Twitter: The liberty of expression

Since it start in 2006, Twitter has become an important public diary and news reporter. Twitter is considered to be a micro-blogging, but it is much more than just a place where people update their current status, moods and affairs.

Twitter is a service that enables its users to post text messages on their profile that can be followed by other users (or so called tweets). The users can than itself follow other users with their updates.  If a user is connected with a certain amount of tweets than it can follow every update made by them in real time. This application can also be followed on your mobile which enables the user to update very quickly. Reporters around the world use twitter to be updated realtime with news events around the world. Twitter can also be used as a advertisement tool to promote events, products or services. The key to its success is its simplicity. The freedom to be connected to the world and to be updated has rushed organisations and companies to use twitter as a first contact for news delivery. The BBC and CNN uses their own twitter account independently from their reporters.

The World is in our hands

We all remember in the late Eighties, when the first handphones were developed by Motorola, a huge phone with an antenna of more than 25 cm long ! It was long after the first fiction phone from a distant future in Star Trek where the famous sentence was pronounced by William Shatner (alias Captain Kirk) when he calls his operator back in the mothership the Enterprise: “Beep me up Scotty”. Fortunately mobiles have been developed into mini workspaces where people can not only contact each other but make video conferences and use internet to share, collaborate and work from distance.

All the players in the market agree that the future is in our hands, specifically at the top of our fingertips. Thanks to Third generation smart phones a person is able to work without being on his desk. You can share and transfer your files, using smart softwares such as Windows mobile, but you can also use google and its free documents and workspace application. Third generation phones, let us call them 3GM are not only more interactive to users but it can be personalized and updated with new and smart applications for all sorts of use.

Social networking can be used without any problem, you register and update your profile with your 3GM. You can access  Linkedin by just clicking the icon on your desktop. Change your profile or update your status, download your contacts to your phone, search for people you know on Facebook, upload or download pictures and videos on flikr and youtube.

Google for examples offers some breathtaking tools and features in order to render our lives more spicy. Thanks to Google maps you can pinpoint your location and use it as a GPS, than you can download a game based on your location, where you can compete with other players in your area, completing missions, like the first to be at a certain place near a monument or a famous statue. Iphone offers another application, whoswhere where you can see your friends that are  in the neighbourhood in order to ask them to join you to a party you have just been informed.  You can even play online games on your phone with others. The thing is that 3GM need to be connected to internet in order to be updated. Google has released recently their 3GM that will compete with its price and originality with Iphone and Blackberry, based on free software.

 

Your road trips will be more efficient thanks to Trapster, a Google application that enables you to know (with a vibration) where are located the “Speedometers” so you will have the time to slow down your velocity.

Mapsbuddy is another interesting application that works on Googlemaps, it shows you restaurants, clubs and bars in the neighbourhood (it knows exactly where you are), but the good thing about this application is that it shows you ratings by people who have already been  there.

It happened to everyone to stop in a country for lunch or diner without knowing the place and than begins the chase for a good restaurant. Do you see yourself in that situation? What happens next is the law of Murphy in action, the place is dirty, the prices are to high, the quality is low, the service is non existent ! but unfortunately there is no place left at walking distance, but perhaps thanks to Mapsbuddy you can be alert and stop a few kilometres further.

 

Sports tracker is another jewel application for Nokia smartphones, here you can train with you friends and gain miles running in the streets, already millions have downloaded the software.

 

In the future other smart application will emerge and the mobiles will be the next level of interactive network between people. In the future 3GM and 4GM will be used to do anything in our lives, from the virtual world to the real world; from buying clothes (your Sim card will be your ID card and Bank card at the same time), being a tools at school to your workspace. Therefore people will have more free time because it won’t be necessary to work in the office but from home or from some beach in the Caribbean.

 

Generation Gap in social networking

 The study of generation has stated that people of different generation react differently and have different patterns of behaviour towards internet and its use. O’reilly’s Web 2.0 philosophy and use of interactive online softwares that enables users to contribute, collaborate, comment, participate and even develop and create are typical GEN Y tools. The Baby boomers which are responsible for the world’s order and economy of today are simply watching their grand children (generation Y) creating and developing a new kind of economic environment, all that with a few clicks !

Generation X are those who are the inventors of the roadmaps of the internet, while Generation Y are the builders of cars inside these roads ! The next Generation, Gen M will look at generation Y and laugh at the use of a laptop in order to create an interactive website, GEN M is growing into a mobile world where you have fully virtual workspace at the palm of your hands ! They will build an economy that is 10 times faster than today ! where people will go virtually on holiday ! ok ok that’s too much science fiction !

In order to give you an overview of the personality of every generation specifically I have interviewed some psychologists mixed with a timetable of internet evolution and Voilà :

Generation Baby Boomers: Post war generation, grew with a strong believe in human freedom, freedom from a system, system of control and pressure. They are the contributors of peace rallies around the world. They are more conservative. They were born after the Second World War and influenced From 1960 till 1979. .

Generation Jones: was the generation of actual children in the 1960s, which came of age in the middle to late 1970s and early 1980s. Their approach with new technology is for the most strictly for work purpose or for example for a specific use such as messaging a family member or using a search engine.

Generation X: is the generation born between approximately 1965 to 1980, are the first to use computing and the internet. They are the programmers and love technology, but are still argues the value of sharing knowledge with the crowd, they generally are connected only to their dear friends on Facebook. A few of them use social networks only for specific purposes, money, business or work.

Generation Y: is a very large generation born between 1981 and 1995. they are often called the Millenials, this generation are the promoters of a new interactive web of sharing and collaboration. They understand the use of a fully interactive internet but not so much its backbone, they develop, mashup, use API to their website and share on a peer to peer level, they are mostly anti-global but work with the world online. They walk around with their laptop at school as if it was a walkman back in the Eighties.

Generation M, or mobile generation are born from 1996 to present, they will work in a more interactive world. They are not seeking money, but notoriety, based on project concept and not on a contract. They like to travel the world, learn languages they interracial and seek an approach with different cultures on every level of communication. They don’t like the idea of being bond to a place or culture or company. They will probably assist to a new frontier human perception of itself.

Crowd Relationship

Crowd Relationship

In the real world you have different types of connections. The very first connection is your family direct family; mother, father, sister or brother. This connections goes as far as cousins of second degree. When you grow up, you create bonds and relationships with people at school, which once again creates friendship till the second or third degree of friendship, so called friends of friends. As an adolescent you will have relationships of close bonds such as a girlfriend or a boyfriend.

Nevertheless, the choices taken in your life makes you lose friends and bonds between your relationships. If we look closely, the average person in the Western countries loses 80 % of its first relationships in his life, remaining just a small fraction of the people known. It is also a scientific fact the a person becomes more choosy when he grows up. At the adult face a person distinguishes by order of importance; family, love mates, friendship, relations, business relations and enemies.

• Family is the first circle of trust created by a person, it is limited to parents, brothers and sister, children and grandparents.
• Love mate(s), refers to love relations and its different categories, girl or boyfriend, husband or wife.
• Friendship; are generally people who play an important role in a persons life, they generally share a similar personality, background, experiences, tastes or hobbies. Here you can count some relatives such as cousins.
• Knowledge Relationships, are people who have at a distance a relationship with a person, generally those people are friends of friends of friends…. They have been in contact with the person a few times in his life, sometimes you see them often and sometimes they don’t show up for a very long time. This category can also be some sort of a place where a person puts the old friends he has not seen anymore or does not contact as often as previously.
• Business relationship, are people you work for or work with, both upwards as downwards, it can also be your teachers which basically you have done business with; they teach you, you learn, you get rewarded ! Business relations can sometimes be relations after doing business.
• Last category, but not do be dismissed are enemies, which in some cases can be really disturbing. Enemies are relations or friendships gone wrong, misjudgements and arguments are generally the basis of this rupture of this relationships.

Today the concept of relationships is at the centre of the media due to social networking sites which all together combines all this different types of relationships. People find friendship with people online, because they go to groups and networks that are somehow related to the persons feelings and personality. People find love online, they even marry thanks to the internet, business relations are created between people who perhaps never had the change to meet in real life ! only advantages folks.
The thing with social networks is, that it has created a new kind of relationship, crowd relationship.

Crowd relationships are people who work together with you in order to develop a project, a business or a home work. They help you to find a solution to a situation. Take an example of Ecademy or Linkedin:

Some people post a job by message to all his connections (most of them he or she does not know).

On Facebook, Myspace or Bebo a word to mouth message goes when someone is asking some advice on a product or a service. Crowd relationship is related to crowdsourcing where companies tend to search solutions within an extern relationships or with its clients.

In the business world, crowd relationships are becoming an emerging power of resources of business development. It strengths ties between companies and clients, in every level; B2C, B2B, etc.

There are two kinds of Crowd relationships, Under the line CR and Above the line CR:

Under the line Crowd Relationship is a more private an personal relationship with the crowd in our network. Example: you are searching for cheap flights to Barcelona and you ask your friends on Facebook if someone knows a cheap hotel in Barcelona ? Your friends may not know but they will forward your request to their friends till someone knows the answer to your problem and decides to post a message in order to help you out.

Above the line Crowd Relationship: This kind of relationship is when your network is used to resolve your work. Example: you are a recruiter and you are desperately looking for a SAP specialist, you send a message to all of your contacts on Linkedin and ask for help, who knows maybe they know someone?

The truth is that Crowd relationship is sometimes a one way relationship, only a few people respond to a request of someone they do not know. But the awareness of using those relationships are growing among companies who use so called enterprise 2.0 tools in order to profit from internal crowdsourcing. Some internet prophets are predicting that crowd relationships will be an emerging economic power to be taken very seriously.