Amazon, Foursquare, etc.

One day, someone will take a picture of me and they won't need to ask my name because they will in one minute receive an email identifying my name, affiliation, and probably address. If this person is interested in me, they won't have to go to Craiglist's Missed Connections, they will cold call me. If this person is a stalker, I will experience one of those Bruce Willis futuristic psycho-thriller situations. That day, effectively, is now.

Amazon has introduced a video recognition feature where you can take a picture of any object, send it to Amazon, and within minutes receive that product, as listed on Amazon, and a one-click step to ordering that product. Crazy.

And in other news they are putting Kindle on the Blackberry. One more step in the right no-more-new-devices direction.

My clustermates are obsessed with foursquare.com. From what I understand, it allows you to live the SimCity reality by letting you figure out where your friends are and use your social habits for the imaginary benefit of earning rank and points for the territories you cover.

We had a guest speaker for marketing who is developing www.webook.com, specifically, a program called Page to Fame. his idea is that publishing needs to evolve in the direction of being allow consumers to purchase editorial in bite size chunks, like a poem, an essay, etc., instead of a 300 page situation. As part of that logic, he's started a site where authors pay to have the first page of their literature read by the people who obsessively peruse blogs, editorials, and the like, for the opportunity to advance in a competition where agents will end up reviewing a few chapters and ultimately offer a book deal.

I think the idea is cool, though I have my questions. But it inspires my interest in expand on-demand programming. I think that there is a lot of money to be made on a lot more movies by bundling and distributing quality arranged video content. (See the recent piece on willingness to buy: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1964604,00.html) And a lot of his ideas on viewer participation means that more people would want to pay for self designed catalogs of digital video content.

And related to last week's class. If Buzz signals what it looks like for Google to become Facebook, I wonder what the internet would look like if Facebook were to become Google. Perhaps content will be organized by most poked.

"Anger Leads to Apology From Google About Buzz " NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/technology/internet/15google.html

Hey Google,

Remember when you had "Beta" – strapped to your site for years, championing the concept that you are forever improving the experience through constant development? Couldn't let Gmail out of the bag till it was ready and had to wait for an invite? Good times.

So what happened with Google Buzz and your decision to not put it through a beta, what was that meeting like? Maybe it sounded something like this:

"Should we put Google Buzz through beta?" - Google Programmer #1

"No need... why would we need to test out our social network with a community.... let's just run this internally between us two programmers." - Google Programmer #2

Except that probably wasn’t the conversation. Google’s privacy hiccup and subsequent apology seems a little malicious and a whole lot disingenious. Here’s why.

We all know from Marketing & The Internet that a social network with only 1 person isn’t much of a social network. So what to do then? Well, let’s take what you did as a guideline for instant success.

1.) Do not prompt Gmail users if they want to participate in your new “service.” Go one further and:

2.) Force your users into your network by automatically creating a friends list based on your most e-mailed contacts. Publically display those contacts as “followers” and “following” for the world to see. (Hey Tiger Woods, if leaving your phone out for your wife to read your most recent text messages didn’t expose your philandering, Google probably would have done it for you.)

3.) Release statement six days after launch apologizing for possible privacy concerns and a promise to improve. Claim ignorance that there was no way to foresee these privacy concerns, but act heroic in attempting to address them. It sounds something like this: “We’re very sorry for the concern we’ve caused and have been working hard ever since to improve things based on your feedback,” Mr. Jackson wrote. “We’ll continue to do so.”

4.) Six days later offer users feature to turn off “auto-follow.” But do not actually take users off auto-follow or prompt them to make a decision the next time they log in (yes, you guys still have your followers and following available for your lover/ex lover/ or family to analyze.)

5.) Oh, and make it really hard to find how to turn off “auto-follow” or buzz in general (somewhere small at the bottom of the page, have fun looking.)

And there you have it, a fully integrated community to feed your social network, at least enough momentum to make Facebook worry.

We all know the majority doesn’t read the fine print, nor is pro-active in privacy control. The minority may rage and rant, but in the end they are still the minority. So the deed is done, the misdeed still exists and Google now has their social network fast tracked.

Your very angry.... but always forgiving friend,

Tim

Google "Buzz" is looking for some social love!

This past Tuesday Google released a new product that represents their first foray into social media, namely, Google Buzz. Google Buzz allows you to share status updates, photos, and videos right from your gmail screen. Sound familiar? It should because at its root Google Buzz is essentially an amalgamation of Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. Should these companies be worried? That depends. What Google is aiming to do with this new offering is take the basic underpinnings of these more conventional social media platforms but make it more streamlined (ie. "Videos play within status messages and images pop open into a gallery for quick browsing").

Although it's debatable as to whether this new service is actually a more efficient social network, one thing is clear, Google is working on an important problem with this offering. While sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter have an army of users who all love to share content, filtering out the noise can be difficult. Google is hoping to use their core competency in search to help with this "filtering" process so you aren't bombarded with content that you don't really care about. There is also an argument to be made that your true social contacts are the ones you e-mail with the most so G-mail provides a natural platform which facilitates sharing with your closest friends. Only time will tell if a search company like Google can take away some of the social networking eyeballs from Facebook, but as a user of the G-mail and chat services, I wouldn't rule it out. And if you missed it, Facebook just finished a redesign of their e-mail interface in the hopes of winning more e-mail market share. This could get interesting.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/09/google-buzz-screenshots/

very long rant including commentary on mobile video content, the Google universe, and other stuff

I like to say that media is the love of my life. When I was a kid, I produced my own magazine, neurotically manipulating the capacity of my mom's Brother word processor to make my impact on the national trade of ideas, trends, and cool advertisements. It still remains easier for me to follow reading that is paired with images than the kind that stands alone, and the thing about the internet is that you can read next a movie or an animation or a 3D billboard.

When I came to New York to be in publishing, I really was trying to get a head-start on my now foggy ideal of men's handheld magazine. I wanted to do men's because the space gets better editors and no limits. It would have interactive cover shoots, top five convo starters for the most likely life scenario of the moment ("top five ways to make a lunch hour a happy half-day," "top five ways to make a dates out of one"), and improved news delivery. All on the cell phone. The problem was that only Asia and a bit of Europe was on the smart phone.

Now I've moved on to thinking about how to get 200 hours of video content on a thumb drive and convince people to pay 89.99 for it. I think its the best way to get more profits into independent productions and more love behind cult classic programming. It's exciting because while MTV has coined the term vee-jay, no one's really ran with it.

If you love deejays, which is to say, if you love music, you know that a good one will start you off where you want to be and take you were you never could have imagined finding love. For instance, I'm Beyonce lover.

As the deejay, you start me off with "Baby Boy," then you mix in some classic Biggie, an allusion to the label Bad Boy, with Junior Mafia's "Player's Anthem," (you know the iconic lead-in 'duh duh-duh-duh duh-duh-duh duh'), then more 90s hip-hop/R&B, to Prince's "Starfish & Coffee," which rolls into Mary J. Blige's "Real Love," and on the fade out do the big spook, Nine Inch Nail's "Closer." You have to throw your hands up because it was sick, and from there, the deejay's got you rocking out to Ray Charles, Hendrix, the Ronettes, John Mayer, Chubby Checker, Dolly Parton, Bo Diddley, and then dropping you back where thought you were going, Rihanna and Lady Gaga.

That's a good deejay. I paid $30 to go to Stevie Wonderful over the summer, because I've been meaning to for years, because the word is that the deejays are so nice...and I NEVER pay to dance. But I will if the programming is beyond what I can do with my own iTunes. It was unbelievable. It's so good that the man himself crashed two years ago because what they do to his music is for lovers only.

But to my point, imagine if someone could start you off with "Arrested Development," follow it up with some "Family Guy," put in some old "Chappelle Show" followed by "The Daily Show," then some "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," then an old school "MTV News Alert," then the classic film "Trading Places," followed by some "24," "Cities of the Underworld," "Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations," the classic Eddie Murphy in a tight red leather suit stand up, "Diddy's Making the Band 12," two hours of music videos while news and finance tickers ran atop the screen, "Wendy Williams Show," and a classic episode of "Fresh Prince" or a series of best of Sesame Street sing-a-longs, before the morning edition of "Anderson Cooper 360."

I want to bundle the most arousing video content experiences and sell them on key cards because while you can get on the internet at anytime, I don't think that people will want to need to be connected to the internet or reliant on the traffic.

Someone suggested to me that this is what the iPad can do, but I'm for no knew appliances. Maybe the key-card lets you sign in to the video content web, and you can be your own programmer. But I'd rather become the world's best veejay, broadening the audiences the exhibitors at Sundance and Tribeca and exploiting the profit capabilities of niche markets. (Note: while niche is a horrible idea for social networking, i.e. the non-difference between BlackPlanet and Facebook, I know it is a hit with television, i.e. "Arrested Development" should not have been canceled and could have been a hit if it we're expected to serve everyday and was expected to serve the optimal amount of people who be obsessed and pay to feed their fanaticism.

But I'll end my rant with this: I used to believe that my real friends are gchat, while my public is Facebook. I'm not sure how I feel about Google Buzz, or why I signed on to be taken there, but I expect that, paired with the Google label internet, I will be a citizen of the Googlobe and I will begin to participate in the annoyances of citizenship that I never expected. I will pay Google taxes and perform Google service. I will sell myself, or at least my name, for money. I will send my kids to college based on how many ads my private email sells. My husband with be insecure about the fact I refuse to comment on my relationship status before people I do not really know how I feel about knowing. I will live life like its an old school television program or "The Truman Show," holding up a bottle of Coke in the middle of my work day to profess via video chat that it is, in fact, always refreshing, always Coca-Cola. And the rainbow flag will no longer be synonymous with gay rights; it will be the right to Google.

Back in 1994 , I thought I'd be (@AIM) starfishur forever. I'm smarter now; I'll be IP address until my computer breaks, buying 8 inch laptops that I can pull out the attached 3D glasses to talk to my mom because I really want to relive the myriad of time spent not having my own life. That was sarcasm. That was to say, I kind of don't mind losing my privacy as long as my mom is the one watching me.