Outside Innovation

Swipp: A More User-Friendly Answer for Social Search?

Enter Swipp.com. According to this article in Wired, Swipp was planning to remain in stealth mode a bit longer, but decided to launch early in response to Facebook Graph Search. Right now, it offers mobile apps that let you take pictures, comment, and find and discover things of interest. It’s kind of like Pinterest for the world. Apparently, the Swipp team hopes to develop a more customer-driven approach—one in which users are able to help one another find and appreciate things. And Swipp promises to make its data very open to its users, so we can export and control the things we’ve posted really easily. Let’s give it a try. Looks like fun!

Facebook Search Graph Is Here: Fix Your Privacy Settings (Again!)

Facebook Graph Search joins Timeline and Newsfeed as a third “capability” in Facebook that most of us didn’t want and haven’t welcomed. The clue is in the name itself. No real person wants to search the “social graph.” Only robots spawned by marketers do. Facebook Graph Search lets applications and algorithms (and individuals) look for and aggregate likes, check-ins, photos, and profiles.

What’s in it for us? As an end-user (not an application), you can search for other people who like Gilbert & Sullivan who live in the Boston area—that’s useful if you’re putting on a performance. But marketers and their algorithms are likely to be much more invasive. And what about those things you “liked” that you may not want showing up on a search. For example, I work for Apple, but I liked Samsung phones at some point in the past?

Anthony Kosner’s thoughtful article in Forbes, “Facebook Graph Search Is A Disruptive Minefield Of Unintended Consequences” provides some thoughtful analysis about what Facebook Graph Search means for marketers and competitors.

Electronic Frontier Foundation provides the best guidance for how to fix your privacy settings, including “unliking” things you’ve liked in the past and untagging yourself from photos.

 

Amazon’s AutoRip: Will It Lure Customers Off iTunes?

I think that Amazon’s AutoRip is brilliant, including the way the company just quietly started doing it, surprising and delighting most customers who suddenly discovered that they had a whole online music library of music they loved that they didn’t have to create or buy. Watching what happens with AutoRip will be a fascinating case study to examine a number of issues:

1. When is it OK to do something that “benefits” your customers without asking for their consent?

2. What are the critical customer experience things you need to get right when you ’re helping customers “manage their stuff?”

3. Will Amazon’s CD AutoRipping service get customers to add Amazon Cloud Player to their devices? Will customers mind have two (or more) music libraries to “manage”?

4. A year from now, will AutoRip be seen as a turning point in the music marketshare battle?

Here's a quick intro to my article:

Amazon Takes on Apple in Digital Music
Combined CDs and AutoRip Make Amazon Cloud Player More Enticing
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, January 24, 2013

Do you like surprises? Many Amazon customers were surprised to discover that Amazon had given them a free gift: digital MP3 files of the music from CDs they had purchased directly from Amazon anytime. You can download and/or stream this music using an Amazon Cloud Player app on your device of choice or directly from your browser. We believe that this capability will cause many people to switch their music purchasing from Apple to Amazon.

Read a sample and download the full article in PDF.

 

 

Aaron Swartz’s Legacy: Stop government & corporate bullying; Provide access to the Internet & public information; Reform healthcare & our financial system…

On Friday, January 11th, 2013, the girlfriend of 26-year old Aaron Swartz discovered that he had hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. The Internet and social media sphere was quickly flooded with expressions of grief and outrage.

Who Was Aaron Swartz?

Aaron Swartz was an amazing visionary and activist who created tools and movements to empower, inform, and mobilize people. He was involved in developing and contributing to many of the tools upon which information sharing on the Internet are based, including Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the XML content type for the Resource Description Framework (RDF) of the W3C, and Web.py (a lightweight Web framework developed in Python).

He built Infogami (a Wiki application framework built on Web.py), which he used to launch a business that he merged with Reddit, which was, in turn, sold to Conde Nast. He used that same framework to build the architecture for the Open Library, a project to create “one Web page for every book ever published,” which now houses 20 million book records and 1 million e-books. He was one of the major creators of and contributors to Archive.org. He collaborated with his mentor, Lawrence Lessig, in the creation of the framework for Creative Commons’ licensing.

In an incredibly moving interview with Amy Goodwin on Democracy Now, Larry Lessig summed up a few of Aaron’s contributions this way:

Our Review of Zazzle.com: How Easy Is It to Create and Sell Customized Products?

Zazzle.com is amazing. You should know about it, if you don’t. It’s a privately-held business, headquartered in California that was founded and is still run by a father and his two sons. Their secret sauce: print brilliant multi-color images on just about any surface quickly and professionally and ship that personalized, customized product overnight. Zazzle.com is a true customer ecosystem. It attracts 8 million visitors per day; 3.5 million/day to its US site and the rest to 17 country or region-localized websites. The site features 80 million unique product designs in 50 product categories, with 150,000 new products added daily. These products are produced and shipped, usually within 24 hours, to over 224 countries. There are over 1 million sellers on Zazzle. These are people who are making a business by selling their own creations.

This week, Ronni Marshak takes us on a tour of how easy (or not) it is to create your own custom products and create a store in which to sell them on Zazzle.com.

Being Creative on Zazzle.com
How Easy Is It to Create (and Sell) Your Own Customized Products?
By Ronni T. Marshak, EVP & Sr. Consultant/Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group, January 17, 2013

Why Amazon Is the Company to Watch in 2013

While everyone else seems obsessed with Google and Facebook and Apple, I’m more interested in Amazon right now. I believe that, with the advent of the Amazon smartphone that’s expected mid-year, we’ll experience Amazon in a more Apple-like way. Instead of Amazon as our go-to online retailer, we’ll see Amazon as our everyday companion.

• We’ll come to expect the ability to stop reading mid-page on a tablet and pick up where we left off on our phone.

• We’ll download and watch free Amazon Prime TV shows and movies on many devices in our household, moving from device to device without missing a scene.

• We’ll check prices from our phones when we’re in stores to make sure we aren’t paying a premium over what Amazon would charge.

• We’ll continue to benefit from subsidized shipping for many of our purchases.

• We’ll be able to use Amazon One-Click^® at the point of sale in stores.

• We’ll be able to select easily among any of our stored payment types when shopping from our phones (online or at point of sale).

• We’ll be able to buy and maintain our mobile apps, music, videos, books, magazines, and newspapers in Amazon’s cloud, so we always have what we want on our devices, and we can always retrieve anything we once bought or enjoyed.

• Instead of annoying ads on our mobile phones that are triggered by our phone’s location and some algorithmic guess about what we might want to do next, we’ll only see offers when we ask for them, and they will be based on deep knowledge of what we actually care about.

• And, if we want to start a new business, publish a book, create a new album, produce a video series, develop a new mobile app, or design a game, we’ll seriously consider using Amazon’s cross-platform infrastructure offerings and cloud services.

Here's my latest analysis:

Amazon’s Next Moves

It’s a Customer Ecosystem Poised to Become an Increasingly Important Part of Our Lives

Amazon is as important as Apple, Google, and Facebook in transforming how we get things done. In 2013, as Amazon introduces its own phones, you’ll have Amazon ease at your fingertips, not just for buying things and comparison shopping, but also to manage much of your life, including all of your digital assets. Moreover, Amazon’s customer-controllable recommendations will challenge Google and Facebook’s ads for relevance. Read more...

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