scobleizer’s posterous

OK, this summer I've been to a lot of different places. London. New York. Boulder. Seattle. Hollywood. Los Angeles. Indianapolis. San Antonio. In each place it's become obvious how much Twitter has taken over the world. In every city it seems like every business is drinking the Twitter koolaide.

The experiences I'm having with business owners in every city makes me understand some things:

1. Twitter has taken over the business world and this should be very worrying for other companies like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and others.

2. Twitter is underhyped. I'm now convinced that Twitter has locked up a whole raft of businesses and that Twitter is actually worth five to 10 billion dollars.

3. Silicon Valley tech bloggers haven't yet put together this pattern, other than by watching traffic numbers which continue to zoom up. Why? Because most of them don't travel very often and don't actually meet with real businesses like restaurants or like the Fiat/Yamaha racing team I'm hanging out with this weekend. When race fans and companies that serve them are excited about Twitter you know the world has shifted.

4. A new understanding of Twitter by businesses is now here, thanks to a raft of new books like Chris Brogan's Trust Agents or Shel Israel's Twitterville.

5. Businesses are seeing real ROI but aren't sharing that publicly and, really, they don't have much else that is working to reach the richest and most educated customers.

6. In each city there are a core group of Twitter evangelists that aren't pushing anything else to their businesses. In Hollywood one of these evangelists, who wants to remain unknown so asked me to keep his name off of the blog, took me to a set where they were shooting Criminal Minds (you can see my interview with the director of photography here) and while there this guy told me why celebrities won't use anything but Twitter. Other services are too hard for the celebrities to use, particularly from their mobile phones. I've been using the new Facebook app on my iPhone, but it has some severe limitations for businesses and celebrities which I'll go into later. Because these influencers aren't pushing anything else, nothing else will get adopted.

7. Facebook wants into this market (and so do others) but they aren't understanding what makes Twitter attractive to businesses.

Anyway, this all leads me to understand that Twitter is way underhyped and is worth more in the marketplace than anyone has estimated yet. Now I totally understand why Ev Williams didn't take the Facebook deal of about a half billion dollars.

"But, Scoble, I see low engagement scores on Twitter," I can hear you saying. That might be true, but the businesses are seeing enough value here to continue pushing Twitter to their customers.

"But, Scoble, businesses are mostly spamming their customers on Twitter," I can also hear you saying. That might be true, but enough businesses are figuring the right way to get customers in the door that word will get around about what works.

"But, Scoble, I thought you hate Twitter," I can also hear you saying. I don't hate Twitter, I just hate how they treated early adopters thanks to the Suggested User List and I think they are fundamentally misunderstanding how the market is actually using and engaging with Twitter. But they don't care about me and the market doesn't care about me either. Twitter has won and is winning big time with businesses. I don't see that stopping anytime soon, so @ev and @biz just need to keep these folks happy and they will ride this train into a huge business.

"But, Scoble, I don't see how Twitter will make money," I can also hear you saying. Here's the rub, when you have every business in the world hot and bothered about using your service, which Twitter is heading toward VERY QUICKLY then you'll be able to make money. How? Charge for business services. I know businesses would pay for better analytics. Better hooks into their lead generation engines. Better team collaboration services like TweetRiver, which is what we use at Rackspace to manage our Twitter accounts. And more features. How much would they pay? Many businesses would pay a hundred a month, maybe even more.

So, why is Facebook screwed so far with businesses?

1. Facebook doesn't have a way for you to track all mentions of your business. On Twitter if you write "@scobleizer" I will see it and be able to answer it. Facebook doesn't have anything like that.

2. Facebook has even less permanence than Twitter does and that's a low bar to crawl under (Tweets are only accessible for a few days on Twitter Search, while on Facebook once they roll off your home page they are nearly impossible to find).

3. Facebook has brand troubles. Most people like Facebook for its private features (my wife can send me and a select group of friends our baby photos, for instance but the newer public features, like fan pages, are misunderstood). If I were Mark Zuckerberg I would split these two usage models into two: one usage model that's kept behind the privacy walls. Another that I would call "Facebook Public" that would be all the totally public features, including search and APIs.

Anyway, that's enough free consulting for Mark Zuckerberg (it's 4 a.m. here in Indianapolis) so let's just end this by saying that Twitter is winning. Is winning big. Bigger than any of the tech blogs have admitted to yet. My new price for Twitter? $5 billion.

Tell me why I'm wrong.

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So, I've been studying Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Google's Wave and other things for some time.

Last week I also visited Yelp, which is growing at a million new users PER MONTH.

Twitter is growing at about 4 times that rate. Facebook is growing about 2x that rate.

So, these are the big players. It's clear that they are getting massive adoption. I don't see that slowing down or stopping for any of these players.

But where's the money? To figure that out you've got to see where they are coming from. What is their usage model?

Facebook's? They built the rolodex of the web. They have the white pages. Sorry, Yahoo, you are toast there. TechCrunch reports that Yahoo wants to be the place people go for social search. That's done. Facebook is it. Strength? They are the white pages. Weakness? Not much interaction with brands and businesses.

Google's? That's where you go to search for most things. Especially businesses. Looking for Sushi in Palo Alto? You go to Google. I also go there to find people's emails, blogs, and Twitter accounts, but they don't have that locked up. Facebook, for most people, does a better job of finding blogs, emails, and phone numbers. Strength? Mobile integration thanks to iPhone. Breadth of usage, thanks to all the dozens of things Google does, from Picasa to Google Maps. Business listing and location is best of breed, but... Weakness? Google doesn't get social software. It just doesn't know what to do to make a Twitter. They bought Dodgeball and Jaiku and then squandered those purchases. The founders aren't really very social people and the culture there is very engineering focused, but not very human focused. Will they overcome that? My bet is no, but they will keep trying.

Twitter's? They understand how to get people to participate in public, which makes search possible. Plus simplicity and openness of their APIs make brands and celebrities hot and bothered (they tell me that Facebook and Google are too complicated to use in comparison). Strength? Publicness and engagement of both developers and celebrities and brands. Weakness? They don't have a good list of businesses like Google does and they don't have a lot of hooks that keep users engaged like Facebook does. They don't iterate fast enough to take advantage of new learning and they are -- so far -- squandering their lead in real time search (it has actually gotten worse over the past year instead of better). New APIs like retweeting and location have been announced, but not really baked into the service yet.

Yelp's? In cities where Yelp is getting adoption, they've found the best business integration of all of these and businesses are now paying to "offer" their users things to get new customers into the door. This is where the real money is and over the next year you'll see Facebook and Google figure this out. Strength? Best of breed business recommendations and best mobile experience for finding local businesses. Weakness? They don't have the general engagement that Facebook and Twitter have. Also, Yelp is only strong in a few cities and is in the midst of a landgrab that could be stunted if Facebook or Google ship a local business service soon.

So, where's the money?

Twitter seems to have moved away from the idea of competing directly with Facebook and Google over a business listing service. That's a shame, because Twitter has the potential to be a powerful business interaction service. We were just in a sushi restaurant in Boulder, CO, which is already using Twitter in an interesting way (we'll have a video about that up in the next week or so) but will you search for sushi in Boulder like this on Twitter? No. You might praise or complain about the restaurant on Twitter, though, and Twitter is moving to charging businesses for more features like group management tools (at Rackspace we use TweetRiver, other businesses use CoTweet, but I can imagine a world where Twitter does these features themselves, or acquires one of these companies and charges for extra features like these) or tools that give more insights into what's happening in the marketplace. Or, look at services like TweetMeme that are tracking retweeting behavior. That will provide an early warning system into Twitter for many businesses in the future.

I think Twitter is going to miss the real money, though. The real money is going to come out of those business listings. Yelp has it figured out. Facebook is stuck inside its walled garden and is doing everything possible to figure out how to become more public, so it can turn on search features. Even today Facebook hired "Mr. Open" David Recordon. If I were Mark Zuckerberg I would rebrand the public part of Facebook as "Facebook Public" and make it very cool to publish there. For the past few days I've been using the not-released-yet Facebook 3.0 iPhone app. You can see this "publicness" all over the place. Zuckerberg understands why Twitter got businesses hot and bothered and is doing everything possible to get his 300 million users there before Twitter figures out it needs to do a business listing and search service.

How will Facebook collect the cash? Well, go to Google and let's do that sushi search for Boulder, Colorado again. Did you see how that list works? Facebook needs that list. Twitter isn't even close. But what's missing? PEOPLE! Imagine if this list, when it's brought to you by Facebook, shows that #1 has been liked by 14 of your friends? Businesses get that for free. But what don't they get for free?

Yelp's "offers." Businesses PAY to "offer" things to customers to try to move up the list.

So, if you're the #3 business on the list, you might say "bring your iPhone in and you'll get free beer." Doing that will cost you money, both in the free beer and the advertising you'll pay Facebook or Google or Yelp to try to move up the list.

Google has the list. It doesn't have the humans or the offers. Yelp has the offers but doesn't have hundreds of millions of people. Facebook has hundreds of millions of people and the "like" system, but not the offers.

So, who will get there first? Now you understand the battlefield. Who will win the war?

My bet is on Facebook. Why? Well, they just hired the guy who built Gmail and the monetization system at Google.

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Some first time problems upon trying Posterous:

1. Autoposting has me torn. I'm now investing a lot of time in Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed. I far prefer people to hand post things made for the specific audiences that show up there. Plus, it's very easy to get duplicates. I already send my stuff from FriendFeed to Twitter, and that caused dupes on my first try here. Sometimes not easy for a beginner to figure out.

2. I tried a video from Blip.tv and it came in black. I was using the bookmarklet. I must have screwed something up, but since it says it supports Blip, I thought it would work and it didn't. So that needs more QA work.

Some good things?

Most everything here is very slick. Feels better than Wordpress.com in a lot of areas and I can see that this will be a powerful place for me to kick off certain kinds of conversations.

I must admit, I don't like popularity based lists of suggestions. I wish we could come up with something better. Maybe something that looks like alltop.com?

Anyway, the one feature that Steve Rubel told me about is when I want to post a long Tweet from SimplyTweet, my iPhone app that I use to Tweet from, it will automatically send to Posterous if it's too long. I'll try that tomorrow. In the meantime, this is very nice.

Oh, and one other disclaimer: I see that this is running on the Rackspace Cloud. That makes my heart warm!

:-)

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I'm now posting on Posterous. You can blame the FriendFeed community and Steve Rubel for this.

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