Notes from a talk by Yossi Vardi of ICQ at Les Blogs.
20 million bloggers are not journalists, what are they? They want to fulfill a human desire of self-expression. ICQ was founded by four Israeli kids who wanted an indication for when their friends would enter a chat room. Initially they bet they might have 3k users, now approaching 400 million. ICQ 297M, Jesus 277M and Bible 250M mentions on MSN.
I'm not of the digital generation. When arguing over a feature in ICQ he didn't understand, the kids said, "it doesn't matter, your generation is dying anyway." If I tried to understand ICQ use (14 days a month is 6 1/2 hours a day). Those up to the age of 35 thank me, and if they are above 35 they say, "my daughters..." Can't reduce the human user experience down to an algorithm, otherwise anybody could copy it. However, there are 3-4 major forces on the Internet:
- self expression
- communication
- sharing
- collaboration
Most people want to get Joi's video and share it with others -- we have a need, desire to share, it gives us comfort to collaborate. We used to pay an unjustified premium to rhetoric. Imagine if in every class there was a backchannel. Now everyone is in charge, can create and express themselves. If you want to understand blogging, understand social software. The killer app on the Internet are people. It provides tools for people to enhance their social potential. Other than the telephone (communicate) and telegraph (collaborate) -- we didn't have much of an invention before it.
Social signals in presence. At Yahoo IM, the most desired feature is seeing the song their friends are listening to. What I am doing now, generally, synch/asynch, on all the time. Facebook doesn't provide dating, they provide social signalling and social cues.
Social software like Flickr takes the power to create APIs from the hands of programmers to give them to the general public. Create a whole phenomena of innovation without having to create. Blogs will be an interface for many applications.
Enhancing reputation and verification: Hal Varian in Info Rules: when you want to consume an experienced product, you know if you want it only after you have consumed it. How do you know if a restaurant, theatre or book is a good one?
32 women played the Prisoner's Dilemma in an Atlanta study, they accreted dopamine 5x greater when they collaborated. We get more satisfaction when collaborating than competing.
1. Internet User on April 26, 2005 5:24 AM writes...
1. ICQ never had more than 10M active users, not to say 400M.
2. not every download is a user...
3. comstore research estimates that ICQ has no more than several million active users, much less than any other significant player like yahoo, msn or AOL which each have several dozens of millions of active users (each being 10x fold of ICQ)
3. ICQ was not the first p2p software... they simply copied and built upon IRC networks, and they never even bothered to give them any credit
I think it's about time that the avangalist Mr. Vardi at least admits the true facts, and not fill his mouth water every time the 400M users number is raised in the air, and other inaccurate data...
Permalink to Comment2. jason on April 26, 2005 9:57 AM writes...
Good to hear that there are some more peope out there reminding folks that journalism is trying to pull a hegemonic take-over of the community aspects of blogging...
Permalink to Comment3. Adam on April 27, 2005 4:53 PM writes...
I've heard Yossi speak previously. One of the aspects to his success that I think is so important (but overlooked) is how he interacted with his younger colleagues. How do certain people cross the generational divide and recognize important ideas foreign to their own generation? It seems like technology constantly raises this generational divide issue, so it'd be interesting to know more why and when people can straddle that divide. Is it a matter more of personal attributes or context?
Permalink to CommentAdam
http://aneufeld.blogspot.com
4. Mickael UNG on April 28, 2005 2:05 AM writes...
Interesting speaks from Yossi and comments. I was at the event "LES BLOGS & SOCIAL SOFTWARE". I think that Social Software will become more social than ever because more we give freedom of speaking more communities will be created.
"Is it a matter more of personal attributes or context?"
Permalink to CommentI'd say both, ... we are all from different culture and social environment. Someone can be more or less sensible to technologies. I can't also imagine myself saying: "it doesn't matter, your generation is dying anyway". Do not forget that Yossi's generation, maybe contributed more on what we have today.
5. maybe.in.my.lifetime on April 30, 2005 2:09 PM writes...
" We get more satisfaction when collaborating than competing." What an utterly female understanding... Bravo !
Permalink to Comment6. RSS news aggregator on May 3, 2005 7:12 PM writes...
some RSS news aggregator
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