gen 24

Why Google and Twitter need to kiss and make up

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If Google and Twitter were to describe their relationship in one word, it would probably be “complicated.” For the past week or so, the two have been sniping at each other about Google’s new social-search features, and how Twitter doesn’t show up as high as it should in those results — thanks to what it sees as favoritism of Google’s own Google+ network. But this particular brouhaha is only the latest manifestation of a much deeper problem between the two, like a fight over the toothpaste, or who did the laundry last. The reality is that both sides need each other more than they would probably like to admit.

When Google launched its new “Search plus Your World,” which the search giant claimed would give users a view of what their social networks were recommending and sharing, Twitter was among the first to point out that all Google was really doing was promoting its own social network in search. Twitter said it was “disappointed” in the move, and suggested that Google was not fulfilling its chosen role as an impartial search provider, and Twitter’s general counsel (and former Googler) Alex Macgillivray went even further and said that the search company’s move was “a bad day for the internet.”

Not one to take criticism lying down, Google responded with a somewhat passive-aggressive statement about how it would love to show more Twitter results, but was obeying the “rel=nofollow” rules laid down by Twitter (which are designed to prevent Google from assigning page-rank value to certain links as part of its indexing process). And the search company also pointed out that Twitter was the one who broke off the previous deal between the two that gave Google access to the full “firehose” of Twitter data, which formed the basis of Google’s short-lived real-time search offering.

Google: “It’s your fault.” Twitter: “No it’s your fault”

This week, Twitter came back with its own argument, and stuck a thumb in Google’s eye to boot: developers with the company collaborated with Facebook’s director of product Blake Ross on a browser plugin called “Don’t be evil,” which is designed to show what Google’s search results would look like if the search giant gave content from Twitter and Facebook the prominence it deserves, instead of favoring Google+ results.

In a lot of ways, listening to Google and Twitter feels like watching a divorced couple fighting in court over who gets custody of the kids. And while neither side wants to go into detail about what is keeping them apart, or what the root of their problems are, there are clues out there to be found: for example, Google is clearly miffed that it spent so much time developing its real-time search based on Twitter’s firehose feed, only to have Twitter pull out of the deal and leave it hanging. According to several sources, the breaking point in that discussion was that Twitter wanted more money for access to its data.

Twitter, meanwhile, keeps pointing out that Google can and does index its content without any kind of special access — Twitter’s communications team noted that Google hits its servers more than 120 million times a day, and Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has described how there is plenty of content from Twitter in Google’s results. But the real issue is more complicated: according to some observers, including Rakesh Agrawal, Google can’t index all of the content that streams through Twitter in real time without special access because with 250 million tweets a day or so, there is just too much of it.

Google could crawl Twitter more aggressively and more often, these observers say, but that would cost more time and money and bandwidth — and on Twitter’s side of the coin, if Google were to crawl more aggressively it could impact the network by slowing it down or even causing it to crash, which Twitter definitely doesn’t want. Having raised almost half a billion dollars in financing last year at a valuation of $8 billion, the last thing the company wants is to have the “fail whale” start popping up because Google is hammering away at its servers trying to catch up with all the new content.

Google and Twitter both need each other

As with most troubled relationships, the saddest part of this whole situation is that Google and Twitter really need each other, and in many ways they should be the perfect couple: Twitter has a huge and rapidly-growing information network, but it has no real search function to speak of — or at least not one that works very well. Indexing and searching 250 million tweets a day is not a small problem. Google, of course, is an expert at making sense of huge quantities of data, and it also needs more social signals in order to improve its search. That’s why it started Google+ in the first place.

Theoretically the two have plenty to offer each other, and plenty to gain from a better relationship — which is why Google has reportedly tried to acquire the company in the past. But Twitter seems determined to build a standalone entity, and appears to be heading towards an IPO rather than an acquisition — and a market valuation of $8 billion or so makes it a rather large mouthful, even for Google. And so we have a classic standoff, in which neither side wants to admit that it needs or wants what the other one has to offer.

Is there some kind of relationship counsellor who could fix this broken couple? No one seems to be stepping up to offer their services. And so users wind up with no functional Twitter search, and Google results that are one-sided to the point of being distorted, which as I’ve pointed out before is a breach of the search company’s promise to users when it went public in 2004, not to mention a red flag for antitrust regulators. In other words — as with so many dysfunctional relationships — no one wins.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users fPat Murray and Stefan

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gen 06

Why Pusher wants to help you build the real-time web

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Not many companies launch by accident, but that’s exactly how London startup Pusher first showed its face to the world back in 2010. Co-founder Damien Tanner had intended to invite a friend to take a look at the real-time web service he’d been working on — and then made an all-too-familiar Twitter slip.

“I meant to send a direct message, but I ended up sending a public @ message to someone,” he laughs. “Suddenly there were people who were following us both who had signed up and were saying it looked interesting.”

That early moment of calamity turned out to be a blessing, however. The initial interest was strong enough to encourage the team to keep developing and now, just a couple of years later, the business is gaining plaudits — and customers.

So what is Pusher? Co-founder and CEO Max Williams describes the service as a set of tools that make it simple to add real-time functions to other websites or services. And at heart, that’s it: an API that lets people offload some potentially tricky work.

“We allow developer to make applications real-time, so that users don’t have to refresh the page, and they automatically get information streamed to them where they are,” he explains. “But it’s a flexible enough service that it can be used for all sorts of things.”

Indeed it is, pulling in clients as diverse as MailChimp, Slideshare and The U.S. Open tennis. Gaming companies are latching on to Pusher to provide multiplayer experiences without having to build out lots of infrastructure or admin, and the business is constantly expanding the ways for people to hook into its REST API.

Building this sort of thing could be achieved in-house, of course — and many web apps currently do it for themselves — but Pusher hopes that the idea of handing off the server and administration load to somebody else will appeal because it allows developers to make and deploy real-time elements quickly and at scale and focus on their product.

“If you have 10,000 people looking at a page, waiting for some sports scores or tweets, you send one message to us and we relay it to those 10,000 people,” says Tanner. “Previously you’d have had an Ajax thing requesting new information from the server every second or every five seconds — and if you have 10,000 people doing that at once it’s actually a scaling challenge. We make it so much easier by having a websocket connection with the browser, which is just a pipe we can just push data down.”

Like so many projects, Pusher was initially developed to scratch their own itch. When the pair’s last business, web consultancy New Bamboo, started building its own products, the team discovered it was coming across one particular issue time and again.

“We ran into the same problem — synchronization across browsers,” says Williams. “Someone’s messing around changing things, but those changes aren’t reflected on somebody’s else’s browsers… so then they start to get out of sync.”

“We built what would become Pusher to solve that problem — but when we came around to implementing it, it only took a few hours. We suddenly thought that to have this problem solved in a few hours is actually a much more interesting thing than the original applications we built. So we put them to one side and started working on getting Pusher out.”

And it was good timing. Growing the real-time web is hot right now: not just through the explosion activity around Twitter over the last few years, but also through the growth in mobile apps and the spread of into businesses. And while some may feel ambivalent about the data deluge it creates, there’s no doubt that many more companies are looking at ways to speed up what they do. And if that’s the case, then providing real-time as a service could be lucrative — at least that’s the feeling of Pusher’s investors, including London-based Passion Capital and the founders of cloud app platform Heroku, who gave the company $1 million in funding last summer.

40 billion messages and counting

Six months on, Williams and Tanner are cagey about Pusher’s numbers, but say that the service now has 10,000 registered users, hundreds of active ones and some high-profile partnerships — and is running close to break-even. And with 40 billion messages delivered, they are hoping that it can become a fundamental foundation on which hundreds or thousands of new real-time businesses can be built.

“A lot of people have their existing infrastructure or their existing applications, and they’re not going to rebuild the whole thing today,” says Tanner. “So a lot of people are adding Pusher on to the side or as an element to add some real-time parts.

“But there are people exploring building fully real-time web apps, where all the communication works over WebSockets. As we move into the future, we see that being the primary method of communication between a service and the browser. You’re still going always going to send audio and video through HTML or streaming methods, but for interacting with web applications, WebSockets is the ultimate technology to use.”

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gen 04

Why Twitter’s “verified account” failure matters

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The new year brought a treat for those who like to follow aging media moguls, with the launch of official Twitter accounts belonging to both News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and his wife Wendi Deng, including some awkward banter around a tweet that Murdoch later reportedly deleted (although as a commenter notes below, the original tweet remains). The only problem with the voyeuristic appeal of this exchange, however, is that Deng wasn’t the real thing — although the account was marked as “verified,” with Twitter’s blue check mark, it was revealed to be a fake on Tuesday. A simple slip-up? Perhaps, but one that reinforces how little we know about Twitter’s verification process, something that is becoming more and more important as the service grows.

When Murdoch showed up on Twitter on December 31, there was widespread skepticism about whether it was the real News Corp. billionaire or not, despite the fact that the account was marked as verified. But a tweet from Twitter co-founder and chief product officer Jack Dorsey confirmed that it was the real Murdoch — and the “verified” check-mark, combined with the apparent back-and-forth between the Wendi Deng account and Murdoch’s, convinced many that it was also real (although some, including publishing industry veteran Michael Wolff, continued to doubt this).

How was the account verified? We don’t know

On Tuesday, however, it emerged that the Wendi Deng account had been set up as a prank by a British man, who said he “set up the account for a laugh” during the holidays, when he saw how much attention the Murdoch account was getting. The account’s creator said that he was as surprised as anyone when his account showed up with a blue check-mark, and that he hadn’t been contacted by anyone at Twitter about who he was or whether the account was for real, telling the Guardian:

I just couldn’t believe they would have verified such a high profile account without checking it out, but I absolutely received no communication from Twitter to the email address I used to register.

Twitter has refused to speak publicly about what happened with the Deng account, or to explain why it was verified and then suddenly un-verified — and the company has also repeatedly refused to talk on the record about how the verification process as a whole works, and why some accounts are chosen for verification and others aren’t. Even if the Deng verification was a simple screw-up due to reduced staffing levels over the holidays, Twitter’s radio silence on the issue makes it even harder to trust the entire process, and that could have ramifications that go beyond just the Murdoch case.

The “verified” program started with the blue check mark as a beta in 2009, primarily because a number of celebrities had complained about fake accounts pretending to be them, and the company said it wanted to help users figure out which were real. For a time, anyone could apply to have their account verified by using a form on the Twitter website, but this was later phased out and verification is now done on what the company calls a “case by case” basis, including advertisers and partners.

Twitter needs to be more transparent about the process

Given the rapid growth in Twitter’s user base, it’s not surprising that Twitter would have problems scaling a widespread verification program — and in some ways, doing this runs against the grain for the network, which has made a point of not requiring real names from users the way that Facebook and Google+ have. But even worse than having an arbitrary verification process is having one that doesn’t work properly, and one that the company is so opaque about. It’s not clear why Twitter doesn’t talk about it, but this vacuum of information is hardly conducive to gaining the trust of users.

And trust is something that Twitter needs in spades, especially as it grows and becomes a crucial part of the way that news and other information spreads in a social-media age. The network is already in a delicate situation when it comes to issues like free speech, with the State Department pressuring it to shut down accounts that belong (or appear to belong) to terrorist organizations, and other lobby groups launching legal claims against the company because it allegedly supports entities like Hezbollah by giving them a platform.

The company’s refusal to provide more details about how the verification process functions may stem in part from its desire to protect the users it is verifying, or to prevent the system from being gamed somehow. But if it is going to continue to ask for the trust of its users, it is going to have to be more transparent about how it manages the network, or risk losing the faith that it has spent so much time building up.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Hans Gerwitz and See-ming Lee

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dic 21

News as a process: How journalism works in the age of Twitter

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We’ve written many times about how journalism is changing in the age of social media, thanks to what Om has called the “democracy of distribution” provided by tools like Twitter — and how everyone now has the opportunity to function as a journalist, even for a short time, during news events like the attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound. A new study of the way that information flowed during the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt earlier this year paints a fascinating picture of how what some call “news as a process” works, and the roles that bloggers, mainstream media and other actors play during a breaking news event. More than anything, it is a portrait of what the news looks like now.

The study, entitled “The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions,” was published in the International Journal of Communications, and involved several researchers from the Web Ecology Project, Gilad Lotan from the social-media service Social Flow, and Microsoft researcher and sociologist Danah Boyd (a PDF version of the study is available here). The researchers looked at two datasets — one composed of 168,000 tweets from January 12 to 19 that contained hashtags such as #sidibouzid and #tunisia, and one composed of 230,000 tweets from January 24 to January 29, containing hashtags such as #egypt or #jan25 (the date of a mass demonstration that played a key role in the subsequent Egyptian revolution).

The research broke those who tweeted about both events down into a number of groups of “key actors” — including activists, mainstream media outlets, individual journalists, bloggers, digerati and celebrities — and then tracked how information about various events during both periods flowed from one source to another. One interesting aspect of the study is that some key players in both events were almost impossible to classify as belonging to a single group: Jillian York, for example, is a researcher who works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation but is also a prominent blogger for Global Voices and is passionate about issues in the Arab world.

Twitter becomes a crowdsourced newswire

As the study describes, Twitter has come to play a crucial role in the way that news functions during events like the Egyptian revolution — like a crowdsourced newswire filled with everything from breaking news to rumor and everything in between, and one that both uses and is used by mainstream media:

The shift from an era of broadcast mass media to one of networked digital media has altered both information flows and the nature of news work… during unplanned or critical world events such as the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, MSM turn to Twitter, both to learn from on-the-ground sources, and to rapidly distribute updates.

The evolution of what media theorist Jeff Jarvis and others have called “networked journalism” has made the business of news much more chaotic, since it now consists of thousands of voices instead of just a few prominent ones who happen to have the tools to make themselves heard. If there is a growth area in media, it is in the field of “curated news,” where real-time filters like NPR’s Andy Carvin or the BBC’s user-generated-content desk verify and re-distribute the news that comes in from tens of thousands of sources, and use tools like Storify to present a coherent picture of what is happening on the ground.

The study makes the point that mainstream media outlets play a key role in the dissemination of news during such events (and also notes that journalists tend to retweet other journalists more often than they do non-mainstream sources), but it also makes it obvious that prominent bloggers and activists are crucial information conduits as well. In graphic representations created by Global Voices using the study’s data, for example, blogger Nasser Wedaddy is a key hub that distributes information to bloggers, activists and mainstream media (here’s another fascinating visualization of networked data flows in Egypt).

It’s called social media for a reason

As noted by Nancy Messieh at The Next Web, one of the additional points the study makes is that the personal Twitter accounts belonging to journalists were far more likely to be retweeted or engaged with by others than official accounts for the media outlets they worked for. The point here is one we have tried to make repeatedly, which is that social media is called social for a reason: it is about human beings connecting with other human beings around an event, and the more that media outlets try to stifle the human aspect of these tools — through repressive social-media policies, for example — the less likely they will be to benefit from using them.

One of the other benefits of a distributed or networked version of journalism is one that sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has made in the course of her research into how Twitter and other social tools affected the events in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. As she wrote in a recent blog post, one of the realities of mainstream media is what is often called “pack journalism” — the kind that sees hundreds of journalists show up for official briefings by government or military sources, but few pursue their own stories outside the official sphere. Social media and “citizen journalism,” Tufekci says, can be a powerful antidote to this kind of process, and that is fundamentally a positive force for journalism.

As we look at the way that news and information flows in this new world of social networks, and what Andy Carvin has called “random acts of journalism” by those who may not even see themselves as journalists, it’s easy to get distracted by how chaotic the process seems, and how difficult it is to separate the signal from the noise. But the reality is that more information is better — even if it requires new skills on the part of journalists when it comes to filtering that information — and journalism, as Jay Rosen has pointed out, tends to get better when more people do it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

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