Sanborn Media Factory

Twitter recently made the announcement that they’ll be launching an analytics dashboard sometime in the future. At first glance, one might think “hurray! My favorite open microblogging service is finally building its own, in-house analytics system so I can see exactly how to better utilize my tweets to more comprehensively connect with customers, publicize better, etcetera!” But that person’s kooky, rambling inner monologue is only seeing half the picture.

 The other side to the coin is how their loyal developers may find it tricky keeping up with the various directional shifts Twitter has been phasing through. Up until their recent retooling of the site, twitter.com has been a bare bones site designed to be as broad-based a platform as possible. This opened the door for other companies to build more encompassing third party apps, which became such an integral part of using twitter that the twitter blog even pays homage to these apps in a recent post. 

Granted, Twitter obviously reserves every right to do to the site what it will, which is why they can pick and choose the best features from their apps and incorporate them into their new design, and it’s totally cool. And the fact that they’re building this analytics dashboard is by no means an act of evil. It’s a shame that it will most likely torpedo all of the other third party apps that have worked with the twitter platform in order to build their analytics tools, but that’s an unfortunate part of how these things go.

So, what’s the big deal? Twitter isn’t giving a clear direction for the big picture course it’s applications will be taking. Should developers build apps to look at pictures and watch videos on? No. Twitter just redesigned the site to cover all that, making it essentially an app itself. Ok then, what about analytics? Nope again, they’re doing that themselves too. Will this discourage developers from building applications that’ll push the platform forward in the future? Possibly. Take Facebook for example, there is a very clear distinction between what Facebook builds in house, and what the companies building Facebook’s apps produce. If Facebook suddenly built its own in-house FarmVille, it’d be bad for business. So does Twitter need to make abundantly clear the role that developers currently play and will continue to play when it comes to building and expanding on their platform? Absolutely. Otherwise, they’ll end up hindering all of this outside innovation that has been propelling them forward up to this point.

Social optimization specialists and friends of SMF, Gigya, released a whitepaper explaining how the open graph and social search drive traffic, compared to the traditional, hyper-link based search. It breaks online content discovery into three categories: traditional search, feeds, and social network search. 

Most folks in digital media already know how traditional search works. Companies optimize their site for specific keywords in Google searches, banking on the fact that the keywords they choose to represent their site or service will match up with the words people use when searching for those products. 

Traditional search is great because there is strong intent amongst the consumer; they’re actively looking for that particular search item. However, there isn’t much influence in the results— there’s no personal connection, no human element in a search algorithm optimized for and based on keywords. Moreover, the single most prominent links displayed, the sponsored links, are paying for that prime real estate. Unsurprisingly, the current trend shows a shift from traffic driven by search engines to a heavy increase of traffic driven by social networks. 

Social networks love their feeds. Feeds are your homepage on Facebook and Twitter— the streaming updates from friends or people that you follow in your social network. They are full of links and content that the people with whom you have an online connection are posting. They’re filled with content because people just happen to have this burning desire to share the best and newest content with each other. People love to share (who knew!). On the graph above, feeds lie directly opposite from traditional search. Feeds have lots of influence because the content is posted by people you know (or in Twitter’s case, people you wish you knew) represented by their very name and picture. People care about the content they post, people want their posts to be commented and retweeted, they strive for their discovery to be apprised by their peers. The very nature of feeds and showing off cool stuff is what powers “web 2.0” and gives feeds its inimitable influence. But when the user scans over a feed, intent is lacking — people aren’t necessarily searching for the content that is being pushed to them. This begs the question: When we want to find something in a feed, how do we sift through all the cat pictures, engagement announcements, philosophical venting, etc. and find the important and relevant updates?

Enter Facebook’s Open Graph. Facebook gave everything in their social graph a unique ID, essentially making everything an easy to find “social object.” EVERYTHING that is connected to Facebook is a social object. You are an object, your favorite football team’s page is an object, your alumni group is an object. With the introduction of the “like” button, Facebook gave publishers a way to include items that don’t live within facebook.com. So…now your website is an object, a specific post is an object, and even a specific comment is an object. When all these objects are organized in one, big standard way it allows for someone (Facebook) to create a search that looks through all those social objects and return results that are based off both search terms and social connections. 

Thus, the third means of driving traffic: the social search. It’s a search that scours the social networks and the rest of the web, aiming to provide the most relevant, personalized discovery of content. The results yielded are social objects that are tightly connected to you, based on your social graph: your collection of friends and your friends’ friends, and their information/likes/tweets etc.

It is the most intriguing because it constitutes high intent—the searcher is actively looking the item up— as well as high influence because the primary results are going to be things that engage you, found in the open graph. They’re things that you or your friends like or tweet or post or comment on, not sponsored results (yet). 

The way to optimize your own content or product or service in a social search is to actively create social objects and contribute to the graph. A facebook “like page” isn’t by any means the only way to create a social object around something. Including proper metadata in the html of a webpage that allows it to be indexed by search engines and define it as its own social object is a start. In a recent blog post, Dare Obasanjo does an excellent job outlying the technical ways tags can be applied to social objects and further explaining the idea of the open graph.

This whole thing is new and more or less up for grabs. Facebook took the lead in figuring out what to do with their large pool of personal data. However, all the players realize the changes going on right now and are putting a lot of weight into figuring out the best ways to push this movement forward. It’s organizing and connecting the web in a new way, which is very exciting. At least for geeks like us. 

What’s better than a social media flow chart? A social media flow chart built to resemble ladder logic diagram programming, that’s what! You know how you just sort of know when to follow a new twitter handle you’ve come across? Well, a marketing consultant has drawn up this chart, visualizing the internal process that goes on when deciding whether to follow that new twitter account. It’s always interesting to see things that we passively mull over all the time, without ever really articulating it ourselves. (Click the image to enlarge it.)

(via RRW)

Mashable has procured documents about the release of an official Tweet Button— the first of its kind produced in house, by Twitter. The customary retweet button that has found its way onto most publications on the web was developed by Tweetmeme, a company which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter, determining the most popular, sorting it by category and relevance. We hope that Twitter isn’t torpedoing this service, but instead the two are combining their powers for good to better sort Twitter’s ever expanding content.

Another oddity of this story is the fact that all of the images Mashable uses have a note on the bottom saying that they’re confidential and subject to a non-disclosure agreement. I’m curious what the agreement may have been, allowing the release of this information, yet not removing the NDA caption on the screenshots. 

This came out a bit ago, but Twitter’s recent announcements made me go back over this. It is interesting enough for another look. Lots goin’ on there.