What’s Next Now

Here’s a video link about a team of neurosurgeons that did a play-by-play, conversational brain surgery using Twitter and YouTube.  It was followed live by about 1900 Twitter members.   We have barely scratched the surface regarding the possibilities that come with the expansion of social media tools.

What else might we find and use in following and conversing in the future?  Well, just off the top of my head:

• Participatory legislative processes – you will be able to follow and converse with elected officials during debate in committees and on the floor with legislators retweeting the most persuasive arguments
• Pizza delivery – your favorite pizza place will automate tweets during the process from order to door, or even deliver to wherever you are, based on your mobile phone coordinates
• Purchasing ninjas- a service will notify you when a hard-to-find item becomes available for purchase or when something on your favorites list goes on sale (Amazon.com, are you listening? Why don’t you have a place for me to put my twitter username in my profile?)
• Targeted benefits – businesses will market directly to you based upon your pre-set preferences and/or a tag-cloud generated from your on-line behavior
• Slow-time incentivism – restaurants and retailers will offer ‘for followers only” discounts and incentives via twitter to increase traffic during non-peak hours
• Prescription meds – pharmacies will provide direct-message reminders when to take your medication, to refill your prescriptions,  allow you to refill by reply and notify you when your prescription is ready for pick-up
• Way out there – Google maps will correspond with your calendar and your mobile device to send you alerts when you may be too far away to make it to that meeting on  time

We’re not quite the Jetsons yet, but it isn’t for a lack of trying.

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Yes, it appears Twitter had an outage last night.  And it was duly reported by Robin Wauters at Techcrunch, which is all well and good, but I have to take issue with her final update on the situation after it had been resolved.

Twitter’s Constant Stream Of Update Messages Suddenly Grinds To A Halt

Lucky for Twitter this happened on a weekend during the night (at least U.S. time) so most users won’t have even noticed. But it goes to show how dangerous it is to rely on a free third-party service for important communication.

This is just absurd.  Computer systems rarely go without glitches, particularly those that are scaling up. Think about all the times your paid services have been down.  If you spend any significant amount of time connected to the Internet, you’re familiar with outages.  The only time in recent years that I’ve found any outage to be unacceptable was when I was without my (former) main email account with Netidentity for two days.  And then a couple of months later it happened again. From what was reported, that the outages happened during upgrades, it was beyond unacceptable. That’s failing to plan ahead, plain and simple.  Inexcusable.

My point?  It is no more dangerous to rely on free services than it is to rely on paid services.  The only difference is that when it’s free, you don’t get to call customer service and complain.  That’s all.  In the case of Twitter, does anyone really think that its staff – and its investors – consider up-time any less important than the staff at your cable or telephone company?  Really?

When supposedly smart folks dole out horrible advice or commentary about anything to do with social media, I feel it’s important to point it out.

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Just a quick note today:

Steve Rubel, who is normally pretty savvy about these things, comes out today and says:

“So you heard it here first, folks. Twitter is peaking. Now I believe Twitter can get through “the dip” that stares them in the face, but it will need to adapt by: keeping its core users intact, remaining attractive to corporations and celebs and by becoming more organized. Search will help with the latter, but expect a battle as Facebook and Friendfeed both make a concerted push to become the place for all your social stuff.”

This is just nuts.   First of all, I’ve been on Friendfeed for at least 18 months now and don’t find much use in it, except that it helps feed my other social media streams to Facebook.  If it went away, I’d find and use other apps to do the same. Friendfeed has yet to break out beyond the more technically literate crowd.  Considering what Facebook is doing with developing its core product, I don’t think Friendfeed has much of a place beyond its existing niche going forward.

Twitter, on the other hand, I predict, is going to be ubiquitous.  Yes, it’s disorganized today, but it provides an information stream that can be sliced and diced in so many different ways that eventually everyone will be able to find an application of it that suits their needs.

The next big step, I think, is for Twitter, or some other programmer, to come up with an address book that allows people to categorize followers and followings by various relationship types.  I think TweetDeck may be the farthest along toward this.  But if the next generation MS Outlook includes the ability to add social media connections to its contacts data (and I believe it will), that may end up being the thing that locks Twitter into the same class as email as a permanent business and personal communication tool.

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The sheepskin on the wall behind my computer monitor says I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Journalism from the University of Florida.  What it didn’t say when it was printed in 1982 was that I majored in Public Relations and specialized in Magazine and Feature Writing.  Today, I see my decision to switch from straight journalism to a sub-specialized path as a fortunate one.

Yes, Journalism As We Know It Is Dying

You’d have to have been living under a rock over the past few years to have been insulated from the stream of stories and much bemoaning about the fact that newspapers are folding and the ranks of employed professional journalists is shrinking. A crashing economy is only facilitating the inevitable.

I found an excellent blog post discussing the current situation in more depth than I’ll go into here:

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.

When I read stuff like this, I do feel a bit glum because I know that many of my classmates went on to mainstream media jobs and are now facing and fearing very uncertain futures. Clearly, a profession that evolved from some 15th century innovations is dying.  In fact, it probably is already dead but the flat-line has yet to register on the monitor. But beyond commiserating with my friends I feel incredibly invigorated because I sense that what is to come of this will be very good. (more…)

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Used by people reluctant to engage in social media

There was a short thread over at the LinkedIn Web 2.0 group that answered this question.  Here’s what I wrote:

From a business perspective, Twitter is as much (or more) about actively listening as it is about providing “follow-worthy” content, links, concepts, etc. There are numerous google-able examples of how active listening on Twitter leads to business wins, particularly in the customer service area. I’ve personally gotten big wins with Embarq and Comcast through Twitter… and I’ve tweeted to the world their praises afterward! I also landed my photographer a wedding gig by responding to a tweet.  So, the “win-win” scenarios are particularly interesting with this cool new social tool.

I want to follow people I might do business with locally, those I might learn from, globally, and those who appear to fit my prospect/client archetypes. Toward this end, I use various Twitter tools and mashups like Twellow and TwitterLocal (and about a dozen others) to find people to follow. Last week I attended my first “Tweet-up” and actually met face to face with several of the folks I’ve befriended on Twitter (including the bride of the aforementioned wedding).

My friends need to get this stuff, so I’ll keep prodding.

I’ll get around to discussing treatments for those who suffer from Social Media Avoidance Syndrome (SMAS).  I wonder if these are the sorts of folks who decided about a hundred years ago that they didn’t ever see the need to have an automobile because the horse suited them just fine.

Sharon Stinner who writes about boomers on the Internet at Examiner.com makes a good point in contending that we are actually shifting from an “unnatural” set of communications practices back to a more “natural” set.  We’ve gotten away from some of the vital pieces of human interaction that make society and culture cohesive and instead have, in large part, allowed ourselves to be told how to think by purveyors of one-way communication processes.

No wonder the print media can’t seem to get its footing in the social media landscape!  It runs too much against its grain.

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