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How The Roxy Became the #1 Venue on Twitter [INTERVIEW]
With over 26,000 followers, West Hollywood’s Roxy Theatre is the most popular club on Twitter. Just short of half a decade earlier, however, the fortunes of the historic venue and many of its neighbors on LA’s infamous Sunset Strip were waning and in need of serious attitude adjustment.
We had a chance to talk with Nic Adler, owner of The Roxy and the man behind the club’s transformation from “castle on the hill” to social media juggernaut, about how Twitter and other tools helped not only reverse the fortunes of businesses on the Strip, but build up a stronger, more vibrant local community.
If you’re a small business wondering how social media can be relevant to you, someone in public relations looking for creative ideas, or an organization looking to take your first steps into the waters of social media, you’ll want to read on for a resounding success story and a number of practical tips. If you’re a music fan, don’t touch that dial or miss a slice of history.
The Roxy’s Social Media Transformation
The Roxy Theatre has been graced by numerous musical legends in its 37-year history, from Motley Crue to Nirvana to Bob Marley to a venerable pantheon of who’s who in rock history. The Rocky Horror Show and Pee-Wee Herman were launched there, and the upstairs bar was a regular hangout for folks like John Lennon, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, and John Belushi.
Fast-forward to the mid-2000s though, and the grunge scene had come and gone, displacing a good chunk of what was once perceived as an unstoppable draw to the Strip — one that had easily brought in locals and tourists alike. “The Strip has always been busy and always had relevance, but in the last 10 years we hadn’t had our best 10 years,” says owner Nic Adler, son of one of the club’s founders (Lou Adler, legendary manager and producer of artists including The Mamas & the Papas, Carole King, and Sam Cooke).
Part of the problem? The “velvet rope” mentality. “We on the Sunset Strip just thought we were on this golden hilltop, that we don’t have to listen. And we just created these walls around the venues, almost like these castles on the hill, and stopped talking with each other, and didn’t really participate with each other.”
What ended up turning the fortunes of not only The Roxy but a good chunk of other businesses on the Strip? A creative and unique social media campaign that began to build offline community using online tools. “We switched over to a blog format about three and a half years ago, and started to understand that there was this conversation going on. And that we could participate,” says Adler of their first steps into social media.
Local Business: Cooperation or Coopetition?
Early on, the club faced the question of how to approach their nearby neighbors and ostensible competitors for the time and dollars of Sunset Strip clientele. “We got on Twitter pretty early, May 2007, and we got up to about 10,000 followers. The Viper Room had just gone through some new ownership and they popped up and started tweeting. We had this conversation in the office, wondering ’should we retweet them?’ We have these 10,000 followers who would probably be into the Viper Room — do we do this ‘coopetition’ thing?”
Deciding to retweet them ended up being the best choice, because shortly afterward, a new bond was formed and other clubs on the Strip began to take notice. The Comedy Store down the street got on Twitter and joined the conversation, and “from there it just went from one business to the next, and it just grew. And because we had started this new relationship — a clean slate — it didn’t have anything to do with the bookers, or who had more people at their show, or anything. It was a whole new relationship that was created online with the clubs.”
Beyond revitalizing an audience of patrons (which we’ll talk more about in a bit), the Sunset Strip’s embracing of social media led to a regrouping of business owners who are taking a fresh approach to their local community. From creative adoption of Twitter and other tools, The Roxy and its neighbors discovered “we can revive ourselves and take a fresh look at what’s happening out there and not only get the actual customers back, but even affect the government — I know that sounds crazy, but literally, we go down to the city council meeting together and there’s 40 business there. And we’re all talking together and we’ve become a really strong voice within our city to get things done.”
Getting Creative With Twitter
From rewarding loyal club fans to transforming customer service, Adler relayed some creative and unique initiatives that The Roxy and other businesses on the Strip have employed to great effect. A “Tweet Crawl” event was first held in July 2009, where several businesses partnered up to invite the Twitter community for an all-night mosey down Sunset Boulevard with free access to clubs, food and drink specials, and hidden prizes and giveaways handed out via clues on Twitter. Now in its third incarnation, the most recent Tweet Crawl grew the participating crowd from 40-50 up to around 100 crawlers. “Something I miss from my youth is seeing people walk on the Strip and go from business to business. So not only are we doing this community thing online, but we’re actually getting these people to go to these places.”
Another initiative, Club Rox, sold 100 “all-you-can-eat” annual passes to the club for $100 each. Buyers get as many shows per year as they want to attend, front-of-the-line access, a special custom drink menu, and half price deals on everything at the bar. The passes, only advertised on Twitter, sold out in three days and had a far more positive effect than Adler and his team expected. “It created this group of 100 people who are so passionate about The Roxy, and there are people who have come to over 20 shows already this year. We thought we were getting something maybe financially, but we ended up getting this voice of this group of people who are super positive about The Roxy and love music.”
The group avidly uses the Twitter hashtag #ontherox to represent themselves. “They’re one of our greatest assets. They talk about the shows all the time, they always tweet when they’re here,” says Adler.
Also just launched is the Sunset Strip VIP Pass program, which gives any customer staying at participating Strip hotels free front-of-the-line access to participating clubs. The initiative runs for the next six months through the summer, and encourages tourists on the Strip to stay in the area instead of hopping in the car to drive over to Hollywood or Universal City. “Personally I’ve done it a million times and it’s one of my favorite things to go see three or four bands in a night and hang out on the Strip,” says Adler of the VIP program.
The Real Sunset Strip is a weekly weekend Ustream show that aggregates the news and events of the week from around the various venues on the Strip. Photographers send in photos from the week’s events, celebrities come down for interviews, and Adler et al grab passersby on the street for short segments. Sometimes they’ll broadcast right from within the venue. “The club is going on but there’s a TV show happening right in the middle of it. That’s been a great way to tie the different businesses together.”
Adler had a robust Wi-Fi system put into The Roxy specifically to encourage patrons to livestream during shows, share photos from the club, and generally get content out surrounding what’s going on at the venue. Licensing issues prevent the club from doing the official livestream events it has long been interested in. Lots of companies are also interested in partnering on livestreams, but “you can’t get any bands to do it because they don’t have the right to give away their own music when they show up here, and who’s going to get a lawyer to go through contracts with all these bands?” So instead, the in-house Wi-Fi provides a platform for the audience to do their own livestreaming, and The Roxy will retweet the links. Adler says, “I’ll go down during the soundcheck and do 10 minutes of Ustream on the phone and people love it. They eat it up.”
And of course, giveaways are also a popular and frequent method of both bringing in repeat business and giving something back to loyal customers. Offers like “the next 5 people to hit us up get two pairs of tickets and VIP passes,” or “the next person to hit us up gets a month of Roxy shows,” often do well. The people who win are the ones who actually show up. They’re happy about the experience, and they tell their friends. “It’s a positive cycle that’s starting to happen not just at The Roxy but all over the Strip,” said Adler.
Other Social Media Tools
While Adler doesn’t see more traditional methods of marketing going away any time soon — “We still have a publicist, we still have a street team that comes and picks up their fliers on Tuesday to distribute them. I don’t think you can totally write it off,” — he sees social media as essentially a no-brainer for businesses to get into. “It’s a [much] better way to do business. Be honest and keep that conversation going.” Nevertheless, it might not be any singular tool that will do the trick, and it behooves companies to investigate what methods their audience uses to find them and make sure they have a presence there. “People find you in many different ways, and you have to find out how people do that — it’s constantly changing.”
Tools like Foursquare are becoming more relevant especially to local business, although Adler still sees that as something “on the horizon. I would love that Foursquare were stronger.” Nevertheless, depending on the nature of your business, diving into emerging tools might help you reach the right audience. “With LA, it’s a different kind of market than Main Street America. If you have that person who’s on Foursquare, it’s usually someone that’s a first-adopter — someone that other people are listening to and watching to find out the next thing.”
Facebook is another staple these days, and Adler had great things to say about the social network’s ad platform and its ability to finely target a desired audience. “I discovered how amazing the ads are on Facebook. If I can get that target number down to 5,000 people, that’s who I want to be advertising to. I don’t think it really helps to go to 100,000 people; I think your ad gets lost. Getting very specific works.”
Still, Twitter remains a primary tool for The Roxy and other clubs on the Strip for a number of reasons, one of which is immediacy. A patron’s tweet about a weak gin and tonic earned her a visit from Adler and a complementary drink refresh. “It was kind of an awkward moment because she’s like, ‘Oh, are you stalking me?’ [laughs] But it turned into a good thing because she ended up being happy. It’s actually brought [customer service] at The Roxy to an amazing level … Having that relationship will really bring people back.”
Having a large number of followers and clout on Twitter also becomes a draw for the bands that play at The Roxy. “Our social media is starting to be a reason for bands to play here because they want that Twitter contest, or whatever influence we might have out there on Twitter — they want a piece of that. That part makes Twitter important.” Twitter is used to knit together the entire experience of a show as well. These days, many bands and their individual members are on Twitter, in addition to the audience. “We do maybe two or three actual tweets [per] day, maximum, and then the rest of them are really using other tweets to tell our message — whether it’s a fan that’s talking about the band, or the band talking about their experience, or connecting up the people who are thinking of coming to a show. It’s a little easier and faster to connect on Twitter than on Facebook.”
Mobility is also key, and access to Twitter from almost any phone, whether smartphone or not, simply makes it more accessible in that regard. “Facebook to me is someone at home, whereas Twitter I feel is someone on the go. They’re either coming to the venue or figuring out where to go — it’s more mobile.”
Advice for Local Businesses and How to Get Started
What if you’re a small business just trying to get started with social media? Adler had some good advice on how to dive in, and primary among the concepts is to start slowly. “It almost sounds old school now, but just starting with a blog was a huge step into everything. It’s like Twitter in slow-motion. For someone that is just coming into this, it teaches you about content.” It’s also a great introduction to bi-directional conversation for brands. “…the comments on the blog — it was my first time listening to what people had to say about what I was putting out there. It’s an awesome moment.”
Adler also speaks to defining your business’s personality as a key component in developing a voice online. “The personality — whether it is on your blog or Facebook or Twitter — make sure that the personality of your business is apparent. That’s a huge step for a lot of businesses because a lot of them don’t even know their personality … What if your business was a person? How would it act and interact with people? Most businesses probably couldn’t give you that answer. But I think defining that and learning what that is was a huge part of our growth here.”
Using Twitter to gather information is also a powerful way to bring the huge amount of new data that’s out there to bear on your business knowledge. “Being able to track the bands in the weeks coming up to the show is great. You can learn a lot about a band and their fans: What kind of drink specials should we have? Is this a Dewar’s crowd or a Bud Light crowd? There’s a lot of data out there we collect. Also when people leave, we want to hear that exit comment. And we’re the first to do something about it — if it wasn’t a positive experience, we want to fix it.”
Building an audience online also helps solve one of the problems that’s often referred to as a business’s number one fear about embracing social media: What happens if and when people are making negative comments? Building up a supportive community can help crowdsource a way of dealing with that. “If someone tweets something like ‘The Roxy is old,’ I can’t wait to retweet them and say, ‘anyone want to tackle this one?’ because literally 40-50 people will tweet back with supportive messages. So you have this awesome community that starts to back you once you define yourself.”
Overall, for businesses just getting started with social media, the key point is to start slowly. “Starting small was key for us. We went from a calendar-style website that was one page and hadn’t been updated in 2 years, to a blog and all of this.” At first, “I thought it was advertising — that doing the blog was an advertising tool. It turned out to not be that. It turned out to be more of a roadmap of what we should be doing and who we are.”
Nic Adler joins The Comedy Store’s Alf LaMont and The Viper Room’s Nathan Levinson at SXSW 2010 for a panel entitled “A Social Media Case Study of L.A.’s Sunset Strip” on Thursday, March 18 at 3:30pm.
Connect with The Roxy:
[Image Credit: Totallylikeduh!]
Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Netalab on Twitter, Twitter, ustream
Tags: blogging, BLOGS, business, interview, live music, MARKETING, music, roxy, small business, social media, twitter
How The Roxy Became the #1 Venue on Twitter [INTERVIEW]
With over 26,000 followers, West Hollywood’s Roxy Theatre is the most popular club on Twitter. Just short of half a decade earlier, however, the fortunes of the historic venue and many of its neighbors on LA’s infamous Sunset Strip were waning and in need of serious attitude adjustment.
We had a chance to talk with Nic Adler, owner of The Roxy and the man behind the club’s transformation from “castle on the hill” to social media juggernaut, about how Twitter and other tools helped not only reverse the fortunes of businesses on the Strip, but build up a stronger, more vibrant local community.
If you’re a small business wondering how social media can be relevant to you, someone in public relations looking for creative ideas, or an organization looking to take your first steps into the waters of social media, you’ll want to read on for a resounding success story and a number of practical tips. If you’re a music fan, don’t touch that dial or miss a slice of history.
The Roxy’s Social Media Transformation
The Roxy Theatre has been graced by numerous musical legends in its 37-year history, from Motley Crue to Nirvana to Bob Marley to a venerable pantheon of who’s who in rock history. The Rocky Horror Show and Pee-Wee Herman were launched there, and the upstairs bar was a regular hangout for folks like John Lennon, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, and John Belushi.
Fast-forward to the mid-2000s though, and the grunge scene had come and gone, displacing a good chunk of what was once perceived as an unstoppable draw to the Strip — one that had easily brought in locals and tourists alike. “The Strip has always been busy and always had relevance, but in the last 10 years we hadn’t had our best 10 years,” says owner Nic Adler, son of one of the club’s founders (Lou Adler, legendary manager and producer of artists including The Mamas & the Papas, Carole King, and Sam Cooke).
Part of the problem? The “velvet rope” mentality. “We on the Sunset Strip just thought we were on this golden hilltop, that we don’t have to listen. And we just created these walls around the venues, almost like these castles on the hill, and stopped talking with each other, and didn’t really participate with each other.”
What ended up turning the fortunes of not only The Roxy but a good chunk of other businesses on the Strip? A creative and unique social media campaign that began to build offline community using online tools. “We switched over to a blog format about three and a half years ago, and started to understand that there was this conversation going on. And that we could participate,” says Adler of their first steps into social media.
Local Business: Cooperation or Coopetition?
Early on, the club faced the question of how to approach their nearby neighbors and ostensible competitors for the time and dollars of Sunset Strip clientele. “We got on Twitter pretty early, May 2007, and we got up to about 10,000 followers. The Viper Room had just gone through some new ownership and they popped up and started tweeting. We had this conversation in the office, wondering ’should we retweet them?’ We have these 10,000 followers who would probably be into the Viper Room — do we do this ‘coopetition’ thing?”
Deciding to retweet them ended up being the best choice, because shortly afterward, a new bond was formed and other clubs on the Strip began to take notice. The Comedy Store down the street got on Twitter and joined the conversation, and “from there it just went from one business to the next, and it just grew. And because we had started this new relationship — a clean slate — it didn’t have anything to do with the bookers, or who had more people at their show, or anything. It was a whole new relationship that was created online with the clubs.”
Beyond revitalizing an audience of patrons (which we’ll talk more about in a bit), the Sunset Strip’s embracing of social media led to a regrouping of business owners who are taking a fresh approach to their local community. From creative adoption of Twitter and other tools, The Roxy and its neighbors discovered “we can revive ourselves and take a fresh look at what’s happening out there and not only get the actual customers back, but even affect the government — I know that sounds crazy, but literally, we go down to the city council meeting together and there’s 40 business there. And we’re all talking together and we’ve become a really strong voice within our city to get things done.”
Getting Creative With Twitter
From rewarding loyal club fans to transforming customer service, Adler relayed some creative and unique initiatives that The Roxy and other businesses on the Strip have employed to great effect. A “Tweet Crawl” event was first held in July 2009, where several businesses partnered up to invite the Twitter community for an all-night mosey down Sunset Boulevard with free access to clubs, food and drink specials, and hidden prizes and giveaways handed out via clues on Twitter. Now in its third incarnation, the most recent Tweet Crawl grew the participating crowd from 40-50 up to around 100 crawlers. “Something I miss from my youth is seeing people walk on the Strip and go from business to business. So not only are we doing this community thing online, but we’re actually getting these people to go to these places.”
Another initiative, Club Rox, sold 100 “all-you-can-eat” annual passes to the club for $100 each. Buyers get as many shows per year as they want to attend, front-of-the-line access, a special custom drink menu, and half price deals on everything at the bar. The passes, only advertised on Twitter, sold out in three days and had a far more positive effect than Adler and his team expected. “It created this group of 100 people who are so passionate about The Roxy, and there are people who have come to over 20 shows already this year. We thought we were getting something maybe financially, but we ended up getting this voice of this group of people who are super positive about The Roxy and love music.”
The group avidly uses the Twitter hashtag #ontherox to represent themselves. “They’re one of our greatest assets. They talk about the shows all the time, they always tweet when they’re here,” says Adler.
Also just launched is the Sunset Strip VIP Pass program, which gives any customer staying at participating Strip hotels free front-of-the-line access to participating clubs. The initiative runs for the next six months through the summer, and encourages tourists on the Strip to stay in the area instead of hopping in the car to drive over to Hollywood or Universal City. “Personally I’ve done it a million times and it’s one of my favorite things to go see three or four bands in a night and hang out on the Strip,” says Adler of the VIP program.
The Real Sunset Strip is a weekly weekend Ustream show that aggregates the news and events of the week from around the various venues on the Strip. Photographers send in photos from the week’s events, celebrities come down for interviews, and Adler et al grab passersby on the street for short segments. Sometimes they’ll broadcast right from within the venue. “The club is going on but there’s a TV show happening right in the middle of it. That’s been a great way to tie the different businesses together.”
Adler had a robust Wi-Fi system put into The Roxy specifically to encourage patrons to livestream during shows, share photos from the club, and generally get content out surrounding what’s going on at the venue. Licensing issues prevent the club from doing the official livestream events it has long been interested in. Lots of companies are also interested in partnering on livestreams, but “you can’t get any bands to do it because they don’t have the right to give away their own music when they show up here, and who’s going to get a lawyer to go through contracts with all these bands?” So instead, the in-house Wi-Fi provides a platform for the audience to do their own livestreaming, and The Roxy will retweet the links. Adler says, “I’ll go down during the soundcheck and do 10 minutes of Ustream on the phone and people love it. They eat it up.”
And of course, giveaways are also a popular and frequent method of both bringing in repeat business and giving something back to loyal customers. Offers like “the next 5 people to hit us up get two pairs of tickets and VIP passes,” or “the next person to hit us up gets a month of Roxy shows,” often do well. The people who win are the ones who actually show up. They’re happy about the experience, and they tell their friends. “It’s a positive cycle that’s starting to happen not just at The Roxy but all over the Strip,” said Adler.
Other Social Media Tools
While Adler doesn’t see more traditional methods of marketing going away any time soon — “We still have a publicist, we still have a street team that comes and picks up their fliers on Tuesday to distribute them. I don’t think you can totally write it off,” — he sees social media as essentially a no-brainer for businesses to get into. “It’s a [much] better way to do business. Be honest and keep that conversation going.” Nevertheless, it might not be any singular tool that will do the trick, and it behooves companies to investigate what methods their audience uses to find them and make sure they have a presence there. “People find you in many different ways, and you have to find out how people do that — it’s constantly changing.”
Tools like Foursquare are becoming more relevant especially to local business, although Adler still sees that as something “on the horizon. I would love that Foursquare were stronger.” Nevertheless, depending on the nature of your business, diving into emerging tools might help you reach the right audience. “With LA, it’s a different kind of market than Main Street America. If you have that person who’s on Foursquare, it’s usually someone that’s a first-adopter — someone that other people are listening to and watching to find out the next thing.”
Facebook is another staple these days, and Adler had great things to say about the social network’s ad platform and its ability to finely target a desired audience. “I discovered how amazing the ads are on Facebook. If I can get that target number down to 5,000 people, that’s who I want to be advertising to. I don’t think it really helps to go to 100,000 people; I think your ad gets lost. Getting very specific works.”
Still, Twitter remains a primary tool for The Roxy and other clubs on the Strip for a number of reasons, one of which is immediacy. A patron’s tweet about a weak gin and tonic earned her a visit from Adler and a complementary drink refresh. “It was kind of an awkward moment because she’s like, ‘Oh, are you stalking me?’ [laughs] But it turned into a good thing because she ended up being happy. It’s actually brought [customer service] at The Roxy to an amazing level … Having that relationship will really bring people back.”
Having a large number of followers and clout on Twitter also becomes a draw for the bands that play at The Roxy. “Our social media is starting to be a reason for bands to play here because they want that Twitter contest, or whatever influence we might have out there on Twitter — they want a piece of that. That part makes Twitter important.” Twitter is used to knit together the entire experience of a show as well. These days, many bands and their individual members are on Twitter, in addition to the audience. “We do maybe two or three actual tweets [per] day, maximum, and then the rest of them are really using other tweets to tell our message — whether it’s a fan that’s talking about the band, or the band talking about their experience, or connecting up the people who are thinking of coming to a show. It’s a little easier and faster to connect on Twitter than on Facebook.”
Mobility is also key, and access to Twitter from almost any phone, whether smartphone or not, simply makes it more accessible in that regard. “Facebook to me is someone at home, whereas Twitter I feel is someone on the go. They’re either coming to the venue or figuring out where to go — it’s more mobile.”
Advice for Local Businesses and How to Get Started
What if you’re a small business just trying to get started with social media? Adler had some good advice on how to dive in, and primary among the concepts is to start slowly. “It almost sounds old school now, but just starting with a blog was a huge step into everything. It’s like Twitter in slow-motion. For someone that is just coming into this, it teaches you about content.” It’s also a great introduction to bi-directional conversation for brands. “…the comments on the blog — it was my first time listening to what people had to say about what I was putting out there. It’s an awesome moment.”
Adler also speaks to defining your business’s personality as a key component in developing a voice online. “The personality — whether it is on your blog or Facebook or Twitter — make sure that the personality of your business is apparent. That’s a huge step for a lot of businesses because a lot of them don’t even know their personality … What if your business was a person? How would it act and interact with people? Most businesses probably couldn’t give you that answer. But I think defining that and learning what that is was a huge part of our growth here.”
Using Twitter to gather information is also a powerful way to bring the huge amount of new data that’s out there to bear on your business knowledge. “Being able to track the bands in the weeks coming up to the show is great. You can learn a lot about a band and their fans: What kind of drink specials should we have? Is this a Dewar’s crowd or a Bud Light crowd? There’s a lot of data out there we collect. Also when people leave, we want to hear that exit comment. And we’re the first to do something about it — if it wasn’t a positive experience, we want to fix it.”
Building an audience online also helps solve one of the problems that’s often referred to as a business’s number one fear about embracing social media: What happens if and when people are making negative comments? Building up a supportive community can help crowdsource a way of dealing with that. “If someone tweets something like ‘The Roxy is old,’ I can’t wait to retweet them and say, ‘anyone want to tackle this one?’ because literally 40-50 people will tweet back with supportive messages. So you have this awesome community that starts to back you once you define yourself.”
Overall, for businesses just getting started with social media, the key point is to start slowly. “Starting small was key for us. We went from a calendar-style website that was one page and hadn’t been updated in 2 years, to a blog and all of this.” At first, “I thought it was advertising — that doing the blog was an advertising tool. It turned out to not be that. It turned out to be more of a roadmap of what we should be doing and who we are.”
Nic Adler joins The Comedy Store’s Alf LaMont and The Viper Room’s Nathan Levinson at SXSW 2010 for a panel entitled “A Social Media Case Study of L.A.’s Sunset Strip” on Thursday, March 18 at 3:30pm.
Connect with The Roxy:
[Image Credit: Totallylikeduh!]
Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Netalab on Twitter, Twitter, ustream
Tags: blogging, BLOGS, business, interview, live music, MARKETING, music, roxy, small business, social media, twitter
MySpace Co-Presidents Reveal Company’s Plan for the Future [INTERVIEW]
We had a chance to step into MySpace HQ for a chat with new Co-Presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones, who preside over the News Corp.-owned social network from a shared desk in Beverly Hills. The joint office speaks to how closely Hirschhorn and Jones are working together to create a unified vision of the future for the lately struggling MySpace, whose former CEO Owen Van Natta exited the company after only 9 months in the hot seat.
Hirschhorn describes MySpace as a site that “lacked focus” as he and Jones were getting up to speed and learning about the business. He sees the pair’s role as instilling that much-needed focus as well as driving a re-imagination of the site from both a user interface perspective and in the development of new products. All of what we saw today on the near near future of MySpace’s roadmap — into approximately Fall of this year — is in service of the networks’s new overarching goal of promoting user discovery and self-expression.
MySpace Strategy
As Hirschhorn (pictured, right) describes it, MySpace’s trajectory moving forward is about the “pillars of broadcasting, discovery, self-expression, and making content a part of all those experiences.” He spoke to quality, usability and engineering as major focal points: “we want as many people here to be people who build, and who create, and who have top-notch engineering talent.”
Jones relates that metrics have become a core mantra for the company as well: “if someone’s inside the company, we want to give them complete transparency in regards to what they’re working on it, why they’re working on it, why it’s important, and if what they did actually came to a good effect.” They’ve effectively retooled the way the business works to make data a huge driver, including implementing very specific new product rollouts, user testing, and full circle evaluation of how changes affect user behavior.
But beyond instilling a level of discipline regarding the process of implementing user interface changes and building new products, at the end of the day Hirschhorn says MySpace is about “music that you love, the photos that you love, the video that you love, and the artistic stuff that goes on every day that says that you’re you. Those are the pillars of how we’re going to be building our product.”
Social Network or Destination?
We asked Hirschhorn and Jones whether they envisioned MySpace as needing to cultivate its roots as a social network versus crafting the site as more of a destination around premium content, and the answer essentially is both. “You need to be a platform where your audience has a voice,” even as culture constantly shifts and changes, said Hirschhorn. “I think a lot of people say ‘content portal’ — it isn’t just about putting up channels that broadcast this stuff one-to-many. It’s about putting up a platform that’s totally accessible to anyone that creates content, whether it’s big media or not.”
Jones (pictured, left) agrees that “going back to the roots of what made MySpace MySpace early on” is important. “I think at some point it lost its way, and we’re basically just tying it back to that. I don’t think it’s a decision of content site or social network — people are doing things that are very social within MySpace, and they’re doing things that are social in other environments too. There’s a type of user, there’s a type of relationship that MySpace is really, really good at, there’s a type of environment around discovery that we’re really good at, and it’s about embellishing that.”
Hirschhorn acknowledges that MySpace is “centered around pop culture topics” that resonate with the primarily 14-34 year-old demographic (“and a very sweet spot in the 18-24 demographic”), “so while you could share your thoughts about the elections in Iraq it might not be the place that you do that — but you’ll certainly talk about what went on in The Hurt Locker and what dress Sandra Bullock wore, and that crazy lady who ran onto the stage during the Academy Awards. That is a part of the pop culture conversation that goes on every day, and also a place we feel we can win at.”
Twitter and Facebook: Competitors or Coopetition?
We asked if the Co-Presidents saw social networks like Twitter and Facebook as competitors, or whether they thought there was room enough in the market to allow a multiplicity of sites to flourish. Jones sees ample space for many social sites: “I think there’s room for all the players. I think at the end of the day there’s not going to be a direct overlap saying ‘this is the exact behavior on MySpace or FB or Twitter’ — there’s always going to be some crossover. I don’t think it’s a winner take all because I don’t think it’s a singular behavior we’re all trying to capture.”
Hirschhorn agrees: “The reality is there are people on there with accounts on both. When you’re as big as 100 million or 200 million users you seem to have a little bit of everybody.” He says that after seeing commonalities with Twitter and doing a simple integration deal allowing MySpace users to sync the two accounts, “all of a sudden we started to see people back on MySpace we hadn’t seen in a while.”
He sees a certain level of platform agnosticity as being a necessary attitude when operating online: “I think that if you want to maintain a presence online, you have to think cross-carrier or cross-network. When you and I were coming up, SMS didn’t take off until it was cross-carrier. To think that your audience is only going to be on one network is silly. It’s very important for us to be cross-networked, and to make sure that if you’re someone who is managing your presence on MySpace that you can also publish into Twitter, and you can go into Facebook, and if you’re creating a playlist and you want to distribute it into Facebook, that’s great.”
Future Roadmap: Profile Changes
We were shown a number of elements from the upcoming re-imagination of the user interface, primary among them being changes to profile pages. Users will still have control over customizing the look and feel of their profile (“they’ll actually have better tools,” says Jones), but there will be more unification to the underlying structure and framework behind profile organization in order to make a better, more cohesive experience for users in terms of site navigation.
Hirschhorn says that customization is obviously valuable but “has to work within a usable framework. And that is going to be a religion for us. It can’t be homogenized, it still has to be ‘let your flag fly,’ but there has to be a certain kind of structure to it. And that’s a very very important point for us going forward.”
He acknowledges the dual blessing and curse of the original wide open profile customization: “giving them that control had a real impact on the usability of MySpace. So the real mission we laid out to the staff was how do we give them the visual control but still maintain a certain kind of architecture in how you browse through the site.” The new profiles will bring a unity to the overall experience while still allowing the “crazy and fun” level of self-expression users came to know and enjoy about the site.
Publishing and The Stream
In the past, you couldn’t do things like publish videos or other types of content directly into the Stream, but the vision is to allow all types of content. Moreover, you’ll be able to filter the contents of your stream by type, so you can view only videos or see just the links, for example. The MySpace Share mechanism will handle incorporating content from all over the web directly into the Stream, both via buttons webmasters can incorporate within their sites and as a browser bookmarklet that allows sharing content just as easily even if the buttons aren’t specifically included.
Currently in testing now is a change to the former status update tool into an explicit publishing tool, allowing users to simply add videos, photos, links, and other types of content. Within the next month we should expect to see a new feature that allows cross-posting to sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg via a simple dropdown. “Why not? Publish once, go everywhere. If you increase publishing, you increase engagement,” said Hirschhorn of the upcoming feature.
Dashboard and Reputation
Back in October, MySpace launched an Artist Dashboard tool (pictured below) as part of the MySpace Music hub for musicians and bands. We’ll be seeing that tool become available for users as well, with the goal of providing a visually-rich view into the “ripple effect” of a user’s activity on MySpace. Imagine being able to get statistics back on what your most popular shares are, who is reacting to what you’re publishing and where they are, and all manner of metadata about what kind of user you are on the site and the effects of your activities there.
Closely related to that will be a system of achievements and badges that users can display on their profile to show off what type of users they are, whether it be someone with the most shared playlists or someone who spots trends early on and more. This creates a cycle of feedback and recognition to the user, as well as providing an additional layer of self-expression and identity driven by the data surrounding how that user is actually interacting with MySpace.
We were shown bright, friendly icons for potential badges that anyone who has used Foursquare will recognize as familiar, and this particular part of the strategy certainly recalls mechanics like Xbox Live achievements or PS3 trophies as well. The idea is to add game-like elements that not only are fun but also give recognition back to the user in a playful visual style: “that’s what the future of MySpace is going to look like. It’s not going to be bland and data-oriented; it’s not going to look like chaos like it does today. It’s going to be fun and tactile,” said Hirschhorn.
Trends
Hand in hand with data visualizations in your Dashboard, another new featured area to look for in the near future is a way to identify trends. Here too we should expect to see bright and visually-engaging ways to find out where the hotbeds of activity are around MySpace, whether it be a hot conversation thread or new movie trailer or new album stream. Trends will be tracked in real-time and be based on what’s being most shared, most talked about, and generating the most activity around MySpace at any given time.
Those trends will also be able to be broken down very atomically by various indices like region and demographics, so you might be able to drill down very specifically into data points like “what is the most popular album among teenagers in New Jersey,” for example. This level of detail is another example of how data-driven some of the new features will be as well as how much of that internal data will be open and transparent to users, but ideally in a way that’s more visually attractive and accessible as opposed to your typically dry charts and graphs: “I want something more visual. I want it to be visually cool,” said Hirschhorn.
Liking and Interest Maps
In addition to friending (a bi-directional relationship) and following or subscribing, a new “Liking” mechanism will emerge in the future as one part of a system that will start to understand more about you. This hints at a still nascent element that will likely play a much larger role in MySpace’s strategy moving forward, which is about learning specifically what you like and changing your experience over time to be more customized.
Hirschhorn said of the Liking mechanism that it “starts to build preferences that ultimately are going to build up who you are in our database so we can deliver you better experiences. They don’t change your user experience overtly in front of you but they’re going to behind the scenes. That will be both passive and active. That’s a discipline I don’t think we’ve had here, but it breeds engagement and action on the site.”
In the long-term, the goal is to build up “interest maps” based on what users have liked and gravitated towards in the past, although the eventual personalization engine will also have to be wide enough to allow for new things and new experiences. “Discovery has to be wider than what you think you want,” and won’t be just about matching a stated set of preferences but also about allowing for serendipity and for new types of content to be exposed to you based on elements including what your social network is actively interested in.
More Features, and When Will We See Them?
Other new features we were shown included a big visual and thematic update to the Calendar application, which will gain the ability to sort and filter by type of event like concerts, movies, etc. The calendar will be culture-based and have a strong local component, so users can drill down in a visually accessible way to pop culture and entertainment-oriented events nearby.
Apps and games will also see significant development in the coming months, with the goal of increasing audience usage from the current 20-30% participation to something more like 50%. Mobile development will also be hugely important, with iPhone and Android (app pictured, right) being the biggest platforms, although currently mobile usage is “overwhelmingly” not smartphone users yet. “The iPhone is gaining very quickly,” though, says Hirschhorn.
We should also expect to see a better introduction to MySpace for new users, who will get recommendations in terms of friend and content suggestions upon creating an account on the site. This will give new users a place to start from even if they don’t yet have any friends.
Topic pages will be another new feature that will pull in content from around MySpace but also from Twitter, YouTube, and all over the web where it’s happening surrounding a particular topic, movie, celebrity, or other entity people are talking about online. This starts to organize existing content around user interest specifically as opposed to relegating content discovery to specific content hubs in music, movies, etc.
Lastly and perhaps more importantly: when will we be seeing all of these new plans come to fruition? The answer is incrementally, as features become ready — as opposed to saving everything up for one big launch. “I don’t think the world wants to wait for a redesign and also, those days are over. 100 million people use this every day, and you can’t just freak out and pull the tablecloth off,” said Hirschhorn of the decision to roll out incremental updates, changes, and new MySpace features.
In other words, if you’re curious about how all the above is actually going to be implemented, you likely won’t have to wait too long. From what we saw today, there’s a lot on the plate for MySpace in the coming months, and we should expect to see a lot of changes coming soon. Will it be enough to restore the social network to its former glory, and put MySpace back on a path of growth and leadership in the social networking space? Only time will tell, but if Co-Presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones are able to successfully execute the vision they’ve laid out, it’s perhaps reasonable once again to be optimistic about the future of MySpace.
Reviews: Android, Digg, Facebook, Foursquare, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube
Tags: Film, interview, Jason Hirschhorn, Mike Jones, music, myspace, social media, tv
An Interview With the Cartoonists Who Draw Toothpaste for Dinner
Idling in the CrunchGear chatroom the other day, John says to me, that’s John Biggs, he says, “Why don’t you interview that guy from Toothpaste for Dinner?” I says to John “Why?” and John says “He seems like a nice guy.” Who am I to argue with John? Plus, the guy from Toothpaste for Dinner lives in Columbus, which is where I live, so I sent the guy an email. We had a little back and forth, and he introduced me to his wife, Natalie Dee, so I interviewed her, too. They are, in fact, nice people, and I really enjoyed interviewing them. I hope you enjoy reading my interview.
Tears for Fears’ Curt Smith Talks Twitter and Solo Career [INTERVIEW]
Musician Curt Smith, otherwise known as half of the international hit group Tears for Fears (along with Roland Orzabal), took a unique approach to finding a collaborator for a recent solo project: he used Twitter. Still touring with Tears after an early ’90s breakup and early 2000s reunion, Smith somehow also finds time to raise a family and pursue a solo career as an independent artist.
We had a chance to sit down with him recently and find out more about his collaboration with avant-garde cellist Zoe Keating made possible by Twitter, why Creative Commons licensing is a no-brainer for artists, and how the Internet is forever changing the mechanics of the music business.
Can you tell us a little bit about how Twitter became an integral part of the “All Is Love” single? (Stream the track at the song link.): It’s sort of interesting, the people you find. What happens with writing a song and demoing it, for me the demo always becomes the master. I never really demo anything, I just get a rough idea and then continue. And I got to the point where I really knew that I wanted cellos. It was kind of the mood of it and the verses really scream out for that. And in the best case scenario, you always want to use real cellos, because they sound so much better. But then it’s a question of finding a great cello player.
So I went home that night and started looking — actually initially on YouTube. I had read something about Zoe before, because she has so many Twitter followers, now up to 1.4 million. So I’d heard about her and went to YouTube to actually see her, and then I just sent her a message and said, “It’s me, do you fancy playing on this track if I send you a copy of it?”
Was it a public message or a DM?: It was a public message initially and then she followed me and we got to direct messaging. So I sent her the track, just e-mailed it to her, and she liked it a lot and started working on it. She finished it and she handed it to me when she came to see a Tears for Fears gig. So that was the first time we met and she’d already finished it, the 80-odd tracks she did. So we take it back and pare it down to what we need.
Was that 18 different interpretations of the song or takes or…: Eighty! 80 different parts — that’s how she works. She wants to give you as much as possible to work from and see what you want to use. And a lot of the times it’s cellos just doing the same thing, but it’s just a much thicker sound. Sometimes I don’t want that, I just want a single cello — so she’s given me both options basically.
But she was great. I loved what she did, so we’ve sort of become friends since then. That’s the way social media can work, which is great. Before, we’d have to find someone who represented musicians: their agents, someone who specifically dealt with session musicians, sort of going round and round and this was a very direct way of just asking someone to play on my stuff, which was great. And what she did was fantastic and perfect for the song.
So you were pretty happy with how the results turned out. Do you think it was significantly different from other collaborations where you’re actually with musicians in the studio collaboration in real time or comparable?: It was very different. I’ve gotta say when it works it’s much easier. You haven’t got to sit there and do anything; the track just turns up and it’s good. I kinda like it. Also I think it allows them to interpret it the way they would interpret it, which I think is a good thing.
I think the idea of working with somebody of Zoe’s quality — it’s different if it’s just a session player that might not be as creative as Zoe is, because she’s actually a writer and incredibly creative. I think it might be different and they might need more direction. Because she is so creative she doesn’t really need much direction and the reason we’re using her is because she’s her. I’ve heard what she’s done and I love what she does — so it was sort of “can you do some of that on this song?”
Do you think this kind of asynchronous collaboration is one model of how music might evolve or how people might be able to be creative independent of geography?: Yeah, I don’t see any reason why not. What made it simple for me was the direct contact we had. So many times in the past, no matter who it is, normally you would have to go through a manager and then get a record company’s permission for them to appear on your record and obviously none of those things existed with Zoe. And for a lot of artists they don’t — if someone wanted to work with me, there’s no one you have to go through, you know where to find me. And if I listen to something and like it, there’s no one else you need to talk to. I don’t have a record company, I look after myself — obviously Arlene (manager) helps me. But certainly with musicians I find that they communicate a lot more than they used to.
I’ve heard of people doing asynchronous collaborations before, but this was the first time I’d heard of social media actually being involved in matching up people who hadn’t necessarily collaborated before.:
I think it’s just getting over that stigma of approaching someone directly — certainly it was for me. I thought, ‘Do I dare really just say “would you play on this song?”‘ And yeah, what are they going to say, ‘Yes or no.’ Zoe was thrilled because it turns out she’s a fan. So in that sense I find it much easier.
I think people will do it more and more. It is so easy now with, ‘Here’s the track, I’ll just send it to you,’ and you just send us whatever you have back, and make it Pro Tools-friendly or whatever system you happen to be working on, and it’s not that difficult to do anymore.
How do you approach your own use of Twitter as a solo artist. Do you do a lot of interaction with your fans?: Yeah, there’s a lot of interaction. A lot of politics go down and the odd argument now and again. It’s multi-layered and I think that’s the joy. There are things that I might talk about — the other night I posted a picture outside of the Justin Bieber sold-out gig and said, ‘This is what I get to do on Valentine’s Day,’ which made my kids very thrilled, and me not as thrilled.
While I was on tour I do the same: photos from the road, what I’m getting up to, where I am each day. Zoe, asking her to work with me. We get into politics — I make my political views openly known on Twitter, which some people take an issue with, but I think that’s okay.
It’s multifaceted and I think people that follow you become very appreciative of you sort of making them a part of your life. I think it tears down a lot of barriers. When we were younger and we did have those screaming fans and that kind of stuff, I never really understood it. And the reason I never understood it was I’d be thinking: ‘But you don’t even know me, how could you possibly be that enamored of me? I might be a complete asshole.’ That personality is still here, and people can actually get to know me now. It normalizes you. You don’t become an icon anymore, you just become this guy, which I think is a good thing and healthy.
How would you break down the value of Twitter for an artist? I’m sure it’s different for individual acts, but I see opportunities to expand the existing fanbase versus keeping an existing fanbase more engaged. Do you have any sense of how that utility plays out for you in particular?: I think it’s certainly expanded it, because there are people that, say, may be fans of Zoe but wouldn’t necessarily think of following me that would now be following me. Certain people who agree with my politics that wouldn’t necessarily follow me for music but are interested in the politics. So yeah, I think it expands it — I don’t know what the retention is as far as keeping fans you already have. I think if you already have them, I’m not particularly likely to lose them at this stage of my life.
I think what’s interesting also on Twitter is the age range. The age range is incredibly broad, which is not the same with Facebook or MySpace or anything else. They definitely have demographics, Facebook and MySpace, which I don’t find as much with Twitter.
Do you have a presence on Facebook and MySpace also?: Yeah, and the Twitter feed goes to both. I go on there at times and post stuff but nowhere near as much as Twitter because I have my phone with me all the time. It’s more readily available. It’s 140 characters.
When I was on the road I would blog, it would be longer, not limited to 140 characters. But when I’m on the road I have the time. I don’t have kids with me and I’m traveling and so… I’m bored. There are other things that occupy me when I’m at home. I find that once I get home I don’t really have the incentive to write a large blog post about something, whereas an idea that comes to mind I can quickly Twitter. Or if I see something I want to post a picture of, whatever it may be, it’s just fast and simpler and I’m more likely to do it.
Do you think any particular platform is more valuable for artists in general? MySpace is trying to transition itself to MTV 2.0.: MySpace is just spam central. I mean, every day I just get mail inviting me to gigs that are nowhere near Los Angeles! No, I’m not coming to Florida tomorrow. There’s not really much of substance on there — that’s my personal experience. I find there’s a bit more substance, at least person-to-person contact, on Facebook. I rarely get mail or comments on MySpace other than the mail inviting me to some gig. Maybe one every few days that’s a fan actually writing to ask me something. A lot of the comments I just delete. ‘Thanks for following me’ — I wasn’t aware I did follow you. ‘Buy my new CD’ — I don’t even know your new CD or who you are, so I’m hardly going to recommend it to everyone. So it’s primarily that stuff, which gets a bit tedious.
We keep each one updated but as far as stuff coming back to me, that’s my experience with MySpace.
But there are some people who do, and they tend to be younger, use Myspace and don’t go on Facebook, so you’re wise to keep all of them updated. I find Myspace is younger, Facebook is older and Twitter goes from whatever to whatever. My youngest Twitter fan is 15, and the oldest one is… me, maybe!
You’re going to do a live performance here in L.A. with Zoe, March 23)? What material are you going to do?: We’re going to do a few tracks together, yeah. We’re going to do ‘All Is Love’ because she already knows it. She’s doing an arrangement for ‘Mad World’ right now because it’s one of her favorite songs. So I’m going to attempt to do that one, and we’ll see what it’s like with just me and Zoe. We’ll find out when she comes down to L.A. Right now those two we definitely want to do, and we’ll see when we sit down together if we’ve got time to try more.
So the single for “All Is Love” did very well, can you talk a bit about the success of the track and how it was distributed and promoted?: Initially we gave it away for free, through Amazon. It became their free download initially of the day and it did very well so they continued it. And I think it’s more about building up and widening a fanbase, so giving it away seemed like a good idea.
A lot of it doing well was down to it being retweetable. Twitter played a bit part in it. Obviously MP3 Amazon have their own Twitter feed, so they sent it out to everyone who follows them. Zoe sent it out to 1.4 million people, and I sent it to my fans, and the reaction we got from people who listened to it loved it.
So I think a lot of it was to do with how much people enjoyed the track. I think if it was a piece of crap then probably people wouldn’t be tweeting about it, so I like to think that some of it is down to it being a good song and recorded well.
Do you think that people were excited about the nature of how the track was produced, too?:
I think so. I think all that fascinates the online world, the social media world. The fact that social media was directly involved in this track being put together definitely added an extra interest for a lot of people.
Arlene [Curt's manager]: One of the first comments on Amazon was from a fan of Zoe’s, who basically said, ‘I’m a fan of Zoe’s and I hadn’t really listened to Curt’s stuff before, but now that I heard this I’m going to go check out his other stuff.’ That’s exactly the kind of feedback we love to get.
You also have a unique plan for releasing some of the upcoming solo work that you’re doing, track by track as opposed to, ‘Here I’ve worked for two years and here’s an album at the end of that time.’ Does that have to do with changes in the music industry — are singles becoming more important? Is the album format becoming more disintermediated?: I think the album format is definitely sort of on the wane as far as the general public goes. I’m sort of of a different age group than the demographic that probably is likely to buy my records — they would still probably buy albums, I’m thinking. My kids don’t really buy albums. They buy singles. But I think it’s more that you want to find new ways of doing things. I didn’t really want to sit in the studio for a year and wait and then release it at all at the end of it. I think it’s more now sort of immediate gratification — that’s what I want. I want to get this track, let’s finish it, let’s do that one, it’s over, goodbye.
Normally doing an album you go from track to track and go, ‘Let’s not work on this one today, let’s go work on the other one,’ and I think you tend to get more self-indulgent that way. I was interested in doing it where a track is written, we record it, put it out there. I think it’s an experiment that I’m going to find interesting as well, to see if there’s any thread at the end of it. See if there’s any reason to release what I would consider an album at the end of releasing every single track.
What happens also when you do an album is you can go from track to track and you find a new way of doing something, whether that be a guitar sound you use or whatever it may be, and then you go, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to put that on the other track.’ So it ends up with everything having a sort of uniformity because you go from track to track and you’re updating them all the time. This way I’ll be interested to see if it has a uniformity or if it progresses, with the last track sounding nothing like the first track. So it’ll be fascinating — maybe we’re working with Zoe now to working with Metallica at the end. Probably not, but…
That would be kind of awesome, actually. It’s interesting, too, in this sort of episodic content model, too, which matches more of what’s going on on the web now. It reminds me of how blogging works.: Yeah, it is the same, it’s really sort of updating people each time as opposed to, ‘I can’t tell you what I’m doing, you have to wait until I’m finished.’ As soon as I’m done this one, I’ll give it to you. So it is very much updating people as you go along. For me it’s going to be an interesting experiment.
Arlene: We got started on that when a couple of years ago he started doing a free holiday song. He and Charlton (producer) would go into the studio and record — I think the first one was ‘Silent Night’ — and we just gave it away for free on the website. And last year he did another holiday song and gave it away for free on the website. And we realized, if we keep doing this there’s going to be a holiday album there at the end of it — who knew? It wasn’t really the thought going into it.
CS: Yeah, in ten years we’ll have a Christmas record. Just in time for my retirement!
You’ve been working in the music industry for a long time now. What other changes have you seen happening over the years?: To be honest the most interesting have been in the last few years. That’s by far when the biggest changes have occurred. The final demise of record labels — they’re not dead quite yet but they’re on their last legs. They will be soon. All that’s a good thing. What’s fascinating to me is now the power is back in the artists’ hands, which I think is a great thing.
We’re going to have control not only of what we do and when we do it, but more importantly ownership. Because the initial thing a record company will always do is take the ownership away from you, for putting money into you making a record, which you have to pay back to them anyway. The Internet came along and changed everything.
It’s not really worked out yet, I don’t think we have all the answers yet of how it’s going to work — we have to find new models of how an artist monetizes what they do. Who knows what’s that going to be?
You’re releasing a lot of your solo material independently on your own label, but you’re already an established artist.: Exactly — it’s easier for me.
Do you think that new artists just starting out who want to remain independent — do you think that’s a viable solution for them yet or something that’s coming soon? Do they still need label support?: I think there’s still something that’s coming soon, but I don’t think they necessarily need label support particularly. Look at it this way: The record companies never discovered them anyway. A bunch of kids went to see the band and liked them, then a bunch more kids went to see the band, then a bunch more, then the record company heard about it. If you took the record company out of the equation, a bunch more kids would still go see them and then a bunch more… and it’s then a question of how you manage it.
It’s very tempting — and we were tempted and went for it as well — when a record company comes along and says, ‘We’ll give you lots of money. And we’ll put you together with a producer and all the rest.’ Could we have done that on our own if we’d have kept going? Probably. What would we have lived on while we were doing it? That’s the difficult bit. I think that now it’s going to be, if you’re a live band, you’re going to live off your live income while you’re doing it. If you’re a DJ, it’s going to be to keep as many downloads coming as possible and sell them yourself, so that you can make that record — whether you’re going to make an album or make singles. But yeah I think it’s possible to self-finance it, if you’re good enough. Before we had a record deal, we did make enough money to live off. We didn’t have jobs, we did it as a living.
From gigging mostly?: Yeah, from gigging. Because we couldn’t go and do demos and have jobs at the same time. We were in two vans touring Germany — we did all those things. It’s not going to be easy — it’s not the same as when record companies just come along and throw money at you. And the fact is, you might as well do it yourself because record companies right now are not going to come along and throw money at you. They’re going to do it as cheaply as they can but take the ownership. Because they don’t have the money to throw at you either. All that’s gone. Making a record is nowhere near as expensive, so you don’t need them for that. You can do that at home. You used to have to go to a studio for that. Making a video — you can do that yourself too.
You can even do it on an iPhone these days.: Yeah, exactly. You don’t need any of those things you needed from a record company. Like I say, the new model has not really worked itself out yet, but I think these things happen organically, and something will happen that will make it all make sense. In the interim period, artists should just embrace the fact that they have more control and don’t need record companies. And actually get to keep everything they do.
Do you have any other specific advice to those artists just starting out? Should they be diving into these social tools, are there any tools for bands that are out there now — things like Topspin, Reverbnation, they should check out?: There are. A lot of it nowadays is always going to be word of mouth, and people commenting on how good they think you are. You have to keep it organic. The problem with MySpace is that it was gamed ridiculously and I think people are hip to that and you can’t game people anywhere near as easily as you initially could when it first started.
They’re going to have to do what you do every day and make music. They’re going to have to have their finger on every pulse and keep involved in everything. A lot of it, especially when you’re talking about music genres, make sure you’re involved with that genre on social media. Even down to the people you follow on Twitter: Find people in your genre. Social media is a great tool, and the more creative you are the better it’s going to be. If you do go out and make a cool video for next to nothing and it becomes a viral video — you’ve got to use every tool at your disposal. It’s not just going to be, ‘Make a record and hopefully someone listens to it and likes it.’ Be visually creative, too, and all the other things that would actually bring people in.
What do you think about some of the more creative business model ideas coming out from artists like Josh Freese, who would give away a signed CD and a lunch date for $250 or Kristin Hersh whose Strange Angels club members get free concert tickets in exchange for financial support?: We’ve talked about doing all of the above. For me it’s a question of where I draw the line. I can’t say I’m a fan of the sort of Gene Simmons, ‘Buy my axe for $20,000′ thing — that’s taking it to the nth degree and sort of ripping people off blindly. My natural reaction would be negative, but it’s a different day and age now. And if you are up front and honest about, ‘This is how I’m going to finance my next record: You’re going to finance it.’ And this is what I give back in return for financing it.
The fact is, I can’t give everything away for free, because I wouldn’t be able to continue to make music if I gave everything away. It’s got to be self-financing. I could make everything for free, but I’d run out of money at some point. So it’s got to be self-financing, anything we do if we don’t have a record company, however you make that happen. I think a lot of those things you mention, like being a member is not a bad one. There are other things like, ‘Come and sing backing vocals’ because now anyone can sing backing vocals, we just Auto-Tune them so it’s fine. So you can be creative and fun with it. And the people could actually get something out of it as opposed to feeling like, ‘I just spent that for this?’ We are discussing it and we’re trying to work out which ones to embrace.
I think the fronting money for recording is a good one — artists like Jill Sobule had a lot of success with that. And I think fans really feel like…: That’s their record.
Yeah! They participated in that.: And we’ll list everyone and send it out with a big sheet of everyone’s names who were part of the album. Or if you get to a higher level of donation you come and do the backing vocals. There are ways to be creative with it which I think fans embrace.
It brings into contrast, too, exactly where the music industry is really getting it wrong: It’s not that fans don’t want to support the artists. It’s more that the nature of ‘product’ has changed and they’re not being given a sort of way to participate.: They now have a choice of just buying what a lot of the time is the cookie cutter stuff the record companies deal with and is imaged and get no real direct contact with the artist — to being involved in something, a project by an artist, band, singer, whatever it may be. They’ll be more inclined to be involved in the thing that involves them back. The fact that they’re getting direct responses from me makes them feel more involved. Even concert promoters on Twitter say, ‘We’d love for you to come play in Malaysia,’ and I’m actually the one to say, ‘Contact CAA in England,’ or whichever agent is that area, and it’s just direct contact.
We have fans that come to shows — we had a whole bunch of them came last year to the Tears show in Vegas. They flew in from all over America and all met, because they knew each other from social media. They all planned it and decided where to go and they met up in Vegas. So after the show we did a private meet and greet and met them all and signed all their stuff. Without social media that wouldn’t have happened. And they felt more involved, and that kind of thing will get bigger.
I know you’re a big proponent of Creative Commons. Could you talk a bit about why you think this is something important that artists should know more about?: The only way I can ever explain it is that it’s a no-brainer. It’s so simple and easy and protects you in the ways you want to be protected — or not if you don’t care. Most of the time you would have to spend a lot in legal fees if you just have stuff copyrighted, and you have the job of chasing after people who may be misusing that copyright. I’ve had so many occasions when schools have e-mailed management who’ve e-mailed me because they want to use something in a school play but because it’s copyrighted they can’t. And I can’t get an answer from Universal and I have to say well, ‘I can’t give you permission because you’ve got to go to Universal and then you’ve got to talk to so-and-so else.’ And this is stuff that’s owned by me. This is a simple way of up front telling people how it’s OK to use this.
And in my case it’s you can use it in any way shape or form, as long as I’m credited and you’re not making money off of it. You have to ask my permission if you’re going to make money and we have to agree on that. But if you just want to use it to show someone or use it in a school play or amateur film or whatever it may be, then knock yourself out. It’s more exposure for me. Just credit me for it so people know who it is. It’s just a way of doing all that at pretty much no cost, whereas before a solo artist would need a lawyer to follow up on all of it. Creative Commons is saving artists a ton of legal fees by making it simple, and I’ve always wanted contracts to be more simple. My bugbear with lawyers has always been, they’ve invented their own language so we have to employ them. It really doesn’t have to be that way; I feel simple English works.
I think there’s a bit of perception that Creative Commons is really only relevant or useful to independent artists. Do you think mainstream artists should pay more attention, or do you know of any mainstream artists that are embracing it?: I don’t know of any major label acts, but surely that would have to also be the label that embraces it. Therein lies the problem — you don’t own the copyright, the label owns the copyright. So it would have to be the labels that would embrace it, and seeing that labels are run primarily by ex-lawyers, it’s not gonna happen. What do you mean do things in a simple fashion? And put all my friends out of work? Not gonna happen.
We talked a little bit before about how major labels are missing the point regarding the human behavior surrounding music which is sharing. Do you know of any tools or can you think of any new music sites that you mentioned being excited about in the past few years that are embracing more of that model? I’m thinking of Spotify or things like blip.fm.: I do blip.fm. But there’s so many around, it usually ends up being word of mouth for me. My days are usually spent writing and trying to keep up with all that is tough. But blip.fm I find easy to use and great. But there’s not one in particular that’s come up. I think you kind of spend a bit of time on each and seeing how much you learn from it. But my primary source of finding new things is people telling me or seeing it mentioned by people I actually follow or know. That’s normally when I’ll go check it out.
Do you have any other advice, if you could be the angel — or maybe the devil — on the shoulder of the music industry about how they can salvage their image?: I don’t think they ever will, to be honest. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Not the music industry as we know it, anyway. I presume when we say ‘music industry’ we’re talking about record companies — they’re just going to become bricks and mortar. It’s going to be catalog and film placement and things like that. I don’t see them as a creative force anymore. And the sad thing about that is that you do meet some creative people at record companies that do get it, especially in new media. Yet, are they ever allowed to run with it? No. Never. They don’t get to do what it is they really want to do, because the people at the top have no creativity whatsoever.
So they don’t get it. ‘We’re not giving away shit for free, that’s wrong! What do you mean someone’s playing that video we spent $100,000 doing, for nothing? No! Tell them to take it down, cease and desist, now!’ So they don’t get it. They don’t get that that video being shared that day by god knows how many kids sending it to each other is going to lead to X thousand downloads of the song. It’s beyond me.
To be honest, what’s happening because of social media and because of the Internet is that we’re becoming more creative. We’re all becoming more creative because it’s easier to create. It’s easier to create movies and almost everything. Record companies? They haven’t changed since I was 18. They’ve never been creative. They weren’t creative then, they aren’t creative now. They’re not a creative force, they’re just a force that just buys and sells. I think music as an art form is a far more creative force now, and can be self-sufficient, whereas back then I don’t think it could. Because of the Internet it can be. Because everything is doable now. For me to make a record back then, I couldn’t. Couldn’t have made a video either. You can do all that now. I don’t really hold out hope for record companies. They will morph into something else, and artists will use them less and less. As long as they keep sending me checks I’m OK.
It used to be you had to have a label and a lawyer and so on, and now there are tools on the Internet to do pretty much everything. You can actually do things yourself. All these tools enable us to be far more self-sufficient.
[img credits: Justine Ungaro]
- Follow Curt on Twitter
- Stream and download the “All is Love” single
- Curt and Zoe’s gig will be at the Largo in Los Angeles on March 23 at 8 p.m.
Tags: blip.fm, Curt Smith, facebook, interview, music, music industry, myspace, ReverbNation, spotify, Tears for Fears, Topspin, twitter, Zoe Keating
Seth Godin on What it Takes to be a Linchpin [INTERVIEW]
Steve Cunningham is the CEO of Polar Unlimited, a digital marketing agency.
In his book — Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? — Seth Godin poses a challenge: Take your gift, whatever it is, and use it to change the world.
In the tradition of his previous books, Godin has not settled for a standard how-to, but has written a book that will push and prod you into seeing things differently. I had the chance to interview Mr. Godin about his book and the concept of the linchpin.
The audio from the interview is below and the full text follows.
What is a Linchpin?
As Godin says, “a linchpin is the essential element, the person who holds part of the operation together. Without the linchpin, the thing falls apart.”
For much of our lives, we have been trained to be the opposite of a linchpin — an interchangeable part in an industrial machine. Even before the global recession, it often took a career of job hopping to get ahead. In today’s world, companies and customers will show their loyalty only to those who are indispensable. This arrangement, Godin explains, leverages talent and creativity more than it rewards obedience.
However, we are hardwired to avoid this arrangement like the plague. Our “lizard” brain is what prevents us from becoming a Linchpin, and it orchestrates what Godin calls the “resistance.” The resistance is what prevents us from doing what we say we will do. It prevents us from getting that project completed, those phone calls done, and from stepping outside of our comfort zones. Our lizard brain wants us to remain safe, and at the earliest sign of danger, gives us all sorts of reasons why we can’t accomplish what we set out to do. For instance, it will tell you that people will laugh at your ideas if you hit publish on that blog post, and that you should probably rework that last paragraph to be a little less confrontational. Godin tells the story of a software engineer at Apple who was reluctant to finish a piece of code he had been holding on to because “it wasn’t quite ready,” to which Steve Jobs replied, “artists ship.” So, the only real way to prevent your lizard brain from taking over your life is to complete things even when it feels uncomfortable.
What is clear from Godin’s book is that the world has changed, and you are at the right place at the right time to make a huge difference in your organization and in your life. Reading this book just might be the kickstart you need to become a linchpin yourself. I hope you’ll take on that challenge.
Interview with Seth Godin
Steve Cunningham: We’re here with Seth Godin, the author of Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? Thanks for being here, Seth.
Seth Godin: Well, thanks for taking the time, Steve. I appreciate it.
Steve Cunningham: No problem. So, let’s start with the obvious question. What’s a linchpin?
Seth Godin: A linchpin is a little piece of a vehicle or device that you can’t live without. It has a very high utility to size ratio. In the terms of my book, a linchpin represents a fundamental shift in the way our economy works. Our economy was built for a hundred years to train people to fit in and be compliant and be productive cogs in a giant machine. And what has shifted just in the last five or ten years, is that those people are not rewarded any more. Those people are outsourced and mistreated and discarded. And instead the people who are accruing the value and doing the work that we’re proud of are what I call linchpins — the people we can’t live without.
Steve Cunningham: This book has a much more, I’d say personal tone to it than your previous books. It seems to be written directly to the person who’s reading it rather than about an idea. Why write this book right now?
Seth Godin: Well, you know, I get a lot of e-mail everyday — a couple hundred letters — and I saw in the last year or so the tone of it changing. What was happening is, you know, it’s fun to talk about strategy. It’s fun to talk about organizational concepts. But what I discovered that made me quite angry is that a large number of people had been brainwashed and abused, and tricked, and found themselves on a dead end because they had believed something about the system that just wasn’t true. And I felt like I had this moment in time where I could speak up and talk about this shift, and try, maybe just for 5 or 10% of the people who read the book, to push people to make a choice. And that’s all the book is about, is making a choice to stand out as opposed to fit in. Because what I’m seeing everywhere I look is that the people who are making that choice, not only are they more rewarded, but they’re happier.
Steve Cunningham: A little bit further in the book you talk about the resistance and why it is so hard for us to ship. James Cameron seems to be able to turn off all those distractions and take 10 years and create what the market is calling a masterpiece. Why is there so much resistance for us as everyday people working on everyday things to actually become a linchpin?
Seth Godin: Well, we evolved to want to fit in like most species. You don’t have a long profitable life by standing up and yelling when the saber tooth tigers are around or by offending the chief of the village. And thus our lizard brain, which is at your brain stem the top of your spine — the original brain, the brain that a chicken has — is speaking up on our behalf all the time. Lizard brain is responsible for fear and revenge and anger and sex and reproduction and survival. Well that leads to what Steve Pressfield calls the resistance. The resistance is that little voice in the back of your head that says, “Well don’t do that you’ll get in trouble. Don’t do that, they’ll laugh at you. Don’t do that, it won’t work.”
This resistance get worse when we go to a committee meeting. This resistance gets worse when we’re getting close to a deadline. It’s the resistance that makes Dell Computer, Dell Computer, but, it’s fighting the resistance that makes Apple Computer, Apple Computer. That every single time you are inclined to sand off a rough edge, what you’re doing is making yourself more average. And the problem with average is that other people are better at being average than you are. And other people are cheaper at being average that you are. And thus, there is little chance for your blog to build a following, or your tweets to get retweeted, or your product to get passed on if it’s average. Because who needs more average? We’ve got plenty of that.
And thus, what James Cameron has figured out is he doesn’t need to dig ditches for a living. He doesn’t need to be stronger than other people for a living. He doesn’t need to put on more hours as a telemarketer to make a living. All he needs to do is fight the resistance. That every time someone says, “Well why don’t we just make this part a little more average. If he can just stand up and say no I’m going to make it exceptional — even if it’s not better, just exceptional — that’s what he does for a living. That’s his job. And what I am challenging people to do is understand that that’s a pretty good job. And it’s one that almost anyone is capable of doing.
Steve Cunningham: Let’s get personal for a second. We talked about the resistance taking over our lives at some point. So did the resistance take over your life, at some point? And if it did, what did you do about it?
Seth Godin: Oh, every single day I fight the resistance. You know, the time I was probably defeated the most visibly was when I was building my first Internet company, and I was in the right place at the right time, with the right resources, and we could have built it to something quite large. Once I hit 72 employees, I couldn’t do it anymore. The resistance, the voice in my head said, “You know what, you have no business building a company with 200, or 400, or 1,000 people in it, and that’s when we made the decision to hook up with Yahoo. I was pleased that I was honest enough with myself that I wasn’t going to be able to overcome that one, but disappointed that I let that voice in my head rule the decisions that I was making. On a more prosaic note, every single day when I write a blog post, every single day when I decide what I’m going to do next, there’s a very loud voice in the back of my head that says, “You know, maybe you’re going to blow it with this one. Maybe you’re going too far. Why don’t you just take it easy? And that conversation, as I was talking about with James Cameron, that conversation’s what I do for a living.
I can’t listen inside your head Steve, but I’m imagining lots of people have that conversation. And I guess if there’s a difference between me and them, at least in terms of my career, it’s that I don’t listen to resistance. Instead I seduce it, or I trick it, or I ignore it, or I fight it different ways everyday. But I don’t let it beat me.
Steve Cunningham: Shifting on to the last topic now — and this is one that you’ve not gotten in trouble for, but people have spoken out about before — [is that] is you don’t give a map. You don’t tell people, “Here’s how you do it. Here’s how you become a linchpin.” Why is it so hard to create a map to become an artist?
Seth Godin: The minute there’s a map there is no art. Paint by numbers is not art. Paint by numbers is a mechanical activity. There’s a village in China called Dafen… By one estimate, a third of all the oil paintings in the world are painted in this village in China. And what happens is as soon as the sun rises hundreds of thousands of people run outside, set up their easels, and paint as fast as they can until sunset. That’s what they do for a living. No one would claim that these people are artists. They are painters. They are people who put oil paint on canvas. They have a manual. They have a map.
If I told you, step-by-step, what to do to become indispensable, then anyone could do it. And if anyone could do it, it wouldn’t be worth very much. Scarcity creates value. And, this is going to frustrate people, but the emotional labor of work, today — the thing that makes you worth $50,000 or $100,000 or $150,000 a year — is that you can navigate the world without a map. People who need a map, are going to get paid less and less and work harder and harder every day, because there’s plenty of those people, and I can find them with a click of the mouse. Challenge — the only thing I’m selling in this book — is the decision that you will now live without a map, that you will be less obedient, not more obedient; less compliant, not more compliant; and that ultimately, you will do work that matters. And, if I achieve that, with even a hundred people it will be worth the effort.
Steve Cunningham: Excellent. So we’re at the end of the interview here. What is the one thing you want anybody who listens to this interview or reads the book to do.
Seth Godin: Well, I’m hoping that if you get that far, you’ve already made some sort of the change that you need to make a difference. So what I would like you to do is be generous and teach somebody else this idea. Teach somebody else, maybe a kid, maybe a peer, maybe a boss, about the power of doing work that people talk about.
Steve Cunningham: Thank you so much for being here, Seth. If you are listening to this, you have to go out and get this book. It’s a fantastic book, and I for one will be playing with more cowbell from now on. Thank you very much Seth.
Seth Godin: Thanks Steve, I’ll see ya.
More business resources from Mashable:
- 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic
- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
- 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business
- The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration
- HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs
Images courtesy of iStockphoto, 3DStock, & sethgodin.com.
Tags: books, business, entrepreneurship, interview, List, Lists, MARKETING, seth godin, small business, social media, strategy, value
TED: Future of Mobile With Henry Tirri, Head of Nokia Research [INTERVIEW]
Disclosure: Nokia is a sponsor of Mashable’s TED Channel
We had a chance to sit down at TED with Henry Tirri, Senior Vice President and Head of the Nokia Research Center, to talk about what the mobile landscape of the future holds. Read on to find out what we might expect from mobile technologies within the next five to ten years.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about what you do at Nokia?
A: I’m heading Nokia’s long-term research globally in our labs worldwide, from Santa Monica and Palo Alto to the easternmost lab in Beijing, and everything in between: Cambridge, UK, Los Angeles, Switzerland, and teams in Nairobi and Bangalore and so on.
Q: What emerging technologies do you see playing the biggest role in the next five to ten years: augmented reality, voice recognition, etc.?
A: Those two things are more user experience technologies, but you’re correct. We also talk about “mixed reality” — the terminology can be confusing, but there is a distinction between augmented reality, where I’m looking at reality and add information to that from the digital world, and mixed reality which means you can do vice versa also, and put things into the virtual world from the real world. To me it’s obvious that it’s such a natural way of looking at the world and interacting with it.
The key question is how simple and how immersive it becomes. My prediction is it starts with rather isolated services like search and navigation but by the end of the day it becomes part of the interaction. You don’t any more find it extraordinary that you can see the real picture and you get some digital information too or vice versa. And it might be visual digital information, or in audio, or even sometimes in sensing. If you’re talking about a five or ten year spectrum, we’re probably going to have some kind of haptic and sensing way of navigating and getting feedback.
All of this is a very Western view: The high end, cool things for those living in the “geek world.” But if you ask me then about growth economies and the emerging markets like Africa, India, greater China, Latin America and some parts of Russia, I would say that the experience and emerging technologies tend to have a different nature because of the constraints you have. You might not have the infrastructure to support data, for example.
So from an interface perspective, speech and gestures are very important there. But emerging technologies are not necessarily always related to the user experience, so things like energy-efficient networking are also a necessity in growth economies. Protocols like SMS are being used in these areas for things we wouldn’t dream of doing with it here because we have access to broadband. There are the “hundreds of millions” who are doing all these very sophisticated and cutting edge things, and at the same time there is emerging technology for the “billions” which can take a different track.
Q: Do you think there will be an upcoming involvement with biology? Are we going to bring these devices into our bodies? Will I have a phone in my wrist?
A: Yeah, chip embedding is already an old idea in computer science so we’re ready for that. I think there’s a natural continuum from biosensors — we already have heartbeat sensors connected to a wireless device and measuring you for sports and wellness purposes. So again, if you talk about the five to ten years era, the questions there are more related to the sensors. In some areas, the sensor development is slower than one would think. Mechanical sensors are faster, but chemical sensors are much slower, so even in the five to ten year domain, certain things are not so easy to do.
When you talk about implantable electronics, you start having … challenges with your biological rejection mechanisms and other problems for medicine to solve. I would say in five years it doesn’t become big, but in ten years I would be surprised if we’re not seeing a lot more of it. Five years is surprisingly fast, because when you think about large scale deployment of something, there’s a delay factor involved in getting the manufacturing process to be reliable and cheap enough.
I do believe health and wellness-related things will become part of our life, and may probably also merge with augmented reality too. Your body state will be communicated to somewhere, or you can start getting metadata and remote analysis on yourself.
Q: How important do you see cloud computing being for mobile, now that we have an increasing range of devices we cart around with us and are looking for a more seamless experience between them?
A: To me, the cloud has become, and will become, a much broader notion than a server farm sitting somewhere and doing something. So the cloud architecture will expand to more devices and the question is more of the seamlessness in actual usage. You may not even know occasionally what is computed close to you physically and what is computed far away.
There are two issues: One is energy. Sending information bits takes more energy than computing them, which means local computing consumes less energy. This is absolutely so fundamental that it will define the future of how our networks will be built. It implies that the cloud has to have a distributed architecture, because it will be too costly energy-wise for billions of people to be transmitting data. I’m not talking about the bandwidth problem — this is much more fundamental. Regardless of how much bandwidth you have in the dynamic user spectrum, you will still face this problem.
The second problem is sociological, which is privacy. People are much more positive about something physically close to them and physically in their possession because they feel like they have more control over it. You believe that if your personal metadata sits in the device, it’s better than to let it go away to some nameless server. So there will still be parts of metadata and bits of information sitting close to you for these sociological reasons.
But the cloud itself will expand, and I think the term will eventually disappear. It will just be our default network architecture.
Q: Do you think people’s notions of privacy might change over time too? I’m thinking of Facebook pushing on people’s privacy, Google taking Gmail more public with Buzz…
A: Yes, and my views on this have evolved a lot over the past 20 years. One dimension is that privacy is culturally dependent, so privacy in growth economies looks a bit different from privacy in the Western world. And even in the Western world, there are different approaches to privacy in Europe and the U.S. In Europe for example it’s very much regulatory — Germans don’t like Google Street View so they banned it. In the EU there’s a lot of regulatory resistance. In the U.S. it’s more like a community movement, “we’re going to make it public that you’re evil.” So it’s a different approach. Asia is somewhere in between.
There are also very contradictory arguments that have been presented to me on whether there’s a generation gap or not. Some say young people put more things up on Facebook or publish things people in my generation would never publish. I’m not totally sure if the generation gap is the right thing to ask. I think it’s more of a question of how much the technology is a part of your life, and it doesn’t as much matter what your age is, although there might be a correlation between the two.
I think it’s complex to predict how people will react, and if there will be negative consequences. Privacy is always considered with respect to the tradeoff you get in terms of utility. If one or two people didn’t get a job or get fired because of something embarrassing they posted on Facebook, but there were 100,000 people that were recruited because of their Facebook presence, how does the judgment come down regarding privacy? Privacy is always relative to the benefits you get, so if people see enough value in sharing and feel safe enough, privacy isn’t the same question anymore. There’s no simple answer — privacy is an evolving factor.
Q: What do you think of the renaissance of the tablet form factor, and will we see another range of devices occupying this middle ground between smartphone and laptop?
A: I’m a computer scientist and have been hacking with computers for 40 years, so I’ve seen the development from mainframes to mini-computers to PCs to laptops to PDAs. The sarcastic comment is that all of them are “fads” to some degree, they come and go and the form factor changes. But each can be a decade or two decades or more in popularity. On the other hand, the only thing that has really disappeared is mini-computers. Mainframes still exist, PCs still exist, and so on.
I don’t think the tablet will “kill” anything — I don’t think it’s strong enough. I would almost think that tablets and netbooks might see convergence. I don’t think the tablet will become so dominant that you will drop your laptop or netbook and use it as your only device.
Q: How will the advent of 4G change the computing landscape? Will we see new types of applications become possible?
A: This is the capacity question, and right now data-intensive applications cause bandwidth challenges. The interesting thing is we have tolerance thresholds for new features, where we want to keep doing things as long as it’s fast enough, but if the performance is below that threshold, we’ll just tinker with it for a bit and, and I think real-time online media streaming will become more prevalent.
Right now the latency time is not good enough. You can’t have 20 million people streaming their personal video streams around the world in real-time right now — that is not possible yet, but will become so. There will definitely be new applications emerging — it won’t just be the old ones getting faster.
Q: In terms of online media streaming, do you think that’s going to change things on the content provider end of things? There’s a user behavior issue to confront too, and I think about how hard things like mobile TV have struggled to take off. How many people really need to watch TV while they’re walking to their car?
A: That’s again extremely culturally-dependent too, looking at places like Korea that have had mobile TV for years. But for me, the real-time media streaming is more about the popularity of sharing your own personal experiences, like your kids playing soccer or when you’re out with your buddies at the bar. That’s a different thing from traditional content; for one thing it’s snippets so it tends to be shorter, but it’s also participatory and it’s human nature to want to exhibit yourself. It becomes a form of expressing yourself, and that will always be popular. And there’s always a long tail of people who are interested in you expressing yourself.
I think the most difficult thing is scale, so something like Twitter is interesting when you have few followers, and it’s great when you have 2 million followers, but if you have something like 10,000 followers it’s more like, “what do I do?” They are not my buddies anymore — I don’t know 10,000 people, and on the other hand I’m not famous like someone who has a million followers. I believe in this idea of federated local community: It’s good when you have this small audience, and federated means you have a common platform and you can actually reach things globally. There’s a certain community that is local enough in a network sense — not necessarily a geographic sense — to want to follow you.
Q: That makes a lot of sense, especially considering the landscape of user-generated content on the web — that’s a lot of what people want to share.
A: Yeah, they just want to share and if there’s an easy way of doing it and there’s a general platform, they will do it. Because there’s always some people who want to follow it.
Q: How far along are we in terms of bringing mobile and artificial intelligence together?
A: People talk a lot about intelligent agents, but I think in a computer form factor it doesn’t make that much sense. Think of the annoying Microsoft Office clip guy that no one wanted. The devices we’re talking about are much more personal, so if you can get help when doing real things and interacting in the world, it becomes more persuasive and appealing to have an intelligent agent or avatar type of thing.
The greatest intelligent agent’s behavior can be specified by a good secretary, who can predict a lot of the things I do, can handle a lot of tasks and information flow, and only checks on the things which are important for me. People want to do this and there’s a lot of development around it, but it faces the same problems that any AI activity does: Any time we introduce an automized way of doing something, our own cognition changes to a different abstract level to assume that.
When there’s a more intelligent layer in a device or in software, we start using that in a different way. This is very fundamental and has nothing to do with mobile devices specifically. But I truly believe there’s a good place for AI — we have elementary things in navigation assistants already that can provide intelligent traffic information. There’s actually a lot of hidden intelligence already and machine learning is already used a lot.
Radio technology will be using AI techniques too, in a deep and unseen way. Dynamical allocation of the spectrum based on availability has deep machine learning components — it has to learn to predict when certain spectrum is available and so on. So there is a lot going on, but it isn’t necessarily always as sexy as the intelligent assistant everybody is looking for.
Q: As location-based services become more and more popular, do you see any killer apps emerging?
A: The first things that come to mind are local search, really relevant search results based on your positioning. Social search is another no-brainer, because you want to start finding people based on physical proximity because it doesn’t make any sense to go to the bar with someone far away. These are no-brainers and they will be very big.
The things people don’t usually think about with location-based systems are aggregate things like traffic information, and collective information about air pollution and other environmental data. In growth economies there’s a need for health-related and epidemic information collection. Mobile devices are key to monitoring things like this because they are globally prevalent and always where we are. They will enable us to aggregate data and get information that would otherwise be very difficult to get — I call these aggregate services.
The pollution example is a very good one. You can start to get real-time information about the environment — your exposure to pollution in LA for example. We did this in traffic already, so think about generalizing it to weather, pollution, and others. The platform allows people’s position combined with something measured, and that gives us a new world.
Reviews: Facebook, Gmail, Google, Twitter
Tags: aggregate services, artificial intelligence, Augmented Reality, cloud computing, computing, future, Henry Tirri, interview, location, mixed reality, Mobile 2.0, Nokia, privacy, social media, tablets, TED, ted 2010, ugc
Tuesday Fun Video: Mosspuppet Interviews Jobspuppet on iPad (NSFW-L)
Walt Mosspuppet interviews Steve Jobspuppet about the iPad, and for everyone who’s loving to hate on Apple’s latest mobile device, well… watch this and try not to gloat to much.
Warning: not safe for work due to language (NSFW-L). Video after the break!
This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored [...]
This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.
Tuesday Fun Video: Mosspuppet Interviews Jobspuppet on iPad (NSFW-L)
Interview: We Talk To The Lead Developer Of Plex Media Center For Mac OS X
As far as XBMC forks go, Boxee certainly appears to have the most heat. It has VC money pouring in, flashy deals with content providers, and you’ll soon be able to buy a dedicated D-Link box to more easily use it on your TV. But Boxee isn’t the only XBMC-based media center that’s worth your time. It’s not even the first XBMC fork to go out and make a name for itself. Plex, which is exclusive to Mac OS X, was Boxee before Boxee was cool. I recently talked to the lead developer, Elan Feingold, to get a better understand of what Plex is, what it does, and where it’s going. Needless to say, if you’re running Mac OS X, you ought to give it a shot. It’s good.
