I’m all for television content discovery, and what better source of recommendations than my friends. But I don’t find the recent trend of augmenting my social stream, and/or introducing another, with TV show check-ins and badges via iPhone and Android devices to be very compelling. Am I just an old fuddy-duddy?
Some of the recent entrants and their corresponding blogosphere coverage:
Whipper snappers! In my day, not only did we walk uphill both ways in the snow, we surfed the Internet via text based browsers (Lynx) and mobile phones were the size of lunch pales.
Now the girl you like will know that you watch Star Trek all the time! :-)
Dave you are an old fuddy duddy.
:P
Seriously though, there’s more to it, especially on the back end. Ironically Tunerfish is built with everything I described in an ZNF post;
https://zatznotfunny.com/2009-01/will-your-tivo-tweet/
“Marc M. Sanford Ph.D., in a detailed white paper titled ‘Social Media Measurement: Widgets and Applications‘ finds that consumer purchase behavior directly correlates to how deeply a Consumer engages with a piece of social media and where they discover the media. Not surprisingly, referrals from friends (or influencers) are 4x more effective.”
…All these different services are testing the waters to see how viable it is to migrate from traditional advertising to the far more focused social graph.
Example: Using Tunerfish, Dave tweets that he’s watching, and liking, Burn Notice season 1 DVD.
I see that in my activity stream and click through, since I trust Dave’s recommendations.
I choose to also buy the Burn Notice DVD …for a 20% discounted price ( pre-negotiated by Tunerfish and the wholesaler ).
Tunerfish gets a percentage of the sale, wholesaler got a sale they never would have, I get entertainment at a discount.
Its still VERY early, but I urge all ZNF readers to try it out, participate in this new paradigm’s development.
Mark my words, this is where *everything*, not just watching TV, is going …soon!
Tunerfish is owned by Comcast, fyi. They had to find something television related to do with the staff they acquired via Plaxo. My old Sling boss/CEO is involved with Clicker – where checkins/tweets are merely a feature of a larger product/service suite rather than their sole purpose. So I give them better odds of success as a sustainable and interesting business.
But the thing that concerns me is the signal/noise ratio. I don’t mind the occasional recommendation, but I’ve already had to prune the list of people I follow due to Foursquare abuses on Twitter. At least on Facebook, I can block the app from posting to my wall. But it’s more difficult on Twitter. (I set up a Seesmic Web filter, but that’s my client only some of the time.)
That’s not really how Tunerfish came about. As a passionate believer in the open Social Web, I believe, like Todd, that social will infuse everything and that “checking in” gestures will become pervasive. TV is a very natural place to leverage social for better discovery, especially as the line between conventional TV and the Web blurs and is then erased. Yes, in this Activity Stream intensive future, we will need more sophisticated mechanism for discerning signal from noise, but it starts with creating compelling product that creates the river of data in the first place.
“But the thing that concerns me is the signal/noise ratio”
Ummm that’s your Twitter client’s fault, exacerbated the lack of Netiquette of the people you follow – not the services listed in this post!
;)
Todd, I’d still prefer to have shared playlists or Season Passes right on my DVR rather than tweeting/tweets from my mobile while watching television. That’s where we are now – perhaps the future you and John envision will have that more natural and sophisticated integration.
John, perhaps I’m just skeptical regarding products out of Plaxo. You guys previously did some spammy things (and ate an address book of mine). I had to bite my tongue real hard in Sunnyvale a few years back when the Plaxo team was eating lunch (sushi?) across from members of my team at the time (which was not Sling). But perhaps it’s my inability to let bygones be bygones. We’re collectively in different places now. :)
“I’d still prefer to have shared playlists or Season Passes right on my DVR rather than tweeting/tweets from my mobile while watching television.”
Sounds exactly like GoogleTV, which is hitting BestBuy in November(?) …at least I hope that’s what GoogleTV will do!
I have two different data points… and there may be Google TV products on store shelves as early as October. That’s the goal anyway – we’ll see how it shakes out.
In order for check-in products to gain wider following, they have to make it either (A) almost automatic; and/or (B) offer you something for the trouble. I hardly have time to keep up with all the email, don’t regularly keep up with Facebook, so why would I make my life even more complicated? Heck, I don’t even keep up with Mint (to really make it work, takes too much time to re-classify transactions).
That’s why I love products like FictFact.com — they solve a real problem :) In their case, it’s keeping up with book series (keeping track of which books in the series you read, what’s to come, etc.).
Bottom line — make my life easier & I’ll use your product!