Social Networks

Gizmodo on Yahoo's long and lingering strangulation of Flickr, as a case study of what happens when you get Bought by a Behemoth - from:

three years ago, of course Flickr was the best photo sharing service in the world. Nothing else could touch it. If you cared about digital photography, or wanted to share photos with friends, you were on Flickr.

To...

The site that once had the best social tools, the most vibrant userbase, and toppest-notch storage is rapidly passing into the irrelevance of abandonment. Its once bustling community now feels like an exurban neighborhood rocked by a housing crisis. Yards gone to seed. Rusting bikes in the front yard. Tattered flags. At address, after address, after address, no one is home.

How? I found this quite interesting as I've done this role from both sides. Gizmodo argues there were 3 main mechanisms:

Firstly - the Incoming Conditions set the scene

When a big company gobbles up a smaller one, often only a fraction of the money is handed over up front. The rest comes later, based on the acquisition hitting a series of deliverables down the road. It's similar to how incentives are built into the contracts of professional athletes, except with engineering benchmarks instead of home runs. Corp dev sets these milestones. They reflect the reason for the acquisition, and how the company—in Flickr's case, Yahoo—can leverage them.

Secondly, Integration takes precedence over new features

An acquisition integration team begins working immediately to make sure they are met. Typically, they're very engineering-based, designed to integrate the smaller company's product into the enormous corporate machine. And because payment schedules are based on achieving those CorpDev terms, it means both companies have a vested (pun intended) interest in putting those milestones ahead of new features.

Thirdly, Big Companies don't feed the small growing businesses - its not in their DNA

"The money goes to the cash cows, not the cash calf," explains one former Flickr team member. If Flickr couldn't make bucks, it wouldn't get bucks (or talent, or resources)

Gizmodo argues that as a result of being resource-starved, "Flickr missed boats - on local, on real time, on mobile, and even ultimately on social—the field it pioneered. And so, it never became the Flickr of video; YouTube snagged that ring. It never became the Flickr of people, which was of course Facebook. It remained the Flickr of photos. At least, until Instagram came along. The Flickr team was forced to focus on integration, not innovation".

Same Old Same Old Tale. Google and Jaiku (remember that - Twitter's competitor once), Facebook and Instagram?

And yet, and yet. I knew some of the Corp Dev people, at Yahoo at that time, I'd even worked with a few before - they knew their stuff, they knew how to structure deals that didn't strangle the growth businesses they bought. And strategically the company was on board big time - as the article admits, in 2005 Yahoo made a number of innovative acquisitions, not just Flickr:

It's hard to remember, but back in 2005, Yahoo seemed like it had its game on. After losing out on search dominance to Google, it snapped up a bunch of small-but-cool socially oriented companies like Flickr (social photos), Delicious (social bookmarking), and Upcoming (social calendaring). There was a real sense that Yahoo was doing the right thing. It was, to some extent, out in front of what would come to be widely known as Web 2.0: the participatory Internet.

And looking back at Flickr stories on Broadstuff at the time, Flickr was patenting "Interestingness" algorithms in 2006, and soon after it limited the number of friends one could have, and tags per picture. These did not go down well at the time, we reported, so blaming errors on Yahoo Management only may be a bit simplistic.

Anyway the article then argues that Flickr failed in two ways:

Firstly, they didn't understand Community:

"By the time we were looking at Flickr, Yahoo was getting the shit kicked out of it by Google. The race was on to find other areas of search where we could build a commanding lead," says one high ranking Yahoo executive familiar with the deal. Flickr offered a way to do that. Because Flickr photos were tagged and labeled and categorized so efficiently by users, they were highly searchable.

"That is the reason we bought Flickr—not the community. We didn't give a shit about that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users."

I don't fully believe that fully, I saw some of the business cases soon after purchase, and spoke to some of the people. The Yahoo guys in Corp Dev understood all about Community. I am prepared to believe that - as in any large Corp - that not everyone else did. The question is how influential were they - bear in mind at the time Yahoo had the biggest existing "Web 1.0" social network, Yahoo Groups.

The other problem, says Gizmodo, was when Yahoo moved Flickr to a single sign on - the idea was that signing onto Yahoo got access to all Yahoo's services plus all the other new sites thay had bought, and levearged Yahoos existing multi country sign on acpability, something that Flicktr would otherwise have had to build. But this upset the Flickr uber-users:

Although Flickr grew tremendously with the huge influx of Yahoo users, the existing community of highly influential early adopters was infuriated. It was an inelegant transition, and seemed to ignore what the community wanted (namely, a way to log in without having to sign up for a Yahoo account). This was the opposite of what people had come to expect from Flickr. It was anti-social. And it very much delivered a message, to both users and to the team at Flickr: You're part of Yahoo now.

So - simplify the product experience, integrate it with many other services, massively increase the user base - a Good Result, surely? No, this is Not a Success because you have pissed off your small cadre of original users.

But in reality, all products have to go through that phase when they cross their Chasms (remember Digg?). I know it could have been done more sensitively (and was done in fact for other Yahoo acquistions), but I think the real problem is noted further down in the article - Social 1.0 got blindsided by Social 2.0

By mid-2008, a year after the RegID debacle, it was clear to most everyone that Facebook was the big up-and-coming social network. What had been a plaything for college kids and high schoolers was suddenly the network your mom, your dad, your gym coach, and everyone else you'd ever met was sending you friend requests from. Microsoft was pumping money into it, and it was fast approaching 100 million users.

Inside Yahoo, which itself had a massive user base and multiple social products, some were already warning that it was going to be bypassed in social just as it had been bypassed in search.

Now, remember Yahoo tried to buy Facebook at about this time, so again its clear they knew how the land lay. They knew what was coming. But the Flickr community (and staff) were 1.0 hippies, and as Flickr had it had already had its Liquidity Event, it was no longer the place to go for the hottest talent:

"Flickr wasn't a startup anymore," explains [a Yahoo] engineer, "people didn't really want to work that hard to turn the entire product around. Even if they had, Flickr [was] very techie hipster, many didn't use or like Facebook and considered it bland, boring, evil, poorly designed, etc., and were certainly not ready to fast follow it. Emphasis was put more on how things looked, and felt, rather than on metrics and on what worked.

But what finally killed their market leadership was not following the Great Mobile switch:

"Flickr was not empowered to build its own iOS app—or any other mobile app for that matter," laments one former Flickr executive. "You had this external team with strong opinions as to what the app should do."

And so, after a bit more score settling in the article, Gizmodo concludes:

Flickr's mobile and social failures are ultimately both symptoms of the same problem: a big company trying to reinvent itself by gobbling up smaller ones, and then wasting what it has. The story of Flickr is not that dissimilar to the story of Google's buyout of Dodgeball, or Aol's purchase of Brizzly. Beloved Internet services with dedicated communities, dashed upon the rocks of unwieldy companies overrun with vice presidents.

As a result, Flickr today is a very different site than it was five years ago. It's an Internet backwater. It's not socially appealing

I don't buy this, in this case I think its uber user grumps distorting the reality-field. I reckon there was actually a different story going on:

1. In 2005 Yahoo knew what Social was all about, and went out of their way to buy leading "Web 2.0 v.1" companies.

2. They tried to integrate all their assets to simplify the UE and impact. It worked, but pissed off the early power users, and that whinging tends to cloud the issue and generates a lot of "Evil Yahoo" negative press even today.

3. The reality is that Flickr was a Web 2.0 v1 creation and got outmanouvred by the v 2.0 startups built on their shoulders, in the darwinian stew of any developing technology. Yahoo actually could see this judging by their actions.

4. Most of the v 1.0 companies haven't made it through the cut, not just Flickr (in fact thay have done a darn sight better than most - or even all!) so it is arguable they would not have made the cut if they were still independent. And virtually no pre-smartphone dotcom/web 2.0/m-commerce business has survived the New Mobile 2.0 game. Just ask Nokia. It was hit with a classic generational shift in developing technologies, like the move from propellor to jet in aircraft.

5. Yahoo by then had far bigger problems, meaning management turmoil at the highest level, which - I know from my own experience - means decisions don't get made and Things Grind To a Halt (the Peanut Butter conspiracy).

6. Yet, despite all this, Flickr is still going strong, rumours of its death are somewhat exaggerrated. Its just no longer the 95% giant in a tiny grovy market, its just a major player in a far huger mass market.

A comeback doesn't seem likely, says Gizmodo, unless its spun out.

Flickr is still very valuable. It has a massive database of geotagged, Creative Commons- and Getty-licensed, subject-tagged photos. But sadly, Yahoo's steady march of incompetence doesn't bode well for making use of these valuable properties. If the Internet really were a series of tubes, Yahoo would be the leaking sewage pipe, covering everything it comes in contact with in watered-down shit.

Flickr's last best hope is that Yahoo realizes its value and decides to spin it off for a few bucks before both drop down into a final death spiral. But even if that happens, Flickr has a long road ahead of it to relevance. People don't tend to come back to homes they've already abandoned.

Now I really don't buy this one. Facebook's IPO is going to create a Social Frenzy, and anyone with the assets Flickr has, is going to be valued pretty highly. Perish the thought that those who want Yahoo to sell it off for "a few bucks" know it full well too, and want to do a Del.icio.us flip-play

This Olympic's logo was an object lesson is paying vaunted professionals a lot of money for a very mediocre product, and the UK olympic strip is coming up much the same - it seems to have left out the red in the Irish, Welsh and English colours. (It is mainly blue, leading wags to point out its the only way Scotland will ever be seen to win anything. Well,the designer was called McCartney....)

Which could be bad news for the UK, because it appears that teams that wear red win more games than ones that don't - Economist:

Russell Hill and Robert Barton, two scientists from the University of Durham, who have researched the effect that wearing a particular colour can have on an athlete’s results. In a paper written in 2005, Mr Hill and Mr Barton argued that competitors garbed predominantly in red do better than rivals in other colours. After the British outfit was revealed to the general public, Mr Barton was quoted in Britain’s Guardian newspaper saying that Stella McCartney, the designer, had made a mistake in using too much blue.

In their 2005 paper, Mr Hill and Mr Barton studied four combat sports (boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling and freestyle wrestling) that featured in the 2004 Olympic Games, for which contestants were randomly assigned red or blue outfits. After stripping out the effects of asymmetry, when one fighter was deemed superior to his opponent, the scientists found that contestants wearing red won significantly more fights than those in blue. If colour has no influence on the outcome of contests, reds should have won a similar number of fights to blues.

The research also looked to a lesser extent at the Euro 2004 football tournament, in which teams participated in national colours unless these conflicted with those of their opponents. Mr Hill and Mr Barton examined five teams that each used two kits throughout the competition—one red and one either white or blue—and found that all five had better results when they played in red. Although a less rigorous part of the overall analysis, this suggests the advantages conferred by red are not confined to combat sports.

And why is this - some hints from another piece of research:

In 2009, a team of German scientists working at the University of Munster found that combat sportsmen were more likely to win dressed in red than blue because of the effect on judges. During their experiment, referees watched clips of fights in which contestants’ outfits could be digitally manipulated. When shown in red, the same fighters scored better than when clothed in blue.

As the Economist points out, this stuff should be fairly well known in sporting circles so it is a missed opportunity for the UK. But thre is something depressing about the inevitability of "designers" putting form over function.

If the British do not bag a lot of medals there will be some very angry Londoners, as it wil be adding insult to the various injuries done already from wildly underestimated budgets, shutting off the transport system to commuters and more (and don't mention the limited ticketing to citizens).

And next time round, how about crowdsourcing the designs (and a lot more in fact) - costs less, involves the nation, and you will very likely also get better designs. Coming to think of it, why not this time round, its not too late to change the strip.

As with Ads and popup killers, now comes the social network privacyscrape killer - TechCrunch:

In the age of endless sharing, super cookies, social search results, and that ever-present social graph, it’s comforting to know that there are some who are still prioritizing privacy. (And a few of them are former Googlers no less!) In October 2010, Google engineer Brian Kennish created Facebook Disconnect, a Chrome extension that disables all traffic from third-party sites to Facebook servers but still allows you to access Facebook itself. The extension was an immediate hit, racking up 50K active users in two weeks (it now has 200K+), prompting Kennish to leave his job at Google to focus full-time on helping the average web user take back control of their data.

Shortly thereafter the former Google engineer launched Disconnect, applying the same method behind Facebook Disconnect to other major third-party sites, like Digg, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo, enabling you to disable data tracking while you browse.

Now collectively attracting over 400K weekly active users, Kennish tells us his privacy-protection tools ended up being much more popular than he ever expected. As a result, he decided to turn the side project into a real company, co-founding Disconnect with another ex-Google engineer, Austin Chau and consumer rights advocate Casey Oppenheim.

Doing well by doing good - it's fascinating that the company has ex Googlers and Facebookers in it. These are the sort of tools that every self respecting self-hacker should have. They have a simple "Mission Statement" too:

Personal data should belong to people, not corporations.

What is most interesting is the takeup rate - the pundits tell us Privacy is So Ovah, but the people seem to be behaving very differently. (I always thought those pundits were drunk on Kool Aid, but nice to see the evidence).

There is also something marvellous about disrupting the Big Data-mining business models of "disruptive" companies

Props to @Janetparkinson for the link

There is some interesting detail in the latest Pew Research on the impact of Social Media on News - firstly, its only 9% of all people who get news this way - El Reg:

News websites are still the place most people visit to get their daily digest of current affairs. The PRC described Facebook and Twitter as being "pathways to news" but added that their role had been somewhat over-hyped. "The population that uses these networks for news at all is still relatively small, especially the part that does so very often," researchers said.

"Moreover, these social media news consumers have not given up other methods of getting news, such [as] going directly to websites, using apps or through search. In other words, social media are additional paths to news, not replacements for more traditional ones."

The study shows 9 per cent of people clicked on news links recommended by social networks "very often", compared with 36 per cent who go directly to a news website for stories, 32 per cent of current affairs fans, while 29 per cent of Americans used an aggregator or app to access the same information.

More interesting to me, the same survey noted that Twitter and Facebook were perceived differently by their respective users.

"Facebook news users get more news from friends and family and see it as news they might well have gotten someplace else if Facebook did not exist," the PRC said. "For Twitter users, though, the news links come from a more even mix of family and friends and news organisations. Most of these users also feel that without Twitter, they would have missed this kind of news."

The stats show that 70% of Facebook users get news from friend and family, 13% from News organisations, 10% from "Other". This is 36%, 27% and 18% for Twitter.

Facebook has the larger user base - the populations do overlap, with Facebook as the leading platform. 82% of those who ever get some news via Twitter recommendations also get some news via Facebook recommendations, and 40% so do very often or somewhat often. Facebook users are much less likely to be on Twitter than the other way around. Just 27% of Facebook news followers also get news via Twitter, with 11% doing so somewhat or very often. Over all, 13% of digital news consumers follow news recommendations on both Facebook and Twitter – but fewer than 4% do so very or somewhat often.

Twitter users believe they get news that they otherwise wouldn't have:

On Twitter, with its somewhat broader mix of sources for news links, there was more sense that the news they encountered this way expanded knowledge or source list. Twitter users were nearly split between the sense that they would get this news elsewhere (43%) and that they would not (39%).

Also, men and women use services different.

Men and women responded very differently. Women were more likely to see the news as not special to Twitter (53% versus 30% who said they wouldn’t get it elsewhere). Men were more likely to see it as giving them a unique or broader sense of the news (46% versus 35% who said they would get the news elsewhere).

There is quite an interesting split of device usage too (see picture at top):

Looking at the heaviest users – the relatively small number of people who rely on social media recommendations for news very often the percentages are similar across devices. Of those who get news on desktop/laptop computers, 6% get news via Facebook recommendations. The same is true for 7% of smartphone news users and 8% of tablet news consumers. For Twitter, the numbers are smaller but follow a similar pattern: 2% of desktop/laptop users follow Twitter recommendations very often on the desktop/laptop, 3% for smartphone news consumers on smartphones and 3% for tablet news consumers on that device.

As you'd expect, Twitter, being more lightweight, is more the go-to service on the small screen

Twitter news followers tend to be more heavily mobile than the public at large, and they lean toward smartphones in particular. Fully three-quarters, 76%, of Twitter new followers own a smartphone. That compares with 67% of Facebook news followers and 60% of digital news consumers over all. Twitter users are also more likely to get news on their smartphone, 64% versus 47% for Facebook users and 30% for all mobile news consumers.

Also, Twitter news followers are more likely to be male, 57% versus 44% of Facebook users and 48% of the population over all. They are also younger; 39% are 18 to 29 years old, which is nearly double the population over all (22%), but about the same as Facebook users (37%). Not only that, they are highly educated. More than a third (37%) have a college degree or beyond, higher than the 28% for all adults, and fewer have no more than a high school diploma (34% versus 44% over all). They are less white than the population over all and less white than Facebook news users.

There are some emerging implications to this - the Facebook audience is probably more mass market (ie lower value), the Twitter audience would appear top be more akin to the higher value audiences that the FT, Economist et al go for. There is a lesson in that, perhaps?

And, as AllThingsD point out, this will grow and grow:

Wait a minute: Aren’t the Pew people the same ones who told us, a year ago, that Facebook was an increasingly important source of traffic for news sites? Yup. (Good memory!) But these two reports aren’t mutually exclusive. Last year’s survey pointed out that social media is a lot more important to news sites than it used to be. This one just reminds us that, for most sites, other stuff still matters more.

'Till next year then.....

This is getting quite fascinating. If you have not been following the story, here is a summary by Dan Parrotta of HBR:

Last week, Invisible Children launched a brilliant video aimed at making Ugandan rebel warlord Joseph Kony "famous" in the interest of capturing him and ending his reign of deranged brutality. The group hoped for half a million YouTube views by year end. They're up to 76 million today. And now they're being attacked — not by Kony, but by critics whose voices are raised louder about this video than they ever were by Kony's atrocities.

Founded by three college students in 2003, Invisible Children is a human rights organization. They intended to make a documentary on Darfur. Bullets in the direction of their truck in Uganda caused them to change direction. Instead of a film, they ended up creating a massive movement to save children from abduction into Kony's rebel army. Their movement has galvanized hundreds of thousands of young people all over the world. They raise in excess of $13 million annually.

What is interesting me is why something so - at first glance right-on and in support of the fight against poverty, war and injustice and so on and so forth, has not got its own twittercolour - no, despite being massively sucesful in capturing attention and driving activity, many of the Digerati just hate the idea that this has happened. What - the Digerati hate that people have designed a very succesful viral campaign that has created action againsts a Bad Person is bad? WTF, I hear you say. So, let me unpick it - here is first rank Digeratiperson danah boyd

"To many people unfamiliar with Invisible Children, the Kony 2012 campaign looked like a brilliant example of “viral” media spread. The center of the campaign is a compelling 30-minute film where a father talks to his son about the evil practices of the Ugandan war lord Joseph Kony. The father makes it clear that his number one goal is to make Kony a household name in order to “raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.” In the days that followed, critics stepped up and critiqued the simplistic narrative (and colonial rhetoric) put forward by Invisible Children. (If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend Ethan Zuckerman’s “Unpacking Kony 2012.”) Yet, what about the media campaign itself? Activists (and brand marketers) everywhere are in awe of what appears to be a magical campaign that came out of nowhere. But there’s more than meets the eye here."

Ah yes, the "but" - but why the but?

"Much to the horror of many human rights activists, Invisible Children is not known for spreading accurate information as much as it’s known for spreading information widely. Most of how they’ve gotten the message out is by engaging youth. Earlier films have been shown directly to youth (in schools and churches) and youth are actively encouraged to join the organization and participate in their campaigns. They provide toolkits for participation with the primary goal being to amplify attention to a particular issue."

...........

The stories that Invisible Children create in their media put children at the front and center of them. And, indeed, as Neta Kliger-Vilenchik and Henry Jenkins explain, youth are drawn to this type of storytelling. Watch Kony 2012 from the perspective of a teenager or college student. Here is a father explaining to a small child what’s happening in Africa. If you’re a teen, you see this and realize that you too can explain to others what’s going on. The film is powerful, but it also models how to spread information. The most important thing that the audience gets from the film is that they are encouraged to spread the gospel. And then they are given tools for doing that. Invisible Children makes it very easy to share their videos, republish their messages on Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr, and “like” them everywhere. But they go beyond that; they also provide infrastructure to increase others’ attention.

............

The initial tweets that came out came from seemingly disconnected youth living in Midwestern and Southern towns who frequently refer to Christian values in their bios. In other words, these tweets appear to be coming from communities that Invisible Children had already activated prior to launching Kony 2012. Not only did they then each turn on, but they spread the messages to their friends. This allowed the conversation to “pop” and then spread. The one profile that does have a lot of cluster is the Invisible Children profile, highlighting how their audience was indeed ready to respond to them. But you also see tight clusters that geographically disparate who bridged from the organization and then spread in their local community with a level of intense density. With this kind of graph structure, it’s not surprising that it quickly became a trending topic on Twitter. And then, it could easily spread. Attention begets attention.

So, in summary, they have been very successful using the exact same tactics that every other Person With A Message and a Cause uses social media for, they have:

- Put their message out with Inaccurate Information (Read - Accentuate polarities, no nuance, dropping Inconvenient Truths etc etc) and use the Impressionable Youth to spread it
- Used clear narrative storytelling and calls to action, and usage of viral social media tools - especialy video - to distribute the message.
- Pre-seeding the message in key communities Omigod. (No doubt they will soon uncover dreadful practices, like sockpuppeting and even false testimony - I mean, whoever would imagine people would do that?)

So, not really "more to it than meets the eye" here. They have used exactly the techniques that all the the Social Media Advocates have been advocating and practicing for years. To think that these techniques are only going to be available to The Guys We Like is naive. The other complaint is about the target. Ethan Zuckerman, whose opinion I respect a lot, writes:

To raise awareness of Kony, Russell urges viewers of the video to contact 20 “culturemakers” and 12 policymakers who he believes can increase the visibility of the LRA and increase chances of Kony’s arrest. More concretely, Russell wants to ensure that the 100 military advisors the Obama government has provided remain working with the Ugandan military to help capture and arrest Kony.

But its not as if no-one has tried these methods before. Its not just the Social Mediarati who are aghast, a plethora of "helping" interests are upset as well:

As a set of Kony-related hashtags trended on Twitter yesterday, some prominent African and Afrophile commentators pointed out that the Invisible Children campaign gives little or no agency to the Ugandans the organization wants to help. There are no Africans on the Invisible Children board of directors and few in the senior staff. And the Invisible Children approach focuses on American awareness and American intervention, not on local solutions to the conflicts in northern Uganda. This led Ugandan blogger and activist Teddy Ruge – who works closely on community development projects in Uganda – to write a post responding to the Invisible Children campaign titled “A piece of my mind: Respect my agency 2012“, asking supporters of Invisible Children to consider whether IC’s framing of the situation is a correct one, whether IC’s efforts focus too heavily on sustaining the organization, and whether a better way to support people of northern Uganda would be to work with community organizations focusing on rebuilding displaced communities.

Now don't get me wrong - I know full well that things are more complicated, more nuanced, not so easy, as this campaign is making it out to be. But, at this point I do also detect the sound of harrumphing vested interests, the murmurs of Not Invented Here (or even Done Better There) echoing round the ranks. In other words, one could read this as Turf being trampled on. And where turf is trampled on, Ad-Hominems soon follow - and here they are: As a charity, these people only spend 1/3rd of their money on Uganda!

The Visible Children tumblr points out that Invisible Children spends less than a third of the money they’ve raised on direct services in northern Uganda and bordering areas. The majority of their funding is focused on advocacy, filmmaking and fundraising.

But, as we pointed out years ago and many a time, few charities spend that much on their cause, a lot is sucked up in - ahem "operating costs" - the industry overall is at best inefficient (and resists all attempts to measure it), at worst it is a scam. I am shocked - shocked I tell you - that these critics apparently didn't know that (Well, I think they do, but they are not exercised by it when it is their own friends. Which is why this - like Bob Geldof's Live Aid at the time - ruffles feathers). In fact to me, these guys look better than many charities in that at least we know that some of the rest of the money is going into advocacy for their cause. I mean imagine that, a charity spending money advocating their cause? Revolutionary stuff, no?. Exactly. They are aiming for a revolution.

Parrotti summarises what Invisible Children is being criticized for:

1. Being a niche cause, and not combating the atrocities of the overall Ugandan military establishment (and wider warlordism).
2. Not giving adequate weight to the fact that Kony is now outside of Uganda with a weakened force of several hundred members.
3. Spending too much money on film and media.
4. Making it harder to capture Kony by spotlighting him.

But, as Parrotti points out, the approach used over the last 16 years hasn't exactly worked well and in 16 days this will do more.

"The children are now visible. Case closed. If only more humanitarian organizations had such success toward their missions."

Parotti also believes there's something bigger going on here, the rediscovery of activism and hope.

In the 1960s, critics whined that the money spent to go to the moon was more than it was worth. They didn't get that it wasn't about collecting moon rocks. It was about collecting passion and aiming it at something impossible. It was about demonstrating to ourselves that we were underestimating our potential by massive orders of magnitude. They didn't get the impact of millions of eight year-old kids watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, whispering to ourselves, "My God, anything is possible."

You should see the light in the eyes of the college kids engaged in Invisible Children's mission. That's the larger value of what these guys have created. A generation of kids believing again that they can change the world, and seeing themselves accomplish it.

I think he is onto something. These people have used Social Media tools extremely well to generate a huge amount of activity in a niche area where all the kings horses and men so far have done sweet Fanny Adams. There is a fascinating exchange between a commetator and Ethan on his blog: One "Erin" says, if this is Bad then:

… what CAN we do? Much of the appeal of Kony2012 is that it gives us white, American liberals a method to engage and do SOMETHING with our bleeding hearts. I have no doubt of the complexity of the problem, and I appreciate the detailed blog post you’ve written. But you’ve made the same omission as many others who’ve written truthful narratives about Africa: you’ve left us with the impression that there is no solution, because all the players are bad and untrustworthy, so we shrug our shoulders, blame the Africans, and turn away. Give us hope; point us toward a solution; give us something specific and achievable to do! This is what Invisible Children has appreciated about human psychology and has done so effectively.

Ethan replies:

Erin, thanks for the comment. You’re right that my post doesn’t give “white American liberals a method to engage and so SOMETHING with our bleeding hearts.” For one thing, I’m not sure the LRA is the issue I’d urge people to engage with right now – I think pressuring the US to take the lead on Syria is likely a higher priority.

Here’s what I do as a white American liberal focused on sub-Saharan Africa:

- I write about a range of stories about issues on the continent. Some look at tragic situations like northern Uganda (which I’ve been writing about since 2006). Some look at stories of innovation and creativity on the continent. I try to feature a variety of views of a complicated continent, because looking at Africa in terms of crisis and failure ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

- I support local, African-led organizations that work on problems in their community, through financial support, writing about their work, and in a few cases, sitting on their boards of directors.

- I support organizations like Medicines Sans Frontieres that have consistently done important work providing health and medical care to people affected by conflicts in Central Africa and elsewhere. I pick these organizations because they spend less money on “awareness-raising” and advocacy and more funds on the ground.

I don’t know if those approaches will help you in your quest for something “specific and achievable”, but I’ve found it more satisfying than supporting efforts like this one.

While I respect Ethan a lot, I think that tells you, in one reply, why the world is a-changing. Putting it another way.

(i) The current established structures are palpably not delivering the goods.

(ii) There is now a proven alternative. From the start of the Arab Spring, it has been clear that Social Media can become a tool of the real actives and activists, not just armchair ones. Twitter avatar colour changing was replaced with co-ordinating real revolutions. Fence sitting has not worked, getting off the fence has had results. One definition of insanity is to believe more of the same will yield different results, so the Old is discredited.

(iii) It is not just a few self selecting Social Mediarati who can make Social Media work, when they said the Man of the Year is You, it really meant You, not The Experts

The Social Media Pandora's Box has been opened, and All Of You are using it. It isn't going to close again. The Digerati love to rail against the Olde Structures, but did not realise some of those pulled down would be beloved ones. The lessons from history of all revolutions in communications is that they are revolutionary socially too.

The times, they are a' changing.....

Good summary post from Adam Tinworth, on 5 lessons from London Social Media Week (my abridgements, see Adam's post and rather good liveblogs for the full monty):

1. This is just beginning

A common theme at several sessions, including the Like Minds one on brand communications is that we're still just in the early stages of what the internet will bring us and how it will change our world. And I think that's accurate. The more I step back from my particular bubble world of journalism, the more I see how profoundly online communications and data pools are changing all sorts of industries. You'd better get used to change, because there's plenty of it still to come.

2. Practical advice is thin on the ground

There were some genuine social media superstars talking at events during Social Media Week London. But I'm amazed by the number of people popping up on panels with only a couple of years' experience (and the degree to which they overlap with the people I talked about in the last point…). They're able to talk in a limited way about an equally limited subset of situations. They're much more comfortable talking theory than they are hard, practical experience. And many people attending these panels want to leave having learnt something they can apply directly. There was much disgruntlement at the night-time drinkies during social media week (and in coffee meetings afterwards) and the value of the content in many of the events.

3. Beware the noise

There was an interesting comment at the Like Minds event about events: "all you need is someone with an iPhone and a brain…" And that might be true now. But it won't be true for much longer. As social platforms grow, it gets harder and harder to attract attention - look at how hard it is to build an audience for a new launch on a mature social platform like blogging, for example. The more people creating content live at events, the more you need skilled practitioners to help cut through the noise and achieve the amplification you're looking for. It's easy to get attention when few people are doing something. It's so much harder when everyone's doing it. The bandwagon feels great, when there's five of you on it. It's a bit less fun when there's five hundred.

4. There's lots of work left to do on curation

I don't think anybody has really solved the problem of linking together related content on a topic. We've been trying since the days of Trackbacks and Pingbacks, which have all but vanished thanks to the sterling efforts of the spammers (thanks, guys). But the idea of a cycle of buzz-building before something occurs, live-coverage as it occurs, followed by curation of that live coverage through to analysis and discussion is compelling, and useful from everything from the events business to news coverage. And the tools for curation still feel like the weak spot to me.

5. Events are the new media

There's plenty of evidence that we're moving towards a world where online and print media are ways of connecting and maintaining the relationships deepened and developed at face-to-face events. For all traditional media's sneering comments about "virtual friends", online communities seem more keen on meeting face to face than pretty much any other form of community, expect possibly swingers. Tweetups, unconferences, theme weeks, blogmeets (remember them?) et al have been a consistent theme throughout the grown of online media.

I'd add the following thoughts:

1. This is just the beginning. And as Bill Gates said about the Internet in the late 1990's, the changes are less than you will expect in the next 2 years, but far greater in the next 10.

2. Practical Advice is thin on the ground - so make sure the people advising you are practical There are people in this space who have been doing it for several years, but we are now in the phase where they are being drowned out by...

3. Beware the noise.....Snake Oil Y'all

4. Lots of Work on Curation - I agree, and more - the Aggregation stage is is where the value is created at the middle game of any new media value chain (see Social Media Value Chain diagram above). There will also be a major push to unify the many different Screen experiences, and then open walled garden Social Graphs (the Next Netscape). A very interesting development is the drive to Social Net Commerce (eg Facebook's new moves for mobile)

5. Events are the new media - very interesting perception. It is well known that in the first phase of the Hype Curve more money is made from talking about something than doing it, but I think Adam has hit a truism here - from the very beginning of the the 'Net, increasing online communication has also increased the desire of people (and I'm not just talking about the swingers) to meet face to face.

Don't know if anybody saw this study on how influence works on different social network structures, but its very interesting:

In a study of networking, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY developed computer models showing that when 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, that belief will be adopted by the majority of society. Their study of minority belief becoming majority opinion appears in the July 22, 2011 online edition of the journal Physical Review E.

.....

When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority. Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.

More interestingly, they modelled how it spreads on different social network structures and found that the type of network and the location where an opinion starts and spreads in society have little bearing on the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion. To reach their conclusion, the scientists developed computer models of various types of social networks.

- One of the networks had each person connect to every other person in the network.
- The second model included certain individuals who were connected to a large number of people, making them opinion hubs or leaders.
The final model gave every person in the model roughly the same number of connections. The initial state of each of the models was a sea of traditional-view holders.

Each of these individuals held a view but was also, importantly, open-minded to other views. The human dynamic is something like this:

In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus.

As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change. People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further.

I recall research about 20 years ago (can't find it now of course) that said once about 10% of a population cheat, then its nearly impossible to stop cheating proliferating. Also, early Memetic Artificlal Life models showed that once an idea had "infected" about 5% of a population in a clustered aea it was very hard to eradicate as they kept on reinfecting each other, and at about 8 - 10% it started to become viral.

This is no doubt something that will be used for good and evil in the coming years.

Yesterday we pointed to the Bad Side of using social media for London's looting and rioting. This story is about the Good Side - Londoners using social media to organise ad-hoc Flashmobs to clean up. Grauniad:

Hundreds of people armed with brooms, binbags and rubber gloves turned out across London to help clean up the damage caused by a third night of rioting, looting and arson.

Co-ordinated online on Facebook and Twitter, volunteers mobilised in the worst-hit parts of the capital to sweep streets, help local shopkeepers and show solidarity with communities thrown into turmoil by the violence. Though their efforts were thwarted in many parts by police work, their presence on the streets gave a valuable morale boost to those seeking an end to the disturbances.

The origins appeared to be the Twitter user @sophontrack who suggested a #riotcleanup operation shortly after 6pm on Monday. It was, however, a tweet from @BenDylan which found its way to Dan Thompson that set the trend going.

Thompson, who runs a social initiative encouraging people to use empty shops and open spaces, decided to use social media to co-ordinate those looking to help. By 10am the tag was the top trending topic in the UK and the second worldwide.

"There are now people on the ground all across London," he said. "Even just putting on some gloves, picking up a dustpan and brush and clearing one broken window on the way into work. People are saying, 'We're Londoners, we're resilient and getting on with it.'"

Makes me proud to be a Londoner (though I was in Wales at the time.....)

In other news, it would appear that Blackberry turned off the BBN service overnight to make it more difficult for the looters to organise thier flashmobs. Hard to tell if that, or the well publicised 16000 police on duty, was responsible for the far lower number of outbreaks in London (though predictably, Flashmob looting broke out in the cities the Police sent to London had been drawn from). Police are also using working smarter, listeing in on Twitter now and using social media sites such as Flickr to identify looters

What is also interesting is the emerging evidence of "Flashmob Defenders" - locals organising to defend their areas also using social media.

London erupted in rioting over the weekend, initially sparked by questions about the police shooting of a renegade youth gang member/young local community member (make your mind up) but the most interesting bit has been the use of social media (apparently mainly Blackberry Mobile Messenger, but that may just be Twitter and Facebook apologists trying to ensure that they are only seen to promote Good Riots* )

Apparently the looters and vandals used "flashmobbing" techniques to organise the liberation of many televisons, pairs of trainers and other goods essential to the revolution, and then to dynamically keep ahead of the police - this from onlookers in Brixton - BBC:

I saw Foot Locker on fire in Brixton High Street after midnight on Sunday. They got in and made off with widescreen TVs, vacuum cleaners, and computers. KFC and McDonalds were smashed up.
About a five-minute walk away in Effra Road, Currys was getting broken into. Nearly 200 people were there trying to get through the metal shutters. Eventually they got in and made off with widescreen TVs, vacuum cleaners, and computers. There were riot police near Brixton station, but there was no police presence in Effra Road for at least 40 minutes.

.....


I live close to Currys in Brixton. I watched hooded youths brazenly running up my road towards the store. At about 01:00, my usually quiet road was filled with cars coming from the direction of Effra Road and Currys. This could have been due to traffic being diverted, or it could have been the opportunists taking their loot home. One man walked casually past my window carrying a fairly large box, with a wide smile on his face.

Anyway, regardless of the whys and wherefores of why the riots started and by whom, this brings home the dark side of Social Media that we have been going on about for years but is typically blithely ignored by the Social media pundits - apostles, conference promoters, authors and service suppliers. Probably a good thing, as it allows a more reasoned discussion of what checks and balances Social Media services need. Also a wake up call for the London (and any big city) police to get more "with it" with new media technology.

*Twitter was full of the data too, as my first information on ths came within minutes that way - so in my opinion blaming Blackberry only is a tad disingenuous

Had a look at Google+ reviews briefly, reminds me of Friendfeed but as it would be done by guys whose previous successes were Buzz and Wave. Anyway a lot of the A listers seem to be spouting the same shill saying much the same as they did about Friendfeed , so the Broadstuff review is to be honest and to rehash our Friendfeed Review of 2008 and replace Friendfeed with Google +:

Fred Wilson* notes, re Google+ and the new new forum:

But it means I have to log into Google+ every day now and check out what people are saying and weigh in. Which I've been doing in the past couple weeks. And that increases the chances that I'll comment on someone else's posts at Google+.

So now, in addition to this blog, my tumblog, and twitter, I have to pay attention to whats' going on in Google+. So it's gone from being an aggregator of attention to a demander of attention. Good for them. That's the way to play the game on the web.

But I would like to see them get those comments portable in some way. Or I'd like to see someone aggregate those comments.

I love the last line's implications - I need another aggregator to aggregate the stuff this aggregator is aggregating so I don't have to visit yet another website

Fred also quotes Umair Haque**:

Umair, who is so right so often, said:

The real point is: Google+ is a next-gen, open version of Facebook's social feed.

Sorry guys, I'm being a bit slow here - which bit of the "yet-another-proprietary-service-that-I-have-to-have-an-identity-and-a-social-graph-in" is the next-gen, open version here?

Or is it that it pumps out stuff in that hate-object of the Web 2.0 faithful, email?

* Fred didn't say it this time round....but pick any sensible pundit you like.
** Ditto Umair

Anyway, I reckon this review will stand the test of time as well as the Friendfeed one did - with one eddition - Friendfeed never got an iPad app at launch.