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I love to sit on the beach. One of the coolest things about the beach is the number of layers of visual depth. Look at the sand and it's beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you'll see a whole layer of life running around on the sand that you didn't see before. Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and light dancing between them. Look closer still and you see that each grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture. If your eyes are strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more layers by looking closer still. That's what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter Annotations this Summer. It's a beautiful vision, with huge potential, but there's another way to look at this analogy: you don't build on the beach sand because it shifts too much. Will Annotations live up to its incredible promise? Sponsor What Annotations Are Last week Twitter announced a forthcoming feature called Twitter Annotations: it's a system for almost any metadata to be connected to any Twitter message when it's published. Inside every Tweet is now a space where you could put or find anything, including links out to further instructions or larger bodies of information. That's always been the case with the 140 characters of content - but now we're talking about systematic metadata intended for machines, to augment the content. The idea is dripping with potential, but also some risk. Isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? Twitter has been considering adding Annotations for at least two years, according to Platform Team member Raffi Krikorian. That's a relatively large portion of the company's young life. Every time a new bit of metadata was added to Tweets, like geolocation information was last Fall, the company would ask itself "should we be doing this, or should we just open up the platform for and and all metadata?" Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content. What might this look like? We could see Annotations fields like: Link to a media file, like podcast enclosures, photos linked to, etc. Context about the Tweet like where was the author when it was published, maybe what the weather was like there at the time. Your Twitter publishing interface could offer you a special option to write reviews of movies, books, or links you're sharing. The ISBN of the book, a link to a preview of the movie and the number of stars in your rating could be included in the Tweet Annotations. Any way you can classify, describe, append or otherwise enrich a Tweet with words or numbers can be included in Annotations. You Tweet, you attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and more will make it easy for users to add these annotations. Yes, this is meaningful in large part because of the 140 character limit on Twitter messages themselves, but isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? From Annotations Come Analysis Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it's when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that thinks get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter - that's when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate. Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier. Tweetmeme's Nick Halstead believes that Annotations will be used most extensively to communicate webhooks, links to instructions for a Twitter client to follow. He thinks it will enable game play and help Twitter start acquiring more users again. "Because of the size of the data you can put in the annotations, I think people will come up with links to offsite resources. Seesmic is building their own platform for Windows to support plug-ins, but this reaches much further, but this lets Twitter clients augment a tweet with other services. Sf you were Stocktweets, you could attach a link in the namespace that's in stocktweets, Seesmic could follow that link back to Stocktweets and ask it how to render it. So you could put a chart and any other associated information. It's like FBML [Facebook Markup Language], the ability to embed applications inside the Twitter clients. Maybe threaded conversations. A game of Scrabble where the link points at a currently rendered scrabble board, so other people could look at the board and join in playing it. Annotations and webhooks would allow gaming to start happening on Twitter." Halstead believes an Alpha version of Annotations could be made available to developers in a month. How about showing me all the Tweets from anyone that are referencing the President of the United States (subject: POTUS?), analyze the sentiment in the messages, show me where those Twitter users were located and tell me how those local sentiments change over time. Send me an alert when one of those starts to shift radically. Show me all the Tweets by people in their 20's and in their 50's (imagine an author age tag in Annotations, why not?), living near the site of a disastrous event. How do those discussions differ? There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be tackled when the developer world's imagination runs wild on the terms of description applied to our messages. Of course it will be tempting to draw all kinds of conclusions from this rich data. We'll surely be able to draw a whole lot of value from it. "You can learn something from almost anything," Big Data cruncher and 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar says. "Just give me enough data, I'll figure out something." But let's keep in mind the words of social network scientist danah boyd, who wrote the following on her blog this morning: Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic...Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer. Tweet Power Politics Twitter's Krikorian says the site will probably list "trending annotations" just like it lists trending topics today. There will probably be a wiki where anyone can find out what namespaces are being used for what purposes. Really though, the classification system is going to be determined by the market. That's something that worries a lot of people. "People who believe in building standards are conerned about our blase attitude about how we want to run annotations," Krikorian says. He believes that the developer community will work things out for itself, just as it has in the past. "There has been a lot of emergent behavior around how to relate to tweets anyway, without our imposing much structure around it. The Twitter platform is continuously evolving - the developers will figure it out. Twitter developers iterate in public." That's likely to be cold comfort for people focused on the power of structured data standards. Many people are calling for Twitter to embrace the well-built efforts of the Semantic Web community. Krikorian says that 90% of Twitter developers don't know what the Semantic Web is but that there's certainly room for standards lovers to work within the Annotations scheme. Still, the absence of standard terminology could really be a problem. Annotations can't be changed retroactively, either. Krikorian says that major players will dominate the obvious use cases for Annotations and the company will monitor and highlight really innovative Annotations developed by people on the margins. We'll see how well that will work. Imagination will make the sky the limit for this publishing platform used easily by more than 100 million people around the world. But a shortage of forethought, planning and agreed-upon standards may bring that platform's aspirations back down to earth quickly in the future. Time will tell. Discuss
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What Twitter Annotations Mean
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Our number one post this week was that Twitter's archives will soon be housed in the hallowed halls of the Library of Congress. There's got to be joke about librarians shushing tweets in there somewhere. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010. We wrote about Internet of Things threads you'll be wearing soon, a real-time trip into Twitter's past, and that augmented reality is going to the fishes on the Discovery Channel. Read on for more. Sponsor Story of the Week: Twitter in the Library of Congress Twitter's Entire Archive Headed to the Library of Congress Apple Announces iPhone OS 4 with Support for Multitasking 10 Smart Clothes You'll Be Wearing Soon Goodbye, Gears - Google Docs Boots Plugin for HTML5 on May 3rd Top 10 YouTube Videos About Facebook New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit Join us for the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7 in Mountain View, California as we explore the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. Be a part of the discussion on geo-location services , augmented reality , native app vs. browser-based , commerce and marketing , mobile social networking and the Internet of Things. Sponsorship enquiries: sales@readwriteweb.com . Mobile Web Where Does Android Register on Google's "Evil" Meter? Opera Takes a Back Seat to Safari on the iPhone Microsoft's New Phone Gets the Social/App Balance Wrong More Mobile Web coverage Augmented Reality Discovery Channel Puts AR In Front of Millions of Eyeballs More Augmented Reality coverage Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Our Newest Research Report We're pleased to announce ReadWriteWeb's latest premium report, Augmented Reality for Marketers and Developers: Analysis of the Leaders, the Challenges and the Future . This report will help you develop a sophisticated understanding of Augmented Reality (AR), the mobile and Web technology that places data on top of a user's view of the physical world. The research included will help you decrease your AR development time to market by learning from the first wave of early adopters. AR offers a new marketing and product paradigm for a high impact, high value customer experience. More than 1,000 AR campaigns were kicked-off last year and we expect to see many more in 2010. In this report, we profile key AR development companies, their campaigns as well as development lessons learned. For more information or to buy the report, visit here . Internet of Things 10 Smart Clothes You'll Be Wearing Soon DASH7: Bringing Sensor Networking to Smartphones More Internet of Things coverage Real-Time Web Google's Twitter Timeline Lets You Explore the Past Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative More Real-Time Web coverage . Don't miss the next wave of opportunity on the Web supported by real-time technology! Get ReadWriteWeb's report, The Real-Time Web and its Future . Check Out The ReadWriteWeb iPhone App We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app . As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we've made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes . ReadWriteStart Our channel ReadWriteStart , sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark , is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs Under 30: Advice From Your Peers Mary Meeker's Internet Trends: The Future is Mobile Apple's Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers ReadWriteEnterprise Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. New Google Docs Features: Added Co-Editing Capabilities, Similar To Google Wave Social Media Analysis: SAS Makes Its Play ReadWriteCloud Our channel ReadWriteCloud , sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Weekly Poll: What does Virtualization as a Service Really Mean? Drupal Founder Takes on Jive Software Another Cloud Computing Acronym To Drive You Bonkers Enjoy your weekend everyone. Discuss
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Weekly Wrap-up: Twitter in the Library, iPhone Gets Multitasking, Goodbye Google Gears, And More...
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In an email to staff yesterday, new Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal wrote that "When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what's working, what's not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success." With that, he announced Ning would be abandoning its longstanding business model and discontinuing non-paying sites on its network. In light of this, is it time to reevaluate and reign in some of the excitement about the freemium model for startups? Sponsor Offering free services for a product alongside premium fees for advanced or special features - the freemium - has been touted as a promising business model for startups for several years now: "Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base." The Freemium Summit in San Francisco last month featured many companies who've been able to leverage the freemium model to great success, including Evernote , Pandora , and Dropbox . A recent New York Times article predicts Pandora could reach $100 million in revenue this year. Finding the balance between what to offer for free and what to charge for is not easy. The trick is to put enough in the free version to get traffic and usage, but not so much that there is no incentive to upgrade. Companies who use the freemium model need to integrate their free service or product into someone's routine so fully (either by making sure it's accessible on their computer and on their mobile phone, for example) that users reach the point where they feel they simply must pay. In yesterday's press release , Ning noted that 75% of its users do pay for some sort of premium service. It may well be then that Ning's announcements are less a reflection on the freemium model than on the company itself. Despite over $120 million in VC funding, Ning has been unable to develop a sustainable business. Yesterday's announcement about the end to free Nings was accompanied with news that 40% of their staff would lose their jobs - an indication perhaps that the company's overhead was simply too high. Nevertheless, the news may serve as a cautionary tale for those startups who think the freemium model guarantees success. As David Heinemeier Hansson wrote in a post on 37signals , "Eyeballs Still Don't Pay the Bills." It remains to be seen if Ning can pull through this reorganization and turn a profit, or if they will also serve as a lesson on what happens when a business that's used the freemium model dumps all those "freeloaders." Discuss
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Is the Freemium Model (Still) Viable for Startups?
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Friday is the last day of New York Entrepreneur Week which upon its completion will have featured over 100 speakers from across the globe sharing their thoughts, advice and experience with attendees, but interesting stories have been surfacing around the event since as early as last week. A guest post on the event's official blog by Janine de Nysschen , a business consultant and endorser of change dynamics , raises the interesting truth that women play a very small role in startups and venture capital , but as her passion might indicate, she feels this trend is changing. Sponsor It's true. Though there are significant exceptions, we seldom here about female CEOs launching startups and receiving boat-loads of venture capital funding, heaven forbid it be from a female venture capitalist. But it's not just a startup problem, its a problem that persists in the majority of business fields; business is an industry that was only a man's game for a very long time, and women are still playing catch up. However, de Nysschen thinks there are factors about venture capital that make it less appealing to the businesswomen of the world. "The truth is that VCs invest in a stereotype, and that right now, the stereotype of high risk-tolerance, abnormal work ethic and business acumen seldom comes in the female form," says de Nysschen. She also says that a lot of VC deals are formed from existing relationships in the community, and points out that men and women tend to socialize in different circles, "especially in business," she adds. She also notes that while there is a shortage of female VCs and entrepreneurs, 70% of female VCs have been involved in deals that included female-led companies. Based on this, it's only fair that de Nysschen concludes that "if there were more women doling out money, there would be more women getting it." But things may be beginning to change. According to de Nysschen, women are the fastest growing subgroup of entrepreneurs - a fact she attributes to a growing trend of women choosing new career paths and educations. One of the reasons she says women have struggled in the venture-backed sector is that many VCs and founders come from backgrounds in which women are traditionally in the minority, such as engineering, computer science and biotechnology. However, women are statistically better startup founders than men, she says. "Women have been proven to build companies that are more capital-efficient than those founded by men, and they use less capital to achieve the same or higher revenue performance in early-stage years," she says. "Women don't fail as often as men: in fact, women-led high-tech start-ups generate higher revenues per dollar of invested capital and have lower failure rates than those led by men." Gender issues are nothing new to ReadWriteWeb, as in the past we've discussed the need for female oriented tech events , the unique market of female bloggers , while at the same time opening up discussion about whether women should be specifically catered to or not. As de Nysschen mentions in her post, there are more women in the world, and women do more purchasing of products and services than men do, so why shouldn't there be more women in the VC industry? Let us know you thoughts on female entrepreneurs and VCs in the comments! Discuss
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Why There Are Hardly Any Female Founders and VCs
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For the past few days, we attended SAS and SugarCRM user conferences in Seattle and San Francisco. These are just a few of the observations that comes from conversations with developers, business managers, product managers, entrepreneurs and executive management. At both companies, you see the influence of social technologies in the discussions and what their partners are offering. With this social wave comes a variety of new methods to crack the biggest nut: "The most effective way to organize, discover and share information." We've been pounding on that last issue for the past week. We have numerous examples for how web applications can be aggregated into environments like SugarCRM but its the complexity of organizing that data which becomes the biggest challenge. Sponsor The consumer social networks give people lots of ways to use applications. For example, Twitter is a hub for delivering messages to external sites from the application or services such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic. It is a bridge for external services that provide data services that aggregate Twitter data to be uses for specific uses. Recommendation services like Mr. Tweet provide a person with references to other people the individual may want to follow. The enterprise is a different beast. It is not the most popular for the hungry young entrepreneurs and developers we met at companies like Twillio Tuesday night on the eve of Chirp, the Twitter developer conference taking place this week in San Francisco. Still, in conversations there, we met a few people who are developing for the enterprise environment. What they bring is a fresh look at how the social technologies apply in a world where compliance issues abound, complex processes rule the day and knowledge often exists in ERP silos and email archives. What these young people see are front-end tools like Google Wave that serve as the foundation for collaborative services. These are platforms, for instance, that seek to eliminate email from the process. These young developers create a certain effect. They've developed ways to organize and share information that the enterprise accepts. So much so that the giants have developed their own services, again, in many respects, inspired by the developers building web oriented platforms. And it is having a transformative effect. On Sunday night, we sat in a conference hall at the Washington Convention Center. It was the 35th anniversary of the SAS Users Conference. It was our first time attending. Twitter was the focal part of the opening. Large screens showed the Twitter updates. Their vice president of marketing used his time on stage to push out his second tweet...ever. The singing group even tried to collaborate with the crowd to create an improvised song from their Twitter stream. We learned the next day that this was a first for SAS. Twitter and the variety of other social technologies in the market are giving this conservative, data analytics company a new view, best illustrated in the launch this week of its Social Media Analytics platform. It's a complete, powerful service that takes structured and unstructured data from social networks, applies it to preset rules and delver the results in a dashboard environment. It's lacking a certain level of automation. It's not self-service by any means. It requires SAS to do the analysis and then present it through a web site. But that's okay. The service acts as a pivot that gives SAS the capability to move into new markets. It moves them from the back of the deal to the front of the deal. In the back of the deal, for instance, SAS helps analyze customer guarantees. They do a lot more than that but it's an example of the textual analysis the company provides. Now they have greater access to the front side of the deal to. They can use the platform to reach into agencies where they can help customers craft brand strategies. That should have an effect all of its own. It gives SAS the opportunity to interact with marketers, designers and UI specialists. They may recruit a few people or take the knowledge inside the company and turn it into something. That should help SAS improve the Social Media Analytics platform, making it a service that is more easily available for users to do more on their own. At SugarCon, the story is also a social one. Perhaps best summed up in the second day keynote by Paul Greenberg: "Do You Really Have To Worry About the Social Customer?" I am not so sure you have to worry about a social customer. But it might be a good idea to get know them a little bit better so you can build on your own transformations, whatever they may be. Discuss
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From Seattle to San Francisco, Social is Everything
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