Darling of the crowdfunders, Kickstarter released its stats for the past year, and there is a lot of data to digest. The total number of projects is more than double from last year, the success rates for funding them is up slightly, and the total dollars pledged is close to a $100 million, which is more than triple what was pledged last year. Overall, more projects were able to meet their funding goals last year than all projects that were launched in 2009. With coverage on NBC's "Rock Center" news magazine and five of their funded films playing last year at Sundance, clearly they have come into their own.
Facebook has cut a deal with political website Politico that allows the independent site machine-access to Facebook users' messages, both public and private, when a Republican Presidential candidate is mentioned by name. The data is being collected and analyzed for sentiment by Facebook's data team, then delivered to Politico to serve as the basis of data-driven political analysis and journalism.
The move is being widely condemned in the press as a violation of privacy but if Facebook would do this right, it could be a huge win for everyone. Facebook could be the biggest, most dynamic census of human opinion and interaction in history. Unfortunately, failure to talk prominently about privacy protections, failure to make this opt-in (or even opt out!) and the inclusion of private messages are all things that put at risk any remaining shreds of trust in Facebook that could have served as the foundation of a new era of social self-awareness.
Google launched a major new feature this week called Google Search Plus Your World and many people are incredibly upset about it. The feature presents search results from your contacts on Google's social network, Google+, and the things they've shared. It's clutter, critics say, it's unfair, it's a violation of a sacred contract between users and Google.
Be that as it may, the feature can also be pretty awesome. Below I've listed 5 examples of search queries that were fabulously improved by the availability of the new search results. What do they have in common? They surface timely and opinionated content, shared by people I know and trust. Search super-expert Danny Sullivan has shown with a long list of examples that some queries suffer at the hands of the new feature. I'd like to offer some counter-examples.
Previous research from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project has found that a fifth of US adults have made a charitable contribution online, and that 9% have done so using texting. But a new survey of 863 individuals who contributed money to the Haiti earthquake efforts using texting donations shows that this behaviour can be replicated, but only in other high-profile disasters such as the BP Gulf oil spill or the Japanese tsumani. Think of this as impuse charity, very much in the moment.
Many of us would love to be trained to have more social skills in everyday life, whether at work or at home. Or perhaps we wish other people we know would receive that kind of training. But is socializing online something that people need to be trained how to do? It might have sounded silly a few years ago, but social technology has now clearly become an important part of workplace activity and productivity.
Tech giant IBM believes that the socialization of business presents a big opportunity to train people to do it really well. The company announced this week a major new services initiative in social business. This kind of news makes me think it's time to put the whole question of whether engaging with social technology at all has a potential for meaningful ROI to bed.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone five years ago, it was a happy day for the Apple faithful. Less so for the folks at Palm, whose employer became a ticking time bomb. In one move, Apple leapfrogged its rivals in hardware and software and changed the mobile industry forever. And Palm -- a touch computing pioneer that lost its way -- was toast.
That's just one example of how quickly a company's fates can change in today's fast-moving tech industry. Every company -- even those as seemingly strong today as Apple and Google -- have clear risks and weaknesses. The iPad could drive Microsoft's decline. The government could smother Google's growth efforts. And a mobile player that doesn't even exist could be the one that takes down Facebook.
Harvard Business Review ran three interesting short pieces in this month's magazine, under the misleadingly timeless title "Tackling Business Problems." The three essays are actually guest submissions from business radicals, the final of the three being from social media luminary Doc Searls.
Traditional Customer Relationship Management is dead meat, Searls argues. Companies should stop collecting data about their customers. Right now, before the customers revolt! This populist vision of revolt is balanced out a little by Searls' vision of what's likely to come next. You can get the picture from the title of his forthcoming book, The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge. It seems crazy, but his view of what the future will bring with regard to customer data is fascinating to consider.
Comments on blogs, what are they good for? Sometimes it's hard to remember, but you know there's a lot of potential in taking the democratization of publishing to the next level and letting people comment on your blog-written comments on the world.
This evening a fresh spate of debate has rolled over the tech blogosphere about whether it's worth it to allow commenting on blog posts at all. Comment fields are spam magnets, their filled with trollish bile and abuse, they rarely offer meaningful discourse and they're more trouble than they're worth, critics say. Supporters contend otherwise, and as one of those, I offer below seven specific ways that new startups can optimize the discourse after a blog post has been published by its author. If these don't work, maybe nothing will, but I think they are only the beginning. Give me a great Letter to the Editor of an old fashioned magazine, written by a real expert in the field who's read and taken issue with a published article, and I'm in nerd heaven. Surely we can get some of that in the blogosphere. Comments are little tendrils of thought, structured and online. There's no way that's worthless.
If you need a lawyer and you can't afford one and live in Tennessee, you might want to take a gander over at this website started by the state's Supreme Court called JusticeForAllTN.org. "The court realizes that sometimes people cannot get help from a lawyer because they cannot afford one or they decide they want to represent themselves." That and some plain-English initiatives started by the court can go a long way towards reducing legal costs for many common activities such as divorce, mediation and parental rights.
Wait a minute. Plain English legal language? Started by a court? For free? Yes, this is for real. And the site is nicely designed and easy to use too. It is about time, and shall we say sets a new high bar for similar kinds of public information sites from their government.
Social media, types of media where everyday people can publish and subscribe to what one another publishes, have changed the world. At least in the United States, though, their rapid expansion through acquisition of new users may be over.
Facebook specialist Eric Eldon published a compilation of statistics from around the web this week on TechCrunch that pointed towards US and Canadian market saturation this past year for Facebook. Surely Facebook represents the forward line of all social media. Academic and tech industry analyst Vivek Wadhwa posted a set of predictions for 2012 in the Washington Post last night, starting with a prediction that the period of rapid growth for social media is over. In the future it will be a feature, not a product, he argues. To startups and investors, Wadha says "It's time to jump on the next bandwagon, folks."
