Earlier this month, two of the smartest people I know (and smart because they actually do their homework--like... you know... real research), danah boyd and Fred Stutzman did a good job casting a lot of doubt on the numbers used to support the "teens don't tweet" meme.  That didn't stop Claire Cain Miller from digging it up again. 

If you work for the New York Times (and you expect that paper to be a viable entity in the future), your content, it's quality, insight, analysis, etc. has to be better than everything else that's out there.  So when a NY Times tech story comes out, and it's at least three weeks behind where everyone else's head is at, full of inaccurate assumptions passed over as common knowledge, it really needs to get called out.  It's nothing personal against Ms. Miller.  I'm sure she's a lovely person, but she missed the mark here with this article.

So badly, in fact, that while I don't drink myself, I think it might be a fun game to do a shot every time there's a ridiculous assertion made about social media or just overall poor analysis of tech trends in her recent article "Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens". 

Ready... go:

"Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.

“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.

DRINK!  So she doesn't feel like everyone needs to know what she's doing every second of her life, but according to a recent Nielsen study, Ms. Nagy exchanges more than 6 times as many text messages as the average teen--a report covered in the NY Times itself this year.  The average teen only texts back and forth 80 times--so while she many not feel like *everyone* needs to know what she's doing every second, it seems like *almost everyone* might be a better answer.  So, not only is she not the "average" teen, but she's also a bit hypocritical for saying that people don't need to know what she's doing all the time when she's texting like that.

"Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group..."

DRINK! This is so typical of MSM's reporting of tech trends.  Let's take one user and a nice lead quote and generalize a whole trend out of them.  So one Jersey Girl is reluctant to use twitter, and that's a "feeling shared by others in her age group. 

Here's a different example, for illustrative purposes:  "Bob is a teen and doesn't like black people, a feeling shared by others in his age group."  Are there other teens who have an issue with black people?  Sure... and funny enough a few of them are actually black--but by no means would I position that as representative of the entire teenage population. 

"Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore..."

DRINK! "Just..."  And what's that number supposed to be?  Well, let's start with the fact that teens make up less than 10% of the overall population of the United States.  Now throw in that, according to Nielen, somewhere around 60% of teens send text messages to friends or send messages through social networking sites.  So, as danah pointed out in her article, that means that if around 11 percent of Twitter users are 12-17, teens are actually way overrepresented on Twitter.  Comparatively, according to Quantcast, only 1% of the users on the NYTimes are teens. 

"That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations. "

DRINK!  Innovations are driven by the markets they're intended for.  At price points in the hundreds of dollars, many innovations are driven by non-teens...  like the Kindle or smartphones.  Teens didn't drive the growth in getting e-mail on your phone because they're not as focused on e-mail as business professionals are, nor are they as finacially capable of buying smartphones.  Blogging didn't become mainstream because of teens either.  The 2004 election is when the blogging tipping point came, and clearly that wasn't a bunch of political teens getting into the fray. 

Do teens drive fashion trends?  Perhaps.  Music?  Perhaps...  but I don't think there's anyone out there with a tech innovation thinking, "This is a tech product... we need to get teens using this right away!"  Imagine if the Garmin folks thought that.

“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.

DRINK!  The early growth of Facebook among teens and college students came from the fact that YOU COULD ONLY GET ON IT WITH A .EDU E-MAIL ADDRESS!!  It wasn't as if teens just disproportionately flocked to it--they were the only people allowed in!  To position teens as critical to the growth of Facebook is like saying that people with drivers licenses are responsible for most car accidents--it's by definition, not a trend derived from any kind of intelligent analysis of the data.  Note that this wasn't part of Andrew's quote--it was the reporter's attempt to pass off factually incorrect "common knowledge" as a trend. 

Ms. Miller is wrong about Friendster, too.  Friendster's early adopters weren't teens--they were 20 somethings, as danah boyd points out:

"When Friendster launched, it was quickly inhabited by populations who had good reasons to connect with each other. By and large, the early adopters were living in a region different from their hometown (or living in their hometown post-college and cranky about it). Finding "lost" friends was a fun game - people wanted to connect... Friendster's early adopters were 20-somethings....   Friendster launched at a time when the economy was slow and many web-minded 20-somethings were slacking at menial jobs that they didn't care about (particularly in the SF region where people were only coming out of post-bust depression); many web-minded folks were happy to spend hours futzing online."

That makes sense to anyone who had a Friendster account.  I got my invite to it sometime in 2003, when I was 24.  Few of the students that have taught over the last few years, who average 8-10 years younger than me, ever had an account on Friendster.  It was clearly not populated by many teens when it first came out. 

"Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success."

DRINK!  Again, Twitter didn't prove this.  See AOL (bought by families looking to get online), any e-commerce site, like Amazon, eBay, casual gaming sites (whose usage is driven by stay at home moms), LinkedIn, HuffingtonPost, Flickr...   In fact, other than MySpace, what top sites were actually driven by early adopter teens that aren't otherwise specifically targeted to teens?  While I'm thinking about it, was Google itself a hot new trend driven by teens that eventually bubbled up to the mainstream?  I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

Then, Ms. Miller goes on to write for a couple of paragraphs about how, "The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth."  She goes on to list LinkedIn, GPS devices, Youtube...

Wait...  all these counterexamples...  the same ones I wrote about...  Then... if it isn't a big deal whether or not teens use Twitter, than what the heck is this story even about??

"Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media."

DRINK!  Seriously?  How much does Owyang get for speaking gigs these days?  He can't seriously believe this.  If he does, I have a bridge to sell him.  With over 250 million Facebook users, it's really hard to believe that the majority of Twitter's growth is coming from people who haven't used any social sites before. 

Everyone who has never used MySpace or Facebook or Friendster who just starting using Twitter as their first social network please raise their hand. 

[crickets]

"Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”"

DRINK! Yeah, because it's really just a bunch of professionals who are twitter about their Sweet Sixteens.  One mom in Arkansas has two daughters who think Twitter is lame and too professional, and now that's what the New York Times puts forth as the generalized opinion of all teens.  Maybe Claire should have interviewed 14 year old Melik Yuksel, who has 34,397 more followers than she does.  His last tweet?

"I can't legally drive yet. :o"

"Perhaps Twitter’s experience will encourage Web start-ups to take a more realistic view of who uses the Web and go after a broader audience, Ms. Forte said. “Older populations are a smart thing to be thinking about, as opposed to eternally going after the 15- through 19-year-olds,” she said."

DRINK! I'm sorry, but what startup is mistakenly going after 15-19 year olds on the web that doesn't have a teen site?  Having worked in VC, you never hear investors going, "Well, you know how it goes... they tried to crack the teen market first and when that didn't work, it was all over--same old story." 

Next time, don't ask an expert on teens and social networks for advice on startup marketing.  If anything, most websites are mistakenly going after geek crowds on Techcrunch when it might actually be teens or other mainstream users that could benefit. 

So what did we learn here? 

Teens are supposedly not using Twitter, even though they actually are, in disproportionate numbers, and it doesn't matter if they are or aren't because mainstream websites aren't usually driven by teens--except with sites like Friendster, which wasn't true anyway.  Riiiight. 

DRINK!

I have a friend that doesn't blog, doesn't tweet, doesn't update FB all that often--doesn't even get text messages.  Yes, there are people out there like this.  :)

I was thinking about what my habits must seem like to her, and the reasons why she doesn't share more about her activities.  One argument that often comes up with nonstreamers is "Why would anyone care what I'm up to?"  I thought about that a lot and realized that when I share, I never make any implicit assumption that anyone does care.  In fact, the reason why I choose to tweet something is actually because I probably don't think of it as important enough to go e-mailing or texting individual people.

So when I'm sharing that I'm going to Staten Island to visit my Nana, I don't actually think anyone cares, but a few things could happen around that:

1. People may respond with relevant  info about traveling to Staten Island today--like Verrazzano Bridge construction or a street fair on Midland Beach.
2. My friends or family will know where I am *if* they need me for something and want to check back on my whereabouts. 
3. You might share some tidbit about your nana...  which is always nice.  
4. It might remind you to call your nana... even nicer.
5. ...or something good that I'm not even thinking of.

The point is, there's upside to sharing via a lifestream of some kind... and there's really very little downside.  You are the one choosing to subscribe, so if you don't like it you can leave.  Therefore I don't fear overwhelming people--you opt in.  I know how to be reasonable and professional--so I'm not scared of oversharing and costing myself my job or my next job.  Nor am I scared of stalkers--because honestly, someone could choose to stalk me on my way to and from the office just as easily.  Knowing who I am doesn't really increase the chance if someone randomly stalking me, IMHO.  Plus, being a black belt, maybe I don't fear the stalking that much.  I'm quite sure I have a higher chance of getting hit on my bike than picking up a random interweb stalker. 

Anyway... point being, most what you see in my various streams is all the stuff I don't assume to be important enough to specifically direct at someone.  In that sense, it doesn't warrant any kind of response either.  When you e-mail or text me specifically, I'm supposed to respond and I'm a dick if I don't.  Again, that implies that you think your message is that important.  When I tweet, I'm content for everyone to just ignore it. 

The other thing is that it's not interruptive.  I rarely ever make phonecalls these days--not just because I really don't like talking on the phone, but because I don't consider my call important enough to bust into your moment.  Who knows where you are or what you're doing--but barging in with a phone call makes me feel like it doesn't matter, because my conversation is more important.   A tweet or a text seems so much more subtle. 

So rather than thinking of us tweeters and bloggers as a bunch of narcissists--perhaps we really don't think you'll care about what we have to say, so we're not shoving it all in your face.  We just leave it out there, and if you want, but please don't feel obliged, you're more than welcome to check it out.  But, you don't have to... really... it's ok.

I'm a guy.  I'm not a metrosexual or a fashionisto--just a pretty average dude who plays sports, occasionally doesn't match, and can't figure out why anyone would pay over $100 for a pair of jeans.

I'm also an extremely casual guy--and would never dress up if I didn't have to.  T-shirts and jeans or shorts would be fine with me.  However, I do see the need to dress to impress once in a while, and it hasn't escaped my notice that on the rare occasion that I do put some effort into my clothing, it gets some non-zero attention from the opposite sex. 

So that's me. 

During Startup 2009, I had the occasion to meet Alexis Maybank, the founder of Gilt.  I followed up with her and asked her to lunch, since I think it's generally a good idea to get to know successful local entrepreneurs--and we also know a few people in common. 

I'll be totally honest--I didn't really expect a lot going in.  I couldn't imagine I'd have much to talk about with someone who started a high end fashion sales site--who could probably name more labels than I could name baseball players.  On the contrary, Alexis was awesome--extremely down to earth and very personable.  We had a great conversation and she was just as interested in what I was up to and the NYC startup scene in general as she was interested in talking about Gilt. 

We talked a lot about the way men shop (or try to avoid shopping) and how much of an opportunity there was in selling to men for the site.  It made a lot of sense to me--that guys want to get good value, but they also want to minimize time spent browsing.  They're also more likely to buy online because they don't run into the same sizing issues that women do.  In a way, Gilt almost seems more built around the way that men want to shop than women do--quick and efficient.

So I decided to try it out--and something hit me right away...

I have no idea what the hell I'm looking at.  You see, not being well versed in all these brands, I really can't tell whether what I'm buying is worth it.  They seem like good prices, but I really have no idea.

Actually, what's even more concerning to me are the associations that certain brands have.  As you get up the ladder in terms of brand hierarchy, I feel like most brands are associated with a certain kind of lifestyle--either intentionally or not.  We all know what it means (meant?) to be an "Abercrombie guy". 

Take for example, lobster pants.  Now, I didn't know what lobster pants were (thank God I don't hangout with anyone who wears them) until a friend of mind used them to describe a very special kind of douchebag. 

I didn't exactly need to be told about the association between lobster pants and douchebaggery to avoid wearing them--but what about associations that are not so obvious? 

Take this shirt for example:

What if, in the fashion world, it's universally known that John Varvatos is the shirt of choice for cokeheads?  I don't want to accidently wind up in the cokehead shirt just because I thought it looked cool.

Ok, all kidding aside, my main point here is that Gilt lacks the tools for anyone who isn't really into brands to make informed choices.  Interestingly enough, Amanda Peyton told me that she doesn't really know the brands either, but still loves Gilt because she implicitly trusts the site to pick out good stuff.  I wonder if men and women are different like that.  Guys don't hand over choices too easily... not without some kind of proof or more insight into the decision making. 

Compare that with the shopping experience at Fresh Direct.  I feel like Fresh Direct makes me a smarter food shopper.  It tells me what fruit is in season and which apples are for baking versus eating.  I'm a smarter food shopper because of Fresh Direct--and while I still want a simple and quick shopping experience, I think I might want a way on Gilt to reach out to the crowds and get a sense of whether these clothes are "me".  On top of that, some background on the designers or lables, some reviews of the lines, etc. might be helpful as well, otherwise I feel like I'm flying blind.  I think Gilt could use a bit of an editorial voice or some way to get to know the brands.

The bigger question, though, is whether it's part of Gilt's model to really care about me as a customer.  Maybe I'm just not the target market--and they're doing well enough with people who are more info fashion than I am.  I guess that would make it a lot like art that I didn't understand.  I had an ex that would tell me "Maybe it's not for you."

I just got this e-mail from LinkedIn.  Someone in my network wanted to know if I could help fill a job opportunity. 

What was neat was that it showed me who in my network I might be able to forward this to.  Instead of just telling the person who was looking to fill the position, it was helping me be a more useful contact by letting me vet the candidates:

I've long thought that LinkedIn had done a piss poor job in helping me understand my network.  It was a great way to connect everyone, but for a long time the actual networking aspect of it has been little more than just a rolodex on steroids.  Actually figuring out who's in the rolodex and how I can leverage them, or how I can help, is something they've never really focused on. 

What I'd really like to do is create some active searches...  like allowing me to see who's actively looking for a job, looking to post a job, looking for funding, etc...   or when I see a profile I like, to allow me to turn that person into an active search.  "Tell me when people like this appear in my network."

I'm long on products that help make me look smarter.  That's stuff I'll even pay for.

There are now over 2200 panels up in the SXSW panel picker.  It's basically impossible to go through every one of them.  You have to rely on recommendations from others or people you know.  Therefore, I'm going to help you out by making 10 recommendations.

How will I choose?  Am I going to read all the panel submissions?  No. 

What I'm going to do is to take pitches until Thursday at noon ET.  Start your engines PR people!  My inbox is open for business until Thursday. 

So send me an e-mail at charlie.odonnell@gmail.com and tell me the following:

1) What is your panel on?

2) Who is on it?

3) Why are you the best person to talk on that topic?  (Don't just feed me your bio... tell me why you're actually better than others.)

4) Tell me what I'll learn that I'm likely to Tweet or blog about.

5) Tell me why I won't walk out in the first five minutes looking for another panel.

On Thursday, I'll recommend 10 panels to vote for.  Pitch away!

Facebook's Twitter envy has gotten out of control.  First they redesigned the interface to make the whole Facebook experience much more about conversational feeds--like Twitter--and now apparently they've just acquired Friendfeed. 

It's not surprising.  Clearly Benchmark looked at the flat traffic of Friendfeed and realized that without a revenue model, and with a post money valuation undoubtedly in the teens, Friendfeed wasn't going to raise a next round at any kind of pleasent smelling pre money.  I wonder if they got their money back.  What's the current price of an engineer these days?  Still a million a pop?  With a team of 12, maybe they salvaged something, and I'd even bet they all broke even.

Whatever they paid for it doesn't matter at all, because their cost of capital is a joke.  The valuations that Facebook has been able to raise money have been astronomical.  So whether they gave cash or stock, it's all a drop in the bucket for Facebook.

What's more problematic is the company's indication that they share a vision with Friendfeed.  This is the "vision" of Friendfeed that has seen essentially flat traffic since January--the vision of everyone drinking from a firehose of the completely unrelated social media apps of everyone they know all at once without any context. 

And mainstreamers think Twitter is too much?  Someone should aim Friendfeed at them!

Here's a photo!

Here's a song!

Here's an article!

Good thing Friendfeed never spread much past the Techcrunch navel gazing fanboys, otherwise someone we care about might have gotten an eye poked out. 

Real time is clearly hot, though--and while the peak of the Friendfeed buzz was clearly behind it, the demand for real time anything couldn't be higher.  It seems like every other day that another Twitter client gets funded or a startup completely changes it's product model to chase after what's happening right now.

But is what's happening right now really that important?  If you're a day trader, perhaps--but with everyone else, I'm not so sure.  I think real time is going to be a real let down for a lot of people.

The problem with many real time apps is that they lack focus and context.  Even with Twitter itself, users need to build in focus and context to get value out of it.  While it's become an integral part of the communication infrastructure--that's what it is--infrastructure.  It's hard to just login to Twitter.com and  get immediate value.  Build in a couple of saved searches, group the people that you follow into "competition" or "media", and now you're cookin'.  Layer on apps and communities like StockTwits and you've got gamechanging services, but just the feed itself is just a dumb pipe. 

More and more I've been feeling like Twitter is just the UGC equivilent of a big telecom--owner of a hugely critical pipe but perhaps a total commodity compared to the value of the services people can build on top of it.  The transatlantic cables changed communication forever, but the businesses that made use of it, in aggregate, were worth much more than the business of owning the cable.  Don't get me wrong--the telecoms are still multi-billion dollar cap companies and I have no doubt that it's investors will make a boatload, but pipes often fancy themselves more than just a pipe--wrongly. 

That's why I can't understand Facebook's insistance on chasing Twitter.  It's already a pipe--a social pipe--the social pipe.  If I had to be the social pipe or the real time pipe, I think I'd rather be the social one.  Social makes stuff more relevent to me than "now" does.

Compare that to Foursquare, which I just made the homepage of my mobile browser.  When I login, I get to see where all of my friends are right now.  Simple, perhaps, but infinately valuable for a specific purpose.  Foursquare's laser focus and geographic context makes its data that much more useful.  When I login to Twitter, I don't even see my friends answers to "What are you doing?" anymore.  I get Foursquare checkins and blog link shares and loves from Last.fm and Follow Fridays--all at the at the very moment they post something, not at the moment I need it.

By stripping away the services that create focus and context, Friendfeed seemed to want to compete in the race to the bottom of the value chain.  The more and more these services just open up to everything and everything, the more they feel like... a phonebook.  That's certainly what if felt like when my second grade teacher found me on Facebook to ask if that was the same Charlie O'Donnell from Brooklyn they interviewed in the paper and on the news about this weekend's helicopter/plane crash.  Twenty five years ago, she would have looked me up in the white pages, and now she checks Facebook. 

The more my Facebook feed gets cluttered with Friendfeed-like all-inclusiveness, the less useful it's going to be on it's own.  I don't want to listen to music and see pictures and read quotes and play games in real time just as my friends are doing it.  Don't get me wrong--having all that piping in the ground makes the game playing and music listening that much more fun and useful, but for those apps.  I want to watch a TV connected to a big fat datapipe... I don't actually want to watch my TV while sitting IN the pipe.