Those who remember the ruthless jungle that was placing your photo on hotornot should check out yesnomayB.
This interesting twist on speed dating for the seriously short of time, asks you to rate a person’s photo alongside sketchy personality statements about likes and character. You answer “Yes, No or Maybe”. The more people you rate, the more it learns about your preferences.
You upload your pic and personality statement, others rate you and where there’s a match, they put you in touch. Simple, ruthless and a clever evolution in online dating software. How long until the perfect matches come through via an RSS feed?
Why do I get the feeling the relationships will last about as long as the selection process…?
Visual recognition is one of the significant challenges facing search as the scale of multimedia content on the web grows. It is relatively straightforward to extract text and even audio, but the variables involved in visual recognition mean that a human eye remains the best judge of a successful search. The likes of Blinkx, Riya and eVision are trying to change that but it remains early days.
Interesting then to see the Retrievr experimental service. It allows you to draw a Paint-style sketch or upload an image and then to search a selected group of ‘most interesting’ Flickr images for matches. Rather than object recognition, e.g. find ‘chairs’, it works by searching for related blocks of colour and overall shapes (see pretty accurate results for a beach below).
Although the existing link is just something to play with at this stage and the results are mixed, the technology has powerful potential to retrieve better search results. For example, rather than just a search for a dog, you could use this in conjunction with existing search to find a dog on a blue background that fills the majority of the screen.
This could have all kinds of potential applications, such as better tagging of visual archives, finding unauthorised use of your copyrighted images, finding a particular video clip.
One of the pieces of feedback from my audience session with Sky+ users was that they skip nearly all TV advertising.
I’m betting if the ads were as engaging/distubring as the remix below then they would watch them (and they are looking at the YouTube stats). I for one can’t get E-e-e-sure out of my head (and my insurance is up for renewal this month!).
Shame the remixes are being taken down from YouTube “due to terms of use violation” as this is a great way of getting the social networking community to engage with your content and certainly cheaper than a 30 second slot during Coronation Street…
I had an interesting session with selected members of the UK public to discuss the ways their TV consumption has evolved thanks to ownership of a Personal/Digital Video Recorder (PVR/DVR), such as Sky+ or TiVo.
Disruptive to the traditional linear model of broadcasting via the schedule, the PVR is part of a growing trend of ‘Me, Me, Media’ - what you want, when you want it and on what device you want it.
Here are some of the takeaways:
They skip nearly all advertising
Despite the predicted demise of the ‘hit’ in Chris Andersen’s thought-provoking Long Tail book and blog, their viewing is structured around hit shows: Lost, Match of the Day, Spooks, soaps…
By more actively selecting their media consumption, TV is less of a background medium. They pay more attention and are more loyal to their top shows.
However, they still like to watch certain live events as they happen: Big Brother, live sport, charity events…
They buy less TV DVDs thanks to the ability to ’subscribe’ to a whole series
They still channel surf, just not as much as before
While I wouldn’t claim that the sample is representative of the whole segment, much of what they said rang true for me in terms of people’s changes in media consumption. As this segment becomes increasingly mainstream, the implications for broadcasters and advertisers alike are clear in that they must evolve in line with their audiences or risk becoming increasingly marginalised.
A recent Nielsen Useit column seems to confirm that the ‘1% rule’ is alive and well. He states that:
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
Although the percentages differ the numbers are echoed in a previous Guardian article that states the 1% rule arguing that:
It’s an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will “interact” with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.
The stats do of course vary depending on the nature of the community. Given the debatable copyright status of a large proportion of YouTube’s content, the numbers are more firmly skewed to those viewing rather than interacting and creating content. Whereas the video editing environment at the likes of Jumpcut and Motionbox has a higher percentage of users interacting and creating.
However, I predict that the 1% rule and its respective percentages will have to evolve as the nature of people’s level of interaction with online media evolves. With the increasing growth of multi-media personal publishing and interaction tools available the barriers to entry are rapidly reducing to creation and certainly interaction.
Challenges to the 1% rule
Take video editing community Jumpcut’s acquisition by Yahoo. As Yahoo begins to integrate Jumpcut’s software into their wider offering the prompts to remix and engage with media will increase in visibility and usage.
Likewise, Google announced in its deal with Warner Music Group that it was looking to facilitate user-generated content by allowing users access to Warner content ”for use in their creative user-generated productions”. That deal will be one of many.
As the social networking generation (which grows ever wider) continues to evolve, there is a whole body of users familiar with embedding and interacting with content and a growing body of tools for them to enable them to do so.
For businesses that monetise traffic, increased interaction with content equals increased traffic and increased new content which leads to more traffic - certainly firm commercial reasons to continue the trend.
Principles remain
Certain basic principles of the 1% rule will remain. There will remain a hard core of users that drive a community by investing considerable amounts of time in it. Equally there will remain a majority of lurkers surfing the community - time pressures, competing interests and familiarity with technology dictate that.
However, both the increasing ease of creating content and ease of interacting with it, mean that the 1% of creators and the 9-10% of interactors will grow putting the neat 1% rule in doubt.
Domain registrants usually enjoy a spam-free honeymoon period, until they need to start paying increasing attention to email and comment filters.
Having been bitten in the past on other projects, I have been careful not to post TechnoCloud’s email address in machine-readable format. However, as sure as death and taxes spam found a way, most likely through some kind of Whois data spider. It took all of 4 days for the first emails to come through. I’m hardlyalone on this one.
A few days on, the inevitable comment spam has started, although Wordpress plugin Askimet has been doing a good job of catching it, as well as providing the depressing statistic that 93% of all comments are spam.
Stats from comScore Media Metrix claim that in the US at least, MySpace has a much broader demographic than the teen segment it is commonly associated with. In fact only 30% are under 25, with just over half over 35.
They estimate that MySpace has 56m users in the US, against Facebook’s 15m, Xanga’s 8m and Friendster’s 1m, but surprisingly they omit Bebo from their stats.
Whether the early adopting teens will approve of Mom and Dad playing in their space is another matter, but social networking sites are broad enough for multiple niches to interact independently of each other. Certainly the stats indicate how social networking has infiltrated the mass market as it moves along the technology adoption curve at rapid speed.
The stats have raisedeyebrows in the blogosphere as well as in a straw poll in the office, although Giga Om writes that it has had the figures confirmed by Fox Interactive.
From a UK perspective, it is not a huge leap of faith to believe that those ‘oldies’ among the 14m that got to grips with this space through Friends Reunited are now finding their way onto the next generation of social networking sites.
One of the functions of this blog is as a space to experiment with technology and to share the results, whether a Google widget or indeed social bookmarking on Wordpress as you’ll see below.
Thanks to the wonders of the Wordpress plugin community (and in this case Apostolos Dountsis), each blog post now has a neat line of social bookmarking icons at the bottom as a gentle reminder for readers to bookmark any post they deem worthy of wider scrutiny.
In a Web 2.0 world as fascinated by social bookmarking as it is with widgets, TechnoCloud would feel underdressed out and about on the web without this little plugin.
Update: as this little plugin appears to have taken my blog down after a recent update, let’s just say I won’t be reinstalling it anytime soon!
No self-respecting site or service can be without a widget these days it seems. A ‘widget’ is a suitably loose catchall that is now so pervasive that it has achieved the true Web 2.0 cachet of being ‘mashed’ into new service names, such as Nokia’s WidSets for mobile phones.
Little surprise then that Google has continued the move to the wild world web by making its desktop and in-house widgets available for use outside the Google family. The full list of currently more than 1200 widgets can be found here, although Google adds a ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ note about the open source origins of its widgets:
“Much of the content in this directory was developed by other companies or by Google’s users, not by Google. Google makes no promises or representations about its performance, quality, or content.”
So, let’s see one in action below and what better one to decide who is king of the widgets than GoogleFight - for example try typing in ‘Google widgets’ vs. ‘Yahoo widgets’.
They are certainly easy to use bar the odd sizing grumble and just require the addition of some script to your HTML code, no big ask for the networked generation. Expect to see much more of this over the coming year.
Netflix are offering a $1mprize to the first person who can achieve a 10%+ improvement in their recommendation engine. They are making available sections of their ratings database and stress that all data is anonymous - after all they wouldn’t want an AOL data leak on their hands…
The standard Netflix model, as with competitors Blockbuster and Screenselect, is to get people to subscribe to a monthly service whereby they send you ‘x’ DVDs a month for a rolling fee. So if it’s a fixed monthly fee, how will Netflix get their $1m back by improving the recommendations?
More recommendations equal a longer subscription time
Competitive advantage for their service
Encouraging people to move up the subscription ladder
Driving people down the Long Tail of their content both to increase rentals and viewing of higher margin older titles. Long Tail originator Chris Andersen explains more.
Feel free to add more in the comments section.
There’s also one other important consideration, PR, in what is a neat piece of viral marketing. An accessible $1m prize gets people talking - in the blogosphere (looks like I fell for it), in the mainstream media and around the water cooler. More awareness, not just of their website, but of their recommendation technology, means more sales.
