What is It?
Lil’Grams is a real-time baby book designed to make it absolutely simple for parents to capture the precious moments of their baby’s life and share it with their family and friends instantly. If you like to draw comparisons, you might consider some of the names early reviewers have come up with:

• Twitter for Parents
• Pownce for Parents
• Dogster for Babies

I’m flattered to be compared to such well executed tools and communities and hope we’ll live up to the excitement that surrounds all our friends there. That said, we’re also quite different – perhaps the story behind it explains why.

Background

Eleven months ago, I was given the greatest gift imaginable, my son Aiden. It was, to say the least, life changing and has given me a new perspective on many, many things – large and small. Today, I am giving him the best thing I can imagine, a living memory book that celebrates his life and my love for him.

When I first got the idea for Lil’Grams, I was overflowing with excitement and lacked the right vehicle to vent through. As a social media enthusiast, I naturally considered a number of different options before deciding to build my own.

• Blogs – my first consideration was a blog, but it just felt wrong to me. As someone who’s blogged for years now, I knew that a blog was a lot of work and tends to make you feel bad when you don’t post.
• Twitter – Twitter, was really interesting as they were lightweight and had an awesome mechanism for notification, but it felt too open to me – yes I know I can make my updates private, but having two accounts was a hassle and more than I thought I wanted to suffer through
• Email – I was equally willing to consider just mailing out updates as thousands of parents do already but that’s just ridiculous – there’s no real archive.

No matter what I found that could be hacked in one way or another, none of them really got my needs as a parent.

Solving My Real Problems

As a first-time father, I’m essentially a fanatic. If you’re not one yet, or had the opportunity to be around a baby from its birth, you might not get what I mean – so you’ll have to take my word for it (for now). As a truly obsessed person, you tend to want to take lots of notes, pictures, videos and everything else. At the same time, you’re also very inclined to want to tell people all about your bundle of joy.

My Memories, My Way
One major problem is that lots of tools tell you what you are supposed to care about. The printed baby books come with pre-assigned slots for your baby’s milestones. Naturally, these are supposed to be the “big” moments in a baby’s life – but there’s far more than that and no place to put them. Blogs and related tools, while being more flexible, are equally abstract. None of the blogging or microblogging tools understood that the things I wanted to keep track of had special meaning to me and my family.

As a parent, it was easy to see the types of things I was keeping track of. We call these little nuggets Lil’Grams since they are short messages about baby’s life. There are six of them right now for tracking things like growth, foods, firsts and pictures too funny to lose. Of course, we don’t think we’ve got them all just yet, but we’ve designed it so we can add more whenever it makes sense.

Always Ready
When you’re chasing the baby around, time at the computer is a luxury. Many, many parents I’ve met have a physical baby book that they received as a gift. Most of them haven’t completed the book in any meaningful way. Why? Accessibility. Most parents don’t have the book around them all the time which means they have to remember to go back. Unfortunately, remembering to do things like that become harder and harder with time – have you seen how fast a baby can creep?

One goal we had with Lil’Grams was make it as accessible as possible. We decided from the beginning that we would support publishing from as many places as possible. The initial version starts out with web posting only, but we’ll shortly roll out posting from everywhere.

Built in Bragging
Now let’s not kid ourselves – you’re a mom or dad and your kid is the best. That’s what every parent has told me :) Kidding aside, we’re all proud of our babies and we want to share the love with our friends and family. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called, emailed, or physically harassed by someone I consider a friend because I haven’t posted enough pictures of Aiden or given them an update on what he’s doing. There’s no shortage of pride, just one of time.

It’s hard work getting your memories down and even harder work pushing pixels out to friends and family. We built Lil’Grams so that you don’t ever have to worry about telling people (or about annoying them with the details you’re obsessed with). When you sign up, you build your own little private network for the baby and invite them to share in the fun. Once they’re in, they get updates (at whatever interval they want) when you post new updates – plain and simple.

Manage the Media
Not the kind coming after you for pictures of your baby, but the thousands of pictures and videos we take. For example, right now I don’t have a highlight reel of my favorite pictures of Aiden. I have started to put them into Flickr, organized as best I can, but that’s not really giving me the “Best Of” reel in any way.

We tackled this problem by letting parents associate photos and videos with their memories. During this alpha, we’re only focusing on photos and specifically photos from Flickr since we love them and they have the best API. Soon in the future, you’ll see lots more sources for your photos to come from and it’s all pretty seamless.

Two Applications for the Price of One

As we go ahead with this alpha, we’re releasing just a couple of the tools we’ve got planned. Here’s the details:

Baby Book
The Baby Book is your real-time publishing platform for baby’s memories, no matter how big or small. It tracks of all those cool details with ease and keeps your friends and family in the loop.

Shoebox
This is your digital media manager. If you’ve got photos or videos out there (be they in your own account or with friends) we’ll help you wrangle them into one place and rise the cream to the top.

All of our tools are completely private and not open to the general public. I hate creeps and don’t want them any closer to my son than I want them to yours.

Calling All Parents

Today, we’re announcing the start of our private Alpha. We’re looking for excited parents everywhere, though we’ve got a special place in our hearts for parents who use Flickr and Twitter at the moment.

You can sign up in the top right corner of our temporary home page: http://littlegrams.com.

Special Thanks

Special thanks go out to Daniel, Susie, Bernie, Ranvir, Shikha, Arjun, David, all the parents who’ve provided input and to my happy little boy Aiden for not breaking all the keys off the computer so daddy could write this post.

Technorati Tags: aiden, baby, bluewhalelabs, greg+narain, media+sharing, memories, moms, parents, littlegrams, puppy, social+media, twitter

Two nights ago, at the New York Tech Meetup, the most interesting news to fall on my ears came from the Gawker crew. It seems that coming this Friday, they will slowly start to release some new publishing tools – apparently riding on the back of the tools they use internally to keep Gawker Media afloat.

What’s interesting is that they are, in essence, fixing the problem with comments which I have complained about for quite some time. There is an unnatural competition between the readers and the site author. The author aims to create content that induces the readers to comment more and more frequently while maintaining some semblance of top-heaviness. The commentators, of course, are often trying to either support or tear down the post itself, often making a good case, regardless of the direction – producing a bottom-heavy situation. Depending on your interests, one situation is likely better than another.

Under the new system, a Gawker reader won’t have to compete in-page with the authors. Instead, they can, principally, respond with their own content at their own user page. A wonderful twist to this would be, of course, if they eliminated the notion of comments in general and instead used trackback as a unifying comment protocol. Put another way, there’s no need to “comment” when you can “publish” at your own venue. This is usually impractical since it imposes the requirement that all users be bloggers of some sort. In Gawker’s case, since they are providing every user with a page, they lower the bar virtually to the ground.

An even better win, for both parties seemingly, is that user content will not be relegated to the lower flap but instead can be promoted aside the more traditionally crafted pieces. This will allow a number of different personalities to form out of the already active community.

Good job Denton.

Technorati Tags: blogging, gawker, nick denton

In my attempts to turn over a new leaf and return to my public life of blogging, I’ve made a couple of changes here at SocialTwister. First and foremost, you’ll notice that there is a new theme in place. I’d like to send special thanks to Elena at Design Disease for this great theme that I was able to drop in without a hitch. As a bit of trivia, Elena also designed the SocialRoots web site for me some time ago.

Secondly, you’ll notice that there is a new tagline for the site: Confessions of a Social Tools Architect. While I don’t anticipate that the nature of my writing will change, but more importantly, I think it quite aptly summarizes the work that I’ve done here to date. Since the majority of my work for the last 4 years has been circling and toiling around the design and development of Social Tools, it seems only appropriate to bring that to the top.

Hope there’s still some of you still out there :)

Technorati Tags: greg+narain

Social Media has created new challenges for many different industries and professionals. As more and more “amateurs” have become empowered to create, publish, and distribute their own media, it’s flooded the marketplaces with both new sources of talent and new sources of material.

It must be frightening as a member of one of these groups. Sentiments such as this probably don’t bring much comfort either:

Half a dozen lurid and splodgy pictures in the local paper brought home to me the death of an honourable profession this week. I took them. I am in my small way responsible for impoverishing an old friend, because he, not me, is a professional photographer, and his living has been more or less abolished by the changing world. Just as film has been replaced by digital, professionals are being replaced by amateurs. The changes are partly technological and partly economic, but the final blow to his profession has come from Flickr and similar Web 2.0 sites.

[...]

A picture-sharing site like Flickr contains the work of tens of thousands of talented amateurs, all of them capable of producing one or two photographs a year that could be published anywhere. A British photographers’ site, EPUK, has calculated that if only 1% of the pictures on Flickr are publishable, that would mean 1.5m usable pictures uploaded there every year. Most of the drudgery of identifying good, relevant pictures is also done here – by the photographers themselves, who tag them, and by the other users, who notice them and have their interest recorded by the software.

Source: The Guardian, “We all helped to speed the demise of professional photographers”

The irony is that, usually, the little guy is the one being pushed aside by the incumbent. We’re seeing a reversal in many ways, though. I venture the underdog has always had a sting to them, however small that might be, especially when there’s tens of thousands of them.

Technorati Tags: longtail, blogging, social+media

There’s some interesting chatter today regarding the future business models of the blogosphere – and other forms of social media – around the water fountain today. As usual, Scott Karp provides an interesting canvas for conversation. Over at The Blog Herald, he points to some analysis done by Sahar Sarid:

Sahar’s historical analysis is certainly compelling. If other media ultimately adopted a paid content model, why not blogging? I agree that there is fairly strong case that some blogs may ultimately be able to adopt a paid model, but there is an equally strong case why most blogs will not.

The case for paid subscription blogs is the same as the case for any other paid content:
1. Must have
2. Not available elsewhere or better than what you can get for free
3. No ads (although not necessarily)

Source: The Blog Herald, “Could Blogging Adopt A Paid Content Business Model?”

Of course, Scott is referring the public notion of scarcity. The reason that works are able to accrue value stems from the belief of others that there is unique value to the content created. The second part of his rules limits the nodes of creation in the network.

The difficulty with scarcity models in the domain of social media is that, well, there is no scarcity. The more important aspect of this market value is the distance between “good enough” and “not quite good enough”. On January 27th, I wrote about the Vanishing Point Theory of News. At that time, I proposed that there is a diminishing returns on my investment in media creation and consumption based on my ever-changing interests.

In the blogosphere, there is no shortage of individuals covering a specific topic. Let’s pretend that Engadget shut down – what do you anticipate might happen? Likely, there would be some moaning (where I don’t know) but millions of people are not going to give up their interest in technology and gadgetry. The built in social network will kick in and spit out another candidate for the go-to site for technology news. Further, some or several enterprising folks will make quick work of aggregating an experience in kind. What are the odds they would charge a fee up front?

This cycle seems impossible to break considering the economics at play today. The appeal of the Freemium model seems to fit much better in our current thinking. I’m willing to pay for that extra edge, for that extra shot of espresso. If I’m paying for content, doesn’t the promise of exclusivity get brought to the table? If I’m paying for gadgets, gizmos, networks or people – suddenly, the value is measure in other ways.

Give me my damn accessories!

Technorati Tags: freemium, longtail, paid content, scott karp, vanishing point theory of news

In what seems like a bad virus, the Pay Per Post meme has kicked up again and is causing for much bellyaching in the blogosphere. I’ve covered this many times before and, fortunately, someone has finally also addressed some of the true underlying issues.

Apparently, the fracas was kicked off by Jeff Jarvis with his post “Pray Per Post“. As Jeff notes at one point:

He [Ted Murphy] also said that he saw no difference in Amanda Congdon making commercials on her old or new vlog and a Pay Per Post person making a commercial on her blog. Fair point. But one of the panelists said that Rocketboom is clearly a show and a commercial makes sense in that context; the relationship is clearer. David Weinberger said that marketers and the public have been at war for a century and the internet and blogs were to be his refuge from that: a place to have conversations with friends. I asked whether Weinberger, who takes no ads, hates me for doing so. He said, no, because the relationship is, again, clear: It’s about someone buying space on my page, not about buying my endorsement. He called Pay Per Post “corrosive” to the conversation. Pressed again on the demarcation, I brought up the rules I was taught as a journalist (emphasizing strongly that I was not trying to call all blog talk journalism or to hold it all to the same structure and rules): Simply put, the rule is that no one can buy my voice and with it my credibility.

BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Pray per post

Quite the dilemma, it seems. This of course relies on the base premise that journalism is an uncorruptable force perpetuated by not just the moral sensibilities of the reporter but also the “Chinese Wall” dynamics inherent to the news business itself. Interestingly enough, both Jeff and David seem to complain citing the nature of the relationship between the reader and the publication. Granted, each medium provides its own unique constraints on that relationship – doesn’t the bi-directional nature of blogging actually provides for a deeper relationship than previously afforded us.

Scott Karp, increasingly the voice of reason in my book, chimes in with some interesting dissection:

Bloggers, almost by definition, create their own niche communities — they create content, readers comment, other bloggers link — it’s a deeply symbiotic relationship where participants get to know each other. There’s a direct connection between bloggers and their communities — so who better than the blogger to create marketing messages that are relevant and interesting for their communities?

[...]

So just to play out this scenario — let’s say a blogger who writes about life and family, and has a number of readers outside of friends and family, occasionally writes a post through PayPerPost and properly uses the equivalent of “Special Advertising Section” to disclose that the post is paid. In the context of the entire blog, what’s wrong with that relative to how it has worked in other media?

Should Bloggers Create Commercial Content? at The Blog Herald

This is my point exactly – as I’ve made it many times before.  It is ultimately the responsibility of the publisher to understand their community and to continue to deliver to them a consistent, accountable experience to them.  While it is certainly possible for the wrong thing to happen – and it WILL indeed happen – I think that the best, most successful personal publishers will actually have the common sense to stay true to this mandate.

technorati tags:blogging, pay-per-post, jeff+jarvis, ted+murphy, scott+karp, monetization

The tumultuous state of the newspaper industry is one that has not only been long in the making. Over the past couple of years, I’ve covered a number of different aspects of this change – an analysis that has only accelerated with the work behind SocialRoots. In many ways, I can relate to the utter blur that is the future. It’s hard to see an empire die, especially one you’ve worked arduously to build and protect. Perhaps the hardest part, aside from the financial dire, is the potential dilution of values and practices.

An interesting post on Search Engine Watch got me thinking about the industry again. As is the usual coincidence, I had a conversation last night about the hyper-local business model after being asked if we now had ubiquitious WiFi in San Francisco now (we don’t). Mike Boland does a great job summarizing the current state of affairs:

The reality is that the web has commoditized national news. The only way to differentiate it is to have a specific angle of coverage at which you excel (Wall Street Journal), or unique voices that demand a premium (New York Times). Notice that these are two major papers that can get away with charging for online premium access.

The third strategy is to leverage a position that can’t be replicated by aggregators; local. This hasn’t really been done in a meaningful way online by local newspapers, or any national publisher with a patchwork of local assets. The opportunity exists, however, to create attractive and unique local destinations.

The Blogosphere Sounds Off on Hyper-Local

We’ve seen the “nichification” of news in the social media universe – there’s a blog, podcast, or video blog on almost any topic conceivable. Naturally, this is not new considering our history of online special interest groups (BBSs, newsgroups, forums, chats). the key difference, of course, is that the surface area for social media is simply an order of magnitude larger – propelled by not only the increased ability and reliance on search but also on the implicit and explicit social networks that connect these publishing posts – millions of regular people consume social media, they just don’t know they do.

Which brings us to today, at the proverbial doorsep of a hyper-local movement. If we trust the signals from the major search players, we’d be safe to bet that there’s gold in them mountains. There’s no coincidence that Google, Yahoo, and MSN are building up their local ad serving technologies and partnerships in the preparation for the next arms race. Chris Anderson reminds us of another reason, the Vanishing Point Theory of News:

Our interest in a subject is in inverse proportion to its distance (geographic, emotional or otherwise) from us. For instance, the news that my daughter got a scraped knee on the playground today means more to me than a car bombing in Kandahar…There’s nothing new about this (it’s a truism of the American newsroom that Paris, Texas counts for more than Paris, France), but it bears repeating. The future of media is to stop boring us with news that doesn’t relate to our lives. I’ll start reading my “local” newspaper again when it covers my block.

The Vanishing Point Theory of News

Yet, I feel somewhat unsatisfied with this direction. I’m not sure why I feel separate from my “community.” It could be that my lifestyle is near-nomadic. It could be a generational detachment from culture as a whole. I’m not sold that I need more of here. When I grew up, we had the Rockland Journal News as our local paper. I never read it. I did read the New York Times, however. Why? We were instructed to do so for school. We were made to have the impression it was “better”, whatever that means.

It seems to me there’s a slight gap, let’s call it a blackhole, where the return on hyper local publishing has diminishing returns. Seems the distribution of interest has what resembles a Planck Distribution – does anyone remember these from school?

At the global and national levels, we’re interested and that increases as we get more and more local.  At the other extreme, there’s the “news” as it pertains to our families and friends – our personal news network if you will.  The gap, in the middle, seems to be where there’s a current leap of faith that there is tremendous interest in what we call the “hyper local” news.

Surely, there is evidence that people are willing to create this type of media content.  There’s even evidence that it’s being consumed.  Of course, that evidence is still sparse and, more importantly, not contextualized relative to the other spheres of media influence.

Is hyper local news the Evil Knievel of media?

technorati tags:hyperlocalnews, chris+anderson, longtail, media, influence, news

It’s getting to be late Sunday afternoon, I am avoiding work (I wonder why), and preparing to head down to my good friend Brian Solis‘ home to catch the end of the game and to say “see ya” before running East for the next month.

Brian and I spoke early this morning about the entire dustup that has been going on over the Social Media Release, hRelease, or whatever flag it flies under at the moment. One of the more salient points we discussed was that there was indeed two arguments being made, just piled together.

My partner in crime (and business), Stowe Boyd seemingly sparked this conversation with his post last week, “Enough Already: Getting Social Media All Wrong.” You can read it for yourself, but Stowe touches on the first half of this problem, the PR industry.

As I see the problem, there’s a small issue of mechanics and a large issue of culture. The mechanics issue really boils down to the nuts and bolts of how press releases are presented to the world. Chris Heuer quite aptly refers to the hRelease as the “presentational layer” of the social media release in his post titled “The Social Media Release is about getting the facts right.” However, the mechanics really are nothing to bat an eyelash at – a standard is and will be resolved and anyone who chooses can put it to use.

The problem, as I see it, with the Social Media Release, is the cultural problem. The problems that Stowe outlines initially are pointed at the professionals and institutions that perpetuate a specific line of thinking and mode of operation. There are brave souls, such as Brian, that are willing to stand in the flames and share his knowledge with those that only are starting to get it – or more likely a bit curious about it.

The problem in my eyes is that we are hanging these cultural issues under the banner of the Social Media Release – but it’s simply too much responsibility for a simple specification on how to express a collection of bits and bytes. The hRelease format does not come coupled with a Code of Conduct, Best Practices, or other treatise on HOW to make the content more truthful, honest, and transparent. Unfortunately, and I don’t think it has been intentional, we here these concepts used interchangeably when the are nothing of the sort.

In a followup post, Stowe addresses head on the issues of hRelease and his position on the matter. This sums it up best, I believe:

I applaud any efforts, philosophically, that are an attempt to shake the corporate centroids into a real dialogue with us, the edglings. However, I don’t believe in hedging, over-simplifying, or reusing outdated rhetoric in an attempt to make it easier for the poor, benighted corporate types to make the trip to the promised land without hard work. The core dynamics of webology can’t be put aside for the sake of offering PR agencies’ clients a baby step by baby step path into the new age of interaction. We are putting aside lying, so let’s not even lie to the liers. Let’s not perpetuate false and misleading metaphors, like “audiences” and “crafting messages for our markets”.

/Message

Amen. Despite all the magical powers and abilities we obtain from technology, it cannot replace the need for change – an emergent force that comes from within, often after weathering a significant amount of trauma from without.

If we truly want to effect change on an aging business practice and culture, we need to attack the problem from both within and without. From within, we need to invigorate the various parties as to the “soft”, human rewards. From without, we must present the metrics, case studies, and best practices that compel and propel all business decisions.

technorati tags:stowe+boyd, brian+solis, chris+heuer, hRelease, social+media+release, social+media+club, pr, pr20, press+release

So Stowe has tagged me in this “Blog Tag” thing.  Apparently, the rules of engagement require that I tell “Five Things People Don’t Know About Me” – so here we go:

1. One of my earliest goals was to live on a monastery for a year
2. I had a real passion for photography, had a dark room in the basement, and even won a prize or two
3. I was born 45 days premature, 3 pounds, 8 ounces
4. I was accepted to 3 medical schools but opted to start a web design company, Firewall Media
5. I’ve never had a full-time job

I am tagging these 5 people:

1. Brian Solis
2. Peter Caputa
3. Daniela Barbarosa
4. David Quiec
5. Jeremiah Owyang

technorati tags:blog+tag, stowe+boyd, brian+solis, peter+caputa, david+quiec, daniela+barbosa, jeremiah+owyang

Peter Caputa poses an interesting question: why isn’t the Techmeme sponsorship model perfect? Peter, much like myself, are both running frugal startups that provide room predominantly for results-based initiatives (be they marketing, advertising or PR) when it comes to allocating our small piles of resources.

As Pete notes:

But, it’s ridiculously out of the price range of the average blogger or startup to pay for. And I’ve heard it doesn’t necessarily result in a lot of new subscribers.

[...]

Subscriber and reader acquisition is a big market. They should apply their filters to content providers willing to pay for the privilege. And that might be a scalable business model.

pc4media: Techmeme’s Sponsored Posts Program is Almost Genius

When I first heard of the arrangement at Techmeme, I must admit that the entrepreneurial cog automatically kicked in and I wondered why I shouldn’t just buy a month’s sponsorship and then “sublet” posts on my blog so that they could make it into the sponsored box on Techmeme.  My second thought, naturally, was that Gabe would already have some control exerted that prevented me from doing this – something akin to removing the tag on my mattress.

Pete’s solution is somewhat different in that it urges the creation of a literal marketplace with paid benchmarks for performance.  As Pete suggests, he’d be willing to pay for RSS subscribers and a smaller amount for site visitors.   I certainly see the value and the opportunity in this approach.  Indeed most corporations and groups that we work with are interested in the size of their audience and how to quickly, if not exponentially, grow that.

My question, of course, is whether or not Techmeme is that place.  I think it very well might have the potential to be, as Pete suggests, with the variety of “channels” it offers.  It also draws the technorati (as in the elite tech users) crowd which increases the likelihood that a subscription might precipitate.  Still, however, I think the universe is in its infancy – at least around this particular watering hole.

In contrast, I might more anticipate Google to broach this problem – maybe even Yahoo! or Microsoft.  Seemingly, the CPA model is understood, supported and innovated in at all of these companies.  They also have the ear of the small to medium-sized advertisers which is really the most critical component in the mixture.

Good call Pete.

technorati tags:techmeme, sponsorship, blogging, rss