More on the maturing web- and the decline of banner ads
Uno as Future Studies, Ideas, Products, Web2.0
Jun|30|2008
Friday drinks are great, drinks in general are great, but drinks with great minds are especially great. Last Friday we moze’d on down to Firemans Arms in Green Point for Beer ‘O Clock with Leezl, Tiaan, Herman and Clint. All people who I love working with.
I wanted to chat about how the web is maturing, how we’re seeing different apps coming from different players, and luckily Clint had already spotted what I was trying to articulate.
The web is maturing, and advertising is changing with that. Read this post by Jackson Fish Market on where they see the web going. The gist of the post is that display advertising is disruptive - placing an ad next to content is the print way of thinking about monetization, branding and advertising. Not only that, but it’s also disruptive. Users are on the site because they want to view the content, not the ad, and you are disrupting them with your popup, overlay, onionskin ad.
Enter the webapp. Web apps are places that people want to be, I want to be on tumblr, I love Slideshare and Last.Fm gets more eyeball time from me than books do. Not only those, but I was devastated when Mymilemarker.com shut down, how else will I track my ridiculous consumption patterns? (I just checked and it’s back up again).
So what that means is that people spending time on web apps want to be there, even if it is a branded environment. You have higher engagement levels, people want to be there, in fact, they even come back! What that means for an agency is that they need to rethink they way that they do branding online. Banner ads are actually really boring. Agency’s need to build web apps that are engaging, that fit with their brand, and offer productivity and utility to the user.
We’ve seen a few webapps already, but mostly not really thinking about “web apps” but still riding the “Social Networking is the be-all-and-end-all” mantra. It’s not about social networks, it’s about utility. Locally, the YoungBlood5 network was an example in a way (it had touches of being an app), but we haven’t seen anything that’s a solid application.
The future of agencies will probably see them building webapps and engaging environments, more so than creating banners, trafficking and managing e-mail campaigns.
It’s also why I get irritated by people wanting to “build social networks for everything”. It’s not about social networks, it’s about social applications. All applications need to be social in some way, but they need to be applications and offer utility.
Some examples of branded web applications (some/most border on Social Networks):
Specialised riders club (built on Rails apparently)
Nike Plus
Youngblood5
MTV Think:
StandardBank ATM locator
Why doesn’t Sasol bring out a MyMileMarker type app? Or VirginActive a health app (they already have the LifeZone stuff, but they can do more)? Rama doesn’t need a food social network, they need a web app that people can use to find recipes.
And finally, just because I know most people won’t read the article, here are Jackson Fish Market’s predictions:
- even the biggest brand advertisers will realize that creating and maintaining high quality web apps is not a simple proposition
- they will turn to their ad agencies and their interactive retinue to build these experiences
- more often than not, these folks will build sites oriented around expensive content, video, and the like
- brand advertisers will realize that they need the traditional creatives combined with deeper software expertise to make great online experiences
- some advertisers will bring this in house and in effect become software companies themselves
- some advertisers will work with companies (like ours) to deliver online experiences that have depth, quality, and utility (some of the agencies over time will build deeper expertise in this area — it’s harder than it looks)
- and whichever tactical choice a marketer makes, the bulk of online consumer software will be funded directly by brand advertisers
DiSo project: Taking a page from Facebook
Uno as Facebook Friday's, Ideas, Products, Social Networks, Web2.0
Feb|28|2008
If you take a look at the structure of Facebook you can see 2 main navigation sections (disregarding the rest of the site).
- Profile data at the top (Profile, Friends, Networks, Inbox)
- You have apps and other things on the left.
The way we’ve been thinking about the way Facebook works in terms of architecture and find it incredibly interesting, from an innovation perspective and also because the products we’re building rely on similar kind of systems.
We follow the standards or thoughts in the DiSo project, as well as the concepts in the Social Network Portability (really the same thing), so we’re trying to look at how your profile can be more portable, and follow you around the web.
In Facebook, your top profile is the one that really counts, it’s the one that follows you through all the apps you’ve installed, and brings you back to your data, the one on the left is basically all the different “sites” you’re on. It’s like FriendFeed or Plaxo or whatever, but the relationship between data-owner and application is much more skewed.
This post is pretty half-arsed and pretty obvious, but sometimes you need to state the obvious!
The problem with dataportability is with the providers, not services (duh)
Uno as Ideas, Products, Social Networks, Web2.0
Jan|21|2008
Going through my feeds this morning I once again came across the “bad user design” meme. A lot of people have been talking about it. Jeremy Keith, Josh Morgan, Brian Oberkirch, Dare Obasanjo, also even Paul Buchheit (the guy behind Gmail) and it was particularly explicit and loud when Robert Scoble went through that whole Plaxo/Facebook screenscraping episode.
Basically what people are saying is that it’s a bad idea to give sites your usernames/passwords when you sign up. This creates a bad anti-pattern and sets a horrible precedent for users who simply give their email user/pass to hundreds of different startups with dismal security standards making it very easy for hackers to get to your sensitive data. It’s called the “password anti-pattern”.
It’s not a new meme I’m proposing, seems like Simon Willison has wrote a bit about it as well, and it does seem like most people are proposing a similar solution - using OAuth to facilitate the authentication process. It’s exactly what I’m thinking, and I also think that we’re pointing fingers at the wrong people. At the moment we’re pointing fingers to a bunch of services, or new apps like Plaxo, Twitter, Spock, etc etc. It’s something we see in almost every new web app: “Import your friends!” And then we cry foul, blasting the service.
But, if the providers made that data accessable, through a properly secure API, would it not be possible to get around this? In my mind Flickr provides probably the best page-flow pattern. So I’m saying the PROVIDERS are making this anti-pattern possible. Facebook must make it VERY easy to export users, so must Gmail and so must Yahoo etc. This must be standardized so that containers (using Open Social terminology) can provide that data using some kind of token system, and it must also happen in a process that doesn’t ask for you user/pass. I believe that because it’s not possible, networks are leaving developers with no other option but to do screen scraping.
Hopefully now that pretty much every network has joined Dataportability.org we’ll see some of this stuff actually happening.
I realise that I must be missing the boat and that the tech is probably there. But being a non-tech I don’t know what’s possible. I’m just thinking that seeing all these services still asking for my user/pass is bad design, and that if all the sites haven’t adopted the token/authentication system, then there is something wrong.
Go OAuth! Go OpenID!
Technorati Tags: dataportability, portable social networks, password, anti-pattern
Daily blog reads
Nov|22|2007
In response to Charl sharing some of his daily blog reads, I’ll share some of mine as well.
I have few buckets or folders which have completely no relevance to the feeds that are in them. They were general folders that I setup ages ago and just haven’t gotten round to re-organising them. They are still relevant to some extent…
I’m not including any links… You can get that if you ask me… and I might send you the OPML file. I have 2 folders for
_Local and _Bloggers (the _ is so that they are at the top of my feeds list):
Platforms as commodities
Uno as Ideas, Social Networks
Oct|25|2007
New news today is that Friendster (the social network of old) will be launching a platform, much like Facebook has done and also as Myspace is doing. Tagged has even gone so far as to emulate the platform that Facebook has created, so instead of using their own markup language, they instead opt to mirror the language used in FBML so that developers can easily duplicate their apps on Tagged (when they’ve built the Facebook app). It’s a good move!
Now coming to commodities, something becomes a commodity when it is so pervasive that it later on doesn’t really matter which one you use - they become interchangable and don’t have any clout. Om Malik has mentioned that social networks in general are just commodities. So when platforms become commodities and everyone has them the space could start getting interesting. Some platforms might give away more information from others, and like the theory goes, your identity is constructed out of what you say you are, but also around what other people say you are. Could this be first steps towards portable social networks that we’ve been ranting on about?
Platforms give the opportunity for different networks to talk to each other, albeit in a limited way at the moment. Multiple platforms might be the solution to getting everyone to talk to each other. If you have the same app on different networks, each app might be able to get a little more out of you, and each app might be able to call differnet API’s and get different friends lists… Maybe moving towards completing a fuller picture of your social graph.
Technorati Tags: platform, social network, forecast
SugarLoving: Testimony to niche networks
Uno as Ideas, Online, Social Networks, Web2.0
Oct|2|2007
I’ve said before that social networks are around communities (duh), and these are going to be more and more connected to content. Also, you might remember me saying that I can still see a ridiculous amount of niche bookmarking sites pop up. (I haven’t said it on this blog, but I think I should probably, read my one comment here).
Why is this? Because sites like Muti, Digg and Reddit are structured around a community. Take the Guy MClaren issue a while back. His submissions weren’t welcome on Muti, but if he’d posted his articles on a bookmarking service for people interested in SEO then he might have received a lot more attention. Similarly, it’s been said that Digg is a tech focused audience. Which is almost entirely true. If you submit a story about the latest hot new designer shoes from Gucci then it will get Dugg down. That’s not because they have a hostile community, but because they have a different community.
Which brings me to 2 new startups this week:
How is this relevant? Well, firstly Sugarloving is a pretty looking niche Digg (I’ll start calling it something different soon). You’ll remember that Read/WriteWeb had an interview with Rogelio Bernal Andreo, the founder of CoRank, (site similar to Pligg that you can create your own Digg clone) and that he got pretty pissed off with everyone naming everything a Digg Clone and called for the term to be buried (and I wholeheartedly agree). It’s a really good argument, I suggest everyone interested in networks gives it a once over.
What it comes down to is that these sites are niche sites, and they are niche sites in exactly the way that Social Networks are/can be niche sites as well. Following on my previous post where I argued that social networks will never die, I want to drive that point home. You can have whatever content, and you can have endless amounts of networks. As long as there are niche interests with enough people you should be able to sustain a network. Yes, Facebook will still be very popular and very mainstream. But I struggle to organise a good Kayak Polo game through it. It is a bad organising tool for these kinds of niche interests. The days for generic networks are limited (and that’s why Yahoo Mash will see very little uptake if they don’t differentiate themselves, and also probably why Netscape’s Digg clone folded and had to be relaunched)
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with the new Friends Sorting feature - if this will be possible.
Techmeme Leaderboard is a similar iteration of this concept. They will eventually give you a Technorati Top 100 (or a Techmeme leaderboard) for any topic - once again mining the niches.
What are the next potential developments in social news?
Each workplace will have its own digg clone (you should have one already, it’s called Enterprise 2.0).
Each publisher will have their own digg clone or favourite ranked stories.
Issues will have their own digg clone (imagine a social news site for stories on Burma - the most popular/active stories are bubbled to the top).
A distributed/federated social news platform
Something that would bring immense value is a social news platform. I’m not sure if CoRank already does this… but where they would be really powerful is in giving a lot of niches their own networks, and then aggregating that info into their main site (which would have much broader topics, but more quality info in each).
Technorati Tags: social news, muti, digg, corank, bookmarking, digg,
Walmart Social Network backfires. Again?
Uno as Ideas, Social Networks, Web2.0
Aug|14|2007
Incase you missed the bus, Walmart launched a sponsored group on Facebook called: Wal-Mart Roommate Style Match
According to Mashable, in this group you can:
Determine your dorm style.
And… erm.. compare the results between friends.
And Which would then mean that would go out and buy the stuff when you get up from your computer.
Not too long ago Walmart tried a similar thing, they tried to build their own social network and it flopped miserably.
There are a few other commentators also saying that this current attempt is also going down, but they are mostly comparing the users. As of writing, the group now has 343 users - still probably more than they would have gotten if they had started their own network.
But that’s not the interesting part, the part where it gets really funny, and the actual reason the network is backfiring is because activists are using the platform to ask for unionizing the company.
Classic!
Some of the pictures uploaded:
Some messages on the wall:
Give Wal Mart a Unionyes but wal mart is the biggest employer
in the country if they paid there workers more there would be less
“poorer people” a more compterble working class this is about the soul
of our great country we most not let wal mart hollow it outGive wal mart workers a Union !
Aaah classic - the internet democratises. On the internet people make their voices heard loudly and if you have bad corporate practices the chances are quite good that you’re going to get exposed.
Internet Lesson:
Manage your online presence well. Understand the platform and medium.
Obviously Walmart has no clue when it comes to a social media strategy. They need to get their act together if they want to be successful in this sphere.
More about sponsored groups.
Even More
Facebook sez:
These groups are paid promotions by outside companies. The sponsor controls the look and feel of the group, but does not have access to personal information or profiles. The money from these promotions, like the money from all our ads, goes towards the Facebook’s server and operational costs. Sponsored groups help us keep the service free and fast.
Technorati Tags: walmart, facebook, social network, fail, backfire,
A Bizcommunity social network
Uno as Ideas, Products, Social Networks, South Africa, Web2.0
Aug|7|2007
Bizcommunity should launch a social network. And the great news is they don’t have to spend a lot of time doing it as well.
I recently spotted this on the Ning blog:
AdGabber is a social network created by Adrants,
a marketing and advertising news site and daily email newsletter with a
bit of attitude. We like this social network because it takes an
established set of “one-way” readers and evolves them into a vibrant
social network of “two-way” contributors.
Everyone knows the popular site Adrants, and BizCcommunity isn’t far off the mark from this.
I have no idea how they’ll structure something like this, but that’s luckily not my job here 
And then Bizcommunity can finally upload photos and images! One of the things that I’ve been ticked off about most often recently is that I have to download a file or something to view an advert, or I simply can’t view the TV spot (why these aren’t included at the bottom of press releases I really don’t know… you tell us about the TV ad, now I want to see the TV ad).
As Rachel Masters says, go and be inspired.
Oh, and this is a perfect example of another case where you should actually develop your own social network as opposed to simply creating a group on Facebook.
Technorati Tags: bizcommunity, social network, south africa, advertisement, ad industry,
Product: Sharing your ideas
Aug|3|2007
Tyler started the post and Stefan followed up on it.
The conversation centers around sharing your ideas. You get an idea, you ask some people about, or you blog about. I’m totally all for this. I’ve blogged about many ideas, the latest one being about geo-tagging articles.
Interestingly, we had this exact same conversation earlier the week. I had invited Dave, Mitchell, Stefan and Johann over for a Skype chat about a new product idea: sharing ideas.
I want a product that will allow me to share ideas. Often I’d quickly skype one or two people to get their thoughts around an idea. We bash a few ideas around and then come up with a solution.
The problem however is that you can’t invite other people on different networks and the conversation is often enough closed. Say you want to start a new topic of conversation around… Social Network Portability. Something I’m digging at the moment.
Now I’ve spoken to Armand about this (he has a killer OpenID/Facebook thing going that I’m not sure I can blog about at the moment, you can read my article on it though). But I’d also like to invite some other people, or at least notify them of such a conversation. Jeremiah Owyang has praised Twitter as a conversation medium, allowing him to throw ideas around with friends and colleagues, although I find it a really cumbersome way of doing things (great for quick posts, but not a good knowledge base).
Eventually you’d be able to “ping” people about a conversation. Typically Robert Scoble would be pinged about 600 times a day, but he can then view (through some kind of recommendation engine) which of his friends were most active in which conversations and also which conversations were most active. This would be an incredible way to track the gist of the net and new ideas as well.
Does this already exist? Well, our original group suggested that Pownce and Twitter could already do this. I’m not entirely convinced yet.
Either way, I would never have had the help had I not asked. I’m not going to build the app in any case, so if you want to feel free.
We could have done this at the wonderful Charly’s Bakery coffee shop, but you can’t always get up and move for such a quick idea.
Technorati Tags: products, idea, sharing, collective intelligence, hivemind, pownce, twitter,
Facebook’s mail as a replacement for e-mail and a replacement for OpenID
Uno as Facebook Friday's, Ideas, Web2.0
Jul|30|2007
A while back I wrote about how Facebook could become the defacto Identity 2.0 provider for a lot of people if OpenID doesn’t get their game up, the post has been getting some great hits and some interest from some great people as well. Gotta love them internets.
Facebook mails better than e-mail
Recently Dave Duarte mentioned how he sees Facebook killing e-mail. While I don’t agree with him on it (Facebook has a terrible mail interface), it did get me thinking about mail and identity differently than before. Facebook e-mail isn’t really e-mail. You aren’t sending a mail to a name@domain.com anymore, you are actually sending the mail to a person as opposed to an e-mail address, which is a total paradigm shift essentially when you think of anonymity on the net. I recently received a mail from someone after a presentation I did at a backpacking conference, almost 2 months ago. The guy must have looked me up on Facebook and sent me a message (note even the language is different).
Previously, I was a lost entity. There was no place that he could have looked up my contact details except through a tedious process of calling the organisers (ok, only tedious for me…) if it wasn’t in the conference pack. Lucky for us, in trots the hero of the day, Facebook. The attendee can now simply do a quick search for me, I can recognise him if I spoke to him and we can quickly strike up the conversation where we left off. The most important part here is that we never had to exchange e-mail addresses. He could contact me as if he was walking up to me - no need to need a secret pass-key (e-mail address), or keep that ever elusive business card.
E-mail as it should be
And this is the way that we should move towards communication. I want to see some sort of identity provider that someone can search for and find my details (currently Google does that for me…) But there should not be one ID provider, there should be many (echoing the ideas of Malcom Gladwell and his TED spaghetti sauces presentation) and it should be open. You’ll remember I mentioned the great talk by Dick Hardt (back in 2005 mind you) where he asks how do you replicate your ID document online, but not only yours, you need to replicate the ID of South Africa, Botswana, America, Thailand, Greece, Morocco, Denmark, etc etc. and they all need to talk to each other in an understandable way. When you walk up to the bottle store in America and you show them your SA ID document, how do they know you are over 21? They trust your ID document.
But I’m straying again - previously e-mail was a pretty good measure/keeper of your identity. Some registration processes used to (and many still do) require you to login with your e-mail address. What kind of a sure-fire identity system is that? I can go and create 50 different ones and then create 50 more using any of the free e-mail services, or I can send the confirmation mail to an anonymous mail client like Mailinator. The fact is that e-mail is and never was a good identity provider, so why are we sticking to it? Because it’s the only weak one we have.
But now Facebook has broken past both of these barriers (geekyness from OpenID, and easily forged for e-mail). I’ve said before that I believe Facebook to be very secure. I don’t believe that Facebook will see that many sex predators (if any) as Myspace because it is such a good identity provider (you can’t fake your friends).
I’d love to get to the day that people don’t ask me what my e-mail address is but simply send me a message (and not in the sense of “Ya cool, I’ll add you as a friend on Facebook”). I have no idea how this would work, but that is what all those smart people are out there for.
Technorati Tags: identity 2.0, openid, facebook, e-mail, message, identity