Micro Persuasion

Should You Rent or Buy Social Real Estate?

Photo: Abandoned farm shed by serendipitypeace2007, modified under a Creative Commons license.

Anyone looking for a place to live invariably needs to first answer this question: "should I rent or buy?" Each has pros and cons.

If you rent a house or an apartment, you control your own destiny. It's easy to get out if you want to move. Then again, you're limited in what you can do to remodel.

On the other side, owning real estate has advantages too - a tax break, flexibility and potentially a lot income if you flip it later on. The downsides? Lots. You can't easily sell in a down market and you're on your own when it comes to repairs.

The same can be said about choosing where to participate online. I had this discussion recently with a colleague who asked me why I am investing all this time in building Twitter's "equity" rather than doing so on my own blog, which I have been writing for four years now. It was a rather thought-provoking question.

Running a blog on your own domain (even if you use a hosted provider like TypePad, as I do) carries with it lots of perks. I can remodel pretty much any way I want as long as I follow proper blog protocols. I can track my returns - Google Juice, subscribers, comments, traffic, leads, press quotes, etc. TypePad really doesn't realize the same kind of benefits that I do personally by writing this blog. Then again, it has downsides too. Namely, Twitter has community built right in.

Investing time on Twitter, on the other hand, truly is starting to feel like renting. When the landlord is doing a good job, everyone is happy. When the landlord is negligent, the tenants get testy and threaten to move. I now view Twitter like a summer rental that you hope doesn't get hit by a hurricane while my blog is casa de Steve. I may be alone here.

It seems to me like "renting" online equity is now what's in vogue. Long-form blogging is less prevalent because the competition for attention from pro-bloggers is steep. That's why I love the Friendfeed model. It's like a co-op. I can invest in my blog and realize benefits not only here but also on Frienfeed. Or, I can invest in Twitter and see the same return on Friendfeed, though certain provisions apply. You're still beholden to the landlord.

I remain a fan of all of these services. However, the big question on my mind of late is this: where should we invest our time and sweat equity online? Will people continue to build equity in sites like Twitter that have community today, but most likely will be gone one day? Or should we look for hybrids like Friendfeed where we can take control?

If the marketplace for online equity is as cyclical as the real estate biz, then change is a given.

links for 2008-06-23

• Study: Having 6,141 friends you don't know may be beneficial
  "Students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st-century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,"
  (tags: SocialNetworking culture teens research Stats)
• We're connecting - and wasting time - on Twitter
  "The San Francisco-based network has all the makings of an Internet phenomenon with vast potential for social, business, political and cultural applications"
  (tags: twitter SocialNetworking microblogging)
• Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Who needs analyst firms anyways?
  Fascinating discussion about the potential impact on the big analyst firms from “Open Source Analysis” who offer insights up for free.
  (tags: analysts opensource Trends)
• Universal Edit Button
  Service highlights web sites that are editable.
  (tags: Wikis icons)
• Info Overload: The Problem - ReadWriteWeb
  (tags: continuouspartialattention Overload attentioncrash attention Trends)
• Info Overload: What Can We Do? - ReadWriteWeb
  (tags: Trends Overload attention attentioncrash)

links for 2008-06-22

• Dipity
  "Dipity is the easiest way to make and share interactive timelines about the people and things you care about."
  (tags: timeline tools)
• The Microfame Game and the New Rules of Internet Celebrity -- New York Magazine
  "There’s a new class of celebrity powered by the Internet. The stakes are smaller, but the rewards are within anyone’s reach. These are the rules."
  (tags: celebrity Web2.0 Trends fame)
• The ECO-SAFE Foundation
  Make your blog easily printable and PDF friendly.
  (tags: environment green Tools Blogs Widgets)

Three Little Tips for Capturing Info Bits Quickly

I consume a lot of information - all of it, digitally. In fact, I recently completed the transition a 100% media green state. I continue to use Gmail as a nerve center - my primary capture system. But sometimes, I want to flag something quickly to review later. Usually, these are tiny bits of info - notes or bookmarks - I need to capture very quickly. Here are three ways I do that.

Use the Google Web History for Quick Notes

Google offers a handy history feature that archives all of your searches by date and time. You need to have a Google account and activate it. Once you do, the search engine will remember every search and  search result you clicked. You can star items and even subscribe to either your history or these bookmarks as a feed.

If I am on phone with someone and I have an idea I want to capture real quick, I go to the search box in my browser (which is always open), type in my quick note and search. Now it's archived in my history, which I can always go back and search later.

Annotate Bookmarks and Feeds with a Private Friendfeed Room

Friendfeed has a feature called Rooms that you can use to share links with either the public at large, a small group of friends or just yourself. The feature is great on many levels, but it's especially handy as a private info trapping system. Here are two ways I use it.

The first is to grab this bookmarklet and start capturing stuff you find in the wilds of the web and stuffing it into your private room. You can annotate it in the process. In addition, later on you can go back and leave additional notes as comments. All of this is searchable too via a box in the upper right hand side of the room. In addition, all rooms can be accessed on a mobile device via FFtoGo.

The second way to use this is to start importing RSS feeds into a private room. This essentially sets up a mini private River of News that you can also review, annotate and search later on.

Use a Link-Trapping Service for Reading Lists

The final tip is to use a link-trapping service for compiling articles you want to review later. There are three I have experimented with - Instapaper, Readbag and LaterLoop. Each of these services saves bookmarked articles into reading lists. They offer bookmarklets and other tools for easy flagging, a personalized RSS feed as well as mobile versions that strip down the articles down to just text for low-bandwidth reading on the go.

Of the three, LaterLoop takes the cake for two reasons. First, it keeps a running archive of all the articles you have read. You can go through these and star items for later. Second, it lets you download virtually your entire archive for offline reading. I use this all the time when I am on planes. It's invaluable.

Those are my latest tips. Enjoy!

Measure Traffic with the Google Web Site Trends Bookmarklet

Google yesterday added a significant feature to Google Trends. You can now enter in URLs and get back rather rich site traffic data. Barry Schwartz has a great rundown. I will have more to say about this shortly as I play with it over the weekend. However, in the meantime, I wanted to share this bookmarklet I created.

All you need to do is drag the link below to your bookmarks. If you're on a web site and you want to know its traffic is, just hit the link and if it's big enough to be in the Google Trends database, you will get back data.

Google Web Site Trends This!

Friendfeed Can Disrupt Search and Reshape Advertising

This is the first in a series of posts. The introduction and links to the entire series can be found here. This installment is also my column in next week's AdAge.

Hi. My name is Steve and I suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS for short).

SOS describes the digerati's never-ending obsession with emerging social sites. First came blogs. Then there was podcasting, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and finally Twitter. Some stick. Others don't. The key is to addressing SOS is to take a step back and look at the the consumer trends and potential business models.

My latest fascination is Friendfeed - a site that in one place aggregates your friends streams from across different social sites. Right now Friendfeed's audience is paltry. According to Compete.com, it has 300,000 active users. Still, I believe that Friendfeed has the potential to become as big as Google. Others who are vying for the crown include SocialThing, Facebook and Google themselves.

Why am I so bullish about such a small site? Simple. There are three mega trends at work here.

First, there's the rising influence of peers. Some 58% of opinion elites 35-64 said they trust a "person like me," according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.

Second, there's search. Some 90% of the online population searches, according to the Pew Internet for the American Life Project. It's part of everyone's life.

Finally, there's the giant pool of Millennials - the descendants of the Baby Boomers. They have no problem living their lives online and are predisposed to creating and consuming content created by peers.

Combine these three trends and you can think about easily searching content created by people you trust. That's huge and monetizable. This is where I see Friendfeed, Facebook and perhaps Google all headed. They will all build businesses around social contextual search advertising. Danny Sullivan calls this Search 4.0.

Social contextual search addresses Google's Achilles Heel - superfluous content. Right now when users scour the web they can't easily separate content they trust - i.e. what's been created by their friends - from everything else. It all gets piled into pages of indiscernible blue links that all compete for attention. However, if you can just search just what your friends think and prioritize it over everything else, you have a very powerful recommendation engine.

As an early Friendfeed enthusiast I find myself increasingly turning to its terrific search engine when I need product and service information. You can give this a try yourself here. However, it works best when you have added a bunch of people whose opinions you trust. Advertisers will soon be tripping over themselves to make sure their ads show up at the precise moment when such searches are executed

I believe that Friendfeed will be the first to implement an elegant advertising system that complements aggregated content from friends. The company's founders are ex-Googlers who know how to build simple systems that scale and have excellent search and monetization capabiliites. Watch for Facebook and Google to follow suit and a race to take off in this area.

The social networking and search mashup is big and extremely monetizable. Will Friendfeed be able to scale? Time will tell but someone will make this work.

Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing

If it feels quiet here and even on my Twitter stream you are right. It has been. The reason is Friendfeed. I have become hopelessly addicted to the site. I am sharing a lot of links there that I don't pump into del.icio.us or Twitter, so I recommend picking up my aggregate lifestream feed here. However, if you just want my blog posts, no worries, that feed continues to syndicate.

(By the way, one advantage to subscribing to my lifestream is that the feed includes comments from other Friendfeed users. I may start to aggregate replies from other services too. To be revisited.)

Despite what some think, I am not being paid by Friendfeed to endorse their service. Rather, I have been playing with it extensively... and thinking about it deeply.  Like veteran web watcher Robert Seidman, I too am incredibly excited about its potential.

Over the last 12 months two quotes really got me thinking in a whole new way ...

"Content finds you." - Dan Scheinman, Cisco Systems

"If the news is important, it will find me." - unnamed college student

Now add one more nugget to this cake mix: 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust "a person like me," according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. This has been growing steadily since 2003.

People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations. And Friendfeed is more than an aggregation site or a community that's layered on top of others. It's a recommendation engine that surfaces content (both pro and amateur) via your peers - and that's huge. Sure there are things wrong with it, but I believe Friendfeed is incredibly disruptive. It's the next big thing online for consumers. It may even become the next Google.

Still, even if Friendfeed can't monetize and someone else supplants it, like Blogger, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter before it, it will make a huge impact on the Web.

In the next couple of posts I will focus on how Friendfeed is going to change journalism, PR and marketing, even if should fade away. In short, it's big. Stay tuned.

UPDATE:: I am now linking to the posts in the series below.

Part I: Friendfeed Can Disrupt Search and Reshape Advertising

links for 2008-06-08

• RSS Advertising Shows Signs of Life - ClickZ
  "A mounting body of evidence suggests in-feed ad delivery is a growing opportunity for marketers and publishers alike"
  (tags: rss Advertising Stats)
• European Online Ad Spend Gains on U.S. - ClickZ
  "Online ad spend in Europe grew to $17.4 billion in 2007, according to the results of the IAB Europe's annual AdEx survey, released today."
  (tags: Advertising Stats Europe)
• MediaPost - Email Preferred Communicator by Consumers For Business Dealing
  " 67% of consumers prefer email as a primary method of communications in their personal and business capacities, and 65% will continue to prefer email in the future (despite Web 2.0)"
  (tags: Email Trends Stats)
• Indystar - Get set to have advertising along for the ride in your car
  "The digital revolution long promised for your car - known in the automotive business as telematics - has arrived."
  (tags: Advertising automobiles Telematics Trends)
• Backlinks Tag Cloud Widget - Show Who is Linking to You as a Tag Cloud (Beta)
  (tags: Widgets Tags Blogs)
• Who Blogs Now? - eMarketer
  "Blogging has gone mainstream, and what was once a quirky hobby based on sharing intimate details with the world has morphed into something used by major corporations and media outlets. "
  (tags: Blogs Stats emarketer)
• iPaper@Scribd - Email Attachments Made Simple and Safe | Scribd
  (tags: lifehacks scribd Email)
• Convert Your Paper to iPaper | Scribd
  (tags: lifehacks scanning paper)

Will We See an Apple TV SDK at WWDC? Eventually, Yes

The annals of technology history show us that typically a market takes hold when there are at least two conditions present: a) users who embrace a particular device, platform or tool and b) an open system that allows developers to innovate and create new value on top. The relationship is often symbiotic. Developer innovation brings in consumers. And more users creates opportunities for developers.

The PC, Windows and Mac operating systems, mobile devices and web services all took off because both conditions were met. Therefore, it's no great mystery why Internet-connected set-top boxes are not mainstream. This despite the fact that TV is poised to become the next great platform.

To be sure, part of the reason is educational. Most consumers have no idea you can even connect a TV to the Internet. Nor are they aware of the value in doing so. However, I fundamentally believe that a lot of it is wrapped up in the other side of the equation - developers.

To date, developers have not been given the tools they need to truly innovate and create value in the living room. It's coming, but very slowly. Microsoft has opened up its XBox 360 console to backyard game developers through a program called XNA (Microsoft is an Edelman client). Comcast at CES in January announced an open cable platform. But what about Apple?

It's no secret that Apple TV has not been a monster hit, but it's slowly picking up steam. Piper Jaffray estimates that 1.6M units shipped in 2007 and that an additional 2.9M will be sold in 2008. So what would give the device a shot in the arm? Content is part of it. But Apple solved that with the 2.0 update that shipped earlier this year. The real answer is developer innovation. Developers are already creating their own unofficial solutions. One, from Apple Core (pictured above, curiously just shut down.

To date, more than 100,000 developers have downloaded the iPhone software development kit (SDK). This will create all kinds of value on a platform that has arguably sold double the units as Apple TV. Expect Apple to do the same with Apple TV in the near future. It may not be at this year's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), but I guarantee it's coming. They're not going to let the hackers have all the fun. Further, watch for TiVo and Slingbox to do the same.

Open systems and developers create value, which in turn, can help IP-connected set-tops take off.

Why Your Car May Soon Be Driving Digital Advertising

Photo credit: Really Simple Syndication by Shira Goldling

The following is also my column this week in Advertising Age.

If you think there's already enough to distract you in your life, just wait. With Americans spending 100 hours a year commuting, according to the Census Bureau, the internet is coming to your car in a big way -- and not just to the front seat either.

Dashboard navigation systems provide a natural entry point. Year-over-year unit sales of GPS devices grew nearly 500% during the 2007 holiday season, according to NPD.

Several GPS manufacturers such as Tele Atlas, which supplies systems to the automakers, already display the logos of nearby fast-food restaurants' gas stations. However, the screens are quickly getting more useful -- or cluttered, depending on your point of view. Navigon's high-end model, for example, features helpful restaurant reviews and ratings from Zagat.

Soon, devices that can both send and receive data will hit the market. Dash, for example, is integrating Web 2.0 crowdsourcing into its systems, allowing cars to send information back to the company to improve traffic calculations. As mobile broadband becomes more ubiquitous, it's conceivable that these devices will soon talk to your cellphone via Bluetooth and, thus, talk to social networks as well.

With send/receive capabilities and overall bandwidth improving, local contextual advertising, perhaps rich-media-based, is just around the corner. Google already allows users in Europe to send directions from the web to maps on connected dashboards. Microsoft is working on a system through its Sync technology to provide ad-supported, location-based information for which users would normally pay. (Disclosure: Navigon, Microsoft and Zagat are clients of Edelman, my employer.)

The back seat offers perhaps more immediate promise for TV advertisers in search of new venues. In March Sirius and Chrysler launched an in-car video network called Backseat TV. The subscription service carries kids programming from Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel and Cartoon Network. Kids weaned on the service will surely demand more as the technology gets more sophisticated, perhaps to the chagrin of parents.

And therein lies the rub: Marketers will need to strike a careful balance to protect privacy and to not push into a space that many consider sacrosanct. However, given the size and captive nature of the in-car audience, the digital-advertising potential is becoming very clear.