Tag: Facebook

  • 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

  • Zoozoology..and more

    The jury is still out (and perhaps permanently so) on who actually won the IPL – the fake IPL player or the Zoozoos. Both massively popular, they even have conspiracy theories built around them – the identity in case of  the former and the inspiration(cached) in case of the latter. There is even a minority who claim that actually the Deccan Chargers won, but that really isn’t relevant. 😉

    I thought the Zoozoos were adorable. The usage of Mallu food terminology in the International Roaming ad added to the fervour. I remember starting at least 2-3 conversation threads on Facebook and Twitter, the ‘people behind the zoozoos’ image i shared on Twitpic got more than 250 clicks, and I saw quite a number of online and mainstream articles on them. Yes, there were many real conversations as well across age bands. There is no doubt in my mind on the amount of buzz that was created.

    As per the afaqs article, the Vodafone brief seemed to be very clear – increase the awareness of VAS services among new acquisitions in a manner that would really stand out.  A small number of people I spoke to managed to remember the VAS services associated with each ad. I felt that the lateral interpretation of the services, or rather the rendition of that, made me try to connect before the ad ended, so it worked for me.  I even started seeing them in unrelated contexts. But a lot of people just remembered the zoozoos. Just like they remembered the pug. Now the association betweenthe Zoozoos and Vodafone would be established easily, I think, since the competition was Madhavan and Vidya Balan.

    But then, there are these little things that happen outside advertising and in the consumer experience space. Like the ‘Hutch’ that appears as the network on my phone screen. Last week, I got this call from a Vodafone customer care executive, who informed me that I could pay my bill by ECS, and that was more convenient than my current way of paying by cash. Nice, but the only snag was, I’d been using ECS for more than 3 years now. I now wonder how my billing happens smoothly.

    All of this made me think about two things. One, whether brands are thinking about segmenting their existing and potential user base, and then further evolving strategies and communication basis this. So, while the Zoozoos were extremely entertaining and informative, I really wondered about relevance. Did the Zoozoos change my perception of Vodafone? Would there have been a difference if Airtel or Reliance brought out the Zoozoos? Not just to me, who is often irritated by the Vodafone service (like many others in Bangalore) thanks to coverage and call drops, but other user segments as well.  Is this way of communication just a function of the media vehicles that are in use now, which allow very limited ways of segmentation? Will the internet and mobile really change this thinking?

    Two, from a slightly larger perspective, will buzz marketing become an end in itself? Somewhat like the trending topics on twitter, which earlier gave an indication of what the ‘happening’ conversations on Twitter were, but now are just self fulfilling memes. The Twitter reference indicates unhappiness but the original query is in all earnestness. Buzz marketing with no trackback to the brand strategy? Is this more tempting when we’re dealing with a real time way of connecting and communicating? How does this stack up against building brand equity over large timeframes? Does it matter anymore? Or is a positive history of buzz marketing sufficient? In the case of Vodafone, they succeeded in creating so much buzz that editorial space in mainstream dailies were devoting space to them. Online, there were FB groups and Twitter mentions and posts after posts. I could write about engagement and conversation in social media, but where does all that lead to? Where do the Zoozoos go from here? Do they continue to be brand mascots, or are they good enough only for a buzz? Good enough to increase TOM and therefore affect sales in a tactical way?  So, is frequent buzz marketing + good consumer experience = brand strategy? Meanwhile, if the buzz has been generated, can we put up a few more towers and spruce up the data centre?

    until next time, omnibuzz

  • What do you recommend?

    One feature that helps add weight (generally) to a LinkedIn Profile is ‘Recommendations’. I’m not getting into debates on how it’s used etc, that’s a subjective thing, but someone else acknowledging that the concerned person has certain skills does help. Facebook recommends friends, Twitter recommends users to follow. These are three layers – in LinkedIn its a human, in Facebook its an algorithm basis the user’s location, friends etc, and as for Twitter, well, Twitter just decides – no algorithms. But its ok, we recommend links to each other on Twitter. 🙂

    A few activities recently made me think of recommendations. Two from Google and one from Facebook. A TechCrunch article from a few days back states that Google Friend Connect now has a widget that can help publishers know (and display) which parts of their websites their visitors like best. So it helps both parties. I’m guessing it should also help Google figure out a little more data on who reads what where, and therefore some thing that can be used to improve Ad Sense’s effectiveness. 🙂

    One of Google’s services that uses a recommendation mechanism is Google Reader. Google has now added a feature on Reader that lets you know which of your friends are still worth following on Reader, basis your consumption of their shares. I wonder if they’ll utilise this data for new users – eg. if A and B are existing users and C joins the service, will Google use the A’s and B’s data to help C start off? I also think users should have the option of sharing their own trends data with each other, tools can be used to enhance utility – eg. if i know that 90% of my friends are following TC, then I might share less of TC items.

    Meanwhile, RWW thinks that Facebook has to be working on some recommendation technology. With those thumbs up and down signs on ads, I won’t be surprised if Facebook uses that on friends – ‘Manu liked this ad’ (so we’re serving this to you, since you’re his friend) and one more ‘rebellion’.

    Also, from RWW, a related topic, for a larger perspective – Linked Data. “Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, gave a must-view talk at the TED Conference earlier this year, evangelizing Linked Data. He said that Linked Data was a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself.” We are moving towards a web that’s increasingly inter connected.

    That made me think – we’ve reached a state where you can now login to Facebook with your GMail id (not vice versa yet), thanks to its working with OpenID. There are tools on existing social networks (and new services) for location based social networking. Made me think of the potential of a larger recommendation based web experience, that can then spill over on to real life. Recommendations are already being used, even in online commerce.

    But what it actually made me think is about a larger system where say, Facebook, the ad publisher and I will all share revenue if the friend does some positive action on the ad served to him, thanks to me. And of course, Google will then use this info to serve ads to me later, or utilise this on its own Friend Connect + iGoogle+ AdSense . 😉

    Virtually connected lifestreams and real money. The friends of friends of friends connection utilised upto a huge degree (with privacy controls) – its not a real social connection, only an algorithm that would calculate relevance basis the degree of separation and the history of activities. Recommendations of ideas, links, ads, people, jobs, music, books and any kind of products, services etc.. an algorithm boost to ‘serendipity’, if you will 🙂 It even works the other way, so  if you say, log in to a site to check out products, it immediately searches to see if there’s a recommendation it can push at you. Trust automatically plays a key role, and how well past recommendations have worked for you.

    Meanwhile, let’s hope that Google doesn’t make a social algorithm to top the one they’re working on now – to identify which of its employees are likely to quit. A recommendation feature that allows one employee to suggest another would be a Google killer. 😉

    until next time, ahem, some social advertising -I’d recommend watching this space – for a virtual interview 😉

  • Search Advances

    So, Twitter seems to be getting serious about its real time search capabilities. According to various reports, all of which seemed to have emerged from this source, Twitter’s new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, has said that Twitter Search will soon be doing two things in addition to what it does now

    • it will crawl the links that people tweet
    • it will sort results by its reputation ranking system

    The ranking algorithm is going to be very interesting, because unlike, say, Google’s search algorithm, this would have to work at two levels – one, similar to Google’s Page Rank to ascertain the site quality, and two, the reputation of the person sharing the link. So, it’d be interesting to see which one would come on top, assuming the same story – me, sharing a TechCrunch link, or Mike Arrington sharing a link to this blog. 😉 Mashable had earlier written about an alternate  Twitter search service called Tweefind that uses various parameters to rank a person. The eternal debate about what should make a better twitter rank just got more interesting. 🙂

    RWW has connected the above happening to an interesting change that happened at Twitter recently – Twitter replacing tinyurl with bit.ly as the default url shortening service. According to an earlier article on the same site, bit.ly does more than just shorten a url, it “analyzes the page being linked to, pulls out the key concepts discussed on that page, and then provides real-time statistics about where the link is being shared and how many people are clicking on it.” Now, isn’t that interesting??!! When talking about the crawling of links, its hard not to think about the various services I’d written about earlier, (Krumlr, Fleck etc) which work on a delicious+twitter principle – use the delicious method of tagging and then share to twitter. I wonder, if at some stage, this is the kind of semantic association that Twitter would want to build on top of the crawling spiders, or will the machines take care of this too?

    The impact of all this on Google remains to be seen. Google is also looking over its shoulder to another hyped up participant in the ring – Wolfram Alpha, which is yet to make a debut. But there are speculations that they are on top of that situation. Anyway, Google must be doing something, they always do, that’s what makes them so dangerous. Since it already indexes tweets, adding real time shouldn’t be a big deal. A greasemonkey script does that for me!! But with the addition of Search inside GMail, the possibilities of that + Google Profiles + Friend Connect (and Gtalk status sharing) in creating a human layer  on top of the existing search is interesting. Their Searchology event has brought out a lot of new stuff  –

    • Search Options – a collection of tools that help you wean out the information you are really looking for, and view it in the way you want to. Essentially you can now tweak Google Search some more to your preferences.
    • Wonder wheel – it clusters search information
    • Rich Snippets – In addition to the info that currently gets displayed in a search item, there will be a line that sums up the result – eg. ratings for restaurants. It has asked publishers for their cooperation in adopting microformats to create this structured data.
    • Google Squared – As per the post, it “doesn’t find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet.” Its description does remind me of a certain yet to be launched search engine 🙂
    • Search will also indicate whether a site is optimised for mobile devices, and will consider location when delivering search results. (Google Suggest bringing in results from local places for say, restaurants)

    Some excellent live coverage happened at Search Engine Land.

    Meanwhile, a small detour for Microsoft and Facebook. Microsoft claimed recently that its going to become “more disruptive in search.” Facebook recently opened its stream API but also cut off the RSS feed for the updates. I used to make use of it in at least a couple of places. 🙁 It also acknowledged Indian users by making itself available in 6 Indian languages. I wonder where Facebook figures in these search battles. Does the opening of the stream API mean that we will soon have a real time status search mechanism? But how useful will that be when a lot of users prefer to keep their profiles walled (like FB itself)? But its interesting to note that many geeks also auto update their FB statuses with their twitter ones thanks to many available services. FB is quite an aggregator too, in its own way, so I wonder if we’ll get to see a search that shows Twitter + FB statuses, and the videos, pages, shared links and comments content on FB. Meanwhile, on real time, alerts now happen as pop ups. 😐

    The last couple of days also saw new versions of a couple of existing players – One Riot now indexes and groups link shares on Twitter and Digg. It also allows you to dig further into the data- numbers, who shared it first etc  and then share it on the two services. Tweetmeme is launching an enhanced search version which lets you filter results by age, category, channel and also shows how many times result has been tweeted.

    To me, real time is only one of the things that makes Twitter’s foray into search interesting. After all, when I search for real time links to a story on Twitter, I don’t think an Ad Sense like mechanism will work for revenue. So it is the combination of semantics, sentiment analysis, and real-time data that makes this Twitter development seem like a huge leap (when it happens). Google seems to be working on making more sense of data, than real time, or semantics. Can that be taken as actually walking the talk when they claim that search is still in its infancy and there’s a lot of room for existing and new players? Twitter and the new services don’t have the scale of indexed pages that Google has, and Google doesn’t have real time. For now, its interesting how all of these services actually work out complementing each other, as shown by the comparison here.

    I have to admit, with all the connecting that was happening on Twitter, I was hoping that a revolutionary model (of revenue and web behaviour) would evolve. The current developments, though a lot of it is still conjecture, are not as over whelming as I’d hoped for. Its an organic evolution of sorts – semantic, real time, social web. Perhaps it is only the beginning.

    until next time, the search is on…