Semantics Incorporated

Discussing government open data and data.gov with the Semantic Web Gang

Paul Miller has just put online our semantic web gang podcast for this month. We were joined by Brand Niemann of the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for a discussion on the efforts to apply semantic technologies to Government data in the USA and elsewhere. I also touched briefly on the Twine news at the end, and look forward to discussing that some more in the future, especially in the context of user utility, usability, and monetization models for semantic web companies.

See the following links on government open data:

• Linked Government Data (Sept. 11, 2009)
• Publishing Open Government Data (W3C Working Draft 8 September 2009)

Twine Confirms Traffic Drop on ReadWriteWeb, but Spins it Out of Control

ReadWriteWeb just wrote about my last post and relayed Twine's response, which in a nutshell is that they saw a 20-25% traffic drop but that it doesn't matter because they are all focused on version 2.0 which will free their traffic acquisition model from its dependence on Google rankings.

Couple of immediate comments (also see comments on RWW site):

Compete.com shows a 85%-90% drop, and so does Quantcast. They tend to be reliable in quantifying % changes and even Twine has endorsed them in the past. Twine has a huge incentive in downplaying this, since a drop of the scale Compete.com shows could lead to a withdrawal of investors' support. So, until I see actual proofs, my assumption is that the 20-25% drop claim is a misrepresentation.

Re: Twine 2.0 as the savior, RWW calls out the spin of the company, writing that "once again Twine is hyping itself up". According to Compete.com, 92% of visitors were passersby, meaning not repeat users. That confirms that Twine 1.0, as lots of commenters have pointed out, failed to make repeat users of the 100,000s of visitors coming to the Twine site from Google. Now that Google has pulled the plug on the bulk of that traffic (that reminds me of Geosign, which went from over $100M in revenue to zero, literally overnight a few years back - there is another analysis to conduct on that Google practice), Twine 2.0 might well achieve great conversion, but traffic-wise it will likely have to rely mainly on buzz, and much less on the search giant. Which means they are starting from close to zero, i.e. some user following minus the badwill they've accumulated from many folks like me plus now the lack of confidence in management created by the traffic drop (I'd expect a little better as an investor if I had put over $20M in the thing).

As RWW rightly points out, Twine can't afford any mistake now. And yet they are already trying to take us for a ride, again. Given that and the past inability of the company to integrate feedback and create positive buzz, I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, Twine sure wins the title of "king of spin 2009".

Twine in Freefall?

What happened to Twine? Earlier this year, VentureBeat characterized Twine as an "early success", based on information from Compete.com. ReadWriteWeb followed suit in March explaining that Twine could soon surpass Delicious.com. In May, Techcrunch made the observation that Twine had overtaken Friendfeed in traffic. Fast Company wasn't as fast, but in June it echoed the comments with an article labelling Twine as "red-hot".

Twine indeed surpassed Delicious in May and June. That was shortlived, however. Since then, the same source VentureBeat used to discuss Twine's traffic, Compete.com, which Twine has endorsed a number of times, shows a huge drop in traffic. According to the traffic tracking application, Twine's traffic would have been divided by 10 between an April peak of 2M unique visitors and the August number of just about 208,000. Quantcast, on its end, reports peaks in April and July above 500K "people", together with a similar drop in August with 50,000 visits only. I don't know which source is correct about the volumes, or how their definitions of unique visitors and people differ, but the trend is what matters and it is striking. Alexa, generally much less reliable, doesn't show a huge drop, although it doesn't show any increase either.

According to all 3 sources, Twine is now back well below Delicious and Friendfeed. Have you read anything about that? I haven't.

So my questions: has Twine lost all his market momentum? Is Compete.com mistaken (isn't it what start-ups often claim after endorsing those sources, once south trends start showing)? Why has no press coverage been reported by Twine since May? Is it an anomaly, or the calm before the storm, and Twine is about to unveil a number of killer features and claim its groove back? (in my observation, once you lose momentum, it is very hard to get it back.) And why are none of the usual tech sources talking about it? Is it because it's riskier to report critically than to praise companies that succeed? Or has the summer just taken its toll?

Pictures speak 1,000 words:

 

 

 

This is a good illustration of the post I wrote last Friday on my other blog Growth Times (previously To Revenue, I just completed a name change), Welcoming Constructive Criticism, a Key Success Driver for Start-Ups.

For the record, back in February I published an interview with Nova Spivack, the founder of Twine, in which we took a 360-degree view of the application, with a focus on some concerns raised on a VentureBeat discussion in the past. I published the interview as is but added personal comments on usability stats provided by Twine, in my view showing what I have long suspected to be low engagement. Nova took offense at this public criticism and instead of looking at the feedback itself and address it calmly and constructively, he decided to libel me on twitter, through tweets he has since deleted. Ok, I know, I sound like a conspiracy theorist - but anyone who knows me know that, while I do like a good debate, I put great pride in being as fair and honest as possible, and I value truth and transparency before all. A number of users (and excommunicated users) have already experienced the Manichean, friend-or-foe approach of Twine's CEO, that's conditional upon paying lip service to the application. I have already denounced this type of PR approach in a post on this blog. Anyway, the point is that Nova mentioned he wouldn't take any interview with me anymore (he probably missed that I'm not a journalist), and so I have not contacted Twine for this post. I'm sure they'll respond one way or another, and hopefully we'll get some clarity as to whether this traffic issue is real. 

Let's be clear, I have also long complimented Twine and described it in my talks and posts as the flagship application of the semantic web - and I still do. This flagship status is why I am so interested in it. I believe we are only at the dawn of the metadata age, that our capability to create and manage metadata is still primitive and, as a corollary, that autotagging of the kind Twine achieves is much needed. I long for some of the functionalities announced by Twine for the end of this year, i.e. the ability to manipulate tags through ontologies and create complex queries as a user.

My theory was, and still is, that twine has a usability deficit. So many users going to Twine report 'not knowing what to do' or 'what it's for'. It lacks a sense of direction. Another example is the Daily Digest that a user receives from the application. I relied on this digest when I had but a few subscriptions to twines. Now that I have well over a dozen, the digest gives me an indigestion. Twine offers the option to select which Twines you want to see in your digest, and that's a step in the right direction, but not a solution to information overload: it's obvious what's needed is item-level selection and prioritization, not removing a full twine all together. As far as I can see, many other users have complained about this, but I was told that's a small issue and that's not the focus of the efforts. Addressing this, Twine would have the potential to become the filter of choice for information on the web, but I guess that doesn't strike them as something important to do. 

That wouldn't be a problem if at least Twine wasn't reacting defensively about those suggestions. But instead, interacting with them feels like grinding metal forks with your bare teeth. As such a rich tagging application, it's disappointing that Twine doesn't go beyond "good" or "bad" when labelling public feedback. Now it might be paying the price of its complacency towards constructive critics. And if the graphs above are confirmed, they might want to pick up a copy of Crossing the Chasm on their way home, too.

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• Twine is growing up (and up, and up) (joshdilworth.com)

Excellent slides on building buzz into your website

Designing For Social Traction

View more documents from Joshua Porter.