New Technology: Internet for Everyone

               I was asked a question on how new technology is going to affect the future of social media. I came across an article that was very interesting, and will change social media for the whole world. The article is about Internet for everyone in the world. This would make pretty much everything accessible no matter where you were on the globe. You could be in the middle of the dessert and have access to maps, email, texts, and any social media platform you wanted. What a great idea right?

                Richard Branson an English billionaire along with a few others such as Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are working on getting this idea to become a reality.

               According to theverge.com Richard Branson is the closest to making this happen. I thought it would be awhile before this happened, but they plan on launching the first one by the end of 2016. That means within the next 5 years there could be internet access for EVERYONE on the Earth.

                The first question I had was will it be free? The answer was given in the video by Elon Musk, and it was of course not. They would go out of business. Someone is going to have to pay for it. In the other video Richard Bronson mentions that governments may pay for it. They were unclear on how expensive it would be, but it will probably be a reasonable price since they will be competing with other internet and telephone companies.

                Going back to how this will affect social media. First off they are giving internet access to more than 3 billion people that doesn’t have access right now. It will increase the usage of each social media site or apps. Mark Zuckerberg actually had the idea of doing a similar thing as Branson and Musk, but it was more focused in certain areas of the world and not for the entire globe.  His intentions were to increase the number of users of Facebook and Instagram. The others may have other intentions as well, but it’s not as direct as Mark’s.

               I think the idea of providing internet to the whole world is a great idea. They claim that it will be high speed internet, but will the speed vary depending on where you’re at in the world? They mentioned about having a router type thing being placed on roofs of buildings, vehicles, aircrafts, and other objects. Would they have to put one in the middle of the dessert, jungle, or mountain region? I thought they would just get a direct signal from their device to the satellite. Have you ever been somewhere and you needed to get in contact with someone for some reason or another and haven’t had service or the ability to? Or where the service is there, but it’s not strong enough or keeps going in and out? It’s the most frustrating thing in the world! This will eliminate that problem, and will make it possible to do things no matter where you are in the world. There are many other reasons to provide the world internet other than just for social media reasons, but it would benefit the social media aspect of the internet tremendously! I can’t wait to see this plan become a reality and how it will affect the world. Only a few more years and we should know more about it, and it will only improve from there!

Stand-alone Mobile Apps versus Internet Browser Apps

              When I first came across this question about mobile apps versus internet browser apps, the first thing that popped into my head was mobile apps are far better. Why? In my own opinion because according to emarketer.com there are over 2 billion people who have smartphones in the world. This makes mobile apps more accessible to the world. People are always on their phone, and it is much easier to pull out your phone than it is to carry around a desktop or have access to a desktop. I know many people who don’t have a desktop and rely on their smartphones for everything. The thing in your pocket is much easier and convenient and that’s what people like.

                In the article ‘Apps have overtaken the Web in popularity’ it shows a graph from June 2010 to December 2011 and how the trend of minutes spent a day on web browsing compared to mobile apps. In June 2010 web browsing had about 20 minutes longer each day. In December 2010 they were about equal with web browsing being a little bit more each day. In June 2011 that is when mobile apps took the lead, and by December of 2011 we used mobile apps 22 minutes longer than web browsing. Today there is most likely a much bigger gap. I hardly ever see people web browsing on a desktop.  This just includes browsing the internet, it doesn’t include time spent gaming or other things you can do on the internet.

                Growing up kids were always on the desktop at home playing some type of computer game. Now we just had children an iPad and let them do whatever they want on it. Mostly play games or watch their favorite kid shows on Netflix. I hardly ever see kids outside playing like I used to when I was a kid. It is a lot more convenient to give a kid an iPad than it would to give them a computer. This just proves that we spend much more time on mobile apps than on web browser apps. They have an app for pretty much everything, and many of the browsing is done within the apps.

                It’s crazy to think how quickly people went from browsing on internet apps to browsing via mobile apps. In the article I mentioned earlier it only took about one year for the mobile apps to take control of how people spend their time browsing. In the articles I read they all mention that mobile apps will keep getting more dominant until the year 2020. That’s as far as they have predicted so far, and who knows what’s after that!

Let me know what you think, or what your opinion is on web apps and mobile apps!

Viral Video's

               I wanted to first start off with a definition of what a viral video is. According to SocialTimes YouTube’s weblebrity Kevin Nalty states “once a video hits 5 million views in a 3-7 day period it is considered a “viral” video”. A few years ago a million views was considered “viral”. It is crazy to see the difference in just a few years. A million views is a lot and they probably never thought of hitting a million. Back then they probably thought it would take forever to hit 5 million views; especially in the first week of being launched on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  

                A question many of us have and especially myself is how can we get a video to go viral? I’ve always wanted to get one of my videos to go viral, but I’ve always thought that I’m not creative enough. In a Ted talk Kevin Allocca talks about how to get a video to go viral. 

             He talks about how there are 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute! How do you expect to have a viral video with that much competition? Many people don’t have the intention of going viral, but it just happens. In this video Kevin mentions 3 things you need to have a viral video: Tastemakers, communities of participation, and unexpectedness.  I did not expect him to say those things. I was hoping that he would give a more specific answer or formula so I could follow it and have a viral video by next Wednesday. Unfortunately that was not the case.

                Tastemakers are people who get the video popular or out to the public. The example Kevin gives in his TED talk is Jimmy Kimmel. Jimmy made a tweet about it, and then out of nowhere the video gets a few million views. So the tastemaker gives their opinion about something in this case the video and all of their followers want to see if it is legit or not. The tastemaker is what gets the video popular because it is usually a voice or a person that is popular nationwide/worldwide.

                The second point he talks about is participation. In this section Kevin talks about how you can take a random video and remake it using something that is meaningful to you or a lot of other people. The example given is of the Nyan cat and there are so many remakes with music, backgrounds, sounds, colors, etc. The important thing is the creativity of other people. Where we don’t just enjoy the video we actually participate in the video.

                The last thing is unexpectedness. If you catch the audience off guard, with either humor, something completely random that people wouldn’t expect, pretty much anything that you normally wouldn’t expect to happen is a great thing to provide. That is where the creativity comes into play. Like Kevin mentioned in the video, people who get videos to go viral most likely didn’t plan on their video going viral. It just happened. The tastemakers got a hold of the video, the participation from others increased the video views/ideas, and they were not a video you would expect to go viral. It just comes down to the audience. The audience is what makes your video go viral. You can only provide a video and then it’s out of your control.

                Hopefully these tips have been helpful and good luck making a video go viral!