Continuing our series of conversations on the future with Gerd Leonhard of The Futures Agency and myself, here we discuss the future of Twitter.
Some of the topics we discuss include:
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The centrality and ease of use of the Circles feature means Google+ is a significant step forward in social networking. It has been a key platform in its initial success.
The Circles feature enables people to selectively share content. Someone can send work-related discussions to their public stream, photos of their children to their family, and information about a boating event to their yacht club friends.
This effectively addresses privacy issues in allowing us to share both public and private information on the one platform, and not have to divide ourselves across different profiles.
However even our public personas have many facets. One person can be a leading software developer, music enthusiast, food lover, skier, and overall a lovable person. All of that is public – there are no constraints on sharing in any of those spaces.
Some people will want to follow everything that person shares. Many may be only interested in their thoughts on software development, and not care about the rest. Yet they have no choice – either they follow everything that person shares or nothing.
Gartner analyst and VP Brian Prentice brought this into focus in a recent Google+ post:
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Continuing our series of conversations between fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here is our session on the future of television.
Here are a few of the ideas we share in the session:
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Continuing our series of conversations between friend and fellow futurist Gerd Leonhard and myself, here are some discursive thoughts on open versus closed systems. Given this issue’s central role in virtually all business strategy today, we find that our clients are consistently asking us about how to think about and build strategies in this context.
Here are a few of the points we make in the video:
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Continuing our series of conversations on the future between Gerd Leonhard and myself, today’s session is on the future of music.
Here are a few of the points we made:
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Tomorrow morning I am giving the opening keynote at the annual conference of Institute of Public Affairs New South Wales, on the topic of The Transformation of Government.
Originally I was scheduled to follow the recently elected NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell, but he has had to travel to Beijing, so he will present at the conference after the morning break via Telepresence.
It is actually quite significant for an outsider like myself to be invited to speak at the event, let alone on a big picture view of a rapidly changing world. The title of the conference is The Future Course of Modern Government, mirroring an excellent policy paper of the same name created by IPAA a few months ago. I blogged about the 11 recommendations in the report, which are well worth a read if you don’t have the opportunity to read the entire paper.
The conference is intended to be a landmark event, several months since the NSW government changed after 16 years of Labor incumbency, and anticipating potentially dramatic change in how the state government functions in the years ahead. The themes of the conference – Technology, Innovation, Services Reform, Collaboration – are now squarely on the government’s agenda, and the reason I was invited to give the keynote.
Below is my Prezi presentation to support my keynote. I will shortly release the underlying framework as a pdf.
Contagious Magazine does a regular Most Contagious Viral Video Chart Round Up. It’s not clear what criteria they use to rank the videos, but they clearly are all enormously contagious videos.
Go to the current Most Contagious Viral Video Chart Round Up on Contagious for the full list of the top 20 viral videos, plus some interesting commentary. The top 10 videos are below – there is some awesome entertainment in there to while a way a moment, and in some cases become inspired…
1. T-Mobile: Angry Birds Live
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Today’s Australian Financial Review has an interesting article titled “Watch out for the spook in the navy blue suit” which looks at how professionals can respond to anonymous slander, quoting me and a few others.
It looks at FirmSpy, which is a site that provides gossip about Australian professional firms, notably law firms and the local arms of the Big 4 accounting firms. FirmSpy provides insights into internal issues such as bullying, sexual harassment, and staff satisfaction and turnover, resulting in Australian Financial Review calling it “Australia’s own Wikileaks for lawyers and accountants”.
For those accused of wrongdoing, there are limited possibilities for response. The article says:
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It is some years now since ‘expert networks’ have become a significant force, linking subject matter experts in science, technology, and business to clients, largely in funds management and finance, usually at very healthy hourly rates. Clients such as hedge funds that are investing in particular sectors or companies want to know more about issues such as the viability of drug development processes, or when they can, about internal issues like staff turnover. A survey showed that over 40% of institutional investors found that expert networks were an “extremely” or “very important” aspect of their company research.
Clearly there is the potential for insider information to be made available if people are currently, or even possibly recently, employed by the company in question. The expert networks, most notably Gerson Lehrman Group, which is reported to control two-thirds of the market, have strict clauses in their agreements about what can be discussed by experts. But sometimes things go too far. An FBI probe into a consultant working through Gerson Lehrman Group was launched in December. The New York Times recently reported that after their success convicting Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon of insider trading, federal authorities are turning their attention to expert networks.
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I was delighted to get an invite to Google+. Then amazed when I was told I can’t use Google+ because we use Google Apps.
It seems that Google is expecting to make Google+ available to Google Apps users “in a few months” with some .edu users possibly trialling it sooner. As many others have expressed, it is very frustrating to be delayed several months into the hottest new social space because we are more dedicated Google users than others.
Andy Pattinson kindly pointed me to the following video and form for ‘entities’ (companies, brands etc.) to apply for a Google+ profile.
This is fair enough, but it is coming from exactly the same mindset as Facebook. Individuals build social networks around their Profiles, and companies, brands, media etc. build Pages (in Facebook) in which there are slightly different parameters on how you communicate with their network.
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