Cole W. Camplese

Social Networking Now More Popular on Mobile

A recent study from Ruder Finn revealed that Americans are spending nearly three hours per day on their mobile phones. And what are they doing there? Educating themselves, conducting business, managing finances, instant messaging, emailing? All of the above, as it turns out, and then some. But perhaps the most interesting finding from the new data is the fact that more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. It appears that the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC.

via www.readwriteweb.com

I find this to be true for me as well -- I tend to spend more time connecting to Facebook and Twitter from my iPhone these days. It is rare for me to even have a Twitter client open on my Mac. The mobile apps seem so robust and I can actually spend some time looking through things instead of bouncing in and out of focus. I even have different workflow while using Twitter on my iPhone ... when I see a Tweet I want to do more with I just email the Tweet to myself to check out the resource later.

Community Question: Lifestreaming

With the closing of several Google services I've been thinking about some of the content I (and a bunch of other people) publish across the social web. So much that I want to get some ideas about what many of you think about it all. If you step back and think about how many new people are joining and actively participating in social networks, one has to consider where we go from here. What do we do to protect the emergence of our meta identities -- each crafted in small pieces across many networks. As a simple example, take a look at the emergence of Facebook with adults ... according to a new report issued by the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey:

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now.

That is a whole lot of people creating lots of real data about themselves and their relationships. Even if you don't worry about closures or server meltdowns, consider the following from a post on Read Write Web:

The most obvious example of this loss of access to lifestream data? The inability to access anything beyond beyond page 162 on Twitter. No matter how many times you've posted, you cannot go back any further than 3240 tweets. So, every new public message you send removes one from your history. (To see this in action, simply add "?page=162" to the end of any Twitter user's default URL.) Those who had seen Twitter as a journal of sorts for recording fleeting moments for posterity, suddenly found those moments just as fleeting online.

I've talked to lots of people who think that their Twitter streams belong to them. The reality is that we are trapping our thoughts, relationships, and content in someone else's microblog. It has bothered me since we used Twitter in my CI 597C course -- much of the course dialogue happened in the backchannel there and much of it is lost. Clearly this only one small example, but I am guessing you get the idea.

So I am curious about what kinds of strategies we should be considering as we continue down this path? I doubt the answer is to stop participating -- the ship has left the port and it isn't coming back in. What do we think?

Should We be Worried?

As we race towards the release of our Penn State Blog pilot I am bumping my head into the same question over and over again -- will our students care? This isn't really something I am being asked by people in general, this is one of those nagging questions that one of the various voices in my head is repeating. We all know that students do live fairly digital lives and the fact of the matter is that they are doing it more and more -- especially when it comes to participation in social sites. Not sure if you've heard of MySpace, Facebook, or YouTube but PSU students have. Here's just a couple of data points for you from a November PSU PULSE Survey on social software usage at our University:

• 83% of Penn State students use Facebook (with the number at 90% at the University Park campus)
• 50% of Penn State students report having a MySpace account
• 85% of Penn State students report watching video on YouTube

So if you look at those numbers you can see they are consumers and producers of the digital lifestyle. You might argue that simply watching a video isn't really taking part, but if you consider that about 16% of our students have posted video you see that there is a solid percentage contributing (BTW, at 80,000+ students 16% is a nice number). The results of the survey are not really surprising, but they do paint a very interesting picture for us to build a case for new services and opporutnities at the University -- or do they?

At second glance I have to return to my question of will they show up if we build it. I am fumbling over this specific question and I am obviously going to take a wait and see attitude. Will they come out of their existing spaces to participate? Probably not ... but the better question is if we can come up with reasons to pull them out and participate in our environments. The funny thing is that when I say "our" environment I am actually talking about their space. We want to publish their blogs/media/stuff into their personal webspace so they can actually take it with them when they go. I wonder how Facebook feels when you say, "thanks for the free account, but I'd like to take my stuff with me." I can't imagine they make it all that easy.

Another strange thing going on with all this is the Facebook's CEO recent comments about becoming a publishing giant ... relying on new tools within the FB environment to encourage its users to create and contribute stories. I found it both very interesting and disturbing. I can say from experience that it is very hard to maintain identity at too many places ... in other words, blogging in both the FB and at their other PSU sites may be a lot to ask. They spend a lot of time in the FB -- consider that about 25% report spending five hours or more a week in there! I know from other results that is more than they report spending on homework and is close to half of the typical weekly class load!

So, the question is being asked again in my head -- will our students care? I'd like to know what you all think and I am really interested in seeing what we do about making it important to them. Or should we?