Technology

Social Media Points of Failure

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Facebook has just added a lot of new features to its offering, buttons and graphs and likes and widgets galore.  Of course among the various discussions about Facebook, one issue keeps  coming up is that Facebook, as it gets bigger, is a single point of failure in people's online lives and identities.

If you think back, there have been a lot of "single points of failure" in peoples online lives.  I remember when ICQ was the big chat program, when LinkedIn had no competitors, when everyone worried about Twitter owning people's lives (remember that?).  There's always a worry that some provider or web service will dominate everything – and then bad things will happen with hackers, TOS changes, etc.

So we've had a lot of worry about points of failure in our internet lives.  Though I have yet to see a Great Online Life Destruction Debacle, it is a possibility of course.  However,  I've watched many a gloom and doom story about the internet and have yet to see Netageddon happen.

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How Services Make Hardware More Valuable

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So I'm using my Netflix disc in my Wii and am pretty impressed with it.  Great picture, runs smooth.  Controls are a bit weird, because it's a mix of standard metaphor and Wii control.  Overall it's pretty good.

I'm also using the Wii for the first time since I got tired of No More Heroes II.  This makes me think about some of the upcoming games for the Wii, and how now the Wii has this service and others, and . . .

Then I realize that I'm viewing my Wii differently because of one release.  This is something you, the progeek, will be facing: services change the value of media devices, and there's a lot of people out there offering services.

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The Subscription Age

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You ever get a magazine subscription – and sometimes read it?  You still renew it you know . . . just in case.

Or maybe you get comics in a pull at a comic store.  You buy them, and might even read them.

Or a book club.

Or . . .

Well you get the idea.  We all have experience with subscriptions one way or another.  However in an age of eMedia, DLC games, and the iPad-ness, think about what kind of subscriptions you're going to see.

I think we're going to see a lot more subscriptions in the future.  Your business models, your publishing models, and your estimates on profitability are going to need to keep this in mind.  If you're writer, an ePublisher, a game developer, this will be a factor.

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