David Emery Online

As well as the rise of the ‘News Feed’, we’ve also gained another feature from Facebook that is slowly seeping into popular culture:

Status.

David is writing about status updates

Of course, most of you have just thrown your hands up in the air and gone “what are you talking about – we’ve had status updates for years in instant message clients!” and I’d agree with you – we (the freaks and geeks) have had this particular form of ambient social interactivity for years. However, while IM has a pretty high penetration rate outside the geek crowd in my experience ‘normal’ people don’t update their status on IM much more then to say they are having lunch or in a meeting – in fact, a quick glance at my buddy list (which is pretty geek orientated anyway) only shows one custom status message.

Of course, post IM and pre Facebook we got Twitter – a whole online community built around the concept of ‘what are you doing?’. There is no doubt that Twitter brought the concept of status to a much larger audience, but its time has already come and gone, I think; the general population thinks it has no interest in telling people what they’re doing – the concept of publicly (and Twitter is very much orientated at “public”) broadcasting is something that – in the UK at least – most people have a problem with.

Of course, the truth is that most people love broadcasting their status to as many people as possible, but getting over that hurdle is quite difficult – whenever I’ve tried to get non-geeks using Twitter they almost unanimously can’t see what the point is.

This is where Facebook steps in.

By building up a platform with all sorts of uses, built on top of the connections you make with your friends, create a perfect platform for a status updating service. People are reticent to join something solely about status updating, but I’d wager that logging onto Facebook once everyday, browsing your news feed and then updating your status is pretty par for the course for most Facebook users. Everyone I’m friends with on Facebook has updated in the last week. It’s interesting, I think, the way people will participate and use something that, when explained to them in basic terms, they see little or no value in.

On Tuesday Ethan Kaplan – VP of Technology at Warner Bros. Records – posted an interesting post on their philosophy on artist sites (which was somewhat in response to Michael Arrington’s ridiculous post about the value of music – short summary: Arrington doesn’t understand the music industry).

I thought it was pretty interesting to see the thought the goes into the artist sites that they make over at WB – I certainly agree with a whole bunch of the points, although I get the feeling that we take a slightly different tack on certain things.

As anyone who has read this blog for a while almost all of the artist sites we make are based on Textpattern, which provides a simple and light-weight framework around which we can quickly do almost anything we want with content. We still haven’t found anything better; we had a good look at Drupal – which is what WB uses – and I do quite like the idea of having a ‘platform’ that can be developed and rolled out for each site, but Drupal seemed like a massive overkill for a normal artist site (which is just a fountain of content).

The only times when Textpattern has seemed limiting is when we’ve wanted to add in more complicated social-network style features (which Textpatern doesn’t do – it’s very focused on content not interaction), but like Ethan I think – after experimenting with a couple of sites – that small social networks just don’t make sense. Sure, if you’ve got a huge fanbase then it can make sense, but you really need a critical mass of devoted users for it to make sense. That, coupled with the obvious development overheads of developing a social network (as there don’t seem to be any decent off the shelf options) mean it seems like a real waste of resources.

This also touches on the whole ambient interactivity things a well; a social network is overkill, but adding a commenting facility on things can really encourage social interactivity, as can a traditional message board (as long as it’s moderated well). While we’re on this point it’s also worth remembering that while an artist site obviously has a value above an artists MySpace, that doesn’t mean the MySpace doesn’t have a value – it performs a function quite similar to that provided for by a message board.

I’m not entirely sure what point 3 (The artist should be a user, not the site itself) is really getting at but I feel that we probably disagree – the site should be as close to being the artist’s voice as possible. The more the artist can participate the better, quite frankly – one of the reasons that radiohead.com is so successful is that it actually has members of the band blogging and posting stuff up. Fans of an artist come to an artist website to try and get more content generated by that artist – whether that’s exclusive music (which is what Kid Harpoon is doing on his site) or just writing or photos that direct connection is still very important. I think this may well have been one of the reasons that aided MySpace’s success – it has a lot of artists directly interacting with fans by posting content.

Moving on to commerce I have to say I’m still not 100% convinced on its place on an artist site. In theory it should be there, and could work really well – plenty of people will want to by direct from an artist – but the reality is that there are very few music commerce solutions that work acceptably well. It’s a sad state of affairs when most people would rather buy a CD from Amazon then an artist, but I certainly would the vast majority of the time. An artist is never going to be able to compete on things like customer service, postage pricing (most band stores are very region specific, so if you’re in a different country to them you’re going to pay through the nose for postage) and probably price (as they’re never going to make much volume) so I’m not sure if commerce is quite as important right now as maybe it could or should do. We need a better solution that allows artists to properly compete.

No flash except for media players I complexity agree with – you can make just as good an ‘experience’ with html and javascript without the overheads. I don’t think in this day and age that dial-up users are relevant – YouTube wouldn’t be so popular if it was – but mobile is getting ever more important and Flash makes even less sense there.

I’m very interested by this concept of providing an API for an artist site but I think it’s probably unnecessary. Like social networks, an API only makes sense if you’ve got a significant user base to develop things to work with it. However, the idea of opening up your data is very attractive so it’s lucky we have a good solution already: Microformats.

By adding the appropriate microformats to an artist site you can instantly open up things like tour dates, news, release information (using hAudio), links and more, and they come with a pre-built user base of developers that want to develop interesting things with them, which makes the whole a lot more interesting.

I’d be very interested to hear if you have anything you’d like to see on an artist site that is traditionally absent – I can’t help but think there’s still a lot of scope for innovation.

I can finally reveal what I’ve been working on for the last few weeks (and no, it’s not an April fools):

radioheadremix.com

It has obviously been a huge privilege to get to work on something for Radiohead, and I’m really happy with the way the site has turned out. From a technical perspective there isn’t really anything too clever going on; it uses sIFR all over the place for text, which wasn’t quite as hard as it normally is to get running.

The code to power the remixes is all custom PHP (luckily not written by me, but adapted from another project) so there isn’t anything I can point you towards on that front – hopefully it will hold up ok with the battering it will probably get today! I couldn’t see many opportunities for Microformats – I guess it could have used some hCards for remix authors and maybe hAtom for the remixes but they seemed slightly superfluous considering we only publish peoples names and no other contact details. It does, however, have an RSS feed so you can keep track of new mixes as they get uploaded.

Obviously you should all go out and have a go at making a mix yourself, but if you can’t be bothered it’s well worth checking out the Holy Fuck mix, embedded here using the natty widget we got made for the site (for that authentic viral feel):

I assume that most of you are familiar with the Channel 4 program ‘Skins’; it’s a slightly edgy portrayal of modern teenage life based in Bristol and features copious amounts of sex, drug use and debauchery. It’s highly stylised and you can’t help but assume that it’s widely inaccurate – being a teenager was nothing like that when I was one (which wasn’t that long ago) so it can’t have changed that much.

It has.

On Friday I attended a ‘prom’ for The Teenagers and it was like walking into an episode of Skins. The kids were crazy and all of them had dressed up to the ’80s prom’ theme; they were smoking in the halls, they were sneaking in booze and they were generally going nuts. It was actually pretty scary – the amount of energy they had was just amazing, and not exactly helped by the free Red Bull that was being given out…

Now without wanting to sound old it really wasn’t like that ‘in my day’ (sigh) and I can’t help but wonder if the internet – and social networks in particular – are to blame for this shift in teenager behaviour. Sure, we used to go out and get drunk but there seems to be a significant shift in the confidence that they display; they’re happy being them, and seem to have a much more defined sense of identity.

Thinking back to when I was their age, something like the gig I went to would have been a huge pain to organise. It was posted on the bands website, myspace and sent out to a couple of mailing lists and that was all that was needed – it was doubly oversubscribed and people had to be turned away on the night. The best we could hope for was hearing about something by pure word of mouth, or maybe picking up a flyer neither of which lend themselves to the slightly anarchic banding together of groups of like minded people facilitated by the internet that make up a main part of modern teenage life.