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

WOW – @jack! From founder of Twitter, check out Square, Inc.

December 15, 2009  |  Tech Worth Talking About  |  0 Comments

I love when people have problems and then fix them. Sounds simple, right? It’s the part of me that loves tech and misses the Bay Area.¬† So this post is for you <insert local business here> who doesn’t want to navigate the murky waters of bringing credit card systems into your shop but still wants to be able to take plastic as payment.

Enter Square. This newly announced company/product is genius and founded by some of the backers of Twitter and other legendary Bay Area entrepreneurs.¬† The story goes that when a local glass artist Jim McKelvey couldn’t accept plastic as payment for his goods, he got busy thinking about how this could be easier and without the lengthy applications and hardware needed to secure the ability to accept credit cards.

Meet the Square team.

According to SquareUp.com, “today the team is focused on bringing immediacy, transparency, and approachability to the world of payments: an inherently social interaction each of us participates in daily. We‚Äôre starting with a limited beta and rolling out to everyone in early 2010.”

Square is backed by Khosla Ventures and a team of angels. Square, Inc. has offices in San Francisco (Product & Engineering), Saint Louis (Operations), and New York City (Risk & Partnerships).

The device is a square card reader that fits into any audio jack – so for example the iPhone. The software allows for photo recognition that in fact the purchaser is using their own card, then the purchaser gets an electronic receipt.¬† The business intelligence that this gathers in endless — for example, if Square is accepted at say Starbucks, you can do away with your “10 lattes, get one free card,” this would automatically be able to count that.

The security is the same as the a credit card processing machine and there are no pesty monthly charges.

Here’s an interview with Jack Dorsey about the product: (courtesy of TechCrunch)

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.

If I’m a tech geek, who do I follow on Twitter?

December 3, 2009  |  Advice for local companies  |  0 Comments

As you unravel Twitterville Capital Region and contemplate how to engage with this mass eco-system, consider starting with your passion for tech. Tech enthusiasts are all over Twitter and following them will in the very least educate you on the happenings of our industry.

Here’s my list:

Smart entrepreneurs and execs who tweet valuable things:

Jack Dorsey (@Jack) started Twitter, now CEO of Square

Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree) CTO of Cisco

Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) Founder of Digg

Jason Calacanis (@jasoncalacanis) Founder of Mahalo

Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) Google engineer

Thought leaders

Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) analyst

Michael Arrington (@techcrunch) TechCrunch

Om Malik (@om) GigaOm

Humor and intelligence

Sarah Lacy (@sarahcuda) Author, social media writer

Natalie Del Conte (@natalidelconte) Loaded on CNET and CBS Early Show

Taylor Buley (@taylorbuley) Forbes and comedy relief

Tom Merritt (@acedtect) Top Ten Lists on CNET

Veronica Belmont (@veronica) Revision 3

OH WAIT — insert shameless plug here @nmessier or @101to87

Twitter’s new digs, Life at Google, Good Examples for Capital Region companies

November 25, 2009  |  Tech Worth Talking About, Venture Capital and All That Jazz  |  0 Comments

This week I saw pictures of Twitter’s new office space. What was once a relatively bootstrapped start-up is now backed by mega-VCs and moved out of the LORI and onto Third Street in the SOMA district of San Francisco. For a tech start up, this is a win. Check out these digs!

Upon review, this reminded me of one of the major disconnects I observe when I head into Capital Region tech offices. I see a lot of the same places – offices crammed with boring cubes, no harvest to collaborate or for colleagues to talk freely to each other in the spirit of morale. Walls are often bare, lobbies are stark and formal and when you walk in you smell that whiff of staleness instead of young professionals thriving to make a better product.

One question I get asked a lot is how to recruit Bay Area talent to the Capital Region. A great PR campaign will help, but it’s going to take a lot more than just a cheaper cost of living and better public schools to get talented engineers, developers and executives to uproot families from Silicon Valley and plop them on 87.

Silicon Valley professionals love their jobs, they pick them carefully and they often evaluate the culture over anything else. Today’s biggest tech companies prioritize the perks of working at a company to help maintain a good environment and employee retention. I’m not saying everyone has to be Google but don’t be Intel either:

Steve Lohr from the New York Times wrote an article last week on a business intelligence company called SAS that seems to offer a happy medium.

Think about an office space where people want to come to work and stay. It’s ok to offer even paid services like haircuts and dry cleaning if it means you may get a couple more employees to stick around past five o’clock. Working hard and being innovative doesn’t come easy in a stark cubicle or mahogany desks, it comes from being vibrant and passionate and working in an environment similar.