Twitter is dying.

Many of the classic signs of impending doom are present.

Slowing growth – a few months back it looked like the number of Twitter accounts was going to rapidly exceed 100 million, and the growth rate promised a pending numerical battle with Facebook – at over 300 million accounts. Now the 100 million mark is approaching with almost glacial slowness. To make matters worse, more and more of the newly minted accounts are bots (automated), spam or the equivalent of simple name squatting.

Declining platform use – all but a relatively limited number of the Twitter faithful are using their Twitter accounts less. After all, there is so much competition for our time. Statistics show that from peak levels of Twitter use, around the time of the Iranian Election and Michael Jackson’s death, we are all Tweeting with substantially less frequency. Isn’t it terrible, that crisis appears to be the major driver of platform growth in social networks (especially Twitter). Unfortunately, it also appears that many of these ‘lifts’ may come with inbuilt time limits.

Bloating and stagnation – there are also the telltale corporate signs of stagnation and questionable changes in strategy. An innovative and entrepreneurial start-up (read: Twitter) moves into glorious new corporate offices. All that packing, choosing furniture, colors and coffee machines must take priority, it was hard won and long deserved after all. Forget about serious product innovation, managing growth and platform stability, all of those unpleasant inconveniences can wait until after the inevitable buy-out. If you were one of the Twitter stalwarts (now seriously paper rich), wouldn’t you be thinking about what you can do next, after you sell your share of the platform? Oops, am I getting a bit nasty, guess I’m having a bit too much fun with this post. Lets just say that key Twitter people may not be as hungry any more (anyone checked their Twitter post frequency lately?). They also have all sorts of mature business things to worry about now – some may call it politics and bureaucracy.

Blood from a stone – there are those evil little signs of commercial imperatives gaining ascendancy. Changes in product functionality, seemingly aimed at squeezing out more growth for corporate benefit, rather than the early innovative purity of singularly focused product development and improvement. It’s wonderful when you are spending money, it gets decidedly harder when you have to generate it. With follower rates slowing, why not add a new dimension to re-stimulate the connection inflation – welcome to: Twitter Lists. Twitter has generated another ‘vehicle’ for user activity escalation – for a little while. Does anyone who has been on Twitter for more than a year put the same energy into #FollowFriday (recommending people for others to follow)? In fact, does anyone even care when Twitter has a ‘moment’ and drops its proverbial bundle. Recently, the Twitter API began providing the follower list in random order (it used to be in reverse chronological order) to Twitter applications, making it harder to identify follow-back opportunities. This seemed to annoy some people, for a few days, and then it was as though no one cared. The evangelical feedback loop of early adopters and innovators appears to have stopped. In fact, the whole Twitter community seems to have become somewhat lethargic and accepting when Twitter stops working, maybe we are all preparing ourselves for its death. We are gearing up for the grieving process.

Death Watch. When the money stops – there is also the uncomfortable question of whether the Twitter infrastructure will be maintained if it can’t be effectively monetized, and whether changes necessary for monetization might themselves speed the demise of Twitter (you could ask this about YouTube as well if you wish – how long will Google fund a $400 million per year loss). In Twitter’s case, the question may be academic if FaceBook or Google Wave squash the poor little birdie first. Seriously, a little bit of market success and everyone wants in, it’s just so unfair for others to pinch the micro-blogging space, some respect … please! Poor little Twitter is only a few years old and it already looks decidedly endangered. Guess a few years online is really a lifetime and perhaps even longer in the whirlwind life-cycle of social media platforms.

Stone the blasphemous prophet?

Please don’t! I love Twitter and of course I am being somewhat facetious. However it is true that Twitter is experiencing all of the issues discussed above – well, more or less. In reality, Twitter is experiencing the well documented wonders of the ‘hype cycle’. Take a look at Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycle Special Report, in particular the lovely illustration about half-way down (you’ll thank me and be quoting hype-cycles at dinner parties). You will see the little blue dots for “social software suites” and “micro-blogging” just past the initial high-peak (next to Cloud Computing – a blog topic for another post *insert wry smile here*).

If you agree with Gartner, and on on this matter I do, Twitter has passed through the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and is heading into the “Trough of Disillusionment” – such colorful descriptions would make for a great technology storyline. A few months ago, heritage media commentators (‘heritage’ – such a wonderfully derogatory description of mainstream media, I just had to use it) were all abuzz with Twitter. Most of these mainstream voices had no idea what Twitter actually was. A classic sign of Hype. I have no idea what Twilight is (perhaps an 80’s song by ELO) but it is certainly on a hype-cycle. Now the mainstream media are quieter (on Twitter, not Twilight) and the silence is in fact the slide after the hype.

Many people who did not experience Twitter in the first pass will be saying: “see, it was a fad, glad I didn’t jump onto that one”. These laggards had their equally mistaken counterparts with the Internet, email, TV and foreign food. Of course Twitter (and all social media, microblogging and related technologies) are not dying. Instead, their place is in the process of determination, integration and slow maturity. Twitter, and social media more broadly, will ultimately move into the “slope of enlightenment” – a slower but much more powerful and long lasting period of growth, leading ultimately to mainstream acceptance and sometimes ubiquity. At least until technical disruption wipes it out (another post for a future date – for now lets just say cassette tapes and cathode-ray tubes).

So next time a TV commentator, your work colleague or an annoying sibling says “I hear Twitter is dying”, shrug it off with a knowing smile, keep learning and preparing for the resurgence that comes from maturity and understanding. Of course, in the meantime, a few major players may fight it out over both the micro-blogging model of the future and who takes market share.

Despite a circa billion-dollar valuation, Twitter still has an epic battle for survival on its hands!

Twitter Tools and Applications Reviewed

I have a bucket-load of links to social media websites. These ‘applications’ access the wonderful open APIs (application programing interfaces) of Twitter and other social media platforms to provide new functionality. New forms of analysis, assistance or simply additional fun and wonder.

Most days, in addition to reading email and accessing business related web applications, an increasing number of people are engaging with these tools. I was cleaning out my links and deciding which tools would remain and decided to make the resulting list and review public. I am also interested in discovering what others are using. Let us all discover new tools that can deliver better information, make our life easier, and show us something else of the amazing online world. Send links and comments to this post, or via Twitter @drwarwick, and I will add them to the list.

You will find the list here – TOOL LIST

Tools are ‘Twitter’ heavy at present. I will add broader social media and web applications, so watch this space. There are already amazing sites that filter the multiple online media platforms, bringing back rich filtered information – see specifically the ‘Analyzing Social Media’ section of the list. In a business setting, you should never meet a new client without looking them up on one of these tools first. Look up your own organization(s). What you will discover in just a few minutes will amaze you.

Tell us what is useful, what you use, and what functionality is still missing?

Twitter Censorship – Network or Message?

Is Twitter a network facilitator, or a participant in message and meaning? Should the environment be open or should it be sanitized, moderated and censored? I don’t know. I also haven’t seen anything formal or significant on policy or approach that provides clarity for the Twitter community.

So why is this an important issue?

Lets take an example. The #Iranelection hashtag (hashtag is a deliberately flagged search term, preceded with the hash character – ‘#’) was a trending topic on Twitter for many months. The topic and Twitter posts covered a host of nasty, sensitive and confronting material based around the election, election violence, democracy and media transparency during this period. The conversation still continues. Twitter was one of the few open outlets that allowed apparently unfettered comment to escape Iran, as traditional media and international visibility was shut down and journalists ejected. Twitter it seemed, let all of this content into the public arena, and there would be no doubt that certain forces were trying to prevent such material from entering certain geographies or to shut down and divert certain conversations completely. Twitter played an active role when they decided to delay a planned network maintenance outage, due to the importance of the dialogue and the volume of traffic. Perhaps no one sees this as an issue, but positive interference is still interference, and changing systematic behavior because of the nature of the prevailing message extends into territory that is much more than network provisioning. I’m not suggesting that it should have been handled any differently, just that it showed clear involvement with the message.

Twitter Intervention and Stewardship

Twitter ’suggest’ people you should follow when you create a new account, or any time you go back into the ‘Find People’ function (under the section ‘Suggested Users’). Twitter regularly remove inter-account linkages in occasional clean-outs and also make decisions on the suspension of accounts. If you use Twitter, you have probably come across the ’suspended account’ graphic. This is all generally accepted and welcomed maintenance and hygiene practice. Suspension for example, would normally be the result of a breach of the Twitter ‘terms of service’, including falsifying an account, obscene material and so on. Twitter suspends accounts, such as the publicized closure of the Dalai Lama account, because of misleading ’spoofed’ operation but chooses to leave thousands of others, with lesser profile, open, despite their clear violation of the terms of service. Obscene content is also on a continuum and based around moral values as well as laws that vary considerably by state and country. There is plenty of pornographic, violent, adult and offensive content on Twitter (as there is online), so for better or worse, Twitter makes a determination. Clearly there is censorship on Twitter! This is not surprising, and it is welcomed intervention by the majority of users, probably even necessary for the effective functioning of the network. There are always going to be people on the ‘thank-you Twitter for getting rid of (insert topic, content, person or view here)‘ and those on the other side of the fence.

Guidelines and Policy

It would of be good however to know what Twitter’s policies and processes are. Is there review, escalation, appeal, audit and accountability? If the #Iranelection stream was instead focused on US domestic politics, a certain political party, or something ‘closer to home’, how would that have gone down? What happens to Twitter streams that relate directly to Twitter – the competitive environment, new social media plays, investment, dirty-linen and so on? How much pornography is too much? How are under-aged Tweeps (Twitter People) handled in comparison to adults (by the way, what is underage in the Twitter world, 16, 18, 21 – how do we know)? In Australia, Indigenous communities have very strict rules relating to the discussion of the recently deceased, known as ‘Sorrow’ material. What happens to the accounts, posts and comments relating to Tweeps who die? Maybe most of the time we don’t care and we expect and assume that Twitter (the people running the network) will act fairly, honorably and in so far as possible without heavy-handed cultural, national or other subjective bias. Can we really expect this? Is this what is happening?

Probably most Twitter users believe that the ‘trending topics’ are determined purely on some mathematical algorithm. Some manipulation is of course needed to group the same conversation where the #hashtag or keyword has identical or very similar meaning to others (which would divide the conversation). Should Twitter remove some inflammatory, sensitive or offensive ‘trending topics’, or weight them in some other message-aware fashion. When would this be appropriate, and when would it not?

Balance – The ‘No God’ / ‘Know God’ Example

On the date of this post, there was a trending topic – Know God. Somewhat earlier there was a trending topic – No God. It is no surprise that this philosophical battle would be waged on Twitter. Religion, spirituality, politics, and sex are stock-in-trade topics for discussion in many social networks. It would appear that ‘No God’ as a trending topic was either removed, or was merged within the ‘Know God’ trending topic. Both clearly have different and largely opposing meaning. The issues that arise are both practical (which trends are the same) and political (what should be manipulated). It would appear from other traffic trend analysis, and from simply watching the Twitter stream through windows such as Twitter Fall, that ‘No God’ should have remained in the trending topic list on a mathematical basis. I think it is fair to say that this is an area with strong opinion and it is unlikely that any 140-character message is going to solve the debate – I am certainly not pitching any view! Surely if Twitter are intervening with the removal of one trend, then they should remove the other counterpoint trend at the same time?

[I am not making an argument for either trend, so please, no hate mail or 'un-following'. This is not a forum for comment on the No God/Know God debate and any such comment will not be published here. Comments on social media censorship, social media policy and intervention practice and related topics will be most welcome and published.]

My view, and hopefully the reasonable one, is that intervention is a necessary and largely unfortunate component of platforms such as Twitter. It must be a pain in the proverbial for Twitter itself to manage. The intervention should however be based on clear policy that is balanced, equitable and non-partisan. Can Twitter currently claim balance and how would the community know?

Please contribute to the conversation, make comment here, and post on the social media network we love – Tweet away!

Google Wave – Social Media Proliferation

Let the Social Media ‘land-grab’ begin! Not that it hadn’t already. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIN and Twitter are no minnows, but one of the web superpowers has weighed in. Google is here and the arms race is on – full speed ahead. Of course I am talking about Google Wave.

There are a number of future defining battles being waged at the moment, and I think any review of the ‘new kid on the block’ needs to consider the environment. Especially when that ‘new kid’ is Google and the stakes are so high. Google may not be ‘betting the ranch’, but this is a big gamble for leadership of the social media domain.

The ‘macro’ review of Google Wave needs to look at ubiquity, inclusiveness, purpose and resonance (stick with me and I’ll explain). The ‘micro’ review of Google Wave is simpler – how does it work? – what’s new about it? – and of course, is it any good?

Ubiquity – critical mass is a must for social media applications. Participants must be able to find the people they are looking for, and it is not surprising that growth trends, numbers of users, and drop-off rates, are the common topics for media comment. Google comes to the party with the most ubiquitous search, advertising, and mapping platforms and a pretty handy amount of market penetration with Google Mail, Google Docs and a host of other web environments, including the relatively new Chrome browser. The “900lb Gorilla” has entered the mainstream social media fray. Surprisingly it has not brought its full market ‘penetration’ with it – yet. To play with Wave, you need a Google Mail account as a prerequisite, and then, if you get an invitation, you are issued a new ‘@googlewave.com’ account. For Google to dominate the space, something will have to change, as not everyone or every corporation is going to want to drop their domain name. Perhaps this will change before the final Wave launch, however it is an interesting initial limitation. This barrier is compounded by the ‘your not invited’ feel of the deployment so far. This brings us to another dimension – inclusiveness …

Inclusiveness – you may be acutely aware that not everyone has access to the Google Wave preview. This may be the sensible thing, with a whole bunch of logical reasons why it needs to be a limited release. After all, it is new, largely untested in broad public deployment, and it is not in its final form – and don’t forget the problems some social media platforms have had with traffic volumes and rapid growth. Of course, there is the other view, that some of the unpleasant dynamics of traditional human networks, are bound to translate to the cyber incarnation of human networking. Google, willingly or not, is creating an ‘in-crowd’. Even with your Google Mail account, getting a Wave Account takes some persuasion (at least it did for me). Google are not alone, Twitter recently launched ‘Lists’, allowing Twitter users to group their connections – this, like Google Wave, is a limited test release (I’m still on the bench). By their very nature, social networks are tools for inclusion and exclusion. With the evolution of online social media, it appears that the bohemian and egalitarian dynamics of the Internet are coming to an end, if indeed they ever existed at all. Network dynamics will ultimately have your peers determining your level of connectivity and online power. Sound dramatic? Well its should, and in all the communication benefits of online social media, the emergent power gulf is the ‘dirty little secret’. Accessibility is not a web standard commonly discussed in the same sentence as online networks. If you agree with my People not Pages post, the difference is that pages (as objects) are largely equal, people are not. As the web shifts to a ‘people connection’ framework, the fundamentals change, and the much more complex array of human issues find a new home, online. We had all better start getting used to the concept (and feeling) of digital exclusion.

Purpose – a large part of the success of Twitter lies in its singularity of purpose, as a result, perhaps more than any other Social Media platform, it integrates with almost everything else. It has a handy API (application programming interface) that allows other systems to connect to it, build upon it, and enhance key aspects and functionality. On the continuum between ‘be one thing’ and ‘be everything’, Twitter is toward the specialist end, Facebook is somewhere in the middle, and MySpace is toward the ‘be everything’ end of the continuum. Google, Microsoft and Apple are arguably even further in the ‘be everything’ direction. All of the vendors have opened their walls, somewhat – although not as dramatically as Twitter. Google Wave looks likely to encourage third-party development of extensions with one hand, but on the other hand, it seems to be trying to re-invent, replace and control other online spaces – email, collaboration and real-time communication for a start. The big question is, can one vendor control such a large space, or will integrated specialists win out? This battlefront will rage for a long time. The broader, multi-domain gambits, benefit from global brand power and more cash, the specialists have domain knowledge and singularity of focus. For me, Google is ‘biting off’ an awful lot of territory in one new application, and this also makes the purpose and functionality of Wave confusing. Not surprisingly, people find Wave hard to explain (not simply because it is something new).

Resonance – At the end of the day people vote with their feet. Google won the ‘Search Wars’ because people voted to use it, instead of the other strong options available at the time. Some of this is about fads, brand, promotion and the vagaries of human behavior. At the very real risk of oversimplification, Yahoo, MSN and others were more complicated portals and search tools, Google was an elegant, simple, single purpose search window, with it’s complexity well hidden ‘under-the-hood’. This resonated for the majority of users and Google won! Google Wave is complex, multipurpose, and forgive me, but “a bit more Yahoo than Google”, maybe even “a bit more Microsoft than Google”. The agile young Google is now a big behemoth – is this what happens when you aren’t agile anymore? Will Google Wave resonate with masses of users, in the way that the single-purpose and simple-to-use Google Search, Google Maps and Google Mail have in the past? I guess we will all find out in due course.

So how does it work, what is new, and is it any good?

If you want to know what Google Wave is – start with this tw0-minute video by EpipheoStudios.com (fun and it will save you more than the two minutes it takes to watch). Still unclear? Good, because that is the point. Is Google Wave a replacement for email? Yes and No. It has an email style account – mine is veridianmedia@googlewave.com but it’s a ‘wave’ not an email. Is it a collaboration tool? Yes and No. You can collaborate on a ‘Wave’ but it is not strictly a document, email, or piece of content that is easily ported into another framework (at least not yet). Is it a contact manager? Yes and No. You use Google Contacts (beta) to manage your contacts and you can put them in groups (friends, family, co-workers and custom groups) however you can’t work with, or externally flag, groups within the Google Wave environment (just yet). So it’s not Twitter (short-form messaging), it’s not Facebook or LinkedIN or MySpace or a replacement for any other social media property (again – just yet) and at the same time, it doesn’t integrate with any of them either (just yet – sorry! Make the ‘just yet’ a caveat for everything else, because it is only in preview after all).

So what’s new?

The image above shows 69 people all collaborating on the same Wave today (as I was writing in fact). Think interactive, real-time email with rich-media and applications embedded. Sort of wiki meets email meets instant messenger meets Google Docs. This was a group of Australian ‘Wave People’ (wavers?) sharing their details. This is new, pretty cool, and practical in its own way. It also highlights an initial Wave weakness – the application didn’t let these people meet each other and collect this simple ‘address book’ data set from their Wave contact information. It is much harder (so far) to make inter-personal connections than it is with Twitter (the easiest), Facebook or LinkedIN. The lack of people with preview access is only part of the reason.

Security, audit trails, accountability, content moderation and approval are all authorship and control issues for exploration – at least you can ‘playback’ the wave and watch the construction in order and see who did what, when. I have to say that Wave has some significant novelty, innovation and smarts – even things like adaptive (contextual) spell checking are nice subtle benefits, not new per se, but well integrated into something that collectively is new. The practicality of Wave as an ‘email replacement’ is still a big question, especially since email communications have some legal standing, will a ‘Wave’ stand up to the same scrutiny?

Is it any good?

Yes! It is good. Although I am not entirely sure what it is yet. Based on Google’s material (videos and help), I don’t think they know exactly what it is yet either. When you get the opportunity to play with Wave, jump in, but expect a bit of a learning curve and some initial frustration. Wave, like all network tools, will work better with more contacts, integration with other network platforms and the natural course of product refinement. Don’t throw away your email just yet. If you want to see the features demonstrated, and have five minutes to spare, watch the Google Wave: 15 features video published by Google.

The big lesson

The web is becoming less about content and more about people – re-stressing what I said in my ‘People not Pages’ blog entry last month. Get your place in the social web established NOW! If you think that you can ignore social media, or wait for Google Wave, or Microsoft, or the whole ‘land-grab’ to sort itself out before you get involved – you are wrong, and you’ll get left with the ‘cheap seats’.

Personally and professionally you need to be activating your online social media TODAY! Google Wave already leverages the investment its users have made in other social media environments – even without any formal integration. One platform leaks into, and crosses over with, other social media conversations and platforms. These are real people, making real connections, and meeting, doing business and experiencing life together. Time to join in!

Promote yourself in the appropriate way for the medium …
Join me on Google Wave: VeridianMedia@googlewave.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/drwarwick

Viocorp and web video – some background

Further to my New Roles post, I am working with Viocorp to set-up a new and comprehensive Melbourne operation. I hope that you find the background and sample links of interest …

Viocorp is Australia’s leading online video and digital media specialist. Since inception in 2002, Viocorp has positioned itself at the forefront of digital media thinking in Australia, investing extensive video production and broadcasting experience in the development of a suite of software solutions and related services.

Viostream is the flagship software platform. A powerful ’software as a service’ (SaaS) media publishing application, allowing you to publish video and audio content directly to your audience – any online device, anywhere in the world. Viostream is a one-stop media publishing solution enabling rapid ingest, automated video transcoding and seamless web-based delivery of all rich-media content.

Other solutions include VioTV (a dedicated video portal), Viomedia (a broad-based web publishing solution), Viocast (a combination video, audio and PowerPoint slide solution) and VioAd (an online banner advertising system). VioTV for example, delivers rapid viewer engagement, arming you with a dynamic and modular portal for multiple video assets, grouping and managing your digital content to suit your viewers.

Viocorp can also completely manage your video and audio production needs. Viocorp’s production team provides comprehensive rich-media capability, experience and customer focus, for any audio or video content capture and distribution project or event. Viocorp can also consult to, and assist, third-party or in-house production teams.

Sample Viocorp client solutions include …

AIMIA, APN Online, Aqua Media, Aviva, Australian Rugby Union, Azure Group, BUPA, CommSec, Cycling World Masters, Deepend, Evolution Media, Go Roaming, iiNet Freezone, MassMedia Studios, NSW State Government, Optus, Popcorn Taxi, Prime Minister of Australia, RaboPlus, Robert Half International, Staging Connections, South Sydney Rabbitohs, Swiss Re, Sydney Film Festival, Sydney Opera House, Tourism Australia, Tourism Queensland and World Vision.

Live streaming events have included World Youth Day (Rome, April 2009), the Victorian Government’s February 2009 Bushfire Memorial Service, the 2008 Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, the 2009 Luminous launch at the Sydney Opera House, the Federal Government’s Australian 2020 Summit in April 2008, World Youth Day 2008, Mardi Gras 2007 and the Paris Hilton NYE event in 2008.

Viocorp delivers to mobile platforms (see an iPhone sample here) and high-end broadcast solutions (preview of the Viobroadcast system here). Although not for public display, Viocorp would be most happy to demonstrate intranet and extranet solutions that include matched combinations of video, audio and indexed PowerPoint presentations using the recently launched Viocast solution.

If web video services and solutions are of interest, follow Viocorp on Twitter – @Viocorp, contact Viocorp and of course, get in touch with me for more information. In the interim, entertain yourself with video from VioTV.

Proof that your website sucks!

Ouch! Hurt? Well prove me wrong. Here are a number of reasons why your website is no good. If you can tell me how you’ve got all the issues covered, let me know. I’ll gladly eat ‘humble pie’ (and promote the hell out of your site)!

I’m not going to talk specifically about features, design, search or social media, that’s all jargon and ‘naval gazing’ if you’re not focused on the main game. What is your website doing for you, and more importantly, what is it doing for me. As someone once said “the main game, is keeping the main game the main game”. Let’s get to some hard truths …

1 – You talk to yourself – the language is yours, not mine. It’s all about you, you, you! Your brand, your features, your history and your industry jargon. How about what I want? My needs, what I am looking for, how you can help me. Do you want my money? Well do something for me to deserve it. How about some plain language, working with terms I’m likely to search on and then tell me what I need to know. If your website was a dinner party guest, would anyone invite them back again?

2 – You don’t do anything constructive - if I only wanted information, I could find better material than yours elsewhere on the Internet. So on the premise that I want to do something with you, and you want to do something with me, why isn’t your website more action based. Most of your pages contain information (see right hand column of image above) and not enough of your site is about action, or at least permission for future action, building a connection or something more than a lousy brochure.

3 – You talk too much – if I am following known web norms, I am going to look at about four or five of your pages and spend about three minutes on your site (assuming I get past the first page). Stop trying to tell me everything, get to the point. If you had the length of a song to tell me everything important, what would you say? Now if you wanted me to remember it, what would you say? Now if you wanted me to take action based upon it, what would you say? Maybe you should write a song – remember to make the chorus catchy! Maybe “you talk too much, yeah, yeah, you talk too much …” (with some subliminal “send me money now” from the backing singers).

4 – You are full of yourself – you think that the web norms in the previous paragraph don’t apply to you. You think your content is just SO important that everyone will break with their normal consumption patterns, simply because you are SO interesting. Look at your webstats, what do they say? If you are holding people for longer than 300 seconds, are they interested or just plain annoyed? While we are at it, do you really have to have so many pages? How many pages within your site have been viewed by only a dozen people this year? Did they really want that material, did it drive a beneficial action, or were they just lost? Maybe it was it your Mother, “nice work dear, I don’t really understand what you do, but it sure looked pretty – I’m so proud!”

5 – You don’t give me what I want – I need to know how you will help me, how I can believe you, and how the process will work. Maybe, but only maybe, I need or want some other information to help with the process. Get to the key stuff up front, newspaper style! I’m not interested in your aims, methods, discoveries and details, just the juicy bits. Stop writing like a scientist, social researcher or lawyer (the way you were taught at school). This is not a competition and you shouldn’t be getting paid by the word. Make your headline point, give me a supporting line if you must, delete everything else and let’s cut to the chase, how do we make something happen? I need to be able to contact you, know where you are, and transact (if a transaction is part of the story). Make these things hard for me and I won’t believe that you can back up your claims, and worse yet, I won’t trust you because you seem to be hiding something.

6 – You expect me to come and find you – of course I spend all of my time looking for you and your products, services and information – I have nothing better to do because you are so important (read point 4 again – unless you make Shiraz or coffee and then you’re right, you are THAT important). Even if somehow you are able to go ‘viral’, like other viruses, the spread won’t last very long, only until something more interesting or infectious comes along. You need to push, push and push some more, take a short break and push again. Rinse and repeat. You may not believe it, but you need customers as a collective more than individual customers need you (the customer collective is always right). For this reason, the onus is on you to push. Google Adwords are a waste, blogging is a waste, social media is a waste, well crafted messages a waste, video a waste, hell even online marketing in any form is a waste. If you hold any part of this view, you are a marketing and communication dinosaur and you are well on your way to extinction.

7 – You don’t play by the rules – web standards are boring, browser compatibility boring, porting content to mobile sites and providing syndication pointless. As for adapting your site to user patterns and listening to feedback from users and interpreting system metrics, what would they know – site visitors are idiots anyway. I know, why don’t you change the way the world navigates websites and redefine the way they consume online content. Sorry, I forgot that you were more important than the whole internet and it’s hard-won established practices (see point 4 again). Why would you want to get your message through, when instead, you could take on the whole world’s habits and teach them something new instead (I always thought a triangle for play and a square for stop was lame, not particularly creative). Three-wheel cars haven’t gotten very far either.

8 – You fail on follow through – if you can get a sufficient and impressive volume from search (top left of illustration) to take action (bottom right of illustration) then you are doing better than most. Then you let yourself down because you don’t give me online feedback or maintain a useful ongoing engagement. Most of the data that passes through your website’s ‘little computer brain’ is lost in some server log somewhere, and out of all the information that could have helped our long-term relationship, only a little bit is retained. Probably just enough information to show that you really don’t understand me, getting under my skin the minute you send me an email blast or have someone phone me during dinner. Then you actually ask me to confirm my ID and don’t understand why I am getting upset (sorry, beginning to get sidetracked here).

9 – You forget what day it is – well maybe not literally, but you write something today and guess what, a bunch of us read it just after the event you are promoting is finished, or the offer period is over. We don’t really care when you last updated the website and maybe signaling that you haven’t touched it for six-months is not the smartest idea – but isn’t it cool that you can show version control and publish dates (no, actually it’s dead boring and we don’t care). The date of the content is the day that it is consumed, not the day that it’s created, and you keep forgetting what day I am going to read it. Maybe you should stick to the past, because lets face it, at sometime it will be in the past and you won’t look like such a fool. Unless of course you can have it auto-removed once it looses it’s value and immediacy, but don’t get carried away, remember we don’t care about your cool web publishing features, only what you can do for us.

10 – You don’t love me anymore – you treat me just like every other visitor, no special treatment, no personalization, and letting me move boxes around on your site is only a gimmick, not a demonstration of doing something for me that counts. Maybe in your drive towards efficiency, you could take a moment to understand when a personal touch-point should be a truly personal touch-point and the other times, when frankly I don’t want you touching me (like that dinner and ID thing before). One day, even if you get everything else right, I’m going to get my (insert your offer here) from someone who makes me feel good, I may even pay them more for it!

Well, how did you shape up?

Told you that your website sucks. Guess what? So do all but a minuscule minority, in fact none that I can name, that’s why I want you to name the exceptions – hopefully yours. The online world is young, full of promise, but far from mature and we all need to lift our game. After ten-years of looking at websites and providing strategic advice, this is the best I can muster, so what would I know?

At least you can try to – 1 focus on the visitor, 2 – cut to the action, 3 – keep it brief, 4 – apply progressive learning, 5 – make the key point, 6 – promote aggressively, 7 – utilize standard practice, 8 – complete the processes you begin, 9 – write with tomorrow in mind, 10 – demonstrate empathy and keep some things personal. Perhaps your website will suck less than most!

Don’t shoot the messenger.

War against RFPs RFQs and other tenders

(Reprise of piece first published 18 months ago, titled “War against RFPs, RFQs, and tenders for CMS projects”, revised to be less content management specific)

Let me flag my position ’straight off the bat’ – I am not a fan of RFPs or any other form of tender. I have spent long enough working with suppliers, vendors and professional service businesses, and not a great deal on the commissioning side, so this position may come as no surprise. If you feel like discounting this view for that reason, go right ahead, however perhaps you may take a moment to consider my premise that no matter how good tenders are, the process and thinking is fundamentally flawed. Of course, if you insist that I write one for your business, then please ignore this post and we’ll both pretend that it is a good process.

Perhaps let me restate the analogy that I used in the original post on an older blog. I encourage you to have some fun with it (comments please), and poke all the holes in it that you wish …

As regulars of this blog will know, I have recently moved back to Melbourne after some fifteen months in Sydney. I, like many of us, need to get from my home to the office, get the kids to school, get around on the weekend and make interstate trips and occasional overseas travel. Oh, and I also like to travel around purely for enjoyment, every now and again.

Based on this, I could produce a set of needs and the send out an RFQ or RFP to Qantas and various airlines, the government’s public transport instrumentalities, purveyors of transport equipment (lets limit it to – Toyota, BMW, Hyundai, Kenworth, Volvo, Comeng, Yamaha, Malvern Star (Aussie bicycle company), Learjet, Sunseeker and NASA), as well as some transport service businesses (cabs, chauffeurs, vehicle rental agencies, travel agencies and the like). Free test samples gladly received, although my comprehensive testing may result in them being required permanently.

I’m sure you are onto me and have guessed where I am going with this!

My complete set of needs, examined holistically, is fairly unique (specific locations, times, preferences), however broken into the right component parts, it is much more generic than it looks collectively. Perhaps to me the whole set is a ‘project’, but from another perspective, my complete ‘travel needs’ are actually a range of segmented items, some that should be shared, some that are customized, and some that have flexible or exchangeable dynamics. If I was to send out an RFP for the whole project, I might get a response from some of the smaller service businesses, although I can’t see one coming in from BMW or the public transport system and many of the other sources I really need to get the best mix. If I choose to ‘do my own project’, I would spend significantly (multiple times) more than my needs require and most likely get a sub-optimal result. I may also miss out on the collective benefit that accrues from shared systems and volume-based solutions. Finally, in crafting the project to suit my perspective alone, I am assuming that I can frame a solution better than the named businesses, who have collective experience that spans many thousands (maybe millions) of users. Now I’m not completely sure, but I think BMW can probably design a better car than I could (haven’t stress tested this assumption).

The key point here is: I can best identify my needs but I am not best placed to specify the solution to them. Yet most RFPs get into deep specifics on where the cup holder should be, how many passengers should be seated and even the mechanical process by which the solution needs to be created (more analogy here). Engine performance and the colour of the upholstery may even be given exactly the same assessment priority (of course we know upholstery colour is much more important than practical considerations).

Restated, my core issues with the tender process are:

1) Most RFPs frame projects that would be better broken up around established market dimensions and component parts. In my case, I need at least public transport, a car, an airline and a taxi service – and wouldn’t ask any one of them to do the lot (apologies to Microsoft, IBM and custom builders who claim to do it all).

2) Most RFPs lead to outcomes that overweight custom deliverables at the ultimate cost of well-traveled common core deliverables that have been tested across large numbers of implementations.

3) Most RFPs are prepared with a strong knowledge of business needs but little product, market and related technical or specialist knowledge and experience.

4) The end result of most RFPs are unique projects that come at high cost and exhaust everyone working on them. Sometimes to the point that two-years later, no one who was there at the time is still working on the delivered solution, so someone throws it out and starts all over again (usually from scratch – having lost the accumulated knowledge).

Yes I know I’m a cynic, but I’m happy knowing that my car only provides part of my total ‘project’ and that if I become unhappy with it (as I am prone to do), I can replace it with another standard / generic / vanilla car that I am not unhealthily wedded to, because I didn’t design and build it from scratch, and I can find any other products and services to fill the other needs in my ‘personal transport project’.

Still with me? If so, either I said something useful or you are preparing a hostile response. Either way, I look forward to more conversation on the topic. Anyone need an RFP?

Twitter – 2,009 experiences in 2009

October 2009 marks my 2,009th Twitter post. I am taking this convenient synchronicity to examine the experience of 2,009 tweets. Cheesy? Yes! Nevertheless, this may prove cathartic for me, and I hope that it may prove somewhat entertaining, thought provoking and memory jogging for you.

I am still a relative ‘newby’ to Twitter, my first post was under a year ago on 23 March 2009. Since then I have averaged ten posts per day. Here is a highly selective and ego centric synopsis. If you are really keen, I have used www.tweetbook.in to produced a PDF of the whole 2,008 previous posts – only 100 odd pages – for download at the end of this post (great for insomniacs). So if you are up for it, lets take a journey down memory lane. We begin with nine of my favorite images posted to Twitpic.

Nine images of 2009, in place of nine-thousand words …

(left to right, top to bottom)

1 – Black Saturday Victorian Bushfires the worst in Victorian history starting on the hottest day in Victorian history. Just happened to be the day I returned from Sydney after 15 months running digital agency Komosion. This was a pivotal day for me, ending almost ten years with the agency I co-founded. The image was taken about six weeks after the fires, while driving near Healesville. The sign says it all!

2 – Madison (age 11) at Buddha Day in Melbourne’s Federation Square – a peaceful contrast to much of the rest of the year. The image is of Madison in the ‘Bohdi Field’ with her ‘wish leaf’. Each leaf is someone’s short wish, hope or message – a bit like Twitter really.

3 – Storm front heading for Melbourne - rain seems to have finally returned to Victoria after a decade of drought. It seems however, that 2009 must also hold some form of record for the sheer volume of natural disasters. Twitter has commented on them all, as well as a few that never happened. In May, a test of a Japanese alert system led to masses of Twitter posts erroneously warning of an impending Tsunami. There have been a number of other real earthquakes that fortunately did not trigger corresponding walls of water, sadly some did. We have also had our fair share of earthquakes with big Richter numbers – hope they are not building to a super-size one. For all those that have been affected by, or are recovering from, natural disaster, like Madison’s Bohdi leaf, I wish happiness and good fortune for you.

4 – Sarah (age 7) resplendent in Carlton AFL regalia and face-painting – it wasn’t a bad year for the Blues, making the finals and showing promise for a real dig in 2010. At a guess I’d say almost ten-percent of my Twitter posts relate to Carlton in the Australian Football League (AFL). Starting from the top of the ladder after defeating Richmond in the first round, the Blues slowly slumped and then came back strong, including a round 18 win over eventual competition winners Geelong. Blues captain Chris Judd came second in the Brownlow Medal count and won the club’s best and fairest award. The Brownlow evening is also infamous for Carlton’s Number 25 – Brendan Fevola (the 2009 Coleman Medalist) drunken escapades. It looks like he will play for Brisbane next year. I have mixed emotions, but if you look at the number in the photo, you can see Sarah is not happy about it. Go Blues in 2010 – expect more posts!

5 – Ozmopolitans, the drink you have in Oz and while watching Wicked – the Wizard of Oz based stage show Wicked ran in Melbourne to rave reviews and great crowds – us included. We enjoyed our green beverages and use the lit plastic martini glasses from time to time. Green was the brand colour of my beloved Komodo CMS with whom I parted company in March 2009 (think I covered that already).

6 – The year of Swine Flu or H1N1. Amy (age 7) with Tamiflu medication – In our family only Amy and I caught Swine Flu. Amy recovered relatively quickly after a couple of days of serious illness. I was hit harder, and couldn’t get out of bed for four days – sickest I’ve been in my whole adult life. Amy called the Very Special Kids piggy bank ‘Swiney’ in homage – both Amy and Swiney are doing well. Unfortunately H1N1 is still on the march.

7 – Youngling’s Amy and Sarah (twins aged 7) demonstrate their mastery of the Force and confuse the hell out of the cat. Yes, I’m a big geek waiting to grow up and a fan of pretty much any science fiction movie. In 2009 also enjoyed Good News Week, United States of Tara and a load of sport – that covers another couple of hundred Twitter posts. Also enjoyed having ‘Twitter’ shots at Eurovision, the Logies and a host of other weird and wonderful television moments. Being a critic is so easy!

8 – Brother in Law Michael in Geelong colours - heading to the Geelong and Bulldogs final with his son Patrick, lets just say they weren’t talking to each other afterward.

9 – My wonderful daughters Amy, Sarah and Madison – it’s been a challenging year for them, moving states and moving schools. They have been fantastic and if you read Amy’s advice in my post on the Victorian Bushfires, you’ll see that they are much smarter than their ‘old man’. Most of my photographic posts revolve around the escapades of the fantastic three!

The Twitter Network Itself – My Comments and Insights

I started using Twitter to prepare some digital consulting and ultimately got hooked. In the process of 2,009 posts, here are some lessons and some tools I have picked up:

Check sources – the more news worthy your post is, the more you should check the source of your information. A case in point was Richard Wilkins announcing the erroneous death of Jeff Goldblum in a celebrity rumor flood that followed the death of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett on the same day. Richard was not the only one, he just said it on national TV. There are a bunch of celebrity ‘Twitterati’ who did the same thing but have since deleted their misguided posts. Heritage media (a derogatory term I discovered on Twitter and have perversely taken a shine to) is still tripped up occasionally by the immediacy of Twitter.

Stability - Twitter has grown very quickly and gets a bit wonky from time to time. Sometimes the little birdy forgets things, sometimes it falls off the perch completely. This really annoyed me at first, but now I am getting used to perpetual beta and growing pains. Seems it has been contagious with Facebook and even Google suffering major outages during 2009. Twitter posts such as #twitterfail #facebookfail and #googlefail are quick to tell everyone when the Internet is having a moment. I’m taking a moment to thank all involved for keeping these largely free public platforms ticking over as well as they do – most of the time.

Red Wine, Coffee and Chocolate – account for another significant number of my posts. I think talking about them makes me love them more. So my insight is that Twitter is not good for your vices, in finding like minded people and talking about your own passions, they are less satiated and more front of mind. Hang on a minute just going for a Shiraz, Espresso and Truffle (Haighs or Koko Black preferably).

Some Twitter Domains – here are a few practical places for Twitter edification …
http://friendorfollow.com – fast way to see who is or isn’t following you.
http://www.twitterfall.com – the wash of all the world’s Twitter posts (good in a crisis or research).
http://twitcaps.com – the same as Twitter Fall but for images (watch the bandwidth).
http://www.topfollowfriday.com – great for preparing your #FollowFriday list.
http://twitter.grader.com – give yourself (or someone else a score).
There are plenty more, but half the fun is going hunting. Also make sure you get some good Twitter application(s). TweetDeck is great on a Mac and so far on iPhone I prefer the paid version of Echofon (also play with Tweetie, TweetReel, SimplyTweet, Twitterific and Twitterena from time to time).

Final Comments

There’s lots more I could say but I want to send my 2,010th tweet, so stay tuned to @drwarwick. In quick review, congratulations to Federrer for passing Sampras record of grand slams, Webber for winning his first Grand Prix, Australia for loosing the Ashes (again – not happy). I have greatly enjoyed reading Purple Cow, Meatball Sundae and Tribes by Seth Godin and ConnectGen by my friend Iggy Pintado – follow @iggypintado. My condolences to the families, friends and fans of Richard Pratt, Charles (Bud) Tingwell, David Eddings, David Carradine, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett and the many other people who unfortunately passed away during this period.

Finally, thank you to everyone I have met online through Twitter and those I have been fortunate enough to meet through ‘real world’ get togethers. They include #tweetupmellers and #socialmelb in Melbourne and #coffeemornings in Sydney. Do yourself a big favor and get along to your local ‘tweetup’ equivalent.

If you are interested you can read more about my ‘Twitter’ experiences in an IDM Article I wrote this year, which you can find here. If you are really deranged, here are the whole 2008 preceding posts. TweetBook-PDF

See you online and thanks to everyone who has re-tweeted – RT – or shared a Twitter conversation! To many, many more …

No hard questions for a difficult situation!

Russell Rees and Mick Bourke from the CFA speak at the Melbourne Press Club

I am a proud member of the Melbourne Press Club and have been for almost 7 years. Over the years I have had the fortune to attend close to fifty MPC lunches. I have seen Nelson Mandela, the Dali Lama, state and federal politicians, sports legends and a host of other inspirational people. Including today, I have had only three occasions to feel annoyed, disappointed and empty after hearing the speaker(s).

The previous two were Richard Alston, when he was handling Telstra and ICT, I watched an experienced politician spend an hour and say nothing, in fact absolutely nothing of substance, at all. On two separate occasions I saw John Howard, one good, the other full of spin, arrogance and a complete failure to address the issue of the day. Today I have greater disappointment than in the seven preceding years – I was prepared to be completely supportive, a strong advocate for the speakers, instead, they managed in an hour to turn my opinion on its head.

MPC – Bushfire Alert Lunch

Today, the new CEO of the Country Fire Authority, Mick Bourke and the Chief Fire Officer, Russell Rees were going to “discuss the lessons of Black Saturday and preparations for another extreme fire danger season”, so the invitation said. The events of the weeks following 7 February 2009 touched millions and impacted thousands in ways that will last a lifetime. It is also the well publicized subject of a Royal Commission headed by Justice Bernard Teague, and no doubt Rees is tired of the process, the criticism, and the trauma of the events themselves. I feel strongly for him, wondering how he could dust himself off, drive hard lessons through his organization, and get revitalized for future challenges – all too near.

Although only a single lunch, a single insight and a single uninformed opinion (mine), I am left with disappointment that is deep and hard to pin down. Please do not assume I have anything but the utmost respect and admiration for the CFA and other emergency services. The 60,000 or so CFA members, largely volunteers, in some 1,200 towns and communities and their other emergency services comrades are amazing. The few that make the media for ‘bad acts’ are exceptions to the rule, and the vast majority are legends of their communities. They should always be honored and congratulated. To lead such an organization would come as both a profound honor and with a corresponding amount of burden. It would be far from easy, and I do not want to add pressure where it is unwarranted to some of the most difficult and challenging roles within the state of Victoria.

As an attendee and interested Victorian, all I wanted to hear was energy directed to the challenge, attention to the lessons of the past, and a collaborative effort to improve the outcomes of any such future natural catastrophe. Instead, I heard a tired and beaten leader, at subtle but obvious odds with the media and community, who spoke very little on what has, will, or can be done. Others that I spoke with felt as I did, lacking confidence that we, the Victorian community, had achieved progress despite the great cost. That is why I am profoundly disappointed.

My Black Saturday

I returned to Melbourne after fifteen months working in Sydney on Black Saturday. I landed at Melbourne Airport that morning, it was a rough flight and when I emerged from Tullamarine Airport in the early morning, it was already outrageously hot and windy. The radio was extolling how severe the fire danger was and that the temperature was likely to reach the mid 40’s (Celsius), with strong NW winds (dry and hot) shifting to SW in the afternoon.

My family and I were moving into a house on the extreme North East edge of the Melbourne metropolitan area. In the afternoon, seeing smoke billowing to the North, we watched from high ground south of the Yan Yean reservoir as fire ripped through the forest north of the reservoir, clearly headed East with alarming speed.

At one point, despite us being at least five kilometers south, we could clearly see huge flames, silhouetted against the billowing smoke, much higher than the trees. The flames must have reached at least 100 meters into the air and they were traveling very quickly, apparent even from such a distance. We decided to head to Richmond (inner Melbourne) for the rest of the day, only to be caught by traffic blocks near a relatively minor grass fire in South Morang. My story is incidental, minor and only relevant for this reason:

My basic regional knowledge, that of my young daughters and the others present at the same park-top hill, armed with a Melway’s street directory, came to the following conclusion: “Towns including Arthurs Creek, Strathewen, Kinglake, St Andrews and Yarra Glen were in the path of the fire, and if the wind turned from the SW, Yea and others would come under threat”. ABC radio were taking calls with the same observations before any formal notice from emergency services. My congratulations go to ABC 774 and Richard Stubbs who came in to work because he felt it was a day for vigilance and provided a great service. It was assumed by all of us present that emergency services would be fully aware of the risk areas related to the major fire fronts, and that warning would be given to threatened areas where time was still available. I made such a comment to one of my 7-year-old twin daughters who suggested we start calling people (she also suggested in no uncertain terms that we should leave).

So when I read in a recent ABC article quoting Justice Teague that: “the most senior CFA officer, made no reference to maps predicting where the fires would go and ignored the fire behaviour expertise in his own building to the point where it was difficult to understand how Mr Rees could properly carry out a strategic statewide coordination responsibility”, it makes me feel physically sick, and wish that I could have done as Amy (age 6) said and start calling anyone in Strathewen and King Lake.

Here is Amy’s self inspired card to all the fire fighters (photo). “Tank you for fitig the fick, tank you” translates into adult English as – Thank you for fighting the fires, Thank you! Again, all I wanted to hear today, and maybe it has been said somewhere else, is that more attention will be paid to where fires are headed and how to get the message out. If the quote above, reported by the ABC, is a true account, then there must be some very traumatized forecasters and surely a lesson that has to been learned. Why can’t this be the message of the new CEO and of the most senior Fire Officer in the CFA?

Instead, the luncheon conversation was about how the ‘community must be ready’, how the media ‘may not get different treatment’ and how the ‘job is hard’. Rees half-jokingly deferring to his “new boss” which struck me as inappropriate and concerning, that the Chief Fire Officer would deflect the harder issues and withhold comment over events that occurred on his watch.

Social media has it’s say

Having sent out a tweet that I was at the MPC lunch, I had a number or responses, including people threatening to ‘unfollow’ me, so deep is the passion that remains. When I asked online if anyone had a question, again an indication that people are not feeling heard, or that suitable answers have been given. By way of example, I received the following question (paraphrased):

“Why wasn’t the Marysville water issue addressed? Without water, no fire fighting ability. Even after the fire passed, the interest was in evacuation, nothing else. It was claimed it was a health and hygiene issue and yet two lone people solved the problem in 30 minutes and stopped the evacuation”

I don’t know the details, but underpinning this question is the same desire – let us know that knowledge has been identified and will be used in future. Show the public that although natural disasters will occur again, more life will be lost, some of the things we could have done better will be done. My personal lesson – say something, that is why I felt compelled to post this article. If Emergency Services, through their leadership, publicly demonstrate learning, then I will have increased confidence. Today failed to do so and all things being equal, I would be forced to take action that comes from a lack of faith. Listening to the advice of my children, who expect their parents to take action because they don’t have the adult expectation that the Government, bureaucracies or specialist organizations have issues in hand.

Difficult situations should come with difficult questions!

Fires happen. A dramatic part of the natural cycle that may be compounded by changing climate. Humans live near combustible material and lives will be lost again. There is no possibility of complete safety and those involved, victims, emergency services and a multitude of others will be affected again. The people in command have a hard, hard role and cannot be expected to make perfect decisions, especially under the pressure of the moment. Russell Rees, his team and other similar leaders deserve respect, thanks and a chance to improve the system, after all, they should hold the hard won knowledge brought about by the hardest of lessons.

With such a role, we are talking about “questions of life and death”. So why now, today, are the hard questions being put in the back pocket. Why are they not seeing the light of day and the answers delivered and learning benefits extracted. Rees and Bourke instead chose to focus on side issues and trivialities, motherhood statements about community involvement and media responsibility and jokes about ‘having a new boss’. Some half-way difficult questions were asked, largely brushed aside, and in a tired, somber, generally polite room, the journalists parked the really tough questions, time was called when it looked like the audience may be getting to some issues, and the guests got their gifts and departed. Unscathed, unchallenged and as far as I can see unaltered.

Once again, the only thing I wanted to see, the thing that would have avoided this post, is some authentic, believable and committed acknowledgment that things have or will change. That we are better prepared as a result of the trauma and that although many of the same people remain, they are wiser for the hardship. Instead the term ’siege mentality’ came to mind. If another quote within the ABC article is true, that a “not-insignificant cog in the firefighting bureaucracy disparagingly referred to the lay witnesses (in the Teague Commission) as the two o’clock tears” then it is ignorance and hardness that has unfortunately been the lesson and not improvement.

Russell, I hope you come through this and lead the great CFA forward, and that your young daughter, the same age as my twins, is no longer concerned for your job. I also hope, that next time Amy asks me if I should start calling people, I can say with confidence that it is not necessary, our world-class emergency services are doing just that or better, and we would be best served to stay out of the way. Right now – I’m backing her advice!

Online Trend – People not Pages

Something fundamental is happening online. Perhaps the most profound and disruptive change in the short life of the web is upon us, and it is more transformational than social networks and mobile devices.

Data is being restructured around people rather than location (page or URL). Although this may seem obvious, have you taken a moment to consider what this actually means, and how fundamental a shift such a transformation is? Lets take a practical look:

Google is considered by many synonymous with the web, it certainly is a principle gateway to much of the web’s content and a perfect litmus test for change. Google is page based. It indexes pages (URLs), it awards them a PageRank, results are listed by page, advertising attached to pages and content, keywords and metadata (where used) are also handled at a page level. Perhaps you can see how a web that is moving away from a page driven system could be disruptive for Google, and for most other established systems. Yet that is exactly what is happening!

Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (better known as AJAX) is one of the forces bringing about change. AJAX is both a philosophy and a collection of interrelated development techniques that enable an ‘interactive web’. Specifically AJAX refreshes elements as required at smaller granular level than pages. This means that a page is less relevant and increasingly a window to functional elements that are flexible and changing. Metadata, hyperlinks and other stored page information is no longer an effective catalogue of what happens within the framework of a page. Websites that previously had thousands of pages may now be reduced to a few templates with elements collecting, processing and rendering data as required (in small sectional parts). YouTube for example, contains millions of digital assets through only a few portal pages. The retention of page URLs for deep-linking and search is really only an accommodation of the legacy systems that depend on discrete pages for effectiveness. Granularity is increasing and the form of web content is becoming more variable. Twitter for example, is a collection of 140 character posts, each currently with its own URL, again to accommodate the page nature of the web. This ‘accommodation’ won’t last forever – already this blog has widgets that bring data from elsewhere and the page paradigm is increasing being forced to fit a more complex model of web assets. Pages are really out of place when we look at rich media (video, animation, and sound) where they do not suit the form and linear data flow of this content. For a long time, the web struggled to ‘fit’ all types of content into the page model – now another wave of online evolution is washing through the web.

Before we look at the future, lets take a moment to explore the past. Although blasphemy is some quarters, pages are a throw back to traditional publishing – literally the pages of a book. With no other model at hand, the ordering of online content followed physical publishing and to some extent, a static screen and a printed page seemed a shared model that made sense. In reality the web was never simply static screens and the digital data (1’s and 0’s) could always be reassembled, re-purposed and escape the physical limitations of a ‘page’. The applications (browsers and access points) we use, and the links in content, could transport us somewhere else on a whim. Online content is also consumed differently to physical (printed) media and the reason is about more than just back-lit screens, hyperlinks and browsers – we never really equated web pages with printed pages or websites with printed publications.

The contemporary online environment is increasingly about how content is connected to the ‘real world’ and progressively less about how it is connected (hyperlinked) to other online content. The web is coming to life because it is being connected to humans – connected to us. Social networks do more than connect us to each other and expand classical network behavior and human interaction, they also connect our content to each other and open correspondingly rich dialogue and feedback loops. We are seeing some of these changes with blogs, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIN, MySpace and hundreds of other socially aware sites, applications and filters. Advertising can now be connected to people rather than pages. Instead of PageRank as a global simplification, variable content ratings that take into account interests, personal connections and intelligent filtering will be part of our digital future. The ‘killer applications’ will be built around trust, authenticity and human connection – the way they should be.

Give this shift some more thought and you will see how fundamental it is. The web is increasingly about people not pages and you need to apply this to any strategy you are creating. Forget the semantic web and machines talking to machines – guess what – humans are social animals and online is becoming humanized (lets not give it a version number)! This post will be explored further in a future media article, so please comment and help me refine the conversation. Hope you took something from it.