LIFE MOVES PRETTY FAST...

Facebook - behind the scenes with Boz

I was lucky enough to spend a sizable chunk of time with Andrew "Boz" Bosworth (Facebook's Director of Product Engineering) and some the US Facebook team last week - firstly at the dinner that Nicola Mendelsohn and the IPA hosted for a small group of digi-folks and then with a larger audience at Facebook's first ever UK "Hack" day in Brick Lane. 

I don't want to get into a pro's and con's of Facebook right now,  but I did think that it was worth sharing some of the nuggets of interestingness that I learnt over those two occasions. It brought to life the Facebook ideology more clearly and made me think hard about where it's heading.

There's a lot that you should be able to throw into conversations about the social web and sounded erudite and informed :-)

FACEBOOK'S MENTALITY/PHILOSOPHY/IDEOLOGY

• "Go Fast and Break Things" - love that. Fail fast and then get back on the track to success.
• "Hacker Culture" - Boz talked a lot about this. How a "hack" is different to a brainstorming where the aim is to spew out as many ideas as possible. A hack, or hackathon, is more about "thinking differently about a problem", moving fast, accepting that not every idea is a good idea, binning the shitty ideas and getting to some kind of working prototype.
• "The journey is 1% finished" - Apparently this is stickered all over Facebook HQ. Constant improvement, constant striving for something bigger and better. Zuckerburg has a kind of professional amnesia according to Boz, so that he has the ability to wake up and look fresh and Facebook like he's never seen it before and make changes again and again and again. When a developer questioned him about the fact that Facebook APIs kept changing and they had to keep changing their approach, Boz refused to apologise and basically said that it was because they were constantly trying to make their site better and that updating APIs was simply part of that. If they weren't updating and making improvements he countered that the developer would be creating apps for another website.
• Only the paranoid survive- Great story about how Facebook worry about being the "AOL of Social Networks", essentially the "play" social network before the real social web appears. Essentially there was a point when AOL = the web and where are they now?
• One killer feature is all it takes - When Facebook launched their photo service they were faced with a host of competitors all of which could far more than their's could (printing calendars, mugs, quasi-photoshopping and retouching services), all that Facebook could do was Tag. And that one killer feature was all that it took to effectively kill off their competition.

Boz is a fascinating character (have a read on Quora on how he got offered a job at Facebook) and Facebook a company that is utterly redefining our experience and expectation of the web.  It falls to us all to really try to understand what drives the Facebook movers and shakers and their philosophy of open connectivity that is having such a profound impact on 750 million of us.

Thoughts?

BLACKBERRY: How to turn the blinking red light off...

Yesterday I was shown how to turn off the blinking red light on my blackberry. And it has changed my life in less then 24 hours...

I'm not sure about you (maybe you don't have a blackberry for work but in my opinion iPhones just aren't enough of solid work-horse for me!) but blackberries are both a curse and a blessing in equal-ish measures. I love the flexibility that they offer but its the blinking red light that drives me crazy. I literally cannot stop myself from checking my emails day or night, weekday or weekend, holiday or workday. It drives me crazy but I cannot help myself.

Nicola showed me how to de-activate the light and I tweeted about it straightaway. Judging from the amount of tweets and DMs that I got it's something that bugs the hell out of a lot of other people too.

So this is how you do it:

1. Go to your RingTone Profile setting (the one where you change what kind of ring/vibrate that you want)
2. Scroll down and click on Advanced
3. Click into your Ringtone Profile
4. Click on "Level 1 Messages"
5. Click on "Repeat Notification" and change it from "LED Flashing" to "none"
6. (Make sure that you do it for what is called "In Holster" and "Out of Holster")
7. Relax!

Let's end the tyranny of the blinking red light one Blackberry at a time!

Does Digital matter anymore??

There is a good debate going on at Digi-Cynic about the future (or not) of pure-play digital agencies.

Jerome who authors the blog has spent quality time in Glue, BBH in London and is  now a Digital Planner W+K Amsterdam so if anyone has a opinion worth engaging with on the subject then it's Jerome. Have a read.

He lists the winners of the 2009 Cannes Cyber Lions:

BBH New York
DENTSU Tokyo
OGILVY & MATHER Düsseldorf
GOODBY SILVERSTEIN & PARTNERS
BOONDOGGLE
BRIDGE WORLDWIDE
BBH London
CRISPIN PORTER + BOGUSKY
DRAFTFCB KOBZA Vienna
PUBLICIS MOJO
DROGA5 New York

A list without many pure-play digital agencies.

It was a similar story at the NMA Effectiveness Awards earlier this month when VCCP won the two most high profile awards, Best Use of Web and Best Use of Social Media for CompareTheMeerkat.com. Given that VCCP is not a pure-play digital agency, we were pretty proud of that. The judges commented that they were impressed with the way that a compelling narrative had been created and extended across multiple, connected digital platforms and the way that characters were developed digitally. VCCP is not a Digital agency, but it seems to "do" Digital pretty well.

The term "Digital" always seemed to be a bit odd really. If you have a Digital Planner, then surely you should have an Analogue Planner? Likewise if there are Digital Agencies than shouldn't there also be Analogue Agencies (but what kind of fool would want to work in an Analogue Agency??) One of the first things that we did when Buster and I started at VCCP Digital in 2007 was to get rid of VCCP Digital. Our logic was that CP+B didn't have CP+B Digital, there was no Anomaly Digital nor a Goodbys Digital. What we wanted to do was digitalize all of VCCP rather than develop a separate stand-alone proposition. We didn't feel that we needed the word Digital in the agency name. It was about digital deliverables not digital descriptors.

However my title did have the word "Digital" in it (Head of Digital Strategy), but I always had a problem with it as a lot of the work that I was doing wasn't actually Digital. I crafted strategies and ideas that were participative, interactive and spreadable, but I'm not sure that I would have said that they were were Digital. That's why I am so happy that I'm now Head of Strategy & Innovation instead of Head of Digital Strategy. A minor tweak, but important. It seems a better description of what I do and what I am trying to do.  Digital is important, but its not the most interesting bit of the job. 

As Clay Shirky says ‘Communication tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.’ Maybe we're coming into the decade when Digital becomes technologically boring as the work becomes socially more interesting. I hope so.

How Toby Young got Twitter

Sometime earlier this year in the immediate Twitter frenzy that followed Stephen Fry's live-tweeting from a broken lift, Toby Young (he of "How To Lose Friends and Alienate People" infamy) joined Twitter.

And he really annoyed me.

In his Spectator column he loudly berated Twitter, bemoaning the fact that being part of Twitter felt like a dull party where everyone talks loudly but no-one talks to you. I sent him a tweet that day in which I tried to point that he just hadn't started using the "@" sign in his tweets. Once you understand the etiquette of "@" then it suddenly becomes quite easy to join the conversation. I heard nothing back, which surprised me, most people when they recieve a direct tweet usually respond (unless of course you're trying to tweet with Ashton Kutcher or Oprah Winfrey!)

Toby seemed to be in the same Twitter-trap as a lot of journalists who on one hand deride Twitter as being the ultimate in boring self-promotion, but on the other hand write weekly columns talking about the minute details and daily in's and out's of their lives. It always stuck me as fairly hypocritical.

Which was why I enjoyed Toby's latest Spectator piece : "I would like to take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly to Twitter. Like many of my colleagues, I unfairly characterised it as a vacuous expression of our narcissistic age. In fact, it turns out to be the most effective tool for advancing freedom and democracy since the invention of the internet." It's a lovely piece of writing, very funny, a great example of volte-face and well worth reading and sharing with all those Twitter-deriders. And I have to say that I totally agree with him!

I spoke at a Unilever PR conference last week that Simon Clift was heading up. I was talking about Social Media and brands. One of the folks attending, Babs Rangaiah asked me for my views on Twitter. He wanted to know if I thought that Twitter was here to stay and would people still be using it next year or the year after. The quick and honest answer is "I have no idea". The longer and honest answer is that whether  or not Twitter remains as the active micro-blogging platform of choice is almost an irrelevance, what is more important are the behaviours that it has helped to foster. Twitter in and of itself is simple a platform of communications, I prefer to look at what Twitter users that have developed themselves such as the use of "@" replies which was started by users not by the founders, the use of hashtags "#" and essential applications like TweetDeck, Twitterfall and TwitPic.

Twitter is conversation, a smart Search application, negates my need to visit Netvibes and check RSS feeds  and Twitter is a means of bringing events happening far away from me physically close at hand (be that #iranelection or #MasterChef) In essence Twitter is what you want it to be. It is becoming as important to me as Google.

Have a read of Toby's article. I'd love to know if you agree.

The Etiquette of Twitter - 3 tips to getting started

In terms of technology, 2009 has been the year of Twitter: Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross, Phillip Schofield, Chris Moyles and many many more celebs have all started tweeting - the mind boggles. 

If you want a quick overview watch this BBC clip:

According to the lovely Hitwise UK people traffic has trebled in 2009 and in the top 100 of UK visited websites. And you can see why it's happened, Twitter has been all over the mainstream media: Radio 1, The One Show, Daily Mail, Telegraph, New York Times etc. You have to have been living under a rock for the last month not to have been tempted to sign up and find out what all the fuss is about!

Although the Twitter-celebs are fun to follow and its their stardust that has propelled Twitter into the digital stratosphere for me its the normal folks that are getting onto Twitter that I find so fascinating. Friends that I would never in a million years have thought would be interested are signing up in droves. And I think that's great. 

There have been many many article of the Etiquette of Twitter, this is a great one from David Pogue at the NY Times who advises "don't worry about the rules", so without wanting to simply repeat his smart write-up, here are some thoughts from a veteran Twitterer.

FYI, these are thoughts or tips rather than rules!

1. Write your Profile:
I can't stress how important that is. When someone Follows me, I click on their link and this is the first thing that I read. I enjoy following new people, but I want to follow people who I think will be interesting, funny and smart (not necessarily all at the same time, but you get my point) If there's no profile and I don't know you in real life then I am not going to follow you back. Just think of it like introducing yourself to someone new at a party, its the beginning of a conversation.

2. Find, Follow, Forward:
Its flattering when someone follows you back (and I am discounting all those Auto-Follow folks, this seems to be playing the old MySpace "how many friends can I build up as quickly as possible" game), so you should add people if they sound interesting. You can always un-follow them and they won't know. If you read a great Tweet and think that others will be interested forward it aka Re-Tweet  it (RT), always saying who you got it from.

3. Be Useful, Be Interesting, Be Engaging:
Its the same rules that I often talk about for digital planning. Twitter is a community or rather hundreds of thousands of small personalized micro-communities. Don't over-tweet, some people at the start seem to tweet every 3 minutes. But when you find something genuinely interesting or funny, tweet it - add the URL. If someone tweets a question that you can help with, tweet back and answer. Its a conversation.

And that's it really.

Like all technology it takes a bit of time to get your head round it, so give it a go. Stick with it. Follow my tips (or don't) and see how you find it. Personally I agree with David Pogue, I think that Twitter is "powerful, useful, addictive and fascinating."

Have fun!

Come and say hello: www.twitter.com/Amelia_Torode

Brands, Bloggers & Word of Mouse

This was the presentation that I gave at AdTech London yesterday.

Brands, Bloggers & Word of Mouse

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2 digital)

Social Media and Social Media etiquette is something that you probably know I feel very strongly about. This presentation has been in "beta" so to speak with various folks around the agency and clients for a while as I wanted to sharpen and refine our approach and get a proper measurement plan in place.

Couple of thoughts that came out in discussion after the Masterclass:

1. I don't think that Social Media takes the place of other channels in fact I am sure that with an ATL push Social Media initiatives would work even better (an hypothesis as the both O2 projects, Cocoon and XDA had no ATL support) Given the fact that branded search terms for clients always increase when we run advertising its not a hugely controversial belief.

2. Measurement in terms of ROI is a bitch, dare I say impossible at the moment. What was the sales uplift on an account of doing our Social Media launches? I don't know, but we have a fairly robust measurement approach in the deck.

3. When PR agencies tell me with great pride that they "treat bloggers just like journalists" that worries me. Most bloggers aren't journalists and I am not sure that the same rules apply here. Yes treat people as human beings, understand what interests them but to me one of the really important things is that if you want to engage social media creators then you have to be a part of that world. One of the points that I made at AdTech was about Radical Transparency and the fact that of our Social Media team are an active part of this world and that our social media footprints are clearly visible and accessible across the web. You can't sit on the sidelines looking in and expect to understand it properly, you have to be in it to get it.

Anyway,

Have a read of PRblogger's POV....

Thank you to Gavin who runs iMediaConnection for the opportunity to speak at AdTech.

I like the "idea" of Radiohead

I LOVE this video.

My Online Marketing Presentation About Radiohead from iaintait on Vimeo.

Crackunit is one of my absolute must-reads - filled with interesting stuff that makes me smile and makes me think. 

When I think about the three "brands" that have used web 2.0 most imaginatively this year it would be Obama, Radiohead and ....shit, I just can't think of a third example that really stands out. Maybe the movie The Dark Knight. Damn...there HAVE to be other "brands" that have inspired digitally this year? And what about the more traditional brands? Hmmm...

Obvious Mission Statement

Been doing some thinking about Mission Statements recently. I just dislike the phrase Mission Statement - they seem so 90s somehow. In the movie Jerry Mcguire, Cruise is adamant that he is not writing "a memo, its a Mission Statement."

Is there a better phrase than Mission Statement do you think?

At the moment I prefer simply the word "Ambition" or maybe "Vision"

The most interesting Mission Statement/Vision/Ambition that I have come across recently belongs to the folks at Obvious:

Hi, we’re Obvious™. Our goal is to create interesting things that matter to the world.

Short and sweet and to the point.

The founder of Obvious is Evan Williams. His is an interesting story: Evan co-founded Pyra Labs and set up Blogger to help the team coordinating their effort in building software. Along the way, Evan figured out that Blogger was actually more useful than the software that they were developing, and then he ditched the original idea and went with Blogger, which was eventually acquired by Google. Evan believes in this "stumbled upon" process so strongly that he founded “Obvious”, with the mission to “create interesting things that matter to the world” by productizing the “stumble upon” process.  BTW, Twitter is a direct result of “Obvious”

I love the attitude of “You Don’t Have To Know What You Are Doing, As Long As You Have The Capability And The Willingness To Try Hard” but I also really liked the neat articulation of their company's philosophy.

Where are the girls?

This has been something that Beeker and I chatted about a while ago in regards to what we ended up calling "Lady Bloggers". I was lamenting the fact that there just did not seem to be very many of them.

Something seems to be going wrong somewhere:

• iMedia Connection 2008: 2 day long conference on future of our industry. c 30 speakers, not a single girl
• WOM Conference 2008: 1 day long conference on Advocacy and Word of Mouth, c 20 speakers - me + 1 other woman
• Clio Awards 2008: 20 judges, I was the only girl.

What is going on?

It seems to be more than simply a lack of Lady Bloggers, it is actually more to do with the profile  of women in our industry in general.

I am genuinely interested in why there aren't more women talking and judging at events like this.

She Says is an interesting organization that was started by Laura Jordan Bambach and Alessandra Lariu from Glue. They are aiming to help create a connected network of females to help address this issue. While they started She Says with a view about addressing the disparity of female digital creatives, I actually think that it is a much bigger problem than simply a creative one and one that needs to be sorted.

I guess my question is that, are women just less good and managing and promoting their own "brand" so to speak so that they are less high profile and known generally than their male counterparts? Is is that men are better at public speaking stuff like this? Do people just get onto the circuit and then stay on it and these are more likely to be men?

Opening this up to the Lady Bloggers (as well as the Boy Bloggers) - amomgst others Katie,  Angus,  Nicola, Lady Geek, Catch Up Lady, Beeker...

Web 1.0 Vs Web 2.0

I often get asked about the difference between Web 1 and Web 2

This is my new favourite answer:

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

Hat tip: Ethan Zuckerman

Global Social Network Map

Hat tip to Digital Supposition for this one.

Sometimes you can get a bit trapped in your own country's Social Network bubble, or as Danah posted a while back, in our own social class bubble. Important to remember that not everyone uses the same social networking sites.

Originally in Le Monde.

Predictions for 2008

Given that it is almost the end of the year, I thought that it was probably the right time to jot down some thoughts and share them around.

Incidentially I did think that I had Delicious-ed all the 2007 predictions so that I could go back and see just how far off the mark we all were, but I appear not to have been too organized a year ago (from memory I think that the key word was Widget, when actually Facebook or Social Networking would have to be my word/words of the year, anyhow...)

Anyway, for what they are worth here are my top 3 things to look out for in 2008:

1. Monetization of UGC
Whether the content is words, static images or moving pictures, 2008 is the year that creators get savvy to the fact that they have helped line the pockets of the likes of YouTube and Flickr. We are doing some work with Metro newspaper, helping them in the beta-phase of a new site called MeView. It's an interesting concept. You upload original video content, you then choose whether you want to add pre-roll advertising to the clip. You get to watch a selction of 10' thumbnail clips and you choose the one that you want to add onto the front of your content. Then for every download you share in the CPM/CPT advertising revenue. Suddenly you move from being simply a content creator, to digital media planner and also content promoter as it is in your financial best interest to drive as many people as possible to view the clip. It's also in the best interests of the agencies who produce the pre-roll advertising to make them as good as possible otherwise no-one will choose their adverts!
Expect to see more Monetization examples in 2008.

2. Sideload Culture
This has already started, but 2008 is going to be the year when Sideloading goes mainstream. We want to be able to move content from one device to another easily, we are starting to expect that we can take pictures on a blackberry and sideload them straight to a social networking site like Facebook.
(I hope) This is the year when it all becomes easier.

3. Augmented Reality
I love this from the Economist: " In the early days of the internet, the idea that it represented an entirely different realm, distinct from the real world, was seized upon by both advocates and critics of the new technology..both groups were wrong of course. The internet has not turned out to be a thing apart...some of the most exciting uses of the internet rely on coupling it with the real world."
The internet is an overlay to the everyday phsycial world that we inhabit, not a separate entity. 2008 is the year of the web being connected and complementary.

Agree, disagre - more to add? Let's get the prediction ball rolling and then come January let's remember that as Alan Key said: "The only way to predict the future is to build it."

Brilliant new gadgets and a call for help

Call for help from the Blogsophere please:

I am writing an article for the Spectator on brilliant, must-have gadgets this Christmas. In fact the article is actually about technology and gadgets for girls (no, not those kind of gadgets for girls...). but having spoken to smart people like Belinda Parmar author of Lady Geek and the folks at London Girl Geek Dinner, I know that it is not about Swarovski crystal encrusted cellphones and pink Hello Kitty laptop carriers, and more about great design and ease of use.

Couple of thoughts to share and questions to ask: I am not convinced that actually there is such thing as a girl gadget, surely brilliant design and ease of use a la Apple works across the gender divide?

I know that pink DS Lites outsold the other colours, but I wonder whether than is more of a youth trend rather than simply a female one?

I guess that the only real gender difference might  be that men are happy to spend longer tooling around and getting a piece of kit set up, as Dr Genevieve Bell at Intel says: " If you want to design technology that appeals to women, it needs to work flawlessly out of the box. They don't have the time to faff around."

Is there a technology gender divide??

Are there any gadgets that you have heard about that just sound fantastic that you think I should look into? Regardless of whether you are a boy or a girl/man or woman.

Nokia?? Phillips?? Sony??

In advance, thank you!

Best viral I have seen for ages!

I do happen to love Bob Dylan, but even if you don't I think that this is just brilliant creative.

Have a click on this and let me know your thoughts. It is a creative video messaging idea, but I'm going to let you discover it for yourself!

This is the original Dylan video

Enjoy!

O2 Cocoon Blogger Launch

O2 have produced what I think is a fantastic new handset, it's called Cocoon, you can play around with it here. We are working the launch and I'm really excited about it.

I like my Cocoon for some quite girlie reasons, firstly I just think that it looks great and very different from other phones out on the market at the moment. When I take it out in the pub or at a dinner it always draws comments.

I also like the fact that this is what I would term a piece of "insight-led design." By that I mean, strip away the hype about mobiles and the reality is that after talking and texting, the third most used functionality is the alarm feature (in fact in today's Ofcom Report they said just that) Cocoon has a nest which it sits in at night, charging, and it becomes an LED alarm clock.

It also has a cool functionality which allows you to see in-coming texts that scroll via the blue LED lights on the outside of the phone (that has led to many hours with friends texting me rude words just to see the phone light up and effectively swear at us while we giggle like 12 year olds)

That is very...

...and quite funny.

So I believe in in the product which from a Planner's perspective is a good place to start.

We decided to launch the phone in the Blogosphere before any advertising started.  The fact that you're reading this blog probably means that you understand the power of digital advocacy, but if you need any more evidence see the chart below.

We used a proprietary tool called Web Mapping to uncover who we think that key influential UK bloggers. It made me smile that in the category of Thought Leaders, some old London Beersphere mates turned out to rank really highly. So if you see Faris, John, Russell or Henry around ask them to have a look at their Cocoon. I've also found smart bloggers who I was not aware of before, like Techno Kitten, Tom Hume and Di Overton.

You can see some of their thoughts and postings over at the Cocoon Blog. Please drop by and feel free to leave any thoughts that you have there, or on this blog.

We have had some really positive feedback to the way in which O2 is reaching out to the new blogger world in a transparent dialogue  It's quite brave for large clients to do something like this as suddenly control moves out of their hands over to consumers, but the learnings that they are getting for the future are, I think, priceless.

 

“PSFK: The O2 project seems
like a smart one and provides
a potential blueprint for
brands to engage with
bloggers beyond the
sending of press releases.”

Trusted Places

I'm a bit of a Trusted Places newbie but I think that it is brilliant. It's a simple concept, in fact one that I've chatted about setting up with friends in the past (I think that we called the site Tip Top Top Tips) Based out of the insight that we are always looking for top tips for people who we trust, Trusted Places does exactly what it says on the tin.

Why do I like it? Well the suggestions are smart and not always expected, I think that the visual based registration is very cool and it's easy, both to upload and to search.

Then I find out that I am not alone in my admiration,  the Guardian featured Trusted Friends founders Walid and Sokratis in their top 1o UK digital start-ups.

Walid and I connected through my post on the Covent Garden Night Market and he invited me to their beta testing of their new site - you can read all about it on Trusted Places Blog. Odd after being in so many usability labs suddenly having to do it myself, but enjoyable.

Interesting mix of people including Ian Forrester from Backstage at the BBC, who blogs at Cubic Garden, and a girl who sat opposite me who is a food taster for Waitrose and whose life seems to consist of eating her way along Marylebone High Street.

Well worth signing up and having an explore of TrustedPlaces.

The "Marketing Funnel" is broken

I really like this quote a lot.  It's from Forrester Research and talks about the new marketing dynamic that all of us involved in brands, media and communication should be addressing:

 

The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers’ trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach…

 

We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence...Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding.

They have a blog on which they talk more about their four phased approach - Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy, Influence. I haven't seen anything like this from a research company before.

The thought of brands starting building reputation through conversation is a fascinating one and one that I have been doing a lot of work recently. It goes back to the good old Cluetrain and the idea that "all markets are conversations."

Hat Tip to Tom who blogs at Usable Interfaces.

Pulverizing our own privacy

At the start of 2007 New York Magazine published a great article called Kids, The Internet and The Death of Privacy by Emily Nussbaum. It's a fascinating article, well worth reading.

Nussbaum says that the fact that teenaged online  behaviour could well be  "the greatest generation gap since rock and roll."

I'm not so sure.

Something has radically changed in our grown-up Web 2.0 world since the publication of the article.

While I totally agree that:

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores...loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones...They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

The thing that strikes me is that this description is not simply about American teenagers, it can apply to all of us.

It's not  just the American Teen who is witnessing the Death of Privacy, it is all of us.

Thanks to Facebook, we're happily in the process of pulverizing our privacy.  Our photos are up online, we're being tagged all over the place, we know when people drop a movie from their Favourite list, we know when people join a new group, we know when they get a new friend. Through Twitter, we know their thoughts and whereabouts, through Flickr we see homes, families, trips to the beach and much much more.

We seem to be  sharing everything, with everyone, all the time. 

I wonder where it's all going?

Danah Boyd posted at the weekend about just this: She has been struggling about whether her Facebook world is a world filled with her real friends from High School and beyond, or whether it is a place to hang out and connect with bloggers, conference speakers, journalists. Given that Danah is the global authority on Social Networking, this is really interesting. Danah has tried, and failed, to keep personal life and professional life distinct and separate. In this Radically Transparent world it just doesn't seem to work. 

AdAge had an interesting piece this week :

"And unlike the very serious LinkedIn, the industry's previous network of choice, Facebook is spewing a strange blend of content, part high-minded engagement with marketing topics of the day -- such as consumer-generated media and, natch, social networks -- and part dillydallying with mundane exercises such as the microblog Twitter and games such as Food Fight that are almost Beckettian in their embrace of pointlessness. "

So where next?

As I have posted about before, I think that by the end of this year we will move away from this era of Radical Transparency to one of Refined Privacy. We can't keep sharing on the level that we are doing now. I for one don't think that I want to know the level of detail that Facebook is giving me every time that I log on about my friends.

I wonder whether something like Ning and other micro-Social Networks are the way forward.

Or at least for Facebook to allow many more complex layers of friendship just like real life. At the moment Facebook allows you to have A List friends and B List friends, but life as we know is much more complicated than that. The sooner Facebook technology recognises that, the better for all of us. But I'm still not sure what will happen to our sense of Privacy.

When Facebook goes wrong...

Earlier this week I picked up in my Facebook feed a picture of a guy I studied with at university.

I will spare him his name, but he is now doing a very similar job to mine at a large London ad agency. In the picture he was totally naked, part from a dust mask on his face and a large power drill in front of his own personal power drill...

His wife posted the photo, not him and someone tagged him in it for the whole Facebook world to see.

This is why when I talk about trends, I say that in my opinion I think that we will probably move from a time of Radical Transparency to an era of Refined Privacy in which we are not quite so keen on sharing everything with everyone all the time.

Anyway, the pix certianly brightened up a rainy morning!

Human Brain Cloud

Thanks Nic, I love this "game"

Kyle Gabler was teaching himself Flash and Javascript and devloped this in the process.

It's a way of eeking (spelling??) out your subconscious thinking.

The game maps the connections you make between words. It also starts to build a cloud of connections, between people as well as words.

I'm probably not explaining myself very well, but it's brilliant. Give it a go.