Extreme Digital Cinema

Extreme Digital Cinema
Originally uploaded by Juston Western
The wall leading into the theater where we saw The Social Network on Friday.

Actual Facebook Movie Trailer, Spoof YouTube & Twitter Ones

For those who haven't seen these floating around over the past few weeks, each trailer is rather amusing.  I've embedded all three videos below.

The first one is for "The Social Network", an actual film being released later this year that documents the rise of Facebook.  Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nail's fame has signed on to do the score of this film.  It is scheduled to debut in theaters on Friday, October 1.

The second trailer is a spoof of "The Social Network" trailer, profiling a fictional film about the creation of YouTube.





Finally, the last trailer also parodies "The Social Network" trailer, but this time features Twitter as the subject of a fictional film.

Social Media During Disasters

The American Red Cross has released results of a survey about the use of social media during disasters or emergencies.  The PDF report of its findings can be found here:

http://www.redcross.org/www-files/Documents/pdf/other/SocialMediaSlideDeck.pdf

Some interesting figures are contained within the report, including that over 75% of respondents would expect help to arrive within an hour if they requested help via a social media network.  Personally, I think this expectation is overly optimistic, but it would hinge upon who was in a user's respective social graph.

When Hurricane Ike hit The Woodlands 2 years ago, I realized that we'd likely lose power for a while and find it difficult to communicate with the outside world.  Prior to the storm's landfall in Texas, I e-mailed all of my friends & family, and directed them towards my Twitter page to stay up to date with our progress during & after storm.

This turned out to be a prudent decision, because we did in fact lose power & most cellular connectivity for several days.  Thankfully, SMS messages are surprisingly resilient following natural disasters (they require much less cellular infrastructure to receive & transmit relative to voice & data services).  This allowed me to update Twitter throughout the storm & its aftermath simply by texting the service.

For those interested in seeing my account of "events on the ground", I captured all my tweets from the storm in a blog post last September to mark the 1 year anniversary of Hurricane Ike:

http://justonwestern.blogspot.com/2009/09/hurricane-ike-twitter-updates-1-year.html

Since that time, I've followed my friends' descriptions of earthquakes on the west coast and crippling blizzards on the east coast, all from my Twitter & Facebook activity streams.  When you want to tell a large group of people you're ok after a disaster, it's tough to find a more efficient way than with one of these social networks.

Facebook Overload

Facebook Overload
Originally uploaded by Juston Western
An indication you may have been too active on Facebook this evening could be illustrated much like this.