Social Networking: Our Leisure, a Corporate Asset

Diving into the digital age...

Who would have thought the internet would evolve this far? Who can imagine how far it has yet to go?
Social Networking, with a history of over 10 years, changing various forms and target audiences, has come to the point of being in the center of our virtual universe.. 
It began as a tool for communities, people who shared comon interests could gather up and exchange opinions.. There was no profit involved, and all early attempts with lack of support had no luck. At some point half way along this past decade, the major giants emerged (Myspace, Linkedin, Facebook).
Today Facebook alone counts well over 350mil. users around the globe. If you come to include more and more services, the numbers are vast.. This has come to change the way we preceive the world around us. It has also changed the way industry looks at the market, the consumers, the people.. us!
Specifically the advertising industry..

Information and Control..

If you think back (for those old enough to remember.. or even further back)..
In terms of today's media, very rughly, the story goes:
Signs
Newspaper
Radio
Television - Where it evolved the most
Internet..
Each of those categories took time and various paths to evolve.. Not planning to elaborate more, if you want, here is some interesting reading on advertising history..

So, with the introduction of intuitive targeted advertising, companies developed CRM applications in order to reach customers based on their purchasing trends, age and sex.
When it comes to the internet, services like Adsense (by Google) allow websites to display content relevant to the content the user is looking for..
Search engines return ads between the results of your queries..

Where does this all come together?

Indirectly, yet with this purpose, Social Networking services sell information on each and everyone of us individually. And by individually I mean down to the single entity..
We ourselves provide this information, we ourselves put the advertiser's scope on us.
An advertiser can chose a very detailed profile of the kind of person he wants his ad visible to.
I can be looking for young male people, in the age of 26, who recently wrote in their profile the word car *perhaps in the context of "looking to buy a new car" on their FB status..

It is a well put together system that the network will sell your leisure (your evergrowing need to share) to anyone who wants to bring something to YOUR attention (who will have a pay-as-you-go scenario to use this information)

Pretty soon geotag will enable Facebook to advertise kebab delivery that is right around your block..

And yet it is hard to tell... is this information manipulation? is this a benefit?
it is definatelly well documented as information ownership..

When you accept the term of use it is basically accepting to allow the service to sell your profile as a target to advertising and profit, in return for you to be able to expose yourself..

iPad vs Windows 7 powered Slates

First off, this post is a personal opinion and certainly open to discussion.

I hope everyone is happy after all this fuss about the iPad (giggles on the name), I will not comment, but I will say I told you so ( read iWhat? )..
Where was all this fuss when Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer presented the HP Slate Tablet? anyway...

But here are the facts:
Apple made a move with an oversized nerfed iPod touch, and probably a crippled portable OS.
Ok, that's it, maybe Apple will develop a new one in time that will correct some of the mistakes or omitted features of this first version.. (perhaps change the name too). What I am trying to say: "How many Apple iPads will we see this year?"

On the other hand, many of you have already witnessed the strength of Windows 7 as an OS and you already know it comes out with multitouch support.
Consider major manufacturers like: HP, Dell, Sony, Toshiba, HTC (big bet here), working their magic around Windows 7 capabilities on such portable devices..
Hec, put HTC's HD2 (even with the crappy wm6.5 core) vs the iPad already..

Who do you think will deliver by the end of the year?
Apple did not innovate with the iPad, the thought is out there for a long time now..

Place your bets, we are to see many great new things...

iWhat?

Never again has the unknown been so anticipated before..


Having witnessed for over a (wow is it a month already?) a relentless rampage of linking, posting, digging, tweeting and eating of endless minimal and always identical rumors, today we are reaching a turn point, where the unknown may be named, it's purpose unveiled and it's form revealed.

Yet everyone is already bragging about how they are getting one and what a great … it is..
Undoubtedly it will be a product of great innovation, sleek design and a vast functionality pool.

What does it do? What is it called? How much does it cost? Who is it for? And most importantly, why do I need it?

Why do we all want something we know nothing about?
We are setting the expectations bar too high.. And there's an upcoming wave of disappointment over a product that should have perhaps gotten a little less attention, in order to get it's full recognition, at least before it hit the market.


Enjoy a very humorous piece of reading:
RT chuck_gopal: Apple fanboys, forget the iPad/iTablet/iOversizediPhone... Check out the iThing! http://tinyurl.com/67xrn2

Regards,

Mah Private cup o' coffee..

Consider yourself waking up every morning, getting all washed up, having your breakfast and leaving for work. You may take your car, walk because work is just around the corner (lucky you), or take some means of public transportation. As you arrive, maybe you want to stop by the cafe next door to grab a cup o' coffee. Then you enter your building, the elevator, walk the corridor and arrive at your desk. Ok, now stop and rewind...

Imagine yourself doing all this while wearing a funky t-shirt that reads: Your name, e-mail, perhaps phone number, D.O.B., your sexual preferences, your status, and a couple of pictures of you sunbathing half naked in some beach.. All this, just above your home address with bold letters. If this does not scare you, maybe your goal was already for all people around you to know everything about you..

There's at least 15 different websites you have registered in possibly with your real name, D.O.B. and several more personal details. And even if you think you keep some things to yourself, think "what things do I keep for myself in each of those?".

On a daily basis, and each for his own reasons, people add even more content to further expose their details, achievements, experiences, educational background, work and all kinds of things they think they are simply showing to their friends.

Not very long ago, we got introduced also to services that allow you to make your mobile device's GPS upload your location and manipulate it in a series of ways:
post a comment about a place, show where you just took that pic you automatically uploaded, or even update your location on a map service in a 5 minute interval.


There's a great deal of reasons one would like to keep his privacy, and starting with the most simple one, its friggin' scary to feel exposed!
An other common one is to protect sensitive data (do you remember that your date of birth is one of the things a bank may verify your identity with over the phone?)
Maybe your secret question for the e-mail you have your paypal on is your pet's name.. Perhaps under the pic of you and your dog you should erase that "Me and Woofy".. Or you should untag your teacher in the photo of your first grade alumni pic.

No one broke into houses before doors with locks were invented... No one stole cars before they existed...
No one vouched for the internet as a safe place. We live in an era of information, and information no longer exists just in a safe spreadsheet. You can gather it a piece at a time with careful investigation until you can generate a full picture of what you were looking for. Like solving a puzzle.

Taking this back to the geotag thing, I need to say, I love technology, and geotag is a great innovation for some applications. It freaks me out however to think that any guy could walk up to me and say "hey look at my smartphone! That dot next to mine is you right? Parmezana?"

Any sort of information you put on the internet is like getting out your window and shouting to the whole neighborhood what you wrote, reeeaaaally loud..

I am a FB and Twitter user myself, so I am not trying to encourage you to stop using those services, but simply to be sure you understand how all this information you upload can be manipulated and used and weight your decision before you chose to share it.

"hello, world"

Figuring how to make a first entry to this blog took forever.. Maybe I tried this sentence a couple of times before deleting it again along with many others. This time it feels like it should simply be an introduction, a prologue if I may, of who I am, and why I.. perhaps decided to "share" my thoughts..

Thinking back.. further back, at first there were forums you'd find teenage me popping a few lines amongst others, discussing small and insignificant things, like what a character in some series did in that episode, or how that specific type of food compares to the other.. Eventually I realised myself had subconsiously withdrawn from all this debating, discussing or spamming as soon it came to look like.. There's no clue as to what brought that change of heart, and it is not something that took time to happen.. Perhaps in a 3 month's span? It's not long, is it? I had began to believe that no matter what I had to say, it don't matter, it's all spam to this chaos of information, and perhaps not interesting enough to bother.. heck, I once witnessed a car crush where flips and air-time was involved, and by the time I got home, I didn't really find interest in sharing that even with my family.. Is there something wrong here?

10 years later, things haven't changed that much.. Well not untill I got introduced to Twitter.. A bit of a late adoption, and even slower adaption. Almost at the point where I had almost lost interest in the service (because face it, you gotta want to share something to use it) I read things having to do with how Social networking will eventually make the term "privacy" bring to mind only a settings tab in some random website we expose ourselves through. It already has. Those things are long in my head and it seems there's lots who welcome such change. So here I am, finding myself comenting again. There's several patterns I saw myself react to, but let me generalise it for now around:
The innovative and/or* improper use of the web, technology and the massive, yet ever-growing social engine.
(*both mutually exclusive and as a subset)

The internet is mutating. Information is becoming unstable. More and more personal data is encouraged to public exposure.
This is the context I am planning to blog on, and I will use this for anything I can't fit in 140 characters.
I will not link to this first entry afterall, thanks for reading it if through an other..

Best regards,