I’ve decided to do a weekly review post of the events I found notable on line during the week, complete with rants, snark and quite possibly even some math. Hey, math is what I do. 
Angelgate
By now, you’ve probably heard the story – Michael Arrington posted on Techcrunch that he’d gotten wind of a secret meeting of “super angels” at Bin 38. He crashed the meeting, and reported that the super angels were allegedly “colluding” to “hold valuations down,” an act which is possibly felonious. There was a hashtag, more blog posts, tweets, a supposedly “leaked” private email, an apparent “feud” between two well-known Silicon Valley “angels”, Dave McClure and Ron Conway, and, of course, Hitler finding out about the whole thing.
It’s hard to find anything good in this story, and it’s even harder to find anything good on Techcrunch these days. We’ve been treated to a post by Sarah Lacy blaming teachers’ unions for the “Why Our Schools Suck” and another one saying, “But from where I sit, it never felt much like a recession at all.” We’ve heard from Vivek Wadhwa about “Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age,” and Arrington saying “Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men.” There was a strange post from Arrington: “Blogging and Mass Psychomanipulation.” And finally, Arrington posted that “AngelGate won’t take over the TechCrunch Disrupt agenda.”
Great going, Arrington – throw out an allegation of Federal criminal behavior, get two Silicon Valley legends publicly at each other’s throats, post a private email from one and a deleted tweet from the other, threaten to post more private emails and then have the expectation that they’ll be on your stage at your conference bright and early Monday morning all unicorns and rainbows to “talk about how venture capitalists and angel investors can help entrepreneurs succeed.”
Mr. Arrington, I can’t imagine why either Ron Conway or Dave McClure would want to be up there with you. What do either of them have to gain? For that matter, what do entrepreneurs have to gain from attending Techcrunch Disrupt? They’ve heard all the advice already, they know the game, and most of them are too busy trying to become the one in 20 that succeeds to spend money on a plane ticket, a hotel room and a conference pass. The only reason they’d be there at all would be to “network” with the very people whose ethics and character you’ve slammed! Angelgate makes Silicon Valley look elitist, arrogant, vicious and out of touch – more out of touch with Main Street than Wall Street ever was.
President Obama said it best, I think:
“We understand exactly who and what got us into this mess. Now, we don’t mind cleaning it up… But don’t just stand there and say, ‘You’re not holding the mop right.’
“Instead of standing on the sidelines, why don’t you grab a mop? Help us clean up this mess and get America back on track!”
So I’ve stopped reading Techcrunch. I’m one of those people who are driven to be lifelong learners, and there’s nothing I can learn from Techcrunch any more. Techcrunch seems to have become one big game of “Let’s you and him fight.” It’s mostly rumor, innuendo and bait. And sadly, people are taking the bait. It’s propaganda for the most part, and the only good news is that critical thinking isn’t dead – the commenters are calling bullshit early and often.
If Silicon Valley is truly about helping entrepreneurs succeed, about “building what people want to buy”, creating jobs in America, and, yes, capitalism, lose the attitude that Silicon Valley is the best place – or even the only place, as I’ve heard – to build a startup. Because what I saw this week has convinced me that it’s the worst place. Silicon Valley is the last place I’d go to give birth to a business.
Twitter Analytics
At a sports marketing conference, Twitter announced that it would be releasing a real-time analytics dashboard. There hasn’t been much detail released about it, but the announcement that it would be “free” struck me as unlikely, considering the way it was described. I suspect that it’s not free, but bundled with purchases of Twitter advertising and other marketing services.
Why do I think that? Well, there are two kinds of metrics one can get from Twitter. The first kind is publicly available now and is the basis behind Twitalyzer, Klout and many other services. Using the Social Media Analytics Research Toolkit, you can build any conceivable dashboard, real-time or otherwise, from the publicly available Twitter feed. Between the REST, Search and Streaming APIs, including the possibility of negotiated elevated access up to the full Firehose of public tweets, one can obtain
- Who tweets what when, and sometimes even from where and to whom,
- Who is following whom, who is listed by whom,
- Who retweets what, who marks what as a favorite,
- Click data for links tweeted using publicly-available tracking APIs, like ow.ly and bit.ly,
- World, regional and in some cases by city trending topics, and
- Search query results about places and topics or combinations thereof.
With the exception of elevated access levels to the Streaming API, all of that is available now for free. In short, you can pretty much analyze everything people write on Twitter. But there’s another set of metrics that only exist at the moment inside Twitter’s data centers – metrics about how people behave reading Twitter. We don’t know
- How does our Twitter page compare with other Twitter pages – how many people visit @znmeb, for example, compared with @justinkistner,
- What parts of our Twitter pages work and what parts don’t, and
- What do Twitter users search for?
With Google or Bing, I can get keyword suggestions – in the case of Bing, even a determination of “commercial intent” vs. “just looking.” There’s an entire search engine optimization / marketing industry build up around these tools, many of them free. We’re even starting to see “social media optimization” tools, although I haven’t seen anything that looked like it had any substance. Without knowing what people are searching for on Twitter, how can I know what to tweet? I can tell you what people are tweeting about, but not what they wish we were tweeting about.
Google and Microsoft may be in a position to give away search optimization tools to market advertising. Compete and Quantcast and Alexa may be in a position to give away competitive analysis data to market higher-level or more detailed data. Hubspot can give away dozens of social media reports and white papers to market their tools and services.
But I don’t think Twitter is in that position. I don’t think they can afford to give away detailed Twitter page analytics or search user behavior data. So I’d be very surprised if their “free” real-time analytics dashboard is anything more than a new presentation of information we can already get externally via the APIs. And if they really are planning to give away analytics beyond a dashboard made from the already-publicly-available data, I think that’s a huge strategic mistake.
Borasky Research Journal Google+ Page 
