In the last couple weeks there’s been some activity around a new service called Pheed. What Pheed does, basically, is provide a micro-blogging platform where updates can be up to 420 characters (I’m going to pretend this isn’t a pot thing) and can include video, photos or audio.The inevitable question here is, of course, how it stacks up to and differentiates itself from Twitter. Obviously the character count is a big one since it’s more than twice what Twitter allows and the native media capabilities are further areas where Pheed is looking to break away from what’s come before.
In addition to those Pheed also gives publishers two interesting options: 1) To copyright what they’re saying, either on a post-by-post basis or an account level and 2) To make their profile available only as a paid subscription.
The second point there is the least interesting simply because it’s the least likely to succeed. I’d have to be pretty interested in what someone has to say and feel it was substantively different from what they were saying anywhere else to pay for the right to read their thoughts. Props to Pheed for actually having a business plan but to make it work they need to attract critical masses of two audiences: The celebrities with large enough audiences that some sub-set of them will actually shell out cash for access and the entire other networks of the people in that audience to make it a place where people can share X celeb’s thoughts with their friends.
The first point, therefore, is one that requires more thought. The move away from owned platforms (ie blogs) has meant somewhat of an abandonment of the Creative Commons license standard, which set the standard for social media, where people were not versed in copyright law but wanted to protect what they were saying from being blatantly ripped off by others. “Share and share alike” is a common credo among early adopters in the social world. So the application of some form of copyright control here has potentially interesting implications for how what’s published can or can’t be used outside of Pheed.
When the service first launched and began making waves you could use your Twitter or Facebook credentials to create an account or login with an email address and password and share your updates on Twitter as well. It wasn’t long, though, until Twitter cut off access, which was pretty predictable since this pretty clearly competes directly against Twitter and that company has been looking to wall itself off from any other service that might compete against it for social screen time.
