Category: Social Media

Categories
Social Media

Finding our brave faces

I agree with Jeffrey Zeldman in that I’m also surprised that George Oates was laid off from Yahoo and her work with Flickr. I also thought that George’s recounting of how she found out she was laid off was telling, and sad.

Once upon a time, Yahoo was the bright and shiny future. Once upon a time, Flickr was one of the most dazzling of the new breed of startups. The success of both was based less on equipment and technology, and more on the people who helped create both companies. How Yahoo treats the people it has let go, is a measure of what the company thinks of itself. Evidently, those still in management in Yahoo, and at Flickr, don’t have a high opinion of themselves.

(An earlier interview with George. More on the layoffs.)

Categories
Social Media

Eureka: product placement and social media

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Eureka is a popular science fiction show currently showing on the Sci-Fi channel, on Hulu, as well as downloadable from Unbox, and iTunes in beautiful, and expensive, HD. Now in its third year, the show was faced with an interesting challenge at the beginning of the season development: this season’s shows will have a corporate sponsor. Not only will the show have a corporate sponsor, but the rule from high was that the creators were required to feature the product as part of the story line for one of the shows.

Last week’s show, Here Come the Suns was the show, and needless to say, the fans aren’t too happy.

Sensing a potentially explosive situation, the Eureka creators have embraced social media to an extent I’ve never seen with a television show. One of the writers has a personal weblog and talks candidly about the show (in addition to other topics). There’s also a Eureka Facebook account, as well as Eureka Unscripted a Tumblr account focused on the show, the decisions that go into the show, and other items of interest to Eureka fans.

One of the recent entries at Eureka Unscripted discussed the product placement in Eureka, including the very unusual corporate direction that one show has to focus on the product—a move not seen since the says when variety shows were sponsored by health tonics.

It all began way back in October 2007 when the Sci Fi Channel announced to the Eureka staff that 1) we would have an official commercial sponsor this season, one that was kicking in a lot of dough and would therefore 2) require tons of product placement throughout Season Three. We were also told that 3) ONE EPISODE in Season Three would have to incorporate a storyline in which the actual product HAD to save Eureka somehow, or at the very least, be INDISPENSABLE to Carter’s Act 5 solve.

Oooooookay…

If you’ve not seen Here Come the Suns I won’t give away either the plot or the product. The show should be appearing on Hulu in a couple of days.

Why such obviousness with product placement? Especially since an action like this is going to generate negative attention? One reason could be the new online publication models. When a product is integrated into a show, the product is going to show whether the show is televised on commercial TV, Hulu, or purchased as an episode through iTunes or Unbox.

Then again, production studios are having an increasingly difficult time making profits, what with viewers attention between grabbed by a plethora of entertainment possibilities. The days when you only had broadcast TV or a book are long gone, and so are the old advertising models.

Is this instance of product placement a sign of the future for shows? I hope not. Product placement can be quite discrete, and most people don’t have too many problems with it. However, incorporating a product into a show’s storyline crosses what used to be a pretty solid boundary and impacts on both the creativity and the integrity of the show. Fans feel betrayed, including those fans who spend $2.99 to purchase a supposedly ad-free episode of the show on iTunes, only to be served what could be seen as a theme-based infomercial.

However, the push-back would be more intense if it weren’t for the Eureka team’s use of social media, including the aforementioned Eureka Unscripted posting on the product placement. Now, instead of nameless, faceless executives screwing with a beloved show, we hear Erik who writes candidly on the issue, before announcing he and his wife have a new baby girl. It’s more difficult to get angry with someone who you feel connected to, even if the connection is tenuous, and via the artificial intimacy that social media can foster.

There’s also a sense that the Eureka creators are not terribly overjoyed about the sponsorship. A new character introduced this year is The Fixer, whose purpose in coming to Eureka is to seemingly squeeze profits out of research that previously existed to Serve the Common Good. Of course, it wouldn’t be Eureka if the character didn’t have ulterior motives, and ended being interesting regardless of her reasons for existence. The subtle message about crass commercialism versus purity of purpose, however, shouldn’t escape even the most betrayed-feeling fan.

Eureka’s third season is an interesting experiment. On the one hand, you have increased intimacy through social media; on the other, corporate encroachment on the creative process. We’ll find out if the experiment was a success if the show receives the OK for a fourth season. If Eureka does get a new season, one wonders what will be sold this time.

Dog food? Coffee beans? MIT? One can only hope the show isn’t sponsored by Ex-Lax.

Categories
Social Media

Long-term goals may mean short-term costs

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted,” the great car making pioneer Henry Ford once said, “they would have said a faster horse.”

Kevin Gamble points to Twitter’s recent decision to cut outgoing SMS for UK clients:

On Wednesday, we announced that Twitter has suspended outgoing SMS to our UK number. The blue in the chart above illustrates the percent of outgoing SMS we stopped sending. 2% of our user base consumed 4% of our outbound SMS over the UK number at a price which disproportionately impacted overall operational cost.

Kevin concurs with this decision, writing:

Twitter has been taking a bit of a beating over this, but when you examine the metrics it makes sense. Every feature consumes time, money and resources. Twitter is making a conscious decision to remove a costly feature that is used by a small number of users.
… I can think of tons of things that if you really examined your customer’s behavior you would deep-six. This should happen a lot more.

I don’t agree and I point to the recent discussions on broadband capping as an example where basing a decision on “typical” customer behavior doesn’t necessarily lead to good decisions for long-term growth.

The broadband companies want to add caps so that heavier users are “blocked” from using more of the service. They give as an excuse that 5% of the people use 90% of the service, and thus feel justified by caps.

The problem with this approach, though, is that it’s providing a short-term solution for a short-term problem. People’s habits change, and though only a percentage of people watch video over the internet today that number will eventually increase, generating more demand, as well as increasing dissatisfaction with draconian bandwidth caps. Additionally, schools and colleges are now offering long-distance teaching for rural communities, leading to a very real possibility that these same communities will legislate against such caps—not to mention the possibility of anti-trust actions if such capping is seen as anti-competitive.

If people’s usage really is impacting on the whole, the companies could implement throttling during busy times, while working to improve the infrastructure. Another approach would be to use tiers, but they have to be reasonable, not the obscenely small caps I’ve seen bandied about. If tiers are used, the excess bandwidth fees, in addition to other profits, should go into improving the infrastructure— not into shareholder pockets. Infrastructure improvement funds should never be diverted to profit sharing.

The companies could also work with communities to see if they would buy into effort where the cost is distributed between companies and community, though in this case, any infrastructure improvements should be accessible by all broadband providers.

The point is that companies should look to make a long-term strategic decision even if it might cost more in the short term. This applies to broadband companies, and also applies to a company like Twitter.

Unfortunately, the problem with Twitter is that it doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up, so all the strategic and management decisions are reactive—hit-or-miss changes based on immediate short term cost cutting or performance goals, rather than based on long-term plans and interests.

If Twitter sees SMS as an integral part of its service, cutting SMS for part of its customer base is only going to create a level of uncertainty that not only will impact the UK customers, but all customers.

An alternative approach could have been to begin to talk with its customer base about premium memberships, which may include services such as outgoing SMS. Outgoing SMS is not an integral component of Twitter, and therefore people won’t be deprived of any essential Twitter service. By making a long-term strategic decision—yes, we’ll support outgoing SMS, but you’ll _all_ need to pay a tiny premium for this service— the company may risk grumbles across the entire customer base, but it will also have made a long-term sustainable decision that won’t leave customers in a continuous state of alt.

Adding service, removing service, adding service, removing service…This is the hallmark of a company that isn’t keeping its eye on the horizon.

Categories
Social Media Technology Weblogging

Creating social networks few want

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There has been considerable discussion this week on Techmeme about weblogging tool as social networking platform, based on Six Apart’s release of Movable Type Pro 4.2. The announcement was still wet from its birth when the WordPress folks started touting BuddyPress, a variation of social networking based on WordPress.

Among the social networking requirements for a weblogging tool are:

  • Support for FriendFeed and other feed aggregation
  • Support for Twitter
  • Forum support
  • Creating user accounts, with profiles and avatars
  • Enabling community-driven content
  • Content voting, ala Digg

I waited for the Drupal folks to tick off each of these, as this type of behavior is already built into Drupal, or provided via plug-in. For instance, support for the just given list can be met by Drupal via the following:

  • Aggregation support is a module included with the Drupal installation. In addition, the FriendFeed Drupal module provides two-way FriendFeed communication.
  • Ditto with the Twitter Drupal Module
  • Forum support is another module included with the Drupal installation, though it doesn’t have a traditional forum look and feel. The upcoming Advanced Forum module supposedly provides the missing pieces for a standalone forum.
  • All of the user functionality is also built-in, or provided as installation module, including adding users, profiles (with avatars), as well as being able to create user profiles with differing permissions. For instance, registered users to this site who I know are given a “Trusted user role” wherein they can post comments without the comment going into moderation. I could also allow users to post photos, in addition to posts of their own — it’s all role-based.
  • You can use the Voting API module with Drupal for content voting, and there have been other efforts to create a Digg-like functionality, though there just doesn’t seem to be much interest in this within the Drupal community.

In fact, Drupal began its life as a bulletin-board system, adding weblogging functionality at a latter time. It is “community-based” from the ground up. Knowing all of these, I watched Planet Drupal for someone to mention about all of this already existing capability in Drupal. And I watched. And I watched.

Nothing. Not a word. Oh, there may be those who are in the process of writing about Drupal’s capability, as compared with the new Movable Type/Wordpress initiatives, but the interest has been more about the upcoming DrupalCon, upgrading to the newest releases, and various other activities; providing yet another demonstration of the differences in communities surrounding Silicon Valley based applications, and an application with beginnings not only outside California, but also outside the United States. Differences that not only don’t include that sense of competition that seems to exist with both MT and WordPress, but that also represent a general lack of interest in becoming part of whatever new movement is currently deemed to be it. it for the moment, that is.

(A difference I’ve not, yet, come to absorb, being still imbued with the vestigial impulse to validate my choice of tools by pointing out We are first! We are better!, and hence, my earlier paragraphs. )

However, to be fair to the vast majority of MT and WP users, there isn’t that much communication in the general WordPress or MT communities, either, about the newest social networking “needs” that seem to be the driving force behind these new tool developments. Regardless of tools used, I find it unlikely that most people are interested in much of the social networking capability that is now being touted as “necessary”.

In her post at ReadWriteWeb related to the release of the new version of MT, Sarah Perez asks, Is this the future of blogging? Or is this the future of web publishing altogether? I think we’ll find, ultimately that the answer is no. The Silicon Valley mindset, for wont of a better term, wants social networks, and assumes the rest of must want the same thing. However, I think we’ll find that most of us just want a web that’s both open and accessible, and there is a vast difference between an open web and a social network.

In an open web, we may try to annotate our writings with metadata, so that the information described in this metadata could be merged by other applications. We work to ensure our work is easily accessible, and (though not always), try to engage our readers. We hope that the site is viewable by a variety of devices. To facilitate these interests, we’ve added syndication feeds and comments, some use of microformats, semantic markup, and even, on rare occasion, RDF, and perhaps a feed aggregator or photo feed in the sidebar. We try to create valid web pages, and use CSS to add a little of our own personality to the site’s look. At a stretch, we may include FriendFeed or Twitter postings, too, but I think interest in these is rarer than one would expect by the cacophony of noise that seems to accompany both services.

An open web, however, does not demand a web whereby the line of demarcation between the writer and the reader becomes blurred, and the reader is assumed to not only be reader, but writer, editor, and critic too— becoming one of many, which seemingly are then used to not only prove the popularity of the site, but also help monetize it.

Specifically, the success of our spaces is not a measure of noise but of satisfaction. What’s happened, though, is that to the Silicon Valley mindset, noise is a measure of satisfaction, so the more accouterments enabling noise, the better.

Posting writings and allowing comments are not enough: we must also give people profiles, with avatars and ranking systems, and the ability to vote comments up and down. By providing multiple levels at which our readers can engage, we create that noise that is seemingly so important in order to justify the worth of our spaces. What we’re finding, though, is that based on such activity, the noise level may increase, but it increases as noise, rather than the thoughtful comments that inspired our original interest, years ago.

As we invite the readers to become more involved, we probably will increase the popularity of our sites, but at what cost? We lose the ability to own our own spaces; to be able to suddenly switch one day from writing about HTML5 to writing about art. Even having comments means we give up some control over what we do in our spaces. All too often when I visit tech web sites and the author is writing on some other topic, I read in comments: “That’s not why I read your site, I don’t care about foo. I want to read about bar”? Or the newer complaint many of us have begun receiving since the advent of Twitter: “*This post is too long to read.”

Voting up and down may increase the number of visitors, and they may feel increasingly engaged, but look at what happens at sites like Digg. Though interesting stories may appear in the front page, such as the one about CAPTCHA technology being improved with the help of old manuscripts, many more are based on the amount of controversy associated with the topic, and not whether the topic is useful, or even relevant. More importantly, popular sites proliferate in popularity driven listings while less popular sites are pushed to the back, making it that much more difficult to find not only new and interesting information, but new and interesting sites. The reader becomes not only writer, editor, and critic, but also gatekeeper.

I’m not writing this to be critical of Six Apart’s new Movable Type social networking software, or the upcoming BuddyPress by WordPress—more power to **both groups in working to expand their offerings. To extrapolate, though, from these new offerings to a whole new web is typical of a mindset that is becoming increasingly isolated in how it views the web and how the web should be.

More importantly, to extrapolate one small group’s determination of what’s necessary in order to be “successful”, to the broader population can actively hurt rather than help the web. Do we really want a web without nooks and crannies, small voices, quiet places, and serendipitous finds? That’s not the web I want. To say that we’re all becoming increasingly narcissistic, is to say that one group’s self-obsession is shared by all, and I don’t think that’s true.

*And I include this post among those considered “too long to read”.

**But Drupal was first.

Categories
RDF Social Media Technology Weblogging

Creating social networks few want

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There has been considerable discussion this week on Techmeme about weblogging tool as social networking platform, based on Six Apart’s release of Movable Type Pro 4.2. The announcement was still wet from its birth when the WordPress folks started touting BuddyPress, a variation of social networking based on WordPress.

Among the social networking requirements for a weblogging tool are:

  • Support for FriendFeed and other feed aggregation
  • Support for Twitter
  • Forum support
  • Creating user accounts, with profiles and avatars
  • Enabling community-driven content
  • Content voting, ala Digg

I waited for the Drupal folks to tick off each of these, as this type of behavior is already built into Drupal, or provided via plug-in. For instance, support for the just given list can be met by Drupal via the following:

  • Aggregation support is a module included with the Drupal installation. In addition, the FriendFeed Drupal module provides two-way FriendFeed communication.
  • Ditto with the Twitter Drupal Module
  • Forum support is another module included with the Drupal installation, though it doesn’t have a traditional forum look and feel. The upcoming Advanced Forum module supposedly provides the missing pieces for a standalone forum.
  • All of the user functionality is also built-in, or provided as installation module, including adding users, profiles (with avatars), as well as being able to create user profiles with differing permissions. For instance, registered users to this site who I know are given a “Trusted user role” wherein they can post comments without the comment going into moderation. I could also allow users to post photos, in addition to posts of their own — it’s all role-based.
  • You can use the Voting API module with Drupal for content voting, and there have been other efforts to create a Digg-like functionality, though there just doesn’t seem to be much interest in this within the Drupal community.

In fact, Drupal began its life as a bulletin-board system, adding weblogging functionality at a latter time. It is “community-based” from the ground up. Knowing all of these, I watched Planet Drupal for someone to mention about all of this already existing capability in Drupal. And I watched. And I watched.

Nothing. Not a word. Oh, there may be those who are in the process of writing about Drupal’s capability, as compared with the new Movable Type/Wordpress initiatives, but the interest has been more about the upcoming DrupalCon, upgrading to the newest releases, and various other activities; providing yet another demonstration of the differences in communities surrounding Silicon Valley based applications, and an application with beginnings not only outside California, but also outside the United States. Differences that not only don’t include that sense of competition that seems to exist with both MT and WordPress, but that also represent a general lack of interest in becoming part of whatever new movement is currently deemed to be it. it for the moment, that is.

(A difference I’ve not, yet, come to absorb, being still imbued with the vestigial impulse to validate my choice of tools by pointing out We are first! We are better!, and hence, my earlier paragraphs. )

However, to be fair to the vast majority of MT and WP users, there isn’t that much communication in the general WordPress or MT communities, either, about the newest social networking “needs” that seem to be the driving force behind these new tool developments. Regardless of tools used, I find it unlikely that most people are interested in much of the social networking capability that is now being touted as “necessary”.

In her post at ReadWriteWeb related to the release of the new version of MT, Sarah Perez asks, Is this the future of blogging? Or is this the future of web publishing altogether? I think we’ll find, ultimately that the answer is no. The Silicon Valley mindset, for wont of a better term, wants social networks, and assumes the rest of must want the same thing. However, I think we’ll find that most of us just want a web that’s both open and accessible, and there is a vast difference between an open web and a social network.

In an open web, we may try to annotate our writings with metadata, so that the information described in this metadata could be merged by other applications. We work to ensure our work is easily accessible, and (though not always), try to engage our readers. We hope that the site is viewable by a variety of devices. To facilitate these interests, we’ve added syndication feeds and comments, some use of microformats, semantic markup, and even, on rare occasion, RDF, and perhaps a feed aggregator or photo feed in the sidebar. We try to create valid web pages, and use CSS to add a little of our own personality to the site’s look. At a stretch, we may include FriendFeed or Twitter postings, too, but I think interest in these is rarer than one would expect by the cacophony of noise that seems to accompany both services.

An open web, however, does not demand a web whereby the line of demarcation between the writer and the reader becomes blurred, and the reader is assumed to not only be reader, but writer, editor, and critic too— becoming one of many, which seemingly are then used to not only prove the popularity of the site, but also help monetize it.

Specifically, the success of our spaces is not a measure of noise but of satisfaction. What’s happened, though, is that to the Silicon Valley mindset, noise is a measure of satisfaction, so the more accouterments enabling noise, the better.

Posting writings and allowing comments are not enough: we must also give people profiles, with avatars and ranking systems, and the ability to vote comments up and down. By providing multiple levels at which our readers can engage, we create that noise that is seemingly so important in order to justify the worth of our spaces. What we’re finding, though, is that based on such activity, the noise level may increase, but it increases as noise, rather than the thoughtful comments that inspired our original interest, years ago.

As we invite the readers to become more involved, we probably will increase the popularity of our sites, but at what cost? We lose the ability to own our own spaces; to be able to suddenly switch one day from writing about HTML5 to writing about art. Even having comments means we give up some control over what we do in our spaces. All too often when I visit tech web sites and the author is writing on some other topic, I read in comments: “That’s not why I read your site, I don’t care about foo. I want to read about bar”? Or the newer complaint many of us have begun receiving since the advent of Twitter: “*This post is too long to read.”

Voting up and down may increase the number of visitors, and they may feel increasingly engaged, but look at what happens at sites like Digg. Though interesting stories may appear in the front page, such as the one about CAPTCHA technology being improved with the help of old manuscripts, many more are based on the amount of controversy associated with the topic, and not whether the topic is useful, or even relevant. More importantly, popular sites proliferate in popularity driven listings while less popular sites are pushed to the back, making it that much more difficult to find not only new and interesting information, but new and interesting sites. The reader becomes not only writer, editor, and critic, but also gatekeeper.

I’m not writing this to be critical of Six Apart’s new Movable Type social networking software, or the upcoming BuddyPress by WordPress—more power to **both groups in working to expand their offerings. To extrapolate, though, from these new offerings to a whole new web is typical of a mindset that is becoming increasingly isolated in how it views the web and how the web should be.

More importantly, to extrapolate one small group’s determination of what’s necessary in order to be “successful”, to the broader population can actively hurt rather than help the web. Do we really want a web without nooks and crannies, small voices, quiet places, and serendipitous finds? That’s not the web I want. To say that we’re all becoming increasingly narcissistic, is to say that one group’s self-obsession is shared by all, and I don’t think that’s true.

*And I include this post among those considered “too long to read”.

**But Drupal was first.