Category: Social Media

  • Re: Search

    There’s this lovely Greasemonkey script that does the job of getting the best of both worlds- Google and Twitter, for me, but then it would be quite interesting to have Google bring out a microblogging search engine. (conjecture, but very much in the realm of possibility) In fact, with the recent pain I’ve been having with Twitter Search, it would actually be a big help. What this would do to Twitter Search and would Google add sense (in terms of ‘authority’/ relevance etc and indexing shared links) and Ad Sense to it, and would they share revenues with Twitter are a few questions that interest me. Let’s wait for the engine before we talk about that.

    Meanwhile, the Facebook vanity url brought out an interesting service from Social Too. According to RWW, Social Too is “extending our existing Facebook profile redirect URLs, which redirect yourusername.socialtoo.com to your Facebook profile, and adding an additional layer of analytics to the whole process. So tonight, you’ll be able to get a Facebook vanity URL and get the SEO benefits, but the URL you’ll want to hand out to all your friends will be your SocialToo vanity URL because we’ll provide statistics around those clicking on the URL, the browsers they’re using, where they’re located, and where they’re clicking from.” This would be a very useful resource for brands and even people, just ask any blogger who obsesses over page views 😉

    So what is Facebook upto? I just read that Facebook has rolled out a beta version of its news search that allows people to search their News Feeds and brings up results chronologically from their streams. It means that I can now easily see what my friends think about a recent event/product/service, and that can be notes, videos, status messages, photos etc. ( I did ask for that 🙂 ) The kind of search results that used to get displayed in the earlier avatar of search (people, groups etc) are now listed on the side. (via Tech Crunch) Wonder if it searches comments on the shared content too? Also, thanks to this beastly tweet from Karthik 😉 ,  I noticed that there is a location tab in my newsfeed now. Nothing much for now, but that is a start, and they could add events, among other things. For instance, since a lot of people are auto updating their Twitter status on to FB, I noticed quite a few with the #cisia tag, which is for an event happening in Bangalore. But both the friends using the tag are from Mumbai, so they don’t show up in the Bangalore feed. But yes, it is a start.

    So it does seem that Bing’s launch and the simultaneous bundling of One Riot with IE8 (One Riot is a real time social search engine) has shaken the search box a bit, especially in the realm of real time, though it could be just a coincidence. I have wondered why Bing didn’t launch with some One Riot like mechanism, that would really have been a differentiator, at least in the short term. A reason why I should use Bing, which seems the problem that MS should be addressing.

    Before we end, while we’re on Search, a couple of services I came across that you might want to look at. Hunch, a new discovery engine, from Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, helps you answer questions, basis its understanding of you from the questions it asks you and your further usage of the site. Yep, this is a decision engine which asks you a few questions first 🙂 Mashable has a full analysis on it. I’ve just started using it a couple of days back, and it takes some time to get used to, and what it can do for you is directly proportional to the time you spend on it. So the task for Hunch would be to keep nudging people to interact with it more.  While I did start with a simple question, for which the sponsored link was an obvious choice, i think the question-answer way of search gives sponsored links a lot of relevance. I like the me+crowd way of answering questions and I think it just be the kind of service that grows on you. The other service I came across is Aardvark (via WATBlog – and they’re giving away free invites) which again uses a community network (via IM) to answer your queries.

    Google has claimed that search is in its infancy and there are many avenues for new and existing avenues to explore. Now while Hunch and Aardvark seem to be great products, if Google puts its mind to it, there’s no reason why it cannot replicate either of the services, especially considering the data it has of me from its various services I am a user of. Also, Wave, when it happens, can build on the power of incremental networks easily.  If the microblogging engine does emerge it will give Google the path to real time too.  The advantage for now, is that once these services reach a certain usage level, a me-too product, even from Google will have to work hard on getting people to jump ship, simply because of the lethargy and the time, content etc already invested.

    until next time, the search continues

  • Its trending, trending..gone

    Much of last week’s discussions online revolved around some interesting news about, well, Twitter 🙂 . From the Twitpocaypse scare (“it will happen because the unique identifier –a signed integer, associated with each tweet will exceed 2,147,483,647 which is the limit of signed integers. At this point many of the third party clients for Twitter could either malfunction or crash if they are not coded to handle this problem”), which has been averted, to the Harvard study that brought out, among other things, the fact that 10% users contribute to 90% of tweets, Twitter, as is it is prone to these days, has been in the thick of the action. Facebook did have its own share of the spotlight thanks to the vanity url, but let’s save that discussion for another day. 🙂

    But among all this, the news that interested me was that Twitter’s rate of growth – that has been giving graph watchers neck cricks so far, thanks to stellar growth, seems to have flattened drastically at 1.47%, even as Facebook continues to grow at a healthy 8.54%. Though I did expect this to happen at some point, the timing was quite surprising, especially since Twitter has been getting a lot of mainstream attention these days, and even brands (most recently Pepsi) have been promoting it. I wonder if I could correlate this with the recent usage of Twitter (self fulfilling trends and ‘Spymaster’, for example) which has contributed to the reduction of my usage considerably. Back to that in a while.

    When i read that statistic, I couldn’t help but remember the article I had come across a few days back titled “Why Things become unpopular“. “According to the results, the quicker a cultural item rockets to popularity, the quicker it dies. This pattern occurs because people believe that items that are adopted quickly will become fads, leading them to avoid these items, thus causing these items to die out.”  I have to wonder if this applies to Twitter, Facebook and the other similar services. Now, for this result to not apply, there has to be obviously some utility that makes it go beyond a fad.

    Facebook seems to be in quite a good growth phase (even excluding the high growth coming from its international success). Does this have anything to do with the relative non-anonymity inherent in the service and the relatively limited number of uses that a majority of its users care to indulge in. In other words, is the Twitter user’s relative anonymity (which might be dealt with soon with Verified accounts) and lack of a specific purpose proving to be a disadvantage for the service? The trends, aimless banter could thus be a manifestation of the latter? Of course, all this would be irrelevant if this is just a minor glitch in its growth story. But meanwhile, if users were signing on, not finding the service to be of value, and then conveying this in discussions (WOM), wouldn’t it result in such dismal growth? Also remember that a recent study pegged the non returning users at some 60%. I, for one am still a Twitter user, but my ‘conversion’ rate is a dismal 1 in 10. And in the remaining 9, at least 6 are fairly active on FB. Ok, maybe its just me. 🙂

    Moving further, I also wonder about the impact of this finding on brands and their strategies. Is it fair to assume that, earlier, in a relatively less connected world,  trends and fads took more time to be formed, and therefore had lasting power. In today’s hyper connected world, a viral phenomenon reaches the peak of its popularity in no time. So what does this imply for brands, keeping in mind the perspective that Twitter, FB, You Tube etc are great platforms for virals. I would also like to question the ‘inherent value’ of a fad in earlier times, compared to now. Is it lesser? Say, a particular hairstyle vs a viral video on You Tube? Apples and pineapples, but still..? Meanwhile, assuming brands provide a great value proposition, do they make themselves hotbeds of trends, or do they look for longer lasting cycles? Is a balance possible? Given the frantic pace of technological advancement and its impact on lifestyles, would the audience really care about trends stretched over a long time, so is maximum reach in minimum time the way to go? From a business as well as brand objective point of view? Would that signal the end of organic communities? This decision could have implications on brands’ communication strategy, if not anything else.

    until next time, trend setter or follower?

  • Ad Hawks

    I made a mental note not to write back to back to back posts about tools, but I have allowed myself this exemption because though the post is about Digg and Twitter, its equally about advertising/revenue models.

    Last week, Digg announced Digg Ads, their new advertising platform, to be released as a pilot in a few months. Sponsored ads, marked so, will appear as part of the stream, and the twist is that the more the ad is dugg, the lesser the advertiser will have to pay. The idea, of course, is that the more relevant/interesting/entertaining the ads are to the audience, the more it can be seen as content, and the lesser the advertiser pays. I am not a Digg user, though I do have an account, but it does remind me of the thumbs up/down concept on Facebook. I have to wonder if Facebook will now release contextual ads in the stream, and use the same mechanism. And then perhaps move to the ‘everyone gets paid’ mechanism that I had mentioned in an earlier post on recommendations.

    Meanwhile, on to twitter, the two business models that i read about a few days back were Sponsored Tweets from Izea, (via RWW), to be launched in a month or so; and Super Chirp (via Tech Crunch) that’s already live. Versions of these concepts already exist in the market – Magpie and Twitpub respectively. As per the Adweek article, “Sponsored Tweets .. will offer Twitter users the option of sending their followers messages about brands and products. Twitterers will get paid based either on the number of clicks they receive or on a flat fee per Tweet.” Izea plans to capitalise on the “built in viral appeal” of Twitter and the sponsored tweets will carry a #spon hashtag. #spon is bound to spawn spam and let’s just say I expect to see #spon trending 😉 Super Chirp is a totally different  concept. As per the site, the mechanism is fairly simple – Super Chirp allows you to “chirp” via direct message to people who pay to “subscribe” to you. If you are a publisher, you can make use of your existing Twitter account, you set the monthly price for your content, users subscribe to your content on the Super Chirp website, pay via Paypal, and then get the messages via DM. Super Chirp keeps 30% and you keep the rest. Its obviously a concept worth checking out for celebrities, and those who can give timely, essential info like say, stock tips. Judging by the way people pay for the Rs.30/month VAS items on mobile, I’m sure this can be put to good use. And while the micropayment concept for news has been dissed, I wonder if some news service provider would experiment with this. And why just news providers,  if i were live tweeting from events – ranging from WWDC to the Mumbai blasts, this could at least pay for coffee 🙂

    Sponsored Tweets is ‘push’, but the publisher uses his pull among the crowd. Interesting that an advertiser might get negative vibes because of the publisher’s greed. Digg Ads is ‘push’ but rewarding the advertiser if he makes a favourable impression on the crowd.  Super Chirp is ‘pull’ and it’ll be interesting to see how the publishers fare. Of the three, Sponsored Tweets is closest to the advertising we see in traditional media today.  Digg Ads lend some democracy and forces advertisers to be interesting and non intrusive. A step ahead of the Google Ad Sense model, I’d venture. Super Chirp is more publisher driven, it is like starting from scratch, building an audience based on absolute value delivered – I like the content, I pay for it. Though i hope they have some system for preventing RTs (which would render the subscription model useless) I like the path, like Umair Haque says in this awesome post, “Today, viral economies pass links and messages from person to person. What will they pass tomorrow — cars, jobs, houses?”

    In all of this, even Sponsored Tweets because I trust the system to correct ‘evil’, what made me take notice and be a bit happy was that we were moving away from an inventory based advertising set up of fixed time/ad space – pushing advertising, towards creating more value for everyone concerned by involving the end consumer in the process. In many views, I see them as different versions of content marketing. Whether we are seeing a new advertising model, is something time will answer. No, not the magazine silly!! 😉

    until next time, add sense 🙂

  • Facebook, Twitter, and the future Wave

    Call it coincidence, but in the last few days, I have read two detailed interviews of the founders of two of the most talked about services  these days- Facebook and Twitter. Coincidence, because my last post ended exactly there – the future of Facebook and Twitter in light of the impending Google Wave.

    Inside Facebook had an interview with Mark Zuckerberg a few days back on his plans and the direction which Facebook would want to take. It starts off with how Facebook’s profiles are based on real identities and that has been at the core of Facebook’s activities, the Newsfeed, the developer community built around the Facebook Platform, and the more recent Facebook Connect. He points out how real identities drives communication, siting examples of how mail on FB is used a lot since people need not remember someone’s mail id. He discusses the rise of content creation – specifically photo sharing. (where Facebook is speeding ahead of competition) On another front, Facebook is also testing out a payment service, which if aligned with Connect, can be useful outside FB too. While on currency, he clarified that FB aims to be cash flow positive next year.While he expects music, location based services and travel to be the main verticals, he says that gaming has been the surprise package.

    Search Engine Land’s talk with Biz Stone on Twitter was also a very interesting read, thanks to references to the repositioning of Twitter, as a sharing and discovery service, aided by the ability to form groups, a redesigned homepage. He also discusses the importance of real-time search and the ballooning of rumours that happens on Twitter. While on the subject of the recent change to the @replies sharing, he talked about creating ‘playlists’ of people that can then be shared.He also spoke about the importance of SMS and how Twitter can be made more useful to beginners – “what do you want to find out” instead of “what are you doing?”. Meanwhile, in a panel discussion in New York, Twitter exec Jack Dorsey commented that he wanted twitter to be as ubiquitous as SMS, but obviously much more advanced and useful than that. I also saw a very useful article recently that discusses the 10 ways Twitter will change US business, which include hyper local marketing, measurement of other media, replacing message boards for stock/financial discussions, democratisation of media, data mining, news alerts, micro payments, effect on telecom companies and governmental agencies, and fund raising. But there’s something about Twitter that goes beyond all this, maybe I am a bit biased, but check out this excellent read on the subject.

    Now in this context, let’s take a look at Wave. If Google is able to sync existing high profile properties like You Tube, Blogger, Picasa, News, Calendar, Latitude, Orkut and even say Knol and Reader, a lot of the advantages of Facebook that pertain to real profiles might cease to be huge advantages, since my connections on Google are usually people I already know – real people, so to speak. The other point is that all these services have quite huge crowds on their own, and sets of crowds that use combinations of these services. It remains to be seen whether Google finds it worthwhile to provide integration options on Wave, and then top it with real time conversations, and the ability to create portable waves. The consolation for FB is that so far, Google has not been able to do any breathtaking synergy exercises.

    Twitter seems to be moving towards harnessing the power of crowds to help people find what they’re looking for. Twitter’s dual strengths, IMHO, are still its simplicity, that allows it to be used for a variety of purposes, and the army of developers who create apps that actually transform these concepts into usable tools. The overlap of my Twitter crowd and Gtalk (and so possibly Wave, when that happens) is in decimal percentages, but if Wave can use its ‘openness’ to connect friends of friends..to a few degrees, that advantage might be lost sooner than later. Wave might also be able to replicate the real time advantages and the ease of use that makes twitter so useful. To be noted that twitter is working on Verified Accounts.

    I’d say that both Facebook and Twitter have to work harder and faster if they’ve to offset the effects of Wave. They will obviously not disappear overnight, but users might actually question the ‘utility’ of being on the networks. On its part, Google’s success with Wave will all depend a lot on how they manage to integrate their services, and the kind of apps that the developer community manages to bring out.

    until next time, the changing status quo? 😉

  • Wave Content

    And just when Microsoft seemed to get moving on Google, with Bing, its new search engine (in case you haven’t heard) with a $80-100 million ad budget, and bundling the real time social search engine OneRiot with IE8, Google comes right back with what could potentially be a game changer for a whole set of services, including Facebook and Twitter, in addition to the obvious mail, and search services. Last week, most of the web world were giving raves for Google Wave. In many ways it took the zing out of MS’s announcements.

    Look no further than Mashable’s Google Wave guide for details. To summarise, Google Wave combines email, chat, IM, wikis, social networking and many other potential uses. A ‘wave’ is a conversation thread that can feature one or more friends and even bots (that can source and modify information, communicate with users etc) and have documents, videos, images, maps etc, there’s drag and drop file sharing too. It can be modified by any participant, who can also add other participants and all this and can even be taken outside to say, a blog. And all this is real time, and really real time, where I can even see the other participant/s typing.  There are also gadgets (like Facebook apps) built on the OpenSocial platform. (so if someone develops a Scrabble gadget, we can play a multi user game live, and maybe add photos of our playing while at it). And there’s an API for developers to build more and more applications. To really understand what the fuss is all about, check out the video. Its way more than an email+real time communication and collaboration  tool on steroids. But with all this content, Google really needs to have a lot of storage space.

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

    Wave seems to be aiming at turning the entire concept of social networking on its head. Instead of a single service (Facebook/Twitter), a conversation could be started on anyone’s Wave interface, participants dragged in, and new content created and collaborated upon, and then taken outside. Take a few Google products, for starters – Blogger, Google News, Picasa, YouTube and imagine what one could do with real time collaboration on these. Create a post, have live comments, and then post it. Wait, maybe I won’t even bother to post it!! I am wondering what sort of privacy settings would happen here, would we able to create groups (like say, FB) and set different criteria for different sets?

    Now, look outside Google, say Twave – Twitter + wave, that uses a Tweety Google bot to display your entire Twitter feed on Wave, where you can archive it, thread conversations and so on. Imagine what this could do to say, news reporting. Live wikis, with witnesses collaborating to create authentic news stories, and the crowd being the check and balance.

    Gmail is addictive, and many users usually neglect their other ids after they become used to the functionality of GMail. If Wave does deliver all the above, then the season’s favourites – Facebook and Twitter really need to look over their shoulder, more so, because the new stream creator is not just another player, its Google. There’s another aspect I am thinking about. Mashable’s testing report states that “Central to Google Wave’s interface is search – you create specific searches based on not only keywords, but activity, history, person, and more.”  Unlike FB and Twitter, GMail users are used to ads, if Google Wave starts off with ads, the resistance to it might not be a lot, especially if they’re of the useful contextual+semantic kind. Twitter was called a protocol (Seth Godin, I think), perhaps the protocol standards have been upped.

    Meanwhile, though i think that Google Wave is a great piece of work, as always, I am also worried about Google being the beginning and end of my web experience. There’s just too much power there. 🙂

    until next time, surf the wave