Google Wave

As written in the #140conf piece, we discussed the paradigm shift that occurs in social media.

Before we had written that piece I had not seen the Google Wave developer video that Google unveiled to developers.

The social media paradigm shifts almost continiously.  MySpace was all the rage and then Facebook opened up and took over. Twitter and Friendfeed are fighting tooth and nail for market share.

But the one thing in common that all these share is that they are a) propietary b) 3rd party stuff only available via API’s

At the conference in this video Google fired a warning shot into the sea of social media with their new App called “Google Wave”

If Google fulfills their promises made on the video, Wave will be an open source application runnable on your own server. Yet as you see during the demo, even though you are running your own Wave instance, you can interact with other Wave instances and “the data is not saved by Google.”

This is pretty impressive if Google hold true. They have interfaces built for Twitter, Google Maps and others.

If the developers will embrace it, it should yield some pretty interesting things.

The paradigm shifts again………

There were over 60 presenters, each presenting their points of view about the role of Twitter and social media.

The conference was held at a especially relevant time due to the Iranian elections and the twitterstorm on #iranelection.

Twitter has played a role in many societal events, but probably none as publicized as the Iranian elections. Twitter has played a central role in the ability of Iranian dissedents to be able to have “free speech” and get the word out. Unfortunately as in most dictatorial countries, dissent is punished by arrest by the basij, or the Revolutionary Guard.

This turn of events prove @jeffpulver’s remarks in his opening remarks that Twitter has democratized information where anyone and everyone’s voice can be heard.

Twitter has started to affect people globally and to change their thinking globally instead of just locally. As @scoblezier said, “People are starting to care as much about global now, as they once did about local – real-time analysis will continue to improve and only help make it better”

Not surprisingly, Twitter has changed the paradigm in which people interact with each other. As @mkokc  stated “People are looking for one another in the most basic human way – Twitter has become our little Town Hall, our ‘Mayberry’, like a good back fence neighbor”

For an example of that, just follow the tweets on the hashtag #iranelection. You will see concern from people for people that lives thousands of miles away, tweeting advice to help those people.

The paradigm with which we are communicating with each is continuously changing.  As the paradigm shifts, the platform developers (i.e. Twitter) will have to change to align with that paradigm shift or risk becoming irrelvant. As people think up new uses for social media and those uses start to become mainstream, the way people interact will contine to change.

Global activism will also continue to increase in use, especially as people start to see how effective that the use of social media was in the Iranian elections debacle and social media will continue to play a part in the activism.

If you weren’t able to make it to NYC for the #140conf, #140conf in Los Angeles and #140conf in London are scheduled for this Fall 2009, follow #140conf for more info.

Two Domino’s Pizza employees in Catawba County, N.C., took it upon themselves to pull a stupid stunt and videoed themselves sticking food in bodily places and then placing it on the food that was being prepared.

Then not satisfied with that prank, they uploaded the video to YouTube where over 1,000,000 hits were accumulated before the video was taken off by YouTube.

The 2 employees were fired and arrested on criminal warrants.

Immediately Domino’s set out to contain the damage.  They did not have a Social Media presence before this incident, but have since used YouTube and Twitter (@dpzinfo) to talk to their customers about the situation.

Damage has been done to the dominos brand and Dominos is doing what it can.

Has Dominos already had a Social Media prescence and a following, might they have been more successful in defending their reputation?

At the very least they probably would have known earlier than they did.

Patrick Doyle, President of Dominos has done an extraordinarily good job of using Social Media to communicate with his customers.

1)He laid out the facts

2) He stated the employees had been fired.

3) He stated they closed the store and sanantized it.

4) He stated that they were getting criminal warrants for their arrest.

5) He communicated how seriously they took this and their reputation.

But had they been monitoring their brand 24/7, the damage would not have been as severe. There are many ways in which to track your brand.

But companies need to have a social media crisis plan in place. Not just traditional media.

Thats what hurt Dominos is the fact that the news broke in the social media sphere and instead of addressing it where it started, Dominos went to the traditional media, only getting to social media much later.

To Facebook’s credit, they have launched a group called Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities for user to input their comments on how Facebook should use the data.

It shall be interesting to see if the enraged masses care enough to actually post on there and tell Facebook what they think.

Mark’s post doesn’t even address this issue.

Alexander is spot on in asking this, and this is what we should be asking all of our social media providers.

Mark Zuckerberg has responded to the mass posting all over the social media scene.

Click here for Mark Zuckerberg explanation about the the TOS rewrite

This has generated a firestorm of publicity, mostly negative, about the TOS for facebook and inviting futhur scruinty to the other social media players.

In all fairness, you are presented with the TOS before you accept your accounts, and you SHOULD read those TOS. If you don’t like the TOS don’t sign up for the service.

That being said, Facebook’s TOS seem extremely aggressive, especially when your content is concerned.And the fact that they are changing this TOS to be this broad and over-reaching is disturbing.

Dr. Amanda French did a outstanding analysis of the TOS of Facebook and the different social media players. Click here for this insightful post.

A synopsis of French’s analysis of Facebook TOS (credit: Amanda French)

1. “Facebook apparently wants to keep all its rights to your stuff after you remove it from Facebook, and even after you delete your Facebook account; they just removed the lines that specified that their rights end when your content comes down. Nobody else (of those I looked at) would dream of that; mostly they specifically state that their rights to your content end when you remove the content from their site or delete your account.”

2. “This one kills me: Facebook claims it can do whatever it wants with your content if you put a Share on Facebook link on your web page. Unbelievable–and unique, as far as I can tell. People can post links in Facebook to your content just by copying and pasting the URL, but if you want to save them a few keystrokes by putting a link or a widget on your site, Facebook claims that you’ve granted them a whole mess of rights. Count me out.”

3. “Other sites point out in their terms of service that you still own your content: Facebook doesn’t mention that little fact. Facebook also neglects to remind you that you’re giving other Facebook users rights to your Facebook content, too — YouTube, for example, makes it clear that other people besides YouTube have a right to use and spread around the videos you upload. In general, other sites’ terms of service just have a more helpful tone.”

Myspace TOS (credit: Amanda French)

“MySpace does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post on or through the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain any such rights that you may have in your Content, subject to the limited license herein. By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace a limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on or through the MySpace Services, including without limitation distributing part or all of the MySpace Website in any media formats and through any media channels, except Content marked “private” will not be distributed outside the MySpace Website. This limited license does not grant MySpace the right to sell or otherwise distribute your Content outside of the MySpace Services. After you remove your Content from the MySpace Website we will cease distribution as soon as practicable, and at such time when distribution ceases, the license will terminate. If after we have distributed your Content outside the MySpace Website you change the Content’s privacy setting to “private,” we will cease distribution of such “private” Content outside the MySpace Website as soon as practicable after you make the change”.

6.2 “The license you grant to MySpace is non-exclusive (meaning you are free to license your Content to anyone else in addition to MySpace), fully-paid and royalty-free (meaning that MySpace is not required to pay you for the use on the MySpace Services of the Content that you post), sublicensable (so that MySpace is able to use its affiliates, subcontractors and other partners such as Internet content delivery networks and wireless carriers to provide the MySpace Services), and worldwide (because the Internet and the MySpace Services are global in reach).”

Twitter’s TOS (credit: Amanda French)

” 1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.”

2. “We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.”

So as you can see, Facebook stands along in its aggressive TOS

To read the complete analysis, check out Dr Amanda French’s post

The country of Yugoslavia was dissolved about  4 years ago in 2003 following a civil war and the country of  The Federation of Serbia and Montenegro were created and given the domain name .cs

Before any domain names could be assigned, last year the Federation was split into the actual countries of Serbia and Montenegro.

ICANN in their new plan is going to assign .me to Montenegro and .rs to Serbia. The plan is expected to take 2-3 years to completely be implemented.

Source: CNN

Google has unleashed a new service called “Shared Stuff” that allows you to share or e-mail any web page with your friends.

You drag a “E-mail/Share” button to your bookmark bar in your browser, which allows you click the button on any web site that you feel that is worthy of sharing with your friends.

There is also support for sharing on Facebook, del.icio.us, and Digg.

The shared stuff is publicly visible and it allows you to share stuff on the web.

It also allows you to see how many times a web site has been shared with other people.

Check out the “Shared Stuff” link on Google and see who is sharing what!