BigShinyThing

Call us contrarian when it comes to over-hyped new tools, but in our experience, early adopters end up with a lot of useless old tech piled in the back of their cupboards (Newton MessagePad? Check. First generation Nokia WAP phone? One of those as well. Sigh). We’ve pissed away enough money on not-quite-fit-for-purpose ‘innovations’ that we even waited until O2 dropped the price a hundred quid before buying the obviously-bloody-brilliant-from-day-one iPhone.

So pardon the lack of excitement we’ve shown thus far for microblogging poster-child Twitter. We’ve never been much interested in the textual ramblings of ad execs and VCs, or the geeky late night geekings of geeks. But Twitter seems to have transcended the demographics of its early adopters, and is now not just mainstreaming, but actually helping people. Data point — evidently Twitter users in China alerted the world to the recent earthquake even before the US Geological Survey picked up on it (and that’s their job!). While closer to home, we’re finding that microblogging Twitter-stylee actually fits nicely into our post-FaceBook networked world of intimate strangers (and intimate strangeness!). All part of the ongoing Great Adjustment of social meaning. Go on. You know you want to.

If you’re interested, we’re darrellberry and bigshinything on Twitter. Share your Twitter IDs in the comments to this post, if you want.

We’ve lost the last day of our lives playing on the closed beta of ‘image bookmarking’ site ffffound. And so have our design- and photography-loving friends. So we guess that’s a big thumbs up.

ffffound is — like the best 2.0-ish sites — dead simple. Install a bookmarklet into your browser, then, when you see an image you like on any site, anywhere, mouse over it, click the FFFFOUND button, and the magic ffffound fairies will add that image to your collection on the ffffound site, where other people can find and favourite it. Kind of a stripped-down flickr for stolen (sorry — ‘quoted’) images, meets Digg, with a collaborative filtering recommendation system under the hood. And that’s it. No tagging, no text: just images and a community of image fetishists. It shouldn’t be as addictive as it is. But it is. The closed beta has obviously attracted a community of design obsessives, and the content is generally excellent. Shame the screensaver seems to be buggered on our Macs.

We think ffffound is One to Watch. We’ve already used up our complimentary invites, so you’l need to get your access elsewhere, sorry. But get on the phone to your friends and try to get signed up.

Why do big companies like to stifle little ones? You’d have thought that in the brave new Web 2.0 world, big brands would have a better way to deal with mergers and acquisitions but apparently not. Example: we are currently witnessing a major user-generated riot as long-term Flickr users are informed by Yahoo! that they will soon have to use a Yahoo! id to access and use the photo-sharing site.

We’re with the rioters.

Yahoo! bought Flickr a while back. Since then it’s grown hugely and doubtless benefited from Yahoo!’s grown-upness and corporate clout. As for us users, the folk who actually populate Flickr with our stuff, Yahoo!’s presence has until now been pretty benign. We’ve also been patted on the back for being ‘old skool’ by Flickr when we sign in — i.e. a user from before the buyout. This makes us feel kind of with it and proud in a very ‘get me i’m an early adopter’ type way. We’re also the biggest marketing tool Flickr has. Only yesterday we were earnestly telling colleages that ‘Flickr changed my life’. And it has.

Here’s an email that one of us sent on receiving the mail saying that I would soon need a Yahoo! id to sign in — the petulant tone is particularly important:

I don’t want a sucky Yahoo! account.

I hate Yahoo!

I like being an old skool user.

Pooooh.

I guess that Flickr/Yahoo! are betting they can afford to lose the old-timers for the sake of more joined-upness and the ability to flog Yahoo! products to the Flickr users who are left. We’re just left feeling that something brilliant has now been tainted and that — much like when Google took over YouTube — the party is somewhat over. And — more worrying for Flickr — I don’t know if I’m going to be envangelising about Flickr for much longer — not if it involves becoming a Yahoo! user. Urgh.

Blog overlord Nick Denton of Gawker Media has started to behave like a proper media magnate. An ex Financial Times journalist, Denton made his fortune on First Tuesday (remember them?) a dotcom social networking site that reportedly sold for $50 million and Moreover Technologies, which sold for a reported $39 million. Ever the entrail-reader of digital media, Denton has established a blogging empire in Gawker Media which produces tightly-written blogs on Manhattan media, tech, the LA scene and seemingly anything else which could interest the young professional.

But Denton’s clearly playing a long game. In recent days he’s put two underperforming sites up for sale, reorganised others and even sacked several editorial staff.

The changes come as Denton when apparently on top of his game. Page views at his sites have doubled in the last year; Gawker Media and Nielsen/NetRatings put monthly unique visitors at 4.2 million. The crucial advertisers flock after the sites’ ohsodesirable demographic: Gawker’s media pack boasts “The majority of our readers are 26-35. Around 75% are university graduates, 18% with advanced degrees; over 20% more attended/attending university. Almost 30% have a HHI of over 100K; Over 70% above 50K.” At one point last year the buzz got so loud that even Vanity Fair was forced to take note and gave the key staff of Gawker and Defamer their own double-paged spread.

Denton told the New York Times, “Better to sober up now, before the end of the party. We are becoming a lot more like a traditional media company. You launch a site, you have great hopes for it and it does not grow as much as you wanted. You have to have the discipline to recognise what isn’t working and put your money and efforts into those sites that are.”

Traditional media owners beware – they’re not as fluffy as they look, these bloggers. As Denton notes, “The barrier to entry in Internet Media is low. The barrier to success is high.”

MySpace mashup SingleStat.us is no more. The site enabled users to find out when another MySpacer’s relationship status changed (feeling like you’re not getting enough attention from the freaks? Change status to ‘single’ and stand back!) — a classic third-party hacker addition to an existing service. According to TechCrunch, MySpace lawyers have ‘cease and desist’ed the site’s owners, and claim that the system caused MySpace ‘substantial and irreparable harm’ due to the ‘undue burden’ it placed on their systems.

All of which flies a bit in the face of MySpace’s claims to membership of the Web 2.0 elite — unlike many contemporary sites, MySpace has yet to publish an open API, which would give wannabe mashers-up of the system a documented, manageable interface into MySpace’s internal workings — in the light of which it’s hardly surprising, given MySpace’s success, to see people developing their own ‘unofficial’ techniques for MySpace hacks and tweaks, as SingleStat.us had done.

When BigShinyThing raised the ‘missing API’ question with MySpace at the recent Mashup* session in London, their reply was that MySpace is ‘worried about the security implications of open source’. As open source is an entirely different class of thing to an open API, we suspect their representative was simply a bit confused about this whole ‘how the Internet works’ thing. Nevermind.

Maybe they’ll get there, or maybe they’ll keep locking out the people who care enough about their product to extend it, and who see enough unexpressed potential in it to build profitable symbiotic systems around what it does. If that’s the case, good luck to them when a serious competitor comes along, which, unlike MySpace itself, actually encourages some modern mashup fun at its periphery. Stay tuned.

Back in the day, Jaron Lanier invented Virtual Reality — or at least Virtual Reality in its original 80s form: helmets, 3D, the works. Since then, his pundity has become an intelligent, annoying and often insightful thorn in the side of mainstream digital culture. His latest volley is against a meta-concept that underlies the Wikipedia and much of Web 2.0 — the belief that ‘no-one is smarter than everyone’:

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous.

It’s a good, contrarian, rant. Enjoy.

[Via the ever-stimulating Edge]

Earlier in May, US lawmakers reacted to public fears about online child abuse with proposals for a bill (DOPA) which would block access to social networking sites and Internet chat rooms in most federally funded schools and libraries. Too blunt and misdirected a weapon for the purpose? Many think so — to the extent that Business Week ran a recent analysis which claims that DOPA could spell an early end to the nascent world of Web 2.0:

[DOPA] could rule out content from any number of Internet companies, including Yahoo! and Google. What’s more, DOPA would prohibit sites that enable users to create their own content and share it. That covers a wide swath of the online world, known colloquially as Web 2.0, where users actively create everything from blogs to videos to news-page collections.

Of course, the failure of a few tech startups is less important than the safety of children. But as with all such panics, the question remains as to the real nature of any threat at hand, and how well the proposed legislative solution will address those real threats.

At this point it’s all a bit unclear — for starters, how much impact on kids’ unsupervised access to MySpace and friends will a simple ban on schools and libraries make? But hey! Subtlety is often lost when there’s a moral panic on, and this is just the latest of many. We’ll keep you informed.

For a nice overview of the ‘new reality’ of online youth, check out a recent interview between MIT’s Henry Jenkins and danah boyd. We’ve reported before on boyd’s view that social media sites function as ‘digital publics’ where young people — whose freedoms are heavily constrained in the physical world — can live more freely, via media ‘in which’ (and, crucially, ‘where’, these media being conceptualised and experienced as places) they feel completely ‘at home’.

So — the kids have a new ‘place’ to play. What’s the difference between MySpace and all the other places where generations of young people have hung out to get a bit of freedom — the park, the mall, the video arcade? Maybe the clue is in this quote from Jenkins:

Just as youth in a hunting society play with bows and arrows, youth in an information society play with information and social networks.

Bows and arrows, yes, but fast forward: during the Industrial Revolution, very few children played with live steam and drop forges. During the Atom Age and Cold War, kids never got hands-on with Deuterium-Tritium fusion reactions. But in the Information Age, they’ve got Access All Areas to the most culturally-transformative technologies of our time, and a fluency with them that comes only to digital natives. Children being children, they’ve been getting busy with these toys — people don’t grok where their kids are at because the kids have left the building. They’ve gone. Nobody noticed, while a whole generation bootstrapped itself up and out — offworld, into media-which-is-a-place, where they’re forging a new reality: a vibrant pop culture mashup of late consumerism and virtuality-enabled persona-hacking. And it’s in their world, not ours, that they’re going to learn, invent and grow up. We’ve lost them. Off into elseware. Gone.

Until childhood’s end: we tip 2015-2020 as the period when the grown-up children of this new world start to port their way of being back into our world, enacting their society, their way.

Expect a revolution.

We’re evidently not the only ones tantilised by the blurred out, pixelated non-sponsored brand identities on reality TV. The good people over at Ironic Sans obviously had some time on their hands, and decided to turn the problem into an opportunity. Presto: pre-pixellated clothing for reality TV contestants. Or any other media-whores.

And this being Web 2.0, their mocked-up ideas were made instantly available as the real thing using the on-demand printing services of the truly cool CafePress service. From idea to product probably took all of five minutes, with all the promotion happening word-of-mouth and -mouse online. Case study time, anyone?

And we have to wonder, idly, whether he’s actually trademarked these images…

The wisest words we’ve heard for a while on the subject come from MIT’s Advertsing Lab:

My take: throw in a recommendation engine. If people are to endure ads on their MySpace pages, at least let them and their friends pick the ads to see. If I know that my buddy is on the market for a new car, I’ll think there’s a better chance he’d appreciate a Toyota ad more than a random punch-the-monkey banner. And if a banner is funny or otherwise amusing (yes, there are amusing banners), people would recommend those too (just watch all these commecials uploaded on YouTube), eventually driving the overall quality of advertising up.

Well yes. Content is media. Respect its creators, learn the vernacular, and maybe the community will welcome your advertising content into its world. We’re particularly excited to see that great ads are accepted as simply being great clip media. And no we didn’t plant this on YouTube. It’s there because some punter loved it enough to do that themselves. And that’s worth thinking about.

Writing on the BBC News site, Internet law professor Michael Geist notes that:

The telecommunications and broadcast industries’ vision of the future of the internet invariably involves its convergence with television.

However, he argues, these plans may have been thrown into doubt, by the emergent phenomena of what he nicely terms ‘clip culture’:

The emergence of video sharing sites is yet another seemingly instant internet success story that has caught many by surprise.

Last month, two sites, MSN Video and Youtube, attracted nearly 10 million unique US visitors each.

[...] Telecommunications companies and intransigent broadcasters face an even tougher choice, as their vision of an on-demand converged internet, must now compete with the clip culture.

The emergence of clip culture represents a lot of unanticipated demand, for a lot of unanticipated content. And the lack of anticipation is what’s making the media giants twitchy: their fear is that betting the shop on converged IPTV might not be as sure a thing as they have thought. Read more in his article.

And as a nice example of the pull of clip culture, ladies and gentlemen — and because here in London it’s a cold rainy Friday and we could do with some inspiration — for your enjoyment, we present Sister Rosetta Tharpe and her electric guitar:

[Via our new favourite music blog, MoistWorks]

Move over Flickr. New-kid-on-the-blog (beta release, currently offline, better call the VCs in for another cash injection) photo-sharing/search site Riya is stirring up a storm.

Why? Advanced image processing, including in-image face recognition and text search. Want to find every picture of your ex? With Riya those pictures don’t have to be hand-tagged ‘insensitive slob’ to come up in your search results — the software knows who (and what) is in each image. ‘Find more pictures with this person in’ is just a click away. Or will be, when they iron out the bugs. Vapourware? Maybe. Or maybe, just maybe they really have what it takes, and simply decloaked a little early — nothing is riskier for a tech startup than to be in the media spotlight a couple of months before the product is ready for a credible beta release!

Either way they’ve been impressing the tech opinion formers. Check out CNET’s review and slideshow, or Riya’s award-winning presentation at the DEMO 06 techfest.

The dark side of Riya is in the implications that content-based search — particularly face-based search — have for privacy. That’s a wait-and-see. Certainly another interesting tool for the avid cyber-stalker.

We’ll keep you in the picture as the story progresses…

Good old Wired is obviously feeling the dotcom sap rising once again, and is limbering up for a long hot summer to be spent vigorously fanning the fires of hype.

We’re not quite at that level of frenzy yet. In the meantime, Wired is — like the rest of the ubergeeks — getting all worked up about ‘Web 2.0′, and has put together a nicely zeitgesity primer on what Web 2.0 means, how it works, and why it matters. Cut and paste some of this — indeed any of this — into your next PowerPoint prez, add in a couple of cutesy screengrabs of Flickr and your clients will just know you’re the right ones to win that account! You know it’s true!

Hell yes. If only Wired would resurrect Suck.Com then we’d know the Spirit of ’97 was truly back and walking amongst us. Give it time. Give it time.

As reported over at TechCrunch, new-on-the-block categorizer Vast has summed the appeal of a great dataset and a flexible API into three little words: Steal This Site.

It’s an irresistable offer! Until you think it through:

• Steal, as in: use all our data, innovate. Do your thing, but make sure we get a namecheck. Come play with our toys, but it’s our game and our rules. [Abbie Hoffman must be spinning in his grave.]
• This Site, as in: we’re cornering the market. Everyone will be part of our ecosystem, just like Google.

We’ve written at length about the DotCom 2.0 innovators’ use of public APIs as part of a ‘stealth’ strategy which creates space for revenue-making media and profits from others’ innovation. Web 2.0 might be all candy-apps and free data, but in many respects, web service providers like Vast hark back to the old days of bureau-hosted mainframe databases — if they pull the plug, all those cool, written-in-five-minutes-over-a-double-chai-latte applications that rely on them will be dead in the water.

Web 2.0 runs on the fuel of community-driven content, but the engines that grind value from that content are as centralised as ever. As Bruce Sterling put it recently in a well-worth-reading speech, paraphrasing Alan Liu (of The Laws of Cool fame:

[...] in the guise of empowering users through all this participatory fooforaw, Web 2.0 is actually a ploy to return the Internet’s technical power to the specialized geek clique that originally built Web 1.0. They stole our revolution, now we’re stealing it back. And selling it to Yahoo.

Don’t get us wrong — Vast looks cool. Very cool. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch. You’re not stealing their site. You’re spreading their meme, helping them corner their market, expanding their media surface. Bigging up their value for the inevitable IPO or selloff. And good for them: this is what late capitalism looks like, and damned if we aren’t part of it. But hey — we like a good old fashioned backlash as much as anyone.

There has been some good punditry on the edges of Web 2.0 this week. And some great new words. Julian Bleecker as been writing about Blogjects — networked objects which can report back on themselves, their actions and their environment. Blogjects are the early precursors of the pervasively networked Everyware (aka Ubiquitous Computing, Things That Think etc) that’s been kicking around in post-grad research circles for years.

Unlike those ivory tower projects, blogjects are, in the rough and ready spirit of noughties geekery, being hacked together right now. Previously we’re reported on pigeons which blog. The lastest upgrade version of Sony’s cutesy Aibo dogbot can blog as well. There’s something in the air (other than the networked ‘flying rats’) at the moment around this kind of thing, and Bleecker captures the zeitgeist well:

Occasionally objects, things, non-humans, non-subjects step out of their thingness to become more than lifeless props. Things can learn to walk upright, too, so as to distinguish themselves as valued companion species, with something to say, something to effect our disposition and attitude about our (we humans) role in managing and maintaining, or mismanaging and terrorizing the world in which we live.

The Sony designers who created the firmware upgrade for Aibo may have been unwitting participants in the Blogject evolution. The new version of the Aibo — a species whose future is uncertain — can take pictures of what it sees and establish a running blog of its whimsical musings. It’s hard to resist the significance of the extrapolation of this idea, particularly when thought of in the context of our elaborate and bizarre kinship associations with domestic pets — arguably our closest companion species.

Pets that blog are just the 21st century, networked world extension of the sometimes puzzling practice of giving pets “human” names like Bill, or referring to them with decidedly human kinship semantics like daughter or brother. As long as they have a network connection, why shouldn’t they get their Web 2.0 upgrade and participate in the circulation of media and content? Things now have a voice in the collective of human social exchange.

Has to be said that the robot dog blogs are pretty same-y. But then, they’re blogs made by robot dogs. What do you expect? Shakespeare?

Dozens of web 2.0 company logos have been gathered up and posted on Flickr (where else?). Via BoingBoing.

As the third part of our Dotcom 2.0 trilogy, we offer some thoughts on the strategy behind the nascent Dotcom 2.0 boom.

After a lot of reflection, we think we’ve seen the light: Dotcom 2.0 is using the exponential growth of networks, and the enthusiasm of consumers to make their own content using their tools — in each instance of which there’s a little of their ‘media DNA’ — to create a ‘Springtime for New Media’ which will eclipse anything seen before.

Get the skinny over at our sister site, Cluster.

It’s not even yet Spring, and dotcom fever has beaten avian flu to become the first pandemic of the year. Those infected are either dusting off their elevator pitches from 1999 and getting their Aeron chairs out of hock, or profoundly suspicious that it’s all a false alarm: that the slow boom is about to turn to another decisive bust. Google is the poster child of Dotcom 2.0, but recently lost a (meaningless) $15.3b of share value in a single day. What does it all mean?

As we’ve said before: we think, this time around, that what will sort the winners from the losers, the dotgones from the dotgonnas, is the degree to which the hopeful new startups, all beamingly optimistic and wifi-ready, realise one simple truth:

Dotcom 2.0 isn’t about selling stuff over the web.

It’s about creating and giving away tools through which consumers themselves can create: new media, new businesses, new ways of being. And then using those innovations — the user-created ones — in turn as fresh media channels through which to spread content, marketing messages, other tools which in themselves create more opportunities for innovation — a self-feeding networked ecosystem, Gaia for the Internet, in which there’s opportunity aplenty for everyone with an idea or something to say.

That’s the dream. The reality? Compare and contrast, for example, Kodak’s latest attempt to get with the wired generation (oh, and survive as a brand): a subscription-based photoblogging system — which has been roundly dissed from all sides — with the storming success of Flickr. Sometimes dreams come true.

This isn’t the old ‘give away the razor and charge for the blades’ business model. It’s about genuinely giving away the best technology available, and then making it even more useful by allowing others to hack it, expand it, use it for their own purposes — retaining just enough control over the resulting creations that there’s still ad-sales, profiling or some other revenue stream built-in to the DNA [or technically, the EULA and API] of whatever the community makes with it downstream. Look at Skype. Look at Google. Look at eBay. They’re not flogging a product — they’re blazing a trail. Dotcom 2.0 is all about accelerating its own evolution, and empowering consumers — even people simply uploading and tagging their holiday snaps — to work as hackers who are adding value, information and with every action pushing the whole thing forward. Dotcom 2.1? Ready for demo this afternoon. 2.2.1? Here Monday. We’re all part of it.

With the above in mind, we offer you in closing the venture capitalist David Hornick’s recent anecdote Company Building For Eight Year Olds (via Gawker), in which an attempt to explain to his son ‘what daddy does at the office’ turns into an object lesson of how the Dotcom 2.0 ecosystem works to enable (even small) people to make their mark on the world. To horribly paraphrase Frank-N-Furter, Don’t Sell It, Spread It.

How long ago it seems, the dotcom bubble and bust. To our eyes, there are two real differences-which-make-a-difference between the first dotcoms and what’s going on at the moment:

• There’s a touch of the vaudeville magician about the current crop of dotcoms: while distracting their consumers (and the markets) with simplicity and openness, they make their money (and are betting their futures) on plans for media empires to rival anything we’ve seen before.

  While punters are having fun with these new toys — uploading their photos, posting to their blogs, gawping at the bigshinything — those same consumers are themselves building, click by click, from the online terra nulla, new media territories where tomorrow the future of marketing and sales will be decided through products and services sold back to them via the channels they themselves have created. Brilliant!

  As evidence, we offer the following:

  • Google is still viewed as a search engine, but its revenue (and future) depends on its footprint as a media owner: every Google brand extension gives it more media surface on which to plant its ads — and as for targetting, who knows what you want better than Google?
  • The must-have iPod probably only really exists to get iTunes onto people’s desktops, and to thus give Steve Job’s growing media empire an early mover advantage in owning media delivery in the next decade — leveraging both brand loyalty with consumers and his success in getting traditional content owners to actually sign up for online delivery — a major triumph given their conservatism.
  • Skype wants ‘the world to call for free’, but still makes its margin from the extras it offers which allow Skypers to interact with the world of traditional telephony.

  For these magicians, a little prestidigitation to keep the brand simple also makes it easier to expand or change the real business plan without having to worry whether its on-brand or not, and without really letting consumers into the secret that they’ve been charmed into doing all the hard work of building the market for them.

• It’s not just consumers being roped in to create the very markets in which the dotcoms wish to sell. The most savvy of these businesses offer out their services for others to innovate with.

  Got a clever idea for a location-based service? Use Google Maps for the interface, and concentrate on the bit of your business that’s unique. Want to add voice chat to your dating site? You don’t need to spend millions on infrastructure, just build it using Skype. Google, Skype, Flickr and the rest make it easy for other people’s clever ideas to come to market: each business using their services increases their media surface and earns them some incremental revenue. Individual bloggers might add a few new pages for Google ads — a startup using Google Maps might just kick-start a whole new category of media in its own right. Lowering the bar for other clever businesses is a low-risk investment in the 99.9999% of innovation that happens outside the established dotcoms themselves.

  These then are what the volume businesses for the 21st century look like — billion-dollar enterprises with cuddly, fun brands and friend-get-friend appeal, which offer access to their core services ‘for free’ to other innovators in return for new media opportunities in the ecosystems they encourage to flourish around them. And so far, it works: not only are these upstarts making obscene amounts of money, they’ve jump-started a new wave of creative systems and services. Look on their works ye traditional media giants, and despair.