Twitter Revolution Iinterview with Robert "Scobleizer" Scoble

Hi, I'm Warren Whitlock for Twitter Handbook here with Robert Scoble.

Hi, Robert.

Yeah, hey, I understand you use Twitter. A little bit.

A little bit. And all these fun tools.

Great, great, great. And I thank you for writing the forward to the Twitter Handbook. But I got a question.

Writing in 140 characters at a time now is a little.

Yeah, I know. It's going to take us a little while to get that in there, so. Great.

If there was justice in the world, you'd have to. The whole book would have to be 140 characters.

Right? What I want to know, we keep hearing a bunch of things like, you know, Twitter's going away or isn't working. There's a fail. Well, and should we all switch over to FriendFeed or something else? Identity CA. What do you have to say about that? Is Twitter here?

Absolutely. Switch away, switch away. The more I try to get people to switch, the less they do Twitter. It's interesting. Twitter, you're locked in place because your friends are there. So unless you get all your friends to move somewhere else, you're never going to get. You're never going to get something else to be successful at brand. That's key. Twitter is. And we see that. Right. Twitter's down over the last two months. It's been down a lot. Almost every day for the last two months. It's getting a little bit better lately, but still, features don't work on there. I go to the direct reply page and it crashes on me. And the IM doesn't work. That used to work before and all sorts of stuff like that. But we still are there.

Don't you think it's something that the Twitter phenomena, the revolution is something bigger.

Than, I don't know, I'd call it a revolution.

The social marketing revolution.

Yeah. Really. Twitter joined IM and blogging and forums into one place. Right. And give every message URL, so I could link to any specific message. It's pretty unique from that. I don't know that that's a revolution. It's an evolution, I think, of where a lot of communication is going to go. Where are we going?

Well, so, so, so, I mean, regardless of what happens with Twitter, the company, are we going to be tweeting in the future?

Yeah, I think so. I, I think that form of a short message that you send around the world to either your friends or an audience or, or, you know, or to a web service. Right. Because I can not just communicate human to human with Twitter. Right. I can communicate machine to machine and that's pretty unique way of looking at the world. But if you're watching Twittervision, for instance, that's not owned by Twitter yet, they're using the API to grab messages out of the Twitter bucket and display them on Google Map.

Right.

And that's. We're not going to stop doing that kind of thing anytime soon. Video is not going to replace sending a short text message. It's just not as efficient. And, you know, is there going to be another service that comes along that does tweeting better than Twitter, maybe more reliably, but not better, you know, and that's the hard marketing challenge, you know, can you add a little photo in there? Yeah. Okay, but is that really better? You know, does that add lot to the communication? I don't think so. So I don't see a big, you know, revolution that's going to put tweeting out of business. You know, maybe a better service will come along that's better integrated into the tools we use. But.

And we're still going to be doing it no matter what, so. And what do we say to those people that come along? Because I know we're just the minority of the population. Somebody says, hey, what about this? Is it unstable? Is it working? Is there something else? Should I start doing it?

Life is unstable.

Great. What advice do you have?

We don't get out of this alive.

Other than reading my book. What advice do you have for somebody that says, should I bother doing any of this?

I think, you know, if you have something to communicate with other people, you should think about it because it's a unique way to communicate with other people around the world. And it's certainly interesting way to have a conversation that you can't have by watching CNN or sending an email to somebody. An email doesn't have a URL, so I can't link into an email. An AP email doesn't have an RSS feed, so I can't get it mixed into friend feed and into my Google Reader the way I can with Twitter. And an email. Can't be. Isn't an API that a like TwitterVision can use or Twirl can use to display these messages in a different way in a different place.

Great. And I got one more question. Now I know you have, you know, more followers than God, more following, and you're doing all this and spend a lot of time.

I think the Catholic Church has more.

Followers than I do. How do you. I was just trying to get you on one of the old Lenin thing. I'm more popular than Christ. But, okay, so I'm not going to get you to make a goof like that. So. But no, you have. You have a whole bunch of followers. I know it must take a whole lot of time. And we've been telling people, you got to be reading these things, you got to be paying attention, you got to get in the conversation. How do you keep the balance?

I'm using it for a very specific purpose. Everybody I follow is a de facto early adopter. So. And I say you define yourself by who you follow, not who follows you. Right. So because that's the inputs in your life are whether you're going to make you smarter or stupider or funnier or not as funny or more informed or not informed. So if you choose your inputs wisely, you're going. That's going to define you. Whether you're following all sports people, you're going to probably be more up to date on sports. Right. If you follow all, you know, like, if you follow people like new media Jim, who's a cameraman in the White House for NBC, you're probably going to be more up to date on what the President's going to do. Right. So if you choose the people you're following carefully, you're going to change yourself. I guess so. I'm trying to follow early adopters because I'm studying how early adopters think and what they talk about, what they like, what I fund, the apps they like, stuff like that. That's how I find a lot of stuff for the latest technology in my life. You know, it's how I know about what's cool on PlayStation 3 or on the iPhone or on my laptop. People tell me, oh, you should go watch wine library tv. And you go over there and watch it and you go, whoa, that's really cool. Because the early adopters are looking for cool photographs.

Yeah. So, like, you and I both follow thousands of people, but that it's not some kind of a contest, a matter if we follow what's going to work for us. And okay, if somebody follows 10 people, absolutely.

If your only goal is to follow your family, then that defines you too. You're a family person. Right. Trying to see what your daughter's doing at school or something like that. That's fine, too. It's just I'm using it to study a sizable group of early adopters. Most of them were handpicked, and that was what happened. If you turn out to be an idiot, I unbody. If you really are an idiot, if you go racist on me, or something. You get blocked.

Right.

So I completely, over time, I continue to weed out, to add new people to who I'm following so that I get smarter. Cool stuff.

Okay, great. Okay, so in case somebody hasn't ever heard of you, you're Robert Scoble. Your, your blog is Scobalizer. Scobalizer. And from there we can find out whatever else you're up to.

Yeah, you can search for Robert on Google. I'm the number of two or three Robert right now.

Okay. That's easier to spell than Scoble.

Yeah.

Okay, great. And your Scobalizer on, on Twitter.

Yeah.

Okay. And yeah, follow this guy. He's small, smartest guy, one of the smartest guys I know.

That's where my day job is.

Okay, wonderful. Thanks so much. I'm Warren Whitlock for Twitter Handbook. Talk to you again soon.

Sam.