Search Results for: "scale"
Tumblr runs counter to web convention
#VT – Folks are sharing yesterday’s NYTimes’ piece about Tumblr… “reminds me of Front Porch Forum.” Well… we’re flattered!
Of course, Tumblr and FPF operate at different scales and offer different products. Tumblr has been used to create 60 million blogs globally. We host 100 neighborhood/small town FPFs in Vermont… and about 40,000 households participate (out of our 110,000-household coverage area).
Some bits from the New York Times Magazine article by Rob Walker…
The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network, is guided by feeling. In particular, the feelings of David Karp, the company’s 26-year-old founder, whose instincts tend to run counter to current Web conventions. Tumblr does not display “follower” counts, for example, or other numerical markers of popularity that are viewed as crucial social-media features, because Karp finds them “really gross.” The culture of public friend-and-follow reciprocity that theoretically expands a social networking service can, in his view, “really poison a whole community.”
Possibly such a view of Internet culture could be arrived at by way of deliberate study of online group behavior. But that’s not how Tumblr was made. “David built it for himself,” John Maloney, until recently the company’s president, told me…
The trick is making page views equal money. “Pretty much every large tech company today,” Karp said, is essentially “metrics driven.” Google, Twitter, Facebook: they’re obsessed with “optimizing” services, design, functionality and aesthetics through constant testing and tweaking. That ability to optimize and (not incidentally) monetize user experiences by reacting to microlevel data is the essence of Web-business magic, as it is generally understood.
Karp chose not to operate that way. Rather than monetizing clicks, he wants advertisers to view Tumblr as a place to promote particularly creative campaigns to an audience whose attention is worth paying for…
The features Tumblr eliminates are as important to the way it feels as those it adopts. Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, an early Tumblr investor who sits on its board, says that it is “normal behavior” for a founder to be excited about adding new bells and whistles, but Karp seems excited about doing the opposite: “He’ll tell us, “˜Hey, got a new version coming up and I took four features out!’ “…
Karp’s thinking about the comments section, which is generally assumed to be a core blog feature, helps illustrate his broader ideas about how design shapes behavior online. Typically, a YouTube video or blog post or article on a newspaper’s site is the dominant object, with comments strewed below it, buried like so much garbage. Thus many commenters feel they must scream to be noticed, and do so in all caps, profanely and with maximum hyperbole. This, Karp argues, brings out the worst in people, so Tumblr’s design does not include a comments section.
How, then, to encourage feedback while discouraging drive-by hecklers who make you never want to post again? First, Karp notes, you can comment on someone else’s post, by reblogging it and adding your reaction. But that reaction appears on your Tumblr, not the one you’re commenting on. “So if you’re going to be a jerk, you’re looking like a jerk in your own space, and my space is still pristine,” Karp explains. This makes for a thoughtful network and encourages expression and, ultimately, creativity. “That’s how you can design to make a community more positive.”
Nextdoor.com Enters “Neighbor Conversation” Online Space
Congratulations to Nirav Tolia and his team at Nextdoor.com. After a year of testing, they lifted the cover from their new service this week. We welcome another player into the “neighbor conversation” online space. They join Whitepages.com’s Neighbors, MSNBC.com’s Everyblock, and about 20 other start-ups working to help neighbors connect.
Will they get traction? Will they generate significant revenue? To the first point, many efforts in this space seem a mile wide and an inch deep with broad reach and little traction. To the second… in Nextdoor’s case, they’re not trying yet.
This is in stark contrast to Front Porch Forum which has incredible particpation, albeit in a single region. Half of Vermont’s largest city participates in FPF. And they aren’t just lurkers. Whereas much of social media content is provided by a slim 1-10% of users, on FPF a majority of our members speak up… and the tone is consistently neighborly. Also, we’re seeing great results with our recently launched neighborhood-specific advertising system for local businesses.
Front Porch Forum has given me information, income, and, best of all, the first real feeling of connection to this town after living here for 22 years!– Anne Howland, Middlesex, VT, FPF member
FPF’s super-charged level of engagement doesn’t come easy. Many players in the neighbor-conversation space will fail because they’ll substitute tech bells and whistles for real understanding of the social demand that they’re trying to meet… or because they’ll scale too fast and thin.
Achieving critical mass in hundreds of nearby small online neighborhood groups AND getting folks to stick around for years AND speak up AND keep it civil… this is hard stuff. And this is what FPF is doing successfully now across one-third of Vermont. We’ve developed a complex and nuanced system that we’re pushing from our seasoned staff into our code base as we approach scaling.
Commentary about the Nextdoor launch…
Authentically Local gets organized
Baristanet and another 30 local-focused U.S. blogs just launched Authentically Local…
Local doesn’t scale. Local isn’t McDonald’s, even if the McDonald’s is right down the street. Local doesn’t send profits back to a home office somewhere else. Local is something that’s part of what makes where you are unique. As unique and flawed and loveable as your own kids. Something is authentically local if it’s the first thing you’d want an old friend, visiting from the other side of the world, to see. It’s authentically local if its disappearance could potentially break your heart.
Local is suddenly the newest, hippest, most lucrative frontier. The local advertising market alone is estimated to be $100 billion a year. Companies like AOL, Google, Apple and Groupon all want a piece of the action. Some of the devices they sell you are even collecting data about everywhere you go – all to help their local campaigns.
Certainly big corporations add a lot of convenience and consistency to our world. They also threaten to homogenize it. If you want home to feel different from everywhere else in the world – or if you want a world that’s interesting to explore, support what’s authentically local. Know the difference, and vive la difference!
Just today, I was on a panel at the annual VBSR conference and responded to a question along these lines. Many folks in Vermont prefer to eat local and shop local, but do they click local? That is, they prefer the locally owned coffeeshop over Starbucks, and the locally owned hardware store over Home Depot or WalMart… but do they think about iBrattleboro vs. Facebook in the same way?
Year-end look at hyperlocal big boys
Peter Krasilovsky offers a year-end look ahead at the WalMart approach to hyperlocal news…
… there is a rap out there that hyperlocal doesn’t scale and these [Patch and Fwix] are toys. Is it still the case?
Patch now has a local presence in 600 communities, with editorial and sales “pods” of 12 each Some of being run by longtime newspaper industry leaders. Last Sunday, LA Times media columnist James Rainey wrote that Patch is revitalizing local journalism and asserted that may have become THE place for journalists to go (aside from wages of $35k-$50k, or half the salary that big city journalists might have gotten from the big metro, if they were hiring).
Patch President Warren Webster… didn’t dispute my characterization of Patch as an experiment that wants to quickly get a national footprint to attract national, regional and local advertisers; create a business directory that goes beyond the Yellow Pages; and scale editorial and sales resources.
On a macro-level, local ad revenues typically split 50/50 between targeted national and local. For Webster (and cohorts), the bet is that Patch is poised to do both. They’ve publicly said they were spending $50 million to ramp it up in 2010…
Peter offers this list of horses in the race, grouped in an interesting way…
National/regional “hyperlocal” news sites
Local editorial and sales
Patch
Main Street Connect
Hello Metro
TBD.org
Geographic aggregation for media partners
Topix
Outside.in
Fwix
Datasphere
Everyblock
Local event and news sites
AmericanTowns.com
Center’d
DiscoverOurTown
Aggregators also supported by unique user-generated content and pro/amateur content farms
Examiner.com
Associated Content
Demand Media
Helium
Merchant Circle
What happened to our communities?
My wife shared a book from 1997 with me this week, and the following passage jumped out at me. It’s from Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America by Lisbeth B. Schorr.
Rediscovering Community
Americans who agree on nothing else, writes William Raspberry, agree that we used to live in wonderful neighborhoods and communities. The neighborhoods that we who are middle-aged and older remember nostalgically may have been poor, seedy, segregated, and populated by the rejected and exploited, but they were our communities and we miss them.
Without a sense of community, says John Gardner, “people lose the conviction they can improve the quality of their lives through their own efforts.”
My friend and colleague Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund, reminisces about growing up in Bennettsville, South Carolina, in her wonderful books, The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours:
“I went everywhere with my parents and was under the watchful eye of members of the congregation and community who were my extended family. They kept me when my parents went out of town, they reported on me and chided me when I strayed from the straight and narrow of community expectations, and they basked in and supported my achievements when I did well. Doing well, they made clear, meant high academic achievement, playing piano in Sunday school, participating in other church activities, being helpful, displaying good manners, and reading.”
Gil Walker’s memories of his childhood in Gary, Indiana, also feature networks of adults engaged with children, promoting community values.
“I can remember, when I was coming up, walking home from school with my report card in my hand. Before I got home, five or six people wanted to see it. If it was a good report card, I got hugs, I got kisses… If it was a bad report card, everyone of those individuals said, ‘Gil Walker, you know you could do better… ‘”
Gil Walker now runs a midnight basketball program for young people who live in Chicago public housing as his way of trying to replace the lost networks he remembers.
So what happened to those communities?
They have been rapidly eroding all over the industrialized world. Some combination of the following have interacted to weaken community bonds everywhere:
- Fear of crime, violence, and disorder deters people from gathering informally in public spaces. Public parks and playgrounds seem more threatening than welcoming. Older people especially, traditionally the backbone of neighborhoods, are afraid to venture out of their homes. In many neighborhoods, vigilant mothers keep their children – even teenagers – at home to keep them safe.
- Rapid advances in transportation and communication, together with the requirements of the post-industrial economy and the attraction of the suburbs and mild climates, have required and allowed vast number of people to move far from their neighborhoods and families of origin. Mobility has become easy and frequent – for all but the poor and elderly and those marooned by racial prejudice.
- The women who used to organize the PTA, volunteer in hospitals, and operate as front-porch disciplinarians and supervisors of the street scene are elsewhere. Some left with the opening of professional and workplace opportunities from which they had been excluded. Many more entered the labor market out of economic necessity.
- With the increase of single-parent families, many parents (usually mothers) must be both nurturer and breadwinner, leaving little time for community relationships.
- Technology has made it unnecessary to leave home and mingle with others to see movies and plays and listen to music. We watch sports on television rather than play them with our children, friends, and neighbors, and we listen to intimate matters being discussed by Oprah’s guests rather than our own.
- The scale of most institutions that touch our lives makes it harder to make connections. The corner grocery has been replaced by the supermarket, neighborhood stores by regional Wal-Marts, and even six-year-olds have to cope with elementary schools of two thousand children. Political institutions have become so large and so complex that most people have no chance to work together to solve small-scale problems, and feel they have no control over how their taxes are spent or how their children are taught.
For all these reasons and more, Americans feel less anchored, more adrift. Political philosopher Michael Sandel believes that the erosion of community lies at the heart of our contemporary discontent.
Robert F. Kennedy was one of the first American politicians to recognize that the loss of community was hurting us, individually and collectively. Not long before he was killed, he called attention to the destruction of “the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection, and respect, which tie men to their fellows.” He believed that the world beyond the neighborhood has become “impersonal and abstract…beyond the reach of individual control or even understanding.” In his 1968 presidential campaign, he called for the restoration of community as “a place where people can see and know each other, where children can play and adults work together and join in the pleasures and responsibilities of the place where they live.”
Cooperation vs. Competion or Regulation
Scott Heiferman’s tweet led me to take a closer look at the work of recent Nobel Laureate (economics) Elinor Ostrom. She studies how cooperation works best in some cases… better than competition or regulation… our two dominant forms of organizing markets. From a Forbes article…
Garrett Hardin called his famous 1968 essay on shared resources “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He argued that a shared village grazing pasture would tend to get overused and eventually destroyed. But even Hardin later acknowledged that shared common resources did not inevitably have to end in destruction, saying that he should have called his essay “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.”
And from Fran Korton’s interview at Shareable…
Fran: It’s interesting that your research is about people learning to cooperate…
Elinor: I have a new book coming out in May entitled Working Together, written with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen. It is on collective actions in the commons. What we’re talking about is how people work together. We’ve used an immense array of different methods to look at this question “case studies, including my own dissertation and Amy’s work, modeling, experiments, large-scale statistical work. We show how people use multiple methods to work together.
Fran: Many people associate “the commons” with Garrett Hardin’s famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”… What’s the difference between your perspective and Hardin’s?
Elinor: Well, I don’t see the human as hopeless. There’s a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems.
If you are in a fishery or have a pasture and you know your family’s long-term benefit is that you don’t destroy it, and if you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if the community doesn’t have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won’t organize, and there will be failures.
Fran: So, are you saying that Hardin is sometimes right?
Elinor: Yes. People say I disproved him, and I come back and say “No, that’s not right. I’ve not disproved him. I’ve shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong.” But he was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It’s just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well.
At the Workshop we’ve done experiments where we create an artificial form of common property such as an imaginary fishery or pasture, and we bring people into a lab and have them make decisions about that property. When we don’t allow any communication among the players, then they overharvest [the commons]. But when people can communicate, particularly on a face-to-face basis, and say, “Well, gee, how about if we do this? How about we do that?” Then they can come to an agreement.
That last bit there about communication leading to better community decisions… love it. It’s so obvious. I guess that’s why it takes a non-economist Nobel Laureate in Economics to explain it to the economists of the world. And, for what it’s worth, her observation jibes with what we see at Front Porch Forum too. FPF leads to better communication among neighbors, more face-to-face conversation, and, in many cases, better community decisions.
Congratulations Dr. Ostrom!
Click Local! Vermont Telecom Authority
Thanks to the Vermont Telecom Authority for pointing Vermonters to Front Porch Forum. While it makes sense for local folks to use online tools from the mega corporations — Goolge, Facebook, Craigslist, Yahoo, etc. — it’s reassuring when Vermont-bred dot.com services (iBrattleboro, Seven Days, Vermont Tiger, Green Mountain Daily, FPF, etc.) get a little recognition from our public leaders.
Indeed, while a growing number of people understand and support the idea of buying local, extending the same notion to online habits has yet to get traction. Just as sure as dollars spent in a local coffee shop add up to benefit the local economy more than the same money spent at a Starbucks, clicks on locally owned and operated websites contribute to a vibrant small-scale local alternative to the Wal-Marts of the online world.
Click Local!
Facebook money-making challenge
An interesting piece by Bernard Lunn on Read Write Web recently. In part…
… the thought that kept coming back to me is that Facebook’s bravado, its “grand vision” talk, is what you would expect from a concept-level startup. Surely by now, about 6 years into its venture, Facebook should show some substance? It is time to deliver some real financial results. The concept-level talk is great for attracting capital and talent. Facebook has done that brilliantly. But the point of attracting capital and talent is to be able to generate financial results.
Anybody who criticizes Facebook’s financial results gets accused of being small-minded, of missing the point, of (gasp!) “not getting it.” In digerati circles, not getting it is like having body odor. Facebook is changing the world, they say. It is a new form of communication, akin to the printing press. Once you get to scale, profits always follow. Google created a service without knowing how to monetize it.
In fact, far too much money has been invested (in both Facebook and hundreds of “me too” ventures) based on that one premise, that “Google created a service without knowing how to monetize it.” The statement is true. If it had not devised the AdWords revenue model, Google would perhaps have sold some kind of enterprise search technology to Fortune 500 companies and rented banner ads on its home page. With AdWords, it found the perfect native revenue model for search, meeting two contradictory needs at the same time:
- Do not irritate or interrupt the user, and even occasionally add value for the user.
- Provide a compelling value proposition to paying customers.
The problem is that Facebook does not seem to have a clue how to do that. Google did not wait 6 years to unveil AdWords, and when it did unveil it, revenue and profit took off like a rocket. Facebook keeps trying. But to date, its attempts look weak and subject to diminishing returns.
There is a world of difference between increasing returns (what Google gets) and diminishing returns (what Facebook gets with its current strategy). That one-word difference equals billions of dollars.
… Facebook’s revolutionary alternative is to allow consumers to invite brands to communicate with them, like we used to invite companies to send us emails. That would get over-used and spammy in a heartbeat. Highly innovative brands would do well, as they always do in a new medium, but the law of diminishing returns would apply. By the time this model scaled, and it would have to if Facebook wants to move the revenue needle, users will have switched off in droves.
These are the diminishing returns. The more the model scales, the more it will irritate users, and the more users will switch off, and the sooner growth will slow down and reverse. As with email, Facebook can “make up for this with volume.” But unlike with email, which is virtually free, Facebook has to pay money to serve each user.
Sorry, “Coca-Cola wants to be your friend” is in no way an enduring revenue model. If it sounds phony, maybe that is because it is phony.
The one lesson from social media marketing is that authenticity matters. What no one has shown — and methinks this would be impossible — is how to scale authenticity.
This is where behavioral marketing supposedly comes in. Wired calls this the “third rail of Internet marketing.” … Or, as Wired puts it, “As the Beacon debacle showed, there is a fine line between ‘targeted and useful’ and ‘creepy and stalkerish’ — and so far, not enough advertisers have been willing to walk that line.”
Facebook talks a great game about helping the world to communicate. It tries to sound like a group of benevolent revolutionaries. But then it turns to really old-fashioned tools to make money. Its basic message to marketers seems to be, “We have ’em locked in. Yep, Google can’t see them, so we are the only way to get to them. And not only that, we can tell you what every one of them is doing and saying right now. Step right up, folks!”
The one thing that Facebook has on its side is trust. Users trust the company with their real identities. That is massive. Break that trust and bye-bye.
Douglas Rushkoff Goes Local
Glad to see another of our society’s megaphone holders catching on to the importance of local. Douglas Rushkoff‘s new book, Life, Inc., apparently gives corporatism the once over and realizes that we’re in kinda deep. Okay.
Further, he prescribes turning real and local as a solution. Here’s a quote from Scott Heiferman‘s review…
84. instead of reconnecting people to their local communities, to one another, or to the value that tey might be able to create for one another, many well-meaning efforts against corp power conect people to abstract ideals and highly centralized organizations… disconnects us further from the truly bottom-up networks through which we can restore human-scaled activity
This is the power of Front Porch Forum. Where it’s working well, it’s catalyzing real, decentralized, non-corporate connections among neighbors who are organizing block parties and knitting clubs, political rallies and casserole brigades for people in need. And for many people, this action is better than what’s served by Comcast, or Facebook, or the WalMart.
About Blog
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more
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