Its been interesting to read reactions around the blogosphere on facebook’s announcement of their adding usernames and the inevitable land grab that will begin tomorrow night when the system goes live.
Anil Dash has a comic take on things. His timeline of events stemming from the facbook identity launch ends in OCtober of 2010 when AOL decides to add a usernames project to their AIM and Bebo 18-month roadmap.
My take is a little different:
It’s about getting you PUBLIC:
My personal take after having spent the last year working on a communications product is that the username announcement is really less about owning your identity and much more about finding a way to get your facebook status updates public in order to compete with twitter.
Twitter is public by default and that is what makes it such a powerful system. There are no barriers to information moving from one user to another. If anyone in the system has anything important to say (like for example if you happened to see a terrorist in a hotel in mumbai, then that information spreads throughout the system in no time.
That is what makes twitter such a powerful system for transmitting news and information and it’s what has set off so much discussion about the real-time web.
The problem for facebook at the moment is that a very strong expectation has been set that information posted there is only available to your friends, and not to anyone in the public. Facebook first added public posts back in March, and then opened them up for celebs and public profiles last month. By most accounts the response was muted at best and posting frequency has declines in places where posts are public. This must be scary for facebook.
By making a big announcement about a new public facing feature and forcing user’s attention over to what their public facing page should be is a great way of shifting expectations slightly towards accepting a public stream of information from you coming out of facebook.
I would bet that within a few weeks of the push, you will be able to publish status items to your public page and within a month or two updates will be public by default.
The data is now starting to trickle in. Here, is a recent Neilson study, for example, that shows that email is starting to slip behind social networks in terms of “active reach”. Here’s the key exhibit:
I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. The sad fact of the matter is that the companies that lead the market in consumer email (Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Google in that order) simply can not evolve their products in the ways that the need to evolve in order to address the needs of today’s users.
It would be too upsetting to the existing users to have the products change as drastically as they need to if they want to remain relevant in this new world. The new Yahoo Mail Beta and the Gmail labs efforts are marginal adjustments that amount to little more than window dressing on an experience that is still 40 years old at it’s core.
Given the recent twirtermania sweeping the nation, I couldn’t help but take A close at the transmission mechanisms built into facebook, MySpace, twitter and some other new communications systems. The whole process has been very interesting and it has really illustrated to me just how big and profound twitter is as a system for collecting, processing and transmitting information.
One thing that has really stuck with me is the follower/following model that twitter users to distribute information. I’m struck by how similar that mechanism is to a neuron, and because anyone can follow anyone else the entire twitterverse is in the process of wiring itself up like a big brain.
With Neurons, you have incoming signals travel in through the dendrites. In twitter, this corresponds to incoming messages coming in from the people you are following. In the brain, if enough of the incoming neurons “fire”, then the receiving neuron will also fire, transmitting a pulse down to the neurons to which it is connected to. In twitter, this essentially means that if enough of the people that you are following are tweeting about an idea, then eventually you will start tweeting about it to and the people who follow you will catch word of it and they too may pass it on.
This is how information moves through a brain. It’s also how information moves through twitter. It’s why information on the Mumbai terrorist attacks spread around the world in just a few minutes after people started twittering about them. In fact the “RT” convention for retweeting is precisely this sort of derivative firing.
Just to keep the metaphor going, I think its interesting that some of the most influential twitterers are acting like a sort of sensory organ, constantly scanning the horizon and tweeting away all of the new things they see. Their followers sort the wheat from the chaffe. Its not unlike the eyes simply passing along the fact that something looking like a bus is moving quickly towards you. It’s up to the cerebral cortex to do something about it.
I think Tim o’Reilly (with 100k followers) and Dave Morin (with 150k) are great examples of this. I wonder if the optic nerve has more neural connections than other parts of the brain? Anyone?
We are about to start building some software over here, so it was great timing when a friend recently forwarded me this great post about consumer oriented software development. Its a very thoughtful and thorough post. If you don’t have the time to read it all (it’s so long that it actually has a bibliography!), here is the snippet that I found most valuable:
The top 4 success factors in new product development
A unique, superior and differentiated product with good value-for-money for the customer.
A strong market orientation – voice of the customer is built in
Sharp, early, fact-based product definition before product development begins
Solid up-front homework – doing front end activities like market analysis well
I couldn’t agree more. Enthusiasm and passion are never missing from startups. What is often missing though is the voice of the customer. We are going to be sure that’s not the case here.
Email has reentered the blogosphere in a big way over the last 6 months or so. There are somany posts now that it’s impossible to keep track of them all. Dave McClure posted another entry in his recent series on email a few days ago.
In his wild-man style, he covers everything from open payment systems to friend lists and by the end of the article seems to have transformed decade old eMail systems into brand new billion dollar business franchises that will dominate eCommerce and displace the social networks.
So he can be dramatic. So what.
The main point he is making at the bottom of it all is that the social information implicit in email is being badly under leveraged. He gets into a little more detail on it over here.
There are a few interesting ideas in there, and I think that for many people email is a good source of social information. His vision is that email patterns will be analyzed and used to come up with a list of contacts who should become the short list for new social sharing.
PROBLEM: when i’m on a website or social network or social app, it wants me to help refer other people / help with some lame-o viral marketing scheme. however, i’m only gonna do that for a select few who really share my context / insanity, not everyone in my network (unless my name is Robert Scoble).
what I DO NOT WANT:
select from a god-awful list of 100 faces in your pop-up face listbox
upload my entire address book of 2000+ contacts for you to spam the world
wait for your data-loading / selection function to crash horribly, after taking forever to load
what I DO WANT:
popup the MOST RELEVANT 5-10 peeps who meet certain key criteria
use an intelligent combination of shared interests & messaging frequency to figure out who these “TOP” friends are (for the given context)
let me select 1-3 of them to invite & checkout an awesome [video game | baby stroller | new book | really good pr0n] i just found
Sounds cool. I think the problem with the thinking is that people communicate for vastly different reasons and the algos needed to guess at which contacts might be relevant for which purpose are way-hard to write. We tried to use prior behavior to guess at what products might be relevant for users at Shopping.com. If our experiences with behavioral relevance at shopping.com are any indication, the best friend-guessing in the world will only get you 80% of the way there. Thats not good enough to automate the job, and it’s not like its the most painful thing in the world to check off a few boxes each time you want to do some medium-scale sharing.
Although nice to have, I doubt if they will be worth in revenue terms the investment they would take to write well…
My friend John pointed me towards this story about the apple design process from Tech Beat. It was presented at SXSW a few weeks ago by Michael Lopp, a senior engineering manager at Apple. He has a blog of his own, which looks to be full of interesting observations on how technology is changing the way we go about our lives. I just added it to my feed reader.
It a brief article and on the surface a lot of it sounds like a slightly fancier flavor of a vanilla design process. Like French Vanilla. The one thing that jumped out as being really different is the 10-3-1 design mantra. Apparently apple designers actually do pixel perfect mockups for 10 different UI choices for their products.
In my experiences, I’ve rarely seen more than 3 different choices. I think forcing people to think up 10 different ways of doing something is bound to get the creative juices flowing. Whats more is that if the mocks are pixel-perfect, they can also go a long way at generating buy-in and excitement for whichever design is selected.
I have been out pitching a new email oriented startup. As I’ve listened to smart people react to the idea, I’ve heard at least five different endings to the sentence “The future of email is _____”. The most frequent ones are:
Social Networks
SMS
IM
Mobile
Video chat
There are other less plausible ones too
Certainly the one I hear most is Social Networks and I’ve seen some support for this idea based on hitwise data. Here is a quick walk through their argument, which I think you will agree ends up being pretty weak.
It all starts with this picture, which is supposed to show that Social Networks are displacing email services for communication purposes.
Now it is impossible to dispute that social networks are growing and growing quickly. That is just a fact, and this picture would have looked pretty much the same if you compared social networks with ANYTHING. What is FAR less clear is whether or not they are displacing email.
Although there is communication taking place on social networks, I think its communication that wasn’t really happening in email before. Kara Swisher seems to think it was the sort of communication that happened in middle school lunchrooms, which she lays out here in “Facebook Apps are for Toddlers”. I think college fraternity parties and local singles bars is a little closer to the truth, but either way its safe to say that social networks foster a different sort of communication than email.
Whats more, is that email growth continues. Here is the data for Gmail vs. Facebook in the US over the last year. A very different story. Here both are growing nicely over the 12 month period, and facebook is actually flat over the last 6 months and DOWN month over month while gmail continues to grow.
Then Hitwise jumps the shark by suggesting that social networks are driving real commerce activity:
Perhaps more importantly, their statistics show that clicks to retail sites from social networking sites are now equivalent to the traffic generated from the web-based email sites. In other words, while many businesses view social networks as entertaining distractions, referrals via social networks are generating eCommerce activity.
That is crazy talk. I have a good amount of experience in eCommerce and I think it’s pretty widely known that social media is not driving meaningful commerce volume at the moment. I think the GigaOhm guys put it best in the You’re Better Off Working at Starbucks Than Running a Social Network post which details the reality of the $.03 to $.10 CPMs that you can earn on a social network precisely because they DONT drive any commerce.
Now none of this is to say that social networks don’t present some very interesting new communications tools and methods.
My simple bet is that the few small things that social networks have added to the communication will find their way into email and not the other way around.
Apparently Microsoft is close to acquiring Xobni. At Least that’s what TechCrunch thinks. It always seemed like a feature to me, so I guess I can’t say I’m surprised particularly given that:
It adds some useful productivity functionality.
Microsoft added anything innovative in years.
It was already implemented as an outlook plug in.
Hopefully Xobni won’t suffer the same fate as LOOKout. LOOKout added search to Outlook, and Microsoft acquired the company to fill that hole. LOOKout was a great product: Simple and effective. Microsoft apparently baked the technology into Windows Desktop Search, which is what you get now when you try to go to the lookout link. Sadly, Windows Desktop Search is a bit clumsy and bloated. There is still robust demand for the original LOOKout product, which is still available from old archives on the web. Here’s a discussion that points to a few of them.
And in other news, people are still widely decrying the death of email in variousplaces.
I am rob, and I am starting work on a new company. This blog is a companion to that endeavor.
The business idea in a sentence is to add back all of the innovation that has been missing over the last ten years in consumer webmail and make the product relevant for a younger audience. I think these pictures present today’s state of affairs better than any words could.
1998
2008
On the left is Eudora 3.2 released in 1998. On the right is Yahoo Mail, the number one product today in 2008 with almost 50% of the market. Essentially no change in a decade. I think we can do better.
It’s still pre-funding but I’ve made the decision to spend the next several years of my life working on it, so I am getting pulling this place together as a venue for thoughts on the company, the industry the competition and where things are headed.
I expect that this will be one of the more exciting parts of the journey. With so few decisions made, almost all paths are open.
You just clicked a link in my email signature. As you probably noticed, its a bunch of links to public content relating to me around the web. It’s got my blog, twitter status, images, resume and facebook page.
What did you think of it? Was it helpful? Annoying? Did it come through looking okay? Do you want one of your own?
Now that people seem to be living out loud without much concern, I suspect that many folks would be happy to send the pointers on almost every email…
