Blog | Jeffrey Talajic

The Social Media Panopticon

August 8th, 2010 View Comments

Living in public is usually talked about in pejorative terms, with a fatalistic nod to the fact that it’s inevitable. As our social media lives collide with our actual lives, our activities are increasingly available for public consumption. In response, more and more of my friends are deleting their Facebook accounts. Will this become a widespread trend that causes Facebook’s 500 million person citizenship to dwindle back down to 400? I don’t think so, but who knows.

My position is clear — I’ve flipped all of the Facebook privacy settings off (#privacysucks), I deliberately control the first page of Google results for my name (#SEOkungfu), and I’m the proud owner of the Foursquare Oversharer badge (#aheadofthecurve). You can either go completely off the grid, or do the complete opposite. The in-between is too hard to define and curate, at least for me.

So this makes me think of things like Personal Identity, Personal Branding, and how technology has come full-circle, where once we were antisocial, alone on our computers, to now where we are more social than we’ve ever been.

Personal Identity

Who are you? How do you define yourself? I define myself, when I bother to think about it, along these lines: who I hang out, the art and culture I consume, where I spend my time, and how I scratch out a living. At a higher level these things are directed by my values, my family and upbringing, and my quirks.

Personal Branding

If you don’t think your next employer is going to Google you, you’re crazy. So you better control those search results, or be invisible. And if you do control those search results, they need to say the right things. Here’s an exercise — what are your three best attributes? Now think about this–are your online profiles and/or search results communicating them? They should. (Need help with that? I’m happy to chat.)

The Social Media Panopticon

Imagine it’s 50 years ago and you live in a small village of 500 people. Chances are, everyone knows everything about you. Got smashed at the local saloon and got into a fight? Public knowledge. Taught the neighbors kid how to ride a bike because her parents were too busy to do it themselves? Public knowledge. It cuts both ways — your reputation goes up as you do good, your reputation goes down as you act like an asshole. And as it should.

Back to today and it’s happening again, we’re living in public. It’s the social media panopticon. That sounds pernicious and Big Brotheresque, but let’s remember that it’s voluntary. And let’s also remember that people in small villages tend to be sweet and helpful. If everything you do is being watched, don’t you act like a better person? And before you say that it’s somehow inauthentic to adopt the pose of a “better” person, don’t you actually want to be a better person? And don’t we need all the help we can get?

Nexus One Review: Not Your Grandma’s Cell Phone

July 4th, 2010 View Comments

And even if Grandma wants a Nexus One, don’t buy it for her. Get her an iPhone. For serious.

Having said that, I will never buy another iPhone. Now that I’ve gone Android, I’ll never go back.

iPhone battery issues got me thinking of upgrading to a new phone in the first place. At the end of its life, my iPhone 3G needed 3 charges a day. That boggles the mind. But alas, that’s pretty much the standard for a 2-year old smartphone battery these days. But what gets my goat is the fact that I’m not able to simply buy a new battery. Apple’s obsession with “perfect” design unfortunately means it’s not terribly functional — no replaceable battery is a deal killer for me at this point.

So onto my thoughts on the Nexus One.

Battery

I bought a second battery right away (at a very reasonable $25)
I can usually go from 8am till about midnight on one battery
Swapping batteries is a bit of a hassle since I have to power the phone off then back on, but of course this would be true of any phone

Multitasking

I’m generally running about 7 apps at any given time (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Music, Latitude, Locale, Talk [i.e., the Gmail Chat app])
Battery life and performance are both great with this setup

Custom Wallpapers

I was installing coloured LEDs, spray painting, and Dremeling windows into my PCs back in the day — so yes, I like to customize. And Android let’s me do that.
Change your backgrounds
Live backgrounds (I’m found of the Aquarium — I have a school of fish constantly swimming behind my apps, it’s very cool!)

Custom Ringtones

The iPhone is iPod meets phone, so you would think it would be easy to use your music as ringtones. Not true. Apple wants you to buy ringtones from them. That’s what happens when your phone manufacturer is also a music store.
Android lets you use any music file for any purpose — different songs as ringtones for different people, or even custom sounds for each text message notification. Such simple things — other phones have been doing this for years — but coming from the iPhone, this is a breath of fresh air.

Notifications

You don’t realize what a big deal this is until you’ve had an Android in your pocket for a day or two! There’s a notification menu that slides open with as simple top down thumb swipe that has become the center of my existence.
Twitter replies, Facebook messages, my friends’ Foursquare checkins, new emails, voicemail, text messages, Google chats — all these things magically populate the notification menu in realtime. No need to check for updates in a dozen different places, it’s all under one roof on Android.
Does that sound like too much going on? Don’t worry, you control which apps push updates to the menu
The (otherwise useless) Nexus One trackball glows different a colour when I have different notifications waiting for me — Twitter and Facebook glow blue, email is white, SMSs are red, etc. So there’s no need to unlock the phone and check all these services to see if anyone wants to say hi, I can just glance at my phone and see if the ball is glowing or not. Easy.

Unlocked

I’m heading to Europe in a few weeks for a little vacay and I’ll be able to pop in a Euro sim card and have it just *work*. No hacking, no jailbreaking, no hassle. (This applies to trips to the US too. No more $1000 phone bills after a few days in America, what a novelty.)
And when my Fido contract is up, my phone is compatibile with every cell provider in my local market — Public Mobile, Bell, Telus, Rogers, Fido, and the Videotron network which is due to launch in a couple of months. In other words, I can switch providers every month in search of the best deal. (I’m never taking another cell contract thank you very much.)

No More Syncing With iTunes

Adding 1 song to my iPhone actually took about 30 minutes. Why? Because iTunes insisted on backing up my entire phone every time. Total lunacy.
There’s no syncing at all with my Nexus One. My app data is backed up over the air.
Plugging in my phone via USB has it show up as an SD card mounted on my Macbook. Simple. Drag and drop files onto it as needed. That’s it. No iTunes management with complicated menus and epic syncing sessions.

Music

I can’t buy music over the air with the Nexus One because it uses Amazon’s MP3 store which (like freedom and the pursuit of happiness) is not available in Canada.
The Music app sucks. It works — you click artist, you click album, you click song. Simple. But the iPhone is slick. This isn’t slick at all.

Widgets

My homescreen has 2 widgets — weather and my calendar. At a glance, without launching an app, I can see if it’s going to rain and what my next meeting is. This isn’t rocket science, but it is seriously useful.
My Twitter and Foursquare widgets are constantly piping in updates that I can see at a glance.
My CBC Radio widget lets me flip on Radio One with a single press.

Locale (Geo Fences)

This is a paid app but it’s so awesome I wanted to mention it!
My ringer/vibrate settings actually change depending on where I am.
At work my phone sits on my desk, so I keep the ringer and vibrate off, but I’ll see my screen jump on when I’m getting a call
At home the ringer and vibrate are both on full blast
At school the ringer is off and since my phone is in my pocket, I keep the vibrate on
I don’t have to change settings — my phone just knows where I am (thank you GPS) and changes settings depending on my geographic location.
You can also change settings based on other criteria — battery life (ex: battery is low, maybe turn off the wifi), time of day (ex: no calls after midnight please!), or even who is calling (ex: my phone is on silent for everyone except my mom!)

I have no doubt Locale’s features will either get copied or they will get acquired by Google or Apple. This stuff is killer and truly makes the phone “smart”.

Keyboard

Straight up, the iPhone keyboard is better. I can fly on an iPhone, but after 2 weeks with my Nexus One I’m still not as fast.
Unlike the iPhone you can actually replace the keyboard with third party solutions. (I like Swype a lot.)

Flash

Flash works surprisingly well. But I tried loading Frontierville and it crashed. So super huge involved Flash games? Not going to work. But basic website functionality works like a charm. You can actually surf the entire Internet now, that’s actually a first for a smartphone.
Famously, Steve Jobs will not let Flash on the iPhone.

Torrents

I haven’t played with this yet, but there are Torrent apps that can actually queue up and start torrent downloads on your home computer. I’m pretty sure Jobs isn’t going to let that on the iPhone anytime soon

Speed

Moving from an iPhone 3G to the Nexus One was a huge jump — I essentially skipped a generation of smartphone, so the speed increase has been startling. Web pages, apps, everything is super snappy and launches in no time at all.
Web surfing on this device is awesome — fast fast fast.

Hotspot

Setting up my Nexus One as a mobile wifi hotspot is super easy. My Macbook connects to it no problem, and surfing speeds are shockingly fast. I used USB tethering with my iPhone 3G and found that very slow. The hotspot is a revelation and can see myself using it a lot.

Google Calendar and Account Syncing

Are you a Google Calendar user who uses an iPhone? Do you want the ability to add a new calendar item on your phone, and have it show up in Google Calendar on the web? Out of the box, this simple functionality doesn’t work. Now, there is a way to make it work, but we’re talking some serious settings kung fu that 99/100 people aren’t going to do.
As you might expect with the Google Phone (aka, the Nexus One), or any Android phone, syncing with your Google account is brain dead easy. Enter your username and password. And you’re done.

Updates

Ever update an iPhone to the latest firmware? Pain in the ass. But I got the Android 2.2 update over the air last week and it couldn’t be simpler. I was prompted to upgrade, I clicked yes, and a few minutes later it was done. No cables, no syncing, no backup, it just worked.

I’ve left a bunch of stuff out of this review — here’s a quick list and my reasons for not going into more depth:

Marketplace (this is the Android App Store) — it sort of sucks, but I never use it.
Apps — yes, the iPhone has a bajillion more apps than the Android. But the Android is catching up quickly. More importantly for me, I don’t use a bajillion apps, even when I was on the iPhone. I use like 15, tops. And I have them all on my Nexus. So whatever!
Camera — apparently the iPhone 4 has a gorgeous camera. The Nexus One camera is pretty good, but frankly I never use. I never used the iPhone camera before it.
Facetime — iPhone 4′s killer app isn’t that interesting for me. And there’s no front facing camera on the Nexus One. I don’t really see myself doing a lot of Facetime-like calls, but that’s just me. I don’t really talk on the phone a lot in the first place. Now, if Apple had bought Skype and integrated Facetime with Skype and made it work on 3G and not just wifi, well, then, that would truly be killer. But you can only talk with other iPhone 4 users if you’re both on wifi? Umm, so that’s like 7 people?
Phone — the phone is great, the voice dialing is great. Not much else to say about that.

Concluding Remarks

If you’ve made it this far, you can tell I’m thrilled about my new phone. Other than the keyboard, I have no real complaints. However, always consider the source. I’m a geek. When I first popped in my Fido SIM card, my phone couldn’t use the 3G network. I had to go switch it on deep inside some menu. I’m happy to do that because I’m the type of guy who is going to investigate every setting and every menu anyway. But grandma? She just wants it to work! And while some things, like updates, are super simple, other things, like setting up Locale, the hotspot, and customizing notifications, actually require you to play around in the menus for a bit. Most people won’t bother, so as a result, this is not a phone for most people.

I met an iPhone fanboy last fall who wasn’t very technologically skilled. He didn’t know how to change his ringer. He didn’t know how to turn on vibrate. Basic, basic stuff. But he loved his phone, he thought it was best thing ever. My guess is that most people are like this, or (I hope!) slightly more advanced. But the Nexus One menu system and customization settings are likely too complicated for your average Joe. Hopefully the next upgrade (Gingerbread) which is coming in the fall will address many of these issues.

Bridging the Online-Offline Gap

May 28th, 2010 View Comments

There’s a great line by comedian Louis CK when he was on Conan last year: “Everything is amazing and nobody’s happy.” It’s a brilliant and hilarious rant about how technology has changed our lives and people don’t realize or appreciate it, check it:

Another great line: “How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only 10 seconds ago” about the guy who complains about the Internet breaking on the plane.

It gets me thinking about how technology has changed my life, and how my offline and online worlds are increasingly colliding. As we integrate new technologies into our lives, it’s amazing how quickly we forget that we once had a life without it.

Remember life before the Internt? I guess I do, but not really. And people younger than me definitely don’t. My dad introduced me to Usenet in about 1990 (I was 9), and then shortly thereafter we got onto CompuServe. From there I discovered chatrooms (which taught me how to type), and from there I discovered IRC. I learned how to build computers because I found out you could play multiplayer Doom if you had 2 PCs — so I took apart and upgraded an older machine we had. Then I learned how empowering the Internet could be because when I had questions about PC building and networking I could find answers on newsgroups or by asking people in IRC chatrooms. In 1995 my dad came home from a business trip and brought me my very first issue of Wired:

For Christmas I naturally asked for my own subscription! Looking at the headlines on the cover are making me laugh right now: Interactive media: who needs it?, Neal Stephenson, and questioning traditional encyclopedias. These are conversations we’re still having.

Fast forward to today and I don’t see the distinction I once had between my offline and online lives. When I was a kid I didn’t really tell people that I was spending copious amounts of time in chatrooms. Now? My Twitter handle is on my business card. (And yes, Twitter is just one big chatroom, 100 million people strong.) In other words, Twitter isn’t a deviant thing I do by myself when nobody else is around like the chatrooms of yore. In fact, I’ve started meeting my “Twitter friends” in real-life, converting them to “real friends.” But in truth I don’t make the distinction between “Twitter” and “real” friends. They’re just friends, or contacts or people I know. Online or off? Who cares. It’s just the world, it’s just people–there is no online-offline gap as it relates to relationships.

And I love how the next wave of social media, location-aware services, are further bridging that online-offline gap. Google Maps has long given physical locations an online footprint, but something so silly as “checking-in” with your phone at a restaurant actually takes that footprint and gives it a leg or two. It connects an actual person to a real location, and produces a kind of digital shadow of what transpired. And this will only continue. Maybe not as Foursquare or Gowalla in their current forms, but this real-time linkage between people, places, and their corresponding online profiles, will only continue. If you can innovate in that stack, you may well have a legitimate business idea.

I admit that it’s polarizing. If you tell 10 people about Foursquare, most of them will shriek in horror. Why would you want to do that? I recently watched Marc Andreessen’s lengthy Q&A session at Stanford (worthwhile if you have the time) and he made the point that he loves to invest in polarizing technologies, stuff that 80% of people shriek in horror at, but that 20% of people become completely obsessed with. That reminded me of Facebook when it first arrived on the scene–many of my friends absolutely refused to join, saying it was creepy and weird. They said the same thing about Twitter a year ago. And now that’s the consensus around location-aware apps.

The more technology changes our lives, and the more we don’t realize it, the more we bridge the online-offline gap. I have ongoing conversations with people via Twitter, that move fluidly to in-person, to phone, to SMS, to email, to chat, to Facebook. Most of this was impossible a very short time ago, yet I take it for granted, it feels like it’s always been here. And that’s because I don’t consider the communication platform when I’m communicating. Online or offline? It’s just communication.

There’s still room for disruption for television on the Internet

May 16th, 2010 View Comments

Bill Gurley recently wrote an incredibly detailed piece on how the TV industry works, how the money flows through the stack, and why a niche channel I never heard of — AMC — is suddenly a must-have simply because they have one hit show, Mad Men.

So the cable/satellite game works like this: every channel gets paid an affiliate fee by the cable/satellite company for every subscriber it has. So if the Disney Channel has a million subscribers on DirecTV, and they’ve negotiated a $1 affiliate fee, DirecTV pays Disney a million bucks.

A channel like AMC has to produce only one hit show to make it a “must-have”. If the whole world is buzzing about the awesomeness of Mad Men, and you’re DirecTV and you don’t offer AMC, you have a problem. So what do you do? You get AMC on your roster pronto, and sit back and smile as your subscriber base adds it to their monthly plans overnight.

Gurley makes the point that a channel like AMC only needs one hit show, and they can broadcast pretty much any old crap the rest of the time. Why? Because AMC’s affiliate fees aren’t based on how much people are watching their shows, it’s based on how many people subscribe to their channel. Mad Men produces huge subscriber counts, and there are diminishing returns for additional investment in content.

Hulu recently started charging for the service because cable networks like Comcast complained. Why should Comcast pay affiliate fees when Hulu doesn’t? Fox/NBC/ABC, who own Hulu, acquiesced, and now Hulu pays affiliate fees. That obviously completely changed the economic reality of running the service, hence the pay wall that now exists.

So it seems that the dream of on-demand, free (but ad-supported), streaming television on the Internet is dead. And not because there isn’t a demand. Who doesn’t love on-demand, free television? Yes, there are PVRs, and yes, network sites are increasingly making content available. But it’s not the same.

The problem is that the content creators are addicted to those affiliate fees (and who can blame them?), and as a result they’re in bed with the distributors.

I’d love to see a new spin on the Hulu idea, where content creators bring new properties straight online and skip the TV distribution model altogether. Mad Men was originally created by a production company called Road Rebel. Road Rebel sold the rights to Mad Men to AMC. What if Road Rebel had sold the rights to “Hulu 2.0″ and instead of receiving lump sum payments, agreed to a revenue share based on the advertising revenues the show generated, in perpetuity? And what if “Hulu 2.0″ wasn’t country-specific, but a geo-unrestricted distribution platform? Mad Men had a million viewers for their Season 1 premiere. That’s just in the United States, and just on an obscure cable channel. If a show was truly “hot” and everyone was talking about it, isn’t it reasonable to think that a show with distribution into any Internet-connected home worldwide would generate not just a million, but tens of millions of viewers?

Consumer Decision Making Process

May 15th, 2010 View Comments

The green boxes are the stages in the consumer decision making process, and the corresponding yellow boxes are the internal psychological processes the consumer experiences along the way. This was a recent topic in my Integrated Marketing Communications class last week.*

As the professor was talking my mind wandered and I started to think web startuppy thoughts. Who gets paid for contributing to these stages and who doesn’t? Online advertising is broken. It over-rewards late stage contributors, and barely rewards the early stage influencers.

Think about that Purchase Decision box. Let’s say I decide I want to buy a digital camera, and I’ve already gone through all the preceding boxes and I’ve done my homework and decided the Nikon D5000 is for me. Easy! I’m going to Google. Here are the ads I see at the top:

And here are the ads on the side:

If you know anything about the camera category and Google AdWords, you know these ads earn Google very high CPCs because there are a lot of retailers bidding on these placements, driving the prices up.

I have no issue with Google making money helping users find retailers to buy stuff. But I think there’s a real opportunity for whomever figures out how to innovate the advertising model for those earlier boxes. Websites that contribute to Need Recognition/Motivation and Alternative Evaluation/Attitude Formation barely get compensated at all! Yet motivating users to want a brand, a model, a product category, is arguably the most difficult thing of all.

And if you as a content creator are successful at this? You get bupkis.

Someone’s going to figure out a model where:

Advertisers are confident that their ad dollars are contributing to real purchases, even if those dollars are spent earlier in the conversion funnel
Content sites are rewarded for capturing the attention of valuable audiences
Users are happy because there will be more high quality content around for them to consume

And whoever figures this model out gets to be the next Google. Get busy!

*I made those boxes but they were inspired (i.e., stolen) from my prof’s slides. My boxes are prettier

Review: Novothink Surge Solar Charger for iPhone 3G & 3GS

April 21st, 2010 View Comments

Simply put: the iPhone’s battery sucks. My 3G is approaching it’s second birthday and I can’t get through a day without a couple of charges. So when I heard about Novothink’s Surge iPhone solar charger, I thought, maybe, just maybe, this will be the solution to my problem. Is it? Sort of! Read on for my quick and dirty review.

It comes in a box:

Open the box, you get some stuff:

So how does it work? Essentially it’s a case for the iPhone that slips onto the back and plugs into the dock connector. Here’s the Surge next to the iPhone:

Here’s a look of the dock connector inside the Surge:

And here’s the iPhone cradled inside the Surge:

The promise of solar energy for mobile devices is huge. Just think of any calculator from the past 20 years — no batteries required, no plugging it in to charge it, nothing. It just works. I like to think that one day we’ll experience the same ease of use with our cellphones (and laptops, netbooks, etc). The Surge is really the beginning of the mobile device solar power revolution.

Here’s my bullet point review.

Pros

Fits the iPhone like a glove
Constantly charging the phone is great, and frankly, necessary
Works with direct sunlight or artificial light sources
LEDs indicate light strength (and speed of charging)
LEDs also indicate how full the Surge battery is
You can charge the Surge without your iPhone plugged in
Cool factor is off the charts
Integrated USB is great so you don’t have to pull the phone out of the Surge to sync with your computer
Rugged design feels very sturdy
Is the only solar charger accessory approved by Apple
Free App estimates charge times

Cons

Weight — at 79 grams, it adds nearly 50% more weight to the iPhone
Size — more than doubles thickness of the phone (see pics above)
Charge time — don’t expect this to replace traditional charging — it takes 10 hours for a full charge in overcast lighting conditions (see charge times below)

Overall, I’m very happy with the Surge. I find it’s a bit too heavy and thick to carry around in my pocket all day, but it’s definitely something I will bring to the office, to class, and keep in my school bag. What’s great is that the Surge has its own internal battery (probably the source of most of its weight) so you can actually charge it up without your iPhone plugged in at all.

I will probably keep it fully charged and in my bag at all times, so when my iPhone battery dies during the day, I can slip the Surge on and continue talking, texting, surfing, and listening to music without missing a beat. That’s the real value here. It’s more of a backup battery than a permanent solar panel for your phone. (Which makes me wish Apple simply included removable batteries on their phones.)

I would love to see a solar panel integrated into future smartphones — not as an accessory, but as a core element of the product — but until that day comes, I applaud Novothink for filling an important niche. Great stuff.

Retails for $79.95 and you can pick one up directly from Novothink. They also make an iPod Touch version.

Innovating in the Stack

April 16th, 2010 View Comments

I’ve been thinking about stacks recently, ever since I read a piece by Chris Dixon on Google’s stack. From Dixon:

Google makes 99% of their revenue selling text ads for things like airplane tickets, dvd players, and malpractice lawyers. A project is strategic for Google if it affects what sits between the person clicking on an ad and the company paying for the ad. Here is my rough breakdown of the “layers in the stack” between humans and the money:

Human - device – OS – browser – bandwidth – websites - ads – ad tech – relationship to advertiser – $$$

That seems pretty obvious when you read it, but I needed Chris to point it out for me. Since that eureka moment I’ve been thinking stacks nonstop! I’m a stackaholic.

I recently got into Last.Fm again and I’ve been thinking about the music stack. How do, say, bands, make money? Pre-Internet, there were two main music stacks, one for radio, one for retail:

The Radio Stack: Human – radio – radio station – relationship with record label – relationship with agent – contract with band – band ($)

The Music Retail Stack (Pre-Internet): Human – transportation to retailer – retailer – physical media – manufacturer – record label – relationship with agent – contract with band – band ($)

So those were the two “stacks” that put money into the pockets of bands. And each layer in the stack arguably added value for the consumer of that music, but took a piece of the action from the band.

Now let’s consider the stack Napster created:

The Napster Stack: Human – computer – Napster – music

What’s missing here? How about the band! How about all the middle men! Napster added incredible value for the end user — download right away to your computer! for free! – but obviously completely screwed everyone else. Yes, the music still had to get made, recorded, etc, but that was done in a different stack. The Napster stack just siphoned off the content and gave it to the masses!

Last.Fm and dozens of others are innovating in the music stack now. For example, I pay Last.Fm three bucks a month! In a world where Napster spun the music industry on its head, how am I actually dishing out money for music? Here’s the Last.Fm stack in reference to me:

The Last.Fm Stack: Jeff – laptop – web – music recommendation engine that uses my listening history and personal ratings to inform it – Last.Fm – relationship with bands (either through a record label or directly with the bands themselves) – bands ($)

That recommendation engine adds so much value that I’m willing to pay for it on an ongoing basis. Consider that I have 43 gb of music in my iTunes library, access to thousands of free online radio stations, and of course a handful of local stations too.

Innovating in the stack can be worth your while. Just ask Google.