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This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

Read the whole story on Gizmodo

Related articles

• Gary Marshall: Is Instagram’s future like Flickr’s? (techradar.com)
• Yahoo: The Worst Way Ever to Pick a Corporate Strategy (mobileopportunity.blogspot.com)
• 500px aims to kill Flickr with new $20 Plus plan (geek.com)
• How Yahoo can get its mojo back (tech.fortune.cnn.com)

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Last week I wrote about the best times to tweet on Twitter. I thought I’d follow up with what the research says about Facebook.

When to post

More sharing occurs on Facebook at 9:00am ET than at any other time of day.

According to research by social media scientist Dan Zarrella, more far more Facebook posts get shared on Saturdays and Sundays than on other day of the week, and at 9am and 7pm (U.S. Eastern Time). The next-most-popular sharing times amount to breakfast-time, lunchtime, and bedtime. These would be the best times to post to Facebook, then, if you wanted your fans to share your posts with their friends.

How to post

Dan Zarrella’s linguistic analysis has also found patterns in the kind of language that gets shared on Facebook:

• Simple language, because the lower the reading level, the more often a post gets shared.
• Nouns and verbs, rather than adverbs and adjectives.
• Digits significantly increases its odds of being shared on Facebook.

He has even determined the most shared words and least shared words in Facebook posts.

What to post

But Facebook isn’t all about words. Research by Vitrue shows that posts with images are far more engaging than posts with either text or (surprisingly) video:

• 54% more than text posts
• 22% more than video posts

How to encourage sharing

Facebook says people who “Like” content–so-called “Likers”– click on 5.3 times more links to external sites than other Facebook members do and have 2.4 times the number of friends (as if we needed more incentive to appeal to these folks). To encourage Facebook “Likers” to share your site content, Facebook advises:

1. Use the Like button on your site to make it easy for visitors to share your content with their friends. If you optimize it by including profile pictures, you can improve click-through rates 3-5 times.
2. Use the Activity Feed or Recommendations plugins. Highlighting most popular content on your site leads people to view more articles. Those who click on the Activity Feed plugin in particular generate 4 times as many page views as the average media site viewer. Place it above the fold on your home page and at the bottom of each article for maximum engagement

Do these statistics match with your results?

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There’s a lot of research out there about what works on Twitter. Here’s a quick run-down on what I’ve turned up recently.

How often to tweet

Tweet click-through rate is higher in afternoons and evenings (U.S. Eastern Time)"

According to Hubspot, Twitterers who tweet between 10 and 50 times a day have more followers on average than those that tweet more or less frequently. Such a large range should disabuse you of any notion that there are hard-and-fast rules in our business. But for those of you who need more specific advice, Hubspot does report the “peak” of the curve is at about 22 tweets per day.

When to Tweet

Research by renowned social media scientist Dan Zarrella indicates higher click-through rates on tweets made between 2:00 and 9:00 pm ET—excluding 6:00 to 7:00—and on Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

How to Tweet

Dan Zarrella’s linguistic research also shows better results on tweets that:

• Keep tweets positive to avoid losing followers.
• Use social language in your tweets (“we,” “you,” and relationship and communication words).

What are your results?

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“Do you mean: poop suit?” Google asked. It was that kind of week.

A giant turd was terrorizing Manhattan — lurking in Central Park and Times Square, trying to gain entry to the United Nations. Even UN Week’s Digital Media Lounge had to batten its hatches against the fearsome feces, which taunted the inhabitants via Twitter:

Meanwhile, in an unrelated incident inside that same Digital Media Lounge, a flurry of tweets were nominating a diarrhea celebrity:

• @ithorpe – OK – I seriously think we should all crowdsource suggestions for a celebrity spokesperson for diarrhea. Suggestions?
• @LCMoy – Sir Mix-a-lot?
• @laurenist – I think @JoshMalina was saying he needs work.
• @BreadHolly – Jane Lynch. She’s the shit.
• @viewfromthecave – Flavor Flav will naturally work. Just change the neckwear.
• @voiceteam – Winnie the Pooh?

A Diarrhea Celebrity?!

WaterAid poo in Times Square to call attention to sanitation needs of the developing world during UN Week

Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen was relating his experience raising money to fight two big killers — malaria and diarrhea — and getting only money earmarked for malaria. “I wish there was a rock star against diarrhea,” quipped Elizabeth Gore of the UN Foundation. “That would be awesome.”

Think about it for half a second and you see the difficulty. Diarrhea is simply not a sexy disease.

It is, however, lethal. Diarrhea kills 1.4 million children a year — more children than AIDS, malaria, and measles combined, according to the World Health Organziation, whose studies report more troubling facts like these:

• 50% of childhood malnutrition can be attributable to repeated diarrhea.
• In developing countries half the people in hospital are suffering from diarrhea.

Which leads us to the giant poo.

Poo Takes Manhattan

The turd was in town to call attention to the lack of sanitation in the developing world. WaterAid (tagline: “Dig Toilets, Not Graves”) says the topic of sanitation is about as welcome in the UN as the giant poo was.

“It would be funny if it wasn’t such a serious matter,” said the poo, also known as Kate Norgrove, WaterAid’s head of campaigns. The organization reports that 2.6 billion people live without safe sanitation, producing the equivalent of a football stadium full of feces every day. And every gram of feces can contain 10 million viruses, one million bacteria, 1,000 parasite cysts, and 100 parasite eggs.

Yuck.

Worse than yuck, of course. Fecal matter causes the majority of the illness in the world. Water-related disease kills 3.575 million people every year — almost as many people as live in Los Angeles. Whatever you think of L.A., you have to admit the situation justifies Turdingnagian measures. We in the West need no longer fear the feces, but for those in the developing world it may as well be the monster the WaterAid poo pretends to be.

The Meme Expands

The poo meme expanded until it seemed to take over UN Week altogether. Diplomats poo-pooed their usual differences as they cooperated to pledge money for women’s and children’s health. Celebrities obviously felt like hot sh*t at the cocktail reception Wednesday night, congratulating each other on their progress in meeting the MDGs. And everyone who worked for an NGO went back to their hotels every night utterly pooped.

The meme reached its full fruition, though, when Oxfam International pronounced its verdict on the week:

The summit has been a mirage. The promises look good from a distance, but the details are hard to see, and when the world’s poorest people most need help, pledges could still vanish into thin air.

In other words, Oxfam called the week’s accomplishments bullshit.

(This post originally appeared on VOICEhub September 25, 2010.)

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The hope and promise of technology to improve governance was on display at last week’s Personal Democracy Forum 2010. So too were the technologies created to make those hopes a reality. Some were not yet in beta, others had been in use for over a year; some had official presentations, others were mentioned as asides. Here is a rundown of the applications that were discussed.

Mobilization

Frontline SMS
Cited in the “Digital Divide” panel, Frontline SMS was described as “mobile phones to save the world, used for sending pictures of diseases to doctors far away…”

From the site: FrontlineSMS is the complete text messaging solution for the non-profit sector.  FrontlineSMS turns a laptop – or desktop – computer and a mobile phone or modem into a two-way group messaging hub. Since it works anywhere there’s a mobile signal, it doesn’t need the Internet, a major advantage for many grassroots NGOs. Once you have the software running on your computer, you can send messages to wide groups of people, and collect responses to any questions or surveys you might want to run, all via text message.

Meetup Everywhere

Lets people schedule associated Meetups all over the world for free. Create a topic you’d like to meet up about, and everyone else around the world can either join you or schedule their own Meetup on that topic. Message boards and tweets allow you to discuss scheduling with other interested parties. Examples:

Huff Post Green fans scheduled 329 Meetups all over the world to brainstorm ideas for fixing the BP oil spill

• HuffPostGreen – 329 Meetups around the country have been scheduled to brainstorm ideas for fixing the BP oil spill June 8, after the Huffington Post putu up the idea on Meetup Everywhere.
• Shakira – Fans have organized 89 flash mobs around the world to dance Shakira’s Waka Waka dance in support of 1GOAL: Education for All.
• NY Road Runners – 61 groups in 5 continents are using Meetup Everythere to find each other and train together before coming to NYC for the Marathon.

Civic participation

SeeClickFix
Citizens around the world report non-emergency issues; civil servants who monitor the feed can get them fixed. You can even generate a widget showing unresolved issues, enabling you or your site visitors to monitor your municipality’s progress. Government, media, and community groups can set up their own pages to monitor problems being reported (and resolved) within their purview.

Hope+
A platform, incubated by Aspen Institute, for bringing together volunteers and the NGOs who need them. Its partnership with Monster.com is expected to drive more than 32 million volunteers to the site. The thinking is that, once you volunteer you’re hooked. The funnel of participation they envision goes like this:

1. Your time
2. Your friends
3. Your money

IfWeRanTheWorld
Website (in alpha phase) that asks visitors what they’d do if they ran the world, then takes their answers and translates them into “tangible, do-able microactions that anyone and everyone can do”– sort of like making a project plan out of a mission statement.

Piryx
The Piryx “The Social Giving Platform” is a platform connecting donors to causes, helping member causes to “develop a more intimate relationship with donors.” Once they get to the website, the average donor conversion rate is 11%, says Tom Serres, CEO and co-founder.

Political engagement

Visible Vote lets people see how well their elected officials match their own values.

Visible Vote

From the site: Visible Vote is the first and only application to allow you to cast your virtual vote and then notify your representatives of your position weekly. Visible Vote also monitors how often your Congressmen vote in alignment with you and the people they represent.

Microsoft TownHall
In Microsoft’s words, its free Townhall is “software that allows you to easily create a destination for folks to voice opinions, identify problems, offer solutions and come together around common interests and concerns.” It lets people express their opinions and organizations collect data about them.

10 Questions
Citizens post questions they want their political candidates to answer, and vote up or down the importance of all submitted questions are to them. Candidates then have the chance to answer posted questions via text or video. Only Ohio and Pennsylvania are active in this early stage.

VoteIQ
U.S.- based social network platform for all things politics. Citizens can find the candidates who align with their views and values, see where they really stand on the issues, learn more about the issues, and discuss with others like themselves. Politicians and organizations can reach voters highly targeted because of the information they’ve entered in the system.

Video engagement

Civicovideo streams events for remote viewing and archiving, including concurrent social media feeds, supplemental documents, and indexing.

Civico
London-based Civico covered and archived the event. The firm video streams events for remote viewing and archiving. According to the site it offers these features:

• Fully contextualized and indexed with speaker names, agenda items and auto jump points.
• Access documents, presentations, pictures or data relevant to the meeting
• Integration with social media platforms (e.g. Twitter), everyday web-based tools, feedback forums, questions, polls, surveys and consultations.
• Measured audience and engagement statistics

Watchitoo
Combines video chat with video watching so users can watch content together and talk about it.

Campaign tools

Election Mall + Campaign Cloud
Allows campaigns to apply everything Obama did in one place: website, fundraising, organization tools, email, phone, ads, tasking, calendars, GOTV. Pay-for-use model, so it’s meant to be affordable to candidates from the local level to President. For use in U.S. and international campaigns, candidate and issue advocacy. Open API so long as you use the Microsoft Cloud, so it can work with Drupal or other environments.

Pop Rule
Platform for creating a campaign website for as little as $1,000. Pulls together the candidate’s social media feeds, making the campaign distributable. Andy Pariser, reviewing the idea, said it was a good idea for statewide office where money was more scarce; not enough customizability or innovation for a major campaign.

Data

Sunlight Foundation’s Transparency Data Tool
Working with the Center for Responsive Politics and Taxpayers for Common Sense, the Sunlight Foundation has combined several disparate databases and made them available via API to developers seeking to explore relationships between fundraising, lobbying, and elected officials, for example. Non-technical people can access the data with the organization’s Transparency Data tool and download it for investigation or create widgets from it for visual distribution. Some Poliwidgets can be viewed on OpenSecrets.org.

Web Seer
Compare Google Suggest results to discover trends, and visualize that data in new ways. Try it live here.

Were additional apps mentioned in the panels you attended? Let me know of any I missed, below.

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If you want your content to be remembered, use color.  More specifically, use natural color.  So says an interesting psychological study I ran across today.

Study finds people would better recall the center image than the versions to the right and left.

In the study, normal-sighted subjects were shown 48 images of landscapes, flowers, rock formations and man-made objects–half of them in color, half in black and white.  Then 48 new pictures were added to the mix to see which original pictures the subjects could recall.  Finding: Subjects remembered the color version of an image better than the black-and-white version. Not too surprising.

Here’s the part that is: When versions of the images with altered colors were added into the mix — ones with green skies or red grass — those pictures weren’t remembered any better than the black-and-white versions.

One would think the unusual would make such an impression it’d be remembered for days or weeks to come.  Evidently not.  “If stimuli are too strange,” explained Karl Gegenfurtner, co-author of the study, “the [brain's] system simply doesn’t engage them as well.”  Gegenfurtner says this shows the brain’s visual memory is specifically set up for natural color schemes.

As fascinating as this is, it’s important to note that subjects weren’t viewing photos by Dorothea Lange, or Ansel Adams.  It’s hard to imagine anyone failing to recall those masters of black-and-white photography.

The study originally appeared in the May 2002 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, and was reported in Scientific American: Mind that same month. (I only ran across it this morning but thought you might have missed it then too.)

PHOTO CREDIT (original): John Collier, Library of Congress. Photo manipulation by Julie C. Roth.

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Think big. Think really big. Double that, and you have an idea of why 1GOAL uses all caps in its name.

First there’s the goal: provide education to the 72 million children around the world who currently have no access to it. Then there are the partners: the whole of FIFA, the most popular sports league in the world, about to launch the planet into World Cup hysteria.

The 1GOAL mobile site: http://1gol.mobi/

Then there’s the mobile campaign: 24 mobile providers, covering every corner of the globe, agreeing to text their 1.5 billion subscribers in support of the campaign. Unsolicited text messages, mind you, to 1.5 billion. With a B.

The Ask

The text message will invite subscribers to respond “YES” to sign a petition to world leaders, urging them to provide more funding for education, schooling 72 million children currently without it. Alternatively, mobile subscribers can sign up at 1goal.mobi or info@join1goal.org . Nokia and Samsung are also creating a 1GOAL mobile app their customers can download.

The campaign aims to get millions of people to sign on to the effort and calculates that a 1% response rate to the mobile campaign would mean 15 million participants all by itself – the equivalent to the entire population of Holland. Numbers translate to pressure where petitions are concerned, but clearly the campaign hopes the staggering number will make news in itself.

“Teaming up with the mobile phone industry, 1GOAL can now reach over a billion people worldwide, making it the largest, cause-related campaign in history,” said Her Majesty, Queen Rania of Jordan, Co-founder and Co-Chair of 1GOAL.

How Mobile Was Enlisted

Queen Rania was personally instrumental in enlisting the GSMA to support the campaign. The GSMA represents the worldwide mobile communications industry – nearly 800 mobile operators in 219 countries. Queen Rania delivered the keynote address at the association’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona three months ago and urged the organization’s members to champion education.

Evidently she was very persuasive.

Participating mobile groups and networks include some of the world’s largest: AT&T Wireless, Axiata Group Berhad, Batelco Group, Bharti-Airtel, CSL, Hutchison 3 Group, KT, MTN, NTT DOCOMO, Mobitel, Orascom Group, SingTel Group, Smart Communications, SOFTBANK MOBILE, SK Telecom, Telenor Group, Telefónica Group, TMN, Umniah, VimpelCom and Zain Group.

Said César Alierta, chairman and CEO of Telefónica: “We believe actions speak louder than words and as we have been striving to make a difference in education for the past 12 years, we are delighted to support 1GOAL.”

(Disclosure: Jason Wojciechowski of this site and I are both working on the 1GOAL project.)

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