The Internet of Actions
As notifications prove more and more irresistible, even the most hardened resistors are bending to the imperative. Take Facebook, for example. From the company that lives to suck you in and never let your data go, comes Notify, an app that offers you a notification bus that registers publishers and inserts them into a semi-tunable queue. The scenario is simple: sign up for Techmeme or Breaking News and wait for the notifications to show up. Click on the notification and it takes you — not to Facebook and an embedded post — but directly to the post on the publisher’s site.
Sure, Facebook gets the data, but none of this Big Brother-ish mania restricting moving an original post in another cloud, unlike Nuzzel or Digg Deeper Twitter satellite apps that mine the social cloud. Or Apple’s Reading List, which you can use to pull the link directly out of Facebook’s grasp even with Chrome. Or the Share button when you open a Notify and move the item into the stream. Try finding that Share button in Facebook. Good luck; I’ll wait. Click the Share button, and then be forced into copying and pasting the link or opening the page in Safari and then clicking the Share router icon. Just describing these steps is so contorted as to demonstrate the deep reluctance to leave the Facebook home planet.
Such is the power of notifications that it goes directly against the Facebook prime directive. Since I installed the app a month ago, it already takes up a healthy 10 percent of the actionable items I click on in the Notification stream. Because it rolls up many chirpy news feeds (CNN, NYT, etc.) it functions even more effectively as a glanceable trend watch thoughout the day, replacing most news sites and funneling through to cable channels such as MSNBC that are overturning network news. Brian Williams went from 30 minutes a day (17) to Breaking News, and the stable of political analysts from talking heads to thought leaders.
This is the Age of Actions we’re in, whether we like it or not. We like it if we can tune it, or incentivize the publishers to tune not based on their popularity but rather the granularity with which we can be reached directly. We can debate whether this replaces advertising, but for sure we’ve graduated to a Permission-based trust model where we grant you notification access in return for you being very sensitive to what we want and how much of it.
Notifications start my day with a careful handling of the iPhone 6S Plus to avoid blasting away the lock screen notifications that have built up overnight on the lock screen. The TouchID is so improved that virtually any thumb press on the Home button wipes out the interleaved notification queue and forces me to the Notification Center and its stored-by-app interface. I’ve taken to turning the lock screen on with the on off switch at the upper right of the phone, or tapping the Home button with the left index finger. It takes a paragraph to explain this ludicrous gymnastic but a nano-second to be forced into decrypting my too-verbose Twitter stream of 200 people tweeting overnight without the benefit of multiplexed markers of context from corporate email, less verbose retweet harvesters, InBox, Chatter, and, yes, Notify.
This may sound insane or much ado about nothing, but mark my words, I am describing my addiction to notifications as the canonical realtime information bus of my daily life. Put simply, resistance is futile. You will go there, as soon as you figure out what streams earn your permission to enter lock screen prime real estate. By lock screen, I include the Watch and soon I suspect a corner of the Apple TV screen. Certainly the Periscope app will have the lead on the first turn.
If notifications are addictive, deep linking is the syringe. As we shift from an advertising model of drawing customers to a page to taking action via deep linking, we derive value from the actions surfaced by selected notifications rather than the implied value we receive from following an advertorial trail of somewhat related material. By accepting the direct offer of value we establish a trust relationship, and reward the service by returning in a measurable way as the stream warrants.
Slack’s momentum has captured the attention of the notifications crowd, as the startup uses venture money to extend its investments in its app community of connectors. The idea is to lock in its share of the notifications queue at an enterprise level in much the same way as Facebook posits Notify in the consumer queue. They are both right for different reasons.
Notify offers a directory of publishers that takes over management of notifications from the individual nodes. In doing so, Facebook owns the customer relationship for as long as the publisher derives enough benefit from risking their notification stream being turned off. Presumably they bet they can use the body of the link to their content as a failsafe to restore their own stream or populate it with different material or timing.
Slack bets on a composite approach, seeding an App Directory with newly-funded apps from a new fund plus API refactoring of its Bots notification extentions. Although they don’t say this overtly, the Slack queue aggregates some portion of the enterprise notification stream. Clearly we are seeing consolidation of the proceeds of a freemium model on the latter hand and an advertising model on the former.
What’s left on the table, however, is a hybrid of both approaches that each entity may not easily achieve. Advertising in the Facebook model breeds an attract and retain imperative that would do wonders for Slack’s developer-focused messaging, but bottling the contextual value of an editorial stream runs counter to the incentive publishers or bloggers are given to continue contributing. The net result is that neither model breaks out of its own container.
This emotional core of the notification experience persists alongside the two efforts. It’s precisely the inspiration to connect deeply within apps via deeplinking that creates a broader momentum relatively immune from the investment model of scale and then meter the directory or stream or signalling objects such as atmentions and private messages. Instead, the attraction and impetus for remaining in possession of these personalized signals and metadata dovetails nicely with the inherent multiplexing of the notification stream on iOS and Android. As long as you respect the volume and quality constraints of the aggregate stream, you improve retention and attract reciprocal adhoc bundling.
Not coincidently Medium supports the early stages of the hybrid model. Deeply personal emotional excursions live alongside corporate branding and social experiments in enterprise marketing. Too much of either dilutes the strengths of both explorations, and in any case gets run over by the political imperative of Donald Trump’s care and feeding of the Notification Media. Like a virtuoso tweet stream, Trump’s melange of deep-targeted insinuations and comic slander orchestrates the editorial calendar of the cable political media.
This is not your father’s nightly news report; it’s a Vine-like SnapChat of the current minute’s target: plump Cruz, slime Billary, loudly ignore the real threat (Christie), dole out video for compliant networks, audio phone chat for morning shows, invert the campaign appearance as excuse for a press event, and adjust as the ripples rejigger the social traction of the players. All the while producing a constant stream of traditional media captions as the networks and pundits scramble to fill the copy holes around Trump’s narrative.
It’s binge politics in the Net of Actions, bypassing the ads in favor of capturing the core bandwidth necessary to stay ahead of the spoilers. It’s Permission television, where you grant access to your behavioral signals that are mined for anonymous polling in a realtime feedback loop. As the field winnows, the drama escalates into the funnel that is the primaries, conventions, and debates.
