My Social media thoughts, November.

Just wanted to give my $.02 on where we are with Social Media at the beginning of November, 2009. About six months ago, I was pretty excited about two trends in social media; location based social networks and video.

The 3gs iPhone had just arrived, this meant two things to me:

1. Video on the best smartphone had arrived. It’s now very easy to publish video from whereever you are, without a computer.
2. The price of the 3G dropped to $99, cheaper than an iPhone has ever been. It has GPS, which means that a lot of users are going to be able to easily participate in a location based social network than before.

I’m going to break these two apart, because they’re equally important:

location based social networks

Location based social networks is really important to me, now there is an easy and direct way to translate offline to online. As I find myself saying way too often, “you can make a latte on the internet”. Location based social networks are exciting because it is a tangible way to translate what someone is doing on their  device to what is around them in real life. Foursquare seemed to be the most exciting network then, and it’s done nothing but pick up steam. Twitter has also stated that they’re officially adding location to tweets. I don’t believe that this will push Foursquare out at all. They still have quirky community that drives people to use the service as much as possible, because hey, I certainly don’t want to give up that mayorship anytime soon. Also, their database of crowdsourced locations is a great asset. Why buy the data, when you can get it for free?

Twitter’s location based info is really interesting because of it’s implication for search. Check out my thoughts on Twitter Trends based on location.

video

This prediction isn’t coming true as quickly as I thought it would. Video on the web already had its coming out party with YouTube, mobile video isn’t having the same splash. I have been really impressed with how 12Seconds has built community within it’s site, I had been thinking that they might have a chance to break out with it. It’s looking like users in twitter aren’t as excited about about sharing mobile videos. I still think 12seconds has some opportunities, they just aren’t as obvious as I thought they were 6 months ago.

It makes me wonder if social media, while being social, is still an inherently solitary act. Even if you’re tweeting in a large group, it’s still solitary. It’s just you and the iPhone screen. When you share a video online, the barrier starts to break down, and it starts to feel more invasive to the process.

Before the year is over, I’ll pen my thoughts on what’s coming for the next 6 months.