Andrew Lark

Another Tipping point

According to Comscore: U.S. Web surfers are spending more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google.

In August, people spent a total of 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, comScore said Thursday, about 9.9 percent of their Web-surfing minutes for the month. That just barely surpassed the 39.8 million minutes, or 9.6 percent, people spent on all of Google Inc.'s sites combined, including YouTube, the free Gmail e-mail program, Google news and other content sites.

Time to geek out

Here’s a look at a modular data center. Wicked.

The right kind of ambition

The “me” decade has fostered many ambitions, and many of them aren’t the right kind for an Enterprise of any size or scale. That’s why I loved this post by Ben.

Here’s how you spot those with the “me” disease:

People who view the world through the me prism might describe a prior company’s failure in an interview as follows: “My last job was my e-commerce play.  I felt that it was important to round out my resume.” Note the use of “my” to personalize the company in a way that it’s unlikely that anyone else at the company would agree with. In fact, the other employees in the company might even be offended by this usage. People with the right kind of ambition would not likely use the word “play” to describe their effort to work as a team to build something substantial. Finally, people who use the “me” prism find it natural and obvious to speak in terms of “building out my resume” while people who use the “team” prism find such phrases to be somewhat uncomfortable and awkward, because they clearly indicate an individual goal which is separate from the team goal.

On the other hand, people who view the world purely through the team prism will very seldom use the words “I” or “me” even when answering questions about their accomplishments. Even in an interview, they will deflect credit to others on their previous team. They will tend to be far more interested in how your company will win than how they will be compensated or what their career path will be. When asked about a previously failed company, they will generally feel such great responsibility that they will describe in detail their own misjudgments and bad decisions.

Too often people confuse doing what is right for them with what is right for their team and the business. They confuse building a business with building a resume. They confuse the business’ agenda with their agenda. And the result is inevitably negative. As Ben says, while it may work to have individual employees who optimize for their own careers, counting on senior managers to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons is a dangerous idea.

The New News Platform

We tend to get caught-up in the obvious. Like, Twitter has become a news platform. It was that at birth. Ok, it wasn’t CNN, but it was and always has been “my” news platform.

Now it’s increasingly the news platform. The source for what’s breaking that matters. The source for instantly building and getting your own river of news.

To follow the rugby scores of my favorite teams the Web’s usefulness declines the further I get from my desk. And it’s pretty useless on my desk. That’s because the news channels are audience-centric on a geographical basis – this is partly a result of poor management, but also a result of limiting industry business models.

The future of these organizations is along the lines of Twitter – which is subject and content centric.

Chatter gets a much needed boost

As much as I like Chatter, it is best a very rudimentary app. Clearly Salesforce are deploying and then growing the feature set. Looking forward to apps on Android in particular. Great to see Seesmic getting on board.

All apps are now about widgets. The idea of accessing a browser to check a feed or engage in a conversation seems almost antiquated. It’s also cumbersome and slow.

How the world turns. 10 years ago we were rushing to get everything in the browser. Now we rushing to get it into a feed to our Widget with information automagically updated and available as we flick to an active screen on our devices.

Is SEO Irrelevant?

Not so sure but Steve makes some good points:

The most important consideration for marketers or anyone who creates content, however, is in the bullets...

"Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need."

Here's what this means: no two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results. That's what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors.

His thesis, and mine, that real-time feedback changes your behavior. Because it is real-time, optimizing it is impossible. Buried in a product announcement are massive implications for how we market online.

Search at the speed of type has implications for marketers

Search now faster than the speed of type… ok, like about time, really. Though I wonder what impact this will have on search marketing?

If the idea is to accelerate your experience off the search page, will this place an even greater premium on the top 2-3 search results. Give the results appear in real-time, will it reduce the time you linger on the page and consider other results?

What do you think?

High Performance

Tony’s blog is well worth following and if you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. I like how he focuses on labor day on how we can get more productive. These hit home in particular:

1. Make sufficient sleep a top priority. Schedule your bedtime, and start winding down at least 45 minutes earlier. Ninety-eight percent of all human beings need at least 7-8 hours a night to feel fully rested. Only a fraction of us get that much regularly, in part because we buy into the myth that sacrificing an hour or two of sleep a night give us an hour more of productivity.
2. Schedule specific times for activities in your life that you deem important but not urgent. With so much coming at you all the time, it's easy to focus all day on whatever feels most pressing in the moment.
3. Live like a sprinter, not a marathoner. When you work continuously, you're actually progressively depleting your energy reservoir as the day wears on. By making intermittent renewal and refuelingimportant, you're regularly replenishing your reservoir, so you're not only able to fully engage at intervals along the way, but also to maintain high energy much further into the day. (I think lots of people uknowingly do this… reading blogs, sites, feeds, twittering… we seek retreat in the river of digital content around us)

The New Challenge to IT

Looking forward to reading Empowered. Everywhere I go I see more and more employees acquiring their own IT and going it alone. They are simply disillusioned with the time/cost/ equation offered by traditional IT. This was pretty enlightening:

The same is true in the way employees are harnessing consumer technologies — social, mobile, video, and cloud. They're improving how they do their jobs and solving your customer and business problems. And it's not just a few employees; it's a critical mass of employees. In a survey of more than 4,000 U.S. information workers, we found that 37% are using do-it-yourself technologies without IT's permission. LinkedIn, Google Docs, Smartsheet.com, Facebook, iPads, YouTube, Dropbox, Flipboard — the list is long and growing. Many of these scenarios are do-it-yourself projects. For example, want to ask me business questions on Facebook? Piece of cake, I'll just friend you. Personal iPhones for email, apps, and Internet access outside my clients' door? Check. Google Sites and Docs to exchange documents with partners? Sure, I can spin up a free site or IT can spend the $50/user/year and make it secure. YouTube to post fix-it-yourself videos for tough service problems? My kid's good with a Flip camera. She can film me doing the fix myself.