Posts from June 2008

My Vision For Social Media

I don’t have a particularly well thought out road map for investing in social media. I just use the stuff as much as I can and I get urges to do things I can’t do. The rest of our team does the same thing. Then we look for people addressing those urges. Every once in a while we are so impressed with these people that we fund them. That has led to many of the investments in our portfolio. There are also times when we find people doing interesting things and we can’t fund them, like FriendFeed or WordPress or Facebook. We try to use those tools as much as the tools we have invested in because it’s the using that informs.

My friend Robert Seidman, who was one of the earliest chroniclers of the Internet with his Online Insider newsletter, wrote me an email yesterday asking me to articulate my "grand vision" social media. He wrote:

There’s no doubt in my mind that you have a vision for what “social media” is and that it’s much grander than anything that’s currently happening.  I think to some degree I’m simply not thinking as big as you are and so I don’t really see what you’re envisioning.  I’m not suggesting in any way that you’re wrong, only suggesting that I have not had the “a-ha!” moment.

Honestly I am not envisioning anything other than this; every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.

That’s it in a nutshell. Many people will say that’s a ridiculous notion. That not everyone is an extrovert. That most people don’t have anything interesting to say or share. To which I say bullshit. I believe that we are headed to a world which everyone will share their lives with the rest of the world via the Internet. That is social media. It’s a huge movement and we are at the start of it.

#VC & Technology

Convenience Beats Quality

I’ve been writing about this theme for about as long as I’ve been blogging.

I regularly opt for a 128kps stream on the Internet over a vinyl record played on our high end audio system (because I can search for the music I want to hear and play it instantly).

I lost my Canon SD850 recently and chose not to replace it. I use the camera in my blackberry 90% of the time anyway (because it has the ability to instantly post to the web).

And so it was interesting to me to read the comments on Techcrunch regarding Scoble’s interview with the Twitter team on Friday, like this one:

What’s the obsession with qik? Even a cheap/small video camera would be better quality that this.

To which Scoble replies:

when I woke up this morning I didn’t plan to do this interview. If I
did it with other equipment I wouldn’t have been able to get it up so
fast.

Exactly. I thought the video was fine. Sure it wasn’t TV quality, but I could care less. It got the point across. To those who care, it was great journalism. Scoble had been critical of Twitter, he thought they were blaming him for the outages, he went over, turned on his camera and recorded the conversation.

Bravo. As someone else said in the comments:

I love what Qik and Kyte and Nokia and others are doing … just needs
time to mesh. Scoble is out on point, taking the first bullets as he’s
discovering new stuff. I give him credit for trying new things and
trying to get interesting content.

The ability to do something is so much more important than the ability to do it in high quality. That will come in time of course.

#VC & Technology