From Social to News
Social media news is getting into the traditional media narrative more easily and more often; http://eicker.at/NewsMedia2013
Tagged: Distribution Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Everyone’s News
Everyone has become more adept at using digital technology and social media to distribute news; http://eicker.at/NewsMedia2013
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Gerrit Eicker
Twitter News is Mobile
Twitter news consumers tend to be more heavily mobile (smartphones) than the public at large; http://eicker.at/NewsMedia2012
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Gerrit Eicker
News Organisations: Twitter Limited
News organisations use Twitter in limited ways: primarily to distribute their own material; http://eicker.at/MediaTwitter
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Gerrit Eicker
Publishing Timing
SocialFresh: When is the best time to publish online? To achieve social shares? Traffic? http://eicker.at/PublishingTiming
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Gerrit Eicker
Brands are Publishers
Battelle: All brands are publishers, learn how to be a good one; http://eicker.at/BrandsArePublishers
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Platform
Facebook F8 amplifies the Facebook Platform: Like, Timeline, News Feed, API; http://eicker.at/FacebookPlatform
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Gerrit Eicker
Forbes: “[T]here’s no question – Facebook remains the most ambitious, most technologically sophisticated, fastest-moving Internet company. The changes announced [at F8] were as big as anything the company has ever done – to turn Facebook into a real-time engine for seeing what your friends are doing and joining them right now… The changes are all big, but perhaps the most interesting is that Facebook is becoming a real-time communication service. … Longtime tech pundit and thinker Esther Dyson posted on Twitter today that Facebook was launching the ‘semantic Web’ without calling it that. Good, because hardly anyone ever understood what that meant. … In order to launch these real-time features for its platform, Facebook needed a way for users to access them. That’s why it launched the ticker earlier this week. … The best way to think of Facebook is as infrastructure – the social infrastructure of the Internet. Zuckerberg believes Facebook has far more to gain over the long term by reinforcing itself as a universal platform than by any other means. … Granted, it is potentially problematic for one company to own an essential piece of Net infrastructure.”
SG: “Without a doubt, [the] major keynote at f8 2011 showed Facebook to be making some major changes in the very near future. Starting with a whole new layout and set of functions they’re calling ‘Timeline‘ and moving through app enhancements that have the potential to change the way we use apps on all platforms, we’ve got a guide here for you, the Facebook user, to easily understand what you’ve got in store. This is Facebook as it will exist starting at the tail end of 2011. … There is a new class of application on Facebook now called Open Graph. This class is defined by three principles: Frictionless experiences, Realtime serendipity, and Finding patterns. The goal here is to have subject matter (games, music, video, social apps) spread to friends via friends in as enjoyable a manner as possible.”
AF: “According to Zuck[erberg]… ‘A record 500 million people used Facebook the same day. We’re connected now. The next era will be defined by the social apps that use these connections. … But there’s more to us, to our deepest conversations. You want to express the story of your life in terms of the most important and meaningful parts of your life – this is the heart of your Facebook experience.’ … Facebook has created a new class of apps to deal with the next version of open graph. Facebook’s mission is to make world more open and connected. They want you to have a more personal experience. … Now you’ll be able to eat a meal, hike a trail, and so on, and the activity shows up in the news feed. This means Facebook is adding verbs to the connections in the social graph. … GraphRank may be the new EdgeRank. What do I want to see in the news feed versus someone’s timeline? Different types of relationships work differently – work friends versus family, for example. And this is probably going to integrate the new friends lists and family categorizations.”
Guardian: “While Facebook is keen for its users to stay on the site for as long as possible, Zuckerberg has consistently emphasised that the site is a ‘distribution platform’ to other media companies. – The social network has moved to strengthen its ties with media partners in recent months as it moves closer to its hotly anticipated initial public offering. Facebook was recently valued at $66.5bn on secondary markets. Its global revenues are expected to reach $4.3bn in 2011, up from $2bn in 2010, according to the research firm eMarketer. … [Zuckerberg] wants Facebook to be the centre of your web experience. That’s the purpose of the redesign of the ‘timeline’ – the river of experiences recounted by your friends. Rather than being a river, he’s offering the chance to organise it, with the photos and videos. … The key is that he wants Facebook to become the de facto authentication mechanism of the web.”
Green, TC: “I was one of the first people to join Facebook in February of 2004, and launched one of the inaugural applications on the platform in May 2007. The new Facebook profile and Open Graph announced…, along with the launch of smart friend lists last week, is going to usher in a new era of the Facebook platform. And I believe entire industries will potentially be revolutionized by social, from travel to reviews to health to e-commerce, and of course charity. … I am confident we will see major sectors, from music to reviews to commerce, revolutionized by authentic friend-to-friend interactions. We are fortunate at Causes to have a big start in one of the largest markets around, the $300 billion giving market. It is anyone’s guess if the other major categories will go social with their current leading companies, or if entirely new ones will emerge, like Zynga in gaming. Either way, it will be a fun ride.”
RWW: “Facebook significantly scaled up the amount of information it tracks about you – and many millions of other people. The once humble status update field has been expanded to include 6 types of ‘life events.’ You now automatically share data about what you’re reading or listening to. … Here’s a quick summary of what’s changed: A new Subscribe button, allowing you to follow people you aren’t friends with, plus filter the amount of information you get from current friends. Improved friends lists – easier way to group people into lists, including via semi-automated ‘smart lists.’ A News Ticker that streams a constant flow of user updates in a sidebar (on top of your chat bar). A newspaper-like relevancy filter for your Facebook homepage. Instant sharing of what you read, listen to and watch. A new Timeline profile (a colorful history of you and your ‘life events’).”
Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora’s First Year
Diaspora: from 4 to >100K users, from 0 to >7K commits, from alpha to beta soon? http://eicker.at/DiasporasFirstYear
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Gerrit Eicker
Diasporial: “[September 15th] is a very special day for the Diaspora project. It has been exactly one year since the guys released the Diaspora source code! For a year now, people have been able to contribute to this project and set up pods. And so they did! Till date, 7371 commits have been made by the contributors and the four founders. In only a years time, the amount of Diaspora users has grown from 4 to over 100.000, spread over lots of pods! … It is rumoured that Diaspora will hit beta in November, on its Alpha release anniversary.”
Diaspora: “We know that if you’re not a contributor and don’t follow us on Github, it’s hard to see Diaspora grow and evolve. Now that Diaspora is moving into its second year and a new phase of development, here are some numbers on the progress we’ve made. … Our developer community is growing. Diaspora has had over 100 unique code contributors and countless others have edited our wiki and updated Diaspora’s translations in over 51 languages. We have over 4,600 followers and over 840 forks, which means that tons of developers are checking out our code. That makes us the sixth most popular project on GitHub, right behind great open source projects like JQuery, Ruby On Rails, and Node, just to name a few.”
Diaspora: “There’s been big news in the social networking world recently, and we can’t help but be pleased with the impact our work has had on two of the biggest developments. We’re proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles. And now Facebook is at last moving in the right direction with user control over privacy, a move spurred not just by Google+, but more fundamentally by you and tens of thousands of community members, as well as hundreds of thousands of people who’ve lined up to try Diaspora* – that is, by all of us who’ve stood up to say ‘there has to be a better way.’ We’re making a difference already.”
RWW: “There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it’s decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered. … Diaspora has been called the anti-Facebook for its strong privacy stance, and it had ‘aspects’ before anyone knew about Google Plus and its circles. … If Google Plus has taught us anything, it’s that normal people don’t feel like leaving the social networks where they already feel settled. … Is there anything Diaspora can do? I think so, but it’s a departure from it’s current incarnation, which is an awful lot like Google Plus (or vice versa, or whatever). It’s unrealistic to expect a mass exodus from one social network that works to another of which no one has ever heard. Diaspora’s potential is in its ability to syndicate to our other services (currently Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) while still allowing us to own our data. … If Diaspora is built as a publishing platform that lets us own our content and direct it to our existing networks – and especially if we can read from them, too – it would be an awesome, welcome tool that even Dave Winer could love. But if the launch of Google Plus wasn’t splashy enough to start a mass Facebook exodus, a later launch of a service that looks the same is not going to do it.”
TNW: “Diaspora has never pitched itself as direct competitor to the likes of Facebook – more an alternative model for how social networks could be designed. However, it’s gained a reputation from observers as ‘that quirky Facebook alternative that never quite made it.’ Whether there’s a need or desire for its product or not, it seems there’s life in the Diaspora team yet.”
Some ‘historical’ Diaspora posts here on Wir sprechen Online:
- Diaspora rockets on Kickstarter, 15.05.2010
- Diaspora gets funded with $200K, 03.06.2010
- Diaspora’s first month and first progress, 04.07.2010
- Diaspora works! 27.08.2010
- Diaspora Alpha, the developer release, 16.09.2010
- Joindiaspora.com opens its doors in private alpha, 24.11.2010
- Diaspora summary, 20.07.2011
Gerrit Eicker
MagAppZine
Digital publishing with MagAppZine: Give us 15 minutes [and a PDF]. We’ll give you an [iPad] app; http://eicker.at/MagAppZine
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Gerrit Eicker
MagAppZine: “…is a New York, NY based company founded in 2010 by former Apple employees who teamed up with an Adobe engineer to create the ultimate digital publishing tool. – MagAppZine allows publishers to create branded apps for their publications and distribute them to the world via mobile devices like the iPad, opening up their business to a whole new audience while maintaining a lower overhead. – The company’s slogan, Publishing Gone Digital, reflects MagAppZine’s mission: to give all publications the opportunity to distribute their content in the most modern way without spending an exorbitant amount of time and money.”
MagAppZine: “The creation of your branded MagApp and deployment onto the Apple App Store [starts at $2,994].”
O’Reilly: “Is the platform targeted toward a specific kind of publisher? Paul Canetti [founder]: ‘Clearly the name brings in magazines first and foremost, but the tool itself is really applicable to all sorts of publications. Anything that can be a PDF is fair game. I have a lot of conversations with small book publishers looking to create a bookstore app on a particular topic or as a branding tool for the publisher or a specific author. It is my philosophy that you should be everywhere your readers potentially are, so when someone searches for you on the App Store, it’s you that they find.’ – How can book publishers use the platform? Canetti: ‘The bookstore app is really cool, and chunking up books into collections fits nicely under the umbrella of the app. I’m also excited to start seeing sub-divisions of books – selling chapter by chapter – or using the subscription functionality to have a sort of book club app or a series where new content is being released regularly. … We’re also rolling out a new tiered monthly pricing structure that has plans starting at $99 a month.‘”
RWW: “It’s a white label, DIY app-publishing platform that is limited to PDF uploads, website viewing in an in-app browser and in-app sales of multiple issues of any publication. It looks really well thought out, simple and accessible. The price is about to drop substantially, too with the Fall release of the 2.0 version of the service. … Can PDF-type content do well in an app store context? I’m not sure, but if I had print-style content to distribute I think I would give this service a shot. It looks much nicer, frankly, than magazine reading app platforms like Zinio or HP’s Magcloud (which I love in theory but never use in practice). I want to go directly to the magazines I want to read, not wander around some app store from the app store that’s 75% filled with magazines of questionable quality.”
Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora Summary
IEEE: The making of Diaspora. Four young coders are planting the seeds for the post-Facebook future; http://eicker.at/DiasporaSummary
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Gerrit Eicker
Wikipedia: “Diaspora (stylized DIASPORA*) is a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service, providing a decentralized alternative to social network services like Facebook. The project is currently under development by Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy, students at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The group received donations in excess of $200,000 via Kickstarter. A consumer alpha version was released on November 23, 2010. … Diaspora works by letting users set up their own server (or ‘pod’) to host content; pods can then interact to share status updates, photographs, and other social data. It allows its users to host their data with a traditional web host, a cloud based host, an ISP, or a friend. The framework, which is being built on Ruby on Rails, is free software and can be experimented with by external developers.”
IEEE: “Journalists and bloggers have called Diaspora ‘the Facebook killer,’ ‘the Facebook rival,’ ‘the anti-Facebook,’ ‘Facebook’s challenger,’ and ‘another Facebook wannabe.’ … The guys, however, don’t see themselves as competition. … They’re taking a stab at reengineering the way online socializing works by building an entire network of networks from the ground up. They hope that in the process they will help promote standards that other social sites … will use to bridge their services. … Choice, interoperability, and the chance to invent your own networking experience are what federated networks such the Diaspora pods are all about. … They don’t like that Facebook owns the data they share through the site and can mine or sell it to advertisers at will. … Above all, they don’t like that most ordinary people and many Web engineers have come to believe that seven-year-old Facebook represents the be-all and end-all of everything online socializing will ever be. … ‘The problem with Diaspora right now is it’s not designed to work with other providers out of the box,’ says Ben Zhao, a network security expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara [listen to an interview with Zhao].”
Diaspora Wiki: “Diaspora needs you! – Diaspora is an open source project, which means all our code and documentation is available for free to anyone online. It also means that, while there is a core team working on the project full time, it only thrives because we have a wonderful set of volunteer collaborators who help out in their free time. – Some of these volunteers are developers and help with the code, which is the ‘traditional’ way to help out an open source project, and is awesome. But many are not developers, and their contributions are awesome too. … Come talk to us. The best ways to get in touch in realtime are our Convore group, or IRC. Tell us what you’re interested in working on – code, tutorials, feature ideas, mockups, running a pod, helping with the wiki, other – and we can help you figure out how to get going.”
Wir sprechen Online. 
RWW: “When’s the Best Time to Blog und Share? – Anyone who spends their day on the Internet inevitably wonders this question. Should I start publishing later in the day, to hit the after-work traffic? Should I publish earlier in the morning, to catch commuters while they’re on the way to work? Or is everything completely random, driven by the off-chance that a post will end up on StumbleUpon and enjoy a slightly longer tail? Social sharing widget Shareaholic looked at its 2011 data, breaking it down to the top 100 days and times for sharing. See the results in Eastern Standard Time. … As most blogs know, the best time of day for social shares is between 8am and 12pm ET. Shareaholic’s data confirms this, showing that the most shares occur at 9am ET, moments before East coasters step into their offices to start the workday. Traffic declines throughout the day, spiking back up again around 9pm, and then slowly tapering off. Evidently, the best time of day to blog for pageviews is also 9am ET.”
SF: “Great content gets shared. Right? – But does the time and day that you publish that great content affect how much it gets shared or how many times it gets viewed? … We have some awesome data from Sharaholic on top days and times for getting your content seen and shared online. … If everyone is viewing content the most at 9am EST (they actually are), make sure your content is published and ready to be viewed shortly before then. … We wanted to take a look at two main metrics, social shares and traffic. If you want to mainly grow your social presence, getting more shares might be your goal. And for many, traffic is their biggest driving force. … Thursdays win out for the day with the most sharing. Social sharing in general is somewhat unpredictable pattern wise. But Thursday wins 10% more shares than all other days. In fact, 31% of the top 100 social share days in 2011 fell on Thursday. … In general, content later in the week looks to do better with sharing. … Pageviews also progress in a predictable order. Monday was top, then Tuesday is second, then Wednesday, then Thursday. We simply view more content on Monday and less as the week goes on. … 27% of all content shares occur between 8am and 12pm EST. – There is a spike at 9am and 10am and then a decline the rest of the day. There are also smaller but significant spikes in sharing at 2pm and 9pm EST. … The best time to blog for pageviews and social shares shares a lot of common ground, unlike the best day of the week. – Blog posts get the most views between 7am and 1pm EST on weekdays. The drop off of traffic is significant after that segment. … Also, use your analytics software to see what time zones read your content when.”
SF: “How to Increase EdgeRank and Add Fans in the Facebook Timeline – Historically, social marketers have widely accepted that once-per-day posting on Facebook was the right frequency of distribution to use to engage their Facebook fans. – A recent study conducted by bit.ly makes us think twice about this assumption, finding that the average shelflife of an update on Facebook is 3.2 hours before it disappears into the timeline and is no longer visible to users. … Using two different Facebook tools, we were able to determine the peak times when the fan volume for our page was high. – The combination of EdgeRank Checker and PageLever provides us insights that tell us the peak times that allow us to get our updates in front of as many fans as possible at the times they were logging on to check Facebook. – The best fan engagement time slots found were a spike between 6am and 8am and 6pm to 11pm.“