Wednesday, April 21, 2010

this is the world wide web

After seeing Facebook F8 conference, knowing the three key apps that Facebook introduced: open graphic, social plug in,graph API, all to make every facebook users, or facebook users to-be be more connected to each other. I came to a question, who will be the most benefit by those new apps? Advertisers, marketers...and every entities that try to sell and be visible.
I rememebr when I first used Facebook, I was certainly thrilled and stunning to find out how myself and all the friends whether past or present, are so connected. Then again, there came a time that I realized what Facebook has done to make everyone too well connected to lose a level of privacy of one's own.
Certainly, as a marketer, I would be extremely excited to know how easy for me now to target my audiences and to directly communicate to them and all the potential market that they will bring. However, as a user, I can't help but notice the huge amount of private information that we've slowly lost. We've always thought that we still have control of what information we are willing to reveal via internet, but not anymore, in the case of facebook.
Do people care about their personal information being revealed? Or, because of te advanced technology with phones and the internet, people somehow get so distant and yet want to be connected to everyone so badly that they just willing to share everything at every moment? Last year, there were some people saying it might be possible for Facebook to finally disappear due to people get sick of being visible all the time and thus stop updating and sharing. From the statistcs of Facebook users growth, I don't think this will happen in a nearby future.

further readings:
http://apps.facebook.com/feightlive/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/live_blog_mark_zuckerbergs_f8_keynote.php
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_privacy_move_violates_contract_with_user.php

Sunday, April 18, 2010

to stop the unstopable in China?

Pirate bay, emule, you name it, people have heard about it. Piracy issue is always there especially in a country that has no limit of internet bandwidth in Asian area or European countries. When I first came to Australia, I struggled a lot with the limited internet bandwidth because of my internet using habits back in Taiwan. The country that I came from has a sub culture that no one speaks out but everyone kind of understand it, the downloading culture amongst young people. Why didn't our government do something about this? Yes, they did. But, let’s face it, it's fairly hard and costing to track down which IP is downloading and nail it down.
When reading all those news about how China censors the internet, something interesting struck me. It's a fact that everyone know that China is the biggest pirate country either online or offline. The software I used to view the latest movies or TV series is from China. It seems like, China does care about how it public think politically and protect them from those "evil" information that they don't need to know about. But it doesn't really care about how the world thinks of it as the biggest pirate kingdom and let every of its illegal sites being used or get out of its "Wall."
China filters almost everything to "protect" it public, but none of it stops it public to be intellectual thieves.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

cloud sourcing and the ancient wisdom.

The future technology pattern is verifing the old asian wisdom. Evern Since I was little I've taught the wisdom of "Three cobblers with their wits combined equal Zhuge Liang the mast mind."Somehow, not till recently as the concept of collaboration going popular that I pick up this saying again.
As google annouced its new google doc, which added co-editing function and the popularity of wiki-, the internet further proved this old asian saying. Team work was a trend, collabortive knowledge is now happening in every fields of works, especially in the world of internet. Open source is a key issue for developing softwares.It is, indeed, very interesting to find the perfect match between our old wisdom with modern technology trend.
Fighting by oneself is relatively hard then coopoerating with others. Not too long ago, there was a project, providing a shareholder structure that open to everyone. With only a little amount of money from each individual, this project was able to run and make profit and finally reture the profit to each "shareholders." This is the power of colaborating, and only in the world of the Internet can this power be practiced beyond national borders.

Monday, April 12, 2010

pay or not to pay

With the Internet access for almost everyone in the world, nearly everyone online users assume that the information posted online is free. The printed newspaper has encountered two phases of change, one, to convert their content into Internet format; two, to face the battle of should or should not charge their exiting free content to the users.
Many news agents nowadays, have their own websites which contain some of the news in their newspaper, other than that, news aggregator engine like Google, yahoo, provide massive news information to Internet browsers. All of those providers are now delivering the content through the Internet for free, at least from the readers' point of view, we don't need to pay any online content for now.
As newspaper readership has dropped and the overall global financial crisis strokes every industry, the News Corporation chairman, Repert Murdouch has been saying to charge online news content with his strong view that quality news content should not be free. He kept one step forward recently by saying that Google, as a news aggregator is a thief and should be banned.

As a online users, I still have doubt for paid-content in the future. The internet is too wide, people can obtain their information in any way through any providers. If the news agent wabsites started to charge for their content, I think most likely, users will find another way to obtain their info and as the consequence, news agent may lost their veiwing and then their ad support.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Phony phone

When tehnology evolved, phones with heaps of apps, allow people to go online, take pictures, filming, and even located oneself, life is not simple anymore. Instead of talking to people, we choose to SMS, leaving messages in Facebook. I will say, the smart phones have become another wall built between actual connections of people.
Went back to Taiwan for couple days early this year, lots of my friends got a new tool in their hands, an iPhone 3Gs, and all of them have a very annoying attempt to keep playing with thier phone in a social event. I was even arguing with one of them that this act is fairly annoying and not respecting others, and he's point is how convenient his phone braught to him, with lots of apps and games and news contents. I kept thinking, isn't this ironic that phone, which is supposed to connect people, has somehow distanced people ?

Phone, came from greek word, far and voice, is no long just transmitting voice from point to point, with lots of added apps, the phone now is quite phony as it is.