Tonight, President Obama will be addressing the nation (and the world) from the Oval Office. He is expected to announce a significant shift in America’s combat role in Iraq. The speech will be on a live stream on YouTube starting at 8pm EST.
Following the President’s address, YouTube is giving viewers a chance to interact with the White House. There will be a Q & A session from queries submitted on YouTube during the day.
Here’s how it works: Before the address, you submit a question. Everyone gets to vote their favorite questions to the top. The questions with the most votes will be discussed by Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications, following the President’s address.
The video will be saved to YouTube’s CitizenTube, YouTube’s news and politics blog, for future viewing for those who miss it tonight and those who want to watch it again later.
This isn’t the first time that the President has addressed viewers in this manner. He used the medium a few months ago to discuss the Gulf oil spill with Americans. If the trend continues, YouTube may become a sort of easy-access archive for presidential addresses and other important videos in our nation’s history.
These live streaming videos seem to signify a significant shift in the government’s presence in the lives of the American public. Social media marketing services are the latest tools the White House is using to communicate with the American people. President Obama’s take on social media since the beginning of his presidential campaign suggests that Facebook and YouTube won’t be the end of his online social expansion in behalf of the White House.
A few months ago a close friend of mine passed away. I decided it was my duty to contact several of our mutual friends and inform them of this tragedy. So I logged onto Facebook to look up a someone I knew that would have more details about the death, funeral arrangements and other things that people would want to know.
I was surprised to see my friends picture on the news feed when I logged on with some action on his wall. He had passed away less than 24 hours ago and there was already over 30 comments on his wall. All the comments were very kind, most of which were goodbyes, remember whens and a discussion going on about his passing and what friends and family can do to help. In affect his Facebookwall had become a memorial forum about him.
This experience caused me to contemplate whether or not I thought deceased people’s Facebook or other social media accounts becoming memorials is a good or bad thing. I was also curious where a company like google, places this on there list of important issues to deal with. In my friends case it was by far a positive thing, and I believe his family was probably fine with it.
On the other side I can see how this could be very difficult. There are people who pass away who likely have some not so compassionate acquaintances/ enemies that could try and use Facebook to defame the deceased. Another thing that is a little eerie is when someone who has died is suggested to you as a friend, or worse if someone who knows there password logs on as them and you see activity on their account.
I have been scouring the web to find out what Facebook’s official stance is and I have found a lot of contradicting info. Some say that Facebook does not really want to mess with this at all because it is so dicey. It appears at least if you wish for the account to be deleted you can present Facebook with a copy of a certificate of death. This will probably become a more prevalent issue since the fastest rising demographic of Facebook users are 65 and older.
Something cool that I did find online is a new site called 1000Memories which creates a location for friends and family to memorialize someone by sharing pictures and stories about them. Each page has 5 parts: Friends & Family, Photos, Stories, Projects and Guestbook. The projects section is pretty cool because you can raise money for a charity and there is even a paypal type system.
What do you think? How should social media services handle this interestingly delicate issue?
Posted under Social Media by robbierane 27.08.2010
Everyone is talking about Facebook’s new location-based service, and so far there are mixed feelings about it and the privacy concerns it brings up. But for those who are complaining that Facebook is sounding a little like Big Brother, apparently they haven’t heard about Yahoo’s newest patent. Only days after finalizing a patent to predict the future, Yahoo was granted a patent for their new “Who, What, When, Where Communications Network” (or W4 COMN for short).
Basically, they will use this technology to gather information about anyone or anything connected to the Internet. It presents a framework for them to crawl and index anything and everything, taking notice of, well, everything. For example, Read all »
Everyone is talking about 
