Media Syndication & Collaborative Filtering, Because Humans Are Lazy

Why is Google worth $144 Billion?

Why has NetFlix killed Blockbuster?

Why did Amazon.com kill the local bookstore?

Because people are lazy.  People want their stuff — whether it’s a movie, a job, or a boyfriend — delivered to them, simple, easy, and fast, without much thought.  This may be depressing commentary for our species, but seems to be proving true, over and over again.

People have become overwhelmed by all the choices they have, in both the real world and the virtual world.  With the proliferation of social networks and user-generated media on the web, this is getting exponentially worse.  Kim wrote about this yesterday.

Every time a new social networking or video sharing web site pops up (a daily occurrence), the VC’s on Sand Hill cringe and run for cover.  I really like Robert Young’s thoughts on this in his GigaOM post yesterday.  So not only are we overloaded by the sheer volume of media, it’s totally fragmented and scattered among thousands of “destination” web sites — usually without any meaningful context.  YouTube is a great example of media without context.

One of the solutions to this media overload is collaborative filtering.  I want people who are smarter and hipper than me, and who share my tastes, to filter out the junk and deliver me just the good stuff.  Amazon.com pioneered this and took it mainstream.  YouTube still has a bit of room to improve their social filtering capabilities.

The other part of the solution is media syndication.  Once the good stuff has been identified by people smarter and hipper than me, I want it aggregated, packaged up and delivered to me; I don’t want to have to go out of my way to find and collect it. 

With SplashCast, we are attempting to marry collaborative filtering with media syndication, and make it easy, easy, easy for everyone. 

Because we are a lazy species.