Robert Scoble monitors 33,000 Twitter accounts organized into 20 lists to spot tech trends before they break. He caught Siri months early, reported an 8.0 earthquake five minutes before USGS, and was Instagram's 79th user by watching what investors, journalists, and programmers share.
I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg before many people did. You know, before he went public, he changed the world by connecting a billion people. So far back then, it was 80 million people. I was the 79th user of Instagram, and now that's 100 million people.
Right? Yeah. Okay. And how do you find these people?
I watch incessantly the social media world, and yet I have 33,000 people on Twitter that I'm watching. And if somebody says, man, this. This new thing that just came out this morning is really cool, then I call them up. A lot of times now, though, I have such an audience that the PR people call me or my friends call me, or people message me on Facebook and say, hey, you got to know about this company. Would you like an intro? You know, this afternoon, too? I'm going to Menlo Ventures. So I've built relationships with a lot of the venture capitalists and investors, and they're the ones who really see things first. And so they signal to me and say, hey, this is actually a cool company. You better go see it.
Okay. And, yeah, you have. I see how fast your Twitter stream is going. You have, I don't know, about a second for every tweet if you wouldn't do anything else. So how do you find out any information in these.
This is serendipity. I have this split up into 20 lists. So I have a list of tech journalists. So if I just want to see what the tech news is, I look at the list, and I usually look at it on Flipboard on my iPad. And same thing for Facebook. I have a bunch of different lists over here that are split up into investors, tech journalists, programmers, tech executives, you know, executives at big companies. And then I split up the companies into startups and big companies. I have pretty good list. So I can just click through the list and see what people are saying about various things. Like, here's my news list. And I can see, you know, what people are reporting on and so on and so forth.
And how do you find out if the story is interesting? Is it a guts decision?
No, you can see signals, for instance, underneath Facebook, you can see how many people liked each story. So I can see which company or which person or which story got the most attention today. That's one thing. But part of it's just my knowledge of the industry and what captures my interest. You know, if it captures my interest, it's usually something disruptive and interesting. I saw Siri. Siri was here in this bedroom six months before it launched, right? And I saw it and the guys who invested in Siri said I was the only one other than Steve Jobs to get what Siri's impact on the world was going to be. And so the reputation about that gets around, and that forces other entrepreneurs to come and see you.
So, yeah, in your talk with Howard Rheingold, you talked about pattern recognition. So you detect some pattern in this noise?
Yeah, well, you know, when you see this kind of flow. Let me see if I can get it going again. When you see this kind of flow. You know, my brain is looking for things that have changed in the last minute. I was the first American to report the Chinese earthquake because of this, right? The 8.0 earthquake. And I saw earthquake and an earthquake and an earthquake. And I went and looked at the. At the cities from each person, and they were thousands of miles apart. And So I knew five minutes before USGS reported it that this was an 8.0 earthquake. And I reported that. And that caused people around the world to start looking at me and passing me information and saying, oh, here's another guy. Here's another girl. Here's a picture, here's a video. We had more news. First of all, we were 45 minutes before CNN on Twitter because we saw this pattern. And second of all, by the time CNN reported just that there was an earthquake, we had videos and photos and firsthand reports. There was people in the city where the epicenter was that were tweeting, right? And I knew how to deal with that. Now, most of the journalism organizations know how to deal with that. They have teams that watch Twitter now, But back then, they didn't, and they were really caught unawares, and they were embarrassed, really.
