Here are three lessons I learned from Twitter that nobody seems to have caught on to.

1. If people use it, it’s valuable
Have you ever looked at a piece of social software and thought, or worse, blogged, that it was worthless? Here’s a trick for evaluating social software in a way that isn’t going to make you look stupid six months down the road: assume it’s valuable if people are using it. Then try to figure out what value they’re getting.

Even professionals make the mistake of dismissing social software despite active, growing communities. Consider this early TechCrunch article, Dodgeball vs. Twitter, where the author (not Arrington) insists that the way to compare software is feature by feature. Dodgeball won the comparison but within a few months was in the deadpool and now Twitter is part of TechCrunch’s everyday coverage. Why? The features that mattered were defined by social interactions, and each user had their own customized set of features based on the social interactions that were important to them. Dodgeball had more features by the traditional measure, but Twitter had the kind that mattered, loads of social interaction.

I even find that this is a good reminder for myself. I follow a startup advice blog from Eric Ries, cofounder of IMVU. The first time I heard what IMVU did I thought it was laughably stupid. They make 3D chat rooms, (like a mini Second Life without the flying), and make money by selling virtual clothing for people’s avatars. Yet he is able to explain IMVU with a straight face and then seems genuinely surprised when people express skepticism.

Here’s the reason he can keep a straight face: IMVU gets 1.3M unique visitors a month and makes tens of millions of dollars per year. He’s not judging the idea based on opinion, which is where most people get into trouble, he’s judging based on observation. Now, I feel stupid for not keeping an open mind.

2. Product, Team, Market? Team.
This is a fun little debate, what matters most the product, the team, or the market? At the time that Evan bought Odeo back from the investors, our podcasting product was widely seen as a failure. It didn’t have any growth and it certainly didn’t make any money for the investors. Here’s how Bryce at OATV put it:

Rockstar team, smoking hot market, all-star angels — and it didn’t deliver the hyper growth traditional VCs need for their return profile.

Was it the product? A year after Ev bought Odeo back, and after zero updates to the features, Time Magazine listed Odeo as one of their top fifty websites. Today, with a very similar product, Odeo.com is the only podcast directory of note. So the product was fine.

Was it the market? Marc Andreessen argues that the market is the only thing that matters for a startup. I just made the argument that Odeo was a strong product and I’m going to argue below that we had a strong team. Since no other web based podcast directory has proven otherwise, it looks like we were in a weak market. So is the answer that the market matters most?

That would look like the answer if not for Twitter, that pesky side project we launched that has had 10x growth in the last year. Market only looks like a good answer if you’re judging individual products, in this case the odeo.com podcasting directory.

A good team, that listens to its customers, is going to find a good market and put together a good product for that market. Steve Blank calls this process customer development (explained well in his book Four Steps to the Epiphany and in this Venture Hacks post).

We could see that Odeo.com didn’t have enough traction so we went looking for other ideas. You might think it was lucky that we hit on Twitter, and as a specific product, it was. If Jack wasn’t on the team, there would be no Twitter. But the team at Odeo had lots of ideas and plenty of people capable of carrying them out. Of the 19 or so people who contributed to Odeo, 13 had started or went on to start a business or major open source project**.

• Evan Williams, founder of Blogger, Odeo, and now Twitter
• Noah Glass, Audioblogger, Odeo
• Jack Dorsey, founded a courier dispatch startup and Twitter
• Biz Stone, launch team at Xanga, founder of Twitter
• Tim Roberts, co-founded BigStep and founder and CEO of Infectious
• Tony Stubblebine (me), founded CrowdVine
• Adam Rugel, founded 71Miles and Trazzler
• Dom Segoia, founder of DollarApp
• Jeremy LaTrasse, owned a tattoo parlor
• Rabble, co-founded protest.net, co-wrote Icalico
• Blaine Cook, started Starling project
• Dan Cederholm, co-founder of Corkd.com, author of Bullet Proof Web Design, many other things
• Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Magpie RSS, icalico

If Ev hadn’t bet on Twitter he would have bet on something else. Three of the companies above are currently live companies that support their founders and a few employees (Infectious is funded and doing well, Trazzler is funded by the Facebook fund, and CrowdVine is profitable). I chose a vertical route for CrowdVine, but the original idea, social networks for everyone, is an idea that’s nearly as big as Twitter (as evidenced by the size of Ning).

Because of the team, Ev had other options to overcome a weak market. So if you’re looking at it from the perspective of the company, team is most important***.

3. Rails was never the problem
Twitter had well-documented performance problems in it’s first few years. Many people, including programmers, pointed the blame at one piece of Twitter’s architecture, Ruby on Rails.

First, all Rails does for Twitter is serve up web pages. The vast majority of those scaling problems came in the back end, moving status updates around and then storing them in a way that Rails could retrieve them for display. So most people aren’t even looking at the right piece of the architecture.

Today Twitter has a much better performance track record and it still uses Rails to serve web pages. The difference is the backend.

So if the backend was such a problem why didn’t Twitter launch with a better backend or at least get it fixed earlier? That gets at the heart of the problem. I’ve never heard anyone get the blame right for all of those performance problems. They stem 100% from the way that we went about switching from the Odeo product to the Twitter product.

When a company kicks off their first project they do some long term thinking and might cover topics like architecture. But how do you launch your second project? Or fifth (approximately what Twitter was)?

Was it easy for the Flickr team to choose to double down on photo sharing, which initially was just a feature inside of a web-based multi-player game? For us, it wasn’t an orderly process at all. It wasn’t even clear that we were abandoning Odeo. We were running hackathons, which led to a condition where many people had competing ideas (and implementations!) of what our next product should be. But around those hackathons we were still continuing to develop Odeo. Twitter eventually won enough that we pulled two engineers off of the Odeo team, but the rest of us kept plugging away.

If you were thrown into a fight, would you start punching or would you open up your iphone and start browsing web pages about Karate? I’d argue that Twitter was launched in the middle of a fight for what we were going to do next, and any thought for long range planning was completely secondary to getting Twitter launched and proven. Without Rails, we might not have even given Jack time to finish the prototype.

So that’s why Twitter wasn’t ready to scale from day one. However, it took almost two years until it could scale reliably, and that certainly seems like longer than necessary. I think it’s an issue of engineering management. Until the Summize acquisition, there was no true engineering manager for Twitter. I had left before Twitter was spun out****. Everyone was a little wary of hiring middle management again since it was widely seen that we had been hired too early at Odeo. The job of middle management is to promote forward progress, and it took us awhile to figure out that wasn’t what Odeo needed. Twitter did eventually hire a VP of Engineering, but he didn’t pan out.

The result was that Twitter operated for a long time (until Summize was acquired) with a gap in engineering planning, someone who could put together a plan that everyone understood and could work from. They had people who could solve problems in brilliant ways, but they didn’t have someone who could get the entire company on the same page. That gap was just an unfortunate side effect of the jumbled team that emerged post-Odeo. So what’s the right way to change your company’s direction? It certainly had nothing to do with Rails.

* Odeo was eventually acquired and is today the only podcast directory of note. However, as a venture backed concern all we had really managed to build was a site with high page rank. We had terrible numbers on repeat visitors and our experimental features (podcast studio, send me a message, audio commenting) weren’t getting any use. Maybe we could have gone after libsyn’s podcast hosting business, but overall our stats said that if we wanted to strike out in a new direction we shouldn’t feel constrained by podcasting.

** Those remaining six include a former core contributor to Rails, Twitter’s current support lead and people that worked for Apple, Google, and Flickr.

*** The idea that Twitter is the same company as Odeo gets muddied because Ev bought the company back, laid off a chunk of Odeo and reincorporated Twitter as it’s own company. But I’d argue the difference isn’t important here. Twitter was launched and run in the early years by Odeo employees who worked at the same desks and the same office that they had when they were working on odeo.com.

**** People often ask me if I regret leaving, and I don’t. I made a list of reasons that included several that would have been sufficient on their own. Did they need me? Not at first, and I hate being idle. Was I happy? No, I was miserable. Every month I had told my team that what we were going to work on was critically important. And every month it had ended up not being important. It taught me an important lesson about what I want from work, to walk in every day believing I’m doing something important. I ended up with the opinion that the only way I could guarantee that was by owning my own company, hence CrowdVine.

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vCard export
You can now export all your contacts as vcard so that you can add all your new friends to your address book. Right now the list is all mutual friends. You don’t get to see someone’s email address unless they friended you back. That’ll change once the privacy controls get beefed up. I used the excellent vpim gem for this.

OPML
OPML is a format for (among other things) sharing a list of RSS feeds. Many feed readers let you import a list of new feeds to follow in this format. CrowdVine now exports OPML for contact list, tag page, and network. You could add a folder for everyone at foo camp or Maker Faire. Found two excellent sites for icons and validation

Cool Networks
I already blogged about Providence Geeks. I’m also psyched that Terrie set up a network for her Citizen Science Projects community. That’s where citizens like you and me are recruited to collect data for real scientific research. I’d love for one of these people to take me out in the field.

Customers
I want to build software according to my sensibilities and standards so it’s been very important to me that I keep the business privately owned and get to profitability as soon as possible. Good news on that front, I’m profitable through the end of the year (as in my rent is paid) and even close to paying a portion of someone else’s rent. CrowdVine is providing the infrastructure behind an exciting new business that’s launching at OSCON. And after our extremely successful Foo Camp experience, Pathable and I are teaming up to tackle the conference market.

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They’ve got a blog, a job board, a flickr pool, and now a crowdvine network.

When I lived in St. Louis I thought I had to move back to the bay area in order to connect with a passionate tech community. Brian’s showing that a little software and a little effort can turn a few people into a strong community.

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we were, individuals from five separate organizations, collaborating to create a fully featured, unique social networking experience for Foo Camp attendees – with only six weeks to piece it all together. This, as much as anything, emphasized for me what a great job O’Reilly has done in creating an environment that generates the level of trust and shared passion that enables this sort of effort to succeed.

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Here’s how it works. CrowdVine provides a social network which let’s people do some pre-event networking by putting names to faces and arranging for in-event meetings and then do some post-event networking where people follow up with the people they met during the event. Pathable provides badges or badge stickers that use their social matching algorithms to recommend maches and opposites (a fun group to meet) and groupings into colors and tags. The badges make for great conversation starters. iCalico provides social conference scheduling. You can mark which sessions you’re going to and also see what sessions your friends are interested in.

Here’s what Scott Berkun had to say after using the package at Foo:

Not sure how much these folks charge, but smart conference organizers should be hiring these folks. Conferences talk the talk about connecting people and building networks, but rarely do anything to facilitate it. Crowdvine and pathable are real tools to help make that stuff happen.

If you know anyone who runs conferences or events I’d love to talk to them.

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2. The youth perspective

Social networking sites are places that help young people be young and let them “practice” youth. Therefore, the sites are mainly a reflection of youth culture.

3. The friendship perspective

Social networking sites are places where young people can maintain and nurse their existing (offline) friendships and create new (online) friendships.

4. The identity perspective

Social networking sites are spaces for identity construction. Here, young people are continuously constructing, re-constructing and displaying their self-image and identity. Also, the network sites make them co-constructors of each other’s identities.

It reminded me of what I thought was the best part of danah boyd’s Incantations for Muggles keynote at ETech.

I want to address four key life stages that i think are relevant to folks interested in social media:

1) Identity formation and role-seeking (aka youth)
2) Integration and coupling (aka 20somethings)
3) Societal contribution (aka “adults”)
4) Reflection and storytelling (aka retirees)

I’ve been using that list to address adults who say things like “I don’t have time to hang out on a social network.” Not every network is about hanging out. Nobody ever hangs out on LinkedIn. That’s a network for adults in phase #3. That’s also been the phase where I’ve seen the most successful uses of CrowdVine networks. People who create networks for conferences or for niche professional communities are trying to be more social because being more social helps them be more effective contributors (and a little bit because being social feels good).

The 35 categories might be good when you’re categorizing the behavior of an individual social network user but danah’s categories are a lot more useful when you’re trying to categorize the value of a particular network.

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How do I make my sneakers less stinky?

and

What’s the shelf life of beer?

Another thing that I admire is how far they’ve gotten without taking any investment or debt. They own the whole thing so they have a lot more options for turning it into a profitable business.

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There’s a lot I’m excited about here, the potential for commodity social network software to connect people in niche communities and of course CrowdVine, my first business.

Social Networks Deserve to be First Class Social Software

When people talk about the types of social software I want them to list blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networks. We’ve all had enough experience with Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook to know that this class of software is extremely useful. Turning social network software into a commodity means it can be treated as a stand alone class of software.

Social Network Evolution

You can’t predict all the ways that niche social networking software will be useful (but I will list all the ways I know of in a second). Just like people came to understand blogging as a distributed conversation rather than merely a light-weight publishing tool, people are going to find unexpected uses for social network software.

One purpose that I enthusiastically recommend is events. Throw-away social networks are unbelievably fantastic for helping people connect at conferences. My entire page of press clippings comes from people who loved using CrowdVine to connect at the SoCon conference. Also check out PodCamp Atlanta and Maker Faire.

I’ve also had good luck using social networks to reconnect alumni. The Graduates of O’Reilly network is like a more personal version of LinkedIn. I also started one for former teammates on my college’s cross country team. That network was so successful and so accurately recreated the locker room experience that I had to rush out my privacy features so that I could make those pages private.

Simplicity Helps Social Software

My vision for social network software is to put the people front and center. There’s huge value in helping people craft an identity and then helping them connect with each other. I’m sure there’s room for several visions for this type of software. Mine is simplicity.

Business Model

People often ask what my business model is. I’m dead set on avoiding outside investment–it detracts from the type of company I want to build. So far everything is self-funded and I’m going to continue with that. While I was building the site I took some work on the side and now that it’s more functional I’m transitioning to CrowdVine related consulting work.

But I also want to make sure to always offer a free ad-supported version. For one thing, having more public feedback will lead to more polished software. More importantly I want to build software that people makes a difference for lots of people. If the ads pay for the servers then I’m sticking with the dual consulting/ad-supported model.

Dreaming of something better

One of the goals of CrowdVine is to connect you to people that share your passions so that you can lead a happier and more successful life. I’ve already had that experience just by building CrowdVine. My passion is for building software and by starting my own business I’m now connected to the people who can get excited about my software, the users. When it’s your software and your users even the tiniest code change can become incredibly fulfilling. If you have a passion, I can’t recommend highly enough that you take the time to find and connect with the people who share that passion.

I’m calling this release beta while I work out some kinks. But I know there’s enough working bits to give you a good experience. So go ahead, bang on it!

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Some of the challenges are like party like a rockstar but there’s also a surprising number of people competing in survive a rollover accident.

It’s built by Peter Brown and Shelly Farnham from Waggle Labs. Shelly’s got a really interesting background in the academic side of social software (as a Ph.D and former researcher at Microsoft). Good people. Worth drinking with if you run into them at ETech.

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It’s easy to see that you could improve the social networking experience by creating a way to centrally manage your contact lists or to implicitly generate a social network. I’m not going to deny that, but there’s a lot of things I’m noticing that make me think people who use the phrase Social Network Fatigue don’t have any idea what’s going on with social networks.

1. I look at my own social networks, I’m an active member of Flickr, Twitter, MyBlogLog, LinkedIn, Digg, and netscape. I’ve joined other networks which I now hardly use, not because maintaining my identity is such a chore, but because I wasn’t having any meaningful communication there.

2. I invited my sister and cousin to Twitter (both younger than 23) and they immediately became active users. They’re also both very active MySpacers. I just found out that neither of them invited any friends to Twitter beside me and Sarah. They’re happy to maintain a four person social network and haven’t had any impulse to consolidate networks.

3. I setup a social network for the SoCon conference with a life span of about three weeks (two weeks leadinig up to the conference and one week of followup). I haven’t heard a single person complain about the trouble of inputting yet another profile and collecting yet another batch of friends. On the contrary, attendees seem to have liked the experience very much.

4. The rapid growth of Flixster, a social network for movie lovers, is more evidence that niche social networks are taking off.

Social Networks are communication tools. Some geeks can’t seem to recognize social networks as communication improvement because there’s so much friction around managing friends and identity. They’d taken identity and relationships out of the first suite of communication tools for efficiency, but that’s not what people want. Having identity and relationships are fundamental human activities and fundamental part of communication. Social networks are a big enough improvement in communication that the majority of people aren’t phased at all by the friction of joining new ones.

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danah boyd provides summary and commentary:

I would like to highlight the fact that 91% of teens are using social network sites to stay in touch with friends they see in person while only 49% are using them to meet people (ever). I hope that this makes people realize that, for teenagers, these sites are *not* about networking. They are about modeling one’s social network.

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While Friending is a social act, the actual collection of Friends and the display of Top Friends provides space for people to engage in identity performance.

Sorry friends, I’m only acting like the person I wish I was when I mark you as a friend. But is anyone measuring my actual friendships? I think Digg and Bloglines have the data, they’re just not doing anything with it. I’ve noticed that I keep Digging the stories of the same few people. Are they my “real” friends? On Bloglines I always read posts from Biz and Ev as soon as I see them. Then there’s another fifty blogs that I haven’t read in months. Bloglines knows the people that I actually like and the people that I’m just pretending to like.

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