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There she sits, looking very much like, well, a sitting duck. Man, can we relate - perhaps we’ve found our mascot!
Some fun facts about the short-tailed albatross:
The head of interactive and innovation at P&G, Ted McConnell, added to the downbeat buzz on the monetization of social networks. Here’s a pretty biting, yet insightful comment, captured in a recent AdAge article:
“I think when we call it ‘consumer-generated media,’ we’re being predatory,” he said. “Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”
While I personally take exception to his perspective, I’ll restrict my comments to the local social space.
The business of social media is morphing, which is no surprise. What is interesting to note is the growing importance of what I’d label “filtration and curation” (not just because of the Jesse Jackson ring it brings to the title!).
In the “early days” of social media, we focused on aggregation - picking up the crumbs of commentary wherever it can be found and blending it to amass some scale of commentary. As the world gets more and more conversant, aggregation hatches a new problem, in its quest to solve an old one. Every day, the problem of scale is being solved naturally, via the sheer volume of user participation. Context and interaction form the mantra, replacing more.
I’ve written from time to time on the “real intention” behind Google’s free 411 service. I’ve long felt it was not a business desire to be in the voice services business as a 411 service provider; rather, it is a new channel for collecting huge volumes of voice utterances, from which it could build it’s own technology for voice recognition. Freeing itself from the shackles of TellME/Microsoft and Nuance - the two technology stalwarts in voice reco (who tend to vigorously acquire and defend patents), was pretty strategic.
John Markoff, NY Times technology columnist, highlights this evolving picture further, with an interesting profile article “Google is Taking Questions“. Markoff references a new (apparently not quite yet available) iphone app enhancement in Google’s search app.
Sometimes humor provides an instructive lens into business reality! The Onion just did an entertaining article entitled “iPhone Left in Hot Car for Three Hours“. With classic Onion wit, they indirectly observe how deeply personal mobile devices have become to our lives.
As I commented in a recent Kelsey Group panel, never before in the history of technology have people slept with a computer.
The bold new world of mobile devices with open applications and fast networks forever changes the way consumers will use the technology. We, in turn, need to adapt our thinking on how we engage users through these devices and applications.
This isn’t about a screen that needs IYP reformatted to do YP searches. In fact, search is tangential to the shift. This is about a rapidly morphing form of active, location-aware communications that is deeply personal. It ignites commentary, conversation and interaction. It’s not about “driving more searches that find advertisers”, it’s about inserting the advertiser into the conversation.
The future of local media and mobile is not about “mobile search”, it’s about live interaction with and among consumers. If we think of this as a search problem, or as a new screen format, we’ll miss the fundamental opportunity to participate in the consumer conversation; it’s this dialog that will envelope and drive the shopping opportunity.
With news today of Twitter’s first organized stream - “Election08” - I’m willing to bet we’re witnessing the first instance of a plan to bring Twitter into main stream usage. When I blogged about this a couple of weeks back, I suggested the current geek user ecosystems needs to give way to pop culture streams like sports for Twitter to reach its scale potential.
Well, the pop culture icons of today are vying for Washington - the Elections. The Elections08 stream is pretty interesting and entertaining - people are tweeting voraciously. I am betting this model will really propel the usage upward.
Smart move, look for a whole new series of channels to form - ad hoc and organized. Make sure you catch the #mccainshot thread, it’s suggesting a drinking game from the election debates - such as: take a swig every time John McCain says “my friends”, and so on…
So, here it comes - a whole new stream of feeds that form tributaries into an ocean of conversations!
Cisco today announced the acquisition of Jabber.
A smart move, Cisco is a very good home for Jabber (why the heck they passed on this years ago still fails me). Jabber/XMPP should become further entrenched in a leadership position in real-time communications infrastructure. Personally, I’m intrigued with XMPP providing a better foundation for the scale-challenged world of Twitter and the like.
Note to Jabber developers in Denver, we’re hiring, and here’s what life is like here ;)
I’ve speculated a couple of times in the past that Google’s entry into the “free DA” space had little to do with a business intention to compete with free 411 services, but rather a strategic development initiative that aims to construct a voice vocabulary.
There are many reasons for Google to be in the forefront of a voice-based interface. Nuance’s technology domination (via voracious acquisition) and Microsoft’s capture of TellMe “forced” Google to do what they love to do - build it from scratch. In order to succeed in voice technology, however, you need a huge base of data (voice utterances) to mine into search ontologies. While Google clearly have this in text-entered search, it had no source in voice. Enter GOOG-411. A consumer service on one side, but a massive pipe for capturing large volumes of voice search terms on the other.
As further evidence of this being a means-to-an-end, Silicon Alley Insider reports on the new audio indexing feature announced by Google for Video Search. Cutely/annoyingly named Gaudi, this gives us a more clear sense of Google’s intentions for voice search, and their ambitions in indexing spoken words in video (presumably, podcasts and perhaps music lyrics can’t be too far behind!)
For fun, I put up a straw poll on the site before the Kelsey Conference asking the question “If the Yellow Pages print business were an animal, on which one would you put the lipstick”. The choices were the two obvious politically inspired images of lipstick on pitbulls and pigs, but I added a third the chameleon!
Notionally, I was asking people to comment on the print business as being “on its way down, “capable of fighting back hard” or “adaptable to the future”.
The results (very unscientific!):
Put another way, almost a 50-50 vote between print being on an irreversible downward trajectory down versus having more life than you’d think.
To me, that sums up the sentiment in the Kelsey Group Conference.