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Last Thursday I was listening to The Howard Stern Show on Sirius, (on a friend’s car receiver, I should point out – I don’t own satellite radio myself,) and heard a brilliant tirade from him on how much he hates social media. He displayed a dedication to not getting it that was hilarious – going so far as to continually call it, “MyFaceBook,” because he didn’t know that there is a “Myspace” and a “Facebook.” It was as though he were insisting, “I am going to stay an out of touch old coot, and there’s not a thing you can do to stop  me.”

The discussion came about because Mike Gange, one of the show staffers, told how he maintains a blog. (On the aforementioned, “MyFaceBook,” apparently. I didn’t hear the exactly location.) Howard pointed out that Gange and other users of social media are getting used by these sites, because they are providing “free content,” which the sites make their living off of, and besides none of the content is interesting.

In my opinion, the latter point is absolutely true: The bulk of what is written on Facebook or Myspace or Twitter of blogs is largely complete twaddle. No one cares what is written, and no one reads it. The users of most all of these sites are only in it to get as many viewers/vollowers/fans as they can, so they don’t spend time reading other people’s posts as much as they do networking and building up a collection of online friends so they can have a sizeable, impressive number, but never read or keep in touch with all of them.

I’m speaking mostly of the, “lifecasters,” who share everything they’re doing at any particular moment. As someone who’s a fan of Brightkite, Utterz, and has maintained a LiveJournal since 2002, I am so completely guilty of this, so don’t think I’m casing any stones here. But for the most part, the things I do there are meant for friends and not for mass consumption. This is when social media really works, when I’m keeping in touch with friends I can’t easily keep in touch with.

It’s when people look to social as a means for being rock stars that there’s a problem, and I think this is really where Stern gets peeved. It makes sense that he would see how “MyFaceBook” or whatever is milking its users for free content – because this content is what he is competing with.

Satellite radio costs money, and social media does not. If people are eager to spend hours blogging and viewing videos and sharing pictures online, for free, that eats up a lot of potential consumers of satellite radio, and The Howard Stern Show specifically. This is another example of the point of “sink or swim” traditional media is facing: Whether to embrace the new technology, because it is the way people want to experience media, or to complain about it and hope it goes away.

After all, that’s what Don Imus would do.

My favorite development is personal online publishing has been in storing bookmarks. I know I’m a simpleton, but I cannot remember the addresses of places I visit all of the time, or the phone numbers of dear friends, or the e-mail addresses of people who aren’t dear enough to call or anything, but…

Suffice it to say, I need services like these in a bad way. And I cannot always trust the bookmarks on the browser I am using, since I could be at home, or at work, or at my parents’ or my sister’s or my girlfriend’s place. I need bookmarks to be stored online, so no matter where I go, I can find my things.

My Bookmarks was an early success, as was del.icio.us. A lot of people think My Bookmarks got buried by del.icio.us because del.icio.us was easier to share favorite places with. In truth, I think My Bookmarks was killed by Yahoo! and Google personal pages. Both services allow you to create a bookmark section of your own page, usually of places you don’t want to share.

But so much for failures. Del.icio.us was the site that figured out the importance of getting users to add tagging to content – a technique that would be copied by nearly every other social media application afterwards. (In fact, a couple of years ago, before everyone was bandying about this term, “social media,” I was still calling it all, “social bookmarking.” Memories. Like the corners of my mind.)

My own favorite site, however, is StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon allows you to pick favorites and share them with others, but you have the added option of “stumbling” – or randomly going to a page one of the other users has made a favorite, and is relevant to the user’s own interests. It is also a brilliant system for getting other users who have similar interests to visit your site. If what you have on display is of high quality, that quick, heavy burst of traffic can work wonders.

Of course, when I’m not trying to promote something or learn what everyone else is doing, I still use my Google Bookmarks. Mostly because every machine I use seems to have the Google Toolbar on it anyway, so it becomes very easy to save and access stuff. Otherwise, frankly, a LOT of these services are creepily similar. Then again, how sexy can you really make bookmarks?

A lot of people may say that Digg and Reddit and Propeller are social bookmarking sites, which is sort of true. You are saving bookmarks to content that interests you. I prefer to think of these as social news sites, though, since they tend to revolve around current events. For example, there aren’t a lot of people “Digging” the page to get a U.S. passport, after all. But on delicious.com (they changed the name. Grr.) there are 533 other users who saved this page to their collections.

If you’re looking for more of these sites to check out, you can always go to Wikipedia to find a pretty happening list of them. They’ll help you read more about it.

Yes kids, TV used to be REALLY bad.

Generation Virtual – AKA Generation V – is the new title given to the emerging generation of technology-savvy folks who converge online from a variety of backgrounds. According to a recent article, Generation V is becoming a force to be reckoned with, one unlike any other generation before. Instead of being divided into categories based on traditional demographics (age, race, social status and the like), Generation V is instead characterized by traits like an “increasing preference for the use of digital media channels to discover information, build knowledge and share insights,” according to the research.

This rise in a new consumer base with its own subcategories and trends is a chance for marketers to create new campaigns geared toward Generation V and the technological mediums they use. It’s a chance for online marketers to shine and also to reach across several traditional demographic groups at once as your message reaches the diverse Generation V members.

So everyone was talking about Cuil today, the newest search engine on the proverbial block.

Created by some ex-Googlers eager to whittle market share away from the search behemoth, Cuil (pronounced “kool,” like the menthol cigarettes I sometimes smoked in high school for that coveted fresh breath/nicotine buzz combo) bills itself as “the world’s biggest search engine,” claiming to index three times as many pages as Google.

What else is new with Cuil? Seemingly a lot. Not only does the SERP look quite a bit different than anything you’ve seen before – think columns, sort of like a magazine page – but the company claims to be ranking on site content, not popularity (i.e. links). (more…)

Biz Stone, co-creator of this month’s flavor Twitter, posted on his blog recently about their fight against spam - which I do think is always a laudable goal, no matter where you are. The bit I found interesting in his post about it was this:

Posting links to Twitter is great and we encourage people to do so. However, spammers are posting links on a whole different scale and they’re doing something else we call Aggressive Following. This behavior entails following thousands of other accounts in the hope of reciprocation and it really peeves Twitter users because many of us are sensitive to our Follower count—we don’t want email notifications triggered by spammers and we don’t want to see our avatar on their profile page.

The immediate problem here is that sometimes you follow thousands of other people because they’re all following you. It would seem a simple adjustment to make, that if you are reciprocating follows, you can go as high as you want. After all, if you’re popular, then a lot of people want to hear from you - and anything where people actually want to hear from you isn’t spam - it’s popular.

“Every week I turn on the TV to watch ‘House,’ and every week that show ‘House’ comes on my TV! Why won’t Fox stop spamming me!”

“Spam” on Twitter is not, in fact, spam. Twitterers can come up with some new cute name to describe what this is, perhaps, but anything you opt into is not spam. If you choose to follow another account - even if they are already following 1000 people and only being followed by 1 - that is the choice you have made.

Personally I wonder if this has more to do with Twitter’s hosting issues. I know nothing about their internal network other than it constantly breaks, but perhaps a large number of users with a large number of users followed is part of what slows down their network? That would make a lot more sense than crying, “spam” because some poor fool with a website wants traffic.

And ultimately THAT is what will detract people from using Twitter in this way - as a means for getting followers, or traffic, it just doesn’t work.

In the event you’ve been living by your lonesome on an island without an Internet connection, you’re probably aware that Apple’s new iPhone - the iPhone 3G - is being released on Friday.  You’ve probably heard that it’s cheaper than the original.  You may also have heard that its arrival will coincide with the release of iPhone OS 2.0, a software upgrade (also available for original iPhones) which will usher in Apple’s platform for third-party software on the device.

As a true Apple fanatic, I have known all of this for about as long as any individual piece of this information has been available.  I picked up the original iPhone last year, and almost anyone who knows me will point you in my direction if the topic comes up.  For the past year I have used and abused my iPhone.  It has become an extension of my brain.  It keeps me in contact with people, and makes it easy for me to keep up on what’s going on with the web, be it tweets, superpokes, diggs, comments - what have you.

For the past year I have been a vocal proponent of the device and everything Apple has brought to the mobile arena.  I thoroughly enjoyed buying the device itself, never having to deal with some lame sales pitch about pricing plans.  I enjoyed bringing it home, unboxing it, plugging it into my Mac, and activating it through iTunes - a process which took five minutes, after which I had touch access to contacts, emails, photos, and the web.  After a full sync I had access to my favorite tunes, as well, which continued to play regardless of what I was doing with the device.  The built-in Google Maps app has saved my hide on a number of occasions.

Then there’s the design.  The simple ringer rocker switch, which disables the ringer with the flick of a switch - something every single phone on earth should have.  One also appreciates the proximity sensor, which automatically turns off the screen (and its touch sensitivity) when held to the head; the ambient light sensor, which adjusts the strength of the backlight to match one’s environment; the accelerometer, which informs the device of its orientation, automatically switching between landscape and portrait modes; the quality of the screen, with its glass cover having miraculously survived in nearly perfect condition despite the onslaught of bumps and drops all mobile phones experience.  Then there’s the multi-touch interface itself.  Simple, sexy, and functional.

It was sweet, and I sure am going to miss it, because I am not buying an iPhone 3G, and will be moving on to another device soon.  There are quite a few reasons for my falling out with Apple, and they all revolve around doing what’s best for the consumer - or in this case, the exact opposite.

When Apple announced iPhone 3G at WWDC this year, I was sorely disappointed.  Having expected 3G on the next version on the device, I was hoping for significant improvements, or - at the very least - the correction of some of the most glaring omissions from the original design.  It occurs to me now that Apple has very appropriately named this new iPhone, because “iPhone 3G” is exactly what it is: an iPhone that operates at 3G wireless speeds.  Whether you look at the hardware or the software, it is clear that this is not iPhone 2.0.

There is no expanded built-in memory; 8GB and 16GB are still the only options.

Battery life is up from 8 hours of talk time to 10, but this only applies to calls made in EDGE; 3G talk time is actually worse, at 5 hours.  There is an option to disable 3G, but it’s buried behind menus and there is no way to set calls specifically to use EDGE by default.  This is particularly egregious when one considers that the battery is still not easily swappable by the user.  New photographs of iPhone 3G have shown that there are screws on the bottom of the device which may mean it is possible for the user to physically change the battery, but it will not be like popping the back off a RAZR (a decidedly inferior device).

It still cannot handle MMS, meaning it is still impossible to send or receive picture messages.  Apple’s suggestion is to send emails with picture attachments, but this is a poor excuse for the MMS available on virtually all other phones with cameras.

iPhone 3G still cannot record video.

iPhone 3G still does not support A2DP, which means using expensive and cumbersome add-ons if you wish to use wireless headphones, despite the fact that iPhone 3G - like the original before it - contains a perfectly good Bluetooth chip which would be up to the task if it were available in the software.

Along those same lines, iPhone 3G still will not allow you to tether it to a computer via Bluetooth, which means it is still not possible to use it as a data modem.  For all the talk of Apple going enterprise with Exchange support, I wonder how many business users will - like me - continue to miss this vital piece of functionality.

Apple has also chosen to eschew what I thought was one of the most innovative aspects of buying an iPhone in the first place: iTunes activation.  With the original iPhone, a customer could walk into an Apple Store, buy the iPhone, and be out in less than two minutes.  Said customer would take the iPhone home, unbox it, hook it up to his or her computer, and fire up iTunes.  iTunes would walk the customer through the process of signing up for a plan with AT&T, and activating the phone.  With iPhone 3G, we’re back to square one.

Opening an Apple product has always been a treat.  Apple takes the time and effort to make unboxing the product part of the experience.  Now, the first person who will get his or her hands on your brand new Apple product is the person who charges you for it.  As a longtime Mac user and Apple fanatic, this is heresy.

I could go on, but my point is made.  After ripping the mobile phone world open with the revolutionary iPhone, Apple has chosen to rest on its laurels and go about business just like every other player in the mobile arena.  It has chosen not to correct significant problems with the first version, and has regressed back from its truly customer-centric approach to activation.  I haven’t even touched on how the new $199 iPhone 3G will actually cost you more over the life of the 2-year contract than the original (you’re paying $10 more per month for 3G data whether your area has 3G or not, and you’ll pay extra for the 200 text messages that used to be included in the base price).

I maintain hope that Apple will come around when it’s time for the real iPhone 2.0.  Until then, I’ll be talking elsewhere.