He began, he says, with the idea that the site should “not look like Tokyo at night”—in other words, it should be as simple as YouTube is cluttered. And the service should be so easy to use that “my mother would be proficient on it in 15 seconds or less, with no help from me.” Mr Kilar, who began his career at Walt Disney, wanted Hulu to offer the same rich-but-clean experience as Disney’s theme parks do.
Being on Facebook is like volunteering to receive spam, and the more successful you are at finding friends, the more spam you get! In the end, Facebook is really the emptiest, loneliest place on the whole World Wide Web. It’s all static and white noise, and the steady streams of status updates start to look like ASDF, ASDF, ASDF after a while.
—
I’m just speculating here, but perhaps facebook feels like spam when you stop connecting with friends and instead connect with anyone. Receiving random messages from people you don’t know = spam. Receiving random messages from people you know = not spam.
Here’s the trailer for this years Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner.
It’s a film by Ondi Timoner about the possible effects of the Internet and the way in which we are living our lives in public, as seen through the life of Josh Harris.
Makes me wonder when we will start seeing people disconnect from the Internet in a (over) reaction to concerns about losing our privacy.
Once you stop having to pay for movies individually, once you’re able to freely movie surf, you lose the risk of making the wrong decision — and some of the joy at having made a good one. In short, movies become a little less special.
— Pogue, NYT.
Three things have happened, in a blink of history’s eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there’s much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?
Random thoughts after viewing this video depiction of the history of the Internet…
‘Life enhanced’ should be the tagline for the Internet because it doesn’t actually add anything new to our lives. We were already:
- communicating
- enjoying media
- researching various topics
- sharing
- donating
- shopping
- etc.
But, it does enhance (arguably) our ability to do each of these tasks (or at least it should). So for all its newness, the Internet isn’t adding anything new to our lives, but it is changing (hopefully enhancing) how we communicate, share, relate, donate, shop, etc.
I guess our desires don’t change much throughout the ages, but our ability to express them certainly does.
What we call “authority” is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us. The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about. Yeah, it’s about other things. But it needs to be respected as an accessory to our humanity.
The Internet = haven for fans
This quote from a WSJ article on Justin Vernon of Bon Iver got me thinking:
“The Internet played a significant role in feeding people the music…. It’s like wildfire [how it] spreads,” Mr. Vernon, 27, said before a show earlier this year in Philadelphia, where the band performed to a boisterous crowd of about 500 in a church basement. “That propelled us right into being able to choose what kind of record label we wanted to work with.”
I’m a fan of Bon Iver, but I must say he’s not doing anything too different in the online world. I think his success has more to do with his talent (and a unique sound) than anything unique he is doing on the Internet.
I wish he wouldn’t have just USED his Internet success to then become the same as any other musician (not that there is anything wrong with that), but rather made his Internet success part of his story by creating a rabid fan base online and rewarding them with unique access to music, photos, reflections, journals, videos, etc.
Perhaps he could learn something from The Grateful Dead. According to a past CMO of Booze Allen, Sam Hill, “The Dead established a long-term personal relationship with their customers and that was the basis of the brand.” They also allowed fans to tape (and then distribute) live concerts, order tickets in advance through a mail in system, and they welcomed the vendors from the parking lot (which is where all of their rabid fans hung out) as licensees.
Now if only Bon Iver would do something equally unique.
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I am excited about the power of blog commenting to bring ‘intellectual discussions’ back to the mainstream. We’ve had forums on the internet for as long as I remember but they’ve been largely for a niche audience. Blogging has brought a more mainstream audience to the idea of ‘discussions’ but the friction in the system is still too large.
— Fred Wilson - I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I’d rather this blog be more of a forum for ‘intellectual discussions’ than just a place for me to rant. So join in the discussion.
Analysts at Gartner predicting that around 20 million people worldwide will be subscribing to internet-based TV services by the end of the year, up 64 per cent in 12 months
Today’s consumers want a richer, higher-quality media experience, and they want access to more kinds of content than ever before. They want to enjoy the same kind interactivity, personalization, and control that they have come to expect from the Internet with their video entertainment. And they want the ability to access any type of content they choose, whenever and wherever they choose, over a variety of devices and screens.
— Simon Aspinall, Managing Director of Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group via Telco 2.0
A 2007 study by the Brookings Institution and MIT found that a one-digit increase in U.S. per-capita broadband penetration equates to an additional American 300,000 jobs.
The future of hidden gems
Can algorithms ever know us better than we know ourselves? That is a question without an answer right now, but it’s being debated all around.
I certainly don’t have an answer, but I do have another related question:
Will hidden gems or rare finds still feel rare or like gems if algorithms take all the EFFORT out of finding them?
My hunch is that part of what makes a hidden gem or rare find so special is the effort that went into finding it in the first place, and as algorithms get better and better at predicting what we will like, the idea is that we will be able to find hidden gems without much effort at all.
So in our effort to make algorithms better and better at predicting and recommending unique and unknown (at least to the person receiving the recommendation) movies, music, books, blogs, etc. we may be cheapening (ruining) the hidden gem.
Enjoy ‘em while you can.
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The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We’re now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren’t fully an information age society.
— Bruce Schneier, quoted in Valleywag
Lawrence Lessig interviewed by Charlie Rose. This clip (2 minutes in length) touches on what Lessig refers to as Free Culture.
What I find most interesting is that he states that for the first 19 or so centuries we were both passive and active contributors to culture, but during the 20th century we have become predominantly passive couch potatoes.
What, you ask, will save us? The Internet, of course.
