JoeCascio.net

My friend Steve Woodruff tweeted this intriguing question earlier this morning. I’ve decided to answer this here because it needs more than 140 characters.

You see, Steve has unknowingly stepped on a trip-wire in the jungle that is my brain regarding social media technology. It regards centralized services. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are proprietary, top-down controlled services. I have two basic beefs with this state of affairs.

Single points of failure

As we have seen again and again, Twitter cannot seem to keep their site up and running and properly functioning for any reasonable length of time. It stalls, or stops delivering or posting text messages, or fails completely with disturbing regularity.

Single points of control

Both Facebook and Twitter are notorious for their cavalier attitude towards users. Because they are centralized, they can and do make arbitrary decisions about functionality, ads, privacy and any other terms of service. Twitter has made very controversial changes to its functionality about “@” messages, for instance, and Facebook has made several missteps regarding user privacy for the sake of ad revenue.

Why not decentralized services?

Distributing and decentralizing control would solve both of my aggravations with social networking platforms. This is not a secret, either. In the technical community, we’ve been discussing this issue for literally years. And there are highly evolved open-source solutions out there like StatusNet. So, why hasn’t anything happened? Why do we continue to put ourselves in voluntary servitude to the likes of Twitter and Facebook?

Technical challenges

Decentralizing and distributing requires that some significant number of people or organizations set up servers to participate in a federated network. Literally millions of people self-host their own blogs using WordPress software, but it’s not something that the average person can or would do, or understand how to participate in. There’s some work to be done here to make it accessible by the average person. One of the reasons centralized sites become popular is that they’re easy to understand and participate in. Being “on Twitter” or “on Facebook” is as easy as signing up. It would have to be the same way for distributed social media.

Marketing challenges

Another important reason that centralized, proprietary sites work is that they have a coherent message, a professionally executed marketing effort. Technical people are distrustful, almost scornful of marketing. We feel as though ideas should succeed or fail on their merits, not on how glossy the product brochure is. It’s the same reason we stopped wearing suits to interviews. You don’t hire an engineer because he wears a nice suit and so, it is reasoned, you shouldn’t use software because it has a catchy slogan.

But over the years I’ve come to learn that marketing can provide an enormously valuable contribution to any effort, and that is making it understandable and accessible to the potential consumers. And in the brave new world of Inbound Marketing (as opposed to Push or Interruption Marketing) this function becomes even more important. You need to expend effort to show your consumer how what you’re building applies to their lives and work, why it’s better than other solutions. The farm products store that shows people how to build a horse paddock with the fencing products they sell is providing a valuable service to its customers. It’s not cheating to help people.

Organizational challenges

The blessing and curse of open-source software is that it’s uncontrolled, unplanned, random, emergent. A decentralized, distributed social media system wouldn’t have to be open source, but in all likelihood would be. The challenge again is coherence. How do you herd enough of the cats in the same direction to give a solution some momentum? Again, we engineers are our own worst enemy in this regard. We inflate small philosophical differences in implementation or functionality into major drama. Open source software that succeeds needs a certain amount of magic and luck. And it needs a champion with enough engineering street cred and people skills to woo the contributors. It’s not an easy task and few succeed, but they can become enormously popular and dominant, like Linux and WordPress. Maybe it can happen with Social Media, too.

My wife and I have been looking forward to visiting the completely reconstructed Ocean House in Watch Hill, RI for a couple of years. This is a project that was several years and $140+million in the making. The “old” Ocean House was originally built on a spectacular piece of oceanfront property in 1868 and served the wealthy residents and visitors to Watch Hill until 2003, when age and neglect finally rendered it beyond repair to modern building codes. The property lay empty while various proposals were floated for it use. Finally, a group of local residents, headed by one Chuck Royce put together a proposal to rebuild the resort to its original splendor. And splendid it is.

We visited the resort tonight for drinks on the Verandah, a porch on one side of the building, overlooking the championship croquet court. Yes, a championship croquet court. I will let the pictures speak for themselves, but will add that the level of architectural faithfulness and the attention to detail in this project are beyond compare. This kind of project that pays homage to a grand history without scrimping on single detail is almost unheard of in modern-day America. If you are ever in New England, take a day and visit The Ocean House for beach outing, dinner or just drinks. The views are spectacular, the comforts opulent, and the service friendly and relaxed.

I may have a bit of a contrarian view on print media and advertising. Many have been predicting the demise of print and advertising. I would agree that this may be true on the web, because it is a different consumption experience. But print and advertising are still a good match. Print is still a sensory experience.

Print is still viable, but not for hard news. News is all about speed and brevity. Deliver the core facts as soon as possible. Don’t interrupt it with ads.

Print still works well for long form content and gorgeous, creative advertising. Advertising in print is simply not as intrusive as it is online, and it can be lush and beautiful. Advertising in print can become part of the experience of consuming the content. Look at fashion magazines in particular.

I’ve had a number of requests to post my tomato sauce recipe. I actually started with a published recipe, “Sally Colucci’s Gravy” (in some families, it’s called “gravy” as opposed to “sauce”) that I modified, and which has continued to evolve over time to be quite good. It generates a big quantity including about 15 meatballs, a half dozen hot Italian sausages and enough sauce for a pound of pasta with another couple pints left over for making eggplant or chicken parmesan.

At the moment, I don’t have any pictures or video of the preparation, but perhaps I can add that in the next week or so, when I make another batch. For right now, I’ll post the text so you can take a shot at making it. I would love to hear your comments about how yours turns out!

I’m not hard-core enough to make my own sausages yet, so I use Perri Hot Italian Sausages. But any good quality Italian sausage will do. All the hot-and-spicy in this sauce comes from the sausages. So if you don’t like spicy, switching to a sweet Italian sausage should work just fine.

Meatballs

• 1 pound 80-85% lean ground beef
• 1/2 cup Italian style breadcrumbs
• 2 eggs
• 3 cloves garlic finely chopped
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• Salt, pepper to taste (I use none)

Sauce

• Olive oil from browning meat
• 1 lb hot Italian sausages (sweet also ok if you don’t like spicy)
• 1 medium onion finely chopped
• 3 cloves garlic finely chopped
• 1 1/2 teaspoons dried basil or 1/4 cup fresh chopped basil
• 2 – 28 oz cans crushed tomatoes
• 1-2 cups “starter” sauce. I use leftovers from previous batch or some bottled sauce.
• Salt, pepper to taste

Procedure

1. In small pot boil water and par-boil the sausage for about 10 or 15 minutes. When done, remove from water and dry excess water from casing. Save the water!!
2. In a bowl combine the meatball ingredients and mix with your hands until smooth and consistent. Be sure to squish the meat thoroughly. Roll into meatballs about the size of a golf ball. Cover and set aside.
3. In large frying pan or skillet cover the bottom with a good amount of olive oil and brown the meatballs and sausages on all sides.
4. Remove browned meat from skillet and set aside.
5. Pour oil from frying meat into a large sauce pot and heat.
6. When oil is hot, pour chopped onion in and cook until soft and translucent.
7. Add basil and garlic and stir well for a couple of minutes. (This onion, garlic, basil mixture smells great, by the way!)
8. Add the two cans of crushed tomatoes and heat until bubbling, but be careful not to overheat and cause sticking, burning on the pot bottom.
9. Add the sausage and meatballs and stir thoroughly.
10. Add the starter sauce.
11. Simmer for 1-2 hours, stirring occasionally, add saved sausage boiling water in small amounts to keep at the desired consistency.
12. Tastes best if chilled overnight in the refrigerator before using.

Ok, it’s true, I won a free hotel room here for one night, but regardless, The Roger Smith is a deal even at the walk-in-off-the-street rate. If you’re into social media, it’s *the* place to stay. And it’s convenient. At 47th and Lexington, it’s only a 5 min walk from Grand Central Station.

If you think it’s impossible to get a decently sized hotel room for a reasonable price in NYC, check this out.

One of my Boston social media buddies, Todd van Hoosear (@toddvanhoosear), set me off on a rant a couple of days ago by retweeting this from Jon Silk (@prgeek) in London.

I responded with a string of tweets, about how restaurants should put their actual street address in a prominent place so I can enter it into my car GPS navigation system, and also to use regular HTML text (as opposed to a pretty image) so I can copy it easily. I also went off on “fake FAQs” that have softball questions written by the marketing department as a contrived way to push their message. For instance, “How does your restaurant have such consistently awesome food?”

Poor Todd. He had unknowingly triggered one of my hot buttons about business web sites, which is that a company’s site should be about customer service, not marketing. To me, it’s the simplest way to keep in mind the proper design approach and overall goal of the site.

One of my favorite quotes (author unknown) on this topic is, “Please. Just help me. Don’t make me endure the sales process.” I’m sure this will resonate with anyone who has been frustrated trying to find the simplest, most mundane piece of information on a over-wrought, cutesy, Flashy web site that was clearly designed by an agency accustomed to creating TV commercials or print ads.

It’s not about what you want to say, it’s about what they want to know.

As a restaurant owner, I’m sure you want to tell me about all the great things you have to offer, from drinks, appetizers, to decor. But often that’s not what I need to know. When I’m going to a restaurant, I want to know things like:

Where are you? Give me a real street address for my GPS system. If it’s in a crowded city location, give me some landmarks nearby so I can find the entrance. And as Jon Silk said, a Google maps link, not some cutesy schematic map.

Parking. This is huge one for me. If you have on-site parking, SAY SO! If you don’t, tell me where I can park without getting ticketed or towed. Tell me where the most affordable, accessible lot is nearby. Give me pictures of them, so I can find them easily. Don’t make me first double park outside, run inside, ask you where, and then have to go out again.

Dietary options. Are you vegetarian or vegan friendly? Or conversely, for veggie-oriented places, do you accommodate carnivores? How about gluten or lactose sensitivities? Do you use MSG? The list goes on. Know your customer base and let them know what to expect.

Busy/Slack time. Of course restaurants want their places packed all the time. Some actually enjoy that status, but most places have slack time. Personally, I prefer going at quieter times, when I can have a little privacy, talk and perhaps get better service. Rather than people be frustrated having wait an hour for a table, let them know when it’s quieter. You might even out your traffic and get more business overall.

Seating options. Does your restaurant have features like a child-friendly or adults-only section? (I’d LOVE an adults-only section, by the way). Handicapped access should go without saying, but provide details, if necessary. Older buildings sometimes have to use alternate entrances or elevators.

The more real-time, the better…

Nothing’s worse than an out-of-date site with stale information. I’ve actually seen sites lately with the wrong address after they’ve relocated, or bios of the former owners still up.

The ultimate is real-time information. I want to jump on a chat or be able to send a Tweet to a restaurant and ask them a question if their site doesn’t already provide it. I think a lot of people are like me and have grown to detest using a telephone to get customer service. I don’t like being tethered to a handset while  being on hold, or getting a sales pitch (live or recorded) or having to deal with some officious hostess who acts like she’s doing you a favor to talk to you.

How about an accurate wait-time, or even perhaps web-cams, so I can see what’s going on? Give people a Twitter hash tag to use so they can tweet while they’re there. If you love your customers and treat them right, they’ll do right by you, too. And it will give you a real-time sense of what kind of experience people are having, while they’re there, so you can do something about it!

FAQs that aren’t faux

Every restaurant manager knows the questions people ask and what they want to know. Just answer those questions. Ok, you may want to shy away from the last three health department citations you got, but if that’s the kind of place you’re running, this advice won’t help you much.

So, don’t look at your website as just another advertising or promotion medium. Use it to really help your customers and they’ll love you for it!

Back in August of 2007, in Twitter’s infancy, I had a cook-out at my house. One of the conversations revolved around the need for “groups” on Twitter. Since this feature, now called Lists, has finally been added, I thought it might be fun to see what people were talking about way back when. It seems we didn’t really get everything we wanted.

See if you can spot some of the now-well-known peeps sitting around the table. Drop a comment if you recognize anyone.

Click to Play

Today I in the mail, I received a dose of the financial reports that I’ve come to expect from various funds and stocks that I’m invested in. The one from Barclay’s Captial just offended me. It’s as thick as a local phonebook and has densely printed prose, tables and graphs on every page. My question is, who on earth is going to read any of that? This is a horrible waste of natural resources and simply denudes forests to fill up landfills. All this information is undoubtedly online but the default seems to be paper mail. I’m guessing there’s some law about disclosure that requires financial firms to publish these tomes. It wouldn’t suprise me if it was sponsored by the paper lobby!

Tags: commentary, ecology, financial reports, natural, paper, political, resources

I recently sent some form email to my congressional representatives and the FCC regarding the battle over wireless handset exclusivity agreements between the large carriers (ATT, Verizon, Sprint, T-mobile) and the phone manufacturers. These agreements are what force you to use ATT to get an iPhone, or other types of phone from other manufacturers. Like the Internet, mobile phone service should be standards based and open to all manufacturers and consumers. You can read more about this at FreeMyPhone.

Today, I received the following letter from my US Senator, Joe Lieberman (D-CT). I don’t have a lot good to say about Joe on many issues, but this letter does summarize nicely a lot of the important reasons we should all be on the side of an open mobile phone environment, in addition to keeping the Internet free and open. I’m hoping Sen. Lieberman is on the side of the consumer along with President Obama on this one.

July 29, 2009

Dear Mr. Cascio:

Thank you for contacting me regarding exclusive cell phone sales and distribution contracts that limit the services consumers can access on their wireless devices, a practice commonly referred to as “handset exclusivity.” I understand that this is a difficult issue, and I welcome the opportunity to respond.

As you mention, many wireless device manufacturers have reached agreements with large wireless companies, such as AT&T and Verizon, in which they agree to sell a certain phone exclusively through a particular carrier’s network. For example, those who purchase Apple’s iPhone can only use it to access AT&T’s phone and Internet service. Currently, nine out of the ten highest selling phones are locked into such exclusive deals. In addition, there have been allegations that service providers have prevented subscribers from accessing web content and downloading applications that directly compete with their own services. For example, many users have complained that they have a difficult time using the Internet phone service Skype because it competes directly with their carrier’s phone service.

Critics of exclusive device agreements argue that they adversely affect consumers by limiting choice and increasing prices. They point out that because many phones are sold through only one network, many consumers have to forego purchasing the device that best fits their needs so that they can sign up for a service plan they can more easily afford. In addition, critics contend that exclusivity allows carriers to charge more for popular devices than they would if the same device was being sold by multiple providers. Furthermore, many rural phone carriers assert that such arrangements unfairly prevent consumers living in rural areas that are not served by one of the major carriers from being able to use some of the more advanced phones on the market.

On the other hand, wireless service providers contend that exclusivity agreements result in lower prices for consumers because it allows providers to offer package deals in which customers can purchase a handset device at a reduced price in return for agreeing to subscribe to a carrier’s service. For example, they cite that the average price of the iPhone has declined by almost $300 since Apple first agreed to sell it solely through AT&T almost two years ago. Industry officials also suggest that exclusivity deals help to spur innovation because carriers will continuously request that manufacturers develop new features in order to stand out from their competitors.

You may be interested to learn that the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Technology held a hearing on this topic entitled the “the Consumer Wireless Experience.” For more information on this hearing, I suggest you visit the committee’s website at: http://commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Hearing&Hearing_ID=03b81ffd-ba9f-42e6-8331-7c28f6d112b0.

Recently, Michael Copps, the Acting Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), announced that FCC would take steps to examine handset exclusivity agreements to determine whether they “adversely restrict consumer choice or harm the development of innovative devices.” Julius Genachowski, President Obama’s nominee for FCC Chairman, has also indicated that he believes FCC should investigate this matter. In addition, there have been reports that the U.S. Department of Justice has opened an initial review into whether large service providers are abusing their market power, including the use of exclusive agreements with handset makers. Please be assured that I will keep your thoughts in mind as I continue to monitor this issue.

Thank you again for sharing your views and concerns with me. I hope you will continue to visit my website at http://lieberman.senate.gov for updated news about my work on behalf of Connecticut and the nation. Please contact me if you have any additional questions or comments about our work in Congress.

Sincerely,

Joseph I. Lieberman

UNITED STATES SENATOR

JIL:gjz

Tags: cell phones, handset, handset exclusivity, mobile phones, open, politics, standards, telephony, wireless, wireless phones