The World Cup is under way in South Africa. For a soccer fan, being able to watch 3 games played by the best teams in the world every day is a dream come true.
To me, what has been particularly interesting this time around is how the media has been pulling all the stops to show, communicate and broadcast the games – there’s TV, mobile, newspapers, radio, live commentary on blogs, Twitter and lots more.
It’s been really cool to see that visualizations have been used so widely, sometimes to illustrate an on-going game, sometimes to put results in perspective.
This one is from the New York Times, for a live game, Greece vs. Nigeria:
This visualization represents Brazil’s performance in World Cups:
There’s a lot more, for example here, here, and here, just to mention a few.
It started in the mid-nineties. Pretty soon, everyone wanted to have a web page. Services like Geocities and Tripod made the set up of a web page a simple task and soon enough, millions of users had a place on the web they could call their own.
Fast-forward a few more years, into the early-2000s, and the free web page phenomenon is losing steam. As it turned out, managing a personal web page, even with a tool like Geocities, was too much work. Writing posts, managing images, creating links, choosing templates was not something people wanted to do every day. Not to mention the ads shown on people’s personal web pages, which degraded the experience and made it feel impersonal.
Around the same time, a guy named Evan Williams built a tool called Blogger that made it possible for everyone to use the web as a true personal publishing platform. No web site management required, just focus on the writing. Not too long, Blogger was growing by leaps and bounds, and was eventually acquired by Google. Successful story.
In the mid-2000, Evan does it again, and with a group of colleagues, creates Twitter, a micro-blogging platform that becomes more powerful and influential than Blogger by at least an order of magnitude. What makes it special? Unlike a blog, whose posts tend to be at least a couple of paragraphs long, a tweet can’t exceed 140-chars. Who has time for a “long” blog post anyway? 140-chars here and there and you stay in touch with friends and family. Twitter raises more than US$100 million from investors and is at the center of the new social media craze. More than 50 million people create Twitter accounts. It’s a category defining product.
Early in the 2010′s, a new service is beginning to gain in popularity. Foursquare lets anyone communicate their location by “checking into” places with their mobile phones with the press of a button, nothing more.
The fact that we are moving towards a one-bit communication culture is undeniable. We want to be able to communicate quickly, but we don’t want to give up control over that last button press.
A simple graph that explains so much. (via Flowing Data)
Seems like everyone is talking about the new Google Wave product, demonstrated at today’s Google I/O event. Of course, it will be much easier to have something to say about it when we can all use it, but it looks very promising.
Not too long ago, all we had was email. Then IM came blog. And then blogs, wikis, Twitter and now Wave. All of these different communication tools bring something new to the table. What’s truly astonishing is how quickly communication technologies have morphed and evolved over the last decade.
One communication angle that I’ve exploring at Slife Labs that I haven’t seen too much out there yet is what I call activity awareness – communicating and staying in touch through the broadcasting of activities. I think there’s room for this form of communications in our arsenal of communication tools, but that’s a topic for another post.
From the 37Signals security page – “the world’s most respected brands trust our web-based products to run their businesses”.
Interesting. Just goes to show how effective and pervasive the Obama movement is. The brand has staying power. And the logo looks good right next to Adidas, Trek and Kellogg’s.
Last week I watched the vice-presidential debate on TV and followed the Twittosphere’s reaction live on election.twitter.com. This new site by Twitter works like a filter for all tweets coming through the system. It is nothing but a page with incoming tweets that refer to the election and the candidates.
Visiting election.twitter.com during the debate was entertaining, and also a distraction. But in my view, it represented a social media breakthrough. It was the first social space tied to a live broadcast event that felt compelling to me. The idea is not new by any means, but Twitter made it happen. In fact, Twitter lends itself perfectly to these sorts of social applications.
I expect Twitter to be doing more of this in future. If they don’t, they will be missing a great opportunity. And there’s no reason not to do it. Tweets by themselves can be very noisy, especially if you are following lots of people.
When you add a layer of categorization to the messages, tweets from anyone can be potentially interesting. With topical groups, which could be static (“Baseball”) or dynamic (“Red Sox vs. Angels Live”), Twitter would become more useful, focused and powerful.
Friendfeed recently added rooms and I am subscribing to a few feeds there even though I don’t have an account with the service.
Do it Twitter!
Twitter is down a lot, as anyone who tried to use the service knows well. But at least they have the coolest artwork to show in their 404 pages, especially designed to match their UI and theme.
This is what I saw last week when Twitter was busy and couldn’t handle any more connections.
Just came back from a quick trip to DC.
US Airways is advertising a cool system where you can find out information about your connecting flight by sending them a txt message from your mobile phone.
I didn’t have to use it, so I don’t know if it really works. But it’s certainly a good idea, a nice SMS application.
