Twitter Power 3.0. Comm Joel

Match.com might have an online magazine, but no one is paying $20 to $25 per month to read the magazine. Users are paying that price month after month to read the descriptions and look at the photos that other people have posted, and to contact those people.

      It's not the site that's the attraction of social media sites; it's the society.

      Photo Sites

      Ever since cameras went digital, there's been a need for a low-cost – and even free – way to share those images with anyone who wants to see them online. In addition to the millions of photos posted every day on Facebook, sites and services are dedicated just to photos and images, notably including Pinterest and Instagram.

      What makes these sites, and photo gallery sites such as Flickr, so cool is that they're designed specifically around displaying and sharing photographs, so the presentation is bigger, bolder, and more visually engaging, all of which is good!

Let's focus on Flickr for just a moment, because it's the granddaddy of photo-sharing sites. As a social media site, it of course depends entirely on the photos that users upload to bring in other users. (See Figure 1.4.)

Figure 1.4 Flickr is the big daddy of photo-sharing websites.

      That broad-based content sourcing already makes sites such as Flickr – one of the most popular photo-sharing sites – part of the social media phenomenon, but Flickr also has the networking power of those sites.

      Like Facebook, it's possible to create large lists of friends and join groups where you can submit images, enter competitions, and participate in discussions about the best way to light a child's portrait or which lens to use in which conditions.

      Flickr also allows its members to mark images as favorites and to place comments beneath them. Both of those activities can be valuable ways of adding new friends. Pro members, who pay a subscription fee of $44.95 for two years, can even see stats that indicate how many views, faves, and comments each image has produced and even where their visitors came from.

      All of that networking is vital to success on the site, and that success can have some spectacular results. Even way back in 2006, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, an Icelandic art student whose images and networking had brought her a huge following on Flickr, was spotted by an advertising executive on the site who hired her to shoot a series of billboard shots for the Toyota Prius. Many of the images used in various versions of Microsoft Windows were bought from photographers commissioned after they were discovered on the site.

      Every day, images are licensed and prints are sold on Flickr, and it's all based on the content created by the site's users and promoted through careful networking.

      That's classic social media.

      Microblogs

      And finally, we come to microblogging. This is a whole new thing in social media, though teens have been embracing this low-attention-span-friendly social networking for years. In fact, in some ways it's the exact opposite of everything we've seen so far.

      Social media sites tend to want their members to contribute as much content as possible. They may restrict that content to just photographs or video (e.g., Flickr and Pinterest), restrict it to participating in the site only through a mobile device (e.g., Instagram), or restrict membership to a select few (in the case of dating sites, to dedicated singles), but on the whole they want their members to offer as much content as possible.

      Microblog sites place strict limits on the content that can be uploaded, and they find that those limits encourage creativity. And some microblogging sites are completely hands-off, including Tumblr and WeHeartIt.

A Closer Look at Microblogging

      Just as there are many different kinds of social media sites, so also there are many different ways to microblog. One of the most popular ways now actually takes place within the larger social media sites.

When Facebook realized that its members loved the idea of being able to update their followers on what they were doing, it added the status update feature, which sure seems a lot like microblogging. (See Figure 1.5.)

Figure 1.5 Facebook status updates = microblogging.

      Facebook's system only works within the site, though, so unlike Twitter, which can broadcast your tweets to mobile telephones as well, updates are visible only to friends who happen to be on the site at the time.

      For Facebook users, though, it's still very powerful, and Twitter users who want their updates to reach further can use Facebook's Twitter application. This lets them send tweets from within Facebook itself. We use it, and think it's great. You can find it at https://apps.facebook.com/twitter/ or by searching the apps for Twitter.

Facebook isn't the only social media site to add microblogging to its list of features, though. Google Plus and LinkedIn are also social networks targeting specific communities. LinkedIn, for example, is geared toward your professional life, with a system that lets you share status updates just like Facebook, but also lets you create blog posts within your LinkedIn account, as shown in Figure 1.6.

Figure 1.6 LinkedIn supports blogging, too.

      Just as important, the site also lets its users track what people are saying in their posts, what new jobs they get, and much more. And that's just smart business, and social.

      Yammer

Microblogging services thrive most when they ask users to answer a simple question and allow anyone to see the answer. Yammer (www.yammer.com) keeps to those roots but narrows the focus of the question – and the audience, too. (See Figure 1.7.)

Figure 1.7 Yammer's restrictions make Twitter look like a free-for-all.

      Instead of inviting people to share what they're doing (and receiving answers that might range from saving an oil-soaked bird to eating an avocado sandwich), it asks users to explain what they're working on.

      But it reveals those answers only to people on the network with the same corporate e-mail address, making it what geeks would call an intranet system, which makes it a useful tool for communicating within a business, but not so useful for marketing of any sort.

Introducing…Twitter!

      And finally, we come to Twitter – the site that has really set the standard in microblogging. Twitter, originally called twttr, was founded by programmers Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass in July 2006.

      Williams was a serial entrepreneur who had founded a company called Pyra Labs that made project management software. A note-taking feature on that software went on to become Blogger, the free blogging service later bought by Google. In fact, some people credit Williams with coining the word blogger to describe people who write Weblogs.

      In 2004, Williams left Google to form podcasting company Odeo, and two years later, he created Obvious with Stone, a programmer who had joined Blogger after its acquisition by the search engine giant. The new company bought Odeo, which it later sold to a company called Sonic Mountain. Round and round. It's a game of musical chairs that makes our heads swim, too.

      The important thing is that Odeo launched and then began to focus exclusively on a simple chat application called Twitter.

      The original idea for Twitter came from Dorsey, an Odeo employee. In an interview for ReadWriteTalk.com Stone described the moment when they first discussed the idea:

      A few of us were thinking about what are some interesting ways that maybe we can merge