Content is still the king.
In the past content was generated by a small elite of journalists, correspondents… big news agencies, or journalist with opinion and good writing.
This has been changing. They are struggling to find their place now. Traditional media is married to a physical support (paper) which is expensive to produce and distribute, it is not real time and the companies behind are not flexible and adaptable towards new models…. now we all have the tools to broadcast, write, publish our content.
Anyway, what I wanted to highlight in this blog post is that I have observed an evolution of the tools towards laziness and minimum effort.
We have the blogs, sure, and we will continue to have them, as we still have magazines and newspapers. We can build them around a topic we want or like, around our lives, our interests, our community… we can have it in isolation or being part of a blog community such as blogspot.
Then a new trend started. Not everybody has time or skills to write. In fact probably it is still a minority. Other tools were more focused to the crowd: micro-blogs such as tumblr or posterous. Less writing. Just share something you see out there, a link a photo, …
Then twitter, with 140 characters, first in parallel with SMS, now twitter just twitter . Surprisingly it quickly became very very very popular.
Twitter is limited so a lot of complementary services were born around it: twitpic, yfrog… and even we have seen better twitter products that have ended up dieing. Products like Buzz or Brightkite, not limited in space, handling location, photos, comments… for me far superior products… but I guess this is life. Beta was also superior to VHS and it was VHS who won.
So we have gone from Blogging to micro blogging to twittering, to twittering with location (foursquare, gowalla) to now a whole new wave of social media products:
Just take a photo with your phone, have your network, comment, like, push it to all the social media channels… no writing. Is this laziness?
Check out what is hot on this: Instagram and PicPlz
Of course they all coexist but I am curios to see how this evolves. I believe Brightkite was too early to be successful. Same with Buzz and even Wave.
In any case, everybody is in Facebook and facebook evolves and has everything: wall for short or long messages, link stories, videos, add comments, photos, checkins … an ecosystem where everybody is and that offers everything.
Still the perception for the people is that is a closed ecosystem where all the friends are. Same for linkedin and your professional cloud.
Perception is key. Even if Facebook has attempted to change this, by trying to make things public and therefore creating a controversy on privacy issues, they are still perceived as a closed tool and the content you find there is thought as this: confidential for friends only.
There is also the fact that it is becoming too big, even at the point of threatening the Internet itself.
Are twitter and instagram and the others just for a minority of people who want to broadcast to everybody with the dream of being popular? marketing tools for individuals and companies?
A media for spreading news fast?
I’d like to read you in the comments.
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