Why does everyone care about content?
One of the biggest problems with the way that people who design and build internet sites is their inability to see the true reason why people decide to use the web. The main reason people use Facebook and MySpace is to interact with people. If we take a look at human history (not that I’m a fan of using history to determine how I make decisions), its quite obvious that people spend most of their time finding new ways to communicate and build relationships. The majority of the population cultivates relationships because it’s how most of us complement our inadequacies, confide in others, or basically keep from getting bored easily. No matter how many articles we read, videos we watch, or activities we do alone, people need to interact with others.
What I posited when I decided what I wanted to do with my life — you know, the “enhance people’s social lives” comment — is provide more avenues for people to create real relationships. I was pretty disappointed at the social scene when I went to LA a few weeks ago. Most of the people were deciding to build new connections because it provided some vanity benefit, not because they were searching for complementary personality traits. This seems to have become more of the case in most major US cities. The FOCUS has trended AWAY from substantive qualities of a personality and to attachments to the person. This focus shift has led most products built online to be more about something “cool” rather than something “useful”. 75% of the Facebook applications available are “Just for Fun” because they maximize vanity value. An example of this is “Top Friends” or “FunWall” which have become major hubs for creation of vanity value and not true connection value.
Why do I think this trend is happening? I think its mainly because its the low-hanging fruit. Helping people build new connections online and find ways of communicating around personalities is not easy by any means at all. Helping people find cool videos that they’ll laugh momentarily at or what new stuff they can buy to make them look cool is much easier and might have some value behind it.
People are probably utilitarian at heart. We all want to gain the most for ourselves and will choose actions that present the most value personally. If you look at what John Stuart Mill says (not really a fan of Mill, but he works here), you’ll see that he intimates people attain more value by working together and connecting with each other than by focusing purely on material possessions and the value of those possessions.
It’s quite sad to see internet products move away from interactions between people. It will be interesting to see who can crack the ‘code’ on how best to help people meet new people online and who will be willing to not follow the crowd and say that content is NOT king. You can view cool videos on a myriad of sites, but you can’t talk to someone you might care about or that might complement you anywhere online today.
I kind of see the internet as an onion. Some of you might laugh at this and think its off the wall, but that’s alright, you can say hello to my middle finger. Anyways, each layer of the onion are just attachments or extras that are used to help people interact more. One layer is social video and another is music sharing, however, the true core of the onion is human interaction. While online chat rooms are reaching that core, there’s still a whole lot that can be done to facilitate interaction between people who have never met before that SHOULD meet each other.