Why CEOs need less generic names
Stacy: We should get an image of Page for the Google story.
David: I have an image of the page in the story already.
Stacy: Yeah, but for the homepage, we should have an image of Page.
David: You want a different image of the homepage?
Stacy: What?
David: Huh?
Stacy: Oh, I meant Larry Page for the homepage.
David: Oh.
Stacy: CEOs have to have less generic names.
The only problem with this right now is that a very small amount of Android phones have this hardware feature. iPhone users won't be able to use this until the iPhone 5 if Apple chooses to include it in 1 year. Remember, Apple rarely breaks features - they perfect them. Copy & paste anyone?
Sidenote, Walgreens didn't do a very good job of informing their staff of this new feature. I went to take a photo of it and the cashier looked at me like I had 5 heads. I'm pretty sure she thought I was documenting her. As I explained what it was she was shocked to find out an iPhone couldn't use it but was happy to try it on her Droid. Her manager was standing right next to her, laughing at the situation. Comical indeed that a customer had to inform you of something corporate should have.
Regardless, Google Wallet is in major stores for you cutting edge tech nerds to try. I'm an iPhone geek so someone go try it out and let me know how it goes. ;)
It's been weighing on my mind for a bit now. It's also being talked about more and more. I also had an in depth conversation on Twitter about it (read: not on Google+). I won't proclaim Google+ dead, because it isn't. It's not even on life support or any other bad cliche for a social network. The content hasn't grown stagnant because there's still a ton of interaction there. Google+'s problem? An identity crisis.
If Facebook is for your close friends & family and Twitter is for people interested in similar things, then Google+ is... both? Well, at least it's trying to be. Now with Facebook implementing smart Lists, granular subscription settings for individual friends with types of updates & frequency and the ability to Subscribe to the public updates of anyone that allows you to, why exactly is Google+ necessary?
Right now, it's not. It could be in the future. For the people that argue Google+ is great for longer conversations (a la Friendfeed) I counter this - so is Facebook now. For those that would volley back that you can't read a Facebook update - even if it's "public" - unless you're logged in, I counter that social networks aren't for creepers. If you're going to lurk then do the proper thing and take two seconds out of your oh so tremendously busy life to sign up for a service.
This still doesn't solve what Google+ is good for. The one thing that it's good for right now is social Games. There's a separate Game stream that you can post your updates to and no one in your main social stream will ever see it. You're able to incorporate your friends that play into your games, although most don't because most make friends with the people that are playing their games. More on this later.
So what exactly sets Google+ apart? Sparks. Yes, that's right, Sparks. Completely underused and almost thrown in as an afterthought, Sparks are what Google+'s DNA should be centered on.
Imagine this:
You start talking about something that you love. You then see more people talking about the exact same thing in real time, sorted by affinity (friends, friends of friends, everyone else), proximity (those closer may be more relevant, you being at an event talking about it makes you & others there more relevant) and frequency (those talking about it more may show up more, those talking about it as much as you will show up more).
Right now Facebook sort of does this. It shows you which of your friends are talking about similar topics. This isn't always the most interesting or correctly grouped set of information. Twitter doesn't even do this. Twitter makes you search for topics and join in on the conversation. No one is really surfacing timely relevant conversations in order to create an interest community. If Google+ can nail this then there would be a reason for your normal offline friends and family to join you there.
The problem with Google+ is that it's competing with Facebook for your mindspace. Twitter is in it's own game because it gives you a way to send quick short bursts of chatter. Both Facebook and Google+ ask more of you by investing more time into a longer-form conversation. Without offering any significant major difference from Facebook, Google+ is in the losing seat. I truly want Google+ to win, if not just for Facebook being around for way too long and it being time for a change.
The landscape we live in is that products aren't judged by their longterm viability; they're judged by what they're doing right now. Google needs to stop trying to kill Facebook. Even though many are saying that's not what they're doing but Google has been quoted in articles as saying that is exactly what they're trying to do. Instead Google should be giving people what they don't know they want and need.
No one knew they needed a better search engine with relevant ads but Google delivered that (which is ironic now considering that searching for precise info and questions on Google can be a joke). Google should go back to their roots to improve on a horribly broken system. This time instead of search it's social networks aka the new search.
While Huddle, Sparks and Hangouts are all cool they don't give us a different reason to use Google+ everyday. Go back to your roots Google. Change the DNA of social networking and change the world with Google+.
While it may not be the social music service you had hoped for, you can find and follow your friends from Facebook on Grooveshark to keep up with the music that they're playing.
In your Community Activity stream you can see what your friends are playing as well as who they follow. This isn't exactly the most social of streams. All you can do is hide your friend, play their song now/next/last or replace your current songs, and view all the songs they listened to. The thing about social is that it's not really social unless you can interact actively.
What should happen is you should be able to comment on your friend's activity. Since there's already a Favorite option for songs (a heart with a +) Grooveshark should employ just a + underneath songs with a Comment button, that way you can "like" (+) someone's song selection.
This is basic social integration. While I'm glad I was able to follow all of my Facebook friends, I'm a little annoyed that I have back to Facebook to talk to them about the song they played. Also, there's no way to find your Twitter friends. Right now no one is really doing social music well. This is the perfect opportunity for Grooveshark to capitalize on this hole in the market.
Create a Like / +1 with ☆ Favorite.
Probably the most underutilized feature of Twitter, the Favorite is relegated to bookmarking items right now. It can still stay that way but once you Favorite an item it should show up in the Twitter Stream and notify the tweet creator. It should also exist as metadata underneath the tweet. i.e. 3 of your friends favorited this + 5 others - it would be 3 of your friends mini-avatars and a link on 5 others that if you mouseover it you see who else favorited it.
Facebook has taken the common word 'like' and owned it. Google+ has done the same thing with the geek term '+1'. Twitter has not one, but TWO mechanisms to denote affinity - the star and the word favorite. For their purposes both can be interchanged. The only other one that is left is a heart/love, but that's moot since Twitter already has something in place.
Attribute tweets to sources in addition to original tweeter
Tumblr currently does this by pulling the source of the post and places it at the bottom. For some posts it also pulls the favicon, which makes it look more legit. Twitter could do this to any links shared. i.e. if www.nytimes.com/link/more-link is shared then it should be easy enough to recognize that the domain nytimes.com is the source and their favicon.ico should be able to be pulled and placed in front of their name. They can also pull the page's Title as another option to identify the source. This can be placed next to the timestamp under the tweet - 16 minutes ago via nytimes.com. This becomes more crucial when shortened URLs that don't expand the tweet (like t.co) hide the original source. This leads to less credibility and possible spam/phishing. By adding a source link at the bottom of all tweets with links you also free up space in the tweet; I currently will attribute a tweet to NY Times by either saying /via @nytimes or placing (@nytimes) before the link. This uses 13 characters too many in a 140 character environment.
Publish my @mentions in a new tab on my profile
If someone leaves me a message on my Facebook wall then others can see it. If someone does leave you a message on your Facebook wall and modifies the privacy settings then only certain people can see it. If Twitter were to implement this then it's version would be much simpler - if a private user leaves you an @mention then only the people accepted by that user can see their @mention of you on your Twitter wall. I often want to know what other people are saying about the people I'm following or looking at their profile. Currently you have to do a search for that info.
Show my conversations / media shared with an account
If I go to a person's profile I want to see my past conversations with them in the sidebar. The sidebar already shows the accounts I follow that follow the person and accounts that are similar to that person. What would make it more noteworthy is if I could see all of the conversations I had with them, all of the photos and videos we shared together, any of the hashtags we participated in, any of the events we shared etc. Twitter is already showing rich multimedia info from many sources and tracking all of your conversations. Why not show them? Facebook already does this when you go to a person's page.
Create a photo/video/link area
I want to see all the photos and videos someone has shared. This is standard for both Facebook and Google+. I can go to their profile and view their uploads. If Twitter can recognize when your account shares rich multimedia it can also sort it into visible areas on your profile. It already does this for your RTs and tweets. This will be even easier when Twitter's native photo uploading feature goes live for the whole network (Sidenote, why no native video feature Twitter? Your power users have smartphones where video is native.)
As far as links are concerned, this could be handled a couple of different ways. They can either be shown according to timeline in a tab on your profile or on the sidebar sorted by source. The links are the least of my concern and there really isn't a precedent for this so I'm more bearish on this than everything else.
Retweets
The retweet tab on your home page is wonderful but why can't I see it on an individual's profile? I can see how many people RT'd a tweet if I click on it. I should be able to see that metadata underneath the tweet on their profile (see Favorites for how I handled this). There should be a tab on their profile that shows their RTs. That lets me know what other people find interesting of theirs. The RT is the Facebook/Google+ Share. The RT currently shows up when your friend RTs something, but what about if a tweet is trending amongst your friends? That brings me to...
Newsfeed
Facebook currently uses an algorithm that takes into account how often you comment / like someone's post and surfaces posts that could be more relevant to you. Google+ tried to do this with posts you commented on that got more comments, but that's the wrong approach. Just because a lot of people are commenting on something you commented on doesn't mean you have an affinity for it. Now let's say a lot of the people I interact with often are chatting about something then that should surface to the top. Let's relate this to Twitter.
There are services that track who I influence and who influences me on Twitter. What this means in layman's terms: who I talk to, who I retweet, who I favorite, who I've listed, who I've private messaged (DM) and who has done all this to me. I should see more items of who influences me ranked according to what influences me the most to the least. This could be on a separate home screen tab next to Timeline, just like Facebook's Newsfeed. It could be called Affinity or something like that.
Trending
Trending topics are interesting and sometimes keep me up to date on current events, but I have no clue which ones my friends are involved in. Trending topics need to have a section that shows me what interests my friends and what conversations they're having in TT so I can join in their conversation.
Brands
Twitter currently treats brand accounts similar to regular accounts (unless they're a part of the Promoted program). Facebook makes the distinction between a personal account and a business page, as does Google+. Facebook used to list the Pages you Liked but now that feature is gone. Instead they use these insights in their ads to show you ads of pages your friends have liked etc etc. Twitter is trying to figure out how to make their Promoted Tweets relevant. One way that these could be done properly is to promote a tweet of a brand that your friend has followed along with saying which of your friends follow the brand, which have RTed the message and which have Favorited it. This would create 4 separate Promoted Tweet products - Promoted Tweet with followers, Promoted Retweet, Promoted Favorite and Promoted MegaTweet (which would include all of the above in the metadata - intrinsically the most powerful of them all).
People like relevancy. There are already "ads" in the sidebar i.e. Promoted Account and Promoted Trending Topic. This is the same for Facebook. If Twitter mimics Facebook's mechanism of how Liked content gets shared in the stream then Promoted Tweets could work really naturally. Essentially, a Promoted Tweet would be just like a Retweet from the person you follow. You didn't ask for it yet you got it because you follow them.
It seems that Twitter is starting to take small steps to bringing their network up to speed with other social networks. It recently added native photo upload ability, albeit still in a small rollout. They are also rumored to be rolling out a status update box for people's profiles, much like how you can leave a post directly on someone's Facebook wall, with this you would be able to leave an @mention on someone's Twitter wall... or would you? Even though you'll be able to send them an @mention from their profile it won't show up on their profile. I addressed this above and hopefully they'll implement a public facing version of these Twitter "wall posts" as well as some of these other points. I love Twitter and want to see it become a more full featured network.
Even though Google+ has only been open a couple of days that hasn't stopped brands from getting onto it. News outlets such as Mashable and The Next Web have naturally taken to it as they cover social networks (where are you Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb?) The first official brand entity that isn't news that I've seen on Google+ is Gilt City. There may be another brand that was earlier but I haven't found them yet. Mobile website developer Mobile Meteor and charitable support organization Bullying UK are also on Google+. You can see my thread on this here.
So what does Google think about all this 'Other' activity? (Google lists 'Other' as a gender option when you sign up for Google+. Progressive!)
Well, Bradley Horovitz (VP) and Christian Oestlien, both at Product Management at Google+, weigh in on this issue on Danny Sullivan's rant about trying to sign up Search Engine Land as a brand on Google+. Below are both of their responses.
Bradley Horovitz:
Let me be clear - and I'm sorry if this wasn't obvious - we are not currently supporting brands, organizations, and non-human entities in the Google+ field trial. While we should have been clearer about this, there are some fields in the registration form (asking for a first name, a last name, an age and a gender) that indicate that.Supporting these non-human entities is an obviously great feature - we have no allergy to it at all! It's just not part of the system we are currently testing.The field trial has limitations that I know are frustrating - ranging from lack of "obvious" features to inability to invite the people you most want to share with... We weren't kidding when we said this was early and a test... and if the product leads to more frustration than you can bear, then that's understandable and I promise that you will see fast and meaningful progress... and you can jump back in when we meet your bar for minimum viable functionality.
Christian Oestlien:
We are obviously only a few days into this, but initially we wanted to make sure that we optimized for the individual use case. Building great consumer products is a necessary prerequisite for compelling business products. In the future we may want to enable Google+ to support businesses and brands, but we want to make sure we do that in the right way. The things that matter for an individual user aren't the same things that matter for businesses and we want to make sure both have a great experience in Google+. For now we are actively discouraging businesses to adopt consumer profiles, but we have heard the feedback and will obviously do what we can down the line to build optimal experiences for all of the entities (human or otherwise) that make up our social and interest graphs. Like we've said from the start (3 days ago) this is just the beginning of a very long journey towards making Google, our properties and products more social. Here is the official language we've used around all this stuff. Feel free to ping me separately if you want/need more explanation.
http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/answer.py?answer=1228271
While their responses are understandable as this iteration of Google+ is still only a Field Trial, I doubt that will stop brands from joining. Nobody wants to be left out when it comes to being first at the table.
The full thread is here.
Anyone that knows me knows that I'm an early adopter and for the longest time I was obsessed with getting all of these badges, stickers, pins etc. But what no one knows is that there was a method to my madness, a greater purpose behind what I was doing. Yes, it was fun - for a bit - but the my true goal in taking the Pokemon 'Gotta catch 'em all' attitude towards flair collecting was to uncover a user's natural adoption curve and attention cycle by voraciously consuming the product that they were using normally.
Some quick personal observations:
There's a plateau around these different areas: Obsession, Moral Compromise and Obligation. In these three areas your mind comes to different conclusions and levels of acceptance with what you're ok with doing and what you're not ok with doing. To progress beyond these areas it actually takes a bit of time to process what it means to change your way of operating and your whole worldview of how you perceive the situation.
*If you would like to find this infographic in additonal sizes it's uploaded on my Flickr account here. Please note: if you want to use this infographic all I ask is that you ASK me either via Twitter or Email. Remember: with Google Instant Image Search I can now track down all used instances, so it's better to ask than to just take.
My outcome is that I have completed the Badge Adoption Curve and am in that "?" phase of not being too sure what to do with all of it.
I'll be following up this post with a couple of posts:
I'll update each post with links to each related post.
A global body that charts the course of the Internet voted Monday to allow the creation of new website domain suffixes by private companies, enabling major firms to replace ".com" with their own brand.
I started out writing that it was the worst idea, as that was my visceral reaction, but I've come to think that this is genius. Think about it.
Right now you have to type http://subdomain.brand.com or .net or .whatever. With these new set of domains ostensibly all you would have to type is http://subdomain.brand.
E.g. news.yahoo instead of news.yahoo.com.
Once people get used to it they'll come to expect it. It's like the .com is implicit and not needed anymore. I even say subdomains like that now anyway, as a .com is assumed. The problem is that the Internet is running out of .com's and has been for a while. With this solution there's no need to get rid of your brand name domain - the focus has just shifted from providing domains to brands to providing suffixes to brands.
Guaranteed most brands will be using the domains associated with their custom brand suffix only for their brand items and no one else. Think how interesting it could get: Sony has many different arms which could all be consolidated under .sony - playstation.sony, music.sony, movies.sony, electronics.sony, tv.sony etc. Think about how much easier it will be to find a TV show: thebachelor.abc, fringe.fox. What about brands and subbrands? polo.ralphlauren, doublerl.ralphlauren, ck.calvinklein. This move just made the Internet that much more simpler.
Clearly a rogue employee with Admin privileges to the Facebook Engineering page was responsible for this:
The screenshot in question was taken from Techcrunch's post on Google adding a +1 button for websites. This screenshot was clearly taken a little bit ago, as all of the social sharing stats have increased substantially since then (Facebook: 118, Google: 986, Twitter: 506, Digg: 7).
The question that immediately comes to mind is doesn't Facebook have a social media policy in place? The content in question was taken down about 7 minutes later. Facebook CTO Bret Taylor definitely has his work cut out for him, from keeping his employees in line to actually making things load faster / run smoother.
It makes me wonder if Facebook's buttons truly do load slower than Twitter, Google and Digg's buttons. This isn't a good development for Facebook considering that Google just launched their +1 button for websites today.
As far as that button load time is concerned, users don't care if it's a couple of seconds. They just want to be able to share to Facebook whatever they come across on the web. If the load time is longer, say upwards of 5-10+ seconds, then people will start noticing that there's a problem.
