BPN 1718: Twitter moving from micro to medium blog

The technology site Recode once again spreads the news that the Twitter management is considering expanding the length of the messages from 140 digits to 10.000 digits. Supposedly this should help its profitability. But will expanding tweets beyond average length help?

On March 21, 2006, Jack Dorsey launched twitter. It looked almost as if it happened by accident. The word tweet was not invented yet nor retweet. But it was a clean editorial formula: a message scrambled in 140 characters. Later on a space for media assets was added, limiting the message even more in characters.

The limit of 140 characters looks like it was chosen arbitrarily. However, the reasoning behind was, that the message should fit into the SMS format. The message asked for literary excellence and/or literary economy with abbreviations, leaving out punctuation and diacritical signs (much to the chagrin of the French). The limit of 140 characters has looked comfortable as hardly no real proposal has been put forward for a smaller amount of characters. Yes in India several text services have been proposed, ranging from 60 characters to 120 characters.

Twitter was introduced in the social media field when other media were there already such as Blogger (1999), LinkedIN (2003)and Facebook (2004). And in this company Twitter had the unique selling point of a micro-blog. It was however less interactive as Blogger and LinkedIN.

Now Twitter wants to expand its length to 10.000 characters or roughly to 4,5 pages text. So what is new in comparison to Blogger and other blogs? They do not have a limit of 10.000 characters, but vary from short messages above 140 characters to postings longer than 10.000 characters.  And most blog postings are not longer than one page, roughly 2500 characters.

Besides, how can extended TWRRT improve on lay-outs of the present blog software and especially Wordpress. Twitter will also like to incorporate text, photographs, drawings and small movies in the lay-out of 10.000 characters.

What USP in text and lay-out will Twitter bring? So far it can only result in a playing field for text, photographs, drawings and small movies, as long as the limit of 10.000 characters will not be succeeded.

The argument that people have been asking for extension of the character limit is a crazy argument. What will be the request after that Twitter has gone from 140 to 10.000 characters. The demand will be exponentially, going from 10.000 to 100.000 characters. And no one will view such tweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeets.

Twitter can bring a differentiated service by adding two levels:

a.                   Present tweet of max. 140 characters, to be filled with text and a thumb illustration;

b.                  Lead of max. 500 characters being the introduction of the article, message; if you cant make your point in 500 characters, you will not do so in 10.000 characters.

c.                   Article of max. 10.000 characters, to be filled with text, photographs, drawings and small movies.

This format also contains a business proposal, whereby the article will have to be paid for the author or the reader at a viewing fee set by the author.

Oepss, 510 words!

web roi

BPN 1700: Liberated from Facebook

Just before the end of 2014 I have deactivated my Facebook. I have not done this as I will be 70 years this week. I did not do so in order to get rid of the dog and cat photograhs and stories. If people love pets, fine with me, but do not force them upon me. But the way that Facebook is pushing  the boundaries of privacy and wants to usurp copyrights should be halted. Some FB account holders have made statements of their own arguing that copyright is theirs. That kind of statements do show displeasure, but still Facebook is being used. Besides Facebook will not be impressed. NO, YOU MUST VOTE WITH YOUR FEET AND STEP OUT OF FACEBOOK.

 Yes and then? You can look around for a similar service. I've looked at Ello, but  the site is too arty-farty.I also checked  Brewster but this site does not realise its promise.

Of course it is a pity to lose your contacts. I had about 300 contacts. And yes that's a shame to lose them. No longer you are informed about relatives and friends as well as business acquaintances. In my case I lose the necessary contacts in the World Summit Award (WSA) circuit. So I will now have to put more effort in it in order  to keep up with that circuit. Before Facebook, you had to keep an eye on the relevant sites for information, but now you must keep the social media. Well I still have contacts through the business LinkedIn, where you do not encounter  dogs and cats pictures and stories. And  I can see and communicate through Twitter, nice and short and pointed.

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Talking of liberation. On the occasion of my 70th birthday I received this vase, the so-called liberation vase from 1945. The vase belongs to the series orange vases, made on the occasion of a Dutch royal event. This vase is dated 1945 and designed by AD Copier, master glassblower from the Leerdam Glass Factory to celebrate the liberation of The Netherlands. The vase is not blown with the mouth as opposed to the other orange vases, but machine-produced. The series has a variety of vases orange coloured glass as there was a  limited glass supply in 1945.

 

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I wonder what I will happen without Facebook. Is it a liberation? Will I have free time? Now I can no longer place an announcement for a new blogposting through Facebook; only on LinkedIn and Twitter, and in some cases by special groups on LinkedIn, as Heritage 2.0. Does this affect the reading stats?

So my communication channels for 2015 are LinkedIn and special groups within LinkedIn, Twitter Yjabo) and Skype, but you can also follow me on my blogs:

- Http://buziaulane.blogspot.com  (in English);

- Http://toendigitalemedianognieuwwaren.blogspot.nl (in Dutch).

And of course I also have an email address (the same for 20 years, this year).

What am I going to do with that free time? In early February I go to Abu Dhabi for the World Summit Award Mobile. A series of nifty apps, including the app Touch Van Gogh of the Van Gogh Museum, will receive their awards.

And on July 1 our company Electronic Media Reporting will celebrate its 25 years. It was founded in The Netherlands in 1990 as one of the first consultancies, specializing in content strategy. The anniversary will be commemorated with the launch of an interesting archive, whch is presently under construction.

 

 

 

 

Electronic Media Reporting wishes you a prosperous 2015! 

 

web roi

BPN 1582 Closing my Hyves account

Today I closed my Dutch Hyves social network account. And today Vinton Cerf warns for walled gardens in the Guardian.

In 2007,  I had a long discussion with Xenia Maren Menzies (hi Xenia, do you remember) about the durability of FB. I told her to have an exit strategy in case FB would go bankrupt or in case you had enough of it or, in the worst case, you would die. Who would close the account, was the question. And now social networks are working on their own way to extinction. And that strategy is called: walled garden.

The term walled garden was often used in connection with AOL around 2000. AOL had started out as a consumer online organisation and had survived consumer services like The Source, Trintex and Delphi. By 2000 AOL had a strategy of keeping consumers in their garden. So they started to cooperate with all kind of news and game companies with the slogan: we are your one-stop shop. The social networks go into the same direction now. BUT I DO NOT WANT A ONE WAY SHOP.

So start reading the Guardian article Google evangelist warns Facebook could be the next AOL or IBM. The Google evangelist is Vinton Cerf who says Facebook's closed model risks it becoming a 'walled garden' unconnected from other networks and websites. On my FB page this link was offered by Professor Melissa Lee Price and also linked by Gyorgyi Retfalvi.

The article appears on the day that I have closed my Hyves social media page. Hyves is a Dutch social network, which is presently belonging to De Telegraaf. This newspaper publishing company bought the social network, when it was really over its commercial top. And presently it is panting and trying to catch up with other networks. Today Hyves launched a major overhaul, which prompted me to look at Hyves in general and to the persons profiles I link to. Then I compared the two networks and the list of profiles and noticed that I could find the profiles also on FB. So what was the extra on Hyves: a walled garden of a newspaper company? I decided that it was time to close my Hyves account and I did. I must compliment Hyves on this clean closing-off procedure.

BPN 1582

Segmentation in social networks

Social networks are popping up everywhere and for different age groups. Recent the UK consumer group Which? published a survey grading the various social networks. Bebo, Facebook and Saga Zone came out as the best three. The top ten, including MySpace, show segmentation, according to age groups, but also to globalisation.

In the UK segmentation in age can be distinguished. MySpace is aiming at the segment of older teenagers and early twens. Bebo and Facebook and is aiming at a target group from 20 onwards. Now also the age group of silver surfers has its own social network in the Saga Zone, a site still at its infancy.

Of course the global internet has had from the beginning a segmentation in sites with regard to age. The site Habbo Hotel is a typical hangout for teenagers. LinkedIn and Xing have been the social network for professionals. And in several countries, like in the Netherlands, there is a network for seniors. From the beginning they have not been typified as social networks, but functioned like them, even to the point of organising physical meeting like Xing and Seniornet do in the Netherlands.

But the social networks have also another interesting aspect, the globalisation. Social networks like Facebook and My Space as well as LinkedIn and Xing aim at the whole world. Yet Bebo and Saga Zone are typically active in the UK. Also in the Netherlands there is a social network for young professionals, Hyves, which is not limited to the Netherlands, but has most of its subscribers there. Of course language is one of the factors as well as a limited national outlook. I can imagine that Saga Zone will do it better in the UK, as the target group looks for contacts in its own country. Yet Facebook is internationally oriented and has a global target group. I guess it will be very hard to set up a European social network as this geographical region is fragmented by languages.

Recently Ofcom, the UK telecom watchdog, released a study saying the UK social network participants spent more time on social networking than their European counterparts, devoting 5,3 hours a month and visiting them 23 times, roughly 14 minutes per visit. Yet people are getting cautious about participating in social networks. According to a survey by the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) no less than 71 per cent of 14- to 21-year-olds did not want their future employers to see their profiles on social networking sites; only 40 per cent realised that their online activities could be traced indefinitely. Also security of the network such as identity theft is an issue before subscribing.

Blog Posting Number: 670

Tags: social network

Mindtrek 2007 (3)

Digital exhibitionism

Mindtrek has as theme: Back to the Future. As a start of the conference a concept video for a hypothetical product, called the Knowledge Navigator, was shown, which Apple Computer produced in 1987. Voice control was predominant in the video as well as an intelligent interface.

But the first presenter Teemu Kurppa did hardly go back in the future. He told about the company Jaiku; the name is a word combination between the Japanese poem form haiku and the Finnish word yukku?). I had not heard of the company yet, but I should have known as Tim O’Reilly said at the occasion of the launch of iPhone the memorable words: I love my iPhone, but bah, no Jaiku. So he was missing Jaiku badly; question is of course whether I would miss it.

I understood that Jaiku is a mobile social network. Or, as the founder of the Jaiku Jyri Engestrom, defines it as an object-oriented sociality. The service is about aggregating the personal textual, photographic and video activities and that of your friends on the web. Jaiku brings together streams of reactions and discussion and indicates locations, current calender data. The service entails web, chat, SMS/MMS, rich mobile content, mobile web and third party applications such as a gateway from and to a Blackberry.

Teemu Kurppa described the service as routing content such as text, photographs and videos or even better mobile story telling with shorter messages. Mobile is involving people in an event.

In the back of my mind a mental tickertape kept telling me Twitter, Twitter. Jaiku is a service like Twitter, but different. Twitter is more a social text service; Jaiku is a router and organiser of social events and mobile interaction.

Jaiku is a start-up which picked up see funding and has now 7 people working worldwide. It is basically burning venture capital money at present. A real business model is not present; it is important to grow as fast as possible internationally. Jaiku users can be found in the USA. There are presently 500 users online all the time with traffic of 20Mb per month.

I talked with some people of the Dutch delegation about the service. Would they use a service like that? What make people tick when they use such a service, which muy business partner Hans calls digital exhibitionism (but he is far over 35 years of age)? I can only see that I am not in the target group. Kids are messaging the whole day and telling what they do. I guess that they like to tell their peer group that they are still alive and kicking. But more companies have their angle in the pond: Yahoo groups, Hyves, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and now Jaiku. A lot of personal information can be gathered through these services. Some kids will be come quite unhappy about letting out personal information. Or they might just end up in a group which takes a direction they do not like. Recently I talked to a girl from Polish descent. She had joined the group I love Polish girls; the group tuned into a prostitutes’ bulletin board.

Blog Posting Number: 884

Tags: social network