I know, I know. Tech startup companies outside the Silicon Valley are not cool. (Note: that was an inside joke that goes back a few months) However, I’d like to give a shout-out to the first-round financing received by my young serial-entrepreneur friend, David Mason and his team at StudioNow.com. Their’s is a clever concept: To consumers, they offer an online, low-cost means to outsource video production. “Individual customers or small businesses interested in transforming digital photos and videos into high-quality content can now do so easily and affordably rather than investing resources in learning time-consuming and complex video-editing software.” The company, in turn, serves as a market=maker for those with video editing software and skills (”from novice editors to high-end professionals”). In other words, they are providing individuals who may be spending time creating “user-generated-content” with the means to make some money applying their video editing skills to a profitable dorm-room or home-based business.

Quote of the day from Fred Wilson: “If I get one more email from someone bragging about the millions of Facebook users they’ve got using their app, I am going to declare bankruptcy again. What I want to know is what apps are people actually using.”

Observation: As I’ve been “playing” with the Facebook Platform, I’ve noticed I’m rapidly going through a next-shiny-object phase. Adding and removing applications on the Facebook Platform takes nothing but a click — the absolutely lowest bar I’ve ever seen for getting someone to become a “user” of an application. Click. That’s all it takes to activate. In most cases, you need no additional email address, no downloading software and installing it, no registering on a website. Just click. This makes it easy for application developers to send out press releases like this one that claims iLike is the fastest growing technology in the history of the world and that within a month every person in the universe will be using it. (Okay, they don’t go that far, but…)

My point is this. On Facebook, they may call them “applications,” but to the user, they’re just features that one can toggle on or off. Next new shiny thing comes along, and, well, an application may discover that it is the fastest obsolete technology in history. I’m already “un-adding” applications at the rate with which I’m adding them. For instance, I have gone through a couple of third-party Flickr-integration applications that I’m trying out until Flickr offers an official one. Lots of the feature/applications that are being created are very fun — but may not reap any benefit from first-mover status. Some will gain in popularity and those who are playing around with the platform will be the folks who figure out what works and doesn’t — but I’m not so sure the number of people activating an application during week-three of the Facebook Platform era is necessarily an indication of future success.

I’m guessing Facebook applications will be more like shareware than big-co software publishing, except when it comes to major categories like an application for me to sell and buy auction items, or an application for me to exchange cash with other Facebook members. In those categories, I think the obvious 800-lb. gorillas will roll out their Facebook-integrated application shortly.

I wish everyone developing Facebook apps a lot of success. But what Fred says is important to understand: Having someone toggle on your application is not the same as having someone use your application.

Doc Searls is blogging this morning about the origin of a quote/theory/concept/law related to the idea that, when it comes to the impact of new technology, “in the short term we overestimate, in the long term we underestimate.” Doc Searls credited Paul Saffo for the line but he then found an earlier explanation from David Isenberg to clarify Paul’s role and relationship to the originator of the concept, Roy Armara.

Several years ago, Paul Saffo ran across a 2002 post on my blog (that, unsurprisingly, links to an earlier post by Doc) in which I had, basically, posted a shout-out to him asking about the origin of the concept he calls “macro myopia.” My original post was related to my desire to point out that something called “The Gartner Hype Cycle” was an unattributed ripoff of ideas from Saffo (and, as he says in his response, Roy Armara and Ev Rogers — and you’ll note, he’s more generous in saying that Gartner may have come up with the idea independently — right.). It took a couple of years and a wayward Google search on his part to run across that original post, but he did, and I posted his response in March, 2004. It may address some of the conversation taking place on Doc’s post.

Here is what Paul Saffo emailed me in 2004:

“The idea that we overestimate short-term effects and under-estimate long-term implications of emergent technological change comes from an observation of the last 100-odd years of technology diffusion. As best as I know, Roy Amara, IFTF’s first president, was the first person to explicitly note this phenomenon, and thus at IFTF, we often refer to it as Amara’s law. I started talking about it publically in 1985, and Roy had been talking about it for at least 10 years before that.

But like all good ideas, this has multiple roots and multiple contributors. For example, Ev Rogers authored a seminal book on technology diffusion title “Diffusion of Innovations” — first published in 1962, with multiple subsequent editions. Ev’s work is what brought s-curves to the attention of audiences beyond the history of technology community. In the mid-80s, “hockey-stick curves” became a focus of attention in Silicon Valley, often derided because of the frequency of its appearance in start-up business plans. Ultimately, the hockey-stick portion of the curve was memorialized by Andy Grove and his references to the “inflection point” — the point at which the curve takes off.

My small contribution (I think) to all this was to focus on the neglected part of the S-curve — the flat part of the curve before the inflection point. In the mid-80s, I began arguing that understanding the flat part was crucial to making sense of the innovation process, and that it revealed that even in Silicon Valley, diffusion was remarkably slow. I also argued in the same period that the then much derided “hype” was in fact a crucial part of the diffusion cycle, an element of communities persuading themselves to cause change to occur. In this regard, I did react with some surprise years later when Gartner began pitching their “hype-cycle,” but simply assumed that they had independently come to the same conclusion as I had years earlier and hadn’t noticed by essays on the topic.

I’ll credit Paul for one thing: He talks in a way lay-people can comprehend. It was from hanging out with Paul Saffo for a couple of weeks about 15 years ago at the Stanford Publishing Course where I first learned about technologies and concepts that have, indeed, become the future. He’s perhaps the only person I’ve ever heard called a “futurist” where, over the course of 15 years, I’ve personally observed their predictions come true.

Technorati Tags: doc searls, paul saffo

• Paul Conley finds a new ‘text ad’ sinner
  Paul takes his campaign against edit-well, in-line link advertising to a new offender. As I have a Firefox plugin that masks all such ads, I don’t see what he sees — but I agree with his stance on this.
  (tags: magazines)
• McSweeney’s is having a garage sale
  Their distributor went belly-up and the independent (and influential) publisher got left holding a $130,000 bag. So they’re having a sale on eBay. Actually, this is not a bad idea for a magazine business model.
  (tags: magazines)
• The 50 best business (and anti-business) blogs | TimesOnline.co.uk
  (tags: blogs)