Web Social Architecture

Too Much Marketing

I really like David Armano’s Conversation Starter post from earlier this week with predicted trends in social media for next year. In particular, his first point hits on exactly what I think is going to be the key to success for marketers in social media:

1. Social media begins to look less social
With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more "exclusive." Not everyone can fit on someone's newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it's likely that user behavior such as "hiding" the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it's not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

OK, I actually think the header on Armano’s paragraph is, as he hints, actually the opposite of the truth—the way I’d say it is that “social media begins to look less anti-social!”

But the real point Armano is making is spot on. Social channels are too noisy, and as more and more marketers start to proactively reach out to consumers online next year, and as listening technologies are more widely adopted, we’ll see a dramatic increase in, well, spam.

I made a joke on Twitter recently about going to back to grad school. I was, I think, really obviously joking. But in minutes, I had four @replies from universities plugging their Master’s programs. Yikes!

We are fast approaching a time when public online social venues are saturated with listening marketers, responding to every mention of everything related to their brands, products, and services. It’s easy to anticipate Twitter’s @ channel, for example, becoming essentially useless.

Armano is right to predict an increase in user behaviors that enable them to filter the noise. But I also think we’ll see a rise in demand for and sophistication of privacy controls (and even products—like the “social router” I once pitched to Nancy White after her talk here at ZAAZ), as well as an increase in the importance of private networks and communities.

What’s a marketer to do?

Create value, that’s what. Next year will be a year for opt-in marketing—the focus will be on creating content and services people want to use. Heads up, folks, people don’t want you to “engage them” in “conversation.”

Social Media Teams: Different on the Agency Side than Internal

One of the things I've been saying a lot lately is that over the next couple years, we can expect to see corporations adding dedicated internal social media teams. Does this sound like a statement of the obvious? Then maybe the corollary is more interesting: I think agencies should do the opposite.

I've seen a similar pattern in a dozen or more corporations in the past year: Responsibility for social media falls to the person or people who get interested and raise their hands. They come from PR, customer service, marketing--and sometimes just out of the woodwork. Good!

In other words, responsibility for social media tends to happen in an ad hoc way--and I actually suspect ad hoc is a perfect way to staff an emerging discipline. And staff it you must.

Social media requires a new combination of skill sets, traversing all the disciplines I just mentioned, but also including strong writing skills, a thick skin, and the social savvy to interact with customers through online media in ways that are on-brand, authentic, human, and bounded by corporate guidelines, policy, and politics. It's hard, but for the right people it's super fun.

For the corporate social media team, representing the brand is a full-time job, with its own discrete challenges and rewards. They need to focus on developing the skills and experience to do it well.

But on the agency side, the whole thing is different. Agencies need to bring to bear their full range of capabilities to support clients' social media efforts, and that includes all the "traditional" digital disciplines--at the agency where I work, we have a 10-person social media team that includes people from development, analytics, search, optimization, user experience, creative, and client services. It's a witchy brew. Our goal is to implode the whole idea of "social media" in the next 2 years.

So my message to agencies is: Adapt, or specialize yourself into an oblivion-vortex!

To be sure, social media specialty agencies (I have friends at several of them) provide a tremendously valuable service with their depth of expertise in social media. But my prediction is, as web marketing evolves further, the breadth of expertise brought to bear by "traditional digital" agencies will pose a grave threat to the specialists. They simply won't match digital agencies' capabilities in development, analytics, creative, usability, planning, and optimization.

Seven years ago, we were explaining the idea of online community. Three years ago, we were selling the importance of Web 2.0. Today, we're answering ubiquitous demand from clients that "social media" be included as a component in all our web work. Give it another 2 years and clients will see "web" and "social" as synonymous--data, content, service, identity, content objects, and relationships as integral to a holistic web strategy.

So on the agency side, there should ultimately be no such thing as a "Social Media Team," only a company made of web-savvy, passion-driven professionals who can support all aspects of corporate social media efforts--from concept through implementation.

The nuts and bolts, and rubber meeting the road, and the delivery of the service belong on the client side; and the vision, concept, and creative / conceptual infrastructure are where agencies can help. All in all, I have to admit, it ends up looking a lot like Mad Men, which my 90 year old Grandmother, true story, described as "the most realistic show yet about the '50's."

"It shows," she says, "exactly how we lived."

How Twitter Promotes Quantity to the Detriment of Quality, And Why Twitter Matters Nonetheless

My Twitter experiment was a “successful failure.”

I started an experiment a few weeks ago, basically using Twitter differently than I had previously. Until then, I'd only followed people I know personally--friends, family, colleagues, and professional acquaintances. But a couple weeks ago, I decided to try following everyone who follows me.

This is not a large number of people by Twitter standards (a couple hundred), but I was immediately annoyed with Twitter, and I stopped looking at it for a while. The people I was using Twitter to keep tabs on were simply drowned out by the deluge of incoming tweets, which I found almost entirely uninteresting and not at all useful.

I didn't give up. I created a group in TweetDeck for people I know personally, so I could follow them separately from my full collection of tweeters. That kind of worked on my computer, but it didn’t work on my phone--I never used poor, neglected Twidroid any more. I had to turn off the updates.

I started sort of hating Twitter. What I thought was interesting, though, was people sending me messages thanking me for following them. "You're... uh... welcome...?"

That was what raised the question:

Why do people on Twitter care how many people are following them?

The answer is, because Twitter wants it that way. The affordance for social capital on Twitter is all about quantity: How many following, how many followers, and how many updates posted. The measure of a person, in Twitter, is all about the total amounts accumulated:

The display of these measures represents just a fraction of the text on a Twitter page, just a few pixels of space—but they’re critical, because they are the attributes attached to the representation of my identity. Effectively, they are me, and I am valued on the basis of their accumulation. Other people, at a glance, get a sense of who I am that’s based on the amount of stuff I have, and not what kind of stuff, and not on the value of that stuff.

This is a bad thing. As Twitter’s massive increase in number of users the last few months has started to illustrate, an increase in users also increases the breadth of topics, decreasing the signal to noise ratio. Six months ago, when Twitter was populated mainly by a relatively narrow group of social software and Web aficionados, there was a stronger sense of Twitter being a community. Today there’s much less topical focus, and Twitter’s limitations as a social tool have become much more readily apparent.

The fix: Build quality-based social capital.

What if, instead of showing, underneath my photo and name, the number of people I follow, the number of people following me, and the number of times I’ve posted, Twitter showed data that reflected the value of my activity? For example, what if my Twitter identity were associated with the percentage of my posts replied to, favorited, and re-tweeted by others?

I’m going to go ahead and suggest that this tweak would substantially alter the way people use Twitter—for the better. Because the measure of a person would be their ability to consistently create value, people would be encouraged to be more interesting. But notice that the measures I’m suggesting don’t reflect the number of people finding any particular tweet valuable, only the percentage of tweets found interesting by someone. That’s an important difference, because it says you don’t need to play to the crowd—that one-to-one value counts the same as one-to-many value. So you don’t have to be interesting to lots and lots of people, only interesting to a single person.

And there’s more here yet: Because the social capital of the system would be tied to recognition by others, the system would encourage connections that were active, and based on mutual attention and interest. “Capital” here works in the sense of “currency.” We’d pass it back and forth—if I like your tweet, I reward you with a reply, a retweet, or a favorite. My doing so counts for you. You look for an opportunity to reciprocate.

Quality and value, when rewarded, are fundamentally self-reinforcing. So if Twitter supported quality and value, great ideas would be passed along more, reaching more people. Reputation and credibility would flow from meaningful contribution. Relationships grounded in mutual helpfulness would flourish.

Now, as Twitterers like the prolific Nancy White illustrate, quality and quantity are not mutually exclusive. And it’s certainly better to have more good stuff than it is to have only some good stuff. So a shortcoming of my suggestion is that it doesn’t reward the consistent creation of value over time, or put another way, the creation not only of consistent value but of a LOT of it, consistently.

Batting average only counts beyond a threshold of at-bats. Total home runs matters only relative to years played. If Ichiro goes 4-for-4 in the season opener, he’s batting a thousand, but that doesn’t yet qualify his season for any discussion of the all-time best. So the real answer, if we’re going to get serious about it, is for Twitter to create a quality algorithm and use that as the measure of an individual’s contribution.

Twanalyst is a gesture in the right direction. It’s a service that analyzes Twitter accounts across a number of quality-focused dimensions, resulting in a (sort of cheesy) personality test: I am very pleased to tell you I am a “chatty coherent guru.” Yes!

Kind of fun, but what I actually really like about Twanalyst is that it’s looking primarily at the nature of what you’re doing on Twitter, rather than the amount of it. That, I believe, is the future on an increasingly noisy web.

Speaking of the future, what about Twitter’s future?

At this point, it’s kind of common knowledge that Twitter has passed a… can I say… Twipping point. As Twitter gets huge, and as the purchase offers get bigger, which direction it takes—toward signal or noise—will help determine its fate as a social application.

Will Twitter end up yet another spammy channel, a trivialized feature of a larger social network, under pressure to monetize? Or will it add a valuable layer of ambient awareness to rich, multi-channel online relationships? I’m rooting for the latter, not just because I’m a fan of Twitter (I am), but because I want to live in a digital future where quality, meaning, order, and value trump unwanted noise.

 

But what I’ve said here is also kind of wrong. The story (like stories always are) is more complicated.

Despite all that—despite the shortcomings of a system that rewards meaningless connections, high volumes of worthless posts, and claiming to listen to more people than anyone possibly could—the truth is we can’t ignore Twitter.

And there’s a reason it’s hard to get comfortable with that truth. Twitter, in the midst of its deluge of valueless tweets, also produces a kind of magic: The collective value of all the noise has a tremendous potential to add up to something meaningful—something with a value beyond what any particular contributor can produce. As the Moldova uprising most recently illustrated, and as did the presidential election and Katrina did before it, Twitter, at its best, is a powerful venue for the expression of real-time collective intelligence. And that’s where businesses need to stand up and pay attention.

Death of Email: Not a Minute Too Soon

Email is dead!

OK, maybe not yet, but the latest news certainly suggests the end is inevitable: Social networking has now passed email in global use. Here are the highlights (from Nielsen via Mashable):

New stats from Nielsen Online show that by the end of 2008, social networking had overtaken email in terms of worldwide reach. According to the study, 66.8% of Internet users across the globe accessed “member communities” last year, compared to 65.1% for email.

Some other key findings from the report:

- Globally, Facebook reaches 29.9% of global Internet users, versus 22.4% for MySpace.

- MySpace remains the most profitable social network, generating an estimated $1 billion in revenue versus $300 million for Facebook in 2008.

- Facebook is the top social network in all countries except Germany, Brazil, and Japan (Nielsen still has MySpace as tops in US in the report, but as of January ’09, that had changed).

- On Twitter, CNN, The New York Times, and BBC have the greatest reach among mainstream media companies as of late February.

Details are here: http://mashable.com/2009/03/09/social-networking-more-popular-than-email/

It’s worth mentioning that “member communities” is a pretty broad definition of social networking. It encompasses more, obviously, than formal Facebook-style social networks—it essentially includes every kind of online space where people can interact with each other!

What this points to for me is less that social networks are better than email and more that email is an obsolete tool. Simply put, there isn’t a single thing you can do with email that you can’t do better with a different tool. (And feel free to challenge that point if you like!)

The reason email, like the occasional tape deck, is still around is that it’s been a dominant norm for business communications for long enough that people depend on it. It's a standard.

But rest assured, in the same way email for personal social use is fading, it will also fade in business. It’s just a matter of time, and obviously it won’t happen overnight. And no, email won't disappear off the face of the earth. It'll go the way of snail-mail instead: Relegation to use by Luddites, a few innovative specialized uses (a la Netflix with snail-mail), and saturation with junk.

The transition to a new set of web-based communication and collaboration tools is already well underway, and it’s happening partly invisibly: The new web-based tools, for now, integrate really well with email. You can post to a Typepad blog through email, edit a SocialText wiki through email, update a Basecamp discussion thread through email, and so on. Email users the world over are, at this very moment, authoring blogs and editing wikis, some without knowing it!

The first step in supplanting a standard is to build in compatibility with it, and that's what the newer tools are doing. Email lovers beware! Your demise is at hand!

Ok ok, clearly I have a personal vendetta against email. My point is, so should everyone.

What do you think?

Tweeting about the Weather Isn't Lame

I can't remember where I read this, but someone (with some time on their hands?) figured out that some higher-than-you'd-expect percentage of posts to Twitter are about the weather. Seriously, the weather!

I myself have done this. And the past month in Seattle, with the crazy snow and now rain we've had, my PNW-centric personal Twittersphere has been all abuzz about sledding, traffic, holiday travel hassles, snow, snow, snow, and now the road-salting controversy in the City Council. (Salting! What is this, Wisconsin? It snows like twice a year here.)

I have to say, the volume of weather-related tweets this holiday season has been marked. And this has made me wonder what's going on. Why would anyone go to the trouble to broadcast a stray water cooler comment out to the world?

On the one hand, this sudden flood (ahem) of banal weather tweets might seem to confirm once and for all the uselessness of Twitter. I see it a little differently, though. What I think is actually happening is that people are creating a layer of light conversation around a synchronous shared experience. It's the equivalent of a water-cooler chat, yes--but I've started to think there's something important about the shared aspect of that experience. If there's one thing we have in common, after all, it's the weather.

Though other smart folks (including, most vehemently, my psychotherapist / wife) disagree, I'm starting to think experiences don't have to be meaningful to be important, as long as they're shared, and especially when the sharing is synchronous with the experience.

So no, tweeting about the weather isn't lame at all. I'd rather think of it as a social gesture acknowledging commonality, strengthening bonds, and maintaining connectedness.

But do all our random followers on Twitter, or even our followers who (are lucky enough to) live in other climates care about this kind of stuff? In many cases, clearly not. For me, this points to Twitter's shortcoming as a social network. Twitter, I'd even say, is not an appropriate tool for relationship-building. It's not, in other words, a social network in its own right.

I see Twitter, instead, as a powerful feature of social networks. Standing alone, it's a feature of existing distributed social networks--and a great reminder that social networks are made of people, not web pages. Fed into Facebook, Twitter becomes a more-powerful status communicator, a feature of Facebook. And with Twitter's open API, endless possibilities exist for layering meaningful triviality into social network-driven web experiences.

A Simple Recipe for Great Mobile Application Design

As you can probably tell, I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek with the title of this post, just for the sake of provocation. But I actually do have a theory about how to design great mobile apps. I've been floating the idea with colleagues lately, and it's been producing great results: Strongly opinionated responses, for and against!

Here it is: There are two things about mobile that are fundamentally different from web designed for the desktop / laptop, two things that are really cool about mobile. They are location awareness and constant access to your relationships. Where those two factors intersect is the sweet spot of great mobile design.

Your mobile device knows where you are. As our creative director said to me in one of his wild rants (yes you, Tim), good mobile is all about "information about your surroundings." I agree, but I'd add that your mobile device also knows who you know. It knows how to contact the people you know, it knows what they're saying, and it gives them a way to contact you. It's a portal into all your relationship channels--good mobile is also all about portable access to your people.

Good mobile design, says me, taps into one of those two unique attributes of mobile. And great mobile design taps into them both.

I also say no manifesto worth its salt lacks a Venn diagram. Therefore:

 

                     

 

Some smart people have voiced objections to this idea, including that there are some really cool games out there for mobile that have nothing to do with location awareness or sociability. I've even been called on my recent defense of triviality in light of this argument. Fair enough. But I'm sticking to my guns.

I'm not saying everything for mobile has to fall into this framework to be worthwhile. I'm just saying great mobile design--game-changing, market-defining, indispensable design--takes full advantage of the unique benefits of mobile. Ms. Pac-Man might be pretty fun controlled by the iPhone's accelerometer, but just because it's kind of cool doesn't mean it's great design.

Here's an example that I think illustrates what I'm talking about.

Helio's "buddy beacon" feature takes advantage of both location awareness and access to the contacts list. (Disclosure: Helio is a client.) Buddy beacons represent people in your contact list, and it displays their locations on a map. You can see where your people are, and you can also see their status: Are they busy, available, on the phone, etc.

Helio has taken the instant messaging metaphors of presence and status, and extended them into a location context.

Pretty nice. There are some limitations, though: Only other Helio customers show up, and there's no seamless way to contact buddies directly through the map. In the era of open standards and touchscreen interfaces, this doesn't quite cut the mustard.

There are plenty of other easy examples. Finding nearby restaurants is cool, and seeing customers' ratings and reviews of those restaurants is even cooler. But cooler yet would be to show restaurants visited by people you know--a shared restaurant landscape of opinions, experiences, and preferences. It's not hard to imagine all kinds of extensions of relatively simple ideas: Just ask, how do we add geographic and social context to create value?

Poof! Mobile design made easy. What do you think?

Twitter: Trivial. Beautifully So.

I wrote a post a year and a half ago on Twitter in which I identified two types of use for it. This was at the height of the initial buzz about Twitter, and while some folks were really excited to finally see an HTML / SMS / IM social application, others worried aloud that Twitter, for the same reasons it offers such a low threshold of entry, would also tend to erode the quality of social relationships online. The thoughtful anti-Twitter point of view was that it encourages triviality, and the gist of my post was that while that may be true, there are times when trivialities are useful.

Since I wrote that post, I've become an avid Twitterer, and I have to say my perspective on Twitter, and indeed on triviality, has changed. I now see triviality as maybe the critical element of truly meaningful relationships, online and off, and Twitter has accordingly become one of the cornerstone services of my personal and professional social lives.

That sounds crazy, I know, and while it may be true that I am prone to crazy-sounding declaratives, I'm actually not kidding about this. I now use Twitter at work very frequently, mostly within my team, and it has improved our functioning and, dare I say it, made us closer, more personally connected.

Let me float an assertion: The deeper the relationship, the greater the proportion of it dedicated to triviality; and beyond, say, 90% triviality, the relationship isn't a relationship at all. And likewise with meaningful interactions--if everything is meaningful, it's not a relationship, it's therapy.

So here is my Bullseye Diagram of Love, illustrating the way I'm starting to envision online social systems supporting healthy relationships:

So I'm arguing for Twitter, or an analogous triviality service (ha!) as a supplement to existing relationships, not as a full-fledged social channel in and of itself. As a social network, I actually do think it's useless, or worse. And you can take that as a caveat.

But I am saying I think triviality in general and as supported by Twitter, in both personal and professional settings, is indispensable--that we can and should deliberately design it into social systems.

A Conceptual Map: The Mobile Web as a Social Space

Following last month's release of the iPhone 3G, along with the launch of the App Store, and what Brian Fling called the "first true Mobile 2.0," everyone around here is talking about the emergence of the mobile device as a critical facet of web strategy. My colleague Anders Rosenquist, who is seriously deep on mobile, presented a first take on the company point of view on mobile strategy at a recent meeting; another colleague, Justin Marshall, is knee-deep in an iPhone app; and in general things are just all abuzz about mobile.

And Brian has pretty much convinced me that mobile is, in fact, a huge deal. But I don't think it's a huge deal in quite the obvious way. The initial reaction to everyone's sudden attention to mobile seems to be along the lines of, "We need to make our web site accessible on mobile!"

Not so fast.

I got  a lot of help on this diagram from Anders and Justin. It's meant to be a framework for thinking about the mobile experience, in particular about how the mobile web experience is different from the web experience in general. There's quite a bit to debate in that question, and we could talk about it for hours. And of course, this kind of diagram certainly oversimplifies a very complex system in a complex space. It doesn't show all the elements, and it doesn't show all the relationships between the elements. What I hope it does do is provide a framework for thinking about the mobile space that makes it easier to uncover opportunities to create real value for real people.

I do think there are some issues unique to mobile that go beyond form factor, device compatibility, and the challenges of adapting content. Let's get this one out of the way: It's not enough to just take your web site, add some new CSS, and deliver it to the mobile device. If that doesn't strike you as self-apparent, bear with me.

In the longer term, the mobile device will become the hub of our social worlds, an indispensable tool for navigating our physical, cultural, and relational landscapes. Does that sound like an overstatement? I don't think it is.

Let's take a closer look at the major elements of the diagram above. Taken together they illustrate what I think is interesting about the human-centric view of mobile computing sketched above:

The mobile context is fundamentally different:

• A contact is the combination of 1) a person you know and 2) the ways you communicate with them. Because it goes with you everywhere and it directly enables communication with people, the mobile device is the logical primary home for contacts.
• Task orientation is the focus on a single primary task at any given moment. The mobile device lends itself to neither multitasking nor complex tasks. Unless you're waiting through a flight delay or sitting on a train somewhere, your focus on the mobile web is probably singular, with a specific goal and a discrete activity. And as mobile evolves to support more kinds of tasks, a self-reinforcing cycle will emerge, where the mobile device becomes the device of preference for an increasing number of activities.
• Location awareness is a critical differentiator between the mobile and, um, non-mobile web experience. Whether or not the device itself includes location awareness per se, the context of use is, well, mobile--away from the desk, network-independent, and out in the analog world we'll always call home. And the more things you can accomplish untethered from your desk chair, the more time you'll spend that way.

And the mobile device has a different relationship to content:

• Regardless of the advances in the browsing experienced introduced by the iPhone, the mobile device will not soon become the preferred medium for web surfing. Mobile content will be increasingly targeted, driven by subscription, syndication, filtering. It will adapting dynamically to the context of use: Locations, tasks, and relationships.
• Web sites have a different relationship with content consumed on the mobile device. The New York Times site will still be the New York Times site, of course--web sites per se aren't going anywhere. But the mobile context creates demand for different uses of the site: The site will increasingly function as a container we interact with through services like syndication. My friend Chris uploads baby photos to Flickr, I subscribe to Chris, and his photos are delivered to my device. The site is a holder of content, syndication is the delivery mechanism, and the device is the receiver; and, APIs deliver content to the site from, you guessed it, the mobile device:
• Artifacts are the things we create on our mobile devices, like pictures and videos. Part of the reason I think mobile really lends itself to social applications is that it is both a producer and consumer of content: A two-way channel between you and the world. And not just any world or the world at large, but the world of your choosing, your place and time, your relationships.

So the most important difference between the mobile web experience and the computer-based web experience is that the mobile web has a context of use that features place and activity: What I've labeled on this diagram Task Orientation and Location Awareness. Also, the mobile device, unlike desktop and even laptop computers, is essentially a communication device. Its heritage remains the cell phone, and its core use, despite its profound evolution the past several years, is to enable communication between people. It's the context that's different for mobile.

Developing web sites and services for mobile requires a keen sense of this different context. Users of your mobile site are out and about--and they're less likely to be reading the New York Times or researching a health care topic than they are to be trying to get directions to a restaurant where someone is waiting for them, maybe take a quick look at the menu, and send their friend a quick SMS apology and ETA.

None of this is to minimize the challenges of designing and developing for mobile. There are still a bunch of screen sizes to deal with, hundreds of devices with different functionality, and no fully-effective standard for adapting content to the variety of requirements. And as important as the iPhone is, it's still only a small slice of the overall market. These are all real challenges you still have to address.

Nonetheless, the opportunity is huge, and soon you might not be able to afford to ignore mobile. Look to Asia and northern Europe for a sense of mobile's future importance in the US.

So what does your business have to offer your customers via mobile? And maybe even more importantly, what do your customers have to offer each other?

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.

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?