Social media at #London2012

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Images social web mapping of Olympics

Web 3.0 at the Olympic Park

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We are seeing a lot of concentrated tweets around the housing and park and lots of four square checkins, but not what we would call extremely high tweeting with the clima score holding about 80 out of 100. Compare to recent Madrid priest which was many times higher.

Web 3.0 activity at Olympic Park

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The following maps show tweets, four square trending and other social media data associated with the Olympic Park.

Nexus 7 camping ad, too much?

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Are mobile computers suppose to enhance our lives, or just replace smokes and coffee as addictions for the brain.  With even Social Internet Guru Sherry Turkle raising questions about how these devices isolate us as much as connect us, we need better thinking about how being connected to the Internet 24/7 offers real benefit.  

This ad simply does not do it.  In fact who ever made this ad seems to have wanted to expand the domain of mobile device addiction to what once was a sacred domain, the father son camping trip.  Recently I was in Nepal and was disturbed to see people spending their evenings on iPads and Mac Books rather then talking or watching the fire.  Clearly the everywhere Internet had taken away much what was my favourite experience of traveling to places like Nepal in my 20s: meeting other people.

People can now just tone out when ever they want were ever they are.  I imagine that this tablet camping trip would be a bit different.  The child would use the tablet to play the same video game he plays at home rather than watch the fire, and father would use it to check he work emails during breakfast and tweet images about what a wonderful vacation they were having.

From our own 2 years of intense research in to cloud living and mobile lifestyle we are booming more and more concerned about the power of mobile devices to give us a false sense of connection when it really separates us. 

State of Web 3.0 apps

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You may not have noticed it but you mobile apps are already moving from Web 2.0 to geo-aware Web 3.0.  Already much of your every day web is spatially aware in the same way it is now common to be socially aware.  Most interesting is the social sites that are now spatially awarey, helping you to connect to people in your local area or around the world.

Goolge Plus has an impressive nearby feature. So you can navigate posts to G+ not only by who is in your circle, or what is popular, but also by what is being posted near where you live. This is an impressive simple way to harvest geo-location data to view the feelings and interests of the local community, even if local is the other side of a big city like London.

Facebook allows you to see where fellow users have checked in, but the feature is underused and I have found it had no real value for me.

 

Perhaps the best use we have seen of geo-location is the Flixster App, which support integrations with Netflix and Facebook accounts. It also feeds data from Rotten Tomatores. The app adds geo-aware, so it can tell you what movies are playing near you, then give you the Rotten Tomatoe scores, your friends ratings, and even download a trailer on to your app. Flixster makes finding a local movie you can walk to more like downloading from iTunes. We love these class of apps that make social and community engagement as easy as non-engagement. You can find a theatre to see a movie in as easily as you can download a movie on iTunes.

Massive tweets at Madrid protest

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We are seeing over 1,000 geo-tagged tweets an hour coming from Madrid protest.

Current real time twitter score from Madrid above.

Skout: Will Web 3.0 be ugly?

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As far as mobile phone applicaitons go it is hard to find anyting more Web 3.0 than SKOUT. SKOUT includes many of the key elements we believe will make Web 3.0. Firstly it is ground on the Facebook API and builds a dating site out of it. Web 3.0 will be about connecting cloud services to create new solutions. SKOUT certainly does that. 

SKOUT enables one to access social data not only by semantic characteristics, but also by location. People have to join SKOUT so these searches are not violating privacy (we assume) 

And SKOUT does deliver. You can use SKOUT to meet people in local areas for anything from dating to just chat, though we assume dating is a primary object of it. Regardless of what you think of online dating you must see that there is demand for such a service to be geo-located and driven from a service like Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare where lots of people already have identities and personal data created. 

But the implementation just feels cheap and desperate to make money. Its not just the endless adds running down the bottom (the new pop-up add) but features like the ability to send Wink Bombs that makes SKOUT look like a ugly preview of what Web 3.0 could be. 

Twitter ordered to hand over Occupy tweets

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 "A US court has ordered Twitter to release old messages and details about a user arrested during an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York. 

"The micro-blogging firm contested the subpoena, saying the tweets were owned by users rather than the company. 

"But a judge said defendant Malcolm Harris' privacy would not be violated if the material was handed over."

BBC News - Twitter ordered to hand over Occupy tweets

Wonder about going after banker tweets?

Lagos and Africa Twitter Leap Frog

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Lagos twitter activity map, showing Wikpedia

Lagos Nigeria shows an interesting pattern of social media use, one that we believe will be common in much of the developing world.  There are few Wikipedia articles tagged with Lagos as a location, few people post Flickr photos from their and there are few Fourquare venues, but there is an intense amount of geo-tagged tweeting.  Lagos does not see a lot of tweeting compared to other major cities (see our tweeter-meter) but the tweets it sees are much more likely to have a geo-tag than many other places.

We conclude that this is because in Lagos the primary tool tweets must be the mobile phone.  We anticipate that Nigeria, like many other nations, is leap frogging the PC stage and going directly to Web 3.0 based on mobile devices.

The above meter shows that despite a lot of geo-tagged tweeting as part of overall tweeting in Lagos, overall tweeting remains very low.

BBC has an interesting article on how this leap frogging with mobile is allowing Africa to jump over the need to buy computers and install broadband.  But as the Web 3.0 Lab is constantly pointing out, one must separate mobile web traffic by intensity, type, and impact.  Too often these are confused.  In fact impact may be happening in a mobile technology that seems to be declining.  For example in the Spring of 2011 everyone was talking about iPhones, Android and Twitter, but the London Riots show the influence BBM on Blackberry was having on creating self organizing 'tribes' of youth.  BBM was the technology young people used to organize while Twitter became little more than a rumor mill for panic struck Londoners.

In Lagos we see low twitter usage, but what twitter usage there is is highly mobile and highly geo-tagged.  We would say Lagos is skipping Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 and jumping to Web 3.0 directly.  And we suspect the impact will be massive.