The story behind it: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-19/twitter-wins-300-million-alwaleed-investment-amid-site-revamp.html

I’ve been using twitter for a fairly long time now, almost from the month(or so) it was launched. Despite being using it for that long a period and having my twitter stream open most of the day I’ve never  tweeted a lot, and by ‘a lot’ i mean excess of a dozen fairly distributed tweets a day. Different people have different definitions and clearly for some 10-12 tweets isn’t much. At times I wonder about people who tweet a lot(say 25-35 times a day or more) and mostly end up judging them(not the best thing to do but). What are they like in professional life, in real life(assuming they have one)?

I see lots of wannabe entrepreneurs using twitter heavily to network, RT others tweets, sharing links etc or asking for things which Google could answer better and faster. Then there’s a bunch of what I call “Micro Celebs”, the celebrities of the world of 140 characters whose only claim to fame is there number of followers on twitter or how many achievers or real life celebrities follow them back there. What’s amazing is that these people continue to Tweet/RT the same old things, they used to when they started an year or two back. But luckily what works for them is the fact like search traffic on the internet, there’s always enough audience for them on Twitter, which probably explains why the ones who tweet a lot tend to have more followers.

Most people in my TL who tweet a lot work for some or other company and start tweeting almost the minute they reach their office and continue till the time they head back home. I wonder if they tweet this much and this frequently, how do they get any work done at all. But then,as I’ve seen and experienced myself, you don’t need to get a lot of work done in a big MNC to survive.

Anyways I feel some people(ambitious ones at least) should spend a little less time tweeting about what they are eating/drinking/feeling and instead think how addicted they have become and the things they can get done in that time..

“Accept Button”?
Curious, I tried to check out what they had to offer and here’s what how things stand. The link takes you to their MF site that has the same icons in the tiniest size possible in the most invisible place possible

And here’s what you get when you click the icons

Facebook:

Twitter:

Orkut:

These screenshots pretty much tell the Social Media story for Reliance MF, which is so typical for most companies that are trying to be there but are no where near the optimum experience. It will take them some time and effort to understand there’s more to Social Media than reposting links and hopefully they’ll get hang of things before they run into a Nestle Like crisis

Though there is an account http://twitter.com/twitter, people using it never talk to Twitter users.

Those must me RT’s I thought and dismissed it but then I saw this tweet,

Refusing at first to admit that it must a bug in Twitter, I thought it just might have got something to do with list feature but on further inquiry, that too turned out to be not the case.

As it turns out there’s a bug in Twitter due to which people are seeing random tweets from people they aren’t following. Let’s see how long does it take people to realize this and for Twitter to fix it

Also, apparently there’s another even more irritating part of this bug in which some people are getting these tweets from people they aren’t following via SMS.

A look around the public timeline confirms the existence of the “Random Tweets” bug.

and a look at this tweet tells us that this has been going on for a couple of days now

In this post I’ll try to compare the notification email by various popular platforms for the basic action of getting a new friend,follower, subscriber etc and see whose doing what and what could they do to make things better.

1) Twitter:

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit profile; Direct Action: Block

This template is mostly good enough to decide if a user wants to follow back another user of not but by having a direct follow button would have helped.

2) Slideshare

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: Visit profile; Direct Action: None

This template is plain and simple but it doesn’t have a display pic for new follower and it doesn’t have a direct button for an action. Also, it has two links which point to the same page, which isn’t the best thing .

3) LinkedIn

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: View Invitation; Direct Action: Accept Invitation.

While Linkedin has a direct action button they don’t have any detail about the user in question. Here again a picture or some more description will be helpful.

4) FriendFeed:

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: None; Direct Action: Subscribe back

Friendfeed has by far the best designed email notification template in which they have the display pic, last few updates and just one link to get direct action(subscribe back) from the user

5) Facebook:

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit request ; Direct Action: Accept Request.

Facebook has changed it’s notification from the older one (active till 14th september 09). While they have definitely gone the Friendfeed way, the name  of direct action button is Login which doesn’t kinda look right.

Format: Text; Display Pic: Not Included; Call to Action: View Request; Direct Action: None

6) Orkut:

Format: HTML; Display Pic: Included; Call to Action: Visit profile and Visit friends page; Direct Action: None

Orkut too like slideshare has two links to the user’s profile and a third link which reads ‘visit friends page’ but it takes you to a separate ‘add friends’ page ala facebook.  Also there is no direct call to action here too.

While there could be reasons for not having a direct action button for Facebook and  Orkut(because they need to group friends into categories for example) some sites like Slideshare and Twitter can easily pick this.{Tip 1}

Having two links to the same profile page is definitely not wise and needs to be taken care off {Tip 2}. Other tips like having some profile info and a display picture can help {Tip 3} in a direct call to action(button etc) {Tip 4} if there is.

As you might have noticed eventually every notification email has moved to HTML format as it has more options like better looks and including a direct action call. {Tip 5}

What do you think about these email notifications?

“frandship request”.

Ladies Beware..

Update: Sighted another ‘frandship request’ (Thanks @jasdeep for the hat tip)

Can you see something missing ?

Ever since we had search.twitter.com ( I think after the summize acquisition) I’ve always wondered how come there isn’t a link to go back to the Twitter home page from the search result page. Though it makes PERFECT sense that there should be a visible link to the main page on the top section of the result page or at least the Twitter logo should redirect to the main page , none of them exists.

Instead they have a inconscpicous little “Twitter Home” link at the page footer which I bet would be hardly used.

Thinking aloud, could it be that ever since Twitter acquired Summize they never really thought of putting the Twitter homepage link which was missing in Summize(it didn’t need a home page link as it was just a search tool and search can be done the search result page too).

For those of you who joined the Social Media bandwagon late, here’s what  Summize looked like.

(Image credits http://www.flickr.com/photos/toprankblog/)

familiar to the F?

What do you think about this, a missing chunk of usability resulting from oversight or something else ?

Act 1: Scribd

Looks familiar ? You bet it does.

The latest changes seem straight from Twitter’s design books. From Tweeting err Scriblling box to follower/following it all traces it’s root to Twitter but that’s not it. Another there’s also a conscpicous attach button(in white) down left. Clicking which leads to

So now scribd users can scribble updates and also attach scribd documents(there’s or someone else’s) to them.

Reminds of Pownce ? It does to me.

Here’s what a scribble looks like

A user profile page with scribbles looks like this

These are some of the efforts taken by team Scribd to make their platform more social and as mentioned in the blog post, there’s more to come.

Act 2: Slideshare

While uploading a case study I compiled on Slideshare yesterday I happened to notice a change in their terminology too.

Follow ? Wasn’t there a different name to this till some time back ? Yes, before being followers they were contacts.

These changes are part of the new profile design change. Interestingly unlike the scribd blog post on new changes, the post at Slideshare blog doesn’t mention the change in terminology and apparently the changes aren’t mentioned anywhere else either. I couldn’t make out if there’s anything more to the ‘following/follower’ change than terminology as the functionality remains same.

So now users can follow other users from Sribd and Slideshare respectively.

At Scribd, we believe that the written word is no longer static; the next major evolution of the “print” medium will be social and readers will contribute to authors’ never-finished works that evolve over time.

As stated in the opening lines of their blog post, Scribd probably has a few things up their sleeve about the whole making ‘Scribd Social’ campaign. While having ability to post updates/scribbles and attach files should see an increase in public interaction amongst users it’s the idea of having followers and followees(for lack of a better word) in both Slideshare and Scribd that intrigues me. Friends or Contacts are NOT same as Followers and these terms shouldn’t be used loosely, especially when they have been around for some time. Also, in Slideshare’s case I particularly don’t see ANY need for this change(same goes for Scribd BTW).

Did I hear someone say in Slideshare the term follower is apt because you get to see updates of your contacts( or whatever) on your home page ?
Right, since you see small updates about activities of your connections in a feed on your home page and get to see their latest slideshows on your page, ‘Follow’ is the best way to describe your relationship. Duh !!

Going by this reason since you can see latest photographs from your connections on Flickr, why not start the  follower/following game in Flickr too ? The point in case is simple, follower/following works for Twitter because there the MAIN activity is to subscribe/follow what other people are upto, which isn’t the case with Scribd or Slideshare(or is it ?) . You might want to know what your contacts uploaded but that’s a seperate thing and a small part of the whole thing.

Going by the fact that people on any social network want to stay updated about their connections should we just have followers and following on every social site ? Also, think from the point of view of an existing user who had spent some time on a site making contacts/friends for some time and come one day he gets to know that now he doesn’t have any contacts but he’s following the same people. I certainly wouldn’t like that abstract change. Will you like it?

Would you like if you wake up one day and see that you have no friends on Facebook but people you follow and people who follow you ?

Any guesses how much time does it take for a typical user to figure out @replies ?

Curious about how many people feel the same way when they use Twitter for the first time, I ran a search on
“what is twitter” and here’s what I found

This is the reason why Twitter’s audience retention rate(percentage of people signing up who return the following month) is 40 %  (via Nielsen)

While we wait n watch what (if at all) Twitter is doing about this, Let’s see
what you think can be done to improve their retention rate ?