What Happens When Malcolm Gladwell And Clay Shirk Can’t Agree On Social Media?

Two of the smartest thinkers when it comes to media and business are Malcolm Gladwell and Clay Shirky

Gladwell is the best-selling business book author of, Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What The Dog Saw and Shirky penned the “must-own” book, Here Comes Everybody along with being both a world-class media academic, speaker and pundit. Both have some of the most progressive business perspectives that have been put forth in the past decade, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that those perspective are not always on the same page.

Watch this..

But this might not be the Tipping Point for Social Media…

On Sunday, April 4th, 2010 the Globe & Mail published an interview with Malcolm Gladwell titled, Malcolm Gladwell: The quiet Canadian. Gladwell isn’t big into Social Media as this article points out: “His blog posts are biannual, his Facebook page is a placeholder and he has never ventured on to Twitter.”

So, what gives? What’s Malcolm Gladwell’s gripe with Social Media?

“There’s only so much you can do in a day. And I don’t feel I lack for platforms for expressing myself. I have books, I write for the New Yorker. If I gave people any more, they’d get sick of me. I have a Blackberry, like any good Canadian. I’m from Waterloo – how can I not have a Blackberry? I’ll leave it in my bag for a while or I leave the office and go and work in a café. I’m right now working on something and I printed it off so I can work away from a computer for a while. There are just all kinds of little techniques one uses to restore alone time.”

Fair enough, it’s not relevant to Gladwell because he already has many popular publishing platforms to spread his ideas, but does Social Media work for others? Can Social Media help bring ideas to a tipping point?

“Do ideas spread through social media? I don’t think they are vehicles. People aren’t spreading ideas on Twitter, they’re spreading observations, perhaps. The point of Tipping Point is that I was very interested in face-to-face interpersonal reactions. If social media or online communication is the means to the creation of a personal connection, it’s a fabulous thing. But if it’s an excuse to not make a connection, it’s ultimately a trivial thing.”

…And they’re both right.

(from twistimage)

redux

Are you looking for stories? You normally use your list of blogs, youtube and so, and then you might share it in facebook or twitter, or maybe you are bombarded by funny emails on fridays with jokes and so.

If you are the kind of person who likes this friday’s emails, then redux can be a nice tool for you.

Redux is all about delivering personalized entertainment on the web, taps into users’ friends and people that share their interests.

Users just like you post links to entertainment that they like and it instantly appears in the Redux stream.

Sharing on Redux is easy: Explore the web, find something cool, paste the link.

Love cat videos, 80′s cartoons, short films, and hockey fights? They have the channels , created by users just like you.

Just join the channels you like and your specially mixed stream is ready to go. Sit back and enjoy or share your own awesome web finds. Can’t find a channel dedicated to failed American Idol auditions? Create your own and share your love.

Google wave the future. Buzz the present. Stupid?

As you saw in a couple of previous posts, google released his social tool called google buzz (not to be confused with yahoo’s one…).

I tried though it still does not work in google apps, and it is pretty good. It is sort of twitter with location and photos, in fact if you read me, you will see that in a way this is what I was looking for… well no.

Yes, it does have all the ingredients: location, you can follow people and in a way is like twitter on steroids (which is great), you can have it in your gmail, there is a cool mobile version too… but…

Well the but is the but I had with google wave. A lot of people can follow you but you need a google account. Like wave, where ended up being a very promising tool but from the moment that it is closed to google users (or wave users which is worse) then is meant to have a difficult future. With buzz the pool is bigger, as there are a lot of google users, but it is still not like email where you can send email across systems, or like twitter where you can just shout and everybody can see it, and follow you.

Did we need another social tool?

Most of us are happy with facebook and twitter. Twitter is limited as I said in the past (location, photos, etc…) but it is big.

Do you think buzz could be a twitter killer? Maybe…

We are starting to have a bit of fatigue on social tools. Recently I posted an article on location based apps, well I got several emails from little companies and I tried all their products. Some are good, but it will be difficult to beat foursquare which looks like is the most established.

For the time being I stick to facebook (for my friends), twitter (for the world), and brightkite to post in both (location and photos). For location foursquare and tellmewhere.

I keep trying buzz and latitude, that by the way, how do they live together? Looks like they don’t know each other…

By the way, google should work harder on integration. I would like to merge all my accounts under one profile and for the time being is not possible…

5 Insightful TED Talks on Social Media

As social media has become a game changer for industries across the board, you can bet the experts at this year’s TED conference will have their sights set on peeling back the hype and getting at the core of what social technology has in store for this year and beyond.

Perhaps the best part of the TED conferences is that videos of the talks are archived and free to view right on the organization’s website. Given the wealth of insight we’re sure to see tomorrow, we thought we’d whet your appetite by highlighting a few recent and exceptional talks from TED’s past, with a focus on social media.

1. Alexis Ohanian: How To Make a Splash in Social Media

We’ll start things off with a real-life social media parable about how the biggest and most effective forces on the web usually take shape by accident. Alexis Ohanian of Reddit.com tells the quick and hilarious story of how the social web provided some unexpected help to Greenpeace in halting the Japanese whaling industry. Internet marketers take note: The meme is all powerful, and it cannot be controlled.

2. Clay Shirky: How Social Media Can Make History

In this talk, consultant, professor and author Clay Shirky discusses the unprecedented immediacy of real-time citizen journalism made possible by social media and the nearly ubiquitous access to mobile web technologies. From the election crisis in Iran to the massive earthquake that shook China in May of 2008, Shirky discusses how media is made on the ground, as-it-happens, via the social web.

3. Evan Williams: Listening to Twitter Users

With a couple of anecdotes building the ultimate social media case study, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams discusses how a little side project called Twitter became a game-changing phenomenon with the help and input of the very users who made the service a success. From innovative marketing uses to core functionality, Williams provides the evidence for what we knew all along: Users know best.

4. Stefana Broadbent: How the Internet Enables Intimacy

As social media changes our social lives, speculation has abounded for years on how the web may be disconnecting us from intimate interactions in favor of meaningless quests to rack up followers and “friends.” Not so, says Stefana Broadbent, who explains that social networks function the same way online as they do in real life. While we may have lots of friends, we only really communicate regularly and meaningfully with a handful of them, and social technologies like e-mail, texting, and tweeting allow us to do so more often across time and space.

5. Seth Godin: The Tribes We Lead

From professional sports mascots to balloon animal makers, some communities are so extremely niche that they could only properly thrive on the Internet. So argues blogger and author Seth Godin, who believes that our revolutionary new connectedness has brought human culture back to its roots, and that tribes (groups of people mobilized around a shared interest) are the present and future of all web content.

(from mashable)

Google Could Unveil Gmail’s Social Features Today

Google could be launching later today a social status update feature in Gmail. The Wall Street Journal reports that it is a new Gmail module that could integrate status updates as well as content from YouTube, Picasa and potentially other social sources.

Google is organizing at its headquarters an event where they will “unveil some product innovations in two of [its] most popular products.”

The description fits very well with the WSJ report. Gmail is one of Google’s most popular products, and this new social status update feature would be a “product innovation” within Gmail.

pixelpipe: the best tool for social networking

Pixelpipe is a content distribution gateway that allows users to publish text, photo, video and audio files once through Pixelpipe and have the content distributed across over 75 social networks, photo/video sites and blogs, and online storage. They provide a number of mobile & desktop applications for users, liberating their content and sharing their life.

I just added the iPhone 3GS app and configured pipes to this blog, youtube (for videos), facebook (videos, photos and posts) and twitter.

This the THE tool.

Free Tool for Gov’t Agencies to Communicate Public Safety Alerts Online or Via SMS

(from readwriteweb)

A new SMS and email notification service is helping local government agencies reach citizens when and where it will do the most good: As soon as possible, and wherever that citizen happens to be.

Depending on whether agencies in a selected location are participating (currently, nearly 1,000 agencies have signed on since the company’s launch in March), users can sign up at the Nixle website to subscribe to emails, web alerts, and text messages about community issues from tornado watches and traffic accidents to local robberies and fugitives on the loose. Nixle moreover provides a painless way for local agencies to transition into modern times and notify community members of critical details in ways that will have an immediate impact.

“Any tool that helps us improve public safety is worth using,” Oklahoma County Sheriff John Whetsel is quoted as saying in a Nixle press release. “People rarely go anywhere these days without access to a cell phone or the Internet. With Nixle, we’re always able to relay important information, thereby improving the community’s quality of life.”

Users can add as many locations as they like to receive alerts for different areas; for example, I know of several female relatives who would be more than happy to know of police alerts in the various towns I travel to and worry/overreact accordingly.

Users can also choose which kinds of alerts to receive and what on medium they prefer to receive them.

Nixle claims to be the first authenticated, secure service for connecting municipal agencies and community organizations to residents in real time. It uses the Google Maps API to determine and display location and proximity. The company is privately funded and its services are free to all governments, government agencies and organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and end users.

As geographic location and proximity become more and more relevant to users and the wealth of information about locations increases, applications such as Nixle seem like the next logical step in law enforcement and public safety. It’s great that these alerts are available in real time; it would also be great to see a Brightkite-esque “check-in” process made available for users. For example, if I’m at a friend’s house and a store down the street is robbed, it would be great to have the information and know to stay safely inside for a little while.

Then again, real-time availability of information is just as useful as location-based information, particularly when issues of public safety are involved.

What do our readers think? Is a real-time, geo-specific alert system the future of law enforcement? Or is it creepy, Big Brother, Minority Report territory?

yoono

Simplify your online social life with a Firefox extension that will bring together all your social network and IM services in one place, from facebook, to twitter, google talk, yahoo, etc…

yoono

FriendFeed

I have previously talked about several alternatives to twitter. 
FriendFeed is again, more than twitter, and it is hitting really hard.

Personally I like brightkite with the great iphone apps, but friendfeed is growing very fast!
Give it a try. You can log in with your twitter account, but you can have videos, photos, etc… You should spend some time to discober its potential.

Petty that there is no iPhone app…