How to Win at Social Media? Use an Astronaut

Couple of hours ago, a Canadian astronaut who commanded the ISS (International Space Station) had safely returned to earth after his 5 month mission. But wait, what does that have to do with social media? Well, in case you didn't know, he posted a massive amount of videos on YouTube about space, Tweeted from ISS, and hosted a world (space?) first Google+ Hangout from Space Station.

The use of social media as an astronaut while on a space station is excellent publicity and it certainly brings in a lot of attention. Mr. Hadfield is a rather entertaining and knowledgeable fellow. He communicated with many mostly children and students who asked him how are ordinary activities done in space, and he promptly showed them. CSA's (Canadian Space Agency) YouTube channel is filled with many of his videos, flying around the space station, gulping bubbles of water roaming around the room, shaving, and eating spinach. Did you know they even have chocolate cakes and coffee on board? Check out this video:

Commander Hadfield tweeted from ISS, did many informative and fun videos and even played a live concert with participating audience on earth! This is just brilliant. An excellent use of social media to bring media attention, spur interest about space, actually teach us something, and mostly of all see how everyday life aboard the space station looks like. By the way, did you know they recycle 93% of used water? They even recycle their own urine into water, which evidently because ISS is an enclosed environment, the water is actually purer that the water we drink on earth.

Watching his videos makes me excited and wish I was an astronaut. Make sure to check out his video and let me know what you think!

Here's some external articles about Chris and the ISS.

Chris Hadfield and Social Media

Commander Returns to Earth

Would You Pay for YouTube?

There have been many speculations about YouTube offering paid subscriptions and apparently this will be implemented pretty soon.
We all know YouTube as the ultimate free video hosting website, and as much as I would like to keep it that way, I somehow knew that this would not continue on forever.

The service is planning to host couple of pilot channels to test out the changes. Reportedly, the prices can be as "low" as 99 cents and on top of that you get a free 14 day trial. Currently we know that there will be a couple of paid channels, two of which will be Sesame Street and Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).

To us, the users, this seems ridiculous; they want to us to pay for what we had free for the longest time. However, from the perspective of the broadcasters this obviously can be a good thing, since the more subscribers they have, the more money they will generate, and the more content they can provide.

I have a couple of questions to ask the person who designed this. If I am currently subscribed to UFC, will I be forced to pay to keep my subscription? Will this service be only available to YouTube Partners or will anyone be able to use it? Finally, how will this affect the monetizing of the videos?

I'm pretty sure that I am not the only one concerned about this issue and I guarantee that this will bring problems. I know that initially the amount of subscribers of a paid channel will drop significantly, but who's so say that people won't change their minds about this?

Would you pay for YouTube? I'm interested in what you think.

Why is Reddit so Addictive ?

 

I'm pretty sure everyone knows Reddit, It's one of those sites that drive a lot of attention. It's pretty well known among fellow social media users, as in general it's a collection of the "internet". What is it about this website that drives so much attention? Why does visiting the website eventually becomes a habit?

First off, EVERYTHING that becomes a newest trend is available on Reddit. It is a collection of the internet, all sort of news articles, tips and tricks, funny pictures, videos, AMAs, you name it. What makes it special though is the people on it. If it weren't for the people, this website would not exist. It is them who post and comment. If you think about it, it's a website by the people for the people.

Reddit has gained some recognition lately. The stories from the website were featured on many news stations; celebrities use AMA section as a PR tool where regular people can ask them any question they'd like. The comment section is tremendous. It can be hilarious, emotional; sometimes it drives people apart and sometimes it brings them together.

At this point, I've been on Reddit for so long and for so much that I do not remember what other sites I've been visiting previously... I guess that’s because of how awesome Reddit is, especially r/funny and r/snowboarding subreddits. I think I have to call myself a Reddit addict.

So the question remains, how drawn are you to Reddit?

Facebook and Your Boss

I've read an interesting article lately. It turns out that when a boss asks an employee to friend them on Facebook, most of employees would delete or temporarily suspend their entire Facebook account rather than accept the request.

It looks like users are concerned about their privacy and would like to keep their professional life apart from personal, that I completely understand. I think that in most cases this isn’t exactly the reason. If a person would rather delete their social media website than simply accept boss' invitation, it means that they most likely have a compromising content, that would jeopardize their jobs,

This brings up an issue of privacy and content. Be mindful that this is on the internet; once you post something it'll stay there, even the unwanted stuff...

If your boss sent you a friend request, would you accept?

Facebook Share Prices Drop Again

Since its initial public offering, Facebook shares have been continuously dropping. Last May the price per share was at $38, whereas now, Barron (from Reuters) estimates that it might have dropped even as low as $25, despite its closing on Friday the 3rd.

It turns out that Facebook mobile ads have increased the revenue of the company, however the focus on desktop ads and money spent on it turned out to be a flop.

Facebook strives to increase the value of the shares, however without a solid business model, this task is a great challenge. Lately Facebook hoped to earn money by releasing its Facebook Home App, however it did not do too well.

If this trend continues, it seems that the rumored video ads will become a reality. After all, the stockholders are losing money, and Facebook will do whatever is in their power to satisfy them. I believe that the era of Facebook freedom will soon be over, as we (the users) will be inevitably bombarded with ads from all fronts.

Brace yourselves.

Slow YouTube

What is happening to YouTube lately? For me it's been terribly slow for the past month. It seems that after the new user interface was implemented, the "snappiness" and the speed of YouTube has fallen drastically.

Some videos load faster than others, and I cannot tell why. My first thought was, "maybe it's the length of the video that's the problem...", however after further investigation, this loading and buffering issue seems to affect all lengths of videos. Then my guess was the location of the server the video is located in, but with today's technology and the way YouTube has their servers set up, this is probably not it.

Finally, I stumbled upon this video. It turns out that Time Warner Cable is throttling my bandwidth on YouTube and Vimeo! All I can say that this is ridiculous. I've been looking for a fix to this situation and I found a pretty interesting blog that addresses this issue and poses a solution. Unfortunately after trying to fix it, the problem still persists.

If you have a problem with YouTube loading times, give this blogger's solution a shot. It might work. http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/time-warner-cable-sucks-for-youtube-twitchtv/

Do you have Time Warner Cable or other ISP that is throttling video streaming services? Make sure to give Mitch a try and see if it works for you.

Oh Twitter...

I know... I've covered twitter hacks lately, but this one really deserves an entry as it is simply mind-blowing. Associated Press' twitter account was hacked, and hackers posted some things on feed. Usually it's not a big deal, however the hackers posted that there were two explosions in the White House and that president Obama was injured!

Three minutes after this was posted, the message was deemed false by the officials, but the damage was already done. All US markets took a plunge, and as one of the stock trader says: it was pure chaos.

Twitter staff restored the account, but apparently 2 million followers disappeared. This is a pretty big mess and here we can really see how much of an impact social media can have.

I hope that after this many successful twitter account break ins, twitter will take the security issue more seriously and aggressively. If this hacking trend continues, I expect that twitter will lose its credibility and respect among the social media users, whether they are individuals or corporations.

Incredible Coincidence

Ok, this is just crazy (or staged). One morning, while driving  on Interstate 55, there was a truck on fire, and a driver decided to take a picture of it. Of course this is a misfortune for the truck owner, and I really feel bad for him, but take a look on what happens next. So the car driver takes this picture of the burning truck with DeLorean in it, and posts it on Reddit.

As usual, interesting things on Reddit get upvoted really fast, so this post reaches a significant amount of views and upvotes to become a popular thread. Then out of nowhere, a user responds to the thread with this comment: "HAHA! That's me in my DeLorean! I take 55 everyday. It's interesting to note that you took a picture of me in my car at the same time as I was taking this picture of the truck fire!" Then he posted this picture:

Not only this is the picture of the same setting, but also at a perfect time. Notice that the picture was taken while another driver was taking the picture! This is just crazy. The power of social websites allowed us to witness a great and really cool coincidence. Reddit!              

More Hacks on Twitter

It seems that after hacking Burger King's Twitter account, there has been a raising concern regarding service's security measures. Recently a CBS News "60 minutes" and "48 hours" twitter accounts had been compromised. The hackers were  using the social media on news accounts to make fake claims, one of which stated that "General Dempsey calls for #Obama's arrest under new anti-terror laws #48hours."

Twitter staff worked along with CBS crew to solve this problem. Again, incidents like this bring security to question. If big companies such as CBS are getting hacked, then it seems that regular users cannot be ensured of their safety. Besides, even a group of hackers that go by the name "Anonymous" have had their twitter account hacked. Think about it, Anonymous were behind many break ins with high level of security, and yet they were victims of Twitter hacking spree.

It looks like we can never be sure of our safety on Twitter.

Facebook and Video Ads?

Do you hate Facebook ads as much as I do? Most likely yes... So apparently, some unknown sources have reported that Facebook is working on video ads! Yay! more distractions and annoyance!

All right, Facebook video advertisements, how will they work? Facebook will implement a video commercial in user's timeline. A new window will appear, which will cover entire news feed, and a random video commercial will be auto-played. So far this is the information that had been provided.

I cannot imagine how furious the users will be. It is obvious that people hate the current ads, let alone a "must watch" video ads.

I can see why Facebook is trying to pull this off. Not too long ago, Facebook has gone public. I believe it was on May, when initial public offering was offered. Since the website did not have a decent business model, so the stock prices were bound to plummet. By making video ads, the company is hoping to earn 4$ million dollars daily, which would strengthen the stock price and finally make money they hoped for by going public.

Could this work? Most likely, but what about the users?

YouTube Celebrates VHS' 57th Birthday!

Today is the 57th birthday of Video Home System, mostly known by it's abbreviation VHS. YouTube decided to celebrate it, by allowing certain videos to be played in VHS mode, which pretty much brings back the old memories of cassette video quality. Surprisingly it does a pretty good job at reproducing the good ol quality (maybe quality isn't the best word to describe it). Anyways, if you want to see the new feature in action, make sure to check out the video below. It played with a big picture noise, flickering screen and worn out "sharpness" just as an old and cheap VHS player would play.

Try stopping the video. See how it flickers? Just like the old days.

It's a nice touch from YouTube to present this feature. It will serve us as a reminder of how far we progressed with technology (especially the internet), and it will without a doubt, leave young kids wondering why is the picture quality so bad.

Well, at least we don't have to rewind the tape when we get to the end!

Social Media Infographic

Today Mashable presented an article about social media demographics. Thanks to a new study from the Pew Research Center and Docstoc, we have a very neat and informative infographic about the users of social media.

Take a look.

Just as I was expecting, the highest usage of social media platforms were among users between the age of 18 through 29. According to the article and the infographic, not much has changed from the past year. Few percentages changed here and there, but there was nothing major.

Personally I do not like this infographic, why you might ask? There are way more social media platforms than presented here and also the study failed to announce where the sample was taken from. Was this US only? I suppose so. While this might be very appealing visually, the data could have been more specific. For instance, what is the education level of the majority of users? (out of 100%). I'm not an expert on infographics, however I believe that readers of this article and viewers of this infographic would appreciate it more if the data was presented in more "comparable" way.

Bad News For Facebook Home

thenextweb.com has an article about Facebook Home and it turns out that it's a lemon. Users of Google Play award this newly released application an average of 2.3 star. This is legitimate review, as only the users who downloaded this application can post a review and rate it.

Out of about 840 reviews, 400 gave this app a lousy 1 star, which means approximately 48% hate it. According to some of the reviews, since the app changed home screen, it made phone operation difficult and it contradicted with many widgets that users already had. Whether it was Note 2 of Galaxy S3, the same problems occurred.

Technicians of this app should really focus and improve it as soon as possible, because the first perception of the new product is probably the most important one.

So if you have gotten Facebook Home, have you encountered any problems yet? Make sure to leave a comment.

Get Facebook Home Now!

All right, so I guess the announcement or "leak" rather, was not an April's Fools joke, but a real thing. Facebook Home will see the light on Thursday April 14th. However if you cannot wait till tomorrow, you can actually get  a leaked developer's version of the software (on Android) right now!

Of course it will be a little buggy and most likely unfinished, since it's not the most recent version of the software, but hey! you can get it a day earlier than everyone else. Interestingly enough, this is a great way to see whether or not you like it, and if it's worth the money. So what are you waiting for?

If you're not afraid of installing APKs on your Android, then you should be on your way of installing the software! Let's see if Facebook Home can impress social media enthusiasts.

Reddit - A New Imageboard?

I've been on Reddit for a long time, and it is truly one of my favorite websites of all times. It pretty much is what the website claims to be - a front page of the internet. I've always browsed articles, AMAs and videos, but lately I just realized that probably the most context being published are probably images.

Thanks to subreddits such as r/pics, r/funny, r/aww and r/wtf, Reddit is swarmed with pictures. An article on Mashable investigates the movement and claims that Reddit is becoming an imageboard. An imageboard (for those who don't know) is type of an internet forum, which mostly operates via posting images. Anyways, according to the study, the amount of pictures published are causing a little problem, since the ratio of text to picture posts is unbalanced.

A picture says a thousand words, this perhaps is true, but what will happen to Reddit, if this trend overwhelms the remaining context? There's much more to this website other than pictures.

I can see where this comes from. Since majority of the content posted on Reddit has to be up-voted or down-voted, with the modern tendency of users preference of pictures over text, this picture extravaganza was bound to happen.

I guess the pictures aren't too bad at the end of the day, however seeing some decent text content wouldn't hurt anyone. You know how professors these days say that students today can't write? Maybe internet picture viewing and favoring picture posts over text posts has something to do with that.

Social Media Makes You A Better Emploee

According to data drawn from Evlov, using social media while being at work is actually beneficial to employer and employee.

Employees (paid hourly) who spend their time on social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest and LinkedIn made more sales and handled customer calls services faster that those who are not on social media. Moreover, the more social media an employee uses, the more productive he/she is.

On average, not only the productivity is higher but also the tenure tends to be longer (about 94 days for social media enthusiast compared to 83 days for those who don't use social media).

This doesn't necessarily mean that using social media at work makes you better employee. It's safe to assume that not only does sociability impact the work, especially in sales, but also that using social media enhances employee's effectiveness in using computers and the internet.

The data probably should not be quoted, as it is not a study, but it does show that employees who use social media are slightly more efficient.

Do you think that using social media at work makes you a better employee?

YouTube Interface

All right, even though it's been quite some time since YouTube decided to put up a new interface  I think people (such myself) still might not satisfied with how it functions and how it looks. You know how I initially felt? Watch first 10 second of  video below, that pretty much summes it up (I strongly encourage you to quickly view this video).

To this day, this is my reaction. What was wrong with the old layout? I mean it might have been clogged up a little bit, but it was manageable and easy. This is confusing. The first time I tried looking for my playlist it took me literally 5 minutes of clicking to figure it out. Sadly, to this day I often find myself making a mistake, and clicking something I was not supposed to to find the thing I was looking for.

I understand that YouTube, being one of the most influential social media platform, decided to fresh things up, but I believe that it only made navigation more difficult. Acquiring a "blog" like look is perhaps a modern move, seeing how all other platforms have done this already, it is understandable that YouTube did not want to fall behind.

Best of April Fool's!

So, April 1st finally passed and today we can finally see which rumors were true and which ideas were plain pranks. Among many interesting features, there were some that excelled on the level of innovation, which naturally led people (and myself) believe that they were in fact true!

Let's start with couple of nice pranks and interesting things that certain social media website have put on for the 1st of April. The major influence of internet we know today, Google, had prepared something special for this occasion. Google featured "Treasure Maps", which transformed the traditional maps into a Pirates of Caribbean style treasure map. I found it quite amusing, but sadly I did not discover any treasures in my backyard.

Next up, YouTube had announced that they created YouTube to simply find the best video in the world. The selected winner will be the "winner" of YouTube. After this is done, the service will shut down and the selected video will not be shown until 2023, when YouTube will run again, just to show you this very video.

Finally, Twitter announced "twittr" a paid service that will allow users to use vowels. While the service will remain free for the next couple of days, only consonants can be used, unless of course someone is willing to pay $5 per month for "premium" Twitter service. That's not all! There will be an extension of the length of the tweets, from 140 words, to 141, for those moments when you need one more character to finish your thoughts.

These were in my opinion most noble of the parks that I've seen this year in social media. Also, cat headphones  should get an honorable mention, as after all it's Sony making home cats look cool (even though it's not really social media related).

Happy after Easter.

Facebook Phone Finally Revealed?

Recently I read an article on mashable.com in social media section and it looks like Facebook is getting ready to showcase their new "Facebook Phone". The unveiling will take place in Android-centric event, Menlo Park,Ca on Thursday, and although there aren't too many details, the speculations and anticipation is great.

According to Android Police, pictures of the new software have been leaked and  they show many, rather interesting changes to the HTC powered Facebook Phone's operating system.

"Facebook Phone" operating system, courtesy of Android Police

We can see that so called "Facebook Home" replaced original Android homescreen. The screenshot of the OS was taken while the OS was running on HTC Sense 4.5, and not the actual upcoming phone itself. The specifications of "Facebook Phone" are actually known. It will be ran by HTC, on a platform called Myst. The Myst will have 1GB of RAM, a dual-core processor, 5 megapixel camera and 4.3 inch 720p display.

The only question is, is this an April Fool's joke or is this a real deal? I guess we'll find out on Thursday.