Periscope: Explore the world through someone else's eyes

Are you still using Instagram or Pinterest to post pictures? If yes, you are going to be out. Live stream sharing is coming! Last week, my friend recommended me an awesome social App: Periscope, the latest must-have app to hit smartphones.

What is Periscope?

Periscope is Twitter's new live-streaming video app. Simply put, it is a new social platform to explore the world through someone else's eyes. The Periscope team say this on the website:

Just over a year ago, we becamefascinated by the idea of discovering the world through someone else’s eyes.What if you could see through the eyes of a protester in Ukraine? Or watch thesunrise from a hot air balloon in Cappadocia? It may sound crazy, but we wantedto build the closest thing to teleportation. While there are many ways todiscover events and places, we realized there is no better way to experience aplace right now than through live video. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but live video cantake you someplace and show you around.

Periscope allows users to watch and broadcast live video from all across the globe, meaning you could switch from watching a peaceful wander across the beaches of Cornwall to a protest in Egypt. Besides, Periscope can save the video streams once you are finished, so that anyone can view them for up to 24 hours.

How does it work?

Periscope's live feeds can be shot from iPhones and iPads and watched through smartphones, desktops or laptops either through the app or on Twitter's site. 

Users can watch back recent broadcasts or browse live streams by pressing the TV icon on the bottom left of the screen. 
While watching, you can tap the video to send color hearts and supportive comments to broadcasters.

What kind of content can you watch on Periscope? Maybe somebody is watching a game, or maybe the sun is rising over a beach in Florida, or just someone is eating dinner.

It is really an awesome app! Right? What excites me most about Periscope is the power of seeing something for myself. I can even imagine Periscope as a visual pulse of what’s happening right now all around the world.

Periscope launched on March 26, 2015. On August 2nd, Periscope already surpassed 10 million accounts.

Periscope has only been live for several months, but it is already being hailed as the greatest social media platform since Twitter. The unique function of Periscope has attracted more and more people.

Above: Time Watched represents the total amount of time (in years / day) spent watching live broadcasts on iOS & Android. Does not include time watching on the Web or replays.

Above: DAUrepresents Periscope iOS & Android only. Doesn’t include periscope.tv webviewers.

Future

Periscope, as a new app, already has a nice start. What’s the next? How to use it into business? It needs us explore it. Now I have an cool idea. Maybe we can integrate Periscope into wearable technology like Google Glass in the future, which would make video more convenient, and it would look very cool!

Groundswell, just in the beginning...

As it said in the book Groundswell, “The groundswell is not a flash in the pan. This is an important, irreversible, completely different way for people to relate to companies and to each other.” Yes, I can feel the trend in recent ten years, and it is just beginning.

I remembered ten years ago blog was very popular in China. No matter who you are, anyone could write something and posted on blog website, and your article could be seen by others, even someone became famous because of good blog articles. Chinese movie star Jinglei Xu became famous because of outstanding blog articles, named the queen of blog, attracting more than one hundred million fans in 620 days.

Five years ago, micro-blog became more popular. We use Twitter or Weibo and shortened our updates to 140 characters. Our posts became shorter. Chinese movie star Chen Yao became the queen of Weibo.

Today we are even skipping words altogether and moving towards more visual communication with social-sharing sites like Instagram, Pinterest.

Information on Internet is so rich that people are easily lost in the ocean of message. So we have little time to read long articles such as the early form of networking-blog. The posts became shorter and shorter and almost disappeared. Picture is a simple and quick way to communication in a few seconds. Five years ago, if marketers were pursuing “content is king”, but now we can say, "a picture really is worth a thousand words." Pinterest captures this trend toward the visual.

Visual communication on social media brings a new business --- inSelly, a marketplace for Instagram. This new business makes online selling and buying easy and simple.

What will happen next? It’s really hard to say. This is a fast-growing phenomenon. Everyone has to learn to accept it, adapt to it, and use it.

Explore Popular Food with Social Apps

More and more restaurants are using social media to develop their business and some are 
very successful. It’s a common problem that restaurants want to be engaging with their clientele and get more patrons walking through their doors. Social media is a cheap but effective tool. Wonderful pictures, discount messages, and amount of good reviews are good reasons to attract people to go into the restaurants. Gradually, lots of people form such a habit: searching restaurants through social media APP before going out for dinner. Restaurants social media like Yelp (a restaurants ratings and reviews APP in U.S.), Dianping (a restaurants ratings and reviews APP in China) can guide us to find a nice restaurant and even give us tips to order the most popular dishes. To some extent, restaurants social media are changing the people’s daily life.

If you are travelling in New York for the first time, you want to try the most popular restaurant. You just go to DianPing, and look popular restaurant raking list. The first one on the list is Shake Shack. It offers you as much as information you need, such as price, service, taste, environment, address, phone number... and lots of customers' reviews. Base on this information, you can decide which restaurant you most want to go. It is really a useful tool to find a nice place for eating in an unfamiliar place.

Not only customers but also businessmen who run restaurants like using social media APPs such as Dianping or Yelp, because they’re too easy for guests to use, and too accessible for operators, especially for some new opening restaurants. For example, a new restaurant manager wants to attract more guests, and Dianping can help him do it. Dianping offers the advantage of letting guests sign up to be “friends” or add themselves to e-mail lists that gain them access to special offers and promos that the new restaurant issued. It also encourage guests to share what the experience of dining at their restaurant by adding pictures, videos and descriptions of the experience on Dianping to get coupons.

Based on above, in social media times, advertising is not about the message the restaurants are sending to the guests. It is about the medium through which the guests can most easily be reached. And that medium increasingly is online and through mobile devices.

Restaurant operators who are quick to leverage these media gain access to countless advertising, most of which are free, quick and easy. These are the sort of quick blasts that fit into the lifestyles of most people in 20s and 30s. Additionally, the successful restaurants encourage guests to describe their experience at the restaurant on social media, providing instant word-of-mouth testimony.

The application of social media for restaurant business gives many new restaurants a lot of chance. They do plenty of advertising on social media and make their restaurant become famous only in one month. Those old restaurants that fail to embrace marketing through social media in the coming years would be left behind.