Scalability: from Neanderthals to Twitter

A quote from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind",

Twitter is having trouble competing for users against Facebook and Youtube because it has failed to scale human relationships beyond the threshold of 150 individuals. That is, the social networking niche of "less than 150" is already occupied by Facebook and for Twitter to become successful, the company has to make it easy for each user to organize and curate information dynamically from thousands of people who are not in the immediate network. Moreover, since connections and information on Twitter is more (10X!) dynamic than on Facebook, the degree of organization of information streams has to be at least 10X more sophisticated as well.

Youtube has met its content scalability challenge by enabling users to create and share playlists, channels, and subscriptions. Every user on Youtube is a developer who produces new ways to access contents at a collection or stream level, rather than at single video level. In Scalable Innovation we call it scaling at the aboutness" layer. So far, Twitter can't find a way to enable its users to become developers. All they can do is propagate gossip, which worsens the information overload problem for everybody who gets over the "150 individuals" threshold.

To summarize, Twitter needs to find a way to help people become better Information Sapiens because the Information Neanderthal niche is already occupied by Facebook and Youtube.

tags:scale, innovation, control, aboutness, twitter, social

Facebook is taking over Google in sourcing the flow of news

Fortune runs an article showing Facebook's influence growing in the news segment:

...it’s clear that search has hit a kind of plateau and isn’t really growing any more as a referral source for media. Meanwhile, Facebook’s influence has “shown it’s on a continued growth trajectory."

Source: Forbes.com (click images to enlarge)

The competition for advertisers' money between Facebook and Google is heating up. We should expect that Facebook will make further inroads into information segments other than news. Although it's too early to pronounce Search dead, its dominance on the web no longer translates directly into the mobile space, especially, when users spend more and more time on social. (Based on system analysis, we anticipated this trend in Scalable Innovation, Chapters 20-22).

It is also somewhat surprising that Twitter is such a non-factor in the race. Despite the "freshness" of their links, they don't have enough users to play the game. Furthermore, unlike the Facebook's, Twitter connections don't have the strength of social relations.

tags: mobile, information, control, google, facebook, twitter, system

Day and Night: Twitter vs Facebook.

VBeat shows an offsetting time pattern for Facebook and Twitter. It is consistent with often stated Zuckerberg's intent to keep Facebook fun-oriented rather than work-oriented.

Twitter marketers should definitely include a link in their tweet. “We saw 86 percent higher engagement for tweets with links,” Ciarallo told VentureBeat. This is another difference vis-a-vis Facebook, where links can be counterproductive.

And while some might think that 140 characters is already pretty short, another thing that Buddy Media found is that even shorter tweets were the most successful.
“Tweets that contain less than 100 characters have 17 percent higher engagement,” said Ciarallo. “What they’re doing is leaving room for others to add their own thoughts and comments in a retweet.”

 tags:  payload, aboutness, storage, 10x, time, facebook, twitter, attention