I'll be teaching a class to undergraduates at Fordham this Spring called "Managing in the MySpace Generation".   Basically, it will catch these students up on all the things the rest of us tagheads have been talking about for the last couple of years...  open, distributed, lightweight, social, etc...   how it effects the way businesses are being run and how they should be running their careers. 

I've slowly started saving links that I'll be using in my class somehow, tagging them "fordhamclass". 

If anyone is doing anything similar... taking "Web 2.0", from a business and career perspective, to college students, I'd love to hear from you. 

Fred posted yesterday about the brilliance of the MySpace "add" feature on their music player, and how most widgets lack the immediacy of this feature.

Most of them provide a landing page, then they have a conversion issue.  Eventually you wind up with some embed code and then its all about hacking your template.   There's no universal "add this to my sidebar/blog" etc.

Or is there?

XML-RPC is what allows services like Flickr to autopost my Moblogged photos directly to my Typepad blog.  All I needed to do was to tell them where to post it, give them my password, and poof, automatic.

Can the same thing be used for my sidebar?

How hard would it be for some social widget to have a "Get this" link that pops up a window, lets you configure, and then all you have to do is give them your blog password and poof, its there up at the top of your sidebar.

Is this possible through XML-RPC?

Are you a digital media young professional in NYC?

Do you have aggressive tendencies?

Do you want to throw things at other people?

Or, do you just want to come, try not to get hit, and meet lots of other cool people in the NYC digital media and technology community?

Join our nextNY Dodgeball league now!  (Starts 9/18... signup ASAP before spots run out)

This was my Tuesday...  I was too tired to blog about it yesterday.

5AM Wake up.

5:40AM Get in car in Bay Ridge.

6:05AM Enter LaGuardia Airport parking lot.

6:13AM Check in to 7AM flight, which has now been pushed back to 7:25.

7:10AM Board plane.

8:48AM Land in Dulles, VA.

9:30AM Finish Cosi parfait.  Get cab. 

9:54AM Arrive at biz dev meeting.

11:45AM Leave campus for lunch with fun potential partner team.

12:15PM Get seated for lunch at local microbrewery/grill.

12:26PM  Chicken sandwich arrives.

1:26PM Return from lunch to continue meetings.

3:33PM Leave for airport with chatty cab driver.

3:56PM Arrive at airport and check in for 5:35 flight.

3:57PM Black cat crosses path.  Cat cannot get wifi connection either.

4:49PM Flight pushed back to 6PM.

5:30PM Flight pushed back to 6:30PM.

6:01PM Flight pushed back to 7:05PM.

6:39PM Flight pushed back to 7:35PM.

6:58PM Announcement that LaGuardia Airport has been closed due to visability.

6:59PM Check NYC weather on phone...  66.  Rain.  Yes, seems like that should close an airport.

7:30PM Flight cancelled.  9PM flight full.  Please go to the customer service line.

7:31PM Customer service line has 6,000 people on it.  Break for Avis.

7:55PM Arrive at Avis. 

"Carkeep, give me the world handling car you have...something that corners like a whitewater raft.  An Impala?  Oh yes, that will do fine."

8:08PM

"Its 250 miles to LaGuardia.  I've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of overpriced airport trailmix.  Its dark, and I'm wearing khakis.

Hit it."

12:38AM Arrive at LaGuardia Avis, located close to the airport in downtown Saskachawan by the Marine Aviation Terminal.

12:52AM Start waiting for the Avis Shuttle, which comes every five minutes, to get back to the parking lot.

1:15AM Avis shuttle arrives.

1:33AM Exit Laguardia parking lot, peeling out in Mustang, because I was used to Impala's pickup, or lack thereof.

1:52AM Park in Bay Ridge.

2:01AM Sleep in my own bed...zzzzzzz

The term "avatar space" or "avatar market" is sort of a misnomer to me.

I think there are really two spaces here...   the gaming/virtual world space and the personalization/expression space.   On one end of the spectrum is Second Life and on the other end are ringtones.   

The immersive, virtual world that is Second Life and all these MMPORGs will have far less users and a very high ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).   I'd also bet that the overall ROI in the whole space will be much less, and the volitility among the bets will be high, because when they score, they score big, but they also require a lot of capital to get off the ground and maintain.  I'm sure one or two virtual worlds will totally tank after swalling up lots of VC money.

The more immersive and time consuming the experience is, the more binary your userbase will be.  Do you know any "casual" Second Life users?  Most people either love it or get overwhelmed by it in the first few minutes... and at a $20 monthly price point, its hard to be casual.  Building a whole virtual world is like building a web service and also building the underlying database backend, instead of just using what's out there and off the shelf.  I already have a "virtual world"... and its loose bits and pieces of my blog, MySpace, Flickr, AIM and Facebook.  That's why I like MyBlogLog, if it has the potential to tie these together.  (You'll notice that your face now appears next your comments if you're a MBL user.... btw... does anyone know any good templates for MT Comments?  I botched mine and would like to fix it, containing the whole comment in an individual box.)

On the other end of the spectrum, for less than a third of what it takes to build the average MMPORG, whole companies are being built around taking advantage of more lightweight users of avatars...  like as a visual representation on chat clients or as a way to be expressive on a profile.   You could look at these avatars as "virtual lite", but I think of them as "ringtones plus"...  or  "MeTones". 

There are a lot of people integrating avatars and virtual stuff into their offerings... everybody "want's in" and doesn't want to miss out.  I think the key is knowing how this fits into your community.  If you're doing an ad supported strategy and you touch a lot of users a little at a time, a whole virtual world doesn't make much sense for your audience.  If you've blown out a demographic and you see these people for long periods at a time, and there's a very strong sense of community loyality...  you might offer more than just a little personalization.  Either way, the key is to realize that users should be able to take their identities out of your world and play on other places on the web, and that you need ways for your users to interact with others outside of the world.  I may not spent a lot of time in Second Life, but it would be cool to receive e-mails and instant messages from people with their characters, or do the same with a character of my own, even if I'm not in the actual world itself.  Because, if I  need my whole network to be in this virtual world, just like a bad social network, its just not going to work.            

I'm realizing a really bad flaw exists in the GMail setup.  How do you find old mail where you know the contact, but don't know the words.  I e-mailed myself a photo sometime in February of last year, but I have like 2000 e-mails to scroll through to get back to it.  Gmail doesn't allow you to select a set of dates to go back to, or isolate messages by sender.  Its all about search (of course, because if I'm not searching then they can't place as many ads against it).  Now that I think about it, searching my endless archive of mail is just as inefficient as searching the internet with Google.  There's no context to anything... dates or otherwise.

Now... perhaps if there was a technology that adds user generated context to content...  [cough] ta-ahhem...tag-ahem...  tags [cough] [cough].

I dated a brand once.

We had a great time... lots of fun...  got really close right away, but then, suddenly, I got this note:

"Dear Charlie,

     You've been great to me and I really enjoyed the time we spent together... the money you spent on me... all the friends you've introduced me to, but now this marketing campaign is over and I feel like I need a change.  I'm afraid of just being the same brand all my life.  I'm not ready for this kind of commitment...  I hope you understand.

Love,

Brand-y"


I should have realized it would happen.  Marketing slogans change.  Products get redesigned, usually, for the worse--alienating loyal users.  Its so hard to maintain a consistent relationship with a brand, because they're always changing... looking upstream, downstream, diversifying, etc. 

Its even worse in a world of sell side advertising where you pick the ads you want to run, because they're brands you like.  Then, they just get yanked from you when a campaign runs out.  That's because marketing is campaign driven.  It has an end.  It is seasonal... driven by television lineups, upfronts, etc.  Brands aren't consistent, and so users have little loyalty to the message.  Its only a matter of time before I stop obeying my thirst to drink Sprite or quenching my thirst to drink Gatorade (Is Gatorade even the "thirst quencher" anymore?  I don't remember.) and I'm doing some other action besides just drinking it.

So at some point, Careerbuilder is going to stop paying us to maintain Careerbuilder Monk-e-mails, even though consumers still want to send them.  I mean, are they supposed to run this forever?  Well, maybe...   Its an interesting problem...  certainly it will be a messy breakup...  just one day the "send to a friend" button disappears and your consumer says, "You won't make monkey for me anymore...   we haven't monkeyed around in weeks...  are you seeing another consumer??" 

Persistence in branding is going to be an issue in a sell-side MeVertised world where the consumers think they own the brand and they have to be told they were just "borrowing" it.... unless we see longer term commitments on the parts of brands.  Like, what happens if American Apparel loses interest in Second Life?  Will they close the store?

I remember hearing Basketcase for the first time.  My mom and I were on our way back from visiting my grandparents in Staten Island. She had to stop at the Staten Island Mall to exchange an item and I was waiting in the car.  I was 14 and too cool to walk around the mall with my mom if I didn't have to.  I remember how cool I thought the song was, and remember thinking (maybe not at that exact moment, but not long after) that I hoped Green Day wouldn't be one of those one-hit wonder bands.  Eleven years later, I'm eating breakfast, watching the video for Boulevard of Broken Dreams.  Its so great to see them still going and I had this sudden urge to go see them in concert.  I checked their website and they don't have any NYC dates left, but they do have dates in April in Atlantic City, Albany, Norfolk (could take a DC trip to go see friends from college...).  Boy, do I wish I had a car.  Maybe I'd make a real trip out of it and go somewhere interesting.  July 1st...  Belgium?  Now that would be interest.  Werchter festival anyone?  Is it hot in the summer in Belgium?  Atlantic City or Belgium?   hmm.

So Kiko got sold off, and Skobee slips silently beneath the sea DiCaprio style...   but we still hold out hope in the face of tractionless attempts at fixing what we perceive to be a real problem.   Calendaring and invitations, obviously going hand in hand, seem to work far from efficiently GigaLiz puts it perfectly...

"Every time we have to click through an Evite, we cringe. We can’t say we use Skobee, Renkoo, or even aggregator sites like EVDB’s Eventful, Zvents, and Upcoming on a regular basis — that would require a mass migration by the people we do stuff with. But we do hope that someone makes it easier and more efficient to make social plans online."

Web 2.0 purists feel like Evite sucks, but you know what...  most mainstream tech users I know  have one of two opinions of Evite...   

It does the job...

... or they just don't like public RSVPs. 

I've never heard anyone on my softball team tell me that its unfortunate that Evite doesn't have more functionality.  In fact, the only thing I use that seems to work even better than Evite is a numbered list on the nextNY wiki...  which has even less functionality.   

The problem isn't client side...  in the invitation interaction itself, its server side and its on multiple levels.  Google Calendar didn't kill Kiko.  I don't know anyone that actively uses it.  In fact, I hardly know anyone who uses any calendar other than one their job forced them to... and less than half of the Outlook users I know put personal items on their work calendar.

Here are the nearly insurmountable hurdles anyone in this space needs to get over:

1)  Most importantly, most people just don't want a calendar.  It makes them feel too structured, under pressure, etc.  All these attempts in the "scheduling" space come from people like me who live by their calendar and whose life would be so much easier if everyone else did, too.  We keep thinking that, if there was only a good enough tool out there, we could get everyone using a calander, and that's just unrealistic.

2) Events drive calendar use, and only a minority of events are formatted to work with a calendar.  Think of the average family...  the biggest drivers of the family schedule--the kids' school and after school activities--are not in iCal, hCal, vCal, or any kind of call.  They're on a paper flyer or on a printed e-mail on the fridge.... or maybe written onto the fridge calendar.  Until schools get into Microformats, don't expect mainstream users to either.

3) You never know if the person you're inviting uses a calendar.  The beauty of Evite is that even if the other people never check the Evite again, it works for you when they click yes.  Try doing that to 100 people with an Outlook invite.  Half of the e-mail programs that open the message won't know what to do with it.  It was like when text messaging first took off here.  You didn't just randomly text everyone...  b/c you didn't know if they could get texts.  It took a critical mass of texting enabled phones for people to really get into texting here in the US, and reaching that critical mass took a long time. 

4) People don't want to let you know what they're doing.  What would really drive a lot of calendar usage is if you could negotiate for people's time based on levels of trust, open times in their calendar, etc.  For example, when I schedule a game of pool with my friend Brian, he's pretty much always going to accept an invite as long as he's free.  I should be "ok'd" to book a certain amount of pool in the empty spots in his schedule.  But, how can he expose his schedule to me w/o exposing it to the world, but also not come off like a complete loser if he doesn't happen to have anything booked yet for his Saturday night?   People share bits...  music, videos.. they don't like sharing information about how they spend their time...  b/c it makes them feel committed, locked in.

In the face of this behavior, what kind of scheduling service could ever be successful?

So, Adi Sideman, the CEO of Oddcast, just came into the office as he usually does late Sunday mornings and something he did just reminded me something interesting about the culture here.

He picked up the phone.

Not his phone number... the main line.

"Good morning, Oddcast".

We often talk about the "no touch" style of Google AdSense and other self-serve applications, but something I noticed from the first day I walked into Oddcast always strikes me.  Our phone number is on the website, and people here always pickup that main line.  If the CFO is at my desk and she hears the main line go off, she grabs the nearest phone possible to answer.

Its usually someone who needs a password reset or something silly, particularly if its on the weekend... and I'll bet few of the people who call release they're getting the CEO of the CFO of the company.

A personal touch is something that's really important to the people here and its sort of refreshing.  Admittedly, I don't rush to grab that line if I'm here by myself, but maybe I'll start.

In the last... hmm...   ten years, my work environments have never been stable and its been difficult to optimize for best results, but I've learned a little something along the way.

In high school, I used to hole up in my room after coming home from play practice (little known fact in the blog world, I did four musicals in high school...).   Doing work in your bedroom is probably the most distracting thing you'll ever do.  I was unlucky enough to have my own phone line, too (well, the other extension on that line was my dad's fax machine), so that didn't help.   Still, I only had a few hours a night to work and so time pressure helped.  I work much better under time pressure.

Also in high school, I took an architecture course.  Anyone who is building anything, be it a still life water color or a web serivce, will tell you that doing creative work is the most time consuming thing you'll ever do--because you can always put more time into it.  I spent every single moment of free time I had (and in senior year of high school, that was a lot) in the art room.  I had picked out the best drafting table.  It was tucked away in a corner behind a dividing wall and I had my back against very high windows... great light.  Most of the time, the room wasn't being used, so I had dead silence.   I got a lot done.

In freshmen year of college, I have to be honest...  after coming out of Regis, the work seemed sort of easy, so I didn't have a lot of time pressure.  I mean, I had class three times a day, no commute...  gobs of free time.  Again, I went with an enclosed space.  In my room, I built a "cubby".  I took the bookshelf from my the back of my desk and attached it to the end of my bed over in the corner of the room.  The cubby was great... I could go in there and people wouldn't even know I was in the room even if the door was open.  I miss the cubby.  I need some walls.

Sophomore year, I was in a huge room, but with three other guys.  The TV was always on, so doing any work whatsoever in my room was just a no go.  So, everyday in the first semester, I spent some amount of time at a cubby-like library desk with my laptop.  (That was 1998... first time I ever had broadband.)   I also used to go into the lounges in the dorm to work at random hours.   That was when I really started to learn how to wake up early.  I would wake up at 6AM and get two solid hours of work done before most people on campus even woke up.  That's one thing about the way I work...    I don't fare well on a normal daytime work hour schedule.  My best times are 6AM-9AM and 3PM to 8PM.   If I could basically work those hours, I'd be very happy.  All this forced quiet time let to my only 4.0 semester...  that was an abberation, but it was fun while it lasted.

Junior year was a disaster, relatively speaking.  I was an RA (stupidest thing I ever did) and so I had my own room.  I should have learned from high school that I can't work productively in my own room.   Lots of wasted effort there.... too many distractions.  I should have went to the library.

Senior year, I had mostly finance classes, so the amount of work I actually needed to do, after interning for a corporate pension fund for four years, was pretty minimal.

When I was at GM, I learned about my afternoon boost.  At about 3PM, I used to kick myself for not being as productive as I could be...  partly b/c of my own lack of concentration and partly because of all the co-worker interruptions I'd get in a day.   So I started pounding stuff out like a mad man for four hours or so and would leave at 7 or 8.  Funny how I can't get my mind to work exactly when I want it to.   

At USV, the work was really just so different.   When you're networking, researching, trying things out, its hard to figure out exactly where your work ends and just your overall interest in the area begins.  So, I'd sort of work a little bit 18 hours a day...  continuous partial attention.  If I was IMing some guy who worked at another venture firm about what verticals could benefit from aggregation, was that productive work?  I think so, but it sure felt different from writing 12 page papers in high school.  I don't remember networking much in high school.

So, here at Oddcast, I've been here a little over a month...    I'm a couple of weeks away from finishing all the design work that will go into our consumer product, and I'll tell you, its been like herding cats to get my brain working correctly.  Like, this morning, I woke up at 6AM, drove into the office to get work done, and was going very well for a few hours before this blog post.  Now, why I couldn't manage that on Friday morning, I have no idea.   I was going to go kayaking, but its raining again, so hopefully, I can get another spurt like that.   

One thing that is very helpful.... unplug once in a while.  Turn off your IM and e-mail while you're working.  I'm going to do that right after I click publish...

Here's a thought...   to what extent should you count on a GP to catch organizational issues and involve themselves in the day to day issues of a business?  Is this different in a venture company vs. a buyout?  Is failure to execute a problem of management or a problem of oversight of management?  When things go wrong at a company, how does a GP know before its too late?

Dreary day, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Eh...looks like its going to rain... I'm going to get out of here soon.

friend06p: (4:48:32 PM) So are u working on a little person project for myspace?

Ceo21: (4:48:57 PM) Yeah, that about sums it up 

Get this video and more at MySpace.com

Darren asks this question in response to the recent article in Wired.

He says it compares very closely to the hot, then not, NY club scene, but I think there's a big difference.  Clubs have a pervasive atmosphere to them... a culture.  Certain clubs appeal to certain types of people at certain times.  They trend younger, older, hipster or homeboy, and among these groups you want to have the best of the bunch there.  When younger people "invade" a more mature club, or older, less cool, people invade hotspots for young people, the strength of the club's identity and therefore the brand declines.

MySpace, however, isn't the same club to everyone.  Its flexibility allows groups to form on their own.  Its what danah refers to as "glocalization"...   bringing together your world, not the whole world.  I can discover other Mets fans, other Lacuna Coil fans, people in Bay Ridge, or other Italians.   No club can do that in real life, and so the idea that "whatever you want" might go out of style is something I disagree with.

However, that doesn't mean that MySpace can't fail.  The site is very slow and buggy and has serious scaling issues, like Friendster before it.  It is full of a lot of spam, and as a development platform, its like the Wild West.   Plus, its still pretty closed.  Are these fixable problems?  Definitely.   

Here's what I'd love to see MySpace do to secure its future at the top and avoid some social network pitfalls:

1. Fix the spam problem or at least open up and let someone else fix it.  I'd sign up for any service that blocked any new female with only one picture and no profile bling and mostly male friends to invite me or message me.  Its a very easy algorithm to detect fake profiles.
2. Innovate around your core strength: Upgrade music.  Music is the backbone of the network and the functionality of the player hasn't changed at all.  I'd love to see a MySpace/Pandora or MySpace/Last.fm integration.... anything that enables more radio station like functionality.  Discovering songs one click at a time is not as fun as being able to let it play for an hour or two.  Plus, why can't I break the player off the page and play it on my blog?
3. Scaling issues.  Hopefully, Google will lend MySpace a few PhDs to help the "MySpace Technical Group" which gets a bug report every ten seconds I use the site when a page doesn't load right away.  No reason why they can't get enough servers and bandwidth and fix the code to make the site run smoothly.  I mean, the "check my address book for contacts" thing has never worked! 
4. MySpace Developers Network or Whitelist:  If they keep approching widgets with this cat and mouse game, we'll never see integration with other services reach its fullest potential.  Innovation is what will keep people on the site, and creating a healthy platform for trusted developers to work with will benefit everyone.

And then there were eight. 

Everything I learned in elementary school science seems to be a lie.   

Did you know there were more than three states of matter?   At first I learned about Plasma, making it four, but now it turns out there are a whole bunch of 'em.  That probably explains why if you leave ice cubes in the freezer long enough, they completely disappear.

My friend Vanessa just started blogging to help facilitate conversations with other people working with people with special needs.  This field is really important to her... as her dad was diagnosed with MS over 25 years ago.   If anyone has any tips for other bloggers in this field she should connect with or how to approach this kind of a blog, please leave a comment on her site.   Good luck, Vanessa!  Its obviously a very worthwhile endeavor.

AdAge left out a key criteria in their overview of mainstream vs. cutting edge advertising...

"While marketing prognosticators and technophiles rush into the future, raving about the next big content delivery system or ad model, the fact is most Americans -- notably adults with steady incomes -- still get their content the old-fashioned way."

I agree, but how many of the key influencers are still doing this, but the bleeding edgers, trendwatchers, trendsetters, etc. habits are changing...  you can't argue that.  You don't have to reach everyone on the first try.. .you have to reach the right people... the people that other people want to be like.  These are the people that are always trying stuff first and get social capital for that.  There was a time horse and buggy sales were still strong, too, you know.  If you're not adopting to new technologies, you're going to find yourself far behind very soon.

I mean, seriously, who would you rather market to, my 88 year old Nana, or her 27 year old RSS enabled grandson who she knows is cool and wants to be associated with.  :)