So, a couple minutes ago, I had a great idea. I read HARO religiously, and forward pitches that friends might find interesting. Lots of people know what HARO is, but don’t have the time to read fifty “People who have had spoken to the ghost of a beloved pet” requests to get at one that’s relevant to what they do.
There’s an opportunity! I could just create a site that helps people automatically search HARO, and only send them the relevant pitches. Pretty easy to create, pretty cheap to maintain, and it would pay for itself with ads.
So I checked the obvious domain, and — at www.harohelper.com, somebody is doing exactly what I thought of, in exactly the same way.
The problem is, the Twitter guys are right that it’s a bad feature: seeing half the conversation is like sitting next to someone on a cell phone: hearing half the conversation gives you about a tenth of the content.
The Twitter blog explains that they took away the feature for technical reasons — it was too damn hard to match up all those @replies to all the people who’d signed up for them. That’s too bad, because the way the feature really needs to work is even more demanding: Twitter should allow you to see all of your friends’ @replies — and all the @replies to them.
That way, you hear the entire conversation. You’ll be able to see what people are saying about friends, rather than just what friends are saying back to them. And you’ll end up avoiding people who get lots of @replies — anyone whose every post is retweeted by a few dozen people will be impossible to follow.
That will turn Twitter back into a social tool, instead of a broadcasting system. Instead of communicating with people to get secondhand popularity, you’ll be able to communicate with people you’d actually talk to.
The widow Mrs. Howard T. Cassan came to the circus in her flimsy brown dress and her low shoes and went direct to the fortuneteller’s tent. She paid her mite and sat down to hear of her future. Apollonius warned her that she was going to be disappointed.
“Not if you tell me the truth,” said Mrs. Cassan. “I particularly want to know how soon oil is going to be discovered on that twenty acres of mine in New Mexico.”
“Never,” said the seer.
“Well then, when shall I be married again?”
“Never,” said the seer.
“Very well, what sort of man will next come into my life?”
“There will be no more men in your life,” said the seer.
“Well, what in the world is the use of my living then, if I’m not going to be rich, not going to be married again, not going to know any more men?”
“I don’t know,” confessed the prophet. “I only read the futures. I don’t evaluate them.”
“Well, I paid you. Read my future.”
“Tomorrow will be like today, and day after tomorrow will be like day before yesterday,” said Apollonius. “I see your remaining days each as quiet tedious collections of hours. You will not travel anywhere. You will think no new thoughts. You will experience no new passions. Older you will become but not wiser. Stiffer but not more dignified. Childless you are, and childless you shall remain. Of that suppleness you once commanded in your youth, of that strange simplicity which once attracted a few men to you, neither endures, nor shall you recapture them anymore. People will talk to you and visit you out of sentiment or pity, not because you have anything to offer them. Have you ever seen an old cornstalk turning brown, dying, but refusing to fall over, upon which stray birds alight now and then, hardly remarking what it is they perch on? That is you. I cannot fathom your place in life’s economy. A living thing should either create or destroy according to its capacity and caprice, but you, you do neither. You only live on dreaming of the nice things that you would like to have happen to you but which never happen; and you wonder vaguely why the young lives about you which you occasionally chide for a fancied impropriety never listen to you and seem to flee at your approach. When you die, you will be buried and forgotten, and that is all. The morticians will enclose you in a worm-proof casket, thus sealing even unto eternity the clay of your uselessness. And for all the good or evil, creation or destruction, that your living might have accomplished, you might just as well never have lived at all. I cannot fathom the purpose in such a life. I can see in it only vulgar, shocking waste.”
“I though you said you didn’t evaluate lives,” snapped Mrs. Cassan.
“I’m not evaluating; I’m only wondering. Now you dream of an oil well to be found on twenty acres of land you own in New Mexico. There is no oil there. You dream of some tall, dark, handsome man to come wooing you. There is no man coming, dark, tall or otherwise. And yet you will dream on in spite of all I tell you; dream on through your little round of hours, sewing and rocking and gossiping and dreaming; and the world spins and spins and spins. Children are born, grow up, accomplish, sicken and die; you sit and rock and sew and gossip and live on. And you have a voice in the government, and enough people voting the same way you vote could change the face of the world. There is something terrible in that thought. But your individual opinion on any subject in the world is absolutely worthless. No, I cannot fathom the reason for your existence.”
“I didn’t pay you to fathom me. Just tell me my future and let it go at that.”
“I have been telling you your future! Why don’t you listen? Do you want to know how many more times you will eat lettuce or boiled eggs? Shall I enumerate the instances you will yell good-morning to your neighbors across the fence? Must I tell you how many more times you will buy stockings, attend church, go to movie picture shows? Shall I make a list showing how many more gallons of water you will boil making tea, how many more combinations of cards will fall to you at auction bridge, how often the telephone will ring in your remaining years? Do you want to know how many more times you will scold the paper-carrier for not leaving your copy in the spot that irks you least? Must I tell you how many more times you will become annoyed at the weather because it rains or fails to rain according to your wishes? Shall I compute the pounds of pennies you will save shopping at bargain centers? Do you want to know all that? For that is your future, doing the same small futile things you have done for the last fifty-eight years. You face a repetition of your past, a recapitulation of the digits in the adding machine of your days. Save only one bright numeral perhaps: there was love of a sort in your past; there is none in your future.”
“Well, I must say, you are the strangest fortuneteller I ever visited.”
“It is my misfortune only to be able to tell the truth.”
“Were you ever in love?”
“Of course. But why do you ask?”
“There is a strange fascination about your brutal frankness. I could imagine a girl, or an experienced woman rather, throwing herself at your feet.”
“There was a girl, but she never threw herself at my feet. I threw myself at hers.”
“What did she do?”
“She laughed.”
“Did she hurt you?”
“Yes, but nothing has hurt me very much since.”
“I knew it! I knew a man of your terrible intenseness had been hurt by a woman sometime. Women can do that to a man, can’t they?”
“I suppose so.”
“You poor, poor man! You are not so very much older than I am, are you? I, too, have been hurt. Why couldn’t we be friends, or more than friends perhaps, and patch up the torn shreds of our lives? I think I could understand you and comfort you and care for you.”
“Madam, I am nearly two thousand years old, and all that time I have been a bachelor. It is too late to start over again.”
“Oh, you are being so delightfully foolish! I love whimsical talk! We could get on splendidly, you and I; I am sure of it!”
“I’m not. I told you there were no more men in your life. Don’t try to make me eat my own words, please. The consultation is ended. Good afternoon.”
She started to say more, but there was no longer anyone to talk to. Appollonius had vanished with that suddenness commanded by only the most practised magicians. Mrs. Cassan went out into the blaze of sunshine. There she encountered Luther and Kate. It was then precisely ten minutes before Kate’s petrification.
“My dear,” said Mrs. Cassan to Kate, “That fortuneteller is the most magnetic man I ever met in my whole life. I am going to see him again this evening.”
“What did he say about the oil? asked Luther.
“Oh, he was frightfully encouraging,” said Mrs Cassan.
This is proof that SEO has a long way to go. Apparently you can start a fake business, use it to market another fake business, sprinkle in some completely dishonest hype, and do some black-hat link building — the net result is attention from Techcrunch, the Washington Post, and possibly Forbes.
The bad news is that this was all unethical stuff meant to pump up a barely legitimate business. The good news is that if this is the kind of result you can get by marketing something fake, imagine what you can get my marketing something real.
I would be negative about the story, but the author doesn’t take any of it too seriously, and he has a talent for hype. As long as this doesn’t become a habit…
Disney, Hulu, and the Death of the Soviet Superstars
In 1965, 69.6 million people saw a single movie: Operation Y. I’ve seen Operation Y, and it’s not very good. It had its moments, but overall it’s nothing special.
What is special is the scope. It was the biggest-budget movie in Russia, and their cinema system was not exactly designed to accommodate lots of independent studios pushing edgy new stuff. So Operation Y, a not especially great movie, turned into a Russian cultural touchstone, because nobody in Russia could avoid the movie, or avoid people who had seen the movie and hadn’t seen anything better in a long, long time.
Every time I see a new, big-budget movie, or read a long feature article in a magazine, I think about Operation Y. That kind of breadth and ubiquity is only possible with captive markets and monopolistic pricing. Whoever made the one huge movie in Russia that year could make it as grandiose as he wanted — the budget basically rounded up to the nearest infinity.
American studios don’t have that, but they have something close: with high upfront costs, byzantine distribution, and tough IP laws, they had the same power to be dull and extravagant.
We’ve been drifting away from that for a long time, as it gets harder and harder for studios to capture a set number of dollars for every viewer. As the economics of the business deteriorate, they have to focus less on the brassy, bombastic hits, and more on fare with a narrower appeal. One result is that the average movie watcher will be happier. Another is that some day surprisingly soon, big-budget movies will look as anachronistic as leather-bound books.
The news that Disney is taking a stake in Hulu is a reminder that our own Operation Y days are over. Disney is funding a company that will push Disney’s own content, for much less than Disney would otherwise make on it. Hulu doesn’t just undersell Disney: it lets viewers change their habits, in a way that will kill Disney’s revenue. This kind of deal might be the only way they can survive, but if they do, they’ll be unrecognizable.
Goodbye, giant budgets.
Goodbye, lowering the lowest common denominator.
Kiss Big Ugly Media goodbye: Operation Y
(Incidentally, Operation Y had an even more popular sequel, about marriage by capture, also known as bridal kidnapping, also known as rape plus a get-out-of-jail-free-and-get-a-wife-too card. It’s a comedy.)
Here’s what he’s missing: he’s exaggerating the importance of Twitter, but Pagerank is gradually giving way to Participationrank: how much interaction and attention a person gets, rather than how many links a page gets.
Yes, it’s easy to overstate Twitter’s role in this. But can you really imagine a future in which Google is going to give more authority the often-linked rather than the often talked-about?
For example, consider a steel industry expert who gets quoted by news outlets every day, but has a site with basically no content and absolutely no updates. Does Google a) assume that this person is less influential than a blogger writing about the same subject, because the blogger gets more links, or b) assume that the expert is more influential, and that Google’s algorithm should catch up?
Twitter isn’t necessarily the medium that will make a difference, but Google is going to incorporate attention of all kinds when deciding how important someone is. Slatten is dead wrong when he dismisses this: in the future, someone who gets poked a lot on Facebook, has lots of teammates on an online game, or gets constantly retweeted, will be treated as more important by Google (if only when talking about those subjects).
If Google doesn’t doesn’t learn to incorporate social influence rather than just links, someone else will. Why not?
Let’s put it this way. Over the years, we have created and sustained many of the world’s most durable brands. We make a lot more hits than companies who think up their own symbols and names. I’m not suggesting that a company couldn’t get it right with a stroke of insight or genius or luck. But if it’s your own brand, how can you possibly be objective? I mean, would you name your own baby … I mean, of course you would name your own baby. But wouldn’t you ask your friends and family for suggestions and recommendations? Perhaps they would open your eyes to a name you’d never considered.
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Oh, the bio: I work at a web design company. I read blog entries from the last few minutes, and musty books from the last few decades.
