Category Archives: Social Networks

Weave -ing the twisted path to browser enlightenment?

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Mozilla is announcing Weave, an application that will enhance the browsing experience in various ways.   I’m somewhat confused about what this means to users, but my early understanding is that this is a Flock-like approach, trying to make the browser environment a better one for socializing,  multitasking, and customized uses.

Generally I think this is a positive thing.   For reasons I don’t understand few of us really take the time to use and configure the many applications that allow us to customize our desktops in more functional ways.    Google desktop, My Yahoo, Flock , and many more tools would allow us to build a great “control panel” for our online needs, but this appears to be a fairly low priority for most of us.    I think it is analogous to how rarely people use even the simplest extra commands at Google search to refine their search.    For reasons that escape me we don’t like to improve on design or functionality even when doing so is easy and does not take much time.     Some do, most don’t.  Why?

You are killing people in your Social Network?

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Massive multiplayer online gaming is increasingly becoming a mainstream social activity.     Leaving aside for the moment many interesting questions about how this affects the offline behavior and psychology of those who are playing these games many hours each day, there are a lot of practical business issues of great interest as well.

Daya over at Webguild suggested recently that the next generation of social networks may be inspired by these multiplayer online video games.     This is a really interesting idea for game developers – could you maintain the excitement of the game play but have players socialize after the game was over in the same way they socialize on Myspace or Facebook?     I think it’s a tall order.    There is limited socializing in the game space to set up games, play, collect a team, yell at your teammates or opponents, etc, but from a business and social perspective this is probably not significant as social activity outside of the (highly relevant) gaming activity.  

An amazing killer application – pun intended – would harvest the motivation, intellect, and creative thought that goes into playing online games and use this for more practical applications – perhaps in real time as tens of millions play the games.      Unfortunately the most viable applications for the current crop of mostly violent games would be military, leading to a very sinister vision of teenagers around the world unwittingly (or even volunteering?!) to help direct battle in real places.    But I’m thinking more along the lines of some fuzzy logic applications where problem solving at the game level could be used for problem solving in some business applications.      Probably not practical – especially as computers become better equipped to create content and analyze opportunities.     

Will work for free WIFI: The New Journalism?

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Scott Karp has a nice post today about the intersection of journalism and blogging.    I’m glad he notes the weakness of the argument that bloggers cannot be journalists.   Suggesting mainstream journalism is on firm and high ground is especially absurd in this world where yellow journalism generally trumps quality, superficial treatments cripple even the few fine writers at major newspapers, and Fox and CNN TV news parade AnchorModels chosen primarily for looks (women) or bombastic nonsense (men) or both (Anne Coulter).

I’d suggest that a key challenge to conventional journalism is not so much one of quality writing as it is *scalability*. Bloggers work for nothing or peanuts, and there are many more coming in the wings.  Most blogs will continue to suck, but some will be great and this number will increase as more writers get comfortable with the medium.

It will be increasingly difficult for publishers – even cutting edge, well funded ones like Nick at Gawker who is hiring a “journalist” –  to justify paying much for content. I don’t think Gawker’s decision to hire a legacy media journalist reflects a new trend, rather it reflects a fairly atypical reversion to old trends during this transition period.   

Contrast Gawker’s success with the demise of Blognation, which was not even paying people.  Would they have succeeded with a bunch of “real” journalists? No, of course not.    Good writing is cheap and getting cheaper.   That’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s certainly an inevitable thing.

Google’s knol project

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Google’s about to launch yet another clever idea.  Called knol, it will feature authoritative articles about any topic which will use community rating and input.   

It will be interesting to see how this project compares to the excellent community produced content at Wikipedia, and also how Google handles the legitimate as well as scammy SEO tactics that always follow good content.     Disallowing links to commercial sites would seem to inhibit an author’s ability to feature things, but allowing them opens up the chance of abuses of the type that made Wikipedia choose to use NOFOLLOW tag on all external Wikipedia links.

The good news – more quality information online – yippee! 

Lessing’s “curmudgeonly missteps” should be forgiven. Close the book and open the internet.

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Jeff Gomez over at the Print is Dead blog has the best piece I’ve read so far about Nobel prize winner Doris Lessing’s mild attack on the internet.    Lessing’s comments were buried in an otherwise inspiring story about the power of reading, knowledge, and education – a story about how some women in Africa were more concerned about having books to read than food to eat.

Lessing’s suggestion that youth is in the process of abandoning quality book reading in favor of the ‘inaninties” of the internet brought the very predictable blogOspheric response of derision heaped on an old litererary lady who deserves a lot more respect than she’s been getting.

Like Jeff, I can quickly forgive the increasingly irrelevant attacks on the internet.    In fact I agree with Lessing that we’ve lost something as people flock to the internet while abandonining books and newspapers, carrying with them little more than a keyboard and a short attention span.    But we gain something as well.   Something very profound.   The internet is not only far more engaging than books and newspapers, and the internet is not only far more accessible than books and newspapers.   The internet is interactive.  

VERY interactive.   

For the first time in all of human history, people from almost anywhere can communicate night and day, every day, with other people from almost anywhere else.    This tidal wave of human socializing has only just begun and the implications are staggering.   Complaining that books aren’t getting their due respect, while true, is a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.   The ship of knowledge known as the internet sailed long ago and is now a huge fleet carrying billions of people.     

As a Nobel prize winner for literature Doris Lessing will be remembered forever.    And rightly so.   But those memories, and photos, and videos, and copies of what she said will live forever in *digital form*.  They’ll live on the internet, long after all the paper representations have been relegated to a handful of dusty old museum archives and rich book collector’s shelves.

And that, dear Doris, is a very good thing.

Facebook Beacon already forgotten by all but the blogOspheric chattering nonsense.

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Om Malik and Matt Ingram are asking why Facebook doesn’t simply ask their 40+ million users to determine what the users would want in terms of advertising on a social network.

Excuse me but are you guys naive or just starting your holiday drinking a bit early in the season? 

The answer is that actually using social networking as a springboard for advertising ideas, although it would be totally consistent with the claimed model of what a great social network will be, would be totally inconsistent with maximizing profit.     I am *so tired* of hearing people talk about how what is best for us user gooses is best for those advertising ganders.   It just ain’t so!

Advertising – even good ads people think they really like – are all pretty much rooted in the old saw “There’s a sucker born every minute”.    Sure there are good products, and sure most companies are honest, and I even think many ads are reasonably “true”.    But the point is that good ads must inspire buying behavior before they inspire wise behavior, and any marketing effort worth it’s even it’s weight in online ads will work to make buyers, not work to make wise people.

Most wise people don’t buy a lot of stuff unless they stumble upon great wealth, and even then most do not become rampant “consumers”.  They reflect, they travel, they exchange ideas, they learn and they love.    Shopping?  It’s  not on the list of activities that spawn great human enlightenment, and it never will be.    Fun?  yes.   Popular?   Sure.   Profitable for companies?    YES!    Shopping, and more generally commerce online is the only sizeable revenue source, making it the key to internet innovation and the driver of internet changes.    User centricism is generally going to be trumped by this force with some notable exceptions like Wikipedia and perhaps Open Social.

The very best marketing ties real human factors to products, but in the same way “conversational marketing” is an oxymoron it is not reasonable to expect “social network advertising” to be glowing extension of the social networking experience.   Maybe in Mark Z’s dreams, but not in his increasingly profit-centric reality.

I’m strongly behind the idea that online community needs should trump profits.   Also, I agree that following this mantra can lead to some successes.    Google initially frowned on advertising while they built a fantastic search system, but note how it took advertising to make them the key online player they are today.   Not a little advertising either – billions and billions and the prospect of billions more.

Can social networkers design ads they like?   I doubt it.   However this could come about indirectly. Google Open Social is the most likely source of social networking advertising innovation for the very reason that Google *makes their big profits elsewhere*.  Google can sweep in with a truly user-centric social model, monetize it to a limited extent using adsense, but from their perspective leave their core cash dow – PPC search – intact.   Also, Google then conveniently puts a huge, perhaps even deadly crimp in Facebook’s potential to become a dominant online environment.    As I’ve noted before Google is brilliant at managing to do the right thing and in doing the right thing reap big benefits for … Google!    (How DO they do that so often !?)

Oh, speaking of NOT doing the user centric thing because it might threaten the cash cow we need look no farther than … Google.   Note their ad standards have relaxed quite a bit over the years while keeping  “user friendly enough” to avoid the sharp criticisms that should have been levied at Google when they slapped ads on the left side of the home page, conveniently blurring the distinction between organic and paid listings, then stopped prominently shading the advertising.  Oh, they also allowed bogus sites to run adsense, didn’t crack down early enough on the spiral of massive click fraud, and have even embedded travel advertising in organic listings while still claiming they don’t do it  (example: try this search: “SFO to JFK”).

So, the moral of Beacon is not that profit sites should stop acting like profit sites, rather that since there is a sucker born every minute, we suckers need to stick together, and every so often we need to stick it to the man to keep him on track.   Maybe that’s all Om Malik is saying today, and if so I’m with ya!

Facebook to everybody: “We’re sorry”

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Mark Zuckerberg is profusely apologizing for Beacon’s shortcomings.  

I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better …

It sure looks sincere to me and I don’t think sincerity even matters all that much in this case.  They srewed up, they are fixing things fast, time to move on.

Like many I’ve been cynical of Facebook valuations and some of the ridiculous hyperbole, but this whole fiasco was a great study in now quickly you go from being tauted as “the next big thing” to tauted as being “dead”.    Also an example of how major media still does not quite get the web thing – just yesterday we read “Facebook RIP” which foolishly suggested this could be a major event for them.    

Google social is a major stumbling block for Facebook, but Beacon is just a tiny bump in the road to more riches.    That said I still think 15 billion dollar valuation is absurd.   But, I thought Google was overvalued too and I was sure wrong about that…. so far at least.

Who is clicking at your online business door?

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Back in July I missed this great post by Dave Morgan at AOL but thanks to Danah Boyd’s post it has surfaced again.    The findings are very surprising and very relevant to anybody running click or online advertising campaigns.   Dave summarizes the findings very concisely as follows:

We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.

Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

What does all of this mean? It means that while clickers may be valuable audiences, they are by no means representative of the Web at large

Indeed, this means that many online marketing campaigns may need to dig a lot deeper to obtain a positive ROI, and for some campaigns positive ROI is not attainable.    If, for example, irrelevant clickers (not to be confused with click abuse) mean you’ll have to spend a few dollars to reach a single prospect, and your margin on your product is only a few dollars, you may be fighting a losing PPC battle for online hearts, minds, and pocketbooks.    On the other hand if your target audience is, say, midwestern stay at home soccer moms, you may want to up your PPC spend dramatically because your nickel or dime per click could be worth many times that in prospective sales.

Obviously Dave’s post is only the beginning of the big story which has yet to be written,  and I’m not clear how representative this sample was of all PPC activity (I think it was broadly representative though – they looked at billions of data items).  However this helps me understand why some of my PPC experiments have failed to yield much of a return.     A good travel experiment given these findings would be to look at midwestern travel patterns and try to advertise popular packages to Mexico  or other commonly travelled points south in the winter.   Since women are the main travel planners this match could work well to increase the normally very low conversion I have seen on travel related PPC spends.

Facebook’s Brandee Barker – the web’s most thankless job?

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Kara Swisher noted the challenges facing Facebook’s PR head Brandee Barker these days, suggesting she might have one of the most thankless jobs on the web, navigating as she must the frigid and hazardous storm water still swirling in the wake of Facebook’s many recent challenges.

First, Facebook launched “Beacon”, which they foolishly tauted as some sort of landmark in the history of advertising.   Beacon turned out to be more a nasty stain mark as bloggers roundly criticized the approach, and then the New York Times and major advertisers like Coca Cola basically said they were lied to by Facebook.

As if that wasn’t enough bad news, Facebook managed to look like the ultimate hypocrite when they sued a news site for posting too much information about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.    This from a site that had just started an ad campaign to capitalize on the profile information Facebookers provide at sign up, information Facebook had promised to respect and protect from prurient commercialization.

Of course they lost the court case, so now Facebook is maintaining a very high and negative news profile across the board for misleading Facebookers, misleading advertisers, and hypocritically wanting to be treated differently from the way they treat others.

So, hats off to Brandee Barker, PR director at Facebook.   If you make it through this you deserve every penny of your Facebook options value, which hopefully won’t be the next big scandal.

Blogger and OpenID

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Reshma Kumar over at Webguild is reporting on Google’s upcoming launch of blogger based blog commenting that will support OpenID.   This is a great development and kudos to Google for again doing the right thing, which is making it easy for people to comment without having to do a separate login.   Also, along with Open Social, this approach is coming closer to the ideal online environment where you log in ONCE, and then interact in a robust way with all online environments and other onliners.   The analogy we should all be using is that of a massive party where everybody has a searchable name tag that contains all the info they care to share including pictures, writings, and resumes.    The complication is obvious here – some people will want to keep some things from some people.    I’m not sure how to manage that part since turning the info “on and off” does not work well in our cached and oft-downloaded online info environments.

Reshma notes:
 Users of OpenID-enabled services such as LiveJournal and WordPress can comment on a blog using their accounts from those sites rather than with a Blogger/Google account.

 This may not sound like much, but it will increase the ease of commenting on other people’s blogs.   I’m concerned by how blog commenting is becoming a dying art.   This is due to part to spam comments and in part to blogger selfishness where they don’t want to add to other’s blogs for a variety of SEO or ego reasons.      Ideally I’d like to see every person with their own blog, and then an auto-trackback feature so the conversations would span multiple blogs and instead of comments you’d just have dozens of interconnected blog posts on a topic.   However many people don’t want to have a blog but do want to participate.   This will help with that.