“But reason with the fellow
Before you punish him, where he heard
this,
Lest you shall chance to whip your
information
and beat the messenger who bid beware
Of what is to be dreaded”
– Shakespeare, Coriolanus
The number of people on social networks grew by 8% in the US in the past year (metro China 18%; Europe 11%) according to a new report today from Forrester Research. But there was no growth in the number of people creating content on social networks. Instead, people on social networks read and (increasingly) watch other people’s content, according to a report yesterday from Allot Communications: “…video streaming applications continue to dominate the global mobile bandwidth scene and remain the largest consumer of bandwidth with a 35% share. In addition, video streaming is the single largest growing application type with a 92% increase, due in part to the ever-rising popularity of YouTube.”
“I don’t believe that [Facebook] has brought us closer together. I think it’s pushed us farther apart.’’ —Aaron Sorkin, Scriptwriter, The Social Network
“The whole premise of the site is that everything is more valuable when you have context about what your friends are doing. That’s true for ads as well. An advertiser can produce the best creative ad in the world, but knowing your friends really love drinking Coke is the best endorsement for Coke you can possibly get.” —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
“There is too much clutter … because we’ve branded ourselves to death… [Consumers] no longer want to be spammed with information about a product, service, or experience; they want to feel a connection to it… People need a reason to purchase, to be part of something bigger, to join a tribe.”–Seth Godin, (MIXX Conference, September 27, 2010)
Update: “The evangelists of social media… seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960… Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice. We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.” –Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change,” The New Yorker, October 4, 2010
Today in 1952, George Santayana died, aged 88. His most famous quote could serve as a motto for this blog: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” He also said: ““History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.” I wonder, how do you remember what needs to be rewritten?
The film The Social Network portrays Harvard’s “social apartheid,” in the words of the Guardian: “an elaborate series of crosscuts shows the gulf the nebbishy group of hackers and the rich-kid decadence of high Harvard society, with its “final clubs” and honour codes – complete, of course, with willing debutantes. This disparity – women, money, social poise – is made the insistent undercurrent of the drive to create Facebook and its desperate emphasis on “friends”. Zuckerberg is hired by a couple of rowing-team bluebloods to work on their similar-sounding website; but they won’t let him past the bike shed of their members-only dining club.”
The very same club, the Porcellian Club, snubbed Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was, according to Roosevelt, “The greatest disappointment of my life.” (quoted in H.W. Brands, Traitor to his Class).
Did the Porcellian rejection motivated Roosevelt to show Harvard who’s on top and attain the highest position in the land and motivated Zuckerbeg to create Facebook and…?
Today in 1979, 5 years before Mark Zuckerberg was born, CompuServe launched one of the first consumer online services, initially marketed as MicroNET through Radio Shack. By the mid-1980s, CompuServe was the largest consumer information service in the world due to the popularity of its online innovations such as moderated forums and online chat. In 1989, CompuServe was the first online service to offer Internet connectivity by allowing its proprietary email service to communicate with Internet-based email addresses. By 1995, CompuServe had three million members (paying customers) but started to lose money with the rapid expansion of the World Wide Web. It was sold to WorldCom for $1.2 billion in 1998.
“We are seeking to uphold truth, beauty, and wisdom in an age which has placed its faith in mere information” –Fictional Oxford Don in Inspector Lewis Your Sudden Death Question episode.
Today in 1789, Samuel Osgood became the first Postmaster General under the U.S. Constitution. The next year, 1790, the U.S. Postal Service moved 300,000 letters and 500,000 newspapers, according to Richard John’s definitive history of the American postal system. Says John: “In America, the postal system and the postal system alone had the capacity to broadcast regularly and throughout the length and breadth of the United States the time-specific information about the wider world that was commonly called news.”
The number of pieces of mail handled by the U.S. Postal Service peaked in 2006 at slightly more than 213 billion, declining to 177 billion in 2009, leading the U.S. Postal Service to predict that “the trend of letter mail and business transactions being replaced with electronic alternatives will also cause continued downward pressure on mail volume into coming years.”
The current Postmaster General, John Potter, oversees the world’s third-largest IT infrastructure and one of the world’s largest e-mail systems: nearly 16 million e-mails a day —or 4.4 billion e-mail messages annually — are delivered to nearly 207,000 e-mail accounts.
IDC forecast the number of business email subscribers (e.g., Blackberry) to grow 36.5% annually and surpass 250 million in 2014.
The Story of Information 