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Alexander van Elsas's Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior

new media, social behavior, Internet, TV, mobile, social networks, human behavior, family, friends

The incredible power of Social TechnologyToday

My good friend Steven Hodson has written an excellent post called The impossible dream - Social Technology. Steven is, rightly, concerned about the fact that many people in society are not part of the freedom and conversation social media technology has brought us. Steven writes:

As enamoured as we are currently with Social Media we have become more entrapped by the services built on what Social Media is all about. Social Media is an idea – a platform of sorts – that because of its philosophy of openness and transparency gave us a new way to communicate. It was a two way communication where those that created the content could interact with those that were consuming that content.

In of itself Social Media has changed the landscape of our online lives by letting us be participants instead of just bystanders. Even though we have gotten caught up in the ways we use the new media it doesn’t change the fact that the Internet has evolved – if only ever so slightly. Even with that evolution though we are still living in a world where access to this new world is a haphazard affair.

Stephen points out that as long as basic access is seen as a revenue generator for companies there will always be people left out of this conversation.  He writes:

In effect when you have Social Technology borders of every

Facebook may become the next online ’smoking’ addictionDecember 23 2008

What if Facebook becomes the new web? This could become a reality for many users worldwide, given their unbelievable growth of 600.000 new users every day. Facebook already has 140Mln registered users. If they continue to grow at this rate they could easily get 50% of all the Internet users worldwide to the Facebook platform within a few years.

Smoking is dangerous for your health

I find that to be a scary thought. Not just because it’s never good for a user if there is only one choice. It scares me that Facebook has access to incredible amounts of private information and that most users do not seem to realise or care about that. Facebook quickly tries to monopolise our on-line relations and interactions. Which would be ok if their business model was to provide users with value. But it isn’t. Their busines model is based upon advertisement. Basically it means that Facebook will exploit everything they know sbout you, about your friends, and the interactions you have with them in a commercial model.

If all of your interactions are happening thought Facebook, imagine what they know about you. Demographics, pol

Facebook Connect a privacy tool? Yeah Right!December 2 2008

A good article by Brad Stone at the NY Times entitled “Facebook aimes to extend its reach across the web”. Brad talks about Facebook Connect:

Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

This is beginning to sound like a development I have talked about many times, the user-centric web. In a User Centric Web, the user is in control of his data and interactions. Facebook’s attempt sounds like it, but it fails in one major perspective. And Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operation Officer of Facebook, together with Brad’s analysis indirectly explain where it fails.

Sheryl is quoted in the article:

“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “They can build their own social capa

Customer engagement improves the First Use ExperienceNovember 20 2008

[disclaimer: this post is related to the experiences I have at my job at www.glubble.com]

The most difficult thing to grasp when you are trying to build a consumer or mainstream service on the web is the notion that everyone is different. It is something we are struggling with all the time. As a developer you want to make things as simple as possible. The First Use experience needs to be near perfect. A user needs a good reason to invest effort in incorporating your service into his daily habits. It’s a question rarely addressed correctly by early adopters.

The problem is that every user is different. You can implement things in so many different ways, and there are so many different pro’s and con’s for each solution. You can ask users, but be ready for many different opinions. Glubble currently has users in 125 different countries in the world. That is a strength but also a complication.  So how can you make this First Use experience good for all? There isn’t a simple solution for this.

We build and released a first version last year and started a continuous dialogue with our users. They gave us a lot of feedback, suggestions for improvement and it h

Freemium is better than FreeNovember 17 2008

A few interesting posts drew my attention this morning. First there was Dave Winer who predicts that on-line advertisement will be dead. Not because it will completely disappear, or that it’s growth will slow down considerable. But because it will be replaced by something more valuable, commercial information. Interesting thought. I’ve always felt that on-line advertisement only makes sense when the advertisement itself has value to its user. Dave takes that thought one step further and explains why commercial information is more relevant.

Erik Schonfeld at Techcrucnh shows statistics that advertisement growth is grinding to a halt. He uses the results of the 4 major advertisers (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL) to show that growth is slowing down considerably. Together they still create a staggering $ 8,2 Bln revenues per quarter, but what would interest me is to know the total market value right now. It would most likely show that more than 90% of all advertisement revenues are generated by these four companies. Why there are so many startups still executing the free advertisement based business model is beyond me.

Chris Anderson explains about the metrics behind a business model I like a whole lot better, Freemium. In this business model you provide most of your service for free and