The always interesting Marcus Brown has initiated ‘Social Psycho, a Creative Commons project’ – which is a crowdsourced work/works of fiction around some interesting questions relating to our increasingly social and networked world.
Dave Cushman has already started thinking about it a bit. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but one interesting example to look at is Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transcience, which I wrote about back in 2007.
(Incidentally, anyone know how to stop my formatting going bonkers if I’ve embedded a Slideshare presentation?)
(Edit…I seem to have located a lot of random /div tags which were causing it..)
social networks
Is Twitter destroying the link economy?
I’m in the process of collating various posts and search into the effect of Twitter on the link economy for a post later this week – but I want to include your views and comments.
It’s been sparked by a few things – including the the fact that despite receiving the same amount of traffic to both my blogs, and numerous Retweets, the ranking of them by various lists has gone down. And much of this seems to be due to a lower amount of inbound links as measured by Technorati and Yahoo.
In the grand scheme of things, the only reason measures of popularity are important for my personal blogs is it makes it easier for people to find them via search or relevant lists, allowing me to hopefully meet and interact with more people (I’m not aiming to build a media empire at the moment!).
But are you seeing the same things happening?
Do you wish Google/Technorati etc started counting Retweets as a metric of authority for a website?
Do you think the effect is proportional to the time you invest of social networks rather than interacting via blogs?
Does it matter to you?
The serendipity defence of magazines and newspapers is a myth
There are several reasons why the print editions of newspapers and magazines will continue for a while longer in there current forms before evolving into something new to survive alongside the increasingly dominent internet and mobile content networks.
But the serendipity argument isn’t one of them, despite the fact it’s so often wheeled out. Unfortunately, when you spend some time thinking about it, it becomes clear that the argument is based on a load of old cobblers.
The argument is that by reading a newspaper or magazine you’ll find things you didn’t realise you would enjoy reading or needed to know.
Which is true.
But the flipside of using this argument as a justification for print publications is that using the internet/mobile to find content will only give you exactly what you want, the majority of the time.
Which isn’t true.
It’s a reasonable assertion if you only consider search as the mechanism for finding content on the internet/mobile. Given a reasonably accurate search string, Google et al will generally give me a reasonably accurate list of returns for the thing I want.
But I don’t just use search. In fact, I’m using it less and less.
The assertion falls down as soon as you use any social tools for the simple reason that humans are not powered by algorithms. Despite the reasonable assumption that the majority of people will share content because it is relevant/appropriate to the recipient, the judgement of relevance/appropriateness is a subjective one on behalf of the sender – which means you can end up with all sorts of stuff.
And that’s only the active senders – now add in the network that shares links on social networks as a broadcast because they found it interesting, and someone in their network might be interested, but they don’t know who, or can’t be bothered to target it individually.
Then add in the lucky dips of social bookmarking tools, RSS feeds, and the entire linking ecosystem.
And it’s always been the case offline:
Think about birthdays and Christmas. Close family and friends might send you incredibly relevant, thoughtful presents, but as the distance grows between you and the sender, the random factor increases exponentially, so you can end up with all sorts of good and bad presents.
That’s the random discovery of things you never knew you’d like, by your network – not by a brand of ‘taste makers’ and distributed by a publication.
And it means basing your survival on the following assumptions:
1. People will have the time and desire for something outside of their interests when there’s a huge abundance of highly relevant material taking up their limited time.
2. People will want something outside of their interests which hasn’t be supplied by friends, family, colleagues, acquintances, or the Stumble! button.
3. Anyone who enjoys this discovery will find it engaging enough to pay before discovering whether or not it’s worthwhile, and will then find it enjoyable enough to keep paying, and perhaps engage with the surrounding monetisation – usually advertising.
Really?
There is a future for providing services which allow for assisted discovery of content – whether by human means or computers (e.g ‘related items’ or ‘things you might like’). But the days of being able to charge purely for those services are rapidly disapearing.
Why Mark Zuckerberg is right to dismiss Facebook users
As a specialist in online communities and social media, it may seem a little strange that I would suggest Mark Zuckerberg is right to ignore the complaints of Facebook users over the recent changes to the social network, but stick with me on this one.
The story so far:
Facebook releases a redesign which shows more of a Friendfeed/Twitter influence. Users react badly and an app is introduced to vote on the new design. The app has over 1 million votes so far, with 94% against the new layout and 600,000 comments – Facebook has over 175 million users for context. (A suitable time to remind everyone of ‘the supermarket effect‘ when it comes to redesigns?)
Then on Friday, Gawker posted details of a memo by Mark Zuckerberg to Facebook employees, supplied by an anonymous tipster. ‘He said something like ‘the most disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers’
Sadly, the memo hasn’t been published anywhere, so like everyone else, I’m going on the third-hand hearsay. Cnet has a reasonable summary of the split between people attacking Facebook/Zuckerberg for his apparent lack of concern about users, and those who are supporting Facebook. So far, though, only Robert Scoble appears to have addressed why Zuckerberg is right to dismiss user concerns in this instance.
So why is Mark Zuckerberg right?
There’s a difference between collaboration and co-creation (which I evangelise), and, as Scoble puts it, ‘letting the customers run our business mode’. Think of every product that has been dulled by focus groups until it fails to ignite any interest from anyone.
Zuckerberg wants to keep Facebook disruptive – which is completely correct if it will avoid the loss of interest associated with the previous big social networks – look at the current state of Friendster and Myspace. Both are still sizeable, but when did either of them ignite any sense of passion or controversy?
Too often, a great idea gets lost in repeated meetings, discussions and trying to meet the expectations of everyone involved – now try applying the views of 175 million people to a business plan.
And it takes strong leadership to lead any project, no matter how democratic in nature – from Wikipedia to Twitter, users contribute, collaborate, create, build-on and influence – but eventually someone has to pick a strategy and run with it.
And the redesign is leading to reports of the benefits for brands and for Facebook advertising.
Meanwhile Scoble points to user data and recommendations leading to businesses. And the fact that people may claim they’re rushing to leave since the redesign, but what people say is often different to what they do, and with such a critical mass, there are a lot of strong ties to break, with no like-for-like alternative really getting any attention.
They just don’t get it:
Part of my reason for posting is an article by Frank Reed over at Marketing Pilgrim, and others like it. We shouldn’t confuse customer service with customers dictating business strategy simply by an immediate backlash – all customer input should be acknowledged, and then a decision has to be made to act on it. It’s the same confusion that portrays Open Source as impossible to make money from, or social media as the only place to bother marketing in.
(And for the record, I don’t like the new design, I’m not going to leave over it, and I probably use Facebook 1-2 times a day for pleasure and 3-4 times a day for work, preferring Twitter and Friendfeed).
On newspapers, advertisers and social media
Russell Davies has a great post on ‘newspapers and all that‘ which looks at the current debate on the future of newspapers and asks where the advertisers/media planners are hiding during the discussion.
As he outlines the reasons why they’re not particularly active in the debate, it echoed my own thoughts – not just on newspapers and magazines, but also about social media. Consumers have jumped all over social media/social networking (175 million+ on Facebook, 133 million+ blogs, Twitter growing fast, Wikipedia essential etc), and celebrities, direct sale companies and media businesses are all getting there pretty quickly – but it’s all being slowed by the reluctance of the majority of advertisers and media planners to adapt to new ways of working, new measurements and new metrics.
Which means the people that will spend money, and the routes to them are evolving quicker than the money which will fund it, and that situation is the slowest one to change.