Archive for the ‘Social Networks’ Category

My Sky Status by Lufthansa

Monday, October 12th, 2009

lufthansaMySkyStatus service by Lufthansa was created for constant auto-update of your Twitter and Facebook accounts about traveling position with Lufthansa flights.

I can name this service like this: “How can I generate more content, when I do not have possibilities to do it or when I am tired to do it?” Lufthansa comes to help you! At least when you are traveling and can not tweet something by yourself.

Again, it is the question about the amount of content needed to be exposed about you and your business for better status of social networking and for better acceptance for the search engines. The web is organized not in the direction of quality but in the direction of quantity.

Lufthansa sends one message per hour. Try to imagine: you get for example ten almost identical messages from your friend who has a flight for about 10 hours. What is the quality and sense of this kind of message? Lets go forward. It is completely possible to attach sensors to all things in your room: to the bed (when you sit or get up it sends a message), to the table (it sends messages about when and what you are eating / drinking), to the ground (information about your movements in the room) etc. Only when you sit by your computer, you may do UPDATES by yourself. All other time it is done for you by tens of sensors.  What is this information about? The most important message could be, that someone became dead on the bed. But will somebody notice this update among millions of tweets like “I moved from kitchen to bathroom.” ?

Well, I would really like this service by Lufthansa in the case it was created to make a fun about the concept of frequently updated content. But in fact it just helps people to “communicate” without making a break. The content which  Lufthansa sends in stead of us becomes colourless and unnecessary.

For example, I have only 10 my best friends. Everyone is at home. Each of them has just three sensors in the room sending a short post every half of an hour. How much messages I’ll be recieving in one hour?60. And per day? Or if I have 100 (it’s a very small number for the real social networker) friends?

Recalling Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice”

Friday, October 9th, 2009

Well, it was one of the best social actions directed to social networks. I just wanted to recall it. Some time ago Burger King offered for Facebook users to delete 10 friends and get a free Whopper sandwich. The reaction of Facebook was not very social:

“Facebook® has disabled WHOPPER® Sacrifice after your love for the WHOPPER® Sandwich proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.” Here is the link.

burger king whopper sacrificeAs I mentioned, Facebook acted not socially. On the other hand Burger King showed the real foundation in social networking relations: THERE ARE NO RELATIONS. People responded really normally: they freely deleted their friends for the sandwich. Oh my God!

It is not social to forbid to break relations. The democracy in social field means being free in both: accepting and ending of friendship.  The sandwich is just a cause to act socially: to filter and to clean up your cupboard of friends. I do not feel a difference between 50 or 10 000 friends. I can not be nor PRACTICALY neither INTIMATELLY closely related to 50 or to 10 000 of them.

So, social networking reminds me Google’s attention to fresh content. It is a field of global involvement of people into space of vacuous spending of time. The time which is spent with 100 000 of friends. Can it be really good time?

But the most important thing is that people subconsciously feel it. They are completely involved but at the same time they can delete friends without a worry. Whopper sandwich is more real than bunch of virtual friends. Isn’t it true?