Will Google buy Twitter?

There is already a lot of buzz around the question if Google is planning to buy Twitter. Some people are already predicting that this is certainly true.

My friend Stowe, says in his post,

This suggests to me that Google is *very* interested in acquiring Twitter, and I bet discussions are happening already.

I know that this was on the offing, but it would be disastrous if Google buys Twitter. Twitter has the potential to create a new revolution in publishing and content assimilation, an idea that Google has no clue about.

Google's strength lies in its ability to create products that present information easily and with great relevance, be it text or images. Google is great at figuring out what people expect to see from the content present on the web. However, it has no idea of how people communicate with each other and how that content can be created.

Twitter hit upon something different, or maybe the users of Twitter have made it seem different (and I hope Evan Williams and team understand this) - Twitter has provided a new content generation mechanism to people, along with the ability to tag them and therefore index them in a way that people associate them. Ofcourse, this does mean that searching and finding that information (which is Google's expertise) does become easy and more relevant, but that is not the "big" idea. The big idea is on the other side - on using the Twitter model to generate content, which has till now been too tedious and cumbersome both to generate and to tag and associate in an easy way.

I suspect that if Google buys Twitter, it will be able to use the relatively small idea of the Twitter model of content access, which is of importance to Google. Google will also achieve its more important objective of capturing the Twitter user base, usage pattern and so on. But it will be a lost opportunity for the "big" idea of the Twitter model of content generation.

If the Twitter team have a vision of the future, they should stick on with Twitter by themselves, just as Google has done. In a few years they will be able to buy Google.

The Social Media Circus

I follow a lot of people via their blog feeds and on Twitter. What amuses me is that all these guys seem to speak to each other and pat on each others back, creating some kind of a self-appreciation affinity group, and nothing more. I don't know if they make much sense to the rest of the world. It's kind of a circus where each clown is trying to outdo the other.

Some of these "bloggers" write 10 to 15 posts a day ( I don't know when they get time to think, eat, sleep or spend time at home, even if blogging itself is their paid job) and most of their posts tend to be either links to other posts or a small comment made on "quoted" text from someone else's blog. I mostly avoid these and go to the source blog at once. It's as if people are trying to cram as many words as possible in their blogs in some kind of a rat race for writing the most words on the web.

As for myself, I enjoy the circus, but have to sift through a lot of crap to actually end up getting any new information.

One blog feed I really love because of its sensible and good quality posts is the O'Reilly Radar

I like Twitter, but again, the crap bothers me. While some guys do post a few important piece of information or news, most of the others simply announce to the world everything from what they are having for breakfast to how they snore at night, as if the world is interested in that crap.

Again, the purpose on Twitter for these ego-maniacs seem to be just about gathering as many followers as possible and its not surprising that many of these guys end up following each other and forming the same self-appreciating affinity groups. They also end up self-announcing themselves as social media gurus.

I think in course of time, most serious bloggers and those on emerging stuff like twitter will have to rethink if this self-gratifying circus adds any meaning to their life or to the society at large. With the start of 2009, I recommend the following for such people:

1. See if you really enjoy reading what you write on your blog or whatever you tweet. This will give you a fair idea if people want to read them. Don't cram in words just to increase your web presence.

2. Get a life. One good post can make your day as well as the day for your audience. You don't need to write in 15 non-informative posts.

3. Assume that tweets are like cars on a "streaming" roadway. Keeping your insignificant tweets out of this road will help keeping this information roadway less crowded and valuable.

4. We have too many gurus anyway. It might be fun to not become another one. The self-appreciation might just be hollow.

5. The web is a serious medium and no one knows it better than those who use it. Let it remain less polluted.

Products are not just a collection of Features

Software products are not just created but also thought out and conceptualized as a collection of features. While this works for extending features on an existing large product, for the conceptualization of a new product, this is possibly the best way to lose your way.

The value of the whole is not always a sum total of its parts.

Let me use a familiar analogy. A house, for example, is not just a collection of rooms, or of its accessories. Each room by itself doesn't have the "value" to its occupants as the whole house has. This is because, beyond the collection of rooms, the house is also built around the social interaction of its occupants. The same collection of rooms, organized in 2 different ways based on 2 different social interactions, will provide a wholly different kind of "value" to their occupants. Similar is the case in software products.

I am a big advocate of the need to think and conceptualize a software product in terms of its social interactions. After all its the social interactions in a product that users of the product experience, and the features are only a means to achieve them. Many of the current range of Web 2.0 applications are actually based on a single social interaction. Many products, in fact, started from a single social interaction, but have since found expression in a wider range of social interactions as well.

Twitter for example, is a simple application that started off with a simple social interaction - "implicit asynchronous messaging" - you could "publish" your status to the stream and let people downstream know about it, without having to explicitly message people. This might have seemed initially to most people (including myself) as not such great stuff, but a little thought will tell you that this is akin to "micro-publishing". The possibilities of extending this social interaction to evolve into a whole genre of social interactions, as people "get it" is endless. Thinking of Twitter as only a feature couldn't have opened up these possibilities, as thinking of Twitter as a publishing-consuming social interaction does.

Of the current crop of Web 2.0 products, those that will survive and grow into the next big thing, will have successfully mapped the next generation of social interactions.

Each such social interaction may involve a single or a multiple set of features. Again, each such interaction may involve some of the features partially. So, those coming from the old world of product management might want to create a matrix/map that co-relates social interactions to features and this might be helpful for them in product development. However, the progress in product development still needs to be measured in terms of how much of the conceptualized social interaction has been achieved and what possibilities lie ahead.