Is personalization making us stupid?

The title of this post may be a bit extreme but the point is that with any segmentation, whether self selected or not, does tend to steer us toward things we are more inclined to like vs. those that we don't. See Apple, Fox News, or any other brand people have affinity to. Such is the tenet of a recent Slate article by Jacob Weisberg. I'm a long time fan of both Slate and Weisberg and thought this article was a great read on the tendency for media (any form really) to focus our attention on their agenda (and presumably yours) at the expense of a broad array of information sources.

Weisberg does an experiment of asking 5 different friends and family with different political bents what Google results were returned for 4 different politicians. The results were more similar than different, surprising the author to some degree. However, he didn't mention whether these 5 individuals were avid consumers of online political media which is what Google would have based its results. Got to have the garbage in to get the garbage out, right? In any case, I liked the premise and believe his central tenet is spot on when it comes to media consumption.

For e-commerce, its another matter. Anyone who has had an Amazon account for a number of years and shopped for gifts for others or simply racked up a double digit purchase list can attest that Amazon doesn't forget easily. They will suggest baby products till the end of time if you bought that shower gift for your brother 4 years ago. (Hey, Amazon: how about evolving the recommendations over time so that you now suggest toddler products for that 4 year old rather than stick to baby gift ideas? the subject of a future post.) That just illustrates the fickle needs of the consumer. I may want to read about the same topics over and over but don't necessarily plan to buy the same things every time.

When personalization isn't there

Back in the early days of web development, I used the metaphor that a website was like a restaurant--need to have good content (food), nice ambiance (pretty design), and good service (intuitive UX, fulfillment, etc.) and people will flock to your front door.  I still think that comparison, while simplistic, is still valid.

Case in point: When I lived in Dallas, we had a favorite restaurant near our home named Rockfish. It was a moderately priced seafood restaurant with some droll touches ('Inboard' and 'Outboard' restroom titles), good food, decent bartender, a menu that worked well for adults and kids, and best of all, a super waiter named Clifton. We only ate there maybe one or twice a quarter but Clifton always remembered us. Soon we requested a table in his section every time. He knew what beer I wanted, that my wife wanted a Cosmo with Grey Goose, and a plate of calamari to start. The food was always consistent--generally good, enough variety to keep us interested, and fairly priced. And Clifton took care of us. In this day and age when we know so few of our service providers (dentist, barber, manicurist, hardware man, etc.) well enough to maintain a long term relationship, I relished having someone know what I wanted who took care of my and my family's needs. We went to Rockfish more often, we spent more and I tipped well.

After a few years, we moved back to Austin and away from Rockfish. We'd still stop in Rockfish when we were in Dallas once or twice a year. And sometimes we got Clifton and sometimes we didn't catch him when he was there. When someone else waited on our table, he or she was friendly, the food was the same, and we felt satisfied. But we were not nourished.

It is the same feeling with personalization when shopping online. The experience at your favorite site without logging in or identity recognition is satisfying but not nourishing because your accustomed to being recognized and taken care of. The most important part of that is being recognized. Why do so few sites give little attention to the act of logging in or encouraging identity recognition? That's permission for you to get to know me. Can't get that right, then our relationship is short.

The Demise of the Flip

I don't usually write on this blog about specific products or topics off the personalization theme but I have to rant on Cisco's decision this week to kill the Flip camera. David Pogue wrote a great story on this in the NY Times, and there is another article here in Harvard Business Review and on Bnet here. The Flip is that pocket size camera that is brilliantly simple to produce videos and quickly upload to your PC or YouTube with a flip out USB plug. The Flip released in 2006 rode the rise of YouTube and proved to be so brilliantly simple, that its ease of use, relatively low cost and simple design overcame naysayers to become of the products of the decade.  Cisco paid $500 million for this product a couple of years ago (OK, not a lot for Cisco but still a sizable chunk of change for the seller.) And then late last week,  Cisco unceremoniously pulled the proverbial plug on the product literally hours before the next iteration of the product was released (more on that in a moment.)

Because my current profession is a product manager at a consumer electronics company, I'm now stumped at this turn of events. Pogue theorizes that Cisco thought that everyone walks around with their smart phone recording video all the time. Doesn't Apple and Google wish this were true. Only the most advanced smart phones record video and, if they do, its not in HD like Flip or with the capacity and simplicity of upload like the Flip. No, not buying it.

Maybe, as John Chambers alluded to, Cisco decided that Flip was outside their core competency of enterprise network solutions. Hmmm, that's rare for a company to admit a lack of ability to market anything but they could have easily resold the 550 person Flip unit for close to what they paid for it. Strike two.

As a product manager, there seemed to be plenty of wind left in the sail of the Flip. There is at least a few years before smart phones were indeed everywhere with capacity and simplicity rivaling the Flip. Cisco had the marketing dollars and marketplace clout to place these things everywhere...even at low cost or margin. At least long enough to recoup the purchase price of the company. Or, sold it to a company eager to have a ready made, successful product like the Flip.

OK, so here's the kicker: The new iteration of the Flip, which was supposed to be released later in the week after the product cessation announcement, was called the Flip Live. The device was to offer the capability to take video and, in real time, upload the video directly to YouTube. Read that again. Yes, that is revolutionary! Imagine that one could tune it to YouTube to watch live any event worldwide where there was a witness with a Flip camera. That's huge! If I'm out of town for my daughter's game/performance/recital, my wife could let me watch it LIVE from another location! Because she had a Flip camera with her and a broadband connection (don't know whether it would have had a 3G or 4G mobile phone connection compatibility.)  That capability would have changed the dynamic of every exclusive, ticketed event in the future. Why would I pay big bucks to attend an exclusive, non-televised event/game/concert/etc. when I could watch it at home over YouTube while someone with a Flip camera beamed it to me in real time? Sure it wouldn't have been as slick as television but you could see the amateur commentators springing up with Flip camera in hand.

Maybe that was the catch. The possibility of every event promoter's attorney screaming that they no longer owned the visibility of an event scared Cisco's legal department. That sounds hard to believe but possible. Cisco could have kept the patent on that device and still sold the rest of the product line. I'm still stumped. This will no doubt go down as an MBA product management case study. I sincerely hope that another company picks up the Flip mantle, or better yet: produces the Flip Live!

June 6 Update: Super followup recently with Jonathan Kaplan who created the original Flip and sold it to Cisco. Read the article. Some interesting nuggets in their about corporate priorities, intertwined technology which made divesting nearly impossible, and even tax breaks for failed products. Also some great background in the origin of the Flip name and his stance on entrepreneurial spirit.

Is Zite the future of online content aggregation?

Great article in Read Write Web recently on Zite, the newish iPad app which purports to build an personalized online magazine. It teases "If you like Flipboard, check out Zite." Sounds intriguing. The article explains that it allows readers to tag articles that interest them as it learns more about you. The comparison is that its more like Pandora rather than customizable like iTunes. "Then it learns from your behavior with the magazine it creates. It's like Pandora for web magazine reading, but smarter." Check out their nifty demo video.

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.


Would love to hear your feedback. My thoughts:

• Starting to use anything like this always makes me feel like I'm missing something. I like the serendipity of coming across interesting articles on my own.  But like the ideas of it finding something unexpected and relevant.
• Do the publishers dislike having their content sampled. Just like borring a riff from a song. I bet this will cause copyright issues if it catches on.
• Does less diversity in reading make us stupid? OK, maybe not stupid but less well rounded. Yes, I think it does but hopefully sharper in our chosen interests.

Could be the future if done well. Can't wait to test it over time. 

The other NY Times innovation

I say "other" because I'm not talking about the pay wall that the paper is putting up this week which has received huge attention. I noticed that the New York Times has given more prominence to its personalized recommendation feature (italics mine.) I've been a long time reader of the Times and think it is without a doubt the best newspaper out there. They have tried different content layouts through the years (Select, Reader, etc.) which have met with middling success. And now have moved to give this feature more house banner visibility on it's site.

Recently they have started suggesting articles once a reader reaches the conclusion of an individual article on their site. These suggestions take the shape of banners which slide out from the lower right hand corner of the screen. In my experience, their matching ability to what I have been reading to what might interest me has been pretty good. The suggested articles are fairly topical and relevant to my interests based on what I just read. It is a helpful feature and I find myself drifting from article to article or even rushing to the end to see what it might suggest next.

Now the paper has a compilation of these recommendations in a top 10 list on the right rail of their section front doors (eg Business, Technology, Style, etc.) although I couldn't find it on the site this afternoon. The feature does require authentication, presumably to remember my list rather than collect info about me.  In any case, perhaps they are tweaking it as only two of the ten stories suggested for me seemed relevant. Maybe this is the recommendation cold start problem since I have only read a few online stories recently or there is a kink in the predictive algorithm. In any case, I hope this feature continues as I welcome recommendations from a trustful source who values my time.  We'll see how this story develops over time as they presumably collect more info on my reading habits.

SxSW recap

Wow! South by Southwest was huge this year! This was my third time in the past 4 years. In that time, registration exceeded 3x the attendance only 4 years ago. It's been discovered. Still the conference was wonderfully nourishing (thanks to my dear friend, Delphine, for that description) for both mind and soul. 4+ days of innovation, creativity, and entreprenuerial spirit by nearly 20,000 participants.

There didn't seem to be a breakout technology this year like twitter or Foursquare/Gowalla in past years. If anything, here are the trends:

• The iPad made it's debut as a hardware platform. Tt was definitely a pro Apple crowd-PCs were in conspicuously low profile even with HP and Microsoft with concourse displays. I predict next year will have a number of sessions talking about the future of tablets, touchscreens, and this new platform.
• The entreprenerial spirit. Panelists and participants talked about life in a startup. Bizspark had a competition among several startups. Despite the rough economy (maybe becuase of it) small businesses were alive..and maybe well. At least they were surviving. And on the larger front, Groupon is thriving, facebook is huge (still), and there are many emerging and established not-so-startups waiting to go public.
• Mobile. Everyone knows this will be huge but is not sure how to implement it yet. Lots of great sessions on apps, gellocation services and small screen design. Next yeat this will be huge once we figure out mobile commerce.
• Game-ification. Making everything have some type of game. I think this is a fad but there were a number of sessions about it. No, not everyone wants to this, people! The tech community spends a lot of time navel gazing, I think,

The City of Austin was also a clear winner. The area around the convention center has been discovered by both temporary corporate marketers and permanant local businesses as a good place to set up shop. 20K people returned to their corner of the world to spread the word about how great Austin's scene/weather/people are. (Please, don't move here. Visiting is great!)

On the personalization front, there were a few panels that addressed issues around data privacy, recommendation engines, and push for relevancy. Had a stimulating conversation on a panel hosted by a rep fro Bazaar Voice and Zaaz on exchanging value for privacy and what that means to the futgure of e-commerce.

Thanks to the organizers, volunteers and participants who keep this such an energized and valuable confernece. I highly recommend everyone attend...well its seems like most already do. Soon it will be so crowded, nobody goes there any more.