Finally moving to igudo.com!

I have moved my site to a privately hosted version of WordPress to be found at igudo.com.

Content has been slow lately but I have been taking some personal time off to enjoy my last weeks of vacation before I start up at Big Blue.  I will be writing shortly over at igudo.com.  I have moved all of the content from this temporary site to the new location for legacy consumption and linking.

Update your RSS reader with the new igudo.com feed here.

Also, be sure to check out my more personal musings at igudo.com/dougw (or grab the feed here).

Social networks and the military’s hidden classism

I just finished reading a great article on a supposed class difference between MySpace and Facebook users. There is nothing you shouldn’t be able to spot between the lines but a good read nonetheless.

One thing I found interesting is her conservative take on the U.S. military’s ban of MySpace.

A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook. Facebook is extremely popular in the military, but it’s not the SNS of choice for 18-year old soldiers, a group that is primarily from poorer, less educated communities. They are using MySpace. The officers, many of whom have already received college training, are using Facebook. The military ban appears to replicate the class divisions that exist throughout the military. I can’t help but wonder if the reason for this goes beyond the purported concerns that those in the military are leaking information or spending too much time online or soaking up too much bandwidth with their MySpace usage.

MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers’ MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I’ve watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren’t quite sure what they are doing in Iraq. I don’t have the data to confirm whether or not a statistically significant shift has occurred but it was one of those things that just made me think. And then the ban happened. I can’t help but wonder if part of the goal is to cut off communication between current soldiers and the group that the military hopes to recruit. Many young soldiers’ profiles aren’t public so it’s not about making a bad public impression. That said, young soldiers tend to have reasonably large networks because they tend to accept friend requests of anyone that they knew back home which means that they’re connecting to almost everyone from their high school. Many of these familiar strangers write comments supporting them. But what happens if the soldiers start to question why they’re in Iraq? And if this is witnessed by high school students from working class communities who the Army intends to recruit?

She neglects to inform readers that in the same stroke a ban was placed on YouTube. The Department of Defense says that strained infrastructure meant that the most bandwidth-intensive sites needed to be blacklisted, which does not suggest the threat to negative perceptions. Many soldiers seem to agree that military bandwidth is stretched but wish that the change did not affect their preferred ability to communicate with family and friends.

If you are really interested.

How not to design a user interface for the Web

I’m just saying, when you launch a product on the Web, make sure you are using every available advantage the medium has to offer.

ABC recently opened it’s vaults and put their shows online. With their new player, we have yet another example of big media still not getting it. The interface (video below) is linear! So not only do you have to sit through the whirlwind pre-roll, but you aren’t even able to select a title in one click. No, instead you have to scroll, one show at a time through the list.

I know it’s petty, but I think that on the Web where there is constant distraction, less is more and efficiency trumps glamor. My point: when you are trying to win your customers from sites that offer your content for free, make sure it is easier to get on your offering than theirs.

Twitter to gain a voice with TwitterGram

I’m late to the Twitter game but still find this interesting.

Dave Winer has decided to bring voicemail to the internet, soon to be tied into the popular microblogging service. What he calls a TwitterGram will send a tweet with an URL to a 200K audio file. Good for the twittering while driving, updates that require more than 160 characters, sharing a song (at a concert), etc…

His rationale is that Twitter is to a blog what a TwitterGram is to podcasting.

A web-service should be up shortly at twittergram.com. I expect that it will gain traction but shouldn’t come nearly as large tweets for normal users. This is a niche service. Twitter is for short, to the point messages. This really caters to efficient text-based communication that is good for mobile users and parsing/aggregating computers.

To align with the update-anywhere Twitter model, a killer TwitterGram service would also have a voicemail box where a user is recognized by their incoming phone number and the recorded message is sent in as tweet. Although, then you are getting into Jott’s space.

Is Noise Facebook’s Next Growing Pain?

Bill Erickson has an interesting take on the effects of Facebook applications on the site’s userbase.

A change has happened at Facebook and not many have noticed it. As the VC’s and entrepreneurs have become more connected to facebook, the average user (a college student) has become more disconnected.

Facebook as a replacement for TV? It was that 2 years ago, it isn’t any more. As a college student and an entrepreneur (like everyone else in the world, I have a facebook app being released next week) I’ve seen the change happen. Last year, whenever we – and by we, I mean college students – were bored, we’d get on facebook and browse around for a while. Check out some photos, browse friends profiles…just bounce around on facebook for an hour or so.

But now, facebook has added so much stuff that it isn’t an exploring tool anymore – they’ve optimized it to a point where I don’t need to explore. Instead of spending hours jumping around on friends profiles, i can take a quick look at hte news feed. I get text msgs and emails whenever I get a message, tagged in a photo, or any other “actionable” item. I’ve found I only go to facebook now when I need to act on one of these “actionable” items; e.g., receive a message, wall post, tagged in a photo.

And it’s not just me. I’ve been talking to a lot of college students because I want my facebook app to succeed. It had almost been finished before they released the platform – it originally used the API – but rebuilt it using the platform, which delayed the launch.

Anyway, almost everyone I’ve talked to has said the facebook apps now are out of hand. One person even said “someone should build a facebook like it used to be, no one wants this new facebook anymore but there’s nothing else that’s better.” Facebook is becoming like digg – too much noise for exploring (ie, TV replacement), but it still works well as a communication platform. So, we are now using it as a replacement for email, IM and the like.

I’m not saying facebook is going anywhere – it is still the best communications platform out there. It has most of my social network already plugged in and I can’t take that to another service (unless it’s built into facebook). But those 250,000 users your application has, they are mostly the same 250,000 users all the other applications have. The vast majority of students aren’t adding any applications. With the huge stream of options, they just blocked the whole thing out.

It’s going to be much harder for my application to get critical mass at my university because the majority of people just won’t look at the application – even if it would be extremely useful to them. People have told me they would have loved my service back before the facebook platform, but now it’s just going to get lost in the noise.

There are other thoughtful comments on Brad’s post linked above. Other bloggers such as Fred Wilson see the signal to noise ratio as a problem, too.

Though Facebook’s userbase is currently less than a quarter the size of MySpace’s count, it is clear, even to News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch, that Facebook is the in and MySpace is out. However, even with this momentum, could these applications mean a quick downturn in Facebook’s touted user activity levels and a loss of focus from their core product?

Sony’s Minisodes on MySpace a Good Idea

There is an op-ed piece on NPR entitled Old TV Is New Again, and Shorter discussing Sony’s release of so-called minisodes. These TV classics, such as Who’s the Boss?, Charlie’s Angles, and The Facts of Life, will be trimmed to run 3-5 minutes, hence the name. Sony plans to distribute through MySpace, hopefully latching onto their viral userbase and targeting a broad audience, the younger of whom have likely never seen these shows.

NPR’s commentator on the piece, Andrew Wallenstein, thinks the idea destroys the integrity of the original shows, killing character development, removing plot, etc… His idea: if you can’t see the episode in full, you are missing something, so you shouldn’t view it at all.

I disagree with the largely nostalgic viewpoint and see this as win-win. To me, this is Sony experimenting with a move to bring mainstream media online and using legacy content (read: cheap, paid for) to do it. What the above argument fails to notice is the context of the medium minisodes are viewed.

The web is a harsh place for content providers. Users have short attention spans and only give partial focus to the content. The clear message is that adaptation is a must and Sony is clearly heeding the call. If companies want their content to spread virally, they must deliver media catered to the users’ short attention span.

Easily consumable videos have propelled short clips toward ubiquity. Examples of a successful move from 30 minute episodes are shows like Prom Queen (originally planned to run 80 episodes, Prom Queen will be returning in August after a cliffhanger ending left loyal viewers wanting more) and the lonelygirl15 craze.

The Paris Hilton Litmus Test

Does the shift of keyword count at this year’s Supernova Conference from relevant industry leaders to celebrities such as Paris Hilton indicate the Web is going mainstream. Paul Kedrosky thinks so.

While it may be true that the frontiers of mainstream media on the Web are just now being explored, gossip and celebrity mishaps have long been a driver of traffic to seemingly irrelevant sites.

BusinessWeek’s August 14, 2006 cover story Valley Boy discusses the rise of the (then) new wave of development on the Internet. The accompanying podcast mentions that social news aggregator digg received it’s first big break when the soon-to-be-freed-Hilton-heir had her sidekick hacked. Long story short, the digg post was listed high in Google search results which seemed to bring digg traffic to the tipping point.

Also, ever taken a look at Google’s Zeitgeist Archive? To say the people haven’t wanted mainstream media on the net since 2001 would be an apparent mistake.

Is this news because entrepreneurs are now realizing an untapped opportunity, the money is just now starting to flow from equity funds, or big media is just now realizing that they are going to have to change their business model?

Brief: Why This Blog

Why am I starting this blog? In the spirit of Seth Godin’s recent Just One Post I am trying to add just a little bit to the Internet’s fossil record.

I started this blog to focus on the tech industry, entrepreneurship, and business. I want to challenge myself to form stronger opinions and arguments, then share them with a larger community. I am humbled by the quality of some of the blogs I read. I want to develop my ability to communicate at their heightened level.

Soon, I will be moving my content to a permanent home at http://www.igudo.com to a hosted WordPress installation. I am not going to invest much time in developing content (outside of writing posts!) in this temporary situation but I will sport a more complete site once I have my production box up and running. I’m just waiting for some new hardware.

Anyway, stay tuned. More to come shortly.

Don’t Get Tunnel Vision

Sometimes, looking around might just give you your answer. Let me explain.

Recently, I was on my way to meet a friend for a round of golf. Leaving my house I looked over the directions to the course and stored the number and address into my phone. It was going to be 2 hours until I actually went to the course and having a larger ego than cranial capacity, I decided written directions wouldn’t be required. If anything I had the address in my phone, right?

So I run some errands than head to toward the course. As I get off the interstate I fire up my mobile browser to get the finer grain directions that I have already forgotten. No big deal.

Connection error after connection error. Browser after browser. Google Maps app then Microsoft Live Search. They all fail. I have no signal. Great.

Ah, I have the phone number! So I call the clubhouse. I listen to the directions and with each turn I am supposed to make I realize I must be really close.

“Yeah, did that. Ok, just got off that road. Wait did you say take the first right and you’re be a mile up the street?”

I look up from the parking lot where I’m sitting and see a street sign that has been staring at me for the past ten minutes, Lumley Road. I knew that’s where I was supposed to be but I had grow so dependent, stubborn, and used to my digital way of doing things that I didn’t even look up to see I had already arrived. Tunnel vision.

Don’t get so buried in your set ways of doing things that you lose sight of all of your resources. I grew reliant on my mobile lifestyle. I wasted ten minutes and sweat in 100 degree weather for my error. Don’t make my mistake. Occasionally, all you have to do is look up.

Fickle Facebook Friends

Paul Kedrosky has noted Facebook user’s fickle adoption of the new third-party applications. Like any user-centric platform users can easily add or remove an application. This does lead to a high level of tire-kicking as Paul mentioned. What developers can expect then is an audience that approaches adoption with a try-before-I-buy mentality. In other words, the Facebook crowd is a savvy user base, fearless but harsh.

Therefore, when developers are planning for and designing their F8 strategy, it is important to remember what the platform was originally designed to do. Just read the home screen, “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you” (emphasis theirs). Facebook has done an amazing job with this charge. They have created a site that organizes friendships into a consumable product but most importantly they have allowed users the ability to express and extend their personality online. This is what keeps socialites glued to Facebook day in and day out.

A successful Facebook application will help to extend the user’s online presence. Whether it means providing a service that allows friends to add updates to a user’s profile (therefore reinforcing and augmenting the friendship) or increasing the opportunity for a user to express their individuality, applications that stick will understand and harness the behavior pattern of Facebook users.

All of the widely used applications do this. Applications with lasting adoption include the deeply-integrated feature-rich iLike, to the less serious Graffiti and SuperPoke, each complementing the user’s expectations of the network.

To win on Facebook, understand the network as a social facilitator, the user as an individual, and friends as reinforcers. Use these ideas in the way demonstrated by thriving in-house applications (e.g. photos, wall, and groups) and create real value within the network for a lasting business opportunity.

Getting back to the original point, users are quickly being bombarded with new applications, many of them adaptations of websites pigeonholed to the F8 Platform. What we see is these applications failing to gain widespread usage. Users rapidly evaluate a new application and determine it’s worth compared to canonical Facebook products.

Does your application help a person tell something about them self? Does your application help friends be friends? Don’t just dump content on their profile and think it will stay. In fact you shouldn’t want static content, encourage interactivity! Design for the platform, create a viral strategy, and keep your application in the user’s profiles.