The Social Media Platform Atlas

This, at first, came across as a rather nice gadget for social media nerds: the social media platform atlas. It shows an overview of interactions possible on the worlds largest social network:

http://vimeo.com/29790319

This is a short description from the website:

Platlas is designed to help you better understand your social networks. Our goal with this project is to introduce a new and interactive perspective to the variety of actions users take on their social platforms. To better educate users and companies alike, we’ve created the first ever social network ecosystem exploration tool. (…)

Starting from a user’s profile in the center of the circle and moving outwards this interactive guide illustrates the hierarchy of Facebook user actions from the perspective of content creation and interaction. (see here)

Clicking through the tool, you can arrange the info in various ways to figure out how to use facebook. The added value does not seem to be extremely high, but it is in fact a nice interactive infographic. No more, no less, if you ask me.

More interesting, however, is the way the video and the introduction to the tool is done. On the page you can read about the technical specs of the tool (i.e. javascript, no flash, etc.).

In the video (if you haven’t watched it yet), you don’t only see the people involved in the project explaining the tool, expressing their pride. You can also see many views across the agency. This way, people can get a feeling for what the agency is like. Whether it is a nice place to work at.

My guess is: this is a clever recruitment „campaign“. May be also built for some new business activities. But when watching the video I got the feeling their first objective was to lure prospective employees…

Waving or buzzing – Google’s new Buzz.

So Google has launched „buzz“, which is a social network simulating extension to GMail, if you ask me. You can share photos, videos, status messages – and people can follow your profile, see what you share and comment on it in real time. Apparently. I haven’t found anyone yet to „buzz“ with.

It’s supposed to be an attack on sites like facebook or tools like twitter. I just wonder, if it is strong enough to get people of these two other services. They are quite sticky already, especially facebook, since they’re offering lots of functions, games, content upload options, etc. – and quite many people have established their network on facebook, it will take some persuading luring these network-settled people over to a new network.

Anyway, how does that align with Google Wave? Will they integrate the two at some point? Or will Buzz just be for sharing, chatting and connecting while Wave will be more about real collaboration? We’ll see… And see this video here, it explains the main points in less than 2 minutes:

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(UPDATE: here is another good take on the whole launch, including the relation to Wave.)

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