Do Not Adjust Your Set

New technology inevitably leaves casualties. The DVD usurped the video tape, just as the CD laid waste to the LP record and the wheel surpassed dragging things. One of the 20th century’s greatest technologies, television, is threatened by the internet – the other great technological innovation of the 20th century. Will people put up with ever-lengthening commercial breaks and strict programming times when they know that they can get what they want usually ad-free and able to be watched at their convenience? The advent of the DVR has already changed behaviour in regards to allowing people to watch shows when they want to. The internet can take this idea a step further, allowing the download of whole seasons of television shows, usually illegally. It is possible that in the future we will see the current programming model overhauled and commercial television as we know it might plausibly cease to exist.

But does commercial television have to be at odds with the internet? TV networks have already wised up to a lot of the digital age trends. News and current affairs programs in particular work well with input from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and it is common for TV shows to advertise their Facebook or Twitter accounts and encourage users to give instantaneous feedback on the show they are watching. This direct feedback can then be used to further determine target audiences and content, thereby creating better programming—which benefits the viewer— and more directed advertising, which benefits the network. For example, if a particular news program gets an influx of ‘follows’ or ‘likes’ from predominantly single urban women, then they can tailor their advertising accordingly and reap the benefits. Such information has been available to TV networks in the past, but never at such a rapid rate and arguably with less information than a Facebook or Twitter profile can provide.

As of this writing, commercial television is still going strong. It is a worldwide industry that has a firm grip on billions of dollars of advertising revenue and still has enough cultural currency to infiltrate pop culture.  But behaviour is changing. With a lot of television shows now available online – both legally and illegally – waiting a whole week to catch an episode of your favourite show can become taxing. The problem is exacerbated if you live outside the region where the program is produced; American television can take at least six months to reach Australian shores, if not longer. By the time you are watching the ‘latest episode’ of your favourite American drama in Australia the next season is already being shown in the States. It’s unsurprising then that people turn to downloading shows in order to get their fix rather than depend on the often unreliable network programming.

I’m basing a lot of my observations of TV watching behaviour on myself and my friends, which is a small sample size to say the least. But I think the assumption can be made that as members of Generation Y we are much more susceptible to downloading our favourite shows illegally rather than watch them on commercial television. The legality and implications of such behaviour is a tricky issue, and this post doesn’t intend to delve into the morality of pirated internet content. It can’t be ignored, however, that such behaviour exists, and especially that for many people of Generation Y it is generally seen as acceptable.

However, there is still a sizeable market of the older generations who might not do the same and therefore keeps the current model of network television—with its pre-determined programming times and set commercial breaks—viable. The most watched shows in Australia are those which present family situations and domestic life (think Masterchef, The Block, Home and Away, etc.) and therefore are relatable to a large percentage of the population, and not just 20-something students with laptops and University bandwidth at their disposal.

Furthermore, the current model of legal internet programming offered by the networks can be confusing, and at times just as limited as conventional programming. A myriad of ‘online television’ options provided by commercial networks exist, but these range from ‘catch-up’ services of already aired content (usually available only for a certain time), or ‘live streaming’ content which means that viewers still adhere to conventional programming schedules. If you want the liberty of being able to legally watch whole episodes of previous seasons whenever you want, expect to pay for it. And this money generally goes right back into the pockets of the networks. The Hulu service in the United States, which streams shows from ABC, NBC and FOX, pays 50 to 70 percent of revenue generated (primarily from advertising) back to the networks. Don’t expect this sort of arrangement to change any time in the near future. Naturally, television networks want to create a profit, that’s why they have to safeguard their productions and ensure to the best of their ability that they don’t lose money due to piracy.

The relative success of services such as Hulu demonstrates that a market does exist for people who want to watch TV online and pay for it. But how long will that market last? For while there still exists generations who have not been exposed to illegally downloading television shows the reality is that in the future all generations will have lived in a time when such an option has always been available. The technology exists for people to create pirated television shows – and unlike television networks, pirates do not charge for their services because they don’t stand to lose money from doing so. It is reasonable to assume that some pirates believe that they are doing a public good – a modern day Robin Hood, if you will, by taking content from the rich and providing it to the poor.

As mentioned previously, I don’t want to get into the rights and wrongs of online piracy. What I am interested in, however, is the direction that television will take in the future. A pertinent comparison to make would be the music industry, which has been threatened by the rise of the internet and peer to peer sites, and has accordingly had to change its mode of operation, with large stores like iTunes perhaps providing the musical equivalent of a service like Hulu.

So what happens when our society is made up solely of those people who know how (or know somebody who knows a guy who knows how) to obtain content for free? Will illegally downloading television content in its entirety become so common that TV networks are forced to concede defeat? Or will there always be a section of society who shuns online piracy and instead relies on the services that the commercial networks provide? Perhaps we could see an end to conventional television programming as networks no longer have the finances to fund new productions. We might forever be stuck watching re-runs of Two and a Half-Men, while wistfully remembering the good old days where we had access to new television shows, even if they did arrive six months late.

Google+

It's that time of year when a multi-billion dollar information technology company makes its annual foray into the mysterious world of social networking. Last year we watched Apple's musically-oriented Ping never quite get off the ground, and at various times over the years we've had MySpace try to reinvent itself and Microsoft promise that they've got a social networking revolution in the pipeline. Google has tried once before to enter the social networking arena with their ill-fated Buzz platform, but this time has vowed not to make the same mistakes and is attempting to really shake things up with Google+.

‘Thank God,’ I hear you say, ‘that somebody has finally realised that what the world needs is a huge integrated online network which allows me to share things with my friends.’ Although their idea isn’t exactly revolutionary, Google needs to break into the social networking scene because, as Facebook has demonstrated, there is a huge market for advertising when people voluntarily give up information such as where they live, where they like to travel and what they like to eat, watch, read and listen to. Advertising revenue is the oil which greases the Google cogs, and if they could tap in to even half of Facebook’s vast membership then it's mission accomplished and caviar baths for all.

First things first: the name. I can't decide if I love it or hate it. I think the main problem I have with 'Google+' is its dullness coupled with its ambiguity. Facebook is a great name because it escapes ambiguity by being essentially what it promotes itself to be: an extension of a physical college facebook (never mind the fact that most of the world outside North America probably had no idea what a 'facebook' was pre-2005; FB’s popularity in the US was so well established that it didn't matter anymore).  MySpace is another example of a solid name which pretty quickly tells you what you have in store. Twitter also escapes name criticism because although the name is ambiguous it is interesting enough to contemplate. 

Conversely, 'Google+' looks like the name of 1970s Soviet software that was specifically programmed to sort and rank south-Ukranian wheat stocks. The name doesn't really offer you anything exciting. ‘Google’ may well have been an intriguing word that garnered interest in 1998 but the company has been so successful that it is blasé now.  The 'Plus' tells you precisely nothing about what the product is or does, except for a vague notion that it may enhance your life (or your wheat inventory). The thing it has going for it is the fact that it clearly tells you that it’s a Google initiative, and Google is a good, strong brand. And, granted, it is marginally better than ‘Buzz’, which perhaps started the 2010 trend of giving social networking start-ups moronic monosyllabic monikers.

Let's skip past the rigours of getting an invite* (which is becoming easier by the day) and take a look around. Looks eerily familiar, doesn’t it? The page layout is, rather unimaginatively, essentially a Facebook clone:

Click for larger image

Can you blame them? Why not try and emulate a service that has a quarter of a billion regular users? Using a Facebook style layout means that people are already familiar with the system and can dive right into using Plus. For example, the ‘Like’ button has become the ‘+1’ button, so whenever you see something that appeals to you, you can hit the +1 and declare your approval publicly. 

But why design a social network clone of Facebook if you want people to move from FB onto your service? It gives people no incentive to make the switch, because all you get is Facebook with Google’s logo plastered all over it. The argument that you have to stick with something that people are familiar to doesn’t necessarily hold up either, as when FB started getting big it looked markedly different from MySpace profiles, which was its biggest competitor at the time. Budgetary issues surely wouldn’t have been a big concern for Google; perhaps they could have paid their programmers to come up with something a bit more revolutionary. However, Plus can’t be faulted in terms of usability, every action is fairly intuitive and there are quite a few keyboard shortcuts which can be mastered to save time.

 

One of the first things I noticed about Plus when filling out your profile information was that Google lets you update the privacy settings for each piece of information that you edit. This makes it really easy to quickly set up a level of profile privacy that you’re happy with, without having to venture to a ‘Privacy’ tab and try and work out which setting will affect which piece of info. This is not to say that Google’s privacy ‘settings’ are actually any better or more secure than Facebook (which are quite comprehensive, once you find them) but they are much more user friendly.

  

Circles

Plus’s big selling point is its ‘Circles’ feature, in which you can separate your friends into groups which reflect real life networks. No longer do you have to fear your boss or your mother getting hold of that photo of you riding a tricycle through the zoo in the nude after a night on the turps, because with Circles you can be choosy about who you share certain things with. Furthermore, it provides you with an opportunity to ‘Follow’ certain people without them needing to add you to a Circle, which makes Plus a hybrid between Twitter and Facebook. Circles brings us closer to needing only one networking account that you can use for both business and social contacts. 

The concept is not quite as revolutionary as Google would like to have you believe, for similar features exist on Twitter and Facebook (‘Lists’) and the smaller social networking experiment Diaspora, whose ‘Aspects’ feature seems to work in the same way as Circles does.  Although Plus isn’t the first social network to provide a contact sorting feature, Circles appears to be the best attempt at it so far. I tried to organise my Twitter followers into lists the other day and died of boredom after adding four contacts. On Twitter it takes at least three clicks just to add someone to a list. Plus lets you add somebody to a Circle in one.

Hangouts

One feature I haven’t had much time to test is the Hangout feature, which lets you connect via webcam with a group of up to 10 people. I’m unsure if this will be a big drawing card to the service. One of the advantages of social networking meant that you could interact with your friends without having to get out of your pyjamas or shave or wear pants. As soon as you bring a webcam into the mix, normal social rules apply. While I’m sure some people will make the most of Hangouts (travelling family members, business meetings) I can’t imagine it becoming used as regularly as simple online chat. Now watch as I’m proven wrong and a social networking revolution occurs in which everybody starts interacting via vidphone as promised in every sci-fi book and film created from 1948 to 1994.

  

Sparks

The other feature worth noting on Plus is the ‘Sparks’ feed, which lets you subscribe to a news feed (provided by Google search) of things you’re interested in. For example, I made a Sparks page on the Space Shuttle, and so whenever I visit that page I get up to date news, pictures and videos about the final Space Shuttle flight. It’s kind of handy, but anything more obscure than ‘Space Shuttle’ or ‘White House’ tends to return a pretty eclectic collection of ‘news’. I tried Sparks with the Melbourne Football Club and got a variety of out of date news and a bunch of articles that mention the MFC in passing. No doubt Sparks is something that will improve once the field trials are completed but if Google really wanted to impress people it should have made this feature a bit more intuitive.

So, aside from worldwide social domination and filling their coffers to the brim, what are Google trying to achieve with Plus? Here’s what they claim:

‘The Google+ Project makes sharing on the web more like sharing in the real world.’

Google have taken an interesting focus with Plus. Whereas Facebook has historically been based on connecting with people, Google have identified sharing information as being the most critical feature of social networking. Plus is geared towards the dissemination of information: the status box asks you to ‘Share what’s new’, as opposed to FB’s ‘What’s on your mind?’ The focus on sharing equates to Google trying to design a product which incorporates the features of other sites like Twitter and Digg with social sites like Facebook and MySpace. Google’s ultimate aim is for Plus to become your networking hub, whether it is professional or social. As in the real world, you’re probably not going to ‘share’ photos of your weekend away with your boss, just like you wouldn’t share last month’s data entry reports with your loved ones. The Circles feature means that this is now possible, and in this regard Google certainly have made it easier to share information between different parties as it would occur in the ‘real world.’ 

Whether or not people will find the service useful enough to abandon Facebook and Twitter is another matter, and the only way I can see Plus being truly successful is if they become the only social networking site that people use. Facebook and Twitter are different enough that people will quite happily use both, but I find it hard to imagine someone using Facebook, Twitter and Plus regularly. One of them would have to give, and history suggests it will be the new kid on the block.

The problem with Plus is that it is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. There is nothing different or useful enough on Plus to entice people away from their established presence on Facebook and Twitter. Google’s attempt to create a networking hybrid seems to have come up with an acceptable half-breed that lets you do some nifty – but ultimately pointless – things.

Of course, if we’re honest, that's essentially the whole concept behind social networking anyway.

*Thanks to Kim, who sent me my Plus invite.

the Goody Bag™ Vol. II

Welcome to the Goody Bag, where collective thoughts of online absurdity come to meet each other, have a drink, go home together and then never speak again.

Buy a piece of the moon!

I’ve seen some internet scams in my time, but this is one of the more ingenious ones I’ve come across. Ever feel that terrestrial land prices are too high? Why not consider the Moon? After all, it’s practically inevitable that we’re going to run out of room down here on Earth, so why not be prepared and start developing your Sea of Tranquility-side property now? You’ve probably only got about thirty years until the inevitable gentrification begins and you’ll have to start looking further afield towards Mars or Asteroid 3455 to escape the space-yuppies.

Lunar real-estate agents like Dennis Hope have made a living out of selling randomly allocated lunar acreage. Before you part with your hard earned, please keep in mind the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies which is a really long way of saying you can’t place dibs on the moon or any other planet. Sadly, I get the feeling that the people who sell extraterrestrial lunar estate are probably the same people who ignore internationally recognised treaties. You’re effectively paying $20 for a piece of paper, which probably costs about 0.01c to manufacture, and about a buck to mail. Ahh, the internet: where capitalism and human stupidity are finally brought together to make sweet, passionate love (and large profits).

Google+

There is a lot of hype surrounding the launch of Google’s social networking website. Reports of the site crashing because of popularity seem impressive, but really, surely the creators knew that they were going to go over capacity? I find it hard to believe that Google could run out of server space. It was marketing genius, however, by making the product look so popular that it can’t handle the overhyped demand. People were so keen to get onto the service that inevitably somebody noted that there was a market for it and started selling invites on eBay. For the record, I managed to score an invite, and will be doing a more comprehensive write up in the coming weeks.

Tabbed browsing

Every now and then something is invented which revolutionises behaviour. Fire, the wheel, telephones, aeroplanes, even the internet itself are all examples. But sometimes it's the little inventions that can have profound impacts, like tabbed internet browsing. I'm not really sure where it came from. I'm not quite sure when I started using it. But I'm pretty sure that now I couldn't live without it. Can you imagine having to open a new window every time you see something that catches your eye, or trying to remember all the links that you wanted to click on? As far as I can tell, there is no limit in Chrome as to how many tabs you can have open. You are only limited by the size of the internet itself, and your CPU. With Google Chrome and a powerful enough processor I theoretically would be able to have every single internet page open in a single browser window. I have no idea what sort of useful function this would serve. But its nice to know its possible.

The Father, Son and the Holy Tweet

I was very excited when I heard that the Pope had launched his Twitter account. I was expecting digital salvation to finally become a reality and was somewhat disappointed when I found that the ‘Pope’s account’ was merely a ‘news portal’ for the Vatican, with someone pretending to  be the Holy Father giving an obligatory tweet every month or so. The rest of the posts are just Vatican PR spam.

In a similar vein, following the US Secret Service on Twitter is not as fun as it sounds either. They give no cool insights into how to jump in front of a bullet in slow motion, but rather report on the danger of fraud and identity theft schemes. To top it off, the USSS aren’t even ‘following’ anybody. Way to be a selfish Twitter user. Of course that’s probably a good thing; because when the day comes that I’m ‘followed’ by an international anti-crime organisation I’ll probably transform into a paranoid maniac and try and burn down the Twitter servers. Or the Pentagon.*


And finally...

I could attempt to write thousands of words on how the internet has changed our lives but I think this picture sums it up nicely. A pile of brand new phonebooks sit untouched in the foyer of my apartment building, not even worth the paper they're printed on. 

*If the USSS weren’t following me before, they definitely are now. 

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda: An open letter to the second place getters of the Digital Age

Do you ever stop and wonder about those websites that seem perpetually on the cusp of greatness, but haven’t quite cracked the big time, and instead constantly play second fiddle to the big corporations? As in Chinese philosophy, to every Yin there must be a Yang, and for every Simon, there is a Garfunkel.* For every wildly successful multi-billion dollar internet start up that contributes new verbs to the common vernacular [‘Did you friend her? Nah, I googled her and she’s wanted for armed robbery in three states’ etc] there is another site which offers remarkably similar services yet hasn’t quite reached the critical mass of users to become the popular standard.

Google > Yahoo!

Did you know that Yahoo! is the second largest search engine on the web? Seems like a pretty good deal for them, huh? The problem is, the first place holder, Google, holds 85 per cent of the search query market. Yahoo! comes in at second place with 6 per cent. That’s the equivalent of Usain Bolt winning the 100m as his competitors cross the 20m mark. Hardly a satisfying second place, is it?

Beyond the search engine itself, Yahoo! offers similar services to Google, in terms of webmail, videos, maps, and advertising. So why is there such a large discrepancy between the two? Google made a name for itself due to its search algorithm being notoriously accurate, at least more accurate than its competitors. Whether or not Yahoo!’s search system is now on par with Google is irrelevant: during the critical period of people flocking to the internet (new millennium onwards) Google proved time and again the best search tool. Searching with Google is so seamless (especially if you’re using Chrome) that I hardly think of myself as ‘using Google’ anymore. I just think of something I need to know, type it in, and it appears before me. Google has effectively become an invisible hand in the information gathering process, and this is surely the goal of any serious search engine company.

Similar examples of complete market saturation exist outside the internet. Band-aids, Bubble-Wrap, Eskys, Stanley Knives, are all examples of ‘Generiscized Trademarks’, in which the product name has actually transcended its own company or service and become the standardised term for any similar product. Google is approaching this now, with most people using ‘Google’ as a term which incorporates virtually any sort of internet search. Of course, with an 85 per cent market share, chances are most people actually are ‘Googling’ everything.

YouTube > Dailymotion

Daily-whawha? At least, that was my reaction when I discovered French video hosting site Dailymotion was the second largest video sharing website in the world. Much like the Google/Yahoo comparison, Dailymotion is a fair way behind YouTube, with 60,000,000 video views per day compared to YouTubes astronomical 1,200,000,000. Of course, YouTube’s success is helped by the fact that it is owned by Google, so that many video searches undertaken by Google will inevitably direct you to YouTube.

However, YouTube was a successful site in its own right before the takeover, and Google have been smart enough not to try and merge YouTube with Google Video, but instead keep the recognisable branding that YouTube built. What’s even more interesting is that before the takeover, Google Video never really came close to the sort of traffic YouTube was generating, despite the fact that Google was the largest search engine at the time.

YouTube, like Google, found success with its easily useable interface. Videos were easy to find and upload, utilisation of attractive site design and memorable branding (the red loading bar is particularly iconic) and clever innovations has meant that YouTube has secured a place as the third most popular site in the world, behind Google and Facebook.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the Dailymotion website, and it was founded only one month after YouTube in 2005. However, like Google, YouTube has become the pop culture standard for a generation of users. Additionally (and I have no idea how much influence this has) it takes approximately 0.45 seconds less time to type youtube.com than it does to type dailymotion.com. Add in the fact that Chrome users can now press ‘Tab’ and search YouTube content instantly, and it becomes hard to see how Dailymotion (or anyone else) will come close to knocking YouTube off its perch as the No. 1 video site.

Facebook > Myspace

I feel particularly privileged that I can actually remember the day I signed up to Facebook. I’m trying really hard to hold onto that memory because it’s probably something that one day I’ll be able to tell a room full of really young people and they’ll laugh at me. I have a feeling that in the future no-one will ‘remember’ when they signed up to Facebook but instead it will just happen, like being able to tie your shoelaces or riding a bike or completing puberty. Kids will probably be signed up for an account when they’re born and then that’ll be the end of it.

One of my most distinct memories of joining Facebook was the fact that it was a social networking site that wasn’t MySpace. I mentioned above how hard difficult it appears for Yahoo to overtake Google or for Dailymotion to overtake YouTube, but don’t take for granted that it can’t happen. Facebook proved that you can take on the biggest rival in your industry and win convincingly.

How did they do it? Whole books could and will be written on why Facebook has succeeded. Briefly, Facebook started in American colleges, and in terms of pop culture, everybody on the planet wants to be doing what American university students are doing. If they’re on Facebook, then everybody will want to be on Facebook. It didn’t take long before other universities and high-schools were DEMANDING that Zuckerberg cut them into his network. When you have a controlled release like Facebook did, it creates hype, and people want what they don’t have. It was marketing genius.

But it wasn’t all to do with marketing. Facebook is actually a remarkable product. It would pretty much sell itself. It has been theorised that Facebook taps into basic human instincts and social practices, and this partly accounts for its widespread success. Zuckerberg has a knack for programming highly addictive software. The timing of FB’s release was ideal too. People had slowly learned the social network game on MySpace, but Facebook gave them something to really sink their teeth into. Innovations such as simple photo uploading and tagging, the newsfeed (which people hated at first), poking, liking and the prominence of the status update revolutionised the social networking world.

Will anybody be able to pull off the social networking coup de grace? People talk quietly of ‘the Facebook killer’, the service that is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace. Google are launching a new service, Google+, which they hope will replace Facebook as the social networking standard. It’s hard to see how they will achieve it. People already have much more invested in their Facebook profile than they ever did in MySpace, and Facebook is much bigger than MySpace ever was. Google+ will  have to be something incredibly remarkable in order to overthrow Facebook, but if anybody was going to pull it off, then you’d think the largest internet company in the world with millions of dollars behind it probably has the best chance.

Wikipedia > Scholarpedia

Sick and tired of people telling you that Wikipedia isn’t a viable source? Why not try out Scholarpedia, the free encyclopedia that not quite anybody can edit. As opposed to Wikipedia’s delightful free-for-all, Scholarpedia’s articles are written by scholars from around the world, and are peer-reviewed. If everybody’s quest for knowledge is so great that a site like Wikipedia can become the seventh most popular website in the world, why isn’t Scholarpedia visited just as much, as it provides reputedly better knowledge? (FYI, Scholarpedia is ranked at about the 300,000^th most visited site in the world).

Of course, most web users don’t necessarily want totally correct information; they just want a lot of it. Wikipedia’s lack of exclusiveness means that an incredibly wide range of topics are covered, including things that generally scholars wouldn’t write about. The longest article on the English Wikipedia is a list describing ‘Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2^nd Edition Monsters’. I’d like to see someone with a degree in that. Of course, this is really the stuff that people want to know about, as opposed to say, politics in Iran.

Furthermore, I have argued before that it is debateable how ‘unreliable’ Wikipedia really is. Many Wikipedia pages are guarded so carefully by those with a vested interest in them that vandalism becomes incredibly difficult. It seems that people have embraced Wikipedia, and are willing to defend its stance as the sum of most of humankind’s knowledge. It would appear that popular opinion is worth more on the internet than a doctorate. Whether or not this is a positive development is debateable, but most people are smart enough to recognise Wikipedia as an open source site, and treat its information accordingly.

So there you have it; a not particularly comprehensive guide to the world’s biggest websites and their poorer, uglier stepsisters. It must be kept in mind that the secondary websites are still, for the most part, multi-million dollar corporations, with the sort of web traffic that many can only dream about. I’m sure the founders of MySpace, Yahoo!, Dailymotion and Scholarpedia probably sleep quite happily at night. But it’s interesting that there only ever seems to be room for one at the top. And being at the top in the digital age is about more than raking in huge profits. It’s about having your company, your brand and your image representing your industry. Your company doesn’t just provide a service anymore; it provides a representation of the zeitgeist, which is something that immortalises corporations. Google is internet search, just as Facebook is social networking, and YouTube is online video. That sort of success and brand recognition can’t be bought by advertising no matter how hard you try: it can only be endorsed by the masses.

*Please don’t take this statement to mean that I have any sort of grasp of Chinese philosophy. P.S. sorry Art.