Category Archives: social media

In Praise of Fourstalgia

One of my favorite new additions to Foursquare is Fourstalgia. It’s a very cool hack project built by Jon Hoffman @hoffrocket, an engineer at Foursquare.

When you connect the app your check-ins surface local historical photos through SepiaTown, a crowd sourced database of historical photos.

What’s awesome about Fourstalgia is both how simple and immediately rewarding it is. You get additive content that is completely relevant and it is built right into your Foursquare experience. If you want to share the photos you can tweet right from the app.

The only thing on my wishlist is additional historical information that tells me more about the pictures. You get a short description, but I need to know everything about the Quartette Club Hall in Hoboken right now.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

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Are you really being social in social media?

Some twitter users have thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers and they don’t follow anyone (or very few). I don’t mean celebrities, just experts, pundits, writers and the countless social media ninjas/gurus/rockstars/experts, etc. Or there are people who follow thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people and have an equal number of followers. Are they really being social or just amassing followers?

How engaged can you be when you don’t follow anyone? Or when you follow a massive twitter stream that is essentially a river at all time record flood levels? Either extreme suggests a true lack of interest in your followers. And this extends across plenty of other social platforms, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Path, etc. Whether you’re a brand or an individual the key is being social and showing genuine interest. We all want followers, likes and engagement, but we also need to engage right back. If you’re not it’s no longer really social media. It’s just a bullhorn and eventually many will stop listening.

What you have to say is important to me and I want understand your ideas, see the pictures you post, click on the links you share. I want to be SOCIAL. I want to engage in great ideas, funny moments, amazing experiences and remarkable thoughts.

Not everyone will follow us and we can’t follow everyone. The key is to find a balance between following a manageable number of social feeds and the right amount of time and attention to make the experience truly social. Sharing, listening, hearing, commenting, curating and engaging. That’s what success in social means to me. What do you think? That’s even more important.

Content on Shuffle

I want to explore how we discover and experience content. The intersection of search, curation and sharing under the umbrella of discovery is fascinating and constantly changing. How does it impact how we interpret the world around us and how we learn? And how does the digital world affect how we socialize and share our experiences with others?

Growing up I listened to records, watched live television, listened to live radio, read a morning or afternoon paper, watched movies in a theater and read the magazines available at the local drug or bookstore. Content was relatively scarce and distribution highly controlled. I quickly gravitated to books and music because I could control and curate my own experience.

Sharing content was difficult, but we all shared the experience, gathered around the TV at the same time. We all watched the same movies and shows and heard much of the same music. Curation was often top down. Rigid TV schedules. Highly formatted radio stations. Mass media was exactly that. Content created and curated for mass audiences.

In the 80s and 90s things began to change with the broad proliferation of cable channels, the Sony Walkman and the adoption of VCRs and DVD players among other things. Choice multiplied and so did the number of devices in any household. The common familial, social experience of media was giving way to individual experience. Not only was there more content, we could share it more easily, copying and trading music, movies and TV shows.

Today content is ubiquitous. Distribution is ubiquitous and often confusing. Our individual media experiences are unique and generally self-curated. With millions of websites, thousands of digitized songs, hundreds of DVDs, our phones, ipods and ipads filled with apps, games, music, books, movies and TV shows, plus hours of programming recorded from hundreds of channels on DVRs, how do we provide context? How do we discover and curate great media experiences?

It’s now a world of content on shuffle. So many amazing media experiences are immediately available on a multitude of platforms. We have amazing tools to share and recommend to our friends, families and social media acquaintances. How has this all redefined sharing? How has it redefined us? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.