It’s been said before, but it bears repeating: Social media (networking, building connections, sharing information) is not about you. In fact, no one cares about you. Social internet and the media is about me. It’s about what I want. In the 1960′s people watched Gilligan’s Island and The Andy Griffith Show. Why? Because that’s what was on. It’s not that they were bad shows, but when you don’t have other alternatives on TV, you watch what’s there. Today, you have your choice. There are hundreds of millions of videos on YouTube that you can watch now. You no longer have to listen to the radio to hear good music, you can find new artists on RCRD LBL, OurStage or Last.fm. In fact, now there are more YouTube-type video PORTALS than there were TV CHANNELS in the 1960′s. So the problem is no longer lack of content. If you’re online and you’re looking for entertainment, you can find it.

So what’s the problem now? It’s choice. If I can read anything I want, what makes me want to add your blog to my RSS reader? What makes me want to watch your YouTube videos? If I have unlimited choice, your social media and marketing goals cannot be about you. You have to engage me and show me something that I want to see. So impress me. Make a video that I want to see, that entertains me. If you’re a blogger, write content that will help me and actually add value to my daily life. Make me laugh, make me think, but please oh please, don’t make me yawn. There is not enough time for me to waste 5 minutes of my life that I won’t ever get back. So rather than putting out 50 blog posts a month that don’t interest me, or 10 videos that bore me to tears, come up with one truly interesting idea and execute it well.

Social media is wonderful because it has such great potential to add value. Value to your business and your brand, yes. But more importantly, value to me. Value that I’m outwardly asking for and hoping to receive. If you bring me that value, I will give you that sale. I promise.

Tonight I met a great group of people at the Gelato Tweetup in Seattle. People like Heidi, Deeckla, Derrick and Travis that I hope to hear from in the future. I appreciated what they did because they cared to ENGAGE with me and have a conversation. If they need help from me in the future, they’ve already made the connection. If you’re a brand, that’s what you aim for. Don’t interrupt my enjoyment of something else with an advertisement. Spend a little more time and deliver something useful to me. Now I can change the channel. I can browse another website. I can turn off the radio entirely. If you want to reach me, find a way to connect to me rather than telling me all about you. I’m dying to engage with you, and I’d be happy to blog about you. But you have to give ME a reason.

I missed last week’s update, so here is the past two weeks’ Tweetstream links.

Category	Site	Description
Gaming	http://bit.ly/bEenu	Tiger Woods PGA Tour iPhone review
Gaming	http://bit.ly/p7BIn	Mass Effect 2 teaser video
Gaming	http://bit.ly/pjH3B	inFAMOUS comic-style marketing campaign on IGN
Gaming	http://bit.ly/17QPkW	Lionhead Studios to present at Microsoft's E3 presentation
Gaming	http://bit.ly/13RcTF	Team Fortress 2: Meet the Spy
Gaming	http://bit.ly/f7iIH	Duke Nukem Forever's development team canned
Gaming	http://bit.ly/envQQ	E3 Floor Plans
Gaming	http://bit.ly/37ovm	PopCap VP heads to Blizzard
Gaming	http://bit.ly/1aw8sO	Trailer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Gaming	http://bit.ly/XYi38	Natural Selection 2 trailer
Gaming	http://bit.ly/1aBrqq	Dell exits the gaming scene
Gaming	http://bit.ly/W3nZN	Leaked videos for Assassin's Creed 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction
Technology	http://bit.ly/11ybwv	Apple considering enabling background apps on iPhone
Technology	http://bit.ly/iJTNY	You can close apps in Windows 7 with Mouse3
Technology	http://bit.ly/tNvbn	Google Wave preview - revolutionary or just cool?
Technology	http://appft.com	There's an app for that - very funny Apple parody website
Technology	http://bit.ly/4Ri5M	Google automatic email message translation
Technology	http://bit.ly/18xIHd	Fans trying to bring back Polaroid film
Technology	http://bit.ly/169McC	Zune HD official announcement
Technology	http://bit.ly/Uvb8n	Microsoft Bing hands-on
Analysis	http://bit.ly/11BpEL	Master your own social media data flow
Analysis	http://bit.ly/19AJOe	Randy Johnson has won 249 games since turning THIRTY years old
Miscellaneous	http://bit.ly/1PD46	Danger Mouse's new album will be released entirely online (through torrents)
Miscellaneous	http://bit.ly/XZtTn	RunPee website tells you when to pee during movies
Miscellaneous	http://bit.ly/1as8iH	A mug for pessimists
Miscellaneous	http://bit.ly/kOPpj	Watch MST3000 24/7 at Justin.tv
Miscellaneous	http://bit.ly/FpIxG	Former employees' recycled business cards

Technorati Profile

Here are some of the links I wanted to save from this past week’s Tweetstream.

I’m still not sold on iPhones and Eee PCs. That sounds like a bizarre thing to say, considering the early financial and social success of the two products, so let me clarify. I’d love an Eee PC, and I use a smartphone every day. What I’m skeptical about is the belief that the future will rely on portability and ease over performance.

Since at least the early 1900′s, audio production has focused on producing the high fidelity sound quality faithful to artists’ original performances. Improved technology brought us from AM radio to FM, from phonographs to records and through to compact discs. The introduction of online downloadable music and the iPod is one of the few changes in technology that actually decreased sound quality in favor of portability, but is taking a very similar path to the tape cassette.* Over the past few years, torrent sites have encoded music files at 256 kb/s or higher, and even Apple instituted iTunes Plus on all new songs, increasing sound quality.
*The cassette tape also reduced quality from the 8-track tape, but later increased its quality dramatically to make it nearly, if not as good.

Cloud computing, mobile technologies and netbooks have been not only popular, but heavily hyped over the past few years. They face a similar quandary, though: does the internet’s increase in portability and usability outweigh its decrease in performance when compared to an operating system? I’m not sure it does at this point. At All Things Digital in 2007, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were asked about cloud computing and future technology, but both pointed out that netbook and internet (cloud) capabilities are still nowhere near the operating system in terms of performance. Steve Jobs gave a concrete example:

“When we were doing the iPhone, we thought: wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? So we called up Google… We ended [creating] a client app [that]… when we showed it to [Google], they’re just blown away by how good it is, and you can’t do that stuff in a browser. People are figuring out how to do more in a browser… but it’s happening fairly slowly, and there’s still a lot that you can do with a rich client environment. At the same time, the hardware is progressing to which you can run a rich client on [lower cost or lower power] devices. The marriage of great client apps with great cloud services… can be more powerful than just having a browser on the client.”

And Bill Gates noted that:

“The 5 inch screen does not compete with the 20 inch screen, [which] does not compete with the big living room screen… [It is important that] locally you have the responsiveness of immediate interaction without the latency or bandwidth limitations that you get if you try to do it [online].”

Granted, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have their own biases, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Will netbooks and smartphones eventually reach the point that their hardware is powerful enough to do what a personal computer does today? Absolutely. However, I don’t think that a smartphone will ever replace a personal computer and I believe it will still take years for netbooks to truly replace the functionality and performance of a full computing system. Take Google Docs, for example. The things that can be done with Google Spreadsheets are much more limited than what can be done with Microsoft Excel.* The differences in form factors and screen sizes only exacerbate the issue, too. I can’t even imagine trying to operate a spreadsheet on a touch screen iPhone.
*I’m a power user of Excel and have dabbled with Google Spreadsheets, and I don’t believe that the functionality is even close to there yet.

So every time I see a new Eee PC, or the next smartphone that will change my world, I can’t stop but think that we’re still not there yet. Touch screens (even with virtual keyboards) just don’t offer the computing or performance capabilities that I need every day, and there is absolutely zero chance that I would ever do 100% of my work from a mobile phone. Netbooks have the most attractive form factor, but most times I still prefer a larger monitor* to the ones featured on netbooks. Unfortunately at this point, my only option is to carry an iPhone-type device (smartphone + music player), netbook (small form factor PC for word processing, simple web browsing), desktop/laptop computer (heavier computing technology & gaming). As I said, I’m not sold. Yet.
*Or two monitors when I’m crunching numbers in Excel.