betajames

The institutions will transform faster than we can keep pace. Between the cracks of our existing educational infrastructure will grow varied species of educational delivery the likes of which we have never seen and cannot possibly forecast. What our students will need is a love of learning but we should not mistake this for an easy love affair. A love of learning is a hard relationship. Learning hurts sometimes. Learning is scary most of the time. It’s impact is all-too-often proportional to its agony. As Benjamin Franklin described it, “Those things that hurt, instruct.

Social media is inherently social, public, and mostly free. And the smartest people in the industry are also inherently social, public, and give away a lot of amazing insight and information for free. Everything you need to know about social media is already available for you, filtered by millions of readers, and optimized from many years of other people’s trial and error. And everyone you need to know to help you learn and apply this knowledge is already willing to engage with you, and help you learn it.

most "social media" strategies have one or more of three goals: to "push product," "build buzz," or "engage consumers." None of these lives up to the Internet's promise of meaning. They're just slightly cleverer ways to sell more of the same old junk. But the great challenge of the 21st century is making stuff radically better in the first place — stuff that creates what I've been calling thicker value.

Organizations don't need "social media" strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it's the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond.

Children used to actually talk to their friends. Those hours spent on the family princess phone or hanging out with pals in the neighborhood after school vanished long ago. But now, even chatting on cellphones or via e-mail (through which you can at least converse in paragraphs) is passé. For today’s teenagers and preteens, the give and take of friendship seems to be conducted increasingly in the abbreviated snatches of cellphone texts and instant messages, or through the very public forum of Facebook walls and MySpace bulletins.

Twitter represents 100 million people who are freely sharing their thoughts with the rest of the world (you don’t need to be “following” someone or logged in to access >99% of tweets), but these thoughts are refined to 140 characters, and typically aren’t very intimate. Facebook, on the other hand, gives you no-holds-barred access to the personal information of your friends, but this group usually doesn’t exceed 1,000 people. And so we’ve ended up with two very different treasure troves of data: a little information from a lot of people in Twitter, and a lot of information from only a few people — from a given user’s perspective at least — in Facebook.

These days we have to contend with the creeping power of what can only notionally be defined as media "content"--produced purely to appear at the top of search results. But it appears that the (so far) still entirely human-filtered paradise of Twitter may come to the rescue. Owing to the short path length between any two users, news travels fast in the tweet-o-sphere.

Earlier work suggested that the best way to get noticed on Twitter was to tweet at certain times of day, and Kwak et al.'s paper sheds some light on why this is the case: "Half of retweeting occurs within an hour, and 75% under a day." And it's those initial re-tweets that make all the difference: "What is interesting is from the second hop and on is that the retweets two hops or more away from the source are much more responsive and basically occur back to back up to 5 hops away."

The Twitter archive, which was “born digital,” as archivists say, will be easily searchable by machine — unlike family letters and diaries gathering dust in attics.

As a written record, Tweets are very close to the originating thoughts. “Most of our sources are written after the fact, mediated by memory — sometimes false memory,” Ms. Taylor said. “And newspapers are mediated by editors. Tweets take you right into the moment in a way that no other sources do. That’s what is so exciting.”

reports that Facebook has “won” the web are laughable, especially given the numbers Google put up this month, with more than $6 billion in revenue over the first 3 months of the year. Moreover, the bulk of Google’s ad revenue comes from “contextual” ads, which rely on the contents of a web page or search query. It’s far from clear that targeted ads — even ones based on deep profiles — would do better than the ads on Google’s search page, even if Facebook eventually thinks it can build a search engine whose rankings are set via the data it collects from users.

Facebook built much of this easy-to-use system on “open” standards, as WebMonkey’s Michael Calore reports, even as it sucks the data into a closed community. But those standards are used almost exclusively by Facebook, and ignore the work that’s been done by others to create universally understandable meta-data.

Moreover, the Like button feeds exclusively to Facebook. If your primary identity on the net is at LinkedIn or Google or MySpace or god forbid, on your own domain, this button does you no good. Facebook didn’t build this architecture to make the net better, it built it to make Facebook money.

You can opt out of some of this through Facebook’s increasingly arcane privacy settings, though most won’t do anything to stop Facebook’s relentless push to make people’s profiles public.

The Facebook phenomenon provides a perfect illustration of this process. At the moment, it looks like an all-conquering monster, and is being reported accordingly. According to conventional wisdom, if the last decade was dominated by Google, this coming decade will belong to Facebook. And the company is beginning to behave as though it believed this.

"Facebook is entering into business deals where the Facebook part of the transaction is user information and the other party's part is unknown," Opsahl said.

Even if partners didn't pay, Facebook is leveraging its access to user information to construct business deals, the attorney argued.

Facebook made it clear that friend information in windows at websites is for users' eyes only.

"It really has no privacy implications," Zuckerberg said at f8. "I think this means people will be sharing less information when they don't need to around the Web."

Facebook users have to be signed into the service for plug-ins to trigger and sharing requires people to click on icons.

Privacy advocates worry that outside websites could get Facebook information considered public, with gradual changes at the social network forcing more user data into that category.