Tonight my daughter, a.k.a. Little Sweetie, requested a bedtime story that was “more educational”. (Apparently she didn’t like my version of the Three Little Pigs, in which the Big Bad Wolf helps the pigs with their unwanted facial hair.) After trying her on the tragedy of the commons — my version stressed the importance of taking care of common assets, rather than the virtue of enclosures — I landed on the story of DeCSS.
DeCSS was one of the most colourful stories that made it into my doctoral research. The version that I included in my dissertation didn’t seem quite right for a six-year-old, so I came up with a slightly revised edition that took some small significant liberties with the facts. Here it is:
Once upon an eon* there was a little boy who wanted to watch Star Wars on DVD. But he didn’t have a TV, and he couldn’t watch Star Wars on his computer because his computer didn’t know how to play a DVD. But he was a clever boy, and so he decided to write his own computer program — a program that would let him watch his DVD.
As soon as he got his program working he sat down to watch Star Wars. It was great! In fact it was so great that it made him feel sorry for all the other kids with computers like his — computers that couldn’t play DVDs. So he shared his computer program with other kids by putting it on the Internet, where other people could find the program if they needed it.
A few weeks later, there was a knock on the door. BAM! BAM!
“Who’s there?” the little boy asked.
“The police! We want to look at your computer. We think you are the boy who put the DVD-watching program on the Internet.”
“Come back with a warrant!” the little boy said. **
“Humpf!” said the police officer, and she went away.
The next day, there was another knock at the door. BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! This time, there were two police officers.
“Do you have a warrant?” the little boy asked.
“Yes!” the police officers shouted.
The little boy opened the door. “Why do you want to look at my computer?” he asked.
“The people who make movies don’t want you to watch DVDs on your computer,” the police officer explained. “You aren’t allowed to share your DVD-watching program anymore.”
But the police forgot one thing: the little boy wasn’t alone. When the little boy shared his computer program on the Internet, he made thousands of friends all over the world — friends who appreciated how nice he was to share his computer program.
And one of those friends had a great idea. If the police wouldn’t let them share their computer programs, they’d share something else — something the police weren’t allowed to keep them from sharing. Like art, or music, or poetry: the law says that people have to be allowed to make and share whatever art they want.
So the little boy’s friends took his computer program and hid it in pictures. They hid it in songs. They even hid it inside a movie.
The police were mad. The people who made the DVDs were mad. But they all knew that they couldn’t keep the little boy and his friends from sharing their art work…and from sharing a computer program that helped a lot of people all over the world.
* Little Peanut was very insistent that all of tonight’s stories began, “once upon an eon” instead of “once upon a time”.
** Little Sweetie and I spent some time earlier this evening role-playing the proper response to law enforcement authorities who want to sweep the house for media downloads and unlicensed Disney merchandise.
A few weeks ago Rob and I went out for dinner at r.tl, which must have the best URL of any restaurant in the world. A waitress brought us our menus, and asked if we’d eaten there before.
“We were here for Valentine’s Day,” I said. “Actually, I think you were our server.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember,” she apologized. “It was a busy night.”
She handed us our menus, and as she turned to leave us, we pulled out our iPhones. Suddenly she pivoted back.
“I do remember you! You were the couple who spent your entire Valentine’s dinner online!”
Guilty as charged. I’d love to claim special circumstances — we did relaunch the Social Signal website last February 14 — but the truth is that an awful lot of our couple time involves the gentle tap, tap, tap of fingers on touchscreens and keyboards. As the parents of young kids, “us” time happens after the kids go to bed, when we break out the laptops and visit with our friends on Twitter. Our most frequent date-night hangout is the restaurant that knows to seat us by the power outlets. And when we do go out without our Macbooks, you can count on the frequent appearance of our iPhones to snap a surreptitious picture of the menu’s typos, or to tweet a thought or question that we want to share with our pals.
Technology has always been a big part of our relationship, but there’s no question that Twitter has taken both our techno-fetishism and our relationship to new heights. I think of us a married couple, as co-parents, as business partners, as creative collaborators and as friends.
And increasingly, I also think of us as a Twitter couple. Nothing delights me more than seeing a tweet from a total stranger like “It’s hard to think of a cuter Twitter couple that @awsamuel and @robcottingham.” (Who was that tweet from? I can’t remember — nor can any of the Twitter search tools turn it up. But that’s a dilemma for another post.)
So while I normally sit out the promotional frenzy of online awards, I now have my heart set on winning the #bestcouple write-in category in this year’s Shorty Awards. The Shorty Awards honor “the best producers of short real-time content” on Twitter, and in our case, a lot of that content is an extension of our relationship as a couple.
Here are the Twitter practices that I hope deserve that title — and which could support your relationship, too:
Keep in touch: Rob and I keep track of what the other person is doing throughout the day by following each other’s tweets and mentions.
Keep a record: Some people look at old photos to remind them of their romantic highs. I look at our tweets and instantly remember where we were and what we were thinking about.
Be direct: Rob and I have as many DMs as public tweets. I often check in with him privately during the day to ask for advice or feedback at a moment when I can’t talk by phone.
Get perspective: Seeing your sweetie interact with other people — whether online or in real life — is a great chance to see them with fresh eyes and remember why you fell in love. Rob’s Twitter bon mots are a never-ending source of amusement (or groaning).
Get encouragement: A committed relationship takes work. The affectionate cheers and teasing we get from our friends — much of it directed at how much time we spend on Twitter! — lets us know that there are people rooting for us as a team.
Share the love: Loving moments — yours or others’ — are a great upper. We share our happy moments when we have them, and draw inspiration from others’ when times are hard.
You can see these conversations for yourself at WeTweet.ca, a site I created to present the case for nominating Rob and me as the best couple on Twitter. Yes, I care about winning #bestcouple so much that I have spent the past week mastering the intricacies of historical Twitter search, Excel-to-CSV conversion, and CSV-to-Wordpress upload. (A subsequent post will cover the tech side of this project.)
The result is a site that captures virtually every tweet between us for the past year. If that sounds like a crazy amount of effort to put into campaigning for a purely notional award, it’s craziness that’s inspired by sanity: sanity of a totally unexpected kind.
Most of my life looks not unlike what I imagined for myself growing up: Career. Kids. Friends. A home of my own.
The part I never imagined is my life is Rob. Sure, I thought I might get married, but I never had particularly high expectations for what that marriage might be like. My parents divorced when I was a baby, and from what I saw of their subsequent relationships and those of their friends, I thought of marriage as an institution in which conflict, infidelity and heartbreak were the norm.
But here I am in a marriage that is not only a joyful part of my life, but the joy that the rest of my life is built upon. And while I have a superstitious unease about sharing that joy — what if talking about it makes it evaporate? — I also remember, too well, what it’s like to doubt whether real love and commitment is even possible. Putting our real-life love on Twitter, in all its magnificent beauty and horrifying minutia, is one way to let other people see that yes, you can have what you fear you can’t have.
Winning the #bestcouple title won’t make our marriage stronger or our fights less difficult, or even make it onto the invitations for our 10th wedding anniversary celebration next summer. (Probably.) What it will do is remind me that the thing I want most painfully, desperately and improbably is possible…and possible not in spite of my geekiness, but partly because of it.
While you’re nominating us for #bestcouple on Twitter, I hope you’ll stop to think about whatever you secretly and at times hopelessly long to achieve. Your heart’s desire may not be reducible to a Shorty category or Twitter hashtag, but believe me when I tell you that no matter how impossible it seems, you can have it.
With so many businesses looking to tap the power of social media — and so many experts interested in selling to them — it’s no wonder that headlines like this one flourish across the web. Promise people bottom-line maximizing, brand-leveraging, social-media-packed goodness, and they will tweet and retweet like little demons. Best of all, they won’t even peek inside: they’ll set up keyword searches that automatically grab and tweet any sexy-sounding headline (like this one) using an automatic RSS-to-Twitter service.
But does automatic tweeting add value, or does it devalue Twitter by delivering automated content instead of personally curated links? I’m of two minds. You could say it’s a victimless crime: auto-tweeting actually helps the SEO of the originating post. But I tend to think it breaks an implicit promise, that I’m tweeting stuff because I found it useful or at least intriguing.
If you’re reading this post, I’m betting it’s because my sexy title has gotten automatically sucked up and tweeted by someone you are currently following. (One clue: the tweet you read was posted via twitterfeed or another RSS-to-Twitter service.) So please tell me what you think:
Do you feel scammed if you were led here by an automatic (twitterfeed) tweet, rather than an actual human recommendation? Or are you still delighted to have found this interesting and provocative post? Please let me know in comments below — you’re helping to make up my mind.
I’m looking forward to this year’s SXSW (including lots of panels featuring great women), but I’ve noticed that the all-male panel is alive and well. I’d like to offer up my XX chromosomes (among other qualities) to round out one of the already-scheduled panels…and I’d love to hear from other women who, like me, are available to XX up an all-male panel. (If you want to know why I care, read one of these great blog posts by Allyson Kapin or Mary Hodder.)
So if you’re a female speaker available to join an SXSW panel, leave your quick summary bio and contact info in a comment below (see my example) or on the SXSW page on the Speaker’s Wiki . I’ll try and get the URL out and around.
And if you’re a panel convenor with an all-male panel, I hope you’ll use this to mix it up a bit. I’d love to see a SXSW where all-male panels are all done.
When a business or organization takes on its first social media project, the communications team typically worries about how to handle a deluge of negative comments or inappropriate content. Rob and I always tell people that what they should worry about is the exact opposite: namely, getting no participation at all.
If you are running a project that relies on user-generated content, you have already discovered how hard it is to get people to contribute that content. Whether you’re asking people for blog posts, videos or even photos (the easiest contribution to make, typically) you’re asking them to go to some significant effort in order to add their distinctiveness to your own. So most online community projects, particularly in their early days, rely on some combination of incentives to get fingers on keyboards, cameras into hands, and content onto the site.
When we do an engagement and promotions plan for a new social media project, we spend a lot of time thinking about different kinds of incentives — contests, recognition, events — as well as other hooks for encouraging contribution. But there is nothing like switching roles to make you see a challenge in a new way. Through experience as a contributor to someone else’s site — the Harvard Business Review — I’ve discovered a whole new way to create value for your contributors: editing.
We typically think of editing as a service to the readers of a site, by making content as readable (or watchable) as possible. But quality editing is a tremendous service to contributors, too. Particularly in the fast-turnaround world of blogging, which requires people to write frequently and quickly, an editor can help turn the daunting prospect of writing a good, widely-read blog post into an achievable goal.
Why is quality editing such a compelling incentive for contributors? Let me use my own experience as an example. When I started blogging for HBR, it was purely for the exposure. But the editorial guidance I got from my editor, Scott Berinato, quickly became an even greater source of value.
Scott is an extremely experienced editor and writer who takes my decent posts and makes them much, much better: compare my first draft of a post about iPhones and impatience with the final version on HBR as edited by Scott. Some of the lines that got specifically tweeted — like Patience is a virtue. There’s not an app for that. — were Scott’s, not mine. And while Scott often makes significant changes to my work, his edits consistently capture what I think of as my voice and message. In fact, when my husband read the iPhone piece, the line he specifically complimented me on — the “what, you don’t?” — was, once again, Scott’s.
Scott’s skilled editing motivates me to contribute by providing benefits like:
Efficiency: I can write my blog posts more quickly because I don’t have to obsess over every turn of phrase or feel like I’ve completely nailed the post. Even if I feel like it’s only about 80% of the way there, I ship my post off to Scott because I know he’ll be able to fix what I couldn’t.
Reputation: My audience and impact has grown because my posts for Harvard are much stronger.
Trust: Because I trust Scott’s work I don’t need to get into a long back-and-forth over every edit; and when I make changes to his changes, he usually accepts them.
Learning: Getting Scott’s feedback on my pieces for HBR has improved my writing across the board, since I now hold the rest of my blogging to a higher standard.
Inspiration: Scott has suggested post topics and occasionally asked me to cover emerging stories, which encourages me to tackle new areas I wouldn’t have considered.
Editors like Scott can help you elicit exactly the kind of content you want: high-quality content from thoughtful, informed contributors. Contributors who care about the quality of their posts, videos and photos will deeply appreciate your help in getting from good to great. For editing to be a real incentive for contributors, it has to be:
Accurate: Your contributors need to know that you’ll correct any spelling or grammatical errors or flag any issues that need fact-checking. They know that you’re protecting their reputation by keeping them from looking silly.
Deep: You have to offer more than copy editing. Your editors have to immerse themselves in the text or video that’s been contributed, and think about how to get the message across in the most engaging and effective way. That may involve some rewriting, recutting or requests for additional/different content.
Skilled: Your editing has to make the content better. Sounds simple, but I can’t tell you how often I have worked with editors or collaborators who make my work worse.
Timely: The faster you can get contributions posted online, the better. If it takes you more than a week to get material posted — and that’s with solid editorial attention, not a quick scan and approval — then you’re going to lose contributors.
Tailored: A good editor connects with the voice of the content creator, and revises the content in a way that’s consistent with that voice. But not every editor connects with every writer or videographer, so you are more likely to make a great editorial connection with your contributors if you can do a bit of matchmaking or experimentation to ensure a good fit.
Sensitive: Your editors’ work is to support and strengthen your contributors’ work, not redo it. Your editors need to be tactful and constructive in the way they provide feedback, and contributors have to feel like they have the final word over their content (or at least the option to pull it if it no longer meets their own standards).
If this sounds like a major investment of time, money or effort on your part, you’re right. But content contributors are a lot like customers: it’s easier to keep the contributors you have than it is to recruit one. And when you offer great editing, you build your best contributors’ commitment, loyalty and output.
This weekend was the first time I found myself on the receiving end of Facebook’s new and more nuanced privacy settings. An old friend popped up in the Facebook sidebar, which rotates an assortment of different people in your friend list. On a whim, I clicked her picture, so I could catch up on her latest news.
Instead I found myself staring at a virtually blank screen showing only her minimal info: clearly, she’d put me on a list of friends who would only have access to her limited profile. I’d been demoted from friend to “friend”™.
This reminded me of an assignment I’d received in my ninth-grade Latin class, when I had to translate the following story:
A son brags to his father about all the friends he has, only to meet with skepticism. “You call these people are your friends,” the father says. “Let’s see if you’re right. Slaughter a goat, and put it in a sack. Then go to the house of one of your friends. Tell him you have killed a man, and you need his help disposing of the body.”
The son does as his father says, and arrives at the house of his first friend. He presents his bloody sack, and asks his friend to help him dispose of the (supposedly human) remains. The friend is horrified and sends him away.
The son repeats the scene at the home of his next friend, who also refuses to help. The son visits friend after friend, but none are willing to help him conceal his crime.
Finally he returns to his father, defeated, and explains that all of his friends have turned him away.
“I have only one friend,” the father says. “Go to his house, and explain that you are my son. Show him the sack, and ask if he will help you.”
Once again, the son does as his father says. This time, the father’s friend – a true friend – immediately offers his assistance in burying the evidence of the son’s supposed crime.
I can’t remember the Latin translation, but the lesson stuck with me: there’s a big difference between “friends” and friends.
You can take a few lessons from this story yourself: the futility of making your kids take Latin. The importance of actually looking inside any blood-covered sack before disposing of it. The opportunity for a hit Facebook application called “Goat Bag”.
I won’t define friendship as the willingness to conspire in covering up a homicide, but there is undoubtedly a difference between friendship as it was classically understood and the click-here-to-accept notion of friendship that has become commonplace online.
Simply using the word “friend” to describe a network-to-network connection effectively cheapens the notion of friendship. And if you’ve heard those implicit air quotes in the way people sometimes use the word friend to describe a social network connection, you know how quickly the currency of friendship is getting devalued.
There’s a simple solution — one you see on a variety of networks. Instead of using the term friend — a term that should have real meaning and value — networks can use words like buddy, connection, or contact.
Meanwhile, it’s up to us users to remember what real friendship involves: Genuine conversation (not mutual monitoring of status updates). Trust (not just putting someone on a “trusted contacts” list). Providing support (and not just of the tech variety).
We all know what the word friend can mean — and what it means to have real friends in our lives. Let’s not get confused by the online appropriation of the word “friend” to describe whoever happens to be at the other end of a T1 line.
Some new mothers worry about when they’ll get to sleep through the night; I worried about when I’d get to write a novel. I’d always figured that I’d write a book some day, but now that I had a kid, would some day ever come?
For me, the answer lay online. Not in an online writing group: I felt far too protective of my writing to consider sharing it with people I’d never met. But I was brave enough to reach out to other local writers by using the web to connect. I found a couple of other writer friends who liked the idea of starting a creative writing group for people like us: people who earned a living as professional writers or communicators, but wanted an outlet for personal writing. I created a simple web site that explained the purpose of the group, with an application form for would-be members. Once we had found our fellow writers, we used a Yahoo Group to run an e-mail list that let us schedule meetings, circulate drafts and store files.
Whether your creativity takes the form of a solitary activity like writing or painting, or is intrinsically collaborative (like theater or filmmaking) the web can help you connect to the people, resources and ideas that foster your creativity. Creativity often demands social connection: for peer support, for feedback, for knowledge, for collaborators.
The social web offers a lot of ways to capture, hone and feed your creativity:
Find your medium. YouTube not withstanding, the web is still a text dominant medium. Blogging makes it easy for writers to find a creative outlet online; photographers have Flickr, and filmmakers have YouTube. But there are lots of creative projects that don’t fit inside these boxes, so you’ll need to get even more creative in finding your online voice. Take pictures of your canvases; shoot a video of someone interacting with your installation piece; film your play, tape your song, make your own music video.
Engage another hemisphere. I rely on my netbook for writing – but I rely on my iPhone to spark my creativity. Not by serving up poetry or inspirational stories: by turning off the very parts of my brain that are key to my writing. When I hit a wall, I pull out my iPhone and plug into a game of Flight Control: an utterly uncreative, dangerously addictive game that involves landing planes on a tiny landing strip. A few minutes of Flight Control is so absolutely absorbing that it lets my creative neurons recharge until they’re ready to fire up again.
Collaborate. My first adult forays into fiction writing happened spontaneously online. An online chat with a pal turned into an extended riff on a “what if” scenario, and within an hour we’d written our way into a story. Over the following weeks it grew into a manuscript, albeit one that we never published or even edited. But even in raw form, that collaborative writing process reconnected me with my writer self. I was far braver as part of a team than I was able to be solo; by collaborating online, I rediscovered the joy of writing and recommitted to writing on my own.
Keep an inspiration file.“Things that aren’t even cats”. It’s a line from a Malcolm In the Middle episode that has become our internal label for “none of the above”. I’m not sure why we find it so compelling, but somewhere in that phrase lies the kernel of a story about organizing ideas online. And when the inspiration for that story hits, I’ll be ready, because I am religious about maintaining a list of story ideas in Evernote, an application that keeps my notes synced between my mac, my netbook and my iphone. Wherever I am, I’m always ready to jot down an idea or retrieve one.
Talk it out. Sometimes the mere act of writing something down strips it of its passion – or feels like too big an obstacle. Text recognition services and software can help you brainstorm out loud, whether by writing full documents by voice, or just using a mobile service like Jott to make calls that will get transcribed and set back to you as notes.
Relocate. When I want to do an intensive bit of writing, I have to get out of the house and out of the office. But I don’t need a quiet garret: I do best in a cafe with lots of light, and interesting people who aren’t too creeped out when I stare blankly into the middle distance that they happen to be sitting in. I’ve made it easy to dive into a day of cafe writing by buying a tiny, lightweight computer just for writing days; it’s always packed into a tiny backpack that’s ready to go with the essentials for a day of writing. (The essentials: computer, mouse, headset, advil, hand cream, nicorettes). And I use a couple of programs that ensure my writing machine can access any relevant notes on my primary computer: Evernote, which is my master notebook, and Dropbox, which lets me keep a folder full of files synchronized across computers.
Find material. Artists are the world’s most incorrigible thieves. As anyone with a writer friend can tell you, everything is subject to appropriation: that quip you made at a party, the video of your first birthday party, the story of your most painful breakup. The social web liberates you from stealing from your friends’ lives, and opens the door on a world full of images, characters and experiences that are yours to borrow and embroider. Stay within the bounds of intellectual property law (i.e. no stealing someone else’s words, images or stories) and you can find all the real life material you need online.
Remove distractions. The same computer I use for my creative projects also contains an endless series of distraction. My hard drive is never more organized than the day before a major writing process: I can procrastinate for hours by consolidating folders, renaming files and optimizing my software setup. To limit my techie procrastinations, I use a separate computer on writing days, and keep it as light as possible: I’ve deliberately minimized the number of software tools installed on my writing machine, and I use a low-powered computer that makes it hard for me to run distracting programs or do much geeking out. I also keep a separate, distraction-free account on my primary computer: if I want to write, I switch to my alternate login, which denies me access to the chat programs, email and files that would pull me out of writing brain and into work or geek brain.
Expand your horizons. I’ve always been comfortable with words, and assumed that in some previous life I accepted the deal that my ability to write would come with an inability to draw a straight line with a ruler. My family is full of visual artists, but drawing stick figures appears to be the outside limit of my artistic capacity. Happily, I’ve discovered that online design doesn’t require the kind of eye-hand coordination that has always defied me: I’ve created photo collages, illustrative graphics and entire web page designs, and had a heck of a good time doing it. You may have a preferred medium, but trying out other forms of creative expression online – whether it’s making a movie, recording a song, or writing a poem – can help you discover other kinds of creativity in ways that fuel your primary creative commitments.
Are you an artist/geek — or a geek/artist? Or maybe even a techno-skeptic who has nonetheless found ways of harnessing technology to your creative self-expression? I’d love to hear about the practices, tools and work habits that have helped you turn the social web into a tool for supporting your creativity.
I’ve been writing about my wish for a family scrapbook solution that would create photobooks that use tweets as captions, and I’ve described the features I’d like. Fuelled mostly by incredulity (surely something like this must exist) I’ve worked my way through lots of options.
Commercial album creation services from Shutterfly, Apple, Lulu, Qoop, Scrapblog and many others typically offer the option of importing photos from Flickr and Facebook, and often from Picasa and iPhoto. But I tried out an epic number of these services and couldn’t find a single one that integrated Twitter or generic RSS feeds. Of course, I could type tweets in manually….but that requires comparing two sets of timelines (photos and tweets).
On the other side of the equation, TweetBookz creates books of your tweets. But no photos!
Bee Docs Timeline 3D creates beautiful timelines for presentations and can import Flickr photo sets, Twitter feeds (using the RSS import option) or iPhoto galleries and use those to automatically generate a gorgeous timeline. But you have to choose EITHER a photo import or an RSS import, so there is no way to integrate the two. And while you can export a timeline to Keynote or Quicktime, it’s not really set up for either web or print publishing.
Blurb is a photobook creation service that offers blog-based photo books. Unfortunately they only support a handful of blogging services, and while this includes Wordpress.com, you can’t install Lifestream or other aggregation tools on Wordpress.com (only on self-hosted Wordpress); if you add tweets to a Wordpress.com site using a widget, that doesn’t get pulled into Blurb. If Blurb supported Twitter the way it supports hosted blogs, it could be the right tool, though it might not integrated tweets with photos into a coherent timeline.
Blog2Print has the same limitation as Blurb: it’s limited to printing blogs on WordPress.com, Typepad and Blogger.
iPhoto2Twitter (http://www.bluecrowbar.com/software/iphoto2twitter/) lets you tweet photos from within iPhoto, but it doesn’t pull in your tweets TO iPhoto.
Pixable is set up to create photobooks from Facebook and promotes itself by pointing out how with other methods you miss out on much of the content on Facebook that can complement the printed photos : tags, captions, quotes, messages on your wall, status updates, and comments left by friends”. But the FAQ <http://www.pixable.com/faq/> notes that “Pixable currently allows you to import tagging information, profile pictures, captions, album titles and, of course, photos of you and your friends. In the future, you will be able to print comments, favorite quotes, status updates, wall messages and more.” I’ll be happy to see that when it arrives — figuring I can use Facebook to import my tweets and Flickr or iPhoto shots — but feel a bit put-off by the gap between the promotional materials and the current feature set.
At this point I’ve concluded that my best bet is to roll my own Wordpress site using aggregation via FeedWordPress, which I’ve now been devoted to for five years — one of my most enduring tech relationships! Then I will periodically use Wordpress export to export my blog to Wordpress.com, and suck my Wordpress.com site into Blurb for printing. Results to be reported….unless some fabulous developer creates my dream service before then.
I just discovered that my presentation at Oberlin’s 2008 Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship is on YouTube. I talked about how the lessons of building social networks parallel our experience as entrepreneurs.
Last week I wrote about the non-existent web application that is currently at the top of my wishlist: a social media scrapbooking service. But I have looked into a bunch of photobook and blogging services, and nothing quite fits the bill. And after a bunch of “have you tried…” conversations, I realize I need to specify exactly what features would constitute the kind of service I’m envisioning, and what would take it from good to great.
Must-have features:
Aggregation of photos (offering Flickr and Facebook import at least, and ideally also Picasa, iPhoto upload, and more) and tweets into a single, chronologically ordered collection
A selection of prefab design templates for online display (as per Tumblr, Wordpress and every other blogging platform) plus the option to create your own or use CSS to style
A selection of prefab design templates for printing (as per all the book printing services)
A print layout tool that lets you select which photos, albums or tweets you want to include in a specific print album
Drag-and-drop rearrangement of photos and tweets so that you can decide which tweets will appear underneath or on the same page as specific photos
Nice-to-have features:
Outbound Twitter support so that you can tweet the URL of a newly published album
Facebook connect, with the ability to share albums with specific friends or friend lists
Aggregation of RSS feeds so that you can add blog posts or headlines to your online or print album
Aggregation of videos (from YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and elsewhere) to include in the online album
Ability to organize content thematically (by tag/hashtag or keyword search) as well as chronologically, so that you can create topical albums (e.g. “birthdays”, “company picnic”, “bowling night”)
Comic-style layouts (like ComicLife) or photo captions (like PhotoCaps)
On-demand printing of individual photos with the option to select a tweet to print as the caption or speech bubble in a photo
Outbound RSS for the online version
Premium features:
Of course, I have also been thinking about what would make this service profitable — profitable enough to be worth building. Clearly, you’ve got the print-on-demand market for scrapbooks, which could include not only tweeting mommies like me but the much larger universe of Facebooking mommies (and daddies, and grandparents). But the market for this service goes well beyond the mom and pop crowd. For example, premium services could include:
e-mail newsletters: select items from your online album to turn into an e-newsletter (some blogging platforms let you do this already); combine this with the kind of list management and delivery service offered by Campaign Monitor or Constant Contact, and you can charge for each e-newsletter that’s sent out
print newsletters and magazines: select items to turn into a regular print newsletter or magazine, and you’ve suddenly got a supremely easy way for organizations and companies to generate monthly or quarterly newsletters and magazines for members, or for families to generate yearly (please, please not monthly!!) newsletters for friends
company, organization or school yearbooks: create yearbooks from the real lives of your employees, volunteers or students, as lived online.
I’m hoping that somewhere out there is a coder who can see that what I’m talking to is not very complicated (it isn’t — the APIs are all there) and sees an opportunity to create a new cool app. Or better yet, some startup is reading this and thinking, hey! this is what we’re doing! Either way, I’d love to hear from you.
This weekend has helped me identify the most likely scenarios for my own demise:
Buried under mismatched wineglasses.
Suffocated by a dishtowel avalanche.
Arm spontaneously separates after 18 continuous hours of drilling ceramic tile.
Food poisoning from leftovers stored in plastic food containers that didn’t precisely match the companion lids.
Trapped under Ikea display unit after lying down on floor and reaching towards wall to see if any of the out-of-stock kitchen hooks had fallen behind (they had! five packs!)
Head explodes from toddler screaming.
Blood poisoning from drinking through our lifetime supply of plastic cups.
Sliced by sheet-metal cutter I stretched from the Home Depot that had the sheet metal in stock, to the one that would actually cut it.
Red blood cells become magnetized from excessive exposure to magnetic spice tins.
Starved to death after refrigerator and pantry are blocked by accumulated housewares.
Our parents and grandparents recorded their memories in baby books, year books, photo albums and Super 8. We have Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and blogs. Our tools have the virtue of immediacy: 140-character updates and cell phone cameras make it quick and easy to add to our collections, and the web enables real-time sharing.
Until Apple releases that much-rumored tablet, however, we can’t curl up with a blog or flip through a Flickr album with the same ease and intimacy you’d experience with a physical book. And our digital memories typically lack the curatorial dimension in which we choose the particular memories to record or images to juxtapose.
As I’ve shifted to recording our family’s memories in digital form, I’ve been frustrated by the lack of tools for presenting and preserving the daily capture of our stories and images. On the one hand, there are dozens, if not hundreds of services for printing photos in physical books. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of tools for aggregating every kind of online media into a single blog or site. But in my search for a service that will aggregate multiple sources of online content, and then prepare it for offline (and ideally also online) publication, I’ve come up empty.
With so many families, groups, and companies capturing and sharing their memories online, surely there is a huge potential market for a service that can convert that collective lifestream into a set of on- and offline photo albums or memory bookss. In our case, I’d just like a tool that would pull our Twitter updates together with our Flickr or iPhoto collections, using datestamps to combine tweets and photos from the same week or month into a nice montage. I haven’t updated my kids’ baby books in years, but I could put together a beautiful album each year based on the comments I’ve captured in Twitter and the photos I’ve snapped with my iPhone and camera.
Essentially, this tool would be a hybrid between a blog that aggregates from multiple web services (like Tumblr), an online photo album service (like that provided by Facebook, Flickr and many others) and a print-on-demand service (like Shutterfly or Lulu).
A service that met my needs would also have a strong potential market for school, community and company yearbooks. Imagine compiling a company yearbook from the tweets and photos of your entire team — a big company could even have separate pages and sections for each department. Nonprofits could use photos and tweets to compile annual reports on their activities. And I hear that the kids now use the Internet to communicate, too: they might have one or two Facebook updates that could help feed a great, relevant yearbook.
In my next few blog posts I’ll present a recommended feature set, a review of related tools and an interim solution.
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