Make my baby internet famous

Recently I helped do a survey of a huge company where the average age was 45.  We wanted to find out how many employees used social media and what they knew how to use.  53% were users.  Yet, Facebook was by far the tool of choice for sharing.  43% said they used wikis, but most didn't use any other collaborative sites. Yet, what was really amazing is that 60% visited video sharing sites such as YouTube.

No wonder people can become internet famous.  Whether it's someone over-singing "Chocolate Rain" or an America's Favorite Video or Susan Boyle shocking all of Britain.  So, here's a cute video of my son cracking up while climbing the stairs.  Click on it, pass it around.  Let's make Kobe internet famous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyVFbwPwpvo

Happy Hannukah

I was going to send everyone an ecard, but there aren't many good ones out there. YouTube's "Hannukah Song" video is nice but a little too silly. I could send everyone a Hannukah candle on Facebook, but those seem so cheesy. Instead I'll just say Happy Holiday everyone.

Catch The Google Wave

Hey Twitter and Facebook, Google is coming for you. They are launching their on-line tool for real time communication. They've already played Santa a little early and given out a million Google Waves. This is the preview stage, before the beta stage and then the launch stage. So, there's plenty of time to enjoy your Twitter updates a little longer.





According to Google:

A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss
and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and
more.

Essentially, it’s the combination of a grip of social media connections into one “wave”. It’s instant messaging, file sharing, blogging, tweeting, retweeting and an espresso maker all in one. One Google exec explained that it is their take on what email would look like it if had been invented now. I watched the hour and twenty second demo video. I get that. It’s real time. It could be a really powerful way of communicating.

Sounds good. You can watch the video at:
http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

Social Media Simplified

Here's a quick look at how social media looks. Any questions?

Facebook, Zynga, and my brother-in-law

Facebook just announced today that one of its biggest games, "FarmVille," has more users than all of Twitter. Here come the numbers from TechRadar.com:

Worldwide Facebook is clocking up 200 billion page views a month, with 350 million users globally logging into the site.
When it comes to the site's online chat function, 1.6 billion messages are sent every single day and 1.4 million photos are uploaded a second. Facebook is also now hitting 23 million unique users a month in the UK, with each of those people logging on spending around 25 minutes on the website a day.

That's huge. So big that Zynga, the Facebook gaming company , has become one of the fastest growing companies in the country thanks to Facebook games like Mafia Wars and Farmville. Yes, they're the ones who are to blame for all those annoying updates. (They're easy to hide, by the way.)

In fact to illustrate the point of how big Facebook is getting, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg was quoted as saying, "69 million active users are using FarmVille alone, that's more users than Twitter."

So, for full disclosure and to do a bit of bragging, my brother-in-law works for Zynga, the makers of Farmville. These games are growing at an amazing clip. I've had everyone from my 5-year old nephew to my 65-year old uncle update me about their prowess building their roller coaster or other game goal. My big question was how do these "free games" make money.

The answer is from selling items for the game for real cash. Normally, in Farmville, you have to earn coins to say buy a new barn. But if you're really into it... really really into it, you can also buy that new barn for just a few coins. Who does this? Only a few people. Just think though, if only 1% of those 69 million people buy a $1 barn, that's a good chunk of change.

Go Facebook. Go Zynga. Go Bro.