It happens all the time. Some new technology or application comes out , it catches on like wildfire and then someone in the media writes an article about the technology being "for the young". Then about 18 months later the technology becomes more mainstream and an article is written about "baby boomers" using the technology, platform or application.
The shock of it all. 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 year olds using a social network ? Sending Text messages ? Bowling on a Wii? Who knew?
It seems like those who write these articles think all of the baby boomers and their parents were asleep over the last 25 years. Did they not notice the PC revolution? Could anyone miss the IBM Charlie Chaplin ads 25 years ago? Did they never quite manage to figure out what that modem in their home pc was designed to do? Even if it came with free software to test and try The Source, CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL and others ?
Technology. Digital Communications. They are not new. They are not news. They are old news. But thats not what is interesting about these articles.
What is interesting to me is not that articles are written showing surprise that the geriatric generation and their kids are going online , despite the protests of their grandkids. What is interesting to me is how few in the media, regardless of platform, be it TV, Newspaper, magazine , blogger or twitterer, have more than a rudimentary knowledge of the history of the technologies we are using.
There seems to be some delusion that all technology and applications are new. Invented from a cloudburst with no historical context. That as new, the technology is the province of the young, with anyone over 29 too old to understand and too confused to actually use it.
If it were up to those in the media, the new phase for high school and college kids today would be "Never friend anyone over 29"
In this day and age, 25 years post the first IBM PC, pretty much everyone is able to adapt to, accept and become accomplished with consumer technologies.
Your granddad is going to want to be your friend, text or IM you and get a GPS enabled phone. Get used to it.
Probably about 5 months ago I had a conversation with someone at Facebook about licensing their API.
The beauty of Facebook, as opposed to Myspace and other social networks is that the people on there are for the most part who they say they are, and Facebook does their best to dismiss those who aren't. This simple differentiation makes the membership base of Facebook far more valuable than any other social network.
When you go to my Facebook profile, you get the real me. Thats not to say I answer every profile question. I don't. I'm not going to disclose everything about myself. However, the data that is available about me is the most comprehensive, self maintained database record about me on the internet or probably anywhere. Access to that information times the however many tens of millions of Facebook active users is worth a lot of money. So with this in mind, I talked to one of their VCs that I know, who referred me to someone at Facebook and we had a great conversation. I asked about licensing the API for use outside the Facebook.com domain. They were definitely open to it. All I needed to do was put together a proposal for what I wanted to do with it. Despite the thousands of ideas I have about how the most comprehensive database of self maintained user information could be used, I just didnt have the piss and vinegar in me to attack this problem with the amount of energy it would take.
So I called a buddy at Yahoo and suggested that they license the Facebook API. I happen to think that far better search and ad serving solutions can be developed around a combination of user published information and user activity It just seems to me that if Facebook were to give me an option of publishing a laundry list of relevant information about myself to external Facebook API applications, such as search and ad serving networks that those applications would serve me better results.
Think "What is my search mood today: Information, entertainment, purchasing, bored..." as a precursor to an actual search. The options that would enable smarter use of the web are endless. Not everyone would avail themselves of what I call Personal Database Publishing to enhance the internet experience, but I believe enough would.
Of course any application can currently ask for this information and many do. But I dont want to have to publish and maintain a database for every application I want to use or happen to use. Nor do I want to have to maintain multiple social network accounts to make this information available. I recognize that this is the exact problem that Google wants to solve with their OpenSocial. But they are too late ... If Facebook opens their API up further and allows for its use outside the Facebook.com domain.
So back to Yahoo and the Facebook API. I thought that if you put the 2 together, enabling Yahoo to access the Facebook database of users within the current API constraints, Yahoo search and ad serving would improve considerably. Expand the Facebook database with an opt in option to add further personal data that could be used FROM WITHIN THE YAHOO WEBSITE, the results for Yahoo could be extraordinary. A Yahoo searchbox within Facebook , or a search from a Yahoo site that recognizes you are the owner of a Facebook profile and customizes the results according to information culled from your profile would be incredibly powerful
I don't know if anything can or would come of my little referral. Maybe now with MicroSoft buying into Facebook, they can get a free crack at the Facebook API and Facebook profile owners who also use MicroSoft Live can get better search and ad results. Who knows.
What I do know is this. As long as Facebook keeps expanding the power of my profile, there is no reason for me or anyone else to create another profile anywhere else, including any of the Google OpenSocial alliance members. If all the value of my Facebook profile remains stopped at the edge of the facebook domain, I might have to give Google OpenSocial a try.
Youtube has a huge problem and they have dug a hole so deep they are never going to be able to fix it unless they change their approach to copyright.
There is no reason to discuss further whether or not Youtube or Google Video is elgible for protection from the DMCA. That topic will be decided by the courts. The question now is whether or not using the DMCA is a good business decision.
The fundamental business issue in claiming protection behind the DMCA is that it requires Youtube to not know what videos are on its site. Unless an uploader is copyright owner that has signed a deal with Youtube giving them knowledge of the videos they will be uploading, by law Youtube can't have any idea what videos are on the site or where.
Think about that for a minute.
How hard is it to sell advertising around content when you have no idea what the content is ? Its impossible. Its like selling advertisers a lottery ticket , and we all know how good an investment a lottery ticket is for the ticket buyer. For some reason the media seems to think that there isn't advertising on Youtube because of advertisers fear of User Generated Content. Thats not it. Volume impressions are still sellable. As is volume video. There is a huge market for mass video. Unfortunately for Google, they take a huge risk of liability from the DMCA in generating revenue next to copyrighted materials they don't have permission for. So to play it safe , they don't sell advertising around videos they don't have licenses for.
So what is happening amounts to Google basically subsidizing the hosting of video for the entire internet. Fortunately for Google, they are probably the only company that could afford to lose that much money a year which has to run into the 100s of millions of dollars per year at this point.
Unfortunately for Google, even with their new attempts to protect copyright, it doesn't change the particulars of how they have to follow the DMCA and what their advertising sales options are.
Which leads to this question. Should Google start proactively checking uploaded videos for copyright violations and if they did, how would it change Youtube and its relationship with copyright owners, visitors , advertisers and their bottom line ?
It wouldn't be a technical challenge to review for copyright. It wouldn't be a financial challenge in hiring and training the thousands it would take to review the videos after all, this process would allow Google to finally know what content they have and sell ads around the videos. And it wouldnt be a difficult evaluation process. A quick smell test would be easy, with any uncertainty being sent to uploader for confirmation of ownership,
Would the number of videos uploaded and allowed fall off a cliff ? Does the take down notice process actually work, which would mean that there is no real net affect on the number of videos available to visitors ? Would users get so upset they would find another site that flaunted the DMCA as a replacement ?
If there is a chance that Google loses any of the many lawsuits and faces Billions in damages, which there is, how big a chance is that and should Google start to cut their losses now by making the change.
I wanted to interrupt my Dancing with the Stars posts (but not the shameless plugs, call 1 800 VOTE 411 on Monday between 7pm and 830pm ) to discuss what I think has become the hallmark of media coverage.
Vulnerability.
Read any newspaper. Any Magazine. Watch any news program. Any gossip or entertainment program. There is one single them that runs continuously: The Search for Vulnerability.
It doesn't matter what walk of life you are in. It doesn't matter what profession or year in school. Whatever group you participate in or hover around. There is now a blog, website, social network, column, reporter, video, segment and ??? to cover it. The audience size can be 1 or 100 million. It doesn't matter. Someone is out there searching for your vulnerabilities to report or for the vulnerabilities they think you will be interested in knowing about.
There is someone hoping they can snap a picture or video of you at a vulnerable moment that can be leveraged into a payday, career or opportunity. There is someone who wants as many people as possible to think you aren't a good.... you fill in the blank, and then call your boss, senator, customers, friends and tell them why they don't like you and why they shouldn't either.
Why ?
It just seems like there are an ever growing number of people, particularly those in the media, who want to encourage people to find what they think is the worst of people. Their most vulnerable side.
Hopefully at some point this will change. That vulnerability will stop being currency and be a private matter that we all respect as a universal trait.
There is nothing wrong with the new HDTV that you just spent a fortune on.
It's not yours' or the TV's fault that the picture quality you are seeing on your brand spanking new TV looks like crap compared to what you saw in the store.
It's not your fault that you signed up for and paid extra for the HD package from your video provider, got all excited about your favorite network and shows finally being in HD and then looking worse than it did on your old TV. Its not your fault because what far too many TV networks are trying to pass off as HD isnt really HD. Its not even close.
TV Networks are misleading consumers into thinking they are getting HD versions of their networks. Which leads to a simple question. What makes a TV Network HD ?
If a network calls itself an HD Network, does that make it an HD Network ? Or should the network be required to actually have content that is of high definition resolution ? And if they have HD Resolution content, how much should they actually have before they can call themselves HD ?
In the coming months cable, telco and satellite providers are gearing for a marketing battle over who has the most HD channels. Ads will be everywhere touting big name networks finally bringing HD versions to the masses.
Unfortunately for consumers, the schedules of many, if not most of those new channels will have less than 10pct of their content actually produced using HD cameras and shown at HD resolution. Few will have more than 3 hours a day of HD resolution content.
I think a lot of consumers are going to be very, very disappointed.
When you turn the channel to an HD network that you are paying for, shouldn't you have the right to expect to see content in full HD Resolution ? Of course. Unfortunately you won't. For many "HD" networks, you may go DAYS without seeing any real HD content.
That's not right.
"All publicity is good publicity" It may have been true at some point, but it certainly is not true today. Nor will it be true forever more.
Instead, the motto has changed to "All Publicity is Abused Publicity"
The reality is that in todays ultra competitive chase to get your attention , if something you say or do is seen by more than 100 people, someone is going to attempt to re-purpose it to their own benefit or amusement.
In essence, the internet has put us all under a form of digital arrest.
"Everything we say or do, can and will be used for or against you on a website somewhere at some time, from now and ever-more"
There will be someone there with a camera phone to memorialize the mustard that dripped on your shirt from your hotdog and some website will use it to explain how the stress of "fill in the blank" is getting to you.
Someone will keep a picture from your 5th birthday party when your sister dressed you up as a Spice Girl. Your local newspaper will write an article saying how cute it was. Then some website or tv show, produced by someone who doesn't like you, will use it to try to convince their readers that you are gender confused and here is proof that it started at an early age.
Silly examples for sure, but real.
The one thing the internet lacks that will forever change us all is Context.
There is no way to retain context when you cut and paste. No matter the original intent of the words or pictures, anything on the net probably will find its way into situations for which they were never intended.
Publicity, in fact all information used to have a shelf life. Newspapers were relegated to the hassles of microfiche. TV became a box or tape on a shelf somewhere. You could find it, but the cost in dollars and time were significant. Which of course reduced its use.
Thats no longer the case. Between the internet archives and search engines Everything is Everywhere. Forever.
The Net is a beautiful, wonderful utility but it certainly not an innocent medium.
I sold and bought my first PC a long, long time ago. Back in the late 80s I owned a Mac, I think it was a Mac2. I honestly thought there would never come a time where I would buy a Mac. Ever.
Then I upgraded my PC to Vista. What a disaster. I had grown accustomed to my PC freezing every now and then. Enter Vista and my PC was frozen more often than it was working. The biggest culprit was MicroSoft Outlook.
The application has to have a memory leak. I could follow memory numbers as they grew and grew. Then as my email was downloading, the rules would stop working and everything went straight to my inbox. Spam and all.
When you get as many emails as I do, that's a problem. When it also causes the system to freeze, its more than just a problem.
My first step was to get a copy of CPU Magazine with Vista tricks. The tricks helped. Everything froze or crashed less often. Significantly less often. But the annoyance factor was beyond belief. I don't run any special applications. I run outlook, Office and firefox. Thats it.
I had gotten to the point where I was embarrassed to be a PC owner. The thought of someone calling me and asking me to go to my computer to find something was paralyzing (ok, not that bad, but it sounded cool writing it).
This wasn't just a problem on my Desktop, it was a problem on my laptop with Vista as well.
So a few months ago I made the executive decision to buy a MacBook to replace my laptop.
I haven't looked back.
It's not that there aren't hassles with the Mac. There are two. One there isn't a version of Outlook for the Mac. As someone who has more than 10 years and gigabytes worth of emails in multiple outlook files, the concept of exporting and importing wont fly. So i am keeping my PC Desktop purely to download my emails into Outlook so I have a master database. But I only do so after deleting unimportant emails from the server using my Macbook.
The 2nd problem is the lack of the right mouse click. I know its a Mac thing to only have one button, but its a hassle. Sure there are work arounds, none of which are quick and easy for a longtime PC user.
Both of these are easily offset by 3 simple Mac elements that make me very happy.
First is that when I close my MacBook without turning it off, it doesn't lose power. It can sit there for hours and then work when I open it up.
The 2nd is that it rarely freezes up. Maybe 3 or 4 times in months.
Finally, i LOVE the fact that it boots up in 1/1000000000 of the time it takes my PC. It probably will add years to my life .. (ok an exaggeration).
I'm not an Apple fanboy, but I love me some MacBook.
I obviously hit a nerve with my last post. My index for quality of post has evolved to the number of "you suck", "broadcast.com sucks", "You got lucky", etc posts that are submitted but never confirmed. For this post it was off the charts. Good.
When people resort to personal comments. Its usually a good sign.
Among those I respect, there were a lot of great responses. Let me first say, my position on this has nothing to do with HDNet. I've not abandoned the net. In fact i have more than 100 RSS feeds and untold other sites Im involved with.
I've been inundated with spam on Myspace. Used flicker. Used Digg for sourcing news and laughed at the unending ridiculousness of its posters. Used and posted to Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Veoh, Flickr, Slideshare, used every bittorrent client, got bored with twitter after 7 minutes, signed up for other findme, find you, this is where I am, this is where you are, type app I could find, and the lists go on and on. I read techmeme, techcrunch, extremetech, and tons of other tech sites and I make a point to try every and any new site that seems the least bit plausible or interesting. I spend far far too much time on the net just to make sure I keep up and know whats going on.
Honestly, its just a bigger, more time consuming version on CompuServe Forums from back in the day (Find someone who participated in the OS/2 forums if you want to know about social networks). Only back then you didn't call People friends, they were just forum members.
I have a ton of Internet investments that you dont and wont know about.
I have loaded and used facebook apps and I have downloaded the API documentation and actually read it. I'm such an exciting guy, I downloaded Ruby on Rails and read the documentation as well. That's what Saturday Nights are for.
I have bought installed and integrated every imaginable wireless device in my house. I think its fun.
I have invested in and gotten involved with application development on Facebook. Had a serious discussion with Facebook about the revenue opportunities they could achieve if they would license their API for full scale commercial applications on other websites. For example, to me, it would be an interesting and potentially explosive business move for Yahoo to license the Facebook API for their Panama platform. I think the beauty of Facebook is that people for the first time have defined and opened up the "database of their lives". Which if integrated into an advertising platform like Panama would allow advertisers to truly personalize ads, rather than algorithmically present ads. To me it was an interesting conversation.
I think it could change the way advertising is handled on the net. Each user could have the option to publish certain fields/objects which could be replicated/peered to the licensees of the API and then integrated Into the ad serving application. When the user showed up on the licensee site, say Yahoo Finance, the ad server could present a contextual ad chosen based on the published objects within the context of the Yahoo content.
Its one of many good or bad ideas that are feasible because the net is the plain vanilla boring, never really changing platform that it is.
Guess what. When things go from exciting to stable and boring in the technology world, that's a good thing.
Call me a cynic. I feel the same way about Personal Computers. Faster processors dint do it for me. Installing Vista was a disaster till I read a copy of CPU magazine and used the OS mods they had in there to clean the junk up. Its sad but true that a 25 year old platform is more volatile than the Internet. It still takes so long to boot that for the first time since I had a Mac in 1990 I bought a Macbook and junked my Vista Laptop. My time is at a premium. The days of being concerned that if I bought a Mac there might be some apps that I could use but the wouldn't run on the Mac are long gone. Not because the Mac has an Intel processor, but because I cant really think of any new off the shelf software that I would get excited to buy.
Beyond Office and email, I spend a ton of time on the net. That boring platform that ain't gonna change and is dead in the excitement category.
What do I get excited about ?
I'm excited about Virtual Machines, as I have written before, and the changes and impact they could have on all of us. I get fired up about the continuing decline in flash and hard drive prices. Its amazing to me after all these years of watching drive prices fall that I can buy more than 500gigs of drive for under 100 bucks. That I can buy a 16gig flash drive for not much more. and it still pisses me off that i have to deal with file size limits that require me to manage my email files when I back them up.
And of course I'm excited about the HDTV space and whats happening there.
Maybe some people dont think peoples media consumption patterns change when 70" HDTVs are installed in their homes, I do.
Which brings me to why I said that "The Net is Dead and Boring"
The best way to sum up how I feel about the excitement and opportunities on the net compared to the many other personal and corporate technology options out there is to use a Yogi Berra quote.
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded"
When everyone is looking for gold in the same river, the best opportunities are somewhere else.
But hey, that's just me.
A lot of people are all up and upset about my comments that the Internet is dead and boring. Well guess what, it is. Every new technological, mechanical or intellectual breakthrough has its day, days, months and years. But they don't rule forever. That's the reality.
Every generation has its defining breakthrough. Cars, TV, Radio, Planes,highways, the wheel, the printing press, the list goes on forever. I'm sure in each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions "dead and boring". The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted.
Some of you may not want to admit it, but that's exactly what the net has become. A utility. It has stopped evolving. Your Internet experience today is not much different than it was 5 years ago.
That's not to say the impact of the Internet on the entire planet hasn't been off the charts. It has been. It has changed the lives of billions of people and it will continue to be a utility to billions of people. Just like cars, TVs, Radio, Planes, Highways, you get the point.
Some people have tried to make the point that Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet is evolving. Actually it is the exact opposite. Web 2.0 is proof that the Internet has stopped evolving and stabilized as a platform. Its very very difficult to develop applications on a platform that is ever changing. Things stop working in that environment. Internet 1.0 wasn't the most stable development environment. To days Internet is stable specifically because its now boring.(easy to avoid browser and script differences excluded)
Applications like Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, etc were able to explode in popularity because they worked. No one had to worry about their ISP making a change and things not working. The days of walled gardens like AOL, Prodigy and others were gone. The days of always on connections were not only upon us, but in sufficient numbers at home, work and school, that the applications ran fast enough to hold our interest and compel us to participate. In other words, the Internet stabilized. Great software was developed to run on the software.
Just as a reminder to some, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, etc are not "the Internet". They are software applications that run on the Internet. Just like MicroSoft Excel is a software application that runs on MicroSoft and Apple operating systems.
The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead. They are dead until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers than the vast majority of broadband users get today.
Few people's actual throughput to their homes have increased more than 5mbs in the past 5 years, and few people's throughput (if you dint understand the difference between throughput and the marketed downstream speeds your read from your ISP, you should) to their homes will increase more than 10mbs in the next 5 years. That's not enough to define a platform that allows really smart people to come up with groundbreaking ideas.
In fact, if you index the expected growth in bandwidth consumption by applications that are heavy LAST MILE bandwidth users (as opposed to the Internet backbone where there is plenty of bandwidth but consumers cant get to it) vs the actual increase in LAST MILE bandwidth available to the home, our net effective throughput to the home could decline over the next few years. The Internet is like a highway. There is plenty of room for everyone to go as fast as the throughput will let you go, that is until the traffic forces everyone to slow down.
For some reason a lot of people don't understand that concept.
So, let me repeat, The days of the Internet creating explosively exciting ideas are dead for the foreseeable future..
The Internet is boring. That is not a bad thing. In fact its easy to make the argument that its a great thing. That it has become the utility that the people who worked to get it started firmly believed it would. That it finally is the platform for any number of mundane applications that are easy to write and that anyone can use and trust.
Just like wheels, printing presses, cars, TV, radio, electricity, water.....
