The Online Social Network

Returning May 15th

No really. We’ll be back soon.

Quick! Blog about it! Corporate Mascot in Peril!

When I lived in Pittsburgh (YAY STEELERS!!!!! Wooooo!) I became very acquainted with a smiley face. This was the mascot that came about as a result of the trademarked cookie of a regional chain called “Eat ‘n Park.” When I moved west I bid fairwell to the happy, smiling representation of family food. Or did I?

On the west coast there is another smiling avatar. His name is Jack. He appears as a human being with a giant snowman-like head, and a little conical hat. His expression changes by how his mouth is drawn. Jack is the fictitious CEO of the western burger chain, “Jack in the Box.”

So, to join east coast and west coast, let’s focus on a Superbowl commercial that occurred. Jack in the Box ran a regional commercial promoting ‘Anything on the menu, any time.’ I suppose this is like getting an EggMcMuffin after 11 am. The commercial started with mascot Jack talking about this, walking out into traffic and then getting hit by a bus. (link to the video)

This commercial is a member of an increasing field of “Teaser commercials.” Commercials that start a story and then drive you to a web site to hear the rest of the story. Usually, very anticlimactic; or in the case of companies like GoDaddy (Official domain registrar of Tosocnet) “Innappropriate for Television.” Translation.. more tease. But with the push onto the internet there is the ability to create more interactivity.

Jack in the Box (henceforth referred to as JitB, so I don’t have to type as much) walks an interesting line between fiction and reality for its ad campaign. JitB has managed to successfully anthropomorphise its company into a tangible character. (Such as Ronald McDonald, the ever-increasingly scary Burger King, and others) By putting its mascot into complete peril, it has latched onto human interest.

The site HangInThereJack.Com is a running blog on Jack’s current condition. There are several video blog entries with the same tongue-in-cheek humour as the rest of the long running campaign. There’s even a youtube video from a passer by’s cell phone camera from the “accident”. Of course the poor quality video lines up exactly with the secondary camera from the commercial.

The site makes the request that, in lieu of flowers, you think of the fallen mascot by going to the stores and “Enjoying any choice from the menu at any time.” To help soothe the worried hearts of his fans we need to honour his last wishes. And speaking of fans of celebrities… You can follow how Jack is doing on both Facebook and Twitter.

Oh, look: two of our favourite new social networking friends. That’s right. This is a campaign to drive you into the stores, but to do so by hooking you on a personal level to a brand and to an anthropomorphised avatar. This campaign wants to give you more of an emotional connection. Truth is, we love our local heroes, and we love an underdog. Nobody loves a burger chain. You may have a preference and even a choice favourite, but it’s nonetheless a burger chain. Crappy food, not nutritious, convenient, and we all eat it. (Well, unless we’re food snobs.) But a smiling clown head suffering from perhaps a near fatal (Ironically football-like) crushing blow? Well, we eat that stuff up. (I’ll bet anything the guy that pitched the campaign used those exact words.)

So, I added this “celebrity” on Twitter. Jack has only been twittering for a few weeks. By my estimation, let’s call it about the time that it takes to produce a commercial for a an ad campaign. The web site monitoring his status has a place where you can send your get wells. And there were many on the site right after the accident.

This was a well-planned social networking attack. Some of the videos and messages were obviously pre-generated, priming the audience to take the idea viral. JitB creates a social meme. Some will play along with this game. And yes, some will honestly believe this is all real and send actual, heart-felt messages. The company doesn’t care. Because at core… they will all drive business to the restaurant. This business they attract is what will pay for the gamble that is advertising. This is the goal of advertising: to create new business that not only pays the expense of advertising, but also drives up revenue beyond those costs.

There’s been a lot of talk about social networking as a venue for business. Businesses don’t social network. Businesses social engineer. These are two very different verbs and very likely could form two entirely different yet intertwinable topics. This is also not new. Anytime you contemplate that, all you have to do is contemplate the earliest corporate mascots you can think of.

Social engineering through social networking is also not new. On an honest level, it is why I respect Wil Wheaton so much. How he’s used social networking is how he has engineered a new perception of himself. People use their content and their metadata (the stuff about their stuff) to sometimes craft very shrewd images.

This becomes a topic that will end here but I feel will show up more in the future.

What happened to Tosocnet?

Reports of our demise are greatly exaggerated.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been laid off from my old full-time position. This in itself is quite taxing. My initial perception of this was that it would afford me more time to contribute to this blog. It did in fact afford me that time.

Unfortunately, that time also got filled with a few other distractions. One of these distractions is finding a new job. The other was more surprising.

When I was on the job market the last time I spent nearly 14 months trying to secure the job I was looking for. The reasons for this span were.

• I had limited my search area
• I was unclear on the type of work I was looking for
• I chose a market that had limited positions to begin with in my field.

During this time I took on some contract work and also began designing a piece of software. I think that every engineer tries to develop that one piece of software. This is much like every author trying to write the great (Insert your nationality) novel. several things worked against my uber software.

• A lack of discipline
• A lack of focus
• Component technology unable to handle my needs.

Interestingly, my life is different now. I have more experience in my field. I have (I believe thanks to parenthood) increased discipline and focus. I have a clearer idea of what my software needs to do. I think the technology is ripe. And oh yes… I know how to generate revenue with it.

Of course this software went on hold when I joined a company full time. I reserve to keep some of my intellectual property as …well… mine. So, now I’m back on my own. I don’t call myself unemployed. Right now, I’ve got two jobs which are really one. Finding a job and writing my software. Both reduce down to… finding a money stream to support the work I do.

I am a coder first and an entrepreneur second. (Which is  probably why I haven’t found venture capitalists yet.) So, when choosing between blog and software… I code. Because, I discover my written Objective-C is a bit cleaner than my written English.

On a side note I spoke with MacOSKen this past week. I complimented him on his daily podcast. I explained that I worked in radio and know the work that is required to keep up a daily show even if it’s under 15 minutes. He asked me if I’d considered podcasting. I suppose it would allow me to dispense with the written form. I’d could probably drop a lot more information in one session.

Sadly, this all comes down to ‘time management.’ Which was much easier before the layoff. Had my schedule very clearly delineated. Now, I have more time… which means I’m not budgeting it well. And the people who were reading me on a daily basis are the ones suffering the most.

So, starting next week, I’m budgeting time specifically for this site. Now granted, this site is still in its infancy. A recent article thus warns you that you absolutely should NOT trust me on Social Networking. Granted, I guess I’m okay because as per my history, I’ve been researching social networking for about 15 years and using it for nearly 30 and I’m just beginning to blog on it now.

So, at some point next week I may try an audio post and see how that works out. But no promises. And there is also an array of phone screens next week at several companies. There is definitely more code to write. Next week I learn CoreImage and possibly CoreData.

There’s definitely more to tell. Social networking, the project, commentary. It’s just putting all the ducks in a row and letting them wander over the cliches.

Blathering on more than usual now… More Monday.

What Ifs: LiveJournal

LiveJournal like every other social networking site asks the all important question. How do I make enough money to support my service? Currently LiveJournal has four primary revenue streams:

1. Member Subscriptions
2. Add ons (pictures, storage, gifts)
3. SWAG: (T-shirts, etc)
4. Advertising

LiveJournal has fallen into the same trap that so many other sites have fallen into. At their core they are really little more than a content distributor. However, in the world of the internet; the distributor has had no luck gaining ownership of the content they distribute. (Unlike the entertainment industry which now sues grandmothers and children and reminds each film watcher in advance that they are a potential criminal)

(The writer digresses; “Shock” I tell you)

I attended a conference many years ago called MacHack. The only real detail I need to give about the conference as a whole is that the conference started at midnight with an opening Keynote and then ran for 48 or 72 hours (I can’t remember which, it was about a decade ago). The relevance was the keynote speaker the year I attended. The speaker was Eric Raymond. Raymond was the king of the open source movement and he was speaking to a collection of commercial developers. The keynote was on changing the business model so that the software was free but the technical support was charged I left the Q&A (Query and Accusation) part of the heated debate at 4:30 am. I am given reason to believe that nobody won that morning.

But this concept begs the question… What could LiveJournal have charged for? What would their users have been willing to pay for? Like all good open source projects (when it started) LiveJournal was a free service. Only a handful of us wondered who was paying for the server, the storage, and the connectivity. While paid accounts were a way to cover some costs; the proportion of free users to paid users was NEVER going to balance the cost. So with the service basically free; of course there was an explosion.

So, the content is mine. You can’t really charge for that. If LJ was going to try, it’d have to somehow guarantee my content from being distributed after LJ put it out there. Further, LJ would have to set up some sort of pay scale between itself and each individual content producer. Of course it’d also have to guarantee that users weren’t distributing (and effectively being paid) for content that wasn’t theirs. (Looking at this you can begin to see some of the mind numbing work that’s gone into iTunes.)

As previously mentioned I subscribe to about 500 LJ content points. So now the question is… who should be dinged with the expense? Who should be reimbursed? What is being paid for?

We have to view this from a point of view of consumerism. Consumerism at its most clever diverts cost. Printers and Razors are the living proof of this. When colour InkJet printers first manifested there were exorbitantly priced. Today, you can buy one for under $100. Partially this is due to technology costs going down. However, if you own one of these printers you know the real reason. The plastic ink cartridges (which cost pennies to make) are $12-18 each. Your average printer takes at least four of these. And can run through one in a month if you use your printer a lot. At an average of $15, that’s $60 a month which totals up to $720 a year. Suddenly that $100 printer is nowhere near as cheap as you remember it. As a man with a full beard, don’t get me started on the price of Razors and Blades.

So, we know that LiveJournal can’t charge for the services or the connectivity or the data throughput. At least not at cost or the people would flee the service. (We’re of course talking about the time back in history, when LJ was all the rage.) I hazard the question, “What if LiveJournal had charged based on the number of blogs you were subscribed to?” Maybe giving the first 20-25 as a freebie to entice. Perhaps the service could use log in credentials to give visibility to additional blogs based on subscription.

Going back to iTunes… $0.99… genius. An amount so small; who notices a dollar. Here or there. 

You put in a subscription rate or a charge for a quantity of subscriptions. Are the amount of users that you lose some made up for by the amount you gain monetarily? The question is… would folks have gone for it? Financially, is it viable? This in itself is a wonderful and mostly unanswerable question because there was nothing like LiveJournal to compare it to.

The flip side to this is the poor user who wouldn’t be able to subscribe to the extra journals. Suddenly friends have to tell friends; I couldn’t afford Bill because I bought Mary. The amusement of people trafficking friends and swapping them out because of the content. By keeping the pricing neutral and the choice to the subscriber; you’re not paying for the content; you’re paying for the service. Of course many might have rejected this idea and there would have been a mass exodus to some similar service elsewhere. Again the devil’s advocate points out that at the time the LiveJournal community was unrivaled. Maybe people wouldn’t have left.

The problem in the socnet industry at the moment is the same as those Oscar Season films that are made up of 4 previous Oscar Winners. People assume that all they have to do is pull in the winners and lightning will have to strike a second time; just because they are in the room. The truth is that the great successes have come from the nobody fulfilling a need and becoming a winner. The genius is in manifesting a need so well; everyone shares a part of that need and the manifestation becomes sensation. The acumen is the business sense not only to recognise sensation before it gets out of control; but knows how to put a price on sensation that will enrich rather than kill.

In Apple History; Woz was the Genius manifesting personal need. Jobs was the acumen that knew how to sell what they were making.

So, the question for you is.. you’ve invented LiveJournal. It’s a service to help you and your friends blog easily. What do you charge for? I mean.. before you’re done giving it away for free to all your friends. All 18.25 million of your friends. Of course.. if you charge… would people still go for it?

How do you make money for making a blogging sensation?

How do you keep up with it all?

I was thumbing through my News Reader today and had a chuckle. Many of my blogs are categorised into folders. The folders display the number of total unread stories in all blogs in that folder. My amusement came from a folder labelled, “Must read Journals” whose unread story count was 1,685. So much for my classification of MUST.

To give you a rough idea of my own addictive nature to information: On LiveJournal alone I subscribe to 386 individual’s journals. This is not counting 164 communities and 22 syndicated feeds. That is 572 sources of different information. This does not count Friendster, Tribe, LinkedIn, MySpace, Tribe, Facebook, OKCupid, YouTube, Twitter, and several other specific social networking sites bringing the number to over 1,750. Of course, we could add in Mailing lists, syndicated feeds, and the number becomes crushing.

How do I keep up with it? How does anyone keep up with it?

We don’t. As a result, we all get the job of being our own feature editors in the grand newspaper called the InterWebs. That’s right, you open the faucet on those tubes and you take a well-timed sip.

Fortunately, many of the sites you frequent help you put some moderation on the flow. LiveJournal offers filters; Facebook offers groups, and an unending array of things to help you filter the noise for their specific site. Of course, this doesn’t make it any easier if you’re looking cross-site. True, you can syndicate external sites to LiveJournal and then filter… You can have your twitters post immediately to FaceBook and then later distribute to LiveJournal.

Therefore, consolidation technologies are coming… slowly. They still require you to do your own editing and management. This in general (so far) is a good thing. Right now, electronic editing is still in its infancy. Recently, (within the last 6 months) a major news source had a story about how a farmer, named McDonald, was proud that it’s cow, named Apple, had chased off a bear. This seeming innocuous story wouldn’t be much to even consider except that the news source was a financial source. Its online editing system slapped the following links on McDonald and Apple:

(nyse: MCD – news – people )
(nasdaq: AAPL – news – people )

Did I mention a Bear was involved in the story? Investors simply saw, “McDonalds owns Apple: Bear” and the stock took a short dive into insanity.

Therefore, at this point, I think that we ought leave the finessing of editing to human hands. Granted I hear a group at Cyberdyne is working on the AI algorithms to take that out of our hands so … what’s the worry? But, as always, I digress.

We need to find a way to tie together not merely what we want to follow (and conversely what we want to broadcast); but who, where, and how. Ah yes, all those basic interrogative adverbs and pronouns that you learned in school, especially if you took journalism.

I’ve been watching the 8-year migration of social networking addicts. For those in the Audubonetwork society, currently it’s LiveJournal to FaceBook and MySpace to Twitter. (More on that later). The bulk of people migrate socnet sites for two reasons: One- Others in their community have already migrated. Two- There is more diversity and potential in the new community. Nevertheless, migration is a two-way action. Migration can be defined as emigration (leaving a site for those who still use USA Today as a primary source of news) as well as immigration. To borrow a term used in an uncomfortable manner by my previous employer… Your citizenship.

Of course, many consider themselves dual citizens. (Or in the case of social networking, poly citizens) So, why am I calling this a migration? It all comes back to tracking your information.  You personally begin to take on a sense of responsibility for how much information you feel has fallen through the cracks. How much water you waste (to use my previous metaphor).

I know many readers who’ve already commented about how much they would feel lost without the community they’ve found in LiveJournal. How nothing will ever replace it or cover the functionality it has. These comments are spiced with such phrases as: “Ease of use”, “Sense of Community”, and the like. What amazes me is that many of these people don’t realise that LiveJournal is their ‘First’ online socnet. Moreover, you never forget your first time. I think it was Wolverine who said, “Murder is only difficult the first time.”

Personally, by this point, I’ve walked away from more social networking sites than some folks will ever be able to count. (This may be literal if my state’s education system continues at the rate it is).  I’ve taken some very seriously only to see them die naturally or become some other site’s property (which is often fundamentally the same thing). As an example, OneList was a personal favourite of mine that was eaten and then mangled by Yahoo. There is also ’six degrees’. No, not that six degrees site. No… not that one either. Right. There have now been three networking sites called six degrees.

While I do admit loving my LiveJournal (and that includes the 3 or 4 that became utterly neglected that I almost never post to); I know that one day in the not too distant future; LiveJournal will be that thing that I reminisce over just as easily as I will over “The (real) Electric Company” and the sequel to Serenity. I quote Red Dwarf:

(Lister), Why don’t you listen to something really classical, like Mozart, Mendelssohn or Motorhead?

Eventually, LiveJournal will dissolve into more noise than signal in the same manner that MySpace has. I wish I could say that this is made up.  I wish I could say that this is made up. I wish I could say that people aren’t falling off LiveJournal.  I took a simple look at my subscriptions page (which I don’t check nearly as often anymore) and it tells the tale. Before giving the statistics, let me tell you that I’ve been neglectful of LiveJournal of late. I don’t think I’ve changed my subscription list in a few months. A recent check of my ‘friends’ page listed the requisite 25 most recent posts. Eight were from individual people instead of communities or feeds. To make matters worse, the eight break down as such:

2 memes, 1 YouTube embedded movie (with no other comments), 1 twitter relay, and 1 one-line status update. The remaining three were: A political post, a display of an activity, and an actual journal post about a person.

Using those filters, I looked at strictly personal posts from individuals.  This is theoretically representative of the real life-blood of LiveJournal. “True blogging.” I found 2 thoughtful blog posts, 1 display of an activity, 3 anecdotes, and two political posts. (note this list includes the posts above) That’s 8 out of 25. The rest were twitter relays, video embeds, memes, and posts that are twitter length or shorter. One personal favourite simply read, “Grr”. (Author’s note. I know she’s going to ding me for singling that one out )

Returning to our idea of migration, I want to delve into those twitter relays.  These are blog posts compiled from all the Twitter microblogging a person has made that day. (I’m just as responsible for making them. They post at 3:35am.) From the people I sampled who have those posted: one has made two posts in their last 10 posts. The rest are all twitter relays. This means at minimum… they are using the twitter service 5 times as much as they are LiveJournal.

As I said, you move to where the community is. Moreover, you move away from where the community isn’t. At least you try to find a place where you don’t feel as bad for wasting as much water. One reader commented about how they don’t feel as bad if they miss a twitter because they deem it as ‘less important’ information. Let me flag that one as another topic for another day.

So how do we gauge what is the important information. A stunning prospect when we’re evaluating information we haven’t seen and doesn’t come from us. Ah, it’s on Twitter; it’s less important.

In the early days of text messaging, there was the pager. You could send a number for a call back. Typically, a number page was uncharged. You only got a charge if you left a page with a voice mail. My social circle created a system of seven digit code messages. The first three digits were who was calling, the next digit was the priority of the message, the next three the general message. As a result:

1114611 meant: 111 (my girlfriend), 4 (not too important), 611:has a question.

The service grows to fit the need and the audience. One person’s tweet is another person’s contract negotiation.

So, 1400 words later and still 1700 groups, individuals, and blogs later… How do I keep up with it all?

To me the purpose of social networking is not the site. It’s not even the stories. It’s the people and what they mean to me. Some meanings are transient: The ex-gf who went psycho and lied to my housemate about me. Some meanings are deeper than blood: The ex-not-really-ever-gf who has a pact to sit in rocking chairs with me on one of our porches probably in neighbouring houses while our grandchildren play together despite the fact that today we live about 2,500 miles apart.

I keep up with the people through every site that I am a part of. I use instant messaging. As an example of this migration theory, contemplate how many people still use “Yahoo Instant Messenger” or “AOL Instant Messenger.” Then contemplate how many people use “Trillian” or “Adium” which brings all of the sources together in a neat combined relay package. I am on (not quite) countless social networking sites. I join all these sites because I am searching. I am constantly playing with the technology because first and foremost; I want to find a better way to filter my water, and drink it. I want to do so without wasting it and most assuredly without drowning in it.

Of course, I’m also a software engineer and a media producer…

So… I’m not just looking at what’s out there… I’m studying. I’m plotting. I’m contemplating. I’m designing.

Beautiful Mind… It’s not just a movie. It’s a survival guide.