Web 2.0, attention deficit and simplification
Web 2.0
Changing topics to the new mashup culture, "the latest wave of internet innovation," LeFurgy asked for examples.
Josh Rubin replied, "firstly, Flickr is a great example, another example is del.icio.us," the social bookmarking site. With tagging and social media, "the whole Web 2.0 thing, there's a good chance that you can discover stuff that you're interested in" from the shared bookmarks of other people. It's a "community aspect," although not with direct communication between community members.
Increasingly, Rubin noted, websites are moving away from conventional information architectures in favor of tagging. "Broad categorization is really going out the window right now in favor of more contextual navigation," via user-generated tags. "That's a way for people who are looking at my photos not only to look at a subset of my photos, but also to look across the Flickr network," at similar photos. At CoolHunting," Rubin is "switching from basic categorization to tagging all of our posts."
In contrast, Michael Tchong thinks that Web 2.0, "is buzz. It's hype. It's crap. We're still at 0.8… we still haven't gotten to officially shipping 1.0 yet…. The majority of the world's 90 million websites are still stuck in dawn-of-mankind html," and are, "lacking the most basic personalization tools." "My sense," Tchong continued, "is that we are not there yet, and we still need to pour a lot more venture capital into the marketplace. The 13 percent increase last year is not enough."
Turning to Tom Conger, LeFurgy asked, "how do you decide what is the best way to look at information from a consumer's standpoint and a marketer's standpoint?"
"Tagging," Conger replied, "is going to be an important innovation. There's a danger, however, that we won't share the same buckets…. If you look at Flickr and pictures that came out of the French labor protests, a lot of them were misleadingly tagged." This leads to the question of "which tag is reliable." Eventually, Conger said, "I think it's going to be more than just share numbers, and we haven't found it yet."
Attention deficit
With all of the ever-proliferating kinds and quantities of media, "the internet has enabled ADD on steroids. I personally live with information anxiety: all my magazine subscriptions pile up," as do the feeds in his RSS reader, Rich LeFurgy said. He then turned to Josh Rubin: "Josh, how are media and marketers taking advantage of these decreasing attention spans?"
Rubin replied that, "on the media side, I read several hundred websites in my RSS reader, and they're all categorized. If I'm going to write about it, then I'll look at the source," in order to give proper attribution. "Otherwise, I'm not really paying attention to the brand of the publication; I'm paying attention to the content."
Generally, because of the increased amount of content and the fact that many people are consuming content on mobile phones and video iPods, where, "the screen is so small and the places where people are using that device -- those moments on the waiting room on the subway, what have you... the pieces need to be short. So you have to be much more concise in the creation of content."
LeFurgy then asked, "How do consumers defend themselves against ADD?"
"Memory pills," Michael Tchong replied. "They're going to become the biggest lifestyle product ever." He noted that "memory is decaying at an accelerated pace," and a new pharmaceutical coming out of Alzheimer's research might help consumers to bolster their memories. Marketers need to pay attention to this because "we're increasingly not going to remember an ad an hour after we see it."
Tom Conger observed that advertisers will become more skillful at "placing memories inside of people." Recent innovations in brain science have meant that "information packets are becoming smaller. As advertisers, we're going to end up learning how people remember, what kinds of cues they need, and what works on a subconscious level." Conger went on to say that, "12 to 15 years from now, we're going to be wondering if big business is controlling people." Watching an ad, "even though you're aware of your emotional response, you can't help it. Advertisers are going to get to a point where they know so much about the brain" that they'll be able to influence consumers without the consumers really understanding it.
Simplification
Moving to the panel's final topic of simplification, Rich LeFurgy noted that the existence and survival of magazines like "Real Simple" show that some consumers desire less complexity in their lives. LeFurgy then asked the panelists for examples of consumer-empowering simplification.
After making a general reference to Apple products, Josh Rubin mentioned Sonos, which is "basically a home wireless system for distributing your digital music throughout the house. It's very easy to set up, super simple to use, and it allows you to control the playback of music throughout your house."
Rubin also mentioned LG's Migo phone on the Verizon network. "A cute little green non-phone meant for kids," on which "parents can put in whatever quickdials they think are necessary."
Michael Tchong observed that Cingular has a similar product, "Firefly," which just has a "picture of mom and dad.... We all need that phone."
Rubin's next example was "ScreenThree... basically, just an RSS feeder that puts real-time content into the idle screen on your mobile phone. It's zero click, and a great example of getting web content to somebody's mobile device."
LeFurgy then asked, "Does simplification work?"
Michael Tchong replied, "You only need to look at Apple and Google's market cap." Later, Tchong expanded, saying that "complexity is going to drive consumer choices," and that increasingly device creators will be either "hiding the complexity from the consumers" or creating "a device that only has two buttons."
"Simplicity is the countertrend to complexity," Tchong concluded. "Devices will get simpler. Interfaces will get simpler. But what we want to do with those devices will run ahead of that."
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