Crastinate

The movie “Happy Feet” is on the television as I write this post. For all that don’t know, “Happy Feet” is a kid’s movie about penguins (I won’t go into details). Anyway, there was just a scene where all the penguins follow each other off the cliff into the icy water.

These images make me think about how easy it is to follow the crowd. We saw it in the financial markets. We saw it in the dot-com heyday. We saw it in real estate investments. People just follow without asking questions. Well, we’re seeing it today in the social media world.

The landrush to grab Facebook vanity URLs was ridiculous. Loren Feldman made a quick video explaining the stupidity behind it. I think Loren touches on a point that goes far beyond Facebook. The business world has become obsessed with social networking and social media as a whole; To the point that they forget what they’re selling or what their marketing goals are.

Why would a company advertise Facebook.com/mybusiness or Twitter.com/mybusiness instead of mybusiness.com. Sure, it’s great to have both Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to foster community but the point of EVERYTHING is to make sales. Maybe not short-term, but in the long-term (by building brand loyalty and customer satisfaction). All this hype around Facebook vanity urls is ridiculous. All the hype around Twitter is….well….it’s not ridiculous, but it’s over-hyped.

All these sites are tools to use in your marketing plan. Tools that are experimental and have trouble clearly connecting to revenue generation. While I recommend all my clients and all businesses as a whole to do some form of social media marketing, I recommend it with a disclaimer. Don’t expect social media to bring in money. If you want money, build a great product and market it via the measurable marketing methods. Social media is the party that you need to be at in case it becomes the next big thing but don’t jump off the cliff because everyone else is.

The recent backlash over the latest ebaY’s feedback changes is just the latest problem with the auction company. The fact is that ebaY isn’t exciting anymore. The newness of auctions is gone. I can, many times, get cheaper prices from Amazon for a new product than the price of a used product on ebaY. It’s still useful, but not something that I would use often. I think it boils down to a lack of innovation on ebaY’s part. Without innovation, there isn’t growth.

Today, I see a blog post by Michael Arrington talking about how Facebook is shunning the Android platform because of the bad blood between Facebook and Google. This situation, amongst many others, makes me think that Facebook is going to be the next ebaY. By that I mean, Facebook will continue to grow until it reaches maximum capacity within its own market. But I don’t see the seeds of innovation wihtin Facebook to continue that growth into new markets such as Google has done. In other words, Facebook is a one-note company, and once the excitement is over, that growth will stagger. People will still use it. People still use ebaY. But without constant innovation, that growth will disappear. I’m calling it now. I’d give it 3 years. Facebook will have major growth problems.

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I was discussing the value of Twitter with a friend of mine this past week. He was making the case that Twitter will be the next big communication tool in the near future for life updates (what you’re up to right now). Currently, looking at my friends’ Facebook statuses and photos is how I stay abreast of what people are up to. This friend of mine was making the case that Twitter is only in its infancy and that it will replace Facebook statuses as the preferred method of this type of communication. Well, Twitter fans, I think Twitter is great but has one major flaw that won’t allow it to go mainstream. It’s just a communication tool and communication tools evolve to become open standards. These open standards allow anyone to compete on the communication side. Let me explain with a bit of internet history.

Prodigy was my first introduction to an online community. I used to post questions about Space Quest on Prodigy game forums and get answers from other Prodigy users on what code the time machine needed to get back to the future. It was amazing. I was also able to message other users directly. For example, I could send a message to my brother’s account (FNHK96B) from my account (FNHK96C). This was, in a sense, email. The user base was limited to Prodigy users, but I could still email any of them as many times as I wanted.

Then AOL came around and blew Prodigy out of the water. AOL gave the option to email anyone, anywhere, as long as they had an email address. Email was suddenly open. So if email was open, what was AOL’s competitive advantage? Some may say that it was their ease-of-use but the real killer app was AOL Instant Messenger. You had to be on AOL to chat with other AOLers. EVERYONE used AIM back then. There was no alternative. Eventually Microsoft and Yahoo came out with their own chat programs. AOL had to open up their chat to outsiders via a downloadable AIM program. Now, any program can chat to AIM users. Chat is open. No matter how many people use AIM, AOL lost its competitive advantage.

Jump ahead to the present. Twitter is the hot program to use for short mass communication. The interesting thing is, it’s already open. Any program can post to twitter and and receive tweets. So what is Twitter’s competitive advantage? People might use it, but why would people visit the site (which Twitter would need to make money)?

So here are the final thoughts of this  long post (sorry about that). Twittering, micro-blogging snippets about your life, is awesome. Twitter, however, is a delivery service. Nothing more. There is no other advantage to using Twitter and therefore, Twitter will become one of the many message delivery services in the future. Facebook, however, has lots to offer. It’s a social network. People will always have a reason to visit the site and because of that, the Facebook status will survive while Twitter will eventually fall. We’re already seeing people migrate to Plurk and FriendFeed (which are both more robust, and in my opinion, better than Twitter). You could love Twitter, but be realistic. Twitter is not all it’s hyped up to be.

People are wired/trained to recognize the the slightest emotion in the human face. The slightest curve of the lip, raise of the eyebrow, or furrowing of the brow implies a different mood. There isn’t one other part of the body that we can analyze as well as the human face. Why is that?

According to the Face Perception Wikipedia entry:

The face is an important site for the identification of others and conveys significant social information. Probably because of the importance of its role in social interaction, psychological processes involved in face perception are known to be present from birth, to be complex, and to involve large and widely distributed areas in the brain.

So we know we’re wired to be able to interpret the face with more complexity. Does that mean that we can explain those complex processes? I don’t think so. I can very easily tell when someone is worried but might have a hard time defining what aspects of their appearance makes me think they are worried. It’s our developed brains that can analyze faces but cannot always verbalize those analyses.

Let’s take this analogy to the evolution of web users. I personally could never stand MySpace. I didn’t know why. It just bothered me. I signed up once and after a week or so and then closed my account. I knew I couldn’t stand the design, but so many people loved it (they won’t admit it now). It was more than the design, however. There was something in my subconscious that was telling me that I don’t like this site. It was something that I wasn’t able to explain in words. I figured social networking just didn’t appeal to me. Then Facebook comes along, and after pushing off signing up for as long as possible, I signed up and I love it.

I still wonder why I have such an affinity for Facebook but still can’t stand MySpace. I think it goes beyond design. It’s a mixture of design, usability, accessibility, and overall usefulness. All these things, combined with some undefinable qualities, create a conscious and subconscious decision on whether I like a website. And while I’d like to think I was ahead of the curve disliking MySpace, I think any new website has to deal with the refined tastes of web users. We analyze websites like we analyze faces. It’s hard for us to tell why in particular we don’t like or use a specific site. It’s just a feeling that we get. Some sites just make us want to use them. This is what developers should be working towards. They should be looking to find those key elements that unlock the “favorable” opinion in our minds. A lot has to do with design. A lot has to do with usability, accessibility, and usefulness. But there is more there that a developer needs to capture in the user’s mind. I know what it is but can’t put it into words. If it was definable, then everyone’s site would be successful.

Earlier today, a few friends and I were discussing the evolution of Facebook over the past couple years. We discussed how Facebook used to be just for certain colleges and evolved in the open network we know of today. One of the appeals of Facebook is that our parent’s generation, for the most part, aren’t on it. Our status updates and newsfeed is for our friends, not our parents (or other older relatives).

What will happen, however, in 10 years from now? When a new generation wants to communicate in their own way free of their parent’s oversight, they’ll flock away from their parent’s communication tool. They’ll flock away from Facebook towards something new. Facebook is going to have to learn to be the social network for this new generation. If I were Facebook, I would be creating a new social network targeting the 8-12 year old crowd. This would hook that generation to their own specific social network. I doubt Facebook would ever do this. Like most companies, they think their brand can be the everything to everyone. Well it can’t. And in 10 years, if not sooner, we’re going to see competitors chipping away at the social network giant.