Everyone's a Star
The ever popular live webcast Justin.TV has turned Justin Kan into an overnight web celebrity. He's opened his life up to the entire world, everything from police raids, landlord eviction, even things in Justin's personal life. Justin Twitters his goings on and keeps everyone in the loop about what he's doing. At just two months old, the site has really gotten some great traction. So, what's next for Justin? They are opening the site up for other live webcasters to become the next Justin. Via TechCrunch, you'll be able to create your own URL's, broadcast your own Twitters, real time chat, calendar, everything.
This idea is really really interesting. I'm not sure how much traction it will gain, although as hardware costs continue to drop a decent webcam attached to your hat (ala Justin) would set you back about $50. Further as we are already impatient enough when you don't respond to an email immediately (and hence IM is so popular) we can actually see what you are doing as to why you aren't responding. Could Justin.tv be the next MySpace?
I don't know about Justin, but I know that the majority of us can't stand to be "on" all the time (like in the Truman Show). Even some stars need their alone, quiet time. Justin is really sacrificing his life by broadcasting 24/7. I think college kids could probably get away with putting a webcam on your head, but what about when you "grow up" and get a real job? I don't think your employer would be too happy.
But the real value in this then becomes who we are putting our webcam on top of. While the rest of the magazine industry has been shrinking, we've seen growth in celebrity gossip magazines. We've seen "glimpse" type shows like Curb your Enthusiasm (look into a day in the life of Larry David), or Entourage (look into a day in the life of a movie star) really take off. However, these are things that are made to entertain. Could you imagine the laws that would be broken if we put a Justin.tv on Donald Trump's head? All of the deals that he would be doing would be known before they were announced. Sergey Brin's head? You'd be able to know what other medium sized company he was going to buy next, run up the stock price, and wait for the official announcement (although I'm sure GOOG traders are watching Sergey's Justin.tv page too). So it really comes down to celebrities and Hollywood celebrities at that, otherwise I'm sure alot of information that we don't want out there will get out when we forget to turn off our Justin cam.
What Are You Doing? With all of the hype surrounding Twitter, I just had to write about it. For those of you unaware of Twitter, it is a minute by minute, second by second updater that you can post to via SMS or the web. It's popularity really grew after the SxSW film festival about a month and a half ago, and its been growing ever since. There have been some Twitter clones out there, like a Facebook or Bebo, however Twitter seems to have rapidly become its own verb in a very short amount of time. The sign that Twitter has made it to the big time is the new Barack Obama account that is a featured Twitter member. While Barack is the most Web 2.0 ified of presidential candidates (he has his own social network, YouTube, MySpace, etc), something about Twitter is extremely compelling. Unlike Facebook's automatic updates, Twitter allows you to write about something when you WANT to write about it and be able to broadcast this to the world (or your subscribers).
So you're probably thinking "Why would I want to know what you are doing at all times?" From a personal perspective, you probably wouldn't. (You definitely wouldn't.) However, from a brand perspective and perhaps even from an IR perspective (although this is very far from happening), you might be interested in knowing what is going on and a daily updated blog is simply not enough. Diehard Apple fanatics would be able to know Steve Jobs every thought at any time of the day. Fans of 24 would get to know what "Jack Bauer" was thinking every second of his day. And supporters, or potential on-the-fencers would be able to know what Barack Obama's viewpoints were...every second of every day. Sounds almost too good to be true, and it is, but the point that I want to make here is that as more and more tools come out that are being adopted by mainstream (right now it is the blog), consumers will be demanding more and more usage of it, which means allocating more resources to updating your Twitter / blog /MySpace profile / YouTube channel
