via behance.net
…social networks themselves may be contributing to the decline in trust. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed people to maintain larger circles of casual associates, which may be diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks. In short, the more acquaintances a person has, the harder it can be to trust him or her. Mr. Edelman believes the Facebook component has “absolutely” played a role in diluting trust levels.
via adage.com
I subscribe to this
Posted in Miscellaneous | Leave a Comment »
I have been a big opponent of the vanity twitter use (aka harvesting followers, hoping that “followers” equals “audience”).
In practice, this meant that from a point on, I completely stopped looking who is following me, did not reciprocate at the cost of being perceived as arrogant and kept my follower/following ratio to 4.
Still not content, I unfollowed quite a number of twitterers (some of them pretty big names) on the grounds that they were either producing too much noise, or were talking about things I found irrelevant to me.
For over two years now, I keep experimenting with twitter:
- In the beginning, it was conversations. But as people kept flocking around twitter, conversing became hard, if not impossible.
- Then it was news tracking which, although useful, it was far from complete. Yes, the news came to me, but not the news I was always interested. And with it came a lot of repetition and nonsense.
- Then, based on retweets, it was content discovery and evaluation.
- Occassionaly, it was polls, mini-crowdsourcing, asking questions etc
- Grouping people allowed to create filters: filters for news, for content, for community info.
- Finally, there came mindcasting. The most interesting use of twitter. The one I subscribe.
The grouping feature offered by many twitter clients, has, for a long time, being the single organizing factor that brought some order into chaos.
But, lately, we have another one, far too important: Lists!
Although lists look pretty much as the groups of twitter clients, they are not the same: groups are for the people we follow or those that follow us, while lists are for everyone! This difference is a game changer.
Already people use how often they are listed as a measure of importance, influence or popularity.
But lists have another function: they are metadata. The criteria we use to classify twitterers in lists, describe what they are or how we view them.
Also, lists, unlike groups, can be public, can be viewed and subscribed by others. And as such, they bring focus and attention from another angle.
“Ok”, you might say. “Lists bring new features. So what?”
Lists can bring back the sanity in twitter. They can undermine the follower fallacy, they can bring value to ordinary users as well as to businesses and marketers.
How?
By allowing us to make a fundamental distinction: following is an action of trust and, to some extend, intimacy. Subscribing to a list is willingness to be informed.
So if you are on twitter to spread your message (be it news or offers or corporate messages) seek to be listed, not followed. Your very intention implies that you most likely want to use twitter for broadcasting and not for creating relationships. That is fine. You won’t have to pretend you are a ‘friend’ from now on. You aren’t. You never were. But now message spreading can be done without undermining the everyday experience of ordinary users.
—– end of part I —–
Posted in social media | Tagged groups, lists, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
Image from Flickr by RBerteig
I remember a time (not so long ago) when people were disgusted by partial feeds and most of the major blogs and bloggers abided by this unwritten law. Publishing a partial feed was synonymous to cheap exploitation, putting ad revenues over readership, alienating your readers etc.
I, myself, am guilty of accusing blogs for this kind of ‘malpractice’.
But things change.
I see more and more probloggers publishing partial feed and very few readers complaining.
Why?
Because the way we read and follow blogs has changed too. Information is coming to us. And usually it comes in the form of a short sentence with a link in it, something especially true for twitter.
So the trend of reading everything in the coziness of our feed reader is in decline, while reading from the source is back with a vengeance. Twitter and Facebook are the benefactors of blog ad revenues.
Posted in social media | Tagged facebook, feed readers, feeds, partial feed, Twitter | Leave a Comment »
I think it is, and I tweeted so yesterday. And the reason is obvious. What is SEO about? Ultimately, it is about one thing: the ‘website’. It’s about making a website and its pages discoverable, ranked favorably in search results, described appropriately so that searchers hook on the description etc.
But ‘websites’ are not ‘in’. Check the diagrams from Google trends for websites below.
Website traffic for 5 major IT companies
Website traffic for the 2 major consumer goods companies
While the overall number of people online is increasing, the visits to the web sites keep falling.
At the same time the volume of searches for these brands shows a completely different picture.
Search volume for the 2 major consumer goods companies
Search volume for 5 big IT companies
In the last 12 months CG companies see a volume increase or remain steady (amidst the crisis) while, for IT, a longer perspective reveals a mixed picture that has to do with what these companies are and technologies they offer:
- oracle and ibm are gradually decreasing,
- apple is increasing,
- dell increases too although less quickly,
- and hp seems to hold its ground or slightly decreasing.
But there is an equally important movement undergoing: people shift their reliance from search to peers for news, recommendations and answers.
I don’t remember how many times and about how many things I have asked my twitter friends’ advise. And it always comes. And most of the time it’s good too. Not so abundant as search results, but who reads search results past the first page anyway?
Enter social seach. Google injects results in search from our social graphs (opt in). I don’t have to reason the usefulness of this.
What should we expect? What else than these two inversely related trends accelerating? Less reliance on search, more reliance on peer recommendations.
There are some interesting implications here: SEO consulting and search advertising have profited from our reliance on search. Search won’t go away anytime soon, especially with the social element in it. But what would be the need for SEO? And what would be the need for adword advertising, if the important factor in search results turns out to be our peers?
Is Google shooting its own foot? So it seems. But I am sure they have figured it out already and they are thinking of alternatives.
Posted in business, technology | Tagged google, Google Trends, peer recommendations, search, SEO, Social Search | 10 Comments »
Posted in Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »
Posted in Miscellaneous | Leave a Comment »
A couple of days ago I came across this terrifying presentation from John Graham-Cumming.
Although the topics covered weren’t entirely new to me, put together in one presentation, had an impact. I came to wonder if and how would the major web 2.0 sites work, if javascript was out of the picture.
I decided to make a little test to find out: I disabled javascript from my browser and started logging in such sites to see how would they behave.
Here is the outcome for the three most important for me.
a. Twitter
Most of the functionality was in place: the timeline, friend and followers. From the various buttons on the tweets and the timeline pages, the reply did work but not the fav button.
The direct message and delete buttons did not work either. Same with the drop down where you select a follower to dm, and finally, the followers and trending topics buttons.
But all these are rather trivial. Because most of the tweet buttons replicate user behavior (putting the @ sign in front of another user name for a reply, or the d letter for a direct message).
Not being able to fav, or, more importantly, to delete is a loss, but not a major one.
b. Facebook
Things are worse in Facebook: while Home, Profile, Friends and Settings are accessible, the inbox and chat are not.
Also, from the bottom bar, the applications menu is inaccessible. Most of the edit links and buttons don’t work either and finally the status updates, link sharing , photos etc cannot be submitted.
c. Youtube
Here things are disastrous: without javascript you cannot see the videos! On top, you cannot access your account settings or you mailbox. There was no point looking for more.
A small gallery with pics of the failure areas of the above web applications follows
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- Twitter: DM and delete do not work
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- Twitter: friends combo box not populated
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- Twitter: Followers do not roll down
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- Twitter: trending topics don’t roll up
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- Twitter: reply does and fav does not work
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- Facebook: Sidebar more does not work
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- Facebook: Apps menu does not work
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- Facebook: chat does not work
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- Facebook: account settings edit doesn’t work
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- Facebook: Settings edit does not work
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- Facebook: box edit does not work
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- Facebook: Share button does not work
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- Facebook: Status more buttons and clear do not work
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- Youtube: videos do not show
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- Youtube: inbox does not work
Posted in social media, technology | Tagged facebook, javascript, security, Twitter, youtube | 2 Comments »
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GreekStartups.com- Social Actions
Is the Salmon protocol tasty enough?
October 18, 2009 by Nikos Anagnostou
Conversations on the social web are mostly performed through comments. But comments are so fragmented! Consider this example:
Obviously the post has stirred some interest and generated a conversation. But the conversation is dispersed in many different places. Publisher looses track of many aspects of the conversation around the post. Commenters also mostly ignore what happens outside their area of interaction with the content: Facebook users ignore the FF commenters etc.
This situation has fired some intense debates. Many publishers think this situation is not in their best interest as potential traffic to their sites is deflected to an ‘aggregator’. Especially publishers that have a financial interest in their site traffic and do not just want their opinions spread, find this particularly not appealing.
To mend this situation, a group in Google is working on a new protocol that will allow comments to ‘return’ back on the original publisher site. The protocol is called Salmon
Salmon protocol logo
and you can get a basic idea of its workings from this presentation.
Salmon does bring back the comments to the publisher site but it does not solve the publishers’ problem. As you can see from slide 4, once a comment is back to the publisher’s site, it is republished back to all its subscribers (including the aggregators). What this would mean is that each aggregator has a full picture of the comments around the post, regardless of origin. From the user’s standpoint there is no need to move to the publisher’s site or to another aggregator for any reason, as the full picture will be available in whatever site the user prefers to frequent. The publishers may object it, but in what right? The publishers’ protests imply they OWN the comments which is hardly the case. The user owns his comments.
But let’s leave aside the publisher’s concern for a moment. Is slamon a good thing for the user? I would argue it is. He can have access to a discussion in its entirety without much hassle. And therefore he might be tempted to engage or engage more.
But there is something still missing: the user does not have easy access to his own comments for ALL pieces of content he has interacted with. And he has no control either. They can disappear with a site that closes down. Or in the simplest case, the can be deleted by the site moderators. This is the problem that systems like disqus, intense debate and JS-Kit are aiming to solve. But they won’t. Because it is very unlike that one of them will become ubiquitus.
I think the problem should be approached from another angle. A comment is a piece of content. There is no distinction in form from any other piece of content. They are both text (or audio or video in some cases). What subordinates a comment-content to the original post-content is notional and semantic: the post-content preceded the comment-content and actually the post-content was what aroused the commenters interest in the issue. But the same applies to a post that pingbacks to another post. So a comment is a piece of content and should have independence.
The question is how?
The issue is related to our digital identities: if in the web -to-come we can have a unique independent central point for our digital identities, this central point could be the originator and hoster of our comments.
A modification of the salmon protocol could easily let this happen: whenever a user comments on a publisher site, the site will send the comment back to the users digital identity home. Likewise, whenever an aggregator receives a user comment, the aggregator sends the comment back to the user home, as well as to the publisher.
I do not think this is difficult to implement although I can predict the frictions about who controls the user’s digital ‘home’. But that’s another issue.
Read also Louis Gray’s post on Salmon
Posted in technology | Tagged Aggregator, atom, comments, digital identity, protocol, salmon | 10 Comments »