The Idler
25th October 2012, 18:56
Just got the following e-mail
We would like to invite you to help us inaugurate ZSocial - http://www.zsocial.org - by users signing up and giving it a road test. The message below explains why, in brief, and then also in more detail.
The bottom line is that we are trying to do something very ambitious, very costly, with a tremendous upside, and with a tremendous amount riding on the outcome, and we need your help. All you have to do is sign up, upload a picture, make some contacts, and maybe follow some media feeds. It is free for thirty days, and very cheap thereafter, as well, and you can leave anytime, if it doesn't appeal to you.
A Brief Summary of Why We Need Your Help
We urge you to sign up for ZSocial because:
Z Communications needs ZSocial to work, as a revenue source, if ZCom is to maintain all its many other projects and free content without drastic reduction.
The left needs social networking that isn't corporate hosted, profit seeking, commercially vile, and a willing and even eager vehicle for government spying
ZSocial needs to be used by folks who let us know any problems they encounter and ideas they have, so we can fix issues and improve features.
ZSocial needs initial users because however good its features and design may already be, people will use ZSocial largely based on their expectation that others will do so too, synergistically making everyone's doing so worthwhile. To reach out to each new audience with any confidence, therefore, we need large numbers from the prior group we have appealed to to be visibly on board...and that means you.
A Fuller Presentation of Why We Need Your Help
(1) We need ZSocial financially.
Due to widespread and steadily growing hostility toward paying for media at all, and due to the horrible state of the economy, Z's recent fund raising, as we anticipated, was less successful than we needed. More, it is reasonable to expect future fund raising to stay at its current reduced level, if not drop further.
In that eventuality, ZSocial, as a source of revenue - is our last plausible avenue for preserving ZCom as is, or improving it. If ZSocial doesn't attract a substantial membership, we will have to drastically cut Z operations from three paid staff to one for working on Z Magazine, ZNet, ZMI, and whatever remains of ZSocial, ZVideo, and ZBooks. However, doing all that with three paid staff, as now, is pretty much a miracle. Doing it with one paid staff will be, if we are reduced to that, impossible. So we would also have to cut output. One option would be the magazine going bi monthly. Another option would be providing much less online material. A third would be raising prices, perhaps even having nothing free.
So, a first reason we need you to use ZSocial is to support ZCom writ large and thereby avoid the horrendous choices noted above..
(2) We, and the whole left, need progressive, not corporate, social networking.
Social networking is now ubiquitous in society. Facebook wants to become everyone's mode of interacting online, with all internet content reached and delivered by and through Facebook. Even short of that horrible image of all cyber information being funneled through one corporate giant, Facebook and other mainstream social networking facilities like Twitter, are in any case profit seeking corporations who have no social conscience, much less any likelihood of serving the needs or potentials of the left. They amass data, sell access to us and the data commercially, spy for governments, and so on. Moreover, their tools are not self consciously suited to left ends - even as, of course, leftists valiantly try to make productive use of them. Finally, and arguably worst, their information inclinations tend to reduce interactions to a tumultuous throughput of brief tweets, updates, an d the like - putting a kind of onus on patience, attention, and length that is contrary to dissident consciousness raising and other serious communications.
What the left needs, then, is a social networking system of its own that serves progressive agendas, promotes serious as well as less deep social exchange, rejects advertising, rejects spying, facilitates social interaction of all kinds, self consciously develops tools and features suited to progressive needs, and even generates real mutual aid and solidarity among progressive constituencies and projects.
These are the aims of ZSocial as it already exists, and its future evolution and refinements, if ZSocial garners your support, will only move it further down these paths. So working toward that achievement is the second reason we need your involvement.
(3) It is very hard for the designers and conceivers of a system like ZSocial to find its flaws.
Programmers and designers knowledge of a system like ZSocial blocks us from seeing what aspects are obscure, and even obstructs our finding outright bugs, much less arriving at innovative insights for improvements. This is why we need feedback from real users like you. Likewise, some problems will emerge only when lots of users stretch ZSocial's resources. For these reasons, too, to succeed we need your participation.
(4) Suppose ZSocial as a piece of engineering is perfect. Does that mean it will succeed? No. The key ingredient is people.
The reality is online success depends mostly on lots of people relating. You need a good system, of courts, but then you also need people. And each new person relating depends, in considerable degree, on how many others have already related. Momentum feeds momentum. Stasis feeds stasis.
So, if ZSocial is to have a chance to attract a reasonable, much less a very large audience, it needs thousands of people to join and begin relating to and advocating a system that initially has not yet attracted enough users to cause prospective users to be confident it ever will. That is the Catch-22 we have to navigate. To have users, we need users.
And how do we jump that obstacle? Well, the most obvious way is for the core constituencies of people who have considerable allegiance to Z and its projects to give ZSocial a serious chance. And that means your signing on, uploading a brief bio and a profile picture, joining a group or two, following some media, and becoming contacts with various folks - even before lots of others have done so.
So please do it. There is no cost for at least thirty days, and mimimal cost thereafter, and you can opt out anytime.
And if you do sign up - please be aware that the site is much more powerful than may at first seem to be the case. If you want to become a pro quickly, try the online manual or the Q&A about the site. You can reach these from the menu next to your name at the top left of the top page.
We thank you again for giving us a chance to create a new, progressive, social networking facility...
And we look forward to seeing you on ZSocial!
We would like to invite you to help us inaugurate ZSocial - http://www.zsocial.org - by users signing up and giving it a road test. The message below explains why, in brief, and then also in more detail.
The bottom line is that we are trying to do something very ambitious, very costly, with a tremendous upside, and with a tremendous amount riding on the outcome, and we need your help. All you have to do is sign up, upload a picture, make some contacts, and maybe follow some media feeds. It is free for thirty days, and very cheap thereafter, as well, and you can leave anytime, if it doesn't appeal to you.
A Brief Summary of Why We Need Your Help
We urge you to sign up for ZSocial because:
Z Communications needs ZSocial to work, as a revenue source, if ZCom is to maintain all its many other projects and free content without drastic reduction.
The left needs social networking that isn't corporate hosted, profit seeking, commercially vile, and a willing and even eager vehicle for government spying
ZSocial needs to be used by folks who let us know any problems they encounter and ideas they have, so we can fix issues and improve features.
ZSocial needs initial users because however good its features and design may already be, people will use ZSocial largely based on their expectation that others will do so too, synergistically making everyone's doing so worthwhile. To reach out to each new audience with any confidence, therefore, we need large numbers from the prior group we have appealed to to be visibly on board...and that means you.
A Fuller Presentation of Why We Need Your Help
(1) We need ZSocial financially.
Due to widespread and steadily growing hostility toward paying for media at all, and due to the horrible state of the economy, Z's recent fund raising, as we anticipated, was less successful than we needed. More, it is reasonable to expect future fund raising to stay at its current reduced level, if not drop further.
In that eventuality, ZSocial, as a source of revenue - is our last plausible avenue for preserving ZCom as is, or improving it. If ZSocial doesn't attract a substantial membership, we will have to drastically cut Z operations from three paid staff to one for working on Z Magazine, ZNet, ZMI, and whatever remains of ZSocial, ZVideo, and ZBooks. However, doing all that with three paid staff, as now, is pretty much a miracle. Doing it with one paid staff will be, if we are reduced to that, impossible. So we would also have to cut output. One option would be the magazine going bi monthly. Another option would be providing much less online material. A third would be raising prices, perhaps even having nothing free.
So, a first reason we need you to use ZSocial is to support ZCom writ large and thereby avoid the horrendous choices noted above..
(2) We, and the whole left, need progressive, not corporate, social networking.
Social networking is now ubiquitous in society. Facebook wants to become everyone's mode of interacting online, with all internet content reached and delivered by and through Facebook. Even short of that horrible image of all cyber information being funneled through one corporate giant, Facebook and other mainstream social networking facilities like Twitter, are in any case profit seeking corporations who have no social conscience, much less any likelihood of serving the needs or potentials of the left. They amass data, sell access to us and the data commercially, spy for governments, and so on. Moreover, their tools are not self consciously suited to left ends - even as, of course, leftists valiantly try to make productive use of them. Finally, and arguably worst, their information inclinations tend to reduce interactions to a tumultuous throughput of brief tweets, updates, an d the like - putting a kind of onus on patience, attention, and length that is contrary to dissident consciousness raising and other serious communications.
What the left needs, then, is a social networking system of its own that serves progressive agendas, promotes serious as well as less deep social exchange, rejects advertising, rejects spying, facilitates social interaction of all kinds, self consciously develops tools and features suited to progressive needs, and even generates real mutual aid and solidarity among progressive constituencies and projects.
These are the aims of ZSocial as it already exists, and its future evolution and refinements, if ZSocial garners your support, will only move it further down these paths. So working toward that achievement is the second reason we need your involvement.
(3) It is very hard for the designers and conceivers of a system like ZSocial to find its flaws.
Programmers and designers knowledge of a system like ZSocial blocks us from seeing what aspects are obscure, and even obstructs our finding outright bugs, much less arriving at innovative insights for improvements. This is why we need feedback from real users like you. Likewise, some problems will emerge only when lots of users stretch ZSocial's resources. For these reasons, too, to succeed we need your participation.
(4) Suppose ZSocial as a piece of engineering is perfect. Does that mean it will succeed? No. The key ingredient is people.
The reality is online success depends mostly on lots of people relating. You need a good system, of courts, but then you also need people. And each new person relating depends, in considerable degree, on how many others have already related. Momentum feeds momentum. Stasis feeds stasis.
So, if ZSocial is to have a chance to attract a reasonable, much less a very large audience, it needs thousands of people to join and begin relating to and advocating a system that initially has not yet attracted enough users to cause prospective users to be confident it ever will. That is the Catch-22 we have to navigate. To have users, we need users.
And how do we jump that obstacle? Well, the most obvious way is for the core constituencies of people who have considerable allegiance to Z and its projects to give ZSocial a serious chance. And that means your signing on, uploading a brief bio and a profile picture, joining a group or two, following some media, and becoming contacts with various folks - even before lots of others have done so.
So please do it. There is no cost for at least thirty days, and mimimal cost thereafter, and you can opt out anytime.
And if you do sign up - please be aware that the site is much more powerful than may at first seem to be the case. If you want to become a pro quickly, try the online manual or the Q&A about the site. You can reach these from the menu next to your name at the top left of the top page.
We thank you again for giving us a chance to create a new, progressive, social networking facility...
And we look forward to seeing you on ZSocial!