And while everyone has predictably been falling all over themselves to get in a lot of general reporting about the debut, yours truly has been busy curating the less obvious, in order to get to the bottom of the question – to buy or not to buy…

The Form Factor Issue

After testing out the iPad at the Apple Store in Austin for about 20 minutes, and then again the following Monday at BestBuy for nearly 2 hours, I have to concur with the commentators that said it was a bit on the heavy side.

Not so much in the sense of the weight itself, but in the sense of being distributed in slightly too large of a form factor (kind of like overly large furniture making moving of it more awkward even if the item isn’t that heavy).

Not once did I think that that there wasn’t enough shown on the 9.7″ screen. Instead, it was almost too much. And watching various commentators such as Scoble et al. on the review by The Gillmor Gang wield theirs for the camera, they looked a bit too large as well. Wield is the right word for it come to think of it.

I said in January after the announcement that I had wished for the iPad to be “one size smaller”, about paperback size. Slightly smaller screen, less bezel instead, to keep it at about 4 x times iPhone size, rather than 6 x. If it had to be slightly thicker to fit batteries and other entrails, then so be it. No one seems quite as obsessed with (device) thinness as Steve Jobs come to think of it.

We’ll see if one of the other tablets planned for Android/Chrome OS or Windows will take advantage of this smaller form factor. [UPDATE: Looks like Dell is going to, with 5" and 7" screen versions of its Streak tablet. 5" seems a bit too small given that the current largest smartphones are already nearing 4.5 inch screens.]

Think about it like this: A 10″ screen held at 2 feet equates to a 50″ screen at 10 feet! (This is why no one thinks that hard about the little screens in the airplane seat backs being too small to watch many hours of movies on long flights.)

Right now I have my laptop on my lap, with the 15″ screen about 2 feet away. The iPad would have to be held with your arms fully out-stretched to create the same distance. At about 1/2 – 2/3 of that distance, the current iPad screen size will actually be the same (at 2/3) or even bigger than that (at 1/2 distance). I really think a 7-8″ diagonal screen would be completely sufficient.

And make the tablets much easier to wield…

The keyboard issue

There are several aspects to this:

1) There seems to be confirmation of what I suspected in my previous iPad post, that the keyboard dock is not as usable as it may first appear. The reason being that the whole thing is a bit unstable for switching from typing to touch-screen as Engagdet writes: “Our one complaint? It’s not that easy to interact with the touchscreen from this angle” (note that NO Bluetooth mouse is supported), and doesn’t transport well.

[While speaking of docks, an interesting fact that seems to be slipping through the cracks is that the VGA-out dock or adapter enables to output content that is DIFFERENT FROM what you see on your iPad screen for at least some applications that make use of this, e.g. Apple's Keynote presentation app.]

2) Given this reality, it is better to buy the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, IF you need a physical keyboard at times. It will work for other Bluetooth enabled computing devices in your house, etc.

Engadget in the same post shows a good quick video showing (at bottom of post) how fast it it to synch up the Bluetooth keyboard.

The question really is, is it needed at all?

The reports on on-screen virtual keyboard usability vary from good (some claim 50-words per minute, and a pre-launch reviewer from PC Mag wrote his entire detailed, multi-page review on it) to so-so, with the landscape view typing mode appearing to…ahem…win by a landslide.

But even in landscape mode, touch-typists who are used to resting their fingers on a keyboard have a problem, because the virtual keyboard will intermittently think you have begun typing.

The portrait view mode however seems to please next to no-one as far as typing more than a few keystrokes is concerned.

Why? Too far apart for thumb-typing or one-handed “hunt & peck”, too narrow for good two-handed typing. Bummer, if there weren’t an excellent solution that I hinted at in the comments on my last post:

3) Swype. One-handed gesture-based input by “swyping” the letters of a word. The application was unveiled at TechCrunch 50 last year, and is finding its way in private (?) beta onto some Android smart phones.

Why is it not on the iPad? That’s the $64k Question. Swype would appear to be a no-brainer, something that could have really pushed the iPad over the top beyond all doubt.

Fast input, aligned with the ergonomics of the device, seamless transition from touch-based navigation to touch-based Swype “typing”, workable and fast even for those of us who happen to be slowish 2-Finger typists.

This alone may make me wait for an Android tablet with Swype on board, with a slightly smaller screen as discussed above. Yeah, it’s that important.

.

Other stuff that is actually great

Somewhat under-reported has been the fact that the battery life is truly excellent, anywhere from 8 hours (non-stop, full-blast use with only the most resource-heavy applications), up to 12 hours or more with normal usage. Very few of the reviewers appeared to be able to get below Apple’s claimed 10 hours, which is a remarkable feat. Manufacturer battery life claims used to be notoriously…how do I put this…optimistic..

Also under-reported is another near miracle that instantly should make the iPad a couch computing favorite: It emits next to no heat, and has no fan, hence no fan noise. All while keeping the screen applications and video very snappy.

This may well prove huge, for business meetings as well, where Steve Rubel has already seen a more positive acceptance than either a laptop (creates distance) or a cell phone (makes people think you’re texting/checking your email).

Despite a variety of conspiracy theories for why Apple has it in for Adobe, THAT is the real reason why Flash is not being supported. Flash is a CPU resource hog. It’s why even a pretty powerful dual-core laptop starts to spin-up mightily when viewing most flash-based video. Have the thing on your lap, and the hot “exhaust” from your CPU is warming up your pants for you.

This is a HUGE DEAL. A literally cool and quiet computer. And just as I write that, here comes news that apparently iPad has issues with sitting out/being used in the hot sun, and can shut down pre-emptively to avoid overheating. Makes sense since it’s all glass and aluminum…

Also underreported: By way of a variety of apps such as Citrix Receiver, the iPad can run any remote computer and nearly any of that computer’s applications that might be too complex or large to run on iPad natively. This could be one of the killer apps for the iPad in settings such as hospitals. Steve Rubel’s point about meetings comes to mind again: Where a laptop would be inappropriate by a patient’s bedside, a tablet can be natural form factor.

About the iPad’s Kindle-Killing…

Much attention has been paid to the iPad’s impact on publishing, especially as a new entrant in the eBook reader category vs. Amazon’s Kindle device. So this area warrants some close scrutiny.

First, let’s point out that Apple is playing it pretty safe when it comes to anything that could smack of anti-trust worthy stiff-arming: The iBooks app is NOT installed by default, even though the iTunes Store is making a pretty obvious suggestion to install it. And Apple did not attempt to block the Kindle app, so they’ve learned from the iPhone Goggle Voice app brouhaha.

Apple has a lot of clout and likes to control everything, and yet, it doesn’t want to get into it with Congress if that can be avoided.

So how should Amazon play this?

Don’t try to take a shrill stand in a battle that can’t be won. Instead of carrying on about how the Kindle is still the superior eReader (e.g. in bright sunlight, which is probably true), Amazon should

1) drop the price for the Kindle immediately to below $200,

2) applaud the iPad for running the Kindle app so well, and so beautifully, pointing out that the Kindle really is a for-the-beach/pool type device, and

3) highlight the fact that ALL of your existing Kindle books will play on the iPad AND hopefully still on your Kindle as well.

The last point will make the Kindle a great hand-me-down device for kids who you don’t quite trust with a $500-900 iPad. And likely persuade prior Kindle owners to stick with the Kindle bookstore. Which is what Amazon should care the most about. There never was much use for them to get into a hardware race against Apple.

The Kindle will eventually simply be seen as a transitional device while Apple and others were still figuring out the new form factor. And meanwhile, Amazon has learned tons of valuable things about eBook economics. The business it should be in.

Given the various issues described further up, especially about the outdoor overheating, maybe it is too early to count the Kindle out just yet, and maybe it will fare better for longer than I first thought. Especially if Amazon further lowers the price.

More details on the iBooks app

One of the big issues that appear to be surfacing in regards to the iBook app is the bookmarking. Writes Gizmodo in “Hands On: Apple iBooks”:

Apple’s Bookmarking solution is perfect for highlighting a favorite line, but pretty lousy for just keeping your page. And, yeah, for a casual reader, this is a biggie.

And I would add to that that iBooks bookmarks are missing the capability to add your own commentary, a must for those of us who are used to heavily marking up our non-fiction books.

Here is another weakness Kindle could exploit for the time being, as relayed by PC World in “iPad as E-Reader: Glaring Problems, Promising Apps”:

By and large, in my reading, iBooks offered the slickest e-book navigation experience I’ve had on any device. Regrettably, however, iBooks makes a poor choice for anyone who wants to read e-book purchases on more than one device. Unless you plan to take the iPad with you everywhere, you’ll be without an e-reader much of the time. To make its bookstore more compelling, Apple needs to make desktop and phone versions of its reader. Until that happens, I won’t be buying any more books from Apple.

That’s pretty definitive, and may be a great life-line for the Kindle.

In summary, has the game just been changed?

I think we can safely assume that the ecosystem of iPad apps, accessories, and other add-ons will be a healthy one, see this example of people’s ad-hoc ingenuity… as the iPad as a design/art object is already spurring on a lot of further, often artistic ideas.

However during my tests one thing I realized is that there clearly is a learning curve for non-iPhone users as far as the basics of the interface are concerned. While that should help to rustle up Apple’s existing customers, it may prove to be a hurdle for very broad adoption. Then again, some commentators have already pointed out that very young users between say 3 and 13, are taking to the iPad like fish to water.

But plenty of adults are also ecstatic. Writes Michael Arrington in his “Unauthorized TechCrunch iPad Review”:

…the iPad beats even my most optimistic expectations. This is a new category of device. But it also will replace laptops for many people. It does basic computer stuff, like email and web surfing, very well. Applications load quickly and are very responsive – think iPhone 3GS with a 50% speed boost.

That’s what surprised me the most. The iPad isn’t just for couch computing…It’s a perfectly usable business device. And the form factor just happens to work far better for cramped places like airplanes than a normal laptop. I doubt I’ll ever open a laptop on a plane again after tomorrow…

The iPad will put significant pressure on laptop sales, particularly second device laptops.

Of course, here is the guy that was so desperate for the tablet form factor that last year he had his own tech blog delve into the device manufacturing business for a bit, and created his own Linux-based tablet prototype, dubbed “The CrunchPad”. (That project ended rather abruptly due to his overseas partners running away with the device under rather dubious circumstances.)

So, do we have a winner?

Someone on Gillmor Gang (see link above) intoned: “April 3 2010, the day the laptop died – or at least became the walking dead.”

I would concur that sub-12-13″ laptops and netbooks have just been dealt a considerable blow.

And Windows 7 based tablet PCs are just not really very far beyond a basic Windows PC with some touch features enabled, it’s as of yet not an end-to-end offering. Microsoft appears to indirectly be acknowledging this by basically ditching Windows Mobile 6.5, and going back to the drawing board:

The (still) unfortunately named (and just “renamed”) Windows 7 Series Phone is pointing in the right direction, but Microsoft won’t have it ready until the fall/X-mas, which means a tablet offering based on it is unlikely to be forthcoming until some time next year at the earliest.

That leaves many as of yet un-announced Android/Chrome OS based tablets, we will have to see if any of those materialize before the X-mas shopping season. Either way, that leaves a lot of room for Apple to run away with the entire category.

If everyone who can afford one and wants this class of device is buying an iPad now, then category leadership kicks in, and could well keep Apple in cruise-control and above 50% market-share from here. Until an entirely new category of device makes the iPad obsolete. Maybe it will be something like this Sixth Sense Technology TED Talk, for example.

Despite my overall positive views of the iPad and relative excitement about the tablet form factor, I for one decided to hold off for a bit longer due to the detail issues described above, which as you can tell are quite different from the ubiquitous and nearly reflexive complaints of “no multitasking, no Adobe Flash, no camera”.

None of those weighed very heavily for me. We will see if maybe Dell’s Streak in a 7″ version running Android and allowing the use of Swype for text input will end up being everything I ever wanted in a tablet. That such an Android device very likely would also support multitasking, Flash, and a camera (the “Big 3 Complaints” about the iPad) would only fall under the rubric “bonus” for me.

Please add your own iPad usage experiences and research in the comments below. Did you get one? Will you? How about an Android based tablet?

As I laid out a few weeks ago, it seems pretty likely that it was Apple that leaked much of the information to The Wall Street Journal about the tablet device prior to its launch — including the bogus $1,000 price from “analysts.” Later, a former Apple employee corroborated this.

Why would they do this? It’s simple. As I said at the time, if they plant the idea in peoples’ minds that a product will be $1,000, then release it for significantly cheaper, it’s a huge win for Apple. So when Jobs announced the entry-level iPad would be $499 yesterday, it was an absolute home run.

I have said for a good while that Apple is purposefully leaking "information" (mixed with misinformation) in just the right doses and intervals to keep the launch mania pot stewing, ending in a rolling boil crescendo right at launch.

(See: The Apple Tablet And Planned Insanity and as early as 8/08: Apple’s "Magician" Archetype Branding Revisited: Good News – Bad News .)

Now when it comes to seeding these price point speculations, they added yet another twist I’ve previously reported on: Decoy Offers or Decoy Pricing.

What it boils down to is that since all price perceptions are relative to a given context (ALL meaning arises in context by the way), if you can create a context where the price point at which you eventually offer something appears low, you will sell a lot more.

To quote my prior post:

Dan Ariely’s excellent "Predictably Irrational" talks about such contextual "decoy offers" that can boost sales for the item the seller really wants people to buy. As an example he uses a past offer by british business magazine The Economist:

It had listed $59 for on-line access only, $125 for print-only, and $125 for print & Web combo subscriptions, and had thereby significantly boosted the number of the expensive combo subscriptions sold (vs. test offers that omitted the seemingly non-sensical $125 print-only option)!

Obviously Apple just took things a step further: Since the Decoy Offer is not expected to be taken by anyone, it really doesn’t matter if you ever really formally write it up anywhere. Just introduce a high price point via a leak and nurture it (by not disputing the rumors) for a while, then triumphantly announce that the thing is actually going to cost HALF that.

If there had been no context of the prior (seeded) expectations, then the announcement of the entry-level iPad costing $499 would have been only referenced against other things in the consumer’s/prospect’s (that includes you!) mind:

Prices for other electronics items, other computers, other Apple products, asf. And the comparison may not have been favorable, or, a wash (no signal one way or the other).

Instead it was compared to a price point that for many months had already been talked about by all and sundry as reasonable, maybe high, yes, but definitely in the realm of the possible.

The expectation that the iPad was going to be a rather expensive and substantive device became more and more firmly established in people’s minds everyday this way. Now if you announce it at HALF, everybody’s knee-jerk reaction becomes: "This is a bargain!"

One more thing that Apple pulled off here is to establish the low $499 entry-level price as an ANCHOR price to pull this stunt off. Even though most people will spend substantially more for the iPad they really want, with 3G wireless and not just Wifi, and with more memory storage.

I doubt apple expects to ship too many of the $499 iPads. In essence, they created yet another decoy offer!

Writes TheNextWeb in I Call It The iLetdown – Why The iPad Missed The Mark And Blew Its Big Day:

Getting right into it, the lowest price for the iPad point is a mirage. A non-expandable device that has a total of 16 gigabytes of storage? Assuming a usable 15 gigabytes of space, I can fit less than a third of my music onto the device. Excellent. And zero percent of my photos. And videos. And apps, of course. So to say that Apple has created a mass market tablet for $500 is a little disingenuous.

So really what we have here is a Double Decoy, so to speak…

The attribution problem: In order to get rid of the attribution confusion, in your timeline we show the avatar and username of the original author of the tweet—with the person who retweeted it (whom you actually follow) in the metadata underneath. The decision is that this:

…is a better presentation than this:

No fault of @AleciaHuck’s but the first is simply easier to read, and it gives proper credit to @badbanana. Even if you know @AleciaHuck, there’s no benefit to having her picture in there.

 

So here is the big problem: That last half sentence (my BOLD highlight) shows complete ignorance of the way that Twitter works as a social engine and calculus.

Twitter users, whether consciously or not, are with each tweet putting a little bit of previously accrued social capital they have with their "followers" (Twitter users that are subscribed to them) on the line. So the act of forwarding another, often third party user’s tweet is significant in that it is a form of a micro-endorsement for this user that their followers are themselves typically not even subscribed to.

If the text of the forwarded tweet or (in many cases) the link to further content that it contains is ill received, the retweeting user in some sense is held accountable by their followers. At best, only a little bit of "social capital" is deducted, at worst, some will unfollow completely.

The user has put their stamp of approval on the retweeted content, and if it contained a link, it is largely expected that by extension the content at the end of that link was read and approved of as well.

(There are some exceptions to this when the news contained in a tweet is considered "breaking" enough so that the timeliness criterion overrides the need for checking out all of the content at the end of a link first. But, as most Twitter users have discovered before, the risk of forwarding something that turns out to be of questionable quality or outright bogus or even harmful goes up exponentially. "Blind" retweeting of links should be avoided.)

So, because of this micro-endorsement element, a Retweet has always gone well beyond a mere surfacing mechanism. Social media statistician Dan Zarrella in a prescient post a few months ago warned that the proposed RT formalization would do away with this form of social proof inherent in the RT convention ("Using the orig­i­nal poster’s pic & name in my time­line destroys any social proof the ReTweeter may have lent the Tweet.").

Known Avatar = Benefit

Back to the example given in the excerpt, there is in fact a GREAT benefit inherent in the picture/avatar of a user you have been following for any length of time: It is known to you, it is far less of a stranger all things being equal.

You have imbued it in your mind, by way of repetition (active Twitter users may be seeing the profile pictures/avatars of other active followed/friended users hundreds or even many thousands of times), with some trust and social capital.

It has been pointed out by multiple people that the surprise of seeing a "stranger’s" avatar in one’s Twitter inbound stream is downright shocking to some people, so strong is the identification with known people one has been following.

This has been one of the 1st rules of Twitter: You see only who you elect to see (i.e. follow).

If the avatar is now switched out to show that of the original author of the forwarded tweet, this trust is gone, unless the recipients (your followers) also happened to be following that same user. But even if they were, you, the Retweeter, are now cut out of the equation!

The social capital you put on the line is now not really rewarded anymore by having you be clearly associated with the surfacing of the information for the benefit of your followers. This can, especially over time, have several unintended consequences:

1) You might RT less because of this (largely unconscious) calculus, after all, why primarily boost the other person when you are taking most of the risk.

If the feature is used less, it would go the way of another Twitter feature that has withered on the vine, Twitter Favorites, which because of a lack of a meaningful social feedback cycle have languished as a form of a somewhat dysfunctional personal tweet bookmarking. Incidentally, the new feature could have been subsumed into and under the name of the old Favorites.

Paris Lemon of TechCrunch just wrote a post (see below) where he predicts that Twitter will have to allow people to turn off all inbound Retweets (per user shut-off is already supported) due to the "stranger shock" factor mentioned above.

He also thinks the feature if left to stand as is, will lead to a bifurcation of the use of Retweets into "old-school" and "new", with possibly unintended or of yet unforeseeable consequences. Which would certainly not be a desirable state of affairs for Twitter.

The control it hoped to gain from the Retweet implementation would largely be void if say half of all Retweets can’t be counted by their scheme.

2) You might retweet less carefully than before because you begin to think by way of 1) that your retweeting has become less meaningful to your followers in the sense of you having done the surfacing.

Other services like FriendFeed (FF) have had features that are similar to Twitter’s new offering for a while, e.g. on FF it is called a "Like". But the "Likes" there never quite had the social touch, mostly they’ve been used as just a surfacing mechanism, with the social element coming from FF comments.

It has also been pointed out by Robert Scoble and others that all Twitter had to do to avoid some of the angst surrounding the new feature roll-out, was to name it something different than "Retweet". Which makes sense, once a "brand name" of sorts is established in people’s minds, they are very loath to rearrange that in their mental real estate (lesson for all business great and small inherent here).

3) Context is clearly lost without the Retweeters avatar, and because the new Retweets presently cannot be annotated as you were/are free to do under the old "RT @username: …" convention.

This means you cannot express why you decided to forward the information if so desired. But intention and context go a long way in all social interactions (just think of the nuances inherent in most inside jokes, popular culture speak, sarcasm, asf.), and to cut it out is to misunderstand the social in social media.

The small annotations, even just 1 or 2 words, or a glyph or an acronym, can make all of the difference between sterile copying and the kind of mild embellishment or emphasis that we all use when telling each other stories or news in our social circles.

Are You A Good Little Retweet Automaton?

The new Twitter RT wants you to be a good, anti-septic, little forwarding automaton. Big mistake, think about what would it would be like if all of your social interactions used primarily direct quotes when relaying what a third party said.

TechCrunch’s Paris Lemon in a good, detailed post about the New Retweet conundrum titled "Simple Is As Simple Does: The Risk Of Retweet", echoes some of the points above:

The second point may actually be even more problematic for Twitter: Users want a way to include their own statements in Retweets. The new way of doing this does not allow for that. The fundamental principle behind this should be obvious: If you share something, there’s a natural desire to explain why you’re sharing it. That’s what a lot of people do with current retweets. Even if they just add “LOL,” it shows that they think the tweet they’re sharing is funny.

We’re also vain. Sometimes retweeting something is more about getting your say in rather than simply highlighting what someone else has said. Or, maybe you’re even retweeting something because you disagree with it. With the new Retweets, you can’t let that be known.

Social media had just given us all a voice, why would we want to give some of it up again to satisfy Twitter’s data management needs?

Lance Ulanoff wrote a great post on some of the awkwardly Orwellian language used by Twitter in the new Retweet implementation and in some of the explanatory PR that has gone along with it.

It appears as if the entire feature change is primarily cooked up for the benefit of Twitter’s ability to easily count Retweets and maybe make money off of the emergent surfacing derived from it. Strange, since they have already been doing something just like that IN FREE-FORM with Twitter "Trending Topics". Why the hand-cuffs now?

Williams (@ev on Twitter) claims the new feature’s goal is "helping you discover the information that matters most to you as quickly as possible." But the cognitive dissonance you may experience with this fundamental change will at best only slow things down for you.

All of these points taken together would explain the so far decidedly negative reception of Twitter’s new Retweet feature. By the way, the oft-repeated excuse that users will reflexively react negatively to any kind of change is a poor fig leaf here:

Twitter users so far have enthusiastically embraced the new Lists feature, a rather substantial change, since a few weeks ago. This obviously isn’t the case with this new RT feature.

And Twitter could have really seen all this from a mile off, since around August when the intentions for the new RTs were first announced. As already pointed out above, back then Dan Zarrella and others created some amount of buzz in the community for "saving" the established, user-borne, well-liked format, using among other things the ominously named "#SaveRetweets" tag.

Why not listen to your users, Twitter? They’re the reason for your success.

[Will social media services finally begin to understand that their very existence has changed the game? See what I wrote here:

Social Media Lessons: Controversy Erupts Surrounding Facebook’s “Twitterization” Redesign ]

While I personally am all for that change, having been an ardent Twitter user since early last year, there has been plenty of backlash from Facebook users about the extent of these changes. And all of the usual suspects of the blogosphere are weighing in, with heavy-weights like TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble siding with Facebook’s right to basically do what it wants with the free service it provides.

Even going so far as arguing that listening to your customer too much can be counterproductive. Here is a quote from Mike Arrington’s piece "No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook.":

In an interview last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked with me about how users are willing to accept change over time, and that Facebook would continue to push things along. Suddenly, though, they surrender because a few users have a belly ache over a redesign.

If they wanted to make these changes anyway, they shouldn’t have titled their blog post “Responding to Your Feedback.” They should have just continued to ignore the ranting, and announced further changes. Showing that you’re listening to feedback just invites more of it.

Someday, if they’re not careful, someone is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace, who in turn did it to Friendster. Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner.

While I can see their point to a degree, social media represent a whole new ballgame in many ways, which it makes it harder to predict what will happen. While these “A camel is a horse designed by committee" ideas may have validity in the realm of physical product design (Scoble is using a quote from a mentor about the problems with crowd-sourcing the design of a Porsche), I would hold that things may not be so straight-forward in the digital/social media realm:

1) Facebook already had several cases where it needed to retreat in shame from changes to the Facebook platform, the biggest among them the Beacon activity-tracking system that caused such privacy concerns and general outrage among Facebook users that it had to basically be abandoned.

More recently, the above-mentioned Facebook Terms of Service (TOS) debate around changes that appeared to give Facebook almost complete, irrevocable control over a users data and images even PAST the closing of an account, brought forth a similat swift user community response, and backing off by Facebook (for now to the original TOS, with supposedly a crowd-sourced version being on the way).

So with this partial retreat by Facebook, incidentally again due to privacy concerns, they’re really batting 0 for 3. One would think that they would be wising up on the PR front by now. And so much for "Zuckerberg never backs down"…

2) Much of this is not really surprising since Facebook’s users are perfectly empowered through Facebook’s platform:

Perfect for sharing photos with your friends, and throwing virtual sheep at them, but also perfect as a virtual soapbox to… complain about changes to Facebook’s platform.

With Facebooks recent full-scale mainstreaming, bringing it’s rate of new user adoption to well over 1 Million a day, one of the side effects is that now, even if only 1% of users strenuously object to something, that’s still close to 3 Million people howling.

And after all, it is called SOCIAL media, so most controversial/high impact messages have a tendency to spread virally, aided by speed of light technologies, AND Facebook cannot come off as looking patently anti-social.

So while Steve Gillmor is arguing that inertia would tend to win out, I’d say that he may be underestimating the righteous indignation that can come with perceived violations of SOCIAL trust.

Certainly there is room for back and forth here, but at some point, if the rubber band is stretched too far, it could snap. Users could turn their collective backs on Facebook, especially since the internet all around Facebook’s so-called "Walled Garden" is always continuing to hustle, and to add to the functionality available with quantum-leap innovations all of the time, making it less and less necessary for users to be locked into Facebook.

3) Which brings me to my last point: Facebook, having started from an, admittedly elegant (especially in comparison to MySpace) but mostly static, user profile page, has already been changing in response to "the rise of feeds". First the profile was redigned to look and feel more like FriendFeed, leaving a lot of the social apps to languish and whither on a back tab when compared to before (I certainly haven’t used many anymore since that point).

Next, the meteoric rise of Twitter, and its persistent "attention hogging", especially with the "hip early adopter" crowd, prompted an attempt by Facebook to buy Twitter (though the offer was mostly in hard to value Facebook stock), and now the redesign of the user’s homepage to look suspiciously like Twitter with it’s realtime feed of friends’ updates and activities.

But the truth is that Facebook users may not be ready for this level of speed, which Twitter users have already "living and breathing" for months or years at this point. Since I’ve been piping my Twitter updates to Facebook status updates, I’ve always worried that it was overloading my Facebook friends, and have recently throttled the pass-through way down.

So the jury is out whether Facebook users are en masse willing to take it to that level, or for that matter make use of the new possibilities of opening up one’s updates to the world (and thereby to Google to index). And since everyone all around Facebook is sharing things (like photos, which Facebook already just said in its TOS attempt it wants to hoard for itself), it may be hard to both maintain the Walled Garden, as well as open up Facebook in ways that could steal Twitter’s thunder.

So no, I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg has a completely free hand to play anymore. The ghosts that the sorcerers apprentice has called may prove harder and harder to call back. The monster that is Facebook is becoming harder and harder to control.

This should be fun to watch…

In the lengthy post he argues his "basic premise [...] that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it", which due to its sweeping nature definitely warrants further examination. The post as of right now has generated well over 200 comments, on a Sunday, so it obviously hit a nerve.

Among other things, Professor Clemons makes the following points about advertising both online or via traditional broadcast media:

Consumers do not trust advertising. Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.

Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible.  Why?  If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads.

And mostly consumers do not need advertising. My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor.

While I would agree with all three points made, and would count them among important caveats for anyone choosing to advertise for anything in this day and age, I disagree with Professor Clemons’ basic premise. Here’s why:

I would argue that none of the major "Old Media" players online (or for that matter none of the "New Media" either) are anywhere close to having efficiently monetized their page views. Everyone is still clumsily fumbling around when it comes to intelligent targeting of ads, both as to offer theme, as well as to offer pricing.

(Or rather mostly lack thereof, as when trying to employ Madison Avenue "image advertising" without any clear offer being made. Which, if it ever worked on TV, etc., certainly isn’t working online. In fact, online it may increasingly create a negative image of a company/brand/product as "someone" who just doesn’t get it).

This is astonishing, when all it really takes is some common sense about selling people stuff that makes sense in the CONTEXT of what they were already doing.

First, let’s get clear on the fact that an article or opinion piece in e.g. the New York Times provides a lot more pointers as to readers’ state of mind/interest than most Google queries ever could (as do Web videos posted on such sites), so the failure to target properly is in part simply a form of laziness.

While it is true that a news reader does come with, on average, less intent to buy anything compared to the problem/solution mindset of many search engine users, the data we can glean from the readers of an article, especially the LONGER they stay on that page reading, is much richer.

They must be interested in the subject matter of the article, and will tend to approve of the author and likely his general area of expertise. They will also be in a news or opinion mode depending on the piece. So what you should offer them in this case is more news or opinions RELEVANT to the topic at hand. Make the information offered exclusive and/or in-depth, and make the offer cheap enough to ideally keep it in the range of an impulse purchase (offer a Paypal option to keep things simple and secure in the reader’s mind).

For example, German Newsmag DER SPIEGEL was selling in depth dossiers from their archives (including PRE internet!) for a few bucks at one point, not sure if they still are.

Sell books (more INFORMATION) related to the topic at hand, in fact, some newspapers ought to be able to do OK just as an Amazon super-affiliate (earning 4% or more on the referral to book or similar pages on Amazon). Especially when compared to the poorly/non-targeted ads they are now showing, e.g. I saw a comparative car insurance ad placed against a financial opinion column. That connection can only be called tenuous at best.

For another example, just earlier today I viewed a video excerpt from the Today Show on MSNBC.com about micro-blogging service Twitter going mainstream, and they served up an ad for KRAFT dressing or something like that as a pre-roll ad. Completely pointless and a waste of my time and theirs, but in reality this kind of thing is still totally common, on MSNBC.com, Hulu.com, etc. Everywhere.

Basically on all Web properties of Old Media companies (and most New Media companies for that matter). It is still the standard handed down from pre-internet TV advertising days. It’s as if content awareness and keyword-based targeting had never been invented yet…

What if they had served a super short pre-roll ad that said: "Stay tuned after the end of the video, we’ve got a major surprise relating to Twitter for you", and then in a post-roll ad try to sell me something related to Twitter, social media, smart phones (to post to social media from my phone), etc. etc.

That would make at least some marginal sense. Getting me to opt in to a list by offering a free useful/in-depth report e.g. on how Social Media is changing the world, and then try to sell me off of there would be even smarter. Remember, it’s difficult to go "from Zero to Sale" in one step, especially if the price point is outside of "impulse purchase" range.

Or better yet the ad could attempt to hand me off to the account/profile for KRAFT foods on Twitter in order for me to connect there, maybe offering a special gift/incentive for doing so. You get the point, the only limit here is your imagination guided by basic common sense and direct-response principles.

By the way, if you’re not capturing prospects’ email addresses and then marketing to that list, you are making the biggest mistake of all. Back to the opinion piece/columnist example, they should all have big, fat lists ranging in the 100’s of thousands if not millions of subscribers (and the NYT in this example could retain an "ever-green backend" commission from the columnist on any follow-up sales via such a list being built for the columnist).

Also, there should ALWAYS be a big bright ad for the columnist’s current book placed for crying out loud, and if you’re really smart you’d switch that ad out every 20 seconds or so (motion drives attention) to an offer for… the audio-book version, earlier books, "Columnist XYZ sayz…" quote mugs, T-shirts, etc. etc.

Anything will be better than what they are doing now. It bears repeating: All it takes is some common sense about selling people stuff that makes sense in the CONTEXT of what they were already doing.

The bottom line is, any online content property like the NYT simply needs to do a lot more with all of the attention that it already has. In an information economy, attention is the only scarce resource. And they happen to already have plenty of that very resource. It is a CRIME to fail to monetize it efficiently.

To bring it all the way back to Professor Clemons’ post, while I will agree that advertising may currently be largely failing online, in my view this is due not to some basic law of the internet (because there is a good number of people successfully marketing online), but to the fact that it mostly hasn’t even been TRIED, in any intelligent reading of that word, by the usual suspects of major media.

This is from an interview by TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington with Citi Bank analyst Mark Mahaney in regard to the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo deal:

MA: [...] I heard that they commissioned an outside study sometime last year [that] suggested that they would have 85% plus increases in cash flow from outsourcing search to Google. [...] I think you said that they would go from 4 cents to potentially up to 9 cents per search — is that right? Sort of, 40-90 dollar RPMs on searches?

[...]

MM: [...] they actually said that they thought they — they didn’t name Google but it was obviously Google — that the difference in the monetization gap was 60 to 70%. That’s the first time we’d heard or seen Yahoo sign off on this specific gap.

No wonder that Yahoo has been flirting with outsourcing at least some of their paid search ads to Google: It’s instant money in the bank, to the tune of potentially 25-50% higher TOTAL cash flow! (TechCrunch rightly pointed this last one out, but omitted the underlying cause in their write-up.)

I came to a similar conclusion re:"the monetization gap" a week or so ago, just by looking at the respective search shares reported by ComScore, as well as the Q1 earnings numbers by Google and Yahoo.

Obviously, the numbers reported by Mahaney from an in depth study (that was apparently commissioned by Yahoo itself!) are much more authoritative. And to me, they therefore are the true bombshell out of this interview, though Google Q1 earnings were obviously enough of a bombshell to send their stock up over $100 in a few days.

Now beyond this very key admission, the further question obviously is how this portends for the proposed buyout of Yahoo by Microsoft. And here again Mahaney is pulling no punches,  and comes to a conclusion very similar to what I wrote here. Even though the TechCrunch summary of the interview again inexplicably omits his dire predictions.

I realize that it’s easy to get caught up in the complicated and "titillating" mechanics of the negotiations (or lack thereof), but at the very end of the day the only questions that should matter are:

Does any of this make sense from a business perspective?

Will this make a difference in terms of Microsoft-Yahoo being able to compete with Google in earnest?

Will they together be able to change these dynamics that have led to what amounts to an admission by both companies that they haven’t been able to compete? (By Microsoft in that they are seeking out this deal, by Yahoo that they likely cannot avoid it, and have even been considering outsourcing to their main rival in a weak attempt to try and avoid it.)

Here is what Mahaney had to say:

MM: [...] The open question and really the last area where they could have an impact on Google is just by creating a larger second place, or second tier, search engine. [...] That would be an intriguing possibility here on how Microsoft/Yahoo! could have a negative market share impact on Google and search. We’re not going to know that for a year and a half or two years from today, assuming everything goes to plan. In the mean time, [...] Google is starting to attack more and more aggressively [...] on the display advertising market. I think it’s a reasonable bet that Google’s share of the total US advertising and the world Internet advertising is the same or maybe even a little bit greater over the next two years.

Sounds pretty open and shut to me, especially if you’ve been paying any attention to how methodically Google has been honing their search monetization.