The latest from TechCrunch
- If You've Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG
- Gmail Priority Inbox Sorts Your Email For You. And It's Fantastic.
- MapMyFitness Works Out $5 Million In Series A Funding
- It's Time To Disqus Our Community
- Keen on… with Reid Hoffman: "You Need to be a Leader in Society" (TCTV)
| If You've Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG | Top |
| Just as I was reading Paul Carr's latest column about quitting social media, my husband looked at his phone and broke into a huge smile. He is a graphic designer and has long been a fan of Chank Fonts. Earlier that day, he'd taken a picture of a retro-looking podiatrist office, posting it on Twitter with the word "Font-o-licious." It didn't go viral. It didn't become a trending topic. It didn't get him 1,000 new followers or even attract much attention at all. But it was noticed by Chank Diesel of Chank Fonts who Tweeted "I'm gonna dedicate my next font to that type-savvy podiatrist" and started following my husband. Here in front of me was one of those serendipitous moments of social media collapsing space-and-time. These moments don’t change the world, but they’re exactly what made social media so addictive in the first place. Imagine an industry hero of yours who seemed untouchable creating a product just because of a random picture you posted on an ever-moving stream of colliding information that he happened to see. Here, in the guise of my beaming husband, was the perfect articulation for why I think people—even my close friends— who declare dramatic social media bankruptcy were just doing it wrong. What made social media a phenomenon were moments like these. Passively connecting in-and-out of a persistent conversation with people you know and see everyday, people you know but have lost touch with, and people you don't know but share interests with. People who in a more efficient world, you might have known. It's about making relationships more efficient. My parents know what I've been up to by reading my Twitter feed, so when I call home I don't have to answer a vague question like "What have you been up to?" I answer a specific question like "What country are you traveling to now?" If a friend is looking for a job at a given company, I can't always remember who I know who works there, but with LinkedIn, I don't have to. And seeing what an old flame looks like on Facebook never gets old. If these selling points sound horribly cliché it's because they are commonplace reasons most everyday people use these sites, and indeed, the same reasons why the founders of most social media companies started these sites. But the sites worked too well at amassing fans, friends and followers, creating micro-economies where people sought to cash in on their would-be fame and influence. And that is when the problems—and inevitably the fatigue— started. People competed for how many friends and followers they could rack up and how many RTs they could get in a day, seeing it as evidence of how cool or smart or influential they were. That's when social media got mercenary and soulless. Here’s a clue: If you find yourself saying “(Fill-in-the-blank-social-media-site) used to be soooooo much better before everyone was on it”– you are using the site wrong. You are following too many people, you are using it too much, you are strangling the pretty, little bunny. The beauty of these sites is you control how many friends you see, and how many of them see you. So if you used to love it and now hate it, well, you know what they say about when you point a finger. Three are pointing back at you. Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of any so-called “social media consultant” who tells you otherwise. What's the value of a Retweet or a Like? It's roughly the equivalent to sitting next to someone during a keynote who nods his head at a salient point. Someone hitting a button in front of them is hardly a heady endorsement—nowhere near the impact of someone calling you to tell you about a story he read. That actually takes more than one-second of attention and work. Everyone touts stats showing that recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising. That's because in the old world recommendations were inefficient. I had to be so moved by, say, the service at a restaurant, that I proactively called people to tell them about it, or it stuck in the front of my mind solidly enough that when someone asked "Where should we go to dinner?" it came flying out. The power of personal recommendation doesn't carry over in a world where it's as easy as clicking a button because the caliber of that recommendation is necessarily lowered by taking out barriers. Of course not everyone becoming fatigued with social media whored themselves out to anyone who would follow or friend them, bartering likes and retweeting anyone who said something nice about them. Indeed, Mr. Carr locked his account and only followed a core group of friends. His biggest complaint was simply that he used it too much—updating any thought in his head so that he didn't take time to mull and form that idea or joke until it was perfect, and that he was distracted. That’s a fair point. But I wonder whether the flood of apps may be making the problem worse, not better. You can have too much of a good thing. After some early security glitches when Twitter desktop apps published direct messages, I decided to only use Twitter.com and update by text message to interact with the service. That's downright luddite in my TechCrunch/iPhone world, but by going to Twitter, rather than Twitter always flooding to me, I forced myself to keep my Twitter feed as manageable to keep up with as email. What's more, when I travel to places like China or have a big deadline, I don't log onto Twitter for weeks. When I come back it's still here. Both Twitter and I continue to go about our lives without one another just fine. I don’t think changing an avatar to green saves Iran. But I wouldn't say Twitter is making us all more detached and stupid either. I just like life with social media better than life without it, for silly little moments like the one my husband had with Chank Fonts. Same thing I’d say about email or a mobile phone or TiVo or a Blackberry. I realize that doesn't make gripping blog copy like Twitter-democratizing-the-world or Twitter-totally-sucking, but I think for most of the average users out there, that's the Twitter they know and the Twitter that will continue to steadily grow, all this hype and backlash aside. | |
| Gmail Priority Inbox Sorts Your Email For You. And It's Fantastic. | Top |
| Email overload has finally met its match. Tomorrow, Gmail is rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox that is going to be a Godsend for those of you who dread opening your email. In short, Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in rough. The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity — it’s nearly as easy as Gmail’s one click spam filter. There’s almost no setup: once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking you if you want to enable Priority Inbox. You can choose from a few options (the order of your various inboxes and if there are any contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’) but don’t have to setup any rules or ‘teach’ Gmail what you want it to mark important. It just works, at least most of the time. The system uses a plethora of criteria to decide which messages are most important: things like how frequently you open and/or respond to messages from a given sender, how often you read messages that contain a certain keyword, and whether or not the message is addressed solely to you or looks like it was sent to a mailing list. If you come across a message that’s been marked important when it shouldn’t have been, you can hit an arrow to tell Gmail it’s messed up. Likewise, if a message that should have been flagged gets sent to the ‘everything else’ area, you can promote it. Through these actions Gmail gets progressively smarter, so the system should work better over time. I’ve been using the service since late last week and have found it to work very well. Occasionally messages that shouldn’t have been marked ‘Important’ are flagged, but I’ve yet to encounter an urgent message that slipped into the ‘everything else’ section. My colleague MG Siegler, who has also had the feature active, has had similar success. It’s great. I love it. But it isn’t perfect. My biggest gripe so far is the fact that there’s no way to tell why a given message has been deemed important. Oftentimes it’s obvious — emails from my coworkers are generally given the golden arrows, as are messages from PR contacts whom I frequently communicate with. But occasionally there are oddballs that have been marked important for no apparent reason. Sure, it’s easy to tell Gmail that ‘this message is not important’ and strip its golden badge. But what if the message was marked important for a reason that is usually sound (perhaps it contains a reference to TechCrunch Disrupt, for example)? It would be nice if I could tell Gmail something to the effect of “this sender is never important”, but not to start frowning on whatever keywords the message contained. Still, it’s a great start. Of course, this introduces a new dynamic to the way a lot of people are going to be reading email. Email intros will become ever more important, because you’ll want to ensure that your message gets marked with coveted ‘important’ tag. It also has much broader implications. Increasingly, content will be displayed to you based on its importance rather than its time stamp — not to just browse email, but for social networks and other content as well. Priority Inbox will be rolling out to Gmail and Google Apps users alike over the course of the week. CrunchBase Information Gmail Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| MapMyFitness Works Out $5 Million In Series A Funding | Top |
| Denver, Colorado based MapMyFitness, Inc has just announced raising $5 Million in a Series A round of financing lead by Austin Ventures. The health-related social network and training application company operates a network of sites including MapMyFitness.com , MapMyRide.com , MapMyRun.com , MapMyTri.com , MapMyWalk.com , MapMyHike.com , and MapMyMountain.com . The MapMyFitness community gives their over two million members the ability to record and store their various running, cycling, walking and hiking routes as well as access to a database of international routes, fitness calculators, and events listings. MapMyFitness also offers mobile apps that use GPS on iPhone and BlackBerry in order to help users geolocationally track their fitness regimes. The latest investment will enable MapMyFitness to expand its site network into further verticals as well as bolster its already existent offerings. The MapMyRide property already has a Tour de France tie-in and its easy to see where similar distribution deals might be possible for each fitness category. Additionally, the company will be relocating their headquarters to Austin, in order to be closer to their Austin-based lead investors. CrunchBase Information MapMyFitness Australian Distributed Incubator Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| It's Time To Disqus Our Community | Top |
| Perhaps you’ve noticed that a couple days ago we flipped the switch to enable the shiny new commenting system here on TechCrunch powered by Disqus . So far, the feedback has been very, very positive — and we’re pleased with how well it’s performing. But Disqus is just one step of what we need to do. As many of you are well aware, the commenting situation on TechCrunch has been completely out of control for a long, long time. That seems to be one unfortunate side effect of when a site gets large enough (see: YouTube and Digg for other great examples). But we also realize that things don’t have to be that way. Some popular sites have very good comments (see: Hacker News and Quora for good examples of that). We’d like our comment section to be useful too. So we’re going to try to do something about that. As I said, Disqus is the first step. The service offers a very nice set of tools for on-the-fly moderation. We’ve also worked with them to do things such as make it very obvious when an actual TechCrunch writer is responding to a comment (I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that something like a quarter of commenters claiming to be us — or at least me — were impostors over the past few months) — you’ll see our names in bright green when it’s actually us. But as we’ve learned over the past several months, comment moderation is a big job. So we’re going to hire someone to help us with it. On the face of it, this may not sound too attractive, but the job we’re creating is about a lot more than just moderation. It’s also about responding and engaging with our readers in an actual conversation rather than shouting matches about nothing. And it’s not just about our comments — in fact, that may end up being the smaller aspect. It’s also about interacting with our community on all the various networks where we have a large presence — Twitter, Facebook, etc. On Twitter, for example, we have nearly 1.5 million followers now. Sadly, right now, all we do is mainly shout links at them. It would be great to interact more there as well. We’ve already gotten a number of resumes for this position when we quietly announced it several weeks ago, but we wanted to open it up one more time as we’re finally looking to hire this person soon. Some quick requirements: you need to be based in San Francisco and willing to work out of our office in the SoMa district. But believe me, you’ll want to. We’re a fun bunch. Prior experience is obviously a plus, but not necessarily needed. If you’re interested, please email: tcsocialczar [at] gmail.com Maybe it’s too lofty of a goal to think that our comment section can be something like the one found on Hacker News, but it’s a good goal to have. As all of you know, the fact of the matter right now is that the vast majority of our comments are pretty worthless. It’s so bad that I use an extension to turn them off most of the time. But at the same time, we have an incredible readership at TechCrunch that spans the tech universe — and beyond. Whether you’re Mark Cuban or an unknown-but-devoted reader, if you have something worthwhile to say, you deserve to be heard. One final thing: Just to be clear, we welcome dissenting opinions. What we don’t welcome is bile or nonsensical comments that add nothing. It’s going to be a work in progress, but we are working on it. [photo: flickr/E raPhernalia Vintage ] CrunchBase Information DISQUS TechCrunch Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Keen on… with Reid Hoffman: "You Need to be a Leader in Society" (TCTV) | Top |
| If there is a father of social media in Silicon Valley, it may be Reid Hoffman , the Stanford and Oxford educated entrepreneur best known for co-founding LinkedIn in December 2002. Hoffman, currently the executive chairman of LinkedIn and a partner in the venture firm of Greylock Partners , saw the future before almost anyone else. Grasping the Internet's shift from a platform for data to one for people, Hoffman not only started the very first contemporary social media business back in 1997 – a dating service called SocialNet, but also was an angel investor in Friendster, Facebook and Zynga as well as the former CEO of LinkedIn, the 78 million member strong business social network which is currently adding a million new members every 10 days. Indeed, back in 2003 Hoffman – in partnership with his friend Mark Pincus , the founder of Zynga – paid $700,000 in an auction for an intellectual patent on social networking, thereby making him, in a sense, the owner of the idea of social media itself. So it was a real treat to catch up with Hoffman last week in Colorado where we were both speaking at the Aspen Summit. In our wide-ranging conversation, Hoffman quoted Aristotle's remark that we are "social animals" to explain the remarkable success of social media. But what has always intrigued me about Hoffman – given his central role in the history of social media – is his own social reticence. As he confessed to me, he's happiest working in small groups, outside the social limelight. This contradiction makes Hoffman one of the most intriguing figures in contemporary Silicon Valley. But there's no mystery to his intelligence – manifested in everything from his thoughts about his role at LinkedIn, his vision of the future of social media, his views about the relevance of large venture capital, to his explanation of why the world needs more entrepreneurs to solve its most intractable problems. Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn and why its future IPO is "definitely maybe." Reid Hoffman on why and how social media changes people's lives and why he remains an optimist. Reid Hoffman on his new role at Greylock Partners and why there's still a role for big venture capital in Silicon Valley. Reid Hoffman on whether it's too late to get into the social media business. Reid Hoffman on why society needs entrepreneurs and what entrepreneurs need to learn to be successful. CrunchBase Information Reid Hoffman Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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