danah boyd on Class and Social Networking
Wow... thoughtfulness in the blogosphere...
I'll read this kind of thing any day over that ridiculous "people ready" flap that killed off a couple of million collective brain cells over the weekend...
From danah... The part I liked best about this essay was the part that had nothing to do with social networks...
Link: Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace.
People often ask me if I'm worried about teens today. The answer is yes, but it's not because of social network sites. With the hegemonic teens, I'm very worried about the stress that they're under, the lack of mobility and healthy opportunities for play and socialization, and the hyper-scheduling and surveillance. I'm worried about their unrealistic expectations for becoming rich and famous, their lack of work ethic after being pampered for so long, and the lack of opportunities that many of them have to even be economically stable let alone better off than their parents. I'm worried about how locking teens indoors coupled with a fast food/junk food advertising machine has resulted in a decrease in health levels across the board which will just get messy as they are increasingly unable to afford health insurance. When it comes to ostracized teens, I'm worried about the reasons why society has ostracized them and how they will react to ongoing criticism from hegemonic peers. I cringe every time I hear of another Columbine, another Virgina Tech, another site of horror when an outcast teen lashes back at the hegemonic values of society.
I worry about the lack of opportunities available to poor teens from uneducated backgrounds. I'm worried about how Wal-Mart Nation has destroyed many of the opportunities for meaningful working class labor as these youth enter the workforce. I'm worried about what a prolonged war will mean for them. I'm worried about how they've been told that to succeed, they must be a famous musician or sports player. I'm worried about how gangs provide the only meaningful sense of community that many of these teens will ever know.
Given the state of what I see in all sorts of neighborhoods, I'm amazed at how well teens are coping and I think that technology has a lot to do with that. Teens are using social network sites to build community and connect with their peers. They are creating publics for socialization. And through it, they are showcasing all of the good, bad, and ugly of today's teen life. Much of it isn't pretty, but it ain't pretty offline either. Still, it makes my heart warm when I see something creative or engaged or reflective. There is good out there too.
The Facebook Problem? Huh? (Scratches head) People, the same rules still apply!
The web is talking about the "problems" with the new Facebook platform.
Last time I checked, customer acquisition was a real benefit, no? Don't people usually pay for customer acquisition? As far as I'm concerned, the main reason why I suggested that Oddcast build a Voki app for Facebook was exactly that... to get more users. That's a phenomenal benefit for developers. Oh, wait.. is Facebook also supposed to invent a business model for you, too. That's like saying that AdSense sucks because it doesn't promise you customer conversions too, just traffic.
The problem of not making money with your app is not a Facebook problem. Its your problem! It shouldn't be up to Facebook to figure out your business model, too! Figure out a way to monetize your audience. If no one wants to pay for the Where I've Been app or you can't figure out how to stick relevant travel ads on it, then it shouldn't exist. If the Where I've Been app existed at whereivebeen.com, it would have the same exact issues. Facebook is not a parallel universe where the rules of needing a business model don't apply. This is real life, folks... and if you can't figure out a way to get the bills paid, well, sorry... This isn't Facebook's fault. Don't put your mouth in front of the firehose and than complain that the water comes out too fast and that you have a small bladder.
I don't really think this is a Facebook specific problem either. In fact, its actually a testament to how pure the signal usually is on Facebook. Right now, I have 25 posts in my newsfeed. Of the 25, 8 of them are notifications related to my friends adding or subtracting applications. The rest are actual usage of those apps, like Twitter updates, or people adding photos or friends or whatever they usually do on Facebook. That might be a lot, but compare that to my e-mail inbox. Of my last 25 threads in Gmail, 14 of them were not from humans. They were confirmations from purchases, notifications for folks joining the nextNY mailing list, ads, etc. On top of that, 4 more were blog comment notifications, which were initiated by humans at least, but not direct conversations.
I'm sure Facebook will adjust this issue, though, but it's not a huge problem. At some point, there will be equilibrium in the app world and people won't be adding or subtracting nearly as many apps. Plus, I don't really need to know when someone took something down... and maybe I shouldn't need to know that someone added something. If you invite me, fine... but I don't need to see that people are just playing.
In any case, I think the same basic rules of needing a business model, needing to be compelling enough to stand out from the crowd, needing to scale, etc. still apply in Facebook. Let's not forget that. It's still the web, people, not Fantasyland.
nextNY Social:Rooftop 2.0 This Wednesday!
Want to meet cool folks in the NYC Tech and Digital Media scene? Signed up on the nextNY listserv but haven't met us in person yet?
Come to the LaQuinta rooftop this Wednesday night (6/27/07) at 6:30PM and hangout under the NYC sky. It promises to be a great time.
Let us know that you're coming... RSVP here.
Business Tools for One
I've been really fortunate. Since I announced the fact that I was leaving, a bunch of interesting projects and conversations have come up.
And I've been keeping them all on a Google spreadsheet.
That's ridiculous... but does anyone else have any other solutions?
Basically, I want the Salesforce-like ability to attach e-mail conversations to people. I could actually get Salesforce, but I didn't really like it. Plus, I don't think I can attach e-mails to people unless it's with Outlook, and I've been using Gmail a lot lately. Do any consultants use Salesforce just for themselves? Anything else useful?
LinkedIn's Outlook plugin doesn't quite do it, because I can't add any info to it. I may owe someone an e-mail, but I may have a reason to wait, which I can't add.
And while we're on the subject of Google apps, why on earth doesn't Gcal provide IMAP compatibility so I can sync it with my Mobile phone or Outlook cal? This is a nobrainer and I think a ton of business folks would convert to Gcal fulltime if they could add and view appointments using their mobile phone.
Anyway, it just amazes me how, once you get out of the Outlook/Salesforce world of enterprise focused apps, how poor the tools are for organizing the professional lives of individuals are.
Breaking open Experiential Learning: An opportunity?
On Monday, two people asked me what I *really* wanted to do, and both times what I can up with was to be the head of Career Services for Fordham. (At Fordham just because that's my alma mater and the school I have the closest connection to... not because it needs the most help... seems that most schools are on par with each other in this area.)
That's not really realistic, though, for a number of reasons. First, I don't want to run the current implementation of career services at any university... The whole thing needs to be completely reinvented and its unlikely any university would allow that without a serious change in its approach. Too harsh? Take a poll of current students and graduates...ask them how helpful career services has been to them. Ask graduates how satisfied they are with their current job and whether or not career services even helped them get a job in the first place. Find out how many graduates undergo a complete career change within the first three years of graduating. It's just a broken model. A career staff of 5 can't help 2000 graduates all find their dream jobs without seriously scalable educational structures.
I have no doubt that the numbers are sorrowful, but I also have no doubt that most schools don't even come close to keeping these statistics. I teach. I talk to students all the time and right now, especially right now, they're overwhelmed by the task of career fulfillment. I'll write more later on this, but its not a quality issue in career services personnel. They're dedicated, hardworking people. Its a structural issue with the way these groups interact with students, employers, alumni, and information technology that creates serious inefficiencies.
You've got alumni with a tremendous knowledge base that goes relatively untapped. Counselors get tasked with the impossible task of helping a student get into book publishing one day and mortgage backed securities trading the next. Plus, you've got all these fantastic information and networking resources online like blogs and social networks that the students aren't being taught how to use professionally because most schools don't actually have a career class.
What I realized, though, is that the problems with this kind of education are not limited to the college career office. In general, structures for industry specific learning, particularly when it comes from learning from the accumulated wisdom of successful and experienced professionals, is horribly inefficient. This occurs to me when I compare the success of grassroots efforts like nextNY and BarCamp to the conference industry at large. As nonprofit, community driven organizations, they are often able to attract better, or at least more passionate, participants than their pricey, more capital intensive counterparts in a more open and intimate setting. Many times, conferences amount to members of a community paying hundreds of dollars to talk to themselves--a tax on poor self organization. Plus, you often wind up with industry newcomers having the material go over their heads and veterans finding the content relatively pedestrian. And don't even get me started on how hard it is to find the three people you absolutely should meet.
One of the issues with these grassroots organizations is that the second you turn on the money part, it needs structure, oversight, and it sort of loses its authenticity.
What of this all? I dunno... but what we have now in terms of how I connect with likeminded folks, or how someone learns about a career and makes contacts... is just poor. The amount of work I need to do to accomplish anything the least bit efficient on this front is ridiculous.
MySpace, Yahoo Swap? Worst. Deal. Ever.
Link: Report: Murdoch ponders MySpace, Yahoo 'swap' - CNN.com.
"Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is discussing swapping social networking Web site MySpace for a 25 percent stake in Yahoo, The Times newspaper reports."
Remember when East Germany and West Germany merged and they set the exchange rate at 1:1 and it wound up crushing the German economy to the point where it became known as the "Sick Man of Europe"? That's the kind of effect Yahoo buying MySpace at a valuation of $9+ billion would be.
Thought exercise: Facebook ad network driven by users
Here's a thought exercise:
Why doesn't someone build, as an app, a Facebook ad network.
Facebook sells advertising that puts ads on our pages and in our newsfeeds. Could you build an ad app that people would ad that could become like AdSense for Facebook (or, in fact, an actual AdSense for Facebook app). Conceivably, it could use some of the data of the signed in user to tip off the engine to get more relevent results, and you could pay the person who added the app. Imagine that, an advertising network that never has to pay a dime for the platform itself... you wouldn't even need to cut Facebook in.
Of course, there would be downsides. People might not like you selling stuff within their feeds and bringing a commercial feel to a social environment, so they may turn you off in their feeds... or join you and ad the app themselves so they can make money, too.
I would imagine that if such a thing was successful, Facebook would adjust its policy on ads in apps.
The First Weekend of the Rest of My Life
One thing I'm going to really love about having a little bit of time is the opportunity to meet more people. I'm a sponge for new people and their projects and being able to schedule things during the day is very exciting... so these next two weeks before I go will be very busy.
However, I'm also making some time for play. I spent a good chunk of this weekend dragging Mere around my life, which she was able to document.
Seems to me that any offspring would be genetically predisposed to large smiles...
Keeping a watchful eye over the kayakers... and yes, that's my softball jersey. No reason to change if I was just going to get it dirty later.
Concentration...
Samara almost got lapped... but she did get on with a nice outfield single.
I think I can... I think I can...
Sweet action shots... and yes, I totally popped the ball up to center, but it looked nice, no?
Four of Us Had Lyme Disease goes to 7-0, winning 21-12 even though we only had 8 people.
From Voki Product Manager to just one of many passionate Voki users... leaving Oddcast and looking for challenges, opportunities, and conversations
Softball is often a metaphor for life.
Seriously, hear me out.
I play on and manage two teams. When it comes to writing up the lineups, I always pencil everyone else in at their positions first, and then play wherever we’re missing anyone. Sometimes it means the outfield, sometimes first. Last night, I found myself at shortstop for an inning. I can pretty much hold my own almost anywhere in the field.
I’ve always been like that—playing where the team needed me. I enjoy new challenges and try to take a very systematic and thoughtful approach. I may not play the most graceful first base, for example, but I grew up watching my best friend playing it quite well and I’m always learning, taking notes… studying the game.
So when I started at Oddcast about a year ago as Director of Consumer Products—Voki employee #1 (before it even had a name, and yes, the name is my doing, or my fault, depending on what you think of it)—I played the role of utility player for quite some time. Sometimes it meant working on product specifications, other times consulting on design and UI, and then I also found myself in marketing and business meetings. It was an exciting opportunity not only to cut my teeth on product work, but also participate in all of the various aspects of the operational side.
In time, we filled out the Voki team around me… Business Development, Product, Marketing. As we got closer to launch, internal folks started converging and helping to push things forward. That was great for the product, but not as great for the larger opportunity that I wanted for my career. Essentially, if we're keeping with my metaphor, I started to DH, since all of our positions in the field were being filled. That may have been the most logical move for the team, but I knew deep down that I had the ability to make a bigger impact.
Was it a desired outcome? To be honest, not really, but it’s also no one’s fault and there are no hard feelings. I initiated the conversation about transition about a month and a half ago. I thanked Adi, our founder, for believing in me enough to bring me here in the first place and providing a fantastic experience. I talked about my desire to make the biggest impact possible in this social media/startup world we’re in and we came to the mutual conclusion that Voki was in good hands with the team we had put in place. At that point, we set a timetable that would allow me to explore some other opportunities that came up without leaving the team shorthanded. In fact, I will continue to work with Oddcast in a part time role over the next month or so and specifically focus on a couple of product and business development projects that I really want to see through to conclusion.
In an organization moving from a service business to more of a product business, there are bound to be disagreements, changing roles, and tough decisions, but I have to say that, down to a person, I enjoyed working with and respect every single employee here at Oddcast.
So, what’s next for me? Well, I’m not completely done with the sports analogy. Consider this my declaration of free agency. There have been some very compelling opportunities that have come through the grapevine (it was hard to completely keep it a secret that I was leaving) and I’m going to explore those. Frankly, I’m looking forward to having the time and the focus to give every opportunity I have its deserved attention. Trying to think about the next job while still working is hard. In the past, I took a weekend off before I started as an analyst at Union Square Ventures, and with Oddcast, I started working here on weekends even before I left USV. I’m definitely not going to do that again!
As you probably know from this blog, I have an exciting cross country trip planned for the first two and a half weeks of July and will take that time to think about what’s next and where I can make the most out of what I have to offer.
So what do I have to offer?
I’ve been exposed to quite a lot in a very short amount of time… getting more involved in venture capital from the LP side in 2004—the beginning of what people consider to be Web 2.0, jumping to a top tier venture firm in 2005 and seeing just about everything in the space for a year and a half, and then rolling up my sleeves and launching a social web application at a portfolio company that has thousands of users after just a few weeks of its Alpha launch. I’m extremely interested in product work, but also how the social media world has left a very thin line between product, marketing, and business development (see Facebook apps). I’ve been a technically savvy non-developer since 1987, when my dad first game home with our PS/2, and while I understand and believe in the power of “Web 2.0”. But, that goes for a lot of folks my age. What I think separates me is that I also have my feet firmly grounded in a Finance major and Economics/Accounting minors and can help companies take a very rational and effective approach to social media, versus just playing “follow the buzz”.
What could I do with all that? Well, I’m willing to have a conversation with just about anyone in the space and I’m considering everything from being employee #2, employee #8, working at ad agencies, venture firms, incubators, big media companies and maybe even just teaching fulltime. So, if you know of anyone interesting that I should be talking to, please, by all means feel free to make an introduction. My e-mail is charlie (dot) odonnell (at) gmail.com.
In the meantime, I do have a little bit of time on my hands, so if there are any interesting consulting projects or speaking engagements, I think it’s a great opportunity to get to know people I might want to work with and for others to get to know my capabilities. I’ve had a unique opportunity to connect to so many great people… 3 great employers, 2,000 blog readers, 900+ nextNYers, 500+ LinkedIn connections… and I’ve learned such a great deal from them that I always enjoy sharing it, especially with relative newcomers to the social media space, which is why I teach at Fordham’s grad and undergrad programs as well.
In closing, I want to thank everyone at Oddcast for making my time here incredibly educational and helping to lay the groundwork to make Voki successful, particularly Oddcast’s founders Adi & Gil Sideman, Adam G., who Voki could not have come to fruition without and I learned a ton about the technical side of product management from, our tech “hat trick” in Sergey, Dave, and Jon, our VP of Biz Dev Shaival, Hannah the Instigator, Annette, Craig, Yuni, Daphne, James, Cory, Tony, Erez, Gally, Isak, Oren, and Riv.
Is there any reason I'm not getting a Helio Ocean?
Avi told me last night about the Helio Ocean and I checked it out:
So 500 daytime minutes, which is all I need, will cost me $65 a month.
Other features:
- Slideout keyboard (Two thumbs up!)
- Unlimited texts
- Integrated AIM instant messaging
- Integrated Gmail and (coming soon) Outlook Exchange sync (we'll see how coming soon this is, that's important for me)
Does anyone have this phone yet?? This all seems too good to be true.
Tailspin
I just don't know what to say about the Mets. Finally, David Wright starts hitting and the rest of the team completely stops.
And I guess Joe Smith realized he was Joe Smith, too.
But back to back to back home runs. Dude... Baseball 101. If two guys hit home runs on you on two pitches, the next guy gets one right in the mouth. Frankly, after you give up one, you should always throw behind the next guy.
Somehow, we're still two up on the Braves, with the Phillies just three behind.
This team better start turning things around, especially now that the Yanks are winning. If, at any point, the Yanks have a better record than the Mets this season, I think I'm going to blow chunks.
And Pedro isn't the answer either... its not the pitching... they're not hitting. They need to get Alou back and figure out how to hit in the clutch.
PS... I played softball last Friday night and the guy on the other team looked exactly like Pedro Cerrano. I yelled out "Hats for Bats" from the outfield, but I don't think anyone got it.