Before yesterday, tablets for me were just that, big flat laptops with some novel software uses, but ultimately were a gimped laptop and a heavy sheet of paper. However, I was very wrong, tablets are gong to be cool. The iPad is revolutionary because it focuses on how people consume, not what they can produce and that is what makes it so magical and why Acer still probably shifts product literature showing a Getty Image doctor standing next to a Getty Image nurse looking over a glowing giant white tablet. My iPab became magical when I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal yesterday purely because the physical copy annoys me (perhaps its the lingering knee-jerk reaction I have to physical newspapers that comes from years of having to take out the trash and sort the newspapers every Tuesday of my life until a college decided to accept me and let me escape chores… See dad, I do know what day the trash had to go out, I just selectively remembered). Consume the Journal while sitting at a desktop is limiting and annoying, but being able to “flick” through it on a small device that presents it cleanly and in a form that is very close to what you’d want in the physical version is why iPad will work for me as a laptop and doorstep media replacement.

The second reason it works for me is that it just works. I shifted off of the iPhone platform because it was too limiting.  The phone didn’t do what I wanted it to do and I had to use three apps to do what my Google based phone does naturally, so the switch was easy. However with the tablet, I disagree with Corey Doctrow’s take that because it can’t be opened it shouldn’t be considered. (http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html) I got it because I don’t want to mess around with it, when it comes to just consuming I want it to be easy, I have a partitioned MacBook to putz around on and play with.

More thoughts on the iPad to come as I use it exclusively at home and leave the laptop at the office.

Oh, and I’m back to blogging. Here’s a sweet pic to go with this post. Dad, “blogging” in ‘87 with video games and uh, awesome glasses on the boat. Today, this would be with an iPad, Pandora playing off of Mom’s iPhone and some weather thingy chirping somewhere…

***** note, this post was done entirely on the iPad.

Go take a look at what Louis Gray is doing on his blog (http://www.louisgray.com/live/) with the footer on the site. The new footer tool allows you to see what is popular on his site right now without out having to read the whole site. This is great because as new user to a site I don’t know what to read, this is an awesome tool for discovery.

“But Greg, I like Digg, Del.icio.us and I follow Scoble on Friendfeed, I don’t have time to check out every site to see what’s great.” This is where I would disagree with you, this won’t make discovery slower, I in fact think it will make for a much more tailored and personal web experience. I think this plug-in is more powerful than Digg or Friendfeed. In time, I think the value of Liveflows will grow as it dynamically builds out recommendations to networks based on preferences unique to each user. I would love to see them go to a model that it would sync with my Facebook and Twitter and work as a plugin the browser level. Imagine getting an instant referral from friends the moment you land on a site, it would be like automatically knowing the best bars in a new town without having to call everyone in your phonebook or ask in your Facebook status.

Right now Liveflows only works on sites that opt in, but I think there is a ton of potential here for a really fantastic browser based experience.

Editors Note: The image has zero to do with this idea, but it’s close to summer and what could possibly be better and more rewarding than swimming out to a raft, climbing up on it and proceeding to throw your younger bother off of it all day long? Not much. I love summer.

Publisher's Note: I don't have any pictures of the old man wearing these in the wild... crap

So how do brands take that dynamic online? How can they get you turn to a friend wearing a dumb pair of glasses and ask them why the hell they have them on? Facebook has started to put that together with how they’ve changed the “Recommend a Friend” system. Now brands are part of that equation, what my friends have becomes fans of is suggested to me.

This is a great move and absolutely the next logical step in word-of-mouth marketing online. Who can you trust more than your friends? Certainly not a brand on their own, but if all your friends have become fans of it, why not? It’s a smart strategy and I just hope brands stick with it long enough to allow organic growth to work like it should. Eventually they will attract the right audiences and because the Facebook comminty is making the right suggestions; their value and the trust of the consumer will spread in a positive way. One that brands couldn’t pay enough to get today through TV ads or shipping all the BluBlockers than can muster to all my father’s friends.

*Full disclosure. While they made you look like a total douchebag, they were kind of sweet to read with.

New York Talk Exchange

The February issue of Seed Magazine had a piece on the New York Talk Exchange project at the MoMA, which I saw. The premise of the project is that all the telecommunications out of New York City in a single day would be mapped to see how the city communicated with the country and world at large. The findings were as one expects; New York City makes a lot of calls and makes them to all parts of the country and world, sort of a no-brainer. But the interesting thing is the VOLUME of calls made per New Yorker relative to those of their small town counterparts. According to Carlo Ratti from MIT who conducted research for the project, a formula emerged; Communication increases according to population size scaled to an exponent of about 1.5*. Why is this interesting? Because conventional thinking would have it that New Yorkers should talk as much on the phone, per person, as the population in Syracuse, but instead according to the findings; on average a New Yorker will talk 30 times more that a Syracuse Townie (full disclosure, I am a Syracuse Townie).

Okay, so what does this have to do with Social Media, Mustaches or Antics? Well, it got me thinking about Twitter and scale of conversation versus other sites like Facebook and MySpace. Perhaps the answer to why Twitter works is not that it’s new, but in fact it is the same as why New Yorkers talk on the phone so damn much.

There is a theory around urban environments and their growth that puts forward the idea that as population size increases as well as population density increases, that people begin to move and interact faster at a subconscious level because survival and competitive instincts kick in. Therefore in New York, we feel compelled to chat on the phone more and walk faster because instinctually there are so many more of us competing for space and mindshare among our peers that the fear of losing drives us to use the phone more and briskly pass tourists on the sidewalk.

What does this have to do with Twitter? Think about it. What did we do on MySpace? I looked at your page, turned off the dumb song you picked and maybe checked out your pictures, but I was alone on the page. With Facebook I could chat with friends, tag the same pictures and the Feed of news kept reminding me that I was not on Facebook alone, so that same instinct that tells me to walk fast, also told me to update my status and make witty comments. I was competing for mindshare among my friends. Now with Twitter, the entire experience is a New York City sidewalk, I’m never alone at any stage of the experience. @thejames says something witty, I have to come over the top, @haynow gives an update to her house being built, I have to respond. That instinct that drives me to make a call while walking home “just because” is the same that drives me to Twitter every 2 hours all day. I believe Twitter’s success lies here, with our competitive drive, not that we all can produce 140 Characters or we really want tickets to a Sun’s games from Shaq.

Thinking about urban dynamics and Twitter has led me to thinking about its tipping point: it may not be when Steve Rubel bails on it, but it may be with the environment gets so large it can’t hold all the calls.

If each successive community we love gives us faster feedback on our peers and more reason to compete and make noise, is the next one a purely mobile experience? Will Google’s Grand Central transpose my calls into Tunblr pages? Will a Britekite / Timelines mashup tell me what is being discussed in the bar down the street from my house? I think it’s going to end up somewhere in the middle of all of that, the line between mobile and the desktop/laptop computing experience will be totally blurred to spur a faster platform for communication and more “people on the sidewalk” to compete with.

I can’t wait.

*SEED Magazine, “City Gravity”, Feb 2009

Last week Clean Freak Confessions launched (http://www.cleanfreakconfessions.com), my first project with Federated Media. It’s a hubsite, developed by Hoovers, that hosts cleaning discussions by leading bloggers.  The cool thing about the site is that the conversation there is real, the cleaning experiences are ones people really have and they’re not forced. It’s my first time in this sandbox, but I’m enjoying it and learning along the way.

Touching on the subject of vacuums (mom is going to kill me for this), my mother is the only person I know who bought one from a door-to-door salesman. I don’t remember the time of year, I picture it being a dark and rainy night but that can’t be true, this story couldn’t have a setup that sweet. Most likely it was just a simple knock at the front door that brought a Kirby Vacuum into our lives.

The guy was young and talked with enthusiasm about his wares. I think he had my brother and I instantly when he sucked up change and it didn’t enter the bag but stayed in a trap. I have no idea what we were thinking; perhaps Elliot and I thought that every time it passed over the floor it would fill with change. I also don’t know which one of his tricks convinced my mother to buy; when he emptied fireplace ash on the floor and cleaned it up, when he put on the shampoo head “easily” or when he collapsed the whole thing into basically the same shape but folded over (it was the 80’s I guess that was a selling point).

Either way, we had a Kirby Vacuum after that night…. and it was never as sweet as it was right before we bought it. Loud; check. Heavy; check (it used to sit at the top of the stairs for hours until someone got the courage to carry it down). Impossible to use; check. We never shampooed at thing with the “easy” attachment. Overall, that vacuum sucked.

Why bring that up? Because that’s the value of this type of campaign by Hoover, not necessarily to get me to speak about vacuums in particular, but to get us talking about cleaning and stories about it.

In this case: point Hoover.

The internet has no Uncle Joe with a glass of wine, no “Flying Walendas” (if New York State had seen my uncle toss my screaming and giggling infant body into the air, to perform flips, I probably would have been on the next train full of orphans out of town), no reading of Richard Scary books in my PJs and certainly no easy single solution to reading about my friends. When I was 3 they were Loli Worm and company, today it’s co-workers, family, friends and people I have interacted with online. Until today I used 3 tools to keep track of everything; Flock, TweetDeck and email, now I’m down to just two and I’m counting the days I’m down to one.

The TweetDeck update today added more content to the application and moved it one step closer to being the ultimate tool for watching and interacting in real time with the web. The addition today of TweetPics and Facebook status updates, for me, replaced the need I had for Flock. Why is this addition important? Why is cool? Because it brings all my streams into one place and allows me to monitor everything with a single application and minimal tabs.

What is TweetDeck?

It’s a simple application that runs on the Twitter API, pulling content into buckets as you designate them. You can set up searches to pull back any term (I set up and @ reply search so anything to me gets pulled in, yes I’m vain).

You can set up groups so you can sort your co-workers, friends or in some cases enemies and detractors. I’m not big enough to have those… yet.

Now, you can integrate Facebook status updates, which is awesome and got me excited today. For most of us the status update is the key feature in Facebook and this addition to the tool makes those of us that use Facebook in this capacity, very, very happy.

I can’t wait for the day when a single application can manage to bring back to me all of the feeds and information I have spent the last 5 years spreading myself out over. This is only the first step; I want to see the addition of my Gmail account and perhaps IM down the road. Thank you Tweetdeck for making my day.

I made the decision because Disqus is a valuable tool for blogs. As a reader it allows you to carry your ID from blog to blog as well as your discussions. While many blogs on Wordpress allow comments with Google ID or OpenID, for me there has been no true way to port “GregHay” around the Internet. I’ve been siloed to your blog or site, not allowing my awesome comments to start a greater discussion. I’m kidding, my comments aren’t that awesome. But there is huge value in allowing comments to work across networks.

Disqus allows non-bloggers to steer conversation!

Many blogs have done “Banned Commenter of the Month” posts, which are basically just public outings of griefers and until now there hasn’t really been a good way for readers to impact discussions. Sure, they could say something crazy or be a nuisance with “ ^ You suck” but they really couldn’t do the heavy lifting of carrying discussions. As I build out my network and more blogs install Disqus, I hope that posts and discussions become much more dynamic and lead to cross pollination of ideas; allowing readers’ comments to do the long tail lifting.

So feel free to comment… what’s the worst that happens?

Blame James Gross for getting me thinking about this.

James asked in his post yesterday what is the New New Thing? Looking at the lifespan of each of the last three big emerging trends (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) and how long they each spent in the limelight being the “hot” thing, James asked how could we guess what’s next. He asked if search data or some other tool monitoring online discussion and/or activity might identify the next emerging “hot” thing. I think it’s a decent hypothesis, if we bloggers didn’t totally muck it up for James. And I’m about to throw my hat in the ring and become part of the problem.

You can’t discuss Twitter without saying, “twitter” and there in lies the problem. We all add to the buzz and drive outlandish hockey stick charts that end up driving these “hot” trends. Not by getting involved and using the platforms, but instead just by discussing them. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, we chat about it therefore it must be the thing to be doing. Are we doing more harm than good? Perhaps.

First Problem
We’re too quick to call something dead. MySpace isn’t in the dead pool yet, it still has lots of traffic, is making improvements and just this week decided to challenge Yelp for local business information. But if you asked an “expert”, they’d tell you it’s dead. Why? Because we don’t talk about it anymore, but the audience that has remained loyal to the MySpace experience doesn’t care that Scott Smigler wrote in ’06 that the long tail of Facebook (what?!?! That doesn’t even make sense) will kill Murdock’s little site that could.

Now, we’re doing the same to Facebook. We’re having the same discussion and saying that the real-time web and Twitter will kill it. I happen to agree that the web will go real-time but I don’t think it’s going to be Twitter that kills Facebook.

But look at the chart above, we’re still making the same arguments and feeding into the buzz about things “being over” when clearly they aren’t. They just are for us early adopters.

Second Problem
We ALL blog about the Next Big Thing. I have my own thoughts and I’ll clearly be adding to that graph in the future. I’ll give you a hint in this post, more to come later. Google answers questions by pointing you to sites that have them. My “Next Big Thing” will be when content answers my question, no matter where or when it’s produced. (full post to come)

Third Problem
All we do is guess. There are SO many bloggers out there and this is what we do, 4% of all blog posts contain guessing!

So James, where’s the next big thing going to come from and how are we going to know where to look? I think the Next Next Thing is going to come to us by changing “how” we look, not where. Timeline by MicroPlaza has us started down the road, listen to your friends, they’ll find it.

Slowly building this up from a Go Daddy squatter page to a site with slightly more traffic than my Deli’s Menu Pages page, I’ve had the luxury of closely monitoring the site’s metrics and understanding how my messaging is getting out. It also allows me to understand how my network of friends and family uses the web.

The exciting tool for me is how Google reports on the geographic origin of my traffic. By looking at the map of New York I can quickly tell that my Aunt in Syracuse and my mother have visited. I know a friend in Rochester checked it out, my co-workers and several of my friends in NYC have looked at it. I have no idea who in Albany or southern NY looked, but it is cool to see that they’re watching.

A look at the whole US tells me that co-workers form other Nielsen offices in Kentucky, new co-workers in California, my aunt in Georgia, my father traveling to Miami for work (yeah, I know you checked it out Dad! So you saw the sweet ‘70s pic! Have to love Google ☺ ) and while I don’t know anyone in Seattle (greetings!) I’m happy that they’ve all looked.

Why’s this cool? As a marketer looking at this level of data is awesome. If I could write it, I’d have the site skinned to appear differently for each visitor based on where they were from. Visitors from Georgia could see a banner with myself and my aunt Shirley, Upstate New York visitors could get the current one of myself and mother, Cali visitors from Federated Media could get shots of me working hard at my desk. Now, how do I do that? Hmm….

Additional Sweet Facts -
28% of my traffic is from Twitter, which is awesome, that’s the only way I advertise and I’ve only tweeted a couple times about my ramblings.

A 51.56% Bounce Rate is great! Meaning half of my visitors do more than just look and leave, they click something. Now if I only had something to sell .

Average time spent is 2:34. This isn’t surprising; my aunts who probably just look at the pictures likely ignore the posts about data wonk stuff. It is still a good number however, when coupled with the bounce rate, it means I have an engaged audience which is ultimately the goal. Additionally, as a design decision I opted not to add links, outside content or any elements that would distract from the simple posts. So this decent time spent metric also is telling that my content is the focus, not RSS streams our widgets that point away from my content.

Only 4% of traffic comes from search. But the cool thing is seeing that a referring term is “Greg Hay Federated Media” meaning someone wasn’t looking for the football player that also comes up in results for “Greg Hay”

Nielsen, please listen, I want you to make a change or take a fresh look at web measurement. Give me something that I can use for media planning that makes more sense for the way the web actually works than what you’re giving me now. Currently you tell me who is on what site by applying an antiquated method of measurement modeled after the TV thinking that when a show is “on” the audience is there and thus that’s how you report it. The web is always “on” and you’ve shown you have no clue when I “watch” and have not taken the time to address that the web is a real-time experience and users don’t have to tune in when a content provider tells them to.

So, this is what I want. Tell me where my demographic goes throughout the day. There are reasons Cartoon Network runs Taco Bell ads during Adult Swim, to get stoners thinking about it. Why can’t you tell me where 35-54 year-old women go during the day? Or males 18-24? Use the panel, follow the group.

I think the ultimate win for online media planners is going to be when groups of people can be identified and targeted by how they move and navigate the web, NOT by who left a footprint by visiting a site at some point in time.

Before OneRiot switched gears and became a weird search engine, they had an amazing browser widget called Me.dium. It allowed users to see where their friends were in real-time and navigate to wherever that was by just clicking their avatar. It was genius. For me, I was totally sold when I spent an afternoon watching stay-at-home moms go on a shopping tour of the web with a blogger hosting, supplying the links and leading the chat in the plug-in. It was probably the coolest experience I had as a researcher; it was real time feedback on products, it was calls to action via commerce and best of all it was watching how a network would react to a shared web experience.

So, that got me thinking, how could this be looked at on a grand scale? How could we watch the web like the Me.duim tool did? Why continue to use metrics in an archaic way that TV dictates? Nielsen, switch. Show me what the crowd is doing right now. Do more men visit EPSN.com on their lunch break or after work? Would ads for iTunes music make more sense at night when people are at home on their machines or during the day when they get the impulse at work? Are more women on Amazon.com during the day and men at night? Build it, we will follow.

I hope someone out there is listening and taking notes…. no matter what time of day they find this.

(Full disclosure, I was with Nielsen Online over the course of the last year and a half in a research position)