Posts Tagged: Web 2.0

Thoughts — No Comments
24
Jun 08

Web 2.0’s Breakpoint

This was big news Friday, but I’m still processing the fact Joshua Schacter has left Yahoo, and del.icio.us. I’ve never met Schacter, but I’ve been a fan of his work for a long time. Memepool distracted me endlessly when I was working for TMF during the first dot com, and Del.icio.us has profoundly shaped my lens on Web 2.0. I’m also hopelessly addicted to del.icio.us – I use it extensively for academic research, it has shaped my thinking about all things social, and Terrell and I employed its design patterns for ClaimID. As Joshua leaves Yahoo and Del.icio.us, I wanted to acknowledge his work and the legacy he leaves behind.

It also strikes me that Schacter’s exit, as well as the exit of Flickr co-founders Butterfield and Fake, create a nice breakpoint for Web 2.0. In 2005, we saw the success of Flickr and Del.icio.us as beacons of hope – not only that the web remained monetizable, but that people still cared, that “web people” hadn’t just been chasing false hopes and dreams. Looking back from 2008, the frenzy of Web 2.0 looks more like gentle turbulence. Web 2.0 marked a change, in which our software enabled participation, identity and peer production. Perhaps it is now time to realize those facets are no longer novel, as the web turns and searches for its next transformation.

Research / Thoughts — 1 Comment
27
Apr 07

Time’s Questionable Web 2.0 Measurements

Time Magazine (via Smart Mobs) has published a dubious article questioning participation in Web 2.0. Entitled “Who’s Really Participating in Web 2.0“, the piece examines how many of us are the “writers” on the read/write web. The author ultimately waffles on a meaningful conclusion, though he hints that Web 2.0 is far from fulfilling its potential. Of course I agree with that, but I really don’t like the statistics the author has used to demonstrate his point.

According to Hitwise, only 0.2% of visits to YouTube are users uploading a video, 0.05% visits to Google Video include uploaded videos and 0.16% of Flickr visits are people posting photos. Only the social encyclopedia Wikipedia shows a significant amount of participation, with 4.56% of visits to the site resulting in content editing.

Not only is the percentage of participation very small online, there are some very strong skews as to who is participating. Visitors to Wikipedia are almost equally split 50/50 men and women, yet edits to Wikipedia entries are 60% male. The gender gap is even greater for YouTube, a site whose visitors are equally male and female, but whose uploaders are over 76% male.

The fundamental problem with the analysis is that sites like Youtube, Flickr and Google Video (and by proxy, Web 2.0) are set up as if there is supposed to be a meaningful upload/download ratio by visit. Video and images are inherently built to be consumed; with the viral nature of Youtube or Flickr, we’re have to be constantly uploading to ever get anywhere near the 80/20 rule the writer cites. In a recent survey I did, I found that over 2 Million videos were uploaded to YouTube each month. That’s a huge amount – but compared to the number of visits Youtube gets by bored office workers and procrastinating graduate students? No way that ratio is ever going to be 80/20, nor should it. The uploading of a video and the viewing of a video are not equivalent actions in any way, and not a reasonable predictor of “participation.”

Instead, the author should have looked at the recent Pew Survey on teen internet behavior. In the national survey, the authors Mary Madden and Amanda Lenhart found that 47% of teens have uploaded photos online (with gender split at 54%F/40%M, nothing like that 25%F/75%M Hitwise found). In addition, the Pew survey found that 14% of all online teens had uploaded videos, and 22% of teens who use social networking as video posters. This is much more meaningful and representative than the upload/no-upload dichotomy Hitwise utilizes.

Noticed / Thoughts — 3 Comments
11
Feb 07

Social Networks and Political Campaigns: A Web 2.0 Manifesto

I’ve been following the launch and reaction to Barack Obama’s social network offering, my.barackobama.com. While the intersection of politics and social networks are anything but new (they were utilized effectively by a number of Democratic candidates in the 2006 cycle), the private-label social network offering by a presidential candidate is new. I’ve enjoyed a couple of reactions to Obama’s social network, particularly Fred Wilson’s and Tony Hung’s. I’ll be the first to admit that this is somewhat uncharted territory, so I’ll approach my analysis somewhat gently. To that extent, though, I think there’s a significant amount of best practice that we’ve learned from other social networks that will be directly relevant to Obama’s offering (as well as the other candidates that will inevitably launch social networks).

By launching a private-label social network, Obama’s campaign achieves two goals. First, it gets people talking, particularly the neterati who care about these things. It establishes Obama as a net-savvy candidate, in an election cycle that will increasingly play to the mores of the social web. Second, it sets a precedent. I believe that the other mainline candidates will follow Obama’s lead, and there are likely a whole host of vendors salivating at the chance to represent a political candidate with their private-label SNS.

At the outset, Obama’s site is inoffensive. There’s not a whole lot you can do, interactivity is somewhat limited, and the site lacks the dynamic feel that I’ve come to expect from social networks. However, this isn’t a terrible strategy. I believe that putting simple, core features in the hands of users and iterating on top of those features is a fair plan (if that is the plan). The fact Obama’s site has a 4 second reload on everything you do is completely bizarre, however, and should be fixed quickly. It is a little too DIY-feeling for a presidential candidate.

With all social networks or communities, the ultimate question to be answered is “What goal is the technology helping achieve?” In the case of Obama’s network, it really isn’t clear what purpose the network serves. Sure, I can log in and find other people, or blog, look up an event, but isn’t that much easier on a site like Facebook, where the Obama group “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) already has 250,000 members? Ironically, Obama himself doesn’t even belong to this group (Note to the Obama web people, wake up and embrace the social media). By attempting to create a social network to solve a need that other social networks have solved, is Obama just reinventing the wheel?

In the 2008 election cycles, different networks will serve different purposes. Facebook, Myspace and the other premier social networks will undoubtedly serve as connection vectors for followers of political candidates. Why? Network effect. There are always going to be more people on Myspace or Facebook than on Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton, or Sam Brownback’s social network. As such, it is absolutely important for campaigns to realize that they’ll always be competing with (and losing to) these social networks. So what good does a private label network provide?

The answer lies in answering situationally relevant information needs of individuals in a simple, low-involvement fashion. The candidate’s social network should serve as the nexus of information about the candidate. It should be the place that I can go to to find anything and everything about the candidate, information about events, snippets and facts I can blog about, heavy integration of social media such as Flickr or Youtube so I can experience everything about the candidate in a single place. It should not try to act as the sole vector between the candidate’s supporters. In fact, doing so could be significantly harmful, as it might give supporters the impression that this private-label group is the only netgroup that supports the candidate, obviously leaving aside the millions that support the candidate in other groups.

My vision of the purpose these networks would serve is actually quite simple. The information need is clear: people need to know stuff about the candidate they support. The candidate they support is a lifestyle brand. The social network is the perfect place to embrace this lifestyle brand, in the sense that it connects information sharers. What if I logged into Obama’s social network and what I saw where 15 great Flickr pictures, all creative-commons licensed, that I could easily upload to my blog. What if I logged in an I could find a set of widgets that I could post on Myspace, Bebo or that would update my network with information about Obama, or even things like his travel schedule (“See Obama Here!”) or fundraising goals (“Help me raise the last 10% for Obama”). What if I logged into Obama’s network and I saw a list of Obama groups in other networks (“Join the 250,000 supporters on Facebook!”). In the words of community marketer extraordinare Tara Hunt – what if Obama “embraced the chaos.”

In reality, 2008 is going to be about the enmeshing of networks. Some of the action that goes on in the networks will be centrally maintained, but some (as in the example of the Facebook group) will be produced by people external to the campaign. Should candidates put their head in the sand and act like the external work doesn’t exist? Absolutely not. The simple reality is that by embracing social media, communities are going to play a significant role in the creation of the candidate. Like it or not, some of Obama’s online identity is going to be created by the Facebook group, over which he has no control. The millions of users who embrace Obama in one way or another will get their messages from a number of different sources, so central control is effectively impossible.

This is not to say that centrally-managed efforts like Obama’s social network are useless. Indeed, they’re anything but. I believe that, properly managed, such communities could play an absolutely integral part of the 2008 cycles. However, to understand how to use these tools, candidates must look at how community marketing has changed in the advent of Web 2.0. Companies like Youtube and Myspace succeeded because they embraced openness (Youtube was largely unknown until it let people embed their videos in Myspace, for example). The candidate who embraces this mentality will make the most sense to the netvoter, as our sensibilities have changed significantly over the past few years.

To boil this concept down to its essence, candidates must remember that while they play an important part in their strategy, they are not the sole drivers. In the coming cycle, external individuals who get social media will harness lots of eyeballs on behalf of the candidate. This is going to happen – it is already happening. Candidates must embrace this and ally with these efforts, and they truly represent the expanse of the support provided to the candidate.

Candidates must also realize the role their technology plays, and the disadvantage they have when competing in the marketplace. As hard as they may try, a private-label social network is never going to compete with a site like Facebook. So don’t even try. However, the private-label social network can be the nexus for important, useful information. Instead of trying to own a significant amount of the voter’s online time, try and own 5 very useful minutes in which you provide them with good links to external resources, rich media. Make it a hub. Make it a something of a placeful RSS aggregator that is edited by someone on the campaign that truly gets social media. Hire someone that truly gets social media.

Individuals are going to come to candidates with a significant information need. They are going to look for community, and connections, and answers. In 2008, the network that represents a candidate is going to be spread across many services, it will be controlled by many players, and the marketplace of ideas will lift some of the best efforts to the top. The Web 2.0 candidate will harness the community’s work, and create a place that solves the information need of the people interested in the candidate. Make no mistake, the candidate of 2008 is competing in the marketplace, so he or she must figure out what they can do, and do well, and concentrate on that. Obama’s site, and the others that will come, have a good bit of work to do before they’re truly useful to their audience. Lets hope they get the message that the web has changed significantly since 2004, and they adjust their strategies accordingly.

Thoughts — 4 Comments
14
May 06

The Web is Fundamentally Ours

That sentence, more or less, ends David Weinberger’s 2002 book Small Pieces Loosely Joined. I read this book a few years ago, and I re-read it recently to see what I might get out of it in the context of Web 2.0. A lot of Small Pieces is about explaining the paradigm-shifting changes caused by the web’s late-nineties explosion; i.e. our new ways of life enabled by the net. Weinberger, interestingly, explains the changes as not really changes after all – the web reveals the selves we want to occupy in a place where the cultural and legal precedents are not yet established.

In a sense, Small Pieces frames Web 2.0 perfectly. The hope we shared during Web 1.0 is still alive; the connected masses want to speak, communicate, and establish their place. Blogging, LiveJournaling, being on MySpace and Facebook, talking with Skype and Gtalk – the promise of the web is very much still alive, and I’d argue our dreams have been wildly exceeded. The Web is our place; and Web 2.0 is about us.

This brings me to a number of posts I’ve come across or been sent recently. Read/Write Web covers it as the 53,651 meme, and has links to all the relevant posts. It is worth a read. To sum, 53,651 are the number of subscribers to Techcrunch.com’s RSS feed. Techcrunch is a fun website that dishes scoops on new Web 2.0 software; to be featured on Techcrunch is to have the captive audience of the web’s tastemakers for a brief moment – something that can jump-start a new web venture. The 53,651 bloggers sum up two points: the traffic spike (and users) you get from this coverage aren’t a “real” audience, and to design for this audience is not to design for the web in general.

During Web 1.0, I worked for a large dot com; I spent the bust working in open source, and now I find myself running a “Web 2.0″ company. It’s a fairly unique perspective. As such, web 2.0 is a unique phenomenon – certainly, a lot of the old faces are back, but there are a lot of new faces – the late-teens/early 20’s set who sat out Web 1.0 from the sidelines. Web 2.0 is a unique hybrid of the large and small; a Google may be mentioned in the same paragraph as a one- or two-person firm from middle America. Designers are torn between Tim O’Reilly’s vision and the need to create catchy, career-defining applications. At the same time, the media holds traffic darlings up as exemplars of the new web; it’s no wonder that the soul searching has begun again in earnest.

For so many of us, Web 2.0 feels so fundamentally right for the reasons Weinberger lays out in Small Pieces. We’ve had a chance to wash away the sins of the past, and now we can celebrate those who design software that answers our needs – a lot of those needs being artifactual needs of living online. We feel fundamentally at ease supporting (financially and otherwise) projects that are truly good ideas; we’ve even got generationally appropriate geek-heroes like Mark Zuckerberg and Joshua Schachter. To the geeks and skeptics, Web 2.0 just does feel right.

The bloggers taking on the 53,651 meme have noticed something, though. The Web 2.0 that is being represented in the blogosphere is becoming a self-referential cycle of non-innovation. Deconstruct a few ideas of Web 2.0 – “social”, “tagging”, “sharing”, “remix” – take them and apply them to a few areas – search, media, bookmarks – and you’ve got the next Web 2.0 application. How many photo and media sharing sites are there? How many vertical search engines are there? How many social networking sites are there? Have we run out of ideas?

No, we haven’t run out of ideas, but the ecosystem that supports Web 2.0 has proven to be more of a sycophant than an actual marketplace of ideas. And since this ecosystem seems to only accept a few notions of Web 2.0, and is more than willing to parrot the thought leaders, we’re seeing a genuine echo-chamber effect. At the same time, the re-introduction of venture capital changes the democratic nature of the blogosphere; the story is no longer a nifty web application doing something genuinely different or useful, but of yet another (social networking/media hosting/rss-enabling) site securing funding. The air of innovation is being sucked out of the room’s conversation.

I think this rightfully scares a lot of us. We bought back into the hype because Web 2.0 was genuinely different. It smelled of grass roots. It smelled egalitarian. And what has that brought us? Valleywag.

It is time to refocus, because there’s a lot to be learned from the Web 2.0 success stories. The sites that are winning in the Web 2.0 market are qualitatively different from their Web 1.0 precursors. The founders of the sites thought smaller, worked to solve real problems, and created usable software that did a few things, and did them well. In tackling a problem area, a few of these sites found breakout success, but many are happy operating within a niche. A big part of Web 2.0 is understanding that you start small – solving one group’s problem and moving on. That we’re not designing macro is a built-in – this is not a point to lament.

That we can be excited about the web again feels good. The web is exciting. The web’s resurgence makes us feel as if the last 10 years of our lives weren’t wasted on a fool’s errand. We bought in to the web, and now we’re being repaid. The web is fundamentally ours, and Weinberger says. However, let us not lose focus; the exemplars of Web 2.0 are great ideas that would have been funded in 2006, 1996 or any time in between. Original, problem-solving thinking is always needed; copycats less so. As someone involved in an “original” venture, I’m gambling on this. For us, the road is long, it requires focus and perseverance. If our ideas are good, the users will come. Our ideas have entered the marketplace of ideas – and it feel so much better to be behind something original than something cloned.

In a sense, Web 2.0 is built on original thought. As long as the innovators keep solving useful problems in usable ways, this movement will go forward. The Web is ours; web 2.0 is about our users’ needs. As long as we can keep that in focus, we’ve got a long and interesting road ahead.