Bruce Benidt
Jon Austin
tcarideo
Ellen Mrja
Mike Keliher
Joe Loveland
Yogi Berra, who contributed the title of this post when explaining why he never went to a particular restaurant anymore, would understand perfectly the adoption cycle of communications channels over the last 20 years or so. Like a hot restaurant, the technology of staying in touch begins as an unknown, gets “discovered” and shared by early adopters, gets trendy with opinion leaders and “fast followers” who like to be at the front edge of such things, “explodes” into the general population and become quickly overexposed and ubiquitous. By that point, the early adopters and the fast followers have forsaken their formerly cool hangout and moved on to the next new thing.
In the early 90s, it was e-mail. Then, when the signal-to-noise ration got too low and the signal itself too overwhelming (400 e-mails a day, anyone?), some of us jumped onto instant messaging via proprietary system like AOL, Yahoo, Google, etc. Then came texting, blogging, Facebook, MySpace and Tweeting. Now, as we have been talking about in the comments section of a post a week or so ago about Twitter, it is possible that Twitter too has reached the Yogi threshold and is becoming too crowded and mainstream to be cool.
This doesn’t mean that the old, no-longer-cool apps will cease to exist. I still e-mail (though I notice my kids’ generation does it only as a courtesy to the old folks and as a low-tech FTP method), I will keep Twitter on my desktop and my iPhone for alerts and such, I will continue to build out my Facebook and LinkedIn pages, but I’m kind of hoping the singularity arrives before I have to add too many more channels to the stream in order to keep up with things.
What’s next, then? According to some of the stuff I read (here, here and here) coming out of the South by Southwest Festival, the breakthrough app was something called “Foursquare” that adds location-awareness and gaming features to social networking.
Unfortunately, Foursquare has already been written up in the New York Times so it’s already passed the early adopter phase and is probably destined to exit the cool quadrant even faster than Twitter or blogging (yes, my fellow bloggers, this activity is no longer cool per se – though the SRC will ALWAYS be cool because of the content and the participants who come hang out in our soul kitchen).
What’s the next next thing?
- Austin
Filed under: Communications, Media, Technology | Tagged: Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, SXSW, Twitter, Yogi Berra
PS – In my post-posting surfing (kinda like the cigarette after sex), I found a rant – ’cause that’s all he knows how to do – from John Dvorak that seems appropos of the posting above – “9 Reasons Why E-Mail Is Dead“.
- Austin
Austin:
To see The Best in Show in a dozen different categories from the SXSW (a much cooler way of saying South By Southwest; get with it, Jon, OK?)
go here: http://mashable.com/2009/03/15/best-of-show-sxsw-2009/
I’ve enjoyed following this conversation, most of which is beyond me–I’m from the era of rotary telephones and three black and white TV channels. But is all this evolving technology bringing us closer together in any fundamentally meaningful way? The CB radio of the 21st century? It all seems so– superficial. Maybe nothing further is required of it.
Ellen – I am so uncool that no amount of acronyming will help me. SXSW from me is on par – almost – with Michelle Bachmann’s “You da man” comment to Michael Steele.
Dennis – I think 99% of Twitter is exactly what you describe – superficial, ephemeral, valueless to almost everyone – that still leaves a lot more interesting content than I can find or absorb. It has earned a place in my digital life but it’s definitely not a universal tool (actually, a boss once described me as a “universal tool” but I don’t think it was meant to describe my usefulness).
- Austin
First, to Dennis: For the thousands of people with whom I’ve made mostly meaningless, shallow and fleeting connections on the Web, I can tell you there are a couple of dozen or so in there with whom I’ve since formed a much more meaningful relationship. Sure, not all of that is from Twitter, but a lot of it has been.
One example: I “met” Bruce Benidt via a series of blog comments on this very site, e-mailed him about joining him on a pro bono project, and one thing led to another…
Second, about Dvorak: What a crabby bastard. He’s notorious for that, I suppose, but seriously. Those nine reasons by which he dubs e-mail “useless” are, at best, merely nine reasons it’s less than perfect.
On to Austin’s question about what’s next…
I’ll tell you what the next thing ain’t: closed-off.
Comparing e-mail to Twitter is, in a way, comparing apples to oranges. E-mail is a communication method that relies on standard protocols anyone can use from anywhere. Twitter, on the other hand, is a “walled garden,” a specific service one must join and within which one can only interact with other joiners.
To get into the realm of apples to apples, we should compare e-mail to the more general communication referred to as microblogging. Just like I can get my e-mail from the fasthorseinc.com server or the gmail.com server — and they can all talk among themselves — I can get my microblogging action from Identi.ca or army.twit.tv or any number of other open platforms that can talk among themselves.
Open microblogging platforms are more likely to survive because they lack Twitter’s Achilles’ heel: the need to keep the crowd. If Twitter struggles to meet users’ needs or starts to lose too many big-time early adopters because it’s not cool anymore, it’ll lose its luster. Twitter is great because the people there are great. Microblogging is great, though, because it’s a convenient communication method, and these small, open, interoperable platforms live and die by their usefulness, not their ability to maintain a stranglehold on the crowd.
You paying attention, content publishers? This is your dilemma, too.
Dennis: now that we have become comfortable with our two way wrist radios (cell phones), what is left is magnetism.
“The country that controls magnetism controls the universe”
Chester Gould
Read some Jules Verne if you want to find out what is still to come!
Hey Everyone that was lively! PM, thanks for the Chester Gould and Jules Verne reminders. What I had in mind though is probably more in the spirit of Aldous Huxley, and we all relate to each other anonymously or pseudonymously by staring endlessly into digitized representations on flat screens.
U GUYZ MK ME LOL
U RLLY DO
LN
Here’s another blogger suggesting Twitter is passed its peak. Again, I found this one in my Twitter stream (another ironic moment) and it’s getting redistributed by some of the celeb geeks like Robert Scoble and Lance Ulanoff.
Once again, the Crowd leads the way; I’m not sure if we’re right or wrong, but once again we were there thinking ahead of the pack.
- Austin
Imagine Twitter had come first.
Then after Twitter had been around for thirty years, imagine a new technology came along that allowed messages of almost unlimited length, not just 140 characters, and allowed the attachment of lengthier supplemental documents in a variety of customized formats. The removal of this Twitter limitation would allow something more than superficial content.
Let’s get really crazy, and say that this new technology allowed you to accept, forward or archive the messages. This allowed you to more efficiently share and archive conversations and decisions made in this new medium. It effectively allowed you to remotely discuss and resolve business issues across multiple venues, without the expense of having to schedule face-to-meetings or teleconferences.
Wackier still, let’s say this new technology would also allow you to target the receiver(s) of the communication, to avoid the Twitter problem of constantly bombarding everyone in your network with information not especially relevant to the whole network.
Finally, let’s say the new post-Twitter technology allowed for something new everyone at SXSW is buzzing about called “asynchronomy.” Asynchronomony is a new way of communicating that allows one to decide when and how much time one will give to each hunk of arriving information, rather than having to constantly monitor Twitter’s real time information flow.
Let’s call this hypothetical upgrade from Twitter, um, er, “email.”
If that had been the sequence of events, would people have stuck with Twitter over this new fangled “email” contraction, because Twitter works so much better? If not, we are left with this question: Is our collective sprint to Twitter about functionality, or fashion?
Add MinnPost to the legion of our followers…
- Austin
Re Loveland’s alternative history, I agree with him in general, but despite my real skepticism on its long-term viability, I think there’s a place for Twitter on my phone and my desktop for news alerts, for some business purposes (though I think less for marketing activities than many people seem to be trying).
That said, it ain’t the only tool I want in my digital toolbox.
- Austin
Twitter is on my phone and desktop too, and I’m not getting rid of it. I keep staring at it, trying to see if I’m missing something, or if it develops into something my pea brain can’t yet imagine, a very, very distinct possibility.
And I must say, yesterday I learned that WCCO’s Jeanette Trompeter had been fired minutes before my wife. That made me feel special, so I will keep staring at Twitter for a little longer.
So, I’m not ditching it either. I’m just not ready to tell my clients they should throw shovel piles of their scarce money at it, simply because it’s new and the guys in the wifi detector tshirts are all evangelical about it.
Dazed by a flood of new technologies, we are all so petrified of missing or underestimating THE NEXT REVOLUTIONARY THING, that we automatically declare every NEXT thing to be REVOLUTIONARY. But sometimes the next thing is merely next, not revolutionary.
Anyone else noticing the connection between Jon and SXSW, held in Austin, TX? Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Great post. It does seem like trends are awfully fleeting these days. And unlike clothing trends that cycle back into fashion every few decades, I don’t think we’ll be reliving Twitter, Myspace or Facebook in 20 years.
Jeanette Trumpeter was fired!? And your wife?
That was clumsy wording wasn’t it. Now that I am Citizen Joe, I no longer have the electronic keys to circle back and correct typos.
Retraction: My wife remains employed. However, Jeanette has a lot of time for Twitter.
Dennis, how in the world did you survive yesterday without this key information???
Citizen Joe–Great news about your wife! Still in shock over Trumpeter. Way too gloomy. What will become of any of us?
Here’s the scoop, guys.
Email is for old people.
Twitter is for people who don’t want to be getting old but are.
FaceBook is for people who will be going out tonight.
Ellen, from what I see in my corner of the world, those observations are about half true.
FACEBOOK IS FOR KIDS. Much to my chagrin, probably half of my adult friends are on Facebook, for no good reason that I can tell, and I get more and offers of e-friendship every week. Adults are absolutely stinkin up the joint.
EMAIL IS FOR OLD PEOPLE. The professional twenty-something people I know — and there are quite a few of them in my field — use both email and social media, because nothing yet serves professional needs better than email. For them, email and Facebook is not an either/or proposition. They use both.
It’s true my 18 year old daughter and her e-amigos don’t use email as much as Facebook, though they do still use a bit of email. BUT, that’s not because she has pledged to go through life using Facebook instead of email. Its because she doesn’t yet have a job that necessitates the more robust functionality that, so far, only email offers. When she does, she’ll be using both email and social media, until something comes along and offers more professional functionality than the current iteration of email.
3) TWITTER IS FOR PETER PAN SYNDROME SUFFERERS. Not sure about this, but it is true that my daughter and her pals have no interest in Twitter. As far as I can tell, that’s because photos and videos are such a big Facebook draw for them, and because Facebook Status Updates pretty much do the same thing Twitter does.
Leading question: Do sufferers of Peter Pan syndrome not deserve a voice? Not deserve customer support service? Not deserve to be interacted with and learned from?
Sure, it’s a playground for techies and techie-wannabe marketers, but 6 million users — many of whom are influencers in one realm or another and can actually help move the proverbial needle — is nothing to scoff at.
Loveland: Since you left us, you have no sense of humor.
“This is Radio Week in New York. The latest styles in receiving sets will be displayed in Madison Square Garden…..There will be two popular questions asked by visitors…What is new in radio?, and, If I buy a new radio set this season, is there likely to be a new tube, a revolutionary development or television, to make the instrument look like an antique within twelve months?”
New York Times
Sept. 16, 1928
All of this social media hoo-hah has me grumpy. I need me some anti-social media.
Does it all mean all of us pathetic introverted types have no hope, doomed to a destiny well down the food chain? The raging social media technologies have us by the cajones–succumb or else. Survival only of the most skilled practitioners.
Imagine a life where you live in a small village in the Nordeast. You’ve lived there since you were a child and know pretty much everybody and they know you. Your favorite mode of transportation is riding your bike; no need to start your car just to run down to the shops. When you return home to your little cottage, you might settle in with a nice cup of tea and a book. Or, if you’re on deadline, you might sit down at work and start keystroking — you’re a writer, after all.
Notice, Dennis, that in this idyllic setting you do not need twitter or flickr or tumbler or ping. You’re content without them.
But you should also notice that this is the setting of TVs “Murder She Wrote” starring Angela Lansbury. It ran from 1984 to 1996.
“The popular idea that the secrecy of private communications sent by telegraph is always preserved is, we suspect, a good deal of a fallacy….there are special difficulties in the way of keeping telegraphic information secret. A practiced ear soon learns to interpret the ‘click’ of the telegraph by hearing quite as well as its ‘dots’ by reading; and while apparently, therefore, only an uninterested bystander, or even outside the door or window of and operating-room, such a person my possess himself very readily of any desired intelligence… How a remedy is to be applied to this state of things is not easy to see…There is evidently a good deal yet to be done in all departments, and in all directions, before the practical administration of the telegraph can be considered perfect.”
New York Times
Dec. 31, 1866
I love it when we have a topic that lures both of our prodigal sons out of the shadows. “Loveland” is – of course – Loveland and “Expatriate” is Hornseth.
Thanks for stopping by, boys. The back door is always unlatched and we always stash a plate or two of leftovers in the oven.
- Austin
Nuts–I thought Expatriate was a great new Crowd discovery in the spirit of Hornseth. You wrecked the mystery. Good stuff though.
Ellen–For some inexplicable reason I was thinking of David Reisman. If the “other-directed” person of a generation or two past sought primarily not to be independent or exceptional, but to “fit in” allowing others to dictate his expectation of himself, what do we make of the preponderance and drive to be facebooked, and myspaced, and twittered and linkedin? Maybe there’s an unprecedented urgency to be “known”. I wonder how technology is beginning to shape our self-perception. But to your point. You’re suggesting that lacking social-media sophistification the only environment in which one could be sufficiently informed, perceptive, expressive and functional is a quaint northeastern village? The world has otherwise become to complex to grasp?
What if the next big thing is….talking with each other at a bar?
In 1969, my big sister talked me into wearing a Nehru jacket she had sewn in her high school fashion show. She assured me it was going to be The Next New Thing. The reaction I got from my classmates the next day taught me to be wary of the claim.
I’ve lived through the blossoming of email, the searchable Internet, faxes, MP3 players, GPS, cell phones, DVRs and many other wonderful things. But I’ve also lived through people telling me I’m a dinosaur if I don’t immediately get audio tapes that place a loud clunk in the middle of songs, the Apple Newton, virtual reality goggles, a paperless office, Internet currency (Flooz), iSmell and other things that never quite made sense.
Those two sets of experiences have made me a relatively early adapter, but not an unquestioning adapter.
The talking in a bar thing? Come on, it’s an inferior technology. It takes too long to load the connection and the signal gets blury in short order.
“The number of telephone calls has grown from nothing at all to 35,000,000 messages a day. Cablegrams have become common; radiograms are not far behind. ….In 1910, the Western Union handled 75,000,000 messages…..The ease of interruption, by wire or telephone or call, is cited by Secretary (of State Charles) Hughes as one factor adverse to serious study. The quiet necessary to thought and research is becoming more and more difficult to attain…Facility of communication has its good points, but, according to Secretary Hughes, “it leads not only to making more numerous and importunate the demands of every calling, but also to a vast waste of time by rendering countless intrusions on serious work…..Besides speed, there is the matter of quantity — the quantity of goods, of magazines and newspaper; the quantity of diversion in the weekly flood of new motion pictures; the glare of electricity; the radio’s quantitiative assault on the ear, reinforced by the phonograph…. This raises the ultimate question: Is the speed mania a cause or effect?…Is it a psychological problem or an economic one, or is it hopelessly scrambled out of both?”
New York Times
Oct. 21, 1923
Brilliant! Keep it up Expatriate. History’s reflection.
Are you all familiar with a web-based serial called “Sparks”? All about humans and technology.
Dennis: Is Sparks set up as webisodes? Web episodes?
Ellen– “Sparks” address: http://www.sparks-series.com
Dennis: Thanks much. What a clever and funny series. I’m a fan now. It’s hard to pick a fav webisode, but I guess I’ll go with #2. Tough love, and all that.