Scoble’s column on microblogging (featuring Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and Facebook) from the latest issue of FastCompany is up online. It’s titled "The Next Email."
His conclusion:
"If we revisit this conversation again in three years, I suspect that
we’ll have found all sorts of little uses for these services, and
they’ll simply become what email is today: something we must do just to
participate in the heartbeat of business."
A little while ago we created a Eurovision commentary channel on Jaiku to enable live commenting around this camp megaspectacle, which is taking place in Helsinki this year.
Around the same time I read a story about the global Finnish humor ambassador Markku from Finland, whose videos had risen among the top 100 most popular comedy clips on YouTube. Although I had never yet met the group behind Markku I could immediately identify with their style. It turned out Markku was getting his own morning show on SubTV, Finland’s leading youth TV channel.
One thing led to another, and soon I was talking with the SubTV head of programming about getting Markku on Jaiku. She thought it was a cool idea, and when Markku’s creators Teemu Niukkanen and Antti Toivonen agreed to go for it we did. Markku started posting on Jaiku pretty much right away, and we issued a press release with SubTV a few days later.
Meanwhile, someone had posted on Jaiku’s Eurovision channel that it’d be cool to get the 2006 Eurovision winner Lordi, a Finnish monster rock group, to join as a commentator. Before I knew it another Jaiku user, Lordi’s good friend Sami Keinänen was driving me to meet the monster. Mr. Lordi, who unmasked is the brilliant vocalist-crafter Tomi Putaansuu, personally liked the idea, and suddenly an international monster superstar was candidly sharing his pre-Eurovision musings on Jaiku in the unimitable style of Northern Finns.
Yesterday during the live broadcast of the Eurovision semi-finals everything sort of came together as Lordi, Markku, and a slew of witty commentators like Arttu Tolonen, Liisa Jokinen, Gita Vainola, and many others let themselves loose on the Jaiku backchannel. The amazing part is how quickly and effortlessly the organizing went – almost as if the pieces of the puzzle assembled themselves. Lordi will open the Eurovision finals tomorrow evening, and we’ll be hosting a Jaiku party at Korjaamo in Helsinki with screens showing the live broadcast and the live commentary on Jaiku. If you’re in town for the event, this is probably not a bad way to experience the spectacle.
The Eurovision Commentary channel on Jaiku: jaiku.com/channel/esc
Markku from Finland on Jaiku: markku.jaiku.com
Mr. Lordi on Jaiku: lordi.jaiku.com
UPDATE: Jaiku is now back up and running.
UPDATE2: The reason of the crash was evidently a traffic spike from badges, Nebula was responsive alhtough it took a while to get through to them on the phone
Jaiku.com is currently down due to what appears to be a force majeur of some sort at Nebula the hosting company. We’re investigating.
UPDATE: Sign up to Innovate here.
I’ll be speaking at the MSN-sponsored Innovate event in Stockholm on Thursday, December 7th. The talk will be a fresh new one on social objects.
Informed commentators like Anne Galloway, Nat Torkington, Russ Beattie, Stowe Boyd, Noah Brier, James Boardwell and others have responded to the idea of object-centered sociality in thoughtful, provocative ways, and I’d like to acknowledge that and build on the feedback I think has value.
Many consider it a useful approach, but so far we’ve been missing a concise set of claims – call them guidelines, rules, best practices, or any such thing – about the design of successful social objects. In the talk I plan to suggest an agenda for designers: point out the most important aspects of social object-centered design and show real-world examples of what works and what doesn’t.
If you’re in Stockholm on Thursday, I hope to see you at the event at Grand Hotel.
Fredrik Weibull of Winkreative invited me to a herrmiddag, a sort of male bonding event in Stockholm this weekend. I never participated in a herrmiddag so it sounded exotic in an old-worldish way: about a hundred men, dressed in tuxedoes, meet at a luxury hotel from where they get whisked to some unknown location for the evening with no advance information about the particulars of the program.
The destination turned out to be a boat. We circulated in the Stockholm archipelago and the onboard menu consisted of snaps (shots) and skagen (toast). Each shot was preceded by a snapsvisa (drinking song). The Swedes were bellowing from their hearts; I was squinting to follow the lyrics from a sheet someone had thoughtfully administered.
Every once in a while the boat stopped on an island and the chic, increasingly raucous party climbed on the shore for short visits to seaside attractions (an aquarium, a historic telegraph station turned into a restaurant) and more booze, speeches, and singing. After the first couple of shots I had to start pouring water into my cup, stashing the shot glasses behind flower pots and tipping the contents inconspicuously into the water to avoid ending up in the hospital for a stomach hosing.
Although it’s not my regular scene I think I now understand better why these kind of collective drinking binges work. I got to talk with almost everyone during the evening: doctors, entrepreneurs, students, lawyers. Guys who’d otherwise never meet exchanged frank accounts of their professional and personal lives and worldviews.
On the plane back the experience got me thinking about how differently people still interact in the real world and online. It’s easier to be candid online when you have a fake identity – but the feeling of genuinity just isn’t there when nobody can trust the other person’s really who they claim to be in flesh and blood.
In contrast, the herrmiddag felt like the real thing. The Swedish gentlemen were genuine and the setting, attire, and alcohol worked to produce a state of mutual sincerity.
I agree with the panelists at SIME yesterday morning that there’s probably going to be more online socializing that happens with one’s real identity in the coming years. If so then people are probably going to create temporary spaces of reciprocal candidness online also. They’ll be getting drunk or whatever at home and logging on with their ‘real’ avatars to some ‘real’ virtual world (as opposed to make believe games) for schmoozing with each other as themselves but temporarily outside the regular social constraints connected with true identity. No doubt it’s already happening, just not yet evenly distributed.
On a related note, there’s a bit of a resurgence of interest in the personal trust element of online relationships going on in the research circles. Eric & Alex have more on that.
Marko closed the first day with seven points that I think astutely identified the collective brainwaves at this conference:
1. Bubble trouble: interpreting history through purely financial cycles will cause you to misinterpret what’s happening
2. Consumer power: they make the media, they listen to each other, corporations must adapt to communicate with those rules
3. Packaging experiences: those companies who overinvest in making things beautiful and simple to use will win
4. The end of anonymity: we’re no longer dogs on the internet. A growing importance of online communication based on real identities
5. Small group communication: from shouting to a mass, to engaging a group of 3-10 people to communicate with each other
6. Undeniable trend toward advertising business models: spinal tap for companies especially in mobile telecoms. Users represented by proxies
7. Let’s believe in Europe: in 5 years, over half of the top internet brands will be launched and run from Europe
Question from the audience (my translation): “What can save the mobile industry?”
Marko Ahtisaari: “I’d say drop data costs, make data pricing transparent, bring in advertising as a revenue source, and embrace the open internet.”
Some quotes (not precise, but by and large) from the Lords of the Blogosphere panel at SIME06 featuring blogger-entrepreneurs Loic Lemeur, Nico Lummma, Dan Gillmor and Henrik Torstensson. These snippets are shamelessly out of context and the guys said a lot more, but it’s what stuck in my mind:
On the core idea of blogging
“It’s not about mass audience. The majority of bloggers are not in it for the money, they’re in it to communicate. An obscure blog by some obscure person that is only read by their family members is more valuable per person than the most popular blog in the world” -Dan
On blogging in the local language
“I used to blog only in English but I rarely got any comments. These days blogging rocks in France. When I blog in French, hundreds of people attack me :)” -Loic
On how blogging fits in their personal life
“At first my wife was totally against my blogging but then she started a knitting blog” -Nico
“When I play WoW with my 8-year old son, I get killed all the time. It’s a weird experience when he has to come in to save his father.” -Loic
On blogging and marketing
“It’s a little harder for the marketers” -Dan
“You can’t fight agains 60 million people” -Loic
“The best example of a company using blogging to improve their brand was Microsoft and Robert Scoble – a real person instead of the corporation” -Henrik
Kävin puhumassa viime viikolla Opintoluotsin järjestämästä julkisen sektorin verkkopalveluja käsittelevässä seminaarissa. Kalvot “Web 2.0-mitä se on?” esityksestä löytyy täältä.
Laitoin alalaitaan omat muistiinpanoni, ne käynevät transkriptista vaikka ovatkin puutteeliset.
Heads up from the future trends panel, the first session of the morning at SIME 06. Four entertaining, edgy guys (no girls) moderated by the elegant Tom Crampton. Some quotes:
“MySpace is so out. Get the stupid people out of my life and get the interesting people in, that’s the only thing the girls [I studied] care about” – Alexander Bard
“The trend now is opposite to anonymity it’s people broadcasting to their friends where they are and what they’re doing with their real identity on services like Plazes and Jaiku” – Martin Varsavsky
“The mobile phone is a closer proxy to real life and we’re going to see virtual selves migrating to the real life through it” – Carlos Bhola
“Poverty makes for better thinking” – Martin V
“I mean real free Wi-Fi not Martin Varsavsky free Wi-Fi” -Thomas Madsen-Mygdal
“Mumbai is going to be the new Los Angeles where content is created.” – Alex B
“It’s getting harder to be a fascist these days” – Martin V
“The internet is making the world more democratic, but democracy is not necessarily nice” – Alex B
“Television, newspapers, and old media are dead dead dead, I’d advise you to get out of there as soon as possible” – Alex B (to Tom Crampton)
“Micro-entrepreneuship. All the exciting stuff that’s happening is about getting the micro to work” – Thomas M-M
“I’m a fucking sociologist, I’m just describing what’s happening” – Alex B
“I just wanted to point out that there are very basic necessities of life haven’t been addressed for over half of the planet” – Martin V
“Micro-entrepreneurship is absolute bullshit terminology because everything starts up small and if it’s successful it grows big” – Carlos B