Jared's Blog

Congrats Tumblr!

5 out of the 7 Huffington Post “Sites You Should Be Wasting Your Time On Right Now!” are Tumblr blogs.  Congratulations to Selleck Waterfall Sandwich, Keggers of Yore, White Whine, F**k Yeah Google Search, and Jesus, Kirk and Vinny.

I have no doubt we’ll do 7/7 one day.

Social Streams

Geoff Cook, CEO of myYearbook, wrote a thoughtful piece about the future of social networks in a world dominated by Twitter and Facebook.  He has a unique outlook on the future of social networks and the various forms they take.  Presently, the dominant form is the stream.  Facebook pioneered it with their News Feed and Twitter capitalized on its simplistic presentation and ease of use.  There’s no doubt that Facebook and Twitter are the 800 pound gorillas in the room, but I think there’s more space to innovate than Cook acknowledges.  In his article, he comes to the following conclusion:

There are at least two ways forward for social media in a stream world – even in a stream world dominated today by Facebook and Twitter. You can dedicate yourself to creating applications that play well in the stream, or you can try to come up with a new way to shape the stream itself.

I agree that one way forward is focusing on applications that “play well in the stream.” Zynga is the quintessential example of a company focused on creating applications that successfully leverage the social stream.  Others like Playfish and Playdom have also followed suit.

However, I disagree with Cook’s claim that you need to find a new way to shape the stream itself.  The stream is here to stay.  It’s not going anywhere over the course of the immediate future.  It’s by no means a permanent fixture in the world of social networks, but it’s proven to be a successful model for delivering and consuming information.  Revolutionizing or reshaping the stream in its entirety is a lofty goal, and I don’t think it’s necessary right now.  If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

There’s plenty of room for innovation when it comes to the stream.  Facebook is compromised by the fact that the stream is really a flood.  There’s too much information from too many people on the fringe of my social graph.  I just don’t care about 80% of the information I see in my News Feed.  It’s overwhelming and irrelevant a majority of the time. That’s not to say that everyone feels this way.  175 million people log into Facebook everyday.  That’s a huge number or people who derive utility from their News Feed or other stream applications on a daily basis.  However, Facebook’s stream is primarily focused on providing updates in the form of text and photos for your immediate social graph.  They’ve left plenty of wide open spaces to play around and innovate.

Twitter’s stream is much different.  They’ve proven that a model focused on brevity (140 characters) and an open following system (versus Facebook’s mandatory reciprocated following system) can scale.  With Twitter, I can better control the information in my stream by selectively following content providers I find interesting. This helps to provide a much more useful and personally relevant source of data.

Twitter is just one successful iteration of the stream.  Tumblr is doing something unique in the space as well by leveraging the open follow system while creating a platform focused on the curation of mixed media. (Disclaimer: I work for Tumblr.)  It allows for a different type of interactive experience, more engaging on an emotional, aesthetic, sensory, and personal level.  The Tumblr stream, or Dashboard, has become a place for people to socially curate and consume the things they love.

There are plenty of other ways to leverage the stream.  Hot Potato is successfully providing a platform for creating social streams around live events.  Foursqare is focusing on personal activities.  Plancast is trying to do the same thing for future plans.  There’s a rapidly growing segment of emerging startups focused on taking streams and using them to leverage different verticals.  There’s also a handful working on rearranging the presentation, functionality, and applications used to interact in a stream.  The immediate future and growth of the social stream is not about revolutionizing its functionality or interface, but on leveraging niches that provide value to an engaged user base.  As Facebook surpasses 400 million users, it grows increasingly difficult to target and leverage verticals within its ecosystem.  People will gradually move towards streams they find personally appealing and consist of peers who share a common interest (Facebook recognizes this and has brilliantly fostered Facebook Connect as a mechanism to stay relevant and connected).  What’s really interesting is thinking about the unique economies, diverse monetization opportunities, and interactive mechanisms for these streams, but I’ll save that for another post.  It’s an exciting time for the emergence of social platforms, especially those focused on providing unique and relevant utility.

Too Big To Fail

I finally wrapped up Too Big To Fail.  I’ll post a book review next week, but in the meantime I recommend that anyone with even the slightest interest in better understanding what happened to the financial industry and economy in 2008-2009 read this book.  It’s thick, but remarkably easy to read.  If you don’t know what a collateralized debt obligation or credit default swap is, fear not.  You don’t need to know a thing about finance to enjoy it.  Go get it.  I’m moving on to Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.

The Online Hub

The job application process for graduating college students is antiquated and inefficient. A majority of interviews and hiring is done through college career services and HR/recruiting departments from various firms.  Students submit a copy of their resume and cover letter through email, or whatever online service their college uses, and the HR people at these respective firms get to work filtering through stacks of resumes, which for the most part, all look the same.

This past weekend I was talking to some friends about the hiring practices at their firms. They’re first year analysts at a top-tier management consultant firm and investment bank, and listening to their stories about college applicants was a little disturbing.  Part of their job is filtering through applications from their alma mater, weeding out the riff raff, conducting interviews, and making hire decisions for summer analysts and incoming first-years.  On paper, a majority of applicants look the same: 3.7+ GPAs, a quantitative or analytical major, a couple extracurriculars, maybe some relevant background experience, and that’s about it.  I asked them how they decide who gets the job and who doesn’t.  Obviously, successful applicants make a good and lasting impression in an interview, but they also have other unique traits like “food adventurer,” or “fluent in German, Japanese, and Tagalog.”  These are the deciding characteristics.  It matters if you have a passion for exotic cuisine or if you’ve helped build houses and plant trees in the middle of Indonesia.  All in all, the whole hiring process is tedious, and it’s inevitable that some of the best applicants are overlooked.  It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re looking at thousands of black and white pieces of paper, all of which look almost exactly alike.  It’s an archaic system.

There has been a growing sentiment in the tech community that if you’re serious about your work, you need to establish an online presence.  Chris Dixon talks about it all the time.  USV hires their analysts by asking for a link to their online hub.  The URL is replacing the standard resume.  It’s a growing practice and it carries significant merit. I’d argue that this approach to hiring and establishing an online persona should be extended to all industries.  If you’re applying for a job, you’re going to be Googled, and when someone Googles you, they should find something you’re proud of.

Everyone should get serious about establishing an online hub you can proudly point to. It can take countless forms: LinkedIn, a blog, Facebook, Twitter, online portfolio, etc. I’ve chosen to make my blog my hub with spokes reaching out to Twitter (where I pass along articles I like) and LinkedIn (somewhat of a formal profile).  I can confidently point to my blog and say that you’ll get a glimpse into what I’m really like as a person. You can see the way I think, the things that interest me, and get a topline idea of what I’ve done throughout the years.

Most hiring practices are impractical.  Some allstars are overlooked, and some undeserving people land gigs.  A step towards rectifying the situation is pointing to an online destination that helps show who you are.  If you’re an exotic food junkie, prove it!  Show me a picture of the seahorse your ate, or the blog entry about the time you cooked rattlesnake.  If you love film, I want to hear about your favorite westerns. Resumes are too easy to bullshit.  (You can argue it’s easy to bullshit an online hub, but if you’re putting information out to the public that isn’t true or doesn’t reflect who you really are, someone is going to inevitably call you out on it and it won’t be pretty.) Creating an online identity that represents who you are as a person is more useful than one page of paper listing your GPA and past internships.  It also provides an opportunity to show, not tell, what really gets you going.  You don’t need to be tech savvy to establish you’re online hub, you don’t need to be a programmer, and you don’t need to have artistic design chops.  The tools are out there and they’re easy to use (Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Twitter are SIMPLE!). I think if more people approached hiring, job searching, and resume creation by establishing an online hub, they’ll be much happier with the end result.