Just tuned into Jeff Doak and Sam Harrelson who cranked out the Jeff and Sam Talk about Marketing, Tech, TeH Internets and Other Stuff (Beta) Show primarily on Facebook and validating what we all knew was going to happen to search with odd twists like Mahalo. I think this was discussed months ago on a Molander guy’s cast.

Great podcast guys- one hour seems to be a sweet spot. A few thoughts and ideas.

- Rumor has it the ill-conceived, worst app ever, 3d Mailboxes is out of West Virginia…/me laughs at irony.

- 3dMailbox is an incredibly horrible implementation of an incredibly great idea and still follows the attention = revenue formula. Allow it change your thinking from an X,Y World (Flat Web Pages) to an X,Y,Z world (Simulated 3D). Much like Second Life and actually building and vending products in the 3D world…when you throw in that Z coordinate suddenly things like Engagement, Curiosity, Influence, etc can be measured. I am ashamed to say it took me months to puzzle that out, but it is a reality and why it still holds my fascination- among other reasons…e.g. acceleration of relationship formation, the impact of the lack of accountability, Avatar as proxy, etc, etc. The issues are multi-fold and momentous and only way to get a grasp on them is to participate. Easy to get into but a steep learning curve to gain mastery.

- Performance marketing companies don’t and won’t get it because they are classically too focused on product improvements instead of pure R&D and rewarding change agents. Rather than improve a system it is about gaming the system…although I argue some gaming is healthy and a little entropy is good because it destabilizes the system. Sidenote: If you cannot control the entropical forces acting on your system you join them or buy them.

- Jeff D. I can totally see how 3D Mailboxes being so bad one would wonder if it weren’t some sleek sleight of hand Brian Clarkian style of faux social media.

- I feel Facebook’s success is predicated on their wise choice to attack the weird angle of a delicate time- renegotiation of college social networks…and their almost incredible illusion of an extension of privacy. Zero privacy, read the TOS…background etc- not a secret- just cleverly wrapped. (Sam please quit messing with my social AI- hanging out in the desert does not mean we lived together).

- Couple that wise choice with control of mass and the velocity at which this mass moves. It has to be somewhat “safe”. Something that MySpace has failed to do, as Chris Boyd points out time and time again, and why they are trapped in this impression/click world of defectors. Once again let’s philosophically call it the Z variable- it lacks “depth”. Facebook offering up an API let’s the community give it all kinds of depth, but they do contain the aesthetic to where you can operate without getting knifed by malware and if you leave the system they are sure to reinforce the fact you are leaving the system! Very astute.

So while everyone chucks bad food at applications like Second Life (primarily due to the ridiculous amounts of perceived freedom, in some ways a low barrier to entry, poor protection for content creators against system gamers, a hideously steep learning curve coupled with complex GUI) the parallels are very similar and valuable. Whether it fails it or not may be largely predicated on LL’s ability to nurture trust, making it secure, reformation of their GUI, and making it more pragmatic and perhaps the rate of adoption of post-humanism among society. I know there are many trans-humanists in Second Life which is even further evolved or devolved depending on your POV.

- Thought or question for the day. Does so-called social media, let’s call it influence, scale? I think so.

It takes a lot of force to move the needle, but once it gets past the sound barrier…the plane stops jumping, going crazy and you break the mythical sound barrier…Chuck Yeager like. Also rumored he is out of West Virginia…

Lastly and yes Mr. Doak I agree- A.I. has a long way to go before it replaces wetware in one the critical aspects brands like to examine- TONE. …which is even more complex if you map posited tone against a quadrant that looks at number of visits (”interest”), and time spent on site (”engagement”). Very exciting world out there…I’ll think about it while on vacation and let Jason’s Mahaloians puzzle out those SERPs.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Share This