The rise of "status"

Fred Wilson on Facebook's new status integration

Facebook opening its status feed is a big deal, as it will continue to cement Facebook as the official social-graph-of-record for your internet identity. Rather than rebuild social graphs on one service after the next, Facebook is in the business of officially owning your graph and allowing an ecosystem of services to spring up around that graph. It's smart to interoperate with Twitter in this way, because it allows Facebook to compete as a status destination - use any of the twitter publishing apps to inject status to Facebook, but keep your social graph on Facebook.

The only thing I object to with all the status talk recently is how commentators are chattering about deriving real-time consumer insights from the Twitter streams. They seem to say that researchers can dip their cup into the twitter river at any time, and instantly poll consumer sentiment. There are several reasons this meme is nonsense: sample bias is extreme given how abnormal Twitter users are relative to the population of consumers as a whole. Twitter users are opinionated early-adopting high-wealth people. They miss being the "average joe" by a wide margin. If marketers spend too much time on twitter, they'll quickly lose contact with their real customer base. Moreover, twitter's real-time nature is misleading. So what if my first reaction is negative? Will I repost later when I have a positive response, or later when I'm actually making my purchase decision? Probably not, but my behavior will be different. First impulses aren't the most accurate, and shouldn't be heralded as such.