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.

Mashable and others have been reporting that the venerable Classmates.com site is now about to do an IPO (initial public offering), at a valuation of $125 million. Started in 1995, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore says Classmates deserves credit for being the first social network, begun two years before the now-defunct Six Degrees.

While it may seem old, dull and boring to the digerati types (and it’s not Facebook), Classmates might still be pretty interesting to average users, if they are smart about making the right enhancements. I like Classmates; they continue to be slowly but steadily adding folks from my school classes. I’ve only communicated with a few, but think the site still fills a viable need (I’ve had virtually NO success locating anyone my age - 44 - on Facebook or other networks yet), and they’ve got the market share/critical mass to make it work.

As others have noted (generating considerable controversy), the big social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook appear to be attracting different sorts of users. While Facebook is now pulling in a lot of older technically-inclined users, the large bloc of non-technical older Americans is pretty much being left out. Obviously Classmates is too specialized to serve all their needs, but it’s the kind of simple and inviting format that would likely appeal to a lot of average folks.

My main complaints are with the pricing and the speed of the site. Classmates needs more functionality to be free and to get away from the True ads, which seem to be their main advertiser. I suspect if the site were faster to navigate and search, folks would spend more time there. Monetizing a site nowadays with AdSense, etc., generally isn’t too difficult, so I don’t see why they couldn’t offer more free functionality and still be viable.

Of course, any school-oriented site should have plenty of ways to generate well-performing ads (though even Facebook doesn’t seem to have succeeded at this, yet), but I suppose Classmates could also keep their paid subscriptions. In the several years I’ve used Classmates, I haven’t seen many people going this route, because you have to pay so much up front just to try it for a short time.

If sites like Classmates are going to have a paid subscription model, then they should by all means offer a less costly middle tier (above the free tier) and segment their market between those who don’t mind paying $20 or more to try out a site that may (likely) disappoint vs. those of us who aren’t willing to risk much until we know we’re going to get our money’s worth!

As with any social network, the key is users returning to the site on a regular basis (Facebook’s strength). Classmates is good about sending weekly emails announcing new members from your classes, but the site is slow to load and navigate, and when someone does try to communicate with you, you can’t even see it without paying a considerable amount for a subscription.

Obviously, basic communication features should be free. Maybe subscriptions could add the option of a blog page or other customization, the opportunity to have a page for that particular class, etc. There are so many possibilities, the site ought to be worth $125 million, considering the number of users (50 million) that they’ve signed up.

A few other ideas for added functionality (maybe some of this exists already but could be enhanced and made more visible):

• Stores for sale of school related merchandise (shirts, stickers, etc.)
• Alumni association pages. My high school’s alumni association has become much more active and is now even conducting a campital campaign to raise money for improvements! With the internet, these activities are much easier to do, and a site like Classmates provides a key ingredient - finding and keeping in touch with people.
• As I’ve written about elsewhere, it’s still VERY hard to locate your former teachers, and Classmates already offers this functionality (membership for teachers, etc.) but it’s almost completely ignored. They need to make a push to sign up teachers, which I suspect would stimulate a lot of other interest, and maybe a fair amount of free media coverage.

As I hinted at above, I find Classmates interesting in part because it’s so different from the sorts of things that the Silicon Valley crowd get excited about. The Valley folks have brought us a lot of good things, but also have some huge blind spots. A large part of the country is moving MUCH more slowly onto the internet, and there’s still not that much available on the net for for folks who didn’t grow up using it.

Classmates isn’t Facebook, but I really believe that there are still a lot of great business opportunities on the net for serving older folks (which, as far as the internet goes, is pretty much anyone over 35). Even though they have a lot of disposable income, many of these users are still fearful of doing too much, of making purchases online, etc. Sites that seem stable and “safe” have a certain appeal that a wild and woolly site like MySpace could never offer.

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.

I started out writing this as yet another comment to my earlier post about Twitter, but think I’ll make it a separate post. In any case, here are two good articles about serious uses of Twitter that I found from a post on the Setting Contexts blog:

The Top 5 Ways Smart People Use Twitter

What Twitter Means for Marketers

Regarding the 5 uses in the first article, I’d add:

1. Marketing & Communication: It’s interesting to just look at Twitter and quickly see what so much of the buzz is about. I do think there’s a good chance of picking up on tech or consumer trends much quicker, if you’re listening to the right folks. A good tool for finding those “right” folks is an obvious key add-on to the service.

2. Microblogging: Not everyone’s brain works this way, but for me there’s a lot of times I want to throw out a random thought, question or link that might be of some benefit or deserving of further investigation (e.g. by a journalist). I’ve added my Twitter account to my Technorati blog list, so now there’s a somewhat decent chance these thoughts might get discovered, though Twitter does need an automatic ping function.

3. Business Networking: I’m hopeful about this; I do well in one-on-one conversation but don’t stand out in a crowd. There’s a lot of folks I’d like to connect with that I’ve never had an immediately compelling enough reason to do it, though it would probably be beneficial for both sides.

4. Breaking News & Getting Scoops: I got this part as soon as I saw the CNN logo on Twitter. Unfortunately, I don’t think most news outlets have figured out how Twitter could drive traffic to their sites. As with RSS, the NY Times is at the forefront of this.

5. Streamlining Your Electronic Inboxes: I’m really hopeful that Twitter can help to reduce the email onslaught, since reading a Twitter update is so instant. I made a suggestion about this, for example, to Kristin at French Word a Day last week, as I thought it was an excellent example of a daily email service that could benefit from a Twitter update.

As I noted before, I expect we’ll see a whole lot of other uses emerge for Twitter, since in essence it’s a whole new basic form of communication. Here are a few more interesting examples of Twitter applications I’ve found recently:

Austin Weather

Kansai Train Announcements

French Practice

Interesting Links Forwarded by Robert Scoble

Twitter Timer

Also someone reportedly found some help after a car accident: Thoughts on Twitter.

Finally, with regard to the second article mentioned at the beginning, there’s this interesting assertion: If Markets Are Conversations, Then Twitter Is Money.

I’ve been reading about the Twitter instant-messaging/social networking site for a while, and decided to finally check it out. My screen name is aeroG, and you can go there to see some of my initial annoyances, some of which have been resolved. After a few hours of messing with it over the last couple of days, here’s my early assessment:

Twitter is asynchronous instant messaging for adults.

While my teenage daughter is glued to AIM, etc., much of the time, I can’t hardly get her to check the emails I send her. I guess email seems way too slow for her. Email seems just about the right speed for me, because I don’t have a boss who’s expecting instant answers all day long. In any case, there are some times where a faster pace is useful, but I’m usually juggling other stuff like most adults.

Twitter might well be a good answer for this need, and it seems to be growing in popularity, at least for the moment. After working with it a little while, I can see that it has a lot of potential for news alerts (BBC, CNET and CNN, for example). You’re also supposed to be able to get a weather forecast, but as you can see on my page I haven’t gotten that to work yet.

I don’t know for sure if these pages are run by the media sources themselves, or just somebody copying (plagiarizing?) their news, since the updates are spotty. BBC seems to be the most frequently updated, but none are working at anywhere near their potential.

I’m surprised media outlets aren’t jumping all over this; it seems like a great way to generate traffic to their news sites. It would sure be nice to have all the latest updates from both the news sources and people you want showing right there on your Twitter page, and it would go a long way toward ensuring that folks kept using Twitter themselves on a frequent/regular basis, which is the idea.

That said, I can’t help thinking that there are going to be some serious privacy issues with Twitter. For example, I didn’t expect to see my full name displayed on my page, after I had to choose a screen name. Worse, when I tried to edit it, their system wouldn’t allow it. Maybe I can live with that, but I don’t see why users shouldn’t have control over that as with all the other social networking sites.

Obviously, if someone wanted to stalk someone else, their Twitter page would be the first place a stalker would look. You can set it private, but there certainly needs to be much finer control over privacy aspects of the site.

Despite these weaknesses, Twitter seems to have enough capability (it works to/from phones and IM services as well) to have a great deal of potential usefulness. I wrote how Xanga quickly evolved from a writing platform (reportedly its intended use) to a social networking site, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some so-far unforeseen application becomes the primary use of Twitter as well.

Well, I just signed up for Socializr. I thought that maybe if I signed up right away, I could get a page with my first name for the URL. It turns out I was right, though it remains to be seen if the site will amount to anything.

Socializr was started by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams, so I guess it’s sort of like Friendster 2.0. I haven’t been too impressed with Friendster 1.0 which, of course, was the big social networking site (along with LinkedIn) before MySpace came along.

It seems kind of late to be starting another social networking site, but then none of the ones so far are all that fantastic, with the exception of Xanga, which continues to improve steadily. Xanga’s problem is that it’s being abandoned by teens for MySpace and Facebook, and has yet to be discovered by most adults (its original target audience), to which it is really better-suited.

Of course, by the time Google came along, there were already a lot of search sites, and it wasn’t obvious there was any room for another. The main problem with these networking sites is that they need to find a way to allow folks to have a lot of connections, without being deluged by junk and redundant groups, etc. (I noted before on my Xanga site AeroGo that there are over 500 astronomy blogrings, for example).

If a site can actually help you connect to people with similar interests, who want to connect (rather than just show off or fool around), then it could prove valuable for personal or business use. They have to for sure move past the collecting friends paradigm, though.

I can’t really tell much about Socializr yet, but I still think there’s a lot of room for innovation in the social networking space, and it would be nice if they can move things to a higher level.

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.

I haven’t been blogging much this summer, been very busy with other stuff. What time I have had has been going mostly to AeroGo, which is slowly but steadily growing in traffic. In particular it’s been getting a lot of high-quality international traffic, so I’m hoping I’m on the right track with that. I’ve got a lot of ideas for AeroGo as well as many other things I want to do on the internet.

One of the things I’ve noticed about my blogs (four in total, so far) is that even though traffic is still modest, since early on they’ve gotten fairly good Google rankings. This makes me hopeful that I may in fact have a good sense for how to use the net to advantage, though it really took me several years to settle on a blogging approach. At first, when setting up and running a blog was more difficult, I figured I’d have to put everything into one blog, but I just never could see how that would work.

Though I don’t generally write about what I ate for breakfast, even in my personal blog Light Side, I thought it would be awfully presumptious to think folks would wade through personal stuff in order to find something they were interested in. The #1 issue in writing is to write to your audience, and with one blog it seemed impossible to define a target audience, at least for me. It wasn’t until last year that I resolved this dilemma of the one and the many, by deciding the solution was several, or possibly many, blogs, aimed at particular topics, with this blog All Things covering everything else.

I knew I was on the right track upon realizing that tightly-targeted blogs would get much better treatment by search engines. Moreover, several blogs linking to each other would raise the rankings of each, whereas one blog with many topics might actually hurt rankings

Right now this is how my blogs are targeted (maybe this will be helpful as an example):

• Light Side: Personal & Education
• AeroGo: Aerospace & Practical Engineering Management/Career Advice (targeted primarily at high school & college students)
• RealCurrents: Current Events/Issues/Politics
• All Things: My various other interests, especially Technology & Business, but also others that don’t fit elsewhere

Originally, I expected considerably more variation in the topics in All Things, but as it’s worked out, most posts are about technology and/or business. Perhaps this means there should be a separate blog for these topics, but I don’t have anything in mind for this yet.

Another thing I’ve noticed this summer, with my limited posting, has been that even when I wasn’t writing, traffic seemed to be slowly rising, except on my personal blog. While I actually cover quite a bit of stuff on Light Side, I haven’t really tried to drive traffic to it, at least yet (I still have some trepidations about that). Nevertheless, I’m contemplating starting a separate site to handle the type of personal/educational advice I occasionally write about there, which has garnered some interest but could be better organized on a separate site.

On the other sites, however, I wonder if I was starting to see a sort of slow-motion snowballing effect as traffic gradually grew even when not writing. The jury’s still out on this, since I was getting an increasing amount of comment spam until I made some changes, and so wonder if a lot of these hits are just spammers (though the large number of hits to my post about GM’s OnStar system - a prime spammer target - really declined after that).

I doubt much traffic growth would occur on its own for blogs filled with short entries, but when you write posts with a fair amount of depth (and several times as many resulting search words), it seems possible that a point of critical mass might be reached where links from other sites, search engine effects, etc., could combine to make traffic grow. It’s my hunch that’s the case for a well-targeted site, but even so it remains unclear whether the effect could be enough to be significant.

In my view the internet, at some level, is one big, giant, experiment. Actually it’s several: technical, business, and social experiments at least. As such, I’m trying to observe its behavior and learn how it works, insight that I’m sure will prove profitable in many ways. Of course, the internet is also a huge political experiment, as I expect we’ll discover, maybe not this time, but perhaps in two more years.

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.