Will Twitter's IPO shrink the size of the accessible web?

Twitter's recent IPO announcement is the latest in a number of high profile public offerings from social media giants. It follows the mega IPOs of Facebook and LinkedIn and also comes in the wake of other socially connected companies' public offerings, such as Zynga and Groupon.

It is an indication of just how important these platforms have become, not just to the web, but to the whole of society, that they are valued so highly and get such huge media attention. However, there is an argument to say that as they all cease to be independent, that we all start to miss out.

The filter bubble

In 2011 Eli Pariser wrote 'The filter bubble'. The book outlines his theory that the more we use the web, the less rich and varied our experience becomes. He argued that because of the way web software learns how you behave and what content you consume, that in fact, as you use it more you are less likely to encounter a contrarian view. That's because you are simply served content through search and social interactions that fit with a profile you create daily and increasingly polarises you.

This is particularly noticeable if you use Google as your primary search engine. Google's algorithm ensures you receive personalised results. On one hand this is great as you tend to get the stuff you want, but it also means increasingly you only see content you are likely to agree with and therefore are less likely to question certain 'truths'.

The Twitter bubble

With Twitter the bubble is slightly different. The way a user builds their Twitter profile shapes what content they see in their stream. The people you follow, the key words you use in your biography and the hashtags you follow, all help to shape the content you see, but also arguably, limit the content you are exposed to over time.

The Twitter IPO makes this phenomenon even more interesting. A lot of coverage in the past few weeks has focused around the fact that Twitter hasn't been profitable. Twitter are laying out plans for a whole host of commercial growth options, including greater integration with TV, increasing levels of tweet data mining, and of course more advertising.

Up until now it's been in Twitter's interest as a network to be as open as it possibly can be, but the commercial imperative that will be visited upon the company following its sale will inevitably force the platform into highly specific targeting around a whole number of commercial propositions. That will mean that the user's experience of it will inevitably become narrower and less eclectic leading to a further narrowing of experience.

Keeping the web open and democractic

It's worth noting that 20 years after the open, democratic web was born, it is possibly one of the most monopolised places you could visit. In all areas choices are narrowing. Consider the fact that increasingly there is one place to look for things (Google), one place to shop for new goods (Amazon), one place to sell things (Ebay), a couple of places to talk to your mates (Facebook and Twitter). That level of monopoly simply won't be good for business in the long term. It simply means there is increasing control over the channels to market and ultimately the price at which that channel can be sold. It's important that companies consider all available channels to ensure the web continues to be an open marketplace.

Advisers are doing it for themselves

Last Tuesday saw the launch of Advisertech a new online and social media self-help platform set up by Pete Matthew MD at Jacksons Wealth.

Pete has been highly active in the social media space for around 5 years now, across a number of online channels, most notably on Twitter and Linked In which he uses to spread not only his own opinion but also the content of his financial education .tv site Meaningful Money. Meaningful Money is an online information platform delivered by video and podcast that he set up a few years ago to educate the general public about financial services and everything they needed to know about financial products.

The channel has been a huge success, increasingly driving new business for Jacksons and also landing Pete with industry accolades, including the Professional Adviser Financial Education award in 2011. After 3 years of success Pete has now made the decision to share some of the secrets of his success and believes any adviser can create the same things as he has.

Advisertech is another education platform, but this time set up to educate Pete’s adviser peers in creating a great online presence. A few months ago he posted about his social media philosophy it’s a simple personally focussed theory that seems to work incredibly well for him, but importantly it’s a philosophy that extends into the way he is offering up Advisertech. The interesting paragraph to note in Pete’s post is the following ‘Now if you’re a big corporate, with shareholders to please and lawyers to placate, you may well benefit from some of these things [social media strategy, plan and KPIs], but this is why most big companies suck at social.’ Although in many cases he’s absolutely correct in reality you don’t necessarily have to adhere to those things if you're a large corporate. After all what’s the strategy and KPIs behind a telephone? Is it that different?

While many financial services companies sit and wait on social media activation especially in the B2B space, the adviser community is happily looking after itself and supporting itself just like Pete and in the meantime the providers become more and more remote from the conversations, many of which are about them. Surely there is real danger in not communicating on social media rather than communicating.

Transforming the delivery of printed news

A couple of weeks ago there was the rather surprise announcement that Jeff Bezos (the Amazon founder and CRO) was buying the Washington Post. It was a purchase he made with his own considerable fortune and not as an Amazon acquisition. A move that removed the issue of how to integrate a loss-making business, into a business in which shareholders were increasingly keen to see an improvement in short-term profits.

The question that seemed to be on the majority of commentators minds was 'Why'? The newspaper business has been gradually disappearing down the sink hole for years, printed paper sales have been slowly shrinking and there are question marks over how successful the online subscription paywall has been for organisations that have introduced it. So why would one of the world's foremost web entrepreneurs have an interest?

Bezos has always been up for a challenge. He built Amazon for a start, launched the Kindle which now eclipses printed book sales. On top of that he is currently building a commercial space travel business, is raising Apollo rockets from the bottom of the ocean and attempting to build a clock that will last 10,000 years. He is not a man lacking ambition.

There has been conjecture that the purchase is merely a way of lobbying congress, or that it will allow him to control the agenda around Amazon's alleged tax avoidance. Those viewpoints can't be ignored, however there is a sound argument to say that he could be simply attempting to conquer the delivery of content online. He has already bought a stake in the Business Insider an online news property and far from trying to strip the asset, he actually invested in the quality of the title as Andrea Peterson writes in her Washington Post article:

“You might have heard that Jeff Bezos just bought us. So what does that mean for our pursuit of journalism? Taking a look at what happened to Business Insider earlier this year is a good start. Bezos joined in with the business news site’s owners to invest $5 million into building up its news and editorial operations.”

So reduction in journalistic integrity doesn’t seem likely, which means what he is most likely to bring is technical know-how. As Mike Ananny, Professor at The Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, states "Amazon is really a technology infrastructure company". Ananny is spot on. Amazon’s online recommendation facility is second to none and could prove invaluable to an online news property delivering relevant content to a reader. What Bezos could therefore bring, is that core customer experience, which may make the building of more customised content experiences a more straightforward process. In turn that means he could potentially look to develop a paid content model that more accurately reflects Netflix or iTunes, than the blanket paywall blockade adopted by publishers such as News UK (formerly News International).

Ananny again states "You can take a lot of the friction-removing processes Amazon has mastered over the years and apply them to news. How do you buy a digital subscription? How do you do a vacation-hold? How do you save stories? How do you share stories? But also how do we actually read things -- how is it customised on the fly?"

This acquisition is an incredibly interesting move in terms of the future of content delivery and if a new paid content model is established it could prove invaluable to advertisers who are likely to be very keen to deliver customised messages to extremely targeted audience segments. Whatever happens as The Verge puts it “… there's going to be a huge collision between classic journalism and stunning technology.”

Short form video gets traction

When Twitter introduced Vine, the six second video format, last year, it was met with a rather muted reaction. After the inevitable flurry of sign ups and people starting to use it, interest seemed to drop off. Other than some mildly engaging stop motion videos there seemed little real utility for it as a medium and indeed, as many pointed out, short-form video had existed in conjunction with Twitter for years with services like Twitvid.

Interestingly though in the last couple of months it's seen a gradual emergence as people have got to grips with it. It's been used to great comic effect with 'Ryan Gosling won't eat his cereal', but more significantly from a marketing perspective the DIY brand Lowe has found a quite brilliant use for it to publish 6 second home maintenance master classes and suddenly Vine seems to be popping up all over Twitter as part of different brands' Twitter content strategies.

Then last Thursday the short-form video sharing space hotted up. Instagram, the Facebook owned photo sharing network, launched a short-form format. Users can record up to 15 seconds, 9 seconds more than Vine, it has 13 custom filters, and users have the ability to select their own thumbnail as well. Instagram usage figures are huge, with 16 billion photos posted and with 1 billion likes a day, so it wasn't surprising that hours after the Instagram launch Twitter started to send emails to its user base promoting Vine. The launch is undoubtedly a direct attack on Vine and Instagram's much broader range of usage and customisation could prove, yet again, that first mover advantage is not all it’s cracked up to be.

We should be building great things that don’t exist

Since Steve Jobs became seriously ill the tech community has been looking for a replacement for his mercurial presentation style. In Larry Page they have probably found him. Page is by no means a new kid on the block, but his key note at Google I/O last week prompted the same sort of fanboy enthusiasm that Jobs inspired at Apple.

That fanboy enthusiasm however, has to be based on some serious innovation and that is what Page was able to cover in his keynote last week. There were numerous announcements, but the standouts from a marketing perspective were the newly enriched Google Maps and Google Play music service that will have Spotify seriously worried and the newly updated and enriched Google+.

What came through, time after time, was that here was a company that don't just talk about big data but use it in a way no other company on earth is. That's why Larry Page's pronouncement that “we should be building great things that don’t exist" rang so true.

There is great cause to be nervous about the level of data that Google holds (especially personal), but there is no doubt that they are using that data in amazing ways. None more so than Google Maps, which has become richer and richer almost every quarter since its launch. The product is now marrying the mapping data, 3d capabilities of Google Earth and the smart functionality of its reviews and location services to provide an almost game-like real-world view of an enormous cross section of the world.

Whatever the concerns continue to be about the way Google operate, there is no doubt that they are creating and will continue to create great innovative product.

The rise and rise of YouTube

YouTube is an odd beast, just eight years old, Google owned and so much a part of the fabric of the web that sometimes it gets overlooked as a social network. Yet the site continues to be a phenomenon, hitting almost no speed bumps on its inexorable journey to the top. It is completely peerless and somehow seems to dodge the ire that is directed squarely at its parent company.

• More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• YouTube is localised in 53 countries and across 61 languages
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views, or around 140 views for every person on Earth
• Find more stats about Youtube here

So with this enormous rise in usage it comes as no surprise that YouTube has announced a pilot channel subscription scheme, starting out with channels such as Sesame Street and National Geographic signing up to show full episodes.

The announcement has been inevitable since the rise of online streaming services such as HULU and Netflix. With Google's vast infrastructure and the channel embeds that come with a huge range of newly purchased televisions it signals an end to the divide between TV and the Internet. It means any content, on any device, anywhere.

Is Facebook 'Home' what users want from a mobile experience?

Last week Mark Zuckerberg introduced the world to 'Home' it's a product that sees Facebook finally get to grips with the shift to mobile platform access, something that analysts  have been looking for ever since the IPO.

So what is it?
Facebook 'home' is an application that will effectively take over the home screen of the user's smartphone – so long as you have an android phone. The product will operate with devices with Android 4 and above only. Zuckerberg stated that this will put a user’s personal interactions at the heart of their mobile experience.

The launch is a bold move, but it's something that as The Register points out, mobile operators have been attempting to do for over a decade with absolutely no success. The issue that the operators have faced is that they've always approached it from the company's revenue generation opportunity rather than from what a user wants from their experience. That means it’s always fallen short with the handset manufacturers.

Is Facebook the Internet?
This user first positioning is where the Facebook play could be so smart. Many argue, probably correctly, that each user is effectively the Facebook product. In reality however, to many users Facebook is the Internet, it's where they go first and where they get a huge amount of their information. So, having it as the homescreen will make sense to a huge proportion of the Facebook community. In July last year the users accessing Facebook via mobile was 543m well over half the base.

Add to that that the amount of time spent on Facebook (estimated at 1 in 7 of all internet minutes) and this adds up to a huge opportunity to launch those users straight into the Facebook environment.

What about our privacy?
There have been deep concerns expressed around the impact on privacy, with many feeling this will simply provide Facebook with the data to track a user’s every finger movement as well as their actual geographical movement. The other obvious objection is regarding the 'user as a product' argument. Home provides a platform for advertisers to place ads directly on to the home screen. This has the potential for users to become hugely disgruntled and advertisers are warning that ads must not intrude on user's experience.

The product launched last Friday and we'll see whether Adam Moressi (Facebook product designer) is correct in building an app that is "...trying to do is shift people's focus away from tasks and apps, and toward people". Or whether Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research, is correct in his assessment that "Facebook thinks it's more important to people than it actually is...for the vast majority of people, Facebook just isn't the be-all and end-all of their mobile experience," he said. "It's just one part."

In the meantime you can take a look at what happened when The Verge took it for a trial run.