Category — sharing applications

• iTunes replaced the record store for distribution of Music
• Netflix replaced Blockbuster as the distribution for Movies’s
• Amazon replaced Barnes and Noble as the distrubtion for Books
• People will pay to read content that matters to them - Micropayments or subscriptions to Online News (WSJ, NYT)
• Google is not evil, but blind love of Google will lead to evilness.

I’ve been neglecting my blog here for some time, but I had this saved as a draft and based on many of the conversations I’ve had in the past few days, I felt that this brief thought captured some good points. Content doesn’t come from Google, it comes from people. Some of those people are professional journalists, but many of them now are just regular “Joe 6-Packs.” You and me posting our thoughts, our pictures - all of us out here sharing our lives.

Regardless of where it comes from, Google doesn’t create any of it and its not claiming it does. Google is out organizing information, which is one form of content. And as we grow less mindful of where our content comes from, or even who is creating it, the medium loses its value and we simply consume content in whatever form it appears in front of us. For me, I see the web as finally having caught up and mimicked our physical world experience with word of mouth. Twitter and Facebook have taken an innate human action, word of mouth, and amplified it online. Almost none of the content I consume comes from Google (except when I am seeking specific information).

My point is that content comes from the people around us, and when we watch, listen or read something that is very interesting to us, it doesn’t often matter who made the content - we remember who told us about it, or where we found it. In todays world wide web, where we found it is rarely on Google, it is from within our social network of friends and acquaintances.

I’ve heard something about this social graph idea…

There has been a lot of buzz around mobile coupons and QR codes in the past few weeks. I wrote about 2D barcodes way back in 2008, and its nice to see a second movement in that direction Target announced a national campaign to increase mobile coupons and the use of QR codes in their print ads, Sprint followed with a similar announcement, but particularly there was the launch of a company called stickybits.

Stickybits is a new company that produces a custom 2D barcode which you can print out and place somewhere, people can then use their compatible camera phones to “attach” a message or a link to an associated page that is tied to the physical location of the Stickybit you scanned. The location based implications of this technology being adopted by businesses is very exciting.

Businesses could place stickybit codes inside their physical location and could use that to store specials and “insider-type” information about their business. They could also use the stickybit to force a “check-in” to actually take place inside their business. They could use the location of the code to prompt reward systems and loyalty programs, adding a location based and mobile aspect to their existing program.

Sure the idea that individuals could leave “stickybits” all over the place behind them as they travel, leaving notes and tips is exciting and novel. Actually pretty darn cool. But for me and my train of thought, I can’t help but see the applications of this for local businesses.

With a simple way to approach it (I will creat an account and order some stickybits and report back on the level of simplicity), local businesses can be making a valuable and big step into local mobile marketing, while reinforcing their existing loyalty programs and driving in-store foot traffic, two things that mostly signal more business. And more business is something everyone can use.

As a preface, the guys who started Twitter are brilliant, they created a service which no one realized they wanted, and turned it into hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, and created an entire ecosystem based around sharing links, emotions, and whats happening right now. They have built a cultural phenomenon, I just don’t believe it will last, at least in its current form.

Twitter has been aggravating me of late.  It seems to be full of self-promoting and self aggrandizing on a scale never seen before. The annoying part is that almost none of the “social media experts” on Twitter are even slightly aware of their actions, and seem to be completely oblivious that their “buy from me” spewing is just a new form of spam.

Yes there are many people sharing useful information and generally contributing to the society that exists within Twitter, but they are getting fewer and farther between. What really bothers me about Twitter is not its populous, but its Soapbox promotion of these experts. That soapbox has people yelling very loud, and as PT Barnum learned, if you yell loud enough some people will listen.  See trending hashtag of the #shooturself - these people are not adding anything.

Twitter holds in itself what Twitter seems to believe to be a new version of Alexander Bell’s telephone. Only they don’t own the lines, or the devices, or even the technology that it runs on. It is just a set of protocols, basically serving as a communal text messaging platform. That observation isn’t news, but what I’m getting at here is that Twitter’s use as a business to its owners and investors is purely as a utility. If it tries to be a media company, it will fail, because it is a fad. A fad that didn’t even truly go mainstream yet, it just caught on with the people *trying* to be cool. Twitter is like the person who used to operate the local switchboard for the telephone companies, as soon as the telecoms figured out how to automate that process, those people were no longer needed. As soon as we figure out that real time sharing of information doesn’t have to all go through the same service, Twitter is toast. What I’m doing right now has nothing to do with Twitter.

There is significant value in the positive information that I garner from my daily perusing of Twitter. Links are great, and the people that I’m interested in the techworld share useful and valuable information daily. But all of that is information I could easily get from RSS feeds, friendfeed, facebook, or a multitude of other options (new services are appearing everyday - like Google Buzz). Right now Twitter holds the illusion of control over that data exchange, but in reality, Twitter is simply the latest iteration of information exchange via the web. First came email, then the http protocol, then instant messaging.  All of those are utility-type services that you can get for free and as soon as another service comes up and reveals that Twitters “control” is merely an illusion, users will shift, and along with them, Twitters value will - from ~$1 billion to zero.

Twitter is as much a business as email is a business. Making email better might be a business, and all of the great auxiliary companies built on Twitter are great businesses, but providing the protocols to send a message across the web is not a business. Well, maybe it was in 1997, but I believe we’ve moved on from that.

Sharing information that is valuable to me, is an important part of our open society, and I believe that Twitter has value, just as email and instant messaging have value - those services are still around today - and flourishing. Those services are not being monetized however, and are corollary parts tied into more extensive offerings.  Twitter has the ability to make it as a large company, but I don’t think its heading down the right path. Right now its walking down that path like its the cock of the walk, and I certainly doesn’t deserve that posture.

Ok, I’m gonna go on a bit of a rant here. I want to create a simple app/widget that I can put in the sidebar of this blog so I can share my song of the day with anyone who might be interested (mostly so I just have a musical history of my life - a mlog if you will)

Why is this so difficult?

I dont understand last.fm at all. Half of the songs I want to listen to it only allows me to “preview” but only if I’m logged in. If I log out, I can listen to any song I want as many times as I want, but if I am logged in it limits what I can do. What the crap is that? Their FAQ’s say I can listen to most any full legnth song up to 3 times. So I can just log out and then listen as many times as I want?

Pandora allows me to customize my stations to an unbelievable degree of quality and accuracy. But it doesn’t allow me to really share that at all. Pandora give me a widget!

I just want to share music with people. Isn’t music supposed be shared? Take down your walls already music industry!

I love Pandora. It has added some amazing new features and I’ve discovered some old ones as well. I haven’t written anything in a while, and something I saw on Pandora just got me motivated. For those of you who don’t know Pandora, here’s the Wikipedia: “Pandora is an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service created by the Music Genome Project. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users provide feedback on the individual song choices — approval or disapproval — which Pandora takes into account for future selections.”

I use it all the time, when I have a long bought of work to accomplish I get a station going and I take full advantage of the thumbs up, thumbs down. Just now I noticed that when you click the thumbs up button, not only does it remember this and adjust the playlist accordingly, but it leaves a giant thumbs up in the background of the current song tile! So silly, but I loved it and it made me think about the devil in the details pitch I always try to give myself.

Pandora does it, they have all the details and they are loved by their users - over 40,000 new listeners everyday. It is a shame that the music industry is pushing them towards closing their doors soon.. (I can’t imagine that actually happens, its such a great service). I know alot of people are fans of last.fm, but I’ve never been to the site. No reason why not, just fell in love with pandora and stuck.

The devil is in the details and so is the the beauty. Keep goin Pandora, I’m pulling for you!

You can view my profile on pandora here

After posting about the growing amount of information and its consequential devaluation, I received a chance to use and review a new service - NewsCred - All the world’s credible news, in one place, a new aggregator that allows registered users to vote on articles and choose to “Credit” the author or article, or “Discredit” the author or article. It is actually similar to my iGoogle homepage in that I can select the news sources and blogs that I want to follow, and track the creditability of. They are out to filter the “Signal to Noise” ratio…

One of the really cool things about the service is that they allow anyone to rank the credibility of an article, an author, or a source (newpaper, blog, etc) based on credibility, quality, transparency and accuracy. The voting process is compiled using their “credibility waterfall algorithm” which although, I don’t like the name (is that a technical term), is a neat concept. It allows the creditability ranking of a specific article to affect the creditability ranking of the author, which in turn affects the creditability ranking of the article’s source. Overall this will theoretically serve you the highest quality and credible news from all across the web. It seems to do a pretty good job of that.

One thing I feel the site needs to really become successful is the proliferation of a “digg” style badge. The relatively new plethora of sharing sites across the internet need a way to tout their creditability, and if the NewsCred “Creditability” ranking badge could furnish this demand, then NewsCred could truly have something remarkable on their hands.

The two largest threats I see for the site are one, reaching a critical mass where they have enough users to rank and “credit” articles which I might read or be interested in; and second, someone else doing that sooner. If the site never really catches on, I don’t really see it becoming anything special, that may go without saying, but here is another 2.0 player in need of user volume.

Its definitely a cool site, one worth checking out. They clearly have a good vision of where they want to be, and how they want to do it and I think it can be successful.

Thanks to the guys at NewsCred for working on something that might actually improve the quality of news out there.

The term engagement is flying around pretty freely these days. How do we measure engagement? Can we measure engagement? What exactly is engagement? Well, if none of these people know, then how do we go about defining it, measuring it and building a model to capitalize on engagement?

My take on engagement falls similarly to what Lester Wunderman wrote about engagement. I would define engagement as: Choosing to interact or involve yourself in something. That something can be a website, a brand, a store, a blog,  or a television station. The interaction or involvement can be a comment on a blog, a post in a forum, a complaint or experience card in a restaurant, changing the TV chanel, speaking with a floor salesperson at Target. Engagement is interaction with a brand or service by choice.

The web, especially 2.0, as brought the world the ultimate (to this point) platform for engagement. People spend hours a day online, engaging themselves with different brands, different sites and people from all over the world. Search engines allow us to target our engagement even further - they bring us a higher degree of engagement, we make a conscious decision to search for a topic, and then choose to visit one site over the other and spend our time engaging that site.

I believe this engagement will soon be the best measure of an advertisers campaign online. I’m not quite sure how it will work, but measuring engagement is a great way to get a sense of if and how people are interacting with your online campaign.

Here is a “For instance”, if Coca Cola creates a virtual world, and they measure engagement by counting how many people create an avatar, and then compare that to how many of those people come back and use that avatar again, Coca Cola could then measure engagement as a function of ‘# of avatars, frequency of use, and abandonment.’ (Lets say: 1000 avatars created; 600 came back 2 or more times; 200 never came back; your level of engagement could be 600/(1000-200) or .75.) This can be interpreted however you want (in this world of spin we live in - who knows..) perhaps you could use this to say that 75% of the people who responded to your promotion where “relevantly engaged” and 20% were not. I don’t know if this makes any sense to marketers and I’m sorry if I lost you…

Or you could measure engagement by counting interactions purchases, perhaps a redemption of a coupon.

I found myself using engagement in a pitch to an advertiser today, he asked me what I meant by engagement. I said “a website visitor choosing to interact with the site or to take an action that wasn’t necessarily related to why they found themselves on this site.” (I was referring to user submissions as engaging).

After all this I think that maybe engagement is just a different way of saying Web 2.0.

I was Just doing some late evening reading here and I discovered this post by Andrew Parker.

It speaks of twitter, which I have been admittedly skeptical about. Until now. I am posting the video I found there below. After watching this I am going to join the twitter phenomenon and see what its all about.

Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

How cool is that animation? Very cool if you ask me. Ha, social social social, just like the Roaring 20’s.

Do you have log in addiction? I’m pretty sure that everyone I know has log in addiction, and the growing influence of social media online is only compounding our problems. Do you find yourself refreshing gmail to see if you have any new emails? Logging into facebook to check the updates? Refreshing your homepage to check for any updates on your RSS? I do, and so do you.

Seemingly every day I come across something new to sign up for, log in to, and then gage my response from. Do any of these applications actually add value to my life? - That is the question on many people’s mind these days, but does it really matter? As all of these new sharing programs emerge and millions of people are logging in every day, what is the world coming to?

My question is how will all of this ever be monetized? There is no way to charge for it, because users will immediately reject that and move to a similar and equally useful/less service that is free. Do we fill the application with advertising? If so, how do we measure the value and effectiveness of these ads? Will marketers really want to pay to reach these tiny niche markets that have suddenly become giant flat, almost muddy, fields?

As I sit here writing this I have 5 other tabs open on my screen, all of them require a log in, a sign up, an email, a profile, something to connect me to all of the anonymous users out there pleasantly sucked in by their ceaseless need to log in. But what is the value of this to me? To you? Facebook has billions of pageviews a month, yet they are losing money. Sure the potential value of those views is huge, but how will they make it happen. What will be done to address these revenue models?

Five websites I’m on. Simultaneously. Two of them have advertising on them. Three of them do not. Why do these websites exist, and how are they going to make money.

If you build it they will come… well if they come, how will you get them to stay long enough to make money? The answer is simple - login addiction. We love connecting ourselves so much, in this increasingly disconnected world, that we will try anything that is fresh, cool and can keep us in touch with the people we care about.

Facebook, Gmail, MySpace, Blogs, Forums, Chat Rooms, Twitter, YouTube, on and on and on, until we stop liking each other. Oh, by the way, don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed…

How do large search networks gain their local insight into the real world? Syndication of content from various internet providers, yellowpages, superpages, ultrapages, all kinds of pages. But mostly, out of date pages. Businesses that no longer exist, phone numbers that are no longer valid and addresses that have changed.

How can I the local consumer place my trust in these large companies having up to date, local information on what I am looking for? That is an excellent question, and one that I as a local business man, believe is a question that these jumbo portals don’t have the right answer to.

Smaller, local search companies can monetize their wealth of small business information by expanding paid syndication through these larger outlets. Building a better database of small and local businesses is what these local companies do, and is exactly what they can do for these larger national and international portals.

In these new days of local search, and local information, more and more small business are transitioning their marketing and their budgets online. As this market grows, more information will be available online, and search engines in particular will hold a lot of power over this information. So how can the consumer get the best information infront of them as quickly as possible? Rely on locally based portals who actually operate in the cities they represent.

If there were a way to capitalize on the huge power and reach of these large portals, by incorporating the value of this local information together in a Search Engine Friendly site, giving searching consumers quick and easy access to up to date, accurate and relevant information, this new model would be very valuable indeed.

Now if only I knew someone who could code like a champion…