Social Media Takes a Note from Media Theorist
August 19, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 0 Comments
Marshall McLuhan was a communication theorist whose concepts are considered a corner stone of media theory.
“The medium is the message,” is one of McLuhan’s better known aphorisms in which he stresses that the medium itself influences the message; in fact, in McLuhan’s view, the message would be obsolete without an effective medium to transmit it.
However, this meaty phrase and corresponding media theorist would have been lost in the abyss of things I learned and subsequently forgot in college – right along side Linear Algebra and Calculus based Physics – if not for nearly daily reminder of the truth of this this basic, yet profound theorem.
As designers re-invent and tweak web sites and user platforms, it is certainly obvious that the medium used to transmit a message is not only important, but ever-evolving and changing, both to maintain the engagement of established users and lure in new consumers as illustrated just this week with several evolutions in the world’s most popular social media ‘mediums.’
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Facebook debuted a cleaner birthday posting announcement for your news feed. Nothing is really more frustrating than having your newsfeed inundated by birthday wishes from individuals wishing someone else a happy birthday – especially if you’r not a fan of the celebrator to begin with. Well, Facebook now has a solution to this problem, and it looks like this:
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The “Check-In” craze initiated by FourSquare has grown a bit as well. Not only can you use Foursquare to alert friends to your locations, but new applications like Meso, Philo, and GetGlue now provide users the power to tell the world what TV show you’re watching, what book you’re reading, even what wine you are drinking. And, never one to miss out an opportunity to breach privacy, just this morning Facebook released it’s iPhone check-in application entitled, “Places.”
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Of course, Twitter is a shining example of “the medium is the message”. Most notably, this microblogging service has penetrated a country that even world leaders can’t… North Korea. Uriminzokkiri – one of the only North Korean local media outlets to syndicate in English for an international audience- has officially made a Twitter account: @uriminzok.
There is no doubt that North Korea runs one of the most secretive governments in the world, but could Uriminzokkiri’s Twitter account (and their one-month old YouTube account) be a sign for a change in North Korean Policy? Unfortunately, the answer seems to be no – one glance at the Twitter and YouTube postings and you can’t get past the latent propaganda-esque material pumping out of these state-controlled mediums. However, you can’t fault Kim Jong-Il for taking a page out of Marshall McLuhan’s book and figuring out for himself that the best way to blast his message worldwide was via the medium of social media.
-Kym
Salesforce buys Jigsaw for $142M, Happy Earth Day!, Microsoft and Facebook team up to create Docs.com
April 22, 2010 | Thursday at Three | 0 Comments
Salesforce, a provider of CRM cloud computing services, announced an agreement to buy Jigsaw, a “data-as-a-service” company. The price tag – $142 million – may seem hefty, but the price will be worth it for Salesforce. Jigsaw just doubled its revenue for the fourth year in a row. Once the deal is approved, Salesforce customers will have access to the 21 million contacts at the 4 million companies currently listed on Jigsaw.
Earth Day is about working together to improve the environment and that is exactly what Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund is doing. On Earth Day, the non-profit launched the Renewable Energy Atlas of Vermont, a GIS web-based application that allows Vermonters to identify and analyze potential sources of renewable energy at a specific location down to the town-level. This free web app is the first of its kind in the U.S. and will help in educating, preparing and directing energy committees, small businesses and entrepreneurs to local renewable energy resources.
At the F8 developer conference yesterday, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced a partnership with Microsoft to develop Docs.com, an innovative new application that will allow Facebook friends the freedom to create, edit, and share any Microsoft Office document over the social network. This new platform paves the way for Facebook to ultimately become the defacto leader of, well, pretty much everything performed online.
Wow Google, way to be a late adopter; are you scared of Bing?
December 8, 2009 | Blunders, Tech Worth Talking About, Today's Headlines | 1 Comments
If you Google Obama right now, give your search results roughly 10 seconds, you’ll notice some new things in your search window.
On Monday at a media event in Mountain View, CA, Google geeks unveiled search in real-time. So for example, when you Google a topic, you’ll not only see what is on the web, but you will also be able to view what is being written about in real-time on sites like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. [Note: Facebook's FriendFeed property and public profiles only]
This notion of real-time search isn’t anything new. Niche search sites like Collecta and Crowd Eve currently offer the same thing, minus the robust Google search results. Microsoft Bing also has a Twitter tool that does something similar.
This development of course is nothing less than Google’s attempt to grow its market share that Bing has been eating away at. Google currently owns 65 percent market share and is fighting hard to keep it after new deals like the Microsoft and Yahoo partnership that gave Microsoft control of almost 30 percent of search.
Google users can click on “Latest results” or hit “Latest” from the options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other content scrolling right on Google. Users can also filter results to see only “Updates” from microblogs like Twitter, FriendFeed and Jaiku. Latest results and the new search options are also accessible via the iPhone and Android phones.
The look and feel of Google search is still the same, very simple and very mathematically complex. Real-time search results appear in the middle of the search results page in a small box with a scroll bar where users can go back to any tweets or other results that streamed by too quickly to click on. There is also a pause button to hold the stream in place.
A fun spin on real-time search?
I think this was expected of Google months ago, but my guess is these partnerships took a bit of negotiation. I will say this greatly improves my Internet stalking results. No, just kidding. But there are implications for both the PR and HR industry. Now you can easily check just one site to reputation check a potential hire. And in that very same way you can also reputation-manage a brand or executive. Find out what is being said in real-time. For example, imagine if you Googled “Tiger Woods” right now.
The new features will be rolling out in the next few days and will be available globally in English only.