Saturday, March 07, 2009

Jeff Jarvis: Bold Restructuring

Video: Eye To Eye With Katie Couric: Jeff Jarvis (CBS News)

American journalist Jeff Jarvis at the 2008 Wo...Image via Wikipedia

The Great Restructuring by Jeff Jarvis

This is a great blog post by Jeff Jarvis, someone I got to meet in person on February 3 at the Diller building. (NY Tech MeetUp: 02/03/09)

Davos 09: Open Bank full disclosure of performance and compensation. ...... a means to confirm that customers understood what they were buying ...... Bankers are in fortress mode ...... eimagined retail, education, and government. ....... obert Scoble, who has been arguing that the way out of our mess is to start a million companies ....... Shimon Peres, who made a forceful argument that the future will be secured with investment in technology (including biotechnology) and education (which he as much as said was the next thing to come after the internet wave). ........ giving trillions of dollars to the incumbents, to people like that sneering banker ....... We should, instead, be investing our money in entrepreneurs and technologists, the people who will change old industries, reimagining them under new rules with new people ..... need to look at replacing rather than just repairing these broken institutions .... We are bailing out the past. Instead, we must bail out the future.
Scenario For News news - on both the content and business side - will no longer be controlled by a single company but will be collaborative. ....... provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together ........ open the process of news in blogs ...... Editors will become more curators, aggregators, organizers, educators. ....... less about controlling a flow than encouraging and improving creation. ....... nvestigations matter more than ever ....... Do what you do best and link to the rest ........ covering a niche deeply ....... The old syndication model will die ..... he wire-service model is in jeopardy ..... any media, wiki snapshots of knowledge, live reports, crowd reports, aggregation, curation, data bases, and other forms ........ EveryBlock will organize data; Outside.in will organize geo content; Daylife will organize news; Publish2 will organize links; Digg will help the crowd curate; Clickable will help sell ads; Google will serve ads; YouTube and Brightcove will serve videos ......... algorithms mining newly transparent government documents ........ Seth Godin’s prescription for The New York Times ..... Why doesn’t the paper have 10,000 stringers, each with a blog, each angling to be picked up by the central site?
The Link Changes Everything The more your customers take ownership of your brand, the less you will spend annoying people with your ads.
Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy



Jarvis is an imaginative optimist.

Instead of seeing job losses and folding companies and wrecked futures and dislocations he sees capitalism's creative destructions. Historic parallels still apply. What is happening right now to the economy seems to happen once every 70 years, has happened four times in a row now. After each such crisis the economy has come out better than ever before. Jarvis is suggesting the same is about to happen all over again. He is focused on the impending good news.



Not all the observations are his, he borrows as freely as he expounds. But they together are a great narrative to these wildly depressing times for the most. Many jobs are lost forever. But new, better jobs have to be created, and people need to be helped to transition to those new jobs.

What are some of his observations, and that of others he mentions?
  • The market is rightly bringing down the artificially high prices on a host of things.
  • An old building is being brought down so a new building can take its place.
  • This fundamental restructuring is to the economy but also to society. How we relate to each other is changing.
  • Many jobs lost now will never return. "In key industries — manufacturing, financial services and retail — layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business." (New York Times)
  • Not just jobs, entire sectors of the US economy might disappear.
  • Newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast media, all are experiencing upheavals.
  • A lot of retail is going online.
  • Business travel will for the large part be replaced by more efficient communications.
  • Dirty energy will "shrivel."
  • Real estate construction will decline.
  • Health care and education will see reinvention and growth.
  • Ditto government.
The good news?
"Every one of the collapsing industries listed above will be replaced - in a different image, at a different scale - and that presents opportunities."

The promise is a new economy, a new society, a new world. Help people see through the transition.

Credit will have to flow again, spending will have to grow again. But they will go in new directions.

But right now we are in the destruction part of the cycle. Let the creation begin as soon as possible.

Jarvis has done a good job of describing where we are now and we are or should be going, but he has not done a good job of connecting the two. How do we help people with the transition? How to minimize disruptions? How to move people from lost jobs to better paying jobs?








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Friday, March 06, 2009

Twitter And The Time Dimension

My social Network on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter...Image by luc legay via Flickr

Twitter is real time search. That is its functionality.

What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Facebook is more about space, the human space, the "social graph," as the Facebook people call it.

The next Twitter does not only text and links and photos but also video. And that might be a hardware and connectivity challenge more than a Twitter challenge. But it is only a matter of time before that video part also seeps in. But I don't wish to emphasize that too much. Text and links are enough for the most part. Photos are a plus, but not all that essential.

The next Twitter is not necessarily richer features, it is a Twitter that has 10 times more users and so is more useful to the existing users. An internet with more computers linked in is more useful. A Twitter with many more users will be more useful. A few Twitter users in every town on earth, and we will really have tipped the scale.



And it can't just be about real time search. The search functionality will have to get much better. Users should be able to dig into the archives and make sense. So Twitter can't be just about real time search, rather it has to be about snapshots in time and space.

Facebook will benefit from switching to real time status updates, but it will make a mistake in thinking it is competing with Twitter. They inhabit two quite separate spaces. The biggest lesson Facebook could learn right now is that just like to the Eskimo there are many different kinds of snow, there are many different kinds of friends. There are family, relatives, close friends, classmates, colleagues, acquaintances. Right now Facebook is at the one snow level of sophistication. And that is not good enough. Inner circle interaction should feel different from outer circle interaction. Facebook is not there yet.

How about adding a Hello function to Facebook which would be like the Follow function on Twitter? I can follow anyone I want on Twitter. On Facebook if we are not friends we are not friends, but I think I should be able to say hello to anyone I want to say hello to. They should see I said hello, and they should have the option to check out my profile, maybe they want to say hello as well. And maybe we talk. And decide to become friends down the line.
















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Thursday, March 05, 2009

What Should Facebook Do

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBase

Facebook is in news today for wanting to catch up with Twitter. Facebook has the mass and the volume, but Twitter has the buzz and the momentum, something Facebook has plenty of. Facebook is a great site, but it could do with improvements.

(1) Do Not Become Twitter

Twitter has its place. Facebook has its place. Facebook would do itself a major disservice if it tried too hard to imitate Twitter. Twitter can not become Facebook. Facebook should not become Twitter.

On Twitter the emphasis is on real time, on 140 characters. On Facebook much more depth is possible. That depth is Facebook's competitive advantage. It should not let go. Instead it should enhance on that depth.



You go on Facebook to better organize your social reality, and to enhance that social reality. You go on Facebook to arrange to meet offline. That offline part is key. Facebook should make event planning seamless. It already does a good job.

(2) Existing Friends

The idea behind Facebook has been that you are only supposed to accept friend requests from people who are already your friends. It is supposed to be a walled garden. It errs on both sides. It does not do enough of it, it does too much of it.

You should be able to accept friend requests from everyone you know, but you don't want your boss to see the same side of you as your college roommate.

On the other hand, what's the point about so many interesting people being on Facebook if you can't make new friends on there? I was at almost 1500 friends and then Facebook went ahead and deleted my account. I got a new one that now has 500, almost all of which are people I know offline.

Friend: now that is a broad category. Facebook should introduce the concentric circles idea. Anybody should have the option to become your fan, but those fans should not see all those many aspects of you that your friends might. Fans should get a much more limited view. And close friends should see more than not so close friends. There should be a whole category called colleagues.

(3) Making New Friends On Facebook

I think that is probably the largest untapped potential of Facebook. Facebook should be a place where you go to meet people. But it has to be safe, and it has to be gradual. You should be able to explore shared interests and conversations for a long time without having to reveal your name or face.

The Unfacebook

Facebook could morph to become the leading dating site. But it should not do so by becoming like the other dating sites. Facebook can become a job site, a place you go to seek talent. Once you get that many people at one place online there are so many things you can do.

(4) Status Updates In Real Time

I believe they have already decided to do that. Good. About time. Here Facebook could really give Twitter a run for the money, especially if it not only does status updates in real time, and makes it URL friendly, but also does a good job of allowing people to search just the status updates.

(5) Allowing Celebrities To Mingle

If you had a million fans, what should your Facebook experience be like? I think people who end up with a large fan base on Facebook should have special features just for them. A million fans should be manageable because of Facebook. How exactly you would do that, I don't know, but I got a few ideas. Fans are not just after the celebrities they are after, they are also after each other. Make that happen. Celebrities should be able to interact with their fans. They should be able to "zoom in" to perhaps interacts one on one, to meet, arrange to meet.

(6) Deepening Friendships

Facebook should be one of the tools that allow you to become better friends with people you are already friends with.

(7) Facebook For Family

Maybe Facebook should help you build an inner core to your profile that only a few close people get to see. Perhaps status updates should be layered. Maybe you want one status feed for the eyes of your spouse only.

(8) Safety And Privacy

Those are paramount. Add all the features in the world, but if you botch these two, you are in bad shape. The idea is not to stop being a walled garden, but rather being many gardens, some more walled, some less, some out in the open.

(9) Photos, Videos, Links

Facebook totally took off with photos. I believe there are way more photos on Facebook than on Flickr, and that happened a long time ago. Flickr made a bad move: it started charging.

If Facebook wants to compete with Twitter, it needs to compete in the aggregation and sharing of links. Links are the number one action on Twitter. Make it easy for people to post, share, search.

(10) Status Stream

That has to be real time. I believe Facebook already did that. Good.

TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter







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