{"id":3350,"date":"2010-09-16T06:02:06","date_gmt":"2010-09-16T14:02:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/?p=3350"},"modified":"2010-09-16T06:02:06","modified_gmt":"2010-09-16T14:02:06","slug":"the-open-graph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/2010\/09\/16\/the-open-graph\/","title":{"rendered":"The Open Graph"},"content":{"rendered":"
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"This past spring, Facebook introduced what Zuckerberg called the Open Graph. Users reading articles on CNN.com, for example, can see which articles their Facebook friends have read, shared, and liked. Eventually, the company hopes that users will read articles, visit restaurants, and watch movies based on what their Facebook friends have recommended, not, say, based on a page that Google’s algorithm sends them to. Zuckerberg imagines Facebook as, eventually, a layer underneath almost every electronic device. You’ll turn on your TV, and you’ll see that fourteen of your Facebook friends are watching ‘Entourage,’ and that your parents taped ’60 Minutes’ for you. You’ll buy a brand-new phone, and you’ll just enter your credentials. All your friends – and perhaps directions to all the places you and they have visited recently – will be right there.<\/p>\n

The Face of Facebook<\/a><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s hard to make sense of the world.<\/p>\n

Used to be there was a dearth of information.\u00c2\u00a0 I remember going to college and being bored.\u00c2\u00a0 That would be impossible today.\u00c2\u00a0 What with every movie and song ever created at my fingertips on the Internet.<\/p>\n

But with so much information available, people are overwhelmed.\u00c2\u00a0 They can’t make sense of it.<\/p>\n

Old wave media players, especially newspapers, have a hard time with the emergence of this new world. News used to be scarce.\u00c2\u00a0 The paper in each town determined what was news and it was all you got, you couldn’t go online to get additional details or the opinion of a blogger.<\/p>\n

Record labels are especially frustrated.\u00c2\u00a0 They controlled what was exposed and sold.\u00c2\u00a0 Now interlopers are taking over.\u00c2\u00a0 Labels say it’s about P2P theft, but really it’s about loss of a monopoly.\u00c2\u00a0 The labels controlled mindshare.\u00c2\u00a0 Now they barely control anything.<\/p>\n

The labels will tell you that only one in ten albums hit, that there are no guarantees.\u00c2\u00a0 A youngster will scratch his head and ask if I’m the best, why don’t I make all the money?<\/p>\n

Old wave media believes it’s entitled to its place atop the heap, that it deserves all the eyeballs.\u00c2\u00a0 And to maintain this position, old wave media alternately complains and hypes.\u00c2\u00a0 Imploring everyone to pay attention. Those sold out to the old game can’t understand those who no longer play it.\u00c2\u00a0 Randy Phillips thinks everyone’s heard "Empire State Of Mind".\u00c2\u00a0 He’s got statistics to prove it.\u00c2\u00a0 SoundScan, MediaBase, ticket sales.\u00c2\u00a0 But the real story is millions of people don’t know the track and don’t care.\u00c2\u00a0 They don’t feel out of it in the least.\u00c2\u00a0 Rather they’re burrowed down in their own little satisfying holes.<\/p>\n

Hipsters don’t like the new world either.\u00c2\u00a0 They might be poor, but they got satisfaction in not only delineating trends, but making fun of those oblivious to them.\u00c2\u00a0 Now there are so many trends that people are proud to be oblivious.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m a nerd, how would I know that!<\/p>\n

More and more people are abandoning the mainstream circus\/game.\u00c2\u00a0 Could it be any more frustrating to read the newspaper on a new act?\u00c2\u00a0 Why this one?\u00c2\u00a0 Why is there no criticism?\u00c2\u00a0 You can go online and find out from a fan exactly what the music sounds like and whether it’s any good.\u00c2\u00a0 Why would you waste time with a newspaper?\u00c2\u00a0 Reporters will tell you about J-school.\u00c2\u00a0 About being fair and balanced.\u00c2\u00a0 But would you rather read the reporter’s take or the one from the person who lived it?\u00c2\u00a0 Would you rather talk to Irving Azoff or Ann Powers?<\/p>\n

Irving was on Twitter for a while.\u00c2\u00a0 He seems to have given up for now.\u00c2\u00a0 But he’s got in excess of 10,000 followers.\u00c2\u00a0 They want to hear it from the horse’s mouth.<\/p>\n

We all want to hear it from the authority.\u00c2\u00a0 We don’t want to hear about it from the label, we want to hear it from the act itself.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfiltered.<\/p>\n

But the excision of the middleman is not the only important trend.\u00c2\u00a0 Even more interesting is these new micro-worlds, which Zuckerberg is trying to create with Facebook’s Open Graph.<\/p>\n

We’re living in a Tower of Babel world.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s too much input to make sense.\u00c2\u00a0 But what if we could all move to a country of our own choice, with like-minded people?\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the change that’s happening.<\/p>\n

I’ll make it simple.\u00c2\u00a0 Zac Brown fans don’t care what Jay-Z says.\u00c2\u00a0 Oh, of course there could be some cross-pollination, but the point is we’re in a very different era from the sixties or even the MTV years, when multiple genres of music existed side by side in a scarce medium.\u00c2\u00a0 Today, you go directly for what you want, screw the rest.<\/p>\n

And you find out what you want from your friends.\u00c2\u00a0 They provide the context!<\/p>\n

Your friends tell you the news you’re interested in.\u00c2\u00a0 You want to go to the movies they do, so you can have discourse about them.\u00c2\u00a0 You buy the cars your friends approve of.\u00c2\u00a0 The world in general?\u00c2\u00a0 Who cares!<\/p>\n

So as major media corporations try to go ever broader, the audience is going ever-narrower.\u00c2\u00a0 And these niches are hard to penetrate.\u00c2\u00a0 Because they don’t like interlopers and they abhor hype.<\/p>\n

Your only hope of penetrating a niche is via trust.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is established slowly.<\/p>\n

You’ve got to get one fan, who turns on another.<\/p>\n

Inherently this is slow.\u00c2\u00a0 Because if you go too fast, try to get everybody to listen to the first album instead of making a second to satiate the core constituency, your hard core fans abandon you.<\/p>\n

Everything’s topsy-turvy!\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not about controlling customers, but earning their trust and then super-serving them with what they want, which might be completely different from what another group wants.<\/p>\n

You might be able to unite niches in the name of charity.\u00c2\u00a0 Or maybe even politically.\u00c2\u00a0 But the future is not about growing together, but separating.<\/p>\n

In other words, there are no more diamond sellers not because of P2P theft, but because not enough people are interested!<\/p>\n

We always try to make sense of our environment.\u00c2\u00a0 Now we do this by going online, connecting via BBM. Hearing what our friends have to say, what they’re interested in.\u00c2\u00a0 We don’t trust the old media behemoths and we’re immune to advertising.<\/p>\n

It’s a brave new world.\u00c2\u00a0 Social media is not about posting useless trivia, as the old wavers constantly claim, but connection with the information we need to feel knit into the fabric of society\/humanity.<\/p>\n

The computer\/Internet just made it easier to do what we always wanted to do.\u00c2\u00a0 Connect.\u00c2\u00a0 And now that we can connect, we want to comment, we want to collect data and make informed choices.\u00c2\u00a0 We don’t want to be dictated to.<\/p>\n

We’re all stars of our own movies.<\/p>\n

But each and every movie has a cast.<\/p>\n

If you want to sell something, you’ve got to figure out how to get cast in someone’s movie.\u00c2\u00a0 And if you know how hard it is to get cast in a Hollywood movie, you’ve got a good idea how this works.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to have assets, whether they be looks or talent.\u00c2\u00a0 And you’ve got to know someone, to open the door.\u00c2\u00a0 Millions of people want to be actors, few succeed.\u00c2\u00a0 What makes you think it’s going to be so easy to open the door of these new niches and get your music accepted?<\/p>\n

In other words, your friends and your family is your audience.\u00c2\u00a0 Be thankful they like your music.\u00c2\u00a0 As far as spreading it further, good luck!<\/p>\n

I’m not gonna listen to it.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t know you and I don’t trust you.<\/p>\n

Your only hope is if your friends think you’re so good they want to tell their friends, not because you told them to, but because they want to.\u00c2\u00a0 Because they think you’re good and their friends will like you.\u00c2\u00a0 They can’t tell their friends to listen to crap, then they’ll burn their trust, and trust and credibility are key today, you don’t want to be kicked out of anybody’s movie, not if they’re important to you!<\/p>\n

Everything’s changed.\u00c2\u00a0 But the new world is becoming clearer.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s still money to be made, but the marketing tools of yore pay fewer and fewer dividends, and their power will continue to decrease.<\/p>\n

<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

"This past spring, Facebook introduced what Zuckerberg called the Open Graph. Users reading articles on CNN.com, for example, can see which articles their Facebook friends have read, shared, and liked. Eventually, the company hopes that users will read articles, visit restaurants, and watch movies based on what their Facebook friends have recommended, not, say, based […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music-business","category-the-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-S2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3351,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3350\/revisions\/3351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}