At last, indeed.

photo credit: cactusthesaint

Someone changed all the Bush Street signs in San Francisco to Obama St.

I ♥ this.

It’s not often I get excited about shopping carts. But I just discovered Foxy Cart and it looks like the shopping cart solution I’ve been wanting for as long I can remember.

At Joby we use Netsuite for our shopping cart, and one of my chief frustrations is how locked in we are to their shitty UI design. It’s truly awful. It takes at least 6 steps to get through the entire checkout process, entering discount codes is completely unintuitive, and customizing the look and feel is very limited and a pain in the ass.

FoxyCart seems to solve most of these problems, and I wish I had a project right now that would let me implement it so I could test its full functionality. They let you completely customize the look & feel of your cart using CSS, they make checkout a breeze, and they’re compatible across most modern browsers. They also have fancy features like live rate calculation from most major shippers (USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL).

If any of you are looking for a solution out there, I encourage you to check it out, with the caveat that it’s still in beta, so it might not have 100% of the features you want. But so far it’s looking pretty darn good.

[UPDATE 12/29/08, 13:45 PST - new content added at the bottom]

This past weekend Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur caused a bit of a fracas when he made a simple feature request for Twitter search. He wanted to be able to sort Twitter searches by the number of followers that a given user has, using that measure as some sort of indication of a user’s “authority”. That comment generated a surprisingly large and passionate amount of feedback from bloggers and Twitter users. Frankly, I was shocked that people felt so strongly about it, and I think Michael Arrington said it all with this post title: “Bloggers lose the plot over Twitter search“.

Be that as it may, it brings up a point that has long been talked about in the Twitterverse: how does one determine a Twitter user’s influence or authority?

Setting aside for a moment the question of whether or not we should even care about “authority” or influence on Twitter, I think that anyone advancing the notion of followers or followees as an accurate measure of influence is completely missing the mark. Twitter is social and interactive. The follower/followee model is overly simplistic. Sure, number of followers is interesting, since anyone with 15,000 followers has a “louder” voice than someone with 7, but what we still need is a dynamic, interactive measure.

Om Malik just posted an article about a study carried out by Bernardo Huberman (et al.) from HP’s Social Computing lab which examined the relationship between followers, followees (people a Twitter user follows), and “friends”. The study defined friends as people to whom a user has sent at least two @-replies.

As I have long suspected, measuring “friends”, as defined in the study, proved more meaningful a metric than simply counting followers or followees. A brief excerpt from Om’s post summarizes the study’s results:

On Twitter, [Huberman] found that regardless of the number of followers or followees, there were very few friends in a personal Twitter circle. He used a very weak definition of “friend” — anyone to whom a user has directed a post at least twice. And because of that, Huberman says that in order to “influence a person’s absorption of content, there is a need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend.”

Huberman’s study found that:

• Users with a large number of followers are not necessarily those with very large number of total posts.
• Even though the number of friends initially increases as the number of followees increases, after a while the number of friends starts to saturate and stays nearly constant.
• The number of people a user actually communicates with eventually stops increasing while the number of followees can continue to grow indefinitely.

Interesting results, but still pretty obvious/intuitive. At least this study is getting closer to the heart of Twitter interaction and the influence its users have. After all, Twitter is a social tool, so just counting followers or followees doesn’t nearly capture the interactive nature of the service. Measuring “friends” (as defined above) gets closer, but I maintain that this still misses two very important measures. If, as Om assumes, we’re using the traditional definition of authority as the “power to influence or command thought, opinion or behavior”, then I propose that the following metrics are even more useful:

• Number of @-replies per post for a given user
• Number of “retweets” per post

As I stated in my comment on Om’s original post, I believe that one of the most important factors in a measure of authority or influence is the extent to which a user is able to get people thinking or talking about a topic. By that logic, a tweet which sparks a conversation and/or a large volume of replies should be given more weight than a tweet which goes out quietly and generates no responses.

To create a normalized metric which translates well across users with different numbers of followers we would ultimately need to collect data and see what kind of conclusions can be drawn from the metric above. We might find that it’s best to take the number of replies per post and multiply it by the ratio of followers who replied to the total number of followers. Or we might come to a different conclusion altogether.

The second metric I mentioned above is the number of re-tweets that a given post generates. Although they are less conversational in nature, re-tweets are interesting because they highlight tweets which someone not only found worthwhile, but found so compelling that (s)he wanted to pass it on to others. In fact, re-tweets are the core of Twitter’s ability to spread news at lightning speed. For example, in the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Twitter was as good (if not better) a source of breaking news than any major cable news network.

I maintain, then, that any credible measure of Twitter authority has to take into account the spread of a re-tweeted post throughout the “Twitterverse”.

One of the main reasons I think my metrics are better than the “friend” metric defined in the HP study is because one can directly control (or even game) the friend count, whereas the reply/retweet metric is dependent on how other people perceive a given user.

For example, since “friends” are defined simply as people to whom one has directed two or more replies, I could start replying to tons of people throughout the Twitterverse, thereby increasing my friend count, but not really adding anything substantive to the community. Conversely, the reply/retweet metric is dependent on my ability to inspire and influence others. If I’m blathering on about pocket lint all day, my followers probably won’t find that noteworthy. Whereas if I’m funny, or a thought leader, or offering breaking news stories, my ability to inspire replies and retweets is likely to be much higher.

The bottom line is that while the study from HP’s Social Computing Lab is getting much closer to determining the influence of any given Twitter user, we really need more data to fully understand the interactive nature of Twitter and its users’ influence.

I would really like to see a more complete study which looks at the metrics I identified above. In fact, I have half a mind to get back to my statistics roots and put that ol’ masters degree to use in analyzing these metrics to see what conclusions can be drawn. If anyone wants to collaborate, drop me a line!

[UPDATE 12/29/08 - 13:45 PST]
It might not be obvious from my post above, so I wanted to go one step further and say that I don’t really think any single metric is sufficient to measure Twitter influence. While I strongly believe that two measures that I highlight above are more meaningful than follower count in a search for a proper influence metric, I think that they need to be looked at in context, and in combination with other measures (including follow numbers, total reach of a given tweet, etc.).

As a simple example, take the tweet from Loic which started this whole mess. Clearly it’s had a pretty major impact among the “Twitterati” and has elicited passionate feedback. But that didn’t just play out on Twitter. No, it’s been blogged, and retweeted, and remixed, and discussed both online and off (some would say ad nauseam). So perhaps any measure of Twitter “authority” is incomplete if it is confined to only measuring activity that plays out on Twitter.

One can extrapolate this problem even further and say that it’s directly related to the problem of measuring the full impact of anything that takes place on a blog, social network, or perhaps even the Internet. How does one measure the full impact of pay-per-impression advertising? Or a viral YouTube video? Or a popular blog post? Perhaps the best we can hope for is a good approximation.

I’ve been interested in the micropayment space for a long time now. I think it’s a promising market, and one that is just waiting to be addressed well. A while back I discovered a service called Tipjoy, which started as a Y Combinator funded project. I liked it the first time I saw it, and I like it even more now.

The most recent development from them is a tight integration with Twitter which lets people use a syntax similar to Twitter’s direct message function to send payments to other Twitter users. For example:

p @peter $0.25 because he finds cool new websites

This would create a promise of paying me $0.25 via Tipjoy. One can use any combination of p or pay, an @username, and a dollar amount prefixed by $ to send money to a Twitter user. Of course, one can also send money to people via an email address or URL, as explained on Tipjoy's FAQ page.

Perhaps my favorite part of Tipjoy, aside from the ease with which one can send micropayments, is the built in tendency toward viral growth. You see, Tipjoy doesn't require the recipient of a tip to be a member before they can receive money from someone. When you send money to someone who's not already using Tipjoy, they get a message from Tipjoy (via Twitter, email, or some other means) telling them that they've received money. Therein lies the beauty.

Who wouldn't want to claim money that's been sent to them by an admirer or a debtor? It's a great incentive to get people to sign up for Tipjoy. The big question is whether that, along with its ease of use, will get enough people using Tipjoy to make them profitable. Tipjoy takes a 3% cut of all payments sent via their service, but only takes that money when a user cashes out his/her funds.

I'm very curious to see if Tipjoy's tight integration with Twitter (as well as their other easy-to-use methods) will get enough early adopters using it. If so, it could catch on among mainstream users, and from there it's quite conceivable that Tipjoy could see the same kind of hockey stick growth that Twitter has recently enjoyed.

Frankly, I'm a little surprised Twitter hasn't come out with a micropayment solution of their own yet. They seem to be playing along with Tipjoy, so it's possible (if unlikely) that they're getting some sort of benefit from the deal, but Twitter is perfectly positioned to add new features like this to begin monetizing their service. Of course, I have a ton of ideas on how Twitter could begin to monetize their service, but that's another post just waiting to be written!

I stumbled across this image the other day. Unfortunately, it’s all too accurate a representation of how web designers are forced to spend their time these days.

In other news, death to IE!

Have you ever noticed how, in many cities, when it starts to rain, people magically appear with a whole lot of umbrellas for sale? They don’t seem to come from any particular place, and as soon as the rain disappears, so do they.

I’ve always wondered where these people come from, and how it is they always happen to have an inventory of umbrellas for sale stashed somewhere nearby, just in case it rains.

I’ve experienced this phenomenon in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and even Rome – where I was once caught in a surprise downpour and actually bought an umbrella… for a mere € 2! It continues to fascinate me, and I would love to know if this is part of some larger street vendor group who sell seasonal and climate-appropriate wares, or if it’s just a bunch of people around the world who have had the same idea.

For the third consecutive year I’m going to be hopping on a bike and riding 150 miles (240 km) over two days to raise money for the fight against multiple sclerosis. The ride is called the MS 150 Waves to Wine. It starts tomorrow at the crack of dawn in San Francisco and finishes Sunday up in wine country. I’ll be riding with some good friends of mine, one of whom – Dunagan – has a father affected by MS. Dunagan and some other friends have put up a website for our team, WeFightMS.com, with a bunch of very entertaining and funny videos. Check them out!

I’m massively out of shape at the moment, and I haven’t been on my bike in months, but what I’ll be enduring is nothing compared to what people with MS have to deal with on a daily basis.

If you’d like to sponsor me I would really appreciate it if you made a tax-deductible donation to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Any and all support would be graciously appreciated.

I’ll be sure to post some photos and videos of the ride after I complete it!

I recently discovered that video site Vimeo has added the ability to upload and view high-definition videos on its HD channel. The results are pretty incredible.

Not only does HD look amazing on the Internet, Vimeo’s FAQ page about their new HD feature claims that you can even play their videos on your HD TV and you’ll get the same quality. I have yet to try this, since I don’t own an HDTV myself, but I’m curious to know just how well it actually works.

One thing is clear, however. High definition video blows standard definition out of the water, both on the Internet as well as on TV. I’m very excited to see where this ends up going, because just as video was the future of the Internet back when everyone else was just posting static images, I’m convinced that high def is the new future of video.

Now if only the US could improve its broadband standards to be on par with those in Japan and western Europe, then we’d really have something.

This dispatch is coming directly from a ballroom at the BlogHer conference, where I’ve been staffing Joby’s table in the sponsor showcase. We’re debuting our newest product, the Zivio Bluetooth headset. We’ve been giving away advance samples to some of the lady bloggers here at the conference, and the response has been overwhelming!

Early in the day we were mobbed by people, sometimes standing four-deep, to hear about the Zivio and to experience it hands on. It wasn’t long before we ran out of our large stock of headsets, but all day long people kept coming by because they’d heard about our headset and wanted to see it for themselves. I wish we could have accommodated everyone, but some had to leave empty handed.

It’s been a great day here at the conference so far. I met some great new people, connected face to face with some Twitter friends, like the amazing @pistachio, @queenofspain, and @leahjones, and ran into some old friends like @CathyBrooks and Sarah Austin of pop17.com.

It’s fun to see such an amazing group of lady bloggers getting together. Their enthusiasm and energy is contagious. Things are winding up right now, so I’ll cut this post short and adjourn for some post-conference cocktails!