Writing Hurts

Not as in mine, although I am worn out and looking forward to vacation, but as in fatigue over the word “my.” The New York Times wrote on Sunday about how every new Web site has the word “my” in it somewhere. My Subaru, MyAOL, Mythis and Mythat. It makes me long for MySpace a little bit.

Here’s the problem as I see it. Companies are letting you store information that they’re giving you — information you could get anyway — and telling you it’s yours. No, it isn’t. It’s yours if you had a hand in creating it, or some vested stake in it, or some part in the conversation.

In some cases you do have that. MyStarbucks Idea is a place for consumers to kvetch or just make suggestions. And you can immerse yourself in a “subtly branded experience” on myCoke.

But in a lot of cases, it’s still about the company addressing you, and maybe you getting to make a comment or two. Just because you use the prefix “my” doesn’t mean you care about consumers, just like using the prefix “i” doesn’t mean you put the care into your product that Apple does.

It helps as a signifier, sure, but it also smacks of opportunism (a point noted in the NYT article). And face facts, the kids are moving away from MySpace. It’s still popular, sure, but if we’re really trying to reach the younger demographic, we need to appeal to them, not appeal to what they used to like.

Tom Altman (and others) keep saying that the ideal is to give people a place to have a conversation. Some people have coined the term “wedia” and I like that, although it’s not very euphonious. How about “our”? Our___ could have a nice ring to it.

But rather than picking out a prefix of any kind, how about actually giving users a place to have a conversation, to contribute and to get the content they want?

In the fall of 2006, I went to a conference with editors and publishers from the chain I was working at. It was a mix of a few small dailies, like the one where I was city editor and metros. We all paid close attention to a presentation about how we needed to change, restructure the newsroom, our Web sites and our print products. Then we broke up into small groups to think of projects we could do.

When it came time to announce our ideas, every group had the same theme: MySpace for ___. One group wanted to make MySpace for pets. Another wanted to make MySpace into a glossy print product featuring high school athletes. You get the idea.

When we were leaving, I asked my publisher what she thought, and she was pretty pleased with all of the ideas. Her take was that MySpace was so successful, why shouldn’t we use their idea to make money? What she missed was that MySpace (and Facebook, and Google, and Flickr and any number of other successful ideas) succeeded because it did something new and interesting. Taking an idea and barely re-working it doesn’t qualify as innovation. Especially when you miss the point entirely, like the glossy magazine people did.

As I’m writing this, I logged into MySpace for the first time in weeks. In 2006, I logged in every day. If you’d have told me then that things like Facebook and Twitter would have replaced that, I don’t know if I’d have believed you. And I’m sure the reaction at the conference would have been along the lines of “What’s Twitter?”

There are plenty of great ideas floating around out there, and people in the media have them. Instead of trying to just re-purpose things that other people have done, we need to implement those truly new and original ideas.