SocialTV – TV with your Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter friends

Cosmin Ghiurau — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:44:09 +0000

For a few weeks now Splashcast and Hulu have partnered up for a unique service called “Social TV”. the idea of having “interactive tv” online is nothing new however what is different with this embeddable widget is the fact that you can share it with your friends on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. In real time you can that chat about the tv show as it is running.

Another interesting feature is the fact that if you are watching “House” like I have taken a screenshot here for this blog post and you place a comment 5 minutes into the show, your comment remains there as part of the show. So in other words you have a permament archived dialogue of the show. It will be interesting to see how quickly this will become abused with profanity and self advertising broadcasts (spammer’s dream). Fi

nally another diferentiator is the fact that you can place a real time poll and have the cability to rate.

According to Mashable Splashcast claims that during the two week test-run, time spent in the apps increased 50%, showing that comments make videos much more engaging.

Personally I have made it a goal to unplug from the tyranny known as “cable programming” by this summer and watch all of my television entertainment via online channels. I love this blog post from Gizmodo listing out all show like an internet TV remote.

Social Media Channel Discovery

Cosmin Ghiu — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:13:00 +0000

Social Media according to Wikipedia.org is: primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences. Source: Wikipedia

Social Media can further be dissected into four primary channels which encompass all of the internet-based tools with relative examples.

1. Communication

The initial grandfather of Social Media is Communication. The internet at its core was developed to communicate among other users. Beginning with usenet, emails, forums, etc. The progression led to our current tools used for communication among Social Media.

Blogs – Blogger (service), Livejournal, TypePad, WordPress, Vox,
Microblogs – Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr
Social Networking – Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, hi5, Bebo
Social Netowrking Aggregators – Friendfeed, Plaxo, Profilactic, Youmeo
Events – upcoming.org, eventful

2. Collaboration

As the internet evolved and the adoption of broadband as common use among the majority of internet users, collaboration was fueled by a multitude of companies and services that were introduced. Collaboration is at the heart of Social Media. Such services can be broken up into:

Wikis – Wikipedia, Wetpaint
Online Office Suites – Google Docs, Zoho Office Suite, Acrobat.com
Social Bookmarking – delicious.com, StumbleUpon, reddit
Social News Sites – Digg, Reddit, Mixx, Newsvine
Opinion Sites – eOpinions, Yelp, Amazon reviews

3. Multimedia

With the continued emergence of broadband, internet users adopted the sharing of multimedia. File sharing became the norm before copyright laws brought those services down in order to be regulated. This gave birth to multimedia social media sites that were used as tools to facilitate multimedia on demand. These can be broken up into:

Photo sharing – Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Zoomr
Video sharing – YouTube, Veo, Revver, Vimeo
Livecasting – Ustream, Justin.tv
Audio and Music Sharing – imeem, Last.fm, Pandora

4. Entertainment

The final channel is that of entertainment. Entertainment online through games has been a fixture on the internet as far as the early years of the internet with the early 80’s film “War Games” with Matthew Broderick. Since then gaming and entertainment has evolved into a complete social medium allowing people to interact, communicate, and collaborate in real time with players on a global scale. The current breakup of the entertainment channel for social media can be defined as:

Virtual Worlds – Second Life, Webkinz, Toppstown
Online Gaming – World of Warcraft
Game Sharing – Kongregrate, Miniclip.com

Now that the four main channels are outlined and broken up into understandable mediums it is important to know that these are only tools and technologies that if not understood in how they fit within an overall strategy for a Social Media initiative it will be a case of the unknown for those that try to dive into Social Media. The consensus is to try Social Media for the sake of not remaining behind with a trend. This should not be the case.