The Value Of Partnership

All for one, one for all. - The Three Musketeers

Through the first two posts, 'Failure To Launch' and 'Pebble In The Ocean', we explored a little of my background and the experience of releasing an app into the Apple App Store in the current market. Today we'll pull into a rest stop and observe the flow before us, specifically looking at the value of partnership to the experience. Before we dive into the details I should perhaps frame the discussion through an explanation of a couple of my partnership experiences, both tight and loose.

I would describe a tight partnership experience as one where you are directly working one on one with one or more partners for a given goal which is usually well defined. The team of partners here at Binary Dawn, for example, are working together very closely to provide entertaining products for those who own mobile devices, more specifically the iPhone and iPod Touch. The value that each member brings to the table is directly felt and experienced by the others as without an equitable effort by the whole team, the product of Binary Dawn would be nothing at all.

A loose partnership experience on the other hand we can see evolving around us. Many years ago I participated in the local electronic bulletin board, or BBS, scene. Each day I would log in using my Commodore 64 and modem to check the message boards, the file uploads, and play games such as 'Trade Wars' and later 'Yankee Trader'. The local BBS's I became a member of had anywhere from forty members to hundreds of members. Sometimes to retrieve certain files or game walkthroughs, a long distance call would be made to some 'far off' place in the United States. That BBS would have many hundreds or even thousands of members, however contact with them was brief and extremely indirect at best, perhaps just being listed next to a locals name in the connection log. While value was derived if information was gained or files were downloaded, that value was tiny and the cost to gain it was high.

While the technologies were different and the communities smaller and more tightly knit, certainly the talk of 'social media' and 'joining the conversation' are but extensions of those types of loose partnerships that already existed. Today reaching out for information is as hard as a search on google and participating in the conversation is as hard as tweeting, following and re-tweeting. The value may be indirectly derived, but there is a lot there to be had. It is with that perspective on partnership that I join the conversation in the hopes that my voice adds value to the stream that each one of you has flowing past each day.