That’s what it got using my personal Gmail account. Amazon Wishlist, Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pandora are all links to the public profile pages of those accounts. When I went to screenshot this I thought about blurring out my potentially embarrassing Amazon Wishlist (I don’t even recall what’s on there) or personal Twitter account (not updated since July) or even my Gmail address (though it’s not terribly difficult to guess). But none of that—none of anything Flowtown collects and presents—is private. Anyone with some time could sit down with Google and find most of it. At the very least, as long as this person has my email address, they can just sign up for Flowtown themselves.

But there is a lot more to Flowtown than highlighting the need for personal reputation management. It has serious business applications. If a company has a mailing list of tens of thousands of customers they can pull all of those customers’ Twitter accounts and start following them and sending them coupons. Those messages are probably more likely to be seen than mass email that gets caught in a spam filter.

There are also more interesting opportunities, like pulling all those Tweets and looking for common topics to find out what a company’s audience is (on balance) into these days. That information could also be used to target particular Tweets at particular users based on demonstrated interest. The music for a commercial could be decided based on information scraped from Pandora about what most customers are listening to through that service. There are lots of ways to extract useful information from what was just a list of email addresses.

Those sorts of things are all possible because data can be bulk imported and exported. But that only facilitates the more novel examples above—there’d be plenty more work to do. Flowtown’s power is in its automation, not some sort of magical social Web x-ray vision that allows it to see things about people that others never could. Still, it sort of seems like it’s an invasion of privacy, or like it should be one.

I think that’s because privacy and social media have an odd relationship. While people are still concerned about invasions of privacy in their online lives, the entire social Web as we know it owes its existence in no small part to the fact that people care a lot less about privacy than they used to.

Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are networks of real people—accounts ideally correspond with and describe individuals out there in the “real world”. People even use their real names and upload real photographs of themselves and tell other people (roughly) where they really live!

By 1996’s standards, this would all be very unnerving. Back in the glory days of America Online, people used screen names selected deliberately to mask their identity. It would be dangerous to do otherwise, the thinking went. And plenty of people would advise against using that new “www.amazon.com” because only a fool would give out their credit card information on the Internet.

Neither Facebook nor LinkedIn nor many of the other sites Flowtown pulls from would make any sense in a world where there wasn’t a one-to-one correspondence between individuals and online identities. That’s not the case across the board of course. One can Twitter or Tumbl anonymously just fine, or even maintain personal accounts and anonymous ones on the same network.

But those anonymous identities would still be connected to an email address. In fact, you could create a whole fictional person around a free email account that Flowtown would generate a social profile for as elaborately as it would anyone else.

To that point, while it’s not exactly the same as making up a new person, here’s what Flowtown gives me when I put in my SnapDragon email address (rather than my personal Gmail):

So it’s not really my social profile (or anyone else’s), it’s the social profile of that email address. That puts an interesting spin on the data one could extract from Flowtown. For instance, I ran my email address book through the system’s free account and here’s the aggregate data about social network usage that was returned:

Now, some of the email address I put in are people’s work ones and some are personal ones (for several people I have both). As is clear from the example of me, not all email addresses are equally representative of the people they correspond to in terms of how they connect up to the social Web. So how accurate is that chart? And how helpful is it if it only covers certain services—I’m sure Delicious is more widely used than StumbleUpon, but it’s not included in the reports one way way or another.

Well, that’s why profiling one’s contacts isn’t the best (or at all intended) use of Flowtown. As their impressively close two-way integration with MailChimp suggests, the idea is to leverage lists of email addresses generated for email marketing in order to do targeted social media marketing. The issue there isn’t an invasion of privacy but rather the potential for spam across new platforms, not less privacy just more noise.

But one way or another the noise will get filtered out. If a platform can’t provide that capability it will suffer in terms of users anyway. So the challenge will really be to use tools like Flowtown to craft such well-targeted outreach campaigns that they stop being noise and become valued communication. Having the ability to efficiently translate an email address (one tiny bit of information) into a social profile (a bigger piece of information) should certainly make that an easier task.

Just a few weeks ago I posted here about the implications of the real-time Web, writing that in conjunction with mobile devices and location aware technology, it would likely result in world where “the Web more easily folds together with ongoing ‘offline’ day-to-day activity.” Today Google has gone ahead and illustrated what I was trying to get at.

This afternoon they announced a new service called Google Buzz. As of this writing it doesn’t seem to be available just yet (to me at least), but there’s a video included with the announcement blog post that gives a pretty good idea of what it’s all about:

That fellow in the video who snaps a photo of a butterfly out in “the real world” and uses the magic of Buzz to instantly distribute it? That’s what I mean by folding together online and offline activities. Sure, there are ways to share photos using social tools now, but only one of them is universal: Email. Buzz is an attempt to update email for the real-time, location-aware, social Web. It’s about getting that butterfly to everyone you feel needs to see it without effort, and without bothering too many people who don’t want to see it.

So in short Google Buzz helps you connect and share with the people in your life. You know, the exact way Facebook describes itself on its landing page. That is in fact a useful comparison for describing what Buzz is. Facebook’s “news feed” is probably one of the most similar (and familiar) tools already out there. As far as more obscure, historical examples go, FriendFeed (which Facebook bought) also had a similar notion of aggregating all the social Web activity a user was concerned about following in a single place.

What sets Buzz apart is that it’s evolving out of the Gmail inbox, not just in terms of user interface, but more importantly in terms of user identity and, even more importantly in terms of a user’s contacts. FriendFeed took a significant time investment to get working because one had to enter a lot of information about what one wanted to follow and/or cajole one’s contacts to join and enter all their information. Facebook (at least from this user’s perspective) suffers from the opposite problem—way, way too much information that it takes much too much work to sort through.

The Gmail/Google account context is different. I think it’s safe to say that people have fewer Google contacts (people who show up in the Gchat widget within Gmail) than they do Facebook friends. These Google contacts are established (by default) based on exchanged emails. Facebook, by virtue of its size, ubiquity, publicness, and the culture around it leads to contacts being established by encountering another individual at all, no matter how fleetingly.

And for all of Facebook’s new feature releases, its friendship connections are still basically “dumb”. Gmail has released little, seemingly novelty features like notifications for when one sends an email to a group but leaves out someone normally associated with that group of addresses. In the context of a social sharing tool that sort of grouping and organizing of relationships is actually incredibly powerful. Not least because it’s information that the system learns from the user’s behavior, rather than demanding that the user enter.

Gmail itself is organized primarily around chronology and conversation threading, with little interrupting boxes for instant messages. There are some widgets one can add and other customizations but by-and-large it’s about sending messages to a fairly circumscribed group of regular contacts. Facebook is, by comparison, utter chaos.

The language used in the official Google blog post fits pretty well with this reading of things:

Today, communication on the web has evolved beyond email and chat — people are sharing photos with friends and family, commenting on news happening around them, and telling the world what they’re up to in real-time. This new social sharing is valuable, but it means there’s a lot more stuff to sort through, and it’s harder to get past status updates and engage in meaningful discussions.

Sound familiar at all, coming from Google? It should. Remember the last time the Web went into a tizzy over Google announcing a reinvention of email? Just about nine months ago, also from the official Google blog:

[T]wo of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the ’60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point…A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

The Jens mentioned there is Jens Rasmussen and the post is by his brother Lars, describing the genesis of what would become the much-talked about Google Wave.

I’m not the only one who thinks Buzz and Wave have more than a just a little in common. TechCrunch’s coverage of the Buzz launch is headlined: “If Google Wave Is The Future, Google Buzz Is The Present”. The post concludes with:

The big question is: will Gmail users buy into this quick sharing? Google thinks so because it’s a part of the evolution from email, to IM, to status updates. It’s also, in their eyes, a part of the evolution to the next step, Google Wave. So far, the public has proven to be not ready for Wave yet. But Buzz might be the perfect tool in getting people to think about communicating in a way beyond email and IM. Or it may be another misstep in Google’s social quest. [Emphasis Added]

This is just one example of what is bound to be Web-wide chatter about the new service, and the point that Google hasn’t had the best of luck with the really social aspects of the Web is an important one. However, I think it’s a big mistake to see Buzz as a stepping stone on the way to Wave. Buzz isn’t just “Wave lite”, created because “the public has proven to be not ready for Wave yet” (also, it’s worth pointing out that Wave hasn’t even been officially released beyond a limited preview version yet, so it’s not really ready for the public either). On the contrary, I think Buzz and Wave have different applications and fill different needs. One needn’t be a step to the other because there is good reason to have both at the same time.

Specifically, I think that Buzz is a tool for individuals and Wave is a tool for groups. Buzz is about the on-going personal practice of using technology to communicate and share, Wave is about collaboration to accomplish goals. Buzz is a big move by Google to get involved in the social Web in a way it hasn’t before, and that’s quite different from the agenda with Wave—I think Wave’s ultimate destiny lies more with the enterprise (or other organizational contexts) than with “the public” TechCrunch suggests isn’t ready for it.

By way of illustration, let’s make some reductive comparisons and line up the Buzz/Wave dichotomy with one I set up in a recent post and another I haven’t gotten around to writing about yet:

Status updating vs. digital publishing was the subject of a post from the end of December:

So on the one hand there is status updating (an increasingly popular, real time–oriented form of online social communication and content creation/sharing) and on the other there is digital publishing (producing larger units of content like long blog posts or things resembling articles that appear in print).

I know I’m pushing it with the block quotes (and the self-reference), but here’s the explanation of that pair that I think is relevant:

[S]tatus updating can be done from your phone. These are usually short messages and a typo every so often isn’t the end of the world. Digital publishing is much more of a sit-down-at-a-desk sort of affair. And this is even somewhat supported (or more accurately suggested) by the data from Pew indicating that individuals who connect to the Internet from their mobile device is a key group responsible for driving this year’s increase in status updating.

Meanwhile, digital publishing continues to define itself. In the past few months especially there has been a lot of buzz about magazines and newspapers potentially shifting to tablet computer devices (Mag+, Sports Illustrated, the elusive and magical Apple tablet, among others). Online-only outlets like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast become more established each day. Most interesting of all might be a “post” from Smashing Magazine, the online Web design publication, about “the death of the boring blog post“. It’s a call for Web sites to start laying out individual pieces separately with their own content-appropriate graphics—to make what they call “blogazines.”

Buzz is a tool one might use to do activities that fall under the broad heading of “status updates”. They get zipped out to a bunch of personal contacts who can easily browse all these bite-sized communiques on their iPhone (or other device). Wave is a tool one might use to compose that ill-defined future sort of content that the iPad is uniquely suited to consume. Wave facilitates incorporation of all sorts of rich media content and, because it’s an extensible platform, could even be used to develop new sorts of embedded interactive elements. Even absent such fancy stuff, Wave is built for collaboration, editing, revision, reversion…it’s a little much for sending one’s friends that photo of a butterfly.

In short, column one is about one’s own time. Column two is about things people hope to be paid for. That doesn’t mean companies won’t someday race to “get on Buzz” the way they’re tripping over themselves to get on Twitter and Facebook, or that groups of friends won’t use Wave for totally noncommercial purposes. The important thing is that in the main an individual or an entity “gets on” Buzz (becomes present on that platform indefinitely); members of a group use Wave for particular purposes (which are presumably discrete).

While being on Buzz might be a continuous state, individual posts or updates (buzzes?) are momentary. That fact is illustrated by Buzz’s support for location-aware updating from a mobile device. If units of Buzz content/communication were meant to be composed over time, how could they be mapped in space? In that sense Buzz might be best compared to Twitter—real-time, location-aware (though Twitter’s version of that feature hasn’t gotten much attention), continuously connected social communication.

But there’s a critical difference the separates Buzz from Twitter, and also from the light-weight social blogging platform Tumblr, which one might also be tempted to make a comparison to. At least as far as I can tell, Buzz content doesn’t publish directly to the public Web. You can’t find a Buzz update by searching Google the same way you can’t find an email or a Facebook wall post by searching Google. Twitter and Tumblr both broadcast out to anyone who wants to listen. Buzz, like Facebook, happens within a more bounded system. [NOTE: This is incorrect.]

There are some caveats to that. Twitter and Tumblr both have some features that only work from within their own interface and for users that have an account on the service (notably retweeting/reblogging and starring/liking). Also, Google has given assurances that Buzz will be very developer-friendly, meaning there will certainly be a way to export one’s content elsewhere (and probably do many other things, even import material from networks as ostensibly closed as Facebook).

Tumblr is as good a note as any to end on. While it offers some integration with Twitter, it mostly stands alone. As mentioned, it also publishes users’ content directly to the public Web (as well as through the internal follow-based dashboard). It’s really quite simple. From a certain perspective (mine), it makes Buzz look as needlessly involved as Buzz makes Facebook look to some (again, me).

Buzz might turn out to be an absolutely fantastic tool, but its potential for success rests largely on leveraging its built-in initial user base of Gmail users. Not everyone is going to be ready to map their email contacts directly onto their social content sharing network. Having Buzz bundled with everything else associated with a Gmail address/Google account is just as likely to make it irritating to incorporate into one’s online routine as it is to encourage adoption. Something like Tumblr, on the other hand, gets to operate in its own separately defined and managed context. (Better to do one thing well…)

Part I ends here because there’s not much further to go with this without having had the chance to actually play around with the thing. Part II will (more accurately, may) come once I’ve done so and can move beyond conjecture.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about what I referred to as status updating and digital publishing:

So on the one hand there is status updating (an increasingly popular, real time–oriented form of online social communication and content creation/sharing) and on the other there is digital publishing (producing larger units of content like long blog posts or things resembling articles that appear in print).

Status updating is a more recent development than digital publishing. For evidence of this just compare the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. Both saw plenty of blogging (both by private individuals and by professionals on behalf of publications), but only 2008 saw a huge role for realtime communications (again, and perhaps even more surprisingly, both in terms of individuals and organizations). The previous post linked to above also has some compelling numbers on this questions.

And all this realtime stuff has gotten a lot of attention, particularly from people who think about the evolution or technology and its social implications. Nick Carr⇒, for instance, started a series of blog posts called “The Realtime Chronicles” almost a year ago in which he (somewhat facetiously) announced that “Real time is realtime“:

I’m glad to see that “realtime” is officially one word now rather than two. It’s an update long overdue. That space between “real” and “time” had become an annoyance. Looking at it was like peering into a black hole of unengaged consciousness, a moment emptied of stimulus. It was more than an annoyance, actually. It was an affront to the very idea of realtime. As soon as you divide realtime into real time it ceases to be realtime. Realtime has no gaps. It’s nonstop. It runs together.[...]

Realtime is our natural state – it’s what we share with the other animals – and now at last we’re going back to it. Listen to the birds. They’ll tell you all you need to know: realtime is a stream of tweets. Yesterday, when he announced the twitterification of Facebook, the realtiming of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg said, “We are going to continue making the flow of information even faster.” The first one to remove all the spaces wins.

I think Carr may have been a bit premature, but only slightly. Realtime arrives for real when the technology is in place to make that flow Zuckerberg describes really and truly fluid. That’s finally starting to happen, though it’s still sort of around the bend for the vast majority of users.
To put it simply, realtime requires “push” information delivery to become ubiquitous and standard. What that means is well-illustrated by looking at how RSS (Really Simple Syndication⇒) usually works. Typically, an RSS feed reader will periodically “poll” the feed source to see if anything new has been added. Feed reader applications allow one to set how frequently such polling is done. It can’t check all the time because it consumes bandwidth for the client and, assuming many clients, would impose an unmanageable number of requests on the server, such that it would almost certainly crash some sites.

For example, the popular Mac RSS reader application I use, NetNewsWire, has “every 30 minutes” as its most frequent setting. That’s much too much time between updates to be really realtime. The NewNewsWire iPhone application doesn’t even poll for updates on its own, it has to be activated (something I frustratingly routinely forget to do before entering the signal-less New York subway).

Now, some might ask why one needs a desktop feed reader. Why not just go and check the actually sites? Well, that’s horribly inefficient and hardly realtime either unless one does so continuously. And it obviously doesn’t solve the problem of on-the-go blog update notification on one’s phone. Of course, a lot of people might find that an unwelcome burden, but if the realtime trend continues it’s fair to assume that it’s inevitable.

So what does an alternative approach look like? A good example is a service called Superfeedr. Superfeedr is, in the words of its own homepage:

Real-time Notification

Give Superfeedr your feed urls and new entries will be pushed to you. By combining several technologies we can notify you in less than 15 minutes (or it’s free).

No More Polling

Don’t waste your time and resources fetching old data and getting “new” data too late. Superfeedr’s parser frequency is constantly readjusted each time a feed is fetched.

15 minutes might not seem like much less than 30, but that’s just the guaranteed maximum wait. Look at the language here (even though they hyphenate real-time): The concern is wasting time and not getting new data before it’s “too late.” Yes, this is definitely the realtime imperative Carr was discussing translated into new technological infrastructure for the social Web, and it’s far from the only example.

In fact, Superfeeder combines a number of technologies and techniques for delivering these up-to-the-minute updates. One of them is the wonderfully named PubSubHubbub⇒, helpfully explained in the following presentation (it’s really very short and simple):

So hubs are used as intermediaries between publishers and subscribers to facilitate faster communication with a smaller load on the computers involved by centralizing the process of figuring out what is new when and letting concerned parties know rather than the current situation in which everyone asks everyone. A bit humorously, this is a technological displacement of they typically Web 2.0 “many-to-many” communication model in favor of something more centralized and hierarchical.

Another key technology here is XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol⇒). It’s what several instant messaging services like gChat and Jabber (where the protocol originated from in fact) are based on and also the basis for the protocol behind the much-hyped Google Wave, a totally different paragon of realtime-ness (read a pretty good anecdotal explanation of how here).

But the most invasively realtime of the technologies involved, though not actually part of Superfeedr’s infrastructure, is the iPhone’s support for push data. Specifically, this post from the Superfeedr blog explains how to hook up that service to an iPhone app called AppNotification in order to get Superfeedr’s super-quick updates pushed to one’s iPhone, thus getting immediately updated of any new feed items.

Still think that might be overkill? I really love this Tweet response to the post (which I get to see because of the DISQUS “reactions” at the bottom of the page—I told you that would be big!):

We’re really close to the perfect iPhone RSS experience… but not quite? Push notifications yes; two-way sync, no? http://bit.ly/22yHz1

Realtime social Web users can be pretty demanding.

Think about all this really realtime stuff along with the location-based social services like Foursquare (here’ s some recent Mashable hype on that) and the rapidly improving world of augmented reality⇒, and you can start to see the outlines of what the next generation of the social Web might look like. It’s one where a mobile interface with the realtime Web is sufficiently advanced that one doesn’t need to be deliberately accessing the social Web to be a well-timed participant in it, and as a result the Web more easily folds together with ongoing “offline” day-to-day activity.

Nick Carr seems to disagree that those things fit together so well. In a post tiled “Realtime kills real space” he writes:

Realtime, you see, doesn’t just change the nature of time, obliterating past and future. It annihilates real space. It removes us from three-dimensional space and places us in the two-dimensional space of the screen – the “intimate portable world” that increasingly encloses us. Depth is the lost dimension.

Maybe he’s getting a little vague there, but the point is there’s already room for debate about the relationships and tensions between these relatively new social technologies. That’s an indication that they’re maturing rapidly and that there’s also room for people to take sides in these debates in a more practical way—in terms of how they deploy and leverage these tools.

Our new address is 285 West Broadway, Suite 250, NY NY 10013.  Right off of Canal.  The phone number is the same. (212) 334-0242.  Stop by if you are in the neighborhood. We love visits!

I missed this in the LA Times, this past November, but apparently there’s a scale available called the Wi-Fi Body Scale that sends weight and body fat info directly to Web pages and mobile devices.   It now connects to Twitter. Oh, and it only costs $159.

Today in the BayNewser courtesy of MediaBistro, there’s a story about how a sheriff in Texas is tweeting the names of people arrested for drunk driving. Wow.

]]> http://snapdragonconsultants.com/twitter/twitter-equipped-bathroom-scale-twitter-for-shaming-drunks/feed/ 0 http://snapdragonconsultants.com/new-technologies-and-tools/getting-your-company-started-with-facebook-pages/ http://snapdragonconsultants.com/new-technologies-and-tools/getting-your-company-started-with-facebook-pages/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:59:36 +0000 Robert Gonsalves http://snapdragonconsultants.com/?p=1208 Facebook has the ability for a business to create a unique page for your company.  Officially called Pages, they have acquired the common name of  “Fan Pages”.  Should you create a Facebook Page for your business?  What should you consider if you build this type of presence on Facebook?

Benefits of Facebook Pages

Remember, Facebook Pages are public.  This allows search engines to search and index these sites.  So people can use search engines to discover your Facebook Page, and it becomes another opportunity besides your main site for customer to discover your business.  Pages can also include links back to your main site, and this helps you with building off-site in-bound links to your main site.

Another benefit of Facebook Pages I the ability to send updates to people who follow or becomes “Fans” of your page.  This ability to communicate with your Facebook Fans is an important engagement method.  Regular updating and new content is a requirement for successfully building the number of your Facebook Fans.

One viral marketing advantage for Facebook pages is that that when someone joins, it is published in their News feed and shared with their friends (unless turned off).  This allows your updates to be seen by the friends of Fans on Facebook, which leads to more discovery by others.

Two way Interactions

In programming your Facebook Page, remember social media is about people interacting with each other.  Make sure your strategy includes giving something to your participating consumers (offering instead of asking).  This is a great way to have people to become fans and remain involved.

Think about offering coupons, weekly deals, limited offers (free shipping) and other product items that are unique or first offered to your Facebook Page audience.  People like to feel special, and you are part of their social circle.  Friendship is a two way street.

While starting a page is free and easy, Facebook Pages also let you add Facebook Applications to your Page.   Some of the best companies pages (CocaCola) utilize Facebook Apps to help create a rich and sticky environment. Keeping away from the standard Facebook Page layout can make a big difference to encourage people to become a Fan of your Page.  The best Pages use rich graphics, strong creative and engaging content, encourage fan communication, and makes strong use of videos and images.  This is not your official website, so you may want to play with the Page editorial voice and tone to match the medium.

The ongoing care and feeding of a Facebook Page can build a rich and rewarding engagement platform with your customers, but this also requires you to address the concerns and challenges that people post about your company on your Facebook Page.  It is important to have established an practice strategy about who and how at your company will address any problems or concerns.

Analytics – Measuring your Success

Besides two-way interactions, measurements are the core of interactive marketing.  The Facebook Pages insights tool includes your Fans’ engagement with posts from your Page.  You can see how many comments Fans make on your posts, and also track the Fans’s viewing your posts in News Feeds.  By watching your posts and Facebook Page analytics, you can see what type of content and interactions your Fans like the most on your Page.  This can then be used to change and improve your ongoing content strategy.

Don’t stop at a Facebook Page

While Facebook Page is a great way to interact with your customers who are on Facebook, don’t ignore the other social networks.  Connecting multiple social platforms through your main website as a hub can help connect and direct your customers across the web.

Make sure you focus on the demographics of each site.  Quantcast.com can give you demographic information about the various social networks.  Facebook has a much different user compared to Linkedin.  Depending on your business, you will want to develop a unique social network presence at multiple networks to help grow and expand your customers across the different social media networks.

Get Started

Before you get started, you should be clear about your campaign needs and goals. How will you define success with your Facebook and other social media presence?  What is your ongoing content programming strategy?  Who from your company will be responsible for the two way relationship building?

We can help.   We help our clients reach this growing audience through creating highly customized Facebook experiences that engage and impress their visitors. For organizations that have a beautiful site or a promotional campaign running somewhere else on the Web, we can build a complementary presence within Facebook to help drive traffic and spread awareness. PS: Ask about our Facebook Connect solutions as well.

Twitter didn’t become the most important thing on the Web in 2008, but sometimes it feels like it did. Twitter didn’t overtake Facebook in terms of users (or even come anywhere close), but 70% of current Twitter users joined in 2008. [...] Maybe the real question is whether 2009 will be the Year of Micro-messaging.

Well, both Twitter and Facebook have kept on growing. So too has Tumblr, the light-weight, socially-oriented blogging platform that I wrote about here as part of the 2008 retrospective. And they’re all growing at sort of close to the same rate:

OK, so maybe not that close to the same rate. These type of stats are always somewhat suspect anyway (I’m going with Wikipedia for these, but that doesn’t deal with inconsistent and often opaque methodologies) and the point is just that the rate of growth averages to something in the neighborhood of doubling over the last year. In a bit more rigorous manner, the Pew Internet & American Life Project came up with roughly the same result:

Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service.

Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users – those under age 44.

What I have referred to as micro-messaging and micro-blogging is called “status updating” as far as Pew is concerned. The survey this data comes from only mentions Twitter by name. The question asked was: “Do you ever use the Internet to…use Twitter or another service to share updates about yourself or to see updates about others?” But sharing updates about oneself and seeing ones from others has increasingly taken center stage on Facebook too. Wikipedia even includes Facebook in its comparison of micro-blogging services.

So regardless of the language one uses or the angle one comes at the question from, it looks like over the course of 2009 the popularity “status updating” has doubled from something a tenth of the Internet using population does to something a fifth of it does.

Does this mean that 2009 was in fact The Year of Micro-messaging? Well, I suppose that depends in part on how 2010 turns out. Especially because the coming year might see the other half of the picture come into focus: what all this means for regular old macro-blogs.

That might be a confusing and overly narrow way to put it. Instead let’s make a category for more serious (for lack of a better word) content production: “digital publishing”. So on the one hand there is status updating (an increasingly popular, real time–oriented form of online social communication and content creation/sharing) and on the other there is digital publishing (producing larger units of content like long blog posts or things resembling articles that appear in print).

The difference between these two can get fuzzy. What separates a personal blog that’s serious enough to be digital publishing from a fairly elaborate Tumblr? Well, even though Tumblr does publish directly to the Web, it is still organized around a defined community (users follow each other in a manner similar to Twitter). Moreover, Tumblr recently announced that their API (the service’s interface to third-party applications) is going to start supporting interaction with tools originally designed to work with Twitter. In explaining how this will work, their announcement highlights the similarities between these services:

The really cool thing – because our following models follow a lot of the same principles, we’ve been able to take advantage of a ton of native features:

• Retweeting = Reblogging
• Replying = Reblogging w/ commentary
• Favoriting = Liking
• “@david” = ”http://david.tumblr.com/”
• Conversations = Reblogs

A lot of the client applications this will enable are for mobile devices. That’s significant too: status updating can be done from your phone. These are usually short messages and a typo every so often isn’t the end of the world. Digital publishing is much more of a sit-down-at-a-desk sort of affair. And this is even somewhat supported (or more accurately suggested) by the data from Pew indicating that individuals who connect to the Internet from their mobile device is a key group responsible for driving this year’s increase in status updating.

Meanwhile, digital publishing continues to define itself. In the past few months especially there has been a lot of buzz about magazines and newspapers potentially shifting to tablet computer devices (Mag+, Sports Illustrated, the elusive and magical Apple tablet, among others). Online-only outlets like the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast become more established each day. Most interesting of all might be a “post” from Smashing Magazine, the online Web design publication, about “the death of the boring blog post“. It’s a call for Web sites to start laying out individual pieces separately with their own content-appropriate graphics—to make what they call “blogazines.”

There is, as always, a lot more to this. Where do comments fit it? A lot of status updating is about responding to, discussing, or sharing digitally published material. A lot of people who write that material are avid status update types and even use such services to find things to cover. And there’s a lot more to say as well about the similarities, differences, and data-exchange possibilities of Tumblr, Twiiter, Facebook, and all the other services that might fit into the micro-something category.

Nevertheless, I think it is possible to see the beginning of a convergence of social technologies around certain styles of often informal communication. At the same time, more formal content creation and distribution on digital platforms has become an urgent matter for publishers and an active area of innovation. How money will be made is a whole other can of worms, but significantly it’s not an issue for status updaters. For the platforms that are used for status updating monetization is certainly still an important matter, but not for the people creating and communicating. That’s a very different dynamic. Ads and premium services might play a role in both arenas, but in quite different ways.

So 2010 (like 2009 and 2008) will probably be a Year of Micro-messaging. Will it also be a year of tablets and blogazines?

Google makes a lot of blog headlines and even some old-school journalism headlines when it does things like announce a revolution in their core capacity (real time search), a new operating system (Chrome OS), or something that defies categorization (Google Wave). In the midst of all that marquee activity little developments can get lost. For example, today ReadWriteWeb reports that “Google Groups Joins Google Apps in Battle for the Enterprise“:

Google Apps is adding Google Groups to its enterprise suite of applications, another example of Google’s commitment to developing an online application environment that is compelling enough for users to move off the Windows platform.

Google Groups has to this point been a consumer service. As part of Google Apps, it now integrates with Google Docs, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Sites and Google Video.

Google Groups is a very useful and very popular way to communicate and collaborate. It’s basically a tool for threaded conversations with many participants, but there are strong additional features like (not surprisingly) search, user rating of posts, tracking of flagged threads, email privacy protection, and public Web pages for groups that function sort of like Wikis. Groups might not have a place in every business or organization that might consider deploying the Google Apps suite, but it will no doubt be quite useful to some of them.

And I think that’s an important shift in the tone of the whole Google Apps issue. It’s not about Google just providing cloud-based alternatives for core IT functions. It’s about Google reorienting enterprise IT towards a more diverse range of potential solutions. RWW includes the following useful illustration in their post:

(It’s not entirely clear, but it looks as if this may have come from a Google slide deck, or some similar origin…)

That’s a lot of additional value in just two years, and for no additional dollars. Of course, most of those tools existed before as free consumer versions—it’s not as though these are all new products.

But it’s not just an increase in quantity, it’s a difference in kind. Groups might be great, but Google Apps could have a case as an enterprise IT solution without it. That’s certainly not true of Email and arguably not true of a calendar tool and word processor/spreadsheet application. The three icons listed under 2007 are much more critical that any of the ones added since. Moreover, they’re likely to come in handy in almost any deployment. The rest will probably be found useful by some but extraneous by others.

Doesn’t that make packaging it all together a bad deal? Shouldn’t Google offer a lower rate to organizations that only want a limited feature set? Why aren’t things like SSL security or video priced separately so that only those that need them have to pay for them?

Well, that wouldn’t be as simple. That’s important to Google’s goal of an evolving market for IT solutions for at least two reasons. First, Google is asking customers to make one big decision—to migrate important functions to the cloud. Stacking a bunch of little micro-decisions on top of that only reduces the chance of getting people to make that (potentially radical) change. It would almost be like giving those who might be nervous about the proposition an excuse to dawdle.

Second, Google doesn’t want “customers.” They want people to pay them money for their products and services but they don’t want to be taking calls, whether about upgrading accounts or providing tech support. That might seem like a strong claim, but the fact that Apps users who run into trouble are directed towards third-party “authorized resellers” for support provides decent evidence for it.

This sounds a lot like the “large-scale utility model” that Nick Carr has described as the inevitable direction of the could computing industry. For one flat fee you get Google-power piped into your organization. Don’t know how to use it right? That’s not Google’s problem, call a contractor. You don’t call the water utility when your drain is clogged either.

This is very much an story still in progress and we’ll have to see how it unfolds. One thing that is clear, however, is that Google is establishing its own model for how to operate in this space.