lovehatethings

There are plenty of brands of carbonated beverages that have all made the surface areas of cans artwork. It's a unique 3D form that opens up endless possibilities for looped imagery and vibrant colors to set it apart from other brands. The artwork on a pop can is reflection of the times and the product. Your average Coke design never strays too far from its roots. Stylized script font and basic color scheme have endured the test of time. Remember when they tried "New Coke"? The reaction was bigger than the recent Facebook profile design uprising of aught nine?

Pepsi kept its basic logo similar for a long period until they went all "New Generation" and started to overwrite the red, white, and blue with mostly blue. In an effort to distinguish itself from the king, Pepsi made a decision that was not only daring, but transcended the color tradition of pop flavors. The decision was also Pepsi's "Curse of the Babe" in ever hoping they could catch up with King Coke. Admittedly my "color legend" of pop types comes from a Canadian upbringing, but from what I've seen things aren't too different in the US. I hesitate to think any of these standards may match up with the common scheme overseas.

The Pop Can Color Archetype

Red - Cola... there is no doubt that when some historical decision was made for Coke to adopt it's color scheme, it became the archetype by which all other colas would be measured. It's still hard to find any brand of cola that is not predominantly branded red... although some have started to try and go Pepsi blue.

White - Diet Anything... although recently taken over with some brands by grey (and light blue with Diet Pepsi), white was the defacto standard for many years when dealing with any diet pop. It was basically analogous to a sports team's home and away jerseys.

Brown - Root Beer... I recall Hires, A&W, now Mug. For some reason I suppose the idea of the word "root" and the color of dirt was too good to pass up.

Dark Green - Ginger Ale... strange that even though Ginger Ale is a golden amber color the dark green was adopted. I remember it mostly from Canada Dry, but the standard was also adopted by Schweppes and several others. Also picked by Mountain Dew during some of its many generations.

Light Green - Lemon-Lime... I suppose Sprite and 7-Up were the predominant memories on this one, although they have modified to add blues and greys over the past few years, the green to light green patterns are still evident, often reflected with the plastic bottle in larger sizes.

Dark Red (Cherry Red) - Cherry Cola... seems obvious and is even upheld by the Dr. Pepper brand which echoes the hints of a cherry cola.

Orange - Orange... yeah, well, some have to be obvious don't they?

Blue - Club Soda... I know it sounds silly, but until Pepsi adopted the blue for their mass marketing, the rare pop can you ever saw that was blue contained Club Soda. I don't know what club one had to belong to to pay hard-earned money for tasteless carbonated liquid, but I didn't want to join.

Yellow - Tonic Water... similar to Club Soda in it's rare appearance in homes and even on store shelves. Yellow has also been co-opted by indie drinks like Mellow Yellow, but for years was rare in the pop aisles.

Gold - Caffeine Free... yeah, I know that many Ginger Ale's have taken gold for diet versions or often bottled versions if the bottle remains green, but growing up the first instances I remember of gold popping in were when the caffeine-free versions of cola started to hit the shelves.

Purple - Grape... pretty self-evident. I can't even attest as to whether the grape flavor in grape pop is made with purple or green grapes, but I'm willing to stipulate if you are.

Pink - Cream Soda... I'm not quite sure where this matchup came from. Sure, I know that the pop is colored in the same fashion, but that's usually an after the fact decision. Maybe they were simply running out of colors.

Grey - The new white. The steelish look reflects light better and gives an aire of sophistication to diet beverages... not really, I just made that up.

The color archetype of the pop can is important in the life cycles of branding. If you're going to hook young children on these beverages before they can read, they'd better be able to associate color and design. That Pepsi broke the chain in their blue- themed "generational" campaigns may have not spelled out their doom, but showed a willingness to succumb to the power that has become the gold (or should it be "red") standard of pop can iconography.

Of course I've never forgiven the pop manufacturer's consortium for breaking away from the perfect venn diagram of the two-holed pressure release can opening system. The perfect evolution of the pull tab and the elegant ancestor of the pop tab, the pressure release system was a masterful piece of carbonated beverage engineering. Damn you soda pop manufacturing concerns. May your agitated containers be explosively opened before they resettle.

"The 39th Step" of lovehatethings includes some ruminations on the "next" great social network, saving money on lethal injections through last meals, sleeping in a hamburger, and why I can't bring myself to care about award shows and Mac announcements.

In the past few years, those of us who have been engaged in a wanderlust around Web2.0 have gone through a quick evolution of social networking platforms that included the big 3: MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. The archetypal pattern that has developed through this continuum is telling in many ways save one - what's next?

The MySpace world was, if nothing else, a simple way for people to get the concept of adding friends and really pushed the notion of "friends" as currency. It was at this time that the first serious criticisms started to arise about people adding friends to simply build their lists. Bots were written to invite thousands upon thousands of friends. And what MySpace did better than anyone else at the time, and perhaps its remaining effective residual today, was the amalgamation of topic-specific pages for music, comedy and the like. When I first joined MySpace and created a music page, I saw it as the great equalizer in web music because my page looked exactly like Radiohead's or Beyonce's or an indie band from across town.

The interface to tweak one's page was far from elegant or intuitive however. The results often looked like a crazy mashup of early graphic browsings in Mosaic or Netscape Gold where people were experimenting in animated GIFs, frames, and blinking marquee text. In the end, MySpace started to fall under the weight of its own interface and clutter. Change was needed in terms of ease of use, customization, and intergration.

Facebook came into immense popularity through a mashup of the widgets available on MySpace, the complete lack of ability to change the basic page look, and the best aspects of old standby Classmates. By mandating a standard layout and inability to change color scheme, Facebook retained a sense of elegance that may have been achieved more through perception than execution. When you don't allow people to add hideous looking backgrounds or customize their html, things go smoother in the end. What Facebook really did right though, was to allow itself to become a hub for all social networks. You could update status, upload photos, bookmark and digg and everything would appear as an action on your Facebook status if you wanted it to. Facebook also allowed highly customizable privacy settings which drew millions of people in who may have been afraid to commit to online networking in any previous fashion.

The Facebook brand is now the largest in the world with a readily adopted cross-culture and demographic. With over 200 million users and countless pictures and video one has to imagine that there must be some success in the ad placements on your profile or I can't find the monetization. While the number of "friends" on Facebook was important, consideration was given to being more selective in that much more personal information was potentially available.

Now that the explosion of Twitter (over 1300% in the past year) has blown through the roof, patterns are starting to become discernable about what people want in a social network. Twitter had been called microblogging for a period of time, but the term has ended up being insufficient. Twitter is a social network, yet its true power is derived from its open API which has allowed third party applications to aggregate the Twitter stream. Twitter is simple - status updates, 140 characters or less. No one really cares what your Twitter profile looks like. People only care about the feed. Twitter is the TV Guide of the Internet.

Let's examine some of the continua involved here:

• Design: MySpace = clunky and gaudy, Facebook = busy but streamlined, Twitter = mundane but irrelevant
• Ease of use: MySpace = learning curve to do basics and customize, Facebook = easy to do basics, widget-based permission, Twitter = a chimp could use it.
• Content Delivery: MySpace = less about message than environment, Facebook = understandable content, but an assault of it, Twitter = you've got 140 characters, learn how to shrink your urls.
• Portability: MySpace = although you could get content to MySpace from without, not so easy the other way around, Facebook = could push content from within outwards, but became much more satisfied in trying to be the content hub, Twitter = is becoming more and more about portable content and nothing else.

And, to summarize, MySpace is dying, Facebook is a monster, and Twitter is exploding.

Seeing as we have gone through this evolution in the past few years alone, the only sure thing is that something else will come along and be the next social network of choice of geeks for two years before anyone else adopts it. What will that platform look like?

What Twitter knows, and Facebook is quickly learning, is that the key is in the API. I never used Twitter regularly until Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck allowed Twitter to become more than feeds of the followed, but a social news aggregator. Try going into Tweetdeck and typing in a person, place or thing in the news and you'll end up with thousands of bits of information from around the world. A Twitter news feed is like the hive mind, unparsed wiki. But as much as I'm praising the upstart Twitter, there is a harsh truth that will have to be faced as the service moves forward. An open API means the site and profile become essentially useless. The ability of Facebook to monetize through profile ads is far less likely to work on Twitter.

While some would like to believe Friendfeed is the next step in the evolution, I would argue that the cosmetic appeal of Friendfeed is severely lacking and there is a valid reason for people loving their compartmentalized Facebook widgets. The definitive social network of the future will need to combine the streamlining and ease of use with some of the inescapable features that a mass appeal service must have to cross demographics.

Hence, I present The Anatomy of the Next Great Social Network

1. Web page used only for modifications, all networking occurs through standalone apps.
2. Status updates, kept 160 characters or shorter and transferable via an open API.
3. Fully functional mobility apps for phone and portable devices.
4. A portal (at least) to pictures and videos which people love to have available.
5. A friend compare and suggest feature based on existing friends and status update tags.
6. A drop dead simple sign up and start up process.

The model that laconi.ca is pushing of the open source social network may not be too far off. An app like Tweetdeck could be made to have a pop-up "groups" column that could aggregate everyone you follow by an interest or common workplace. The app could sort your followers by category and allow you to do the same for a friends followers. The apps will all be different, but the network will simply be differing flavors of content that can be aggregated.

Let's face it, it all revolves around new content which is most often status updates. The ability to aggregate, parse and present the snippets of wisdom or stupidity of everyone you follow will be the key determinant of success. The customizability will determine which app wins the platform war. The question remaining, is will the architects of the network allow others to profit from using their backbone in an independent application. Just as productivity applications are moving into the browser, social networks must start to move away from the browser into their own space. Such content is no longer a function of html, but rather Java, Python, and Air.

I'm starting to wonder if there is some sort of "expectation meter" that I can use to determine what my excitement level should be over things when hanging out with friends.
 
There are, of course, infinite levels of subjectivity when it comes to being excited about events and objects and people, but I'm finding more and more, in mixed company, that I don't really know what level to portray my interest at.
 
Should I feign a ridiculous amount of interest or excitement at the prospect of an award show? Could there be any time less usefully spent than spending 4 hours waiting for the announcement of about 20 awards when I could check out a website at the end of the 4th hour and find out all the winners in 60 seconds without the poorly-written jokes and pompous stage show? And yet people are aghast when I tell them I don't watch the Academy Awards. They inquire incredulously, "aren't you a fan of movies?" To which I reply, "yes, and that's what I'll be watching when you're listening to the exit poll interview on whose dress was the trashiest."
 
Must I get hyped up for the announcement of some new piece of technology? I suppose the answer is no for most people, but I tend to blog and podcast about tech and gadgets and the like, so one would expect that my excitement meter might go up. I've found that I really don't care about the event aspect of an announcement of a new or updated product. Sure, I'd like to think that the actual features of any technology may be met with anything from disgust to gratification, but the announcement of such things means little. Needless to say, I never skipped a day of work to huddle around a Steve Jobs MacWorld keynote.
 
I've spoken before about my distaste for "liners" - basically people who feel the urge to claim early adopter or consumer status by being the first to buy, watch, or listen to something new. I've been waiting 20 years for the Watchmen film to come out, yet didn't actually go for almost two weeks to see it. I simply don't understand the culture that builds such expectations around events such as awards shows and opening night films.
 
I'll line up to see a band that is playing one show in my local arena because I won't be able to see the same thing tomorrow. This case doesn't exist with films. I absolutely cannot stand award shows and find them to be the most insulting things on television this side of daytime talk shows.
 
I think, however, I have found the unifier of what the real coalescence of expectation and excitement is all about... or at least an example of it: The Superbowl.

The Superbowl, with few exceptions, is a boring and monotonous game of football that is often surrounded by the same pomp that I detest in award shows, and yet more people get excited for this North American event than almost any other... but it's not about the game, it's about the people. The Superbowl is a social event more than a sports event. In the same way people dress up and throw Oscar Parties, the event becomes secondary to the social milieu that surrounds it. Quite simply, any excuse to get together with friends will be exciting for that reason alone.
 
I suppose I may even go to an Oscar Party if enough of my friends were there, because let's face it, an Oscar Party where everyone is dressed up and you only know one person is like going to the wedding reception of a friend from work - you'd better hope there's an open bar.

After being torn away by work and other commitments for almost two weeks, I finally got to see the movie I waited 20 years to see. What did I think?