In an informal chat at Twitter headquarters on Thursday, chief executive Dick Costolo talked about some of the numbers behind the service (as Erica reported earlier), including the fact that the network has over 100 million active users now. That may be a long distance away from Facebook’s more than half a billion, but the fact is that Twitter isn’t really competing with Facebook — it’s not really a social network, but a real-time information network. In other words, it’s a media entity, and the sooner it starts living up to that reality the better.

People like to lump Twitter in with Facebook as a social network, and there are definitely similarities between them — users can obviously distribute information on Facebook in much the same way they do on Twitter, whether it’s just text or links or photos or videos. But Facebook puts much more focus on the social aspects of its network, such as games and birthdays and so on, while Twitter is just short bursts of information. As Costolo likes to stress, one of the service’s main strengths is its simplicity.

That’s something Twitter gets criticized for — the fact that it isn’t easy to carry on a conversation, or put together a coherent narrative from such a rushing stream of information (which is why tools like Storify are so useful), but it is also the network’s greatest strength. It allows users to send information quickly to a large group of followers quickly and easily, whether those followers are looking for personal updates or details about a news event like the earthquake in Japan. That’s why expanding the 140-character limit would be such a mistake, as I’ve argued in the past.

It’s an information distribution system, like a newswire

So what Twitter has is this ever-growing stream of text and links and photos. In a sense, it’s an information distributor — like a newswire — except everyone who uses it is constructing their own stream of news. So how do you monetize that? You can charge for access to the “firehose” of that data, which Twitter is doing, but has mostly outsourced to companies like Gnip. Costolo said during his chat on Thursday that the company isn’t really interested in building that business much bigger than it already is, which makes sense because there’s probably not a lot of money in doing that.

You could also build analytics around all that data, the way that companies like Radian6 and others have, to try and tell brands and businesses who is saying what about them and when. That’s not a bad business, and Costolo suggested that Twitter is interested in doing more of that, or possibly partnering with others. But that’s probably not a huge business — and it’s certainly not a business that justifies an -billion or -billion market value, which is what Twitter reportedly has as a result of its latest round of financing.

So what else is there? There’s the media business — and that’s where Costolo (who used to run another information-distribution business at Feedburner) has said Twitter is placing most of its bets. In other words, on advertising. But isn’t the advertising business going down the drain and taking newspapers and old web publishers like Yahoo and AOL with it? Yes. But look at where the ad revenue is going: to social networks like Facebook and to Google, since both can target ads in a way that traditional publishers can’t.

Targeting the “interest graph” and monetizing that

That’s something Twitter can do as well, but in the process it will have to become even more of a media company than it already is. It has this huge ocean of data coming in that it can analyze and make sense of — and it can carve it up however it wants. Why leave it to others to curate the news or other content coming from Twitter using tools like Percolate (which is now powering a news offering from Reuters) or Storify or even Flipboard? Why not make it easier for users to customize the stream of information they see, the way some are trying to do with Zite or Paper.li or Summize?

If it wanted to, Twitter could easily publish customized news and information products using the billions of tweets it sees, and an analysis of the trending topics and other data that comes with that. It could even create targeted mini-networks, like the kind that StockTwits (see disclosure below) has created around a specific niche or market. That’s the kind of thing that would likely interest a lot of advertisers and brands — and likely more than just slapping a “promoted tweet” at the top of a user’s stream.

The bottom line is that Twitter shouldn’t really be looking at Facebook or even Google+ as competitors, because at heart it is an information company, not a social network. A better comparison would be something like Thomson Reuters –a company that runs a newswire, but also has targeted services around specific markets and kinds of information that advertisers and knowledge workers are willing to pay substantial sums for.

Twitter could be the crowdsourced Reuters of the digital age. And having closed a financing round of close to a billion dollars, or what Costolo described as “a truckload of money,” the company now has the financial resources to pursue that future — if it wants to.

Disclosure: StockTwits is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users See-ming Lee and Si Brindley

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Are we becoming slaves to the “like” button, the retweet and the thumbs up — and now the Google+ “plus one” button? In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, writer Neil Strauss argues that we are, and that all of this implicit and explicit voting that takes place in social networks is encouraging a kind of vicious conformity. We no longer reveal our true selves online, he says, because so many of us are obsessed with judging our conduct based on whether it is approved by our friends, followers or social graph. But is that true? And if so, is it social networking’s fault?

Strauss argues that widespread use of social-networking features such as the “like” button, the retweet and the +1 button that is part of the new Google+ are effectively training us to only respond to things that have become popular — and to govern our own behavior so that it gets more likes and retweets, which he says effectively suppresses any unusual or controversial opinion in favor of the mainstream or predictable.

Just as stand-up comedians are trained to be funny by observing which of their lines and expressions are greeted with laughter, so too are our thoughts online molded to conform to popular opinion by these buttons. A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn’t retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence.

A real-time version of high school

The result of all this, Strauss says, is that “we don’t show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us.” To the Wall Street Journal writer, the Internet used to be a “liberation from conformity” that was eventually hijacked by advertising and commerce, and has now been turned into a giant, real-time version of high school, in which we all seek approval by tailoring our behavior and the way we look to the preconceptions of the group.

“Like” culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Instead, we are shaped by our stats, which include not just “likes” but the number of comments generated in response to what we write and the number of friends or followers we have.

Is Strauss right in his fear of the “tyranny of the like button?” I would say yes and no — but mostly no. Not that what the author is describing doesn’t exist, because I think it does. Anyone who has spent any time blogging, or on Twitter or Facebook (or any one of a dozen other online discussion forums and websites) has probably felt the same way at times: wondering why something they posted didn’t get more attention, and thinking about ways to draw more eyeballs or comments or likes.

Always be closing

Dave Pell, a veteran blogger and technology entrepreneur, wrote a great post about this very phenomenon not too long ago, in which he described how social networking and living huge parts of our lives online can result in a pressure to judge ourselves by how many votes or tweets or likes we get — which he compared to the famous line from the movie (and play) Glengarry Glen Ross: “Always be closing.”

When I post a photo of my two year-old daughter on Facebook, I expect likes. I expect comments about how cute she is. And if I don’t get them, I consider the sales-effort to be a failure. Maybe it’s my camera skills. Maybe the timing of my posts is off. Or maybe it’s my two year-old. Sure, everyone in my family likes to think she’s the cutest little button in the whole wide world. But the numbers don’t lie.

Do we all feel a subtle — or not so subtle — pressure to conform because of the explosion of features and services that allow people to vote on what we produce? Sure we do. If I post a photo on Instagram, I want it to get a lot of comments and “likes,” and if I post something I think is funny or smart on Twitter, I like to see it get retweeted a lot. And if I write a blog post (like this one, for example) I would love to see lots of comments, and a big number next to the tweet button and the Facebook like button.

I’m not sure this is something terribly new, though, or that social networking is to blame. Strauss seems to contrast our current era with some mythical period when the Internet was a bastion of non-conformity and everyone was entitled to their own point of view, or when we were all free to “show our true selves online.” I’ve got news for the Wall Street Journal writer though: there was no such time. For the most part, people have always promoted a less-than-true or idealized version of themselves online — just as they try to do in the real world. Social networks may have amplified this, but it has always occurred.

We all create versions of ourselves

Sociologists have described at length how users of social networks and other online worlds create personas for themselves that are either entirely fake (i.e., a different sex or a different background) or at least partially fake, in that they portray a much better version of themselves than they would otherwise — which is just one reason why so many online-only relationships disintegrate when the two people involved meet “in real life.”

And while the online world may seem a lot like high school in that we are all feeling the pressure to conform, that could be said of the real world too — why else would so many people wear clothes they hate, pretend to like sports they can’t stand, or laugh at a joke that isn’t funny simply because their boss told it?

Strauss is right, however, that bowing to this kind of pressure — submitting to the tyranny of the like button — can be bad in a lot of ways. If it encourages people to submerge the things they are really passionate about and not take chances for fear of not being accepted, then that’s probably not good. Dave Pell describes how a venture he started recently called Delivereads (which sends long-form articles to your Kindle) didn’t get much traction when he launched it, and this caused him to doubt whether it was a good idea or not. But he persevered with it, and tried not to think about how many hits it was getting or not getting.

So is there a subtle or even overt pressure exerted by all the like buttons and retweeting we see around us? Sure there is. But it wasn’t invented by social networking, and it won’t disappear even if we get rid of Twitter and Facebook. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to resist that pressure to conform — it just means we should be aware that it’s part of the way human beings operate, whether they are online or not.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Gabrie Coletti

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We are the connected generation. Thanks to our ever-present mobile devices we are always ‘on’ and connected. This allows us to capture a record of all the great things we do, and share our experiences, our recommendations and our memorable moments with friends, colleagues and the world at large, through the medium of popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp. We broadcast these moments out to the rest of the world. We let others share in our passions and see the details of our daily lives. We have become the lifeblood of information for our friends and followers, and they have taken on the role of gatekeepers as we filter and pump information from network to network.

As the opportunities to share information have become more ubiquitous, there has been an increasingly hyped-up debate and concern around the topic of privacy. But is privacy really the issue? As Jeff Jarvis rightly points out, the reason for using social services is for sharing, not hiding. Twitter and Instagram are prime examples of this, where the user is forced to choose between sharing everything or limiting their sharing to a personally selected group who apply for the privilege. Nonetheless, the fact is that although many of us want to share, we want to be able to fine-tune our audience. This challenges services like Facebook where you determine sharing settings in advance of your broadcast.

Has the notion of a ‘friend’ become too diluted by the many different definitions of ‘contact’ across social media networks? Path is trying to redefine this by limiting the number of friends you can add to 50, encouraging you to only share with your “real friends.” But then the question is whether this really solves the issue? Do we only want to share with our close social circle, or do we (as I would argue) have things we want to share with other groups of contacts we would not classify as “friends”?

The problem is that there is currently no universal standard for privacy settings. Each social network has implemented their own interpretation as it applies to types of content shared on their platform. As social networks open up their APIs, allowing users to give third parties access to their content, their social media content can become spread across multiple services. Every network defines their privacy and sharing settings differently, so there is significant ambiguity around how these settings translate when transferring content among services. If you try to inherit privacy settings from multiple services the level of complexity that results is enormously challenging both from a development and a user perspective.

No one has solved this problem yet, and it is a highly relevant and important issue that needs to be addressed. We need a platform where you can manage and arrange all your connections into one simple structure, allowing you to easily define the privacy layers for how, and with whom, you share your content online. And this platform needs to integrate all the social networks.

Facebook Connect was a good first attempt at this, but sadly they quickly closed down their API that allowed you to invite your Facebook Friends to join third-party services. Now you can only view and add friends who are already signed up to that service. The continuation of Facebook Connect in its original form would have made Facebook the major organ of social media sharing, pumping content between networks and controlling the flow to new arteries of social circulation. For users, this would have allowed them greater control and continuity of how their content was shared beyond the confines of Facebook’s network.

Until we create a unified theory of sharing across social networks, there will continue to be great concern around the conflicting definitions of individual privacy. Regulators, in their efforts to protect internet users, are already discussing how to create barriers to protect the individual and simultaneously stifle social sharing. What we need is not greater personal protection through legal limitations, but consistency and standards that are recognized across social networks.

This past week the Google+ platform was revealed, ushering in a promising new chapter in the movement towards a universal standard of privacy. Google+’s ‘circles’ interface allows users to easily organize their network of contacts into spheres of association. Their organizational model for privacy takes what Facebook has developed one step further by allowing the user to easily visualize their different spheres of contacts, and determine which group they want to share updates with as the final step in broadcasting content. Wouldn’t it be great if I could link that structure to all of my other social networks? Let’s hope that Google+ hurdles past the point where Facebook Connect retreated from and becomes the new heart of social network sharing.

Eric Lagier is the cofounder and CEO of Memolane, a service that creates social media timelines for individuals and companies. Lagier formerly was the director of hardware and mobile business development at Skype.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Josh Hallett

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Every week, it seems there is more evidence that the balance of power in the book industry continues to tilt towards the author and away from the all-powerful publisher. One of the latest examples is John Green, who writes fiction for young adults from his home in Indianapolis, and whose latest novel has hit number one before it has even been published. Green gives credit for this phenomenon to his Twitter and YouTube followers, but the real credit should go to him for being willing to not just use social media as a promotional tool the way some do, but to actually reach out and engage with his readers and fans.

As the Wall Street Journal  describes it, Green simply posted the title of his new book — a story about two young cancer patients called “The Fault In Our Stars” on his Twitter account — where he has built up a following of more than a million fans — and on his Tumblr blog, as well as a community forum based around Green’s work called YourPants.org. He then offered to sign the entire first print run of the book, and later followed that up with a live YouTube show, in which he discussed his plans for the book and read from a chapter of the uncompleted novel.

The whole process started on Tuesday afternoon, and by that evening, the book had apparently hit the number one spot on both the Amazon list of bestsellers and the Barnes & Noble list. Not surprisingly, this kind of word-of-mouth marketing multiplied by the force of social media has caused a lot of raised eyebrows in the industry. As one senior editor at publisher Harper Collins told the Journal:

Everyone is now focused on it, because when it works, it can be a runaway train

Obviously, not everyone is going to have the million-plus followers that Green has, or the devoted following on YouTube that he and his brother Hank have built up over years of doing what used to be called “vlogging” or video-blogging. The two have also created a couple of thriving communities of online fans such as Nerdfighters and YourPants, which are very similar in some ways to the communities that other artists such as Ze Frank have been able to create around their work (PDF link). The point is that no publisher or agent or industry had to create those things; the author did it himself with help from his fans.

Green is just one of the new authors changing the rules in the book business in unpredictable ways. Although he is still represented by a traditional publisher (a unit of Penguin Group), the kind of following he has been able to gather through social media gives him enough clout that he could easily decide to publish on his own, as author Barry Eisler recently decided to do, turning down a 0,000 advance after years of publishing through a traditional agency relationship. JA Konrath is another author who has argued that more writers should pursue the self-publishing route because it gives them more control.

Amanda Hocking is another example that many point to of how authors can become powerful entities in their own right, while controlling their own fate: Although she recently signed a -million publishing contract, her ability to negotiate that kind of deal was a direct result of the incredible success she had self-publishing her own young-adult fiction through the Kindle publishing platform, with many of her books selling for as little as 99 cents. In less than a year, Hocking was able to rack up more than million in sales, without any help from the traditional publishing industry at all.

And Amazon’s Kindle isn’t the only non-traditional outlet for authors. Startups such as Byliner are also carving out new niches in the space between the novel and the magazine-length feature, as are sites such as Long Reads and another startup called The Atavist that focuses on publishing long-form nonfiction.

Some feel that authors like Green are “outliers,” or exceptions to the rule, and that just because they can marshal an army of millions of Twitter followers doesn’t mean others can. The publishing industry, these critics say, is becoming more and more like the pop-music business, which focuses its attention on a few million-selling mega-stars — the book equivalent of Brittany Spears or Justin Bieber — while ignoring the bulk of writing that occurs outside the spotlight, where authors don’t get access to the publicity machine.

That may be true, and it may be that not every author can become John Green or Amanda Hocking. But that doesn’t change the fact that the same tools that these authors have used, whether it’s Twitter or YouTube or the Kindle Singles publishing platform and 99-cent books, are available to anyone who wants to use them. In a lot of ways, this takes more effort than simply signing with an agent and then complaining when the publisher doesn’t promote your novel properly and your sales tank — but at the same time, it gives authors more power to affect their own future, and create their own success.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy Mates and marya

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Let’s just face it — anytime some new start-up comes along and tries to innovate around the idea of music, it is hit by some roadblocks. Latest one to realize that  – Turntable.fm. The social music discovery service is now unavailable to International visitors and is now restricted to just the US residents. In a tweet this morning, the company shared the news with its followers.

It is a shame considering Turntable.fm was just beginning to blow up and ushering in a new era of music consumption. In a few weeks, Turntable.fm (formerly Stickybits) had attracted 140,000 members and was being actively pursued by investors. Many were skeptical of the legality of the service and the current actions are only going to increase investor skepticism.

Being supremely addicted to Turntable.fm, I hope this little startup finds a way to first survive and then thrive, because it has a lot of potential. Olga Nunes, a San Francisco-based musician used Turntable.fm to get traction and push sales of her music. I think this is the read potential of Turntable.fm — artists and fans, all in one room, driving sales. Say what Lady Gaga???

What is Turntable.fm? Here is what I wrote in a previous post.

Turntable.fm is a New York City-based social music listening and discovery service that is spreading on the web like wildfire. The idea behind the service is pretty simple: You sign-up by using your Facebook credentials, create a music listening room and invite people to come join you in the room. You can create a playlist by selecting songs from the service or upload your tracks. Others can join, and become co-deejays.

If you don’t want to deejay, you can skip from one room to another based on musical interests. You can chat with others and share your playlists. You even get your own avatar that bobs to music. The whole experience is not just about music. It’s about finding others who enjoy music and forming relationships with them — albeit transient ones.

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How can you get a band famous?

Text message marketing.

To begin a mobile marketing campaign with your band, you must 1st gotten a mobile program. My favorite is located here: mobile marketing Chicago. It is easy to operate, cheap & it allows the user to use the most recognized and also memorable five digit number on the planet, 90210.

The moment you have got a mobile system up and running, begin marketing it constantly.

The singer we work with performs by the group name of Alibaba. Taking advantage of the mobile message marketing program we made for him, all his followers need to do is message “thebandsname” to the number “90210″. If they text this, they’re automatically added to their cell phone database & they’re entered to win free seats to one of their concerts.

They put the phrase “Text bandname to 90210” on all of their marketing and advertising pieces, Facebook & YouTube videos. The band also asks followers to text it during the live concerts. Our program involves a good little feature that totally allows you to have an instant contest. So for instance during a concert, he will ask everyone to pull out their cell phones & message in to win a bunch of booze. Our system will randomly select one cell number & send them a mobile message telling them they have won! Band marketing will make you famous.

When you’re always getting followers to text your mobile database and also putting this information on all your advertising pieces, you should create a big following that you could message a few hours before your show. Come to our concert at 10pm to win free alcohol always seems to work extremely great. Very quickly, the band will be filling the littler bars & will not have to beg to play anymore.