“Google doesn’t get social media.” This sentiment’s been bandied about since the dawn of social in the mid-aughts. Google executive chairman of the board Eric Schmidt even admitted recently that his biggest regret as CEO was “not anticipating the rise of social…”

Social media can be very loosely defined as a construct and in the ever-changing operating system of the web and its users, Google is still poised to thrive even as it continues to slowly, but surely ramp up its own platform, Google+. But things begin to get real when some key moves are made to create a more social environment within YouTube. While SoundCloud took cues to become the YouTube equivalent for audio, YouTube can learn from SoundCloud’s superior integration of social subscription discovery and how that improves the user experience.

YouTube is Google’s gateway to the living room and with the $35 Chromecast dongle now available in several countries, YouTube could become the primary source of both information and entertainment for both cable subscribers and cord-cutters alike. Chromecast makes it easier than ever to watch online video on a television. Sure, Roku and Apple TV have been around for years but Chromecast has the best YouTube integration and can be controlled via native mobile apps or a laptop.

What’s missing? A way to navigate and discover YouTube content based on your personal interest and those of your peers. A more social YouTube can empower not only users but also content creators while redefining the way we use Chromecast.

The fix begins with one [seemingly] simple feature: social subscriptions. The best and easiest way to begin watching YouTube via Chromecast is by browsing the new content from the channels one already subscribes to. But what channels to subscribe to? Users should be able to opt in to publicly share (at least some of) their subscriptions so others can discover new channels to subscribe to. Currently, there is no way to generate a dedicated link to one’s own page of YouTube subscriptions, you can only add a module with videos most recently watched to your own channel (see mine). Granted, not everyone wants to share their viewing preferences publicly – or even with friends – but for those accustomed to sharing and discovering new content and channels on platforms such as YouTube, this feature can be a game changer.

Now YouTube is only one “app” that plays over Chromecast — there’s an entire suite of them, including Netflix, HBO Go, Hulu Plus and others that are standard with the set-tops like Roku and Apple TV. But YouTube is free and has the greatest breadth of content, with more and more being made each day by fast-growing multi-channel networks such as Fullscreen, Machinima and Maker Studios, which will be acquired by Disney and will now be taking several hours of its YouTube content to cable TV, according to reports.

People are flocking to YouTube, no longer just to watch a song or search for a news clip but to watch regularly produced and even episodic content.

UPDATE 12/1/2014: You can now visit a users YouTube channel subscription list, example – youtube.com/user/revolute/channels (revolute is my YT username). There is some semblance of Google+ integration as well, when you go to a channel, you will see Google+ avatars at the top right of your contacts who have already subscribed to the channel. (Click here to make your channel subscriptions private.) With just a unique URL to shareable subscription lists that can be posted to Google+ I wouldn’t have to go through the tedious exercise of creating a web 1.0-style list of recommended YouTube channels for friends to subscribe to (as I recently did — copy/pasted below) and ideally the discoverer wouldn’t need to go through so many clicks to subscribe. Ideally, YouTube could create a profile tab similar to this one on Soundcloud (the YouTube equivalent for audio), which displays the accounts I’m following…

Below: A shortlist of some of the YouTube channels I’ve subscribed to over the years. I’d love recommendations of new channels to check out – there’s so much good stuff out there! Please leave your recos in the comments section.

Right-click (or command-click [Mac] ctrl-click [PC) on the links to open channels in new tabs then click “Subscribe.”

Facebook‘s biggest and boldest move to date was announced last week at its f8 conference. Timeline is a complete overhaul of Facebook profiles and changes the way user behavior is reflected and shared across one’s network, or social graph. In essence, Facebook expects users to be active participants in the social web, actively sharing thoughts, photos, and more but also sharing semi-passively. What you’re listening to, reading, discovering and discussing across many websites can now be automatically archived on one’s Facebook timeline and published in real time to the Facebook News Feed.

Facebook has always pushed openness and sharing on its users and this latest innovation is bound to spark concern among users who wish to maintain significant privacy controls over their profile and presence. For users that embrace the increasingly open and social nature of the web, the distracting nature of Facebook is about to multiply exponentially.

News Feed
In October 2009 Facebook made its first significant shift to a focus on the home page news feed. In October 2010 it discontinued apps and revealed a roadmap signaling intentions to bring everything into the news feed. By October 2011 this will be closer to a reality as the news feed will feature a firehose of activity featuring users’ friends and interests and their actions across not only Facebook but on other websites that incorporate Facebook’s Open Graph.

The ability to see not only the primary news feed, occupying the middle of the home page but also to see the “hyper” feed at top-right can be overwhelming. This is where lists come in handy, and fortunately Facebook has begun iterating “Smart Lists” including segmentation by city. So if you just want to see updates from friends in your city, that list is automated if you click on “more” next to lists for your Lists index and then click on the list name corresponding to your city to view updates from people in a 10-mile radius.

The news feed also adds an added layer of engagement — see what friends are doing on Facebook in real time and join in. This is an area that will grow rapidly now that Open Graph has been released in Beta. Many users find this hyper-news feed to be superfluous and annoying and there is at least one Chrome browser plugin available to make it go away.

For now you can view what friends are listening to in real time by visiting http://www.facebook.com/?sk=music and interact, comment and even listen with your own Spotify, Mog, or Rdio account (or check out Earbits). In fact, Spotify is so deeply married to its open relationship with Facebook that it now requires all users to have a Facebook login.

Open Graph

This makes the Facebook Connect experience more complex and potentially more rewarding but also potentially embarrassing depending on what content you are reading. Visit this page to see Facebook’s initial partners announced at the Open Graph beta launch at f8, which in addition to the music partners include The Guardian, Washington Post and Hulu. Open Graph is in Beta and your mileage may vary, in fact, many of the supposed launch partners don’t appear to have any live integration at the moment while others lead to broken 404 pages.

By September 30th the new-look Facebook Timeline will be live for all users according to Facebook. No matter your level of Facebook engagement, interest, or concern regarding privacy, your experience and most notably the appearance of your profile will change. Those interested in implementing Facebook Timeline early can do so by clicking “Sign Me Up” at the bottom of facebook.com/timeline.

The greatest hits of everything that Facebook knows about you will be visible on your profile, in reverse chronological order. This immediately flips some simple privacy features that you may already have in place:

• Your age: Even if your profile is set to only show the month and day (and not year) of your birth it will appear on your timeline. It may even appear to date you as older than you are (for me it says 2000s, 1970s, Born; I was born in 1975). More on this here.
• Embarrassing photos: Timeline will pick and choose your greatest hits as it wishes, unless you go through and mark various updates and photos to feature in your timeline.
• Past lives: Your past jobs, relationships, hobbies, etc will all be easy to access if they are made public. Who you married, who you broke up with, what jobs you started and ended. None of this needs to be points for concern, I think it’s better that we become a more open and less bashful society, however, you may want to take a quick look in case there’s anything out of context to cherry pick.
• You can add a featured header image: I added a photo I took during a drive in Bariloche, Argentina. Amusingly, the first audible reaction beyond oohs and ahs that I got when I showed Facebook Timeline to my class last Friday was: “hello, MySpace!” I had a similar first reaction to the wider, two-column look and feel of the timeline.
• Your information: Be careful with passwords and “secrets” for all of your online accounts. If somebody really wants access they might be able to easily find your Mother’s Maiden name or date of birth right there in your Facebook Timeline.

You may or may not agree that Facebook is onto something incredible here. But if you are not already affected by the new features and the Nicholas Felton-esque Timeline design or people complaining about them) you soon will be.

Watch the archived video of the entire Facebook f8 keynote below:

A massive hurricane is swirling toward the eastern seaboard of the U.S. leaving 29 million people under a Hurricane warning on Friday night. Currently a category 2 storm, Hurricane Irene is forecast to straddle the coast before making landfall near New York City. Here in Southern California we don’t have many hurricane threats but then again it had been a while since the East Coast experienced a strong earthquake before this week. But in 1939 the only tropical storm to make landfall in California killed dozens at sea before coming ashore in Long Beach. 45 deaths were reported as a result of the flooding. And in 1858 a hurricane is said to have nearly made landfall off the San Diego coast, causing the 2011 equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars before turning back out to sea.

But in the 19th and even the 20th centuries we did not have the advanced warning and communications systems that we have today. Without even grazing land, Hurricane Irene is making history — New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that today was the first time in the city’s history that mandatory evacuations had been ordered. About a quarter-million residents, primarily on the low-lying edges of Manhattan were urged to abandon their homes. New York’s subway system will be shut down Saturday at noon due to the threat of flooding.

It’s uncertain what kind of damage might result from up 20 hours of sustained tropical storm force winds (40-60 mph forecast), a storm surge up to six feet and a deluge of rain (anywhere from 6 to 15 inches) to top off a wet summer.

But one thing is for sure: Hurricane Irene is headed directly toward NYC. Unless it veers to the west. Or takes a more easterly track. In the post-Katrina era both the government and the public hope to avoid any catastrophic surprises.

NYC Evacuation Map

Google is hosting a central interface where anyone can view and mashup meteorological and government mapping data at crisislanding.appspot.com. FEMA announced a new text messaging service and an Android app today and is regularly publishing updates on local government emergency information sources available on Twitter and is recommending its Ready.gov preparedness guide. Mayor Bloomberg’s office is continuously tweeting updates as well. Maps of the evacuation zones and shelters have proliferated across the web even as the NYC.gov site buckled under heavy demand earlier today.

Power outages will be widespread and cellular voice services may be shaky as they were following Tuesday’s almost entirely unexpected East Coast earthquake. SMS and mobile data services, however, are more likely to tough out the storm and it will be Twitter messages and photos and YouTube videos that will keep people updated in near-real time on their internet-enabled smartphones even after the power goes out (until, inevitably the battery dies on the phone).

Originally posted on KCET’s The Public Note blog.

Mirror.me is a Champaign, IL-based start up and may be the best looking twitter tag cloud mashup since tweetcloud itself. What do you think?

Click through to the videos in the presentation. Especially BP Spills Coffee. Riotous, no? But there’s truth to every bit of the parody. While BP was too focused on its record-breaking earnings and deflecting blame, it needed to address the reality of what was — and is — a very human tragedy in the eyes and on the active social networks of the public. And BP was way too late to that game.

The U.S. government just approved the first permit for deep-water drilling in the gulf since the disaster and there remains no known fix should history repeat itself. But our consumer culture didn’t get to where it is today out of an abundance of caution. This is where crisis management runs counter to traditional public relations. Organizations cannot wait to get involved on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, they must be proactively engaging and listening to their audiences. Sometimes communication is the only viable regulation.

Last.fm, iLike, Networked Blogs, Causes and any of the hundreds of third-party apps you may have incorporated into your Facebook Profile page are no longer there. As I wrote about last month, Facebook’s customizable profile experiment was short-lived even if its demise took over a year.

Before this weekend, if you added approved third-party applications to your Facebook profile, many would have the option of adding to your wall or as a profile tab. The default selection would be to your Boxes tab. Today, even the Boxes tab is missing the apps that you used / played with / were annoyed by over the past couple years. From NY times Quiz, to How big of a Cubs fan are you?, To Myflickr, finetune, and everything else under the sun: Gone. Granted, the Boxes tab on my profile used to run on and on and pretty certain that nobody ever checked it out (myself included). Now the Boxes tab shows nothing more than I’m allowed to display on my profile tabs: the Facebook proprietary applications “Video” “Photos” and tabs for “Links” I share, “Notes” I write or import from this blog via RSS, Events, and Questions. The Boxes column is much narrower and ads have returned.

It’s been fun taking advantage of Facebook’s more open experiments over the past couple years but now our Facebook profiles have returned to their original states as rather vanilla bulletin boards.

That said, if I do want to customize my online profile and incorporate apps and even add raw html… there’s always Myspace!

“…I know y’all fresher than North Hollywood,” Common freestyled from a stage set up in the Grant High Lancers’ gym.

Los Angeles was the ninth stop on Get Schooled’s National Challenge and Tour, a program funded in part by MTV and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In each city, a top school is chosen by the district but the details and location of the school are kept under wraps to maximize the surprise. In L.A. Get Schooled is encouraging students to not just stay in school but to be proactive and take advantage of LAUSD programs such as City of Angels, to help those who are still a few credits shy of a diploma and the Green Dot Public Schools. The comprehensive website is loaded with resources and tips for students of all ages as well as volunteer opportunities, such as City Year. Everyone is encouraged to step up!

We caught up with Common and Sway to discuss the importance of programs such as Get Schooled. Watch the videos below!

Interview with Sway:

Student asks Common what the best advice he ever received was:

Common freestyles:

Grant High Principal Ibach on the event:

I view recent developments in technology and media (roughly 1995 – 2005) as nothing short of revolutionary. The incredible pace of technological advancement and increased access to new media and communication tools during those ten years was like nothing we’ve seen in such a short time span and nothing we might see again for generations. From dial-up to WiMax, the browser-less web to OSx and Google Chrome, from buddy chat to Twitter, and low quality streaming audio to YouTube and video chat. Not to mention, TVs and monitors are now flat and gigantic.

We can have it all now and slowly the big picture is coming together, new tools and modes of communication are growing more comfortable for greater proportions of the global population. In many ways we’ve already leapfrogged adoption of previous generations’ groundbreaking tech. For example, many Native American reservations in the southwest were NEVER wired for telephones but now are not only on the mobile grid but have hi-speed WiFi setups such as the Tribal Digital Village.

Even early adopters of social tools on the web still find themselves in a sort of honeymoon phase — so excited to have the new tools yet not ready to get practical with them and in other cases hesitant to engage peers and family members who may be slower to pick up on new tech. Even the media is waiting for the proverbial “other shoe” to drop, slipping off the heels of privacy issues (Facebook), feature flaws (Apple), or media companies getting in the way of foreign policy (Google).

We’re nowhere near seeing the potential of the internet as a communication device and as a powerful social tool.

But I cringe a tiny bit when I see one of my mentors and colleagues minimizing the scope of social media’s — and the web’s global reach. That was my first reaction to reading the beginning of Geoff Livingston‘s next book, currently titled The Fifth Estate. Now, I know Geoff is not looking to repeat what he already covered in Now is Gone but I hope to see broader strokes applied from a global perspective.

For many Americans, the rise of social media is tied to a political shakeout due to blogger backlash or an embarrassing clip of a candidate memorialized on YouTube. Geoff points to the election of Jim Webb as Virginia senator in 2006, which happened after a pivotal YouTube video led to a destructive backlash against the incumbent George Allen — the infamous “‘Macaca’ moment.”

I had a similar awakening through the rapid rise and fall of the Howard Dean campaign in 2004. Dean’s campaign was the first test of the Netroots, in which bloggers on the progressive left, behind the brilliance of political strategist Joe Trippi, rallied behind Dean and turning him into a formidable candidate in a battle that was largely viewed as Kerry vs. Gore. Influencers in the blogosphere got on board, spread the word, and suddenly the people had their candidate, in spite of what the mainstream media was calling a two-man race.

But Dean’s undoing was not unlike Allen’s — and after a strong showing in the Iowa caucus, shot himself in the foot with the “Dean Scream.” There may not have been YouTube (or even Twitter and Facebook) at the time, however, the Dean Scream shot around the world, gaining “cult-like status on the web” thanks to social media, blog posts, and audio remixes.

For people in many countries, however, the rise of these new social devices and online tools have been marked more by mobile phones than online social media platforms — at least to this point. News and photos from the scene of the July 2005 London bombings were spread via SMS messages from people on the trains to their loved ones and photos uploaded directly to Flickr and other photo sharing sites like moblog.co.uk.

But it’s not just how social media has influenced how news is reported and affected the way political campaigns are managed. It’s about how these revolutionary technlogies enable a freer flow of information between agents of social change and primary points for action.

In 2003, journalists first got word of the severity of the SARS epidemic thanks to an SMS message from medical sources in China (read about this and more in Dan Gillmor‘s We the Media). Had it not been for these SMS messages and the ensuing global communications on listservs among medical professionals scrambling for a vaccine, the global scale of SARS could have been much worse — the Chinese media and government certainly weren’t letting on about it.

Personally I don’t like the term Fourth Estate and I certainly don’t think that our newly enhanced and increasingly social media need the badge of being a Fifth Estate — it’s all the same — and it seems to me that media in general can do a much better job of holding the government in check. Ironically (or maybe not) the term Fourth Estate refers to the press as a fourth branch of British parliament (or the three French states-general, as Wikipedia would have it).

Bollocks, I say! More branches does not make the tree grow taller, faster. Let’s take advantage of these revolutionary times, adapt and consolidate for the greater good and, like Wells wrote, save society from collapse and bring hopefulness to future generations.

Part 2 in an series of posts and cross-published comments inspired by friends’ recent blog posts. This one inspired by “Welcome to the Fifth Estate,” by Geoff Livingston.