Every Monday morning at 7:10 am, I am a guest contributor on CHOM 97.7 FM radio broadcasting out of Montreal (home base). It’s not a long segment – about 5 to 10 minutes every week – about everything that is happening in the world of technology and digital media. The good folks at CHOM 97.7 FM are posting these segments weekly to SoundCloud, if you’re interested in hearing more of me blathering away. I’m really excited about this opportunity, because this is the radio station that I grew up on listening to, and it really is a fun treat to be invited to the Mornings Rock with Terry and Heather B. morning show. The segment is called, CTRL ALT Delete with Mitch Joel.
This week we discussed:
Right after our segment last Monday, I hopped a plane to The Art of Marketing in Toronto. Within that one hour flight, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for over $26 billion dollars. If Facebook is our social network, is Microsoft now our professional social network?
Are we done with words? We write a ton on Facebook, but shortly the world’s largest online social network is predicting that it will be entirely mobile and – probably – all video. Think about that. Does this mean that the written word can become obsolete, in a world where moving images and speech will prevail? Voice platforms like Siri and Amazon‘s Echo might be a contributing factor as well.
And, if it is all videos and live streaming, what do we do in a world where people are – literally – being killed live on Facebook? That may sound extreme, but it happened – tragically – last week. A Chicago man was shot and killed while live streaming a video on Facebook, police said on Friday, just days after a double homicide in France in which the killer later took to Facebook Live to encourage more violence. Wow, times are changing, and this underscores the huge challenges that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will face, as they push live video streaming to hundreds of millions of people.