If you’re feeling social… Please don’t network me!

As readers of this blog, and perhaps my US one, AdScam, may have noticed, I am not a fan of Twitter, and increasingly, I am becoming less and less enamored of FaceBook. Not because they blithely assume they can take my quirks, foibles, preferences and general information, then sell all that valuable information without my permission to the highest bidder in order to justify their outrageous valuation in the eyes of their respective venture capital vultures…

No… It’s because my Facebook entry has just been completely f**ked up and compromised ‘cos a good friend did a post on my page that contained some kind of virus and now other people are picking it up. It’s not that I post much on Facebook. I have better things to do. Including sorting through hundreds of emails a day. The only time I use Facebook is when I respond to someone sending me a message… Which I’m quite sure I won’t be doing from now on.

So, I’ll probably cancel my account. Why not, if I hardly use it… Does anyone out there have a convincing reason why I shouldn’t? And don’t give me that networking bullshit. Anyone I know, or anyone I want to know, can reach me through my blogs, emails, columns, books etc… I don’t need a social network to do what people have been doing long before the Internet arrived on the scene… Communicating with each other on a one to one basis, or in small groups. Why anyone would need hundreds of friends or followers, who you more likely than not, do not know, is beyond me.

Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not a Luddite, I use and enjoy the wonders of technology and broadband communications all the time… I am, after all, writing this blog post six thousand miles away from where you’ll be reading it. So, if you need me, email me… I promise you I’ll read it. I can’t say the same if you try and reach me on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn or, God forbid, Twitter.

The future is here… Again!

I was intrigued to read last week that Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, now has the first example of the “Espresso Book Machine” in the UK. This is the digital one that prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

The printer carries an inventory of almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton's Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one.

As Blackwell CEO Andrew Hutchings put it. "This could change bookselling fundamentally, by giving smaller locations and independent booksellers the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon ... I like to think of it as the revitalisation of the local bookshop industry. If you could walk into a local bookshop and have access to one million titles, that's pretty compelling."

Why I find it intriguing is that I did a campaign for Qwest Communications, here in the US, eight years ago explaining the possibilities of broadband communications. In one spot a girl goes into a corner newspaper stand and asks for a copy of The Odyssey in the original 5th century Greek. The gnarly old guy behind the counter says… “Which dialect, Attic, Doric or Thebes?” To which she replies, “How is that possible?” He says… “I have every edition of every book ever published in every language.” The juke box in a diner has every recording ever made. A motel in the middle of nowhere has every film ever made. They’re on my Web site.

Which just goes to show… There’s nothing new under the sun. Everything you ever imagined will happen one day. You just have to stick around long enough.

Ah-Ha me Hearties… Pirate Bay still sails the Main!

I’ve been to Sweden quite a lot and it’s certainly not one of the places you think of when considering which country is most likely to be the home of big time criminals… So I had to laugh when I read that the four guys behind Pirate Bay, the world’s best known service for illegally sharing music, movies and software, were convicted by a Swedish court last week. But they still see themselves as being outside the law.

Pirate Bay gained global notoriety through its incursion onto Facebook over the past month, where it posted links to its service, which tracks BitTorrent hosts for illegally sharing files - essentially providing an index to free content all over the net (Facebook banned Pirate Bay on April 9, two weeks after it first appeared).

On Friday, a Swedish court found the four men who run the service - Carl Lundström, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg – guilty of copyright infringement. Each was sentenced to 12 months in prison, and ordered to pay 31 million Swedish kronor (a shitload of money) to copyright holders including EMI, Twentieth Century Fox, Sony Music, Sony Pictures and Time Warner.

So far, the conviction looks like an epic failure. While prosecutors got the one-year sentence they’d requested, the Pirate Bay four have simply moved their server offshore, and the service continues to operate. Global movie, music and game companies had asked for a fine of four times the size. Regardless, the Pirate Bay four are refusing to pay the damages, for which they are jointly liable.

Using the courts, even if they get a conviction, is not a long term solution. Constantly improving technology is always going to make copyright infringement a problem that will never go away. The only solution is a commercial one. Copyright holders, should recognise their customers needs and address them. If they don't do this they are screwed.

Enfatico, WPP’s “Agency of the Future” now has little future!

Unless you’ve been asleep or in an alcoholic haze for the last couple of days, you are no doubt aware of the flaming demise of Enfatico… The WPP agency that was created by Sir Martin to handle all of Dell’s business world wide. This crash is an event I have been forecasting for months on AdScam, I even wrote about it in my new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders. 

As usual, Enfatico was launched with massive dollops of hoopla and hubris. They claimed they were inventing the “Agency of the Future.” But all they did was re-create the “Agency of the Past.” It was a classic Big Dumb Agency… And don’t give me all that sh*t about breaking down silos and walls and shortening lines of communication etc, etc. Every agency since the dawn of time has made that same claim.

Enfatico told everyone they were replacing the 850 agencies on Dell’s roster, which is a giant crock. When IBM put all its business in Ogilvy, IBM used 80 agencies world wide, and IBM is way bigger than Dell. So, at the end of the day, after sixteen months in business, Enfatico has produced a very average campaign for India and a Peter Arnell rip-off for the Adamo launch. Reminds me of “boo.com.” Instead of getting on with what they were formed to do, it was all about self promotion.

That’s why, before Enfatico did a single ad for Dell, they did ads for themselves in all the trades… Were they really stupid enough to think Dell wouldn’t have noticed? One day this will be a classic case study of how NOT to create an ad agency. Sir Martin’s face must now be buried under a mountain of egg!

Facebook’s monetization plan du jour!

In another pathetic attempt to start making serious money, Facebook has come up with yet another dumb f**king idea. They are testing a new virtual gift product that allows users to give “credits” to other users. The idea is that you can give other users these credits in addition to or in lieu of commenting on or liking a message or expressing a status. So if for example I say “got completely arseholed last night,” other people can throw some credits my way.

Why they should want to do that unless they are a complete cretin, is beyond my imagination. It’s bad enough that complete strangers send me virtual teddy bears and martinis. Or that others with virtual STD’s want to hug me. I refuse to believe that all these douchenozzles are going to start sending me money.

Still, somehow or other, in spite of all the hoopla about it growing faster than “The Blob” in Steve McQueen’s unforgettable movie debut, Mark Zuckerberg has to start justifying the outrageous $15 billion valuation Microsoft gave them in 2007. And he’ll have to do it before his ex-college roommates, currently suing him for stealing their idea, win their case and inherit the company.

Couple that with the fact that Twitter has taken over as “Digerati Flavour du Jour,” and you might consider that the Economist put it best about a year ago, when they said that the founder of Facebook should sell out before his bubble burst. A year from now, I expect to be saying the same thing about Twitter.