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Encapsulating your life journey

Is it even possible to archive your entire life journey in one single place ? if you had asked me this question 10 years ago, I probably would have laughed it off, however with the rise of new and social media technologies, sites such as Facebook has made it entirely possible.

Even before a baby boy was born, his parent's have set up a social networking profile for him, using it to share the different stages of his childhood; from the day they found out about the pregnancy till the birth of the baby, his parent's could record every important moment with the posting of pictures/videos and the updating of statuses.

Family and friends could also be part of the social experience by joining in to give their comments, moreover the social experience does not just stop at childhood, when he grows older, he would probably be managing his own social profile by continuing to archive his various life experiences, and eventually many years later till in his final days, he could look back and reminisce on every memorable moment of his life.

There you have it, an entire life journey from its inception to its passing, the most amazing thing; being able to capture and encapsulated everything under one single profile.

Making our social environment a better place

Inspired by a movement called Save Social Energy I've decided to write a blog entry on issues I've observed on social media over the years, and even though I've been guilty of committing some of it myself, I see the need to voice out my opinions on what I think are some of the most common misuses of social media nowadays

1) Telling the entire world what you are doing every moment of the day.
Yes we know you are enthusiastic and you see yourself as an active participant on social media, but you do not have to let everyone know what you are doing all the time, post like "I'm having lunch now" and "I just woke up" "I'm going to sleep" so on and so forth are like so passé, and at the end of the day you will have like probably 20 over post on your social networking profile and none of it makes any sense to anyone, unless of course you have a spouse or family member who wants to monitor your every moment of the day but that aside, I doubt anyone else with a right frame of mind would want to see 20 over post a day from you plainly updating what you are doing.

2) A page full of updates from 3^rd party apps
Status like "I have just revived my withered crops" and "I've just slayed the master dragon" are totally flooding our newsfeeds everyday, I know that these games can be really fun but nobody and I mean nobody gives a rats ass about your achievements on these games, and FYI if you are playing these games, there are actually options for choosing not to post it on your newsfeeds

3) Bitching about others on social media
I know sometimes you would like to vent out your frustrations on a certain individual that pissed you off and thus you start bitching about him/her, but as you know the world is a much smaller place with social media, and although that particular person you are bitching about is not on your friend's list, you will never know which one of your 300 or so friends might be close friends with the person you are bitching about.

Even in the past, walls have ears and gossips do spread, today with social media, your walls can easily be seen by 300 or more people on your friend's list and worst still it could spread even more exponentially, so try not to post anything that might offend anyone or worse still, a group of people, you might just end up getting into a whole load of trouble.

4) Publicly criticizing your partner on social media
In my point of view, this is probably the greatest misuse of social media, things like telling all your friends "my boyfriend don't understand me" or "this is the end of our relationship" after having an argument.

Issues that arises in a relationship are personal and should just stay between the both of you or at most between a few close friends; publicly telling the entire world about how crappy your partner is and trying to gain sympathy out of it is one of the lowest act anyone can think of, if you are guilty of that; do thoroughly evaluate your relationship, if you really love your partner, the thought of posting hurtful comments on your social networking profile should have never crossed your mind.

In this age where the social environment is a media-polluted mess we should do our best to embrace social media but at the same time making it a conducive environment for people all over to share and collaborate.

It is great that you have meaningful stuff to share like great music videos, great jokes or even interesting experiences but do take note that there is only so much media an individual can consume everyday, so let us all do our part and make our social world a better place; don't just share, share wisely.

I knew I loved you before I met you

I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with the song titled "I knew I love you before I met you" by Savage Garden, the possibility of this song might seem very far-fetched but let's change the context a little and look at it in the perspective of today's ever shrinking world which is rapidly being connected through Social Networking.

Social Networking sites like Facebook, MySpace or even LinkedIn, had made falling in love or starting a relationship with someone you have not actually met a possibility, thus giving new meaning to the sentence "I knew I love you before I met you", well physically at least.
Meet Serena (not her real name), a good friend of mine who has in recent years gone through the ups and downs of transcontinental dating via Social Networking.

After a of couple of disastrous experiences with local men, she decided to set her sights and venture further to the west and what better ways to do it than through Social Networking.
Her first escapade took her all the way to the United States, she never did travel there, but she met a guy hailing from Pennsylvania through Facebook; eventually they started a "Facebook Relationship" after a series of liberating and profound conversations on MSN, it seemed at that time they were destined to be together.

Serena said "for once I don't feel myself being judged, and the fact that he is so far away and his culture is so different from mine makes this relationship all the more intriguing, he even sent me flowers, omg!!!"

However sweet the relationship was, factors like personal commitments and time zone
differences became a big barrier to their relationship and eventually putting this romantic experience to an end, and all these happened when they had not actually met physically.

Not to be dismayed, Serena had decided to give long distance relationship another chance, one day through Facebook Serena received a message from a Swedish guy called Thomas (not his real name) and she realized they actually had a friend in common, and through further conversations she found out that the Swedish guy was actually an ex-housemate of that friend in common.

With this, it became the basis of their conversations, they eventually connected via Skype and went into more engaging conversations; when I asked Serena about Thomas; she went: "Thomas is so much like a Singaporean, and he uses terms like 'baobei', 'uncle' and ends his sentences with 'lor' "

Having a Singaporean housemate had probably given Thomas the understanding of Singapore's culture, thus enabling him to communicate with Serena on a much deeper level, needless to say they eventually got involved in a relationship and this time they even met in person, when Thomas actually came down and visited Serena.

Cases like Serena's is well becoming more and more common as locals seek to find their fairytale romance in places far beyond Singapore, and with Social Networking sites like Facebook and many others, this has made such dreams a convenient reality.

The Social Media Rock Star

I was down the other day to catch my favorite YouTube singer David Choi perform at the esplanade, and to my dismay, the esplanade concourse was so jam packed that I couldn't even catch a glimpse of David Choi , in the end I had to content to just listening to his performance from behind the crowd.

I had expected a decent crowd to come down and catch David Choi, but not a crowd of such proportion, and it's pretty amazing that so many people turned up, considering that he spent closed to nothing in terms of the marketing and publicity of his music, the bulk of his publicity was actually done through posting videos of his performances on YouTube from the comfort of his own room.

There is without a doubt that David Choi by himself is a very talented musician, and yes he is also a fantastic songwriter, but there is no denying that without a platform such as YouTube, his music would had never been able spread so far and wide, to date he has hit the 6.2 million mark on YouTube in terms of channel views, his songs have also been used on popular networks such as MTV and NBC.

The concept of using Social Media to become famous is pretty simple actually. First you record a performance of yourself on video then subsequently you post it on a platform such as YouTube; thereafter it all depends on the likability of your content.

The availability of social sharing had also made sharing videos much easier; with a click you could share the video with your hundred of friends on the various social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace or Twitter; in any case the video is really enticing, your friends would probably share it with their friends and if the cycle keeps continuing, the video you posted would very soon be seen by millions of viewers all over the world, instantly making you a star.

Back before there was platforms such as YouTube, aspiring musicians had to record their songs on tape or CD and hand it the various record labels, and in most cases record companies would not really give much of a consideration to the recordings, some of these musician would just end up wasting their efforts and eventually giving up their hopes and dreams. It's quite a bummer as some of these musicians are really talented and the fact that there are so many other less substantial musicians that actually made it to the big time because they have better connections or are better off in terms of wealth and even aesthetically more appealing.

Now with the advent of social media, this would allow the really talented musicians to shine as they would now be able to showcase their talents on the various social media platforms with the potential of a global reach.

Nowadays record companies spend the bulk of their time scouting for the next big thing through social media, some notable success are the likes of Colbie Caillat and Justin Bieber. Established musicians had also joined in the bandwagon by using social media platforms to promote themselves and reach out to more fans.

If Video had killed the Radio star, Social Media had swallowed them all.

A New Generation of Football Commentators

The 2010 FIFA World Cup is now over and it was dubbed as the world cup of many first times, this was the first ever that the world cup was being held in the continent of Africa, the first time that an European nation has won the world cup outside of Europe and most importantly Spain who was previously known as the perennial world underachievers had finally deposed that tag name and crowned themselves the world champions.

Amongst the many other first time, this 2010 World cup was also the first time which the social media movement had been so prevalent in a major international football tournament. The advancement in mobile technology and the proliferation of its usages has certainly advocated this new movement, ushering in a new generation of commentators and critiques whom had made their voices heard through the various social networking platforms with their mobile devices

For the first time, almost everyone was talking about soccer, and even those whom had previously never expressed an interest in soccer have decided to voice out and social media was the perfect channel for them.

In a constant motion, we could see throughout our Facebook and Twitter feeds an influx of soccer related news feeds, be it pre-match analysis, post-match conclusions and even live commentary. Every notable moments be it a goal scored, a penalty conceded or even a crunching tackle, generated thousands of comments by the seconds

Social media has helped to ignite passion and connected people across the globe, be it of different cultures, languages or even social status; everyone and anyone with the means to access the internet had the means and ways to express their thoughts and opinions and most importantly to be heard.

From the sheer amount of data that was generated on the various social networking platforms during the course of the tournament itself, we can expect that with further advancement in technology and an expected increase in the adaption of new and social media; Social Media movements would advance to a whole new level by the next major international football tournament in 2012.

Practical implementation of goal line technology

Tennis uses it, Rugby uses it, Basketball uses it, American football uses it, most modern sports in fact have embraced technology to ascertain the outcome of critical sporting decisions, and from the aftermath of the Germany vs. England world cup match, die hard soccer fans and critics all over the world are now crying out for FIFA to finally implement goal line technology into the beautiful game.

As seen by millions of television viewers, the ball had clearly crossed the line, but the referee had still decided that it was not a goal, bad refereeing decisions like this as seen in the Germany vs. England match had so many of times affected the outcome of the game, and in this modern age of science and technological advancement, it is simply unacceptable to let so many bad refereeing decisions go by when something could actually be done about it.

The implementation of goal line technology into modern soccer is not really a complicated matter. For so many years now, television audiences had the luxury of viewing instant replays but unfortunately, this is something which the most important decision maker does not have.

So what is in fact needed is for the referees to simply be able to view instant replays and make critical decision.

With advancement in mobile technology, small handheld devices like the iPad of the iPhone would be able to do the trick, and from the main broadcasting console, video feeds of instant replays, could be sent to these devices via a secured wireless channel, in this manner, referees could simply refer to their handheld devices and watch the instant replays when critical decisions are needed to be made.

This simple solution if implement effectively could so much aid the referees when it comes of decisions like determining if the ball has crossed the line, offside decision and most importantly it could prevent the tons of shenanigans that happen behind the referee's back.

And if such solution does get picked up by FIFA, I'm sure the likes of CISCO, HP, SONY, SAMSUNG and even APPLE would be lining up to be the first ones to endorse and implement it. We have 2 more years till the next major international tournament; would we finally see a change?

Apple: Revolutionizing Technology

About a week ago, Apple Inc surpassed Microsoft to become the World's most valuable tech company. Apple has certainly came a long way in becoming number one; as many would have expected this news to come sooner rather than later.

Let's take a look at some of the milestones which Apple has set over the last decade or so.

Personal Computing

In the late 1990s, Apple developed a range of proprietary personal computing systems called the Macintosh; consisting of the Macbook, Macbook pros, iMac and many others. The core of the Macintosh was the state of the art operating system, the Mac OS.

Not only does it have an out of the world user interface, the Mac OS was also an incredibly stable platform.

Wowing the computing world with its beautiful aesthetics and its amazing stability, the Macintosh successfully changed the face of personal computing.

The Macintosh was also a predominant feature in movies and television; making them a de-facto for coolness; cool kids and celebrities were seen owning a Macintosh, making it an integral part of American pop culture, which eventually spread on to the rest of the world.

Digital Music Revolution

In the year 2001, Apple introduced to the world the iPod, at that point of time no one would have imagined that there was a device that could contain one's entire music collection, and the iPod was more than capable of that.

The first generation iPod was capable of holding up to 10 GB of music (estimated over 2000 songs) ; the later generations of the iPod had improved capacity of up to 160 GB and it eventually became capable of storing and playing other multimedia files such as pictures and videos and even games.

To further monopolized on the success of the iPod, Apple released its own online media store called the iTunes Store, allowing users to purchase music that can be downloaded to their iPods.

The iTunes store was itself another revolution; with its intuitive user interface, it made purchasing of music easy, and ignited a whole new paradigm in the distribution of digital music. Being a robust platform, the potential of the iTunes store was exponential; and eventually it expanded from a music store to providing podcast, vodcast, videos, applications and even ebooks.

Mobile Technology

If you think Apple was already contented, you are so wrong. In the year 2007, Apple decided to redefine the mobile phone when they released the iPhone.

Although the iPhone had a very breathtaking user interface and some very advance features, the fact is, the market was already saturated with tons of smartphones What made the iPhone truly stand out were neither its aesthetics nor its features, it was the applications.

Riding on the success of the iTunes store, Apple added the App store to iTunes and this paved the way for developers to develop their and sell their own iPhone applications. These apps, which are available on the app store for free or at a reasonable pricing, opened up a world of possibilities for the iPhone, enabling the iPhone to do almost anything, be it using it to check the train schedule to using it as a multimedia player or even using it as a music tuner.This became the best reason for everyone and anyone to get an iPhone; and in a few years, the iPhone became the most popular mobile phone in the world.

A new shift in mobile computing: the portable touch screen?

Wherever they went they conquered and excelled, with the recently launched iPad, Apple certainly looks like they are going to reach another milestone in revolutionizing mobile computing with their touch screen technology.

Having already sold more than 2 million units in less than 2 months, will Apple do it again this time?

Got a complaint? Why not set up a Facebook page.

Let's say you have a complaint or a nagging issue that you want to voice out to a large corporate entity, what could you do? Well there are few conventional channels you could go about doing that.

Calling the company's helpdesk - That's not a bad idea, only problem is how long are you going to wait? Depending on the multitude of your issue, the person answering your call can't exactly make any managerial decisions, all he/she could only try to escalate the case and by the time it reaches someone that could handle the case, you might have already forgotten about it and chances are it might never reach that important decision maker.

How about sending an email to them? Sounds convenient, but let's see; firstly you will get an auto generated email reply saying that they have received your email and that they will get back to you asap, but many of times, the auto generated email might just be the one and only email you will receive and even if you do receive a human generated email reply, chances are it might probably just contain a link that refers you to a section of their official website, which in most cases does not address any of your concerns.

If all else fails and you really want to get your point across, why not try writing in to the forum of a local newspaper so you could get your letter published to the public, but what are the chances? The thing is, the newspaper would probably have tens of thousands of such letters/emails coming in everyday and the chances of your letter/email being picked up are pretty slim.

So does that mean, there is no way to voice out your heartfelt frustrations or issues? Well, you could make use of social media tools such as Facebook; it sure is easier and probably less frustrating and it has the potential to get your point across to the highest amount of people in the shortest amount of time, and best of all it's free.

That's what one individual did; being unhappy about the absurd pricing that a corporate entity is offering for a major televised sporting event, he created a Facebook page to firstly voice his concerns and also boycott the package that the corporate entity is offering, not surprisingly, he wasn't the only unhappy individual out there, in fact there are many others who has the exact same sentiments, soon enough this Facebook page connected like minded individuals by the thousands, not only did they join in to make the numbers, many took the chance to post their heartfelt views on the page. Within 3 days, the page was flooded with an avalanche of heartfelt opinions and some even shared tips on how to watch the sporting event for free, and this has also led to the attention of a local newspaper. The final outcome of still unknown, and will this force the corporate entity to revise the package? We just have to wait and see.

This example demonstrates the power and potential of harnessing social media platforms such as Facebook; in this case, as the page was just started a few days back, it has yet to get the main point across to the corporate entity, but judging by the number of people flooding in to the page, it sure looks like it's going to stir up one major shitstorm! So the next time you have a nagging concern or a complaint towards some unreachable corporate entity, forget about the conventional channels, why not set up a Facebook page instead.

The battle for WORLD wide web DOMINATION: Facebook vs. Google

After launching its open graph api for only a week, Facebook has already announced that over 50,000 websites have integrated its social plugins, and as we speak more sites expected to follow suit, thus this allows Facebook to draw nearer to its goal of being the center of the World Wide Web. This places Facebook in a favorable position for World Wide Web Domination, making them a serious threat towards Google's seemingly unsurpassable position. And if it's still not enough, Facebook has also teamed up with Microsoft to offer a new online document editing service called Docs.com, which directly challenges Google Docs.

With Facebook marching in strongly at all fronts to undermine Google's leadership position, Google is definitely not resting on its laurels. In 2010 alone (up till April 30^th); Google has already acquired 9 different startups companies, they are namely

• Aardvark (Social Search)
  
• ReMail (Email Search)
  
• Picnik (Photo Editing)
  
• DocVerse (MS Office file sharing site)
  
• Episodic (Online Video Platform)
  
• Plink (Mobile Search Engine)
  
• LabPixies (Online gadget publisher)
  
• Agnilux ( Server technology)
  
• BumpTop (Desktop Environment)
  

It is still unclear how Google plans to integrate these startups into its already humongous empire, but from the looks of things, these startups might just provide Google with the much needed arsenal to gain back the edge from Facebook, and as we speak, Google might already be planning a couple more acquisitions in the later part of the year.

Only time will tell who the eventual victor will be in this face-off, but in the meantime we can definitely expect more cool and free stuff from both Google and Facebook as they square it off in the battle for WORLD wide web DOMINATION.

Facebook’s open graph in a nutshell

In the last 2 weeks, most of you would have heard about Facebook's new open graph concept, so what is it really about? Let me illustrate to you in a layperson's term.

Firstly let's look at some of the obvious changes that has already been set in motion, if you have noticed at sites like IMDB, ESPN, CNN and popular blog sites all over the net, there is this "Facebook like" symbol that has been put in place after every entry or article. This "Facebook like" symbol works the same as the one on Facebook, so upon clicking on it, a status will appear reflecting something like "Bob Daniel likes this" (be it a news article on CNN or a movie on IMDB).

There is more, if any your Facebook friends had already "like" this particular article of movie, you would be able to see it next to the "Facebook like" button, it will go something like "Denise wee and 15 others likes this".

Upon going back to your Facebook profile, you will see that on your profile page and subsequently your live feed, it will reflect the particular item you have just "like". This would then be viewed by all your Facebook friends and to top it off, let's say you were to "like" a movie on IMDB, Facebook will automatically add the movie to the list of your favorite movies on your info page.

Of course there are still many more implementations besides the "like" button, but to keep it short and simple, I won't really go deeper, but what does it really mean for the web and for us, the users? In accordance to Mark Zukerburg, The CEO of Facebook Inc, Facebook's open graph aims is to create an instantly social and personalized experience for web users all over the world, allowing a platform that places people in the center of the web.

By people, he simply means that this will put Facebook in the center of the World Wide Web, this open graph will then allow Facebook to pull in and connect the various different web graphs (i.e different web categories, societies etc.) to its ever growing social media platform. With an exponential growth in the number of Facebook users as well as the sites adopting Facebook's open graph being expected in the coming months, this will eventually lead to - More advertising dollars and control for Facebook, and in conclusion, it leads to - World Wide Web Domination.

The biggest conspiracy in the history of new and social media

If you have been following some sort of new/social media newsfeeds or tweets, you would probably have heard of the case of the misplaced IPhone 4G or some sites would put it IPhone HD, whatever the name is, Apple has this time pulled off one of the biggest publicity stunt ever in their own history or you might even call this "the biggest conspiracy in the history of new and social media"

Why do I think it's a publicity stunt or some big conspiracy by apple? let's just say this entire incident of an Apple engineer leaving his latest unreleased Iphone at a bar and it ending up with gizmodo; who in turn published photos of it to the entire world, all these looks too much like a well planned conspiracy.

As a result; it has got the entire new/social media community talking about it, let's just say the amount of tweets/retweets, blog posts and forums discussions on this missing Iphone have already reached a colossal level and it continues to rise, and isn't this what apple wants all along? Apple's PR have done it once again, this time they have reached a total new level in the shortest amount of time, stirring up a total shit storm and making gizmodo the unfortunate sorry ass decoy.(fyi, they actually paid a whopping USD$5000 to obtain that iphone)

Now that Apple wants the phone back, gizmodo is not just going to lose a USD$5000 phone, they might face a lawsuit from apple if Steve Jobs decides to sue.

And there is more, let me bring you to the attention the Hitler "Downfall" parodies that has been circulating on YouTube; isn't it too coincidental that of all time, the producers of clip had decided to have it take down at this time, after they made a spoof of it based on the missing Iphone; I mean spoofs of it had been made like all the time, and for years already, why take it down? And the real question is why now? after they spoofed the Iphone 4G?

And from all these series of events, the proud winner of the biggest conspiracy in the history of new and social media is "Apple's missing Iphone 4G"

The Internet of Things

Some of you may already be very familiar with the concept "Internet of things", but for those of you who don't , let me give you a lowdown on what this is all about, first up let's just do some imagining;

The alarm clock wakes you up at the right timing, you walk into your bathroom and the water temperature will be just right, without you having to adjust anything.

Then with a touch of a button, the coffee machine prepares your perfect cup of coffee, not too sweet…just the right taste.

Once you've stepped out of your house, the taxi arrives on time to send you to your destination.

All these and more, is the Internet of Things in action, so how does it actually work?

Well it all starts with you keying in details like your appointment time and location in your calendar which is linked to a central automated system; so upon your input, this will trigger off the series of actions that I've illustrated above.

The internet of things essential refers to the network infrastructure that had made these entirely possible, linking all our network enabled household devices together to this central automated system, in which we are able to configure to our own preference. In essence the Internet of things is the technology which allowes these devices to communicate with one another to make our lives easier.