Social Software Explored

I have been anxiously awaiting this day. My Space has begun a “targeted ad” campaign which if successful, I think will revolutionize the advertising world. The benefits of targeted advertisements is simple:

Deliver more meaningful advertisements

It is a fact of life that quality content must either be paid for (Cable channels) or supplemented through advertisements (Network). We have been living with advertisements on television since it’s inception. Although TV/Cable content providers have become more intelligent about their ad placements (My wife does not understand half of the humor displayed in the advertisements during a Football game on Sunday), there was no real way to determine who was watching television.

Enter “Cookies” – no not your mom’s chocolate chip cookie. Imagine the Nielsen Ratings group – only in EVERY household. Essentially every visitor to a web site can be tracked. And with sites like Facebook and MySpace your content retrieval habits can also be tracked. Imagine watching television and getting an advertisement that said: “Goes great with the new pair of brown pants you just bought last week from the store”. Freaky yes, but I would rather have this ad then a bunch of ads completely unrelated to what I am looking for.

Targeted advertisements hold the key to increased click-through rates and even higher completion rates (someone actually purchases). I know this topic represents a mixed bag – but I think that this is the best thing to happen to the Internet. Among its benefits:

• Potential for less advertisements – key concept here is that the websites sprinkle a ton of advertisements in hopes that one of them is clicked
• Advertisements are more successful – no more campaigns with unknown return value
• Freak the hell out of your Mom – ha- no seriously, though, remember the Minority Report? Imagine an ad directed towards your mom? I know mine would freak out. “How’d they know that I just remodeled my kitchen”?

There are certainly some challenges and I think that the general privacy community will certainly have problems with statements like this:

“If someone’s been identified as someone who’s interested in fashion, we target ads to them that have nothing to do with fashion, and then ads that would direct them to say, the MySpace fashion channel.”

How do they determine someone is “interested in fashion”. Do they look at my MySpace messages? At my “Blog” posts? Surely someone will want a public deceleration of the data collection policies used to determine the targeted advertisements.

At any rate – we are on our way, so we shall see!

http://www.calacanis.com/2007/07/27/facebook-bankruptcy

One of my “friends” on Facebook posted a link to this BRILIANT blog post which has filled me with a ton of energy.  I am trying to figure out where to aim this and I guess I am hoping that you can help.  I have a few angles of discussion from this post and I need to know where to focus (may help to actually read the post =) :

1.) These applications that are popping up (Facebook, LinkedIn, Pownce, Twitter, ???) – are they opportunistic software application developers taking advantage of the hype of Web 2.0 to make a buck (or million) or are they opportunistic software application developers taking advantage of the shift in our societies decision to communicate more openly/freely over the Internet to make software that helps enable true “enhanced connectivity”?

2.) Is his disgusted with the Social Network System and his inability to internalize what is going on here (we are completely shifting our Communication techniques).  Is he part of the “older” generation that just can’t understand how to fit this into his daily actions?  Hyper connectivity anxiety disorder?

3.) Is he trying to get people to think further down the road?  Can we honestly think that the current state of Social Networking is the “Way it will be”?  Why do we have to travel around to all of these different sites?  Why do we have to post on other people’s blogs (only to loose that communication later when the user decides to close up shop?)  Should we think about shaking up the model a bit and leverage the Internet to communicate in a whole new way?

4.)Unrelated – I have travelled quite a bit over the last 2-3 years and I have met a ton of young professionals who either don’t know that much about social networking or find it to be a  waste of time.  To be honest I am not sure that I would have learned as much as I did if I hadn’t been on the road.  With a wife and two children, time is a precious commodity.

One of the conversations that I have been having recently is how we as a society is not interested in information for the long term anymore.  We are “experience” animals that search for the “next best thing”.   We revel in the challenges to achieve it (getting from A to Z is half the fun) but are disinterested as soon as we do.  Moving on to the “next best thing”.  We are an ADHD society who have been transformed into “minute-memories”.

Our means of communications have shifted towards this – IM, Text Messaging, Blogging etc…  We are very interested in the now – and NOW moves faster then any of could believe.

The nagging question for all of this – what does it mean to the next generation of “communicators”?  When they have grown up on Text Messaging, IM and {gasp} Twitter?  And more importantly, how can we establish these new levels/channels of communications so that these new communicators are capable of achieving more then we have.

I am certainly not claiming “Facebook Bankruptcy” but I have denied the Zombie requests and I continue to edit my “iLike” portion of my site (and encourage others to do the same).

There is no question that the Wii has changed the world of console based gaming. In a time when the other game consoles were focusing on high powered (high cost) graphic engines designed to produce the most realistic gaming systems to date, the Wii focused on the controller. They have built an interface which has truly changed how gaming systems are perceived, at least for the general public. The question remains though, will their be any followers? Will we see the “gyro-controller” for the PS3 or the “sensor-plate” for the X-B0x 360?

They say that imitation is the ultimate source of flattery so why haven’t we seen more innovative controllers from the other major game consoles? Or, even a new gaming console that no one has heard? I am sure that Nintendo has all sorts of patents on the controller but until the Wii arrived, controllers had not changed that much. In the last two major console releases there were no added buttons or features in the controller.

So, if the Wii is so revolutionary and they have completely changed family entertainment, then why are they still all alone? If the time to production of the Wii is any indication, then it may just be a matter of time. Or, is the Wii simply a fad, a blip on the screen? CNN.com seems to think that the Wii may at some time soon become “the biggest hit in the industry’s history“, topping Play Station 2 (which is currently at over 120 million consoles shipped the Wii is currently at about 8 million) .

While I think that the Wii has certainly struck a cord and expanded the console game systems beyond the everyday “gamer”, I am skeptical about it’s wide acceptance amongst the entire gaming community. Hopefully, the folks at Nintendo have taken the time to produce the killer controller and are now working on adding the graphics horsepower found in the other major consoles.

Amazing Controller’s + Extreme Graphics = Revolutionary.

Update [7/18/07] – I was catching up with some of RSS reads and I found this on Engaget: Microsoft shows off new Xbox 360 controller for casual gamers.  Maybe we won’t have to wait 3 years for someone to combat the Wii and begin extending the gaming community.

[digg=http://digg.com/nintendo_wii/Will_the_Wii_get_any_followers]

I have been a member of LinkedIn since April 24, 2006 and I have about 50 connections. I have been a fan of LinkedIn but since I have been at the same company for over 5 years I have to say that LinkedIn has really only gotten me back in contact with a few people that I lost touch with in the past. Most of the people that are on my list I regard highly – people that I have personally done business with and would more than likely enjoy doing business with in the future. I am not too concerned about a “network” per se, so the number (50) doesn’t bother me. I have several people in my list that have over 500 contacts. So, if I needed to find more people or get a reference or introduction I certainly could.

Then I joined Facebook (don’t remember when but it was shortly after they started to allow users without .edu email addresses). I have begun to get into Facebook a bit more and started to look through their groups and networks. I found an interesting group called Web 2.0 (Entrepreneurs). Currently, there are over 7500 members and they are people who are either looking for help or want to offer their help with startups. The group’s officer list is a who’s who in Web application knowledge. People like Kevin Rose (digg.com), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Om Malik (GigaOM), Guy Kawasaki (Garage Technology Ventures) and others. The group got so popular that they had to spin off another group which they entitled Web T.e (T.e = Trust, Integrity and Ethics) where you essentially need to be invited to participate.

In the “Recent News” section of the group Mark Fletcher (started Bloglines.com) had 25 (15 + 10) things to remember when starting up a Start-Up:

+15 Startup Commandments

1. Your idea isn’t new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it. Get over your stunning brilliance and realize that execution matters more.

2. Stealth startups suck. You’re not working on the Manhattan Project, Einstein. Get something out as quickly as possible and promote the hell out of it.

3. If you don’t have scaling problems, you’re not growing fast enough.

4. If you’re successful, people will try to take advantage of you. Hope that you’re in that position, and hope that you’re smart enough to not fall for it.

5. People will tell you they know more than you do. If that’s really the case, you shouldn’t be doing your startup.

6. Your competition will inflate their numbers. Take any startup traffic number and slash it in half. At least.

7. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. Leonardo could paint the Mona Lisa only once. You, Bob Ross, can push a bug release every 5 minutes because you were at least smart enough to do a web app.

8. The size of your startup is not a reflection of your manhood. More employees does not make you more of a man (or woman as the case may be).

9. You don’t need business development people. If you’re successful, companies will come to you. The deals will still be distractions and not worth doing, but at least you’re not spending any effort trying to get them.

10. You have to be wrong in the head to start a company. But we have all the fun.

11. Starting a company will teach you what it’s like to be a manic depressive. They, at least, can take medication.

12. Your startup isn’t succeeding? You have two options: go home with your tail between your legs or do something about it. What’s it going to be?

13. If you don’t pay attention to your competition, they will turn out to be geniuses and will crush you. If you do pay attention to them, they will turn out to be idiots and you will have wasted your time. Which would you prefer?

14. Startups are not a democracy. Want a democracy? Go run for class president, Bueller.

15. You’re doing a web app, right? This isn’t the 1980s. Your crummy, half-assed web app will still be more successful than your competitor’s most polished software application.

+10 More Startup Commandments

1. You will have at least one catastrophe every three months.

2. Outsource effectively, or be effectively outsourced.

3. Do you thrive on stress and ambiguity? You’d better.

4. The best way to get outside funding is to be successful already. Stupid but true. But you, cheapskate, don’t need money, right?

5. People will think your idea sucks. They’re even probably right. The only way to prove them wrong is to succeed.

6. A startup will require your complete attention and devotion. Thought your first love in High School was clingy? You can’t take out a restraining order on your startup.

7. Being an entrepreneur requires a healthy amount of ignorance. Note I did not say stupidity.

8. Your software sucks. So what. Everyone else’s does also, and re-architecting is the kiss of death for a startup. Startups are no place for architecture astronauts.

9. You do have a public API, right?

10. Abject Terror. Overwhelming Joy. Monstrous Greed. Embrace and harness these emotions you must.

With online networking opportunities like this who needs LinkedIn?

I am not the only one thinking about LinkedIn like this, in fact TechCrunch has recently posted that LinkedIn may face a

“real risk of long term irrelevance as Facebook becomes the social networking platform of choice for professional networkers. “

Today I will keep my accounts on both sites. Currently I only have a handful of people in Facebook and I am currently only using Facebook for personal not professional reasons but who knows. Maybe I will ditch LinkedIn and get all of my contacts to join me on Facebook.

I can tell you this: I will more than likely pull down my MySpace account and focus solely on Facebook – it is leaps and bounds ahead of MySpace.

In an article posted by CNN.com about “Drugs found in Gore son’s Prius after traffic stop“:

Al Gore III, 24, was driving a blue Toyota Prius about 100 mph on the San Diego Freeway when he was pulled over about 2:15 a.m., Sheriff’s Department spokesman Jim Amormino said.

Who knew that a Prius could even go that fast? I guess I need to re-evaluate the purchase of my Volkswagen Passat.

“Prius: Environmentally friendly and almost fast enough to get away from the police”

Note: I am doing an experiment – a while back I told you that CNN.com was going live with some interesting technology from a company called “Sphere”. They are linking to blog posts which are talking about CNN.com articles. It appears from the blog posts which are listed that the only thing you need to do is to link to the article. So I am going to see if my post gets presented on CNN.com.

More to come later….

Update 07/05/2007 21:44:

Ok, so I would say that this worked.  I saw 6 direct views from CNN.com so my post must have been displayed at some point, but more interesting was that I was picked up by this website called “Slate” which appears to be a site that talks about what people are talking about.  they were kind of funny as they posted this:

NotronWest at Sweet! echoes the surprise: “I guess I need to re-evaluate the purchase of my Volkswagen Passat. ‘Prius: environmentally friendly and almost fast enough to get away from the police.’ “

I am going to see how far this goes as I post a few more CNN.com responses.

Later

When the Internet first came around TV producers were reluctant to deliver their content in the new medium. TV was TV and the Web was the Web. At first, many producers looked at the Internet as just that – a new medium for delivery. What they didn’t know was that this was not just a new medium for delivery of existing content, it was THE medium for delivery of NEW concepts.

I first heard about Homestar Runner when I started working with 2 web developers from the University of Alaska. Camie and Melanie turned me on to these guys back in 2002 when we were working on some support issues. At first I was like “Ok, these guys are weird” but after a while I started to really enjoy it. Short clips that lasted under 2 minutes were the staple. Something that the TV medium just won’t support. This was right after Atom Films and a few other early video sites started (No YouTube was _not_ the first video aggregation site).

At the time most TV cartoons were only running on TV. Even the radical Cartoon Network remained popular only from their TV audience. But then the Video revolution hit and TV producers were not scared to publish their content on the Internet. In fact, most of them jumped ship completely because the Ad revenues far exceeded that which they recieved from the Television Studios. Plus, with the popularity of the Flash player, they could push ideas out faster.

So, I naturally thought that the progression would move from the Web back to the Television. I envisioned that artists would use the Internet as a low end pilot system where they could test out their ideas. When one got popular, they would shop it around at the TV stations for that illustrious weekly spot on Cartoon Network or the like. However, it appears that it may not happen this way:

It seems like a foregone conclusion that the hit online animation Homestar Runner and his cartoon friends will end up alongside Meatwad, Space Ghost, Brock Sampson and the other pop culture icons on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim — a block of cartoons for grownups.

Unfortunately for this would-be marriage, the only people who think Homestar isn’t quite right for Adult Swim are the character’s creators, Matt and Mike Chapman.

I would now agree with Mike and Matt. Keep the show where it made it’s history, where it has it’s sharpest fans. It proves to me that maybe the Television is the 2nd medium. That the Internet will dominate and as TV advertisers flock to the Internet, you will see a ration of content larger than ever seen before.

Nice Work Guys! Long live Strong Bad.

Before the wis.dm site jumped ship, I wrote about how mainstream media has begun to engage end users in conversations. News sites like Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Wired, San Jose Mercury have been engaging their customers for a while. Readers have been posting comments, digging, tagging for some time. And most people actually like it. CNN.com has been a little late to the game and while they have the “revolutionary” Situation Room, they have not joined the true social network. Until now..

I use CNN.com for all of my mainstream news (can’t ever get enough Paris jail footage), and while I don’t spend a ton of time there, I do use the site on a daily basis to keep up with what everyone else is keeping up with (not everyone knows what NewsGator is for or how to use it). When they announced their beta I like any other beta tester jumped at the chance.

I have to say that I was not tremendously impressed at first. Since all of my news is read through a pretty plain RSS reader, I saw this as a simple re-design. Then I started seeing a few things that I liked. First was that they have a tab on some articles (the details page) which will display a video file if the article has an associated video with it. Then I saw it … the difference that I had been waiting for.

CNN.com has not only decided to allow people to add their voice directly to the web site, CNN.com has decided to “report” on conversations in the Blogsphere with a widget created by a company named Sphere. The basic idea for the widget, is to query the Blogsphere for content related to the article. I think that this feature will really improve the recongition of Blogs and expose the community to more people. I am not sure how many people will actually use this but I think that it is a great idea.

We all know that AT&T is working on a new marketing campaign but this is a bit ridiculous. Today on the front page of Wired Magazine, there is an AT&T ad which is missing a critical piece – the close button. Funny thing is, this only happens on Firefox. So if you really want to read the main stories today, you need to head on over to IE. Are we ever going to solve this stupid cross browser issue? How long do you think it will take for A.) Wired to realize there is a problem and B.) That the problem is in some browser detection code which is only displaying the ad on Firefox?

Awesome!

Firefox

IE 7

Sarah Cooper posted a great response to the following series of posts regarding “Circles of Relationship”. The summary of which can be found here and here.

The flash application that Sarah built (here) brings up a good topic about classification for our communities. I participated in a beta site called wis.dm (which has currently shifted it’s format and is completely unusable) but when it started out it showed me clearly how a system could be built which would allow us to classify the people we participate with in our communities.

The system used a rating service (which had some scaling issues that lead to its ultimate demise) which allowed people to determine who were experts.

Basic idea was this:
1.) Someone posts a link to topic and adds some comments (to spark conversation). They then tagged the links (and people who posted comments could also add their tags).
2.) You voted on the link and comments

The result was essentially a system which would relate someone who posted a lot of information on say “Apple” or “iPod” with a positive vote as an “expert” on the topic.

We need this system in our world today so that you can tell me that “Jen” (from the sample flash application) is really good to talk to about concerts, OK to talk to about clothing and not so good to talk to about Movies. I think that this has been created as an internal memory piece (particularly on web forums where you participate with many of the same people) but how do we extend that?

For instance, I have frequented a web forum where people talk about movies. And there is this one person who is the “King-Transformer” guy. Knows everything about the history of the show, the movie and everything else that is Transformer based.

Know I know that this person is the person to go to in order to ask an educated question about Optimus Prime and gang, but how do I tell others. How does this person become widely known as the “King-Transformer” guy. This system has to be created some how. Unfortunately I think that this is something that will require the cooperation of many sites but we can hope.

As Mike posted about “RSS in Plain English” , it reminded me of some of the conversations we have been having at work as we try to jump-start discussions surrounding our companies general approach to Web 2.0 (which includes a healthy dose of RSS). I spoke at internal round table last week about RSS, Wiki’s and Blogs and their place in the Web Content Management space. Particularly, focusing on how RSS was effecting the Enterprise business world and how our product would be growing to support that need. During my work, I came across a great video (like a great cult movie these days you need to watch it a couple of times to pick up everything) which helps to dispel the myths about Web 2.0.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE]

What I found to be well done in the video was the process of not only describing what Web 2.0 is today but how we got here. How HTML was built as a markup language which was

“…designed to describe the structure of a web document … such elements defined how content would be formatted. In other words, form and content became inseparable in HTML…”

In the early days of pure HTML development, the tags were the power. <b> for something bold, <i> for something italics. We coded because we wanted to designate that something was important and should be looked at differently. We were not thinking about the actual content in the context of the document, we were simply saying “when this is displayed on the Web we want it to look like ‘x’.”

What is remarkable about the current changes on the Web is that they are not simply architectural changes (support for semantic style markup like <address>4222 Clinton Avenue</address>) but it was also the explosion of the user compiled data:

Amazon.com customers rushed with surprising speed and intelligence to write the reviews that made the site useable. Owners of Adobe, Apple and most major software products offer help and advice on the developer’s forum web pages. And in the greatest leverage of the common user, Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 2 billion searches a month into the organising intelligence for a new economy. [excerpt from "Unto us a machine is born"]

Nobody could have ever imagined how much the consumers of the world would contribute to the web and it’s over all growth. In some articles it is said that a new blog is born every 1/2 second. When I first started blogging at WordPress.com (which was admittedly way after the general populous started) there were roughly 190K blogs. In the short amount of time that I have been active in the blogsphere, that number has grown to an astonishing 900K+.

So as this data grows and the web spins out of control, we must start thinking about the next thing. How many times have you gotten to a great Digg article, only to find that 850 people had already commented on this article. Rendering the comments section of this article completely useless. Who can sort through that many comments and make heads or tails of anything relevant to the discussion. Likewise, how do you weed out the unproductive comments that prove we still have a long way to go as a society? You don’t, that’s how!

One thing I will say that I have spoken about in the past (and is iterated in the article mentioned above) is that the system is growing and the tools that are becoming available to us are opening up our use-able networks. We are currently connected (most of us) with way more people then we were in the past. Additionally, we are capable of maintaining relationships with hundreds of people at at time through many different outlets.

I am not sure that we are “teaching the Machine (a.k.a. the Internet)” but I can say this, when I get involved with projects like Behavioral Targeting I can truly say that we are living in a remarkable time, and I am glad to be a part of it.