Maybe I’m Amazed
I’ve been trying to do an enterprise version of the Gillmor Gang for a long time. It actually goes back to the early days of TechCrunch, when Mike Arrington and I agreed to launch an enterprise-focused version of the site called TechCrunch IT. TCIT eventually got folded back into the main site, as the enterprise started to mine the social wave and cloud computing.
Those of us who thought Twitter was more than just a consumer technology were validated as Benioff encouraged us to think different about supposedly consumer-facing technology. @mentions, a user created construct, blossomed into the first instantiation of the power of a social graph. Chatter, the software Benioff demoed at this event, used social gestures to power the enterprise.
Now we see live streaming emerging from that same Twitter social graph, with a similar suspension of disbelief required to pay attention to the power of this transformation. To many, it seems like an SXSW hypefest, or blunt force API power politics on Twitter’s part to protect an acquisition, or just another latest and greatest shiny object media storm. But it’s none of the above.
Instead it’s the same thing that John, Paul, and George felt the night in 1962 they played their first gig with Ringo. “The first few minutes that Ringo is playing,” McCartney recalls in Rolling Stone, “I look to the left at George and to the right to John, and we didn’t say a word, but I remember thinking, ‘Shit, this is amazing.’”
It’s not one thing; it’s many. Live streaming today is on the phone, and right now the iPhone 6 or better the Plus with its hardware image stabilization, LTE, sophisticated extraneous audio cancellation, and big enough screen real estate so you can interact with comments in realtime. The arms race between Meerkat and Periscope is not David v. Twitter-owned Goliath, but rather a rapid iteration engine for finding the best common denominator between two fast-moving development teams.
Right now Periscope’s private streams have enterprise written all over them, while Meerkat’s smaller audience and VC investment gives them a good shot at developing a cloud back end that doesn’t disappear after 24 hours. Much like the storage plays, the cost of harvesting actionable content from these streams will be absorbed by the innovation curve and the success of customers leveraging the value for their bottom line.
Live streaming is not just a one to many phenomenon; it’s an interactive feedback loop, or in enterprise speak B2C2C2B2B. It’s not a rigged celebrity mill but a talent aspiration model, where those who figure out what will work or are just born naturally to the job will surface. And as it develops its own social graph either borrowed from Twitter or carved out of some tools or third-party harvester, we’ll see services emerge that inform media with a nextgen authority model.
If it was so easy to predict which ideas will work, there’d be no venture capital, no tech media, just the Friday jobs report. If open source was the answer to every question, there’d be no Medium or Facebook. Facebook paranoia is based on the notion that once they get too big to fail, no new ideas will surface. But hybrids of these different models have characteristics that blend open with closed in interesting and disruptive new ways. Microsoft + Github = something new.
GigaOm’s demise is perceived as a startup media business caught between the poles of a blog at one end and a Buzzfeed at the other, or niche versus big media with homespun capitalization vs. viral venture backing. I know nothing about what happened there, but know that we lost a voice (hopefully temporarily) that we miss. Yet as Medium develops we’re seeing a valuable voice emerging from multiple sources and a unique combination of deep backing and the patience that is iterating slowly but steadily while preserving an on-ramp for talent and business innovation.
All of this adds up to an exciting and opportunistic (in the best use of that word) state of mind. Similar, in fact, to the early days of Twitter, the steady growth of Facebook, and the spectacular growth of Apple from a niche player to one of two giants that allow niches to have room to develop and grow up. The Apple Watch may seem like a niche product, but its impact will be broad and transformative as it triggers the flowering of the Age of Notifications.
