Tag: iGoogle

  • The changing face of search

    The last week saw some frenetic activity in the online space – a few events that are not just going to cause a shift in the way we search and share online, but could possibly impact the direction in which the web develops henceforth. These are very very interesting developments, and not just from a technology standpoint. Apparently, if we go by this, our brain is hard-wiring us to  love Google, Twitter and texting. That will change the way we evolve as a species. But meanwhile…

    Facebook began the week by acquiring Friendfeed (FB, FF – BFF), something I’d hoped that Twitter would do. For those not familiar with the service, its a neat aggregator of most of your activities online (blogs, twitter, facebook, delicious, flickr, YouTube…) and allows others to comment, share, like, search. Yes, most of those features that Facebook has been adding have been lifted from Friendfeed. For several reasons, the service, though extremely useful, has remained geeky.

    The integration is bound to be tricky. While Friendfeed is used mostly as an aggregator (though some publish content exclusively there), Facebook thrives on ‘original’ content. Also, there are features on FF that don’t have a parallel on FB, and perhaps users too. I have different user names on both places, and there are very few who are friends of mine on both networks, and for a reason. I wouldn’t want to import my network on FF to FB. Also, I don’t import all of my content on FB. In many ways FF was my ‘private’ aggregator,  a place where I could aggregate without making it too public. Adapting that on FB would require a lot of settings work. FF’s stream and its approach to updates is also different from FB. So it is quite possible that integration will not happen. But the Friendfeed ‘brain bank’ – people who had earlier made GMail, co-founded Google Maps, is unquestionably an asset, and one part of me won’t mind the fact that the acquisition will perhaps ensure that the innovations will reach a wider audience, and perhaps speed up the learning curve of casual social media users. The other part hopes that they will leave this version of FF intact too, even if it is as FB Labs.

    Facebook’s ‘Lite’ also caused a stir, as several users saw an announcement that they were the chosen ones to test it out, though it turned out to be an accident, but that meant that all of us got to see a preview. It turns out to be a lighter, faster-loading version of Facebook, designed to give new users (especially from countries with lesser broadband access) a simple experience to begin with.

    Facebook also launched real time search around the same time, and the ability to search shared (friends and public shared) news feeds (of the past 30 days) – status updates, photos, links, updates, Fan pages, with the option of filters, is quite a huge step. In many ways, FB is ‘forcing’ people to be more public to derive the maximum advantage out of the service. As Steve Rubel correctly points out, it has major implications on our consumption of content, making us ‘source agnostic’, which we are already, to a certain extent. Also, as he mentions, the impact of Facebook Connect in this equation means that the net is cast wider. The important factor in this, and the reason why i feel Google needs to take a long hard look at this is because there is a people filter here, in addition to the algorithm – news feeds of friends, people who have chosen to share their FB content publicly, means that it works as a kind of endorsement, a personally tested good source. That might potentially be better than Google’s spiders. I am not even bringing Twitter Search into the equation because if FB uses FF correctly and gets a majority of Twitter users to get their tweets into FB (store all but dipslay selectively), then the uniqueness of Twitter Search is gone. Besides FB has a much larger user base anyway.

    Yes, Google is watching, flexing its muscles, and developing a few new ones too. On the day that Facebook dropped its big news, Google also unveiled the next generation of its own search – Caffeine. According to them, “It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.” More than an upgrade, it seems like completely new architecture, and will change the way Google indexes pages, and these changes also include real-time. Meanwhile, its also playing with new forms of product ads.

    Google is also getting a bot more serious about ‘social’, and that is perhaps the reason behind iGoogle getting a facelift with 18 new widgets on the homepage. I’m not too much of a user of this service, but according to RWW, Google is slowly unleashing the services built on OpenSocial, and trying to make iGoogle the hub of a user’s Google activities, and sigh, there’s quite a lot of them. There are Facebook like update feeds (of friends), a share-able To Do gadget, a Scrabble gadget (hmm, that’s appealing) among other things. But the integration is not complete as shown by the YouTube widget and the absence of a Reader widget. But as I always say, the potential, if they actually manage to integrate all of this, and then add Wave features on top of it, is scary. But perhaps (since the social graph – i.e. who sees your comments and shares, is different) iGoogle is not meant to be connected with others.

    The last announcement from Google was on the subject of Reader. In addition to the recent social developments, now reader items can be shared easily to other networks including Twitter, Facebook, Digg, MySpace, Blogger etc. Also, some tweaks in the ‘Mark all as read’ feature make it a lot more useful now. You can read the details here. But hey, Google, how about bringing Reader closer to real time?

    Meanwhile, in the midst of these killer shark wars, the ‘whale’ boys have their own bogeymen. In addition to the wave of DSoS attacks, and the fact that Facebook grew twice as fast in July, the Gartner Hype Cycle white paper for 2009, has stated that microblogging has tipped over the peak and are about to enter the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’. But I am not sure I agree with that. Microblogging, as Seth Godin once stated (about Twitter) is a protocol (nailed it brilliantly!!), what gets transmitted across it is a variable. Its news and links now, and who knows, a smart user/set of users might figure out something else tomorrow that would cause yet another disruption. Perhaps Gartner meant it only in the current context of usage. Twitter has just announced phase one of Project Retweet, which is aimed at changing the way the format of RT works and looks. While it does pose some inconvenience – we are used to the current RT @ format and will perhaps take some time to get used to seeing just the original tweet with a small ‘RT by’ (reminds me of Friendfeed’s ‘Like’), I am hoping that the open API means the developers will deliver to us some useful stuff (Retweets by/to me, of my tweets timelines, the lessening of clutter, as Mashable points out) But honestly, these seem to be small efforts when compared to those of Google and FB.

    Interesting indeed. Rather than conspicuous face offs, Facebook and Google are warily circling each other, and launching and tweaking services that  test out each others’ stranglehold on areas. An elaborate game of chess, that doesn’t look like it will end anytime soon. Stalemate? Though it could be argued that there is space for both, I am inclined to think that the margin of advantages between the leader and the second best will be very high. The battle is for understanding consumer intent and making a revenue stream out of it. Google did that without much competition with search, until specific competition (Bing), real time and social media made threatening noises. Facebook’s appeal was on both those fronts, and now Google is making advances there. But Google is rich and now even has a browser with which it can define the starting point and direction of a user’s web experience, while Facebook revenues are still iffy. Facebook users have shared so much of content inside the ‘walled garden’ that it’ll be difficult to get out even if they desire. Not that Google is an angel on that count.  (You must see this hilarious Onion video – Google’s opt out village) And now with Friendfeed, FB can lay its hands on Google content too – YouTube, Blogger etc can all be pulled into Facebook. But if they rub users the wrong way while trying to accelerate revenues, one can never say.

    What would I like to see? Microsoft buying out Facebook. Perhaps then, we’ll have a fight that’s really too difficult to call.

    until next time, which service is your BFF? 🙂

    Bonus Read: John Borthwick’s ‘The rise of social distribution networks‘.

  • Social Connectivity

    Just yesterday, I read about AOL launching Social Thing for websites. Adding the service to your website gives you a navigation bar at the bottom of the page, users can sign in with their AIM/AOL/Bebo/ICQ ids and comment. They can also chat/IM, check out what their buddies are doing, and share stuff with them. According to Mashable, “Authentication goes through AOL’s Open Authentication API, which is being extended to include support for a single sign-on from Facebook, Google, Yahoo, OpenID and other services.”

    As TechCrunch mentions in its article which talks about Facebook opening its stream API to developers, the conversation wars are heating up. Facebook Connect and its potential is something I’ve written about several times before. Broadly, as a site owner, the implementation of FB Connect allows me to broadcast my content to my Facebook audience, and if they comment using FB Connect, it gets added to their stream thus multiplying the reach. As a commenter, I can share my activities on other sites on my FB stream. The opening of the API enhances the potential for FB stream conversations to happen outside FB.

    Meanwhile, a few days back, there was also a news about Twitter Connect. Obviously, since Twitter has very less profile data as compared to FB, it need not be seen as a competitor to FB Connect, but seen from a “conversation  platform choice” perspective, i’d say it still is. For those interested in how each of these Connect services work, this is an excellent detailed read.

    And what Connect conversation can be complete without the omnipresent Google. Before we get to Friend Connect, a detour. Google recently decided to give us more control of how we would be seen in a search result page – Google Profiles will now be part of search results and we can edit it. In addition to regular data, you can showcase links to your profiles on services like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and so on. While Google claims its just responding to users’ needs, its obviously aimed at getting more user data. However, the profiles will only be shown at the bottom of the search pages, and will not ‘save’ you if you’ve been making news otherwise. 🙂 I assumed that the Profiles so created would be in sync with what gets displayed on Google Friend Connect, but apparently its not so. But you can have a vanity url (google.com/profiles/your name) so long as its connected to your gmail id. You can get a detailed report on the new Profiles here.

    Back to Google Friend Connect, once implemented on your site, it allows users to log in using GMail/Open ID/Yahoo/AIM . Users can comment, rate etc (depending on the gadgets you’ve added), engage with other users, and invite their friends from other networks to check out the site. There are many related things I am thinking of – will Profile and Friend Connect be made to work in sync, and is Google doing the opposite of what FB has done? FB created a social network first and then decided to connect other sites with it and thus enhance its own lifestream. With Google’s many services, it has a ‘disaggregated’ social network in place – YouTube/Picasa/Blogger/(even) Reader. At some point will Profile be just the equivalent of the ‘Info’ tab on Facebook and something like iGoogle (or God forbid Orkut) serve as the aggregator of one’s conversations across the web, not just across Google services, but the sites in which one logs in using Friend Connect. Google is always hungry for more data on users, so it can build more (and truth be told, sometimes better – like the proposed new Google News) products and get more data and obviously find more ways of making money.

    Of the four, Facebook is now using its Connect on popular sites to add more layers to its existing user data  and increase the conversations on Facebook. The opening of the stream API should get us some interesting apps. We’ll have to see what AOL does with its new service, how it ties it with Bebo etc. Twitter Connect is in many ways a different animal altogether, its simplicity and existing third party applications throw open many possibilities (as always) The data just goes back to Twitter, and it can be argued both ways whether Twitter Connect can be used effectively to increase a site’s visibility in the open yet ‘noisy’ stream, but the commenting using Twitter login would be useful to quite a few people  (a wild thought – maybe Twitter should just buy Friendfeed and make that its base social network). Google Connect is easy to implement and interesting gadgets are sure to happen. The possibilities of aggregating  it into a network remain. Now I wonder if Microsoft will find new ways to connect, or will they just Vine? As for Yahoo, maybe they’ll connect with Microsoft finally!! What will be interesting is what handle you would use to connect.

    until next time, connecting people ain’t just Nokia’s job no more

    PS.  6 years of blogging. A week’s break. 🙂

  • The Construct of Communities

    The initial version of Blogger enabled communities only through comments. And it did enable it quite well, as my other blog would validate. A lot of the people who comment there have been doing so for years now, and some of them are not bloggers. These days, I’ve been noticing a lot of people utilising the ‘follow‘ function that a recent version of Blogger had introduced. Of course, there were many entities that were providing this service, but the official Blogger add on is still a help. What pleased me much was the inbuilt feed mechanism, which would get people to use RSS more.

    Twitter of course, is built on a follower/following concept. But I’d say that Twitter/Facebook/Orkut/LinkedIn are not built around one entity as much as a blog is. The groups on these (except Twitter which still hasn’t got groups outside Japan) can be considered communities.

    I saw a list of fastest growing social networks a while back, with Twitter leading (in terms of growth), not surprisingly. But what i was surprised by was the appearance of Ning at #3 (despite the note that in the survey, it did not meet the minimum sample standards). My surprise had perhaps to do with the fact that, though i am a member of a couple of communities, i have not been active there. Both the communities I am part of are centred around shared interests.

    It made me wonder about the construct of communities that individuals would prefer to build in the future. Would it centre around blogs, would it centre around microblogging tools like twitter, which I know a lot of bloggers now prefer. Would it be a customised version of twitter, that’s made possible by tools like Shout’Em or Twingr (via Mashable)  or even something like the Prologue theme of WordPress. Would it be based on lifestreaming services (self hosted like sweetcron or otherwise like storytlr) where they can aggregate activities that they do all around the net. Or perhaps a tangential version of this like Friendfeed which also builds in the community feature. Will iGoogle become more social? Would at some point of time, individuality merge into communities, as discussions around topics become more important than introduction of the topic in a personal space? Or would both exist (as it does in the current form) side by side, depending on subjective likes/dislikes without any commonality in evolution?

    until next time, social circles into social web

  • Social Branding (3 of 3)

    I’d mentioned in my last post on the subject, about a study which showed that 93% of online Americans wanted companies to have a social media presence, and believed these companies also should be interacting with consumers through social media, with one third of the younger set saying that companies should actively market to them on social media. 

    Of course, we have a different scene here in India, from what I read in WATBlog’s report on the IAMAI Digital Marketing summit, with marketers hesitating to go beyond the performance based model . I personally believe both the performance based model as well as a more ‘social’ model have their uses. To put it simply, the former is tactical, and the latter is strategic. But, I agree that it is difficult to sell the latter.

    Like I mentioned once, the measurability of the net as a medium is a double edged sword. I mean, which marketer can measure how many people saw a particular billboard, a particular ad (print or television) or heard a radio spot. The first is at best a judgment, and the rest, an approximation based on reach figures. There is zilch accountability in all cases, but the net has to be measured, even if the spend is 1% of the other media. Perhaps the fundamental love for quick, short term results that envelops the rest of marketing is prevalent here too. But yes, in the end, the intent/objective of the activity should decide the strategy in any medium.

    The best part about social media is that it allows the marketer the flexibility to do both kinds of activities. On one hand, you could be having twitter conversations, interacting on Facebook groups/profiles, and building communities ( a good how to note here)  keeping the brand strategy in view, and on the other hand, you could be running interesting promos on say, YouTube. Here is another study by iPerceptions that shows customer online ad preferences. (via Wild Blue Skies) There are independent tools being developed that measure the efficacy of  video campaigns – Visible Measures is an example, so its about time more companies got viral. I saw a few good digital promos that I’d like to share. (all US based)

    Chevrolet offered up to 10 free rides a day to college students on six campuses in a Chevy Aveo5 hatchback and filming the experience. They are then loaded on a special site, from where it can be shared on other platforms. Finalists are chosen from each college and then one grand winner will get a car. Read all about it here.  

    For their product ‘Dragon’, HP did a promo called 31 days of the Dragon. As part of this, they contacted 31influential tech bloggers to give away 31 laptops in 31 days. Each blogger ran a contest according to his rules, but also publicised others running the contest. With 3,80,000 links and 25000 entries, I would count it a success. (via Marketing Pilgrim)

    And these days the biggest marketer online is after all Obama. He’s got himself an iPhone app, which enables you to call your friends prioritized by their location in battleground states. That nothing works better than peer recommendation is a smart understanding. Read about it here.

    Nokia has a new and interesting promo running at somebody else’s phone. I wonder if its a new phone or something else altogether. The Facebook profiles of the characters don’t offer me any clue. Anyway, we’ll know in about 4 days.

    I read a post here, about an agency Modernista, that does not have a website. Big deal, you would say, most agencies here don’t have one, but the twist here is that its website is a ‘Wikipedia’ page that uses the resources of the web (Flickr, YouTube etc) to showcase its work. Its a great and radical thought, which definitely breaks the clutter.

    Lastly, take a look at this article, which talks about branded iGoogle themes. And here’s a superb compilation of companies that have used social media, but while in social media, beware of the cliches in digital marketing, especially social media. After all, Gartner has projected that over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes. But, he added in an interview with CNET News, 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures. (via a must read article) A similar small but useful note on Twitter usage can be found here. 

    As Chris Brogan has rightly written, social media is like phones, its a new (possibly better) tool, but the most important part is how it is used to reach consumers in a better way.

    The sad part is that there is still a tendency to choose easier ways of getting this job done, than getting a clear understanding of the medium and using it to the brand’s advantage. Here’s an article that talks about ways of ‘handling’ online reputation. The CEO of one such company that does this job for brands talked about cribbing sites like Mouthshut!! I wonder when these ‘practitioners’ would understand a few things – one, usually customers write negative things because they feel strongly; two, you cannot control the conversations on the web; and lastly, if companies made good products and provided good service, the same customers would write good things!! 

    until next time, be the change you want to see?