Before I say anything more let me qualify myself a bit. I'm a pretty liberal guy. I'm open minded. I live in San Francisco for goodness sakes! My family is Catholic but I keep my views very low key. No one accuses me of being a prude - let alone of being Conservative! I'm a parent. I have an 8 year old boy who is Transformer crazy. He has all the toys from the first movie. He has both the DS Lite games. My 6 year old daughter likes the games too. They've both seen the original movie. They both love the old animated series. My son was incredibly anxious for the movie to come out and for me to see it. He knew it was PG13 so I had to screen it to see if I would let him see it.
Neither of them will see the new movie if I have anything to say about it.
Why? Because for reasons that have nothing to do with story, plot, or artistic values the director (Michael Bay) needed to express. The movie is laced with really stupid and immature sexual innuendo. It started with the opening scene of Mikaela who poses quite sexually while painting a motorcycle. That scene was obviously intended for all the guys who thought she was a babe. The humanoid 'babe' in the college dorm who practically sexually assaults Sam served no purpose in the story but clearly was out of someone's college fantasy. The little robot that Mikaela 'turns' to the Autobot side humps her leg while making sexually suggestive noises. Mikaela's character morphed from the tough street wise beauty in the first movie into a frightened sex object in the second. All of this was certainly too much for my kids to see.
Why? What purpose could any of this have served?
Oh, that's right. I forgot. They basically tailored the movie to the male 18-30 year old crowd. The guys who played with Transformer toys 10-15 years ago (we hope it was that long ago). I guess the idea was to aim for that demographic and pull in all that money.
But you see, there's a problem with that. Those guys are not going to buy more Transformer toys (we hope). They probably won't see the movie again. They might buy it on DVD someday, but the value to *Hasbro* is gone.
Had they toned it down sexually and made this a cleaner PG movie they'd have pulled in a whole new crowd: the kids. I can tell you that movies that my kids love they talk me into seeing again before it leaves the theatres. Ka ching. My son just had a birthday and would love the transformer toys. Ka ching. Christmas - more toys. Ka ching. DVD release and a certain buy. Ka ching. Repeat cycle. Ka ching. Cash for Hasbro as well as for the movie studio.
But that's not how they played it.
Back to my son. I had to him that he couldn't see the movie - that it wasn't appropriate for kids. And I had to hug him and hold him as he cried and cried with bitter disappointment. He asked a great question: "but Dad, why did they have to make it inappropriate for kids?"
So, Hasbro, I hope you are happy with your profits this year from royalties on this movie. You'll not get another dime from me. My kids won't get the toys... I'll go out of my way to get them other things, to say "well, you know you didn't see that movie... why don't we get this other toy?" And I won't get them the games from it either.
Sometimes companies can be stupid, pathetic and completely short-sighted. Hasbro clearly is. And the movie was even worse.
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( 2.9 / 382 )A while back I blogged about Why Twitter is Important. Essentially, my point was that Twitter is the first application going mainstream that exemplifies the new 'real time stream' type of service.
Clearly I'm not alone in my analysis. On Friday I'll be attending the Real-Time Stream Crunchup. Speakers and panelists from Facebook, FriendFeed, Microsoft, Salesforce, Seesmic, and Tweetmeme will all participate, and there's going to be some new services demonstrated too I hear.
What's important to me about this is that it's a chance to hear from the cutting edge what they are doing and why. I'll get to meet a bunch of other folks who - like me - think that real time streams of data will be the next wave. I cannot wait.
Will you be there? If so, tweet me @gherlein.
UPDATE: Unfortunately I won't be there, but one of my staff will be. I'm disappointed I'll miss it but I look forward to the report, and I'll catch part of it via the live web stream.
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( 3 / 401 )I've been digging into Facebook development the past few weeks, as well as Twitter and a few other even newer things. I may or may not be all that interested in actually developing a Facebook application - but I'm extremely interested in the concepts and foundations behind the so-called 'real time web' intersected with the social networking that's surging into the mainstream. As I read different Terms of Service (ToS) and play with various APIs I'm solidifying my opinion that it's all about the data.
Of course, folks will talk about the relationships and the real-time and the social graph. But that's all data. It's all data yet it's only data, and yet it's the most important part of the puzzle. Control the data, or the access to the data, and you have an advantage - if and only if the data is useful. If someone can create value with the data then you have isolated a new natural resource that you can monetize. It may take some time to figure out how to efficiently monetize it, but it will happen. It always happens - only often it's not the first mover that taps the money well.
Most of the work going on feverishly about Facebook application development is purely to get access to your data. Whoops, I meant [ul]Facebook's[/ul]data! For all the protections they provide for your data (and if you don't know them well I recommend you read this blog entry. ) That will at least protect your data from others, but Facebook can do whatever it wants with your data. It can, and is, cross-referencing it, sifting it, looking for connections and useful things. So far they don't seem to be finding ways to convert this natural resource into money (at least that we can see).
But given that they control the data, they could be poised to be a huge provider of '4th party' services.
What's a 4th party service?
A 4th party service is a means of connecting customers to suitable vendors who can meet their needs. This kind of connection is what was always existed in human commerce, but in the age of mass advertising modern culture lost much of it. We came to have conversations about 'brands' and such - like a brand really matters. Brands mean nothing more than 'reputation.' And reputations amongproducts are earned - you cannot really bamboozle your way into it and expect it to last. Funny, reputations among people work the same way. But back to the 4th party concept. I read a very good blog entry about it that defines it as:
" A fourth party logistics provider is primarily coordinator of
other supply chain partners through the ownership and maintenance
of information systems. This is differentiated from third party
logistics providers that provide physical handling and or
transportation of goods."
The definitive book about this revolution is now almost 10 years old. Here's a link:
If you have not read it, buy it now. Of course, I'd love it if you bought it through my link so it would help defray the costs of operating this blog.
So how does this matter with the data? The data holds the reputation. The APIs to access the data are about accessing the reputation. Who do you trust and what do they trust? You will trust that by association. Once you start down that path you won't care about 'branding' messaging any more - unless that brand is one that has built trust through your own trust network!
There are folks who envision a future where the data is not centralized in only a few companies. They say:
" Tomorrow, as everything becomes social, you will be able
to shop Amazon directly from within your iGoogle page without
ever having to visit the site. What's more, Amazon will
show you what your Gmail address book friends have publicly
said about a product and/or its category in any one of
thousands of online communities. Finally, to help you
further Amazon will offer an aggregated view of your
friends' friends opinions in a way that protects their
identity."
That's a great vision. But it will be awhile before we all can own and share our own data as we choose. Today there's data in Facebook that's as valuable as oil sitting under a Middle-East desert. Tapping that well is there for the taking. If they think in the old way and focus on traditional advertising they will miss the boat. That's the past, and I'm of the opinion that the age of advertising is seriously in decline (though most ad folks don't know it yet). However, if Facebook can grasp the revolution happening in the way customers seek data - and try to connect with reputation - then they will have that billion barrel well they can tap for near-endless money. But, and this is the important part: do they have the vision to grasp this? Or will they fall into the trap of the past and just sell demographic targeted advertising?
And perhaps the more important question: who's in a garage startup right now working on the technology for the customer driven real time web - and when do they launch? And who will recognize it?
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( 2.9 / 229 )This is most certainly not my usual technical or leadership kind of blog entry. I've been thinking about something all week and I finally have the time to write my thoughts.
Last Sunday I heard about a project that is well worth supporting. At Saint Boniface Catholic Church in the Tenderloin of San Francisco the homeless can come in during the day and sleep on the pews. There's a lot of reasons that they cannot sleep at night, but primarily it's fear. Fear that their few belongings will be stolen, or that they will be beaten, or perhaps fears that exist only in their own mental illness. This church, run by Franciscans, opens the doors, provides security, feeds them breakfast, and provides them a safe place to sleep.
A safe place to sleep. So many of us take that for granted every night.
Once upon a time, I didn't. It's only luck, or the Grace of God, or Divine Intervention - pick your term - that I didn't end up permanently on the street. Once upon a time - way back in the dark ages when I was a teenager - my family life was pretty rocky. My Mom had a dual addiction: alcohol and bad men. My little brother and two little sisters and I coped the best we could. Life took us to a small cottage behind my Mom's boyfriend at the time brothers house - two rooms and a tiny bathroom for six people. At least that was until Mom came home at 3am and made us all leave. It seemed that Mr. Boyfriend had gotten a bit abusive and she'd decided we had to leave - immediately. So a late thirties woman with four kids - aged from 17 (me) to 8 - ended up sitting in a donut shop until dawn. No money, no home, afraid to go to the only sliver of shelter that we could call 'home.'
We most definitely did not have a safe place to sleep.
Life twisted, and my brother and sisters went to live with my Dad in the midwest. I stayed - ironically - with the brother of my Mom's boyfriend, who owned the cottage and the house we'd stayed in. He gave me a safe place to sleep. I was 17 and trying to stay in high school. Mike, if you ever read this, please know that I am eternally grateful for letting me crash on your sofa for a few months. It may not have been a big deal to you, but it was to me. It was a safe place to sleep. I think about you often. After a while, my Mom got sober (but not necessarily sane) and within months I moved back in with her an my life moved into the next phase of growth.
But last week I sat and listened to a Jesuit Priest (who works with a group of Franciscan's at St. Boniface) speak passionately about the importance of providing a safe place to sleep for those who don't have it at all. I remembered my own past, my own brush with the chaos of the streets, and I deeply, passionately understood what he meant.
In a few minutes I will go crawl into bed next to my wife and sleep comfortably until morning. Just before that I will check on my kids and make sure they are covered up and that they didn't knock their pillow onto the floor. My family has a safe place to sleep. I am counting my blessings.
I hope and pray that you never experienced a lack of a safe place to sleep. I hope that none of us ever will experience that. But tonight, and every night, many people do. My heart reaches out to them, and I plan to do what I can to help. Please look into your own heart and find your own 'safe places to sleep' and do what you can for those less fortunate.
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( 3 / 219 )I spent to evening playing around with Facebook Application Development. I'll tell you about my grand application idea another time (but you can be sure it's an idea centered around the real-time web and Vendor Relationship Management (VRM)). I've built a ton of PHP code in recent years so the only learning curve is the Facebook API.
I have to say that I wanted to create a clean sand box to play in so I bought a SliceHost virtual host to use for development. Incredibly easy and a basic slice good for development is only $20 per month. They say the cost to start a web-based business is dropping by half every two years. With this kind of easy virtual hosting it's got to be dropping faster than that! Within 5 minutes I had an Ubuntu server live with a full LAMP stack installed. Amazing. Do you realize how many hours I've spent formating disks and installing linux over the last 15 years (yes, I started doing linux in 1994).
I bought two books to help climb the API learning curve. Both are helping a lot though are already slightly out of date. They are:
and the excellent reference:
I have two big initial observations:
1. There are very few useful Facebook Applications that I know of;
2. Setting up the Facebook Developer with a new Application is mind-numbingly detailed and complicated
Useful Facebook Applications
I don't know any useful Facebook apps. Do you? There's all sorts of play applications - where have you been, what City should you live in, etc. But what's really useful? By useful I mean one that really uses the social graph to increase the value for the user. I've not seen one yet, but I'm sure they are there. If you know of one I'd appreciate it if you dropped me a note or comment.
Mind Numbing Options
The Facebook New Application page has more configuration settings than you can shake a stick at (as my Grandmother would have said). It's insane! I realize that this is complicated business, but geesh. Anyway, I set up the name (had to do that to create it) and the most important configuration options were on the Canvas tab.
Te Canvas Page URL is the catch all place where the Facebook platform will go to get content to render within a users Facebook page when they are running your application. The Canvas Callback URL is where the majic happens though. That's the calculation engine.
Getting a List of Your Friends
So, the Canvas Callback URL I tossed together does not format or anything - it's just a small extension to the example code they provide.
<?php
require_once 'facebook.php';
$appapikey = 'yourkey';
$appsecret = 'yoursecretkey';
$facebook = new Facebook($appapikey, $appsecret);
echo "<p>Friends:<br>";
$friends = $facebook->api_client->friends_get();
$friends = array_slice($friends, 0, 500);
foreach ($friends as $friend)
{
$uids=array($friend);
$fields=array('first_name','last_name');
$users=$facebook->api_client->users_getInfo($uids,$fields);
foreach ($users as $u)
{
$f=$u['first_name'];
$l=$u['last_name'];
print "<br>$f $l ";
}
}
print "</p>";
?>
This little snip of code will go grab a list of up to 500 friends getting their Facebook UserID. Then it gets those users names and prints them.
Of course, this doesn't do anything useful either, but in about an hour total I was able to fiddle around and learn how to pull real data out of Facebook. Not bad for an evening's fiddling.
What have you done with Facebook apps? What would you like to see done?
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