These thoughts gave me an idea. My own little art project. A statement against the vomit of all possible uninteresting accouncements on the public Twitter timeline.

My idea was to make a Twitter account with the soul purpose of letting its followers know the owner is still breathing. The most uninteresting and trivial information you could possibly broadcast. Call it a universal hint to those every-five-minutes Twitter users.
Of course I wasn’t planning on doing all that typing myself. I made a script that uses the Twitter API to breathe in and breathe out alternately every minute (about the maximum you’re allowed to post). With the added bonus that people could use the link that was sent with the tweet to broadcast the breathing from their own account.

One of the things that immediately struck me was that the account (@ademhaler, which means “breather” in Dutch) was automatically followed by scripted follower tools. Apparently, if you tweet a lot you’re attractive prey for these automated follow bots.

What shocked and surprised me, however, was that the Google search results were already heavily influenced by my Twitter account after a week. When you searched for “breather” the page at our server (http://breather.conceptables.nl, on which I’d posted the link to the breather) would be ever higher in the results, while it’s quite a generic word. This was the case despite Google claiming to have such an advanced algorithm to generate its search results.

It seemed strange that by simply repeating the same tweet you can drastically manipulate search results. You’d expect this kind of relatively simple manipulations to be filtered out.

During the development of our online feedback service Mopinion we were curious if this trick would also work with popular buzzwords, such as “social media”. We created a number of Twitter accounts with some relevant keywords for our service.
We felt it was a bit tricky as most people naturally don’t like these kinds of ways to increase their presence on Google. But on the other hand you could hardly call it spam. If no one adds you and you don’t send people messages uninvited you could not possibly qualify it as such.

What surprised us is that specialized Twitter search engines were also simply duped by the fake tweeting. There are actually no filters present in these search engines that remove such repetitions. Thus it’s not so difficult to manipulate your presence on Twitter and Google enormously.

We did get messages from employees of these Twitter search websites who weren’t very happy with us. But as it’s fairly easy to filter it out, we didn’t really see the problem for them.
To be extra careful I wrote a script to remove friendships with all Twitter accounts that would follow our “breather” accounts so nobody would be directly bothered by our messages, even if they did use the also dubious practice of automatically following an active user.

Our new Twitter accounts also had a huge impact on the Google search results (and of course the Twitter search results). With fairly generic queries, such as “social media”, “client interaction” (in Dutch) and “feedback” the Mopinion website showed up very high in the results.

It pays to tweet the same message as much as possible. Google does not have any filters for this.

When more people find out about this (like now :-s) it will temporarily be a free alternative to Google Adwords. Since Google’s business model is based on this service, it seems to be a high priority of the internet giant to make a filter for this as soon as possible.
When everybody starts doing it, it will become less effective. But Google will be completely overwhelmed by unaccurate search results. The loudest Twitter users will be on top.

We have, of course, terminated our Mopinion “breathers”, the experiment succeeded. But in the end people want to find what’s relevant for them and not something somebody is tweeting the most (or pays for, for that matter. That’s why Google has so strictly separated the paid results.) With a “breather” you could manipulate the real results.

This is not good news for Google or their users. To us it seems a priority to build in filters for this as soon as possible.
But the company’s employees are so brilliant, surely they’ll find out for themselves. Right?

In recent months we have been reading a lot about social network sites like facebook, XING and other portals making profitable use of the user data they are storing.

Politics usually react by designing legal structures which are not going to help the development of the internet. Where borders seam to evaporate, national laws are reduced to barking dogs.  With the current situation Ministers have learned their lesson and are using the social media as a tool to force social media to rethink their policies.

Eventually ministers participate in social media portals (facebook) in order to increase the number of followers who will also support the minister’s initiative. This is very much the case with the German minister who has been increasing the pressure on facebook so that they improve their data protection policies. Eventually, she decided to cancel her facebook account and hereby motivated other people to either cancel their own accounts or reduce the quantity of material they have been leaving in facebook. Hence, social media is not just useful to build up a public image but also to influence people and companies.

On the one hand you could argue that clients might start questioning if their existing solution is going to keep within the expected or required boundaries. On the other hand, it must make clients aware that data security is not just a matter of having a firewall on the server. Good site security needs know-how and that is not for free but available at competitive prices.

But how do you get your services to a state that they will not get you into trouble?

This is not an easy question. This requires not just technical knowledge but also an insight into local data protection laws and regulations. In General: the safer the server, the database and its scripts the less you are likely to get security issues.

But what if you use the client data to earn extra cash? It is not a good idea to sell your clients data to a 3^rd party in order to finance your business plan. You need to change your income generation to make your services much more attractive to users and advertisers. Add powerful tools for targeting advertisements and you will start winning again. But you need to have real business intelligence knowledge. For that best outsource your ideas in order to speed up delivery of new services at much lower costs.

Knowledge is power but unrivaled attractiveness is tremendous.

Last year September Google released their newest innovation on the web: Google Wave. After a lot of media exposure they sent out the First 100.000 invites for their newest product. The two brothers Rasmussen, who also invented Google Maps, describes Google Wave as:  “How would e-mail look like if it was invented nowadays?”.

The answer of this question is an online real time communication platform which combines the power of e-mail, instant messaging, chat, wiki, social networks and project management. The browser based tool is still an early beta, but more and more people are starting to use it.

Google Wave operates completely in the browser and is using a lot of JavaScript and HTML5. It’s not strange that the older versions of Internet Explorer are not officially supported by Google. To experience Google Wave in full glory it’s best to use Google’s own browser: Chrome.

KEY FEATURES
Google Wave has a lot of innovative features that makes it a unique concept:

• Real-time
  All the communication in Google Wave is real-time. If a group members of a Wave is typing a message, the text will instantly show to all the other members character by character. You can see multiple people typing messages in the same wave. There is even  a robot available that will translate your message to any desired language as you type it (you have to add aunt-rosie@appspot.com to your wave).

• Open Source
  The code and platform specifications of Google Wave will be released under the  Open Source license. As you see Open Source Software is getting more and more mature this will definitely help the adoption of Google Wave. Businesses can host Google Wave on their own servers without  the fear that Google is scanning their messages. The API is also open to developers  so they may create their own Robots  and Gadgets.

• Wiki function
  All the content of a wave can be edited by everybody that has been given access to the wave. You can not only edit your own messages but you can even correct, append or delete messages of anybody within your wave. This is a powerful feature but the risk is that a wave with a lot of people can get a bit messy.

• Embed a Wave
  Just as you can embed a Google Map in your website, a Wave can also be embedded. By doing this you can add tons of functionality to your website. Imagine the following:
  • A customer service that uses a Wave to communicate real time to the customer
  • An E-Commerce Shop with a Wave embedded as a way for visitors to review and share  products
  • A forum where all the thread are replaced by Waves so forum members can communicate and share information with each other.
• Gadgets & Robots
  Gadgets adds functionality as a small piece of software inside a wave. Just as all the gadgets that are available at iGoogle or Netvibes, developers can build their own social gadgets for Google Wave. This can be anything from a simple Yes-No-Maybe gadget to a full blown video conferencing gadget.                                                                                                                                                                                             Robots are programmed conversation participants. They can access all the content of a Wave and can respond to updates by using certain content and bring it available outside a Wave. Just add tweety-wave@appspot.com to your Wave and all your messages will be posted on your Twitter account. It is even possible to write your own Robot that exports all the content of a Wave to your custom build CMS or website. An interesting list of 11 Wave Robots for the Enterprise can be found here. A very complete list of Robots and Gadgets can be found here
• Playback
  One of Wave’s most powerful features is its ability to replay the entire history of a wave. From the first moment of creation until its current state. Every time you click update a Wave, Google Wave saves a snapshot of the document state. That version of the wave appears as one frame in its playback. If a user is added to a Wave a bit later it is simple to get him up to speed. Instead of checking all your related email, it’s enough to just playback the wave  to have all the information that you need.

• Drag-and-drop Files
  In Google Wave users can drag files from the desktop right into the Wave. If the selected files are images, they will be shown as a photo slide show. Movies can be played back within the browser and documents can be shared easily. By adding this functionality Google Wave can be a great tool for a project management system. Companies can use Google Wave as their online platform for communication and file sharing.

Of course the above list of features is just a small part of everything that is possible. If you have some spare time I would advise you to watch the full introduction movie

CONCLUSION

After using Google Wave for a couple of months I believe that it can provide a more efficient and productive way to communicate. The fact that your communication stream is bundled together in a wave makes it  to a great tool for brainstorming, group writing, project management, chatting and a lot more.

Since the initial release back in May 2009 Google did a good job in building a steady growing community around Google Wave. The stream of visitors was building up towards the end of last year. But now it looks like people are losing some interest in the product as shown in the graph below:

Search volume for the term Google Wave in the past 12 month.

Google Wave is exciting and powerful indeed, but I have some doubts whether this tool will completely replace email or IM. Let’s be honest, both email and IM have been around for nearly as long as the internet exists. While it’s impossible to answer this question, I think that within one or two years more and more people will use Wave. Ultimately what I would love to see is that Google Wave and Gmail will merge into a new universal communication tool that will combine the best of both worlds. Until that moment I will continue to use both Google Wave and Email.

2009 has been quite the eventful year: There were plane crashes in Holland and on the Hudson River, Michal Jackson died, everybody was freaked out by Swine Flu, Lance Armstrong returned to the Tour de France, there was a climate summit in Copenhagen, America got its first Black President that gave new meaning to the sentence “YES we can!”, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were elections in Iran, there were tensions between the West and euhm.. well.. everyone else. AND of course the mother of all newsitems in 2009 there was the big CC, the Credit Crunch…. oooooh the Credit Crunch

If you are an average news-follower you will for sure recognize all these events, because they have been in the news at the time and in pretty much every news-year-review program towards the end of the year. But the careful observer will notice that all of these events have something in common……. see it yet??….. yeaaaah there you go…. all these events have had something to do with Social Media.

Many would argue that 2009 was the year of Twitter and there is indeed some evidence to support that: Growth succeeding 1000% in some months, the fastest spreading of information, 50 million users and all the big players in the online business either want to buy Twitter or have developed similar things. Here in Holland you are hardly taken seriously anymore as a politician if you are not tweeting about how much salt you put on your tuna sandwich during lunch. So YES INDEED it has been a great year for Twitter.
Personally I think 2009 has been the year of Facebook. in 2009 Facebook has become the single most dominant force to be reckoned with in Social Media land. With over 350 million users (that is more than the entire US population) and usage numbers in terms of picture uploads, video uploads, profiles, fan pages that boggle the mind Facebook has truly grown up. Yes there have been issues with a new UI and new privacy settings, but as far as I’m concerned those are just small hickups for now. And maybe the most impressive part is that Facebook is able to stand up to the biggest name of them all: Google. Normally companies roll onto their backs and come over all funny as soon as Google starts to tickle them. But Facebook has stood their grounds for now.

So what can we expect for 2010??
Well I do live in Amsterdam where many people will use substances illegal in other parts of the world and from what I hear they can get pretty misty-eyed and start babbling about the meaning of life and how we all fit into a bigger picture. No worries, I do not resort to those substances or babbling.

Integration
Nowadays it is becoming increasingly time consuming to manage all our Social Media platforms. Doing a status update almost forces you to go through several different login processes and go to a variety of websites. Platforms like Ping.fm, TweetDeck and Digsby are already doing a very good job in “mashing” several Social Sites into one system or enabling users to access them from 1 location. I think that this trend will continue in 2010. Whether it be in downloadable form like TweetDeck, or in a mash on site like Ping.fm, it will become increasingly easy to manage all Social Media activities from one single location.
This integration will also span over several different types of applications we use. The current Facebook app for iPhone automatically syncs the Facebook Profile Pictures and links of the people in you phones contact list with each other. For me this even goes one step further since I also sync my phone with my Google address book from Gmail and Wave.

Mobile and Real Time
In one of their commercials, HTC says that your phone is the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see before you go to sleep, and that it’s the only thing that is always within an arms reach. In 2010 our phones will become the central hub from which we control our Social Networks, because of the computing power of our phones, we will let our networks know what is happening real time. And obviously we will be informed about developments FROM our networks in real time.
Location based services are easy to link to smartphones GPS capabilities and will show us what we need, where we need it, whenever we need it. And it will show us where the rest of our network is and what is happening. Services like Google Latitude and Location based Twitter apps are fantastic examples of this.

Im not sure if eReaders fall under the category “Mobile” but they are a first step in a new direction of multi-functional devices that narrow the gap between phones and netbooks. There are many manufacturers that are planning to launch tablet PC’s in 2010 (Apple, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Acer etc) so there will be a lot of development there. Especially since the chip- and battery- technology is getting better every day.
I am really excited about the mobile and real time development. It means that we are more and more dis-attached from our computers and desks and that everything that happens will come to us as it is happening. This trend was already very much alive in 2009, and will continue to amaze us in 2010 I’m sure.

Evolution
If 2009 has been the year of REvolution, 2010 will sure be the year of Evolution. I think that 2010 is going to be the year where the Semantic Web will come into play. Some of you might call this web 3.0 or 4.0, but I personally don’t really believe in those terms. It suggests there are different versions on the web (which isn’t true). The Semantic Web is not something that will simply be introduced some day and then live on ans the new standard from there on. It’s more something that gradually works its way in our lives. Technically speaking, a simple Google Search is already part of the Semantic Web since it learns from every search and becomes smarter and knows what you want the more you use it. I’ll write more about this in another blog sometime, since it is a fascinating topic.

Tipping Point
I think that 2010 will be the year where businesses and organizations will start to realize that Social Media is the way to go when it comes to communicating with their audiences. 2009 already showed some great examples, (Dell, Starbucks, Google) of companies using Social Media platforms to reach out to people. In general though, businesses are not that eager yet. Of course budgets are tight and maybe there is a bit of “fear for the unknown”, but in my opinion there is SOO much momentum and feedback business and organizations can acquire through Social Media that it is unthinkable not to consider it. 2010 will be the year where businesses that can develop a good Social Media strategy will be the winners and the businesses that opt out will start to see the consequences.

Conclusion
There are people like a Susan Greenfield, the Dutch Queen and Archbishop Vincen Nichols that suggest Social Media is driving us apart as a society, shrinking our attention spans, make us anti-social and confine our worlds to our desks. I completely disagree with them, I think they are just scared about something they do not understand.
Social Media is opening up the world to everybody with an internet connection. We can now have friendships that span the globe, find peers on the most obscure topics and solve our own problems and those of others in our networks.
I think Social Media is a truly fantastic way of bringing people together, a way to share information and help others that has virtually no limits in its capacity and speed. I think this is something amazing and something that we should all embrace.
Privacy and data will become an issue though. I think that in 2010 we might be seeing the first lawsuits and try-case in which the boundaries of what is possible and allowed will be tested.

Happy Social Networking to all of ya in 2010!!

Remember when mobile phones were introduced?? This goes as far back as 1973 (yes really! that long ago!). Remember people saying: “That’s not for me” and “That will never catch on”??

Remember when the fist PC was introduced? This was back in 1981. Remember people saying: ”That’s not for me” and “That will never catch on”??

Remember when the internet first came around? Actually already invented in the 1960′s, but introduced to the general public in 1991 when the World Wide Web became available. Remember people saying: “That’s not for me” and “That will never catch on”?? Including big corporate giant Microsoft, who only at the very last minute took the decision to adopt the Web and the Internet into their strategy.

Remember, walkmans, Google, laptops, Tetris, mp3 players, Windows, Scientology, Atkinson diet, lava lamps and smartphones?? “Wasn’t for people and it would never catch on”

The fact of the matter is: all these things have entered our lives and somehow managed to cling on. And as a result, we can’t live without them anymore. Well… apart from the Scientology maybe

Recently “people” have been talking about Social Media, and guess what they have been saying……. And guess what is happening…..

YES INDEED!! They are wrong once again, and this might possibly be the biggest wrong since people believed the earth was flat and you would fall of at the end.

Maybe you (yeah YOU!) are reading this and thinking: hmm I was one of the people who said all those things. Well…let me say, social Media has arrived and is here to stay to turn things upside down quite violently. For some of you this might seem like a threat or a danger or at least as a daunting task. But is it really that scary and difficult??

Forums, newsgroups and discussion boards used to be for shy, socially alienated, acne rattled teenagers that knew all about World of Warcraft, but had no idea how to talk to a person without a keyboard. Which is fair, because they are usually the early adopters of any new technology.

Nowadays though, the fastest growing group on Facebook is 35 and older! People (including you) are communicating, searching, shopping and living in ways that move away from traditional media

Looking at the development of the internet and the WorldWideWeb this actually makes a lot of sense, because Social Media is nothing more than a digital version of how we communicate and find information in our daily offline-lives.

Think about it, in your every day lives, we are part of many small groups. A fishing group, sports club, music group, young parents etc etc. With all these group we have interactions, discussions and meetings. We turn to specific groups when we need help on a particular topic and others come to us with similar request, because some see us as an authority on something. This is exactly the same as what happens on the several Social Media platforms we participate in. Finally our digital lives have caught up with our offline lives. This in turn explains the success of Social Media and ensures the future success as well.

Going to a birthdayparty and talking to the people that have something interesting to say is exactly the same as going to LinkedIn and joining a group that you have a connection with. We humans like to find peers in any shape or form on any topic imaginable. In the “old days” we had to join a club or become a member of a group in our local activity center. Now we can do it with 2 clicks of a mouse and instead of our local community we can now talk baseballcards with the whole wide world. And the best part is, that we don’t need to learn anything new!

I read a lot (truly a LOT) of blogs, posts, Tweets and updates about Social Media. And frankly, most of them make me want to harm myself after a while, because they all seem to boil down to a boring list of statistics put together by someone a bit handy with a search engine or yet another self proclaimed “guru” that thinks he is the next best thing after Google.
No worries, I’m not about to do any of that. Instead I want to challenge you. After reading this article, I hope that you realize that Social Media is actually nothing else than what you do every day in your offline life.

Maybe right now, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week or whenever you are ready, take the plunge and see what Social Media can do to enrich your life. Have a look around, see what works and what doesn’t. I’m sure you will find more out there than you can imagine because in the end Social Media is all about people finding people and I’m sure there are people out there that you want to find or that are looking for you.

Whatever you do, don’t become one of those people who close their eyes and hope Social Media will go away soon. Don’t become one of those people who say it’s not for them. Because people, businesses and organizations that do so, might miss out in more ways they can imagine.
Whether you love it, hate it, like it, adore it, find it hard, find it easy, find it amazing or find it intrusive, let me know what you think after you gave Social Media a try. And when you are ready to go one step further and make it into a project for your business or organization, give me a call.!!

See you around!

Peter Doesburg

Social Media Strategist @ SeventeenThirty

info@seventeenthirty.com

0031-6-140 38 758

The past months I have intensely observed the ‘open’ movement in various forms. At Bridge we do a lot with open source. We organize open coffee. And we are an open company with open people.  I wonder whether in the future ‘open’ will become a new economic/organizational principle.

Open source software is known to many people in the IT industry. It exists since Linus torvald initiated Linux in 1991. The past few years, open source technology starts becoming popular in domains where previously only closed source software vendors were active (Business Intelligence, CRM, ERP). Today’s wisdom says that open source software brings many advantages to companies, among which: better quality software, no licensing costs, no vendor lock-in and higher speed of developments. One might predict that in the software industry, open source will become the dominant way of developing and distributing software.

With open coffee we experience ‘self-organization’. To ‘launch’ our open coffee Alkmaar initiative, Maikel created a group in linkedin. Then Maikel and I invited our networks to join us at the open coffee meeting. Few weeks later, over 60 people joined that first open coffee meeting. Without any organization, Sybren Arnoldus brought a professional camera. Paul Mars liked that and took the microphone. The next day the video was published on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFT6kFzpEfk) and watched 690 times till today. The second meeting we motivated people to have brainstorms in small groups, separately from the regular meeting. We posted a call for the first brainstorm in our linkedin group and 8 smart people volunteered. The first session was held last Thursday (about the business model of Bridge with very inspiring results).

This week I visited the open source conference in the Amsterdam Arena (http://www.opensourceconference.nl/). A central theme was ‘co-creation’ and I even got a practical course in co-creation. We have implemented SugarCRM (one of the strongest commercial open source initiatives so far) a few months ago. 2 months ago I wondered whether there was some plugin available to see twitter messages inside a contact’s record. Wednesday Maarten Plomp (Brixcrm) made me aware of the fact that a plugin already existed. This plugin was developed for some company somewhere on the planet. I search in google and find an interesting presentation meanwhile (http://www.revver.com/video/1045051/sugarcrm-social-marketing-and-twitter/). Then I visit sugarforge and I can download the twitter plugin for free (http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/twitter4contact/). This is all made possible by the ‘open’ organization principle.

Another stunning open initiative I came across is Innocentive (http://www.innocentive.com/). On this platform, people can post a ‘problem’ or ‘scientific challenge’. Experts from all over the world can login to the site and start working on the solution to that problem. The best solution is then financially rewarded by the poster of the problem. This means a company doesn’t need to hire a large R&D staff anymore to find the solution. They can simply tap into the ‘brightest minds’ on the planet. The solution is achieved at a fraction of the costs it would take when the bright minds would be on the payroll.

With all these open initiatives, the question arises whether the traditional ‘corporation’ will still be needed in the future to create value. If groups of people come together in networks to organize, to co-create, will we still need companies and employees?  This question intrigues me, so I hope that you can share some of your thoughts with me.

Bridge specializes in open source technology. Our focus is mainly on content management using packages as Magento, Joomla, Os Commerce, Typo3 and WordPress. Custom applications are built on the open source Zend Framework. A separate team in Ukraine uses Java technology to build applications.