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So What If Obama Thinks Information Is A Distraction?
May 14th
People where surprised when Obama came with his remarks about information and distraction. After all, he has a Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook page and was very active on social media before the elections. So what does this comment really mean? A shift in US technology policies going towards utility rather than entertainment?
Well, Obama also said something about technology as a tool for empowering and emancipating communities. What does that mean? Does this mean that he is OK with social media but that he feels it should be used to lead to constructive action in the real world?
My opinion is that this could be a new era for social media. I don’t think Obama wants to shift American policies but rather express something everybody feels in some way.
Celebrity Friendship: Turning Twitter Into A TV Show
Apr 18th
If we believe its blog post, Twitter is not meant to be a TV show. But what do we find when we look at Twitter’s suggestions? For news, we get Slate, CBS, CNN and Larry King. For funny, we get Conan O’Brian. It all looks like Twitter is an extension of traditional media. But how did this happen? Celebrity friendship! Celebrities are those that are the most followed on Twitter. It seems like everyone on Twitter is befriending a celebrity. Or is it a small group that follows no one else but celebrities? Of course, we can’t really answer this question unless we take a close look at the network structure on Twitter. Given the size of the network and the little effort it takes to follow somebody, we can bet that it’s one hell of a huge network graph. However, one thing is sure: those who have more followers will have a greater audience for what they say than those who don’t.
Let it be purely on mathematical basis,one having millions of followers is guaranteed that a large number of people will be exposed to one’s tweets. Don’t forget, Twitter is real time. If you follow a hundred people who happen to tweet at a high and constant rate, you will have to be on Twitter constantly to make sure you don’t miss a thing. Since nobody can really be on Twitter constantly, it means that there will only be a fraction of one’s followers who will see a tweet. In other words, a Tweet will get attention only for a very short period of time, unless there are a lot of people who see that tweet in that short period and that they retweet it. Thus the value of having tons of followers.
This is the problem with celebrity friendship. Everyone being friends with celebrities means that celebrities are the ones that have a voice on Twitter. Other people’s tweets will be buried under the heavy noise generated by the millions who follow and retweet celebrities’ none sense. To make my case more dramatic, a close study of retweeting rate vs number of followers shows that those with more followers are less likely to retweet one of their own friends! Isn’t that awful? Ashton Kutcher is probably the most generous celebrity when it comes to retweeting and he is way below average when it comes to retweeting others. As a result, Twitter ends up being just a broadcasting platform for those who already have one: TV. Befriending celebrities is definitely not a win-win situation.
Does Twitter Offer Anything Besides Following Celebrities?
Mar 28th
Twitter is great for celebrities. If we look at both the number of followers and retweets received, celebrities are among the top Twitter users. This is something that annoys me. Twitter is an open communication platform which means that it should give voice to everybody. However, those who flood traditional media end up having an omnipresence on other social media. As a result, social media becomes an extension of traditional media. TV viewers are first fed with stuff on Entertainment Tonight and then start commenting about that stuff on social media. It is a convergence of traditional and social media towards the same kind of useless nonsense about the silly life of celebrities.
After celebrities, other known faces take the second spot on Twitter. A-list journalists for instance happen to have a lot of followers. So once again, the propaganda machine is doing a great job of having all kinds of media converge on the same subjects. Is there a way out of this situation? I believe so, but it is going to take time.
A Forrester report shows that 70% of people on Twitter are spectators. When a spectator signs up with Twitter for the first time, he is offered to follow a list of people who are celebrities. For this person, it is only a natural to follow celebrities because his other source of information does not expose him to anything else that celebrities. This is the first obstacle to real social media: people just don’t know where to start since traditional media has kept them in the dark about a lot of real issues.
The second obstacle to real social media is time and effort spent by alternative sources of information to reach people and attract their attention. Since people are used to a certain kind of conversations that are dominant on TV, new ideas are marginalized and it is going to take time before people can find meaning in them. The danger is that Twitter and the Internet in general are cheap media but it doesn’t mean that competition is free. Traditional media can also broadcast for low costs and they have the kind of muscle to direct people to their websites. However, the possibility is there for innovative communicators to broadcast new ideas with relatively low costs. Once every a while, when someone will be tired of the same old opinions being exchanged on CNN or the Wall Street Journal, he or she might try something new and here we go. A new person joins the crowd of those who wanna do something good with social media.
Google Wave Follow Feature: Social Media Market Penetration Strategy
Feb 6th
Facing increasing danger coming from Facebook as number one website on the planet, Google has to do something about positioning itself against social media. The easiest thing to do for the giant was to use its existing capabilities, i.e. information retrieval, to index social networks. Google will become a social search engine and a real-time search engine.
But all this is not enough in my opinion. There is something that social media do that search engines cannot do and that is offering interaction between users who are holders of knowledge and who are willing to share it. Of course, Google has Friend Connect and has also bought Orkut to have social media products in its portfolio, but those are definitely not competition to Facebook. So Google has to come up with something different, something that offers new communication capabilities to users. Well, that thing is Google Wave.
Google claims that the Wave is chatting 2.0. This is mainly because 1) your ‘waves’ are broadcast, 1) what you type is broadcast in real-time, and 3) you can follow waves. So basically, we could say that Google Wave is Live Messanger meets Twitter! Now the analogy with Live Messanger is not so important. What really matters is that Google Wave can do something that Twitter cannot do so well: instant messaging. While it is possible to use Twitter for instant messaging, things get complicated when you want to follow a stream of conversation when you have of a lot of friends and followers. In other words, Google Wave is disruptive to Twitter’s domination of the broadcast-based communication model that it is dominating. My opinion is that Google can slowly take pieces of market away from Twitter and having a strong network of application developers complement the platform is going to be very helpful.
Unpaid Labor: Daily Tasks For Social Media Junkies
Dec 19th
I came across an interesting TechCrunch article about how social media transforms all of us into affiliate marketers. Of course, like all TechCrunch articles who are ads in reality, this one is about a new Amazon affiliate marketing program. However, it could also be seen as a caricaturization of what would happen if we all had to endorse a brand in order to be able to surf the Internet.
I wrote this article because I feel like social media has reached a point where platforms are gaining more than its users. Social media by itself is nothing without all that user generated content. It works only when people start using it and create content. And people create content for free because in exchange, they can communicate, collaborate and have fun by using the platform they build. The platform designers and maintainers on the other hand have to make sure they delivers the infrastructure necessary for its user to achieve the aforementioned goals. So there is some kind of an agreement as everyone seems to be in a win-win situation…or do they?
The need for balance
Can please someone bring balance to social media?
Users who generate content gain only under the condition that the balance between what they gain and give is not broken. If for some reason, users waste their time on things that are not really useful to them, the balance is broken. For instance, the presence of malicious agents inside the platform could have a perverse effect on that balance people have to spend more time on the platform because they have to avoid unwanted interaction with those malicious agents. Keeping this balance is one of the duties of the platform. It has to be able to regulate itself to make sure that malicious agents have decreasing incentive in harboring anti-social behavior. Of course, it is up to the regular users to take all precautions to avoid malicious users, but if the platform is flooded by the latter, regular users will not have enough incentive to use the platform.
Let’s get to reality
Taking this need for regulations into account, lets now consider major social media platforms and see what they do to keep that balance. Let’s start with Facebook. Well, things don’t really look good for Facebook since it has changed its privacy settings aiming for a more open network. The funny thing is that some people inside Facebook don’t really find these changes to be very relevant. The result of this decision from Facebook will be that malicious agents will have access to more information and will be able to target users in a more effective way. So clearly, Facebook is breaking the balance here. It is saying to parasites of all sorts: “Hey guys, I’m opening up the house for all y’all. Just come an take whatever you can. Make sure I get a bit more traffic though…”
Let’s now examine Twitter. In Twitter, the whole concept of allowing users to follow other users is a license to spam. If you have the option of receiving an email every time someone follows you, you are subjecting yourself to spam. Why? Because you will go visit that user’s account and will be exposed to it’s spam if the user is a spammer and is using the mass following technique. It’s like if you are in a public place and someone starts to follow you and say things like: “there is a great sale at…”. This is abuse. Here again, not only Twitter didn’t do anything to prevent this to happen, its whole platform is based on spam. As a result, only one thing can happen and that is the balance is broken.
The case with unpaid labor
Get ready for famine…
So now that honest users are second class citizens inside a platform they have helped to build, what is left for them to do? Nothing more than unpaid labor. Yes. Unpaid labor. Honest users are condemned to tweet, update their statuses and post pictures of themselves only to become more target to unwanted advertising. And there is nothing they can do about it because the whole platform is built for that purpose. If you consider that 90% of tweets are created by 10% of the users, you must wonder why these guys put all that effort? Well, the answer is very simple: the platform itself encourages that kind of behavior: anti-social behavior. And what is more anti-social than a group of people spamming another group of people who happen not to have a clue about what is happening to them.
Wanted: Killer Map-Based Mobile Application
Oct 5th
There is something easy to think of: a map-based mobile application. Of course, what this website would do is to let the mobile device user discover its surrounding thanks to that application.
While this is pretty straightforward to think of for most creative minds, what is more complicated to accomplish is to bring enough information on a map and still be usable. This problem becomes increasingly difficult for dense areas.
There is also another issue: the relevancy of the service for local people. The thing is that local people already know their surrounding and would not need this kind of application that much. It is more useful for people on the go. As a result, there will be a kind of ceiling on the kind of traffic that map-based applications can gather.