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Recalling Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice”

Paulius Sluškonis — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:58:47 +0000

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.

As 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?

When Social Networking Becomes A Dangerous Illness

Paulius Sluškonis — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:21:32 +0000

Sometimes addiction to social networking and mobile technologies becomes a dangerous illness, which shows itself in mysterious ways. It is hard to predict exact consequences, but the facts are quite negatively impressive.

I like Scoblizer or Robert Scoble a lot for interesting interpretations of nowadays media tendencies. But his real-time baby birth ceremony was something I can not appreciate nor logicaly neither spiritualy. He continuously transmitted various facts from the birth process of his child. Try to feel his emotions of a “real father”:

1. At first he wrote an email to the members of the family and to friends, calling to watch Twitter updates.

2. Then he checked in on Google Latitude, Gowalla, and FourSquare “so that people would know we were at the hospital.”

3. Twitter and FriendFeed were constantly updated.

4. “I also let my Facebook friends know that a baby was on the way. That made sure I got as many people to know something was about to happen as possible.”

5. Finally an iPhone is used to capture an image and to post it across all possible platforms. The screen was monitoring reactions from all over the world. (You are checking reactions, not your baby?..)

6. SLR and 5D MKII were used also.

7. Back to the iPhone and here he made a first image of newly born kid.

8. Flickr was involved immediately for uploading fresh photos.

9. And the finish: audio recording feature on iPhone captured the first cry of the baby and then it was uploaded via email to FriendFeed.

10. Thats all. Sorry, I can not analyse this social networking ceremony. I leave it just as it is. Make your own conclusions.

Even this odd action of Robert Scoble has some good insights about absorbing information in various types of social media. Explore them.

5D MKII

Terms Of Service In Social Media

Paulius Sluškonis — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:29:07 +0000

1. If you are involved in some way in social networking, you have to be very precise with your terms of service (TOS).

2. People are different and they see the same things in various courses. So, you must write with black on white, what are offering exactly and what do you services mean, if you want to avoid future misapprehensions with the users.

3. Please, update your TOS as frequently as it is needed, because the world and meaning of things change fast.

4. Here is an example. Today Twitter anounced its update of TOS. Here are the main points, highlighted in their blog post:

“Advertising—In the Terms, we leave the door open for advertising. We’d like to keep our options open as we’ve said before.

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” your tweets because that’s what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

APIs—The apps that have grown around the Twitter platform are flourishing and adding value to the ecosystem. You authorize us to make content available via our APIs. We’re also working on guidelines for use of the API.

SPAM—Abusive behavior and spam is also outlined in these terms according to the rules we’ve been operating under for some time.”

Paulius Sluškonis

The Record of Your Life

Paulius Sluškonis — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:41:50 +0000

1. It becomes absolutely clear for everyone: with social networking your life is being recorded from the moment you create your account.

2. Even President Barack Obama warns (or just states?) about it. Asked by a student how to become President someday, Obama expressed an important message about Facebook: “I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook (Facebook), because in the YouTube (YouTube) age whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life. That’s number one,” he said, according to Bloomberg.

3. Without a doubt, Obama has very good advisors in social networking field, because he touches the essence of it.

4. If you have a few serious plans for future (who does not?), you must be very careful communicating on the internet. Because everything you say, everything you do, everything you share etc. is being recorded in the history – for example – of the wall in Facebook.

5. And all this pretty long record becomes a better CV than any other which you’ll create someday by yourself.

6. The question is: how to became a responsible and earnest man, who does not tweet silly and stupid things, from the early days of your life?