France recently banned TV and radio show hosts from naming Facebook, Twitter, or other specific sites unless directly referencing a news story involving the companies. The regulation was created to reduce bias for the popular social networks over other striving, lesser known sites.
Apple’s iTunes has benefitted from the phrase “Now available on iTunes” commonly tacked onto advertisements where it was previously customary to simply say “Now available in all good music stores” — which could today be updated to say “online music stores” in order to include other music providers.
Additionally, the phrase “Now available on Amazon.com” has become standard for book promotions, which basically provides free advertisement for the site while ignoring other providers.
Similarly, “Follow us on Twitter” and “Like us on Facebook” have dominated commerce. “Social networks only work when people use the same ones. In other words, they naturally lend themselves to being monopolized,” suggests The Next Web.
Some brand names have now become part of everyday language. Google, for example, has grown so popular that it is commonly used as a verb when describing the act of searching online. TiVo is also regularly used as verb, and sometimes replaces “DVR” in conversation.
The article casts doubt on the actual effects regulation would have on social media monopolies: “…users will typically go where all the action is taking place.”
“The Internet isn’t a monopoly though. It’s an oligopoly consisting of multiple monopolies from different digital industries, and the reason this is happening really isn’t all that complicated,” adds The Next Web. “Success breeds success, something which underpins most monopolies, whether we’re talking about dominant languages, biological species or, indeed, Internet technology companies. Hegemony stems from success, and it’s certainly not unique to the Internet age.”
Google intends for Google+ to become an identity platform for its other services such as Android, Chrome and YouTube to develop an “understanding of who you are,” Brad Horowitz, VP of product told Wired magazine.
“This comes on the heels of comments that Google chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt made earlier this year about how Google+ was intended to be an ‘identity service’ for other projects and services that the company either had in place or was planning to launch,” reports GigaOM. “It wasn’t clear exactly what Schmidt meant by those remarks at the time, but putting them together with Horowitz’s comments, it sounds like Google wants to make Google+ the central repository of everything it knows about you.”
GigaOM compares Google’s desire to “aggregate as much as it can about you and your interests via all the services it offers” to Facebook’s recent improvements in accumulating data through social apps and “frictionless” sharing.
The article contends that “all of this social-activity data and these ‘social signals’ are crucial information that Google needs not only to make its search better — since socially-influenced search is becoming a larger and larger part of how people find things online — but to make its advertising more targeted as well. Google’s giant market share in online advertising has been built on the back of its understanding of ‘intent’ when it comes to search, and without access to the Twitter firehose and Facebook’s walled garden, Google has to effectively create its own sandbox for social activity.”
Social startup Tout offers a Twitter-like microblogging service, but enables users to publish 15-second video clips instead of 140-character text fragments.
“In other words, now anyone can be famous for 15 seconds,” suggests San Jose Mercury News.
When asked how it’s different from the Facebook feature that lets users post video chats, CEO Michael Downing explained the “abbreviated and near-instant nature of ‘touts’ makes them like mini-conversations.”
Endorsements from high-profile users such as Shaquille O’Neal, Mitt Romney and ESPN are helping the service build momentum.
O’Neal is one of many celebrities who have taken to communicating via Twitter (he currently has more than 4 million followers). “But what I’ve been noticing about Twitter lately is that you don’t know who the person you’re talking to really is,” he said. “When you can see my picture, you know it’s me.” O’Neal is so impressed with Tout that he took an ownership stake.
Since launching in mid-April, the San Francisco-based startup has attracted 4 million unique visitors. “It took Twitter two years to hit 1 million visitors,” explains Downing. “We hit it in under 12 weeks.”
Twitter’s 200 million tweets per day are being analyzed to monitor political activity and employee morale, track flu outbreaks and food poisonings, map changes in moods around the world, predict box-office success or failure for new movies, and predict changes in the stock market.
Hewlett-Packard’s Social Computing Laboratory used Twitter to successfully forecast the box office of 24 films by analyzing “the intensity of the word-of-mouth” about them on Twitter. They are now looking at doing the same for other products.
The Twitter users are younger adults, more urban and less likely to have children, but there is enough diversity to make judgements from the Twitter’s 200 million user stream.
Twitter is also being used to manipulate public opinion. “Twitterbots” have been created to automatically generate messages and thereby attract large followings by building relationships with unsuspecting users.
“Network sociologists are worried that these newest contrivances may offer others a powerful way to manipulate people through Twitter on an even larger scale,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Doing this on Twitter with a thousand accounts or a million accounts is the next step,” said Indiana University computer scientist Jacob Ratkiewicz.
Software engineer Joe Hewitt proposed in a recent blog post that Web technologies may need an owner, and the assumption that the Web must not be controlled by anyone is a dangerous one. “The HTML, CSS, and JavaScript triumvirate are just another platform, like Windows and Android and iOS,” he writes, “except that unlike those platforms, they do not have an owner to take responsibility for them.”
He also suggests that “the arrogance of Web evangelists is staggering” since they “place ideology above relevance.”
Standards bodies cannot create the kind of cutting edge platforms developers need like they are doing with iOS, Android and Windows.
“My prediction is that, unless the leadership vacuum is filled, the Web is going to retreat back to its origins as a network of hyperlinked documents,” writes Hewitt. “The Web will be just another app that you use when you want to find some information, like Wikipedia, but it will no longer be your primary window. The Web will no longer be the place for social networks, games, forums, photo sharing, music players, video players, word processors, calendaring, or anything interactive. Newspapers and blogs will be replaced by Facebook and Twitter and you will access them only through native apps.”
Farhad Manjoo, writing for Slate, offers a compelling counterpoint to Facebook’s updated “share everything with everyone” philosophy.
The article suggests that Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for Facebook’s newly-designed profile feature (“it’s called Timeline, and it’s beautiful”) involves encouraging sites to develop social apps within Facebook, a grand vision that could dramatically change our digital lives. On the surface, this sounds like a fascinating idea, but there may be problems that evolve from too much sharing.
“If Facebook’s CEO has his way, everything you do online will be shared by default,” explains the Slate article. “You read, you watch, you listen, you buy — and everyone you know will hear all about it on Facebook.”
The article uses Spotify, Netflix and Hulu to illustrate Zuckerberg’s concept of “frictionless” sharing: “What he means is that I don’t have to bother with the ‘friction’ of choosing to tell you that I like something. On Facebook, now, merely experiencing something is enough to trigger sharing.”
Manjoo does not have privacy concerns or hesitation regarding Facebook’s financial gain based on his personal information. However, the author believes that the “nightmare” of “frictionless sharing” is more about Facebook killing taste. He believes that Zuckerberg is essentially lowering the bar by providing an all-access pass to things we don’t necessarily share with everything because they aren’t worth mentioning in the first place (read: boring).
While Manjoo enjoys sharing and discovering new media via Facebook and Twitter, he fears the day these services no longer serve as tools for navigating recommendations once they are bogged down in minutiae.
“That’s why I welcome any method that makes it easier for people to share stuff,” he writes. “If you like this article, you should Like this article. And even if you hate this article, you should Like this article (add a comment telling your friends why I’m a moron). But if you’re just reading this article — if you have no strong feelings about it either way, and if you suspect that your friends will consider it just another bit of noise in their already noisy world — please, do everyone a favor and don’t say anything about it all.”
TV industry insiders can start monitoring buzz around TV shows through Trendrr’s real-time dashboard, launched this week.
It measures buzz on Facebook, Twitter, GetGlue, and Miso and allows users to compare the show’s performance on the various platforms.
The dashboard can tell users how effective the social networking sites are in building up anticipation for upcoming episodes and how long the buzz lasts the moment the show airs.
It can also tell which show is garnering the most buzz, show top markets and hash tags, and explore Twitter users tweeting about the show.
“Trendrr and its parent company Wiredset have been tracking how well TV shows fare in social media for quite some time, and the company claims to count half of the top 25 cable networks as its customers,” reports GigaOM. “Its most ambitious project so far has been the Weather Channel’s new social media initiative, which incorporates curated tweets into the network’s website and on-air programming.”
Twitter has announced that venture capitalists Bijan Sabet and Fred Wilson, two of the company’s earliest investors, will be leaving Twitter’s board of directors.
Additionally, Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhury confirmed his departure, ironically enough, through his own Twitter account.
“So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. Twitter was an amazing experience & even greater set of people,” tweeted Chowdhury. (The first sentence is a reference to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” spoken by hyper-intelligent dolphins on their flight from the end of the world, reports VatorNews.)
The departures mark the latest in a series of related moves in what Vator refers to as a “mass exodus” that “reveals a leaky ship.”
Two of the company’s co-founders, Biz Stone and Evan Williams recently resigned from day-to-day operations (Williams remains on the board) and CTO Greg Pass left in May. Also, four product managers have reportedly been dismissed.
Other reports suggest the departure of the two directors may be less about a “leaky ship” and more about financial restructuring. “The person familiar with the matter said their departures were related to the reduction of their firms’ stakes in Twitter as part of a financing round in August,” reports The Wall Street Journal. Twitter recently announced it had raised a significant round of financing, putting the company’s worth at $8 billion.
Americans currently spend more than 22 percent of their online time engaged with some form of social media, indicates a new report from Nielsen.
According to the research company’s “State of the Media: The Social Media Report,” these networkers spent 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook in May of this year (following Facebook was Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter and LinkedIn).
With 70 percent of users now shopping online, social media has become a crucial tool for many companies, says Nielsen executive Radha Subramanyam. “Social media is becoming increasingly mainstream,” she notes, and as a result, “there’s a need for companies to engage even more strategically in the space” than they already do.
It is interesting to point out that in regards to the Facebook tracking, 62 percent of the visitors were females. Additionally, while more women than men were reported to watch video clips on blogs and social networks, men streamed more videos and spent more time actively watching them.
Kinetik has made social discovery easier with its free iPhone app that helps users weed through the massive collection of available apps. It is designed to streamline the search for relevant iPhone apps based on users’ selected apps and other users’ feedback of apps.
“Just load up Kinetik, choose an app that you have downloaded and then you can leave a comment about the app, then share it to Twitter and Facebook,” reports The Next Web. “As you add friends via your social networks and inside of the app itself, you can see recommendations that your friends have made too. There’s even an online profile for each user, where you can see the apps that they’ve shared, commented on and the like. You’ll also see apps that are trending on Kinetik.”
Kinetik will compete with similar offerings such as AppShopper and AppsFire, but TNW likes its chances: “I’ve tried loads of different ways to find new apps. I can tell you that Kinetik is one of the best ways I’ve found yet. I’ve had the chance to play with it for the past couple of weeks while it was in beta and it’s slick, useful and really quite fun.”
The New York Giants claim to be the first NFL team to introduce live, realtime Twitter updates into broadcast TV coverage.
The team will display fans’ tweets during games via video boards and digital displays at Giants stadium, while fans watching at home will see realtime Twitter updates as part of the game’s graphics.
The Giants are collaborating with Mass Relevance, the firm that will aggregate and deliver the Twitter posts to the in-stadium displays, TV broadcasts and Giants.com website.
I saw this feature this week during NBC’s coverage of the Giants-Jets game. I found it to be an unnecessary distraction that occasionally obstructed my view and I didn’t read a single tweet that added value to my viewing experience. When I first submitted this story, I commented: “Based on my experience during last night’s game, this is my question: Who can I pay to make this go away?”
However, I understand why this may become popular. Perhaps the concept would be better served by delivering only to those fans actively seeking social interaction.
Despite having no host on Sunday, MTV’s 2011 Video Music Awards ramped up audience engagement through social media.
MTV delivered pictures and videos to their audience in realtime through their second screen application and social media channels.
Fans could track what celebrities were tweeting about, and who was tweeting the most. The application also showed which celebrities and content generated the most buzz. (Celebrities who did not tweet during the event could have missed out in a big way.)
The awards program scored its highest-ever ratings, pulling in 12.4 million viewers. “Not only was this year’s show the most-watched in the history of the Video Music Awards’ 27-year history,” reports Rolling Stone, “but it was also the highest-rated telecast in the 30-year history of the network.”
TechCrunch reports that a new startup named Joint is aiming to address the concerns of Twitter users who are “badly in need of a better way to facilitate realtime, private, and longer-form conversations.”
Twitter’s general philosophy so far has been to keep its UI simple and rely on third party developers to add features.
That’s where Joint comes in with its solution that “essentially turns any Twitter hashtag into an IRC-like chat room, which is integrated with a realtime hashtag stream,” indicates TechCrunch.
This enables different social interactions, including a front-and-center realtime group chat feature. “Joint could become a very useful resource for people looking to easily congregate and discuss ongoing situations like hurricanes, protests, or events, live, from any location,” suggests the post.
TechCrunch adds: “Joint and its team isn’t affiliated with Twitter in any way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the social network comes knocking at their door at some point down the road.”
Twitter has released its Bootstrap platform to better compete in the ever-changing app market and renew its ongoing efforts with developers.
The platform will provide a set of CSS and HTML tools for creating apps.
“At its core, Bootstrap is simply CSS, but built with Less, an easy-to-use pre-processor that provides more power and flexibility than standard CSS,” reports Digital Trends. “With Less, a range of features like nested declarations, variables, mixins, operations, and color functions become available.”
“Bootstrap remains very easy to implement; just drop it in your code and go. Compiling Less can be accomplished via Javascript, an unofficial Mac application, or via Node.js,” explains Twitter via its blog post. “Second, once complied, Bootstrap contains nothing but CSS, meaning there are no superfluous images, Flash, or Javascript. All that remains is simple and powerful CSS for your web development needs.”
Twitter is introducing user galleries that integrate with third-party services such as TwitPic, Instagram and yFrog to display a user’s 100 most recent photo tweets.
This is the first feature Twitter has built upon its recently-launched native image sharing, launched earlier this summer.
“We think the user galleries feature will be good for advertisers, who now have greater incentive to include cool pictures in their tweets,” explains Matt Graves, Twitter’s director of communications.
ReadWriteWeb reports: “…considering Twitter’s need to monetize, bringing multimedia in-house and attracting more users to the website, rather than third-party clients, could be key to Twitter’s future business plans.”