Content Matters

Apple Music - the Spotify Accelerator

 

Apple Music was finally announced this week at WWDC.

For months (years) we'd been hearing that Apple was ready to launch it's "Spotify killer". But, will Apple Music be a big threat to Spotify, Pandora and other streaming services?

 

Apple has proven that it can sell music. Before iTunes, digital music was the wild west, fraught with piracy and viruses. Kids and tech-savvy adults figured out how to download music, while the rest of the world barely could figure out how to rip a CD. Along came iTunes, creating a safe and user friendly marketplace for buying music. Yet, 14 years and numerous tries later, Apple hasn't shown the ability to deliver a compelling music service. Remember when Apple launched Genius as the "Pandora Killer"? Yeah right.

It's usually a safe bet that anything billed as a [        ] killer will fail to deliver on that promise.  Remember the Blackberry Playbook, the "iPad killer"? Or for those in fintech, the Reuters 2000 terminal aka "Bloomberg killer".  I love Slack, but it's not really an email killer. And Apple Music won't be a Spotify Killer. In fact, it could be a Spotify Accelerator.

What might the impact of Apple Music be? It might:

• Grow the audience for streaming music beyond the tech-savvy market
• Simplify the concept - Apple didn't use the word "streaming" once. It was all about having all the music in one place.
• Enroll millions of users into Apple Music trials, some of whom will cancel after the 3-month free period ends, instead adopting free versions of Spotify or Pandora.

The one way in which Apple Music could have truly killed Spotify would have been if the rumored deals with the record labels came to fruition, eliminating the free version of Spotify and other competitors. But there's no way that would have passed antitrust muster. 

So now, Apple Music becomes YASMS (yet another streaming music service). Bob Lefsetz said it best:

in order to succeed you’ve got to deliver something better, bring in those who were disinterested or scared to participate previously, and there’s nothing in Apple Music that isn’t widely available elsewhere, including its social network and playlists.

When you're the little guy, driving public awareness is tough. Advertising is expensive and word-of-mouth only gets you so far. Despite those challenges, Spotify has grown to 75 million active users, with 20 million of them paying. Apple Music will help to make subscription-based streaming music mainstream. Think of it as your mother's streaming music service. And as streaming becomes more mainstream, that means more users for Spotify.

 

How Radio Shack Missed Its Last Opportunity to Reinvent Itself

Abe Vigoda is still alive.

We'll need a new analogy. For years, people were stunned that both Abe Vigoda and Radio Shack were still alive. Thankfully, Tessio is still going strong, but we've seen the end of Radio Shack.

Radio Sh ack lost its relevance in the early 80s when IBM PCs became mainstream and the early adopters moved on from TRS-80s.

And while it never found its footing again, the sad thing is that there's an emerging opportunity that would be a great fit for Radio Shack, had it been able to reinvent itself.

The one thing that made Radio Shack special in the 70s and 80s was that their staff were tinkerers. You could ask them all kinds of questions and get real answers. Long before there was a Maker community, you had makers and tinkerers behind the counter and as customers at Radio Shack. And while most technology today is fairly simple and doesn't require use of a soldering iron nor following detailed instructions, there is a nascent market where those skills would be perfect: Smart Homes.

The Smart Home market is in its early phases. And it's complicated. Sure, it's pretty easy to install a Nest thermostat or a Dropcam camera, but which smart lock should you buy? How about the garage opener? Can you replace your expensive alarm system with a DIY version? And do you need a hub? Can you control it all with one platform or do you need multiple apps?

While it's easy to buy any of this gear online, it's still pretty confusing, even for technically savvy early adopters.

There are several retailers chasing the space, notably Home Depot, Apple, Lowe's, Staples and others. Yet none of them seem particularly well-suited for the space. Have you asked questions at a Home Depot or Lowe's lately? Apple will make elegant products, but you can't bring your house to the Genius Bar. And Staples? Really?

Smart Home gear would have been perfect for Radio Shack. You don't need a massive big box store to show it. You just need well-informed staff and an area to educate and showcase. They could have either provided or partnered with a provider of home installation services, to make it easy for people to adopt the new technologies. The typical Radio Shack employee might not have made the leap, but they could have engaged an entire new generation of tinkerers to want to work there.

But instead, the Shack decided to focus their efforts on selling mobile phones and overpriced phone accessories, driving it to irrelevance.

With Immediacy Comes Great Responsibility

UPDATE (5/26/14): Rap Genius cofounder Mahbod Moghadam has been fired.

Community site Rap Genius sets as their mission to annotate the world - or to become the Internet Talmud. That's a lofty goal and perhaps a worthy one, particularly if they expand into poetry, literature, political speeches and more. But it's also a thorny path, as you look to a community to interpret the words of others.

Rap Genius co-founder Mahbod Moghadam learned that today when he decided to annotate and publish the "manifesto" of UCSB mass shooter Elliot Rodger. 

Defenders of Rap Genius will note that the words of mass murderers are often published and analyzed. But, for the most part, that doesn't happen immediately. Ann Rule's biography of Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, was published in 1980, five years after his arrest for multiple murders. Moghadam's annotated version of the Manifesto was published just a day after the shootings, at a time when the names of some of the victims have still not been released.

Making the matter worse, Moghadam's comments seemed to reinforce some of the rawness of the crime itself. In perhaps the most egregious example, in a reference to Rodger's sister, Moghadam's comments try to interpret the shooter's feelings towards her, saying "My Guess: his sister is smokin hot".

(image credit: Gawker.com)

While this text was later edited out of the Rap Genius post, it was at best insensitive and inappropriate, particularly since social media has been dominated all weekend with the #YesAllWomen hashtag. 

But the core issue, in my view, is that, while the immediacy of the web enables, and often encourages all of us to "publish" events as they happen, that doesn't mean that we should.

Traditional news outlets have editors who set policies and help journalists make decisions about what information should be shared when. Those of us (including bloggers like me) who do not have a background in journalism, nor editorial oversight, must make those decisions ourselves. And while I'd argue that having a layperson try to interpret the meaning of a mass murderer's comments, with no context nor professional experience, is a wrongheaded effort, the timing of it becomes a key factor as well.

Just a week or so ago, there was great debate about whether it was appropriate that the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City sell high-priced trinkets at a gift shop. Personally, I've been more offended by the politicians who have spent the past 13 years grandstanding in front of the site, but I can see the view of those who were upset by the gift shop. Yet, the Holocaust Museum has a similar gift shop that generates no such outrage. And a major difference, in my view, is the passage of time.

If Rap Genius wished to annotate the manuscript a year or two from now, it wouldn't generate much attention. Of course, it wouldn't generate many page views either, which was clearly a driver in getting it posted today. 

But the immediacy of the web requires us to gauge public response to our actions and to decide what we want our role to be in doing so.

 

 

 

 

 

A Secure Yet Simple Password Strategy On the Cheap

Another day, another major site getting hacked. This time it's eBay and, possibly (and frighteningly), Paypal. 

Everyone knows that passwords are a horrible way to protect your information, but until finger scanners or other systems are in widespread use, we don't have much choice. And, even where finger scanners are used (Android and, on a limited basis, iOS), you still need to provide a backup password for when the swipe doesn't register.

There are a handful of basic rules for passwords which we all know by now:

• Passwords should not be words that appear in the dictionary
• Passwords should have a mix of upper and lower case
• Passwords should have a combination of letters and numbers
• You should not use the same password on multiple sites

Yet, despite the fact that we know these rules, most people break them all the time. It's simply too difficult to remember dozens or hundreds of passwords.

The best approach is to use a secure password manager. Personally, I'm a fan of 1password. Their protection is about as strong as you can find, they have a simple browser plugin, and they support multiple platforms and devices (OS X, Windows, iOS, etc). Other password managers include LastPass, KeePass and oneSafe. I strongly recommend you use one of those tools. But, for those who don't want to pay for a password manager, or choose not to use one for other reasons, there are still ways to keep secure.

Here's an approach that I'd used previously, before I adopted 1password. It's free. It's fairly safe. And it's still easy to remember the password for hundreds of websites.

1. Start with a basic password you'll remember but that's not that obvious. For this example, I'll choose falcon.

2. Always capitalize one letter in the word. Now it's faLcon.

3. If possible, change one of the letters to a number. How about faLc0n

4. Add the current year to the password. faLc0n14 (or better yet split the year into two parts - like 1faLc0n4). Then, each January, update the password, so it becomes 1faLc0n5 in 2015, etc.
At this point, you have a fairly unique password that consists of a mix of numbers and letters, does not represent a word in the english language, etc. It can still be beaten by brute force (i.e. a computer trying tens of thousands of combinations) but would not be easily guessed.

5. Now - here's the key part. For every website, take the 1st 2 letters of the URL and insert them at the beginning or end of your password. So, for Facebook, the first 2 letters are fa. If I put the f at the front of my password and the a at the end, my Facebook password becomes f1faLc0n4a. For Yahoo, my password would be y1faLc0n4a, etc.

Now, I recommend you modify this approach to your own requirements. Perhaps you put the numbers in the middle of the base word. Or, maybe, instead of the first 2 letters of the URL, you take the last 3 letters before the .com suffix. Make it your own. But there's no excuse for using weak passwords or using the same password on multiple sites. 

PRISM or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Information Awareness

In the last 24 hours, everyone has suddenly become an expert on privacy and national security, weighing in on the NSA's PRISM program.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about the program. While we have government assurances that the program is limited in scope, does not target US citizens, and is under close supervision, I'm not sure that I'm completely comforted by that. Rules governing use are hard to enforce, particularly when cloaked in complete secrecy. So, I think that any program like this can be easily misused, which clearly concerns me.

At the same time, on a practical level, do we not expect our intelligence community to use information and technology in their efforts to keep us safe? Whether it's the Boston bombing or Benghazi, there's a fairly strong outcry asking "how come our intelligence efforts couldn't prevent this"?

Following 9/11, I worked for a company that provided semantic technology used to identify potential relationships between entities. While they were not our primary market, the Intelligence Community quickly saw value in what we did, and our product was part of the Poindexter-led Total Information Awareness ("TIA") project. TIA was clearly a bit in-your-face (the all-seeing eye of God was a bit much, not to mention hiring John Poindexter to oversee the effort) and the program was officially killed in 2003 when Congress refused to fund it. But the program never died. Our software licenses were simply shifted to a different project, with different funding, but where the same analysts were the users.

Technology has come a long way in ten years. Entity extraction, data mining and analytics are commonplace tools in the business environment. It shouldn't shock anyone to see those tools are used by our government agencies, particularly the one tasked with "signal intelligence". 

Accessing voice, email and social media data takes that to another level. And I think it's good that we're having this public debate. Personally, I am very conflicted about this issue. But many of those now voicing the loudest criticism will be among those asking "how did we not know about this" when the next incident occurs.

Boycott Retailers Donating Percentage of Proceeds to Sandy Relief

As I write this dozens (perhaps hundreds) of marketers are kicking around thoughts of new marketing campaigns in which they donate a percentage of their proceeds to relief efforts for those hit hardest by Hurricane Sandy. I have one word for them:

STOP!

I'm sure they are doing this with the best of intentions. And I bet most of them are good people. But this practice, which seems selfless is anything but. In reality, what these companies are doing is saying "Hurricane Sandy - what a horrible event; how can we benefit from it?"  While some are obvious - like American Apparel's (APP) blatant Hurricane Sandy Sale email, others may seem to be doing good on the surface.

Here's Ferragamo's pitch:

In aid to those affected by Hurricane Sandy, a percentage of proceeds will be donated to the American Red Cross Hurricane Relief Efforts, Friday, November 2 - Sun, November 4.

In this instance, they don't even state what percentage they're giving. Is it 10%, 1% or .0001%? No way to tell. 

But even if they were giving an explicit percentage - as companies like Courtshop, Barney's New York, Gilt City and Natori are doing, it's still horribly offensive in my opinion. They are out there using the victims of Hurricane Sandy as props in an effort to market their products. And that's simply craven and wrong.

Look - if you're a retailer or other brand and you wish to make a donation to help the victims of Sandy, there's a really easy way to do it. Write a damn check. And if you truly want to tie that to revenue, feel free. You can project what your revenues will be this week or this month - so write a check for some percentage of that. But don't wrap your marketing efforts in Hurricane Sandy. 

And this goes beyond just Hurricane Sandy. As we approach the holidays, Toys R Us and other retailers love to put up boxes to collect Toys for Tots gifts. But what they're really doing is inflating their own sales, by convincing their customers to buy additional gifts at full price. Before their well-deserved bankruptcy, Borders was the master of this, aggressively asking every customer at checkout "do you want to buy a book for a needy child?". "Oh, no" I was tempted to respond; "I like the needy to remain ignorant". Instead I, like many others, was guilted into buying additional books at full price (Borders never chose books off the sale rack for these offers), propping up their weak revenues.

If retailers want to support organizations like Toys for Tots, it's really easy to do. Let your customers buy those gifts at cost, rather than at retail price. That way, we know you're doing this because you mean it, not to inflate your own revenues.

So, join me in commending those companies which are out there writing checks - like Disney (DIS), News Corp (NWS), Target (TGT), Kohls (KSS), Hanes (HBI), Home Depot (HD), Wal-Mart (WMT), Viacom (VIAB), Ross Stores, Wells Fargo (WFC), BofA (BAC), Lowe's (LOW), Chrysler, Ford (F) and others. These companies have given without asking anything in return - and we should support them.

And please also join me in boycotting those companies who are trying to boost their top line by wrapping themselves in the cloth of the victims of Hurricane Sandy. They are shameless and do not deserve our patronage.

Do you know other companies who are generously supporting those impacted by Sandy? Or companies looking to use Sandy as a marketing ploy? Please note them in the comments below. 

A Boycott the Only Way to Get NBC Olympics Coverage to Change

The Twitterverse is all up in arms over the fact that NBC won't live-stream Olympic events. NBC, of course, has exclusive broadcast rights to the summer games in the US and they intend to maximize their revenue by showing the key events only during primetime hours.

And NBC has limited online streaming access to those who have cable access, further frustrating the cord-cutters among us. They've turned to online VPN services which allow them to appear to be from other countries, as detailed by Heidi Moore.

Take a look at the #NBCFail hashtag on Twitter. You can see all the frustration pouring out in real-time. But while that's helped to get journalist Guy Adams' Twitter account suspended, it's having little to no impact on NBC. Even Jeff Jarvis' pleas for NBC to listen to its' customers fell on deaf ears. Of course, that's probably because we aren't NBC's customers; we're the product (eyeballs). 

For as frustrating as this experience may be for the technologically advanced, it's been a positive for NBC, who reportedly have averaged over 35 million viewers for each of the first three nights of Olympic coverage.

NBC's customers are their advertisers. And the only way that NBC will respond is if their advertisers press them to. And the only way that will happen is if we have a viewer boycott. A sizable boycott will be incredibly difficult to stage on such short notice - but maybe with the right media coverage, it can happen.

So, let's call for all in the US to boycott one hour of Olympic coverage this Thursday at 8:00 pm ET. Let's send NBC the one message that they can't ignore.

Is Apple a Net Job Creator or Destroyer?

Apple's been taking heat lately about their manufacturing locations and treatment of workers at FoxConn and elsewhere.

Today, the company struck back, releasing a study showing that the Company and its ecosystem have been responsible for the creation of 514,000 U.S. jobs. About 10% of those jobs are with Apple itself (47,000 of their 70,000 employees are in the U.S.), the rest include jobs by companies in their supply chain (e.g. Corning, creator of iPad and iPhone screens) as well as those of the Fedex workers who deliver their products.

The company also made a point of noting that their 21 call centers are located in the U.S., while they could have saved money outsourcing support to India, for example. The driver there is not goodwill, of course, as they point out that the reason they keep their call centers in the US is that they believe it provides a better customer experience.

Apple further estimates that more than 210,000 jobs were created from the iOS app ecosystem since 2007, extrapolating from a recent TechNet study.

I won't quibble with the numbers. They used an outside firm to develop the study and I've got no insights to challenge their methodology. At the same time, pushing that study out could be a slippery slope.

It won't surprise me to see other studies come out, aiming to tally up the number of workers displaced by Apple. We've recently seen the bankruptcy of Kodak, a company which lost its footing early in the digital camera era, began to recover a bit, then got displaced by the cameras in their phones. The Netbook industry has vanished with the emergence of tablet computing and the laptop industry is taking a good hit as well.

Conversely, iTunes has done a lot to save the recording industry from complete death. Until iTunes made it convenient to buy music, most digital music was pirated. While the music industry may not love Apple's business terms, there have clearly been many music industry jobs saved by iTunes.

Now, it's not Apple's job to keep people employed at other companies any more than it would be Google's job to keep the newspaper industry afloat.  Transformational technology, by its very nature, is disruptive. And society votes with its pocketbook as to whether these issues matter to most individuals. When the iPad 3 is announced in a few days, millions will line up to order one. Unless there is pressure from consumers, Apple and its peers will continue to source materials from the least expensive providers. I'd gladly pay a $50 tariff for a "fair trade" iPad, or maybe a $100 higher fee for one made in the US. But until consumers demand those options, we can't expect Apple to change.

So, is Apple a net job creator or destroyer? That's hard to tell. I'd wager there have been many more jobs displaced by Apple than enabled or created by them. And while that's not their responsibility, they do have to be very careful before initiating a PR war in which they may not come out smelling sweet.

In the meantime, I miss the days when the co-occurrence of Apple and Jobs in a sentence was referring to their founder.

Innovate, Don’t Legislate

It’s an oft-repeated tale. An industry gets disrupted by upstarts with new technologies and business models. The incumbents act quickly – turning to their legal team for advice. Litigate and legislate and the typical responses that come back.

The approach to SOPA and PIPA is hardly new. We’ve seen this play out many times in many industries, most notably in the music recording industry. But in each case, the approach ultimately fails. Sure, it may slow the erosion of your business, but in the end a broken business model is still broken. And all of those efforts to solve the problem through legislative and legal efforts simply distract companies from focusing on what they really need to do, and often alienate your customers.

SOPA (and PIPA) are not the only current examples of this. The Research Works Act (H.R. 3699) recently introduced by Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), aims to reverse the current public access policy under which any taxpayer-funded research is provided free of charge via the NIH website after 12 months.

The bill is being pushed by scientific journal publishers, who currently get a 12-month exclusive to sell the research in recognition of their efforts to coordinate the process of peer review.

My goal here is not to debate the specific merits of the Research Works Act nor those of PIPA and SOPA. Instead, I’d like to suggest a better way forward for publishers than relying on legislation and litigation. But before I do, I think it’s important to note that public policy or legal solutions are certainly appropriate in some instances.

My first job out of school was with a startup called Legi-Tech, a McClatchy-backed online service which tracked legislation. (This was, of course, in the pre-Internet days.) Legi-Tech soon faced a competitor – it turned out that the State of New York decided that providing access to legislative information on a subscription basis was an attractive opportunity for them as well. Fair enough – we believed we could certainly put out a better product than the State could. But the State, or its Legislative Bill Drafting Commission to be specific, went further. They made the full text of new bills available on their service 2-3 days before the printed copies were made available to the public – or to LegiTech, to provide through our service. We believed that violated the freedom-of-information act – they were giving preferred access to public information to those who paid them. So, we hired lawyers and filed suit. Eventually, we won a settlement. Eventually, while we won that battle, we lost the war and Legi-Tech ultimately was shuttered. But in this instance, litigation seemed proper. We were not looking to protect our own rights, but rather to fight unfair business practices of the state-owned entity.

In most cases, litigation and legislation are the wrong approach.

Rather than investing in lawyers, what if these companies invested their time and efforts into trying to identify the best possible experience for their users?

For example, with movies, it’s pretty straightforward. The “going to the movies” experience is very different than the “I’m tired – let’s stay in and watch a movie” experience. Yet, as Fred Wilson notes in his Scarcity is a Shitty Business Model post, the movie industry as a whole would make significantly more money if they would make new releases available in theaters, on DVD and streaming, globally on the same day. But, with the exception of some small indie movies who are experimenting, the industry refuses to adapt and loses out – to piracy, to video games and to other forms of entertainment.

For b2b content, it’s largely the same. Journal publishers seem concerned they will lose out on the one-off use. To me, this seems misguided. B2B publishers should look to get 80-90% of their revenue from their core markets. For journal publishers, this would include life sciences companies, universities and government agencies. Their focus should be on delivering the best solution to meet the workflow of those users – on desktops, tablets and other platforms. That's where they can maximize their revenue opportunities.

Yes, there will be light users who have an occasional need for their content. Aggregators can pick up some of that business – by making their content easy to find and by providing top-notch metadata, summaries and analyses, which will make those users’ jobs easier.  But the answer is not to make that content inaccessible via the public web.

A good example of this is the market for SEC filings. In the pre-Internet days, there were companies that made their living by Xeroxing copies of SEC filings and overnighting them to users. When the SEC decided to put their filings online via EDGAR, it could have been the death of these providers. Yet today there are a half-dozen or more filings providers (Thomson Reuters Disclosure, EDGAR Online,  ICC, Perfect Information, Morningstar) all finding their own niche in this competitive space. While the one-off user is typically happy with the free service from the SEC, the business user is happy to pay for better search and better access, embedded within their workflow.

And, of course, the digital music business provided great lessons for other industries. The music industry started out with an L&L (legislation and litigation) approach, but it failed pretty miserably. Users wanted a way to get all of their music onto the devices they used in their daily life, and the threat of lawsuits were not a major barrier. What changed the industry was iTunes. Once users had an easy and convenient way to buy music for their iPod most chose that path, abandoning the free downloads. Today, with iTunes, Amazon, Google Music, Rhapsody, Spotify, HypeMachine and others, there’s no reason for most to pirate music.

The organization with the biggest push behind SOPA/PIPA is, of course, the Motion Picture Association of America. This is the same organization that sued to stop the VCR in the 70s, saying it would kill the motion picture industry. Of course, DVDs (the successors to VHS) now account for a third of their revenue. This should come as no surprise. The CEO of the MPAA is former Senator Chris Dodd, who succeeded former Kennedy aide Jack Valenti. The day that the MPAA hires a product person to run them will be the day that industry changes.

Of course, there will always be the handful of users who will choose piracy. For the most part, these are users for whom their time is less valuable than money. And they’re not likely to buy your product regardless. It’s a lot like the market for counterfeit luxury goods. When my niece was around 10 years old, she wanted a Kate Spade handbag for Christmas. Luckily, the tabletop vendor near my office had them for $25. Now, lobbyists will claim that my purchase cost the real Kate Spade $300; but there’s zero chance I’d have bought her a real one, even if no counterfeits were available. As Tim O’Reilly eloquently notes:

The people who are pirating are most likely the people who would never give you a nickel to begin with. Piracy serves people on the fringes who are not being served adequately by legitimate markets. Frankly, if people in Romania can download my books and enjoy them, more power to them. They weren’t going to pay me anyway.

The pro-SOPA lobby puts forth estimates that piracy of digital media costs the US $200-250 Billion per year and an amazing 750,000 US jobs. Yet, all the calculations of losses are bogus, as noted above. The only real economic losses come around the fringes – where you have users willing to pay for a service but who choose to use an otherwise free or inexpensive version. And that $250 Billion figure? It’s made up. According to the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez:

The $200–250 billion number had originated in a 1991 sidebar in Forbes, but it was not a measurement of the cost of “piracy” to the U.S. economy. It was an unsourced estimate of the total size of the global market in counterfeit goods. Beyond the obvious fact that these numbers are decades old, counterfeiting of physical goods imported in bulk and sold by domestic retail distributors is, rather obviously, a totally different phenomenon with different policy implications from the problem of illicit individual consumer downloads of movies, music, and software. The 750,000 jobs number had originated in a 1986 speech (yes, 1986) by the secretary of commerce estimating that counterfeiting could cost the United States “anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000″ jobs. Nobody in the Commerce Department was able to identify where those figures had come from.

Now, let’s look at what most media companies have failed to do, while they’ve been fighting the legislation & litigation battles:

• They’ve failed to identify ways to leverage the changes in technology and media consumption to create new products for their core customers.
• They’ve failed (for the most part) to introduce compelling new mobile or tablet-based applications.
• They’ve largely failed to experiment with new business models, instead focusing on keeping the status quo.
• They’ve largely failed to embrace the technologies, tools and approaches (cloud, agile development) which the upstarts have used to displace them.

All in all, they’ve failed to create significant value-add that will give their customers no reason to ever consider the lesser, free alternatives and to reinforce the overall value of their brand.

Now, that’s not to condemn all media companies. There have certainly been sparks of innovation across all segments. But on the whole, publishers have been focusing a lot more energy on legislation and litigation than on innovation. And that’s a strategy that’s destined to fail.

Note: For those interested in more details on the Research Works Act, I’d suggest reading Michael Eisen’s blog post on the issue or this one from Scientific American.

Going Viral Does Not Constitute a Community

Last night, for an hour or two, most of our Twitter streams got overwhelmed with a meme called #LessAmbitiousMovies. It started with a tweet by Toronto artist @Rob_McCallum and spread virally, generating tens of thousands of tweets. The “game” was pretty simple – come up with a play on a movie title, and yielded results like Saving Private Benjamin or Last Tango in Parsippany.

That led to a Twitter debate this morning over whether that demonstrated that Twitter was a community, sparked by this All Things D blog post by @lizgannes. Her premise was that the meme Shows Twitter Can Still Be Community, Not Just a Tool".

My answer is that no, going viral does not constitute a community.  To me, a community consists of people with a common interest, interacting and/or sharing information around that interest. There are communities on Twitter – StockTwits is one that springs to mind, but there are other communities around health, sports and other areas. More importantly, there are many, many informal communities of users that spring up around numerous topics.  But that is quite different than a random group of people interacting around a viral meme.

While there were tens of thousands of tweets, there was only a modest level of retweeting. According to the Liz Gannes post, the most heavily RTd one was the clever Being John Stamos with 225 retweets. More importantly, it seems highly unlikely that any of those people will continue to interact with one another around this or any other meme going forward.

To me, #LessAmbitiousMovies is akin to people watching an awards show or the Super Bowl or all shouting “Happy New Year” at midnight.  Or perhaps trying the “Elf Yourself” viral marketing effort from Office Depot. There was common interest in a very general topic (humor) generating a lot of participation but little interaction and no sustained impact. Internet and Twitter memes are interesting but they don’t constitute a community.