Thinking Interactive

According to Tech Crunch, they are looking for a partner. I was sorely disappointed by Facebook’s first and sole attempt at classifieds, which they named Marketplace, not only was it an underachieveing piece of junk, it also made me looks like an idiot (I am pretty sure when it was initially announced I declared it the Craigslist killer).

While some believe that there is something inherently flawed about social classifieds and cite Marketplace as proof, there was no real attempt to map it to the social graph in a meaningful way or even give it half decent search and browsing functionality. If Facebook could just knock off Craigslist and then layer on top its oft-rumoured but still vapour warish transactions platform, I think we would have a game changer on our hands and the opportunity for some serious revenue for Facebook.

The downside of that is that Facebook would be opening itself up (well it is already open, but inviting themselves) to all the types of slimeballs and scammers that hang out on Craigslist, but I doubt they would be too different than the folks who are buying their ad inventory currently (yes I want some green tea extract that will give me a chiseled 6 pack, yes I want to chat to hot girls in my area live on webcam).

A bunch of Silicon Valley’s tech elite including Brittany Bohnet of Google, Mike Hudack of Blip.tv, Dave Morin and Aaron Sittig of Facebook, Sam Lessin of Drop.io and Jessica Vascellaro, the Wall Street Journal’s Silicon Valley beat reporter jetted off to Cyprus for a little fun. Part of the fun was the production of this video.

Alot of people have been coming down pretty hard on these folks for letting this video slip in light of recent events. I do not feel any outrage at all. The only thing I feel is jealous (although I am a little weirded out by the fact that all the women are wearing matching bathing suits). I just see some people having fun in an incredible setting (if the video didn’t convince you, Google #campcyprus). As for the idea that the video is inappropriate, that depends on how you read into it. Don’t Stop Believing seems like the perfect song to me. All these people working at ad-supported Web 2.0 companies are going to need some faith in the coming months… or a new business model.

They should enjoy their vacations to Cyprus while they can.

On a side note, I couldn’t help but be reminded of this video.

So what do you do when you are given the opportunity to do a campaign for the button-fly version of Levi’s most iconic line of jeans, one of the few lines of jeans that has mainstream appeal and is respected by denim heads? If you’re EVB, instead of capitalizing on the cache and heritage of the brand and the 501 line you are selling (and its countless advocates), you make creepy, talking penis monsters.

The money wasted on this lame attempt at viral could have been much better spent on outreach and advocacy tools for the pre-existing 501 community, capitalizing on the 501’s heritage and timelessness. 

Instead… penis monsters.

Well done.

I was having beers with a couple of friends the other night and we were talking about digital distribution of music and one of my friends remarked on having heard Steve Jobs once say that he didn’t feel that iTunes was competing with CDs, but that it was competing with piracy. I responded that that wasn’t how it looked from where I was sitting as iTunes has competed very well with CDs, pushing them down the path towards obsolescence while music piracy (I was thinking strictly downloads) is still going strong.

This lead me to begin to think about what was competing with illegal downloading and the answer more or less hit me in the face- streaming. As someone who has a copious number of MP3s of questionable provenance on my various hard drives and listens to music on a regular basis, I was surprised to realize that I have only downloaded 3 albums in the last 6 months (for comparison, at one point I would say I was downloading about 5 per day). It was such a gradual transition that I hadn’t really considered the implications of it or had even really been cognescent of it. More than 95-100% of the music I listen to on a daily basis comes to me streamed from services ranging from the blatantly illegal (you know who you are) to the legally ambiguous (Seeqpod) to the fully legitimate (imeem). Online streaming has all but killed off (illegal) downloading in my life. While this revelation was a little slow in the coming for me (so slow in fact that MySpace beat me to it), it gave me something to think on.

As mobile bandwidth becomes increasingly more accesible, the idea of a music collection will cease to exist. All MP3 devices will have network capabilities. Who needs a 120GB iPod when all the world’s music is just a wireless connection away? So if the evolution of music consumption in recent years is as follows, CD, MP3, streaming, what comes next? If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t have time to write rambling blog posts, but if Steve Jobs or anybody who else who claims to be competing with pirates wants to win, they better figure it out first or remain flexible enough to adjust and adapt when someonelse does.

Have you ever looked at the work of an agency and wondered why their television commercials and print ads are so great and why all their interactive work is so weak? Here are five reasons why that dynamic exists (each of these could be a blog post in and of itself).

1. Masters of the Brand – The concept that ad agencies hold the keys to their clients’ brands. Any control that agencies had over the brand is now in the hands of the consumers, who have a collective voice far more powerful than any agency’s, one that is amplified by the current generation of web technologies. Brand broadcasts have been drowned out in favour of brand interactions. Designing these interactions requires a change in mind-set from that of the tastemaker to that of the proactive listener, an adjustment that many agencies are having trouble making.
2. Hierarchy of Media – The belief that the importance of a medium or channel is proportional to what clients are willing to spend on it instead of what the value will be on it for their clients, essentially prioritizing cost over return. Rather than taking the time to educate their clients on the importance of the digital space, many agencies would prefer to take the path of least resistance and continue to push the services that both they and their clients are comfortable with. As a result, the interactive component often ends up being a poorly conceived, underfunded afterthought.
3. Creative as a Department – In order to do great interactive work, creative cannot be a department, it needs to be an adjective, one used to describe everybody involved in a project. Each team member needs to be able to innovate in his or her function in order for a project to reach its potential. In addition, the central idea driving a project should not be the exclusive domain of a single individual or department. It needs to be free to come from a strategist, a developer, a designer, a project manager, a usability engineer or even the client (heaven forbid) depending on the needs and nature of the project.
4. No Technology – Many agencies do not have their own in house technologists, which limits their ability to fully understand the medium. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to innovate. It is akin to someone offering marble sculptures without being a marble sculptor themselves. An artist can have flawless concept sketches, but in order to realize those concepts, the artist needs to understand the stone all the way to its core. Otherwise, the true potential of that marble block will never be realized. Similarly, an organization that does not have a deep, functional understanding of a technology will never be in a position to fully exploit it, much less direct someone else to do it.
5. Allocation of Talent – This stems from the Hierarchy of Media. The highest paid and most influential positions in many agencies still belong to those who work in television and print, reinforcing to employees that those are the desirable areas to work. As a result, you will often see someone leading or playing an influential but dispassionate role in an agency’s interactive department in the hopes of using it as a stepping-stone to one of the traditional forms of media (sadly, this happens on the client side as well for much the same reasons).

Side note: I stopped including the songs at the end of each post because I didn’t like the aesthetic of the player and they don’t show up in the RSS feed.

I’ve heard a number of people say this over the past few months and I could not disagree more. There is and will always be a lot of value in asynchronous threaded discussions. However, message boards as they exist are a dated technology much in need of an influx of some of the features and concepts that are driving the newer forms of social media.

One idea that I have been mulling over is integrating tags into message boards. It is small and hardly revolutionary, but I think it could add considerable value to the experience for everyone involved. When a user creates a thread, they add tags based on what they think the conversation they are starting is about. The tags will then be editable by everyone so how a thread is categorized can evolve with the conversation. The tags can then be used to highlight those conversations elsewhere. So if I am in one thread, I can see at a glance and browse related threads based on how closely the tags align. Similarly, they can be used to provide additional context for users on pages with other content types. For example, if I am on LeBron James’ profile page on NBA.com, I will be able to see a feed of all the conversations that have been tagged with “LeBron James”. That is a relatively simple example, but I imagine on an ecommerce site, it could become a fantastic way to let your community merchandise for you, creating another sort of recommendation engine. By connecting the tags to a user’s activity, the tags could also be leveraged to create much more robust community member segmentation than what could be gleaned from a users’ profile (I imagine you may even be able to identify where they are in the sales funnel depending on their activity). All this using a pretty commonplace technology that would be relatively inexpensive to implement. Has anybody seen anything like this before? I would love to hear some more ideas on how the message board could be improved upon.

On a side note, how awesome would it be if you came to a community site and there was a tag cloud with one of the prominent tags being “flame war”? All name calling and childish behaviour would be on display just a click away.