Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

Our little Norwegian-based company, Opera, is at it again with a bold claim that it will "reinvent the web" with its new Opera Unite service.
 
Some of the features available to Mac, PC, or Linux/Unix users:

• File sharing -- securely share files direct from your computer
• Web server -- turns your home computer into a web server via Opera Unite URL
• Media player -- direct link to your music collection from any web browser
• Photo sharing -- shares your image library over the web without requiring a photo service
• Lounge -- self-contained chat service running on your computer
• Fridge -- a place where friends and family can post notes

All sounds good on paper. But we have some skeptics here:

"These Swiss army knife apps that attempt to do everything for everyone tend to fall short in the end. The convenience of having all that functionality in one place often comes at the expense of the robust functionality we expect from dedicated apps.

Take the photo-sharing feature. Sounds nice, but are you really going to use go for that over Flickr or Picasa? Especially if it means fragmenting your library? Will the media player have the codec support I have in my dedicated media player?

Looks nice on paper, but I'm not buying shares just yet."
- Dan Neumann
 
"I'm wondering how this would compare to Google Wave. Google Wave is claiming to 'reinvent email', but it sounds like they are trying to do a lot of the same stuff by making it more collaborative, real-time, and enable sharing."
- Marta Strickland
 
"Opera's promo video and new list of features are uninspired, in my opinion. One could replace Opera with Facebook, Twitter, Google, Xbox, and probably countless other platforms, and no one would notice the difference. This is a failure in branding and product strategy.
 
As for this vs. Google Wave, the Wave team has truly examined the experience from the user's perspective, and uniquely rebuilt communication online, while Opera Unite seems to be just adding on functionality that certainly isn't revolutionary. That is, the elements of Wave aren't new, but most people don't use things like Wikis and Twitter... Wave is positioned to take over because of its simplicity and intuitive structure.
 
And btw... 'Fridge?' Dumb."
-Craig Ritchie

 
These are all valid points and they've left us wondering three questions:
1.  Will people really make the leap from their "trusted" current browser?
2.  How long before other browsers copy these services?
3.  And last but not least, the privacy issue. Will people be fearful of sharing their stuff?
 
Opera has been around for over a decade and had features like tabbed browsing and a search bar at the top of the browser before Firefox did and is looked to as an innovator on the web browser front by companies like Mozilla. So the thought about other browsers copying Opera's services is absolutely correct.
 
Opera claims their mobile and computer-based browsers are very secure - even safer with user data than Firefox and any product they develop tends to include the same encryption and security. Even if people trust that, it may not get past the legal barriers. The file sharing aspects of this product may be frowned upon by the U.S. legal system, as they will likely fall into the same category of services like Grokster and Napster. However, with a much larger following for Opera outside of the US, and being Norway-based, we don't really think they're concerned about that.
 
Do you think the new Opera will do as they promise and "reinvent the web?"
 
Tyler King
Sarah Jo Sautter

A close friend of mine used to work at the Virgin Megastore here in San Francisco. An affable fellow, he coordinated the in-store sets by the rather diverse array of musicians who used to pop up to do a few songs. Increasingly, he also managed other areas of the operation when fewer musicians started showing up. As sales of music slowed and the store grappled to reorganize around merchandising, my friend started to lament his fate within the larger context of music retailing. "I didn't get into this to sell t-shirts," he said to me once. He quit and went back to work as a trombone player in a number of local bands.

Well, today is an interesting day. And somewhere this gentleman is probably going to see this post in my Facebook feed and have an interesting moment of introspection. Because there is not one, but two fascinating pieces of news coming out of Viginland today. First, yesterday marked the closing of the flagship of Virgin's Megastore chain--the 57,000 square foot, two level outlet in New York's Union Square. But much more significantly, today Virgin announced a plan that may eventually prove to unseat Apple's iTunes and redefine the model by which the increasingly digital world of media is consumed. In fact, if you're my musician friend you might want to sit down right about now.

Unlimited MP3 downloads. From the world's largest music family of record labels in the industry: Universal Music Group. For $24.50 a month.

People familiar with the service said it would cost 10-15 pounds ($16.30-$24.50) per month, which could appeal to parents concerned by children accessing illegal sites.
The service, which both sides described as a world first, would allow Virgin Media broadband customers to both listen by streaming and download to keep as many music tracks and albums as they want from Universal's catalog.

The music will be in the MP3 format, meaning it can be played on the vast majority of music devices, including the iPod and mobile phones.

The service, which would compete with Apple's iTunes, is set to launch later this year.

Unlimited MP3 downloads. For a flat monthly fee. Say it again. All of a sudden, the entire model of consuming music is flipped on its ear. Just like that, the primary consideration is no longer the cost or illegality of acquiring music, but the cost of storing it digitally. The ownership issue might even be rendered moot by a new breed of consumer--one who is probably also intimately familiar with the streaming-download model--that doesn't need to own the music to enjoy it pretty much whenever and wherever.

While I couldn't reach Lars Ulrich of Metallica for comment, one has to wonder how this model can adequately support the payment of artist royalties. Moreover, one has to wonder what this portends for all manner of copyright-protected media. Are subscription services the future of other forms of media as well? With this media increasingly consumed via digital device and stored on hard-drive(s), "ownership" in the sense defined by the thousands of LPs I currently have in storage may be headed out the door. We'll just pay some set amount, borrow what we want, in whatever degree of permanence we desire, and then press delete when we're done.

It's hard to believe, but it has been scarcely more than 100 years since the mass marketing of gramophones began and with it the era of the consumption of recorded music. Before that time, the only way to consume music was to see in performed live by someone else, or to play it yourself. With not everyone being talented in this capacity, the world of live performance was where the music really lived. As the record industry matured and American consumerism grew up alongside it, the propensity to maintain large music collections flourished. Now, perhaps the pendulum is swinging back in the other direction. If you can listen to or own virtually any piece of recorded music anytime you want, maybe the thrill and value of ownership is diminished. And paradoxically, perhaps this will return the original form of consuming music to greater prominence. I'll have to ask my trombone-playing former Virgin employee friend in ten years or so.

Daniel Turman

The U.S. Postal Service recently launched a very nice way to use augmented reality (AR). Their Virtual Box Simulator is unusual in that it offers real utility by allowing users to determine appropriate box size for what they want to ship. Simply print out their eagle logo. Then use your webcam.

Branded AR executions are under fire these days and agencies who use the technology are often derided for buying into a novelty that offers little value to end users. Some critics have even gone as far as to draw comparisons with Second Life.

Dan Neumann notes: Recently, I've seen a few executions that seem to defy much of this criticism. This is one of them.

Karri Ojanen wrote about a mobile application that broke through this with entertainment value. The Virtual Box Simulator is another. And it appears to bring much product and service value. How long before the other shipping companies follow?

Thanks to Dan Neumann for the link.
Sarah Jo Sautter

I'm going to let you in on the Search industry's dirty secret...

Google is slipping.

Google's big innovation was in realizing that a link to content is the same as a vote. By tracking all the links pointing to a page of content Google assesses how influential that page is - its reputation. Google calls this 'PageRank' and it's old tech.

PageRank assigns a reputation score to the URL where content is published. This makes it a great fit for content that stays put in one location. However, evolving content distribution via blogs, RSS, guest columns, and syndication are a challenge for PageRank. Tweets, retweets, micropublishing, ratings, and comments - even bigger problems.

The solution lies in associating reputation with the identity of the author - a PageRank for People.

image credit: Bonnaf

News sources reported earlier this week that the TV networks just might be developing a series based on Twitter.

It sounds like it would be unscripted, competitive and non-professional talent. The description is vague, but it leaves me wondering how it'd really work.

The Cast
Would just anyone be able to participate or would it be only pre-selected Twitters? I'm thinking about MTV's The Hills. Before the series, the actors were simply Hollywood wannabees. It was the success of the show that turned them into full on celebrities.

Frequency
In order for it to be interesting and meaningful, it'd have to be real-time. Otherwise it'd just seem fake. Would you be able to watch the show and them Twittering at the same time?

Content
What would a televised show give viewers that Twitter couldn't? I'm already on Twitter. Even if I decide to follow some seemingly interesting "cast" of "friends," why would I devote time in front of the tube to them?

Medium
Is TV the right medium for this? It seems more fitting for the interactive sphere. More pointedly, Twitter is engaging. Unless you're on Twitter interacting in dialogue, why would you want to read static posts?

So, I'm a cynic. What do you think of the idea? What would make you watch the show?

Sarah Jo Sautter

Neil Patrick Harris will be hosting the Tony Awards and one of the reasons he was chosen was because of his work on the web: Dr. Horrible Sing-Along Blog. He plays a super-villan in this low-budget yet professional, Internet-only musical production. If you missed it, you can view the first season on Hulu. It crashed the site, shot to the top of the iTunes video chart its first week and garnered quite a (cult) following. Marta Strickland told us why it was so ingenious in an earlier post back in July.

Rumor (according to i09) has it that it may become a full-length movie. Is Hollywood on its way to using more content produced for the web?  It's not a bad idea as they seem to be running out of old TV shows.
 
They should follow in one European city's path. Upload Cinema is a film club that takes the best web films to the big screen. Every first Monday of the month at 9:30 P.M. a fresh program of Internet shorts is screened at a movie theater in Amsterdam. This probably has more legs as a local draw in more artsy, nouveau communities. Think Park City for the Sundance Film Festival. Or Traverse City, Michigan for their annual film festival. But I have yet to hear of any North American cities truly partaking in such a source. If we've overlooked any, please share here.
 
Hollywood seems to be stuck in time though. MTV.com wrote about how although the Web is faster for breaking entertainment news, trade pubs get a better rap -- even though they sometimes break the same stories without giving any credit to their Web competitors.

So just as major entertainment pubs view film blogs as not as credible, polished and noteworthy, do they view web-based content the same way?
 
Like newspapers, Hollywood is not adapting quickly enough to the web influence on movies and it may be to their detriment. I'm sure the democratization of cinema is frightening because the king entertainment city has had a strong hold for so long. But if the big movie houses don't collaborate with the Web at all -- or wait too long to do so -- they just might get blogged out of business.

Kari Jo Girarde
Sarah Jo Sautter
 

In honor of the Web 3.0 Conference going on in New York, I wanted to write a piece today not to answer the question "What is Web 3.0?" There are plenty of articles that try and accomplish that task, and to me the easiest answer still is: Who cares?

It doesn't matter what Web 3.0, it doesn't matter what exactly we call it. All that matters to 99% of the people surfing the web is how it is going to affect their daily digital lives. I see three ways that is going to happen in the near future.

1. Knowledge Engines (give me data, not webpages)
There has been a lot of attention paid to Wolfram Alpha, which just launched in beta last week. Do I think it's a "Google killer"? Nah. It doesn't have quite the right ingredients to go mainstream yet... a funny name, a focus on deep but niche data, no easy answers for the lazy college student. But, it's not the only "answers engine" coming on the scene. Look for Google Squared to launch shortly. As consumers become more familiar with this new type of service, they will flock to the service that offers the best answers, even if it has a really funny name.

2. Social Discovery (you're no longer browsing alone)
Start ups like Headup and the very promising Glue offer contextually relevant social information as you browse. Soon consumers will see that they have a much better option than finding out what 500 complete strangers said about a restaurant or a book... they can find out what 10 of their closest friends and colleagues said about it, without even having to ask.

3. The Open Social Graph (social goes everywhere)
With the announcement yesterday that Facebook is going to integrate with OpenID, it's a great time to start asking... what is this really open social web going to look like? Much of the magic is going to go on behind the scenes, in the secret (to consumers anyway) world of linked data. Formats that describe relationships, interests, and social activities already exist, and have the potential to infuse some relevance to the increasingly noisy social networks. As more companies latch onto OpenID, consumers are going to see their online worlds bleed together. Retail opportunities inside Facebook, social opportunities on news sites.

Why do brands and marketers need to care?
The opportunity for marketers to leverage what Web 3.0 is going to change about the web is a whole lot more than semantic advertising. While behavioral targeting and contextual ads leave a lot to be desired, semantic enabled ads along cannot fight the impending trend... online ads are losing engagement. Most solutions are failing to realize the potential of the medium. It's like bringing a radio announcer to television, and forgetting about the new addition of vision and motion. Ads often lack interaction, context, and socialization. (Comparison courtesy of Joe Marchese, SocialVibe)

No... brands and marketers need to care because Web 3.0 is going to take all the social chatter online and start piping it into relevant tools, discovery mechanisms, and applications that will actually enable consumers to make smarter decisions and inform purchases. Social recommendation (semantic enabled) will replace online advertising. And unless we do everything we can to make sure our content is part of the stream... that we are forward-thinking, open, and friendly in this growing pool of linked data... we are going to be left out of the conversation.

For more, check out our series on Web 3.0 from last year on how the next generation web will change the way you connect, discover, and share with the social online world. And how this movement is going to make marketing more relevant and measurable.

Marta Strickland

image credit: Kate loves Bar Pt

I recently came across an article that had me questioning the validity of my position as an Experience Architect. A San Francisco-based Interaction Design Firm, Cooper (a la Alan Cooper) asked "Is Interaction Design a Dead-End Job?"
 
In fact, discussion around these topics has heated up of late. Jesse James Garret, the infamous experience designer who coined the term "Ajax," recently made the bold statement that Information Architects (IAs) or Interaction Designers (IxDAs) do not exist. So where does that leave people like me who hold title of Senior Experience Architect on our business cards?
 
Both Cooper and Garrett arrive at the same conclusion. We're User Experience Professionals with titles such as User Experience Designer/Architect/Planner ... However you spin it, we think about the experience.
 
So what exactly does this mean?
 
Interaction Design as function is certainly not dead. Information Architecture as a function is also alive and well. The scope, however, has changed/expanded, and the functions are performed by more than just IAs or IxDAs. As a Senior Experience Architect, I work closely with and am sometimes mistaken for an Interaction Designer. An Experience Professional considers a task and all the touch points between a user and a technology. Our goal is to plan a seamless, intuitive experience from beginning to end. This entails structure, flow, and navigation. We also look at any interactive elements and try to make them obvious.
 
Lately, I've been following Dan Klyn who, among his many interesting observations, compares our architecture craft to that of a real architect. He quotes Walter Gropius who says, "Architecture is a mastery of space." So, the question Klyn asks is, "User experience design implies a mastery of __________?"

I submit that it still implies a mastery of space, but the definition of space is expanded. Good architecture considers the structure, the space, how one enters and what one experiences in the space. Emotion and art is involved. Comprehensive architectural design affects the structure, way finding, interior design and emotion.

A writer might see my role differently than a designer. An engineer surely sees my work differently than a project manager. But, when done successfully, experience architecture serves all of their needs.

How do you define Information/Experience Architecture? Do you think it's here to stay?

Anthony Viviano
 

Good News! Twitter search to focus on relevancy. Bad News... is it doesn't matter.

The blogosphere has a fascination with rooting for the underdog. A wanting for the new kid on the block to take out the older, established, seasoned, and extremely profitable bully. The new kid we're talking about here is Twitter and the bully is, obviously, Google.

Santosh Jayaram, Twitter VP of Operations, has ambitious plans to index web pages linked to from Tweets. This would add additional context and relevancy to Twitter search results. I love the idea and can see the value of such a move, but I'm growing wary of are those in those in "The Industry" suggesting Twitter will somehow leap the reigning champ. Before I get in to why Twitter will have a difficult time competing with Google, here's a short list of recent "Google Killers": MySpace, Facebook, Wikia Search, Cuil, Wolfram's Alpha.

Okay, so why does Twitter have zero chance of defeating Google?

1. The current Twitter search engine doesn't work well
If Yahoo or MSN told me they developed the secret sauce to beat Google at it's own game, after laughing hysterically, I would be interested in what they had say because they, at a minimum, have fully functioning search engines. Twitter Search, in its current state, appears to be a basic full-text search engine that comes standard in most database servers. Twitter has a long road ahead!

2. No one needs Twitter
I have a Twitter account and I enjoy the service. It's a fun service that has recently received very good publicity, but no one needs Twitter. We need to find directions. We need to find highly relevant information. Google has proven to be the best available solution for filling this need.

3. People don't search they "Google it"
Old habits are hard to break. Yahoo has been able to retain a respectable share of search not because they deliver the best search results but because they've retained a loyal following from their days as the leading search engine. It will take some time before we associate Twitter with Search.

4. Twitter should set their sights on Facebook first
Facebook is far superior to Twitter in terms of execution and technology. Facebook Lexicon ( http://facebook.com/lexicon/new) provides sentiment analysis, trended keywords and topics, keyword associations, pulse, and geography information based on keywords in profiles and search behavior. It's similar Google Insights for Search (http://google.com/insights/search/) but on steroids! Twitter will need to face, no pun intended, this battle before taking on Google.

5. Whatever Twitter can do Google can do better
Google currently has the ability to index social network content including Tweets. I don't believe it will be very difficult for Google to bake Tweet relevancy, ranking, reputation, and authority into their algorithms. Additionally, Google has developed the most efficient advertising platform in the world. Combining the two equals a world of hurt for those competing in the search space.

6. Finally, see the image located at the top of this article.

Damon Henry