Posts from Twitter

If you want to understand what's going on at Twitter right now, watch this interview that Adam Lashinsky did with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo yesterday at Brainstorm. It's about 23 minutes long and covers most of the major issues that the media has been focused on in the past six months. In Apple's infinite wisdom, this won't play on an iPad or an iPhone because it is a flash player.

Tom Anderson, the Tom we were all friends with on MySpace, wrote a guest post on TechCrunch suggesting that there is a "Fred Wilson School Of Blogging." I'm not sure about a "school" but I do have some points of view and Tom mentions some of them.

Here's how I do it:

1) Have a long form blog on a domain that you own and that is permanent. Like Anil Dash says in the comments to Tom's post, this is about compiling a set of work that is substantial. Anil says:

Based on the past dozen years that I've been writing it, I expect that my blog will in some ways be one of the most significant things I create in my life.

I'm 100% with Anil on this. People ask me when I am going to write a book and I laugh at that suggestion. AVC is more than a book will ever be. It is live, it is deep (in terms of total posts), it keeps going, evolving, and ends when I end.

2) Have a short form blog an a different domain that you own and is permanent. Mine is at fredwilson.vc and hosted on Tumblr. This is where I put the things that fill out the story but don't belong on a long form blog.

3) Participate actively in the social distribution platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Build profiles, followers, and credibility in these communities. I use Twitter for broadcast to a wide group, I use Facebook for friends and family, and I'm still trying to figure out how to use Google+. These distribution platforms are great for getting your work out there but I don't personally want to use them as the place where my work is hosted.

4) Build community on your domains. In the case of my longform blog, Disqus is the tool I chose and after that decision, our firm invested in the company. I've seen and used all the various community tools out there and I believe Disqus is the best at building community on long form blogs. In terms of community on short form blogging, I think Tumblr has done the best job and that is why it is growing like a weed right now.

5) Engage everywhere. That means on Hacker News, other blog communities/comments, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. This takes a lot of time. Too much time. But I get so much value back from doing it that I make the time.

The most important part is to engage. The second most important part is own your online presence. Marco Arment has a great post on this point. He says:

If you care about your online presence, you must own it.

So if there is a "Fred Wilson School Of Blogging" this is it. It works for me and it can work for you if you are willing to invest the time and energy.

The day Google+ launched, I sent a friend at Google who was involved in building the service an email requesting an invite. I got the invite late that day and started playing with the service. Here's my profile. I'm not sure if this page is public or you need a Google+ login to see it. At some point Google will open the service to everyone and I expect this page will be public, but I'm not sure.

In any case, I hope Google+ succeeds. Given the blog posts saying this will kill Tumblr, Twitter, Foursquare, etc, you might wonder why I feel that way. Well first, I don't think competitors kill companies and services. I think the vast majority of "deaths" are self inflicted. Facebook didn't kill MySpace and Friendster, they killed themsleves by failing to address the shortcomings of their services and their inability to respond to changing market dynamics, in some cases brought on by competitors. Of course, that fate could be in store for any company, including our portfolio companies, but it won't be because of Google+.

My vision for social media is:

every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet

Not everyone wants a Facebook experience; default private, mutual follow, best for close friends and family. Not everyone wants a Twitter experience; default public, asymmetric follow, best for broadcasting short burts of information to large networks. Not everyone wants a Tumblr experience; totally public, asymmetric follow, best for posting microchunked media.

My dad, for example, doesn't want any of those experiences. He might like Google+. It's a lot like email. He can curate groups of friends; his friends from school, his friends from the army, his friends from the community he lives in, and share information with them quickly and easily. I can see The Gotham Gal's dad loving Google+ too. It's very utilitarian and functional and powerful for certain kinds of users.

I've never thought that there would be one social service to rule them all. I've never thought that there would be one social graph for the web. I believe we'll need a multitude of social services to satsify the needs and desires of all the users of the web. Google+ fills a void between public and private, it serves what is likely to be an older demo less interested in hooking up or hipstering out and more interested in the social utility it provides. That's a good thing. We'll get more people "posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet."

And there's another reason I hope Google+ succeeds. Developers need more social platforms of scale. A friend on Twitter posted a link yesterday to the post I wrote on the USV blog when we first publicly acknowledged our investment in Zynga. We first invested in Zynga in the fall of 2007 and back then I was eager to see Zynga build a business on multiple social platforms. I wrote:

Currently all of Zynga's games run inside social networks, largely Facebook, but also Bebo and several others. And that list of social nets will grow longer in the next few weeks.

Developers like Zynga benefit from having multiple large social nets to build on top of. Tech blogs have noted that Google+ has hooks for social gaming built in. That is great. My dad would love some of the Zynga games. Maybe he'll join Google+ and play them with his friends (including me) there.

My line about "don't be a xyz bitch" is all about controlling your own destiny. These social platforms are awesome to build and launch on. They give you instant distribution, instant users, instant social identity. But in a perfect world you don't want to be dependent on any single one of them. The more social platforms of scale there are, and we have a bunch now, including Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare, the better world it will be for developers. And our business at USV is investing in and helping developers build companies. So I'm rooting for Google+. I think it will serve users who aren't being served well (or at all) on the social web right now. And I think it will be a strong new platform for developers. And both of those are great things for the web, our business, and entrepreneurs.

The frequency of posts in a service is inversely proportional to the size of the post. Said another way, the longer the post, the less frequently they will happen.

Take a look at stats from the three largest "default public" social media services:

WordPress – 430k posts per day

Tumblr – 31.8mm posts per day

Twitter – 140mm posts per day (march 2011)

Of course, these numbers are also impacted by the number of total accounts and active accounts on the system. None of the three companies post those numbers publicly. Based on the numbers I've seen, the ratio of monthly active accounts to total accounts is also highly correlated to the the size of the post. The shorter the required post in a service, the higher percent of total users will be active on it.

If you want to understand the power of Tumblr and Twitter, you need to look at how quick and how easy it is to post. There are of course many other factors at work, but brevity and ease is a big part of why these services work so well.

There's a culture of celebrity around founders in the tech business and certainly the Twitter founders are no exception. @jack, @ev, and @biz are celebrities and deservedly so. But you can't build a company all by yourself, or even as a trio. And Twitter has a relatively unsung near founder in @goldman who contributed so much to the company over the years.

At the end of the day, it takes a lot more than four people to build a company. And Ev's post today about Twitter says it so well. So I'll end with his eloquent comments about the team that built Twitter into what it is today:

Founders, in general, get an out-sized share of the credit for any successful company. There are hundreds of people at Twitter now, some of whom have been there for years and played critical roles. There are those whom you know by name and others you may never have heard of individually, but they have all contributed to the company’s success. I'd venture to say it's one of the finest teams ever assembled in the Internet industry, and it’s the accomplishment of which I’m most proud. Not just because they are people who are good at their jobs, but because they're good people.

When I was running the company, I felt very privileged that this amazing group had granted me leadership. (It practically brought me to tears on multiple occasions, during our all-hand's meetings, when someone demonstrated their unique and heartfelt awesomeness.) It was they who collectively helped Twitter mature from a quirky, wobbly toddler of a service with great potential but way too much attention for it's own good to an operation that is becoming—if not already has become in some areas—world class. And it is they who will take it to the next level, which will surprise us all.

We largely invest in consumer web services with a large number of engaged users where the users create the content. Services like this can become messy and hard to navigate. There is always a signal to noise issue.

I'm a big fan of curation in these services. Twitter has lists. Etsy has favorites. Tumblr has tag pages. These are all variations of curation in services that have a lot of noise in them.

Recently Kickstarter launched their own version of curation called Curated Pages. In the Kickstarter model, "Curated Pages are a way for organizations, institutions, and (soon) individuals to share projects they love on Kickstarter."

Here are some of my favorite Curated Pages:

The Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund – The Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund provides grants to photographers who are documenting social and political issues around the world. Now with Kickstarter, we can all help fund these important projects.

NYU's ITP Program – NYC's "media lab" and one of the most impactful and important pieces of NYC's tech community. They've curated a page of projects they like.

Creative Commons – The Creative Commons organization evangelizes for technology and legal frameworks that facilitate sharing and creativity.

The Sundance Institute – A curated page promoting Kickstarter projects from Sundance supported artists.

You can find all of the current curated pages at the bottom of the Kickstarter home page.

If you are interested in curating a page on Kickstarter, this feature will be made available to everyone soon.

If you are building a marketplace or a social platform, make sure to build curation into your model. It will make the service easier for everyone to navigate, particularly new users.

I was talking to a bunch of entrepreneurs a few weeks ago, and someone asked me what I thought was new and game changing. I replied mobile notifications. I thought I'd explain why.

I'm talking about android notifications here, not iPhone notifications or anything else. I think notifications is one of the things android has done much better than any other mobile OS and I suspect the way they do it will be eventually copied by the other mobile OS vendors.

Instead of doing a popup alert which interrupts you (iPhone), the android notifications all go into a single inbox that can be quickly viewed by pulling down from the status bar at the top of the main screen. You can get a vibrate or audio alert when a new notification comes in. That is configured by the user. I choose to have some notifications give me vibrating alerts (like communications services such as sms or kik) and leave most others silent. But that is totally up to each and every user.

The reason I think mobile notifications, done right, are a game changer is that notifications become the primary way I use the phone and the apps. I rarely open twitter directly. I see that I have '10 new @mentions" and I click on the notification and go to twitter @mention tab. I see that I have "20 new checkins" and I click on the notification and go to the foursquare friends tab. I see that I have "4 new kik messages" and I click on the notification and go to my kik app.

I think this is a game changer for a few reasons. First, it allows me to use a lot more engagement apps on my phone. I don't need them all on the main page. As long as I am getting notifications when there are new engagements, I don't really care where they are on the phone. Second, I can have as many communications apps as I want. I've currently got sms, kik, skype, beluga, and groupme on my phone. I could have plenty more. I don't need to be loyal to any one communication system, I just need to be loyal to my notification inbox. And finally, the notification screen is the new home screen. When I pull out my phone, it is the first thing I do. I think Android ought to reconsider what the home screen looks like. Why not have it feel like a Twitter timeline, alive and happening, versus a dead desktop style collection of apps?

I haven't done a deep dive on how this all works but I intend to. Can HTML apps use the notification channel? Can developers get access to this notification channel and start to build filters and other obvious applications that we will all want and need when this becomes our primary way we use the mobile device? These are the kinds of questions I want to understand because I think notifications will become the primary way that we consume on the mobile device and may be the reason we move away from downloadable software and back to web based software on our mobile devices.

And that is why I think mobile notifications are one of the biggest game changers to come along in our world recently.

When you've been in a relationship for a long time, you start to take things for granted. And then something happens and you are in love all over again.

That's what is happening with me and Twitter right now. I was in a rut with Twitter for much of the past year. I'd tweet out my blog post every day and not a lot more. I'd check my @mentions and a search on fred wilson a few times a day. It was a routine. Work.

But in the past few weeks, I've found myself reading tweets a lot more. I'm replying to tweets a bit more (something I've never loved to do for some reason). I'm retweeting more.

I just spent 20 minutes reading my timeline from this morning back to yesterday morning. I have built an amazing set of people I follow, 564 of them, all curated one by one over the past four years. The timeline is so rich, so full of different things from different people. Tech, sports, politics, music, family stuff, humor, and way more.

Twitter's mission is to instantly connect you to the things that are most important to you. It does that so well. It's love all over again.

I immediately thought of that great Monty Python skit when I read a series of posts in the past week declaring RSS "dead." If you look at the number of refers/visits coming from RSS, you might conclude that services like Facebook and Twitter are taking over the role of content syndication from RSS. That's essentially what MG Siegler concludes by looking at TechCrunch data in this post.

But as some of the commenters on that TechCrunch post point out, many RSS users consume the content in the reader and don't click thru. That's certainly what goes on with AVC content. Here are AVC's Feedburner stats for the past 30 days:

The blue line is "reach" meaning the number of unique people every day who open an AVC post in their RSS reader. It was almost 10k yesterday and it averaged 7,730 per day over the past month.

Here is AVC's web traffic over the same period:

So AVC averages about the same number of web visits every day that it gets RSS opens (about 7,500 per day).

Not dead yet.

A few other things worth noting. The direct visits of ~80k per month include a substanital amount of Twitter third party client traffic that doesn't report to Google Analytics as Twitter traffic. That's been a missing piece of the analytics picture for a long time and I wish someone (Twitter and Google??) would fix it.

AVC gets about 2,500 visits a day from RSS. That means about 1/3 of the people who open a post in their reader end up clicking through and visiting the blog. I suspect the desire to engage in the comments drives that.

The twin tech news aggregators, Techmeme and Hacker News, drive a ton of traffic to AVC. Thanks Paul and Gabe!

Bottom line is that RSS is alive and well in the AVC community. While I do agree that Twitter and Facebook have gained significantly in terms of driving traffic across the web, for technology oriented audiences, RSS is still a critically important distribution platform and is very much alive and well.