Look out folks, it's on the rise.

Foursquare is what some in social media circles are calling the Twitter of 2010. It is a social media game that rewards you for logging your location at any point in the day.  Eating a burrito? Tell the world where and when! The more you do, the more “badges” you earn. If you are the person who has logged the most visits to a specific place on Foursquare, you will win the additional honor of becoming the “mayor” of that location. Smart locales are playing along and giving out freebies to their “mayors.” Taste D-Lite lets customers accrue extra points on their TastiRewards cards for Foursquare check-ins and tweets.

From January 2010 to February, Foursquare passed the 1 million mark on Twitter (you can opt to have all your posts on Foursquare automatically post on your Twitter stream as well). In that month’s time, the number of check-ins doubled–showing remarkable promise. It list of seed-money investors include some of the most innovative minds in social media, including Digg Founder Kevin Rose, who endorsed the site to the tune of $1.35 million.

Some cite the brilliance of Foursquare in the fact that real-life social interactions become a virtual game. The person who wins the game is the person who is best able to show the world that he/she has the most interesting life.

So why do I think it’s such a bad idea?

Don't people realize the power they are giving to others when they reveal their whereabouts & spending decisions?

Because so far, the only benefit I can see in Foursquare for the common man–the Joe-the-Plumber, if you will–is that it’s entertaining.

Who really wins in Foursquare? Marketers, big businesses, anyone hoping to use your personal information to make  buck…oh yea, and the FBI. And trust me, there are bucks to be made in this. I hate to be a fear-monger here. I swear, I’m not one of these “all change is bad” people. I am a quick adapter. Half my family has me to thank for their Facebook pages. But I also believe that information is power. And by making public every location where we spend money, we are giving incredibly powerful information away for free.

Twitter, which some would argue does the same thing (see cartoon on left), you have the option to generate meaningful conversations (albeit short ones), show off expertise, track breaking news, donate to a cause, and much more. You can also remain anonymous if you need to (on Foursquare, you can’t be a “mayor” unless you’ve posted a profile photo). No one ever needs to know your location in order to tweet.

Time for the Twitter vs. Foursquare Face-Off

Looking at this from a different angle, let’s take John Bell‘s five key questions to determine the viability of a new technology as a “groundswell” threat.

• Does it enable people to connect in new ways? – Yes, both Twitter and Foursquare present creative connection tools for people around the world.
• Is it effortless for people to use and signup? Yep. and Yep.
• Does it generate enough content to sustain itself? You bet.
• Is it an open platform? Of course.
• Does it shift power from institutions to people? This is the key question. In Twitter, the answer is an unequivocal YES. During the Iran elections, voices resonated worldwide because Twitter gave them a mobile platform. With Foursquare, I would argue that the institutions are the ones who still hold the power. Users feed information that otherwise would have been painstakingly cataloged by expensive marketing research firms and sold to big businesses in order to improve their bottom line. At most, you could argue that it shifts power from big institutions to smaller institutions. Those mom-and-pops shops who can’t afford market research can log into Foursquare and see what kinds of people are coming regularly, and try to capitalize on them.

My question is: Do the benefits outweigh the negatives? With Foursquare, they do not.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Anderson makes a good case for how the explosion of online commerce equalizes opportunity and spreads the wealth

At least once a week I see protesters against universal health care holding huge posters warning of Obama’s socialist agenda (I work right by the White House). Conservative pundits like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck insult Obama by calling him a socialist…and we’re supposed to cringe in terror.

With this in mind, I ask:

How do you think our fair and balanced friends at Fox News would react to Chris Anderson’s view of the socialist state of our collective online futures?

First, let’s be clear. Socialism does not mean fascism or Stalinism. I’m not talking about big-brother State murdering journalists and political dissidents. And while there are many different political systems that adopt their policies as “socialist,” what I mean here is the strict definition of the principle.Wikipedia says it well: “a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on the amount of labor expended.”

The 80/20 distribution disappears when online commerce opens up the number of options available for the same cost.

Meanwhile, economist Vilfredo Pareto outlined wealth distribution at the turn of the 18th century with a ratio. He found that about 20 percent of the population owned 80 percent of the wealth. Since Pareto’s time, this ratio has been argued for all levels of modern economic systems. Merchants find that 20 percent of their products account for 80 percent of their sales.

If Anderson is to be believed, that model is dead with the Web.

That’s where socialism comes in. With the even-handed nature of the Web, you and I can decide to Digg an article or not, and that’s what rises to the top.

Digital technology eliminates the need for editorial decisions. All products can be treated equally and filtered for any number of different audiences.

Everyone has an equal opportunity to define the agenda for the day.

It’s a philosophical difference. When all information is treated equally, society is collectively held responsible for sifting through the nonsense. Anderson reflects, “Fundamentally, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is a healthier society than one that simply accepts what it’s told from a narrow range of experts and institutions.” When all information is treated fairly equally, we are required to think for ourselves. We are no longer media consumers, but media critics, analysts, and producers.

Anderson calls this, “The Paradise of Choice.” With the nearly unlimited boundaries of online commerce, choices become close to infinite. And the alternative to this paradise? Having those on top of society (the editors, business owners, political forces) choose for us. I doubt even the staunchest anti-socialism advocates would surrender their freedom of choice.

But the variety isn’t enough. In order to make smart choices, we also need more information about the choices.

And that’s where the power of filters comes in.

Search engines started the filtering process. Google analyzes keywords to bring meaning to a Web page. So that when you search for a term, you are likely to find a page all about that term.

Now social networks pick up where searches left off and filter topics and sources through your own network’s recommendations. Facebook’s new “Live Feed” even filters information using information on the friends with whom you interact the most.

Real-time-web promises to be even smarter–using information about our past actions to define what we are truly looking for in a search and recommending pages we never would have found otherwise.

But as online information grows and is filtered over time, one overriding quality stands out: We are quickly breaking off into many niche markets.

Could this be an element of human nature? To make ourselves feel more significant, we constantly form into small ponds? Anderson argues it is something deeper than that. In clusters, we are more creative and productive. Cities are energetic hubs. In these niches, society seems to group itself naturally.

Perhaps this natural filtering process is our natural way to seek and define our individual identity…not a very socialistic tendency. Whatever the answer, I find strength in the thought that we are moving in the direction of greater collective autonomy and power. Editors can overlook a big story, but millions of users on the Web are less likely to be so neglectful. One must hope that the “collective wisdom” we hear so much about is truly wise and not just a lot of fluff.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

President Obama's virtual town hall gave organizers, including office on new media director Macon Phillips, "an ulcer" because the highest-ranked question was on legalizing marijuana.

This week I was fortunate enough to ask Macon Phillips, the director of the office of new media at the White House, how he is able to hurdle government bureaucracy and create some of the Web’s most innovative uses of social media for President Obama. We all know that the Obama campaign and now administration has set the standard for political engagement on social networks. I’m sure books will be written about just that.

Phillips talked unassumingly about how the White House is using new technology to reach larger audiences, get their feedback, and sort the feedback into manageable bites that then reach the ears of the most powerful man on earth. Phillips also talked about one of the toughest moments for his office, when President Obama responded to questions submitted and voted on by online communities for an Online Town Hall. The conference made headlines when the top-rated question had to do with legalization of marijuana. The President made light of the question asking what that said about online communities. Phillips said the experience gave him a very rough few days in the White House, not to mention an ulcer.

I was glad Macon Phillips took my question (and follow-up) and even happier with his great answer. "Never start a sentence with Twitter" when proposing a new social media strategy to your boss, he said.

What I most wanted to hear, though, was how Phillips sells these cutting-edge ideas internally. Social media is all about trial and error. And when you fail in social media, you do so very publicly (case in point: The question about weed).

Philips said the key was not to frame the conversation in terms of the tools. “Never start the sentence with ‘Twitter,’” he said. He said he convinces the President’s office of the importance of engaging in social media by emphasizing the potential impact. “Wouldn’t it be cool to get thousands of people to watch the President talk about health care and then give him a way to answer their questions in real time?” Is more effective than confusing social media skeptics with lots of technical jargon about the tools that will be used.

He couldn’t have given better advise to the audience. Phillips was speaking to 125 non-profit professionals who work in Washington, DC at the Oct. 22 White House Networking Reception. While non-profits are often touted as the industry most on the edge of social networking, we are far from immune from the knee-jerk responses to innovation. Especially in a year that has cut back so many non-profit budgets, it can be hard to justify spending valuable staff resources on tweets. Social media can feel intangible, abstract and unimportant.

But it’s not.

More and more, we’re seeing that the organizations that embrace social media, are the ones that survive–and flourish. Phillips is at the cutting edge, and we would all do well to follow his example.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This week I had the distinct honor to interview longtime investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. His office was a love story to journalism of days past. It was filled with piles of boxes, papers, files, notebooks, awards, and books written by him. He even had an old typewriter on top of a filing cabinet. He takes all his notes by hand and only types on the computer when the story is final. No database of contacts, just scribbles on the backs of yellow legal pads.

Newspapers are closing. Does this mean an end to quality information? Not if you believe Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody"

Unsurprisingly, he had a very negative view on the future of the profession to which he has dedicated more than 30 years.

But I’m not so sure I agree with Hersh’s pessimism.

I truly value quality journalism (and in the interest of full disclosure, I am paid to say that). But I’m not so sure that professional journalists are the only ones that can give us quality news. And with dropping circulations, shuttered newspapers, and a widely-held business model going up in flames, we may all be stuck relying on online collaboration to do journalists’ dirty work of keeping politicians honest, businessmen ethical, and communities connected.

Clay Shirky spends 344 pages illustrating what will happen when the masses organize without formal corporations in Here Comes Everybody. Shirky points out that social media is based on very different principles than large organizations.

For one, in social media, collaboration is king.

The most successful social tools are the ones that started small and relied on a community. Through trial and error, and by incredible collaboration, they grew incrementally bigger. Take Linux, which now runs on some 40 percent of the world’s servers. The brainchild of Linus Torvalds, Linux began with an unassuming note on a discussion group. All along the way, Torvalds sought help from a community of developers and promised to implement the best ideas. This collaboration proved to be one of his keys to success.

Steven Colbert teases Craig Newmark for destroying the American newspaper then asks him how he comes up with the idea. Craig's answer is true to Shirky's definition of success for social organization: He put collaboration front and center.

Now, apply that to journalism.

Many analysts blame the rise of Craigslist.org with the decline of the newspaper industry. Craig Newmark started Craigslist with much of the same humble community awareness that went into Linux. He saw people using the Internet as a way to help eachother out, and decided to do the same. Newspapers missed the boat. They put brand and tradition ahead of the community’s needs, and as a result they missed an opportunity to provide a useful tool that could have, in turn, raised their popularity–and their profits.

New Ways to Produce the News

In the new era of social collaboration, Shirky says, quality content can be produced by hundreds of tiny contributions.

Take Wikipedia, a community-created and maintained encyclopedia. Since 2001, this collaborative Web site has been a growing source of information on every topic from asphalt to astrophysics.

And it has the news.

Minutes after the 2005 London bombings, there was a Wikipedia page with a few sentences of what had happened. In the first five hours of the page’s existence, Shirky says, more than a thousand edits were made. Members of the Wikipedia community linked to traditional news outlets, and to phone numbers for people trying to track down loved ones. The page that was never touched by a professional journalist was a hub for vital information. Oh: And it didn’t cost a penny to produce that information or share it with the public.

Powerful Forces

The forces of social media have proven to bring real results. In May of 1992, the Boston Globe published more than 50 cases detailing abusive behavior by Catholic priests, specifically Reverend James R. Porter, who was accused of sexually abusing children in three different Boston parishes. The stories produced outrage, and the church criticized the media coverage as unfair. Despite the scandal, no priests resigned and no legal action resulted.

This online community formed in response to newspaper articles regarding scandal in the Catholic church. Their organized outrage brought real results.

Compare that with a similar scandal in 2002.

Same city. Same newspaper. Same appalling behavior by religious leaders (this time it was Father John Geoghan, a Catholic priest who had abused children at parishes over a 35-year period). The difference? Technology enabled outraged readers to organize and demand action.

When the story broke in the Boston Globe, blogs, e-mail and discussion forums allowed readers to forward the information on to their own networks of friends, parents, and colleagues. An organization of concerned Catholics formed to demand change. And they brought results: about one year after the formation of the group, Cardinal Bernard F. Law, then archbishop of the Boston Diocese, resigned.

In ten years, the technology was developed for communities of like-minded individuals to unite forces. So instead of a newspaper article creating a wave that eventually died away, it created a tidal wave of action around the world. And it brought a powerful institution to its knees.

If online organizations can produce those kinds of results, I wonder:

Could it be that creative collaboration online could produce collective wisdom surpassing that of the professional news industry?

Time will tell.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/opinion/19baris.html

I am curious about the increasingly familiar crash of big business. Big media are falling to their knees with free advertising on craigslist.com and audience numbers dropping with widespread access to information online. Wall Street seems to be following the same track – though I won’t pretend to understand why.

The established media moguls seem to be perplexed with what to do with the new world order the Internet has created. So, they cling to old models, proclaim that newspapers will never die and continually dig their heads deeper into the ground. But not all of them …

I listened to an interview with St. Louis Post Dispatch’s Will Sullivan and loved that one of the Post Dispatch’s solutions to make a profit is to create a number of niche papers and Web sites for different interests and communities. The Post Dispatch is the paper I grew up reading and every time I go home to visit, I’m increasingly depressed by the poor quality of reporting and the pathetic amount of original coverage. But I think this new business model of diversifying and appealing to different communities and interests is a fascinating one.

Digital media experts like Amy Webb say the best thing you can do to get the word out about your work/product/service/etc is to put it in as many different portals as you can. So it does seem logical that by big media going small, they’re really going to find more success.

I also heard a presentation at the Knight-Batten Awards on Wired.com’s Wiki-scanner. The scanner tracks down IP addresses of people who edit Wikipedia and uncovers conflicts of interest in the entries. For example, Exxon Mobile deleted the entire section in its own Wikipedia entry on the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I notice a few back stiffen when the presenter said the resulting information is better than that which would result from the best team of investigative journalists because of the sheer quantity of people with different opinions looking for information of interest to them. The result: the most interesting information rises to the top based on number of votes.

Of course there are plenty of other models that may work out for these big media companies that have the honorable goal of bringing quality information to their communities. But I like the thought that maybe we’ll be going back to our roots when small, neighborhood businesses and not massive chains were the norm.

Who knows, maybe the same painful process will take place in the financial industry!

Either way, the massive democracy of crowd sourcing is taking over, and I think the masses will come up with a better world than the big business owners have done over the last few decades.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.