Tumblr: Ease Of Use?

Image via CrunchBaseTumblr has been in the news for having surpassed Wordpress. Tumblr surpassed both Blogger and Wordpress in page hits months back. Looks like it has now surpassed Wordpress on some other metric that shall remain unnamed by me.

What is it? There is the itch to explain. The pundits are pouring in.

I have a feeling analyzing might not work. Unless you use Tumblr, you will not get it. I myself was late to the party, but now I show up every day, most every day. Tumblr completes me.



And Tumblr still is not my primary blogging platform. I am still stuck on Blogger. I do long form blogging. I pontificate. And Blogger allows me to play with a little bit of code. On Tumblr, I mostly reblog, I almost totally reblog. And yet Tumblr completes me like Blogger does not.

The Music Tag On Tumblr
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David Karp: Tumblr Or Hipstr

Some are saying it's ease of use. And, I mean, that's there. That's a given. But that ease of use does not explain it me. I am not on Tumblr for ease of use. Most of the people I follow on Tumblr are people who are deep into tech. I don't think they are ease-of-use people. Most of them perhaps can code. These are smart people who did not show up on Tumblr after they bought a Blogging For Dummies book on Amazon.

What is it? It is beyond ease of use. Ease of use is a given. It's just there. But it's not the reason, it's not the primary reason, I don't think so.

I think it's social. Tumblr might have cracked the social nut in ways Facebook and Twitter haven't. On Facebook you find yourself friending people you did not bother friending in real life when you actually were doing high school with them. But now you are friends, and they get to see all your party pictures, parties you might not have wanted to invite them to even if you had the option.

Twitter is thin and spread out. It has its place. It sure has its place. I show up on Twitter every day, pretty much every day, just like I show up on Tumblr pretty much every day, most days. There are several things that are possible on Twitter that simply are not possible anywhere else. But Twitter is another topic. This post is about Tumblr.

What is it? It's magic. It's the magic of social. Things happen without your knowing it has happened. I follow a bunch of people in
Image by Matthew Buchanan / Flickr via CrunchBasethe NY tech ecosysmtem on Tumblr. I am a political person who did not come to Tumblr for politics. I came for tech acting on a piece of advice from Casey Culture. Some of the most prominent techies I follow on Tumblr, the most prolific ones, are all hard core political animals. And that brings me a sense of relief. If you are out to change the world, you need to know what's going on.

In following people and reblogging them, you kind of get to know people over time. If you have a good idea of what someone is passionate about, you will get to know them in ways you will not get to know them simply by saying hello to them at five separate tech events. Tumblr can add depth to your offline socializing. Tumblr is social.

It is not exactly networking. You are not trying to get something out of it. But it is inspirational. There are tech entrepreneurs I have met a few times in person who I meet near daily on Tumblr. Gives me a pretty good idea of who they are over a period of time. Most of the time they probably don't even notice when I reblog them, and that's okay. I reblog to make my personal tumblog pretty, not to get their attention.

But sometimes you get noticed, and this happens.

Meeting Kevin Slavin: Tumblr's Brilliance
Kevin Slavin Sold His Company To Zynga

I thought I was following 100 people on Tumblr. Looks like I am following more like 250.

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Social Media: Listening Tools Are The Next Frontier

(Article first published as Social Media: Listening Tools are the Next Frontier on Technorati)

Image via CrunchBaseThe terms social media and new media are makeshift. Watching TV with friends can be a perfectly social activity, but we are not thinking TV when we say social media. Radio was new at one point. But we don't think radio as new media. Social media, new media have been birthed by the internet, more specifically Web 2.0. But we don't think of email, the web's central application still, as social media, new media.

Facebook, Twitter and blogs are the most often thought of tools of social media. How are these tools so different from television, radio, books, movies, music, even a website?

No matter how many people are talking to you, you should still be able to listen, and listen well. I believe that is the next frontier of social media. Social media has so far presented itself as the antithesis of broadcast media like television and radio. They spoke to us and we listened. But so far social media has been primarily a miniature version of that same broadcast media. Some listening is possible, sure, and is done. But social media still has been primarily a broadcast mechanism.



Twitter meaningfully spitting out all the tweets it takes in would be a sign we are getting good also at listening.

The frontier after that would be to get closer and closer to realizing everyone on the planet is connected to everyone else. We will use the web to explore our interest graphs in ways that we will find ourselves interacting with people who are out there, but before new technology we just did not have the option to get to know them well. That is partly about getting everyone to come online, that is partly about getting people more bandwidth. But it goes beyond that. In 2000 we did not see Twitter coming. Today it is fair to say we don't exactly see the tools of 2015. There are Twitter size surprises ahead of us.
Image via CrunchBase
New forms of collaboration will become possible. Richer social relationships and interactions will become possible. More meaningful dialogues will become possible. Ambitious social goals will be achieved.

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Social/New Media: Blurry Lines

Image via CrunchBase(Article first published as Social and New Media: Blurry Lines on Technorati)

When we say social media, new media, we mean Facebook, we mean Twitter, we mean blogs. There are many, many other platforms, but those stand out. A lot of people don't realize this, but the blogosphere collectively is bigger than Facebook, just like the Chinese restaurants across America collectively are bigger than McDonald's.

"(W)e think as McDonald's as sort of the Microsoft of the dining experiences. We can think of Chinese restaurants perhaps as Linux: sort of an open source thing where ideas from one person can be copied and propagated across the entire system; that there can be specialized versions of Chinese food depending on the region. For example, in New Orleans we have Cajun Chinese food, where they serve Sichuan alligator and sweet and sour crawfish. And in Philadelphia, you have Philadelphia cheesesteak roll, which looks like an egg roll on the outside, but a cheesesteak on the inside. I was really surprised to discover that, not only in Philadelphia, but also in

Atlanta, because what had happened was that a Chinese family had moved from Philadelphia to Atlanta, and brought that with them. So, the thing is, our historical lore, because of the way we like narratives, are full of vast characters such as Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Ray Kroc with McDonald's and Asa Chandler with Coca-Cola. But it's very easy to overlook the smaller characters - oops - for example, like Lem Sen, who introduced chop suey, Chef Peng, who introduced General Tso Chicken, and all the Japanese bakers who introduced fortune cookies. So, the point of my presentation is to make you think twice, that those whose names are forgotten in history can often have had as much, if not more, impact on what we eat today."

- Jennifer 8 Lee of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles

Old media was about broadcasting. I had a TV station, and there were few TV stations, and I broadcasted my message to you, and you listened. With new media I broadcast at you, you broadcast right back at me. We might talk past each other, but that's okay.

Social media has come far over the past five years in that Facebook competes with Google itself in terms of buzz and general weight in the tech ecosystem, and at one point Google was trying to buy or bury Facebook.

But social media is still amiss. There might have been massive fragmentation, and we might have ended up with many, many smaller, more relevant audiences, but we are still better at broadcasting than at listening. Part of the fault lies with the technology behind the various social media platforms.

And there is social itself. When we are broadcasting, are we really socializing? That is partly a numbers problem. How are you going to socialize with 2,000 Facebook friends or 100,000 Twitter followers? Is Path up to something by limiting you to 50 friends?

I once asked my friend Dario Meli of Hootsuite in Spring 2010 as to where he saw social media in five years? He said at that point there will be only media. The new media, old media bifurcation will have disappeared.

Not only that, I think we are moving towards a scenario where everyone is connected to everyone else. Everyone is talking to everyone else, and is being able to do that fruitfully. The lines get more and more blurry. Human organizations that we could not have seen possible before will become possible. I am optimistic of the possibilities.

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FoodSpotting Follows Me On Twitter

I just realized FoodSpotting follows me on Twitter. They must not mind seeing me in their stream all the time. I show up often. It is like when I was doing democracy work for Nepal a few years ago. One visiting politician said, "I know a whole bunch of people in Kathmandu, the only person who ever emails them is you."

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Image by zyrquel via Flickr

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Is Location The Fifth Dimension?

Cover of A Brief History of TimeThe SimpleGeo Promise

I put out this blog post earlier. And I have been thinking. Your laptop screen is 2D. Your smartphone screen is 2D. But Twitter and Facebook happened before FourSquare happened. The time dimension got added before location ever became a factor. Length and width were the first two dimensions. The third dimension was not spatial, it was time, chronologically speaking, pun intended.

But if you go into 3D computing, the third dimension is not location. Easy math, that would make location the fifth dimension of web tech.

That makes it really, really interesting to me. Location has several sub dimensions. Location can be local, it can be global. Local can be hyperlocal with all its associated richness. When you move from local to hyperlocal, that starts feeling like fractal territory all over again. Blows my mind.

And social is not one of the five dimensions. Social is a reality on its own. Social can inhabit any of those five dimensions. Now you know why Mark Zuckerberg is smiling.

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FourSquare Up To 500 Million Valuation?

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FourSquare Has 6000000 Users

I think they were at two million users or less when they got their 100 million valuation. Moving from two to eight million jacks up your valuation by four hundred million dollars, looks like. That is really something.

FourSquare is not mainstream yet, although the tech insiders might not believe that to be the case. It is still early days of Twitter for FourSquare. Eight million is not a lot of people, but the trajectory of moving from two to eight million people is what you have to notice. The movement has happened fast.

FourSquare is in a sweet spot. Check in is a sweet spot to be in. The next five years, at least the next five years, belong to the mobile web. It is a fertile sector. The promise of the space is obvious to those who watch tech.
Image via CrunchBase
2015: A Mobile Tech Company Will Storm The Room
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Fast Company: How Foursquare's Improved Photo Sharing Does Color One Better: Foursquare announced in a blog post today that it will add easy photo-sharing between friends, all tagged to check-ins. As described, this service will fill in the gaps where Color--which shows you photos from everyone around you, not just your friends--falls short. ...... "It works wonderfully for parties, elaborate brunches, and things like concerts," wrote Dave, in a description that sounded exactly like what Color was designed to capture. However, unlike Color, Foursquare now provides "more context and photos for your memories."

Capital New York: Keeping FourSquare Good: In 15 Months Foursquare's Grown From 250,000 to 8 Million Members; It's Chrysanthe Tenente's Job To Listen To All Of Them: one of New York’s most prominent and buzzed-about start-ups .... Foursquare's eight million users speak different languages and are spread out all over the world. ...... Now, businesses from restaurants to media companies to TV and movie studios are counting on Foursquare to help them collect information, woo loyal customers and, eventually, gather their own communities. ...... a bigger company with ambitious business plans. ..... the Community Manager's job is to act as a conduit between a new generation of consumers on social networks and giant, amorphous corporations. Sometimes the title is synonymous with the honcho salesperson whose main responsibility is to scale up the size of the user base ...... Tenentes’ job at Foursquare is to Not Be Evil, even as the company gets more serious. ...... Tenentes addresses users' privacy concerns, user-experience problems, and feature requests; there are all kinds of technical, emotional, and psychological issues among Foursquare’s users, who number roughtly the size of New York City's entire population ...... “When people hate on Foursquare and they direct it at me, it definitely feels like a personal attack” ...... “I’ve definitely had moments where I’ve melted down because of my inbox,” which is typically stacked with correspondence to Foursquare’s engineers for technical difficulties (“It won’t sign me in on my BlackBerry!”), the marketing manager for gameplans on Tweet language and blog posts explaining new partnerships (“Check-in to a "Real Housewives"-approved restaurant and get a Bravo badge!”) and the small team she has assembled during the past 15 months to communicate feature requests (Pictures! Comments! International phone number compliance!) and help answer users’ questions
Image via Wikipedia. ......... This past March at South by Southwest, the yearly part-conference, part-Burning Man for techies across the country, she gave actor and Foursquare investor Ashton Kutcher an in-person tutorial on the application’s new features, which were launched in time for the festival in Austin, Texas. “He gave me a high-five,” she said. ........ Sometimes it feels almost like she's their ‘elected representative’ and the community expresses their big asks through her ....... Tenentes voices the concerns of Foursquare’s 8 million users to its busy founders, engineers, and marketers. She is also a human core for to a technical platform that uses a bunch of bits and code to not only connect people to places, but connect people to people—in the real world, offline, away from screens. ...... food crawls for Brownstoners and Williamsburgers. ....... part of their goal with the breakfast meetup is to get tech entrepreneurs away from the glow of their laptops and be able to wave at peers as they walk down Bedford Avenue. ..... Foursquare is not at the 500-million-member Facebook or Twitter with its 200 million registerd accounts level ...... before the “community manager” title would become ubiquitous—the most trendy job for twentysomethings who grew up online and have plenty to teach aging companies about interacting with the next generation online. ....... She left Outside.in in November 2009 and began working on Brooklyn Based “pretty exclusively.” Meanwhile, “I kept running into Dennis and Naveen, like literally running into them while they were grabbing lunch, and I was in the city,” she said. In January of 2010, Crowley and co-founder Naveen Selvadurai sent out a message on Foursquare’s Twitter account that they needed customer service help. ....... Tenentes joined part time, planning to stay for “just a few weeks” ....... “Now we’ve scaled to having our own support site, our own Frequently Asked Questions, which I wrote," she said. "We have a support Twitter handle." ...... "We have a superuser forum. We have a Google Group for power superusers. We have a support staff for super users” ...... “The people who are really the early adopters, and not just the people who are in our small tech scenes in New York and San Fransisco but people who were in small towns all over the country” ...... “Like I remember a lot of our first superusers were people whose check-ins were at a grocery store, a convenience store and their home. But really it just made sense to them. So they were asking for photos, they were asking for comments, all these things that we ended up building.” ...... “We still hear from people who are just starting to set up their business or people who want to partner in Foursquare. We’ve noticed a major uptick in that since South by Southwest this year.” ..... “We jokingly call me chief grammar officer,” she said. “Usually I’m policing ‘check-ins’ versus ‘checkins’ with one word. That is never a word—looks like ‘chicken.’” ..... “She's really unpretentious, not a name-dropper," said her friend McGivney. "So refreshing in the startup scene in New York.”

Going Backwards: FoodSpotting, FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook
Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies
StartUp Anxiety For FourSquare?
FourSquare: $20 Million At $95 Million Valuation
Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius
Great To Meet Craig Newmark
4/16: I Found Myself A Party: Tonight's Gonna Be A Good Night
If The Tweet Is The Atom, What Is Location?
This Is Not Happening: King Dennis

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