Throughout the course of history, telecommunications has played a critical role in upbringing change and has paved the way to new eras. Whether it was the invention of the telegraph, telephones, the internet, or electronic mail, each and every one of them has transformed society into a more connected place. While those technologies have greatly impacted response times and exponentially increased the pace of business transactions, the more recent advent of social networks has created an aura of omnipresence spanning the entirety of our “friends circles”, if you will. Telephones, instant messaging and electronic mail brought us closer to our friends as it created a private dialogue between us and our friends – a compromise from face-to-face time, yet arguably a step towards deepening our relationships. Social networks, however, promise that no longer are we imprisoned to dwell in the mere consciousness of ourselves, but we can constantly breathe in the consciousness of others even when we are not in close physical proximity to them. That’s taken the sense of “connectedness” to a whole new level. Nowadays, people find telephones, IM, and e-mail increasingly antiquated and it’s as if social networks have become the norm to strike a dialogue with friends. Often, that dialogue is focused around information that one party shares. And more often than not, this information is not a story or an experience, but a few bytes of a popular YouTube video, a comic of the more slapstick crude type, a picture of a furry animal, some odd 140 characters, or a confession or self-portrait of some kind. Have we finally blurred the line between self-expression and self-exhibition? You might argue that this omnipresence is bringing us closer, but is it deepening our relationships, or is it only amplifying the apparent feeling that there is a relationship?
Friendship and the Social Network
The answers are pretty obvious when you realize that the premise of social networks is to broadcast our consciousness to a set of people we like to call our “friends circles”. The key word there is broadcast. Mark Zuckerberg’s vision is an accurate embodiment of this premise – friendship should be open and transparent. I believe this is a flawed concept due to two reasons. Firstly, our so-called “friends circles” are nothing more than a set of individuals who are sharing, liking and commenting on this stream of collective consciousness, except the feeling of collective is merely an illusion. Gone are the days when you attuned the message you conveyed based on the listener’s personality, their background, their interests and most importantly, the emotional connection between you and that person. Today, it’s like you’re talking to everyone at the same time, but… you’re not really. As essayist William Deresiewicz concisely points out in his article Faux Friendship, “visual juxtaposition [of Facebook friend lists] creates the mirage of emotional proximity”.
This leads to my second point, that intimacy has practically been eroded. Friends write on friends’ walls that they haven’t been able to respond to their voicemail because they’ve been incredibly busy. Or that they love them. Or that they miss them. The wall, of course is a public platform and posting on someone’s wall with something intimate invites the speculation that whether the post was truly an urge to strike a dialogue with the opposite end, or a network-wide exhibition of how caring the initiator of the message is. And are those people really so busy that they can’t respond to a voicemail but have the time to comment and like others’ posts left and right? It’s as if Facebook is what is keeping the person busy in the first place. My point is that friendship is essentially private and there is a certain level of intimacy involved to provoke a sense of emotional proximity. What the rampant use of Facebook may have significantly contributed to is the erosion of the very nature of friendship and its conversion into a vulgar exhibition of the self.
A New Level of Self-exhibition
We’ve all seen the arrival and departure of that “25 things about me” survey that you did to shamelessly show your “friends” what you’re all about. And for the readers of those surveys, if knowing “pet peeves” and favourite colours of your friends is what differentiates confidantes from acquaintances, then I feel sorry that friendship to you only means a shallow mutual understanding of the other. Self-exhibition is not a new phenomenon. Humans are hardwired with an urge to make other people envious of what they do. Broadcasting your recent purchase of that convertible, or that high-end coffee you’re drinking, or those ridiculously touched up shots from Vogue-inspired photoshoots, or that cool new hobby you just undertook – these are but examples of self-marketing we’ve witnessed from time to time. However, Facebook takes this display to monumental extents. It makes things and people appear what and who they are not. It creates two worlds – your true self, and an alternate deliberately crafted depiction of your persona. So you went on a jog today, or you went for a picnic in the park, why do you need to advertise that to everyone? Relaxation means taking a break from your surroundings, and if you’re going to do it only so that you can project a certain image of yourself to your so-called friends, it really does defeat the purpose. What’s rather amusing is that people are thinking of self-advertising on social networks so much that they are deliberately creating experiences just so that they have a picture or a status update to share. And of course, the more you care about the broadcasting of your consciousness, the more disconnected you become from reality. My friend aptly calls it being in “autopilot with respect to the world”:
“If music or daydreaming (about the past or future) wasn’t bad enough, let’s add the 4th aspect of time: cyberspace time. Whenever you’re online, such as FB or Twitter, you’re not living in the present moment, and you’re in autopilot with respect to the world. Yet another thing to fragment time with. […] What is even more hilarious is the time people spend daydreaming/thinking about Facebook related stuff. […] It’s a compounded cluster****”
I prefer to call it the rise of the self-entrepreneur. Yourself is the product, and you are willing to go to any extent to sell the product to your market. Of course, the market in this case is your Friends list. Likes and comments are your validation and criteria for success. Posted something but didn’t get enough likes? It’s like pushing out a feature that didn’t chime with the market. Good self-entrepreneurs would reiterate, right?
Right.
Connectedness: An Illusion?
I believe that it’s not Facebook’s fault that most of us have become validation-seeking overly individualistic self-promoters with a shallow sense of security. Putting technology to good use is always the consumer’s decision. Facebook is merely a tool that amplifies the quirks of a developing mind. However, it has been instrumental in making relationships ever more superficial. Friends settle for wall posts, don’t have time to talk on the phone because they’re too busy checking Facebook, and thinking about what to do next so that they can check-in or update their status. Sometimes they’re in front of you but talking to a dozen different people whom they call their “bffs” on BlackBerry Messenger. The ubiquity of your friends might give way to an illusion of having more friends but deep down in your heart a sense of loneliness looms and you’re even more disconnected from your internal self. This rise of the self-entrepreneur is characterized by a faux sense of self-worth and an illusion of friendship. It’s a sad reality in the eye of the beholder. While a fine group of geeks may have set out to make the world a more connected place, it seems like they’ve instead unleashed a Revenge of the Nerds on everyone along the way.
If you aren’t aware that the world’s population hit 7 billion people on October 31 2011, I don’t know what you’ve been doing or where you’ve been for the last few days. But chances are you’ve heard about it unless you’re stranded in a desert or lonely island somewhere and only have access to this blog. And if that’s the case, then I just told you that it has hit 7 billion people and you should believe me (and I also want to meet you someday because I admire your respect for me). So either way, you should realize it’s a big milestone. Milestones can be good or bad, but I’d like to assume they’re good. People who like to believe that Earth is creating too many babies too soon should also consider that it’s part of human nature to reproduce. After all, what matters most are the people. As an Earthling, I can say that nothing is more paramount than our species. Not Mars, not robots, not the time-space continuum, not Tigers, and not even Mother Nature.
Now, that might piss a lot of you off. Sure, go ahead and call me a solipsist but I think we as a society are inherently solipsist. It’s not just me. We care the most about ourselves than anything else, and it won’t change, at least not anytime soon – we’re just hard-coded that way, get over it. Of course, don’t get me wrong, I don’t encourage producing kids if you can’t afford to sustainably provide them a decent education and a lifestyle that you’d like them to have. So, I feel sort of significant and insignificant at the same time. Significant because I was alive when the population was less than 6 billion, and I’m still alive when we have surpassed 7 billion – and there’s only about 6,999,999,999 others. I mean, think about what it’s going to be like a thousand years from now. So much bad shit is going to happen – I just feel lucky that I can be safe and sound, and I can have the freedom to do whatever I want in life. That makes me feel like a significant dweller of this era which has, in fact, spanned two millennia. I feel insignificant because (now the irony will be thick here) there’s fucking 6.9 billion of you – I am essentially a speck of dust to anyone who’s creeping our planet from somewhere far away in our galaxy (btw, if you are that person on that planet, you should totally add me on Facebook, or whatever you guys call it over there). The thought of me being so tiny in the big picture of things is just depressing. Though, I have the perfect song that makes me feel better.
But, anyway, I didn’t write this post to convey my emotional misgivings about our planet reaching 7 billion people. Fuck that. I wrote it because I would like to highlight what this means for entrepreneurs, hackers and people who design stuff for, well, other people (and themselves …hey, check this out, I’m not all talks).
7 billion people means 7 billion potential users if you build consumer products. Of course that’s not a reality right now, but one day it will be. Out of those 7 billion potential users, 36.3% live in India and China. A whopping 36.3%! That means, you need to have some sort of product strategy for these emerging markets. And the biggest mistake that entrepreneurs make is to think that emerging markets are exactly the same as Western markets. They’re not. I think Groupon’s failure in China is the best example how products just fail if you don’t build a strategy that is geared exclusively towards an emerging market. It also can’t be the same strategy for India and China – they have to be two different ones, though, they will be similar in many respects. So, how do you do it?
1. Understand the culture of the emerging country really well. I can’t stress this enough. Go back to its roots, learn the history, learn what motivates people, what are their most important values, what are the aspirations and so on. Master the culture.
2. Then demographically categorize your knowledge obtained from the above. Figure out the differences between people in villages, people in cities, young people, old people etc.
3. Determine the core values of your product, and put them in a list – call it List A. Preserve these values from this point on. Put the rest not-so-core ones on another list – call it List B.
4. Study products that entered the market and failed. Two good examples are Gaopeng (name Groupon operated under in China) and Barbie. Barbie was a complete failure in China. They had opened a flamboyant six-story, $30 million store in downtown Shanghai that saw a lot of visitors, but never sold any barbie dolls. Carefully study what caused such high profile entries to fail.
5. Only after you’ve done 1-4, figure out how to translate your product into a Chinese or Indian version. Don’t change the core values from List A in #3. Localize everything in your List B from #3. I’m not just talking about the language. Truly localize your product. Some major consumer brands such as Pizza Hut and McDonald’s have nailed it by Indianizing their products. McAloo Tikki Burger and Paneer Pizza, anyone?
6. When you have a decent strategy to penetrate these markets with your new, localized product, start thinking about a separate marketing strategy. But remember that a great, localized marketing strategy won’t make a shitty product successful. Great products will tend to market themselves. This is how Apple and a dozen other companies, including Dropbox and 37Signals, became so successful. They built such great products that they didn’t need to spend a great deal much on marketing. Definitely don’t spend too much on marketing at the start. If you spend too much on marketing at first and the initial version of a product fails, those initial users will never come back. I personally believe iteration is how products, especially software, should be built. Ambitious marketing campaigns come later when you’re a trusted brand among a subset of the society.
7. It is important to only focus on one market first. Don’t try to do China and India both at once, because if you fail miserably, you’ll lose a second chance. If you only do one, you’ll have a spare life to apply all the things you learned from your failure. If you don’t understand this concept, go play some video games like Mario or Zelda. You’ll know what I mean.
So, the secret to success is really embracing the culture of the emerging market, and then creating a localized version of your product. It’s a given that you need to spend a lot of time in the country, blend with the people, make some friends, and speak the language. And definitely don’t forget to hire local people to run your business. Multinational companies who enter India or China and don’t hire Indian or Chinese executives who are currently living in India or China to run the subsidiary are doomed for failure. You might think you’re really know the culture well and you get it (especially if you have a Stanford MBA or something), but that doesn’t mean you’ll be successful in those markets. It’s important to hire seasoned, local executives who have led successful companies since they know their economy the best.
Now, I hope one day I can test out these theories on some product I build and see how they fare in an actual emerging market setting, which will most likely be India. Till then, I’ll believe in whatever I said above because I think I’ve got it figured out.
(This was part 1 in this series. Part 2 will go over what 7 billion means in terms of usability. Fun, fun. But I’ll write that on some other day.)
Earlier today, I was figuring out how to replace the previous and next buttons in my app CloudDiary so that they don’t use background images. And I discovered something amazing: CSS triangles. It turns out that it’s ridiculously easy to make triangles purely in CSS by hacking the border property of an element. You can finally throw out those background images and boost the loading time of your website/app with a few lines of CSS. Here’s how to make something that resembles a “play” button:
- Create a div. Set its left border-color to a colour of your choice. Set top, right and bottom border-color to transparent.
- Set border-style to solid, and border-width to 2 x (the height of your desired triangle).
- Set width, and height to 0. And voila!
Just for fun, I created a fiddle to showcase triangles by mimicking a simple song player widget.
In case you want to learn how it works in more depth, check out this post by Jon Rohan.
P.S. Also, check out CloudDiary if you haven’t already – a place on the web where you can store your thoughts.
So, I look at my newsfeed. Status update from a “friend” I haven’t hung out with once, a company page trying to sell its product, a distant acquaintance becoming friends with people I don’t know, more updates from more companies, a string of wall to wall posts between two people I barely know but met a few months back …and I’ve had enough so I log out hoping that the next time I log in, someone I’m actually interested in knowing about posts a photo or an update. I think I’ve made myself clear. I don’t want to know who my acquaintances are becoming friends with. I don’t want to know that someone I barely know just woke up. I don’t want to see an advertisement disguised as a link or video post from a company. I don’t want to see that my “friend” checked into a restaurant a few hours ago. I don’t care about these things. And maybe you don’t either.
A Little History
Let’s go back to 2006. I got invited to join Facebook by a fellow Shad. Because my high school didn’t have a network, I got on through my friend’s school network, ironically an all-girls Toronto school, Havergal College. I didn’t care because at that point there was barely anyone I knew on Facebook. And then I discovered status updates, and the Wall. Writing on someone’s wall felt like talking to them in public. It was like others were in vicinity and were aware that I’m talking to someone. That summer, I instantly felt more social, and spent a lot of time talking to the friends I made at Shad through Facebook (and stalking them). Friendships flourished.
Signal vs. Noise
Back to 2011. Facebook is busier than ever, and due to the huge number of updates from a significant number of people I don’t know too well, and certain types of updates I don’t care about (“John Doe is now friends with …”), it’s not as inviting to log-in as it once was. The experience is nowhere as much fun and the audience is nowhere as much closely-knit as it once was. It seems some of us are approaching “Facebook fatigue”. And Facebook engineers are faced by a challenging question: how to reduce the noise and amp up the signal in someone’s newsfeed?
In the past, they’ve have addressed this question with variety of approaches: friend lists, grouping of similar posts, grouping of posts about to a particular event, smarter friend lists, and their most recent and significant innovation: the Subscribe button.
With the Subscribe button, Facebook has really hit on something big. You can unsubscribe people you don’t want to hear from without defriending them. This is a much needed innovation that took way too long to come out. But will it really solve the problem of not being able to only connect with your real friends (in the truest definition of the word)? It’s too early to predict, considering that this latest newsfeed innovation just arrived today, and probably hasn’t been rolled out to most people yet.
Moving Forward
As an early adopter, I’m still left evaluating options to make my Facebook experience as much fun and addicting as it was back when I started. Another friend clean up? With 500+ friends, it would be a gargantuan task, so I’m not really sure how I would go about it. Unsubscribing from a lot of people? Yeah, maybe, but “unsubscribing” updates from 200 of my 500 odd friends? Really? That seems a bit ridiculous. In fact, it begs an important question: Has Facebook has turned into something so crowded that will deter a big chunk of its old users away in the long run?
Not easy to say. It all really depends on what the Facebook engineers churn out, and how other Facebook-like services on the web get more popular. One thing is obvious – that, we will definitely be spending more time on the internet talking to people. But hopefully, the value of the time we put into a social life digitally will be recognized through some innovation within Facebook or outside of it that’s just around the corner. What I need is something that lets me connect more quickly to my real friends, something that’s private within my friend’s circle to some degree. Something that makes the social network experience fun. Something that’s not cluttered with updates from people who aren’t my real friends. And, Path might just be on the verge of becoming what I’m looking for.
If you have a lot of new radical ideas, you may be really cool and smart but that doesn’t necessary mean you’ll be successful. Ideas are overrated. All that matters in the end is how you execute your ideas. That familiar feeling of having a million (or billion)-dollar idea and getting super psyched about it, and envisioning all sorts of things for your product is almost always deceiving. I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions to the rule. But if you just keep thinking about the idea and don’t convert it into tangible things that work, then it’s not really a big deal. Execution garners respect. It should also bring you down to reality. You might even realize that some ideas that sound good may turn out to be really shitty when you execute them. You may have put yourself on cloud nine thinking you came up with the idea for the next big thing, just wait and realize that it’s just an IDEA so far. No one can see it, it’s not useful for anyone, there’s no market value of an idea. A lot of highly ambitious people fall in this idea trap. Some even use big or really small words suffixed with whole decimal numbers to describe them, like “Web 3.0”, or like “next-generation” or “innovative” — but it’s not any of those things until it’s actually built and others think it can actually be described in that way when they see how it actually works.
This is coming from experience from being a novice designer while being highly ambitious, to be honest. Often you just have to keep a check on your ambition and get down to reality.
I’m not asking you to significantly change the way you think, because I know how that excitement feels of coming up with ideas and talking about them to people. However, use that excitement from your lightbulb moment to fuel your implementation efforts. A lot of the times you may be frustrated because your implementation so far doesn’t work anything like how you thought it would, but yeah, that’s what it is — converting ideas into working products is a hard job. I think millions, or even billions of great ideas with a lot of work put into it have failed to be of any value to people other than the person who built it, so don’t end up wasting years of work into something that you’re not sure will work.
I think the path to success lies in quickly churning out something that works and seeing the market response to it, or even how your friends react. They might like it, but do you find them using it? if not, then it’s most likely never going to be of much value to the world. That doesn’t mean it’s shit and nothing can be done about it. It just means you have to iterate and make your product better and just think technically from a user experience perspective why people aren’t using your product. It may even be the case that it’s how you’ve marketed your product that’s not attracting people towards it. This is why marketing is so important. Sometimes ideas you thought were shitty actually turn out to be good and even if they don’t seem that impressive, they make it big. Marketing efforts make or break a great product. How you brand something is very important for its success.
Anyway, I don’t really have any sort of track record of designing successful products, but I think this is something that a lot of people even well towards the end of their careers never realize: ideas aren’t nearly as important as execution.
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