One of the things I love to do to train this muscle is just messing around on the internet, letting my interests take me where they will. Its really useful to sit back and experience the things as a regular user does, except listening to yourself and what you’re feeling when you’re in this process. It always feels like a personal psychology experiment – you must reflect on the dataset of your motivations and actions while browsing, and come to some research-y conclusion of what triggered what emotion/motivation/action, and whether satisfaction was found with the products that were used. Research stops when you get an interesting conclusion.

Finding something cool

My experience tonight shed some light for me on micro-blogging and what place it serves, after having finally gotten bored of my latest obsession/analysis of hulu (*). This led to memes with the introduction of a confounding variable (my housemate), which very quickly led to lolcats. I found two recent ones I loved, and finally hit the snag – what the hell do I do with these?

Yeah.. not an easy question to answer. Laugh, obviously. Laugh quite a bit. Seriously, the one below is just great:

But now what?

This reached a level of significance to me that I could not ignore. *I’m not going to leave this behind, it means too much* (i think). Pseudosignificance. How do I deal with this?

Save it? Nah, hard drive too cluttered. Stopped saving stuff years ago – that’s what the internet is for!

Bookmark it? Well, my history of bookmarks suggest that I never look at them again and they only clutter things up.

Social bookmark it? I use delicious enough, that’s for sure. But that’s more reference-y, nobody tracks my bookmarks but me (that I know of), and I rarely look at mine again.

Sign up on lolcats forums and chat about it? Well… I don’t really know those people, I prefer not to write in lolcat (see the comments section in the link of the picture), and after comment 200 who is really reading?

Vote it up on lolcats? I never pay attention to their voting system (from 0-5 cheeseburgers) because a) it’s ratings haven’t been the most accurate predictors of humor, b) nothing gets below a 3 anyways, and c) why do I care about casting one of a few thousand votes on something so non-personal to me?

Oh! Facebook it! Well, except not really. With such a wide a variety of things showing up in the facebook feed nowadays, the random a process of selection, and the ambiguous group of friends / acquaintances / business contacts all mashed into one, if a lolcat is the only thing people see of my activity they probably get the wrong idea about me. Nix ‘posted items’

Finally, I remembered twitter. Media like this image, plus maybe a quick comment, is perfect for micro-blogging (and to a lesser extent for micro-blogging aggregation). What is it I want to do with this pseudosignificance I’ve discovered? I want to convert the immediate happiness and feeling of significance into long term satisfaction. Twitter is it.

Wait, so twitter earned the escalation of commitment, while neither the content provider (ichc) nor my social life aggregator/distributor (facebook) nor my persona life aggregator (PC) did? Unexpected.

Using microblogging to throw important stuff away

What is it that microblogging tools like twitter have over identical functionality on facebook? Expectations first, commitment second. Unlike facebook’s posted items, there are no social concerns for me to post because a) the reader expects this type of content (based on the constraints of the service and the type of material other members post) and b) the reader has asked for it (by explicitly subscribing to your twitter feed). In addition, I feel satisfaction that I have a place to ‘keep’ this, and have the potential opportunity to turn that ‘keeping’ into something more – implicit ‘i’m sure one or two of my friends saw that’ to explicit social interactions around the topic. Right there is the escalation of commitment I was looking for.

What is microblogging used for then exactly? Too important to be kept to myself. Not important enough to inspire breaking new social ground. Might or might not elicit other responses. Expected type of media by those that happen upon it, though few expected to happen upon it. Semi-public. The place where these pseudosignifiant pieces of information go to make us feel satisfied we’ve given them a proper place so we can move on. But maybe not, if they, you know, really hit a nerve and create a shared experience. Then we’re open to staying around, before moving on.

Until this point, I thought of microblogging as a niche product – one that certainly had it’s place as another method of journalism, for those few that strive to be journalist-connectors or happen to be at the scene of a natural disaster or breaking news story… but not for everyday use by everyday people. The internet though looks more like that lolcats picture than a breaking twitter news story, as defined by the slicing and dicing and re-packaging of information into new formats that has happened thus far. So why not – micro-blogging as a sort-of bookmark, sort-of public, definitely opt-in with clear expectations, means of getting stuff that sort of matters off your chest and out of your mind. I can see that as mainstream.

In conclusion, my personal realization is that microblogging is like a recycling bin of information you’ve already found useful and used, that you want to live on in some way, that you gain ease of mind discarding. Everything we do creates ‘waste’ that must be discarded in some fashion, and internet browsing is no exception.

–
* My hulu insights: lacking more full eps is really a buzzkill, ads are great and i watch them, and !!i want to know more about the shows, their casts, and all that crap!! – bring in imdb-like data and more please!)

 

Best ones I saw this week:

Funniest

a reference to this guy on mythbusters:

I couldn’t stop laughing on this one.

Best Reference

Best Story

 

There exists a perpetual flaw in the media world that any darling like SL or the Wii is bound to not live up to the breathless expectations of journalists. Although I doubt this is an entirely deliberate phenomenon, journalists get a great deal of benefit from the waxing and waning of hype that in aggregate they largely create – cycles of over-hyping followed by over-griping, and then sometimes followed by consolidation and acceptance.

If we were to turn the tools of emotional manipulation we wield with alacrity in game development to this phenomena, we’d find journalism and news have actually become quite good at what we do. First, the hype creates anticipation and excitedness, and translates it into feeling emotions now that are emotions that will come in the future. For instance, just reading about the Wii makes you *feel* the simple joy of playing games, and the social reward of playing with friends, even though you are actually doing neither. Next, the counter-hype plays of your emotions of judgment and naysaying, and branches off into either a sort of “i told you so” even though you probably said nothing, or – if you really bought into the hype – a disappointment that paradoxically drives you to further seek the emotional up and down the news provides. Finally, sometimes the hype ends with consolidation, where you feel closure and a general sense of contentment, possibly with a slight feeling of hope for the future as the story ends on a good note.

With these emotions, the hype model is just plain good story writing.

So, back to the topic at hand: the usage patterns of the Wii are different from other game consoles, yet expectations are the same.

For instance, people aren’t playing the Wii. Or rather, 67% of people aren’t. This is according to publisher Famitsu, although many other Japanese developers are jumping on board to say things like the Wii is a fad. Others may point out that Wii software sales aren’t that great, not even breaking Top 10 sales, that sales figures mean nothing unless people play it, that none of the follow-on titles had the appeal of Wii Sports, etc.

Whatever. Part of opening a new market is discovering that it doesn’t work the same way the old one does. In the case of the Wii, this means that people aren’t buying new titles every 3 months, or counting down the days until the Big Game is released and then dropping a collective $200mm on it. They’re being… how shall we say… a bit more ‘casual’ about their usage. Game publishers, used to catering almost exclusively to a forgiving and predictable gamer customer base, are caught off guard. This doesn’t fit their model of reality. Why would someone buy a game console if they only played it once a month? Don’t they know games get old fast? Meanwhile, the non-gamer with the console under the TV goes about their daily life, barely using the damn thing, but – I posit – still deriving satisfaction from it. How?

For this new audience, usage doesn’t equal value. It’s not an iPod, though it’s small, glossy white, cute, and media-savvy. Nor is it a consumable, defined by it’s rate of replacement. Usage has little to do with it in fact.

Think of some outrageous clothes you have purchased, probably for halloween or a costume party. You wear them maybe twice a year. Yet they occupy a part of your mind and identity, at every thought providing you with an anticipation of positive emotions (just like hype) in the off chance you have the opportunity to show them off. In fact, you’re always on the lookout for those opportunities. Alternately, think about the home fitness market – if it was usage-driven, there’d be no market, nor late night television spots with Christy Brikley and an ageless Chuck Norris. Or perhaps a better analog is a social one – the dining room table. You probably only eat on it when guests are over, preferring a more practical spot to munch on your normal meals. But you know it’s there, in that off-chance you get folks over.

I think the Wii is really an item that exists nowhere near games, and instead in the same space as the above examples. It’s an identity item, something that has a property that you want to be associated with. It’s a novelty item, something you thought you’d use a lot more than you actually did. It’s a social tool, something that once you have you seek opportunities to use it, although rarely actually use. All of these touch on what it actually provides people. The Wii is about simple joys, shared with others – something that is actually not that easy to find in modern life, and something very difficult to distill into a product. And it’s the actual zig-zag, drunken stumble, half-rational path that people take in pursuit of these simple joys that is the market.