Technology360

Does Facebook contain the seeds of its own decline?

Social media outlets have certainly grabbed a significant share of attention, both from individuals and from organizations hoping to ride what many perceive to be a wave.  I participate in three such (or four, if you count blogging), Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, in declining order of value to me.  As this is written, I have 382 "followers" on Twitter, 152 "connections" on LinkedIn, and 264 "friends" on Facebook.  This compares to about 800 subcribers that FeedBurner says I have for this weblog.  Modest levels all.

What motivates most of my Twitter "followers" is a mystery (in the last few months, some may have come from the follow link below left).  They generally come in at a pretty steady clip -- one or two a day, though once in awhile there is a burst of 10-15 in a day.  I recognize very few of the IDs.  The 86 people I follow are of two types -- a handful people close to me (mostly family) whose tweets I like to get on my phone, and then everyone else who I read mostly using TweetDeck, which helpfully pushes tweets out.  Those I follow are mostly favorites from my blogroll -- easier than scanning RSS feeds.  No, you can't say much in 140 characters, but that's a good thing.

LinkedIn "connections" are almost entirely people with whom I've had a business relationship.  I've used LinkedIn a few times to check "who is this person?" and a couple of times to look for potential hires.  It's nice to have but not essential.

Then there's Facebook.  Hope I don't come off as a misanthrope for the following -- I'm not -- but here goes...

In contrast to Twitter and LinkedIn, Facebook is increasingly annoying.  "That's OK, grandpa," I imagine some of you saying, "it wasn't built for you in the first place."  But when I read, as I did this morning in the Financial Times, that social sites are losing popularity with British 15-24's, I wonder if it's something more than what the author supposes is loss of the "cool" factor.  Perhaps it's the underlying math of Facebook.

Think about your connections to other people.  You have family and dear friends, casual friends, acquaintances, etc.  As the circle of "friends" expands, you become less interested, frankly, in the stream of pictures and comments that come from them nor in the growing number of requests to join and support and hug and poke and to offer up your "friends" to causes and the like -- Facebook is full of goofy apps.  It's set up like a big chain letter -- or rather a series of them -- only without the threat of harm if you break the chain.  It's been ages since I actually did anything on Facebook other than respond to requests.

As your group of "friends" expands beyond your initial core group, you get more and more requests to "friend" new people.  The longer you're on Facebook, the more common are requests to "friend" people who you barely know, or maybe met at a conference a long time ago, or in some cases don't recall ever hearing of.  Yet they all come with some "friends" in common, so you want to be nice and include them in your circle.  Maybe you had a great dinner or served on a committee with them five years ago and just forgot.

So, eventually, it seems that the math of Facebook becomes essentially a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game where almost everyone can be connected.  Management of "friends" and their various requests becomes your primary reason to visit the site, but the value of the site as a true social glue diminishes in proportion to the number of more distant relationships you "friend."

So here's my theory -- feel free to knock it down:  The reported declining use among teens and early 20s is because they've been through the "chain letter" earlier than the rest of us and have thus widened their circle of friends already, and that's led to declining value for them.

Oh, hold it...  Kevin added you as a a friend on Facebook.  We need to confirm that you know Kevin in order for you to be friends on Facebook.

--Dennis

Mobcasting the news

At NPR, we have occasional brown bag lunch (is there any other kind of lunch at NPR?) presentations.  Today's was extremely informative and given by our social media expert, Andy Carvin (twitter @acarvin).  His topic was Mobcasting the News: Crowdsourcing, Volunteers and Journalism (slides) and audio.  Recommended.  --Dennis

The Infinite Dial 2009: Radio's Digital Platforms (video info, too)

I'm beginning to think of my iPhone with its free Public Radio Tuner app as my "infinite dial," having just had the experience yesterday morning of an early drive from Baltimore to Washington listening to WSIU in Carbondale, IL by simply plugging my iPhone into my car's sound system.  [Hint to pubcasters:  WSIU's signal that morning was very reliable and sounded great, but the higher bitrates some stations are using contribute no fidelity that you can detect in a car and have many, many more dropouts.]

However, in this case, it refers to a study of this name from Edison Research and Arbitron:

We update the status of radio's new digital platforms (online radio, satellite radio, HD Radio, and podcasting among others), social networks, online video, iPhones, and implications for broadcasters, advertisers, and media planners.

They say, for example, that an estimated 69 million Americans listened to online radio in the last month and that weekly online listening (42 million) is up by one-third year over year.  The same number of people who listen to internet radio in a month watch internet video in a week (69MM).  For satellite and HD Radio, there are awareness data only.  Finally, in spite of the rapid growth in internet radio listening, 80% of people say yes to, "In the future, you will continue to listen to AM/FM radio as much as you do now, despite increasing advancements in technology?"

A rich study.  Link:  Edison Research.  --Dennis

NPR's digital distribution strategy

N.B.   Many readers know that I'm the Interim CEO at National Public Radio, but this personal blog (now closing out its fifth year) has only a couple of times been used to talk about related things going on at NPR or at my previous workplace.  However, since what we're trying to build is so closely related to what I've learned over those five years and earlier, all of which I've shared here, I thought it made sense to share this "private" email to NPR station managers here.

If you're at a public television station or in a non-profit, education or government organization, please read on because this initiative could very well be for you also.  So now, I'll quote from this morning's email with only very minor changes.  --Dennis

_______________________________

Dear station colleagues,

 

Happy Monday!  With apologies for the length of this, I’m hoping to stitch together several developments at NPR in the context of what they mean for the future of your station.  It will pay special attention to connecting a number of developments into a coherent digital strategy.  I am excited about these because I think they can be important building blocks in lifting all of public radio.

 

The 90 stations that founded NPR did so because they wanted to serve the public in a way that could only be achieved through collaboration.  This collaboration has encouraged impartial distribution of both branded programming (NPR, PRI, APM) and independent productions - in the intervening 38 years through PRSS and, more recently, PRX. Distributed hours have grown tremendously over the past four decades.  As we seek to strengthen our relationships in content creation and fundraising, we must make a strong commitment to reinventing distribution for a new age, or we will fail to reach the audiences we seek to serve.

 

Radio will remain strong long after I’m a full-time grandpa, but the rapid adoption of new digital platforms means we must effectively utilize these platforms or ultimately witness the erosion of our audience and economic model.  More importantly, the new digital platforms give greatly expanded opportunities to deliver broader public service, to be more significant in our communities and nation.

 

Toward this end, there are now several initiatives on our plate at NPR.  I'll write primarily about a cluster of digital distribution projects from which we will draw to create something we're calling the "Community-Building Initiative," but I also want to mention a news-related one that will benefit from the same initiative.

 

• A “News Network of the Future” (NNoF) is envisioned to provide structure and scale for collaboration in the support      and production of news for all platforms, building on ideas which have already brought promising results to a few stations (e.g., N³, the Northwest News Network);
• Three related projects in the category of what I’ll call “distributed distribution” —expanding our ability to reach our listeners better, and expanding and engaging our audience:
  • The open Application Provider Interface (API),
  • The acquisition of Public Interactive (PI), and       
  • The Community-Building Initiative (CBI), which I’ll discuss below.

 

There have been several digital distribution efforts in public media in recent years.  Leaving out many, I’d like to tip a hat to a few that have made extraordinary contributions.  Independent producer Stephen Hill showed us that the web can be an important means to serve the audience, and that they will financially support such efforts.  Entrepreneur/philanthropist Mike Homer developed Open Media Network, a functioning content delivery network for public media, with the help of Stephen, KQED’s Tim Olson, myself and several others, and gifted it to public broadcasting.  PI (above) under the direction of Debra May Hughes has been public media’s innovative application service provider for years.  Jake Shapiro’s team built Public Radio Exchange (PRX) under the sponsorship of the Station Resource Group, creating a way to cultivate, discover and distribute new talent, voices and ideas and to innovate with models that connect listeners to a broader world.  Mark Fuerst’s Integrated Media Association has led beyond-the-transmitter thinking for years. NPR’s Dana Davis Rehm has championed both the News Network of the Future and the Digital Distribution Consortium (DDC) of 2006 in which Jake, Tim and others played critical roles.  Lastly, the WGBH Forum Network and Twin Cities Public Television’s Minnesota Channel are important inspirations to the CBI.

 

Bottom line – there has been a ton of work by dozens of people over nearly a decade during which, independently, Web strategies and content distribution over the Internet have matured.  We have learned a lot in this time, we have successful exemplars, and it’s past time to put those to work in ways that strengthen public radio. 

 

This and what follows provides some context for the announcements you’ve heard about the open API and the PI acquisition and why it’s important for the future of your station.

 

The open Application Programming Interface (API) is an awful name for a very powerful functionality that permits accessing NPR and, soon, station and other content and placing it with modest but important restrictions on non-NPR web sites.  These might be your station’s web site, or it might be a non-profit organization with which your station has a relationship, or it might be a blog that your sister maintains.  If you look down the left column of [this] blog, you can see an example that took me ten minutes to install.  Why do this?  Because open, distributed access to public radio content will result in much greater usage than if we require everyone to come to our portals.  It’s expanding the reach of public radio beyond the radio or our own websites.  This is being fairly recognized as one the most progressive and powerful web initiatives in American media.  Open APIs are common on the web but are very rare among major media companies.

 

Public Interactive (PI) has been around for a long time and has a great reputation for providing Web services to the public broadcasting community.  We’re pleased to have reached an accord with Public Radio International to bring it into the NPR family.  Its mission is entirely consistent with our goal of increasing NPR’s commitment to station services, as was our acquisition of National Public Media(NPM) last fall.  PI has a great suite of products and its core competencies are consistent with our open API and other “distributed distribution” efforts to grow the quality and relevance of station websites.

 

Combining these, we are developing the Community-Building Initiative to expose public media content to broader audiences, strengthen public stations as a key community anchor, help national and local community service organizations be more effective, and, through all that, enhance and diversify the public media economy. Like NNoF, the CBI is a “child” of NPR’s New Realities effort.  An example follows and this weekend I doodled a simplified drawing [see link] for those among you who are visually oriented.

 

To seed this effort, we are working to establish several model national partnerships with non-profit organizations which have affiliates in your communities.  There is a complex array of ways new partnerships of this kind could work, so to help in understanding one of them, here’s a fictional example:

 

Let’s say that you’re a public radio manager who wants to gain exposure for what your station does and build community public service alliances, adding local value.  You have recently been approached by a local conservation organization that has a best-practices initiative relating to salmon recovery for which it would like build awareness.  It is also interested in building a community dialog using modern social media tools.  Traditionally, you might have put them in touch with your news director, who has done stories on salmon recovery in the past and perhaps might be interested in another one.  She handles the story in the journalistically critical arm’s length way and it is heard by 10-15% of your weekly cume on the air and then it (maybe) goes into a podcast or is archived on your web site.

 

But the CBI expands possibilities.  Let’s say that the organization also has some video content that it commissioned, perhaps from your local PTV station.  With proper guidelines, branding and labeling, it can be part of a larger collection that you can distribute.  So this video piece, the ten radio stories you’ve already produced archived on this subject, some NPR stories on the subject (Google gives 574 hits for “salmon” on npr.org), a couple of related stories from PRX, and links to related blogs in your community are curated by your web producer into a widget (a piece of portable code that can fetch content from other web sites) carrying your branding, the template for which has been provided to you by Public Interactive.  That template also includes social media features to build communities of interest, plus opt-in sponsorship messages arranged by NPM.  The widget then goes on the partner’s web site, on those of many of your other partners, on your own pages, on relevant blogs, etc.  Others will use the API tools to extract some of these pieces and republish them still more places.  Web searches build still more users, not just for the distributed content but for your main web site.  In the context of how search works (see PageRank), these multiple linking relationships make it more likely for your content to emerge higher in search results.  This strategy builds a much larger audience by bringing content to people rather than requiring them to come to your website.

 

Perhaps the station undertakes similar partnerships with 25 or 50 or 100 other community organizations. Some of these are local affiliates of national service organizations with which NPR will have initiated relationships that stations can opt into.  Others are those you develop yourself.  You can see that the placement opportunities for content grow tremendously.  So do new partnerships that increase your station’s impact in the community, not to mention new funding opportunities from new sources.

 

Public broadcasters have learned over nearly 40 years that distribution success depends on brand impartiality.  Recent digital distribution work has taught that we’re better off starting with a service   model and related economics, instead of with technology, and that we need a to place our content many places on the web, not just on our own web sites.  To be sure, there are important issues, especially with the need to maintain a wall between partner-generated content and station journalism efforts, but there are numerous successful examples to follow.  The CBI plan is to incorporate all of these assumptions in a way that just might transform the value equation for public broadcasting stations in their communities.   

 

These are exciting and challenging times for all of us in public radio.  I continue to be encouraged by what I see and hear from stations around the country, and what is happening here at NPR.  These latest developments should give us some important new tools to address our common future in a way that can transform both the impact and economics of public media.  Please share your thoughts about these issues with me by posting a comment below. 

 

Dennis Haarsager, Interim CEO, NPR

Who are you, Master, and why do you want to control me?

My sister and brother-in-law have been staying with me in Washington this week, so I've played hookey a few hours during the week to do touristy things with them.  One of them was a visit to the Newseum yesterday, a beautiful tribute to the values of big craft journalism -- which, of course, I try to nourish every day.  However, that particular visit followed a briefing that our management team at NPR got from Andy Carvin concerning social media plans.  I'm trying to nourish this kind of thinking every day also.  So this juxtaposition of media values, which some observers might think are contrasting, were at work when I ran across the foot tall MASTER CONTROL letters on the 3rd floor of the Newseum.  What room in a media company could be more at odds with social media?  --Dennis

Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus

I've been doing some weekend bike riding and visits to the gym in my building for the last five or six weeks -- not that you would know it by looking at me.  But when I want to visit an intellectual gym, I pick up the New York Review of Books or boot up Edge.org -- always satisfying.

The latter recently posted a video by Clay Shirky of this title -- and its transcript (you'll need to scroll down the page to find it).  Shirky is one of the most innovative thinkers out there, especially on the social web, and recently published Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (have read most of it, but got sidetracked by a rare read of a novel*).  He says:

... And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.  ¶ We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.  ¶ And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement. ...

Be sure also to read the intro by John Brockman and the commentary by Tim O'Reilly on that same page, and Nicholas Carr's commentary, Gilligan's Web, here.

Shirky's writing usually resonates with me -- and I like his "cognitive surplus" coinage.  But here, on first reading, I feel more comfortable with Carr's critique.  I'll read it again in a week or so and see if I change my mind.

Update 4 September 2008:
*Mark Laskowski asks, "what was the rare novel?"  It was the excellent Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson.   --Dennis

'My Cancer' Blogger Leroy Sievers Dies

It's taken me a while to note the death of Leroy Sievers in my blog because even though it perfectly illustrates how powerful the combination of broadcasting (NPR in this case) and social media (blogging in this case) can be, this one had a personal dimension for me.  My wife, Sandra, died nearly a year ago after a 2½-year bout (since diagnosis) with esophageal cancer.  Leroy's NPR appearances and his blog were, for both of us, important fuel for the fight she waged from the moment her cancer was first diagnosed in early 2005.  Leroy was a journalist and so was Sandra early in her career (became a professor of it later), and she also wrote eloquently about it, though in her case it was in private emails to a large group of friends and family members.  Maeve McGoran and Laurie Singer have posted to Leroy's blog since his death and many among his large circle of readers wonder if this is going to survive him.  Or perhaps, since it was such a personal statement, it needs to be let go.  I don't have an answer, only hope for the much too large a club that is touched by cancer.  --Dennis

NPR to acquire Public Interactive

I'm about a week late in doing so, but no less enthusiastic, in noting in my own blog that we (I'm interim CEO of National Public Radio) have reached an agreement to acquire Public Interactive, an innovative ASP serving both public radio and public television, from Public Radio International.  PI will continue to be based in Boston and headed by Debra May Hughes.  I will have a lot more to say about this, how we got here, where we hope to go with it, and who the key players have been in this multi-year effort to extend public media's impact in a future post.  PI will continue its current range of services, but it would also be useful to think of it as the beginnings of a new digital division within NPR which will operate with the same culture of neutrality as has characterized public broadcasting's satellite distribution systems for decades.

Link:  NPR.  Related articles in paidcontent.org, current.org, et al.  --Dennis

Key Differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0

Graham Cormode and Balachander Krishnamurthy, who are both with AT&T Labs have written an article in one of my favorite online publications taking a detailed look at what makes a web effort "2.0."  Given how long the term has been around, we should be at least to 3.0 by now, right?  Here's the abstract:

Web 2.0 is a buzzword introduced in 2003–04 which is commonly used to encompass various novel phenomena on the World Wide Web. Although largely a marketing term, some of the key attributes associated with Web 2.0 include the growth of social networks, bi–directional communication, various ‘glue’ technologies, and significant diversity in content types. We are not aware of a technical comparison between Web 1.0 and 2.0. While most of Web 2.0 runs on the same substrate as 1.0, there are some key differences. We capture those differences and their implications for technical work in this paper. Our goal is to identify the primary differences leading to the properties of interest in 2.0 to be characterized. We identify novel challenges due to the different structures of Web 2.0 sites, richer methods of user interaction, new technologies, and fundamentally different philosophy. Although a significant amount of past work can be reapplied, some critical thinking is needed for the networking community to analyze the challenges of this new and rapidly evolving environment.

Link:  First Monday.  --Dennis

Social media passé?

Just when so many media companies are trying to implement social components in their online operations, apparently some are saying social media are passé.  In Digital Futures: How Do Companies Get Money To Follow Users?, Diane Mermigas writes:

... Social networks, which sometimes function as unwieldy aggregators of special-interest content and communications, have a general resistance to advertising and e-commerce. But despite the numbers–Facebook, MySpace and YouTube–the medium is considered by some to be passé, according to Ross Levinsohn, the ex-Fox executive and co-founding partner of Velocity Interactive Group. His insights came during an opening-day conversation with Jonathan Miller, a co-founder in Velocity at OMMA Global Expo in Los Angeles on Monday. The new venture-capital fund is not backing any more social networks. It’s focused on whether widgets represent a sustainable viral distribution platform that can grow into a moneymaker. ...

Link: On Media in  MediaPost.  --Dennis