How much is Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google involved in your common day activities? Did you ever ask yourself that? Where would you be if those didn’t exist?
Well there thousands of those existential questions that you may or may not asked yourself, and there’s no need to get real philosophical about this, but we sure can be certain that those technologies, web apps and more have an important presence in most of our days.
About those presences, here’s a very interesting video about the facts of several of these social tools, technologies and media: “Social Media Revolution”
Here are some of the facts that caught my attention:
Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the web
1 of 8 couples married in the US met via social media
If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users, Facebook took less than 9 months to reach 100 millions
Ashton Kutcher has more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles
80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
35% of books sales on Amazon are for Kindle
“Social media isn’t a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate”
Over at Hulu all the content is free and ad-supported for the USA market. However, News Corp chief digital officer Jonathan Miller says that could change. Speaking at an event last night, Miller said some of the TV shows and movies on Hulu future could be made available only to paying subscribers in the future.
There are no plans to launch Hulu subscriptions at the moment, and Miller was just speaking in hypotheticals. But News Corp is one of Hulu’s two primary backers (the other being NBC), so if he thinks subscriptions are a good idea, it might be time to start throwing a little money in a piggy bank for a Hulu day fund.
There are so many user generated video sites available on the internet these days, but sometimes you might not want to see user generated content. Thus, I thought I would put together a very quick list of the best places to view the news online as if you were watching it direct from your television at home.
Livestation – Livestation is a free downloadable video players that streams live news, events, shows from some of the world biggest media companies. Livestation includes services like the BBC, CNN, Fox, MTV, Al Jazeera and more. The service is easy to download and it great to use. The player itself can be changed to any size and you are able to add additional news and radio sources that can be found on the Livestation website.
BBC iPlayer – The BBC iPlayer has been around for quite some time now, and even though they got a lot of harsh press at launch they have been quitely improving the service and it actually now isnt that bad. The iPlayer is a great place to head when you are looking for what has been happening from around the world in the last few days. On the iPlayer they have a dedicated section to BBC News in which will keep you up to date with the major headlines.
Hulu – Hulu is a partnership between News Corp and NBC Universal. Hulu is for USA users only at the moment and it allows them to watch their favourite TV shows, movies and of course news programs all for free. Hulu was born when News Corp and NBC werent happy with the revenues they were receiving from YouTube, so they formed a strategic alliance and launched a free online television service that has been growing at a rapid pace. Hulu has a dedicated news section which allows users to view news from major USA sources as well as smaller sources like Cnet.
Boxee has just sent out an email to bloggers alerting them that as of this Friday, they will be removing Hulu from their channel lineup. This comes at the request of Hulu. Apparently Boxee has been working to try to keep Hulu in their lineup for two weeks.
we love Hulu. they have built a great product and brand (including one the best Superbowl ads this year)… the response has been amazing. people love watching many of their favorite shows on Hulu via boxee. last week we generated more than 100,000 streams for them…
two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it.
Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes…Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites…For those Boxee users reading this post, we understand and appreciate that you’re likely to tell us that we’re nuts. Please know that we do share the same interests and won’t stop innovating in support of the bigger mission.
Boxee only just release onto Mac and Ubuntu on the 8th of January and now they have lost one of their major sources of content. The Boxee service is a very simple one, they provide movies, tv shows and music all in one simple location.
