A Decade of Silos Has Throttled Open Content Distribution

The 2018 Social Media Flow is Driven by Content Silos

In the ten-plus years since I started this blog, one of the clearest trends on the Web has been for destination sites to want to control the user session and experience. In parallel, sites focused on aggregating content from external sites or highlighting the best of the web - serving as a filtered pass through, have struggled. Many are gone.

While significant efforts were made during the forging of Web 2.0 to drive open standards and allow for data to flow from one site to another, through RSS, Pubsubhubbub, Atom, XMPP, or whatever your preference, 2018 on the social web is a much more challenging place to write once and publish everywhere.

As I view the publishing space, I often turn to four big challenges that have to be solved for a platform to be a success to both authors and readers:

1. Creation

A platform, be it for photos (Instagram, Flickr, Google Photos, etc.), short updates (Twitter), long form (Medium, Blogger, WordPress, etc.), video (YouTube) or a mishmash of all (Facebook, Google+, etc.), needs to make it easy for the content creator to share what they want, in the form they want, and have the output be what they intended. This is true whether we are talking about desktop or mobile creation.

2. Distribution

Once the content is created, it has to be sent somewhere. If you write a post and hit publish, how do people find it? Is it sent to a third party network where they are hanging out? Is it sent by email? Do they get a notification on their phone? Does it flow down their timeline, as they have new items to consume? Or is it just another flat file, waiting to be indexed by Google and other search engines?

3. Discovery

Readers want to find new content. They seek relevance, freshness, and community. This mirrors the three pillars of social sites I highlighted back in 2009, and echoes that readers want intriguing views that mirror their own preferences. Like I'd predicted in 2006, the Web has become a divided place, where we all flock to our groups of like minded people, and disavow opposing views, but we still are eager to find more who reinforce our position. We still crave new friends and stories and we want to find them quickly.

So how good a job do these apps and sites do of surfacing new people and ideas? Do they have an aggregated site with highlights and popular people or posts? Is there a place to find more obscure viewpoints and new voices?

4. Consumption

Since the smartphone revolution, kicked off by Blackberry and the iPhone and now led by Android, more people are constantly connected and reading news from their mobile devices. In many countries, the mobile device is the only window to the Web. Does the content flow well for mobile consumption and new ways to navigate from screen to screen, update to update? Or is it best suited for a leanback tablet experience or for the desktop?

What typically happens with content platforms is the content fills the available container. Twitter is a clear 140 or 280 characters. Social hubs like Facebook and Google+ favor large photos and a short introduction. Instagram is all about the photo with a small description. Blogger and WordPress and Medium are as long as you want to go. One has to consider if users and screens keep up.

2009's promise of sharing everywhere wasn't meant to be.

We've Come a Long Way from Aggregating Streams and Sharing the Web

As content started to be created in a wide array of social sites, aggregation services like FriendFeed helped bring people's streams together. Bookmark services like Delicious helped people save the highlights from the Web and amplify the world's favorites. Users voted up posts from Digg and passed them along with StumbleUpon. The most voracious consumers lived in Google Reader and didn't miss a single post from the RSS feeds they were subscribed to.

It was too good to last.

The largest social platforms were not content in simply being links to external sites. Facebook focused more on original content shared on the platform, with less priority given to send traffic off site. Google Reader shut down, and while Feedly and others stepped up, the world of RSS never recovered. Delicious died. Digg is a shadow of itself. FriendFeed was obliterated. LinkRiver closed. Socialmedian closed.

In the wake of all these gateways' demise, taking content from the open Web and getting it in front of new viewers is more challenging. While I've always said you need to be where the users are and can't force them to come to you, what could be automated is now requiring manual intervention at practically every step.

Just What Am I Talking About?

The alpha and omega, yin and yang of social outlets (for text, anyway) are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is much bigger and much more profitable, but don't get distracted. People creating content for the Web also need to make sure that content fares well downstream on Facebook and Twitter. You can write it for the open Web, but you then have to take explicit action to share the content downstream - or set up automation to either site, usually backed by RSS. At that point, whether you get discovered or not is up to each site's algorithm, which has leaned more in favor of implied interest rather than chronology of late - meaning you can see viral content from hours or days ago before you get the newest stuff.

On a mobile phone, notifications are the holy grail of getting someone's attention. (See: Life by Numbers and Notifications from 2014) It's not uncommon to get notified when someone tweets, but it's very uncommon to ask for a notification when a site makes a post.

In parallel, the feedback loop from such networks, as well as Instagram or others, is near instant and acts as an incentive for the author to initiate their content on that silo natively. Post a 20-tweet storm to Twitter, and immediately start seeing those likes and retweets roll in. Post a story to Facebook and wait for the Likes and comments. Post a news story or a blog post, and ... wait. Wait for visitors in Google Analytics? Wait for the post to be shared downstream? Wait for the story to be indexed in Google News and search?

The elimination of Google Reader, FriendFeed, and Digg as amplifiers of Web content, alongside the attention absorption by Facebook and Twitter makes it harder for Web authors to get visibility - and they they aren't dropping their content into the real time stream.

So What Does the New Flow Look Like?

In 2009, it seemed pretty easy to me. Post on the blog. RSS would take it to FriendFeed and Google Reader. FriendFeed would post to Twitter. Twitter would post to Facebook. Then I'd run around and answer comments wherever they were distributed. (More on distributed conversations from 2009)

Now, I can still post on the blog. And the RSS link is the same. I even get the small bump of engagement on Google+ from the blog's page automatically adding my content there. But then, to make sure I cover all my bases, I then make another share of the same content to Medium, for those who love their site, and I've even found good engagement on LinkedIn, by making a third post of the same content on their channel. It's a different audience, but, if on topic, they share and engage.

So that's three posts. Meanwhile, I still have to share the story on Facebook and Twitter separately, hoping that someone will break their consumption flow and engage on my content downstream.

It feels like more work to get less return. And yes, I recognize that some may not miss FriendFeed because they never used it. Maybe others think Digg got replaced outright by Reddit, and gains similar traffic. Others prefer Hacker News. So aggregators do exist, obviously, but hubs aimed at surfacing new content, as opposed to highlight content on the site and keeping readers there, have declined.

To properly make the Web as desirable and viable a platform for publishing, we need to work together to fix the distribution and discovery gaps, make content fantastic on mobile for creation and consumption, and allow for engagement that is as simple as a Like. I applaud (there's the joke) Medium's approach to reward users with claps, for at least they're trying something. We should all be trying.

Disclosures: Yes, I work at Google. Sometimes, I help the Blogger team. I used to work on Google+ and have many friends on those teams still. I miss Google Reader every day. FriendFeed too.

Don't Fear Being Fireballed or Slashdotted if on Blogger

It can be difficult to plan for an unanticipated spike in Web traffic. One of the most amusing parts of reading Macolyte John Gruber's Daring Fireball blog is the near certainty that at least once per day, one of the poor saps he links to goes down due to the resulting crush of curious onlookers. It happens so frequently that it's practically second nature to see him update a post saying the link has been "Fireballed", opting instead to point to Google's cache of the original. This phenomenon, of course, is not a Gruber exclusive. For years, otherwise innocent bloggers have been Slashdotted, TechCrunched or even Scobleized, seeing their sites crack under pressure. But from what I can tell, if you're hosted on Blogger, this isn't an issue at all. The company was just recognized for perfect uptime during a survey by Royal Pingdom, and I've seen my own site spike in traffic following controversial posts with no ill effects.

Blogger was not always known for a stellar uptime record. In late 2006, the service practically had to write "a novel" about continued outages. In fall of 2007, I railed against Google for ignoring users during another major outage. But services mature and times change.

Royal Pingdom's Downtime Report. Blogger Scores a Zero.

With the backdrop of Tumblr's highly-publicized downtime of more than a day earlier this month, Royal Pingdom also spotted occasional outages at WordPress, TypePad and Posterous, each of whom looked great compared to Tumblr's unfortunate blip, but not as spotless as the often overlooked Blogger.

Getting Slashdot, Scoble and Spiegel Bumps Simultaneously

While escaping system-wide downtime is a major win in itself, that doesn't speak to the services' ability to scale under pressure. Gruber recommends the WP Super Cache Plugin for WordPress, letting users serve more than a page a second, as it's self-hosted WordPress blogs that often get crushed with one of his links. But I've been linked from Daring Fireball a few times and lived to tell the tale. Same for Slashdot, Techmeme, Hacker News and the Huffington Post, all of which are capable of sending solid and sustained traffic on good days.

Techmeme, Hacker News and Scoble Don't Bring Down Blog

Similar to how Google is well known for its Web site never going down, I have to assume Blogger has mastered Google's distributed architecture, and makes no single blog, or its hotspotting, an instrument for failure. This blog didn't slow or go down when tens of thousands of visitors dropped by this July to tell me I was an idiot for switching from iPhone to Android. It also didn't go down when I questioned the usefulness of Google Wave last year, or when the Huffington Post liked my recap of David Kirkpatrick's Facebook Effect.

Not Even Daring Fireball Could Take the Blog Down

Even the largest services have occasional downtime. Facebook was down last week, intentionally, due to a code push ahead of schedule. Twitter has had its share of bumps, though the site has gotten much better in the last year, and even Facebook subsidiary FriendFeed went down this weekend. But Blogger users are sitting pretty knowing their blogs are going to be up and responsive, even under pressure.

OneTrueFan Adds Personalized Hot News From Your Friends

OneTrueFan is looking to be more than a badge-creating Web surfer tracking toolbar gimmick. The site, already extremely compelling to me due to the ability to discover new networks and stories from my social connections on Twitter, is adding an intriguing feature today that essentially brings each user their own Hacker News-like top stories summary, pulling from shared pages by one's friends in the network. The concept, a social newspaper, is one used by other sites including Paper.li, but in this case, taps into the power of the toolbar which follows registered users around the Web, and surfaces the most shared stuff in an effort to be sure you don't miss a thing.

Quietly launched at the end of last week and being publicly unveiled today, OneTrueFan has added a "Your Hot News" tab to every user's profile, showing items that are popping throughout your network of connections. Interestingly, not only do the items display the avatars of the people who distributed the shares in their network, but it gives each avatar a weight, as evidenced by size, to show how much downstream impact the sharer had. The bigger, the better.

The Hot News Story On My OneTrueFan Page

OneTrueFan gives site users 'points' for sharing items to Twitter and Facebook, and tracks the number of clickthroughs to their URL shortner, otf.me. One recent share I made of Micah Baldwin's "It All Changes When the Founder Drives a Porsche" article gained more than 1,000 clickthroughs, passing the points to me and making me the OneTrueFan of Micah's blog - which I was already, but now is confirmed by irrefutable science. This clickthrough data contributes to the Hot News section, but in the event other URL shorteners are used, ones Twitter reach comes into play.

Another Top Story Shared By Many Folks In My OneTrueFan Stream

In the days I've tracked my Hot News on OneTrueFan, I've found it to accurately find top stories of the day that are frequently shared. It's not personalized based on my interests, but does a solid job of becoming a more personal Techmeme or Hacker News. Of course, seeing just who shared an article gives me more data to choose whether I want to engage in the item as well.

Like Blippy, I believe OneTrueFan's full potential has yet to be discovered. If I look at what the team is developing, essentially it is a horizontal social network that you can take from site to site with you around the Web, without requiring a centralized login. In fact, you just log in with your Twitter account. I believe in the model of sharing and discovery, and Hot News will make OneTrueFan (or OTF) an even bigger player as a destination site. If you're not on OneTrueFan already, you haven't been listening to me and should go register now.

Hackr WatrCoolr: Tech News Aggregation With No Mouse Required

A couple weeks ago, in an article about Microspaces, I said that Web entrepreneurs are finding new ways for you to navigate their sites, and many are now incorporating keyboard input, to jump to new comments or pages. Though I mentioned it in a quick tweet on September 25th, I thought it was worth highlighting the Hacker WatrCoolr, a site that displays headlines from many popular tech news sites, and lets you quickly flick through them using only your keyboard - no mouse required.


A Headline from ReadBurner on WatrCoolr Tonight
WatrCoolr shows the latest headlines from Digg, Hacker News, Del.icio.us, Techmeme, Reddit, RSSmeme, Slashdot, Yahoo! News and ReadBurner. Each headline shows its recency, and the destination URL (e.g. nytimes.com or makeuseof.com).


Scoble's Post Hits Techmeme and Makes it to WatrCoolr
But unlike many other news aggregation sites, the Hacker WatrCoolr doesn't shoe-horn them into one busy page, like AllTop. Instead, it displays one headline at a time. To scroll through older items from the same source, you just need to hit the down arrow key. To see a new source, hit the right or left arrow. And to read the article, you just have to press the "r" key, or press "n" to have it open in a new window or tab.

While Hackr WatrCoolr is not looking to replace your RSS reader, some of the functionality is very similar to that of applications like Google Reader, and it's a very easy way to get all the top stories from each of these sites in one place. It may be a little experiment, but it hints at one way the Web could go to make the process of our news gathering even that much more easy. I hope to find more Web developers who are thinking different about how we navigate today's often-formulaic and static Web sites.

DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner, and hold a small equity position.

YooPlace Captures Twitter's Top Conversations, Lets You Reply

With Twitter's tweaking its API limits, you've seen a virtual tug of war between the popular microblogging service and the many different sites that have sprung up to capture the most discussed links and topics. In the last few months, we've seen sites like AlphaTwitter and Tweetmeme arrive, each finding middling success. But quietly, a new service called YooPlace is looking to not only show popular discussions, capturing all matter of shortened URL services to resolve back to a single original, but also setting you up to reply, either to the original tweet, or any of those that have followed suit.

On Friday, Jesse Stay highlighted Twitter's ability to enable threaded comments, a feature long desired, and one that could eventually see the disappearance of the omnipresent @ symbol used to connect users. While it might be some time until we see that on Twitter directly, YooPlace has designed their site to make conversations by way of Twitter seem threaded.


YooPlace Is Like Twitter Meets Hacker News.
The YooPlace main site looks a lot like the popular Hacker News, complete with tan background, items showing rank by number, and even a triangle on the left by each item in the same font. Clicking on the triangle, like in Hacker News, votes the story up a point, presumably higher in the rankings. But most of the scoring comes from the tweets themselves, which are shown as "comments". The first Twitter user to post the URL is shown as the originator, even if they are not the blog author themselves. Clicking the "comments" link displays all the following tweets, as well as their avatars, with the ability to respond in line.


A Popular Item from YooPlace
As you would expect, the most popular items ranked by YooPlace are blog posts from popular blogs, including TechCrunch, Engadget, and Mashable. But there are also tweets that call out recent earthquakes, political news, and the Olympics. You can also see the items which hit the top of YooPlace by following YooPlaceTop on Twitter.


You Can Reply From Within YooPlace
The author of YooPlace is Thomas Bikeev, a Belgian, who tips his hat to Hacker News as inspiration for YooPlace, and saying the data is provided by Twitter's API as well as Twitter Search (formerly Summize).

Ranking popular topics on Twitter has been done before, and the magic formula to "get it right" is still eluding folks. But I really like the ability to click on comments and see just who said what about the topic, as well as aggregating the different URL shorteners. With so many new ones cropping up, it can get easy to miss who is talking about your posts or a specific issue. And the fact you can respond in line is very interesting. We'll see if YooPlace can do more than the others have, and get real traction with the new features before Hacker News sues them and wants their interface back.