What does this have to do with Twitter?  I’m getting there.

When Twitter was created, none of the core team were quite sure what it was they had built.  It was an open-ended platform with limited utility but powerful reach, and became a clean sheet onto which savvy users penned their own utility.  To date Twitter has shined as a mechanism to propagate ideas, status, and other forms of (guffaw) intellectual creativity in 140 characters or less, and has made it easy for people to track and follow those whose ideas, status, and guffaws are noteworthy to them.  More recently it represents an interesting and compelling way to search ideas, nearly in realtime, as they plot their course through the collective psyche of the twitterati, including such worthy topics as this morning’s #Skittles firestorm.  Still, many have questioned its utility.

This morning’s availability crisis (ostensibly brought on by the Twitterification of fans of the TV show “The View“) highlights one consequence of a growth management problem.   But that’s a simple issue:  more servers, please.  But as Twitter is now clearly tipping into the mainstream, the more complex challenge is how to maintain some sort of acceptable signal-to-noise ratio.  The vagaries of the general public may well threaten to soil our garden much as the growth of the internet to the wider corners of the intellectosphere rendered Usenet.. well… unusable.

Which brings me back to the Crest Plaza parking lot.  With all of the self-ascribed “Social Media Experts” running around encouraging corporate clients to blast their marketing messages out over Twitter, and with the influx of celebrities into the Tweetspace enabled by the simple power to publish by sending messages over their mobile phones, there’s certainly lots of messaging traffic.  But all of this “grass roots marketing” means that, like the beginning of baseball season, there is a whole lot of pitching and not a lot of catching.

The presence of an increasing number of celebrities on twitter, in particular, are illuminating a disturbing trend.  Hockey phenom Alexander Ovechkin rather sweetly tried to maintain two-way conversation with his fans but found it difficult to scale.  His intentions were clearly sincere but obviously having thousands of fans buzzing his mobile phone became a killer.  As of this morning, Ashton Kutcher has 201,869 followers but himself is only listening to 48.  There are clearly practical limits to how many people we can specifically converse with.  I don’t begrudge these ratios, but anyone who thinks that this is truly conversation has never been in a bar.  We live in a celebrity-obsessed culture, and clearly more and more people crave more and more access to their favourite stars.  But just because you’re following William Shatner, does that mean you’re communicating?

Likewise, there is only so much that we as individuals can absorb from the sphere of things we declare our interest in.  At the risk of sounding McLuhanist, the form may be much more important here than the content.  My concern is that the former is quickly overwhelming the latter.

Speaking firsthand, I have sent replies via twitter to well-known Twitterati like Mathew Ingram, Fred Wilson, Ian Rogers, and others whom I also communicate with via email, Facebook, and other media.  I’ve never actually heard back from those tweets, but I can’t take it terribly personally since I know these folks have replied to other messages sent by me via phone, email and Facebook.  Are they really listening on Twitter?  I’m not sure that, at a sufficient level of scale, that is possible in practical terms.  I once asked Robert Scoble (who oddly follows more than follow him) how he could keep track of so many people (at the time, and this was in 2008, that was around 2100).  His answer was, essentially, that he doesn’t.  He checks in when he can and based on sheer volume there is almost always something that is interesting to him.  It is akin to standing behind a dumptruck that is 99% rock and 1% gold and trying to grab nuggets while the tipper lifts.

This doesn’t seem like the solution to any problem.  I still occasionally find topics of interest via twitter, though as my network expands the numbers are fewer and the time spent increases.  Moreover, Twitter appears to have become better at empowering the illusion of conversation, rather than actual conversation — this makes it the perfect hangout for the fame-obsessed, the celebrities, corporations, and various other notorious self-promoters.

So while Twitter continues to grow thanks to its amorphous nature, eventually measures are going to need to be put in place to mitigate the signal-to-noise ratio and preserve (or pinpoint) the service’s utility.  Embedded in this is both risk and opportunity.  The risk is that a gatekeeper placed at the wrong entrance will turn away users.  The oportunity is that charging a toll at certain entry and exit points may enable the company to establish a viable, independent financial future, a topic which is the source of considerable debate lately.

Ultimately though, Twitter’s long term success is dependent upon more pitches landing in gloves.  With such a strong, open, and growing network of individuals, the end result of a lot fewer broken windows benefits us all.

I’m fairly certain that having “Lucent” on your curriculum vitae and “VP” beside it as your title will just about qualify you for a position as a Barista at Seattle’s Best Coffee[1]. Try for a bigger gig, and perhaps you’re reaching.

In the boom times the notion of meritocracy in American business was often talked about but, due to a shortage of real talent, was also highly superficial. This explains how a number of pudknockers (to quote Panch Barnes [2]) managed to dig themselves out of big, ugly, unsuccessful companies and land cherry jobs with big salaries, private jets, huge bonuses and, of course, stock options packages that at the peak of the market would allow them to purchase medium-sized African republics.

During that time, companies (apparently including Lucent’s Board of Directors) consistently failed to take into account both the track records of the companies from which their prospects were fleeing or the individual success of the executives themselves. Big names like Lucent, AT&T, Nortel, Microsoft were enough to seal the deal when you were looking for a CEO because one was only trying to impress investors and, frankly, investors can’t tell the difference.

When interviewing big names like Fiorina and Russo, apparently nobody bothered to look at Lucent’s track record since its launch and the history of the company that spawned it. HP and Kodak got dazed by the glare, and mistook it for halos encircling the heads of their CEO candidates and look where it has gotten them. HP has gotten a multi-year-long merger which will never work during which time the brightest success that the world’s oldest technology company can laud is making digital cameras mainstream. [3] Kodak got 8 months of floundering attempts to segue their now squandered lead in photography into some reasonable market position in digital cameras. Apparently both have digital photography on the brain.

If you want to look to either of these two for innovative thinking, you’d best look elsewhere. It’s not all their fault, though — their lack of creativity is institutionalized. When Lucent was a shiny ray of hope within AT&T, you didn’t get to be a VP by being an innovative thinker or by taking risks. Leadership within AT&T meant mastery of the groupthink: the unflappable ability to read the winds of whimsy and spew it back to the powers that be. This explains the long relationship between AT&T and McKinsey Consulting [4].

As Trish Russo and Carly Fiorina are discovering, life is a lot more difficult outside of The Borg. Patricia Russo has wisely cut bait and fled back to the constitutional monarchy that is Lucent, while Carly Fiorina (evidently more courageous — or perhaps just deluded) has committed herself to riding the blazing meteor all the way down to earth in a megaproject that would make BC Ferries [5] proud.

Pity, though. In the wake of their experiments outside of The Borg (and other Borg-like objects), execs like these two have left a lot of otherwise intelligent people out of work, out of options (stock options, I mean), and short on opportunities. In the process they have killed some pretty cool companies, thus proving that the challenge of careers which have some ultimate consequence is not something they’re ready for.

After failing to recognize opportunity after opportunity, the battle cries of these supposed technology leaders have amounted to what Percy Bysshe Shelley would call “an ocean of dreams without a sound[6].”

-Ian.

[1] – http://www.seabest.com/site/about/careers/ [2] – http://www.danielc.com/quote.html [3] – http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/08jan02a.htm [4] – http://www.telecomvisions.com/visions/ [5] – http://www.nsnews.com/issues00/w032000/03150001.html [6] – http://home.westserv.net.au/~alen1/TheSensitivePlant.htm

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/RTGAMArticleHTMLTemplate/D,D/20020107/wmath07?hub=homeBN&tf=tgam%252Frealtime%252Ffullstory.html&cf=tgam/realtime/config-neutral&vg=BigAdVariableGenerator&slug=wmath07&date 020107&archive=RTGAM&site=Front&ad_page_name=breakingnews

(nice friggin’ URL, guys!)

Ingram: A track record isn’t always a good thing By MATHEW INGRAM

Globe and Mail Update

Monday, January 07 ? Online Edition, Posted at 3:25 PM EST

Here’s a nice welcome: The board of directors of a struggling tech company names you as the new chief executive officer, and the stock falls. Admittedly, shares of networking equipment maker Lucent Technologies only fell by a small amount Monday, after an initial boost of enthusiasm, but it still wasn’t much of a greeting for new CEO Patricia Russo.

The tepid response could be because Ms. Russo is a Lucent veteran ? which means she was around during the former superstar’s fall from glory, a loss of value that would be almost unprecedented if Nortel Networks hadn’t experienced a similar fall from grace. For some investors, her connection to that era means her abilities are already in question.

The lack of an enthusiastic response could also be due to the fact that Lucent has been looking for a new CEO for more than a year, and the expectation was that ? like Nortel ? the company was interested in finding a senior telecom executive from outside the company who could turn things around, rather than someone with a history inside the firm.

“What they’ve got with Pat is another lifer,” one analyst told Reuters. “I view this as a lost opportunity to bring in some new management. For the long-term health of this company they need an infusion of outside views, outside experiences, and frankly Pat does not bring that.” Several senior tech executives were reportedly offered the job and turned it down, which probably doesn’t make Ms. Russo feel any better.

The company, naturally, chose to focus on the fact that as a Lucent employee and executive for more than 20 years ? before she went to Kodak to become president and chief operating officer about eight months ago ? Ms. Russo had an in-depth knowledge of the company, and therefore could “step in as CEO without missing a beat,” to quote a news release.

The problem for some Lucent-watchers, however, is that Ms. Russo was a key members of several different departments at Lucent while the entire company was not just missing a beat, but missing entire technology developments ? and thereby effectively handing control of the telecom and networking equipment game to competitors Nortel and Cisco Systems.

Ms. Russo replaces Henry Schacht, who was CEO of Lucent following its spinoff from AT&T and then returned to the position following the departure of CEO Richard McGinn in October, 2000, and now becomes chairman. Ms. Russo left Lucent two months before Mr. McGinn, who was fired as a result of the company’s lacklustre performance, which included paying about $44-billion (U.S.) to acquire startups with little or no revenue.

Like Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, also a former Lucent executive, Ms. Russo was intimately involved in the spinoff of the company from AT&T in 1995, which at the time was one of the largest initial public offerings in U.S. history and was oversubscribed. After a couple of positive years, however, Lucent made a number of critical errors ? including a decision to delay the introduction of a new series of switches.

Nortel did the opposite, pouring its development and marketing resources into rolling out its version of the new switch, and within a year Nortel had taken so much market share away from Lucent that it had supplanted its formerly much larger competitor as the No. 1 player in the telecom equipment industry. Nortel’s market value also eclipsed Lucent’s, something that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.

But Lucent did more than just miss a product cycle: To compound its error, the company took some desperate steps to try and catch up ? including engaging in an orgy of vendor financing, the questionable practice of loaning large customers the money to buy your products. It didn’t work, and Lucent wound up with hundreds of millions in questionable loans on its books just as the entire sector was heading into a sharp downturn.

Since Mr. McGinn left, Lucent has narrowly averted a cash crunch by spinning off a couple of its units ? the Avaya corporate networking business, and the Agere fibre-optic operation ? and has laid off or announced plans to lay off close to half its previous employee base of 106,000. Despite these moves, which led to a loss of $16.2-billion for 2001, the company said it will not meet estimates for the first quarter.

Some of the company’s supporters argue that Lucent needs a quick turnaround, and that having someone who knows the business ? even if they were associated with some of the company’s failures ? will help speed up the process. But it may take time for investors to be convinced that taking someone from Lucent’s past will help it have a brighter future.