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I still remember trying to connect my new Dell Inspiron 8000
laptop in my dorm room the first week of college (all the way back in
‘99 - yikes) and having the nerdy dude on my floor help me figure out
how to connect the Ethernet cable to the dongle to the computer.
The first thing I probably did was login to AIM. I may very well
have spent more time chatting online (and writing away messages) than
any other single activity I did in the dorms for those first few months
of school. Then one day somebody told me about Napster and I spent ALL
of my time downloading music. Having a seemingly unlimited music
selection to download and store on my computer blew my mind away.
Most people my age probably had a very similar experience to the one
that I mention above. If we could turn back the clock to the fall of '99
and ask the younger, skinnier, less burnt out Littyhoops about his
thoughts on these services I would have told you:
1) I will never pay for music ever again because it’s already free
2) I’ll always use the internet to “chat” with friends and stay connected to them
My point here is that these trends were super obvious to me back
then. Yet, eight years later we still have music executive at the major
labels fighting to turn back the clock and fight a losing battle
against technology with things like DRM,
weird restrictions and inefficient lawsuits by the RIAA. Meanwhile,
online chat has become both ubiquitous and a commodity (how AOL managed
NOT to take over the digital world with this is beyond me) but it still doesn’t seem to get the love and attention it deserves.
I often say that I would dread being a senior media executive at a
big media company. The industry continuously gets flipped upside down
by new technology. It’s impossible to correctly predict trend after
trend after trend. Yet that is exactly what media executives have to
do, and when they predict wrong they are gone. Throw in the fact that
experience and age often hurts them because it distances them from the
oblivious college kid who naturally “gets it.” (Incidentally, this is
exactly why I entered the digital world…I was too impatient to build a
career and this was the one industry that allowed me to be an
irreverent know it all from Day #1.)
So as I often try to make sense of the new services, trends and
technology in the digital world I look to college kids to see what they
are doing and how they are acting. Luckily, my younger sister Wartney
is a recent college graduate and my digital guinea pig/focus group. In
fact, as I think about it, the majority of conversations I had with her
in '04-'05 was why she spent so much time on this Facebook thing. Having
her rack her brain trying to articulate the meaning of a “poke” must
have been as annoying as when people ask me why I still cry when St.
John’s loses!
So, you may be asking, what are the kids doing today. I would recommend you find out for yourself but here is my take on it…
Facebook is for fun. The emphasis is on social and not on
networking. As you get older and less social Facebook is less fun.
Zuckerberg and his posse better figure out how to make Facebook a bit
more useful to your real life, and get people to use it in that way, or
it’s going to become a more glorified Match.com.
The killer mobile app is chat. Blackberry messenger is amazing and
addicting and releases awesome endorphins. The next generation of cell
phones will all have some form of chat that will trump text messaging, twitter (will never get past the nerds) and even voice. People will be connected 24/7 to those that they want to be connected 24/7.
The web is becoming more mobile in general. Email and Facebook and
fantasy sports will take place over a smart phone and not on the
computer. Kids don’t want to move past their pocket for this
information.
Audio, video and design production costs are dropping faster than a
Ching Ming Wang sinker. Final Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop and Garage Band
are all intellectual video games and not complex software for
youngsters. They teach themselves how to use this software and then
actually use it. I’m not sure how this will transcend past the film and
music business but it will.
The “people web” is a narcissistic joint. Everybody wants to be
glamorous and they work meticulously to craft their ideal images on
MySpace, Facebook, blogs, etc. This here blog is a perfect example. Ask
anybody who knows what a mopey, sarcastic, dispassionate slug I really
am. Littyhoops is way cooler than Brian Litvack!
Everybody wants more
friends, more followers, and more face time, and the web satisfies this
craving.
Nobody is scared. Yes, sometime in the future somebody is going to
find a photo, comment, video or email that you don’t want them to find.
But this holds true for everybody. So it won’t be as big of a secret
when you run for President and there are Facebook pictures of you with
a two-foot bong because odds are that there are Facebook pictures of
them with that same binger!
E-commerce is the forgotton giant of the web. Kids spend online like
it’s the most convenient thing in the world and that’s because it is.
Although margins aren’t that high I’m bullish on e-commerce as it seems
like people are buying just about everything over the web. Yes,
identify theft and credit card problems will arise but those will also
be solved. Long live Amazon.
DVR is awesome but will soon be extinct. It’s annoying to have to
record a show before it is on television. We want to watch any show,
whenever we want, on-demand and on any platform and for free. Whichever
media company allows people to do that is going to win.
So that’s my rambling for now. I would love to hear what you think.
I dedicate this post to da kidz. As I’m writing I thought of this Kanye
song for some reason.
We wasnt supposed to make it past 25 but the jokes on you we still alive
Throw your hands up in the sky and say we don’t care what people say
To read more great articles like this one, please visit Littyhoops.
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