Repbulic.com 2.0

I spent the last week away on the coasts of Mexico near Puerto Vallarta with my girlfriend Nicole. We spent time hiking, horseback riding through the rain forests, boating to isolated beaches, and exploring the local neighborhoods. I also got a chance to do some reading. One of the books I started reading during the tail end of the trip came through a recommendation from my friend R Why called Republic.com 2.0 by Cass Sunstein. R Why thought that I should give this a read because he wanted to balance my passion for the personalized internet and media experience with a well reasoned opinion on the side effects of the personalization of content.

While I have only started reading the book, Cass Sunstein raises some very good points. He states that a well functioning democratic system should 1) expose people to material they would not have otherwise chosen on their own, and 2) enable people to share some common experiences. He notes that without these, a democratic system will be tough to sustain because of the inability for different groups of likeminded people to understand and collaborate with one another. His thesis centers around the notion that various filtering and targeting technologies have "the consequence to encourage people to narrow their horizons, or to cater to their existing tastes rather than to allow them to form new ones." The natural result will be a slow decline of common experiences amongst people who share different tastes.

So far, I agree with Sunstein that collaborative filtering, contextual advertising, and other such technologies do have the negative side effect of minimizing exposure to content and advertising that may otherwise have enlightened us to see an issue in a different light or to appreciate a perspective which we did not previously understand. While I am a staunch promoter of personalization technology to limit the noise that comes our way, I think continuing to consume media which we would not have otherwise chosen is important for our democratic system. We cannot solve today's problems with blinders and seeing media that people different from us consume is important for shaping our opinions. How can such information be best delivered to consumers of media is the question. How can we give consumers the media they know they want and also serve up the media they may not otherwise have chosen in an engaging way?

iPhone 2.0

Although I did not purchase a 3G iPhone, I did update my original iPhone software to 2.0 on Friday with great difficulty. When the software finally updated some 7 hours later, my frustration from the installation process was quickly overcome by excitement for the new platform.

In my opinion, the iPhone 2.0 represents a monumental milestone in the role of the mobile phone in our daily lives for the following reasons:

1. Platform: the iPhone is the latest platform that is generating entrepreneurial passion. I spent the weekend downloading and engaging with a handful of apps, and I did so while out and about in cafes, restaurants, lounges, and the park. A few apps I tried were Twitterrific (a twitter reader), whrrl (a location based service to find friends and see where they are at/going), and the facebook app. Both Twitterrific and Facebook offer a very cool feature to take a picture and automatically load it into your feeds, thus removing one of the painful manual processes in social media which I talked about in previous posts. Apple has done a wonderful job managing the platform via the App Store, which makes finding and loading apps extremely easy and efficient. Additionally, the process to get an application approved for the store creates an environment which is far less polluted than other platforms like facebook and MySpace which have become breeding grounds for application spam.

medialets , a startup ad network for iPhone applications has been posting some very interesting analytical data about the economics of the app store. The chart below indicates that in a few short days, simple economics are taking shape and the average price of iphone apps on the platform is dropping as competition increases with each additional app that is added. My belief is that most apps will end up being free as a result of price wars amongst competitors and applications will modify their business models to monetize through advertising via companies like medialets.














2. GPS>LBS: The GPS technology enables location based services which will finally come alive on the touch screen iPhone. it is the iPhone's touch screen and ease of use that finally moves LBS services like whrrl and loopt from niches plays into the mainstream.

3. True Internet Experience: The iPhone 1.0 was the first mobile phone to deliver much of the full internet experience on the go. In 2.0, it is combined with the application platform and GPS to deliver functionality that come close to matching or surpassing those that we achieve on our PCs. While the PC will have a place for writing documents, crunching numbers, etc, the scope it will have in our lives will begin to trend down.

Social Media Aggregators

I tried a handful of social media aggregators today.

The first was FriendFeed which provides a feed of all of your activities across the social web. You designate services that you belong to (e.g. twitter, blogger, YouTube, etc) and FriendFeed aggregates all of your activities across those services into one feed to be viewed by those following you. Similarly, FriendFeed makes it easy to find friends to follow or others that you may want to follow based on who your friends are following.

The second was Swurl which is very similar to FriendFeed but also has a calendar view to see feeds in a calendar format with the ability to drill down by day to get further details on any given day.

The third was Spokeo which is more of a spying service than a social media aggregator. It does not require you to follow anyone and pulls in available information about any contact based on unique email addresses from most available sources. At a glance, you will see your friends updates from LinkedIn, Hi5, MySpace, Filckr, etc. without anyone even knowing that this information is being shared or viewed. I was amazed by the wealth of information I was able to find about people I know. There are also premium services to access further information that will be useful for HR managers to do background checks before making a hire. Spokeo is screaming with privacy concerns.

I draw two conclusions from these three services.

1. The first is that our digital selves are becoming a commodity. There is so much information about each of us available across the Internet and social media sites that the power now rests in the ability to aggregate and present everything about us in a manner that engages the audience. With so many moving parts, it is hard to predict a dominant winner with each new service aggregating more information and adding further capability.
   
2. The second is that while aggregating information about ourselves is useful to communicate a comprehensive view of our digital selves, it still does not solve the manual uploading challenge. A big problem still exists in the upload process to get our media into the social media ecosystem in the first place.