Biggest Social Supernovas of 2010

Social media has seen a lot of meteoric launches in the last year, but only a few of these were able to make earth orbit and fewer still achieved star status.

As a testament to the riskiness of the business, it’s also true that some companies that were already rising stars went supernova in 2010.  By supernova, I mean they blew up, imploded, and in some cases, disappeared from view altogether.

Let’s be clear, I’m saying some of these supernovas have disappeared or at least, gone very dark…but not all. Others are alive and well and floating somewhere out there in the galaxy. They simply made a bright and spectacular flash that was followed by a lot of less than stellar twinkles.

So with that caveat, here is a brief compilation of some of  what I perceive to be 2010’s intergalactic duds. I’m sure there will be some disagreement, I’d like to hear your thoughts!

Federated blogging. The idea that thousands of blogs could be federated under a single roof and then promoted to other bloggers has been around for a long time. Affiliate marketers have been pushing it forever (for obvious reasons), but it really never reached mass appeal until the term came into the general lexicon earlier this year.  Perhaps fortunately, it seems to have left just as quickly.

Bloggers, it seems, are simply reluctant to admit that their unique contributions aren’t so unique after all. And given all the hard work they have put into creating their precious products, it should come as no surprise that they aren’t really prepared to be lumped into categories with hundreds of other bloggers and pass their value on to somebody else to profit from, to boot.  And frankly, there isn’t one federated site out there that is easier to use than a simple Google search or even StumbleUpon.

Even WordPress’ foray into this area, a beta site called FoodPress, has failed to gain much traction despite its association with Federated Media and many weeks of prominent positioning on the WordPress home page.

Given this, it should also come as no surprise that the beta run of Jumo is having difficulty getting traction, despite high initial praise from social media gurus. The new social network created by former Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes (right) is designed to link individuals and philanthropists with worthy causes. It couldn’t have picked a worse time to have come into this world. Sure, there’s a lot of need for financial help among nonprofits. But the economy is SO bad that even people with deep pockets are reluctant to give. The site hasn’t helped its own cause much, either: its poor design lacks any sense of community. It IS still in beta, though, so there’s hope yet.

By contrast, there’s really not much hope for another new social network called PhilanthropX, which essentially mirrors what Jumo attempts to do. It was announced via old-school news release exactly 24 hours after Jumo. Talk about bad timing and bad execution.

On the subject of timing…whatever happened to Cisco’s UMI Family Videoconferencing capability? While it may seem to have died immediately upon delivery the truth is that it simply was announced too early. Not just too early relative to production, but too early for the networks (Internet and TV) to support it. There’s simply no cable or DSL broadband network out there that can handle the upstream traffic that UMI would require (although that’s about to change, very soon).  Just very odd timing.

The same notion seems to apply to Apple TV, which, despite its elegant design and powerful capabilities, still has not gained any traction whatsoever. My personal theory is that we’ve not really seen what Apple TV is supposed to be,  – a delivery vehicle for TV-as-an-app, also known as Internet Protocol TV (which by the way is going to take off like a rocket in Asia over the next few years). If I’m right, Steve Jobs is essentially holding the real details of the technology close while he negotiates with the cable and network companies. If this happens, it may well be that UMI and Apple TV will eventually become direct competitors.

And while we are on the subject of TV, what is going on with 3D TV? Great idea, but terrible execution. Nearly all the available 3D shows are animated, the technology still requires special glasses or a very limited viewing range, and for the most part, it still feels like watching an animated diorama from grade school.  Sony has had a great start in this area, but it’s unclear when this technology going to really happen.

I could say the same about one of my pet technologies, augmented reality. For all the noise that was generated about it at CES and in a TED Conference early in the year, it’s gone absolutely nowhere since. I truly believe this could be an extremely useful and entertaining technology, but there are far too many limitations to allow general deployment today. Chief among these are processing power and the accuracy of GPS systems in today’s cell phones. It’s still not possible to point your cell phone at a line of businesses in a mall and get an accurate read of which is which, let alone any other details.

And speaking of details, perhaps the biggest thud in the universe this year was the Facebook privacy fiasco. Fault for that interstellar boom can be laid squarely on … everyone.

On the one hand, Mark Zuckerberg jumped in with both feet when he made himself the singular arbiter of America’s sense of social decorum by throwing every user’s personal details up for public scrutiny as a default setting. On the other hand, it should be clear to people by now that if they’re still upset, it’s because they haven’t bothered to change the settings to their liking. Of course, this supernova doesn’t seem to have hurt Facebook at all…indeed, even though a few thousand users quit the service in a show of protest, several million others signed up that same week. Zuckerberg himself was earlier today named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year. Sometimes a little controversy can be a good thing, I guess.

Oh, and those so-called open social networks that have been cast around as an alternative? Bad, very bad idea.

On the theme of explosive controversies, one of the most bizarre celestial events of the  year was Gizmodo‘s historically ill-fated purchase of the stolen iPhone. The site was already playing with fire by calling on readers to spill the beans about their companies’ upcoming product launches when insiders purchased the prototype phone, which had been inadvertently left in a bar by an Apple employee.  The story was page one news for a while, but in the end, it proved to yield little usable information about the phone and Gizmodo has gone remarkably quiet since.

And while we’re on the subject of rumors around Apple technology, let’s not forget the all-time slam against internet journalists and bloggers – including yours truly – that occurred right in the middle of the World Economic Forum when Jason Calacanis punked the tech journalists who were tweeting to each other during a Livestream of a social media roundtable, by claiming to have been given a beta copy of the iPad for the past 10 days and then describing some of its “features”.  Several media published his fake specs the next morning, only to learn at the Apple press conference that they had been punked. Omigod that had people fuming, but he was right, they should have checked their sources. I think that actually caused quite a few bloggers to step up their game in 2010.

Lastly, I’ll note for the record that one of the fake specs that Jason threw out was the idea that the iPad included two opposing cameras.  Funny thing, that was a major feature of the next big Apple rollout, the iPhone 4, which, because of its backward-facing camera, provided the first-ever built-in smartphone videoconferencing system (which also requires a special calling feature, known as Facetime). Strangely enough though, Facetime really isn’t being used that much – and not just because it only works between iPhones. I can tell you from personal experience that most people simply don’t think to use it, and in public settings, it can be more of an embarrassing annoyance than a useful tool.

Rather than end this blog on the phrase “embarrassing annoyance,” I feel inspired to throw in just one more supernova for good measure: the Tea Party. Borrowing heavily from President Obama’s grassroots social media campaign for the presidency, the Tea Party ran up the shoulders of the GOP and then leaped ahead to form one of the largest social media movements organized to date. It was loud and loquacious during last year’s health care debates, urging some of the more brazen Republicans in Congress to botch the president’s health care reform bill early in 2010.  After that initial effort, the GOP began to realize that the Tea Party was as much a threat to the old guard in its own party as it was to the Democrats.

By the mid-term elections, the movement had its own spokespeople – Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck – both of whom leveraged their outrageous personalities to stoke the embers of voter distrust and anger.

In the end, though, the movement doesn’t seem to have accomplished much more than a meandering quasi-political-religious rally and enough upsets in the House to throw a monkey wrench into the American political system at a time when we badly need meaningful action. Some would argue that in itself is a significant outcome, but I’m sure that wasn’t the end goal, and even Sarah Palin can’t claim success by redrawing the finish line.

Maybe I am going to have to end this blog on the phrase “embarrassing annoyance” after all.