Monty Flinsch

I’ve been using Facebook for a while now to connect with friends and family and at first I loved it. Facebook was fun and I felt like the Web was a smaller, more intimate space because of it. I even got my wife to start using it which is a big deal given her general aversion to geek toys. I accumulated a pretty substantial number of friends and colleagues from real life and the web faithfully changing my status whenever I could muster the creativity to come up with a sentence that started with “is”. I would occasionally post on someone’s wall and they might post back, or maybe I’d upload a photo or two to share. All of that was working fine and I thought Facebook would become the place where my worlds connected. But it didn’t turn out that way…

There a certain discontinuity about Facebook even with the news feed and status updates trying to aggregate the bits of information that are relevant to me. There’s just not enough real information coming across the line to keep me interested. Add to that the swarm of requests to join groups, applications and other crap that clogs the Facebook stream and I’m thinking it’s time to give it up. Don’t get me wrong, facebook is cool, it’s just not that relevant. I want something fresher, more relevant, and that allows me to parse bits of information from a wider group of people than my one or two degrees of friend separation can offer.

Just in the nick of time comes the micro-blogging upstart Twitter. It’s got a dead simple proposition: post and read bits of information in a single continuous stream from a group of people that you choose to follow. No friend requests, no “is”, no groups, no ads. Just drinking from the stream of consciousness fire hose. I’m following about 40 people, ranging from my daughter at college to Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble with all sorts of people in between. It’s a wild, diverse and amazingly relevant information feed.

What amazes me about Twitter is that I can follow just about anyone, and many of the people I follow also choose to follow me. The conversation, while disjointed, is relevant and to date has not gotten out of hand. I’m seeing content that I would normally find out about on Digg or one of the tech blogs earlier and in a more raw state than before Twitter. I love reading Michael Arrington’s bombastic tweets which then appear later as much more refined posts to Techcrunch.

So I set up Twitter to feed my facebook status, thats all I was using FB for anyway. I don’t even visit Facebook most days, but my Twitter feed is blazing away pretty much constantly. I’m pretty sure I won’t be back to Facebook other than to occasionally check on my friends, but then given the lack of real connection on Facebook I think I’d rather email or call them if I really want to connect. I don’t really care that much what you’re doing, I care deeply about what you’re thinking. Twitter comes closer to a thought feed than anything I’ve seen yet.

So go on, get yourself a Twitter account before your name is taken. If you like it you might want to try Twhirl, which brings Twitter to the desktop in a very sweet UI that resembles an IM client. It’s nice to have a live feed without refreshing your browser. Even nicer to have that browser back for surfing.

If you’re interested in what I’m thinking you should consider following me on Twitter at twitter.com/mflinsch

Update:
Matt Maroon has written a great post on why Facebook just isn’t that special, and if I haven’t completely offended you by this point maybe you’d enjoy reading it.  He echoes some of my concerns but takes it to the next level by asking how Facebook possibly compares in its impact to what Google has done.  Matt’s right, in my mind, that the Internet isn’t a social thing…  That really struck me, and I think I might agree.  What I’m doing on Twitter isn’t really all that social, in some ways it’s more voyeuristic than participatory.  I’m scanning the feed  for the next meme, looking for relevance rather than a relationship.  I have plenty of relationship contact in real life and do not need the Internet to fill that space for me.  But I sure do need the Internet to inform me faster about things that are not clicking in my existing social network.   Anyway, read Matt’s post, it’s good.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Twitter, the micro blogging startup from Obvious in San Francisco.  Twitter has a simple purpose, allow users to post small blurbs of text (tweets) to the service which are read by an individual user’s followers.  It’s a sweet service and does one thing really well.  More than a status or presence message, and less than a blog post, Twitter fills a void in the 2.0 space.  The product emerged in an organic fashion and given the rather simple and inexpensive development pathway (read Ruby on Rails) did not require a traditional start up approach.

Guy Kawasaki has launched an RSS aggregator called Alltop that resembles Twitter in that it also does one reasonably simple thing quite well.  Both of these services are great examples of what I think is the next hot business trend: the Micro StartUp.

Venture capital has clearly adapted to this trend as can be seen with the emergence of the Y Combinator and the Founders Co-op among others. The business model is radically different from traditional VC models in that the initial investment is in the range of $10k to $20k instead of low to mid seven figures.  Business plans are eschewed in favor of the ability to rapidly produce a functional application.  Business models are often left in flux in favor of achieving first to market status.  I’m still not sure how Twitter plans to monetize their service.

I’ve been preaching about opening access to content production with wikis and blogs and how this represents a radical power shift in the publishing industry.  I think the micro startup phenomenon is evidence of a similar trend in the arena of idea realization.  How cool is it that a small group of people can launch a product to a global marketplace with a tiny budget and a project life cycle that is measure in weeks rather than months or years?

Given that both the technology and business case for much of what we’re doing in the web2.0 space is still emerging it really makes sense to me that we try small steps that can be easily realized rather than grand unification projects that often spend longer in development than the projected life span of the product being developed.

I’m thinking this is cool.