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The levels of engagement in Twitter are analogous to those observed in other communities. At the periphery of this onion model, we find passive users (in this case, users are ignoring tweets), and as we get closer to the core, users become more active and their interaction is more intimate. Thus you find conversing, retweeting and direct messaging at the core of the figure.

Take a break and enjoy this great podcast on saving the newspaper.

Two important changes to the social media landscape over the past couple of days:

• Google’s move into social media (from Google’s blog) and Google taking on Facebook and Twitter (Buzz)
• Flickr co-founder returns to roots by launching an online game (Glitch)

Google’s moves are a good example of countermoves (Google’s response to Facebook’s newly announced webmail product, code-named Titan) as described in Ferrier’s framework on competitive agressiveness.

One interesting play will be the integration with other services such as GMail, Google Maps, and their mobile versions in the case of Buzz. Which side will be in a better position to leverage their existing user base?

Here is an example of one of the risks of tethered applications Zittrain discusses in The Future of the Internet. As posted on the ProgrammableWeb, Google just announced that it will shut down three APIs. The services affected are Jaiku, Dodgeball, and Mashup Editor. The code for Jaiku will be released as open source once the service is discontinued, Dodgeball will terminate without replacement, and Google will promote its AppEngine as replacement for Mashup Editor. While, of course, shutting down APIs is part and parcel of Perpetual Beta, this is a stark reminder that as we are building applications on top of the services of others, the very existence of those applications depends on the continued availability of those services.

Has anyone tried to compare Google trends and the Gartner hype cycle? The hype cycle says that any technology goes through phases of hype and disillusionment, and looks like this:

From Wikipedia article on hype cycle

It seems that overlaying both should be possible. For instance, if you look at the trend for Web 2.0, we can see that the popularity of the term peaked sometime 2007, and is in decline since. Does this correspond to peak of inflated expectations followed by the decent into the trough of disllusionment?

Google Trends for web 2.0

Found a short article on Google trends that suggests to a comparison to the hype cycle model. Seems that the guys from Gartner agree. In the blog on Mastering the Hypecycle, they quote a New Scientist article that traces the uptake of the Chrome browser, and found the shape of the curve to correspond to that of the early part of the hype cycle. Would be interesting to examine this more systematically.

Welcome to the new instantiation of my blog. This blog will track technology and management issues around open source, ecosystems, Web 2.0, and mashups.