People are social and yearn to be connected. That was our big bet when we launched AOL more than 25 years ago. While some of our competitors focused on content (such as CompuServe) or commerce (such as Prodigy), we went all in on community, believing that the “killer app” was people.
By Steve Case
As much as people like to mock AOL these days, they got social way better than anyone else in the early days of the Internet. And what was true is even more true now.
Over the last decade, my musical tastes atrophied. I was not in a band or playing gigs anymore. I stopped buying music. I did not attend a single concert. I was essentially stuck in the 90’s music wise as a whole decade of music passed me by. My music collection stopped at the Foo Fighters.
When I started my blog on Tumblr, it was simply to get something up quick without much hassle. As I started reading other Tumblr’s though, most of the people I followed were also sharing music. Some of it, like the stuff Bijan posts, is not my taste, but plenty of other folks, like WhitneyMCN and Jenrobison, have inspired me with the music they post. The point is whether I like the song or not, I still follow all these people and get exposed to music that otherwise would never cross my way. This was when I got back into music again.
Discovery is a tricky thing. The music we listen to is heavily influenced by what we are exposed to, which is generally the mainstream media and our friends. When we are introduced to music that goes outside of the bounds we are used to, the natural reaction is to dismiss or mock it. Most of the kids I hung out with in school listened to Aerosmith, AC/DC, and Judas Priest, not Joy Division, Depeche Mode and The Smiths. We mocked one kid relentlessly for a year because we found out he was an Amy Grant fan. We were not into discovery, we were into what we knew and what Kerrang, Hit Parader and Circus told us we should like.
Social networks have entirely shifted the game of discovery. Now we can collect and stream and share music all across various destinations. We are awash in awesome online music apps like Spotify, Turntable and others. My problem is that these apps are not really solving the discovery problem. My problem was that I wanted to expand my musical boundaries without being deluged with options while getting the balance right between playing it too safe and being way too out there.
Tumblr therefore was my default music discovery service. While I enjoyed checking out tunes in my Tumblr dashboard however, it was a pain to find music, especially music I liked and wanted to play again or share with others. Then I found Ex.fm, the most brilliant music discovery service ever. It is now my regular everyday playlist,. New music is getting fed into it every day from the people I follow on Tumblr, but the explore features help me break out once in a while to find new music and artists. My only complaint is that there is as yet no Android mobile version (only iOS), but I am sure they will fix this problem soon.
If your music has been getting stale, I recommend trying out Ex.fm, hooking it up to Tumblr, following some folks, and open up your mind. Good listening!
I get a fair number of LinkedIn connection requests during the course of the week. Sometimes they are from people I recently met, but the majority of requests come from complete strangers. Unfortunately, I usually end up ignoring or declining many of these requests. The problem comes down to a lot of noise and not much signal.
Everyone comes with different perspectives and experiences around social networking. LinkedIn is no exception and in fact tends to facilitate poor business networking etiquette. The tools become an enabler for lazy networking or aggressive networking or outright spamming. Because of this, LinkedIn has become less effective for the type of serendipity that an effective business network should foster.
I have talked before about cold emails techniques. Many of the same principles apply to LinkedIn as with other contact methods but with some unique twists based on the nature of the site. So here are some tips that hopefully will make your use of LinkedIn more effective as a networking tool and allow you to use the platform to its fullest potential.
If you are going to use LinkedIn to find investors, mentors, advisors, customers, partners or whatever, then get a plan together to use the tools correctly. Time is too precious a commodity to waste it on sending emails and messages that are ineffective and will never be read. Give yourself a fighting chance and master the methods and technology.
First time I noticed this, Amazon building out a social recommendations engine. I had heard about this last year, but I suppose I do not do much shopping. My guess is that this will prove to be significantly better than Amazon’s current recommendations, but this only hints at the very tip of what should be a very interesting and rapidly innovating space within eCommerce.
The potential and impact is much greater and wider however than eCommerce. Following on from these experiments, the potential to provide much better, more personalized recommendations across an entire spectrum of goods and services is at the heart of social recommendations. Where brute-force statistical algorithms failed, the input of social data will begin to usher in the era of hyper-personalization.
The promise of hyper-personalization was elusive, with mentions and experiments since the first dot com boom, but never materialized. In fact, I had been involved in one company several years ago that provided technology to deliver real-time marketing offers via call centers and websites using various statistical analyses, real-time data collection and customer demographic information. With infinitely more sharing of personal information and a different mind-set towards privacy and data however, the promise of hyper-personalization is getting closer to reality.
I am going back to school this Monday. I applied to a new certification program at General Assembly for front-end web development where we get to delve into the world of HTML, CSS and JavaScript for ten weeks. I was lucky enough to get the thumbs up last week, so I will be “hitting the books” once again, something I have not done in over a decade.
Much of my desire is to round out my own understanding of the programming stack as much of my knowledge is in back-end architecture as opposed to front-end technologies and design tools. I am hoping to parlay my learning into building out some of my own product ideas combining my knowledge of back-end and front-end skills.
This led me to think about motivation and self-improvement. Much of my education in technology from my earliest job building database apps till now was self-motivated and self-guided. I burned through some books, barreled my way through lots of code, made lots of mistakes and did my share of debugging. It was an incredible learning experience and was a huge boost of self-confidence that I could do it on my own.
Looking back however, my learning was not quite “all on my own”. My colleague Kang helped me through the gnarliest of SQL code. Our sys admin guru Dave stepped my through Unix installs. Glenn taught me the rundown on debugging techniques. Later in my sales career, I took hours of classes on sales methodologies, negotiation skills and contract terms. Some of the best classes got us working in teams where we tried our hands at tactics we just studied such as discovering customer pain points or overcoming objections. It is the combination of motivation and structure that has yielded the most positive learning outcomes.
A major revolution is fomenting in learning. Starting in smaller corners away from the attention of the mainstream, Learning 2.0 is poised to have a major breakout due to social and technology dynamics. We are entering a period that people are calling the era of the freelance nation as the economy remains unstable and long-term stable employment becomes a thing of the past. This is leading people to acquire relevant skills quickly but at lower cost and more flexibility than what is offered by traditional methods. On the other hand, tools and technologies for learning and collaborating are significantly more accessible to the masses. We are already seeing this with tools such as TeachStreet, Skillshare, ShowMe and many others that are disrupting traditional learning by democratizing the process. In other words, we have what computer-based training really should have been about from the start.
What makes Learning 2.0 work and pulls social and technology forces together however is community. We are seeing the rise of hyper-community where the Internet has accelerated the convergence of diverse groups of passionate people around specific interests and causes. We had seen that in full force during President Obama’s presidential campaign and continue to see it with the emergence of Meetup groups around the global that bring the online conversation into real life. In the NYC startup community, we are seeing places such as General Assembly developing communities that are becoming startup learning campuses, giving entrepreneurs the opportunity to acquire skills that are highly relevant to their needs.
I am excited by the opportunity to walk into a classroom setting this coming Monday in a way that I have never experienced in the past. Whereas I viewed the classroom setting as drudgery and boredom, I am looking forward to being with a group and a setting that will be engaging, collaborative and relevant. In a nutshell, I will be participating in Learning 2.0.
If you are building an Internet service, it is helpful to know what type of service you are building. I see a ton of start-ups trying to chew off too much at the same time, therefore diluting the functionality and confusing users. Outside of infrastructure technologies which manage back-end services such as messaging, transfer and storage, there are four core services that any user facing Internet technology can be categorized:
There are no hard set rules in these categories and many services straddle two or more of these quadrants. Path for example is social but also is a photo application. Quora is a content website that incorporates a strong social component. Some services are still trying to identify where they sit, such as Twitter which for some is a content service, some use as a social tool, but others consider it more of a search play.
It is very difficult however to start out of the gates trying to be a service that covers more than one category. It is hard enough to find success delivering a service in one of these quadrants. For early stage start-ups, this means it is critical to understand what type of service you are creating from the onset. By overextending yourself, you risk building something which does a lot of things, but nothing very well. This damages your credibility and perpetrates a cycle of reactionary product development. Identify your core proposition and focus on simply building the most awesome service in one of these four quadrants.
