Category: Technology

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ProjectVRM Blog » VRM and the Four Party System

I’m not sure I like “4th party” as a description. We spent way too much time at the VRM West Coast Workshop wrangling over the naming of firs, second and third. But when you get past all that, this key idea is really something big:

VRM is about enabling the first party. It is also about building fourth-party user-driven (and within that, customer-driven) services, which make use of first-party enablement.

…

Fourth parties will provide many services for first parties. In fact, VRM should grow large new fourth party businesses, and give new work to large old businesses in the same categories. (Banks, brokers and insurance companies come to mind.) Native enablements, however, need to live with first parties alone, even if fourth parties provide hosting services for those enablements.

Fourth parties also need to be substitutable. They need service portability, just as the customer needs data portability between fourth (and other) party services. That way whatever they can provide can be swapped out by the user, if need be.

[From ProjectVRM Blog » VRM and the Four Party System]

The combination of service portability and data portability doesn’t just put the user in charge, it also makes the data better. Companies should be very interested in that.

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Apple netbook/notepad

“It’s not a surprise if you’re paying attention,” says my wife. Of course, when it comes to new sexy toys from Apple, we want details and dates. We know it’s going to come… eventually. It’s fairly obvious that the Macbook Air was the first step. This is the product development process we’ve come to know. And when Steve Jobs says, “We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk… ” we all know to add the implied “… yet.

Still, I was pleased to read Jason O’Grady’s article in the WSJ this morning:

Less than a year after Apple dismissed netbooks as a “wait-and-see” product it may be getting upgraded to an actively-developed project overseen by none other that Apple’s mercurial CEO Steve Jobs. According to the WSJ the Apple’s netbook-like device will come in at a size larger than the iPhone/iPod touches, yet smaller than any of its laptops.

Wall Street Journal reports that while Jobs is technically on medical leave from his duties as CEO, he remains actively involved with business decisions and has completed a 180-degree turn and is taking a more critical look at a netbook device.

[From WSJ: Jobs heading up Apple netbook project | The Apple Core | ZDNet.com]

Will we see this before WDC? I doubt it. I’m guessing the new iPhone will be first and this netbook/notepad won’t be until summer, at the earliest.

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Focus and Priorities vs. Turf

When dealing with complex issues that spread across functional lines, a senior executive focusing on the issue can being important focus and coordination to the effort.

But too often, people are paying more attention to the politics of Turf instead of the value of that cross-organization emphasis.

I started thinking about this after reading a piece by Jonathan Martin of Politico. He may be right about Obama’s strategy. He believes he’s bringing power in closer to him and taking authority away from Cabinet positions. For example:

“Czar” Carol Browner will head up Obama’s fight on global warming, where once his energy and environmental chiefs might have stepped in.

[From West Wing on steroids in Obama W.H. – Jonathan Martin – Politico.com]

But the spread of authority on some issues, such as global warming, is exactly the problem that needs to be fixed. These problems need focus and it helps to have someone focusing on the issue and actively figuring out how to bring together the disparate objectives throughout the administration.

The same applies to any organization. This approach can be great for everyone involved. But infighting and turf battles do happen.

What’s the key? How does it all come together? What is it that really makes the difference?

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Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive Seagate learns important PR lesson: keep the customers happy! «

Robert Scoble posted details of this week’s blow-up over failing drives and censored forum posts:

Seagate (maker of hard drives and storage devices) has been getting slammed on forums and blogs the past couple of days. Partly because they had a bad batch of hard drives and didn’t properly recognize or fix the problem quickly. Partly because they removed a few anti-Seagate threads from its forums.

[From Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive Seagate learns important PR lesson: keep the customers happy! «]

This one is going in my file for great examples. It’s surprising how often you’ve got to walk companies through this logic.

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FriendFeed, value, and … on Gillmor Gang

The May 30th Gillmor Gang is all about FriendFeed and it’s one of the best I’ve heard.

http://gillmorgang.techcrunch.com/2008/05/31/gillmor-gang-053008/

Why FriendFeed Matters

Bret Taylor of FriendFeed makes the point that different people use different tools, and that’s one of the reasons he created FriendFeed. He says: “The union of all of your friend’s one or two services is a really diverse set of information and a really diverse array of services.”

For me, this is the key point. I shouldn’t have to use the same tool as my friends in order to see their photos, videos, favorite music or movies, recommended news articles or podcasts. The key is in how usable my view into all this information can be.

Following the conversation

Today we can search, but when the conversation is flying, I really want to see “who else is talking about this”. Within that view, I may want to be able to limit it to what my friends are saying, or maybe what their friends are saying, or just see the whole conversation.

This is not a trivial problem. The conversation isn’t a single thread; it doesn’t start from a single place. So bringing it all together in a coherent way is not easy. I shouldn’t have to be an expert at crafting a search string in order to find and follow the conversation. That search complexity should be hidden – It needs to be a usable, intuitive interface that lets me focus on the content, on the conversation.

Segmentation of content

I’m not very interested in Robert Scoble’s twitter feed or his shows on Qik, but I’m very interested in his events list on Upcoming, shared items from Google Reader and his detailed posts on technology. Can FriendFeed be the place where I follow just the parts of Scoble’s prodigious output that interests me? Can this kind of fussy control be provided without making the user experience so dense that it drives away users?

Take a Listen

The Gillmor Gang today covered all these questions and more. It was a fascinating hour, and the FriendFeed team handled it all thoughtfully and with great insight.

Hugh McLeod says “Being a nucleus is the money shot” for FriendFeed, and I think he’s right. The FriendFeed team seems poised to really make it work.

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Why the Open will win

Why the Open will win

If only my friends who have accounts in the same service can see my photos or favorite music or restaurants, then I will put less energy into participating in that service. But with a mesh of services connected by common syndication formats and open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), my friends and I can share and converse amongst ourselves or with the connected world, independent of which tools we use.

For all the services using this open model, this network of tools brings audience. People who share photos, recommend an interesting article, or podcast, or coming event will pull more people into the conversation – a conversation tied to the open mesh of tools.

Any company that sticks to a silo strategy will fail. Instead of the silo communities locking in their users, they will be locked out of the conversation.

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Anti-Customer Update – WSJ Online

WSJ Online now has a policy that shuts down your account access if they detect you logging in from more than one computer at a time.

TechCrunch does a nice job telling the story behind this fiasco.

What I find really funny is that this sort of stupidity is now considered an “understandable, and classic reaction” from incumbent executives. Erick at TechCrunch is exactly right about this.

There’s hope for WSJ, of course. If Rupert Murdock has his way…

 – but what about YOUR company?

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Danah Boyd on socialization in the digital world

In this video interview, Danah Boyd makes some great points about lack of socialization of kids. Lack of space for them to gather and be social even in with their own friends and some of the factors making this happen. Then she talks about how they DO socialize, online… OK, there’s a few asides regarding Scoble being different from normal users, but the rest is fascinating stuff.

Danah Boyd interview by Robert Scoble, at Davos:

[From QIK | Streaming video right from your phone]

Danah Boyd is a researcher who studies teens ad their online interactions. See more on Danah at her website.

You can also read about her on Wikipedia