30 January 09
SALT Branding recently released a report on trends in branding for 2009. I’d be surprised if there was anything in here a competent brand manager or marketer wouldn’t already know. But nonetheless, they’ve done a good job refining into a nice, easy to read package. And smarter still is the timely tie in to branding in a recession.
Eight years later though, I’m still waiting for someone to reference something besides Nike-iD. Sheesh.
29 January 09
A recent post from Flowing Data led me to the website for the Portland agency Instrument. Last summer they completed an application for Google that beautifully visualizes the social influence of content across the Internet over time.
Would love to get my hands on this, but it looks like an internal Google R&D effort.
01 December 08
Pownce was a once-hyped micro-blogging competitor to Twitter. I say “was” as today Pownce announced that they will be shutting down their service on December 15th.
While the demise of Pownce and other social media sites during this recession seems like dot-com bust déjà vu, there’s one key difference. We the users feel the loss as well. Our connections with long-lost friends, geo-tagged photos, witty and pithy comments, and moment-by-moment recitations of the best days of our lives are lost — forever. Along with all the countless hours invested uploading them to the world.
It’s not just the start-ups that are shutting sites down either. Yahoo! shut down Yahoo! Mash, their MySpace/Facebook competitor. AOL shut down AOL Pictures, their flickr competitor. Google shut down Lively, their Second Life competitor. Some have been kind enough to help you port your content to a similar service, but not all.
The lure of these services has been strong over the past few years. My wife and I opted to use Tumblr for micro-blogging about our newborn — fully aware that we were entrusting our efforts to a start-up service. Why? It was free and really easy set up, customize, and maintain.
Next up, Facebook. Just about every article you read about this social media darling mentions that they still haven’t announced how they’re going to make real money. With the recent market downturn some are suggesting that they figure out a way to start charging users. Others feel like that would be disastrous.
Now as some of us are counting ourselves among the web 2.0 casualties and learning the true price of “free”, it will be interesting to see what 2009 holds for start-up and user alike.