The Downside

Rule of Product Management #675: If you’re going to post your mission on your homepage, make sure people can get behind it.  Vyoom, a new “real-time” social network presents their philosophy front and center on their homepage:

We at Vyoom believe members should be rewarded for connecting and sharing with friends, family and co-workers in a real-time environment.

Excuse me, what?  Why exactly should I be rewarded for chatting with my friends and family?  Shouldn’t the mere activity and social interaction of sharing helpful, entertaining, or personal information with my acquaintances be reward enough?  It sure is on Facebook, Twitter, email, or even in person.  Why do I need to be rewarded for this?  If I’m using your site because I want to be rewarded, I’m likely to overuse the site, flooding my friends and family with information they don’t want, and ultimately having them all block me and/or add me to their spam filters.

Further down on their homepage, they claim they have a “real-time” social network that lets me see what my friends are doing and customize what updates I want to see.  Their meta description (shown to search engines, but not on the site) describes them as a

Social network with advanced social capabilities and true real-time data streaming in both a public and a private network all in one platform

This featureset actually sounds like it might be interesting and differentiating, so why lead with the messaging about rewarding me for communicating with friends?  If you have a great new tool that will make my communications easier, lead with that.  You don’t need to bribe me.  If the product is that cool, I’ll use it and I’ll do your marketing for you by telling my friends.  This is a classic case of a split personality site - they seem to have a cool product, but their lead pitch doesn’t even mention its strengths.

And while we’re at it, Rule of Product Management #425: Avoid underlining words that are not hyperlinks.  Their homepage is riddled with underlined words that unfortunately I just can’t click on.

And you might be asking if I actually used the site…well, no.  I tried - I registered, but never got my confirmation email, and you can’t use the site at all without it.  I tried signing up with a different email address, and the registration form broke.   Sorry guys, I’m done.

If you’re on the digital airwaves at all these days, you’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about Twitter and particularly how people are starting to turn to it for bleeding edge news reporting.  (I covered the real-time news aspect of Twitter previously.)  What most pundits and even reporters are missing in this fray is that Twitter is more of a communication tool than a source of information, and they should treat it as such in their reporting.

The distinction is an important one, and it’s growing increasingly relevant.  In the aftermath of the coverage of Michael Jackson’s untimely death, the TechCrunch blowhards bellyached about how the mainstream media didn’t recognize Twitter’s role in the story coverage.  Author Robin Wauters cites the Chicago Tribune’s coverage:

Gossip site TMZ.com, owned by Time Warner, was out in front with Jackson news and digital-era pipelines spread the word, as has happened before with other major celebrity news stories. But it was old media stalwarts that did the heavy lifting, with giants such as The Associated Press and the Web site of the L.A. Times, sister paper of the Chicago Tribune, reporting the fastest, most credible information on the emergency call for paramedics and ultimately his death.

and she complains that

Chest-beating over old media doing the “heavy lifting” for blogs and Twitter, and being faster in reporting information than those new media when it was exactly the other way around is beyond ridiculous.

Wauters asserts that Twitter and TMZ did all the “heavy lifting”, but let’s be totally clear here: Twitter didn’t do anything at all. Twitter only facilitated communication between humans; in this case it enabled the distribution of links to the TMZ story.  Twitter doesn’t have a news room, and they don’t have writers.  Twitter is a pipe, a utility, a tool; it is not a source, so stop treating it as such.

Countless news stories are spread every day over email, blogs, message boards, cell phones, fax machine, or even good old word-of-mouth, but do we need to recognize the role of those tools in news coverage?  ”I just heard the news, thank you cell phones for giving me this news!”  Do we believe these tools should get recognition equal to the actual sources of news that created the stories being passed along them?  Now that’s ridiculous.  Just because the communication tool is new doesn’t mean it is anything more than a tool.  TechCrunch, please get over yourselves and stop promoting Web 2.0 for the sake of it.

Twitter is pretty sure Jeff Goldblum is dead

Jeff Goldblum, for one, can probably vouch for how little heavy lifting Twitter actually does:

TMZ alone should get credit for having feet on the ground (of some sort) and for getting the story first.  Stop thanking the messenger, and thank the writer of the message.

If you haven’t already seen Microsoft’s so-called ‘Project Natal’ in action, check it out here.  The original Xbox and the 360 were essentially me-too products that thrived due to an easy-to-learn development platform and a solid online component, but with Project Natal MS is actually pushing technology, gaming, and even user interface forward.  If the final product works as well as it does in the video (which frankly is a little hard to believe), they’re really on to something.

According to the laboriously-named Participatory Media Network, 99% of 18- to 24-year-olds have profiles on “social networks,” but only 22% of people in that age group use Twitter.  In their press release about the survey, the PMN concludes that Twitter “has yet to catch on” with Gen Y’s, and Cnet’s Caroline McCarthy parrots the PMN’s press release in her post “Young adults haven’t warmed up to Twitter.”

In what alternate universe does a service that after just over two years in existence already has a 22 percent market share count as something that has yet to catch on?  This is exactly what happens when market researchers trained in the 60’s are allowed to research things they don’t understand.  Any new online service would be thrilled to have a 22% market share of Gen Y, particularly a service that requires them to actually post content publicly to participate, rather than consuming content or having private conversations as they do on most social networks.

PMN is showing that they are hopelessly out of touch by positioning Twitter against the entire social networking space at large - it’s like saying “90% of adults 18-24 have cars, but only 20% are Toyota - Toyota has yet to catch on!”  Yet again I am severely disappointed by market researchers, as well as the press who mindlessly regurgitate these releases.