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Have you seen Skittles.com lately?  It's now an aggregation of Twitter search, Facebook, YouTube, etc...  Instead of pages on Skittles.com, you essentially get pages from other social network sites, about Skittles, but at the Skittles URL. 

Like the Matrix, you can't really be told.  You have to see it for yourself.

People are going to have two reactions to this.

Self proclaimed social media gurus and advertising wizards are having a field day with it.  They're tweeting and blogging about it left and right--causing it to shoot right to the top of the Twitter trending topics list...

...which of course means that, when I go to Skittles.com, I can go see a Twitter search page for Skittles, which is filled with links to Skittles.com... thus creating an infinite loop capable of tearing a hole in the space-time continuum, ending all life as we know it.

Way to go, Agency.com. 

On the other hand, anyone not familiar with Twitter, which is probably most of the 18,000 average monthly visitors that previously came to Skittles.com and who will come to Skittles.com in the future when they hopefully change it into something less half-assed, will be seriously effin' confused.  They will undoubtedly get annoyed, frustrated and leave.

The folks at Agency.com will probably get praised for being so cutting edge, even though the Skittles idea was pretty much a ripoff of the Modernista site.

Instead, they should be burned at the social media stake for promoting everything that's wrong with big companies engaging in social media.

Where do I begin?

1) Instead of reaching out into the community and showing up in our spaces, they took our spaces and brought them back to their site.  Instead of sending traffic to us, they took our stuff and made it all about them.

2) Now their site is all about people talking about their site--which is kind of like bragging, in a way.  How exactly does that make visiting their site a good experience?  I go to Skittles to see who's talking about Skittles?  Is that what I came for?  If I wanted that, it'd go to Twitter search--the version without all this floating Skittles crap on top of it.

3) They didn't make it easy for the mainstream to participate.  When you show up on Skittles.com, it's not obvious to the non-Twitterer WTF is going on and how you get your thoughts on the page at all.

You know what's a really great experience in comparison?  Jelly Belly.  Over 130k monthly vistors and the site has a ton of news, info, virtual tours.  No, it doesn't have a ton of social media juice, but in terms of effectiveness, it's got 10x the normal traffic as Skittles, and, OMG, people are still Twittering about Jelly Belly even without this silly social media publicity stunt of a website.  Best of all, it has tons of info about Jelly Belly, which is exactly what I expect and want when I go to the Jelly Belly corporate site.

Right now, Skittles.com isn't telling me much about the product--at least not anything more than Wikipedia was already telling me.

It isn't telling the stories of it's customers.

It isn't entertaining.  Did you watch the YouTube videos?  They're mind numbingly stupid.

What's the point, other than generating a lot of chatter about the campaign, rather than about the product?

Fail.

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Andrew Chen is asking which startup's collapse will end the Web 2.0 Era?

End the Web 2.0 Era?  Wait... so are we going to ditch open source, go back to high burn rates, long and slow builds, and not focusing on data at all? 

How exciting for Microsoft!

Back in 2005, Tim O'Reilly attached the name "Web 2.0" to a set of emergent technology principals--guidelines for building "lightweight", data-focused, web services. Most of the services that inspired such categorization never consciously decided to be or aspired to be "Web 2.0 companies". That's usually the way evolution happens--natural selection and environmental adoption spits up a set of traits that get adopted through natural selection and some anthropologist comes along later and throws a taxonomy on it--drawing lines across the gray areas almost making them seem intentional.

I guess that's how the intelligent design theory got started.

These companies were simply pushing the edge of what we've come to know as best practices.  They aimed to solve particular sets of problems given current technology capability, cost and penetration. Stewart and Catarina weren't trying to build a Web 2.0 company at Flickr, nor was Joshua at del.icio.us.

In fact, I can't think of any startup where the intention was to "build something Web 2.0". Instead, the thinking was usually, "Wouldn't it be better if you could see the reviews of your friends?" or "Instead of making content, why don't we let our users share their own content" or "Let's just code this up in Rails, put out an alpha, and see what people think of it."

It all just seemed easier/quicker/more efficient to accomplish certain things using these Web 2.0 principals.  It was like that even before Web 2.0 had a name. You just had less people familiar enough with the technologies to apply them to real problems and build solutions until we popularized them with a monniker.

However, from a business perspective, grouping the set of companies whose products exposed these principals is a gross miscategorization.  Spread out across a myriad of uncorrelated industries, some were amazing ideas, many were not (as normally happens with innovation and entrepreneurship). Some had clear business models, others did not--and to confuse things, others had potential business models they chose to forgo to get scale or market share.

Andrew writes, "it turned out that most of these startups didn’t work out as real businesses."

Most startups don't work out as real businesses.  That's because creating something from nothing is hard.  It isn't because they're "Web 2.0" any more than it's because they were using open source technology.  You wouldn't turn around and say that most startups using open source fail and then blame open source, right?  Most startups ultimately don't make it anyway--and it usually has something to do with poor execution, bad management decisions, failure to solve a big enough problem or provide the right solution, etc.

Here's the truth: There never was a Web 2.0 any more than there ever really was a Yugoslavia. You just can't arbitrarily tie things that have very little to do with each other and slap a name on it--expecting it to be cohesive. If I use AJAX and Rails to build a group scheduling application for enterprises, it requires a completely different knowledge base and business accumen to make a Rails+AJAX real estate investment modeler--and no boom or bust in the Web 2.0 space will affect both equally.

At the end of the day, these companies will live and die because of their underlying sector and management execution more than whether "Web 2.0" falls out of favor. Indeed.com is much more correlated to recruiting than it is to Web 2.0.  Zoho needs to execute a good sales strategy for the SMB market rather than it needs to keep up with all the companies reviewed on TechCrunch. Muxtape didn't die because it was a Web 2.0 company. It died because it stepped in the mindfield we know as the music industry without a map.

Reporters and pundits will undoubtedly call the shakeout of companies started '04-'07 the end of Web 2.0, but the reality is that it's really just the end of a bunch of pretty unrelated businesses that had poor value propositions or business models--i.e. par for the course in Startupville. It's hard to be successful--even in good times. Most startups don't make it. 

In the beginning and in the good part of a cycle, the busts don't get the headlines. They're dwarfed by the launches and the fundings. With less fundings, and more companies with their heads down trying to build businesses than wasting their time pitching to TechCrunch, we were bound to hear more of Chicken Little. Since crashes gather more clicks than stories of unrelated individual companies running their course, that's what we have.

Silly bloggers. Web 2.0 can't die. It never existed in the first place.

Great comment on Andrew's post:

"An interesting difference between this wave and the experience we went through in 99-01 is that most of them will not collapse in big ways. Think about watching a 2 story building versus a collapsing old Vegas casino.
1. They are smaller, and even ones that are bigger can operate very small. I wonder what a 200 person Facebook looks like financially.
2. The ad revenue is alot of the time being done with ad networks that did not exist in 99, including Google so there is less fixed costs.
3. I don't know anyone who has bought an EMC box in this wave, infrastructure is much less of a fixed cost
4. Not alot of Oracle licenses that have to be paid up each year anymore either.
5. And most importantly, I think we all learned something last time and things just did not get as crazy in the start up world.
So maybe just like there weren't any big exits, there might not be any massive failures. But I guess we all know there will be some. Who will be the pets.com of Web 2.0 ?"

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Back in November, NBC Digital head George Kliavkoff left the company, but not without sending out a message to the troops.  In it, he cited that "NBCU has made significant strides in digital" and that he had done his job well enough that there really wasn't a need for him anymore.

After NBC (EDIT: and Fox--bad to assume both owners aren't at fault here) just forced Hulu to yank its content from Boxee--a browser built for TV that sent them 100,000 streams just last week--it reminds me of another "Mission Accomplished" speech. 

Check out the excerpts:

"I believe in my heart that this is a best time to start, run or invest in digital companies..."

Unless of course those digital companies need any content whatsoever.  Then, the practice of sacrificing virgins to the content-owning overlords may prove too costly for startups located in NYC or LA--given the rarity of chaste women in those cities.  I'm enthusiastic, however, about the potential of some Utah-based companies...

"I want it to be clear that my group does not take credit for any of these other than having helped set a tone..."

Don't blame me if this shit didn't stick. 

"...and create a culture where hopefully there was a new focus on, and understanding of, digital."

They totally understand digital.  In fact, some of them can even use it in a sentence. 

"NBCU successfully worked with ISPs and content aggregation partners..."

And by "content aggregation partners", we mean sites we own and not necessarily sites or services we plan to kick squarely in the nuts.

"These accomplishments, and many others, too numerous to mention, are an indication that a digital mindset has in fact taken hold throughout NBCU, in every business unit."

And by "digital mindset", I mean that NBCU employees have all been replaced by soulless robots programmed to do one thing... 

Help aliens destroy the world.

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

I don't code. 

Well, check that...I can muck up the HTML and CSS on my own blog, and I did cut and paste some PHP once, but for all intents and purposes, I don't code.

More importantly, though, is that I don't pretend to know how to code.  I know what I'm capable of and what I am not.

So when I see the pitchdecks and biz dev presentations that techie entrepreneurs send me, or when I ask someone to tell me about their company, I have to smile.  I smile the same way my CTO Alex smiles and shakes his head when someone who has never built anything advocates buzzwords like cloud computing or Ruby on Rails for every project.

Creating a sales plan, a marketing pitch, or PR for brand awareness is like building a service, and tech people are going to be no more successful at it than a business person will be trying to manage a technology build themselves or hacking something together on their own.  Sure, you get the occasional lightning strike exception, like Craig building the original version of Craigslist, but for the most part, every espect of a business requires focus and expertise to do it right.

For some reason though, tech people never seem to admit that they need a businessperson.  I see businesspeople ask for tech all the time to build a great idea but where are the tech people clamoring for a businessperson to market and sell a great product?

Some people think a great product doesn't need to be sold or marketed.  Sure, some things take off in a small community at first, but haven't we learned our Slanket/Snuggie/Freedom Blanket lesson yet?  Same product, but one of those products is making money hand over fist because of savvy marketing.

Crossing the chasm into the mainstream--really hitting that tipping point on usage or revenues or what have you--will be a function of a well thought out and well executed sales and marketing plan.  It's something that a lot of startups don't take seriously enough--until they're scrambling for users before their money runs out.  If you're asking the intern or the entry level marketing associate to drive your business forward, it's too late.

If you're in NYC this Thursday night, you should definitely check out Mark LaRosa and Jeff Stewart's nextNY presentation on Jumpstarting Sales at a Startup.  They're two sales experts and have helped a number of startups.  If you've got something to sell or are already selling something, this is a must-attend!

Long eyelashes and a long thin smile...pointed nose just like the guy she's with. He's in a dusty Yankee cap. They are both too casually dressed to still be single. I can't see her hand but they must be married. My view is blocked by the baby carriage turned towards them, awning and plastic weatherproofing raised to expose the baby in pink. It belongs to the woman next to them.

They are making funny faces at the baby. I can only see an arm poking out the side--tiny fingers pointing. Mom was a tattoo on her hand and a ring under her bottom lip--just a stud. She has big star earrings. The couple is chatting between themselves now. She has pulled down the hood of her coat. She has a single blonde streak across her otherwise brunette hair. They're nuzzling and he's kissing the top of her head as she buries it in his chest.

She's back to the baby now...and back to him. She makes a comment and he responds with a kiss. I can't hear because Alphaville is playing Forever Young in my ears.

Mom is tired. She yawns. She has a small piece of rolling luggage with her next to the carriage. The baby has thrown something on the floor. She pushes the carriage back to find it, exposing yellow leather boots.

The woman in the couple next to them is tapping the Yankee cap with her arm outstretched behind her against the subway car window. Her nail polish is very dark--almost black but not quite. Her nails are short.

The baby has an Elmo. I yawn myself and my eyes tear up as they always do when I yawn. The couple exits at Pacific Street. Elmo is dancing now--in rhythm with mom's arm. I can see the baby in the reflection of the subway door window. I didn't realize that before. Mom leans back. She seems a bit pregnant actually, but it could be her coat. Oh. Definitely not her coat.

Google reads your e-mail, you know. 

And Tacoda was tracking you based on your cookies.

And the government can wiretap your phone if they think you're a bad guy.

Remember when Facebook told everyone what I bought?

I hate to break it to most of you...  but 99.999% of the people in the world really don't care about this stuff. 

I mean, sure if you ask them in a survey, they'll care--but realistically, we have bigger things to worry about.  When Facebook shot themselves in the face with Beacon, most of the students taking my college business class hadn't even heard about it.

Facebook recently updated its TOS to give it the rights to stuff you upload, even after you leave, and people started flipping out.  

Someone wrote on Twitter that they were concerned that Facebook could relicense photos of their kids.  Really?  And why on earth would Facebook do that?  Is there a big potential revenue stream there for them?  I have a feeling there isn't much of a market for photos of your kids if you're not Brangelina.

So... Where's that rank on your concern scale relative to... um... let's say...  how you're going to pay for that kid's college tuition when the cost of education in this country outpaces inflation by 2:1?  Hell, I'm worried about that, and I don't even have kids.

Let's view all this stuff under the microscope of, "What can actually hurt me?"

In terms of consumer privacy, where's the relative concern over the credit report industry?  Whether I get an auto loan or a mortgage is based on information I can't check on everyday without paying for it that I also have little to no control over.  Nor can I add anything positive about myself, like references.  *That's* concerning. 

Facebook photos?  Like most people with half a brain, I don't post photos that I really care about that much on Facebook.  Any photo of me on the web could turn up on the front page of the NYT and I wouldn't really be that concerned about it--they're not worse than anyone else's photos.  And also like most people, I don't plan on eliminating my Facebook profile.  Hell, we forget, but most of us in our late 20's still have Friendster profiles!  Friendster!

As time marches on, having a presence on the web is becoming more the norm--as is having a mildly embarrassing photo or two around.  It's not the end of the world.  It won't get you fired.  You've still got a lot better chance of getting fired for what you say on the phone to clients, or just flat out underperforming at your job than based on what you post on the web.

And as for what Facebook's going to do with all your stuff--probably nothing.  I highly doubt, if I delete my Facebook account, I'm suddenly going to see all my photos being sold on some stock photo site somewhere--or some remnant version of my account that I can't get rid of.  The fact of the matter is, companies don't really fare well when they do things that piss off a bunch of people--so don't expect much abhorrent behavior from Big Brother if for no other reason than it just don't make a lot of business sense.

Now, if you're an artist and content creation is the way your feed yourself, then perhaps you need to worry about this, but for most of us, I highly doubt our day to day lives will be impacted at all--save for the fact that we'll have to read all our favorite echo chamber tech bloggers debate about it until Apple makes a new product announcement or Arrington returns from walking the earth like Caine in Kung Fu.

Link: ESPN.com - MLB - McAdam: The Big Question.

I'm liking this Typepad quickpost thing.   So if you're the A's, who do you deal?  Hudson, Mulder, or Zito?   

Personally, I like Hudson and Mulder better, especially because of one stat I've been paying more close attention to...  ESPN now has pitches per plate appearence... the total amount of pitches thrown per each batter that comes up.  High strikeout pitchers tend to have high numbers in this area, and you get a couple of freaks like Ryan, Johnson and Clemens who are able to ring K's up for 15, 20, 25 years, but if I'm making bets on longevity of young pitchers, I'd bet on someone who doesn't waste a lot of tosses.  Zito's P/PA number is almost a half a pitcher higher than the other two, meaning that over the course of an average game, that could equate to nearly 15-20 pitches extra for the same amount of batters--if he lasts the same amount of batters.  Throw in some inexplicably mediocre recent years and Zito is a tougher bet to me.  Hudson is just a winner, year in and year out, and Mulder is better than Zito if I'm choosing between the lefties.  Its tough to let Hudson go... its tough to let any of them go, but Hudson has the second highest winning pct of out any active pitcher.  If I'm the Mets, I'd sign whoever they give up.  Let the Yankees and Red Sox throw money at Pedro "5 innings 1 run" Martinez.  The Mets need a young arm to hang their hat on and Aaron Heilmann is not the answer, and I don't have a lot of faith in Kris Benson or that other goofball who can't throw strikes.

Fred talked this morning about the kind of blogroll he'd like to see...

"The only blogs I read every day are my wife, daughter, and brother
Everything else is based on links I see on the web
I wish there was a last.fm for blogs"

That's cool, but he's really addressing a much more fundamental shift in the way we're consuming things on the web.  A blogroll is just the data exhaust of our reading habits--or should be anyway.  More and more, through Twitter, Facebook, Google reader recommendations, del.icio.us, etc. we're being driven to things on the web from other people.

At the same time, the web has a much clearer picture of who are trusted network is--Facebook friends, the people we follow on Twitter, people we link out to, etc. 

That leads me to believe that there's a much more efficient and relevant way to consume content than my feedreader, which I filled over time, needs manual curation, and literally contains everything the blogs I read care to post, regardless of quality. 

The fix for this should be simple, and here's what the app would do:

- Let me login to Twitter and Facebook.  Instead of filling my reader with feeds, I want to fill it with people.  Whatever links they tweet, share, etc. become the flow of urls to me.  Instead of the firehose of everything from your blog, or *gasp* everything from everywhere like Friendfeed, I want to see the things you want to spend the social capital to share.  When you share something, you're investing with your social capital and if you continuously share irrelevant or low quality stuff, you'll lose it and people will stop following you.  The filter of knowing that you'll be taking attention from your network improves quality by an order of magnitude.

- Analyze it.  Screen for uncommonly appearing words, del.icio.us tags, blog post tags, etc. and pay attention to what topics are trending not only for me, but within my network of what my friends are reading.

- Filter it.  I've been pretty impressed with the PostRank widget on my blog and its ability to callout the best posts I've written lately.  It's pretty obvious what they're doing--looking at tags, Diggs, comments, etc...  but that's the important metadata we should use to figure out if something's worth looking at. 

- Mobilize it.  Give me either various clients so I can subscribe anywhere (and sync it up) or just a single feed so I can subscribe from anything I'm already using.

- Expose it.  Like Fred asked for, I want widgets showing most popular links from my network, best sources, and even aggregated data on most interesting content overall--a TechMeme for every tag. 

- Monetize it.  Give me the choice for a free version with sponsored links (links that people paid to get into my feed) or a subscription version w/o sponsored links. 

This is the way I want to consume content. 

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

This is seriously the worst Hans Gruber impression ever, and the dialogue they wrote for him was even worse... but Jamie Gumm saves it.

"Trust me I'm the all time wrongest tree to bark up..."

Yesterday, my blog turned five.

I'm not really inclined to write much about that...  I've got too much work to do today.

And, I suppose that's somewhat fitting.  This is me working.  You want to look back on it?  Knock yourself out.  It's all here.  Me?  I'm looking forward.  I have stuff to do. 

I'm not going to write about how much my blog has given me or who I've met because of it.  If you're blogging with any kind of consistancy and effort, you know what I'm talking about.  If you're not blogging, then the rest of us are inclined to think that either a) you do not want feedback on your thoughts, b) you do not think your thinking needs practice or c) you do not think you have any thoughts worth sharing.  In any case, we're not inclined to chase you down to force you into it. 

It's 2009 and if you don't get it by now, the world is passing you by.

I will, however, leave you with three lessons that I hope, in my five years of blogging, that you've learned from me by now:

1) You do not know everything and neither do I, so open communication makes us all smarter.

2) There are a lot of people out there who are working hard on awesome things.  There are a lot of other people out there talking about other people who are working hard on awesome things, talking about awesome things in general, and tagging themselves on the 8,000 pictures they took of themselves during social media drinkups and tweetups.  These latter people are to be avoided.  Strive to seek out those are are actually changing the world--leave no stone unturned.

3) You can't please everyone... so the best you can do is be a lightning rod for those likeminded people that you do see eye to eye with, and poke bears and rattle cages around the rest of them. 

Ok, back to work...

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