SpectatorBytes

Since writing the last post, it has become increasingly evident to me that while “social” experiences have become synonymous with services that include networks of friends, people or interests, the impact of these services on the Web will extend well beyond that. The main contribution of social products will be establishing the foundation for the emergence of the “Personal” Web.

Over the past few years, the Social Web has garnered most of the attention from consumers and the overall industry. Led by Facebook and Twitter, social products have changed the way people are interacting with content and information on the Web. The push-nature, efficiency, and personalization of social experiences have made these digital products popular with consumers.  Their design enables users to consume easily and quickly vast amounts of highly relevant data, regardless of their type (articles, photos, videos, audio). This aspect of social products has become increasingly important as the growth of the Web data corpus continues to accelerate.

The design used by social products can be applied to enhance any service where users seek to consume any type of content, data or information. Existing categories such as commerce, news, travel, health, classifieds, local information, etc., can be reinvented. The result would be highly “personalized” services that allow users to stay up to date on mainly the data that interests them, and help them to easily discover new relevant data.

Personal Web experiences will employ: (i) basic entities or topics (people, places, businesses, locations, etc.) as key organizing principles rather than categories as the minimal unit, (ii) flexible taxonomies which allow users to group entities any way they want rather than a single editorial-driven classification, (iii) feeds that facilitate the creation of multiple expressions of the data (e.g., only videos, photos & snippets, text & audio, etc.), and (iv) robust recommendation mechanisms rather than just a search box.

This perspective envisions a world where one receives information on deals from only merchants that one is interested in, news only on subjects that are of interest to that person, updates on only the hotels that one prefers, reports on only the companies that one is interested in, updates on only the home services that one is interested in. The vision also entails users accessing these “personalized” feeds via both optimized applications and multi-purpose data readers (e.g., FB app, reader apps, etc.). The myriad of applications such as Flipboard, Pulse, Tweetdeck suggest consumers are likely to have multiple ways to access their “personalized” feeds.

Lastly, the rise of the Personal Web is likely to lead to the emergence of “curation” as a core element of many Web experiences. In some ways, it would replace current editorial or merchandising initiatives. Unlike blogging or traditional promotion efforts, curation is much more scalable and enables a greater degree of data personalization. Curators which one follows are expected to only deliver things that one is interested in. If they don’t, one will penalize her/him with a hit of the unfollow button.

Personalized experiences have been tried several times in the past. However, unlike in the past, the Social Web has put the infrastructure in place needed to usher in the era of the Personal Web.

Social networks have established a new “social paradigm” on how users can consume information on the Web. Content consumption in social networks has been mainly organized around friends or people you know. The primary tools provided by “social” experiences have proven to be highly addictive and engaging:

-  People  or entity-specific data feeds provide an easy way to personalize the data a user wants to receive (e.g., colleagues from my prior company, high school friends, celebrities, music bands)

-  The “news feed” or “stream” is an efficient user interface which allows users to quickly snack on aggregated information

-  The recommendation engine which enables user to add people to their network (e.g., people you may know, celebrities your friends like, etc.)

-  In-stream interaction tools (comments, likes, pulse, check-ins) foster increased user engagement due to their low-friction

“Social” experiences tend to be much more personalized and allow users to consume information much more efficiently. Given its efficiency and precision, the “social paradigm” is likely to emerge as a dominant framework to create next-generation Web experiences. (These new Web experiences will apply the “social paradigm” to new data sets which today are organized using the traditional Website paradigm.)

It is important to make the following clarification: “social” is not limited to “people I am friends with or people I know.” While “social” products are commonly associated with social networks built around people’s relationships, the “social paradigm” can apply to services built around experts, interests, services, shopping, etc.

We are beginning to see examples of these new experiences. Quora, the recently launched Q&A service, applies the “social paradigm” to enhance the Q&A experience. Linked In has done the same for career and work related services. Microsoft and Facebook recently announced a series of products which seek to rethink the search experience using the “social paradigm”. Content experiences are poised to be the next area ripe for social innovation.

Applying the “social paradigm” to content experiences require adopting a different set of design principles from what is traditionally used by content websites. The following are some of the key design elements:

1) Profile managed by people or entities providing the data become the main environments where “deep engagement” and “consumption” takes place. This is where the user can access all the aggregated content related to a specific person of entity, and becomes the “showcase” destination.

2) Connecting or following people/entities becomes for content personalization

3) Content is organized around taxonomies that are built around people or entities (e.g., teams, brands, players, companies, etc.). Users can then group these entities into “personalized” playlists. Thus, each user gets to see only the relevant information they have selected to follow. This is in contrast with pre-established categories defined by an editor (sports, gossip, movies, celebrities, etc).

4) Each user is presented with a unique, personalized  “feed or stream” of aggregated content rather than a “common” home page for everyone.

5) Recommendations are based on degrees of relationship or interest similarities between people and or entities rather than using semantics or collaborative filtering to determine relatedness.

6) Interaction tools are optimized to foster additional distribution of the content across the network (e.g., check-in, like, pulse) as well as increased user engagement in the site

When these “social” design concepts are applied to content experiences, the results can be transformative. More personalized offerings, better discovery solution, increased community activity and greater engagement.

Achieving mass personalization of content has been elusive to media companies for many years. Applying the “social paradigm” to content experiences offers the best chance to make it a reality in the near future.

In recent weeks, I’ve been increasingly impressed by the attractiveness of the “application reader” experiences on the iPad / iPhone. Flipboard, FLUD and Pulse are good examples. After several weeks of using them, I believe these news readers are ushering in a new era in content aggregation.

These application readers are designed to allow users to easily aggregate their content into personalized “homepages” and to make the consumption of vast amounts of information more easily and enjoyable. These applications use media-heavy designs that allow users to peruse and read RSS feeds and social networking streams from Twitter and Facebook. Unlike traditional RSS readers on the Web, these applications optimize their design to take advantage of tactile navigation, and use images and video to provide magazine-like experiences.

The key advantage these readers have over traditional Web aggregators, such as Huffington Post, Yahoo News, Drudge Report, etc., is that the user can easily optimize their home page to personalize their experience. While personalization has been tried in the past (and has failed in many cases), these readers are leveraging Twitter (and RSS) to make content personalization increasingly simple. Users can create highly tailored “homepages” by “following” a mix of their favorite Twitter streams or Url feeds.

My personal example has evolved around Jason Hirschhorn’s Media reDEFined daily email (Jason is a friend). Jason curates the Web for the most interesting news and information on digital media and related topics. While I always wanted to read Jason’s email, I did not always have the time to read it when I received it. Since I began using Flipboard, however, Jason’s @Media reDEF news stream (available via Twitter) has become one of my most visited sources of information. Jason is now part of my Flipboard “homepage” experience. I now am able to check Media Redefined at least three times a day to see what’s new. In turn, this has made Flipboard a key starting point in my daily internet experience.

This experience has led me to seek other “curators” or “editorial voices” (individuals or content brands) who are putting together interesting streams of information. I want to find people who or brands which satisfy my appetite for a certain editorial voice to cover subjects that I am passionate about. I am beginning to find this good mix of sources which are quickly becoming my daily “starting point”. This process has not been easy, as finding “individual” curators is still difficult via these readers. This is an area in which I foresee these applications to develop further. In any case, ease of access to the myriad of new curators that exist in Twitter is how these readers will likely drive change. RSS readers failed to reach mainstream appeal but I believe the reader applications will succeed at that.

Traditional aggregators will have to face the challenge of the rise of these new aggregators, and all these new content curators these readers will enable to stand out. I expect traditional aggregators will confront these challenges quickly. They may start by optimizing their content experiences for customization. I imagine they will begin to produce more tailored streams of content than they do today. Rather than forcing users to digest their entire experience in a single stream, they may create multiple ones. This would mean that each of these streams would likely have to be updated more frequently and thus offer greater amounts of content than what is currently available in their Web expressions.

All in all, content experiences are about to get more interesting for users. They will more personalized, relevant and frequent. In other words, they will better satisfy users growing appetite for content and information.

At Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s D8 conference a couple of months back, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, stated that one of Facebook’s objectives was to “rethink the web stack around people.” This statement echoed the thoughts I shared in a recent post concerning the way social networks are poised to change all types of digital experiences over the next few years. In this posting, I will expand a bit on the implications of this transformation from a “site-centric” Web to a “people-centric” Web in the area of content.

Today, content experiences are built around a link-based architecture, in that links are aggregated to create static channels. Relevancy of a specific link is determined by how it relates to other links or analyzing the metadata used to describe that link. Generally, sites are designed to act as a holistic product rather than a modular one, although sites have certainly become more modular as they optimize themselves for search engines.

However, the overall product is designed to be controlled by the publisher rather than the users. Users’ ability to impact the way most sites package content has been primarily through click-through activity. User comments to a certain extent introduce user participation but that is probably where users’ involvement stops.

So, what would a content site designed with people as its primary focus offer?

The following list outlines changes to the content experience that I think we’ll see as a people-centric Web becomes increasingly dominant:

1. From Sites to Profiles Networks: Social profiles are built around elements, which invite engagement (sharing, commenting, liking) while websites are mainly designed to invite consumption (page views). Profiles are optimized to establish virtual connections with users (follow/add) while sites are optimized for users to find via a search engine or get there “organically” (i.e., type the URL). Profiles will be optimized to deliver highly tailored content on specific entities (individuals, places, businesses, locations) rather than overall categories. Compare this to sites’ architectures, which are optimized for driving browsing around a category.

2. Channels to Streams: Social networks have established a powerful paradigm to consume content as news or content “streams”. This phenomenon is has proven to be a highly efficient way to consume content. Social networks have trained mainstream consumers to use this “construct” to easily access, aggregate, manage and consume information about people, things, and topics. This means that content experiences should be optimized for this construct — i.e., content providers should increasingly optimize their content to flow inside streams.

3. From Homepages to Stream Readers: Given the above evolution, homepages become less important as entry points into a content site. Users are more likely to interact with the content a “network” makes available through individual profiles. This shift implies that user navigations tools need to be deployed at the profile level rather than simply relying on “back button to Home” as the primary navigation paradigm for users. It also implies that users (which can now act as editors) are more likely to design their own homepages by using next-generation reading tools (e.g., Flipboard, Pulse, etc.).

4. From Articles to Authors: People follow other people or topics or things. They do not follow “articles.” This evolution requires changes in design, which leverage entities (people, topics, places, companies) as a way to allow users to establish relationships with specific pieces of content. This implies that any one article is a component of a highly tailored feed to which a user can easily subscribe. Experiences will emphasize building relationships with content sources rather than getting their users to consume articles or individual pieces of content. Success in the People’s Web relies on active “subscription relationships” rather than consumption volume alone.

5. From Comments to Communities:  Content providers will focus on strengthening the loyalty and engagement of their subscribers. This involves fostering the creation of communities among their users. Content providers will increasingly resort to “game-dynamics” systems to reward their most active users with social recognition and create among these users a sense of social obligation that will keep them coming back.

6. From “Subject-Related” to “People-Recommended”: In the People’s Web, users will rely more heavily on social graphs (whether it is symmetric like Facebook’s or assymetric like Twitter’s) to filter and discover new content. Like with music playlists, users will be increasingly interested in exploring other people’s content “streams” as a way to identify new content entities with whom to subscribe.

7. From SEO (search engine optimization) to Virality: Content creators will need to find new ways to promote their content to users. They will likely borrow techniques used by social application and game developers to increase the virality of their content experiences as well as to retain their subscribers/followers. I predict that focus will shift from optimizing to appear in search results when consumers “pull” for data to “push” for data via “stream” and notifications.

Many content providers have already begun to adjust to these changes. Twitter has certainly emerged as a catalyst for change. However, we are in the early stages of the emergence of this new paradigm and thus the change in content experiences has just begun.

This past Monday, Apple announced that they had sold two million iPads worldwide in less than 2 months. I am not surprised. When the device first came out, many tech reviewers were disappointed that it did not include many of the features of the iPhone, such as a camera or USB port. Others complained that it was too big to fit in a pocket. Many skeptics also questioned the iPad’s ability to succeed in the niche between the iPhone/iPod Touch and a laptop.

My reaction was a bit different.  For me, an iPod Touch with a bigger screen was an instant winner. My thinking was the result primarily of the dominant role the iPod Touch had on my media consumption behavior. It is the superiority of the iPad experience relative to laptops and netbooks, however, that makes this device a game-changer.

In the past, I have discussed how I enjoy watching TV shows/movies, listening to radio, and browsing on the Touch. This device had become my main media consumption companion. While I enjoy watching TV, I constantly found myself multi-tasking with the Touch.  The TV had increasingly become simple wallpaper. I believe it is the highly personal nature of the Touch experience, which has led me to make it a key part of my daily routine. The Touch was with me before going to sleep, right after I woke up, at the gym, when traveling in trains and planes, and even at the pool during vacation. Over the past two months, since the arrival of the iPad, all these behaviors have intensified.  Needless to say, the multi-tasking update will likely increase my usage even more dramatically.

I expected this to happen. However, what I did not expect was how quickly the iPad was going to make my home laptop obsolete at home and how much less I would be using the one at work. In advance of the launch, people questioned whether or not the iPad would replace laptops. After two months of iPad joy, I would say that the right question is why many users would need a laptop if they have an iPad? The iPad surpasses the laptop experience for numerous use cases. The iPad offers an instant on. It does not crash. It works like an iPod with no instructions required. Its battery life is long enough that it does not require to be plugged into an outlet. More importantly, it does not burn one’s legs when lying on the couch. For many users, the iPad will come to replace laptops in the home.

It has been said that the iPad is a great “consumption” device but not a great “input” device. I expect that forthcoming iPad apps will challenge that assertion over time. I have found that buying airline tickets, booking hotels, making restaurant reservations, and shopping are use cases in which the iPad can put up a great fight, if not beat a PC outright. Just as the iPhone app universe has drastically improved the iPhone experience, new iPad apps will provide a similar boost. We need to remember that we are still in the early stages of the iPad application development cycle. Most developers had taken a wait and see attitude prior to the launch. It is now clear to developers that this platform is here to stay, and we should expect an avalanche of iPad apps.

The most liberating aspect of the iPad experience is the versatility of the device. It fits well everywhere. It gives you a glimpse of the kitchen of the future when lying opened to Epicurious on the counter. It seems made to measure when lying on my nightstand playing Stitcher or on top of the treadmill playing a TV show. It also has proven a good companion during meetings opened to Alley Insider, AllThingsD and Pulse, and during my subway ride when I can read The Wall Street Journal.

The iPad will enable a new series of experiences, which will reshape our ecosystem of devices and media products. Laptops will have to redefine their value. TVs will have to offer more flexible experiences. Magazines will rethink their experiences (some have already begun to do so). Video providers will likely experiment with new types of experiences (e.g., real-time, instant on demand, shorter form, etc). True multi-media experiences will likely become the norm. Consumers will increasingly seek video, text and audio solutions (NPR app offers an early example).

It is incredible the level of innovation that a small change like adding a larger screen to an iPod/iPhone will likely generate.

There are two major forces poised to significantly simplify the way we interact with the Web over the next few years. In the process, the drastic simplification will anoint the Web as King of All Media (sorry, Howard).  The first one is mobile applications and the second one is the social graph.  A“simpler, easier-to-use” Web means more people will use the Web more than they do today.

Over the past few years, the growth of information on the Web have lead to the creation of “packaging” experiences which make information consumption much more efficient for consumers. The proliferation and popularity of content aggregators such as the Huffington Post, Digg and Twitter readers such as Tweetdeck and Sessmic are evidence of this phenomenon. Niche bloggers also play the role of packagers for their audiences, serving them with the most relevant information on a topic from across the Web. System-driven efforts such as topic pages by companies like Kosmix and Loud3r or human-driven like Mahalo are another example of this desire to create efficient ways to package information for consumers. These initiatives have been built around the currently predominant paradigm which is built around URLs, websites and search engines.

There are, however, a couple of new paradigms that will seek to rival the existing construct of the Web. First, we are seeing the rise of an entire new consumption paradigm via smartphone (and soon tablet) applications. The “smart” mobile Web has allowed content owners to offer digital experiences which are much more efficient, targeted, easy to use and personalized than those we find on the PC Web today. Most of these applications are optimized to serve “specific” user behaviors rather than to serve multiple use cases, which most Web sites tend to do.

This mobile framework has some additional benefits for users. It is a cleaner, spam-less environment (for now). It allows for greater control by providing quicker access to the information/content with which I want to interact. Although the discovery of new applications needs to be more efficient, applications are proving very effective mechanisms to help users discover relevant information via “relevant and in-context” notifications.

Personally, I have already shifted my behavior to favor apps over the PC Web when looking for a movie to watch on the weekend, keeping up with my friends’ status, skimming headlines from my favorite blogs, checking the weather and making restaurant reservations.

Although at an earlier stage than the app store paradigm, the new “social graph” paradigm for content consumption advanced by social networks is also emerging as an alternative for users. This new consumption framework uses the social graph to re-arrange content and information available on the Web, and promote the delivery of relevant and “passively” personalized content experiences. In this paradigm, we “follow” our interests rather than “search” things that we are interested in.  We discover new information via “recommendations” rather than “browsing”. We access the information via “streams” rather than traditional aggregators, RSS readers or search results. We move to a push environment (delivered) rather than a pull environment (requested).  Ultimately, in this framework, we expect to be able to access / receive information in real-time given our indication of interest. Twitter and its ecosystems of applications have led the way in seedign this paradigm.

These new content consumption paradigms will have significant implications. Here are some of the ones that I envision:

- Users may gravitate more towards branded experiences tailored to their needs / interests; Brands will regain their equity
- Users may search less since they already receive what they need to know;
- Companies will need to develop new marketing and distribution capabilities tailored to this new envirnoment (something the social game companies know well);
- Real-time experiences will become the standard; content producers will need to speed up and increase the volume of content production.

Even though these changes will challenge us as participants it will also create significant opportunities if we quickly move to optimize our businesses around these new trends. These are exciting developments for the Web as it is making it an even easier medium to discover, consume and share information / content for all users.

A simpler Web is one that as a consumer I will certainly welcome.

Digital media organizations that think in terms of “building vs. buying” will struggle to compete in the marketplace going forward, especially when the answer tends to be “build.”

Over the past couple of years, it’s clear that one of the reasons why large digital businesses struggle to sustain growth is that they fail to maintain a differentiated competitive advantage.  In simpler terms, organizations stop evolving their skill set around the core aspects of their businesses, and try to begin to build new skill sets in non-core product areas.

Once a digital media business reaches scale in audience and revenues, a broad set of opportunities opens up to them. It is at this point in time when most large digital businesses begin to ignore the realities of the marketplace and start to lose their competitive edge. Three major behaviors start to take place:

1. The overall organization feels emboldened to pursue new business opportunities which may appear to complement their core business but for which it does not have the necessary skill set to compete in the marketplace. Good examples include: content websites, which build their own video solution, advertising networks that build their own internal production companies.

2. Product and tech teams begin to focus primarily on new product development rather than on evolution of the core products. This leads to the creation of large teams, which have diverse capabilities but limited depth.  These large, vast teams then focus on new product development rather than on integration of 3rd party innovations.

3. The organization exposes itself to competitive attacks as success tends to breed complacency. As organizations become distracted with new business opportunities, they are not able to keep pace with external market innovation. Investment in resources has been spread so thin that the core business is left exposed. In many cases, the natural reaction is to dismiss the new entrants even when they have achieved significant success. Thus, creating an opportunity for these new entrants to be truly disruptive. Think of the effect that Google Maps has had on Mapquest.

Many of these organizational behaviors are a legacy of the early days of the Web when the ecosystem of third party vendors had not been fully developed and most of the expertise resided inside the large digital companies. Now, this is no longer the case. Specialist product teams with deep expertise in areas such as publishing, video, mapping, advertising solutions, etc. tend to reside outside of the large organizations. Large digital businesses are increasingly struggling to both attract and retain top talent at all levels.

Furthermore, new product development has become so inexpensive that large companies will increasingly struggle to out-innovate the market.
As a result, it is important that organizations rethink their set of product and technology priorities to ensure that they can continue to compete in the new environment.

There are a few ways to rethink how organizations can better handle the new dynamics:

- Install an infrastructure that allows dedicated teams to operate with a significant degree of independence from one another (open platform, well-defined set of resources, clear success metrics)
- Emphasize focus on integration of new technologies rather than new product development
- Focus new product development in areas where the core product demands innovation and the external market has not invested in such innovation.
- Pursue a limited number (one or two) “new product” initiatives per year
- Stop thinking in terms of “building vs. buying.” Start thinking in terms of how to virtualize a company’s operations and organization. The external ecosystem of services is now well-developed and companies should take advantage of their expertise and innovation.

Organizational change is never easy. However, the sooner an organization recognizes the need for evolution, the higher the chances are of long-term survival and delivery of sustainable growth.

The digital media landscape continues to evolve at a significant pace, with new forces disrupting the market dynamics every 12 months. This is one of the reasons why digital media companies of all sizes continue to struggle to sustain revenue and profit growth long-term.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, digital businesses need to be in a constant state of re-invention. They must embrace disruption, consistently drive innovation, and maintain highly flexible organizational/operational infrastructures to avoid becoming victims of rapid market changes.
The recognition of this phenomenon has led me to consistently focus on identifying these new forces as they emerge. Recently, I have been thinking about the major forces shaping today’s marketplace. I have touched on some aspects of these trends in recent posts. However, I thought I’d share with you some of the trends I find most interesting.

1. Mobile computing: The growing popularity and penetration of smartphones and netbooks will have a transformative impact in the marketplace over the next couple of years. While monetization models may take some time to develop, consumer behavior will be greatly impacted. These devices expand our ability to execute computer-driven tasks by a factor of 2-3 times. We will be able to consume dramatically more content and information, watch more videos, play more games, and buy more things than ever before. Moreover, competition among manufacturers for phones and netbooks has intensified over the past 12 months. We now have 3-4 pretty robust operating systems for mobile devices, several application stores, and declining price points. Carriers are aggressively embracing these new devices as a way to push their data products and increased stickiness. I expect penetration of smartphones and netbooks to accelerate beyond current analyst expectations.  In fact, the FCC recently warned that wireless networks will soon be overwhelmed by the explosion of data usage.

2. Social discovery: We are entering an era in which consumers will increasingly discover content using a social construct, in addition to search and traditional topic-based content aggregators. Twitter has established the “follow” metaphor as a way to consume content. Several new startups are leveraging this construct to enable consumers to more efficiently discover content. In past posts, I have discussed True/Slant and Fanfeedr (using FB connect) as examples of this trend.

3. Real-time: Twitter has brought real-time experiences to the mainstream. They have set new expectations around the speed of content distribution. Prior to Twitter, content sites were expected to deliver content periodically. Now, a growing segment of consumers expect content to be delivered in real-time.  Beyond the myriad Twitter-centric startups, real-time search engines have begun to emerge. At the TC 50 conference, there were several new efforts that focused on delivering real-time news and content such as Thoora and Clixtr. I expect the number of real-time experiences to grow meaningfully as consumers’ patience diminishes and startups find innovative ways to leverage real-time experience to increase user engagement. This desire for getting the latest information “now” will become particularly important in mobile experiences.

4. Distributed innovation: The web services revolution has put innovation in the hands of many. While this has happened over the past few years, the main implication is that companies must develop new models to drive innovation. In the past, companies relied on R&D teams, acquisitions and corporate venture efforts to drive innovation. However, given the new dynamics, companies are pursuing new approaches. The emergence of partnerships between companies and venture capitalists such as FB Fund to create highly targeted funds are an example of this type of new efforts. Best Buy recently partnered with my old firm Fuse Capital to pursue digital investments. Twitter has used its open API to aggressively drive innovation around its corpus of data. This search for continued innovation is likely to lead to the emergence of companies, which will be increasingly virtual in nature.

5. Premium experiences: High-quality content has always captured a disproportionate amount of the value in any medium. The Web will not be the exception. Even though consumers are faced with an infinite number of choices on the Web, they will continue to gravitate en masse towards high-quality content. The more cluttered the Web is, the more consumers will gravitate towards high-quality/talent-driven experiences. In recent months, I have seen renewed efforts to reinvent existing services around premium models. Some of these new services focus on talent and premium content, filtering out noise, enabling richer conversations, and qualifying participants. The success of sites such as Angie’s list, Hulu, the Ladders, and WOW in recent years has emboldened a new generation of startups to focus on developing premium versions of existing services.  The challenges of the advertising model has certainly further pushed companies in this direction as well as early success of fee-based applications in the iPhone. This does not mean that these services will necessarily be fee-driven. They believe that they will ultimately be able to capture a larger portion of advertising dollars as well as position themselves to offer fee services.

6. Data-driven advertising: We have been talking about hypertargeting for quite some time. However, I have begun to see the impact of enhanced targeting techniques used by ad networks. Nowadays, the display ads in the websites I tend to frequent offer products for which I have recently expressed interest. While I have worked for many years with ad networks who claim the ability to target users with great precision, I have never experienced hyper-targeting first-hand as a user. While I am witnessing a simple “re-targeting” product, I believe we are entering an era in which the entire ecosystem (publishers, ad networks, advertisers, exchanges) recognizes the value of user data and focuses on deploying more precise, data-driven ad products in the marketplace. Publishers should be able to leverage their data and others to increase the performance of their inventory. We are in the early stages of the process and will likely see a new generation of winners emerge as ecosystem is increasingly driven by data.

Please let me know if you think there are some other major trends which deserve to be among the ones I have reflected upon in this post.

Upon learning of Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed, very few industry people (myself included) were surprised that Facebook needed to acquire a company to bring in talent to compete with Twitter. However, if one takes a step back, this news should have at least raised an eyebrow. Currently, Facebook is one of the hottest digital media companies and has a best-in-class engineering team. The question that should have been on everybody’s mind is: why would Facebook, of all companies, need to buy talent through an acquisition? The answer is rooted in the dynamics of digital media. The pace of innovation is accelerating so fast that large organizations can quickly fall behind in emerging areas on the Web. Acquisitions are a quick way to catch up.

This situation is not exclusive to Facebook. Most other large digital media organizations have relied on acquisitions to bring new talent into the fold. This is a pattern we have all seen for several years now. Organizations clearly benefit from embracing 3rd party innovation. So, if this is the case, why are digital organizations consistent victims of not-invented-here (NIH) organizational cultures that make it difficult to leverage external innovation? I have witnessed this first-hand as buyer, seller, and advisor. NIH is one of the primary reasons failed integrations outnumber successful ones. Cultures inside large organizations are not designed to effectively leverage 3rd party innovation. Large organizations naturally find it easier to adopt a culture that prides itself on internal innovation rather than the ability to embrace external talent.
While answering the question of why NIH tends to flourish as a culture inside large digital organizations could generate a pretty interesting post, I would rather jump ahead and make the argument that digital media companies cannot afford to tolerate NIH sentiments. The main reason is that small pools of talent can compete with large organizations on an even-level playing field and prefer to remain independent. This has created a situation where the pace of innovation in the broader marketplace is much greater than that inside large organizations. Several years ago, large organizations used to have significant advantages over small startups. They had the ability to develop proprietary systems. They had the deep pockets needed to pursue R&D projects. They had marketing dollars to promote their products.

These advantages, however, have diminished significantly in the current environment.  Given the level of web services infrastructure that exists today (distribution systems, monetization engines, marketing tools, etc.), smaller teams can drive significant innovation without requiring much capital. They can easily get their products distributed. They can access monetization engines, etc. Moreover, the upside for top talent to go at it alone is more compelling and the potential for a payoff may be greater than it has been in the past (though the overall payoffs for talent may be smaller given the size of exits). The result is a much more distributed talent pool than in the past. In the coming years, we are likely to find the number of digital outfits to grow rather than to shrink.

If these are the market dynamics, large digital media organizations would be well-served by embracing 3rd-party innovation. This means actively fostering organizational cultures that look to leverage external talent to strengthen their product experiences rather than to compete with them. This is particularly true in the post-Twitter era where open APIs can enable groups of talent to quickly leverage each other’s capabilities to rapidly create defensible ecosystems of consumer experiences. In other words, innovative companies can leverage each other’s skills to create a distributed infrastructure of services capable of competing with large, centralized organizations. In this context, large organizations are likely to struggle to keep up with the speed of product development, market testing, and innovation that these ecosystems of companies can enable.

If we agree that Facebook is in a battle against Twitter, Twitter’s ability to defend its position with limited internal resources is very impressive. I would argue that the ecosystem of Twitter-focused companies including Bit.ly, TweetDeck, Collecta, Twitpic, Tweetfeed, etc., has made Twitter a much stronger competitor than the actual size of its organization (fewer than 100 people) would have allowed.

The current dynamics reflect the evolution of open systems/platforms, which has been happening for a while. As I have mentioned before, Amazon and eBay were pioneers of this approach in the early 2000s. However, I think the evolution has gotten to a point that large digital media organizations can no longer ignore and thus NIH is not something that they can continue to afford.

This does not imply that centralized organizations should cease to exist but rather that they need to evolve into environments which foster specialization around their core capabilities, build expertise around integration and platform services, and provide adequate support to their ecosystems.

Our industry is increasingly imitating life, where it is important for companies to have friends…many talented friends. Facebook certainly realized that Friendfeed was a friendship they needed to make.

I would appreciate hearing about some of your experiences with NIH.

Recent events such as the Microsoft and Yahoo search deal, Facebook’s efforts to move from a private network to one that is public, and AOL’s imminent spin-off illustrate the challenging nature of consumer digital businesses. The constantly evolving nature of Web businesses continues to challenge most business leaders and corporations. The lack of “rules of the road” make it difficult for many managers to deliver predictable long-term financial performance. As a result, with the exception of a few businesses (e.g., Google), most digital media businesses have struggled at one time or another to deliver continued revenue and profit growth. One way to avoid this seemingly unavoidable fate is to establish a long-term “strategic framework” rather than simply putting in place a traditional annual strategic plan. “Strategic frameworks” enable businesses to leverage evolving market conditions to continuously delivered financial growth. Traditional strategic plans mainly focus businesses on extracting growth from existing businesses operations.

Establishing a sound “strategic framework” inside a digital organization is a complex process. Start ups are advantaged in doing so, as these nascent organizations are designed to embrace change. They operate under the guidance of a strategic framework put in place and shaped by their founder(s). More developed organizations find it more difficult to set a long-term “strategic frameworks” as they tend to focus on the preservation and growth of existing models.

Having said that, there are a couple of key tactics/initiatives which can help any digital business to sow the seeds for the emergence of a long-lasting strategic framework:

1.  Create mechanisms to continuously assess the implications of disruptive innovation

This first element seems plainly self-evident at a quick glance.  This task, however, can be difficult to achieve in digital environments. When I started my career as a media consultant, identifying consumer behavior trends for traditional media businesses was rather simple. The main reason for that was that traditional media businesses (cable, magazines, broadcasting) were already mature and there were robust syndicated data/research sources to help strategists identify new market opportunities. This is not the case with digital businesses. Given the nascent stage of the digital industry relative to its traditional peers, identifying changes in consumer behavior requires a deep understanding of the changing dynamics of a particular business segment (search, content production, publishing, social media). Acquiring this deep understanding is relatively difficult as only the principals in each of the business segments have access to the data needed to monitor how their corresponding segment is shaping up. Given the speed of change in the digital marketplace, this is also a critical advantage for the principals as data rapidly becomes obsolete on the Web.

Having said that, one can overcome this challenging dynamic by focusing on “fine-tuning” one’s business instincts to be able to readily identify the key data points (public and private) that prove the emergence of new consumer/business trends. Traditional business instincts do not translate to the digital media world because these businesses are designed to disrupt existing business rules. Thus, a new set of instincts are needed to anticipate and prepare for business disruption. While experience plays a key role in fine-tuning one’s instincts for digital businesses, one way to start the process is to pay close attention to how consumers and or businesses react to new disruptive business models. For example, one of the first signs of “audience fragmentation” was the emergence of professional blogs in the 2001-2003 time period. Even though Comscore did not show the change in numbers for the portals, growth in usage numbers for both blogs and search suggested that audiences were using search to find blogs and thus they were likely to fragment going forward. Search was becoming the ultimate remote control for users to access content and blogs signaled that thousands of new “content channels” were going to be created. This meant that audiences looking for consumer content on the Web were going to be increasingly fragmented for many years to come.

Google’s affiliate search business offers another example. In 2004, Google’s affiliate search revenues started to show significant more momentum compared to Yahoo’s. The two main drivers of this momentum were Yahoo’s decision not to go after the long-tail of publishers and Google’s focus on “ad relevancy”. This allowed Google to grow its publisher network much faster than Yahoo while providing superior performance. As a result, Google had put in place a much more robust marketplace by having a greater supply of clicks to offer to advertisers. Given marketplace dynamics, at that moment in time, it became a safe bet to say that Google’s monetization engine was going to be much more powerful for many years to come. This was one of the main reasons why, while at AOL, we decided not to enter the search business and focused on a different advertising product (performance display) via the acquisition of Ad.com. Google’s market dynamics were too strong for AOL to mount effective competition in paid search.

Organizations can accomplish this by establishing formal mechanisms to monitor market disruuptions. These mechanisms include the creation of product and business innovation teams, strategic advisory boards and a formal strategy development process. These mechanisms should be treated as part of the core of the organization rather than as entities on the fringe.

2. Adopt a flexible but clear “set of beliefs” to guide decision-making across the organization

This second element addresses the need for digital businesses to continuously be able to re-invent themselves in an effort to maintain or even  reignite their revenue and profit performance.  The need for reinvention has been primarily driven by the fact that digital technologies have empowered customers in ways not seen before. Free pricing, low switching costs, and convenience are at the core of consumer/customer empowerment. Moreover, new technologies are increasingly reducing friction for consumers/customers to move from one product experience to another product experience. This implies that digital businesses can be victims of the ephemeral nature of consumers/customers more so than most businesses have been in the past. With their “apparent” rapid ascent and descent, it is tempting to label many digital businesses as “fads. I believe thinking of them more as “hits”, much like a movie franchise or a TV series, is more apt because success relies on continued evolution of the product. Digital businesses need to constantly strive to reinvent themselves in an effort to remain fresh in the eyes of consumers.

Instilling the capability to reinvent the business in an organization is not easy. As companies become successful, their organizations get married to a particular “set of beliefs.” While having a clear “set of beliefs” is critical to success, the issue is that winning beliefs sets are constantly changing in the digital Web. This means that companies need to either create a set of beliefs that is flexible enough to adjust to market changes or they create the mechanisms to periodically change that set of beliefs. Companies must create an environment where their internal cultures/religion can quickly evolve to embrace emerging consumer trends.

While establishing this context for continuous change may sound difficult to implement, it really is not. One can focus around beliefs that are likely to survive changes in the marketplace. For example, a long-lasting belief can be: “aggressively leveraging technologies and new business models to stay on the cutting edge of cost-efficiency is critical for long-term success.” Leading the organization to the point that it can embrace this belief is not easy but it focuses the organization around creating a tech infrastructure that allows for easy integration of new technologies and capable of quick upgrade cycles. Another approach is to use acquisitions as a way to introduce new belief sets into an organization. Acquisitions can help an existing organization understand and appreciated the benefits and viability of new operational models. Succeeding in using acquisitions for this purpose requires carefully balancing the need for continued independence of the acquired business and desire for integration into the core business.

Ultimately, the organization needs to be able to recognize when their business is significantly challenged and have the capability and wherewithal to re-invent itself. Even if in some cases this means entering completely new businesses.

Developing strategies have always been an art and the results tend to ultimately be felt many years later. For digital businesses, however, the key consideration is the ability to develop a strategy that assumes and anticipates changes in market conditions and provides a window of time long enough to successfully execute against it.

Continuously monitoring the implications of disruptive models and establishing a clear but flexible set of organizational beliefs provide a good foundation for doing so.

Over the past few months, I have noticed a rise in large images are increasingly dominating the user interface of content websites, particularly news sites.  The Huffington Post front page illustrates this trend. Here is a comparison of the current front page (below left) versus the version when the site was launched in 2006 (below right).

Actually, it is not just about the growing presence of images but simply about the importance of photos as part of the Web experience. As bandwidth constraints have dissipated, Web designers and editors are increasing using pictures/images as a core element of the Web experience. While this flood of images is not surprising given the layout of newspapers and magazines, the presence on the Web and their ever- increasing in size signal a shift in the way the medium will look long-term versus the “link driven” layout with which we are familiar.

Images are an effective way to attract consumer attention according to Eyetracking studies. Consumers are also more comfortable with graphic-driven pages. Also, the bigger the pictures are the more time users spend time on sites. This trend is particularly important for advertisers. The new “Marquee” ad format launched by MySpace and that other large sites such as YouTube (below) are also selling is a good example of that.

The social Web is certainly likely to accelerate the change in look of the Web.  The “profile” image (a picture, logo or avatar) is becoming a key mechanism to aid people navigate through information on the Web. These thumbnails allow users to quickly assign different value to news headlines or activity “feeds.” Users can quickly decide whether or not to engage with content based on the picture to which it links. As the social networks extend their social graphs across blogs, websites, applications, etc., users will rely more and more on those pictures to travel the Web. The design of TrueSlant.com (below) offers a good example of this trend (I was an investor in and advisor to this startup).

Some search startups believe the role of images will be so dominant on the Web that they are creating alternatives to Google based on an image-centric paradigm rather than on “blue links”.  Searchme is one of those startups (see below).

Ultimately, pictures are a more effective mechanism to help consumers filter information on the Web, in particular when that information is being “pushed” to them.

Personally, I have to admit that the more pictures the better and the bigger the image the more likely I am to click through the article. What about you?

Last week, I attended Techcrunch’s Real-Time Crunchup. The event brought together many members of the Twitter ecosystem to showcase their products and several key investors to discuss their views of the Twitter phenomenon. This event helped me crystallize my view on Twitter, which is that Twitter is facilitating the creation of a new database of real-time content and information on the Web. Angel investor, Ron Conway referred to it as a new “data corpus” on the Web. Google’s index is an example of another data corpus, which contains information about sites across the Web. Navteq’s mapping information is another data corpus. The creation of a new data corpus can unlock significant value creation opportunities.

So, how is Twitter creating a valuable and new data corpus? At the highest level, Tweets are pieces of real-time data that users contribute to a database. I am not referring to the original Twitter use case of “I am enjoying a juicy burger for lunch.” I am referring, rather, to the emerging and powerful “use-cases” of users reporting on news, sharing and commenting on article links, uploading photos and video, promoting blog post headlines, tracking flight information, following financial news, etc. While these are activities that we have been doing for some time on the Web, there are several reasons why Twitter has managed to leverage these use-cases to create a new and unique data corpus:

1) Public Network: To date, these activities have primarily taken place in private networks – i.e., most people shared articles with their friends and family rather than with the overall public. Most social networks had been dominated by activity in private networks. The fact that the Twitter database focuses on public information amplifies its value because it increases the potential number of consumers for ti.

2) People-led: All of this “public” information is now being mapped to individuals rather than websites. This means that we can now use individuals to navigate information across the Web. As I have discussed in the past in the context of journalism, this is a powerful shift that suggests the emergence of “Intimacy” as one of the key differentiating elements of the Web as a commercial medium.

3) Frictionless: The experience of contributing information to the database requires little user involvement. As a result, the information is contributed in real-time and the database is constantly updating at an unprecedented speed. The myriad Twitter-centric tools (upload videos and photos, share links, etc.) make the overall experience for contributors to the Twitter database “frictionless.”

4) Optimized-for-mobile: The Twitter ecosystem of tools is becoming optimized around using phones to contribute information to the database. As the penetration of smart phones increases, the speed of growth of Twitter’ database will accelerate.

There are several key implications from the creation of this new “data corpus”. A whole new infrastructure of services/experiences needs to emerge to unlock the value of the data. This has already begun in a similar way as it happened in the Web in the mid nineties. Directory and search services lead the way (e.g., Summize, Collecta, Oneriot). Uploading tools and analytics companies follow (e.g., 12 seconds, Twitpic, Twitvid, Bit.ly). New user interfaces start to be tested (e.g., Twubs, ExecTweets, StockTwits). Lastly, a monetization model/solution eventually emerges.

Thanks to its open approach, the overall Twitter ecosystem is developing at much faster speed than we have seen before. While Twitter remains small in terms of number of employees as a company, its ecosystem of services is growing at rapid speed. Judging by the size of the Techcrunch event, it is probably safe to say that the number of people involved in developing Twitter’s ecosystem of services may be more than 1000.

There is no guarantee that Twitter’s momentum will continue or that the service itself will become a permanent fixture of the Web experience in its current form. However, the real-time Twitter data corpus will likely stand the test of time and be one of the main differentiating elements of the Web experience going forward.

Starting in early 2004 during my tenure at AOL, I with others began to advocate opening up the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) platform. The goal was to accelerate product development by using third party developers who could work with the open platform. We had seen the valuable ecosystem of third party applications and sites Amazon was creating and thought AIM would benefit greatly from a similar approach. Because of the walled-garden culture upon which AOL had been built, it took a couple of years before we were able to “open” AIM, and when we did it, we may have not open it enough.  While AIM’s remains a strong platform on the Web, its ecosystem of applications does not rival that of Facebook, Twitter or WordPress. As a result, it has become evident to me that merely “opening” a platform does not automatically lead to success, the degree of openness is just as critical.

Upon my arrival at AOL, several leading technologists in the organization, who shared their thinking with me, identified AIM as one of the company’s most valuable assets. These technology thought leaders referred to it as a “messaging” platform. Messaging in this context did not mean communications, but rather “real-time” transport of data. Sharing files via AIM is a good example of this. Live chat is another one. In addition, AIM’s presence engine was consistently praised and was in high demand by outside parties who wanted access to that capability. At that point, AIM generated revenues via fees from Wireless carriers and advertising, which were in no way commensurate with the reach and scale of the platform. This is what prompted us to explore an “open” strategy. We wanted to further build scale and enable innovative functionality.

As we further explored opening AIM, we identified potential additional uses of the platform. Most of the use-case examples centered on the existing desktop application paradigm. Could we have a radio product developed which could link to the application? Could we use a third party developer to add video chat to the client? Could other applications leverage presence to enhance their services and drive incremental AIM usage? In looking back, while these questions were good, the use-cases we focused on the most involved retaining control over the main mode of consumption (the AIM client) and fostering the creation of services to add value to that client-driven experience. While our focus on user experience seemed reasonable at that time, we may have unintentionally capped the potential value of “opening” the platform by limiting the number of potential use-cases. AIM APIs were not designed to enable 3rd party developers complete freedom to create new user experiences but rather focus them on simply enhancing the existing experience.

Flashforward to today, Twitter embraced a “fully open” approach and has built a strong ecosystem of third party applications in a short period of time. While the value of Twitter and its ecosystem still remains a subject of much debate, one thing has become clear: Twitter has rapidly become one of the leading social media platforms as well as the leading real-time information engine on the Web. Both of these things seem pretty valuable and their open approach has played a key role in making that happen. Third party developers have used Twitter’s open API to develop solutions, which enable a broad set of  use-cases/user experiences,  from sharing links, to uploading videos and photos, to conducting real-time searches, to following categories of individuals, etc.  I venture to guess that many of the use-cases were not initially envision by the Twitter team when they first developed their core product. However, the success of their open efforts has taken them into new areas of functionality and opportunities to create value.

Early this year, it was reported that Jack Dorsey had conceived the idea of Twitter out of fascination with AIM status updates. This led me to consider what would have happened if we had fully opened AIM’s platform and enabled developers to create completely different user experiences leveraging the existing messaging infrastructure. Would AIM have become what Twitter is today? While contemplating this question is interesting, the important lesson is that the power of “open” platforms emanates primarily from enabling the creativity of the external marketplace to create new user experiences and thus new opportunities to capture value. Open platforms allow 3rd parties to finance innovative new products which leverage the existing technology infrastructure and thus foster the creation of rich ecosystems of applications. Eventually, these ecosystems create significant competitive advantage for a product platform as new applications begin to be built on top of other applications.

However, opening a consumer product platform often appears to be risky from a business perspective, especially for entrenched competitors who have fought hard to establish their position and user base. Companies, which fully open their platforms, run the risk of inadvertently giving away too much of their asset value. Thus, managing an open platform requires a clear understanding as to where the ultimately sources of value will be (e.g., data monetization, advertising network opportunity, etc.). One also should keep in mind that revenue opportunities for open platforms take some time to materialize (Think Facebook and WordPress).

Having said that, the benefits of open platforms are easily seen from a user perspective (after all, more functionality/applications is better than less), and from a product development perspective — where being able to tap third party creativity to discover new user experiences (as we have also seen from the iPhone app store) can add significant value to a platform. Hence, my bias is increasingly towards opening more rather than less.

We are still in the early days of “open” consumer Web platforms and the rules of the road are still taking shape. I will try to codify these rules as I see them emerge.

It would be good to hear where you land on the openness scale.

A few months back, I wrote about the emergence of the real-time Web and the impact it would have on content publishing. In recent weeks, the news coverage on the Web of the fallout from the election in Iran and the death of Michael Jackson have crystallized for me the impact of the real-time Web on news production and publishing.  We are witnessing the dawn of a new era in news: in fact, I would equate this game-changing moment to that of watching the images of “Desert Storm” on CNN in 1990.

To illustrate the revolution in the news consumption experience, I will share a personal experience from a couple of weekends ago following the news coming out of Iran. I first learned about the election protests when TV-channel surfing early Saturday morning.  I quickly abandoned the TV, turned my attention to my PC, and pulled up two news sites that I rely on for up-to-the minute news, Huffington Post and The Drudge Report. As I began to read the story, my appetite for additional information grew.  So, I went to Twitter Search to get more information, and there I received real-time updates and comprehensive coverage given the number of people, who like me, were following the story.

Once I found myself immersed in “#IranElection” a couple of interesting things happened. First, I found other sites/blogs which fellow Tweeters thought were doing a good job covering the story. There were several that stood out, including the Vigilante Journalist, NYT’s The Lede, and Twubs.com/#Iran Election. I was particularly glad to learn about Andrew Sullivan’s the Daily Dish. He was “live-blogging” the events from Iran in a way that I found pretty interesting. He was “curating” the tweetspehere and sharing what he thought were the most interesting tweets, adding videos from YouTube as they were uploaded, and posting links about interesting articles and news releases. He was updating the content every two to five minutes.

Second, this experience gave me a sense that I was as close to the story as I have ever been to the extent that I began to identify individuals in Twitter whose tweets I wanted to follow. Even though the overall “streaming” experience felt overwhelming at first, I was soon able to determine to whom I should be paying attention pretty quickly. I started to follow a couple of Iranians whose reporting on the events seemed accurate as far as I could tell. I determined this by matching their reporting to the video images that would emerge hours later.  Also, I have to confess that the Twitter community led me to find those people as it provided me with signals on whose reporting to trust via retweets, links and outright recommendations. After just a few minutes, I was getting “real-time” news coverage about the Iran elections protests. I have to say that my TV was still on in the background and I turned my attention to it a couple of times when CNN’s Christiane Amanpour commented on the day’s events.

There are several elements of my new news experience, which deserve to be called out:

- People Rather Than Brand: I found myself following more individuals rather than websites. The live-blogging experience from HuffPo’s Nico Pitney and Andrew Sullivan made me feel that I was sharing the experience with them rather than with the Huffington Post or The Atlantic. Certainly, in Twitter, I was following people, rather than news brands.

- No editor required: I found it particularly interesting that I was able to focus on facts and events that I thought were important rather than what an “editor” thought to be important.  I was creating my own storyline around the news event, relying on my judgment to filter the content I was consuming. This made consuming news a more involved activity but at the same time much more rewarding. For a big part of the day, I was “news hunting.” I guess it unlocked my investigative instinct.

- Bigger news appetite: As I got more involved with the story, my appetite for news grew. I kept on following the events on my blackberry after leaving home. I consumed news of the event for a solid 16 hours.

- Introduction of Live blogging to the masses: This is something that has happened in the digital media industry for several years now. Tech bloggers reporting Apple keynotes, conference gatherings, company layoffs, etc. I have always found the format to be really satisfying. Seeing this construct in action during the Iran election events prove to me that it will be part of the future of news.

- Use of tech tools: My news experience involved using a broad set of the ecosystem of Web tools such as Twitter and Google’s language translators, Twitpic, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook among others.

This news experience may be unique due to the nature of the news event (as you may know, the international press was prevented from reporting on this event).  However, it does highlight how the news consumption experience is likely to evolve with the arrival of the real-time Web.

Exciting times are afoot for the newshounds in all of us.

Other than the interesting presentations by current industry newsmakers and catching up with industry friends, one of the most valuable things that I took away from Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s D7 conference was a Flip Mino HD camera that I received as part of my gift bag. This simple yet  sophisticated video camera has made sharing memorable experiences with friends incredibly “frictionless.”

This has led me to think about the potential for another explosion in real-time, “social video” sharing over the next few years. Today, social networking activity evolved primarily around “status updates” as a universal behavior.  While sharing pictures and video has also been part of social networking in recent years, the behavior has not yet turned universal. Video sharing has primarily involved TV show clips rather than “social video clips.” However, as new devices and software tools make the producing, editing and uploading video process much more “frictionless,” real-time, I expect social video broadcasting will increase in popularity within social networks.

Video is a powerful mechanism of communication.  I realized this several years ago through a service that a local TV station offered in my hometown. The channel set up video kiosks around town that allowed people to create short-form confessional-like content. The channel would package this video and integrate it into their programming. These videos allowed local community members to discuss social concerns, express grievances with government officials, use their singing talents to complain about city services and in some cases embody the culture of the city via jokes or poetry. The success of this initiative was driven by the fact that the process of creating these videos was completely painless. The local TV network had set up kiosks all over town where any individual could easily record their rant of the day.

Recently, several signs have heralded the advent of this new real-time, video era. A new generation of tools designed to increase the use of video as a form of communication have been introduced. 12seconds.tv is one of the first services which aims to provide a “Twitter-like” video service that enables people to easily broadcast video “snacks’ to the their communities of friends and followers.  I must confess that I found myself unable to think of anything that could in the 12 second window. Facebook’s partnership with UStream, which makes it easier for celebrities to stream video live from their profiles, appears to be another sign around real-time/live video broadcasting.

As video recording-capable phones are added to the mix, real-time, video sharing will accelerate. There are new tools such as Posterous that aim to make uploading videos via iPhones to social networks pretty frictionless. Several other services like Twitvid and Tweettube, are making sharing videos on Twitter as simple as Twitpic has done with photos.

Thus, I expect that over time the same way that people take a few minutes to “update their status,” they may decide to point and shoot at something they see with some voiceover commentary. Needless to say, “video” will always require a bit more involvement than “text.”

Nevertheless, I expect continuous innovation in this area and thus new tools and devices emerge that will enable the process of real-time, video broadcasting much more frictionless than it has ever been.

In the meantime, I will be honing my video communication skills with the help of my Flip Mino HD.