Social media – What if it all ends?

By the end of the post we won’t be running around like headless chicken’s so let’s get the picture of Mike out of the way now, actually I’ll leave it at the bottom of the post as not to offend any vegetarians.

It’s not often I see a tweet that makes me think, stuff flashes past you so fast now that it’s forgotten about thirty seconds later.  Then the odd gem arrives….

“in fact since i was about 12 i’ve always had something…MSN…Myspace…Bebo…Facebook…Twitter…what if it all ends? OH GOD” (shutupcaf)

I think it’s fair to say that the amount of investment given to social media over the last 8 or 9 years means that nothing will end in the near future.  It does raise the interesting question of “what’s next?” in the grand scheme of things.

The collective drain of excitement of getting status updates from people that you didn’t know (or care about that much in the first place) has been wearing thin with folk for a while now.  While from a technical standpoint Google+ is a cleaner system than Facebook I still don’t think it’s made the impact they were expecting.  Now the hype cycle is complete and the growth rate flattens out it’s now down to the residents to create the content.

The art of conversation still rules on the simple messaging platforms. Email, SMS and Skype.

My first foray into “social networking” goes back to 2001/2002 when I was playing around with FOAF and it’s links with RDF data.

@prefix rdf:  .@prefix foaf:  .@prefix rdfs:  . <#JW>    a foaf:Person ;    foaf:name "Jimmy Wales" ;    foaf:mbox  ;    foaf:homepage  ;    foaf:nick "Jimbo" ;    foaf:depiction  ;    foaf:interest  ;    foaf:knows [        a foaf:Person ;        foaf:name "Angela Beesley"    ] .     rdfs:label "Wikipedia" .

Not exatly fun to look at and “like/+1” but it was the start of something exciting.

The evolution of the tools that @shutupcaf mentioned shows an interesting timeline.  The whole MSN/ICQ/AOL instant messenger was all about the one to one communication.  MSN tried the whole groups and boards thing too. MySpace, is full of band stuff, Bebo was a teenager’s playground.

Orkut is still in use today, big in Brazil, and outstrips Facebook in other countries too.  Orkut didn’t have social media experts promising 4000 likes for the simple reason was no one cared.  We’ve been hooked and polluted over the last few years by people and all this social media expert nonsense.  Friendfeed still lurks in the wings and there’s obviously LinkedIn to consider too.  As these networks have been launched the hipsters go hunting for their trophy wares of “I was there when it first started”….. yeah, bite me I was there too….

Twitter

Yammer

Facebook

MySpace

Identi.ca

Orkut

Google Buzz

FriendFeed

Friendster

Bebo

Linkedin

Ning (I’m with about six networks alone here).

Friends Reunited

Flickr

Foursqaure

Gowalla

So fear not @shutupcaf, it won’t end while there are investors pouring money in like it’s going out of fashion.  Here’s a list if you’re really bored 🙂

Now vegetarians…. turn your head away now! Everyone else can scroll down a bit….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did you know Mike lived for 18 months after having his head cut off?

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Groupon: Who knew that so many people liked cupcakes?

I haven’t read one of these stories in a while….. but Mashable have posted a story about a London based cupcake business that once again underestimated capacity planning and the Groupon spike.

To any business….

• Think best case (low sales volume via Groupon)
• Think worst case (high sales volume via Groupon)
• Think ohmigod I’m gonna have to hire temp staff (wave goodbye to the bottom line)

Shall we have a sweepstakes on when these stories will stop?

BBC Link to story

I love the idea of #NaAppDevMo, a worked example.

Thread started off on Twitter a few nights ago and Matt also posted on his blog.  Commit an hour a night during December to put the bones of an app together.  A brilliant idea.

Let me add something to that – I know it can be done.  Three weeks ago a spark of an idea came into my head so I jotted it down and ran it past the trusted inner circle.  Seemed like a go-er but needed a prototype (you can insert your lean startup cliches, itch scratching and all that here – me, I just got on with it).

I have a golden hour, it’s between 7:20am and 8:20am – the time I’m at the bus station or on the bus itself. A laptop, a text document with a to-do list…..not #NaAppDevMo but more #NaWebAppHadoopDevMo.  Without the pomposity of it all I know I have the coding advantage and can get on with it. Others have to look at the pdf/book and figure stuff out.

An hour is the perfect block of time, split into 15 minute blocks and define what you want to achieve for each of those 15 minutes. Four tasks in various stages of completion – works nicely and you see the overall picture coming together.

The whole concept of #NaAppDevMo is brilliant, I encourage you all to give it a go during December, even blog your progress.  I’d love to read how you’re getting on.

Good luck!

 

My tuppence on teaching programming in schools.

There’s been a bit of noise on teaching kids programming at school level.  It’s been on the boil for a while now and accelerated when TED released the video of 12 year old Thomas Suarez an iPhone App Developer.

 

From previous experience and also from doing computer studies from 1985-1990 here’s my take on things.

• At a primary school level using computers is fine and teaching the basics of logic is even better. To a point this is already happening.
• Dedicate computer clubs within schools teaching programming will fair better than a class based lesson in programming.  Attention and ability levels aside, not everyone is interested in text on a screen.
• Focusing on one language is dangerous.  In the 80’s we had little choice, at the time every classroom had a BBC Micro and you were plunged in to the mysterious world of BASIC.  It’s real world use was,well how can I politely put it, limited.  Is there such a thing and a natural kids based programming language?  And what’s taught now probably won’t be relevant in the real world when the same child leaves school in 5/6/7 years time.

Lastly, not everyone is cut out for programming.  There has to be an inner drive to want to program a computer in the first place.  It’s usually to challange an assumption or to solve a problem and if kids aren’t inquizitive from the start then the uphill task of learning to program becomes all the more harder.

It’s great that kids do want to program but if the single aim is to create iPhone developers to make apps then we’ve already failed before we started.  The quality of the teacher is vital as well, it’s not about programming knowledge but being able to hold an air of mystery so intoxicating that any kid will say, “that’s what I wanna do”.

The likes of Thomas are a rare 1 in 10,000 kids who can apply all this logic, patterns and the syntax and put it together. On the opposite side of the coin I’ve seen grown men in tears over trying to get Java to produce a simple for loop because the books they were given were useless.

 

 

Plain language is the easiest route to a customers heart.

Never let a programmer write copy, they’re usually crap at it.  Let programmers do what they do best, hopefully being, program code.  I’m real good at getting coders onside….

Even if your venture is aimed at the technical community it’s still wiser to have a human being, ones who are subjected to daylight once in a while, explain to the rest of what world what the product or service actually does.

I’m willing to assume that most of us in one way or another have been caught in our own little hype cycle of marketing speak, it’s natural to talk things up.  Now I’m uber critical of marketing people and I can sense their wall paper shredding marketing speak from about three miles away.  On the flip side when they work wonders, boy they work wonders.

So techheads, mission one – find a person who can i) understand the drivel that’s coming out of your mouth (I’m including myself here remember, I’m a tech) and ii) can write the words down in the correct manner so your drivel, now prettied up, can be handed to any Thomas, Richard or Harriet and even they can understand what your original drivel does.

Ultimately which would you sign up for?

 ‘a proximity-based, real-time, buyer-powered market,’

or

“Buy and sell anything with people nearby”

 

 

 

Why do we make this Startup euphoria so dramatic?

The prologue

The latter part of 2011 for me has been reflection.  A good old look in the mirror to see if the man looking back at me was happy, fulfilled and ready to take on the post 40 year old part of life with the same enthusiasm and humour (some may say it’s a little dry to know if it’s humour or not).

I reviewed the spines of the books on the bookshelf, I looked at my Twitter lists, my Facebook friends. I’ve got be happy haven’t I?  Lastly I dug out my big black book of jottings, notes and snippets of information.  I reflected at uVoucher (now parked) and all it was potentially going to do and potentially change the world (yes I fell in to that trap too).

I looked back in the mirror, “you’re mad, delusional and a failure”. Jason Bell, you may join the pile with the other 84% that didn’t get there.

The Wilderness

Startup, bootstrapping, entrepreneur, CEO and other ego fuelled labels are there for one thing, to tell another person what you are.  Depending on your level of ego defines how well you can gel into those titles and project the required levels of marketing.  The real risk is when you believe the title is you and you live your life by it.  Rocky ground on a road to ruin.

It’s a strange badge of honour.  First of all we award it too ourselves with no prior grounding.

The world does need more JFDI that’s for sure.  People who are willing just to get on with it and not spend months on a business plan (though you do need one).  Those people tend to work in isolation or in pairs and just beaver away until they are ready.  Better still the ones you never hear about are so busy selling to post anything….

All technical people struggle with this mentality of sell first then build for service based software. And as much as I battled, struggled with the concept and argued tooth and nail with some (mainly Learning Pool’s Paul McElvaney) I can hand on heart say he is right.  Sell, then build. My tech brain won over my commercial brain and paid the price.

Obviously there are some things you can do that with, a game for example, you just gotta get it out there and measure the response and adjust accordingly.

Agile startups, who cares? Lean startups, who cares? Just sell the idea then build…..

The epilogue

“Life is a cattle farm coyotes with the mules, life is a bullring for taking risks and flouting rules. Who needs a safety net the world is open wide. Just look out for the card sharks and the danger signs.” 

There are 60+ business books on my Kindle and I hardly look at them.  There’s one I do look at as it encompasses everything (and I’m not talking about The Book that Garrett Murphy and I worked on 🙂 ).  Most business books sell us a lie that you can make it, the reality is most don’t. Business books sell the dream, buy a book on selling instead, it’s more useful.  The only good book I’ve come across trying to put you off starting up on your own was “The Entrepreneur Equation” by Carol Roth.

The few nuggets from two years of reading and talking to hundreds of people brought me to this.

• What problem does it solve
• Who can you sell it too
• How are you going to charge for it

All that guff about passion is fine, what you really need is stamina and time.  And if you think that you don’t have the time the review what you do in a daily around your daily job/routine. You could pack in another four hours minimum without trying.

Just don’t crucify time with your family, they come first.

Do one thing executed perfect and people will talk about it.  Then you can build it from there. 

I’m not dead, it’s just a flesh wound.

 

 

Social influence is not based on simple word counts, Klout take note.

How do you influence someone? It’s usually by knowledge or an action.  Marketers love the fact that if you gather enough numbers on something you come up with a pseudo idea of what someone is like.

The Klout score is becoming a pointless metric in my opinion.  

1. Too many networks to measure

It’s not a case of spreading yourself too thinly, it may be a case of you talk about different things on different networks.  I don’t really mix my tweets from my Facebook, LinkedIn or G+.  The mediums are different and so is the content.  Within my topics, more on that subject in a moment, I tend to communicate with my friends on Facebook and broadcast messages on Twitter.  The range of reach is calculated as an average against all the networks, I’d rather see this separate to each network I’ve attached to the mechanism.

2. Word meanings are different and you have to measure that (somehow).

Klout maintains I’m an “influencer” on coffee…… No I’m not.  I’ve tweeted many times about three different types of coffee.  i) The drink, ii) Coffee Cake (yum) and iii) Open Coffee, the networking event.

This is where Klout’s algorithms need some severe tightening up. I’m assuming there’s some sort of weighted average going on, “Jase has mentioned coffee n times in the last seven days”.  Mentioning the word coffee far from makes you an influencer in the subject. Does my mentioning of Java weight coffee more, programming or both?

 

 

 

So from all those MTV tweets last week…..

Well if there’s one thing MTV can do it’s create a hypertweet frenzy.  First of all a big thank you to all at RepKnight who were drinking tweets like they’ve never seen before.  They rightly pulled the plug.  Could have been due to this one…

Anyway we have data to go through.

The social media landscape was churning messages at the peak of 166 tweets per second on the hashtag #mtvema.

A little playing around this evening with a basic Hadoop setup gave me the following.

144,649 users created the 817,060 tweets I have on file. Hadoop/MapReduce worked that out in less than a couple of seconds and gave me all the figures of who tweeted how many times.

To get more sense out of it though I pulled the results in R….

The average number of tweets per use was 5.6, the max was 600 tweets by Bepirem from Turkey (read it and weep Belfast tweeters!) but she was in a very small group of high tweeting outliers.

So, a starting point…. but there’s a lot more to go through and I’m just scratching the surface.

 

 

Deep delving in to RepKnight with MTV data

I’ve had the honour to be a beta tester for RepKnight for a long time but never had a real deep dive into the features and the searching.  

So today seems like a better excuse than any to do something with it. The nice thing with looking for our specific data from the firehose in general. In this case the hashtag #mtvema is what we’re after.  I’m not using any major features of the RepKnight par se, just the fact I can dump the comment data out in a csv file. To be fair RepKnight is saving my butt in terms of collating huge amounts of data for me. I love it.

Next stage will be to run a Hadoop cluster and find the counts on the unique words and other boffinry. It’s going to be a fun week of deep diving the data.  Updates as they happen.

I wanted to have a proper look at the Twitter Storm API as there was an excellent demo in regards to the Emmy awards that happened not so long back.  It relies on quite a few prerequisites to get everything up and running where as I already have all my hadoop things ready here.

The next few days are going to be fun…. trust me.

 

So how do you measure the return on a thing like the MTV awards?

While my tone on Twitter has been a bit dry to the whole MTV European Music Awards (#mtvema/#mtvemas) there’s a buzz in Belfast that I’m sure can’t be beat.  If it’s the same buzz as standing in front of 5000 people and doing a live gig (and yes, I have) then I know exactly how it feels.

(Lady Gaga, falling off a sofa previously)

Now to the sordid question of the numbers. What do we know… Belfast City Council put in an amount and the Northern Ireland Tourist Board (NITB) put in an amount. With the concert capacity at around 14,000 it works out as a cost to ratepayer/funding body at just over £78 per head.

My issue is with non of that, it’s with the media and the “it will bring nMillion pounds to the economy”.  If you can’t measure it then you’ll never know.

One phrase that always springs to mind when I read/hear that phrase is, “do not accept what you cannot verify for yourself”.

If you look at the 14,000, remember we haven’t factored in the freebie tickets and the dignitaries, where exactly are they going to spend their cash? If the pictures of Victoria Square are anything to go by excessive crowds will have a negative spend effect not a positive one.

The non fiscal data makes sense, it’s great for Belfast, it’s a great way of highlighting Northern Ireland as a whole in the media arena. Will any acts ever come back and perform, more than likely not as it’s normally out of their control anyway, promoters decide based on hard numbers and very little else.  This is a about profit and return on investment, it’s very rarely about art.

So what I read headlines like:

 

Music awards worth estimated £10m for Belfast

My immediate response is, “how?”.

Over what timeframe?

Over what sectors?

And how is it measured?

And when we will see a report that it was worth the risk?

Rest assured, the week after next this will all be forgotten about and the figures will be immaterial until the next rate bill comes for Belfast and you realise you’re footing the bill for it.

I applaud the risk takers who said YES to this. Good luck, I’m looking forward to seeing the results.