Early on in my web geek history, I used to hear the phrase “it’s just a platform” dispensed frequently, especially when someone would ask: “What’s this thing good for, anyway?” I was always frustrated by that kind of non-answer answer. After all, if you’re building some cool new tool, community or virtual world, you would think you would have an answer to the “What do I do with this” question, which is really just asking “Why have you gone and built this thing? What do you plan to use it for?”
The web started out as a way for academics to share information. They built the web as a “platform” for these conversations. I don’t think they could have forseen what it has become over time, because it has evolved, as the needs of people using it have changed over time, with each new tool or site or use adding additional knowledge and information in its wake. Sure, the idea of a platform, like a blank canvas, that changes as the needs and creativity of the users changes, is amazing. I’d argue that with that logic, we can look at democracy and capitalism as “just a platform”, but clearly they were created with some sort of intent behind them.
Platforms, like Facebook or Twitter, have clearly evolved over time. Like the code that runs the web itself, its changed enough that its original form seems barely recognizable, like an old farm house that kept having rooms added on to it until barely anything of the first structure exists. Sometimes the way the initial foundation is constructed reflects what tools were in use and available at that time, leaving us with archaic pieces glommed on to less efficient pieces of code (cough- Windows- cough). The question then becomes whether or not to abandon the old to make way for a whole new platform, like the Mac did with its OS based on Unix, or to keep modifying the old, and hope the rickety building sticks together. The legacy of the old foundation and initial purpose still flows through the veins of the platform, however.
The creators of platforms, ranging from web communities or even the iPod and iPad, may be surprised, and even thrilled at what people have been able to do with their creations, enjoying how these “children” have grown up over time, changed, evolved, and even exceeded the parent’s wildest dreams at the moment of conception. I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg has probably had a cringe moment or two when his Mom or old girlfriend contacted him on Facebook, but has also been thrilled that people see him as a visionary and having created something 500 Million people engage in- exceeding the population of the US.
Sometimes its difficult to see what to do with blank canvases. Sometimes its hard to explain to others “What is it good for? Why do I need to use it?” But if you ever want someone to engage, to have the platform grow and evolve, you had better be able to answer, even in a simple way, why someone would possibly want to be there, and what the attraction is. If you can’t bait the hook, you can’t catch the fish, or in business, make the sale.
So, my dear geekarati friends, please have patience with the lay folk and come up with a better and more compelling sales pitch than “it’s just a platform.” That tends to be what we refer to as content-free speech- words are being said, but the meaning is obscure.
Tags: marketing, platform, sales
Someone on Twitter was talking about how to celebrate a big Tweet number- 25,000 tweets. Some people have chosen to try to raise money for their momentous tweet, but what struck me was what might have been said in those 25,000 tweets. Does that equal a novel? A Book? Since Tweets, for most purposes, disappear after about two weeks (1) much of the content created is history.
This made me think about the longevity of digital media. Some things, like blogs and podcasts, are more durable. This information is stored not only on your website and servers, but by others, including the Internet Wayback Machine. Twitter, and to a certain extent, Facebook, relies more on real-time day to day content, rather than provide any sort of long term search-ability or archiving. Yet with more and more people sharing news items on Twitter, communicating with customers and the like, how much of this information will continue to exist in the future? What becomes “evidence” could be saved for later on, whether its for journalists researching a story, hisotrians, or even laywers? Would this stuff be admissible in a Court of Law? I’m not sure whether or not we know the answer to any of these questions yet.
For me, I often share information and links on Facebook, sometimes for me, sometimes for friends. I’ve opted to share many things through Delicious, and to Facebook through Friendfeed. This means I have a tagged list of blog posts and articles, creating my own clip file, my own library and encyclopedia that grows over time. But if I only tagged this stuff and shared it out through Twitter, it would likely be gone.
How much of what you are creating online is meant to have a lifespan? How long to you want to be held responsible for opinions, tweets, snarky comments, etc.? How much is intended to be in the moment alone?
A case in point is the LD Podcast. I have had the show on hiatus, and I’m working hard to put it back into production in the near future, spurned on by recent emails from a number of sources who are discovering the content for the first time. I’m realizing that the content I create has a lifespan far longer than my attention span, and it continues to provide value to others, long after I have taken it for granted.
I hope this provides a little food for thought- Where are you putting your digital media energies? What’s providing the most real time versus long tail value? And, what can you do to create both?
Most of all, don’t forget that sometimes, creating content with longevity might actually create the most long term value.
(1) unless they have been stored, archived or otherwise placed in different formats…
Tags: creation, creativity, facebook, ld podcast, longevity, media, podcast, twitter
When is sharing your life online with others crossing over into TMI (Too Much Information) territory?
Like it or not, we make judgments about people based on the integral of all we know about them. The baseball player who bets on sports in Vegas is assumed to have a vested interest in tailoring his own play to affect his financial bets, whether or not anyone can prove that that’s true. We assume Tiger Woods credibility as a spokesperson for various corporations is called into question because of what he has done, or hasn’t done in his personal life. Bill Clinton apparently had a long reputation of “being a dog that was hard to keep on the porch”, but somehow, he still manages to be a brilliant guy and a pretty great president, overall.
We learn about friends and family these days, not just by our own experience, but by the deluge of information available about them on the web. Before I meet with a client or speak to a group, I do a Google search to find out a bit about them in advance. It helps me feel prepared, have a sense of who I think they are, and a chance on meeting in person, to match that preconceived notion, based on web data, with what I see in person.
This is why I try to teach my kids and constantly remind myself that everything I say or do online is the most public of records. The DM’s I get on twitter, the text messages sent to my phone, my email- all of that- has an illusion of privacy, but it is still discoverable by others, in some way, at some point in the future, legally or illegally.
If you note the recent media discussions about controlled leaks from Apple about the upcoming tablet computer, and rumors of similar controlled leaks in government, you’ll note that these conversations all occur over the phone or preferably in person, aren’t taped or recorded, and provide both parties with plausible deniability because there’s no documented paper trail.
The clear lesson here is that if you want to have a private conversation, clearly don’t leave a voicemail message and don’t put any of it in writing- don’t leave a web or digital or actual paper trail.
This brings me to the point of this post, which is a new service called Blippy, where you can share your recent purchases (and the amount spent) on various sites, including Amazon.com, Netflix, Threadless and iTunes. You can link a credit card as well, so every time you make a purchase at the convenience store, that, too, is posted to this social network.
Here’s a list of the accounts you can link to Blippy:
I am all for living life out loud. I know people can find almost an infinite set of information out about me- but this crosses the line into kind of stalker-ish territory. It’s one thing to get pointed to cool apps , books, and music that your friends are buying. In fact, when looking around Blippy, I found a bunch of great things my friends had purchased, especially books and iphone apps, that makes it almost certain I will purchase the same, which I am sure is Blippy’s whole marketing attempt. After all, if you can find out, passively, what your friends are up to and what they’re getting, what better way to keep up with the digital Joneses? Or even better, find out what your friends are into when it comes to birthday times, or for marketers doing blogger outreach?
However, it’s another thing to be updated every time they buy milk or cigarettes at the convenience store.
And let’s talk about the judgments people make about our private spending habits.
Say I get an account and share with my friends and co-workers. How long before my boss finds out I rent weird films from Blockbuster? Or am ordering books on how to develop a side career on Amazon? How long before a health insurance company figures out you never did quit smoking like you swore you did on those forms? What if they never see me paying for a gym membership? What happens if you are buying books on how to make a career transition or how to pad your resume? What if you ordered books about medical issues? Or your bill from Wine Library TV seems to indicate you have a serious drinking problem?
Yeah, I don’t much care if all my friends learn I have an old school Tretorn addiction and Zappos is my favorite supplier, but does my husband need to know every single penny I spent there? What if he gets notifications of things meant as gifts for him?
While it’s great all this information can be aggregated in one spot and I can see it being useful even for companies to track what employees are spending on Company credit cards, this is the first social network in a long time asking us to share information that has long been isolated in your credit card bills, email accounts and the sanctity of your ipod and cell phones. (I’ve long thought you can learn a ton about someone by seeing the contents of their ipod alone- often leading me to be a bit cautious about giving mine to friends and seeing the plethora of various kid tunes (What? an addiction to Trout Fishing in America? Really?), my secret like of old school hip-hop, and other music that leads to raised eyebrows in some social circles).
After only a few minutes of poking around, I’m getting more information than I planned about my friends. Not only did I find out about a great analytics app, but the same person also downloaded the Playboy app as well. Clearly information I probably didn’t need, even if it’s clearly nothing to be prudish about. Likewise, a recent troll through the people my friends are following led me to Leo Leporte’s account, and the multiple $1,500 purchases he made in a short period of time at the Renaissance in Vegas. People commented on the site about whether he was paying for his team’s hotel rooms or having a bad night at gaming tables, but is this information everyone should have? Should Leo have to justify what he was buying to everyone on the internet, or his sponsors? Likewise, Ev Williams bought a Pregnancy Tracker app for his iPhone. Does that mean I should offer my husband’s services as an OB-GYN? Should I start knitting a baby present? I don’t think so, and that’s why I think Blippy, while a marketer’s dream, is a privacy nightmare.
Feel free to make your own conclusions, but for now, for better or for worse, I think I’ll be keeping my purchases to myself.
Tags: Blippy, information, Leo Laporte, privacy, TMI
Posted by Whitney on Jan 12, 2010 in
business,
finance,
new media I’m still getting caught up on podcasts that got the better of me recently, but the one that caught my attention was one of NPR’s Planet Money podcast about Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, and an effort to make certain media content “exclusive” and free to that search engine only.
Apparently, Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch are in talks where Microsoft would pay the Wall Street Journal to make its contents exclusive and indexed only on Bing and no other search engines.
I found this whole concept kind of shocking. While I understand that news organizations have to find new revenue streams, I would happily go back to paying for getting the New York Times delivered to my inbox and iphone rather than this model. The idea that search will devolve into separate walled gardens, with parts of the ‘net only searchable on certain search engines seems to me to be against the very nature of what the internet was about- to make information open and “findable” in ways it never has been before. And frankly, if I have to go to yet another website to see if the Wall Street Journal has a piece of news I might need, I might as well go to the WSJ site directly and search their site internally than use yet another search engine.
From Microsoft’s point of view, I can understand how becoming a site that indexes primarily news, for example, might seem like a great competitive advantage. What it fails to take into account is that money alone isn’t the only thing that matters anymore. News comes out via non-mainstream media news sites including the Huffington Post, Politico, not to mention the excellent tech blogs like Tech Crunch , Mashable, and Gizmodo. News is no longer proprietary in the same way it used to be.
It’s going to be virtually impossible for Microsoft to make news a walled off garden, and even if they do, how will they keep people from re-publishing the same material via, say, a tumblr blog and making it easily indexed by Google as well? Isn’t this just begging for a “Pirate Bay” solution if established? How long before bit torrents of news are being siphoned out and placed where they can be indexed and re-indexed by any search engine?
There may even be some anti-competitive issues at play here, but as usual, the law drags so far behind actual technology, it will be years and largely irrelevant before that’s all sorted out.
The bottom line here is that information is a precious commodity, but news is only news for a short period of time before even in its old, traditional newsprint form, it starts lining bird cages and train puppies all over the land. Information now flows faster than we can analyze and process its meaning, which means the value in this play is at most, temporary and ephemeral.
My largest objection is to turning the internet into a series of walled gardens regarding search, and how much more cumbersome it will make finding good and relevant information. And as the ‘net has already shown us, in the absence of great and thoughtful information, people will simply propagate what is readily available, which may include rumor, innuendo and more.
The Bing/WSJ deal will be an interesting experiment if it happens, but I wonder what it will mean for the future and how long it can last in an economy where information is distilled down to bits and transmitted faster than Marconi ever could have imagined with the radio telegraph.
Tags: bing, Microsoft, planet money, WSJ
Posted by Whitney on Dec 14, 2009 in
business,
new media,
social media I’ve been reading Chuck Klosterman’s “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs- A Low Culture Manifesto”. It’s basically a collection of essays-each one different, but each one (so far) displaying Chuck’s great sense of humor, connecting what you would think are wildly disparate things together in a way that gives you pause. I first heard about Chuck Klosterman through Ira Glass and This American Life, in particular, the great show that’s entitled New Kings of Non Fiction, which is just amazing and easily worth the price and a donation to WBEZ.
In an essay talking about how MTV’s “Real World” helped to define reality TV and how everyone becomes a one-dimensional archetype because it’s easier to cast and tell stories than dealing with the real world complexity of ordinary humans, he says near the end, “Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.” And this struck a real chord with me.
There seems to be a real tension in life between being genuinely interesting, and being identifiable. You find this in everything from food, to stores to social media. In food, there’s a group of people who are always looking for the different and inventive (just watch Top Chef) but most Americans seem to eat more frequently at chain restaurants, serving up familiar and predictable fare, even when they are visiting new cities. This is a clear case of going for Identifiable over Interesting. Identifiable is predictable and known- you don’t have to think too hard. Interesting can have upsides, but it’s risky and you don’t know what you’re getting in advance, and that can be pretty scary.
Even in retail, I see a confluence of both stores and merchandise that plays into choosing an archetype over choosing your own style. Department stores have gone under major consolidation, so you are basically left with the ultra-high end Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom’s, then Bloomingdales and Macy’s, then Sears and JC Penney, who are basically on the same fashion wavelength as Kohl’s and not far behind are Target and Walmart. The lack of variation leads to a lack of choice, so we see more and more stores popping up with similar pair structures like the Gap/Old Navy and Ambercrombie/Aeropostale. When I shop for clothes for my 14 and 11 year old sons, I find wherever I go, my choices come down to Preppy, Sports Kid, Skater Dude, Rockstar/punk, and My Mother Dresses Me. My choice in clothing for my kids seems loaded with buying into a stereotype, and I feel like I have to guess the right one to avoid too much scrutiny from either teachers or other students. Getting the line right between “cool” and “I still respect my elders and won’t cause trouble” is not easy at all, but I have to admit, occasional social media conference t-shirts work well to blur this line between cool and geek.
In social media, it can seem like everyone wants to have an “elevator pitch” of who they are and what they do, classifying themselves into archetypes for others. For those that seem much more complicated than a simple label, it becomes harder to market your business and ideas because they aren’t easily labeled or defined. And in an attention-deficit world, anything that’s too complicated gets left at the curb.
Life is easier if we pigeon-hole everyone we know. They can be classified and re-categorized, but it saves you time and effort and actual thought if you play the archetype game. It’s easier to identify people, to tag them, to label them, than get to know them.
But in reality, people and friends are more than trading cards. We may have lots of friends on social networks, but how many of them are friends that would buy you a cup of coffee or let you crash on their couch? In a quest for new media popularity, are we going for identifiable over interesting because it’s simply easier? People are more complicated than the simple archetypal mold we try to fit them into. But it takes time, effort and actually listening to people consistently over time to see past the label and delve into the interesting.
I’m not sure if we can easily walk the line between interesting and identifiable, because interesting simply takes more time and engagement than a simple identification and label system of interfacing with the world does. But I know I extract more value out of interesting than I ever have from identifiable relationships with others. So I’ll continue in my quest to be interesting, even though it often seems the vast majority of people value identifiable, because it’s quicker and easier. What’s your choice?
Tags: chuck klosterman, clothes, food, indentifiable, interesting, MTV Real World, social media
iTunes
Amazon
Zappos
Audible
GroupOn
Threadless
StubHub
GoDaddy
Netflix
Blockbuster
SeamlessWeb
Credit card (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX), debit card, or bank account
