Three ideas for social media in Real Life

I've probably spent more time on Facebook and LinkedIn in the past eight weeks than in the past eight years (yes I know, some of that time those services didn't exist, but the symmetry of that comparison is rhetorically satisfying). I am now very committed to several strains of conventional wisdom on the subject, many of which seem, at first blush, to be contradictory:

1. Social media is going to change the way we interact. The ability to be instantly in touch with individuals *or groups*, in small and vital ways, is revolutionary.

2. Most social media is relevant only to the source, and of little interest to most others. My Facebook news feed is chock full of information from contacts I don't remember very well, about parts of their lives that have little overlap with mine. And yet - a Ryan Turner post introduced me to the funkadelic Har Mar Superstar, which was a very cool half hour diversion. An oblique reference to my Dad's passing in June resulted in a hundred condolence posts from old old friends, and made a huge difference to me during a trying time. I got far more out of my business school reunion by speaking to the people I hadn't friended on FB, because I wasn't reading daily excerpts from their lives every other day.

3. No one has time to absorb even a fraction of the good stuff out there. This is true. I have several Boing Boing bookmarks I keep meaning to go back to, a feed reader I somehow never view, and yet I already spend far too much time engaged in FB and such.

4. Social media is still a puzzle for businesses. The jury is out on whether businesses will be able to manipulate social media like they have other media. So far (aside from Adwords-style ads in the margins of pages), FB lets me choose when to engage in commercial activities, and I rarely do so unless there's a personal hook from someone I respect pointing me there ... and even then I usually avoid it. So far the commercial idea that has resonated with me the strongest when it comes to social media for business comes fromHubspot: put lots of stuff that's actually valuable out there for free, and people will follow it back to see what you're about. This approach has several things going for it: it's honest, karmically positive, and in-line with how social media is supposed to work.

But these observations are less damning than they appear, and similar things were said about the first wave of the web. It was clear back in the mid-nineties that the web would change the way we interact, but no one knew then how it would do so, precisely. Same deal here. At the time the web was frustratingly full of garbage and the real gems were hard to find. Google solved that problem decisively, and you don't hear that complaint very much at all anymore. Back when I was a web consultant in 1996, I had a twofold sales job on my prospects: I first had to convince them that a website was worth having at all, then I had to convince them to use me. The first part of that sales job has pretty convincingly vanished from the landscape.

So we will muddle through, and social media will seem as obvious and revolutionary as the net does, in a few years. And yet it's a different animal - imagining that the social media trajectory will look like the early web's is folly. There are things social media (and universal personal devices tied to the people who carry them) can do that seemed like science fiction just a few months ago. Here are three ideas to help move things along to the next phase:

1. BUILD ME SOME FILTERS, DAMMIT! There are gems of value out there in the social media streams - help me find them. WhenI hit my desk at work, filter out the social updates; reverse that trend when I'm checking from home before bed. Let feeds from people I like/work with/find relevant/click on a lot bubble up over the rest. If my Google search logs show that I'm thinking about online education, emphasize the streams from people whose blogging/tweeting keywords related to the ones I was using. I like reading executive summaries - prepare me one of the streams I care about, broken up topically or by relevance. I need a smart Google to help me make sense of these feeds.

2. Hook me to my neighborhood's/town's/region's streams. I just got an email forwarded to me about a string of break-ins happening in my town. It was written by the police and described the suspected folks pulling these jobs so we could be on the lookout. I was openmouthed when I finished - if everyone in my town got that feed, someone would doubtless be looking at the guys in real time, and call in a tip. Using social media to fight crime? How about that library committee meeting that happened last week that I never heard about. It was posted on the town's website (my town does damned well on that score, compared to others), but how often do I think to go to the town website? Do I care about all the notices? Lord, no. But my filters should know I'm helping with our local library and should have pulled that notice out of the sea for me to look at.

3. Give me a way to geo-locate strangers' streams, if they're willing. I'm writing this from the Minneapolis airport while I wait for a flight. I guarantee there are businesspeople around me who are in related businesses or who I might want to talk to. Sure, if I'm feeling private I want to be anonymous - but I could think of lots of situations where I would be open to the people around me. Conventions, for example - these are intended to provide a way for people to meet each other. Link that with some augmented reality stuff, and let me look through my iPhone to find the people I want to speak with in this room with big Sims-style pointers over their heads. Singles bars, parties - let me read the blogs of the people around me before I choose to introduce myself, and I'll find someone who seems interesting to zero in on. Bonus: their last tweet gives me a conversation starter too.

The good news is, people who have been thinking about this for far longer and in more sophisticated ways than me are doubtless doing all this as I type, and probably have funky funky names for them already in place. But I don't know about them yet. Find us, social media entrepreneurs of the world - we're waiting.

Bits becoming atoms, 2009 edition

I just finished watching Bronwen Blaney print an on-demand book.

A customer came in to the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, MA wanting an obscure 1860s-era work by a legal scholar he had found online, (scanned, conveniently, by Google). Bronwen selected the title from a database, previewed the PDF output on a screen with the customer watching, and sent it to the book machine, which was effectively a high-quality copy machine hooked up to an automatic bookbinder. The cover printed first - four color on a thick stock, and then she started 'heating up the glue.' The book downloaded in about three minutes, software converted the PDF to a printable format, and the sheets spit out into a receiver.

When complete, the stack of paper was painted by a roller coated with binding glue and folded into the cover in a special jig to keep it straight and let the glue dry. A few slices with some industrial-strength paper cutters later and the book chunked out into the output slot, looking indistinguishable from the paperbacks on the shelves behind us.

Yesterday, Bronwen said, they printed sixty copies on the machine. The only flaw we saw was that whoever scanned the original got their fingertips caught in the scanner on pages 79 and 347, so if anything, this copy has some character. Whoever they were they had a nice manicure.

Direct printing has been around for some time, but this kind of one-stop device at the consumer level is pretty new. The machine isn't home-grade yet, but honestly that's just a matter of time (as Google and Amazon have long figured out). Bronwen was pretty convinced that the short-term impact of these machines would be on back-list titles - out of print, copyright-expired ones, and eventually the titles owned by publishers who have determined that the demand is not enough for a full printing run. It's probably still cost-effective for front-list titles to be offset-printed centrally and distributed in boxes and palettes - although ask any bookseller about the environmental consequences of "no return" policies and they'll grimace. Wouldn't it be nice to keep a couple of centrally-printed copies on hand for display purposes, but if you suspect you'll sell fifteen copies tomorrow, why not print out that inventory locally the night before? No waste, and zero shipping or storage costs.

I started musing immediately about self-publishing. A simple model for a new business: give us the URL of your blog, we'll pull down the archives, source freelancers to lay out and convert your work to PDF, send you a proof, and then get Bronwen's machine to output a dozen copies for your friends or organization - or you can tell people to drop by Harvard Bookstore and get one printed out whenever they need one. Plus, we'll add your title to the online distributors so people can download it PDF style on their desktops or Kindles, and we'll set up a search-engine optimized marketing site and place a few keyword buys to drive the public to your title. Voila - disintermediation of the publishing industry - albeit on a low level - and every dollar not spent on paper and glue goes right to the author.

One thing is for sure - bits are separate from atoms, now more than ever. iTunes showed us the long tail for music; YouTube for video; now we have it for books. Real books, not just content. I would think that the economics would support these devices (smaller and slicker, perhaps, at a lower pricetag) in local bookstores within a few years. How a "YouTubed" book industry would look is an open question.

Want one at home? Any title ever written, whenever you want it, good enough to put on your bookshelf for future reference and intellectual bragging rights? Not a bad unique selling proposition. Bronwen, get on it.