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Can we move as one using social media? Twitter’s Biz Stone thinks so.

Published on November 25, 2010 in Twitter, business, mobile, politics, social media, technology and video. View Comments

Here’s an interesting recent video interview with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

One point grabbed me as I was listening to the interview. He says:

One particular event opened our eyes to what we had on our hands. That was in March of 2007 at a festival called South by South West….We had about 75,000 users at that point and many of the people at the festival were using Twitter, and this was the first time we were able to see Twitter in the wild, so to speak. And there were a couple of things that happened at that festival that made us realize that people were using our service to come together and move as one…We rushed right back to San Francisco and formed Twitter Incorporated.

I find this interesting in the light of my recent thoughts on what a global civilization, aided by an increasingly social web, might start to look like. Is it possible that sometimes (only sometimes) we may be able to use the social web to come together and act as one, on a larger scale than anything previously achieved? Twitter has certainly become a lot bigger since then.

Web creator Tim Berners–Lee criticizes “some of its most successful inhabitants”.

Published on November 24, 2010 in Facebook, Google, Twitter, business, mobile, politics, social media and technology. View Comments

In a comprehensive new article, Tim Berners–Lee calls for vigilance in maintaining open web standards and neutrality. He asserts that the egalitarian principles the web was founded on 2o years ago, are being threatened in different ways by “some of its most successful inhabitants”. He criticizes the likes of Facebook, Apple, Google, Verizon, some ISPs, even Twitter and Linkedin for various dubious and potentially dubious activities.

He asserts that the walling off of information from the rest of the web by large social networks (such as Facebook) threatens the web’s established universality and decentralization. He points out that large social networks such and Twitter and Linkedin capture users’ (voluntarily offered) data and assemble excellent databases, and then reuse this information to provide a value added service. However, this only happens within their walls, which segments off information and threatens the decentralized nature of the Web. Once we enter our data into one of these networks, it can’t easily be used by us on another site or network. The pages are on the web, but the data are not.

Not such a big deal you say? The stated threat is that the more this kind of structure spreads, the more the web becomes fragmented and the less it becomes a universally accessible information space. Another threat is that any one social network, search engine or web browser could get big and powerful enough to become a monopoly; of course Google and increasingly Facebook spring to mind here.

He also points out that some cable tv companies that provide connectivity are considering the possibility of limiting users to only their content mix. Some wireless internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites which have not made deals with them, and governments both totalitarian and democratic, are monitoring people’s online habits, infringing human rights. My previous post, A year in a labour camp for one retweet!, is a shocking example of these very activities in action.

In terms of lack of openness and centralization, he singles out Apple’s iTunes system, which uses the proprietary “itunes” instead of the standard “http” to locate content. You can only access iTunes using Apple’s propietary iTunes application. You are no longer on the web, it’s walled off. It’s a single shop rather than an open marketplace, controlled by one large company. On a related side note, only today I was looking around for a particular audio book. It turned out that it was $32.99 on iTunes, and $10.47 elsewhere, for the same book.

Yet another development he finds disturbing because it’s off the web, is magazines and newspapers (for example) starting to create smartphone–only apps rather than web apps. You can’t bookmark pages within them or email a page link within an app. You can’t tweet out a page link from an app, without others having the app. He believes it’s better to build web apps that run on smartphone browsers. This may not seem like such a big deal, but if it turns out that one company, one walled garden, has too tight of a hold on the market, it could slow innovation, or worse.

Berners–Lee maintains that if these and other trends continue unchecked, the Web could be “broken into fragmented islands”. The freedom to connect to whichever sites we want could be lost, and this will extend to mobiles devices too. He points out that the web is a critical democracy, one that “makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation.” This could become more fragmented.

There is real food for thought in this article and I encourage you to read the whole thing, as I’ve only touched on some of the issues he mentions. It’s really worth reading when you have time. He makes some excellent points in relation to why we should care about all this. The web is ours. It’s a public resource on which we are coming to depend on more and more, for so many things.

Should we let the web become fragmented, and monopolized by a few big and powerful companies? Should we let governments chip away at our liberty by monitoring and filtering? Do we even have any power to stop these things happening if we want to?

Take Facebook – many people are aware of the walled-garden nature of Facebook, yet it’s grown to over 500 million users and doesn’t look like slowing down. Facebook is starting to make substantial revenue from its walled garden too. It’s a big company now.

Google has become a huge and profitable company is such a short time. It’s continually expanding its operations into new areas with some astonishing technology, while still making the vast majority of its money from advertising. It all seems to unfold before we realize what’s happening and can think of all the possible ramifications. It so often seems to be the case with new technology. We take the good with not so good, because the good seems to outweigh the not so good.

If there are significant dangers, perhaps we are safe in the knowledge that we can collectively change things if we really want to. For instance, at some point, if people decide to leave Facebook en masse, that would be it for Facebook. If Google steps over the line towards the opposite of “Don’t be evil”, we can always stop using Google. If something else that seems better comes along, we’ll start using it. We seem to be fickle like that when it comes to the web.

Wow, a year in a labour camp for one retweet!

Published on November 18, 2010 in Twitter, politics and social media. View Comments

Amnesty International has urged Chinese authorities to release a woman from a labour camp after she was sentenced to a year of detention for retweeting a supposedly anti-Japanese message:

@wangyi09 retweet

According to the BBC, the woman, Cheng Jianping, is the fiance of human rights activist Hua Chunhui and has been accused of disrupting social order. She has been sentenced to reeducation through labour, even though she says her message was just a joke. There was no trial.

The offending tweet mockingly encourages nationalist protesters to smash the Japan pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, and when she retweeted the message, she added the words “Charge, angry youth” to it as a joke. Obviously this was taken all too seriously by Chinese authorities.

As the BBC points out, her detention is a sure sign of how closely China’s government scrutinises what is said on the web by its citizens. No kidding! That’s a rather severe punishment for one sarcastic tweet. The authorities must really worry about the power of social media to spread subversive ideas.

Is the future of eBooks social?

Published on November 16, 2010 in Facebook, Twitter, social media and technology. View Comments

With the recent proliferation of eReaders, it must be worth asking the question: is the future of eBooks and eReading social? After all, these devices are connected to the web, where our online social networks are.

It seems to make sense that the next step would be to share thoughts and examples of what is being read. I already share many thoughts on social networks about what I’m reading at any given time. I’m sure many people do.

As a beginning, it may be worth noting that Amazon already displays such things as the ‘Most Highlighted Passages of All Time’ and ‘Heavily Highlighted Recently’, from the new social highlighting feature of kindle books.

Amazon Kindle most highlighted passages of all time

In terms of social eReading, here are a few other possibilities, as recently suggested by Kevin Rose. And let’s face it, most of these will probably happen soon enough in one form or another:

  • Friend annotations – highlighting paragraphs and leaving voice annotations for friends. (As I said above, Amazon has already implemented part of this).
  • Lend a book to a friend by hitting a button and choosing a friend to lend to.
  • Seeing how far friends are into the same book you are reading.
  • Virtual book clubs – seeing who out of your Facebook and Twitter friends is reading the same book, so you can discuss it with them.

I don’t know about you but virtual book clubs seem to make a lot of sense to me, considering how popular they have been offline over the years. It seems like these would work pretty well online, in connection with eBooks. This is even something smaller, independent book sellers could start, or host, as a way to help compete with the big online retailers.

Academic Joshua Tucker has also pointed out some of the benefits and possible pitfalls of social eReading. On discovering the Amazon social highlighting feature by surprise, what disturbed him was that he could not find a way to opt out of sharing his own highlights.

The issue of privacy is one that may disturb some people, and will not bother others at all. As Tucker points out, now Amazon knows what books you have downloaded, they know which passages of the book you find interesting and can make recommendations on what you might be interested in buying based on them.

Tucker mentions that he found the collection of highlights at the end of the book most troubling as a professor, as the temptation for students may be to just read the social highlights and not read the whole book.

Another interesting issue to me, is that book authors may soon have the opportunity for feedback from readers, as blog authors do.  As Tucker says, the possibility may exist for authors to see which parts of the book people are highlighting, and even to be able to answer questions from readers.

Do you like the idea of eReading becoming more social, or would some of these features be too much of a distraction? Do you think the privacy concerns are a serious issue, or overblown?

What would a global civilisation with a collective mind look like?

Published on November 11, 2010 in Twitter, environment, politics, social media and technology. View Comments

Lately I’ve been thinking more on the subject of this great human hive humanity is currently creating, in the form of our insatiable and widening use of the internet.

In just 20 years we have come to the point where almost 2 billion of us now use the internet, and no doubt that will continue to grow until most of us are communicating online on a regular basis, however long that takes.

Star Trek references aside (to The Borg hive mind), as I know someone will mention it, the question remains: is all this mass connectivity leading to a global civilisation with a collective mind? Is it an inevitable part of our social, technological and cultural evolution as a species?

Let’s just say the answer to that question is yes. Will this collective mind be able to help solve our greatest problems, such as climate change? Will it create new problems, such as large scale cyberwarfare? Will life on the internet just play out as it does offline or will it be different? Perhaps the answer is all of the above.

As usual I’ve already floated these ideas on Twitter, a part of this global hive mind in the making (now close to 2oo million users worldwide). It was suggested at one point that the general level of discourse on the web is not high enough at present to be able to achieve anything of real value in a collective sense.

My answer is that it doesn’t all have to be of crucial importance and of great value. Like conversation, the collective mind will wander, will concern itself with trivial matters and pointless entertainment, and “oh look at that silly cat” and celebrities and so forth. Like conversation itself, it can be trivial, it can be awkward, it can be small, it can be big, it can be vitally important. It can have a sense of urgency. It can be relaxed and slow. It can be a lot of things.

Someone also mentioned that it may be a disastrously disconnected global mind rather than a cohesive, perfectly in-tune collective consciousness. My answer to that is that perhaps it doesn’t need to be pretty or perfect, maybe it just has to be.

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