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Invisible without a website

Byrichard

Having a website is essential in today’s media landscape for one simple reason. You don’t exist until I can hyperlink to a website containing examples of your work and describing what you do. This is particularly true in today’s new media landscape. For the minimalist among you a facebook or myspace page is the bare minimum. For those of you that take your work seriously though a website is more efficient.

There are a number of reasons for which having a website is essential. The first of these is visibility. If you’re going to an event and you take hundreds of pictures then no one will notice them unless you share them publicly. You don’t need to be published to get your big break. That’s the point of viral marketing. Produce some content. Make it public and then mention it in a few places. If it’s good then others will advertise that work to friends from now on. You are now visible. That’s in an ideal situation.

Yesterday when I went to the protest (which event? Describe it in a few words and link to it) I met two friends, one is a well established photographer whilst the other, is, as yet a relatively anonymous face in the crowd. With the established friend it was easy for me to link to his work because he has a high quality site. It’s something concrete, easy to see and assess. For the second person there is not much I can do to demonstrate their worth except mention their name but is of limited value, without a link. Why? Because there is no action to follow a “plug”.

The plug is a term used to describe how one person promotes their work through another person’s content, whether it be in website form, podcast or other. As you are talked about more frequently, your visibility increases and, with it, people’s interest in what you do. John C Dvorak of Dvorak.org/blog is the best example. Anytime he can, he will mention his website and, although for the first ten times you may not react, you will go to the website, eventually. He’s got another reader.

Whilst you’re surrounded by new media people everyone has a blog, a website, possibly a podcast and more. Leave this group, though, and most people are “invisible”, except, for young people, facebook. Most of them are shown in their bikini, at drunken parties or in other situations that would not reflect well within more traditional work environments. That’s why facebook should be kept private and personal, confined to a group of friends.

When you apply for a job online, you’ are one of a thousand applicants. It must be a nightmare reading all those applications. I am taking as an example the work I did for blogwise, a human moderated database of websites. Each day several hundred people would apply for their blog to get through. As you look at the first ten your mind is clear and you’re interested. After several dozen you’re tired and by the time you reach several hundred you skim through. The same happens when you’re applying for work – boredom sets in.

When you think about how much time people spend looking for content and entertainment on the web you begin to understand why and how important it is to have something to show. When I worked on my dissertation I looked online and found an interview of Jacques Yves Cousteau a matter of minutes after he won his Oscar for Le Monde Du silence. I needed, for a documentary, a soundbyte of Rupert Murdoch speaking about Myspace – and after several months of searching we found the key clip.

That’s also how a documentary maker found my content for use in a documentary that will be on ARTE television in Spring 2008. The point is simple. In the past when you created content and you wanted people to notice you the best method for visibility was to be mentioned in physical examples, whether magazines, DVD or on the air.

Today we’re all part of the same media landscape. What this means is that there is unlimited time for content to be shown. But how do you stand out, to get noticed?

If there’s an event taking place and you have the time to cover it, then do it – and find where people are actively talking about it. That’s a great way to promote your work. If people see your latest video and want to find out more about you, they can go to your website, if you have one, to see further examples of your work. They read your blog to see your thoughts, they follow your twitter stream to see whether you’re a party animal, they check your linkedin profile to see who you know that they may know and, as a result, they get a better idea of what kind of person you are. You’ve just increased your chances of being noticed – and hired.

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The mobile phone app

Byrichard

Everyday at least one friend has one of their friends lose their mobile phone and all numbers on that device. As a result you find that there are hundreds of groups with the title “named individual has lost their phone” where everyone is expected to post their mobile number for quick synchronisation.

It would be quite simple to implement. As everyone adds their contact details into the database and as you acknowledge that those in your contact list are your friends you could develop an api that would allow you to download all that information straight to your phone whether HTC, motorola or nokia. It’d be an interesting application to have.  It would also slow down the rate of “i lost my phone” which in itself would be a great improvement.

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Facebook, a personal rather than social network

Byrichard

Ten years ago if you met someone and they gave you their visit card you’d put it away somewhere and eventually you might have come back to it but the information would need updating. Over the years social networking tools on the web have evolved from simple mail clients to web forums and finally to Myspace and Facebook. With Facebook we find what I think of as an enhanced phonebook.

When you meet someone at a party today there’s a good chance that this individual has a facebook presence. As a result when you go home they may add you as a friend and in so doing you are brought into their lives. You can see where they’ve worked, for how long and what they were doing. you can see whom they associate with and how they tend to meet people. Facebook has become  a daily feature of contemporary life.

Facebook does not limit your interactions to the people you’ve met during your time at parties, events and more. It also allows you to join groups, some are based on occupation, others on passions and yet some more on soemthing that may be relevant to only ten to twenty people. As these groups multiply so you decide to associate through these people through forums and the likes.

For a time I was part of the Lecture napping appreciation society whilst others were part of the “curse of the N18” amongst other groups. Today a friend joined a group which I would never join for the simple and good reason (simple et bonne raison) that reflects the views for which I avoid the place. I’m living between London, a city of up to twelve million (depending on the demographics you chose) and a village of no more than 2000. I love the contrast between the two and as a result feel no need to visit the place that the group boasts about.

The point is that as a medium becomes more commonplace and as more people feel comfortable with the technology so their personalities are reflected in a variety of ways which give a great wealth and diversity of character to the medium they are using. It is precisely because of those differences in interests that we gain as a social group. We, the international internet users, have a great wealth of opinions and views available within a few keystrokes and we should constantly aim to promote those interests that most effectively reflect our character, things that friends may take years to notice but that can be made obvious online. Facebook, in my opinion, is a personal, rather than social network where you promote the interaction between friends you’ve had for years and friends you’ve only just met. There are other networks that are great for making new online friends but Facebook should be kept for those people whom you have met face to face.

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Social networking and freebase

Byrichard

As you’re painfully aware by now there are hundreds of social networking websites but none of them have a communal database. If you’re on orkut your data stays there, if you’re on yahoo communities your data is there. All these social networking websites are very similar in what they ask of you but different in how they link you. Loudmouthman got me thinking about how you could use a database like freebase to share this data between networks, sort of like openid but with more data.

Freebase is a database for volunteers, similar to a wiki but whereas the wiki is a collection of articles this is a database where you write the front end and implement it according to your needs. If you’re interested in video production and television for example you could take the television section of that database and make it accessible within that site. If you encouraged your users to create their profiles within that communal database then details which are not so critical to your persona (whilst being careful not to make phishing to easy)  could be used so that you input your data only once.

By having a communal database the migration from one social networking website to another would be far smoother, more transparent. You’d have the same user profile in a number of places and you would have more freedom to concentrate on what you feel is important. If one website goes down then that is not as critical since your presence is spread in a number of places therefore there is less opportunity to be in trouble should your main social website go down, as was the case with Facebook and Skype within the past few weeks.

RSS feeds are already helping to spread your presence across a number of websites and sites like Jaiku and tumblr help aggregate your daily output to a number of locations.  As a result of such practices. In effect you’d have built in redundancy. If one node goes down then five others can be used whilst waiting for your preferred  social network to come back online.

In summary since we are members of more than one community there is a demand for a communal database from which the sharing of certain types of data would promote the spread of online presence between more than one community at a time. By facilitating the process of setting up a number of communities there is less opportunity for us to be bogged down in content we are uninterested in. Communities, rather than forums could be far more specific to our needs.

I would welcome your views on this topic.

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Cheapening the user experience

Byrichard

There are a great diversity of websites out there and each one has it’s own strengths. As a result of this it is not unusual for me to visit twenty to thirty websites on a daily basis, from the likes of twitter, my own website, news sites and more. What this means is that I find the tools that are best for what I want to do on a variety of websites. To each website it’s own purpose. That’s why I’m so dissapointed with what facebook has become at the moment.

In the good old days of e-mail use you would start with a clean account and every e-mail you received you wanted. As a result you might get one or two e-mails every few days but they were of interest. Over time spammers started sending their junk and this personal space was less personal space. At around the same time friends began sending chainmail, participating on “which character are you most like” and other activities. As a result of this there was a lot of static which meant more time would be wasted processing the influx of information.

This problem then came to social networking websites. One of the weaknesses of myspace was that everyone could put megabytes of junk on their pages and the website would slow down and crash certain browsers. In other situations people spam you via the bulletin boards in such way that you start to ignore them.

I thought that facebook was different. I used to view facebook as a mature online community that was about people keeping in touch with their friends. The sharing of personal images, personal videos and personal work was great. That is, until the api came along.

A I look at the daily requests on facebook I have zombies biting me, I have several application requests that do the same thing for music and more. The “questions for friends” api is one of those useless api that makes you sign into a service you don’t want to use so that you can read the question a friend wants to ask you. The “compare me to my friends” api is another annoying one. Yesterday I noticed that I was more likely than someone else to do something and I signed up for the api, unselecting all the elements that would advertise the api to those in my news feed. I wanted to see whom I had been compared to but found out that I had to answer fifty questions before being able to use the api. At this point I removed the api.

The beauty of the World Wide Web is the vast amount of specialised websites and tools that allow for the sharing of a variety of elements. If I want friends to know about my travels then I’ve got World66, website I used before going to Poland. If I want to talk about good food and restaurants then I’ll drop by Trusted Places and read what users have written. If I want to play games online then I’d go to Kraland, nainwak, travian and a number of other websites.

I see Facebook as the modern version of the phonebook where I can keep up to date with what friends are doing and where they are geographically. I enjoy the ability to see photographs and videos of what they’re doing but hate being spammed with movie trailers and other junk. I want facebook to be about my network of friends and what they’re doing in the real world. If there is too much extraneous content then I shall be looking for a less populist website. The fact that it’s been banned in certain work environments demonstrates it’s declining value as a social networking website.

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The Modern phonebook

Byrichard

Recently I have been trying to categorise websites and how they are used into single words. To this end I have recently started to view facebook as a self actualising phonebook. There are a number of factors which help to contribute to this feeling. One of these is the ability for me to add all “real life” friends without adding any “virtual friends” – friends I do not know in person. In so doing it limits the number of people in my contact list to those I have talked to in person at least once, but occasionally spanning two decades or more.

What is great about facebook is that those you have not seen in a decade are once more part of your daily life. I look at what people are posting and I know they’re in a number of countries. I can see which are their favourite films, whether they have recently travelled, whether relationships have crashed and burned or more. I can also see what they’re up to.

Twice in the last week I have noticed events put on by friends. One event was by friends whom are part of my University of Westminster days whilst others are from when i was a Bournemouth University student (albeit in Weymouh an hour away). When I went to the Westminster event I recognised quite a few faces since they are part of my recent history. It allowed me to meet new people and one comment was interesting. The girl who organised the event commented that most of these people did not know any others. She was the degree of seperation between all of us. As the night progressed so the links would strengthen and people who had been strangers just a few hours before would become familiar once again.

The next day saw me going to another facebook event but this time with people I had not seen for half a decade. By taking a look at the newsfeed in facebook I could catch up with these people. I saw that one friend was having their birthday that night and that another friend from the same time period was also going to be there. Looking through the photo stream I could see what the latest adventure had been. If people think that it’s important to mention something then it’s easy for you to notice and aknowledge this once you meet them next time.

When  you think of a phonebook you usually associate a limted amount of details like phone number, address, business and address. Facebook gives these details but it also gives us so much more. It’s a great tool for those of us who are mobile and willing to travel.

There are three contributing factors which help make facebook popular; the first of these is mobility, the second is international travel and the last is broadband.  The first two factors are related. I am thinking about the distance and time it takes to get from where you live to where the friend lives. If you’re in North London and your friend is in North London then it’s easier to keep in touch via the facebook newsfeed than to commute over an hour to see that individual. At the same time as more of us have international groups of friends so the cost of phone calls and ability to see how friends regularly declines. We need technology that allows us to keep up to date with friends and that’s why we need the enhanced phonebook. Broadband is the enabling technology.

There is a lot of information. Imagine taking two hundred pictures of an event where twenty of your friends are. If you have to mail each of these to each friend then this is going to take a lot of time and effort. Facebook allows you to do this without hinking about it, hence keeping friends you may not see frequently current to the life you are currently leading.  In effect the more open your network of friends are the easier it is to remain up to date with current developments.  At this moment in time Facebook is one of the best adapted to these needs