A life of “nothing better to do”

Recently I have been posting quite a bit about the distraction that social media has become in our lives.  This message coming from someone who makes a living from online marketing might seem a little confusing; I should be the person telling you to spend every waking second on FaceTubeEeter.ly.

I post these things because I know to have a future for what we do there is a need for me to care about a life of moderation in what you do.

Being too invested in one space as a company, marketer, or individual means you might miss the world evolving around you.  If a change happens you might be too heavily invested in what you have created to adapt to what is new and better.

There are 3 companies that I think everyone would put in their social / new media top 5: Apple, Google, and Facebook.  In many ways they are becoming “too big to fail”.  But as we have all seen recently too big to fail just means more people will be hurt when they finally do get turned upon their head.

I saw a peek into Apple’s upheaval in real life this past Friday and I didn’t put the pieces together until just now.

I love Apple’s products and brand motto of “make awesome good looking stuff and people will pay a little extra for it” (S. Jobs, I made that up but feel free to use it).  I understand why Apple has kept a closed door when it comes to the development of software to run their hardware.  That being said, if I were in charge up in Cupertino I might want to consider opening up my doors as much as possible because that is the way of the soon to be new world (OpenID and open source are not new but they are not exactly the mainstream, yet.  There is a tug of war game when it comes to controlling the quality of experience and the ability to access content.)

This past Friday (I bet you forgot about where this was all going) John and I went to meet some friends at the Playing for Change show featuring Toots and the Maytals.  While waiting for the show to begin I remembered a funny old video clip that a friend recently brought back into my life with the aid of Failblog and Digg.  The clip is of Andrew W.K. not so seriously answering some serious questions on FOX News:

One of our friends pulled out her Apple iPhone at the same time that John pulled out his HTC Hero and the race was on.

It was a very short race, the iPhone was not able to quickly and easily pull up the video clip because of some flash issue but there was no issue with the Hero.  Result was we all laughed and much later I said, “hmmmm?”.

The future of the web is going to be about providing access to gather feedback to fuel the sale of tangible products.  Right now Apple is the best designer of products that consumers love to touch but that will not always be.  Making the product something that also allows the consumer to access equally if not above all others is the other big element that Apple is soon going to have to address as others begin to close in on their clean look and feel while at the same time taking over the landscape around them.

This land-grab means control in connecting the dots making the users experience more streamlined.  This let’s us get back to the other things in life that matter sooner and makes us happier.  That is a win.

Google is getting a head-start in mobile advertising by buying AdMob.