This is the future. I’ve been waiting for this for five years. We will become the media and Refer.ly is a tiny peek at what that will look like.

Here’s a snippet from an article I was interviewed for back in 2010:

“Advertisers aren’t really giving incentives to Facebook users — and they should,” Hilimire said. “People are writing up movie reviews or posting links to their new Apple computer just for fun, but if companies start building this into their marketing programs by offering credit, discounts or free small gifts for sharing their thoughts, the impact could be huge.”

It’s coming.

Incredibly, this was sent to me by @gumboshowjoe, a real Google Fan Boy.

Over this past weekend I started messing with Quora again. I happened to search for a few things on Google and Quora answers kept popping up in the search results. So I decided to revisit the site and see what was up.

I wrote about Quora on this blog over a year ago. At the time, people were asking whether Quora was the future of blogging, to which I responded – in this instance, correctly – that Quora was in fact NOT the future of blogging. But there were aspects of it I enjoyed and I predicted – incorrectly this time – that I would keep using it.

I think I dropped off because once the novelty of asking and answering wore off, I just didn’t see a use to coming back continuously. However, after messing with it over the weekend, I’m intrigued by their Credits system. They describe it on their site as:

Credits make content you care about on Quora more prominent. This prominence can help questions get answered, or get more attention for answers and posts.

You’ll spend credits to add a question, ask someone to answer, or promote content. You’ll earn credits when people vote up your answers or follow your questions.

This credit system actually might make me come back to Quora and start exploring it again. It’s interesting to me that they created a value system that promotes the activity the site is based on (asking and answering questions). They didn’t create useless badges or meaningless levels the way most sites do. And after using the credits system for a few hours over the weekend, I find myself wanting to answer questions to build back up my credits. Already slightly addicting.

So I created two new questions (one for fun, one for real) and then used my credits (somehow I had 500 or something) and promoted my questions to over 200 people. Actually, here’s what I did with the credits:

So we’ll see if people actually answer my questions or not. Should be a good test to see if people are really into the credits system or if its just another gimmick. But my prediction is that its probably a nice tool to increasing the level of engagement on the site. We’ll see if that prediction proves correct ;)

Engauge’s own social leader, @teresacaro, gives her thoughts in yesterday’s USA Today:

Instagram signifies a change in direction from Facebook’s previous strategy of buying, at bargain-basement prices, small-staffed companies that are on the “downslide” with smart founders, says Teresa Caro, vice president of social marketing at Engauge, a digital-marketing agency.

After getting location-based service Gowalla and acquiring social-networking patents from Friendster, “Facebook decided to spend a lot more for a stronger mobile presence — and Instagram helps,” Caro says.

Facebook’s Instagram buy could portend a few more deals, such as Google’s pursuit of Pinterest, to acquire eyeballs and data, and Facebook’s possible interest in Path, a popular social network for smartphone users, she says.

But the staggering price paid for 11-person start-up Instagram has some murmuring about another Internet bubble. Version 2.0, anyone?

“Unreasonable salaries. Unreasonable amounts paid for companies. Lack of resources,” Caro says. “It’s all so unrealistic, and it feels like a do-over for me.”

Yesterday Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars. Last week, Instagram received funding that valued the company at $500 million.

So the question is, why did Zuck pay double the valuation for Instagram?

Mobile and photos.

Instagram, like Path, is a mobile-only network. And Zuck, like many of us, knows that mobile is everything.

And Instagram just happens to do better than anyone the one thing that Facebook users do more than anything – share photos.

Makes sense why Facebook would be interested in them. My worry is, what will Zuck do with Instagram going forward?

He says he’s going to leave it alone, but that doesn’t make any sense. He’s going to want to integrate it somehow into Facebook, because sharing photos is inherent in Facebook’s DNA. It’s not like when Yahoo bought Flickr in 2005. Storing photos wasn’t part of Yahoo’s DNA, so it made sense for them to leave it alone and not try to Yahoo it up.

My personal take is that this is a bad thing for Instagram users. I’d say there’s a 30% chance that the original founders of Instagram, now that they’re super rich, are going to be less motivated with all their money and their new bosses; a 50% chance that Zuck tries hard to integrate Instagram into Facebook and in the process takes away the essence of the platform; and a 20% chance that this all somehow makes Instagram better.

That’s right. It’s shitter.

I think I’m going to dump all my other startups and invest in shitter.

I’ve got a feeling this isn’t just another crappy social networking idea.

I think these guys are going to wipe up the competition.

Twitter must be pissed. The shits really going to hit the fan when @ev finds out.

You can’t make this shit up.

#thankyouillbehereallweek #tipyourwaitress

The Internet is doubling like every five minutes. Or something like that. And people are starting new blogs about a billion times a day. It’s crazy*.

We’ve always relied on content curators to help us weed through the crap to get to the good stuff. It’s why we have newspapers. And radio stations. And magazines. And cable companies.

But these entities were all flawed because they rely on one entity (a radio station, for example) to decide what everyone should listen to, at the same time. The digital world has allowed us to rely less on this type of model and more on music coming to us based on our likes and preferences and those of our friends. Today we have Pandora and iTunes and Spotify to help us find the best music. All of these attempt to determine what we individually will enjoy listening to.

Is this dude really going to be able to figure out what I want to listen to? #doubt-it

Until last year, I’d argue that we really haven’t had a great way to help us curate “content” on the web. We used to have portals like Yahoo that aggregated the content for us. We actually still have those, but they have become less relevant as social has emerged. Because now, we can allow our friends and connections to help us find the best content.

And that’s why we’re seeing sites like Pinterest (link to me on Pinterest) and apps like Flipboard gaining such momentum. Pinterest is now the fastest growing website of all time. Of all time. That’s like, since forever.

I talked about Pinterest last month in the context of this new wave of smaller sites and networks popping up. Everyone seems to be trying to figure out what to make of this site. We at Engauge just put out a very thorough Point of View on Pinterest (though I’m highly biased, I think you should read it ;)

And Flipboard is one of the iPad apps I can’t live without. It essentially lets you create your own magazine with content you enjoy, not what the magazine decided you needed to read that month. It’s phenomenal. And its spurring a bunch of similar apps, including News.Me which I downloaded last week and like a lot.

The point is, I think we’re only seeing the beginning of a huge wave of focused, content curated websites and apps. And people are going to flock to them as a means of making sense of all the wonderful chaos that the Internet affords us.

Tangent thought: I can’t help but notice that Facebook is trying extremely hard to monetize its traffic, as it should. But if Facebook doesn’t keep most of its focus on finding ways to make the experience of using their site more and more relevant, its going to continue to lose eyeballs to these new content curators.

* My facts may be a little off, but they’re 90% accurate. Or .90%. Or something.

I’ve always been of the opinion that Google+ didn’t have anything compelling enough to offer to get people to leave Facebook. Doesn’t mean they don’t have anything to offer. I mean, what was the big draw, that they had circles (not a fan) and video chat (I can only name a dozen other ways to do video chat today? But some people seemed to like those features. And by some people, I mean Google employees, Robert Scoble, and Joe Koufman.

The problem was and always will be that in order to unseat Facebook, you have to bring something incredible to the party.  Or five incredible things. And Google+ never did that.

Instead, they just tried to be a better Facebook. Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily nailed it when she said:

We simply don’t need another social network, no matter how great your circles are or how badly Larry Page wants to have one.

So I wasn’t surprised when I read recently an article yesterday from Business Insider entitled, “More Hints That Google+ is a Deserted Wasteland”. Turns out, nobody is using Google+, with the average time spent being 3 minutes a month.

3 minutes! People spend 20 times that much time on Tumblr in a month.

I mainly don’t use Google+ because nobody is using it. You know the old saying, if you post a photo in the woods and no one is there to hear it fall…

Ironically, I’m also not using Facebook as much because everybody is on it and the noise level is too high.  It’s why I think the smaller, interest-focused networks are making a huge run right now (Path, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.).

Perhaps if Google+ pivoted* and decided to be the best at one thing, they’d have more success. Maybe they should be the best social video chat tool. Or THE technology-based social network. Anything other than “another Facebook”, which is what they are and why they are failing.

* Pivoting is a classic startup term that basically means you assess your business and realize that if you adjust your vision you’ll be more successful. Maybe you start off thinking you are building a chat service and you end up building a photo service (that’s how Flickr started). I’m not sure a massive company like Google will either be able to pivot or be able to swallow their pride and make Google+ a smaller entity. But they should.

I’m getting a ton of this crap. Anyone else?

I sure hope Twitter has a solution to this because it seems to be popping up more and more…

On the Internet, small is the new big.

Instagram is “a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends through a series of pictures.” And boy are they hot right now. In fact, Facebook tried to buy Instagram this past summer but the boys said no. If you’re curious why people love Instagram, here are two interviews I did recently with Instagram fanatics.

Path has emerged as one of the first mobile-only social networks and in January it reached over 2 million members. I’ve been loving Path (here’s why) for a while now and much prefer it to Facebook these days.

And then there’s Pinterest, describing itself as such, “Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web.” It’s been kind of successful, being the fastest growing site of all time and all. Everyone at Engauge seems to be obsessed with it. Oh, and its not just for the ladies ;)

So the three hottest web properties today, Instagram, Path and Pinterest, are beginning to eat away at the big boys. Probably not enough to annoy them yet, but they soon will.

Why are these sites gaining traction? I have some thoughts…

They’re nichier. Yes, I realize there’s a good chance that nichier isn’t a word. If its not, and I’m too lazy to check, then it should be. These sites are all hyper-focused on one area. They aren’t trying to be everything to every one.

They’re more visual. I’m a huge believer that the killer differentiator for technology is the user experience.

They’re more exclusive.

They’re browsier.

And they’re coming at a time when the smaller, nichier social sites of the past have become massive, mainstream sites. Yes, we’ve seen this before.

Think about how Facebook started. There were already a few social networks out there (MySpace and Friendster), so what was different about Facebook? It had a simple design, but more importantly, it was a smaller network. Only for college kids. Every college kid at that time was on MySpace, along with the rest of the world. So when this smaller network popped up it became a place for more intimate conversations and personal connections.

The same can be said about Twitter when it first came out. It was fun because only a small, concentrated group of people were on it.

Now Facebook and Twitter are huge and these new guys are starting to dig away at their users. Both of these sites have “become” the Internet, making it almost impossible to extricate them from the web itself. People are once again looking for smaller, nichier experiences. And Instagram, Path and Pinterest are there to fill that need.