A weblog by Christopher Carfi, since 2004.
Robert Heinlein popularized the now-ubiquitous phrase TANSTAAFL ("there ain't no such thing as a free lunch") in his novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The adage holds today.
Free video services, free email, free social networking tools? No, they're not. Look a little closer.
Alan Patrick nails it:
"If you can't see the free lunch on the web, then it's you."
You're paying for it, one way or another, usually with your privacy.
Here's quick overview on Facebook Places (Facebook's new location-based service) from David Armano.
Link here: David Armano Point of View on Facebook Places
Key pull quote from David:
"From a user perspective, Facebook places is not bad, which is a bit of an accomplishment for a new launch. From a platform perspective this is not great news for the competition. However, there are some serious issues and the biggest is lack of integration with other platforms such as Twitter. There is also no reward system (badges) which some Foursquare users like and others care less about. The experience though shows promise and for Facebook it's yet another source of behavioral data which will prove to be valuable to advertisers and brands. In short, as a user it's off to a decent start. If your Facebook connections use it, it's likely you might as well. If users adopt the behavior as Facebook rushes to support other mobile platforms and global locations it could gradually make the act of checking-in as common as the status update. If this happens, organizations with physical locations will have to take a very close look at this and what it means for their business."
Some interesting data from Pew. Note that we're not just consumers, but creators thanks to mobile, as evidenced by the photo / video / text growth. Full source is here. Internet access over mobile also is experiencing statistically significant growth. -cfc
—
"Cell phone ownership has remained stable over the last year, but users are taking advantage of a much wider range of their phones’ capabilities compared with a similar point in 2009. Of the eight mobile data applications we asked about in both 2009 and 2010, all showed statistically significant year-to-year growth.
This year Pew also asked for the first time about seven additional cell phone activities. Among all cell phone owners:
The really interesting bit was Slide 12 (although the page number says “11”). Check out the rate of change and the narrowing of the gap between iOS and Android over the last year. If you look back to 2009, iOS had a commanding lead. Now, iOS has flattened, then declined, and Android keeps marching up-and-to-the-right. Something to watch.
Ok, so do this.
Go to http://facebook.com and do a search for "JC Penney." Go to the #1 result. It's a page here.
Now go to Facebook and do a search for "JCPenney." Go to that #1 result. It's a totally different page here.
Confused?
Back in April, Facebook released a new feature called "Community Pages," which are touted as "a new type of Facebook Page dedicated to a topic or experience that is owned collectively by the community connected to it. Just like official Pages for businesses, organizations and public figures, Community Pages let you connect with others who share similar interests and experiences."
You can learn more about Facebook Community Pages here.
Reasonable idea, horrible implementation. The main difficulty is that, structurally, both types of pages look pretty similar. Big logo thing in the upper left hand corner, tabs across the top, and generally the same kind of layout.
The implications are manifold:
Some other good analysis of the issue:
Caveat emptor.
photo: hubpages, "the crash at crush"
"I Am Not A Brand": http://bit.ly/99NRwU
The killer pull-quote: "We can, if we group together, fight off the weenuses and hosebags who want to turn the Internet into a giant commercial…"
GREAT post. Is
Android Destined to be the Windows of Smartphones?
Some interesting parallels between the mobile war between Android and
Apple…and how it may be tracking the same battle we saw between Windows and
Apple a generation ago.
Interesting take on how social media have affected the early stages of a
relationship with a customer. Slides 8 and 13, in particular, show an
interesting contrast between the "old" way of cramming things down a customer's
throat, vs. at least one view of how that interaction has changed as a result of the fact that we are all significantly better informed as customers before we ever even pick up the phone the first time.
(via Axel Schultze)
Two things to read on the "how social media intersects with sales" front today.
1) "How Social Media Are Ruining Your Lead Qualification Strategy." Here's the salient bit, from Charles Green.
"CRM systems used to capture all the dialogue—between seller and customer. Only now, they’ve realized that was only 5% of the real dialogue. The other 95% of the real dialogue happens between customers."
2) From Transactions to Community, which looks at the phenomenon from a slightly different perspective, and arrives at a similar place.
#crm #vrm
Emotional, awe-inspiring stories are more likely to be shared online, says John
Tierney of the New York Times. In his column Will You Be
E-mailing This Column? It's Awesome, Tierney cites a study done at the
University of Pennsylvania that finds the following:
"More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers
found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer
articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said
that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics.
(The best way to test that, he said, would be for The Times to run shorter and
longer versions of the same article that would be seen by different
readers.)Surprising articles, like one about free-range chickens on the streets of
New York, were also more likely to be e-mailed — which was a hardly a surprising
discovery, of course. But the researchers also kept finding popular articles
with a quality that went beyond surprise.“If I went into my classroom dressed up like a pirate, that would be
surprising, but it wouldn’t be awe-inspiring,” Dr. Berger said. “An article
about square watermelons is surprising, but it doesn’t inspire that awed feeling
that the world is a broad place and I’m so small.”Building on prior research, the Penn researchers defined the quality as
an “emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the
face of something greater than the self.”They used two criteria for an awe-inspiring story: Its scale is large,
and it requires “mental accommodation” by forcing the reader to view the
world in a different way." (emphasis added)
That last line was the one that really hooked me. At an intuitive level, I
think we all get this, yet it's not immediately apparent why.
Doc Searls has written quite a bit over the years on the concept of
"authority," linking the meaning of the word to its root, author. In
2007, he wrote:
"What we call
'authority' is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us."
I think that's the link. If we've read (or seen, or heard, or experienced)
something that has changed us, perhaps we feel a need to share that change with
others. Furthermore, if we have allowed ourselves to be authored…again,
literally, we've allowed ourselves to be written to…that means we have
interacted with something that is, at some level, larger and
more powerful than ourselves.
And that's awesome.
photo: chuck
revell
