Lets start with what they have managed to get right.

Altimeter, and specifically Brian Solis should be congratulated for being a marketer that has advocated the use of social science, when trying to make sense of social media.

When messages are dependent on their spread via social networks rather than through traditional means, social science indeed provides a more correct theoretical framework compared to what media buffs use now.

Altimeter is also right to point out that services like Klout and PeerIndex, although imperfect, will become increasingly important to understand how information flows through media.

Altimeter is correct about one other thing: They point out that Influence is a complicated terrain, and that services like Klout measure potential – rather than actual Influence – although Solis does not do the best job of unpacking why this is the case.

Klout scores show social capital & status?

“At a minimum, these scores indicate the stature someone possesses within social networks… This stature is referred to as social capital…” – Solis for Altimeter

Altimeter says that a person’s reach, relevance and resonance (see below) comes together and contributes to your “social capital”, which is the likelihood that you will influence behaviour. This is really what your Klout “score” is alluding to, they claim. As you can see, almost in the same breath, Altimeter says these scores indicate ‘stature’, but without elaborating much. Which is unfortunate, because status or stature might be closer to what PeerIndex et al shows us, rather than these scores being a proxy for ‘social capital’.

Now social capital is quite an old and much debated concept in social science, and there is not one accepted definition of it, but none of them is quite like the one implied by Altimeter. All the definitions generally refer to a concept where a social network has a value as a whole for those in it, although individuals can indeed access this value. But to over-simplify, it speaks of trust, cooperation, all things that make life inside the network easier for its members.

For sociologists and economists, a network where there’s trust and cooperation has major advantages over groups where such a network is absent. A case in point: It’s generally accepted that the existence of sufficient social capital is one of the prerequisites for democracies to function.

Like many other social-scientific concepts, it is thought to be quite useful, precisely because it looks at groups or networks of people and their relations with each other, but at scale. Social scientists tend to think that individuals are a bit like sub atomic particles are for natural scientists. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics state that we can’t accurately measure the position and momentum of a particle at the same time. We can however predict that if we heat water to a certain temperature, it’s particles as a ‘group’ will vaporise.

Similarly, with a few exit polls we can predict the outcome of an election very accurately. At the same time we struggle to predict how individuals behave.

So you can predict people’s behaviour in groups quite accurately, but you can’t predict individual behaviour that neatly – which is kind of reassuring. And although Solis tips his hat to Heisenberg, he still insists on equating Klout scores – which are very individual, to social capital AND status.

Now, to illustrate why this might be problematic consider this – networks with high amounts of social capital often are quite flat or not very hierarchical (within the network). Large differentiators of status inside groups (hierarchies or inequality), often destroys social capital in that network.

Altimeter’s three pillars of influence

Altimeter claims that Influence rests on three pillars:

Your Reach – which is in turned comprised of three things. Popularity: Britney is very popular and has high reach; Goodwill: Do people think you are a good egg? It stands to reason that if you are liked people will be more receptive to your messages; Proximity: Do you have close ties with others that are influential?

Then there’s Relevance: Clay Shirkey might not have a massive following like Britney Spears, BUT he is followed by many academics and smart people in media and tech. He has subject and topical relevance. Relevance also has three components, says Altimeter, namely Authority: Are you an expert in your field?; Trust: Logical really, and I’d argue you can’t have authority without it; and lastly Affinity: A natural liking or sympathy for someone or something. This last element is not necessarily wrong (in fact I will argue that it’s often crucial) – but it’s not obvious that this is the place to put it.

And then there’s Resonance: Which is how frequent the subject make updates on social media and how this activity travels, and how long it stays around for. This sounds a bit like putting the cart before the horse. Resonance is really what impact we can measure a person is having in social media – after the fact. It fluctuates wildly from day to day (more on this in an upcoming blog post).

The three pillars point toward status

Now I think status is more accurate a description for what’s actually being measured here.

When an already famous person signs up to Twitter, their scores quickly jumps, as their followers (and reach) increase.

But what about the difference between a person famous for being famous (Britney), and a genuine authority on a topic (The so-called Relevance pillar)? Well, in social science there’s a differentiation between ascribed status (status you inherit) and achieved status (status that you earn), which can be used to make a differentiation here as well.

So while the first two pillars – reach & relevance – of Altimeter actually measures status, the third – resonance – is a case by case proxy for actual influence on social media, but after the fact.

In a next blog post we will discuss if and why this case specific after-the-fact influence – is such a poor predictor of future performance.

This chimes with my own experience of conducting focus groups for web services, and seeing creative concepts subject to them.

In other words, if somebody put a mobile phone in the hands of the focus group it could be very useful to ask about their impression about how it makes them feel.

If however you came up with a concept for a creative brief, or an application like Twitter, without a working prototype, you won’t get meaningful feedback from a focus group. In fact Twitter is a fantastic example of how nebulous an interactive human driven service – most new digital services – can be: Many users have to try and use them multiple times before they get it. If Twitter’s future had been dependent on the approval of a focus group of people that had not used it, it would have been dead in the water.

In political polling the pollster will always frame the question, “if you could vote tomorrow”, precisely because of the need to focus the mind on an outcome which is imaginable, says Tyndall. If the polls tell you that the public thinks there is no alternative to austerity, that does not mean politicians should take it face value and not seek other solutions. A major policy shift that could be received very well, might just be out of the groups frame of reference in the present.

But – making decisions without these crutches are hard. It requires insight and vision. And courage.

So whether you are a product developer, pitching a creative concept or an activist politician. Remember – focus groups can never replace an informed vision if you want to do something out of the ordinary.

Sonar
It’s not rocket sience anymore: It’s not terribly difficult to check two people’s interest graphs (Twitter) or social graphs (Facebook) based on a checkin (Foursquare) into a similar venue and tell them how they are related. That is exactly what what Sonar does.

When services like PeerIndex (and Klout) analyses people’s Tweets and assign an influence score, and on top of all that tell us what topics they talk about – it makes things a little more interesting. Now you can tell not only that this person and you follow the same person on Twitter, but how influential they are, and that they like talking about political-economy. Sexy. We built an app like that ourselves called Woos.at.

Whit.ly
Robert Scoble has just done an interview with Whit.li who claims to be a social curation technology. Its soon-to-launch iPad app analyses your Facebook status updates, likes, comments and friends and then creates a psycho-social profile (through that incredibly exact technology called sentiment analysis – not). And they match you with ‘like-minded’ people based on things like religion or politics. The options on Facebook is rather basic. A simple choice between “Liberal” and “Conservative” is a little too banal and unsubtle for our liking. And it will give Eli Pariser (of Filter Bubble fame) heart palpitations. Are we going to end up in a hall of mirrors? Staring at ourselves?

If only there were more FourSquare checkins, because the places you visit says a lot about who you are, and about your identity. Ethan Zuckerman points to Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining”, digesting huge sets of data, like mobile phone records. They estimate that they can predict the location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data.

What all these services have in common is the ability to get at the real you: You are to a big extent a product of who your friends are, where you go, and who you share interests with.

Whit.li produces an API which other companies can use to produce better recommendations (for example). Or so they claim. This person that says the sushi is crap at this restaurant, but do they actually know anything about real non American sushi? This information could also be used to build a better Sonar type app.

Blendr
Then there’s Blendr from the guys that built Grindr, the gay cruising app. Except this one is for straight people, so while they hope it creates lots of serendipitous bumping into each other, it’s not for grinding. Blendr allows you to chat with people, perhaps based on how close they are to you, eschewing the checkin functionality completely and just indicating whether the person is far away or 500 meters from you. That neatly gets away from the problem that checkins have not taken off.

But it’s a little different from Grindr, because the app assumes straight people need more than sexy profile pics to make chat partner choices. So Blendr asks you a whole raft of interest related questions with over 200 options. An interesting choice because they could have tried to get some info from Facebook (or an API like Whit.li ) or services like PeerIndex for Twitter users.

Will Blendr be as wildly succesful as Grindr? We doubt it, simply because it will suffer for the same reason many other straight chat apps have suffered. Over subscription from males. But it will probably get some traction.

But Blendr does point us rather unambigously in the direction in which most of these crosses between location and social tend to point us. The main reason service builders imagine you’d like to meet relevant strangers (serendipity is just that) is for some blending, or even grinding.

Holler
Another case in point is Holler. AllthingsD report:

Holler falls somewhere between group messaging apps, event planning tools and “social discovery” sites. The main action is for a user to broadcast — “holler,” as it were — that they are down to hang out, either to specific friends or to people nearby who have said they are interested in a certain activity or event (dog walking, surfing, a conference).

It’s US only now, so I could not try it. The concept reminds a little of the Situationist app, where it put you in contact with other app users when are were close by each other, and asks you to perform some silly task. Which sounds like a great idea but is a bit daunting when it comes down to it. Meeting complete strangers is weird. I certainly never had the courage to actually meet somebody that way. What on earth will you talk about?

Doweet
Doweet is yet another service that does much the same, but seems to be more focussed on your existing friends, thereby solving the above problem.

Grouper
And approaching the problem of people discovery from a slightly different slant is Grouper. They organise a meet between two groups (3 girls and 3 guys) of friends (via Facebook) that don’t know each other. Interesting.

Are any of these apps games changers in their current incarnation? Nope. Will they be big business? Dating is not THAT a huge. But it gives you an indication of where things are going. Somewhere somebody is going to hit on a really sexy app.

In the past week Gawker made the startling claim that the controversial conservative politician Newt Gingrich has 93% fake followers on Twitter. Backstory: Gingrich himself had complained why so little attention had been given to the fact that he has such a large Twitter audience:

“I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other (Conservative) candidates combined, but it didn’t count because if it counted I’d still be a candidate; since I can’t be a candidate that can’t count.”

Gingrich has a whopping 1,325,842 followers. Twitter is increasingly being regarded as a proxy indicator of popularity and influence.

But, said Gawker, an ex-staffer told them that:

“Newt employs a variety of agencies whose sole purpose is to procure Twitter followers for people who are shallow/insecure/unpopular enough to pay for them.”

Later Gawker followed that up with some research. They had found a research firm PeekYou that professes to have scrubbed all of Newt’s followers. They claim to use sophisticated tecniques to check names against actual people on the web. And only 8% were deemed to be ‘real’ people.

We let our own RAAK bots loose to see what we could find out about Newt’s followers. In the space of a day, they gathered a random sample of some 26,616 followers. And here is what we got.

We also had a look at the dates the accounts were created, and these were evenly distributed. There were no flurries of activity.

None of these numbers seem to be suggesting anything as dramatic as PeekYou’s assertion of 92% fake accounts.

Meanwhile, The Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing has analyzed a random sample of 5,000 of Gingrich’s followers. Their data is strikingly similar to ours. Fully a third had never posted to Twitter and 76% had added no biographical information to their profile.

So what does our and the center’s data mean?

It’s a widely known fact that Twitter is full of lurkers. People that sign up only to follow celebrities but that never make their presence felt. Telling these people apart from fake accounts can be a daunting task. For example, this and this account following Newt could be by lurkers. They are following a coherent list of accounts, which would sit pretty well with the idea that this is a person that just wants to consume content.

And it gets more complicated. Even accounts that Tweet can be non human. We ourselves have created bots that Tweet and that have attracted large follower counts; even from what we can tell are real people (as opposed to other bots). One of our bots even had a Klout score of over 50!

In another recent analysis, we tracked these weird accounts that tweeted political Google News results. They had avatars, bios and were starting to pick up followers. They turned out to be bots, and we presumed that they were being used as sock puppets. Heaven knows for what purpose. Shortly after we started tracking them, they must have been found out and Twitter deleted them.

So none of the above stats of ours conclusively point to whether an account is fake or not. The absence of a bio or Tweets only increase the likelihood.

A better way to guess is to compare the preponderance of these suspicious accounts amongst the Twitter population as a whole with those of Newt. PeekYou did exactly that:

Whereas Gingrich rates 8% real followers, Sarah Palin is closest with a 20% ratio of real followers, by the firm’s analysis. Mitt Romney has 26%, Michele Bachmann 28%, and Tim Pawlenty 32%. In other words, Gingrich has by far a higher proportion of fake accounts following him than any of his competitors.

Now that IS interesting. But how does one explain the large discrepancy between PeekYou’s findings and ours and The Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research’s? Gawker again:

“Keep in mind that the PeekYou weeded out business and brand accounts as not real people, which CCNS didn’t and would change the ratios.”

RAAK is not convinced I have to say.

So what CAN you take away from this article!? Newt has a stranger than most Twitter follower composition. And spotting fake followers en masse is about as easy as spotting a fake orgasm. You can play around with the data yourself here (Google Docs).

There is research (PDF) that shows that Twitter users Retweet in a partial political fashion. Older research shows that blogging and the consumption of blogs are highly partisan as well.

Push vs Pull
Two new trends in the consumption of media are clearly discernible. The early ascendancy of Google very much put pull, or actively looking for content, at the forefront of how we consume media. This was at the expense of the old push model: where others – usually pros – decided what content we should consume.

But now push is back with a vengeance. It is called the Facebook Newsfeed, or in the case of Twitter, the Timeline. Flipboard wraps this push in nice formatting for the iPad, while a slew of new video apps like Showyou are competing to make your social connections your TV channel controller.

Even when pulling, we now encounter the effects of push. Google now includes results from our social connections in our search queries, and that has just been extended worldwide.

But all these changes, whether pull or push have the same focal point. The erosion of the exclusive power of professional taste makers and curators in deciding what media we consume.

Lost serendipity
With users increasingly exposed to content via peers through social media, instead of through the choices of schedulers or editors, are we in danger of not seeing information we should? Jeff Jarvis, as per usual puts it well:

I constantly hear the fear that serendipity is among the many things we’re supposedly set to lose as news moves out of newsrooms and off print to online. Serendipity, says The New York Times, is lost in the digital age. Serendipity, it is said, is something we get from that story we happen upon as we flip pages, the story we never would have searched for but find only or best in print. Serendipity, it is also said, is the province and value of editors, who pick the fluky and fortuitous for us. Without serendipity, as I hear it, we’ll be less-well informed (all work, no play, makes Jack a dull boy; all relevance, not serendipity, makes Jill a predictable girl).

Today in the New York Times Eli Pariser founder of Moveon.org presented another argument that this new media ecosystem leads to a echo chamber with disastrous results for society.:

All of this is fairly harmless when information about consumer products is filtered into and out of your personal universe. But when personalization affects not just what you buy but how you think, different issues arise. Democracy depends on the citizen’s ability to engage with multiple viewpoints; the Internet limits such engagement when it offers up only information that reflects your already established point of view. While it’s sometimes convenient to see only what you want to see, it’s critical at other times that you see things that you don’t.

She He underscores her point with the following evidence:

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, once told colleagues that “a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

I can’t argue with that statement put in those terms. But is it true?

What interests you

My personal experience is that it rings true, but that the argument can have exactly the opposite effect. I was one of the early people – that previously paid no mind – to be switched on to events in Tunisia. I followed the fall on Ben Ali. And then I was early onto Egypt. How come? It was Twitter’s fault. I saw tweets about unrest in Tunisa in my timeline. These tweets piqued my interest. Would I have followed events so closely without Twitter? That is highly unlikely.

The odd thing is I can’t even remember who in my timeline were responsible for those tweets.

This very article is the result of seeing a Tweet by @academicdave (Dave Parry) of Eli Pariser’s article. I discovered @academicdave when I saw Tweets about @techsoc’s brilliant blog posts about Tunisia. I followed her. I found out she and Dave are Twitter debating partners AND she recommended I follow him.

The key is that a dying squirrel in my front yard is unlikely to be of more interest to me than people dying in Africa in a revolution by young people, against a tyrant.

Serendipity is relevant surprises
Jeff Jarvis points out that serendipity is not to be confused with randomness. It is in fact unexpected relevance. And Jarvis reckons our friends, our social connections are best placed to deliver this relevance:

Can we still get serendipity online? Of course, we can and do — mostly on Twitter and Facebook. Serendipity comes from friends who find that story and — like an editor — pass it on. If we share their judgment, we may like what they share and call that serendipity. But there’s plenty that passes me by on Twitter that I don’t like; it’s serendipitous by the usual definitions but it doesn’t work for me because it has no value; it’s not relevant.

Can an algorithm serve us serendipity? Maybe, if it has enough signals of what we and people we trust like, what interests us, what we need, our context. It can calculate and predict and try to serve our relevance and serendipity. I think serendipity comes not from one-size-fits-all editing but from better targeting across a larger pool of possibilities. If Google can intuit intent, I think it can also serve surprise and serendipity.

The generalist media provider can not deliver niche relevance, your friends, your peers are often more likely to. The real trouble then is us. The real problem is our thresholds of what we consider to be relevant.

The problem is not necessarily that new technologies insulate us from people that know better what we should pay attention to. The problem is that we get out of these technologies what we put into them. The responsibility for consuming and spreading media has fallen on us. Jake Levine points out that:

In the distributed social web, where every participant is a content producer, the audience must curate the curators!

And this is a constant process. On at least a weekly basis I adjust and tweak my Twitter graph.

At the end of last year, I proved that bots who tweet regularly, but non-interactively, can get very high Klout scores. I repeated this experiment against Peerindex, with somewhat better results.

Obviously, the next target should be their list, should it not?

Just a quick reminder of the setup:

• I have set up 4 Twitter bots, which have been tweeting random quotes since September 2010.
• The tweet frequencies of the bots differ. The busiest bot tweets once every minute; the laziest one only tweets every half hour. The other two tweet once every 5 minutes and once every 15 minutes respectively.
• The four bots tweet randomly from a single set of quotes. The mean content of their tweets is thus identical, except for the tweet frequency.
• These bots follow no-one, retweet no-one and don’t have any avatars or other custom profile settings.

As you can see from the results below, the total amount of registered profiles was ascending quite rapidly at the time of writing. To provide a comparable metric, I have calculated a normalized rank for each bot, which is the percentage from the top that the bot ranks.

Number 1 would be 100%, number 500 out of 1000 would be 50%, and so on …

Now, without wasting your time on any further philosophical meanderings, herewith the results:

Bot 1: 1 Tweet per 1 Minute

Rank: 776th (out of 2867)
Normalized Rank (% from number one): 73%
Social Status: Guru

Bot 2: 1 Tweet per 5 Minutes

Rank: 1199th (out of 2894)
Normalized Rank (% from number one): 59%
Social Status: Linchpin

Bot 3: 1 Tweet per 15 Minutes

Rank: 1880th (out of 2920)
Normalized Rank (% from number one): 36%
Social Status: Hotshot

Bot 4: 1 Tweet per 30 Minutes

Rank: 2203rd (out of 3085)
Normalized Rank (% from number one): 29%
Social Status: Graduate

So, my bot is a guru?

Keeping in mind that the mean content of the four bots is identical, and that the normalized rank seems to grow consistently with tweet frequency, it seems that the Sunday Times have managed to, quite successfully, build an algorithm that estimates how often you tweet, regardless of whether you’re an actual person.

It doesn’t sound right, does it?

In short, as with Klout, you can reach a pretty high score on the Sunday Times Social List merely by tweeting feverishly. Out of the three major services we’ve analyzed, only Peerindex successfully manages to determine that these accounts are bots and assign them appropriate scores.

Sohaib Athar, an IT expert with a touching knack for mixing cynicism with a dry turn of phrase, lives in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He unwittingly became embroiled in a media storm when he live-tweeted (Storify curation here) the assault on fugitive Osama Bin Laden’s abode.

More than 100,000 followers later, ReallyVirtual is the social web’s newest if unwilling amateur star.

Over in the US, a pro – Lauren Young – works for Reuters. She recounted her experience that same evening:

I was sitting in my home office, helping my husband file our, um, overdue taxes when I noticed a Tweet from Reuters at 21:54 ET that the president would “make a statement shortly.”

I’m not sure if Reuters was first, but we were definitely early. Other news organizations began reporting an Obama statement. Within 10 minutes, the Twittersphere was in a tizzy. Musings included the death of Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi or something “relating to national security.” Others joked that the president was making an announcement simply to interrupt Donald Trump’s show “The Apprentice.”

But plenty of folks predicted that Osama bin Laden was dead. The first reliable report came from Keith Urbahn, Donald Rumsfeld’s spokesman. It took more than an hour for President Obama to speak to nation, well past the reported 22:30 ET address. But, by then, we all knew the news.

Hot damn!

This is THE Keith Urbahn Tweet. “Hot damn!”

This Tweet came a good 20 minutes or so before the first news organisation, ABC News, made the claim. Like many other organisations Reuters’ Lauren Young went on to describe this as Twitter’s “defining moment”.

In London the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones agrees. He got up at 7:00 that morning and heard the news the traditional way. He immediately Tweeted it but…

“…only to be bombarded with messages saying this was now very old news. In the age of Twitter you have to be online all night to keep up with events.”

Rory speculated as to why:

“So Twitter was first with the news, partly because it has become the medium now used by people in the know to spread information.”

What is the wider significance of all this for communication professionals?

So Twitter is a really significant platform. Perhaps more so than Facebook? No. They are very different beasts allowing for things to be done in different ways. In Egypt we saw revolutionary leaders organise on Twitter, but the platform where the masses were mobilised towards action was Facebook.

Unlike Twitter, Facebook is far less real time. If you miss something significant on Facebook, you can always catch up with it later. On the other hand, it is very easy to miss something because of Facebook’s Edgerank Algorithm. You will only pick up on it when and if the story has reached critical mass. And because Facebook is a series of often closed networks, how information spreads is more opaque and uneven.

You Tweet therefor you are

As we explained Twitter is not a mass platform like Facebook is. You don’t have a nice big profile page on Twitter. On Twitter it’s hard to just be, you need to say something interesting or you become invisible. And because of this we think that in its current form, Twitter is unlikely to ever have the scale of Facebook.

It is the place for people that have something to say. And because of this Twitter is also the place for people that like to be in the know.

But what are the key insights into Twitter’s particular real time power?

The power of real time

Emily Bell has written an excellent blog pos, which makes a good start at explaining our brave new world. She muses that:

“…The rise of the realtime social web has changed everything. The network effect now means that people with connectivity and curiosity really do live where news breaks…

…stories are most engaging when they are happening, and that the level of interest and engagement for big stories is only increased when they are supplemented with context, new facts and conversation also in real time…

…New audiences now assess quality through immediacy and relevance. You fail to register a story when it breaks, you lose an opportunity…”

If you want to grow your relevance and network on Twitter fast, one sure way is to be talking about and curating information about real time events. That is when people are most engaged.

If you know the subject, and if you can add context. So much better.

That is what Andy Carvin and Sultan Al Qassemi did throughout the Arab Spring: curating and annotating Tweets, and, particularly in the case of Qassemi, providing context and a fuller picture. RWW has shown how Carvin’s curating has made his Twitter followers grow.

Andy Carvin Twitter Growth

I can talk from personal experience. As you may have deduced from this and this blog post, during January, I got particularly into events unfolding in Tunisia and Egypt and how social media was playing a role. I followed it closely, and reported all I could find, and ReTweeted a lot. Look at my follower graph during that period.

Growth of my Twitter account during the Egyptian uprising

There is an easy way for people to get into this kind of journalism. By opening up their reporting process. Bell again:

“Carvin’s skill is in being timely, and diligent. He tweeted up to 500 times a day at the height of the Egyptian revolution, yet he never left Washington. Of course some would argue this is not ‘proper reporting’ although fewer and fewer people would actually contest that it doesn’t bear the hallmarks of the highest quality reporting. But every news organisation has desk editors don’t they? And desk editors follow stories through back channels, conversations, reading, watching and listening to material relevat to their field. Most desk editors will be totally engaged on every story of this magnitude to the same kind of sleepless depth as Andy Carvin, yet almost no desk editors expose this work in the way Carvin does. Why not?”

Yes, why not?

In the meantime, a massive debate has broken out whether what ReallyVirtual did was journalism. The Poyntner Institute points out that regardless of your view, ReallyVirtual now can use his new-found distribution network anyway he likes. And what has he been up to? Says Poyntner:

And in the days after the raid, he decided to use it to act like a journalist,posting photos of the compound and of the media covering the story.

The elastic Network - RAAK

There’s much excitement over the opportunities created by the triangle between social, mobile and location technology. The fuss over the $41 million funded Color app and the meteoric growth of Instagram has added fuel to the fire.

To recap – we noted last week that we too had our doubts about Color, the new ‘photo-sharing’ app:

Its interface is obtuse to the extreme and it has inspired one of the best App Site reviews ever.

And it only does one thing, really. Take a picture, and it will be added to a photo album with any other photos taken by anybody in about 150 meters from yours. No friending required. Besides the fact that it’s a boon for voyeurs and exhibitionists everywhere, we’re a bit unsure whether it deserves 41 million in funding, although some on Quora beg to differ.

Robert Scoble was one of the most vocal ciritics of Color. But then – a few days later – he interviewed the founders including Peter Pham.

And that certainly put Color in a different light. Color has very powerful tech under the hood, if it works like they say it does. And tests by us over the weekend suggested it might.

Fellow RAAKonteur Adriaan Pelzer analyses their tech in this week’s tech post, but suffice to say that Color will be using the phone’s full array of sensors (including the camera, the mic, the compass and GPS) to determine who a user is close to at any given time. At times even when they don’t have a phone signal!

So what do they want to do with this information?

They want to build the ‘elastic network’.

The Color founders claim that Facebook is a service we reserve for our friends and family, but not for the people we work with or interact with on a day-to-day basis. It certainly is true to a big extent. Although Facebook is trying to be more Twitter-like – it is still the domain for your strong ties.

In social networking theory the point is made that we learn most and get more opportunities (jobs, dates) from those people that are not in our direct networks, but from the so-called weak ties. Friends of friends or people in your neigbourhood. These people step in and out of our networks. This is the elastic network and it’s what Color seeks to capitalise on. They want to help us discover who these weak ties are, and then help us keep contact, or not.

It’s Facebook for the other people in your life. Now you could argue that that is kind of what Twitter is. The famous maxim, Facebook is for people you do know that you don’t want to interact with, but that Twitter is the reverse – the network for the people that you don’t know but want to get to know – rings truer than most people would care to admit.

But Twitter is hard work.

Twitter lacks identity information. And Twitter lacks easy conversation pieces, say compared to Instagram. Unlike on Facebook, where you can just be through your profile, where the simple act of friending is content and where news hangs around for you to see it. Or as opposed to Instagram, where you effortlessly snap gorgeous little easily digestible pics. On Twitter it’s different; you have to Tweet. All the time.

You Tweet therefor you are. And being interesting – even in just 140 characters – will always be hard for 80% of the population.

Ah Instagram. The super slick but simple service only available on the iPhone has come from nowhere and now has 3 million users in 6 months.

It originally irritated me that Instagram was generating a glut of – admittedly good looking – photos, using filters. That was compared to the genuinely good but hard-to-do photography you find on Flickr. It was just too easy.

But I missed the point. Instagram is not about photography.

Adding Color to the Royal wedding

Instagram is a way to communicate. In an illuminating interview with Techcrunch this week their founders – Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger – called Instagram an entertainment platform:

“By no means do we think of Instagram as just a photo-sharing service,” said Systrom. “It’s something that a lot of people lump us into, but we’d like to think of ourselves as a storytelling service. It’s the way you go out in the world and tell a story about your life, and it’s a new entertainment platform. You can open it up and see a story about what your friends are doing, but also [that] ABC World News is posting photos of someone in Japan reporting on the nuclear crisis. It’s really moving to see those things coming together through images.”

The Color founders must be thinking the same thing. That their app is not about photography, but about communication and sharing. And if that’s what you do and your app achieves scale, building a social network might be achievable. Whether they will succeed will depend on much going right for them.

Color have fixed their complicated UX somewhat in a release earlier this week. But their app needs a critical mass to work.

They hope to use the British Royal Wedding as a test case. One of the things that the Color app claims to be able to do is group people together that are indeed at an event together. Even when the group is very big.

So as the Royal Carriage passes down the Mall, Color will show the pics everybody is taking. But because they are focusing on a particular point, the Royal entourage, Color will figure out who is closest to the action. It will send everybody the pics of the users closest to the action. Magic!

Or at least, that is the claim.

Twitter as we pointed out before, is not in the location game.

Foursquare, on the other hand, has recently been in the news because of its fantastic levels of growth (see this infographic). Brian Solis has been waxing lyrical.

Meanwhile Godzilla Facebook has announced Facebook Places. Exciting times for developers wanting build cool location based applications?

Not yet.

As this Tweet from Wednesday night by Made by Many co-founder Stuart Eccles points out, neither Foursquare nor Facebook is showing dramatic numbers yet:

Emirates stadium, attendance 60000. 68 @foursquare checkins, 44 @facebook places checkins.

We did a quick check during the first day of the Davos conference this year. We found only 5 people checked into the main conference venue, and two in hotels nearby.

More anecdotal evidence from accross the pond with RWW’s co-editor Marshall Kirckpatrick Tweeting this week.

Have any illusion that @Foursquare is mainstream? I’m at a packed mall on Sat night and only 1 other person is checked in here.

Foursquare is of course famous for its use of game mechanics to drive usage and interaction. But it seems that while it might get people interested at first, these mechanics, like many games, do not have staying power (Point well made by Anjali Ramachandran).

Think about it. If Foursquare boasts over 6 million registered users, and a whopping 38,157,6000 check ins, it means that the average user has checked in only 63 times!

For Foursquare to have a point, it needs to be more useful. Just this week Foursquare hosted a hackathon in New York. Some good ideas there. We liked the winner best, precisely because it starts to make Foursquare more useful. It allows you to leave a private message to a friend that checks in to a specific venue.

Our idea – PeerSquare

Foursquare’s Tips is one of its most useful functions. They tell you a lot about a venue. But what about the people that are there now? What about the type of people that frequent the venue? (names and profile pictures are not that descriptive).

I have often checked into a venue and seen others who were also checked in there, but Foursquare did not tell me anything meaningful about them. What is missing is an identity layer.

So, we came up with this little mash-up combining Foursquare with Peerindex. It has two exciting use cases.

• It allows you to get a better idea who is with you at a venue
• It gives a measure of you how influential a venue is, or the type of people that go there

This was something we knocked up in a couple of days. Any ideas or suggestions to make it better would be grand. We are working on a souped-up mobile version.

If you have not tried Quora, you should. While literally hundreds of social services launched in 2010, and we try most, there are only a handful that are real game changers. Quora is one of those.

The use case – Questions & Answers – has been tried before (I was a product manager of LycosIQ, and there’s been Yahoo! Answers), but they failed because people were not incentivized in the right way to create quality content. But Quora is on the right track.

We find Quora interesting in part because of the innovative way it has re-imagined interface design to nudge, prompt and help usability and the quality of the service.

Quora aims to crowdsource the best information around a question.  To this end it includes the ability to edit your answers or to suggest edits. The best answers can be voted up to more prominence. And they have moderators to monitor the quality. Pretty nifty.

But that is not what this post is about. It is what we think you can use it for and what we have discovered so far is the best way on how to use it.

Since it launched:

Quora has sent us one business inquiry (a hot lead);
It’s great for showing you know your stuff. Thought leadership. So myself, Gerrie and Adriaan are all active answering and asking questions. Notice the URL of the profile pages – this is designed with SEO in mind. Soon, when people Google your name, your Quora page will be one of the top links.

Quora has helped us build an interesting tool;
We wanted to build a mash-up between FourSquare and PeerIndex, but we could not find out how FS checks you out of a venue. So we asked a Question. And an FourSquare engineer answered.
We speculated the other day why somebody like a FourSquare engineer would rather answer a Question on Quora than on Twitter. It’s because you don’t have to keep on answering the question. On Twitter, the communication disappears into the ether rather quickly. On Quora it sticks. It becomes a resource. This allows people to show how clever they are over and over gain with the least amount of effort.

Quora helped us research a blog post;
I violently disagree with Malcom Gladwell’s assertion that social networks can not be used to make risky political change happen. To prove this point I searched for and followed some Questions about the unrest in Tunisia. And once I knew more I asked a few, at times directing the question to specific users. I got information from people that were involved. The result is arguably two of the most detailed blog posts on Tunisia and Facebook in the west.

As is the nature of Quora, there are answers to even more specific uses of it on Quora itself:

• Using Quora for PR & Communications
• How Businesses Can Use Quora
• How Teachers & Schools Can Use Quora
• How Journalists Can Use Quora
• Using Quora for Recruiting & Hiring

RAAK’s Tips for using Quora

• Above we mentioned specific questions. Being specific, being niche is key. When you log into Quora you get to see Questions based on topics you have selected. The more specific the topics, the more likely you are to see interesting questions. So instead of following the Facebook topic, Follow what’s being said about the Facebook API .
• Otherwise follow people you know that are likely to to ask or interact with questions you might find interesting.
• When answering a question, make sure you have a genuinely interesting or insightful answer. If your answer is not one of the top 3 answers, not many people are likely to see it. Try to be the best or else you’re wasting your time.
• Don’t forget to add topics to your questions. That way the right people can see them.
• Often some of the best bits of information and good insight is in the comments below questions. That’s where debate happens. It’s in the comments on an answer on this question on Tunisia where the gold dust about Facebook and Google’s actions re Tunisia came to light.
• Direct specific people to answer a question. The founder of RWW France, Fabrice Epelboin, was very involved in the Tunisian affair from early on. I directed him to a few Questions. Some argue that this is Quora’s greatest strength: It gives you first-hand accounts from verifiable personalities. See for example Ashton Kutcher’s answer to What determines whether an actor is cast in a part in Hollywood? 
• If you have a question about using Quora, search for an answer (the search and Question writing boxes are done in the same place). Invariably the Answer to your Question is already there. It helped me find out how to link to specific Answers, and not just Questions for example. If you can’t find it, then you’ll have an excellent Question.
• It helps if you have an active dedicated following on social networks like Twitter. People that have spent time on social media will reap the rewards on Quora, which is tightly integrated with Facebook and Twitter.

Which brings us to one of the points of criticism against Quora, i.e. that the answers of popular users with a large Twitter following – like Robert Scoble – get voted up, simply because of who they are and not because of what they say.