Mr. iPhone Comes to Canada and Causes a Stir
If you’ve heard much about the iPhone lately, you’ve heard about the fracas over the rates announced by Rogers and its subsidiary Fido, the 3G model’s exclusive Canadian carriers.
Outputs and Outcomes: Overheard at Get Satisfaction
I’m still unsure if the right moniker is Get Satisfaction or Satisfaction, but either way the service found at http://getsatisfaction.com rocks. Their entire reason for being, built right into the brand, is to create positive outcomes between companies and customers.
The Netflix Strategem and the Future Already Past
In talking about what made his game so different, Wayne Gretzky used to say that “a good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” It’s a great insight into the strategies that, with his talent, sportsmanship and drive, made Wayne a legend in the game. Steve Jobs used this very quote in the almost offhand, but profoundly important announcement at the close of his 2007 Macworld keynote, changing Apple Computer to simply Apple.
Some 18 months later, which would be now-ish, that new direction is becoming clearer, although some analysts are still a bit bewildered by what it all means. Case in point, Forrester Research produced a comical report this week that breathlessly anticipates Apple’s introduction of clock radios, digital picture frames and on-site service. Slow down, space-man, you’re blowing my mind! I can’t believe people pay in the hundreds and sometimes thousands for these reports.
One thing Forrester does get right is that there are many aspects of home life that Apple can touch with digital lifestyle products. Along with Microsoft, Apple has jealously been trying to wedge its way into the living room, getting some of that sweet engagement time that has traditionally been hogged by stereos, televisions and game consoles.
AppleTV is its way in, and after languishing for a year or was was re-positioned for wider appeal in the couch-potato market by adding movie rentals and un-tethering the device from the need to already own a Mac.
With a smooth iTunes Store experience, movies to rent or buy on demand and an eye towards the trend of wider screens and HD capability, AppleTV seemed well on its way to grabbing a huge chunk of media purchases and rentals.
This week, Apple was handily out-skated by Netflix. If you haven’t heard, Netflix released their own hardware+online service offering, and while it seems a bit shaky out of the gate it pushes AppleTV back onto the premium shelf. Let’s take a closer look at how these products measure up.
Faceoff
Fortune does a good job of rounding up the critical aspects of the AppleTV and Netflix offerings.
From this and sundry other sources, the Netflix experience sounds very beta:
- no on-screen movie selection (queuing is done on your computer via the Netflix site),
- high-octane broadband is a must or the quality is YouTub-ish
- a dusty 10% of the library is available.
But these do sound like debut jitters for what seems to be a strong product with a much simpler technological proposition than AppleTV: unlimited movies, instantly, across the internet for a $100 box and 9 bucks a month. You can explain everything it does in one breath. You can’t do that with AppleTV.
Now, I’d give away the cutest baby animals you can think of before I’d give away my AppleTV. But understanding its capabilities and getting it set up to take full advantage of what it can do is no mean task for those who don’t really dig getting to know a device.
Netflix offers a predictable spending model that lets potential customers do the math and realize that a month of all you can eat from their service compares with about 3 movies from Apple for the same price. Moreover, the Netflix model offers zero cognitive friction over making the choice to order a movie. In the iTunes Store model, every movie is a separate sale, and a separate, cost-weighted choice. In fact, the more a Netflix box customer watches, the lower the cost of each movie rented.
Fortune is right to call it an apples and oranges comparison, and while I’m a happy AppleTV camper, what Netflix has going is a damn good orange. One so good that it may have shut Apple out of the wider rental online rental market.
It’s amazing to watch big players move through a market that’s in serious flux, and even more so when they produce compelling and well thought-out products. I wonder what else is going on in home theater these days. You know, outside the Internet…
About those Platters
With all this action in the online space, where exactly does all of this point for the DVD format in general, High-def or otherwise? DVD rentals doesn’t exactly look like a growth market, and I’m probably not alone in wondering whether Sony’s Blu-Ray format victory will be overshadowed by the Internet eating the non-console-game portion of their winnings for the next few years. The future they fought so hard for seems already be fading into the past.
Like those ironic pictures of a
In hearing and reading various stories about the Netflix release this week, I heard a great quote from the Netflix CEO that I can’t find for the life of me online, but went along the line of “We called the company Netflix very consciously. There are very clear reasons we didn’t call it DVDs by Mail.”
Talk about skating to where the puck is going to be.
Taking the Licks
Tech bloggers, reporters, pundits and armchair quarterbacks worked overtime this past weekend with news of Microsoft’s withdrawal of their bid for Yahoo!. It’s anathema to blog rhetoric to say, but I have no opinion on who was right or wrong, won or lost, or who’s stunned and who’s sly.
As Monday closed, the commentary had shifted to Jerry Yang’s role in the collapsed bid and his future. As with the bigger picture, I have no opinion on Jerry’s actions. What has struck me as worth commenting is the blog post under his own name that appeared Sunday night.
More precisely, it’s what follows the blog post. Comments. Quite a few comments, at that: 125 as I write. While some comments offer encouragement and ideas, many are personal and none too flattering. Old school PR would have hit the kill switch on most, if not all of those comments, in a heartbeat.
Now, jump back in time to December with me, and recall if you will, Facebook’s Beacon fiasco. After a month or so spent stonewalling calls for some kind of dialog with members, founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote a mea culpa on the company blog, also announcing a change in the sharing model for Beacon. As a blog, there is a form for posting comments. With hot-button (and legitimate) issues like privacy, data ownership and proper disclosure in play, one can imagine that the comments would be on fire.
Not so much. In fact, there are precisely zero comments posted. There’s a form for submitting, but those comments aren’t seen by others. Old school PR rules here, because we can’t be expected to believe that exactly zero Facebook members had nothing to say here, yet that’s the line being held there. Months later (which would be now), there’s barely an ember of the firestorm over Beacon to be found. The ads that do appear look like clutter, and the focus as a business development technology seems to have shifted, I am guessing, to background aggregation of members’ purchasing activity across participating sites.
However history remembers the business savvy of these two personalities, there’s a kind of respect that I have for Jerry’s blog post showing comments in all their often-ugly glory. As much as I find Facebook innovative and interesting, I can’t find that same respect for their willingness to hook up anything and anyone within its walls, as long as it’s not the opinions of its members with its own statements on controversial policies.
But, I’m an idealist about these sorts of things, and believe that conversation with customers should happen in the open. I’m interested in hearing other takes on these polarized approaches to member feedback and conversations about problematic issues in an online community. What example is the right model? Yahoo!, Facebook, or something in between?
Seeds to the Wind
In February I’ll be wrapping up full-time involvement with Ma.gnolia, my longest and, by far, the most fulfilling gig to date as an indie contractor. I’ll still be a member of the Ma.gnolia community, and I have a couple side projects going with Ma.gnolia’s founder and my close friend, Larry Halff. I’m very proud of what we’ve built in Ma.gnolia, all the way from its inception through design, launch and the growth of a smart and friendly web community.
Almost every assumption I’ve held about application design and how people connect through the web has been challenged or changed by this project, and I like to think I’ve grown quite a lot from the experience. I also learned to wear and quickly change hats: on any given day I’d be manning the front-line of member support, talking with the Ma.gnolia community, designing new features and evolving existing designs, writing newsletters, co-managing development tasks, and of course keeping that classic sense of humor in play. Insert dreamy, retrospective montage here, perhaps set to a Jack Johnson tune.
Since we started Ma.gnolia, so much has changed, and there’s still a long way to go. The walls between websites that were once taken for granted have crumbled significantly with the rise of APIs, OpenID, Microformats, OAuth and the widening adoption of web standards. Software designers and even some business are seeing and serve the fact that people don’t act as atomic units, but as members of social groups where the relationship trumps all. Things change, and yet somehow feel familiar.
My role as Ma.gnolia’s product manager has introduced me to many interesting and honestly good people, and provided the chance to work with some very talented folks. The new perspectives and methods I took away from those contacts that have proven themselves over and over. Chris Messina and Tara Hunt of Citizen Agency, specifically, have profoundly changed how I think about many aspects of my work, from feature design to business policies to the right and wrong ways to engage with online communities. In a way, it’s been like a graduate course in web app design and product management.
What’s next? As I mentioned, I’ll still be hanging around the Ma.gnolia community. I’ve also begun some work with the Citizen Agency crew, and will be looking to engage more with the Vancouver development scene. Though I enjoy working in distributed teams, I think the soul does best when there’s more face-to-face interaction in the mix, so I’m really looking forward to that. But most of all, I’m excited about being able to bring what I learned in working with Ma.gnolia to new projects, taking that flower power far and wide.
Holiday Reading: Getting to First Base – A Social Media Marketing Playbook
I’m a lucky guy when it comes to getting advice on web community relations: I have friends with experience and insight that I trust, who are also patient with my questions about the right approach or even the right words to address an issue.
Just the same, it’s good to brush up on the basics every now and then, as the state of the art changes and new ideas or ways of thinking can stir up new thoughts in an otherwise old hat. This week, the Capulet Communications team of Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo, two of those kinds of friends I was talking about, released an e-book that promises to do just that as part of my holiday reading list.
Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook will be a welcome read for both old and new-school marketers who’ve seen how even small missteps in communicating with web communities can turn into anger and heartache. Darren and Julie have helped many clients run successful and responsible social media campaigns, and have gathered the most valuable lessons from their work, and the work of others, together into a tidy volume of good advice.
As if good advice isn’t enough, I’m pleased to have a spot in the book about my own approach to making the most of negative comments found on a blog. It’s heartening to see these friends bringing their insight and experience to a wider audience, and to be make a small contribution to the book as well.
At $29, Getting to First Base is easily one of the best investments in learning to communicate better on the Internet, with its ever-changing and sometimes baffling ways. It’s also a good way to divert attention from holiday hurly-burly, without any extra calories or the carbon-footprint of treeware.
The Web Needs a Starbucks and Facebook is It
The Ancients talk of a time before memory, before 1990, where, here on the west coast of Canada, coffee culture did not exist. The world then was a flat wasteland of instant coffee, reconstituted from crystals, sitting for hours on a sad Tim Hortons’ hot-plate. Like cave-folk, only with less to live for, we stumbled about knowing nothing of espresso, machiato or latte. The only reason to drink that grim brew was to bitterly pinch oneself for a moment out of a mumbling, lurching existence.
Things are different now.
Today, serving coffee means having an industrial espresso machine, knowing and boasting the bean supplier, and not daring to let an espresso shot live outside the cup for more than a minute. What changed?
One thing: Starbucks.
Serious coffee drinkers may wave Starbucks aside, but deep down they know that they owe the flourishing of their love to the green mermaid. Starbucks cracked the secret of bringing coffee as way of life, with all of culture’s refinements and diversity, to places where it didn’t exist. They bridged the gap between specialist and general consumer. They raised the bar everywhere they went, changing perceptions and democratizing the elite language, tastes and enjoyment previously isolated to eccentric cafes.
Like any large business there are bound to be practices and effects that aren’t so great, but what I want to focus on is how Starbucks took the tastes of an elite group into the mainstream, and in doing so changed the minimum expectation and demands of the mass market. Leaving coffee, let’s look at the state of Web 2.0.
Hey, Spaceman, How’s the Weather Up in Space?
Chances are that if you’re reading this blog, you know that user-generated content can be more surprising, compelling and often trustworthy than ‘the news’. You wield feeds to give yourself a god’s-eye awareness of change across a custom chain of islands producing news, images, opinions, and funny cats. You know how to find your friends on any website and how to make new ones purely on the basis of shared interest. You know how to weave your awareness and presence through a network of devices, and how to make the threads vibrate to communicate your most casual and profound thoughts. And you know that the world without the connectedness seems dark and stale.
Web 2.0 is our coffee, and we’re the oddballs who sip from tiny cups in out of the way cafes while everyone else thinks that Folgers and Maxwell House are the real deal. We might get small thrills from knowing we’re on the cutting edge, but we also know that it would be more fun if more people understood how much they were missing. And deep down, we know we’re failing to bring the most exciting fruits of Web 2.0 to the world at large.
Try explaining a folksonomy or a wiki to an average web user. It’s hard. How about social bookmarking, or lifestreams? It’s usually hard to get the concepts across, and our enthusiasm for this or that innovative startup comes across as almost alien. With our interest in the web, it’s easy for us to pick up new ideas and words and run with them. For the rest of the web world, it’s not so easy, and we do a terrible job at communicating the value of what we’re doing. To really cross over into the mainstream, Web 2.0 needs its Starbucks.
Blue is the New Green
This weekend I got to meet and work with Scott Kveton up here in Vancouver. While waiting for the rest of our group at breakfast, Scott told me that the night before, he overheard a pair of 30-something women talking outside a pub, and these words especially caught his ear:
“You’re not on Facebook? Oh my god you have to get on Facebook, you just have to.”
What Scott heard was akin to a Starbucks opening on a new street. Only it’s not called Starbucks and it doesn’t serve coffee.
But when that friend goes home, possibly drunk, and gets herself into Facebook, she’ll learn in a short time much of what we’ve been building and enjoying on the web’s edge for the past few years. She won’t be socially networking, she’ll be finding friends and checking out people. She won’t be posting user-generated content, she’ll be making jokes, whispering to friends and talking in a group of people. She won’t raise an impressed eyebrow at some AJAX-fu, but she will be pleased for a second that her message appeared in a thread without reloading a page. She’s not joining an elite crowd of aficionados, she’s joining a party in progress, where it’s easy and safe to move from room to room.
In talking about this, Kris Krug noted that Facebook excels at taking only the most useful and central feature patterns from Web 2.0 websites and making them flow well into the central app. I think he’s dead right, and that’s how Facebook blue will become the Starbucks green for Web 2.0 concepts.
There are things that weird me out about Facebook. There’s a strong streak of Disney-like sanitization running through it, and any hub that links so many personal details together in a persistent space makes me wary. But there’s also no denying the power of a smooth user experience and especially of making contact with people you haven’t spoken with in a while. It’s not the most advanced, it’s not the best, but it just works and works well.
Like Starbucks, there are lots of Facebook members who have discovered a whole new world through one well-crafted and infinitely repeatable experience, and after a while they’ll move on to something more specialized and refined. But most will stick with Facebook for their daily fix of the social web, barely remembering the time before time, when the gossamer-thin channels of email and instant messaging and websites that weren’t about us were the whole online world. But no matter where they end up after Facebook, they’ll expect certain things and a certain quality of experience that didn’t exist for them before.
Like Starbucks, Facebook won’t steamroll every plucky startup and well-loved, if small, service. Niches will still have their place, and in their innovations have a better chance of being understood and adopted with the post-Facebook web user, much like the ex-Starbucks customer has been schooled enough to seek out and embrace niche providers that suit a more refined taste. Makers of the new and cool will soon have more people than ever who get what they’re doing and want a piece of it.
The tide is rising, and all boats are floating higher with it.
