Whoa. So there is hell of a lot going on in the social media world. It’s like starting this blog has opened up a whole world that I knew of only from the sidelines. It makes me all the more glad I did, because it is all so fascinating.
This post is likely to be long, but I have tons of thoughts and information that I’d like to put on the table.
I’ll try to keep the focus on three things: Facebook, Twitter and Qik, and I’m going to briefly mention another: tinyURL, which I touched upon yesterday.
Given the scale of Facebook’s impact today, I don’t think it is unwarranted for me to admit I’ve been following Zuckerberg’s his words closely. It’s a fascinating website socially and culturally, even if I have some suspicions about it. It’s never been easier to follow a person’s actions than it is today, thanks to social media applications and platforms, so I am able to track what he thinks of Facebook reasonably carefully if I keep myself plugged in online.
Robert Scoble tweeted sometime last evening about Zuckerberg’s desire to have a re-do of his SXSW interaction with the public. I caught that video on Qik because Scoble posted it as it happened (or soon after). (Qik is a website that allows you to stream videos from your phone).
So Twitter became the starting point for my being able to listen to Zuckerberg. I got to know some interesting things about Twitter yesterday, when I listened to this interview with Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, Rob Pegoraro, columnist with the Washington Post, Holly Willis, professor of media studies at the University of Southern California and Robert Scoble, about Twitter’s impact on the world. The interview was last year but the issues are as relevant now. I’m not going to get into all of it (it was a 1-hour interview) but some of the topics under discussion were how Twitter is basically an extension of Facebook and MySpace, where people broadcast their actions to their friends – and others – in the hope that it is interesting, about how it is voyeuristic in a sense but it is a construct of who we are, about how people are therefore willing today to have that level of surveillance of their lives. Also, however, platforms like Twitter create a culture of synthetic closeness (this phrase, coined by a caller who had some questions for the panel, was fascinating) and potentially alienates some people because users no longer feel a need to go out and meet people as they are meeting them online and are satisfied with those interactions.
Yesterday, the second time round at SXSW, Zuckerberg took questions only from the audience – a very wise thing to do. I’m going to mention some of the issues I found interesting (these were Zuckerberg’s responses to questions from the audience):
- What happens when all relationships online become social relationships, as often happens with Facebook? You don’t really know or want to know, say a thousand people, but many people do. Zuckerberg mentioned the concept of Dunbar’s number in response, which basically says that a person can have stable inter-personal relationships with about 150 people – he thinks most people, while they may have a huge number of people on their list, ultimately stick to 150 for reasonably close relationships.
- Facebook has become so much about games now, and games allow people to connect socially though they may not otherwise. When Facebook started, the thought of games becoming such a big factor in Facebook’s success did not even strike him vaguely. Zuckerberg himself said that there were many people on his own list who he does not communicate regularly with except for the times he plays Scrabulous with them! He went on to mention that the great thing about these platforms is that Facebook does not have to play an editorial role at all, because the market will sort out what is successful and what isn’t.
- Facebook’s plan to share information with other countries: While Facebook wanted to allow as many people as possible to use the site, Zuckerberg recognized that there are certain countries like China, for example, that maintain high levels of data policing. They could deliberately slow down servers if they don’t like what is being transmitted, or if Facebook decides to host servers themselves then they may arrest the administrators of the servers. Keeping people’s private information private is crucial to them, and it is an issue they are working on with regard to expansion to other countries.
- Another interesting bit of data that I gleaned from the video is that apparently Robert Scoble, who runs a popular blog himself (I heard someone sitting next to him call him part of the ‘blogerati’!!), was kicked off Facebook in January this year for attempting to ‘scrape’ information off Facebook. Basically he ‘scraped’ information of more than 5,000 of his friends off Facebook for import into a new feature being run by Plaxo which allows users to import Facebook information. This violates Facebook’s service agreement so his account was disabled, but subsequently reinstated when he contacted their Customer Service division.
Just think about all of this. There is so much going on online that makes this world clearly one that is going to be almost debilitated without recourse to social media in the years to come.
Back to what I started off talking about: this is how I got the data I have – Scoble used tinyURL to create a succinct link of his Qik video of Zuckerberg talking to insert into his Twitter feed, which I then clicked. So
Qik=>tinyURL=>Twitter=>Facebook video
The technological equation of my social interaction!
One Size Fits One 