Anti social media

And so to the Groucho Club, one time home of the media in-crowd, where dear old Yahoo! is holding a round table debate on social media. Various notables attended, and somehow they also managed to let a few print journalists in, possibly because we looked like we needed feeding. Not sure yet. Anyway, aside from the rather tasty salt beef sandwiches, the debate was a good one, even if it did stray from time to time into social networking, which everyone is more familiar with.

The debate brought up some interesting angles; not least the difference between Yahoo's own Flickr service and YouTube. While Flickr steers clear of unsavoury content (and that's not just pornography, you know), the likes of YouTube has been pretty open. Looking at the videos marked as being popular or well viewed on YouTube can be a little eyewatering at times, whereas Flickr's popular shots are generally fantastic examples of photography. Flickr's 100 most interesting was compared to the rather eponymous karate monkey video (no, not this Karate Monkey), which has been around since before YouTube and is nonetheless still one of the less pleasant work-safe videos out there.

Sadly for Yahoo (and much better for YouTube) it's YouTube that seems
to be winning the battle for eyeballs at the moment. While a great
number of people know and love Flickr, even more will confess to taking
a quick trawl through YouTube. This is reflected in many things, not
least the enthusiasm amongst operators for YouTube content. Partly this
is because it's moving pictures, but mostly it's because YouTube is a
brand that attracts people. It's a guilty pleasure in most cases.

Perhaps we missed the trick at the round table; Flickr and YouTube
aren't telling us anything new. Some people like doing arty things with
cameras, prefer a smaller choice of a higher quality. The vast majority
want to be entertained with something crazy, funny or sexy. That's got
us to the point, perhaps, where social media is aping old media - or
perhaps to a point where old media hacks like I are seeing parallels.

There's also a dark side to it all - something Chinwag is going to base an event on soon. Yesterday I found that personal information I'd posted on my Facebook profile had been inadvertently scraped into Jaiku, and thence into a Google Alert. People have been bullied, victimised and stalked. So no different from old media, then. However, there is a difference, and that is in terms of accountability.

There are a lot of positive sides to social media. It dis-intermediates. It brings small, local stories into the fore. It may yet show up the imperfections of older, more entrenched forms of media. It's certainly going to be fun for the search companies. Perhaps it already has. Google's original algorithm depended on links to sites, not the considered weight of an organisation behind a site. Whatever is likely to happen, it'll be a fun ride.