Twitter's growing faster than you think

I recently told my friend Lane Becker that I didn't think Twitter was growing much anymore. I was wrong

Twitter's growing at a very healthy rate. And in this case, the compete numbers, even if absolutely correct, don't tell the whole story. The first thing any serious twitter user does is download a desktop client, or start using TwitterIm or Hahlo and being relying on the Twitter API, whose usage isn't reflected in Compete statistics. So the Twitter growth is really a measure of some baseline passive users, and the flux of new users entering the system, which means that Twitter's attracting a linear number of users each month, or better.

Congrats to Twitter. Now can someone please explain what Twitter is to all my friends, because I'm failing at it.

SNMP for feeds

Josh Kopelman at First Round wants an "SNMP Dashboard" for feeds. I for one wholeheartedly agreed. Someone needs to help me managed my 500 feeds.

I'm a data junkie, and probably a two-standard deviation edge case for now, but like Josh, I think this will end, and I'll be normal shortly. I think you can see these problems in microcosm on Tumblr right now. Content comes in either as a river of data, with no re-prioritization, no de-duplication, and no categorization. It's overwhelming, but the only other choice is to avoid content with great care. This is an unattractive solution.

Josh is correct, too. These aren't technical challenges. Heck, we had them solved, more or less, at Screaming Media in 2000. There's a degree of fit and finish that makes this project hard. Content selection and prioritization are tricky items to do in a trustworthy way (as opposed to statistically relevant way), and when there's no ROI statement to be made, consumers might reject a service that didn't take great care in presenting these choices to the user. But that's likely solvable.

What's really interesting is how the market is working on a different, and I feel temporary problem. Most projects are focused on discovering new feeds (which is, good lord, not a problem I have), Google Reader, Findory (deadpooled), Friend Feed, and Persai are all devoted to this temporary stop gap before we reach a world in which we live and breath feeds and syndication.

It's roughly the same engineering problems, with a more difficult design problem coupled to it. Hopefully one of these, or a new service will come in to fill this whole.

Angels vs. Professional Investors

Research suggests that you'd be foolish to accept both angel and professional investment money for your startup. Sounds like bunk to me, but others are eating it up. The paper does have a fair number of controls in it, but the conclusions still seem a bit aggressive to me.

Net summary: Having more investors involved complicates things, and angels and professionals often have trouble coinciding their mutal interests. Fair enough.

My take home: this is more evidence that if you ever have to raise money for anything, be sure that you are getting more than money with it, and that you and your project's needs match your investors interests; try to make sure you bought key help for your next milestones for all that equity in your project. Most likely you'll have improved your chances of success if you do that.

Via [Paul Kedrosky]

Watch walmart take over the world (well country)

Friend and "data magnate" of Metaweb Toby Segaran, just published an animation he made of the growth of Walmart over time, built exclusively from publicly available data joined together using the psuedo-typed join algorithms they own there.

You can see it here.

Toby's promised more improvements and I'm excited to see what else he can come up with.

Note: Edited for fat fingered typing problems.

Why facebook apps are important even though they annoy the crap out of me

Facebook applications are here to stay, and are, I suspect the key data point that will provide Facebook with an edge in the social advertising space. The reason being is that the applications give Facebook a unique way to look into how closely user are located on the social grapb and in what manner they are close on the graph. (Well, technically, it actually create a set of graphs, one per communication channel that can be projected down onto a single graph using from matrix transform, but whatevs.) By combining this new data, with the permission graph that all the social networking systems have (this is what you are used to, so-and-so can see this data but not that data, etc) you start to get a pretty persuasive package of socially intelligence agents with permission settings that allow access to and from the data with user confidence.

The genius here is that by forcing all of this networoked behavior over their permission graph, Facebook makes sure that the implicit graph and the explicit graph overlap, an furthermore, the implicit graph is a subset of the explicit graph, guaranteeing that for any implicit edge, there's a explicit trust or permission edge dictating what inferences can be used from that edge. Genius. Contrast that with OpenSocial, which gies google a myriad of implicit edges, but no explicit edges, and even those edges that it can find will exist in a federated system of graphs that are, most likely, highly degenerate. What a mess. It will take Google a long time to sort this out and come up with a way to unlock the implicit behavior for their clients. Meanwhile Facebooks new and rather impressive R&D team will be churning out one novel application of implicit networks after another.

Now if only someone could give them an applications that generated an implicit network based on something other than zombies, vampires or ninjas.

Why I can't go on vacation

These pictures are so gorgeous, that I want to go there, sub zero temps and all. As far as I'm concerned these relics are our modern marvels of the world.

Edward Burtynskey does this obsession better, and with more philosophical and theoretical flair, I just react to these photos emotionally. There's a lovely U.S. Navy graveyard in the Suisun Bay near San Francisco that's fine, but the primal nature of the russian ships, ripped apart by the ice, is far more moving to me.

Via [IOC]