The first thing that is striking about this is the visual style. Its a particularly Web 2.0 style website with a friendly feel, a lot of space and nice sized fonts. Those lovely big speech bubbles and the pigeon complete a distinctly Web 2.0 looking logo to go with it.

NOTE: The kanji used for “Hato” in Hatoyama’s name is the symbol for pigeon or dove, thus the strategic placement of the bird.

The site is still light on content, one rather plain post and a few links, but I still remain interested in where this is going. This is a very fresh move for Japanese politics and is probably keeping an open mind to trying new things to stay ahead is one of the reasons Hatoyama got into power in the first place.

He does include a brief introduction on the left of what this site is which basically translates as “This is a place where you can have a direct communication with him and so he can listen to what people think and respond  … blah blah blah”, you get the picture. Nice sentiment, nicer when they follow through.

So, that bit about communication … unfortunately no comments section on his posts. The way he wants people to communicate is via Twitter, which has no direct display on this website.

To enable that, he has created a Twitter account, @hatoyamayukio, to which you should direct comments.

At the time of writing he already had almost 40,000 followers and my guess is that this number will be growing quickly. So far he is pulling an Oprah and only has one post, but at least he follows almost a thousand people.

So far this is pretty much an Obama copycat move… it worked for Obama, so I can’t fault that.

What would be very interesting to me is to see if any real listening and response goes on. We all know this isn’t actually Hatoyama that will monitor these posts, but what will happen when the multitudes start talking? Maybe they need Press Army?

Today we launched Red Bull Crowdcast, which, as far as I know, is the first time a global brand has handed over the keys of live casting an event to the audience, allowing them to show their vision of the event in real time.

The idea sprang from looking at some of the ways that we share information today, the immediacy and the ease of it. Posting to your blog can be done by email, uploading to the cloud can be achieved with a simple iPhone App. Within the last coulpe of years we have progressed from storing all our images, text and videos on computers at home or at work, to storing and interacting with most of our media in shared environments online.

Here in Japan the primary way to share information is via the mobile phone. Even in a country where iPhone has a mere 1% market share (my estimate based on what I have heard on the street), data manipulation is mature and flat rate data plans mean that sending large files, images and videos is a reality, not a dream of what will be.

Instruction card handed out at the event to show users how to use Crowdcast

Taking these keys I came up with a concept that my team at USN has been wonderful in making into a reality. Based around Red Bull events (this time Red Bull Sound Clash), you can email your images to our special event email address and they are dropped into the event stream. Email on mobile phones in Japan has been a standard feature since the beginning and often acts as the primary email address for many Japanese people. It is a natural interface to participation. The time from sending your email to appearing on the stream can be as little as 5-10 seconds, so the reward for participation is almost immediate.

You can then watch the stream via the mobile or the PC websites allowing both people at the event and people sitting at home or at the office to tune in and watch the live images of the event come in real time.

What is most interesting to me, and what is so great about having a client like Red Bull who is willing to push some conventions, is how you can let your audience or consumer carry your voice. This is a scary thing for an established brand to do. Brands spend so much time protecting their image and attempting to control their public perception, that handing over some of that control can be scary indeed for an old school marketeer.

However, this really is just the continuation of an ongoing media evolution. Remember, it was once scary for newspaper websites to start accepting non-moderated comments on their articles. Today, it is expected and normal to have a public space to voice potentially opposing opinions.

What a brand can gain by taking this step is another level of mutual trust and respect I am working with my clients to achieve. By showing trust to your consumer, by telling them that their voice matters and responding to that voice, we can build a relationship with the consumer that has the potential to be closer and much more long lasting, but we also start a conversation that helps to learn about what satisfies our consumer.

Now, our little photo stream may not look like a place for social commentary, but what people send and the way they send it can teach us wonderful things about how we do our jobs as the ones attempting to fulfil their needs and wants.

You can check out Red Bull Crowdcast’s archive for Red Bull Sound Clash online, and also we plan to use it again at the upcoming Red Bull Box Cart Race where you can try it out yourself if you are able to get there on the day. For those interested in attending, the Red Bull Box Cart Race will be held at Odaiba’s Yumei-no-Ohashi in Tokyo on October 11th from 1pm.

1) Twitter

Yes, I have been on Twitter for more than the hiatus. But I want to be honest here, at some point around the end of last year as the world started to discover Twitter en-masse, as for many people, Twitter became such an easy method to update and communicate about news that I got a little lazy about going to the effort of writing full sentences and paragraphs and became sucked in by the immediacy of the Tweet.

2) Other projects

Lets call a spade a spade, I got busy.

In January I launched Retweetist, a Twitter Website that searched for all the retweets to determine trending topics, popular users and generally what people felt was worth repeating. This could probably have done with a post or two of my own, but being a Twitter project, I was blinded by the Twitter magic for getting the word out here.

My agency, UltraSuperNew Inc, has had an intense year. After picking up the Red Bull Japan account in October last year we have been busy and getting more and more involved, guzzling lots of Red Bull energy on the way. One of the highlights was the bicycle installation we made through the streets of Harajuku claiming to have borrowed parts of people’s bicycles. We got into a little trouble for that one, but the result made it worth while. We have picked up a number of interesting projects with Audi, including running live streaming of their press events and the new mobile website. And that’s just the start.

Press Army, a company that was birthed from a key need of UltraSuperNew to report on the success of social media activities, has now got legs. We launched it as an independent company just recently and have been growing that business very fast with some great new people on board, joining the talented team who has been behind it from the start.

3) A real world social life

Photo by susiviews

Looking past the tweets, status updates and general sharing of digital bits and pieces, I have managed a little more attention this year on exploring the world first hand. I have managed to visit about 8-10 new cities this year that I had never visited before, primarily across India and China — and most of those were not related to work!

I have also been cultivating a non-public life which I enjoy in that it is shared just with close friends and family. This is something I recommend everyone try to do. When we share things online, even on a closed connection with so-called “friend relationships”, I really consider this as a public forum. At some point a work colleague, a client or someone otherwise outside your central circle is going to be included into this platform (be it Twitter, Facebook, Mixi or whichever other service you might consider), so you may as well consider it public from the start… then at least there is a chance you keep the public embarrassments to a minimum. [note: I still have plenty of embarrassing moments captured online, so my method hasn't exactly been foolproof]

So, what does this return to the blogosphere mean?

As I have been distracted by the tweeting, the busyness and a private life, I have been slowly building up the urge to once again express myself in an expanded form online. The blog is the best way to achieve that result, and these days everything connects enough that I can push and pull content to and from other places that my presence can be maintained across the multiple networks without too much management time spent.

In my hiatus I experimented with Yongfook’s Sweetcron to try to merge all my streams of data. The software was a great idea and very neatly executed, but ultimately I found that I ended up with an unbalanced public page. When I mashed together Twitter, Blog posts, Flickr, Youtube etc, I ultimately ended up with a custom Twitter feed where if you were quick you might catch a glimpse of something else. Didn’t work for me.

On the other hand the progress that Wordpress has made recently (especially since version 2.8) has been very impressive. It has brought me back to the fold with auto-updates, auto-installs, widgets, more evolved CMS structure and lots of bug fixes that enable me to swiftly make updates and system changes.

So, I am back.

Recently we, as a collective internet populace, have become very good at republishing our comments, images, and other life streaming features to multiple platforms.

Our status updates are the most common, with Twitter (and for the early adopters, FriendFeed) being the easiest and most common to republish elsewhere. Some of the common places to push your updates to are the darlings of years past, LinkedIn, Facebook, Skype and of course the common blog to name a few. Most services offer a way to either push or pull these updates, so we tend to forget that when we speak in these micro mediums, we do not just speak to our friends on that stage, we speak across all our stages at once.

For me, I have all but forgotten Facebook, which stopped being interesting for me a while ago as it loaded up with applications that felt more like spam than fun. However, I still have my updates pushing there from Twitter, so for anyone who is a friend on Facebook and isn’t aware of my twitter account, it appears I am a very active Facebook status updater.

This is all well and good in that we have finally learned the lessons of write once, publish everywhere, which is surely one of the benefits of being digitally connected in this world. But what of the nature of this echo talk?

When I have my comments echoed to Facebook, the words are not written for Facebook, they just end up there. In fact, as I alluded to earlier, it is a place I often forget is even getting my updates. Without the targeted voice, we also stop listening to the responses and with this I start to see a weakness in the trend.

What we have is ghosts in the social networks, echoes of something that was said in another place being brought out of context.

Of course, FriendFeed has sought to rectify this to some extend by denoting the source of the information, setting itself up as the place to collect all your disparate conversations with the digital world. Google also has some strategies to clean up this fragmentation and duplication with Open Social and similar endevours to connect the disjointed networks with one framework. But those are the big bucket solutions, It is the trailing echoes in the networks that we no longer use that becomes the ghost.

Perhaps it is time that we stopped trying to talk to everyone (as pro-blogger Jason Calacanis has pledged to do recently), and concentrate on talking to the few important ones. The social capacities of the internet have opened us up to more new connections than we will ever need (and many that we didn’t want in the first place), but it is a seriously powerful tool for passing new information, which we now see at close to real time, and the concept of public sharing over commercialism seems to be gaining momentum at the individual level as a result.

I can deal with echoes and ghosts for the time being, as long as I give pointers to where I really exist, but the validity of various platforms seems to wane now based not on the number of accounts, but by the number of users who use it to keep up with their contacts. It becomes our telephone address book (and in some cases really becomes our telephone address book) for the 21st century.

There have been a lot of discussions recently about ways to construct a distributed micro-blogging environment. Dave Winer triggered a conversation on distributed storage and distribution of Twitter but all the consensus amounted to was a lot of chatter about clever ways to backup your Twitter feeds to recover when Twitter goes down.

For me this doesn’t directly address the problem. It fixes Twitter uptime issues to some extent, but that is not a solution for the masses, it is a solution for the elite who can realise that this is an issue to think about in the first place. Most users will use something or not, they are not looking for ways to retrofit a service.

Elsewhere Mike Warot compares centralised internet services to silos and makes a convincing argument for using centralised services. The comparison to silos is made to discuss the need for specialists and specialised equipment to keep your grain/data safe. I agree. But another thing that makes our grain/data safe is having multiple silos. Mike’s argument only sells me on the aspect having properly supported infrastructure and technicians but I want to be able to choose the silo that doesn’t sit in the path of the tornado (continuing with his metaphor).

As mentioned in much of this discussion, the structure of micro-blogging (and we can use Twitter as the base model) can be its own data structure, not so dissimilar to RSS. There are a few different types of information that need to be requested, but surely they are all easily rendered with XML…. but something a little bit more clever to handle the unique nature of the exchange.

As it turns out, as I have been writing this post, Michael Arrington released a very nice piece outlining how Twitter could be opened up technically based on what a bunch of smart people who know about this kind of thing have been talking about. It demonstrates a viable system utilising XMPP that can push messages to clients rather than having to continually check for updates. This need to continuously check for new data is what was widely regarded as the biggest obstacle for an open Twitter-like platform.

As soon as someone does the work to get an open platform running, does that mean the end for Twitter and its hefty status as the “next best thing”?

Very likely “yes”.

The brand of Twitter will still more than likely continue but you have to think that the number of roll-your-own micro-blogging platforms will boom and eventually most of the micro-blogging for the bulk of normal users (as opposed to the geek centric Twitter users of today) will collect around the use of open micro-blogging from the big guys … Google, MSN, Mixi (for the Japanese users), Yahoo (if the shareholders don’t tear it to shreds).

Japan has really only just got started with Twittering if what we hear from Twitter Japan is true, which implies that micro-blogging is well suited to a Japanese market. The heavy use of mobile phones for accessing the internet (100million mobile users vs 85million PC users) and the heavy affinity for blogging (Japanese is the most popular blogging language in the world) would all point to a boom about to hit Japanese shores once the mainstream gets a hold of it.

Counter to support of an open platform is the reluctance to get too heavily involved with open source projects (mostly due to language difficulties)… which brings us back to Twitter Japan. The people behind Twitter Japan are Digital Garage, who have been very successful in bringing foreign web assets into the Japanese market. One of the projects that they very successfully brought in was Movable Type,… yes, an open source project. While the rest of the world moves heavily towards Word Press, Japan uses Movable Type more often than not.

Chances are the Digital Garage would be the best ones to bring such an open micro-blogging platform into a Japanese market that has some reluctance to adopt foreign projects without their hand held, but they of course have other motives with the Twitter relationship well established.

The question I have been thinking about is, “When (yes, that’s a when, not if) an open micro-blogging platform is established, will Twitter follow?”. I think the boom Japanese use of Twitter implies that Japan will have a lot to say about that.

Second question, “Does it matter?” … will Twitter be over-run by everyone else or will they have time to have  the market controlled by the time an alternative is available.

I am looking forward to finding out the answers.

I have been wanting to do this story for a while based on my experiences of working with social media and trying to make sense of the growth and subsequent abandonment of many social networks.

It seems it is every month that we have another star social network, social web concept, or interaction model. Right now Twitter seems to be the golden child of the social web, but before that we had Facebook, MySpace (one of my personal least favourite) and even Friendster taking turns as the next “it” service. In Japan, the market is less volatile with Mixi being the long standing flag bearer and others such as Gree having been active and growing for an extended period, but the same market forces are at work.

Some of these services are still growing strong but the interaction is often becoming less interesting over time and eventually people will leave for the next service to capture the imagination of the masses.

In my opinion the reason for this exodus over time is due to more than fleeting trends, it is because of the way that our use of them grows through three phases. I call them…

The three stages of social media relevance.

Stage 1 : The Noob

Everyone who has joined a social network can remember that feeling of arriving and realising it is very quiet with no friends. With this being the initial experience of a social network, it is no wonder that as a new user we usually have a reaction of apathy to the new offering that we stumble on.

Some of this has been rectified by some smart tricks such as email matching from an online mail client or imports direct from another social network. Open Social also seems to offer something to aid this entry process once it has more uptake.

Even so, that initial process is about making connections before we can interact. If it is a permission based social structure this can be an even more drawn out process before we can populate our ghost town.

Stage 2 : The Happy Medium

Somewhere shortly after breaking out of the Noob stage, we see the light. Our social service’s purpose and usefulness become clear and it begins to enhance our online (and sometimes offline) social lives. Being connected serves a purpose, we add the mobile website as the start page on our brand new mobile phone, we download the desktop app and life is good.

The daily experience is that of witty banter between friends, colleagues and new acquaintances on a public or semi-public forum, of quick dissemination or absorption of information. The utility and enjoyment of the service is actually at its peak here in my opinion, although often we don’t realise it.

We look to our socially wealthier contemporaries with admiration. If I have so much value with 40 friends, how much fun will I have with double that? triple?

Stage 3 : Overeating

It would be wonderful if we all could keep our cool and stay at Stage 2, but the temptation of more followers, more friends or more contacts is too much to resist. The social kudos of breaking the 200 friends barrier, of having 300 contacts with 15,000 people at a mere two steps removed is too much to resist. There are always more people to connect with and more people to compare your gaudy numbers against.

Robert Scoble has more than 21,000 people that he follows on Twitter. That amounts to a tweet almost every second, far too much for any person to keep up with. This is an extreme example but also symptomatic of the Overeater.

The average Overeater gets started as early as 50-100 social connections. Somewhere in that range you go from keeping up to date with your friends to struggling to sift through the noise to get to the juicy content. Once you go over 100 contacts you usually start to spend more time sifting that you do reading. The purpose of the medium starts to become subverted and you lose the ability to stay connected in a convenient way.

There are clear motivations for continuing to grow your network. The obvious one is to connect with or reach as many people as possible to advertise your agenda. The reality of connecting with so many people is that the information you pass and collect becomes an unmanageable mess. The micro-blog is alive, but polluted with noise. It is broken.

Where to from here?

There is a solution somewhere and I, like many others, am searching for the next model to extend the function and positive engagement of the social web. Of course, I hope I discover it first, but regardless, I will be happy to have a model that supports growth and expansion in a more valuable way, balancing the voices that matter and subverting the ones that distract more effectively.