I’m surprised its taken Google so long to launch Realtime (social) search. Last year, their Updates feature was very cool, especially at monitoring hashtags. I don’t feel this new feature will replace proper sentiment monitoring tools such as Radian6 or Scoutlabs. But it’s certainly not a bad free tool. Now, I wonder what monitoring realtime goodness Microsoft will add to Bing?

Remember, be careful what you tweet. They are being archived for a very long time to come.

I first heard about David Kirkpatrick’s book during Robert Scoble’s interview of him at the 2010 F8 Facebook conference. Both Scoble and Kirkpatrick discussed how Facebook was evolving from a social networking platform to an identity platform. Facebook’s recent privacy issues, left me intrigued. Over the past eight months, I had found myself going to my Facebook profile less and less. Instead, I devoted my time in following interesting people on Twitter. So, learning more about Facebook’s plans during F8 and the interesting insights from Scoble and Kirkpatrick led me to purchase the book.

Amazon delivered it within a few short days and upon arrival, I immediately skimmed the Prologue. It became apparent early on, that Kirkpatrick was asked to write this book by Mark Zuckerberg, to pen an historical account on how Facebook started, Zuckerberg’s vision for Facebook and how his friends helped him to change the world by building an infectious social network.

The book itself consists of 17 chapters and is a very engaging read. The 333 pages are packed with some truly interesting insights, and I couldn’t help feeling in awe at the research time and commitment that Kirkpatrick put into this work. Hours of interviews with people in Zuckerberg’s inner circle are recalled and provide a great backdrop to the true story behind the world’s leading social network. Zuckerberg describes Facebook as “a social movement”, not as a publishing platform. He is motivated by a passion for radical transparency. Through the sharing of our data and making our lives publicly available, he believes it turns us into better people. Many people disagree and the recent controversy over privacy controls as only fuelled the fire on what Facebook is sharing about us.

Kirkpatrick has written the definitive book on the company so far. It left me with a deep under­standing of how the company thinks, its philosophies and it stunned me on its true power. Anyone who is interested in Facebook’s history will absolutely love this book, as will those who are interested in contemporary geek culture.

The Facebook Effect is a great weekend read, buy your copy of the book from Amazon here.

Last night, Facebook launched “Places”. You can see the announcement and launch video above. This new service from Facebook is similar to other Local Based Services (LBS) such as Foursquare and Gowalla, where you “Check in” at various locations and announce your presence.  Places allows you to see where your friends are and share your location in the real world. When you use Places, you’ll be able to see if any of your friends are currently checked in nearby and connect with them easily. You can check into nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit, and view comments your friends have made about the Places you visit.

Facebook is working with a small group of LBS developers including Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah to build Places check ins into their own services. However, Facebook is also launching its own Places API, which means that Facebook will eventually become the key platform on which other location based applications will be be built upon. This is huge for Facebook and no doubt worrying for Twitter and Google.

Places works in conjunction with geo location supported smartphones and allows you to:

• Check in and your Places update, which will appear on the Places page, your friends’ News Feed and your Wall.
• Tag the friends you’re with so they can be part of your update.
• Appear in "Here Now" to friends and others nearby who are also checked in.
• Browse status updates of friends checked in nearby.

[Updated] Facebook releases, “Why to Check In?” video

It will be interesting to see the uptake of businesses on this new feature. To help them, Facebook has released a short guide to help advertisers, you can read the guide below.

Places creates a presence for your business’s physical store locations- encouraging your customers to share that they’ve visited your business by “checking in” to your Place. When your customer checks into your Place, these check-in stories can generate powerful, organic impressions in friends’ News Feeds, extending your brand’s reach to new customers.

As of writing, the new service is not available outside of the US. However, a global rollout is expected over the coming months. Use Places on touch.facebook.com or the Facebook for iPhone.

NB. Places is currently available on phones that support W3 geolocation.

A fantastic presentation by Rohit on reinventing marketing. I have been a long term fan of his work for many years and I found this recent Tedx talk particularly inspiring. In this talk, he states why we are all in the business of marketing. In everyday life we try to influence others to do something, whether its trying to convince a spouse over what dinner choices to make. Or, trying to convince our kids to eat their vegetables.  However, over recent years marketing has experienced a bit of a bad reputation because “it will bend you to its will”.

Rohit continues to state that marketing suffers from what he calls “The Marketing Mirage”. Namely products have traditionally been marketed on the basis of:

• Features – People buy things because of features. Or, the belief that it solves a particular need.
• Promotions - If I give you something for free or discount it, you will buy it or more of it.
• Demographics - If I know my target audience, I can just purchase media to target my segment better and succeed.

Such models worked particularly well during the 1960s and 1970s, when consumers were “mass media consumers”.  However, consumers have changed and many marketing teams have evolved and become more complex (teams are spread throughout the world, some work together others work in silos). The consumer of today is different, they have full control, it’s become “a one button economy”. All the consumer has to do is publish his or her thoughts online, by a touch of a button and share them with the world quickly easily and cheaply than ever before.

For the first time, we have a huge shift where "virtual trust" now exists. In essence, I will trust the opinion of someone I don’t know, who no one in my network knows and I have no way of verifying whether they are real or not, or credible or not. But I will still trust them. If ten people all say that a digital camera is not good on Amazon I will believe that. Even if i don’t know who those ten people actually are. 

Rohit, ends the talk with a great quote:

When it comes to marketing and when it comes to reinventing marketing, it’s not about retelling the features and benefits and having something that somebody can connect to. What it’s about is having a story that you can tell and that someone else can take, make their own and retell.

Picture Credit @kiwanja

Recently I attended my favourite conference of the year – Thinking Digital (#TDC10). Sadly, I was unable to attend last year. However, getting back to Newcastle and the Sage this year was great. I left the conference with my brain a little bigger but also fried (in a good way!) #TDC10 had a great line up of speakers, and it was fantastic to catch up with messers – Steve Clayton, Marc Holmes, Paul Fabretti, Christian Payne and Benjamin Ellis. (Shame about Mark Johnson not being there, I missed him even if some others didn’t

There is a lot of good stuff in this post. So, I would advise grabbing a cup of coffee, or indulging in some fine wine (depending on the hour) that you are reading this.

P.S. If you are wondering what the Diamond Shreddies reference above is, read on to find out!

Christian Payne

Christian Payne aka @Documentally presented an excellent talk on how mobile technologies have evolved, by getting ever smaller but ever more powerful. His talk focused on his own personal experiences as a journalist and photographer.

Documentally, intersects a perfect Venn diagram of citizen journalist, professional photographer and audio/video podcaster. Learn more about his work at: http://ourmaninside.com

Christian showed the following video in his presentation, and discussed that soon after the video was broadcast over Twitter, he received many calls of help.

Julian Treasure

Julian Treasure is chairman of the The Sound Agency, a company that helps its clients achieve results through the better use of sound – in branding, communication, retail or public spaces, offices and product design. Julian’s talk was an amazing journey into everyday sounds that surround us. From the Nokia ringtone to The Simpsons theme music. Sound plays a very important part of our lives, and yet we take it for granted.

I loved this talk for a number of reasons, Julian’s passion for the subject is obvious. But also his tips on how we can improve our own vocal sounds was invaluable. He was very kind enough to answer my own question on which CDs make the best calming music. I’ve already ordered Bird Song from Amazon!

Here is Julian discussing why “Sound Matters”. Learn more about his work on the Sound Business blog, and if you are inspired, you can read his book too.

If you get the opportunity to see (and hear) Julian speak, you are in for a real treat! A quick taster of Julian’s talk can be seen at a recent Ted Talk below.

Rory Sutherland

Rory Sutherland is a Vice Chairman of the Ogilvy Group in the UK and presented one of the most entertaining talks of #TDC10. The Ted Talk below, captures the essence. The talk touched on many aspects of Behavioural Economics, if you are a big fan of this subject (as much as I am), you will love the great book recommendations by Rory – Obliquity by John Kay and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Rory’s Ted Talk, which covered many of his points at #TDC10 can be seen below.

Now, on to the Diamond Shreddies picture at the start of this post. Watch the video below to discover the context.

Yes, there is even a website: http://www.diamondshreddies.ca

Andy Hobsbawm

Andy is the co-founder of Green Thing (Dothegreenthing.com). Green Thing is a public service that inspires people to lead a greener life. With the help of brilliant videos and inspiring stories from creative people, Green Thing focuses on seven things you can do – and enjoy doing. A flavour of Andy’s #TDC10 talk can be seen below.

Here are some of the videos that Andy showed during his talk.

Mary Anne de Lares Norris

Mary described spatial interfaces and presented the Oblong video below. The g-speak technologies presented here, inspired some of the UI scenes in the film, Minority Report. Mary described the process as “Emancipating Pixels”. I have included some footage from the film as a comparison. I think you will agree this is very cool.

Jer Thorp

Jer is a data visualiser, responsible for creating some of the infographics, (generally known as “infoporn”) sections for Wired magazine. He focused on data mining and using the open source Processing software to create  some amazing data visualisations. He describes his work between a cross section of Art, Science and Design and this is certainly is true.

Jer’s work is inspired by the work of Mark Lombardi, take a look at some of his amazing data visualised presentations here. Also, I recommend downloading and installing “Processing”.

In the video below, he extracted tweets from where people were coming from and going to as defined by their Twitter updates. If you like this video, check out the many others on Jer’s Vimeo site.

Ralf Herbrich

 Ralf Herbrich of Microsoft’s FUSE (Future Social Experience) Labs unveiled a new web application called “Project Emporia”. The app indexes tweets and provides a number of “lenses” which with to interrogate Twitter’s fire hose data (unfiltered tweets).

The goal of Project Emporia is to give the user a personalised search experience over the Twitter fire hose. The lenses allow you to discover “filtered and more relevant data”.

The project is certainly interesting and currently in alpha. I’m keeping a close eye on this one, as it has enormous potential as a Twitter “filtering mechanism”. Another great job from the Microsoft team.

Test drive Project Emporia today.

So there you have it, another Thinking Digital has come to an end. The quality of the speakers gets better each year and already is has become one of my favourite conferences in the UK. From the tweet pie chart above, you can see I wasn’t too far behind the other tweeters at the conference. Incidentally, if you missed the event and are looking for an archived selection of the tweets over the two days. You can find them here and here on my Windows SkyDrive.

Thank you Herb and team and see you again next year!

Wonderful to see that Erik Qualman has refreshed his Social Media Revolution video. I only wish he had used a difference accompanying soundtrack this time. Fat Boy Slim, so 2008?

Key stats from the video follow below:

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30-years-old
2. 96% of them have joined a social network
3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
6. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…
7. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
8. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
9. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we DO it.”
10. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest ahead of the United States and only behind China and India
11. Yet, QQ and Renren dominate China
12. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
13. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment; % of these using LinkedIn 95%
14. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
15. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  populations of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
16. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
17. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé – some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
18. Instead they are distributing: eReaders + iPads + Tablets
19. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
20. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
21. While you watch this 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
22. Wikipedia has over 15 million articles…studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
23. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
24. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
25. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
26. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
27. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
28. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better.
29. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
30. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
31. Only 14% trust advertisements
32. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
33. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
34. Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas
35. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation
36. 60 millions status updates happen on Facebook daily
37. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
38. We will non longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media
39. Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate
40. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men Listening first, selling second
41. The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years
42. Bonus: comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

A fascinating web documentary describing what the Semantic Web may hold for all of us. Are you ready to put your data on the web yet?

Interviews with  Tim Berners-Lee, Clay Shirky, Chris Dixon, David Weinberger, Nova Spivack, Jason Shellen, Lee Feigenbaum, John Hebeler, Alon Halevy, David Karger and Abraham Bernstein

“Because I didn’t write the book you expected, I thought I’d present you with this book. This book is all about social media”.

These are some of the opening lines from Chris Brogan’s new book entitled “Social Media 101”. If you have already read his last book Trust Agents, you will already be familiar with Brogan’s style – people who put a human face to organisations through the use of social tools.

If you have been reading Brogan’s blog or at least following him on Twitter, many of themes in the book will already be familiar to you. In fact, the book is a collection of 87 of his finest blog posts (edited and updated) and neatly bound into a small book. But don’t that put you off! Brogan adds his own real life experiences to each chapter, and as you become absorbed through the pages, you will gain some excellent insights from his career. Also, make sure you have a notepad and pen handy, because you will end up making a lot of notes. There are also a great number of footnotes in the book too, so plan some time to investigate the resources and links, as these will help you to assemble your very own social media master class.

There are two different types of reading styles for this book. You can either sit down and read the entire book from page to page. Or, you can treat the book as a reference guide, and pick out the chapters that sound the most appealing to you. This is certainly a book to have close by, when you are devising your own social or community strategy. Or, for those moments, when you wonder , “What Would Chris Brogan Do?”.

Social Media 101 may be a little book in size, but it is certainly big on ideas. “Social media lets you go wide, but YOU have to make it go deep” Brogan says. This is certainly true and the book takes the reader beyond “branded social sites” such as Facebook and Twitter. It opens the reader’s mind to explore a wide variety of rich media technologies such as audio, video, media hosting, blogs, listening tools, document sharing and collaboration sites to name but a few. These can all help as effective lead-generation tools. Most of the chapters are full of useful hints and tips such as 50 ways, 50 steps 100 tactics etc.

While I did receive a review copy, courtesy of the great team at @Wiley Books, it’s a book that I would have bought regardless. Frankly, I enjoyed the book because I am not going to read 80+ blog posts on a computer. I spend far too much time in front of an LCD screen anyway! Brogan carefully selected his best posts, added great references and produced a little book easily worth its weight in gold. While you can get most of the content for free, Social Media 101 is money well spent.

With thanks to Julia Lampam at Wiley books for the review copy.

Buy Chris Brogan’s Social Media 101 from Amazon here.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Gordon Brown outlined a series of initiatives for Britain’s digital future.

These initiatives can be summarised as:

• The creation of a web portal called MyGov, that will allow individuals to personalise their experience to public services.
• £30m worth of funding to create an “Institute of Web Science”, which will focus on the economic and social benefits of the web.
• The publication of an online inventory of all non-personal datasets held by departments, creating a modern day "Domesday book".   
• All public service contracts over £20,000 will be made available on a free online portal by the end of 2010. Thus allowing any suitable business to bid for them.
• Roll out broadband access to all, with digital champion Martha Lane Fox broadening her role to set up a Digital Public Services Unit in the Cabinet Office

Quoting Brown

I want Britain to be the world leader in the digital economy which will create over a quarter of a million skilled jobs by 2020; the world leader in public service delivery where we can give the greatest possible voice and choice to citizens, parents patients and consumers; and the world leader in the new politics where that voice for feedback and deliberative decisions can transform the way we make local and national policies and decisions.

Underpinning the digital transformation that we are likely to see over the coming decade is the creation of the next generation of the web – what is called the semantic web, or the web of linked data”.

Now, whilst I applaud the Government’s efforts in each of the areas above. I do have serious concerns about our IT future in 2020.  For Britain to be a true world leader in the digital economy, the Government must invest in universities for tomorrow’s IT graduates. Funding cut backs are already causing big problems and the disruption is only going to get worse.

Yesterday morning, I was alarmed to read Dr Black’s tweet on the lack of support for Computer Science courses. The link she provides leads to a report on the decline in computing graduates. (Read the full report below).

The report states:

The UK is currently sitting on a ticking time-bomb – all of the evidence shows a significant and increasing gap between supply and demand for IT professionals in the critical IT sector of the UK economy which, if left unchecked, will severely damage the competitiveness of UK industry in the global marketplace, and will hit smaller employers and the public sector particularly hard”.

The recession has caused many jobs within the IT sector to evaporate. This, coupled with the proposed closure of many computer science departments, is only going to make a bleak IT future for Britain. We need the best and brightest computer scientists to help deliver the wealth of opportunities that will appear on tomorrow’s digital landscape. Without a dedicated and passionate IT workforce, we risk a “brain drain”.

I completed my Information Systems degree in 1998. My course was more than than “a short journey into IT”. It has proved to be a true life skill. I’ve been lucky to work with a number of global businesses, in a continued cycle of learning and delivering value. My IS degree gave me the passion for that. Working alongside talented IT colleagues gave me inspiration to work harder, and to provide simplified business solutions.

Making sense of technology, and sharing that with the world is a wonderful and enriching feeling. IT graduates push the technology envelope further each day. Not only in the worlds of coding and architecture. But many, in the worlds of business, engineering and even geek marketing (Just like me!). IT graduates don’t think in black and white, they dream in colour.

Dear Gordon Brown,

Please don’t forget that Britain needs thousands of IT graduates for 2010. To provide them in sufficient numbers, computer science departments need adequate funding. Don’t allow them to close. Overseas expertise will eventually costs us dearly. 

Here’s a worrying paper, with a specific list of recommendations for you to consider.

The Decline in Computing Graduates: A Threat to the Knowledge Economy and Global Competitiveness