All Things

Business Week Senior Writer Stephen Baker has been soliciting comments for an upcoming story on blogging/web 2.0, and his summary of the responses so far is pretty much on the money.

My main concern, as noted earlier in Twitter & Taking Info Overload Seriously, is that information overload has ALREADY become a big problem, is rapidly becoming worse, and few media folks (or anyone else) are taking it seriously.

I remember back when USA Today started publishing, how it was criticized for publishing in a short-article format. Comparisions were made to TV news, with accusations of dumbing down complex issues. Some feared it would be the beginning of the end of serious journalism.

Well three decades later, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are still cranking out in-depth articles. These are now available to anyone in the world with internet access, so those fears were certainly exaggerated.

Nevertheless, while both have been aggressive adopters of internet technologies and online presence, they - and other media - may struggle financially if means aren’t developed to help us better find, track, and consume the information we need, and then suitably record/re-publish it. This is a critical business concern for the publishing and advertising industries.

While USA Today-type capsule summaries are one way of dealing with information overload, we also need to be able to manage effectively more in-depth information sources, too. There really is a rapidly-growing stream of valuable, specific content being produced now, and we’ll never really be satisfied with any solution that simply restricts, without helping us access, more of this content than we can currently.

Indeed, the continuing growth in the number of channels of information is staggering. We’re going to need powerful tools to manage that. There’s much more to be said about this, but what we really need is a vibrant conversation about how best to handle information overload. What’s the crux of the problem - how do we define it? What kinds of tools would be truly helpful?

Here’s the comment I left on Steve Baker’s blog:

Information overload is a BIG problem, and I’m amazed how little that reality has registered with most people and with journalists and other media folks.

The answer isn’t simply read less, because the availability of quality, specific and useful information (that you need or really want for your job, life, etc.) is exploding.

What’s missing are powerful tools to help us manage this information in a convenient, non-redundant and timely manner.

Information is coming in - and in the case of bloggers, flickr users, etc. going out - from so many directions that organizing/integrating all that is going to become a big aspect of social networking, and computing/telecom in general, in the near future.

I ran across a post, The Attention Crash on Steve Rubel’s blog Micro Persuasion. In it, he argues that the real danger isn’t another .com financial bubble bursting, but rather individuals hitting a wall of information overload:

“We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.”

I agree that there’s still a lot of life left in this tech deployment cycle. At the same time, I’m amazed that the media and society at large still don’t seem to be taking information overload seriously.

There’s been such an explosion of both work and leisure information, not to mention creative tools, games, etc., yet you don’t notice many people outside of the GTD blogging community talking about it. We obviously are going to need some more sophisticated tools than just raw RSS feeds, and these folks seem to be about the only people seriously exploring that. There’s so many GTD-related productivity and project management tools, that I’m having a hard time getting them all sorted out.

In other words, we need a lot of innovation in order to develop tools for handling information overload, and so we should be seeing a lot of experimentation taking place. Right now most of that is happening in the GTD community. I think we should also expect to see a variety of tools tailored to particular individual styles. That’s an area I’ve done a great deal of research in, and hope to see its application to innovative productivity tools.

Beyond GTD, Twitter is clearly generating some of the loudest buzz currently, mainly as a social networking site, where it seems to have great potential. A lot of folks have criticized it as the worst example of pointless info overload but I think Twitter, or something like it, could actually be a tremendous tool to help deal with overload, both by making inputs timely without interrupting (using the web interface, anyway) and by forcing inputs to conform to a quick summary so you can judge whether it’s worth a further look.

Of course, most folks don’t get that yet. I see tweets saying “This is great” and just a link, giving me no idea what it’s about. Others send out a half-dozen or more pointless tweets a day, clogging up my friends page. Some news sources such as the New York Times, commendably quick to get on board, nevertheless send out the same update on multiple channels. All this “noise” reduces Twitter’s usefulness, but even in just the six weeks or so that I’ve used it, I’ve already seemed to notice a certain sort of evolution going on, with many (not all) folks starting to effectively pre-screen their tweets and limit them more to ones that would actually be helpful to others.

I think eventually we’ll see people going to multiple accounts (”channels”?), one with personal info and more security, another with interesting links (as Robert Scoble has already done with his Scoble’s Link Blog), and another with updates from all one’s own blog posts, important comments, etc. The last purpose is how I’m primarily using my own Twitter account, aeroG, at present.

The main point is that Twitter, as with so much of the web, is a grand experiment being done on a huge scale, and it’s likely to evolve rapidly in the coming year or two. If Rubel is at all correct, then we should expect to be seeing a lot more of these tools coming along shortly, to help us sort out not only our increasingly complex lives and connections, but also the huge flood of information that increasingly threatens to overwhelm us, or at least to drown out the truly valuable information tidbits that these tools should help us to find and track.

Years ago, Apple ran an ad with a bunch of lemmings all following each other off a cliff. After all, why think when it’s so easy to just NOT think? Well, here we go again. This year it seems like most all the major blogging/social networking services are one by one getting blinded in the headlights of MySpace.

As if we really need more of the lowest common denominator! There’s so much opportunity for innovation in this area, yet everyone wants to be the same. I’ve complained previously on my MSN (now Live) Spaces blog about Microsoft in this regard, and now the latest casualty apparently is Facebook.

With only 10 million users after two and a half years of operation, I guess Facebook just feels like a failure next to MySpace. Never mind the fact that they own the campus network space, they would rather throw out that distinctive so they can compete head-on with everybody. Usually these sorts of commoditization strategies don’t end up being as profitable as the competitors expect (the airline industry comes to mind).

Perhaps the Facebook users will again make a big fuss. Maybe management will listen, but chances are, based on the past history of fast-growing tech companies, they won’t. Most keep determinedly going in the wrong bone-headed direction until they go right off the cliff.

Xanga, which I use for my blog AeroGo and perhaps my favorite of the bunch, is likewise feverishly adding multimedia features, to compete not only with MySpace I suppose but also Flickr and YouTube. So far these changes seem mostly positive, but if Xanga can add these features so readily, they will very likely end up as standard on all sites.

Hasn’t anybody (or at least any VCs) noticed that there are a lot of people out there who don’t like MySpace? I mean really, it’s pretty raunchy by and large. It’s as if there was a town full of nice, somewhat distinct neighborhoods, yet all the developers were racing to fill these places with trashy businesses and dumpy apartments.

So why don’t any of these sites carve out a unique identity for themselves? I think the only plausible answer is the dramatic, rapid growth of MySpace. Why have 5 or 10 million users when you can have 100 million? Of course, these users apparently are also spending a lot of time on MySpace and so, presumably, potentially a lot of dollars.

Nevertheless, it seems that money is best made on the net by tightly targeting customers, not with mass marketing, so I suspect sites that are oriented around specific topics, activities and user demographics will ultimately yield a superior return. As I’ve noted before, these social networking sites need to differentiate themselves and find niches where they can thrive, as Facebook has (even if they don’t grasp the value of this).

Let me use Facebook as an example, since it has done the best job of targeting a very large yet tightly-defined niche (high school and college campuses). College students in particular have so many things they have to (or want to) buy, that the marketing/advertising opportunities seem almost endless, both at the local and at the national or branding/name recognition level. Everyone from the local pizza restaurant to students selling used textbooks to Hollywood film studios will want to target their users.

I’m not in school so I don’t use Facebook and don’t know how good a job they’ve done of capitalizing on this opportunity, but the folks developing (and funding) these sites need to remember that traffic often, but not always, equates to sales. Ultimately, it boils down to trust. I suspect that MySpace, as many city centers did, will begin to collapse of its own weight as many head to the “suburbs” of seemingly safer sites like Xanga and others.

The planned growth ideal for urban development might in fact be a useful metaphor for these social networking sites, which may do best if they concentrate on growing at a sustainable pace with a clear demographic or interest group in mind. Users need to come to trust these sites and feel safe in them. Then they will end up spending a lot more time and money there, and for the long run.

It’s been a very busy month and I’ve got a lot of things to write about, mostly small items worth mentioning. Hopefully I can get to several of these over the next few days. One thing I’ve been wondering about is what effect the rapid growth in investor interest in MySpace is going to have on other social network and blogging sites.

When the business press writes about social networking, they usually identify three sites - MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga - as the big three. I’ve really only spent much time on Xanga, where I have my site AeroGo.

AeroGo is the site I’m most interested in driving traffic to, and so inevitably I’ve been wondering how much the increased investor interest is likely to impact Xanga. They seem like an obvious candidate for acquisition, considering the valuation MySpace got from News Corp.

Well, today when I looked on AeroGo, instead of the usual message asking me to upgrade to Xanga Premium, there’s this:

“WE’RE HIRING!

Xanga is looking for a few good programmers and systems people to join the Xanga Team. Click here to apply. ”

This is an encouraging sign, I guess, that the Xanga folks are looking to increase the offerings of their site. It seems to me that there’s certainly more potential there, especially with the Blogrings, though these need to be cleaned up and tended to some extent, to get the worst of the silly stuff out.

One thing that bothered me about Xanga was the seemingly exclusive nature of a social networking site, i.e., that it was only for casual/social and not more interest/topic-oriented interaction. I wanted to do something specific to aerospace, and at least to some extent network with people interested in this topic, but it seemed almost too “serious” for a social networking site.

So far, AeroGo seems to have been pretty well received by the members of various Xanga aerospace-related blogrings (see to the left of my page for some of the best). I’ve even had a few very nice and grateful comments, which were certainly encouraging.

As I’ve noted, I think there’s a lot more potential with sites like Xanga and MySpace. MySpace apparently is oriented mainly toward music and dating (though the latter may prove problematic, and the site is now in the news frequently over concerns in this area). Facebook is positioned around college, and now high school, communities. Xanga obviously needs its own particular niche as well.

In this regard, I was surprised to read that Xanga’s goal initially was to provide a place for writers to “publish their work on the Net.” Now I wonder if perhaps I had Xanga figured out right after all.

Of course, Xanga has limitations, and I’m now working on a more extensive hosted AeroGo site, though I’ll keep AeroGo Xanga as a way to connect with those who are interested. Nevertheless, I wonder if Xanga’s best focus would be as a topical networking site, for hobbies, education and careers, rather than music or school.

Another thing I’ve been suspecting, but don’t really know how to confirm, is that more folks beyond the college years are getting interested in social networking sites, and that many are feeling more comfortable with Xanga. This is something investors might want to consider, especially since the out-of-school population is a lot bigger and generally has more spending power.

Google has been catching some criticism for its deal to pay $1 billion for a 5% stake in AOL, but I can see several reasons why it may make sense, at least for them.

First of all, the deal is a defensive move, in multiple ways. Google can afford the billion but doesn’t want to lose a substantial portion of its revenues and cash flow. As any experienced entrepreneur knows, managing cash is Job 1. Maybe Google is so big it could afford to be a bit sloppy in this area, but it’s good they are being disciplined about this and defending their revenue and cash flow first before worrying about maximizing return on investment.

Of course, it’s also defensive in that it locks Microsoft out, thereby sustaining Google’s online ad momentum while restraining Microsoft’s. Though some seem to view things differently, I think Google’s brand, on the net, is still way more valuable than Microsoft’s, and the brand must be defended.

Second, AOL’s valuation seems to be nearly completely a function of the perspective from which it is viewed. At the time of the merger (with Time-Warner), it was viewed as a top internet property/portal/brand that was key to driving traffic, and was given a sky-high valuation. Today it is viewed as just a dial-up ISP going the way of the dinosaurs.

A couple of weeks ago, I got another AOL disk in the mail (what does that make - about one a month for a decade?). This one, however, was different, and got me thinking. Instead of just trying to sign me up for AOL, the cover says, “Get Your Business Online”. This was such an obvious growth direction for AOL that I’m surprised I hadn’t thought of it before.

It seems to me that AOL’s members align pretty well with Sams Club shoppers, i.e. upper middle-class folks who often own their own businesses. Of course, these are all switching to broadband and AOL is no longer viewed as the premium ISP. As someone noted the other day, however, AOL’s core competency may really lie in getting newbies (or now their businesses) on the web.

Of course, AOL has a lot of work to do if it wants to make this really profitable, but considering that the local web is something that really hasn’t happened yet, at least most places, there’s still a lot of growth potential there for helping small business owners. Those who have been AOL customers and used to the web are likely smart enough to know there’s more their business could do online, if it was simple enough to implement.

Consequently, a third reason Google’s deal may make sense is that it solidifies its relationship with AOL, which has already proved to be a strong partner in generating ad revenue. Google hasn’t really tried to be a portal like Yahoo, Excite, or the others, but AOL could provide that part while Google drives development of new online services.

One opportunity I keep waiting for Google to tackle is local classifieds, which would capitalize on their compelling brand and near 100% user base. A single, strong brand for local classifieds seems so obvious (and needed), I don’t know why they haven’t been more aggressive about it. Maybe they’re just trying to be merciful to the print newspapers.

I enjoy reading about how Google is turning the business/venture capital world on its head. I use Google every day, and haven’t paid them a dime, yet they’re making billions. It’s interesting … fascinating!