Посты с тэгом: twitter

Now, Twitter Must Grow

Published date: November 7, 2013 в 11:32 am

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It’s official. Twitter is a publicly traded company, and it will face constant pressure to innovate and grow. Let’s look at how innovation methods can be applied to Twitter to find new opportunitues.

We’ll apply the five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking
to Twitter.  Our goal will be to create new features and innovations
with the main Twitter platform as well as to create completely new
applications related to Twitter.

To use S.I.T., we start with the components of Twitter:
1.    Profile
2.    Photo
3.    People followed
4.    Followers
5.    Hashtags
6.    Tweets
7.    Re-tweets
8.    Groups
9.    Search
10.  Feeds
11.  Client
12.  API

We
apply each of the five templates of S.I.T. one at a time to create new
configurations.  We work backwards to identify potential benefits or new
markets with that configuration.

1.  SUBTRACTION: Removing an essential component

  • Virtual Product: Twitter account without the “tweeter” (person who owns the account).
  • Concept:  Your Twitter account pulls in and aggregates interesting
    factoids from around the social web and creates a tweet automatically.
    It “auto tweets.”
  • Potential Benefits:  Creates a more dynamic Twitter presence, likely leading to more followers.

2.  MULTIPLICATION: Making a copy of a component but changing it in some way

  • Virtual Product: Create multiple Twitter accounts under one user.
  • Concept: An app that allows the Twitter users to compose a list of accounts and
    distribute their tweets, choosing their release in one or more of their
    accounts.
  • Potential Benefits: Broadens re-tweeting as it links to the Follower network of each account.

3.  TASK UNIFICATION:  Assigning an additional task to an existing resource

  • Virtual Product: A Twitter client that automatically fetches content for you.
  • Concept: An app that resides on your desktop, and it pulls in Twitter feeds along with any other feeds of interest (much like RSS).
  • Potential Benefits: Convenient, one place to look for all your social feeds.

4.  DIVISION:  Dividing a product or component either physically, functionally, or preserving (maintaining characteristics of the whole)

  • Virtual Product: Divide your Twitter followers into relevant groups (much like Google Circles).
  • Concept: An app that sends instant messages to groups of friends in
    real-time. You can join in on conversations about topics that interest
    you, or start your own conversations.
  • Potential Benefits: Keeps track of all your social web activity in relevant groups.

5.  ATTRIBUTE DEPENDENCY:  Creating (or breaking) dependencies between two internal attributes or an internal and external attribute.

  • Virtual Product: The information pulled in about a follower depends on what other social networks they belong to.
  • Concept: A browser plugin that allows you to view the social web
    profile for each of your friends simply by mousing over their name in
    your Twitter stream.
  • Potential Benefits:  Better informed about Followers.

Inside the Box: “Oh, This Is Going to Be Addictive”

Published date: July 15, 2013 в 11:39 am

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When you use Subtraction, you don’t always have to eliminate the
component. There is also what we call “Partial Subtraction.” It is a valid
technique as long as the product or service that remains delivers a new
benefit. To deploy Partial Subtraction, you pick a component and then
eliminate a specific feature of that component. Consider the case of
Twitter, a microblogging application used by hundreds of millions of
people worldwide. By simply restricting each tweet to 140 characters,
Twitter has become a vast digital conversation about what individuals
around the globe are thinking and doing. A Partial Subtraction of
the traditional blog down to 140 characters dramatically increased the
volume of and participation in this Internet phenomenon. How did it
happen?

Twitter founders Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey, and others knew that the
concept was right and that they had a potential hit on their hands. Their
intent was to create a service that allowed people to send text messages
to many friends at one time. Originally, Twitter was supposed to be only
a way for people to easily update their friends on their current status.

But when attempting to build a service with text messaging as
its foundation, the Twitter team ran into challenges. First, texts were
expensive. On top of that, phone companies imposed a limit on the
size of text messages. Any text message of more than 160 characters is
automatically split into two messages. So the first thing that the Twitter
founders did was to place a limit on the number of characters in a
short message service (SMS) text (now called a “tweet”). They Partially
Subtracted text messages by reducing the size to 140. That left room for the sender’s user name and the colon in front of the message. In February 2007, Dorsey wrote, “One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters.”

He was right. Today more than 100 million users subscribe to Twitter. The Twitter website gets more than 400 million unique visitors each month. It has become the global “listening post” when real-time events such as the March 2011 Japanese tsunami and the Egyptian revolution two months earlier are happening. Glass said in an interview, “You know what’s awesome about this thing? It makes you feel like you’re right with that person. It’s a whole emotional impact. You feel like you’re connected.”

Partial Subtraction can create just as much value as the full Subtraction Technique. Partial Subtractions have another advantage. Sometimes you can convince skeptics to do a Partial Subtraction rather than stripping out a component completely to get them on board.

The Fabulous Five

Published date: January 7, 2013 в 3:00 am

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Five

companies are slugging it out in what may be the most competitive and
unique business battle of all time. It is larger in scale with more at
stake than battles in other industries including transportation, energy,
and finance.

More
remarkable is how different the combatants are from one another.
Instead of similar companies competing (Toyota versus General Motors,
for example), these companies hail from different business bases: an electronics manufacturer, a lifestyle computing company, an
online
retailer, a search engine, and a social network.  In order: Samsung,
Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.  I call them the Fabulous Five.

What
are they fighting for? They are fighting for the right to define what
they are fighting
for. It is a category yet to emerge.  The battle is about who can get
the largest numbers of customers that generate deep
and meaningful insights.  Each company wants a massive following of
human beings using their products
and services in a way that generates monetizable information twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.  Each of the
Fabulous Five has a strong and growing foothold to do exactly that.

What
about traditional powerhouses like Microsoft?  Microsoft fell behind and is trying desperately to catch up with acquisitions
(think $8.5 billion for Skype).  Microsoft will regress into a word
processing, server, and gaming company.  Blackberry?  RIM lost one million
customers in the last three months of 2012.  Motorola? Sony? HP? Yahoo?  They
are watching the battle from the sidelines. PC’s
are becoming irrelevant as the tablet and smartphone takes hold.

That
said, there are some potential challengers to the Fabulous Five.
Twitter, for example, has an impressive subscriber base generating 500
million tweets a day that are being archived
by the US Library of Congress.  Despite the enormity of Twitter, it has
a serious gap.  Twitter (the company) lacks a way to own the insights
being generated.  Twitter is just an advertising portal.  More
concerning is the Fabulous Five can encroach this space fairly easily.
Some already have.

Which of the Fabulous Five will win is not a matter of financial resources.  What matters is their core competencies and their ability to stretch those into other domains.  More important is what each company learns about consumers to stretch further.

Who has the advantage?  Let’s look at sheer size and scope of each.

Google averages
nearly five billion searches per day.  Insights about keywords used to
search the Internet are extremely valuable.  Google learns what it takes
to make websites search engine friendly.  It sells that to companies
who want their websites optimized.  Google’s Droid operating system
gives it presence in smartphones.  Now they seek ways to stretch into
consumer electronics.

Amazon leads the nearly $300 billion online retail space.  It had nearly 8 million unique visitors on one day
(Black Friday).  Amazon learns how people shop, how they compare, and
what they are willing to pay across a wide range of consumer products.
It is stretching itself into the smartphone arena.  Amazon will continue to make bold moves.

Facebook
has over one billion users.  Despite all the criticism about its
privacy policies, Facebook has an enormous advantage in learning how
people socialize, communicate, and visualize their relationships.  But
it lacks a smartphone, entertainment platform, and shopping presence
that others have.

Samsung leads in technology development the way that Apple leads in design.  Samsung is well managed and aggressive.  It has massive resources
to put hundreds of millions of handheld units into any region of the
world.  The question is what they do with it – how much of the
information stream will come from the unit versus the operating system
within that unit.  Samsung knows it needs its own smartphone operating system to compete with Google.

Apple
is the most valuable company on the planet with a fiercely loyal base of
customers across every demographic.  It wins on design, integration,
and service.  More than the other combatants, Apple cuts across a wider
swath of a person’s daily life. Its next strategic move will likely set
the tone for the next wave of battles.  Fierce patent skirmishes with Samsung and others will subside so they can all focus on with the real battle – earning loyalty and staying relevant.

The
common theme for all five is innovation – the ability to stretch
into other domains and create new value systematically.  The choices they make to compete will be topics of future blog posts here.  2013 is
sure to be a milestone for this epic battle.

The LAB: Innovating Pinterest with Attribute Dependency (September 2012)

Published date: September 30, 2012 в 4:36 pm

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It’s official.  Pinterest has joined the elite group of social apps along with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Google Plus.
“Pinterest is a Virtual Pinboard that lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.”  How popular is it?  It is the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark.  A report by Shareaholic claims, “Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined.”  As of March 2012, Pinterest was valued at $1.5 billion.

There are many creative ways to use Pinterest.  New apps are emerging around it much like what happened with Twitter.  But to maintain growth, Pinterest needs innovation.  For this month’s LAB, we will apply Attribute Dependency, one of five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking, to Pinterest.  Our goal will be to create new innovations around Pinterest as we did with Twitter and Facebook.

To use Attribute Dependency, make two lists.  The first is a list of internal attributes.  The second is a list of external attributes -those factors that are not under your control, but that vary in the context of how the product or service is used.  Then, create a matrix with the internal and external attributes on one axis, and the internal attributes only on the other axis.  The matrix creates combinations of internal-to-internal and internal-to-external attributes that we will use to innovate.  We take these virtual combinations and envision them in two ways.  If no dependency exists between the attributes, we create one.  If a dependency exists, we break it.  Using Function Follows Form, we envision what the benefit or potential value might be from the new (or broken) dependency between the two attributes.

The attributes of Pinterest are:

PinterestInternal Attributes:

  1. size of board (number of pins)
  2. size of the displayed board
  3. number of boards
  4. description of board
  5. subject of pins
  6. number of likes
  7. number of re-pins
  8. number of guest pinners
  9. who following

External Attributes:

  1. time
  2. followers
  3. boards trending
  4. links to other social networks

The new concepts are:

1.  Push To Friends:  Pinterest pushes a notification to Facebook friends or Twitter followers based on a keyword in the description of the Pin.  This is a bit like RSS feeds into a reader, but different in that the Pinterest board owner gets to decide what gets pushed to friends.  There are some existing links between Pinterest and the other social networks, but an approach like this could make it much stronger and more valuable.

2.  Pin Recommender:  Pinterest finds and recommends new Pins to you based on keywords in your Pin or Board description.  It is similar to the “You Might Also Like…” feature on many web applications.  A new app called SpinPicks does something similar, but it does not pull from the inventory of images in Pinterest.

3.  Board Cloud:  The Boards of a Pinner change size depending on Likes and Followers.  This is similar to a tag cloud where each word varies in size depending on how often it shows up on a website or document.  Tag clouds help the reader quickly understand which words are most prominent or popular.  Twitter has a similar feature called Trendsmap.  Given the highly visual nature of Pinterest, I would expect users to be able to turn features like this on or off in their settings to give a more personalized experience.

4.  Twitter Trender:  The boards displayed on the viewers main page vary depending on what is trending on Twitter.  Twitter has become the “eyes and ears” of the world, and hot topics trend all the time.  Pinterest would read these trends and match them to Boards for display on the front page, perhaps as defined by the viewer.

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The LAB: Innovating Twitter with S.I.T. (February 2012)

Published date: February 27, 2012 в 3:00 am

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Lab_2
Twitter continues to evolve with some 220 million users tweeting collectively 250 million times a day. It is a vast social network that has become the world’s “listening post” for events happening everywhere.  Major news organizations rely on Twitter to give early warning to breaking stories.

For this month’s LAB, we will apply all five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking to Twitter.  Our goal will be to create new features and innovations with the main Twitter platform as well as to create completely new applications related to Twitter.  Many “apps” tied to Twitter already exist, and you can find a thorough inventory here.

This is not the first time we have applied SIT to Twitter.  See my March 2009 post about using the innovation method on how to monetize Twitter.  Since then, not much has changed in their business model.

To use S.I.T., we start with the components of Twitter:
1.    Profile
2.    Photo
3.    People followed
4.    Followers
5.    Hashtags
6.    Tweets
7.    Re-tweets
8.    Groups
9.    Search
10.  Feeds
11.  Client
12.  API

We apply each of the five templates of S.I.T. one at a time to create new configurations.  We work backwards to identify potential benefits or new markets with that configuration.  In each example below, I apply a template and then try identify whether an app already exists.  This is a way to check the validity of the templates to create new value:

The LAB: Monetizing Twitter with Attribute Dependency (February 2009)

Published date: February 15, 2009 в 3:10 pm

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Lab_2

Venture capitalists could increase the value of their investments by applying a corporate innovation method to those investments.  Take Twitter for example.  It just received its third round of funding – $35 million.  Yet it has no revenue, no business model…just the promise of such.  It is the perfect time to innovate.

I decided to take the challenge to create new concepts for the Twitter platform that have the potential to earn money.  Others are chasing this, too, including the Twitter management team.  It reminds me of the early days of Amazon when many (including me) wondered if the company would turn a profit.  The difference between Twitter and Amazon is an important one.  Amazon started with a business model in mind.  From there, it had to achieve economies of scale.  Twitter started with none.  Economies of scale do not matter until it can define a viable business model.

Let’s see how innovation can help.

I used the Attribute Dependency template of Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method of innovation that works like no other I have found.  Attribute Dependency (or AD for short) differs from the other templates in that it uses attributes (variables) of the situation rather than components.  It is a powerful tool and more challenging than the others in some respects.  It yields amazing results.  You start with an attribute list, then construct a 2 x 2 matrix of these, pairing each against the others.  Each cell represents a potential dependency (or potential break in an existing dependency) that forms a Virtual Product.  Using Function Follows Form, we work backwards and envision a potential benefit or problem that this hypothetical solution solves.  Innovation!

Young it Down

Published date: January 22, 2008 в 9:48 pm

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Technology improves our lives in many ways, but overreliance on it can cause us to “dumb down.”  Technology has a tendency to fill in or take over certain tasks for the consumer, relieving us of cognitive activities that we once did ourselves.  These cognitive activities get weak or atrophied.  We get lazy and dependent on the new technology to do our work for us.  We become dumb.
Example:  I used my Garmin GPS this weekend at my son’s hockey tournament to find our way back and forth between the hotel and the ice rink.  I have always been “directionally aware,” perhaps a result of Air Force survival training and other experiences.  I know my way around, even in new locations, because of my sense of direction.  I’m never lost.
But on this trip, I used the Garmin (Nuvi) to do the work for me.  Then it struck me as I was riding in a car with one of the other families on the way to the rink.  Without the GPS, I had no clue where we were headed.  The technology caused me to switch off my natural sense of direction.  I had shut it down and paid no attention to where I was or where I was going.  I felt that very strange notion of being lost.  So much for “directionally aware.”
Given the power of innovation tools, we need to be mindful of this as we create medical products, for example, that do the decision making for surgeons, or commercial airplanes that do all the flying for pilots, or educational products that do all the teaching.  We are becoming a knowledge society, they say.  But I worry that knowledge is getting imbedded in new innovations, and it may be having the opposite effect on our society…it is dumbing us down.
Technology has a bright side, though.  Web 2.0 and the myriad of new social networking applications are helping generations reconnect.  This technology is not “dumbing us down;”  rather it is “younging us down.”  I am more connected with my 16 year old son and his friends with applications like texting, Twitter, and Flickr.  My Dunbar Number is expanding thanks to LinkedIn, del.icio.us, and Facebook.  It is helping me identify with 20 year olds, 30 year olds, and beyond, even though I get one year further away from these groups every July 14th.  That’s cool, especially as I find myself speaking to audiences at these age groups all the time.  If I don’t connect to them, they don’t connect with me.  Innovation helps me connect.  It helps me “young it down.”

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