Perry

Hewitt

Tag: social

  • Tying transaction to check-in

    The friction inherent to the foursquare check-in becomes a harder sell in an attention economy full of competing distractions – the value had better be high. Today, foursquare announced a partnership with OpenTable. Marrying the “Explore” feature’s social reviews by friends with the transaction and history of OpenTable’s reservation system is a big win, especially for travelers. It’s desktop web for now, but here’s hoping the app version isn’t far behind.

  • Facebook, individuality & loneliness

    Just re-read this thoughtful Stephen Marche essay in The Atlantic Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? about social networking in the current American social context.

    • Facebook arrived at a time when Americans were more alone that ever before. The article points out that in 1950 fewer than 10% of U.S. households contained only one person, and that number had reached 27% by 2010. We’re a culture that extols the individual, something I am reminded of constantly when I compare my own family’s daily or vacation habits and choices with those of friends who immigrated to this country.
    • Our hyperconnectedness leads to myriad but shallow connections with others. In-person connections still matter, and having a number of people we consider confidants reduces loneliness — and that number is dropping.
    • There’s a troubling paradox of how many people we are connected with online and our increase in social isolation. The effects of the latter are tangible — more mental health workers from psychologists to life coaches, and more professional carers needed as we age and become ill.

    What about time spent on Facebook, in particular, drives the loneliness in a constantly connected world?  Social media mavens cite the importance of authenticity. “Don’t mimic, that other guy with all those followers,” they tell us, “but be yourself.” Generally sound advice, but what they forget to add is that most people online are highlighting their best and most interesting selves “Here I am in Paris!” “Here’s the kind of witty banter that typifies an evening with my family.” The toddler beams into the camera, but the explosive tantrums are rarely captured and shared. It’s both widespread FOMO — at any given moment, someone in your network is guaranteed to be doing something more fabulous than you — and an underlying fear that perhaps almost everyone’s true selves are more adventurous and clever than your own.

    Perhaps we’re all just using Facebook wrong. The author refers to the work of Moira Burke, HCI graduate student and soon-to-be Facebook employee, who points to the behaviors of broadcasting and passive consumption rather than engagement with friends as a cause of loneliness. To a degree, that makes sense: We’ve all had the cocktail party experience of the person who speaks in paragraphs, and with it the dullness and loneliness of listening to a monologue in a venue built for dialogue. True engagement, in Burke’s opinion, is enhanced by writing to friends rather than resorting the “lazy like,” and being motivated by others’ sociability to enhance one’s own.

    Last year a Pew Internet and American life report asked ~1,000 technology stakeholders and critics about the ways millennials will benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives. The opinions were diverse — even among a wide range of people who think a great deal about the effects of the internet, it’s hard to find consensus on how our brains, behaviors, and happiness will change as a result. U.S. internet users spend about eight hours a month on Facebook, so the degree to which hyperconnectedness to Facebook itself creates or abets loneliness remains an important and unresolved part of the discussion.

  • The mobile future’s already here …

    Cross-posted on the MITX blog

    One of my favorite quotes is from the science fiction writer William Gibson. He once said, “The future’s already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”  I first grandly predicted the Year Of Mobile in 2000. Now, finally, there’s enough of it here that I can claim to be right.

    What’s happening in mobile right now is exactly what happened during the stampede to the desktop web in 1995. Organizations are trying to force-fit existing content and transactions to meet the needs of a new use case. Unfortunately, in most instances, it’s not working. There are so many mobile–appropriate and even mobile-magical opportunities left on the table.

    Social is the accelerant that’s igniting the mobile platform. It took AOL 9 years to get to one million users; it took Facebook 9 months, and it took Draw Something only 9 days. (Source) Mobile apps spread socially – brands need to figure out how their mobile experiences fit into that ecosystem, and how learned mobile behaviors, from gestural inference to game mechanics, provide opportunities to surf the social wave.

    But on the technical front, figuring out what to do with mobile isn’t always easy. Developing for mobile elicits church and state decision points, like native app vs. mobile web. Both play an important role in the mobile ecosystem. However, the advent of HTML 5 is helping to address this. Better HTML support in native apps allows for faster/cheaper native app creation for both smartphones and tablets. The “hybrid” approach of injecting HTML5 code into native allows developers to do both effectively. And of course browser-based apps can be made more compelling. Check out Facebook at http://m.facebook.com/ on iPhone/iPad’s Safari web browser and compare it to Facebook iPhone app and iPad app experiences, for example.

    Another emerging religious issue is responsive design vs. RESS (responsive endpoint with server-side adaptation). Responsive design addresses a fundamental challenge that everyone’s facing today: how to serve the growing variety of physical form factors of end-user devices. Responsive design assumes that all users on all devices want the same content, just formatted differently. That’s not always true; if you’re walking down the street looking at an iPhone for a few seconds, do you really want to see everything served up to a user sitting in front of a large-screen desktop? In contrast, RESS does more of the work server-side, and offers customized (and reduced) content for different form factors.

    What’s next for mobile?

    First, analyst firms report that in just a few years the number of mobile devices will dwarf the number of personal computers. We see it anecdotally with the devices students bring to university each fall, and we see it as mobile-first behaviors are reflected in our site analytics and app download numbers. This will be a wake-up call for organizations used to thinking of mobile as discrete apps or afterthoughts.

    Second, the steep innovation and adoption trajectories mean that generations just a few years apart are having very different experiences with mobile. We’ve all seen the video of the baby trying to make the print magazine behave like the iPad – and who knows what her little brother will expect? So the rapidly growing and rapidly changing experience of mobile will be yet another way consumer behaviors drive seismic shifts in the enterprise. In the mobile near-future, we may see a more seamless interaction with things and people around us, compared with the relatively clunky and interruptive way we “check in” today. Tablets are already changing how people – especially senior ones — access and share information in business meetings, too.

    So, “mobile first and mobile everywhere” is where we’re headed. It took me a decade, but just like that stopped watch, the prediction was finally right.

  • Visualizing the #linsanity

    Checking out visual.ly to track the rise and fall of #linsanity – with Obama as top influencer. Great way to see the wax and wane of a topic on Twitter.

  • Understanding Truthiness in Digital Media

    Yesterday the Berkman Center hosted a conference focused on defining and dissecting the ways propaganda and (mis)information spread online. As usual, the stellar participants contributed along with the presenters to deliver a thoughtful and provocative event.

    There are already several liveblogs, and Storifies, and a whole host of tweets tagged #truthicon from people able to stay for the full day. The morning session I saw reminded me that amid all the technology excitement (at its annual peak with the Dow high and SXSWi this weekend) there’s a lot to watch out for with the deliberate and accidental creation and spread of misinformation online – there was good fodder here for the tech dystopian crowd. Individuals and institutions need to think about how we educate ourselves in the critical thinking and practical tactics to get the truth out there as we all wade into the fray.

  • Google+ today: From sausage fest to ghost town

    Google+ today: From sausage fest to ghost town

    Throughout 2011, it was clear that Google+ was mostly a male bastion. Mashable reported that if you were to throw a dart at Google+, it would be more than twice as likely to land on a man’s profile as a woman’s profile. Ensue hue and cry.

    This week, the Wall Street Journal puts Google+ on ghost town watch, pointing out that users spend a mere three minutes a month on site versus six-seven hours on Facebook. Meanwhile, Pinterest is soaring, with growth driven largely by women. Think about it, guys.

  • From SOPA to Susan G. Komen to Superbowl

    Hard to believe that in fewer than three weeks, social media has been front and center on three major news headlines: the SOPA defeat, the Susan G. Komen (apparent) reversal on Planned Parenthood, and tonight’s Superbowl. The first two events mark social’s expanding role in leading and shaping public opinion; the Superbowl stands out as the moment when social was self evident enough that TV ads featured hashtags with no explanation. (I can remember being asked to provide explanatory copy for ads featuring the cryptic “www.lotus.com”  back in 1997.)

    We’ve come a long way from 2007 when tech pundits saw Twitter as “stupid and lame and small …  [and] real addictive”