Fred Wilson has a post, Twitter.com vs. The Twitter Ecosystem, that is an essential read for anyone whose job involves Twitter. Strike that: it's important for anyone in business, period. I say that because the evolution of Twitter and similar "sharing" services is happening much faster than many people realize and it is reflected in the numbers that Fred shares. Anyone in business will be directly affected by that trend.
Please read Fred's post for yourself and keep in mind that his audience is a geek-ish, early adopter crowd, but over the five years I've been reading Fred's blog I've found them to be highly predictive of the world of communication and commerce that is about a year down the road. In other words they are behaving now the way the average consumer will be behaving in the next year or two.
One of my pet peeves about Facebook was getting all those stupid apparently profitable notices about what my friends were doing on Farmville or Mafia Wars. Thankfully someone showed me how to hide those things, but I'm guessing my lack of participation hasn't hurt the games' parent company, which according to this article may be valued at $1 billion. You read that right, billion with a "b." From the article:
That could make San Francisco-based Zynga the third-largest U.S. video-game publisher by market capitalization, bigger than Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., the maker of crime-game franchise “Grand Theft Auto.” New York-based Take-Two had 2008 sales of $1.54 billion and has a market value of $909 million.
Zynga will have revenue of $210 million this year and $355 million next year, according to Justin Smith, founder of the industry-tracking Web site Inside Social Games. The figures are based on estimates of Zynga’s revenue per player across all its games and its number of daily active users, Smith said.
Hmmm. I tried to log into Facebook this morning and got a nice note saying that, "Your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience." I checked with a couple of other people and they aren't having any problems logging in. Since we're literally logging in from the same network it doesn't appear to be a location based or across-the-board FB issue, so my knee jerk reaction is to wonder if I've joined the small army of people who have had their Facebook accounts fried for no apparent reason. If so I guess there are worse things in life, but after investing all that time into building my network of new, old, and recently re-acquainted friends it would truly stink to have to rebuild it all.
On another note, if this happened to my daughter it would be the worst thing in life if you asked her.
*Update: False alarm. Now fully able to waste half a day.
I'm finding the Facebook thing more and more interesting. Not Facebook itself, but the Facebook thing. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is that it's the first tech related thing that my kids use regularly and have kept using even after "old people" started using it in droves. Of course the fact that old people use it in droves also makes it interesting.
Personally I love Facebook because it's allowed me to reconnect with all kinds of people that I actually want to reconnect with and haven't seen in real life in decades. Literally. Of course there have been a few who have contacted me who I wish would have stayed un-reconnected but that's a very small minority. My wife, who is much more cautious than I am, has resisted the Facebook light because she fears it will be a giant time suck. She's right of course, but in my mind that's no reason to stay away. Productivity is way over rated.
And of course the reason people leave Facebook is equally fascinating to me as the reasons that people use it. Being stalked by a wacko from the gym? By all means kill your Facebook account. Actually, I think Fec has come up with the single best reason I've seen for killing a Facebook account:
I killed my Facebook account when I found all my old girlfriends had become lesbians, not that there’s anything wrong with that
There's a lot being written about the use of new media/social media in politics. I'm not a political pundit so I won't even try to bore you with my own 10,000 word treatise on the trend, but I would like to point you to an example that I think shows how these tools can be used.
Ryan Shell is a candidate for an at-large seat on the Greensboro City Council. (Full disclosure: I've talked to Ryan regarding an issue he's working on that would affect members of the association I work for, but other than that I know him only from reading his blogs). He's a young, energetic guy who is new to the political scene. If he had to depend on traditional media to address the community he'd be doing a lot of talking to himself, frankly because he is young and new to the scene and I'm sure he's considered a long shot candidate by the local political punditry.
What Ryan has going for him is he's savvy to the ways of the online world. He doesn't need the traditional media to get his word across because he has a digital camera, a computer, a couple of blogs and access to Facebook, Twitter and the like. Yesterday that ability allowed him to get a different version of a local story out that contradicts the official line that was carried in the Greensboro News & Record.
A few days ago a 16 year old boy was murdered near an apartment complex run by the Greensboro Housing Authority. It occured on the same day that the rest of the city was participating in the "National Night Out" campaign and as you can imagine the people in that complex were not able to participate. Ben Holder, another city council candidate (and blogger) decided to try and put together another "Night Out" event for the complex and started recruiting others to help. Ryan jumped on board, the paper picked up the story and some current city council members said they'd be there. Then yesterday word got out that the police thought it was an unwise move to have the night out so soon after the killing and the event was postponed. The source of that news is still being debated, but the result is that the event was cancelled for last night.
Ryan decided to go to the neighborhood to check for himself and he took his camera with him. The result is that he ended up talking to the friends and the mother of the slain boy and as you can see in the interview below they wanted to still have the event and they would welcome any reason for the media and police to be present. Roch101 used that interview in a piece questioning why the News & Record "scrubs" online versions of its story so Ryan's efforts are already reaching beyond the core group of people who read his blog.
My point here is that Ryan, along with other upstart politicians like Ben Holder and Jay Ovittore are ahead of other local politicians that I've seen in their use of new media. While this by no means guarantees them greater political influence, it does give them a tool to get their word out before the traditional media grants them "serious contender" status. It also enables them to tap into the network effect that takes hold online, and it prevents them from being easily dismissed. In fact if you want to see how effective an online presence can be just look at Holder's accomplishments with his Troublemaker blog. Many people may not like his style, but you can't deny his effectiveness at getting issues in the city addressed.
One last point: just because they have blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter followers, etc. doesn't mean a thing. The fact that they beat the streets, hammer the phones and generally get involved and then use their new media tools to get the word out is what makes a difference.
It's going to be interesting to see how these guys do come November.
