Joel on Twitter

I still have mixed feelings about Twitter, but I generally agree with the points that Joel makes. In particular I think that if you can do more listening than you do talking you can maximize its usefulness as a tool. He writes:

Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.

The other day I was having a conversation with my parents about the purpose of Twitter. I argued that it was to attain useful information. I use it to find interesting articles and conversations. I think the key here is that it helps me find them. The entirety of these conversations does not actually occur on the Twitter platform. My parents argued that it was yet another tool of my generation that provides entertainment to the ever-growing portion of the population who have a short attention span. The difference between “learning” and “empty enjoyment” may help illuminate the segmented market of Twtitter users. So, when you use Twitter, do you find yourself gaining knowledge; do you “learn” something of interest or value? Or is it just a way to pass them time; a vehicle for empty enjoyment? I think the answers to these questions are important for the impact Twitter will have on my generation.

Becoming an “expert”

Disclaimer: I am by no means an expert, and in the spectrum of knowing, taking a view, and acting, I’m somewhere between knowing and taking a view. Below is just what I’ve observed, I’m not speaking as someone who has mastered these stages.

When I worked in Sales and Trading this summer, I was given one piece of advice more than any other: take a view. All the full-time employees expected each summer analyst to read the Wall Street Journal and talk to other traders about the latest market activity. But, many people had difficulty translating the knowledge they acquired into a coherent view on the market. It’s one thing to know the price of oil relative to equities and to read why the “experts” think the trend will either continue or cease. It’s quite another to develop your own genuine view on the subject.

It’s tricky too. In stating your opinion, where does regurgitation end and originality begin? My answer would be that forming an original opinion requires a return to primary sources – a study of the original facts or statistics, combined with a critical review of many secondary sources. So, you aren’t taking a view, but rather only being knowledgeable if you restate the opinion of one of the senior researchers at the firm or mimic the column you read in the opinion section. Taking a view requires the examination of original data and the analysis of diverse and contending readings in order to figure out what you might be missing. Only then can a person advance from simply knowing to taking a view.

Now that I am transitioning from the finance world and to the startup world, I see the same principles being important. There is a stark difference between knowing what web products do, who started them, and how they were funded (this is the “memorize TechCrunch” approach to becoming an expert) and being able to predict which will be successful and then explain why.

Some mistake simple knowledge for expertise. In fact, expertise = (knowing + taking a view + acting). And knowing, taking a view, and acting must occur in this order. Which is why it’s so important for anyone new to a particular industry to not only take in information that you read online or elsewhere (the knowing) but also engage with it (the taking a view) by talking with other people, be it in person or virtually. Laying the foundations of knowledge and taking a view early will increase your chances of success in action beyond the basal rate of luck. And then you may become an expert.

Let’s quit the gimmick of writing open letters

Recently I’ve seen a lot of “open letters” circulating on the Internet. The ones that I’ve come across usually have been addressed to tech CEO’s like Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt or Steve Ballmer, or to their companies: for example “an open letter to Google.” The word “open” (as opposed to private, direct letters) connotes the idea that “if I am open in my letter to you, then you should be open in your response to the public.” The logic suggests that when the company doesn’t respond (as is the case 99% of the time), it reflects that they are not as “open” as the original letter writer and fail to meet standards of accountability to the public. And isn’t that an important aspect of what makes a company “not evil”: that they are engaged in an open discussion with the world?

But this logic is off base. It is unrealistic to think that, in terms of openness, a public company can be judged in the same way as a single customer or a blogger. CEOs cannot and should not be expected to respond personally and publicly to every critical letter they receive; if they did their boards should give them the boot for wasting the shareholders’ money. The real measure of responsiveness is whether the company considers taking actions that reflect the suggestions they get from large numbers of their customer base, and when it can’t respond positively, the company its position persuasively.

The perception of taking the high road in terms of openness is not the only reason people use the open letter medium. Formatting the ideas as a letter allows the author to be quirky and dispose readers to believe that the writer is effective and that the intended recipient should read it. The reader should be excited because, after all, this is not just another opinion piece, but a letter that Steve Jobs might actually read! This is the implicit promise of such letters, yet are they really read by their intended recipient at a higher rate than opinion pieces? Probably not.

Let’s quit the gimmick of writing open letters. If you want to influence a company, forget the open letters to CEO’s. Be more direct about the audience you are really reaching: the consumers. Write an opinion piece and ask customers to vote with their own emails and dollars not spent with the company.