“Facebook’s explosive rate of growth and recent product releases, such as the prominent Newsticker, Top Stories on the newsfeed, and larger photos have all been focused on one goal: encouraging more sharing. As it turns out, it’s precisely this hyper-sharing that is threatening our sense of happiness.”
It’s not often that HBR really “gets” social media, but Daniel Gulati really nails it with this article.
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Two nice thoughts from this rather good bit by Felix Salmon:
“So one of the big reasons why online advertising has done so well is simply the negative one: online micropayments were a disaster, and never took off. But they’re much more compelling as a business model, and there’s a decent chance that at some point in the future the financial system as a whole is going to get its act together and put together something which actually works and which people are happy to adopt.”
This is an interesting stance to take given paywalls are still unproven (and in fact the Fin Review almost halved it’s paywall price yesterday). But I don’t think he’s too far off the mark, it’s just the timing of it all wil be slower than a lot of people (and publishers) assume. Once we get used to contactless payment in the real world via NFC, I think we’ll start to get used to the same sort of fast and invisible payments online. But this won’t be for mainstream news on the desktop – it will be for content or information people need and want immediately on their mobile. This is already happening with Angry Birds levels. Once we change this fundamental payment heuristic, we’ll see a big change in how we experience the internet. Display ads will (hopefully) fade away, but advertising certainly won’t disappear.
“It’s the measurement fallacy: people tend to think that what they can measure is what they want, just because they can measure it. And it’s endemic in the online advertising industry. In fact, with very few exceptions, I’ve never even wanted to look at online ads: its quite astonishing, the degree to which we’ve collectively trained ourselves to ignore ads when we bring up a web page. And what that says to me is that online advertising is missing something really huge.”
Nothing to add to this. He’s dead right.
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“What the composer had was a kind of menu, a packet of seeds, you might say. And those musical seeds, once planted, turned into the piece. And they turned into a different version of that piece every time. So for me, this was really a new paradigm of composing. Changing the idea of the composer from somebody who stood at the top of a process and dictated precisely how it was carried out, to somebody who stood at the bottom of a process who carefully planted some rather well-selected seeds, hopefully, and watched them turn into something.” – Brian Eno, on Edge
Brian Eno is talking here about a musical movement that happened in the last couple decades of last century. He talks about himself (and others such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and John Cage) as gardeners, not as architects. These guys wrote some amazing music back then (and still do), but they created it not through trying to control every single piece of their work. They created a system, and stood back and watched what grew out of those systems.
I think the vast majority of creative people working in this industry are architects. And yet in an age where you have absolutely no control over your idea once it’s out in the wild, we all need to be thinking a lot more like gardeners.
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“It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone.”
This interview with William Gibson is full of brilliance. But I really loved his ideas around imagining the future. Particularly given a few recent videos, like this one on the future of work, and this one on the future of human interfaces, and the fact that we’re about to hit that period of the year when every man and their dog puts forward their “trend predictions” and “visions” of 2012.
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Towards the end of the year I usually find myself doing lots of “the future of…” presentations.
This year, unsurprisingly, the big focus is on mobile, tablets, NFC, and Big Data.
I almost never mention QR Codes, but I always get asked about them. – “Will NFC replace QR Codes?” “Should we still be using QR Codes?” ” Does anyone in the real world actually scan them?”
The Telstra Smartphone Index in June 2011 reported that only 1% of Australian smartphone internet users regularly use QR codes to access sites. That’s compared to 23% who type a URL to their browser, and 16% who search. Yet it’s hard to find a print or outdoor ad without them these days. So why are we still seeing QR Codes everywhere?
Read MoreThis post was also published on Technology Spectator.
“The computer industry is converging with the television industry in the same sense that the automobile converged with the horse.” – George Gilder , Life after the Television
IPTV seems to be on the verge of hitting the buzzword bingo card. I’ve had a lot of questions on it recently, and figured I’d post a few key bits I’d written in responses.
Read MoreLast weekend I found myself staring at a totally blank iPhone.
Through the process of re-installing apps and changing all the settings, I made a conscious decision to limit what was possible on my mobile.
I can’t access my work email, only my calendar. I have no social apps – if I’m really bored and want to check Twitter or Google+, I can always use the web interface. The only news app I have is FT, and that won out mainly because I like the idea of web-apps, and they’ve nailed it.
It is, on the face of it, a pretty boring iPhone. Only one screen of icons.
At the end of this process I realised that mobile is completely broken. I don’t believe this is the best we can do with ultra-portable, super-powerful, convergent technology.
Read MoreThe below was originally published on Technology Spectator.
Sometime in the past few days, Google+ passed 20 million users. That’s not remarkable just because it’s the fastest piece of technology ever adopted. It’s remarkable because there are 20 million people who are putting a lot of trust in Google. A trust that this time is not simply about privacy, but something much bigger, and arguably much more important - the trust of creating and curating what defines us as a global, national, and a local community. The ideas that create culture.
Read MoreGiven the rather hectic pace of TED, I thought I’d summarise the last two days in one final post.
Alain De Botton spoke about religion 2.0. It was brilliant. I won’t go on much more because I’m sure it’s all going to be in his book.
Erik Hursman is one of the people responsible for Ushahidi. If you’ve never seen or head of Ushahidi, go check it out. Started as a way of mapping reports of violence in Kenya through an open-source and accessible platform (anyone could SMS reports and they would instantly show up), the platform expanded to become applicable to all sorts of crises where collection, visualisation, filtering and aggregation of data was critical.
Read MoreTED’s all about “Ideas Worth Spreading”. So in that spirit, here’s something that someone didn’t say at TED today: You shut your goddamn carbon-taxin’ mouth is a piece by Geoff Lemon. Please go read it if you haven’t. (I’ve just noticed the original post is down, luckily Marc testart re-published is here)
Geoff’s amazing, and is not just the most talented writer I know, but one of the most amazing people I have had the pleasure of spending many beers with. The media’s epic overhyping of the apparent assault on Australian’s “cost of lifestlye” seems to be reaching ridiculous proportions. I’m glad that with this piece Geoff has probably reached more people in the last 24 hours than Andrew Bolt.
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