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A few days ago, I asked a bunch of thoughtful people I know to post 7 second video predictions for 2009.  Not everyone kept to the 7 seconds (I didn't), but that was fine.  The whole process was made a lot easier using two web services.  First, I used drop.io to create a private dropbox where people could upload their videos, but not see the others that were posted.  I have this debate with Sam, but I still think that drop.io needs to brand itself as X for Y... whatever they want to be.  I don't think they can get big enough if they're just this really flexible platform that solves random-ass geek problems, like mass uploading videos from a group of people.  They need a simpler value prop.  Still, it was perfect for what I needed.

Then, Motionbox the *only* video site I could find that would not only take all of the various video formats that were posted, but also allow easy trimming and splicing.  I was expecting to use Kaltura, but I guess they changed their model into an editing tool for other communities--and have since dropped their consumer offering.  One True Media didn't recognize a couple of the files either.  Motionbox had an easy uploader, making the whole thing a snap--but one feature request is definitely titles. It would have been nice to type titles into the video as overlays.  Still, pretty slick.

So here it is...

Embed code: <embed pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" src="http://www.motionbox.com/external/player/id=0a98d6b81c1ee7c787" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="375" width="425">

...and here are the participants, in order of appearance...   

Bryce Roberts - Managing Director, O'Reilly AlphaTech (@bryce)

Chris Fralic - Partner, First Round Capital (@chrisfralic)

Jim Robinson - Managing Partner, RRE Ventures (@jdrive)

Brady Forrest - Technical Evangelist, O'Reilly Media (@brady)

Charlie O'Donnell - Co-Founder & CEO, Path 101 (@ceonyc)

Whitney Hess - User Experience Designer (@whitneyhess)

Howard Lindzon - Partner, Knight's Bridge Capital Partners (@howardlindzon)

Pete Hershberg - Managing Partner, Reprise Media (@hershberg)

Hunter Walk - Director of Product Management, Google (@hunterwalk)

Howard Morgan - Partner, First Round Capital (@hlmorgan)

Josh Stylman - Managing Director, Reprise Media (@jstylman)

Sam Lessin - Co-Founder & CEO, drop.io (@lessin)

Sarah Tavel - Associate at Bessemer Venture Partners (@adventurista)

Darren Herman - Head of Digital Media, Group Director at The Media Kitchen (@dherman76)

Andy Weissman - Founder, Chief Operating Officer at betaworks (@aweissman)

Brian Harniman - EVP, Marketing & Distribution at Kayak.com

Beth Ferreira - VP, Finance and Operations, Etsy (@bethferreira)

Nate Westheimer - EIR, RoseTech Ventures (@innonate)

Janetti Chon - Community Manager, Web 2.0 Expo (@janerri)

Laurel Touby - Founder & Senior VP, Media Bistro (@laureltouby)

Fred Wilson - Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures (@fredwilson)

Kristin Maverick - Director of Communications, Carrot Creative (@kmaverick)

and...

Josh Wilson, Ladies Man

Spinach Pie, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Even though my nana is sick, she still feeds anyone who walks in.

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Where the f is Carmen Sandiego?

Minesweeper the movie... "Calm down.. it's never the first one!"

Today,Loic Le Meur blogged that "We're not equal on Twitter, as we're not equal on blogs and on the web.""  He was talking about the need for Twitter to start filtering searches by authority--and by authority he means the number of people following them.

It's laughable...the idea that someone has "authority" because a lot of people pay attention to it.  Isn't that the most anti-Web 2.0 thing you've ever heard?  Did we forget about the long tail?  Wasn't that the whole point?  Level playing field... hear the small voices...   excuse me, is this thing on?

So, mark this date down.  Today, December 27, 2008 is the day that the digerati jumped the shark--the day that a guy who raised $12 million for a video blog commenting platform with no revenues or any idea of what the business model would be told the world that he only wants to listen to Twitter users with a lot of followers.

Perhaps that was his mistake in the first place--thinking that the only people worth listening to are people who are already big into Twitter. 

A lot of companies that will not survive the next 12 months because they will not get additional funding and don't have enough user traction.  Many of these companies were fueled by echo chamber ideas--they didn't solve big enough problems for nearly enough people nor did they have any sense of where the potential business value might get created. 

Along with the creation and support of these companies, we got a cavalcade of stars--voices that were early, and built up followings for mostly that same reason--the Robert Scoble's and Mike Arrington's of the world.  They became water coolers, and in talking about new technologies that were going to overtake the establishment they became the establishment. 

I think that's when, slowly, people started realizing--these new voices we were all paying attention to weren't really all that relevent.  Ask anyone in PR what they tell their clients when they say they want to be on TechCrunch--it isn't worth it.  You'll get a firehouse of traffic that will be gone in a week, with few of the people likely to be in your target audience anyway--unless your audience is other Web 2.0 entrepreneurs.

There's been an explosion in Web 2.0 "experts" and people have started carving out their own niches.  If you are a non-profit, you are much more likely to pay attention to a social media expert from the non-profit world than you are still going to listen to Steve Rubel--another key early voice.  Sure, Steve might have introduced you to blogging, but there's probably a more immediately relevent expert out there that you found using the tools that Steve taught you about.  In fact, this person probably isn't even an "expert" with a shingle--they're probably someone just like you, a working professional trying to solve an immediate business need.

So while the RSS numbers are still there for these early folks--because we all filled our RSS readers with them early on, we've actually stopped paying attention to our RSS readers nearly as much. 

We're much more likely to find worthwhile reading on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr--places where the screen in which I view the world is my friends or people I care about associating with--not the aggregate number of followers someone has. 

We're pulling back...  and the smart money listens to smaller, more focused, more immediately relevent voices--people we're likely to meet up with, share a Shack burger with, etc.  Sure, there are people with 40,000 Twitter followers, but there are over 1000 people who have more than 2700 followers.  Twitter is actually flatter than the blogosphere (and getting flatter--maybe because it's just easier), and it's not surprising.  Following a blog is a very low cost activity--having too many feeds in your feed reader is annoying, but it's not going to make you miss something cool going on right outside your door this very minute.  Follow too many on Twitter, on the other hand, and you're going to get overwhelmed quickly... or go bankrupt in SMS billing.

And the traffic is showing that we're drifting away from the early to the party folks.  Techcrunch traffic has been largely flat since June--although Mashable traffic, with more writers covering a more narrow space, with less of that patronizing, even sometimes mean, authoritative tone, continues to grow slowly but steadily.

Scobel's blog traffic appears down, and Techmeme--the water cooler of water coolers, is flat, as is Micropersuasion.

As technology increases engagment, we'll demand much more relevence...  and we're less likely to follow the water coolers just because they're the water cooler.  Most of what the masses are saying just isn't nearly as interesting as what your best friend wants to tell you or some smart person in your industry (Web 2.0 is not an industry) is talking about.

This is a good thing, btw.  We need better ideas from more people.  We don't need an authority filter--one based on sheer numbers.  We need a relevence filter...  and we're getting that--it's in our own head.  We're getting more and more likely to unfriend, unfollow, clean out, etc...  and the economy will sweep its share of noise out the door in the next year as well.  Remaining Web 2.0 compaines one year from now will be stronger, more stable, more useful--and the voices that most people pay attention to will likely be the builders--the other entrepreneurs and professionals doing your job who have encountered the same issue you have--not the sideline pundits.  There isn't much money left in being a sideline pundit anymore--just ask the newspapers. 

At the end of the day, I hope Loic gets his feature request, though--so that he can only pay attention to the other Twitter users that have as many followers as he does.  This way, he's not likely to notice when the rest of us stop paying attention to him and become our own little water coolers.

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Shrimp, tomato, and portobello pasta with orange tuna, and broccoli rabe., originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Yup... I made it!

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Mashable just reported that Plenty of Fish, the free dating site run by Markus Frind, is now the #1 dating site in the US, with a 17.02% share, 3-5x that of Match.com or eHarmony. 

I'm sorry, but I'm calling bullshit on this.  Do you know anyone who met someone on Plenty of Fish?  (PS...  I have no doubt I'll get anonymous comments to this post... Seems such remarks, always supportive of the service, always turn up mysteriously.)  If it had 3x the share of Match, you'd think it would have at least half the brand awareness. 

Supposedly, this one man operation is netting millions of dollars of ad revenues--of this doesn't wreak of a Web 2.0 Madoff scheme, I don't know what does.

But let's think about it for a second.  What's actually going on here?  It would be irresponsible to dismiss this out of hand without some kind of logic, right?

Well, thanks to a little deductive reasoning, I've figured out exactly what's going on here.

Let's start with what we know to be real--the money.  We've seen the million dollar check, not to mention the fact that, if logic holds true, someone at Google would have commented on the situation if he wasn't making nearly what he said he was or if his checks were fake. 

So if the money's real, it's got to come from clicking traffic, right?  The question is whether or not the clicks and traffic are real or if they're fake. 

If these were all real people, you would have imagined more of a buzz among real people.  A scan of Twitter reveals a lot more people talking about actually using Match.com than Plentyoffish, even though the latter supposedly has 3x the market share.  So either, for some reason, everyone who uses this site isn't telling anyone, or these aren't real users. 

Since this isn't a porn site, it seems unlikely that the audience here would be so silent, so it's probably the case that these aren't real users.  That doesn't explain, however, all the clicks.  If these were bot clicks, Google would have picked up on it right away and stopped sending him checks. 

Could he have fooled the Borg?  What are the chances that one dude outsmarted all of Google into believing his phony clickstream?

That seems pretty unlikely, too.  Thousands of people are out there trying to fool Google.  The idea that one dude cracked the code is far-fetched.  Plus, wouldn't he eventually do or say something stupid and get caught?  It's human nature.  If you had tricked Google into paying you millions per year, wouldn't you just be bursting to tell someone?

Of course.  That's how I came to my next conclusion:  Markus doesn't actually know the clicks are fradulent. 

Wha?

Yes, that's right.  He's totally unaware.  Remember what George Costanza said.  It's not a lie if you believe it. 

It's too good a secret not to get out.  Someone else is generating all the fake clicks.

But who?  Who would have any interest in having a site get fairytale-like traffic and click numbers out of a service that looks like a 9 year old built it?  Who could possibly benefit from a story of someone making millions from Google Adsense?  Not only that, but who would have the sheer brain power on hand to create an undectable army of clicking bots that model human behavior so much that they dupe Google's own servers?  It wouldn't be enough to just have the brainpower, though--you'd need extensive data models on how real users actually behave on real sites. 

Who might have that...

...unless...

...nah...

Yup.  Google itself.  The story of Markus Frind is better than any PR Google could possibly buy.  What's even more amazing is how it happened.

Such a plan would have to be held to a very small number of Google engineers and PhDs (And you wonder why Google has so many PhDs in the first place...).  It might actually have to be abstracted away from them, too.  They might have to think they were running some kind of simple, more mundane task... because, again, such a story would find it's way out if it got out to too many people.  No, each engineer would have to think what they were doing was pretty harmless.

That's where Steven Johnson's book, Emergence, kicks in.  It tells the story of very simple software programs that were meant to mix and match with each other to create smarter offspring, using simple survival of the fittest tactics.  By design, strong traits survived and weaker ones didn't. 

Under the guise of "testing" their click fraud conrols, Google unleashed millions, even billions, of tiny little bots out on the web, clicking away--little testers that could be divided up among all these PhDs and engingers so well that none of them would ever suspect a thing.  You've even seen them--random one-offs from sites you've never heard of showing up in your server logs.  The ones that get caught clicking die right away.  The ones that don't get caught have time to run into other little clickbots and they spawn... again, and again, and again. 

Eventually, given the millions of combinations of bots, they get smarter and smarter, until one day, one set of bots at a given site gets so smart, it disappears--seemlessly blending into that site's real traffic, and eventually dwarfing it, but all the while looking completely legitimate to the owner, traffic trackers, and even to Google itself.

Yup...  What you have with Plenty of Fish is nothing short of monkeys typing Shakespeare--a site whose audience is mostly made up of incredibly intelligent--almost sensient--clickbots.  The bots, not unlike a fantasy franchise league, have even started generating new profiles, pulling names, photos, etc, from other places, each with their own distinct clicking behavior.  They've even started plugging into the Aviary API to start creating photos of entirely new people that have never been seen before.

So there you have it.  Markus Frind isn't intentially a fraud--he's just the completely random and unsuspecting winner of the Google emergent  intellience clickbot spawn lottery.  Only through reason and logic could we uncover this--knowing that no matter what the stats say, we all know there aren't nearly as many actual real life humans using the site as we think, and knowing that only Google itself, and not Markus, could have the werewithal to unleash this situation. 

Let's just hope this machine city of cyberdating bots sticks to the personals and doesn't have any intention of clicking over to the Department of Defense website. 

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"...there are now thousands of little lightweight web services out there created by people who aren't in the business of building businesses. They are programmers experimenting in their free time. Maybe they're trying to promote their services. Maybe they just needed to solve a problem that only they had, without much concern as to whether or not anyone esle had it. These apps serve a lot of different purposes for a lot of different people, but that doesn't make them all businesses. Bubbles happen when we don't see the difference and we start funding (and overfunding) the projects."

I'm off eHubwatch!! | from This is going to be BIG! - Comments on New York Tech Community, Startups, Venture Capital and Career Education

There are a lot of reasons a university could come up with for not participating in existing social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.  You can't really authenticate people or control the messaging.  You might be exposed to illegal activities of the students. 

For a few years now, those of us who build communities online for a living have touted all the benefits of participation--how they could engage their constituencies better, increase their reach, etc.  It's largely fallen on deaf ears.

Well, today, we now have a reason why universities absolutely must participate fully on existing social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook--to protect their communities.

Brad Ward, who is the Electronic Communication Coordinator (does your school even have this position??) in Butler University's Office of Admission, uncovered a marketing scheme that should be the turning point of schools' aversion to participation on Facebook.  College Prowler, a college guide publishing company, created hundreds of "Class of 2013" Facebook groups geared to individual colleges in order to "catch" incoming students after gaining admission--in order to be able to market to them later.

You see, when students decide on a college, one of the first things they're likely to do is to join the Facebook networks and groups of their new school.  They search for groups on Facebook, and without paying much attention to who is running the group, they join up.  Once the numbers start climbing, these groups seem more and more legitimate, furthering momentum of signups.  In the end, 250+ groups were created by the company, giving them the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of students. 

The point here is that by not participating on these networks in any kind of coordinated, official manner, these schools created a vacuum that was taken up by marketers looking to co-opt these communities for business purposes.

If your school does not have official groups that you or an affiliate manages (and promotes!!) then groups will pop up.  Who will create them?  Anyone and everyone, if you're not present. 

Some schools, by tiptoeing into the social networking waters through closed, white label social networks, have made the problem even worse.  By consentrating all their efforts in one place, they've exposed themselves to the business risk of dealing with exclusive providers.  For example, it is rumored (and confirmed if you spend enough time on LinkedIn) that Affinity Circles is cutting staff. 

Hundreds of schools and associations, often instead of participating (and diversifying) across networks that already exist, depend on this venture backed startup as their main networking tool for alumni.  Hundreds of hours of integration, thousands of dollars spent on marketing--where does it all go if the company goes under?  Trust me, as an entrepreneur currently experiencing this venture capital market, if your school isn't asking Affinity Circles "How much staff did you cut?  Why?  How much money is left in the company?  What is your burn rate?" then you could very well be sitting on a time bomb.

For a school that participates everywhere their alumni do--on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, on their own official school blog, etc--this wouldn't be as much of an issue.  When alumni have multiple potential touchpoints to connect with their school, if one of them doesn't work out, you're not completely cut off. 

Butler is really lucky to have a guy like Brad working for them--someone who understands social networks and helps you create an innovative strategy for active and positive participation on them in a way that is engaging, but also covers all the bases that schools need covered.  If your school doesn't have that in house, perhaps it's time to invest in a good consultant who understands how schools work and who actively participates in all these networks.

Hmm... too bad I have a fulltime gig.  As an adjunct professor, active blogger, Facebooker, Twitterer, LinkedIn guy, and organizer of alumni, after stories like these, there's a huge opportunity here to help schools out with their social media strategy. 

Pics and clips from an awesome impromptu tech community snowball fight at the Shake Shack at Madison Square Park.  Props to the Shake Shack employees who participated in the fight and also gave us some hot chocolate.

Alex and I and our ill-fated attempt to charge the line.

You can call in (646-929-1686) or check out the show online...   be there!

Topic:

With over 2700 blog subscribers, 1700 Twitter followers, 1000+ LinkedIn connections, and 600+ Facebook friends, not to mention IM buddies, 100+ blogs in my RSS reader, and 3000+ e-mails in my address book, you'd think I'd be a bit overloaded!

I'm going to talk about how I "manage" all of these and also take some questions around the following...Friend everyone or keep a velvet rope? Can you develop authentic relationships at scale? Where does networking cross the line to self promotion?