March 11th, 2011
Dear Social Media,
It is without a doubt that Internet—and everything it connects to—is entering a new chapter of its life. And nothing has influenced this change more than your birth into our world.
With Facebook, you have introduced the world to the power of social connections, and your ability to augment almost any digital experience—whether it's staying connected, keeping updated, or sharing and promoting content. With the maturity of Twitter our social ring is anyone with an internet connection, and so while the functionality is the same (near-live updates) the content is vastly different. Facebook tells us what our friends are doing, while Twitter tells us what the world is doing. Most of the time this is limited to the constraints of our filtered lists, but when a disaster strikes (an 8.9 earthquake has hit Japan as I write this) the power of world-communities really shine.
Twitter users are sharing warnings before official Government statements are released. What's interesting, is not that we now have information (more) instantly and from the direct source, but the fact that it can, and sometimes is, wrong—and what effect this will actually have. It sets up Twitter and related services for some interesting changes. Firstly, next-gen services such as Twitter will have to discover how to extract the truthful signals from so much false noise. At the moment this is limited—when viewing a trending topic, you are sometimes given a summary of the related event, however this is a fraction of the total power of these systems. The relocating of the search bar to a more prominent position in the site's header, adds some action to their words to improve this feature. The result of this is that it will force official services to act sooner, to ensure that the correct information is networked through these services.
The other effect is having, is on services like Google. Their recent and probably most significant (2010) update of their homepage, includes realtime contnet (ie Tweets) as well as discussions, news, blogs and... time filters. Search is now just as important for the most relevant information and (now) the newest information. Google have included a few new services, especially relevant to disasters. For example with this recent tsunami, the homepage includes the most updated warnings for surrounding countries; a search of "tsunami" or "japan" returns an snapshot of the recent event along with a link to the warning centre, Google.org's people finder and a summary page of related news, media and maps etc. for the event. Without applying a time filter, the second result still returns a Wikipedia page on tsunami's and youtube videos of past events, so Google is still obviously serving it's original purpose, but it will be interesting to see how this shapes over the next few years.
More services are growing to fill this instant-news void, such as CNN's iReport which allows anybody to upload their own newstories. Or Youtube channels like citizentube that upload the latest videos from disaster events, to even services like UStream which have an increasing number of channels reporting the latest video streams around an event.
It's amazing how quickly you've grown.
