Bambi Francisco

Geni's approach to social networking

With the success of MySpace, there has been enormous activity in the startup world focusing on social networks around a particular niche, or purpose. In the case of Geni.com, which launched mid-January, the site attracts anyone interested in genealogy – the study of ancestry or family histories. It is a social network that first starts with one family tree, and then branches out from there. You can imagine that as family trees get filled out, you'll be able to see who your 10th-degree cousin is. You might also learn that your best friend is related by having the same great, great, great, great grandmother.

The viral nature of this site is pretty obvious and compelling. Once someone fills in their family tree, like I did recently, they know exactly what they have to do next. They have to prompt others – parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, in-laws – to fill in their family profiles. To this end, the value proposition seems far greater than other social netwok sites that are trying to get people to post their thoughts, photos and videos on their own personal pages and get their friends or family to connect with them. The problem for those sites are 1) some family members/friends aren't interested in social networks, or they're already part of one 2) there are too many other social networks trying to position themselves as neighborhood or family/close friend networks, such as TypePad's Vox and Friendster, and therefore, it's hard to choose which one to be part of.

Geni.com is interesting because it's a site that organizes your family tree. That's a value-add that other social networks don't provide.

To be sure, Geni.com - though its approach is different -- is actually trying to do the same thing as the other sites. It's trying to connect people. And, on the site, a person can upload their photos, and create profiles, such as favorite cuisines, school and professional history. There's even a place where someone can message me on my Geni.com profile. These are requisite features of social network sites. Now, what I haven't seen is a place to blog. But I imagine it's only a matter of time before this feature is incorporated into Geni.com. After all, once you get your family tree up and running, you'll likely want to communicate with them through stories. Additionally, if people can blog, that means they'll likely stay on the site longer, create content, and drive pageviews. And, since Geni.com is going to be mainly advertising supported, I'd imagine the company will want as many features that drive pageviews.

Now, while I really thinking the viral nature is compelling, it will take a lot of encouragement to get others to respond. For instance, since I pinged my family (nearing two weeks now) to upload their information – their spouse, children, in-laws, etc. – they had yet to fill in any information. But no matter, I’m sure in time they will. It’s a matter of changing their behavior and understanding how easy a family tree can be organized if they just added their 2 cents of knowledge.

Former PayPal COO David Sacks, who also produced “Thank you for Smoking,” based on the popular book (and one of my favorites), founded Geni.com in mid-2006. In this video, he gives his pitch about why he started it and what his vision is.

Flixster - MySpace for movies

This is yet another social network, but the difference is that the content or focus is around movies. Flixster is building upon the popular features that have helped Netflix rent more movies. Those features include the ability to see or make recommendations and see which movies are the most popular among friends or in the Netflix community. Netflix said that some 60% of the movies rented come from recommendations. Clearly, recommendations help people discover new movies to rent. Unlike Netflix, however, on Flixster, you don’t get the great service of receiving movies in the mail. Of course, you don’t have to pay $10 a month either. To that end, Flixster can be a nice complement to the many movie-download services emerging, such as Amazon’s unBox. So, let me share my experience on Flixster. First off, I have to say that this service (more than others) is set up in such a way that it’s easy to invite friends – a form of grass-roots marketing that can have exponential affects on growth. It’s no wonder that in 10 months, Flixster has signed up 5 million registered users who collectively have posted 190 million movie recommendations written. That’s pretty fast. But a lot of that has to do with the way Flixster is set up. One of the smart ways Flixster is making the grass-roots marketing far easier for us is by integrating our address books immediately upon signing up. After I signed up with my gmail account, Flixster displayed my gmail email list and an automated email invite that, with one click, could go to all of my friends (and other random emails) in my email list. Smart move. With one click, I could have invited the 135 emails recorded in my gmail account. The only problem is that the automated invite said: “Hi, I just took a movie quiz at Flixster.com.  If you come take it too we can see if we like the same movies.” Since I didn’t just take a movie quiz, I didn’t think it was honest of me to send this email. Besides, it did feel a bit like I was spamming. The one thing I didn’t like was that I couldn’t easily choose which email accounts I wanted to send an email to. Rather, I had to check off each box (next to an email account) that I didn’t want to send an email to. This was rather annoying, and ultimately a turn-off. Another way Flixster is making the invite process easier is by integrating with News Corp’s MySpace. With 115 million members worldwide, it’s a smart integration. At one point in the sign-up process, Flixster asked if I wanted to send a bulletin on my MySpace account inviting my MySpace friends.

The social network features are great. There’s even a feature that lets you upload videos and images related to a particular movie. There is also, of course, the requisite “profile” page. (I think I must have two dozen profile pages by now.)  The site also seems to have some pretty useful reviews and recommendations. But I’m not sure I’d create a social network just around movies. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of movies – having seen three in the movie theaters just in the last week -- but I wouldn’t build a social life around my movie preferences. That said, I did click onto the tab that said “Meet people like me.” The No. 1 person that showed up was a 13-year-old girl.

Mobile social networks

If you want to see where your kids will be spending their time in the future, take a look at Gemini Mobile’s platform that lets carriers offer their subscribers a social networking community on their phones. Essentially, the service is a mobile community – a MySpace on the go, but for more virtual reality. The platform is called eXplo, and it powers SoftBank Mobile’s S! Town. S! Town is pretty neat. A subscriber can have an avatar that walks around this virtual world. In the demo I was given, Michael Tao, Gemini Mobile’s CTO, had a black anime as his avatar. His avatar strolled through S!Town’s virtual town center, which was quite deserted, given that it was 4 am in the morning in Japan, where this service is available. At first, it seemed pretty silly and useless to be walking around this deserted town. But then Michael bumped into several females (or at least one might think they were female because their avatars were female). Michael tried to befriend them, while at the same time clicking onto a user profile to find out more about this person. All members have profiles that can be made public to the community. All community members can roam around this virtual town and meet other members. Watching this interaction was a bit frightening, especially when Michael could – with just a click of a button -- find out more about the person whom he was interacting with. When I was a little girl, I played tea with some dolls around a mini table. My future little girl will likely be playing tea on her mobile phone with (hopefully) other little girls. So, what's the business model? Consumers don't pay for the service. Rather they can buy content in the town. There are also advertisements on billboards in the virtual town. In 2007, the service is expected to be deployed with U.S. and European carriers.

The social and visual Web

I recall years ago when Steve Case said that those who dig for gold make more money than those supplying the picks and shovels. As the co-founder and former CEO of America Online, he was bias. But he has a point. These days if MySpace and YouTube are the ones digging for gold, their sales to News Corp (nws) and Google (goog) show that when you hit gold, you hit it big.

But the battle to become a top video or social network destination site is fierce. The landscape is littered with sleep-deprived, burned-out founders and CEOs of dozens of startup video-sharing or social network sites, as well as those working at veteran Internet sites. So despite the rich rewards in finding that pot of gold, some startups are avoiding this costly war, opting instead to provide the tools and platforms to socialize and video-rize the world. Essentially what they're saying is: Rather than fight with MySpace and YouTube, and the dozens of others, why not just provide the picks and shovels to others who want at it? What's the result of that?

I'm not sure, but I can only imagine that my inbox will be filled with "new friend" requests in a video format some day. Oh, joy.

So, who are these tools and shovel companies? This week, two young companies -- DAVE.tv and vSocial -- unveiled software services to provide companies and individuals a way to have a video and text blog platform that also includes social networking features. (Note: I use blog to define a Web-based publishing platform that allows anyone to contribute.) I think it's an excellent idea. As many of my readers and viewers know I love the marriage of both: The blogging capabilities in video or text allow for anyone to contribute from a staffed producer and reporter to the audience or the user. The social network features allow anyone to market and distribute the content.

Now, sure, there are others who already provide white-label video solutions, such as Feedroom, Brightcove, VideoEgg, Maven Networks, and Narrowstep. Even Cisco Systems (csco) is offering video-capabilities to businesses. But none of the aforementioned companies (besides DAVE.tv and vSocial) are offering the social networking features that let the audience communicate with one another, make friends, share and build affinity groups. These are the features that give the audience control to manage their worlds, or in MySpace parlance, their spaces. 

That said, it's only a matter of time before social network features (connect, make friends, share, vote, rank, etc.) are commodities incorporated into blog publishing platforms. It's only a matter of time before all the companies I mentioned above announce that they too will offer the same services and tools. For now, they don't. Or if they do, they're in stealth mode.

Read my Net Sense column on MarketWatch for the rest of the column: Socialize this... video

The Web 2.0 cost - less control

Facebook is going to open up to the masses. Some rabble-rouser Facebook members are upset. But Facebook has no choice.  Even though it has 9.5 million members, that pales in comparison to the 100-plus million members that News Corp's MySpace has.  But here's the silver lining... well sort of.

Facebook founder and  CEO Mark  Zuckerber is likely learning a lessson. And, other Internet startups can learn from him as well. In the Web 2.0 world, control has been shifted over to the audience, or "community." Web 2.0 companies enjoy the fruits of that community labor. Web 2.0 companies haven't paid for the content created either. 

But everything comes at a cost. And, the cost in the Web 2.0 world may be less control.

For my full column, blog, video commentary and interview with Zuckerberg, go to:
My blog on MarketWatch

More video-related columns

1) NBC has its own user-generated site called www.dotcomedy.com, where aspiring comedians can upload their own videos. But starting a video-sharing site isn't that easy.  On Tuesday, NBC struck a marketing deal with YouTube to tap into the video-sharing site's booming and active community (YouTube had 20 mln unique visitors in May, according to Nielsen//NetRatings). The partnership will allow NBC to test video-sharing sites as a means to promote shows, and it will allow NBC to test user-generated participation in the promo-creation process.  Still, new user-generated services continue to emerge, like Yahoo's user-generated video service. With more than 100 of such video-sharing sites cropping up, it's a wonder anyone bothers to launch another one. But Yahoo did.  For more of what's behind Yahoo, read my commentary on MarketWatch, or visit my official MarketWatch blog.

Net Sense: Yahoo's openness

My official blog on MarketWatch

2) What are people watching on the Web? Are they watching amateur or home-grown video or big-media video? They're watching home-grown video. For more, read my Net Sense column on MarketWatch, or go to my offfical MarketWatch blog.

Net Sense: Your video vs. big media video

3) The trick to making sure that video ads won't be skipped over online is to make sure they're compelling enough to share. The way you can do that is to make the video provocative, if not nearly X-rated. A couple weekends ago,  HuffingtonPost.com started displaying video advertisements created by ad agency JWT for a week-long pilot program. I won't be explicit about the various ads. Suffice it to say that if you watch the one created for Scruffs Hardwear, you'll know what I mean about video ads that have crossed the line of appropriateness. Am I surprised? Actually, I'm no less surprised about salacious video ads on these emerging online publications than  news that a U.K. doctor is conducting an historic full-face transplant, which will undoubtedly ignite a truculent ethical debate. I'm no less surprised about such ads than I am about scientists attempting to write a "code of ethics" for robots, for the anticipated day when robots are not only smart, but possibly sexier than us humans. Read Australian News article. I'm no less surprised about such ads because we live in a world where we're always entering new frontiers, are in need of constant stimulation, and the fact of the matter is that soft-porn ads already exist in respectable magazines and television, say for example the Carl's Jr. hamburger ad, starring Paris Hilton. Anything goes on the Internet when no one is really watching. For more, read my Net Sense column on MarketWatch, or visit my official MarketWatch blog. 

Read Net Sense: Video goes viral

NBC embraces YouTube

YouTube - the online-video sharing service that exploded in popularity after showcasing unlicensed NBC content - managed to ink a marketing deal with the network.  As part of the deal, NBC will make a "small advertising buy" on YouTube's site. The deal runs for a season and includes a cross-marketing and a user-generated video component.   

It's not surprising. YouTube, along with every other emerging video channel or video-sharing service, has been trying to strike such marketing deals with major studios. Guba.com signed with Warner Bros. earlier this week. (Watch my video with Guba.com founder and CEO in my earlier post.)  But Google inked a deal with CBS earlier this year. And, that's not exactly working out so well. Who watches CBS shows on Google? That said, NBC is only putting promotions on YouTube, and not entire  programs.

To read more, go on my official MarketWatch blog at Bambi's blog on MarketWatch

Meanwhile, Guba.com also inked a deal with Warner Bros. earlier this week.

Watch my interview with Guba founder/CEO Tom McInerney

One-off moments in time

Compared with whimsical one-off moments in time captured on video, big media productions just don't seem to matter online. Take a quick scan at the top 100 most popular clips viewed on Google Video, and you'll note that a large majority are far from professionally produced. The No. 1 video, at this juncture, is a 13-second clip, titled "Girl caught cheating." Of all video sharing sites out there, one would think that Google's would be a place where branded productions could get attention. Yet without promotion on Google, CBS content apparently is getting lost in a sea of colorful photo thumbnails, seemingly far more popular if only because they ask little of our time. Consider another example.  The most recent Apple data shows that 30 million videos -- music videos as well as episodes of popular shows, like Desperate Housewives -- have been sold since October 2005, when Apple's store began to offer video. YouTube, the fast-growing video phenomenon, claims that 50 million videos are viewed each day on its site. Put another way, more than 2 million videos are viewed per hour on YouTube vs. 5,000 videos purchased per hour on iTunes, arguably the most successful distribution platform for digital content.

To be sure, statistics barely exist for video streaming and downloading. We rely on companies, like YouTube, to give us their internal numbers without really knowing what they're counting exactly. So, for now, we have to settle for video viewing stats that are decent at best, or entirely inaccurate at worst. The result: misguided conclusions.  For instance, MSN Video was the No. 1 video site ranked by unique visitors, followed by Video@AOL, YouTube and then Google Video. According to comScore, MSN Video had 14.9 million unique visitors in January 2006, or 5 times more than YouTube, with 2.7 million visitors. Yet over at Nielsen//NetRatings,

YouTube's audience figures were nearly twice as high, and MSN Video was doing worse. YouTube had 4.9 million unique visitors in January while MSN Video had 9.6 million, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. For those watching traffic data over the decade-long commercial life of the Internet, it's not a surprise that the numbers vary since the methodology at the research companies is different.The point remains that the imperfect data likely misstates the real activity of these self-produced, non-copyrighted videos.

While it's hard to be sure, I'd say there is a lot of overstating of true demand going on. That's because at least some of the activity at these video-sharing services can be attributed to spying (hundreds of rivals trying to find out just how video services are working), experimenting, pirating and double counting (the same video sent around and viewed on multiple sites or platforms). This is not the kind of activity one should extrapolate from; the Internet bust taught me that.

Read Net Sense on MarketWatch

Life is a stage

Pretty soon, our entire life will be a movie. Creating our own slide show and mini-movie just keeps getting easier. Next-generation photo/video-sharing services like One True Media  should help mainstream America move beyond static photo sharing to storytelling through video montages. I tested One True Media by uploading photos of my nieces and nephew, and a video of a friend and his son (see my examples to the left).  It took me about 20 minutes to navigate through the site, figure out which videos were compatible, select videos and photos, create a music video montage and  upload to my blog. Now that's quick.  The service is fairly straightforward. There's music to choose from to accompany your video montage, and you can upload with one-click. Another feature that's useful is that you can mail all your old video tapes - beta or VHS - and have OTM transfer them into a DVD. We've come a long way from the early days of photo sharing. One True Media's business model is subscription, the sale of hard goods, and soon it'll begin testing out advertising as well.

Wiki world

If you haven't noticed, Silicon Valley giants, like Google and Yahoo, and a host of two-man shops are attempting to fuse and apply the user-generated Wiki-model, the expert-driven About.com model and the social-networking News Corp's MySpace blog model. Whether all of this turns out to be the next growth engine for online advertising remains to be seen, but the end results are beginning to remind me of that most prosaic advertising vehicle, the brochure.

In some ways the collaboration involved in these efforts recalls the efforts needed to compile any reference work. In particular, it reminds me of Simon Winchester's two books: "The Professor

and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary" and "The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary." I'm reminded of these books because in them we learn that it took hundreds of volunteers (including J.R.R. Tolkien) to contribute their knowledge to create this Bible for grammarians. In like vein, the Web services in development today - Google Co-op, Yahoo MyWeb (and other social media services), ShopWiki, Squidoo, JetEye, Plum, Kaboodle, WikiOutdoords, Wikia, WikiHow, WikiTravel, World66, to name a fraction of the ones that exist or are in the making -- expect contribution from passionate people who will share knowledge simply for the sake of sharing. But unlike that massive undertaking to publish one universal reference for words, today's Web efforts aren't a comprehensive dictionary so much as a tapestry of, well, online brochures.

Admittedly, the creation of brochures sounds absolutely boring. And any contribution to such promotional material seems far less noble than submissions to the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. But it doesn't make these brochures less useful. They're big money generators too, though did you know that a 20-volume OED edition costs $1,600 a pop? Last year,

$31 billion was spent in direct marketing (which includes pamphlets, postcards and brochures), according to the Direct Marketing Association.

Read Net Sense on MarketWatch

 

MSN video originals and Warhol

MSN's user-generated upload service - code name Warhol - is still on track to be available this year, according to Rob Bennett, who heads up MSN's entertainment and content unit. He also talks about what kinds of original Internet programming we can expect out of MSN. Will any of these made-for-the-Net videos go to the networks or cable, where there is a larger audience today? Watch my interview with Bennett to find out.

Watch my interview with MSN's Rob Bennett

Vox neighborhood

If MySpace is the place to be seen as the hottest restaurant/bar in the country, Vox is the place where you can feel comfortable and safe. It's a feeling you might have at your favorite neighborhood bar, like Cheers (the bar in that long-running situation comedy).  Vox is Six Apart's answer to capturing the many non-bloggers out there who have been introduced to blogging via social networks, like MySpace. Vox is Six Apart's social network/blog for Luddites.  You can choose who you want to be in your neighborhood or family. "It clearly has a lot of social-networking aspects," said Six Apart's Andrew Anker, who was showing me around his virtual network yesterday. I should mention that Vox is not yet open to the public. Even though Six Apart has been working on this project for over a year, it'll be officially launched in September, so Anker predicts. 

After having played around with Vox for not even two hours, I can honestly say, it's one of the easiest blog tools out there - which will work in Vox's favor, I'm sure. That's one of the three reasons I like it. 1) Ease of use 2) One-click options 3) Emphasis on family/friend closed environment (are we tired of being public?).

1) When you compose a post, to the left of the post box, you have options to post photos, videos (from YouTube), and books (from Amazon). Most people like to embed graphics and videos, so having those options right there is easy. 2) Embedding is a one-step procees. I easily embedded a video of my nephew Bubba snowboarding into a post and wrote around it. I also like the fact that you can easily edit right from the front page. No longer do bloggers have to go through a backdoor, like I do when I'm blogging on TypePad. 3) I think my mom might want to start blogging with this tool as long as she knows no one else but me (and other family members) can see it. I know blogs have been around for a while, like Blogger (kind of easy), but this one might just be the right speed for someone like my mom.

As Anker puts it: She won't get performance anxiety. And, I'll add, she'll feel safe and connected. Maybe the pendulum will swing, and the desire to be in a big network like MySpace will decline, and the desire to be in a place where everyone knows our name feels just right.

Google's video exchange ambitions

Google is trying to get everyone -- and I mean everyone -- to create video advertisements.In fact, if you're a job candidate seeking to get hired by Google, you might consider creating a video ad about yourself and bid against other marketers to place your smiling face on those gazillion blogs and publications that write about Google. This idea was first mentioned to me by Ryan Money, who started HireVue.com. But Google's Gokul Rajaram seems to think the video resume idea will work on Google as well. My money is on HireVue.com since I believe Google will be too distracted to provide the contextual environment job seekers need. Plus, I don't believe job seekers will want to pay for everyone watching their video resume.

But I think there is a place for such pay-per-click video ads, partly because the inventory for news and entertaining video (where these ads typically are placed) is scarce. Advertisers are clamoring to place ads on rich media. I know since I've been creating online videos for MarketWatch since 1999. Google is creating liquidity for advertisers (with video ads) by giving them a cheap alternative ($5 to $12 per CMP) across the blogosphere, where there is inventory. And, when the supply of entertaining video increases, Google will have already amassed the inventory of video ads.

Publishers won't mind these video ads as long as the ads are relevant. And, I believe they have the potential to be relevant and entertaining. The possibilities of what video advertising will look like tomorrow, and who will be advertising are scary, exciting, on the verge of ridiculous, potentially profound, and almost limitless. 

Google's ad video project has had mixed reviews across the Web, with many skeptical about the viability of pay-to-click video commercials. For those who have any doubt about how much video advertising will be created and viewed, think again. Videos will come from people and places unimaginable.  Will Swedish nannies start creating ads about their services and target blogs that only attracts readers who can afford such luxuries? If the potential salary covers the cost of their ad spend for those clicks, which it might, why not? If I had property in Lake Tahoe, I might take my relatively cheap video camera and create a video to showcase the property and upload it onto Google and target lifestyle blogs. 

My Net Sense column - which includes the rest of my observations -- received a lot of responses. I hope those who responded to my column also post their observations here for others to read.

Read my Net Sense on MarketWatch

Knowledge exchanges

Yahoo Answers, Google Co-op and MSN's Live Q&A sound very similar to me. Yahoo's Patrick Crane spoke with me about what he thinks is Yahoo's competitive advantage.

Blog churn

Technorati's David Sifry talks about the many one-hit wonders in the blogosphere. Yikes.

AddictingClips

So you want to share your videos? You can earn $250 if you submit your video to Atom Entertainment, which operates AddictingClips and AtomFilms. If you're serious about a making movies, you might want to consider this service, given Mika Salmi's track record. AtomFilms helped launch JibJab into stardom. I asked Salmi, who started Atom Entertainment about 8 years ago, how he was going to compete for user video when YouTube seems to be the place to be seen. File-size limit at AddictingClips is 100 megabytes.

YouTube vs. MySpace videos

To everything, churn, churn, churn. There is a season, churn, churn, churn. If there is one word we'll hear often in this new media world, it's churn. Consider: It took MySpace's video service four days to top the charts, surpassing YouTube and Google Video, according to Hitwise, a measurement service company - which sells its data for $30,000 to $50,000 annually. It won't be long for that ranking to change since there's a lot of churn at these user-generated sites, according to Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Hitwise, who came to the MarketWatch studios recently. Tancer also clarified some traffic data.

Hitwise had been reporting that YouTube was generating more session times than vids.MySpace.com. But Hitwise wasn't exactly comparing apples to apples, resulting in what may have been overinflated numbers for YouTube. According Tancer, all of the hits on YouTube are counted. So, if I'm just navigating around YouTube's favorite or most-viewed videos, these are counted as sessions, even if I don't watch a video. Also, if I click back onto a video just to write a message, the video automatically plays. On MySpace, only videos that are  viewed are counted as sessions. MySpace videos also don't automatically play.

YouTube and Paris

YouTube should start filtering what goes onto its site if it wants to keep its service child friendly. You'll know what I mean when you go onto YouTube's most-recently uploaded videos. There you'll get some vides with the title "lick" and "asian girl." I'll just leave it at that.  Seems like YouTube is following in the footsteps of Paris Hilton.

To be sure, YouTube doesn't want this material on its service. The problem is that it's still small and probably doesn't have the man power to police the service. MySpace has 100 people on staff in its customer service department. Videos are filtered before they can be publicly posted.

To be fair to YouTube, the two videos were taken down. I caught them when they were up for 14 minutes. Here's what Julie Supan (spokeswoman) said:
"Our policy prohibits inappropriate content on YouTube.  Our community understands the rules and effectively polices the site for inappropriate material.  The users can flag content that they feel is inappropriate and once it is flagged it is reviewed by us and removed from the system within minutes.  This combined with our proprietary technology helps us to enforce the rules. We also disable the accounts of repeat offenders. Community policing is very effective in open communities, such as ours - similear to the model created by eBay, Amazon.com and Craigslist."

Meat-market cleanup

One of my 10 Internet predictions for 2006 was a "meat-market cleanup" or "social-network crackdown." When I wrote this list on Dec. 28, 2005, I received a number of responses from those who disagreed. Well, looks like that prediction is coming true. Earlier this week, News Corp hired a security officer - Hemanshu Nigam - to police the largest social network on the Web, MySpace.

This is what I wrote last year: "Because of rising concerns that social-networking sites allow people to disguise themselves, and potentially harm unsuspecting members, there will be a social-network crackdown. As part of this, there will be new attempts to monitor members and to make sure that children don't gain access to these virtual meat markets."

MySpace undoubtedly needs a watchdog. It's inevitable that something unfortunate will happen in the virtual world. Earlier this week, I wrote about how far more public we've become because of the benefits received from sharing information. Someone will take advantage of that information, I'm sure. Until that perceived threat of danger becomes a reality, people will continue to share freely and abundantly.

Read my Net Sense on MarketWatch: Our privacy in exchange for...

 

The transparent society

Back in 2003 I gave a presentation to investors who wanted to know about Internet trends.  Truth be told, they cared less about trends and more about stock tickers. My last slide for that presentation was a picture of Tadao Ando's Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.  Essentially, I ended the presentation by admitting that I was terrible at predicting trends. But what I felt strongly about was that we would become more transparent. Whatever the consequence of that would be, I didn't know. Based on their blank stares, they didn't know either. Nor did they quite understand why I was talking about transparent societies. If they could invest in such an idea, however, I'm sure they would have been all ears. Nonetheless, I left it up to them to decide what transparency means to them, and how transparency would change consumer behavior, and create demand for certain products developed by companies they may one day want to invest in. It's been a long time since that presentation. I finally got the chance to use that "Transparent Society" title in a recent column on MarketWatch.

Read my Net Sense column on MarketWatch

Once again, I wondered what the consequence of such a society would be. I think it's that we all get to know who we truly are at the core. And, I'm pretty sure it won't look all that pleasant.  Consider this, would you really want to see those photos of you during your bacchanalian days?  David Sifry - CEO and founder of Technorati - predicts that in 40 years, we won't be asking about whether the presidential candidates inhaled. Rather, we'll be asking: "What does his Facebook profile say about him?" Sifry thinks that transparency will make us all tolerant of one another. I agree. After all, we won't be able to hide from anyone. 

AddictingClips

So you want to share your videos? You might win $250 if you submit your video to Atom Entertainment, which operates AddictingClips and AtomFilms. If you're serious about making movies, you might want to consider this service, given Mika Salmi's track record. AtomFilms helped launch JibJab into stardom. I asked Salmi, who started Atom Entertainment about 8 years ago, how he was going to compete for user video when YouTube seems to be the place to be seen. File-size limit at AddictingClips is 100 megabytes.
 

My media portals

In stealth mode for now, San Francisco-based  Plum is an easy-to-use service that lets you mash up -- to use the au courant term -- what's on your desktop and what's on the Web, putting all of it on one Web page that's not only for your own use but for the perusal of family members, friends and acquaintances, and other potentially interested parties. That is to say: the entire world. Plum definitely exploits the user-centric mindset that's swept the Web in recent months and years.  Read about Plum on MarketWatch.

Engineers have busily been writing code to create tools with a "social" aspect, like Plum, ever since Friendster showed that social networks -- or people just being people -- can attract big crowds in the new-media world. From social networks sprang other services hoping to capitalize on modern society's navel-gazing desire to create (on their own time and dime) and to share.

At times, of course, these media neophytes attach their self-indulgence to promotional skills on par with those of Dick Grasso in his NYSE heyday. Thus, while their output itself may range from brilliant to innovative to pointless to silly, it does tend to command disproportionate attention.

Hence the emergence of social bookmarking sites like  del.icio.us; social photo sites, such Flickr; social content sites, like Rojo.com; social search sites, like Rollyo; social Web organizers, like Kaboodle; and video sharing sites, like Grouper.com, YouTube and Google's Video, just to name a few. On the upside: such services help to solve the latest media conundrum: How to drive up page views by providing the audience with low-cost tools to sell themselves, or their alter egos, or their own creative content? The downside: We're now truly entering  The Al Franken decade, only now everyone gets to replace the comic, author, radio host and presumptive Senate candidate's name with his or her own. Another key difference: Franken was joking.

The emergence of these social services, if you will, reminds me of the days when retailing on the Web seemed like the greatest idea. Back then, the thought was that it would be cheap and easy to put up a virtual shingle and set up shop because there would be no expensive real-estate costs or inventory concerns. But what e-tailers were later faced with were rising costs in marketing, technology and shipping. In like vein, if anyone thinks they can create the next hot-media portal

tossing these tools out to the people, he or she would be wise to prepare for unforeseen costs and consequences. I'm not sure what the fallout will be, but a trail of useless tools is one possible outcome. Another observation: Most people grow tired of creating, or they'll need far more incentive to create. They'll start projects without finishing, resulting in half-baked Web pages and would-be news sites that ultimately are nothing more than one-off snapshots in time. Like the many cardboard folders I've created and then shoved in my desk or into storage boxes. At some point, they lose their value, and we end up with a bunch of useless Web pages or dead blogs just taking up space and clogging up searches. But, hey, each is an individual user's media portal, and users can do -- or fail utterly to do -- whatever they want.