A quick post to capture a few thoughts on what I observe re: social media prognostications and insights from people with an interest in this area. I am not interested in bashing social media gurus – like anything there’s people who are opportunistic and see an area where they can make money – and away they go – that’s life and it happens. I’m also completely bored listening to so-called experts pour scorn on anybody else who shows a professional interest in the area, as if they have a monopoly on the internet – give me a break – just because you’ve been writing a blog for a couple of years doesn’t give you the right to ridicule someone else for expressing an interest. Regarding social media, for me, its not so much about the specific tools (although they are very interesting too), but its much more about the behaviours that these tools have given rise to that is so phenomenally intriguing from a business, cultural, psychological, sociological etc… perspective.

On any given day, there are both commercial and non-commercial examples of how ubiquitous access to the internet coupled with the adoption of these newish (social) tools throws up scenarios that were just not possible five years previously. Somebody captures an incident on a mobile phone, uploads it to YouTube, gets picked up by a blogger, gets posted and tweeted, retweeted, picked up by mainstream media, and within a few hours hundreds of thousands (millions)of people have seen the original online and then it gets covered on national TV that night. A facebook page springs up and within a few hours there’s hundreds of thousands of fans. The velocity in which ideas, memes, incidents etc. can go from nothing to being a national or international story is amazing – and its going to keep on getting more pronounced as more people use these modes of communication. And of course people tend to focus on the high profile and headline grabbing examples, but of course there is also an infinite number of practical examples of social media being useful for instance when victims of floods, hurricanes, fires tweet for and receive help from emergency services – the red cross in the States use twitter as a key local tool to help out victims in distress situations.

The ability to find, watch, listen, and read the most incredibly comprehensive content is made so much easier by the usage of social technologies. This in itself constitutes a paradigm shift in information access. A lot of information was there before, but I think the whole model of following people and following the link trail they create, gives you access to information (and real people) that you just wouldn’t necessarily have found access to in Google or Yahoo – I know I certainly didn’t. So by using these tools – I think its fair to say that I have become smarter – I definitely have been exposed to a lot more ideas and knowledge than previously.

Back to the original purpose of writing this post, which is that I get tired listening to people prattling on about the tools and not focusing on the behaviour and looking beyond the obvious. Im tired of social media experts telling you how many blog posts you should post, and how you should use twitter, and how to create a facebook fan page or building a profile on linkedin. Its laughable, what anyone with an interest in this area should be looking at, is the massive shift in indvidual behavioural conduct and how millions of people are beginning to instinctively and innately think about sharing information as a matter of course, consuming and placing credibility on information sources that they didn’t even know existed a few years back, and how their ability to consume information from a hugely diverse ecosystem has evolved rapidly from a narrow set of channels to an infinite number both online and through mobile.

So it would be really nice to see more informed thoughtful debate across the board rather than one dimensional talk about THE TOOLS.

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FriendFeed the social aggregator and now real-time sharing and commenting application has upgraded to its new Front-End interface. Up until yesterday, users could opt to use the application in beta mode, which got mixed reviews. Some of the power users such as the ubiquitous Scoble were quite positive about it. It will be interesting to see how it is viewed by the wider audience.

Initial feedback is that if you have a large amount of friends, that the real-time update is just too much and far too much noise for the regular users. I am big fan of FriendFeed, I really like the fact that you can follow people and see their aggregated footprint, providing that they are posting interesteng and sharing relevant content. I use the FriendFeed notification application that displays updates in the corner of my screen. So I tend not to use the actual friendfeed interface. The diference that I see with FriendFeed to Twitter, is that you do get exposed to more information from users in FriendFeed, depending on what services they have decided to share – for instance, GoogleReader shares, Blogs, Feeds, video and photo sites etc…but providing people are sharing and posting interesting content, one gets to see and read a lot of good, wide and varied content. This of course can be construed as a massive noise wall by users who do not want exposure to this level of detail.

But the main point, I think for FriendFeed, is that it is still a tool for users who are very technically engaged, as opposed to new users of social applications. It will be interesting to see will it become a Twitter like tool in terms of popularity. I think possibly not, as the options and levels of perceived complexity may switch people off.

That said, it’s a great application and one that will be very interesting to watch. The guys who set it up are also Google veterans who know what they are doing. Also, saw a very interesting video with their chief interactive designer with Scoble on Kyte.tv. Worth checking out to get an insight into the new changes and what is coming down the tracks.

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Interesting piece in VentureBeat today claiming that Facebook has rejected a valuation of $4 Billion dollars.  The social networking site is the fastest growing social site in terms of numbers – Comscore estimated in January 2009 that it had over 276 Million unique users. In the UK 47% of the online community use Facebook with the fastest growing cohort in the 35-49 year old bracket. It has taken a lot of flak recently on a number of fronts. Firstly it changed the terms and condititions that users subscribe to, essentially turning ownership of all asssets and content (photos, videos, relationships) explicitly to Facebook. They rolled this back after a major online revolt errupted.

Most recently they have changed the user experience trying to make the site more real-time by introducing feeds from friends and subscribed sources. This change results in a lot more information being displayed to users, especially if those friends have active lifestreams connected to their facebook profiles. It is generally agreed that the new changes are good for businesses who want to ensure that fresh content is presented to users as often as possible (to keep their profile in front of as many users as possible) and very active social media participants. These changes have been seen as a play by Facebook to capture the ground stolen by the likes of Twitter, which offers real-time participation and also most recently be the beta version of friendfeed. However, the majority of Facebook users are not power users and consider excessive feed information as pure Noise and have registered their displeasure in droves. In a move to counteract this, Facebook have now made a semblance of reaching out to the public by courting their ideas on changes to the platform. But this has been circumscribed by a time limit and a quorom of 30% of the active Facebook community, which is unlikely to be reached.

That said, it is undoubtedly the big beast in the social networking space in 2009. MySpace figures are dropping – 2% since the start of 2009 accompanied by a lot of organisational distraction. Twitter is the only other site generating the same level of mainstream interest, but in terms of numbers is in around 14Million, which is no mean feat considering it had about 700,000 users this time in 2008.

It will be interestng to watch what Facebook does with its dominant position and likewise it will also be very interesting to see what happens with Twitter. Both of them face monetising issues. Facebook, for its massive user database generated only approx. 350Million dollars in revenue. Not a lot. Twitter still has yet to monetise itself. Most recently a lot attention was paid to the fact that they seemed to have sponsored applications advertised. But they have disabused the market of this saying that it was not the case. So the market looks on and tries to figure out what form of monetisation it will embark on.

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There’s a few events coming up in Dublin that maybe of interest to people. There’s the Dublin Twestival which is a Tweet up happening in The Sycamore club in Temple Bar, which is on the 12th February at 6pm. And then the Digital Media Island Forum is organising a Innovaton Day day in the Radisson Hotel on Tuesday 24th February which is geared towards  those with an interest in Digital media and software companies. Anton Mannering organises them, and I was at one pre-Christmas, out in the Digital Media Centre in the IT college in Dun Laoighre – which was very well organised. This one has a good line up of speakers including Chris Horn from Iona, Pat Phelan from MaxRoam and Steve Collins previously of  Havok. There’s also a BizCamp being organised in Dublin Saturday  March 7th in the Digital Hub. This is aimed at start-ups and is being organised by Keith Bohanna (as far as I know).

Loads of other events going on – so keep the peelers out and stay informed:-))

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Twitter it seems are hiring a product manager. Obviously taking the never-ending chatter about them making some money seriously. If you fancy it stick the CV in – could think of worse places to be .

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