I can assess its impact very personally. Twitter is where I found out that Barack Obama would be the next President of the United States. Twitter is where I heard the anguish of unrest in Iran and the fear during the terrorist attacks on Mumbai. I saw tweets from a minor earthquake in Seattle 6 seconds after it occurred. I’ve been able to follow goings-on at conferences I have not been able to go to, and experienced real world conferences in different and deeper ways. I have met people I didn’t know before in far off countries, and refound old friends. It provides me with ideas and the idea that I am connected with people whom I respect. Twitter on my phone fills the moments when I’ve already read my email and run the risk of having nothing useful to do for a few seconds as I wait in line or for the lift to arrive.

Twitter also contains lots of dreck, is easy to misunderstand, and provides the venue for thousands of petty and uninteresting spats. Luckily, tools and techniques for avoiding those are easily accessible.  If irrational grudges and meaningless arguments are your thing, then Twitter provides a relatively harmless place to indulge in them. I remain positive about the overall effects of social media, but I am happy to see people taking a more serious look at the potential downsides. Anything powerful can be misused. Knowing about the potential pitfalls is the best way to avoid them.

Beyond Twitter, the concept of microblogging has been slower to catch on, but it’s coming. Frequent, small updates can provide value within the enterprise just as it provides amusement and entertainment outside of it. Microsoft this week launched a test version of Officetalk, to test some of its ideas about enterprise microblogging. It takes guidance, thought, and a bit of discipline to use enterprise microblogging effectively. Since these are still not common attributes of many corporate social media projects, it will not catch on everywhere.

As for Twitter, it has become so widely adopted that it has become fashionable to deride it, a sure sign of a breakthrough. I still Tweet and monitor what people are saying but usually find that I get better feedback and comments from what I post on Facebook, perhaps because that circle of people is more restricted than the Twitter megaphone. Twitter still has to prove that it can make real money, but I am confident that it will, real soon now. Given its growing role in society and popular culture, this is getting easier not harder as time passes

Perhaps the worst effect of Twitter is the preponderance of Tw-words it has spawned in the spirit of bad puns. Please see the title of this post as ironic. Please.

First, Hubspot’s measurements show that the rate of growth is slowing, not that Twitter is in decline. Growth is still good, especially in this economy. While 13% is better than 4%, growing at all is good. Given the huge growth they have been having, I am not surprised that it is slowing, especially given the big surges that came from the plane landing on the Hudson, the Iranian protests and the Arrival of Oprah.

Second, while the number of users is not growing as fast as it was, many of the other indicators are positive. Users are more engaged, better behaved, and more spread out around the world. So while one number is down, all of the others showed improvement.

Third, so what if user growth is slowing down? It already has achieved a pretty good scale, enough to drive insights based on the constantly-growing real time content pool. Surely, bigger would be even better, but it’s already big enough to do interesting things.

Longer term, I think that a slowdown is inevitable. While Twitter is pre-eminent in North America, Australia and Europe, other players like Plurk, Me2day and Zuosa have had a chance to establish themselves in Asia. Facebook is busily adopting Twitter features. The market will inevitably split geographically and by interest group at some point. That doesn’t mean that it’s all over for Twitter, but it does mean that the microblogging market looks like it is starting to grow up.

Do you think it was a bad business decision for Google to acquire YouTube, in terms of the low revenue (or losses) the video site generates?

Outside of their core advertising-based products, speculating about Google’s business model is always a tricky thing to do. They don’t say much about their plans, and don’t seem to mind losing money on individual businesses if they think (for whatever reason) that it will make sense eventually. With so much money flowing into Google from advertising sales, this is an easier position to take than for many companies.

Google is in a position relative to the Internet similar to where Intel was several years ago with general computing. Intel figured that if people use computers more, they will buy more microchips, most of them from Intel. So they made a lot of investments (e.g. in games, virtual reality, 3D design, video) that didn’t contribute money directly to their bottom line, but increased the general usage level of personal computing. For Google, the more people use the Internet, the more they use Google services like search and the other products they offer. Youtube attracts lots of traffic, so it increases total Internet usage, which eventually — somehow — is good for Google.

Also, Youtube has become the place to put videos and to look for videos, making it more like a platform than just another service. This will open up more possibilities, like licensing deals, tie-ins with television and music companies, libraries, etc. Microsoft has shown with Windows how good it is for a business to control a platform. Google may not have figured out how to build a business (at least publicly), but there are lots of possibilities. Google is comfortable with short term uncertainty if they see a large long term advantage, something else that cannot be said about very many companies. 

It seems that being popular is not always enough for success as a business. Is that so? I’m asking because of Twitter and other free services…

Popularity alone has never been enough to be successful as a business. What is new now is that business success is not necessary to be a success, at least in the short term. Twitter has enough money and is well on the way to becoming a crucial platform. Once they are there, there are plenty of ways to build a business. The short term things they could do to get revenue now (advertising, premium accounts, selling highly desired user names) would get in the way of becoming a platform, which is where the real opportunity is. They don’t want to do anything which would discourage people from using it, and I think that is very clever. I talked about Twitter’s business model on this blog earlier.

What formulas are there to make these services profitable, considering
the big audience they have?

Really, I see two main ways:

1. Become a platform like Youtube and Twitter are doing. I discussed the monetization schemes for Twitter on my blog.

2. For the other free sites that won’t become an unmissable platform, the standard way to monetize is either by advertising or premium services. Consumer sites which attract enough visitors can build a nice business on advertising, but most are unlikely to really break through and be big successes. It could pay the rent and some reasonable salaries, but not buy a private jet. The problem with advertising is that the big get bigger; people advertise on the most popular sites, so that if a site starts to become popular it quickly pulls ahead of the others. The Long Tail for the less popular sites leaves a nice, but not great business.

Premium services attract payment from users who like the service, and are willing to pay for more features or availability. So-called “freemium” sites combine the two, providing free services (sometimes supported by advertising) with limitations, and then paid premium services for those willing to pay.

I started to collect some of the best practices we have found to use in a research note, but since not many of our customers organize conferences like this, I figured it would have limited relevance. That’s what blogs are for.

Best practices for tweeting at events

A few weeks before the event, start tweeting about the event using the #hashtag you want to use. That establishes the hashtag so that you don’t have people trying all kinds of different ones. At Garter, we have established the convention of using #gartner plus a two or three letter abbreviation for each conference. For example, the upcoming Symposium events will use #gartnersym while #GartnerPCC was used for the Portal, Content and Collaboration conferences. We don’t differentiate the location or year in the hashtag, since it is kind of fun to see these as a rolling event across time and space.

Use Tweetdeck or some other client app to monitor mentions of the event’s hashtag. You can set up a search panel that automatically displays new tweets with that text.

If someone says something cool, retweet it.

During the keynote or sessions you can see, quote what is interesting, and always add the hashtag

Tweet any interesting trends or non-confidential insights from customers.

If someone complains about something minor, respond to them (too cold in the meeting rooms, where is the veggie lunch…)

If someone has a major complaint or wants to challenge what is said in a presentation, engage them if you feel like it, but don’t let the discussion descend into a long argument.

Publicize events happening on the show floor, mention room changes or extra sessions, encourage people to sign up for 1on1s, especially if they are filling up.

Organize a tweetup: meet other Twitterers at a certain time, preferably when there is an open bar. It’s a nice way to put faces to @names.

Consider displaying a rolling list of tweets on a display in the hallways.

Displaying tweets during a presentation is trickier. It works in some situations where the speaker is prepared for it, but it can be very distracting to be reading with one eye while trying to say cogent things delivered in an engaging way. If a non-speaker is moderating the session or will be posing questions, they should monitor the twitter stream for comments or questions.

Save some of the best Tweets and display them in the locknote, if there is one, or collect them in a blog post

Look here for more tips on live tweeting.

As always, these conferences are amazingly energizing for analysts, and I hope for the participants as well. Hearing what people are up to and how they are using the technologies we talk about helps keep our research from being too abstract. External speakers like Edward deBono (the father of lateral thinking) and Chris Thorpe of the Guardian (who described how they built groundbreaking crowdsourcing initiatives like Investigate Your MP’s Expenses in a few days using almost no money) were inspiring as well as entertaining.

Dr. de Bono plans to autograph the stack of transparencies he used during his presentation and auction them for charity. See www.debonosociety.com for details.

As well as speaking and talking to clients, this year I took on an additional role as Twitter ambassador. I had planned to tweet highlights and notable quotes using the #gartnerpcc hashtag,but pulled back when I saw that other participants were already tweeting away. In all, we had about 600 tweets, which is quite a bit for or events. There was enough traffic that followers from Canada, the US and Korea were able to get an idea of what was going on without making the trip to London.

Many of the tweets repeated quotes that caught people’s attention. Some examples:

More than 50% of large ecm projects fail if less than 6 months are spent on vendor choice + planning Tony Bell (sic) @ #gartnerpcc

“You shouldn’t need training on tools: who took Facebook training? who’s Myspace certified?” – Deb Logan #gartnerpcc nicely put, again

Others commented on what the analysts were saying.

Unified comms can lead to clashes between those who run the phone/data netwowrks & those who want to innovate on it #gartnerpcc Surely not!

Social networking analysis very interesting, but has some interesting cultural issues. Definite Big Brother overtones #gartnerpcc

Inevitably, some some sessions didn’t go down as well, and Twitterers let us know it.

#gartnerPCC That session with the countdown questions was a train wreck. Sorry Deb, keep the day job.

Ironically, Dilbert had a cartoon that same day which sums up how analysts feel when someone criticizes the presentations they’ve poured their souls into.

I happen to know that the person who sent that last tweet knows Deb Logan quite well, and did not intend it to be as harsh as it might sound.

Thanks to all who contributed to the event IRL and on Twitter. All of the Tweets are accessible in this archive with a representative word cloud here.

This year, Microblogging (which includes the Twitter service) has crested the Peak of Inflated Expectations and is beginning to move into the Trough of Disillusionment. Some people disagreed with the placement of the dot, but that’s to be expected. From an unscientific survey, about as many people felt microblogging still had plenty of hype left in it as thought it was well onto the Slope of Enlightenment. So that’s OK. If the critics are all over the map, then the position is probably just about right.

It was also apparent that many people don’t really get how the cycle works. The most prevalent Tweet said some variation on “Web 2.0 Trending Up, Twitter Down.” Many commentators seemed to think that moving towards the trough meant that Twitter was over, never to be heard from again.

Actually, microblogging is moving along the cycle rather smartly. The structure of the hype cycle means that everything goes through the trough, before it reaches the plateau of productivity and wide adoption. Moving into the trough is therefore, a good thing for someone’s favorite technology, but not without risks. It is far worse for a technology to languish on the up side of the peak, never to approach wide adoption. Other technologies whiz quickly through the trough to reach the slope and onto the plateau.

The Twitter backlash has certainly begun, and many are piling on enthusiastically. I am not one of them, but there are definite indications that microblogging will have a difficult time getting through the trough. Moving into the enterprise will be especially tricky, one of the necessary steps to really achieve productivity. While there are several enterprise microblogging platforms out there, one of Twitter’s attractions is the massive volume of Twitterers and the amount of content they generate. Recreating that internally will be hard. Some companies have achieved successes, and I would love to talk to any others I haven’t spoken with. But it will be more difficult for microblogging to jump from the consumer to the enterprise market than many other collaboration technologies, such as instant messaging.

Japanese companies are very interested in social software technologies, why companies are deploying them, and the benefits they expect to achieve. Comparatively few have active deployments, but the curiosity and level of interest is quite high. Many of the questions and concerns are predictably about security, governance, control and business benefits. In the consensus-driven culture of many Japanese companies, free-wheeling social software sites sound strange and chaotic.

Familiarity with social software concepts is quite high through consumer services. Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn haven’t made much impact in Japan but mixi and many mobile phone-based communities have already become an important part of people’s lives.

Twitter, inevitably, also came up often.The whole concept seemed strange to many of the people I talk to, even more so than usual. When someone explained that it is common for Japanese to update their personal blogs dozens of times per day from their mobile phones, I began to see why the appeal of Twitter was so hard to grasp. Western Blogs are usually longer posts updated several times per week or month. Japanese mix the short and long form. They’ve been Twittering for years, so they don’t see the point of microblogging; it’s nothing new.

Some companies are doing interesting things, as a panel at the conference showed. Panelists from Ricoh, CSK Holdings and Tokyo Marine discussed how they are using blogs and wikis in several different ways to facilitate sharing among customers, employees and partners.

The level of interest and depth of questions gave me the impression that there is more activity than might be readily apparent. Several of the companies I spoke with were actively watching what other companies were doing and looking for cases where they could begin to use social software technologies internally. It reminds me of the image of a Harrier jump jet, which runs its engines for several minutes before taking off. In that pre-launch phase, it looks like nothing is happening, but inside it is building up power. When it does take off, it goes straight up, very fast. i suspect that Japanese adoption of social software will be similar, with a long period of preparation and then quick adoption once they finally start.

As well as hitting the visitor high spots like a karaoke bar and marveling at the controlled chaos of the Shibuya intersection, I got to try out some ideas I will be presenting at the PCC conference in Orlando, Florida June 8-10 (not much time at home this time of year). Just one of the reasons I appreciated being able to make this trip. I really want to thank the event organizers at Gartner Japan for giving me the chance, and the customers, vendors and journalists who gave me so much of their time and insights.