If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth?

Cameras have been an essential part of our mobile phones since the beginning of time. Ok fine, they've only been around since the beginning of the new millennium. (the first camera phone was released in 2000 and it is debated whether it was South Korea or Japan who got there first) But it seems like it.

Either way, mothers really have been around since the beginning of time and if I know anything about mothers, having one myself, it is that they LOVE taking pictures. Now that love has begun to transfer to their children. With almost every major social media site making it so convenient to post pictures and videos the hunger to do so is almost unbearable.

According to a study done by the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project 54% of Internet users have posted original photos or videos to websites and 47% share photos or videos they found elsewhere online. Now that's a lot of selfies and the cameras on our phones can shoulder quite a bit of the blame.



Nailed It!!

 All of the technological advancements on our mobile phones make it incredibly easy to take high quality pictures and videos and even easier to send them out into the vast universe that is the internet. Photo specific apps like instagram and snapchat are the partners in crime. In the same Pew study it was found that 9% of cell phone owners use Snapchat and 18% use Instagram. 91% of American adults own a cell phone, so almost 1 in every 5 Americans is using Instagram and almost 1 in every 10 is snapchatting.


Oh the Internet

I know I have a sarcastic tone but the truth is I am part of both the 9 and 18 percentiles. I admit, snapchat is pretty fun. You can take random pictures. Draw funny things on them. Caption them any way your heart desires. But I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that in this ever evolving word we(especially Americans) are becoming more and more inpatient. We want to be entertained and we want it now. That might mean less text and more pictures, videos and selfies.

Is it word of mouth if it is given with a type and a click?

As we all know Facebook is a the place to be when it comes to a bit of free press. Today more than ever. With millions of potential customers online at any given second why would we not want a significant presence on Facebook?

Online marketers are continually trying to pry information out of internet users and internet users are continually fighting back. It is a never ending battle. According to searchenginewatch.com “nearly two-thirds of Americans said they’ve had something to hide with past online searchers". Now this study was basically about hiding your search history from work or anyone else that may have access to your computer. The question is, if most of us want to hide something from people that we know wouldn't we try even harder to hide it from those that we don't?

Stories to Share Dashboard

 

So how do we get people to our sites without having to fight them to the death? Word of mouth. And Facebook is the best place to get that done. According to mashable.com, media sites saw a 170 percent increase in traffic from Facebook between September 2012 and 2013, with some sites, like the pop culture site Buzzfeed, seeing as much as an 855 percent increase.

Never trust a bunch of girls

On October 21st Facebook added a new service called "stories to share". This will show links from “liked” pages based on the volume of friends posting a certain link, whether or not the actual fan page has posted it. Pages won't even need to post an article for it to hit newfeeds around the world.

As with any relationship trust is key. We all tend trust our friends, for the most part. Even our high school classmates we haven't seen in a decade.

Should We Be Disconnected?

In our ever shrinking world we are "connected" more now than at any point in history. We can log onto the Internet and search for information about almost anything we want. With one caveat. We are being watched. Everything we search is being tracked and recorded. Not just by the government, which I am totally fine with by the way. They can watch my boring, nerdy Internet habits all they want. Anyway, not just by the government but by anyone trying to make a buck, which turns out to be quite a few people.

If you are a dedicated disciple of Ron Swanson you would consider all this tracking to be a huge invasion of privacy and are looking to get off the grid. Now if you can't get off the grid completely and still have Internet duties to attend to there are options for you. Disconnect is a service that helps Internet users "visualize and block the invisible websites that track you".



 

Ron Swanson getting disconnected

Disconnect started out in 2010 as a service for blocking ad tracking on Facebook but has since grown to block tracking on several web browsers, namely Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox with Internet Explorer soon to come. They also have apps for mobile devices but are limited to those with iOS.

 

 

 

What they are most excited about is the service they have just released for search engines. Disconnect Search is an extension( only for Chrome and Firefox browsers at the moment) that lets users searching on Google, Bing and Yahoo, as well as Blekko and DuckDuckGo, remain private while doing so.

 

While Disconnect is not the first service of it's kind, it does seem to have quite a bit of momentum. They say that as of today that over 1 Million people use there service every week. Even though this service is not going to get you around PRISM, I think that the causal effect will be that many people will want to control at least a little bit of what remains of their Internet privacy.

 

What impact is this kind of service going to have on SEO and other business related Internet activities? If it grows big enough I think this could have a significant impact. I'm sure there are people at Google right now working on ways to get around these types of services but it seems, that as of now, the battle is on.

Omnipotent App Adds App Ads... say that ten times fast

Turns out the all powerful Facebook has decided to further saturate our lives with advertisements. I guess we can't complain too much seeing as we collectively use their FREE services, on average, around 20 Billion minutes per DAY. So I guess we have to pay for it somehow, as the old saying goes... Nothing's Free.

So, whether we Like it or not, Facebook is going to be adding more ads to the news feeds within the mobile application. This means we get to scroll through a couple more ads a day to get to the important stuff, like our friends' dogs and babies and let us not forget all of the highly educated political opinions. What we would do without Facebook I don't know.

Now for some this won't be the end of the world. In fact, it may be a blessing. Many of you can get your Candy Crush updates faster than ever. I know those stages are important milestones in many people's day.

I know I sound cynical and sarcastic but all joking aside this is going to be a good thing for both Facebook and for App marketers. We will be able to see many of the cool new apps right on our news feed without having to search for them. That's pretty cool right?

A good thing for Facebook is a good thing for us all right? Considering the amount many of us use Facebook everyday the logic only seems sound. I'm willing to scroll a little bit more for the betterment of the human race. You can thank me later.