Slides of talk given at Reboot 9.0 and at Mobile Monday Amsterdam on 4 June 2007

1. Microblogging
Tiny social objects
on the future of participatory media
Jyri Engeström
jyri.jaiku.com

2. Top 100 English Web sites on Alexa
1. Yahoo 31. Friendster
32. BBC Newsline Ticker
2. MSN
35. Internet Movie Database
3. Google 39. Go
4. YouTube 40. Craigslist
42. Flickr
5. MySpace 48. CNN
6. Baidu (Chinese search engine) 50. ImageShack
7. Windows Live 52. AOL
54. PhotoBucket
8. Orkut 59. Xanga (weblogs)
9. QQ (Chinese instant messenger) 67. LiveJournal
70. Geocities
10. Yahoo.co.jp (Japanese portal)
73. Adult Friendfinder
77. Apple
11. Wikipedia
78. RapidShare
13. Microsoft Corp.
79. ImageVenueHosting
14. EBay
80. Digg
15. Blogger
81. Alibaba (trade leads)
16. MegaUpload (file sharing) 84. Rediff (Indian portal)
19. Hi5 87. Googlesyndication
21. RapidShare 92. Skyblog
23. Amazon 94. Adobe
26. TheFaceBook 96. Starware
97. About
29. Fotolog
98. Sourcefourge
30. Passport.net
An increasing number of the most popular services are built on user-generated content.

3. This talk has 3 parts

4. 1. The case for social objects
2. Five principles for building services around them
3. My take on the next wave

5. butterfly, butterfly
fly in the sky
butterfly, butterfly
flies so high
butterfly, butterfly
lands on my thigh
butterfly, butterfly
motionlessly lies
butterfly, butterfly
gracefully dies

7. $580M

9. Is MySpace another butterfly?

11. The sites that fail are just ‘social networks’

13. The sites that work are built around social objects

14. Think about the object as the reason why people
connect with each particular other and not someone else

15. Flickr did it to photos

17. Delicious did it to bookmarks

19. Amazon did it to books

21. The focal object on MySpace is music

23. How does one build a service around social objects?

24. 5 key principles

25. 1. Define your object

26. When we first launched Flickr, it
was a Flash application that was
mainly just a chat environment
with real-time photo sharing.
As we started adding features to the site
itself, like pages that hosted the photos
so that people could visit them at a
unique URL, we had a lot more success
with that. People responded to it, and
the site began to grow.
Eric Costello

28. Think about the objects on these services

29. 2. Define your verbs

31. Silent selling on Igglo

32. 3. Make the objects shareable

33. E-mailable permalinks
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jyri/315809759/
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XhXvlLiVXCo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
Thumbnails and widgets Actual files

34. 4. Turn invitations into gifts

35. PayPal example

36. Skype example

37. 5. Charge the publishers not the spectators

38. Habbo Japan example

39. Freemium business model

40. Quick Checklist
1. What is your object?
2. What are your verbs?
3. How can people share the objects?
4. What is the gift in the invitation?
5. Are you charging the publishers or the spectators?

41. What will be the Next Big Thing in participatory media?

42. Can anything disrupt blogs?

43. Preconditions of a disruptive innovation:
1) Simpler
or
2) Cheaper
or
3) Frees from need to go to inconvenient place

46. ?

54. Preconditions of a disruptive innovation:
1) Simpler
or
2) Cheaper
or
3) Frees from need to go to inconvenient place

55. Jaikus = short posts to the people who follow you

56. Preconditions of a disruptive innovation:
1) Simpler
or
2) Cheaper
or
3) Frees from need to go to inconvenient place

58. “Can you talk?”
“Where are you now?”

59. Latest Jaiku
Availability
(ring profile)
Where you are
(freely named cells)
Who you’re with
(Bluetooth)
What you’re planning next
(calendar)

60. Preconditions of a disruptive innovation:
1) Simpler
or
2) Cheaper
or
3) Frees from need to go to inconvenient place

61. “The Mass-Starbucksization of Nearly Everything”

62. Social objects “to go”
Web communities Microcontent

63. A river of updates
from the people you
follow

64. A river of updates
from the people you
follow

65. A river of updates
from the people you
follow

66. A river of updates
from the people you
follow

67. A river of updates
from the people you
follow

68. A river of updates
from the people you
follow

69. A river of updates
from the people you
follow

70. A river of updates
from the people you
follow

71. Blog post 1 per week
Photo 1 per day
Jaiku 1 per hour

72. Occasional Continuous
Beat Hum
Particle Wave
Videos Blog posts Photos Microblogging Presence

76. crisis

77. “The future’s here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”
Is it free?
Is it quick & easy?
Is it cross-device & multi-channel?
Is it everyday?
Does it bring people closer together?

78. Last but not least
an announcement

85. Dankjewel.
jyri.jaiku.com