Last week, Recode's veteran tech reporter Kara Swisher visibly held an aggressive interview with Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, who has been on something of a meandering press tour over the last few months, which has led to more questions than it's seemingly answered, as he has avoided specifics, and not taken full responsibility for many of the negative impacts the platform he created has spawned.

Despite Kara's noble attempts, this round didn't fare much better, largely due to Twitter's failing as a medium for such a debate. The #KaraJack hashtag, expected to be the core space for her serves and his returns, with a fair share of unforced errors, was difficult to follow in real time, with Twitter's poor design getting as much visibility as the discussion itself. Taylor Lorenz of the Atlantic called it impossible.

Twitter was not designed for this, and barring dramatic redesign or new product spinoffs, it won't be.

The most impactful press interviews are typically done live, be it for radio or TV, while other forums, like Reddit, have made Ask Me Anything (AMA) events a free for all with viewers getting as much access to the subject as anyone else. But #KaraJack wasn't supposed to be a free for all, with every tweet seeing replies from the masses, or requiring dedicated TweetDeck columns and search queries. It was supposed to be on a stage of sorts, with bright lights seeing yet another tech CEO sweat and try to avoid withering under Kara's query onslaught - the type of event you would see at an All Things D or TechCrunch Disrupt, or if you insist... at SXSW.


That's not to say panels can't be done on the web - for they can be, and done well, with a moderator having the option to interview a subject (or multiple subjects), with progressive question and answers, and audience reactions, but not interruptions. I know this, because I've seen it done. A quietly intriguing web service called Cake, created by Chris MacAskill of Smugmug and General Magic fame, has been working on a topics-focused, troll-free, community that offers a unique approach to panels.


If you're unfamiliar with Cake, the site's content is much like if Medium met Flickr - not a surprise from a site with roots in photography, like Smugmug, which coincidentally bought Flickr from Yahoo! last year. You can use Cake for long form posts, as I did last year after seeing my dad purchase a gun, making me rethink the safety of family visits, or you can just share a photo. Each post allows for Slack-like reactions, but also, comments, from any user - with a focus on finding similar interests, be it on Photography, Tech, Travel or anything else - not uncommon on the social web.


A site for sharing on the web is not new, nor is the idea of one focused on topics. Their manual approach to curation and high quality discussion is noble, but becomes challenging at scale, should they get there. But what is working is their approach to panels, which would have been a great home for #KaraJack, instead of Twitter.

Cake panels work because they remove the noise from the discussion and keep it in one place. Like Reddit AMAs, they can be scheduled and announced in advance. But unlike AMAs, a moderator can invite an individual or group of people to a panel, and when the panel begins, they are the only ones who can make posts or replies. The audience, for once, is silent. No shouting @replies, like on Twitter. No hashtag spam. Just the questions and the answers. And if you want audience engagement, you can create a parallel post on Cake to solicit questions or have discussion as the panel is ongoing.


Trying to design a conversational medium that is all things to all people is a mess. Twitter has struggled with experiments with tweetstorms, moments, live video, doubling character counts, trending topics, short form video and more. Twitter is great at real time news and short updates. Their search, after years of struggles, is actually very good. But it's not a good place for a smart panel like #KaraJack.


In the last few months, there have been panels with venture capitalists, the founder of GrubTubs, the man behind 20 years of Steve Jobs keynotes, and former General Magic employees, as well as dozens of others. Each of these panels has a clear formula, with a topic, an introduction, and then the back and forth of discussion that brings a feeling of a shared space, even if geographically distributed.

Do I expect future conversations with Twitter's CEO to happen on Cake? No. Of course Dorsey would want to use his own product. But #KaraJack didn't do Twitter any benefits, showcasing one of the service's many holes. There is a better alternative to Q&A like this out there, and I hope we can see more innovative panels coming.

The social web is long overdue for some real innovation, beyond photo filters and disappearing content. We need smarter conversations and less noise. Panels are a solid start.

Readers want to find new content. They seek relevance, freshness, and community. This mirrors the three pillars of social sites I highlighted back in 2009, and echoes that readers want intriguing views that mirror their own preferences. Like I'd predicted in 2006, the Web has become a divided place, where we all flock to our groups of like minded people, and disavow opposing views, but we still are eager to find more who reinforce our position. We still crave new friends and stories and we want to find them quickly.

So how good a job do these apps and sites do of surfacing new people and ideas? Do they have an aggregated site with highlights and popular people or posts? Is there a place to find more obscure viewpoints and new voices?

4. Consumption

Since the smartphone revolution, kicked off by Blackberry and the iPhone and now led by Android, more people are constantly connected and reading news from their mobile devices. In many countries, the mobile device is the only window to the Web. Does the content flow well for mobile consumption and new ways to navigate from screen to screen, update to update? Or is it best suited for a leanback tablet experience or for the desktop?

What typically happens with content platforms is the content fills the available container. Twitter is a clear 140 or 280 characters. Social hubs like Facebook and Google+ favor large photos and a short introduction. Instagram is all about the photo with a small description. Blogger and WordPress and Medium are as long as you want to go. One has to consider if users and screens keep up.


We've Come a Long Way from Aggregating Streams and Sharing the Web

As content started to be created in a wide array of social sites, aggregation services like FriendFeed helped bring people's streams together. Bookmark services like Delicious helped people save the highlights from the Web and amplify the world's favorites. Users voted up posts from Digg and passed them along with StumbleUpon. The most voracious consumers lived in Google Reader and didn't miss a single post from the RSS feeds they were subscribed to.

It was too good to last.

The largest social platforms were not content in simply being links to external sites. Facebook focused more on original content shared on the platform, with less priority given to send traffic off site. Google Reader shut down, and while Feedly and others stepped up, the world of RSS never recovered. Delicious died. Digg is a shadow of itself. FriendFeed was obliterated. LinkRiver closed. Socialmedian closed.

In the wake of all these gateways' demise, taking content from the open Web and getting it in front of new viewers is more challenging. While I've always said you need to be where the users are and can't force them to come to you, what could be automated is now requiring manual intervention at practically every step.

Just What Am I Talking About?

The alpha and omega, yin and yang of social outlets (for text, anyway) are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is much bigger and much more profitable, but don't get distracted. People creating content for the Web also need to make sure that content fares well downstream on Facebook and Twitter. You can write it for the open Web, but you then have to take explicit action to share the content downstream - or set up automation to either site, usually backed by RSS. At that point, whether you get discovered or not is up to each site's algorithm, which has leaned more in favor of implied interest rather than chronology of late - meaning you can see viral content from hours or days ago before you get the newest stuff.

On a mobile phone, notifications are the holy grail of getting someone's attention. (See: Life by Numbers and Notifications from 2014) It's not uncommon to get notified when someone tweets, but it's very uncommon to ask for a notification when a site makes a post.

In parallel, the feedback loop from such networks, as well as Instagram or others, is near instant and acts as an incentive for the author to initiate their content on that silo natively. Post a 20-tweet storm to Twitter, and immediately start seeing those likes and retweets roll in. Post a story to Facebook and wait for the Likes and comments. Post a news story or a blog post, and ... wait. Wait for visitors in Google Analytics? Wait for the post to be shared downstream? Wait for the story to be indexed in Google News and search?

The elimination of Google Reader, FriendFeed, and Digg as amplifiers of Web content, alongside the attention absorption by Facebook and Twitter makes it harder for Web authors to get visibility - and they they aren't dropping their content into the real time stream.

So What Does the New Flow Look Like?




In 2009, it seemed pretty easy to me. Post on the blog. RSS would take it to FriendFeed and Google Reader. FriendFeed would post to Twitter. Twitter would post to Facebook. Then I'd run around and answer comments wherever they were distributed. (More on distributed conversations from 2009)

Now, I can still post on the blog. And the RSS link is the same. I even get the small bump of engagement on Google+ from the blog's page automatically adding my content there. But then, to make sure I cover all my bases, I then make another share of the same content to Medium, for those who love their site, and I've even found good engagement on LinkedIn, by making a third post of the same content on their channel. It's a different audience, but, if on topic, they share and engage.

So that's three posts. Meanwhile, I still have to share the story on Facebook and Twitter separately, hoping that someone will break their consumption flow and engage on my content downstream.

It feels like more work to get less return. And yes, I recognize that some may not miss FriendFeed because they never used it. Maybe others think Digg got replaced outright by Reddit, and gains similar traffic. Others prefer Hacker News. So aggregators do exist, obviously, but hubs aimed at surfacing new content, as opposed to highlight content on the site and keeping readers there, have declined.

To properly make the Web as desirable and viable a platform for publishing, we need to work together to fix the distribution and discovery gaps, make content fantastic on mobile for creation and consumption, and allow for engagement that is as simple as a Like. I applaud (there's the joke) Medium's approach to reward users with claps, for at least they're trying something. We should all be trying.

Disclosures: Yes, I work at Google. Sometimes, I help the Blogger team. I used to work on Google+ and have many friends on those teams still. I miss Google Reader every day. FriendFeed too.