This is a few days old but it’s well worth revisiting if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s by English rapper Dan Bull and it’s about everyone’s favorite time-waster, TheFacebook. The best part?
He also does a Twitter one. Give it a listen and then download it for free to help Bull hit the record books.
See, Bull is aiming to have the first torrented single in in the UK and global charts so he’s giving the tracks away on BitTorrent and asking for a small donation once you’re hooked. It’s a noble venture and the music, needless to say, is really good and it’s a wild proof-of-concept for future artists.
As virtually every form of media from newspapers to television shows becomes more socially aware, the book remains stubbornly anti-social. Despite the rapid growth in e-books and the launch of a number of services designed to add social features to books, the act of reading is still a fairly solitary thing. Author and tech blogger Clive Thompson says he sees a future in which books become just as social as other forms of writing, with comments and conversations integrated into them or revolving around them — but is that what readers want?
Thompson, who contributes to both Wired and the New York Times magazine, is one of the most thoughtful writers around when it comes to how technology affects us as a society, so it’s worth paying attention to what he has to say about the future of books (Disclosure: Thompson is also a friend). Although as a technophile he may be more of an outlier than a mainstream user, the Wired writer says that he full expects books to become more social, just as every other form of media has thanks to the web:
Every form of media has migrated online and benefited from conversation. The newspaper is broken into articles that get blogged and get turned into conversations. We’re at the point where the most interesting thing you can find on the Internet is the conversation in the comments on a blog after someone excerpts an article. I will read an article in the Times in paper, because I’m old-fashioned, and then I will go online to see what people blogged about it.
Not everyone is going to agree with this view of the value of newspaper or blog comments — especially those who have decided to shut them down, or hand them off to Facebook because they see them as a magnet for trolls and other internet low-lifes. But Thompson (who is currently working on his first book, about the future of thought) says that he believes books can attract a higher quality of conversation:
Books are going to provoke the best conversations because people think really deeply about them. And people bring a certain level of intellectual seriousness to them that they don’t even necessarily bring to newspapers. I am absolutely convinced that being able to see what other people have said about a book and to talk about it and respond to it is going to be a freakishly huge boon for books.
We’ve written before at GigaOM and PaidContent about startups that want to add social features to the reading experience, including Findings (a service for sharing highlighted passages in books, where the interview with Thompson appeared), as well as Readmill and Goodreads. And Amazon has made some attempts to add social elements to its e-reader, such as the @author program that allows participating writers — such as Tim Ferriss and J.A. Konrath — to take comments or questions from writers directly through the Kindle platform. But none of these have really taken off so far, it seems.
Is that because most people still see reading as a fundamentally solitary activity? Whenever social features come up, I hear friends say that they have no interest in making their books more social, and some even say they prefer reading on a Kindle or Nook because it just has text, and therefore they don’t get distracted by other things while they are trying to read. But surveys of younger users show that many don’t like reading on e-readers precisely because they *aren’t* social, and social media has become a way of life for them.
In any case, just because social features exist for e-books doesn’t mean that everyone has to use them — even Thompson says he foresees them as having an on-off switch for when a reader doesn’t want to see comments, etc. But given the success that some authors have had with social ventures such as the 1book140 project and other ways of making their books more social, I’m surprised we are still so far away from the future that Thompson envisions (the rest of his interview is worth reading as well).
Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy Mates and Marya
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In 2010, South Yorkshire police showed up at the workplace of 26-year old Paul Chambers and arrested him. His crime: posting a frustrated joke to Twitter after his girlfriend’s flight was delayed due to snow at the local airport.
“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
This was perhaps unfortunately phrased, but was it “menacing”? Even police didn’t think so. As Chambers’s lawyer describes the chain of events leading to his arrest:
[The tweet] was not sent to the airport, and when it was found in a search some days later it was graded as “non-credible” by the airport security manager. However, the process in place meant that it was referred to the airport police, who did nothing, and then to South Yorkshire police, who arrested Paul at his workplace for a suspected “bomb hoax.” The police in turn realised after interview that it was intended as no more than a joke; but they had to refer it to the Crown Prosecution Service for a decision.
The CPS agreed that it was not a bomb hoax offence, but they decided it was in the public interest to prosecute Paul under section 127. This seems the first time… that this offence had been used in respect of an internet communication.
Chambers was fined £400 plus costs (now over £3,000). But he has appealed the case, which was heard in London this week, and the ruling will set precedent as the first time an appellate court has considered this sort of issue related to social media.
The UK isn’t the only government not sure how to handle tweets. Two weeks ago, British tabloid The Sun interviewed a man and woman who had been sent back home after long flights to California, where Homeland Security agents pointed to a recent tweet from the man saying, “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.”
If it all seems a bit over the top—what person actually out to “destroy America” would write such a thing publicly, on Twitter, and in English?—it could be far worse if you live in Saudi Arabia.
Sina Weibo, one of China’s premiere microblogs and alternatives to Twitter, saw a record number of messages sent per second Monday, in honor of the Chinese New Year.
Kicking off the Year of the Dragon, the new record — 32,312 messages per second — trounces Twitter’s record 25,088 messages sent per second, which was set last December in Japan during a TV screening of anime movie Castle in the Sky.
Chinese news site DoNews reports the first minute of the new year saw 481,207 messages sent, roughly three times the number of messages sent during the first minute of the last new year. That figure is on par with the site’s 296% increase in users during 2011.
Sina Weibo now has 250 million registered users, making the site slightly smaller than its largest domestic rival, Tencent Weibo, which has 300 million registered users. However, according to DoNews, Sina Weibo is the more-used of the two, seeing some 100 million users visit the site each day.
SEE ALSO: China Has 500 Million Web Users, Half of Them Are Microbloggers
Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow’s overtime touchdown pass earlier this month set the U.S. record for the most tweets per second at 9,420.
Perhaps, given the Twitter-based enthusiasm of football fans, the upcoming Superbowl Feb. 5 will give the U.S. a chance to catch up with the Chinese and Japanese microblogging records.
As China’s online population continues to grow, do you expect microblogs like Sina Weibo to continue to appeal to the mainstream? Let us know in the comments.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kizilkayaphotos
More About: china, microblog, sina weibo, Twitter
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You’ve probably noticed it over the years; I certainly have. You’ve seen the companies who are way too friendly on the web. You click on their website and it’s stuffed with messages like “Yay!” and “w00t!” You look at their Twitter accounts and they’re asking what crazy capers everyone got up to this weekend. On Facebook, it’s all “why not look at this funny cat video? LOL!”
It’s everywhere, and it drives me crazy.
Katy Lindemann, a friend of mine who’s a communications strategist in London, made an interesting point about the growth of this approach in a recent blogpost. Too often, she says, companies simply decide to let their standards slide when it comes to social media, opting to drop their usual voice for one that I call hypercasual.
She refers to one example noticed by U.K. developer Phil Gyford. He spotted that his bank, Smile.co.uk was polling web users on a topic that felt oddly casual.
“Smile.co.uk, I know you want to be friendly,” he said. “But is a poll on the front page about your favourite A-Team character appropriate for a bank?”
I’m not entirely sure when this extremely casual voice started being used by companies online, but I remember when it seemed novel: back when Flickr launched, for example, using a playful, personal voice that seemed like a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t pretending to be a person, exactly, but it had a personality. In Britain, we had Innocent Drinks, a company that has spent the last decade making a virtue of its cute copywriting.
Through the Web 2.0 boom, the friendly voice was rapidly copied. In fact, it became synonymous with social media presence — even though it was rarely done as well as those who led the way. Now it feels as if everything is trying to be friendly, from fashion outlets to banks to your kid’s school.
But it doesn’t always work. As Lindemann puts it, it’s the result of people getting their “content strategy” wrong:
It’s partly the Innocentification of cutesy, zany copy where it’s just not plausible or appropriate for the brand… But it’s also suggestive of a complete lack of content strategy… Of not really understanding what kind of relationship the people they’re trying to engage want to have with their brand. Whether they want a brand to be useful, helpful and deliver against their brand promise – or whether they want a brand to be their mate.
The question of tone is important because sometimes the hypercasual approach ends up not simply being inappropriate, but downright offensive. Remember when Kenneth Cole made an inappropriate joke during the Egyptian uprising? Or when Microsoft urged people to buy Amy Winehouse downloads just hours after the singer was found dead? There are dozens of examples of companies getting it wrong in social media.
And while some of these problems are individual failings — giving the wrong person the ability to post messages on your company’s behalf, or posting to a company account when they mean to post to a personal one — they are all, on a broader scale, the result of trying to take a hypercasual approach.
The discussion reminded me of a recent New York Times piece arguing that the late novelist David Foster Wallace was really the man to blame for over-casual. In the article, writer Maud Newton argues that Wallace’s popularity was emblematic of the language that evolved from the web; the equivocations, the postmodern inflections of IIRC and IMHO.
While the argument itself is a little tricky — I’m not sure whether she’s suggesting that a large proportion of bloggers have actually read David Foster Wallace, or merely that he captured the voice of a generation — she is right to point out that his prose is full of the sort ofs and pretty muches that define hypercasual. He is, in some ways, its patron saint. From the article:
I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon… It’s fascinating and dreadful in hindsight to realize how quickly these conventions took hold and how widely they spread.
When the hypercasual is used properly, it can be very powerful. Betfair, a British gambling website, started experimenting with a new Twitter voice earlier this year. The result was a riotous stream of consciousness, jokes about corporate life or tales of dogs and strippers. It was the manic, unbalanced voice of somebody on the verge of madness, trying to escape office life through the magic portal of Twitter. It was great.
So perhaps these clunky examples of the hypercasual voice — the A-Team polls and the bad taste jokes — are actually part of a strategy. It’s just a strategy that has gone wrong.
More likely, I suspect, they are merely evidence that many people companies confuse being friendly with being flippant. Trying to “do social” means trying to be friendly, which in turns means sounding like an ordinary person — and it’s very easy to imagine that the best way of sounding like an ordinary person is to simply let an ordinary person take over your Twitter account and do whatever comes to mind.
But thinking that hypercasual is synonymous with not trying is a terrible mistake. David Foster Wallace didn’t just write the first thing that came into his head; he agonized over the text. Flickr’s playfulness with words represents something of the company’s culture, even now that it’s part of Yahoo.
Lots of businesses want to be friendlier, but that doesn’t mean you can just slap up a few jokes and I’ll be your lifelong buddy. The truth is, I don’t want brands to tell me what they were doing this weekend or share funny video mashups with me. That’s what my real friends — what real people — are for.
Photograph of Yay! sticker from Moo used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Richard Moross
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