It was one of those intriguing twists of fate that the announcement that Madonna was to premier her new video on Meerkat popped up on my RSS feed just as I was contemplating the news that Ello had secured another $5m in funding.
My heart duly sank. It’s not that I have anything against either pop legends or modish apps – in fact, there’s very much room in my life for both.
But coming just a few weeks after Madonna premiered her last video on Snapchat Discover, which itself followed a Grindr promotion, it seemed as if Madonna (or, more likely, Madonna’s people) have taken to heart recent criticism that she’s not cut out for the social media age and responded by spraying a wave of fresh Madonna “content” at the hottest tech tools.
Were Madonna’s new album to have come out in summer 2014, I wondered, would she have premiered a video on Ello? Would she have set up a Yo account and publicised her album that way?
OK, I’m being slightly flippant. In the end the Meerkat premiere, scheduled for Tuesday night, European time, turned out to be something of a technical disaster, the page displaying a 500 error rather than a slice of new Madonna. The premiere has now been rescheduled until Wednesday night.
Had it worked, though, then maybe we would be talking about how Meerkat – which, as you surely know, lets people stream video via Twitter – had proved a useful tool for Madonna to make waves with her new video.
But you get my point: sometimes it seems like the tech world is so trend-crazed, so rampantly hot for the next big thing, that we’re losing all perspective on what services might actually be useful.
By “we” here, I largely mean tech-savvy consumers. Cast your mind back to last July, when suddenly “Yo”s started popping up all over the internet. How long did the novelty last? A week? Not even that? Have you thought about it again since? Opened the app? I thought not.
But by “we” I also mean the tech media. The British music press used to be condemned for its “build them up and knock them down” attitude towards new bands, which saw a promising group move from being the saviour of music to the standing joke in a matter of months.
Compared to the tech press, however, which can move from declaring an app the saviour of humanity to deeming it a laughing stock in less than a month, the music press seems like a tar-pit stuck dinosaur of slow decision making.
In a way this is inevitable: many tech journalists live inside a hermetic bubble of Twitter and blogs, a strange hall of mirrors whereby the actual importance of an app to the outside world is blown out of all proportion by the sheer volume of people talking about it on your Twitter stream.
What’s more, this initial enthusiasm is almost certainly well intentioned. Most people rave about a new tech tool for the simple reason that they they like and feel enthused. That is something to welcome, rather than condemn.
But if you think that these tech bubbles are entirely innocent, then try telling that to the people who invested $1.5m in Yo at a valuation of $10m.
Will they make their money back?
It’s not impossible. But it hardly seems likely either when the launch of the Yo Store in February – a big push for the company, allowing users to subscribe to updates from the likes of rapper Lil Bub and the NBA – was met with widespread indifference.
You could argue that Yo was both created and destroyed by its early hype. “Created” because without that early media attention an app that simply sends out the world “yo” would never have found its way to millions of installs.
And “destroyed” because this attention essentially turned Yo into a running tech joke before summer 2014 was out, a guilty secret to be forgotten at the back of your iPhone.
The case of Ello is even more complicated. Techstars managing partner and Ello investor Mark Solon told the New York Observer that Ello was “almost cursed by their early success”, with tens of thousands of users flocking to a new product in the early days of beta testing, one that simply wasn’t ready for them.
“The media frenzy and the weight of those expectations wasn’t fair to a company in beta,” he added.
And yet Solon seems happy with his investment telling the Observer this week that user numbers are growing at Ello (which is still, remarkably, invite only).
“Based on our growing number of users, people are exhibiting the desire for an ad-free network where personal data isn’t bought and sold for profit,” Solon says. “That’s our investment thesis: People want to pay for that.”
And, in fact, Ello is still in development. As well as raising new funding, it has redesigned its entire site, added community managers and is close to releasing a mobile app – doing the kind of things, in other words, that would have really helped it out last summer when the app was plunged into the harsh media glare.
The redesign, according to VentureBeat’s Jordan Novet, has been an aesthetic success: “I can say this confidently: I really do look forward to coming back tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that,” he writes in his review.
All the same, he’s not convinced that many people will share his enthusiasm, ending his review on the downbeat note. “I really do look forward to coming back tomorrow… I’m just not sure how many other people will.”
You might ask the same question of Madonna. Will she be coming back to Meerkat when her next single is released? Almost certainly not, given the circumstances.
But even if the premier had worked technically – as her Snapchat Discover promotion did – the move always seemed destined to be a one-off stop on the singer’s imperious tour of fashionable digital services, rather than a long-standing commitment. And I think it is this – rather than the cringing tech failure – that made my heart sink.
Because the novelty of technology can be a wonderful thing. But what makes people come back to a digital tool, what makes investors continue to put money in, and what makes a robust, powerful business is its usefulness.
Twitter was once a novelty, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest too. But the reason they have endured, rather than slipping into the Friendster-esque where-are-they-now? file, is because over time they proved to be very useful tools
If Snapchat Discover was a brilliantly effective launch tool for Madonna’s latest video, then why didn’t she return there for her next release? You wouldn’t expect a major artist not to put their new video on YouTube, after all, simply because that’s what they did with the last one.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with trying out new services. the world would be pretty boring otherwise. But the end result here is that Madonna looks like she is pandering to novelty with Meerkat, making a slightly desperate attempt to profit from an app’s brief cultural chic.
I wish Meerkat all the best; Ello and Yo too. But I can’t help but wonder if in the future we’ll all look back on Madonna’s Meerkat video launch, nod our heads wisely and wonder what on earth she was thinking.