Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Beautiful Minds...Coming Soon !!


I know, I know. I am sorry for not having blogged for so long. But I do have an excuse, and a very good one at that. I was busy knowing people who are absolute inspirations to the field of work I have made myself belong to. And, I am so enamoured with the concept of helping non-profits with social media and any online web 2.0 medium that I have hunted out my role models here. Tony Hsieh, David J Neff, Beth Kanter, Wayne Mansfield, Jamie Inman, Jordan Viator and so many more such beautiful and awesome minds are all my role models. I wish and I hope to get them to talk more and more about their unique ideas and how those can be linked to non profit causes with the internet as the medium. I am loving this. The sea of knowledge that these wonderful minds have, can be translated into technically strong web-apps and get help for all the creatures of god!! Isn’t that amazing! Guys...I am not being spiritual here...just being human. Anyways...keep reading my blog where I promise to bring you at least one interview every week and I would live all the conversations tagged with them. Follow me @sumitory001 and mail me sumitroy001@gmail.com if you want to know more. Thanks. Keep helping !

In pic (clockwise from L to R): Jordan Viator, Tony Hsieh, Beth Kanter, David J Neff, Jamie Inman and Wayne Mansfield.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Twitter Lifespan.. What next ??

Twitter is over crowded and the strategies involving it is becoming increasingly difficult. But then, it’s all the more challenging, isn’t it? Social Media to most pundits is a conversation and that is powered by various user content based tools. Twitter is one of them and has been the hottest one in the last few months. Its rise has been meteoric much like its social networking predecessor, facebook. It receives over 3 million UMVs (Unique Monthly Visitors), and has seen a daily growth of approximately 420% over the past 12 months.

Though they are different from one another in terms of features and usability both twitter and facebook serve the purpose of the social media theory, communication. However, as with facebook, twitter too will soon start to suffer from the ‘data splurge’ syndrome. It’s fast loosing the personal touch and being used more as a marketing medium. This not only detracts the users from such profiles but also causes irreplaceable damage to the domain. It’s difficult to find the required data and too much of information makes the user’s experience rather grim. The bounce rates start falling and it becomes a tool which only attracts new users and not new interactions from existing users. Facebook users who had registered 12 months prior have accepted of having gone down on their visits to the site. Most use it as repository for their snaps and videos while others use it for people search.

But then every social media site seeks popularity to make it a more powerful tool. So how does it survive the ‘plateau effect’ (the user traffic stats remains static while the bounce rates fall)? What can a Twitter or Facebook possibly do to diversify? What can they do to stop their popularity from ultimately paving the way to their collapse? Somehow they have to show a new way to their extensive user-database with another interesting and interactive tool. That should help them keep their massive list of followers/ users intact and then subsequently, grow.. Much like what google did with gmail.