What more can I say?

That is all.

Ch-ch-changes

I just got spammed by Glue, looks like maybe their notifications engine had a little freakout and sent me a bunch of messages I had already received. Which is fine. Part of playing in this new space (both as a producer and a consumer) is sometimes things go awry. Software (i.e. anything on a screen) is in flux, it is not right - just least wrong. And it gets less wrong as people find ways to improve it.

Seeing those messages suddenly arrive though, I'm wondering about the tolerance people have for that. Nobody expected those to arrive (least of all the developers I imagine), and if it had been a major brand, then it would have been annoying. But it came from a service trying to do something good - connect people.

They're a start-up and still getting things figured out, and that is fine. Last year people were fond of droning on and on about Twitter having scaling issues. You know what? They're supposed to!! That is part of building a popular service!! They had scaling issues because they focused on building something people wanted - their server going down on a regular basis meant they were doing their God-damn jobs. In turn you got a service you love for free.

Give. Me. Strength.

Image via CrunchBase

I am fond of banging on and on about my mate Tim saying "If you want to understand change you have to be part of it." And part of that, particularly when playing with services like Glue or FourSquare or whatever it will be tomorrow, is an understanding that this shit is in flux. And it will get better and it will get worse and that is the contract you sign when you join.

It is called the bleeding edge for a reason, things get broken.

And thank God they do.

Smoke on the water

Twitter's Biz Stone (via CrunchBase)

At the recent Web 2.0 conference, Twitter search deals were announced with both Microsoft and Google, something I was pleased to see given about a week earlier I had made the prediction in Digital Strangelove (slide 178) that a deal was imminent with one of them - turns out it was both.

Twitter's Biz Stone has gone on the record saying of all the options they are considering for a revenue model, advertising is the least appealing. My feeling on that statement is this: either they changed their minds, or they've done a deal to monetise the most natural part of their business while they think about the avenues they're truly interested in pursuing. It's akin to having a field of lavender and making a deal with local photographers to let them take pictures, all the while trying to figure out what you really want to do with all that crop.

I could be over-complicating things, an activity that is a favourite of mine as many an ex-girlfriend will attest. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is famous for saying he had little interest in a feature, such as video on an iPod, before revealing it the next quarter. I can't help but feel the web is so eager to answer Twitter's revenue question for them that they've jumped on the first clue that appeared and cried "Case closed!"

Call me paranoid, this one stays open in my book.

I feel the earth move under my feet

There's so much talk about platforms - Facebook-this, Twitter-that, more specific but no better than loose conversations about blogging or podcasts. I overheard someone say "It's OK, there's a slide on Twitter in the client deck", which stopped me in my tracks. These tools are not the kinds of things that make sense when being described; who in their right mind would want to tolerate 140-character updates among a sea of people you barely knew? It in no way describes the vibrancy of using Twitter, nor the opportunities inherent in it.

Your friend and mine Tim Beveridge has a great saying: in order to understand change, you have to be part of it (it probably isn't his saying, but I'm not sure where he got it from, so it's his now).

The point is the best way to explain Twitter to somebody is to take 30 seconds to sign them up, another two minutes to follow some people they might be interested in, and then sit back and let them have at it. On the (often false) assumption you have a strategic reason for using Twitter, if your client doesn't already use it then paying it lip service is not going to get you anywhere. Only by engaging  do people actually understand, or as I just commented over at AVC, being heard is not enough, you must also be understood.

Starting a strategy conversation by talking about a platform is a recipe for disaster. It is like deciding what kind of house you are going to be build based whatever hammer you have handy. It needs to begin with intent. Every. Single. Time.

For those who've just joined us here by way of Digital Strangelove, thanks so much for stopping by. We're going to keep talking about intent for a bit, at least until the rest of the world starts to understand the power of it.

--

Image courtesy of onkel_wart, with thanks to compfight.

You gave you away

A few days ago I posted a presentation on where I think this space is headed. On slide 191 (yes 191) I mention something called The Three Musketeers rule, All For One or One For All. The former is siloed value creation, the latter creates value for an ecosystem.

I realised in the shower last night (keep it clean people) I had actually been thinking about this since November when I drew the below image:

I believe the Internet is, on a DNA-level, structured to create value for an ecosystem, and I believe this is why we're seeing traditional business having a hard time playing in the new landscape, with models being destroyed and a new kind of value creation making waves.

This is also why I'm still on the fence about Facebook over the long term. Nobody can deny their growth or do anything other than applaud getting to profitability. But I feel on an instinctive level the model is All For One, it's old media dressed up in shiny new threads, it's a system that creates value for Facebook alone, and it's questionable if any value is created outside of its walls.

In the presentation I included a slide of companies who are operating with a One For All approach:

[caption id="attachment_826" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Looking for a model?"][/caption]

If over time it transitions into One For All it will be interesting to watch. As it stands now, I can't help but feel it is organised against the natural order of the Internet, which is open and connected. We're seeing what happens when you do that across all kinds of industries, and it being an Internet darling does not exclude it from the same principles.

Even Rome fell people.

I just called...to say...

I have Skype running pretty much constantly on my computer due to being a long way from home. I like being able to talk for free to any of my friends back home, or indeed any friends in other part sof the world, and I look forward to a day when ubiquitous Internet access makes ridiculous carrier plans a thing of the past and blows the communications space wide open, with access for all.

Until that day however, we make do with what we have. And as I was doing this last night a message came in over Twitter from my dad back in Australia. We went back and forth and then I asked him why I never saw him on Skype. He responded with this:



Now, you can argue Skype provides an entirely different service to the above or you can argue that it crosses over in a few really key places. It isn't hard to imagine Facebook implementing its own video chat service, and this was heavily rumoured back in May. Add to this ongoing concerns about the future of Skype's underlying technology, and what we have left is a legacy of arguably Europe's biggest VC success story (in 2005 eBay ponied up ~US$3.3 billion) winding up in the hands of a company that had no idea what to do with it (and may soon go the way of Pets.com).

The ultimate take-away is, for me, about sticking to what you do.

Or put another way, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Let's give them something to talk about

So while waiting for Toronto's subway system to get its act together this morning, I caught Clay Shirky's latest online lecture, given as part of the TED series. The title, "How Twitter, Facebook and cell phones can make history" does a lousy job of conveying the depth of information and the ideas contained within. Back in November I touched on issues around social media and the gross misunderstanding of what was important in this new revolution, making the following statement:

It is a period that will forever be known as a time where it became as easy to create content as it was to consume it. THAT is the important part of what is going on.

Now, I'm on the record as being a fan of smart people agreeing with me, and in this case, Clay's latest talk is bang on the money.

The moment we're living through is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.

He says it far more eloquently than I, granted, and the rest of his talk is loaded with fantastic insights and examples of how technologies, once ubiquitous, develop interesting uses (and not the other way around). The TED Talk is below. Enjoy, then go change the world.

[ted id=575]

Best digital work this week - June 7th, 2009

Hi,

This is an ongoing series I'm doing rounding up the most interesting digital work I've come across in the past week. Sometimes it won't necessarily be new, it's amazing what can slip under the radar. If you find something you think is worth checking out, please leave me a note in the comments!

Cheers,

David

P.S. This post is best enjoyed with some Motown on in the background and a glass of wine/ice-cold beer.

----

This week has been somewhat of an odd one, I've been fixated on augmented reality (henceforth referred to as "AR") and have thus been scouring the web in search of the latest and greatest while trying to concoct ways to foist it on clients. Aside from just geeking out over it though, I really think there's an opportunity to tell some interesting stories in ways that have previously eluded marketers. Mini started off with a cute but ultimately shallow AR spot, I like what Ray Ban have done though, upping the stakes ever so slightly and making sure to use the medium to do something others can't (THE rule of ANY advertising: what can we do here that our friends in other disciplines can't?).

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAHYadYNz0w"]

As has been called out in other places however, not offering the option to "BUY NOW!" is a wasted opportunity.

In the interests of pushing things forward, I also came across a mad genius Russian raising the interactivity stakes, creating an environment virtual characters could interact with and makign it accessbile from your mobile (if your mobile happens to be a Nokia N95).

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyWVH6jkDHg"]

And I couldn't bring this up without of course pointing you in the direction of a video I found and lost a long time ago, bless the Japanese for all they have brought us:

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JOM6Y_88Nc"]

Experiential markteters: take this and run with it. Please.

Now, as I am a big proponent of brands getting more into the facilitation of experiences and services in more of a sponsor sort of way, I was a big fan of this new webservice, Supercook. The premise is simple: punch in the ingredients you have lying around and let Supercook display recipes that match what you already have in the pantry.

[youtube="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMAr8p6UdQY"]

Dear Heinz,

Why are you not all over this?

Hugs and kisses,

Gillespie.

Moving on, in a great example of transparency, however cultivated I'm sure it is, I had no idea the Obama White House was running its own Flickr photostream. All companies who sell people-powered service please take note: putting a human face on what you do will always, always bring your customers closer to what you do. Next thing you know there'll be a Get Satisfaction feedback form on the official White House page.

Adding another section to platform cold war going on right now, a game called Spymaster has launched a closed beta. "What is so special about a game being in closed beta?" I hear you ask. Well, not much, except it has been built on and is to be played using Twitter. Mashable have a great round-up of it, and while this shouldn't be all that surprising given the myriad of web services already available, it's interetsing to see people extend Twitter's platform into a realm of sheer entertainment.

Last but not least, I couldn't help but share this Brazillian site encouraging people to...errm...urinate while in the shower as opposed to the toilet. I can't say it's a practice I'll be indulging in, and while I risk exposing myself for the hypocrit I am by including this site even amidst the lack of meaningful interaction between the site and its visitors beyond obligatory links out to various social networks, the execution is lovely and put a smile on my face.

Really, what more can we ask than that?

Saddle up your horses, we got a trail to blaze

Over at Mashable I caught site of a service called RT2Buy (from company Twitpay) which is hooked into Twitter and PayPal, allowing purchasing and money transfer over the space of 140 characters. In exposing platform upon which people could build services early on, Twitter made a very savvy move which puts it head to head with the likes of Facebook, Microsoft etc. in more ways than one.

While people continue to duke it out at a site level, I'm super-bullish on the browser-as-platform. Instead of waiting for traffic to reach a site before it is meaningful, the experience remains with you regardless of where you travel to online.

I commented over at AVC acknowledging the barrier to entry that exists for browser extensions, and said perhaps application developers for Facebook, Twitter and other platforms will find interesting ways to extend the experience into the browser.

My thinking is a popular game on Facebook could potentially be extended into the browser and played when not actually on the site. Yes it is the long way around, but I think the fix will arrive via a combination of it being relatively easy to do AND having it heavily incentivised. Games, photo-sharings apps etc. already with a large audience on Facebook seem to be like the most direct path at this point.

This ties back to my whole thing about seeking out great digital work that is uniquely digital; that is to say, taking advantage of the things you can do with digital platforms that you can't do with any other. There are ways we can open the browsing experience up that will appeal to a mass audience.

Whoever figures that one out is going to have a handle on a wide open space that leapfrogs everyone.

--

Image courtesy of Eduardo Amorim with thanks to compfight.

I could never take the place of your man

When I made games, every now and then I'd see a project underway where all the code was written by a single individual. That individual would invariably write it in such a fashion that it was only decipherable by them. This became an issue when the project got sufficiently far along that there wasn't time to re-write the core code (it became, in other words, "too big to fail". Har har). The company would then be in an interesting position - they could fire the programmer and lose the work, they could assign someone else to work along side the programmer who would no doubt have the most miserable job in the whole building deciphering and documenting the spaghetti or they could...? I don't know.

I was thinking about this as I reviewed the top 100 brands on Twitter. Upon investigation there should be a massive asterisk which leads you to "In April. Over a few days." - but this is not the point. The list itself is a collection of the usual suspects, and where possible their Twitter name is included and linked to.

What I find interesting here is at #21 Ford appears. Not just Ford though - Ford's social media evangelist, Scott Monty. Nowhere else on this list does an individual appear alongside a company listing, in fact nowhere else does an individual appear at all.

[caption id="attachment_667" align="aligncenter" width="373" caption="Is Ford or Scott Monty doing well here?"][/caption]

We can assume, at some point, Scott won't work for Ford. This creates an interesting dillemma wherein an individual not tied to the company potentially takes the good will built up with them when they leave. We've seen this previously with community managers, but it has for the most part remained within the confines of tech companies. Less risky strategies have been seen from the likes of Southwest Airlines where they encourage their employees to blog and engage in social media, but do a good job of tying it under a single site.

Personally, I'm a big fan of putting a human face on this sort of initiative, in fact I don't think it works without it. It will be interesting to see however how it plays out once Scott no longer calls Ford home.

I really believe you can't pay someone to engage, you can only reward them for it. In this case, the reward is a job.

But this is why you can't just pull in the new recruit from the marketing team to take up the mantle. If they don't already engage, they're not going to do it because of a paycheque, not in a way that resonates.

Because that can't be bought.

Is it me you're looking for?

Clearly it hasn't been as long for everyone.

As Twitter's Chief Architect, Blaine Cook caught the brunt of the Twitter community's frustrations over the micro-blogging service's frequent downtime. He left the company earlier this year and has now joined Yahoo! to work on a service called FireEagle, apparently similar to Twitter but focussed on user-location.

Twitter's issue was a popular service which struggled to scale. Yahoo! already has scale, but struggles with services that offer value. Perhaps this is a perfect fit?

(By the by, if you're on Twitter, so am I)

Spam sam spam spam...

Just saw Andrew Cafourek Twitter the following: Best SPAM ever: "There is this huge amount of ($2.800.000) dollars which my late father deposited with a bank before being assassinated..."

I love the idea of one of these actually being legit. A Nigerian Princess sitting there thinking "WTF? I'm a fucking Princess!! Doesn't ANYONE want to marry a princess!?!?"

Terribly amusing. If only for me.

Twitter, its users, and the notion of "free"

There's been a lot of chatter lately around Twitter and its inability to remain online consistently. The service is doing its best to scale but it doesn't not seem to be improving reliability overall. People are threatening to leave, which isn't a great sign for something still very much in 'early-adopter' stage, but I find the whole thing largely amusing, and I really think the user base needs to just chill out.

Twitter itself came about almost by accident. The company behind it, Obvious had the foresight to spin it off into its own entity and remain as a investor; such a shrewd move to be sure, one that could only be born out of the experience of selling Blogger to Google and getting another company - Odeo - to a stage where it could be acquired.

To put the events around Twitter into context, let me explain the perspective I have on it. I used to make video games for a living, a job I enjoyed for the most part. Some of the best times we ever had were when we saw people do things in the game that we hadn't actually intended; it's referred to as emergent gameplay; and basically you create a set of tools and the player manages to solve puzzles according to what make sense to them (it's a little more complicated than that, but that definition works none the less) - you give someone what they need and then see what they do with it.

Prior to Twitter launching, I don't think very many people could have seen it as something they needed. Trialled initially out of curiosity than anything, people users have come to love the service. Not only that, but they applied it to different situations, certainly ones that went beyond the original vision for the application. That great, but what it means is Twitter is being used for things it wasn't designed to do. Obvious, being the clever folk that they are have embraced the behaviour rather than hinder it, spawning new micro-behaviours such as "live" or "event" tweeting, taking live blogging to a new platform altogether, along with the conversation around it.

Cue major events, marketing/tech conferences, elections, natural disasters. The Twitter service suffers because of overload on the infrastructure. People in turn start complaining that Twitter isn't reliable, or scaling appropriately. Yes a few events have taken place where it has become obvious that work needs to be done on their backend, but what the tech was created for and what it was applied to are different things. Obvious are being smart and doing their best to run with that, but it is going to take some time to get right.

What it means is we have a service which is still very much in beta but that people have come to rely on the same way they rely on pieces of software that cost them hundreds if not thousands of dollars. What a fantastic development!! Unfortunately people forget it didn't cost them anything to arrive at this point and expect the same level of service they get out of their commercial software.

I think everyone needs to take a deep breath and acknowledge Twitter is a fantastic service that is having some growing pains. We're such an instant and on-demand culture nobody seems willing to acknowledge it just might take a little time to build it into the service it can be. Twitter could never say this themselves, their users would revolt and call them arrogant. But I'm on their side.

And I think they're doing a great job.

Twitter; the new talkback?

A good friend just asked me if I really thought Twitter was going to take off, and I guess around that are a host of questions on the value it offers to its users. Maki has some great thoughts on ways it adds value to its users (thanks to Jennifer Laycock for the link), but one thing that just occurred to me as my friend asked the question and I glanced at my laptop to see the conversations roll past is that it seems to operate the same way talk-back radio did (or does for those who still listen to radio).

My Dad pointed out to me years ago the things the talk-back guys were discussing were invariably the things that made newspaper headlines the next day. In the same fashion, the conversations on Twitter revolve around other newsworthy pieces of information. They may not make the front page of the New York Times, they may not even make the front page of the New York Times website, but they will invariably make it up on somebody's blog, read by any number of people from one to a million.

In this fashion, I love Shel Israel's notions of global neighbourhoods. I am not American but I am about as interested in the US election as a foreigner could be, and because of this I can discuss the goings on today in Florida with people actually State-side and engage in a discussion about it; I doubt there's an audience for US politics large enough on Australian talk-back radio to make it worth anybody's time to take the subject on. It also reminds me of something I think I read in The Black Swan, but I can't quite remember; you can have only three readers for your blog, but those readers are the presidents of America, China and Russia, your influence out-games the raw numbers...there's more there I think...

So with the understanding that a blog readership, no matter how small can have a significant impact on the (on and offline) world around the writer, and for a percentage of those posts to have origins in conversations on Twitter, then I think there is a role for it to play as a topic is started by The World™, discussed on Twitter, generating a blog about that discussion which incites further discussion and winds up any number of places. Or as James Governor ironically pointed out (via Marshall Kirkpatrick), if markets are conversations then Twitter is money.

*After-thought* I went back over to Twitter to think some more and saw a note from Loic about Seesmic. If Twitter is the start of a new talk-back, Seesmic is where it is going (additional thoughts on that as I get more into the service...)

Carts and Horses; Forrester's POST Methodology

The second anyone says the "M" word to me, my eyes roll back in my head and I'm out for the count; call it subjective narcolepsy, some things just cannot hold my attention, no matter how hard they try.

With that in mind it comes as a great surprise that I find myself blogging about Forrester's POST Methodology, a copy of which was sent to me by the equal parts affable and amiable Josh Bernoff, VP and Principal Analyst over at Forrester. It's timing was somewhat ironic, given I had just implemented a strategy that went about things in exactly the opposite direction the POST document suggests. Funnily enough, they got it right (me less so...).

POST stands for People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology and can be broken down in the following ways:

People -Who are the people using our service and what technologies are they currently engaged in?

Objectives - What are our business goals for this audience?

Strategy - How will achieving those business goals change our relationship with this audience?

Technology - What technology best supports the above?

The entire thing is, in hindsight, common sense, but having sat in far too many meetings now where executives decried the need for Facebook applications without any thought process behind it (beyond "Because everyone is doing it!!!"), something like this comes at just the right time.

I have been guilty of this in the past too, having recently implemented a Twitter feed on my company's homepage. Now I can still justify this from a business point of view, that isn't what bothers me. My problem centres around the goals I had for using Twitter. I envisaged a conversation with our users, live support, instant community (just add water). All of these are great, achievable, inherently good things to work towards and we will continue to do so. I left one tiny piece of the puzzle out though, and while perhaps in hindsight I had the OST down pat, it doesn't actually count for anything.

Because our company's audience is still enthralled by Facebook.

Because our company's audience are not at the core of the early adopter segment of digital societies.

Because our company's audience has no fucking idea what Twitter is. Nor do they care (right now).

That may change, it may not. It depends on how Twitter continues to grow, how it evolves, how much sense it makes to people in the coming months. But given the process that POST outlines, I would have noticed straight away that we have two audiences, not one, and the technologies at their core are mobile (SMS) and social networks, heavily skewed towards MySpace and Facebook. Those techs are relevant to both audiences, and while they require different strategies for interaction, it would have meant a more focussed effort on our part.

The advantage with Twitter is it is a low-cost, low-risk strategy to implement; the worst that can happen is nobody in our audience uses it, the best is it achieves everything I had hoped for and more; the upside greatly outweighs the down (hat tip to Nassim for that lesson). We'll still continue on a path of developing strategies in technologies that are yet to be proven (largely because we're able to), but I will personally spend more time in the future identifying the core audience for a project and not get carried away like the "Facebook" execs I derided earlier.

Happens to the best of us I guess...for more advice along this path, check out the method for yourself. Alternatively it is also available in handy book form. These Forrester guys just think of everything.

Ten Rules for Web Startups

I never seem to close Firefox properly and as a result some pages I looked at ages ago keep cropping up. One of those is a post from November 2005 - I know, how could anything in this day and age still be relevant two years on. The post is situated on a blog run by Evan Williams, founder of Obvious Corp who are responsible for a little site you may have heard of.

The post in question is titled "Ten Rules for Web Startups", it's something I go back to and re-read each time I find it loading up. Some of the insights are obvious, some less so, but they're all worth touching back on from time to time, particularly for those of us actually in this space. Careful to appear more of a guru than he is, my favourite is the bonus 11th post:

"#11 (bonus!): Be Wary - Overgeneralized lists of business "rules" are not to be taken too literally. There are exceptions to everything."

The previous 10 points are well worth your time. An added bonus is this more recent article on evaluating new product ideas. Equally worthwhile.

Australia vs. India Test, live on Twitter!

Twitter.com/baggygreen

Apparently social media is reaching deeper than I thought...

Let's see how far we've come...

I twittered this morning about how there were two books being read, one newspaper and a magazine but I was the only one reading from a BlackBerry on my way to work, a timely reminder that if you don't pop your head outside the bubble (no, not that kind of bubble...) every now and then, your perception of reality can be so far off as to be unrecognisable.


ANYWAY, cue quote: "We have built this from a brand owner’s perspective." Paul Hurley, CEO of Ideeli, quote found by way of GigaOM. No. No no no. No no no no no no no. How many times do we need to go through this? To shamelessly mis-quote Bono, the war is over, we don't need your help, the brands are waging war on themselves. I saw a great quote yesterday I wish I could remember where, it was essentially "Newsflash - we're not markets, we're people." I was somewhat disheartened to see they had raised capital while spouting utter crap like that, but $3.8 million doesn't actually get you all that far these days, so I welcome a post in the not too distant future from Mike Arrington announcing a descent into the deadpool. I don't ever wish failure on anyone, unless their thinking is so far behind that some sort of Darwinian theory for business must be invoked.

Making me feel better though is this and this. The former taking Web 2.0 enhancements with you wherever you go (equal parts crucial and awesome) and the latter an ode to the 60-year old transistor and a pondering of how long Moore's Law can hold out. Both take us closer to a mobile future, and my experience on the tram this morning will surely become a thing of the past sooner rather than later. We'll then find out if you can indeed have too much of a good thing.