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The Future of Online Ratings and Reviews
The cute girl from last Friday’s Christmas party agreed to go on a date with you! Nice work, my friend! Time to find a good spot to grab dinner. If you’re like the rest of my net-savvy generation, you pull up Yelp and start looking for places. The list of restaurants come up and as you’re scrolling down, you can’t really tell the difference between their ratings. This sushi restaurant has 3.7 stars, but this Italian restaurant has 3.8 stars and the Mexican place down the street has 3.6 stars. Is a 3.7 star sushi restaurant really that much better than a 3.6 star Mexican place? Okay, time to check out what people had to say in their reviews. One person says they got food poisoning from this place, but another says they proposed to their wife there and another said it’s just okay, but not better than the place around the corner. Who do you trust?
There is a fundamental problem with the online rating systems we use to give and find feedback on businesses and products. I’m going to dive into these problems below and try to give a little insight into how I believe we can solve them. Then I’ll try to provide a glimpse of the vision I have for the future of rating systems and how we use them to discover the world around us.
The Problem with 5 Stars and Written Reviews
The most common rating system we use online is the 5-star scale. This scale was adapted from the familiar ratings we found in newspapers growing up. Newspaper critics helped people discover the best new restaurants, movies, plays and events by rating them and justifying that rating with a written review. When the internet began implementing feedback mechanisms, the 5-star and written review system made the most sense because it was familiar. Websites could average out the ratings and feature written reviews that users found the most helpful. It worked pretty well in the beginning, but then as more and more people began rating and reviewing things, the utility of that feedback became murky at best.
The problem that began to emerge with 5-star ratings is that as more people rate things, the less differentiated those things become from the rest of the market. The clearest example of this problem emerges when searching Yelp in cities where most businesses have over 1,000 ratings. When the search results populate, you’re going to be stuck looking at a range of ratings from 3.5 to 4.2 stars generally. The 5-star scale was meant for critics to provide a singular opinion. It was not designed to be averaged across thousands of opinions. It also wasn’t designed for amateur reviewers because we tend to rate things at the extreme ends of the scale.
YouTube realized this problem after they analyzed the distribution of user-ratings when they had a 5-star scale below every video. The graph above shows that users were much more likely to give videos 5 stars or even 1 star than to bother with the nuance of giving a 2, 3, or 4 star rating. Since sharing this graph in a blog post, YouTube moved to a simple thumbs up or down. Kudos to them for realizing they made a mistake and fixing it!
There is also the problem that everyone has a different interpretation of the 5-star scale itself. Some people might hand out 5-star ratings like candy on Halloween and some might hold onto one full-size candy bar for the best costume of the night, yet both of those people are counted equally when averaged. The subjectivity 5-star scales inject into the rating process even further decreases the usefulness of the average ratings.
If we can’t tell the difference between businesses based on their ratings, the next source we generally turn to is reading the reviews other people have written. Written reviews suffer from the same problems as the 5-star scale though – they are highly subjective. When you ask your friends how much they like a business or product, you know who’s opinion to trust (and probably don’t even ask the people you don’t trust). There is no way to tell who’s opinion to trust and who’s to discard online. Is the restaurant really that dirty or is the person who wrote that review an OCD germaphobe? Did this customer really receive poor service or was it written by the owner of a competitor down the street to boost their own business? Again, who do you trust?
The Solution is Simplicity
How do we solve the rating system problems described above? KISS! Keep It Simple, Silly! Okay, not THAT simple. The en vogue thing in social media right now is to use an over-simplified system where users just “like” or “+1″ things. It seems like it should work – the more people who “like” something, the better it is, right? Wrong. When you throw out the ability for people to express dislike or negative experiences, you create a system that doesn’t reflect reality. What does a “like” or “+1″ really mean if people don’t have the option of “disliking” or “-1″ something?
So maybe instead of KISS, it should be KIPS. Keep It Pretty Simple. Simplify the rating system into a straight-forward measure of like and dislike. This rating system approach has gained popularity with the emergence of websites like RottenTomatoes and Reddit. RottenTomatoes is an interesting case because they have developed a system to convert ratings into a binary positive/negative rating. They knew that if they just averaged all of the 5-star ratings for movies across the country, their website would be full of movies with 3.5-4.2 stars. Instead, the movies currently in theaters have scores ranging from How to Survive a Plague’s 100% fresh rating to Playing for Keeps’ rotten 3%. While RottenTomatoes aggregates movie reviews from vetted sources, Reddit provides a model where the rating process is given over to the community. Every user has the ability to rate any link submitted to Reddit by giving it an upvote or downvote and links are ranked by their net upvotes (upvotes minus downvotes). Reddit is quickly becoming one of the most influential sites online and it’s popularity is highly attributable to the beautifully simple rating system at the core of its functionality.
Another part of the solution for improving our rating systems online is the integration of social media’s secret sauce, photos. Photos have been the fuel that drives websites and apps like Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and FoodSpotting. At the end of the day, we are very visual creatures. It makes sense then that any solution for improving rating systems should pay special attention to photos. Anyone who has used FoodSpotting understands the maxim “a picture is worth a thousand words” is especially applicable when choosing where to eat. Yelp understands this and has begun to build photos as a central part of their experience, but they are still chained to their flawed 5-star ratings and written reviews.
The Future is Rating Pad Thai
If rating systems are already slowly moving towards a pretty simple binary rating scale augmented with user-submitted photos, where is the next point of disruption and opportunity for innovation? I believe the future of rating systems hinges on our ability to add layers to our experience. Right now, we go to a restaurant, come home, and write a couple paragraphs describing what we ate, the service and the overall ambiance. The rating we give is meant to describe your overall experience with that restaurant, which, similar to “likes” and “+1″, is a little too simple. Maybe you went to a restaurant, loved the ambiance and food, but your server was new and in over their head? Life is complicated and our experiences are influenced by a number of different factors. I believe the rating systems of the future will let you rate each of those complicating factors separately, so you can give the food and ambiance of the restaurant a positive rating, but give the service a negative rating.
Adding these layers respects the complexity of our experiences and provides more useful insight to people who use the ratings to make decisions. If someone has a hankering for pad thai, they can search for the highest rated pad thai dish near them instead of just hoping the highest rated thai restaurant has the best pad thai. It lets people search for the best masseuse instead of the best spa and the best beer instead of the best bar. Adding layers opens up a whole new world of social discovery when combined with a simplified rating system and photos.
Moving to San Francisco – The Online Tools That Helped Make My Relocation Easier
Hire movers. They're worth every penny.
In the middle of February I received an offer to work for Altimeter Group in San Francisco, CA. This was an excellent opportunity to take the next step in my career and work with a very talented, intelligent group of social media experts. The only thing that kept my excitement in check was the prospect of relocating to a city I had never visited before. The first time I ever set foot in San Francisco was actually for the last round of interviews, so moving somewhere so unfamiliar was daunting to say the least.
I had already made a major relocation once before when I moved cross-country from Chicago to Los Angeles three years ago, but that move wasn’t as intimidating because I had a very solid base of friends who moved to LA after graduation. Three of my four best friends lived there along with a large number of friends I had from the theater department at Northwestern University who were trying to succeed in the entertainment industry. It was stressful, but having a network of friends there made the transition much easier.
I knew three people in San Francisco before I moved here and one of them was studying in Japan for a semester. That coupled with the fact that I had never set foot in the city meant I needed to get creative and use every single tool at my disposal to make it work. The following is a list of the most important tools, websites and apps that helped me make this transition as smooth as possible.
Leverage Your Networks
This might seem obvious, but it was an important first step for me so I had to include it. Hopefully you know someone in the city you’re relocating to, and if not, then hopefully the rest of the tools I list will help you. The biggest question mark for me when moving to San Francisco was where to live. Every neighborhood has it’s own character, traditions and style, but I only had two weeks to find an apartment and move in, so the first thing I did was reach out to the three people I knew there to ask them which neighborhoods I should look at in my apartment search. This helped immensely. Even if you don’t know someone in the city you’re moving to, you probably know someone who grew up there or lived there at one point. One tool you can use to help this is searching your friends list on Facebook by hometown and current town.
All I can say is thank God for Craigslist. I can’t imagine apartment hunting without it. I was also lucky that the San Francisco Craigslist pages allowed you to narrow your search for apartments by neighborhoods. This feature is available in New York City, but not Chicago or LA. You can always work around it by searching for the neighborhood’s name, but it can be tough when neighborhoods have nicknames or if the posts only mention a street.
UPDATE (2/17/12): @JulesFaas made a great suggestion in the comments to use PadMapper. Couldn’t agree more with her. One of the more frustrating things when comparing Craigslist apartments is that you can’t compare locations on a map. For those like me who are more spatially and visually inclined, this website really helps augment the Craigslist experience.
One of the best new websites I discovered in this process was WalkScore, which rates neighborhoods on a hundred point scale based on how walkable they are. Scores under 50 mean you’ll be dependent on a car and anything above a 90 is a “Walker’s Paradise” where your daily errands don’t require a car. It was really important to me that I lived somewhere very walkable, so this was incredibly helpful. It also provides you with lists of restaurants, bars, coffee shops, grocery stores, parks, and other lists of places nearby that can give you a better idea of what’s in the neighborhood. My current apartment’s score is a 97 and I’m thinking about getting rid of my car now. My old apartment in Venice was an 78, which is “Very Walkable”, but the difference between the neighborhoods has definitely made my move much easier. I LOVE how convenient my new neighborhood is and the scores pretty accurately reflects that convenience. Even if you aren’t apartment hunting, it’s interesting to see how your neighborhood scores.
Craigslist and WalkScore gave me a bird’s eye view of possible apartments and what their neighborhoods has to offer, but Google Street View rounded out the experience by giving my the ability to virtually walk down the street. Almost all apartments on Craigslist include a link to Google Maps and from there you can zoom in far enough and actually move around the neighborhood as if you were just out for a walk. It’s a great tool for getting a feel for what the neighborhood looks like without ever stepping foot in the city. This was especially helpful in my search considering how little experience I had with San Francisco before moving here.
The second weekend after I got my offer I drove up to San Francisco to check out apartments. I had been looking at Craigslist nearly every day for potential apartments, but decided the best way to save my favorite ones for follow up was syncing them with my favorite note-taking application, Evernote. Using the Chrome plug-in, I clipped full page craigslist ads to my account, which synced with the app I had installed on my iPhone. That way I had access to the pictures, links, phone numbers and addresses in each post on my phone without having to re-search Craigslist. It’s true you could create a folder of bookmarks and then sync it to your phone’s web browser, but Evernote allows you to write your own notes above the webpage that’s been clipped. So after I’d check out an apartment I’d give it a rating and type in any important things like “Windows look out onto an ugly brick wall. Feels like a prison.” or “Landlord is really friendly and street parking nearby is pretty easy”. If you aren’t using Evernote yet, I’d strongly recommend checking it out. It’s simply the best note-taking application I’ve used yet.
Apartment Application + Credit Report
One of the most annoying parts of any apartment search is filling out multiple applications that ask for the same details. Knowing that I was going to check out at least 10 apartments and that I might want to apply for up to five or more of them, I decided I’d create my own application. I google searched “apartment application” and found this document. Applications can vary between management companies though, so I just used it as a guideline and created word documents for each section. Looking at a couple applications will let you know what to include in the document, but mine included previous addresses (including the dates I lived there, management company contact information and monthly rent), my employment history, professional contacts and personal references. I also included a credit report so I could avoid some of the application fees, but most management companies will require you to submit to a background/credit check anyway. Only two management companies accepted my credit report, but it only cost me $15 and ended up saving me about $40. Put all these documents into an envelope that you can hand to the landlord when he’s showing you the apartment and you come off as very prepared and responsible. Plus, it’s great to just have all that information saved in a document that you can update and use in the future.
One of the most intimidating aspects of moving to San Francisco was the fact that I’d have to rebuild my social life from the ground up. I’ve made a very concerted effort to get out of the apartment and explore the city, but exploring isn’t enough. I generally find it pretty easy to make friends, but it’s tough when you don’t have other friends to introduce you to their social circles. Meetup.com is a website where you can signup for “meetups” which are basically groups that schedule events open to the public. Think high school clubs for adults. There’s a meetup for nearly any interest you could have: meditation, yoga, photography, writing, professional networking, sports team fans, religion, live music…. and if the meetup you’re looking for doesn’t exist, go ahead and create it! It’s a great way to meet people with common interests and everyone who joins is usually very friendly because the whole point of it is to make new friends. Just be careful about your email communication settings. Joining a bunch of meetups can quickly flood your inbox, which can discourage you from seeing the value in the service and using it.
One of my favorite TV shows is Diners, Drive-ins and Dives on The Food Network. The food always looks incredible and the restaurants have a ton of character. ”Flavortown, USA” is one of the catch phrases from the host, Guy Fieri, as in “Wow, partner, that meatloaf sandwich is a trip to Flavortown, USA.” He has a ton of great catch phrases like that, but someone turned this one into a website that maps out all of the restaurants he’s featured in the show on a searchable google map. Each restaurant has it’s own page with details and most include the actual video clip from the show so you can see their signature dishes and what it’s like inside before you visit. This website is now one of the first places I go anytime I have a road trip planned and I’ve never been disappointed. In a new city, it can help you explore new neighborhoods and many locals usually know about the places, so it can often be a nice conversation starter.
This is a San Francisco-specific tool I’ve been able to use, but it’s been one of the most useful iPhone apps I’ve ever downloaded. It contains over 50 different apps, including tools to locate Wifi hotspots, tours, restaurants, bars, nightlife and guides to help you navigate public transportation, find local events and read local news among many other things. It’s a jack-of-all-trades app for living in San Francisco that would be helpful to anyone in the area, not just those of us who are new. If you aren’t moving to San Francisco, just try searching your phone’s App Store for your city’s name and see what comes up. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you find.
What did I miss?
Those were the most helpful tools I used during my relocation to San Francisco and I’ve been very pleased with just how smooth a transition it has been. I’ll keep adding websites, apps and other tools as I find them, but I’m curious to hear what other people have used. Do you have any suggestions for people moving to San Francisco or relocating in general? Please leave any feedback you have in the comments section below!
Are Movie Status Updates Too Antisocial for Social Media?
The recent news about Netflix dropping their integration with Facebook has me puzzled. One frequent suggestion I see in industry news and among social media experts is that movie studios should push social media initiatives because people enjoy talking about the movies they watch. It makes sense intuitively – movies are an important part of our culture and many of our social lives. Even so much so that there’s a stigma to watching a movie by yourself (it’s really not bad, especially for quiet movies). If movies are such a common topic of conversation and have so many avid fans, then why are Netflix users (the most active movie renters out there) so indifferent about sharing their movie ratings on Facebook? Is it because posting something to your Facebook wall isn’t a valuable enough social behavior? Are our experiences with movies SO communal that it’s awkward to express a written opinion from a single voice and point of view that isn’t necessarily seeking validation or trying to stir controversy? It’s possible the real value of a movie is the shared experience, not the individual experience, at least not the individual experience expressed in the form of a social network status update. Posting a status update of the stars you gave a movie doesn’t actually say much about what you thought of the movie. There has to be a way for fans to express their opinions about movies in a way that is natural online.
There is one service that is slowly growing on me. It’s a mobile app called GetGlue that lets you check into media you’re consuming in real time, like a Foursquare for the movies and TV shows you watch. The feature that sets it apart from Foursquare (and one that I WISH Foursquare would integrate) is that it asks if you’d like to write a review. Since I started using Foursquare, I’ve wondered why they don’t have a review system so they could compete (or work collaboratively) with Yelp. It would add SO much more value to both the users and Foursquare. Back to GetGlue though – I think they’re on the right track, but I also wouldn’t bet the farm on them. I don’t get the branding behind their name. ”GetGlue” makes it sound like a registry for an elementary school teacher. It might catch on if a big enough TV show or movie launched a compelling promotion campaign, but the best chance for it to really make an impact would likely be getting acquired and re-branded by Facebook. If GetGlue’s functionality were added to Facebook, it might be able to get enough people engaged to where you could chat with friends who checked into the same movie/TV show’s fan page. I think service will eventually lean more towards conversation and further from simple status updates.
What do you think about checking into and writing reviews of movies/TV shows (or restaurants and bars in relation to Yelp)? If you’re a Netflix user, why wouldn’t you want to share your movie ratings on Facebook? Is all this simply over-sharing? As always, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
iPhone iSsues
At one point I was the perfect Apple customer – I owned a Mac Laptop, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iSoul… everything but an AppleTV and Mobile Me account. Apparently it wasn’t enough for the replace-everything-in-two-years business model Apple had set up for their customers. I’m going to try to be as level-headed as I can in this post, but Apple has pushed me to the breaking point this week. I’ll explain….
A couple months back, the vibrate button on my iPhone stopped working. It wasn’t a huge deal, so I didn’t rush to get it fixed. I didn’t realize until later that my missed calls had skyrocketed because I couldn’t hear the ringer in my pocket. So I looked up the issue online and found out it’s fairly common and that Apple would try restoring it first and then replacing it if that didn’t work. I tested the restore solution to find out it didn’t fix anything (it’s like restarting your wireless router. You always try it and then call your internet service provider’s help line to have them tell you to try restarting it. Even though you explain that you already did that, you do it again to amuse them and…. IT’S FIXED! I still have no clue how that works.). Anyway, I took my iPhone into the Apple store to have it replaced. No problem there. The Genius Bar, while usually filled with snarky little mac fanboys, was helpful and quick. I got a replacement 3Gs and it was working, no problems. Although it didn’t have my settings yet, I could still use it before I restored it from my last backup saved the night before.
Why is there always a "Genius" wearing a stupid hat like that?
I get it home and plug it into my PowerBook to restore my settings. I select my backup from the night before and walk away to let it do its thing. A couple minutes later, I check on it and iTunes has stopped syncing. I was expecting this to take the annoying couple hours like it normally does to restore an iPhone, so I immediately knew something was wrong. When I picked up my phone, it was just a black screen with the white apple logo. I couldn’t get to the home screen or even reboot it. It gave me an error saying it was stuck in recovery mode and none of the google searches I did could help me troubleshoot it, so it was time for round 2 at the Genius Bar.
This time the “Genius” Bar wasn’t as helpful. First it was annoying that they made me register an appointment when there was nobody in front of me. I couldn’t just walk up and start talking to someone. I understand why they have that process, but when the store is empty and there are all these employees just standing around, they should just skip that step. Anyway, back to the real issue. I tried explaining what happened to the “Genius”, but like most macboys, his below average listening skills made him miss the part where I told him I was in the day before and this was a broken replacement iPhone. So he went through the same process of trying to restore it and he couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t boot up. By the second time I got through explaining the issue in extreme detail, he got it. He still tried to restore it because that’s apparently the solution to any problem the “Geniuses” have figured out. When the screen turned purple and started flashing green and yellow bars, he finally gave up and replaced the replacement iPhone.
After 30 minutes of this, I was just glad to walk out with a new (read refurbished, but new to me, so who cares) iPhone. Having been without a phone for an entire day, I tried calling my Dad to check in with my family in Cincinnati. The only problem was that I couldn’t hear anything. It said it was “calling”, but I couldn’t hear it ringing. I tried putting it on speakerphone, but that didn’t work. I could play voicemails and music, but nothing was coming out of the ear speaker at the top of the phone. Thankfully I hadn’t even made it half a block away from the Apple store, so I turned back to have the “Geniuses” look into this new problem. Once I got it, they couldn’t believe I was experiencing ANOTHER issue. Thank god this time they didn’t make me check in and didn’t bother restoring the phone. They just gave me another and I was out of the store in 10 minutes.
"Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name...." (points if you get the reference)
So now I’m on my third replacement iPhone in 2 days, but at least I didn’t have to pay for any replacements or put anything in the mail. It really could have been a lot worse. Apple’s warranty is the best out there. Period. If I had a Blackberry or Android phone, I would have had to deal with people at an AT&T or Verizon store who know even less about cell phone troubleshooting than Apple Store “Geniuses” and it would have been a much more difficult process to replace my phone. I wasn’t out of the woods though. The issues with my first replacement iPhone came up when I tried syncing it, so I knew that would be the test. I wasn’t going to trust this new phone until all of my music, apps and settings looked like my old phone.
As discussed in my previous post, I am the proud owner of a 15″ PowerBook G4 that I got at the end of my Sophomore year of college. It’s 5.5 years old, but it’s still hanging in there. Sadly, Apple has given it a 10 count and decided they’re done with it. I found this out when I tried upgrading my iPhone from iOS 4.1 to 4.2 and discovered the new update would only work on Mac OS 10.5 and my machine was a 10.4 (and because they switched to Intel processors after the version of my computer, I can’t upgrade to 10.5). To make matters worse, when I clicked on the “Update” button to download the new iPhone update, it acted like I was trying to update iTunes and kept telling me “You already have the latest version of iTunes”. I decided I’d just sync it and deal with the iOS upgrade problem at another time. Except this time iTunes had lost my backup from 2 days earlier! It showed up when I tried syncing the first replacement phone, but this time it was asking me to sync back to November. SUPER annoyed, I selected it anyway, but it only synced my photos, contacts and general settings…. no apps or music!
Somebody get this guy a scotch.
After making myself a stiff drink, I became determined to ninja my way out of this situation. I’m the DIGITAL ANALYST for Christ’s sake! I can’t let this little machine defeat me. I racked my brain for possible work-arounds to fix my syncing issue since restoring it didn’t work. I figured I’d try upgrading the iOS to 4.2 on my PC laptop. Of course this couldn’t be a simple process either. When iTunes finished downloading the file and was “processing” it, my “network timed out” and couldn’t finish downloading the file. I tried re-downloading it, restarting iTunes, restarting my computer… nothing worked. I googled the issue and a forum said to disable my Antivirus temporarily and that should fix it. While it did fix it and iTunes finished downloading the update, I was still annoyed I needed to disable my Antivirus protection in the first place. It’s a standard Antivirus program called Kaspersky that is given away with every laptop sold at Best Buy, so I know I’m not the only person who experienced the issue, but I digress…
I finished downloading the update and upgraded my phone to iOS 4.2. Hoping this would solve the sync issues I was having with my PowerBook, I plugged it in and crossed my fingers, but of course, nothing comes easy. Upgrading to iOS 4.2 made my iPhone completely incompatible with my old computer. iTunes won’t even recognize it and just spits an error back at me any time I try to make them play nice.
At this point, you must be wondering why I don’t just sync it with my new computer. Here’s why…. my iTunes music folder is saved on an external hard drive. I keep all my files there so if anything were to happen to my old laptop, everything important would be backed up externally. So when I got my new computer, I tried connecting it to the external hard drive, but nothing happened. The computer saw that something had been plugged in, but it wouldn’t let me open a folder or anything. Turns out, formatting it to work with my PowerBook made it incompatible with any 64-bit Windows operating system. So I couldn’t transfer the files or even access them from my new computer. I discovered this issue when I first bought this laptop and again tried to troubleshoot it online, download new drivers, etc. etc., but nothing worked. Since I don’t have a “Genius” Bar for my Samsung Laptop, I talked to the IT guy at my work.
Turns out that I could plug the hard drive into a new Mac and it would recognize it because the new Macs with intel processors have a driver necessary to read old Mac hard drives. So the solution was that I’d have to first transfer the files to a newer Mac with an intel processor, then reformat the hard drive to work with my PC, then transfer the files from the newer Mac back to my hard drive. That should in theory work.
Until I can get that worked out, I’m going to have to be patient. At least this phone seems to work, so I won’t have to go back and deal with any other “Geniuses”. A problem for the interim was that I don’t really use my phone as a phone. I really use it for the apps. I’m addicted to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, HuffingtonPost and Solitaire, so without those apps, my phone feels worthless. Well, while I was updating my iOS, I changed the email address used as my login from an old account to a newer one, thinking it wouldn’t be an issue. Sadly, I changed it right after my phone had synced, so it was still using my old email address as my iTunes username and I couldn’t change it to my new one.
This was an easy problem though. I’d just re-sync my phone and it would recognize my new iTunes account settings. Easy peasy one two thre…. ERROR! I guess Apple thought I hadn’t experienced enough crazy-stupid issues over the past 24 hours, so it tossed this curveball at me. It was saying I needed verify my account AND that my account was verrified in the SAME ERROR MESSAGE! Had hell just frozen over? I couldn’t believe it. Of course I turned to Google and found a post from someone having the same issue:
I really thought I’d seen it all, but this was a new level of WTF APPLE?! I followed the steps from the linked issue above and finally fixed my iTunes account after working on it for close to an hour. At least now I’ve downloaded my most important apps, so I can make it through until I transfer my external hard drive and can restore from my backup registered in November. I’m not even expecting to recover the backup I made 3 nights ago… part of me is just giving up after all of these iSsues.
For those of you who have made it this far into my longest post here, I apologize for the rant. You’re probably thinking, “You’re the Digital Analyst dude. You should understand tech becomes obsolete and buy gadgets more often” and there’s some truth to that. My problem with this whole situation is that it could have been avoided, but Apple decided my computer was obsolete. It wasn’t that it stopped working or that iTunes wouldn’t work on it or anything else. I mean, it’s not even 6 years old. I’m mad because I bought a $2000+ laptop 5 years ago and assumed it would work for at least this long, but really I expected it to go 7 years before I recycled it for the metal. I expect 2 year life cycles on iPods and iPhones, but a computer is a much bigger investment.
Is 5 years the maximum shelf life we can expect from computers now? I’m sure if I asked a “Genius” at an Apple Store that they’d tell me their new MacBook Pros will last longer than that, because that’s what they told me when I bought my PowerBook 5 years ago. That’s why I upgraded the ram when it started slowing down. That’s why I manually took the entire machine apart to replace the keyboard after some coke had been spilled on it. I invested time and money into keeping that laptop chugging along, but then Apple decides to stop supporting Mac OS 10.4 and I’m screwed.
What would happen if Microsoft decided to stop supporting Windows XP? People would be up in arms! Rioting in the streets. They bought computers 5 years ago that still work just fine today and then Microsoft decides to drop them? That’s not how you treat customers who have been loyal to your product for this long. Of course Microsoft will eventually stop supporting XP and new updates will only be available for Vista and Windows 7 computers, but at least they’re supporting their products and proving that they can still works 5 years later.
I Was a Mac. Now I’m a PC.
Although I have always vehemently disagreed, some have called me a Mac Fanboy in the past. I resent this label because I think it represents a very immature, biased and unbalanced perspective on consumer electronics. I’m not saying all Mac Fanboys are like that, but c’mon… we’ve all been in an Apple store when one of the customer service reps goes on a tirade about how bad Microsoft and Windows are, blah blah blah. They couldn’t find a nice word to say about Steve Ballmer if their life depended on it. I like to think that I approach my decision-making a little more balanced than that. If you look at my desk though, it’s a sea of Apple… (once upon a time, an iPad) iPods, an iPhone 3Gs, Airport Extreme and my dear PowerBook. I got my PowerBook when I was a Sophomore in college 5 years ago. When you’ve had a machine for that long, you form a special bond with it. It’s seen me through a study abroad, college graduation, 3 cross-country moves, love and heart break, joy and disappointment. It survived a lot of life experiences that I didn’t always think I’d make it out of. The only big thing I’ve owned longer was my second car (8 years).
THAT SAID, I wasn’t always happy with my PowerBook because I got the last model before they started using Intel chips, so I couldn’t upgrade to the newest OS. I was content with my Tiger, but slowly the Internet left my computer in the dust. The first major frustration I had with my PowerBook was that it was too old to sync with my iPad (RIP), but the kicker was when I was no longer able to watch streaming video of any quality without it going haywire. The battery also died, so it had to be plugged in all the time, and there was a major kernel issue where it would shut down without warning and only turn on when it felt like it (I swear…. I tried all sorts of voodoo, witchcraft, karma, prayer and incense, but no key combination, trouble-shooting guide or mac fanboy had a solution for me). This morning, I decided enough is enough! I need to buy a new computer.
I had been shopping around and weighing options for a couple months anyway, debating whether I’d get a MacBook Pro or pick up an iMac and use a iPad for mobile computing. I’d had a laptop since I went to college, but the more I thought about what I needed from a computer, portability wasn’t high on the list. I had reasoned that I could save the money on a MacBook Pro (my customized version cost about $2,350 before taxes… 15″ high-res antiglare screen, 2.53 GHz Core i5, upgraded 7200rpm hard drive with MSFT Office), and just get an iMac ($1400… 21.5″ screen, 3.06 GHz, trackpad + magic mouse with MSFT Office). My rational for making my home computer immobile was that I used my iPhone for any personal mobile computing needs and that I could use a laptop from work when I needed it.
Well, speaking of that work laptop, I have it set up right next to my poor old broken PowerBook and after a YouTube video wouldn’t load 2 nights ago, I decided to switch over and use the work laptop more regularly. It’s nothing special… just a Dell Lattitude E5500, but it gets the job done and while writing a couple emails this morning, it dawned on me that there wasn’t ANY reason for me to buy a Mac over a PC. So I went out and after a couple hours at two Best Buys, I picked up a Samsung Q430 laptop for $799 ($850 after MS Office). I put a lot of thought into what my specific needs from a computer were and decided I just didn’t need to spend the money on a Mac. I’m going to avoid comparing specs and weighing processor speeds against screen resolutions. Here are the major reasons I switched back to a PC:
7 Reasons I Bought a PC Instead of a Mac
1.) PRICE – After measuring the space on my desk and reading an article about unemployed people my age, I decided I couldn’t go with an iMac to save money because I would eventually need a laptop and a desktop is too limited. I’d have to buy a netbook or laptop to compliment it eventually anyway, so once that decision was made, I was left staring at a $2350 laptop, wondering whether it was actually worth that much money. Considering the quality of laptops Sony and Samsung were producing, I simply couldn’t justify buying a laptop 3X more expensive when the only discernable difference performance wise for me would be a 9 hour battery life vs. a 4 hour battery life.
2.) MICROSOFT OFFICE 2010 – This was an area where Microsoft just flat-out beat Mac. Fanboys will defend iWork until they’re blue in the face, but Keynote just simply isn’t on the same level as PowerPoint. Microsoft really nailed the user-interface when they redesigned the Office suite. I’ve stayed late at the office many nights because I had a PowerPoint presentation I needed to edit and I knew it would be a million times easier and quicker to just do it on my PC at work than try to work in Keynote or even the Mac Office suite. Anyone who’s worked with the Mac Office applications know they’re designed nothing like the PC experience, which I found very frustrating. Most of the functionality is in the Mac version as far as I can tell, but it really made me appreciate how well organized PowerPoint is on the PC. If I bought a Mac, I’d have to run Parallels so I could use Microsoft Office within Windows (additional costs not incorporated into the already crazy price tag…. see reason #1).
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The new Office 2011 suite for Mac looks like a significant upgrade over the older versions, so I’ll have to walk back some of my criticism on the Mac office experience. The old Office suite really did affect my Mac experience so much that I thought it was all a plan at Microsoft to get consumers to switch back to Windows. Obviously, that didn’t seem sane enough to write in the first version of this post, but that’s how frustrating the old Office apps were on a Mac.
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3.) APPS – This was probably the straw that broke this camel’s back (aside from reason #1). Getting a new MacBook Pro meant I’d get all of the iLife applications, which I was pretty excited about. The new Mac OS applications are great, but I don’t see as much value in native computer apps anymore. When I really look at my day-to-day life, I use Google for email, contacts, calendar and to-do’s,in addition to storing/organizing files. I still have to use Excel, PowerPoint and Word, but those are basically the only non-web based programs I run regularly besides iTunes and TweetDeck. When I thought about all of those programs, most of the PC apps were either on par or head and shoulder above their counterparts on a Mac. I was excited about getting iPhoto for a while, but realized I don’t take many pictures, and when I do take them, I upload them to Facebook immediately. I wanted to use Flickr or Picasa, but neither site really stuck with me for some reason. Now that Facebook has begun seriously upgrading their Photos app, my next major personal project will be to upload every single picture I own to Facebook albums. Similarly, I’ll just upload my videos to YouTube and save anything else in folders on my external hard drive.
4.) PRICE – Did I mention I saved over $1,400?
5.) WINDOWS 7 – You have to give credit where credit is due, and Windows 7 is a quality operating system. Microsoft was able to correct many of the annoyances of Vista (thank God I’ve barely seen any pop-ups since setting this bad boy up). It’s clean. It’s well-organized. It’s not as pretty as Snow Leopard, but it’s not the ugly step-child either. I spend most of my time looking at tabs in Chrome anyway, so the aesthetics of it all aren’t too important to me in the end. I just need it to work.
6.) VIRUSES – Many people cite this as the main reason they switch from a PC to a Mac, but over the past couple years, I haven’t gotten a single virus on any PC I’ve used because I always have some sort of baseline virus protection and I’m not an idiot. If I don’t know who sent me an email, I’m certainly not going to open the attachment. You can avoid most viruses with simple common sense. Make sure you’re downloading from secure websites, read the comments on Torrent files if you choose to risk it, and set up a little protection from mal-ware. It’s not that difficult. Macs might not have as many vulnerabilities to viruses, but they do exist and as Mac’s share of the market increases, they’re turning into a bigger and bigger target for malicious programmers.
7.) PRICE – Just in case you missed points 1 and 4, $2,350 minus $950 is $1,400. I just paid for a vacation to Costa Rica that I’ve been planning for over a year! I just really couldn’t find any justification in spending an extra $1,400 for a MacBook Pro. It felt like buying a BMW when the new Honda Accords look pretty snazzy and still get you from point A to point B. Sure, BMW’s are beautiful, well built machines. I have nothing against BMW. I hope to one day own one even, but I couldn’t justify buying one right now and I couldn’t justify buying a Mac either.
I’m still a big fan of Apple, but right now, their computer products just aren’t as differentiated as the rest of their product lines. The iPod, iPhone and iPad all have rivals on the market, but I don’t think any other devices are on the same level (Android is close, but the variance of quality in their apps are holding them back).
I’ve spent the day setting up and “breaking in” my new Samsung laptop, and so far I couldn’t be happier with my purchase. I wrote this post with it and the more I type, the more I fall in love with it. I couldn’t believe how many mid-size laptops tried to cram a full number pad onto the keyboard. It pushed everything off center, throwing off the spacing and how you look at the screen. I was not a fan at all. Some companies still design really poor laptops (I’m looking at you Dell, HP, Toshiba and Gateway… I trust those brands about as far as I can throw them), but Samsung and Sony both design beautiful machines that are reliable and perform well. What more can you really ask for (aside from a $1,400 rebate)?
I’m curious though. I hear about people switching from PC to Mac all the time, but I haven’t heard as many instances where people switch back to a PC after having a Mac. It’s time to speak up! Why did you switch back? Do you regret it or miss anything about having a Mac? Please post your experiences and thoughts to the comments section.
Facebook Places: It’s All About the Advertising
I originally wrote this post for Interpret LLC’s blog. Please check it out and read the other interesting articles by my colleagues.
Everyone in the social media space has predicted 2010 to be the beginning of the ‘location war.’ Smartphone applications that let you ‘check-in’ to places you visit in real life finally began bridging the digi-social experience with the real world. Foursquare took the early lead in the location war, but Facebook has stolen its thunder with the roll-out of its own location-based service called ‘Places.’ While many are calling Places a direct competitor for Foursquare, Facebook’s strategy is markedly different and surprisingly compatible with Foursquare’s services.
The biggest difference between Places and Foursquare is that Facebook has not gamified their service. The points, mayorships and badges built into the Foursquare experience have been very popular with early adopters, and Facebook’s decision to not incentivize check-ins with anything beyond the satisfaction of self-expression has been seen as the only chink in Places’ armor. This decision against gamifying their location-based service seems more indicative of Facebook’s overall strategy in regards to Foursquare and other similar services like Gowalla, Loopt and MyTown than an oversight in the development of their own services. Instead of trying to compete with them and push them out of the space, Facebook has left its Places API open for Foursquare and other services to compete within their platform because they don’t care about the actual act of checking into locations as much as they care about the user-data those check-ins can add to their website’s advertising value.
Facebook knows it’s on the top of the social media mountain looking down at the rest of the networks trying to climb their way up, and with the lead they’ve surmounted in active users, it would seem paranoid and borderline vindictive for them to try to squash smaller platforms – they simply aren’t a legitimate threat to Facebook. They’ve recognized that they can let the other companies do all the leg work developing unique and engaging user-experiences while they gather the increasingly valuable data each of these services generate. Location-based check-ins are a gold mine of tangible profiling data that Facebook can use to develop more targeted advertising, leading to higher premiums and more specific opportunities for building relationships with location-centric advertisers.
One of the most important ancillary effects Places will have is the spur in creation of Pages for local businesses. When someone creates a place to check into on Facebook, businesses have the opportunity to ‘claim’ that Place, given they provide proof that they are the actual owners, and once a Place has been claimed, Facebook automatically creates a Page for that Place. Integrating Places into their Pages platform will give local businesses a strong incentive to build or increase their social media presence. Once more local businesses have created their own Facebook Page, they can then be sold advertising targeted to people who have checked-in to their business. The Pages will also likely become destinations for promotions, coupons and other deals which will increase their value to users, lead to stronger engagement, more time spent on Facebook, and again, higher premiums for their advertising content.
In the end, Facebook isn’t betting against companies like Foursquare, they’re betting on them. They’re betting they will continue developing apps that deliver highly engaging user-experiences that integrate seamlessly with and add value to Facebook. Facebook is very comfortable letting Foursquare play with their point system, badges and mayorships, as long as those check-ins are posted to Facebook walls and integrated into their ever-growing stream of user-profiling data.
I lost my iPad. AKA, THE END OF THE WORLD… or is it?
A tragedy occurred on Thursday. As I was flying back from NYC from my second business trip ever (first one was the previous week… yay new professional adventures!), I made one of the most stupid mistakes I’ve ever made with something I own/love. I left my iPad in the magazine pocket of my plane seat. I did not realize this until about 6 hours later and have come to grips with the fact that I will likely never retrieve my baby. I went through different ideas of tracking IP addresses connecting to my email account wirelessly on it (the email accounts should update automatically if it’s connected to a wifi router), but while I KNOW it is possible to locate my iPad by identifying the IP address connecting to it, law enforcement is basically stuck in the pager-era, so this sounds like a fool’s mission. If anyone has any ideas on how to find locate my iPad (no, I don’t have MobileME), I’m all ears.
I’m really torn up over it because of the apps I had on there… I can’t watch Netflix as easily in my bed before I go to sleep. I’m stuck on my high score in Fruit Ninja (greatest game EVER), giving my co-workers an opportunity to beat my rather impressive, if I do say so myself, high score. Even worse, I’m halfway through the book Linchpins by Seth Godin and I do not want to have to buy it again to finish the book (same with Blink by Malcolm Gladwell). My Powerbook was too old to sync with my iPad, so neither were backed up (major frustration… I’m definitely in the market for a new computer, so you can expect a post on that to explain my decision-making process once I’ve made up my mind). I’m going to investigate whether I can get those ebooks somehow. I figure Apple has a record of me purchasing it through my iTunes account, so I should be able to get access to it on another computer.
The most interesting part of this experience though has been the realization of the role the iPad played in my life. If it’s true that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, I wish the iPad gave me more to miss. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s purely a luxury device in my life and not something I can justify purchasing again only a month and a half after my first purchase. Basically, I can live without it. This is slightly depressing in hindsight, but also depressing in foresight because I know I’ll eventually buy another one…. I’m debating whether I’ll wait for just the price to drop or if I’ll have the patience to wait for the second generation. Right now, I’m thinking I’ll wait for the second generation. By then the apps will have evolved into iPad-worthy experiences (which I can’t currently claim… it’s a nascent marketplace though, so the sky’s the limit on innovation within the space), the price should drop and they should have integrated the front-facing camera for video chat on it. I feel like the only reason the first version of the iPad didn’t have it is because they wanted to wait to release it with the iPhone 4. From a business perspective, I completely understand the roll-out plan, but from an early adopter consumer perspective, I expect more from Apple and I know the camera is a really easy feature to integrate. I digress though…
After realizing that I didn’t need an iPad in my life, I began considering which devices were truly essential for me anymore. The first one that I KNOW I couldn’t live without is my iPhone. I rely on it way too heavily. It’s my primary device for interfacing with email, social networks, web search, communicating with people, organizing my life… the list goes on. It’s been integrated into so many parts of my life that if I lost my iPhone tomorrow, I don’t think I could make it more than 2-3 days before buying a replacement. This was a shocking revelation to me because I couldn’t put my home computer in the same category. It certainly meets a different set of needs, but in the end, I found it didn’t meet any crucial needs that my iPhone couldn’t accomplish within a short period of time. There’s no replacement for saving all of my old files, navigating pictures, or full-on web browsing, but the more I thought about it, the less these features mattered. Almost all of my pictures are uploaded directly to Facebook or Twitter from my phone and I’ve started using Google Docs to save Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. I have all of my historic files backed up on an external hard drive, so even if I lost my laptop, I’d still have the files that really mattered. The fact is, if I lost my laptop or spilled water on it or whatever other tragedies I can imagine, I wouldn’t need to replace it within a week to continue functioning on any level that mattered. It would certainly be inconvenient not to have access to a full web browser, but that’s the main thing I use my computer for anyway and the Safari web browser on my iPhone meets nearly all of my essential browsing needs. My situation would be different if I relied on my home PC for work, but I try my best to finish work in the office, on the Windows-based PC my employer provides me, and keep work-related tasks separate from home. Work-life separation is very important to me, which is part of my explanation/excuse for not updating this blog more frequently.
So I’ve found that the only truly indispensable gadget in my life is my iPhone. Although I’m not glad that I went through the agony of losing my newest toy, I have learned an important lesson about what truly is essential in my life. If I were more willing to consider a ‘disconnected’ lifestyle as an option, my iPhone wouldn’t even qualify anymore, but let’s not get crazy here.
Which devices in your life are truly indispensable? If you lost a device, what true impact would it have on your life beyond simple convenience? These are important questions because the relationships we form with technology can have a profound impact on our daily lives.
Internet Convergence vs. Divergence
The reason I love Jackson Pollock, and especially this piece called Convergence, is because I believe his paintings reflect the complexity and beauty of human expression.
Facebook and Twitter are challenging the very foundation of our internet experience. From the days of dial-up, the Internet has been the most prolific catalog of human experience in recorded history. Services like Google and Yahoo have made millions of dollars organizing all of that data for us to search, but social networks like Facebook and MySpace, coupled with the emergence of real-time information provided by Twitter have irreversibly altered the landscape of the Internet.
Many consider email the advent of the social web and modern email clients like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are more easily compared to social networks, but at its heart, email is just a messaging service. It might deliver messages in the blink of an eye instead of taking days or weeks, but in the end it’s just a digital form of mail. Chat rooms are another form of early social communication, but real identities were very rarely ever linked to this communication and nascent chat rooms more or less resembled the wild west of creepsters and registered sex offenders.
The true advent of widely accepted social interaction on the web are instant messenger services where you communicated with people you knew and who knew you in real-time chat windows. It was the beginning of real conversations on the web. Instant messaging served as proof of concept that people desired to use the internet as a social medium.
Direct instant messaging services like AIM were essentially the real-time expression of an email correspondence. You can think of Twitter in the same frame of real-time expression of an already established form of social media communication, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
MySpace and eventually Facebook upped the anty when they allowed users to create profiles that they could customize to reflect their individuality and connect to other profiles that reflected their real life group of friends and family. If instant messaging gave us a voice to communicate digitally, then social networks gave us a presence on the Internet that reflected our personality in the real world.
I’d also argue that MySpace’s fall from grace could be partly blamed to the nature of user-expression in their profiles. Many people immediately reference the customizable profile elements as a primary draw for creating a MySpace profile, but after a while the aesthetic of the MySpace community became very confused and to be frank, ugly. Not to discount the importance of individuality, but connections are usually formed because of commonalities and feelings of familiarity/trust. The aesthetic of MySpace, I believe, created a subliminal trust barrier because it emphasized our differences instead of what naturally draws us together. Facebook on the other hand has standard profiles that allow users to just control the information that they share. Even MySpace’s name emphasizes individuality over community. MySpace. Not YourSpace or OurSpace. MySpace.
Facebook’s introduction to the market and it’s origin as an elite-college social network gave it an incubation period that was healthy for the development of it’s culture. While most see students as crazy, reckless and impulsive (which they usually are), I’d argue they are the most aware of and in-tune with social influences that permeate their circles. Being a college student is tough. A completely new set of people in your life forces you to connect with a new set of friends and communities for you to express yourself. As young adults gain more independence to explore and own their self-expression, they also become very aware of how they are perceived and this gives them an incentive to actively control that perception. This isn’t just true of college students. Teens and even kids in grade school are highly aware of social status, what’s cool and what isn’t. This aspect of student culture transfered to the early iterations of Facebook as students on the network were highly aware that their profile could easily be the first impression they make on a number of people. When you don’t know whether your crush or your arch-enemy is reading up on your activities, interests and groups, you tend to self-censor a little more carefully. This leads to profiles that are a little tamer, but ultimately more inviting to connection with a wider net of people because there are fewer outlier/alienating elements included in profiles. The profiles also more closely reflect the real-life expression of our identity because most of us are very proficient at controlling our perceptions through self-censorship.
Fast forward to 2010 and social networks have begun to dominate discussion in the advertising world and among thought-leaders developing tomorrow’s business models. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is one of those thought-leaders. He sees Facebook and the social web overtaking search engines as the primary portal through which people interface with the web. I won’t argue with this point. I do believe as the social web will continue to develop and deepen digital relationships, that social networks will become our homepage and primary reason for going online, but I also believe that search engines and the information-web have a unique role independent of the social-web.
Those who argue that the internet experience is converging into one portal that people will use both socially and to seek information seem to ignore the fact that digital technology, in almost every instance, begins to mimic our real life experience. If our real life were 100% social and all of the information we learned was through our friends and family, then I’d jump right on the bandwagon for a one-portal interface solution to the internet. This is not the case though. We seek information from sources outside our social sphere and interact with the world in many ways that have nothing to do with our friends. Sure, we seek the opinion of our peers on subjects, but many people prefer to develop their own perspective before letting others influence their opinion. How is that possible if social networks and the influence of our peers is interwoven with all of our internet experience?
In the end, I don’t see the information-web and social-web experiences converging into a single solution for all your internet needs. Facebook and other social networking services like Twitter and Foursquare have a long way to go before they have maximized their online potential because they’re only starting to integrate themselves tangibly into our real life experiences. The power of digital word-of-mouth is only starting to be felt because consumers are still acclimating to the idea of expressing opinions online. The rise of blogging, Twitter, status updates and viral content online is helping drive this expression to the mainstream. As opinion expression spreads through the culture of the internet and more people become comfortable with sharing their thoughts online, businesses will be forced to listen and encourage this feedback because it will provide them invaluable data on their customers that they’ve never really had access to before. From a research perspective, think of social media as the largest representative sample in the history of research.
Personal expression is extremely important to the growth and integration of the Internet as a ubiquitous aspect of our everyday lives, but the web as a source of independent information and cataloging will always be a part of our user-experience. A converged Internet would be like living in a world without libraries or bookstores where you could only borrow buy books based on your friend’s interests and literary purchase history. There is no winner in this war between social and independent portal experiences because the “battle” is just a narrative that has been developed based on too narrow of a perspective. The user-experience will eventually converge in it’s ubiquity, but diverge in the expression of that ubiquity, ultimately reflecting the very complexity of those who created the experience.
As always, feedback and comments are appreciated, so don’t be shy! The topics I just covered are entirely too complex for a 1300 word blog post, so if you think I missed something big or am thinking about something in the wrong context, let’s discuss!
Using Social Networks to Cope with Loss
My Sister, Mom and I at Christmas Eve dinner.
Shortly after starting this blog, my Mom passed away on January 31st. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer last spring and I moved back to Cincinnati in September to help her through the chemo treatments, but the cancer was very aggressive and came back to claim her life only 4 weeks after she finished up her chemo and I returned to work in my LA office. She was the most important person in my life and although I had prepared myself mentally for her passing, the timing of it was very unexpected and left me a little shell-shocked.
In the midst of this personal tragedy though, I realized very quickly just how important social networks are in my life. Simply put, I could not have gone through this grieving process without Twitter and Facebook. The first thing I did after my Dad called me from the hospital was post this tweet, which in turn updated my Facebook status. Some might have thought it was inappropriate to announce my Mother’s passing with a tweet, but I did not know any other way to express myself at that time and I could not be more thankful that I turned to my social networks.
It is very easy for a death like this, especially at my age, to feel overwhelming, but the messages of sympathy and support that poured into my inbox reminded me that I wasn’t alone with this struggle. Knowing I had so many people thinking about me and offering their support, even when they couldn’t really do anything, kept me stable and let me be strong for the rest of my family who did not feel the same level of support.
One regret I have from the past month is not reaching out to and supporting my Dad more consistently. He has never responded well to big changes and my Mom’s death sparked a downward spiral of depression that ended with him in the hospital. While my social networks helped me avoid the overwhelming feelings and some of the loneliness of the past month, he did not have the same support network online or in real life. I can’t help but think that a network of friends expressing their support would have made even a small difference.
I expect the role of social networks in the grieving process to expand as my generation (Millennials) ages and I wonder what impact it will have on our ability to cope with loss. Although research has found that social networks do not expand our social circle past the magical Dunbar number (150 people), it does provide a communication platform where we can more easily reach out of our immediate circle in times of need. I hadn’t kept in strong contact with many of the people who sent me messages of support and I doubt they would have sent the messages or even known about my Mom in the first place if it had not been for my announcement through Twitter and Facebook.
Have you turned to social media during a time of grieving or when you needed emotional/psychological support? What effect do you see social networks having on our ability to cope with loss in the future? Please don’t be afraid to be honest in the comments if you disagree or think coping with social networks is unnatural. I recognize my experience is my own, but I’d love to hear other perspectives on this topic.
The Organic Evolution of Technology
If we analyze the evolution of technology in the same way Darwin studied our biological evolution, the adoption of new technology starts looking more organic than we might have originally thought. The genetics of our digital evolution is the actual hardware and software available to us, but many people make the same mistake as those just starting their study of evolution when they place too much emphasis on the technology available and not enough on the environmental factors affecting the expression of that technology in the marketplace. The environmental factors affecting the evolution of tech are primarily economic in nature, but also include our ability to understand and assimilate new technology into our everyday lives.
Earlier technological developments like the printing press and even the television when it first came out were not as universally available due to their high cost of entry. Technology like these changed human life profoundly, but not as ubiquitously as the effect that the Internet will have in our lifetime. Whereas the printing press made it easier for us to transfer knowledge and the television provided a window into another world outside our own, the Internet combines the power of those two devices by mediating knowledge transfer in a world that both exists outside our world and all around it. The Internet is no longer relegated to being a glorified yellow pages and encyclopedia. Mobile and wireless technology is integrating the internet into nearly all aspects of our experience.
We are creatures of habit and the integration of the Internet into our home, work and social life can leave many feeling lost in the change around them. Habits are healthy for us though. They are grounding and help us understand exactly who we are and how we relate to our environment. They are an ounce of stability in the sea of change that we call our lives. However, they are also stubborn and create frames of reference that are hard to break, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence. Digital technology adoption is difficult for most people because it challenges the very framework of how we view and live our lives.
One concrete example of technology challenging the framework in my life is my foray into Twitter and location based services like Foursquare. Even though tweets are similar to text messages, it took a while for me to understand the public relationship I wanted to have with my followers and friends on Facebook. I’ve become pretty comfortable with Twitter, but as soon as one technology is assimilated, another emerges to challenge you. The latest challenge to my frame of reference is the location-based game, Foursquare. For those who are unfamiliar with Foursquare, it’s a game you play with your cell phone where you get points and badges for checking into stores, restaurants or areas you visit in real life. The controversial part for most people is that it can broadcast your location to anyone you’re friends with in the game, or post it as a status update to your Twitter account (and to Facebook in my case because my tweets update my status there). I’m slowly figuring out which information I broadcast and which I keep private, but it has certainly been a challenge to find the balance.
What technology has challenged you recently? How is technology changing the way you live your life?
The Digital Analyst
Zak Kirchner
