Okay, it might be extreme to use the term “ruin,” but the encounter was eye opening.  Or at the very least, an awakening for those of us who live and breathe the rarefied air of all things social media and believe that social reporting can only work for the advantage of the consumer.

I’ll set the scene:  I met up with my brother, his wife, and their good friends for a foodie weekend in New Orleans.  Bending to the rave reviews, we get a coveted reservation at Louisiana Bistro, where any self-respecting foodie takes the “Feed Me” menu over the standard card.  The idea is simple and wonderful.  Choose 3, 4, or 5 course option.  Chef Mars comes to your table, inquires about your food “issues,” then retreats to the kitchen to create a custom multi-course meal for your enjoyment.  The catch:  it’s all in. Everyone at the table must agree to dine on whatever the Chef sends your way.

Here’s one more catch:  I have a seafood/shellfish allergy.  If it was raised in the water, I can’t eat it.

So along comes Chef to discuss our dietary issues.  No sooner did I reveal the Big Hurdle than he says, simply, “No.”  My seafood issue is too limiting to his repertoire.   Well, I say, we’re a party of six.  Why don’t I order from the menu and the others take the Feed Me option.

“No.  It must be the whole table.”

“Really?”

“Well, if it weren’t for social media, I’d make an exception, but as soon as I do, some idiot with an iPhone will come in here shoving it in my face and talking about how if I made an exception for you, I’d have to do it for them.”

Seriously.

He wouldn’t serve a table of 5 +1 because we might Twitter that we had a great meal or post a photo or two on Facebook, and in so doing reveal the deep, dark secret that on one occasion, Chef made an exception to his hard and fast rule.   The risk that social media would somehow influence what he would and would not be able to cook in the future meant he couldn’t make an exception, even just once.  (Or, as I suspect, he’d already made that exception and was now haunted by iPhone-wielding social media aficionados  who insisted on equal treatment.)

I played the “Who do you think popularized the term social media?” and “We promise we won’t Tweet” cards, but to no avail.  We ordered from the standard card, which I have to say was phenomenal, particularly the inventive and tongue in cheek “BP” (Bitch Please) menu.  My Boudin Booms, plated to look like an oil boom protecting the coast (or toast) from an oozing dark sauce, and Pork Barrel Leeks were delicious.

Still, I’m left to wonder what Chef might have cooked up, if not for the fear that social media might be wielded against him.  For every door that we believe social media knocks down, it just may be boarding up another.

I feel I should start this post by getting one thing straight – Louis Gray is one of the nicest people you will ever meet. He’s super smart, genuine, thoughtful, and honest. He’s a rare tech pundit who isn’t all about ego and self-aggrandizing. We all love Louis, right? Right.

However.

This post yesterday is about 10,000 kinds of wrong.  Now don’t yell at me – we all love Louis, remember? But that doesn’t mean we’re required to accept this level of hyperbole. Facebook didn’t fail your family, Louis. You have about five trillion friends on there, making it quite easy for updates from family members to get lost in the shuffle. I get it, really I do. You wanted the site to be smart and know which people are important to you. But it can’t do that yet. Oh it very likely will in a couple of years, once somebody figures out what to do with all this personal data with which we’ve flooded the Intertubes. In the meantime, you’re going to have to choose human interaction instead.

And that’s really my central point: all this technology that we spend 80 hours a week with, that has become our go-to activity during downtime, that is the hub of an ever-more-frantic daily existence – all these tools and services are not the endpoint. Or at least they shouldn’t be. All these gizmos and software should be improving our actual real worlds, not creating entirely separate ones in the clouds.

I’m really not one to talk. I check TweetDeck at stoplights. I talk to friends more on Facebook than on the phone. I’ve caught myself enjoying a good book or movie and immediately wondering how best to share it online. And when you work in emerging tech, you’ve got a ready-made excuse. “This is my job! I have to tweet!” In actuality, it’s damn addictive and can easily overtake real-world existence.

With other addictions, you know you’ve hit rock-bottom when you forsake all other aspects of your life in search of the high. In technology, I’d say it’s when you blame a social networking site for not telling you you’ve become an uncle. Step away from the computer, Louis. Go outside and read a book under a tree. Or, better yet, go see your sister and the new baby. It will all be here when you get back.

Earlier this year, at a TIEcon panel on the business of social media, I spoke about social media as an analytics machine.  Millions upon millions of people announcing what they had done, what they are doing, what they plan to do.  The Social Web is an observation tower for human behavior.

The highest tower among many is Twitter, yet when I asked Twitter’s VP of Business Operations Santosh Jayaram how many developers were working on analytics he mumbled, “We have a couple of guys looking at it.”  No doubt, Twitter has its hands full just keeping the lights on, but folks – analytics is the value of Twitter.

I’ve beaten this drum in dozens of conversations throughout the summer yet the focus always comes back to things like social graphs and crowd marketing.

Then, today, a guy with a bigger drum made a bang at Defrag. Eric Marcoullier, CEO of Gnip, Inc., has a booming voice and a big personality, and his brief talk this morning — ‘The business world doesn’t give a shit about your lifestream app” — resonated throughout the room.  Fundamentally, Eric argued, social media (for business) needs to “make the leap from marketing to business intelligence.”

Exactly.

Business is beginning to pay a lot more attention to Twitter and other social media as a megaphone and a listening post, and that’s a start.  We now have ample examples of small businesses announcing that the donuts are fresh from the oven and large companies responding to disgruntled customers to convince businesses of any size that there is something to this social media thing.

Typically and perhaps understandably, these now-enlightened companies gravitate toward selling and marketing.  Yet they are missing the big opportunity of social media by not taking the further step to understand the meaning behind the collective voice.

These organizations need a new set of tools and new approaches to data to gain that insight.  Fellow Defrag attendee  Nathan Gilliatt, whose practice is focused on working with corporate clients to bring them meaning to social data, described this as the need to break down the “measurement silos” to blend social media into business intelligence.

Indeed, social analytics brings a deeper understanding to customer engagement. It allows organizations to create the right product, drive the right relationships, structure a more responsive organization, and – yes – market and sell.

Most importantly, as Eric put it this morning, it allows business to “move beyond data and seek meaning.”

We’re back by popular demand – or at least a few random asides from people I pass on the street. It seems some of you genuinely missed the weekly snark-fest that is The Vortex, in which we take a moment to poke some fun at the Egotocracy. And once I started compiling items earlier in the week, I just couldn’t stop. This may be slightly longer than usual; there’s just so much to choose from! Let’s get to it, shall we?

News from the Social Media Vortex

-The big kerfuffle of the past two weeks has been King Arrington vs Twitter. Citing the entire history of the news industry as precedent, he decided that publishing confidential company documents sent to him by a hacker in need of a hobby qualified as sound journalism. Twitter has not ruled out the possibility of lawsuits. I think the best assessment of the situation came from a journalist friend who said, “Lovely how journalism has progressed from The Pentagon Papers to this…” Indeed.

-In other Twitter news, the company found a fan in Martha Stewart this week and a critic in David Letterman. Calling Facebook “dippy,” (my new favorite word), Stewart lauded the ease of using Twitter, though also strangely labeled it the ‘Wal-Mart of the Internet.’ (Is Twitter now hawking mass-produced crap made by Malaysian children?) Meanwhile, Letterman rebuffed Kevin Spacey’s attempt to lure him to the service, calling it a waste of time.  They’re both right.

-Social-networks-in-a-box site Ning reminded us that the tech bubble never truly dies, raising a $15 million funding round on a valuation of $750 million. In April, the company said its users had created over one million social networks, with only 200,000 of those still active. I’m no math whiz, but that sounds like a user retention rate of just 20%. How does that translate to a valuation higher than the GDP of, well, any country in the world? Just asking.

Apps on the Radar

-Mashable has a great piece on impressive implementations of Facebook Connect.

-Parents will appreciate Have2P, for those times when the young ‘uns just can’t wait, and Balloonimals, an ingenious little app that lets your kid blow up a virtual balloon and shake the iPhone to create an animal.

-Gamers need to check out Triazzle and Peggle, both of which are quickly addictive.

-And stoners should know about Cannabis, a recently approved iPhone app that will locate legal purveyors of medical marijuana. Not that I know anything about that.

Tweet of the Week

-This one was just too easy. In the category of Scarily Immersed in Social Media, we salute Mark Rizzn Hopkins for the following: “Ever wanted to micro-podcast to your FriendFeed? Try FriendBoo! http://riz.gd/bt2qn4“  Um, no Mark. No I have not.

If you’ve checked out my FriendFeed stream in the last few weeks, you may have noticed the emergence of a glaring theme in my online activity. Its name is Facebook and it has commandeered my life.  There are pages upon pages of Facebook status updates in my FriendFeed and not much else. (Excepting the glut of old YouTube favorites that just popped up yesterday. That’s an odd bug.) Though I can’t pinpoint precisely when this shift occurred – some time over the last month my time on FriendFeed has dwindled to zero while Facebook has become an always-open tab – I can tell you precisely why. My friends are on Facebook.  My real-world, send-Christmas-cards friends. For the most part, they’re people with which I share history. I want to see pictures of their kids and reminisce over embarrassing high school pictures. While it can be fun to argue politics with strangers on FriendFeed, at the end of the day it’s simply more fulfilling to connect further with people I’m personally invested in. And I’m reasonably sure I’m not alone in this sentiment, particularly among mass consumers.

What’s more interesting, though, is that no one on FriendFeed comments or likes my Facebook entries. They sit forlornly on the FriendFeed page, a sure sign that my attention and energies have moved elsewhere. It’s like a tacit acknowledgment among FriendFeed users that Facebook is an entirely separate world unto itself. Or perhaps my status updates are just boring.  The point is that these two worlds, so similar in so many ways, seem to be at war with each other. To FriendFeeders, Facebook is a sheep-filled home of tech noobs and FriendFeed is, well, no one on Facebook seems to understand the point of FriendFeed.

The irony in all of this is that Facebook’s increasing appeal of late, at least for me, is features it has modeled directly after FriendFeed. (And some would say I’m being kind with my phrasing.) The ability to comment on any feed item in Facebook was implemented several months ago but seems finally to have settled in among users. And just yesterday I noticed a Live Feed tab on my Facebook page, allowing me to follow all my friends’ activities on the site in real time. You know, for those days when you’re bound and determined not to accomplish a thing.

Regular readers know that I’m an ardent fan of FriendFeed. For a time right after its launch, I wouldn’t shut up about it.  It was and is a great example of clean, intuitive, oiled-machine technology that adds a vibrant community layer to flat Internet content. But the fact remains that the community on FriendFeed is still by and large tech sophisticates and early adopters. And the community on Facebook is everybody else. Facebook currently has over 120 million users, 70 million of which were added just this year. Rant and rave all you want about the site but name another social media service that has achieved such numbers. The trick, of course, is to translate those numbers into revenue, something Facebook has yet to figure out. As Dan Lyons pointed out in Newsweek a couple of months ago, Facebook is only managing about $2.50 profit per user – per year. That’s not a particularly rosy profit forecast in the midst of a recession.

So you know where I’m going with this, don’t you? Facebook is a thriving community of mass consumers, in search of a viable revenue path. FriendFeed is a brilliantly built technology in search of a thriving mass-consumer community. Let’s put the peanut butter in the chocolate and call it a day. Facebook gets great technology of which it is obviously enamoured and FriendFeed – who it should also be mentioned has no current definable revenue path – gets the mainstream spotlight it so richly deserves.

Granted, the two companies coming together would require adaptation from both;  Facebook would need to implement a design change, first and foremost. But part of the reason the merging makes sense is that the changes needed aren’t drastic. Add FriendFeed in a layer over your existing Facebook page, perhaps a dynamic window that emerges with a mouseover, so that users can maintain some separation of the two networks. Or go for the complete merge and allow Facebook friends to pull other online activity into their newsfeed.  The ultimate result is without a doubt a richer community for users. And from a business standpoint, almost unparalleled insight into the user base. If the two companies can’t figure out what to do with virtually complete profiles of each user, social media is in deep trouble indeed.

The virtual friends that I’ve really connected with on FriendFeed have eventually become Facebook friends. It’s a natural progression in the 21st century. Once you get to know someone better, you invite them a bit further into your world. So why not skip the middle man and complete this circle?  The recession has yet to set in completely; social media needs to gird itself for survival. What better way to do that than create a site that brings us the best of both worlds?

The worst part of not being a full-time blogger, i.e., other work precludes me from jumping on every story, is that you curse a lot. As in, “dammit, I was going to say that.” That happened to me this morning when I read this post by Rob Diana. He was building off a post by Chris Brogan that does an excellent job of examining real-world consumers and what technology means to them. Both posts echo Guidewire Group’s sentiment that the current financial crisis should be a call for the tech world to focus attention on the masses.

Rob’s post, though, takes it one step further to just where I wanted to go. The tech world has at its fingertips a ready-made, gargantuan network of users who have dipped their toe into the social media universe and are primed for more – Facebook. Tech insiders regularly deride Facebook and, at times on Twitter and FriendFeed, there seems to be a game of who can hate Facebook more. We could certainly spend an entire post talking about Facebook’s flaws. But the fact remains that the people who are on it are, for the most part, not involved in the blogosphere. Those are precisely the people entrepreneurs need to reach and, for the moment, they’re lying fallow, playing Scrabble and throwing things at each other.

Just in my little world, Facebook has exploded in the past few months, with seemingly every college acquaintance joining up. In general, their activities are limited to posting pictures, playing games and sending messages. And that, from the entrepreneur’s point of view, is a waste of one hell of a network. No company has nailed this yet – found the chink through which to pull people into truly immersive technologies. Take FriendFeed, for example. My Facebook news feed is primarily populated with FriendFeed updates and a few of my non-tech friends have noticed. But their initial forays into the FriendFeed site itself have proven short lived. There’s too much of a behavior change required to really get the value of FriendFeed. In addition, it can be lonely for a first-timer; you post a link and anxiously wait for comments that don’t come because you have few followers.

In fact, that is the primary hurdle for most social technologies – users don’t get the value without a large circle of connections and you don’t gain connections without a deep level of involvement. That kind of chicken/egg problem will be the death of the social Web. The answer is to deliver these immersive technologies to networks that already exist. Facebook attempted this in part with the comment feature added to its news feed. It took a bit for it to catch on but is now thriving and creating real conversations on once flat pages. There is much more on that page to plumb, though. Smart entrepreneurs who’ll need to watch every dollar in the coming months will recognize that it’s much easier to build on top of an existing social graph than attempt to build your own. Let’s hope they realize it before we lose consumers’ interest.

Those who know me at all well know that I love words. I delight in a beautiful turn of phrase. I am amused by oxymoronic combinations (“Live Chickens Fresh Killed” remains a favorite storefront sign from my days in Somerville, Mass.) And I can get agitated when words are misused, and worse, abused for the sake of drama.

It was amid that agitation last week that I began a post challenging bloggers to avoid ill-advised use of language.

An excerpt from the offending post:

AlwaysOn conference payola: only $1,000 a minute! 1/3rd the cost of DEMO’s payola!

The DEMO conference isn’t the only payola game in town…. looks like Tony Perkins is trying to get a $1,000 a minute from startup companies to present at his conference. Now, that’s like $2,000 less than DEMO charges per minute, so I guess it’s a deal!

Losers.
Here’s how they get you… first they send you a “congratulations!” email (just like a spammer), then they break the news of the fee to you.

Let’s ignore for the moment the ridiculous calculus and focus instead on what I have to believe is the misuse of the word “payola.” It sounds good. It’s even kind of fun to say. Payola. It kind of rolls around in your mouth. But it is exactly the wrong word to describe a business model as transparent as that of DEMO or AlwaysOn. Both companies do ask their clients to “pay” for the services rendered to them. But there is a tremendous difference between “pay” and “payola.”

pay ¹ (p)

v. paid (pd), pay·ing, pays

v.tr.

1. To give money to in return for goods or services rendered: pay the cashier.

Giving money in return for goods or services is a common business practice. Good businesses work to ensure that they deliver value to their customers in equal or greater measure than the price paid. Business has worked this way for millennia.

pay·o·la (p-l)

1. Bribery of an influential person in exchange for the promotion of a product or service, such that of disc jockeys for the promotion of records.

2. A bribe or a number of bribes given to an influential person in exchange for a promotion of a product or service: “I do not mean to imply that most Wall Street analysts typically receive payola for touting particular stocks” Burton G. Malkiel.

n.

bribe (brb)

n.

1. Something, such as money or a favor, offered or given to a person in a position of trust to influence that person’s views or conduct.

2. Something serving to influence or persuade.

Certainly, it’s true that this particular malapropism is apt to perturb me. After all, a business and brand that is practically pseudonymous with my career and good name is being painted with a poisonous brush. But it’s just not DEMO or AlwaysOn or me or Tony Perkins that is affected by careless language.

Anyone -and there are tens of thousands of us – using social media to be taken seriously as thinkers, writers, and analysts are affected when small numbers of bloggers mangle the language and the blogosphere’s credibility with it. These days, words are tossed about carelessly. A blogger engages in outrageous language to make his writing more entertaining. Entertaining posts attract more readers. More readers embolden the blogger to amp the crowd-pleasing hyperbole and so the cycle continues. And thus, the blogosphere – a platform that could as well support and encourage civil discourse and intelligent debate – has devolved in too many instances into a circus of words tossed about to amuse the masses.

We can do better than that. We must do better than that if blogs are going to be taken seriously by the mainstream masses.

The blogospheric (I’m not sure that’s a word, but I like the sound of it) introspection that emerged from Mike Arrington’s post yesterday’s post is undoubtedly a good thing. The much-valued “conversation” of social media has become downright anti-social and if the civility of discourse continues on its decline, we bloggers will destroy the art form.

As Carla pointed out in her post, Robert Scoble’s mini-manifesto this morning called for a civil community to reclaim the values of early blogging. It’s high time. Buried deep in the post was this hidden gem:

Building a new thing is more noble than tearing something down.

Now some might misinterpret the message in all this conversation to be a return to the admonition of Moms everywhere: If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything. I think to take that up as a banner would be as artificial as the manufactured mud slinging that too often happens on blogs now. Instead, heed my crusty grandfather’s advice: Keep a civil tongue in your head (words usually followed by a swift blow to the back of it).

But even that misses a larger point. I was delighted to find this post this morning (thanks, Carla) and not just because all the pretty pictures made it a quick read. Chartreuse reminds us that the reason we write at all is to have an impact, and that we can have that impact by the words we choose and the attitudes we take. But none of it matters unless we find and attract an audience.

Funny how easy it is to say one thing and do another. Monday morning, I had the opportunity to speak to employees at Dolby Labs as they were about to embark on their “IdeaQuest.” I recapped a bit of that talk in my DEMO.com column Monday afternoon. The point I was making is that we can say that we’re best and brightest, smartest, coolest, or most innovative (what ever that really means) all we want. But until an audience says it on our behalf, it’s only so much posturing.

The technology bloggers have done plenty posturing, and there’s no doubt that the down-and-dirty dialog has attracted an audience. If we’re ever to break out of the echo chamber, though, we’re going to have to do better.

And, after the discussion of the last couple days, I think we will.

On most days, Carla and I debate our analysis in private, Skyping with one another until our fingers burn. And this day started just the same. She’d been mulling over the value of reasoned analysis as subject matter for blogs. Then, a TechCrunch post about (I think) why investment in blog media companies will never pay out described the blogging as some sort of word-based Fight Club, and that tipped Carla to action.

Her post today asks, essentially, whether thoughtful analysis has any place in the blogosphere. She quoted one colleague who effectively said that if one writes a solid analysis, then what’s there to say in the comments. The subtext: fire off an ill-conceived “rant” and we can really sink our teeth into that.

Reinforcing that thinking is a comment from Cyndy Aleo-Carreira on profy.com:

I think I nearly busted my gut laughing at the idea of “thoughtful analysis” ever being popular.

To be fair, Cyndy commented on Carla’s post more fully:

. . . I’m still of the old-school that feels like quality should stand on its own without the constant whoring for Diggs and link-backs and attention. . .
The reality, however, is that the squeaky wheel gets the eyeballs in this industry, and the eyeballs get the money.

I’m heartened to see the thoughtful comments being added to Carla’s post, but still I wonder why the (mostly) intelligent people who spend hours each day consuming blog posts don’t demand more from the bloggers they read. Readers reward shoot-from-the-lip bloggers with traffic and attention, and never seemingly feel exploited. Somehow, the opportunity to get into the mud with an A-lister out-measures the value of time and intelligence.

This, of course, is not a new phenomenon. Back when DEMOletter was still published on paper (yes, the Dark Ages), I wrote about attention and time as the currency of Web 1.0, and now, most certainly of Web 2.0 and beyond. Yet still, the social-media consuming public doesn’t understand that value. Too many people have so devalued their time and attention that they “over pay” for “free” content, allowing the value to accrue to bloggers who, frankly, are not always worthy of the page views.

In a quest for readers and rank and authority, too many bloggers have turned the posts and comments into a side show. The only thing that will change that is if readers demand more.

Mike Arrington’s post on TechCrunch this morning about bloggers and the capital around them was uncanny, as I spent yesterday pondering the ins and outs of blogging in the current climate. A bit of a ramble and frankly, lacking introspection, his post was nonetheless an interesting perspective on the blogging market and its potential future. It’s prompted me to lay bare some concerns and questions I’ve had of late.

The Guidewire is a relative newcomer to the blogosphere. Not counting personal blogs and the weekly posts on DEMO.com, Chris and I haven’t contributed much to the blog conversation. To be honest, our initial stab at a Guidewire Group blog collapsed under its own weight. We approached it with too heavy an editing hand, too complicated an interface, too… much thought, if that’s possible. We’re industry analysts by nature and trade, a profession that doesn’t lend itself to off-the-cuff musings and breaking news. We spend weeks, sometimes months, weighing market trends and startup viability and only then do we craft our analysis aimed toward Guidewire Group’s primary audience of VCs and C-level execs in technology firms. As we delve deeper into directing some of those thoughts into a blog, though, I increasingly struggle with how to build and maintain an online presence by producing interesting, mindful content that people want to read without turning into a ranting egomaniac. It’s right there in About The Guidewire:

Our goal… is to add to the conversation, not echo it. We hope that when we do wade in on an issue, we can offer a different perspective, one that’s missing from the discussion.

Easier said than done. All the well-intentioned, reasoned thought in the world isn’t worth much when people don’t see it. I think Chris best summed up our abrupt education in blogosphere politics when she said recently, “I’ve become a link whore.”

Chris and I have no interest in becoming another TechCrunch. Arrington has built a hell of a business but his philosophy of “leave no lingering emotional stone unturned” isn’t our style. Engaging in blog arguments “as bloody as possible” seems to me a good way to drive oneself completely mental, but if it works for him, so be it. Personally, I want The Guidewire to engage deeper in tech punditry by contributing both a voice of reason and cutting-edge thought. A perfect storm of Chris’ seasoned industry experience – she’s forgotten more about emerging tech in her 25 years than most of us possess in our pinkies – and my position at the forefront of new technologies.

I parsed over some of this with a blog-savvy friend yesterday, who said something I can’t get out of my head. He believes that when you write a blog post with a beginning, middle and end, – as Chris and I often do – there’s nothing for readers to contribute. Take the pretty little bow off The Guidewire, in other words, and expose a bit of the skeleton of our analysis. Does he have a point? Are we presenting our blog readers with flat content? Is that even a negative? If we focus on being thought leaders, must we sacrifice visibility?

The pre-blogosphere way of thinking would hold that I shouldn’t even post this. Publicly questioning The Guidewire’s direction, some may posit, shows a certain weakness. But my immersion in communities like FriendFeed, Twine, Twitter, and Seesmic is making me question a lot about effective interaction and engagement online. So let’s hear it, bloggers, pundits, and just-plain readers (do those exist anymore?) – what do you want from The Guidewire? Is traditional analysis dead?