Clunky Flow

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result: Albert Einstein

How many attempts have Yahoo made at breaking into social networking? Yahoo360 anyone? Yahoo Mixd? Efforts to buy Facebook? And now Yahoo Mash has closed after less than a year in operation.

If you’ve tested your assumptions and found them to be false. Try some new assumptions…

Anyway, here’s the assumptions that Yahoo keeps making. And keeps proving to be false:

1. “If you build it, they will come.”

2. “Existing community + social networking tools = vibrant social network”

Very expensive mistakes in their own rights. But think of the opportunity costs! If Yahoo! had “done a MySpace or a Facebook” things would be looking very different today.

Community is organic, not mechanic

So what did these other guys do differently? They understood that community is an organic entity that emerges bottom up.

MySpace identified bands with a need to get the word out through friend-of-a-friend networks. Facebook identified students with a need to get to know who’s who when thrust into an whole new social scene.

MySpace and Facebook identified latent communities and gave these latent communities the tools to let them nurture themselves into existence.

Without this realisation, a social network is just a shiny new tool that is about to start rusting through neglect the moment it has been created. Yahoo never got this. They never understood that a community emerges through an organic process. They have never reached down to nurture the relationships that prime the emergence of community.

Electroconvulsive therapy

Yahoo wasn’t always insane. It has lost its way. Yahoo have had a lot of smart people working for them over the years, but it must have been like some kind of Tower of Babel in there. Somehow none of that cleverness seemed to be able to make its way through the commitees and into the products. Case in point: Caterina Fake of Flickr fame was one of the key people to show the world how to do community on the web in the first place. She also ran the Technology Development group, known for its Hack Yahoo! program, a stimulus to innovation and creativity, and Brickhouse, a rapid development environment for new products.

When you’ve had that kind of instinct, experience, talent and set up on your side. And your still not producing anything that makes any sense in the social networking space. Then, there is something seriously wrong with the system. At the very least, it needs rebooting. It may well be time to roll out the gurney, electrodes and conductant tape…

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I really like this. Crewger is a great idea. If you want to make a movie you need to get a crew together. Crewger solves that problem. They create a space for Irish people interested in movies to hang out and meet one another. Its that simple.

Did someone say social networking? Yep. But done right. Crewger launched during the Darklight festival. Smart move. Focus on the community. Get the technology right. But focus on the community. 80/20 community/technology.

And if Crewger name is ringing a bell, maybe you are thinking about this guy?

Part of the Tuesday Push

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Gotta an iPhone?
Gotta train to catch?
>You gotta go here…

I could explain why. But good design explains itself.

Or you could go here to see the designer’s POV. Good man Dave Barrett who demo’d this a while back at OCC in the Hub to much oohs and ahhs :)

Can’t remember the URL? Just Google something like[ iphone irish rail trains ] and it’ll get you there :)

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Do yourself a favour and look take a look at Toddle, from BAFTA nominated design agency Spoiltchild.

There’s a nice writeup about the guys here in the Irish Independent

I have to admit I’ve always loved the work coming from the Spoiltchild stable. So when I heard they were moving beyond bespoke design and had started developing a range of innovative products my ears really pricked up.

Toddle, is really cool. Toddle provides design templates for email newsletters. So far, so what?

The cool thing about Toddle for me is that it saves users from the death by a thousand cuts that puts people off and results in so many email newsletters looking so…well…crap.

Those in the know. Know to use Toddle. It actually manages to turn the whole process into a pleasure. And leaves you with the energy to put out some compelling content.

1) The design of the templates are as beautiful as you might expect from Spoiltchild.
2) They are so, so, so simple to use. They’re… a… toddle. You don’t need to know ANYTHING to use them.
3) They don’t charge you ‘per recipient’ like others do. Send them out to as many as you like for one very small price.

Spoiltchild is innovating on productising design, they are selling you beautifully designed email newsletters, and everything to make it easy for you to have a ‘no worries’, point, click and go experience.

And by God do they also save you money! Before Toddle the design of an email newsletter would have set you back about €700, using Toddle designed newsletters you get all that design for €6. (No, that’s not a typo. I’ve got an email confirmation. S-I-X euro)

Part of the Tuesday Push, getting the good word out there.

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Mike Butcher just written a post about the case of a 15 year-old Welsh girl getting herself into what could have been a very dangerous situation as a result of a relationship she developed with two men via the social network Netlog.The rest of Mike’s piece explores Netlog’s role and responsibility with regard to this drama.

The reason I’m referring to it here is that it is also a good example of how the online predator/prey relationship typically operates.

In the case Mike refers to, the 15-year-old Welsh girl pretended she was 18 and befriended 19 and 20-year-old Turkish guys via the social network Netlog before running away from home to meet them.

The thing is that the truth about how the predator/prey relationships works is highly counterintuitive. If you follow your instincts you would guess or assume that typically the predator poses as another child in order to lure in and entrap their unwitting victims. The fact is that in most cases the minor is often seeking out and collaborating with and sometimes deceiving the adult. This is an uncomfortable notion to say the least. Uncomfortable enough to make it a taboo subject. But the facts bear it out. And are laid out by the world’s foremost quantitative scientists studying this field.

Its just over a year since the top researchers on child online safety gathered to deliver their research at Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization:

Here’s some excerpts from the transcripted video inserted below:

04:50 Dr. David Finkelhor,

The predominant sex crime scenario, doesn’t involve violence, stranger molesters posing online as other children in order to set up an abduction or assault. Only five percent of these cases actually involved violence. Only three percent involved an abduction. It’s also interesting that deception does not seem to be a major factor. Only five percent of the offenders concealed the fact that they were adults from their victims. Eighty percent were quite explicit about their sexual intentions with the youth that they were communicating with
…

So for example, Jenna – this is a pretty typical case – 13-year-old girl from a divorced family, frequented sex-oriented chat rooms, had the screen name “Evil Girl.” There she met a guy who, after a number of conversations, admitted he was 45. He flattered her, gave– sent her gifts, jewelry. They talked about intimate things. And eventually, he drove across several states to meet her for sex on several occasions in motel rooms. When he was arrested in her company, she was reluctant to cooperate with the law enforcement authorities.

Many of these cases have commonalities with this particular instance. In seventy-three percent of the crimes, the youth go to meet the offender on multiple occasions for multiple sexual encounters. The law enforcement investigators described the victims as being in love with or feeling a close friendship for the offenders in half the cases that they investigated. In a quarter of the cases, the victims actually had run away from home to be with these adults that they met online.
So this is very different, I think, from the predominant impression that one might get from how these cases are being presented in the media. And also, I just think the inferences people make. And then I think it has a lot of implications for prevention just to go to that point. We can talk about some of these things in greater detail.

But first of all, we think it means that our prevention messages really need to be directed at teenagers themselves in language and format and from sources that they relate to.

13:44 Dr. Michele Ybarra,

First, things that we assume to be true did not seem to be worn out by the data. For example, we assumed that if adult men are meeting young women online, deception must be involved. We assumed that if young people are posting and sending personal information to other people, this must place them at greater risk for victimization.

The data suggest that the vast majority of young people who are meeting adults online are not deceived and instead, knowingly, at least as knowingly as a young person can, consent to this relationship…

Over and over, our assumptions turn out to be not reflective of the experiences that youth tell us. This is important because if we’re to keep young people safe, we need to understand what truly puts them at risk and what the risks truly are.

Of course we should continue to do everything in our power to tackle online predators. But the research shows that is only part of the problem. We need to remember is that children, by definition, need to be protected from themselves. To rework that choice phrase of Clay Shirky’s, we need to remember that ‘a youth is its own worst enemy’.

The truism that ‘a youth is its own worst enemy’ is useful as it helps us remember that tackling an internal enemy is always a hard problem.

It reminds us we need to take a different approach. Its a reminder that cuts through and clarifies the task we are faced with. People will clamour for us to treat the symptoms. And even champion us when we do. But the phrase ‘a youth is its own worst enemy’ can help us to focus on the class of problem we have before us. And remind us that the only way to solve the problem is find a way to tackle the root cause.

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Pix.ie really has the most user friendly photo sharing site on the web today. And some of the ideas that Marcus has been pushing out over the 8 months since this video was taken are really exciting. Sign up today and see why.

Part of the Tuesday Push.

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Karatechimp

There are 3 main life stages of a trend monkey. A species commonly spotted out and about on the techpreneurial scene.
Stage 1: I’m pretty certain we’ve ALL been here.

Imagine the scene. You just met someone and they say to you

I’ve got this cool new idea. Yeah it’s a social network for X. We KNOW people like X, right? And we know people love social networking, right? So my idea is to put them together? Brilliant. Right? Yeah, I know we’ve got competition. But that just validates the market right?

You are standing wondering if this person realises they sound like they are trying to pitch cheesy peas?

Stage 2: I’ve a good feeling we’ve ALL been here too:

Six months pass. The market is getting a wee bit noisy. Ever day its getting more difficult to differentiate. And every day there are more and more ‘me too’ start ups entering the market. At first. most of the ‘me toos’ are run by the young and hopeful. A bit later they are run my old media types trying to cathc a bit of cool. Its beginning to look like this market is going to be ‘validated’ out of existence.

You bump into ’social network for x’ and ask how they are getting along. They say:

Its not really a social network as such. Its really all about X. Okay it has some social networking functionality in there too. I mean you have to have that these days, right? But is not really about that. Its about our really fresh new approach to X. It’s an approach that’s never been done before. Well. Not exactly in the way that we are doing it anyway. It could be quite revolutionary so we’re not really ready talk about it yet.

Stage 3: I’ve got a feeling we are all going to be hearing a lot of this in the next 6 months.

We’ll hear a lot of people explaining that THEIR service is NOT a social network. In ANY way. It will go something like this.

Our service has no social networking features because it is not a social network. That’s not our thing. There are others that provide those services and good luck to them. That’s not to say that we won’t serve social networks as customers. In fact we are happy for them to use the valuable data we will provide to enhance their services. But we will NOT be confined to servicing the needs of social networks alone. Our data will in fact be used by all sorts of services that make up the entire internet ecosystem. For example merchants like Amazon, Ebay, Travelocity would find our services especially useful. But we’re not just talking about Amazon and Ebay here. A whole multitude of online sellers big and small could use our services. We thinking we can actually reach out to the high steet with this. Its a massive, massive market.

Important Disclaimer: At this point, I think it highly advisable to point out that most of those you meet who have passed through these same 3 life stages are not trend monkeys. In fact it can be very difficult to come up with useful screening criteria to distinguish the trend monkeys from those who genuinely do have revolutionary new ideas. There’s little doubt that any such screening criteria would have filtered out Google as Johnny-come-lately, trend monkeys trying to hitch a lift on the search engine bandwagon. The same goes for Facebook, with their social network for the university campus.

STOP PRESS: I was just about to post this. When I came across someone tackling this subject from another angle. So, I’m tagging it right onto the end of the original post

What a nice piece of synchronicity. I just came across the video below on Mulley.net: “The Cool Curve” by Toby Moore CEO of Sleepydog talks about ideas that are in the comfort zone that exists somewhere between far out creativity and what the world ready to adopt. He puts the whole thing in much better context. He talks about those creatives that are sadly ahead of their time, those that are one hit wonders, and those are bang on consistently over time.

He describes what I call the trend monkeys at t=5:00 as:

…the flighty ones, they think they know about all kinds of things but actually know very little. They flit from thing to thing. They’ve always got this great idea. They are basically just headline people. They’ve read the headlines. But they have no depth. They are just. really. tiring. people. to. hang out with.

Spotting a trend monkey is not as easy as I thought it was when I started writing this post. In fact, I’ve decided that Toby Moore’s characterisation ‘they are just really tiring people to hang out with’ is pretty good indicator of who you are dealing with. Which you could argue exposes this post as woefully incomplete. And/or creates an open invitiation to any passing readers to drop comments describing the judging criteria that they use or that they find works for them.

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The Tuesday Push this week is for 1time.

Always on the ball, Derek Organ was captured pitching to a waiter here.

Conor O’Neill has called it “an incredibly useful tool for time and expense tracking both for internal business use and service providers like freelancers.”

Joe Drumgoole calls it “a cracking web based time tracking tool [that] provides a perfect tool for sole traders or consultants who need to keep track of their own time or client time.”

The software is free for one project for a single person.
Sign up over here.

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Back in April, I wrote ’search is dead’ and used the phrase ‘discovery is the new cocaine’ a phrase I picked up from the discoverio guys at the Web2.0expo.

Web2 is about participation, but what comes after that? We think it is all about Discovery, the art of helping users serendipitously discover content and people that they did not know they wanted to know. Discovery is what makes people come back again and again, interact, and explore.

So the guys made the slideshare homepage with presentation they gave at SXSW. Its brilliant and insightful and may just change the way you look at things.

| View | Upload your own

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@davebarrett posted a link to this on twitter just now.

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