I joined twitter 802 days ago on 17th May 2008. Since then I have sent 2,623 tweets, an average of just over three a day. Not too bad for anyone who thinks I spend too long on the site.
In June, according to twitter COO Dick Costolo the micro-blogging site had 190 million users, growing by 300 thousand a day. These users were generating 65million tweets a day – that’s enough for twitter to be building its own brand new datacentre to handle all the traffic.
The Child Exploitation and Protection Centre (CEOP) and Facebook announced an initiative that gives Facebook users direct access to CEOP’s advice and reporting centre from their Facebook homepage.
The initiative is not based on a standard panic button solution but on a CEOP Facebook App and a CEOP Facebook page. This means that only users who install the app will have direct access to CEOP.
I have met CEOP CEO Jim Gamble during the course of meetings between CEOP and the ISPA and understand the hugely difficult nature of their job. CEOP volunteer staff have to spend much of their time looking at horrendous photographic evidence of child abuse. It isn’t something that a person can do for too long due to the mental stresses involved.
The success of the whole Facebook initiative depends on whether or not the CEOP app becomes viral. To facilitate the distribution of the app, Facebook has agreed to support the initiative via an advertising campaign.
CEOP deserves your support.
Just seen a wall post on Facebook from a friend warning of a virus being sent out from his account. Next minute I got a Direct Message from him with a link in it. Fortunately I had just seen his warning and was able to delete it.
This is going to be a problem I can see. I wonder what can be done about it?
How is Facebook a business tool? It is interesting to understand how people use it at work especially considering that businesses do get concerned about staff wasting time. I have in the past defriended someone because they seemed to do nothing but talk about their car whilst working from home.
A quick snapshot this morning of status updates by my friends show:
MD of a wireless networking company
someone I used to play rugby with
VoIP Technical Authority from one of the worlds leading communications electronics manufacturer
international product manager for cellular handset manufacturer
renowned ISP consultant
university PhD student
international tech journalist
UK Member of Parliament
international cricket website
rugby playing prison warder
gateway presales engineer
MD of international telco startup
product manager for mobile network
global voip and social networking guru
owner of a social media startup
networking engineer
rural broadband activist
It doesn’t matter what the nature of the conversation is between my Facebook friends. It is rarely to do with specific business issues. The point is it is just a hugely productive tool because it builds up an ecosystem of contacts that makes it easy for me to talk business with them another time, and not on Facebook. It is the internet version of a round of golf.
Following this morning’s post regarding the use of Facebook to announce school closures due to bad weather a huge proportion of the UK’s scholastic community has taken my advice.
There is now a group on Facebook called “Its far too dangerouse for colleges and schools to be open on the 6/1/2010 “, currently with 31,795 fans, and it can only have been created today! Of course the poor spelling in the name this group is clear evidence that the schools need to stay open tomorrow – even longer than normal perhaps. They can all huddle together in the English teacher’s form room and larn 
Good luck to them – anyone for a snowball fight?
Friend Lindsey Annison commented today on Facebook that both her kids’ schools were shut today due to heavy snow. Their websites , however, had fallen over and were not accessible to view the announcements.
It didn’t stop the kids finding out though as the news spread like wildfire on Facebook and via SMS. Seems to me that every school should have a Facebook Group controlled by the staff even if it is just an intranet/forum. It would grow content far more quickly than a traditional school website (if there is such a thing) that depends on the good offices of an enthusiastic member of staff to maintain and update.
Last year my wife, who is a supply teacher, struggled for an hour through the snow to a school only to receive a text message announcing its closure just as she got there! She doesn’t use Facebook though .
Readers living outside the UK will perhaps struggle to understand these problems - this country grinds to a halt the minute the first snowflake hits the pavement. Two snowflakes almost constitutes a snowstorm and kids all over get ready to build snowmen. Most schools in Lincolnshire are open today, much to the extreme disappointment of the Davies clan.
Those of you in the UK watching the Christmas Number 1 music chart battle between the X Factor winner Joe McElderry and Rage Against The Machine may or may not have realised they were watching the power of the internet in action.
Hundreds of thousands of people signed up to various Facebook Groups supporting Rage Against The Machine and have been hugely proactive in getting people to buy their song to keep the X Factor out of the top slot. My son Tom for example was regularly posting on the subject. There were active strategy decisions going on to discuss optimum methods of hitting number 1. How many times to buy the song from where? This is teenagers spending their (parents’ hard earned) pocket money.
Of course this is a fairly frivolous and trivial use of the internet. A bit of fun. It did strike me though that there were other far more deserving causes that could hugely benefit. Global warming for example. The world’s politicians appear to have been letting their voters down at the Climate Change Talks in Copenahagen, regardless of what spin we might be getting from them after the event.
I even thought about starting a Facebook Group on the subject. Then it occurred to me that there might already be one so I took a look. There already is one.
These are the results of a Facebook search for “Rage Against the Machine” followed by those for “Climate Change”
You can see for yourself which is the most popular.
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1 476,980 fans
rage against the machine – RATM 466,612 fans
Rage Against The Xfactor 326 fans
YES…Jedward has gone!-lets get rage against the machine no.1 
326,991 members
RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1 – BACKUP GROUP 176,737 members
Rage Against The Machine 49,165 members
Slow Climate Change 55,599 members
COP15 – Climate Change – JOIN AND INVITE ALL 49,826 members
Climate Change 1,634 members
Climate Change 407 fans
The biggest challenge I think is how to get the Facebook Generation tuned into issues such as climate change so that they can make politicians sit up and listen.
PS I didn’t buy either of the singles myself. I imagine we have enough copies around hte house now though for me to legitimately have one if I chose to
As usage of the internet grows it has of course totally changed the way people interact. It seems as if I sometimes don’t see my seventeen year old, Tom for days on end but it doesn’t stop me communication with him. We just chat on Facebook.
The image this portrays is of online addicts (of which I confess I am one) buried in their PCs for hours on end ignoring everyone else in the house.
This might well be an unfortunate by product of the internet age. I do however think that this is a phase we are just going through. As technology improves it will give us more control over our lives and allow us to start living again.
This is very much likely to be the case in what might today be called a dormitory village. Most people in these places commute long distances, buy their groceries from superstores on their way home (or online) and village life becomes an impoverished cousin of its glorious social past.
In the future the internet will take away the need for these people to commute, for at least some of the time. The efficiencies that will come will give people time to physically reconnect with others in their local environment and village life will come again. Maybe the village shop and Post Office will reopen!?
In the meantime I have to clean my rose tinted spectacles, get back to my 16 hour day and someone somewhere needs to get around to putting fibre into that village.
PS Tom does occasionally update his photo on Facebook so I do keep up with what he looks like as well. Kids change so quickly don’t they?
Following on from the Jeff Pulver #140 Conference in London yesterday I’ve been trying out a new toy.
This is the Zi8 HD digital video camera by Kodak and I have to tell you it is a stunner. Presented to me yesterday by Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak the HD video quality is outstanding and it is extremely easy to use.
My kids have already latched onto it and started playing with it though rapid adoption by children is not necessarily a pointer to how easy a gadget is to use – technology comes naturally to them.
The camera facia comes printed with the YouTube and Facebook logos, which is a strong enough hint for even the dumbest of users.
I’m not going to bore you with the camera spec. What I will says is that the 75MB of the 59 second video below is well within the 2GByte allowance that YouTube gives for a single video!
The video is presented below for all to see. It’s no professional production and I note that I should have combed my hair first – I’m desperate for a haircut. That’s showbiz folks.
The Zi8 is groundbreaking and although I’m no expert I have no hesitation in recommending it after just a short test.
You may have noticed that this blog doesn’t major on gadget reviews. The point here is that this another contributor to the growth in bandwidth usage as people start to upload more and more HD footage to sites such as YouTube. What goes up once of course gets downloaded many times, assuming it is any good. It’s a worry for those of us having to manage ADSL backhaul bandwidth but that’s progress for you.
I just put one of my kids to bed via Facebook. He had already been sent up to his room but I could see that he was still online – almost certainly using the wifi connection on his iPod touch.
The IM conversation went like this:
Tref oy
Tref bed!
Joe ok
Tref goodnight
Joe is offline
I know that the cynical amongst you will decry this as poor parenting but pshaw I say. It is modern life – location independent fatherhood. There is still, however, no replacement for a real cuddle which is dispensed regardless of the age and sensitivities of the offspring.