I love how the web as we know it is much like a living organism that we are able to watch evolve at a breakneck pace. It has been particularly interesting to see how services and products have been in a tug-of-war over what shifts are trendy to be doing, and what adds the most value for the end user.

As far as I can tell, here is how the web has evolved so far…

Existence/Content

As the web was just coming about into the consumer space, the most important thing was just getting something out there. We had no real way of cataloging great content and cool new websites which made domain squatting overly profitable given the amount of time effort required to snatch them up. If you wanted to buy t-shirts online, you would simply try typing in tshirts.com and hope for a reputable vendor. These were truly the days of the wild west online where pretty much anything was kosher and there was limited to no oversight. These were for all intensive purposes the dark ages of the internet.

Organization/Services

As more and more content based (read: informational/brochure) websites cropped up, we started to see the need for finding this content and thus search engines were born. Search hasn’t really changed all that much since inception, but we all know that Google was a game changer with their Page Rank system to help bring order to the chaos. We also started to see more and more transactional/e-commerce based websites pop-up and sites that offered package services for end users to try and make their lives better.

Sharing/Quality

When information became even more overbearing for consumers, social sharing services like Delicious, Facebook and now Twitter have sprung up for friends and new connections to share the best content across the web with. This has worked well at driving traffic beyond the tried and true e-mail, forward, repeat method of sharing information. It has helped bring “social proof” to particularly good articles, and sites like Digg.com funneled new and interesting stories into social graphs that would have otherwise never seen the content.

Design/Interface

But now we are seeing a much more subtle but equally important shift in what will make new products interesting and much more useful for us. We have entered the Age of Design for web services. What I mean by this is that web services now have to make something beautiful, instead of just something that “works”. The introduction of the new Twitter.com after yesterday’s announcement is living proof that in order to more useful, you have to be more usable. It seems simply in logic and in theory, but creating a truly gorgeous user interface is paramount to a web services success in today’s marketplace. Being attractive to the eye, and folding in rich media to the user experience also allows impressive split testing to understand the usage pattern of your users.

So while winners just ship products, how are you making the usability layer of your web services gorgeous? Additionally are you actually separating the functionality teams from the design teams? Functionality should be handled by your engineering minds, and graphical designers should be handling the interface layer. Make something usable, make something great.

You may or may not have heard that Twitter is rolling out their own official “Tweet” button for content sites, among others, to use for their audience to publish their content into the Twitter stream. A move like this from Twitter is important because it directly effects the many companies that publish Retweet type buttons to blogs etc in order to track and aggregate trending articles across a variety of niches. TweetMeme, arguably the largest of these aggregators isn’t being completely left out in the cold though since Twitter has paid to use some of TweetMeme’s backend code to facilitate this new feature.

Brand or Platform?

The most interesting part of this new product to me however, is figuring out whether or not this product is more about platform or brand control. The investors in Twitter have been saying for over a year that Twitter application developers need to “stop filling holes”. By that they are referring to the innovation coming out of many developer hot beds to fix the obvious gaps within the Twitter ecosystem. While you might think Twitter would appreciate all this innovation from its development community that made Twitter so popular to start with, but in fact Twitter has been gradually tearing apart the development community in order to deliver an end to end experience that consumers love.

This is in part motivated by control influences, but I feel that this is a big play by Twitter to control their brand across the web. If you have been noticing or not, Twitter has been implementing a refreshed sense of design across every product within their portfolio to deliver a clean and simple experience regardless of what platform you are using. This new button is no different in that the design, delivery and aggregration is now all under the control of Twitter itself instead of a 3rd party.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Twitter is being fair with gradually consuming each outlet of their data to control the user experience, or should 3rd parties be encouraged to compete against Twitter itself to add features and usability?

Twitter is rolling out a limited beta to users to try out “lists” in order encourage users to follow more people and have managable feeds that they can follow easily. This feature has been sorely needed for a while now on their website, but has been available in Twitter applications such as Tweetdeck for some time.

While Twitter did ask me not to Tweet about it yet, I see no harm in blogging about it

UPDATE:

Here is an interesting video about a professor at the University of Texas that tries to use Twitter in a truly engaging way. It allowed her to bring more students into the discussion, cover more topics in a very short amount of time. Not to mention the ability to engage with the discussion while she was not even in the classroom…

Everybody seems to have the golden answer for how Twitter could potentially monetize it’s service, and co-founder Biz Stone has shot down many of them as detracting from the user experience that is helping Twitter achieve it’s break neck growth. A number of celebrities (both through media and the web) have been monetizing Twitter through sponsored tweets from such places as Izea’s http://sponsoredtweets.com which connects brands with publishers, although only those with large follower bases seem to able to make this profitable enough for their time.

The real question to ask is not what Twitter should do in order to monetize the traffic and user base that they have, but rather where the greatest value lies (assuming they don’t go for saturation). The common school of thought is that Twitter should just tap into the gold mine of standard advertisements placed into feeds that would inject the community with sponsored information but would ultimately dilute their brand. Biz Stone and others have greatly discounted this as a viable, long-term solution and have rather stated that adding layers of value for power and business users would be the key to long term success and profitability of the business.

So you may be asking, “But if Twitter is offering tools to power users and businesses, wouldn’t those tools just be ways to monetize their feeds?”. The answer is not quite so simple because it all depends on what types of value Twitter would be adding in which they could charge accounts for. These businesses and power users need to see a positive ROI for their monthly investment, however this return could be in the form of user engagement with their brand, metrics for measuring the level of engagement, as well as tools to seek out the squeaky wheels in their clientele to retain their brand image.

Most “power users” of Twitter would love to see Twitter opening up a marketplace to completely displace Izea’s Sponsored Tweets and other third party solutions providers. However, while this would offer short term gains for the company I think that their long term relevance lies in providing tools to boost brand engagement, tracking and mediation.

This does not exclude the possibility of a very powerful Twitter advertising network to come out and temporarily dominant the market (assuming they take a small cut of the advertiser/consumer relationship) and force Twitters hand into buying out said network to maintain control of their brand and how the community is effected from a usability standpoint.

How do you think Sponsored Tweet’s and other networks like it are going to effect the Twitter brand and consumer usability? Are followers going to lose the strong trust and high conversion value that they currently posses due to a dilution of Tweet authenticity?

Every business model includes some sort of hockey stick growth for when clients understand the service and really start to adopt it at an alarming rate. Even with Twitter the user base has exploded sooner and larger than the founders had predicted according to their meeting notes that were released on TechCrunch a few weeks ago.

Today Facebook is officially the 4th largest website on the Internet with 340 million unique visitors in June (comScore). While it still falls far behind #3 Yahoo! Sites which has amassed 581 million uniques in the month of June it shows the pure power of social media in a large scale. The other interesting part of the ranking is that the top 3 (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo respectively) are all the culmination of services and domains that the firms own while Facebook’s numbers are solely Facebook.com as they do not currently own 3rd party sites.

Twitter is only reporting roughly 44.5 million uniques in the month of June, but again these numbers only represent Twitter.com which does not include the methods that most people interact with the service through third party applications, mobile devices etc. Twitter has even found it’s way into pop music with @mistahfab creating the song “Hit Me On Twitter” (link), and relates the popularity of the service with what used to MySpaces’ kingdom back in 2006. It will be interesting to see how Twitter builds on their service oriented platform to continue their high rate of adoption and how they plan on becoming ubiquitous to those who currently see no value in the service.

I believe that now more than any other time does the social media platform have a chance of wide market adoption across multitudes of countries to reach such a diverse audience that any marketing initiative would have the chance at success across the sites. Facebook has shown that they are able to create a cleverly targeted advertising platform that allows a much higher value targeted customers for companies looking to create traffic, buzz, sales or all of the above.