Social Networking Sites

For this post I have selected two of my favorite sites in addition to Facebook and Twitter. These sites are Youtube and Twitch. Most of you probably are not familiar with Twitch.tv as it targets a specific group of people: Gamers. One thing about all these social network sites is that if they are similar they try to "copy" what the other one is doing in an attempt to replace it. We have seen it in Facebook's status messages and tagging people, imitating Twitter. Youtube is no stranger to copying a potential competitor. Youtube added "Youtube Gaming" in order to offer similar services that have been in Twitch.tv for a while.

One thing that all 4 sites have in common is that they all let people communicate with one another and share original content and all sorts of files. Facebook concentrates more in the social life aspect of people. As in the main purpose of Facebook is to share any life event trough pictures and videos. Like pictures of the bar you visited Saturday night, or your cousin's birthday party. I feel that most of the time, these posts are an attempt from the person posting it to seem interesting, cool or to be accepted to certain social group that he wants to belong.

Twitter seems to be more professionally and academically accepted as a social network tool. Not that it is bigger than Facebook, but it seems more appropriate at a business and academic level. Having a limit of the amount of words per tweet makes people more creative about what they post. I see twitter used as a tool that supports the content of a specific project. For example, many people who make videos in Youtube, often use Twitter to let their followers know what they are working on and when their next project will be ready, as well as updates that have to do with delays.

Youtube has been around for a while and its main purpose is the making of videos that range from cats being cats; to classes of economics. Youtube users often concentrate their content in one specific audience. For example, there are channels that will only post videos about basketball and others will only post videos that have to do with video games. Youtube seems like the most profitable social network if the user can get a constant amount of viewers. There is an interesting trend in youtube, and this leads to my discussion of Twitch. The most viewed videos are music videos, having at the top "gangnam style" with 2.6 BILLION views. However the channel has 9 million users subscribed which is more important that a video view since it remarks how many people are going to see all of the content that you post. On the other hand we have "PewDiePie" gaming channel. It is the most popular channel with 48 million subscribers. Even tough his most viewed video accounts for only 78 million views, it counts with the persistence and support of 5 times more people than the "gangnam style" channel. Making it more profitable.

Twitch.tv is concentrated only in gamers. In this website people can stream in real life when they play at home. Anyone can watch them, talk to them and give donations. There are a lot of people who stream video games for a living and make a decent paychek (all from donations). Twitch.tv has been becoming bigger with the growth of video games popularity. Even Amazon.com just signed a contract with them and having an amazon prime account gives you benefits in twitch.tv as well. Its busiest time is when the League of Legends world championship runs every year; at this time they get up to 500000 people watching live. Streaming has been adopted by youtube and even facebook. Streaming games is growing rapidly and twitch is definitely a social network to keep your eyes on.

Social Networking

We all are familiar with social media and social networking. Most of us even feel that we know most of the uses that these social media platforms offer and the advantages that they bring to a business or a person. Most of us have heard about a case when through social networking a business has increased their revenues at little to no cost. Like the case that was discussed in my marketing class last semester about a restaurant that opened in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The owners decided to bring the restaurant to twitter, foursquare and yelp. But not only that, they listened to what people were writing and they were actually acting upon those comments. Even sometimes the customers will give a recipe for a burger and the restaurant will actually use it and sell it. As you can imagine this boosted the revenues of the restaurant tremendously. 

Other organizations that are benefiting from social networking are involved in politics. Political campaigns are now publishing heavily on social media in order to attract support from all the social media users. This has been proved to be very effective, mostly because the people seeing the post by a politician can actually comment and give their opinions in real time. One of the first examples of this change is the Obama's campaign. When the president used social media in order to strengthen his campaign. In the article "How Obama Tapped Into Social Network's Power" by David Carr. We get a description of how the president was one of the first politicians to take use of the "unconventional" and non traditional social media for his political campaign. The use of Facebook and twitter to run a campaign ended up giving more power to the people and to the president himself; the ones loosing here were the bankers and lobbyists, as Mr. Carr said: 

   

           "The juxtaposition of a networked, open-source campaign and a historically imperial office will have profound implications and raise significant questions. Special-interest groups and lobbyists will now contend with an environment of transparency and a president who owes them nothing. The news media will now contend with an administration that can take its case directly to its base without even booking time on the networks."

Just as these social media platforms become more popular and powerful; they become more competitive with each other. Social media platforms are in a constant fight in order to grab more users and it seems that they all want to take over the other. Some social media platforms have not survived the competition from Facebook and Twitter (like Myspace). But even when we think that these two giants are very different from each other, they are actually very competitive. This is better illustrated in the article "Facebook Goes for Some Twitter Sensibility" by Claire Cain Miller. On this article, Miller explains how after failing to acquire Twitter; Facebook decided that it was time to imitate some of the features that seemed very useful by the Twitter users. One of these features that Facebook took from Twitter is the option to tag a friend in a status update. Before, the option to tag friends was limited only to pictures. Another thing they took was pretty much the whole Twitter layout in what is called "Facebook Lite". Search, and see for yourself; I hope you are okay with copycats. 

Blog v Wiki

Blogs and wikis have become so popular that these words feel very familiar to us now. So familiar that sometimes we even forget the actual meaning or in fact what these two words represent. Blogs and Wikis serve to gather information from multiple people into one web page. The main difference is that blogs are all about the authors opinions and the development of these ideas (with some criticism and collaboration from other bloggers). As we see in the article "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid" by Michael Wilson; a bunch of people from the area of Brooklyn came together in a blog, providing information hat came from each blogger's perspective. This different information added up in one blog to become so detailed and accurate that eventually it was for use of the police to perform an effective drug raid in a house.

Wikis, on the other hand, serve as a collective effort to provide information. As opposed to blogs, the main article or piece of information can be altered in order to expand on the subject or to enrich the range of information that is provided. The most known wiki, is Wikipedia, which everyone has had used at some point. Sometimes Wikipedia seems so common that we forget the actual nature of the website and that pretty much anyone can add whatever they want to it (for a little time before getting edited by some other user who doesn't want people to fail their research paper). The purpose of a wiki page is very well described in the article "An Internal Wiki That's not Classified" by Noam Cohen, we get a picture of how a wiki page is used as an every day tool in the State Department. A wiki page is used for executives to come up with information about an important foreign politician that they have a meeting with. Now, instead of each executive coming in with their own piece of information about the politician; they all add that information in a wiki page in order for everyone to have the most accurate data for that meeting.

 I can not think of a way that wiki pages are not being used right now. With all the free flow of information sometimes we feel as everything that is to be invented, its already invented. I am sure that somewhere there is some blog and/or wiki page discussing on the multiple ways a wiki can be used that has been overlooked by most people.

Gaming and New media

In my opinion there are two sides of gaming. First, there is the side that the costumers see and enjoy, which is the game platform and all the features it offers for entertainment. Second, there is the developer's side. This is much more complicated and it is a process that a lot of people do not look into it. New media has affected both sides of the gaming industry by creating online communities where players communicate with one another. Adding to this some developers have turned their game process updates into something like a blog or a wiki page, where the players can give direct feedback and recommendations. I will look in more detail all the ways that new media has affected the gaming industry and how the industry is adapting to the merge of new media platforms.