Impressions: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the Iranian Revolution

Saturday, June 20, 2009, was a fairly typical day for me. The only thing different than most Saturdays was we woke up early and dropped my daughter off at the airport for a graduation gift trip with her friends. On the way home my wife, younger daughter and I decided to stop at the mall and have the Apple store take a look at my daughter's busted power button on her iPod touch. We made a reservation at the Apple Genius Bar and ended up with about an hour and a half to kill walking around the mall. My wife and daughter ended up doing most of the shopping and I ended up peeking at my Twitter feed on my iPhone. I noticed a lot of tweets tagged #iranelection and decided to start following those tags.

Like tens of thousands of others for the rest of the day I watched a revolution tweet by tweet - described in 140 characters or less on Twitter. The Iranian government had pretty much shut down traditional media (television feeds, reporters, etc) but that did not matter - they could not shut down the web. As Secretary of Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, the Iranian government "could not draw the net tight enough to stop everything" It was evident when I got home and turned on the TV - guess where the major networks (CNN, Fox, etc) were getting their updates on Saturday - Twitter, Facebook, YouTube......

The ability to read, watch and experience through the eyes of others what was happening in real time was something I had never experienced before. The closest think I can compare it to was was it felt like like watching a live battle - not through the eyes and interpretation of a reporter or camera person - but through the tweets of the individual soldiers.

For the past few days there are reports the Iran government has been confiscating laptops, cell phones, etc and analyzing historical information on the devices. It is very simple to pull historical information off cell phone SIM cards (for example) and they will be able to track down some of the posters this way. It has also been reported the government is taking a close look at those videos on YouTube and will be identifying some of the protesters this way too. There are also reports of looking at things like Twitter names and tracing IP addresses to ID people. There also may have been a counter attack using social media, hacking Moussavi's Facebook page and posting incorrect information to confuse and upset his supporters.

What can be done? Not much without shutting the entire country down from the rest of the world. I'm guessing tsomeone is taking a serious look at cell phone signal jammers that could shut down cellular communications when things start to get out of control. Sure things can be shut down temporarily but a jammer is not going to stop a user from tweeting or recording video and then posting the content when they do get a connection. It will be very difficult to shut this stuff down for extended periods of time.

So many really smart people have told me they just don't get social media apps like Twitter and I struggle sometimes describing why and how I use them. I'm hoping a lot of people are getting it a little more after the past weekend. Saturday will stick with me and I'll remember it in a way that I remember the first time I saw a color television, used a modem, sent an email and searched the web.

Alloy Media 2008 College Student Study

Alloy Media just published their 8th annual College Explorer study with some interesting results. The study was conducted online for Alloy within the United States by Harris Interactive. This September 13.6 million college students (ages 18-30) are predicted to arrive on campuses and bring $237 billion in spending (a 20% increase from last year) with them. Here's some detail on some of the mobility gadgets students will be bringing back to school with them next month:

7 in 10 students now own a laptop (a 67% increase in three years), with desktop ownership dropping 34% over the last three years.

Ownership of MP3 players has increased, with 67% of students now owning one and using it for more than just music. 23% are now watching downloadable videos on the “small” screen.

The cell phone, once a utility for getting in touch with friends and family, is now favored by a growing number of students who use it as their all-in-one device for communication, entertainment and web access.

The way television is viewed on campus is changing too:

62% of students report watching TV online.

26% are choosing to visit the various major networks websites 34% are opting for YouTube.

Others emerging platforms on campuses include Veoh, Hulu, and Joost.

I also found the politics portion of the study interesting:

90% are planning to cast their presidential vote in November. 43% state that they’re “Pro-Obama.”

Candidates’ presence on social networking sites became just as vital as a campus town hall with 88% of students (up from 73% just last year) reporting engagement with social media, including visiting social networking websites, video websites like YouTube, and blogs.

Also with regards to social networking - 81% of students have created a social networking profile - popular activities reported include posting web applications, with 39% doing so, and almost one-third posting videos.

You can read more about the study here.

Bandwidth Hogs and the iPhone 3G

A couple of weeks ago I purchased an AT&T USBCONNECT 881 3G card and have been doing spot bandwidth tests where 3G is available. The 3G iPhone will use the same network so these spot tests will be a good indicator of the kinds of bandwidths we can expect. You can see my speed test results by location linked here. Coverage and bandwidth has been good so far in areas where I spend time including out on Cape Cod in North Truro, MA.
On the left is a screen shot (click to enlarge) sample - 1324 Kbps downstream and 334 Kbps upstream in the wilds of the Cape Cod National Seashore - pretty good for a PC and would be very nice on a new 3G iPhone!

A recent piece on Gigaom titled Is 3G Ready for the iPhone Stress Test? is an interesting read. Here's a quote from the post:

The original iPhone runs on the 2G networks using a technology called EDGE. Despite the slower speeds, the data usage on AT&T’s mobile network ballooned due to the original iPhone. According to Chetan Sharma, our favorite mobile data guru, iPhone users used nearly five times the data used by average AT&T subscribers, and nearly twice as much as other smart phone owners. About 55 percent of the data was carried on Wi-Fi networks, while the rest was on EDGE.

3G bandwidth on a small handheld device..... sounds very nice especially for YouTube and other mobile video applications. YouTube does run on the original iPhone over the EDGE network but it is slow. As a result, most are only watching YouTube videos on their iPhones when they are within WiFi range. If users can now watch elsewhere - will mobile video become a 3G bandwidth hog? I think so.

I'm also interested in how AT&T will handle the inevitable BitTorrent iPhone file-sharing applications (these are much bigger bandwidth hogs) that will be rolling out this summer. The AT&T 3G service I purchased for my PC card has a monthly 5 Giga-Byte (GB) data "soft cap". Will users get cutoff for the month when the 5 GB cap is hit?

It's not just AT&T that's going to have to deal with these issues - they'll just likely have to face them first with the 3G iPhone.....Verizon and Sprint also have similar caps in their 3G wireless contracts.

Subscribing to RSS Feeds

Blogs, podcasts, videos - you name it - are being distributed today using RSS feeds. Scott St Onge, National Center for Telecommunications Technologies (NCTT: www.nctt.org) webmaster and John Reynolds, NCTT consultant, have put up a nice 6 minute video on YouTube showing how to setup a subscription - click the play button below to watch.



RSS feeds are excellent ways to keep up with news, technology and hobbies. Get one of the free aggregators (my.yahoo.com or igoogle.com are the two most popular ones) and start subscribing. When you do be sure to subscribe to our NCTT YouTube channel and of course subscribe to this blog!:) We'll be posting lots more!

UC Berkeley Posting Full Lectures on YouTube Channel

I said I would not until next week but just had to write a quick post on this topic. UC Berkeley announced today that it has started posting full lectures on YouTube. Subjects include biology, chemistry, physics and a lecture titled Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Here's a cnetNEWS.com quote from Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley's vice provost for undergraduate education:

"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life, academics, events and athletics, which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community,"

The Berkeley channel is at: youtube.com/ucberkeley. Take a look at what Berkeley is doing and also watch our NCTT channel at: http://youtube.com/user/NatCtrTelecomTech. You may find our RSS feed tutorial interesting!

Online Video Viewers Growing

From a Telecommunication Industry News Feed:

According to a Study titled Digital Content Unleashed by ABI Research close to 50% of U.S. consumers are watching some kind of video on their personal computers.

Streaming online content is now the most popular form of PC video, with 72% of viewers watching movies in their web browsers, versus only 65% who use their computers to watch DVDs.

The number of viewers who have used a computer to receive pay-TV services, delivered over carrier networks, meanwhile, stands at just 7.1%. This suggests that although subscription web TV has gained some ground in recent years, the overall number of users tuning in is still relatively low.

It looks like it's time to reconsider the production of DVD's - a popular way for some to market things like academic programs and move the content directly to the web. One way to do this would be to setup a free YouTube channel and post video content there.

We've had our National Center for Telecommunications Technologies (NCTT) channel up for a while and are just starting to populate it. Here's the first part of Karl Kapp's keynote presentation at our July Conference in Marlboro, MA.

You can see our channel and other content here: http://www.youtube.com/user/NatCtrTelecomTech. Keep your eyes on it as we post!

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Read Show Notes and listen to Mike Q and my latest Podcast titled iPod touch Overview and Impressions linked here.
Podcasts also free on iTunes.
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Michael Scott [The Office] and Jimmy Wales Explain Wikipedia

One of the few shows I do watch on TV (I Tivo it) is The Office. and yes - I even watch the reruns. Last night was a treat with Michael, played by Steve Carell, giving his Wikipedia impressions. Here's his clip from YouTube:



Tongue in cheek funny stuff but still - this is the impression many (especially those in the academic field) have and - yes - there is some justification. Here Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales discusses two different views of Wikipedia - Emergent Phenomena and a Community of Thoughtful Users:



Let's compare videos - Michael is taking the more common emergent phenomena perspective which, from Jimmy's perspective (and mine), is the lesser of the two. Here's a quote from an interview Jimmy did a couple of years ago with Mark Hurst from Good Experience. Jimmy was asked by Mark about Wikipedia's error correction after Jimmy had claimed a 5 minute turn-around time.

A lot of people, when they learn about Wikipedia, have this very attractive idea that it's an emergent phenomenon - the sort of thing where a million people add one sentence each to build the site. But really, the vast majority of changes on Wikipedia are made from a hard-core group of users. It's not a Darwinian phenomenon of millions of people, but rather a community of people. That core group is in constant communication, via IRC, and on the Web itself - they're always talking, in 40 languages, about the articles. That's how the site gets corrected so fast. People notice the change and very quickly communicate it through the community. The tight-knit group of users makes all the difference.

So it's not built and maintained by millions of people popping in, posting and popping out, never to return again. It's built and maintained by a much smaller community of thoughtful users that closely monitor and maintain content. Perhaps we could even say community members have some social "skin in the game".

How well does the Wikipedia concept work? According to the Wikipedia entry, as of August 14, 2007, approximately 7.9 million articles had been posted in 253 languages. 1.95 million of which are in the English edition.

How accepted is it? Let's consider academia - there is much criticism and controversy regarding the use of Wikipedia in the classroom - some faculty discourage use, some ban it and others allow it. Wikipedia has an excellent entry titled Criticism of Wikipedia linked here. I also (as referenced in link) would not consider Wikipedia a primary source just as I would not consider an encyclopedia to be a primary source..... however, most Wikipedia entries are richly linked to acceptable primary sources.

Wikipedia is likely one of the first places students (and faculty including myself) do go to start researching a topic - whether "banned" or not.

Who's Watching Online Video?

On July 25, 2007 Pew/Internet released a new Technology and Media Use report with some fascinating information. Here's highlights quoted from the report:

- 57% of online adults have used the Internet to watch or download video, and 19% do so on a typical day.
- Three-quarters of broadband users (74%) who have high-speed connections at both home and work watch or download video online.
- More than half of online video viewers (57%) share links to the video they find with others, and three in four (75%) say they receive links to watch video that others have sent to them.
- Video viewers who actively exploit the participatory features of online video, such as rating content, posting feedback or uploading video, make up the motivated minority of the online video audience.
- Three in four young adult Internet users (18-29) watch or download video online. - News video is the most popular category for everyone except young adults.
- Professional videos are preferred to amateur productions online, but amateur content appeals to coveted segments of the young male audience.
- 8% of Internet users say they have uploaded a video file online for others to watch. - Most video viewers watch at home, but one in four report at-work viewing.
- Half of young adult video viewers say they watch video on YouTube.

How they watch:

- Most have watched online video with other people.

- More than half share links to the video they find with others.
- Three in four video viewers receive links to online video.
- One in ten have posted video links to websites or blogs.
- One in five have rated video or posted comments after watching online.

What users prefer:

- Young men are among those least likely to express a preference for professionally-produced video.
- 37% of adult Internet users report online news video viewing and 10% say they watch news video on a typical day.
- News video is the most popular category for everyone except young adults.
- Comedy and humorous videos attract the largest number of young adult viewers - 56% of young adults prefer these.
- With bite-sized clips, music videos also draw young audiences online.
- Animation and cartoons garner the young male audience.
- Full-length movies and TV shows are still making their way online.
- Political content resonates most with active viewers who rate or comment on video.
- One in eight Internet users watch or download commercials online.
- Young male users are the most likely to say they have watched or downloaded adult video online.
- Few pay to access online video.

I wonder how many faculty are using on-line video in their courses. I also wonder how many employers are using on-line video to enhance and grow their business.

We hear a lot of discussion in the academic community about blocking online video sites like YouTube - some IT Directors say it sucks up too much campus bandwidth. As we reach out to young adults, especially in the academic community, blocking sites like YouTube does not appear to be a very good idea.

You can download and read the excellent 28 page Pew/Internet report linked here.

And.......... it's not just the "young adults" watching this stuff - as a former VW owner here's one of my YouTube favorites!


Enjoy:)

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Listen to Mike Q and my latest podcast "Skype, More Skype, Goodbye Copper and Casual Gaming" linked here.

Viacom versus Google

As you probably know Google and ViaCom are squaring off for a major legal battle. On March 13, 2007, Viacom filed a Federal Copyright Infringement Complaint Against YouTube And Google. According to the Viacom press release:

"The lawsuit claims over $1 billion in damages, as well as an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from further copyright infringement. The complaint contends that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times".

Viacom is protesting the posting of Viacom owned content on Googles YouTube. Viacom holdings include MTV, Comedy Central, VH1 and Paramount Pictures.

Yesterday Google responded to the Viacom lawsuit kicking things into high gear. Here's how the Google response begins:

"Viacom's complaint in this action challenges the careful balance established by Congress when it enacted the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA balances the rights of copyright holders and the need to protect the internet as an important new form of communication. By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for internet communications, Viacom's complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment, and political and artistic expression. Google and YouTube respect the importance of intellectual property rights, and not only comply with their safe harbor obligations under the DMCA, but go well above and beyond what the law requires".

As I understand - and I'll preface this by saying I'm not an attorney - Google says it is in compliance with the DMCA because it removes copyrighted content that has been posted on request. Viacom, on the other side, is claiming Google is not taking "proactive steps" to prevent users from posting copyrighted material.

This will be interesting to watch and you can believe everyone will be watching.