phone, children, pets and the person who sits next to you, Twitter can be a serious interruption engine. And like all those other interruptions, learning to keep them from running and ruining you is part of working and playing in the Internet.

Objection 2. Twitter is a river of banal narcissism, in that answering the question that drives Twitter, “What are you doing right now?” produces only familiar, ordinary moments. Waiting for the bus. Eating a sandwich. Is your sandwich that important that the world must know? With 140 characters, what can you possibly say of substance? Perfect instance: Nick Carr calls out Twitterers as a navel-gazing chattering class.

Context is Key

The answer, I think, is quite a lot, and it’s not so much about what gets sent out as it is how it is read. Twitter posts (I really can’t call them ‘tweets’, not yet), aren’t consumed like most regular blog posts and web pages, because we usually read those items in the context of a search for information or in a passive, news-reading mode. Twitter is just sort of happening, and as such most Twitter posts can seem pretty trivial when read without some kind of context.

Since Twitter streams grow and intersect by adding ‘friends’, the most natural context is a personal relationship with an individual or group. Common, but important relationships, like friend to friend, organization members, teammates, and so on. In the context of these relationships, the conversation is already flowing in some way or another, opening up shared values, vocabularies and timelines as informers of each Twitter post.

To demonstrate, let’s make a fictional Twitterer. We’ll call him Adam and say he’s in university. When Adam posts to Twitter:

“Talking to Amanda on the phone”

We can imagine that being read in a few different ways:

Adam’s lab partner: Who’s Amanda?

Adam’s best friend: Awesome! He finally got the nerve to call her up!

Adam’s ex-girlfriend: Her?? I can’t believe it. He’s still rebounding.

Adam’s rugby coach: Whatever

Amanda: doesn’t use Twitter, which is probably a good thing at this point

How Adam’s post is read is determined largely by the relationship he has with the readers. There’s a neat trend in that scenario, where the more involved the shared context, the deeper the understanding, and the stronger the resonance. Indeed, Adam has moved the shared timeline between himself, his ex, and his best friend in under 140 characgters. As a relationship builds, Twitter posts can say more with the same number of characters, and I think that’s how Twitter posts can communicate very well with few words. This isn’t to say they always do.

Same Time, Different Space

Dropping into a bunch of Twitter posts might leave you feeling a bit lost if you don’t have any reason to be looking at them. Something has to tie you to the person making the post for the resonance to happen. The campus gossip scenario shows this in theory, but please try with me this comparison of experiences:

First, check out the public timeline from Twitter. You get the idea right away, but it’s just kind of there.

Next try this view, and let it play for a half-minute or so.

Bada-boom! Context! Every post gets a place on the world map, and you’re seeing it barely a moment after it was sent. With our understanding, or lack of, about places in the world we can establish a context for the person behind the post, and a powerful one at that. What does it do to know that someone who just posted “getting ready to go to the market” lives in Baghdad or in Paris? The difference in locality from our own or from what we are familiar with becomes a binding element in reading a given post and knowing where it comes from.

Place raises notions of environment, culture, language, stereotypes and more, and as such adds richness to each Twitter post. By also answering ‘where are you from’, Twittervision adds something engaging and human to what is otherwise can feel like a bulletin board on Red Bull. Twittervision adds the context of geography, an alternate to the context of interpersonal relationship.

Though overlapping Twitter streams with different types of contextual information are novel and interesting, the context of relationship seems to be the one in which Twitter works best. Returning to the scenario with Adam, we can see that the value starts to go down with the degree of interpersonal involvement. That would seem to relegate the best uses of Twitter to existing friends and family circles, but in fact, with the right circumstances and the right approach, Twitter can be a great tool for strengthening ties in communities that gather online around services or initiatives.

Next Time, on TwitterTalk

In the next post, I’ll show how we’re doing that at Ma.gnolia, and talk about some of the unexpected benefits of doing so.