There has been much wailing, gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair about Twitter these days because it seems as if the service is down more often than not. And even when it is working again, some features that make it worthwhile (IM, pagination, etc) are unavailable. The poor whale is quite dehydrated now. Twitter is a communication framework that many people now rely on every day. It’s even been touted as an emergency news service and a critical component to some people’s jobs. Hundreds of third parties have written tools to pull, push, slice, dice and trend data from it. And yet it is still a free service. What is Twitter’s obligation to its users? What is any free services’ obligation to its users? And what should the repercussions be for breaking a user’s trust?

Louis Gray has raised some interesting points about Web 2.0 services being crippled by their own success illustrated by the fact that once a service is popular, if it wasn’t built to scale from the start, it will have trouble as it grows. Cyndy Aleo-Carreira has remarked that the entire software development process (or lack thereof) in Web 2.0 is to blame for these problems and argues that the rush to bring something to market without going through the whole old-fashioned software development and release lifecycle (delaying release to the public until a true 1.0 version) is ruining web offerings in general.

My personal take is this: the obligation of a service to provide you with consistent quality, features and uptime is dependent on whether you pay for it. Regardless of monetization, every service that holds on to data it has aggregated or generated for or about you must provide you a way to extract that data from the service. If that one requirement is met, and the service is free, then you don’t have any inherent rights as a user. If you want rights you need to pay for them.

I have a right to complain if I am a paying customer. I expect the service’s obligations to me to be outlined in their Terms of Service. A ToS is a legal contract which should outline the consequences for either party breaking it. If the contract is broken by the service then I expect it to respond in the way that’s defined by the ToS I agreed to when committing financially. If a free service has a ToS, they should live up to it, but I still don’t feel I have a right to complain if they break it because I’m not supporting that service and it’s operations.

I also have a right to complain, if a service holds my data captive and I have no way to extract it and back it up. That’s the only obligation a free service should be required to offer. There are many service out there that don’t offer this, and there are not many practical options for a user to back up their data to. If there’s any real problem with Web 2.0, in my opinion, it’s that one.

We are far too spoiled with all the services we get for free. Companies such as Google have set the bar impossibly high with their offerings. We’ve come to expect not only many new services to appear on the horizon every week but that every one of those services will be feature rich and extremely reliable. We scout and negotiate for invites to beta services to make sure we get in early and don’t miss out on being at the top of the social media pyramid. And we are devoid of gratitude for the time, effort and resources that go into providing those services for us. Our sense of entitlement is misplaced and counter-productive.

That’s not to say, for instance, that I wouldn’t be extremely upset with Google if suddenly they stopped offering Gmail, a free service I use many times a day. My online life revolves around Gmail and the loss of it would impact me greatly. But Gmail offers data export through POP3 and IMAP and a few other options. It’s my responsibility to make sure that data is backed up (whether and how I do is another blog post!). If I am responsible then I won’t have lost my data if the service goes away. I have no real grounds to complain because I have never paid for GMail. And I guarantee that if Gmail started taking the features that make them unique away, I would move to another service. For a free service that’s really the only punishment a user has the right to inflict on it. And it’s an effective one. If enough users leave a service, it dies.

If we start insisting that we have rights on a free service beyond preservation of our data then we are going to completely stifle creativity and innovation on the web by restricting the release of good ideas. Only large organizations that move slowly but have the resources to do a full scale development effort and can afford to handle any lawsuits that happen for infringements of our rights will be able to afford to release anything new. So, users, if you want shiny toys to play with for free, quit insisting on your rights and offer your support by being patient or opening your wallet. Otherwise, quit complaining, leave quietly, and take your rights with you already!

So is the answer for Twitter to start charging customers? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t have the answer there. But I do feel that Twitter, like any other free Web 2.0 service, doesn’t owe any of us anything if we’re not willing to pay.

I think I know what FriendFeed is really all about, and it’s simply brilliant.

For those who have been following the conversations about noise on FriendFeed you know that many people (including me) have been asking for the ability to create filters to solve the problem. Some people have even suggested that the solution will be the Semantic Web or that FriendFeed is already a step in that direction. I think FriendFeed’s creators have even more ambitious plans.

FriendFeed is going to be an intelligent agent.

The setup is perfect. FriendFeed is gathering all of our attention data. It’s just a small leap to analyzing that data and finding patterns of usage for each FFeeder. Then it’s just another small step to apply those patterns to incoming data, both as filters on streams we subscribe to, and as alerts on streams that we don’t. It’s like reverse web site analytics: instead of analyzing what lots of people find interesting, it’s finding what’s interesting to a single person.

FriendFeed’s founders are from Google. They have experience with finding interesting things in large amounts of data. Search, from one angle, is simply gathering data from many sources, extracting what is relevant within a context and then prioritizing the results by ranking. It seems as if the same type of algorithms that are used to determine page rank with search engines could also be used to determine what’s interesting to us in the pool of our attention data.

At FriendFeed is each user is a context and ranking is a result of attention. With page rank, every link to a site is a vote for its contents. With attention rank, there is a chance to be even more precise because there can be negative votes as well. You’re voting on what’s interesting every time you participate and even when you don’t.

Votes Up:

• Contributing content (big)
• Creating or joining a room (big)
• Subscribing to someone (big)
• Creating an imaginary friend (big)
• Commenting (big)
• Liking (minor)

Votes Down:

• Leaving a post in your stream untouched (minor)
• Hiding (big)

The more you participate, the more you share about you and your interests, the better the agent will be able to work for you. All of these votes reveal keywords and context about what’s important to you and what’s not. And you’re constantly generating that information.

So what’s the big deal? It means a pleasurable, efficient, speedy, personalized experience consuming social media with little wasted time digesting noise. The uses could be to filter your stream (no more noise), find people who are similar to you (expand your network), find content you might not have noticed that you would like (information discovery), and even customized advertizing (that you’ll actually appreciate)!

FriendFeed’s founders have most likely learned yet another lesson from their old employer. Google has set itself up to be the gateway for the bulk of the world’s digital information. There’s a lot of power in that. FriendFeed is setting itself up to be the gateway for our attention. We’ll become extremely reliant on it to do the grunt-work of filtering and alerting us to what’s important to us. It will become a service we can’t live without.

And it will be a profitable service as well.

FriendFeed as an intelligent agent can also be a recommendation engine for products and services through tracking how often people with similar interests to you, or people you subscribe to (and generally trust), recommend them. But the most lucrative profits will come from extremely well-targeted advertising. If a FFeeder mentions he’s looking for a new camera, all the sudden he could be presented with offers from camera retailers for exactly the model he’s mentoned. As long as FFeeders participate and announce they are seeking something FriendFeed will deliver advice and ads of relevance. We won’t even mind we’re being advertised to because it will be useful and timely for us. Adding Amazon Wishlists is already a feed option. What if you received a coupon any time something in your wishlist went on sale? Would you be annoyed or appreciative? And what advertiser wouldn’t want to participate and have such a high probability of sales resulting?

It’s even possible that FriendFeed could share revenue with FFeeders based on their influence in resulting sales, giving a cut to the influencer in a model similar to Squidoo. Will they? Probably not, considering there’s possibilities there for abuse by spammers, but maybe. That could even help alleviate the issues many bloggers have with the conversation being diverted from their blogs to FriendFeed. Bloggers could still make money by producing good content that way.

Why do I think FriendFeed is going in this direction? There are already hints in what features they have and what features they don’t (besides the obvious aggregation features):

• Stats for the top 10 people you find most interesting and who find you most interesting are already available. It’s logical to keep expanding on that.
• Only offering Like and Hide on posts simplifies the voting system. Offering a starred ranking system would just confuse things.
• They haven’t offered advanced threaded comments or a full blogging platform and probably won’t. Again, more simple to implement a voting system without these things, and they would be distractions from hooking 3rd party streams into the service. It sets up the impression that FriendFeed is the place to go to consume and attribute information instead of create it.
• Rooms are an awesome way to get people to both cast a vote with their attention and also add context to any content. If content shows up in a room it’s most likely related to the room’s subject.

Maybe this is all just a pipe-dream of mine, but if this isn’t FriendFeed’s developers plan after all then it should be. The potential is there, not only for providing a service that so many people would benefit from, but simply to make a nice profit. I have great expectations.

I find people incredibly interesting. I love learning how they think and why they think the way they do. I like to debate, not to be argumentative (though it often comes off that way) but because I want to see if the other person can convince me that my viewpoint is flawed. When someone proves me wrong with a well-thought-out response I gain both new insight and new respect for them. Being exposed to new information and cataloging it is an addiction for me and I thrive on conversation.

That’s my reason for participating in social media: my whole goal is to be a part of the conversation. Apparently I’m in the minority.

It seems to me that there are two other goals that are much more common: building a reputation for yourself and/or to get the most attention and keep it. Both of those goals involve a lot of rules of conduct and seem to be a lot more work than fun.

Over the past few days I’ve noticed conversations pop up on FriendFeed about the “appropriate” ways to interact with the service. FFeeders have admitted that they alter their behavior now (such as not clicking on “like” and avoiding posting things to the external networks which feed into FriendFeed) simply as to not offend their followers. There are many debates on Blogging 1.0 vs 2.0 where blog authors are expected to follow the conversation wherever it is instead of expecting it to come to them which is causing loss of attention to bloggers’ sites. FFeeders are concerned about the noise that subscribing to many people generates and fretting over how to keep it all manageable.

Who has the responsibility of attention control? Those who post or those who subscribe?

I’ve been reprimanded for declaring that I “like” and share things on FriendFeed without much thought about whether it will distress my followers, but I think the burden of filtering content should be on the subscriber. I subscribe to many people myself so I understand that it’s a hassle to filter out the noise but I would rather people post what’s interesting to them and let me figure out what I want than limit their participation to give me less noise and possibly less insight.

It’s implied that there’s a contract between followers/followees that somehow makes the followee responsible for meeting the follower’s expectations. Who is serving their followers better? Me, by being myself, posting what’s interesting to me, and participating in the conversation or the people who spin cycles in internal debate over what/whether to share because sharing might cause them to lose some followers (and attention)? As a subscriber I already spend too much time discovering what’s important to me and sharing it. I don’t have time to filter out what’s not important to each of many followers.

If I didn’t share in a way that my followers appreciated when they chose to follow me, then they wouldn’t have subscribed. I would rather have a smaller number of followers who are closely aligned with my interests than a larger group that I have to censor myself to keep. Nothing is keeping them from unsubscribing if we no longer share the same interests. Is it realistic to say that if someone chooses to follow me I am under the obligation to provide them with input of consistent quality, quantity and timing?

If everyone is expected to put their followers first, participating in social media is more like a job than for enjoyment. I already have a job (or two) and don’t need any more.

For some people it is a job. For those people interaction is all about building your “Personal Brand” and having the most followers. I don’t begrudge those people laboring over how they participate because they’re making a living off of it. But how many A-Listers can there be? If you’re not going to lose your house because you quit making ad revenue off your blog then chill-out, sit down and share stuff with me. I don’t mind if you throw me a little noise. I just want to have a conversation and maybe make a few friends.