Last night I watched an advance UK preview of The Social Network, the Facebook movie. Having read Steve’s post a few week’s ago, I have been looking forward to seeing it as soon as it reached British shores. This post describes my thoughts after watching the film and will contain spoilers. I’ve been a member of Facebook right back when it was called ‘The Facebook’, and I’ve been fascinated with it ever since. Aaron Sorkin did a great job with the screenplay and the outcome is a beautifully made film, dark in places though that’s a trademark to the genius of director David Fincher. The early part of the action takes places around the Kirkland campus at Harvard, and depicts Mark Zuckerberg as a socially awkward computer science nerd.
Jesse Eisenberg, plays Zuckerberg in a rather robotic performance, lacking any kind of human emotion during the early part of the movie. Once you get past the monotone voice, you do hear traces of Mark’s humorous dry wit. I found myself laughing out loud in certain places. The Winklevoss twins came across rather creepy, blessed by family fortune and the status that it brings. They are used to getting their own way until of course they meet Mark. He manages to give them the run around and take their idea of the Harvard Connection social network and build upon it. You can’t help but feel they were naive suckers, despite their smugness.
Sean Parker’s (co-founder of Napster) role adds an injection of ‘coolness’ into the movie. Parker was the person that suggested that ‘The’ from Thefacebook.com should be dropped to simply read "Facebook". You can see how Zuckerberg becomes enthralled by Parker’s influence. Interestingly though, the film fails to mention that Parker became Facebook’s president up until the cocaine drugs bust.
Sorkin’s screenplay shows the painful build up of Eduardo Saverin’s betrayal by Zuckerberg, Sean Parker and the rest of the Facebook management team, it really stood out towards the end. In David Kirkpatrick’s Facebook Effect book (read my review here), Saverin came across as rather cold, socially awkward much like Mark himself. But above all he was a business machine, exceptionally shrewd and focused on making big contacts and even bigger deals. This didn’t really across within the movie. I genuinely felt sorry for him. Upon reading the Kirkpatrick book, I felt that Saverin was the villain. However, who is to really know the true story, apart from the main protagonists? Overall, the 120 minutes of the movie passed by very quickly because I was engrossed. If you get the opportunity, I would certainly recommend you go and watch it. It’s a great story.
Twitter has announced a radical new design for their own homepage. Yesterday, to much fanfare they announced “Today, we’re introducing a new, re-engineered Twitter.com that provides an easier, faster, and richer experience”. You can find out more about the enhancements on Twitter information page here. But here are some of the highlights:
Enchanced new design. The new Twitter.com has a cleaner timeline and a rich details pane that instantly adds more impact to individual Tweets. The site also now offers infinite scroll — you no longer have to click “more” to view additional Tweets.
Embedded Media. You will now be able to embed photos and videos directly intoon Twitter, due to 16 partnerships with DailyBooth, DeviantART, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, TwitVid, USTREAM, Vimeo, yfrog, and YouTube.
Related content. Click on a tweet and the details pane shows you additional information related to the author or subject. Depending on the Tweet’s content, you may see: replies, other Tweets by that user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from, and more.
Mini profiles. Click a username to see a mini profile without navigating from the page, which provides quick access to account information, including bio and recent Tweets
Mashable succinctly describes the forthcoming update as “…a desktop app minus the download” and I think that makes a very fair description of the new site. You can see an example of the new interface below. For iPad users, the revamped Twitter interface will be familiar. Twitter for iPad uses a very similar display to the new Twitter site.
Lifehacker has collated a list of all of the keyboard shortcuts which will helpful to users, once they are migrated to the new site. You can learn more about the shortcuts below:
Navigation
j/k to move between the next and previous tweets
Enter to drill down into or close a selected tweet
space to page down
Shift+space to page up
/ to jump to the search box
. to refresh and jump back to the top
Actions for Individual Tweets
f to favorite a tweet
r to reply to a tweet
t to retweet
m to send a direct message
n to compose a new tweet
Escape to cancel a compose window, dismiss the help window
Via lifehacker.com
The roll out for Twitter users will begin within the next few weeks, so watch out for your upgrade. Personally, I think this is a great revamp. The Twitter experience will become richer for users, and the embeddable media features will save time. Today, I don’t like having to go to sites such as Twitpic and Yfrog to view picture content. However, I do wonder how desktop clients such as Seesmic and Tweetdeck will respond to this update? Are we going to Twitter desktop clients evolving. Or, does the new Twitter upgrade make desktop clients redundant? Only time will tell.
I’m surprised its taken Google so long to launch Realtime (social) search. Last year, their Updates feature was very cool, especially at monitoring hashtags. I don’t feel this new feature will replace proper sentiment monitoring tools such as Radian6 or Scoutlabs. But it’s certainly not a bad free tool. Now, I wonder what monitoring realtime goodness Microsoft will add to Bing?
Remember, be careful what you tweet. They are being archived for a very long time to come.
I first heard about David Kirkpatrick’s book during Robert Scoble’s interview of him at the 2010 F8 Facebook conference. Both Scoble and Kirkpatrick discussed how Facebook was evolving from a social networking platform to an identity platform. Facebook’s recent privacy issues, left me intrigued. Over the past eight months, I had found myself going to my Facebook profile less and less. Instead, I devoted my time in following interesting people on Twitter. So, learning more about Facebook’s plans during F8 and the interesting insights from Scoble and Kirkpatrick led me to purchase the book.
Amazon delivered it within a few short days and upon arrival, I immediately skimmed the Prologue. It became apparent early on, that Kirkpatrick was asked to write this book by Mark Zuckerberg, to pen an historical account on how Facebook started, Zuckerberg’s vision for Facebook and how his friends helped him to change the world by building an infectious social network.
The book itself consists of 17 chapters and is a very engaging read. The 333 pages are packed with some truly interesting insights, and I couldn’t help feeling in awe at the research time and commitment that Kirkpatrick put into this work. Hours of interviews with people in Zuckerberg’s inner circle are recalled and provide a great backdrop to the true story behind the world’s leading social network. Zuckerberg describes Facebook as “a social movement”, not as a publishing platform. He is motivated by a passion for radical transparency. Through the sharing of our data and making our lives publicly available, he believes it turns us into better people. Many people disagree and the recent controversy over privacy controls as only fuelled the fire on what Facebook is sharing about us.
Kirkpatrick has written the definitive book on the company so far. It left me with a deep understanding of how the company thinks, its philosophies and it stunned me on its true power. Anyone who is interested in Facebook’s history will absolutely love this book, as will those who are interested in contemporary geek culture.
The Facebook Effect is a great weekend read, buy your copy of the book from Amazon here.
Last night, Facebook launched “Places”. You can see the announcement and launch video above. This new service from Facebook is similar to other Local Based Services (LBS) such as Foursquare and Gowalla, where you “Check in” at various locations and announce your presence. Places allows you to see where your friends are and share your location in the real world. When you use Places, you’ll be able to see if any of your friends are currently checked in nearby and connect with them easily. You can check into nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit, and view comments your friends have made about the Places you visit.
Facebook is working with a small group of LBS developers including Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah to build Places check ins into their own services. However, Facebook is also launching its own Places API, which means that Facebook will eventually become the key platform on which other location based applications will be be built upon. This is huge for Facebook and no doubt worrying for Twitter and Google.
Places works in conjunction with geo location supported smartphones and allows you to:
Check in and your Places update, which will appear on the Places page, your friends’ News Feed and your Wall.
Tag the friends you’re with so they can be part of your update.
Appear in "Here Now" to friends and others nearby who are also checked in.
Browse status updates of friends checked in nearby.
[Updated] Facebook releases, “Why to Check In?” video
It will be interesting to see the uptake of businesses on this new feature. To help them, Facebook has released a short guide to help advertisers, you can read the guide below.
Places creates a presence for your business’s physical store locations- encouraging your customers to share that they’ve visited your business by “checking in” to your Place. When your customer checks into your Place, these check-in stories can generate powerful, organic impressions in friends’ News Feeds, extending your brand’s reach to new customers.
As of writing, the new service is not available outside of the US. However, a global rollout is expected over the coming months. Use Places on touch.facebook.com or the Facebook for iPhone.
NB. Places is currently available on phones that support W3 geolocation.
A fantastic presentation by Rohit on reinventing marketing. I have been a long term fan of his work for many years and I found this recent Tedx talk particularly inspiring. In this talk, he states why we are all in the business of marketing. In everyday life we try to influence others to do something, whether its trying to convince a spouse over what dinner choices to make. Or, trying to convince our kids to eat their vegetables. However, over recent years marketing has experienced a bit of a bad reputation because “it will bend you to its will”.
Rohit continues to state that marketing suffers from what he calls “The Marketing Mirage”. Namely products have traditionally been marketed on the basis of:
Features – People buy things because of features. Or, the belief that it solves a particular need.
Promotions – If I give you something for free or discount it, you will buy it or more of it.
Demographics – If I know my target audience, I can just purchase media to target my segment better and succeed.
Such models worked particularly well during the 1960s and 1970s, when consumers were “mass media consumers”. However, consumers have changed and many marketing teams have evolved and become more complex (teams are spread throughout the world, some work together others work in silos). The consumer of today is different, they have full control, it’s become “a one button economy”. All the consumer has to do is publish his or her thoughts online, by a touch of a button and share them with the world quickly easily and cheaply than ever before.
For the first time, we have a huge shift where "virtual trust" now exists. In essence, I will trust the opinion of someone I don’t know, who no one in my network knows and I have no way of verifying whether they are real or not, or credible or not. But I will still trust them. If ten people all say that a digital camera is not good on Amazon I will believe that. Even if i don’t know who those ten people actually are.
Rohit, ends the talk with a great quote:
When it comes to marketing and when it comes to reinventing marketing, it’s not about retelling the features and benefits and having something that somebody can connect to. What it’s about is having a story that you can tell and that someone else can take, make their own and retell.
Recently I attended my favourite conference of the year – Thinking Digital (#TDC10). Sadly, I was unable to attend last year. However, getting back to Newcastle and the Sage this year was great. I left the conference with my brain a little bigger but also fried (in a good way!) #TDC10 had a great line up of speakers, and it was fantastic to catch up with messers – Steve Clayton, Marc Holmes, Paul Fabretti, Christian Payne and Benjamin Ellis. (Shame about Mark Johnson not being there, I missed him even if some others didn’t 🙂
There is a lot of good stuff in this post. So, I would advise grabbing a cup of coffee, or indulging in some fine wine (depending on the hour) that you are reading this.
P.S. If you are wondering what the Diamond Shreddies reference above is, read on to find out!
Christian Payne
Christian Payne aka @Documentally presented an excellent talk on how mobile technologies have evolved, by getting ever smaller but ever more powerful. His talk focused on his own personal experiences as a journalist and photographer.
Documentally, intersects a perfect Venn diagram of citizen journalist, professional photographer and audio/video podcaster. Learn more about his work at: http://ourmaninside.com
Christian showed the following video in his presentation, and discussed that soon after the video was broadcast over Twitter, he received many calls of help.
Julian Treasure
Julian Treasure is chairman of the The Sound Agency, a company that helps its clients achieve results through the better use of sound – in branding, communication, retail or public spaces, offices and product design. Julian’s talk was an amazing journey into everyday sounds that surround us. From the Nokia ringtone to The Simpsons theme music. Sound plays a very important part of our lives, and yet we take it for granted.
I loved this talk for a number of reasons, Julian’s passion for the subject is obvious. But also his tips on how we can improve our own vocal sounds was invaluable. He was very kind enough to answer my own question on which CDs make the best calming music. I’ve already ordered Bird Song from Amazon!
Here is Julian discussing why “Sound Matters”. Learn more about his work on the Sound Business blog, and if you are inspired, you can read his book too.
If you get the opportunity to see (and hear) Julian speak, you are in for a real treat! A quick taster of Julian’s talk can be seen at a recent Ted Talk below.
Rory Sutherland
Rory Sutherland is a Vice Chairman of the Ogilvy Group in the UK and presented one of the most entertaining talks of #TDC10. The Ted Talk below, captures the essence. The talk touched on many aspects of Behavioural Economics, if you are a big fan of this subject (as much as I am), you will love the great book recommendations by Rory – Obliquity by John Kay and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Rory’s Ted Talk, which covered many of his points at #TDC10 can be seen below.
Now, on to the Diamond Shreddies picture at the start of this post. Watch the video below to discover the context.
Andy is the co-founder of Green Thing (Dothegreenthing.com). Green Thing is a public service that inspires people to lead a greener life. With the help of brilliant videos and inspiring stories from creative people, Green Thing focuses on seven things you can do – and enjoy doing. A flavour of Andy’s #TDC10 talk can be seen below.
Here are some of the videos that Andy showed during his talk.
Mary Anne de Lares Norris
Mary described spatial interfaces and presented the Oblong video below. The g-speak technologies presented here, inspired some of the UI scenes in the film, Minority Report. Mary described the process as “Emancipating Pixels”. I have included some footage from the film as a comparison. I think you will agree this is very cool.
Jer Thorp
Jer is a data visualiser, responsible for creating some of the infographics, (generally known as “infoporn”) sections for Wired magazine. He focused on data mining and using the open source Processing software to create some amazing data visualisations. He describes his work between a cross section of Art, Science and Design and this is certainly is true.
Jer’s work is inspired by the work of Mark Lombardi, take a look at some of his amazing data visualised presentations here. Also, I recommend downloading and installing “Processing”.
In the video below, he extracted tweets from where people were coming from and going to as defined by their Twitter updates. If you like this video, check out the many others on Jer’s Vimeo site.
The goal of Project Emporia is to give the user a personalised search experience over the Twitter fire hose. The lenses allow you to discover “filtered and more relevant data”.
The project is certainly interesting and currently in alpha. I’m keeping a close eye on this one, as it has enormous potential as a Twitter “filtering mechanism”. Another great job from the Microsoft team.
Test drive Project Emporia today.
So there you have it, another Thinking Digital has come to an end. The quality of the speakers gets better each year and already is has become one of my favourite conferences in the UK. From the tweet pie chart above, you can see I wasn’t too far behind the other tweeters at the conference. Incidentally, if you missed the event and are looking for an archived selection of the tweets over the two days. You can find them here and here on my Windows SkyDrive.
Wonderful to see that Erik Qualman has refreshed his Social Media Revolution video. I only wish he had used a difference accompanying soundtrack this time. Fat Boy Slim, so 2008?
Key stats from the video follow below:
Stats from Video(sources listed below by corresponding #)
Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
96% of them have joined a social network
Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama. Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
Only 14% trust advertisements
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
90% of people that can TiVo ads do
Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
A fascinating web documentary describing what the Semantic Web may hold for all of us. Are you ready to put your data on the web yet?
Interviews with Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, Chris Dixon, David Weinberger, Nova Spivack, Jason Shellen, Lee Feigenbaum, John Hebeler, Alon Halevy, David Karger and Abraham Bernstein
