Because it sounds good, I occasionally like to warn audiences to whom I’m speaking that “email may be the fax machine of my generation”. By which I mean that, in 20 years, we’ll all be looking back and laughing at the goofy “electronic mail” with the “at sign” and “attachments”. There’s evidence that today’s teenagers use email less, or at least differently, than older age groups. They’re using instant messaging systems, texting and channels like Facebook to communicate.
Yesterday, on the aforementioned Book of Face, somebody I know wrote the following in a conversation thread:
I usually respond ‘yes’ to any event I am invited to on FB regardless if I’m actually going or not.
When I asked her why she did this, she wrote:
Well I figure people don’t really care either way. And it’s nice to say ‘yes’ always nice to be invited. So far no one has even noticed that I do this. Sometimes it’s because a ridiculous invite (environmental event in Toronto) deserves a ridiculous response. But really the bottom line is that people don’t care about FB event invites.
This raised an obvious question for me: how seriously do people take Facebook event invitations? Where do they rate compared to an email, an invite by text message or an Evite message?
I struggled to devise a poll that asked the right thing. This poll assumes that an email invitation is weightier than an Evite, and both are more serious than a text message.
I’m particularly interested in hearing from people, say, under the age of 25. How seriously do you take Facebook event invitations?
I’ve had a few days to kick the tires on Google+ (pronounced ‘Google Plus’), Google’s shot across the bow of Facebook and, to a lesser degree, Twitter. It’s a nascent social network built around the concept of ‘circles’, where you group friends and acquaintances into clusters so that your online social interactions are more distinguishable than in other tools.
Google hasn’t had a great track record in software products in recent years. Sure, Chrome has been a massive success, but Knol, Wave and Buzz all failed to cross that trough of disillusionment after a flurry of early excitement.
Will Google+ make that leap? It faces the tremendous inertia of Facebook, whose more 600 million have invested serious time and effort in their profiles. That feels like a nearly insurmountable obstacle.
That said, let’s look at some of the possible reasons why they might:
Users get bored with tools and platforms. We saw it happen when Facebook eclipsed MySpace, and when Gmail eclipsed Hotmail.
I haven’t tried it yet, but maybe there’s a sweet spot for Google+ Hangouts, group video chat sessions. On the other hand, there are rumours afoot of a Facebook partnership with Skype which might quash this competitive advantage.
Users might start seriously caring about privacy, and they trust Google more than they trust Facebook.
Google+ is being integrated into all of Google’s products. If you’ve got a Google Account–for Gmail, Google Reader, Docs and so forth–then you’ll see the ‘Sandbar’, the black bar at the top of our Google apps. Much like Facebook, there’s a red notification number on this bar that will constantly be reminding you of Google+ activity. Google has an enormous existing user base, and they’re not going anywhere, so this ever-present hook into the user may be the difference-maker.
Of those four, I think only the last reason has serious merit. Why do you think Google+ could win?
The other day I received an invitation to my 20-year high school reunion.
Man, I am old.
The reunion is, of course, being put together on Facebook. The organizers have created a ‘Grad 91′ group, spread the word and in a couple of days, 68 people have joined. My grad class was about 150, so that’s just under half.
In 2001, I went to my 10-year reunion, and had a good time. It was pretty fascinating to see how my high school classmates–very few of whom I’d kept up with–were progressing in their lives.
Of course, 2001 was a pre-Facebook world (Facemash was still two years away). Aside from rumours and trash talk I’d heard from the few classmates to whom I regularly talked, I knew very little about my classmates.
In 2011, I can just cruise around Facebook (I use ‘cruise’ in the ‘drive around’ sense, not the ‘pick up’, gay culture sense) and learn all about my classmates. Who got fat? Who got thin? Who has a brood of children? Who’s just plain brooding?
That takes a lot of the delight and surprise out of the actual event, doesn’t it? When you meet your high school crush, it’s not “wow, you look great, how was your decade?” Now it’s “I’m glad you got that mole looked at” and “I love the colours you chose to paint your garden shed”.
But then that familiarity might lead to deeper conversations about things that matter at this, the (hopefully) halfway point of our lives.
What do you think? Has Facebook wrecked or improved reunions?
End note: Dunbar’s number
On a vaguely related note, I was interested to learn that Julie’s high school class had never, to her knowledge had a high school reunion. She graduated from a big high school, with more than a thousand people in her grad class. As I mentioned, mine was 150, which reminded me of Dunbar’s number. When I graduated, I knew the name and face of every student in my class, so that probably makes us more inclined to reconnect later in life.
One of my favourite sub-reddits is Today I Learned, where people post facts they, well, learned today. I’ve posted quite frequently to Today I Learned, and I thought I’d share some of the random trivia with you.
Here’s the top ten list, sorted by the most votes the items garnered on reddit. You may also want to read more about these facts, and the reddit comments for them. Click the items on this page to do so.
Today you may have learned that ‘TIL’ is reddit shorthand for ‘today I learned’.
TIL that Americans do not have to answer questions from federal authorities when re-entering the US.
TIL ‘snuck’ is relatively recent Americanism. Other English speakers, and many style guides, prefer ‘sneaked’. When I heard this, I fruck out.
TIL that President Theodore Roosevelt radically changed American football by, among other rule changes, introducing the forward pass.
TIL in 1974, a news anchor shot herself on-air during a morning talk-show.
TIL the Golden Globes are picked by less than 100 people in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, few of whom are credible journalists.
TIL there are writers who write anecdotes for guests on late night talk shows.
TIL Chuck Lorre, creator of the execrable “Two and a Half Men” and “The Big Bang Theory”, also co-wrote the theme music to TV’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”.
TIL that 25 minutes–long considered lost–of Fritz Lang’s seminal “Metropolis” were found in a film museum in Buenos Aires in 2008.
TIL that the Dutch government provides “No Junk Mail Please” stickers for its citizens.
TIL American coins are not ferromagnetic. This was inspired by personal experience.
Of those ten, the one that I was most surprised about was, embarrassingly, the one about anecdotes for late night talk shows.
A couple of others that didn’t garner many votes but were surprising to me:
TIL only 10-15% of pregnant womens’ waters break as the onset of labour.
TIL a good number of Hemingway’s early stories were stolen from a French train station in 1922. They’ve never been recovered.
TIL that Mr. Bigglesworth, the hairless cat in the Austin Powers movies, is a rare breed that originated in an alley in a Toronto suburb.
TIL a traditional New Year’s meal kills several elderly people each year in Japan.
About 18 months ago, I did a pretty unscientific analysis on Mashable regarding the clickthrough rate for Twitter accounts. That is, when you share a link on Twitter, how many of your followers click it?
I arrived at a clickthrough rate (CTR) of 1.7%. Looking at a couple of othersources, that seems quite accurate. It’s safe, I think, to estimate a CTR of 1% to 2% for Twitter for a small to medium Twitter account (say, up to 10,000 followers).
It’s worth considering Anil Dash’s great analysis of being on the famed (and now deprecated, I think) Suggested Users list. As he notes, he acquired hundreds of thousands of new followers, but “being on Twitter’s suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get.”
As with all forms of marketing, quality of audience matters far more than quantity.
That’s all a bit of a long introduction to this observation, which reminded me of a phenomenon on Twitter and other corners of the social web.
Earlier this week, I had a (quite unremarkable) tweet retweeted a lot. Here it is:
As you can see from this Bit.ly page for the shortened link, it was clicked 3872 times. I’d never actually checked out the top referrers for this page–that is, where people were when they actually clicked the link:
As a second data point, here’s a recent tweeted link that was clicked about a thousand times.
So, that means that 52% of the clicks came from that first big category, and 38% of traffic comes from the Twitter site. It’s too bad that Bit.ly can’t further unravel that first category, eh? How much comes from HootSuite, how much from SMS, how much from chat and so forth. As you can see, most people access Twitter without visiting Twitter.com.
In our workshops and talks I give, I often have to explain to people that they should think of Twitter and Facebook as services or utilities, as opposed to websites. As we can see here, Twitter is water that flows from a lot of different taps, not just from Twitter.com.
In 2007, famed web cartoonist Randall Munroe drew this great map of online communities. Today, he released a wonderful new version of the map. He’s worked hard, apparently, to build the map to scale. Hence the huge landmass that Facebook covers. I also like how he’s clustered a lot of the foreign social networks into a kind of Southeast Asia in the western quadrant of the map.
Incidentally, if you got a message from me in the last half-hour or so that looks like this, don’t click any of the links. I received this from a known Facebook friend, but clearly I should have worked a little harder to parse the title.
I think was just on autopilot. Bastard spammers. Eternal vigilance, and all that:
I subsequently received another similar message from another successfully-phished friend, though this one was for the even stranger sounding “Home Income Time”. Dear me.
The other day, somebody sent me a link to fflick (myself, I’d have capitalized the first ‘f’). It’s a site which (I assume) uses language analysis to aggregate movie reviews off of Twitter. They present this data as a rating out of 100 for any movie, and enable you to just check out reviews by your Twitter friends.
I wondered how accurate these ratings were. And, of course, I saw a chance to make a chart.
I compared the fflick ratings from the top ten box office films this week to those of another crowd-sourced site, IMDB, as well as two professional review aggregation sites, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s what I came up with–apologies for the goofy X-axis labeling. As usual, cliquer pour agrandir l’image:
I know that’s a pretty small data set, but it’s a start. It’s actually interesting how close the four data sets are. I’d guess that the disparity in Charlie St. Cloud can be explained by two factors: uncritical teenage lust for Zac Efron, and the movie’s newness. It’s also not surprising that the critics are generally less enthusiastic about a movie than the general public. Still, fflick seems to do a pretty decent job of distilling Twitter’s cinematic zeitgeist.
This language analysis is a very deep vein in social media channels like Twitter. Marketers, researchers and hackers across the globe will be keen to explore what people love and hate, whether it’s movies, music or recliners.
