Twitter and Facebook are duking it out to own the future of the social Web, though users won't have noticed. Indeed, for those who use both, this may come as a surprise, since the two, while both social media platforms, seem to serve very different purposes.
Tell that to Twitter and Facebook, which increasingly have painted big bull's-eyes on each other.
Facebook groks this more than Twitter, which is why your mom/dad, teenage neighbors, and friends all use Facebook, and probably don't use Twitter.
Both companies have open APIs that encourage third-party developers to build out their respective platforms. Facebook has the Open Stream API; Twitter, the ">Open API Service.
These are critical components of a platform strategy, but they're secondary to the lesson that Microsoft and Apple have taught us: if users don't care about the front end of software/services, developers won't care about the back end of the same.
Facebook largely works because people know how and why to use it. Twitter...not so much.
It's telling that Twitter's "big" feature of the last six months is...lists. I use and love Twitter, but after a month I still can't get myself excited about creating or following Twitter lists. I'm not even sure why I'd want to do so.
Is this the best Twitter can do?
This is perhaps why Twitter seems to work for a narrow class of user: Caucasian, middle-aged urbanites with no kids.
In other words, not teens, not your mom/dad, and probably not you.
Facebook's demographics look very different, probably because its current range of uses is very different.
To me, this is a user-interface problem, and not a defect in the DNA of the Twitter platform. It's simply not immediately obvious what one should do with Twitter. That's not the case with Facebook.
We learned this long ago in open source. What separates a good but doomed project from a truly great project is documentation (to help developers know how to use the system) and user interface (to help end users know how to deploy the software). That's why Linux was interesting but not ubiquitous until Red Hat, IBM, and others added the finish that made its power usable by the general business world.
Twitter has a lot of promise, but not yet much polish.
It's nice that New York gangs have found new ways to dis each other using Twitter. It will be better when Twitter makes it easy and obvious for me to talk with my parents using Twitter.
Content may be free, but the format in which we buy it certainly is not. As Apple, Google, Red Hat, and others increasingly demonstrate, consumers and enterprises are happy to pay for "free" when packaged in convenient formats that add value to digital goods.
Over the years, I've paid Morrissey several times for his Bono Drag album: cassette, CD (twice), iTunes, concerts. I'm reading Moby Dick (again), and have bought it in hardback and paperback, not to mention Kindle, formats. The Economist? I pay for the right to read it in magazine format, because I hate the thought of trying to read it online.
All of these (re)purchases strike me that the media world may have problems, but they are mostly of discovering convenient formats in which to deliver content. Formats that suggest, and sometimes demand, payment.
Along came iTunes and it became easier to buy the song for 99 cents than to steal it.
Of course, iTunes wasn't the only "format" pioneered by Apple. Its iPod also made the music portable. The iPhone increased this advantage by meshing digital entertainment with work (phone).
Indeed, the iPhone introduced another winning "format": the App Store. Over 2 billion downloads and 85,000 available applications later, Apple has demonstrated significant value in aggregation of "content" (in this case, applications) in an easy to discover and consume format.
But it's not just Apple that benefits from such format shifts, as SourceForge's Paul Huff comments:
It seems like Red Hat, Apple, Google, and Microsoft...all win because of value added via aggregation/packaging/ease of use, which is why business models like Cloudera['s] and Lucid Imagination['s]...make a lot of sense to me: packaging can add immense value.
And maybe packaging is the wrong word...[It's really about] surrounding something free with something that facilitates the use of the free.
To me, too. Whether software or music, the key is finding the right format to make "abundance" manageable, as I've described before.
Importantly, such formats must facilitate and not inhibit the ease of distribution that digitization enables. This is why DRM worked fine for Apple's iTunes but why its rough equivalent--the pay-wall--may not work nearly as well for newspapers and magazines.
If I'm following a link off Twitter the last thing I want is to have my interest bogged down by a pay-wall. I might, however, be happy to subscribe to a Twitter service that automatically lowers the pay-wall. In other words, a walled garden around The Economist may annoy me, but a metered garden accessed through Twitter, similar to iTunes and music, would not.
It's all about getting the format right.
In software, I've described current business models for open source as a transitory period, the "awkward teenage years" before models mature. I suspect we'll come to see cloud computing as a convenient new format to distribute otherwise free software. Or, as The 451 Group's Matt Aslett suggests, perhaps cloud computing is a natural evolution from open source.
Good content is a necessary precondition to getting paid, but it's not going to be reason we pay anymore. That reason for payment is the format in which the content is delivered.
Perhaps it's always been that way, but the physicality of the delivery mechanisms confused us: we were buying the paper but thought we were buying the news.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Open source hasn't traditionally been thought of as an innovative force, but based on suggestions that the media industry is borrowing its leading business model, perhaps open source is at least the sexiest nun in the convent.
Whether you're selling software or newspapers, it's tough to get paid in the digital age. This is due, in part, to shifting value.
As Arnon Mishkin, a media consultant with Mitchell Madison Group, suggests, "The vast majority of the value [in news media] gets captured by aggregators linking and scraping rather than by the news organizations that get linked and scraped." According to Mishkin, this sets up an untenable situation where the Googles of the world get rich on the work of organizations like The New York Times...which ultimately can't afford to be "scraped" anymore.
Rather than rage against the digital machine, however, some organizations are fighting back, and doing so with one of the open-source industry's preferred tools: open core.
The Financial Times, for example, is looking for ways to balance free use of its news assets while charging for premium content through micropayments (for individual articles) and subscriptions. The idea is to give away the core of its product to casual readers and charge for more "professional" interest.
It's Zimbra's business model, but for newspapers.
This is the right approach to digital commoditization, rather than the sue-them-until-they-pay approach that the music industry has taken (and which the U.S. Department of Justice appears to condone). Users of digital goods, as Linus Torvalds will tell you, are not parasites or thieves: they're customers waiting to be converted.
The Open Core approach is working very well for the companies that employ it (Disclosure: Alfresco, my employer, increasingly uses this model), and sees various permutations even outside digital goods. The airline industry, for example, is being turned on its head by the discount carriers, which have discovered all sorts of innovative ways to make big business on low prices.
If there's sufficient value, users can be converted to customers. The question is 'how?' Open Core, with its emphasis on both adoption and monetization, seems to offer a compelling answer, whether you're an open-source project or a global media brand.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Just as Amazon and Google are obliterating profit margins for old-school publishers, so, too, is open source putting the squeeze on them, whether in cloud computing or in search or...you name it. As the world digitizes, there's a mad rush to commoditize everyone else's business. This is good for consumers (low prices!) but not so good for vendors (low margins!).
The problem (and promise) of digitization is, of course, "free." Everyone loves to pay "free," but few really enjoy selling it. Or competing with it.
As Bill Gurley suggests: "The key question for anyone in business is, 'Can someone do what you do for free?' If the answer is 'yes' you have a problem." In a digital world, that "problem" is wreaking havoc on an increasing array of industries.
The problem, however, isn't "free.'" It's that old businesses persist in trying to charge for goods that others give away.
Twitter, for example, may not be making much money from its service, but a host of companies are starting to derive considerable cash from the sale of ancillary software or services, as TechCrunch points out.
Or take the media industry. As Andrew Savikas persuasively argues, media continues to think it's a content business, while the world believes it's a services business.
JP Rangaswami illustrates why:
What if the troglodytes finally began to realise that customers were scarce and digital music was abundant? What if they finally began to realise that downloads were an excellent way to advertise scarce things like concerts and physical memorabilia, as Prince figured out?
And what if the customers have given up and moved on, from the download to the stream?
It was never about owning content. It was always about listening to music.
It was never about product. It was always about service.
The customer is the scarcity.
That scarcity only appears to grow as digital goods proliferate. So much content seeking audience with comparatively few consumers. Something has to give.
That something is, first of all, old business models premised on selling an abundantly available good as if it were scarce. The real model is to foster abundance while selling the scarcity that naturally accompanies it. Google gives away search so that it can help you narrow that search with ads; Red Hat encourages open-source development so that it can boil down that teeming mass of uncertainty to a certified, stable build of Linux; and so on.
Some in the software world don't get this. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer can repeat ad infinitum that "We just keep coming and coming and coming" with the same strategy, the same software, the same everything.
But eventually it won't, because even Microsoft's bank balance and "Tenacious. Tenacious. Tenacious" approach can't withstand a perennial battle with 'free' (or enterprise customers' apparent indifference to more of the same). Not unless it can re-learn how to make 'free' work for it, as it has with SharePoint.
The same is true for the media industries as well as new-school software companies like Google. Today's profit center is almost certainly going to be given away by one's competitor.
That's why creative destruction must be creative to pay off. It's what drives innovation. No one is entitled to its business model forever, for which consumers should be very, very grateful.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Even as the decline in DVD sales--both in the U.S. and abroad--has accelerated since 2006, DVD rentals through services such as Netflix (adding 25 percent more customers since 2008) and Redbox (adding 500 machines per month) have been booming.
The reason, as The Economist surmises, may be a shifting view on how consumers prefer to consume entertainment:
The real worry (for the movie industry), then, is not that people are abandoning DVDs but that they are abandoning the notion of owning them.
This is perhaps exacerbated by an industry that can't seem to make up its mind by what it means by ownership, as Ogilvy Group U.K.'s Rory Sutherland writes in The Spectator:
(The) piracy debate is far from one-sided. The very same record industry which today bleats on about intellectual property seemed conveniently blind to the concept back in the early 1990s when they charged us 19 pounds (about $31) for every CD they reissued--even when we already owned the very same album on vinyl....
The BBC often commits the same offense. Why should I pay full price for a DVD boxed set of "The Office" when I have already paid for the series through my license fee? Either the value lies in the physical packaging or in the content itself. Publishers try to charge for both; to have their cake and sell it. This is questionable.
Indeed, it is. Whether we're moving to a rental market or finding new ways to apply ownership to digital goods through digital rights management (DRM) and other means, those industries that sell digital content (movies, books, news, software, music, etc.) need to get their story straight. Is the value in the content, or is it in the packaging?
For Apple, it's both. Apple has long insisted that consumers prefer to own rather than rent, and it has sold more than 6 billion songs through its iTunes Store to prove it. But arguably, the value in Apple is in its distribution service (iTunes), more than the bits and bytes of the songs themselves. I can download Bob Marley for free, but I elect to buy through iTunes for a fee. The service justifies the price.
In software, it's increasingly packaging and ancillary services that drive purchasing because the "content" (i.e,. the software) is a free download. That packaging, like Apple's iTunes, is worthless without the content, but together, they're a good deal.
Is this the future?
Trent Reznor seems to think so. You?
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
VideoLAN VLC's logo
VideoLAN's VLC media player, arguably the world's best media player, hit version 0.9.9 in early April. Three months and more than 78 million downloads later, VideoLAN has announced VLC 1.0.0, or "Goldeneye."
Your media will never be the same.
In fact, with VideoLAN's VLC media player for Windows, Mac, and Linux, it doesn't have to be. One of the amazing things about VLC is that it can play anything that you've ever even thought about playing. That random media format that one site in Ecuador requires--VLC likely plays it, while Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. likely will not.
This is, in part, a natural result of VLC's open-source heritage. Licensed under the GNU General Public License, VLC attracts a diverse array of developers with disparate media interests. Those interests translate into a media player that really can play every obscure media format I've ever thrown at it. (And in my hunger for Arsenal videos, I've found many different video formats that Windows Media, Apple QuickTime, etc. didn't know what to do with.)
Here are a few of the features now available in VLC 1.0.0:
- Live recording
- Instant pausing and frame-by-frame support
- Finer speed controls
- New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, ...)
- New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, ...) and major improvements in many formats
- New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder
- Video scaling in full screen
- RTSP Trickplay support
- Zipped file playback
- Customizable toolbars
- Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface
- Better integration in Gtk environments
- MTP devices on Linux
- AirTunes streaming
I regularly use VLC to transcode media files, including files I originally streamed from the Web:
VLC can transcode virtually any media file.
(Credit: Matt Asay)If you don't have VLC, I encourage you to download it and give it a try. It really is an amazing media player, one that has far more tricks up its sleeve than the proprietary media player that came with your computer.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Just when I get consumed by the "destruction" in Schumpeter's "creative destruction," I stumble across something like this note from a new indie band on Dave Kusek's "Future of Music" blog:
TOTAL MADE THIS MONTH USING TWITTER = $19,000 TOTAL MADE FROM 30,000 RECORD SALES = ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
In part, this is a testament to the power of Twitter, but it's primarily an example of how new technology can upgrade old business models, as Kusek points out.
These new tools, such as Twitter, will help the entire music business scale much, much better. Very popular musicians such as Radiohead will still make a lot of money. But relatively unknown artists, by promoting their work and selling stuff directly to the fans, using free or inexpensive online tools, will be able to make a better living than they do right now. The future might not be very bright for the big record companies, but it is indeed bright for the artists.
It's not about a wholesale replacement of the old world with the new. It's about making the old world more efficient through the Web.
Yes, some businesses will absolutely get bulldozed by the power of the Web. But not most. At least, not yet.
For example, Jason Hiner is likely right to suggest that Microsoft's enterprise dominance is unlikely to wilt in the face of Google in the near term, though I continue to believe Google has the upper hand in the long run.
This is particularly true when you track the executive departures from Microsoft to more agile competitors like eBay (Yes, even eBay is more agile than Microsoft), Google, Facebook, etc. Steve Ballmer was quick to call the death of offline media, but has been slow to move Microsoft to an online existence.
Regardless, there's still plenty of time for software companies and record labels to adapt to the power and potential of the Web. But the transition must start now.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had some provocative prophecies to share with the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France, declaring that within 10 years all content will be online.
There won't be newspapers, magazines and TV programs. There won't be personal, social communications offline and separate.
But will there be Windows?
After all, the trend Ballmer spots in the media world is almost exactly the same thing that is roiling the software markets as software shifts to subscription-based cloud computing, a weak area for Microsoft but a strong one for Google.
Yes, Microsoft has Azure, an attempt to blend cloud services with on-premise software. But its cloud story remains a bit complex and the company doesn't seem overjoyed to be telling it.
After all, it has billions of dollars of revenue tied up in the old world of on-premise software installations. Who can blame it for dragging its feet on the way to the cloud?
Ballmer correctly noted at the conference that media companies have yet to figure out how to make money online. I guess it takes one to know one.
However painful it might be, Microsoft, like the print media that Ballmer eulogizes, must change. Microsoft must get online, and much faster than is comfortable. Otherwise it stands to lose to Google which has no built-in dependency on on-premise deployments.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
If you've ever struggled to play a file you downloaded from the hinterlands of the Web, you clearly didn't try opening it with VideoLan's VLC media player, a free, hugely popular, and open-source media player. VLC can open anything.
VideoLan released on Thursday version 0.9.9, a bug fix release that corrects a few issues with the previous version.
The best media player just got better and is rapidly approaching 1.0 status.
Version 0.9.9 adds the following improvements to the feature-packed VLC player:
- Fullscreen behavior on Windows with multiple screens.
- Workaround bug with libxml2 >=2.7.3.
- Video performance on Intel-based Macs.
- Various decoders updates on Windows.
In addition:
An experimental native decoder for Real Video 3.0 & 4.0 using FFmpeg has been added and many fixes happened in our Real Media demuxer. This should improve Real Media Files support on all platforms.
VideoLan's logo
(Credit: VideoLan)If you're an existing VLC user, you might opt to skip this release if you haven't noticed the problems above. But on my Mac, I did notice an improvement in video performance, to the point that in my non-scientific test, the VLC felt like it performed slightly better than Apple's QuickTime and certainly plays a much wider range of video formats. That update alone made the download worth it.
If you've yet to try VLC, do so. Whether you just want to play media files or also want to convert them, VLC can handle just about anything you throw at it. When all other media players fail, whether on Windows, Linux, or the Mac, VLC will almost always deliver.
You can download VLC media player 0.9.9 from Download.com for Windows and Mac. It's open source, but that's not why you'll want to keep using it. You'll use it because it's better than its proprietary peers--by a long stretch.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
I used to think I was in control of what I blog and what I Twitter. Recently I've been disabused of this notion, particularly with regard to what I Twitter. In a postmodern, Jacques Derrida sense, the reader has come to mean more than the author. Or to think that she does.
This fact was brought home to me yesterday when two of my 1,195 Twitter "followers" advised me that I was Twittering incorrectly. I had been working myself up to a blog post, and was thinking through the idea over Twitter in 140-character snippets. As a result, I posted a string of short snippets that added up to a full screen of Twitterings. A bit lengthier than I'd like, and much more than I normally post, but I wanted people to see how I think.
Now, I have yet to see a manual on proper Twitter etiquette, but given how easy it is to "un-follow" people on Twitter, it seems bizarre to me that certain readers should determine the proper way for me to Twitter, other than by unsubscribing if my strategy doesn't suit them. That, to me, seems the proper market-based response. If that 1,195 number were to drop to 500, for example, I might assume I were doing something wrong and correct the behavior.
But the data suggests the inverse:
Matt Asay's Twitter Growth
One of the commentators later suggested to me that he likes much of what I write, but was trying to offer constructive criticism in how to improve the content for him. I care about his perspective, so I'm trying to accommodate him. But I'm still not sure why readers don't vote more with their feet, rather than with their mouths.
The great (and terrible) thing about social media is, well, how social it is. Readers, especially on Twitter, aren't content to be followers. They also want to lead the content, and have no compunction about prescribing their preferred style and content. This is positive, I suppose, but after blogging for several years and Twittering for a few months, I'm finding it can be a bit uncomfortable to realize just how vocal readers can be.
More pertinently, it's very hard to take in social media's blaring wall of sound and effectively process it. Has anyone else found positive, non-cumbersome ways to interact with their Twitter or blog readerships?
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
