Interesting catch-phrase: "broadcast yourself". It's an intriguing spin perhaps on how communication technologies are evolving (slowly)- rather than transmit information in a point-to-point manner to known addresses (e-mail sender to e-mail recipient), we post or stream communication to a space where 1-N people can receive it in multiple ways. As senders lose control of the tool used to interact with the message, those receiving such messages gain control by interacting with information using preferred tools. We can begin to think of "channel switching" as a key communication design point. For instance, a Twitter SMS post ("tweet") can be sent from a range of client tools but does not dictate the manner in which other users will interact with the message. Some users might receive it via SMS while others might see it on the Twitter web site or via IM or even displayed that user's Facebook page (via a Twitter plug-in). Messages can even be subscribed to (example: a tweet can be delivered to your favorite XML feed reader).
The article goes on to discuss Quickeo but the idea of communicating into a space (rather than locking a dialog into a specific toolset), and designing up-front for channel switching (which enables more flexible "1-N" conversation paths), jumped to mind.
A lot of non-techy people, when they hear the words wiki, upload, widgets, layout, blogging, user-generated content and so on, simply tune out; what's available now works for techies, but uploading personal content to a public Web site is a huge barrier for others. Such is the contention anyway of a new San Francisco-based startup, Quickeo, which offers a service for those "who don't want to go public with their private lives."
According to Quickeo, while YouTube tells you to "broadcast yourself," and Flickr says it can help anyone show off their best pictures to the whole world in a bid for Web celebrity, those messages just don't resonate with those who want to share pictures and videos with family and friends but not the whole world. The Quickeo alternative allows you to send any kind of data (e.g. video, photo, audio) in an email format called a Quickeomail.
What If Web 2.0-Style 'Life-Streaming' Isn't For Everyone? (SocialComputingMagazine.com)
I think this is missing the point: in my experience most users simply don't use services like flickr or youtube to "broadcast", they use them to narrowcast and filter: twitter is a case in point: while it is true that messages can be sent and received in a multitude of ways, I reckon most people's primary network on twitter is that of their friends and followers and not the public timeline. That tweets can be on the public timeline is the same as people using their cellphones in public.
Posted by: alex de jong | August 13, 2007 at 12:21 AM
Actually, I do think the article is right, I was on some site a couple of days ago which said that < .5 percent of YouTube users are actually uploading content and that the rest just come to download... if people were truly broadcasters and not just viewers then those numbers would be much closer to equal like maybe 70%/30% [the numbers could be even higher if people were truly uploaders and not just viewers ... I made it 70/30 by taking into account the fact that most users can't figure out how to upload content, but if they could, they should be more even yet like but they just aren't....]
No matter what, I tried out that Quickeo software, pretty good either way you consider yourself... an uploader or a viewer
Sincerely,
Emmanuel
Posted by: Emmanuel | September 05, 2007 at 11:29 PM