In early 2008, I wrote a blog post on a concept I called "Strangers in a community of the likeminded". The concept at that time addressed the notion that for many sites there are only really conversations between the site and the individual visitor. There is no real community - the visitors are strangers in the dark, and often knew nothing about other people like them visiting the same website.
Since that time, we have seen a proliferation of social features added to sites that allow for community. We are now going to see a proliferation of social features added to TV, and a new revolution will explode across our screens.
Going forward the water-cooler TV conversation will take place whilst the show is on TV. Going forward you will know who else is watching TV with you, wherever they are. Going forward you can sit-back and be entertained, or lean-forward and participate, and share.
TV was the main medium that created 'strangers in a community of the likeminded', now its about to lose that tag in a big way.
Here are a few apps and technologies that are helping drive this revolution:
Foursquare announced not too long ago, it had reached 10M users. This starts to give it a critical mass, rather than it being a fringe platform for the digital cognoscenti. I'm late to this, so excuse me, but Foursquare's recent deal with American Express is what is really exciting for me - where Amex rewards users with loyalty card-like credits when they check in. For those outside of the business, checking-in always seemed really odd. Now many more people will have a reason to check-in - the Amex loyalty incentive.
"The New York startup won’t be receiving any revenue from the deal, but the partnership could give Foursquare a better shot at becoming a mainstream service.
“A big part of what we’re doing is building enhanced loyalty tools,” Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley told The Wall Street Journal when the company first announced the partnership in March. “We’re seeing that things like this can drive users.”
Foursquare recently announced that it had surpassed 10 million users, but it hasn’t clarified how many of them are actively using the service after registering. A 2010 Pew Survey found that just 4% of online Americans use any checkin service.
Many digital campaigns are constantly asked to prove two really key things that this partnership helps with:
Show that they can reach their audience of lean-forward-digital-types, at a rate that is competitive to the traditional sit-back-TV-watching audience (with regard to CPMs)
Show that all that lean-forward behavior- tweeting, posting, checking-in - produces sales at a comparative ROI
It is well worth watching to see where this partnership evolves.
An interesting chart, sourced from Silicon Alley Insider, using data from VC Darren Herman, showing that the combined forces of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and AOL control about $40.1B of the world's digital ad spend, or about 64%. He took the ZenithOptimedia figure of worldwide digital advertising spend of $64.03B.
I'm fascinated by mapping, and the role data visualization plays in bringing to life patterns that are essentially 'invisible' to the naked eye.
This smart project from Stanford takes 18th century correspondence between intellectuals in what they term the "Republic of Letters" and visualizes who is sending and receiving letters. Worth watching
Mark Zuckerberg knows that even Facebook's mighty ecosystem is not enough by itself, it needs partners. If developers combine their ecosystems with Facebook's ecosystem then Zuckerberg gets the complete map. Google wants that map, Microsoft wants that map. Who will get their first?
This video is long, but well worth watching if you want deep insights into Facebook's priorities within the developer community.
The first part of this video is just policy statements, and Facebookcheerleading, but at around time marker 06:55, Zuckerberg moves to the big stuff, as he says - which is the social graph.
It's interesting how Facebook is now starting to overlay semantics onto the social graph. This is powerful stuff. This semantic layer on top of the social graph comes in the form of the Open Graph Protocol
The Open Graph Protocol enables you to integrate your Web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Including Open Graph tags on your Web page, makes your page equivalent to a Facebook Page. This means when a user clicks a Like button on your page, a connection is made between your page and the user.
Your page will appear in the "Likes and Interests" section of the user's profile, and you have the ability to publish updates to the user. Your page will show up in the same places that Facebook pages show up around the site (e.g. search), and you can target ads to people who like your content. The structured data you provide via the Open Graph Protocol defines how your page will be represented on Facebook.
Just as interesting, was the launch of the Graph API:
At Facebook's core is the social graph; people and the connections they have to everything they care about. The Graph API presents a simple, consistent view of the Facebook social graph, uniformly representing objects in the graph (e.g. people,photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friend relationships, shared content, and photo tags).
Participating in the Graph API will help Facebook get one step closer to the map of connections of people and things. Remember this is not just a technical exercise, this map is a map of our culture. Being able to add and take from the map will be a very appealing prospect for brands and developers alike.
"The limits of my language means the limits of my world." Ludwig Wittgenstein
Search is a language game, with an elite and an underclass. Some people simply know how to work these machines better than others. Not only do they have a deep understanding of computer based logic (Boolean logic), but they have wider vocabularies, and understandings of semantic relationships between search queries.
Today is Google's 13th anniversary, and that search box might appear to be one of the most democratic and egalitarian spaces possible, but don't let appearances deceive you. People using search engines are not harmlessly and positively divided by their interests, but are also divided by their aptitudes and knowledge.
In addition to Boolean operators like AND, and OR, there are other operators that power what users know such as:
Term Location: - inurl:, intitle:, intext:, or inanchor: to tell Google where it should look for the term your looking for.
Similar terms: ~ in front of a word tells Google to look for similar terms to that word, for example ~blog web 2.0 You'll find a full list here or here.
Knowing how to effectively use keywords and operators makes a huge difference in search effectiveness and thus content discovery. Keywords are still the dominant paradigm for navigating the digital space, and I hold to the phrase I created, which is that "keywords are doorways to content" Many people out there would describe, Ludwig Wittgenstein, as the foremost philosopher of the twentieth century. Eccentric, even a little crazy, a genius, but no expert on search engines. But its strange how so much of his work around language is relevant for today's challenges around semantics, search engines, and tags. More to come on this topic in future posts.
This is a very cool infographic using data from Kiva, the peer-to-peer lending network. HAT TIP TO Jason Pearson
Kiva defines itself as "a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world." Very cool.
We often complain how charity money disappears into admin costs, but here we have no excuses - the intermediary is disintermediated, and we get to build a direct relationship with the beneficiary.
This is the type of cool stuff that reaffirms why we work with the Internet and how it's changing the world.
Two TED videos with very different views on algorithms. They both spotlight the tremendous power that algorithms now exert over our culture and business life. What do you think - force for good or bad?
