Results tagged “facebook” from Trends in the Living Networks

I just caught up with my neighbor and fellow futurist Mark Pesce, who over a coffee at our local briefed me on his new project Plexus, which he publicly announced at his recent keynote at Pycon Australia, for Python developers. His excellent speech, titled How Not to be Seen, is below, and the transcript on Mark’s blog.

In his presentation Mark starts with his long relationship with programming and finally moves on to describe his project Plexus, which will provide a new platform for social networks.

Hey, I was there first! :-) On Saturday I wrote Breaking: Facebook bans doll nipples on profile images, about how my wife Victoria Buckley was told by Facebook she couldn't show nude dolls on her Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page.

Today the Sydney Morning Herald has featured this as its top story, with a headline Facebook nipplegate row and story by Asher Moses titled Now Facebook bans doll nipples. It says:

Facebook's prudish police are out in force yet again, this time threatening action against a Sydney jeweller for posting pictures of exquisite nude porcelain dolls posing with her works.


Victoria Buckley, who owns a high-end jewellery store in the Strand Arcade on George Street, has long used the dolls as inspiration for her pieces and hasn't had one complaint about the A3 posters of the nudes in her shop window.


But over the weekend she received six warnings from Facebook saying the pictures of the dolls, which show little more than nipples, constituted "inappropriate content" and breached the site's terms of service.

Here is a video of a very interesting interview of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch.

There are a number of very interesting comments by Zuckerberg in the interview, including on how Facebook Connect is so fundamental to the company. He said that "obviously much more is going to be developed outside of Facebook than inside," meaning that the development of Facebook into a platform is critical.

More controversial was Zuckerberg's comments on privacy. At around 3:15 in the video he says:

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are."

This prompted Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb to write a long diatribe, saying:

I don't buy Zuckerberg's argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

This is a fascinating issue. I and many others - including Zuckerberg - have been surprised through this decade by quite how much people have been prepared to share, given the opportunity by the rapid rise of Web 2.0 tools. Undoubtedly there has been a rapid evolution of social attitudes to privacy, as many people have discovered that they are in fact comfortable sharing some personal information.

Last week I gave the opening keynote at IPZ2009 Interactive Marketing Summit in Istanbul. Here are my slides for my keynote on the Future of Interactive Marketing.

It was a fantastic event, the fourth annual IPZ conference organized by Günseli Özen Ocakoğlu and Hakan Senbir of Marketing & Management Institute, which publishes a range of leading magazines including Marketing Türkiye.

In preparing for my keynote and during my visit I discovered many fascinating things I did not know about the Turkish online market. It is in fact one of the hottest and fastest-growing Internet markets in the world.

As it happens I have a very deep interest in language-defined online markets, such as Japanese, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Korean. Each of these markets – some within national borders and others spanning countries – has very different characteristics across all facets including which types of social media are used, which are dominant players, and the most successful business models. I have written about this before in the context of blogging languages and global media strategies, and will be doing further analysis of country markets soon.

Here are five facts that illustrate how exciting the Turkish online market is.

1. Turkey is the third largest country in the world on Facebook


Source: CheckFacebook

Coming from almost nothing two years ago, Turkey now has close to 14 million Facebook users, overtaking France and Canada earlier this year to be the third largest country on Facebook after the US and UK. Facebook does not dominate social networking in other high population countries such as Brazil, Russia and Japan, so Turkey with a population of 72 million and a very rapid uptake of online services ranks close to the top of the list.

Microsoft’s withdrawal from its bid for Yahoo! has hardly clarified the the tech landscape. In fact it has made the shape of the industry far more uncertain, as Microsoft mulls moves to shore up its future.

Microsoft is one of the most financially successful companies on the planet. It anticipates operating income this year of over $26 billion, maintaining strong growth from the last few years (just $9 billion in 2004), making it arguably stronger than other highly profitable companies in financial services and oil, which have more inconsistent incomes. However their success is founded on operating systems and client-installed office productivity software. Online services account for around 5% of their revenues, and entertainment 12%. There is no question that their core revenue is under attack. The summary of the challenge is “lower cost alternatives”, including online software and services, and open source.

So what will Microsoft do? The latest rumor is that Microsoft intends to buy Yahoo!’s search business, then buy Facebook for $15 to $20 billion. This is highly credible, though gossip is rife. Unquestionably this would give Microsoft a very strong position, both in the online advertising business, and also in leveraging what is now the dominant social network platform. In addition, the total price would be less than what Microsoft was prepared to pay for Yahoo! as a whole, keeping some of its financial powder dry.

Here is an old (November 2, 2007) interview I did on SkyBusiness about social networks, examining both the industry landscape and how social networks can be valuable inside organizations. What I like best about this is that for much of the interview they had up a banner reading “Facebook And Other Social Networking Sites Can Be Beneficial For Corporations”, a message that business audiences, especially at the time, hadn’t heard much before.

Some of the things I discuss in the interview:
* The role of advertising networks in social networks
* The upcoming launch of Google’s Open Social and what it means for the sector
* The value to organizations of encouraging strong social networks
* Examples of companies using Facebook and other social networks internally
* How Enterprise 2.0 takes social media tools to apply to organizational productivity