robert scoble Archives | Ian M Rountree

Never Mind the Buzz, Cocks

February 13, 2010 by Ian 27 Comments

When I started Tweeting, I didn’t de-construct the service because I didn’t feel I knew enough about what I disliked or appreciated about it. I also didn’t know what it was actually for. The same thing goes for Facebook – when I joined, I didn’t get it, mostly because all of my friends were using it in such starkly different ways. Dynamic networks are like that – you can’t judge the entire service or network based on the habits of a few groups of users. Much as we like to burn the Midnight Oil, it’s impractical to over-study networks that just came out.

But then Google released Wave. Instant internet-wide love/hate relationship. And now it’s Buzz. And it’s another case, in part, of twenty people using the same services fifty different ways, and no one seems to know what they’re actually for. As much as we like to think well of Google, this is far from The Cure for Social Media.

It’s easy to see why. Buzz interrupts you, something internet marketers have been trying to avoid for years. It makes a mess of your inbox, when its default settings are on, and there’s no real way to get right of it, short of turning it off. This all or nothing approach has a number of people convinced that Google’s off their own kool-aid and making some key errors in product development.

To me it just looks like they’re taking the tactic of Ship-Then-Perfect to an entirely new realm – I wonder what Seth Godin would think about that, actually. But I doubt he’s on Buzz. He’s not even on Twitter, really – which is fine. However, Jeff Jarvis, one of Google’s few scholars, has a great deconstruction of the visible intent of Buzz on his blog; post titled “Google’s Buzz(machine)”

I turned Buzz off after my BlackBerry went ballistic over the first fifty alerts coming in within five minutes. The merging of my inbox was too much – I don’t want that, and it’s easy to see from all the clutter on Twitter and elsewhere, that not many other people do either. Stephen Hodson noted that Search Engine Land completely killed a story about the rumoured split between Buzz and GMail – which may have proven an important point about exactly how much we try to appease El Goog, even when we dislike features of their services.

The important point that many of these de-constructions are missing is that this is a service stil in Beta. Google is well known for their endless cycles of public beta. Christopher S Penn made the first good point when he talked about why Buzz is Brilliant and Deadly for Social Media 1.0 on his own blog – and I agree with much of what he says there. Robert Scoble, Supercurator, made a note about Google’s announcement as well, taking the tactic of talking about why Google won’t go after Twitter or Facebook on their own. The bit that convinced me to look more into Buzz?

Google isn’t willing to piss its users off to get to the next level. [Facebook’s] Zuckerberg is willing to piss off Facebook’s users by changing the platform. He is in the midst of changing his platform once again from something that was only for private friends and family to something that’s more public so that Facebook can effectively compete in search (or, at least, be like Twitter and sell its feeds to Google or Microsoft). Google just isn’t willing to do that over and over.

I think Scoble’s got it right here – the features we hate about Buzz are temporary. Already, people are coming up with stupid Buzz tricks to make sure that the service is usable – and it works. I’ve turned Buzz back on, having followed about three of the tips from AEXT.net‘s article on Undocumented tricks for Buzz. Most important trick there? Convincing GMail not to deliver Buzz notices to your in box. Anyone with a Smartphone needs to use that, just to make the service liveable while Google is still ironing out The Kinks. Tip number 5, on finding a user’s name to @ them with is also very handy for larger following groups and conversations. Props to Mark Dykeman for sharing this one, as well – I would have written Buzz off entirely without these tips.

I’m still not sure how I’m going to use Buzz. Don’t be surprised if you see some posts in the next week about how I actually do use social networks personally – I think some study might be required before I can decide if I really need that extra tank in my motor pool.

What do you think? Is Google off its rocker, or is this another instance of the Big Country saying Yes before it’s time?

UPDATED: Jeff Jarvis dropped a post about Buzz’s to-soon launch.

UPDATED x2: The Supreme Court of Texas Blog also added some privacy concerns about Buzz, especially poignant information for journalists, lawyers and, yes, even bloggers.

Photo by Aitor Escauriaza.

Deconstructing Social Media: The Nuclear Option

January 25, 2010 by Ian 17 Comments

As I’m writing this I have 323 followers on Twitter. Last night I had less than 300. This morning I had more than 350 – and then, one by one, the difference disappeared as I deleted used-nonce and pure noise followers. Obviously, Twitter’s request to some services to stop using auto-unfollow has not kicked in properly.

This isn’t a bad thing. Not one bit.

Get this straight. I don’t really care if you follow me on Twitter.My numbers don’t mean a thing – now. I’m just a dude who writes. I’m not a pundit or journalist like Jeff Jarvis, a massive tech god like Robert Scoble, or a marketing whiz like, well, at this point half of Twitter. I’m a participant, not a trend-setter. That’s what I’m about, that’s what I do. So I don’t really care if you follow me. But you’d better damn well bet I’ll be impressed with YOU if you respond to something I’ve said, the way Jarvis, Scoble and a few others have.

I don’t care about follower numbers because until Twitter and blogging and other things of the sort become a career instead of a hobby, I’m always going to win the engagement war against bigger stars in the social media arena. How, do you figure, that is? For the same reason that Liz Strauss and I agree Conan O’Brien won out; he didn’t forget his core audience. There’s no value in the followers metric, at all, any more. If there ever was. I care about conversation.

I can account for eight of my twenty subscribers. I speak to these eight people fairly regularly – half of them are on Twitter, and about the same number reliably hit my blog from the links I post there. Of these, two or three comment regularly. Of all of the numbers, this is what matters to me the most, because I value contribution, even when it’s small. Lots of bloggers say they live in the comments – I dream of one day having a comments section to call home.

Robert Scoble just dropped a bomb about the differing benefits of creating content versus curating content produced by others. It’s one of the best he’s done in a while, taking apart the work of going to a big event, and why following it in broader scope is an important job too. I agree – but doing this work does not help Scobleizer’s engagement. He sits at his screenbank, aggregates, and curates. A necessary job, yes, but it places him even more in the ivory tower others have built for him – it’s entirely his personality. But it makes the idea of engaging him, of insinuating oneself into his circle nearly unimaginable.

Having a massive following is great – hell, if I hadn’t engaged on Twitter, I wouldn’t ever have interviewed Mark Dykeman, Liz Strauss wouldn’t know who I was, and Steven Hodson wouldn’t be putting out perspective on my writing. It’s awesome, all of these people rock.These people are why I win.

Participation is something we can’t lose. Participants are like me, engaged, interested, involved. Meta-curators, the human aggregators, are more like Scoble. They can be very interesting people, but they’re spending so much time outside themselves, in their lists, being the activity more than the action, that the focus of what they do moves beyond participation to something bordering on obsession.

Something to think about. I’m participating – and winning, but that’s me, and my role. Some might be better served by meta-curating, as Scoble is.

Have you given any consideration to what you’re doing with your in-public presence online?

Photo by Brian Auer.

Here Comes The Lunatic Fringe!

January 13, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

The landscape of language is changing. As political correctness makes its ever-quickening attacks on etymology, we’re seeing a lot of phrases we could trust to mean certain things replaced with what seem to be much less demanding, or much less threatening ones. Sometimes this can mean good things for certain groups – “blacks” are now African Americans, which is good, and “retards” are now broken into many diverse groups which accurately reflect whatever integrated dysfunction they’re affected by. These are very good reasons for political correctness.

There are a number of bad reasons to become over-specific of our language. Mostly these boil down to either panic, sense of threat, or a need for control. I get this – you do too, right? No need to overdo it.

What concerns me lately though is how often we throw euphemisms aside, and just flat out replace one word with another, or change the use of a phrase, without letting anyone else know. Sometimes this is slang, other times its buzzwords. Sometimes…

When was the last time you heard the term “lunatic fringe?” Do you remember? Did you read it somewhere? I’m reading Six Pixels fo Separation by Mitch Joel, and he mentions on page 90 during an examination of the history of the acceptance of blogging, that in 2004, bloggers were seen as “… people living in their basements, typing about their cats. It was only being done by the lunatic fringe.” This is a totally valid point, but it made me realize I haven’t heard the term lunatic fringe since, yep, probably about six years ago.

What do we hear now? Early adopter. Insidious, isn’t it?

In 2004, bloggers were unaccepted, the weirdos known for having girlfriends in the US – or in Canada, if you’re from the US instead, whatever, right? – with bad haircuts.

Find a picture of Steve Wozniak from 2004- ok, Woz hasn’t changed much. But he’s much better accepted as a rockstar in wider circles, recently. Go find a picture of Matt Cutts, or Robert Scoble from 2004. Here’s a Google Image search if you feel so inclined. Scoble is the quintessential early adopter. Would he have been called lunatic fringe in 2004? I suppose we’d need some of his friends to speak up, but I doubt it. And yet, the term early adopter is being employed to describe the very same behaviours we attributed to bloggers less than ten years ago.

What happened in 2004 when the bloggers attacked? We circled the wagons, knuckled in and prepared lacklustre legal defence against poorly informed miscreants. Now? Businesses have shifted from the defensive to courtship, there’s even a bloggers’ lounge at CES this year (can you tell I’m bitter I didn’t get to go?). And it’s not that the ecosystem has changed. Yes, blogging has become accepted, even encouraged, if we go back to SPoS and just about every other marketing book coming out in the last two years.

But what’s changed about our portrayal of the blogging culture itself?

Once, the lunatic fringe attacked, and drove us back into a huddled circle, a bastion of right and good and true. Now, we’ve become the supplicants, praying for the Gods of the Blogosphere to bless us with yet more linkbait (read as ambrosia) and say nice things about is. SO much so that the FTC in the United States just had to issue a papal bull demanding that bloggers fess up to sponsorship.

What changed? New media used to be the Lunatic Fringe, encroaching on all that was tradition and margin and blue chip. Now, the Early Adopters are leading the way, having discovered a path toward enlightenment, community and equity.

Damned etymology.

Photo by tibchris.

The Automated Prejudice of Scale

January 5, 2010 by Ian 6 Comments

How do you approach big problems? You know, the ones you feel – at first glimpse – can never be solved? After you ge over the shock, how do you go about tearing down the mountain? On the other hand, what do you do when confronted with a big project at work? Perhaps liaising with a Fortune 100 company at the C-level to get a contract? Do you treat it differently than working with a local entrepreneur?

Of course you do. You have to. Don’t you?

Apparently, Berkeley High might be cutting out its science labs in order that the massive ethnic gap in its students grades might be levelled. I think these teachers are missing something. The move comes with the aim of diverting resources toward helping “underachieving” students get up to snuff; their studies say that black and latino students are doing poorly, and the science labs only benefit white students. I can’t help but wonder if this is an indication of educational idiocy, or if they’re playing to their audience. It’s hard to tell until the work gets done.

But we’re used to bureaucracy doing this sort of thing. It feels external. Often, we’re unaware of treating things differently because of size, because the prejudice is so ingrained it’s mental furniture. If you go shopping for a TV, you probably want a big one, the biggest you can afford, right? Who cares that if you’re sitting six feet away, a 37″ screen is just on the high end of useful for viewing – that 60″ plasma just screams take me home.

It doesn’t always work in a good or productive manner, but we tend to treat anything bigger than our estimates as better when it’s a perceived benefit, and worse when it’s a perceived threat. I should know – I’m 6’2″ tall and fairly large. My friends treat me as localized security, because without more than five seconds exposure (I’m the goofiest person I know, most days) on the face of it, I look big and threatening. Useful? No. Clothes cost half again as much as they do for anyone else, I hit my head on everything including some doorframes depending on my shoes, and I’m vastly out of shape. Still think being 6’2″ and having a football player’s frame is better than whatever shape you’re in?

As a proving converse argument, I had a friend in school who was 5’10” tall and less than a hundred pounds – and still more threatening than me. Is scale still impressive, putting these descriptions side by side?

One of the things we need to be able to do to combat these clouding assumptions is change our paradigm away from immediate impression toward utility. Often these are one and the same, but in the ever-more-convoluted twenty-first century, we can no longer afford to let first impressions count for anything if we’re given evidence the impression was imperfect. Minds are like parachutes, they work better when we let them open.

Another thing we need to get better at is making sure we’re aware of where scale is of any benefit. I’ve got less than three hundred people following me on Twitter, for example, but those I’ve connected with (and if you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re one of them and know where to find me there) are awesome people, well worth following – and well worth promoting on my part as well. Does this make my stream less valuable to the world than @Scobleizer‘s constant ReTweet storms?

If the small fish is connected to the right big fish, does the small fish need to grow?

Photo by jurvetson

Personality Thieves – The War for the Identities of the Internet

December 23, 2009 by Ian 4 Comments

Big Ass Feed Icon — photo by Danny Sullivan

Robert Scoble posted an interesting discussion topic on his Facebook wall, asking the deceptively simple question: Who will win the Identity war in 2010?

The question was asked with specificity towards tech platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Google and so on, but it’s an important question to ask of ourselves: to whom are we giving the leverage of our primary identification on the web?

Like a lot of others who are best suited to interface, I’m an adaptable person. This is both a great help in my work, and a hindrance with my friends for one simple reason; when I spend time with you, I’m going to start to sound like you. If I spend an evening watching QI, I have a flare-up of British in my speech. If I spend too much time reading Justin Kownacki, I get ornery. Too much Seth Godin and I fall afoul of sweeping inspirational pessimism. I’ve been accused of having a weak identity, but I don’t think that’s it, primarily because I’m not alone in this behaviour; I just happen to display it as a very visible means of communication. I’m in the habit not only of speaking your language, but speaking your accent as well.

Identity is a touchy subject for a lot of people. We like to be ourselves, but easily fall afoul of pop culture epidemics. Every teenager falls into a category during high school – those who try not to get branded as “outsiders” by their peers, which makes demarcation an impossible process to avoid; it only goes away when everyone stops participating, and it’s not human nature to remain intentionally ambiguous. Social networks make this even more difficult to avoid – Twitter has lists, Facebook has the friend system, as do so many other networks. It’s not a bad thing, but as with so much else, awareness is the key to safe navigation.

The idea of identity, of finding peers to connect with, is so easy to reconcile with our daily lives that technology has adapted it as a mode of operation – we can’t ignore this. Peer to Peer filesharing. Friends lists. Contact lists, address books, RSS feeds, folders, libraries, right down to the DLLs that run your computer programs. Grouping is everywhere. And because it’s everywhere, it’s possible to manipulate.

I recently read an article on Brad J Ward’s blog from last year about “FacebookGate” where a group had severely infiltrated student-run graduation groups for various schools – for who knows what purpose. Perhaps data mining. Maybe stalking. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this event as a demonstration of the very demarcation we use to identify ourselves being used for purposes we did not choose when we claimed the label in the first place.

It gets worse: Over the last month I’ve seen both Chris Brogan and Amber Naslund suffer outright plagiarism. Brogan’s world saw a hack marketing an eBook made out of a collection of Chris’ blog posts. Naslund had a blog post ripped right from her site and posted, no claim of attribution whatsoever, on another site. This goes beyond casual emulation for the sake of communication; this is outright personality theft.

So how does this apply to technology as a communicative and cultural force? In practice. I make a habit of signing up for every social networking site I can lay my greedy hands on, whether I’m aiming to use it or not. I’ve been trying to snap up my own names as a username for the last three months as well, for branding purposes, it just makes sense. Now, think about that for a second. Think about what I just said.

Branding purposes.

Sounds funny, doesn’t it? We talk about personal branding all the time, but it’s always as an external force, information we’re carefully aligning outside ourselves on networks, website after website, trying to make a name for ourselves. We get annoyed if our names are already taken, but how do we fight back? Not by making a mass acceptance of the fact that our personal brands are facets of our identity – that would be silly, applying a business term to ourselves – but rather by setting up “Verified Accounts” and other measures to make sure the people represented by certain usernames really are themselves. It’s a good thing, but it’s still external.

Scoble’s question about who will win the identity war this year – and it will be this year, it has to be, or it will never come – is a big one. I answered by asserting that it won’t be the creation of utility that wins. If we’re looking for utility we already have a mesh of social networks for that. Facebook for friend gathering Twitter for grapeshot conversation, LiveFyre for in-depth enquiry. FourSquare and Gowalla for relational location. We build our online identities out of these things, among many others (personally branded websites, I’m aware, are a big deal as well. I’ve got mine, did you get yours?) and often forget that the idea of identity is more about accessibility than it is about utility. We use these networks to get our words out to others, to track interest in what we say based on how, when, and how loud we say it.

Whatever wins the identity war will provide the greatest power of accessibility and cross-feeding to the largest number of people with the least amount of hassle. Google’s profiles are a great start, but it’s not quite enough. If I know El Goog half as well as I hallucinate that I do, they’ll improve it; I can see the potential there for the perfect outward-facing home base meshed with the ultimate inward-facing dashboard. I wonder if they do, too.

Maybe it won’t be Google. Maybe it’ll be something, or someone else that brings up that killer app.

I just can’t wait to use it once it’s there.