The BBC ran an article that ties in with my post last week about Social Networking for Social Animals. Jay Fienberg posted a comment and we had a short conversation I thought I would escalate to the post-level. I really wish that blogging let you syndicate the conversations that happen around your posts. I'd like to be able to just note a few comments and dynamically add them to my Feedburner feed.
The original post was about MySpace looking for a search partner (likely Google) to find new ways to suck revenue out of their users. Aside from turning the net into one incestuous ball of revenue sucking, I felt that this was misguided because it focused too much on the web site. Focusing on usefulness to the user seemed a better strategy to me.
Trying to build a web site that will capture users when they are little kids and expecting that site to retain full relevance for them when they are adults is patently ridiculous. Even if you keep adding new bells and whistles to it, at some point you don't visit your Legos every day.
You may still love Legos, but you don't visit them every day.
This has been reinforced recently by this great article in the BBC News. This article argues that the Internet in general and the Web in particular are not the place to fully explore community. They discuss a Floridian professor named McKeen who actively stops his students from using the Internet as a resource. In a wonderfully pithy statement, they say:
...the hypertextual web is no more a machine for producing serendipity than the Dewey decimal system was.
And we all understand that. In Silicon Valley, arguably ground Zero for blogging, there are copious social events to get people out and talking. To supplant the various types of information we get on the net. Because MySpace isn't MyLife. It could be seen as My[Storage]Space, OneOfMySpaces, MySpaceForNow. MySpace is a tool.
One site is not our answer.
Integrating the Web into a healthy life, however, is. Human beings, especially American ones, love extremes. That's why we have a two party system. We just love dichotomies. They are so easy to get your head around.
However, the extreme here would be, if the Web isn't going to give us nirvana, it must be a festering dungheap. And, no, it's not that either.
Much like the Oat Bran craze of the early 90s where people went from eating no Oat Bran to eating 10 helpings of it day, we seem to have a moderation problem. The Internet is not going to solve all our problems - but the Internet is not one web site. We need to see its strengths and make the most of them.
Steven Johnson recently posted about this and said:
I'm constantly stumbling across random things online that make me think: what is the deal with that anyway? And then an hour later, I'm thinking: how did I get here? I can't tell you how many ideas that eventually made it into published books and articles of mine began with that kind of unexpected online encounter.
I believe that what companies like NewsCorp need to ultimately understand is that their "place" on the Internet is fleeting and value-less. Their integration with the Internet is invaluable.
The web is a place of randomness and a place of purpose. It is a place we go to and a place we immerse ourselves in. We just have to know how to appropriately open ourselves to the possibilities.
Having said that, no one place on the Internet is stable or static. No one place on the Internet replaces our need to have lunch with a friend. Every so often, I fly to the Bay Area, just to talk to people. We could talk via e-mail or on the phone or via blogging - but it's not the same.
Conversely, Jay lives 4 miles from me. We communicate via IM or blog comments or posting. We have lunch, dinner, and plates of Salumi meat. Electronic communication is a natural extension of our relationship.
Newscorp cannot force our relationship to happen on their web site. Angry professors like McKeen cannot force our relationship to entirely happen outside the Internet. If we have a balanced diet of communication, we will be healthy.
What follows are Jay's and my conversation stemming from this post:
Yeah, I know they've got it. I just think that the focus on the browser page misses the point of the brand.
I use Wikipedia a lot now because it is both integrated into Trillian and into my search bar in Firefox. Having to go to the site initially, then search for something, then get there involves extra and unnecessary steps.
Wikipedia already gets its branding needs met by having its logo permanently in my search bar drop down.
Their insistence that users need a portal and no other tools is likely the real reason why their users leave after they leave high school. They simply outgrow the limiting and controlling interface.
From Jay:
It's an interesting division: what aspects of the web are places that people go, and what are services that people use (across places, or even in some "place-less" fashion).
Although it's not an accurate characterization, we could imagine web 1 was about building places, and web 2 was about building services.
I don't think either approach is universally superior, in terms of building a brand, e.g., getting new customers and hanging on to existing ones.
In general though, it seems to me that the successful services on the web have tended to be extensions of successful places on the web. And, as with your Wikipedia example, I think MySpace could take search from the portal /place context and expand it into a service-brand, e.g., a MySpace search extension in Firefox, or a MySpace search toolbar, or a MySpace desktop search. . .
I imagine, with MySpace, that if they have a user going away to college who keeps using MySpace (e.g., as a service) for one more year beyond high school, that will be profitable.
It's a lot like Yahoo! or Google--they keep adding new "properties" that their users will try out for a while (at least long enough to be willing to try the next new thing)--keeps users around, clicking on advertising.
From Jim:
Absolutely, I think the distinction here is that people see things like MySpace as a place - but in our heads we don't think that way.
For example, this blog is ver central to how I communicate with people. But you likely didn't read this initially by looking at my blog directly, you saw the post in your aggregator and then came here to comment.
You came to this blog as a site because context deemed it necessary. But you wouldn't come here every day otherwise.
This is like real places. There are a lot of restaurants I like in Seattle, yet I might go to each of them once every two or three months. This isn't because I don't want to patronize them, it's because life requires you to do other things.
In terms of blogs, the icite blog (Jay's blog) is important to me. But I couldn't to there and to the other blogs on my blogroll (see right column) every day and have any type of a life.
So places like MySpace, who expect their users to go to a certain _place_ EVERY DAY are setting themselves up for failure.
They should understand that every on-line community has a churn rate, has a daily viewership rate, and has some measurement of relevance. Relevance requires that people be thinking about their community, and thinking about it in a good way.
Making people physically go to MySpace every day turns people into Dunkin Donuts guys. Every day at 4 am they "gotta make the donuts". And you start to resent things you "gotta" do.
This means that MySpace needs to inject themselves into the daily lives of their users through useful and relevant things. This includes things like search bars, notifications that their friends have posted something, etc.
In other words, in order to ensure that people keep going to MySpace, MySpace needs to make the _need_ to go to MySpace less of a requirement and more of a natural act.
If they retain a few million users every year, but overall users go to the site 10% less - their brand gets stronger and their ad clicks get more relevant.
If MySpace makes themselves more a state of mind than a state of being, they will find themselves synonymous with on-line community. Like "Give me a Coke" means any type of soft drink in the Southern US.
So I fully agree that laying the infrastructure of a distributed network is much more important than building a web site.
Do I think that NewsCorp, even when they read this, will understand this? No. They are far to bought-in on the broadcast model of revenue generation and user retention. In their eyes, you need to "watch" Fox, you need to "visit" MySpace. I can't see them ever getting past that.
MySpace does have a search interface already--it's obviously used for finding people / bands on MySpace. And, it also can search the whole web. Like everything on MySpace, it almost is useful in a slightly annoying / mildly amusing way.
But, if you think about the search-portal connection, e.g., Yahoo is a big search engine because a lot of people use Yahoo as their home page / portal, you can imagine MySpace seeing an opportunity to be a big portal in that same way.
And, the big web biz these days is all about locking users in to your services, collecting data on them and selling ads to partners.