Post(s) tagged with "social curation"

Erly And The Social Experience, Or Tumblrizing Your Pig Roast

Erly is a new start-up led by Eric Feng, formerly founding CTO of Hulu, reportedly backed by Kleiner Perkins. Erly is a social media tool, aggregating media around the theme of ‘social experiences’, like a day at the beach, a trip to Japan, or a wedding.

The website’s Experiences page does the best job of making a pitch.

All sorts of media — photos, videos, text posts, Facebook check ins and status updates — can be associated with a given experience. And the experiences can be shared with others, as participants or just to view.

Erly is based on the premise that we conceive of our lives as a stream of experiences, and rather than just throwing everything into one undifferentiated stream of bits, it makes more sense to collate things into discrete piles, like a specific baseball game, or a movie night out with friends. This is a form of social curation, since the purpose is to pull together media related to an experience.

My read? Erly is integrated with Facebook for a number of reasons. First of all, Facebook has historically been a service geared to people’s personal networks of real-world friends (stay tuned for the new Facebook Subscribe, though, which opens the service up to Twitter-style open following).

Secondly, Facebook does not support Erly-style ‘experiences’ very well, although they can be emulated in various ways. This means that Erly will have a run at an underserved area, and could be very attractive for Facebook if they are successful.

I haven’t fooled with Erly at any length, but the experiences displayed by the company look to me like Tumblr blogs. Imagine if I created a special-purpose Tumblr blog and invited the three pals who are vacationing with me in St Kitts to co-author with me. We could post pictures, video, text, etc., and others, far away could keep up with our activities from afar, and after the vacation, we’d have that blog as a keepsake.

But the overhead of doing this with Tumblr is high: logins, passwords, telling friends to follow the blog, etc. So Erly gets rid of that social friction by integrating with Facebook.

I will have to take another look, once I am headed off for a weekend in the mountains with friends, but my early take on Erly is that it looks promising.

related

15 September 2011 6 Permalink
erlyfacebooksocial experiencetumblrsocial curation
A Vast Wasteland, Five Decades Later - Ethan Zuckerman ⇢

Ethan Zuckerman cites Terry Fisher in a long post about a recent retrospective at the Berkman Center about Newton Minow’s (in)famous ‘vast wasteland’ speech 50 years ago. Fisher got to bat clean-up, and departs from TV and stretches out:

New technologies, and some of the practices that surround them (though are not dictated by them) are eroding some existing, long-standing dichotomies: public/private, professional/amateur, speaker/audience, news/entertainment, university/society. There are huge benefits and costs to this corrosion. We see the collapse of oligarchies, address of systematic biases, democratization of processes. But we also have fragmentation, loss of a coherent single culture, the rise of a tower of pundit babel, and the superficiality of much programming. This move, he [Fisher] argues, is impossible to stop. Instead, we need to think through the new opportunities the shift presents: the ability to change who contributes to this process. And we need to figure out how to ameliorate the costs we suffer. That means creating distributed models for sifting, curating, organizing, like Wikipedia, Slashdot and academic projects like Jeffrey Schapp’s Digital Humanities project. In this new world, the FCC may not be the prime mover – the real power is located in intermediaries like Google, and if we were to push for the public interest, that’s where we’d apply leverage.

The web is slowly being converted to a giant mall (see The Stripmalling Of Social Media: Media Sprawl And The New Urbanism), and TV is made into just another pile of ‘content’ for it’s yawning maw. Google and other private companies wire their policies into the plumbing of the social web, and the FCC is hopelessly out of date, focused on channels and spectrum instead of the global agora we are constructing, and living in.

Fisher is right in the particulars: a fragmentation of culture, and the dissolution of public/private, to name just a few of his points. Like Fisher, I am caught up in the quest for a distributed ‘engine of meaning’ to make sense of the streaming world through a combination of human and algorithmic curation, and it will have to be based on social structures we aren’t mining yet, I guess.

14 September 2011 4 Permalink
social curationterry fisherengines of meaningcurationsocial media sprawl

Comparing Tumblr to Wordpress - Bijan Sabet

bijan:

Yesterday, I received a few emails linking to this post on Pingdom that describes the growth of Wordpress and the faster growth of Tumblr (disclosure: I’m a board member and investor in Tumblr).

But comparing Tumblr to Wordpress is like comparing apples and oranges. They are completely different things. 

Wordpress is a publishing platform. You can host it yourself or Wordpress it will host it for you. And yes, some people use Tumblr in this use case. 

But the vast majority of the Tumblr engagement (traffic, page views, liking, reblogs, follows, etc), is on the Tumblr Dashboard which is their unique & native version of a social newsfeed. The Tumblr Dashboard is where you follow other Tumblr users and traffic inside the Tumblr Dashboard far exceeds (understatement) traffic to the aggregate page views to Tumblr powered sites.  

I think this is a misunderstood thing with people that dont use Tumblr or haven’t started following enough people. It’s not a tool.

Tumblr is a social network and the best place for creative self expression. 

I wrote a piece a while back, when I was first getting excited about Tumblr, where I describe the inside and outside view of Tumblr:

The Outside View — When Tumblr users are looking at other Tumblr-hosted blogs, they see several controls that are not visible to non-users. Along with the blog content, they see ‘like’, ‘reblog’, ‘follow’ and ‘dashboard’ icons, like this:


The ‘like’ button (the heart) is a way to create a haptic gesture that winds up on the post’s ‘notes’ list, a history of all the ways that the post has been touched by others.

The ‘reblog’ button makes a copy of the post on the user’s blog, and adds that action to the original post’s notes history.

Clicking the ‘follow’ adds the blog to the user’s list of followed blogs, which is a perfect segue to the second view in the poststream model.

The Inside View — When the user logs into Tumblr (or when they click on ‘dashboard’ after being logged in), they are presented their Tumblr dashboard, which aggregates posts from all the blogs that the user is following, plus posts from their own blog, and notes that other users’ actions have left on posts. Here’s the third page of my Tumblr dashboard from this morning (I wanted to show a note and the page controls):


The ‘like’ and ‘reblog’ controls are displayed on all the posts in the poststream, and work in the same way as described.

You can see that wakeupfromthedramscene has started following my UnderpaidGenius blog. Other notes also are displayed, although their are none in this page of my poststream:  reblogs, likes, and answers to questions (any text post that ends with a question mark allows for answers to questions to be accumulated).

Bijan makes the case that this inside view — the Tumblr Dashboard — is a social network while Wordpress is just a blogging platform: all outside view, and no inside. Note, however, that the piece I quoted above was about Wordpress releasing new social features — specifically, ‘like’ and ‘reblog’ — in an effort to become better social plumbing.

So I don’t go along with the notion that these are two discrete and different things. Wordpress, Tumblr, Typepad, Squarespace — they are all social tools with a strong publishing orientation, but all support social networks of people reading and writing, just with different appraoches to supporting those connections.

Tumblr is the technology that has gone the farthest down the path toward a new social paradigm, where all involved can become full participants in the explicit social network that Tumblr supports. People can opt to be plain old readers if they want, but they will never get wise to the social streaming in the inside view until they sign up for their own account, and jump into social curation: leaving plain old reading behind.

Source: bijan

11 May 2011 173 underpaidgenius Permalink
bijan sabetbloggingsocial curationsocial mediasocial networkssquarespacetechtumblrtypepadwordpressxl*

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Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. more.

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