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.