Saturday, May 30, 2009

Weird things on the social network

A funny thing happened on Twitter last night. Someone that I was following tweeted "I'm having a video chat here" and a link, so I followed the link and found myself in a chat room. It was clearly an automated tweet sent by the chat room software, but I followed it anyway.

The was one other person in the chat room as guest (I changed my nickname to my twitter name). Very quickly after @FlemmingDoerksen followed my link into the chat room and the guest announced he didn't know us and was off.
So now Flemming and myself found ourselves randomly in a chat room, the original reason long gone. We started chatting, then realised there was no video. We quickly found out neither of us had a camera or microphone on our computer!

As we laughed about this more people started joining the chat. My twitter status updates my facebook status and these were friends from facebook joining to see my video chat.
Soon we had several people in this video chat, all of whom had followed the link from the previous person and no one had video or audio.

We started wondering how big this would get - the viral spread of something quite pointless and not even interesting.

Maybe we'll try this again deliberately to see what happens and do it a little earlier so we don't have to cut it off short to go to bed.

All in all it was a complete Social Media #fail as far as the video chat and having any point, but it seemed quite a success in attracting a crowd to an accident - maybe that's the real use of social media ;-)

Tim.C

#fail #socialmedia #twitter

1 Comments:

Blogger zachpbass said...

Hey Tim, great post and real interesting observations about the chat! It was kinda fascinating to see the ebbs and flows of the room over such a very short time, and I, too, was amazed at the vast, totally unrelated group of people that ended up there!

I'm honestly not even sure who started it in the first place (I know I heard about it via @solobasssteve), but after only a little while, I'd seen such an incredible variety of friends come through, and most of whom knew of neither each other OR even Steve!! LOL

Really makes you think about the incredible 'pyramid effect' Social Media has when used effectively, especially when it comes to "scenes" like the music community! Exciting stuff!

23:14  

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