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Is Social Media the Answer to the Health Insurance Debate?

The debate over health insurance and healthcare reform ignites strong feelings among most groups in America today. Politicians have struggled to discern even the vaguest idea of a compromised, mutually beneficial solution. Many citizens feel left out, confused, or angry about the entire debate. However, all people should be able to contribute their experiences and background to the discussion. With a background in social media, I can’t help but think of ways social media & social networking could apply to the conversation. This quick article is not meant to propose social media as a comprehensive solution, but rather as a brief summary of how a social media enabled technological capacity

could contribute positively to and perhaps radically change the structure of a future health insurance system.

Google Wave Apps are Coming Fast

Google Wave just released its Beta version to a select group of people. Don't feel bad if you were picked, Google tends to release the next round of invitations pretty quickly. Google Wave developers, however, have been hard at work for quite some time. Google Wave Apps are coming fast!

Google Wave Apps

What will applications for Google Wave look like? They will most likely be centered around communication and collaboration. Google Wave has built in real-time collaboration across sets of users. Google Wave is kind of like Twitter + Google Search + Google Documents. Think of it as Google answer to Twitter, but what it is truly is another swing at Microsoft. Google documents now become living, real-time, collaborations, which is something Microsoft cannot yet fully deliver. Do people want to collaborate in real-time? Will they feel threatened? That's the real question.

So while the public has been anxiously awaiting Google Wave, developers have been fooling around with Google Wave's API and development tools. Applications for Google Wave are already being released and tested out. You can imagine an incredible series of applications touching upon many aspects of everyday life. An app for Google Wave might include a specialized auction site for a private club of members or an application for a sales team to work collaboratively on penetrating an account. Google Wave applications will surely center first around business before approaching the public at large.

Google Wave App Adoption

There may be a very high hurdle for Google Wave applications to leap. Google has an incredible built-in distribution system and can propagate their system like no other. However, the concept of real-time search and collaboration is extremely foreign to all but the most hard-core tech enthusiasts. Google Wave itself may face real challenges in broad adoption, and you can imagine that derivitative applications based on Google Wave will face even greater difficulties. If you are thinking about how to develop for Google Wave or have ideas about real-time search, it might be wise to distance your application as far as possible away from the technology itself. Think about your Google Wave appliaction as just another client-server based application that a user might be familiar with. Grind away at every user interface hiccup and pay special attention to usability.

We can likely predict a very small adoption rate for any application that is prefaced on a bleeding edge technology and then takes even a further step toward the future. The most successful Google Wave apps will deliver a new functionality to a very specific audience and address a very specific need. Google Wave represents an incredible opportunity for both the public and developers - it will be exciting to see the innovative software that Google Wave will enable.

UberTwitter Taught Me How to Tweet

I always tend to bastardize technology: leverage technology to make things and not necessarily to use them how they were *meant* to be used. For instance, when I learned about Twitter I thought, cool, now I have a way to structure standardized text and propagate it efficiently around the web. I still can't stop thinking about applications for Twitter and real time communication - it can be applied to almost any life context you can think of. It's going to change the world, really.

So when I discovered Twitter I didn't think, wow, now I can tell people what I'm eating for lunch.

But then I downloaded UberTwitter and I suddently got the social in social media. Simply because of how the user interface on UberTwitter emphasizes the stream of user updates, I started seeing Twitter in the kind of context you're supposed to view it in. I started paying attention to the pull and not the push. In other words, I started caring about what the people I follow have to say. I started unfollowing anyone I don't want to listen to and caring about the smaller group of people I do follow. It's really opened up a new perspective for me. I check in every twenty minutes for the pithy, empathetic, and sometimes promotional tweets by a group of not-so-strangers. I said I got Twitter six months ago, but I think I really get it now.

I never want to stop thinking of social media for what it could be instead of what it is. But it's refreshing for me to see why everybody loves Twitter and gets addicted. It's real life and it's real connection with real people. It's really not about web distribution systems and structured text. (who woulda thunk?) I'm getting there, but it's taking a while! For lunch today, btw, I had a nice mushroom and cheese chicken panini.

Social Networking Schizophrenia

Ning is a method of building social networks. Over a million people have created their own social networks. (And almost 4 of them have successfully monetized!) But what does Ning really do? What role might Ning have in the great web equation?

Let's think about Ning not from the network creator standpoint, but from the user perspective. Why does a user use Ning? Why create a profile for themselves when they already have multiple profiles around the web on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter? The answer surely must be that the user intends a particular communication with that niche network audience. They then create a profile not only communicate with that niche audience, but to also convey a particular set of information.

Members of niche networks create their profiles to enable communication. However, doesn't this present a built-in redundancy? Doesn't Ning intend for users to belong to multiple networks according to their tastes, hobbies, and affiliations? Why have 10 social networking profiles when you could have one?

Ning attempted to address this redundancy this year by reintroducing Ning.com as a centralized portal for your various user profiles. From one screen, a user can now see the activites and updates of multiple networks. However, there are still multiple and completely variant user profiles in each one of these networks. There is no centralized way to update a user's profiles across multiple networks. The average user is left with fragments of their personality scattered around the web with no organic cohension.

However, we might view these multiple webpages not on their own, but as a tinted reflections of a central whole. Multiple social networks may be able to provide not singular profiles, but lucid realizations of one aspect of a real person. Put another way, imagine Facebook buys Ning. Facebook now provides a centralized profile and Ning becomes the presentation to a particular community that a user wants to express. Ning becomes a vehicle for self-expression coupled with community and audience differentiation. Multiple profiles become what we are in real life, not fractured pieces, but authentic experiential expressions suited for a particular audience. Ning ain't the cause of social networking schizophrenia. It's the solution.