I recently heard that a few days ago President Obama joined Pinterest, the latest cool social networking platform. Pinterest which calls itself “an online pinboard where you can organize and share things you love” With pinterest, you can put up photos, videos, text on a bulliton board type of space. Since the site started in September 2009, the site has seen close to 900 percent increase in unique visitors. The Huffington post reported that there were 17.8 million unique monthly views in February, up from 11.7 million one month earlier. What makes it so popular? It’s exclusive and you can’t just join. You have to be invited, and there is a waiting list. It is a clean design and is a break from the networking part of facebook and twitter. You get to escape into your bulliton board – and put up. It is easy to get to see interesting content. Want to see a page of animals hugging? Or antique doorknobs? There are pages for that.
Another growing trend in social media is the increase in games in social media. A visiting game designer who came to school last month told us that gaming is moving towards more games being made for social media platforms rather than for console. Right now, the hot games are delivered on the canvas in Facebook. Facebook has become a major part of the gaming industry. 60 million people use games every month through Facebook. Facebook paid $1.4 billion to developers in 2011.
Where is social media going next? Hard to say. I recently have found it difficult to balance my teaching, art projects, and keeping up with my social media. I have consistently been up 5 posts a week, but dipped down to only 4 posts last week. I put out about 10 tweets a week, and use bitly to help shorten and track my links. I have resisted signing up with Google+, but the new commercials that show groups of people videochatting with friends made me want to join. I got an invitation to join Pinterest 4 months ago, but never signed up.
Today I checked out Flowtown, a social marketing blog that already helped me find a new service to help me with getting more attention in Twitter. I joined Timely, a free service that is supposed to help me get more retweets and replies. I also confirmed my account for Pinterest and will be making my first board related to a current project I am working on. What is the future of social media ? For me it seems like I will be joining more networks and expanding my social media.
Image Source:
wheredoyougive.org/blog/
Links:
Flowtown – a Social Marketing Blog
It’s All Games Now (Cnvergence of Games and Social Media) talk by Raph Koster of Playdom at GDC