Today there was a very interesting discussion session on the feed of happy father and prominent blogger Louis Gray also starring Robert Scoble. Is Twitter for following topics and listening or for following people? I think that neither is true.

Reason's 2 arguments and records of a heart in pain are as follows:

1. Intellectual frustration

When I started using the service I had 2 major motivations: the network and the 140-letter format. The audience was really cool and I could contact interesting people all over the world.

The ugly truth is that there are not so many people like Chomsky, Searle or Pinker, who would be able to fulfill a 140-letter message with infinite wisdom.

I was initially inspired with the short format but it turned into a hardly manageable lump of news and facts. Somebody else's choice is unpredictable – I manage data stream myself. That's it.

The fact that any man can do what another man has done was also pretty clear from the outset. I'm talking now about professional issues. Right, I touched the train of thought of Scoble and Kawasaki (although he is a spammer I have a newfound respect for Guy since he mentioned Kafka recently).

I'm subscribed to their blogs though. I still need thoughts – whoever it were. Instead I'm getting dumber here. Gray matter needs permanent work and frequent inspiration.

No to mention that further growth in the number of Twitter users dilutes its intellectual stock. And leads to the second point.

2. Personal degradation

Robert Scoble follows 70,500+ people. Have no idea how Robert manages his feed (and he says he does - see a nice video by Robert below), but I think he's been so passionate in evangelizing Twitter and maximization of the number of followers, that he just can't stop.

Personal and ironic tweets are my passion. I will not praise that purpose not to sell, but I don't think that the number in this line could exceed 30.

So what's the chase for numbers is about? Addiction. It is really addictive. My favorite Lord Stanhope in His Letters to Son wisely advised his offspring to stick to smart people – one has to evaluate himself against others. It boosts development of personal qualities in case people around you are smarter than you.

Now, all I want to say is that you may be confused by the number followers and relax with an illusion of importance. Don't claim to be a visionary, but that's why I didn't start on the chase. Today I was pleasantly surprised, when I saw comments of guys (in the abovementioned discussion thread) who don't tend to be champions of attention. One guy even deleted 23,500 people following him!

That's it. Of course I don't think that my arguments really worth abandoning Twitter. Just a reason to think it over.

If you're interested in Twitter and FriendFeed this video is highly recommended:

И это ещё не всё...

There IS life without Twitter and digital socializing - for at least a week. Running through these Web 1.0 days was like the passage of a bright idea while heated with fever. Of course, that's a rhetorical exaggeration. Don't get me wrong: I like talking with people and new followers inflate my ambition as well. Nevertheless, it was another guide to the following strategies on Twitter that brought back to life my 2.0-polemical itch. Meet Kevin Rose and his 10 ways to increase Twitter followers published at TechCrunch.

I wouldn't start a discussion on personal pros and cons of the quantity of followers. Just a piece of meditation: despite the narcotic power of social appreciation I myself really enjoy the other basic foundation of online activity– the power of feedback. BTW, it's human nature as well – the derivative of our cognitive instinct.

Whatever. I doubt if my own Twitter experience hath in this line some interest: 119 following and 120 followers. That doesn't impress much. On the one hand, I really try to read tweets (the task becomes more complex as the number of people I follow grows), and on the other, I don't think, that my 140-letter messages are even noticed by 99% of followers. The rest are within a statistical error. That's ok. Mind share should be won and the network of interesting interlocutors should be built up laboriously.

But it's not the personal advantages that the founder of Digg Kevin Rose is talking about in his article. He's talking about professional ones. To be more precise, the chase for numbers is assumed to be necessary by default. And Kevin – with his accurately sighted rifle (Pownce was a perfect target) – gives a very reasonable breakdown of simple (and executable!) rules of attraction. Kiss me baby one more time.

Cool, I'm not kidding. However, the big picture view highlights a very serious problem that all of those who follow his advice may encounter: it contradicts the Conservation law, which is probably the most fundamental law in our Universe. Let me explain the histrionics.

1. The cash contradiction

Ok, you have a 'powerful twool' and can easily spread your ideas or information about your products or things with a very low CPC. In my view, Kevin's (and Guy's, and Robert's) pitch has an obvious pitfall – equality of users. Even if all the IT-guys join Twitter and FriendFeed they still have to generate revenues selling some stuff outside (directly or through ads). If they don't, it contradicts the Conservation law: there should be an external source of cash.

Hence, warming up a no-brainer chase for followers en masse is not a good idea. Either your messages will drown in the unbearable sea of data, or you'll just have to... I don't know... switch to another hip service.

In the long run a candy for the 'non-professional' audience (or at least for those who don't get bored with the same stuff) should exist, no doubts. But the current motivation seems weird and hardly monetizable. Nothing survives if it contradicts the Conservation law.

2. The background contradiction

Here's the point and it's very simple: to be interesting you have to invest time in personal development. The abovementioned rules of attraction are rather time consuming. Of course, if you are Stephen Fry or at least Guy Kawasaki you don't really have to worry about tweets.

If not, you have to invest some time outside Twitter in order to bring in something new (remember the Conservation law). And I doubt that gaining new followers may really inspire that.

Sigh, the vicious circle. If you want to be interesting you have to work hard outside Twitter, otherwise it mutates into a classifieds board with an option of news feed. If you do some studies IRL or even read books it's hard to: watch what top users tweet, get involved in #hash tag memes, track results, etc.

Enjoy this content? Add me at twitter.com/alankodzasov. If you don't I won't take offence, though.

Illustrations: = FoX =, id4.ru, lifeboat.com.

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Seems once again I'm parasitizing on bright ideas of Profy. It shall be so.

I don't like terminological disputes since there is a serious risk of necessity of dancing on the head of a pin. And I'm far from being an angel.

Nevertheless, I don't think that what Svetlana calls a 'few months ago startup' was and is in fact a startup. As a former investment banker (ouch), I hate naming great ideas without any opportunity of being profitable as businesses – in every fiber of my being. Think it's a conceptual misunderstanding.

Take a subculture: it's usually very influential, attracts thousands, and the significant part of its influence is contrary to any cash flows. There's something in, let me say, the web applications industry that reminds me of a subculture – an army of guys taught coding (not necessarily at Stanford) and currently inspired by numerous stories of success.

Probably, they just sublimate their healthy ambitions, nothing more. In fact the number of success stories – in terms of cash – is modest. Attracting audience is definitely a hit, but not a business.

In my view that comes from a certain gap in perception of popularity and target audience, i.e. those who are ready to satisfy some needs and those who are ready to buy stuff – either upon reading ads or directly. I may be wrong, but something is definitely wrong here.

Remember the dot-com bubble? My VP in a private equity boutique, an American, told me of traffic growth expectations prior to the crunch: optical cables were being laid on parallel streets and everybody talked of 'selling information' (no one really understood what it meant).

So what? Now they are talking of a potential collapse of the Internet in 5 years due to capacity limitations. The idea was cool, the trend was correct, but inside that pool something went bad. Ha, almost poetry. I mean, those, who are successful, realize the importance of money from the very beginning. Communism wouldn't last for long

Illustration: kaist.ac.kr

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I've just written a comment to the post by Svetlana Gladkova – "Microsoft Plays Nicely with IT Departments – Lets Block Internet Explorer 8 Installations". Reason's icy intimations came out to be wordy, so I decided to voice my doubts in a separate post (since I got no answer :-))

The key idea: as business on the Internet is a kind of kafkian (you'll never know for sure who is a real enemy/competitor) and at the same time hobbessian (everyone against everyone) world – how can one establish a whatever strategy? [ha-ha, it's an open question]

Take for example a hypothetical war of browsers. I think there might be a kind of cognitive dissonance. For PCs we have three serious players: MS, Mozilla, and Google.

Meet Mozilla. The company earns most of its revenue from an agreement with Google for generating search traffic (according to the FY07 audited FS it accounted to 91%).

Good old MS distributes its "optimized for Google" IE7 for free (to be more precise, they have to). MSN holds a ...m-m-m... healthy 10% in the search market. The cash cow of MS pastures on the other side of monitors.

Here comes a knight, Google. These guys make 0.3% in royalties (FY08 3Q FS), while the rest effectively comes from ad revenues of which 66% is search engine. Google is threatened to lose its search revenues as the pie is being bit by aggregators, wikis, etc. (and at less extent by competitors). So they want to control search at each level of users' activity.


Now, only guys from Mozilla probably know how to monetize a browser in itself. For Google it looks as if MS moved into PC market. MS, in its turn, may not even have a clue what do they struggle for in terms of $.

No matter how you slice it, the bottom line, IMO, looks as follows: each of the 'Big 3' has its own, different, and in somewhat opposite motivation. So where are the logical foundations of "the new browser war" (as Svetlana calls it)?

I mean the war might burst out, but the battling sides will remind of Russia in the World War I.

Illustrations: fooloffun.co.nz, marketshare.hitslink.com

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