Web Week: Geni.com

MySpace is so 2005. And Friendster? Does anyone even remember when that was cool?

Ah, yes, social networking sites. How quickly they catch on, and how equally quickly they fade away. Inherent to them is what I think of as the Pokemon Problem: at first, people set out to ‘collect’ all of their friends. They use the site frequently, connect and counter-connect. And then, after a little while, the ‘collecting’ slows down. They’re connected to all of their real-world friends, and probably to a slew of random people they could care less about as well. At which point, they have far less reason to come to the site. Sure, they could message friends through it; but they already have their real friends’ email addresses, so why bother? And photo sharing? Doesn’t Flickr already do that far, far better?

So the site begins to atrophy. User pages become unchecked hulls, perhaps logged into every few weeks just to see if anything interesting has happened. Ad revenue falls, user sign-ups dry out, and visions of billion dollar acquisitions no longer dance like sugar plums in the founders’ heads.

But, of course, there’s a point at the peak where a savvy exec team could handily cash out of such a site. For which reason, new social networking sites still pop up all the time.

At the moment, the gorilla ‘new kid’ is Facebook, already hugely popular with the college crowd. But, like any of its forebears, once chasing a market that doesn’t have time to log in eight or nine times a day just to profile-stalk the hot girl in chem class – and Facebook, indeed, is now trying hard to expand to the ‘grown up’ world – the site will run into the same problems of short shelf life.

Even in the case of Facebook, their best efforts of pushing into that ‘grown up’ market will likely be feeble indeed. Sure, my peers and I will perhaps join up. But my parents? My grandmother? The vast majority of the online market? Not a chance.

So, if the model of a social networking site is to grow fast and sell at the peak, and if the market of young whipper-snappers is already tapped, couldn’t a site make a huge amount of money by being the first to successfully target the 34-65+ demographic? I suspect one could. The question, then, is what kind of social networking site my mother and my grandmother might join.

Behold: Geni.com, a social networking site disguised as a snappy, AJAXy, web-based family tree application. You can start filling out what you know about your relatives yourself, then (and here comes the clever viral part!) enter the email addresses for any of those family members to invite them to help continue fleshing out the tree.

As the success of the Mormon Church’s Family History Centers as proselytizing tool suggests, people of all ages are fascinated by their past, and eager to map out their biological place in the world. Plus, Geni’s investors and exec team are extremely seasoned, savvy, and press connected, so a slew of coverage – the first step in getting this otherwise virally self-spreading effort rolling – is likely just around the corner.

Get on and sign up fast. You don’t want to be the slow cousin at this upcoming digital family reunion.

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Web Week: Intro

Despite the Luddite claims of my last post, I am, incontrovertibly, a bleeding-edge technologist. I download software in beta, buy gadgets unlikely to ever cross over to mainstream adoption, and generally waste all kinds of time and energy thinking about and playing with things only total nerds would think are cool.

The upside of that is, tech-wise, I’m usually ahead of the curve. In fact, before I started blogging, for about a year I wrote a newsletter trying to highlight new technology on the rise. And, overall, I did pretty well, pointing out, for example, a new-fangled search engine called “Google” I figured might even give the reigning champ Yahoo a run for its money.

So, hoping to re-channel some of those futurist smarts, this week I’ll similarly be showcasing a few new sites I think are, similarly, bound for big things. As many of you readers are rather tech-savvy yourselves, I imagine some of those will be ones you’ve already seen. But, perhaps, others will be new to you. So, tune in and check out the new New New Thing, just so you, too, can experience the joy of gloating that you knew such-and-such.com way, way back when.

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Re-disc-overy

About seven years ago, when I first copied my entire CD collection to my computer, I carried out a series of blind listening tests. And, through those, I discovered that a 192kbs AAC sounded, to both my and my friends’ ears, nearly on par with CD quality audio.

This afternoon, however, with city radio interference causing the music streamed from my Mac to my Airport Express to clip in and out, I defaulted back to listening to the same songs from Ye Olde CDs. And, holy crap, I don’t know if we did those first listening tests on shitty stereo equipment, while exceedingly drunk or high, or simply with a more tech-friendly future-hopeful world outlook. Whatever the reason, we were ridiculously kind to those 192kbs AACs, the ones from which I’ve been listening to all of my music for three-quarters a decade. Because, in short, they sound nowhere, nowhere as good as the same music on CD, at least as played through a pair of Linn Tukan speakers or a pair of Etymotic ER-4P earbuds.

I realize this may soon turn me into the equivalent of the crazy old curmudgeon who still refuses to buy anything but vinyl. And, worse, I’ve yet to work out a way to steal music on CD rather than BitTorrent. But, regardless, for the time being, I’m sticking with it. Like most of the best music of today, it seems the best music listening of today is similarly, firmly, rooted in music’s – and music technology’s – past.

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Today’s Quote

Time management for entrepreneurs:

“You must systematically, agressively divest yourself of those activities you do not do well, do not do happily, or find routine, so as to systematically invest your time (and talent, knowledge, know-how, and other resources) in those things you do extraordionarily well, enjoy doing, and find intellectually stimulating.”
– Dan Kennedy

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Footsie

For the past year or so, I wore and loved a pair of Kenneth Cole boots. They were comfortable. They made me tall. (Or, at least, as close as you can get to tall from a 5’6″ starting point.) And they looked good.

Or so I thought.

A few weekends back, however, over pizza at our apartment with our siblings and all their significant others, Jess and the other females went on an extended diatribe, tearing to shreds ‘man boots’ – what I and three out of the four other guys in attendance were wearing.

And, in short, it turned out that, while we guys all thought we looked good, the girls thought we looked like idiots. Worse, in subsequent polling, I universally reconfirmed that initial split: guys, pro; girls, very, very con.

So, continuing further the field-research-driven footwear rethinking, I polled on replacement ideas, and ended up with a pair of navy Converse Chuck Taylor’s and another of tan suede Campers.

Which, on the one have, have elicited such male responses as my brother’s, “who’s your stylist, Ray Charles?” But, conversely, have been a hit with Jess and every other lady I’ve come across.

Given my demographic preference, I’m pretty sure that’s trading up.

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Day Five: Denouement

Via Blackberry Messenger:

Josh: I’m sitting at a table with Gary Coleman
Jess: Wawaweewa
Josh: Wawaweewa indeed

My Sundance experience is now incontrovertibly complete.

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Day Four: Star Struck

So far today, I’ve walked past Nick Nolte, Jeremy Sisto, Scott Speedman and Cameron Crowe. Each was mobbed by an autograph-, photograph-seeking crowd. And each reminded me, as ever, that being famous would pretty much totally suck.

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Poem of the Day

“Away In Virginia, I See a Mustard Field And Think Of You”

because the blue hills are like the shoulder and slopes
of your back as you sleep. Often I slip a hand under
your body to anchor myself to this earth. The yellow
mustard rises from a waving sea of green.

I think of us driving narrow roads in France, under
a tunnel of sycamores, my hair blowing in the hot wind,
opera washing out of the radio, loud. We are feeding
each other cherries from a white paper sack.

And then we return to everyday life, where we fall
into bed exhausted, fall asleep while still reading,
forget the solid planes of the body in the country
of dreams. I miss your underwear, soft from a thousand
washings, the socks you still wear from a store
out of business thirty years. I love to smell your sweat
after mowing grass or hauling wood; I miss the weight
on your side of the bed.
– From Barbara Crooker’s Radiance

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Day Two: Small Victories

God bless you Sorel and North Face, makers, respectively, of my new low-top slip-on and high-top lace-up winter boots.

It’s eight degrees here in Park City, and, for once, I’m not about to lose my toes to frostbite. Which is, perhaps, the best news of the fest so far.

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Day One

The flight attendant told me that, normally, passengers on Delta’s 7:25am flight from Newark to Salt Lake City are fast asleep, rarely move around much. But, today, she noted, the aisles were packed with people wandering around, pacing back and forth.

That’s because, I explained, Sundance began today, and the plane was completely packed with New York film types too neurotic to sit long in the same place.

The fun begins.

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