Le Web Social de Pierre-Julien Grizel

This week in our Weekly Social Network Review, some interesting thoughts about the future of emailing and two stunning twitter stories.

Email Vs. Social Network

• The Wall Street Journal explains that Email era seems to be over. Social Networks now are an unavoidable media used for our electronic communication.
• Meanwhile, Google Wave continues to make the buzz. I still wonder how the « can’t explain, just try » motto can lead so many people to change the way they communicate, but only time will tell.
• Tech Crunch, for example, talk about the passive-agressive communication scheme Google Wave offers. It looks like we’re going to be bound closer to our « mailboxes » (or what remains of our mailboxes) as Wave grows!

How to dismantle a bombe atomique (french inside)

• Interesting times in France where a specific event (nomination of the — young — son of the President to an important function) has lead to an unpredictable result: Twitter bombing. Wanna see? Check #jeansarkozypartout in Twitter. I wonder how it all started (Jean Sarkozy Partout means « Jean Sarkozy (son of Nicolas) everywhere ») but it’s there. Impressing.
• Meanwhile, a french blogger, Christophe Grebert, (@grebert) launched a signing to protest against Sarkozy’s son nomination. Quite a honorable success and an important buzz on the Internet (even outside France).
• That lead to jokes that turn out not to always be very funny. Godwin point reached, of course (an example, another, yet another). Read also a very insteresting study of the phenomena here (in french, partisan view but interesting analysis).
• And, eventually, the buzz becomes one of the most important ones on the french twittosphere. Congrats, Jean!

Balloon Boy In The Sky With Diamonds

• Long story short via @cnnbrk : Officials try to rescue 6-year-old boy who climbed into balloon-like homemade craft, floated into sky over Colorado. A few minutes later, the #balloonboy hashtag raises along with many jokes.
• Sympathy and empathy arise. Poor Balloon Boy… Many many retweets about this story. I must admin I believed it as true — but didn’t think about retweeting it.
• A few minutes later : Runaway balloon lands; police say no one inside; sibling said 6-year-old got in & untied it at Colorado home. http://bit.ly/oDtSK ; Uh ?! And then it appeared to be a hoax : http://bit.ly/3POY6u and http://bit.ly/cnndcl1.
• What can we learn from this? Tremendous News has some clues on it (I don’t agree with all of his points, though).

6,8 Billion people on Earth, 5 Billion tweets

• I was about to forget: Twitter’s got this week its 5 billionth tweet (pentagigatweet — via @cyberpoint).
• Minter Dial (@mdial) ruled a survey to ask what does the future hold for Twitter. Looks like many of its readers are predicting an ugly death for it.
• …And maybe this death will be caused by assassination by upset users who saw some of their private tweets exposed (via @mashable). This may be only be caused to users who made their account private after Google crawled it. But whatever. Who wants to tweet privately anyway?