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The 4th Screen is killing events

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Last night was the premiere of Rihanna Live – a live webcast of a Rihanna show where she launches her new album. I had a look at it last night during the launch, and it was a pretty epic production, apart from the poor streaming we get in South Africa.

Rihanna live concert with Nokia

But that’s not what I want to talk about. Take note of this screen shot of the stream. Notice all the little screens? Almost everyone is documenting the event. The camera’s made a VERY explicit point of taking crowd shots of everyone with their phones whipped out.

It makes a lot of sense seeing as a while ago Nokia had “The 4th Screen” video that everyone was blogging about. I didn’t, but here it is below:

Now, I’m actually finding The 4th Screen pretty damn irritating. No one is having a party anymore, everyone is too busy documenting it. The other crowd shots were of people standing around with their hands in the air, holding their video camera or cellphone. The same happened a while back at the Vice Magazine party, which was billed as being bat-shit crazy, but none of the people who would normally go bat-shit crazy attended. It was full of industry folk hanging around at “the cool event”. It was still a cool event, Jack Parow, Die Antwoord and Driemanskap played some good music, but everyone was either too busy “watching” and documenting, and not “participating”. It fell flat because of that even though it had lots of potential.

And I’m kind of feeling the same about people documenting events/gigs/partys using their phones. When you tell the world “I’m having this amazing time at this party, here is a photo”, it can’t be that amazing because you took the time out to document, upload and share. Sure it’s quick and easy to do, but still… why?

Now, I’ve done my fair share of documenting for 10and5 – we covered the Loeries quite extensively, as well as some other events, but that’s always been because it was work. One feels obligated to document it since you are drinking their bar dry on your media passes. Lovely. But the times that I’ve been having a rocking party are typically the times that I’ve left the documenting up to other people. Like We Are Awesome, JR or Justin. Or whoever has a camera out at that stage.

When everyone is documenting the event, no one is participating and it makes the event fall flat. Put away your cellphone every now and again and participate.

Tags: culture, documenting, Nokia, the 4th Screen
Posted in Identity, Online | No Comments »

Building Constellations and not Destinations with social networks

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

Dave Berkowitz piqued my interest again last night with the news from OMMA social. Dave was tweeting about the presentation by Angela Courtin – SVP Marketing, Entertainment & Content at MySpace. So while the rest of the presentation was pretty dull (apparently) one of the things that stood out for me was the distinction between Constellations and Destinations when talking about Social Networks.

Destinations
Traditionally, most companies try to become a destination in and of themselves. The produce or aggregate content, and then try get eyeballs to view the content. It makes sense – you monetize around the content. So the more eyeballs you have on your site, e.g. Huisgenoot, the better off you are as that’s where the money is. It doesn’t make sense to spread your content to different places, never mind your users! That would be sacrificing yourself!

Now though, we’ve seen this model being turned on its head in numerous ways, firstly your content might be appropriated and chucked into some aggregator (ala Digg), it may be repackaged somewhere else, and a user might consume your content without ever knowing that you were the producer of that content. Content has always been a difficult game to be, it’s just become a lot more difficult.

Constellations
Social networks have also been destination sites, until the launch of their platforms. They also still wanted people to arrive at their site, and stay engaged. This meant uploading photos, responding to events and browsing profiles – all the time staying on Myspace.com. But social networks have matured now and are expanding their reach. Platforms allow the larger SN’s to start forming constellations, with their service in the middle, and the race is on for the larger 2 or 3 networks to be the biggest constellation. I’ve recently blogged on how platform wars are spreading the reach of social networks further.

When people think of constellations, it is typically in the “my social graph” kind of constellation, but what’s happening is much bigger than that. While the social graph is a very important constellation, it’s still more a graph than a constellation, think of a wheel with spokes in between (and lots of them). The constellations that are happening are happening on a site and internet wide level. The constellations are being built out of websites (and not friends as was traditionally understood). Image a solar system with Facebook at the center. In the solar system we’ll find sites like Digg, 10and5, Techcrunch, etc etc, all sites who have adopted Facebook Connect. Just as the sun is the lightsource for many of these “planets”, Facebook becomes a valuable lifeblood for the sites – providing the sites with user profiles and deep social data.

User profiles and connections remain within Facebook (or whichever service is at the center) and allow the other sites to thrive with life – and relevant, contextual life. It might not be the best example as it would be possible for the sites to be successful on their own, but imagine the lifeblood that Facebook injects as being akin to the difference between Earth and Mars.

Brands
This holds important considerations for brands – you should be thinking how your brand fits in inside the constellation, and which “sun” you are going to adopt, if any. Different suns have different benefits and drawbacks. It’s important to know which one will be best for you. We also see so many brands and companies trying to “build their own social network” without the user context so many users want when they use a site.

Niche networks
Quite a number of people have also spotted that niche social networks are the big thing of 2009 (personally I think that kind of happened in 2008 and it’s going to kick in in 2009), but that’s missing the point. It won’t be a new social network, it will be the same social network but with a different context. You still want to connect with your friends on a mountain biking social network as it gives you context on that network, but Facebook will never build that out on their own. So they’ve effectively outsourced it. And the value for Facebook is that the profile that they “own” gets better and better. So while you might be browsing for social gym strategies at Gyminee.com, you are doing so within your own social network that you’ve brought over from Facebook (not yet, but imagine it).

Facebook failed quite miserably with their groups – who really uses them to organize around interest groups? Ning is a much better model. Can you imagine organizing kind of interaction on Huddlemind.net with a Facebook group? It was bad in 2007 and it’s still bad now. So now we’re seeing more social utilities outside Facebook, and sooner or later we’ll see even more of these utilities using one of the Connect utilities.

Steve Rubel has a good post on the topic, as does The IndyChannel.

Tags: facebook connect, google connect, Identity, myspace friendconnect, portable social networks, Social Networks
Posted in Identity, Online, Social Networks, Web2.0 | 3 Comments »

Of the platform wars

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Platform wars are interesting, mainly because the winner will potentially be in the hotseat for quite some time. Take a look at Microsoft winning the desktop platform war – they’ve had a very well entrenched position for a considerable amount of time.

We’re more or less at that point with the web. We were at the beginning of the wars about a year ago when Google launched OpenSocial and FriendConnect, and then Facebook with their platform and Facebook Connect. Having a well adopted framework is very important – developers typically want to develop apps for a widespread platform. This allows them to build once, and get multiple distribution on different sites.

From the outset, it looks like most of these services are very similar, but on closer inspection they do have some subtle and important differences, which I’m grappling with at the moment.

To sketch a background, I’m doing research on a pretty exciting portal project. At the risk of giving too much away – we need a portal that users can customize with widgets. It’s not too far off from something like Netvibes or Pageflakes. The scripts to run these sites are a dime a dozen and pretty easy to get hold of, plus it’s not so difficult to build them from scratch. They’ve almost become as ubiquitous as white label social networks, blog platforms etc. To use the lingo, they’ve become a commodity.

We initially did some research into white label networks to add a social element to the site. But this poses new problems though – will users need to sign-up to the site again, and find all their friends on the site? Wouldn’t it be cool if they could get a current list of friends already on the site, and potentially on the site right now? We honestly don’t want to build a new network from scratch. Cue FacebookConnect. We decided on Facebook Connect over Google Friend Connect for the predominant reason that we find the social profile of Facebook much more expansive than Google. Even though lots of people have a Google account, we feel the data in Facebook is much richer and also much more organized. There is the benefit of action injection into the news feed, as well friend linking and profile integration.

So we’re going to go the Facebook Connect route – we’re pretty excited about the one-click login for users as well. Now however, we’re posed with a different problem. We want to outsource the development of new widgets to the portal. It’s a similar problem that Facebook had a while ago, and the reason for the platform development (or definitely a large part of it). Facebook has effectively allowed for the outsourcing of it’s ecosystem – things which make the site useful. They first started with Events, Albums and Videos, eventually they expanded in the Marketplace. Soon enough it becomes apparent that they won’t be able keep up with new apps – what if they want to add a TV guide? And if they build a TV guide, how would they build a localized one – for us here in South Africa?

An easier route is to allow outside developers to build those apps – effectively outsource the development of them. Enter the Facebook Platform. This allows for hyper-localized applications (e.g. a TV guide for DSTV) without Facebook needing to build them, and also better applications. Facebook is going “license” the building of the marketplace to Oodle.

So what we’re going to need for our portal site is a similar platform framework. We could build our own platform, but that won’t make much sense. For one: we also want to outsource some of our development. Say someone builds a DSTV app for Facebook, we want that app to be available on our portal as well without the developer having to build the app again. Secondly, we also don’t want to go through the process of building an entire new platform – we simply don’t have the people to build a new platform, plus we want to play nicely with the other platforms out there (why build something that is already built?).

And we’re lucky here as well – we have actually have a choice! We can look at Google’s Open Social, or we can go the Facebook Open Platform route. But once again, we’re more partial to Facebook, also because we’re not to keen to go down a route where we need to figure out a way to integrate Open Social and FBConnect. Yikes. Plus the OpenSocial implementations that I’ve seen are pretty mediocre.

So now some problems start cropping up – I’ve never seen an implementation of Facebook Open Platform, plus I have no idea what we will be able to do with it once we have it setup correctly.

Will the Facebook Open Platform be compatible with our portal?
Will we be able to filter apps that will appear on our site?
Will we have access to the applications?
Will people be able to build an application once, and it be used on Facebook, and our site?
What happens to users who aren’t Facebook users?
Where are other examples of these same implementations?

These questions are really bugging me at the moment, and if anyone has any tips, we’d really appreciate some feedback!

Tags: application, Facebook, Identity, portal
Posted in Facebook Friday's, Identity, Online, Social Networks, Web2.0 | 3 Comments »

Leading Geeks

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

I found this pretty cool presentation on “leading geeks”, which I feel could be very applicable to Generation Y as well.

Leading Geeks

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: leadership management)

Posted in Identity, Online | 1 Comment »

My last day at 24.com

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Tomorrow marks my last day at 24.com. I’ve had a fantastic time here, learnt a lot and met some brilliant people. Naspers/MIH/24 is the one company that I’d like to work for at the moment… but I have other plans.

After some deliberation, job interviews and such, I’ve decided to open my own social media and digital consultancy here in Cape Town. I’ll be focused on providing digital context to brands and company’s, with a youth and application slant.

That’s the short of it. Drop me an email for the long part. You can contact me here: unodewaal<at>gmail.com.

Posted in Future Studies, Identity, Online, Web2.0 | 8 Comments »

What Facebook connect will mean for Identity 2.0

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Dick Hardt, the guy who sort of helped kickstarted OpenID and had that awesome presentation, has blogged about an abbreviated history of identity systems. It’s a pretty good read if you want to understand since when the whole Identity 2.0 thing has been coming – and how Microsoft might actually have been on the forefront of the movement, but did it in a sucky way.

The part that struck me most, and what I believe is really important for the web, is that we are seeing the web mature more. I posted about signs of a maturing web earlier in reference to more complex advertising and how digital advertising is coming into its own.

What Facebook Connect will mean is that we’ll see your real identity commenting on this blog and moving with you on the web. Which says a lot. OpenID is a cool way to do that already, you can create a profile and sign-on easily, but how do I know that it’s really you? Current commenting systems suck even more at this.

For example, here we have Nelson Mandela commenting on the Facebook Connect post on Quirk’s blog:

Many services have been suffering from a similar problem – fake or multiple identities. 24.com regularly suffers from spammy comments and Muti has also gained flak for allowing people to register multiple profiles (and thereby game the system).

Magnolia has an interesting way of getting around some of these problems – you can’t register an account with an email address (as these are quite disposable), you can only register with a select group of services. While this doesn’t directly solve the issue of identity, it was one of the first services that I saw that used a type of Facebook Connect before there was a Facebook Connect.

Now. What we’ll see is more of this, better identity with Real People in commenting. Real Identity. And this is why the web is maturing even more. It’s moving away from the geeky world of AcidBurn76 commenting on everything, to a more mature web where you are responsible. I find this exciting because it also opens up the opportunity for web communities to flourish more.

(As a side note, Facebook is the first service that has managed to get probably everyone to use their real name to sign up. It’s quite incredible really.)

Posted in Facebook Friday's, Identity, Music, Social Networks, Web2.0 | 5 Comments »

Google you bastards

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Dammit, why does their Toilet Seat look better than my Toilet Seat?

Posted in Identity, Web2.0 | No Comments »

Questions around dataportability

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008

I really liked the post on RWW today about dataportablity by Josh Catone. It’s something that I’m struggling to get my head around – who owns that data?

I’m a believer that while you own the data, the activity, i.e. what you did on the site and what you put on there, is partially owned by the site. Just because you uploaded a photo to Flickr, and you used all the cool nifty uploading, tagging, rotating, sorting, organizing tools that Flickr offers, you should now be able to port all of that to Facebook? Same, Facebook has friend tagging as a feature, and it’s a piece of technology that they pioneered, and now you want to take that over to Flickr?

That part doesn’t sit well with me. I feel that the services/sites have invested quite a lot of R&D time into building these features, and for you to now be able to up that data and take it somewhere else…

The example Josh used is quite a good analogy – can I take my data from Store 1 to Store 2?
Store 1 has brilliant data capturing, sorting and customer research. Store 2 is a mom and pop shop, no technology, but they can tailor a lot of niche services to you, if they can get that data. Yes, I would like that data portable, but Store 1 has heavily invested in that data, and it would not have been possible to get to that data without the infrastructure that they built.

Now, with some dataportabilty chucked in, we can quickly take the attention data from Store 1 and plug it into Store 2?

Is that attention data owned by Store 1? Yes, I believe it is. Unless they agree to making that Attention Data public, it would be a breach of service to take that data out. Unless there are laws governing it. Principle Six in New Zealand does exactly that embodies what I want to happen.
(thanks for the link Pete! )

Why do I say “Yes, I would want that”? It means that I don’t need to input that data again, and the new service would just start working automatically.

This is something I’m struggling with so far – I know it’s a good thing. But how do you keep the technologies safe that companies have invested in, and promote more research and innovation? No site would like their users to be able up and off to another site.

Should I be able to select what data I want, send that over to the new service? I believe so. oAuth is going to help me.

Posted in Identity, Social Networks, Web2.0 | 3 Comments »

Social news sites are more valuable than Facebook.

Monday, April 14th, 2008

If you take a look at the data that Facebook has on you, and the quality of that data you’d be able to see that they really don’t have that much qualitative data and can only target pretty rudimentary ads.

For making it easier, let’s split it in 2 groups: Profile data and activity data.

Profile data is the data that you fill in – Favourite books, movies, interests, music. Honestly I’ve never filled in this data and I don’t know of someone who has maintained that, it also doesn’t reflect your true preferences (typical case of “you don’t really know what you like”).

Your work details are in there as well – what you are busy doing and more or less in what field of business you are in. People don’t maintain that too well either. Then there’s also your network data – which shows in which area you are, but that you could probably get more accurate data on with IP targeting.

Last but not least – your relationship status, age and sex. Well golly gosh, ain’t that fantastic.

Up to this point, it’s really difficult to target an ad to a person. With this data, for e.g., would you be able to target an Audi ad to me, knowing that I prefer Audi over BMW? I don’t think you can target something specific to person with those details. Would you be able to know that I am looking for a vintage Mercedes Benz SL500 convertible? And be able to serve me ads for that?

I don’t think so.

But luckily, there is the opportunity to expand! We have a whole set of other data: Groups, photos, events, Friends, Pages and applications – which we can lump into activity profile data.

However, none of this data is structured enough to be able to give real value. Does Facebook know that I have an intense dislike for 7de laan if I have joined the following groups:

I struggle to think that they would.
(as a side note – there isn’t a Fan Page for 7de Laan…)

Similarly, the events that I attend are only tagged on a very rudimentary level, Facebook does not know that some of the music I listen to is nu-electro-afro-coochie-pop, but that I also like DJ Krush and really want him to come to Cape Town. Does it take into the account the nature of post-modern, ironic party organisers who label their Electro dress-ups a “Party – Barbecue”?

The photo’s we have of all our events and so are also not really semantic in any way – does Facebook know that I am wearing Diesel (and not Nike) sunglasses, or drinking Amstel (and not Windhoek) beer? Nope. Fan pages are a cool addition and it does allow me to specify the relationship between a product/person/music (i.e. “I like this”), but it’s still a very rudimentary system. Does it know that I like a genre of music (which I haven’t specified on my profile)?

My friends list isn’t too great either – I can’t get any more data out of there than I can from my own profile.

Applications has the best repository of info, but it’s in a data silo. Your last.fm application can’t talk too well with you Facebook profile and make you stop seeing “Beat Bladder Infection” ads along the side, and rather “Watch the new Justic video”. This data still sits in a silo and I’m thinking it sits more with the 3rd party app than it does with Facebook.

Still, at the end of the day I don’t believe Facebook could target me an ad for a vintage SL500 Merc.

Enter social news

Now, on the other hand, DIGG, or any social news site, has much more data on me. While they don’t have my profile data (like age and sex) they can find out what I like and don’t like much better. I click on links and submit articles, all these are in semantic form. If I’ve submitted articles on vintage cars, rated anything up or down, Digg would be able to better target an ad tailored to me. It’s because of that that I feel Digg (or any social news site) should have a higher per-user valuation than Facebook. That data is more valuable and deeper than Facebook could ever have.

Posted in Identity, Online, Social Networks | 2 Comments »

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