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Num Galleries: 0 | Description TRETC / Attention Theft
I spent most of today at Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT here in Cambridge. There were many engaging sessions, from Nicholas Negroponte (Chairman of the MIT Media Lab) talking about his quest for distributing a hundred-dollar laptop to children in developing nations, all the way to Jeff Hawkins (Co-Founder of Palm and Handspring) speaking about a theory of intelligence which he hopes to apply to developing intelligent machines.
In addition, the afternoon contained a “Social Computing” panel which included Dennis Crowley of Dodgeball and Joshua Schachter of delicious. Most of the discussion was fairly standard fare for a crowd which probably has had mixed exposure/understanding of the space. But the one thing that struck me was Joshua’s characterization of the “spam” that shows up in delicious; he called it an instance of “attention theft.” He also cited further examples of attention theft in other social software, like people you don’t know asking to become your friend in Flickr. It’s a distraction that steals your time.
I really like this classification and label of attention theft (which I hadn’t heard before per se, but looks like a few others have used it as well). It goes right to the heart of one problem with any open contributory content system – there are incentives for others to utilize that platform to grab my mind-share, even if it is not in my best interest. With e-mail came spam, and for the most part, it became fairly clear what rules to apply to discern valuable e-mail content from that which isn’t. The challenge was largely how to apply those rules. As we proceed further along towards socially-influenced content production and filtering, the distinction between what is valuable and what isn’t may blur. Perhaps the challenge moving forward will also be deciding what the rules are, not just how they are applied. Consensus is a good measure for the majority, but I want a personalized experience. No, I don’t want my time stolen, but I don’t want to miss valuable content either.
eBay and Skype: Connectivity over Content
With today’s buzz surround the rumor of eBay’s potential acquisition of Skype, I was struck by what the larger implications of this move would be. One of my readers, Zbigniew Lukasiak, recently brought to my attention an article which I read last weekend. Written by Andrew Odlyzko, “Content is Not King” maintains “that connectivity is more important than content.” Citing historical industry revenue figures, Odlyzko makes the point that “spending on connectivity [point-to-point communications] vpn android apps is much more important for communication services than spending on content can ever be.” Though the article is a little long and somewhat dated, it is a good academic argument supporting this thesis.
If these eBay rumors are indeed true, it represents a significant departure from the company’s current main business lines. And at a speculated multibillion dollar price-tag, the deal would certainly be valued at more than its most recent acquisition, Shopping.com, a “content” site. While the latter deal makes sense to me strategically, the Skype one for me is a stretch. Certainly there are other more strategic content companies out there for eBay to acquire. Given a blank slate to spend suspending strategic considerations, eBay’s possible move re-raises the question – is connectivity worth more than content? |
