Farmer in Your Dell - October 16th
Synchronicity: In an early episode of the TV show “Brothers and Sisters”, one of the characters loses his cool, shouting “Get a Filter” at a family who shares everything, all the time, with no forethought. The bottom line is that sometimes the best communication happens with a little editing. Since the advent of writing, human beings have had this ability, sometimes referred to as asynchronous communication. So even though the Wall Street Journal predicts the end of the e-mail era, chances are, it’ll be around at least a little longer.
Repetition vs. Reputation: As the social media world evolves, etiquette is often assaulted, but rarely vanquished. Many heavy users of Twitter have engaged in the practice of repeating their “tweets” several times a day, in order to catch the attention of people in different time zones. But this has led to a backlash, as people become weary of seeing the same messages flash across their status update screen over and over. Techcrunch reports that Twitter has addressed this problem — kind of. They have now blocked duplicate tweets that appear anytime within a 24-hour period. As one commenter noted, however, all they have to do is add a blank space if they want to fool the system.
Evolve or die! In the Darwinian world of high technology, innovation is constant and aggressive. One new adaptation in social media that may prove to have a competitive advantage is Google’s new “wave”. It promises a high level of interactivity –users can message each other, edit documents together, share media, and decide who they want to be communicating with. Best of all, wave’s creators have not defined exactly how it “should” be used. What remains to be seen is how the predators (spam, porn, etc.) will adapt. Like cockroaches, they seem to be indestructible, even in the face of evolution.
Farmer in the Dell: The agricultural-industrial complex has gone virtual. Which is to say that every day there are more and more online users of the game “Farmville,” by Zynga. In fact, according to USA Today, Zynga’s most popular games (which include such illustrious titles as Mafia Wars and Sorority Life) garner three times the audience of Twitter. What makes this so astonishing is that users who get hooked on these games are spending literally millions of dollars on “virtual” products that they can buy or give to others. Yet this bodes well for the internet. Why? If good money can be made through innocuous games that people play and share with others, it stands to reason that at long last porn is no longer driving the development of e-commerce!
