• 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…

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.

The power of your competing with your friends for trophies has been a force since man first evovled from ape. Whoever killed the biggest animal fed the most people, and gained fame throughout the land. Today there are many trophies, many competitions and most of us have a bunch of friends. In today’s world of hyper connectivity, we can stay in touch with friends and acquaintances just as if they lived across the hall. This leads us to follow our innate competitive instincts and make a bunch of stuff over which we can compete peacefully. In this hyer-connected world, we have many examples of how games and trophies become popular, sought after and create successful businesses. The NFL is based on competition, Major League Baseball, UEFA,  The Olympics, all multi-billion dollar businesses built around the peaceful exploitation of competition.

But there are other levels of competition, ranging from who has the nicest car, to who has the most followers on Twitter. Us crazy people spend hundreds of hours, thousands of dollars and massive resources to win the imaginary trophies that the world offers to us. But alot of these games are fun, meaningless ways to interact with your friends and associates. Zombie Toss on Facebook, ReTweeting and now the ultimate example - Foursquare.

Foursquare captures all the potential of Twitter, and makes a fun game around who can go to more places and “check in” You can become the mayor of your favorite coffee shop, win badges for hitting multiple spots in a night, and show off your badges to all of your hermit friends. The intriguing game of checking in and badges is only the front of what could become a brilliant business idea, and I believe will capture the potential value of twitter to many of the small businesses staring aimlessly at a little baby-blue bird.

What Twitter first started out as, and what got me intrigued was the ability to broadcast where I am, to the people who cared. Now Twitter has become much more than that, but Foursquare takes that fundamental use-case, and makes a fun game out of it. It tracks and records where I go, how often I go, and withwhom I go (of course, only when I tell it). This information is absolutely invaluable to small businesses. Deli’s can learn their customers favorite sandwiches, discover problems in their offerings, and find out who their best customers really are. Then they could be able to send out offers to those customers who “checked in” They could build an email database to lure those customers back in. There are so many business applications to Foursquare, so many more obvious ones than for Twitter itself, I would buy Foursquare if I were Twitter - like tomorrow.

Foursquare is a fun application that takes human nature’s desire to see their friends and show off their trophies and turns it into a desire to go out more, tell the world where they are and win some meaningless badges. But all that adds up to great data for small businesses, great marketing opportunities for those businesses and a whole bunch more percieved immediate value than simple twitter feeds (to small businesses). Instead of trolling through twitter searches, I can just go to my business page on Foursquare and see what people are saying - and who’s coming.

I have several great takeaways from Foursquare’s app, but really its fun and it makes me want to go out more so I can check in again. Who doesn’t like badges?

A lot of people wonder how Twitter is going to make money. They certainly have alot of options considering the mass of loyal users they have, but choosing the right one will be key to them transistioning from a cool tool, to a useful and sustainable product. I believe that Twitter will have to charge its users to use it, at least business users (companies) and that Twitter will grow into more of a utility than an application. Just like telephone lines.

Roughly 134 years ago, Bell and Watson struck a chord across some wires and invented the first practical use of the telephone. It would revolutionize the way people communicate, making the world smaller, in an instant you could speak to someone on the other side of the earth. (of course they still had to build that network..) But here we have twitter, and it provides the same type of utility that phone lines do, or email. It is revolutionizing the way people are communicating with each other, only this time - the network (the internet) is already built.

In creating their new Twitter 101 guide to using twitter for businesses (http://business.twitter.com/), twitter is taking its first step in the direction of charging businesses to send specials and deals out to their followers/customers. And that makes sense, particularly if they begin to implement freemium upgrades, additional features, and perhaps guidance and service upgrades for small companies.

The freemium model has worked online for years now, and many of the most successful companies use it to lower their customer acquisition cost to near zero. Its an interesting idea for Twitter, I’m looking forward to seeing how they execute. I know for a fact that, and I’ve seen it first hand across several dozen small businesses - Twitter offers a great service to gain and bring back your customers quick and easy. And thats something worth paying for.

I am spending my first trip to San Francisco working and taking in the culture. I’ve been attending SMX West, getting some great knowledge, meeting some really interesting people and really exploring the power of Twitter. I installed tweetdeck so I could monitor the conversations happening in other sessions. I made some new friends through the online conversation, then I met them offline after the sessions. The world of SEO is a funny one and there are some pretty clear thought leaders in the field. Its exciting to be meeting and learning from them out here.

The real takeaway I’m getting from this was accentuated by a second post from Fred Wilson I just read with my morning coffee. Its about Status (facebook/twitter status) and how it is quickly becoming integrated into our social fabric. In a way it is sort of becoming our social fabric. I explained to my girlfriend why Twitter is interesti by relating it to Facebook Status, or Gmail/AIM away messages. In college I would put real thought into my away message when I went to class/lunch/out. Some people would be “boring” and put “class” up, and others would say things like “enduring another endless rant form my crazed finance professor” - Thats interesting, and its not a need to know, but it can make me laugh and it can make me want to meet someone I might only know through class or passing in the hall.

As more and more people are using Twitter and more and more functionality becomes available through their API, its only going to get cooler. And the potential to integrate a single update to your Twitter account and your Faceboook is really exciting! We are working on a solution to this right now, and its going to be live in a few weeks (focused on getting small businesses involved). Twitter is just so freakin cool, there’s no reason anyone should be afraid to jump in.

Fred’s posts are typically very inteligent and this Status post (read along with Truth) is certainly no exception. But today I feel extra energized to be involved, even in just a tiny way as a user, in this media revolution thats occuring. Its happening right now and i fantastic! Maybe its the atmosphere out here, maybe its just this week immersed in my geek side of life, but I think its all of those things and just a general feeling that better things are coming.

For now, I’m going to keep living my life 140 charachters at a time and I’m going to get as many people I can to start doing that too. Because the more people who are contributing the better the interaction will be, the better the content will be and the better off we all will be. If I can get my girlfriend to twitter, I can get you too…

The holidays are a time of traveling, eating gift giving and spending time with Family. I turned off the blackberry for a few days and tried to avoid any lcd screens (other than my tv, because I crush James Bond during breaks). It was brilliant. I feel refreshed and ready to get back to work, of which I have plenty.

Of course it didn’t work entirely. My mom and brother got new iPods. My dad got a new all in one charging dock and in place  of Christmas cards, we sent hundreds of photos out digitally to the extended family. I was needed for all of these actions and had to troubleshoot a Picasa issue that was not letting my Dad share photos properly.

The point of this post is to layout some predictions for 2009. I have been way to immersed in my own technology recently and I really don’t know enough about emerging technologies to comment on which ones will be the most famous next December. But I do know that digital is going to be it. Everyone is going to realize that the cost-effective power of the internet is actually something to take advantage of - not just to talk about how “neat” or “cool” it is.

Heads of businesses are going to adapt or get passed by leaner more efficient companies. Layers of Presidents and Vice Presidents that clog the business process are going to be gone. Large excessive manufacturing is going to begin to disappear. Newspapers will realize that spending millions of dollars printing papers is not cost effective and actually do something about it.

The power of the internet will become mainstream in 2009.

Yes today the internet is mainstream, everyone uses it from time to time. Most everyone uses email frequently and people can find things they need with Google. But everyday people are going to realize all the great benefits of the internet. The communication mediums that it has created (blogs, facebook, twitter, etc) and not just look at them and say “wow, this technology is really cool. look how many people use it!” but they will sit down and actually use it themselves to make something worthwhile and relevant. Average users will take advantage of the really cool tools the “web 2.0″ world has made us. They will make their business process more efficient. To gain new customers. To make new “real” friends. Even to buy real world virtual goods.

I’m not in tune enough to tell you whos going to be behind all the great apps and widgets. I just feel very strongly that it will be 2009 that makes it all mainstream.

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…