Mac Slocum's Recommended Stuff and Links of Note
A couple things jumped out at me from this NY Times piece on Jumo, the new site/service from Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes
1. “Unlocking” is a word that gets bandied about too much in tech circles (particularly when it’s followed by “innovation”), but it applies when you’re looking at how technology lowers barriers to entry. Apple, Facebook, Google, eBay, Yelp, Twitter, Amazon, and on and on and on — all these companies use tech to make things easier or faster. In turn, people use these services. It’s a simple equation. You can’t always know what will catch on, but knocking down barriers is always a step in the right direction.
“One thing we’ve learned with Internet companies is that if you can lower the barrier and lower friction, then activity follows where it didn’t exist before,” he said. As an example, he pointed to the flood of donations via text message that followed the earthquake in Haiti last January: “We saw what people were willing to do.”
2. Facebook.com is one outlet — albeit a big one — that sits on top of Facebook, The Platform. Just as eBay and Amazon became a platform for mini shops, Facebook could emerge as a platform for mini networks. The hints of that are already in place via Facebook’s various groups and pages.
Jumo was not intended to compete with Facebook. Instead, he predicts that Facebook will become a ubiquitous backbone for the social Web, and that people will also use niche sites focused on specific interests and communities.
November 2010
33 posts
Andy Vuong from the Denver Post calls out three very interesting points that underlie the Comcast-Level 3 skirmish. The order of these paragraphs is as important as the content contained within them:
1. “Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is working on rules that would prevent Internet providers from favoring some online content and applications over others. The FCC reportedly could vote on the rules as early as December.”
2. “Telecommunications analyst Donna Jaegers said the fight could speed up the net neutrality rule-making process. “By them (Level 3) going public to the regulators with this, they’re going to heighten the issues before the FCC about net neutrality and about the whole Comcast/NBC merger,” Jaegers said.”
3. “Comcast has proposed to acquire NBC-Universal for $30 billion, a deal that is still under regulatory review.”
If this plays out as anticipated, Apple could be on to its second-generation iPad before a competitive tablet emerges. From ZDNet:
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said that once Intel delivers its Oak Trail processors, Microsoft and its partners will deliver Windows slates that can be considered iPad competitors. So maybe we’ll see a Google OS vs. WinPad slate slug-fest by mid-2011? However, Apple probably will have delivered its lighter-weight iPad 2 by that time…And who knows what, if anything, will come of Microsoft’s ServiceOS (the browser-centric Microsoft research project, formerly known as Gazelle.)
For a technology some have already declared dead, email is receiving an awful lot of attention from significant companies. (Sidenote: I’m really intrigued by Facebook’s rumored “Gmail killer.”) — Mac
Clay Shirky on newspapers’ commodity problem:
The “paywall problem” isn’t particularly complex, either in economic or technological terms. General-interest papers struggle to make paywalls work because it’s hard to raise prices in a commodity market. That’s the problem. Everything else is a detail.
The classic description of a commodity market uses milk. If you own the only cow for 50 miles, you can charge usurious rates, because no one can undercut you. If you own only one of a hundred such cows, though, then everyone can undercut you, so you can’t charge such rates. In a competitive environment like that, milk becomes a commodity, something whose price is set by the market as a whole.
Owning a newspaper used to be like owning the only cow, especially for regional papers. Even in urban markets, there was enough segmentation–the business paper, the tabloid, the alternative weekly–and high enough costs to keep competition at bay. No longer.
Why is it so hard for general news outlets — newspapers, broadcast, websites, etc. — to get this? Is it hubris? Ignorance? Desperation? The insanity and inanity of this is why I’ve had to limit my exposure to future of news / future of journalism discussions. I’m at the point now where I believe the whole news industry needs to be ripped down and rebooted. The folks in control are too far gone. There’s nothing to save.
