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SMT: Five Social Media Predictions for 2010 http://bit.ly/6qnLDo Social
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more social dynamic ways for us to pay in this web 2.0 world
Since i have switched my accounts to a post office account i have taken off the ability to have overdrafts, being able to take money out of a machine - etc. Right now i only get some benefits onto that card and i know every few weeks i get that amount. This makes paying for other services that require visa cards and stuff very difficult to organise quickly. It's a case of getting cash out and putting into my own/someones visa card and calling up to get the payment done manually. I'm having to do this today to pay of my bethere account as i got disconnected last night at home. ugh.
But it started making me think about a few suggestions and ideas for payment systems that i have previously used when i ran my own gameserver provider (gsp) called clanlife mainly for clan members that were under 18 and had no access to visa cards but did get pocket money (some £10+ a week) and they wanted an easy way to chip in together to make payments for their clan server. We tried to make the process ultra easy - the first thing we tried was mobile payments. Everyone sent a text message to a certain number and paid £3 -> £6 and between them they clubbed together and paided off the server for four weeks. This worked really well and we had a great callback system that updated the total so you could see who had paid. If you updated that for the social network arena today and did a crowd sourced service for services, sorta like a social cloud payments system for people to help out paying certain 'services' - for instance dreamhost one of my server hosts has a simple donations system that is hooked up with paypal that works well, even that could be extended with something like google checkout - the ultimate is 1 or 2 clicks for a user to pay quickly. that's why i like google checkout so much you can do that after you have signed up and added/verified your payment details. works extremely well, the ultimate thing is not to stress your client - i'm surprised that more taxi ranks do not have a prepaid kind of system in place. The only problem with the mobile phone sms message system was that most operators operate on a three month cycle before you get payment and they often argued the amount of messages they received and so for a small company it was always hoping that you were going to get paid the money and if the total was correct. This might have changed since and might be a faster timeframe to get paid but for a very small startup like i was having regular monthly cashflow was very important. The other thing we went to try was splashplastic. A card similar to the post office card but mainly aimed at under 18's to be able to top up the card with money that can then be used online. Of course it required a visit to the post office (and loads of them seem to be closing down!) to topup the card but the concept was good. Would be good if you could cross it over somehow and have some donation based system for paying into the card without going to the post office. I'm hoping that more places think about adding additional ways to pay.Untitled
SMT: Where Brands Can Engage Customers On Twitter And Social Networks http://bit.ly/4pHTrj Social
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Waze: Community-driven GPS in Singapore
via waze.com
Waze is a free social mobile app that enables drivers to build and use live maps, real-time traffic updates and turn-by-turn navigation for an optimal commute. It's 100% powered by users the more you drive the better it gets. Unlike other navigation solutions, Waze "crowdsources" its map-making process, reliant on its users to switch the app on when driving around town. Then, using the phone's built-in GPS capabilities, Waze uses the information sent back to create base maps and determine traffic patterns in order to warn other users of traffic jams ahead.
Waze was made available internationally about 2 weeks ago, and map coverage for Singapore is above 20% in less than one week. While it may not be ready to replace your conventional GPS just yet, it gets closer every day as more roads are mapped and more users join the service. So for early adopters who are interested to join the community of drivers in your, download Waze at,
- m.waze.com for Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian users
- Apple iTunes Store for iPhone users
Arvidsson, A (2006) 'Quality Singles': internet dating and the work of fantasy. New Media & Society, Vol. 8 (4) pp 671-690.
Arvidsson offers an exploration of Internet dating which tracks notions of identity and fantasy within the users of match.com and considers the way in which the acts of the user are activated by match.com to build a brand and generate profit. This is very much a marxist review of online communities that posits the community member as a worker who contributes to the brand of match.com in a form of “informational capitalism” (p. 672): “The imagination is empowered, but it is also put to work as an important site of profits” (p.672) Here he talks about “fantasy work” - “the work of imagining situations, people and relations – is activated to an unprecedented extent in the online economy” (p.672) - which, from the perspective of the community owner can be seen as the role of members in maintaining the means of production and profit within the community. Brand management is described as a way of organising knowledge so that I can be commodified (p.673). In the example of match.com, profile creation is mediated through a data collection form (p. 679) which contributes to a structured expression of self that informs a wider discourse and savoir (p.685) within the community. The prevalent discourse within match.com normalises a certain approach to finding love encapsulated by the phrase “quality singles” (p. 678). The notion of ‘quality singles’ is important to the brand of match.com. It allows match.com to recruit new members, thus ensuring stability in the means of production (p.685). It also allows the company to synergise with other brands, generating more profit form the activity of its members: “it does this in ways that makes its fantasizing and communicative investments of affect evolve within a branded space, which in turn it makes directly economically productive.” (p.687). We are also presented with a brief survey of other online communities that may be said to function in a similar way through “fantasy work” or other methods that monetise communities and user generated content, for example AOL, Ebay, MMPORGs (p. 673). As readers we could also suggest additions to this list such as Twitter which, if it ever finds a business model, will be reliant upon user activity to generate capital and financial value. We should also consider how these ideas have become accepted as a common sense mode of operation and are articulated in the wider media and popular culture. For example the current Windows 7 advertising campaign which has the strapline “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea” seems rooted in the idea that consumers happily generate intellectual property and brand value as a by product of their acts of consumption.
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SMT: You May Monitor For Crises, But Do You Monitor For Opportunity? http://bit.ly/7SpBdV Social
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