It just occurred to me that the only time I ever receive LinkedIn invitations from someone is when they have recently left their job and are looking for work. Could there be a hidden meaning in other social software email invites? I’m not particularly well-qualified to say, since I’m not popular enough to get invited to much of anything. But here’s an attempt nonetheless:
What they say: “I want to be your connection on LinkedIn…”
What they mean: “I can’t find a job.”
What they say: “I’m inviting you to join my personal and private community at Friendster…”
What they mean: “I can’t get a date.”
What they say: “orkut - Invitation to join…”
What they mean: “I’ll play with anything at work to avoid actual work.”
What they say: “I have invited you to Flickr…”
What they mean: “I’ve burned out my friends and family with my incessant output of digital photos, so now I have to force them on strangers.”
What they say: “I’m inviting you to keep in touch on Multiply…”
What they mean: “How do you turn this damn thing off!?”
What’s in a name? In the technology world, quite a lot, as illustrated by a friendly little spat over the term “social software” on the Many-to-Many weblog. Of course, great technology often wins out with or without a catchy buzzword, but I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of terminology. For one, it has a clustering effect, lumping disperse projects together under a single label that lets people know that they are not alone in what they are doing (and, crucially, helps them to decide which industry conferences to attend).
This in turn has a tangible effect on capital allocation. For better or for worse, VCs tend to invest in the hot sector du jour, invariably associated with a handy catchphrase (”we’ve just closed a fund focusing on B2B, P2P, e-commerce, nanotechnology, etc., etc., etc.”). Heck, when you get right down to it, isn’t this why language was invented in the first place? It often seems arbitrary to attach any label to any group of inevitably heterogenous stuff, but it was the willingness not to require a different word for every type of snow that optimized interactions sufficiently to give rise to civilization. (Sorry, I may have been watching a little too much of the presidential debates.)
So is “social software” a good term? It’s a great one! It’s short, alliterative, says what it is, and I agree with Clay Shirky that the implicit emphasis on technology is a feature, not a bug. Just look at danah boyd’s proposed alternative: “Computer Mediated Communication” or CMC. Very catchy. In fact, it strikes me that the best thing of all about “social software” is that it isn’t a TLA.
But the most intriguing part of Clay’s post is the second sentence: “I want to address her despisity (despision? despisement?) of the term.” In linguistics there is a famously clever saying: “In English, any noun can be verbed.” Clearly the inverse is not true.
Great article in Wired about the impact of digital distribution on the media business:
For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution.
Amen, my brother. The author, Chris Anderson (who is Wired’s editor-in-chief), goes on to cite some interesting statistics. For example, Amazon apparently makes more than half of its sales outside of the 130,000 most popular titles. Why 130,000? Because this is approximately the number of books stocked by a big box retailer like Barnes & Noble. In other words, a bricks-and-mortar bookstore loses half its potential revenues due to space constraints. And simply stocking more books in more space would not be a solution because it would be uneconomical: a book has to sell a certain number of copies every year to pay for the shelf space it takes up, so only relatively popular works are even worth bothering with in an old-economy media outlet.
Anderson does an excellent job of explaining why digital delivery will radically change these economics (and, in the case of innovators like Amazon and Netfix, has already done so). In particular, he illustrates how media products tend to obey a power law (although he could have made this a lot more explicit if, like me, he had been willing to totally bewilder half of his readership). What this means is that there is a relatively small number of megahits that sell tons and tons of copies. There are somewhat more “microhits” that still sell well. And then there is the “long tail”, gazillions of items that hardly sell at all. The curve thus produced is similar to the one for the number of links to a given website (among many other things that also follow power laws). A few superportals like Yahoo and Google have millions of external links, while uncounted minor websites have practically no one linking to them. This blog, for example.
What Anderson doesn’t touch on is the impact of digital production on this state of affairs. Amazon may make more than half of its revenues from titles that a traditional bookseller couldn’t justify stocking, but the authors of these books still had to jump through a fair number of hoops before their efforts could see the light of day. In particular, they had to find a publisher and convince her to spray a symbolic representation of their creative output onto a bunch of pulped, flattened dead trees.
In my opinion, an even bigger impact will be felt as production and consumption of media go fully digital. There are still massive overheads inherent in the business model of an Amazon or Netflix, and this constrains the number of economically viable products despite the fact that physical shelf space is no longer a consideration. Now imagine that I could sit down at my word processor, crack open a six pack or two and crank out a 200 page book on where to find the best brands of canned tuna in different central European countries, making the book available in digital form for online download (for a modest fee). The enterprise could end up being profitable for me even if my potential audience is much, much smaller than that required by a traditional book (even one sold over the web).
Alright, I’ve finally accepted that there is no way I’m going to make it through U.S. election season without making at least some cheesy wisecrack here. At least I’ll freely acknowledge how inappropriate this is for a “corporate blog” before going ahead and doing it anyway. This is just too funny to pass up.
So I was reading the vice-presidential debate blog written by Jessi Klein, a VH1 comedienne. Most of it is quite hilarious and skewers both candidates mercilessly in the best spirit of bipartisanship, but my favorite by far is her 9pm posting entitled “Garfield anyone?”. Here she draws a parallel so obvious that I can’t believe it escaped me. Let’s take a look:
By God, she’s right!
