In a blog post, Twitter said you can now tweet photos from Glass to your feed — the update will include the hashtag “#throughglass” — and see your other tweets by turning on in-Glass notifications. The service is now available and users can activate the Twitter app on Google’s MyGlass portal.

Facebook’s Glass implementation is also live, though for now you can only share photos, not post status updates or view your newsfeed. You can, however, set privacy levels and add descriptions to photos you post using Glass’s speech recognition features.

Evernote doesn’t yet have an app per se, but it is integrating with Glass’s sharing menu, allowing you to capture a picture or short video and save it as a note in your Evernote account. It is also giving users the option of sending notes (from its web app) to the Glass timeline so your grocery list or crib notes are right in your line of vision.

At I/O Google revealed three other companies taking up shop on Glass. CNN’s app will put news alerts in front of your retinas. Elle is providing content from its magazines that can be viewed in the Glass display or read aloud. Tumblr lets you post content to your personal blog and get updates from Tumblrs you follow.

These companies join Path and the New York Times as the only official third-party apps on the Glass. For now Google is being rather conservative in its Glassware efforts, placing restrictions on the level of access to platform and banning ads or any other monetization scheme.

Still, once Google fully opens up Glass, it likely won’t have any shortage of interest. Smaller developers are already clamoring to get on board. For instance, Open Garden wants Google to expose Glass’s networking functions so it can link the headgear to its crowdsourced mesh network.

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That idea isn’t going to work.

Why? In a nutshell, social network-based communication is primarily organized around the concept of a “pull” medium — that is, a medium where individuals subscribe to whichever information sources they prefer and find useful. Traditional business processes, on the other hand, use “push” communications, where whoever created the information gets to decide whom it’s most important to. Simply put, the two parties don’t gibe.

Perhaps more importantly, the nature of work in our era has changed. Most people now have jobs based on non-routine work, where the predefined and fixed roles of business process do not reach.

I recently wrote a report as part of my activities in GigaOM Research, entitled “Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them” (subscription required). In the report, I argue that we are drifting away from a business-process defined culture and towards a social network-shaped, cooperative one.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Above we see the variance between process-oriented organizational cultures and network-oriented ones. I consider this part of the transition from post-modern (1970-2005) to what I’ll call post-normal (2005-present and beyond) economic eras. These cultures also differ in the nature of social affiliation, with a loosening of the bonds that tie people together in cooperative cultures contrasted with collaborative ones. People in cooperative organizations will have a higher number on connections, but the proportion of those that are strong ties decreases relative to collaborative cultures.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Some corporate cultures are stuck even farther back in time because they are based on competition. I don’t mean competing with others in the marketplace, like Toyota competing with BMW. I am talking about a corporate culture based on zero-sum competition among workers, where one person’s advancement is someone else’s demotion. These are cultures strongly based on authority-based decision-making, and really are a holdover from the late modern era: the late industrial era.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

In the report, I discuss the “fit” of different psychological profiles, or archetypes, in these cultures. For example, the Entrepreneur archetype (see above) fits well in collaborative and competitive cultures, and fits the entrepreneurial culture perfectly. But Entrepreneurs won’t like working in a purely traditional, “cooperative” culture, because they like to lead collectives that are managed through consensus. A cooperative organization is too loose for them: It’s a connective, and is based on laissez-faire decision making.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

This is the debut of the 3C model — competitive, collaborative, and cooperative. It’s a psychosocial model of organizational culture, and I hope it helps address some key issues in organizational dynamics in organizations today as social technologies and practices are being adopted. Marshal McLuhan said, “we make our tools, and they shape us.” Keeping that in mind, we see the change that social network-based communication is causing.

Businesses are not making these changes on a whim or because individuals are made happier by cooperative work relationships. The fast-and-loose business is most in sync with the digital realities of today’s world, although most companies are still operating principally in a more traditional mode, and may even have a healthy dose of the “frozen-and-immobile” at the core. Nonetheless, businesses must move towards a more cooperative work environment because in doing so they will successfully compete in today’s fast-paced, digitally focused world. Older cultures that cling to traditional business processes will not.

To read the full report, click here (subscription required).

Thumbnail image courtesy of flickr user ShellVacationsHospitality.

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This isn’t a new idea, but it was revitalized by Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos in early April, who suggested people pick a teen and find out what kids are up to on Twitter these days. The hashtag took off, and if you haven’t searched for the results recently, you should.

My teen hates school because you have to wear pants there. I love my teen. #followateen—
Choire Sicha (@Choire) April 12, 2013

#followateen update 2: he's upset about being placed into remedial english next semester. He also spelled remedial wrong. Good luck, teen!—
Brandon (@BrandonTCX8) December 30, 2011

Not sure I understand the #followateen hashtag. Are people really following random teens? How do you find one to follow?—
Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 30, 2013

(Sometimes the teens even catch on.)

My teen says she's pretty sure my deer tweet is about her, and she's pretty sure she doesn't know me. #followateen—
Meaghan O'Connell (@meaghano) April 13, 2013

Aside from making fun of random teenagers, the growth of the hashtag can actually teach us a good deal about teens, social media, and our weird relationships with the internet. Here are five things I actually learned from #followateen:

Life is a lot harder for teenagers in 2013

When Timeline came out last year, I went back and deleted a lot of old wall posts, and I was shocked by the volume of bad photos and inane thoughts my friends and I posted. (i.e., “Do you have a copy of the math homework?” or “OMG lacrosse practice was so hard today.”) At the time, I thought that teenagers had probably learned from my generation’s early adoption and over-sharing, and that today’s teens had stopped posting as many inane, personal moments online. Surely they’d come to realize that everything they post on the internet is public and searchable forever.

Hahahaha. No.

Scrolling through posts from teens on Twitter this week, it became clear that they have not stopped posting personal, intimate details of their lives online for anyone to search, and if anything, they’re posting even more. As someone who went through high school missing one of my front teeth (don’t ask), I cringe for the future selves of these teens who will wish they’d posted a little less for the public to see. And in my (pretty recent) day, we didn’t even have Instagram or Tumblr.

PROMMMMM TOMORROWWW CANTTT WAITTTTT 😁😘😍😙—
May29th™ (@TiiAHBHOO) May 03, 2013

I have 6 school days left in my senior year and I just got my first detention ever for leaving gym class early. Ha. #whatajoke—
ʝαє∂єи вαяℓσω (@jaebarlow) May 03, 2013

im grounded, so i guess i will just make some vines—
jason orcutt (@jason_orcutt) May 03, 2013

#followateen is the future

You can lament those selfies and poor grammar on Twitter all you want, but how teens are using social media like Twitter today is likely going to have an impact on what we’ll all be using ten years from now. Companies like Facebook and Twitter are struggling to build advertising networks and continue to add new users, but data has shown that many of those new users are actually coming from older generations, as kids are being drawn to new sites like Snapchat, Vine, Wanelo, Tumblr, and Instagram.

You and I don’t use Twitter the same way

When I log on Twitter, I find people talking about the latest tech news, debating the proper way to report corrections to tweets, and LOLing at internet trends like #followateen. I bet the average age of the people I follow is 30. But searching for teen-esque hashtags and scrolling through the resulting posts was an incredible reminder that Twitter is entirely what you make of it, and that my experience on the network probably looks nothing like yours.

It’s easy to forget when everyone becomes so accustomed to his or her personal feed that this is true. I would guess that there’s far less disparity in people’s different Facebook and Instagram experiences, because those social networks are much more dictated by the design of the sites and the types of content people can post. But on Twitter, you create your own adventure.

Twitter is totally creepy, whether or not you #followateen

Yes, it can be super creepy to #followateen on Twitter and treat that teen like a zoo specimen for observation. But Helena Fitzgerald of The New Inquiry points out that, really, following a teen and reporting back on the hilariousness of their lives is no different than most of our Twitter relationships, where we follow people and retweet them and view their tweets as news; especially when most of them never follow us back. Humans are curious about other people by nature, and Twitter plays up that curiosity in ways that can be creepy but also completely entertaining.

Stupidity on the internet is certainly not confined to kids

Lest the adults get too full of themselves and their superiority over the teens, the emergence of the #followanadult hashtag on Friday serves as incredible reminder that adults can be just as predictable and boring online as the teens are.

Growns who think teen tweets are dumb (#followateen) should see their fellow adults'. Today we dare to #followanadult. Join us won't you?—
Rookie (@RookieMag) May 03, 2013

#followanadult my adult is posting articles about divorce, punctuated by wiz khalifa lyrics.—
m.h. (@zefzefmeredeath) May 03, 2013

my adult gets a text, email and phone call from Walgreens when his prescription is ready. He thinks this may be overkill. #followanadult—
shannon (@shansperl) May 03, 2013

@tavitulle My adult's corporate employer is planning an office-wide Harlem Shake parody. #followanadult—
Kirsten Reach (@KirstenReach) May 03, 2013

my adult is out of kombucha #followanadult—
Tavi Gevinson (@tavitulle) May 03, 2013

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Path announced this week that it hit 10 million users, hoping to reinforce that the company is on a growth track. But just as soon as Path announced that number, stories that hint at less-than-ideal user-acquisition strategies came out, highlighting yet again that attracting new users doesn’t mean much if those new users feel that they can’t trust you.

As many people have already written, the concept of “registered users” is essentially a meaningless metric. A registered user could be someone who downloads your app once and never opens it again — hardly a valuable customer to have. There are also a variety of shady ways companies can acquire new downloads.

On Tuesday, The Verge reported that several users had done just that — downloaded the app, tried it out, and then uninstalled when they found they didn’t like it or need it. However, those users then reported that Path had then sent a message to all of the contacts in their address book, urging them to check out photos that the user had shared on Path — even after the user had uninstalled the app — which in order to see the photos requires one to download the app and sign up. This is also an issue that commenters on Reddit have complained about before.

When I spoke to the company about those complaints Tuesday, a representative explained that when a user signs up to download Path, that user can choose whether to grant Path access to their contacts and Facebook friends. So presumably, if you unselect your friends and contacts from the suggested lists when you sign up, you’re set.

But in regards to today’s story of the user’s contacts getting messaged after he uninstalled the app, Path VP of Marketing Nate Johnson said the company is investigating how that happened, and the current guess is that there was a delay in sending messages to the person’s contacts after he signed up, that went out after he’d uninstalled the app.

“That’s something we’re investigating very closely,” Johnson said. “We’re not going to do anything without your knowledge, that’s not the Path way.”

Maybe contacting your Facebook friends is fair game on Path’s part if the user doesn’t realize he needs to uncheck some boxes, but if I uninstalled an app and then discovered it had spammed all my contacts after that app was gone from my phone? I would would be livid, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend the app to any of my friends.

It’s not an uncommon strategy in Silicon Valley for companies to take first and ask later when it comes to user privacy and sharing — Facebook, where Path founder Dave Morin played an integral role, practically pioneered the strategy.

But for Path, it’s a much more dangerous road to travel than it is for Facebook, and not just because Path doesn’t have the 1 billion strong user base to serve as a buffer. Path already had to settle with the FTC and pay an $800,000 fine for acquiring the numbers of minors, and back in its earlier days it made headlines when the company apologized for storing user address book data on its servers.

So yes, Path absolutely needs to acquire new users to remain relevant, and there are several ways the company could achieve this. That road to users and revenue could come with the company’s new messaging and stickers (which I was just using this weekend, and are stupidly, addictively entertaining.)

But if that growth comes from violating user trust and spamming their address books to effectively cold-call a user’s friends? That’s a surefire way to alienate both existing users and deter any future ones.

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Community-inspired initiatives, much like journalism, need a sense of purpose, passion and objective urgency – the ability to look unflinchingly at a subject and capture it in a way that’s surprising and insightful. With that in mind, here’s how some of the most popular communities and social networks are experimenting with original content — and what works and doesn’t.

Tumblr

Storyboard sought to surface and report on interesting stories and users within the Tumblr community, applying a kind of branded journalism and marketing mix that’s becoming increasingly commonplace.

The failure of Storyboard was in its inability to find an editorial voice that resonated in the community. Tumblr users communicate with a pidgin lexicon of reaction GIFs, memes, and blog entries, but Storyboard took a more print-oriented approach. The content (and layout) was reminiscent of an in-flight magazine, as if trying to sell the reader on a particular destination.

Of course, Storyboard did produce a variety of laudable content in partnership with esteemed publishers, most notably its Letters from Newtown project with Mother Jones and WNYC’s look inside the New York Times morgue (and the Daily Dot syndicated a significant number of Storyboard articles). But the numbers don’t lie and Storyboard’s most popular posts hover around just 6,000 notes – surely a factor in the decision to shutter it.

Facebook

Like Storyboard, Facebook Stories is a branded editorial effort that relies on publishing partners and user submissions. Last month, former managing editor Dan Fletcher proclaimed the social network “doesn’t need reporters,” because there’s “no more engaging content Facebook could produce than you talking to your family and friends.” To be blunt, it’s almost as if Fletcher hasn’t seen a typical Facebook post. The most talked about pages on the social network are dominated by image spam and mindless posts about “teen swag.”

The greater  problem with Facebook Stories has been one of approach. It publishes monthly, a bizarre strategy that utterly defies the very best characteristics of the site and is obviously in direct conflict with the online ethos. Content on Facebook is instantaneous and reactionary; it’s about celebrating small moments not just milestones, and any editorial effort should mirror that.

Facebook Stories needs to take a cue from Upworthy – a comparable editorial effort centered on inspiring content – and focus less on presentation and more on how content should be packaged and shared. 

YouTube

YouTube made headlines when it invested $200 million in original channels and programming last January. Then, after cutting its losses on 70 percent of those recipients, it promptly dropped another $100 million in November. The few shows that actually succeeded – most notably, Philip DeFranco’s SourceFed, Felicia Day’s Geek and Sundry channel, and the VlogBrothers’ Crash Course – were the ones that understood how to connect specifically with a YouTube audience and what makes content succeed on the platform. Notably, none of them are TV veterans.

The quick lesson is you can’t fake authenticity on YouTube, and celebrity status often doesn’t translate to subscriber counts. The content has to be immediate and impactful. As Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers (SciShow, CrashCourse) noted in a recent Tumblr post:  ”Online video isn’t about how good it looks, it’s about how good it is.”

LinkedIn

The career-oriented network is oddly the rare success story of implementing original content. Even before LinkedIn’s $90 million acquisition of popular news-reader Pulse, the professional network was making all the right moves in terms of content creation and curation with a leadership board in the form of LinkedIn Influencers and a daily news feed that distributes third-party content selected by users.

Where the company has invested in original content, it’s done so by popular demand, tapping proven influencers like Virgin CEO Richard Branson and ex-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski for exclusive articles that cater specifically to the network’s business-savvy audience. As Jennifer Van Grove noted for CNET, “content is quickly becoming the new connection on LinkedIn.” 

Outliers

The web is becoming one big imageboard, where the emphasis is placed on viral sharing. That can be seen in everything from Facebook’s redesign to LinkedIn’s revamp. A recent study of Reddit found that 86 percent of the posts on the social news site were easily disposable: image macros, photos, and videos.

The challenge facing that site, not to mention communities like Pinterest and Instagram – whose content strategies thus far have been comprised mostly of curated tags – is to create something of permanent value for the community, to offer more than a temporary spotlight.

Simply put, you have to add value. Social networks need to support the native content efforts of their users and accentuate it where they can. But if they are going to provide editorial content themselves, it must be in the spirit of the community, not forced from outside of it.

Austin Powell is assistant managing editor of The Daily Dot, which calls itself the hometown newspaper of the World Wide Web.

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The small-world experiment that gave us the concept of six degrees of separation has a new counterpart in the internet age. The State Department’s Tag Challenge had teams search for five “thieves” (portrayed by actors, pictured below) in five international cities. The winning team, who found three of the five targets in less than 12 hours, have now released research analyzing their performance. They were interested in people’s mobilization efforts under time pressure, particularly whether messages were targeted (like @ mentions on Twitter) or whether social network participants engaged in a blind search.

In their Tag Challenge data, the researchers found that geographically targeted tweets increased over time, especially as the deadline approached. They think this represents conscious mobilization efforts as time became critical to the task, similar to the locally targeted geographic mobilization seen during Occupy Wall Street. They also found that successful mobilization requires passive participants. These are people who don’t sign up or recruit their friends into the challenge, but are aware of the efforts and pass on this information in other ways.

In a simulation of how people choose to use their social network to locate someone, the proportion of messages reaching the target cities was about 0.46, higher than what would be expected with a random flow of messages. The simulation was based on the constraints of the Tag Challenge, where the targets’ geographic locations (but not identities, save for a mugshot) were known, so real world situations might play out slightly differently.

The researchers think the fast discovery of people via social networking depends on thoughtful targeting. When people are being bombarded with news and social media, an @ mention may cause them to pay more attention, and a geographically targeted message may hit closer to home and give the recipient more of a reason to care. The recursive incentive scheme used by the winning team, which landed them 4,400 sign-ups within 48 hours, was also a crucial part of their success.

There is no doubt that the world has shrunk with online social networking. “We can find any person (who is not particularly hiding) in less than 12 hours,” wrote the study’s authors; their claim seems to be borne out by other research showing only four degrees of separation on Facebook. Correct identification may not be as easy in the real world, though, where “suspects” don’t wear t-shirts identifying them as targets, and the wisdom of the crowd can degenerate into frenzied fingerpointing.

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Some of the commentary about Reddit and the bombings has made it seem as though all of Reddit was engaged in a massive “witch hunt” to find the identity of the suspects in Boston. But the reality is that other parts of Reddit were doing things that were much more valuable, and I think we shouldn’t lose sight of that. So here are a few things that I think Reddit got right:

• It collected verified information: There were multiple Reddit threads that did nothing but curate or aggregate information about the bombings, including links to police reports, news articles and other sources. These threads also helped collect photos and video clips of the Boston marathon that might have contained useful information — and asked anyone with that information to also send those photos and clips to the authorities.
• It helped people who wanted to help: A number of the threads early on in the aftermath contained lists of all the things that users could do if they wanted to assist not just the investigation but the people who had been injured — from links to Google’s Person Finder and the Red Cross help line to information on where to pick up bags left at the scene, or airlines who had changed their policies on cancelling flights as a result of the attacks.
• It helped to verify facts: In most of the information-gathering threads, there is real-time verification of the info occurring, as users challenge other users to prove their claims. It is almost identical to the discussion that occurs on a Wikipedia “talk” page, in which editors try to verify the information that is being posted to an entry. Multiple updates occur within minutes of each other, and each one is marked with the time and any edits that took place.

Is Reddit capable of journalism? Yes

Even Reddit itself posted a disclaimer on one of its threads that said it isn’t trying to be a media entity, and that what it does isn’t journalism. And the user who created the “Find Boston Bombers” sub-Reddit or thread told The Atlantic that he doesn’t think of it as journalism either, and that no one should ever rely on such threads as a source because there is so much conflicting information flying around. He also admitted that the attempt to identify the bombers from photos was “a disaster.”

So if even Reddit itself doesn’t claim to be producing journalism, why do I keep saying it is? Because I think Reddit and Twitter and other social tools are broadening the concept of journalism. Some, like my friend Raju Narisetti from News Corp., believe that we should call this kind of thing something else — like that horrible term “user-generated content” — and leave the term journalism for things that are produced by professionals who are held to standards (although some might question whether the New York Post fits that description).

@mathewi you should fear. Find a new definition for non-journalism and use it. Why call ugc, crowds as journalism. It isnt.—
Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) April 22, 2013

In a nutshell, I believe that journalism is being atomized — that is, broken down into its component parts. One of those is the news-gathering function, whether it’s from eyewitnesses or just on-the-ground observation. This part of journalism can and is being done by anyone, thanks to what Om has called the “democratization of distribution,” and it can be hugely valuable. And the verification function has also been outsourced, so that people like Eliot Higgins can play a key role in identifying Syria weapons without leaving their apartment.

Reddit may have failed badly in one specific thread, and that is unfortunate. But other parts of the site have and continue to perform valuable functions that I see as part of the broader landscape or ecosystem of networked journalism. Instead of focusing just on the downside of that community, we should be thinking about how to take advantage of it — how to turn a negative feedback loop into a positive one.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Shutterstock / wellphoto K

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