Futurity Media

Sometimes we get the opportunity to stand back from our most pressing work commitments, and gaze across the technology landscape at the changing Internet. We are frequently told that social media is a work in progress, and is still its infant phase. So let us ponder where it may go in the coming years. What follows is idle future pondering, scenarios almost. Please do not take the following as a forecast.

Twitter will not last without a radical reinvention

The increasing openness between networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – will increase. Status updates on one will be seamlessly available to all, and also embedded in Microsoft Office applications, in collaboration tools, with SMS and so on. Status will be your thought’s, your retweets and @’s and also your car’s GPS location, and your appliances’ status (you’re washing machine will let you know when the cycle is complete). In fact the ability to display status updates will be as common a function as voice: completely commoditized.

Imagine a future Facebook interface which selects your real friends, the people you have interacted with on Twitter (or the like), or that have used common hashtags. Powerful algorithms will serve up only the status and conversations you are likely to find interesting. So what value in having an army of followers that is not listening to you? Will those that are currently trying to greedily acquire social captial now find their efforts were in vain?

I believe the effect of this evolution in social media interfaces (not the networks behind them) will help to cut down a lot of the noise.  In terms of which social media applications will dominate, the winning environment will be the one with the best usability and the best distribution because being a walled garden isnt going to last.

Junk content will get worse before it gets better

Ever wonder what happens when you pay “writers” $1 for a 1000 word? It ends up as a How-To article on websites funded by Google Adsense revenues.  Many (not all) of these sites operate without any accountability whatsoever. What’s wrong with this? People are paid a pittance to plagiarise, cut corners or simply write with fake authority about subjects they know absolutely nothing about. Hundreds of millions of pages of junk content is clogging up Google. While bedroom publishers can build an economic model based on Adsense, don’t expect any self restraint.

This is not to say that How-To sites are the only ones manipulating or exploiting dubious online content to gain Adsense revenue. There are many technology sites doing this also, grabbing articles about popular brands and scurrilously twisting the meaning into something sensational. The best of the Adsense-funded sites are enthusiasts with not enough time to check facts; the worst simply don’t care at all about veracity. Their only interest is traffic because now they have a direct correlation between views and cents.

Eventually we will stop reading and the noise will quieten down

Looking further ahead – 10 years for instance – and the verbal diarrhoea generated by UGC and copy factories will be on the wane. As more and more of the content we will view becomes video, audio and spoken-word menus, our reliance on scanning stories for what we want to know will disappate. Natural language-based search (sometimes called the semantic web) will make it easier for us to go direct to the information we want. Intelligent agents will learn our habits and interests and will interoperate with these search tools to ensure that each search is really, really targeted. And the widespread deployment of touchscreen interfaces – in work PCs, the living room TV, in-car computer and the home control panel – will gradually break our century-old connection to the keyboard. Intelligent speech, search, profiling and interfaces could combine to end the rule of the Word on the internet

So which of these scenarios could come true? What other futures for media/social media can you envision?

Ever wondered how Google search has joined up all bits of your life that you previously needed a secretary, PA and office assistant to accomplish? Well check out this 1 min ad – featuring the awesome band The National. Watch, learn the lyrics, buy gig tickets and plan your journey within a minute. In truth, think I need at least a whole album to plan that much, a lot of procrastinating along the way….

Google says “Every search is a quest. Every quest is a story. These videos show that anyone can do anything when paired with the power of search.” They’ve showcased some other amusing ads here. Not sure about Kerouac’s On The Road powered by search. It would kind of undermine it wouldn’t it?

My apprehensions about the #Likeminds social media event was that it would be a love-in among insincere folk selling sincerity services. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Nearly all of the people I met over the course of two days in Exeter were genuine, enthusiastic and passionate about social media.

And I learned a lot from the sessions – about Chris Brogan’s jealous Followers that need regular loving, to Olivier Blanchard’s discovery of disconnected organisations that are listening to social media but unable to channel listening into doing; and debates about the future of journalism, paywalls, bloggers and brand advocates.

And the networking and discourse (a true Socratic symopsium?) at an event like this was far more informative and vibrant than any of the hundreds of technology conferences I have attended in my working life.

But the lasting thoughts that I left with is that of noise and the inability to filter it out. Every moment of the Likeminds event was caught on iphone camera, on Kodak Zi8 and of course the ubiquitous Twitter tap tap tapping. A multiverse of content was generated on this most sociable of days. Ok, as a consumer of this data (rather than producer) I can dip in an out.

But how much juicy content am I missing? Fear of this, and a desperate desire to taste everything, as it happens, means that I am monitoring social media streams 24/7.

It has to stop. The noise has to be filtered out somehow.

The future of publishing, of blogging, of social media, will depend on some way to filter.

I’m thinking about how I can do this with my own work – Futurity produces up to 1000 articles are year, with ideas inspired from a vast array of sources. I need to organise and filter this, and in doing so, capture underlying trends.

When I trained in Futurology (a dumb term, I know), we learned how to think slowly, see real changes behind the vapid. But it’s getting harder to do this since the advent of the social media. So how can we learn to filter?

Your thoughts please?

#stewartbaines

Tonight – my first experience of #Likeminds – and I’ve got more questions than answers. I came to this social media event, which was highly recommended as one of the best on the social media calendar, hoping to learn about the positive impact social media has had on companies. I find that the problem with events like this is that a load of consultants and small agencies are essentially pitching to each other, and there are very few leads. Scattered around though, are some very bright, very persuasive people who have far more experience than I do in engaging enterprise acolytes.

Nonetheless, I did learn something tonight – you can’t fake sincerity. If you want brands – whether B2B or B2C – to engage with social media, particularly blogging and Twitter, you need to find interesting, enthusiastic contributors  that enjoy what they are doing. You can cajole, poke, threaten or bribe consultants and other knowledge workers in enterprises to participate in knowledge sharing, you can persuade them of the need to build their own social capital, but you can’t convince them to be sincere.  So what does it take to convince people to be sincere? Tomorrow I hope to learn that . In the meantime, how do you think we can encourage corporate  bloggers to be sincere?

#stewartbaines

A new report from the UN warns that the environmental dangers of e-waste is set to explode with the increasing use of PCs, mobile phones and consumer gadgetry worldwide. It says that unless countries  take action to collect and recycle e-waste, many developing countries will be left with (even bigger) mountains of hazardous toxic e-waste. The report predicts that e-waste from discarded mobile phones will be seven times higher in 2020 compared to 2007, and 18 times higher in India. Two to four times as many computers will be dumped in South Africa and China, and five times as many in India. China already produces 2.3 million tonnes of e-waste domestically and remains a major dumping ground for developed countries despite having banned e-waste imports. How to deal with this waste is a growing problem, and the report acknowledges that simply transferring existing recycling methods from more developed countries is unlikely to work.

Existing controls for e-waste recycling are already weak, as demonstrated by a Greenpeace investigation that followed a TV from the UK to Nigeria where it is dumped or the materials recycled using less than safe methods. With the poorest being involved in trying to extract materials such as lead, cadmium and mercury e-waste, Greenpeace say its up to the manufacturers of this equipment to stop using toxic chemicals in its manufacture.

Normally, we like to post finished articles, but in this instance, I’m going to post my request-for-information.

I’m writing article for the good people at Silicon.com on the pains and barriers of deploying social media in the enterprise. I have a number of issues that I am struggling to deal with. So, in collaborative writing kind of way, have you got any answers?

Either leave a comment at the bottom of the post, or send me a tweet (#stewartbaines) or email (stewartbaines at futuritymedia dot com)

1. Can enterprises truly engage in social media then they are “anti-social” organisations (argues Benjamin Ellis). Is this true? Is the profit motive inconsistent with sharing (which is intangible)?
2. Should enterprise social media stay under the radar (with small projects) until you have an ROI and then roll-out extensively?
3. How do you identify social media champions in an organisation, how do you motivate them (without financial rewards)
4. How do you get those with the most knowledge to share their knowledge when they are increasingly working to time sheets with minimum no. of billable hours? Surely those with “knowledge capital” are disinclined to convert this into “social capital”
5. If you can’t demonstrate ROI, will participating in social media ever be written into a job description
6. What happens to social networks in the enterprise, when you remove the champions (e.g. they move jobs) – do the networks collapse? (I’ve seen some evidence to suggest this does happen with immature networks.)
7. How do you measure the value of enterprise social media in terms of marketing/PR terms, particulalry in B2B space? My point is that traditional B2B marketing was all about segmentation based on job title, location etc. Social media is so scattergun, and your audience typically doesn’t fit the segmented target audience (i.e you can hire an agency like Futurity to be your social media mouthpiece but what are you getting back for that, in terms of increased sales, or raised profile in your target audience.

Your thoughts, comments, corrections or criticism very welcomed.

UPDATE: I am going to be at Like Minds social media conference in Exeter on Friday 26 February. If you, or a client, is going to be there and has something interesting to say, I’m happy to meet up.

#stewartbaines

My Futurity colleague Steve Costello points our that for some public sector CIOs the need for power (i.e. being a big spender) is more important than looking after the public purse. Here’s a post he wrote….

An interesting paradox was reported in the UK IT press recently, when one of the UK government’s Chief Information Officers revealed that if he cut his IT spending by too great a sum, he would be excluded from an informal “club” of top purchasers which has a significant influence on informing cross-departmental policies and procedures.

In addition to writing text at Futurity Media, we’re also doing video and audio. This is an example of a recent podcast that we did with Orange Business Services in Herndon Virginia. We were talking to Current Analysis analyst Amy Larsen DeCarlo about cloud computing from an enterprise viewpoint. Where is the technology heading? What applications are suited to it? How are early adopters using it?

As well as all of the wonderful corporate blogs and customer publications that we manage for industry leaders  like Orange Business Services, Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper Networks,  Airwave, TelecityGroup and Vodafone, we also still like to get our hands dirty with the nitty gritty of the technology businesses. Writing white papers is never easy but does give us an opportunity to really get our teeth into some pretty cool technology. In the last couple of months, we’ve written reports on M2M telemedicine, M2M applications, Cloud Computing and enterprise perimter security. The latest is a report on femto cells (or small cells) for Alcatel-Lucent. Bell Labs performed an extensive five country consumer survey (and I mean extensive) on attitudes to small cells and mobile broadband. So while pundits may argue mobile operators should be paying the costs for network in-fill, a surprising number of people are prepared to buy their own femto cell if it provides an significantly improved mobile broadband experience. I know I would.

If you’re interested in what people would do with a femto cell at home, check out this white paper that we wrote for Alcatel-Lucent: Alcatel-Lucent small cells whitepaper

This will probably come back to bite me….

I love my iPhone, it’s indispensible. I run with it (tracking my distance and speed), i’ve used it when i’ve been lost in the mountains, i’ve checked train times, used maps, watched TV episodes when I’m on the treadmill in the gym, search recipes in the supermarket, found recommended cocktails when wandering around the West End, and listen to audio books on the Tube. I’ve even used it to have multi-way, international Skype conferences while I’m stuck in a service station on the M1. It’s properly integrated with out MS Exchange, so i have pretty seamless communications.

For me, its the personal and portable nature of the iPhone which has become indispensable – and i think augmented reality apps (when mature) will entrench the addiction even further.

So what of the iPad? Its seems to me predominately a device for using at home – although yes it would make a great accompanyment to a long haul flight if the 10 hour battery life for video playback is a genuine.

So what would I use the iPad? Which of the dozens of location and office productivity tools that i have on my iPhone will be useful on a tablet that spends most of its time in the living room?

I’m sure that the enduringly innovative app developer community will prove me wrong, and before you know it there will be a plethora of compelling and addictive iPad apps – but it seems to me that the most likely use of the iPad in my home will be the web and possibly TV series. I already purchase TV through the iPhone and connect to my giant plasma screen using an AV out cable so that’s not nessarily a new feature. The iPad doesn’t have HDMI either. Or USB. And its 4:3, so not great for most of today’s video content.

And so to the Web – the Web that requires so many plugins and updates that allow you to view the broad spectrum of file formats. Like Flash – the iPad does not offer in-browser Flash. Kind of dumb in my humble opinion.

Apple in its rather closed, limited environment, would rather that you were a viewer or consumer of the Web rather than a contributor to it, they would rather you purchase your leisure time through iTunes than finding you pleasure spread throughout the four corners on obscure site. I cannot believe that the iPad will offer me a sufficiently flexible and rewarding experience as my £500 laptop, with which i can download all manner of content and plugins. My cheapo Dell Vostro is light enough, with a long enough battery life, to support most of the living room browsing I need. A Windows tablet would probably do the trick if i really wanted a tablet. Or maybe the new Chrome OS ultra-mobile PCs.

So for me, the iPad is just a little bit too much. Just like the Touch, and the Apple TV. A profitable niche perhaps, but unless you are a Mac lover (I’m not), the tablet in my living room will need to be a lot more open than an iPad.

There are some more objections here: http://technologizer.com/2010/01/27/my-first-25-questions-about-apples-ipad/ and this wonderful sanitary towel courtesy of failblog.

@stewartbaines