Talk Funnel

Papervision3D, the ActionScript/Flash-based 3D development toolkit has been getting better with every release. Version 2.0 was announced only a couple days ago and people are already doing amazing things with it. Will definitely be using it in my projects to help visualize complex information (and no, I’m not talking about this sort of thing).

For those interested in learning more, core developer John Grden will be conducting a 2-day class in February 2008 in San Francsisco. Here’s his report from the class conducted last weekend in New York City. Astounding results with so little code. If you’re into Flash and are curious about 3D, this is a good opportunity to get a rapid brain transfusion.

We should be seeing even more interesting stuff come out by then. My favorite 3-D modeling/rendering package Strata3D already has support for Collada, the open 3D file format that can be imported (and now, animated) in PV3D. And later this month we should be seeing direct PV3D-generation support in Swift-3D.

Realtime 3D, complex modeling, procedural animation, and interactivity — all delivered inside Flash. Throw in Flex and AIR and It should really open up some interesting venues both on the web and in desktop apps

Can’t wait till February.

Big fan of The Superest. It’s like watching a gunfight… in slow motion… with nerf guns… and bad jokes. So. Worth. It.

Not sure how long they can keep it going but it’s in my RSS reader (I just wish they would include the actual image and the sidenote in the feed).

One thing that has been bothering me about social networks in their current incarnation is that their purpose often seems to be less about connecting people and more about increasing pageviews and selling more advertising (a footnote to the $15B valuation of Faceboook was Microsoft’s advertising distribution deal.)

This means that there’s very little difference between the business model of a social network and traditional media, like television or print media: attract viewers and sell them advertising. At that point, social interaction is just another means of site ’stickiness’ — to bring users back and shove more advertising in front of them.

Seth Godin points this out as well, by reaching back into the pre-dotcom era and reminding us of Microsoft’s last big purchase of an ad-supported venture: Hotmail.

To understand this better, we have to look at the nature of advertising when it comes to social sites. There are (at least) two broad types:

• Let’s call one informational advertising, where someone already knows what they want and they’re looking for more data (on features, popularity, or pricing) to help make an educated choice. These can manifest themselves as in-site home pages, product reviews, and recommendations.
• The more common form is demand-creation advertising which is much more akin to what you’d see in traditional web-sites. These manifest themselves as side-bars, banners, pop-ups, or text-ads intermingled with content that most of us tend to ignore. Here the presumption is that the user doesn’t know what they want, but the ad placed before them might trigger a synapse or two that eventually leads to an I want it impulse. The goal here is to get as many impressions as possible in front of people, to improve the statistical probability that a certain percentage will click through and a (presumably) smaller percentage will actually follow-up and buy something.

Think of it as laser-beams vs. searchlights.

The problem with the demand-creation form is that there is no real a priori way of determining who may want something until you’ve put an offering in front of them. A large amount of energy and technology has gone into trying to improve the efficiency of demand-creation advertising, but most of it is based on the premise that a certain type of user is more likely than another to go from impulse to impetus.

The trouble with social networking sites is that they’re perfect for the first kind of advertising — where users help other users decide what to do, where opinions count for something, and metrics like trust or authority matter. But that’s not where the larger social networks are heading. When a site starts getting into the tens of millions of registered users and hundreds of millions or billions of pageviews per day, they become a cost-effective vehicle for the second type of advertising. Like a television broadcast, the number of viewers becomes the prime metric.

Some might say that sites like Facebook or MySpace cater to both types — but there’s a fundamental disconnect between the two approaches: Informational advertising is driven by what the user needs whereas demand-creation advertising is driven by what the advertiser wants.

This impulse that what a user says is not to be trusted is deeply ingrained into modern marketing. Clotaire Rapaille in The Culture Code makes it his very first Principle:

Principle 1: You can’t believe what people say.

Former Facebook engineer Karel Baloun in Inside Facebook points out that the same principle applies to determining the ‘arcs’ that connect Facebook members. The system (at least in its early incarnation) made the decision as to who constituted an active ‘friend’ instead of trusting users to self-report.

The irony is that demand-creation advertising presumes that the user’s own proclivities are immaterial, that if left to their own devices they wouldn’t necessarily seek out and purchase the advertiser’s goods — hence the need for demand-creation.

This brings up the larger question of what the user’s profile and social graph are good for when it comes to these two approaches. In the informational scenario, it can be used to help narrow down the search effort and cut through unwanted information. In the demand-creation scenario, however, I would argue that a user’s preference is of very little use. I’d even argue that it’s counter-productive — by prematurely filtering out eyeballs that are just as likely to be affected by the impulse as any other person. (If there’s any filtering that should be done in this case, it should be for people who demonstrate a proclivity for clicking on an ad from the moment they see it — in other words, to try to locate the more impulsive buyers. An ad network that measures the number of milliseconds from an ad view to a click to a buy and can identify the user will probably have much better luck with that user the next time around.) None of this has anything to do with a user’s profile or social graph.

You can argue that a car manufacturer may want to focus its advertising on a certain demographic to improve its odds of success, but the entire premise of demand creation is to put an offering in front of as many eyeballs as possible, to count on that moment of serendipity where the message connects with the viewer and gets them to the I want it moment. That’s why advertisers who can afford demand-creation continue to pour marketing dollars into broad-based activities like football games, general-interest magazines, and television programs — where the demographics are so diverse there’s really no point in trying to narrow-cast anything. It’s all about volume.

Facebook and MySpace have announced their plans for SocialAds technology, where advertising can be targeted at specific users based on their profiles. But what they’re doing is mixing demand-creation with informational. In the Facebook Ads announcement today:

Zuckerberg said the company’s advertising startegy is “based on getting into the conversations that are already happening between people … Nothing interests a person more than recommendation from a trusted friend.”

But take a look at the list of participating companies in the Facebook Ads launch and you’ll find companies who spend the majority of their marketing dollars on widely appealing demand-creation campaigns:

Partners joining the stage at a launch event in New York for Facebook Ads included senior executives from Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, The Coca-Cola Company, Sony Pictures and Verizon. Other brands and companies launching with Facebook Ads include CondéNet (Epicurious.com and flip.com), Crest Whitestrips, Dove Cream Oils®, Herbal Essences, The New York Times Co., and Saturn.

If an advertiser’s goal is demand-creation they’d be better off ignoring the targeting and go for wide-beam coverage. On the other hand, information-based advertisers would be better off creating well-designed, information-rich, searchable sites that cater to a user’s needs instead of wasting funds on side-bars or text ads. As an end-user, I clearly don’t want ads I haven’t explicitly asked for — but let’s not forget, the premise of demand-creation advertising is that I don’t know what I want so what I do want is irrelevant.

Social Advertising — demand-creation advertising narrowly-focused based on a user’s preferences — is inherently contradictory. It’s a searchlight masquerading as a laser-beam and it doesn’t do anything to benefit the end-user.

Confused as to which 2008 Presidential candidate runs closest to where you stand? Yeah, so am I.

The good folks of Minnesota Public Radio offer a handy quiz. The outcome may surprise you, especially if your support for a certain candidate is less based on issues and more on emotional attachment.

For me the results were somewhat murky since the top four candidates it picked for me all came within one point of each other. What was surprising was how certain candidates I had totally discounted were on that list. I haven’t been paying that much attention to the race so far, but I’ll be taking a fresh look at where people stand.

I subscribe to a number of print magazines (favorites are New Yorker and The Believer) and online RSS feeds, most of which I find I don’t have time to read on a regular basis. As things begin to pile-up I find myself questioning why I’m even subscribed anymore. But every once in a while I come across an article or story that is like a portal to another world — at once gripping and enlightening but also something completely out of one’s own plane of existence.

This article on The Owners of Machu Picchu from the Virginia Quarterly Review is just this sort of story.

The story itself is interesting and well-written, but it also makes me once again realize the value of serendipity and what a joy it is to come across found ideas.

Here’s a quickie.

The premise: every Friday afternoon two designers go up against each other. They volley Photoshop files back and forth in fifteen minute intervals, each trying to outdo one another and create new visual layers. You can attend live or wait and zip through the finished ten volleys.

The result: Layer Tennis. So worth it.

I’ve been writing a blog on and off since 2003. The last one was hosted on my personal work site and was mostly about technology (with a few sprinklings about home life). I stopped actively writing it a few months ago and eventually decided to retire the work site so I could focus on a new project I’ve been building for the past year.

Everything personal is now on this domain. My intention is to expand the scope of the blog, to talk about anything and everything. On the technology front, I’m starting off with some pretty decent off-the-shelf blogging software, but will eventually transition to the code I’ve been developing (so don’t get too attached to the look-and-feel ).

Regular postings should begin next week (how do you like that for a passive voice, eh? Mistakes were made.)

Until then…