Abrams Research Blog

YouTube brought huge news yesterday to its users, viewers, and tech community: anyone can now upload up to 15 minutes worth of video instead of the previous 10 minute limit. On its official blog, it took pleasure in being able to deliver the long awaited news since a bigger upload is the “number one most requested feature” on the site. But when it answers its own question about why it made the move now, the reason is because, “we’ve spent significant resources on creating and improving our state-of-the-art Content ID system and many other powerful tools for copyright owners.”

Cue, a bit of confusion.

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On Social Media Today, Stanford Smith asks an interesting question: do smart people prefer dumb blogs? It seems like a rather ridiculous thing to ask, until you realize he might be right and for reasons you hadn’t though of.

He tells a personal story, so the evidence Smith offers us does not come via charts and graphs. Still, his anecdote resonates. For example, he talks about having a friend critique an article he recently wrote. The friend pointed out a common problem: it’s too smart. Of course, whether an article is “smart” or not ultimately comes down to semantics. What we often consider to be the smartest stuff on the Internet is really an endless back-and-forth of point and counterpoint. Bloggers writing smartly dig themselves into a downward spiral by incessantly picking apart an argument in pursuit of, as Smith says, “rhetorical victory.” The problem? Readers care much less about the two sides of the debate than those engaged in it. He writes, speaking directly to these “smart bloggers”:

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For those whose friends are social networking content sharing fiends, the iPad app Flipboard offers a unique “social magazine” format for consuming friends’ digital content.

The first time I saw this application, I loved the concept, the interface, and the overall design. The idea of creating a real-time visually pleasing social networking aggregator is a fabulous idea. This is where internet trends are moving: reigning in our over-stimulated brains and taking all of the elements we love about social networking (sharing) and curating them in ways that diminish the overwhelming volume of content.

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If you’re a web developer by trade, you are probably well aware of the gamut of development tools out there for you to create an application for a mobile device.  Sure, there are all the different coding languages for software, but when it comes to mobile application development specifically, tech companies often create and host the development software themselves.  Take, for example, the development tools put out by Facebook or Apple for the iPhone.  This, of course, makes great sense.  If the company supplies the platform, the crowd supplies the products.  Everyone wins!

So it doesn’t come as a surprise that Google released a new app development tool for the Android last week.  This time, though, it’s different.  The App Inventor for Android, as it’s called, is actually designed for use by non-developers!  That’s right, Google wants everyone to become a developer.  From the Google Lab description:

To use App Inventor, you do not need to be a developer. App Inventor requires NO programming knowledge. This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.

However, this might sound like sacrilege to bona fide app developers, the people who actually understand the way binary code translates into functional software. In some sense, the new App Inventor is more technically advanced so that more people can ignore how it actually works. If more people are using a development tool, the tradeoff is a sophisticated understand of that tool.

That being said, the tool has potential to bring many new minds into the marketplace for Android apps. Those who might otherwise have steered clear of such a highly technical endeavor might now be able to offer insight, advice, and guidance that leads to a bigger and better product both for Google and its consumer base. And if everyone’s happy, who can complain, right?

But let’s not forget that the hacker and developer space has always been plagued with political and ideological battles. Some, like the free software crowd, value technical understanding via free (as in freedom, not free as in beer), while others, like the open source crowd, value mass involvement and metastasized branching of the movement. In a way, the new Google development tool takes the side of the open source crowd. Now the question is, will it irk those on the other side?

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Yesterday an article on the unveiling of the Ford Explorer 2011 model came out on Inside Facebook, a site tracking the uses and changes to Facebook for marketers and developers. In the article, the author discusses the logistics of the campaign, what Ford is doing well, and what is lacking. He sites the number of fans for the Explorer-specific page at just over 3,000.

Checking in with the page this morning, that number has soared to nearly 4,000. Good news for Ford, and for marketers who want to use Facebook as a platform for disseminating information. The lesson here: If you build it, they won’t come. If you use it (with interesting content, of course) it has enormous potential.

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It’s no surprise to anyone who has seen a news headline in the past month that British Petroleum has now unleashed the worst environmental disaster in American history.  It is a tragic, now political event of truly epic proportions.  And while there are very few who would stand in defense of the company right now, Patrick Barbanes over at SocialMediaToday argues that BP actually is getting one thing right: social media.

It started on May 19th when someone created a parody twitter account called BP Public Relations.  Here are just a few of the tweets:

Then, a spokesman for BP, Toby Odone, responded by saying:

I’m not aware of whether BP has made any calls to have it taken down or addressed. People are entitled to their views on what we’re doing and we have to live with those. We are doing the best we can to deal with the current situation and to try to stop the oil from flowing and to then clean it up…People are frustrated at what’s happening, as are we, and that’s just their way of expressing it.

Barbanes says this is an exemplary reaction, admitting that most companies have no idea how to respond to biting attacks via social media. Barbanes says, “That is about one of the HEALTHIEST and most enlightened responses I’ve ever read from a corporate spokesperson about a parody of their company.” And while Barbanes scoffs as the suggestion that a company should embrace these kinds of fake accounts by exposing them as false and then highlighting the real account, does it help more for the company to condone the outlash?

BP’s response might seem so ahead-of-the-curve, though, only because of its unique position at the moment. All eyes are on the company. So while their decisions seem brilliantly sympathetic to the lives they have affected, it might not be a blueprint to follow for other companies. The moral of the story here might be that it’s too soon to tell how exactly a company can effectively respond to parodies, but we should be taking notes nonetheless.

If you’ve recently tried to update your Facebook settings, you might have noticed that once again, everything has changed. The layout is different, and the groups you spent so much time choosing?  Gone from your profile page. And that’s only the beginning of what has turned out to be quite a major overhaul.

More importantly, however, Facebook has started to like a lot more things. In fact, now Facebook likes almost everything.

As of last week, Facebook has begun to give websites the option to install “Like” buttons, from which the websites can drive traffic—every “Like” posts an update to that user’s page. What does this mean? Effectively, it means that Facebook may slowly be transforming the internet into an SEO-resistant open-graph. Google is, understandably, starting to worry. read more »

“I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening”.

Does this sound like you? When you want to check up on your friends, do you use Facebook? When you want to find out what pre-teens think is cool, is it Twitter that tells you it has been and always will be Justin Bieber?

The fact is, rather than use the phone or walk to a friend’s house, we log on and plug in. It’s gotten to the point where we don’t even think about it anymore. But what would happen if you had to abstain from social media, say, for an entire day? University of Maryland students recently found out. read more »

Social media’s power to transform advertising is a well-documented phenomenon—look around and you’ll see that the majority of corporations are now testing the waters. But advertising is not the only corporate division affected by Web 2.0′s innovation. What is equally astonishing, and often overlooked, is social media’s effect on what the public doesn’t see (unless it involves a sensational story about inappropriate Facebook use)—human resource management. Personneltoday’s recent feature, “Social Media: 6 functions HR can’t do without”, highlights what many professionals already know to be true: social media has promoted some amazing HR improvements. read more »

There comes a time in the life of every business when a difficult reality must be faced: value optimization cannot continue indefinitely when the underlying business model fails to generate sufficient profit. Twitter’s most recent announcement, that it intends to integrate advertisements through Promoted Tweets, is therefore the long-expected, highly anticipated (and somewhat feared) step towards diminishing the disparity between operating costs and profit.

Unsurprisingly, the news has been met with a firestorm of opinions. But before we get to that, let’s cover the changes.

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