88% (85% Q1) of Facebook’s revenue is coming from advertisements. 41% (30% Q1) of that is already coming from mobile advertisements. There are over 1 million active advertisers according to Facebook’s latest report. The growth is driven significantly by local businesses. Continue reading Facebook moving advertising on mobile
Category: behaviour trends
Social media, privacy, new user generation – does old medicin of Facebook still work?
Interesting report from Pew Internet & American Life research program how behaviour of younger generation is changing. Both idea what to share and where seem to in transit. Continue reading Social media, privacy, new user generation – does old medicin of Facebook still work?
EU data protection regulation – right to be forgotten
70% of EU citizens are worried about misuse of their personal data according to EU justice department. One might think are the remainin 30% in groups of ignoranda and unaware. Naturally nobody wants misuse of personal data.
source: European Commission
One way to give control to indiciduals is the defined “right to be forgotten”- rule. Tricky part is how that can be implemented.
From individual point of view it is impossible to know where you have left some information about yourself while wondering through web. All systems are storing huge amounts of information in their logs. Picking and deleting few individuals out of that might prove to be tricky. Easy answer would be that no-one is allowed to store any logs, but that would be quite huge change effort for all systems running in web. For example my blog remembers you visiting here and staying on this page, which is basic functionality for all web based applications.
From company point of view this rule would have big impacts on need to invest renewal of systems so that unwated data can be deleted. It would impact also on business models: imagine what amazon would look like without any memory of your earlier visits.
On the other hand, if right to be forgotten would be limitted on registrations into services like Facebook and such, what would be the benefit? Your information will be collected into different web services which are crawling the content all the time and you do not know from whom you should request you information removal. Check out Way Back Machine, it shows nicely what i mean.
So nice attempt to increase individual control on personal privacy, but naturally there are some minor details to be considered while implementing it.
Net attitude – details change, but thinking out of the box remains important over time
A book from history: beginning of this century. I don’t know if this book is anymore available anywhere. I started to read it out of curiosity: how development and future of internet was seen by this book?
Writer had interesting edge into story as he started to think about internet and its opportunities already during 1993. At that time they were considering if it is possible to monetize this new technology. While considering how, they came to conclusion that they don’t know.
Basically book is pointing out the handicaps of thinking that was common during early 2000. Most of those examples seem amusing ten years after, but if you abstract those though a bit there might be some relevance for today’s business world too. When you try to move your old business model into new environment you are making mistake. You need rethink what you are doind seizing the opportunities created by new environment. Some things might have changed to be mandatory, even they were considered optional earlier. Those companies who figure out new rules fasted, will gain the benefits too.
I don’t know if i would recommend to read the whole book, but rather consider the main thought: think out of the box when entering the new arena with new rules and especially consider your timing. It seem that often first mover advantage is a myth or lucky strike. In many cases second wave hits into more mature market and picks the berries.
Best technlogy does not always win – ecosystem plays significant role
An example of this kind of battle during last century was the one between IBM and Microsoft. OS/2 was more stable and advanced (multitasking) compared to Windows versions available at that time. It was taken quite well in corporate environment, but did not really ever take of among wider consumer audience.
I have a bit same feeling when observing current struggle between platforms for smartphones. Being able to figure out what is the appealing thing for consumers may again play crucial role for future of winning platform. Interesting to see if history replays itself and there will be one dominant platform complemented with few special interest group platforms and naturally open source platforms.
Why crowd sourcing works and why it doesn’t as source of online content
People like to be experts, it is stated. Thus they want to share their expertice in restaurants, shops or different products among their peer group. This works conveniently for online services seeking relevant content.
It is also said that people like to utilize insight provided by those they trust as part of their purchase decision process, but there is a catch.
Challence 1: What is the motivation of the expert to create evaluations? Does volume go over quality? What is the relationship between expert and the target evaluated? These are not always clearly visible for those utilizing evaluations. Thus evaluator profiles become increasingly important for end user to be able to check relevance of evaluations.
Challence 2: If you want to use evaluations created someone you trust to have judgement, how do you find that among wast ammount of evaluations? Some services offer opportunity to prioritize those who belong to your own social media circles, but you do not neccessarily have an expert among people you know for all purposess. For these situations it would be neat to be able to select evaluations based on your own profile: people with similar values, preferences etc.
When tackling these challences in the back ground there is always the rude fact of small ammount of evaluations or limited capability to filter those. Usually inorder to get relevant and fresh evalauation, categorization of them is not really possible, because of limitted ammount or limitted information of evaluator to base categorization (language, date and stars is quite limited).
The way how people communicate has changed – todays multichannel interaction is harder to manage
People have now many new tools they can utlize for social networking and communication.
It will became increasingly easy to broadcast to many target groups, but at the same time, as communication is two directional, it will became more difficult to master all utlized channels. This will have interesting impact on popularity of different channels and the audience available in those.
Collection of information needed in online services becomes easier
People make personal information increasingly available into online services. A study done by Bovitzin shows that 70% of young and 77% over 35 years think that their private information should be kept unavailable. At the very same time over half of these people are willingly providing they private information to online services. Reason for this behaviour seem to be that people believe information exchange as integral part of social media. Interesting to see how this develops as utilization of shared data increases and both positive and negative effects become visible.
Open data provides new bulk source of infromation that can easily lead to new innovative online solutions as barrier of entry is getting lower. Ammount of open data sites is increasing rapidly as governments see increasing utilization beneficial for businesses and thus local economies.
Scoopshot is excellent example of information collection with crowd sourcing. Similar approaches are utlized in review sites, which make their users as content providers. This enables better coverage of online services also in not so dencely populated parts of real wolrd.