Sitting in on the meeting between her and my internship supervisor Tim Lovitt was a great experience. I will confess the majority of what they spoke about was a bit foreign to me so I had to write down everything then look it up afterwards;
- VC: Short for venture capital. Venture capitalists follow angel capitalists, and reflects the financial stage that Facebook is currently facing.
- Indexing: Data structuring in order to improve the speed of operations.
- Rogue AI's: The bad apples of artificial intelligence. Science fiction related.
- Incubators: More specifically technology incubators are facilities which offer a nurturing environment for individuals and businesses to develop commercially.
- The '.com' boom: A period marked by the emergence of new internet based companies referred to as 'dot-coms'. The novelty of the dotcom concept saw shares in 'dot-coms' boom.
Apart from the meeting, I spent the majority of my research time learning about Twitter and how people are using it in different ways. One small village in the US uses Twitter to 'Tweet' messages to residents of the community including roadworks and weather warnings etc. It keeps everyone connected and well informed. Although there are many stories of businesses using it successfully, its challenging to think of an innnovative way to use this application, as everyone that uses it tends to be more concerned with what they are 'Tweeting' than other peoples 'Tweets'.
If that is the case, then how do you get people to listen?? I think an important thing to remember with social media and specifically social networks is that you must add value to the network before it starts adding value to you. If you offer an honest and engaging connection, the connection will grow.
Twitter is also in danger of becoming a mini-myspace...people don't really care about the content of tweets, it's all about how many followers you have - myspace (as you may know) is really terrible and full of junk but it's all about how many friends you have and that's it, the platform and it's interactions is becoming irrelevant.
ReplyDeleteTwit.fm is a cool application of twitter - it mashes up last.fm and immeem's music databases with twitter so you can tweet links to music (I have an @glitchhop account where I just post quality glitch-hop tracks...I have 3 followers!
I agree with you Luke, that Twitter is risking becoming the next Myspace. However, to respond to Lorien, yes, you do have to build value into yourself or company etc. in order for people to find you worth following. I use Twitter to keep up with people that have established reputation in their respective fields, by following them it gets me access to their world, and what they are currently interested in as well as gossip and thoughts, allowing me to know them on a more personal level. When they respond.. it's that EXTRA cool :)
ReplyDelete