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There are still many start-ups (young and old) clearing the path towards virtual worlds.  ”Portals” that allow us to dive into digital realms to inhabit new personae to slay dragons, get a date, or just IM with a sales rep.

More recently there has been a lot of work in blurring the boundary between the real and virtual in the opposite direction.  Augmented Reality is easy to spot with applications like the iPhone app from Acrossair below - a very cool app launched last year. 

Now there are companies that are taking or creating social data and transposing it onto the world around us through location.  It’s all very, very new so the data is raw and many will just scratch their heads.  But watch the video below that maps the activity at South by Southwest (SXSW) of users of Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, Flickr, Bump, and a couple of other social platforms and apps.

Beyond the long touted “advertise coffee coupons as people walk past a particular Starbucks” application, there are infinite Social Media opportunities in both the consumer and enterprise world.

If you’re in an office of 5 people and you’re all using Yammer or Twitter, then it’s maybe not so interesting.  But what if you’re working at a huge sprawling campus in HP, Kaiser, or Stanford University?  Get’s interesting huh?

Imagine not only reaching out for help or information on a corporate wiki, but you could see where people are and walk over and ask as they walk down a corridor.  Or you could join in on a “water cooler” discussion about a product roadmap item that your CTO just got into with a bright-eyed intern, or the VP Product Marketing. 

You can see barriers start to be broken down in the physical as well as the virtual worlds.  And that’s a good thing for productivity and creativity.  It’s not just for selling Starbucks.

(Props to Robert Scoble for the video and inspiration.)

Posted under industry, marketing

It’s not just you folks - if you haven’t seen the news on Twitter, Facebook is apparently having some service problems.  Some people report that their pages have been loading after multiple attempts, but on the whole the largest social network in the world (300m+ users) is essentially down.

While most software applications only dream of having to deal with the level of scale Facebook does, it does point to a couple of key points in the transition to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS):

Multi-tenant Architecture

This is a fundamental premise for the business model to succeed for many SaaS vendors.  Essentially, it is the use of the same software stack by multiple unassociated users.  The challenges here are security and scale.  Security is quite straight forward once a solid user registration and management system has been put in place.  Scale is a bit trickier because it is dynamic.

Cloud Infrastructure Provider

This is the hardware (CPUs, memory, and storage) that the application runs on.  Even though the architecture of the SaaS application could be developed to scale, the Cloud Infrastructure needs to be in place to support scale robustly (both the scaling up and the scaling down).  There’s a reliance on the robustness of both the hardware and software architectures.

Facebook has their own datacenters.  According to Datacenter Knowledge, as of April this year the Facebook datacenter stores more than 40 Billion photos and users upload nearly 40 million new photos per day!  Now, that’s scale!

Multiple requests are in to FB for when they’re back up…hopefully it’s soon, or we might be forced into actually picking up the phone and talking to our mothers-in-law.

UPDATE: Facebook is back up in San Francisco as of 18:00 PST.  (Disaster averted!)  But I see from Twitter that a lot of people are still having trouble with the platform.

UPDATE II: (18:15 PST) Facebook have disabled Chat - a clever way of freeing up some bandwidth for some?  Many are still struggling to get back on the platform.

Posted under industry

A new report published by Nielsen describes some incredible statistics related to the growth of Social Networks (or Member Communities) on the internet: Global Faces and Networked Places.

• Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit a social network or blogging site
• This sector accounts for nearly 10% of all internet time
• This sector ranks higher than email as fourth most popular online sector (see below)

Ranking of Internet Sector Reach

This probably reaffirms anecdotal evidence of older demographics newly discussing their “Facebook page”.  However, what is not as widely understood is the headway that has been made in terms of time.

“The staggering increase in the amount of time people are spending on these sites is changing the way people spend their time online and has ramifications for how people behave, share and interact within their normal daily lives.”   

 

Percentage of Internet Time Spent in Member Communities

Another interesting way to think of this increase in terms of internet “mindshare”:

“A year ago ‘Member Communities’ accounted for one in every 15 online minutes globally – now it accounts for one in every 11.” 

 

But it gets more interesting, and more relevant to electronic design.  Common wisdom within the industr is that the senior demographics do not participate in online member communities.  Times are a-changin’ - the highest level of growth is in the three demographic ranges from 35 years old and up beyond 64.

While anecdotal evidence points to an increased desire of these demographics to access the photographs and videos of younger relatives, that’s not the point.  As with all of these web 2.0 phenomena, consumer adoption and growth will drive corporate adoption as users become familiar with use models and more comfortable with the degree of access.

So, does this mean that every company should rush out and create a Facebook page?  I think they should consider one as part of a comprehensive internet marketing strategy.  But I would tell them that this should not be their primary online channel for two very closely related reasons.

“Much like a friendship, marketing on social networks requires continual investment – in terms of time and effort as opposed to financial – to be of value to both parties.

So, use Facebook as a signpost to your community on a Professional Community Platform - that would be Xuropa - and build your community there.  Even better, place your product at the center of your community!

Posted under Community, Xuropa, industry, marketing