The Theory of Nothing
Facebook’s containment strategy is its Achilles Heel. It wants you to stay inside, playing back its tuned stream without the prospect of escaping to the chaotic rhythm of what’s going on. There is no hope; I am sadly confident I will get sucked in barely above the level of irritation by an invisible melange of algorhythmic signals I can only tune if I opt out of all other work, family life, or play.
Recently Facebook made some change to email notifications; where formerly I only got notifications of Close Friends, now I was getting a firehose of every friend’s status, photos, etc. So I stopped the emails and made do with a daily summary email I could scan. Even that proved too time consuming, so I opted out completely and now go into Facebook every day or so and just scroll until I’ve had my fill. Where Facebook does prove compelling is the stream of family and friends and the drumbeat of their lives.
But I knew Twitter and Facebook is no Twitter. Marc Benioff apparently made this same choice recently for lack of enough time for both services. I don’t really care what Jack Dorsey does as long as he doesn’t interfere with the @mention social graph that lets me filter the notification stream down to a Digg Deeper/Nuzzel hybrid that summarizes what the people I follow think is important enough that they retweet in significant enough numbers.
That simple equation has enormous significance for our multiplexed worlds of tech, politics, media, and the finer-grained verticals within that guide us. The common denominator of these channels is the pursuit of actionable information based on the marriage of context and insight. I don’t care if you’re a Trump fan or I am a Hillary one; what we share is the goal of finding out what our candidate or movie possibility or Amazon purchase is about and whether it is the best use of our time.
At the Notifications Summit we heard some facts that were startling only in the way they validated our intuitive assumptions: Deep linking to the information in an app produces 40–60% better results than going to the gateway home page of an app. Time to action on the phone is the whole ballgame, and deep linking is the Prime vehicle (pun intended) of customer success. With Apple Pay, the Watch, and now the 6s’s, what you deep press is what you get.
The swipe-to-action channel is more important than any app screen. If it’s easier to swipe to retweet a post than read it, the title and the author become the home page of the news, the context and content combined. The action is that I want to validate or accelerate the opinion behind the story over the actual content, leveraging the social cloud and innate connections lurking in metadata around individual minds (brands.) I care more about what Benedict Evans says about anything than any number of link-bait headlines around a similar subject.
I’m not talking about Benedict’s tweet stream but what he writes or talks about, as his output is usually 3 or 4 articles or podcasts a week at the most. That’s the third element of the equation — the URL, which gives a glance at whether it’s from his site or if not where else he’s amplifying. Who, what, and where. Benedict, anything, ben-evans.com. That taxonomy forms a metric of authority Facebook does not easily or reliably provide. Facebook people are very smart, so they could change the game if they wanted to or could do it without destabilizing their very powerful model.
But the reason they haven’t so far is that Facebook lives by keeping you inside. Twitter keeps me engaged by providing the exact opposite: signals about what isn’t important. If I can get a pretty good idea of what’s not going on, and can stay outside and not get captured by the barely relevant or the enticingly redundant or the tantalizingly important that may never reappear if I get distracted for a second — I’m ahead of the game.
These signatures of nothing spread out across the resultant information base and provide incentive for new and more powerful gestures of intent. If our old way of doing things was check email, browse RSS, and use private IM, our new way is to use the notification layer for all of the above. Even apps are submerged in the notification services layer, using deep linking to bypass the app context in favor of an interactive uber layer where we don’t care which app offers which service or feature. Automation services such as IFTTT bridge the APIs of complementary tools, making it easy to target and move objects between different apps for various processing.
These IFTTT scripts and text-based bots become our valuable intellectual property, mining the metadata for the value and shredding the rest. The algorithm is IF NOT Important Then Ignore Else use Social to Rank and Notify. The signalers become the publishers by selectively enhancing the velocity of relevance; it’s an authority engine. Trust becomes the dominant value, something that can be simulated only so far before it loses steam by being too broad. Each tweet, retweet, and @mention is at best a validation of its predecessor, at worst the beginning of the end. If our day job is stream-fishing, our deflectors are set on high to weed out the noise.
At the Summit, we identified the presumedly unassailable power of the main platform vendors as the elephant in the room. Would Apple kill this golden age of innovation by locking down access to what apps were running in memory? Didn’t the two main players Apple and Android need to differentiate at the notification layer in order to compete? Was Amazon locking Apple TV and Google Play out of their store a harbinger of things to come, or was Microsoft’s cross-OS Office Everywhere a countervailing strategy?
My bet is that notifications provides us the tools to vote up common services across the elephants, blurring the distinctions between silos while enhancing the power of the cross-bots, API connectors, and ultimately, bundlers. Deep presses are a canvas for time-to-action success, regardless of who shipped it first or made it a household gesture. Once you use the Watch for Apple Pay, you start collecting the services that support it. As with deep linking, I don’t care what app or platform delivers a service, just that it does.
Looking back, who were the elephants that led the Web Services wave to the Cloud? Did Microsoft stop XML from happening, or RSS from upending media, or Google emerging, or Apple roaring back? Neither will any presumed elephants stop notifications today. As Dylan first sang in the basement:
Oh, when there’s too much of nothing
No one has control
Read more: http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/too-much-nothing#ixzz3pc4DHaYe
