Social Media In Full Flush

A study of 3,000 people conducted by London's Science Museum  set out to prove how important clean drinking water but came up with results that were even more edifying.

What the survey actually proved was how pervasive social media has become in our everyday life. The British would rather forgo the use of a flushing  toilet than go without Facebook according to the results.

They'd even cast aside their shoes to ensure that they had Facebook access and a decent internet connection.

Not surprisingly for those of us who have lived or visited Britain during one of its wet summers, 'sunshine' ranked at #1.

Google is almost as important as a good diet of fresh fruit although Twitter languishes at the bottom of the list of fifty items.

The list of 'must haves' has a very 'techy' feel to it. Flat screens and mobile phones rank higher than a wedding ring which probably goes some way to explain the country's high divorce rate.

Here is the list in ranked order:

   1. Sunshine
   2. Internet connection
   3. Clean drinking water
   4. Fridge
   5. Facebook
   6. NHS
   7. Cooker
   8. Email
   9. Flushing toilet
  10. Mobile phone / smartphone
  11. Tea and Coffee
  12. Washing machine
  13. Shower
  14. Central heating
  15. Painkillers
  16. Fresh vegetables
  17. Vacuum Cleaner
  18. Kettle
  19. Sofa
  20. Shoes
  21. Fresh fruit
  22. Google
  23. Car
  24. Hair straighteners
  25. Public transport
  26. Laptop
  27. Chocolate
  28. DVD Player
  29. Wristwatch
  30. Make-up
  31. Flat screen TV
  32. Wedding ring
  33. Tumble dryer
  34. Bottled water
  35. Ebay
  36. Bicycle
  37. Ipod
  38. Air conditioning
  39. Disposable nappies
  40. Light bulbs
  41. Spell-check
  42. Sat Nav
  43. Push-up bra
  44. Nintendo Wii
  45. iPad
  46. Gym Membership
  47. Season ticket to your football club
  48. Freezer
  49. Xbox
  50. Twitter

The Museum's Exhibition Manager, Sarah Richardson is reported as saying: 

"Brits are obsessed by the weather, so it’s not surprising sunshine was rated as the top thing we couldn’t live without. But to say you can’t live without material things over drinking water is crazy"

Related articles

• Facebook Comes in 5th on the "50 Things You Couldn't Live Without" List (blogworld.com)

Consumer Confidence Slips

Not good news for retailers. Nielsen Wire reports the re emergence of recessionary attitudes.  Their key findings are:

• 58% of global online consumers said they are still in a recession – the most in the past year. More than half believe they will still be in a recession in a year’s time.
• 31% of U.S. consumers said they have no spare cash for discretionary spending, along with 25% of Middle East/Africa consumers and 22% of Europeans.
• U.S. fell five index points to 78, two points lower than the 80 points recorded at the height of the recession in the first half of 2009.
• Indian consumers, despite a five point quarterly decline, remained the most positive.
• Largest confidence declines in Q2 were recorded in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which had enjoyed the biggest increases in Q1 2011.
• Increasing utility bills and inflation again eclipsed the economy and job security as main concerns in Europe.
• Latin America consumer confidence edges up one index point to 91.

Related articles

• U.S. Consumer Confidence Now Lower Than At Height Of Global Recession (huffingtonpost.com)
• Inflation hits consumer confidence (mirror.co.uk)

Our Facebook Habit

 

Social networking use has doubled since 2007. Non-social sites are fighting a losing battle when it comes to online user preference.  As this chart clearly demonstrates Facebook is not just growing in addition to the rest of the Web, it is actually taking patronage away from other sites and growing at the rest of the web's expense.

Ben Elowitz, Founder and CEO, Wetpaint defines the 'rest of the web' as:

"the 'document Web,' based on how Google and other Web architectures view its pages as documents, linked together. But increasingly, it might as well be called the “searchable Web” since it’s accessed predominantly as a reference, and navigated primarily via search".

Instead of the searchable web we now have a fully connected digital life.

As Elowitz explains:

"Now, the Web knows who we are (identity), is with us at all times wherever we go (mobile), threads our relationships with others (social), and delivers meaningful experiences beyond just text and graphics (video)."

The implications of this quantum shift for publishers of content are profound.  The old searchable web as we knew it is struggling, while the new, connected social web is sweeping all before it.

Facebook is the new docking station for our human interaction as Search Engine Optimistion (SEO) a la Google is becoming increasingly less relevant.

Facebook is already receiving three times more users minutes per month than Google acording to ComScore and this trend will continue.

Facebook is now #1 in the advertising campaigns although competion remains fierce.

Other social network platforms also struggle to catch up with Facebook although LinkedIn, Tumblr and Twitter all hit record highs in May, 2011.

LinkedIn now attracts 33.4 million U.S. visitors, more than Twitter’s 27 million and Tumblr’s 10.7 million. Tumblr is the fastest-growing of the three companies though, boasting 166% growth in the last year. LinkedIn’s U.S. audience rose by a strong 58% in the last twelve months. (Source: ComScore).

The once popular NING platform ceased to be a free option in 2010 and has just announced a 27% increase in its base fees for their NINGPlus subscription.  This is guaranteed to turn off even more of its former users as such platforms wilt in the shadow of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Related articles

• Why SEO Disgusts Me - It's getting ugly
• Facebook Can Kill Google Completely (businessinsider.com)
• Facebook, Google & Beyond: Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz & Ben Elowitz of Wetpaint Debate the Future of Information and Relationships (xconomy.com)

Social Media and Cyber Warfare

Security threats have been on the rise ever since the death of Osama bin Laden. These threats vary from spam attacks to very serious politically motivated, foreign nation attacks. According to Charles Dodd, a government consultant for cyber defense, social networks are adding to this string of attacks because terrorists are using them to find information and recruit others to join their cause.

He also points out that these terrorist camps are "well-versed in how to get past our good senses," which is why they are reaching out on places consumers are comfortable, such a social networks. Another challenge involved is privacy concerns, which creates a two-sided problem.
Source: WebProNews

Not that governments can count upon the accuracy of what they are viewing in social media. As Paolo Passeri in his article on the Consumerization of Warfare states:

The main security concern relies in reputation, a bless and a curse for Social Networks. As already mentioned, in the specific circumstance the tweets of war were checked with “traditional” methods (anyway this is already an advantage since it is easier to check the veracity of a received information, rather than probing satellite images search for enemy outposts), but, generally speaking in absence of verification means, there is no guarantee concerning the truthfulness of a tweet, which, for instance might have been modified or manipulated up to the point of reversing the original content.

Related articles

• Consumerization of Warfare (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
• MI 6 Opens Cyber Attacks on al-Qaeda. (ramanan50.wordpress.com)
• China Admits to Assembling a 30-Strong Team of Elite Cyber Commandos (techland.time.com)

Cutting Your Losses

MySpace has been finally been sold and for the miserly sum of $US35 million. That's a huge loss for News Corporation and according to reports, 50% of current staff will be laid off.

The reason for the site's rapid demise appears ot be due to a combination of "poor management, or a need to hit revenue targets once News Corp. took over, or a bottleneck in the technology department, or lack of resources given to their division, or a poor public relations effort, etc." according to Hypervocal's Lee Brenner.

Entertainer Justin Timberlake who has taken a stake in MySpace believes the platform still has the potential to be the place on the Web where “fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect.”

Related articles

• Justin Timberlake buys ownership stake in MySpace (digitaltrends.com)
• Digital Rupert's bumper $545m loss (go.theregister.com)

Sparks, Circles And Hangouts

Say one thing about Google; it never gives up. Faced by increasingly daunting competition from Facebook the Google team has had another go at a social platform - the Google+ Project.

A small number of people are testing the project, but Google says that it "won't be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone."

Unfortunately when registering interest the project so that I could be notified when it came online, all I got was the 404 server error and the image of the dysfunctional robot (at right)!

Google has thus failed to make inroads in social networking front and its most recent intitiative in February of last year - Google Buzz - was a bit of a damp squibb which failed to ignite the online passions.  What Google Buzz did achieve were numerous compaints about privacy which resulted in a reprimand from the US Federal Trade Commission.

So will Google+1 fare any better?

Its most impressive new feature is 'Hangout' which is group video and could potentially be a big competitor for Skype Video.  Google says:

"With Google+ we wanted to make on-screen gatherings fun, fluid and serendipitous, so we created Hangouts. By combining the casual meetup with live multi-person video, Hangouts lets you stop by when you're free, and spend time with your Circles. Face-to-face-to-face"

Apart from this functionality I don't think Facebook will feel seriously threatened by Google +1.

One Reason Google+ Needs To Be A Hit

Related articles

• Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web
• Google's Facebook Competitor, The Google+ Social Network, Finally Arrives (searchengineland.com)
• Google+ Project (techcrunch.com)
• SlashGear 101: What is Google+, Circles, Huddle? (slashgear.com)

Hair Of The Dot. Dog

Dot.BMW, Dot.dog and Dot.Singapore may soon become three of many new domains now that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) the nonprofit Internet coordinating body has approved the development.

The only catch is that a  person, company or government wanting to secure such a domain-name suffix will need to fork out the princely sum of $185,000 to make their application and this will put such an initiative beyond the budgets of many SME's.

This however is not the end of the cost.  For having secured the domain, there is then an annual fee to Icann of about $25,000, among other costs such as hosting and domain management

Registering a new extension for your company is an excellent branding idea but the cost of doing so and maintaining it will be prohibitive for most.

So the Dot.Com party is finally a thing of the past and we have entered (to quote the WSJ) the age of Dot. Anything.

Will this development make it easier for the consumer, or more difficult as they search through an ever expanding array of domains for the company or service that they seek?

Going to the Dot.Doctor will never be easier.

Read All About It

While a plethora of new domains might make finding relevant information more of a challenge, a new service from the Newseum allows a reader to feel the pulse of the world through an interactive map of newspaper front pages.

Front pages of the World - Flash version

Through a special agreement with more than 800 newspapers worldwide, the Newseum displays these front pages each day on its website. The front pages are in their original and unedited form and are viewable in either the Flash or Bing Beta versions.  Personally I prefer the latter (see below) as the pop-up windows are easier to navigate.

Bing Beta version

Related articles

• Brand name Top Level Domains coming (zdnet.com)
• ICANN Approves Generic Top-Level Domains: New Era of Innovation or A Flood of Spam? (readwriteweb.com)

On For The Ride

Yet another company has beaten the proposed Facebook / Skype partnership to the punch.  They have plans to enable free telephone calls via Facebook but maybe leaving their run a little late.

Bobsled follows Jajah, who launched a similar service several days earlier.  So far there has been no further updates or response from Skype on the progress of their Facebook offering.

Bobsled is a new brand from T-Mobile aimed at providing Facebook’s 500 million plus users worldwide with free, one-touch calling to their Facebook friends from a personal computer and through the social platform’s chat window.

Users will also be able to send voice messages to their friends either privately or via their ‘walls'.

This free download is available for all Facebook users and is repsonse to a recent survey by conducted by Vivox and T-Mobile in March 2011, which found that 88% of Facebook users surveyed want voice chat capabilities within the site.

Brad Duea, senior vice president, T-Mobile USA says:

"Bobsled by T-Mobile takes our communications services innovation to a whole new dimension, bringing simple and cost-effective connections to more than half a billion people overnight, allowing people on Facebook to more easily connect and giving voice to social networking. Our new Bobsled brand will evolve in the coming months to provide even more ways for people to connect, no matter what platform, device or mobile provider they are using."

Bobsled is a partnership between T-Mobile and Vivox. Previously Vivox's technology, which is built on "voice over internet protocol," has been used primarily by a computer gamers who use it to talk to fellow gamers.

Vivox claims it has 52 million users through its partners like Sony and Electronic Arts and this new partnership with T-Mobile will expand its global reach significantly.

Once downloaded, customers can use the Bobsled application for Facebook to place voice calls to their friends through Facebook Chat with just one click.

As a Facebook user you can make calls to to your friends even if they don't also have the app installed. All that is needed on your and their computers is either a microphone and speakers, or a headset.

There is voicemail if the person you call doesn’t pick up and Bobsled plans to produce further enhancements such as video chat, and the ability to call outside Facebook and connect with cell phones and landlines in a similar fashion to Skype.

Related articles

• Facebook app to allow phone calls (boston.com)
• Vivox and T-Mobile turn Facebook into a phone company (venturebeat.com)
• T-Mobile Bobsled Enables Voice Calls To Facebook Friends (huffingtonpost.com)
• Download T-Mobile Bobsled App To Enable Voice Calling on Facebook Chat (mydigitallife.info)