Social Mashup

“Privacy is an onion” (patent pending maxim); it is situational, temporal and multi-dimensional. Perhaps said axiom should be recast as a ‘genetically modified onion’.

Perusing articles on Facebook privacy control changes from a well-known security company, there is the revelation that “no private information should be on the Internet”. A wise statement for an information security purist, but what constitutes ‘private information’, to what degree is it fluid and are the controls within Social Networks sufficient to allow us to restrict access in the ways we demand / require? What are the ’sociological norms’, and what of ’super-social’ libertines (such as I) that have exceeded Dunbar’s Number by a magnitude of 700%?…

Read the full article on the Atos Origin CIO / CTO Blog

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Star gazing with a Social Nostradamus

I was thinking this week about Social Networks and how I saw their potential development over the next few years. As wonderful as they are, we must remember that sites such as Facebook are only really 5 years old, and they have had to spend time defining a business model, growing awareness and user bases and of course dealing with horrible scalability issues (when a site has 200 million users the industrialisation and volumetric management becomes a ‘tad tricky’).

So let’s assume the last 5 years have been all about understanding the market, users and fundamental sizing problems. What will (or should) the next 5 years deliver?

I see this question in the context of some interesting statistics:

1. The amount of time people are spending on Social Networks has trebled

2. Revenue from online advertising now outstrips offline

3. The rise of the smartphone, advances in mobile networks, and importantly price reduction in handsets and mobile Internet usage opens up some really exciting new potential

So let’s get to some predictions… ..Continue reading..

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Tech Journalism and PR Signposting

I wanted to post up some links and a short video about UKTJPRs Twitter project. If you’re interested in Technology Journalism and PR in the UK tech market, I would suggest having a look at the following:

1. The link above and this overview

2. On Twitter @spode and @andylim (there’s a couple of suggestions for FollowFriday!)

3. On Facebook the UK Technology Journalists and PR Group

4. The UK Technology Journalists and PR group on LinkedIn

5. The video below, which will give an overview of some of the features the Twitter project is looking at

6. In the ‘wider sense’ also have a look at JournoTwit

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Click on the map to see a larger version on Flickr

Well, September 2009, Technology Mashup first came into being in early 2008. Lots of experimentation in Social Media has resulted, and 3 months ago I decided to take down both my stevenimmons.org and subdomain blog(blog.stevenimmons.org) for some well needed restructuring. ..Continue reading..

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When people talk about LinkedIn they usually cover topics such as:

1. Building the network before you need it
2. LinkedIn for Social Networking and Business Opportunities
3. Finding a job using LinkedIn

The Traditional Problem

A feature of the site that I have found very useful (and wished existed years ago) is the ability to find ‘virtual mentors’ and subsequently source new ideas for career and personal development. About 7 or 8 years ago I spent a lot of time thinking ‘where next’ and ‘how’ in terms of building a highly credible technical (and to an extent public) profile. The issue in 2001 / 2002 was the distinct lack of Web2 / Social Networking sites, and therefore a pretty tough time finding exemplar CVs and information about successful people that I would ‘like to mirror’. My solution at the time (which still seems reasonable) was to plough through lots of public academic profiles (mostly staff lists on university web sites). Draw backs with this approach were: ..Continue reading..

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An intriguing title and it is important to first define terms. Out posting is the practice of operating satellite web presences, I think of this as a hub and spoke model with spokes operating as the outposts. With the proliferation of social networks and other web2 sites, it becomes extremely easy to operate dozens of these and they are quite commonly used by bloggers, marketers et. al. to ‘deliver their message’ to multiple audiences. A good way to think of an outpost is as a channel. The hub could be an aggregator service such as ping.fm. This facilitates a broadcast ‘model’ – i.e. from ping.fm you can push in a single update the same message to multiple web2 outposts.

Sounds great so far! A simple way to hook up tonnes of web2 presences and push updates to multiple audiences. You could also say it sounds a bit untargeted and even ‘spammy’, so what are the potential drawbacks? ..Continue reading..

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I’ve previously written about ratios and authority on Twitter and I wanted to expand on the specific issue of a ‘retweet’. Retweets make sense as the follower / following structure of Twitter means that one message does not necessarily travel far into the depths of Twitter. A retweet pushes that message to the followers of the retweeter – and so on as it passes through more of the interwoven following / follower circles. So retweet = ‘pass it on’ and might well indicate interesting / viral content.

Phew! that was a mouthful.

So what’s wrong with using number of retweets as a measure of a user’s authority? ..Continue reading..

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