Who's Qualified to Create Our Social Future?

Does anyone else find it ironic that the people who are creating sites such as Facebook and Twitter, who are shaping so much of our online social experience, are the same people (i.e. computer geeks) who are stereotypically socially inept? Talk about the inmates running the asylum!

Are we being set up for a workable and worthwhile future of social interactions, or are we slowly poisoning our ability to be truly social?

My colleague Eleanor Davies, based in frog’s Stuttgart studio, has written an enjoyable and interesting article about how constant status updates are shifting our perceptions about everyday life.

She says,

Not only is the location of our new communication worrying, but the content and format is reducing our previously complex communication skills, which have formed and evolved as we have. The etiquette and elegance with which humans have learnt to interact varies intricately between cultures. The way in which we articulate our thoughts can in turn influence the way we think – and it is this relationship that becomes an ‘Alert’ when projecting the effect of ‘Shout’ culture.

Read more >

Fiesta Movement - Will it Catch On?

I was driving along the other day and saw a lime green Ford Fiesta - a car which is not currently available in the US, but which launched recently in Europe. It’s combination of good looks, driving fun, and low prices has quickly made it the second-best-selling car there after the Golf.

Ford is planning to bring the Fiesta to the US in 2011, an excellent move, as we need more good “economy” cars here that are not boring and/or ugly. Ford is doing an interesting viral/social campaign ahead of the launch. It has engaged 100 “agents” to drive the cars around and blog and tweet about their experiences (the car I saw was evidently driven by one of them - it had a fiestamovement.com logo on the back bumper).

80,000 people volunteered to be agents, according to MarketingVox:

The online program has also generated 6 million YouTube videos, 740,000 Flickr views, and more than 3.7 million Twitter impressions to date, according to the company. Additionally, name awareness for the model has risen to almost 60%, according to Jim Farley, Ford’s vice president of marketing (via the Detroit News).Ford will officially debut the 2011 Fiesta model at the Los Angeles Auto Show today.

Each round of agents produces videos that combine into “chapters” that will play out over the following months. It’s the most extensive social/viral based marketing campaign that automakers have yet undertaken (good enough to get me to write about it anyway), and shows the importance that Ford is placing on the Fiesta. According to the Detroit Free Press:

The Fiesta represents a seismic shift for Ford. The automaker, best known for its F-Series pickups and SUVs, hasn’t sold a subcompact car in the United States since it discontinued the lackluster Aspire in 1997. What’s more, Ford hasn’t sold a car with the Fiesta name since 1980.

Ford said it will offer 15 technologies in the Fiesta that are not typically found in subcompact cars. That includes keyless entry, pushbutton start and its Sync wireless communications and entertainment technology.

Trends in Twittering and Status Updatering

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has release a new survey with some stats on how many people are using Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and so on to give status updates to others, or see what other people are up to. 

• Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others.
• The more devices someone owns, the more likely they are to use Twitter or another service to update their status. (39% of people owning four internet-connected devices use Twitter, compared to 10% of those owning just one.)
• The median age of Twitter users is 31, holding steady over the last year. Facebook’s median age has shot up from 26 to 33 in the last 18 months - it’s not a college social network any longer, that’s for sure.

Read more >

Twitter is not a Conversation Platform

Insightful post from O’Reilly about the strengths and weaknesses of Twitter, which echo very basic thoughts I’ve had about the service. Mark Drapeau goes into much more depth than i’ve thought about the topic. He starts out saying:

Perhaps the most common reason given for joining the microsharing site Twitter is “participating in the conversation” or some version of that. I myself am guilty ofusing this explanation. But is Twitter truly a conversational platform? Here I argue that the underlying mechanics of Twitter more closely resemble the knowledge co-creation seen in wikis than the dynamics seen with conversational tools like instant messaging and interactions within online social networks.

What makes for a good conversation? There are obviously many different kinds of conversations, but I think what most people would consider a conversation has a number of key elements:

• A narrative thread that is flexible and changeable, but follows a familiar pattern. Twitter lacks that (or rather, the way that Twitter threads are typically represented make the narrative very difficult to follow unless you spend some time learning the lingo
• A coherent, relatively stable, and acknowledged set of participants. Twitter conversations jump around between participants, you never really know who you’re talking with, and random people can jump in at any point
• Shared contribution. Twitter obviously allows anyone to participate, however, Drapeau notes that 90% of Twitter content is produced by 10% of participants. This is more like someone holding court at a party with people standing around saying “hell yeah” or “ditto” rather than a real conversation.

Twitter is supposedly breaking more into the mainstream, but for me it is far from certain that the attributes that have served it well in its niche pioneer audience of techies will translate into a mass medium. The lack of ability to define what Twitter does has made it part of the fun so far, but will hinder its broader adoption.

Read Mark’s full article >

TinyURL and Disambiguation Pages Should Become Web Standards

There are two pieces of the web infrastructure that need refreshing:

• The ability to generate short URLs so when I want to point someone to a book they don’t get this: http://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/1400064287/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238028638&sr=8-1
• Disambiguation pages for domain names, and the ability to have duplicate domain names.

(And I’ll preface this by saying that I know jack about web infrastructure, ICANN, etc. so some of this will probably be laughably naive for someone who does. I’m just looking at this from a user point of view.)

Short URLs

TinyURL has gone from being something you’d see occasionally to pervasive, especially with the short message needs dictated by Twitter and Facebook. But it’s also a great way for print to leverage online content, but right now most publications resort to typing out the entire URLs, which is both visually distracting and hard as a reader to enter into a browser accurately.

It seems like something so valuable should be more formalized and turned into a real function, rather than something left to a private company (Gilby Productions). I don’t know who Gilby Productions are, but I sure appreciate Tiny URL. But they also have a strangehold on an awful lot of content. If they close up shop for whatever reason, all of a sudden tens of millions of links become useless. The same goes for the other URL-shortening sites that have sprung up recently due to increased popularity of Twitter, Facebook, etc.

We should have a better way of doing things.  It should be built into browsers, email apps, social networking, etc. This would make things more convenient, more robust, and avoid the roundtrip through a third party site to generate the short url. Tiny URL itself offers an API and people have made plug-ins for various things that make the process smoother.

Nevertheless, I still worry about a single company, no matter how good their track record to do date, having this much “power”. One other url-shortening site I used for a little while (forget the name) disappeared without warning and probably took all those links with it. What if these sites forced us to watch an ad or pay a fee before revealing the destination? For highly transient stuff like Twitter feeds maybe the possibility of these companies disappearing and taking their coded links with them is not such a big deal, but for other uses a more permanent solution should be developed.

Duplicate Domain Disambiguation (DDD)

In this hot, flat crowded world we live in, we need a way to distinguish different companies, organizations and individuals that may have the same name. It used to be that when choosing your company name you only had to worry about local infringement (ie your town) or clashing with a Mega Corp. Today that is still the case from a legal point of view, but from a web findability and advertising point of view it is a non-starter. If a good name hasn’t already been claimed by a legit company, chances are a squatter is sitting on it, waiting for you to dream it up.

We need something like the disambiguation page from Wikipedia. An interstitial page that asks which of the, say, six “acmecorporation.com” you were looking for, along with a brief description of each to distinguish them.

Google serves this purpose today, but even then there can be confusion. And it doesn’t solve the basic problem that we should be able to have exact duplicate urls (at least from an end-user’s perspective), just as there are many Acme Corporations out there making all kinds of different things. Someone at each of those Acme’s today has to come up with a clever variation on acme.com in order to get noticed on the web.

Update on Monday, July 6 by Adam

As I was sayin’… Cnet has an article about the perils behind url shortening services, pointing out some that I didn’t think of.