All online contacts are not created equal--whether they're friends, connections or followers.

1. Segmentation. All contacts are not created equal–whether they’re friends, connections or followers. Relationships naturally form along these lines, as we make social distinctions among family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Though Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have provided users options for organizing contacts, Google+ is the first social network to make audience segmentation a primary design feature. “Circles” are the best manifestation, to date, of what I think will become a defining characteristic of social media: tracking our online connections with the natural ways we form and segment relationships. My recent work with Bullhorn Reach has illuminated this issue for me, as users often share that Facebook friends consist of a motley mix of personal and professional relationships, making decisions about what content is appropriate to share increasingly difficult to manage (1).
2. Specialization. Like liberal arts students emerging into the working world from broadly-focused educations, social media are reaching a point of maturation where they are increasingly purposed for specific business goals. Whether for finding talent or identifying sales prospects, social media are being leveraged by professionals to a greater extent than ever before. LinkedIn paved the way for professional-centric social media, but limited user engagement is leaving the door open for others to displace it as the preferred professional social network. Google+, with Google’s dominance in cloud-based business applications, could ultimately become LinkedIn’s greatest rival. As of now, however, LinkedIn’s current pay offerings (that I know of) only serve two professional groups: salespeople/business developers and recruiters/hiring managers. Beyond LinkedIn, niche networks are emerging that serve specific professional groups, such as doctors and teachers.
3. Socialization. By ‘socialization‘, I mean “a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position” (in this case, appropriate to being a user of social media). More specifically, norms on how to behave on social networks are gradually being learned and adopted, as social media are used by an ever-broadening cross-section of the population. The shift is marked by the growing number of interactions and conversations via social media, as opposed to one-way broadcasts of content. With authenticity and relevance as table stakes for adherence to ‘social’ etiquette, social media are getting closer to fulfilling the promise of being channels for engagement, not just publishing.

Norms on how to behave on social networks are gradually being learned and adopted, as social media are used by an ever-broadening cross-section of the population.

Where do we go from here? Who really knows?

It’s one thing to identify trends; it’s another thing to predict them. The problem is that predicting actual use patterns is a crap shoot. Contrary to what Shoeless Joe Jackson might lead you to believe, if you build it, they won’t necessarily come. That is, even if innovators design tools with specific use cases in mind, the reality is that users’ expectations, thought processes and subsequent behaviors will vary as widely as there are personalities in the world. Take, for example, how people leverage Twitter’s search of tweets, versus LinkedIn’s search of updates. At Bullhorn Reach, we’ve found that the shelf-life of jobs posted via Twitter is considerably longer than those posted on either Facebook or LinkedIn because people are leveraging Twitter’s search function. In contrast, even though LinkedIn allows users to search updates, users continue to consume content as they do on Facebook (clicking on what they see in their newsfeeds), just to a lesser degree of engagement.

All that said, just because it’s hard to predict the future doesn’t mean I’m not going to try! After all, we’re living the in the future (2).

Footnote:

1. I believe that “localization” (think location-based social media services like Foursquare and SCVNGR, in addition to check-in features on Twitter and Facebook), which some may identify as it’s own trend, is just another form of segmentation–viz., “Some connections are geographically closer to me, requiring a different kind of treatment than those who are further away.”
2. You may notice that it’s been awhile since my last post on this blog. Apologies, dear readers. There have been a lot of major life changes in the last year, including a new job, a new love, and health issues in my family. Rest assured, however, that there will be more to come.
   

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People today are faced with the cumbersome task of dealing with disparate content on multiple screens, via multiple platforms, and through multiple profiles. The unification of experience is the great frontier for innovation in technology, user interface design, and computing. How we get there is up in the air.

The number of ‘digital’ screens we view every day and the sheer amount of diverse content we consume through those screens can feel overwhelming at times. How our experiences of those screens and the content we consume through them (more the latter, as screens may become antiquated) are brought together, consolidated and streamlined is the great frontier of innovation in technological development and user interface design, I believe.

The unification of experience is the term I’ll use to describe the unrealized ideal of a trend toward the coalescence of our experiences through those screens (though I’ll limit the discussion to ‘digital’ screens, as opposed to traditional ‘screens’ like book pages and canvases).

The screens I personally interact with regularly are: my  personal laptop, my netbook, my personal monitor, the other personal monitor/LCD my friend loaned me, my work laptop, my work monitor, various other screens I use at work (the LCDs I use on the walls of meeting rooms and the projector in the screening room), my smart phone, and the TV in my living room.

I admit, though — I probably interact with a lot more screens than the average person. Still, according to recent research by the Council for Research Excellence (recently cited by CBS), “The average American adult now spends 8-1/2 hours a day staring into screens.” That’s not an insignificant amount of time, and chances are that those interactions aren’t limited to a single screen.

The screens of our life and the content we consume through them take up varying proportions of our time, on average. An interesting infographic from Boston's AMP agency, released during MITX's first annual FutureM Conference.

As both the number of screened devices people use and the time they spend with those devices increases,  the unification of experience becomes an increasingly important idealization of a trend — and one that  the titans of media and technology are seeking to attain at an ever faster clip through varying strategies and tactics.

3 Approaches That Could Work

While there are a host of innovators aiming to attain the unification of experience  through myriad tacks, there are only a few avenues that I think are truly viable. Even these, though,  are harried by obstacles that lead me to believe it’s unlikely that any single one of these strategies will ever have the opportunity to fully succeed.

1. The Cloud, Ubiquitous Broadband & Inter-Operable Languages. Companies like VMWare, Cisco and IBM (among others) are laying the groundwork for a computing future in ‘the cloud’, while the FCC pushes policies to expand the scope and speed of broadband coverage in the United States. These trends, in tandem with development and dissemination of inter-operable computer languages, could be factors that facilitate the perfect storm of tech that would ultimately lead to (something like) the unification of experience naturally. Simply put, the cloud provides an external place where programs, content and even computing can live, while users are free to move from device to device and have similar experiences that are delivered via the internet.  Think Google Apps, but broader. The adoption of a singular inter-operable language (which is dominating certain niches of cross-platform communication — e.g., Flash vs HTML5), while less likely, would augment the cloud and broadband’s strides toward the unification of experience.
2. A Closed Ecosystem of Devices, Software & Experiences. Undoubtedly, the company most successful at executing this strategy is Apple. Their “walled apple grove” is both beautiful and verdant. Their hardware, software, virtual shopping experiences and developer community — while aggravating to many competitors and developers — has created an unparalleled attempt at taking on the unification of experience single-handed. The problem: there are competitors that are coming out with comparably awesome experiences. Their barrier for creating a similarly closed ecosystem? — They’re not as cool. Don’t count competition out, though. Companies like Samsung are going to give Apple a run for their (heaping pile of) money.
3. Cross-Platform programs that Bridge Devices and Share Content. While many of these types of programs (e.g., Google’s many online apps) reside in the cloud, there are a host of ‘hybrid’  programs (downloadable programs, online portals, mobile interfaces) that allow devices to communicate and share content among each other seamlessly and with little thought for users (other than using them). Among my favorites are Evernote and Dropbox; sadly, I have yet to see All Share (on my Samsung Epic 4G) work in action, though it seems to have a lot of potential. Less ambitious programs like Gmote are also tackling the unification of experience, though in much smaller bites.

Barriers to Unity

• Privacy, Security & Cultural Backlash: With data, content and operable capabilities flowing from device to device, it’s no wonder that attaining the unification of experience is fraught with security and privacy issues. User access, compliance with regulations and figuring out where data resides are among the many security challenges, for example, that cloud computing faces, according to Gartner Research. Google and Facebook are the most publicized villains in the ever-growing debate over online privacy. Truth be told, though, it’s a broader cultural question — with vast differences across nations — that pits one of the fastest growing areas of business (how companies wield data) against traditional cultural mores about privacy. How this will play out remains to be seen.
• A Competitive Market & Fragmented Innovation. The nature of a competitive market gives rise to the fragmentation of technological innovation (as a result of differing business models). Not every company can be Apple, but many will try their damnedest to break the efficacy of Apple’s business model and introduce disruptive innovations that prevent them and others like them from gaining too great an advantage in any one of the aforementioned strategic areas. The result is a ‘king of the hill’ approach toward playing in this space. But, if businesses can find mutual benefits from helping each other win (as many are already doing — e.g. Sony, Intel and Google with GoogleTV) we may be looking at a more unified future.

Closing Thoughts

I initially wanted to include a piece about ‘pervasive computing,’ which is, in many ways, of the same ilk of idealized trends as the unification of experience. But, for the sake of brevity (yes, I realize this post is long), I’ll leave you with a salient quote from IBM’s W.S. Ark and T. Selker:

“Part of the beauty of pervasive computing is that we will not even realize that it is here, once it has become a necessary part of our lives. In the future it will often be invisible, and the user interface will be intuitive. The other important part of the story is that it will all be networked. Data, once entered, will never have to be entered again, but will be readily available whenever and wherever needed.”

Regardless of whether unification of experience or pervasive computing is attainable, is it a reality we want? Do we really want to be that ‘jacked in’?  I leave you with this video, which one of my colleagues sent me with the note: “If this is the future, shoot me now.”

I’d love to read what you think in the comments section.

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Observations

That our relationships with others have changed as a result of social media is a foregone conclusion.

Blurred  and Broadened Borders of Social Spheres. Social media’s initial default of openness made normal the notion that the borders of our neatly distinct social spheres of who is granted access to the content of our lives are blurred, intersected and broadened. It’s increasingly tough to draw distinctions between ‘personal’ and ‘professional,’ not to mention ‘public’ and ‘private’ social spheres. And it’s increasingly expected — as is satirized in the South Park episode below this post — that we open our lives’ contents to previously siloed participants in our lives.

Increased Social Productivity. Our ‘social productivity’ is on an upward trend. That is, we ‘interact’ with more people on a broader array of subjects in a shorter amount of time than ever before. This is more a function of   technological innovation in communications and a heightened threshold for multi-tasking — broadly speaking — than a unique effect of internet-based social media’s ubiquitous popularity. But these new media have provided a platform for sharing rich forms of content, effectively expanding the palette we use to express ourselves.

A Deeper, Different Look

Spending more social time online can result in less in-person social time. After all, there are only so many hours in the day.

Social media have certainly expanded the absolute number of human social interactions. A qualitative look at how we use these media to interact with others, however, sheds light on a somewhat ironic result: social media can actually enhance physical isolation, loneliness and detachment from others.

Socially Prolific, but Physically Isolated. While our social interactions on an binary scale have absolutely increased, being increasingly ‘jacked in’ has also resulted in a larger proportion of our ‘social’ lives being spent in physical isolation. Though we can share our lives through social media with people in-person, actually using the media is necessarily a personal, solitary experience. Our immediate interaction is with devices — our computers, smart phones and tablets — not people. Whether more prolific but less physical social relationships are preferable to the less frequent physical intimacy of yesteryear is a big conversation best saved for another day.

The social time we spend online can cause detachment from in-person relationships.

Detachment from Others. As traditionally physical interactions are increasingly superseded by virtual counterparts, the decline of our physical interactions with others has real impacts on how we relate to others. As mentioned in a previous blog entry, the interesting (though unethical) research of Harry Harlow with rhesus monkeys indicated a primal longing and need for physical contact with others. Long periods of time without physical social contact result in further withdrawal from society, a self-perpetuating cycle of loneliness. And loneliness, as you’ll soon read, can be both enhanced and spread through social media.

Social media can act as a more efficient platform for spreading the contagious effects of loneliness.

A Platform for Loneliness. Recent findings by professors at Harvard, UChicago and UCSD discovered that loneliness, like a cold, can be contagious among social networks. Involving roughly12,000 people over 60 years, the study concluded that lonely people are highly likely to share their loneliness with others, extending up to three degrees of separation (One lonely friend makes one 40 to 65 percent more likely to be lonely, a lonely friend-of-a-friend makes one 14 to 36 percent more likely, and a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend makes one 6 to 26 percent more likely, the study suggests). Says UChicago’s John Cacioppo:

“These reinforcing effects mean that our social fabric can fray at the edges, like a yarn that comes loose at the end of a crocheted sweater.”

Social media amplifies and exacerbates the spread of loneliness, providing a more efficient platform for lonely people to share their loneliness with others. Not only that — increased use of social media both increases physical isolation (see above) and provides a disheartening view into more popular people’s lives.

Social Media Success, Where In-Person Largely Fails

Social media isn’t all bad, though (duh). In fact, it produces some great results where in-person interactions often flounder. Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski astutely observes:

“Online social networks are most useful when they address real failures in the operation of offline networks.”

Among the biggest failures of in-person interaction that social media addresses are keeping up-to-date and in-touch with friends and acquaintances outside our most immediate social periphery, establishing new relationships (both professionally and personally. Interestingly, online social networks may soon become the No.1 way Americans find significant others, some experts suggest), and facilitating a passive job search. And, needless to say, it allows us to satiate our voyeuristic desires to peer into others’ lives and points-of-view, even as people are increasingly pushing their privacy thresholds back against social media’s push forward. Piskorski confirms:

“People just love to look at pictures. That’s the killer app of all online social networks. Seventy percent of all actions are related to viewing pictures or viewing other people’s profiles.”

Closing Remarks

Admittedly, this account of some of the impacts of social media on human interactions is incomplete. In particular, I never explore the impact of social media on the presentation of self in everyday life. Undoubtedly, social media have provided an elevated platform for narcissists, self-promoters and online celebrities to broadcast their lives, thoughts and points-of-view. How this affects the general consumer of social media’s sense of self and identity is best saved for another entry.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on both that subject and the one in this post in the comments section below! Thanks for continuing to follow the blog, and apologies for not writing more. Rest assured, though, I’ve been keeping up with at least some social media, and there’ll be more to come on the  blog soon!

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Will marketers and developers recognize the full potential of Kinect's functionalities?

What Kinect Does & What Makes it Unique

In an initial ‘Project Natal’ (Kinect) fact sheet released in May 2009, Microsoft describes what differentiates its functionality:

• Controller-free gaming and entertainment. “Project Natal” provides a whole new way to play — no controller required. It uses a sensor to track your body movement and recognize your face, even listen to your voice. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips, or speak, you and your friends will be able to jump instantly into any “Project Natal” experience.
• Full-body play. “Project Natal” provides a new way to play where you use all parts of your body — head, hands, feet and torso. With controller-free gaming you don’t just control the superhero, you are the superhero. Full-body tracking allows the “Project Natal” sensor to capture every move, from head to toe, to give players a full-body gaming experience.
• Personalized play. “Project Natal” provides an in-game experience in which the player’s face and voice are recognized. Greet and speak to characters in the game, or simply step into view of the sensor to log into Xbox LIVE and connect with friends. Only “Project Natal” is smart enough to remember voices and faces. Fun has never been so personalized.
• Off-the-couch play. “Project Natal” provides gameplay that gets you off the couch, on your feet and in the fun. Each “Project Natal” experience is designed to get players moving, laughing, cheering and playing together. “Project Natal” makes social gaming off-the-couch fun.
• Easy-to-play fun. “Project Natal” makes sharing in the fun a snap. Talk or watch a movie in the same living room or on the other side of the world — no headset, no keyboard and no controllers required. It’s just you, your friends, your family and a whole new way to play.

Controller-free interaction already places Kinect a cut above Nintendo‘s wildly popular Wii gaming system–and Sony‘s soon-to-be released Move controller apparatus for Playstation 3.

Beyond not needing a controller, the platform’s ability to recognize a person’s entire body — face included — and voice creates a whole new level of identification between the user and her virtual persona. On top of recognizing you, it remembers you, allowing for easy recollection of checkpoints and check-ins (a hint of what’s to come in the article!).

Seeing the Kinections

Now that you know what it does, let’s consider some of its potential applications.

• Retail: Zugara’s webcam social shopper cracked the door open to the possibility of a camera-based virtual retail experience. Despite its efforts, however, its inability to gauge size and body type of the user makes the experience somewhat useless, in terms of how the item actually fits. With its ability to recognize all parts and angles of a person’s body and gauge depth perception, the Kinect platform kicks the door wide open not only to virtual experiences in clothing retail, but also to head-focused retail like cosmetics and glasses.
• Customer Loyalty Programs: Mark Cuban’s recent suggestion of ‘checking-in’ via facial recognition (by a company he recently purchased, of course) is a step in the right direction. Even separated from services like foursquare or gowalla, the notion of ‘checking in’ — particularly, by facial recognition — can dramatically impact how businesses run their customer loyalty programs. For small businesses, Kinect and Xbox 360 could provide a relatively inexpensive platform to deploy this type of model. But, using such a system would naturally depend on customers’ privacy thresholds for being recognized whenever they enter a store.
• Fitness: For Wii users, using motion-sensitive gaming is a foregone conclusion. For Kinect users, the experience will be that much better, largely due to enhanced sensitivity to users’ actual physical bodies, not a controller’s relative position to where it was moments before. This leads to my next point.
• Education: Training programs that require physical movement — e.g., sports training, physical therapies and some forms of art — could be greatly enabled by Kinect’s platform. Not only that–they could be social, and people could participate in programs ‘alongside’ friends and other users from around the world, allowing interactions among those who are learning in real-time.

While I briefly discuss some broad applications, there are certainly more, and I’d love to hear some of your ideas in the comments section! Enjoy this video demo of Kinect from CNN!

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Twitter announced on its blog yesterday that it’s rolling out an optional location identification feature across 65 different countries to help provide context to tweets.

According to the post,

“…you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location.”

A well-strategized foray into the geo-local hotbed, Twitter positioned itself as the unifying piece between the two most popular geo-local players: Foursquare and Gowalla. The move gives users access to standard Tweets and check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla, if users click on a Twitter Place, many of which correlate to check-in points generated by these services.

Stripped of virtual goods and rewards (which, in recent times, have demonstrated tremendous economic potential in the West, after a long history of success in the East), Twitter Places could be the singular feature that renders these services irrelevant, as late-adopting geo-local media users shift toward a community with a markedly larger user base. Despite the laudable achievement that  Foursquare accrued users at an initially faster rate than Twitter, the fact is that the competitive landscape is significantly different than it was for Twitter in 2006.

Some, like GigaOm’s Matthew Ingram, look at Twitter’s move as ensuring the longevity of Foursquare’s and Gowalla’s services. Integrated into Twitter’s offering, they will have a place for their own niche, given their gameplay lure that Twitter lacks. Perhaps.

My intuition, however, is that Twitter aims to relegate its would-be competitors to the world of interesting but subservient sub-brands. While I believe that virtual goods and its cousins have yet to reach a saturation point of unearthed demand in the West, I do believe that the space lies across a tech-loving threshold that many potential users are unwilling or don’t care to cross. I may be wrong, though. Hell, FarmVille is a pretty big deal.

The different faces of geo-locality in social media

Geo-locality is undeniably one of the hottest sources of conversation in the social media world. But how, as a concept, it is best utilized and, for lack of better words, serves as an indispensable function remains as unsettled as the Wild West. That is, the question remains: why should we care about geo-locality?

To that end, I’ll assess potential uses and share some thoughts on different applications of geo-local functionality in social media.

1. Sharing relative position to ongoing deals: In my mind, this application has the most promising potential for monetization, and many are already of the same mindset. Charging businesses for places in the virtual geography of the commercial world, companies like Yelp are releasing powerful mobile applications that can show people’s locations relative to ongoing places where they can spend their money. Add the ingredient of people wanting to share deals with others (getting validation of their value-seeking mindset), and you’ve got a good reason for social geo-locality.
2. Making news about large-scale events discoverable: Proclaimed as a powerful tool to monitor the goings-on of the World Cup, Twitter Places (as well as other geo-local functionalities) enables users to follow large-scale events in real-time from the perspectives of those there. While a bright idea, I wonder whether this is actually a service that many should care about, as real-time updates and streaming online video are nearly ubiquitous and available from sources that are much more informative than a person’s Twitter feed.
3. Broadcasting to your social network: While Foursquare and Gowalla have unearthed a significant amount of demand for broadcasting one’s location to her social network, I struggle to believe that this is something the general public will ultimately want in a big way. Frankly, there are many points in the day where I have no interest in telling everyone in my social network where I am. The key winners if I’m wrong about this trend: parents and stalkers. The key losers: those who want private lives.
4. General context to commentary: Most useful to the Twitterers with proclivities to comment about varying internal states and sights and sounds of surroundings (who, unfortunately, are many), providing general context to commentary isn’t the least reasonable application of geo-locality in social media. The real question, however, is whether the tell-all generation will continue on its merry way or pull back once it realizes that it’s not the best idea to broadcast every aspect of one’s life to her social network.

The linchpins of geo-locality in social media

Whether these applications of geo-locality will succeed hinges on the general public’s sentiments toward a couple broad trends, I think.

1. Privacy: Traditional paradigms of private life are now challenged everyday by the titans of social media, with Facebook leading the way. Personal boundaries are increasingly stretched, but there are some signs of push-back. The adoption of geo-locality in everyday use will largely be a consequence of whether people will want to share their location with others. Unless a better array of tools to segment and target one’s social networks arise, I predict that the answer is ‘no’.
2. Sharing useful info with others: That people want to help others with useful information may be the saving grace of geo-locality in social media. Whether citizen journalism or sharing great deals, people seem to want to tell others about useful public information. That is, when witnessing a public event or participating in a public activity (such as shopping), my intuition is that people are more inclined to share their locations with others.

How this all plays out remains to be seen, but I’d to hear your thoughts in the comments section on what the future looks like as we live it.

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Five years ago this past Monday, three former employees of early PayPal — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim — founded the ever-pervasive video-sharing platform. The site now boasts over 2 billion views per day or, as YouTube’s blog puts it,

“…nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.”

Click on this image to see a larger, more readable version of this very informative graphic about YouTube's first five years of existence.

As the story goes,  Hurley and Chen conceived YouTube after having trouble sharing videos shot at a dinner party at Chen’s San Francisco apartment. The mission was simple:

“…give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself.”

Aligned with this mission, YouTube’s celebratory channel prompts users to upload videos and share their YouTube stories, some of which are chosen for the channel’s video wall. Also home to an interactive timeline of some of the most important moments and memes in YouTube history, the channel also hosts big names like Conan O’Brien, Vint Cerf and Katie Couric, who curate playlists that showcase their favorite videos.

YouTube’s Rise: Striking Fear into the Hearts of TV Networks

A few fun facts:

• Users upload over a day’s worth of video to YouTube every minute;
• YouTube broadcasts live sports to over 200 countries;
• and the average user spends about 15 minutes per day on the site.

Needless to say, YouTube’s staggering success is changing the way TV networks are thinking about both their audiences and themselves. As Wired‘s Eliot Van Buskirk writes, YouTube’s doubling the viewership of the United States’ three major networks

“…hints at an eventual tipping point when the internet could become the world’s dominant video delivery system, Mark Cuban’s predictions aside.”

YouTube, however, may be more of an ally than a foe for TV networks. As Van Buskirk astutely observes, unlike their counterparts in the music industry, TV networks not only own their content, but they also have the leveraging power of having similar, successful projects already in play — e.g., Hulu (ABC and NBC) and CBS.com. This will certainly work in their favor as they make the plunge of officially posting their old content on YouTube.

More interestingly, Van Buskirk notes, YouTube is changing our viewing behavior, and our computer content viewing habits will inevitably alter how we consume TV programming.  The trend toward bringing the internet to TV is already well in motion:

• YouTube reaches TV-using gamers through Nintendo Wii‘s and Sony PlayStation‘s ability to connect to the internet;
• set-top boxes like D-Link‘s Boxee Box are making it possible to stream high-definition and even 3-D YouTube videos onto a TV;
• and Google will soon unveil its next-gen set-top box in partnership with DishNetwork, Intel and/or Sony.

TV networks aside, I think the real losers in this trend may ultimately be TV manufacturers. Recently, I personally opted to buy a large computer screen instead of a TV, given how little I actually consume TV programming (, which was the case even before YouTube,) and the wide-spread availability of those TV shows I do want to watch online. It’s no wonder, then, that companies like Samsung are running to novel technologies like 3-D to reinvent their businesses.

A New Creative Class: New Media Content Entrepreneurs

As YouTube’s director of strategic partnerships Kevin Yen recently noted in his article on CNet, new media like YouTube are giving rise to a growing creative class. While few in the mainstream know of them, new media’s emerging creative class often command weekly audiences that dwarf network television’s biggest shows on a good night, Yen observes.

For example, Phil DeFranco, who runs the seventh most popular channel on YouTube, “has beaten ‘Larry King Live‘ and ‘The O’Reilly Factor‘ in daily audience,” according to a recent article in Fast Company.

Of this creative class ilk, Yen writes:

“They are not only the actors and stars of their show, but they are the producers, the copy editors, and cinematographers; they work to market themselves, close advertising deals, and sometimes employ a team to support and promote them.”

Online video content companies like Machinima, Next New Networks, and Demand Media collectively represent billions and billions of views, which they have converted into dollars (primarily from advertising). Nascent rental services for YouTube content only supplement an already robust toolkit for online content creators to turn their projects in money-making enterprises.

That said, YouTube undeniably is still home to a plethora of crap. Among that crap is the first YouTube video ever posted, “Me at the zoo” (see below), which features founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The nineteen seconds you’ll spend watching it is probably nineteen seconds too long. Thanks, YouTube, and happy birthday!

Thanks for reading! I hope to read your thoughts and concerns on YouTube, the future of TV networks & manufacturers, and new media’s emerging creative class in the comment section below. If you’d like to contact me directly, you can reach me through my newly added contact form.

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Last week’s security lapse that exposed personal Facebook chats was embarrassing for both the social media giant and its users, materializing  many’s most salient concerns about sharing private information over the social Web.

Personal lives are broadcasted across online social networks. Are young people more apt to act with indiscretion? Conventional wisdom says 'yes'; recent studies say 'no'.

The New York Times’ Laura M. Holson recently reports, however, that the tell-all generation (those between 18 and 29-years-old) is learning to keep things offline. Holson writes: 

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

Young adults in their 20s, in fact, more frequently delete unwanted posts and more actively limit profile information, according to a soon-to-be released report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. This fact, the report suggests, is indicative of heightened diligence among young adults in exerting control over their digital reputations.

Says Mary Madden, lead researcher on the forthcoming Pew report:

“Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you. Now you are responsible for everything.”

Recent academic research by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and UC Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology attest to young adults’ online vigilance. In the UC Berkeley study, which explores how young adults differ from their elders when it comes to information privacy attitudes and policies, the sentiments are especially clear:

• 88 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds believe laws should require websites to delete their stored information;
• and 62 percent say they think laws should require that people have access to what websites know about them.

Interestingly, as Holson highlighted, this runs counter to conventional wisdom about young adults’ online behavior on social media. The Berkeley study succinctly describes the misconception, which is fueled by frequent media coverage of the risks of social networking:

“Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide shift in attitude toward information privacy. Many commentators therefore claim that young people “are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.”

According to the study, however, the apparent license with which the young behave online stems from a gap in privacy knowledge. In general, it seems, young people know very little about privacy issues:

• 42 percent of young Americans answered all five online privacy questions in the study’s survey  incorrectly;
• 88 percent answered only two or fewer correctly;
• and the problem is even more pronounced when presented with offline privacy issues – post hoc analysis showed that young Americans were more likely to answer no questions correctly than any other age group.

While many sites offer tips for maintaining one’s general online privacy, substantial guides for navigating social media privacy concerns are limited, largely due to the ever-changing privacy policies of our favorite social media giants.

As the future of privacy online is necessarily unclear, whether the ‘tell-all generation’ remains ‘jacked in’ or ‘checks out’ is now a more relevant question than ever.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to read your thoughts, comments and concerns on social media privacy in the comments section below. I’ll leave you with this relevant cartoon by The Joy of Tech by Nitrozac and Snaggy.

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The Dawn of the Mobile Internet Era

Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker — the ‘Queen of the Internet‘ behind both Netscape‘s and Google‘s initial public offerings — recently provided research and insights into the upward trend of the mobile web and social networking.

Among her more startling predictions was that, within the next five years,

“…more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.”

This trend, Meeker posits, marks the beginning of the fifth era of modern-day technology’s historical progression, roughly approximated below.

1. 1950′s-1960′s: the mainframe era
2. 1970′s: the mini-computer era
3. 1980′s: the desktop era
4. 1990′s-2000′s: the internet era
5. 2010′s-: the mobile internet era

And, compared to the uptake of desktop internet usage, mobile internet usage is growing at a considerably faster rate. This rate, Meeker and her team suggest, is evidenced by the disparity between contemporary adoption rates of iPhone/iPod touch versus AOL/Netscape in the early 1990′s — a staggering 11x difference. This trend, Meeker et al. add, is enhanced by the rise of 3G technology, which is available to nearly 21 percent of the world’s cellular users. Japan leads 3g penetration levels with a breath-taking 96 percent.

Data Usage and a Shafting Landscape for Carrier Networks

Carrier networks, however, will face the challenge of dealing with increasingly cumbersome data loads, as mobile internet usage continues to rise. At present, Meeker’s research notes, average cell phone users’ usage patterns consist in roughly 70 percent voice. In contrast, iPhone users’ voice usage only comprises 45 percent of bandwidth usage. Carrier network NTT DoCoMo of Japan, which Meeker (and others) assume to provide the model for the mobile internet’s future, reports a significantly different pattern: data usage comprises 90 percent of network traffic.

By 2014, Meeker et al. predict, data traffic will increase by roughly 4,000 percent, with the expectation that each year the annual growth rate will exceed 100 percent. Some U.S. networks — namely, AT&T — are already encountering problems in highly populated areas (e.g., New York and San Francisco) due to increased data loads. The data logjam on their network, AT&T claims, is due primarily to iPhone users. Comprising only three percent of the AT&T’s customer base, iPhone users reportedly consume approximately 40 percent of the network’s capacity. And data loads look as though they’re only getting heavier. The next wave of smartphones look more hungry for data than ever.

The Next Wave of Smart Phones (in the Foreseeable Future)

• HTC’s new phone, EVO 4G, comes video chat-ready. Apple’s new iPhone promises to offer similar functionality (through iChat) in its latest iteration, though one wonders when Apple will bring video chat to the iPad.
• Rumors that Facebook will produce its own phone are preceded by Microsoft’s unveiling of its Kin, a social media-focused smart phone with otherwise lightweight hardware.
  

  While interesting, Mircrosoft's Kin only syncs within its "loop" of status updates and messages every 15 minutes -- a time delay that many criticize as being too slow for the social media generation.

• Google’s Nexus One and Motorola’s Droid have subsumed the ‘traditional’ role of mobile GPS navigation devices, and look to enlarge their stake in the navigation market, unfortunately for Garmin and TomTom.
• HP’s recent purchase of Palm promises the advent of a whole new slough of business-ready smart phones that will compete with Blackberry’s newest line of preferred devices for the suits & ties.

What It Means for the Future of Content Production

• Advertising: The most important platform for reaching a captive audience will not be TV, e-mail or the (desktop) internet. Rather, it will be through mobile phones — and companies are catching on. Apple’s iAd will provide developers and agencies opportunities to deliver in-app advertisements. Google is hot on its tails with its attempted purchase of AdMob, but has encountered snags along the way.
• Publishing: It’s  obvious that big publishers are well on their way to taking their content live on the mobile internet. In the near future, do-it-yourself mobile content publishing programs like Maxdox and full-service companies like PressMart will provide publishers — both small and mid-sized — the tools they need to bring their content into the mobile internet era. This point doesn’t take into account the imminent increase in usage of various online publishing platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
• Virtual Goods: With nearly $600m in revenue and $1 per average user engagement, FarmVille’s continued success has proven that virtual goods are no longer a trend relegated to the Far East. And both Foursquare‘s and Gowalla‘s location-based apps center their models on rewarding users with virtual honors like ‘badges’ and other rewards, sometimes in exchange for real rewards. With the rise of upstarts like Booyah and an ever-growing potential base of users, virtual goods are becoming an unforeseen form of content that is certainly a force to be reckoned with, given it’s significant revenue generation and popularity.

That’s it for now, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on what the rise of the mobile internet means for other aspects of life — technology, media, culture, life or otherwise. Please provide comments below!

See this post re-blogged on Wall St. Cheat Sheet, Jack: a Blog about Experience Brands (Jack Morton Worldwide’s blog), and Point About.

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Facebook and Google are increasingly going head to head -- for users, functionalities and the advertising dollars that sustain either site.

Facebook’s first triumph comes at no fault of Google’s, whose traffic increased by 9% over the same period last year. Facebook’s traffic, in contrast, nearly tripled, joining fellow social media giant MySpace as one of two sites who have ousted Google from the position of most trafficked site for a full week (last done in September 2007).

Of the Facebook’s second triumph over Google, Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins writes,

“Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook.com are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from News.Google.com. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook.com users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook.com compared to 64% for Google News.”

Returning visitors prefer news provided through Facebook over Google. For example, 81% of visits to CNN.com in the week to March 6, 2010 were returning visitors while 84% of visitors to CNN.com that came from Facebook.com were returning visitors and 72% from Google News were returning visitors.

Though this may seem surprising at first glance, a closer look at a couple different aspects of either site, I think, reveals why this outcome is natural, if not obvious.

2 Characteristics to Consider: Facebook versus Google News

1. Fan Pages & News Feeds: Facebook fan pages are the perfect way for media outlets to consistently reach a targeted, interested audience with their content. Not only is membership opt-in, but new content posted to a given page is streamed into fans’ News Feeds. The only similar offering that Google provides is Buzz, which is a comparatively cluttered, less user-friendly experience in its current form.
2. The Variety of Google News: What makes Google News so appealing to me (and other news junkies, I assume) is that it provides myriad, varied sources that cover the same topic. In other words, there are always a lot of choices on Google News. It’s no wonder, then, that readers are choosing major media outlets less frequently through Google News. In fact, I think it’s a testament to the strength of major media outlets’ brands that they attract so many loyal followers through Google News, despite the available choices.

Beyond structural characteristics, I think it’s also fair to say that context matters. In an online environment surrounded by friends, users are more susceptible to make choices that are consistent with ‘loyal’ behavior. While this may seem like a stretch, considerable research in advertising reveals that cognitive priming of context does, indeed, affect how messages are received.

On that note, I’ll end this post with a funny but relevant cartoon about social media that I came across. Enjoy, and please feel free to share your thoughts!

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Pricing iPad e-magazines provides new opportunities for publishers to get it right this time.

Subject to ongoing battles over who has rights to what, one thing remains certain to both publishers and Apple–content will cost something, unlike most e-newspaper counterparts.

Certain newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, have successfully employed partial pay or pay wall (i.e., pay after a reader has visited more than a certain number of times within a given period) models. WSJ.com boasts over a million pay subscribers for its online content. But, a million pay subscribers certainly isn’t the norm for most news content providers, and even WSJ articles can be accessed for free through backdoor sites like Google News (much to the chagrin of Rupert Murdoch).

Pulitzer Prize winner and former Chairman of Dow Jones & Co. (which publishes the WSJ) Peter R. Kann eloquently describes the decline of print newspapers, the emergence of the ‘free model‘ of online content, and the pricing challenge most newspaper publishers face:

“… by the time Internet editions arrived, the prevailing philosophy in most publishing companies already was that customers could not be expected to pay much for content, that it was easier simply to rely on advertising. The new Internet editions were merely the ultimate extension of that trend: free news to the consumer, total reliance on the advertiser.

But that didn’t quite work out as expected. Online advertising, given virtually unlimited supply and also given clever new competitors like search sites, has been nothing like publishers posited. Online edition ad rates and online edition ad revenues are only small fractions of those in traditional print. And as print advertising continues its steady decline, online advertising cannot come close to compensating.

The print editions still have customers willing to pay for at least a discounted subscription, but there are fewer of the customers as free online editions peel them away from print. And so the publishers are left to juggle their twin products—the old one in inexorable decline and the new one in commercial denial—and pray the future may be somehow different.”

Sadly, many print newspapers seem to be going the way of the dodo, drawing cries of death of the medium, at least as we knew it, from many.

Unlike their faster-moving counterparts, books — in all forms — are doing quite well, financially-speaking. According to the Association of American Publishers, book sales increased year-over-year by roughly 4 percent at $11.2bn for the year. Of those, about $170m were e-book sales, marking roughly 177 percent growth over last year. While not insignificant, e-books grabbed only a little over 3 percent of the total book sales.

Beyond the cost of e-readers, some, like PC World’s Tony Bradley, criticize what they perceive to be e-books’ bloated pricing model. Bradley writes,

“Media businesses–whether music, movies, books, magazines, or newspapers–seem to cling to a pricing model that fails to account for the significantly lower overhead of digital distribution. These entities seem hung up on pricing narcissism, rather than realizing that production costs are different and distribution is almost universal–changing the economics entirely from traditional models.”

Bradley suggests a revenue-focused model, which (to me) makes sense:

“Basically, publishers should be pricing digital distribution based on what it would expect in net revenue from the traditional distribution method, not based on some calculated percentage of the traditional retail price. I don’t know the exact numbers, but If Wiley is only going to net eight dollars when it sells a printed version of my book, then it should create a digital pricing scheme that nets the same.”

Some, like BNET's Eric Sherman, predict that the iPad will 'kill publishing.'

Unsurprisingly, many publishers like Murdoch seem more prone to employ beefier pricing models that hinge on how much people are willing to pay. Can you blame them for wanting a bigger margin?

That said, e-magazines provide a whole new opportunity to find a happy pricing medium that pleases both publishers and readers. Needless to say, the removal of frequent, full-glossy print production costs will reduce publishers’ overhead significantly, allowing them to price e-magazines lower than their costly print counterparts. Better content and more innovative design — enabled by the iPad’s functionality — will allow for the creation of quality multimedia experiences that readers/viewers are willing to pay for.

Central to paid e-magazines working is leaving old models behind–from both a production and consumer standpoint.

Content and design worthy of pay

In many ways, the term ‘e-magazine’ is too antiquated to encapsulate the multimedia, dynamic possibilities of content production and distribution through the iPad. It’s a given that video and audio should be integrated among text, but navigation through content should move beyond a page-by-page linear progression.

The navigational structure of each issue could take on unique properties, linking different portions of content to one another and external sources. Typefaces, sizing and layout could vary dependent on the content and what would be most aesthetically gripping to readers/viewers/listeners — much like magazines are now. To do this, however, developers would play an increasingly important role, taking on tasks akin to layout and design editors of magazines–but with more design elements at their disposal. It’s not just a matter of positioning text, pictures and headlines anymore. It’s creating a dynamic, multimedia experience with which readers and viewers can interact and experience with multiple senses.

In other words, publishers need to envision a medium that consumers are willing to pay for. If publishers utilize the technology to its fullest and give readers/viewers great content in a way they have never experienced it, I predict they will not only make good money, but they will also reverse magazines’ downward trend in recent years. Granted, that’s easier said than done. It may be the case that old magazine houses are too entrenched in their old ways to look into the future, and it may take a disruptive innovator in their industry to catalyze forward motion.

Shifting consumer focus: from price to value and cost

Most good sales people will agree that it is key to shift clients’ focus onto value, as opposed to price. A closer examination of  this notion and  re-reading Kann’s article in WSJ casts some light on how this is relevant to publishers’ making money with their content.

Entrepreneur.com‘s Barry Farber writes,

“…there are customers worth working with, whom you can help understand the difference between price and cost. Price is what they pay for the product or service; cost is what the investment is over the lifetime of doing business. Can you help your customers grow their business in a way they never thought possible?”

In the case of publications, readers and viewers are in the ‘business’ of personal edification. And if publishers can convince their audiences that they convey quality content in a quality way, the cost of an e-magazine becomes an investment in personal edification.

Looking at the difference between e-books and e-newspapers (and WSJ‘s content contrasted with many e-newspapers), the difference is quality. Books take a significantly longer time to write, and readers are thus willing to pay extra for the value of the writer’s labor. The WSJ has unique, quality reporting and a distinct brand, and hence people are willing to pay for the content over free content available on Joe Schmoe’s blog. Admittedly, this is an oversimplification of the issue at stake, and free content isn’t necessarily bad (achem…this blog).

To end, here’s a video demonstration of Wired’s iPad e-magazine, in current form. It’s looking pay-worthy, in my opinion.

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A graphic provided to convey differing opinions on privacy by the The New York Times in its 'Week in Review' Section on February26, 2010.

Contrary to most contemporary intuitions about media treatment of stars like Tiger Woods, the court ruled, as related in an article by MSNBC‘s Bob Sullivan, that:

“…posing for the photographs did not mean Dumas and Menken had surrendered their rights to privacy and dignity, even if they consented to do just that during a heady romantic moment. These rights trumped any commercial property rights the photographer might have claimed, the court said.”

For most Americans, this ruling, along with the recent ruling against three Google executives in Italy for passively allowing ‘privacy-infringing’ videos to be posted on YoutTube, is troubling.

Beyond the need to fine-tune Google’s passive distribution policies for offensive content, this case highlights a deeper ideological divide, which Dumas’ case also exemplified. As The New York Times‘ Adam Liptak writes,

“… it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone.”

In the  abstract (no, I didn’t read the entire paper) of Yale law professor James Whitman’s paper ‘The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty,’ Whitman (or, more likely, some editor of the Yale Law Journal) clearly describes the issues and implications at stake:

Privacy advocates often like to claim that all modern societies feel the same intuitive need to protect privacy. Yet it is clear that intuitive sensibilities about privacy differ from society to society, even as between the closely kindred societies of the United States and continental Europe. Some of the differences involve questions of everyday behavior, such as whether or not one may appear nude in public. But many involve the law. In fact, we are in the midst of major legal conflicts between the countries on either side of the Atlantic–conflicts over questions like the protection of consumer data, the use of discovery in civil procedure, the public exposure of criminal offenders, and more. Clearly the idea that there are universal human sensibilities about privacy, which ought to serve as the basis of a universal law of privacy, cannot be right.

The article (achem…abstract) later argues:

European privacy norms are founded on French and German ideas of “personal honor.” Continental “privacy,” like continental sexual harassment law, prison law, and many other bodies of law, aims to protect the “personal honor” of ordinary French and German folk. American law takes a very different approach, protecting primarily a liberty interest. The Article traces the roots of French and German attitudes over the last couple of centuries, highlighting the French experience of sexual license in the nineteenth century and the German experience of Nazism…

Throughout, the Article argues, American law shows a far greater sensitivity to intrusions on the part of the state, while continental law shows a far greater sensitivity to the protection of one’s public face. These are not differences that we can understand unless we abandon the approach taken by most privacy advocates, since such differences have little to do with the supposedly universal intuitive needs of “personhood.” Instead, they are differences that reflect the contrasting political and social ideals of American and continental law. Indeed, we should broadly reject intuitionism in our legal scholarship, focusing instead on social and political ideals.

For those of you still reading the post after reading through that quote (it might be a bit dry for some), I tend to disagree with Whitman’s rejection of the notion of some universal concept of ‘personhood’, though I also (unsurprisingly) lean toward sympathizing with American ideological and, hence, policy decisions.

The differing opinion lies in what I believe to be a false dichotomy that Whitman presents: between ‘dignity’ and ‘liberty.’ The value of ‘liberty,’ I think, draws its compellent force, like ‘privacy,’ from an intuitive notion of ‘personhood’ or ‘human dignity.’ And so, the dichotomy instead lies between ‘liberty’ and ‘privacy.’

Like most talk of ‘rights,’ however, these discussions are muddled by differing foundational concepts, not to mention differing laws (premised on those differing concepts) across national boundaries.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, we must weigh the value of ‘liberty’ against ‘privacy,’ knowing that that the results will vary by situation. I wouldn’t, for example, value a voyeur’s autonomous choice to spy on someone through a window over the watched person’s desire not to be watched while changing. More broadly, it’s understandable, too, that there should a sliding scale for the threshold of what constitutes tolerable infringements of either value across different cultures and national boundaries.

University of Michigan Internet law professor Susan Crawford also cautions against cagetorical thinking in the aforementioned NYTimes article:

Privacy is a broad enough concept, and Europe and America are varied enough, that it is easy to find counterexamples. Britain, for one, is only slowly moving toward the Continental model.

Something tells me, however, that the ideological divide will continue and deepen as online media continues to proliferate. I wonder how French courts would feel about the sale of copies of of Dumas’ and Mencken’s photos on this NY state-based site.

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Action Comics No.1 (1938), the first appearance of Superman, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.

Earlier this week Action Comics No. 1, which features the first appearance of Superman, sold online for a record-breaking $1m (£640,000).

This event marks an important cultural milestone in media for a few different reasons, all centered on some notion of populism.

1. Internet commerce. The comic was sold through one of the many successful but niche, mom’n pop auction websites borne by the internet age — ComicConnect.com. Unprepared for heavy traffic after news of the sale spread, the site was down yesterday, except for a press release.

From this perspective, Action Comics No. 1′s sale highlights how far internet e-commerce has come. Less than five years ago, making purchases on the internet was a scary thought to many, especially those 55 and older. And the notion that someone would spend up to a $1m on a less-than-secure-looking, website for a comic book would be laughable.

Shortly after I wrote this post, Detective Comics No. 27 (1939), which features the first appearance of Batman, exceeded Action Comics No.1's sale price, going for $1.08m.

ComicConnect.com’s big sale is indicative of a broader trend toward trusting non-big brand e-commerce sites, a sentiment ushered in by trailblazers like eBay and innovated by upstarts like Threadless. As trust in online purchasing burgeons and apprehension dissolves, the internet’s democratization of information will have increasingly populist effects on e-commerce, providing a relatively level playing field for any who aim to sell their wares to the internet’s vast audience.

2. Comic books as high art. Long before recent ventures into new formats, comic books were one of the first popular forms of multimedia art, combining elements of literature and visual art in one medium. For much of their history, however, comic books have been regarded and treated as a low-brow form of children’s literature. But, with the conceptual treatment of mass-produced art in the pop art movement, some artists (like Roy Lichtenstein) took style elements from the medium’s early practitioners and elevated it through their own critically-acclaimed work.

Separately, as many who witnessed comic books’ maturation as a medium are now grown up, academia and other ‘elite’ cultural arbiters have started to treat comic books with some intellectual respect, instead referring to them as ‘graphic novels.’ Action Comics No. 1′s sale marks an important step in elevating a medium to high art: someone paying a boatload of money to acquire a piece of it. Roughly tripling the past highest paid sum for a comic book, the purchase puts comic books in the big league. Hell, auction house Christie’s online hub places the upper end of the price filter for paintings at $600k.

3. The story of Superman and his creators. After five years of failure and waiting, Jerry Siegel and Joel Schuster published Action Comic’s No.1 through National Allied Publications. As two young Jewish men in the American midwest during the early stages of WWII, Siegel and Schuster aimed to create a just and powerful embodiment of their frustration with a world that they perceived as unjust and unlistening to the plights of the powerless. Each, too, had personal stories that contributed to Superman’s inception. Siegel’s father was killed in an armed robbery, and Schuster was refused from military service due to his horrible eyesight.

The rise of Superman’s importance in popular culture, evidenced by Action Comics No.1′s sale, is indicative of a broader ideological trend — the valorization of the outcast martyr. An alien stranded on earth, Superman was raised by human parents to desire the attainment of social justice. As some Superman scholars note:

Among the things that made Superman popular was his fight for social justice, rather than law and order. The Superman of late 1930′s had no qualms about doing all sorts of illegal things in order to right what he felt were wrongs. This included getting confessions out of crooked politicians by threatening to injure or kill them, kidnapping and forcing weapon makers into fighting on the front lines of a war and trapping a Mining Company owner and his rich friends in an unsafe mine that his employees worked in. Some people would criticize Superman and superheroes in general because of these types of stories, saying they taught “might makes right” and were fascist.

And further, as others note, Superman’s experience resembles, in some ways, the plight of unpopular teenagers in high school and Jewish people trying to adapt to an anti-Semitic society. Like their presentations of self to society at large, the character is Clark Kent, and Superman puts on a ‘mask’ (glasses & street clothes) as his disguise as a normal person.

To end, I’ll leave you with a favorite painting of Superman by Alex Ross, one of my favorite ‘graphic novel’ artists. As my vernacular would suggest, I’m a bit of a comic book geek (, which would also explain why I’d write this post…).

Alex Ross' version of Superman.

Note: This post was written days before the sale of Detective Comics No. 27, which features the first appearance of Batman. While Batman’s story is certainly less populist in content (given Bruce Wayne’s elite upbringing and place in life), points 1 and 2 of this post remain extremely relevant. Not only that, but many might posit that, like Superman, ‘Bruce Wayne’ is Batman’s disguise, and Batman is the true character.

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Beyond Status Messages: Google's push into social sharing of updates, photos, videos & more.

Leaked yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, Google announced the deployment of Google Buzz, its exciting foray into providing its own real-time social media platform.

Other Google Social Media Endeavors

To say, however, Buzz is Google’s first social media venture is not quite right. In 2004, Google launched Orkut, its proprietary social network, to little fanfare and minimal Stateside impact to this day. According to demographic reports, over 50 percent of users hail from Brazil, roughly 20 percent from India, and a measly 17 percent from the US.

Interestingly, Google’s nascent real-time social media search has received considerably less media coverage (largely obscured by its release of Google Goggles on the same day and the existence of rivals like Collecta and Bing Twitter), although its ultimate impact on the largely untamed social media landscape, I think, could be tremendous. Echoing Michael Arrington’s sentiment, social media now feels like search did a decade ago. Perhaps Google can be the transformative force in real-time media, as it was in taming the vastness of the internet. Arrington writes:

A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn’t know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn’t imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us immediately.

…

The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.

Google Buzz

Google Buzz may very well be the piece of social media that “unites the clans,” so to speak. While Gmail has allowed its 146 monthly million users (as of July 2009) to update Gchat statuses, this functionality lacked the timeline-view that allows one to view her friends’ update history, akin to viewing friends’ feeds on Facebook and Twitter. While Buzz links to external sites like YouTube and Picasa (which it owns), it also links to Twitter but doesn’t link to Facebook.  After a brief look at some of its other features and factors like competing ID systems, it becomes clear, I think, that Google is taking a big swing at Facebook with Google Buzz.

Multimedia sharing and viewing interface. A demonstration of Google Buzz’s multimedia viewing and sharing tools (see the video posted below) reveals moderately superior tools to Facebook’s. With roughly 15 billion photos (and adding 100 million/mo.) Facebook is quickly becoming the front-runner of user-generated online photo repositories (second only to ImageShack, which is growing at a much slower rate). It’s Facebook’s game to lose, and integration of Picasa into Buzz, which will ride Gmail’s coattails, will breathe new life into Google’s picture-posting positioning (say that three times fast).

Sharing privately and publicly & integration into Gmail. Unlike Facebook or Twitter (I think), Buzz will allow users to share updates with specific users (and only them, if the user so chooses), and will send responses immediately into one’s e-mail inbox. Beyond the benefit of automatically signing up users for Buzz, utilizing its integration into Gmail places Buzz updates in a much more interesting space than a mere update — part broadcast, part e-mail, part private message, all multimedia. A Google buzz communication may altogether become a new medium for communicating content-rich  messages to one or many users.

And further, the demographic ubiquity of Gmail versus the relatively older crowd of Tweeters may make it the preferred broadcasting medium over Twitter, placing it in direct competition with Facebook.

Mashable’s Adam Ostrow, however, makes an interesting point:

… Gmail has historically added people to your contacts based on e-mail interactions. Hence, this contact list often varies significantly from your friends on social sites where relationships need to be made explicitly.

In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.

True story, Adam — but neither Facebook nor Twitter allows updates to reach a specific group of people (as I said, I could be wrong; it seems that the closest thing is Facebook’s multi-user messages). Separately, it’s oftentimes the case that Facebook users don’t want all of their Facebook friends (which include, in many cases, family members, co-workers and others who you’d prefer not to see the “less professional” side of you) to see their updates, and so end up not posting their updates altogether.

That’s my two cents on Google Buzz thus far. Please feel free to send/share thoughts and other articles as the subject gains more media traction. Until then, bask in the glow of Buzz’s demo video below.

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An MQ-1 Predator drone returned from a mission to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with a new paintjob, courtesy of StevenDuque.com.

In his book Wikinomics, business strategist Don Tapscott writes:

“Employees drive performance by collaborating with peers across organizational boundaries, creating what we call a ‘wiki workplace.’ Customers become ‘prosumers’ by cocreating goods and services rather than simply consuming the end-product. So called-supply chains work more effectively when the risk, reward, and capability to compete major projects—including massively complex products like cars, motorcycles, and airplanes—are distributed across planetary networks of partners who work as peers (1).”

According to a recent article in The New York Times, unmanned surveillance drones are currently collecting more video intelligence than analysts are able to handle. The volume of footage taken from last year’s surveillance efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan nearly triple what it was only a few years ago–a grand total of roughly 24 years’ worth of footage, if watched without break. As operations in Afghanistan will certainly escalate in the near future and U.S. troops are withdrawn from both countries over time, the problem of excess, unmanned surveillance will only compound.

What if, as customers of national security, citizens aided the government’s counterterrorism surveillance efforts through mass collaborative online efforts? The government could post snippets of video on a centralized media hub, and citizens could review videos, comment on them, and flag them (if they see something suspicious). The government might even provide incentives for quality interactions — say, a fiscal or honorary rewards for good citizenship. Perhaps other citizens could rate others’ interactions, providing an element of peer evaluation and competition. Government intelligence officers could use the number of unique flags and/or comments to make triage decisions, and users could help screen the verity of flags by giving them a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down.’

Citizens would become ‘prosumers’ of national security, adding value to the end product of counterterrorist intelligence because of their vested interest in U.S. national security.

There are undeniably both interesting and disconcerting aspects of this proposition. I’ll address what I see to be the most immediate issues at stake.

The Big Brother Effect & and Society of Distrust. If implemented, social surveillance should be limited to foreign threats, most would agree. Mass collaborative surveillance of faraway lands would foster national antagonism (in addition to a sense of social responsbility) toward threats external to a nation’s society. If focused inward, however, our trust in one another might suffer from fear of Red Scare-like accusations, akin to how many around the world distrust police. Separately, dislike for Americans in the international community may be exacerbated by citizens’ participation in military surveillance efforts.

Securispam and Poor Intelligence. For those of you familiar with the comment boards of YouTube, you’ll find that some of the comments are sometimes, well, pretty crummy and downright idiotic at times, even on serious videos. Inviting open commentary on quasi-sensitive information could result in a deluge of crappy ‘intelligence,’ not to mention create PR-nightmares that may result from less-than-politically correct commentary that media outlets — both domestic and overseas — catch wind of. Additionally, opening up participation to the online world could create security windows for foreign intelligence operatives to spam video surveillance posting boards with faulty intelligence. Imagine how many times you’ve watched a crummy video or read a stupid article because of how many diggs it received.

Needless to say, there are plenty of holes in my half-baked plan for wikicounterterrorism. But, the problem remains: as our government is increasingly inundated with an endless streams of surveillanc edata, a better system of reviewing what could be important information is needed. While creating an open wiki-hub for commenting and flagging video may not be the right answer, I tend to think there is something right in the proposition to incorporate mass collaborative techniques, at least structurally, into the processes for reviewing large amounts of sensitive data. Whether that means opening up the surveillance data to the American general public or limiting who can access the information — e.g., to government officials and/or outsourced private military companies — the excuse that there’s simply too much surveillance out there will not suffice, if national security threats pass under the radar.

To end this post, I’ll leave you with a  comment from then-Senator Barack Obama on citizen participation in national security efforts:

“”To succeed [in the War on Terrorism], we must improve our civilian capacity. The finest military in the world is adapting to the challenges of the 21st century. But it cannot counter insurgent and terrorist threats without civilian counterparts who can carry out economic and political reconstruction missions – sometimes in dangerous places. As President, I will strengthen these civilian capacities, recruiting our best and brightest to take on this challenge. I will increase both the numbers and capabilities of our diplomats, development experts, and other civilians who can work alongside our military. We can’t just say there is no military solution to these problems. We need to integrate all aspects of American might.”

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An image pulled from DeviantArt by CrapsY (username).

The first was with an old friend, Michael P. (whose facebook profile I took the below quotation from), who forsook the life of  a Harvard-graduated consultant to work in a coffee shop and live as a Central Square hipster. Our conversation, which ranged from ‘catching up’ to ‘big issues,’ gravitated toward Michael’s thoughts on an emergent counterculture that he termed ‘the unplugged’ — that is, those who refuse to subscribe to a lifestyle that increasingly depends on modern technology. A proponent of this lifestyle, Michael made significant efforts in the last couple years to reduce his online footprint, pare down his digital interactions, and do things like increase the size of his record collection and work on a screenplay about an 80′s record producer.

As I understood them, Michael’s views (and those of ‘the unplugged’) are premised on the notion that technology detracts from our lives’ experiences by drawing our attention away from our real-world experiences and interactions. Michael posits that those who are ‘plugged in’ misguidedly reify technological advances as ‘progress.’ While technological artifacts seemingly make our lives better, they actually distance us from one another and definitively human activities — e.g., expressing ourselves through art and engaging the world through our tactile senses (sound familiar?).

The ‘unplugged’ view, I think, tends to overly romanticize the past and a (purportedly) simpler way of socializing, expressing oneself, and interacting with the world. Though I understand the love for and actually tend to prefer activities that more intimately (in a physical sense) connect me to the product of my work, I (and, I think, many others) view technological artifacts as just another set of tools we can use to interact with the world — e.g., a paintbrush, a pencil, a pair of glasses. In other words, technological advances most directly affect media, not expression. Or, more simply, technological advances most directly affect the tools we use, not how we use them.

That said, the forms of expression undeniably change as a result of the given media through which they are expressed. The notion of ‘friendship,’ for instance, has changed dramatically. In a world where roughly 30 percent of the facebook friendships of those between 18 and 24 are people whom they have never actually met, ‘friendship,’ it seems, certainly means something less substantial than what it perhaps once did. For photographers, the development of Adobe’s Creative Suite has changed how they view their craft.

In this light, I think the dichotomy between ‘unplugged’ and ‘plugged in’ is misguided. The analogy implies a reliance upon a sort of technological energy for functionality. But technology is more than that–at least for me. It enriches, enhances and augments my reality; it creates opportunities to share information, connect with others and learn about things I never would have been able to otherwise. In many ways, my subscription to a life filled with technological artifacts is more akin to the Matrix’s ‘jacking in’ — that is, it’s a choice to participate in a whole other experience of reality (I recognize the negative implications that this term may hold. My use of this term is also an admission that there is certainly something lost in exchanging the simplicity of more immediate physical interactions with the world for a view shaped by a world in which technological advances are a given). In contrast, a life without technology, I think, is a rejection of participation in this world and its benefits — and so, I will term it ‘checking out.’

This distinction leads me to think of the second conversation I had on this subject. During my final interview presentation with Jack Morton Worldwide, where I now work in business development, Liz Bigham, the Director of Brand Marketing, asked me if I perceived a pull-back reaction to a world saturated with social media — a desire for real, physical connections with other people. During the interview, my first response was that the nature of interactions is being transformed by media and the capabilities of technology. That is, the line between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ experiences would continue to erode as time progressed, and any desire for ‘physical’ experiences could eventually be entirely satisfied by virtual ones.

But thinking back on this question, I’m not certain this is the case. I anticipate that the ideological divide between ‘jacked in’ and ‘checked out’ peoples will only increase as technologies transform our experiences of reality more dramatically. Michael’s disdain for technology isn’t fading quickly, and there’s something intuitively appealing about his rejection of the ‘jacked in’ life that evokes sympathy. Don’t I also enjoy it when I get out to nature, leave behind my cell phone and computer, and cut myself off from the technological world? But my memory of the practicality of using technology always seems to win out. I like having a world of information at my fingertips, the people I know available at the touch of a button, and the host of possibilities technology provides me. I suppose, though, that’s the divide–some people don’t.

But perhaps there is something to my initial intuition in my conversation with Liz, and the ‘checked out’ counterculture will ultimately have less ammunition to fuel its ideology. At the core of disdain for technology, I think, is disdain for ‘the complex,‘ a purportedly enhanced reality in which our actions must conform to the constraints placed upon them by the limitations of technology. What this disdain fails to recognize is that accompanying the trend of technological complexity is an ever-increasing tendency toward simplicity in design. User interfaces are becoming more elegant and intuitive, despite increasingly complex back-ends. Physically, technological artifacts — e.g., televisions — are also becoming less cumbersome and streamlined. This tendency toward design simplicity will only become more apparent as  futures waves of technological artifacts reach us.

My guess: ‘checked out’ people will resist until Apple comes out with a strong enough ad campaign for its iTablet.

“As I look around the contemporary American scene I am puzzled by what seems generally to pass for a historical object or monument…With us the association seems to be not with our politically historical past…what we cherish are mementos of a bygone daily existence without a definite date. Archie Bunker’s armchair will recall–at least to the present generation–not only the many hours agreeably spent watching television, but also the environment, the setting, of a popular program, though not necessarily the program itself.”
- J. B. Jackson

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