I wish the guys at I love Charts (@ilovecharts) had a chart on this, but I am sure if they did, we would see a decline in our manners and increase in emotion since the internet, and all its little pilot fish, became mainstream.
By example, it’s truly amazing that a CEO of a gillion dollar company like Apple takes time to read your email, let alone respond to it. Steve is a pretty press friendly CEO too, so what pushed him over the edge, let alone what pushed the drunken ValleyWag guy to even start the argument in the first place? What is it that has pushed us over the edge to become an emotional lot of argumentative, belligerent, bad mannered bunch of communicators? I don’t know, but I’m Just Saying. A few cases in point below:
- Steve Jobs & Ryan Tate’s email exchange… but honestly, I’m up til 2:30 am some nights, so why not Steve? (oh and BTW, if you don’t like the products, don’t keep buying them)
- Stephen Fry’s response to malevolent comments on his blog
- A Chicago landlord sues over a Tweet made by his ex-tenant who criticized state of apartment
- Well respected and renowned thinker Umair Haque being lambasted by attendees who didn’t like the way he interviewed Evan William at South by Southwest
- Japanese girl killing a friend over an internet spat
- A petty dissing contest on Twitter between Bow Wow and Chris Brown (author says it makes you yearn for the days when rappers would just shoot each other)
Can we take it one step further into the sexes? I don’t know but according to the Scientific American, men are more belligerent than women, although woman can be just as aggressive as men. But there is a new project underway by Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris (BTW both of these men are absolutely on that smart is sexy list) which has started combing the internet to look for and measure emotion in a project called “We Feel Fine“.
We Feel Fine scours the blogosphere every few minutes and scans for the words “I feel” or “I am feeling.” The crawler looks for feelings of people who broadcast and renders into a dynamic, real time color map by age, topic, location, gender, etc. When you click on any one of the moving dots, it explodes to reveal the feeling sentence behind it somewhere in the blogosphere.
I think that perhaps Steve Jobs said it best when he retorted to his drunken belligerent, insolent, disrespectful emailer with this: “BTW, what have you done that is so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations”
Hey Ryan Tate, go start your own company and go easy on the booze. – JLH
Tags: Apple, Bow Wow, Chris Brown, Jonathan Harris, Scientific American, Sep Kamvar, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs
We are lucky enough to be able to peek into two tech worlds. One, is a well established, revenue producing, tactile-based yet well understood world of telecommunications, i.e. how you watch TV (set top boxes, TVs, electronic program guides, Video on Demand, PVR, etc.). The other one is the topsy-turvy exciting world of web 2.0 technology that you can’t really get a grip on but you know its there and your friend Trixie uses it, so it must be ok. These are the people that bring you Facebook, the cloud, Twitter, social networks and the like.
The telco world lives pretty much in a fact-based (although somewhat altered) world of actual subscribers, content rights and a general understanding of how to move their industry forward. Now I said “general”. They don’t succumb to hype and when they get a feature that they think will make the vertical trade press wake up and listen, they go for it with gusto – currently the red hot chili in this world is “3D”, multi-screen delivery and social TV (also the cloud). Suffice it to say, they never really cave into hype.
However, in the other world – they live in a bubble that thrives off of hype and works on the premise of “if a few are doing it, we all must be doing it”. This brings me to location based social networks.
Recently there was a great article via CNN about why location apps haven’t gone mainstream yet. When CNN writes the story, it takes on a different perspective because by the time the “hype” of the start-up technology or craze (location based social networks) comes their way, they actually decide to look into it and see what in reality is going on. The article goes on to say that only 7% of all Americans actually are AWARE of location based social networks. This would have to be 7% of all Americans (around 21 million people) But if you tune into any start up technology news source, it would read as if the whole planet is using it and its growing by leaps and bounds. So many issues affect normal users that don’t affect early adopters. Most early adopters (those with smart phones like iPhones, etc. rather than feature phones) tend to care less about privacy than those outside of that market.
VCs still are funding location based start ups and they are putting more pressure on them to monetize and gain traction with users, but how many location based social networks can NON-early adopters handle? And how many of those care more about privacy than the early adopters. If early adopters don’t care about privacy nor the fact that their sign up and usage is just paving the way for targeted advertising, what happens when it hits mainstream and they do care? How will the model be adjusted then? It could be just an issue of usage = complacency, which is normally how technology gets assimilated into our lives, we just get used to it and then we can’t part with it. Or rather, its like a drug, we crave it even though we are forfeiting some of our privacy rights. After all, no one is making you sign up for these services.
Here is our take: Location as it relates to your life where you are in the moment will be relevant to the mainstream user (not early adopter). For example, I am shopping on this street, let’s see what else is around me. Not WHO is around me, but WHAT is around me. If I see that there is something near to me, I want to get there easily, and if there is a money saving voucher or coupon, I am more incented to go there.
According to UK-based Juniper Research, mobile coupons are redeemed at a 5% to 20% rate, compared with about 1% for print coupons. They recently forecast that 1 out of every 10 mobile subscribers in developed regions around the world will use mobile coupons by 2014, generating nearly $6 billion in redemption value. The fact of the matter is that consumers like coupons/vouchers. In the fourth quarter of 2008, coupon redemption was up 7.5% in the US alone. And, according to Hitwise, internet searches for discount vouchers in the UK grew by 47.5% in 2009.
We aren’t the experts, but this sort of feels a bit like maybe how the Gold Rush felt — lots of people rushing in to get their claim, but most of the claims just pinch out. Where LB social networks go from here is up to the user, and they are a fickle lot. – JLH
Tags: Advertising, CNN, Facebook, Social network, Telecommunication, Television, Twitter
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