The startup I am launching, Noozify, is based on one key assumption:
People are censoring their news sharing on social media sites (FB, Twitter), because they don’t want to give their friends and followers a ‘spammy’ feeling. People are self conscious about their social sharing. Nobody wants to be “that guy” who is always sharing any and everything he reads.
At the same time, the benefits that would come out of sharing all the news you read with your friends would be huge, some of which include building relationships, connecting with like-minded people, and many others.
The truth is that we are all UNDER-SHARING the news we read. But it’s not our fault. We are simply missing the medium in which to share all our news. Facebook and Twitter are not the platforms to share ALL your news; they are the platforms to share the cream of the crop and most highly selective news we read. Facebook is organized around people and relationships while Twitter, which is more geared toward news than is Facebook, is still mainly comprised of the status update.
There needs to be a niche site for sharing your news (the same way you share your location on Foursquare, your music on Spotify, your pictures on Instagram, etc.)
This is where Noozify comes in. We are extremely passionate and excited about solving the major issues with news sharing today. We hope to launch our beta within the next month, and we really hope you will join us. Please take 20 seconds go to Noozify.com and enter your email address to be updated on our launch.
We are in the process of building a team of A+ players. If you or anyone you know may be interested in joining us, or if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions regarding Noozify, please email us at founders@Noozify.com. All feedback is very much appreciated. It is the feedback we receive from you that will help us shape what Noozify ultimately becomes.
In order to ensure that Noozify succeed I am becoming an expert in the news, social media, and sharing domains. This process of acquiring knowledge has been extremely fun and rewarding. It has lead me to read many books and blogs by many intelligent people who I may have otherwise never heard of.
One of the books I read recently, on my quest to domain expertise, is Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis. This is a fantastic read, and I would highly recommend anyone read it. I needed to share what I’ve learned through the book with my co-founders at Noozify, so I decided why not write a post summarizing the highlights and notes I took in the Kindle app on my iPad. Please keep in mind that I am only discussing the parts of the book that I feel are relevant to our startup. The post is a mix of material directly quoted from the book, along with my thoughts and opinions. I hope you enjoy.
Public Parts analyzes the unique dramatic changes that are occurring in the world in regards to the public information we share about ourselves on the Internet. There are many benefits and threats that come along with this new age of sharing; Jarvis focuses on the benefits, and so will I.
All around the world, we are already living increasingly public lives, sharing our thoughts, photos, videos, locations, purchases, and recommendations on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Foursquare, and platforms offered by other companies in the sharing industry.
Why do people share so much on these platforms? Are they exhibitionists?
No, they are sharing for a reason; they realize the rewards from being open and making the connections technology now affords.
We decide in private where we stand on an issue – and making it public allows us to join with like-minded people, share our ideas, and hear feedback from others. At the same time, hearing what other people are sharing - their ideas, arguments, and sources – helps us inform our private decisions.
The Golden Rule: Share information if it could help others.
The Don’t Be a Fool Rule: Put simply, Don’t be an idiot. Don’t tweet about how much you hate your job, don’t post pictures of drugs and sex on Facebook. Use common sense when sharing!
On the other end of the spectrum, all of this sharing breads fear. There are many privacy advocate groups fighting to remind us of all the risks and fears that come along with being open and transparent on the internet.
Again and again in history, technology has caused change and that change has caused fear that our privacy is being threatened.
The invention of the printing press caused fear about our privacy 5 centuries ago, as did the invention of the camera a century ago and countless other technologies since.
But the printing press, camera, and the newer technologies of the internet and sharing have proven and will continue to prove to be extremely useful tools in the evolution and advancement of society.
Publicness is not merely an online fad, a few cool tools, a new business method, a flash of political rhetoric, or a fancy of youth. Publicness is at the heart of a drastic reordering of society and the economy that I believe will prove to be as profound as the one brought by Johannes Gutenberg and his press.
We are still in the early stages of the digital age, which is an extremely exciting thought when you stop and think about what that means. What the printing press brought to the early modern age, the Internet and its tools are bringing today. These tools empower us. They grant us the ability to create, connect, organize, and aggregate our knowledge.
What is the definition of an expert? It used to be defined as expertise limited to a small number of people. What the Internet does is treat everyone like an expert. Well, not everyone, BUT it does allow anyone to prove themselves to be an expert.
The Internet is our tool of disruption, a catalyst that breaks old bonds and sets us loose to explore our natures anew. All of us no longer watch the same, shared news, with the same, one-size-fits-all viewpoint.
We can now find the publics (groups) we wish to join based not on the gross labels, generalizations, and borders drawn about us by others – red vs. blue, black vs. white, nation vs. nation, but instead on our ideas, interests, and needs: cancer survivors, libertarians, revolutionaries, Deadheads, vegetarians, single moms, geeks, hunters, birders, privacy advocates, etc.
In our roles as individuals, parents, employees, employers, citizens, officials, and neighbors, each of us is deciding how private to be (safe, protective, closed, sometimes solitary, often anonymous) and how public to be (open, collaborative, collective, and vulnerable.) These decisions will be the deciding factor in how we give shape to our next society.
We should be grateful for the choice and power we now have. Prior to the opening of the gates of publicness, we used to have this culture where you were either a producer or consumer. The tools of publicness, including the media, had been in the hands of the few; now they are fullt available and in the hands of the all.
Now the question is not “Are you completely private?” It’s “Which things do you want to share and which things do you not?”
“Personal Data is the new oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world”
-Meglena Kuneva, EU consumer affairs commissioner
What is the determining factor in how much money Facebook is worth? Is it the amount of profit they make? Their revenues? Their assets?
It’s evaluated in social currency! Facebook’s biggest asset is the information it has about us!
The market values Facebook by how many members it has, how loyal and active they are, how many connections they make, how much the company knows about them, and what it can do with all that knowledge.
The most recent reports are saying that Facebook's IPO valuation could be in the range of $100 billion perhaps by April 2012.
$100 Billion.
Mark Zuckerburg argues that every product and all business will be social. “Get on the bus” he advises.
Over the next 5 years, Zuckerburg says, most industries and many companies will be reimagined and redesigned as social enterprises. People (and companies) who are able to understand this, and adapt the fastest, will be rewarded the most. People (and companies) who fail to adapt will be left behind in the dust.
I wouldbet my money on startups that put relationships at their center in order to disrupt old, closed industries. And, I am betting the most precious asset I have, my time, on my startup, Noozify, which assumes relationships will be the catalyst of change in the news industry.
Can we all admit that attention and credit feels good? Can we agree that the desire for these rewards is part of human nature?
Most of us want a public persona.
“One of the biggest things I’ve learned over the years is that people want to be heard,” Oprah Winfrey said in a YouTube video as she announced the end of her show. “Every human, no matter what age, no matter how old we get, is looking for the same thing. What everybody wants is to know, ‘Did you see me? Did you hear me? And did what I say mean anything to you?'"
The new American dream is to go viral.
The media used to decide where attention should be paid: what news to cover, who gets into print, what gets onto air.
Often today I hear publishers, editors, and academics long for a way to ensure standards of quality on the Internet, as if it was a medium rather than a public space for open conversation.
NYU’s Jay Rosen writes: “The press does not ‘inform’ the public. It is ‘the public’ that ought to inform the press. The true subject matter of journalism is the conversation the public is having with itself.”
The Internet has introduced the news as a conversation.
One website that has been a major inspiration in our Noozify project has been the Drudge Report. The Drudge Report is a news aggregation site. Matt Drudge aggregates (what he believes to be) the top news stories from across the web. People love this type of personal news curating. The popularity of this method of getting your news from a trusted person has been enormous. In a 2010 UK study, Drudge Report was the #1 (non-search) traffic referral to news sites (ahead of Facebook, StumbleUpon, and other HUGE players)! Why has Drudge been so popular? We think it is because readers are already in content-consumption mode (rather than search mode, or Facebook browse mode)
We believe everyone should curate the news they read for their friends and followers, and Noozify is a platform that will give individuals a platform to seamlessly aggregate, curate, and organize their own personal “Drudge Report.”
When the radio came out, and threatened newspaper publishers, the print barons warned: “Radio Journalism posed a threat to the journalistic ideals of objectivity, the social ideals of public service, the capitalist ideals of property rights, and the political idea of democracy” They pretended to defend the interests of the nation, when really they were only protecting their own interests.
Publishers claimed and complained that radio news departments didn’t have enough reporters and editors to uphold the high journalistic standards of print.
Today, the pattern holds once more as old-media titans complain about the new-media upstarts, dismissing bloggers as opinionated amateurs who don’t uphold the same standards as the industry.
Together, Twitter, Facebook, and bloggers are challenging Google as the primary path to content discovery online. Google sends 4 billion clicks a month to news publishers, while, in an admittedly apples-to-kumquats comparison, Bit.ly, just one of the services used on Twitter to shorten web addresses, causes more than 8 billion clicks a month (though not all to publishers), and Twitter is only a fraction of the size of Facebook. By sharing publicly we people challenge Google’s machines and reclaim our authority on the internet from algorithms.
“The large profit margins newspapers enjoyed in the past were built on artificial scarcity: Limited choice for advertisers as well as readers.” Google said in a paper published to the FTC in 2010. “With the Internet, that scarcity has been taken away and replaced by abundance…. It is not a question of analog dollars versus digital dimes, but rather a realistic assessment of how to make money in a world of abundant competitors and consumer choice.”
No one has found the secret of sustaining news. I believe the answer will lie in finding new efficiencies through public collaboration and networks.
I think the people who used to be simply consumers and readers of the news, will serve as the new curators. The solution to the news industries’ problems will not come from trying to preserve old business models.
Everyone in the publishing industry and their mother has tried to think of new business models for the news. Besides for all of the amazing feedback I have gotten on Noozify, when I tell people in the industry that I am passionate about trying to solve the news’ problems with Noozify, many tell me not to even try: “It’s impossible” they say, “Everyone has tried”. To me, this response makes me believe that the opportunity is even that much more so there. I’m sure similar feedback has detracted, and continues to detract, much of my potential competition from entering this space. But mostly, I feed off this type of feedback - it only makes the fire in me burn stronger to continue to work harder to succeed in this tough industry.
Thanks for reading and for all your support.
-Miki
