Social Media Round-up #41
Welcome to eModeration's round-up of all that is intriguing, alarming or odd in the world of social media, compiled by Kate Williams. For more social media snippets, follow @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.
This week (a little bleary-eyed): The Social Election; Facebook's fork in the road; and Apple redux.
THE HEADLINES ...
ON FACEBOOK...
THE LOWDOWN ...
APPLE JUICE ...
NEWSBYTES...
THE HEADLINES ...
After the most closely-fought (and poorly-predicted) election since 1992, we Brits awoke today to a New Dawn. No, strike that - a Dawn of Chaos, Confusion and Disarray.
It has, I’m sure you’ll agree, been a night - indeed a campaign - of delirious highs, and pendulous lows.
In the course of the country’s first social media election, The Worm took its place beside the fabled Swingometer in political lore, and social media was monitored to within an inch of its life for clues to the nation’s intentions. There was rolling sentiment analysis, streaming debate, and of course, obsessive tweeting - as well as that rather awkward moment of electile dysfunction when Labour’s Twitter Tsar Kerry McCarthy peaked too early, and revealed the results of postal voting before she should have.Two of the three main parties launched last-minute social efforts, hoping to sway the many voters who dithered till the bitter end. The Conservative Party booked a well-padded takeover of YouTube’s homepage, where users were treated to the party's final election broadcast, 'A Contract between the Conservative Party and you', for the duration of the Big Day.
Labour, meanwhile, targeted its core supporters with a Facebook viral - a smart rebuttal of Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ idea - in which an exhausted mother of the future revealed what life might be like if individuals became providers of vital public services. In the final frames, the mother berates a friend on the phone, for causing the chaos by not voting Labour – and the friend’s name appears, through some cunning Facebook trickery, to be that of the viewer themselves. Clever – but not clever enough, it appears, to swing it for Labour.
And what of Mumsnet - the parenting website whose users were so eagerly courted by the three party leaders that this became known as the Mumsnet Election? Well, until Monday, when Gordon Brown stopped by for a quick chockie-bickie and a last-minute webchat, the site had been firmly Cleggist; a poll conducted immediately after the final Leader’s Debate gave the LibDems an enormous 42.5% of their vote. Meantime, Facebook had predicted remarkably similarly: a poll of 463,000 users gave Nick Clegg a mammoth, but - as it turns out - wildly unrepresentative 42% of the vote.
On Election night, Twitter’s function as the new town square was firmly established, as socialites of every hue settled in for a night of outraged tweeting and the neurotic analysis of exit-polls - activities which continued through the early hours and into the new day.
Now, of course, it is over; Britain has, for now, a hung parliament. Whether this is a moment for peals of gay hilarity, hiccups of bewildered apprehension, or tears of bitter recrimination and regret will depend on the particular cut of your political jib. Either way, it has been a night to remember.
If you are still awake, and inexplicably keen to review the month’s electoral events in even greater detail, BrandRepublic anatomises the iconography of #GE2010, here.
ON FACEBOOK ...
It’s quite possible that Facebook’s PR dept are reduced to biting each other’s nails, their own being already gnawed to the quick, and beyond. This week the site was forced to suspend Facebook Chat for several hours, after it became clear that, with a bit of not-particularly-sophisticated manipulation, users could see the pending friend-requests of each of their connections, as well as – gulp – their private chat messages. Once again, the social behemoth’s privacy policies were brought into painfully sharp focus, and once again, CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s breezy assertion that privacy is no longer a social norm hung awkwardly in the air.
In case you’ve been very determinedly Not Paying Attention, Facebook’s latest raft of changes mean that users’ digital identities now follow them around the web, like a floating tail of bathroom tissue accidentally caught in their trousers. When a user clicks the new ‘like’ button on a third-party web page, that third party can access the user’s list of Facebook friends, favourite activities and other content which the user has previously shared. Meanwhile, data about each individual’s home town, education and hobbies is linked to community pages on those topics.
Publishers are understandably delighted. Within a week of its launch, 50,000 websites had clutched the ‘like’ button to their collective bosom, and Zuckerberg’s plucky prediction that he'd serve a billion of them within the first 24 hours was quickly realised.
But the modifications have brought the site under the increasingly beady scrutiny of privacy campaigners.
And, as ReadWriteWeb points out, the tactics which the ‘Book have used to encourage users to opt-in have verged upon the thumb-crushing: as well as making it the whole process predictably serpentine - thus discouraging individuals from getting to grips with their settings - users who refuse to allow their info to be linked to Community pages find that their profile page is suddenly, and alarmingly, blank.
Last week Four US senators wrote personally to Zuckerberg, and they were rather grumpy, to put it mildly, about recent developments. Yesterday, a gaggle of 15 consumer groups filed a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that the recent changes “violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations.”
Regardless of whether these particular complaints come to much, it seems incontrovertible that Facebook – and by default, the rest of us – have hit a fork in the road; and that an increasingly bright spotlight on privacy can be expected from both users and regulators.
It may be well to bear in mind that Facebook has mis-stepped on privacy before (Beacon anyone?) with memorably disastrous results for all concerned; and while another error of that magnitude is unlikely, anxious brands might appreciate the strategic bullet points offered by Augie Ray on Forrester’s blog, here.
Meanwhile, if you’re anxious to know which slippery snippets of your personal info Facebook is enthusiastically scattering across the web, this simple tool may prove enlightening.
THE LOWDOWN ...
The amount of digital data in the world is currently equivalent to that which would be generated if everyone in the world tweeted constantly for a century – indeed is expanding so rapidly that a new unit of data measurement has had to be invented. A warm welcome, then, to the Zettabyte: you are worth a staggering 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual bytes, and though your name most closely resembles that of a mid-range fast-food chain, I don’t doubt you will become a familiar friend in the coming decade – during which the digital universe is predicted to expand by a factor of 44.
It need hardly be said that in the matter of child-rearing, Discipline and Drudgery are my watchwords. No sentimentalist, I – though I confess I swallowed hard at Boeing’s response to the plane-obsessed 8 year-old who sent them a design for a fantastical fire-fighting plane: “We do not accept unsolicited ideas. Experience showed that most ideas had already been considered by our engineers and that there can be unintended consequences to simply accepting these ideas. The time, cost and risk involved in processing them, therefore, were not justified by the benefits gained.” Harsh, chaps, harsh.
Do you shy away from bluntness? Too busy avoiding offence to fully grasp the rungs of the ladder of success? Don’t despair – those innovators at GeekCulture have launched the Steve Jobs Email Generator, guaranteed to have you firing off curt responses like the Master - or your money back.
According to the Telegraph, women are blaming smartphones and other ‘modern’ gadgets for their husbands’ apathy towards conjugal relations. With uncharacteristic candour, that most respectable organ reports that ‘hand-held devices [are] particularly to blame.”
Meanwhile, another poll reveals that the under-25s are keen multi-taskers in the boudoir – 10% of them think it’s quite the thing to text during, erm, intimacy. As Mashable so aptly puts it, there’s never been a better time to worry about the future of civilization.
‘Controversial’ Venezuelan presidente Hugo Chavez has joined Twitter, to muffled sniggers from the international press, where he is widely held to be the most verbose of global leaders. So far, @chavezcandanga is managing the 140 character restriction - although his tweet-per-day rate is accelerating at a rather ominous pace: this is, after all, the man whose weekly improvised TV broadcast regularly exceeds seven hours.
Some readers may find this next report disturbing: new app In 20 Years reveals how you will look in – um - twenty years. Please: Think Before You Click.
APPLE JUICE ...
Gawd, these Apple scandals do drag on a bit, don’t they? This week, we will attempt to buck the tide by presenting you with a handy redux of the week’s developments in Apple’s lost-iPhone saga, consisting almost entirely of links which will lead you, if you care to follow them, to reams of additional info.
California's Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team raided the home of Jason Chen, the Gizmodo editor who apparently bought the ‘lost’ iPhone. Gizmodo owners Gawker Media threatened a law suit, claiming that the raid was illegal under laws which shield journalists from revealing their sources; Time magazine poo-pooed the claim, arguing that the public interest had not been served by the theft – and Chen covered his bases by hiring a criminal defence lawyer. Meanwhile, Wired announced that they had tracked down the culprit, who turned out to be a nice college boy who did volunteer work in his spare time, and was really very sorry for all the trouble he’d caused.
I believe that about covers it.
In other Apple news, there has this week been much back, and not a little forth, between Steve Jobs and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, who have been tussling over whose fault it is that Adobe crashes Apple’s OS. Now – following a complaint by Adobe - it looks possible that the Federal Trade Commission will be weighing in, with a formal investigation into whether Apple’s Adobe ban for app developers is anticompetitive.
The iPad’s sales stats are, if not quite vertical, then listing only slightly:
1m iPads have been sold since its launch on 3 April - easily outpacing the iPhone, which took what now feels like a tortoise-like 74 days to reach that number. Now, all eyes are on the iPad 3G, an estimated 300,000 of which flew out during last weekend’s launch.
If you are not only unconvinced by the iPad. but actively ill-disposed towards it, you will enjoy the following experiments, in which various individuals - who perhaps define the thematically-linked expressions “more money than sense”, and “too much time on their hands” - put their idle musings on the robustness of Apple’s wundertablet to the test.
NEWSBYTES ...
35% of British children – that’s over 4 million – still don’t have easy access to the internet, meaning that they’re unable to complete some of their homework, or access the social world of their peers, a new report by Point Topic has found.
US Senators have urged Congress to review whether America’s privacy law is sufficiently robust to protect children from unscrupulous online marketers. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) currently requires that sites get parental approval before they gather info on under-13s - but some senators are demanding that the age limit be raised to 18, and that its remit be immediately extended to include geo-location data.
Meanwhile, the head teacher of a New Jersey secondary school has called for parents to enforce a ban on social networks, which he says are nothing more than a platform for cyber-bullying. The school’s guidance counsellor claims that 75% of her work now involves dealing with social network-related worries.Finally, 48% of parents add their children as friends on Facebook - news which, with luck, will be just the spur youngsters need to get to grips with the social network’s byzantine privacy settings. Those same parents might want to check if their offspring are signed up with Formspring.me, the wildly popular new site where users invite friends and strangers to ask them a question – any question. Plenty of opportunities to stalk their offspring there.
A gruff Rupert Murdoch admitted that ‘big mistakes’ had been made with MySpace, in an earnings call which revealed yet another consecutive quarter of escalating losses. And it’s time to gen up on Murdoch’s much-vaunted plan to gather other media companies behind a group paywall – we’ve been told to expect an announcement in ‘three to four weeks’.
YouTube has announced plans for a self-service rental platform, through which moviemakers will be able to upload and rent out their own streaming content, according to MediaPost. But will anyone watch? asks VentureBeat, nodding to YouTube’s dismal rental stats.
Google is breathing down Amazon’s neck, announcing plans to turn Google Editions into a vendor of digital books. It’s also invested $38.8m in two North Dakota windfarms: always good to have a plan B, in case this internet thingy doesn’t quite pan out.
That’s all folks!
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