Serendipity, Discovery and Digital Media

So I saw a tweet from Fred Wilson earlier today with a link to an op-ed piece in the NY Post titled: "The Future of Television".

It was a well written piece and has a great flow-chart depicting the capabilities and limitations of many of the video offerings currently available to consumers (on both traditional television and the web). It really gives a clear picture of Boxee's position in the digital video market.

I have yet to try the service (no spare macs right now) but it looks pretty damn cool. Think iTunes if it had no DRM and allowed you to pull from a dozen other services.

At the same time I was reading the NY Post piece I had my XM-radio in my house pumping some Brian Eno. While I LOVE listening to Eno while working this was completely coincidental, I just had the channel set to "Chill" and Eno came on.

That got me thinking about new content delivery services such as Boxee and iTunes and how they've fundamentally altered our experience in discovering and consuming content.

When you use a service like Time Warner's Video on Demand, Boxee, iTunes, YouTube, whatever, it requires that you:

1. Actively seek or search for a particular piece of content
2. Make a concious to decision to view that piece of content (relative to other options)
   
3. Commit to viewing (or listening) to it for at least a little while

Think about that for a minute - those are A LOT of steps. They all require a level of thought, comparative analysis and some element of stress when determing which show/song to select.

Now think about what usually happens when you come home after a long day at work (or on a lazy sunday) and you flip on the tube (or your radio). You can sit back, flip through a few channels randomly and through a divine act of serendipity, you stumble upon one of the greatest movies you've ever seen -- FYI: this is exactly how I first found The Shawshank Redemption.

There's something so pleasurable about accidentally finding a great song or movie. The process of accidental discovery - serendipitous content discovery, if you will - adds so much to the content consuming process. The level of enjoyment just seems to increase dramatically for me - not only did I get to enjoy a great piece of content but I also got to feel like I just won at the craps table too.

However, many of the newer services being built today are ignoring this concept.

It's what makes services like Digg so fun, it's why I keep Twitter open all day and it's why no matter how big the Video on Demand selection is on Time Warner, I'll ALWAYS default to channel surfing before heading to Channel 1000.

I'd love to see more mechanisms for serenedipitious content discovery baked into some of these new media services.

But don't get me wrong here either, services like Boxee and Video on Demand are amazing for their intended purpose: quickly browsing a catalog of content, finding the video you were looking for and having it delivered quickly and elegantly. But I think that before anything becomes the "future of TV" or radio, the recognition and utilization of serendipity in the content discovery process will be critical.

Content and Community

Two of Hagel's 3 C's of the web - Content and Community - are the cornerstone of all User Generated Content (UGC) sites. They are their biggest asset and at the same time their biggest liability - well, maybe not a liability but definitely a challenge.

I mean, think about it:

1. A UGC site's (social networks, blogs, etc.) value is solely predicated on the participation of its members.

2. In some instances like community dating or classified listings sites, there are two classes of users. Think of it like Supply & Demand. On a classified listing site you have those posting ads, but you also need a commensurate amount of people viewing those ads. Like on eBay - you need both buyers and sellers otherwise the site is worthless to both groups.

So here are the inherent difficulties with a model like this:

1. What's the value for an early adopter? In the beginning there's limited content on the site and limited community activity.

2. What if demand (eBays buyers) exceeds supply (eBays sellers) - or vice versa - in a dramatic way?

Those are the two challenges that face most User Generated Content sites.

Here's how TickerHound has addressed some of these issues in the early stages of our Beta period:

With respect to adding value to the early adopters, I've partnered up with InvestorWords.com - an investing and finance dictionary - basically, I've converted their word/definition items into question/answer records in my database.

So even if nobody is on the site we have a minimum number of questions and answers that at least cover the "ever green" type content (e.g. What's a stock option?, What's the dow jones?, etc.). That doesn't solve the community issues, but it certainly helps with the content (which could keep people there long enough to develop a community). So far it's proven to be fairly successful.

But the supply and demand issues are rough. Too many questions not getting answered and you have a lot of unhappy first time users...and they won't care how great the service "could" be, they'll just walk away. So I'm trying very hard to cultivate the community slowly:

- No intensive marketing just yet
- Writing a weekly newsletter highlighting certain members and their contributions
- Reaching out to "power members" individually to thank them and ask what else we can do to make their experience on the site better.

It's been working well and I'm going to continue doing many of these things as I go forward.

There are other issues that are beginning to creep up, however. Now I have to start thinking about SPAM issues - how can we effectively keep stock scams off the site as traffic begins to build? How do we quickly get SPAM off the site when it does appear? How do we evangelize our community so they'll also help police the site?

These are questions that I - and every other UGC site owner - has to answer if we hope to be successful. That's primarily why I decided to attend a meet-up on Tuesday that's going to be hosted by Cupid's Lab where some other NY tech entrepreneurs are going to meet and discuss some of the very issues I just raised.

Here's to reaching some conclusions on these issues!