I just arrived in Boulder, Colorado and the view from my hotel room is one of the reasons I love this city so much. The Flatirons cast a magical energy over the city that is not common anywhere else.
I’m here in town participating in TechStars as a mentor over the next couple of days. I’m looking forward to working with local entrepreneurs from Boulder, and my alma mater the University of Colorado, to see how they can make their internet businesses more social through the power of Facebook Platform.
Google’s Android OS will ship in eight million handsets in 2009, an increase of 900 percent compared to the year-ago period, according to Strategy Analytics.
Zach has some good things to say here.
And, after having given this some thought, I agree with what a lot of what he says.
Tumblr has been a wonderful, albeit niche, creative community for the last couple of years. Inevitably, along the way to become a great company from being a startup, you have to start putting good incentive systems in place which will inspire your users to do things like recruit their friends or create higher quality content.
It seems the challenge is to do this in a way which aligns with the values of your community. Tumblr has been a place, in my opinion, of almost pure creative contribution. Some of the most creative individuals have come to Tumblr to create beautifully designed pages, and to contribute uniquely creative content which was, as Zach describes it, sometimes intimate, quirky, and vulnerable.
Tumblr is built upon these core values and the deeply seated desire of the creative and design community to collaborate with itself.
Expanding the game to incentivize broader audiences is all part of scale. But, working with a niche community as influential as the creative and design one, is a balancing act for certain.
It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. I hope that the creative contributions that have made Tumblr wonderful thus far continue, and that the new more poppy audience that is attracted can have fun with these new metrics.
Not diminishing the quality of the interactions for the original core seems to be a big challenge the social web will face going forward.
It’s not the infographics on the page that interest me, rather it’s the trend of emphasizing a user’s popularity on the network. Lamentably, I think this metric will come to define the experience for the next generation of social networks. The internet’s utility for many people will equate to constant awareness of one’s value, and the play of meaningless games to increase the sum. This in turn will render many networks impersonal and irrelevant. Like a candidate’s bid speech for high school class presidency, I fear my Tumblr dashboard will become padded with ‘popular stuff’ sure to garner votes rather than the intimate, vulnerable and quirky bits that I’ve enjoyed, and define Tumblr’s personality.
I’m disappointed by Tumblarity, and Ashton’s follower count for the same reasons. I liked the Internet better when it was nebulous, and now I’m depressed that it shaping up to be a social pyramid.
Congratulations to Kevin Rose and the entire team at Digg for launching Facebook Connect. It has been over 1 year in the making. We’re excited to see this flagship integration go live as the web becomes more social.
Awesome thoughts from Bono on religion in the New York Times. I’ve been thinking a lot about religion’s future role in society recently. So this is timely. More on that to come soon.
Social Web Foo Camp concluded today with a caravan down the California coast to Hog Island Oyster Company where we shucked our own oysters and enjoyed the sun next to Tomales Bay.
Sunset over the first day of Social Web Foo Camp.
The Social Web
I couldn’t agree more with Josh Bernoff from Groundswell in his article Why Social Media Sucks. “Social Media” is the wrong way to describe something that is open, participatory, and collaborative. Something that is grounded on the open web. Media is a one way conversation, the web is a two way conversation.
The web has been around for decades, the world of traditional “media” has been around even longer.
Only in the last few years have we begun to build social technology that enables people to connect and share through the open web. The web is not about information or media, it is about people. People creating, collaborating, connecting, sharing, and participating. It is the power of social participation through the web that creates information and media.
Thus, this movement should be called The Social Web.
Today, David Recordon, Scott Kveton, and I are hosting the second annual Social Web Foo Camp at O’Reilly Headquarters in Sebastopol, California. This is the second annual gathering of the brightest web minds working to make the technology building blocks of the Social Web possible.
Last year, we called it Social Graph Foo Camp. This year, we’ve renamed it to encapsulate the identity-brand-meme that we all identify with the most:
The Social Web.
Sprint hitting the social message. Love it. Seriously, these ads might be the best in recent history.
The new Sprint ads are totally brilliant.
