MediaFlect: Facebook

Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts

Social Media's Nuanced Differences

In the Social Journalism Educators group on Facebook (which I believe is invite only), @emilybell of Columbia U's Tow Center alludes to a great point: Understanding the differences among social media is a core piece of knowledge, and how use them in a given situation a core skill. I've used Facebook to reach out to certain types (for example, suburban mothers of school-age children for one hyper-local news project), Twitter and LinkedIn for other groups or purposes. Am still learning Google -- yet another one to learn -- which at this point seems biggest among the tech influencers or 'digerati.

There's also what I might call the "serendipity factor." Sometimes you discover that an unexpected network is big among your community. With PBS MediaShift and a NY local tech blog, for example, we've seen the occasional spike in traffic from StumbleUpon, a service we had not previously concentrated on. I have even seen some spikes in activity from niche networks, such as AllTop (which if memory serves is run by uber-marketer Guy Kawasaki). It also changes over time, so it's important to pay attention to the flow, and the changes in use of and abilities of the tools. When Google+ really opens up, and when it releases an API, we'll probably see spikes there. Here's a project I'd like to work on and contribute to: A tool that has the intelligence to do a lot of this for you: IE, it knows that Google+ will work best in this instance, Facebook in that, Twitter in another. I just plug in my content or my need, and the tool decides where and how to send it. We're seeing some nascent attempts (SocialFlow, Measured Voice) but none that yet quite get it right and load balance among all the social media and are able to quickly incorporate the unexpected spikes in new networks.

The Web Is Dead? It's Open vs. Closed

Updates in bold.

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The Web is not dead and Chris Anderson knows it, though as editor of Wired, he can't claim that someone else chose the headline on his piece The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet. I say he knows it, because he knows at the very least that it's via the Web that people access the apps he mentions that are growing in popularity (Netflix streaming, iTunes, Facebook, etc.), at least to get the app, if not operate it every time. And in a later debate with John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly he clarifies that the piece is about the Web as a business application, not in general -- business is moving to apps and platforms, but not all users or content creators.

He also must know, as is pointed out on BoingBoing, that bandwidth, alone, can be a poor measure of value. In fact, many of the most valuable and often longest-lived applications take the least bandwidth proportional to their utility -- that's part of their value. Email, Twitter, audio, IM. In fact, the utility of an application improves if the bandwidth it requires comes down over time as it becomes more efficient.

Battelle is right that it's wrong to say of the Web and apps that "one kills the other," but in a broader sense than he posits. The battle comes in the context of the larger one that has been, and will be, going on for years, perhaps decades to come: Open vs. Closed systems. The benefits of control vs. scale.

There's room for both, and both are growing.

Everywhere I go these days, I see traditional publishers excited about their ability to control the environments in which their content appears and charge for that content. Most recently I saw that excitement from Hearst and National Geographic at the DigiDay Apps conference Monday in New York (Tweets here).

It may be that magazine publishers have the understanding and mindset of how to offer, and make a profit from, their content on controlled platforms and devices like the iPad. They, after all, made money for decades with niche content provided to niche audiences interested in anything from food to fishing, fitness to foreign policy. And in the new environment, they won't have to bear the costs of printing, paper, postage and distribution.

Yet, the new environment provides new challenges. There is no standard magazine size that will fit on all newsstands, no way to produce something once and have everyone be able to buy or subscribe. The magazines, like anyone pushing their content through an app, will have to provide it multiple times to reach niches within niches. Those interested in a particular type of fashion may or may not have iPhones, iPads, Kindles, Blackberrys, Androids or other tablets or devices. How small can the universe be before a profit will be made? It can cost tens, or hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop for every different platform, and the platforms require constant change and update. Not that it's as high a cost as printing and distribution, but it is a cost, and a real cost that's not borne on the open Web.

A core challenge to those who wall content off will continue to be what it is today and what it was before the app and platform world exploded a few years ago: Those who do provide content that appeals to a niche audience can find that niche further diced into sub-niches and picked off by those who can outdo them because there are so few barriers to entry. Want to do a smartphone publication? Well, someone concentrate on the iPhone and do a blog on just that. And, presumably, if that blog gets an audience, some of the ad dollars that would have accrued to the larger Smartphone publication go to the sub-niche. This holds true into all the niches I named above and many many more. Why will someone pay for an app that gives them a publication about food, in general, if what they're really interested in is Asian cuisine, and there's a blog that covers it just as well or even better than the general interest publication?

The Open Web Supports the Closed, And Vice Versa

The open Web also can't die because it is interfacing with the closed in new and creative ways, as well. Facebook has come out of its shell with Facebook Connect, Open Graph, new "like" and "activity" feed buttons that all can be placed on Websites and make them interlace better with Facebook (and other social apps, in some cases). The platform is often the biggest driver of traffic to any given blog post or Web page these days, and Facebook's new media page is cultivating outreach to publishers.

At the DigiDay Apps conference, a new company called AppMobi said they were providing a way for anyone with decent Web developer skills to use Javascript to write an app that AppMobi would translate to the various popular app platforms. No need to learn Objective C or other iPhone intricacies, or Blackberry or Android or any of the others. That's an example of someone using the open Web toward proprietary platforms the way it's been used in other walled instances: breaking down barriers to entry, lowering costs, and increasing access.

We are in a constant tug between free and paid, open and not. The battle will go on, with 800-lb gorillas on either side of the equation. Maybe if the niche you want to reach is a very specific group that has similar habits of consumption and provides a high enough return -- say Wall Street Stock brokers -- that you can develop just for certain popular smartphone apps, charge for your content, and get away with it.

The communication theorist Ev Rogers, whom I was lucky enough to study with at Stanford, taught how new communication inventions inevitably flow first to the monied, then to the masses, over time. If he's right, and his lesson applies today, society becomes the loser as the freshest and best technology goes behind app-laden and other walls that seal off access to the less-resourced. Let's hope libraries, at least, are able to level that playing field and provide those without the financial means, but who do have the drive and interest, to get the best of what's out there.

Publishers Should Hedge Their Bets

Meanwhile, the battle will rage, and I don't see either side winning just yet. I would suggest publishers large and small hedge their bets -- provide content in various ways to reach their target audiences. It's a fallacy to think, by the way, that "open" means unpaid. I sometimes buy the digital version of books from O'Reilly's company specifically because I can access them so many different ways -- computer, iPod, Blackberry and more. I'm very glad the Kindle has followed suit and wish it would make it easier to get content I haven't bought from Amazon. There are kinds of openness that come after the wall has been leapt. Whether the Web is the instrument may be immaterial, but the open ethos makes a difference.

Yes, Chris, "idealism is giving way to pragmatism," just as the idealism of the 1960s has given way to the pragmatism of now; yet, that 60s idealism infuses today's pragmatism with corporations promising social and community responsibility and even top MBAs choosing where to work based on the values of a company, not just its bottom line. I believe that the idealism of the open Web, while fought against in some quarters, will continue to infuse much of the media that's produced, and by virtue of its production and consumption, tug other more closed models into levels of openness they may have previously rejected. Even Apple, I would note, opened recent versions of its operating systems to others' applications in ways it resisted just a few years ago.

Still, Facebook is Thriving

OK, I may have jumped the gun in saying Facebook has "jumped the shark." Maybe it's just gone mainstream, just as broadcast TV networks did decades ago. And, in going mass, it's got a real (potential) business, but also lost some of the specialness, and become more of a platform for things like marketing and ads and so on.

As everyone's been saying all over the "mainstream" media, it's still getting hundreds of thousands to sign up every day, has something like 175 million profiles and so on. But, I'd still like to see some real figures -- how many profiles are active, how active are people 1, 3, 5, 24 months after signing up (growth or diminished)? for how many people is it a regular habit? Is Facebook Connect -- which allows folks to do Facebook stuff outside the Facebook universe -- a boon, a help? Is there a sweet-spot demographic group? What types of users use it most? Who's really made money off it? What utility does it really serve for people? What are the revenues vs. the costs, and what's the cashflow?

Maybe the parodies (aluded to in the post linked above) are a sign of how popular it is.

How Facebook is Jumping the Shark

Update: Still Facebook is Thriving. (If this makes me seem like Tevye in "Fiddler on the Roof" (on the other hand, on the other hand), so be it.)
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OK, ok, the phrase "jumping the shark" has also "jumped the shark," (gotten stinky old and stale), but here's why: It's not just the recent brou-ha-ha over the change in Terms of Service reported on Consumerist (which according to reports basically gives FB ownership of your information in perpetuity -- FB has since rescinded the change, says Consumerist.)

It's because Facebook is following the typical pattern:

- Write the cool new app
- Get it to be popular
- Get some press
- Make it more open, to make it more popular
- Become a place where marketers can reach people in a very targeted way
- Become a place where the marketers then climb aboard en-masse, along with everyone else who's got an agenda in trying to reach out to tons of people. PILE ON, everyone
- Get lots of press for a few things (25 Things ..., "poking,")
- Make a few fumbles
- Get to be a place where your "friends" get overwhelmed by people who aren't, really, but instead just want something from you.
- Get bad press
- See parodies from folks who should be in the "target audience group."
- Start to plateau. See user profiles lay fallow en masse
- Start to decline or become less "hot" as people move on to the next new new thing.

Here, thanks to AllFacebook's Nick O'Neill, is a funny parody of 25 things. Note that a comment on YouTube says "People Still Use Facebook?" That sentiment is becoming more frequent.

Gain and Loss of Social Self

Who owns you? This is part of the battle brewing over social networks, and networking applications like Facebook. Robert Scoble, the Scobelizer, complains that when he tried to run a “script” on his profile on Facebook, Facebook detected it and kicked him off. He’s appealing the decision. He won’t say what the script is -- says he’s under a non-disclosure agreement with the company that wrote the bit of code that will somehow do something to Scoble’s Facebook profile -- but it seems to be something that would somehow take the info on Facebook, and run some other application on it.

A clue comes from a comment Scoble writes in response to someone who says that in a “walled garden,” the point is that it is walled. “We fundementally (sic) DON’T want someone wholeheartedly using our graphs. Especially not a friend, who we trust to not do that,” writes the commenter. Scoble replies: “What about info you’ve made public? Like, your name? And other stuff that’s on your public profile on Facebook? Are you saying that no one has the right to use that? How about this? Can I write down your email address and put it in my address book? Or, how about your birthday?

“So, why am I allowed to write down your phone number or email address, but my computer can’t take it out of Facebook and put it into Outlook for me? Or another program or service I’m using?

“How about something that actually ads value, like something that’d see that you’re on both Facebook and Twitter and Flickr and could mash those three together?”

So, Scoble is implying that what he wants to do is use publicly available information for private uses that he’d have permission to regardless of technology. This, I would guess, would be legal -- putting aside the Terms of Service issue -- in the same way that making copies of material for purely personal use are also legal.

He also alludes to a holy grail of social networking I think we’ll see more of this year: the social network mashup, applications that allow use of networking and profiles across platforms. Google’s Open Social is a step in this direction, though one that’s more push out than inbound in the way Scoble describes. Media companies and publishers are signing on with Google’s scheme so they can, say, write a widget once and have it spread across myriad platforms, rather than having to write or tweak new code for each. (And then they’re still having to write for Facebook, if they want to reach its millions of users. MySpace is a whole ‘nother issue.) I would expect to see a bunch of such apps come out this year, many with funding, and a few to catch on.

We’ll see, too, continued battle over closed vs. open that’s been part of the conversation since the earliest days of AOL and Prodigy vs. Netscape and Mozilla (and Internet Explorer, which provides the enticement of openness AND the control of digital rights management).

In a way, Scoble is arguing both sides of the coin. He owns the right to scrape his own profile, his own information -- though in joining Facebook, he signed terms of service that said he couldn’t run such applications on the closed network. Facebook, too, is trying to have it both ways. When they were exclusive to the academic community, they had a closed system that, while potentially very large, was limited to people with some similarity in mindset and orientation, at least in the broadest sense, and, probably, less likely to use the system for certain kinds of commercial behavior. By now allowing anyone from any background to register and use Facebook, and open up the API to all developers, the company is trying to reap the benefits of openness, but still with a closed system.

Facebook now has many millions of users. But how long will those millions remain when they are a) hit with an increasing number of unwanted marketing messages, un-needed invitations from non-”friends,” ever more mass messages, fewer directly relevant personal messages, b) finding it increasing difficulty to manage it all, and c) Open Social is on the way? We’ll see shakeouts this year among social networking applications, and an increasing number of profiles lay fallow. Facebook won’t die, and they’re smart enough that they may come up with a graceful solution that leads to more openness and integration with other platforms. The apology they gave due to the controversy that broke out over their Beacon system proves they are a company that’s able to hear complaints and try to adjust. But they will having a tough time overcoming the tension between walled garden and open access.