Hey there everybody, I hope you're all doing well.
I apologize in advance for the relatively short length of this post and, quite possibly, for the entire lack of direction for the post. I would go on to explain WHY I think that the post will be directionless, but I might as well just show you. So, let the party begin--
Many nerds all along the watch tower will have heard, by now, of the acquisition of Zappos (an online shoe and accessory store) by Amazon.com. The giant.
If you click on the title to this blog post it will take you to a letter written by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, to all of his employees to announce to them the sudden, and somewhat sneaky, sale of their wonderful company to the online giant known as Amazon.
The letter is actually fantastic. It's a true testament to Hsieh's character and heartfelt gratitude to his employees. It's the kind of letter that every employee deserves but only a lucky few ever get the opportunity to see. Really good stuff.
But it gets better!
Near the end of the letter, Tony goes into a Q&A session and, near the middle we see this question,
"Q: Can you tell me a bit more about Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO)? What is he like?"
to which he responds with a short answer, saying "We’d like to show an 8-minute video of Jeff Bezos that will give you some insight into his personality and way of thinking. He shares some of what he’s learned as an entrepreneur, as well as some of the mistakes he’s made."
And the video that follows is really what I wanted to talk about, today. Don't get me wrong--The letter is awesome and I'd love to sit around all day and praise it. But the video is fantastic. I recommend anyone who's interested should click on this blog post's title to go to the site and then watch the video (It's about half way down the page...you'll see it).
The video features Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com.
Now, I don't know about anyone else, but I've never been a huge fan of Amazon. I figured that it was the site where my mother goes to find books for book club and, as such, I have no place even looking at the site. But, literally, after watching an 8 minute video of the founder, my entire perception of the website and of Bezos, himself, is completely transformed.
In the video, Bezos comes across as fun, energetic, and down-to-earth. Not some krazy high-powered executive who sits at a huge high-back chair with a big furry cat and slowly mumbles to himself about how the next Oprah Book Club book is the "big cog" that will put his master plan into action and he'll finally rule the world of suburban-mom book clubs.
Not at all. Instead he gave 8 minutes of enjoyable one-way banter, using common language and basically shared the "things he knows" about business. It was his very clever way to spending 8 minutes sharing his business philosophy....I can't even imagine how inspiring it would've been to me, had I been an employee.
What's remarkable, though, is that it was still absurdly influential to me. I have an entirely new view of him, his company, and I feel like he let me in on the ACTUAL answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. (that was a semi-geeky reference for those of you who think I'm particularly strange for writing it in that way.)
So what was the purpose of him releasing this video? This 8 minute grail of genius?
Long story short? Brilliant marketing.
It was a brilliant opportunity for a super-successful CEO to poke his head out into the public and allow everyone to perceive him as some friendly, approachable, everyday joe. He's no longer a CEO of an evil corporation. He's a cool, business savvy, friend who gave everybody some advice the other day.
It was so influential that I immediately left the article to go onto Amazon.com and check if he'd released any books. I then took the time to find the phone number of the local public libraries and ask them to scour their catalogs to see if they were holding any of the books he'd written or books that were written about him.
Couldn't Tony Hsieh just answered "Well he's a really great dude. I really respect him. He's got business philosophy that matches my own. And we occasionally party hard together."
Gosh...see? I have no direction for this at all...I just wanted to share how absolutely brilliant that video is.
Builds brand loyalty. Hopefully stops millions of Zappos customers from hating Amazon. Keeps Zappos employees comfortable. And adds a very human face to an otherwise very corporate and intimidating company.
Really super stuff. I'm very impressed.
And now, as I sign off, I'll apologize one last time for spending 20 minutes of all of your lives on something that wasn't nearly as inspiring as that Jeff Bezos's video.
Hope everybody is doing well, out there! Take care, ya'll!!
(P.S. THIS would make a good collar-pickin' Christmas present. *wink wink*)
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Ziploc "D"evolve
Feel free to click on the title to this blogpost to catch a quick glimpse of the general theme I'm going to be following--
Go ahead...I'll wait....
Ok, so, you may notice that it has nothing to DO with the title "Ziploc 'D'evolve", and you may be wondering why that is. That answer, my faithful followers, is that Ziploc is being dumb and I feel the need to tell you all about it.
You see, yesterday, while I was receiving my daily regimen of Antiques Roadshow, Larry King Live, AC360....., up through NightLine, I saw a commercial repeating over and over and over again that I just couldn't shake. It was for the new Ziploc Evolve bags. And ultralight bag that still keeps things ultra fresh. But what makes the bag really special is that it uses 25% less plastic and was produced with wind energy. That's what the commercial is all about...The graphic design on the commercial is pretty cool, admittedly...But it's also somewhat cliche, by now. Anyways, what Ziploc is trying desperately to do is capture on the whole "Green" movement, but they are making the most rookie mistake that they could make--They're sucking.
Consumers want stuff. Lots of stuff. And we'll pay more for something if it has extra gizmos. It's fairly easy to convince a consumer that something is worth an extra dollar or so. So sure, Ziploc is counting on people wanting to save the environment (a futile cause when you're considering that they're purchasing double-ply sheets of premium never-degrade-polystyrene). But here is the problem--The bags are more expensive and they suck. Nobody wants to pay extra for a "light bag" that holds less stuff!
--It should be noted that there is also an asterisk next to the "wind energy" thing that tells us that it's made with a mixture of wind energy and traditional energy sources. First: duh. Second: get out of my face you useless marketing hag.--
Has it not been proven that going green doesn't have to be a sacrifice?! Has it not been proven that going green will go NOWHERE if it IS a sacrifice!?
One example might be the Green Roofs that people have taken to installing, worldwide. These green roofs (pictured here atop the Chicago city hall) are absurdly expensive. They put excessive strain on the building...Overall they are just crazy. BUT, when you look at these extra expenses, you begin to see that it is not a sacrifice at all. Green roofs can have lifespans of over 200% of normal roofs(that could be 50 years without intensive maintenance!). Green roofs have been known to save from 20-80% on heating and cooling bills because of their insulatory factor. Green roofs are obviously great for the environment (in so many ways that I wont bother to mention here). And there is literally almost no maintenance (watering and green-thumb-hubbub is all taken care of via rain and the water management systems in place!) And here's the best part: That extra couple thousand dollars that one spends on a green roof is recouped in the span of only a very few years. This is a perfect example of something that is an absurdly larger step towards helping the environment than buying Ultra-crap Ziploc bags. And while there is still an increased cost, the cost is for functionality and luxury, as opposed to a cost relegated to "well...it helps the environment..."
Now, I wont say that Ziploc is the first to make this mistake, obviously. In fact, if it were the first, I probably would be more forgiving or, more likely, wouldn't have noticed at all. But, really....who do they think they are?
I'm sure there are a million other examples of green products that are entirely worth the extra cost--Why not share them?
I have this big ol' comments section and nobody leaves me anything. I'm not sure if I'm just not interesting, or nobody is interested. Either way, maybe now I'll at least get a couple...who knows.
Alright, that's it for me, today. Have a good day, everybody!!!
Go ahead...I'll wait....
Ok, so, you may notice that it has nothing to DO with the title "Ziploc 'D'evolve", and you may be wondering why that is. That answer, my faithful followers, is that Ziploc is being dumb and I feel the need to tell you all about it.
You see, yesterday, while I was receiving my daily regimen of Antiques Roadshow, Larry King Live, AC360....., up through NightLine, I saw a commercial repeating over and over and over again that I just couldn't shake. It was for the new Ziploc Evolve bags. And ultralight bag that still keeps things ultra fresh. But what makes the bag really special is that it uses 25% less plastic and was produced with wind energy. That's what the commercial is all about...The graphic design on the commercial is pretty cool, admittedly...But it's also somewhat cliche, by now. Anyways, what Ziploc is trying desperately to do is capture on the whole "Green" movement, but they are making the most rookie mistake that they could make--They're sucking.
Consumers want stuff. Lots of stuff. And we'll pay more for something if it has extra gizmos. It's fairly easy to convince a consumer that something is worth an extra dollar or so. So sure, Ziploc is counting on people wanting to save the environment (a futile cause when you're considering that they're purchasing double-ply sheets of premium never-degrade-polystyrene). But here is the problem--The bags are more expensive and they suck. Nobody wants to pay extra for a "light bag" that holds less stuff!
--It should be noted that there is also an asterisk next to the "wind energy" thing that tells us that it's made with a mixture of wind energy and traditional energy sources. First: duh. Second: get out of my face you useless marketing hag.--
Has it not been proven that going green doesn't have to be a sacrifice?! Has it not been proven that going green will go NOWHERE if it IS a sacrifice!?
One example might be the Green Roofs that people have taken to installing, worldwide. These green roofs (pictured here atop the Chicago city hall) are absurdly expensive. They put excessive strain on the building...Overall they are just crazy. BUT, when you look at these extra expenses, you begin to see that it is not a sacrifice at all. Green roofs can have lifespans of over 200% of normal roofs(that could be 50 years without intensive maintenance!). Green roofs have been known to save from 20-80% on heating and cooling bills because of their insulatory factor. Green roofs are obviously great for the environment (in so many ways that I wont bother to mention here). And there is literally almost no maintenance (watering and green-thumb-hubbub is all taken care of via rain and the water management systems in place!) And here's the best part: That extra couple thousand dollars that one spends on a green roof is recouped in the span of only a very few years. This is a perfect example of something that is an absurdly larger step towards helping the environment than buying Ultra-crap Ziploc bags. And while there is still an increased cost, the cost is for functionality and luxury, as opposed to a cost relegated to "well...it helps the environment..."
Now, I wont say that Ziploc is the first to make this mistake, obviously. In fact, if it were the first, I probably would be more forgiving or, more likely, wouldn't have noticed at all. But, really....who do they think they are?
I'm sure there are a million other examples of green products that are entirely worth the extra cost--Why not share them?
I have this big ol' comments section and nobody leaves me anything. I'm not sure if I'm just not interesting, or nobody is interested. Either way, maybe now I'll at least get a couple...who knows.
Alright, that's it for me, today. Have a good day, everybody!!!
Monday, July 13, 2009
How I twitter
(This is not the post that I told everyone that I was going to be posting...that will be here shortly)
So, I recently read an article by Guy Kawasaki about how he uses twitter and the reasons for his actions (Read it Here!) It is pretty interesting.
Since then I've seen one or two similar posts by people doing the same Q&A type post about how they use twitter and I decided that I needed one, as well...Not quite as prestigious, though, because I dont have a multi-thousand, celebrity-type, following. Here goes!!
Q. You only follow 41 people? How unpopular are you??
A. Relatively unpopular. But that's not the reason that I only follow 41 people and only have 53 followers. You see, despite my being a student of social media and being a particularly tech-savvy dude, I simply dont know many people, personally, who use twitter. But that's not that important. I could, very easily, follow every twitterer I can get my hands on and hit the auto-follow button and, thereby, follow every bot and porn-spammer who decides to follow me. Instead I follow only certain friends and, primarily, the people who are virtual celebrities in the field that I find most interesting. Social media and entrepreneurship. By following only 41 people, I literally see every single post that comes by me. And I read every single article/blog post that people tweet. And, on a decent majority of them, I leave thoughtful responses and often retweet the posts that I feel are most relevant to the people who I know are following me. Let me say it one more time--I read every article that comes through my tweet stream. That means that, of this elite group of super-people in their respective fields, I read every single thing that they think is remotely important or interesting.
Q. Do you ever repeat tweets?
A. Occasionally. I try not to make a habit of it because, quite honestly, the people who are important might never see them, and the few people who follow me that AREN'T that important...well...They dont really need to see me post the same tweet over and over again. Generally, I'll only repeat tweets when they contain a link to an article that I posted a comment on or something. That's my way of saying, First: "hey look at this article" then Second: "Look at my post on this article! Timothy Ferriss responded to me!!"
Q. What twitter applications do you use?
A. Well, my needs are very simple. I use TweetDeck, primarily. I sync it between my office and my computer at home. My cell phone is relatively basic, so I occasionally tweet via SMS, but i dont receive updates from twitter on my phone. That would probably bug the hell out of me as well as run my bill up before I could even think of changing to an unlimited-SMS option.
Q. How long do you spend on Twitter each day?
A. I hate this question because, while I enjoy tweeting, I dont want people to think that I'm so hopelessly addicted to twitter that I cant step away...I spend 8 hours a day with the TweetDeck open on my computer at the office. I then go home and put up the tweetdeck, there. And I'm constantly monitoring that for the rest of the evening. Probably totaling around 15-16 hours per day.
Q. 16 hours a day on Twitter? Do you take breaks?
A. Well, I try to take weekends off, at least. It works out because I tend to be furthest from computers on weekends. But then, of course, I have an entire weekends worth of blogs and articles to read and comment on, Monday morning.
Q. How much self-promotion do you do?
A. None. This will probably be the first blog post that I'll ever have posted an external link to. Absurd, right? Truly, because I keep such a tight group of follow/ers , I dont consider the things I read of much importance. I spend most of my time retweeting the articles and posts of my celebrity-cast and then I post some general tweets to my small group of friends on twitter. I'm not clever enough to find my own sources to share with people. I wait for the pro's to do it.
Q. What about real self-promotion?
A. Yeah...I do that. I look at my twitter account as the best self-marketing tool that I have at my disposal. My twitter stream is populated by the small group of people who I truly feel are the most important and influential in my area of interest. And how do I connect to them? I read their blogs. I post on their blogs. I read the articles the post. I respond to them or retweet them. How would I have ever gotten to talk to Kevin Rose or Andy Beal if I hadn't found them on twitter? (Kevin Rose might've been the first person I ever followed on twitter!) So I hope that, someday, when I'm a world-shaking business-world-titan, I can call on these people and they'll lend me a hand as though I were an "old friend" or something. Eh, here's hoping, right?
Q. So Twitter isn't as lame as people were thinking it might be?
A. Absolutely not. To me, twitter is one of the most influential and powerful tools that I've ever had at my disposal.
Q. Not so fast--We read your blog post where you blasted Twitter for 10 pages!
A. Now now, dont be silly. I said that it wasn't the greatest step in social technology that the world has ever seen. I stand by everything I said in that post. Twitter is important to me for different reasons than were cited in that absurd article that I was ragging on. Besides...It was a TIME magazine article! How could I NOT tear apart it's terrible inadequacies while I had the chance?!
That's it for me. Hope everyone is doing well!
(keep an eye out for that post that I keep meaning to write!
Hint: The working title is "Generation: Y bother? Democrazy and Apathy")
So, I recently read an article by Guy Kawasaki about how he uses twitter and the reasons for his actions (Read it Here!) It is pretty interesting.
Since then I've seen one or two similar posts by people doing the same Q&A type post about how they use twitter and I decided that I needed one, as well...Not quite as prestigious, though, because I dont have a multi-thousand, celebrity-type, following. Here goes!!
Q. You only follow 41 people? How unpopular are you??
A. Relatively unpopular. But that's not the reason that I only follow 41 people and only have 53 followers. You see, despite my being a student of social media and being a particularly tech-savvy dude, I simply dont know many people, personally, who use twitter. But that's not that important. I could, very easily, follow every twitterer I can get my hands on and hit the auto-follow button and, thereby, follow every bot and porn-spammer who decides to follow me. Instead I follow only certain friends and, primarily, the people who are virtual celebrities in the field that I find most interesting. Social media and entrepreneurship. By following only 41 people, I literally see every single post that comes by me. And I read every single article/blog post that people tweet. And, on a decent majority of them, I leave thoughtful responses and often retweet the posts that I feel are most relevant to the people who I know are following me. Let me say it one more time--I read every article that comes through my tweet stream. That means that, of this elite group of super-people in their respective fields, I read every single thing that they think is remotely important or interesting.
Q. Do you ever repeat tweets?
A. Occasionally. I try not to make a habit of it because, quite honestly, the people who are important might never see them, and the few people who follow me that AREN'T that important...well...They dont really need to see me post the same tweet over and over again. Generally, I'll only repeat tweets when they contain a link to an article that I posted a comment on or something. That's my way of saying, First: "hey look at this article" then Second: "Look at my post on this article! Timothy Ferriss responded to me!!"
Q. What twitter applications do you use?
A. Well, my needs are very simple. I use TweetDeck, primarily. I sync it between my office and my computer at home. My cell phone is relatively basic, so I occasionally tweet via SMS, but i dont receive updates from twitter on my phone. That would probably bug the hell out of me as well as run my bill up before I could even think of changing to an unlimited-SMS option.
Q. How long do you spend on Twitter each day?
A. I hate this question because, while I enjoy tweeting, I dont want people to think that I'm so hopelessly addicted to twitter that I cant step away...I spend 8 hours a day with the TweetDeck open on my computer at the office. I then go home and put up the tweetdeck, there. And I'm constantly monitoring that for the rest of the evening. Probably totaling around 15-16 hours per day.
Q. 16 hours a day on Twitter? Do you take breaks?
A. Well, I try to take weekends off, at least. It works out because I tend to be furthest from computers on weekends. But then, of course, I have an entire weekends worth of blogs and articles to read and comment on, Monday morning.
Q. How much self-promotion do you do?
A. None. This will probably be the first blog post that I'll ever have posted an external link to. Absurd, right? Truly, because I keep such a tight group of follow/ers , I dont consider the things I read of much importance. I spend most of my time retweeting the articles and posts of my celebrity-cast and then I post some general tweets to my small group of friends on twitter. I'm not clever enough to find my own sources to share with people. I wait for the pro's to do it.
Q. What about real self-promotion?
A. Yeah...I do that. I look at my twitter account as the best self-marketing tool that I have at my disposal. My twitter stream is populated by the small group of people who I truly feel are the most important and influential in my area of interest. And how do I connect to them? I read their blogs. I post on their blogs. I read the articles the post. I respond to them or retweet them. How would I have ever gotten to talk to Kevin Rose or Andy Beal if I hadn't found them on twitter? (Kevin Rose might've been the first person I ever followed on twitter!) So I hope that, someday, when I'm a world-shaking business-world-titan, I can call on these people and they'll lend me a hand as though I were an "old friend" or something. Eh, here's hoping, right?
Q. So Twitter isn't as lame as people were thinking it might be?
A. Absolutely not. To me, twitter is one of the most influential and powerful tools that I've ever had at my disposal.
Q. Not so fast--We read your blog post where you blasted Twitter for 10 pages!
A. Now now, dont be silly. I said that it wasn't the greatest step in social technology that the world has ever seen. I stand by everything I said in that post. Twitter is important to me for different reasons than were cited in that absurd article that I was ragging on. Besides...It was a TIME magazine article! How could I NOT tear apart it's terrible inadequacies while I had the chance?!
That's it for me. Hope everyone is doing well!
(keep an eye out for that post that I keep meaning to write!
Hint: The working title is "Generation: Y bother? Democrazy and Apathy")
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Self Regulation=No Socialism=Hurray!
Hello everybody!
I know I've been absent for about a week. Suffice to say--things were a tad busy.
Sorry.
But now I would like to bore you all, again, with more industry jargon!
So, if you click the title to this post, it will direct you to an article about how the advertising industry is talking about self-regulating itself so that the government stops looking at it with one of those looks on it's face which basically means "...Do you really want a spanking? You're gonna make me hit you? Seriously?"
So the article is pretty short and fairly interesting and at the end of the article the Author, Frank Reed, asks readers to comment about basically what they think about self-regulation. What policies they think might/should be implemented. Things of that nature. I wrote a lengthy response which is viewable at the bottom of the page, but I'm going to try to re-write it a little cleaner here. It will probably bore everyone...And I'm going to love it!
"The self-regulation of industry has proven to not only be extremely effective but also to act, in many ways, in the better interest of affected parties.
If the advertising industry is trying to resist government intervention, then perhaps they will create their own innovative solutions to problems rather than having a government organization create a ruling which could potentially damage the industry. This method allows advertisers the ability to create regulations and policies that are both effective and, possibly, healthier for business.
Also, from the standpoint of the industry, this action of self-regulation gives them far greater power in the making of the regulations–They will have the greatest amount of say in the creation of the actual policies. Not to mention that, had they been regulated by the government, the policy would seem like something of a reprimand. But if they make they’re own policies, then it’s more like they’re making concessions out of the “goodness of their hearts” and, in truth, are likely to be able to get away with dealing with some issues less harshly than they would be, had the policy been created by a government agency.
Another important point in the argument for self-regulation is that, so far as anyone cares, self-regulated laws are, by and large, followed with far greater discipline. If the government makes a bunch of policies that act as a detriment to the industry, then everyone is going to wheedle their way around them and find sneaky ways to circumvent them. But, as is fairly common knowledge, if they make the rules, they are far more likely to follow them. Especially if their more likely to be judged by “brothers” in the industry, if they act too maliciously against the policies.
[A point that I had been trying to make clear here is that people wont circumvent their own regulations. It's just silly. But if the government makes the regulations into actual 'laws', then they will be non-self imposed and people are going to be more willing to avoid them. For example, I have no problem J-walking. I would have no problem if my kids learn to J-walk. No problem. But if I'm trying to teach my kids to be safer and instill a precedent in them that will keep them safe for the rest of their lives? Then I will never J-walk again! Because it's ME who's making a regulation. Not some omnipotent big brother with a strange proclivity for orderly pedestrian traffic across public roads. Get it?]
The final point is this–Who cares if they self regulate? Especially in this example! If they fail to regulate appropriately, then the government WILL step in and the industry will get a swift kick to the hind-quarters. So why not save the time, money, and frustration and just let them do it themselves. If they fail to dissuade the government’s watchful eye, then they’ll get what’s coming anyways.
For the above reasons, though, no one in the industry should want governmental interference and, therefore, we should expect the policies that they create to be strong, good for business, good for the consumer, and, most importantly, strictly self-enforced.
It’s worked in other media industries.[Like the enforcement of non-obscene and graphic material in certain modes of media.] Why not this one?"
See now? That wasn't too bad at all, eh?
I just have to hope it makes sense.
I think I'm going to pack this one up early. I'll be posting sometime tomorrow with a more mundane look at my life over the past week or so.
Have a good day everybody!
I know I've been absent for about a week. Suffice to say--things were a tad busy.
Sorry.
But now I would like to bore you all, again, with more industry jargon!
So, if you click the title to this post, it will direct you to an article about how the advertising industry is talking about self-regulating itself so that the government stops looking at it with one of those looks on it's face which basically means "...Do you really want a spanking? You're gonna make me hit you? Seriously?"
So the article is pretty short and fairly interesting and at the end of the article the Author, Frank Reed, asks readers to comment about basically what they think about self-regulation. What policies they think might/should be implemented. Things of that nature. I wrote a lengthy response which is viewable at the bottom of the page, but I'm going to try to re-write it a little cleaner here. It will probably bore everyone...And I'm going to love it!
"The self-regulation of industry has proven to not only be extremely effective but also to act, in many ways, in the better interest of affected parties.
If the advertising industry is trying to resist government intervention, then perhaps they will create their own innovative solutions to problems rather than having a government organization create a ruling which could potentially damage the industry. This method allows advertisers the ability to create regulations and policies that are both effective and, possibly, healthier for business.
Also, from the standpoint of the industry, this action of self-regulation gives them far greater power in the making of the regulations–They will have the greatest amount of say in the creation of the actual policies. Not to mention that, had they been regulated by the government, the policy would seem like something of a reprimand. But if they make they’re own policies, then it’s more like they’re making concessions out of the “goodness of their hearts” and, in truth, are likely to be able to get away with dealing with some issues less harshly than they would be, had the policy been created by a government agency.
Another important point in the argument for self-regulation is that, so far as anyone cares, self-regulated laws are, by and large, followed with far greater discipline. If the government makes a bunch of policies that act as a detriment to the industry, then everyone is going to wheedle their way around them and find sneaky ways to circumvent them. But, as is fairly common knowledge, if they make the rules, they are far more likely to follow them. Especially if their more likely to be judged by “brothers” in the industry, if they act too maliciously against the policies.
[A point that I had been trying to make clear here is that people wont circumvent their own regulations. It's just silly. But if the government makes the regulations into actual 'laws', then they will be non-self imposed and people are going to be more willing to avoid them. For example, I have no problem J-walking. I would have no problem if my kids learn to J-walk. No problem. But if I'm trying to teach my kids to be safer and instill a precedent in them that will keep them safe for the rest of their lives? Then I will never J-walk again! Because it's ME who's making a regulation. Not some omnipotent big brother with a strange proclivity for orderly pedestrian traffic across public roads. Get it?]
The final point is this–Who cares if they self regulate? Especially in this example! If they fail to regulate appropriately, then the government WILL step in and the industry will get a swift kick to the hind-quarters. So why not save the time, money, and frustration and just let them do it themselves. If they fail to dissuade the government’s watchful eye, then they’ll get what’s coming anyways.
For the above reasons, though, no one in the industry should want governmental interference and, therefore, we should expect the policies that they create to be strong, good for business, good for the consumer, and, most importantly, strictly self-enforced.
It’s worked in other media industries.[Like the enforcement of non-obscene and graphic material in certain modes of media.] Why not this one?"
See now? That wasn't too bad at all, eh?
I just have to hope it makes sense.
I think I'm going to pack this one up early. I'll be posting sometime tomorrow with a more mundane look at my life over the past week or so.
Have a good day everybody!
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Clarity and Clarification
So...No title on this post, yet.
Maybe there will be one by the time I finish.
The problem that I'm having is that I'm not quite sure what to write about today...weird...I don't have a thousand opinions to yell at the top of my lungs...
Well, I do have those opinions--I just can't think of them right now.
It should be noted that, while I write this, the song "I've got too much time on my hands" by Styx is playing.
How appropriate.
Anyways, I think that I will start my little ramble by clearing something up about my last blog post--the one where I offended everyone in the world by calling them "old".
Well, here is my clarification:
The general theme of the post was my ranting about a guy who thinks that this new communication-technology and how he's totally wrong. Mostly because he's too "old".
I even go on to clarify that old people can be as young as 25 years old or maybe even younger!
So how can I say that such young people are too old and that they need to stop talking about technologies?
With age, sadly, comes responsibility. The more responsibility that one has--the less time one has to be free-spirited.
SO! What does this mean?
It means that old people are people who have responsibilities. So many, in fact, that they can't waste all of their time playing with new toys and tech-junk. It all comes down to time and energy. If someone is working 50 hours/week and raising three kids as a single parent, they probably wont have the TIME, nor the ENERGY, to fiddle around online and play with, read about, and fiddle around on every new Internet trend that shows up online.
They aren't able to be on that early-adopter's curve.
And there lays the distinction I make between "old" and "savvy" in the tech world.
Whether or not a user has the resources to be able to stay on the early adopter's curve.
There are generally three levels of adoption--
1) The early adopters-
--In this case, they are generally younger people. Tech students. Blog readers. The epitome of young and tech savvy. The Trend Setters, if you will.
2) The Majority-
--This group is occasionally broken down into what's called a "Early Majority" and a "Late Majority". This is where the people who are picking up twitter, today, are. In fact, I would say that, perhaps before this whole Iranian snafu, were the Early Majority adopters. And, since it's gotten so absurdly famous, worldwide, due to it's ability to share news, the people who are seeing it on the news and saying "Hey sonny, show me how to get myself one of them twitterer machining things!" are Late Majority adopters. They're still on the ball, they just don't get to tell all their friends about how savvy and hip they are.
3) The Laggards-
-- This group is, classically, that old guy who refuses to buy a color tv in 1999 because "after that damned Y2k crash the government is going to release some fancy new thing and you'll just start bugging me to buy that!" (this is a warning...If you think twitter is going to stick around...read my last post again...then get a twitter account so that you're not a laggard!!).
So yeah..."old' people are people who can't stay on that early adopter's curve. Basically-- People with real jobs.
Now, being "old" in this case doesn't necessarily imply anything bad. There are downsides to being on any part of the curve. It's up to users to decide which downsides they'd like most to deal with.
For early adopters? The downside is that, as a generality, there is a lot of wasted time, energy, and, most notably, money. People who accept new products before they're proven have to face the fact that many of the new products will fail. Of course, these early adopters can take some pride in knowing that they are essentially the prototypers of an entire population and that, if they pick up the right product, they could be seen as early adopters or, even more exciting, "innovators" (the super-bleeding-edge early adopters. In the technology sector, for example, innovators are generally college students who focus on or center their lives around technology...People like me). Betamax and 8track. Both failed at the early adopter level. And all of those early adopters who had gone out to purchase them? Well, they felt the cold sting of being an early adopter.
Another more recent, and much more expensive, failure is the HDdvd. Microsoft thought that they would be SOOO cool and offer this really expensive and fancy drive to couple with the Xbox360. They wanted to be the early adopter of this technology. Needless to say--Blueray won the race and Microsoft was left kicking themselves in the butt. I'm sure someone really important probably lost their job for that hiccup.
The pitfalls of being the Majority of adopters are really quite slim. The only thing that a majority adopter has to deal with is the shame they feel when the meet an early adopter and have to say "ohhh you've had it for years? Oh cool...I just signed up for it last week....cool....".
And of course, the Laggards have their own set of pitfalls which should be pretty clear.
They don't get the benefits of an extremely popular success and they have to deal with intense public ridicule until they rectify the situation...And then for many years on.
Where do I sit on all of this?
I'm a perfect early adopter. In fact, I sit right and tight on that little indefinable line between being an early adopter and an innovator. I started my first twitter account in late 2006, shortly after it's debut. The same goes with facebook. It's safe to assume that I was in the first 500,000(possibly as early as 100,000) users on each of these networks. Facebook now sports over 200 million users. So I think it's safe to say I was pretty early in that adoption curve. Unfortunately I deleted my original twitter account and, as such, can not verify exactly when I first sent my first tweet. Rest assured, though, that even though I restarted a NEW account, years later, I'll still probably be in the first 2-5% of users on twitter. Absurd, isn't it?
In truth, that last paragraph was to basically justify myself as an adequate judge of "age" or the extent to which someone is "old" in the technological realm.
Hopefully all of this was ALMOST interesting (or at least barely standable) and, moreover, hopefully it cleared up what I meant, so recently, when I declared that people of relatively young ages can still be "old" and basically offended my entire readerbase.
I hope everybody is doing well today! I'll be living alone for the next week so I'm sure to be awfully lonely! If anybody feels like calling or posting a comment or something to argue with me, by all means go for it! Regardless of the strength of my arguments, no one ever agrees with me because I'm just no good at winning over a crowd. Something about being too condescending or something. Anyways, I'll talk to ya'll soon!
Maybe there will be one by the time I finish.
The problem that I'm having is that I'm not quite sure what to write about today...weird...I don't have a thousand opinions to yell at the top of my lungs...
Well, I do have those opinions--I just can't think of them right now.
It should be noted that, while I write this, the song "I've got too much time on my hands" by Styx is playing.
How appropriate.
Anyways, I think that I will start my little ramble by clearing something up about my last blog post--the one where I offended everyone in the world by calling them "old".
Well, here is my clarification:
The general theme of the post was my ranting about a guy who thinks that this new communication-technology and how he's totally wrong. Mostly because he's too "old".
I even go on to clarify that old people can be as young as 25 years old or maybe even younger!
So how can I say that such young people are too old and that they need to stop talking about technologies?
With age, sadly, comes responsibility. The more responsibility that one has--the less time one has to be free-spirited.
SO! What does this mean?
It means that old people are people who have responsibilities. So many, in fact, that they can't waste all of their time playing with new toys and tech-junk. It all comes down to time and energy. If someone is working 50 hours/week and raising three kids as a single parent, they probably wont have the TIME, nor the ENERGY, to fiddle around online and play with, read about, and fiddle around on every new Internet trend that shows up online.
They aren't able to be on that early-adopter's curve.
And there lays the distinction I make between "old" and "savvy" in the tech world.
Whether or not a user has the resources to be able to stay on the early adopter's curve.
There are generally three levels of adoption--
1) The early adopters-
--In this case, they are generally younger people. Tech students. Blog readers. The epitome of young and tech savvy. The Trend Setters, if you will.
2) The Majority-
--This group is occasionally broken down into what's called a "Early Majority" and a "Late Majority". This is where the people who are picking up twitter, today, are. In fact, I would say that, perhaps before this whole Iranian snafu, were the Early Majority adopters. And, since it's gotten so absurdly famous, worldwide, due to it's ability to share news, the people who are seeing it on the news and saying "Hey sonny, show me how to get myself one of them twitterer machining things!" are Late Majority adopters. They're still on the ball, they just don't get to tell all their friends about how savvy and hip they are.
3) The Laggards-
-- This group is, classically, that old guy who refuses to buy a color tv in 1999 because "after that damned Y2k crash the government is going to release some fancy new thing and you'll just start bugging me to buy that!" (this is a warning...If you think twitter is going to stick around...read my last post again...then get a twitter account so that you're not a laggard!!).
So yeah..."old' people are people who can't stay on that early adopter's curve. Basically-- People with real jobs.
Now, being "old" in this case doesn't necessarily imply anything bad. There are downsides to being on any part of the curve. It's up to users to decide which downsides they'd like most to deal with.
For early adopters? The downside is that, as a generality, there is a lot of wasted time, energy, and, most notably, money. People who accept new products before they're proven have to face the fact that many of the new products will fail. Of course, these early adopters can take some pride in knowing that they are essentially the prototypers of an entire population and that, if they pick up the right product, they could be seen as early adopters or, even more exciting, "innovators" (the super-bleeding-edge early adopters. In the technology sector, for example, innovators are generally college students who focus on or center their lives around technology...People like me). Betamax and 8track. Both failed at the early adopter level. And all of those early adopters who had gone out to purchase them? Well, they felt the cold sting of being an early adopter.
Another more recent, and much more expensive, failure is the HDdvd. Microsoft thought that they would be SOOO cool and offer this really expensive and fancy drive to couple with the Xbox360. They wanted to be the early adopter of this technology. Needless to say--Blueray won the race and Microsoft was left kicking themselves in the butt. I'm sure someone really important probably lost their job for that hiccup.
The pitfalls of being the Majority of adopters are really quite slim. The only thing that a majority adopter has to deal with is the shame they feel when the meet an early adopter and have to say "ohhh you've had it for years? Oh cool...I just signed up for it last week....cool....".
And of course, the Laggards have their own set of pitfalls which should be pretty clear.
They don't get the benefits of an extremely popular success and they have to deal with intense public ridicule until they rectify the situation...And then for many years on.
Where do I sit on all of this?
I'm a perfect early adopter. In fact, I sit right and tight on that little indefinable line between being an early adopter and an innovator. I started my first twitter account in late 2006, shortly after it's debut. The same goes with facebook. It's safe to assume that I was in the first 500,000(possibly as early as 100,000) users on each of these networks. Facebook now sports over 200 million users. So I think it's safe to say I was pretty early in that adoption curve. Unfortunately I deleted my original twitter account and, as such, can not verify exactly when I first sent my first tweet. Rest assured, though, that even though I restarted a NEW account, years later, I'll still probably be in the first 2-5% of users on twitter. Absurd, isn't it?
In truth, that last paragraph was to basically justify myself as an adequate judge of "age" or the extent to which someone is "old" in the technological realm.
Hopefully all of this was ALMOST interesting (or at least barely standable) and, moreover, hopefully it cleared up what I meant, so recently, when I declared that people of relatively young ages can still be "old" and basically offended my entire readerbase.
I hope everybody is doing well today! I'll be living alone for the next week so I'm sure to be awfully lonely! If anybody feels like calling or posting a comment or something to argue with me, by all means go for it! Regardless of the strength of my arguments, no one ever agrees with me because I'm just no good at winning over a crowd. Something about being too condescending or something. Anyways, I'll talk to ya'll soon!
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Egg vs. Chicken
So, a little house keeping...Actually, skip the house keeping that I should be doing. I know that this has been a little dry for a week or so. Sorry.
So today I'm going to do a little more intense house keeping. I'm going to clear up a question that people have thought was SOO clever forever. And it's not. Not even a little bit clever.
"What came first, the chicken or the egg?"
This question has become the namesake for indistinguishable timelines and seems to be roughly as famous as things like the "prisoners dilemma" or, more likely, the "tree falls in a forest" issue. All of the above claim to be philosophical and, in some way, psychological.
I'd like to make the point, though, that the question of "chick vs. egg" is, so far as I'm concerned, a dumb one.
It should be noted, here at the beginning, that I'm something of a man-0f-science and, therefore, will be discounting any ideas of "tree in the forest" (Descartes's uncertainty) and any conservative spiritual views of intelligent design, great wind, any of that weird Greek stuff...
So, this should be fairly simple.
As far as we can estimate, evolution works in the following way--
Specimen A from Species 1 finds Specimen B from Species 1. They get it on like JFK in the oval office.
Some time later, Specimen A gives birth to Specimen C. But Specimen C has suffered a freak mutation and, while not being a discernible difference, could be viewed as a member of Species 1.0000000......000001. Feel me? Minute change? Eventually, Specimen C meets another Specimen from Species 1.x and they get their Paris Hilton on. Extrapolate this forever and ever down the line and eventually you'll see a bunch of compounding mutations that start to make up tangible differences in Specimens of Species 1.x. Until eventually, one day baby is born to two specimens and that baby appears to be such a compound of minute changes that is needs to be viewed as Species 1.0 V2 or, simply, as species 2.0. How exciting! A new species!
NOW, what does this mean to the chicken and the egg? Anything?
Of course, people say "Well, how could a chicken egg be laid if there wasn't a chicken present to lay it?" But separately, "How could a chicken lay a chicken egg if that chicken, itself, was never in an egg to be born??"
Quite simply, I maintain that there was NO chicken to lay the first chicken egg. There was some pre-chicken(1.00000.....000001). That pre-chicken then got with another pre-chicken and then they birthed a freak. The first chicken. And how was it born?
Anyone? ideas?
Well, I'd say it was born via egg (as is a specific detail inherent in the genome of the species of chickens). That being the case; should it not be assumed that, sweeping away all Descartes anomalies and crazy spiritual science, the egg preceded the chicken?
Let me know if something about that isn't clear...And please, please please please, make fun of anyone who thinks that the chicken came first. Because that would just be silly.
I'd also like to note, for those people who are being particularly skeptical of my writings, that my "scientific" explanation found above was absurdly simple and I was merely cutting the corners that I felt could be cut to make the point with obfuscating the end result. Deal?
Great.
So-- "The egg preceded the chicken." That's my official public statement. Enjoy.
In light of this discovery,which i distinctly recall realizing to myself while standing near the kitchen table at Grandma Syd'z house (It should be noted that the implication, here, is that I made this discovery probably greater than a decade ago), I would like to criticize an article that I found in the Time Magazine that appeared at my place of residence, yesterday.
(you can find the article by clicking the title of this blog post!)
There was an article, "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live" by Steven Johnson, about how magical Twitter is.
Now, while I understand that Steven Johnson is only 41 years old, I still maintain that this is a perfect example of why old people should not be allowed to write articles like this.
I'm sure he did a great job trying to make some sense of the situation to some of the older, less tech savvy, readers of Time and he should be proud of that. But, as a writer, he should be completely embarrassed for writing an article that was, above all else, completely....Naïve, I guess is a good word for it.
He's a dude who's talking about a social media that, while popular, has not risen to prominence. Nor has it managed to make a truly marked impact on the technology world the way things like tabbed browsing, email, or, the best example, instant messaging.
Instant messaging has been a corner stone of technology-enhanced communication since its inception in the 90s.
And, while AIM may have dropped in popularity, instant messaging (truly brought to the social forefront by AIM) has forever changed communications.
I'll skip the common and current uses and just try to make a few conjectures about it's lasting impact-- What did instant messaging lead to?
-Cell phone texting (and blackberry messages...for you pretentious elitists)
-Microblogging....like twitter
-Search consolidators (basically turning a thousand articles into a blog that people read snippets off. It's pushing the envelope of "skimming" to the bleeding edge)
-And, a built-in messaging integration in almost every network user's enter, now. (Gmail, the Google Wave, facebook, twitter feeds, ustream, pandora...it doesn't stop there.)
Suffice to say, instant messaging set its phaser to stun and changed communication forever.
Has twitter done that?
Maybe.
Who knows. It's too new. There is no way to tell.
That being the case, though, is it really fair to write articles (from an old guy perspective) about how twitter is changing the face of communication. Steven Johnson was out of college BEFORE instant messaging even had a chance to infest all of our computers with absurd popups from the weirdest chatrooms ever conceived(species 4.0000000.....0001, maybe?).
Steven Johnson goes on to say, quite powerfully, that "In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it."
What a load of Time Magazine+Oldguy=crap tech bologna!
This is what got me thinking about the chicken and the egg, to begin with.
Did they make twitter, as it's used, and we use it. Or did they make twitter, a platform, and we adopted it to our human purpose.
In my opinion, he makes the right assumption, here. He says that Twitter was invented. And then we took the platform and did what we wanted with it. Twitter was the egg, and our communications are the chicken. Steven Johnson is absolutely right, in the matter.
Where he's wrong is claiming that it's...unique. Or even interesting!
That's why I made that point about the chicken and the egg, at the beginning.
The egg always comes first!!
Of course we've adapted it and found uses for it that 2 guys (really cool guys...One of whom actually started Blogger, the site this is posted on...), the founders, would ever think it might be used for. We are using the basic methods they provided, but we've augmented and adapted. Basically, we've done the human thing.
If I had to make a bold statement, I would say that Species 1.000000002 was basic email communication. Species 2.000000006 was instant messaging. And they met up, got freakier than the idea of running into your grandparents buying lingerie at the mall, and had a little Internet baby. Is it Species 3.0, though? That remains to be seen. I'd guess that it's something along the lines of Species 2.000000012, something like that. You know...Something advanced, but not altogether a new wave, yet.
A perfect example of this, and Steven Johnson's misinterpretations, lay in one of his examples. He talks about a conference in New York that focused on education reform. There were 40 odd educators in a room and they held a conference. But on a large screen, there was a projection of everything that each one of them posted about the conference. Side conversations, jokes, heated remarks. Anything. Eventually the public even noticed it happening and started to have their posts heard on that wall. He says that that public-esque forum truly changed everything and that conferences will never be the same.
I'm sorry Steven Johnson, but you're a late adopter and I'd appreciate it if you tried to reel your articles in closer to the nursing home that you're writing them from.
To begin with--What in the world could possibly have ever hosted a "real-time" (that was a big point of his...he loves the real-time updating of twitter) forum where people could post and be seen by all(or privately) and the public could have found their way in and posted their own opinions? Hmmm...I mentioned them earlier. Anybody have a guess??
Chatrooms? These super-olde-skool communication devices that would allow anyone to join in and say whatever they have to say about a subject in real time.
Not only has that been an available option for all this time, but it's been happening for years. Gamers have been IRCing, while playing their favorite game, for years. Fore thinking professors have been posting similar IRCs or chats in their classrooms.
To bring the idea home--Even I have had a class with an IRC set up so that we could all chat on the screen behind the professor.
Not that crazy.
So what are Steven Johnson's panties doing all in a bunch like that?
My guess is that he's just too impressed with old people finally managing to wheedle their way into a form of communication that they can understand. And that communication has been opening a whole wave of technologies that they are being introduced to. He talks, with such pomp, about the huge wave of 3rd party developers and open-source works that are shaping twitter and, therefore, the new communication toy of the elderly. But the open-source movement and 3rd party developing has been going strong for quite a while. It's shaped essentially all of technology. All of it. forever. Grass roots innovation, man. Rock on.
What's nice about this little techie wave is that, because so many youngin's are getting into tech-magic and people can become tech geniuses with greater and greater ease, there has been a huge explosion of young, innovative, and basically free application development. Fancy, eh?
What's best about this is that it causes an enormous democracy. or should i say Democrazy. The applications that people like are kept alive. The ones that aren't adopted fail.
And Steven Johnson thinks that's awesome. It is awesome.
But why talk about Twitter?
Twitter is fun, no doubt. But why is he wasting time talking about it like it's the crowing glory of new technology?
Probably because he doesn't know any better...
I think that's the end of my rant. I don't want anyone reading this to think that I'm actually so absurdly disrespectful to old people and the way the adopt technology. I just don't think that it's fair for him to be wasting 4 pages in TIME magazine, the most read magazine in America (i think) to celebrate something he doesn't understand.
So please old people, young and old (Old people can be between ages 25-126), enjoy the new technologies. Try them. I have no doubt that these demographics have shaped these technologies in some way...Maybe they can have a bigger impact. So please, old people, try it. Go to twitter.com and sign up. All it takes is an email address. They'll never email you junk mail. It's totally secure. If you're really a savvy old person, you can post all your tweets from your cell phone. That will be sure to impress all of your friends. And just try it. Try watching your favorite shows on youtube or hulu. Check out LinkedIn.com. It's a site like facebook but for a more professional grade. But sure, check out facebook, too. Worry less about not getting "caught up in the system". It's not dangerous. Just check it out. Give Steven Johnson something real to talk about.
OK, that being said (and ended somewhat abruptly) I'd like to say one last thing about twitter while I'm here--
No one that I know who would be reading this is going to have heard of the thing I'm talking about, but that will make it all the more funny to them.
Twitpocalypse.
The Twitpocalypse (CLICK HERE for the website that coined the term) is similar in kin to the Y2k disaster. Basically, they were worried that when the twitter database reached a certain total number of tweets, all of the applications for twitter would fail. Twitter was expected to survive. But many applications were supposed to die. And on June 12th, at 11:52pm, they did. Someone sent this tweet "The Tweets must flow. http://bit.ly/Khk7s" and the Twitpocalypse occurred. Tons of applications went down. Grass roots developers screamed and cried. It was absolute melee for about 10 minutes. By the next morning, though, like a phoenix from the ashes, all of the major applications were releasing easily downloadable patches which righted the problem and left users with nothing to worry about.
Isn't it funny how such silly things can still happen in this day of advancement and technology?
How do we let these things happen? Well, for one thing, some of us are just too young to know better. For example, there are kids who have developed iPhone applications and made millions of dollars. Those kids are so young that they weren't even ALIVE for the Y2k scare. Seriously. So, hey, maybe old people know a thing or two. I guess we'll never know until we can unite in our ever changing communication ideology and grassroots support.
I guess we'll see.
Sorry I'm so long winded and horribly presumptuous! I hope everything is going well for everybody out there. Take care everyone!
So today I'm going to do a little more intense house keeping. I'm going to clear up a question that people have thought was SOO clever forever. And it's not. Not even a little bit clever.
"What came first, the chicken or the egg?"
This question has become the namesake for indistinguishable timelines and seems to be roughly as famous as things like the "prisoners dilemma" or, more likely, the "tree falls in a forest" issue. All of the above claim to be philosophical and, in some way, psychological.
I'd like to make the point, though, that the question of "chick vs. egg" is, so far as I'm concerned, a dumb one.
It should be noted, here at the beginning, that I'm something of a man-0f-science and, therefore, will be discounting any ideas of "tree in the forest" (Descartes's uncertainty) and any conservative spiritual views of intelligent design, great wind, any of that weird Greek stuff...
So, this should be fairly simple.
As far as we can estimate, evolution works in the following way--
Specimen A from Species 1 finds Specimen B from Species 1. They get it on like JFK in the oval office.
Some time later, Specimen A gives birth to Specimen C. But Specimen C has suffered a freak mutation and, while not being a discernible difference, could be viewed as a member of Species 1.0000000......000001. Feel me? Minute change? Eventually, Specimen C meets another Specimen from Species 1.x and they get their Paris Hilton on. Extrapolate this forever and ever down the line and eventually you'll see a bunch of compounding mutations that start to make up tangible differences in Specimens of Species 1.x. Until eventually, one day baby is born to two specimens and that baby appears to be such a compound of minute changes that is needs to be viewed as Species 1.0 V2 or, simply, as species 2.0. How exciting! A new species!
NOW, what does this mean to the chicken and the egg? Anything?
Of course, people say "Well, how could a chicken egg be laid if there wasn't a chicken present to lay it?" But separately, "How could a chicken lay a chicken egg if that chicken, itself, was never in an egg to be born??"
Quite simply, I maintain that there was NO chicken to lay the first chicken egg. There was some pre-chicken(1.00000.....000001). That pre-chicken then got with another pre-chicken and then they birthed a freak. The first chicken. And how was it born?
Anyone? ideas?
Well, I'd say it was born via egg (as is a specific detail inherent in the genome of the species of chickens). That being the case; should it not be assumed that, sweeping away all Descartes anomalies and crazy spiritual science, the egg preceded the chicken?
Let me know if something about that isn't clear...And please, please please please, make fun of anyone who thinks that the chicken came first. Because that would just be silly.
I'd also like to note, for those people who are being particularly skeptical of my writings, that my "scientific" explanation found above was absurdly simple and I was merely cutting the corners that I felt could be cut to make the point with obfuscating the end result. Deal?
Great.
So-- "The egg preceded the chicken." That's my official public statement. Enjoy.
In light of this discovery,which i distinctly recall realizing to myself while standing near the kitchen table at Grandma Syd'z house (It should be noted that the implication, here, is that I made this discovery probably greater than a decade ago), I would like to criticize an article that I found in the Time Magazine that appeared at my place of residence, yesterday.
(you can find the article by clicking the title of this blog post!)
There was an article, "How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live" by Steven Johnson, about how magical Twitter is.
Now, while I understand that Steven Johnson is only 41 years old, I still maintain that this is a perfect example of why old people should not be allowed to write articles like this.
I'm sure he did a great job trying to make some sense of the situation to some of the older, less tech savvy, readers of Time and he should be proud of that. But, as a writer, he should be completely embarrassed for writing an article that was, above all else, completely....Naïve, I guess is a good word for it.
He's a dude who's talking about a social media that, while popular, has not risen to prominence. Nor has it managed to make a truly marked impact on the technology world the way things like tabbed browsing, email, or, the best example, instant messaging.
Instant messaging has been a corner stone of technology-enhanced communication since its inception in the 90s.
And, while AIM may have dropped in popularity, instant messaging (truly brought to the social forefront by AIM) has forever changed communications.
I'll skip the common and current uses and just try to make a few conjectures about it's lasting impact-- What did instant messaging lead to?
-Cell phone texting (and blackberry messages...for you pretentious elitists)
-Microblogging....like twitter
-Search consolidators (basically turning a thousand articles into a blog that people read snippets off. It's pushing the envelope of "skimming" to the bleeding edge)
-And, a built-in messaging integration in almost every network user's enter, now. (Gmail, the Google Wave, facebook, twitter feeds, ustream, pandora...it doesn't stop there.)
Suffice to say, instant messaging set its phaser to stun and changed communication forever.
Has twitter done that?
Maybe.
Who knows. It's too new. There is no way to tell.
That being the case, though, is it really fair to write articles (from an old guy perspective) about how twitter is changing the face of communication. Steven Johnson was out of college BEFORE instant messaging even had a chance to infest all of our computers with absurd popups from the weirdest chatrooms ever conceived(species 4.0000000.....0001, maybe?).
Steven Johnson goes on to say, quite powerfully, that "In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it."
What a load of Time Magazine+Oldguy=crap tech bologna!
This is what got me thinking about the chicken and the egg, to begin with.
Did they make twitter, as it's used, and we use it. Or did they make twitter, a platform, and we adopted it to our human purpose.
In my opinion, he makes the right assumption, here. He says that Twitter was invented. And then we took the platform and did what we wanted with it. Twitter was the egg, and our communications are the chicken. Steven Johnson is absolutely right, in the matter.
Where he's wrong is claiming that it's...unique. Or even interesting!
That's why I made that point about the chicken and the egg, at the beginning.
The egg always comes first!!
Of course we've adapted it and found uses for it that 2 guys (really cool guys...One of whom actually started Blogger, the site this is posted on...), the founders, would ever think it might be used for. We are using the basic methods they provided, but we've augmented and adapted. Basically, we've done the human thing.
If I had to make a bold statement, I would say that Species 1.000000002 was basic email communication. Species 2.000000006 was instant messaging. And they met up, got freakier than the idea of running into your grandparents buying lingerie at the mall, and had a little Internet baby. Is it Species 3.0, though? That remains to be seen. I'd guess that it's something along the lines of Species 2.000000012, something like that. You know...Something advanced, but not altogether a new wave, yet.
A perfect example of this, and Steven Johnson's misinterpretations, lay in one of his examples. He talks about a conference in New York that focused on education reform. There were 40 odd educators in a room and they held a conference. But on a large screen, there was a projection of everything that each one of them posted about the conference. Side conversations, jokes, heated remarks. Anything. Eventually the public even noticed it happening and started to have their posts heard on that wall. He says that that public-esque forum truly changed everything and that conferences will never be the same.
I'm sorry Steven Johnson, but you're a late adopter and I'd appreciate it if you tried to reel your articles in closer to the nursing home that you're writing them from.
To begin with--What in the world could possibly have ever hosted a "real-time" (that was a big point of his...he loves the real-time updating of twitter) forum where people could post and be seen by all(or privately) and the public could have found their way in and posted their own opinions? Hmmm...I mentioned them earlier. Anybody have a guess??
Chatrooms? These super-olde-skool communication devices that would allow anyone to join in and say whatever they have to say about a subject in real time.
Not only has that been an available option for all this time, but it's been happening for years. Gamers have been IRCing, while playing their favorite game, for years. Fore thinking professors have been posting similar IRCs or chats in their classrooms.
To bring the idea home--Even I have had a class with an IRC set up so that we could all chat on the screen behind the professor.
Not that crazy.
So what are Steven Johnson's panties doing all in a bunch like that?
My guess is that he's just too impressed with old people finally managing to wheedle their way into a form of communication that they can understand. And that communication has been opening a whole wave of technologies that they are being introduced to. He talks, with such pomp, about the huge wave of 3rd party developers and open-source works that are shaping twitter and, therefore, the new communication toy of the elderly. But the open-source movement and 3rd party developing has been going strong for quite a while. It's shaped essentially all of technology. All of it. forever. Grass roots innovation, man. Rock on.
What's nice about this little techie wave is that, because so many youngin's are getting into tech-magic and people can become tech geniuses with greater and greater ease, there has been a huge explosion of young, innovative, and basically free application development. Fancy, eh?
What's best about this is that it causes an enormous democracy. or should i say Democrazy. The applications that people like are kept alive. The ones that aren't adopted fail.
And Steven Johnson thinks that's awesome. It is awesome.
But why talk about Twitter?
Twitter is fun, no doubt. But why is he wasting time talking about it like it's the crowing glory of new technology?
Probably because he doesn't know any better...
I think that's the end of my rant. I don't want anyone reading this to think that I'm actually so absurdly disrespectful to old people and the way the adopt technology. I just don't think that it's fair for him to be wasting 4 pages in TIME magazine, the most read magazine in America (i think) to celebrate something he doesn't understand.
So please old people, young and old (Old people can be between ages 25-126), enjoy the new technologies. Try them. I have no doubt that these demographics have shaped these technologies in some way...Maybe they can have a bigger impact. So please, old people, try it. Go to twitter.com and sign up. All it takes is an email address. They'll never email you junk mail. It's totally secure. If you're really a savvy old person, you can post all your tweets from your cell phone. That will be sure to impress all of your friends. And just try it. Try watching your favorite shows on youtube or hulu. Check out LinkedIn.com. It's a site like facebook but for a more professional grade. But sure, check out facebook, too. Worry less about not getting "caught up in the system". It's not dangerous. Just check it out. Give Steven Johnson something real to talk about.
OK, that being said (and ended somewhat abruptly) I'd like to say one last thing about twitter while I'm here--
No one that I know who would be reading this is going to have heard of the thing I'm talking about, but that will make it all the more funny to them.
Twitpocalypse.
The Twitpocalypse (CLICK HERE for the website that coined the term) is similar in kin to the Y2k disaster. Basically, they were worried that when the twitter database reached a certain total number of tweets, all of the applications for twitter would fail. Twitter was expected to survive. But many applications were supposed to die. And on June 12th, at 11:52pm, they did. Someone sent this tweet "The Tweets must flow. http://bit.ly/Khk7s" and the Twitpocalypse occurred. Tons of applications went down. Grass roots developers screamed and cried. It was absolute melee for about 10 minutes. By the next morning, though, like a phoenix from the ashes, all of the major applications were releasing easily downloadable patches which righted the problem and left users with nothing to worry about.
Isn't it funny how such silly things can still happen in this day of advancement and technology?
How do we let these things happen? Well, for one thing, some of us are just too young to know better. For example, there are kids who have developed iPhone applications and made millions of dollars. Those kids are so young that they weren't even ALIVE for the Y2k scare. Seriously. So, hey, maybe old people know a thing or two. I guess we'll never know until we can unite in our ever changing communication ideology and grassroots support.
I guess we'll see.
Sorry I'm so long winded and horribly presumptuous! I hope everything is going well for everybody out there. Take care everyone!
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Facebook User Names
Ok, I know that no one who reads this is going to be interested, but I feel that I ought to spend sometime talking about the newest addition to the Facebook social network.
To begin with--
Facebook is making a small change to it's web system (this is the layman's explanation for the people who have know idea what I'm talking about).
You see, currently on Facebook, one's user name is not identity specific. Lets say that my user name is "Joe Schmoe". Well there can be a thousand "Joe Schmoe"s in the world and they can all have a facebook account with that same name on it. Facebook made their system that way by adding a 9-digit ID number in the URL of a users Facebook account.
The reason they did things this way was to basically stop people from having to come up with absurd and childish user names like "XxSexyChiquitaManxX". It worked. People really appreciate being able to use their own names.
It performs 2 functions. First, it almost forces disclosure (makes it hard to appear annonymous). And second, it makes it super easy to find friends, even if you only met them once. As long as you know their name, you can find them.
But now Facebook is adding a function that will give people unique ID names and people are freeeeaking out!
Now, the reason that they're freaking out is...I'm not even sure...Too silly for me to even speculate about. I guess it probably has a lot to do with people misunderstanding what is going on and, therefore, thinking that they're going to lose their original user name and that Facebook is suddenly going to be populated with "XxSexyChiquitaManxX"s again.
This assumption is mostly wrong.
The purpose of adding these unique identifiers is twofold.
The first of which: Ones personal URL currently looks something like this "http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/profile.php?id=883269526&ref=profile"
Not very easy to figure out, obviously. But soon it will look more like this "http://www.facebook.com/home/XxSexyChiquitaManxX.php" Much simpler. It will be much easier to view other users straight from the URL. It's more of a courtesy.
Not to mention that they're actually a little behind on adding this function.
MySpace, the largest Social Network in the world, has sported this function for years and years and Twitter, the new big trend amongst the geekiest of us all (and Aston Kutcher...), has sported the same function since it's inception.
As far as I'm concerned-- It's about freaking time, Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook).
The next purpose of adding unique IDs to people's profiles is that the ID will appear in paretheses under the normal user name.
For example, Ted Turner's Facebook account will look like this.... "Ted Turner (XxSexyChiquitaManxX)".
What this will do for users is, hopefully, add some ease to the searching and identifying of new members to one's social network.
If someone had been searching for Joe Schmoe, the could search him and find a thousand Joe Schmoes. And with people's affinity to put up pictures that do absolutely NOTHING to help identify them, it makes it hard to figure out WHICH Joe Schmoe you were looking for. But now you can see their personal ID and that will (hopefully) contain something that might help identify them, or at the very least, will help users share contact info. i.e. "Hey what was that guy I met last night's name?"--"Ummm, Theodore Turnstyle or something...I think he's XxSexyChiquitaManxX." -- "Ohhh, ok, I'll go stalk him online."
Aside from helping people searching for a NEW friend, it will also help existing friends search for eachother. I may not recall how to spell someone's name or something of that nature, but if they have a decent personal ID then not only will I remember it, but if I'm looking at a profile and I THINK it's theirs, then I can just check the personal ID to see if it matches what I remember.
See ya'll! That was long winded, unnecessary, and pretty silly. But it makes all you people who DONT like the idea look like krazy people! I mean...What is to be LOST from having that identifier? You're not losing your user name. You're not losing that sense of disclosure. And you're not going to end up being friends with a bunch of SexyBananaPeople.
Easy Peasy!
More to come, later!
To begin with--
Facebook is making a small change to it's web system (this is the layman's explanation for the people who have know idea what I'm talking about).
You see, currently on Facebook, one's user name is not identity specific. Lets say that my user name is "Joe Schmoe". Well there can be a thousand "Joe Schmoe"s in the world and they can all have a facebook account with that same name on it. Facebook made their system that way by adding a 9-digit ID number in the URL of a users Facebook account.
The reason they did things this way was to basically stop people from having to come up with absurd and childish user names like "XxSexyChiquitaManxX". It worked. People really appreciate being able to use their own names.
It performs 2 functions. First, it almost forces disclosure (makes it hard to appear annonymous). And second, it makes it super easy to find friends, even if you only met them once. As long as you know their name, you can find them.
But now Facebook is adding a function that will give people unique ID names and people are freeeeaking out!
Now, the reason that they're freaking out is...I'm not even sure...Too silly for me to even speculate about. I guess it probably has a lot to do with people misunderstanding what is going on and, therefore, thinking that they're going to lose their original user name and that Facebook is suddenly going to be populated with "XxSexyChiquitaManxX"s again.
This assumption is mostly wrong.
The purpose of adding these unique identifiers is twofold.
The first of which: Ones personal URL currently looks something like this "http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/profile.php?id=883269526&ref=profile"
Not very easy to figure out, obviously. But soon it will look more like this "http://www.facebook.com/home/XxSexyChiquitaManxX.php" Much simpler. It will be much easier to view other users straight from the URL. It's more of a courtesy.
Not to mention that they're actually a little behind on adding this function.
MySpace, the largest Social Network in the world, has sported this function for years and years and Twitter, the new big trend amongst the geekiest of us all (and Aston Kutcher...), has sported the same function since it's inception.
As far as I'm concerned-- It's about freaking time, Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook).
The next purpose of adding unique IDs to people's profiles is that the ID will appear in paretheses under the normal user name.
For example, Ted Turner's Facebook account will look like this.... "Ted Turner (XxSexyChiquitaManxX)".
What this will do for users is, hopefully, add some ease to the searching and identifying of new members to one's social network.
If someone had been searching for Joe Schmoe, the could search him and find a thousand Joe Schmoes. And with people's affinity to put up pictures that do absolutely NOTHING to help identify them, it makes it hard to figure out WHICH Joe Schmoe you were looking for. But now you can see their personal ID and that will (hopefully) contain something that might help identify them, or at the very least, will help users share contact info. i.e. "Hey what was that guy I met last night's name?"--"Ummm, Theodore Turnstyle or something...I think he's XxSexyChiquitaManxX." -- "Ohhh, ok, I'll go stalk him online."
Aside from helping people searching for a NEW friend, it will also help existing friends search for eachother. I may not recall how to spell someone's name or something of that nature, but if they have a decent personal ID then not only will I remember it, but if I'm looking at a profile and I THINK it's theirs, then I can just check the personal ID to see if it matches what I remember.
See ya'll! That was long winded, unnecessary, and pretty silly. But it makes all you people who DONT like the idea look like krazy people! I mean...What is to be LOST from having that identifier? You're not losing your user name. You're not losing that sense of disclosure. And you're not going to end up being friends with a bunch of SexyBananaPeople.
Easy Peasy!
More to come, later!
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