Twitter's missing millions: How social media will make money

I have a feeling those of us old enough to use search are getting rather tired of it. Search fatigue is setting in. I've hinted as much before and more recently at /message.

Indeed my own informal research (ask the kids you know) suggests the latest generation of digital natives aren't even bothering to try it long enough to tire of it. They are skipping straight to friend recommendation. (image courtesy)

I've been doing the January thing. Searching for a holiday. What a chore that has become. Dead end after blind alley after irrelevant results. SEO without the social can do that to an Internet.

Thought: wouldn't it be good if SEO was all about an improved experience for the customer, rather than the vendor? We might be more inclined to surf the resulting SEA (search engine accuracy) with more joy in our hearts.

I digress. Search fatigue is driving us to opt for a strategy of 'good enough for me' results, by which we mean 'if it's good enough for the friend I trust, it's good enough for me'

Recent questions I've been asking of the humans Itrust on Twitter include where should I go for a holiday with guaranteed hot weather, all inclusive, safe and fun for my 4yr old with kids clubs and baby sitters. Oh and at the right credit-crunch adjusted price.

People understand what I mean by all that. And if they don't, they ask questions. People who come to know me also know what makes me happy.

We're not being lazy. We just trust our friends (our adhoc communities of purpose) more than we do search returns.

Algorithms eat your heart out.

And so to Twitter's missing millions. Everyone is asking how this phenomenon can turn all this two-way flow of conversation into cash.

And most struggle to see an answer. And I think that's because it's like looking into the fourth dimension from a world of just three.

We want to apply business models we know - ad models, banners, affiliates etc. to a networked world we are glimpsing in the corner of our eyes - a blur of a ghost we think we may have seen.

But before google gave us adsense few would have predicted such a brilliant fit with the third dimension of the digitally disaggregated world. It gave us ads that served as content by virtue of their potential to be so relevant to the content they were served against.

That was something that couldn't be done in the two dimensions of print - and couldn't be conceived of from those thinking in those two dimensions.

Twitter - and the other peer-to-peer networks which make up social media are different from the broadcast style websites which went before them. It requires a different model again to monetise.

There IS money being made in Twitter, via conversational p2p marketing. We're all buying stuff on the recommendation of those who make up our social graphs - of our ad hoc communities of purpose.

The vast majority is done with zero involvement by the brands getting the benefit. And zero involvement by Twitter.

So how will Twitter stake a claim on those missing millions?

What I do know is there IS a key to unlocking this - trouble is, not only do we not know where we left it, we don't even know what it looks like.

The adsense moment for social media will come. My guess is it'll involve a combination of conversational marketing, co-creation webs and ways of enabling production by communities of purpose.

Social media's monetisation will be less from the traditional broadcast model (cash spent to persuade us to buy the mass produced) and more from the networked world it inhabits - a model enabling a crowd-sourcing response to deliver against global, real-time niche needs.

The fourth dimension in this case is not just time, it is right now, real-time - and the adhoc communities of purpose who act in it.

And that, my friends, is not a banner ad.

It's not an ad model at all. It's ultimately a new means of production.

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Searching together: The biggest challenge yet to SEO?

This video, from Techcrunch, shows an experimental version of google which includes digg-like social search functions.
Quite a challenge for traditional SEO? It seems like a huge one to me.
Would love to hear some thoughts from anyone in SEO - and from anyone else!
It's clearly a huge step forward from google's previous efforts in social search.

When search fails: humans to the rescue

Just added a new blog post over on /message which includes an interview with ditto.net's Colin Kennedy.

F**K the algorithm! It's time for the human touch

Since the rise of the search engines we've surrendered the nuancing of our experience of culture to the algorithm. In other words, the machine has been in charge of editing our choice.

Google's bots, maths, hard science has shaped what we all get to know about. Increasingly so. Google accounted for 87% of searches in the UK in May, 2008.

When humans get involved, then we start to discover things we didn't know we needed to know.

Blogrolls write this large; very human recommendation lists which extend and share our networks of trust. Trust me from the metadata I express on this blog? You're likely to consider my blogroll less advert and more recommendation.

The likes of Mahalo, Powersets, StumbleUpon and Ditto (disclosure, one of our own) take advantage of this, too. The human element of discovery. Tools for us to use rather than tools that use us?

The robots have played the role of editors of choice. Page 1 or die! In many fields they are very good at it.
But now it's time for the humans to take back a little control - particularly and effectively where things have a human, emotional dimension.

Traditional maths-led search is a little like someone who thinks they are quite well-enough socially connected, thank you, if they have the phone numbers of the people they know.
My question, aimed at tempting them to dip a toe in social media is: "How do you discover new people to call?"
Human-powered search recommends relevant alternative people to call.

We're playing with a ditto.net list at the moment - aiming to rank the Rock Stars of Web2.0.

We could just google appropriate terms and see who comes out on top.
But somehow, asking you what you think seems more fun - and more appropriate. How do YOU define what makes someone important in this context. Maybe humans are better at doing this than machines?

I'd rather know how human beings are ranked by other human beings - we're complex, more-than-the-sum beasts.

In that context I don't want to be a slave to the algorithm.

Searching for Powerset? Now in public beta

Powerset has gone live with a public beta - at just about the time talk is brewing that Microsoft plans to acquire it.

Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.
One thing is for sure, it's going to need cash to burn to move from the indexing of wikipedia it has achieved to the 20billion web documents it has ambitions to cover.
But try it for yourself - it's the latest attempt at the New Search.