Category: Random, But Interesting

Predictions 2012 #7: Shooting From The Hip

This year I tried something new with my predictions, writing deeper posts on each one. I got to six, but I underestimated how long it would take to write 1,000 or so words for each post. I’m pushing past 10,000 words for the past week, and “predictions season” is pretty much over. I think it’s about time I gave all of us a break, and just got down to some rapid fire predictions. This will be my last predictions post, and most likely the one most likely to bring down my year end grade, because I’m just going to shoot from the hip. It’s something I’ve never really done before, but that’s why I’m doing it. These are notions, hunches, itches I’ve not scratched. But what the heck, this is for the fun of it. To them:

– Google’s Chromebook will triple its marketshare by the end of the year. I can’t figure out what its marketshare is now, but it’s pretty small. Another way of putting this is Chromebook will be a success this year.

– Obama will win the 2012 election, thanks in part to the tech community rallying behind him due to issues like SOPA, visas, and free speech.

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The Internet Big Five By Product Strength

As I have written in previous predictions, I’ve been focusing on the Internet Big Five lately, and expect that to continue this year, as the group, collectively, are something of a “character” in my upcoming book (as is Twitter, the “free radical”). Other characters include “The Government” and “Corporations,” so expect predictions about those players in the next few days. But today, I want to focus on the Big Five as a whole. I’ve been staring at these companies, trying to understand their strategic imperatives, which is why I found myself making yet another chart.

This one focuses on core product lines where all (or most) of these companies are playing. For me, these product lines, taken together, are the basis of what we might call “the operating system of our lives.” And since the book is about how we will be leveraging our lives over digital platforms in one generation, it struck me as important to assess where each of the Big Five is right now (what they have already built) and where they are weak (what they need to build to compete).

Here’s the chart:

As you can see, I’ve laid out the same five companies, listed top to bottom by market cap. From left to right are columns of various product lines or offerings that I’ve determined are crucial areas that any player in the “OS of our life” must address. I’ve keyed each company against each product line with one of four scores, from “Strong” – where a company already dominates – to “Weak” – where a company either does not play, or has an anemic offering. The terms “Developing” and “Improving” demonstrate that the company is making progress in that area, from either a weak position (“Developing”) or a middling position (“Improving”).

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Searchblog 2011: The Year In Writing

I’ve done this a few times in the past, and this year I’m feeling the need to review all I wrote in 2011, and highlight the best posts (at least, by my own measure). Even though my writing in the past year withered to an average of two or three posts a week, I still managed to get some meaningful ideas out there, and I intend to redouble my efforts in 2012. Herewith, my list of favorites from the past year, in order of appearance:

Predictions 2011 The first substantive post of 2011, by my own reckoning last month, I did pretty well.

What Everyone Seems to Miss In Facebook’s Private or Public Debate… I make the point that a company with this much data should be accountable to the public.

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Predictions 2012: #2 – Twitter As Free Radical, Swiss Bank, Arms Merchant…And Google Five Years Ago

My predictions this year will be pretty focused on the Internet Big Five (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook) but the first two focus on Twitter. Why? Because Twitter is poised to become a critical “free radical” whose presence affects the actions of all the Big Five players. And 2012 will be the year this becomes readily apparent. In short: In 2012, every Big Five Internet company will need to have a clear Twitter strategy. At the moment, not all of them do.

What do I mean when I use the term “free radical”? Well, taken loosely from molecular chemistry and biology, free radicals are particles with open shells or unpaired electrons – they cause change in otherwise stable systems. I take the term with a bit more license, however – to me Twitter is the only Internet service at scale that has yet to ossify into a predictable platform with a massive revenue base to protect. This fact, plus the company’s liberal philosophical bent toward free speech, positions Twitter as something of a shape-shifting arms merchant in the ongoing battle between the Internet Big Five. Believe me, any one of the Five would kill to own Twitter, several of them have tried to buy the company over the past few years. It’s now clear that Twitter’s path is one of independence. To succeed, it must become the Swiss bank of social intent, providing its services in some kind of useful way to each and every one of the Big Five.

2011 has already set the table for how this year is going to play out. In short, Microsoft and Apple embraced Twitter, Google and Facebook rejected it, and Amazon stayed on the sidelines, for the most part.

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Predictions 2012: #1 – On Twitter and Media

2012 is going to be a year of contrasts – of consolidation of power for the Internet Big Five, and fragmentation and disruption of that power due to both startups as well as government and consumer action. I’ve spent the past few weeks jotting down thoughts for 2012, and hope to do the Year That Is About To Be justice in the following set of posts.

Yes, I said “set of posts,” because for the first time since the birth of this blog (that’d be nine years ago), I’m going to post my predictions one by one. Why? Well, because I’d like to dig in a bit on each. If I do it all in one post, we’d have a *very* long read, and most of you are just too busy for that. I don’t plan to release these posts slowly, I’m just going to write till I’m done, so ideally I’ll be done in a few days. And when I’ve finished, I’ll post a summary of them all, for those of you who want all these predictions in one easily linkable place.

So let’s start with Prediction #1: Twitter will become a media company, and the only “free radical of scale” in our Internet ecosystem. 

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Google Does Its Tenth Annual Zeitgeist

Ten years ago, Google’s first Zeitgeist inspired my first book (The Search). Here are some highlights from the tenth annual edition. Props to Google for going deeper than most year end lists with its data. Now…open source the damn data, folks!!!

 

 

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TextPlus Adds Free Calling – Watch This Space

A couple of weeks ago I met with the CEO of TextPlus, and wrote up my experience here. I mentioned he has some news coming, and this is it: TextPlus, which is a popular free text messaging service, is launching free calling between TextPlus members today. Calling to regular lines is pretty cheap to boot (like 99 cents for 40 minutes).

Why am I writing this up? Because it makes me wonder….TextPlus is a fast growing service that is leveraged over the Apple iOS world I call AppWorld. It serves at the whim of a gatekeeper, in this case, Apple (you can also get it for Android, which is growing faster). Apple, in turn, must keep its carriers happy by selling tons of iPhones (and iPads) with plans that lock customers into paying a pretty penny for data and voice connectivity. And I am not sure those carriers are happy with the idea of a fast growing app that helps teenagers (TextPlus’ main constituency) bypass those profitable service plans. It’s like a built in way to teach the next generation of customers how to cut the cord.

Sure, there’s always Skype and Google Hangouts and such, so perhaps this isn’t such a big deal. But then again, maybe it is. With Wifi coverage growing quickly these days, TextPlus – perhaps the name now should be CommPlus – is one to watch, IMHO.

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Neal Stephenson on Important Work

(image) An interesting interview in the NYT  I missed from last week, with noted author Neal Stephenson. In it, he riffs on something that’s been bugging me as I work on the book. Asked about “the future of computing,” he responds:

“I’ll tell you what I’d like to see happen,” he said, and began discussing what the future was supposed to have looked like, back in his 1960s childhood. He ticked off the tropes of what he called “techno-optimistic science fiction,” including flying cars and jetpacks. And then computers went from being things that filled a room to things that could fit on a desk, and the economy and industries changed. “The kinds of super-bright, hardworking geeky people who, 50 years ago, would have been building moon rockets or hydrogen bombs or what have you have ended up working in the computer industry, doing jobs that in many cases seem kind of ignominious by comparison.”

Again, a beat. A consideration, perhaps, that he is talking about the core readership for his best sellers. No matter. He’s rolling. He presses on.

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Instrumenting People Into Location Services

So this week a well known VC made the trek to my writing retreat in Marin, and we hung out in a room that until this year was a large storage closet behind my garage. I rethought the space, soundproofed it, added a hodge-podge of AV gear and musical instruments, and named the place the “Ross Social Club”  – on Foursquare, anyway. I haven’t really told anyone that I gave the place a name, but it was sort of an experiment – would anyone ever check in there besides me?

Now I chose that name for various reasons I won’t get into here (another story, one I’ll be glad to tell you over a bourbon). But I like being able to name a space on Foursquare, and it’s become a habit for me to “check in” whenever I actually use the room. It’s like  leaving a digital breadcrumb for me, a record of my new relationship to music (I’m learning to play the drums). A lot of friends hang out there too, often playing their own instruments or riffing on the whiteboards I’ve hung about the place. But  I don’t make it a habit to mention the room’s Foursquare doppelganger. It seems a bit … forced. And as far as I know, many of them don’t use the service.

On the same day I created the RSC on Foursquare (and probably because he asked me what I was doing on my phone), one fellow did check in. With some whimsy, he added a tip: “Try the wings.” It’d make you laugh if you’ve ever been there, trust me. Since then, in the past nine months, countless folks have been through the place, but only one other person has checked in.

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Help Us Shape The Signal Conferences in 2012

I’ve spent the better part of a few days thinking through the theme(s) of FM’s Signal series of conferences for the upcoming year. I’ve got a ton of thoughts scrawled across my whiteboards, but then a thought woke me up in the middle of the night – why don’t I ask all of you what you think are the most important trends for digital marketing in 2012? (This crowdsourcing thing, it might just take off…).

So I signed up for PollDaddy and created my first ever Searchblog poll. You can pick three of the choices below, and/or add your own topic at the bottom. So help a brother out, and let me know what you think!

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