I'm still making my way through a TON of notes from TechCrunch Disrupt NYC this week, which is still among the most important intellectual events on the East Coast for me, whatever the drop in buzz (more on that in the next post).
The trick to working TechCrunch is not to sit in the room and watch a VC like Ron Conway say almost the same thing he said last year or at a dozen other conferences and try to dredge his chat for investment tips or clues to who's hot/who's not, but to watch the video later and meanwhile go out on Start-up Alley and talk to all the kids bursting with new ideas and enthusiasm.
One pair of geeks with fire in their eyes about their product are Embedle co-founders Daoliang Yang and Fei Deng.
And like a lot of new tech things and apps with names that don't seem to fit, you may not have any uptake with it when you first see its web page, see a demo, or see them walk through an example tweet. The Twitter crutch space is getting crowded and it takes a little to appreciate when something is better.
When you see the demo, it seems like an interesting Twitter consumption tool, an aid to try to filter out some of your own personal firehouse of Twitter and perhaps follow just one coherent thought/conversation. Typically in an evening I find I might have dozens of conversations with dozens of articles or sites we're linking to and it begins to suffer the Second Life group chat problem -- the information goes by faster than the human eye can see it or specific threads are interrupted by other threads, and therefore you start to respond to about every 10th message and get out of sync with coherency.
So at first I perceived Embedle as a chat chiclet that was cleaner and more coherent than the old Weblins or the new Tokkster. I like Tokkster, and it enables me both to chat with the whole group that shows up on a page (or as many as can fit in my view) or individuals on the page, but I'm still left with the feeling, as Yogi Berra put it, "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
Embedle hit the sweeter spot for me by enabling me to take my *already hand-filtered convos* from Twitter, i.e. the ones I had manually selected with humint, and continue them in a focused way, while bringing in new people and new comments.
This has the potential of taking all those mindless myrmidons who just retweet stuff all day and never produce original content or say what they think, and luring them into saying just a tad more.
If you've ever followed a hash-marked topic on Twitter, it can be very frustrating, especially as a journalist. Twitter is like Google in that it rewards the mediocrity of the mass mind by putting on top -- and *keeping* on top the most retweeted, i.e. linked tweet, which in the case of a topic like "East River Helicopter Accident" or "Moscow Election Rallies" can be an official's view of the event (often belated or spun) or the very early (and biased) view of an event (like a "wow" from a 10-year-old kid) -- and that top tweet just keeps getting looked at and retweeted. How to break out into real-time from there?
You have to keep scrolling down -- Twitter willing, and it often lags or freezes -- to try to see *the rest of the actual news* under that hash-tag and then try to get more news and views from individual people tweeting.
Now, if you see someone who has posted their comment on a website using Embedle, Embedle enables you to go back to that interesting page linked and then keep the conversation going. So much of Twitter is shallow and inane precisely because of that inability to follow up meaningfully with the content you personally selected.
I find one of the hardest things to get working on Twitter is "the conversation". Often when I click on "view conversation" it simply never comes up. This could be due to the fact that Twitter will only display both sides of a conversation for people I follow, but even when I follow both of them, it often seems to fail to display.
If I I had a long Twit fight and I want to capture that debate, I don't know how I can do that usefully and quickly, except by using Storify, which still requires manually dragging and dropping the tweets into reverse order in which they now appear (like trying to read email from the bottom up) to make them coherent.
Maybe Embedle will be able to solve that problem (if it proves to have sufficient user demand down the road); currently it shows only an initial Twitter exchange and then one round of back and forth on Embedle -- but that's huge progress. I don't know what it would take to enable saving longer convos of many rounds -- it already took about a year to code and test and I don't know what's involved in adding a "Disqus" like memory archive.
Here's the problem with the name "Embedle", however: it does not describe the product as far as I can tell.
This script is not embedded on my web page, if someone uses it to visit and comment on my webpage. I am not pasting their script into my back end on Typepad, and it is not obviously injecting script into my web page without my consent.
(Note: the developers do plan to provide a script eventually that people can plug into their own web pages to have a ticker of conversations using Embedle -- but that's a separate concept.)
The name "Embedle" reminds one of the journalistic practice of "embedding" with the US army in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is usually signifies that you have biased information. They might want to stay away from that association.
"Embedle" isn't physically embedding in anything, from what I can tell, except in a sense a tweet, where it appears like any shortened web link such as bitly or owsly or Twitter's own link-shrinking function. That isn't "embedding" -- it's just linking, although in this case, providing a link that has "more to it" (and that was probably their train of thought in designing the name).
But the beauty of Embedle isn't that it's inside your tweet (where you might not appreciate it's potential at first when you spot it on someone else's tweet); the beauty is that it is on your bookmarklet bar at the top of the screen and you can instantly turn any page you're reading into a shared conversation on Twitter you are *already* in or will start with followers.
It sort of turns Twitter inside out: instead of fighting Twitter the platform to talk, trying to see past your own firehouse of feed, spam, random crap, distracting stuff, you tame Twitter to use for the purpose you were hoping you'd use it more for -- discussing the news (or whatever area you're interested in).
Of course, to succeed at making this really kick-ass, there will have to be more and more Embedle users who make it fun and interesting -- and I think there will be, although they just launched this week at TCD and I only see a few dozen on Twitter search.
In response to discussion of another app I haven't had a chance to look at, the founders of Embedle wrote: "I think Monki is about bringing related people to webpages, and we are about bringing focused tweet conversation to webpages."
Well, except your Twitter feed of those you're following and your followers responding to you is already what makes people stick; they then either discovery new content serendipitously, or travel to a related webpage to make a point, and have the more focused tweet convo, then come back to Twitter and draw in more people and more pages, so it's more of a spiral. The transaction does not end on the shared webpage. It's also a way of having asynchronous content accessed through Twitter
When I saw the demo on a Mac (I hate Macs), the chiclet was showing as a little blue box alongside the Twitter feed and then later on a web page.
But on my PC, for some reason (or maybe they changed the display in the interrim), Embedle manifests as a page-wide white box which very clearly gives me a template spread across the top with my original tweet and the dev's response, then my options to "reply" or "retweet" or "favourite".
Under "reply" I get a box to type in and the message "Your tweet as on Twitter will be the first 120 characters, plus a link to long tweet & webpage" -- which means I can "Twit longer" like Twitlonger. (I will never, ever use Twitlonger because it constantly spams me on Scoop.it under the guise of "suggestions" for my topic there -- a spammy annoying practice.)
OR I can restrain myself to the 140 characters and take the second option "Tweet as on Twitter".
There's also a "Tweet Later" function whose use case baffles me, but I suppose this is good for timed press releases for product launches or reminders about an event that will then drive people to the event page.
I asked the founders if they could summarize their story in one line. Fei Deng said, "We try to encourage the Twitter conversation."
They could drop the "try" and say "We encourage the Twitter conversation" but then change their service's name to "Convos" or "Encourage" instead of "Embedle" -- maybe the VCs in the clinics would tell them something like that, or maybe they would tell them to keep their name which connotes the wacky sounding verbified nouns of Silicon Valley products.
Precisely because it's outside the Twitter stream where you are viewing another web page, "Embedle" doesn't work as a name because it's not embedding in that web page, it's embedding (in a sense) *back* in your Twitter stream.
Also planned for this service is an "earned credit" concept that will create a "positive feedback loop".
This will mean a "promoted tweets" system but not the "promoted tweets" of ad agencies paying Twitter itself, but rather crowdsourced promotion, whereby the public enters the system, and people use up their own earned credits to retweet you in that system.
The "earned credit" system solves the problem you could foresee coming with a burgeoning Embedle community, where I will have to find interesting people no longer with a search of the term "Embedle" or sifting through my own stream, but will see what is "earning" in the system.
I don't know if the devs then have the capacity to put a "leaderboard" of "top earning tweets" on their own dedicated page, or give you script to run it on your own web page as interesting content.
What I do find intriguing about the direction the "earned credit" concept is going is that it crowdsources the value, i.e.
Full disclosure: While I was writing up this story, after I'd seen the demo and studied it, one of the Embedle founders gave a small tip to my "crowdsource" project on blogging about Central Asia. That's a nice thing to do, and teaches me to offer the link in each post to get more activity there, which I haven't focused on drumming up yet (crowdsourcing is not automatic, as you will discover!). But I don't believe this kind tip influenced my blog! It does bring my tips in the last 60 days to the grand total of...$147, so keep it coming, as blogging is an impoverished and lonely activity : )
Support Different Stans, My Crowdfunding Project on Indiegogo.
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