The Second Law of Social Media

I want to take a minute to reflect on Mark Zuckerberg's now infamous second law of social media

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before”

I think for the most part this type of growth is really happening. Those of us using digg and delicious for years are now stepping it up to twitter and friendfeed. Those of us who never used any social tools are sharing links and posting status updates to facebook. Wherever you are on the growth curve, though, most of us are doubling the amount of content and information that we're sharing year over year - whether it feels like it or not. Sharing content is really the way we all socialize on the web, it's the backbone of the most basic social networking, it's what makes it addictive rather than repetitive. And it's only going to become more mainstream, more commonplace, more build into our everyday actions naturally- we might as well accept it and get used to it.

(To see an example of how much content i share on the web, look at the red mybloglog widget on the right of this site, or check out out social footprint here)

My social media map, my online footprint

At work this week I participated in a social networking symposium. As part of the discussion, it became apparent to me just how many social tools I use to some extent or another. One one hand there is Facebook and Flickr that I use every day, Twitter and Friendfeed that I am diving into, and DocStoc and Viddler that I'm learning about. There is also GoodReads and Fotolog that I contribute to sparingly. There are "old school" social tools like IM and and eMail. The list goes on and on, as social media is slowly defining my online experience and existance. The above map is my offhand list of online social tools, drafted up in mind mapping tool MindMeister.

Xoopit Turns Gmail Social and Organizes Your Email Files

Tonight I started testing out Xoopit, a web-service that integrates with your Gmail account and organizes the social content within.  It's in early development, and so it has limited features and only seems to index the most recent few months of my email, but the results are very cool.  Now I can browse through all of the photos attached in my email like they're a photo album.  I can also view all of the Youtube videos that have been linked to in emails, and see a list of all of the files that have been attached.  This essentially indexes, archives, and organizes all of the media associated with your Gmail messages.  Right now this basically only works for YouTube, Flickr, Picassa, Shutterfly, and Kodak, but more support will come and I'm sure more features will come. Also, there is no detailed information about the actual contact with your friends, such as seeing send/receive rates, response times, etc.  There is some "info stream" and content prioritization if you log in to your account on the Xoopit website, but this should all be integrated into Gmail.

So far Xobni doesn't seem to have broken Gmail or slowed it down.  It leaves itself pretty un-intrusive up at the top of the Gmail interface.  If it continues to show no negative impact on my email consumption, and doesn't break after a few weeks (like other Gmail integrated extensions), it has a chance to be a mainstay.  I'll report back on my experience overall.

A few months ago I tried out a service called Xobni that completely wowed me right at the start.  It did similar things stripping out and organizing media, but more importantly it brought "conversation view" that is so popular in Gmail directly into Outlook.  It also provided instantaneous search, and showed social information around contacts such as what I listed above in a wish-list (quantitative rankings, response times, etc.).  The biggest feature it had was that it identified the phone numbers and addresses that people included in emails and filled this information in on the contact cards within Outlook, almost like magic.  Xobni had a chance to revolutionize Microsoft Outlook, and it still could, but unfortunately it slowed Outlook to a crawl, and given how slow it is already with company-server integration, Xobni's negative impact in this area forced me to un-install it despite all of it's other great features.  Hopefully Xobni and Xoopit both continue to grow in feature set and become more efficient.

[Xoopit via Techcrunch]

Friendfeed is for people who share and create online

If you are creating or sharing content online, you should be using friendfeed. If you are writing reviews on yelp, blogging, posting photos on flickr, bookmarking sites on del.icio.us, saving videos on youtube, microblogging on twitter, digging articles, or more, you can pull it all together with Friendfeed and share it as a picture of your social web. Charles Hudson (I don't know who he is) says "FriendFeed is a community of people who like to share stuff" and I agree - you can see my feed on the right, and follow along; and if you join, let me know.
kskobac on friendfeed

Google's ulterior motive of collecting more information, and Google profiles

There's an interesting interview with Marissa Mayer, Google's VP, where she discusses how Google sometimes makes moves for ulterior motives - her example being 1-800-GOOG-411.  Engineers were really looking for data to analyze in working on speech recognition modeling:

"The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy."

It's an interesting point and makes you think of Google products and Google decisions in a different light.

Seperately, Google has started integrating social features into more of their tools, and are beginning to develop the Google profile, which will follow you across their products.  Right now you can see it in Google Shared Stuff, in Google Maps, in Google Reader, and more.  In Google Reader, you can now see your gmail and chat contacts' shared feeds in a separate dashboard.  Soon you will hopefully begin to receive information flow about more actions directly within the same contact dashboard, just like the newsfeed in facebook (these same contacts are updating shared documents, adding photos to Picasa, building maps, etc).

View and subscribe to my shared items feed here (visible on the right of this page) - and let me know if you use Google Reader.

A Google Video Wired NextFest Infrared X-ray story

So almost 3 months ago I posted a few videos I took from the Wired NextFest in New York City. In that time, it received somewhere around 75 views, over the entire duration.

Randomly I looked at my Google Video stats and noticed that in the last few days, almost 73,000 people have watched the Infrared X-ray video I posted from Wired! I didn't really believe it, but then checking on the page shows that there's not only views, but over 50 ratings and 10 comments, discussing the legitimacy of the video, potential harms of the machine, etc.

I took a look over at Technorati to see how was linking to the video, and 18 sites now have links to it. It looks like first someone at Spoozer Magazine picked it up, and then someone at Ubergizmo posted on it, which has over 1,100 blogs repeatedly linking to it and therefore suggests strong readership.

All in all, I'm surprised and impressed at how quickly a viral video can spread in two days, from 75 to 73,000 people.

Technorati Tags: googlevideo, sharing, technorati, wired, nextfest, viral

Social Music etc - Last.FM , Rhapsody , Digg , Del.icio.us

Is anyone using Last.fm or any other social music service? Do you use Rhapsody or Yottamusic? For that matter is anyone using Digg or Del.icio.us?



I just started using last.fm... it's currently keeping track of everything I listen to on windows media player or iTunes, and building out a music profile for me that it can make recommendations against. Unfortunately it doesn't always work in catching the music, including if I replay an album that I've already seen it catch. Is this a fluke?



Are there other social oriented sites that I'm not using that I should give a shot?

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, digg, yottamusic, lastfm, delicious, last.fm, social, sharing, music, bookmarks, news