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Multitasking in Tel Aviv

by Brian Blum on July 14, 2010

in Entrepreneurs,Social Media

From right to left: me, Benjy Lovitt, Lior Manor and his iPad

From right to left: me, Benjy Lovitt, Lior Manor and his iPad

A recent episode of the NPR program Science Friday featured an interview with Clifford Nass, the author of the forthcoming book “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop,” about whether human beings are truly able to multitask. His conclusion: not really.

Nass says that we have the illusion of multitasking, but in reality, we are switching from one task to another so quickly it seems like we’re doing more than one thing at once. The problem is that, every time we switch, there is a micro-millisecond delay and that teeny tiny pause causes us to be less productive even when we feel we’re sailing high.

I had a chance to experience the woes of obsessive multitasking first hand earlier this week when I attended the 140 Characters conference in Tel Aviv. The event, produced all over the world – including Israel – by social media and VoIP guru Jeff Pulver, is dedicated to exploring the “real time web” (a fancy way of referring to web and mobile services that let you follow a stream of never ending status updates as they happen).

As I sat in the lecture hall at Tel Aviv’s Afeka College listening to the lectures (which, in true short attention span spirit, were allotted on average no more than 10-15 minutes each), I had my laptop with me open to TweetDeck, a Twitter desktop client where I could follow along as much of the room was “live tweeting” what was happening on stage; Gmail – which I checked incessantly while simultaneously chatting with people both in and outside of the room itself; Facebook – of course (just for fun); an Excel spreadsheet of all the attendees sent by Pulver – so I could scope out who to approach during the networking breaks; a live video stream of the conference itself (with a slight time delay); and Evernote – a application I used to take notes on my laptop which were then automatically synched to my home computer, iPhone and (when I get one) iPad.

And if the lectures ever got boring, I’d brought with me a copy of an article I was working on that needed an edit.

By the time the conference was over, I actually breathed a sigh of relief as I finally caught a break in the long drive back to Jerusalem.

Not so for Michael Matias, a 14-year-old who took the stage for his 10 minutes of fame to tell us about “growing up in real-time.” My multitasking experience is his daily reality. He adds to the mix doing homework while simultaneously watching TV on his laptop (42-inch flat screens are so 2006) and playing online chess and poker. He says he spends at least 5 hours a day online, not including class when he often uses the school computers. When he needs to study, it’s as likely to be via video conference than an in-person cram session.

Matias is a relative pauper when it comes to Facebook friends – he only has 300 and says he only accepts someone he’s met in person. Although he does spend time with people in the so-called “real world,” he told the audience that in some ways he actually prefers his online world. “It brings me closer to them. I can hang out with more than one person at the same time.” No, he doesn’t think he spends too much time online and, when asked which of his real-time tools he’d give up if necessary, he quipped that he couldn’t. “It would be like choosing between my mom and my dad.”

The rest of the conference was interesting (if less shocking). Israeli comedian Lior Manor did “Twitter magic” – he asked the audience to tweet a number between one and 140 (get it, the 140 character maximum Twitter imposes), then he picked a number from his real-time Twitter stream and did a card trick in person – no different than what magicians have been doing for years except that he used an iPad to display the input.

Yossi Taguri talked about his latest startup Fiidme which lets you “share your satisfaction” about food. “If you’re in a restaurant,” he explained, “you can ask your friends what’s good on the menu and they’ll tweet you their recommendations.” With a grin, he added that they also “thought it would help us get free lunches.” His business partner Lior commented that being in a restaurant “without wireless is very frustrating.” (Whatever happened to the romantic candlelit dinner?)

There was also a session on using Twitter to do good in the world: an Israeli company called JustCoz lets you “donate” your Twitter status to organizations to raise awareness about their causes. In just under a month online, 100 organizations have signed up for the free service, gathering 1,200 supporters which provide re-tweeting access to more than a million people.

Now that’s a great idea from the real time web…if we can actually take a moment away from our incessant multitasking to participate.

Oh, and about that article I was writing? I guess I succeeded because you’re reading it now.

This article was originally posted at Israelity last week immediately following the 140 conference.

Tagged as: Conferences, Entrepreneurs, Facebook, Jeff Pulver, Social Media, Twitter

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The Serendipity Effect in Social Media

by Brian Blum on November 9, 2009

in Classified Advertising,Product Management,Social Media

Image from Mary Lindsay's blog

Image from Mary Lindsay's blog

When the web first started becoming paramount in how people consumed news, there was a lot written about the dangers of information “narrowcasting” and how it would result in a populace that knew little about what happening outside their own limited sphere of interest. Traditional print newspapers and magazines were lauded because by their very nature they enable readers to serendipitously stumble across news they might not have searched for on Google.

An interesting interview on a recent episode of NPR’s On the Media with Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard’s Berkman Center, and Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired and The New York Times Magazine, suggested that – surprisingly – social media could be an answer.

Thompson cited the research presented in Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” about how many people someone can actually have as friends or colleagues. The number, says Gladwell, is 150; human beings can’t really keep track of more than that. But on social media, that number jumps to the hundreds (and in some cases, particularly on Twitter, the thousands).

I have over 600 Facebook “friends.” Do I know all of them well? Certainly not. But something interesting happens when it comes to learning about news. The more “friends” we have, the more likely it is we’ll learn something about a topic we didn’t expect to and likely wouldn’t have searched for either.

And if enough of our friends share or re-tweet on a particular subject, we will come to think this is “important” (even if it’s really about some ludicrous boy in a balloon). More seriously, the tweets emanating from Iran during the recent mini-revolution definitely opened many new eyes.

Admittedly, most of our friends are “like us” in terms of educational backgrounds and socio-economic standards. But some of those friends may have a wider circle that includes one or two more exotic colleagues. And I have not been terribly discriminating about who I “friend” – when I have a question that I need answering, I then have a wider circle to whom I can publish.

The issue of serendipity in social media has come up recently with one of my clients. The client has a particular organizational focus, and most of what we post relates to that topic. But sometimes we also publish links to articles off-topic which we feel will be interesting to our readers. It’s a way of keeping the site timely and relevant. But it also has the effect of populating our fans’ activity streams with news they might not have seen otherwise.

So, if part of the product management services you provide your clients includes preparing and executing on a social media “content plan,” keep in mind the serendipity effect. It can help establish you more as a destination site within the social media universe…and it’s good for the world too.

Tagged as: Amazon, Facebook, Google, Social Media

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Consumers Really, Really Don’t Like Behavioral Tracking

by Brian Blum on September 30, 2009

in Classified Advertising

BullseyeFollowing up on my previous post, it appears that consumers are not so happy with behavioral tracking on the Internet. According to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Berkeley, two-thirds of Americans object to being tracked by advertisers. And if those consumers learn exactly how they’re being followed, the percentage increases even more.

The study, reported today in The New York Times, was conducted by telephone not via the web and included 1,000 adult Internet users. Some of the highlights:

  • Tailored ads in general did not appeal to 66 percent of respondents. More important: 55 percent of those in the 18-24 group were opposed to being tracked (somewhat of a surprise given that anecdotal evidence says that Facebook users don’t mind handing over personal information).
  • When the respondents were told that part of that tailoring was tracking what they were doing on specific websites, an additional 7 percent said those ads were not OK.
  • And when they learned that tracking was also being done on additional websites, another 18 percent were upset.
  • The worst: when respondents learned that advertisers could track them offline, the percent of disgruntled consumers jumped an additional 20 percent.
  • On the other hand, 51 percent said it was OK to follow them if it meant customized discounts and 58 percent didn’t mind getting tailored news.

The survey is bound to fuel the legal ambitions of lawmakers looking to score points with privacy ravaged Americans. Representative Rick Boucher of Virginia and David Vladeck, head of consumer protection for the FTC, say they both are looking at data privacy issues closely.

On the question of laws, the survey found that:

  • 69 percent of American adults feel there should be a law that gives people the right to know everything that a website knows about them.
  • 92 percent agree there should be a law that requires “websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about an individual, if requested to do so.”
  • 63 percent believe advertisers should be required by law to immediately delete information about their Internet activity.

Marketers of course argue that, without advertising, free content couldn’t exist online. There’s no debating that. The issue, as I posed in my previous post, is that consumers have a right to know – and to opt out – of being followed without their knowledge during their travels on the net.

Would that there was such a backlash at the casinos.

You can download the full 27-page report from The Times website.

Tagged as: Advertising, Facebook, Newspapers

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A Social Media Proposal

by Brian Blum on August 8, 2009

in Social Media

This is what social media is all about…a wedding proposal via YouTube and posted to Facebook. It’s in Hebrew, but you get the idea.

Tagged as: Facebook, YouTube

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Move over Twitter, Here Comes Flutter

by Brian Blum on August 4, 2009

in Social Media

There have been some very funny social media parodies that have swept the web. CollegeHumor’s Web Site Story and the BBC’s What if Facebook Were Real?

The latest to come across my desk is this take on a new nano-blogging service with a maximum of 26 character updates: Flutter. Enjoy!

Tagged as: Facebook, Twitter

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More People Share Links on Facebook than Email

by Brian Blum on July 30, 2009

in Classified Advertising

Publishers who want to more widely distribute their content should pay attention to new data from AddToAny. According to the firm, more people use Facebook to share links than any other service, including e-mail.

Facebook accounts for 24 percent of uses of a widget created and marketed by AddToAny to share links to articles, videos and other content. E-mail came in at only 11.1 percent.

Yahoo’s properties, which include Delicious, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz and Yahoo Messenger, came in second at 14.4 percent. Twitter came in third with 10.8 percent.

The results from this report are important. Most newspapers distribute headline and breaking news via e-mail, but how many have a regular publishing strategy focused on social media applications? Yet that’s where the sharing, re-publishing and re-tweeting is happening, not with forwarded e-mails.

The data isn’t all that surprising. Already in March, a Nielsen report, “Global Faces and Networked Places,” found that by the end of 2008, social networking had overtaken e-mail in terms of worldwide reach. According to the report, 66.8 percent of Internet users across the globe accessed “member communities”—social networking or blogging sites—compared with 65.1 percent for e-mail.

Nielsen also found that social communities accounted for nearly 10 percent of all Internet time.

For more articles on newspapers and classified advertising, visit the industry experts: AIMGroup.com.

Tagged as: Facebook, Nielsen, Yahoo

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