May
18

Mind The Gap: Social vs. Interest With Facebook’s IPO today, you’d think that social networks are taking over the Web. Look at virtually any website and you’ll see social button flotsam and jetsam: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, and on and on. Social is everywhere. But it’s far from everything, especially everything about me. While Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn map who I know – my Social Graph – they so far do a pretty lousy job of mapping what I like or love – my Interest Graph. My Interest Graph encompasses much more than my activity on social networks. It is defined by my affinity to certain music, movies, restaurants, TV, coffee, political leanings, etc. At best, the Social Graph informs the Interest Graph but it does less to define you and what you like. For a concise writeup on the difference, read this excellent post from ReadWriteWeb’s David Rogers. While educating myself on the differences, I also turned to these helpful articles from TechCrunch, Edward Boches, GigaOm, Social Media Today and this fantastic mind blower from the folks at Gravity. Facebook’s in a buying mood The differences between Social and Interest are not lost on the behemoth that is Facebook and such differences explain the foresight in a string of acquisitions that dip into the Interest side of the equation. The $1B acquisition of Instagram is an obvious one but so was Gowalla (check-ins) and the less ballyhooed purchase of Glancee (serendipitous discovery based on shared interests). The urgent need to tap the Interest Graph is also at the core of Zuck’s concept of frictionless sharing with Open Graph – Spotify and the Washington Post Social Reader are prime examples of your Interest Graph tying back to your Social Graph. Because of these moves, we’ll see a continued blurring of the line separating Social and Interest.  Why This Matters Brands that are clamoring for our attention in this space, along with their marketing and advertising partners, need to understand that Facebook is not Twitter – one size does not fit all. Just as we don’t approach TV in the same way we do print media, we need to realize that each service comes with its own set of rules. In this chart, I’ve tried to indicate the degree to which some of the bigger players in the Social/Interest world dominate, and how some bridge the gap better than others.  Mind the Gap The sites that best bridge the divide between who we know and what we like will win in the battle for our attention. Despite the bashing, Google+ is poised to best combine the Social and Interest Graphs because of its dominance in search and the absence of barriers between its Social Network and the rest of the Web. Any significant connections on Facebook are mutual though you can subscribe to an individual or like a brand. Open graph sharing is Facebook’s attempt at breaking into the Interest Graph. I can see what music my friends are listening to and presumably because we’re friends, I’ll like it too. What’s wonky is that the connection relies on the friendship rather than the social object, in this case music. Facebook’s attempt at connection makes me think of iLike, an early entry in the Interest Graph space that used music as the connector. While I didn’t make any lasting friendships on that site, I did discover some amazing new music and I have complete strangers to thank for that. For a great rundown of social objects, check out Gaping Void’s cheat sheet. Twitter permits one-way connections, allowing people to follow anyone and anything of interest, as well as friends and family. Mutual following is likely based on shared interests rather than personally knowing each other (though that often happens later). Google+ allows for both one-way and mutual connections. It also employs the easiest method for segmenting social and interest graphs into Circles. LinkedIn’s entire success rests on the foundation of who you know, though with its newsfeed and recent SlideShare acquisition, Interest has small foothold. The other sites depicted here, like Pinterest, are all about what you like, acting as self-expression. It’s worth noting that many of the sites entrenched on the Interest side encourage and sometimes even require a Facebook connection.

Mind The Gap: Social vs. Interest

With Facebook’s IPO today, you’d think that social networks are taking over the Web. Look at virtually any website and you’ll see social button flotsam and jetsam: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, and on and on.

Social is everywhere. But it’s far from everything, especially everything about me. While Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn map who I know – my Social Graph – they so far do a pretty lousy job of mapping what I like or love – my Interest Graph. My Interest Graph encompasses much more than my activity on social networks. It is defined by my affinity to certain music, movies, restaurants, TV, coffee, political leanings, etc. At best, the Social Graph informs the Interest Graph but it does less to define you and what you like. For a concise writeup on the difference, read this excellent post from ReadWriteWeb’s David Rogers. While educating myself on the differences, I also turned to these helpful articles from TechCrunch, Edward Boches, GigaOm, Social Media Today and this fantastic mind blower from the folks at Gravity.

Facebook’s in a buying mood

The differences between Social and Interest are not lost on the behemoth that is Facebook and such differences explain the foresight in a string of acquisitions that dip into the Interest side of the equation. The $1B acquisition of Instagram is an obvious one but so was Gowalla (check-ins) and the less ballyhooed purchase of Glancee (serendipitous discovery based on shared interests). The urgent need to tap the Interest Graph is also at the core of Zuck’s concept of frictionless sharing with Open Graph – Spotify and the Washington Post Social Reader are prime examples of your Interest Graph tying back to your Social Graph. Because of these moves, we’ll see a continued blurring of the line separating Social and Interest. 

Why This Matters

Brands that are clamoring for our attention in this space, along with their marketing and advertising partners, need to understand that Facebook is not Twitter – one size does not fit all. Just as we don’t approach TV in the same way we do print media, we need to realize that each service comes with its own set of rules. In this chart, I’ve tried to indicate the degree to which some of the bigger players in the Social/Interest world dominate, and how some bridge the gap better than others. 

Mind the Gap

The sites that best bridge the divide between who we know and what we like will win in the battle for our attention. Despite the bashing, Google+ is poised to best combine the Social and Interest Graphs because of its dominance in search and the absence of barriers between its Social Network and the rest of the Web.

Any significant connections on Facebook are mutual though you can subscribe to an individual or like a brand. Open graph sharing is Facebook’s attempt at breaking into the Interest Graph. I can see what music my friends are listening to and presumably because we’re friends, I’ll like it too. What’s wonky is that the connection relies on the friendship rather than the social object, in this case music. Facebook’s attempt at connection makes me think of iLike, an early entry in the Interest Graph space that used music as the connector. While I didn’t make any lasting friendships on that site, I did discover some amazing new music and I have complete strangers to thank for that. For a great rundown of social objects, check out Gaping Void’s cheat sheet.

Twitter permits one-way connections, allowing people to follow anyone and anything of interest, as well as friends and family. Mutual following is likely based on shared interests rather than personally knowing each other (though that often happens later). Google+ allows for both one-way and mutual connections. It also employs the easiest method for segmenting social and interest graphs into Circles. LinkedIn’s entire success rests on the foundation of who you know, though with its newsfeed and recent SlideShare acquisition, Interest has small foothold. The other sites depicted here, like Pinterest, are all about what you like, acting as self-expression. It’s worth noting that many of the sites entrenched on the Interest side encourage and sometimes even require a Facebook connection.

May
10

Draw Something’s usage plummets

Yesterday, ReadWriteWeb published an article by Alicia Eler on the rapidly diminishing usage of Draw Something, a mobile app recently purchased by Zynga for a reported $200 million and change. According to Forbes, the app is shedding 5 millions users a month since the Zynga purchase. 

To me, the main reasons are obvious.

Beyond the simple fact that drawing with your finger can get frustrating, the Draw Something gameplay is tedious:

  • There’s no reason to play for coins
  • You don’t earn more coins for guessing or drawing quicker
  • You can easily write the word if you value worthless coins over honesty
  • The interstitials of stars and happy explosions take way too long
  • The sequence required to “finish” a turn forces a question, “Do I have time and patience to do this right now?”: watch your drawing being guessed (skippable), guess your friend’s drawing, draw your response.
Zynga has proven their playability prowess in games like Words With Friends or Scramble With Friends and it’s surprising that they paid such a boatload for Draw Something. They could have simply made their own copycat (hello Tiny Tower clone, Dream Heights) and based it on a solid foundation of game mechanics. 
With Zynga owning Draw Something, there’s still a chance this game will bounce back but they should rebuild the whole thing from scratch.

May
09

“Embrace the happy accidents. They are really the result of your life’s experiences bubbling up to the surface.”

Me

May
03

Big day for acquisitions!

First off, I’m loving the immediacy of Twitter, as my feed was the first place I saw the news about Discovery Communications acquiring Revision 3. I’ve been a long time viewer of the Rev3 original programming, particularly Diggnation (pour a little of your drink out) and the Totally Rad Show. My buddy, Pete Stringfellow and I even pitched a show at one point and got a great tour of the studios on the south side of San Francisco.

Even bigger news is LinkedIn bringing SlideShare into the fold. Talk about making LinkedIn the professional’s Facebook - this deal instantly skyrockets the amount of shareable and worthwhile content living within the world of LinkedIn.

Congrats to everyone involved. The buyers got the goods and the sellers deserve the rewards.

Apr
26

Apr
25

stoweboyd: Austin Carr is dead-on: why haven’t Microsoft or Apple built Dropbox-style sharing into their OS’s? Austin Carr via Co.Design “If it takes really long [to explain], then there’s probably a problem with the product,” [Dropbox CEO Drew] Houston says with a laugh. It’s that stripped-down approach to product design that’s turned Dropbox into a cloud powerhouse. The service, which offers arguably the simplest solution to accessing your files across PCs, tablets, and smartphones, has rocketed to well beyond 50 million users, and was said to be on track to hit $240 million in revenue last year. Today, the startup introduces its most convenient tool yet: the ability to share any files, right from your desktop, in just two clicks. Apple should take $1B of their $110B hoard, and buy Dropbox. Totally agree. Money would be well spent.

stoweboyd:

Austin Carr is dead-on: why haven’t Microsoft or Apple built Dropbox-style sharing into their OS’s?

Austin Carr via Co.Design

“If it takes really long [to explain], then there’s probably a problem with the product,” [Dropbox CEO Drew] Houston says with a laugh.

It’s that stripped-down approach to product design that’s turned Dropbox into a cloud powerhouse. The service, which offers arguably the simplest solution to accessing your files across PCs, tablets, and smartphones, has rocketed to well beyond 50 million users, and was said to be on track to hit $240 million in revenue last year. Today, the startup introduces its most convenient tool yet: the ability to share any files, right from your desktop, in just two clicks.

Apple should take $1B of their $110B hoard, and buy Dropbox.

Totally agree. Money would be well spent.

(via stoweboyd)

Source fastcodesign.com

Reblogged from stoweboyd

Apr
09

With Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, in the next few weeks you’ll see marketers scrambling to fit Instagram into strategies. And you’ve got a small vocal minority rightfully gloating that they knew what they were talking about when they tried to slip a fringe application into a marketing plan. Hate to say I told you so… I’d love to see what’s cooking up within the Facebook walls - Beluga, Gowalla and now Instagram all under one roof. Game on. Love this meta photo, Pete. petestringfellow: BIG news everybody! The rumors are true, Facebook has acquired Instagram. Good news ya think? (Taken with instagram)

With Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, in the next few weeks you’ll see marketers scrambling to fit Instagram into strategies. And you’ve got a small vocal minority rightfully gloating that they knew what they were talking about when they tried to slip a fringe application into a marketing plan. Hate to say I told you so…

I’d love to see what’s cooking up within the Facebook walls - Beluga, Gowalla and now Instagram all under one roof. Game on.

Love this meta photo, Pete.

petestringfellow:

BIG news everybody! The rumors are true, Facebook has acquired Instagram. Good news ya think? (Taken with instagram)

Source petestringfellow

Reblogged from petestringfellow

Apr
04

Apr
03

Mar
19

Thoughts on SXSW (director’s cut)

Last week, I was fortunate to have an op/ed piece published on the Agency Spy blog. Understandably, it was edited for brevity and so I’m publishing a slightly longer post, my director’s cut if you will. I wanted to put it out there since it includes a shoutout to Ray Kurzweil whose keynote inspired a good deal of my piece. Cheers.

The annual SXSW Interactive conference is called many things – geekfest, spring break for nerds, networking lovefest. But with thousands of tech/startup/marketing folks packing the streets of Austin, there’s no doubt that at SXSW, we collectively crash into the future.

Futurist Amber Case presented the Keynote on Sunday and gave us a glimpse of that future we’re already beginning to live. She aptly boiled down the advancements in computer interfaces into the three properties of water – solid, liquid and air. Your thousand-button TV remote is a solid, a tiny nub for every function. Your contextual iPhone keyboard is liquid, adding or changing buttons to suit any task at hand. What’s to come is the invisible interface, one that is ambient and helpful based on the context of where and what you may be doing. Millions of us walk around with supercomputers in our pockets and bags. iPhones and Droids and Windows phones that know where you are, where your friends are, what time it is, what the weather is like, etc. With Case’s current project, Geoloqi, developers will be able to geofence just about anything, from shopping list reminders when you’re near the grocery to texting your family when you’re almost home from work.

The future of interfaces, the Internet of things, will communicate with you and with each other based on proximity and commonality. One app making a splash at this year’s conference is Highlight. The app uses data from your Facebook profile and in real time shows you who is not only close by but if you have mutual friends or shared interests. Already, a colleague noted that he “found” a friend he hasn’t talked to since junior high.

Brands will soon forge relationships around those serendipitous moments provided by apps like Highlight. Yeah, it’s creepy in a “Minority Report” kind of way. Done wrong, the damage to a brand’s reputation would be hard to repair.

Monday’s Keynote came from another futurist, the brilliant Ray Kurzweil. He noted that technology has always struggled with promise versus peril. Going all the way back to the invention of fire, Mankind had a choice of what to do with the gifts our brilliant minds dream up. As marketers, we also have a choice of how we use these new technologies for their promise, avoiding the perils of blindly pushing products without adding value.

As always, this year’s SXSW was a fantastic glimpse into the future. It will be fun to watch how we all return to the present day and bring a little bit of that future with us.