Geeks Tolerate Apple Hypocrisy Until They Mess with Porn

On February 24, 2010, In Biz, By Tac Anderson

I’ve posted  several times about Apple’s continued hypocrisy and my love/hate relationship with their products. Like most people, I love their design and I’m glad they’re pushing the industry but I have always hated their closed culture and hyper controlling attitude.

Full disclosure I used to work at HP (who is now a client). Microsoft, T-Mobile (who sells Google’s Android phones) and HTC are all clients. But my wary feelings towards Apple have been around long before I worked in tech. I’ll take choice and glitches over design and limitations.

MG Seigler, TechCrunch’s editor and self proclaimed Apple fanboi, has a post about Apple’s latest move to block porn from the app store. I think this is a fascinating move by Apple. My personal stance on morality is that first I believe everyone has their own free agency to do as they see fit and it’s not my business. Second I personally dislike anything that’s addicting. This goes for drugs, alcohol and pornography. (Yes porn’s addicting). So while I want to applaud Apple for this move, it’s not any type of moral victory, as MG points out.

Problem number one is that while Apple is removing most of these sexy apps from the App Store, it’s not removing all of them. So who gets to stay? Big publishers like Sports Illustrated and Playboy. In fact, not only is Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit 2010 app not being removed, it’s being featured in the App Store. Both it and the Playboy app clearly violate the new rules of the more prudish App Store, yet they get to stay.

The TechCrunch post has well over 100 comments as I write this and is trending on many news aggregation sites. Apple has struck a nerve. Now anyone who has studied technology adoption understands tech’s dirty little secret: Porn

VHS, BluRay, broadband adoption (what pictures and videos do you think people so desperately wanted to look at in the late 90’s), and search can all thank their success, in very large part, to the porn industry. That’s why Apple’s stance against porn seemed so interesting.

Google and Android have no such qualms about porn and several commenters to the opportunity to proclaim their “love” for Android. I also have to doubt Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace will follow Apple’s lead here. It is still in it’s infancy and won’t really see it’s potential until Windows Phone 7 comes out and Microsoft typically takes a hands off approach to content and partner development.

Ultimately I have to think this is a move towards Apple to placate publishers. As MG points out Apple hasn’t removed Apps with similar types of content from Sports Illustrated and Playboy.  Again from TechCrunch we see a hint at the future in Apple’s response?

As Apple VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller explained earlier to the New York Times, it’s because they’re well-known companies known for that content. Yet, he also cited women being upset about feeling degraded and parents being upset about kids having access to sexy apps as the main reason Apple is cracking down on them. The omission of the fact that parents probably also don’t want their kids downloading the Playboy app, or that some women might also find the Swimsuit app degrading is laughable.

I imagine that Apple users will get their porn, especially with the iPad coming out. It’s just going to come from established (and struggling) publishers.I just wonder how much longer developers and users will put up with Apple?

[UPDATE] Yep, thought so:  New “Explicit” Category in App Store Could Herald Return of Sexy Apps

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Social Media is a Wicked Problem

On July 28, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I know this is a ‘no duh’ for most people but I had an epiphany about the way I think about content “consumption”.

We don’t consume content. In fact every interaction with every piece of online content only serves to create more content.

Every click, every rating, share, new link, comment, new blog post, etc, just creates more content. More 0’s & 1’s on a database more records.

This is why data is expanding exponentially. And as the data expands exponentially that creates more interactions resulting in more content resulting in more……you get the idea.

There’s actually a scientific term for this and it’s called a Wicked problem. Search is a Wicked problem. Social media is a Wicked(er) problem.

I imagine that social media measurement and search provide a level of complexity that made search in the late 90’s look like child’s play.

Photo cred to me

This blog was originally posted at New Comm Biz

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I Don’t Care What Google Thinks I Should do with My Content

On July 5, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I’d like to ask your forgiveness while I re-use an overused analogy here.

If your only marketing objective is to drive awareness of your message then why do you drive people to a site?

This is like going to a cocktail party and trying to get a girl to come back to your place for small talk.

If there’s no conversion, no purchase, no download, then why do you care if someone comes to your site to get that message. I would argue in many cases it would be better if they didn’t have to come to your site to find the message.

When I asked Steve Rubel why he decided not to keep both his Life Stream and his blog his initial response was because Google penalizes you for duplicate content.

I was kind of surprised that was his reason. I haven’t worried about duplicate content or SEO in general for my blog in almost a year. The only two “stats” I really care about are RSS subscriber numbers (because I don’t think RSS is dead) and comments, be they comments on the blog, Twitter, FriendFeed or somewhere else. (BTW if you haven’t please feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed.)

Other than my own name I don’t care anymore what key words I rank highest for. If this site were trying to sell something, or run advertising then I’d care.

I care more about people reading my next post then I do about who read my last post.

And I don’t really care if they do that here or somewhere else.

And if Google’s not smart enough to tell the difference between good content re-purposed on a good site, versus good content scraped on a spam site then that’s their problem not mine.

My personal take is that I want my content all over the place. That’s why you’ll see this post on my life stream, on my blog and on the Thinkers and Doers blog. My blog is the main source, it’s why I wrote it but it’s also relevant to those other sites. You’ll also see this post on Social Media Today and My Venture Pad. Plus if you or your company is a subscriber to Lexis Nexis, Thomas Reuters or you have a Kindle, you can find my blog which is syndicated through Newstex.

If that penalizes me in Google then so be it.

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Image via my Flickr Stream

This post was originally posted on New Comm Biz

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In fact for a view into the total fragmentation of this one post I’ve embeded the FriendFeed search for this post. You’ll also see many of the tweets and RT’s in the Disqus comments.

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How to Win the Real-Time Web Publishing Battle

On May 22, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
www.Army.mil
Image by Army.mil via Flickr

As the Web moves into hyper-drive the ability for organizations to turn out high quality content has never been more important. From my own experience as well as what I’ve seen others publish the life span of link shared on Twitter is 5 minutes. After that it’s old news waiting to be discovered by search engines.

While Twitter is not your only distribution vehicle this example is indicative of all Web streams (which, eventually, the Web will simply be a network of streams).

The notable exception to this rule is the RT. Links that get re-tweeted have another 5 minutes of life. The more RT’s the more 5 minute life spans. This is also true of other LifeStreams like FriendFeed and Facebook, except instead of a RT you’re hoping for a like or a comment. This resurfaces the content and shares it out that persons network.

This does not mean that companies and other content producers need to turn on the firehose. (I know this is a futile plea but I’ll make it anyway) Please do not focus on quantity. Focus on quality.

The number one way; the best, most cost/time efficient way to win the real-time publishing battle is to create high quality highly shareable content. Create compelling content and then make it easy for others to repurpose it. You can attempt to higher an army of content producers or you can enable the existing army* or content producers out there to re-create your content.

*Your existing army is much larger than you are thinking about right now. Most companies think about their customers advocates and their employees but the must underutilized node in every companies social media strategy is the partner node. More on that later.

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What Can Corporate Marketing Learn From Digg?

On April 2, 2009, In Comm, By Tac Anderson
A chocolate-chip cookie.
Image via Wikipedia

Who doesn’t like cookies?

The ability to share your companies content on social networking sites should be a huge piece of your social media distribution strategy.

Part of the problem is that there are so many options and platforms out there where do you focus your efforts. The VP of Biz Dev at Digg has some great suggestions. You really should read the whole thing but I’ll highlight some key areas and as usual add my own color commentary.

Want Success on Digg? Think Choc Chip Cookies – ReadWriteWeb

Bob Buch, VP of business development for Digg spoke at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today and explained that if you want successful social media integration, you need to think chocolate chip cookies. “Much like social media, choc chip cookies are made up of five key ingredients,” he explained, “and if you want to succeed, you need to know what those ingredients are.”

5 Ingredients for Social Media Success

1. Sharing: If you love something, set it free
2. Integration: Don’t try to do everything yourself
3. People: People who know: ROFLCopter, LMAO, PWND, Noob
4. Platform: One to one is now one to many
5. Authenticity: Stay true to your core competency

While I think the analogy is cute and people like numbered lists, the real gems IMO were the suggestions around content sharing. There are several great examples he shares but here’s my two favorite.

Give Visitors a Customized Experience
He has a great example of how Wired figured out where there traffic was coming from and focused their sharing efforts around those sites. I think this is a great way to learn who your customers really are. Most companies/sites take a shotgun approach trying to be everywhere. By focusing you can be so much more effective (of course that’s true for just about everything).

Automatic Syndication
Butch shares success around Facebook connect. A service I at first dismissed but have more and more been thinking about using. This may have pushed me over the edge.

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bit.ly takes you along the river of content

On July 23, 2008, In Comm, By Tac Anderson

I think it’s well established that I geek out about weird things when it comes to content/communication on the Web. So I hope you’ll bear with me while I yet again show my geeky side.

For those of you not familiar with URL shorteners; A URL shortener is a servive that takes really long URL’s and turns them into much shorter URL’s, making it easier to share a URL without it getting broken.

TinyURL is the first URL shortener I was familiar with. With the rise of microblogging services like Twitter, which limits your posts to 140 characters, URL shorteners have seen a tremendous up take in use.

bit.ly is the most recent URL shortener to hit the market and has packed some tremendous innovation into its service. For a full report check out Read/Write Web’s glowing review.

Example: When I want to share a blog post from my HP blog, which, like many corporate websites has insanely long URL’s, I can either try and send this URL

http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/marketing/archive

/2008/07/22/farewell-vince-hp-s-1-blogger.aspx

Or I can use bit.ly and share this URL http://bit.ly/2I0DwA.

bit.ly shows long tail of content

Among the many cool features with bit.ly is the ability fo you to see how many people are clicking the link and where they are comming from. bit.ly is also supposed to generate a thumbnail of the site but that doesn’t seem to be working at the moment.

As you can see from this photo, most people clicked on the link in Twitter, which is where I shared the link. The link was also accessed via Twiiter app betwittered and URL tracking site twitturly. The link then flowed on to my FriendFeed page where another peson accessed it and then went onto Facebook via the FriendFeed app I have on my Facebook profile where yet another person accessed it. There are also about 16 people that clicked the link that bit.ly couldn’t track.

To me this is fascinating (like I said, I’m a geek about this stuff). bit.ly is a free service and only stores the last 15 links you shortened. I would gladly pay for a premium service that stored more URL’s and gave me a time line for when people clicked.

I can’t wait to see what other features bit.ly comes out with.

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