Web Social Architecture

Innovative Uses of Portable Content: A New Category of Products and Services?

I realized recently that several of my favorite things on the web have something in common. They're taking content that lives elsewhere and not just mashing it up, but transforming it into something new. I've started to think this approach might be part of the next generation of social media services--tools that take advantage of data portability in new ways.

We talk about data portability all the time in terms of newly-enabled distribution, and beyond a doubt, distribution is a huge benefit of widgets, APIs, standards, and syndication. But there's also a new opportunity to innovate, beyond viralizing, mashing up, or recontextualizing content. Some of my favorite tools go another step further, transforming the content itself. Let me explain.

Flickr, as regular readers of this blog are (all too?) aware, is my very most favorite web site. And Flickr's combination of public APIs and open-source projects has spawned a huge number of tools and services, like Flickr Graph, Shozu, and Mappr, that recontextualize photos from Flickr in all sorts of interesting ways. The problem with these services, from a business perspective, is the lack of a revenue model.

Printing digital photos, on the other hand, is a no-brainer. It was a big part of the revenue model for the earliest photo sharing sites, including KodakGallery and others, and it's a nice business. The problem with it is the lack of differentiation among the many competitors in that space. You have to either compete on price, build a reputation for superior quality, or retain exclusive access to the content itself.

A couple standout services go farther.

Moo basically just prints out your photos, like the all the similar services--but the difference is that they enable you to create distinctively-shaped business cards from your photos. And the shape of the card is really the thing that works. They're smaller than a standard business card, and proportionally longer. So they stand out, and in an interesting way, they're informal. Moo has really put forward a new version of a throwback product--the personal calling card. Moo transforms the personal digital assets hosted on Flickr into personalized, real-world artifacts--a new use for a thing you already have.

Animoto is a little different, in that its product stays on the digital side of the digital / analog frontier, but like Moo, they have taken advantage of an existing asset by transforming it into something else.

Using Animoto's web application, you can import your photos from any of a number of media hosts (including Flickr) and turn them into a movie. Animoto's user experience really stands out. The whole process is, dare I say it, simple. You import your pictures, arrange them, select or upload music, click a button, and a few minutes later Animoto spits out a polished, fun, unique movie you can import into all the social media contexts you'd expect.

Here's an Animoto video I threw together just for fun, starring a few of my colleagues. Took about 5 minutes to make.

Cool! Ok, maybe you had to be there. But what I love about Animoto is that it takes your photos and increases their entertainment and storytelling value--increasing the usefulness of your things.

There are many other examples of products and services that take advantage of portable content, and I think they represent an emerging category--and an emerging opportunity to create new kinds of value.

The Four C's of Social Technology Vendor Evaluation

We do a lot of helping clients pick technology solutions for social media and online community efforts. It's a big challenge, partly because the requirements are always a little different for every project and partly because there are so many community tools and platforms out there.

Obviously, vendor assessment and selection is complicated, and it's important to get it right. Most of the formal assessment processes I've seen do a great job of differentiating between products on the basis of their feature sets. But in the social media space, there are many, many players, the landscape changes quickly, and many of the products out there do a lot of the same stuff. The effort required to assess all the viable options is prohibitive. So, you need a simple way to narrow the field.

The other day I had an epic consulting moment, spontaneously creating a framework for simplifying the vendor selection process in the middle of talking in a meeting. OK, so it's not the theory of relativity, and it might not be perfect, and someone else might have a better idea, but moments of clarity are rare enough for me that I'll go ahead and claim this one, and call it "epic." Here it is:

The Four C's of Social Technology Vendor Evaluation: Capabilities, Cost, Compatibility, and Customization

Capabilities:  This is pretty straightforward. Does the tool do what you need it to do? Does it have all the required features? And less obviously: Does it have the flexibility to scale to accommodate unforeseen future needs?

The challenge here is that in the social software space, there is a great degree of feature parity. The major tools do most of the same stuff. That's why you need the other three C's.

Cost: Pick a tool you can afford! But beware the hidden costs of cheap tools, like maintenance, scaling license fees, extra customization, and lack of scalability. While on the one hand it's tempting to pay good money for a tool you can count on, on the other hand don't forget to evaluate open source and custom options--vendor management creates overhead, and the costs can surprise you.

Compatibility: Be careful with this one. Unless you're working on a fully standalone service, you're likely to be integrating your social tool with other systems--if not now, then in the future. Make sure your systems can talk to each other.

Customization: Most white-label tools out there are very flexible and can accommodate a great deal of customization. But you need to think through who will do the customizing. Does your in-house team have the bandwidth and capabilities? Some social technology platforms are built on proprietary scripting languages. Paying for customization can get the thing built, but it can also add significantly to the total cost.

 

There you have it. I hope that simple (simplistic?) framework helps. If you have other approaches, please do drop me a comment and share.

If you need a list of vendors to start from, there are a number of them out there, including this helpfully-annotated one I stumbled across a couple days ago.

Google Explores Participatory Search Results

Google’s success was built on their early recognition of the value of tacit social data (like linking, and more) to help gauge both relevance and quality in search results. Now it seems they’re moving toward an approach that combines their traditional algorithmic approach to search with an explicit voting system, where users vote individual results up or down for a given query. Here’s a demo:

Naturally, because it's Google, everyone's talking about this. For an overview, check out the  comment thread at TechCrunch:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/is-this-the-future-of-search/

In general, there’s great precedent for combined tacit / explicit quality measures. Users express preference and valuation in a number of different ways on different sites, and those expressions control which content shows up where. This works well. Digg and Reddit, for example, use yes / no voting systems like the one Google’s prototyping combined with algorithms; de.icio.us uses the act of bookmarking as an explicit expression of valuation in combination with tacit factors like timing; YouTube uses ratings combined with views and other factors; and Flickr uses a “secret” combination of views, comments, favorites, and other factors to identify the good stuff.

Applying this kind of explicit quality measure to search results is new, as far as I know. But does it make sense? I can imagine a couple problems:

First and foremost, how do you know whether an individual result is relevant and high-quality before clicking through the results page and accessing the resource? And if it’s exactly what you wanted, why would you go back to the results page and vote it up? There’s an assumption baked into the idea behind this that users have a strong enough investment in providing feedback on their searches that they’ll interrupt their task at hand to participate. I say, unlikely.

So if the best results aren’t getting voted up, an explicit voting system won’t reward them.

What will happen is that the results that look best on the search results page itself will get rewarded, and the results that look bad will get punished. So an important effect of this kind of system is that it will place a premium on optimizing the metadata that gets displayed on the search results page. Don’t forget those page headers!

One thing that I do think might motivate users to participate in this voting system is revenge. If you feel lied to or misled by the information displayed on a search results page, you might be a tad more likely to go back and register your displeasure. So, one of the effects could also be an improvement in the accuracy of search results page descriptions. Power to the people!

What do you think? Is Google on the right track here, providing an explicit feedback system, or are they just being lame Digg copycats?

Samantha Starmer on Metadata and Human Relationships

Samantha Starmer of REI entertainingly titled her talk at last week's event Single Athletic Female Seeks Single Slender Male: The Marriage of Metadata and Social Media. Her talk surveyed a number of the challenges and opportunities of working with metadata in social computing.

Here's the 15-minute video:

When Samantha posts her slides I'll add them here.

Wendy Chisholm on Universal Design for Social Applications

Wendy Chisholm presented on Universal Design last week at the social media event at ZAAZ. Wendy is an independent consultant wrapping up a forthcoming book for O'Reilly on accessibility, and she's been involved with accessibility issues, first with the W3C and later as a consultant, for many years.

I asked Wendy for a take on accessibility on the social web, and here's the result. There's a lot involved, but a good portion of it boils down to standardization and semantics in APIs and I/O interfaces.

For 15 minutes of wisdom and righteousness click here:

And here are the slides: 

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Because SlideShare's player lacks important accessibility features, Wendy also posted a tagged PDF version.

I must say, I'm chastened not to be posting a transcript in support of that video, but Wendy's post on eating her own dog food while struggling to make her slideshow accessible makes me feel better... a little better.

Nancy White on Slow Community

Nancy White spoke at ZAAZ last week at our social media event. Her talk, titled Slow Community, was wonderfully ironic coming from the most prolific online participant in THE ENTIRE WORLD. And as usual, Nancy has her finger on an important pulse. Her (she credits others as well) notion of slow community is an exploratory gesture toward solving an emeging crisis in our online lives: social overload, or if you like, information overload 2.0. Ha!

Who doesn't have trouble these days, tracking professional, avocational, personal, and informational relationships across sites, services, and devices? Social network fatigue is here today--and tomorrow promises a truly overwhelming inundation of social and relational input across many channels.

Here's Nancy's 15-minute talk:

Here are the slides:

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Nancy wrote a follow-up post here. There are some great comments on her post--check them out.

For more on Slow Community, start here, then go here.

 

Brian Fling on Mobile 2.0 and the iPhone

Brian Fling spoke at ZAAZ last week at an event we hosted on social media. His talk, titled Mobile 2.0: Design and Develop for the iPhone and Beyond, was a rapid-fire tour of the ins and outs for mobile design, with special attention to the game-changing impacts of the iPhone--which Brian calls "the first truly 2.0 mobile device."

There's a tremendous amount of information here. Poor Brian thought he had an hour for his talk--but the five talks that evening were supposed to be only 15 minutes each!

Here's the video. It's about 30 minutes long (he was on a roll, I couldn't interrupt):

Brian's on the road and so hasn't yet posted his slides, but he'll do so soon, and I'll update this post to include them. Meantime you can see Brian's other presentations on his site.

Justin Marshall on Social Media Marketing

Here is the video of Justin Marshall's talk last week, titled Money, Media, and Your Mom's Peach Cobbler: Social Media Marketing Done Right. Justin is a colleague of mine at ZAAZ and a major contributor to our efforts in social media.

Justin's take on social media revolves around 3 critical points: Find your customer's shared passion, build value through community, and focus on strategic objectives. His talk includes some great stories and examples, including a sample concept for a social media campaign done right. (Are you listening, Whole Foods?)

Here's the 15-minute video:

 And here are the slides, so you can follow along:

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I'll be posting the other presentations from the event as I get them ready. Video processing, especially at my novice level, takes forever.

Nail Hit on Head: The Breakup

Our creative director shared this video at a company meeting the other day. Might be preaching to the choir here, but it's a nice illustration of the pain and confusion those imaginary (I haven't met any in quite a while) old school marketing types must be feeling these days.

 

Power to the people!

 

The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager