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Google recently announced that it was abandoning Wave, a multimedia social media collaboration tool. I’m sorry about this, as I thought it had great potential. That being said, I never used it, so perhaps I was typical. Pete Cashmere writes on CNN Tech:
Wave was perhaps the prototypical Google product: Technically advanced, incredibly ambitious and near-impossible to use.
Its demise is the canary in the coal mine for Google’s social networking plans: Facebook is destined to build the Web’s next wave, as Google continues to tread water.
Meanwhile, let’s take a look at what is going on at Facebook and elsewhere, courtesy of EduDemic. I offer #6 (regarding Facebook) and #10 (regarding Twitter) especially for those hospitals and other companies who choose to block these media on their servers, in the hope they will consider how fruitless that is.
- The average Facebook user has 130 friends.
- More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each month.
- Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application.
- More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites every month.
- Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook.
- There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
- Over at Twitter:
- Twitter’s web platform only accounts for a quarter of its users – 75% use third-party apps.
- Twitter gets more than 300,000 new users every day.
- There are currently 110 million users of Twitter’s services.
- Twitter receives 180 million unique visits each month.
- There are more than 600 million searches on Twitter every day.
- Twitter started as a simple SMS-text service.
- Over 60% of Twitter use is outside the U.S.
- There are more than 50,000 third-party apps for Twitter.
- Twitter has donated access to all of its tweets to the Library of Congress for research and preservation.
- More than a third of users access Twitter via their mobile phone.
Paul Levy is the President and CEO of Beth Israel Deconess Medical Center in Boston. Paul recently became the focus of much media attention when he decided to publish infection rates at his hospital, despite the fact that under Massachusetts law he is not yet required to do so. For the past three years he has blogged about his experiences in an online journal, Running a Hospital, one of the few blogs we know of maintained by a senior hospital executive.
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I’m not so sure. Google has YouTube, Gtalk, Groups, Sites and Gmail to name a few. Not to mention, the ability to collaborate using the facilities of Google Docs. Probably, their best asset is the development of their “gadgets”. I would expect to see collaborative gadgets appear on the horizon that can easily be added to sites and other Google products so that one can engage in “social” consumption of the internet.
Dr. Techner makes an interesting point, although non verifiable really. I confess to being of two minds on this issue. While Paul Levy has a point that forbidding this activity is probably futile and promotes an adversarial attitude between management and the front lines, the addictive nature of these media practically ensure their inappropriate use during work hours. (However, the same could be said for email prior to the advent of Facebook and Twitter.)
Casting about for a way to study this issue, I wonder if it would show up in decreased patient satisfaction scores in hospitals which allow free use of these media. Surely a patient who falls while his nurse is tweeting will be an unhappy patient. Controlled for other variables, it might be interesting to set up such a study.
One can spend all day twittering away and checking out social media sites while patients lay crying out for care, and I see that happening. Nurses are twittering while patients are falling. Doctors, nurses, and CEOs have patients to tend, not twitters to tweak.