Author: Heather Negley
A new way of communicating has emerged that will transform our lives. It brings information to us in an instant and has the power to overload us with information as well as save our lives. The social networking technology behind Facebook status updates on Blackberry smartphones, created by Research in Motion, will have as big an impact on society as the invention of the telephone, the first tool to allow us to communicate over long distances. But unlike traditional telephones, social networking tools on smartphones have the advantage of asynchronous communication, where the recipient does not have to be available the moment the message is sent. This increases the convenience factor. Email, voicemail and the teletype are all asynchronous. But collaborative and networked environments makes status update applications an even more powerful way to send messages, because you can reach everyone you know in one message, or at least everyone in your network. The development of the Internet has been huge. But this technology will be bigger because it facilitates ultra-convenient, two-way communication.
Facebook status updates are a way of publishing micro or short messages to your network of friends. The added ability to do this on a handheld device means messages can be sent and received from virtually anywhere. At first it seems pretty vanilla to write something as mundane as what you are doing at the moment.
“Heather is sitting in traffic.”
“Heather is drinking coffee.”
“Heather is watching Project Runway.”
But as soon as we become comfortable with our network, a strange thing happens, the postings become more personal. We post more pictures and connect with more friends. We start writing about how we are feeling, what we are thinking, where we are going, who we are seeing and our major life events; information usually discussed on a one-on-one basis for most people. We become mini-celebrities in our circle of friends. We have an audience.
One interesting side effect of the emergence of this technology for me has been the ability to reconnect with old acquaintances that I thought were left forever in my past. In the future people will never lose touch with each other. Keeping in touch will become truly realistic.
What’s the power of all this? The ability to publish to the world is literally in our hands and only a click away. Guttenberg could hardly have imagined the impact of the published word when he invented the printing press in 1439. Nor could Western Union imagine the long term power of asynchronous networked communication. If they had, they may not have announced the discontinuation of all of their telegram services in 2006, ironically, the same year, Facebook became available to the public.
Imagine if a collaborative community such as Facebook status updates on a smartphone had been available during 9/11 or the sinking of the Titanic or to someone lost and fearing for their life or for Christopher McCandless as a device of last resort when he was trapped in the Alaska wilderness. He could have contacted his Facebook network and asked for help. Many people could have. Many people will.
The power the publish “what we are doing” at any moment will have a profound impact on the way we communicate with each other. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan coined the term, “the medium is the message” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McLuhan hypothesized that the medium itself changes the way people perceive messages and makes changes in society not only by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. For example, our children will not understand how we lost touch with our friends or how we used to make plans to meet someone at say a concert but never saw them when we got there. This is what McLuhan meant.
Perhaps the most profound use of the status updates is the ability this technology gives an individual publish and deliver a message of goodbye to everyone they have ever known at the end of their life. These types of messages are usually kept private and reserved for close family and friends. Sure obituaries are published in newspapers but not everyone reads obituaries or newspapers for that matter. Plus, these messages will certainly find the receiver and fast. Humans are social beings and the more tools there are for us to enable our sociability, the more we will exploit them, even up to the very end.
October 14th, 2008
Motherlode Blog - “Hope Greenberg, an attorney and mother of four on Long Island created the group when she asked her 12-year-old daughter to “friend” her and the girl pushed back.”
Everyone knows that locals are great to meet when visiting a new place. They are the ones who know their way around and can tell you the authentic and memorable places to visit. HospitalityClub.org is a good strategy to save yourself time and money by hooking you up with locals. The service allows you to find people all over the world willing to let other members stay the night, or receive a guided tour through their town.
This is a novel concept. Politweets is an extrapolation of the political comments on Twitter packaged into a self contained unit. This site is a good way to read the latest buzz as well as let off some steam about the latest political outrage. Perhaps even more useful because of its subject specific focus. You may not feel a need to twitter about what you are doing in general most of the time but twittering about your political opinion
seems like a natural fit especially in ‘08.
Web2.0 grown and developed into a huge subject area. There are all sorts of terms and jargon associated with it. What about all the categories that fall into Web2.0. How can you keep it straight? Let’s break it down.
Social Software: Normally applied to a range of web-enabled software programs. The programs usually allow users to interact and share data with other users.
Social Networking: Primarily web based. It is a collection of ways for users to interact by way of text chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, and discussion groups. Social networking sites enable people to create public profiles within Web sites and form relationships with other users of the same site. Social networking sites can be used to describe community-based Web sites, online discussions forums, chat rooms and other social spaces online. Examples are MySpace and LinkedIn.
Instant Messaging: This type of application or client allows people to communicate over a network in real time. Popular examples include Gtalk, Skype, Meebo, ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger and Pidgin. Users can add friends to a contact list, by entering their email address. If they are online, their name will be listed as available for chat. Clicking on their name
will activate a chat window with space to write to the other person.Blogs: Blogs, short for web logs, are like online journals for a particular person and are powerful tools. The owner posts a message periodically, allowing others to comment. Some blogs allow comments on the
entries, thereby creating a discussion forum. Blogs may even have blogrolls which are links to other blogs. Pingback and trackback allow one blog to notify another blog, creating an inter-blog conversation. Blogs engage readers and can build a virtual
community around a particular person or interest. Examples include Slashdot, LiveJournal, BlogSpot, and Wordpress. An offshoot of blogs are Vlogs which are video blogs. The most popular example of this is YouTube.Text Chat: Internet Relay Chat (IRC) allow users to join chat rooms and communicate with many people at once. Designed for many to many communication. Examples are EFnet, IRCnet, QuakeNet, Undernet.
Internet forums: Allow users to post a topics
for others to review. Other users can view topics and post comments. Most forums are public, allowing
anybody to sign whenever. Popular examples are Yahoo! Groups, GroupSwim and Google Groups.Wikis: a webpage that can be edited by its
visitors. Examples include Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Portland Pattern
Repository, MeatballWiki, CommunityWiki, and Wikisource and the niche Congresspedia, dedicated to information regarding Congress.Collaborative real-time editor: Simultaneous editing of a text or media file by different people on a network can be traced back to the 1970s but is now a practical application. Examples are SubEthaEdit, SynchroEdit, Moonedit are examples of this type of
social software. Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Zoho allow for joint editing, but other users will only see changes after saving.Social Bookmarking: Very useful for researchers. This technology empowers people to share and organize through use of keyword descriptions to identify images or text as a category or topic. Web pages and blogs with identical tags can then be linked together allowing users to search for similar or related content. If the tags are made public, online pages that act as a Web-based bookmark service are able to index them. Tags can be created
using words, acronyms or numbers. Examples include digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, reddit, Netvouz, and furl.Social Guides: This type of social software recommende places to visit or contains information about places in the real world such as coffee shops, restaurants, and wifi hotspots. A popular example of this is WikiTravel.
Social Citations: Similar to social bookmarking, this software is useful for academics, because it allows the users to post a citations for articles from online database like Academic Search Premier or LexisNexis Academic or even library catalogs. Citations can be organized into predefined categories allowing researchers interested in similar areas to connect and share resources. Popular examples include CiteULike, Connotea, BibSonomy, Zotero and Wikindx.
Social Libraries: This software allows visitors to keep track of their collectibles, books, records, and DVDs and allows people to share their collections through tagging. Recommendations can be
generated based on user ratings. Examples include discogs.com and LibraryThing .Social Web Browser: an internet browser with the ability to interact with popular social networking web services. Examples include FlockVirtual worlds: These are services where it is possible to meet and interact with other people in a virtual environment. Users move through the world by manipulating their custom-made avatar. A very popular example is Second Life.