Sinéad

A quick request from a final year MSc Cyberpsychology student, it would be great if you could fill out his quick survey for his post graduate thesis and also forward this on to any Irish Facebook users over the age of 24.

My name is Graham and I am doing a thesis on Facebook usage. The following is a link to a secure survey that I have made, asking basic Facebook usage questions and also incorporating a short personality questionnaire.

Open The Survey In A New Window

The whole survey will take no more than five minutes to do and is completely confidential; I can assure you that it is also anonymous. You need only type your initials. I would really appreciate it if you could find the time to do it, as I am struggling to get the required numbers. The only stipulation is that you are Irish, over 24, and have a facebbok profile. Thanking you in advance.

Graham Gilbert
Final Year MSc Cyberpsychology student at IADT

I’m rather interested in the results of this study and hopefully will be able to share the results of Graham’s study with you next year.

Amazon Mobile for iPhone was launched recently, similar to Google Goggles on Android phones, there’s a visual search option within this application called Amazon Remembers. Esentially it allows you to take a snapshot of any item and then attempts to match it with a product listed on the Amazon website. Pretty cool, right? I tried it out extensively and it seem to work perfectly with book and DVD covers and is okay with common household items too.

Wanting to push the application to it’s limits (a.k.a break it) I started experimenting with taking photos of people, to see how much everyone was “worth” – thus turning the search into a game of Top Trumps for Faces using Amazon Remembers. Some of the search results were pretty interesting. For example, my lovely girlfriend in her dressing gown was listed as a “Dark Grey Wool Womens Winter Coat” retailing at £49.99, whereas I was listed as a “Wooden Nose shaped Spectacles holder” retailing at £9.99 which meant she was worth far more than me, so I totally lost the game! However, it was a win all round because that made us both LOL ourselves silly.

Hopefully one of these days I’ll find someone with a lower Amazon Remembers face value than myself, I tried it on my Dad and it found a “Russell Collection Long Sleeve Easycare Fitted Shirt” retailing at £17.99, doh!

Non-digital brands offering free iPhone apps isn’t something new. Back in November I posted a short “homage” to the Denny iFry (2.5 stars), and I’ve tried out quite a few of these, like the Magic Coke Bottle (2.5 stars) or Lightsaber Unleashed (2.5 stars). All of these free apps are novelty at best, as you can see by their user ratings. Personally I don’t like to clutter my iPhone with apps I don’t regularly use, so these novelty apps are usually downloaded and played with for a week, maybe less.

I would argue that the key to using free iPhone apps as an effective brand awareness exercise, or as a way to drive physical sales, is not novelty usage.

Take for example the new app from the photography accessories company Joby, who primarily sell Gorillapods – flexible tripods for cameras. They now offer these tripods for mobile devices and with the launch of their new range they’ve made a free app to accompany these accessories. The GorillaCam app has an array of features you’d expect to pay for. It’s certainly not a one trick pony. It has a shot timer, time lapse, rapid-shot mode and a bubble level. There’s this great “press anywhere” mode too, that lets you press the touchscreen anywhere in order to take a photo. This app makes self portraits and photos with your friends really easy, something that’s virtually impossible with the standard iPhone camera app.

I can see myself using the GorillaCam app over and over again. I’ve already placed it beside my other camera apps – apps which I willingly paid for. I would have paid for the GorillaCam app too. I didn’t have to pay for it and in exchange I’ll be seeing the brandname Joby over and over again. I’ll also be constantly reminded of how if I bought a Gorillapod for my iPhone, I could fully utilize the brilliant features of this free app.

I may have initially been triggered with a desire for a sausage sandwich or a can of Coke, but with no motivation to use either app over and over again, the trigger was never reinforced again. With GorillaCam, I’ll be reminded of my interest in their products every time I happily use that free app.

Now that is an effective free, branded, iPhone app.

I seem to be in a minority group that sees the potential that the new twitter re-tweet function brings. For someone that has worked on a method of highlighting Irish tweets for the benefit of non-twitter users and anyone offline for a long period of time, it’s possible that I’m able to see the potential a little more clearly.

The biggest benefit of the new retweet function is how it adds a method of highlighting localised trends. If 20 of your twitter friends retweet the same message you won’t see it 20 times, but you’ll see 20 “likes” beneath it instead, giving weight to the content of the message. It also stops your stream being diluted by the same message over and over again, which can be frustrating. And at the end of the day, if you’ve not had much time to use twitter you’ve got the “retweets” section to conveniently show you the highlights you’ve missed from your own personal stream that day.

The retweet feature also takes into consideration attribution; the original composer of the tweet appears in your stream and this is a wonderful way of discovering new twitter users. In essence it’s a solution to the fix @replies issue twitter had, everyone was so angry that they wouldn’t have an organic method of discovering new users to follow, now you do.

The other great thing about retweets is that it adds an extra dimension to keeping track of the tweets YOU find most interesting. If like me you use the favorite feature in twitter for something else entirely than the ability to view “retweets by you” will help keep track of the tweets you found important enough to share.

Overall I’ve enjoyed watching the evolution of the service and will continue to do so. I find it most interesting how, just like with Facebook users, change is scary and new but after awhile everyone gets used to it and moves on to being mad about something else entirely.

Will someone let me know when it stops raining in Ireland? I feel like it’s been going non stop since last year.

The increase in rain fall over the Summer might have something to do with why there aren’t any small birds visiting my garden any more. Cold and rain equals less insects, so I wonder if that has meant they’ve moved on or the chicks didn’t survive to Autumn. Though the crows and magpies certainly are benefiting, they’ve been knocking our full bird feeders over and gorging themselves. Cheeky buggars.

I wish the sparrows, finches and robins would come back to brighten these dreary days.

There’s simply not enough “practice grilling your sausages” apps out there. (#sarcasmfilter) I’m addicted to downloading and playing with free apps, hence
how I come across so many. The Denny iFry sauasages app lasted a whole 5minutes on my iPhone before I deleted it, but yet it managed to elicit quite the girlish giggle. Just look at those sausages! Hehe.

There never seems to be enough time to blog any more. So I’ve installed the WordPress application for the iPhone and I’m going to stop letting my musings get lost in the Twitter stream forever. Should be perfect as a replacement for Twitpic (which I’ve become increasingly tired of) and for posting Spotted posts.

Now if I could just figure out how to make all of this work with Flickr, so I could store uploaded photos there instead of on my server… might be too much of a challenge, but alas, I’m never one to turn away from a challenge.

The lovely Clarabel on Twitter posted this photo last week. This is a fine little collection of psychology text books (and a Philosophy one thrown in for good measure) that would be perfect for any undergraduate psychology student. As a psychology graduate myself I understand how expensive psychology text books are, so please, if you know anyone that could do with a helping hand with their first or second year of college ask them to get in contact with us. Leave a comment here, send me an email (sineadcochrane at gmail dot com), a tweet, or, contact Clara via an @ reply on twitter. These books are free to a good home and are in perfect condition. Even if any of these books have new editions now available, more often than not there are only slight changes made and they would be perfect to help you with your long road of study ahead.

*Update* Two hours after posting this the books found a home. Yey books!

Stop spamming and start interacting.

Listen to the conversation.

Give insightful input.

Continue to provide feedback.

Incentivise and reward.

Social Media for Business example, Thanks to Comply – who I am in no way involved with, but have just made a €20 purchase from them due to their successful use of Twitter.