David Smooke: All right, getting back in the game.  I am walking down whatever street …

Paul Andre: Tehama

David Smooke: Tehama with my friend and colleague, Paul Andre.

Paul Andre: Hey, what’s up, how’s it going?

David Smooke: Today we’re going to talk about social media trends.

Paul Andre: Yes we are.

David Smooke: We didn’t prepare anything, did we?

Paul Andre: I know we didn’t but one thing that just came up was the recent use of Google in the work place.

David Smooke: That’s Google for Work.

Paul Andre: And that was what, a handle on Twitter?

David Smooke: That’s their handle, their general entire marketing message that Google’s going after the enterprise and they want to replace this whole suite of Microsoft PowerPoint and all the Microsoft Office suite and kind of say, hey, we’ll organize your email and build all our apps off of it from there which we’re already doing, which is …

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: Kind of nice. 

Paul Andre: So it’s like a higher collaboration or working collaboration, it’s more for the work place.

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: When you first heard about it, did you see what other channels they’re using to promote it?  I mean you recently wrote something on, is Google entering the workplace, right?  I mean with hiring and you said you just tagged them on what was it, Twitter, Google+, was it …

David Smooke: Yeah, so I tagged them with my old article, Is Google about to enter the job market? and clearly, they’re in the workplace, and they’re entering the workplace.  Yeah, the lesson here is just kind of riding the wave as you see.  I wrote it as a speculative piece but then as you see Google is actually starting to do it, it’s like now you want to bring this article and show it to other people that are writing about it and talking about it and it kind of serves as validation, oh, you were saying this two months ago and now it’s starting to happen and social media is nice because it does date everything.

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: Every tweet, every blog post.  Well the blog post people can change dates but within Twitter, Linkedln it’s like the comments, everything’s dated and it is a historical record which is kind of nice of when you were thinking about it.  How many times like ten years ago did people say like, oh, I had an idea for that site.

Paul Andre: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

David Smooke: They’re over there like, oh yeah, that would have been mine, it’s like, oh, I’m sure you came up with the Facebook idea.  You know, I’m sure you came up with Twitter, like I’m sure came up with LinkedIn, it’s like, not really but if you did describe it in great detail now you can put it on social media and put it on-line and people may be able to see it.

Paul Andre: Unless you had a website and put it on Archive.org and looked it up.  I mean, you had it on line and it was picked up, hey, this is evidence right here.

David Smooke: It’s funny though because once you put it on-line, it’s like it’s, it’s anyone can take it.

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: It’s also like you’re giving away your idea and it’s like, so what, you came up with it, I built it, like later guys.  Thanks for the help, I’ll re-tweet you.

Paul Andre: Yeah, I mean, I find that … I lost my train of thought, sorry.

David Smooke: No worries.  I wanted to ask you about you’ve been doing search engine optimization for what, 18 years now?  15, 18 years?  Really like since people were doing it almost.

Paul Andre: Yeah.  My first website I was doing since high school which was like 97, 98.

David Smooke: So, I mean at a high level, how do you see like social media changing search engine optimization?

Paul Andre: I see it changing a lot.  [Ireek 03:44] said even before companies, like enterprise companies now are putting it in to their tools and saying like social media, use it for Social Signals to get you more back links.  Even right now, today, what was that, September 9th, Searchmetrics just put out ranking factors that’s put Social Signals right up there.  So I mean, this was something I was like reaching also years ago.  Even before I started using a software like BrightEdge.  I mean, I actually asked them if they’re ever going to integrate with social media tools and it was in their road map.  They saw it as a value and now it’s there but one thing is, I only see people giving value to Facebook and Twitter.  I see LinkedIn as being a big one. I mean, especially all the influencers on there, I think …

David Smooke: Especially in the B2B space.

Paul Andre: Yes.

David Smooke: It’s like night and day because if you’re going right to consumer, it’s like LinkedIn’s great for your colleagues and making like a business to business software or vendor or purchasing decision.

Paul Andre: But not necessarily just B2B, if you could see almost creates you as like an actual, an authority like almost like a thought leader.  You’re putting thought leaders out there where you’re putting out stuff you write, put it out in your networks, so you can see friends, or maybe they’re not, like maybe they’re just like in retail or not necessarily in technology but they see what you’re writing so they know that, hey, I have a buddy that knows all about that.

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: You know it’s like, let’s see, huh.  Any other things you picked up from the Google in the work space because I’m curious to see how if it’s a new marketing campaign, I want to see what they find valuable in social media?

David Smooke: That’s a good one.  I haven’t, I guess I have to take a closer look at it because you know I’ve read some of it and it’s like to me like even though I know it was an announcement, to me it wasn’t an announcement like I’m already using Google Drive for most of my operation.  You know, multiple work emails on Gmail …

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: It just seems so like, I don’t know, 3 years like I’ve already been doing this and the fact that they’re packaging it and positioning it more for larger enterprises, there is a lot to learn from it but I just didn’t get as sucked in because I really saw it more as repackaging than actually brand new like offerings.

Paul Andre: Yeah …

David Smooke: You know whenever Google+ came out, I was reading a ton of things and looking left and right and really trying to study it because it was actually something that was brand new, which interested me more.  And the other thing about that search engine article you said today, it was very funny that even though Google+ is the lowest engagement, not surprisingly it’s the most important for SEO …

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: Because it’s what you’re telling Google.  It’s almost like taking to the search engines.

Paul Andre: Yeah, exactly.

David Smooke: They’re calling it so much more heavily than Facebook, you know a lot of it’s blocked for them and Twitter you know, Twitter turned down an offer to become Google at one point and I’m sure that doesn’t exactly make Google prioritize them.

Paul Andre: Yeah, and Twitter …

David Smooke: Multiple times they turned down purchase offers.

Paul Andre: They used to have tweets, used to be indexed, in Google.

David Smooke: I think they still are. 

Paul Andre: Not as …

David Smooke: I just don’t think they’re prioritized.

Paul Andre: Yes, I’m just not strong …

David Smooke: I’ll search for old articles and I’ll find, …

Paul Andre: Threshold.

David Smooke: And you titled, exactly, yeah.  Twitter will generally show up as like the 3rd or 4th link for articles that aren’t republished elsewhere.  They’re republished elsewhere even on a shitty site or low traffic site.  Google will put those low traffic sites ahead of Twitter.

Paul Andre: Yeah. Even with Goggle+ you can see it’s definitely a retro-factor because almost everyone has a Gmail account, right, and if they’re logged in and someone shares a certain link in their network, that site will give you their rank higher, when they’re logged into Google.  I mean it just will.

David Smooke: Yeah. That’s funny.

Paul Andre: I mean, don’t you see us catching ourselves, like hey, are you in porno mode, you know the privacy and you have to walk all that way …

David Smooke: I don’t know if that’s the correct term.

Paul Andre: No, that’s what I’ve heard of, I hear all the time.

David Smooke: Incognito.

Paul Andre: Yeah, incognito.

David Smooke: Incognito.

Paul Andre: Also known as the pornography viewer.  Because you’re hiding all your links but it’s just keeping things, if you’re logged in, it’s just a way for them to give you more relevant content which Google really wants to do it in all …

David Smooke: That’s true.

Paul Andre: It the end.

David Smooke: Did you know the Miami Dolphins guy that got in trouble for bullying last year?  He actually changed his last name to ‘Incognito’ legally.  He was Richie something in college and then when he was approaching like pro status, sometime as USC, he legally changed his last name to Incognito to embody his persona and then he got kicked off the team for bullying. 

Paul Andre: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know.

David Smooke: Just a little side note there on incognito.  Do you think people should be worried about, in their emails, they should actually be worried like what anchor word text they link and if you send an email blast to 50,000 people you could actually impact search results or whatever anchor text you pick?

Paul Andre: Within the Google [inaudible 09:33] system?  I don’t see how that can, unless it’s like a Gmail and people are linking things within Gmail and Google’s just picking it up.  They say their watching us, see all our emails, could be.

David Smooke: Yeah.  Do you think we could reach the point where everything we say is indexed on the internet and how scary is that?

Paul Andre: Yeah, how about the Facebook image came up and they can turn on your camera?  Is that…

David Smooke: Someone told me that on Facebook Messenger like your actual terms and conditions they can access essentially almost anything on the phone including turning on your camera, so use case on their end would probably be if you’re phone gets jacked … you can see, all right, someone’s hacked into my messenger, maybe it could actually take a picture of that person as they’re typing and now Facebook has a picture of the person that’s hacked into your account sending messages which I guess that moment you get hacked, maybe it’s worth it to have them intervene but the fact that I could be on the shitter sending a message and Facebook …

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: Mark Zuckerberg would feel like, hey, what’s up with Dave Smooke, let me take a look and there I am, like on the shitter.  That’s not exactly comforting in terms of privacy.

Paul Andre: Yeah, that’s a lot of things when, that’s one thing that scares me about even webcams on laptops.  Sometimes you’ll see, a lot of idea’s happen when you’re on the shitter.

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: And you are typing or maybe you’re, you just have to go when you’re in a meeting and you got to go to a meeting and a camera shows up. 

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: Pretty embarrassing.

David Smooke: Yeah, I mean the more and it’s like, turns people like, oh, you know, if you have transparency you have nothing to hide.  It’s not really like hiding, it’s just like about appropriate, like what’s a one to zero activity, what’s a one to one activity and what’s a one to public activity?  One to zero is you working on something yourself, it doesn’t mean you don’t want to share it, it’s just not appropriate to like take a picture of someone working on their own stuff and then this is private just for that person, and then this is for everybody and actually choosing those distinctions, it seems like we’re losing more control over it as all of our activities are being pushed further and further to one to many.  One to many is how everything we do will be perceived.  Whoever’s interested can find out. 

I mean if you’re doing good things it’s pretty encouraging because you just feel like, oh, I’m starting this new non-profit business and in starting this new non-profit business I’m going to have to essentially take all these one to one meetings but if you don’t need to take one to one meetings and you can broadcast your message and get a lot of views online, it’s like, that part’s very encouraging.

Paul Andre: On the topic of social media trends we see that social media started us off a website so it’s Friendster, Myspace, these are all desktop firsts.

David Smooke: I do a really good Tom impersonation. 

Paul Andre: I know.  But if you check it out, there hasn’t been another website like Facebook, or social media site.  It’s been mobile apps, it’s almost been like social media has become very mobile and everybody’s going mobile first.

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: What do you think is the next big mobile first, social media platform?  There’s stuff on the rise right now, who’s the one that couldn’t get bought out, it was …

David Smooke: WhatsApp.

Paul Andre: WhatsApp, didn’t want to sell out.  SnapShot …

David Smooke: SnapChat.

Paul Andre: Sold, right?

David Smooke: Other way around.  SnapChat turned down $3 billion from Facebook and then Facebook turned around and bought WhatsApp for $19 billion.

Paul Andre: Okay.

David Smooke: Both mobile first properties, and you can see it in how Facebook is dividing, forcing you to get messenger and taking you out of the Facebook app.

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: Like, ‘Oh, you use the Facebook app for this whole massive address book and voyeurism and maybe occasionally post, now we want to take your time anytime you’re texting, we want to take that time and drop you into a Facebook program. ‘ As opposed to texting on my phone charged by the text…

Paul Andre: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

David Smooke: It’s a really good, I understand why they’re doing it, basically, the more existing activities on your phone that you can funnel into our software, it’s really like they’re trying to take over the phone app by app and realizing you have to log-in to one app, Facebook, to do all these different functionalities, you have to get across this whole barrier of essentially one place to do so many different things people end up choosing the specialized version. 

Paul Andre: Yeah, of course.

David Smooke: Yep.

Paul Andre: It gives you a better experience.

David Smooke: Yeah, exactly.  So I mean that’s why …

Paul Andre: That’s more productive.

David Smooke: Yeah, and I get what Facebook’s doing buying, you know, all right, now we’re going to buy the hottest photo sharing app.  Now we’re going to buy the best text communication app. You know, and they’re expanding into the phone so I think they get it even though at the core of them they’re trying to be one platform that does everything on the mobile phone they divide.  And on this subject, who’s grasping audio or where do you store your audio files?  I’ve frankly had a pretty bad experience, I mean, I’ve been emailing SoundCloud for 2 days trying to get the embed button to work.  I’m on a premium account and they’re not helping, the embed button’s a free feature and it’s not even working so when I do the recording like this, I can’t even immediately put it online.  It’s like I know that’s what they’re about and they’re doing it and it’s a lot of complications but …

Paul Andre: You know what I find very interesting is that okay, SoundCloud is a desktop first app, well, company was it, or am I wrong, can you say that …

David Smooke: I’ve been using it mostly on the desktop.  They do have a mobile app…

Paul Andre: Yes.

David Smooke: I’m not sure how good it is, I’ve tried it a little bit, I don’t want to say good or bad, I don’t know yet.

Paul Andre: What I’ve notice is that, okay, there’s all this equipment for all true musicians like DJ’s and stuff like that so it even records their stuff and you can put it on SoundCloud which is then on the desktop.  What if a DJ wanted to record his live DJ set and all he has is his phone? 

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: And how would he be able to get a good recording and just put it right away once the set is done.  I mean it would have to be a Mobile First type of technology or something like even SoundCloud to venture off into.

David Smooke: The big thing with this Mobile First it’s like content creation like the computer is the hassle.  It works for the writer because the keyboard helps you actually do the job but if you’re not writing like the computer is not essential in the way.

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: If you want to do audio or visual, taking the picture, the computer does not help you.  It exists, maybe it helps you later if you want to edit the photo, I mean more and more tools are emerging for the phone but it’s always still better to get the real Photoshop on the real computer with all the functionality …

Paul Andre: Yep.

David Smooke: And look how small the phone is.  If your phone could do something …

Paul Andre: Yeah, you can capture moments when you wouldn’t have the computer.

David Smooke: Yep.

Paul Andre: And create content then.

David Smooke: Which way you want to go?

Paul Andre: Let’s – you want to keep walking straight?

David Smooke: Yeah, we could loop around the Ferry building and head back into SOMA.

Paul Andre: Okay.  So back to doing something social.  Would you think, say something like SoundCloud is social?

David Smooke: Oh, yeah.  They’re showing you, they have the same icon as Twitter for retweeting a piece of music.  They show your views, you make friends, you follow, you unfollow people. There is social media marketing for SoundCloud, I’ve seen various solutions offer it, most of them don’t but some of them do.  They’re a pretty inspirational story. I remember I watched a video about them, this guy was basically like in Germany and had a problem, they just like, they were all huge fans of you know all this electronic music and they wanted access to it and they were musicians themselves and they came up with essentially this bare bones solution to solve their own problem and it turns out a lot of people were having issues getting their music heard as well as reliable storage and they just took off.

Paul Andre: It’s very safe to say that the next social media trend or social media next big thing is based on innovation. Innovators,  maybe solving a problem that no one has before.  Obviously we keep referring SoundCloud but there are other websites, but we’re first to SoundCloud.  Maybe for us SoundCloud was the first to get to us.

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: It’s those first set of innovators just do it, do it all, and just …

David Smooke: It’s almost like the best executor of the first set of innovators.

Paul Andre: Yeah, exactly.

David Smooke: Because you know you have these waves in the beginning, the famous Friendster, Myspace’s …

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: That like at the core of it their pages were very much the same as Facebook.

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: Here’s a picture: it’s your page online and that is the idea.

Paul Andre: Yep.

David Smooke: Everyone has a profile page and you can interact with each other in different ways.  But, you know, their path to the market was so much better, it was, get every single .edu address in the country to use Facebook,  get them early …

Paul Andre: Yep.

David Smooke: At 20, and now this is your page online for life and they did a level of exclusivity to it, only .edu addresses and I think that was brilliant, that was the crowd that wanted it.  Tinder did a good job too using an oncologist to grow.

Paul Andre: Yep.

David Smooke: Tinder, they would send an advocate, one of their co-founders to all the sororities first and she would go sorority saying ‘this is the best new way to look at guys and think about hooking up,’ and once all the girls were on it, all the guys just followed like crazy.

Paul Andre: You know, even like Tinder’s a very, very good case of someone going mobile first or going under the route of something that’s already been out there.  When I was doing my websites and back in 97, 98 …

David Smooke: All these old dating sites too …

Paul Andre: Yeah, like I had something that was as simple as [inaudible:20:39] which was Hot or Not …

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: Basic thing, yes or no, hot or not.  But, within there was, yes, put it out there to the colleges and stuff like that but they went mobile first with it.  It was like, okay, we’re in a whole new generation of people on mobile phones, they’re many people that will not know what Hot or Not was, or is. 

David Smooke: The wording, the verbiage itself, it’s not Hot or Not anymore, it’s swipe left or swipe right.

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: This is literally what you do on the phone, it was very smart.  Like the function on the phone is different, you weren’t swiping left or swiping right with a computer screen but your thumb, this is actually a very easy way to make a decision and how the functionality makes you make decisions which is the phone using your thumb, new verbiage submerged and now everyone’s following them really.

Paul Andre: Yeah, and you’re …

David Smooke: So many swipe left, swipe right people …

Paul Andre: And you’re also taking advantage of the latest technology.  Back then when Hot or Not was around there was no such thing as geo-location or people around you …

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: Everyone now put up their picture and you could be at like in the Philippines or like Europe …

David Smooke: I mean, Zuckerberg solved the problem by hacking the Harvard network and just using students so he knew they were in the area by doing a different work around.

Paul Andre: Yep.

David Smooke: Like they all attend this university as opposed to just everyone working outwards in a circle from where you are, which is really a cool idea.

Paul Andre: Do you see social media as being, obviously we consume it, what are some social media tools or like famous websites that you’d say that probably would produce content?  I mean, yeah, we’re producing content but we’re actually just sharing what we’re doing.  On Twitter I used to say, ‘hey, I’m over here at Starbucks’ or ‘I’m passing the bridge,’ I used to really, really get into it but now it’s more I have a different take on how I use Twitter.  I mean I first used Twitter, I heard about it at a conference …

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: And it was for everyone, it was built very small specifically, I don’t know if this was their main goal but I mean, it was a conference app where I would download the app and you could ask questions and it would show up on the board.  Then, all of a sudden, I’d say maybe just, even just 2 years later I started seeing it in more mainstream, everyone started downloading it and then, now look at it.  It’s like it’s part of our news.

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: It’s part of our lifestyle. 

David Smooke: Yeah, the conferences, that was amazing for Twitter.

Paul Andre: See?

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: I actually thought of Twitter as being more of a productivity tool.  It was for us to solve the problem to like a bunch of conferences like a key note of a few hundred people, you know, there’s going to be questions and not everyone can get all to them …

David Smooke: It’s like passing notes in class.

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: It’s so fun for that.  You know everyone’s immersed in the same piece of content or watching the same show which is how it’s taken off so much on television but you get to without talking and disrupting and the actual watching of the keynote or whatever it is, …

Paul Andre: Yep.

David Smooke: You can participate and also discussion at the same time which is really powerful.  You really had to wait until after before Twitter and talk to people about it after.

Paul Andre: Yeah, and there’s so many things it solves, there’s even at conferences I know everyone has a question, I would have a question, I would be just too shy to raise my hand but you know when I just saw this …

David Smooke: You’ll probably get over that.

Paul Andre: Well no.  That was before.  I’m sure other people have dying questions that like they didn’t want to raise their hand.

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: But if all I had to do was just write it up …

David Smooke: Or you’ll just forget the question by the time you have the opportunity to raise your hand, you forgot the idea.  Twitter allows you to at least record it in some fashion in real time and you can go back to it later or other people can see it. 

Paul Andre: Yeah. 

David Smooke: I mean, at the end of the day, I was also thinking about with all these free social networks the line is like, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.  It’s like they win: whenever they turn these people into content producers.

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: If they’re not content producers then it’s just consumption, you’re in a media site of some kind, aggregating content, but if people interact –  it’s almost like by definition to be a social network you have to turn a certain percentage of your readers and consumers into producers.

Paul Andre: Yep.

David Smooke: Then once this percentage is too high in favor of just consumers, you’re no longer a social media site and you’re now a new type of site.  You’re probably media.

Paul Andre: Yeah, that brings me to the point to where you said we had our users creating content, even in SEO, one good thing that was getting  them ranked, even until today, was user generated content through communities.  It was like all these bulletin boards, these forums …

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: It’s like, people are creating conversation within the board and of solving problems, whether they’re solving problems like if I want to find a fix an error for my computer, I search, I’ll get a community conversation you know and it’s documented on the web.  It’s like solving problems through conversations, it’s just …

David Smooke: It’s empowering.

Paul Andre: Yeah.  Who knows, someone might search social media trends and find this on your website, DavidWalks.

David Smooke: Yeah, and I don’t know exactly what problem I’ll solve for them.  Hopefully they’re just walking on their way to work and they’re a social media professional or they just are curious about the subject before using it and maybe they run into us and they’re like, ‘huh,’ you know that’s one way to think about it but at the same time if they run into us and they’re like, ‘those guys are idiots, at least they were exposed.’  We gave our ideas a shot at the market and that’s fine by me – without a fair shot and a few relevant listeners and readers, you can’t go anywhere.

Paul Andre: Yep.

David Smooke: So what’s your one bold prediction of how social media will be very different say 7 years from now?

Paul Andre: Very different?  It’s already happening now.  I think it’s just we ride, I mean social media just tends to ride on the use of whatever technology comes out.  Say, there might be some social network with everyone that has the Google Glass on, it’s like, I think the trends are going to be on innovation, on actual technology and someone’s going to find a way to unite that group of people or that market or that community.

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: Whether, I mean, I don’t have a hard core prediction but, what’s yours?

David Smooke: I think any one’s really cracked the nut on how to meet new people because there’s so many different ways you can filter by, you know, there’s 700,000 people in this city, then you start filtering by age, interest, location, location at that time, it’s like there’s so many different, you look around here on Market Street and you can see probably 250 people if you do a little birds eye circle and it’s like there’s probably at least 5 people I would enjoy a short conversation with. 

Paul Andre: Right.

David Smooke: But how do I know who those 5 people are and how do I actually have that conversation?

Paul Andre: Right.

David Smooke: I know I can actually approach people which is great but it would also be nice if my phone or an app would just tell me.

Paul Andre: Someone that’s open to conversation.

David Smooke: Yeah, here’s another person you should meet as opposed to me proactively reaching out, talking, messaging, it’s just like bam, you know it’s like the dating sites are trying it, the recruiting sites are trying it, there’s just so much information available but no one’s really nailed how to meet new people.

Paul Andre: Yeah, then again if you refer to dating, I’m sure there’s a lot of other people out there are just willing to meet new people, learn about certain things, maybe just talk. 

David Smooke: Oh yeah, mentorship, friendship, you know there’s tons of reasons to meet people and I … Meetup is kind of cool, by choosing an event and a time you’re self-selecting interests and availability and location.

Paul Andre: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

David Smooke: That’s cool but it’s not… there’s just a lot more there.

Paul Andre: So what do you consider a meet up, is that social networking?

David Smooke: The site itself?

Paul Andre: No, well Meetup and what they’re providing for people.

David Smooke: At the core of it, it’s event listings.

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: At the very core of it, that’s what it is but they’ve made great steps in building communities around types of events - I think we can cross – so once you have a community around a type of event, now you have a group you can reengage with later and they made it pretty social.  You can add pictures, you can add comments, you can connect to people and send them direct messages, but you know it’s, yeah, social event listing site.  I’d have to look at their identifier but that’s what I would call it.

Paul Andre: Yeah, I mean, social media, was social media even around 10 years ago, I mean, that term?

David Smooke: No, I think, well 10 years, yeah, just about.

Paul Andre: Well, yeah.

David Smooke: I guess.  Just about, yeah, 10 years.

Paul Andre: I’m losing how old I am but I mean …

David Smooke: No, that’s real.  If you said it in 2004, you probably wouldn’t, or most people wouldn’t, know that term. 

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: Yeah.  Imagine if you bought Socialmedia.com in 2004.

Paul Andre: Yeah.

David Smooke: You could do nothing with it, it’s just like that’s the big, like when you can really predict a term that’s going to emerge, you know what I mean?

Paul Andre: Oh, yeah.

David Smooke: That’s kind of cool. Or really just jump on its early it’s your like, wow, this terminology is just going to be heavily used.

Paul Andre: But maybe earlier than 2004 because as a domainer, I’ve bought domains since 97, 98 and I’ve been finding some terms I would never have thought people would have got for, I mean, it’s just the way …

David Smooke: Maybe you’re just not that good.

Paul Andre: No, I …

David Smooke: Maybe they just got there first.

Paul Andre: Yeah, but that’s 97, 98.  I’m going by the date you went out, 2004.

David Smooke: Yeah. 

Paul Andre: So.

David Smooke: Yeah, people, I mean there’s a lot of people thinking this way.  It’s almost like if a term has never been bought it’s like, well, no validation at all, maybe I’m really coming out of left field here.

Paul Andre: Yep.  As a domainer I’m actually one of those people that will buy cool domains or something that will you feel like, oh, shit that’s pretty cool.  It’s actually one of first reactions I do, something cool comes up, check the dot com.  It just is, and buy it.

David Smooke: Yeah.

Paul Andre: That’s real estate right there.  Online real estate, you’ve seen domains going for 100,000’s of dollars. 

David Smooke: Yeah, it’s funny like the domain itself has value just like land but then it’s also so much more flexible then land …

Paul Andre: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

David Smooke: Of what you can create with it.  Any site can be hosted on any domain.  It’s exciting you know …

Paul Andre: Yeah, that’s …

David Smooke: You can’t build a skyscraper on 5 acres but you can build a billion dollar site on a ridiculous domain name that no one …

Paul Andre: Yep.

David Smooke: Even considered purchasing. 

Paul Andre: Yeah. 

David Smooke: It’s property man.

Paul Andre: Oh, yeah.

David Smooke: It’s flexible property …

Paul Andre: It’s a domain, domain that’s …

David Smooke: Like malleable assets.

Paul Andre: What’s your domain?  It’s property there.

David Smooke: What’s your spot, yeah.  All right, well let’s wrap things up, remind everyone to visit paulandre.com or misspell Wikipedia with 2 k’s …

Paul Andre: [Apea 33:21].

David Smooke: In order to get redirected.

Paul Andre: That will work.

David Smooke: In order to get redirected to his LinkedIn and learn more.  So, talk to you later.

Paul Andre: Talk to you later dude... There was a lot of sound, I’d like to compare it like, when you get the…