GooglePlus is dominating my RSS feeds today. My excitement about Circles has faded a little because of articles like this:

Google Plus’ Circles System May Not be Sustainable — ReadWriteWeb

I posted an abridged version of the following in the article’s comments:

Good categorization is an expertise most people lack: “Work” isn’t particularly meaningful, but “Coworkers”, “Headhunters”, and “Professional Acquaintances” are. It’s more work to apply and maintain a richer taxonomy, and I’d imagine even fewer people will get equivalently greater value from such effort in social networking. We’ve been trained away from finding exactly what we want by the search-and-browse approach of unstructured searches like Google, so wading through irrelevancy is a more common skill.

Grouping mechanisms in other social networking systems also have upkeep problems; I suspect most people just don’t bother doing it, and the same will probably be true with GooglePlus. Maybe adding a feature to display circles as Venn diagrams would help data geeks like me.  For most people, public versus private might be just enough categorization to avoid social networking faux pas without making the posting process feel like taking the SAT.

Existing social networks don’t have the concept of categorization on both ends, posting and reading, and I wonder if GooglePlus Circles has the same deficiency because it hides the names of circles I’ve been added to. I’d like to subscribe to (and filter out) people’s circles instead of people themselves to control the noise of their posts about unshared interests; I’d probably disagree with how most of my non-professional acquaintances would categorize me. It doesn’t sound like GooglePlus makes the distinction of subscribing to people’s interests or topics instead of people themselves. Relevancy has to be a two-way street.

Or, perhaps, a four-way intersection.

GooglePlus Venn: Relevancy is an Intersection

With all those brainy data geeks at Google, I’m optimistic that they could create a Venn diagram of Circles, Sparks, +1′s, Reader Likes/Shares that could define social graph relevancy in that oh-so-Google statistical way. How many licks would it take to get to the center of that tasty relevancy tootsie-pop?  Lots, probably, but it creates a new kind of payoff that Twitter and Facebook are incapable of delivering.

Hey, Google, are you listening?

On a related note, I tried posting my comment using my Twitter account. Twitter on the web is totally brain-dead about multiple identities, so of course I posted my comment using the wrong account. It’s a perfect example of the mis-post problem I referenced in the preceding post. Then I reposted my comment using Google, and Disqus allowed me to choose from the three Google accounts I’m logged into right now. Google gets the issues of identity and context more than anybody else in the field, so I’m (somewhat) optimistic about GooglePlus.

Here we go again!

I wanted Twitter lists about five seconds after I clicked my second “follow”. My life is about categories and contexts: I follow people for different reasons, and I want to group those people and their tweets around similarities. Search and hash tags helped a little, but full-text search and uncontrolled tag vocabularies come with a host of problems–I know that all too well from my day job.  In the meantime, a Rube Goldberg of RSS feeds and multiple Twitter accounts provided some degree of order. Now Twitter’s on the eve of releasing lists, and I can’t say for sure I’ll even use them.

Twitter needs to advertise their betas better.

There’s no telling when I got the feature because I don’t use the Twitter website. It’s all about the client: Tweetie 2, Tweetie for Mac, or Google Reader. I even stopped going to the website from email notifications because they don’t have anyway to handle multiple accounts. The email may be about “A”, but I’d end up as “B” because that’s who I last logged in as. Yes, this is another case of clients having it all over web apps in terms of context and state. I hate living in a buzzword-compliant age: Web 2.0 is roughly Client 0.2 in my book.

An API is no substitute for a conceptual model.

I found the API calls for lists easily, but I never found diagrams or narratives explaining what lists are and how they work. Lists don’t appear to be very complicated at first, but it’s not just twiddling the two radio buttons and one text box on lists that creates complexity.  How things interact with lists internally and externally can create unexpected conditions and counter-intuitive behaviors. That leads me to my biggest initial gripe and likely deal-killer …

Lists do not have RSS feeds; they are a walled garden, and not in a good way.

Lists were looking pretty neat until I noticed something. Actually, I noticed the lack of something–an RSS feed icon in the address bar of Firefox. RSS lets me consume and crosspost Twitter anywhere–Google Reader, my blog, Facebook, FriendFeed. Right now lists are only available through the Twitter website, and that’s fine for a beta release (unless you’re Google). However, even when clients start supporting lists, people will still have to come to Twitter. Maybe that’s a hint that Twitter’s getting ready to monetize, or maybe that missing conceptual model contains some details that make RSS problematic.

A little more experimenting is in order …

Unmentionable!

When Twitter changed their reply functionality, now called mentions, my initial reaction was unmentionable.  After a few weeks to ponder and play with it, I still think they made a big mistake.  A reply was originally a message that began with a twitter username, like this:

@zorak No, really?

Replies were public, but Twitter added a link so you could see just your replies and options to filter other people’s replies out of your friends stream.  According to the Twitter blog, the community came up with the convention that Twitter later embraced and enhanced.  Then Twitter added a separate API call and a “swoosh” button to their web site:

Just what I wanted! Twitter added metadata underneath so that a reply remembered which tweet it replies to.  Pretty soon every Twitter client included swoosh buttons and “in reply to” links.  This was a philosophical break for Twitter–whether they know it or not–because there was no way to distinguish swoosh and “@user …” via SMS.  Supporting SMS creates a larger potential user base, but it drastically limits functionality.  Until everybody has an iPhone, fledgling social networks like Brightkite must consider this trade-off.

The original reply syntax is still supported and continued to create confusion as Tweetie developer AteBits explained on his blog.  People put multiple names in the message or put the @ in the body of the message, assuming the right people would see the replies:

@me @myself @I Remember the milk.
Give @me some sugar, @baby!

Only @me sees the first tweet as a reply; nobody sees the second.  Search was already catching on thanks to other community-grown initiatives like hash tags; users and client developers began using search on @user instead of the reply API to catch such grammatically incorrect tweets.  Apparently this is a bad thing, or at least something Twitter discouraged, perhaps because of its impact on Twitter’s call throttling.  That and other scaling problems should make for a few good dissertations; I just hope Twitter is keeping the historical record and will be willing to share it.

This brings us to mentions which are basically just searches on @user.  Although it’s a good thing that Twitter learns from their community, the big mistake here was changing the functionality under the existing API calls.  I agree that instantly supporting new functionality in all Twitter clients is attractive to a provider, but it can–and did–create unintended consequences.  All those clients blessed with catching those malformed reply tweets were also cursed by all those side-bar mentions crowding the replies page.  Twitterati like @wilw get many more mentions than direct replies, and now there’s no easy way to sort out the two.

The lesson here is that it’s safer to create new API and UI elements for new-ish functionality and let the community migrate over than to replace the guts and hope nothing breaks.  As any API designer knows, developers will do all kinds of unexpected things once your API is released into the wild.  The Twitter community’s active, inventive role in shaping Twitter also provides for some real “They did what?” moments.  Tweaking reply functionality to support only swooshes and adding new methods for mentions would have made everybody happy.

There’s one thing I want from Twitter that they promise in the API FAQ; I want to see all replies for a given tweet.  I disagree the assertion in the Twitter blog post above that people don’t want to wander into the middle of an ongoing conversation.  Sometimes that’s the best way to discover new topics and interesting people.  When that happens, there is a need to go back and discover the source and all its tributaries.  Twitter is aware of the need, as this quote from the Twitter API Wiki FAQ shows:

How do I get all replies to a particular status?
For now, there’s not a great way to do this. We’ve heard the requests, though, and we’ll be providing a solution for it before too long.

Conversation functionality is cropping up in Twitter clients like Nambu and the soon-to-be-released Tweetie for Mac (20 April 2009).  Looks like Nambu constructs conversations based on cached tweets, building little trees as it discovers reply pointers to other already-fetched tweets.  This single-linked list structure makes it easy to find your immediate predecessor but difficult to walk up, across, and back down the tree.

Hmm, where have I seen this problem before?  Oh yeah, version trees in Documentum.  Every document remembers its immediate predecessor (i_antecedent_id) and the root of its version tree family (i_chronicle_id).  A single query on i_chronicle_id returns every version of that document.  That’s just what I want Twitter to do!

Twitter already has its own i_antecedent_id–with a better name I hope.  So add an equivalent to i_chronicle_id and a new getAllReplies API call.  I suggest topic_id since that’s what the root tweet of a tree of replies becomes.  It would be nice to go back and stitch up all the previous replies-of-replies, but I would understand if the hit on the database would be too big.  How many tweets are in there anyway?