Social Networks

Bill Liao is the author of the “The Stone Soup Way” and is involved with Xing and WeForest. The latter is an organization set up to empower local communities to reforest their environment by offering training in permaculture techniques.

Bill spoke on the first day at BlogTalk2010. He was interviewed afterwards and we would like to share some of the things he had to say.

“I am a great believer in a thing called permaculture which is an ethical design science. If you want to look at the height of civilization in my view, then it’s design.

"You can design a future that’s beautiful or you can design a future that sucks. Most people don’t bother to design the next five minutes let alone a future they really want to live into.

"It’s about designing a future you really want to live in and then creating a narrative about it that other people really hear and treating everyone with compassion. Hearing them, having them feel heard. Because most of the time we’re [left feeling] right about something because no one’s listening."

On the internet and mobile phones

Ted Vickey hails from Erie, Pennsylvania and now resides in Galway, Ireland. He started his first company when he was 24 years old and his first client was The White House: official residence of the President of the United States of America. He is now working on a PhD in social networking and exercise adherence at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He will be speaking at BlogTalk 2010 on how to make best use of your profile and connections on Linkedin.

1. Could you tell us about your background (where you're from, what you've done)?

I am an American entrepreneur living in Galway, Ireland. I studied Exercise and Sports Science at Penn State. I then had a 17-year stint living in the Washington, DC area.

Nova Spivack was an initial angel investor in Klout, a social networks analytics tool, which quantifies people’s interests by measuring their influence on others and also who in turn influences them.

Nova is now working on Live Matrix which is being designed to navigate the Web by time instead of space.

“Basically all these things at the moment are happening in a perpetual present. There’s no sense of time on the Web. What Live Matrix is doing is trying to index what’s happening when at different times.”

With the increasing amount of video on the Web and expansion of such services as Ustream, more and more scheduled events, lectures, sports, and so on are being fed out onto the Web. Therefore it is becoming increasingly important to find out when these items start and finish. As more content appears with a temporal dimension, there is more of a need to find that material.

Nova adds, “The past two decades have been spent on the space dimension of the Web. That is, what’s where? What keywords are on what pages. What people are at what sites. What content is where. But now we’re looking at what’s when. I think that’s a huge, open, uncharted piece of the Web. It’s a big opportunity.”

Number of Twitter posts per day, and projected growth.

It seems that Twitter has grown up. From work undertaken to determine the growth rate of Twitter at the Discipline of Information of Technology which is part of the National University of Ireland, Galway, it appears that Twitter is now growing at a constant rate. It’s growth is no longer dramatically and somewhat erratically determined by early adopters and the subsequent wave of trend followers.

This constant rate of growth reflects Twitter's now established role as a social tool and people are joining this online social network when and as they find it useful.

From December 2009 until June 2010 myself and Josephine Griffith ran an experiment to track the growth of Twitter. To measure the rate of growth of this online social network we used two key metrics: The number of Twitter users and the number of tweets posted.

Facebook is the largest personal social network in the world. So why should any company bother doing any business networking elsewhere?

1. The Stats speak for themselves.

It is always a good thing to go do business where people are. Facebook has now passed the 500 million user milestone. If this growth keeps continuing soon Facebook will become the world’s first truly global social network. As a business you need to be there. Facebook is essentially becoming the new Web.

2. Establishing your brand on Facebook helps to humanize your brand – where is the Love?

Using Facebook people get to see what sits behind the brand. You need to be a part of the Facebook community. If you are considering developing your presence on Facebook it is where plenty of your future prospective customers are to be found. There is plenty of need for corporate and professional sites but with Facebook Pages this is changing fast but this will no doubt shift in the coming years as web traffic and individuals spend more and more of their time on Facebook. So it pays to build your community on Facebook. This in turn can drive your fans towards your company’s website.

Ignore this at your peril. There is a shift online and as a business you need to pay attention.

3. Trust and the “Social Glue”