Oh just jump over the cliff already, before I could even write up my “FriendFeed, The Best Thing Online Since Porn” blog post, along comes yet another service. Once again we all lurch forward, sign up, rinse, friend request and repeat. Duncan has a nice wrap up with quotes from various folks today. Once again, someone registered Robert Scoble’s handle before he could. Finally, I was of course once again, too late to get that coveted first name only handle. :: shakes fist ::
There are however a few cool things about this Twitter of the week. Identi.ca for one is open source, that’s news good enough to make even Dave Winer happy. Like him, I’m also first hearing about the OpenMicroblogging concept today. Their website is so 94′ it makes me think of simpler times online.
Really these are all great things, perhaps the next step?
I’m looking for some more folks to join the Docstoc Content Partnership Program. The below document gives a brief overview of what the program is all about. If your content is good match, please contact me at seanp (at) docstoc.com to discuss further.
Twitter is dead, long live TwitterFriendFeed. That seems to sum up the general sentiment floating around this weekend. After months of troubled operation, many Twitter users are jumping over to FriendFeed. We’ve seen the social media mass exodus before, I imagine will see it a few more times still. FriendFeed does have one distinct advantage, why switch to yet another service when you can simply import it into FriendFeed?
I keep saying that aggregation is the future of social media, or at least the next step. While attempting to look forward, lets look back as well. For that I give you the evolution of social networks, or at least from experience.
Disconnected Me
The lonely days, the dial-up days, the disconnected days. Sure we had things like BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) and Usenet but connections were difficult to forge. BBSs went multi-node and services like AOL increased social connections to some degree. E-mail and on the fly chat rooms provided the best avenues for communication. This eventually grew to include message boards and various types of profile based websites.
Friendship Redesigned
Taking a few steps ahead of the very first social networks (classmates.com was one of them) we find our selves at Friendster. I’ll never forget how simply out right confused I was by the whole concept. It was my first experience where you *HAD* to build friendship connections to really use the site. As you built your social network you could further peel back its layers, look at friends of your friends and so forth. It was this onion like setup that made the services so interesting, and of course a massive time suck.
Social Network Fatigue
Evolving further, social networking web sites are everywhere. Two major players emerge in the form of MySpace and Facebook. Today they are now even part of popular culture. We begin to see tons of services launch with social networking features. Some of us run to each new service, play around for a bit and then quickly abandon it. Many social networks begin to look like ghost towns, littered with millions of long forgotten profiles. Most “normal” users find one particular network that appeals to them, making it their online home. These types of users don’t even want to think about joining other social networks, they just don’t have the time, energy or interest.
Aggregated Me
Now here we are today, our online impressions spread well across the internets. Services like FriendFeed are making it much easier follow your friends. In fact, following is becoming a preferred mechanism to friending someone. Data (activity) is starting to move around more freely thanks in part to things like RSS, Dataportibility and APIs. Lifecasting in whatever medium has never been easier. Twitter becomes a joke on The Daily Show as these services trickle down into mainstream usage.
Whats Next
I can’t tell you the next step in social network evolution, but I can tell you what I’d like to see. I’d much rather that central hub be something I control. A type of service or technology I can deploy and manage from my own domain. A decentralized me where people could follow and interact. As wonderful as FriendFeed is, I can’t help but feel I’m jumping to yet another online rental property. Personally, I’d rather own the home myself.
For those who haven’t seen Docstoc in action, below is an example of a document embed. In this case, a congratulation letter that can be used when a business acquaintance receives a promotion.
No matter what software created the document, the viewer only needs to have flash installed to see it. Right below the embed is a direct link to Docstoc, here you can download the source file as well.
We have a few more embeddable widgets on the way as well. Let me know if you have any ideas on how this can be improved.
Considering where Yahoo is these days, receiving the below scam email is pretty amazing. I captured it on video so you could see the quality animations. Now that I think of it…maybe this isn’t such a bad idea for Yahoo!
For my recent job switch it took me 1 week to speak with 3 companies, sign a deal with one and double my salary in the process. Oh, and I did it all with social media…
You might be saying, “But Sean, I thought social media was simply a device for telling your friends what you ate for lunch“.
Well of course that is true, however you can also use these services to land that next great gig. For those curious, or perhaps looking for a social media job, here is how its done.
LinkedIn: Take your paper resume and throw it away. In the tech space LinkedIn is the new resume. Build out a nice large network by tracking down any former/current colleagues. Get them to leave you a recommendation whenever possible. SEO the shit out of your profile, include every major keyword from your industry. This is ultimately how Docstoc.com came across me, via a recruiter who found me through a LinkedIn search. Big thanks to Dan and Jason at Neohire who setup the whole deal for me. Add me to your LinkedIn network to get started.
Twitter: Oddly enough I had an interview with another company because of Twitter. Stranger still, it was with a start up I was razzing in a recent tweet. They used tracking services to follow their company’s name and it started a dialogue between us. While this case is probably unique, a good Twitter presence is vital to getting any social media job today. At Mahalo we managed to get a nice amount of traffic from the service. Due it part to Jason’s large following and the vertical based Twitter accounts I setup. You have an MBA? Good for you, but who cares if no one is following/listening to you today. You can follow me on Twitter here.
Meatspace Marketing: I was able get a few potential jobs lined up through through this medium. The meatspace is that strange place away from the web. Its where real people exist and occasionally interact in a none virtual fashion. Become part of your local tech community and get to know the players. Contribute so they can all see how great you are. Read Chris Brogan’s post on how to be sexier in person.
Today is going to be my last day with Mahalo.com. The last 8 months here have been an amazing experience for me. Truly unique and rewarding on so many levels. Leaving it behind has been a very tough decision for me. Big thanks to Jason and C.K. for giving me a chance and some footing in this crazy industry. Huge respect and gratitude to the Mahalo staff, both in-house and the many remote guides. There is no shortage of great ideas and people here; I’m certainly going to miss it all.
So what’s next? Well I’m going over to Docstoc, an online document sharing website. I’ll be heading up their content and SMO/SEO efforts. They recently received a nice round of funding and are posed to break out. There are going to be some huge challenges at the new gig, I can’t wait to get started.
Finally got a chance to play around with Spore tonight. Someone I know used to joke saying, “Spore is going to be an awesome game, when it launches in 2012″. Sometimes it even felt like this was the truth. Luckily for us this is not the case and we are a little closer with the Spore Creature Creator. While this is only the first piece of the massive simulator, it gives us a great feel for what the expect.
I created the below creature appropriately named “Heady”. Check him out followed by some of my initial feedback.
Insanely intuitive: A common problem with 3D content creation is simply getting started. With Spore the entry bar is very low, the whole process smooth and easy. There is just enough “auto-snap” without losing any freedom for creativity.
Machinima: Capturing video content is incredibility easy. The software has a simple and great incorporation of YouTube. Capture your video and send it right up to YouTube, all from within the app.
A Wii Moment: Watch someone use a Nintendo Wii for the first time, this is the Wii moment. It’s the very real smile someone gets from a virtual experience. Using Spore yields several of these moments as you tweak and customize your character. The music and sound effect composition will easily have you grinning back at your monitor.
Social Spore: There is a profile based community piece to the game as well. It’s a little scarce now, hopefully it’s due for expansion in the future. Virtual Worlds and MMOs have a poor history of integration between web and the medium itself. Let’s hope they come up with something innovative here as well.
This above image is search. Thats you stuck in the middle of it. The information you need may be as close as the nearby blue nodes. These are websites like Wikipedia and eventually Mahalo. Sometimes that information is deeper, on the green nodes. These are sites like Cooking.com and for the guys Chickipedia. Lastly we have the final stop, the purple nodes. This is the finest granular detail of search. It may appear in the form of a blog post, single news article or other form of user generated content.
Taking a search user all the way to that final purple node is not always required. There are of course plenty of nice stops along the way. For many of us however that central (or red node) is Google.
Right now Google search is the earth, the wind and even the fire. No one is going to change this anytime soon. Truth is they do everything so great, who would want to? There is however (as with everything), room for improvements in certain segments. This means a handful of useful services have the opportunity to at least disrupt Google’s dominance. To increase their presence and cause a little bit of blue node disruption.
1. Intelligent Aggregation: Online content is already reaching a saturation point, in the future it will only get worse. Services that can swarm around related topics and cleanly present them will be huge. Present examples include services like TechMeme and Alltop.
2. Editorial Layers: A concept we have obviously deployed at Mahalo. It’s challenging and in some cases expensive, but necessary. When you get down to very granular niche searching, humans will always win.
3. User Generated Search: That actually scares me just to type… Wikia is going to be an interesting trail for this type of service. We also have an untapped amount of good usergen search data already. Right now it’s in the form of Digg/delicious voting based methods.
What are the other disruptions out there? Don’t say Twitter!
Talk 
