Social Software Explored

Recently my mom not only asked me to join her on Facebook (or maybe more likely she asked to join me on Facebook) she also created a Twitter account and posted “@notronwest I lost your number can you call me?” (as her first post ever) She recently took down her Twitter account when I told her not to follow me there cause she wouldn’t understand a word I said but, I think she is pretty serious about Facebook.

Facebook and Mom - matched made in ??

Not unfamiliar territory for most of us but I thought it would be a good idea to talk about the expectations a mother should have should one of her offspring decide to connect on social media sites (like Facebook)

1.) Don’t expect to understand everything that your offspring says. We are in a different world now and for some of us the language is different. I am not talking about words like “wicked” or “phat” or other social slang - I am talking about Doppelganger, Pandora, Hipster … words that have real connotation but are best described to those that don’t understand with a role of the eyes.

2.) Don’t pretend to understand everything that your offspring says. Nothing worse than a “hip” mother sharing their favorite 60’s Pandora radio station link on your Facebook wall.

3.) Don’t take anything that your offspring says or does personally. What you get on Facebook is sometimes easily taken out of context. This is a relatively new medium for most of us and we ourselves are trying to figure out the right way to use it. We may (and often do) say something that isn’t quite politically correct or goes against the morals you taught us. Remember that sometimes we drink before we update Facebook and therefore can’t be held completely responsible for our actions. Unconditional love - right?

4.) Keep your distance. Let it come to you (and it will). Eventually, over time, you will understand that less is more. Again you are gaining a unique view into your offspring’s life. One that you were never afforded before. Imagine what you would have thought should you have bugged the bedroom when I was 10 and had my friends over for a sleepover or gasp when I was 16 and my girlfriend and I … well you get the picture.

5.) Get involved but don’t offer advice (not online anyways). We are past that stage in our lives (most of us anyways) where we don’t want your advice. We get it - your smart - you’ve been there and done that. Most of us don’t want our friends to see that we are still attached at the hip - I mean were in our 30’s for goodness sake - if we can’t demonstrate that we have figured it out by now we will never make it.

6.) Don’t be surprised if we call less and post more. We are creatures of the net. Our jobs and home life have equal parts human contact and digital contact. If we feel we can get our point across or have our questions answered online - that’s where it will happen. It doesn’t mean we won’t call - ever - just not as much.

7.) This is a huge opportunity - don’t blow it.

Oh - and by the way - we love you!

facebook, Mom, social media, Twitter

I am very fortunate in many ways but, one of the fortunate things I get to do is to meet cool people. All of the people that I meet add a lot to my life and the combination of their knowledge feeds my own thoughts on a daily basis. I share with you today a conversation that I had on Twitter with a very intelligent marketing person at Seton Hall (Rob Brosnan - @brosnaro).

He posted the following:

Facebook Showing Worth?

Being that I don’t know a ton about marketing I replied (ignore the “tweet so rarely” dig - just trying to get more frequent posts out of him :)

What is 18 30d?

And the answer is:

First Click from Facebook is more valuable than same source Google view

Essentially, what Rob is saying is that you can’t always count on “same session” information to tell you the story about a conversion and that what he concludes is that Facebook as a lead in or introductory source, is becoming more successful.

Do you count “30d first click” information on your conversion rates? What are you seeing?

Conversion, facebook, Marketing, Twitter

Take a few minutes (3 minutes and 13 seconds to be exact) and watch the following video. While watching it take note of the ease in which both characters select content and move it around to make it easier to view and work with.

Now think about the iPad. The single reason why I think that the iPad will work (and why other previous inventions similar to the iPad failed) will work is because we are ready. The iPad represents the closest representation to the Minority Report UI that we have seen. Yes - there have been touch screen devices but I think the “multi-touch” approach is going to separate the iPad from its predecessors pretty quickly.

Whenever someone makes good on science fiction and can bring a product to market that meets the expectations of the general public - it works. Bringing the truth out of science fiction is ultimately why we will see a shift in technology use in the year 2010.

Apple, Design, iPad, Minority Report, User Interface

Bill Gates is on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/billgates) . Yay! (really?) I find it quite amusing that in the first 3 hours he demonstrated the real power of Twitter - Open Connections in a Real Time World.  Take a look at his second post:

RT @RyanSeacrest: Just got a call from cnn. here are the final numbers raised from last nights show.. for unicef + american red cross $8 … about 6 hours ago from web

RT @RyanSeacrest: here are the final numbers raised from last nights show for unicef + american red cross $8,944,956

RT @RyanSeacrest: here are the final numbers raised from last nights show for unicef + american red cross $8,944,956 [double it - call me]

Bill Gates, social media, Twitter

This was too big for Twitter and I didn’t want to lose it.

From an excerpt I just read (from John Bargh a social psychology professor at Yale)

“We know now that there is a very high likelihood of finding unconscious influences that effect our decisions, preferences, etc.”

Have you ever heard of a third party cookie? Do you know what it is? Are we breaking free from a prison placed on our brains by experience, culture and the thoughts of others or are we entering into a time where we are innately predictable and defensive our perceived notions of free will?

free will, Google, John Bargh, Social Psychology

I want to drag and resize everything. Put my grubby hands on it and handle it like a “thing”.

As I go through the interface for our new software version I can’t help but want to drag items around on the page and put them where I want. Even with the increased real estate of a 15 inch laptop it doesn’t seem like its enough. I want to open a Rich Text Window - hold the bottom left corner and the top right corner - slowly stretch it apart and resize it to about 24 inches across. Then when I want to insert a link, I want to touch (physically touch) like where I can feel the rounded beveled edge of the button under my fingers (the button should be about the size of 3 fingers) and when that dialog appears to choose a link - I want to drag it to the center of my viewing area. Resize it the way I did the Rich Text Block.

Cool Plastic Feel

It would be nice to feel the cool plastic of these windows in my hands too - while I am handling them. I then want to push all other things away while I work on this link. When I am done with the link and click the “finish” button with my index and middle finger, I want the most relevant window (which I previously slide away) to reappear in the same dimension and size as it was when I started linking.

Is this really too much to ask?

1.) Man in the Mirror

2.) Remember the Time

3.) PYT (Pretty Young Thing)

What Facebook chooses to do with your content in the coming months/years will unequivocally determine its fate. Period.  I really could stop the post here and we could all move on but for some of you that have been reading and I suggest the following:

1.) Facebook Change of Policy: Why You Should Care

2.) How do You Feel About Facebook Owning Your Content?

3.) Zuckerburg On Who Owns User Data On Facebook: It’s Complicated

lets spend a minute to talk about the possibilities.

What if Facebook did sell your photo to and advertiser and they made a commercial which sold a product which made millions and Facebook got half.

What if Facebook took your idea that you posted in your note and sold it to a VC company who turned your idea into a multi-million dollar product which in turn made millions for Facebook

What if….

The list goes on and if you read Mona’s examples you may be left with an uneasy feeling that you should be protecting your information.  You might even go so far as to stop posting pictures, and notes and comments for fear that your information will be sold to the highest bidder.  You might even become an ultra  radical and remove your profile from the site and start an "I Hate Facebook" Bebo site.  Go ahead, its a free country.

I am going to tell you why you shouldn’t though

Content is King

First of all everyone at Facebook knows that as long as there is fresh new content by new users each day - people will continue to show up.  The content (which some people are losing site of) is the only thing that Facebook has going for it.  From pictures, to status updates and comments.  From videos and links to (yes even) those stupid Bumper Sticker requests.  Its all good.  Facebook has more content then it knows what to do with and that’s why they are wrestling with how they handle it.

The recent updates to the TOS is really just a sneaky way for Facebook to value its site.  Advertising sucks and will continue to suck as users become more savvy towards old school marketing tactics.  Although there is still some value in the number of people that visit a site its the information that is placed into this site which ultimately holds this thing together.

Erich Schonfield sums it up like this:

When you share your data with someone else, whether it be an email or a photo, it becomes their data as well. You cannot normally rescind data you share with other people in an e-mail. So why should a social network be any different?

And I for one agree. Facebook is a digital history book of all your interactions (good or bad) with all of the people that participate in your network.  If that digital history starts to get holes in it the site loses its luster.  The changes are an insurance policy to investors and suitors which Facebook will use to improve its valuation.

What If?

So back to the what if.  Well what if one day Facebook started to use your content for profit with or without your knowledge.  What would you do?  You would do the same thing that everyone else would do.  You would leave.  But before you left, you would leave your mark.  You would tell your friend, your friends friend and anyone else who would listen.  You would start a group.  You would reach out to advocates and you would tell them your story.  You would inform them that Facebook has used your content and is now profiting and that you got nothing.

It will become easier and easier for ordinary people to be heard.  The walls of communication have been knocked down.  Facebook knows this.  They understand this very well.  They don’t want you leave and if they are going to put this at risk then they will fail.  Miserably.

Up to know Facebook and I have an agreement in writing and one in principal. Until either of these agreements are broken I think we are safe.  And if any of you think that its hard to re-build something like Facebook - think again.

Update (2.18.2009): Facebook posts this message at the top of the home page today:

Terms of Use Update

Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.
If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

Hmmm… thank you for validating my point. No need to worry.

Content, facebook, social media, TechCrunch, TOS

I have been wanting to right this article for a few weeks (er months) now.  It has to do with the changing face of marketing especially around advertising.  Particularly with how things get sold. The article which sparked my interest was actually written late last year and posted on Business Week.  It is entitled: “A Modest Blogging Proposal” The article talks about a growing trend in the blogging world: “pay per post”.  The idea being that a company can pay an important or well followed blogger to essentially influence readers by writing good things about a product or its company.  In the early days of Social Media an idea like this was outlandish and preposterous.  No good blogger would ever write anything that was either untrue or tainted simply to satisfy a sponsor.

In “The Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell speaks of the power of influential people and challenges, that perhaps it is only a few influential people who “tip” the scales of modern day consumerism.  He tells a a tale about Mavens, Connectors and Salesman and how they can control the most innocuous fads such as the growth of Hush Puppies as the trendiest of trends.  His story and others like it have forced me to think about why we buy and how that has changed over the years.

Influences

We all have influences - the TV, the World wide web, magazines, radio, newspapers. They all play some sort of role in how we make decisions.    Without marketing and advertising many of the products you buy (even consistent products) wouldn’t exist because you wouldn’t know about them.  Those 10-15 pages in the front of almost every magazine with full page ads are there to influence our choices and display branded images that we can relate to.  Without this form of advertising you would have to see a product in use or more likely you would have to hear about it from someone you knew.

A lot of how we buy however is influenced by other people: friends, families, co-workers. What if we erased marketing and advertising and didn’t have sites like Facebook, MySpace, Ning, Twitter and every other social network around (eek sounds like the dark ages to me).  Without any marketing, advertising or social networking we would essentially be back to the way it was at the turn of the century, at least in the minds of a product owner.  Consumers had little knowledge of anything outside their local network which if they were lucky stretched a few towns separated by a few miles at most.

What if we really did erase marketing and advertising? How would you even know that a product existed? Really, in a nut shell marketing and advertising is a few people (or companies) that decide which products and brands will sell.  What if marketing and advertising wasn’t the only way you could find out about a product?   What if we had a network of people (at our fingertips) that could help us make these decisions?  At the turn of the century you could picture a few people riding from town to town with carts or wagons selling products that solved this problem or a new product you have never seen that could be used to clean dirt off a pan or your clothes (yikes another scary vision).  But is that essentially where we are?  Full circle?  A few influencers using this new medium to distribute their ideas and thoughts?

Enter Social Media

The ultimate result of the debate spawned by the article “A Modest Blogging Proposal” was this:

…we came to the realization that few bloggers see any conflict in being paid to write a post, even if payment comes from the same company being reviewed.

Hmmm… bloggers who don’t make money on their blog turn to sponsorship by companies who can’t use traditional means like television and magazine advertising to sell products because nobody is listening.  Hmmm…scary.

This is where I feel Wayne had us all beat - back in 1992:

Benjamin: Wayne! Listen, we need to have a talk about Vanderhoff. The fact is he’s the sponsor and you signed a contract guaranteeing him certain concessions, one of them being a spot on the show.
Wayne Campbell: [holding a Pizza Hut box] Well that’s where I see things just a little differently. Contract or no, I will not bow to any sponsor.
Benjamin: I’m sorry you feel that way, but basically it’s the nature of the beast.
Wayne Campbell: [holding a bag of Doritos] Maybe I’m wrong on this one, but for me, the beast doesn’t include selling out. Garth, you know what I’m talking about, right?
Garth Algar: [wearing Reebok wardrobe] It’s like people only do these things because they can get paid. And that’s just really sad.
Wayne Campbell: I can’t talk about it anymore; it’s giving me a headache.
Garth Algar: Here, take two of these!
[Dumps two Nuprin pills into Wayne's hand]
Wayne Campbell: Ah, Nuprin. Little. Yellow. Different.
Benjamin: Look, you can stay here in the big leagues and play by the rules, or you can go back to the farm club in Aurora. It’s your choice.
Wayne Campbell: [holding a can of Pepsi] Yes, and it’s the choice of a new generation.

In short, when you have 20K+ people listening to almost every word you say (like @davewiner, @scobleizer, @techcrunch, @guykawasaki and many others - http://www.twittown.com/friends/topfollowers_1 ) its hard to not imagine the above scenario.

Fortunately, I don’t see it quite like that.  Sure you will see some of the people in that top list influence decisions (knowingly and unknowingly) and you may also see some of those people in that list take money for services rendered.  But what you won’t see is the change in the fundamentals here: we are all connecting at an alarming rate using common platforms like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc…. and by connecting on these common platforms we are removing the need to rely on traditional means for purchasing decisions.  Some will be swayed but the smarter ones will realize that there’s a choice.  And that choice will come from trusted individuals in a wide circle of friends that have no geographic boundaries.

Marketing, social media, targeted advertising

When I think about what Twitter has done (and continues to do) I can’t help but think about XML and what being "Standards Based" means to the evolution of our human (and non-human) communication.  What XML has done for the Web I am in no doubt convinced Twitter (or something similar) will do for communication.

Another way to look at it is to think about SMTP.  It is just a protocol.  When I was in college we could plug-in to our VAX system and send e-mail to other people in the world.  That quickly evolved to desktop clients like Netscape 2 and Eudora (I know that there were many others).  Eventually, we saw a growth in servers that could handle millions of E-mails a day and what we are left with now is essentially Free E-mail for everyone (thanks Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the like).  All on top of an agreed upon framework - SMTP.

Twitter is a framework.  Twitter is not: IMing, Texting, Friending, Linking, Time wasting.. its a framework. And frameworks let us build bigger and better things easier.

The beauty of Twitters the framework is quite simple:

1.) All messages are routed through a single server, or in this case a cloud of servers.

2.) Discovering, connecting and communicating with individual people is stone simple.

Conversations are open

Since everything goes through a single point of entry and there are ample API’s you get an amazing effect.  Take a look at Monitter.  Type in any three words and you get a glimpse of every conversation in the recent past and present where those words exist.  What is amazing here is that you don’t have to know any of them.  You hear conversations going on around the world.  The US government paid millions (maybe billions) for a similar service - it was called Carnivore.  Twitter enabled this for far less and in far less time.

Framework is key to growth

Twitter started out as a simple website where you could go and communicate.  It really wouldn’t have grown to where it is now without a strong API.  In a short time (about a year and a half) hundreds of desktop and mobile applications sprung up.  Allowing you to post, read and connect on Twitter.  You can equate this growth with the same growth of e-mail after Netscape 2 launched.  Not surprisingly, most people didn’t do to well interfacing with green screens and the desktop interface that Netscape 2 provided allowed more people to send e-mail easily.

We see the same thing happening now with applications like Digsby, TweetDeck, Twirl, iTweet (and many, many more).  Without these applications - Twitters proliferation into the mainstream would not be possible.  Look at it this way.  If Twitter were to try and develop a single interface into Twitter that satisfied every user - they would go broke.  They would need 100’s of developers and it would take forever to release new versions.  Undoubtedly, they would never provide just the right interface.

With a published API Twitter does what they do best - manage Twitter and provide framework enhancements (in the form of API’s and services).  With those API’s developers can develop many different applications that allow people to communicate on the Twitter network.  Each application slightly different then next.  Each providing a unique experience which is capable of capturing many different users’ desires.  So in effect what Twitter gets is an army of developers guaranteeing that Twitter stays alive.  Without Twitter and its framework - TweetDeck dies.

Where is this going?

What we are seeing now is that intelligent entrepreneurs are beginning to extend the framework of Twitter to offer services on top that were not part of the initial Twitter framework.  Take TwitPic for example.  Twitter is only a text based system - there was no thought in the design (or at least in the first iteration of the service) for external document support.  However, since Twitter has published an API websites like TwitPic can piggy back on top of the service and provide easy integration between Twitter and a Photo hosting solution.

No one really knows what is going to happen with Twitter but if you think about some of its quintessential qualitie s it is nothing more than a protocol. An open conversation protocol which will be stretched beyond its limit someday - just like e-mail is today.  The defining moment in Twitters place in history will be when applications available to the mainstream public offer services on top of the framework and the users of consumers of the services are ignorant to the fact that Twitter is the underlying architecture.  Much like most mainstream people today couldn’t even tell you what SMTP is or what it stands for or that they should curse it.

And I doubt anyone made any money from the development of SMTP.

Digsby, social media, Social Networking, TwitPic, Twitter, Web2.0