Video has more than a half century of sales experience under its belt, but now that YouTube has become one of the most popular search destinations it's time more organizations utilize its power.  Salesforce has almost 1,000,000 views on less than 1000 videos, Google educates all of their new features and products with educational cartoons and smart small businesses do the same.  Educating potential customers on your industry with a helpful video like Salesforce's 'What is Cloud Computing?' is a great way to build trust and credibility.  You don't need a media team to provide something great; a $200 flip camera, some creativity and the knowledge others want that you possess is all that's required.

Here's the New Yorker's engaging video selling their iPad app

I've become frustrated with a lot of products and services lately and am making a declaration that the four core features that will make or break any experience is whether it's fast, useful, simple and stable(FUSS).  Let me walk through some of my reasoning:

1) My internet connection - I've lived in my house for four years and have had three different ISP's.  Cable, DSL and most recently have switched to Clear.  All I want is a stable 3-6 Mbps down and 1Mbps up(these are speeds of downloading and uploading information if you're unaware).  I don't want 25 Mbps at peak speeds if that means I have to live with sub-1 Mbps at other times.  I don't want to constantly tweak my hardware and reset modems and check for signal strength.  I just want it to work as i'm told it's supposed to.

2) Digg.com - This is a social news website i've been reading for five years to get tech and other news.  I go on and off with how often I visit the site, but I am a creature of habit and have been a loyal reader for a long time.  Recently they changed to a new version and the site is down almost every time I visit.  I'm going to get my news one way or another, in this case i've gravitated towards news.ycombinator.com and reddit.  As I said before, i'm a creature of habit and if these new sites are my new habit, Digg may have lost me permanently.

These two experiences recently have made me think about my laziness as a consumer and how quickly I will change direction if you don't give me what I want.  I won't even give the satisfaction of a text message breakup, I'll just be gone.  I'm sure most other mainstream consumers are the same way as I see the same patterns when i'm the service provider.  Do you find that that FUSS is applicable to most products and services?  Is there anything that should be added or taken away?

Whether you realize it or not, Apple is building a full featured social network that will serve as an incredibly viable Facebook competitor once all is said and done.  Yes they have released Ping and everyone realizes that it's pretty weak in its current iteration, but it will get better.

What people are overlooking is that Game Center was also released yesterday.  It allows me to invite friends via my phone's address book, create status updates and invite friends to compete against me with games that we both have.  If I don't have a game a friend has, it shows me the name and price of the game so I can purchase it.

Let's compare Facebook to Apple. Facebook has 500 million potential people to connect with and makes almost $1bill selling ads.  Facebook realizes that gaming is a great way to keep people using the site and create a revenue stream with Facebook credits to buy in game items.  So Facebook has the social graph but lacks in a strong development community and users credit cards.  Apple has tens of millions of devices in people's hands and 160 million people with Apple ID's who are already familiar and comfortable with purchasing through Apple's ecosystem(Apple has paid $1bill developers through app sales).  They just turned on Ping and Game Center to begin building their own social graph that relates to music and games that will inevitably gravitate towards TV, movies and books as well.  Apple has the hardware, the development community and users credit cards, but lacks a strong social graph.

Seems to me Apple can easily create the social graph as people inherently have the desire to share music and games with friends.  If they move forward with giving MobileMe away for free(rumor), they'll have the beginnings of the rest of the package.  Throw iChat and Facetime in the mix and we also have text/video chatting capabilities.

What am I missing?