ambient

Scoble writes about his experiences with a preview version of Plaxo’s Pulse application - apparently something the application did triggered Facebook’s TOS and got his account disabled.

Out of curiosity, I created an account on Plaxo to see if the application was interesting. I like the idea but it immediately made me uncomfortable. It wants me to sign in to all of the various social networks I use so it can import my friend’s email addresses and create my own “stream.”

Streams are good; I like them. But why do I have to alert all of my friends that I have just given yet another application permission to spam all of them?

Meta-aggregators are a good thing too (disclosure: I’m building one, of sorts) but they should be polite and not ask users to annoy their friends in order to use it. I understand viral marketing, and there is even a place to add this sort of functionality, but do it later, after I’ve settled in and gotten comfortable.

Don’t make it the first thing I see.

The new Facebook Ads network presents some new opportunities for marketers. Whether those opportunities translate into any real value for consumers / Facebook users remains to be seen.

I wanted to understand how it compares to PPC ad networks from the likes of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, so I created a small text ad for Boompaste. It was denied. So I created a new one.

The first, disapproved ad said “Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place.”

I think Facebook rejected it because you have to use the title of your company, product, or service in the ad title and body. Annoying, but whatever. I guess they are shooting for high quality ads, which is good for users.

My second ad reads “Boompaste: Meta is Betta. Get all your news in one place. Boompaste aggregates the most popular stories on the web.”

It was approved, for two reasons, I believe:

1. I targeted 16-40 year olds the first time. This triggers additional editorial review. The second time I targeted 18-40 year olds and it went live almost immediately.
2. I used the name of the offering in the title, as mentioned above.

So the ad is live, and within 10 minutes I had about 196 impressions and 1 click (CTR of 0.51%). Gotta love PPC.

I’ll post more results later. So far, however, I like the experience. It’s clean and well done, if still immature.

In order for Facebook to really compete, marketers are going to need:

• Data exports: there is currently no way to export campaign / performance data from Facebook. It would be even better if this was available via API, depending on the delivery options for reports. If you could schedule email delivery of reports, that would be fine.
• Some sort of transparency. This is a critical area where I believe Facebook is lacking, and it’s tricky because it’s related to privacy. When you buy ads on search or even content networks, you can easily see it live. For example, if you bid high enough on “laptop,” you can query Google, etc. for that keyword and see your ad running in its live environment. You can also view competitors and their ad copy. More sophisticated marketers automate this process.
• Automated ad placement - Facebook needs to understand that marketers with large budgets work hard to create consistent campaigns across a variety of networks. Nobody wants to manually create thousands of ads on Facebook when you can automate that entire process on Google. Facebook does offer a valuable enough audience to target it as a network regardless, but velocity will suffer in comparison to other networks.

I’ll add more later. You may want to read Fred Wilson’s blog - he is conducting a similar experiment.

Blogs aren’t that interesting anymore. Actually, it’s more accurate from a marketing perspective to say that blogs have become or are quickly becoming mainstream.

I feel rather lucky to have followed the earliest bloggers. I myself am an early adopter of the medium though none of my blogs were ever “successful” as success is commonly measured. They did, however, give me a chance to practice my writing and communicate with my friends and family through important times. For those reasons, I will likely always have a blog of some sort and for now it lives here, and this one isn’t going anywhere. I just don’t write here nearly as often as I used to on Sacking Rome.

Several trends are beginning to interest me. One, with the mainstreaming of blogs we are seeing new levels of text commodification. It’s almost as if the excitement around text itself, or at least prose, has fizzled out in favor of new mediums such as on demand video, games, music, and social networks.

There does appear, however, to be one new entrant on the text frontier. It’s what I call spasmodic, terse broadcasts of useless information that somehow matters a great deal. Twitter exemplifies this service. My description of this service is not to say that the medium itself is useless or not important. On the contrary, I was absolutely blown away by what the service represented - nothing short of the closest thing to global telepathy in a network-based emulation of spritual connectivity that we have right now. It is precisely the mundane nature of the messages on Twitter that makes it such a fascinating application.

But I digress. Back to the new mediums. (I use the Anglicized plural of medium here to distinguish the word from the loaded term “media” and to demonstrate fealty to McLuhan’s assertion that the “medium is the message.”)

Marshal McLuhan was more prophetic than he would have ever realized when he made his two most interesting, in my opinion, observations.

The first is that with the commodification / mainstreaming of text has come the next evolution of the human societal mind: post-text, or post-literacy, as he calls it. He says of this evolution

“we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.”

So, he’s not entirely optimistic about this transformation but the new post-literate culture that he envisioned can be seen coming to life in our video games, social networks like Facebook with its viral fetishes and, offline, a renewed resurgence in religious fundamentalism and xenophobia.

The second is really an offshot of the first and it is that the dominant medium of society (or even any individual) shapes the cognitive channels of the mind (whether collective or individual). For the last 500 years of Western culture, text has been the dominant medium.

It is mind-boggling how quickly that dominance is being dismantled by Generation-Y and the stragglers of Generation-X. It’s very possible that Generation-X will be the last American literate generation. That is not to say that future generations won’t be able to read and write. What it means is that that ability will no longer be the defining characteristic of intelligence, education, or incentivized behavior in society. Thus, new patterns of thought will emerge in the next 20 years that are utterly alien to all previous generations still alive.

Through a friend, my wife discovered Etsy. I’m sure it’s been around for awhile, but we just found it and we think it’s fantastic.

It lets artists / craftspeople market and sell their products without having to create their own website and figure out how to handle transactions, etc. The look and feel is clean and simple, and it’s a great way to start getting immediate traffic.

The site favors new users / listings so it enourages the prolific.

My wife, Kaoru, has had her own jewerly store online for a long but Etsy makes life so much easier that she is going to switch all of her operations over to Etsy. If you’re an artist, or you know one, there is tremendous potential here.

I may be a little slow on the uptake, but I just got why Pandora is such a powerful ad platform for advertisers.

Pandora has done a great job in making the application interactive. If it plays a song I don’t like, I give it a thumbs down; if I like it, thumbs up. That becomes quite a powerful semaphore in determining which ads to show because songs are delivered in the context of channels.

So, on my Pandora, I have a Tristania channel and an Iron & Wine channel. Both of those specific bands become mapped to larger symbolic channels in my own mind (eg. Tristania = dark fantastic adrenaline-pumping capital ‘R’ Romantic Byronic gothic symphony vs. Iron & Wine = chill guitar-strumming melancholy pensive relaxing americana).

My interaction in each of these spaces gets pumped in the form of very sophisticated demographics data to their advertisers. When Tristania is playing, I get Absolut Vodka, shrouded in dark shadows, and when it’s Iron & Wine, I get relaxing images of people taking long baths or going on vacation.

Brilliant, if you ask me.

I know it’s a sad statement when I discover an author because they have died, but this is the case with Jean Baudrillard, who passed away at the age of 77.

Timing aside, ideas and books do seem to fall into my lap at a time that is almost always relevant to my current interests. As I research the work of this man, I’ve been fascinated by the connection between his philosophy and how closely it relates to my own research topics (although he obviously got there first and is way smarter.)

What is intriguing is how much cross-disciplinary applicability there is between his work and those industries that are dominating the headlines in the high-tech world: virtual reality, web 2.0 and social networking. Alongside the ubiquitous optimism that comes with these fields are the revolutionary changes that are occurring in journalism, entertainment, and the academy.

His followers would find it ironic that I learned the most about him via Wikipedia, at least biographically. However, I felt that the description of his arguments and the following criticism was not so helpful. Indeed, the short bio on the BBC story managed in a few short sentences to capture the more interesting nuances of his philosophy, namely that:

He gained notoriety for his 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place and again a decade later for describing the 9/11 attacks as a “dark fantasy”.

Baudrillard focused his work on how our consciousness interacts with reality and fantasy, creating from them a copy world he called hyper-reality.

He said that mass media led to hyper-reality becoming a dominant force in today’s world - an argument taken to a provocative extreme in his statement that the 1991 Gulf War primarily took place on a symbolic level.

If this is an accurate portrayal (I should be writing this after I’ve read the man’s books but, what the hell, I’m probably proving his point by not), then his ideas are worth discussion.

There is little doubt that the controversy surrounding his statements that the first Gulf War did not exist and that 9/11 was the culmination of America’s dark fantasy gained him notoriety, but it seems clear that he was not denying the historical reality of those events.

It is their significance that he is interested in, and he seems to claim that the mythological significance that these events have in our society is a constructed one, and it is weaker than what used to pass for significance. The reason for this is because our society, so heavily saturated with the layered interlinking references of mass media and pop culture, that the images these sources evoke have lost their own original meaning without mass media and pop culture to prop that meaning up. How much meaning these elements originally had, according to Baudrillard, would be interesting to discern because the answer could potentially place him more in the camp of conservatives than in the camp of post-modernism. My guess, however, is that he would not have allowed that sort of inconsistency to survive in his work.

Hyperreality is probably the prevailing psychological phenomenon of our society and times and, boy, is it a gold mine. Coming back to my original reason for interest in his work, and some of the things I alluded to in my previous post, is that we are a culture comfortable with obsessed with our constructed realities and the mythology that comes with those fantasies because it’s the closest thing we have to meaning. How else do you survive, mentally and emotionally, in a Wal-Martian, flickering-fluorescent-lit landscape such as ours?

To use his example of 9/11 (this is not intended as a rant - it just happens to be a very convenient and potent case), if one reads the literature of those most galvanized by those attacks, it should come as no surprise that they immediately called for what has come to be known as the War on Terror.

Works like those of Tom Clancy were prophetic in a way that we may not understand until we at least acknowledge the possibility of 9/11 being a self-fulfilling prophecy. Politics aside, this would be a tremendous development in the study of both political science and history.

So, in 9/11 all of the building blocks were there to develop a leviathan political fantasy into a dynamic policy and war machine that continues to consume resources and divide the nation. This political fantasy is a narrative that asserts itself against those who deny its existence. Powerful stuff.

Daniel Rourke had some interesting things to say about all this just over a year ago.

We think of worlds that we create to be directionally below us because that is how our minds work, if we try to fathom entering those worlds. We assume ourselves to live in a created world and so we imagine the creator of our world to live in a wider context, which must, of course, be above us.

Incarnate. Animate your avatar. Zoom in, zoom out. Zoom in for greater detail, less context, less complexity. But the minute details of the part affect the complexity of the whole.

Heaven is moved by the particles of earth and our world is moved by ideas chasing currents of the objects that travel between us. But now all is moved by bits traveling on the grid that we have created in the image of our mind.

Virtualization has been the mechanism of human evolution for the last 35,000 or so years, and what is language but the most advanced virtualization to date? But we are now living in the beginning of the next stage.

Both GigaOm and TechCrunch are abuzz today with news about Ning 2.0, the recently revamped tool to allow anyone to ‘build a MySpace.’ Other players in this space include the recently acquired five across and peopleaggregator.

These feel like someone is giving me the fuselage of a plane and telling me to fly. Pinning down what makes high-growth social networks valuable could probably be someone’s dissertation, but it’s not the availability of features like pictures and video widgets. It may indeed be the aggregate of all of these features, but somehow I doubt that this can be turned into a valuable community just by spewing it out in little bits.

I’m no expert here, but in my estimation there are three social networks that are really successful. They are by no means as highly trafficked as MySpace, but they are also different from MySpace in that they actually encourage offline interaction. The first, with which I have the most familiarity is CouchSurfing.com. Its goal is simple - provide a place online for people looking for a place to crash to connect.

We traveled around the world two years ago and we met amazing people through this site. Here in San Diego, we host people all the time. Sure, it has some of the basic features that social networks these days use but, comparatively speaking, it is a low-tech, even campy, website. But I now have friends that I communicate with on a regular basis in Turkey, New Zealand, all over Europe. And these are people that I’ve shared meals with and met their folks.

Next up is Craigslist. Born out of the ideas originating with The Well, I don’t think many people have truly taken the time to understand how revolutionary Craigslist really is. My buddy Austin told me the best story I have yet heard about Craigslist. He posted some items for sale once when he was moving. A lady came to look at his stuff and they ended up in an hour long conversation about life and forgiveness.

Finally, Meetup.com is the site that I never use but highly respect. Their approach to building a place for local, grassroots campaigns does not need to be elaborated on here but, again, it meets and exceeds my criteria for successful online communities: it encourages offline interaction and views itself as the facilitator of community, not the community itself.

You think the collective jack-off session we call MySpace will ever result in those kinds of stories, with any kind of statistical regularity? I don’t think so. Instead we get this. I’ve been able to connect with old friends through MySpace, and I know it’s great for indy bands, but in terms of pound for pound community value-add, it just doesn’t stack up, IMHO.

As an entrepreneur, I would be much more proud of having built Craigslist or CouchSurfing, despite the fact that MySpace was sold for half a billion dollars and the others were not / will not be. If I had to identify one changing trend in our society it would be that a growing, and increasingly important minority values true community over economy. And I’m with them.