Mashable | Samuelson's Media

May 14, 2010

Who Wants a Facebook Alternative?

Filed under: Social Media,Technology — Tags: aggregation, Diaspora, facebook, Facebook Alternative, Kickstarter, Mashable, privacy, social networks, twitter — diamondadmin @ 4:58 pm

Almost everyone I know complains about Facebook. Sometimes its the constantly changing interface, the privacy debacles, the spam, or even just service outages that are the cause of these complaints. Sometimes I think it’s like people riding a train complaining about it; sure the train could be better, but who is going to do anything about it?

Some guys from New York – freshly minted college guys of course – have put their money (or in this case, their summer and perhaps the rest of their lives) where their mouth is. Their project is called ‘Diaspora‘:

Diaspora: Personally Controlled, Do-It-All, Distributed Open-Source Social Network from daniel grippi on Vimeo.

They’ve already raised over $100,000 ($135,815 as of this writing, according to KickStarter) from people who want to see this live. (They originally thought they might raise $10,000!)

The skinny is this: Unlike most ‘aggregation’ services, this is not some site somewhere that is trying to grab as much of your data for itself as it can (like, um, Facebook?) but rather a piece of software – a seed as they have it – which can be planted in a variety of places including (it seems) your own website, interact with everywhere else (Facebook, Twitter, etc) but let you choose how much data you want to share, and your own data remains your own (such as a list of friends) so long as you do not wish to share it.

It appears that there will also be a ‘turnkey’ service available – for hosting it no doubt – which raises the single question everyone might be thinking right now. In all probability, running Diaspora will not be ‘free’. Now, Diaspora will not cost anything itself, but you will be responsible for hosting it, or paying for the turnkey service (which logically must be a form of hosting with Diaspora pre-planted.)

My prediction is thus: If they can make the turnkey cheap enough, they can bust Facebook’s bubble. It might take a miracle, or a disaster (a privacy-related disaster no doubt!) for this move to take place.

To me, it is quite pleasing to think of this as internet homesteading; I log into my own seed, and there I get everything I have on Facebook, but not on Facebook at all. And if someone isn’t on Diaspora yet, I can still interact with them (via Facebook’s open graph) and best of all, Facebook does not know who all my ‘friends’ are.

And if you can’t pay or figure out how to host it yourself, chances are someone you know and trust can. Now that’s a local internet.

From the irrepressible Mashable.

December 18, 2009

The ‘New’ Influencers?

Filed under: News,Opinion,Social Media — Tags: aggregation, INQ Mobile, Mashable, pete cashmore, social climbing, Social Media, stories, twitter — Garth @ 12:15 pm

No formal connections to Twitter (as far as we know.)

I like to pay attention (with one eye at least) to the happenings in the social media world, since it is likely our success on the web going forward will involve more and more of it.

It is somewhat amusing to see the ‘new media’s equivalent of the Oscars, the Pulitzer and so forth – as it more often than not serves as a promotional tool for itself! As an outsider of course I find this intriguing, but it also makes sense from their perspective to do so.

So on to the meat here. We have the ‘most influential people on Twitter’ – and the irony of the day is Mashable reporting that their own Pete Cashmore is regarded as #1:

Along those lines, INQ Mobile has just released their 2009 Twitter (Twitter) influence study, determining the most influential Twitter users in both the UK and the world. The winner? Not Oprah, not Ashton and not Diddy, but Mashable (Mashable)’s founder and CEO Pete Cashmore!

I’d offer congrats, but then, the way social media works he has probably seen too many congratulations already to read them.

An interesting fact here is that I was not surprised in the least by this, and not because of a kind of general theory about being a media person on Twitter and thus producing a lot of tweetable content, but on this simple fact. I actually follow Cashmore.

Generally speaking, I do not follow people who have a lot of followers or who follow a lot of people (10000+) as I have no interest in shouting for attention among thousands, and I certainly have little interest in gossip or self-help. Social climbing is not for me either (you can see I have few that I follow!)

But I followed Cashmore, mostly because of three things (that I can recall.) 1. He seemed like he was really there using the account. 2. He was active. 3. He offered things I was interested in, that were if not completely unique or original represented some kind of genuine work; a collection of stories and opinions which reflect Mashable’s take on things.

Many who are out there for ‘twitter success’ seem more like they’ve randomly grabbed stuff to put up; there’s no story to the stories. All chatter, no thought.

And I tend to think that this difference itself is Cashmore’s X-factor.

November 23, 2009

The Social Media Train is Coming At Ya

Filed under: Social Media,Technology — Tags: brand name search experience, google social search, Mashable, News, search ranking, SEO, text rich, twitter, Yelp — Garth @ 12:14 pm

This train doesnt have to stop for anyone.

It has been long clear that blogs and other kinds of fast-updating media – especially of the text-rich variety have dominated other websites in search.

The formula is pretty simple: New content is news, blogs and public social media produce more new content than even periodicals, therefore to the search engine they essentially produce more news. A standard method of ranking includes a measure of relevance – which for many things will be how recently the information was acquired. The search engine can’t tell Plato from Gawker and add to that a frequency of smaller and more diverse postings (as in Twitter or Facebook,) and you have a recipe for search-domination.

Jennifer Van Grove at Mashable writes:

Essentially what customers, fans, and detractors are posting to social media sites are dominating the brand name search experience over social media content created by the brands themselves. This data clearly creates a legitimate reason for brands to be proactive with their social media presence, as participating in the exchange about their brand should improve the quantity and quality of customer-created social media content that searchers will happen upon.

It is worth noting that this only effects opinion and brand, since these sites (blogs and the like) are less apt to drive sales than product-rich websites. They have a broad but shallow impact. It really makes clear what marketers have been saying about word-of-mouth advertising for a long time, doesn’t it?

Google Social Search is coming!

Add to this the emergence – and how soon no-one knows for sure – of Google Social Search, it might just be the moment to be on social media (or the time to stay very, very far away from it!) Which you choose depends on how you interact with customers.

A final note is that Google Social Search requires a person to keep connections in their Google account (which not everyone has or does) so the impact may be spotty for awhile. I’ve experimented myself, and my results tend to be dominated by a few people who are more connected in that way, or who run blogs or comment on blogs frequently.

It is cool, though, in a weird kind of way. What kind of SEO can you do on that kind of stuff?

My brain replies:

To: john

Subject: your posting on Yelp!

Body: Can you please include the words ‘diamond retail experience‘ in your review? Thanks.

Oh! That would be strange.