While I like and use Facebook and Twitter, there’s enough hype and abuse of words like innovation, transformation and revolution around all things social media that a critique is warranted - if only to  take a shot at calibrating how people talk about this stuff. I hope this post is used whenever someone feels they’re being sold something phony or that makes little sense and wants a skeptical opinion to help calibrate where the truth is.

For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on, lived out its own rise / hype / boom cycle years ago and was smartly ignored this time around - first rule of PR is never re-use a dead buzzword, even if all that you have left are stupid ones. I’ve been involved in many stupid terms, from push-technology to parental-controls, so I should know when I see one.

That said, here’s some points not made often enough:

1. We have always had social networks. Call them families, tribes, clubs, cliques or even towns, cities and nations.  You could call throwing a party or telling stories by a fire “social media tools”. If anything has happened recently it’s not the birth of social networks, it’s the popularity of digital tools for social networks, which is something different. These tools may improve how we relate to each other, but at best it will improve upon something we as a species have always done. Never forget social networks are old. The best tools will come from people who recognize, and learn from, the rich 10,000+ year history of social networks.
2. There has always been word of mouth, back-channel, “authentic” media tools. In Gladatorial Rome, in Shakespearean England and in Revolutionary America, motivated individuals had ways to express their ideas and share them. Call it gossip, poems, paintings or pamphlets, there is a long history of individuals taking action to express opinions through non-official channels. The ease of using these channels changes over time, but they always exist because #1 always exists.  Of note, IRC predates some, but certainly not all, of the features twitter is heralded for introducing to the world.
3. The new media does not necessarily destroy the old. TV was supposed to kill radio - this was wrong. TV forced radio to change and in some ways improve. The web forced TV, newspapers and magazines to change, and they will likely survive forever in some form, focusing on things the web can not do well.  Its unusual for new thing to completely replace the old ones and when they do it takes years. Anyone who claims social media will eliminate standard PR or mass media is engaging in hype, as odds are better those things will change and learn, but never die. It’s wise to ask what each kind of media / marketing is good and bad for and work from there.
4. Social media consultants writing about social media have inherent biases. It’s difficult to take posts like this about social media seriously, as it’s written by someone from a social media consulting firm without an ounce of humility or perspective. It’s hard to come across as authentic if you promote a revolution that you personally stand to benefit the most from. Much writing about social media is PR people writing about the importance of PR - see a problem of authenticity here? When did PR, like advertisers, become a reliable source for what is authentic? How is SEO optimization, or similiar techniques for twitter, authentic? When a system becomes popular the greedy will game it and social media is no different. We should be worried when people with PR and advertising backgrounds or consulting firms are leading us in the ways of authenticity or integrity. The Twitter Book, from my publisher O’Reilly, takes a surprisingly reasonable, authentic and low-hype approach to social media I wish was more popular.
5. Signal to Noise is always the problem. I’m someone who would rather read 5 or 10 really good things every day, than skim through 50 or 100 mediocre ones. I find all social media frequently consists of people re-forwarding things they were forwarded that almost none of them appear to have read, as they believe they are rewarded for publishing frequently above all else. Using twitter and digg I often feel I’m in the minority since what’s popular is rarely what’s good.  If you are interested in quality, and not volume, than the size of your network matters less than the value of what’s in it. I’m more fascinated by how kottke.org and metafilter.org have kept such high signal to noise ratios for years than I am about most media tools I see.
6. All technologies cut both ways and social media will be no different. For all the upsides of any invention there are downsides and it takes time to sort out what they all are. Blogs and Twitter have made self promotion, and self-aggrandizement, acceptable in ways I’ve never seen before, and I’m guilty myself. Is it possible to write or publish without self promotion? I don’t know anymore. I suspect digital tools for social media may have the negative effect of making authentic communication harder, not easier to find, as more people, and corporations, hover right on the gray dividing line between authentic and corporate, or selfish and generous.
7. Be suspicious of technologies claimed to change the world. The problem with the world is rarely the lack of technologies, the problem is us. Look, we have trouble following brain dead simple concepts like The Golden Rule.  Millions starve to death not because we lack the food, but because of greed and lack of political will.  We will largely behave like idiots on blogs and on twitter because we behave that way in real life. Every technological revolution must contend with the fact that we bring our stupidity, selfishness and arrogance along for the ride with our generosity, wisdom and love (12for12k.org being a great positive example). This is true for any new technology we use, and invariably its this fact that plays itself out and ruins the current technological wave, setting up the frustrated landscape for the next one.  Democracy, steam power, electricity, telegraphs, telephones, televisions, the Internet, and the web have all been heralded as the arrival of Utopia, and although there has been progress in each wave, it seems there are things we want that technological change can not bring to us.
8. Always ask “What problem am I trying to solve?” The smartest thing to do with something new is to ask what is it you need it to do for you. Recognize  good marketing will not make up for bad products or incompetent services.  If your company is marketing itself well to customers, or your social life is fine, perhaps you don’t need a revolution and need something much simpler and more realistic from social media. Spend time figuring out what you need. If you want to experiment and see for yourself, that’s awesome, but know that’s what you’re doing. But above all use whatever media/communication tools or methods work for you, whether they are old or new, no matter what anyone says, including me.

If you liked this post, you might also like my general purpose essay, How to detect bullshit.

Update: @jmichelle posted a response, In defense of social media, on O’Reilly Radar. I responded in the comments.

Posted in Innovation, Web 2.0 / social software, politics, rant | 55 Comments »

Interesting analysis by fellow Harvard Business blogger John Sviokla about Microsoft’s missed opportunity to enter the social network game:

Microsoft’s Outlook may be the world’s Rolodex, but they have not figured out how to link up all the latent connections that sit inside our Outlook address books. Put another way, they have the ends of the network, but don’t know how to tie them together!

In your email is a latent network of most of the people you know, and how often you talk with them. The Outlook add on - not made by Microsoft - called Xobni (pronounced ZOBNEE, and named for Inbox spelled backwards) looks through all the mail on your machine and figures out who knows whom by who is copied on which emails. In other words, your emails naturally contain your social network. It would be easy for Microsoft to simply ask your permission to contact the people in your email list, and Outlook contact database, and ask them if they were willing to join your Microsoft social network.

(Sviokla’s full post)

There is a ton of social network data in our cell phones (who do you call/text most often? Talk longest with?) and email applications, and a simple app could mine that data and build, or at least enhance, networks from it.

The problem is that for many people Outlook is no longer the primary contact list. Anyone using Linked-in or Facebook depends on those sources as virtual contact lists. Facebook wisely offers to import contacts from many sources when you create your account.

The surprising thing to me is that there isn’t a wikipedia, or craigslist, of social networks. A free, non-corporate, social network that protects it’s users by charter against the pressures of corporate raiding of personal social information.

Posted in Web 2.0 / social software | No Comments »

Thanks to Brady Forrest and Jen Pahilka for giving me not one but two slots this week in a high caliber lineup. It was awesome to meet and talk to so many folks in just a few days (talking to people is always where the value is). (Photo credit: James Duncan Davidson).

Its been awhile since I’ve been to a big tech conference around a singular theme (web 2.0) during its rise. To see both the promise and the hype swirling around together made for a fun couple of days. Walking the expo floor, where vendors and companies demo and pitch for your pleasure, gave me flashbacks to Internet World in ‘96 and ‘97. Back then, there were a zillion “push technology” companies, services and products. Now it’s “social media” or “web 2.0″, with a zillion companies all throwing the same jargon around and mostly failing to distinguish themselves from one another.

There are certainly good ideas in the mix, and I think Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky’s opening keynotes did more than any company I saw to speak for those ideas, or even attempt to describe what substance might surface from all the technology, energy and money bouncing around.

The problem for me is how infrequently people investing their lives making these things can describe how, at the end of the day, all of the potential described gets transfered into value. Or why the value provided is worth the risks and costs of using whatever they are selling (register for this, buy that, use this, etc.) It’s not a complex question, but it is the primary one I’m sure many attendees were asking: how much substance and takeaways can I fish out of the buzz?

I wasn’t surprised, but I didn’t hear anyone mention how many amazing things are made, in 2008, by organizations with little interest in web 2.0 concepts - namely Apple, Toyota, your favorite film director, or your favorite music band. Not to mention all of the great amazing things the world produced before 1994 (the year the web, even in 1.0 form, was born). That’s not to say this alone proves anything - my point is only this: it is possible to achieve amazing things, without -insert name of current trend here-. Thriving communities, tribes, and cultures have existed for ages. If its possible to do well without whatever the new secret sauce is, it suggests there’s an underlying element that’s not being talked about. I’m convinced there is a more refined explanation for what people might gain from buying what the expo vendors are selling, but very few people seemed capable of even suggestion one.

The unspoken nugget / explanation / marketing line that might get me jazzed is this:

We have always been collaborative. Always been social. It’s in our genes and it’s what we have evolved to do well. Good technologies enhance our natural abilities, give us useful artificial ones, and help us to get more of what we want from life. Web 2.0 and social media make the process of collaboration and developing relationships more fun, efficient, powerful and meaningful.

Ok. Now we’re talking. With a statement like this I can walk the halls of the expo, or converse with the greatest web 2.0 pundit, and have a straight conversation. Will this get me more of what I want from life? More of what my customers want from me, or vice-versa? I can make tangible arguments about what I want or my customers need and sort some decisions out. But note that the statement above is devoid of hyperbole like revolution, ground breaking, disruptive or transformative, things that are entirely subjective. If you identify a real problem well enough, you never need those words: the people who have those problems will naturally find what you do revolutionary if you really solve their problems.

Ok, enough industry talk. Here’s some shop talk for anyone that saw me speak: I’d give my performance at my innovation workshop a B and the keynote a C+. The keynote was mostly new material and, surprise, I never found my rhythm. I gave it my best but it wasn’t a great 10 minutes. The other funny thing is that the tech crew warned me the remote doesn’t go backwards - it’s kamikaze style - a warning I shrugged off as I couldn’t imagine in a ten minute talk needing to go backwards. Well, guess what, I did. I could have asked them to go back if I’d wanted but didn’t, it wouldn’t have saved my performance anyway :)

Workshop slides here: How to Innovate on Time

Posted in On Tour, Software/Web development, Web 2.0 / social software | 5 Comments »

Check out isolatr. Currently in public beta. Everything you need to know can be found here.

Posted in Web 2.0 / social software, humor | 2 Comments »

I don’t write about it often but I’m a huge film fan. For awhile now I’ve known about the works at Overcast Media, but they’ve been in stealth mode, under the radar.

Finally, with this coverage by the Seattle Times, I’m free to tell you: If you’ve ever wanted to create your own DVD commentary, or make commentaries for TV shows or other media, you’re in for a pleasant surprise.

Roger Ebert and others have talked about this idea for years, and finally it looks like someone is making it happen.

Their new beta release is invite only - but you can sign up for an invitation right now.

(Disclosure: Richard Stoakley, Overcast Media’s CEO, is an old friend. He had the office across the hall from mine at Microsoft on the Internet Explorer team, circa 1997)

Posted in Innovation, Web 2.0 / social software | 1 Comment »

FOO Camp saw the power combo of two different social software technologies: Crowdvine, a linked-in type system for pre & post conference connection making, and pathable (which I first saw at Bizjam) for guiding people in finding folks to meet.

Here’s a short review:

It works and its fun. Bravo! The premise is simple: weeks before the event log in, list some tags, and ping people you might know attending the event. It’s easy to find people who share your interests (via tags), read their bios, and ping them if you so desire. There’s a comment system so you can leave notes which was surprisingly active, and public: going to the home page for the site shows all activity, from blog posts made by an individual, to comments sent or received. Anyone can jump in on the threads which was interesting (and I wondered if it’d work for a 500 or 1000 person conference).

At a minimum crowdvine helped me match faces to names before the event which is a big deal for networking or meeting specific people. And it was voluntary - had I been annoyed or less social, I didn’t have to participate at all.

Pathable provided the event badges, fueled by their social matching system - based on tags and other magic they grouped individuals by interest (represented by the color of each badge and the color of the crowdvine profile, see photo above) and created the surprisingly popular matches/opposites lists for every person.

Much like at bizjam, the badges got people talking. It made introducing people to each other much easier as being someone’s opposite or match was an easy way to start a conversation.

Gripes:

Only problems were mild integration issues. There was a wiki for FOO that didn’t integrate with anything else, a photo wall, with tagish Q&A, at FOO that had different photos for people than crowdvine, little things like that that I’m not sure need to be fixed. Someone needs to do a user experience analysis on how many different places and systems ask for personal/social info and check that any redundancies are useful or fun in some way.

After the event I noticed it was possible for me to track what sessions I’d been to in Crowdvine, but wasn’t sure why it was worth the time - perhaps to follow up with people I’d met but didn’t grab their contact info? Not sure.

Summary:

Not sure how much these folks charge, but smart conference organizers should be hiring these folks. Conferences talk the talk about connecting people and building networks, but rarely do anything to facilitate it. Crowdvine and pathable are real tools to help make that stuff happen.

Posted in Teaching/Training, Web 2.0 / social software | 6 Comments »

I experienced an innovation doubleheader last week. First, the inaugural Bizjam event in Seattle, where several hundred independents got together to learn and network, jam and mingle. First conference I’d ever seen aimed at this crowd and it went really well - Kudos to Dan, Lara and all the biznik folks.

But one particular bit of cleverness was their hiring of WaggleLabs to create custom conference badges using their Pathable system.

Now mind you, I hate conference badges. They make me feel like a 12 year old in a self-help group, and they’re often so big, ugly and annoying to wear that I often hide them in my pocket - Really, I can introduce myself and meet people without them. But this was new, fun, easy and it worked. Here’s the rundown:

1. Fill out a short form. Could do this online before or at the event. Took about 3 minutes.
2. Pick up the badge. This took another minute or so.
3. Talk to people about their badges. Each badge lists tags, and two groupings: people you have high affinity (Most similar), and low affinity with (Most opposite), based on your answers.

The effect was obvious: it gave everyone something easy to talk about, even if just to compare colors, or to ask people if they knew any of the people on your list.

They had a projector up in one hall listing all of the groupings the colors represented, and I had several conversations with people about that alone.

Posted in Innovation, Teaching/Training, Web 2.0 / social software | 4 Comments »

Much of the current web 2.0 vibe was born by the folks who started the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL (first online community), and Wired magazine.

Well, here in this panel interview are the founders of all three: Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, and Howard Rheingold, talking about how it started, why they did what they did, and what they think of where we are today.

80 minutes long in Realvideo format. Skip to ~15 minutes in to bypass the various intros.

Posted in Innovation, Web 2.0 / social software | No Comments »

Rather than torture y’all with my first foray into liveblogging, I’m writing live comments, insights, and brlliant notes on each and every session.

Check it out here: Ideaconference blog.

Tags: idea2006

Posted in Design, On Tour, Web 2.0 / social software, architecture (real) | No Comments »

Back at the Emerging technology conference I presented a quick and dirty makeover of several popular web 2.0 sites and UI idioms (See slides for my talk: data vs. design). The fun and much loved Del.icio.us was one and here’s a makeover recap.

Step 1. The popular page

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site, and the /popular page shows which bookmarks in the del.icio.us system are most popular - but the layout uses open flow, blue on pink text (eek), and sloppy columns which all contribute to making the page hard to scan.

Step 2. Make a grid

The most basic layout trick in the world is the grid - throw down some columns and check how the stuff in the design lines up. The more things that don’t line up, the more work people’s eyes have to do. In this first photo, look at how the del.icio.us design compares against a simple 3 column layout. Not well.

In the next screen I’ve marked every visual column that the existing layout creates - each one of these lines is a point in horizontal space people’s eyes are forced to track to each time they try to read the next line - that’s a lot of wasted energy (and time).

Step 3. First pass

As a first pass, I’ve aligned all text into 3 columns. I killed the blue on pink, switching to black. I’ve also trimmed all the extra text from the pink brick, trimming its size by half.

Step 4. Second pass

After 15 minutes of experimentation, I was able to pull the data down into two complete, easily scannable columns. I brough back slim color bricks, but forced them into three buckets (light pink = low, pink = medium, intense pink= high) as that’s enough to indicate how popular they are, but keeping them easily distinguishable (And yes, there are better color choices to go with blue/black but I’m lazy in no-frills makeovers).

Step 5. Side by side comparison

Here are the two designs side by side, original on left and my quick makeover on right. My makeover fits more data into the same space, is faster to scan, easier to read, and slightly more attractive. It’s both easier to scan titles and which items are most popular.

Summary

• If you’re a data centric site, be fast, clean and lean.
• Use a grid or basic columns to frame the layout, and speed user eye movement.
• Trim extra text - especially if you’re repeating things every line.
• Use colors to signify and speed understanding, grouping data together (high / medium / low) to speed comprehension.
• (And yes I cheated in some screenshots as the examples don’t match perfectly - but you got the idea, didn’t you?)

What’s next?

Have a popular site you’d like me to throw some design mojo at? Name it.

Posted in Design, Web 2.0 / social software | 5 Comments »

I’ll be speaking at E-tech in San Diego on Data vs. Design: UI design in a Web 2.0 world. I’ve never been to e-tech before, but it’ s largely about new ideas, entrepreneurship and what’s coming next. Should be fun.

Let me know if you’ll be there.

Posted in Design, On Tour, Web 2.0 / social software | No Comments »

Here’s a good short essay about lessons learned from the founder of blink, a 1999 social bookmarking effort.

This really shouldn’t sound too different from what del.ico.us was able to do, and we had something like $13 million to play with to make it happen. Not to mention that there were others with the same idea. Remember Backflip? So (besides the money), why did we fail and del.ico.us and the other Web 2.0 companies succeed?

Kudos to Ari for being honest and open about lessons learned on design, business and timing. Wish there was more of this kind of thing.

Posted in Design, Management, Software/Web development, Web 2.0 / social software | 3 Comments »