I recently wrote a message on Twitter saying that I was “thinking that newspapers are looking more and more like magazines. And magazines are looking more and more like books.” That thought came out of the following realization:
- Newspapers are trying to stay relevant by doing more in-depth analysis and longer articles (the Focus section of the Globe & Mail is a perfect example). They’re slowly morphing into magazines.
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Magazines are still focusing on long articles and analysis but are also doing special topical issues. For example, Philosophie magazine recently published an amazing issue on twentieth-century philosophers. Monocle magazine’s about us section says its “More of a book than a magazine, Monocle’s designed
to be highly portable (it’s lightweight and compact) and collectable (it’s thick and robust)”. They’re slowly morphing into “books”. - For many people, microblogging is replacing blogging. I had detailed that new phenomenon in a recent blog post.
I also received a couple of responses to my Twitter message. Bruno Boutot said “.. and tweets like blogposts?”. Dylan Fuller added “I
expand blogs R now newspapers or niche ‘zines… thus newspaper to mags to books. what R books becoming? perfect & timeless”. To which I replied that I agreed and that “books are permanent reference markers in time.”
A typical reaction to new competition is to add value to your product, to avoid becoming a commodity and having to fight on price only. I think we’re seeing that reaction on the whole “news” value chain.
- Microblogging is replacing blogging (expressing your thoughts)
- Blogging is becoming newspaper-like (more reporting)
- Newspapers are becoming the new magazines (more analysis)
- Magazines are becoming book-like (more permanent reference material)
- Books are still relevant as reference material
Have you seen the same thing?
Microblogging: The Evolution of Blogging?
September 4, 2008
This morning, the fine folks at Mashable wonder “What is FriendFeed’s Effect on Blogging?” Friendfeed, for everyone’s benefit, can be described as a lifestream activity aggregating site. You basically centralize in one place all of your social media feeds from a variety of services (such as your blog, tweets, YouTube postings, etc.). You can find mine here. You also add “friends” and watch the aggregate of all their activities in one place, on the home page of Friendfeed (when you’re signed in).
One of their killer features (which was quickly replicated by Facebook) is the ability to comment on any feed. Spontaneous conversations can erupt around a variety of topics. The Silicon Valley in-crowd quickly adopted Friendfeed and it seems like many interesting conversations are happening there now . The Friendfeed commenting feature could be equated to what you do in Twitter or in the Facebook status update. In my case, I haven’t adopted Friendfeed as most of social graph doesn’t really hang out there.
About Friendfeed’s impact on blogging, Mashable says: “I see most of the folks who’ve taken up Twitter, FriendFeed, and other similar services drasticly decrease posting volume, but not to the expense of their substantive editorial or news based posts, it seems. A lot of the personal updates, questions to incite discussion and the observational posts shorten themselves and end up on the lifestream. (…) In short, micro-blogging isn’t killing traditional blogging, it’s evolving it.”
What it means: I agree. Blogging is slowly evolving towards a more fragmented world as we see the emergence of new social conversational tools allowing more and more people to start/join conversations in many different places. More fragmentation means a more complex ecosystem, but also more opportunities for word of mouth. For me, this is still the tip of the iceberg on our way to a completely social Web.
Twitter is The New Facebook
March 6, 2008
Back in December, in “A look back at 2007“, I wrote that I believed early adopters’ interest in Facebook had peaked and had even started to decline. Recently, the blogosphere echoed that sentiment with news of “Facebook fatigue”.
- In January, The Register started by saying “Whisper it, but numbers from web analytics outfit comScore have confirmed what the chatter in bars and cafes has been saying for months – people are, just, well, bored of social networks.” About Facebook, they added that “behaviour seems much the same; join, accumulate dozens of semi-friends, spy on a few exes for a bit, play some Scrabulous, get bored, then get on with your life, occasionally dropping in to respond to a message or see some photos that have been posted.”
- A few weeks later, Techcrunch also looking at ComScore data said “The number of people who visit Facebook has been leveling off over the past few months in the U.S., and even dipped by about 800,000 individuals in January. (…) Maybe all that friend spam has something to do with the decline. Will the Facebook fatigue get worse, or is this just a temporary dip?”
- Adding his grain of salt, Rory Cellan-Jones from the BBC added: “The general feeling is that the kids, with their minute attention spans, have already tired of the social networking site and moved on to something more hip and happening. I think the opposite is true – that Facebook’s new wave of older users have decided it is just not worth the bother and are now leaving it to the kids.”
I agree. My personal experience with Facebook is that its relative utility for me has decreased drastically in the last few months. There used to be a lot of “friend” activities in my newsfeed and in my status updates. Even though I have more than 550 “friends”, I suspect that only 20% at most are using it regularly. As I wrote two months ago, Facebook is just a game. Industry pundits are looking for utility and, for a while, it certainly felt like Facebook was IT. But not anymore. Has something replaced it? Yes. Today, I’d like to say it’s Twitter. It’s all anecdotal, mind you, based on my brain filtering a massive quantity of articles and blog posts I read every day. You’ll have to trust me on this. 
Should you still care about Facebook? A resounding YES! As Jeremy Liew from Lightspeed Ventures Partners says “The digerati, with their Outlook address books and social network friends lists in the 1000s, bloated by people they met at conferences several years ago, are edge use cases. Their experience is atypical. Normal users of social networks use Facebook apps in the same way that middle America forwards emails to one another.” Those millions of users are not going away and Facebook is still a formidable platform to broadcast your brand and content.
But back to Twitter, what is it? Twitter is a micro-blogging application that allows you to send text messages of up to 140 characters. It really exploded on the Web scene last year at the SXSW Interactive Festival. People started using it in drove but I wasn’t sure what to do with it (and I’m sure I was not alone), until Facebook taught us how to “Twitter” through its “Status Update” feature. Along with the newsfeed, it is one of Facebook’s killer apps but I think most people found it too limited in functionality. It was really just about broadcasting information.
Twitter is much more. It can be a:
- Broadcast tool. Send information to your network of “followers”, your latest blog post, a breaking news, a summary of a conference you’re attending, the boring stuff of your daily life, etc. Best of all, you can share clickable URLs.
- Conversation tool. Using the @ symbol followed by the Twitter alias, you can ask questions, join an existing conversation and contribute to the community.
- Early warning system. Breaking news seem to pop-up on Twitter much more quickly than in other media. I’ve learned about different breaking news more quickly in the last few weeks using it. Some people have already created specific channels for breaking news, which you can start following. See BreakingNewsOn or the Techmeme firehose.
- Proxy conferences. Recently, I was able to follow updates from the TED, a very coveted invite-only conference. You could obviously follow it in real time, but through structured data standards called hashtags, you can also see what people have been reporting about TED here.
- Subscribe to people. Where else can you follow updates and insights from industry luminaries like Pierre Omidyar (eBay’s founder) or Paul Kedrosky (famed Canadian VC)? There are hundreds of interesting people to follow in Twitter.
Howard Rheingold of SmartMobs fame offers even more reasons to like Twitter.
Twitter obviously has flaws:
- It hasn’t announced a business model yet and people are afraid its introduction will break the utility.
- It suffers from many well-documented technical interruptions.
- You can’t segment your “tribes”, allowing you to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, as you start following more people.
- Most of my (and possibly your) contacts are not on Twitter yet, which reduces its intrinsic value.
- It’s a huge time-waster, looking at the conversation feed and making sense of it all.
But even with these flaws, I expect Twitter to really catch fire in the next few months, with more people joining, trying it out, finding utility and transforming it into a vibrant worlwide conversation-based community. Even my Praized Media partner, Sylvain, is organizing the first TwittYul, an informal event for Montreal Twitter users and fans You could read about it first … on Twitter. BTW, if you join and want to follow my “tweets”, I can be found here: http://twitter.com/Praized
Twitter and Local Search
March 3, 2008
In the last ten days, I have actively started using Twitter (you can follow my tweets here) and have a written a bunch of personal notes about how I think “Twitter is the new Facebook”. I can’t wait to write that blog post but I don’t have time to write it today (this week?). One insight: here’s one way Twitter intersects with local search:
Wow! Local merchant reviews and micro-blogging. You can find the original tweet from Tantek here.
Evan Williams: What We’ve Learned Running Twitter
October 18, 2007
As most product managers will attest, the temptation is always great to add new features when building a product. Evan Williams, Twitter’s founder, did a short presentation yesterday afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit to talk about how we can build better products by removing features instead.
Knowing that Williams created Blogger at Pyra Labs, he defines Twitter as a blogging application with a maximum of 140 characters and no formatting. But he says that Twitter does not compete with current blogging applications as it offers a different experience. They originally built their technology to use with an already existing ubiquitous friend status network: the SMS, and SMS basically come with a command line.
They quickly realized that the majority of people went directly to the Twitter web site, many of them using 3rd party apps built on their API. They now have hundreds of applications today because “text integrates well with everything”.
He offered additional examples of sites or technologies that kept things simple (or that should keep things simple):
- YouTube has a 10-minute limit for uploaded videos. This definitely had a beneficial impact on the service as it created addictive, ready-for-the-web content.
- Podcasts would certainly benefit from a time limit to become a more successful phenomenon.
- What about a social network that limits you to 10 friends?
- What about a dating site with only a picture and a yes/no button? (Hot or Not)
- What about an e-mail tool where you can only have 20 messages in your inbox?
- What about a competitor of MySpace where only college students are admitted? (Facebook)
- What about a competitor of Yahoo with only a search box on white page? (Google)
The Praized Blog: One Year Anniversary
September 26, 2007
Today, I celebrate my first year of blogging. When I started, I had an objective of writing at least one blog post per business day. Mission accomplished! I now have written close to 300 blog posts on a variety of local search and/or social media topics. I’ve met many new friends and blogging has become a very important part of my professional life. I currently have 416 RSS subscribers and I think I’ve found my blogging “voice”.
To celebrate, I take a look back at my top 5 blog posts that generated the most comments and trackbacks in the last year:
1) “Robert Scoble is Media“, July 14, 2007. By far my most popular blog post. I stumbled upon a major meme with “I am Media”. Lots of people have talked to me about that one and have told me they now understand Facebook because of it. If any book editors are reading, I think this could be a great business book…
2) “What Micro-Blogging is All About?“, September 13, 2007. Re-reading one of my favorite Douglas Coupland book, I found this excerpt which poetically describes what micro-blogging is potentially all about. Mashing-up Douglas Coupland with Web 2.0 earned me some great reactions.
3) “Google Opens an Office in Montreal“, January 25th, 2007. Major buzz in the Montreal blogosphere as I was the first blogger to discover that announcement in Montreal’s La Presse.
4) “Chronology of a Successful Facebook Group: The “Save Business 2.0″ Example“, July 19, 2007. Chronicling my efforts (with Colin Carmichael) to save Business 2.0 magazine using Facebook. That one was a lot of fun and offered some great learnings. We unfortunately did not save the magazine (I got my last issue today…)
5) “Web 2.0 Startup Praized Media Inc. Secures $1,000,000 in Seed Funding“, September 18, 2007. The announcement of our seed round of financing was welcomed by the local search blogosphere.
I’d like to start my second year of blogging by thanking all my Year 1 readers! Thanks and here’s to another 300 blog posts!
If you’re not a RSS subscriber, click here to add my feed to your favorite reader.
What Micro-Blogging is All About?
September 13, 2007
Many people wonder about the utility of micro-blogging using Twitter, Pownce or the Facebook Status Update. It’s difficult to explain but I’ve found a philosophical answer from Douglas Coupland, famous Canadian writer, in his book Life After God (published in 1994):
“And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection– certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether, one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real– this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.”
