After reading Dave McClure’s post, subtitled “How to Take Down Facebook”, I think that, between all the f-bombs and Generation Z three-letter acronyms, Dave makes a few good points.  For example, Twitter is better for following famous people (to which I would counter, Facebook is better for enabling fame).

Dave wants to see Facebook become an enabler of more private communities.  To his burrito point, we could say that Facebook alerady does this through threaded, instant mail messaging.  We could also respond to his friend overload point that perhaps Dave doesn’t know how to manage his profile privacy settings, or that perhaps Dave should start a Fan Page and whittle down his friend relationships to the bare essentials.

Bottom line is, true intimacy in relationships cannot be fostered by an inorganic structure like Facebook, in my opinion.  Intimacy is about mutual experiences, not a mutual sounding board.  We all have telephones–does this make us more intimate in our relationships than when we’re together, shoulder-to-shoulder, or working on the same outcome as a team?  Hardly.  Facebook is merely a platform for communication, and while it plays a role in enabling quality relationships, it is certainly a subserviant role.

My advice to Dave McClure is, you probably don’t have 2000 actual friends, so fix it. Delete. Delete. Delete.

But to give up those synchronous connections on Facebook is to give up the influence that comes with having a large audience.  And herein lies the real challenge, if I can rephrase what Dave is saying here into something a little more succinct: Facebook is mediocre at protecting the privacy of celebrities, while Twitter is very good.

The effect of this can be seen in Facebook’s inability to provide more intimate connections, and in Twitter’s ability to prevent celebrities from having to spill anything more than they’d like to on their profile.

Friend Mike at Chronic Dawgs put up a post last week about how Joshua Cribbs, the best football kick returner of all time, is feeling under-appreciated by his team, the Cleveland Browns.  To put it in perspective, Josh had four return touchdowns and nearly broke the all-time pro football record for all-purpose yards this season.  No small accomplishment.

So the guy’s a big deal.  Anyway, he makes about a million a year and was insulted by a contract modification offer the Browns made for 1.4 million a year.  (As an aside, I’d be pretty happy making half that if my job was to play a game and stay in top physical shape using the best gyms and trainers in the world, but I digress.)

The din around Cleveland surrounding Josh’s contract has been constant and obnoxious the last few weeks. It all started when the new team president Mike Holmgren came in and started hiring coaches.  Fans feel that management has turned their back on Cribbs and are ignoring his request for a contract (never mind he has three years left on his current one) while they build up the white-collar staff in preparation for next season.

It’s amazing how much Twitter action I’ve seen on this subject. People are tweeting, from as far away as Kuwait, using the #payjoshcribbs hash tag. There are Facebook fan pages called “Pay Josh”, and I myself have received 7 to 10 separate invitations to support Josh’s cause.  Of all the causes to worry about.

Yet public opinion doesn’t influence an NFL owner’s bank account. Just ask the Browns, who just put the finishing touches on their ninth losing season since returning as an expansion franchise.

Take William Shatner, for example.  Now here’s a guy whose charisma and silly selfless sense of humore could go vast distances on Twitter–much like M.C. Hammer (whose tweets are frequent and awesomely down-to-earth).  Yet the Shat only follows 4 people.

Why?

Well, because it’s not the Shat.  It’s one of his agency people.  I’d be surprised if the Shat and the majority of folks in his ilk even use a computer on a daily basis. 

If I sound let down, it’s because I am.  Guy Kawasaki tweeted a list of Hollywood elite on Twitter. Turns out most of them are merely professionally managed, third-person twits with no more personal touch than one of their attorneys or public relations experts.

The same argument is occuring over what the Cloud is and isn’t.  I have my own theory that the symantics will ultimately give way to widespread social adoption (as was the case with Web 2.0) or cultural irrelevance (as is arguably the case with VoIP, thank you very much AT&T/Verizon).   In the end, Cloud computing will either get over the hump because there’s something truly compelling in it, or it will fade away into abscurity along with push web, active desktop, Vonage, and a thousand other nifty concepts that have had their 15 minutes of fame.

So what IS cloud computing?  In my estimation, the cloud is the same thing we used to call web hosting up until about 2006–with one arguable, barely-noticable difference.  Since 2006, the availability and cost-effectiveness of both Blade infrastructure and virtualization technology has increased substantially, meaning that it’s now possible to compartmentalize and virtualize the core pieces of hosting technology that run the server side of the web.

In essence, you can turn networking resources on and off when you need them, serving peak loads and ignoring moments of non-demand.  Indeed, before we had this monicre, “the cloud”, we had other words for the same idea, chief among them “on demand computing”.  Thanks IBM.  The reason we’re using the cloud to describe  this now instead of on deman computing probably has something to do with the Web 2.0 thought evolution.  People view the web in a much more organic way now.  It’s a playground, a garden, and an ecosystem, serving as a center point between instant communities of millions of people and interest.

That degree of just-in-time social organization requires a name that lends itself to mud, muck, cloudiness, and disorganization. Hence, the cloud, not on-demand computing. Not Web 3.0, which itself offers little meaning beyond a chronological sequence.

Yet the cloud is merely a brand, a catch-phrase designed to market the engineering ideas we in the tech community get all hot and bothered about to people whose purse-strings ultimately power the fulfillment of those ideas.  With that goal in mind, the cloud is a very poor brand indeed.

Now I know IBM was selling servers, but maybe they had it right with on-demand.  Guys, the “cloud” doesn’t need to marketed.  Let’s stop trying to hard-sell something that we’ve been using for years already.

I spent ten bucks for MLB Gameday Live on my iPhone.  Every game, every radio broadcast, plus the gameday diagrams, video highlights, and consolidated video replays.  Awesome.  In fact, the best value on the App Store if you ask me.

Only one problem: the local broadcaster of the Cleveland Indians, WTAM 1100 AM, which refers to itself with the catchphrase “the Big One”, hasn’t had a working stream of its broadcasts for over a week.  So when there’s a day game, like today, I am forced to listen to the opposing team’s broadcast team.

I could understand if I missed a portion of a broadcast due to technical problems at WTAM, but come on, the thing’s been down for over a WEEK.  What’s worse, the excellent iHeartRadio app for iPhone, which also carries the ClearChannel affiliate WTAM, has been absent the live stream for a over a week, too.  I couldn’t even listen to their web-browser stream yesterday when I tried.

So I’m listening to the Minnesota Twins crummy announcer instead of Tom Hamilton, the Indians’ announcer.

Come on WTAM, fix this. And keep it fixed.

1 – Microsoft lost big when it walked away empty-handed from Facebook, and Redmond’s been regretting it ever since.

2- Microsoft’s unexciting efforts in the music-business, including the Zune, may now have renewed hope, as MySpace is probably the only real 2.0 music destination on the web (iTunes is hardly a 2.0 destination; nice try Apple fans).

3 – Silverlight sucks and nobody wants it except Redmond.  Those page takeover ads for the next Batman movie that you see on MySpace occur courtesy of Flash, not Silverlight.  Of course, this won’t change that, either.

4 – MySpace is desperate to clean up its image as the red light district of social networking.  Who better than squeaky-clean Microsoft to bring a little much-needed legitimacy to the table?

5 – There are a greater percentage of Mac users on Facebook than on MySpace.  OK, I’m guessing here. But I bet there’s a pretty Mac-favorable ratio on the Facebook side that doesn’t exist on MySpace.

6 – Windows Mobile is late to the social networking party, and not fashionably so.  Hey, wait, what party ISN’T Windows Mobile late to?

7 – Microsoft would consider making an offer for MySpace, if it weren’t for the horrible fact that MySpace is the world’s largest ColdFusion abuser.  Eek, that’ll scare off a .Net dev in a hurry.

8 – MySpace’s Hold ‘Em poker apps are better than Facebook’s.  (It’s true.)

9 – Microsoft holds in very high regard the design ethic of MySpace (which looks like a 1998-era web site and always causes people to wonder where in the hell the link to edit a photo album is).

10 – MySpace still garners some undeniable clout, even if it’s with a segment of consumers that are less likely to have graduated college and more likely to still be rocking a Pentium 3.

Come on people!  The reason Obama was elected is this: 2x the “McCain’s a dud candidate” than “Obama for iPhone rocks”.   And people have long worked in groups to dissect social economics.  It’s called Economics 101–you might’ve even attended it yourself when you were in college. Churches and synagogues offer personal economics ministries–and so do tax planners, for that matter.

If we’re looking for shining examples of how social networking is going to change the world, are these really the ones we’re putting on a pedestal?   The article I linked to espouses admiration to people who do good things and get virtual karma points, all because of social networking.  A-hem.  Human decency doesn’t need Facebook.

We’re searching, it seems, for some greater purpose to social media. But why do we have to think we’re going to solve world hunger because of Web 2.0. Why can’t it just be fun?

Social Media and Newspapers #1 – Newspapers and Social Networking: Bridging the Gap

How do newspapers embrace social media in order to retain and grow their content audience?

Listen now.

K, guys, when some impressively large fella is rapping to his MacBook Pro about social networking, can you really question if this social networking thing is mainstream?

All that above together with the new features introduced with Skype 2.8 for Mac made me wonder: can Skype ever become the next big thing in the field of “social networking” rather than “only” the most popular VoIP service ever? Let’s try to analyze how far Skype is from this “big picture”.

Users are not certainly a problem for Skype. With over 200M users (not active, but downloads), it’s not far from the huge 150M active users of Facebook. What Facebook is missing at this time is a powerful desktop client. Despite the world of consumer services is moving to the “cloud”, having an always on client on your PC has many benefits, such as being always available and experiencing a realtime interaction with your friends.

I don’t know if a desktop client is the best place to do social activity management.  The browser is good for what’s it’s good for: rich browsing experiences.  But I don’t want to change the form factor of the IM client just to accomodate a feed list or yet another messaging utility.  Skype needs to stay in the same size and shape it has now: on the right side of my screen, occupying maybe 10% of my real estate.

Plus, the other thing that’s cool about Facebook is that nothing has to be immediate.  The realtime nature of Skype conversations is precisely why I’d sometimes rather communicate on Facebook, or e-mail, etc.  But please read Luca’s post, as it is a really cool idea that warrants deeper inspection.

As these two pieces have approached it, you’d think the newspaper, and print media in general, have no merit at all when compared to the web.  But this is arguably not true, and a gross simplification of a more complex problem. Sadly, the people who’ve argued the web allows cheaper, faster, more demographically-appealing news coverage are right. But, because they look at consumer trends alone, they’re wrong about the roots of the problem facing papers today.

That is, the web isn’t killing papers with its competitive advantages. The web is killing papers by beating them over the head with their own cockiness. First, newspapers they’re always the purest, best source for news–and this is sometimes true, but more because of the deep pockets of paper financiers than because newspapers employ English majors and journalism grads. To say you need more than a sense of fairness, a knack for clarity, and a smidge of brevity to succeed in the reporting business is only a partial truth: but the flip-side of this expression, the one that says only nimrods work for online outlets, is false. Newspapers employ good purveyors of the written word, and so do web sites.

But the thing that’s killing newspapers right now isn’t a disparity in newsmaking power: In fact, they can get the news to their web sites as fast, or faster, than the most well-informed blog or Slate.  Actually the real problem in the paper business lies in the dimishing value of print advertising to potential advertisers.  The web has a near-zero production cost when compared to the composing costs of a newspaper. This means advertisers aren’t required to spend as much money on the web to get the same mind share in return, at least in theory.

Furthermore, content management techniques on the web outstrip any current CM thinking in the print periodical industry.  The web is a cheaper, faster output mechanism that doesn’t require QuarkXpress or InDesign labor, doesn’t require expensive inks and press upkeep, and doesn’t impose a diesel bill for distribution. Yet these issues alone don’t undermine the success of the newspaper. Remember, newspapers still think they are all-in better than web sites.  Cockiness is at the heart of the matter.

The web also empowers the news preferences of the consumer, something newspapers have struggled with. Lifestyle nonsense doesn’t matter to the guy who wants the business section and real estate doesn’t matter to the single twenty-one year-old.  The web solves this by putting the end-user in command of his news consumption preferences. Of course, it does so at the expense of the tactile pleasure of handling and reading the news from the printed page. While sentimental, this can’t be over-valued.

That said, it’s easy to pick on papers because of what the’re bad at. But there are still free rags that turn a profit.  And there are still monthlies that turn a profit. I write for several of them. There are also small-market dailies that break even or make a small profit by concentrating on the news that is hyperlocal in nature: high school sports, local arts, and the like.

But if the Times and the small-market news shop alike are going to be in business in 10 years, it’s going to have to be online.  The boomers will start dying and the diminishing value of print advertising will so burden the print industry that the web will be, for some shops, their only option.

Hopefully, my friends in the print industry recognize this long enough before it happens that survival is still an option.  The newspaper industry must first recognize that classified advertising is not the model of the future but of the past.  Paying $40 for something you can do on EBay or Craig’s List isn’t going to work any more.  Moreover, display advertising can continue to work but only if newspapers learn how to subsidize print production costs using the web. This is a difficult proposition at best, since the web itself has no physical production costs to speak of.

Newspapers: here are your keys to survival.  1. Keep it local. 2. Play the web game and learn how commerce works online. Classified advertising is a dying ilk.  3. If print production and daily delivery remain close to profitable, find out who your customers are. If they’re over 50, by and large, it’s time to move online for good.

I hate to say it. I really do.

The problem was that the words he was using – “gay,” “lesbian” and “bisexual” – were being filtered from text chats and were not being allowed in the naming of clubs or in postings in club forums. Marsh, who is straight but supports gay rights, said he raised the issue with Home community managers during the private beta test, but the problems persisted after the public beta introduction of Home on Dec. 11.

“I can understand if they’re filtering out profanity, but if feel like it’s discrimination,” Marsh said. “By blocking a word like ‘gay,’ which is a preferred term by the gay community, you’re encouraging it as a bad word.”

There are a couple of things that strike me here. First, if you live in the midwest and have junior high-aged kids, the word “gay” is indeed used, too frequently, as a derogatory expression.  If a teenager doesn’t like something he or she calls it gay.  It’s quite common.  I don’t know if it’s vulgar or not, but I don’t believe it’s censorship-worthy.  Second, lobbying the proprietors of a miserable, unpromising project like Playstation Home about gay rights is like picketing fifty miles from the nearest Wal-Mart: unlikely to have any effect, and completely out of place.

If you don’t like something in Home, there are plenty of other options to suit your social (and yes, sexual) preferences: like Second Life, Sims Online, the list goes on and on.  Heck, I’ve known (multiple) people whose marriages have been destroyed over affairs that started on World of Warcraft.  Bottom line, if Sony thinks it’s accomplishing something by banning the use of the word “gay”, they’re wrong.  And if a gay activist thinks he’s accomplishing something by complaining about it to Sony, he’s probably wrong too.

Interestingly, Sony has also opted to block the words “Christ” and “Jew”.  So I guess neither gays nor religious advocates will have much success setting up special interest groups.  The article goes on to say that because it’s early yet for Home, Sony can be forgiven.  I say take a cue from Linden Lab: Second Life is the wild wild west; nothing is off limits.  Kind of makes it more fun.

And I guess that’s the bottom line.  In our initial evaluation of Home, my girlfriend and I basically came to the conclusion that it wasn’t fun.   If Sony can solve THAT problem, all this other stuff would be worth talking about.

2008: the harbinger year for a revolution in the telecom industry?  No, not exactly.  Nor was 2008 the year of action of for end-to-end VoIP.  But 2008 was a good year for me.   I more or less quit consulting on VoIP, as the majority of clients who need help with VoIP are too small for my firm, and the top 5% of clients available in the field are too big for it.  The in-betweeners are dominated by a group of recruiters who beat each other up and submit VoIP candidates to internal employment positions I can’t be interested in.

Twitter was an interesting subject, retrospectively, in 2008.  On one hand it’s dying at the hands of Facebook. On the other hand, it’s got so much vigor and a following, too.  Twitter is one of those things that, even as an objectively expert witness on the subject of social media, I still struggle to grasp.  I wonder what the sex appeal is, minus all the fluff of a LinkedIn or a Facebook, of Twitter.

Sony launched a social network for the PS3.  The world essentially yawned, already beaten to death with the concept as previously implemented by things like Second Life, Sims Online, and World of Warcraft.  Now, if Nintendo had launched a social network along the lines of Animal Crossing–now that might be cool.

I received a pool table and air hockey table for Christmas and have nowhere to put either of them. At the moment my basement is full.  My son wants me to move the foozball table to the living room. A-hem. Kids take a while to develop decorating taste, I guess. Maybe in 2009.

(Editor’s note: I told you so.)

So it certainly makes sense that Home, a free online virtual world geared around selling other PS3 titles, would rapidly become filled with greasy, horny kids.  And since it’s not a Wii title, Home’s remote control citizens are demographically lopsided in favor of males.  What do you get when you combine a legion of aggressive, pimply guys with a small number of curious gals?

Well, it certainly is offputting to women, no question. Not to mention–neither my son, nor my daughter, 11 and 13, will be allowed to use Home.

So is the answer turning Home into a police state, a la Brittania in 1984, where sex was essentially illegal? Perhaps we should redefine online sex as what it really is: laughably poor behavior. Problem is, Big Brother can’t monitor everybody.  Even in 1984, he couldn’t.  Winston, the main character, and his woman still found a way to do the deed–and Winston, with everything to lose by breaking the law, was a brainwashed comrade.

So self-obsessed teenagers with nothing to lose aren’t likely to cooperate should Sony drop the hammer.

As if we really need ANOTHER social networking tool, this time geared around, ostensibly, advertising Blu Ray discs with video games on them in a virtual world called “Home”, Sony is launching their virtual world on December 11.  We previously covered this in a post that provided one of the first public glimpses of the Home beta.

So what IS Home?  Well, it’s a subset of Second Life with shorter learning curve, better graphics, and no built-in economy.  It seems that Sony has decided to launch a virtual world that has none of the annoyances of Second Life, but also none of the intrigue. What determines the success or failure of this thing is how well Sony can integrate Home with other titles.  But I think I smell a flop cooking.

New N-Series flagship? Definitely.

With a full Qwerty keyboard and a bent towards social networking, the N97 will certainly outshine the iPhone in at least some respects.  Among the new Nokia’s features are persistent network connections–something iPhone apps have been locked out of by Apple for “performance reasons.”

It’s curious that Nokia’s announcements keys so heavily on social networking, something that Apple has more or less ignored over the years. (Remember .Mac?  That was Apple’s idea of social networking I think.)  Location-based social features are something Apple has used in their TV ads for the iPhone, but the app they use in the ad (Loopt) isn’t allowed a persistent connection, limiting its usefulness.

Now, if the N97 is as usable as the iPhone and hits retail at a price point that folks can swallow (Symbian UI has nothing on the iPhone in my opinion), then this could be a serious hit.  I’m looking forward to trying one out.

See, the Web 2.0 push has Cleveland business people shrugging their shoulders.  Things like the automation of social networks and the need to adopt a social networking strategy in every business are foreign, newfangled ideas to many in the midwest.

Yet in parts east and west, people live and die by social connectedness. So does Gary. So do I.  But we’re birds of a feather, “coastal thinkers” who’ve somehow managed to set up shop in northeast Ohio.  A great place to be sure–the leading bio-technology center in the world, a leadership zone for polymer chemistry and alternative energy, as well as the place where my mom grew up–if not a little behind the times from the perspective of networking.

So listening to Gary’s ideas about how social networks are converging with the arena of “vouching”.  That is, the old-school “employment reference check” has turned into a sort of credential certfication app of social networks.   Ie., why bother checking References 1.0 when you can see a candidate’s entire network, read their network’s feedback, and read the feedback of the person providing the feedback?

Reputation management is one of the things businesses can do with social networking. There are dozens more.  But, at least in Cleveland, we’ve only just begun to communicate that to our local business leaders.

High school sports is a fantastic market opportunity for those in the media business, and that’s why I’m excited to be a part of LocoFan.net, a social networking and personal publishing platform being launched by one of my clients, LCPP Inc.   As you may’ve noticed, high school sports has garnered much attention from the new media lately, including launches of stats-oriented services like HighSchoolSports.net and PrepSportsNation.com.

These sites are great, but they stop short of empowering the social discourse surrounding sports that makes prep athletics so much fun: I’m talking about boosting, smack talking, Saturday-morning quarterbacking, and of course, media sharing.  Recognizing the opportunity to seize on the great hunger for high school sports social outlets, LCPP and I have been working together on LocoFan.net for the last six months or so.  We hope you’ll enjoy the result.

It’s part Facebook, part Typepad, and part Sports Page. We’ve put several core features into this service that give it a unique sports feeling, while leveraging the essentials of Web 2.0:

• Full-blown personal publishing platform with XMLRPC support, so it’s compatible with Live Writer, Twitter, Technorati, and other services that leverage remote posting / browsing.
• Photo sharing with galleries.
• Video hosting and sharing.
• “Fans”:  Instead of buddies or friends, the node relationship between users on LocoFan is not mutually exclusive (something I’ve always found frustrating about MySpace).  That is, you can become somebody’s “Fan” even if they choose not to be your fan.
• Integrated private e-mail style messaging.  All the anonymity. None of the spam.
• “Faves”:  Pick your favorite teams, and the LocoFan network uses your Faves in a number of cool ways. You can Team Tag any post, placing your favorite team’s color block on your posting, and aggregating the post into that team’s dynamically-generated home page.
• LocoRank: Think your team has the most fans?  Think again.  LocoFan ranks teams according to the amount of activity associated with each team via Team Tags, so bragging rights are never in doubt.
• Super-easy customizable theme for your LocoBlog.  Pick your team colors and favorite fonts, and LocoFan gives your blog a special customized look. We’ve even included over a dozen widgets that you can snap into your blog’s sidebar to further customize.
• Avatars with links to the user’s LocoBlog are integrated throughout the site, in comments, posts, the “featured LocoFans” section of the home page, private messaging, and in your “Fanbox”, the area of your LocoBlog where the world can see who you’re a fan of.

So visit LocoFan, which is now in public beta.  There’s something fresh and new here, and I would love to hear your feedback.