By Thoreau
I admittedly don’t follow business news as closely as I probably should, but what little dribs and drabs that I hear indicate (1) a renewed interest in tech start-ups and (2) a lot of hype over apps for “social media integration.” I’m definitely primed to dislike hype, especially about social media, and I’m admittedly a grumpy old man (I just barely remember Usenet, kids!), but I don’t quite get why people are so sure that a big transformation is imminent this time around. In the 1990’s, the internet was very, very different from what had been before. Not so much because a Geocities site in 1995 was fundamentally better than whatever AOL had been offering, but because use of the internet was spreading much more rapidly than it had previously, and it was going from being the sort of thing that geeks and gurus use to something that your uncle could use to forward email jokes to you. Now I talk to a kid (God, I’m old) and he’s all “Yeah, I’m developing an app that will select news stories for you based on things you liked on Facebook” or “We’re working on an app that will look at your social media contacts and let you know which parties they’re at.”
To me, it sounds like an effort to solve the problems of bored twenty-somethings and TED talk enthusiasts, rather than an effort to make things that might get interest (and revenue) from across society. I mean, Amazon sells lots of things that appeal to lots of people. Google has lots of products. Even Pets.com at least wanted to sell the sorts of things that lots of people have a use for. A slightly different way to aggregate news stories? Eh. The leap from “no internet” to “Even your uncle has email” is much bigger than the leap from “Facebook” to “integrating Facebook with your news feed.”
I know, I know, I’m old, but with experience comes wisdom, and when the tech bubble of the 1990’s popped it was because a lot of companies were unable to figure out what they would do to get customers to spend money on their products. If you tell me that some of these social media apps will be reasonably profitable little endeavors in specific, I believe you. I have no doubt that some of them will find their niche and do well in there. If you tell me that all of these apps and social media integration endeavors will transform the world in the same way that putting everybody online did, I’m far more skeptical.
“I’m developing an app that will select news stories for you based on things you liked on Facebook”
Setting aside for a minute your quite valid point that this is hardly one giant leap for mankind, such an app as this, and related tech, seem likely to make people even more insulated from opposing views or writing that challenges their existing opinions and premises.
We already have plenty of people who get all their news from within the same echo chamber, e.g., (1) Fox News, Drudge, and a handful of rightwing blogs, or (2) NPR, MSNBC, and a handful of lefty blogs.
But now, the best and the brightests of the Millenials are working on technology to aggregate news stories and other pieces based on your already revealed preferences. They’re building a better cocoon, a better insulated echo chamber. Lovely.
I get the feeling this is about a winner-takes-all race for social media dominance. The basic business model is to deliver advertising, and if you get a little bit better at integrating news feeds or whatever, that makes it more likely that you can control more people’s attention for longer and capture more advertising revenue. This is not about changing the world, it’s about maintaining dominance (or creating a serious threat to the established players, which will probably compel them to buy you out for a handsome sum).
People work on that little app because if it goes big across a platform, they are suddenly rich – someone else is handling distribution for them; they just need to get it into the Play store (and work a bit harder to get it into Apple).
It doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot going on – but the big stuff is being handled by the big boys, in large teams with R&D in the millions. The lone kid (or group of young’uns) are working small because they are small.
Remember, it wasn’t a 20 something that put together the internet, it was the DoD. Big $.