@ev on the BBC

Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, interviewed by the BBC. He states that London is the top worldwide twittering city... And BTW for all you fans, Demi Moore's Twitter account is mrskutcher

Evan Williams of Twitter on Charlie Rose

Interesting vision of the "human need" for communication driving Twitter and, 5 years from now "normal people" using Twitter like "normal people" use Facebook and MySpace.

Looking at "normal people" around me (wife, father, non-techie friends) I accept the notion of a need for communication and a general acceptance of social networks as a way of sharing more than we would have been comfortable with 5 years ago... The evolution from a phone call to an email to a text message to a facebook wall post to a tweet does sound natural. The question is whether the platform for that outreach will be Twitter or not.

Eric Schmidt seems to believe that GMail could take that place.

The Economist, Facebook and the Dunbar number

The Economist has an article this week entitled "Primates on Facebook" which talks about the size of the average network on Facebook (120 "friends") and the connection to the often quoted (mis-quoted perhaps?) Dunbar's number in which British Anthropologist Robert Dunbar claimed that the human brain (more specifically the size of the neocortex) could only keep track of 148 connections in its network.

The question raised by the article is whether mediation of these networks by a computer makes the "cost" to keep each relationship alive lower. I might be dating myself, but in my early teenage years, I still wrote real actual letters to my friends across the world. My group of "friends" therefore was lept fairly small due to the cost of staying in touch.

Email lists allowed me to employ one-way communication and share my life with a much broader group (some were avid readers, others considered it spam). Now with Facebook, I feel that I have two networks: My friends (those that would have been on the one way email blast) who now have a 2 way dialogue thanks to wall updates, pictures, and social apps, and my "other" contacts, people that I would never add to my email but whom I am OK having on the periphery of my social network (they can consume but it is unlikely to be two way).

So, yes the article is correct that "people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are 'broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,'" but I still disagree with the notion of a static number... and believe that social networks, twitter and the like do allow us to have less costly (and thus more frequent) interactions with a greater number of people.

A great book on some of the science behind social networks, made consumable for the common man, is Duncan Watts Six Degrees. Duncan had joined Yahoo! Research...I wonder whether he is still there.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Facebook's "In-House Sociologist" Shares Stats on Users' Social Behavior (insidefacebook.com)
• Beating Dunbars Number (chrisbrogan.com)
• Richard A. Smith: The Facebook Effect: How Social Media are Transforming Our Capacity to Achieve (huffingtonpost.com)

Social media marketing examples

In his blog, Peter Kim (ex Forrester analyst , ex Razorfish marketer) posts a great (and growing) list of how brands are usig online media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter) to extend their reach. Some of the examples were great for both the simplicity of the communication channel and the ability for community engagement.

Some of my favorite:

AMC's Mad Men. Microblogging: Fake Twitter accounts. [CHG: extend the life of your characters! brilliant]
BMW. Social networks: Facebook 1-Series Road Trip application. Rampenfest fan page.
Heinz. Online video: YouTube contest.
Motorola. Wikis: MOTO Q Wiki with how-tos on using the phone [CHG: because its so darn hard to use?]
United States House of Representatives. Microblogging: Twitter account. [CHG: really?]
Securities and Exchange Commission. Microblogging: Twitter account. [CHG: highly practical for hedge fund bankers to be alerter for upcoming regulation]
Virgin America. Microblogging: Twitter accounts for information and sales. [CHG: question is...any sales come out of this?]