Google Friend Connect

Yesterday Google announced a private beta of FriendConnect - a standards based (OpenID, oAuth, and OpenSocial) collection of widgets that can bring social networking type functionality to any site or blog. The announcement has garnered its fair share of coverage (Mashable, Yahoo!, SearchEngineLand, Outside the Lines) so instead of simply rehashing what's already been written about FriendConnect, I'd like to look a little deeper.

With the CPC contextual text link model, Google opened up online advertising to the masses. With AdWords, even the smallest web site could bid on keywords and arbitrage traffic - effectively eliminating all barriers to entry. With FriendConnect, we will see the same effect. Any web site, no matter how small, will be able to add social networking components. Initial availability will include user registration, invitations, member galleries, message posting, and reviews, as well as OpenSocial applications.

This is again Google's long-tail approach to the web. Commodotize a feature set once controlled by a small number of vendors, and in so doing reach the vast potential of 100+ million web sites out there. With FriendConnect, Facebook and MySpace lose their prominence as social media platforms and the web itself becomes the platform. Consider how the game changes when your OpenID follows you from site to site and you know which friends are active on which sites. Combine this with the data portability movement and suddenly the web begins to resemble, well, life. Walk into any room, see whos there, recognize your pals and, wherever you go, you're the same person.

Spammers, All

How many Friends do you have?

Not on Twitter or Digg or anywhere like that. I mean Friends with a capital F - real ones. Now, compare that number to how many social media "friends" you have. My guess is that, if you practice SEO for a living, your online friends out number your real world friends by at least one order of magnitude.

A couple of days ago, rebecca over at SEOMoz complained that Digg Shout-Blocked her. When she attempted to send a shout to her entire fan base, she was first asked to narrow down her list of friends before selecting which ones would receive the message. She didn't like this and points to her Digg usage stats as evidence that she's not a spammer and thus Digg should allow her to do what she pleases. She has 568 friends and says:

I mean, all I do is befriend people who become fans of me. The whole point on having friends on Digg is so that you can share stories with each other, and the Shout feature allows you to share stories with a large number of friends vs. having to contact them all one-by-one. Why then would Digg penalize me for having too many friends? Did I hit some mysterious "max number," like once you get to 500, it's too many?

Blindly befriending everybody who becomes a fan of you on a site like Digg is evidence enough that you're not using the site to truly find like minded internet jockeys. And, blindly sending shouts to hundreds of your friends is not "the whole point of having friends on Digg."

As professionals, we should be honest with ourselves. Sending a story to 500 mostly anonymous people on a social bookmarking site is spam. You're doing it with the hopes of garnering votes, most of which will come from folks who never even read the story.

So, the next time you're having an identity crisis, count your friends both real and online. The bigger the multiple of online friends to real, the bigger spammer you are.

Related Posts: Google, SEO and the Ruination of the Internet

StumbleUpon Down?

Is StumbleUpon down?

Last night I was attempting a stumble and here's what I got:

Okay, so it was late and I decided to pack it in for the night. Early this morning, I visited StumbleUpon again and got the same message. I found a quick NSLookup tool online and ran a query, to find:

What stands out here is the expire time on the DNS record, which seems to be set to 604800 seconds, which equals 7 days !?! Could StumbleUpon have planned a server move without adjusting thier TTL first? Is anybody else seeing this? I'll try to check some other name servers when I get to work.

UPDATE: Okay, so, it works fine from home. I suppose it could be an issue with my ISP at home. Still curious is anybody else say any issues.

Going Viral

I've heard this phrase far too much in recent weeks. It's usually come in two phases. I like to call them Viral Desire and Paid Popularity. Here's how they work.

Viral Desire
A traditional print media company begins to dabble in the digital world. Having a voice and distinct editorial style they figure their content will play well online, just as it has on the newsstands. A new Digital Team is hired and a framework is established to leverage content online and drive organic traffic growth. Within three months, traffic from natural search results has doubled and continues to grow steadily. This, however, is not enough for the Men In Charge. They want more, and they want it faster. "Let's Go Viral," they say.

Of course, to the reasonably intelligent among us this is a ridiculous statement. Far too often the Men In Charge believe that something will happen simply because they say it will.

The Digital Team explains that Going Viral requires, above all else, quality content. "Videos!" demand the Men In Charge. And so non-trivial sums of money are spent on editing stations and high definition video cameras and expensive paid-hourly editors. The video is shot, and edited, and transcoded, and uploaded, and YouTubed, and the Men In Charge say - Let's Go Viral.

And, guess what? Nothing happens. That is, the content created is fine but not exceptional and it's received online as such. Some people look at it. Most don't. It's certainly not viral.

Paid Popularity
The internet, with all it's wonders, has truly been a boon to mankind. We are living in the midst of a revolution, driven by technology and a seemingly bottomless pit of entrepreneurs. As with any period in history where the rules of the game have changed at such a rapid pace, there are those who seek to subvert the system and profit from the gaping holes that technology's advance leaves behind. Here are some examples from the Internet Era in which we live:

Overpriced HTML - In the early-mid 1990's, when the World Wide Web was freshly spun and corporate America was racing to get online, services companies sprung up by the thousands. These firms would hire freshly minted philosophy majors, bestow upon them the lofty title of Web Master, and bill them out at $150 / hour to create brochure-ware websites. And they made a lot of money doing it, too - that is, they did until 2001.

Earnings-Free Startups - Bubble 1.0 was infamous for new companies whose cost model far exceeded their revenue model, and most of them never found a way out of that hole. Bubble 2.0 has solved this problem by eliminating revenue all together, and so far it's worked. Twitter, anyone?

AnyHat SEO - I liken the modern day SEO to the Aristotle toting Web Master of 1995. Nobody's really sure what she does, but they're willing to pay large sums to get it done. The greatest part about this swindle is that the SEO guarantees nothing - except that they'll try really hard to improve rankings.

UPDATE: Case in point to the above - Expensive SEO

One of the fastest growing segments of this exploitation set are purveyors of popularity. Just as SEO has become an over-hyped beauty contest and relevance reduced to a function how many inbound links a site can generate, the notion of online popularity is further blurred when you consider the following services are available for hire:

• Paid Diggs - Going rate $1 - $2 per Digg
• YouTube Subversion - Ever seen a "Featured" video play while you're tinkering with that new Facebook application you just added to your home page? $25,000 will buy you 100,000 embedded YouTube video views.
• Paid Links / Blog Posts - Old Faithfuls, I know, but worth mentioning.
• StumbleUpon CPC - A legitimate offer from SU, for $0.05 CPC you can have as much traffic as you want. Seems harmless at first glance, but consider that the stumbler who gets the page served to them has no idea it's paid placement.

In this world where popularity can be had for a price, how can we trust any story that lands on the front page of Digg, or any site served from StumbleUpon, or any video that has Gone Viral?

Related Posts: Web Page Spam Definition, SEO Dirty Tricks

Aggregation for the Mainstream?

Mashasble has published an article today asking the question -

Will Aggregation Ever go Mainstream?

It's a valid question. In considering the issue, they reference recent posts from Louis Gray and Corvida, but the main point made and the potential death knell for these services is:

I think it isn’t that these sites aren’t cool and fun. I think that it’s just for folks who aren’t news junkies or folks who don’t make their hobbies and livings being up to date on the news have other things to be doing.

In an earlier post considering lifestreaming services in general, I wondered aloud (well, in blog-print) who has time for all this hyper-connectivity and in the end opted out of my FriendFeed account.  The reality is that the early adopters who have put the weight behind the initial splash of these services is a finite set. Eventually, growth will slow and the public at large will be looking for something more. My guess is that the common internet user doesn't have hundreds of RSS feeds and thousands of social media friends. For those folks these services simply aren't useful.

While the problem of Information Fragmentation is a real one, for most of the population it's manageable. I think of my wife as the perfect example. She has one email account, one social media account (facebook), reads the NYTimes online, mostly ignores her Twitter account, and has no idea what RSS means. Sure, she's got a few places to visit in order to collect her daily dose of digital information, but something like FriendFeed would be an unneeded layer of abstraction.

The articles referenced above cite the need for added functionality to allow a service like FriendFeed to be viable for the masses. You can break down these potential functional additions into two categories:

Added Functionality Generates Service Specific Data
If a service like FriendFeed generates additional data specific to the use of the service, then the service itself simply adds to the problem. That is, it ceases to be just an aggregation point and so as competing services evolve it becomes likely that either users will need to join multiple aggregation services or the aggregation services will need to inter-operate. Both of these scenarios seem pointless and I'm fairly certain there's an endless loop involved in inter-operable aggregation services.

Added Functionality Does Not Generate Service Specific Data
If these services do nothing but allow you to interact with your social media data from afar, then they're resigned to be the bastard step child of the sites for which they aggregate. For the average user, there's no reason to participate in FriendFeed when it's just as easy and more straightforward to participate in Facebook.

So the jury that is me remains undecided on the fate of these services. For an incredibly small segment of the population they present a solution to a daily problem, but to the internet user at large they're not very compelling. I'll report back when my wife activates a FriendFeed account.

Related Posts: LIfestreaming

Jason Calacanis Does It Again

Once again, Jason Calacanis has enraged the SEO Community.

His keynote address at SMX Social Media, as reported by Lisa Barone, contained the following statement:

"SEO is a wasted industry. You're wasting your time fighting off ranking problems instead of creating great content. You're just spinning your wheels hoping the Google gods won't kick you out. It's a bad way to live your life. Using a human service is a better way to go about it."

It didn't take long for the blood to start boiling. It got picked up on Sphinn pretty quickly, with follow-up posts and Sphinn rants not far behind. Wow, is this industry sensitive or what? Here are some thoughts:

Make a Point, Please
If you read though all the posts and comments and replies, you'll find that the most thought out retort anybody has so far is that All Conferences Should Heretofore Ban Jason Calacanis from Speaking, Forever (and Ever). What's notably missing is a coherent argument against  Jason's position. To do this, you'd have to demonstrate that the skills and practices used by SEOs today have a long term value proposition to both clients and search engines alike. You'd have to further predict, convincingly, how search technology will evolve (or won't) and what the future for SEO is in the context of that evolution.

Jason's point is simple, and I agree with it, that current day SEO is largely an act of attempting to influence the (flawed) link-based page rank (and thus relevancy) algorithms in an attempt to achieve higher search engine rankings. As the link-based algorithms go the way of the do-do bird, the basics of SEO will be left behind and these basics will likely not require an entire independent industry to support them. I've had this argument myself with an SEO or two, and have yet to hear a compelling counter position.

Stop Being Suckers
Is it not evidently clear why Jason Calacanis makes statements like these in public forums? Despite their loathsome contempt for Mr. Calacanis, the SEO industry has just created a ton of press for him, his keynote address, and his current endeavor (Mahalo). The best part about all this is watching Jason reply to Sphinn comments, basically egging on the community, and they fall for it every time.  Jane Copland put it best when, on Sphinn, she said:

"There were two or three things he said that were either unfortunately worded or deliberately baity. No one's really paying much attention to anything else he said, but the grand total of about 100 words have made him the story of SMX Social Media. Calacanis wins."

Right now, the SEO Community looks like the rats that Jason the Pied Piper is leading around as he chooses - all for his own amusement and benefit.

Calacanis Wins.

Related Posts: Web Page Spam Definition

Onaswarm

Mashable published a review today of the latest Lifestreaming solution to hit the market - Onaswarm. The Mashable post gives a nice overview but left out one notable item. Unlike FriendFeed (whose Lifestreaming offering I've already commented on), Onaswarm is overt about their intent TO MAKE MONEY.

Early last week I offered some thoughts on how Twitter might turn a buck one day, and listed among those is the idea of contextualized affiliate links - so I was intrigued to see an Amazon affiliate banner, ripe with product links, at the bottom of the Onaswarm page. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out - that is, can they ever really get good contextualized product recommendations in the midst of a generalized, ever changing, content stream.

However it works out for them, it's refreshing to see a new company putting revenue generation high on the priority list.

Stumpedia Stalled?

A couple of weeks ago I posted about Stumpedia - a recent entry into the growing ranks of Human Powered Search engines. At the time, I wondered aloud about Stumpedia's value proposition. While honestly believe that real live people are the solution to the search relevancy issues we face today, Stumpedia seemed caught in a classic Catch 22. They're not crawling and rely on user link submission to build their index, but since the index is so sparse the results are poor (mostly non-existent) and thus there's little reason for anyone to adopt Stumpedia as a search service. But without users, how will they get links? You see where this is going.

Anyway, at the time I decided to start tracking the following (as reported on the Stumpedia home page):

• Registered Users
• Links
• Search Terms

A quick (and unattractive) excel graph shows the growth trend in all of these beginning to flat-line.

In addition to these slow growth trends, their company blog and forums have gone quiet. No posts to either in nearly two weeks. I hope they're off somewhere figuring out how they're going to bulk up their index, or they could be road-kill in the near future. I'll keep watching and report back.

Twitter Ads

Rumors were floating around today that Twitter was testing in-stream advertisements as a monetization trial. These same rumors were quickly squelched, but it certainly makes you think about where this new media darling's first buck will come from. Some possibilities:

Twitter Advertising
This is the most obvious of the potential solutions. Throw up some banner ads, or insert text / image ads directly into the Twitter stream and, viola, instant revenue. There's a problem with this approach, however, and that problem is targeting. The stream of data that runs across a user's page is far too disparate and non-contextualized to provide any meaningful basis for ad targeting. In a world where vertical ad networks are popping up all over the place and promising a highly identifiable audience to their advertisers, I have to wonder how much value Twitter ads will have. And without value, you can surely expect a low-grade of advertiser.

Twitter Affiliate Links
In the lead-gen, affiliate marketing space, there's an opportunity for Twitter to dynamically insert product / service links into the stream. For example, when a user is posting about watching Dexter Season 1 on DVD, the appropriate text could be turned into a link that would drive users to a point of purchase. This might be more effective from a click-thru and ROI perspective as it would keep the Twitter steam pure and, if implemented properly, provide meaningful contextual links.

Twitter Co-Brands / White Label Solutions
Really pushing the envelope on this one but with everybody and their mother wanting a social network these days, Twitter could offer a hosted micro-blogging solution either direct to client or via partnerships with some of the social media platforms (Ning, Small World Labs, etc., etc.,). Though, now that I've just typed that sentence, I realize that the Twitter API may render something like this of little value.

Twitter CPC
There are some interesting collaborative filtering offerings out there, and one company taking this to an interesting place is Loomia. Their SeenThis? product provides content recommendations based on a user's connections in Facebook (they're aiming to expand out to the other social platforms as well). A Loomia client can have links to their content displayed on Facebook profiles and then pay on a CPC basis anytime a user is delivered to their site. A similar implementation on Twitter could be very interesting and would be an innovative way to leverage (and monetize) the social graph.

These are just some ideas that popped into my head while reading the coverage today. I'd be interested to hear any other thoughts folks have on how Twitter can capitalize on the huge traction they currently have.

Stumpedia

On February 22, 2008, Stumpedia launched as another entry into the Human Powered Search Engine category. Stumpedia differs from Mahalo, however. Rather than paying staff to generate targeted search results pages, Stumpedia depends on the good will of the community to submit links and suggest relevant search terms for each.

SearchRank.com has published a nice overview of the Stumpedia service if you want to get acquainted with exactly how it works. In the end, it's very easy to use and intuitive to navigate. After playing with it for a while, here are some observations -

Human Powered Search
It's pretty clear to me that the holy grail of search lies beyond the algorithm. Any attempt at human powered search seems seems at first glance to be untenable. The sheer volume of information is overwhelming and it's daunting to consider the number of people required to perform the task. Mahalo's approach to employ staff around the country (globe?) to build hand-crafted search pages seems unmanageable in the long run, especially when you consider the rate at which new web content is produced. It's also hard to consider their pages 100% objective when they're produced by paid staff.

The potentially better solution is the path Stumpedia has taken - let the searchers themselves indicate which sites are relevant for given search terms. The risk in this model, that Mahalo avoids, is abuse. If Stumpedia starts to get any traction it will become a magnet for online marketers, spammers, and the like. At that point the quality of the search results become suspect unless Stumpedia can somehow keep the hordes at bay. Their stance on this is that they expect the community to be self-policing. How well this will work remains to be seen. They shouldn't lose site of the fact that a non-trivial portion of their user base will be marketers attempting to influence the results pages - and these folks tend to work together more often than rat each other out.

Google Indexed Search Results
I covered this point when looking at whether Mahalo fits Google's definition spam, but it's curious to see the Stumpedia search results pages being indexed by Google. For Stumpedia to be genuine in their attempt to become an alternative search engine, they should block the spiders from indexing their results pages. One search engine garnering traffic from another is simply a terrible user experience. Stumpedia should be able to stand on their own merits and attract a user base through the quality of their results.

Value Proposition
Stumpedia is in a bit of tricky situation at the moment. Since they rely on site visitors to submit links, they're going to depend heavily on content producers to join up and start adding their sites. Publishers will only do this, however, if there is a large enough user base such that they can expect a reasonable amount of return traffic. But currently there simply aren't enough links submitted to the site to make it useful for the searcher and so I expect adoption will be slow. So we have the publishers waiting on the searchers and the searchers waiting on the publishers. Stumpedia will likely need to lower the barrier for link submission (RSS?) to encourage publishers to jump on board. Right now, link submission is manual and I doubt major publishers will be keen to dedicate man-hours to submitting links individually.

There are some quirks I noticed while using Stumpedia, but I expect these will get flushed out as the service matures. I've submitted a few links as a test, to see what kind of traffic it generates. Stumpedia also displays the number of users, submitted links, and search terms directly on their home page. I've started to record those numbers and will check back a few times a week to track their progress.

Related Posts: Stumpedia Stalled?

Lifestreaming

In January of 1995, I took a month-long trip to Australia.

Being an early-twenty-something man, I was looking for adventure and during the "planning" stages of my trip, I decided not to plan anything. And so, after 25 hours of travel time I found myself in Melborune, at midnight, on the eve of the Australian Open. Needless to say, places to crash for the night were scarce. All the hostels were booked and the longer I roamed the city, led only by my Rough Guide, the more likely it became that a park bench would be my bed for the night. My feet aching, the pack on my back weighing heavier by the second, I found a room at last. It was priced considerably more than I had budgeted on a per-night basis, but I desperately needed a bed and a shower soon thereafter.

The next morning I packed up, turned in the key, and headed out into the (day-lit) wilds of Melbourne. Fully awake and refreshed, I reveled in the thought that nobody knew where I was or what I was doing. It was a sense of freedom unlike anything I had experienced - totally disconnected from everybody I knew.

I recently wrote about Information Fragmentation and how the sheer number of information sources and viable vehicles for information consumption can be simply overwhelming. And then I heard the term "Lifestreaming."

Mashable has posted a nice overview of 8 Lifestreaming Services. The thrust behind these services is a solution to the Information Fragmentation issue and an aggregation point for the volumes of information flowing out of our social media accounts and RSS subscriptions. In the interest of science, I signed up for one - FriendFeed. Creating the account was simple and pulling data from across my social accounts took nothing more than providing my username and password for each. I can then, just as easily, subscribe to my friend's FriendFeed to see all of their social media / RSS activity.

Good Lord.

I can't help but wonder - do we really need all this hyper-connectivity? With a service like this, communication can be reduced to a steam of FlickrDiggStumbleTwitters and it's quite possible for me to know what every one of my friends is doing nearly every moment of their online lives. When is it too much? When do the details of our daily existence become so available that we lose our sense of self. If everybody knows everything about you, what's left?

I suppose the argument is that these services are, clearly, optional. For me, I miss that morning in Australia and I've deleted my FriendFeed account.

Related Posts: Aggregation for the Mainstream

Tin Twitter

Like so many others, I've taken the plunge and created a Twitter account. I figure I'll have something more to say about it pretty soon - after having used it for a few days - but I wanted to get out a quick post in case anybody out there is feeling adventerous and wants to follow me on twitter.

One thing I promise, however, is never to use "twit" or "tweet" to refer to a post on twitter.

Information Fragmentation

Some days, it's overwhelming.

On any given day, and several times each day, I scan the following for new or updated content:

• 1 LinkedIn account
• 1 Facebook account
• 3 news sites (NY Times, NPR, CNN)
• 5 social bookmarking sites (Digg, reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn)
• 7 tabs on my Google home page consisting of
• 32 Google widgets
• 10-20 Blogs for post comment threads I may be following or new posts I may have missed.

Within those, there's some overlap. For example, I have RSS feeds for the news sites on my Google home page, but there's always more to see and read on the site itself. So when I saw this post about TwitterFeed, I couldn't help but wonder if I, or anybody else, really need yet another place to have RSS style content delivered to me. I interpreted Jane Copland as touching lightly on this concept in a recent SEOMoz.com article. When talking about activating a Twitter account for herself, she wrote:

I didn't try to convince myself that I'd signed up in order to keep ahead of the world's breaking news, to connect with important people or follow the torrid happenings at SXSW. I did it to add yet another method by which I can communicate with my friends, because we're lacking those. What I noticed, however, was that there is interesting information to be found via news sites' accounts, but they blend in all too well with the idle chatter.

The intent for a product like TwitterFeed is obvious. Many people are passing much of their day on  Twitter and online marketers are keen to get in front of their audience as frequently as possible. The challenge, however, from a user perspective is that no one delivery vehicle is ever complete. As a content consumer, it's not clear to me why I would want to follow an RSS feed on Twitter when I already have too many content aggregation points. One might argue in favor of TwitterFeed, and in doing so  might say something like this:

"It's just another option for the user, and one of the great powers inherent in digital media is the latitude it provides the customer. No longer can content publishers dictate how content is consumed, but rather the consumer has become accustomed to the wherever/whenever paradigm of content consumption."

That's all well and good, but it creates the problem of information fragmentation for the user - not all information is available via all channels - which in turn exacerbates the problem of Audience Fragmentation. So while the user is spending more time bouncing from channel to channel, online marketers are spending more time trying to reach those consumers, and the content publishers are spending more time trying to find new avenues to deliver their content.

And so round and round it goes. Where so often technology is produced to make us more efficient, a content production-consumption cycle has been created that continually is taking up more time of everybody involved.

Audience Fragmentation

Loren Baker published a post yesterday on how to set up TwitterFeed. It's a good, instructive, post for anybody looking for (more) ways to leverage the social media, but it brings to light an ongoing trend - Audience Fragmentation.

As more and more social media sites crop up, target demographics will become more and more fragmented across these. Online marketers trying to reach these consumers (of content, products, etc.) are quick to embrace the newest gadget that allows them to spread their message far and wide and, on the surface, this seems ideal. However, it's not yet a perfect solution.

Online audience fragmentation, in general, is an issue. Any advertiser looking to target a specific demographic with reasonable reach and frequency quickly finds that they need to run ads across many, many sites. This ends up being highly inefficient and costly from a media buying perspective. As a solution the hot ticket in online advertising right now is the Vertical Ad Network. Vertical Ad Networks were pioneered by such companies as Jumpstart Auto Media and NetShelter Technology several years ago, with perhaps the best known current example being Glam Media. The concept is simple - online publishers interested in the same set of users band together under an umbrella ad distribution platform. This platform is typically run by an interested party who is also a content producer. In the case of Glam Media, they serve as the Ad Sales arm for all the publishers in their network and also provide the technology solution to aggregate and target ad delivery across the publisher base. Adify has also made quite a splash providing an open Ad Network Platform, basically allowing anybody to set up an Ad Network and recruit publishers.

Clearly a similar solution that would enable a targeted marketing reach into the social media sites would be welcome by online marketers the world over. The results would be reduced marketing costs and higher conversion rates - something everybody can appreciate.

Digital Footprints

Overheard on the 8:22pm Metro North Harlem Line train to Southeast -

Young Man (speaking into Cell Phone): Yo, Chris, it's me.
(pause)
Young Man: Listen, if you get a message on your MySpace or your Facebook from Maria looking for me, tell her you ain't seen me.
(pause)
Young Man: Nah, man, I told her I moved to Miami.
(pause)
Young Man: No, yo, I'm on the train to Brewster.

For those of you not familiar with the town, Brewster is about 60 miles north of Manhattan and about 1,347 miles north of Miami.

Some observations:

1. Note how the brand (MySpace and Facebook in this case) is becoming the thing - the idea of a MySpace page or profile is simply expressed with the brand name. Classic examples of this are Kleenex and Xerox, but that's only mildly interesting.
2. Covering your tracks used to be much easier. If you wanted to hide out for a while, you could simply not answer your phone and peep through the peep-hole before opening the door. It's not that simple any more. As we engage with the various forms of social media, we leave a record of ourselves behind and an expectation that this history will be maintained. Regardless of whether Chris follows his instructions to tell Maria he's not seen the Young Man, Maria will surely wonder why The MySpace or The Facebook doesn't show the Young Man in short sleeves standing under a sun drenched palm.

Social Media

Today, Greg Rollett published a interesting post titled Gen-Y Bloggers vs. Reality. It's interesting to me, at least, because rather than being a Gen-Y Blogger I'm a Gen-X Geek who got caught up in the internet boon-doggle of the 1990's and has ridden the wave straight through to the web 2.0 world.

This generation gap (x-y, I suppose) lends us differing perspectives. As a mostly cynical 40-year old I find myself spending each work day figuring out how to best leverage the 100's of Social Media Sites out there and incorporate them into our online marketing and technology strategy. In essence, my view of the Social Web is largely as a tool - a means to an end not unlike any of the other tools I use daily (web servers, programming languages, databases, coffee, etc.)

Mr. Rollett has a much different relationship with Social Media. For him, it is much more intimate and integrated into his daily life. He is surprised when peers are not familiar with basic Social Media (or SEO) concepts, and considers himself a pioneer. The most telling quote from his post is:

There is such a great advantage to using this technology, not only for networking and playing Scrabulous but for learning about ourselves and taking control over our careers and lifestyle.

And so what I find most interesting is how Mr. Rollett's post conjured memories of how I felt in 1995. The software company I was working for in downtown Manhattan relocated to the west cost. Instead of finding another full-time job I recognized the opportunity the then-burgeoning internet provided and I struck out on my own. It's been a bit of a roller coaster ever since, but I don't bemoan one minute of it.

In hindsight, I often wish I'd taken even more chances; been more daring. But regret is a wasted emotion. The opportunities that will evolve from this (new) New Media are countless and folks like Mr. Rollett are helping to uncover them everyday.