Ever noticed how many people are taking pictures and filming at any event? Be it a concert, a sport event, a wedding or  the recital at your kids’ school. I bet you did and probably you may also have asked someone near you to share a clip that you might have missed.

Well, Vyclone, a start up, is going one step further. They have created an app, running on iPhones, that can send a clip to their servers and at that point they will look for videos taken at that location (GPS mon amour) and at that particular time. If clips are found Vyclone will splice and mash them up returning a nice clip to you.

The resulting video contains just one soundtrack (you can decide the one to be selected) but provides different point of views since several cameras were involved in filming.

The Vyclone app has been made available for trials and it should become downloadable from the AppStore in the next few weeks….

So far there are several limitations: all people need to use an iPhone and should record through the Vyclone apps. However, just give it some time and Vyclone, or some copycats, will come up with more flexible options. I can easily imagine the interest (at least on my side) to mash up clips taken at different times. I can imagine taking a clip on vacation at a nice spot and wondering how that place would look like at dusk, or when there is a certain event… All of these can become possible since there are really no technical issues to spot this evolution.

As more and more people are taking clips and more and more cameras are continuously filming the world around (I always marvel at the number of car accidents being filmed live you can see on YouTube!) there will be a growing data base of clips to select and merge or mash up.

This, in turns, will provide us with a new interface to look at the world. Indeed, it is like extending our viewing capabilities, in time and in space.

Any given event, that we have witnessed from a certain spot, will become available for us to see also from a different point of view.

I can expect most sport arenas will have plenty of cameras filming what’s going on and once they make these clips available and you can use an app like Vyclone, then you can really start to appreciate the world with a whole set of new eyes. And of course the bandwidth demand will keep growing, at least in local areas and will once again transform our perception of communications. Not an infrastructure to transmit information from here to there but a fabric making all information ubiquitously available.

As the residential user has access to greater bandwidth, new services that previously were not possible, are now closer to reality. Among such services, it is possible to highlight applications that make use of live video streaming. Unlike other social networks, which rely on text messaging, SocialEyes focuses on the use of videoconferencing for communication between people. To do so, users access the system with the same identification of Facebook and, thereafter, may participate in video-based discussions on various topics.

This system is web-based yet since the application is based on Flash 10.1 and makes use of its new technology for peer-to-peer video streaming. This is not yet supported by some smartphones. The user can communicate with up to six persons simultaneously, and has control over each one of those connections such as he can mute, and pause individual friends.

The potential for this application is enourmous, imagine you receiving real-time feedback from your friends while buying something, and as soon as the bandwidth is no longer a problem, a conference with as many friends as you want would make it easier for business, or even for family, to have visual meetings.

This is certainly true, but at the time of social networks and review sites, companies may not completely agree. For the travel industry online consumer travel reviews have gained an immense weight and have become a powerful marketing tool. Trip Advisor has become the world’s largest travel website with more than 35 million unique visitors per month, a few millions more than Expedia. 8% of unique visitors to OTAs (online travel agencies) purchased travel from a OTA in 2009, 16% of all unique visitors to OTA hotel review pages purchased travel, twice as much. This is why hoteliers are afraid of bad reviews, a bad one has much more impact than a good one and it may put off a potential customer. Just take in account that  90% of online consumers trust personal recommendations and the 70% trust online reviews…hotels should avoid at all costs negative reviews, even if sometimes they could be helpful to improve the service given. There is also the problem of fake reviews, but the big web sites usually monitors these kind of situations.
It is not surprising then that more and more hotels and other suppliers of travel services are present in the web with their own Facebook and twitter account and engaged actively in responding to messages on the travel review sites and encouraging discussion on their own website. People are going to discuss and share experiences no matter what, so if you are a travel company (or any kind of company) it is better to become part of the whirlwind that is socialnetworking otherwise you will be left behind with no way to handle these new internet-hyperactive consumers.

Personal experience? When you know nothing about the hotels in a certain destination, you try to find some information and the opinions of others who had already stayed there matter, but always keep in mind that opinions are very personal and can change very much from one person to another….still, better than nothing. I found myself in the situation where I had to choose between a four-star hotel and a two star-hotel without a great difference in price…The four-star hotel had 9 out of 10 negative reviews, the two-star hotel 10 out of 10 positive reviews but with complaints about some minor aspects. Because of what I read I chose the two-star hotel, I did not regret it.

I’ve always known it. It was just a question of time, but sooner or later a Social Network for our pets would have been thought. This is the case of Dogolog – but I can already imagine something like that for cats, rabbits and hamsters – a step ahead of the Fido’s Facebook Page, toward a mashupable social tool that lets you track the activities of your neighborhood canine friends.

In a nutshell, as reported on the Kickstarter projects page, Dogolog project consists of:

A Do-Good Social Network for Dogs

QR Coded dogs running around town

An iPhone app to scan your dog’s activities, or meet other friends

A Google Map , and heat map of your ZIP’s dog activity

Community maintained with donations and ‘become-friend-donate-requests’

The second age of the World Wide Web has brought a new social-media-centric vision of the world where users share information, interact mutually, collaborate. The hosted services that embrace Web 2.0 share more and more attributes: from early blogs to folksonomies, wikis, video sharings, mashups and, of course, social networkings.

Such a user-centered design along with the interoperation among users guide to the evolution of online communities, that spring up for every imaginable purpose, at any time, unlike in the offline world when it was more complicated for people to come together due to restrictions of place, time and money. And this web-based trend is just destined to increase with the advent of the so called pervasive computing, when the networking logic will absorb, through billions of ubiquitous robots spread worldwide, every frame of daily activity, in every location and in every context.

Given that there has been huge interest in using Web 2.0 technologies, I think we’re still stumbling around in the dark about how to best incorporate these new media strategies as part of a whole effective marketing strategy, how much time to invest on social networking, how to monetize the social media mechanism, etc. Even among those who are the most skilled in social media there are different approaches: there is who, like Chris Anderson (Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine), sees social networking as a feature of a website, not a destination in and of itself. And there is who, like Charlene Li (Altimeter Group’s Founder and better known, here at the Future Centre, as the co-author of Groundswell), believes that social networking is becoming so important that it is like air. I like this similarity, at the point that I’m convinced that if we could analyze chemically SNs, we’d find all components of air pollution!

Joking apart, studying user interactions is a crucial task, and many efforts are underway to analyze them by analyzing SNs among users. For instance, it has been reported that an individual with friends in a group is significantly more likely to join the group if these friends are themselves mutual friends, rather than they are not. But despite what has been done, we surely need to keep experimenting and asking questions. What is clear, is that a social network has precise structural and organizational properties – for instance, network size and density, that respectively describe the number of peers and the general level of linkage among them – and that there are algorithms able to identify, starting from a given social network, important network-based features in order to analyze user behavior efficiently and to expand the services.

So, studying SNs becomes a way to improve effectiveness of communication infrastructures and, of course, the other way around, studying communication networks can reveal some interesting organizational features of the social-interaction processes, useful for predicting user interactions. Alessandro Panconesi, full professor at Sapienza University of Rome, is convinced of the connection between infrastructures and behaviors: in his research about the social dimension of the networking he explains the possible evolution of this phenomenon and the ideas that underlie it, so convincingly to obtain the IBM Faculty Award. That such a connection exists is quite self-evident: instant messaging and chatting mirror the immediacy of communication, SNs reflect the structure of the primacy we attribute to our own friends. But going into more depth, we could point out both interesting mathematical and social models!

One of the aims of this research, as a matter of fact, is to understand if, and the measure of that, the structural features of the SNs facilitate or slow down the diffusion of information due to “gossiping” processes. The term gossiping, borrowed by the social sciences, can be identified with the spreading of rumors in a network and refers to any communication algorithm where messages between nodes are exchanged opportunistically, with other nodes that act as betweeners or forwarders of the messages. The rumor spreading starts when the initiator node chooses randomly a friend to whom communicate the gossip; from now on, every peer that is acquainted with the gossip will do continuously the same thing, communicating the information to a randomly chosen neighbor, that will do the same with another peer, and so on.
A gossip-based algorithm is similar to that one inspired from the virus spreading, with the main difference that gossiping nodes adopt a human-like communication paradigm, while the infected nodes behave like pathogenic microorganisms (bacteria, parasites, viruses exactly).
The preliminary results of this research have already obtained a prestigious international award. The work “Almost Tight Bounds for Rumour Spreading with Conductance”, which Panconesi co-developed with his PhD students, has been invited to the 42th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2010), the most prestigious international congress in the field of theoretical information science, that will be held in Cambridge, MA, from June 6th to June 8th.

Young children prefer network Bebo, Twitter attracts an older audience  while LinkedIn is crowded with over forty to share their curriculum. The  ecosystem of social networks can be classified according to the age of the participants.

The appeal is determined by various factors: the popularity of the social network, the interest of the topics discussed and the  membership age of users.

The pingdom report (www.pingdom.com) shows that 25 percent of Users in the 19 main social  networks monitored (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Slashdot, Reddit, Digg,  Delicious, StumbleUpon, FriendFeed, Last.fm, Friendster, LiveJournal, Hi5, Tagged,  Ning, Xanga, Classmates.com, Bebo) are between 35 and 44 years and the average Social network user is 37 years old.

From this analysis, we understand that digital life is not only for young people  but the market is just ready and mature to be exploited. If the average person  that share his life online is about 37 years old it is easy to imagine how much  data of value and content are available in the new gold mine of personal metadata.

The company “The Astonishing Tribe” (TAT) www.tat.se, developed an application  called Recognizr that lets users point the mobile phone at a stranger and  automatically know a lot of things about him…
This remarkable way of using face recognition and augmented reality applied to the  social networking world opens new scenarios of digital life, entertainment and  communication.

The head of user experience research at TAT says: “It’s taking  social networking to the next level,” and then “We thought the idea of bridging  the way people used to meet, in the real world, and the new Internet-based ways of  congregating would be really interesting.”

When a user points the camera phone at someone near him the application detects  the face of the stranger and creates a signature for him. If the subject opted in  to the service with a profile and photos then the service sends information about links to his profile on his social networking sites.
For istance, one cases of value about security could be the ability to identify the  face of a known criminal from a crowd.

It is easy to understand the potential for this kind of technology within a few  years, becoming ubiquitous in an individual’s digital life; of course people are  scared about privacy, but I think the privacy issue would not be a problem if the  application allows the person to be “identified”, opting in to the service

Last summer the venture incubator H-Farm has contributed to the start-up of an Italian company that operates in the sphere of music and that is catching the media attention. Thounds – this is the name of the new fast growing social network, a fusion between thoughts and sounds – has a business model similar to that of Facebook but takes advantage of an old-age union: Internet and music. The main goal is to give who loves music the possibility to share each other original podcasts, creative experimentations, research of new sounds. In other words, it offers a new way to collaborate in creating music. How Thounds works is simple, and this is its strength as well (Apple, before others, has benefited from its devotion to simplicity): Giulio lives in Venice and is playing a guitar melody that you just can’t shake from your brain, so he creates a free account and uploads his music on Thounds. Paul, from Oslo, just starts singing on top of Giulio’s great track. Sandra, a german drummer, adds a good drum base. Finally Scott, comfortably sat on his coach somewhere in the British countryside, lays down the perfect bass line. The sounds brainstorming activity is done, they record the song… A new band is born, pheraphs.

But inspiration cannot be kept in storage and planned. Maybe you want to catch your musical idea when it happens, where it happens and record it live. No fear, Thounds for the iPhone and iPod Touch is already on the shelf. And now with a new release available for free from the iTunes store (http://itunes.com/apps/thounds) with three relevant improvements: you can decide who can hear your thounds, you can share them also on Twitter and by email, the metronome now starts before recording begins.

Honestly, something similar to Thounds already existed. Does “Remixing for the masses” say you something? Probably not, but that’s what Jamglue’s slogan recites, synthesizing the concept behind its service: “upload or record your own tracks; create an original mix or personalize someone else’s in our simple online mixer; show off your music: email it, embed it, or just sit back and let the Jamglue community discover your talent!”. This is Jamglue, a functionality-reduced version of Cubase or GarageBand , living in the confines of the browser and with some social networking features. However, despite some analogies with Jamglue, Thounds has two strength points: it has enforced the social networking aspect, giving everyone the possibility to create their own musical project, through a selection of the best musicians for their needs; the interface is pretty intuitive, in full Apple style. And Mac people know that a simple, intuitively designed and catchy user interface brings people more convenience and enjoyment.
So, the growing of music-based social networks is confirming the role of users in driving online trends. Furthermore, users are learning how to monetize through their networks, bypassing the music industry that is in a turning point towards an adaptation to survive in the present scenario. I think no other industry had trouble in achieving benefit from the Internet in the way that music industry had over these years. The marriage between music and Internet was inescapable, but it’s undeniably rocky. If we talk about self-made music, instead, things go differently and a win-win relationship is possible. How? Through several music marketplaces, such as AudioJungle, that aim to help unknown musicians buy and sell their digital works.

After the earthquake in Haiti which happened in January 2010, as the phone line collapsed, Haitians tried to discover the fate of their family or relatives by using web and social networks. The major tools are Emailing and social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

After that, an integrated mash-up website “Ushahidi” (http://haiti.ushahidi.com/) has been built to provide proper information about missing people, structural risk, lack of water and food, and also contains Twitter, photo tagging, person finder to exchange and provide information. The mapping system contains all the integrated information of the certain area such as Google maps.

Ushahidi made an agreement with local mobile phone operator Digicel and created a short code to which people could text their message. That message is received by “situation rooms” set up in Boston and Washington. A third one will be set up in Geneva to provide 24-hour cover. About 10,000 Haitians have volunteered to translate messages from Creole to English and ask for more information if needed. Other volunteers and experts try to verify the information and put it into the map.

I know it is definitely not a good term to use, but some people who are tired of their life commit suicide to let them free from the troubles and complexities which they used to have in their life… However, it seems like this is not only for the real life, but also applicable for the “digital life”… Maybe some people are already fed up with dealing with social networks spending so many hours everyday to do something meaningless, or simply tired of this kind of unreal world and prefer going back to real society… You can of course just close your account temporary or permanently. But if you want to eliminate all information you have on your several social networks at the same time, it will mean that if you completely want to get out from your digital life, the only solution will be to commit suicide from the digital life… But there is a question, how? Do I have to make elimination processes one by one? Or does somebody do it for me?

Actually, there is a website called “web 2.0 suicide machine” (http://suicidemachine.org/). It seems like very easy to use. You just put your username and password of the social networks which you want to eliminate forever (at the moment it applicable for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter) and the system will eliminate all of your information, history, data, everything you have on that social networks and you will never be able to recover it. It will be taken away forever. Once you start the process, you cannot stop the progress and neither the system can do that… So, I strongly recommend you to think a lot about your digital life, social network friends, and all of your information you have put, such as photos, videos, communication, etc. before you commit “digital suicide”…