Coffee on the Keyboard

There is an op-ed floating around Twitter today: As a social network, Twitter is a dud. Is it ironic that an article deriding Twitter is being spread on Twitter? Irony is so ill-defined.

Twitter is not for everyone, and I respect that, but the author, Alex Groves, seems to be basing his entire point of view on Ashton Kutcher. Alex claims (and this may well be true; I don’t know since I’m never on Facebook) that “[t]he only problem with all this twittering by celebrities and politicians is that they are on Facebook much more often.”

Based on this, Alex argues that Twitter is an “unnecessary” alternative to Facebook walls and warns that “[b]y spending more time on social networks and the Internet than we need to, we enable ourselves to become reclusive, sheltered from family and friends.”

What Alex is ignoring is that most people are not (just) following celebrities. If we look at the number of “following” relationships—even relatively inactive people often follow 30 or 40 others—the 1 million “follows” of Mr. Kutcher seems much, much less impressive.

What occurs to me, the more I see Twitter on newspaper websites and on the Today show, is that there are multiple communities within a larger community like Twitter.

On the very smallest scale, you may have a “community” of family and friends that are mostly following each other. You may have a TweetDeck group set up for them. That kind of mutual relationship leads to what Clive Thompson of the Times called “ambient awareness“. I would encourage Alex to read Mr. Thompson’s article, it might answer his question: “How does one know if his friends are OK?”

Now, Alex is absolutely right that spending too much time on the internet can take time away from other meaningful activities, like “enjoy[ing] a crisp, clean-smelling spring morning.” (With my allergies, I don’t think I have ever “enjoy[ed]” that.)

But the same could be said about almost any aspect of life. Too much time at work causes you to lose time with the family. Too much time away from work can make you lose your job. Too much time using computers can give you carpal tunnel.

On the large end of communities, I think you could classify several, such as “people interested in social networking,” “people interested in marketing,” “people interested in programming” (I’m in all three of these communities) “people interested in celebrities,” “people interested in news,” “people interested in <insert your special topic here>.”

I would argue that these communities reflect real-life relationships the same way the small communities do. A person who is more likely to read Us Weekly is probably more likely to follow more celebrities. A person who enjoys Britney Spears’ music is more likely to follow her. Just as I am more likely to make a joke about the word “const” on a construction sign, I am more likely to follow John Resig.

Alex asks, “[w]ith all the good we can do online, including disseminating information and spreading knowledge, why do we become obsessed with Britney Spears tweeting about playing with the boys on tour?”

I contend that the people Alex is really criticizing (surely many of the newest users) are the same people snapping up People at the checkout lane and watching TMZ in the mornings. Furthermore, he fails to recognize the rather large community of users that uses Twitter to share information and resources, follow the lives of people who may be emotionally, but not physically close, or generate other types of value.

The complaints he levies could—arguably should—be equally directed at Facebook, MySpace, several websites, magazines and TV shows. Alex is confusing “Twitter” with a culture of “celebrity worship.”

I argue that the people creating value off Twitter (and Facebook) are the same people creating it on Twitter. If all you follow on Twitter are celebrities, you obviously aren’t contributing much to that community’s conversation. On the other hand, if your community is broad, and includes peers, friends, family, then you have a unique opportunity to both benefit from, and provide benefit to, that community.

Fortunately, the way Twitter works, I don’t need to follow those celebrities. And neither do you, Alex.

Google your name. Right now. I’ll wait.

Good. What came up?

Look at the first page of results and ask yourself these questions about each one:

1. Is it really me?
2. Did I create this?
3. Do I control this?

You need to be able to say “yes” to all of these for at least the top two or three results. (As I write this, the RSSmeme page repeating my Google Reader shared items has crawled above my blog, and I’m upset about it.)

Creating Identity

I’m lucky. My last name is very rare, so even if you Google just “Socol” I come in second—only to my father, and ahead of Wikipedia. You may not be so lucky, saddled with a name like Jones or Smith or, even worse, you might have the same name as a celebrity. You may have an uphill battle.

People with common names need to get creative. It can be as simple as adding an initial—my friend became Alec R. Johnston to distinguish himself. Something a little more creative—Lisa Bettany named her blog Mostly Lisa. Or you can geek out, like Ben Lew, who uses the name n0s0ap. (Those are zeros.)

Ben uses the name n0s0ap on del.icio.us, flickr, Last.fm, Digg, Twitter, etc. Lisa uses a combination of “MostlyLisa” and “LisaBettany.” I use a combination of an old name, “UrbaneExistance” (I know it’s spelled wrong) and “JamesSocol” for all new registrations.

But all of us, Alec, Ben, Lisa, and I, make sure our real names are linked to our identities. It’s no Clark Kent: n0s0ap is Ben Lew, with the glasses on or off.

Owning Identity

Do you own your own domain name? Why not? Go buy it. Now. Go!

I have this conversation with friends all the time. Would you want someone signing your name on paper documents? Of course not, so why would you let them do the same thing online? I own jamessocol.com, jamessocol.net, and jamessocol.org, just so no one else does. Even if you do nothing but have it redirect to your social network of choice, you should own your name.

If your name is taken, reread the last section and get creative.

Now, about those social networks. You don’t need to be on every one, but get on a few, build a profile, and put your name on it. You can create and control your own Facebook and MySpace pages without knowing a single HTML tag. Once you’ve got a name, whether it’s your real name or something else, use it. last.fm/user/you. twitter.com/you.

Controlling Identity

The best way I’ve found to control what the web knows about you is to start your own propaganda campaign. Put your name on a lot of things, preferably with links back to your own site.

An easy way to start is by commenting. Blog comments help the most, since you spread that influence around the whole internet, but within MySpace or Facebook posting real, meaningful, interesting comments on profiles and walls will make sure people think of you when they hear your name.

If you have the time, try blogging. There are a lot of blogs with great advice, but you can always just “write what you know.” Once you find your voice, the writing flows.

What else? It depends what you like. If you take pictures, get a Flickr stream. Last.fm is a great way to share and find music you like. GoodReads is a similar site for books. Twitter is great for finding people with similar interests and building connections. LinkedIn is a professional social network, particularly good for people in marketing or new media. Blogger, while not the best blogging platform, has some good community features. There is a lot out there.

Be Yourself

Don’t let someone else be you! Own your own identity and be proud of it. It will help you build authority and when a potential employer or client googles you, they’ll get a good idea about you from the first page of results.

What else, 2.0-savvy readers? What did I forget?

I’ve been reading Eran Hammer-Lahav’s intelligent posts on microblog scalability, and now I’m concerned about my own “microblog” site, Picofiction.

Similar to social networks, social updates, social messaging, social… Like many social web sites—amongst our weaponry…—Picofiction lets you “follow” your favorite authors, displaying all their posts along with yours.

I handle this very naïvely: everything is offloaded to the database. There are three tables involved here, one of users, one of posts, and one of follower/followee bindings.

Here’s the basic structure of this query:

SELECT post_id, post_body, post_date, post_type,
  user_name AS author_name, user_id AS author_id
FROM posts
LEFT JOIN users
ON posts.author_id = users.user_id
WHERE author_id = 'CURRENT_USER'
OR author_id IN (
  (SELECT followed_id
   FROM followers
   WHERE following_id = 'CURRENT_USER')
  )
ORDER BY post_date DESC
LIMIT PAGE_START,20;

Here’s where I need help: this works great on a single database, but it does not scale horizontally.

Since this horizontal scalability is such a hot topic right now, I’m asking for ideas. I’d like to put in the infrastructure before there is a need for it.

Eran points out that caching is not as simple a solution as we’d like to think. What do you cache? How do you keep caches in sync?

Does anyone have experience with MySQL Cluster Servers? It seems like the best way of scaling is to make the process as parallelizable as possible. The database then handles the parallelization, so the less I can do in the program the better, right?