Major news today in the world of social networking. Google has announced their OpenSocial Alliance, a way for developers to build social applications that span more than one social network. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch calls it “a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.” Hosts include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

Now comes word that the biggest Daddy of them all, MySpace, is joining, which would make everyone except Facebook a part of the alliance. Facebook, in my judgment, will have no choice but to join. So much for the value propositions that led to its $15 billion valuation last week.

In so doing, Google has again taken the position of facilitator regarding web applications. Rather than build its own social networking application (it already has one in Okrut) to compete with Facebook, it has chosen the path of adapting to the whole web as its platform. This is so smart.

Diane Mermigas agrees:

Google’s ability to create value and seize control of reinvented markets has been at the very heart of its more than 700%-plus growth from a $4.8 billion to a $220 billion company since going public three years ago. Google’s core services and technology are so fundamental to all things interactive, it can put itself in the middle of any trend or business and blow away competitors. The combination of Google’s scale and agility, vast resources and consumer intelligence make it the $700-plus share gorilla in the media space. And its social-networking plan is just another step toward cyber-world domination.

At the end of all of this is a very big hand in the growth and development of the portable web, a term I use to describe interactive media away from desktops or laptops. Its uses are, in some ways, the same as the WWW, but in other ways, it’s quite different. It’s much more personal, interactive, and reflective of the user’s real world persona. We need to watch this space and participate with great care, because the rules are being written every day.

So what can we glean from this that will help us downstream.

1. Everything is going mobile. By talking with Verizon and Sprint, Google is setting the stage for their operating system to become the mobile standard for, well, everything except the bloody phone itself. This doesn’t have to be seen as directly competing with our efforts, because Google’s mission is not to control so much as it is to enable. I have always been impressed by how focused the company has been on this goal, and this “enabling” message is one I constantly share with local media companies.
2. The OpenSocial Alliance will marry all of these applications in such a way that it finally makes sense to join many different social networking sites. My problem with the whole social networking concept is the same with the Web as a whole — how do you keep track of so much information? By participating with Google on this, I think everybody eventually wins. Assuming alliance members allow developers access, we could see some really interesting stuff coming down the pike.
3. Privacy, I believe, will be in the hands of individual users, simply because that’s been Google’s model all along. Call me naive, but I don’t think the company’s “do no evil” slogan is just marketing. I think it’s the path to prosperity in the new world. There won’t be a need for a “Do Not Track” list, because tracking, in Google’s paradigm, doesn’t include blinking and whirling or other disruptive ad attacks so popular with Madison avenue. I’ve seen enough from Google to give them the benefit of the doubt in this one.

Interesting times, indeed.

New York Times writer Brad Stone rightly set the stage with his summary of hulu.com’s private beta launch today:

Since March, when the broadcasters announced their joint effort to bring free, ad-supported television shows to the Web, critics have pounced, predicting the venture would be doomed by diverging agendas, technical challenges and an all-powerful enemy: YouTube.

Skeptical bloggers even slapped Hulu with a derisive moniker: “Clown Co.”

Now the defense is ready to present its case.

As any viewer of “Law and Order” will tell you, the defense is often not about guilt or innocence, but about the presentation of reasonable doubt. That’s what hulu has done with its highly-controlled press presentations on this, the launch of its private beta.

The NYT header says it best: “Hulu Readies Its Online TV, Dodging the Insults.” Over at TechCrunch, one of the site’s biggest pre-launch critics, the headline is just the way hulu wants it: “Hulu Launches Private Beta, Makes Very Good First Impressions.”

Since I’ve been one of those critics — not of the presentation but of the strategy — I’ll admit that I’m naturally going to be skeptical of what I’m reading. Launching in private beta means you invite some people in to kick the tires. I’ve found nothing yet today from any such person, which means all of this positive coverage is coming from the information and screen grabs that hulu is feeding them. That said, everything looks very nice on the surface. The videos look well-organized. The player is portable, and they’re touting the ability of users to clip programs and embed those clips elsewhere. These are textbook unbundled media tactics, and they should help spread the monetized videos across the Web.

(You can view hulu vids via AOL Video. If this is the best they can do, it’s not saying much.)

There are two problems immediately. One, the videos don’t play anywhere except in the U.S. This is the result of trying to provide an application that lives by all the industry’s rules. Rights, you know. Secondly, the television shows that are offered stay online only five weeks. So think about this for a minute. Why would anybody embed a hulu clip if it couldn’t be seen in other countries and would disappear after five weeks?

The idea of a portal for “legal” videos is a good one, but 1.) all content creators must play in the same space, and 2.) the reach must parallel that of the Web itself. Hulu may work these things out eventually, but right now, those are big concerns.

Moreover, hulu further erodes the already damaged network-affiliate arrangement by making first-run show videos available after midnight, Hawaii time (nice).

In the Times article, NBCU head Jeff Zucker goes out of his way to position hulu as an entity separate from NBCU, and this will either be its greatest strength or its biggest weakness:

“At a minimum it’s another way for us to offer our content to users and get paid for it,” Mr. Zucker said. “If the site itself does well, that will be gravy on top of it.”

This distancing himself from hulu is interesting, because it was Zucker who made the original announcements and led the original cheerleading. So now hulu is just another company that’s distributing content created by NBCU, which means if it crashes and burns, it was THEIR fault. Nice.

But this isn’t what we get from NewsCorp president Peter Churnin, who takes credit for the idea in the Times article and is a bit defensive about the criticism. “I think there’s a snarky desire to say this is big dumb media and this is a big dumb joint venture,” he said, adding that he thought of the idea as a way to distribute Fox programming. So is it a joint venture or a stand-alone company?

I guess it’s both, but the question is important in judging its viability from here. If it’s a stand alone business, will it be able to sustain itself without more investment money when the costs go up? That’s a fairly significant issue. If it’s a joint venture, then NBC and NewsCorp will foot the bills, and then it becomes just bad strategy and a drain on resources.

There is one distribution partner in this that really intrigues me, and that is MySpace. If hulu is to succeed, it would help to be THE application that exposes this content to people who don’t already watch it, and that basically is the definition of MySpace’s core demos.

Stay tuned.

Max Kalehoff writes in today’s Mediapost Online Spin that he’s overwhelmed by “friends” on various social networking sites.

We’re experiencing friends overload, and it’s a tragedy of the commons. The practice of friending has morphed way beyond the term’s original intention and utility. And that is why I declare friends — at least in the social-networking context — passé.

…Let me be clear: Social networks are very much alive and well, but our traditional, generalized notion of friend is dead. When online friendships begin to scale artificially — such as randomly or via the all-too-easy click of a button — they run the risk of overwhelming us, causing the aggregate value of deeper social-network friendships to erode.

I would add that in trivializing the meaning of the word “friend,” we’re also changing the word’s definition, and this has cultural ramifications beyond what we might think. My 22-year old daughter recently went through a personal trauma and learned that her online “friends” weren’t really friends at all. She won’t use that word lightly again.

When we examine culture, we must always look for unintended consequences and especially those that alter the definition of words that we use to communicate. A young person today reading the Robert Lewis Stevenson quote referenced by Kalehoff (”A friend is a present you give to yourself.”) would view it differently than, say, my mother, and this kind of re-writing of the source code of our culture is more serious than we realize.

This one includes more on the collapse of page views as an ad metric, RTNDA/NAB retrospectives, MySpace News (told you so), and some thoughts about students and their resumes.

Friday, April 20, 2007

Now that the hoopla is over, some very interesting observations are popping up about the NBC/Fox “YouTube killer” announced yesterday (see below). The most provocative — and, I think, insightful — comes from Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. Michael pulls no punches in calling a spade a spade. Go read his whole take, but here’s the crux of it:

The two key messages Chernin and Zucker were selling were (1) a focus on respecting copyright, and (2) the fact that they were creating what they called “the largest advertising platform on earth.” That may be good messaging to stockholders, but it isn’t what the public cares about.

I think a better approach would have been to focus on the user experience, but this was hardly mentioned (except at one point when Zucker said “we are shocked at the willingness of the consumer to sit through the whole show with ads on NBC.com”). It’s either arrogance or it’s blindness to the reality of this Bittorrent and YouTube world. Either way, it suggests they are in over their head.

There are really big challenges ahead for this company. First, the fact that only two networks joined is a really bad sign. Viacom at least should have been willing to join. Second, this group has little experience in creating web applications, and no experience building the kind of stuff, like YouTube, that users get seriously passionate about. Third, the track record of major media companies working together to deal with this kind of viral attack on their business is not good. As Valleywag pointed out today, EMI, BMG, and Sony Music banded together in 1999 to deal with the Napster situation and created Musicnet, which was a dismal failure and was named by PC World as one of the worst tech products of all time.

I think this is absolutely spot on analysis, and the more I think about the deal, the less I think of it. The biggest problem is not that there are only two partners (and that’s huge); it’s the way they seem to have ignored the real trends in video CONSUMPTION that are central to the business disruption attacking the industry.

TiVo allows people to skip ads and why? Because time is the new currency, and those consumers that “shock” Zucker don’t have as much of it as they used to. People skip ads, because they don’t have time for ads, and it’s a foolish assumption to think this would be any different via the web.

I’m also hearing the words of business disruption guru Clayton Christensen in my ears.

(I)f you’re looking to start a new-growth business, very often, the most important customers to understand, are non-customers. Because if you figure out why it is they’re not customers, and then bring an innovation that allows them now to become customers, that’s what growth comes from.

On the upside, one of Christensen’s core recommendations is at play here, because the joint venture announced yesterday is the creation of a new business.

A company can survive a disruptive attack and remain as the leader, but evidence is overwhelming that the only way to do that is if the leader in the industry that’s being disrupted sets up a separate organization. The separate entity then needs the freedom to create a business model that is tuned to that new disruptive business and gives it a charter to kill the parent.

Does this new enterprise have that kind of authority — from the top? In the answer to that question lies the future of the project, and frankly, I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, there’s another aspect to this that bears noting. Some observers are calling this “the new cable TV.” I don’t know if that’s the case, but if it is, it will be similar to satellite in that it’s delivered directly to consumers from points outside their local geography. Why is this important? Because as broadcast affiliate and local cable distribution fall (cable penetration in February was at its lowest level since 1990), the marketplace for local advertising has fewer options. All that money will dramatically move to the internet and those media companies able to do geo, behavioral or contextual targeting.

This is why I tell clients that we must begin to view ourselves as enablers of commerce, not merely purveyors of advertising. This is the real opportunity for local media companies in the years ahead. Databases and database marketing — like Obi Wan Kenobi — are our only hope.

And if you want to know more about that, call me.

The television and internet worlds are abuzz with today’s announcement from Fox and NBC of a joint effort to provide TV shows and films via the internet. Via Lost Remote:

MySpace, Yahoo, MSN and AOL have signed on as distribution partners, and each site will carry embedded video players customized to their look. “This is a game changer for Internet video,” said Peter Chernin, President and COO of News Corporation. “We’ll have access to just about the entire U.S. Internet audience at launch. And for the first time, consumers will get what they want — professionally produced video delivered on the sites where they live.”

Well isn’t that special? And let’s hope Peter has solid research to back up that “want” from consumers.

Chernin says this will be the largest advertising platform on earth and it’s hard to doubt that. There’s apparently not going to be a standalone site per se, but the content will be distributed by partners. Hence, the Chernin statement that people will get this where they live.

While everybody’s whooping and hollering, it cannot go unnoticed that the affiliates take it in the shorts on this deal (again). Oh, they have protections built in (the delay window will be several hours after shows air in Hawaii), but this is certainly a play that by-passes the affiliate system. I suppose the next move would be for broadcast companies to get in on the deal and provide their locally produced content in a similar manner.

This is a move to create the “new spectrum” for broadcast programming, but this time, it’s owned by the private sector. How will that go over with the public? Not as well as you might think.

MySpace is getting into the news business with launch due in early 2nd quarter, according to inside sources and the company’s own sales materials.

• MySpace News takes News to a whole new level by dynamically aggregating real-time news and blogs from top sites around the Web
• Creates focused, topical news pages that users can interact and engage with throughout their day
• MySpace is making the news social, allowing users to:
  Rate and comment on every news item that comes through the system
  Submit stories they think are cool and even author pieces from their MySpace blog
• MySpace users previously had to leave the site to find comprehensive news, gossip, sporting news, etc. With MySpace News, we bring the news to them!

Now it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is not good news for those of us in the news business, unless we view it as another way to get our content onto yet another platform. MySpace is currently cutting deals with content providers to do just that, and I think it’s likely the process will show us what types of “news” will be of interest to young people, circa 2007. And that is something we might be able to use downstream.

That said, this is another example of an internet pureplay company taking on the role of media company and using their core audience as the distribution vehicle.

And we’re about to see a bunch of “real” media companies attempt to grow their own social networks. First up is USAToday.

USAToday.com has relaunched with new interactive features, in an effort to create a “social network” of news users. USAToday has led the way in RSS and customizeable pages, but this takes all that a step further. Users can not only interact with the paper; they can also interact with each other.

While I don’t doubt that this is cool and will help their overall mission (to drive traffic to their site and keep it there), the truth is this is a Media 1.0 play in Media 2.0 clothing. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, because there’s an awful lot of money to be made in the 1.0 world.

The demand is unknown, but everybody in the news business knows there’s a group of news “groupies” in every market, and these, I think, will likely be the users of such an application. This, of course, begs the question why there isn’t already a social networking site called “news groupies,” but that would mean the ability to tap multiple media sources, and this is something media companies abhor. We want everybody to come to OUR portal or OUR site or OUR social network.

This, I think, misses the bigger point of Media 2.0, and because of that, I think media companies who explore this space as a way of bringing more people into their tents may be wasting time and resources they could be spending on developing business strategies within the Media 2.0 disruption.

All traditional media companies speak to their own audiences, regardless of format, but those audiences are shrinking and just because we have elaborate sites online does not necessarily mean we’re attracting a different crowd. People who left “the media” did so for a reason, and no matter how much we try and reformat, remix or repurpose what we do, it still is what it is.

We should strive to do as much of that as possible, of course, but it simply cannot be our only strategy, for the disruption impacting all media isn’t something that brand extension tactics can overcome.

Alex Rowland doesn’t blog as much as he used to (or should — take that, Alex), but when he does, it’s usually a worthwhile read. This morning he writes about the vanity of sharing your life online, or is it more than that?

Many do these things for fame and self-aggrandizement, but I think the reason for most share their lives is that the simple act of sharing information for most humans is a very pleasant activity.

I think this is an evolutional trait of human beings. We are genetically programmed to enjoy the process of passing along experience and information to others. The web has just enabled this to become a much larger part of many people’s lives. It’s magnified the pleasure of sharing because you can share with so many people at the same time. It’s more subtle and less sinister than fame, but actually more powerful.

It gives me great hope for the future of our emerging civilization.

Me too, Alex. Me too.