The Praetorian Times

Life In The Post-Facebook IPO World

Yesterday (or today depending on where you’re reading this) marked six months since the almighty Facebook went public. Just last week, the lock-out period for the largest number of shares — 800 million — ended and miraculously the price of FB shares climbed out of the teens. But it’s still nowhere near where it started, and it’s going to take more than subtly nudging us into one day buying promoted posts to get back there.

Mark Zuckerberg’s wallet isn’t the only thing that’s reduced in size in the past half of a year.

With the fear that’s come alongside watching the giant flounder, there also seems to be a loss of competition. Not that people aren’t trying, but for one reason or another nothing’s had the same pop. Remember February, when everyone was planning their Pinterest strategy and Instagram was on it’s own? Google+ even maintained some relevance, and was still growing, releasing new features. Mobile-only networks like Path still had the potential to prove the web as we knew it was done. There were new kids who were actually growing quickly and served a unique purpose to their users.

Well what changed?

It’s not that new networks haven’t launched since then. I’ve seen a number of smaller networks launch (if I hear the phrase “Instagram for video” one more time I may lose it), and even quite a few big name ones make a go for it. Cory Booker-backed Waywire has made a go at a stand-alone video network, Branch has tried to make us rely on the experts (and more importantly their friends), and I’m still trying to figure out exactly what Medium is. But none of those is making headlines. Heck, DIgg has gotten more buzz in the past few months.

This could be chalked up to saturation. That’s a solid explanation at the very least for why Google+ never stood a chance. You could say it’s tech. Video is the next big thing, but so few people have access to all of the technology necessary to make it work perfectly, though they are getting there. It could be a lack of originality. No one knows what the next big thing is until it happens, but until then everyone else will just knock it off.

At heart, I think it’s something else. I think it’s fear.

It’s not that there aren’t hundreds of twenty somethings in the Bay area that are trying to act like real entrepreneurs and build somethings original. But profit is a hard thing to commandeer. It’s even harder to have faith in an untried idea and rely on someone else to make it profitable. Especially when getting snapped up by a big boy like Google is no longer a given.

But the fear isn’t only affecting investors. It scares the creatives. It scares the developers now comfortably working for tech giants. Once you watch enough projects burn, you stay away for the fire. It makes a guy like me far more hesitant to walk away from a good thing and into a world of uncertainty.

I’ve been through an acquisition and watched a startup go from a small venture to a big part of a big company. Some left the Huffington Post and started their own ventures. Few made it. Now even they’re more apt to work for someone than attempt to build the next big thing. It doesn’t help to see even a massively popular endeavor like Facebook flail.

But there is hope, and there’s always innovation. Screw fear.

If you’ve got a startup, or know someone who does, email me. DeanP@huffingtonpost.com. Mention this post and I’ll hear you out. Hell, mention an idea and I’ll hear you out.

Numbers Can Lie (Or At Least Not Tell The Whole Truth)

Anyone and everyone has shared this bit.ly blog post the past couple of days. 

The data, which addresses the times of day on different platforms with the highest click data, claims to provide insight into the best times to post on each network. Mashable, ran with that and essentially rewrote the visualization into a post (understandable, it is a little hard to read).

But I’m not convinced that’s really what the data says.

The problem with solely tracking click data is that people need links to click on, and in order to generate links, you need content. If there’s less content (and lower quality) being produced and tweeted at night, on the weekends, and in the early morning there’s a much smaller chance that clicks will be generated. Because there’s less new content produced at these times, there seems to be less activity.

News doesn’t follow a 9-to-5 schedule, but for the most part, content producers do, and are only fully staffed in earnest during regular hours. We wouldn’t be shocked to see that bit.ly’s results would be echoed today as well: there’s a reason Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage was leaked this afternoon, not in the morning or even saved for the airing of the interview. People like to break news during the day, so naturally platforms like Twitter, which rely on up-to-the-minute news and sharing, drive the most clicks the moment content is produced. Facebook does more to spread out when you see content (hence why you see updates from hours ago in your newsfeed), so the results look a little bit more scattered, though within a general range. Tumblr doesn’t rely on news, so its results are more all-over-the-place.

Ultimately it’s the volume and quality of content being produced at these times that drives clicks, not actual activity. Or at least, this data doesn’t prove that, so it’s not worth relying on to figure out when you should post the most.

In reality, you should just post great content all of the time.

Struggling With My Digital Identity

I don’t know if you noticed, but my last name is hard to spell.

For years (literally my whole life), I’ve dealt with it. And without regret, I’ve come to accept and nurture it, especially when that one Biggie song comes on the radio (Prae, prea, praetorius… Yeah, I know you can hear it now.) But that doesn’t make the DMV any easier. Or telemarketing calls. Or awards ceremonies where the announcer doesn’t know my name. Or third grade.

Or Twitter.

See, I never figured that this might carry over to the internet. When I first got online, pseudonyms were all the rage and the only time I had to use my real name was for buying things. I didn’t have interaction that required any sort of legitimate identity. But eventually things changed and even by the end of AIM days I had begun to use my full name online.

So when it came to Twitter, @DeanPraetorius was an obvious choice. “Phew, no one stole my name,” was the first thing to come to mind. Why I even thought that would be possible is beyond me at this point, but hey, it happens to the best of us. And I proceeded to move on with my social media career. Naturally I had already secured that username (with a slight modification that I still can’t explain clearly, and still gives me a bit of trouble) on Facebook, and LinkedIn made it pretty clear my true identity needed to be out there.

So years later I imagine the same look of dread telemarketers must have on their faces when they call me, on the faces of my followers when they try to mention me. Struggling over that first a-e combination and then losing all hope after the r. Maybe I’m exaggerating,  maybe it’s an imagined problem to some degree, but at the very least it’s taking up far too many of a few people’s 140 characters.

So I went about trying to change it. No, not my name, my Twitter handle.

Now picking a different identity than that given to you by your parents is never easy (I still remember the countless days that passed as I considered leaving “DeantheGreek” behind in 6th grade), but keeping it short and sweet shouldn’t be that hard right? Heck, D-Roff did it in high school (inside joke, I apologize). There’s plenty of recognizable initials there (though some unpleasant implications if I went for the obvious ones like @DP or @DPP… yeah, third grade was tough), or at least something to work with. 

But the obvious ones were gone, @dean long taken (and I got a nasty response just for asking) and @deanp with few followers but some activity (we connected over email, still no dice, but a very nice and considerate response nonetheless). The one that would have really caught people’s eyes (though it would have been equally as hard to do) was taken by none other than my little brother (@praetoriusBIG), and a quick search of a few other ones (@SPQR for historical reference and @Spartan for heritage) yielded no good results. @praetorius wouldn’t have solved any problems except length, but alas, that’s still taken by a distant cousin from Germany (who I probably should connect with one of these days).

So, when it looked like I couldn’t make a decision on my own, I looked to friends, naturally, on social media. Namely Facebook. This excellent conversation ensued (my favorite suggestions, though somewhat unusable are @deanpraelove and @DeanVictorious), but we couldn’t quite put a finger on the perfect one. 

I have a feeling, I’m not alone here. I want people to know I’m me, especially in a public space like Twitter, and despite my desire to be creative, the easiest way to do that is to use my full name. But it’s not functional, and I may be out of choices. More importantly, I love my name, but it is what it is. I don’t want to have to come up with a new one just because it’s not easy to sound-out, but that choice may be beyond me. 

So for the time being, I’m still me, but we’ll see how long that lasts.

What This Is All About…

For the past few weeks I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a post almost as cliche as “Why I Write,” or something along those lines. I had this whole spiel about about writing for myself and putting ideas on paper and creating a full story.

But the reason I haven’t been able to put those ideas together only just dawned on me. I do write for me, but I do so knowing I can’t truly reach everyone that needs to be reached.

A good friend of mine, and a mentor, Craig Kanalley, just posted this little bit about how 9/11 inspired him to become a journalist. It’s open, it’s honest, and I get it. Across the country it was the biggest most gripping story for weeks, and a number of highly regarded journalistic pieces came out of it. I now work with people who have received some of the most prestigious awards in journalism for their coverage of the tragedy. As Craig said, there was such great media coverage that it was often hard not to watch.

But, for me, 9/11 isn’t so easy.

As a bit of background, I’m from Long Island. I’m from the type of suburb where fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, cousins, friends and neighbors worked in the towers. The type of suburb where even if you didn’t know someone in the towers, you had a relative or a friend who worked in NYC and you worried about (which isn’t a phenomenon limited to Long Island, but by sheer proximity the concentration is high). It’s also the type of suburb where they didn’t tell middle school students what happened, and instead let them find out on their own. The type of place where you didn’t know why students where getting pulled out of class and teachers were crying or dumbfounded.

What journalism couldn’t do on that day was paint more than just a picture of what happened in downtown New York. It could accurately display the fear and unknowing gripping those close-by that didn’t even know if they should be worrying. In many ways, that’s why cable news just kept replaying footage of the planes striking the towers until someone literally had to tell them to knock it off. In the following days there would be great pieces of journalism to arise, stories of heroes, victims, and the events that led to what happened. But the story took the shape of what the media made it take, not because of some decision made by media companies or anything malicious or even negligent. But simply because that’s how news works, the story developed on national level as something around the stories and people they could find. What it lacked in many ways was the opinions and feelings of real people, unedited. Sure there were interviews, comments et cetera, but at the end of the day there’s always an editor.

This is why 9/11 helped me fall in love with social media before it even really existed.

Just as Craig says it’s something that made him realize the value of swarming a big story, it made me realize that those affected most deeply by a major event need a place to be heard. Airing the opinions of everyone is true objectivity. Though as a journalist you certainly have a duty to curate the best and most accurate information, you also have a duty to acknowledge that your voice isn’t the only one out there. That’s often where traditional media fails without knowing it.

So on that day, I lost some of my faith in traditional journalism.

I’m not saying that 9/11 would have been an easier if Twitter had existed. The effects of those tweets would have fundamentally altered the way many people look at the world. I’m not even saying the journalists didn’t do the best they could in the circumstances. But in the wake of the events of that day there would have been an outpouring of earnest emotional content and storytelling across Facebook, Twitter and other platforms that journalists simply weren’t able to touch at the time.

So I get why 9/11 inspired many journalists, but as someone who was scared to death on that day that something could have happened to my mother or father, I truly think journalists failed some of the people who needed help, and were blinded by going after the biggest, most enticing, nation captivating stories. It’s what they knew how to do.

Social media plays no favorites. When your friends update their statuses to say their families are okay, they’re better journalists for you than the ones on television. I decided to renew my faith in journalism with this tool at hand, knowing that there was at least more of a possibility of reaching those that otherwise wouldn’t be reached, and of connecting people who need to be connected. It’s a decision I’ll never regret.

(Disclaimer: As is stated in the description, these views are mine and mine alone. This is somewhat emotionally charged for me, and I apologize if this even potentially offends anyone, especially those who lost someone dear to them in 9/11. It’s a difficult subject to broach.)