Dembot

Why The Daily Show Left Hulu

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 21:04:00 -0500

Today Hulu announced that John Stewart and Stephen Colbert would be departing the service. The content will however be available at The Daily Show and The Colbert Report websites.

As many note, this is a serious blow to Hulu in terms of losing a major performer and content draw.

Brian Stellar from the New York Times added some additional facts surrounding the relationship though suggests this move to depart Hulu “does not represent a strategic shift for Viacom.”

I would suggest that this this move *is* part of a strategic shift, specifically for Viacom and The Daily Show in particular, and in general, part of an invetiable trend to centralize a brand’s online audience. In an article a couple of months ago entitled “Video Distribution Tending Towards Centralization”, I noted the following observation:

“Along with this…..is a trend with reverting back to the pre-social network days of placing an emphasis on your own domain dot com. The NYTimes and CNN for example have been putting more development into their own on-site and single-point-of-distribution strategies….This centralizing trend has always seemed inevitable for preserving as much of the revenue share as possible. “

In other words, whatever they get for ad sales over there at Hulu is going to be split up between Hulu and Comedy Central. Why should Comedy Central cut in Hulu on their ad money? They can sell their own ads for a premium and make 100% of the share if they do it themselves. Some shows may be glad to give Hulu 50% or even more of the rev share because Hulu brings an audience they dont already have. But eventually, for any top show, the leverage tide will turn and the middle person will be the first to go.

I remember the period of time Robert Scoble transitioned away from placing an emphasis on his own destination webiste at Scobleizer, and began doing most of his work via Twitter and Friendfeed. He essentially became decentralized. I used to suggest he was diluting himself and destroying the great SEO juice he had built up for himself. If he could somehow get all that chatter back onto his own destination at scobelizer.com, I imagined, he would be able to maximize the value for himself, his audience and his sponsors. It used to be that his name and his website would pop up in a search for the latest tech news, though soon it would be link-juice that got attributed to Twitter, and then eventually he lost a lot of search rank (there are pros & cons, but this had some negative impact against the same principles he had employed in prior times). For those who know exactly what I’m talking about, you’ve probably also noted that Scobelizer has in the last year really centralized his presence back towards his own site where he has complete control of the experience. It’s the natural thing to do for advertising, SEO, etc.

As you can see below, The Daily Show can still be everywhere (embedded right here on my blog for instance), but it’s in control, gets all the money for the advertising and has all the marketing space.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c Intro - Olympics Hockey Game Bet www.thedailyshow.com

A Decade In History of Online Video

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:44:00 -0500

Aside from a few notable uses of video by the likes of jennicam, Justin Hall and the archive.org, you could play around with video online, but for the first half of the decade, the audience wasn’t there. As war often begets technology, US political campaigns often begets online trends and with the 2004 presidential election, Howard Dean’s campaign took the online world by storm not just by chatter, but because micro donations became significant and challenged traditional means of hitting up only the established elite.

Coinciding with the election of 2004 was the prevalence of broadband speeds, and with half of American homes reaching better than dial-up transfer rates, along with all the noise created by the blogs and pundits of the internet, an audience was born, capable and accustomed to online payments (i.e. market potential) and finally able to watch video, on demand by the masses.

However, this perfect storm would not occur until nearly the end of the election and 2004 can be seen as the end of flash animations and the begging of online video. It was really this year, in 2004, that online video would be born. The difference is only in frames per second. The star of the 2004 election was Jib-Jab which made fun flash animations at just a few frames per second, after loading. With broadband speeds, the world moved on to 15 full color frames per second. Any less than 15 frames (13 or 12 frames for example) can be detected by most people as frames of consecutive images, like a flip book. 15 is a magic number of frames that allows almost all humans to see a video as fluid.

2004

+ The first organized group of online video enthusiasts congealed throughout 2004 and solidified in the beginning of 2005 with a conference called Vloggercon. This group was identified as vloggers and videobloggers and toiled over the technical methods of serving video online, naming conventions, the philosophy of, production methods, etc.

+ On May 7th, a group associated with Al Queda released the Nick Berg beheading video which was readily passed around on blogs and was seen by many people who had never seen, and would of preferred to never see anything so intense. This kind of content previously had no outlet as it would not be shown on TV.

+ Rocketboom launched in October and is still running, considered by many to be the first online daily news show and the longest running online video show to date. (Im obviously biased for including this as important)

+ In December Numa Numa was released onto the website Newgrounds which was a turning point for another kind of video that previously had no outlet. People were charmed after watching it’s down-home sincerity and many were compelled to create their own video responses.

2005

+ The Asian Tsunami that hit at the end of 2004 surfaced several amateur videos several days later and they would go on to be talked about and heavily viewed in January of 2005. This signified to people from all over the world who went online to watch the videos that we had entered into an age similar to the one digital cameras had recently transitioned into as now phone video and consumer video cameras had become pervasive. This content is yet another style of content that was too poor and too difficult to get copyright clearance to run on TV, yet was probably the most watched set of video online up to this time.

+ 2005 was also the year of the video aggregator. FireAnt.tv was the first RSS based media player optimized for download and viewing of online videos. Followed by Miro (then DTV) and a million more which were previously working on audio podcasting.

+ In April the first video is posted to YouTube. Along with Blip.tv which launched a month later in May, the two hosts are largely responsible for providing the only feasible hosting solution as most online hosts regularly charged $.50 cents per gigabyte of video transfered. Because Blip and YouTube would provide free hosting, it set the stage for the democratization of online video to truly occur so that anyone could participate freely.

+ Beyond ‘vidoblogging’, ”video podcasting” became popular, especially with Tikibar (March), Diggnation (July) and Ask A Ninja (Nov).

+ By the end of June, Apple launched a video podcasting aggregator in iTunes which would essentially wipe out all the other aggregators.

+ In October Apple releases the Video iPod and thus ushers in an era of portable video content, including popular, contemporary TV shows and movies, on demand via iTunes.

+ In December Tivo launches online video content to it’s boxes.

2006

+ Throughout the year, a major shift would occur from file downloads like .mov and .wmv to connected flash player views with the rise in popularity of YouTube.

+ In June, lonelygirl15 launches on YouTube and becomes an international sensation due to the uncertainty of it’s reality.

+ In September, Revision3 and Podtec rolled out multiple independent shows as the first new independent networks to obtain venture capital, hoping to become a new form of ABC or CBS for the web. Next New Networks would announce funding a few months later.

+ Google buys YouTube in October for $1.65 billion which is essentially the biggest moment of online video of the decade.

+ In November 2006, the Vloggies would recognize many online videobloggers. This somewhat represents the end of an era for videobloggers and the vloggies would also die. The videobloggers were mostly interested in the tech and the spreading of the word; by the end of 2006, the tech was no longer a question and the word had been spread.

2007

+ Politicians would embrace video to get out their messages, each creating a videoblog. John Edwards was the first, announcing his run for President on YouTube before TV (I was going to say spare the jokes, but why not, go nuts)

+ Sites like Metacafe, Dailymotion and Veoh would all fight for their lives as YouTube would dominate the market.

+ Political Mashups would take the form of actual video, often from video found on TV and around the net of the actual politicians and their respective clans of extremist supporters.

+ On March 19th Justin Kan launched Justin.tv by announcing he would wear his camera and stream his life 24/7. This essentially launches a new era in online live broadcasting. Ustream also launched in March. Livestream is another popular one currently.

+ In June, It’s Jerry Time won an Emmy Award, the first ever for an online series.

+ In November, Marshall Herskovitz launched Quarterlife on Myspace as an independent online production which was the first time a major Hollywood talent had taken to a web-specific series. By almost all accounts the series failed for not being in touch with the online culture it was targeting.

+ From the end of 2007 until the beginning of 2008, the Hollywood writers strike brought the internet to Hollywood’s attention as union talent found themselves unable legally to work anywhere else.

2008

+ Coming out of the writers strike, Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog would go on to become a big hit online due in part to it’s creator Joss Whedon having already built a significant online following.

+ Beyond ‘podcasting’, many “Youtubers” came into prominence by ranking amongst the highest on the YouTube charts for subscribers and views, from Brookers (Sep 2005), Smosh (Nov, 2005), What The Buck (May, 2006), Nigahiga (June, 2006), TheHill88 (Aug, 2006), Sxephil (Sep, 2006), Mememolly (Nov, 2006) to the more recent Shane Dawson (Mar, 2008) and Fred (May, 2008) who all rival the million-dollar online efforts of the main stream media even still today.

2009

+ In March, The Streamy Awards honored online web series from 2008. The Streamy’s somewhat replaced the Vloggies in spirit.

+ At the end of 2009, YouTube remains dominant with over a billion streams per day - and growing - while Hulu has gained a significant market share of audience with almost a billion streams per month. Not much in the way of innovation though for video in 2008 or 2009.

The Tsunami of 2004, Online Video's First Major Event

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 12:04:00 -0500

Today marks the five year anniversary of the great Asian Tsunami of December 26th, 2004. This was a turning point for online video as it was the first time people from all around the world went online to watch. For all who now take online video for granted, this was even before Google Video. Here is a story I wrote about my own experience which happened just two months after I had launched Rocketboom:

“On a Sunday when I was writing the script and looking for news stories for the following Monday, I witnessed the tsunami go down online via the main stream media like cnn.com particular. So I knew the issue was so intense that there would be nothing else to say on Monday and so I spent all day looking for images and video and personal accounts - anything that I could find to “show”. This was something I had never done to this degree because I had never really had an impetus. But looking around for footage and pictures was what I would do for any event, big or small on a daily basis for Rocketboom so it started as just another day.

Anyway, I couldn’t find any videos on the day of, but I found two sites in Singapore that had about three people total who had posted a whole load of photos. So I believe I created perhaps the first tsunami video online that was a montage of the images with intense background music. While we did not have as much of a reach with our content at the time, we gained very high search return results for “tsunami video” apparently.

There was another major factor that led to the endurance of tsunami traffic: When Waxy and others like myself had accumulated the videos the next day, the same that also became really popular, I decided to turn them all into quicktime videos because there were none. As a result I was the only one serving the Quicktime files for several days and so probably all of those original batch videos that are out there that are quicktime, are generations from me (not to say that makes me special or anything, just pointing it out because i think its interesting), coincidentally. A few sites took these files and re-seeded them in bittorrent sites and then they quickly surpassed our search authority as it stacked against the time, I reckon. I assume Robin Good has an interesting tale to tell because we received a huge amount of traffic from his massive roundup as just one example.

[**aside: Of course I could not pay for the bandwidth and had the videos on the Parsons.edu server space. I brought the graduate multimedia sever down to a grinding halt (the same server that everyone uses to experiment with all kinds of wacky and powerful stuff). We couldn’t even get the server to deliver a 5k gif file until I renamed the videos and brought them back on slowly over days.

[**to the other aside: I watched as iFilm, the massively obnoxious and ad invasive leech site, learned a thing or two during this time as well about search return results. Of course with their link authority, they became the mainstream site to watch the tsunami videos as the only known option to a lot of people to start with. I remember later, on the day before the Superbowl this year, iFilm had posted all of the superbowl commercials, including all of the text and even video and image placeholders for ALL of the commercials in order to get them up first and to receive the best search results. So if you went to iFilm that night before the game, you could click on a bunch of superbowl commercials, which of course never loaded. But all of the advertisements surrounding the commercials were there and they were already making big bucks before they even copied the broadcasts and then posted the videos. Thats crummy of them and you can predict their behavior to be like this in the future too I suppose. I have noticed that over the last few months the obnoxiousness had gone way down, but its still pretty out-of-control for my tastes]”

Here are a couple of note now on YouTube:

For one of the best historical accounts of the various tsunami videos now, see:

http://www.asiantsunamivideos.com/

Favorite Video of 2009

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:46:00 -0500

In 2006 I started a personal tradition of naming my favorite online video each year. Then, it was Weird Al Yankovic’s White and Nerdy, as explicated here. (this became popular on Google Video just before Google bought YouTube).

Unfortunately, I would go on to break my annual tradition each year until today, as I name my favorite video of 2009, JK Wedding Entrance Dance.

The video continues to be enjoyed for all to see freely online due to the binding union YouTube arranged between the music industry and the video owners though the reason why this is my favorite video of the year has everything to do with the emotion it evokes, only possible because it was truly real.

When I think back through every wedding scene I’ve ever seen in the movies, this wedding dance video is in a class of it’s own for provoking the emotions that just simply can not be re-recreated.

The wedding dance video with it’s out-of-sync dancers and shaky lo-res handheld camera footage brings out the real love in the occasion with just the right song, in just the right space and from just the right perspective. This was not a movie where the orchestra swells and the camera pans ideally, this is a slice of reality captured nearly accidentally.

I continue to show the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video to countless people on my iPhone and universally, everyone totally lights up!

Platform Explainer Video Surprise

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 16:36:00 -0500

I was going to title this “Magma’s Recent PR Event”, but it wasn’t exactly a PR event, we just made a video and put it on Rocketboom. Though it turned out to be so important, it’s worth mentioning. Rocketboom is a content studio, but Magma is a platform for content, two completely different businesses. We have a small but growing user base on Magma and putting out a video that explains to people what the site is and how it works has always made a lot of sense, it’s just that I had no idea how much of an impact it would have…it literally doubled our user base within a week after posting it.

A philosophy many people believe in (me included) is that a very simple platform with one very simple idea is a very good way to start. Being the best at something very special and ultimately simple is key here. Google often likes this idea, e.g. their search page is very simple as it’s just one thing to begin with, a text box. Twitter is a good example of a seemingly simple platform too as it’s just a simple box where people type in some characters and hit enter. If Twitter started out looking like Tweetdeck however, a popular complex tool for twitterers, Twitter probably wouldn’t of caught on the way it has.

Other platforms are relatively complex in terms of feature sets, like Facebook for example. Facebook has so many features and so many things going on there, even the regular users are still learning about the various capabilities. Magma fits in this complex category too, especially in terms of where it’s going. And different people use it for different reasons right now so discovery of new ways to use the site had been slow.

When we put out a video explainer to the site, it was like a night and day difference in terms of how people have been talking about it. Instead of load of questions questions, suddenly people are writing about it and commenting with excitement and ah-ha’s as if they suddenly see where it fits in.

This is one of the neat things about the video medium, especially theater-house movies. People tend to come in, sit down and all go on the same-exact ride through the full course of thoughts and emotions the director intends. No detractions along with no time to reflect, you just get sucked in and come out with the painted story.

I was just reminded again that I wanted to post about this after seeing that Jamie had whipped up a quick integration to Boxee for Rocketboom, Know Your Meme and Magma and made a demo video explainer on how to install them. Though another reason for this post to include “press release” in the title, we hear there are big plans for the Boxee directory so soon you wont need a video to figure it out I think but until then, once again, the point I think by now is clear: Video explainers for can be VERY helpful.

Considering our video is a whopping 6 minutes and 23 seconds long I would highly recommend a much shorter video in most cases. I have no regrets for us because as I mentioned, Magma is pretty darn complex and we wanted to get it all out there. It’s just that in our case, we had Molly who singlehandedly scored the intent just by her awesome performance alone.

Magma to Tumblr: Can you hear me? Tumblr: Copy.

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:01:00 -0500

Magma now supports full integration with Tumblr! When adding videos to your Magma account you can automatically cross-post toTwitter, Facebook and now Tumblr simultaneously, with support for any of your Tumblr blogs, including group blogs.

We are excited to announce a few other new features too:

New Add to Channel Interface

We’ve also redesigned the channel video add experience, making it easier to see and customize the videos as you add them to your channel.

Customizable Share Message

Based on your feedback, you can now also customize the share message each time you add a video.

Explainer Video

The Magma user base has been growing rapidly over the last month, if you haven’t seen the Magma explainer video, have a look at http://mag.ma/211919

An extra special thanks to our lead developer Jamie Wilkinson and to head designer Greg Leuch for their extra hard work in building and operating the Magma platform.

http://mag.ma

TV Everywhere Launches, No One Notices

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:05:00 -0500

Last month on November 4th at the Ad Tech New York conference the President of Comcast Interactive, Amy Banse said TV Everywhere would be available in the first part of December, but I had not heard of anything so I just Googled it and in fact, it just launched, within the last day…according to lot of the bigger publications (nytimes, wsj) though surprisingly, it didn’t cross any of my channels in the tech world including my Twitter friends, Techmeme or RSS blog feeds. Maybe because it’s just not that exciting or maybe because it’s not working (I’ve just been getting a blank page all day and havent seen it yet)

The service is called Xfinity http://xfinity.com/ and it sounds like a good idea. If you have Comcast for your TV content and pay for Comcast internet service too, you should be able to not only watch TV at home, but travel to anywhere in the world where you can get online, with your laptop, say, login, and watch whatever you would be watching as if you were at home in your living-room.

Comcast and partners including Time Warner kinda need to make this work because if they dont, they could lose a lot of business as the world moves on without them. Before the internet, the big cable companies made great money just pumping TV through the cable to homes. Then when the internet came around, they were able to double up and send each person two subscription bills per month, one for the TV and one for the Internet.

But now, if you use Hulu, iTunes or Boxee, for example, you wont need your TV subscription anymore so Comcast could be out of luck on that one. And you may not need Comcast or Time Warner either for your home broadband service, especially if you upgrade to FIOS, or use internet at work. This is pretty big business as I was saying. Much bigger than the TV Networks like NBC which Comcast may soon control.

Setting aside the cable companies and their visions, you can see the model is pretty neat: Eventually you could be anyone in the world, like a customer in India willing to pay the monthly subscription fee and gain access to the same content that Comcast TV subscribers currently have in the U.S., without any wires. Just a Hulu like subscription, which this service obviously competes with. This is a double whammy though on Comcast because they will have advertising on the content anyway. iTunes on the other hand does not have advertising.

This may or may not threaten Apple’s plans, but it certainly threatens the Apple rumor fanatics who suggest that Apple is working on a similar subscription service via iTunes. I assume people would pay $50 a month to Apple to have free access to all the content on iTunes, music, TV - everything. Then Apple can divy it up back to the content creators.

And while usually people tend to piss and moan about Apple being closed, I’m rooting for Apple in this game so far - Apple is open. Anyone can podcast their content through iTunes with an RSS feed. I also like YouTube because they will host anyone so far as the law will extend YouTube the rights to do so.

And this leads me to my main concern about TV Everywhere, er Xfinity (the TV Everywhere lingo was just code speak, it’s Xfinity now) which is that it threatens to close off the rest of the content world. The Comcasts of the world have a history of maintaining an elite control over their airwaves and thus stand to hurt the general democratization of media that I personally believe in. I’m a major proponent of content creators getting paid for content and I think the tradition has shown a desperate and unhealthy way of doing business in order to keep control over the content industry, finally diluting the medium for everyone down to the lowest common denominators. For even as there will always be alternative places to freely distribute and access content, if the TV Everywhere initiative becomes the main one, closed as it is, people are generally lazy and will likely go with it, the marching on of the following masses, making it more difficult for people to discover everything else.

Big guns have rolled into to save TV empires before and so far, all retreats. See them now regrouping…and waiting…

Video Distribution Trending Towards Centralization

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:23:00 -0500

It’s been interesting to watch and participate in the ebb and flow of the online video space. One unique trend that I have noticed recently is that the “be everywhere” motto with your video has not so much changed but the technical means for being everywhere has.

In the recent past, the video tool TubeMogul was a good idea. They do the heavy lifting of re-distribution; you can create an account on TubeMogul, upload your video, and then TubeMogul will upload your one master to over 25 video account destinations around the web including YouTube Vimeo, Blip, Metacafe, DailyMotion, Yahoo, Revver, Veoh, StupidVideos, etc. and then track the videos.

When TubeMugul first came out, it was great because it filled a hole in the marketplace for publishers who found themselves spending a lot of time trying to get their videos to all of these destinations with the hope of finding audiences anywhere.

It was worth the effort, I think, to be everywhere but one problem with this means of distribution is that it creates so many copies of the same thing which is itself a technically sloppy and irresponsible method of doing anything. A more elegant solution is to be everywhere with referents to just one copy, the benefit of the “embed”. Embeddable videos can appear be all over the web when they’re really just pointers to one location.

And now, the online video distribution space seems to be swinging right back in this direction to fewer and fewer distribution sources because the audiences are consolidating into fewer places. It’s becoming more and more counterproductive to distribute to 25 different open platforms due to diluting your audience, losing control over your ad revenue, spending time with the day-to-day efforts needed to nurture each one, to name but a few issues…primarily, because the audiences have faded away from many places that were once more active.

A common trend with publishers today is to publish to only one or two open locations. Most people obviously upload to YouTube and then many like to add an RSS feed with quicktime files for iTunes, which also serves as a plausible option for many other local-players as well. Many also find that other, unique destination that perfectly fits their audience but may not be suited for many others.

Along with this, for the good I think, is a trend with reverting back to the pre-social network days of placing an emphasis on your own domain dot com. The NYTimes and CNN for example have been putting more development into their own on-site and single-point of distribution strategies. So have smaller content creators who got big just on YouTube or iTunes. They enjoy being everywhere by embeds and feeds and continue to dabble with alternative distribution points, though drastically fewer than a couple of years ago. This centralizing trend has always seemed inevitable for preserving as much of the revenue share as possible. If you are wheeling and dealing with 25 public facing websites like Metacafe and Dailymotion and YouTube and Blip and Viddler and iTunes and so on, all doing different ad deals, you are probably undermining yourself, the marketplace and especially your own audience.

In other words, worldwide distribution is growing and video is becoming more available in more places (through embeds, links, tweets, referrers) but the number of places one needs to actually push distribution to, and the number of file types one needs to create appears to be drastically diminishing.

Why News Won't Work Like Murdoch Wants It To

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:01:00 -0500

There is a great deal of information worth paying for, but for the most part, it’s hard to understand why anyone would be incentivized to pay for the news for news is as free as the freedom of speech.

Consider this article from The Wall Street Journal, Google to Start Selling Own Phone Next Year. The article starts off “Google Inc. has designed a cellphone it plans to sell directly to consumers as soon as next year, according to people familiar with the matter.” But to continue reading, you must subscribe.

Shucks, are you going to subscribe to get this news? If you don’t want to subscribe but would like to get some additional information, you can likely find another trusted brand of your choice writing about the same exact news. I found well over 100 articles just from looking on Techmeme alone:

Word gets around quite easily these days, you know? And when it comes to commentary, there will never be any shortage of outrageous personalities to choose from with equal and often greater standards of integrity and speed.

To that end, brands like the WSJ and the NYTimes will suffer when it comes to breaking news because they are no longer unique or valuable in today’s news gathering cycle (as seen for example in today’s news about the Google Phone). The only hope that these companies have is that they have a few journalists on their payroll currently who are popular personalities, like David Pogue and Walt Mossberg, for example. I think Peter Rojas and Ryan Block can be just as influential and I just love their writing style. And even if you put them all behind a pay wall, I’ll likely read the news on their work because whatever they say about the news is itself news.

CNN probably has the biggest problem of all because most of their articles online do not come from personalities, they come from robots (sometimes called staff writers) Aside from Anderson Cooper, can you name any journalist at CNN that you know of? Wolf Blitzer? What if one of these two guys leaves? Is Katie Couric at ABC or CBS and does it matter? Without the personalities who have opinions and put themselves out there and work hard to build up their own personal prominence, news organizations will no longer be able to maintain their own prominence online. It’s the people, people.

rocketboom: Photos from the Rocketboom Thanksgiving Episode 2009

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:23:04 -0500

rocketboom: Photos from the Rocketboom Thanksgiving Episode 2009

jamiew:Know Your Meme: Auto-Tune goes Internet Platinum!

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:40:49 -0500

jamiew:Know Your Meme: Auto-Tune goes Internet Platinum!

“Weird Al” Yankovic rehearsing for Know Your Meme Stay tuned...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:47:49 -0400

“Weird Al” Yankovic rehearsing for Know Your Meme

Stay tuned for a special guest.

Be the (internet) sensation of any Halloween party with Know...

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:51:56 -0400

Be the (internet) sensation of any Halloween party with Know Your Meme’s Hallow-meme Costume Builder. Our internet scientists have crafted easy-to-follow costume recipes for your favorite memes, from Afro Ninja to Zombie McCain.

How Twitter Could Lose The Game By Design

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:35:00 -0400

Do you know how to use the twitter logo? My guess is that you are far from able to navigate the Twitter website in general, and that in particular, you can not explain the why’s and wherefore’s behind the intricate and complex functionality that exists behind the Twitter logo. Don’t feel bad. I have used Twitter daily for years and I still can’t figure out how the Twitter website works either.

Even Steve Rubel, THE super-duper-duper-user of Twitter was trying to figure out the most simple aspects of who can see what and unfortunately, I didn’t know. I’ll bet you didn’t know the answers either.

Twitter is totally messed up and I know why. Its due to the interface design. Twitter has been known to have poor retention rates and I would suggest that their biggest problem is that most new users will never figure out how to use it.

Ev and Biz, you guys rock and I love Twitter so I hope you will take this seriously. I know you know this stuff so I’m giving you a D- and will stand-by to see what happens, especially now that Facebook has bought Friendfeed. But I would not let any student get away with this. The Twitter interface design by any academic standard gets an F for being completely incoherent, inconsistent, broken and likely left by the wayside over all these years. Take just the logo, for instance.

Company logos have the main purpose of representing the vision and the brand of a company with aesthetics. There are no rules but there are standards and considerations. The logo is regularly adaptable to various media like business cards and metal plates, and commonly acts as a company’s masthead in the digital form. What more, the logo tends to act as an interface element - a clickable action that leads a user to the website’s home page. One of the first questions any interface designer must ask is, “How does the user get back to the home page from here?” This is so important. It’s of no matter what level they entered in at or how deep they went into the site, the typical web-surfer rightfully expects that there will be a link somewhere to get back home. Aside from a link that simply reads “Home”, in a consistent, global location, surfers take for granted that the company logo will usually be clickable and lead them home. Obviously.

A common stump with the interface design of the logo leads the designer to ask: “Should the logo on the home page be clickable?” In otherwords, if you are already on the home page, why have any links that you can click on that will take you to the same page? There are some compelling reasons either way but I dont want to bore you with petty issues. Typically the details of this kind of discussion and the variability at play are so minor, but in the case of Twitter, as you will see, the problems compound to create complexity in ways that are not only absurd, it leads the user to madness. The convoluted design of Twitter is likely why even the greatest of first adopter experts and day-to-day users alike can’t ever explain how Twitter works. Ahem, back to the logo in particular.

Lets map out this amazing puzzle of how to use the Twitter logo, which is different, depending on who you are, what domain you are on, where you are coming from and a variety of other unexpected variables.

Here is what Twitter calls the home page. I concur. Note we are now looking at http://twitter.com

Confused already? Yea, the design is not consistent once you log in, this home page is “new” and it’s just for people who are *not* logged in.

Imagine now that you decide to go Twitter for some reason and for some reason you are not already logged in, and then land on the page above. Since you probably hate AT&T as much as everyone, you notice “AT&T” is a hot topic so you get distracted and click on it. Typical, from start to finish.

So now that we are here and see everyone complaining about AT&T (i.e. total non-news), lets get back home. So what’s the obvious first thing to do? Why look for a link that says “home”, of course. But there is no link that says “home”. No worries, most people know enough about what to do and naturally give clicking on the logo a try.

Nope. As you can see above, clicking on the Twitter logo didn’t take us back to the home page, but if you look closely, note it did tweak the URL. So now it may seem like we are stuck and thus, even though interface design should not be our problem because we are just users trying to get by, we are going to have to keep thinking about these things to get by. After looking around the page some more, and finding nothing, the very determined user may eventually stop to consider that maybe - just maybe - clicking the logo a second time, will work. What luck. In fact, with Twitter, you gatta click on the logo two times to get home from the search return page, if you are not logged in.

It took some work but now that we are back to the assumed home page again, lets login.

Once logged in, the home page now changes to a new home page. Remember that page you found that had the AT&T search on it? Forget that home page, now that you are logged in you cant get there any more. To be sure, in the screenshot above, (1) you can note right above the first tweet, the word “Home” which is *not* clickable (2) the word “Home” in the global nav bar at the top right of the page which *is* clickable, (3) the twitter logo itself which is clickable and leads to itself, and wait, there’s more: (4) the word “home” is also now in a right navigation menu and it’s also clickable and leads to itself. This home link has a highlight that appears to reveal the subjective artistic preference of the designer’s extreme taste for subtleness which overshadows the usefulness of the design as an indicator.

Now that we have made it this far, and we are at the new logged-in home where we see the tweets from our friends, lets find our archives to see our own recent tweets. How do you get there? It’s not easy, you’ll have to figure that out. Eventually you will find you must click on your own name. In my case, I must learn not to click on “@andrewbaron” and instead click on “andrewbaron”. The link I need is not in any of the navigation bars, and not apparently a link even but I digress from the topic at hand, the problems just with the logo.

Great, as you can see above, I made it to my own tweets without the need for the logo. After a quick scan, I’m now ready to see what my friends are saying again and I’m ready to click…but where? Looking at the above screen shot, which link would you click on to find your friends? You remembered! It was a trick question because there is no link to get there. You must have remembered that in order to see what your friends are saying, you must click on the logo. If that doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because it doesn’t make sense. Though you would assume your friends’ tweets along with your own tweets would both be at the same level of navigation, that is not the case here, don’t ask why. Anyway, dont look now but the right navigation on the above page is mostly missing most of its links too. Yes, the logo, lets move on.

Wait just a second. Have a closer look at the right nav bar. What’s that link that is unique to only this page called “tweets”? Have you ever seen that before? Go ahead and click on that new link. Yep, it’s useless as an interface feature because it leads to itself. But it does have a subtle highlight. Lets move on.

The user must also learn how to use the logo from a Twitter subdomain. Consider the Twitter search site which was once Summize and lives happily at search.twitter.com shown above. It’s got the same exact logo so you would expect to click on it to get home. Not the case here. Stuck on the search.twitter subdomain, there is no longer a home button to get back to the main twitter site, and no familiar navigation so this is your new home, get used to it. Or dont. Now that your brain is really working hard to learn and remember the navigation features, if you are not too warn out and have made it to level 26, as they say, you’ll probably quickly make it to the bottom of the page to find the link you need in the footer, and learn that it’s called “twitter home”, to be distinguished form the particular home that you on right now or any others I guess. Or without guessing, you can find in the HTML code that the home you are on now is called the ‘Twitter Search Home’. So to find out where you are, just go to your browser and depending on the make and model, find something like “show source code” and check the header metadata. Easy!

Above is another good example of being locked into a Twitter subdomain with no familiar way out, welcome to the Twitter blog. Note in the screenshot above there is no home link at all, but there is a masthead logo, all-be-it a different logo. This one is clickable and leads back to the main blog where the logo is now NOT clickable. This is inconsistent with the other twitter logo uses on home pages so more red marks. You can get back to the new Twitter home from the word ‘blog’ in the footer (if you make it that far down) or you may notice the “back to the main twitter blog” link that takes you to the “main” page, whatever that means.

Conclusion: WTF?

In all the classes I have ever taken or taught, I have never seen anything so messed up. If a student handed in today’s iteration of Twitter as an example of solid interface design, one that will be effective for millions of users to navigate within the context of the content and aesthetic design at hand, I would have no choice but to say we failed.

A Timeframe for TV's Future?

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:38:00 -0400

Printed today in The Guardian: “The TV industry has as little as two years to create viable digital businesses or face a version of the “iTunes moment” that saw the music business cede the online future to Apple, according to Ashley Highfield.”

With regards to the various threat levels to traditional media, the TV and Film businesses are converging and it’s much more complex to transition online. More than two years will almost for sure be needed. Rocketboom has been around almost five years now and there is almost no difference in terms of non-technicalogical support.

Consider the evolution from print media. News will continue to be created and articles will continue to be consumed but the questions still remain about the business of the industry. The New York Times is literally scrambling and the bloggers are literally clamoring because no one has a viable solution, a hot topic even today in 2009.

From Lofquist, 1994: “Growing competition from the electronic media and a squeeze on leisure time are forcing U.S. printers and publishers to reappraise their traditional markets. Printed products originally issued as books, directories, newsletters, and reference materials increasingly appear in the form of audio books, laser disks, compact disks, software, facsimile, and on-line information”

That was fifteen years ago, WTF has everyone been doing since then?!…you might ask. It takes time for big systems to change. A lot of time. Granted, WTF, it shouldn’t have taken that much time; the heedless leaders over the last fifteen years have clearly run it into the ground, caught in a Catch-22 for relying on advertising as their only business model.

The music industry is changing at a faster clip, more on par with a technological pace because the industry is very different - there were just five record label companies that controlled the entire music industry. Literally only five.

Steve Jobs’ second greatest feat, aside from turning the computer into a tool for people, was usurping the entire music industry into just one company. Apple now single handedly sets the prices for all music. Because people were already used to paying for individual copies of music, this was not a difficult problem to solve for consumers. Apple simply made it easier and more economical to continue on.

TV has its similarities to music, but is often by comparison much more complex. TV is quickly losing it’s secular identity, along with Film and all kinds of additional screen based content to become the business of video in general. TV was once the business of only three companies, the adoption of cable drastically saturated share and today, video is spread out all over the place through a multitude of middle companies that all have various amounts of power and influence over the same primary asset, which is ultimately just the content itself. There is also a very complex array of revenue sources including theater tickets, merchandise, dvd sales, rentals, hardware sales, advertising and monthly cable subscription fees.

In particular, people are used to paying for all this stuff, but they are not used to paying for individual TV shows. And because TV is heavily ad-supported, just like the Newspapers, questions on how the rest of the non-fee based, non-cable TV industry will survive remain to be seen.

Setting aside the considerations above, there is still a very plain and simple reason why the industry probably can not transition in the next two years. Most of the new works that are currently being scoped or are in production, will release in the next three years. The industry that will support these productions is for a large part already in place awaiting. Distribution contracts, promotion contracts and talent contracts with writers, actors and producers are in many cases already set for years. With regards to movies, there are currently over 7200 films officially in-production, many for 2012 and 2013. And the greatest TV show hits of the season will likely not pass up the lucrative renewal contracts to instead go out on their own to find a non-industry and no revenue. It’s a ferocious Catch-22 that could cause the entire industry old and new alike to become stuck for even a decade. It’s hard to tell.

The writers strike of yesteryear gave a lot of the traditional executives and talent a quick chance to do some pondering. Remember the new Hollywood Digerati that was going to stick it to the man? They are all back at work now and again, missing from the conversation. It’s a shame because however the future pans out, the talent will eventually end up with the most power for being the centerpiece and beachhead of any business’ portfolio.

It’s fair to say that the TV and Film industry is doing some pondering and whether it needs to or not, separate or together, it’s very unlikely that it will become overall viable online inside the next two years.

Select Magma Tweets

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:58:00 -0400

alecorreo: I am really digging Mag.ma http://ow.ly/lugQ
19 minutes ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

BuildIntel: Just wanted to let everyone know that I love #Magma. Check it - http://mag.ma/
about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

nickdemartino: RT @jonarcher: Impressed by new video aggregator Magma http://mag.ma/
about 6 hours ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

barryroodt: Very very cool - Magma, the current top videos right now: http://mag.ma/
about 7 hours ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet

teachtech: Really cool, but not for those with ADD. www.mag.ma - compilation of top vids from so many sites it’s silly
about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

NatashaKhan: The best thing to happen to online video since myspace video launched back in the day, Mag.ma http://mag.ma/
about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

techintrovert: Mag.ma is an amazingly cool video aggregator- http://mag.ma/
about 9 hours ago from sobees · Reply · View Tweet

anyabelle: Wow. Just wow. http://mag.ma/ did not disappoint. Heck, it even had my CollegeHumor in here too.
about 9 hours ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet

TheRobRose: Every time I see the vid svc…Mag.Ma in print.. I think of Dr. Evil saying “we’re surrounded by liquid hot Magma“… http://ow.ly/lmgV
about 10 hours ago from HootSuite · Reply · View Tweet

kimo79: Finally a way to browse videos! Love Magma… it makes you find interesting videos to watch… http://watwet.com/u/cdf6c1 about 12 hours ago from Watwet.com · Reply · View Tweet

stealingsand: looking over mag.ma - video aggregator. this could get good. http://bit.ly/XJGh5 (expand)
about 12 hours ago from web · Reply · View Tweet

lloyd_xmas: and thank you @andrewbaron and @jamiew for creating the very beautiful mag.ma, a brilliant video sharing/tracking/exploring/saving site.
about 22 hours ago from web · Reply · View Tweet

hoverbird: @jamiew really liking mag.ma so far… I’ve been waiting for something like this!
about 23 hours ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet · Show Conversation

ryestar: @ambermac Caught net@night on mag.ma, great discussion of progressive thoughts on collaboration in software development. Fascinating stuff.
about 23 hours ago from web · Reply · View Tweet

EliciaBG: Looks amazing greg!!! RT @gleuch its out… Magma is officially open to everyone. http://mag.ma
1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet

DeliciousHot: Magma http://is.gd/2yLUC (expand)
about 23 hours ago from API · Reply · View Tweet

lkandr: Just Loves http://mag.ma/
1 day ago from Twittics3 · Reply · View Tweet

jonarcher: Impressed by new video aggregator Magma http://mag.ma/
1 day ago from TwitterGadget · Reply · View Tweet

theNEONblog: Mag.ma just officially launched. One of the coolest sites I have ever seen. No lie http://mag.ma/
1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet

ravivasavan: http://mag.ma/ just beautiful, beautiful!
about 17 hours ago from EventBox · Reply · View Tweet

rachaeljoyTV: thank god for this. RT @andrewbaron: RT @mashable Magma: A Billboard Hot 100 for Online Video http://bit.ly/nceyJ (expand)
1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

globalhero: Really likes http://mag.ma/ Content Aggregation at its best! #magma #ilke
1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

mashable: Magma: A Billboard Hot 100 for Online Video - http://bit.ly/lNVZF (expand)
1 day ago from bit.ly · Reply · View Tweet

TechCrunch: Mag.ma Unleashes Its Directory Of Hot Video Content To The Masses http://bit.ly/4n54RY (expand) by @jasonkincaid
1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet

deepsea33: Magma launches, tracking online video www.mag.ma Mo bettah than youtube suggestions. Cool URL
1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet

ejacobsen: http://mag.ma/ very well done video site. on my short list of sites to check at least once-a-day.
1 day ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet

elisinger: Congrats @AndrewBaron & team on Magma launch http://Mag.ma my new fav site! I’m stoked to have them present at #CaseCamp http://CaseCamp.org

RomanSF: Lovin’ http://mag.ma so far. #magma seems like the #popurls of video on first take. pretty cool.
1 day ago from Seesmic · Reply · View Tweet

davidleeking: @mattsingley yep - mag.ma IS cool.
1 day ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet

whileseated2: @tedr why did it take someone so long to develop a curated site like that? great link: http://mag.ma
1 day ago from Tweetie · Reply · View Tweet

markuswamser: Online Videosammlung einfach organisieren: http://mag.ma/
1 day ago from TwitterFox · Reply · View Tweet

LibEvo: Magma gaat public http://magma.ma
1 day ago from API · Reply · View Tweet

mee_z: Video Meme- und Statistik-Plattform http://mag.ma/ jetzt online. Viel Erfolg dem Team um @andrewbaron #magma
1 day ago from HootSuite · Reply · View Tweet

stefanronge: Gillar Magma skarpt! RT @Birming http://mag.ma är nu öppet för alla.
1 day ago from web · Reply · View Tweet

MissPirata: @jamiew felicidades por ese magma esta increíble :)!
about 21 hours ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

TorstenBeeck: Die begehrtesten Videos im Netz, hübsch sortiert nach Relevanz und Plattform bei http://www.mag.ma/ (vom Rocketboom-Gründer Andrew Baron).
1 day ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

romsfou: Link: Magma : Les Videos qu’il faut voir sur le net - Nouveau site qui recense les meilleures videos du net… http://tumblr.com/xnp2u4wfe
1 day ago from Tumblr · Reply · View Tweet

Know Your Meme Makes TIME Top 50

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:28:06 -0400

rocketboom:jamiew: “Know Your Meme was selected as one of TIME Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2009! 50/50 :) We wrote our first scientismic episodes in Dec 2007 and launched the ‘Meme Database’ website in Dec 2008. It’s seen amazing growth — we’re now at more than 500 meme entries, 10k images, and will serve over 4.5 million pageviews this month!”

Building Big Dreams With Just a Little

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:24:00 -0400

As we gear up for the public launch of Magma, I’m starting to feel as if we are heading out into the unknown. I’m worried and excited for the same reasons: We are going at it with no investment, no PR company, no advertising or sponsorship deals in place, no anything really, just a website and a few computers.

From my experience with Rocketboom, I know this is not going to be easy. Rocketboom is a simple idea, and could be simple to sustain if there was already an established marketplace for video content online. In that case, we would just focus on making the show better. As a new online content studio expanding into our own studio network we must regularly engage with new technologies, new legal issues around copyrights and licensing, new forms of distribution, new ways of interacting with our audience and completely new business models including new ways of doing advertising in new international marketplaces, none of which existed to support video online when Rocketboom started.

Magma is even more complex in being a platform *for* video, in general. In terms of it’s product offerings, it’s a video aggregator, a social network for video, a place to collect video, statistical charts, a tv guide, a short URL service, a video search engine - it sounds like a crazy undertaking which is why I’m even more excited and amazed that we were able to build it so quickly and cheaply. And so too, the scare: the business model is also complex and no easy job to pull off well: It involves market research, statistics, video advertising, API licensing and branded partnerships.

Having never raised money before, but having read my share of Techmeme articles, I knew it would be a challenge to justify all of this and I found myself out pitching the idea of Magma, based on my own “self-proclaimed” foresight, instead of pitching something that already existed that someone could see and experience. It didn’t feel right. If I was proposing to launch a Moon lander (something I would also like to do one day), I would have no choice but to raise investment first. For Magma, the fact of the matter is, while it could be helpful, we didn’t *need* any outside investment to get the site built and launched.

Recent years have seen a boon in internet companies in a similar position of being able to take off with minimal resources. As I’ve mentioned, Rocketboom is one example and plenty of people have done much more with much less. It’s extra hard work, but its also extra fulfilling when it works out. With regards to Magma, I’m probably most excited because I believe we identified a massive hole in the marketplace and I think Magma has the potential to be not just any entry point into online video, but all together, THE entry point.

Despite all the uncertainties, high bars and high hopes, it’s the same kind of excitement I had after dreaming up Rocketboom. What worked then was identifying what would likely happen in the world, racing to be amongst the first to execute and focusing on making the offering as good as possible. Beyond that, staying plugged in and a step ahead of technology, remaining transparent, growing spending based on growth in revenue, and building out a team of only the best. With both Rocketboom and Magma we have a long way to go to realize our full potential, but in terms of living the life, its happening.

Where is Molly?

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:38:59 -0400

People have been asking about Molly. Molly is in the UK and we are waiting to be sure that our governments approve Molly’s work visa before we are finally allowed to work together. We are hoping it will happen this upcoming week in which case Molly will be begin hosting Rocketboom daily asap, thanks for keeping a look out! In the meantime, the rest of the Rocketboom crew is rocking it out with fresh daily content: http://www.rocketboom.com

Know Your Meme on the Up & Up

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:37:00 -0400

While programming Magma, and keeping up with the Rocketboom back-end, our three person dev team, Jamie, Greg & Todd whipped up the Know Your Meme websIte from scratch. When I say whipped up from scratch, I mean to say we are not using a pre-existing CMS, we built our own to suit the project. Philosophically, it was hard to determine how to strike a balance between allowing anyone and everyone to create and then determine the validity of each entry. WIth just the right balance, it’s turned into a really fun and growing community of people who care passionately about internet culture. Nothing like mixing the rigor of academia with the lulz.