:Ben Metcalfe Blog

When rolling out a new feature of your app/startup/site, do you consider which groups of users should receive the update first? If you can’t roll out to everyone at the same time, how do you decide which folks get switched first?

It’s been a few days since Twitter announced the revolutionary and complete redesign of the Twitter.com site #newtwitter, and I’m disappointed that I’m still being served the old site. It’s not because I’m on some self-entitlement trip but because there are two aspects to my Twitter account that I’d have thought, strategically, indicate would be a good candidate to be one of the first to get the update.

My account was created in 2006
I’m a very early Twitter user – which means I’m probably very interested in the company, I probably work in the industry and I’m probably well connected/networked/influencer. Think of the blogging, evangelism and Mad Props™ I could be giving Twitter right now if I was able to precis the new site. Instead I’m frustratingly warming the bench unable to offer any viewpoint other than the slide deck.

My account is whitelisted as a developer account
As Alex Payne said in his recent post “The Very Last Thing I’ll Write About Twitter”:

“#newtwitter sees the Twitter web interface itself become a kind of platform. Previously, developers took data out of Twitter and into the context of their own applications and services. The new design flips this on its head, bringing rich embedded content into the site from a host of brand-name web properties.”

So we have this new platform opportunity, and presumably Twitter wants developers to experiment and build plugins for it. Well I’m labeled as a developer in Twitter’s system but I’m getting no play. Not only is the thought of building something for #NewTwitter becoming less appealing, but if others are getting there fist then the window of opportunity is closing (cue a future blog post on the ‘arms rush of a new platform’).

I have no idea how Twitter has decided to roll out #NewTwitter – presumably it’s just on a shard-by-shard basis, which is also how Google does updates to GMail (although the above factors have less merit in the GMail ecosystem). To me, for Twitter, that seems a less-than-smart way of doing things and its not how I would have done things if I was working there.

Please consider this really carefully:

“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”

(via blue_beetle on MetaFilter, I believe)

“Stop Making Social Networks, Facebook Won” by Nelson Minar is an interesting blog post that’s getting a lot of attention over on Hacker News right now.

The gist, if it wasn’t obvious enough from the title, is that Facebook is “Layer 7″ of the Internet (a reference to the OSI network model) with it’s tight yet comprehensive control of the social graph. Minar asserts it is the de facto social graph for the Internet.

What’s odd about the post is that it acknowledges several problems with declaring Facebook as the winner, but doesn’t provide any workable suggestions. In brief, the issues are:

• Facebook will let some entities tap into their graph via Facebook Connect but not others (eg Apple Ping was refused at the last minute)
• Facebook has a lot of limitation as to what you can do with the social graph data, caching rules, etc – although this is loosening
• There is no uber social graph: My Facebook Graph isn’t anywhere near the same as my LinkedIn Graph (both ‘tier 1′ graphs for me) and again are very different to my Flickr, FourSquare, etc

All of these issues would appear at odds with declaring Facebook the winner of the social network and social graph battle.

The author concludes:

“Sadly OpenSocial is a failure and because of network effects I think it’s too late to displace Facebook”

What’s bizarre about his post is that it fails to look at the history of the Internet – where patterns and paradigms can be identified and extrapolated into the future.

They said that Larry and Sergie were doomed because Yahoo! had all the network effect. Ditto Jobs vs Microsoft.

What Nelson hasn’t factored in is that ultimately companies have a lifecycle and Facebook’s will wane too. It’s why I laugh at my friends who are buying up Facebook stock on the secondary market at $70/unit @ $33bn valuation right now. Perhaps you could make an argument that it’s worth that, but what kind of headroom is left for Facebook to get so much bigger that you will see a return on your investment?

As a company grows, it can only innovate so quickly. It becomes more conservative, less willing to take risks and in Facebook’s case it will ultimately have to bow to external pressures post-IPO.

All of these make excellent targets for disruption. The model I like to talk about these days is not that of incumbent disruption but that of disruptor disruption. When the new school gets kicked by the new-new-school

We must also not ignore the insatiable consumer-driven appetite of man kind – we all want to be driving a new car, drinking at a new bar, etc. Facebook is already becoming passe in many circles and that will continue.

So I say let’s not give in to Facebook. They haven’t won. They probably will always be a dominant force for the foreseeable future of the Internet, but there’s plenty of opportunity for others to beat Facebook at it’s own game.

Just look at the list above for the obvious points for disruption:

• Create a proposition that has a social graph that lets a user delegate two way access to anyone the user wishes. Facebook can’t do that.
• Create a proposition that lets users manage intersecting graphs (family vs work vs friends vs niche use x). They say it’s too complicated for regular users to understand – maybe 2 years ago but now it’s a more apparent problem most users will understand. Facebook stopped trying because it was no longer was beneficial to them (this feature is no longer shown when you add a friend).
• Utilize PoCo and other open formats that let you map nodes (users) in the graph that are not even registered with you yet – to flattern the network effect Facebook currently has against everyone.
• Build your social graph around uses and applications that Facebook won’t compete with or have failed to launch a strong product in – eg video, photos (FB sharing is terrible, Flickr is terrible these days), etc

There’s plenty of opportunities out there, I’m working on a few – what are you doing?

I’ve just completed my registration for SxSW 2011 and was pleasantly surprised to see that the organizers have increased the price of Interactive badges by ~15% for early-bird and ~40% for the on-site price.

SxSW Interactive 2010 prices were $395 (early-bird) and $550 (on-site), SxSW Interactive 2011 prices are $450 (early-bird) and a whopping $750 (on-site).

(yes, SxSW 2011 tickets are already on sale and you need to get a ticket before you can book a hotel room as SxSW pre-books all of them. And hotel rooms sell out quickly. And attending SxSW with an out-of-town hotel room sucks.)

…back to this price increase. Yes, I said pleasantly surprised at the increase.

One of the biggest gripes I had with the 2010 event was many attendees didn’t seem very vested in actually attending any of the conference itself. Many, by their own admittance, were just there for the parties. Even I fell into the trap of:

“oh, I can’t be arsed to get up and go to the sessions today. If it’s $395 for 5 days of conference, that’s only $79 of conference I’m missing out on! Bah!”

People just turning up to cruise for parties creates a different mindset and I think it really changes the overall vibe of the conference. I therefore am glad to see the increases as I hope they encourage people to see a greater value in sessions. This is partly based on the old adage that sometimes the best way to make people feel more appreciation and value for something is to charge more for it.

It also puts more pressure on the conference organizers to curate a better conference, of course. This year’s panel picker still had tons of panel submissions by PR firms shilling their clients and creating faux-conversation around the launch of their client’s products, without any disclosure. When those panels are picked, those people essentially get a free badge to push their product. There’s a whole blog post here, actually…

What remains to be seen is how this actually effects the attendance of SxSWi 2011. The comments on this post outline a lot of the resuling concerns: That freelancers and startups won’t be able to attend, creating a more corporate and homogenized event. And that many people will just turn up to attend the parties and not even buy a badge (the latter is somewhat mitigated by the fact you can’t easily book a hotel near to the conference as SxSW books up entire hotels for the event and ‘official’ parties are not supposed to let non-badge holders in. Of course there are ways around both.)

What do you think? Will you be attending?

photo by Mike Rohde, CC: BY-NC-ND