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There really is nothing new in Web 2.0

May 22, 2008 By Dan Thornton 4 Comments

It’s been said before, but having chatted with some of my readers, and having been unable to quickly find a previous online example, I though it’s worth restating: There’s nothing new in Web 2.0.

And by that, I mean there’s nothing new about the facilities Web 2.0 offers. And now for some examples:

Tagging: Every time you’ve labeled anything in your life, you’ve tagged it. Putting your bills in a folder, putting a sticker on your homemade chutney, or creating a mixtape of songs. If only we’d called it labeling, rather than tagging, I’d have saved myself a few hours of explaining. And a Folksonomy is just what happens when information is structured by people labeling it.

Social networking: Every time you’ve been introduced to someone via a friend, or found yourself chatting to someone you’ve stood next to at a concert, or at the football, you’ve networked socially. Facebook and Myspace are the internet equivalents of your local pub, or the reading group at the local library.

Blogging: Diaries. Fanzines. The family newsletter tucked inside Christmas cards. Newspaper columns.

Crowdsourcing: Happened hundreds of years ago. Sticking up a ‘Wanted’ poster and offering a bounty was crowdsourcing people to catch a criminal.

Social news aggregators (e.g. Digg): Just recording online the same opinions you’d get chatting around the office coffee machine/smoking area.

Word of Mouth, Buzz, Social Media Marketing: When your pipe sprung a leak last night, and you came into work and asked your friend if they knew a good plumber – that’s Word of Mouth. Buzz is just getting lots of people talking and recommending. And social media marketing is just using the new online gathering places.

I did lie earlier.

There is one new thing about all Web 2.0 technology which radically changes everything we know. It’s made it so much easier to do all these things, that the amount of people involved, and the effects, have been amplified 100s, 1000s or even millions of times. It’s always happened. But now it’s happening on a global scale, and in a way that can change the fortunes of businesses.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: aggregators, amplified, Blogging, buzz, Crowdsourcing, digg, facebook, folksonomy, marketing, myspace, social media, social network, social news, tagging, web 2.0, word of mouth

I’m not an early or late adopter. I’m a cheap adopter…

May 11, 2008 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

That’s why my latest purchase isn’t a top of the range iPod Touch or an Alienware PC, as much as I’d love to have the cash to spend.

Nope, my latest gadget purchases were a £10 1Gb discontinued Technika MP3 player (closest one I could find online is this), and a £9.97 Technika MP3 cassette adapter, due to the fact both of the cars in my possession come from a time when cassette players were the standard equipment.

The joy of being able to drive around in an open top car, and not being forced to listen to the radio! Now comes the dilemma of which online MP3 store to register with to keep things nice and legal. I suspect the only real viable option involves an ‘i’, at least until Myspace gets into gear.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: adapter, alienware, casette, gadgets, ipod, itunes, mp3, myspace, player, technika, touch

Internet usability demands centralisation

May 8, 2008 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Normally internet usability refers to the design and placement on a website to allow users to easily interact, but I firmly believe there’s an important new item which is hugely important in making any website, widget or service usable.

And that’s allowing centralisation.

Now I’ve moved to my own domain, I’m trying to update two years of links – on social networks, blog directories, wikis, forums, websites, other people’s blogrolls etc, etc, etc. And I’ve realised exactly how much work is involved in changing my url on all those sites. And that’s the same for all the major events in my life (such as the birth of my son recently), or even keeping minor details up-to-date and relevant (Do I still like the same music and films as I did when I filled out my Facebook profile, or the last time I updated Myspace?).

More and more people are online, and although the numbers of promiscuous profile creators are small compared to those who are happy with one site and profile, that’s changing. And it will change more and more as niche networks and groups form and grow – and advertisers etc see more value in targetting those niches.

It’s where ideas like Google Open Social work, with an API that works across numerous websites/networks. And although I don’t think it’s always suitable to limit every internet user to one ‘real’ linked ID, I do think it’s now essential that anyone collating information from internet users looks at the best way to allow that information to be updated from one central place. You might lose one or two clicks from someone being forced to update, if they see enough value – but the flipside is it’s too much hassle to update so people don’t bother coming back at all – ever.

And for something like a domain change, it can mean a website stops sending me any referrals, and drops even further off my radar.

That’s why something like Last.fm works, and why so many more users utilise its’ ‘scrobbling’ technology to track the music they listen to, rather than using it to find new music etc. If you’ve got a site which has a field to list music, don’t make me fill it out. Let me link to Last.fm, or Pandora. Or create somewhere that I can update once and feed out to all my various outlets. That’s one reason why Twitter works (I’m @badgergravling btw). A Twitter update can be done via a variety of desktop clients or other sources, and then end up on my blog, on FriendFeed etc, etc. Sites like FriendFeed are tackling the problem from the aggregation perspective, and allowing a huge range of inputs to be put into one place – but where’s a system for allowing me to make a huge range of outputs to all the relevant destinations without traipsing for hours around the net?

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Filed Under: social networks Tagged With: aggregation, congregation, facebook, friendfeed, future, last.fm, managing outputs, myspace, pandora, social networks, twitter

Myspace MP3 store is a huge threat – but not to Apple

April 16, 2008 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the new Myspace Music store will pose a threat to the Itunes and Ipod Applopoly. But I’m a little surprised by Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel being so ready to dismiss the threat to streaming music services.

The growth and success of Itunes, added to the image of Apple products and services, gives it a fairly secure position at the moment, and it would take something pretty revolutionary to overturn that. Certainly I’ve encountered enough people who have lost music collections from Ipods yet won’t switch to an alternative to realise Apple devotion works across all their products and services. And enough alternatives exist, even including supermarkets.

However, plenty of people already use Myspace to listen to individual tracks by their favourite artists, and offering a streaming radio service without limitations would make this option extremely attractive. And would seriously threaten several services.

I recently heard a stat regarding Last.fm which is pretty believable. Apparently just 25% of Last.fm users actually visit the website, with most using the ‘scrobbling’ tracking software, and possibly the downloadable radio player. It makes sense as the Last.fm site is hobbled by 30 second clips, and limits on the amount of times you can listen to individual tracks by specific artists. And although it does a reasonable job of finding similar artists, it won’t let you play the specific inspiration before sending you round the houses, which leaves the similar artists without any context. The arrival of Myspace could push Last.fm to concentrate on scrobbling and displaying widgets, which will either lead to new and interesting revenue streams, or could put a real chokehold on the traditional display advertising on the website.

Meanwhile Pandora.com is still on a U.S only lock down. And when you’ve taken something away from users, it puts you in a far worse position than when you’re launching for the first time. There’s no news on any re-opening to non-American markets, and in the meantime, along comes a site already extremely popular, and proposing free music streaming. Suddenly the non-U.S. world forgets Pandora exists. That’s going to limit expansion!

And then you have a myriad of small rival streaming services, like Meemix, which has a plethora of great add-ons and ideas around their music service – but has a corresponding amount of niggles and flaws, as if the ideas exceeded the ability to deliver in a simple and user friendly way.

Myspace can be far from user friendly – but enough people are already familiar with it and accept the problems to mean they’ll jumping all over new music options. And various research shows that the early adopters who jumped ship to Facebook etc are likely to still have a Myspace profile and pop in occasionally, so a fair few profiles could be fired up again to explore a new music option.

At the end of the day, it could be really good news for consumers, as Myspace plans to offer DRM free downloads (possibly pressuring others to follow suit), and it could prompt some serious thoughts about giving more value to users in the streaming market, and some serious attempts to differentiate and move ahead. It’s not often I praise and support Myspace, but for once their plans have my vote.

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