The only certainties in life are death, taxes and Facebook changes

To coin another cliche: it's funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same. I noticed a little spike in my blog traffic and found that Smosh had featured the cartoon above that I drew in March 2009! You can see it here.

The Smosh feature was in the context of the recent big Facebook update announcement, moving everyone onto a timeline. And yes, as sure as there were whingers in 2009 when I drew the cartoon, there are plenty of whingers again this time around.

I still stand by my assertation that Facebook are correct to keep changing and keep pushing the boundaries. It's this agile nature of the site that has kept it revelant and kept the amazing growth and usage stats climbing exponentially.

Public speaking's effect on Klout

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people that quotes their Klout score when trying to impress girls, I just feel it is something I should understand, being in this space . In fact I find it to be a very marginal way of measuring one's true influence but I could write 10 blog posts on that.

Something prompted me to check out my Klout score this morning and it was interesting to see how a real life action I took on the 29th, speaking at #digitalsurrey really boosted my Klout score both on the 29th (so posts to the effect of: I'm going to #digitalsurrey tonight to list to @jonin60seconds) and then again the day after with lots of blog posts and review tweets.

So evidence that real life activity influences online life, although I'm still not convinced that Klout is a measure of influence rather than merely a measure of online activity.

Google fighting too many battles?

 

The launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire last week is a pretty significant moment in the highest-end tech movement, showing that it is possible to welcome other viable competitors into the space and giving hope to other players such Microsoft, HTC and Samsung. This is no longer a two horse race and Google/Android are all of a sudden under pressure in a segment they were starting to feel very comfortable in.

It makes me wonder about Googles ‘Everything’ strategy and how sustainable it is. I love what Google does and I love how it’s all starting to integrate but maybe this was a viable model when expectations were low and there was no serious competition. On every viable front of Google’s business, there is at least one major competitor trying to aggressively hold on to their slice of the pie or take some of Google’s. Any army general will tell you that it’s much harder fighting a war on multiple fronts.

This is where Apple have been so successful. Their strategy and vision have been pointing in the same direction for years and they have not been distracted by anything else going on around them, almost to the point of arrogance! They focus on delivering the content people want effortlessly onto a platform that is beautiful and easy to use. This ecosystem has always been their core focus.

You could probably say the same about Amazon, now that they have an ecosystem for delivery and consumption of media. Although their retail strategy is, famously, to sell pretty much everything you could think of, you don’t see them diving in search, maps, office suites etc. They are still purely retail focussed and are taking a big bet on digital media.

The difference is evident in the graphic above. If Google were concentrating, they would have had a media purchase and delivery solution as well.

How mobile has changed your world - slides

Your world has changed

View more presentations from Jon M Bishop

I had a great time talking at #digitalsurrey last night, which for me is one of the best networking events around so if you are in the general area, try coming down to one.

Last night I spoke about how mobile has already changed your world and also what the very near future for mobile holds. Based on the comments on Twitter etc, it seems to have gone down pretty well. Above is the Slideshare of what I spoke about. There is also a video on the way and here are a few blog posts that spun off as a result of the conversations the talk generated:

http://pwride.co.uk/index.php/2011/09/communities-mobile-future-ready/

http://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2011/09/the-future-of-mobile-telcommunications-jonin60seconds-at-digitalsurrey.htm

http://kchadda.co.uk/2011/09/30/some-thoughts-on-visa%E2%80%99s-repositioning/

http://www.creativecopywritingservices.co.uk/blog/?p=119

http://www.lisaharrismarketing.com/events/another-great-digitalsurrey-event/

http://www.digitalsurrey.co.uk/?p=879

http://www.thewebpitch.com/social-networking/jonin60seconds-says-your-world-has-changed

Google+ will win with photographers

(Picture a screenshot from Thomas Hawk's G+ stream)

One of my first impressions of Google+ was that its seamless integration with Picasa would make it a serious threat to Flickr. I wasn’t alone, as just a few days after G+ came out, there were myriad articles on how to migrate your Flickr sets across to Picasa.

Great for the amateur photographer

For me, Google has now completed the picture share loop. Inserting the SD card into my computer used to be the beginning of a long journey with lots of clicks, folders, naming, window jumping and file management involved. Now using Picasa desktop’s auto web album sync options means that not only do the pictures get onto my computer but they get onto the web in front of people I want to share them with (this would be even better when they associate Circles with your sharing settings in Picasa desktop). The only thing missing really is more friends and family signed up to G+ on the receiving end to close the loop.

The cherry on the top, is the fact that with the G+ app on my Android tab, I now have effortless access to all my Picasa web photos right there and then and the UI is much slicker than all the other crappy photo viewing apps I have tried. For me, that really closes the entire photo sharing loop, and I only had to initiate a copying process once.

And now it’s great for the professional photographers

The pros seemed to mainly use Flickr to showcase their work. They did this because it was the best photo sharing service at the time. I’ve spent hours of my life clicking, clicking, clicking through great pictures on Flickr but I have always found it quite a cumbersome interface to deal with. Yahoo! really missed a trick there as photo browsing really is one of those things that needs to be slick and intuitive.

On the other hand, Google and G+ have nailed it! The recent update to the photo browsing interface in G+ is just simple brilliance. You can browse a photographer’s entire body of work without a single click, really helping to expose these great pieces to the photographer’s audience/circles.

The example Google used when talking about the update was photographer Thomas Hawk’s pictures. The combination of the layout’s white borders and comment captions and Thomas’s brilliant mixture of colourful and black and white pictures makes the whole thing look like a scrollable graphic novel. Within 5 minutes I had been through all his photos and added him to my Circles. And not just me, he already belongs to 40k+ peoples’ Circles and G+ is only a few months old. His pictures and posts already have hundreds of comments and other interactions.

What a very powerful tool Google+ could become for photographers to get themselves noticed.

The modern day hype cycle. AKA why are these companies all up in my inbox?

Ever wondered why companies are so keen to talk to you these days, you social media blogger interwebs rockstar you? The most commonly kicked about reason is probably something to do with you being the gateway to 10’s of (ahem!) 1000’s of wide eyed readers hanging on every recommendation you uhm, recommend. But that’s not where the smart companies are at. They’re starting to realise that you probably sit right next to that big pink X [in the image dummy] as an early adopter in the ‘Law of Diffusion of Innovations’ graphic.

 That’s right, you’re that dedicated fanboy, foot soldier armed with plastic, queuing for 8 hours in the snow to be the first to get your hands on, well generally anything that’s just been released with an i at the beginning of its name.  And the first thing you’re going to do when you get it is vindicate your efforts by smearing the social interwebs with your coolness,  so much cooler than those people with jobs and mortgages that don’t have 8 eight hours to stand in the best queue ever. What's you're doing without even realising, you leader of black-framed-specs men, is kicking off the early adopter hype that will eventually influence the early majority into wallet emptying action. In fact you were tweeting about your iThing while you were still queuing for it weren’t you? You were generating the hype before you got inside the iDoor.

you were tweeting about your iThing while you were still queuing for it weren’t you?

No wonder you’re getting spammed with press releases from companies wanting to talk to you.

 The world of commerce needs early adopters, they need people that are emotionally led in their purchases, not waiting around for other people to realise the antenna doesn’t work. You can live with it, you just need to be first and cool, oh so cool. And being cool these days is easy cause you have so many places online to brag about it which is why there is such an intrinsic link between early adopters and blogging/ social web.

 The Hype Cycle of Love

Your words, your excitement your passion is what puts a rocket under the arse of the early majority to get them up and excited and buying your iThing. You need them to do this so you can say, ‘Pfft, that old thing, I’ve had it for three weeks already’. They need you to tell them three weeks ago already how awesome it is and then give them three week to research any better alternatives. 

 The clever company appeals to your emotional response first (ever seen any mention of spec on an iPad advert?) and makes sure the spec is easily available to the early majority who like to do a bit of research. You, you early adopting thing of beauty, you may check the spec but you were going to buy it anyway.

ever seen any mention of spec on an iPad advert?

Now don’t get uptight and think that the clever company is playing you. The product needs to be killer to dance this online tango. It needs to be cutting edge, it needs to be intuitive and it needs to be beautiful. It needs to be certain that you will be certain that holding it in your hand (before anyone else) will certainly make you cooler than oldskool. You, you amazing early adopter you, are single handedly contributing to a small collective that is pushing product development to the highest possible standards. You need something good enough to get excited about every year, those lazy majority need to you tell them what is cool and those smarty-pants in cubicles all over the world need you both to buy their killer product. Everyone wins.

This is the modern day hype cycle and it is a beautiful thing.

Oh yeah, this groovy TED video gives insight into how the smart companies are appealing to your twitchy emotions

The London riots remind us that people are no longer connected by geography

There are some pretty appalling scenes coming out of London this weekend. Riots have rocked the capital all the way from the very north of London right down to Brixton in the south.

What has the more traditional commentators (and the police apparently) perplexed is the rapid and wide spread growth of the riots. How does the shooting of someone in Tottenham start a riot in Brixton? Traditionally riots took a while to form and were usually contained to one place. This appear to no longer be the case.

Cdr Stephen Watson: "We had no information to suggest that we would have the scale of disorder that now confronts us" 

What’s changed? People are more connected of course and more importantly the general age group (and a few other factors) of the people involved in the riots would mean that they were most likely Blackberry users, who communicate via private BBM which must be a nightmare for police intelligence to track and respond to in time.

Communities are defined by interest not locations

The dispersed nature of the violence point to an important seismic shift in the way communities are defined. Traditionally, communities were defined via geography, which is why riots are usually contained to a local area where people come to protest against something that happened in their community or to someone from their community. In a more connected world, communities are defined more by an interest or passion group.

These riots are an extreme example of people coming together to act on a certain interest that they (obviously) feel very passionate about. What that interest could be, is sometime hard to tell, I’m sure it initially started out as anger and frustration toward the killing of someone in their community but I find it hard to believe that people all over the capital were rioting over an incident that arguable didn’t really affect them. Anarchism and self gain (looting) must have had something to do with it as well.

How can the police react to this shift?

This all makes life a lot harder for the police. They’ve got a lot to figure out in regards to how they go forward based on these events. It seems pretty clear that this is how riots will be in the future: quicker and more widespread than before. This is what they have to content with:

• Rapidly spread messages over mobile-connected groups will mean that inflamed situations are much more likely to turn into violence much more quickly.
• Violence is much more likely to spread geographies, especially with the inherent presence of anarchistic elements in peaceful London protests.
• How are police going to be forewarned of escalating violence when communication primarily takes place on the private networks such as BBM? 

Link to the map pictured above. I'm not sure of the accuracy or source but it looks similar to what was shown on the BBC.

My interview with Social Media Influence

How to build an overnight Facebook sensation on the cheap

That’s how you could pretty much sum up the conversation I had this morning with Jon Bishop, head of social media for PayPal UK. For the second time in a year, the popular online payment service has amassed 6-digit gains in its Facebook following in a matter of days with a pretty cost-effective pitch: friend us and you’ll get a chance to win a new iPad 2.

When we first reported on this campaign we were pretty skeptical, wondering if such a blatant give-away was, you know, pandering to the masses. What happens when the winners are announced, we wondered, and all but 10 grumble in disappointment? Would they stick around, or un-Like PayPal UK and go about their day? And isn’t there a more meaningful way to generate interest than to just give away a must-have gadget?

Keep reading here http://bit.ly/iZ2yYO

Posted via email from Jon's posterous

4 alternatives to Twitpic now that they are being idiotic

Correction, this blog post has a new headline: “Learnings on how quickly the information on the Internet can change and why you should always check your facts before getting on your high horse”.

This morning my favourite news source, TNW, wrote a piece on Twitpic changing their picture ownership policy. This irked me somewhat and got me unusually inspired to write a blog post as something was happening and not the usual two weeks later.

When I checked the TNW post again an hour later, it had been updated/redirected to a new post that reveals that almost all popular photo sharing apps have the same terms, including some of the alternatives I recommend below. It turns out the only one that doesn’t have these terms is Mobypicture, although there is no mention of Posterous’ terms.

So I’ve included the post in the state I had gotten it as a momument to stupidity, much like the Siegfried Line on the French / German border: “General George S. Patton, when asked about the Siegfried Line, reportedly said, "Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity”:

____________________________________________________________

Disclaimer one: Please do not heed the advice written below, use Mobypicture instead.

Disclaimer two: I still think Instagram is poncy and an insult to the progress of the digital camera.

____________________________________________________________

Twitpic seem to have not learnt from similar privacy gaffs from the likes of Facebook and the iPhone 4 by re-writing their terms, essentially taking ownership of your Twitpic shared images so that they can sell them on to someone dumb enough to pay for such low quality imagery.

Twitpic, you baffle and frustrate me:

·         Seriously, have you not learnt from Facebook?

·         You’re not Facebook you have lots of decent competitors and therefore cannot afford to be idiotic. Yours is a pretty easy model to duplicate, which is probably why you have lots of competitors.

·         Who’s going to pay for pixellated, blurry pics taken with rubbish iPhone cameras?

·         When you mess with people’s personal property, you can be sure it will be met with resistance and loss of users.

·          I have pictures of my baby nephew on Twitpic, why would you want a piece of that?!

·         And finally taking ownership of people’s private property (especially something as emotive as their pictures) is a massively flawed business model.

So people, please choose an alternative below and start voting with your feet:

Yfrog – seems to be the main alternative to as close a match as you can get to Twitpic. Hope they don’t go the same way!

Posterous – I use Posterous and am a big fan. Once it’s set up it is brilliant simple and flexible to share across many platforms.

Instagram – I don’t have an iThing but I have heard this is great for Mac. Being very Mac, you can add poncy  filters that make your images look like a picture that has been lying in the sun since 1974. What was the point of the digital camera revolution?

PicPlz – If you’re an Android droid like me then check these guys out.

Not satisfied with that list? This dude was much more industrious than me and came up with 7 alternatives to Twitpic a few years ago. Can’t vouch for any of the services he mentions.

Posted via email from Jon's posterous

Facebook targeting is spooky but so good!

Random share here, this random encounter just showed me how good Facebook's targeting is getting:

I mentioned something about the old sitcom Fullhouse. As soon as I hit enter on the status update, this recommended page appears.

Posted via email from Jon's posterous