Less Is More.

Mr. Adams’ gives several examples. Booking Travel Online. Buying Movie Tickets. The iPad and pretty much everything else that Apple does. But in Apple’s case the example was that less is more works, whereas booking travel and buying movie tickets have become bogged down. More has become Less.

The business change examples are so numerous I won’t spend much time. Just think about how much easier it is to shop when you have packages to choose from, or pre-built meals at a restaurant instead of a la carte ordering. No comment on value or what’s “better”, or for whom; it’s just easier, and that makes everyone feel better.

In social networking, less is more is looking like the way things will go. Yesterday Apple announced a social network of their own. PING will be a way for iTunes users to share how they feel about the music they listen to with others. I don’t care, but my 21-year-old son thought it was a great idea.

Social networking needs more thinking like this; it needs a real Facelift. Social networks need to actually have something social about them, beyond the mere “come to the marketplace and see if you recognize anyone” approach being practiced by Facebook. Again, I personally think Ping is silly, but it’s going to be immensely popular—not so much because it comes from Apple, but because it makes sense.

Look for the news about the Facelift of Social Networking right here . . . very soon!

If you look at the oh-so-slick website home of The Puck you’ll notice that it’s not available everywhere just yet. In fact, this little thing isn’t going to make any difference in the plans that the AT&T ‘s and Verizon ‘s of the world make—yet. But The Puck is a great example of how one company’s business change plans can derail another’s, even when the new guy is way smaller than the company they’re attacking.

The short of this story is that people who use The Puck (or the other offerings from Rover) will get high-speed, flat-rate bandwidth. And the rate, while not low, is fair; $50 per month for unlimited use, in line with what you pay for wired service through your cable company. No contracts, no wires, just a short-circuiting of the plans from the big guys that were starting to look like we’d have to accept.

And if you only need to use The Puck occasionally, that’s covered too, for less money, and again . . . as you need it, without a contract.

Watch for The Puck’s availability where you live, work, and travel to. And when you can, plan to jump; you can run your entire data life over one of these things . . . and maybe even drop a phone line or two.

Metered Data rates? I say Puck No!

ADDENDUM: Just eight hours after I posted this David Pogue clued the world into something I had previously missed: For ten dollars less than service on The Puck, you can get service from Virgin Mobile that’s available almost everywhere. It’s 3G, which is slightly slower under most conditions than The Puck’s 4G, but . . . wow.

So if older workers are smarter than younger workers, does that mean that we don’t care about their extra experience or that we don’t care enough to pay for it?

Speaking as an “old guy”, I have a personal stake in the answer to this question. There are things about technology that I know which my younger brethren don’t. And while my dated programming skills and understanding of what happens at a command line prompt may not matter any more the decades I’ve spent watching how the choices we make in technology effect the business impact of  those choices matter very much. Facebook is a prime example; It does everything, but it’s a nightmare to “get”.

Listen up: the kids at Facebook have done an amazing job building something huge, and I need to be clear: I’m way beyond impressed. And if anyone thinks they’re going to topple Facebook they’re fools. But there’s room—even need for—a business change. Facebook’s steadfast insistence on growth is by definition a model that can’t be sustained; where will they go next? And is there any way in the world that Zucketberg et.al. can be the people to pull it off?

I’m pretty sure I know what’s next. As I’ve mentioned before I’m part of a team that’s about to launch the next wave in social networking. And seriously; if I wasn’t as old as I am I might have thought of it, but I couldn’t execute it. But this leaves the issue of cost: in constructing the Facelift of social networking I’m going to have to either pay for older, experienced talent, or accept the narrower, simpler understanding of younger help.

Last week I came across a story about this issue: most businesses would rather churn through younger, cheaper labor than pay for expertise. And it seems that can be a smart choice; after a relatively short period the younger help get up to speed on all the things that most of then were ever going to be good for, anyway.

But what if you can hire older workers at a price closer to what the younger guys cost? Is a small(er) premium worth acquiring the extra expertise?

Except in the cases where existing knowledge gets in the way (!!!) the answer is yes. The question is creating a tenable balance between the expertise and cost issues. And that’s REAL business change.

I’m stopping there; this subject could be a book—or two. If you want to know more you’re going to have to ask. Drop Me a Line, and we can talk.

The Facelift of Social Networking. I think I like the sound of that.

Last week, Microsoft founder and gazillionaire Paul Allen filed a lawsuit against . . . well, yikes, against almost everybody. And the lawsuit goes way too far, as do most lawsuits over software patents. But the reaction to that suit has been off the mark. Almost universally, that reaction has been not to the merit of the lawsuit but to Paul Allen’s new career as a patent troll . . . and to how evil a place patent trolls occupy in the business world.

I’m on the record as believing that many lawyers do more harm than good, and that they add nothing the the GNP while lining their pockets with others’ money. And oh boy will Paul Allen’s attorneys make a bundle playing with this one. But I’m also on the record as saying that there’s nothing wrong with defending a patent.

And yes, managing your intellectual property almost requires attorneys.

So where’s the disconnect? How do we align software patents owned through purchase (not invention) by one of the wealthiest men in the world and also encourage restraint on a group of people who make their living by being the opposite of restrained in a business environment where things are changing so quickly that it seems like you’d better sue someone before they sue you?

We take a step back. We change the patent system. We make it harder to file lawsuits and impose large fines on those who file suits found to be without merit.

Which . . . uggh . . . means I just suggested creating more oversight and rules.

More than anything, I’m suggesting that we need for cooler heads to prevail. We need more experience and less “innovation”.

We need old people.

Come back tomorrow to see what I mean by that. But in the meantime, cut Paul Allen a break. His lawyers may have reached too far, but in the system we have now defending his intellectual property was the right thing to do.

Last year, The FTC created a regulation that was designed to make knowing what was trustworthy amongst all the stuff you read on the Internet easier. If you blog, tweet, or basically say anything and are paid for doing it you have to disclose the payment. Failure to do so carries an $11,000 fine.

Soon after the regulation was enacted I mentioned that one Kim Kardashian was shilling for Carl’s Jr. over Twitter and that her tweets weren’t marked. I presume Ms. Kardashian hasn’t been fined.

Yesterday, the FTC gave me good reason for that presumption. A public relations firm that placed many uncredited reviews for their clients’ music on iTunes has reached settlement with the FTC, and will be removing the offending posts. And that’s it; there’s no fine. It’s kind of the equivalent of this short conversation:

• “You’ve made a mess of this wall, young lady, please clean it up”
• “OK, Mommy”

But on the Internet, nothing ever gets erased. Sure, the PR company might be able to “remove their reviews from iTunes”, but those words have already been stored in thousands of other places; they aren’t going away.

The business change lesson in this is simple. Just as Google and Verizon understand that the real impact of their pact on Net Neutrality is control, on the Internet, you’re in control. All you need is a clear understanding of how the things you say impact the space.

I’ll make the offer again: For $11,000.01 I’ll blog about you, and I won’t disclose that you paid me.

With so much information finding its way onto the Internet, I’ve taken a pragmatic approach: nothing is private. Don’t expect privacy. Period. Laws are nearly meaningless. And court rulings mean even less.

Germany is considering a law that I don’t believe can be enforced, but at least sounds good. If passed, the new German law will make it illegal to use “private” data when looking for information about prospective employees.

Start with the “can’t be enforced” part: the distinction between what’s private and what’s public under this proposed law is unclearly  based on a broad understanding of “intent”. So Facebook information would be off limits to prospective employers, while LinkedIn data is fair game.

I agree that the intent of using Linkedin almost always runs toward “hey! look at me, world!” whereas people who use Facelook generally mean to shout only at people they already know. And that’s where the law being considered in Germany becomes most interesting.

In the United States, “intent” is a prime consideration in determining guilt in a criminal proceeding; it’s the reason that “gee officer, I didn’t MEAN to be over the speed limit” can actually work. If the German legal system extends intent to privacy issues, this law is a great idea.

Specifically, if you friend someone on Facebook just to find if there’s any dirt on them, you aren’t really trying to be friends.

I don’t know how this is all going to play out, and certainly a law in Germany doesn’t mean anything elsewhere. But given that privacy and data usage are currently being played out on a completely open field, I love the idea of this law.

And I’d love for you to think about intent the next time you use data to create business change.

It took Apple just a few weeks to respond. Their method? A new software patent filing. Apple has already filed for a patent on software that would examine your Smartphone for bad stuff, and if they found anything they didn’t approve of could cripple your device.

I could go all indignant here and rant about how Apple has no right to mess with your phone, smart or otherwise. I could cite examples of software companies that won’t cripple your software if they believe it to be pirated even if they can, and tell you how smart I believe that decision to be. But the real story here is the software patent Apple has filed for.

Let’s cover those first points, quickly. FIRST: Apple has the “Right” to do anything they want, until a law stops them. Even then, they have the right to ignore that law and roll the dice on what happens when they do. SECOND: the software companies that act as I described above cover themselves another way; they build expiration dates into their software and simply refuse to renew licenses that they don’t consider to be illegitimate.

Since the first point can’t be discussed except in the abstract and the second point would be incredibly easy for Apple to implement, all there is to discuss is this patent application.

As you know, I’m outspoken in my belief that software patents are a bad idea unless they actually describe and incorporate something unique and specifically disclose what’s unique and why. Apple is now trying to claim as unique the idea that if they see something bad they should be able to turn it off.

Unique? Really? I can’t even think of a way to MAKE that idea unique. And I really hope that someone challenges this patent application under the very simple tenet of the existence of prior art.

But let’s get to the real point: Apple knows they couldn’t really defend this patent. If they ever tried to sue an “infringer” for using this “technology” they’d lose both the case and the patent itself. This patent application isn’t about that at all; it’s about Apple putting words on the record with the United States Patent and Trademark Office that defend them, however tangentially, against the people who will scream when Apple deactivates their phones after they exercised their legally-protected and established right to modify them.

And because it’s a software patent, it’s so complicated that Apple will use it for years to do exactly that.

Patents are supposed to be about protecting unique inventions. Apple has filed for one to do nothing of the sort.

Start screaming.

I could make this complicated, but let’s go the other way:

While it might be technically correct that when you manage to scrape together a few dollars in revenue you are “operating a business”, and while many people wish to make a living as bloggers (and some make very nice livings, indeed), this isn’t the same as being “in business” or being a business.

In fact, I commented on this once before. Want a simple test of who is in business? If you ARE a business, then you are IN business.

Shame on the city of Philadelphia. But Philadelphia is a government, not a person; it shouldn’t surprise us when this kind of thing happens, because nobody is in charge, really. Except . . . wait . . . perhaps the mayor of Philadelphia could step forward and stop this ridiculous practice?

Business change is complicated. But sometimes it can be simplified by making a couple of smart decisions. Be smarter than Philadelphia: do business like a business, take responsibility for the choices you make, and move forward from there.

And now I love The New York Mets.

OK, I already loved the New York Mets. I’m a fan, and have been since I was a kid. But last week they did something that has no precedent in their business and if they get away with it this will be a business change that will reverberate through professional sports and maybe even other businesses.

Recently, one of the Mets players is alleged to have assaulted the maternal grandfather of some of his children, and to have done so in front of many people. (that clumsy sentence was actually the shortest way I could think of to tell the story fairly and with an appropriate level of detail). In doing so, the player injured himself, thereby making himself unable to do the thing for which the Mets pay him approximately $12 million per year.

The Mets decided that because the injury was self-inflicted, it represented a violation of the player’s contract, and announced that they would not be paying him until he was able to do the thing they had contracted for him to do for them.

Whether you believe this is an appropriate response or unfair, it sure does represent business change through negotiation.

The business change may look more obvious than the negotiation, since the Mets’ action was carried out unilaterally, but let’s dig deeper.

Even though there may have been no face-to-face meeting on the topic or agreement on the way the Mets are interpreting their rights under the contract they have with their employee, acting as they have is a form of negotiation; the question is whether and how the player responds. File a lawsuit? That’s negotiation, too.

The negotiation that’s taking place thus far on the players’ side isn’t being carried on by the player or his agent, though; it’s being carried out by the Union that represents Major League Baseball Players. The question being debated and that will ultimately wind up in front of an arbitrator per the rules of the standard clauses in the player’s contract is whether the Mets had the right to do what they’ve done.

Now let’s be clear: I’m not an attorney. But if there’s a morals clause in the contract (there is) and the player (a pitcher) violated it (he may have), the Mets should have some recourse. More to the point though, is this: if there’s a clause in the contract covering the player’s absolute need to get his team’s approval for any non-baseball-related physical activity (again, there is) and punching someone with your pitching hand is an example of that (it may be), it seems that the Mets have acted within their rights.

To me, the issue is intent. If a player injures himself while skiing or playing in a pickup basketball game and can no longer do his job a result, it’s obvious that he’s violated the contract. In this case, I presume the player didn’t plan to attack anyone so maybe he has some wriggle room. But that’s where the discussion of the morals clause kicks in.

And no, I have no answer. And that’s the point.

EVERYTHING is negotiable. And renegotiable. And sometimes it’s that renegotiation that has the largest impact on your business and your planned business change.

The next time you sign a contract, keep that in mind. A contract, like any other “agreement” is a document that spells out intent. But intent is subject to interpretation. And your actions are always subject to business change.

And it’s positive. And I’ll even say something nice about Facebook!

From Wired Magazine:

A study led by Abilene Christian University followed the Facebook profiles of 375 first-semester freshman students for nine months to examine how Facebook activity can be used as a predictor for a student’s likelihood to stay in school. The research found that students who returned to school after freshman year had significantly more Facebook friends and wall posts than those who didn’t return.

In other words, peer pressure works.

In business, the closest thing to this is peer review. When your work is held up to the scrutiny of the people you work with, you’re going to want their approval. So your work is better, before ever getting completed. For kids, in college, in a social networking environment, the very face that there’s a growing and tightening net of peers boosts the odds of success.

The positive upshot for social networking is obvious. The positive upshot for Facebook is . . . oh darn, I take it back; Facebook doesn’t make you feel connected to your peers, it makes you feel disconnected.

OK, maybe I should back down just a little. This study used Facebook and there was a clear positive outcome. Facebook helped kids stay in school. But the reason that worked was because the kids in the study were linked to each other naturally; Facebook merely facilitated the usefulness of that link.

And that’s where social networking becomes really useful (see yesterday’s piece on GetGlue). If you have a reason to be communicating with other people social networking goes a long way toward making that reason stronger. And that’s when peer pressure can become a good thing.

To nobody’s surprise, Facebook has unveiled their newest toy; Facebook Places lets you “check in” from wherever you are. It’s an obvious attempt to eat Foursquare‘s lunch, and the fact that it plays nice with the heretofore leader in geolocation-based social networking doesn’t change anything. (By the way, so far Facebook Places only works if you use an iPhone)

I’d like to place some emphasis on that “doesn’t change anything” clause.

The problem with most social networking sites is that they don’t actually bring people together; instead, there’s a cacophony of voices screaming “look at me!” and it’s hard to know where to look/listen/pay attention.

Aside: The Answer Guy is working on a new social networking platform that addresses this issue. Have I mentioned that already?.

For social networking to work, there has to be a reason to network with the people you find at your favorite site. We’ve done quite a bit of anecdotal research on the subject, and what we hear over and over is that Facebook is too hard and too busy, Foursquare is little more than a way of asking people to rob your house while you’re out (or YOU, for that matter), and that while most people try one or more social networks they really just don’t get the point.

This week I stumbled upon GetGlue. And it’s silly, but it . . . makes sense. At GetGlue, you “check in” just like on Foursquare, but it isn’t location based. GetGlue instead is a place where you tell people what you are doing. “I’m watching Doogie Howser M.D.“, or “I’m listening to Green Day’s American Idiot“.

In many ways, it’s just as silly as Foursquare, but GetGlue makes sense in the same way a book club does, or taking a class on movies. You meet people, and you know ahead of time that you have something in common. And you talk about it. Or at least the ice has been broken for you enough that you might.

Now to be fair, GetGlue is still a little bit too open, and they have no traction just yet. But at least GetGlue makes sense; they have a reason to exist that goes beyond the benefit of the company that sells advertisements to you, the user.

I can’t say it enough: you need to take social networking seriously in your business plans. Now if more social networks would take you seriously in return, something might just come of all this . . .

No, really: social networking really isn’t going away any time soon and you need to figure out your plan for social media, social networking, and how they impact your business change. Yes, I’ve said that before. I’ll be saying it again, too.

A few days ago, one of the writers at TechCrunch wrote a piece that made me think about social networking in a whole new way: all the tweeting, all the Facebook updates, and whatever else you do to scream “look at me!” is a matter of something a bit . . . scary: all we’re doing is trying to eat everyone around us.

I’M more important than YOU are. MY words are worth hearing. GET OVER HERE AND LISTEN TO ME.

And then I’ll eat you. Or at least own you.

What’s strangest about this dance is that social networking is being done in the name of better communication, while what it’s actually creating is communication that’s worse. MORE, but worse. We’re not saying anything worth listening to.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I’m part of a team that’s creating a new social networking platform. It’s going to be unveiled very soon, and it’s different. Seriously. It isn’t “more”. It isn’t “special”. It’s respectful and focused. And if you join you’ll be happy you’re there.

Which is what being social is supposed to be about, right? Nobody really likes big parties where there’s so much background chatter you can’t even hear the person you’ve chosen to spend time with and are standing next to speak, right?

That’s how Twitter feels. Facebook, too.

The Guy Sure Looks Like Plant Food To Me. Feed Me Seymour!

Last week, I told you that Netflix has expanded its movies-on-demand-over-the-internet offering by signing deals with three big Hollywood studios. It’s <ahem> a Blockbuster of a business change, but one that goes not nearly far enough. Presumably, time will improve this.

As I’ve mentioned before, my local Blockbuster Video Store recently shut down. I pointed out that the unavailability of movies made me understand why people would feel all the more justified downloading their “wanna see tonights” over the Internet. I’ve just re-discovered another business change in progress for movie rentals, and I started out really excited . . . but realized it’s a change that needs to be re-thought.

I’ve known about Redbox for quite some time. It’s a video kiosk business, and if you happen to live near a Redbox you can rent movies for just $1 per night. Sadly, I don’t; Redbox just isn’t that well represented and there’s not one within 20 minutes of my home. What I discovered yesterday is that Blockbuster is doing almost exactly the same thing as Redbox, and the kiosks are everywhere. The service is called Blockbuster Express, and it costs the same $1 to rent a movie that you’d pay at Redbox.

So let’s see: instead of going to a Blockbuster store (if you can find one ) and paying $5 to rent a movie you can get it from Blockbuster Express (popping up everywhere!) for $1. Big Win!

But only if you have a short-term view of what video rental is supposed to be.

At both Blockbuster Express and Redbox, there’s an inventory of between 600 and 700 movies. That’s great if you want to see movies that have been released recently, because understandably a number that low means that someone is deciding what to make available. “Recent” is simply the criteria that makes the most sense.

Also, there are problems that a physical-inventory system like this one simply cannot overcoming; the good news is that you can return the movies you rent to any location with both Redbox and Blockbuster Express, but that means that you might find yourself running around to find a kiosk that has what you’re looking for.

What’s most intriguing is that aside from it being a lot cheaper to use a kiosk at Blockbuster Express or Redbox than it was to walk into a video store and rent a movie, the physical store model simply worked better. It wasn’t a sure thing, but you at least had a chance of picking up that obscure oldy-but-goody at the thousands-of-titles-in-stock physical Blockbuster.

Internet downloads and streaming are looking better and better, huh? And the sooner the movie studios and distribution companies can figure out how to make rentals work “any film, any where, any time”, the better off everyone will be. What’s frustrating is that the technology exists and is in place in most homes right now; it’s all contractual issues that are standing in the way.

Remember that contracts are made to be changed. Kind of like business change itself.

I’m astounded that there are still businesses trying to get you to pay for Wi-Fi. I mean, seriously: that connection costs them only a few dollars a month, and while it’s possible I’d hang out in or in front of my local Subway sandwich shop all day to get that signal, the truth for almost everyone is otherwise.

Guilt issues aside, even if you get a few hangers-on the extra money most people spend while sitting for hours at Starbucks makes giving that Wi-Fi away a great business change.

After trying to make money on the deal, Starbucks first made their Wi-Fi signal nearly free a couple of years back and totally free last month. Even McDonalds has figured this out.

But business change is a matter of always evolving and always finding and moving forward with the next business change. Or better yet, creating it. It’s called business development.

Don’t let anyone tell you that business development is the same as sales.

Getting you to buy more coffee is sales. Finding reasons to keep you in your seat SO THAT you buy more coffee is business development. And Starbucks is doing business development in a big way.

With all respect to the folks at Mashable for that fine article, I pointed this out a couple of months ago. Starbucks has made a deal with the Wall Street Journal for people who access the Internet using their free Wi-Fi to be able to read WSJ for free. Presumable, Starbucks is paying something for the right to have WSJ become free from their locations over the Internet connection they’re giving away. Ditto the other content that you need to pay for when you get to it from your home or office connection, but not from Starbucks.

THAT’S business development. And business change. And if you think about it, it’s also social networking.

Sooner or later, it even strays into the realm of coopetition.

I’ve been clear that you need to be doing social networking, but also being careful about how, and how much. It’s just like business development; you need to always be looking for ways to make more money through your connections, but you also need to keep doing actual sales.

And if you’re serious about any of these things you need to see where they merge, and where they don’t.

I’ve told that story before. Now I’ll tell you about a big mistake. Yes, mine.

While we’re very good at SEO here at Answer Guy Central, and regularly get great results getting both our clients and ourselves right up to the top of search engine results, like anyone we want . . . more. So a few months ago I tried a little trick on The Computer Answer Guy page. On the page, hidden in the text, I embedded a small graphic about a dozen times. The image was six pixels across by nine pixels high (the exact size of one character of text), so by setting its color to “transparent” and putting it in place where a space character would normally be, the image was completely invisible.

The image was named computersupportcomputercarenewyorkcity.gif, and by naming and pointing to that file a dozen times in the Computer Answer Guy page and also by creating a title that described the picture using those same words, I crammed fully two dozen extra references to what The Computer Answer Guy does into the page.

And it worked. The Computer Answer Guy went to or near the top page in Google’s Rankings for the things I wanted it there for.

Then, Google noticed how.

I don’t know how they noticed. If you understand SEO and think about the logic behind how we set that up there’s no reason for Google to have found it. I could go into a long explanation of page and content construction to back that up, and as I’m writing this I’ve thought of a way that I could have made the trick just a little bit more difficult to uncover. But find it they did. And Google has rules against tricking them.

The technique is called “Black Hat” SEO. And I won’t be doing it again.

By the way: we never do Black Hat for our clients; this was as much an experiment as anything else. I wanted to know just how smart Google is, and I found out. Good thing you injected yourself and not a patient with that serum, doctor!

What was the impact? See for yourself:

In case you aren’t good at reading graphs, I’ll lay it out for you: we were averaging almost 800 search engine impressions per day. Then Google found our little trick and practically overnight we dropped to something just north of zero.

Let’s recap: SEO Good. Computer Answer Guy Good At SEO. But BLACK HAT SEO VERY VERY BAD.

You have been warned.