Okay, now on to some real stuff. I want to talk about Twitter. For those unfamiliar with the service it's a sort of microblogging platform that allows you to send posts via text message, web or third-party app. Friends subscribe and can receive your posts through any of those portals. For a long time I couldn't figure out what the point of Twitter was. It seemed like it was solving a problem I didn't have.
But then we built House of Naked and included Twitter integration. All of a sudden everyone from work was Twittering back and forth as it was the easiest way to add content to the site. Once I had a real-life social network on the service it became a far more useful tool. Twitter has become a place for exchanging funny quotes and inside jokes within a network who exists within a certain proximity and mindset. The majority of people I'm subscribed to exist within this network and while occasionally I find it annoying that my phone is constantly buzzing with new text messages (or that I get a $300 phone bill because I hadn't turned on unlimited texts), overall I love this connection point and feel like it's brought much of the office closer.
Overall I think the service has been quite brilliant in the way it's handled itself. Twitter never really tried to describe what it did and rather has allowed its users to determine the path of the service. For instance in July they streamlined the friending process. Rather than having to chose between "friend" and "follow" (which no one quite understood), they changed it to just "follow" and gave users the option to receive notifications via SMS. In doing so, they solved what I believe to be the most fundamental problem with social networks at the moment.
As anyone on Facebook can attest to, making friendship a binary decision makes things quite difficult on occasion. Sure you can give someone a "limited profile", however, the user on the other end knows that you've done this. It kind of feels like calling someone an "acquaintance" to their face. Friendship is not a binary thing. We all have different levels of people we call "friends", ranging from folks we talk to every day to those we've met once.
Twitter solved this problem incredibly elegantly. You can add anyone as a follower, however, you can be very selective about who you subscribe to on your mobile without letting the other party know. This kind of opaque management of social connections is almost completely unheard of anywhere else. There are lots of people trying to figure this problem out at the moment, but no one besides Twitter (which is also a fundamentally different kind of social software) seems to be doing a particularly well.
Not quite sure what to do with all this, just wanted to get it out there.
And I wanted to find a way to put "opaque management of social connections" into a sentence. Have a great long weekend.
Update (9/11/07): I signed up for an Orkut account and they have a feature that seems to do just this. It allows you to opaquely decide where someone falls on a friendship scale of 1-5.
Once again, I don't have a coherent entry to put together, so instead I've got a bunch of links and stuff. Sorry for the recent slowdown.
First off, I've done a bit of a redesign of the likemind site. The big reason I finally got around to it is that Google finally made their maps embeddable. Now with MyMaps (which allows you to create custom maps with your own locations) you can embed them in any site. Check out the likemind map I put together
Now I'm not sure how I've missed this for so long, but I finally got around to watching the beginning installments of R Kelly's trapped in a closet. If you haven't seen it, it's a bizarrely brilliant "hip-hopera" based on Trapped in the Closet. Chuck Klosterman put it well when he said: "Describing TITC [trapped in the closet] to anyone whose hasn't seen it themselves is virtually impossible, simply because there's no other art to compare it with (it falls somewhere between a parody of musical theatre, a soap opera from the late 1970s, and a BET version of The Red Shoe Diaries)." I've embedded the first two episodes below.
Not to keep harping on this one, but it's seriously blown me away (to the point that I just bought both DVDs. Now beyond the amusement of the whole thing, it's pretty amazing that this guy made something over an hour long that held my interest in the way it does. Sure it's totally absurd, but who cares? I can't watch 10 minutes of music videos without switching the channel . . . In addition, it's a fairly shrewd business move. It's not a high-quality production or anything, couldn't have cost a ton, and the DVDs go for $16.99. As Klosterman wrote, "In practical terms, this all might be nothing more than a way to sell DVDs instead of CDs." As I've made quite clear in the past I'm all for music finding new revenue streams.
Finally, one last video for your enjoyment. This one comes from Miss Teen USA 2007 . . .
Think that's it for now. Hope your weekend's went well, will try to write something with a bit more substance this week. It's amazingly easy to tell where my head's been by these link posts isn't it?
The secret to business software is to not make business software.
For a whole bunch of reasons I've given a lot of thought to building software for businesses. First off, I work for a business, so it's interesting to me. Second, I'm quite fascinated by the idea that you can build software to help things and people work more efficiently. And third, because 90% of software for businesses sucks. It's just plain terrible. Time-sheet software is the perfect example: Ask anyone in the ad industry what part of their job they most despise and they'll tell you it's completing their time sheets. Sure it's an onerous process, but it's only made worse by how awful the majority of time management software is.
So it's with those things in mind that I've developed my rules for making business software. It's a pretty simple two-parter:
Make software people want to use.
Even better, make software people can get value from without even knowing their using it (without spying on them, of course).
With those rules in mind, I was quite excited to run across an essay by Jamie Zawinski titled Groupware Bad (the link came via Anil Dash who recently wrote about this very topic in relation to the iPhone). His two money lines are both things I've thought/said in the past (though I never read this 2005 essay until today): "If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy" and "Your 'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?" (The latter I wrote about in a 2005 entry titled DLA Should Get You Laid which was inspired by this story of iTunes getting a college student laid.)
Anyway, this is a topic I'm quite passionate about and while I've only actually built one piece of "business software" (a term I use quite loosely for it), I tried to bring these ideas to life. The Naked Aggregator is a fairly simple idea: Rather than forcing people to constantly update the Naked blog with full entries, why not pull from the content they're creating anyway? So it pulls in content from del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter and other people's blogs and inserts it right into houseofnaked.com. In my mind, it's an example of passive activity, which I define as tapping into people's existing behavior in order to deliver, rather than asking them for the information themselves. This can come in the form of metadata created from regular digital activities or by tapping into services that people are already using (with the help of XML/APIs).
One simple solution in this area are information visualizations (think Jonathan Harris), which exposes insights into news/language/culture by aggregating lots of data people are creating anyway and organizing it in a way that allows others to extract value. (Watching Harris explain his work makes this far more clear.) As Ed at InfluxInsights so nicely put it: "in a data-driven world -- infographics are the new art." In that sense, infographics act as a mirror to our universe.
Okay, so back to business software, I think there's a lot to learn from people like Harris. If you really want to understand what people are up to, you need to watch them, not ask them. Researchers have known this for years (hence recall bias). Business software needs to take the same tact.
Last week basically swallowed me whole, but luckily there were a ton of comments on the Facebook post to keep things going. It's nice to know I can admit I don't know where I fall on something and get lots of smart people to give their opinions. I plan to go through everything and pull out some nuggets to continue the conversation. Until then, though, here are some random thoughts/links for your enjoyment.
On the Facebook tip, I've been thinking that the size of a network is no longer an effect, but rather a cause. I haven't found a particularly good way to articulate what I'm trying to say yet, but basically it's that the size of a network and the fact most of your friends are on it is a selling point, not necessarily something caused by your other selling points. I understand there are major issues with that idea (like how can you get a large network without attracting people), and that's why I say I'm having trouble articulating what I'm trying to say. Anyway, does that make any sense?
I wrote about this over at the Naked bloglast week and I figured I'd mention it here as well. I've been thinking that the decline of newspapers can at least in part be attributed to the decline in leisure time. Specifically the fact that people don't sit down for breakfast/coffee anymore. Rather, they drink their coffee in front of their computer while checking email/reading blogs, etc.
Brian Norgard articulates something I've been thinking for a while: "What Om, Mike and Paul are doing [with job boards] is effectively creating lightweight professional publishing outlets; complete with all the offering a newspaper/magazine has, with the added benefit of less overhead and easier (if not frictionless) distribution. I think we are going to see more of these type of monetization opportunities spawn in the next 2-3 years." Go read the whole thing.
On the Official Google Blog they have poo-pooed Blackle (the Google page with a black background that claims to save much energy).
design|snips is a site I wish I made. It's wholly devoted to little design elements that are awesome.
likemind was pretty amazing last week. We had roughly 60 people show up in New York and it was in 32 other cities around the world. If you haven't been yet, it's worth checking out.
I think that's about it. Not much of interest in here, but then again I haven't had a lot of time to think in the last few weeks. Anyone have anything more worthy of discussion/thought?
Like most people in our little world, I've been spending a fair amount of time lately thinking and having conversations about Facebook. Unlike what seems to be the rest of the natural world, I'm not totally sold. I know about many of the features as well as the platform and news feed and I think many of them are quite fascinating and even brilliant. However, I'm still not sold that they've created a long-term success.
So I decided to open it up to all of you. I would really love to hear opinions, thoughts, insights into what's going on over at Facebook. There aren't that many things that I don't have opinions on and to be honest it makes me a bit uncomfortable. If you've got something to say, just drop it in the comments. I'd really appreciate it.
Let me throw out a couple of my own thoughts to get things started.
I'm increasingly convinced that the only thing Facebook really has is critical mass. This is a dangerous selling proposition. How is it that much different than Myspace? (Obviously it's much more user-centric and closed, but really, what are the core differentiators?) I'm feeling as though the number one reason to be on Facebook is that all your friends are on Facebook. The problem with that is that at some point in the near future all your friends will be somewhere else and while I'm totally fine with using Facebook for now, is it just inevitable that social networking sites come and go in waves?
The news feed is a brilliant thing. It's funny to think back to people's responses (including my own). What was initially seen as a privacy invasion seems to be widely cited as the most popular feature (and a fairly valuable one for the company).
Danah Boyd hit the nail on the head with her latest post about the loss of context on Facebook. "For months, I've been ignoring most friend requests," Boyd writes. "Tonight, I gave up and accepted most of them. I have been facing the precise dilemma that I write about in my articles: what constitutes a "friend"? Where's the line? For Facebook, I had been only accepting friend requests from people that I went to school with and folks who have socialized at my house. But what about people that I enjoy talking with at conferences? What about people who so kindly read and comment on this blog? What about people I respect? What about people who appreciate my research but whom I have not yet met? I started feeling guilty as people poked me and emailed me to ask why I hadn't accepted their friend request. My personal boundaries didn't matter - my act of ignorance was deemed rude by those that didn't share my social expectations." This is an interesting issue and speaks to why it may be inevitable that new social networking platforms will rise and fall every two years or so. As users begin to lose context/control there are opportunities for new sites to rise and take their place. Those new sites are used to communicate with your core group of "real" friends until they too are overrun and its on to the next location.
Although . . . I did think the first comment on Danah's post was quite insightful. From someone named Nathan D: "Maybe the real trend is the gradual loss of "context" -- where people are less differentiated in their persona between school, work, and social worlds. Worlds collide!" I think Nathan is exactly right. The issue is that a) as people we're trying to hold on to the last shreds of "context" and b) these sites were built for a world where "context" is a meaningful thing. I wonder if there's not an opportunity to approach social networking from this new perspective and build something revolutionary.
I know there are lots of new sites popping up that are promising to let you be multiple "yous". The idea is that your work, school, home and family identities are all quite different and you should be able to deal with that on a social networking site. I'm not sure this is the answer either, as the different face you present to these different groups isn't a considered one. The idea of managing the four different worlds in an active way sounds like a fairly miserable user experience. That's not to say it can't be solved, but . . .
So that's it for now. If I come up with any other random thoughts I'll add them. Like I said, I would love to hear what all of you think of Facebook? Will it last? Is it really different? Why do you use it? What happens when people's moms get on the site? Lots of questions. Would love to hear your thoughts.
So it looks like the New York Times experiment with TimesSelect is going to come to an end. This doesn't surprise me, as I never thought it was a very good idea in the first place. There's plenty of commentary on the decision, including a thoughtful breakdown of the error in strategic judgment by the Times. Seamus of at Virtual Economics adds a bit more insight writing, "This is about reducing the incentive for NYT's key asset - its writers - to strike out on their own as so many of the best newspaper writers have already done . . . Possibly that day has been put off a little longer by this latest move."
This is a key shift in the world at the moment. People are creating powerful personal brands on the back of their employer. Iain pointed out a similar trend in the agency world: "all of the really good people seem to have their own game going on. They’ve either started their own small companies, or they’re freelancing and living the life that they want, on their terms. (Or they’re heading that way fast and using their next jump or two as an experience-farming exercise). Which means that it’s quite tricky to get them to come and work for wages in a company." Thanks to a number of factors ranging from the low cost of publishing/owning your own media space (mostly in the form of a webpage) to better communication/networking skills, people are competing with the companies they once worked for.
The big problem for their companies are that they're working on much smaller margins. When you only need to support yourself and have next to no overhead, your revenue needs are far lower (it's all relative after all). On top of this, the people many companies are searching for (the "mini-CEO" Iain describes) are exactly the type of people they'll have trouble retaining. Seems to me that companies, like most other businesses, are going to take a serious look at how they're structured and do a better job of creating an environment where employees are doing more than "experience-farming."
Part Two
Okay, now onto the second portion of this entry where I praise the Times. On three occaisions over the last few weeks I have been surprised to find myself at the Times (or surprised by what I was seeing).
iPhone the Musical: Times gadget guy David Pogue does a song and dance about the iPhone. It's got 220,000 views on YouTube and is a perfect example of how to use a media audience to snap something into virality.
Bree, We Knew and Knew Ye: This is another Times blog moment. In this one they write about the death of lonelygirl15 (who got started a year ago). What impressed me was that the entry embedded a video from Myspace. Can you imagine a situation even two years ago where one major media outlet was embedding content that drove to another major media outlet? I've often said that the biggest difference between web 1.0 and 2.0 is that in 2.0 links don't open in new windows: You trust your audience can find their way back.
Freakonmics: Last, but not least, is today's announcement that the Freakonomics blog is moving over to NYTimes.com. I just noticed yesterday that Freakonomics had something like 110,000 subscribers which must be a nice little score for the Times. Not sure what the deal looks like, but clearly it's an opportunity for both parties.
I don't think blogs = strategy by any means, however, these three developments seem to signal different steps forward in an industry that desperately needs to redefine its business.
Just wanted to point to some mentions of me and my activites. This is completely self-serving, but hey, what can you do? Hopefully you'll find it moderately interesting.
From Facebook to Dove’s “Real Beauty� campaign, social networks play a key role in media today. But, despite the current hype, networks aren’t particularly new. Consider, the famous “six degrees of separation� experiment examining social networks was conducted in the 1960s.
What’s new is our understanding of how they really function. Just 20 years ago, if you asked a social scientist to graph out a social network they would have shown you a bell curve: Most people are friends with a few people who know hardly anyone; a few who know a massive amount of people; and the majority sit in the middle. Bell curves, or Gaussian distributions, traditionally result when the subjects being plotted aren’t connected to one another.
Second, my friend Celia recently started a magazine called Slice. The first issue features an article all about likemind. Here's the intro:
To be honest, I'm not sure how to feel about it. I really don't like marketing blogs that much. As I've said in the past, I think the best way to think about marketing and what's next is to not talk about "marketing" at all, but rather to focus on things like people, technology or culture. With that said, obviously it's exciting to be on the list and I'm joined by some esteemed company (PSFK, Publishing 2.0, Russell Davies, Grant McCracken and Influx Insights all made the top 50).
That's about it. Naked, the company I work for, also had a nice writeup today in Adweek featuring this choice quote: "Carney confirmed that J&J is by far the shop's biggest win yet. And the agency celebrated with gusto: "We sang We Are the Champions by Queen loudly and repeatedly whilst inhaling vats of Champagne," Carney recalled. "Neal [Davies] and I danced on the boardroom table and everyone [at the agency] got money. It was brilliant, I still have a hangover."" Nice.
Five insights into life, technology and other stuff.
I've recently added a new tag to my del.icio.us: "insight". The articles I tag with this all have some single nugget or idea that I think is genuinely insightful. Most of them take something I think I know about and flip it in some way. I've got five articles with the tag so far, and I think they offer some interesting peeks into the world.
more thingy: The first one comes from Russell Davies and I've actually mentioned it before. "I've liked noticing the solidification of the internet recently, it seems to be becoming more like a thing and less like a service or process," Russell points out. He notes that it's become much more like a commodity, you buy it with vouchers or it just exists in the form of signs mentioning free wifi. Finally he concludes, "Soon we'll just stop mentioning it." I think that's the insight. It's becoming ubiquitous and it's only a matter of time (or generations) that we cease to even mention its existence.
Why did we feel oddly liberated thinking the terrorists had struck again?: I'm not sure if this is insightful, or just stating something others are afraid to state, but it's true. That's the way I felt. "We know it’s coming. There was that apocalyptic but apparently far-fetched JFK plot, what almost happened this summer in London with the car bombs. Last Wednesday, when everybody thought it was 9/11 Part Twoâ€â€at lastâ€â€it was, at least to some New Yorkers, something of a relief. We could deal with it and move on."
Pixels are the New Pies: Anil Dash points out that increasingly infographics are using pixels to represent data instead of pie graphs. He asks the question (amongst many other smart ones): "Is the square format more familiar to readers now because of the preponderance of the pixel in pop culture?" I don't think it's a coincidence that I saw the photo below over at swissmiss the same day.
On Stickiness: This is one part lesson and one part insight. The lesson comes in the form of understanding that if you want to find insights its great to understand what's going on underneath/what's the science behind something. In this case, Clay looks at the science of what makes something sticky and takes away three lessons for creating "sticky marketing": 1. Make it flexible, 2. Make sure it can flow and 3. Make sure it has enough internal strength to provide resistance.
Meet the Wired Retired: Last but not least is an article from Amelia. In it she points out the new Luddite might not actually be the elderly . . . "So the real Digital Luddites lie, I believe, somewhere in between our web-saturated youth and the wired retired. It’s the busy professionals, too frazzled from family, too washed out from work, who are simply too tired and scared to engage and explore new digital technologies. They feel they have enough technology to contend with during working hours to let it interfere with their leisure time."
So that's it. Would love to hear more thoughts and get some more links to insights. Also, I'm in Chicago for one more day, so if anyone has any recommendations on things to do I'd love to hear them. If you're around town, drop me a line.
Oh, and I'm feeling much better, thanks for all the nice notes and comments.
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Mostly random thought (from Twitter): Wow, I am now getting Ground Zero Mosque comment spam ... I don't know whether to be impressed or disturbed. (31 August 2010, 11:54 am)
Q: What is this site all about?
A: I think Michael Bierut explained it nicely a few years ago in response to people asking him why he didn't write more about design on Design Observer: "But the great thing about graphic design is that it is almost always about something else. Corporate law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson. And if I can't get excited about whatever that something else is, I really have trouble doing good work as a designer. To me, the conclusion is inescapable: the more things you're interested in, the better your work will be." Replace "graphic design" with "media/marketing/technology" (or whatever you'd like to call my field) and you've got my deal.
Q: Where else do you live?
A: Good question. All over the place as a matter of fact. On Tumblr for more randomness, Twitter for short bursts, Dopplr for places I'm going, Delicious for things I'm reading, last.fm for music I'm listening to, Flickr for photos I'm taking and Facebook because I don't really have a choice. (Oh, and Amazon for stuff I want people to buy me.)
Q: I meant that literally. Where do you live?
A: Oh, sorry, Brooklyn, New York is where I call home at the moment.
Q: Any other side projects you'd like to tell us about?
A: As a matter of fact, yes. There's How Much Does it Buy?, a calculator for the rest of us. Holy Crap! Facts (and accompanying Twitter feed) which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. Da' Bears Blog is, in my opinion, the best Chicago Bears blog on the web (I don't write it, I just helped it get off the ground) and Tweemail is a little PHP script I wrote for getting Twitter updates by email. I'm also always working on a few other things and will let you know when they're ready for public consumption.
Q: Um okay.
A: Yeah, that's a fake question mostly so I can throw in this one other quote I like that I think sums up some of what I try to do here. This one comes from Albert Einstein (or at least the internet says so) and goes something like, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Words to live by.
Hi, I'm 