Esther Dyson
The Mirror of Our Lives
Technology Outlook
December 2004 / January 2005
Volume 2 Number 6
There's an old story in the real-estate trade about a landlord whose office building had slow elevators. He decided to reduce his tenants' complaints by putting a nice painting in the lobby for them to look at while they waited. After about a week, the effect wore off. His wife, much smarter, had a better idea: She persuaded him to buy a large mirror. That effect never wore off. The tenants continue to be happy to look at themselves, day after day.
That story explains the rising popularity of a host of tools that provide virtual mirrors for web users. Indeed, I write this as I sit in my hotel room in Tallinn, Estonia, suffering from fierce jet lag. The words don't come easy, so instead of writing this column, I just took photos of the view from my room and, yes, of myself. My mother will enjoy them! The great thing about this content is that I can produce it with very little effort, yet it's rich and meaningful.
The rise of user-generated content marks a huge shift in the media business. The inclination to represent ourselves in word and image may have existed practically forever, but the tools for creating and distributing those words and images are new. Cell phones with cameras are a key factor in making this possible: They're lightweight and easy to carry around, and the quality of their photos is improving rapidly.
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than 53 million Americans —€”or 44 percent of U.S. Internet users—€”have contributed some kind of digital content beyond private e-mail to the online world. Of those, 21 percent have posted photos, 17 percent have posted text (on a message board or via consumer-feedback mechanisms like that at Amazon), and 13 percent maintain their own Web sites.
The implications for businesses are broad, starting with relatively reduced demand for "asymmetrical" bandwidth, such as cable or satellite, where there's lots of communication capacity to download content but not much to upload it. People aren't just downloading music; they're uploading their own creative efforts.
Aside from communication, this is a whole new source of competition for consumers' attention.
The trick for businesses is not to compete with user-generated content, but to co-opt it, by becoming the platform where users can post their content and invite their friends to see it. For example, instead of e-mailing my Estonia photos to my mom and friends, I can just send them a link to some provider's site. And then, of course, if the business model works, more and more of my friends will start sharing and annotating the photos at the same site.
There are already a host of such services, ranging from Ofoto and Fotolog to PreClick, Flickr and a host of blog and other sharing sites that host photos as well as text blogs.
Many of the social networking sites, such as Friendster, rely on photos for a great part of their appeal. Photos are what make those sites feel like real communities, and they are an endlessly compelling medium, even when they depict people you don't know and will never meet face to face. (It worked for People magazine, too.) It takes talent to create good music or to write well, but almost anyone can take a photo that others will want to look at.
Lisa Gansky, chairman and president of Ofoto, says, "In Western Europe, Korea and Japan, where the cameraphone markets are most mature, we see that group or community authoring of online photo displays is a regular practice. The ability to do 'storytelling' and rapid-share or live shares is pretty compelling to many kinds of folks." If you go to a party, the party can live on in a collection of photos of and by the people who attended.
As we live more of our lives online, it makes sense that we'd want to decorate our virtual space with photos, just as we decorate our living rooms. From the business point of view, the challenge is to be the real estate that people want to decorate. In real life, that requires good schools. Online, it requires good tools.
Of course, there's always a delicate tension: People want to build online nests in spaces as individual as they are -- but they want the validation, and the more broadly shared experience, of a brand name.
AOL, Yahoo! and probably Google (spreading out from its Orkut social network platform) are all vying to support the online neighborhoods of choice. This is a market that will consolidate and the independent companies I mentioned may soon be snapped up by the giants.
Esther Dyson is chairman of EDventure holdings and publisher of Release 1.0.
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