Social Dying
The Way It Was Then
8:00 AM
Celebrity sent to hospital
10:00 AM
Celebrity pronounced dead
6:00 PM
Local TV announces death
Next Morning
Story printed on page 9 of the local newspaper
The Way It Is Now
8:00 AM
Celebrity sent to hospital
9:30 AM
Celebrity news site announces celebrity death
9:31 AM
Traffic on Twitter begins to explode with suspicions of drug related cardiac arrest
10:00 AM
Celebrity pronounced dead
10:30 AM
Rumors of other celebrity deaths spread on Twitter and other sites
10:45 AM
Celebrity tributes to dead celebrity begin
11:35 AM
Cable news networks announce death on network
12:00 PM
Cable news networks announce death on their web sites
News in 2015
Will newspapers still exist in 2015? Here are my predictions:
- Printed newspapers will be virtually gone.
- About 35% of newspapers will still be available, but primarily as content providers, rather than print distributors.
- The majority of news will be consumed on a handful of social news portals, platforms similar to Facebook but specializing in news, allowing layout flexibility and hyper-localization. It will not be Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft.
- These portals will monetize with a combination of advertising and subscriptions.
- Subscriptions will come in different forms: All content, all content from certain content providers (formerly known as newspapers), and subscriptions limited by usage quotas (# of articles, etc).
Your thoughts? Am I on track? Is my timing about right? Am I way off base? Please post your predictions, and feel free to post links to your posts on the topic.
Best Human-Powered Uses of Twitter
Twitter is a great tool, still lacking business model. What I hate about Twitter is that a huge percentage of tweets are about Twitter. What I love about Twitter is that it’s an open canvas; a new medium for creativity and USEFULNESS. I’ve seen Twitter used as a platform for news, customer service, “interactive” PR, and even an author’s new medium. What is the best human-powered use of Twitter? Please send your nominees, and we’ll hold a vote. As you comment, I’ll bring the nominee list up here. Please recommend. And please share this link to get as many quality nominees as we can.
PLEASE nominate a use, and if possible, a tweep:
140-character short stories / @arjunbasu, @twirledview @mrichtel
Breaking news situations / (If you have a list of accounts, comment and I’ll link)
Why I'm Late to the Blog Party
I’ve been in the web publishing industry for a dozen years, and yet, I hadn’t started blogging until…well…a couple weeks ago. Sure, I thought about it. I even dabbled with LiveJournal as a personal open journal, but stopped abruptly when I realized my ex-girlfriend shouldn’t have been reading my outpouring of pain from losing her.
As a software development manager and product manager, I had plenty to blog about, but I chose not to. I’m not the best writer (although I’m far from the worst), but that didn’t stop me. Why did I wait until now?
It’s simple. Who would want to read my blog? And if I got a ton of readers, would I just be duping them? Could I live with that? Sure, I felt that I was very good at what I do. But was I an “expert,” and wouldn’t blogging be inappropriately declaring myself as one? How much experience did I have? Was my opinion or experience relevant?
But in this new age of social media, loaded with blogging, microblogging, user-generated content, social bookmarking, etc., I’ve finally realized I missed a very important point. It doesn’t matter if I’m an expert or not. The beauty of this world is the ability to spur conversation and thought. It doesn’t matter so much whether my opinions or “right” or “wrong,” but instead it matters that it triggers thought.
This is why all of these Twitter ranking services make me a little ill (although I’ll admit that I always know my Grader Twitter grade). Self-proclaimed experts are the worst kind, and unfortunately, the most common kind. So, while I certainly believe that I’m great at what I do, I’ll let you decide whether or not I’m an expert. And if you follow me on Twitter, thereby increasing my Twitter Grader or twitterrank, does that make me an expert?
No, it does not.
But should that stop me from blogging?
No, it should not.
And so, here I am. Please send me your non-expert blog links, and I’ll be happy to add you to my blogroll. And please, let me know what you think about what I’m saying here. That’s the whole point. Waiting for your comments…
Four Keys for Traditional Media Companies to Tackle Digital Ad Networks on the Web
I just read Did Standards Kill the Online Ad Business by Saul Hansell on nytimes.com. It is true that standard ad sizes lowered the cost of entry for digital ad networks, but these networks would have emerged and succeeded even if standards weren’t formalized. Informal standards would have been dictated by the largest publishers or ad networks. The success of ad networks has everything to do with their business models, and nothing to do with standards. Furthermore, the online ad business is far from killed; it’s maturing. Ad networks simply makes sense, on a medium where publishers are plentiful, and not limited by bandwidth over coaxial cable, printing, or distribution costs. With the large quantity of publishers, mostly with a relatively small share of Internet reach, ad networks become necessary. Most publishers can’t afford large sales teams, and don’t have the distribution to pull in scalable deals.
I would argue, though, that many large traditional media companies have brought this tough competition on for themselves. Many of them have turned to these same ad networks to back-fill the ad inventory they were unable to sell-out with their internal sales teams. Why would a large advertiser pay a premium to buy ads on a premium site when they can pay a tiny fraction of that amount to get their ads on the same site through the ad network? These publishers can typically block specific advertisers or industries on these ad networks, but unless every major publisher issues such a block, the savvy advertisers will continue to find cheap ways to get their message out using these standard units.
Here’s how traditional media companies can beat the effect of digital ad networks on the web:
- Deliver a product people truly want to your audience. Migrating newspaper content to the Internet is simply not compelling enough to accomplish this goal. You need to differentiate yourself from an overcrowded set of publishers. And stop with the one way broadcast, already! Engage your users! Lucky for you, many advertisers still want their message on premium brands only.
- Deliver innovating ad products that really pay off for your advertisers. This is difficult, because many advertisers are still not savvy enough to go after custom solutions. Additionally, these solutions can be very costly. That said, if you can show a few success stories, you can make it happen. The bottom line is that you need to help your advertisers accomplish their goals if you want to keep them.
- Don’t be so rigid, try something new and take a chance. Go out on a limb and try something that you’ve never tried before and can’t guarantee success with. Just be sure to measure success, and have a plan in place so that you can make adjustments from what you learn. Again, differentiate yourself!
- Be and early adopter for all new media platforms, including social media. Rich Sanchez? ’nuff said.
On Twitter, Everyone Knows You're a Dog
I’m feeling inspired, after ready Marty Cagan’s “Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love.“ Marty describes some clear best practices for success when creating a new product, or updating an existing product. He references segmentation, and points out the importance of using personas when planning features and releases. I finished the book last night, and I immediately started to think about whether or not I truly know my user base. Truth be told, I don’t know as much as I need to about the users who come and quickly leave. But new tools such as Twitter and Facebook make it possible to understand your users better than ever before.
Peter Steiner created a famous cartoon, captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Well, this is simply not true anymore.
Copyright Image from New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner.
Take Facebook, for instance. I know more about my real life friends than I ever did before. Just the other day, on Facebook, I got notified with what must be quickest spreading Facebook content ever; “xxxx tagged you in the note 25 Random Things About Me.” I read, in awe, that years after being the best man at his wedding, I still didn’t really know him. And here I was, learning more about a real life friend.
Twitter has a tremendous amount of following. People follow complete strangers to get them to follow back. People follow others they think might be interesting, and yet others that are accepted thought-leaders. If you analyze someone’s posts, you can quickly learn a great deal about them. And some tweeple’s fingers are like loose cannons, allowing you to even learn about their personalities. Take this rant from a well-followed Tweep, for instance. With some tools doing some basic analysis on a user’s tweets, you can learn an awful lot about this user.
This is where social media and social networking start to close the gap between a publisher and it’s users. With new features such as Facebook Connect, site publishers are gaining a lot more access to this valuable insight available based on users’ contributions to your site, and to others as well. This insight will really help to identify one or two of the personas you will undoubtedly need to create to ensure you’re building your product for the audience.
Truth be told, on the Internet, everyone knows exactly who I am.
Mini-size Me: Web Businesses Think Small
Aspirations. Aim high. Reach for the clouds. Thing big. Take over the world.
Not anymore. More than ever, I’m seeing businesses with small ideas. Niche ideas. Some that have symbiotic relationships with other small businesses. Perhaps there are bigger ideas they haven’t let out of the bag yet? Here are some examples, and why they might be onto something. And why they may not be.
- ShareThis
This site offers a social sharing button. An API. And a Sharebox for users. That’s it. At its core, this is a button. I love it for a few reasons. It offers the publisher reporting, an API and customization. Also, if you don’t want to keep up with every sharing service, ShareThis takes care of it for you. For ShareThis, they own the data on usage of social sharing sites. Business model – perhaps advertising, perhaps sharing data, perhaps a tiered pay model? Who knows. But they got $15 million in funding in March ‘08. Still seems niche and small to me, and it’s dependent on all of the sharing services – which do not yet have a proven business model either. - TweetDeck
This application is a Twitter client. Twitter is still fairly niche, although many are betting for it to go mainstream this year. There are also a large number of Twitter clients out there. And Twitter doesn’t even have a viable business model yet. Yet, TweetDeck closed an angel funding round at $500k. I highlighted TweetDeck, but there are a ton of Twitter piggy-backers, like Qwitter, who’s only feature is notification of tweeps that stop following you. That’s about as niche as you can get. - Plinky
One of the newest entrants into the micro-blogging arena (kind of), Plinky managed to get a lot of hype before finally making its premise known yesterday. They ask a question each day, and you provide an answer. They basically just prompt you for something to write about, and allow you to share your response on the social grid. This managed to get a $1.5 series A.
Is this niche company phenomenon due to the recession, or is this a bi-product of Web 2.0? I think both. There’s no question that a bad economy triggers more start-ups. Enter Web 2.0, and we have all of these opportunities for apps with symbiotic relationships. If you can run a small business and make a little more than you made working for someone else, why not do it? As long as these businesses are reasonable to support with small teams, they have a good chance to bring in more than they cost.
But the risk is high. Twitter, and even the major social networking sites still don’t have proven, viable business models. If these businesses fail, the ecosystem of apps that are dependent on them also fail.
I love the idea of these small businesses, although finding the apps you want becomes difficult in this crowded app environment. Enter twitdom.com to solve that problem, too.
TTFN. I have to go start a micro-biz 
Heard of Inbox Zero? What about Twitter Zero?
If you’re like me, you’re not in the top 5% of Twitter users (regardless of which system you decided is the best at rating you). Most likely, you follow more than you’re followed. Perhaps you follow @scobleizer, @davewiner, @skydiver, @mashable, @guykawasaki, or any number of tweeple that have 10,000 to 50,000+ followers. Have you tried keeping up with the tweets? I check every half hour or so, and realize that I still can’t keep up with everything that’s been posted despite following only about 150 tweeps. @scobleizer follows over 20,000.
I remember the Inbox Zero project; epic fail for me. But what would be the equivalent for Twitter, rather than just missing all the tweets I simply can’t keep up with? Well, my honest and disheartening opinion is that I have no alternative.
Not today.
But, perhaps, there is some hope? Let’s take inauguration day as an example. At least 60% of my friends’ tweets were about the inauguration. If my Twitter client could group tweets on similar topics, perhaps this would have saved me from having to read tons of similar posts. Sounds simple, although I know in practice it’s quite challenging. Wouldn’t it be a great start, though?
In the meantime, here are some tips:
- Continue to follow people who follow you. It’s not social media if it’s not social.
- Use an application like TweetDeck, that let’s you create groups. I have one group for people I actually know, another group for news, and another group for social gurus.
- Perhaps you can’t keep up with all of your friends’ tweets, but make sure you read replies and direct messages.
Want to know how to be interesting enough for people to follow you? I can’t help you there 
But perhaps the @scobleizer and these other folks can.
