Tagged with 'social networks'

Here is a link to the conference Tweets (will link to a spreadsheet).

There was a lot of great content presented and shared at the2009 Eduweb Conference that ended in Chicago.  I’m hoping to share some of what I learned soon. But I wanted to quickly post my latest obsession with conference tweeting.  In this case, with considerable brute force I have cut and pasted all the #eduweb tweets and sorted them in chronological order (earliest to latest).

If you have the slightest interest in this, you will find a spreadsheet with 4 tabs.  The one you want is the one I called Final Chronological Sort. The other tabs are for those who want to play with the rawer file export.

You will find that we have about 1500 Tweets. Some were lost because the Twitter search tool would not let me go further back. And, of course, people are still posting new Tweets but I had to cut it somewhere.  So I believe I have the greater bulk of the Tweets. Have fun.

If you know a better way to grab these Tweets than cutting & pasting from Twitter’s native search, share it here.   Other interesting things to mine might be the number of active Tweeters and the volume ranking of all Tweeters.  Not sure what useful Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) come out of this, but it is always good to measure.

Terms of use and privacy policies, how often do you read these terms before agreeing to them? Most of us would admit we don’t read the fine print even when it’s prominent large type. But when a community member does pay attention to a change in the terms of service and gets 100,000 other people to pay attention also, you’d better believe that the originator of the terms and policies are going to take notice. That scenario happened just last week for members of Facebook, one of the largest social media sites with 175 million active users and the most visited site in January 2009 with 1.2 billion visits according to Compete.com.

Democratic Approval for Social Networking Usage

Rather than a Terms of Use statement, the phrase for the future terms on Facebook will be “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” Now, to get a user-voted statement approved, it needs 30% of active users to vote on it, which is 53 million people according to this article on Top Tech News. That number is 23 times the number of “fans” that Facebook has on Facebook. Yow! The voting closes March 29, and you had to be a member on February 25th to be eligible to vote.

The content “ownership” isn’t all that contentious, in my mind. It’s similar to how you treat email – you send a message to a friend, then delete it from your “Sent” box, but it still exists on your friend’s email server. As this Scientific American blog entry points out, ” The terms still indicate that Facebook can make copies of member content and, even if a member removes content from the site, Facebook can still retain archived copies of that information. Facebook isn’t claiming to own that information, but it isn’t promising to delete that info either.”

Watch out for a viral message that you’re in violation

And now for the Public Service portion of this blog entry. If you’re on Facebook and see a message from one of your Facebook friends that you’re in violation of the Terms and Conditions, do not “Click for Details.” It’s a virus that someone has engineered.

Sony’s Network Policy

Sony had a similar uproar from users over the network policy changes that occured before a new game called LittleBigPlanet was released last fall. For a game whose premise contains aspects of sharing creations, the terms that players agreed to were vital to its success. One blogger, Dean Longmore, a technical writer no less, talked about his concerns last October in “LittleBigRipoff? Sony can sell your user content” where he noted that the terms say that “Sony may sell subscription services or gain advertising revenue related to your content.” It seems that Sony hasn’t gone so far as to sell user content, nor does it yet allow users to create their own “stickers” by uploading images to the game. So it could be that this contention in the terms of use have perhaps limited gameplay to an extent.

What do you think? Are you concerned about your rights to one day delete uploaded content? Or is this uproar going to settle out as more trust is built between companies and their customers?

Back in 2002, the engineers at IBM were already talking about location-based services on mobile phones. They envisioned scenarios where you could access information on the go, informing you if there was a traffic jam ahead, or helping you find the location of the nearest bakery. But they were working with WAP (wireless application protocol), which did not end up taking off as expected. Mobile web browsing was slow and the user interface was not ideal for displaying lots of information.

Last week, activation issues aside, the launch of the iPhone 3G and App Store breathed new life into location-based services. According to Matt Dickman at Fleishman-Hillard, the “single most important element of the new iPhone 3G” is GPS. “For the first time ever, GPS will be fully integrated on a user-friendly consumer device,” he wrote. Even more important, developers are also able to create applications using the GPS technology. (Note: old iPhone users can still download 2.0 firmware, but location-based services will use the less accurate tower-assisted AGPS - thanks Jough!)

What this means for social media:

• Mobile social networks may increase in popularity

When Twitter was first launched, I remember thinking it was both creepy and unnecessary for people to know what I was doing at that moment and vice versa. But over time, microblogging sites have evolved into useful communication devices. News stories sometimes break on Twitter before hitting the mainstream media, companies are using Twitter for customer service, and Twitter even helped a student when he was arrested in Egypt.

Similarly, while it may seem creepy to be asked “Where are you now?” the potential for location-based social interaction to take place may later have us wondering how we lived without it. Mobile social networks to check out: Loopt, Brightkite, and Whrrl.

What this means for marketing:

• Higher level of customer engagement with the ability to deliver more relevant, location-specific messages

Another dimension of customer segmentation is now available to marketers – exact current location. An obvious use of this information is to offer an opt-in program to receive coupons for a specific store when the mobile device is within close proximity to the store. Some Asian countries already have such programs in place.

The possibilities are endless. Someone at Duo suggested a store-specific Starbucks application that will alert the store when you are two blocks away. By the time you arrive at that Starbucks, your drink will be ready and waiting for you to pick it up and go.

With 1 million iPhone 3Gs sold in the first weekend and 10 million App Store downloads, it will be exciting to see how the implications of location-based services continue to grow.