Does Zeebox flop sound early death of Social TV?

News this week that Zeebox has received a lukewarm response from users might announce the stillbirth of Social TV.

Zeebox ran a trial with E4 show Desperate Scousewives but found that only 100 Twitter updates were made via the service out of 80,000 posted during the series, despite promotion and close collaboration between the program and the app.

The app is just one of many in the Social TV landscape, dominated by fast-built American offerings such as Fav.tv and a host of others including Clicker, which was acquired by CBS Interactive in March 2011.

Zeebox was founded by ex-iPlayer CTO Anthony Rose and former EMI board director Ernesto Schmitt with $7 million of seed funding. It is perhaps most similar to GetGlue, which started off life as a service to show you who's visiting what on the web but refocussed its business on social check-ins and has partnered with a whole host of channels, including the UK's Channel 4, in 2011.

Last year, 31,000 people checked in to the Oscars on GetGlue. While the figure is supposed to demonstrate traction, it's a tiny percentage of the people who watched the Oscars. How can such small user numbers ever generate significant revenue for the services?

So is Social TV dead?

Perhaps that's the wrong question. TV has always been social. From its origins as a box in the living room to the present day, TV has generated conversations between its viewers. And it seems the predominant app today for interaction in real time is Twitter.

The question then arises, is there any need for a conversation platform that is dedicated to TV? or even a Twitter app for it, a Tweetdeck for TV?

BSkyB thinks so. Murdoch's business acquired a ten percent stake in Zeebox not two weeks ago for an undisclosed multi-million pound sum, according to the FT. It transpires part of its intention is to sell advertise alongside BBC programming in the Zeebox app on the companion screen, be it smartphone or tablet.

For that to work, scale is required. It doesn't cost much to buy eyeballs - no one has used the term since 1999 - but what's required is engagement - can we say stickiness and get that 90s feeling again? - for users to keep returning and advertisers spending. Is a Twitter app, albeit with some bells and a couple of whistles, sufficient to do that?

Wait and see.

In the meantime, a few million pounds is a small punt for the Murdoch empire that could result in substantial returns if Zeebox takes off.

Viral marketing is as much about context as content

Saturday and @Madeupstats is running another #madeupstaturday for Fyneales. This weekend's theme: the Internet.

Sadly lacking in creativity today, I was amused by some quite clever quips.

Then I saw this:

1 sperm has 37.5MB of DNA. An ejaculation is a data transfer of 1587GB in 3 seconds - via @bsiscovick & @nivertech #BigDataForTheWeekend
— Michael A. Jackson (@MAJACKS0N) January 14, 2012

Nothing to do with #madeupstaturday, it was a bunch of numbers and vaguely Internet-related.

So I appropriated it.

1 sperm has 37.5MB of DNA. An ejaculation is a data transfer of 1587GB in 3 seconds. #madeupstaturday
— Alex Guest (@AlexGuest) January 14, 2012

While Michael Jackson's tweet got 8 retweets and 1 favourite, mine received 50+ tweets in moments. Twitter won't tell me the exact RT count but it looks like 100s and over 20 favourites within 4 hours. As I stood chatting to a potential new flatmate, my iPhone was going insane with notifications from Twitter with replies, retweets and new followers.

Also, Michael has been informed that his information is a @madeupstats!

So what?

Getting a tweet to spread - and to spread all over the world from South America to Russia - in quick time, is not just about the content. My taking the tweet and associating it with a different hashtag, with far more watchers, meant that it propagated far outside my usual Twitter network. Let's call it 'reproduction marketing', taking content and repurposing it in order to disseminate it far and wide.

Meanwhile, you may well be curious to know if the original information is accurate.

I ran a search for 'MB of DNA in sperm' and discovered that Reddit had the exact same information back in 2009! And it's been repeated over and over in various corners of the Internet. But it appears to be false.

According to UTheGuru.com,

approximately 21.45 megabytes of ‘data’ is transferred during each act of human sexual reproduction in the form of gametes.

 So the figures really were @madeupstats.

Social media: ubiquitous but not quite there yet

IKEA UK YouTube Store

I came across a presentation recently from  The Social Practice, which talked about the trend for social media to go from being a destination to a dispersed network. In particular, it touches on the nature of 'Social' as ubiquitous, intuitive and dynamic.

A nice illustration of the ubiquity of Social, which the presentation mentions, is in the IKEA UK YouTube Store, which we are told is powered by Facebook data. I thought this was fascinating, so I took a closer look. And was a little disappointed. As The Social Practice state, "We're not quite there yet".

I compared the experience of a user who logs into the YouTube store with Facebook credentials with that of one who doesn't. Taking the latter first, we are asked "who's in your bedroom?" and asks you to click and drag an icon of a man, a woman or a baby into a circle. It allows for single sex couples with a child but you can't have a ménage à trois. If you go for a childless couple, whether gay or not, you are then asked "How long have you lived together?"

After that IKEA brings you a video exposé of 'the bedroom that might be', albeit without any options to pause rewind or fast-forward. You can then click on one of several items to be taken to its page on the IKEA online store. Altogether quite a nice idea.

So what's the difference if you log in with Facebook? Well, you'd think it would pull your relationship status and length of time since you were together, along with whether you have one or more children and their ages. That would neatly populate the questions that the app requires.

But it doesn't do that.

All it does is take your name and mine some text from your newsfeed then puts it into a little box that shows up while the bedroom of your dreams (sic) is pulled together. Like this:

(I've airbrushed out friends' names)

So, The Social Practice seems to have it right: we're not quite there yet, to which I'd add, ever so close.

What irks me, however, is the misalignment of the video window and the navigation menu above it.


Here's the presentation:

New Twitter UI is a car-crash waiting to happen

There are all sorts of reasons why the new Twitter UI is just as bad as the last new UI. Why are direct messages buried in a drop-down menu? Why is there an option to 'Open' tweets that provides almost no additional detail.

One, slightly arcane UI tomfoolery is the rearranging of the columns.

Left-hand navigation columns have been common since the very earliest days of the WWW. Later, it became standard to have a main section in the middle column and on the right-hand side, further links and details. The placement of the content in this third section is so typical of online media that it has become convention.

Guardian

 

Telegraph

It isn't just online newspapers with their millions of pageviews that adhere to this unwritten dogma. Facebook adopts this principle too, with navigation top and left, the main content in the middle and extra gubbins to the right.

So, should we blindly follow what everyone else has done before? Well, actually, in this case, yes. Conventions are good for User Experience. A word on a page, which is underlined and in a different colour, we know by convention links to another URL. By the same token, we know that stuff on the left is navigation and stuff on the right is your side salad.

Twitter is asking us to drive on the wrong side of the road.

MediaGuardian 100 most powerful people in media shun Twitter

The Guardian today published its annual list of 100 most influential media people in the UK, the MediaGuardian 100. I set out to discover how influential the top 100 are in the online world by using PeerIndex, one of a number of services that map the social web. I discovered some surprising truths. In particular, the large majority of the most influential people in media have never registered on Twitter.


Only 26 of the 100 most influential media people in the UK are active on Twitter.

I've created a Twitter list of them. Now I might be wrong about that and failed to find some or all of the others but I did search high and low. Please let me know in the comments if there's anybody I missed out.

Of the 26, only two are registered on PeerIndex.

Daniel Ek, founder of music-streaming service Spotify, at position 40, and Iain Dale, radio presenter and former political blogger, squeezing in at 93, are the only two who are sufficiently concerned with their only presence to have registered on PeerIndex.

The PeerIndex ordering bears no resemblance to that of MediaGuardian.

Jeremy Hunt is 13th of the MediaGuardian 100 but with a lowly PeerIndex of 19, he comes just nine off the bottom of the 26 on this list.

Zuckerberg's PeerIndex is lower than mine.

According to PeerIndex, I'm more influential than the founder and CEO of Facebook. Today, my PeerIndex is 48 compared with 31 for Zuck. The man who leads the greatest social network in the world has little influence online, apparently. Meanwhile, the average for this group as a whole is actually 47, which makes me more influential online than the MediaGuardian 100, on average.


The PeerIndex list