Mario Sundar's Speakeasy

Spero Ventures. Early LinkedIn, Twitter. These are my thoughts on tech, brand, marketing and community.

February 7, 2023 • 8:24 pm 0

The Enervation of Social Platforms Continues…

Why Artifact is of the past and what does “social” mean tomorrow?

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl 1

Social Networking is 20 years old.

Friendster in 2002, MySpace & LinkedIn in 2003, Facebook in 2004, and Twitter in 2006 started the deluge that we are all swimming in today.

As someone who has been a small part of two of those, I find it intriguing that I am left standing in just the two of them, LinkedIn & Twitter, despite the constant noise we have come to accept as normal. It’s like yelling in a nightclub. Feels normal, but it ain’t.

This is a series of posts, contemplative more than analytical, about what might a ‘social’ app of the future look like today. 

ar·​ti·​fact ˈär-ti-ˌfakt
b
: something characteristic of or resulting from a particular human institution, period, trend, or individual

…

Artifacts Die Hard

Just last week, I reacted to a tweet (on a “new” AI news service) from Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram, who announced a new product he’s building with his former & current co-founder Mike Krieger – called Artifact.

This is a post about Artifact; maybe it’s not. But, let’s start there…

Thoughts on a new ‘Artifact’

In essence, Artifact is Apple News (Lite) to the tune of Bytedance’s Toutiao. 2

The onboarding of Artifact was reminiscent of the model, made famous by TikTok, by gathering your interests in one simple onboarding swoop. Once they have that, we’re off to the races.

We have now replaced social cues with algorithmic heft.

Artifact’s onboarding is reminiscent of TikTok’s gathering simple cues with which they surface the most interesting short videos, in this case, news articles.

I’m not sure what I expected, but as someone who has tried every “News App” from the early days of Techmeme to the excess of Apple News & Flipboard, there’s nothing new here. Yet another noisy news app, but with the promise of A.I. to curate, which leads one to the question, what do we expect of technology these days?!

What was I hoping for?

Maybe a highly curated high-signal news feed (R.I.P. Google Reader & Nuzzle), instead I got more of the Apple News model (without the free access to magazines or subscriptions), closer to Flipboard (than I’d have liked), all of which I avoid at all costs. And, yet again disappointed to see old tricks from social networks (whether it’s getting access to my address book) or receiving text messages with Artifact invites. Been there, done that!

On reading news: Frankly, I’ve finally steered clear of opinion sites. Ranked below from left to right, are ‘news’ sites that I used to subscribe to from “The Information” the last pure-news site I still subscribe to & Techmeme, and I have successfully unsubscribed from the rest.

Twitter might be the last one standing, as I ease out of the rest of the subscriptions that range from signal to noise (left to right) opinion to speculative fiction, neither of which serves me any good.

SIGNAL --> The Information — Techmeme — The Economist — The Athletic — Paris Review of Books — Esquire Classic —  NY Review of Books  — The New York Times — Twitter <-- NOISE

To a great degree, I fear news & networking as platforms suffer from the original sin of advertising. Cory Doctorow says it best, explaining how it all ends the same way, as a principal-agent problem. 3

Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice.

More intriguingly for me, obscurity through the noise is where I find myself landing, on social apps (news or networking), no matter how many ways we skin this cat in every possible medium (SEO or social or A.I).

Whether it’s search or social or tomorrow’s AI overlords, the end result is the same. Noise as artifact. Or, worse still, news as noise.

… noise is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us ‘navigate’ social networking. 4

This is not an indictment of Artifact. As I mentioned earlier, this is not a post about Artifact.

It’s about whether we are better off with the platforms we have built and trained (with our behavior) for the past two decades. Are these “networks” and “news as entertainment” models, working for us?

…

A.I. Everything, Everywhere, all at once and more and more and more!

The floodgates are open.

A.I. has become a catchphrase (!) for all things worth investing our attention into.

Like every wave of technology before and after it, the truth is we are wading into uncharted territory, gleeful like an unleashed dog on a beach. That said, I’m all ears for any technology that stills noise and derives signal.

So far, no luck.

Thoughts on Quora variant, Poe (a more A.I. Q&A)

I briefly tested the waters on a new A.I. Q&A Engine called Poe, from the team behind Quora. 5

One now sees A.I. sites popping up in the news on a near-daily basis. And, some of these are intriguing, to say the least. It’s a terrific sign of creativity & innovation I have not seen since the early days of society. To me, the most interesting thing about Poe is this.

Sure, they might not be the answer we seek, not a panacea, yet. But the energy is thrilling and reminds me of why there is no other place in the world to be – in tech – but here. Sure, there’ll be a slew of them that engender one’s curiosity, but it is going to be a Sisyphean battle for our mind, and it’s clear every one of the tech horsemen is ready to rumble.

…

I do find the intersection of A.I. and social intriguing in more ways than one. I was always hopeful that Alexa and the voice UI would liberate us from the tyranny of the feed. I am tired of pruning this never-ending relentless barrage of content I have not asked for. Even the good ones, on LinkedIn, I find myself with no way to select who I wish to receive updates from, and I’m left cherry-picking each update that LinkedIn throws up on my feed.

Google has become, for lack of a better term, a search shit-show, and so it’s great to see new ways to tackle old problems. But I’m afraid, we’re falling back into old patterns. We seem unable to un-see or unlearn the habits of the past. So, I’ve been wondering what it all means anymore. What am I looking for?

Since when did “social networking” become all about “social media.” Where is the social in both cases, and why am I faced with a barrage of algorithmically tuned feeds on topics and people I don’t know much about. Even on LinkedIn, a platform I have the least annoyance toward (and one of the last two remaining social networks I am on), I have no way to fine-tune my feed, so any time I open the app, I’m left unfollowing the people whose updates show up on my feed.

More noise, more problems.

…

What is “social” anymore?

Into this seething mind-numbing doom-scrolling apocalypse, enters teenage “social” networking whose growing pangs only worsen with every wave of technology.

One has to ask the obvious if we can step out of our blinkered existence on social platforms (nearly two decades in running), what does “social,” either networking or media mean to us anymore?

Are we truly more social, more insightful, and more clear on the things that matter to us as a society?

Here is what social networks seem to optimize for, as the feed moves from “social” to “media.” And media that gets your eyeballs fastest seems to be the operating word here. So, we’ve become dumb and dumber; fat, not smarter, in the blink of an eye. It’s an arms race to the bottom.

And, I am swimming in noise.

More like, I am swimming in questions: Are these platforms making us more social? What does it mean – to be social on a ‘social’ platform? Is it reading updates on your career, life lows (which seems to be the most viral status updates I see on LinkedIn), 280-character dad jokes (that pervade Twitter), is it, DMing folks you find yourselves close to, you can’t meet otherwise? Why can’t that be done on iMessage or text?

Now, what… whither goes social?

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”
– J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’

After decades now, we come to see that all that likes & RTs do not glitter; are but ephemeral frost. And, ‘deep roots are not reached by the frost.’

Is it possible to build something social with meaning, where features truly make us more social and does one thing and one thing well: deepen good relationships. 6

Can we build something where there’s meaning in every ‘like’? Can one build something of lasting value, or is this a fool’s paradise of thought, as we collectively gravitate toward the loudest common denominator.

Design should not dominate people. Design should help people. – Dieter Rams

One would think we’d want out of this cycle of noise, but habits work the other way around. Nearly 20-year habits die hard. Many of us, myself include until recently (remind me to pen a few words on this sooner rather than later), are hopelessly addicted. This might not have dawned on most of us, yet, but there has got to be a better way.

…

There must be some way outta here…

There must be some way out of here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief

Businessmen, they drink my wine
Plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth 7

  1. 12 lines, 230 words, 2.5 minutes and one of the greatest poems ever written. Dylan famously said of this poem, Rolling Stone, 1968, ‘There’s no line that you can stick your finger through. There’s no hole in any of the stanza. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something.’ And, that is no mean feat. ↩︎
  2. I’d hate to compare any artist’s creation to another, but the idea of using A.I. to generate a true news feed has been pioneered by Bytedance, the makers of TikTok, in their original app called Toutiao in the Chinese Market. Here’s an exploration of its technology by Y Combinator’s Anu Hariharan in 2017. ↩︎
  3. Cory Doctorow’s diatribe on thinking through the shell-game that is online advertising, whether it’s SEO or social optimization is as prescient about tomorrow as it is about yesterday. Just replace SEO with AI optimization, it’s all the same. ↩︎
  4. This is an indictment of current social platform trends. It does not matter why these were initiated to begin with; both Zuckerberg, 2006 & Dorsey, 2006 seem to have arrived at it for different reasons, but as a society, we seem to have stumbled upon the noisiest way to engage on social platforms, thereby losing all meaning in the process. ↩︎
  5. Many moons ago, circa 2012 right around my exit from LinkedIn, a social Q&A site called Quora became the hottest technology site around and one I frequented until I didn’t. ↩︎
  6. One of my favorite recent reads was “The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness” by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz; that is built on an ongoing 80-year (the longest yet) study on what makes ‘the good life.’ ↩︎
  7. If this post does one thing, I hope it’d be an appreciation of the sublime poetry of Bob Dylan. Nerdwriter does a pretty decent job, breaking down “All Along the Watchtower,” what is arguably one of his most famous compositions. That it lends relevance to my silly writing on the state of social technology over 50 years after its writing is proof-positive of poetry’s incandescence over time & mind. ↩︎

Filed under: A.I., Artificial Intelligence, Best-of, Linkedin, New Products, Product Design, Thoughts, Twitter, What's New in Social Media, , , , , , , ,

April 13, 2012 • 6:24 am 17

Why do Social Media Management Tools Still Suck?

It’s been over 5 years since I wrote this piece on MarketingProfs referring to Charlene Li’s original post that introduced us to new ways to track social media metrics. Here we are in 2012 and after a review of some of the leading social media “management”, “monitoring” and “listening” tools, it’s too bad that we don’t have a single winner-take-all scenario but rather a mashup of tools, some of which work better than others.

Now, I bet you didn’t come here to read that. What I’d like to do over the next few minutes is to give you a sense of the social media landscape that greets you today. Consider this post a primer on navigating the mess that is social media management.

There are tons of social media management tools out there that’s probably confusing to the novice but the ones you’ve probably heard of are the ones above. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I’d highly recommend Jeremiah’s research on this topic.

Where do I begin?

I’m sorry to break this to you but there ain’t a single tool that’s a panacea for all your social media tracking woes. Frankly, you’re gonna find out that there are two kinds of tools that cater to different teams in your organization:

  1. Social Media Management tools (Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, etc.)
  2. Social Media Listening tools (Radian6, Sysomos, Lithium, etc.)

You’re going to find that all of the tools you evaluate is going to perform better either as a management tool or a listening tool. Very few try to do both (For example, Hootsuite) and in those cases, they fail at one of the two. Chances are that most companies and small businesses will start this journey looking for a social media management tool since the first step in evolving your company’s social media brain is “Awareness” where you identify and track your existing social media presence on social platforms. For example, see LinkedIn’s Social Media Presence below:

Step 1 is gonna be to monitor your activity on these key platforms, identify audience growth (# of followers) across platforms and figure out engagement (how to improve RTs or comments via proper copy and scheduling).

Define your criteria

Step 2 is to identify what are the criteria for selecting this social media tool for your company? The social media tool will have to take into account a bunch of internal requirements that you’ve got to map and then find a tool that fall within the parameters you set for yourself. Here are some criteria I mapped before we began the process of identifying potential social media tools at LinkedIn.

Once you define your version of the above criteria (see above), the goal is to come up with a list of tools that fall within the parameters you define. As you go through the list you realize that the primary challenge is finding a tool that’s complex enough to deal with massive datasets (for example, to plan your marketing campaigns on Twitter or run reports around PR campaigns) while at the same time easy enough to be used by everyone on the team to update your company’s status updates.

So, though Tweetdeck is ideal since it’s free and is easiest to use (has basic scheduling of tweets for e.g.) it unfortunately lacks even basic collaboration / report generation features. So, what you eventually end up with is you’re forced to pick either a Social Media Management System, Listening tool or both.

How does your company do social media? And, if you’ve had a different experience and found your ideal social media tool leave a comment or tweet me @mariosundar. 

Filed under: Social Media ROI, Social Media Tools, , , , , , ,

April 11, 2012 • 6:47 am 5

Beating Blogger’s Block

I started blogging years ago. Nearly 6 years ago.

It has unquestionably changed my life and my career in the years since. But, I don’t do it anymore. At least not with the passion that I originally started blogging with and that bothers me.

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I’ve written over a thousand blog posts since then but here on my personal blog it just doesn’t feel fresh, fun or exciting anymore as it was during those early days.

What went wrong

1. I blog for a living. Here a blog, there a blog, just too many blogs. 

2. It’s been an interesting roller coaster of a year (to say the least)  

3. Twitter killed Blogging for most of us

Why this bothers me 

Blogging is a really good indicator to identify how passionate you are on your favorite topics.When I started blogging I’d spend hours after work writing about topics I love. It’s that passion that slowly helped me find social media and LinkedIn way back when. And, so when I find myself not blogging actively anymore it bugs me.

I don’t want that and I need to change things up. I need to blog. And, I need to start today.

What’s next? 

The blog definitely needs more regular, interesting content and I’m gonna make an extra-effort to do exactly that. Oddly enough, there’s far more interesting stuff happening today in social media than there was a few years ago; so much so that there’s tons of noise and hopefully the content I create here will cut through that noise.

Over the next few weeks you’re going to see content that will focus on three key attributes.

1. People: Meet professionals whose work I admire. Capture that on the blog. 

I meet tons of interesting folks in the social media space whose work I find relentlessly fascinating. Expect to hear more about them on the blog as I get them to share lessons learned while working on real world projects in social media, whether it’s in PR, Marketing or Journalism.

2. Always unique, always differentiated. 

Using Quora for the first time was a huge aha moment that reminded me of my initial experience blogging. What Quora does best was provide a platform for sharing what you’re good at while bringing you an audience of interesting people in that space who’d love to hear from you. That’s what a good blog is supposed to be while giving you the control over every aspect of content and design.

So, you’re gonna see a slew of content that I can provide unique insight into and hopefully we can reach many more readers like you who will find that content useful. All I’d ask is for you guys is to share posts that you find useful, when you find em useful.

3. Give more than you get

In the past, there have been days where I’d put together a hastily scribbled post just because I’d want to get to my quota of one post a day. Now, granted this is a part of the Writer’s Block that hastened the slow-down of my blogging, but as I look around I see a a few awesome bloggers who generate a ton of quality content on a regular basis. And, I know it’s doable.

Blogs that I love reading on Flipboard. Blogs from my good friends, for example, Jeremiah who has been churning out some stellar content for years or Adam who more recently has been kicking but with some super insightful posts these past few days.

It’s time for me to get back to blogging…

Filed under: Best-of, Miscellaneous, ,

March 6, 2012 • 7:33 am 1

Do you view your career as a startup?

I first met Reid Hoffman, nearly six years ago (Thanks, Kay!) as I was being interviewed by the then executive team at LinkedIn for my role as social media guy. Since then, what has always struck me the most about Reid is his simplicity coupled with his enthusiasm in debating complex topics, whether it’s a philosophical discussion on social media to something as simple as the importance of adding commenting to our blog.

 One of my favorite pics from the old days – Reid Hoffman (center) with Jean-Luc Vaillant (left) and Allen Blue (right) at our old Palo Alto office

Working at LinkedIn during those early days was a great opportunity to watch, discuss and learn from him on a slew of topics and it’s great to see that Reid’s now shared many of his learnings into his recent book – “Startup of You“.

There are tons of valuable insights that Reid and co-author, Ben Casnocha, have assembled in the new book. Insights that are simple on the face of it, but you’d be surprised at how unheeded some of them are. Here are some:

  • How to establish close professional alliances who can help you and whom you can help in turn.
  • Why the most powerful networks include a mix of both allies and looser acquaintances.
  • Why you should set up an “interesting people” fund to guarantee that you spend time investing in your network.

The other parts of the book that I also found fascinating include the anecdotes, like this one:

I [Reid] first met Mark Pincus while at PayPal in 2002. I was giving him advice on a startup he was working on. From our first conversation, I felt inspired by Mark’s wild creativity and how he seems to bounce off the walls with energy. I’m more restrained, preferring to fit ideas into strategic frameworks instead of unleashing them fire-hose-style. But it’s our similar interests and vision that have made our collaborations so successful.

We invested in Friendster together in 2002. In 2003 the two of us bought the Six Degrees patent, which covers some of the foundational technology of social networking. Mark then started his own social network, Tribe; I started LinkedIn (LNKD). When Peter Thiel and I were set to put the first money into Facebook in 2004, I suggested that Mark take half of my investment allocation. I wanted to involve Mark in any opportunity that seemed intriguing, especially one that played to his social networking background. In 2007, Mark called me to talk about his idea for Zynga (ZNGA), the social gaming company he co-founded and now leads. I knew almost immediately that I wanted to invest and join the board, which I did.

An alliance is always an exchange, but not a transactional one.

Now, some folks may think that these alliances are an exception:

All of which prompts a question: in a winner-takes-all world, do the networks of the rich and powerful become self-reinforcing? For all Hoffman’s claims that the lives of successful Silicon Valley zillionaires are a useful model, one cannot escape the sense that he moves in a rarefied world in which a you-scratch-my-back chumminess excludes the less fortunate.

I beg to differ. These mutual alliances model is one that all successful professionals follow. These alliances can be found everywhere in our careers. And, we do it all the time.

Now, some professionals may have an old-school way of thinking where they stop looking at professional enrichment once at a job. Though this may have worked in the past, I couldn’t agree more that in today’s economy it’s imperative that we not only keep our skill sets updated constantly but more importantly, that we also actively nurture our relationships that matter so much. As Reid shared with Thomas Friedman of the New York Times last year:

The old paradigm of climb up a stable career ladder is dead and gone. No career is a sure thing anymore. The uncertain, rapidly changing conditions in which entrepreneurs start companies is what it’s now like for all of us fashioning a career. Therefore you should approach your career strategy the same way an entrepreneur approaches starting a business.

I highly recommend this book if you believe the world of work is undergoing a dramatic change and if you’d like to learn some of the basic lessons to equip you to deal with those paradigm changes successfully. So, I wanted to share some reasons why I think it may be worth your while to take a read. Tweet me your reactions to the book.

I look forward to your stories.

Follow me @mariosundar

Filed under: Linkedin, LinkedIn Colleagues, ,

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