Ariel Waldman

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while to let the dust settle over the buzz and debate that surrounded Flickr’s venture into video a couple weeks ago. What I found most interesting from the conversations that erupted across the inteweb was the sense of community (or lack there of) in Flickr and YouTube based on the comments the videos receive and the environment those comments live in.

People flock to both YouTube and Flickr for their easy portability that is supported by their simple UI design (read: easy embed codes). The general sense from people who use both Flickr and YouTube is that Flickr would provide a more relevant place to put videos due to there not being a clusterclick of comments. Comments on YouTube are typically stereotyped as being hundreds of negative remarks from users that are largely unknown to the YouTube “community”. It’s true that YouTube is more about the content than any social networking device, but the known lack of community management over negative and harassing comments on YouTube videos often gives off the same “hopeless mess” feeling as a MySpace profile design.

As Scott Beale has stated, “for the most part the comments on Flickr are relevant and add to the conversation, unlike YouTube comments“. This can partially be attributed to Flickr’s community management, both exerted by the Flickr team and the “self-help” tools like blocking that they provide to make sure that comments aren’t spam, harassing, or are just overall unwelcome.

Is it the community management or the content that has created a more relevant community? Is it that photography has become more niche than video, and thus feels like a closer-knit community? In ongoing discussions with colleagues about online social interactions ranging from Twitter to Xbox Live, seemingly, the less the feeling of having an active community management system, the less users feel a loyalty to the service, despite if all their friends are using it.

I’ve been digging through a lot of my old work this past week and stumbled across a pitch that was a lot of fun to execute. In 2005/2006, my former agency VML received a RFP from Ubisoft to create buzz for their upcoming release of Splinter Cell 4. I had directed a very large brainstorming session for creating various concepts for the pitch. With an incredibly creative and talented team, we came up with some awesomely insane guerrilla ideas to pitch, but we wanted to somehow prove to Ubisoft that we were able to not only create these ideas, but to actually execute them as well. My favorite projects have always been the ones that I’ve been involved with from creation to execution, and part of the reason I really enjoyed working at VML for so long was to be able to do random things like this.

The night before the pitch, Adam Kellogg, Aaron Weidner, and myself flew in to San Francisco and acquired a generator, a $60k projector, and a minivan. The result is this video. Adam edited the video overnight and we presented it the next morning in the pitch (note: this was never meant to be a viral video). At the end of the video, we turned to Ubisoft and said “now, imagine if that was the NSA building” - their jaws dropped. Needless to say, most of our ideas required a budget for bail.

Recently, there has been a rash of one-size-fits-all services that aim to provide a solution to “managing” various sites like Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku and Facebook all at once. As with most of my rants, they begin on Twitter and then trickle their way into a blog post - and if you’ve seen some of my tweets, you have seen my personal distaste for these services and the people who use them.

There is definitely an increased need to edit down the information influx we receive everyday via email, IM, web apps, etc. There is also definitely the stress of joining all the new sites your friends keep joining. However, just as a recent blog post pointed out the potential resurgence of separating public and not-so-public content, there is also arguably a need to cater which content resonates most with which audience.

A quote from 2006 that I often refer back to and has always resonated with me is “the internet favors infinite niches, not one-size-fits-all fare“.

So, why I think one-size-fits-all services like HelloTxt, Ping.fm, Twhirl, and Mahalo Share are missing the mark:

Spam
The one-size services assume your followers and friends are only following you on one site. In reality, most of us go between various different sites as much as we would go between kissing partners at a game of spin the bottle (as Sean has stated, I have a non-proprietary crush on Twitter and Pownce). This mass broadcasting may help you spend less time catering to each site, but will end up filling up all your friends’ social inboxes two or three times over with the same content. Undoubtedly, this will annoy them - especially if they really didn’t need to see that you’re broadcasting live on Qik in 3 different places every 5 minutes.

Rudeness
Worse than a wish-I-could-be-there video award acceptance speech, it’s centered around broadcasting without valuing interaction. Almost all people I’ve observed who use these services to cross-post, rarely ever login to the individual sites to see the replies, nor does it seem like they care. As a result, the content suffers significantly - as people learn to not click through or respond to things where they know their opinion won’t be heard.

Poor Catering
If not interacting with a community and spamming your friends didn’t hinder you enough, the services completely overlook the most important aspect: the content. On Pownce, seeing your 5 latest 140 character @ replies you had on Twitter is completely useless, annoying and a total giveaway to the fact that you’re probably never going to take the time to send me that new song you like or point me to a video you wanted to talk about outside of the 5,000 YouTube comments it received. As such, I’ve most likely already stopped following you.

To quote myself from 2006 in reference to advertisers, “So what if you reach a larger … audience? Did you reach the right audience? There’s so much talk about demographics, but in the end, people only care about numbers instead of the effectiveness, no less defining effective influence.”

Have these microblogging sites given rise to an advertising-like mindset of reaching numbers rather than niches?

Arielwaldman.com launches today! This will be a place where I talk about social media and related topics. I will continue to blog at Shake Well Before Use as well, but there was a demand for having a site more tailored to my personal opinions and adventures - thus this site was created. I will most likely be updating this weekly instead of daily, so feel free to subscribe via RSS.

This blog is currently in the midst of being set up. In the meantime, you can find me at:

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Engadget

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or send me an email!