Digital Content, Marketing and Disruptive Technology Consultancy
Seeing as it’s one of my first projects since joining Absolute Radio, and it’s the first iPhone project I’ve worked on, it’s been great to return from holiday to find this:
Absolute Radio LiveAmp - Top Ten Paid iPhone app
Yep, that’s the Absolute Radio LiveAmp at number 7 in the list ofthe Top Ten Music Apps in the iTunes store. For just 59p you get photos, videos, event info and a Twitter stream from the best live events in the UK.
Now to crack the top five!
Once upon a time, there were three prominent microblogging platforms, Twitter, Plurk and Jaiku. One became incredibly popular, one introduced a side-on view, and one was acquired and then released by the Google Fairy Godmother.
Others fell by the wayside, including Pownce, and Rejaw.
But how do they compare now, after the mainstream adoption of Twitter:
Obviously this doesn’t tell the complete story, as it tracks web visits only, but it’s safe to assume it’s proportionally correct. Twitter’s close to 25 million Unique Visitors, Plurk is holding steady between 250,000-300,000 for the past year, and Jaiku has dropped from 70,000 down to 30-40,000 for the last two months measured.
In fact, it’s not even winning the Open Source Microblogging Platform war – as Identi.ca has grown slightly while Jaiku declined.
Meanwhile, Google has listed the 46 official accounts it has on Twitter.
And in the meantime, we’ve seen the rise of Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck, internal microblogging such as Yammer, the blend of micro and macro blogging in Tumblr and Posterous, and video and audio blogging with the likes of 12 seconds and Audioboo. Not forgetting the lifestreaming element of the likes of Friendfeed.
And although we talk about forums, blogs and Web 2.0 social networks as if they’ve reached the endpoint of their evolution, there’s still a lot more to come from them – I’d say the social elements of the web aren’t even 15% of what they’ll become in the next 10 years.
The question is how you as a person, you as a company, or you as a developer can find clarity through it all…
(There is also the question fo what Google were thinking re: Jaiku, and how it’s managing to miss out on the rise of Open Source as much as it did on the rise of microblogging – after all, the platform itself doesn’t appear to be the cause)
I neglected to write about my fellow speakers at the ALPSP event, mainly because I was enjoying a bit of time off for the last week.
There were great presentations from Ros Lawler of Random House, Phil Archer from the W3C Mobile Web Initiative, Steve Paxhia of Beacon Hill Strategic Solutions (With whom I got absolute soaked in the storms that hit en route to the station), and Gail Robinson from TSL Education Ltd.
But the one presentation that really kept me thinking was by Alex Evans from MediaMolecule (The developers of LittleBigPlanet for the PS3). It was interesting as a videogamer, someone interested in game theory, someone interested in encouraging user generated content, and someone interested in developing business and revenues in the changing economy.
But he also highlighted a very important law – one which was applied to programming, but in my mind applies equally to marketing, PR, and to almost every aspect of a business.
It is:
…organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations
Conways Law was originally introduced in 1968, by Melvin Conway. And for me it encapsulates a lot of the challenges I’ve encountered, whether it’s been for a large company, a group of volunteers, or in my current role.
As much as a system designed may mirror communication structures – communications will mirror them just as much. That’s why things tended to be more rigid and evolve more slowly in a larger, more traditional company which was constructed around a defined hierachy.
It’s also why a flat structure of volunteers led to challenges that seem to have proved even more insurmoutable since I left – trying to encourage business attributes from non-businesslike creative people.
And it’s why I relish my new challenge – listening and engaging with a team packed full of ideas, and then herding those cats into the most effective order.
You might want to sit down, but I’ve just spent some money on physical entertainment media. Or to put it another way, I bought some books and DVDs for the first time in ages.
I’d actually been looking for a work-related book which doesn’t seem to be available in bookshops, so that will be an online purchase, but in the meantime, I though I’d treat myself.
Interestingly, I’d spent a while choosing the unavailable book, so was at a bit of a loose end, and ended up coming out with three purchases – and as far as I’m consciously aware, I hadn’t seen advertising or media reviews etc of any of them:
Buyology: How Everything We Believe About Why We Buy is Wrong
Code: Version 2.0
And from the non ‘tech geek’ world, I also picked up:
Lukas Moodysson Presents (4 Disc Box Set) [DVD]
I thought I was all done, but there wasn’t any peer recommendation to prove this whole social media thing.
Until I got home.
The first I heard about the Xbox Live only release of Battlefield 1943 was via two friends of mine as we chatted. I hadn’t been online on the Xbox for a while due to the work/commuting/family combination, and as a result, I hadn’t been looking at gaming sites.
And within 10 minutes, I’d paid 1200 Microsoft points (About £10 or so), and downloaded the game.
It’s having a number of server issues at the moment, but the basic game is pretty good, and the online distribution of a ‘full’ game is interesting.
It’s being followed up today by the release via Xbox Live of 1 vs 100, which is an online gaming show with real prizes, which should be interesting.
Peer recommendations and loyalty aren’t new, of course. But generally they’d be prompted for me by either an event (my plumbing has broke, who can fix it?), or by media awareness (this game is coming out, is anyone else buying it?).
It seems as if the weighting has now changed, and the peer/loyalty aspect is what then might result in someone sharing a helpful media review, or just leading me straight to a purchase.
