• Facebook’s Timeline will become the key focus of the Facebook profile experience.  They are trying to make all of your historical data on facebook lots more accessible (eventually you will see a year-to-year list on the right hand side so you can go back and look up what you’ve done last year this time, or add additional content/photos to your page).
  
• Open Graph Apps Publishers and developers are now given the options to build apps that enrich the timeline.  Imagine recipes I’ve cooked, music I’ve listened to, videos I’ve watched.  A good social app would make it much easier for people to record what they have done, to find our what their friends are up to, and to share such action.  More on  (Btw if you put together a quick mock apps and choose an Open Graph action (e.g. ‘read’ a ‘book’, you will be given an option to preview the new Profile)
  

• Open Graphs Actions and Objects Like and Recommend used to be the only two verbs enabled by Facebook’s Open Graph; they will now slowly roll out other actions including ‘listen, watch, read’. Eventually this will expand to other verbs that we can customise ourselves. 

What does it mean to publishers?

• ReadWriteWeb has a gloomy view of ‘once a user opts in, they will not realise they are sharing everything to everyone
• Guardian seems to find a way to work around by essentially building their website inside facebook

• They can monetise on with their own ads serve (See the MPUs and Skys – it’s theirs and Facebook has nothing to do with that)
• Users interact with these content in a Facebook environment, which makes it more likely for them to realise their action might be shared across their networks
• Users are clearly sign-posted that once they have read an article it would be added to their timeline, but also given the options to remove the article immediately (see screen grab below)

Exciting time; looks like this will definitely drive engagement up (as the sentimental drive is quite compelling to most of us) for Facebook.  As for publishers, it’s about building clear objectives on what’s beneficial to business as it can be expensive building a Facebook App that nails the user experience, but the reward can be significant as well.

1. Social media, like all media, is a medium for people to connect
2. Social media is defined as digital medium that allows people to distribute information to one another or to many in a low-cost, parallel distributed way (i.e. once a message is sent, it can easily be cascaded and spread out)
3. Human beings intrinsically connect to satisfy their emotional and social needs, and seek empathy when something elicit their emotional response (e.g. fall in/out of love, winning a competition, had a bad day at work, best friends getting married, stress of moving homes etc)
4. Just like it is comfortable to watch episodes of Friends where it feels like people you knew all along are there with you, Facebook/Twitter or even your old school emails provide you with a digital venue to meet and greet and connect with people that you like (hence interested in what they are up to)
5. Social media, hence, is an extension or convenience for us to connect, just like a community cafe in the town where you read newspaper and get greeted by familiar faces on Sunday mornings
6. Social media also provides ample information for people to compete and distribute their achievements (linkedin profiles) for social capital gain (oh I know this person who can help our company does that), but at the same time can back fire as a medium on ego-stroking oneself (e.g. facebook updates on how someone bought another race car with photos etc..)

Now the business side is what boggles me.

1. Marketing sees that when there’s something that everybody looks at and ‘ENGAGEs’ with, it is a channel (the ‘billboards’ where they can make a lot of money in getting people to notice and buy a product)
2. Marketing sees that ‘social media’ is one of these venues
3. Now how does marketing ‘capitalises’ and ‘leverages’ social capital?

Here I hope we can take a step back and look at the human side of social media.  If your product helps me connect and share my feelings/thinking (e.g. WordPress), I would genuinely really like you and I would spread the word for you when someone asks me what blogging platform I recommend.  Or if my good friend develops an iPhone app that rocks, I would gladly review the app and put some good words (genuine, of course) in the app store, not because I am doing that for you per se, but if I find something useful, I would want to share and help other people find the same thing too.  But if the app sucks, I would help my friend to improve by giving him offline recommendations because I know online reputation counts.

Now what I am not sure is if a big brand comes along and ask me to re-skin my blog to promote their brand so that my visitors would constitute their ‘page impressions’.  This is where traditionally marketing having a hard time to understand.  Social media is NOT a traditional billboard.  It is an intimate part of my daily life.  Imagine if you are a new father/mother, you won’t ‘brand’ your kid with Pampers outfit to promote the brand, but if Pampers works really well for your child’s skin, you would naturally recommend it to other parents (whether via social media or just a simple chat over coffee).

In a nutshell, social media allows users to get their words out fast and more exponentially, but ultimately your product needs to deliver.  Get the product right, then people would do the talking for you.  Social media helps getting the words out faster, but that’s both for good and for the worst.

1. A professional window to share your knowledge and join the conversation

Social Media Gurus like Jeremiah Owyang use blogs as his professional medium for outreach and aggregates information as well as shares knowledge.  By opening up his blogs on various topics, he manages to attract a critical audience of the social media industry while also puts himself in the spot light among the social media practitioners.

To me it’s a bit like what Chris Rock says about relationship, ‘For the first three months, you are not you.  You are a representative of you.’  Probably blogs are not an ideal medium to fully represent who you are (i.e. no drunk photos, please), but blogs are much better medium as the representation of one’s professional self.  Great for networking, industrial visibility, connection with the like-minded.

2. A scrapbook on what you are reading and interested in

Christian Heilman (aka CodePo8, Yahoo! Developer Network‘s EU evangelist) sees blogs as a place where he tosses all the pieces he thinks of in one place where he may have to refer back to. Blogs to him are his scrapbook (and obviously the world is his playground).   Umber lady geek DivineMissN (who dearly saves delicious bookmarks for me, literally thanks!) is definitely a queen in blog-cious-streaming. Whoops.  Did I just create a new word?

3. A platform for you to keep in touch with people that works better with pull information rather than push

Remember those friends that call you at 11:30 pm and keep on rambling about how their lives are (completely disregard of whether you are busy or, dare to say, care or not)?  Blogs are great medium to share what you are up to, especially for geeks on the go – you might not have the time or enough drives to call someone up and talk about BarCamp London and how it’d go – but once you blog about it, people who care will find you and will keep in the loop on what you do.  And better yet – it only takes them 2′secs to leave you a comment, or track-back if they’re blogging anyway.  Great for keeping in touch with people that you kinda care, but not enough to pick up the phone.  (Note: I am not saying that calling someone or meeting someone for a coffee is bad – but there are friends that you do truly care while you just really want to know that they do well, and you are perfectly aware that they work 14 hours a day!).  However, it seems that Facebook does serve very well for this purpose for the non-bloggers in this world… So does Twitter.

4. An alternative medium outside emails and phone that helps open communications and reduce correspondence volume

Luis Suarez, the star of IBM social software branch, is known for his say-no-to-email initiative that inspired my last blog post.  Although I get mixed feedbacks from you guys, it is hard to refute the idea that we save time to build information on top of existing one, rather than to create information from scratch.  Wikipedia is a good example.  Documenting information about Hong Kong on Wikipedia is likely to benefit thousands of internet users, as opposed to those junior highschool projects where you start from scratch and only your parents and your teachers get to see what you’ve accomplished.  Not to mention no one else can build on top of you brilliant work.  Because of the hypertext-trackable nature of blogs, it is obviously a great medium for knowledge to be documented and grow on one and others while benefiting anyone who care enough to check out the strain of information.

5. A personal yet paradoxically open space for you to share emotions that you might not share with your mom, but in a form of poems with people you may never meet

Are you ready for this?  I’m getting contentious, as usual.  Blogs can be an environment similar to the Alcoholic Anonymous clubs – where you meet people that you never knew, but who are going through the same kind of issues at the same time as you do and would really love to hear about your emotions, experience and feedbacks, vice versa.  A good use of blogs in this context is MacMillan‘s use of blogs for cancer patients and their family to share what they go through.  Just like [hypothetically example, totally] your highschool best friend might take no interests in your stress in planning for a Bali holiday when she’s about to be sacked from her investment bank (and hence you go to tripadvisor instead of calling her), blogs become this paradoxically open space for people to share their most intimate reflections, thoughts, doubts and dreams.

Now, what is your blog? Probably this question is much easier to be answered in retrospect than when you set out to start a blog.  For me (yup it’s all about me me me here, I’m sorry), I am stuck because my blog has always been my personal playground, scrapbooks, and thinking pads to share some very naunced reflections.  But working in the social media industries, gathering all the insights and learnings, I feel bad not sharing those with a wider audience outside my firm.

You might ask, what’s stopping me?  Well, being a keen observer on the sociology of collaboration, and as someone who is hyper risk adverse (which makes me a good social policy paranoid), I have, frankly, no appetitte for unfriendly strangers.  Let me give you an example. Kathy Sierra, an amazing techkie lady who founded the Creating Passionate Users blog, attracted an amazing crowd of followers and supporters, and I was truly very inspired and concurred with her observations and learnt a lot from her.  Sadly she stopped her blog at the peak if its development due to malicious personal threats.  Why?  In Chinese, we say that ‘Being at the peak also brings you frosty chills’.  It’s great to have the attention of the people that think alike, who care about the future of technologies, pursuing our passions, being people closers.  But we must not forget that there are those who are hurt, angry, and frustrated.  The more prominent you are, the more likely you attract those attention as well.

All in all, I feel comfortable enough back to blogging now.  And probably there is no point about pre-determining and risk-assessing everything you do.  Or perhap there is?  Don’t have the answers here.  Thanks for bearing with this long post.  Hope you have a great time blogging, sharing, and learning from one another.

Step 1: Know who you are, and who you want to become.

This is usually the hardest step and try not be led by opportunities open out there but create your own. My internship with an architecture firm, Fluid, was not included into my programme’s database but I know I am interested in deploying new media in public engagement, which is this company’s expertise.

Step 2: Look for contacts in your network to see who can give you advice on who to approach

‘It’s not who you are, it’s who you know’ – cliche but probably true. I started looking up my own contacts, and asked an architecture professor at my former University for ‘advice’. Never say ‘Oh what do you think I can do?’ because other people are not responsible for your business. Be prepared. Only when you have precise, carefully formulated question then you you get concrete answer, ‘hey i’d like to intern at a company that drives new media technologies in public consultation, will you happen to know any given your previous experience?’

‘come to think of it I know a firm in London that does this!’

Step 3: Don’t wait for someone to initiate the conversation – get the contacts and make it happen!

Instead of waiting for the professor to get back to me with the director’s email (I did wait for a few weeks and then assumed that he must have been buried under an avalanches of work), I google-d and found the company’s email. I mentioned the professor’s title and where they met, and the director eventually got back to me.

Step 4: Persistence, Persistence, Persistence

Eventually over almost 4-5 months of email correspondence, there were frustrating moments of waiting because the company does not know how to postion me (they are all architects and I am sociology/psychology/journalism/new media ‘thing’ by training). I had to push them again until we had a face to face meeting, and they agreed for a ‘testing period’.

Step 5: Back-up plan

During the painful months of waiting, I have been bouncing off emails to other companies. Eventually two got back to me, including the British Urban Regeneration Association and Yahoo! EU. I decided to step out of Fluid at the end of the Internship and check what’s going on in big corporation like Yahoo!. When I left, Fluid offered me a potential position to be their associate, great news, but you never know what’s out there until you venture.

Step 6: Time management

Some of you might want to just work enough to fulfill your course requirement, but if you aim to start a career at the end of the course, it makes sense to do a few internships because this is the only time you can ‘shop’ around for different industries. Once you formally start a proper position you will not enjoy the freedom to jot from jobs to jobs. I did my leap in Yahoo! EU and eventually they hired me as their EU Community Manager, where I am now. And I love my work. Moreover, I see this more than just work but also as my career.

Finally don’t forget to deploy online networks if you’re looking for opportunities out there – I got quite a few contacts from linkedin.com and even facebook.

Did i miss any big tips?

When I was about 12 I decided that being a psychologist was my true sense of vocation. It sounds wrong but I was very fascinated by the typography of personalities, as well as what makes people loveable and loathe-able. Working in a psychiatric hospital as a young intern, the idea that you can’t make everyone happy started rooting in me… as devastating as it may seem, I started gradually realizing that there are people who would never be happy. If you want to be sane, you better leave them alone.

This realization doesn’t come conscious though, probably until when I was about 19, things started to change. As lame as it sounds, it was the internet that changed me… the first thing I remember that truly shocks my world (sorry, Yahoo!), it’s google search – imagine all information (well I know it’s not all information) around the world at your finger tip! Then I became more aware of all the interesting cultural movements, such as Open Source *slash* open initiatives from Firefox to Wikipedia, where people seem to enjoy the luxury of being super altruistic, or egoistic, and present themselves in a way that *they* want.

Apart from the Wikipedian vision that drives ‘the sum of all human knowledge’ to even the most under-privileged population, to less well-know grass root movement as little as bringing one extra kilo of goodies to poor kids in China, the internet never ceases to amaze me.

Starting my career as a community manager in Yahoo! Europe seems to be the best place I can be. It wasn’t as easy as I thought, and there are hurdles for me (and fella geeks), such as occasional needs to push through layers of ‘corporate membranes’ to get things done, but somehow by remembering that it’s passion that matters, everything seems to be fine. After all, job is just what we do to exist, but passion is what we believe in to live. As my cool colleague, Farhan, told his story – there is no excuse for lack of passion…

What is your passion?

The geek in us…

Emuishere Peliculas‘s photo on Flickr

From 43Folders

*running to pick up the book

1.    Look for your objectives

Be it taking more personality tests, reading the biographies of your heros, or talking to your best friends – you might have your own style.  But for me and for the harsh reality of London’s commuting – I prefer to spend some reflective time in the tube not sniffing someone’s sweaty armpits, but to think of what I have done that day and what does that mean to me in a larger scheme.

Of course, me comes first.

And of course, at times sweaty armpits are unavoidable.

It is also a time to think of what I want to become at the end of the year, at the end of five years, as I am ten years older and when I retire, who do I want to be?  A billionaire?  Someone who travels around the world?  Be part of the believers and supporters of microfinancing or MIT’s $100 laptop per child?

Whoever told you that you could find the answer is complete bullock.  But it is worthwhile to gain some perspectives into who you can become and more importantly, who you want to become.  Then that’s the time you can better prioritise where your energy goes.  The amazing side effect is that all petty things around you become minuscule, really.

2.    Be strong

Men or women – we are living in the world of doubts.  Am I too fat?  Do I earn enough?  Is my car cool?  How much money I have left this month?  Should I enroll in pension schemes?  Oh, or MBA?  The list goes on…

The truth is, people love judging you. Either you choose to have the lowest profile or you feel overwhelmed.  The best advice I got is to believe in what you can achieve, and do think of how you can contribute to a larger scheme in life.  Tossing your ego out of the window does not make you weak, but brings you new strengths because it reminds you of your beliefs – how you can contribute to the greater good.  It does take more strength to do that than to hold on to your ego.  It’s a constant battle.

3.    Remember what makes you happy

My friends told me the Centre of Buddhist Studies in Asia actually attracts more investment bankers than the usual suspects, aka the new age folks.  Making money is important, but only if it makes it easier for you so that you can make the most out of your lives.  Sometimes it doesn’t take much – be it a long distance call to your parents, taking your best mate out for a dinner, or bringing a rose to your spouse (god knows what’s next).  We have the power to be happy, and sometimes it comes from making other happy.  Whatever it is, don’t forget you soul.

4.    Speak less, Listen more

Haha – this is hard for the extroverts.  Listening doesn’t mean just nodding your head and listen to anyone, but to go out, finding those who are with it, learn how they become who they are, conceptualise their ‘dots’, and draw a line through the dots the way you like it – and share.  That’s reflexive listening.  As much as a cliché it is, the sum can be bigger than the whole.

5.    Respect

Respect others.  Don’t gossip.  It might be okay to listen to gossips (they are fun and we are human, after all) – but don’t pass them around.  You never know what are the bigger intentions someone has when passing along gossips to you.

Also, respect other people’s time.  If you do need to invite someone to a meeting – show them you have done your homework and be precise what you need from them.  Follow up.  I know it’s been written all over the internet but respecting other people’s time is an art.  And the best piece of advice I got is, ‘It’s ABSOLUTELY legitimate to ask why you are invited to a meeting and what you are expected to contribute’.  And be ready to answer your attendees that question as well.

6.    Don’t stop learning

Happiness comes from learning something new and breaking routines.  Learning also lets you hop from jobs to jobs and realize your dreams.  But more importantly, when you learn something and become a mini-expert in the area you are passionate about, not only can you glow and grow in the area, you also gain respect from other passionistas – and there’s nothing that beat the feeling.  (again, I’ve assumed that you’re also an extrovert)

7.    Learn to say ‘I don’t know’

Don’t bluff.  If you know enough of the area, no one expect you to know everything.  But if you bluff it, you loose respect, because PEOPLE KNOW!

8.    Assume good faith

Yes, of course there are people who piss you off at work.  Here I’m nicking Wikipedia’s top two core ‘norms’.  I love ‘Assume good faith’ and ‘Neural Point of View’, with a bit of my own twist.  How much time we spent suspecting other people’s motives?  If you assume good faith from the others, you actually go and communicate and dispel a lot of myths or accumulated anger/frustration – which goes back to point 5 – it’s a big respect to people you work with as well.

9.    Neutral Point of View (at times)

Don’t jump to conclusion and be a judge of what’s work and what’s not, who’s good and who’s bad.  Life is parallel to work in a sense there’s usually no black or white, right or wrong in simplistic terms.  This is not to say you should be the one without opinion – it goes back to points 2&6 – don’t stop learning, be strong, but make INFORMED opinion instead.  And that’s a bloody huge difference between annoying your colleagues and being someone whom everyone loves to work with.  A main lesson I learnt from Wikipedia – it’s not who you are, but it’s what you say and what sources you are citing.

10.    Believe in yourself, but research, research, research

All in all – it is never easy to believe in yourself, but when you do, keep on learning and listening to others and research – everything would just all seem to be in better place.  And of course, this list is not exhaustible.  Feel free to pass along or add stuff on and share that with me.

Thanks to all the wisemen!