As a follow up to the posts that I did a year ago I wanted to look at the growth of the Canadian Networks in Facebook. I wasn’t really sure what I was going to see, aside from my gut telling me that there are alot of Canucks on Facebook.

If you weren’t sure if the social web was catching on ….these numbers are going to astound you.  These are very impressive numbers for adoption of anything. I guess if you are in the Canadian market you might want to be looking at this and wondering “is this going to help me or hurt me?” and/or “how can i do something here?” 

So here it is …. 

Here are the numbers. This is a visual so if you want the actual spreadsheet here it is.

So what are you going to do with these numbers ? Reconsider your stance on social media? Look at the money you are spending on a publically funded portal projects? Wonder if you should be on? Figure out how to leverage the networks? Build apps for your Canadian Customers ? Spend your advertising dollars differently ? Something interesting to watch. 

Cheers, 

Scott 

 

 

previous posts 

Canada is all  FaceBook! Big time.

Canada is all about Facebook. Big Time : The redux

The 3 month look at Facebook growth in Canada

4 months of FaceBook growth in Canada

 

 

Posted in Community, ConceptShare ~ 14 Comments
Written by Scott

 The folks at ThoughtLava are still using ConceptShare every day to collaborate on design around the world.

A year later, not a day goes by that we are not using the power of ConceptShare to get a better understanding of what a client wants from a design perspective, showing a series of websites that might be good models, critiquing a design for one of our designers, etc…It has changed the way we work and we can’t see going back!

Posted in Community, ConceptShare ~ No Comments
Written by Admin

We’re getting ready to do another round of user experience improvements on ConceptShare. We’d like to hear from you about how we can make our tool even more fun for you. Please let us know:

• Where a simple message would help
• Where you’re not sure what to do
• Where the flow of the experience feels broken
• Where something feels painful

Please feel free to mention anything and everything that comes to mind.

We care a lot about making ConceptShare a breeze to use. Most of the improvements that went into our recent V2 launch had to do with making the experience smoother. Since then we’ve already made several improvements based on requests from our community. Your help today will help us make it even better in the near future.

Posted in Community, ConceptShare ~ 14 Comments
Written by Admin

We’re getting really close to launching ConceptShare V2, the first major upgrade to our online tool for design collaboration. We’ve been testing it, but we know that we can’t possibly find every last bug ourselves. We’re setting up a testing account where you will be able to get a sneak peek. In return, we ask that you kick the tires and report any issues you find.

Please go to the ConceptShare V2 sneak peek page to apply.

A Few Things You Should Know

• We have a limited number of spaces, if you don’t get a sneak peek invite please don’t be offended.
• This account is for testing only, don’t use it for real work.
• There will be bugs, we’re inviting you in to help us find the last ones we haven’t found yet.
• We may close any workspace or end the test at any time.

Posted in Community, ConceptShare ~ No Comments
Written by Admin

If you love ConceptShare, now can now let your friends on Facebook know. Check out our new page for ConceptShare on Facebook, and add us to your products! If you’re really trying to avoid that deadline, why not write a quick review while you stop by. Adding ConceptShare to your products and writing a review will show up in your friends’ news feeds, helping folks find out about us. Plus you can find out who else is a fan of ConceptShare and see exclusive content we’ll have coming soon.

Posted in Community, ConceptShare, Facebook ~ No Comments
Written by Admin

We really want to make some cool shirts, and what would be better than to have a shirt designed by one of the amazing designers that use our product? We’re looking for something unique, something that stands out. Remix our logo, go crazy, be your creative self! Simply go to the tshirt challenge webpage and follow the instructions to download the assets and submit your design. You’ll also get to collaborate on shirt designs in a special ConceptShare workspace. Challenge submitters will receive a free shirt, and the designer of the shirt we love the most will receive an iPod Touch!

Posted in Community, ConceptShare ~ 3 Comments
Written by Admin

We will be presenting a sneak preview of v2 of ConceptShare at DemoCampToronto15. It has been over a year since ConceptShare was first demoed at DemoCampToronto9, and the product has evolved a lot in that time. We’ve added features like activity summaries, approvals, video support, batch upload, project folders, drag and dropping concepts and the text tool.

For v2 our product team has been pouring over every detail of the interface, obsessing over how we can make ConceptShare more of a joy to use. The entire web management interface has been re-engineered from the ground up and put back together with a simple, clean UI, resulting in less clicks and a smoother workflow. The Workspace interface has more vertical screen area and is completely customizable. The new GUI improvements are part of major framework upgrade to allow us to more easily make modifications and improvements in the future based on your valuable feedback. So there’s much more to come after launch.

We hope we see you at DemoCampToronto15!

Posted in Community, ConceptShare ~ No Comments
Written by Admin

Being accessible to you is a big part of my work here at ConceptShare. Here are some places you can find me online, in case you ever want to reach me or just figure out who this crazy guy is. If you ever have any questions, ideas, or just want to send a high five through the wire; please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Here is my contact info

will.pate@conceptshare.com
AIM: willpateaim
skype: willpate
yahoo!: pate_will

You can also find me goofing around on various websites

My blog
commandN
Facebook profile
Flickr photos
Twitter status updates
LinkedIn profile
delicious links

Posted in Community, ConceptShare ~ No Comments
Written by Admin

I have been a pretty active digg’r for a while now. Yesterday was a turning point in the evolution of the digg. It seems that there was a digg link to a story regarding the secret key for the encryption on HD-DVD. From what has been talked about there was a ‘please take it down’ letter from someone. Obviously trying to use their clout to force the suppression of this information.

According to Techcrunch

“That just got the Digg community fired up, and soon the entire Digg home page was filled with stories containing the decryption key. The users had taken control of the site, and unless Digg went into wholesale deletion mode and suspended a large portion of their users, there was absolutely nothing they could do to stop it.” -Techcrunch

So what do you do? Digg has basically gone to the crowd. When you create an open system that is mostly unmoderated you have to be open to the fact that at some point the crowd can take over. How do you handle this is the key. I think this is where companies like Digg are different then other companies. I think if this was an old school minded company they would be bowing under the pressure … Digg however …responds with honesty

“But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.”-Kevin Rose

What find really funny is how these things turn on the companies that want to hide this info. Did the company that sent the cease and desist letter really think that sending a letter was going to hide this code ? I bet that if they would have left it alone the story would have been up on the popular page for a few hours a few thousand people would look at it and it would settle into the digg dust. But now by making a big deal about it they have made this front page news on some of the major blogs. Now instead of glancing over that story I have now learned about the security of HD-DVD’s and I now know how to exploit this seemingly feeble security. So there now you have educated more people, more potential pirates. This story went from the hacking community to the entire community….unexpected effect I am sure.

What can be learned from this?

Community is stronger then a letter …. even if it is a C&D letter. – You can’t kill the community. Try and the voice just gets louder. When Digg started to kill stories, users started to use the code in comments, story bodies and titles. Here is a story that I ran across yesterday ….

Sometimes it is better to let things die on their own. – The net has a surprisingly short memory. I think that by ignoring the story the effect would have been much less. Let the story go thru the life cycle. Dugg, Popular , Digg Dust. Don’t try to play with that life cycle and make it go away. Now this story made it to TechCrunch. Now more people know then ever would have on Digg, way to go ! (an obvious move by a lawyer that doesn’t understand the social web.

Roll with your users - I mean really what could digg do? I think their response was adequate and the that there was really nothing that was going to stop this from getting out there. I liked Kevin Rose’s response …

Well this story is obviously going to evolve more in the coming days. As for me …. I am off to buy a HD-DVD player ….. those things are hackable you know!

cheers

Scott

UPDATE to this story:

BBC is now covering this ….i guess that cease and desist looks pretty silly now. If this had been left alone ….digg dust.

John Dvorak cites :

First of all, nobody, myself included, knows what to do with the code. It is practically useless.

If the lawyers did nothing, it would have languished as a curiosity with perhaps a few crackers developing some software with it. The end result would be a few cracked copies of DVDs running on a few computers here and there.

Because of the lawyers and the nasty letters, now everyone online knows how important this number must be. Boom! Now users get to work on it.

Heck of a job, lawyers.

Investors should be aware of the overall dangers the legal profession present to companies, and how its current and generalized naiveté can sink fortunes overnight. While I know of no corporation that has been bankrupted by this sort of fiasco, it will happen eventually if lawyers doesn’t catch up with the times.

Or perhaps some executives should think for themselves

Posted in Community ~ No Comments
Written by Scott

BarCampEarth got some great coverage in the Canadian Media this week.

Hi Chris, Hi Scott and Hi Ross,

Thanks very much guy for taking the time to talk to me about BarCamp.

I’m sure our readers will be very interested to know more about your movement. And maybe BarCampers will be interested too.
You’re doing a great thing and helping a lot of people.

Here’s the links to the story I was quoted in:

ITWORLDCANADA Article Part 1

ITWORLDCANADA Article Part 2

PS. Nice photo Chris

Nestor

There was also some great coverage in ITBusiness also …..no quote from me ….but a article none the less.

ITBUSINESS CANADA Article

Thanks to all those who have taken the time to cover the goings on.
And if you haven’t signed up for your barcamp ……sign up

BarCampSudbury

Cheers

Scott

Posted in Community, Technology ~ No Comments
Written by Scott