Inspiring ways to connect social media with real life

In a motorshow in Amsterdam Renault had Facebook passes (cards with RFID) that you could register your Facebook accounts to and use those tho "like" their cars in that show. That was a really cool new way to get people to share their experience in that show and also get free publicity via social network. Here's the whole story as reported in Springwise.

Couple months ago I blogged about Shoes as your social media tools, which was a school project where they used shoes to be able to check-in to places using special carpet. That was another way to connect social media with real life.

I've seen couple of similar ideas in couple of other occasions and I believe there's a trend there. Real world and social media is getting more and more connected. Foursquare, FB places and other location based services have taken the first step, but I wouldn't be surprised if we would soon jump out of app world to integrated world of things. I bet some of the clothes makers are already planning to integrate social media chips to their clothes or something similar.

I can already imagine people tagging to like something with their jacket sleeves, wrist bands or rings. This trend could start with similar liking as it is now, but soon there could be also "hanging with out with these guys" type of check-ins or likes. There you would be checking in also with people, not only with places or products.

It would be easy to say that phones will play an important role on these type activities, since those are still most often carried with, but I still believe these type of activities could work even without a display. You could sign in to your equipment (cloth, jewelry, key chain or whatever) and then just touching something with that one does the one action it is meant to do. Dead simple and cool.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Is Facebook usage changing ?

Is it just me, but I have this gut feeling that amount of Facebook status updates has been going down. At least amongst my friends there used to be much more status updates during one day than there has been in last month or so.

I tried so search from web some tools or websites, which could prove my point, but there wasn't any. Almost got the impression that this is information Facebook is not sharing with us. Or then they just don't store old status updates.

Also I haven't received any new FB friend invites for some time and also the amount of others making friends are calming down. Could it be that now in FB usage has calmed down. Most of those who will join have joined and rest won't join due to principle.

I'm not saying that FB is in any ways dying, but maybe the dynamics of usage are changing. I would say there's bit more interaction, meaning more comments on posts and then there's much more links shared than previously and discussion is going around those.

Maybe this is specific to Finland or then this is just my imagination, but let's see, if this is one ff these silent signs on social media usage changing. If my guess on this usage pattern is correct, next step could be Twitter having easier way to follow up tweets related to specific links somehow. Kind of like comments on blogs or comments on FB or Buzz updates.

I'll keep on following if this is really a trend.

Latest trend - letting others know your credit card usage

In short time I've run in to 2 different services which offers it's users possibility to share their credit card purchases with your friends. Those are Swipely and Blibby

Eventhough I'm always thinking about security, somehow this service makes sense. Social media's are going to direction that people want to let others know about every step they take, so this makes it even easier.

Cool kids and wannabes can try let every one easily know that they are visiting hippy places or buying cool stuff.

Let's see how this takes off, but I would guess quite well.

Here's ad from Swipely:


Swipely from Swipely on Vimeo.

Web reputation as currency

I happened to run in to Whuffie bank (http://thewhuffiebank.org/). It's an interesting idea of earning currency (Whuffie) by being active in  social media. It currently supports only Twitter. Somehow it feels like quite an "american idea" of more is better, but still it got me thinking that could it actually work.

Easy way to say someone have influence for example in Twitter is to look at amount of followers. Still in current days, it's so damn easy to start "following" someone, but then discard everything from this same person, if you are not interested. I atleast am not that active Twitter user and I atleast miss most of the stuff people are tweeting about.

Whuffie tries to tackle this problem by counting how much people re-tweets someone's posts. Whuffie has also some balancing factors that those who tweet too often or always just re-tweets would get lower score, but overall it's about who story is being told forward.

Reputation as "free-ticket" has so far been the privilidge of actors, athletes and other celebrity. Now this tries to bring the same to social media actives. Also this tries to bring reputation as a visible number. It's ultimate way of saying I'm cool and you're not. I wouldn't be wondered if you could soon buy (with real money) someone to retweet you and get your whuffle number up.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic to see it actually work as a currency, but certainly it will work as indication who are influencers in social media and who are not. Also, I could easily see that for people with high Whuffiebank balance, will be asked to try out many cool stuff, so that they could make it viral if it is good.

I guess I need to get the book the idea came from to understand it bit better: Cory Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen