20 Dec

Category

By Niki Cheong

To predict or not

0

IN the past few years, social media “predictions” have been a popular subject to approach, especially towards the end of the year.

With social media being such a “new” phenomenon, it was easy getting caught up in it. Will next year see Twitter trump Facebook, or will Google come up with something to kill off its blue nemesis (it tried, and failed miserably in 2011)?

Who can blame the experts, analysts or academics their predictions? After all, isn’t this the era of new media technologies that move so fast there’s always something new to look into?

Well, not really.

If anything, 2011 has taught us that it’s not the mediums and the networks we should be focusing on.

There was the prediction that this was the year of geolocation – you could tag your tweets with data about where you were, while Facebook’s “check-in” was supposedly going to crush Foursquare. Except that it never really took off, so Facebook essentially killed it and Foursquare remains a niche network.

Some people who saw this coming decided that it would be more accurate to look at it from a business point of view. After all, how many new networks can one deal with? So, while predictions about which social media network will go public entertained us all year, we’re actually still guessing when all of it will happen.

I suspect that while we obsessed over what was coming next – in an effort to one up each other – we forgot to look at what was already at hand.

The biggest mistake in 2011 was asking what was coming next when we should have focused on what the current big guns had in store.

If we just looked at the more mainstream networks, Facebook introduced the social graph and its Timeline, which look set to change the way the Internet functions forever.

Twitter gave us several new looks – not just via its web version but also with its native apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry.

Then more recently, we saw the re-emergence of the “anti-social social network” Path, an iPhone app that once allowed you to add only 50 friends (its reincarnation allows 150). The first time it launched, it died a slow death but rose from the ashes over the past few weeks by “borrowing” ideas from successful applications like Facebook (with its own timeline feature) and Instagram’s photo manipulation concept.

The best part is that it allowed you to connect each update via its application with the most popular existing networks – Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Foursquare.

Facebook

It’s early days still but it looks set to be the next iPhone app du jour. Why? Well, it’s because it acknowledges the power of the aforementioned social networks and attempts to survive by complementing them as opposed to competing with them.

If my interpretation of what Path is doing is correct, then 2011 would have been the year that the biggest social networks made their mark and withstood any of its competitors – Google+ and Diaspora (what?).

So where does this leave us as 2012 approaches?

I wouldn’t dare make any predictions, really. At this stage, I feel like we’ve been obsessing over social media so much that we’ve forgotten the largest digital ecosystem in which it resides.

Along that vein, I would say that we can look forward to 2012 as the year where digital users empower themselves. We’ve already seen how social media assisted in protests – either in the Arab world or in many Western countries via the Occupy movement – so much so that Time magazine named the “protestors” as its person of the year.

My vision is that next year, we move forward from there and empower ourselves to be active users of social media by being more conscious of how we engage online, be aware of what we’re “liking” and retweeting and figure out how else we can be more efficient users of social media, than just following the trends.

I won’t predict that for 2012, but I would definitely hope for it.

* Niki Cheong is pursuing his Master’s degree in Digital Culture and Society in London. Connect with him via www.nikicheong.com or www.twitter.com/nikicheong.

25 May

Posted by
David Lian

Category

By David Lian

Too young to Facebook?

2

In your honest and totally unbiased opinion, what is the right age for someone to be allowed to sign up for a Facebook account?

Currently, in keeping with the United State’s 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), Facebook only allows people aged 13 and above to sign up for its service. Yet, a study this year by Consumer Reports found that about 7.5 million children have Facebook accounts.

What’s with all these kids wanting to get on Facebook anyway?

Well, if you’re anybody and everybody in school, being online and socially connected is something you strife for. When I was younger, this came in the form of IRC (Internet Relay Chat) although there were less rules back then. All you had to do was learn how to download and install a piece of software.

Today, the social network du jour is Facebook. And even before Facebook, kids have found a way to make use of blogs and other social networks to express themselves and connect with friends outside of school.

Without a doubt, COPPA was an immensely important act in its time. In theory, at least, it protects children from unwittingly divulging sensitive, private information to strangers, especially those with malicious intent.

However, as the latest Consumer Reports study has shown, children are fast getting around this through the means of fake accounts, and very little can be done to stop them. In an attempt to keep up with the times, a bill is being mooted in California to allow parents of kids aged 18 and below the right to request for the removal of information on their child’s social network.

Explaining why the bill was proposed, California state senator Ellen Corbett explained that social networks today were “encouraging the disclosure of information that was formerly discreet (like location) and to enable the sharing of information even when not sitting in front of the traditional computer (like mobile phones).”

This senator is, at least, partly clued into what’s happening in the social space today. Location and mobile are certainly game-changing elements. Parents don’t want their precious children checking-in to school on Facebook on their mobiles, especially if they’ve got strangers following them on Facebook.

But I think the need goes beyond making up laws. Yes, it’s an important building block to give parents legal rights to take action, but to truly protect young people online, education remains the key.

So, in a roundabout way, we come back to the original question of this article.

In an age where social media is becoming a part of our everyday lives, so much so that you see young children toting iPhones in school, it’s hard to think that the law will catch up with the practical reality of the situation.

Rather, it falls on the parents to understand the technology and to teach their children to use it responsibly, in the same way I learned how to be responsible with the telephone. I remember my mum warning me not to give away our home address or even to say my name to a stranger I didn’t recognise in case they called the house phone.

Similarly, we need to master the Internet and understand the dynamic effect social networking has on our public/private information dichotomy. I think there’s no better way to teach kids then letting them learn from a young age.

Also, it is not as if there has not been a precedent. Children-friendly and targeted social networks have existed for quite a while, Disney’s Toontown being an excellent example (http://toontown.go.com). However, there’s always this spark in all of us to do what the adults are doing, isn’t there?

Hence, the curiosity for Facebook.

So, should Facebook create a “Facebook for Kids” product? Or perhaps create a special class of accounts for minors aged below 13? I think a “supplementary” account for minors would be a great way to address this issue.

Parents can sign-up for their children and attach the “supplementary” account for their children to theirs. Facebook can then give parents special controls as – for example, information privacy settings come under parents control. This allows parents to approve what others can or cannot see.

Perhaps even giving parents control as to what times an account can be logged into might be a good idea, so children can log and post on Facebook only during the times their parents specify. And of course, once the child turns 13, they automatically gets full autonomy of their account.

The point is – social networking is here to stay. And whatever our reservations or issues with the technology, we’re either going to have to learn to deal with them, or falter in our progress.

q David Lian is a father of one and is looking for ways to keep his daughter out of trouble online, if he’s able to. Tweet him feedback or suggestions at www.twitter.com/davidlian.

04 May

Posted by
Niki Cheong

Category

By Niki Cheong

The next step

0

WHEN Sohaib Athar (@Really Virtual) sent tweets out about the “rare event” – a helicopter hovering above Abbottabad, a city in Pakistan – a few nights ago, he didn’t imagine that he would be credited with “breaking” such an important piece of news.

In fact, it was such an insignificant moment, that the second tweet was in jest: “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”.

The helicopter was one of four in a raid held to capture Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, which eventually led to his death.

Of course, no one (besides those who were clued in about the raid) knew about the incident Sohaib was tweeting about.

In fact, the Twitterverse only went on an #osama and #OBL rampage after @KeithUrbahn tweeted: “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn”. This has been credited by many news sources as the first tweet about the attack.

OBAMA: Scooped by Twitterverse.

It appeared even before US president Barack Obama officially announced the news.

Like most major news that has “broken” on Twitter, the frantic search to find the early tweeters is a given. This would be followed by the announcement, often by advocates of social media’s prowess, that Twitter has once again trumped the traditional media.

Considering the number of breaking news we’ve gotten on Twitter, I wonder if we’re not tired of the same rethoric yet.

Ever since Janis Krums posted that now-iconic picture of the US Airways plane that crashed into the Hudson River in New York in 2009, Twitter has been credited with breaking the news of several significant events and incidents.

The picture posted by Janis Krums on Twitter of the US Airways flight that crash landed on the Hudson River.

Many – the traditional media included – have acknowledged social media’s speed in terms of information dissemination. It is this realisation that has led to the many debates about the journalism industry, the downfall of traditional media, and social media’s role in this “phenomenon”.

The fact is that it is not the ability to “scoop” the traditional media that makes social media what it is. Social media does not exist in isolation and is most powerful when used to complement and mobilise action.

That is why it is time we move on from focusing on the breaking news factor and instead look at other elements that social media can offer. Perhaps, we should start asking more often: “What can social media do after the news has broken?”

We have already seen examples of this happening in the past few months.

In Japan recently, when the tragic earthquake happened, social media aided in the search efforts (through Google’s “Person Finder”) and in sending out tsunami alerts. In North Africa, and the Middle East, it was the conversations happening on social media that served as an enabler for the revolutions.

I also found Sohaib’s tweets (such as when he posted on Twitpic, “life in Abbottabad”, around the time of Obama’s announcement) to be most interesting in the news development of Osama’s death on Monday. Then there were also the use of Google Maps to indicate the location of the raid.

These examples indicate that it is in action that social media reigns supreme.

Online media company GigaOm, in an article titled The stages of news in a Twitter and Facebook era, wrote: “Action. This is where Facebook and social media really shine. From tweets about people seeking more information from friends to those seeking to find out if others are meeting at Ground Zero by checking out a live web cam of the site, people now can learn about news and do something.”

Many social media advocates will tell you that we haven’t seen anything yet when it comes to the real power of these networks. With each new incident and event happening around the world, we are seeing ingenius new ways in which people are using social media. We live in exciting times, where technology is concerned, but for me, it is in the anticipation of what is to come that is keeping me on the edge of my seat.

23 Mar