Sorry about the confusion, I was typig too fast to notice I put it on my old (no longer used) blog here.
Every so often I come across posts and declarations about particular social media platforms where people are laying down rules about how I will use a platform. They’re telling me how it’s going to be. I have never responded particularly well to such outbursts, mostly because I consider myself intelligent enough to think for myself, and consider someone blindly telling me what to do as a gesture that disrespects me as an individual… but when it comes to social media, it’s not just my attitude toward blindly following authority that’s the problem, it’s about something different.
I see social media as a social construct. Let me briefly explain what I mean there. ..
I’ve moved! I started up another blog at www.mollybob.wordpress.com called “Mollybob Goes to School”, can’t really explain why, just felt like the right thing to do at the time.
One of the first things I saw when I opened up Twitter this morning was the below post from @paulrasmussen
Being the ever curious person I am, I decided to have a click on the link and see what all the values were about. Assigning a monetary value to my profile? Could I possibly use this twitter value to buy myself a new pair of shoes?
So I had a look, and relieved that I was not required to enter my password anywhere (it is optional), I entered by username and BAM!
Cool! That’s enough money for a pair of shoes! How’d they work it out? …and that’s where things started to fall apart. TweetValue was only happy to give me vauge details about someone’s Ph. D algorithm and public information. Well, blah. That feels a bit like selling me a car but not disclosing the size of the engine, no?
So being a bit curious and only slightly bored, I decided to google Jonas and TweetValue and see if I could make any sense. Was this a massive phishing scam for those that opted to enter their password? Was there an interview with Jonas Lejon anywhere? Is he even real? This is what I found in brief:
So what does it actually achieve? It’s a bit of fun, sort of like a popularity test while also helping to raise awareness that social networks have value and influence, which larger companies are now starting to pay attention to.
I know it’s not designed to be much other than a superficial tool, but it did spark my interest in deeper questions. How do you assign financial value to a social network.. or social capital for that matter? What do the calculations look like?
I just read a really positive article on Flux about Intel, Microsoft and Cisco getting together and to call for a change in the way we “do” education called Time for a change? Largely I agreed with it. Certainly, we need a change, we need our education to reflect the way we do business…. wait wait wait. Zip it right there. I think we need education to reflect the way we’d like to do business.
The flux article states the trio’s position as being:
“They argue that in contemporary business people work in teams across disciplinary boundaries and use a variety of social, digital and physical resources informed but unconstrained by disciplinary to solve complex ill structured problems”
I think this is an idealised perception about what happens in the business world, either that or I’m just too young to remember a time when things were worse. What I generally observe is a younger generation who have been educated slightly differently and had different life experiences wanting change (impetuously and vehemently demanding change in some cases) managed by an older generation who tend to sway more towards the opinion that knowledge is power, technology isn’t entirely trustworthy, and flying people in for big meetings is the way to go.
Before you think I’m doing a bit of management beating here, let me explain. I’m trying to show the other side of things as I all too often read about this rosy and positive view, but I don’t see it and hear about it in the real world. I think that the kinds of people who contribute online largely already have the said mentality to some point, as sharing something online is a movement toward collaboration and knowledge sharing. If we want to see more of the changes that are so enthusiastically heralded, we need to start spreading our attitudes we show in the online world to the workplace at the management level.
Education doesn’t just need to reflect what we do in the workplace, it needs to reflect the way we’d like things to be. Our future managers need to be educated in a manner that reflects how we’d like to do business, not how we actually do business now.
So a while ago I read a post called Twitter versus Facebook: Should You Choose One? on the twitip blog. It got heaps of responses from people, me included. I didn’t feel the urge to respond in detail until @valeriestevens raised the issue on a twitter post again today that got me thinking. Thanks @ValerieStevens!
So my take on twitter versus facebook? It’s like comparing apples to oranges, or your toaster to your oven. They are two totally different tools that serve different purposes with a small crossover in the middle.
Twitter
Twitter is a microblogging tool, by which I mean you use it to post short (140 character or less) updates onto what is essentially a time ordered message board. You connect with people on twitter by “following” them and replying to their messages, you can even send them a direct message if you feel the need. Relationships are not automatically reciprocal unless you’ve got the settings geared that way, and there’s a much greater sense of immediacy with tweets generally being more frequent and up to date than facebook activity. For example, people tweet current events as they happen, such as the recent bombings in India, or the inauguration, but most people update thair facebook status once or twice a day at best.
Facebook
Facebook is much more complex than a microblogging tool like twitter. Your status update on facebook is like a microblog all on its own. When I fill in my status update on facebook e.g. “Molly is writing a blog post about twitter and facebook” that’s a microblog all on it’s own. You can even connect your facebook status to your twitter if you feel the need. Additionally if someone wants to see your stuff on facebook, they have to “friend” you and you have to grant them permission so the relationship is reciprocal.
A special mention about facebook requests and twitter links
Based on feedback from the twitterverse, I’ve given a mention about facebook’s notifications, why they exist, and an attempt at the apple-orange comparison to draw a parallel in response to twitter. This is my take on things.
Things on facebook are often a little more complex, and may not occur at the same breakneck speed as they do on twitter. Facebook’s more complex features mean that the main activity tends to stay within with bounds of facebook, which I think is why facebook users receive so many requests and invites, because we use these to essentailly promote aspects of facebook. On the other hand, my twitter network often sends me outside twitter with blogs to read, reports to bookmark, webinars to attend and so on.
Be a glutton if you feel like it
I don’t think you can compare the two and come to any meaningful conclusion. I think they complement each other and there’s no need to select only one.
One of today’s nuggets from the Twitterverse is a reverse image search engine called TinEye which allows you to paste in an image file or URL and see where an image has been used. So my experience went as follows:
I created an account in TinyEye easily, confirmed it and got to work. My immediate first reference was my profile picture which is stored on my desktop here at work as I know that image is floating around the internet. Strike one. No such luck, it cannot find my image so any dreams I have of being famous or appearing on a magazine cover in some faraway land only to marry a rich prince and live happily ever after are shot.
So after my initial failure, I thought I’d better read that yellow highlighted bit on the screen which says “Wondering why TinEye couldn’t find your image” while thinking “awesome, maybe rich prince accounts are blocked”… but no. What it actually tells me something far more useful. TinEye is in beta and their search library is currently quite small. Read in my mind: you are not that important, get over yourself and use this site properly.
So I came up with the idea to find an image online of Barack Obama, hes important right? I mean, my own profile picture wasn’t making the grade. Setting my narcissism aside, I figured his image was more likely to have more reuses than my profile pic. I experienced instant success. There were pages of results for this image, showing me the image over and over with information about the size of the image and which website it was used on.
The good things
I found it extremely easy to use, all I had to do was enter a URL or file
The interface is clean and intuitive in design. I was never at a loss about where to look, infact it felt a bit like Google
You can subscribe to their what’s new page which tells you when changes are made to the site. I really like this feature because it means you don’t have to go searching for informtion. Very effective communication.
its FAQ section does a very good job of explaining how it works in plain English. Even I could understand what they were talking about!
They aren’t taking any copyright or ownership when you run a search on your image
The scans will apparently pick up slight alterations to images you’ve submitted for search, so close but not identical matches will show. E.g. someone’s made your pciture other colours, or adjusted the size.
The not so good things
TinEye says it’s beta, and the size of its image library probably reflects this
You cannot see dates on the search results as TinEye does not return that information
If you’ve pirated people’s copyrighted images into the public domain, this search engine may not be good news for you (can’t say I’m that sympathetic either, tsk, tsk)
Some possible uses for it
If you want to check where else an image has been used before using it yourself this is a good way of doing it. It wouldn’t be too good to use an extremely political image accidentally in your blog or whereever
Because of the way it works, if someome is really silly and links to your image you can catch them, if they’ve captured it using something like SnagIt and renamed it, TinEye isn’t going to find them.
If you’re a narcissist like me you can go through your whole Flickr account and see if anyone’s used your images (you may also choose to get really really excited when they do and get an over inflated ego).
I’m sure there are others too…
So from my perspective, “the not so good things” are far fewer that “the good things” , so I’m suggesting that I like it. If I didn’t, this post would have been alot shorter.
Witchery, a popular Australian fashion label seems to be painfully cutting its teeth on the whole social media thing with attractive 24 year old Heidi Clarke supposedly searching for the male owner of a jacket that she supposedly felt a connection with left at a cafe.
“A Lost Jacket and a Stolen Heart” – a touching story
I first read about the story in the Sydney Morning Herald over breakfast yesterday and didn’t think it was that weird but I was very interested, so I checked out the YouTube video and website the article spoke about. I admit that I was not one of those who immediately identified the video as a fake, although some of the things that struck me while watching the video were:
that apartment in Elizabeth Bay is disgustingly nice for a 24 year old shop assistant
she looks like a model, good looking people tend to have certain advantages in life
why is she talking about the lining so much?
I can’t see the label on the jacket, and she hasn’t mentioned it. That’s a bit wierd
If this guy has a girlfriend, she may have a bit of an insecurity complex after watching this
I can see this is Jet cafe in Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building, why isn’t she telling us that?
A touching story that is possibly untrue
So when I read NineMSN’s story today, outing the video and associated website as a fraud I was interested, and dug a little further to find they are not alone in their thoughts, although there is discussion about who is behind the video. NineMSN report that people were commenting on the video suggesting that Ms Clarke’s body language was suspicious, and that the jacket was part of a new men’s range that Witchery has not yet released, recognisable by… surprise surprise… it’s distinctive lining that Heidi spoke much about. However, Witchery denies any knowledge of Heidi or the video.
Arrogance… well, that’s advertising
While I tend to agree that the video is probably an attempt by Witchery to gain publicity through a viral campaign, or they have by chance had an absolutely gorgeous girl pick up a pre-release jacket and want to talk about it online, it has still gotten the point across. I don’t like being manipulated by the media and think it is arrogant of an advertising agency to think they can and should make up stories and tell us they are real to get us to buy their products, but you know, that’s what advertising is. It’s basically manipulation so that we feel compelled to buy things we often don’t need. Why else would my wardrobe be filled to the brim with clothing, much of it with ”labels”… and where did those five Polo shirts come from, the ones the same as those from Target, but with a price tag inflated a couple of hundred percent? Either I’m silly with my cash all on my own, or someone has created a brand and image that I am trying to buy into by essentially telling me stories.
But let’s not get too comfortable with the deception
It’s just like the fashion magazines, and the stars in Hollywood we idolise, let alone 2006′s lonelygirl15 on YouTube. It seems we like to be told stories, if we didn’t we wouldn’t be watching, but when we look at the case of lonelygirl15 in particular we can see we only like them when we think they are true. While I think this attempt was crude and feels as though someone has tried to get traditional marketing and cram it into social media, it did work, at least temporarily. I did wonder if my partner would be interested in a men’s tuxedo jacket like the one “Heidi” was holding, and I have gossiped with two girlfriends already. So while social media’s “age of marketing innocence” is certainly on the way out in Australia, and I hope that advertising agencies get better at putting the message across without making up ”real” and insulting stories, it still worked. I watched the YouTube video and told my friends about Witchery’s men’s line, along with their lame foray into the social media world. Hmmm… perhaps it didn’t work so well afterall.
