Foursquare 3.0 and thank God for Instagram
So a new version of Foursquare’s app for iPhone and Android dropped today, some interesting features along with it, which plenty of other people will cover.
What I’ve been thinking a lot about over the past few days is Instagram, and how it has driven me to continue checking in when Foursquare was actually the last thing on my mind.
Instagram gives me a relatively hassle-free way to create some interesting content and share it so easily it kinda blows my mind sometimes. And then it pushes this content into the networks I care about publishing to, most of the time Foursquare and Tumblr.
I’ve been saying for a number of years now the successful products and services will be the ones that continue to lower the barrier to self-expression. Foursquare didn’t do that very well, but other people have picked up the slack and automated a lot of the content-creation for the service. Ultimately a bunch of photos and no guides to city life won’t make Foursquare a better platform, but the photos will add some crucial colour and life.
All this happens via Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. Developers create APIs in the hope that other developers will use what they’ve made and build on top of it. Instagram built on top of Foursquare’s API, and we’re now starting to see others building on top of Instagram’s API. That will drive further adoption of Instagram, which will in turn drive greater use of Foursquare…you see where I’m going with this.
In an ecosystem, the biggest opportunity is building as close to the center as possible. I wouldn’t say Foursquare are in the very center, but I don’t think, in their category anyway, they’re far from it. As people build increasingly popular services on layers who themselves have built on Foursquare, they stand to reap tremendous rewards.
Thinking about the silos of sound on the web. I’m trying to figure out what an appropriate metaphor is for the sharing of audio. Someone said to me today they thought audio was already figured out on the web; I said that was akin to saying video was figured out on the web with the advent of Netflix.
As far as I can see, the emergence of services like SoundCloud means content creators can spend less time thinking about how people can consume their content and more time just making it. I’ve written plenty before about the winning platforms being those that lower the barriers to expression; SoundCloud is poised to do just that.
I don’t have a metaphor for it though…
Animals in advertising | #208 « From up North
Desperately cute collection of some thoroughly disarming advertising featuring a variety of creatures big and small.
D9C (1168×1810)
The anatomy of an AT-AT (Star Wars)
MTV, Harmonix and why media businesses can’t help but fuck things up
So I’m the last person to write about this, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Just prior to Christmas MTV’s parent company Viacom announced that it was selling Harmonix, creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band to an investment firm. This doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is Viacom thought it was a good idea to get into this business in the first place.
If history is a good guide - and I think it is - lessons were not learned from Vivendi’s attempts to do the same. Media companies have a tendency to think of everything as media, which is fine if it is what they think it is (the issue of course being that it isn’t).
We’ve had thousands of years as a species to bed down concepts of drama, narrative, comedy, music and so forth. Media companies are good at that stuff. Media companies excel at taking something crafted according to certain rules and using the rest of their resources to make sure you hear about it.
But when there’s a constant state of stress due to not knowing if your writer or musician is going to meet the deadline you’ve set to entertain in a decidedly linear fashion, why does anyone think they can get a handle on a business where content runs both ways, when the mere concept of what is entertaining shifts so dramatically every 18 months? Hell Microsoft had been making software for 20 years when they launched the Xbox - and they still managed to lose billions - literally billions - as they figured out how to do it right.
The best, most compelling work, I truly believe, will continue to come from developers that are independently owned, who don’t have earnings calls to make. In the same way nobody sets out to write a bad song or novel, nobody sets out to make a bad game; it’s just that it’s much easier to do thanks to many more moving parts.
The people that work in M&A departments of large media conglomerates don’t see that though, nor are they paid to. They see a P&L, consumers watching a screen, and figure it’s all the same.
It, of course, isn’t. The most universally true scene in The Social Network was Zuckerburg, Parker and Saverin sitting in the restaurant, Saverin agitating to put advertising on the then nascent site and Parker telling him “You don’t know what it is yet.” That applies to game development as much as anything else.
When even EA are down 80% over the past three years, you begin to wonder what signs need to be erected in order for people to understand that this is a very different business, one that has a long way to go.
Atlassian's Big Experiment with Performance Reviews | Management Innovation eXchange
The details behind Atlassian’s attempts to change performance reviews for the better.
Steven Pinker on language, and why we don’t say what we mean, even when we know the listener knows exactly what we mean. Magic stuff.
Found via Profero.
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