Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’
The Internet: five years ago
2005: social media?
About five years after its launch, last Sunday evening, You Tube announced that they are now receiving two billion hits per day. On their official blog they wrote:
Five years ago, after months of late nights, testing and preparation, YouTube’s founders launched the first beta version of YouTube.com in May, with a simple mission: give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself. [Link to full post]
Not only is the two billion milestone noteworthy, but the fact that the site is five years old is also well worth noting.
There’s a good argument that 2005 was the pivotal year in the shaping of the Internet as we know it. You Tube was founded, Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook up to schools across America, and Yahoo acquired two year-old Del.icio.us and one year-old Flickr.
For the sake of nostalgia, here is what some of these websites looked like back then, five years ago.
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You Tube
Billed rather simply as a digital photo repository back in 2005 – their logo has hardly changed a bit in the last five years. The homepage design obviously owes quite a bit to Google’s, who, in any case, bought the site in November 2006 for $1.65 billion.
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Google
In 2005 Google was already looking fairly grown up and confident. Very few changes were made to this minimalist homepage design until just a few weeks ago.
You’ll spot here that back then Google were busy promoting Froogle, their price comparison service which was later rebranded as Google Product Search.
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Blogger
In May 2005, blogger was already six years old. Therefore it predates Web 2.0 and is one of a few notable survivors of the Dot Com Crash in 2000. It had been acquired by Google in 2003 and by the time of this screenshot it was by far the most popular blogging software available.
In May 2005 they launched Blogger Mobile, which allowed people to blog by text message –making them, by my reckoning, just about two years too early.
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WordPress
WordPress would supplant Blogger in popularity over the next few years. It’s interesting to note, however, their reasons for encouraging people to use their software. ‘You can stop sending mass emails to everyone’, ‘You can archive your thoughts’ and ‘Why the heck not?’
Indeed.
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Facebook
Facebook has retained this familiar feel from the start, but its evolution has been a little more complex than most.
Back in 2005 there were two Facebooks, one for people in college and one for people in high school. All the dots would be joined up over the next year as it began the march that would see it become the most popular site in America.
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The BBC
Back in 2005 I had never written a blog, had never used Facebook and only seen a handful of You Tube videos, but I was already mildly addicted to the Internet. And from a sunny Madrid and a fitful Internet connection, the BBC’s official site was where I spent most of my time.
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The Guardian
And 2005 was a time before guardian.co.uk existed. Back then it was known as the Guardian Unlimited – a website that promised such things as ‘All the headlines from today’s first edition.’
From that I suppose you can summise that the website was still being considered as some kind of digital reflection of the newspaper – and not really a strong publication in its own right.
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Flickr
Flickr now hosts more than four billion images and is the most popular image sharing site on the web. Back in 2005 PC World were offering them some kind words:
‘Cutting edge real-time photo sharing’, they said. They were right.
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And in 2006 … Twitter
Twitter didn’t exist in 2005 and it wouldn’t appear properly until more than a year or so later. Therefore it’s just tagged on to the end of this post. It’s a good demonstation of just what can be done in four years with a scruffily designed website, a clever idea and a willingness to stick with your logo through thick and thin.
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Top image credit: TonVC on Flickr
Screen shots pulled out of the Way Back Machine
On why Gordon Brown calling Gillian Duffy ‘a bigot’ sparked a perfect social media story
The perils of going out for a loaf of bread in Rochdale
Yesterday was an unusual day and one that Gordon Brown will never forget. Personally, I feel quite sorry for him. You can accuse him of being short-tempered, autocratic and blinkered if you will, but one thing that I don’t think Gordon Brown is, is disingenuous. Today that’s exactly how it looks and I hope it doesn’t become the slip that characterises the end of his career. That would be unfair.
As some people have already pointed out, Brown was dreadfully unlucky yesterday. The audio fell straight into the Rupert Murdoch’s hands rather than anyone else’s; the sound was sweet and crisp and Gillian Duffy turned out to be a respectable lady with the perfect background for the Tory press to exploit.
But there was also some other factors that combined to make the incident into a perfect social media story. Here they are:
1. Time
Brown closed his car door a little after midday and Andrew Sparrow reported that ‘Gordon Brown has been caught on a microphone…’ at 12.18pm.
Britons were sat before their computers with their lunch hours approaching – time to discuss, blog, tweet or whatever. For Gordon Brown there was another seven hours of campaigning to go before the evening, and the story had the whole day to play out.
2. Quality content
Shortly after Sky News producer Tami Hoffman had noticed, analysed then broadcast the audio it was being uploaded to streaming sites across the Internet. What’s more, it was high quality.
Within half an hour the video was featured on Brightcove and shortly after that it was uploaded to Audioboo and any newspaper or blogger could feature. With content to link to, people linked – circulating the story far quicker that the television could do alone.
3. Exposure
Social media excels when exposing perceived wrongs. Look at the Trafigura case last September or Jan Moir’s article about Stephen Gately’s death. Now here was the Prime Minister using scandalous language to describe a potential voter.
Just the type of thing to tweet about.
4. Narrative
The story lingered. First Gordon Brown was in Jeremy Vine’s radio studio, then he was back on his way to Rochdale, then he was in Gillian Duffy’s house and then he was on her doorstep, smiling like a Cheshire cat. Many newspapers live-blogged the whole thing and evening into the evening people were still tweeting about whether or not the Sun had paid £50,000 for a story.
It was very much like watching a long episode of Neighbours, albeit with deeper, Scottish accents. At 3.42pm, when Gilliam Duffy’s door swung open, Andrew Sparrow wrote something on the Guardian blog that summed it all up:
“Everyone: the door has opened. This is live blogging at its best. More follows.”
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Image credit: Downing Street
Digital directions and social media life expectancy
Making sense of it all
I’ve begun 2010 thinking a little about social media shelf life and the longevity of digital publications. Just how long will someone last on a particular social media site before they abandon it? How long could/should/might a blog trundle on?
These, I think, are interesting questions. We’re always told how to set things up on the Internet, but we’re very rarely told when to finish something. When is it time to stop?
When it comes to blogs, it seems, far too many are launched with the assured expectation that they are going to roll gloriously onwards into infinity. Therefore they usually evolve to the same familiar rhythm – which often means beginning in an explosion of energy before generally trailing off into obscurity.
I’ve already blogged here about the enjoyable experience of completing the Camervroom blog. It was a happy experience for a number of reasons: that I was experimenting with new technologies, that I was working from unfamiliar surroundings, and (importantly) that I knew that it was a temporary thing.
Camervroom had a very simple narrative arc. It started with the preparations of the car, continued with launch and the journey and concluded at the finish. There was one wrapping up post from my home in Islington and then that was it. Finished.
To end a blog off in that manner was satisfying. A little like finishing a book and slipping it back into the bookshelf, or sending a completed publication away the printers.
You’re left with a sense of achievement and the knowledge that you can take whatever it is that you’ve learnt on to the next project. The nagging blogger’s noose – the one that tends to appear after you’ve exhausted your first creative spurt – is gone, and because your blog is based over a shorter period of time you can ensure that it conforms to that most important of blogging essentials: that it stays niche.
Ok, jumping from one project to another means that you’ll forgo the benefits of pouring all your efforts (and Googlejuice) into a single domain, but as long as you keep your Twitter feed reasonably well updated then it will be easy to signpost new work and take your readership around the web with you.
This, I suppose, is why I think that Twitter will endure. It is the nerve that runs through all of our online projects, knitting them together and giving them context.
It’s understandable that many established (and very good) bloggers are, through page rank, brand recognition and emotional loyalty, wedded to their domains – but it doesn’t mean for those that are just starting out that it is the only way.
Moving from one carefully crafted web project to another is an underused alternative approach to digital publishing that might well suit those who are looking for a dalliance, and wanting to avoid a millstone.
Something to think about, at least.
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Image Credit: PhotoGraham
Politics and Social Media
I’ve already written about paid search and politics, but a far more obvious digital tool for politicians over the next few months is social media.
It’s an obvious and efficient way of politicians (and budding politicians) engaging with their constituents or target audiences to get their message across. Some good examples being:
Ed Fordham’s website
Alastair Campbell’s Blog
Iain Dale’s Diary
Tom Watson’s Twitter Feed
Watching each of these grind into motion over the last year has been interesting and this week it has been satisfying to get a bit of social-media-political-attention for myself.
Clowns and Parks
I live in Islington, just off Pentonville Road. Opposite my flat is Joseph Grimaldi Park, named after the man who invented the identity for the modern clown and who, Joe Frankenstein contends in a recent book, was the very first celebrity.
For interest, here is a snippet about Grimaldi:
Grim-all-day
A man goes into the doctor’s. ‘Doctor,’ he says, ‘can you help me? Life doesn’t seem worth living, and I am shrouded in constant gloom.’ ‘My good man,’ says the doctor, taking a look at the melancholy face before him, ‘there is only one cure for you. You must go to see Grimaldi the clown.’ ‘Sir,’ replies the patient, ‘I am Grimaldi the clown.’
Depressed or not, Grimaldi was a sensation and two centuries on his bones lie in the park opposite my flat.
All good and interesting until workmen arrived a month ago and dug it upside down.
After weeks of muddied shoes and sharp clatters from beyond the window, I wrote on Twitter:
“Oh. And congratulations to Islington Council for transforming the lovely Joseph Grimaldi Park into something that resembles a bowl of porridge”
It was about as much as I had time to say on the subject. It wasn’t a concern but it was an irritant. The kind of latent issue that a councillor/politician would never get to hear about in a letter or at a public forum, but which they might just find out about if they took the time to study the Internet.
And well done to Bridget Fox for doing just that. Within the hour I received an @tweet informing me about plans for the park and estimated deadlines and this morning it was followed up by a blog post.
If you glue those two things together it adds up to about as much direct engagement I’ve had with a politician for years. Mostly my fault, I know – but a lesson for politicians nonetheless. If you want to dig beneath the surface (pun intended) and engage with the apathetic masses – then social media is a pretty good way to go.
I suppose it would be glib and rather self-absorbed of me to suggest that I was going to vote for a politician because I’ve appeared in one of their blog posts. But in a world of beeping computers, identity numbers and automated messages it is comforting to communicate with another directly. And when it comes down to it, that might just make the difference.
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Image Credit: Rich Lewis
Social Media Profiles
Digital You
A short post, but a useful one (I hope).
Any digital identity needs consistency and coherence. So whenever we have a new starter at work I always ask them to secure their online profiles across the most important social media sites.
But which ones? Um. These, I reckon:
1. WordPress (importantly)
2. Tumblr (for blogging)
3. Vimeo (for video)
4. Flickr (for images)
5. Delicious (for bookmarking)
6. Twitter (pointless little messages)
7. Audio Boo (for audio recording)
8. Posterous (for blogging)
9. Friend Feed (an aggregator)
10. You Tube (for video)
So there you go. You’ll notice that facebook isn’t on the list, as to my mind it isn’t really too useful for work. I just hope your name isn’t Peter Moore, or I might just have annoyed you.
But have I missed anything obvious?
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image credit: JMC Photos
Numbers and Social networking
Adding Up
Here’s some maths for a Friday morning:
- I’ve got a 246 ‘friends’ (their word) on Facebook. So far this year I’ve interacted with 14 of them. (5.69%)
- I follow 102 people on Twitter, of which, I’ve interacted with 28 in the last two months. That’s just above a quarter.
Now, let’s compute this with some social anthropology. In a study published in 1992, Professor Robin Dunbar, then of University College London, published an article in the Journal of Human Evolution that proposed a theory that came to be known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’.
Here’s how Wikipedia explains Dunbar’s Number:
Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150. (link to Wikipedia)
Dunbar’s Number was calculated by studying apes, their social networks, and by extrapolating up until he had a relative number for us humans. And if you apply this number of 150 to social media, then the results can be revealing.
Broadly put, our brains can only cope with mental mind mapping for 150 people. So, even if I did nothing else spend my time on Facebook, I still wouldn’t be able to properly follow the activities of all my 246 friends. If you go with Dunbar, it would be biologically impossible.
But if you look at the active numbers of people in either my Facebook or Twitter account, the numbers suddenly become more sensible. 28 on Twitter and just 14 on Facebook (none these, incidentally, overlap). These 42 people constitute my active social media network – a number that I, as a simple primate, can understand.
A bit more maths:
- I have 46 names on my telephone of people that I keep in contact with (I’ve just checked) by telephone or day to day contact and without using social media.
- As I demonstrated earlier I know about 42 people via social media and I, more or less, can understand what they are up to and where they fit in. (88)
- Add to this a collection of family members, office colleagues that I see on a daily basis and other casual contacts that might number around 50 more. (c.138)
Then you are getting something approaching 150. Accuse me of bad maths if you like (I was never any good at it anyway) – but I think that it serves as an interesting approximation.
So what about all the others? The people on Twitter that follow thousands? All the Facebookers with hundreds of friends? The Blip dj’s with scores of listeners? How do they keep up?
The answer is that they don’t. It’s impossible. We just can’t do it. Our brains are not sufficiently well wired to spool a constant stream of information from a vast number of people. But that’s not to say that people haven’t tried.
Jim Connolly and digital burn-out
Social media burn out is a real and dangerous possibility. The most notable example, I think, comes from a marketing specialist named Jim Connolly who went on a famous, high-octane tour of Twitter during the second half of 2008. Connolly’s online marketing strategy was to meet as many people as possible and propel his brand into infinity – and he did this through Twitter.
He followed everyone, and they followed him back. He was polite and useful and helpful and spent vast amounts of time responding to all of his followers’ questions. One quote from his blog notes that:
‘I was amazed to see that even during a fairly quiet period, I was investing an average of 2 and a half hours each day!’
A further quote was even more revealing:
‘The rest of my Twitter time was spent dealing with the hundreds of Direct Messages I get each day and filtering through the hundreds of people who follow me each day; to see from their profile whether or not to follow them back. This is an increasingly time consuming problem, as so many people are now doing that follow / unfollow trick, to attract auto follows and make it look like they have lots of followers.’
Most of the Direct Messages I get on Twitter are people asking me; ‘please share this link with your followers Jim’ or asking me to look at their blog / website and give them some tips. I’m also getting stacks of spam sent to me via Twitter’s Direct Message. This all takes time to review, answer or delete.’
Quite predictably it ended in burn-out. Admirably Connolly held his hands up before his 22,250 followers and declared one day that he couldn’t possibly do it any more. If only Professor Dunbar could have got hold of him, he might have pointed out that it was probably because he was more than 148 times over his golden limit.
Social Media or Broadcast Media?
Let’s not miss the point here. The large numbers of followers, friends, contacts and so on that are associated with social media are, in the main part, to do with advertising and not engagement. Simply put, we are all getting better at broadcasting our own lives. Stephen Fry is an excellent example of this and by most sensible measurements; he is no more engaged in social media than the Queen is.
Fry is remarkably adept at broadcasting his life to the world – through his Twitter account or through his blog. And whilst he does answer individual Tweets and respond to direct messages, I suspect that any real interaction that he had with the public through social media has long since vanished.
There’s nothing at all wrong with how Fry uses social media, but don’t be mistaken: he uses it to broadcast and effectively manage his fan mail. He’s not a long-term component of an online conversation.
The Economist talks about this:
‘Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.’
I want to keep my social media activity useful. I realise that my Facebook account is already a lost cause, but I want to keep my Twittering to the point. To that end I don’t automatically follow everyone who follows me (something I used to do) – I prefer to keep it simple, meaningful and manageable.
Dunbar pointed out that many institutions had been organised around the number 150 – Neolithic villages and the maniples of the Roman Army were notable examples – and it’s good to get some historical perspective. Because, after all, we’re products of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and despite the fact that social media has arrived with a jolt in a few sharp years – we still firmly live in a world where it is impossible to have seven hundred friends.
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Image from Flickr