“Any company that isn’t primarily delivering its service via mobile five years from now will probably be irrelevant.”
—Web 2.0 Is Over, All Hail the Age of Mobile | PandoDaily
April 2012
27 posts
“Hegelian philosophy. Hegel reasoned that the present always has components of the past and the future. The job of the observer is to disambiguate those elements of the present that have to do with the past (and are therefore dying) from those elements of the present that are part of the future (and are therefore being born).”
—Web 2.0 Is Over, All Hail the Age of Mobile | PandoDaily
Square + Foursquare →
gigaom.com
The author proposes that Apple buy Square and Foursquare, which isn’t a bad idea. It’d be cool to see one acquire the other but that’s not likely. I do think both would benefit from features borrowed from the other.
The phone is poised to usurp the PC’s throne →
gigaom.com
I think the bigger point is that everything will become a connected computing device:
Google found that more people have a mobile internet-capable device than a PC or laptop in five key markets (U.S., UK, Germany, France and Japan). In the U.S., this figure is eight percent greater.
Book Review: Reality Is Broken
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a super important book. It’s excellently written and ties together so many current trends around work, life, education and society that I think anyone would benefit from reading at least the first 1/3 of the book. The examples and specific conclusions about gaming may not be of interest to everyone but even if they’re not I guarantee you’ll still find the examples very interesting and they’ll challenge many of your preconceived notions about what motivates us and what games are good for.
View all my reviews
“In the depths of my personal bout with Klout status anxiety, I installed a browser plug-in that allows me to see the Klout scores of everyone in my Twitter feed. At first, I marveled at the folks with scores soaring up into the seventies and eighties. These were the “important” people—big media personalities and pundits with trillions of followers. But after a while I noticed that they seemed stuck in an echo chamber that was swirling with comments about the few headline topics of the social media moment, be it the best zinger at the recent GOP debate or that nutty New York Times story everybody read over the weekend. Over time, I found my eyes drifting to tweets from folks with the lowest Klout scores. They talked about things nobody else was talking about. Sitcoms in Haiti. Quirky museum exhibits. Strange movie-theater lobby cards from the 1970s. The un-Kloutiest’s thoughts, jokes, and bubbles of honest emotion felt rawer, more authentic, and blissfully oblivious to the herd. Like unloved TV shows, these people had low Nielsen ratings—no brand would ever bother to advertise on their channels. And yet, these were the people I paid the most attention to. They were unique and genuine. That may not matter to marketers, and it may not win them much Klout. But it makes them a lot more interesting.”
—What Your Klout Score Really Means | Epicenter | Wired.com
“The world is being bifurcated into two classes: high skill knowledge workers and creators (programmers, designers or those who otherwise contribute to a technology organization, finance, a few lucky enough to work in the creative class) and everyone else.”
—Maybe we’re in a bubble but it doesn’t matter by Justin Kan (via kemeny)
Pensions and Royalties: The Game Changed.
Baby Boomers grew up thinking that if they worked really hard that everything would be okay. Many people were promised pensions that would take care of them late into life. But the World changed. Companies failed. Money was mismanaged. Even if money hadn’t been mismanaged and even if all those companies were still around, I doubt the pension promise would have worked out the way people thought it would.
When I read stories like this, about aging rockers who have to continue to tour just to pay the bills and they blame pirating, it sounds to me like people complaining that their pensions, jobs and even social security are disappearing.
The problem with the music industry and royalties is the same problem that happened to GM and Ford and every other company in the World. The Internet flattened everything. The companies that offered pensions and royalties are built on antiquated models. Those models don’t work in the days of the Internet. They were designed for a different time.
It’s sad and you have every right to be angry but be angry that the game changed, not that people are breaking the rules. You can’t expect future generations to continue to play the old game just because you were made certain promises.
The last 50 years were an anomaly. The World changed. Again.
Crooked Usage Books: Reality is broken by Jane McGonigal →
crookedusage.tumblr.com
I also just finished reading this book and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in gamification. I also recommend it those that are skeptical of gamification and gaming.
I had been interested in reading this book for a long time; an attempt to show that we can improve the real world we all live in by applying lessons learned through the study of how video games affect those that play them. Can looking at why millions of people the world over pour hours of every…
“Now I just need to get over the fact that Google knows what I’m reading, where I am, who I’m saying things to, what I look like, and what I’m thinking. It’s lucky it does all of the above in such an elegant way, otherwise this would all be a bit frightening…”
—Jon Silk | PR Geek: Why Google is the most elegant social network
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? →
wiredpen.com
The Atlantic makes some trumped up claims and Kathy Gill (a professor of digital communications at the University of Washington), tears the article apart.
Brilliant.
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There have been three big innovation narratives in the last few years that complicate, but don’t invalidate, my thesis. The first — The Rise of the Cloud — was essentially a rebranding of having data on the Internet, which is, well … what the Internet has always been about. Though I think it has made the lives of some IT managers easier and I do like Rdio. The second, Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways? Perhaps the personal genomics companies, but so far, they’ve kept their efforts focused quite narrowly. And third, we have the daily deal phenomenon. Groupon and its 600 clones may or may not be good companies, but they are barely technology companies. Really, they look like retail sales operations with tons of sales people and marketing expenses.
I also want to note that there are plenty of ambitious startups in energy, healthcare, and education, areas that sorely need innovation. But fascinating technology startups, companies who want to allow regular people to do new stuff in their daily lives? Few and far between.
” —Great tear down.
Rejected By VCs, Pebble Watch Crowdsources Millions in Capital on Kickstarter →
go.bloomberg.com
I love that there are more outlets to people beyond traditional VC funding. I think we need more crowdsourcing initiatives that work more like an investment and I think we need a more robust second market. But overall, the investment word is about to get very exciting.
Twitter's Revolutionary Agreement Lets Original Inventors Stop Patent Trolls →
techdirt.com
This is a much more social way of handling patents but I wonder what happens when there’s a dispute between the multiple people on a patent.
Understanding Amazon's Strategy →
antipope.org
This is a great post that breaks down Amazon’s business historically and where it’s going now. Every strategy has trade-offs but what do you do when your strategy is so effective you get so big you scare people?
Microsoft had this problem and now we see Amazon, Apple and Google falling victim to this as well. Being big, means you did something right but it can also give you an unfair amount of power in the market. That’s what scares people.
Where are the $1 billion European acquisitions? →
kernelmag.com
I wonder, do US startups come with a premium over their European counterparts?
Viadeo gets $32m to become LinkedIn for the world →
gigaom.com
There is a huge lesson here that American tech companies need to learn. Retail giants like Wal-Mart had to learn this but US based social media companies have failed to latch on to this yet.
Viadeo’s success is based predominantly on its “multi-local” approach to Professional Social Networks, which focuses on leveraging and honoring the local language, business and culture of its members. This strategy has allowed the group to be very successful in emerging markets. In China, for example, Viadeo’s subsidiary Tianji has seen tremendous growth in the last year, going from 100,000 to 500,000 new users per month with a total member base of 10M.
“We’re a global society where critical business connections span multiple languages, geographies and cultures,” said Dan Serfaty, CEO, Viadeo. “We have always been laser-focused on our ‘multi-local’ approach, which goes beyond simple translation and focuses on catering to, and understanding the business and cultural needs of each market. This approach has awarded us tremendous growth and success in both European and emerging markets.”
Social Media: The Seven Year Bubble?
I’m so tired of people saying social media is in a bubble. Investors, journalists and pundits have been shouting “bubble” since 2005 when News Corp acquired MySpace for $580 Million. A bubble can not last 7 years. Social Media is not in a bubble.
Maybe it’s just time to finally admit that *maybe* social media companies are just different. They operate differently, scale differently and create value differently. If anything I think we have yet to really see the true value of social media and I think (but I’m biased) it’s going to be bigger than we currently realize.
Skillshare, Codecademy and the gamification of education →
plasticresume.wordpress.com
Two excellent examples of gamification and learning. And yes, these can absolutely be applied to work.
If you have any interest in or doubts about gamification you really, really need to read Jane McGonical’s (@avantgame) book Reality is Broken.
Instagram's Buyout: No Bubble to See Here →
wired.com
This is a great point about the ability of 13 people to build a company capable of grabbing 35 Million users. I think the $1 Billion acquisition price is high but not unjustified.
“Some would point to this as a sign of a bubble, but I think it’s more likely it just reflects the incredible scalability of modern app architectures. Using EC2 and solid monitoring, Instagram can quickly scale up to support a million new users overnight with very little additional engineering effort.”
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First and foremost, we crave satisfying work, every single day. The exact nature of this “satisfying work” is different from person to person, but for everyone it means being immersed in clearly defined, demanding activities that allow us to see the direct impact of our efforts.
Second, we crave the experience, or at least the hope, of being successful. We want to feel powerful in our own lives and show off to others what we’re good at. We want to be optimistic about our own chances for success, to aspire to something, and to feel like we’re getting better over time.
Third, we crave social connection. Humans are extremely social creatures, and even the most introverted among us derive a large percentage of our happiness from spending time with the people we care about. We want to share experiences and build bonds, and we most often accomplish that by doing things that matter together.
Fourth, and finally, we crave meaning, or the chance to be a part of something larger than ourselves. We want to feel curiosity, awe, and wonder about things that unfold on epic scales. And most importantly, we want to belong to and contribute to something that has lasting significance beyond our own individual lives.
” —Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
I’m loving this book.
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The purpose of the modern organization is to make it easy and natural and expected for people to take risks. To lean out of the boat. To be human.
Alas, most organizations do the opposite. They institutionalize organized cowardice. They give their people cover, a place to hide, a chance to say, “that’s not my job.”
Our organizations are filled with people not only eager to dehumanize those that they serve, but apparently, instructed to do so. In the name of shareholder value or team play or not rocking the boat…
During times of change, the only organizations that thrive are those that are eager to interact and change as well. And that only happens when individuals take brave steps forward.
Giving your team cover for their cowardice is foolish. Give them a platform for bravery instead.
” — Seth Godin, Organized bravery (via stoweboyd)The Post Social Age
The post social age is not the age built after the age of social media, it’s the age built on top of social media. In fact the post social age will be built on not just social media but the equally disruptive trends of crowdsourcing, gamification and big data. These four horsemen of the post social age will usher in a new era more disruptive than anything we’ve seen to date. The last decade has merely been a summer breeze compared to the category 5 hurricane we’re about to experience.
Your Privacy Is A Commodity And You Will Continue To Give it Away
We live in a rapidly evolving time. It’s scary. We’re going from a time where we lived our lives in private to where we are increasingly living in public. What we did behind closed doors, what media we consumed, what conversations we had, who our friends were, what news articles we read and what we liked, was known only to us.
The only way companies and governments were able to find out this information about us was through huge expensive research initiatives where armies of college students were deployed to ask us what we thought and what did. It was our choice to give this information away or not.
But increasingly we’re giving away that information “for free” and far more of it than we’ve ever given away before. Why? In simplest terms we gain social capital from our over-sharing but it goes way beyond that.
Invasion Of Your Privacy With ConsentEvery week there seems to be a new story about some app or social networking service that is being accused of violating your privacy. Facebook is almost always somewhere in the mix as they are the service that is most aggressively pushing the boundaries of our privacy. Over the weekend a new app called Girls Around Me sparked off the debate again. The app pulled Foursquare check-ins from public Facebook profiles to locate girls in your area. Creepy? Yes.In violation of any rules? Nope. But it was still pulled down. This app basically confirmed all the worst fears people have about geolocation.
Despite this, and possibly much worse, we will continue to give up our personal data. Not only will we continue to give up our personal data, we will gladly give up even more than we are today.
I’ve argued in the past that our privacy was already an illusion and have even gone as far as to suggest that geolocation could eventually make us feel safer.
Personal Information Is The New OilYou may remember sometime last year (seems like longer) that everyone was saying that your personal information was the new oil. That collectively our personal data would fuel a whole new economy. The analogy was heavily championed by Reputation.com CEO Michael Fertik. The World Economic Forum even released a study (PDF) which praised the social goodwhich could be done with this data.
I had the opportunity to hear Fertik speak at Gnomedex on the topic. Fertik believes that our personal information is a currency we can use and that services will spring up that will broker our data for us to those companies which wish to use it. Unfortunately for Fertik, that information broker already exists and it’s called Facebook.
Why We Give Up Our PrivacyWe all (those heavily involved in social media) understand intuitively that there are benefits that outweigh the risks involved in sharing our data. And when you get down to it, the use of information brokers is just too cumbersome and costly to use. Who’s going to pay for the service? Large data gathering companies aren’t going to pay for it because there’s more public data than there ever has been. Your data is a commodity. Sure it’s unique to you, but for the purposes of data gathering, your data isn’t special. So if someone was going to use a data broker, they would have to pay for it themselves. And I think we’ve already demonstrated we’re not going to do that.
We may not like it but we seem perfectly content to let Facebook manage our data for us.
The Future Is TransparentBut don’t despair. We are receiving plenty of benefit in trade for our data and we’re only going to get more. Right now we have unlimited use of World changing services like Facebook. Could you imagine going back to a pre-Facebook world? A World without Facebook would seem like post-apocalyptic fiction. And it’s only the beginning.
Eventually our personal data will take us into the post-social age, where our every experience is layered with social data. We will all rely on, or work from, the crowd and the only way that will be possible is if we have access to each others data. With access to that data we will know who to reach out to, who we want to work with and who we trust. Without ever seeing or even talking to that person.
We will inherently distrust people who don’t share their data, the same way we distrust incoming callers who block caller-ID.
I’m not saying it’s all going to be rosy and shiny. There will be casualties along the way. Some people will be taken advantage of. Some people will be physically harmed. This is no different from it is today and is the sad downside of living in a society. And some people will “drop out.” We’ll see some people become Digital Agoraphobics.
One Final NoteI’m not saying we should throw all privacy out the window and just abandon ourselves to the whim of corporations. We need to be smart about how we move forward because I believe most of the damage will be done not in the final state but on the path there. During the transition there will be an imbalance of data. Some people will use this imbalance to their advantage and that’s what we have to mitigate. Additionally I believe that if companies want to participate in this new transparent world, they themselves have to become more transparent.
