Tastebook – User generated publishing…

Our friends over at Tastebook asked us to test their new widget.  We are happy to help out, but I thought I’d also take a step back to reflect on the significance of what they are up to.  This is a really good example of a company that “gets” the big picture we have talked about in previous posts.

When I first saw Tastebook I thought “Okay, that is pretty cool”.  You make your own cookbook by remixing your favorite recipes from places like Epicurious and Simply Recipes along with your own.  Playing book DJ is fun and the end result is a beautiful collection of your favorite recipes.  Julie created a great Tastebook which is a good thing because my cooking knowledge is limited to toast and quesadillas (unfortunately that is not an exaggeration).

Then I started really thinking about what it meant and the implications behind what they are doing are significant.  Social media is all about giving people the tools, platforms and creative license to create a web experience “their/our way”.    And sometimes you want a physical expression of that, something you can hold in your hands or give to other people wrapped in actual gift-wrap.  Speaking for myself, when I do that I want just as much control as I have in the virtual environment.   The idea behind Tastebook is just that  - user control over my physical experience of a book.  Well done!

Now, hopefully they’ll expand to things I actually know something about, like travel. Check it out especially if cooking is your thing:

 

 

Shocking – it isn’t a highway after all!

Om Malik over at GigaOm wrote an interesting post today “Shocking:  New Facts about P2P and Broadband Usage“.  In it he cites some stats from Arbor Networks and makes the following comment:

• 10 percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth.
• 0.5 percent of subscribers consume about 40 percent of total bandwidth
• 80 percent of subscribers use less than 10 percent of bandwidth

 

  This supports the arguments made by some of the larger ISPs, including Comcast. In a recent interview, Comcast Cable CTO Tony Werner told me his company would try and deal with the tiny number of subscribers who use most of the bandwidth by slowing down their connections during peak times.         

    

  I don’t agree with the premise that the stats make a case for the ISP’s.   In fact I think just the opposite.    ISP’s like to use the highway analogy (I thought it was a  bunch of tubes) .  The reasoning goes that since bandwidth is a limited resource, like the lanes on a highway, certain entities should be given preference (access to the fast lane) while individual bandwidth hogs are regulated to the slow lane.  Unless they pay of course.  

Simple, easy to understand and with an emotional appeal.  Too bad it is wrong.  When you drive your car you degrade my experience of driving my car.  No cars on my road = good.  Many cars= bad.    If you’ve been asleep for the past 5 or so years (arguably the ISP’s have) than you may not have noticed the web went all social.  People, (i.e. users bound for the ISP slow lane), create cool content, share, mashup and generally make the whole thing a vibrant community instead of a video billboard.    My web experience is enhanced the more people that use it! Not like a highway at all, is it? 

 Aha, says my ISP – “but what about P2P?”.   And there is the really shocking part of the stats.  Turns out, at least according to Arbor, that only 20% of the total traffic is P2P (arguably a portion of which is people creating content collaboratively).  The rest is you and me creating sharing and generally making the web a richer experience. 

We see this all the time in the user communities we look at for clients –  it tends to be the 10 or 20% of the community that heavily engage that makes the whole community vibrant and alive. Yep, they use some bandwidth to do it. I think that’s a small price to pay for creativity.   I guess what it comes down to is – do you want  YouTube?  Or do you want Clown Co Hulu?