Tag: Friendfeed

  • Product Life Cycle and Consumer Life Cycles

    One of the social web’s by products er, products, are “shiny new objects”. (new services that launch and send us enthusiasts into a tizzy. All the web 2.0 greats were shiny new objects at some point in time)  There were a couple of wonderful posts I read in this context. The first is Rex Hammock’s excellent post on how we obsess over these for sometime, and then move on. Yes, I know you know that, but its the next part that’s interesting.

    Then one day about three years later, you notice people who aren’t obsessed with shiny new objects are talking about something four-or-five shiny new objects ago and you wonder: Why is everyone obsessed with this?

    This happens to me occasionally, the latest example being a few guys tweeting about the Baba Ramdev- Chrome ad that was circulated around quite a few months back.

    The second post was great, right from the title – The Loneliness of the Early Adopter, and when i shared it on Friendfeed, at least a couple of guys liked it. I confess I’m more at the borderline of early majority and early adopter, (refer this ) but I could empathise with a lot of that post.

    Now, a long way back, Jeremiah had an awesome post on Applying a social computing strategy to the entire product lifecycle. As the title suggests, its about listening to consumers, collaborating on product development, filtering out the right consumers, learning from them and supporting them and in essence, utilising the social web in all parts of the PLC. Here’s another great post in Social Media Explorer on the same theme.

    Twitter and more so Friendfeed (as this Mashable article explains) and Facebook (commenting on status and other elements of the newsfeed, the ‘Like’ feature) are great examples of how the product/service is evolving with the consumer and his preferences. Increasingly consumers are ‘creating’ a use or finding a way to fulfill a need gap from a basic service.

    The question is, who is the consumer? I’m trying to juxtapose the Product life cycle with a consumer life cycle. Are the tastes and preferences of the early adopters markedly different from that of the late majority? As the adoption of various social media services rapidly increases, who would a service target, and will it be at the cost of another segment? Different consumers, located at different points on the Roger’s bell curve will use the service at the same time. How can these possibly different sets of expectations be met? Will there be variations of the same service for different categories of users? I don’t see the issue being addressed a lot now, that possibly explains why a lot of people leave say, Twitter after a few tweets/days since they can’t figure out what’s happening? Would a ‘nOOb version’ have helped? Social media is about customisation too, and this might be something that needs to be answered soon, as these services become mass.

    until next time, handling a cycle on a curve 🙂

  • LinkedIn…a bit more

    A few weeks back, RWW had an interesting piece on why LinkedIn shouldn’t have Facebook envy, and should not attempt to make itself a destination site like the social networking service.

    We thought the Valley intelligentsia long ago proclaimed the end of destination sites. The desire to “get people to spend more time on LinkedIn” is linked to a failed business model around advertising.

    I agree that just because people spend time at a site doesnt necessarily mean that advertising makes a great business model there. In the early days of Facebook, apps like Scrabulous made me spend a lot of time there. I’ve noticed that (at least among my friends) the usage of apps has lessened, and there’s much more sharing – notes, photos, comments on status messages etc. If advertising is the revenue model, brands and FB would have to do a lot more than just contextual banner advertising.

    I’m not quite sure whether the same would apply for LinkedIn. Not in terms of the advertising bit, but in terms of the time spent. Again, while I agree with RWW on the accessibility via API tools, I’m a bit ambivalent on the need for spending time on the site first. Perhaps it might make sense to offer services that are first utilised on the site, and then made convenient. Once the users are more familiar with the tools and services, they’d be more comfortable with connecting to it via mail or say, a browser plugin etc. Ambivalent, because my usage of Twitter via twitterfox screams an opposing view (but not every service is as simple as Twitter)

    While I use at least one LinkedIn app, and utilise the status message quite frequently, I believe that a lot more can be done with the ‘News’ and ‘Groups’. Yes, it does have features like ‘share articles’, ‘start discussion’ etc, but I think there’s definitely more potential. The best reference I could find is Social Median (recently acquired by Xing). Now, I admit that my usage of that site was pretty limited, but I still think it was only a matter of time before i utilised it much more. Somehow it appealed more than say a Friendfeed room.

    I also think that the limited usage was because I was connected with a similar set of people on twitter who used to share links on the topics I was interested in. This, and the paucity of time, made a visit to Social Median a postponed task. Now considering that LinkedIn is best placed to offer tangible benefits (business networking, as opposed to social networking), what if the Social Median kind of tools (like the browser add on to share sites) and services (like adding feeds to groups) were introduced on LinkedIn.

    Now, you might say that we do roughly the same on say, Friendfeed. The difference is that in the case of LinkedIn, the adoption would be much more, because professionals interested in say, Social Media would find it easier to join a group, and have discussions on LinkedIn than joining a relatively geekier service like Friendfeed. Also, the different kind of groups that could happen on LinkedIn is much more since it already has professionals from a variety of streams, and each of them could create their own networks. The tangible gains from such a network even in daily office work is easy to imagine. This would also be immensely useful for those who’d like to gather information about career streams different from their own. In fact, this wonderful post also shows how brands can utilise content aggregation to their benefit. The thing to note here is that LinkedIn would need to provide enough tools so that the groups don’t become stagnant like that on Facebook. But I’m guessing it won’t, since most people would like to offer insightful comments, and share the best links, because its a business network, one that’d help their careers.

    until next time, a link book 🙂

  • Twitt…er, pay?

    Would you pay for Twitter?’, a very good question, asked by Walt Ribeiro, at his blog. It made me think, and I came to the conclusion that I’d pay (though it all depends on the price). Apparently, I’m in a majority. There’s possibly no ‘pain’ that Twitter is addressing in my case, unless I count the need for every human being to communicate. But I can do that on Facebook, and if its streaming conversation I want, there’s friendfeed, or Kwippy. But yes, twitter has a charm of its own, especially when you start with so many interesting people who share different interests of yours.

    The revenue model for Twitter is something that has caught the imagination of a whole load of people, since everyone, I think, is keen to prevent an ad based model. (yes, including me). The Twitter CEO also agrees. And in a lesser way, there have been discussions on the revenue models of Facebook and Friendfeed as well. A good read on this here. Meanwhile, I read an excellent article, which had a P&G digital guru stating that marketers don’t belong to Facebook. In his own words,

    “What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”…. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”

    A superb perspective, I thought. He goes on to wonder who said this (user generated media in general) was media, since all consumers were doing were trying to talk to each other. Its a wonderful line of thought, and when I think about it, I’d have to agree with him. But it makes me wonder about the nice folk who built Twitter and Facebook and Friendfeed. While they are nice people, I doubt if they had such massive charity in mind. They build the infrastructure, they bear the costs, I’m happy using it…for free. I go into a coffee shop, and pay money for the coffee, that’s the basic service, I never wonder if they work on a freemium model. I watch a movie in a theatre, pay money for it, and only grumble when they show ads. I suffer both kinds of monetisation, and still go back. But when the Fail whale happens, i rant, and threaten not to go back. Thankfully, I do go back.  I wonder if there’s something wrong with this scenario.

    So, monetising FB, Friendfeed, Twitter – why is it such a difficult thing? Is it because there’s no tangible value in them? But there must be, considering that millions use them everyday. In fact, I read a post yesterday that shows an example of tangible value created by Twitter. But then, the moment there’s a payment mechanism or an ad model discussed, there’s usually a user revolt. I still remember the extreme reactions to magpie.

    A very long time back, someone thought of leveraging the audience that uses content, that became the fundamental way of running media businesses. Newspaper, television, radio businessses have not been built on content, they have been built on monetising the audience that uses the content. Then, a long time back, the web came into being, and someone started a price war that started at zero. So we had free content, free mail, free IM and we were generally happy. Over a period of time, some learnt to monetise, and Google learnt it so well (hell, without content!!), that it built a Google economy, which I agree, might be an inevitable future. But while the ‘customers get everything for free and advertisers pay for Ad Sense’ model is great for Google, I wonder if it’s fair to demand the same of other services that subsidise our conversations with each other.

    Every UGC driven medium – Flickr, You Tube, Twitter, Facebook etc needs to find its own way of leveraging the audience. Template solutions might be a thing of the past.  Like I replied  to a comment on an earlier post of mine, I know quite a few twitter clients, while i know only one for FB. Facebook ‘s services compels users to visit the site, Twitter’s simplicity doesn’t. Every service is different. Ads are obviously not the greatest of solutions though both Facebook, and You Tube are increasingly going along that path. (Here’s an excellent read on Facebook monetisation) Twitter should find its own way of leveraging the audience its gaining daily. I personally thought the research based model that has been started by SocialToo is worth a shot, as one source of revenue. LinkedIn is already doing it. I also saw Twitpay today, and think there’s potential in it.

    Meanwhile, I feel quite like a hypocrite when i consider services like Twitter Image, which is based on Twitter and charges $100 for a customised Twitter background, while Twitter doesn’t have a business model as far as we can see. I desperately want Twitter to crack their model soon, after all with 2500 plus tweets, there’s a lot of me in Twitter. If Twitter dies, a part of me dies too.

    until next time, a sharing caring world, reluctant to share costs?

  • Social Aggregation – Birds of the same feather…

    I installed Flock quite sometime back, and even used it for a few days. I was quite impressed with the social aggregation, and the sheer number of sharing sites it was tying together on a browser. Flock has recently released version 2 of the browser, though the Beta was launched back in June. The major updates are MySpace integration and Media RSS accessibility, a standard developed by Yahoo that syndicates rich content like photos and videos. (via Tech Crunch)

    However, it puzzles me that I am still unable to figure out why I didn’t stick with it. Though adding all the services- from blogs to photo sharing to status updating services is a tedious exercise, it’s something I managed to do. Its load time is greater than others,but I doubt that’s the reason. After having thought about it, I figured out a few other possible reasons

    • the sheer lethargy of changing the preferred browser, especially since there are a few plugins in Firefox that have made life much easier. (but i just read that most of them should work in Flock. Yes, it has the Awesome Bar too, something that has proven to be extremely useful)
    • the existence of a web/ desktop client based service like Friendfeed which does a fair bit of social aggregation
    • a browser plugin like Yoono which does roughly the same job as above

    While I am now a fairly good user of Friendfeed, I haven’t used Yoono much.  But I did read a couple of days back that Yoono has announced support for IE and is adding Imeem and MySpace.  It is also adding an interesting shopping widget soon.

    Anyway, as if all these weren’t enough, I also read recently about the launch of Sobees, a social desktop aggregator. Both Flock and Sobees have a very useful picture uploading feature.Its interesting the social aggregation wars being fought on several platforms – browser, desktop, browser plugin, web.

    Meanwhile, there are other browsers popping up. Mac users can check out Cruz, a multi pane social browser, about which I read here. There is some work happening on Mozilla’s Minefield.

    So now, i am wondering what will work for me – Flock 2.0, or the combination of Firefox and the Yoono plugin? With Chrome’s awesome speed, only one of the above alternatives will survive. Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that Chrome and FF don’t really take to each other. Invariably FF develops problems when Chrome is run simultaneously. Anyone else having the same issue?

    until next time, browse