Comments as a Platform, Or Silencing the Trolls

My plea to Jack on Twitter.

Web content has typically divided into three camps - those who create, those who react, and those who just watch. The lurkers, if you will. From the very earliest days of blogging, those first posts awaited the inevitable comments, and, given a clear revenue stream, you would see early participants like Fred Wilson say that "comments are how bloggers get paid."

[Source: https://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/the-real-value-of-social-media-interaction/#comment-2531]

The earliest engagements we had with people who read our site gave us incredible discussions, and spawned more posts and even, in rare cases, changed minds. Sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and others became known for their diverse threads, and those in the comments are why you showed up.

But we've also seen the pendulum swing the other way. Everybody knows to "never read the comments" on popular news sites, as the most aggressive vitriol and ignorance floats to the top. YouTube comments have long been notorious for their lack of quality (though I feel this has improved of late). And Twitter, for many who should be able to use the platform, their every move can attract trolls who have a vendetta to take them down - but somehow don't get banned.

As social media sites eclipsed the momentum of blogs, conversations moved. We adapted by integrating social discussions from FriendFeed, Facebook and Twitter and appended them to our blogs. We would all share our posts on social, and then engage where the content landed. The best bloggers would find their readers wherever they were. But others simply turned comments off. Maybe it is because they were full of spam (they were) or the quality wasn't there (often true), but also, because the total quantity declined.

Let's go back to talking about Twitter. Twitter drives me nuts because it's fantastic and so poor at so many things. They seriously have real-time on lockdown. There is no better place to see what is happening right now. If there's a calamity, search Twitter. A breaking news event? Search Twitter. A sporting event? Twitter.

But Twitter has this awful habit of giving all users an equal voice. Now hear me out what I mean.

If you tweet publicly, anybody who you haven't blocked can reply, and their content is appended to your tweet. It follows you around. If a Republican politician posts, left-leaning posters race to take down their message, while the MAGA crowds prop it up and try to gain eyeballs. If the Kardashians say something, the crowds pounce on the valuable real estate quickly to show their adoration or pimp whatever link they've got going.

And down the publicity food chain, if you're a woman, especially a visible one, you get awful men saying foolish things. I guarantee it. They may call you names or question your ability. You block one and ten more pop up. If you're black, or Jewish, the racists will find you. They all know how to tweet.

So what I recommend above all other Twitter changes is the ability for people to reclaim their space. Hillary and Trump should both be able to post information without the crowd's replies being appended. Just like blogs and YouTube stars can turn comments off, Twitter users should be able to as well. The thing about social networks (and most products, to be honest) is that you should give the users control. But they haven't done it, and I think it delivers a great disservice to the platform, which has become a hotbed of harassment and hate - as Reddit and others have too.

If you can trust your commenters enough to give them a voice, by all means, amplify their voices. But when they have shown you time and again that they cannot be trusted, turn it off.

We Need Smart and Personal Streams, Not Just The Latest Updates

Once again, the tech web is aflutter about a proposed change in Twitter’s timeline — as they have finally made a choice to offer more than a simply chronological feed of updates displayed in the order they were posted. While a chronological order of tweets can be considered a hallmark definition of what Twitter is today, and truthfully, one of its most addictive features as each new Tweet rolls in, it’s also a detriment to those who aren’t ready to be constantly hooked to the information IV drip.

My 2010 Summary of a Personalized Web future

Twitter is 10 years old now. That’s fairly mature from a Web services standpoint. Its peers, LinkedIn and Facebook, are 14 and 12 respectively. The next generation? Pinterest is just over six. Instagram nearly six. Snapchat is five. And yet it often seems as people are still waiting for Twitter to make that big leap forward to properly sit at the adults’ table.

Twitter as a Media Network, not a Social Network

Ex Twitter PR and comms guy Sean Garrett, now running his own firm, commented yesterday that Twitter’s been done a disservice by being labeled as a social company instead of as a media network. Taking that summary seriously, it clarifies one of the major needs for a personal and intelligent ranking of content, rather than a raw feed of the latest updates. Media companies don’t just give you the very latest updates in order, with no external curation. Instead, they sort it, rank it and deliver them from the most important to least important — whether their medium is television, radio, print or online.

For the most aggressive media consumers, like myself, the idea of seeing content out of order may seem like pure heresy. We read every email, read every blog post in Feedly, and generally catch up on Twitter to the point where we left off. Scrambling that up seems abhorrent. But we’re not normal. We’re seeing that from the tippy top 1% of the bell curve, and hoping the rest of the world will catch up to us. But not only won’t they, but they don’t need to, and we should stop expecting it.

A successful network has an obligation to give its users the best possible experience and do it instantly. But surfacing the right updates for the right person at the right time is a tricky Venn diagram to figure out, be it based on the users’ topics of interest, their affection for the person posting the content, the recency of that content, and obviously, a mix of all those signals and more. Just sitting back and showing the latest stuff only solves for one of those qualities: recency — completely ignoring what I like, who I trust and so on.

Personalized Content Leads to Happier Users, More Usage

From 2009 to 2011, I worked with my6sense, first as a third party consultant, and later as the company’s VP of Marketing, before I joined Google. Their app surfaced content from your social streams in a personalized way, just for you, based on your own implicit behaviors — what you clicked on, what you chose not to, how long you read something, etc. The more you used the application, the smarter it got, and eventually, we would know your interest patterns so well, that we could take our user model and apply it to any stream on the web.

my6sense for Twitter

In early 2011, we delivered a Chrome extension for Twitter, which took the smarts we’d developed and displayed the results of that effort on the Twitter website — giving you two options: your standard timeline, ordered chronologically, and a smart, personalized timeline, from my6sense.

By no means were we the first company to try and bring sense to a social stream. In fact, in 2008, FriendFeed (RIP) offered users personalized recommendations as a feature to their service, aimed for those who’d been away and wanted to quickly catch up. But one aspect important to both of these examples is that they gave the user a choice. You could quickly switch between a chronological feed, which was the default, and the smart feed, personalized to your interests. You could always go back.

But as we found out, the more the user visited the app, and the more accurately we could determine their preferences (which we called digital intuition), the less likely they were to ever visit the unfiltered, unsorted feed. If you became accustomed to a curated feed tailored just for you, going back to one that wasn’t seemed unacceptable in comparison.

Quantity Isn’t Quality. Popular Isn’t Personal.

So imagine you’re one of the millions of users of Twitter (or Facebook, etc.) who doesn’t check in every day. On the rare occasion you do visit, you’re not seeing a feed of updates from people who matter to you most. You’re instead seeing a feed of updates from people who post the most. And quantity rarely was quality. When your selling action to those most likely to leave your service is to give them something low quality and off topic, that’s a problem. And yet, for many services, that’s the default.

Going even further, what many services provide as an option is a leaderboard of popular or “Top” content. It’s assumed the most engaged content is the “best”, but this alone is far from the truth. If you seek out a stream for intellectual curiosity and news, you won’t get that from viral videos and memes, jokes and celebrity news. But many people go to these services to turn their minds off or to relax, and their goal may be in direct contradiction with yours.

Twitter’s Success Really Isn’t the Topic of Debate

Now that Twitter has gone public and its financial success is being graded quarter by quarter, and Wall Street’s public vote on their valuation is there for the world to see, its success could be easily measured solely by stock price. Amid the hubbub of whether Twitter could sustain a billion person audience, like Facebook, or if it’s exceptionally valuable due to the role it plays in the world’s news dissemination and communication, the reality is that it has to do better both for its current user base and those yet to embrace it. And that requires change and evolution.

Twitter should be personal just for me. So should Facebook. And LinkedIn. And the web at large. And my phone and car and so on. If a dichotomy is set up between something that’s smart and personal against one that isn’t, I know I’m going to give the service a chance to give me a better experience — and if not, I should always be able to go back.

Disclosures: I work at Google, a partner and occasional competitor to Twitter. I’ve been an active Twitter user for eight-plus years. I was previously VP of Marketing at my6sense, which built a personalization engine.

Listen Different And Learn

For most people, new ideas and perspectives make us uncomfortable. It’s easier and less taxing to surround ourselves with people who agree with our worldview, and reinforce our way of thinking, to make us believe we are correct. We self-select our communities, both in the physical world, and the online space, and these friends or peers become an extension of our own identity.

A byproduct of this selection process is that our communities end up looking a lot like us and behaving like us. Techies follow techies. White guys talk to white guys. Democrats engage with Democrats. While the Internet has a virtually infinite pool of people and ideas to choose from, we easily ignore, unfollow, mute or block those voices and appearances that we don’t identify with or make us question our position.

A Divided Web

Ten years ago, I saw this polarization coming, saying the web was dividing in what I called a “bifurcation”:

“It is human nature to seek out a community of peers and equals, of those who yearn for the same things or have parallel experience… (and thus) polarized and wholly separate communities will grow and thrive.” — Feb. 23, 2006

As a white male in Silicon Valley for the better part of two decades, my world view is a very specific one. I know that my experiences don’t always match people who don’t look like me, or whose LinkedIn profile looks vastly different. And over the last decade of participating in many different social channels, (Google+, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) my established audience I’ve curated has ended up looking a lot like me. It’s very white. It’s very male. It’s full of people from Silicon Valley, who love tech, and, in most cases, vote Democrat.

But I know that’s not good enough. To close ones eyes to the rest of the world means also closing my ears, and my mind. Last May, I was especially struck, and angered, honestly, by how the Silicon Valley community seemed especially blind and silent on the topics of racial bias in our country’s police forces, which sparked unrest in places like Ferguson and Baltimore. While protesters loudly called for improvements in their world that begged for equality, millionaire VCs speculated about unicorn valuations and other techies complained about high rents in San Francisco — which don’t seem all that important in comparison.

Amid this noise and seeming tone-deafness from the public profiles of many active Valley participants, we have an ongoing cry for help and recognition and value from women in tech, who correctly see an uneven playing field that throws roadblocks at their career progress, polluted by landmines of sexism, bias and the good old boy networks — as well as a call for an expanded level attention to increase diversity in all our ranks, with diversity meaning not just women, but people of color (POC).

 Exploring New Streams for New Voices

So over the last year-plus, I’ve actively tried to do a much better job of listening and engaging with people who aren’t like me. And this simple act of listening opens my eyes every day to things I may have missed — while making those topics that I might have previously ignored become critically important to me as an individual.

Twitter Analytics shows my audience is overwhelmingly male. Not a surprise.

As I still love tech, and still identify a geek, my bias and interests remains there, but I’ve aggressively opened my eyes and ears to more women voices and more black voices — especially on Twitter, where the following model is very lightweight, and the stream’s recommendation system smartly brings me new people who I may never have previously discovered.

On Twitter, as of today, I follow just under 600 accounts, including brands. But by no means is my stream a perfect picture of diversity and equality. So I created a list that explicitly expunged all the men and all the brands from my stream — carefully only showing tweets from the 170 or so women I choose to follow, as well as those retweets they found interesting (No Men. No Brands.). And by dipping my toe in this curated stream, the view is remarkably different.

While this may not be rocket science, women don’t always want to talk about what the loudmouthed ego-driven men want to talk about. They bring in topics and conversations that often get otherwise lost in the testosterone flood, and introduce me to even more interesting ideas and initiatives. So when the men annoy me too much, I turn them off by following that list instead.

But as I said above, it’s not enough to count my streams as diverse just because I made a list that follows a bunch of women — because diversity means diversity of thought and backgrounds.

 Diversity Doesn’t Just Mean Women

As the conflicts in Ferguson and Baltimore extended to cover alarming incidents in Cleveland, Texas, and so many other places across the country, those leading the social justice movement, like Deray McKesson, Shaun King, and Johnetta Elzie spoke loudly to me, as did others speaking up about inequality everywhere, like Bianca St. Louis, Jacky Alcine, Yukio Strachan and Trilly Stardust. I started adding them, and each new person brought me a new voice. And, unlike the old days, where the lack of a return follow may have felt like personal rejection, I’ve left the ego at the door, and not expected the same. I have to earn my way into the conversation, and can’t just expect a seat at the table.

In July, I saw many in my stream go in euphoria over Drake and Meek Mill.
But most of you missed it.

Now, it’s not uncommon for my Twitter stream to be overwhelmed by updates from women, and people of color. And it’s excellent. The increased diversity of voices and topics means it’s not a monotonous echo chamber, but one that’s vibrant and has me seeing things I would never likely otherwise see.

All of us who participate online, even if we’re not in tech, have a responsibility to keep our eyes, ears and minds open to people who don’t share the same backgrounds, and may not look like or sound like us. But so many times, that’s the trap we fall into. We may not like looking into a mirror, but we are surrounded by our clones.

 We Have a Responsibility and Challenge

My colleague and great friend, Rick Klau, also spoke on this issue last summer in his post “My unconsciously biased address book”, where he stated the downside of keeping our world homogeneous:

If the majority of leaders at most companies are men and if the majority of their networks are men (as mine are), then this is a self-perpetuating problem.

We have an opportunity to choose our networks. When we unconsciously choose for our network to shut out a segment of people, we are doing a disservice to them and to us — and we extend the issues, which are very real, one generation further, rather than confronting them head-on ourselves.

Without listening, we can’t be learning. If you think you’ve built your networks with blinders, take them down. Cast them aside and rebuild. It’s beautiful over here.

You Have Your Tech Routine. But It Will End.

In 1995, as a freshman in college attending Cal, I was rapidly trading emails with my friend from UCLA in a heated conversation, hitting “Check Mail” in Eudora, eventually changing my settings to automatically retrieve email every minute. One of my roommates, annoyed at my behavior, suggested I just pick up the phone and call him instead. But I didn’t. 

Obviously, in the near twenty years since, I have expected my messages to come in practically instantly, and to immediately have my attention - so I’m on top of it. But there might come a day in the future, if you can imagine it, where I send my very last email. For just as we’ve “always” done something one way doesn’t mean we always will. The pace of tech, and one’s changing lifestyle, practically commands adaptation.

Switching to a separate firehose of electronic messaging stimulation, we’re nearly a decade deep into the hyperconnected social media phase. We’re long past the time for education and evangelism, for the most part, on blogging, social networking, tweeting, and YouTube - and you’ve got routines.

While not everyone uses every service, and different people have different approaches, there’s a good chunk of you who can’t imagine doing things a different way, and stopping what you’ve always done. You can’t imagine never tweeting again. You can’t imagine never checking in to the office on Foursquare when you arrive at work, and maybe you can’t even remember the last time you had lunch and didn’t take a photo of it to share on Instagram or Foodspotting.

But it will all end.

My First Tweet from January 2008

I often think of that, especially as I’ve reduced pace here... what would my last blog post say? How will I know that I’m done? What will be the reason I would possibly walk away from thousands of posts in the archives? Could I really close down my Twitter account, or delete my Facebook, or even FriendFeed?

And that goes for offline activity too. In my recent adoption of Fitbit, and regular walks to keep my stepcount high, I think about how long I’ll keep the routine. Will this be the last night I’m walking around the block to get a few thousand steps in, for tomorrow, I’ll be back in front of the television instead, having let my Fitbit power down?

On other occasions, the choice is seemingly made for you. In 2009, I once said I wouldn’t stop using Google Reader every day, even if you paid me $25,000. I guess the joke was on me, of course - for it wasn’t really all that long after I joined Google that yes, Reader was closed, and I’ve turned to Feedly to get all my RSS feeds instead. So outside of my control, one day, my routine of opening Google Reader was no longer there. If Reader had remained, I’d probably be in my same routine, as I always had been, consuming content and sharing it, just like I’ve been doing for about six years.

Meanwhile, the removing of Google Reader, and yes, Google Buzz before that even, meant ranking my social content in my6sense no longer was needed, so I found myself deleting that app from my phone last week, despite our history.

Even when it’s not the company or the service shutting down, it could be a simple measurement of priorities for you against what benefits you’ve seen from the app. For the last few months, I’ve thought about this a lot, as I’ve checked in on Foursquare at places big and small, for the important travels and the mundane.

Am I really a Handmade Hero? No. Last Badge...

While my badges and points racked up, the real world benefits were exceptionally rare. I’d met a few people, and saved a few dollars, but today, I deleted my account. No drama. Just decided I was done. That should save a few power bits on my phone, and a few minutes of each day.

As much fun as it has been to play the role of early adopter and use every service to its fullest, I believe we’re well past the mania time of social networking, services and apps. Being on a platform isn’t the same as using the platform well. And if you can’t find measurable or emotional value to participating in a place, there’s no harm in calling it quits - or continuing to have your eyes open for what’s next, so you don’t find yourself entrenched in the way things have always been, while missing new experiences.

Sometimes that means never joining in the first place, analyzing what you’ve seen and deciding if that makes sense for you. Even though I was an early trial user of Burbn, I never got an Instagram account, and I lived. I never got into GetGlue, and won’t. I never liked Turntable.fm, and I’ve never done a Snapchat. Maybe it’s the graying hairs on my head, or being closer to 40 than 30, but I know time is valuable.

Someday all of this will stop, and when I pick up my head from the computer monitor, will I feel as if I’ve missed something, or will I be happy with the results of what I’ve done?

Disclosures and Disclaimers: Yes, I work for Google, in the Developer Relations team. This post is not intended to represent them or favor their services in place of any of those I just mentioned, obviously.

Video: Social Media: The Thing You Do "Between" Things

A couple weeks ago, I got the chance to visit Paris, France and London, in the UK, to speak at Devoxx France and meet with colleagues internationally. While in London, I sat down with +Bob Barker, who works with my good friend +Thomas Power, and he asked me questions on how I use social media, including what sites, what times, and for what purpose.


As this question comes up a lot, and continues to come up, more than 7 years after I started the blog, I'm glad he took the time to record it in this video, less than ten minutes long. Fast summary: You shouldn't block off time in your day for social media. Like email or catching up on the news, social media happens "between" the rest of the bits in your life - be they meetings, work, or anything else.

Like many people, I consume content differently on a mobile device than I do on the desktop. I often watch television, but at the same time, have my Nexus 7 so I don't miss a thing - levering what I've long called continuous parallel attention. In the discussion, we talk about how Google+ Hangouts have broken down barriers in communicating with friends, family and colleagues, and how I leverage Twitter for real time content and sports. Of course, I work for Google, but these are my individual words, and the objective was to be as transparent and real as possible.

Real Valley Stories: Leveraging Assets to Get One's Way

Editor's Note: Part 7 in an irregular series of stories from my 13 years in Silicon Valley. Part 6 talked about the a trade show booth nightmare. This time, an example of how you can leverage opportunity to achieve a goal.

Practically every employee has had a point in their career when they have run into friction with management on ideas or strategy. How you deal with this conflict, explain your ideas, and try to convince those who aren't yet sold can have a big impact on what gets implemented and how you are perceived by your colleagues. Hold to your guns too strongly, as I almost did back in 2000 over URL structure, and you could be out of a job. Become too passive, and it's unlikely you'll do much besides become a wallflower.

In the 2006-07 timeframe, about when I started posting on this blog regularly, I was sure of the impact social media and blogging would have on the way customers interacted with each other and brands. But while I was blogging in the evening hours on strategy and playing the part myself, during the daytime hours at the office, I was struggling to get my management team to go along, no matter the examples I brought up, the guidance from our current PR team, or the links I found on the web.

As sure as I had been in 2003-04 that leveraging Google Adwords ahead of the competition would give us increased visibility to customers, buying keywords for our industry, I was sure that we once again had the opportunity to be leaders in what was a fairly slow moving market. But my boss, the VP of Marketing, said my time would be better used doing a demand gen campaign than writing a blog. When the PR team and I appealed to the CEO, and asked him what blogs he read, he drew a blank, looked up, and said "those Louis sends me." Aside from being frustrated at what I perceived to be a lack of intellectual curiosity, I felt like a fraud - unable to  get my company to do what I was telling others they should. My Clark Kent and Superman cape was showing holes.

But opportunity struck, surprisingly, when I was asked to solicit additional public relations firms, as we ramped up for what would be our first approach at entering the public markets and filing an IPO. The main reasoning for taking on an elite firm was that we wanted one to assist with not just the standard marketing and PR, but also analyst relations and investor relations.

While that in itself was a lot to do, I tagged on more. In creating my requests for proposal (RFPs), I made it mandatory that any firm bidding also had to propose a thorough social media and blogging strategy. In phone calls with each of the firms I reached out to, I made it clear that this was mandatory - and I would not consider anyone who did not lead with a comprehensive strategy that explicitly suggested I lead the company's blogging effort. Everyone, no doubt wanting to win the contract, agreed.

In the next few weeks, firm after firm came through our doors, telling us about their PR, AR and IR acumen, their industry expertise, and one after one said that our company should initiate a deep social media strategy, including blogging, and each one told our VP and CEO that I should lead it. After hearing this three or four times, my boss turned to me, and smiling, said, "What the hell? Did you tell them all to say this?" I played dumb, but eventually they wore down, and social media and blogging, including activity on Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader shared links and FriendFeed was part of our standard activity - at a time when larger competitors were still figuring things out.

I'd like to say the story ended up with roses. We ended up filing the IPO and later withdrawing it, and the quiet period disrupted some of our ability to be more active. Later, after I left the company in 2009, they filed again, before being acquired last year. But for me, it was good to see I could leverage the assets I had to achieve what I wanted, even when seeing executive debate. You don't always get a chance to get an external team to preach your ideas to your management, but if you do find the opportunity for leverage, it can't hurt to give it your best shot.

Writing for Social, Defending for Court

Earlier this month, I had an interesting experience, being asked to participate in a deposition, taking questions from a legal team as part of an ongoing case. While I’ll skip the details out of deference for confidentiality, there were aspects of the morning that serve as a reminder for those of us who participate online that often, content we post is permanent, and it can be discovered and used for means far beyond those we originally intended.

For those unfamiliar with the process of a deposition, it’s essentially when an individual is called as part of a fact-finding mission, to bring information deemed relevant to a lawsuit or other legal matter, outside of court. The individual being deposed, in this case, me, fields questions from an attorney, and those answers are recorded as on the record, as they would be in court. The questions can draw from one’s memory and experience, or can come in response to exhibits entered into evidence.

In my example, beyond questions about my knowledge and experience, I was presented with four exhibits entered into evidence. As is procedure, I was first asked if I recognized the exhibits, and after acknowledging I was familiar, I fielded questions about their content. The source of these exhibits was intriguing, consisting of:

1. The main documents related to the case, as one would expect.

2. My own LinkedIn resume.

3. A Google+ post I made in 2011.

4. Multiple Quora posts I made in 2010 on a single topic.

Seeing my own words come back to me, in a new and unexpected setting, was initially unnerving. No doubt when I set up my LinkedIn resume and ongoing work history, I didn’t anticipate it forming the background for how I would be qualified in the legal process. When I posted to Google+ last year, I didn’t anticipate mining a few of the paragraphs to confirm what I had stated was accurate. I certainly didn’t expect posts I made on Quora two years ago would later be entered into the legal record.

As I revisited my own words, I was comforted to see they were not only accurate, but mirrored my testimony and helped answer the questions. I was intrigued to see the mix of content coming from LinkedIn, Google+ and Quora as forming the exhibit summary for the case, and glad that my honest and direct approach to social networking meant I didn’t have to explain away any hyperbole, sarcasm or misdirection.

The morning’s events wrapped and I was left thinking about the mountain of content I’ve brought to various social networking sites in the last several years - from the blog to Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Quora and so many other places, as well as the activity many of my peers are consistently producing. We’ve all heard stories about how posting pictures from a party or slandering your boss online can have real world impact. But as social networking content becomes the grounds for evidence in law, it brings up new considerations for seriousness on the web.

As one friend of mine, who has also gone through the deposition process before, noted when I replayed the events, “People who work for a large company, yet insist on saying crazy things, probably haven't been through a deposition already.” I would have to agree. That doesn’t mean lose your sense of humor and personality, but it does mean that if you do participate online, consider where the words could eventually fall. You might be surprised.

10 Great Ways to Get Discovered on Google+

As social networks evolve, so to do your circles. Even in the few months since our launch, you’ve probably added a lot of people to your circles who you didn’t know before - people who share common interests, or came by recommendation of a trusted friend or expert. Some people have rocketed their way to high visibility, added to hundreds of thousands of circles, by virtue of their actions on Google+. So while I can’t promise you the big numbers, here are ten ways you can get found on Google+, and examples to boot.

1. Embrace the Community While Doing Something Unique and Creative.

+Daria Musk +Thomas Hawk and +Trey Ratcliff are three of the most prominent people who have taken their talents, including singing and photography, to constantly give back to the community. And rather than post and run, as some content creators do, each of them learns from the community, honing their craft, highlighting others, and making recommendations of other top people. I’ve met all three in person in the last few months, and their dedication to both the network and their talents is something to behold.

2. Speak Eloquently, Thoroughly and from Your Experience.

+Tom Anderson used to just be the default avatar on a once-high-flying network. Now we recognize him as a respected observer of technology trends, social interactions and business moves - both for better and for worse. Having lived through the white hot rise and similar plummet of Myspace, he made enough cash to comfortably tell you how it is and not worry if you love it or hate it. Similarly, +Mark Cuban, a man never known for holding back his words, talks openly on Google+ on sports, business and tech.

3. Go on a Google+ Diet.

If you like what you see here, there’s little better way to show you’re all in than by fully committing to the platform. +Mike Elgan coined the term “the Google+ Diet”, but +Linda Lawrey and others, like +Denis Labelle, are just as devoted in their posting top links throughout the day to Google+ and sparking discussion. Linda also seems to have a side project going squashing the occasional spammer here, and we all appreciate that. 

4. Have a Sense of Humor and Share The Wacky Parts of the Web.

One of the best parts of circles is being able to organize your friends due to what they share, from serious to … not so serious. +Hillel Fuld and +Mona Nomura manage to mix their tech and social enthusiasm with a (un)healthy array of crazy images and outlandish things they find on the Web and share with those who follow them.

5. Gain the Attention of Others Who Have Proven Influence Before.

One of the most viral opportunities here on Google+ is that of the shared circle, where friends you already trust place you in a circle, usually topical, and recommend you to others. +Robert Scobleis one of the most active curators here, and takes a lot of effort to make sure his circles are full of active, contributing people. Gain his eye, or others with a network effect, such as +Veronica Belmont or +Felicia Day, and your updates could reach thousands. To gain the attention of these influencers, engage in their comment threads, don’t be shy about +mentioning them when you have interesting content, or stay on topic.

6. Spend Your Time Contributing to Make Google+ Even Better.

We’re working hard on making Google+ incredible. But we’re just getting started. Smart developers like +Matt Mastracci and +Mohamed Mansour have made a number of Chrome extensions to improve the streams and sharing beyond where they are now. +Paul Allen has made a side project of projecting our growth using real statistical analysis. Products like+CircleCount and SocialStatistics.com try to keep tabs on who is growing and what the top posts of the day are. This makes them all worth watching.

7. Be Well Known for Something Outside of Google+, Engage Here.

Call them celebrities or whatever you like, but there are many people who are household names who have taken to Google+ and used the medium to get closer to the rest of us, so you know them even better. From +Richard Branson and the +Dalai Lama to +Hugh Jackman to +will.i.am, people you read about offline are part of the community online.

8. Embrace Hangouts.

+Daria Musk's concerts in hangouts have been incredible to watch, but many more of you just simply hang out, with friends in your circles or the public. Every evening, I get invites from friends like +Bobbi Jo Woods, +Erica Joy and +Liza Sperling who just love hangouts. Want to know the community face to face to face? Click the Hangout button and see who shows up.

9. Be On the Scene and Break the News.

+Roberto Vongher was armed with a camera and reported on the Costa Concordia disaster, giving us a primary source view previously the world of the news networks. +Breaking News has adopted Google+ and is a fast place for me to catch up on what’s happening, as is +Fox News. For tech, I’ve got +The Verge +The Next Web and +TechCrunch. On the sports side, between+ESPN +SB Nation and +Sports Illustrated, I’m pretty much set.

10. Be The People Who Make This Place Run.

This might not sound fair for those of you who don’t spend your 9-5 (or longer) at the Googleplex, but the people who set the agenda and write the code to make Google+ go are as committed to the platform as its users. So it’s a pleasure to see updates roll in not just from +Vic Gundotra and+Bradley Horowitz , but Google’s execs including +Larry Page, +Sergey Brin and +Eric Schmidt. I’d list out the many folks I work with every day who own different aspects of the product, but by starting I’d never finish.

If you’re not constantly finding people to add to your circles, you’re not seeing what I’m seeing, which is a thriving community eager to share, socialize and discover. Looking for engagement on your content and feeling a bit ignored? We’ve all gone through it. So keep being yourself, and there’s no question your friends and peers are here. Leverage search to find topics and people you’re interested in. Check out shared circles from people you trust. Hangout! Play games. Have fun.

I’ve added all the people in this post to a shared circle. Add them and you can’t go wrong. There’s no question your stream will be full of some great stuff.


/via My Google+ Profile.

Social Networking With Strangers

There’s a well-known saying attributed to the poet and playwright William Butler Yeats: “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.”

As social networking has evolved to encompass a significant amount of people’s time on the Internet, divergent approaches to friending and following, sharing publicly and sharing selectively have emerged. Some networks have a solely synchronous relationship, where the bond can be broken unilaterally by either individual, but must be initiated by one and accepted by another, while others are asynchronous, meaning one can follow the content you make available publicly, even if you don’t explicitly pass approval.

The two best-known social networks that primarily rely on a synchronous relationship are Facebook and LinkedIn, preceded by sites like Friendster and MySpace. In September, Facebook introduced a “Subscribe” feature, which is asynchronous, but to be counted as “friend”, the connection must be mutual. LinkedIn connections are also mutual.

Other services, including, most notably, Twitter, but also FriendFeed and Google+, have used asynchronous relationships. For Twitter and FriendFeed, anybody who ran into your content, whether following you directly, or discovering it through search or friend recommendations, could respond to it via a Like, a Retweet, a Comment or Share. The same is true for public posts on Google+, while sharing to limited circles on Google+ reduces the visibility to those you have explicitly selected.

(Disclosure of course: I am on the Product Marketing team at Google+, and joined in August. Comments I make about the service and other social products are done with the best of intentions to be fully accurate.)

That people you don’t explicitly know or have a mutual relationship with can engage on your content can be a surprise, or even unnerving, to some users. While Twitter has seen user following numbers vault into the tens of thousands or even millions for some celebrities, not all have embraced the interest of being followed by the masses, who are often simply people interested in you or your content, not necessarily bad actors. Not blurring the lines of a “friend”, Twitter calls them “followers”, while FriendFeed calls these people “subscribers”, relating a connection between the individual and your content, not necessarily you.

Those used to an asynchronous model are used to connections with strangers, while others used to a synchronous model are often quite verbal about what is perceived as an onrush of random connections. As Google+ has been in the market for about six months, many users have been quite surprised at the high number of people who have them in circles, and I’ve seen some say they block those they don’t know. But as someone who has engaged in both models, the value comes from learning who sees your content, and what that means - especially on a network like Google+, where you can fine tune what content reaches which people.

Who Are These People Following Me? (via SocialStatistics)

For me, the overwhelming majority of people I interact with on social networks are people I met first through the web. I have made tremendous real-life friendships that started out as an online only relationship to start, through reading one another’s blogs, leaving comments, following people on Twitter and Google Reader, or any other myriad of places. Many of the colleagues I have now at Google are people who I knew years prior through FriendFeed, Twitter and their blogs, helping me continue the conversation when we finally met, rather than starting cold.

Not all online relationships turn into real life relationships later, of course, and not everything you share should reach everyone, particularly people you don’t know well.

On Twitter, if someone follows you, and your feed is public, your content is shared with them. The exception is when you may be doing @replies to a person they don’t follow as well. It makes sense to share on Twitter what you assume all your followers would see.

On Facebook, your publicly shared content is available to your friends and those who are subscribers to your public content. To share more selectively, choose one of the lists you have created. Strangers who follow you should not have access to this content, so you are at lower risk of oversharing if you use lists.

On Google+, your publicly shared content is available to all people who have you in circles, anyone who browses your profile or anyone who has a direct link to your content. To share your content without reaching strangers, you have multiple options, including sharing to any individual, any circle, to all your circles, or even extended circles, which reaches all those people you follow and those they follow. You can share as widely or as thinly as you like, and keep your content safe.

The goal is to share the right content with the right people. As people who you may not know add you, they are opting in to your public content, and nothing more. They don’t get any additional access to your contact information, photos or shares, and like Facebook and FriendFeed, you can moderate any comments in your stream, to remove spam or other unwanted feedback.

There’s no downside to new people asking to have access to your public shares, even if you don’t know them yet - and you just might be surprised about the relationships you build in the future. The requirement on your end, on any service, and trust me, I’ve tried just about all of them, is knowing what you are sharing and with whom. It’s our job, and those of other products on the web, to make this simple and easy.

You can connect with me on Google+ by going to http://www.louisplus.com. Howdy, stranger.

Network Effects and the Power of Recommendations

In the world of social networking, there is little more valuable than a trusted referral from a friend. Whether it be Twitter's "Follow Friday" phenomenon, where users point out accounts that have value once a week, or bloggers creating lists in their blogroll (at least back in the old days), it is a good rule of thumb that someone you trust probably has good insight into more new people who you would like to know, but haven't found yet.

As people have expanded their online interactions beyond those who they already know offline, the barrier to adding new people to lists, groups and circles is reduced. And if a respected cog in the network sees their recommendations pushed further downstream, the network effect is something to behold indeed. Popular social networkers can drive dozens, hundreds or even thousands of new connections in a single day. Whether its driving pageviews, like the Slashdot Effect, or mentions, like the Scoble Effect, a big push from a major participant can have ripples downstream that last for days.

Yesterday, I took some time and shared a list of women who interact with tech and media who I follow on Google+. Working on the Google+ team, I think a lot about how I consume content and want to make sure other people have the same opportunity to see the updates I enjoy. So I made a quick post highlighting about 200 or so women from the service, and said the circle would make your stream more "diverse, engaging and smart". That's my belief, and I'm sticking to it.

Felicia Day's share of Veronica Belmont's list, building from a circle I shared.

As the shared circle made its way through the stream, from person to person, share to share and comment by comment, it reached the view of Tekzilla's Veronica Belmont, who thoughtfully added on a few dozen more to the circle and shared it herself. With 100,000 or so people following her, this expanded the number of people who could see it dramatically. But it got even better when The Guild's Felicia Day shared the list. Felicia has almost twice as many connections as Veronica and so, again, the velocity of discovery and following was accelerated.

For years on this blog, I recommended new blogs to follow each month, and during FriendFeed's heyday, I shared new accounts to follow. I think doing this made sense as it helped solidify the community and help bring visibility to many people who were doing great work, but possibly not getting the awareness they deserved. There's little more exciting to me as a participant in these networks to help give a boost to high quality people. That doesn't mean that everyone following will agree with my recommendation, but putting somebody on the list puts a stake in the ground and ties my personal reputation to theirs. By endorsing someone, I am saying that I personally vouch for their content, and hope you will see value.

The Web gives us amazing potential, good and bad, for content to zip around the globe quickly. Seeing how the network shares information and builds on it in real time, is incredible. So when you are participating online, don't just think about yourself and your numbers and how you are being seen, but instead of how you can pay it forward and bring value to everyone else. This knowledge is power.

Disclosures: I am on the Product Marketing team at Google working on Google+, of course.

Subscribing to the Stream of Consciousness

There's no question more people are on the Web, consuming greater amounts of content, sharing more and expanding their networks online. Social networking has eclipsed previous web pasttimes, including email and porn, in sheer use. As many different activities become social, different services have emerged to center around specific niche activity - for example, Foursquare for location sharing and discovery, Last.fm for music listening and artist discovery, and at least for a while, Blippy, which tracked my spending habits.

As an early adopter and one who likes sharing, I've embraced practically all these sites. I enjoy sharing and learning from the community, finding friends and shared interests. I like that I can explicitly use my NOOKColor to tell you I finished a book. I like that I can explicitly use Spotify to share playlists and my favorite tunes of the day, and I like that I can explicitly share from Google Reader to bring you the best from the Web I am reading. The human element, I believe, is an important one, where I signal to you what I find most valuable of all these things - what I have hand-selected for you and you specifically, to know.

There are two defining attributes of the services I've mentioned that I think are critical to enabling a positive user experience. The first is that the users who I am sharing with know just what they are getting into. They joined Foursquare to follow location updates. They joined Blippy to see purchases. They joined Last.fm to see music plays. The second, if the site is more of an aggregator, like FriendFeed in its heyday for example, is that filters exist, so I can avoid seeing your tweets, or your Foursquare updates, or your Flickr photos. Both of these ensure that the user, as the consumer, maintains control over what content they see and the publisher has a choice as to what they publish.

There is value in explicit sharing with selective audiences. There is value in the audience anticipating what they will see when they choose to connect with you, and in you having the opportunity to share what you want, when you want - an inherent, unwritten, contract, that if you violate by sharing too much, too often, or too off-topic, means your connection can be broken.

Spending a lot of time listening to mainstream social networkers, such as my wife, who is not quite as embedded as I am, I hear a lot about the minutiae of people's lives that go into these networks, and the resulting annoyances about such updates. Initial responses to sites like Twitter or Foursquare was typically skeptical, in terms of why people would want the small updates, seemingly unfiltered. Obviously, as both services have reached a good level of traction, thanks in part to power users and casual alike, there is some value to microsharing, and some are on the services constantly. But quality and filtering adds value - something I've obviously been focused on with my work at my6sense and constant testing of new products to make our social networking even smarter.

Sharing is going up. This is fantastic. Enabling more apps to share and people to connect is great too. But I hope quality and curation don't fall by the wayside.