This week I’ve been happily exploring the new retweet feature on Twitter.com. I can’t wait for this same functionality to spread to my favorite twitter clients. It’s accomplishing a better user experience for many reasons.

1. The integrity of the original tweet is saved (if you want to add comments, just send your own tweet)
2. You can easily measure how many times a tweet has been Retweeted
3. Measurement of overall influence on Twitter can be better calculated

So, why the change? What’s next?

One of the biggest reasons I’m excited for it is the ability to measure overall reach by bringing it back to old school marketing numbers. Number of impressions. Why is that good? For people like me who run a brand twitter account and you get questions like, “what were the numbers on twitter today.” I say things like this, “We had 430 Retweets, and our share of voice on Twitter spiked to .2% (from .05-.1%)”. This probably sounds like klingon to people who don’t use Twitter. Or I can say other things that mean less to me, but probably more to others, “We sent it to our 500,000 followers, I don’t know what they did with it.” With old school marketing numbers you can easily communicate more relevant data to your leadership team, and it makes it easier to validate the need for social media.

(side note: Yes, there are a lot of tools to calculate reach & engagement, but I have yet to find one where I can both fully trust the data and translate it to an normalized number, like impressions.)

It’s a small, but an important step in Twitter’s maturation.

The new Retweet feature is going to allow precise measurement of how people are consuming tweets and what they’re doing with it next.

Now, what is the number one reason Twitter is doing this?

Commercial accounts: Charge for information that isn’t available to anybody else. For example, this tweet went to 520,000 followers. The actual reach of that tweet was 3.73 million (just a guess) because it was Retweeted by these people.

Other reasons:

• Old school IP (not this, this)
• Cleanliness of the interface
• Standardization of a popular use case

Can’t wait to see what Twitter, Inc. has in store next.

They took a sample set of ‘connected customers’ who are often leading indicators of how people interact digitally. There are a lot of great snippets of data that are worth reading through. Highly recommend.

Buzz Canuck: The Blindsiding and Bubble of Social Media

Key quote:

But in a very few short years,  my prediction – the term will fade into irrelevance – all media will be social – no more need for the distinction.

Twitter Census: Publishing the First of Many Datasets

Infochimps has been scraping tweets for the last three years, and they have a dataset of information that is very hard to find. This is data that I would love to dig into. I’m positive that the amount of insights into every part of Starbucks (and digital society, really) would be astonishing. I’m sure we’ll see some interesting studies come out from this.

John Battelle’s Searchblog: Why Did Google Buy AdMob?

This post is to the point. Love it.

Wouldn’t it be cool if two things were to happen …

1. All cameras had a gps and a compass installed, just like your iPhone.
2. Sites that people upload photos to, such as Facebook and Flickr captured this data and utilized it in a smart way, with other data, like type of camera, lens, etc

If you stitched those two things together, you know these things:

• Where someone is
• What direction they’re facing
• The type of camera + lens they’re using (already included with Flickr meta)

You could build a crowd sourced, almost real time (if the photos were uploaded immediately), virtual reality video/time lapse video. For big tourist destinations, this could be amazing. For Sporting events, you could see a 360 view of the field. Big shared experiences could almost be recreated. What if you were then able to add location specific tweets into the mix.

Very much like GigaPan or Microsoft Photosynth, but entirely sourced from lots of different people and made into a virtual reality video.

… and ya, there are probably some privacy issues there.

Technology excites me.

The 3gs iPhone had just arrived, this meant two things to me:

1. Video on the best smartphone had arrived. It’s now very easy to publish video from whereever you are, without a computer.
2. The price of the 3G dropped to $99, cheaper than an iPhone has ever been. It has GPS, which means that a lot of users are going to be able to easily participate in a location based social network than before.

I’m going to break these two apart, because they’re equally important:

location based social networks

Location based social networks is really important to me, now there is an easy and direct way to translate offline to online. As I find myself saying way too often, “you can make a latte on the internet”. Location based social networks are exciting because it is a tangible way to translate what someone is doing on their  device to what is around them in real life. Foursquare seemed to be the most exciting network then, and it’s done nothing but pick up steam. Twitter has also stated that they’re officially adding location to tweets. I don’t believe that this will push Foursquare out at all. They still have quirky community that drives people to use the service as much as possible, because hey, I certainly don’t want to give up that mayorship anytime soon. Also, their database of crowdsourced locations is a great asset. Why buy the data, when you can get it for free?

Twitter’s location based info is really interesting because of it’s implication for search. Check out my thoughts on Twitter Trends based on location.

video

This prediction isn’t coming true as quickly as I thought it would. Video on the web already had its coming out party with YouTube, mobile video isn’t having the same splash. I have been really impressed with how 12Seconds has built community within it’s site, I had been thinking that they might have a chance to break out with it. It’s looking like users in twitter aren’t as excited about about sharing mobile videos. I still think 12seconds has some opportunities, they just aren’t as obvious as I thought they were 6 months ago.

It makes me wonder if social media, while being social, is still an inherently solitary act. Even if you’re tweeting in a large group, it’s still solitary. It’s just you and the iPhone screen. When you share a video online, the barrier starts to break down, and it starts to feel more invasive to the process.

Before the year is over, I’ll pen my thoughts on what’s coming for the next 6 months.

Like a lot of things in life, it’s turning into another popularity contest. “Ohh, I’m on 3,746 lists! thanks everyone” is a Tweet I’ve been seeing a lot lately. Twitter obviously wants Lists to become a big thing, otherwise they wouldn’t have placed it so prominently within the page. Regardless, this will be another interesting metric to watch on someone’s page next to number of tweets, and the following-follower ratio.

Here are some lists that I’ll probably be making and watching:

• Start unfollowing people that you don’t want to read every day, but are still interested in what they have to say every now and then.
• If you manage a brand account, you probably follow lots of other brands on Twitter to keep an eye on what they’re doing. You can now make a tidy list to watch them on.
• Organize your lists by where you meet someone or what they mostly talk about, if you like, you can keep your list private to be more descriptive. Did you meet them at a conference, local event, introduced by a mutual friend? Are they into music, technology or

Facebook’s had lists for sometime. I haven’t spent the time to organize it in quite some time, so it’s not even worth using right now. I think with the introduction of Twitter Lists, I might revisit it and try it out again, though.

The api is going to be fun. I already have some super secret ideas on how to use it for the @Starbucks Twitter account.

Can we fast forward to the future when the good apps have fully implemented it and the API is available?

The last two weeks have been filled with a lot of traveling. I also don’t get cable at home, so I generally have cable TV on in the background in hotel rooms. I get my fill, and it’s decent background noise. When I go home, I don’t miss it. Some were making the point that cable news is a good place to emulate for how to tweet. Repeat the same message many times over the day to make sure you get it across. There are many great tools available to get this done, so technically, it’s no problem.

However, I have a problem with this. To me, it feels like it’s fighting noise with noise. Eventually everyone is going to go twitter-deaf (twideaf?) and unfollow you from the amount of redundant tweets. I personally try to keep my number of followers kind of low on Twitter. It makes it easier to actually get to know people, which is what I’m interested in. I’m sure that if I followed more people, I would have built up a bigger following base. Which is great, but that is tertiary to what my actual goal on twitter is; have great conversations with great people and learn something every now and then. This use case on Twitter is not conducive to brands that counter noise with more noise. I’m far more interested in real conversations with real people, quality always trumps quantity.

The conversation on the panel was top notch, and I’m thankful I was asked to participate.

Anyway, here’s the panel, in it’s entirety:

Growing Your Brand on Twitter: Strategies and Tactics From the Trenches from Parnassus Group on Vimeo.

1. Would the other people be fun? Told myself that I can do anything for two weeks, but still … two weeks is a long time to spend with people you don’t know.
2. I’ve never spent much time in front of the camera, would it be fun?
3. Will I be away from the internet for too long and cause withdrawals?

The answers are turning out as follows; incredibly so, affirmative, 3g usb cards – ftw.

The first two days were spent in Seattle, Vancouver, and Bellevue. I did not feel like I was on a road trip. It was just an odd trip. The third day we made the trek to Montana, and it definitely started feeling like we were going to actually drive across the country. My original plans for road tripping involved lots of camping and couches. I’m fairing much better with couches and wifi.

For the most part, only Erin and I are on the camera, but it truly takes an army of smart dedicated people to put it together. When we started, I thought I might have to actually do some driving. Fortunately, we have four of the coolest drivers that are complete road veterans schlepping us and our coffee around. We should do an episode on the radio banter, exclusively. It’s hilarious.

Traveling with comedians is really fun.

Tomorrow I’m flying to LA to speak at 140tc, I’ll meet up with the road trip in Nebraska on Wednesday. Then it’s Chicago, Erie, Boston, and NYC.

You can follow the road trip on Twitter or watch the videos on YouTube.

Like all good things in life, if they’re accessible enough, it’ll be taken over by people that aren’t necessarily looking to do good or have a thoughtful discussion. At it’s best, the stupid hashtags show up, such as #threewordsaftersex or #musicmonday, at it’s worst, spammers leech onto existing hashtags and just use it to get into people’s search, w/out being relevant to the discussion. Long term, this is the equivalent of MySpace’s irritating ads. Untargeted and distracting. As this becomes more frequent or targeted, this could be a reason that Twitter loses relevance.

Twitter has a big opportunity to turn Trending Topics into Trending Topics based on user criteria. The useful areas for me are in the following areas:

• Follower list: What are my friends talking about? How about their friends that I don’t know (friends, plus once removed)?
• Location: What are people in Seattle, WA (my hometown) talking about?
• Interests: What are trumpet players (my instrument) talking about? How about other motorcyclists? Or others that work in Social Media?

I like to think that my beer drinking friends are smarter than your beer drinking friends. With this, you could have 3 or so different lists of trending topics. All of which could be opt-in if you decide. However, I don’t work for Twitter Inc, so it’s not my job to say how they should do this. Regardless, the need for a middle layer of relevance between Facebook/Twitter status updates and the greater world’s Trending Topics exists.

This could get really interesting. Twitter biggest strength right now is the collection of data detailing what people are thinking about right now. If they want to become the central place for global consciousness, it’s going to need to become more granular.

This is some funny stuff:

There are many sides of the equation, such as; i have friends and i want to see what they’re doing, maybe I’ll hang out with them right now, i’m a stalker and i want to be a creep, i’m a gov’t and i want to follow my citizens, and i’m an advertiser and i want to spend my money wisely with smart call to actions. All sides need to be addressed for the location based social web to take off, which it will someday.

Existing location based social web apps exist for the iphone right now. All of them have their advantages, some range from neat story-telling with people you don’t know at the place that you’re at, see where my friends are now, play a game based on the location, or see what else is around me. I like all of them for different reasons. I hate all of them because whenever I use them there is no benefit to me. None of my friends are on there, at least the ones that live in my city that I hang out with. It’s only a matter of time.

These social networks are going to take off this way, by focusing on shared experiences and shared events where a lot of tech savvy people are going to be present and leveraging existing mature social networks for promotion. Facebook and Twitter are great, but the problems they need to focus on are very different from the features that these location based networks are focused on. It’s a big area of opportunity. Hashtags are great on Twitter, but they aren’t the final answer.

This is going to be a fun area of the internet to pay attention to.