Looking into a murky crystal ball - social media

I’m finding myself more and more using the murky crystal ball as a metaphor for trying to peek into the [foreseeable] future – to predict breakout social-media names that might pose some sort of a threat to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. I think for many, particular those who own and/or are responsible for managing the marketing over the social media.

I think what is becoming obvious is the threat to companies that don’t fully commit to using the better known social-media platform and holdout for the next next new thing.

It doesn’t matter if we are running a restaurant, a recruitment company, or a law firm; we have to become good at [using] the platforms our customers are using, our employees are using, and what other people in related sectors are using. For restaurants for example, I think Twitter is probably the best platform positioned to drive traffic to their website and other social channels.  It’s much more timely and good for current events and conversations.

Potential guests are broadcasting their thoughts and crowd-sourcing their dining decisions more than ever before. 
Paul Barron, founder and chief executive of the Miami-based DigitalCoCo agency, which produces the Restaurant Social Media Index says Twitter is getting better at verticals and can potentially become more real-time for restaurants, like chatter boards, feedback systems and maybe even reservations. So restaurant brands are still figuring out how to leverage Twitter to its fullest.

And according to BTC Revolutions, a social-media consultancy restaurateurs are looking at the ratio of followers they have on Twitter versus fans they have on Facebook and see Facebook as the stronger tool to reach their audience when, in most cases, the reality is there are more people ‘Talking About’ or mentioning their brand on Twitter that they can directly reach in real time than they can on Facebook.”



As an example, on Facebook a brand can only “tag” or reply back to someone who has come to the page and left a comment. However, the brand can search Twitter for comments and engage any Twitter poster that has mentioned the brand.

Twitter allows you to have a two-way conversation with anyone, not just those that reach out to you.

Facebook and a brave new world

In recent months, Facebook has spent large amounts of money on the startup behind photo-sharing application Instagram, on face.com who according to the press releases, a technology that has helped to provide the best photo experience and on the "social discovery" startup Glancee responsible for the mobile application for finding like-minded people.

Wonder where facebook is going with all this; Emphasis on mobile platforms perhaps, Facial recognition technology, automating photo-tagging. Just a couple of things...

Face.com is a firm based in Tel Aviv, Israel, that has developed technology used for facial recognition on photos loaded onto websites and through mobile applications. The company has released two apps used on Facebook called Photo Finder and Photo Tagger. Facebook says the startup firm specializes in software that lets computers recognize people's faces in digital images. That there may be a worry for some.

Implementing facial recognition technology for all users can mean Facebook is able to collect a huge, photo-searchable database of its users.  So what you say? Basically, Facebook is using facial recognition technology to "suggest" tags to users who upload photos. In other words, if I upload 12 photos of my friend Munchkin, Facebook may "recognize" her face (thanks to other tagged photos of her on the website) and "suggest" that I tag her in those 12 photos. This makes the tagging process a little easier for me; after all, aren't I more likely to tag Munchkin if all I have to do is click a button that says "yes, tag away"?

Facebook has 800 million active members and each day, members upload over 200 million photos, Facebook currently hosting over 90 billion photos. Each time you "tag" a photo, its facial recognition technology learns more about what that person looks like. This technology is currently being used to help people tag photos. Is it possible, however, this will ultimately culminate in the ability to search for people using just a picture. And that will be the end of privacy, as we know it.

Not difficult for someone to snap a picture of you in a crowd, and discover everything about you on online.

When Facebook went to Wall Street

At $104 billion, Facebook's IPO is the largest ever by a technology firm, topping Google's $23 billion valuation back in 2004, and the net proceeds to the company will be $6.4 billion. However, Facebook’s stock rose by mere pennies in its initial public offering.

The performance fell far short of the expectations of Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and raised questions about whether the company's stock will be the sure bet many had counted on.

So what went wrong? Analysts point to a variety of factors that might have given investors pause.

·    Its valuation at about 100 times earnings likely struck some as too high.

·        Its growth in new users is slowing.

·      Facebook has not yet found a way to cash in on mobile devices, where social media is gravitating.

·     It’s largest shareholders moved to maximize their profits at the expense of new investors. For example, a few days before the IPO, Facebook raised the stock's projected price to a range of $34 to $38 from the initial $28 to $35, and priced it at the peak of $38 on Thursday.

·       On Wednesday, the company announced that longtime investors led by Goldman Sachs planned to sell big chunks of their holdings in the IPO. That struck some investors as greedy and a sign that Wall Street insiders were getting out while they could.

Harvard, Final Clubs, Facebook and first again

Jack Dikian

March 2012

Just the other night I watched The Social Network and reacquainted myself with the final clubs – remember Zuckerberg’s fascination with Final Clubs - his best friend Eduardo getting punched by the Phoenix. And, how about a Final Club fraternity awaiting a bus load of girls from another college to arrive for a party.

But of course we know Harvard is much much more than that. This year, Harvard University again topped a list of universities in terms of global prestige according to the World Reputation Rankings, published by the London-based Times Higher Education magazine.

Among the findings was the widening gap between the top six "global super elite" and all the others. The top 6 are listed below.

1. Harvard University U.S.

2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology U.S.

3. University of Cambridge U.K.

4. Stanford University U.S.

5. University of California, Berkeley U.S.

6. University of Oxford U.K.

Some Australian University rankings

43. University of Melbourne

44. Australian National University

50. The University of Sydney

Our Digital Legacy

Jack Dikian

July 2011

I was an early user of the Internet – only back in the dusty computer and physics labs of Sydney University the term Internet wasn’t yet invented. It was all about having UUCP access so that we can jump on the Usenet and look at newsgroups.

Newsgroups contained a great deal of content, albeit mostly of a technical nature and mostly text. Even from back then it occurred to me that much of what we were posting would have a presence, linger on servers distributed all over the world.

We are, after all, the first people in the history of the world to create vast online records of our lives. I say our lives because since the rise of the Internet (some 25 years) and more recent advent of social media (7 years) the internet has become seamlessly integrated with all our experiences, and more and more of our everyday life is being documented online.

For example, a quick look at Facebook’s stats tells us there are more than 750 million active users, 50% of them log on to Facebook in any given day and have 130 friends on average. Our lives, relationships, thoughts and opinions will surely fascinate future historians, sociologists, archaeologists and anthropologists studying the dawn of the digital age. The individual worth or contribution might be relatively small, but collectively, as a result of years of Internet activity, this becomes a significant.

At the same time people are beginning to think about their digital legacy. Those digital or virtual assets in the form of photographs, music, blogs, information, and other data that may be typically overlooked in terms of financial or monetary worth. Digital Legacy has been described as ‘the birth of a new industry' as new companies are being created to hold secure encrypted access to digital assets, to be released upon the proof of a users death.

In contrast to the legal, finical and officious aspects of digital legacy I’ve been wondering about what will happen to our Internet presence once we are gone. This is particularly true when we consider the rise of the phenomenon of social networking especially amongst the over 50’s is creating millions of personal archives.

So should someone notify our friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other services after our death. Would we want somebody to remove our material from those services, or to leave it there as a memorial? More than a quarter of a million Facebook users will die this year alone.

Importantly, how long will our blogs, tweets and other material remain on the net if nobody removes them? History shows that even the most prominent technology companies can be rapidly overtaken by competitors or deserted by customers. It’s possible that some of our material might disappear along with the demise of our favorite platform. I grew up believing IBM would permeate our personal and professional lives for example.

Twitter

Whislt Twitter’s search only goes back a few days, every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions. So there is a very good chance our tweets will be archived for many many years.