Eyal makes a good argument: that virality — users inviting their friends to try an app — is less important (and more annoying) than habitual use of apps: habit is the new viral.
Nir Eyal via TechCrunch
The Curated Web Will Run On Habits
Increasingly, companies will become experts at designing user habits. Curated Web companies already rely on these methods. This new breed of company, defined by the ability to help users find only the content they care about, includes such white-hot companies as Pinterest and Tumblr. These companies have habit formation embedded in their DNA. This is because data collection is at the heart of any Curated Web business and to succeed, they must predict what users will think is most personally relevant.
Curated Web companies can only improve if users tell their systems what they want to see more of. If users use the service sparingly, it is less valuable than if they use it habitually. The more the user engages with a Curated Web company, the more data the company has to tailor and improve the user’s experience. This self-improving feedback loop has the potential to be more useful – and more addictive — than anything we’ve seen before.
However, I think Eyal’s characterization — helping users ‘find only the content they care about’ — is too limited. Steve Jobs said the users don’t know what they want, so by extension, they don’t know what they care about.
Getting back to Eyal’s habituation remark, these new tools will have to meld into the user’s existing behaviors and amplify them in some adjacent way.
For example, I’ve started to experiment with the user of Timely.is instead of Bitly as a way to publish Tweets. It ‘fits the hand’ in the sense that it works much like Bitly: a bookmarklet in the browser that creates an editable tweet with a shortened URL back to the source. Like Bitly, it provides stats on clickthroughs, but adds one additional feature: the ability to queue tweets and have them post over time.
So, I am able to develop a new Timely habit because it is similar to my habituated use of Bitly, but adding an additional capability. And there is a viral vestige: the promotion of Timely in the footer of the tweets.
Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman of Freakonomics discuss the claims that piracy leads to $250 billion a year in loses and 750,000 American jobs lost:
The good news is that the numbers are wrong — as this post by the Cato Institute’s Julian Sanchez explains. In 2010, the Government Accountability Office released a report noting that these figures “cannot be substantiated or traced back to an underlying data source or methodology,” which is polite government-speak for “these figures were made up out of thin air.”
And:
So what’s the real number? At this point, we simply don’t know. And this leads us to a second problem: one which is not so much about data, as about actual economic effects. There are certainly a lot of people who download music and movies without paying. It’s clear that, at least in some cases, piracy substitutes for a legitimate transaction — for example, a person who would have bought the DVD of the new Kate Beckinsale vampire film (who is that, actually?) but instead downloads it for free on Bit Torrent. In other cases, the person pirating the movie or song would never have bought it. This is especially true if the consumer lives in a relatively poor country, like China, and is simply unable to afford to pay for the films and music he downloads.
Do we count this latter category of downloads as “lost sales”? Not if we’re honest.
| — | Scratching An Ankle Is Hard To Beat (via npr) |
Global Risks 2012 - Seventh Edition | World Economic Forum-Global Risks 2012 - Seventh Edition
Economic imbalances and social inequality risk reversing the gains of globalization, warns the World Economic Forum in its report Global Risks 2012. These are the findings of a survey of 469 experts and industry leaders, indicating a shift of concern from environmental risks to socioeconomic risks compared to a year ago. Respondents worry that further economic shocks and social upheaval could roll back the progress globalization has brought, and feel that the world’s institutions are ill-equipped to cope with today’s interconnected, rapidly evolving risks. The findings of the survey fed into an analysis of three major risk cases: Seeds of Dystopia; Unsafe Safeguards and the Dark Side of Connectivity. The report analyses the top 10 risks in five categories - economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological - and also highlights “X Factor” risks, the wild card threats which warrant more research, including a volcanic winter, cyber neotribalism and epigenetics, the risk that the way we live could have harmful, inheritable effects on our genes. Key crisis management lessons from Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters are highlighted in a special chapter.An interesting report that underlines the need to transform our society from an productivity optimizing hence brittle one to a resilient and adaptive society.
But for me this report also raise the need to again argue for a necessary analysis of what is going on and from which standpoint the discussions in Davos is held. One of the core issues underlying many of the problems and risks in this report is the structural transformation of the power and consequently governance, a lot due to the emergence of radically new communication capabilities. Because of that the platform from where this discussion is taking place is a completely different place in the power hierarchies than most of the participants think.
Underlying many of the risks in these lists we can trace the effects of a differently wired world i e an emerging bottom-up model of governance. From the Davos perspective i e the perspective from a traditional and hierarchical standpoint to much of what is going on is perceived as societal threats or risks to address, when in fact they are just threats to the traditional ways of governing! To be able to focus on the real risks and challenges in the world we must understand that a changing communication paradigm is NOT a risk to hedge for or a problem to solve. It is more like the paradigmatic shift when your life changes when you give birth your first child. It is not a problem to solve but rather a case when you mature and realize that the world doesn’t gravitate around you alone anymore, but around the new unit of the family, suddenly and magically appear. It is rather a new prerequisite that you have to come to turn with and understand how to relate to, and consequently adapt to in the best way you can, but not a problem to solve.
Sometimes intelligence is a curse.
Being able to think rationally and weigh up consequences often leads to cold and detached interactions. I sometimes wish I could cloud my mind and truly live in the moment and not care what happens next. I can simulate a carefree attitude by taking calculated risks, but it always feels fake. Like the waitress that smiles at you even though they aren’t happy.
Paul Higgins : read this. It may seem like exotic mathematics but it could have huge and widespread ramificationsMath breakthroughs don’t often capture the headlines—but MIT researchers have just made one that could lead to all sorts of amazing technological breakthroughs that in just a few years will touch every hour of your life.
Freakonomics » Is Higher Income Inequality Associated with Lower Intergenerational Mobility?
It’s striking just how closely related inequality and mobility are. And it’s political dynamite. Why? If income inequality in one generation can be linked to unequal opportunity in the next, then income inequality can’t just be dismissed as the politics of envy. My bet is that this chart that will launch a thousand papers, as economists try to sort out just what these linkages are. Whatever the answer, it will transform our thinking about inequality.
Unlike in real life, our online friendships are not subject to a healthy natural decay.
Paul Higgins: interesting piece on social media and online friends and the difference to the real world.
Full Story: The Mark
