I’ve been so focused on the user experience of Google’s new social network Plus that I haven’t thought very much about the big picture, I must admit. Listening tonight to an interview with Plus designer Joseph Smarr on the IEEE Podcast it became clear to me that for at least some of Plus’s leadership the goal is not to win social networking outright, or to kill any competitors, but to disrupt the social networking economy with a big enough, good enough and popular enough service that the walled gardens (Facebook in particular) are forced to open up interoperability enough that their users can communicate with the significant enough number of people in their lives that use a different social network. Back in the bad old days, customers of one phone network couldn’t call customers of other phone networks, then people couldn’t email out-of-network. Today people can’t be social across networks, but few people mind because everyone they care about is on Facebook. Plus is a big push to change that. Interoperability will be better for the open web and thus better for Google. It should also be better for consumer choice and satisfaction, in the long run. As long as Face-oogling or whatever doesn’t become as frustrating in the future as dealing with phone companies is today. But they do have interoperability!

I don’t know why I hadn’t thought about it this way before. I hope the plan works. One more cool thing about Plus.

I’d post a link to my Plus profile here but I wrote this whole post on my phone, sitting on the sidewalk in front of my house, in the dark. (Cutting sod that’s grown over my walkway.) I’m not hard to find there though and am lots of fun to talk to, I promise.

Last Spring I was weeding my yard and thinking “what new fields of data online could I gain programmatic access to, subject to some analysis and then use for strategic advantage?” Blog comments came to mind as an under-utilized set of data: structured, publicly available and created as a result of casual gestures online. BackType came to mind because that’s what they did at the time, search for comments left by a particular person. I thought about a lot of different ways I could analyze or filter feeds of blog comments, cross referenced with other sets of information or delivered through various interfaces. Most of my ideas didn’t come to anything.

That’s when I thought “how about I take a list of high-priority individuals, track their comments around the web and use that as a way to sniff for news?” I used Robert Scoble’s Twitter List of Most Influential People in Tech, but it could have been any list of people with home page URLs published in a public, predictable place. If I was a geotechnology beat specialist, I might have used (heck, maybe I still will) a list of geotech industry specialists.

Source of data, available programmatically, with a structured field with which some data can be filtered out from others based on some criteria, criteria data-set available from another source already. Put all of those circumstances together and you’ve got an opportunity.

That’s what I did, as described in this post on BackType’s acquisition today by Twitter. That feature is probably as good as dead, now.

I just thought I’d share that thought-process here. I think about things like this all the time, but especially when I set aside some time for my brain to think about it. You can too. Publicly available, structured data enables all kinds of strategic possibilities.

I am a big advocate of low-cost virtual assistant program Fancyhands: $35 per month for up to 15 tasks requested by email. I’ve posted some pretty complicated requests over the last 6 months or so that I’ve been subscribed. People ask me about the service often, so I thought I’d show readers here how it’s been going over the last few months. It’s been interesting. Like so many things in life, I think you may get out of it what you take the time to put in.

Below is a picture of my email inbox, with a search for the Fancyhands threads. Below that is a more detailed discussion of each request, but the high level take-aways seem to be: I’m not remembering to use anywhere near my full quota, many of the tasks I request aren’t working out so well but the ones that are working out have been great.

You might think: Marshall, you need to make simpler requests – those are the ones that get the best results. But you’d be surprised at the crazy requests I’ve gotten great results from in months past! Like: send me a spreadsheet of every daily newspaper in the US, its name, its location and its URL. No problem! That was great. I think it depends largely on who happens to answer my request on the other end. I’ve gotten some really sophisticated responses and some really frustrating ones. (more…)

I read someone say on Twitter the other day that they really appreciate it when bloggers just share news on Twitter if it’s short enough it can be reported in 140 characters or less. Writing a post about it for nothing but pageviews, when you really didn’t need to go on and on is just poor manners.

So now I will just Tweet news when it’s short – and I’ll include a link back to this post explaining why for the first few times I do that. Maybe. What do you think of this idea? It does neglect RSS readers, Facebook users, etc. There is that. If it decreases the amount of click-bait BS around the web though, that could be a net win, no?

Quick photo! Testing testing!! New WordPress iOS app!

People are freaking out about iPad super-app Flipboard (a very nice RSS reader, if you’re not familiar). I don’t get it. I love the power of feeds and I like Flipboard a lot. As a content creator, it sounds like a blessing to me. The service even shows the ads we put in our RSS feeds. (I just looked, ours are there.) What’s not to love?

I suppose people say it robs publishers of pageviews. Here’s the math I do in my head. If 1 million people read 10 of your articles and 5% of the time they will click through to see your site itself – that’s 500,000 free pageviews you just got. Did you have some other plan in mind that would bring those million people to your content but with a higher conversion rate? Did Flipboard cannibalize your existing plan? I suspect that’s not how it goes down – instead 1m people are exposed to your content that wouldn’t have been otherwise. That sounds win-win to me.

Who am I to say this? I do publish content for a living. Though I don’t own the business I do it for – I have led the growth of that site from a 3 person staff to now 15. Publishing tech news content. That’s where I’m coming from.

I love finding Twitter lists like a good curated collection of Anthropologists or GeoTech pros and subscribing to the links they share on Twitter inside Flipboard.

Maybe there are concerns that I’m missing. Somebody tell me the rest of the story.

I am at the San Francisco airport headed home and super excited about the Twitter/Mediasift announcement today. I posted a couple of cryptic tweets that I thought I’d flesh out a little bit here, inspired by the news.

* I believe we’ll look back at these days when social media search is primarily for brand monitoring like geocities “under construction”

By this I mean that there are so many more things to search for on the social web than just brand reputation monitoring – people talking about you. That’s clearly what most people are interested in today but I think in the future we’ll see that there’s far more value to glean from discovery of communities of interest, the nature of their interest, patterns and correlations, changing connections over time, weak bonds and weak signals, early hints and wise ruminations. Maybe thinking the world will find wise ruminations of value is a stretch.

But my point is, there are so many more opportunities online beyond covering-your-ass that I think someday the focus on that will seem silly. Give me an introduction to a new voice articulating where the world might be tomorrow and I’ll trade a chance to hear ten utterances by people about me today. Right?

* I believe that someday soon, creation of keyword lists for group discovery will be a hot part of our industry

Finding or ranking influencers is getting hot already, but determining what keywords can help outline a relevant community of interest when found in their discussion remains a big unmet challenge. There’s too much content being produced every moment and producers are so disinterested in structuring their own communication that the creation or discovery of the structure of a community and its communication is most likely to happen from the outside in, I think. At least in large part.

What language do people use that designates them as belonging to a particular community? Lately I’ve been hunting for Twitter Lists of employees of certain companies. Sometimes those lists are called Team, Staff or Work. Sometimes not. In less structured environments, what language gets used casually that can be used to draw a line between a group being watched vs not, between people relevant to a particular query or not.

That Mediasift allows developers to filter the Twitter fire hose for the presence of 10k keywords for the entry level price makes me picture a query like “who are the community of people who use these 10k keywords on Twitter?”. Creation of that list of keywords, to discover a small group inside a group of hundreds of millions of Twitter users just by the language they use, that’s a technology opportunity if you ask me.

* I believe someday NLP (natural language processing) parsing of business from social messages will make both and the stream much more valuable

How much personal communication is appropriate in a business context? That’s what people always want to know in a new medium. Both are valuable and important though. I think someday we’ll have technologies that will be able to tell the difference and give me control over how to view it all. Let’s say I just discover someone who is business relevant to me. I my say “show me a profile of their interests and circumstances on a personal level, but interrupt me during working hours if they post business-relevant messages.”. Or vice-versa.

Such analysis would mke the personal more valuable because we could appreciate it. It would make the business more valuable because the signal to noise ratio would change and allow us to capture more of the must-read content, depending on the nature of our relationship. Both put separately and summarized would mke awesome context.

Plane boarding, just some initial articulation of some thoughts!

Related: See my recent RWW post on How to Track the Future of the Music Industry (Or Almost Anything Else)