Perhaps these have been the same people who’ve declared Google+ a failure over and over again. Even the fastest growing social network is not enough in a world that has Facebook. And even if there would be tens of millions of registered users for the service already after a few months, at least they weren’t using this “ghost town” of a network (see the discussion around #aavekaupunki in Finnish). Yeah, it can only be a failed attempt from the Mountain View engineers to build a Facebook clone, since that is the gold standard of social networking that every other contender must be evaluated against.

To all those people surprised about the launch of Google “Search Plus Your World” with integration to Google+ profiles, circles and posts, I’d like to present the following question: did you think for a moment that Google was not going to leverage it’s core competence (search) in the social network it was building? Vice versa, was it not blatantly obvious right from the start that the company would utilize this new social data source it has unlimited access to (G+) for improving the relevancy of search results?

Ok, enough of the “my network is better than your network” wars. For the end user there’s precious little significance in which US based company is luring in the biggest number of status updates per second. What we ultimately want is for the creation, sharing, discovery and consumption of relevant information to be as convenient as possible, so the question is: what can I get out of a social search engine that wasn’t possible before?

Yesterday I came across a brilliant presentation from Jeff Atwood (behind Coding Horror and more notably Stack Overflow), which contained this quote from Clay Shirky:

Work is when your boss tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid.

work is motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid.

It was late Sunday evening and I had happily spent a good number of hours reading work related articles on my free time and loving every moment of it. The though of the looming Monday morning and returning back to mundane Work tasks made the concept strike a nerve and I decided I wanted to post it on a social network, as people generally do nowadays in such situations. I went googling for the source of the quote, to get a link that would be shareable (yes, it is a word). This is what I received:

It turns out I had actually already posted an article referencing the very same speech 11 months ago, only I didn’t have any recollection of it. It was on my Posterous “blog” that I’ve used mainly as a public noteboard of interesting articles I come across regarding knowledge work. Due to the ultimate simplicity of Posterous, it’s very quick to compose an email with quotes, images & links, send it to the Posterous email address  and see it turn into a blog post, which is why you don’t need to spend much time thinking about the topic itself. A noteboard is only useful if you know to go and read its content, which is what I didn’t know. But Google did.

Ok, the result in the example is most likely taken from a tweet rather than a Google+ post, since that didn’t exist last February yet. The point is not really about Google+ itself, rather it serves as yet another reminder that the web knows you better than you do. Instead of being frightened of the privacy implications, what I would recommend everyone to do is to make the most of it – exploit the intelligence of the machine that we’ve all helped to build.

Related artists. Who to follow. Recommendations based on your browsing history. The Web has to be working for us, not the other way around.

— Jukka Niiranen (@jukkan) January 5, 2012

For example: in a world of personalized search, is there any longer a need for social bookmarking á la Delicious? Why should I bother saving links into my own list on a separate point solution like Delicious, when I might as well share the link to my followers/circles/friends/whatever and trust that the system will bring it up if I ever need it again? Trying to come up with descriptive tags for links all on my own seems like a futile attempt compared to the power that the networked online society can have on building relevancy for the shared content.

To continue on the thoughts expressed by Shirky, sharing is work, but not Work, as it feels inherently like the right thing to do and requires effort, yet you don’t get paid for it. “Big Work drives the economy, little work drives the Internet.” It took around 100 million hours to create all of the content on Wikipedia, but thanks to the evolutionary nature of social technology and the network effect, the next Wikipedia will most likely take only a fraction of those hours. It has to, and we really shouldn’t settle for anything less. It is therefore imperative that the tools being built by companies operating in the realm of IT, be it the Google Goliaths or the start-up Davids, strive to make the most of what the collective little work of the online population has already built, because that is the best way to foster motivation of workers (with a lowercase w). This motivation, in turn, will be more and more in demand as the human civilization is facing problems that its capitalist system is not very good at solving. The little work can go a long way.

As what comes to the search engine business that built Google / Google built (any which way you want to look at it), we’ve already seen signs that indexed search has peaked. The way we used to search for content is on the decline, and if Google would be sticking to what they do best now, fighting against the next big thing, they would be standing on the deck of a sinking ship. You could well blame them of being hopelessly late to the game of social, but based on what I’ve seen from them during the past year, I wouldn’t count them out just yet. The reason is, I believe we don’t yet have nearly enough tools for social technology to make us as smart as we could be.

Right now we have the infrastructure  in place for networking with people and sharing content. That’s a good start and it’s been a big enough revolution on its own to fuel the stellar rise of services like Facebook and Twitter. However, if we’d just continue on the same path of ever increasing tweet counts, would we end up becoming increasingly smart or rather end up in the lunatic asylum? If we look at the content search functionality offered by Twitter (basic keyword search on less than a week’s worth of data) or Facebook (absolutely none!), it’s easy to see that the game has only just begun on developing content relevance and discovery algorithms that deliver real added value over simply consuming an ever growing feed of data. While social media has brought us new strategies to overcome information overload through relying on recommendations and content sharing  by people we know/trust, this won’t scale indefinitely, and it is in fact quickly contributing to the very problem it once promised to solve.

In order for us to keep getting smarter through social networks, the filters available to us will need to get smarter first. The question is: can Google produce the missing UI needed for harnessing the true power of social networks? And if not Google, then who?

Anyway, I though I’d highlight a few examples of a more recent trend that’s becoming visible in the world of social web. It’s always been about telling the apps what you are doing, thinking or liking, where about and how. Now, after feeding the networks with data about yourself, they are gradually becoming smart enough to tell you what you are like.

Where Do You Go?

Foursquare is not new, but here ‘s a very quick recap: you pull out your mobile phone, launch the app and see what venues are close to you (based on mobile network location data, or GPS for the hifi geeks). You click to check-in to the place you are currently. The end.

Ok, so of course you can also view where your friends have been checking in to. That is, if any of them would be similar gadget geeks like you. I’m pretty sure eventually the location information will become a natural part of the social fabric (waiting for FB Places to arrive here in Finland), but as of now, in reality it isn’t for everyone yet.

What can you get from the location data then? For example, this heatmap of where I’ve been checking in around the city of Helsinki. Sure, I don’t spend all my time with a finger on the check-in button, nor do the public venues available on the service give an accurate view of where I spend my time. Still, it would be foolish to say that the heatmap doesn’t give me insight on the locations that are a part of my ‘graph in the geographic sense. With enough data and the right presentation method, casual transactions can start to accumulate a whole new value added.

Take a trip down Memolane

Pretty much every social app has a timeline view of some kind, similar to the FB wall. It’s sort of a divider between generations of applications, as many of the oldskool software and business applicatios are perfectly happy with asking you the user to punch in more and more data without trying to present it back to the users in any aggregated “what’s been happening lately” view. Another common dilemma is that it’s hard if not impossible to automatically combine data from different applications. That’s how bad life used to be only a few years ago.

Integration in the cloud is as easy as OAuth (open authorization), so in a matter of a few clicks you can be connecting the various dots fragmented around your networks into a single stream of information about yourself. Now all there’s left to do is to put a nice timeline UI on top of the data and you’ve got Memolane. Your tweets, check-ins, FB posts, Last.fm scrobbles and everything else in a chronological order that allows you to travel back in time and reminisce about what you did last summer. Yes, again the web knows what you’ve long since forgotten in your selective human brain.

Get Glue’d to the media around you

Apps on top of apps – that’s the future we’re already living in. Why keep on re-inventing the wheel when you could be focusing on designing the rest of the vehicle instead?

Back when Last.fm launched their audioscrobbler app in 2003 the concept of sharing playlist data right from your WinAmp in real time to a web-based service was very novel. Keep in mind, this was waaaay before social networks made sharing and liking and retweeting something that’s considered an everyday activity. I kept on accumulating information their database on a regular basis, then stopped using them, then returned back to an active user thanks to their integration with Spotify.

The concept of scrobbling remains cool, but in this day & age there are people out there who cannot be satisfied by merely sharing what track they are listening to. Enter GetGlue. What they’ve built is an almost universal system for checking in to things. Books, movies,TV shows, games, gadgets, restaurants etc. By installing an add-on for your browser and browsing one of hundreds of supported sites that GetGlue recognizes as having content items that their database tracks, you’ll see a toolbar at the bottom of the window. The toolbar not only allow you to like/unlike/favorite/saveforlater or share to FB/Twitter, but it also shows who else has been liking the content in question + recommendations of what else you might like, based on the user data similarity.

Sitting home alone on your sofa and watching Dexter doesn’t have to be unsocial time anymore. Reach for your smartphone, launch the GetGlue app and do a check-in. You’ll see who else has checked into the same show, so you can go and spy their profile to see where their remote has taken them next. While at it, why not do a check-in to that bottle of wine you’ve been sipping? Come on, you’ll get badges as a reward as well!

OMG, where’s my privacy?!?

The first reaction from a casual web surfer on all of the new ways in which you can expose yourself to the world will surely be a cry for privacy. Isn’t this the kind of a surveilance society that George Orwell warned us about by writing the 1984? Only it’s worse, since the innocent web surfers have been brainwashed to report back to big brother seemingly on their own free will, just by giving them pictures of digital badges! Someone please stop this insanity!

I’m going to let you in on a little secret that explains why the situation is not quite that grim at all:

The web knows you because we are the web.

Back in the 90′s, the world wide web was born as a network of documents. Today it is a network of people. Small but profound difference. While it is still perfectly possible for anyone to choose to use the web as a big document management system and just passively consume content that is published there by large organizations and media entities, there is an increasing amount of benefits to be gained by being an active participant instead. Once you cross that line, you start to exist in the web. It may be behind a number of aliases and alter egos, or it may be with your real name and identity (probably both). You may exist in different forms and footprints to anonymous surfers, identified users and verified friends or co-workers. Nevertheless, your actions become a small but integrated part of the fabric of web. Just like you’re a tiny little piece of society, still making an impact all the same.

The web knows you’ve clicked. Google knows you’ve searched. Your ISP knows you’ve downloaded, so don’t waste too much energy on worrying about leaving a trail of what you do when using a networked system like the web. A more interesting question to focus on is how much more can you know about yourself with the help of the web and what value could be derived from the data that you and other fellow citizens of the web are capable of feeding into it. As long as the publishing of data is done through a conscious decision and you pay attention to where the line of privacy is set, it’s hardly any more reckless behaviour than using the web in the old document oriented way. Same old channel, just a very different application.

Becoming digital

I bought my first mobile phone in 1997 (see the full timeline here). Prior to this I had absolutely no digital contact data assets whatsoever: just a rolodex, a few paper lists of addresses and the good ol’ memory. Sure, the world was a much smaller place back then, and as a high school  student living in the offline era there wasn’t that many people who you didn’t either meet at school or after school on a weekly basis. It was the villager way of life and I think we were all quite happy with it back then.

Mobile phones brought us the concept of electronic phone books, with SIM cards as the media used for transferring these from one device to another. Email client applications like Eudora and Outlook Express gave us the option to store email addresses as contacts in their own address books. Pretty soon the phones began to connect with your PC through a cable and handy software like Nokia PC Suite (don’t get me started on that one…). This meant you now had the problem of several mismatching address books on your computer, so the whole contact management concept started to become painful not just for corporations but private persons as well.

During the past few years we’ve seen some improvement on the situation, thanks to the wide availability of mobile data connections and push email services in the corporate world. If you keep your personal contacts and business contacts in the same address book, updating the records in MS Outlook and synchronizing data through MS Exchange (replace with your favorite non-Redmond software) has made phone number and email address management almost a non-issue.

What’s the problem?

Well, while we now have fairly decent solutions for address book sync and some established formats to make interoperability across platforms less painful, these are essentially solutions for the wrong problem. You see, not only have the address books become digital but so has life. Here’s my personal evidence of this:

• Everybody and their dog is on Facebook. With hundreds of millions of registered profiles, we’re far beyond the point where you’d need to make guesses about whether social networks will really catch on or not. They came, they saw, they conquered. Sure, you might be on VK or Renren instead of FB. That makes no difference, social networks are now as universal as SMS.
• I have “contacts” who don’t know me, nor do I know them IRL. The may be bloggers or twitterers who I follow regularly, which means they’re relevant people to me on a much higher frequency than old acquaintances in the address book who I may not interact with even once per year.
• A job is no longer for life. Knowing where someone worked 3 years ago, what his title was and how to reach him through land line or snail mail is of decreasing relevance to anyone. I’m more interested in knowing where you’re working today and with whom you’ve worked with, which is what LinkedIn was invented for (7 years ago already).
• The number of phone calls I make is dropping every year. I’ve reached the point where calls are the least preferred method of communication in my mobile “phone”. No matter how much the mobile revolution initially increased the amount of phone calls, it will only decline from here onwards. Meeting in person is effective for establishing shared understanding, exchanging textual information asynchronously is great for managing details, reacting to synchronous voice communication requests (a.k.a. phone calls) is, well… a distraction I like to minimize. The phone call is dead.
• Christmas is pretty much the only reason for me to use postal services nowadays. Be it cards or gifts, I’d prefer to replace them both with bits and services. Similarly, if you’re arranging a party, you’ll probably send an FB invite with the relevant information. Recording you home address is therefore not so relevant for me, whereas knowing your current/recent location through Foursquare might be much more interesting.

When I think about these facts, then glance at my Outlook address book, I see two worlds collide. Yes, may both be about people and communication, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

How can we manage?

What’s different in this brave new digital life when compared to the old offline world is that the number of channels and players is significantly higher and it will just keep on increasing. The possibilities become ever greater and so will our pains with the traditional address books. Tim O’Reilly has been writing about the missing Web 2.0 Address Book in 2007, others have speculated about the data management concepts it requires in 2010. If we’re lucky, at this rate the solution will arrive maybe a few years after HTML5 has become mainstream. In short, we’ve got to stop waiting for a new solution and find a way to live with the contacts we have for now.

For my task at hand, I chose Gist as the web application to take care of my immediate contact data management needs. Like any contact manager, it promises the same old “one place for all contacts” Holy Grail. What the service does is it asks you for your Facebook, Twitter and Gmail account authorization, then pulls in the contacts from each service and tries its best to merge them. LinkedIn contacts can be imported through a file, as can naturally Outlook data. In addition, there’s also a ranking algorithm that tries to identify the importance of each contact based on communication history, and by also allowing you to adjust the score, so the most frequent interactive connections float to the top.

Is it the new address book then? Who knows, I’m sure there’s also many other valid contenders besides Gist out there. The main point is that this approach of utilizing networks and integrating online channels blows the Outlook contact list right out of the water, no doubt about it. This is what’s relevant to me in 2010. Not the daunting task of recording phone numbers and street addresses completely separately from the interactions and channels. The information and the interactions are out there, just bring the data to me and let me enrich it as new connections get established and new channels emerge. Give me an app I can install on my Android phone and a plug-in I can use when viewing Gmail. Allow me to discover more about my contacts through suggestions of in which networks they are present in.

I started with the assumption that I wanted to update and keep my address books in order. It turns out this wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. What I really wanted was a way to keep in touch.

A healthy dose of reality

When going through some of the ancient entries originating from my SIM cards, I realized something which can be all too easy to forget while sitting in front of your PC: not everybody is online. I’d like to say “not yet”, but that would be perhaps too optimistic. Considering how young the trend of being present in the web with your real name and real thoughts still is, even in the short history of the mainstream internet, the current divide between who “are” in the web and who’re just consuming the content is quite understandable. Blogging requires effort, LinkedIn may not fit every kind of profession and Twitter is something most people can’t get their head around yet. The FB boom is covering up the fact that most people are not yet ready to adopt the digital lifestyle. Fair enough, I’ll keep you as an offline entry in my contact list, waiting for the day when you will be ready.

Then came Twitter and all the TweetDeck style clients, which claimed the “real-time” and “dashboard” titles respectively. Suddenly the old RSS reader applications started to feel like a graveyard of old and irrelevant news, when all the big stories and best articles seemed to flow from your tweeps via URL shorteners within hours or minutes from publishing. All this meant that browsing through your RSS feeds became more of a chore that you had to do every now and then, a bit like keeping your inbox clean. At the same time I had also abandoned Netvibes due to its continuous technical glitches and moved over to the simple choice, i.e. Google Reader. We all know Google is great at productivity apps for information management utility services, so this further played down the status of RSS feeds for me.

I started to feel increasingly unbalanced in this situation where my online media diet had transformed from an á la carte meal to a series of fast food pick ups. Sure, I was getting absolutely great links through Twitter, but my ability to focus on following any single topic was rapidly eroding as the gap between RSS feeds and real-time feeds was growing. One night when sitting on a train without any headphones or books with me, I spent a couple of hours on gReader for Android and went through the unread items in by Google Reader queue. When I reached my destination, I had started to better understand what the world of information around me looked like and how I should change my reading habits.

First, the concept of “unread items” is a relic from working with email clients, therefore we should get rid of in the world of feeds and tweets. Trying to use this metaphor there is like saying “you have 6,000,000 unread sites in the internet”. Only messages from a person to a person should carry the assumption that you have the duty to read through the item. This is why spam in your inbox makes you so angry, whereas a banner on a site can just be gracefully ignored, even if they both would spend exactly the same amount of time in your line of sight.

Second, you shouldn’t read all RSS’s with a single application. Yes, technically you could have just one great tool for managing all the bits that are distributed through the RSS format, but you don’t do both work and personal email through the same inbox either, do you? (At least I hope you don’t?) There are two main types of content that I have on my list of RSS subscriptions: posts and news. What I call posts is the traditional blogging kind of content that is written and published by people who don’t write this content for a living (they may get paid for it, but it’s not their main task). Then we have the news content, which is the traditional newspaper style articles that get published by either old or new media houses, be it WSJ or TechCrunch. Treating these two separately is what I believe to be the key to resolving my RSS anxiety.

Any feed that regularly publishes more than 2 items per day should be categorized as news. No matter how remarkable the content might be, it should be consumed differently. Just like you don’t read through each and every article in the morning newspaper (if you still subscribe to a physical paper, that is), the news feeds are meant to be glanced at from a high level and then read selectively. Whereas if you follow a blog that consistently delivers good analysis or entertaining stories, reading through each and every post at least with some level of attention may well be justified. Getting caught in reading “the whole newspaper” is all too easy if the delivery channel and presentation of the content is identical to posts. Instead of searching for a tool that can separate and categorize the content just the way you want it, do the easy thing: split the feeds into two totally separate RSS readers.

After an autumn clean-up, my toolbox for the digital media diet is now as follows:

• TweetDeck for Twitter feed/lists/hashtags, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare updates
• Google Reader for blog post RSS feeds
• Netvibes for news RSS feeds

I went through my old Netvibes dashboards one by one, moving subscriptions to either Google Reader, a brand new dashboard in Netvibes or just deleting them (wish I had even more courage with the last category). Similarly, anything that was filling up my Google Reader in a newsfeed style got moved to Netvibes. When it came to reviewing some of the older blogs that had become less active, I also checked to see if the writer was nowadays in Twitter and if they were posting any content of interest over there. The same kind of quantity metrics apply to tweets as well, but that’s a whole different post I need to write later.

So far I must say I feel considerably more at ease with the feeds and other information sources around me. Let’s see if the system works on a longer term, or until new channels come along. If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, I guess it’s all about not searching for the one ultimate hammer but rather selecting the right tool for each job.

With the explosion of sites and services where many of us register with our real name and create a real profile, the number of potential hits to be found is growing. This makes it all more interesting to see how Google ranks different sites that publish your name, because they are very likely to be not something you would have expected. Anyway, that’s just a side track of the topic I’m trying to get at, so let’s see what the results for a search on Jukka Niiranen looked like today on Google.com:

The first hit goes to a namesake of mine. Nothing unexpected there, as there’s plenty of us. My personal domain niiranen.eu comes in on places 3 and 4, after that we move to the usual LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. But wait: what the —- is Bantam Live, and why does Google think it’s the second most likely page that a person would be looking for when searching my name?

Ok, here’s the story. Bantam Live is a hosted CRM service, which is nothing like the traditional Enterprise Software that CRM used to be like in the 90′s and early 00′s. It’s in fact more like the social network services that people like you and me are actively using when not in the office. I tried the service, loved the concept and decided to show some respect by writing a tweet about it.

So what, there’s a million tweets every minute, right? Well, it just so happens that smart companies nowadays are listening to the conversation that takes place in Twitter. So was John Rourke, the CEO of Bantam Networks. Not only did he retweet it, but the company decided to quote the tweet on their own site’s front page. Nothing much I can or should do about that, since it’s a piece of text I have intentionally broadcasted to the world to see.

The end result is that now Google thinks I have something to do with the service. But is that actually such a big mistake at all? Isn’t it rather a lucky shot that the search engine has managed to surface such a connection, instead of blindly following hyperlinks and counting words? Sure, there’s absolutely nothing dynamic about the tweet text ending up on the page in this case, but it gives a glimpse of what could be possible with the data that’s already out there in the social network sites. Without having to build a proper semantic web to replace the web we have right now, the mere association of Twitter identities to people and companies could already have a huge impact on how the search engines might begin to understand the online content in a whole new way.

The real revolution of course is already taking place. Whether you call it Social CRM or something else, the fact that the customers now have a voice to speak with is creating a big demand for solutions and strategies that allow the companies to listen to the conversation that is taking place out there, and most importantly to be able to react to it. It might be a topic that I should rather write about in my CRM blog, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to draw the line between fun web apps and serious business platforms. Which is exactly the whole point of the revolution.

I felt like such a stalker, but was I really stalking on the poor guy? That is a question I was left pondering as we parted our ways and I moved on to the next list of tweets. Unlike in Facebook and some other networks that are repeatedly making headlines for alleged privacy violations, Twitter truly represents the raw power of untamed social networking applications. There is no privacy, period. The name of the game is in the public broadcasting of your thoughts to an unspecified audience. You don’t need to worry about the concept of a “friend”, as there are no friends in Twitter. You can of course follow other users, but this doesn’t have any impact on what they can see and know about you. It’s all out there and that’s why we love it. That’s what makes it the ultimate sharing platform.

Let’s take a look into the future for a minute. Layar is a great mobile app for demonstarting the concept of augmented reality. How it works is you launch the AR browser in your mobile phone, point the camera to any direction and Layar will start to append the image with location based information. The usual stuff like restaurants and points of interest are of course available, but you can also view things like geotagged tweets. With the kind of devices we are carrying around in our pockets, it is not at all far fetched to envision a time when you can pull up an augmented reality browser that shows you not just the buildings around you but the names of the people. Think of avatars and @username’s floating on top of the commuters in the traffic jams. The ultimate nude scanner for your mobile?

In the tech or media industry, or any knowledge work intensive line of business, it can no longer be considered bizarre behaviour to be constantly revealing yourself to the world through various social media sites and services. It is rather becoming the norm of what is expected. You better be active on Twitter and Foursquare, otherwise there’s a risk of people thinking you don’t “get it”. Ok, I’m perfectly fine with that trend, with my active sign-up policy to new and exciting web apps.

It is only when the virtual world meets the physical world that things can start to feel ackward. When you meet a familiar avatar in flesh and blood, there cab be a sudden sensation of “OMG, I know too much about you, yet you don’t know anything about me”. The unilateral nature of the relationship can play tricks with your head. People you’ve never met but who you’ve followed through Twitter can start to feel like pseudo celebrities, even though they are likely to be far more average Joe’s in reality than you are, with nothing better to do than posting stuff online 24/7.

I think we’re reaching the uncanny valley of social networks. This concept was originally introduced for describing how in the field of robotics there is a point in which the machines can begin to look too human, thus causing a natural feeling of revulsion in us human beings. In the world of social networks, this same sensation may be achieved by simply knowing too much about the stranger standing next to you. Something that is perfectly cool when sitting in front of your monitor at home can suddenly feel just plain “wrong” when meeting face-to-face. Sharing your life and thoughts is great, but just don’t do it when I’m around. God, us human beings can be such weird creatures at times.

Is there going to be a moment when we simply get enough of revealing ourselves to others? Will the new sociality trend reach its peak and make way for the ultimate privacy backlash, where people simply refuse to give out any personal details to any online service? I’d say that’s an unlikely scenario. Certainly we’ll need to go through the emotions and find the right balance, time and time again, but eventually we’ll have to make it across the valley. With social media and robots alike.

Here’s a demonstration of the core difference. Slashdot.org is down (at the time of writing), so do I go to Facebook and yell this out to my friends? Hell no, I haven’t got enough nerdy buddies that would care about it. But what about on Twitter?

Nowadays the best way to determine whether a popular online service is down just for you or the entire web population is to do a search on Twitter. There is always going to be some people wondering the exact same question as you, to the extent that they will go through the effort of tweeting about it. That’s the real-time pulse that Google is still missing.

If only Twitter’s front page would be designed in a search oriented way, driving people towards entering search terms instead of new tweets (who needs more of them, anyway?), the perception of the service could be altered in a quite profound way. Until then, the average user will upon initial viewing just see it as Facebook without Farmville and Mafia Wars. For some people, that will of course be reason enough already.

Anyway, I decided to install WordPress 2.8 instead. Here we are now.