Knocking down the walls

When Tim Berners-Lee developed the web he envisioned it as an open web of information that anyone could read (and modify originally). In the 25 years since then the web has changed a lot. Some sites are more like applications than just sources of information. One of the bad trends has been to lock sites behind some sort of barrier. This may be force people to pay for it or just to make them sign up to the site. There may be cases where privacy is required, but if I'm just sharing cool links or blogging then I want it to be accessible by anyone. That's one reason I use Blogger and other web sites I've run that have been open.

Although I liked many of the features of the Tsu social network I didn't like that it was a walled garden. If I sent anyone a link they would see this sign-up screen. That put me off sharing posts on other social networks. People thought I was trying to 'scam' them into joining some money-making scheme rather than being social.

Being able to share links across the various social sites is something I enjoy and any barriers to that were a pain.

As of today things have changed.









There's a new privacy option "Do not require users to sign-in to see my profile and posts". I've turned this on as I don't want my posts to be hidden. There's a further option to my profile from search engines, but I can't see any reason to do that.

It's going to be interesting to see if this affects the number of views I get. Tsu users have access to statistics on their most recent posts. You don't get details about where viewers came from, but it's interesting to see which posts work best. On Tsu views translate into income. When money is involved people will try to cheat the system and concerns were immediately raised about this. So it will be interesting to see if they count views from non-members.

Previously people have joined up just to see what the site is when someone sent them a link. Many of them never came back. Now they can have a look around first and decide if it's something they want to be part of.

I do see a few little issues with this. The profile that they originally visit only gets credited for new members if they join whilst on one of their posts (or the whole feed). If they click to another user (who has opened their feed) then the credit goes to that one. If they go to the 'home' page then they are back to the old method of having to manually enter a username. These may be teething problems that will get sorted out soon. The site is still relatively new and I don't know how much user testing has been done before making this feature available.

Tsu user Eileen Brown has written an article on ZDNet about the new open Tsu.

Here are a few of my recent selected posts for you to check out:

• From when I discovered the open Tsu
• Sharing a video about renewable energy on Orkney
• One of my photos from my neighbourhood

You are still limited in layout and number of images, so it's not an ideal blogging platform. I'll keep doing that here and post the links onto Tsu (and elsewhere).

I am making a little more money on Tsu lately, but it's not enough to justify my time. I stick around as I'm having fun interacting with cool people. It's interesting to play with a new site that is doing radical things. The money is just a bonus.

Collected thoughts

Earlier this week Google+ added a feature called Collections. This looks a lot like a feature I thought of some time ago that I called 'aspects'. I was thinking that there are some people I follow on social media who post on a variety of topics. In some cases these may be tagged, but it has not been easy to include or exclude specific topics. For example I follow some fellow Linux fans who are also into soccer, which is of no interest to me. I'd like to be able to exclude those posts from my feed as I have limited time to look through it all.

The Google+ feature allows you to select a Collection instead of circles for a post. When you create a Collection you can select whether your existing followers get it by default and they can opt out if they wish. You can also set whether it is public or for a circle (or just you). You cannot change that afterwards, so choose carefully. I created my Social networks Collection for my thoughts about G+, Tsu and other systems. I had a comment recently saying they thought I was 'spamming' their feed with money making schemes. That person could now opt out if they still want to see my other posts. The money making aspect of Tsu, 3tags and Bitlanders does interest me, but I don't expect to make much in the short term. I've given most of what I have made to charities that use those sites.

It would be good to see some automation of this feature by suggesting an appropriate Collection from keywords. Collections are already in the Android app.

I've seen a few opinion pieces saying that G+ is dead, but it seems pretty alive to me and this shows that they are still adding features. There are many millions of users and plenty of interest to me. It hasn't taken off like Facebook and Twitter, but I think it has the best set of features and a good user interface. They still don't have advertising, but I'm not sure they need the money as they will get it when people go to Gmail or Youtube anyway.

My current (dead tree) reading is Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. I've been interested in on-line collaboration for some years. It covers more than just traditional wikis. I've been an advocate of using a wiki at work for years, but some people just don't get it.

This book is a few years old and so it's interesting to see what has changed. Back in 2008 MySpace was the big player in social, having taken over from Friendster. Facebook was still in its early days and even Youtube was still fairly new.

Open for business

Businesses are starting to accept payment using funds accumulated on the Tsu social network. Users there get paid based on views, likes and shares. It will take most people some time (years?) to reach $100 when they can take the money out, but they can also use the money to send to other users or to donate to charities. There has recently been a surge of charity donations to aid the people of Nepal who have suffered a terrible earthquake. I estimate that thousands of dollars have been donated already. That shows how much money users have already. I've given away over half the money I've made on Tsu.

There are a couple of similar articles about Denver juice bar Bambucycles accepting Tsu payments. More will follow in areas where the network is big. You can only spend as much as you have earned as you cannot transfer money into Tsu from outside. The service is supposed to be taking 3% from each transfer, but I am unsure if they have started doing this yet. They are not profitable yet, but this could provide an appreciable part of their income in future. For now they still rely on venture funding that will have to be paid back.

I think Tsu needs to add features to make payments more convenient. They could add a barcode scanner to the app so that users can scan a code in a shop to make a payment. Some Bitcoin apps do this already. Users need to be very certain of how much they are transferring and to whom. There should be options of anonymous payments or to have the payers name listed against the transaction. At the moment you get a notification when you receive money that says who sent it, but you can't see this later in the Bank. People who are selling on-line need details of where to send their product.

With all this money floating around the service needs good security. Currently accounts are just protected by a password. I would hope people are using something non-trivial for that. Really they should be using two factor authentication as others do, so users need a code via SMS or other means to confirm they have a specified device. Even this is not perfect, but it reduces the risks. It is very difficult to achieve ideal security in ways an average user can cope with.

I've still only made a few dollars. I have a large network there that could potentially earn me much more, but most of those people are inactive. Keeping people engaged remains a problem. I had one recent 'child' who I estimate was making me several cents per day, but she was mostly posting what I would consider 'click bait'. She gained hundreds of friends in a few days, so people obviously go for that. She's stopped posting for now. If all of my network were that active I would be making several dollars per day. A lot of people still don't seem to understand the value of recruiting children and building a network. At this early stage there is huge potential for that.

Although Tsu is gaining new accounts they are not retaining all those users. Statistics show falling visitor numbers. Articles like those above may help to bring in more people, but they need to have realistic expectations about how much they can make.

I'll be sticking with Tsu for the meantime. I've made some cool friends there. There's Theo of the band E-Mute. I'm hoping to get to one of their gigs in a few weeks. There's also guitarist Elliott Randall who has played on many classic songs (e.g. Steely Dan's Reelin' in the Years). There are also lots of fellow social media enthusiasts.

The value of networking

A common feature of sites that pay users is that you get rewarded for recruiting people. This seems logical as they need to grow in order to make enough to pay the staff. Tsu and 3tags have the same model (spookily, rights-infringingly similar) where you get a portion of what your 'children' and their children make. The site keeps 10% in each case.

I've seen people on Tsu with networks of many thousands of people and this can make them several dollars per day. This only works if they are active. I have built a fairly large network myself, but only a small percentage are still active on the site and so I still only make pennies per day. This may change in time if more people join up or if those who joined before come back. There is definitely an issue with keeping people engaged. I suspect they give up when they don't make anything immediately. I think the two main issues are

1. Setting realistic expectations
2. I also think there is a language barrier. I've reached out to some of my children, but often they do not respond.

I wonder if some people join Tsu when they see a link just to see what it was as the main site is not visible to non-members. This seriously reduces how many will use it. I want my public content to be truly public, where Google etc can find it.

3tags is public and seems to benefit from that as people are making good money even though it has a lot less members than Tsu. I haven't managed to recruit many people and creating a post involves a little more work than Tsu, so I'm not doing much there. It's not really a social site. It's about sharing links and blog posts. I could blog there I suppose, but I prefer to be a little independent. Yes, I know Blogger is not under my control either. I do have my own site, but it's easier to blog here.

There's a new (ish) player at Bitlanders. Their USP is that they pay in Bitcoin. The site looks a little like Google+, but uses cartoon avatars. I think it's actually been around for about 6 months, but it's fairly quiet there. Some people have accumulated thousands of followers and may be making money, but there's not much discussion of that. A lot of the posts I see are about Judo. I think that's because some of the founders are into it. You get 'buzz' for viewing posts and videos. Each day that gets translated into some small amount of Bitcoin. If you recruit people you get a fixed 20% of what they make. I'll keep an eye on it, but I won't be visiting every day.

I've been neglecting things like blogging and pocasting lately. I need to drag myself away from the feeds and get back to that, as well as important things like playing my guitar.

Tag, you're it

They imitation is a form of flattery. Well, Tsu should be flattered that another new site called 3tags has a practically identical network revenue model.

Like Tsu you earn from views and from those of people you recruit. Unlike Tsu you don't actually need a referral link to join, but I think it's fair to reward whoever let you know about the site.

3tags is not really a social network. You follow tags instead of people, so it's more of a link sharing site than somewhere to post personal updates. You can up vote and comment on posts. I really like that the site is public, so people do not have to join to browse it and posts can be found by the search engines. This is something Tsu does wrongly in my opinion. Walled gardens are a bad thing.

You can include up to 3 tags on each post (hence the name) and people following those tags will see it. I assume up votes will make a post more visible and this will become more important as the site grows. I think this is something like reddit, but I've not used that much.

People will use sites for no financial reward. When there is one they may think it's a scam. I know people are getting paid on Tsu and you don't have to pay to use it, so I don't see a problem.

I've written a few posts that have gained some views and earned me 9c in 3 days. That's a lot more than I got in the early days of Tsu. You can take money out when you reach $25, which seems more achievable than the $100 on Tsu.

Of course I wanted to post my thoughts about this new site on Tsu. It appears they are not fans as any links or mention of the name got me an error message saying this was spam. That looks like censorship to me and that is not good. I'm a little wary as I don't want to get banned. People are discussing this elsewhere, including on a new Facebook group.

From what I've heard both Tsu and 3tags were working on their businesses for several years before they went public, so perhaps the similarities are a coincidence. I'm not sure you can copyright or patent the 'rule of thirds' distribution.

For now I will use both sites, but I will be socialising on Tsu and just posting links to 3tags. I may also post some comments there.

So feel free to use my links to Tsu or 3tags to join up and I'll make a few more cents. Let me know what you think.

Tsuitability

Yesterday Tsu was down for most of the day. I understand they were doing an upgrade, but some combination of circumstances, possibly involving heavy load, took it down. It seemed to be available for brief moments. There have been maintenance outages before, but I'd not seen it down for more than a few minutes.

This is obviously not a good thing for any site. People expect a site to always be available. I do not manage any busy sites, but I would expect there to be contingency plans to switch back to a working system if something goes wrong, but maybe they don't have the resources for this.

I expect everyone took a hit on their earnings for the day. Mine were down to a third of the previous day, but that's no big deal for me, and even the big guns would probably only earn a few dollars less.

I hope this will not deter people. Every business has teething troubles. They say they added more servers. I think they use Amazon S3.

Meanwhile, a new social site called 3tags has appeared recently. Their revenue sharing model seems to be identical to Tsu, but I've seen a report that people have made more per view. It's not a clone. I like that their public posts can be seen without logging in. That's not true for Tsu. I don't know if I will join. I'm lacking on time to play.

Another new site is Synereo. I'm not totally clear on how it will work, but you can currently buy into it by purchasing their 'AMP' tokens that you can use to make your content more visible there. You can buy with Bitcoin, but I don't have the funds available right now. I'll keep an ear out for opinions.

There are many social sites out there, but they have to reach a critical mass to keep going. Nobody wants to go where they won't find their friends or leave a site that already has them. I think it will take a lot to get most people to leave Facebook and Twitter. Those companies are so big that it's hard to see them failing. Mind you, Friendster, MySpace and others lost out, but I don't think they were ever that big.

We live in interesting time. There are no precedents for the modern internet.

Tsulebrities

Please excuse the pun.

Although it's not so important to me I understand a lot of people like to follow celebrities on social media. I know some have many millions of followers on other networks. Tsu did manage to get some big names early on, but not all of these stayed active. I followed people like Axl Rose and William Shattner, but they were not posting anything. I suspect that this partly due to Tsu not having an API that would allow posting updates to multiple networks at one. I don't know what they use to update Twitter, Facebook etc, but I have used IFTTT to update Facebook when I do other things, e.g. post a track on SoundCloud. Celebrities are busy people or they are paying someone to post for them and they won't want to mess around. It is possible to post a Tsu update to Twitter and Facebook automatically. That works okay on Facebook where people will see the whole post, including pictures, links and video, but on Twitter they will just see as much of the post as will fit along with a Tsu link that will only be properly visible if they sign up. This is only of the reasons I do not like Tsu being a 'walled garden'. I want my public posts to be visible to anyone.

There are some active celebrities (major or minor) on Tsu and some of these have followings of around 100,000. I'm not sure that is enough for some of them to hang around when they can get millions elsewhere. The few dollars they earn on Tsu are not significant to them.

Tsu has sprouted its own set of celebrities. One of the best known is Kevin Hinkle. I understand he was homeless, but through posting about health, diet and inspiring people he has earned several hundred dollars in the last few months. His most recent stunt was to write a post to say he would not write any more until that one got 10,000 comments, and it did in a matter of days.

Note that Kevin has a green tick to indicate he is a verified user. Normally you get that if you can link to a verified Facebook or Twitter account. Tsu are offloading the work of checking that people are who they say they are to those networks. I think Kevin knows the Tsu team and was awarded the tick. There are of course lots of fake accounts. I've had friend requests from Mark Zuckerbrg (sic). I don't follow Kevin as I'm not that interested in his posts and I have to focus my attention on what is interesting to me.

Other people have got big by helping people learn about Tsu. Jon Dun is one such. I've had numerous discussions with him. I see he also has a tick.

Tsu does less well than some other sites at suggesting who you should follow. There is a Discover Users page, but it only show verified users and give no indication if they are active. This needs to be improved. Other sites suggest people based on who you follow and what you might be interested in. It's generally difficult to find people on Tsu as the search is limited. Some people are posting lists on Tsu or on their own sites.

I've mostly found people via shared posts or when they write an interesting comment. I have had a few friend requests that I did accept, but the bulk of those are basically spam. I've disabled friend requests for now so I don't have to deal with them. People will have to message me if they want to link up.

I'll write more about friends and followers soon.

If you are thinking of joining Tsu then please consider using my link http://www.tsu.co/steevc. Please leave feedback if you have questions or suggestion.