It was announced by Jason Goldberg today that SocialMedian, the website which helps you consume news through your social connections, has been acquired by XING, one of the older social networks that is headquartered in Germany. Here are a couple of thoughts on the very 'social' hook up:

Products With Core Values Rarely Fail: I have been tracking SocialMedian for a while now and have been a user of the website since its early days. Where the site has reached today is a testament to the fact that good products that do something useful for you repeatedly rarely ever fail. Other than the tremendous hours of work that has gone into the website, from what I recollect, the site has done zero advertising, than Jason relentlessly pushing and leveraging his extensive network to spread the word about the product.

SocialMedian took an existing ill-defined solution of filtering and sourcing news through your peer funnel to discover content and news. Normally, this is done through a mix of email, IM, Twitter, various shared lists (Google Reader, Delicious etc), in a haphazard manner. But, this mode of content discovery through P2P has been the silent rising star of the past couple of years. What SocialMedian did was to pick this up and packaged it nicely, making it much more accessible for the average Joe.

Om Malik has posted an entry on how Twitter could monetize and make money off their service, especially from the ultra-power users like Robert Scoble and Leo Laporte. But there are a couple of points that he has gotten wrong there.

1. His hypothetical 30 GB of data transfer for Scoble alone does not take into account what is Twitter's major problem: tracking. Scaling for known relationships are relatively easy, because you are dealing always with a finite number and you are also dealing with spikes that can be guessed to a great extent. The case is entirely different with keyword tracking.
2. It ignores Twitter's Jabber problems, which will gradually grow to eclipse the problems it is having with API, which is throttled anyway at 70 (60, says Aditya in the comments) requests in an hour.

Realistically, I don't think Twitter can continue the Jabber service the way it is being run right now. They will need to limit tracking per user to maybe a maximum of five, so that the entire tracking mess can be brought under control. If you want to track more than that, you need to pay. And people who normally track more than four or five terms are likely to be PR or other professionals who can afford to pay for the service. This one avenue for them to get some money back into the system.

There needs to be a premium API endpoint, which does not have the 70 requests per hour limit attached to it. The current API client experience is very laggard and there is an opportunity there to scale the API much easier than scaling either Jabber or the tracking service. Once you kill the Jabber service, the premium API becomes the only available service from which you can get a user experience that is closest to the IM-based interface to Twitter.

Actually, the title for the post should have been "Why Twitter Works for Me," but it does have some valid things to say about why it trumps email and RSS readers for me.

1) It has no unread count: Almost every application that has hit us since the advent of email has made a point to remind us constantly how far behind are we lagging on information accumulation, processing and categorization. Everything these days tends to tell you that you suck if you are 1) not overwhelmed by information overload and 2) not trying out the zany fancy ways to kill the overload.

2) Simple is the new complicated: There have been numerous attempts made till date to find a complicated explanation for why Twitter works, while the fact is that it works because it is quite simple. All information is presented in flat structure, in a hassle-free manner that saves you from having to tag/organise, categorize information. In Twitter there are no labels, folders or color coding. You can dive in and swim out of conversations at will and also pick your ideal rate/degree of involvement.

In a weird way, Twitter is exactly what you want it to be. It can be a social network, a meme tracker, time-lapse instant messaging or even email lite, which is why everyone has a hard time trying to define it. It means different things to different people.

3) 140 or bust!: Since there is a soft limit of 140 characters per message, Twitter, by virtue of its form, forces users to condense the matter into concise little capsules. This automatically means that value per message per follower or message is considerably higher than what you get from subscribing to an RSS feed. The form itself ensures filtering of the content, rather than having to rely on social categorization or machine categorization.

4) Single window system: The best thing about Twitter is that it does not enforce the use of any particular software or website to participate in the conversations, or just listen in. You can do all the activities specified in (2) using any of the numerous ways that are available to interact with the framework.