antti.vilpponen.net

I’ve been talking about this to some of my friends for quite some time that we might see something like this in the near future and now I’m starting to see it in my own behaviour. I’m talking about Facebook being so powerful of a community that it’s disturbing the use of other social sites, despite it lacking the features of these other social sites. This is something that sites with strong social aspects should be worried about. Seriously worried.

The use of the social application I mainly see myself questioning is Jaiku. Now that it has closed registrations, it’s hard to invite people to use it and I only have about a bunch of people using the application. This of course results in the whole application not being very useful, even though I consider myself being in the innovator/early adopter groups with regard to the technology life cycle.

Facebook on the other hand is not that useful (especially from the mobile) and it’s not really micro blogging when you change your status line. However, it has severe social implications. My friends are able to see what I’m up to, and what’s really scary is that almost all my friends are using it to update their status. Those that use this feature know how clumsy and detached it is from your usage patterns - you have to open your browser, sign in to Facebook, change your status as compared to Jaiku’s take your phone and post a new Jaiku.

I find myself wondering if I should stop using Jaiku, because it doesn’t fulfil its social use anymore - Facebook is simply so much more powerful, there’s a lot more social pull. This of course will be a major problem for other sites with strong social aspects, such as LinkedIn, Last.fm and so forth. Only when the social groups that dominate the applications in your own circle of friends are far enough from each other is there a chance of adoption for you with regard to that application. With Jaiku, it shares pretty much the same social group with Facebook and therefore I find myself questioning the use of it when there’s a lot more value in using Facebook (despite lacking the features).

What does this all add up to?
Well, it certainly affects the way websites and companies should see their line of business and strategy of growing as well as their product development. It’s pretty self evident that you have to have the features to grow and keep the user base satisfied, but these features should very strongly support social interaction in your service - only then do they create enough stickiness and glue. The power of the website and the business is definitely in the community and how well the company can hang on to, and develop, that community.

There’s also a big question to ask in terms of Roger’s theory of diffusion. Is the theory itself valid anymore or are the diffusion cycles dramatically shorter in social applications. Do innovators matter anymore, when you can directly tap into the mass market and due to the architecture of the application, spread very rapidly in that group?

Update: TechCrunch and VentureBeat are reporting on a “gang-up” on Facebook. Seems like I wasn’t alone with the thinking.

Book Depository is not your ordinary book store online. It’s got a massive and very competitive range of books and even some audiobooks. The prices are almost always better than Amazon’s and what’s best: Delivery is free!

I just ordered Getting Things Done by David Allen and Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki - total price including delivery £13.02, not bad.

Sorry Roxie, but this leaves me wondering about the Americans :) Helsingin Sanomat published some results from different studies that quite honestly are shocking:

• According to the State Education Study, about 33% of Washington’s Washington D.C.’s citizens are illiterate.
• About one third of Americans are scientifically illiterate, meaning they are unable to understand simple scientific material for example from a newspaper says the US Science Academy (own translation)
• John D. Miller from the Michigan State University rightly argues that this could be the reason why most of the Americans are unable to understand evolution, DNA or global warming.
• About 20% of Americans believe that the sun revolves around Earth.

Sigh….

Haven’t had the time to blog last week, which was yet again pretty hectic. Over the weekend I exchanged e-mails with a certain Indian person wanting to publish our article in a book in India. The article was previously published in Journal of Interactive Advertising. It’s interesting to see how your work gets spread around in the internet era :)

Yesterday I held a 4-hour lecture on Internet marketing. It was an interesting experience as I really had to dig out certain things and put them on paper to talk about them. It forces you to form an opinion of most of the things you’re talking and in that sense is a sort of self-educating experience. Last, but definitely not least I endured a 4,5 hour poker tournament of No Limit Texas Hold’Em with some friends and managed to take the victory home.

An excellent way to start the weekend…

I haven’t had the time to blog for ages, apologies for that. But last weekend was a blast meeting different very interesting people. On Friday, I went to play monopoly with future economists with a few friends and new friends to be at KY. There was a lot of hassling and dealing going on - the famous Marrakech marketplace would have seem like a calm place compared to our dealing.

On Saturday, I took part in the HSE BScBA Alumni’s annual Crab Party. Crab, shots and another night out - tough. It’s always nice to see alumni members from as far back as BBA 5s taking part and partying like it was 1998 :-)

Anyhow, there’s lots going on and thus the lack in blogging. Oh, and I finally finished The Long Tail only start with Jack Trout’s Differentiate or Die (don’t know how I’ve managed to skip this great book for so long).

Wow - I checked out something just now that we had been working on last November and through some days of February and March. The results can be found here. First of all, even though my name is first on the paper - a very - and I mean a big thank you to my professor at LUT, Sanna Sundqvist and colleaque Susanna Winter. Never could have done anything like this without you two. Very talented people, I have to say.

Man, this week has flown past me. I’ve had so much stuff to do it’s hard to imagine. I just got back from work and it’s 7pm. I’ve got some good news that have made me work a bit harder than normal. Our paper that we did for Journal of Interactive Advertising was conditionally accepted into the word-of-mouth special issue! We’ve had to do some revisions and clarifications to the text, let’s hope it gets published - that would give me my first academic publication.

Also in the news this week (short clips, haven’t simply had the time to blog about these):

• The Futurice guys have struck a deal with the largest commercial television network MTV3 with their discrete photosharing service Kuvaboxi. Kuvaboxi seems to be now an official part of MTV3 offerings. Congrats!

  How do I know them? I did my Master’s thesis in close co-operation with these guys.

• Ex-CEO of Nokia, Mr. Isokallio, launches the first open WiFi in Helsinki center in co-operation with Fujitsu and a restaurant chain (source - in Finnish). With this he wants to show that it does not require a lot of money to operate a ubiquitous WiFi network, but more a will to do so. This is something I’ve been ranting about previously quite a bit - for example; here, here, here, here, here and here. Man, talk about being obsessed about WiFi :) Anyhow, my point is: Pity the fools who don’t see the value in this and a big thank you to Mr. Isokallio for doing something about it!
• The head of US copyright office has actually said that the current copyright term is too long! Is this the beginning of the end to large media companies bullying consumers?

Oh, and the Finnish Curling team is in the Olympic finals playing at the moment…

I’m testing an embedded video from Google Video, let’s see how this works in the long run.

According to this article in Helsingin Sanomat (screenshot), all 29 polytechnics in Finland will start calling themselves universities in English language translations. For example; Jyv?§skyl?§ Polytechnic will be called Jyv?§skyl?§ University of Applied Sciences. In the time when differentiating yourself in the workforce is a definite must - polytechnics are shooting themselves in the head with this procedure.

Secondly, all they are doing is cheating their “customers” ie. students. People will surely begin to expect “university level” jobs with their new “university level” teaching. Oh, and with this translation gimmick, we now are supposed to have 49 universities, but the ministry of education that governs education in Finland still clearly distinguishes the difference between these 2 branches of learning.

Thirdly, what is the reason for doing this? In the future when you’re explaining the Finnish education system you have to try to explain that we have 20 official universities and then 29 “universities”. I mean surely with all the bureucracy and wise men and women in high positions this is a well though out solution. Also marketing Finland as a place to do your exchange (to foreigners) just became a lot more questionable - would you like to do your exchange in the “Jyv?§skyl?§ University of Applied Sciences” or University of Jyv?§skyl?§?

While we’re at it, let’s start standardizing the work force and call everybody a manager of somesort - that will surely look good for foreigners and make Finland an attractive place to work, no?

Damn I feel good. It’s finally done. I worked 16,5 hours yesterday on it and over 12 hours each day for the last two weeks. It’s been tough and challenging at times, but very rewarding at the end.

And I finally came up with a decent title for my thesis;

“Creating awareness in mass markets ‚Äì Experiences from small and medium sized companies”

I’m gonna take that pile of paper to the city to be bound. After that, probably some good food and a well deserved beer.

I think it’s a pretty good way to start the weekend.

ps. I’m gonna put up a pdf of the thesis later on, once the official graduation ceremony has been held (There are some details that can only be released in December).