They studied 100,000 Facebook and email users and mapped the volume of communication against geographic distance. It turns out that we predominantly use these digital tools to talk to our geographically close friends.

With email, 41% of communication was with people within the same city. (Email data does not provide as granular a geographic distinction as is available in Facebook). While we know that digital communication breaks down borders, the study shows we mimic our natural, physical, social networks when creating digital networks. These are true for Facebook and may not be true for groupings based around an external subject and not focusing on friendship as the primary social object.

They carried out a second study looking at how baby’s names spread over time. Since the digital communication revolution, their study found that :

“the baby-name data suggest that the IT revolution was accompanied by a significant increase in the importance of geographical proximity for social interaction.”

It strikes me that this may have a direct impact on how marketing should position products. We know that friends tend to have similar interests, likes etc. When marketing to an individual where we want to leverage their social graph, we should take into account the local nature of the graph and communication behavior. If there is a local element, or one can be defined, then there is benefit in promoting the nearest geographical location where the product can be found or experienced. The local nature of communication means that influencers within social graphs are likely to live near and communicate with one and other.

The report also re-enforces the arguments in favor of location based marketing.

As the report says, the potential for global communication does exist and is used but:

“…that while the IT revolution has clearly increased the overall volume

of communications, it has increased local communications to a greater degree than

long-distance communications.”

Amazon has just announced that Kindle is going global – or at least it will be sold in 100 countries, arriving in UK on 19th October. Sony has just released the second generation of its ereader. At the same time Apple is rumored to be in talks with publishers about selling books through iTunes with enhanced functionality and content. These would be available via their much hyper tablet device. So it appears that ebooks may be finally ready for mainstream adoption.

The question is what advantages do ebooks really offer? If Apple is to offer enhanced content and functionality, what will be the killer features which will make enough of us abandon paper in favor of digital?

So far the Kindle and other ereaders have offered, portability, mass storage, long battery life (but not as long as that of a traditional book), book marking, adding notes, wireless download and subscriptions, text to speech, embedded dictionaries and grey scale images.

If you were sitting in Cupertino what functions would you add to usher in the age of book2.0?

Any new functions have to add to and not detract form the experience of reading. Ideally they should also be applicable to a wide range of books, not just the newest and best sellers. Adding video interviews with the authors can only be done with a limited number of publications. Today’s new titles are the tip of the iceberg compared to the vast body that has already been published.

I can think of two potential routes. Firstly, one could add a social element, allow users to note and comment on whole books but also specific passages and to share these with other readers. Users could ignore these comments or in the case of research or literary appreciation read and engage with these critiques.

Secondly, any book could become a reference source. Users can already highlight passages in Kindle and see definitions, why not take this further and use these as wider queries to find out more about the places, people, things, events, which are referred to in the book. Again access to this is layer of deeper information is user initiated, dynamic and an ever growing body of information. The data brought back can be of any media and is not limited to what a publisher thinks you may be interested in.

What defines book2.0? And what will make it a quantum change from plain old paper, what will it offer that, once experienced, you cant live without?

Story…

http://econsultancy.com/blog/3311-nielsen-websites-need-mobile-versions