At first thought, I have a hard time disliking Justin Bieber as much as I think I should do. Certainly, his cocksure attitude and posey self-awareness are at best irritating – but then, if we boycotted musicians for that, we wouldn’t have many musicians. Or bloggers.

Anyway, he did genuinely start up on his own, did genuinely get noticed on his indivdual merit (and obvious commercial appeal), and is, essentially, a boy done good – even if his songs are crap. So that itself is hard to hold against him. However, what is very easy to hold against him – or rather, his caretakers, producers, and marketing machine – is the cynical positioning and messaging designed specifically to corral the emotions of his followers, who now number over 20 million on Twitter alone (as a side note, it is interesting to compare the relative efficacy of Twitter and Youtube in the terms of followers vs. subscribers vs. views, and how that information seeding works).

Fans of the JB are noted for the frenzied – some might say feverish – dedication to their idol. They will point out Beiber’s personal relationship with his fans, in the sense that he dedicates, or is perhaps instructed to dedicate, unusually high amounts of time to individual responses and discussion. This is where things differ from previous crazes such as the Beatlemania (or even Lisztomania!) phenomenon, where the band was still very much a separate entity.

Part of this, you may say, is the inevitable product of growing up in an era of social media, which is inherently interpersonal due to everyone having individual handles/accounts, rather than manifesting as a foaming sea of people. And indeed, you only need to look at Lady Gaga and other recent megastars to see that an avenue of social media is now not only desired but expected. It’s not solely a one-way relationship, of course, with many celebrities and other people who are, or who have risen to, prominence on these channels frequently evangelizing about the ‘connection’. Which I, may I just say, completely believe.

However, the thing about Bieber is, well, he’s awfully manipulative. The nature of his particular account and fanbase means that he benefits immediately and disproportionately from romancing his followers:

It’s ultimately difficult to dissect the appropriate reaction to this – girls and women are of course able to arbiter their own emotions and are not simply helpless – but to my mind it seems to demonstrate that manipulating his followers is of such immediate commercial advantage to BeiberCo that it simply must factor in to marketing plans. In other words, I am reasonable sure that those ticket-selling tweets are very much deliberate, and very much with that end in mind. His latest album is rather unambiguously titled ‘Boyfriend’, for heaven’s sake.

Now, the question as to the rightness of this is long and complicated and filled with historical precedent. Rock bands of the 70s, anyone? Where girls were separated from their boyfriends after the show so that the band could ‘meet’ them? More recently, the mega boybands of the 90′s were forbidden to have girlfriends, so as to create the illusion of availability to the fanbase’s imagination. As you might imagine, I’m generally against such exploitative chicanery, but there are reasonable arguments to made along the lines of perfomance and showmanship for at least some elements of this.

However, irrespective of the above, it’s something users of Twitter have to put up with almost every day in the trending topics sidebar. There are two particular issues – firstly, that the practice is expanding to include other guff such as 1 Direction (currently trending as I type: ‘Directioners Love 1D’) and their ilk. Secondly, that Bieber and his fans are both growing up, and so are the trends.

almost legal

— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) February 29, 2012

What sparked this post was someone complaining that “The current Bieber “wet” trend is a bit R-rated for comfort” – referring to a trending topic of ‘Justin Bieber makes us wet’. Some of the star’s more fantastically reckless tweets like the above, sent ten minutes before Bieber’s birthday, have started to lend the mania a distinctly sexual tone.

It must put Twitter in a tremendously difficult position.

On the one hand, Bieber and his fans should surely be able to say what they like without fear of censorship – Twitter is noted for being a liberal-leaning platform in any case, but it has always had an identity as an enabler of free speech, especially in the Arab Spring. Furthermore, stamping on the explicated lust of predominantly female participants smacks unpleasantly of denying female sexuality. To cut off this kind of content would come across as prudish at best, and a betrayal of core values at worst. At the same time, though, should people have to put up with such domination of the sidebar by the sexual effervescence of a crowd of whipped-up teenagers?

Twitter have tried to guard against such things by the evolution of what must be an increasingly complicated algorithm to nip spam-trends in the bud – but it’s clear that it hasn’t really worked as intended, and actually caused a minor PR crisis when it inadvertantly obstructed the #Occupy movement (isn’t it remarkable that I automatically included the hashtag there, by the way? Didn’t even stop to think about it).

Of course, they could always just leave it to the Darwinist tendancies of populism, in that if people want something to trend enough (which is indeed the explicit intent of many of these trends), then their collective ingenuity will always find ways around the bulwark. And indeed, Twitter will be enjoying the business benefits of this kind of activity: more users, more advertising options, more exposure, more integration appeal for publishers, and so on. But it’s probably not great in the long term, as they need to avoid the Craigslist scenario. It’s a very good job that Twitter is self-curating and that users aren’t exposed to this stuff too much, but equally they can’t just cross their fingers and hope the practice dies.

Every social network that makes it struggles with spam. Facebook is perhaps the only one that really managed to control the problem by requiring phone and email registration and operating a real name policy. Twitter has far fewer defenses. Hell, Pinterest must be quaking in its boots. But Twitter might be facing the toughest problem of all: controlling a massively vocal segment of the userbase without alienating them or compromising communication values.

It’s spam, Jim, but not as we know it.

So this chart has popped up from Nielsen today, as part of ‘the first mobile media rankings based on audience measurement data from metered Android smartphone usage’. Righto, Nielsen. Anyway, apart from the fact that they need to make their goddamn images larger, what does it tell us?

Well, firstly, that there seem to be a solid 9.5% of people who didn’t even open the app store this month. Assuming that Nielsen have stuck to measuring active users as claimed, there are two possible reasons for this: either these users are downloading all their apps via other means, or they simply have everything they think they need. I’m leaning toward the latter. To me, though, 10% actually seems like quite a low number. This would indicate that people are still downloading apps out of curiosity or boredom long after their core needs – email, browsing, picture management – have been satisfied. Clearly, the attention of the majority is still up for grabs for developers, but the rate of use also indicates a fickle beast: a strong value proposition is more important than ever.

Secondly, use of Facebook among women beats out men by a healthy 14%, albeit with 8.7% of men using Google+ more. Still, that’s not enough to make up the deficit, and if you throw in +3% more use of Twitter, this would appear to indicate that women prefer social networks to men. As this measures basic use of the app, the only way that the numbers could be misleading would be if men were still accessing these services only via their sites, or disproportionately using text-to-Tweet. These both seem unlikely given the ease and single-purpose nature of the apps. The male-heavy early adoption of Google+ follows the trend of previous social networks, which too have since been taken up by women in greater numbers. Whether G+ will mimic or buck this trend remains to be seen. I think it needs time to accrue more users in general. With only 11.8% of the active userbase – which itself is 42% of the entire market – that’s just 5% of smartphone users using the new social network. Google will no doubt be looking to grow that number by weaving it more tightly into Android and Google Profiles.

An addendum to gender. The point about maps, Nielson: it’s not ‘despite the stereotype that men don’t like asking for directions’. Men don’t like to admit they don’t know directions. Maps empowers them to do a good job faking it.

Next, there’s a small bias from men toward utility apps, such as QuickOffice and Adobe Reader, but there’s little difference between the sexes here. What’s more interesting – without getting distracted by gender-typing – is that over a quarter of smartphone user seem to use these ‘work’ apps. I doubt that all these people have the kind of jobs that would make such use absolutely mandatory, and so I think we can probably interpret this as the product of a number of different stimuli: convenience, deliberation and novelty. I imagine there is an element of choice when it comes to viewing documents on a smartphone, as frankly it’s cooler than using a desktop. What does that mean for marketers and developers? Well, it’s paving the way for the consumerisation of IT. The remote office will be a Big Deal in the next 5 years, and will necessitate a new kind of work/home hybrid mobile software with enterprise levels of security and compatability. There’s going to be a lot of money in solving these problems, assuming Google Docs doesn’t eclipse the competition.

Lastly, there are some things that are obviously missing. With the caveat that this is the US and so only just now sampling the delights of Spotify, music services seem underrepresented. Pandora isn’t quite the same. I suppose this is largely because of iTunes being built in to Apple products, but there’s surely ground for expansion here. There’s also a conspicuous absence of financial service software. It’s still a bit early for NFC and Mobile Wallet, though we can expect to see it soon – but there is nothing in the top 20 that hints at finance at all. It seems odd in these economically troublesome times, but perhaps people simply don’t want that sort of functionality. I do also recall that banks in America are a much more scattered affair, with lots of regional and state-specific institutions. It seems as though banks could capitalise on capturing this kind of data, though. Wouldn’t knowing where and when consumers were thinking about money be a powerful bit of information?

It will be interesting to see this again in a year’s time.

Attention: you are being lied to.

Meet Lara Croft, the original videogame pin-up. For too long the embarassing symbol of a desperately skewed userbase, Croft was sexualized to the point of parody. That picture I linked? Official art.

We’ve progressed/regressed(?) since that. Characters like Soul Calibur’s Ivy make Croft look positively modest. There are countless games that are simply about semi-naked or naked girls, from soft idiocy like Dead or Alive Extreme Volleyball to hundreds of knock-off hentai titles (NSFW). Yet Croft has never quite shaken off that stigma, despite her more recent games garnering some pretty favourable reviews.

Until now. Or, at least, apparently.

Read more…

These have been doing the rounds over the last week or so. They’re not all that surprising, but it’s still a little discouraging to see gender divided so clinically. Interesting to see that even the most unassuming words have been carefully demarcated: ‘change’ for girls, but ‘transform’ for boys. In fact, I can’t see any crossover at all.

I’m rooting for the tiny ‘killer-boots’ in the bottom right of the girls’ word cloud. If I have a daughter, she’s going to have killer boots. For killing.