Social Media Gone Anti-Social?
Like many web agencies Social Media has been on our radar for some time.
For those who want a useful introduction on the revolution check out You Tube.
This internet phenomenon has almost gone full circle from being the most dynamic and leading edge way to communicate to information overload.
The web is abound with satire about individuals producing virtually meaningless ‘tweets’ of limited value taking the “What are you doing?” prompt a little bit too literally. Twitter can be inundated with the volume of individual tweets that the site temporarily overloads and that is when ‘fail whale’ appears!
But Social Media is not trivial. Many organisations are taking it seriously. The British Library, who claim they house “The World’s Knowledge”, prominently feature social media feeds on its website and they are not alone.
How are we at Click Suite embracing this new technology?
Most of our staff use Flickr for photos, Facebook for personal contacts, LinkedIn for professional contacts and Twitter for sharing ideas, thoughts and links.
And, in case you haven’t already heard, we created a social networking toy of our own. Recently Click Suite sponsored the popular Webstock 2009 conference in Wellington, where we showed off The Suite Spot.
This was an experimental visualisation of the thoughts, pictures and news generated by the Webstock fans and participants. We aggregated all the social chatter from Webstock 09 participants into The Suite Spot. The content could be experienced in three ways:
1. On a website. Where you could explore what people were saying via their blogs, Twitters, Flickr or TXT messages.
2. On a gestural screen in the lobby. Here individuals could swim through a sea of feeds just by moving their hands in thin air.
3. On a giant screen in the conference auditorium. Here the entire audience could see what others were saying in real-time.
The experiment proved that there is value in bringing together otherwise disparate social networks into a single view. In the same way streams feed into rivers and rivers flow into the sea, The Suite Spot become the end-point for a mesmerising social experience.
Which social networks do you use (if any)? Do you find social media useful in your job and life?
