Twitter Censorship
Twitter censorship becomes nationalised: starts censoring tweets country by country; http://eicker.at/TwitterCensorship
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: Unified Privacy Policy and TOS
Google updates and unifies its different privacy policies and TOS: Sure it’s evil? http://eicker.at/GooglePrivacyPolicy
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “In just over a month we will make some changes to our privacy policies and Google Terms of Service. This stuff matters, so we wanted to explain what’s changing, why and what these changes mean for users. – First, our privacy policies. Despite trimming our policies in 2010, we still have more than 70 (yes, you read right … 70) privacy documents covering all of our different products. This approach is somewhat complicated. It’s also at odds with our efforts to integrate our different products more closely so that we can create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google. … While we’ve had to keep a handful of separate privacy notices for legal and other reasons, we’re consolidating more than 60 into our main Privacy Policy. – Regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies – and having one policy covering many different products is now fairly standard across the web. … The main change is for users with Google Accounts. Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience. … Second, the Google Terms of Service-terms you agree to when you use our products. As with our privacy policies, we’ve rewritten them so they’re easier to read. We’ve also cut down the total number, so many of our products are now covered by our new main Google Terms of Service. … Finally, what we’re not changing. We remain committed to data liberation, so if you want to take your information elsewhere you can. We don’t sell your personal information, nor do we share it externally without your permission except in very limited circumstances like a valid court order. We try hard to be transparent about the information we collect, and to give you meaningful choices about how it is used… We believe this new, simpler policy will make it easier for people to understand our privacy practices as well as enable Google to improve the services we offer.”
Google: “One policy, one Google experience – We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google. – This stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service now. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012. … Our new policy reflects our desire to create a simple product experience that does what you need, when you want it to. … If you’re signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you’ve expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. … By remembering the contact information of the people you want to share with, we make it easy for you to share in any Google product or service with minimal clicks and errors.”
Google, Privacy Policy Preview: “As you use our services, we want you to be clear how we’re using information and the ways in which you can protect your privacy. – Our Privacy Policy explains: What information we collect and why we collect it. How we use that information. The choices we offer, including how to access and update information.”
Google, TOS: “Our Services are very diverse, so sometimes additional terms or product requirements (including age requirements) may apply. Additional terms will be available with the relevant Services, and those additional terms become part of your agreement with us if you use those Services. … You may need a Google Account in order to use some of our Services. … Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours. – When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.”
GigaOM: “It certainly makes for a more personal experience – and really just confirms the direction Google has been heading in for a while – but it’s not necessarily a more-welcome experience. Personalizing someone’s search experience is potentially great, but potentially problematic if another user on the same device sees results they were never supposed to see. – That said, Google is making the right decision in announcing the changes up front and so publicly highlighting what the changes will be. … Google and Facebook, of course, are in a slightly different situation than are most other web companies. Both companies have settled with the FTC around charges of privacy violations, and among the settlement terms for both is that they can no longer misrepresent their privacy claims. So expect to this trend of privacy transparency – even as the sites continue to overhaul their platforms – to continue for at least the next 20 years.”
TC: “The main change, say Google, is that if you are signed into your Google account, Google will combine user info across its products to better serve account holders. As Google says: In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience. – This is exemplified, says Google, in its more personalized search product that debuted recently, and received major criticism. You’ll see Google+ posts and data in your search results, and allows for the seamless transfer of data in between other services, including Docs, Calender, Gmail and more, says Google.”
pC: “The announcement is a bit puzzling given that so much of Google is integrated already. Indeed, the company has been taking flack for weeks after forcing users to opt-in to Search Plus Your World, a feature that displays personalized search results replete with friends, photos and so on. – So why the major announcement? In a word, YouTube. – While Google’s core products are already bundled into its search results (if a user is logged in), the popular video sharing site is not. … For Google users, this means that the personalized search results will likely become more personal still with the inclusion of video. … This policy may not only represent a way to fend-off antitrust hawks but, in the long term, a potential competitive advantage for Google.”
eWeek: “Google is changing its privacy policies around Google+, streamlining identity services and paring the terms of service. The move makes opting out hard, which will raise regulatory flags. … Google’s streamlining comes as regulators in the United States and Europe have criticized Google, Facebook and other Web service providers for offering long-winded and legally gnarled privacy protocols. … The Federal Trade Commission, already looking into Google’s search business practices and which had previously ordered Google to submit to 20 years of audits after breaching user privacy with its Google Buzz feature, will certainly take notice. … Increased personalization across Google Web services will also help improve Google’s ad targeting. Google downplays this benefit, but it is a major reason why it is changing its privacy policies; it wants to refine its ad-serving features to boost relevance for each of its 1 billion search users.”
Economist: “Some of this is welcome and arguably long overdue. Too many web firms have a smorgasbord of privacy documents laden with legal jargon that appear deliberately designed to deter people from reading them. If Google’s new master policy is more accessible and concise than its existing plethora of notices – and preserves the safeguards embedded in them – then it will be a great improvement over the status quo. – But the search firm’s plan to expand the ways in which it can use data provided by someone signed into a service such as Gmail, its e-mail service, or YouTube, its video-streaming site, is likely to provoke heated debate. … Critics fret that this is a departure from its traditional habit of giving people power over their data (for instance, by letting them extract it easily from Google if they want to as part of the firm’s “data liberation” initiative).”
Gizmodo: “Google’s Broken Promise: The End of ‘Don’t Be Evil’ – This has been long coming. Google’s privacy policies have been shifting towards sharing data across services, and away from data compartmentalization for some time. It’s been consistently de-anonymizing you, initially requiring real names with Plus, for example, and then tying your Plus account to your Gmail account. But this is an entirely new level of sharing. And given all of the negative feedback that it had with Google+ privacy issues, it’s especially troubling that it would take actions that further erode users’ privacy. … So why are we calling this evil? Because Google changed the rules that it defined itself. Google built its reputation, and its multi-billion dollar business, on the promise of its ‘don’t be evil’ philosophy. That’s been largely interpreted as meaning that Google will always put its users first, an interpretation that Google has cultivated and encouraged. … This crosses that line. It eliminates that fine-grained control, and means that things you could do in relative anonymity today, will be explicitly associated with your name, your face, your phone number come March 1st. If you use Google’s services, you have to agree to this new privacy policy. Yet a real concern for various privacy concerns would recognize that I might not want Google associating two pieces of personal information.”
TC: “You Call That Evil? – There’s a nice little insider quarrel going on over Google’s just-announced privacy policy changes. A number of sites and commentators have let their fingers jump up mechanically in accusatory fashion. Google, caught red-handed being evil! – Here, I think, is a time when the word ‘bias’ is actually warranted. Everyone wants so badly for Google to do something truly evil (instead of just questionable or inconvenient) that their perceptions of Google actions are actually being affected. … What about not being able to opt out? What is it people want to opt out of exactly? The new, simplified privacy policy? What would you opt into instead – the older policy? Being tracked per-site instead of by account? Perhaps you would you like to opt into pre-Timeline Facebook as well? Maybe you’d like to opt out of Apple’s restrictions on selling your iBooks? How, specifically, are people being harmed by the new policy, and in what way can they be demonstrated to have less privacy than under the old system, under which the exact same data and behaviors were recorded, analyzed, and packaged? Google is not collecting more information, they are not selling new information, they are not changing anything but the level at which the data is collated before you are anonymized into an ad group (baseball, travel, Boston, gadgets) and exposed to ads targeted to your general type of consumer. – And of course, you can opt out of the part worth opting out of: ‘Opt out if you prefer ads not to be based on interests and demographics.‘ … The worst one can say about this change is that it causes yet more overlap between Google services that people may not have requested. If you call that evil, you’ve forgotten what evil looks like.”
Forbes: “Internet Freak-out Over Google’s New Privacy Policy Proves Again That No One Actually Reads Privacy Policies – What’s changing is not Google’s privacy policies but its practices. By combining information from across all of its services, Google will be able to better target users with ads, offer more innovative features, and, importantly for Google, better compete with Facebook. … I hate to tell you all, but Google already knew all these things about you – to get a sense of how much Google knows about you, check out the Dashboard – and already had permission to combine that info, they’re just now actually going to do that. And kudos to them for being so explicit about that.”
GigaOM: “The bottom line is that whether you see Google’s new privacy policy as evil or not depends on what you think the company’s purpose is: Is it to help users find information that is relevant to them? If so, then pooling information is probably good. But if Google’s potential distortion of that purpose with its personalized search and favoritism towards Google+ results has you suspicious about its motives, then it might look a little evil. In the end, you have to answer the question: ‘Does Google have my best interests at heart?’“
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Gerrit Eicker
Nimble
Turn your social communities into customers: Nimble social CRM platform for unified communications; http://eicker.at/Nimble
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Gerrit Eicker
Nimble: “Today, business has changed. With the advent of social media, email, IM, text messages and more, businesses are overwhelmed by the myriad applications needed to listen to and engage with their customers. The question is no longer how to stay connected – but how to efficiently and cost-effectively build business relationships given multiple communication channels. From that new need sprang Jon Ferrara’s latest innovation: Nimble. … After two years of development and thousands of real world users, Nimble has emerged as the next evolution in relationship management – the only web-based solution that brings together all of your contacts, calendar, communications and collaborations in one simple, free platform. – Nimble’s core benefit lies in its ability to unify email, calendar activities and the most popular social channels (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter), and automatically link this functionality to business contacts. Instead of jumping from application to application, small businesses now have one solution that can help them find individuals relevant to their business – no matter where they are on the Web – listen and engage with those individuals in any number of ways, and build relationships that can lead to opportunity.”
Nimble: “View core contact information, and all activities, emails, notes, and social conversations related to that contact, in one clean and simple screen. – Nimble will automatically identify contact’s social profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter so that you and your team can easily connect, listen, and engage with your most important business associates. – With Nimble, you can send messages, add tasks and events, edit or download the contact profile…right from the contact’s profile window. … Listen to all of the relevant conversations happening in your social networks. Connect with your community from one unified inbox. – Listen to all of the relevant conversations happening in your social networks. – Nimble’s message screen gives you plenty of options for engaging contacts. Quickly create tasks, schedule events, or reply to messages using the most popular social platforms. … Create and delegate tasks to team members with ease. See who assigned the task, or keep track of team member tasks by viewing their calendars and to do lists. … Nimble unifies your social streams and conversations from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Now you don’t have to go to three different places to listen, engage, and build trusting relationships. … Extend the power of Nimble with these great products from our Integration Partners. Offering lead capture and analytics, email marketing support and more, Nimble’s add-ons give your business even more ways to close the marketing and sales loop: MailChimp, Wufoo, HubSpot”
TC: “Jon Ferrara thinks Salesforce is doing it wrong when it comes to social. The founder of Goldmine, a CRM company he sold for $100 million nearly a decade ago, is attacking the market a different way with his latest startup, Nimble. ‘We are effectively Salesforce but social,’ he says, taking a jab at what is now the 800-pound gorilla. – Salesforce would counter that it has Chatter and Radian6, but punching up is always a good way to get noticed (just ask Marc Benioff, who became a billionaire tussling with Microsoft and Oracle). … Nimble isn’t going up against Salesforce head-on. That would be stupid. Instead, it is trying to nail the social component of business communications. Nimble is an enterprise social platform built around contacts, calendars, and communications (both internal and external). It ties together email with social streams (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and puts it all into one interconnected database. … A better way to think of Nimble is as a social contact and communications database which ties into other enterprise and social services. Today, it pulls in messages from Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. With its next release, it will pull integrate with HubSpot (which turns website visitors into sales leads), Infochimps (datasets), and WuFoo (online forms).”
VB: “CRM systems act as a database of people you have been in contact with. From quick e-mail conversations to full out meetings, this often cloud-based software – the best-known vendor of which is Salesforce.com – is your little black book of sales. But because of how many different ways there are to connect with people, along with how many different people we can reach with the advent of social media, customer relationship management has become extremely messy. – Nimble’s solution takes your e-mail, calendar, social networks, business networks, and a number of other points of connection and aggregates them into its software. But even with all of these integrations, CRM systems are static, one-way streets. That’s where Nimble’s changes start. … With the topic of ‘big data’ floating around, Ferrara wanted to touch on not just what you could do or enter into Nimble, but rather what Nimble could tell you. Currently, Nimble’s system sends out daily e-mails announcing a contact’s birthday, job change, or other tid bits of information. But it will soon add alerts to let you know about possible relationship changes with your contacts.”
Comparz: “Nimble’s account set-up, contact-importing and profile-building features are largely automatic and at least as easy to use as those of leading competing offerings. The Nimble interface offers fewer configuration options than those of some other offerings, but is clean and easy to navigate. Nimble’s ability to let users post to Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Twitter and to create e-mails from within the same interface offers more flexibility and agility in integrated management of communications and social networks than available from most leading alternatives. … Nimble goes beyond social media management, adding collaboration, sales and marketing features and consolidated communication options not available with other leading alternatives. Those interested in converting social networking contacts into engaged relationships, business or personal, should look closely at Nimble (and keep tabs on promised enhancements such as add-on applications and campaign management features).”
CRM Idol: “While Nimble is only two years old, it seems like it’s been in the making for the past two decades. The founder, Jon Ferrara, is one of the pioneers of the industry; he was one of the co-founders of Goldmine (contact management application). And that experience, along with his passion for relationship building is at the heart of the company, and the product. … Nimble builds on the valuable experience the core management team obtained while building Goldmine. That experience combined with the organization’s social philosophy has led to a unique application that delivers a nice set of services to SMBs needing to be social and do business. The approach to creating a community of developers and integration partners – as well as relationships with local resellers from the Goldmine days- provides Nimble with an ecosystem most small vendors don’t have at their disposal. Nimble also has the financial resources to compete in the SMB market, which puts them in a great position to succeed in the space – that is unless somebody snaps them up in the near future.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Pseudonyms? Not yet!
Google Plus updates its real name policy: allows nicknames if they are ‘established‘; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusPseudonyms
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Gerrit Eicker
Horowitz, Google: “Since launch we’ve listened closely to community feedback on our names policy, as well as reviewed our own data regarding signup completion. The vast majority of users sail through our signup process – in fact, only about 0.1% submit name appeals. … Today we’re pleased to be launching features that will address and remedy the majority of these issues. To be clear – our work here isn’t done, but I’m really pleased to be shipping a milestone on our journey. … Over the next week, we’ll be adding support for alternate names – be they nicknames, maiden names, or names in another script – alongside your common name. This name will show up on your Google+ profile and in the hovercards which appear over your name. … On Google+, we try to flag names which don’t represent individuals, such as businesses or abstract ideas which should be +Pages. Sometimes we get this wrong, so starting today we’re updating our policies and processes to broaden support for established pseudonyms, from +trenchcoat to +Madonna. – If we flag the name you intend to use, you can provide us with information to help confirm your established identity.”
Google: “Your name and Google+ Profiles – Google+ makes connecting with people on the web more like connecting with people in the real world. Because of this, it’s important to use your common name so that the people you want to connect with can find you. Your common name is the name your friends, family or coworkers usually call you. For example, if your legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, any of these would be acceptable. – If you are unable to complete the Google+ sign-up flow, or if your profile is or could be suspended for a name-related issue, review our guidelines below. If your profile name was already saved, and we find your name doesn’t adhere to our Names Policy, you will have a four day grace period to change your name or appeal our finding before we take further action. … If you’ve followed these guidelines but your name still isn’t being accepted by our system, please follow the on-screen instructions to submit your name for review. You can provide us with several different types of information to help confirm your established identity. These could include: Scanned official documentation, such as a driver’s license – Proof of an established identity online with a significant following – References to an established identity offline in print media, news articles, etc. – We’ll review the appeal and typically get back to you within a few days. We may also ask for further information, such as proof that you control a website you reference.”
RWW: “Google’s initial handling of pseudonyms on Google+ was draconian. Critics argued that a real-names policy endangers politically active users, and that it’s not even how real peoples’ identities work. In response, Google’s Vic Gundotra said in October that Google+ pseudonym support was coming. Today’s addition of ‘alternate names’ at least allows users to display an identity of their choice, but Google will still actively patrol the network to establish users’ identities. … Kevin Marks has captured Google engineer Yonatan Zunger’s explanation of the policy, making clear that Google only cares that the names on Google+ sound real. According to Zunger, Google doesn’t care whether you use your own name, only that it looks like a name to Google’s algorithm. Short online handles are not allowed.”
VB: “However, Google+ accounts are increasingly being linked to other Google web product accounts, from Gmail to Blogger. Someday soon, Google+ accounts will likely be linked to products like Google Checkout, where only a ‘real world’ identity will do. As Horowitz mentioned in a recent long interview with VentureBeat, Google is well aware of the complexities and challenges of managing multiple personas and identities online, and the company is thinking carefully about how to let each one of us be who we are, whatever that means for us, on Google’s Internet. – Saying that there are three ways to use any web product, unidentified, identified or pseudonymous, Horowitz told us last year, ‘Certainly, some products like Google search will support ‘incognito’ mode… (but) something like Google Checkout is the highest bar, where financial processes are involved. And there’s a spectrum in between. Some products make sense to support in multiple modes, and it’s sort of a product-by-product decision.‘”
TC: “Moving forward, Google says that when the Google+ team flags a user name, people can appeal the decision by showing that it’s an ‘established identity,’ either offline or online – though if it’s an online identity, it needs to have ‘a meaningful following.’ – In discussing the issue, Horowitz says that only 0.1 percent of users submit name appeals. Of those users, 60 percent want to add nicknames, 20 percent are businesses that accidentally created a personal Profile rather than a company Page, and 20 percent are people who would prefer to use pseudonyms. To address nicknames, Google+ is adding support for alternate names that display alongside your legal name.”
ZDNet: “Pseudonyms on Google Plus? Wrong. – Google Plus is now only supporting ‘nicknames’ and names in another script in addition to the ‘real name’ users are require to register with the service. – Users’ birth names (or names on ID) are still rooted to the account and displayed with the added name. – The change they made on this explosive issue is minor. The implementation makes it clear that this is ‘nickname’ support and not true pseudonym support. – Clarification: The very limited pseudonym option to be offered in Plus is not tied to a user’s ‘real name’ only if the user signs up for a new account using a pseudonym (and the ‘nym is considered ‘established’ and gets approved by Google’s hazy ‘appeal’ process – or you are famous, like Horowitz’s example, Madonna). … A pseudonym is a different name that is used in place of someone’s real name, for a wide variety of legitimate reasons. … Google Plus and its truly problematic pseudonym policy encompasses issues of online harassment, personal safety, political speech, sexual minorities, women and gender identity, privacy, the collection and use of personal information by corporations, identity verification, and online deception. – So if you left Google Plus because you couldn’t safely use a pseudonym – don’t come back just yet.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Tablets and eReaders
Pew: Tablet and eBook reader ownership nearly double over the holiday gift-giving period; http://eicker.at/TabletseReaders
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Gerrit Eicker
Pew: “The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period. – The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January. … These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers. However, as the holiday gift-giving season approached the marketplace for both devices dramatically shifted. In the tablet world, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet were introduced at considerably cheaper prices than other tablets. In the e-book reader world, some versions of the Kindle and Nook and other readers fell well below $100.”
Pew: “The surge in ownership of tablet computers was especially notable among those with higher levels of education and those living in households earning more than $75,000. More than a third of those living in households earning more than $75,000 (36%) now own a tablet computer. And almost a third of those with college educations or higher (31%) own the devices. Additionally, those under age 50 saw a particularly significant leap in tablet ownership. … The story with the growth in e-book readers was somewhat different from the story with tablet computers. Ownership of e-readers among women grew more than among men. Those with more education and higher incomes also lead the pack when it comes to e-book ownership, but the gap between them and others isn’t as dramatic.”
NYT: “The holiday season spawned a huge marketing and advertising push for the Nook Tablet, Barnes und Noble’s latest color device, and the Kindle Fire from Amazon. While many consumers bought the costlier Apple iPad at $500, tablets from Barnes und Noble and Amazon cost less than $250, a more tempting price for a Christmas gift. Some black-and-white e-readers cost less than $100. – ‘Publishers are putting a lot of effort into e-books; apps developers are cranking out more and more tools for tablets; libraries and tech companies are making e-books easier to borrow,’ Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, said in an e-mail. ‘So the ecosystem of these devices is making them more valuable.’”
VB: “Leading the pack is Amazon, which sells a slate of Kindle e-readers and tablets. The online retail giant claimed to have sold units in its Kindle lineup at a rate of one million e-readers per week during the holiday push. … However, money still plays some role in whether or not a given consumer decides to spring for a tablet. – While some demographic factors such as race and gender showed little or no statistically significant variations among tablet owners, education and correlating factors such as income showed strong proportional relationships to tablet and e-reader ownership.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Öffentlichkeitsarbeit: Ziele? Bezugsgruppen?
Welche Ziele verfolgen Sie mit Ihrer Öffentlichkeitsarbeit? Gegenüber welchen Bezugsgruppen? http://SprechenSieOnline.de?
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Gerrit Eicker
Google’s Graveyard 2012
More Google shut downs: Urchin, Social Graph API, Picnik, Needlebase, Sky Map, GMC; http://eicker.at/GooglesGraveyard2012
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Here’s an update on some products that will be merged, open-sourced, or phased out in the coming months: Google Message Continuity (GMC) … Current GMC customers will be able to use GMC for the duration of their contract and are encouraged to consider using Google Apps as their primary messaging and collaboration platform. – Google Sky Map … We will be open-sourcing Sky Map and are collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University in a partnership that will see further development of Sky Map as a series of student projects. – Needlebase: We are retiring this data management platform, which we acquired from ITA Software, on June 1, 2012. The technology is being evaluated for integration into Google’s other data-related initiatives. – Picnik: We acquired this online photo editor in 2010. We’re retiring the service on April 19, 2012 so the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products. … Social Graph API – This API makes information about the public connections between people on the web available for developers. The API isn’t experiencing the kind of adoption we’d like, and is being deprecated as of today. It will be fully retired on April 20, 2012. – Urchin: In 2005 we acquired Urchin, whose online web analytics product became the foundation for Google Analytics, helping businesses of all sizes measure their websites and online marketing. We’re fully committed to building an industry-leading online analytics product, so we’re saying goodbye to the client-hosted version, known as Urchin Software. New Urchin Software licenses will no longer be available after March 2012.”
Google: “The success of Google Analytics has been incredibly rewarding and humbling, and we are very thankful for the support of our early Urchin customers and investors. The Urchin Software product has now been completely overshadowed by its tremendously popular offspring. And so, it is time that we now complete the cycle by officially retiring the Urchin Software product and focus exclusively on online analytics. On behalf of the original Urchin crew and Google, we thank you and hope that we can continue to serve you with amazing products. – Urchin has only been available during the past several years through Certified Urchin Resellers, and new sales will officially discontinue at the end of March 2012. We are encouraging Urchin users to migrate to Google Analytics, although expect that current installations of the software will continue to work fine on most systems for years to come. You can learn more about the retirement of this product on the Urchin Website.”
RWW: “As Larry Page said in yesterday’s earnings call, Google’s current focus is on speeding up its execution. To make way for its main teams, Google has been closing down and open-sourcing its less-used projects over the past year. – Many interesting projects have moved on to bigger and better things as open-source initiatives. The Android App Inventor found a home at MIT. Knol, once Google’s effort at a Wikipedia-like knowledge database, has become Annotum, a WordPress-based system. Google Body became Zygote Body, and now it, and even the 3D viewer software behind it, is open-source. Today, Google Sky Map goes open-source, and it will live on as a student-run project.”
VB: “Looks like the picnic is officially over. Google announced today on its blog that it will be retiring the picnic-themed photo editing service Picnik in April of this year. – The news comes about a week after Flickr announced it will be dumping Picnik, which now seems like foreshadowing of the news that was released today. – If you use Picnik for your editing needs, you can download your images as a zip file with Picnik Takeout for the time being. You can also move your photos over to your Google+ page until the service shuts down on April 19.”
TC: “Today’s culling follows this summer’s shut downs of Google Labs and most of the products internally developed by former acquisition Slide. While Google has long encouraged experimentation, its found itself overextended. The company needs all hands on deck fighting the wars for social, mobile, and the cloud. – Google typically reassigns employees from scrapped projects rather than fire them. The teams from Picnik and Sky Map could increase the concentration of product leaders working on Google+. With any luck they can give Google’s social network a more human feel.”
RWW: “Google announced today that it is closing a number of services that it wasn’t able to attract millions of users to without making any effort. The worst of the lot to lose are two: the Social Graph API and DIY data extraction service Needlebase. Following on the heels of the kitten-stomping-bad sunsetting of Postrank, these latest closures are really meaningful, even if the adoption of the services never was. … The worst loss to humanity at the hands of Google’s startup eating monster of late remains PostRank, which Google acquired this Summer. … It was captured by Google and refashioned as a mirror for the fairy’s hideous ogre sister Naked Self Interest, which the ogre (a publisher using Google Analytics) thought made her more beautiful and rich with pageviews, but which really only made her uglier and more vacuous every day. – I can’t believe they are killing Needlebase and the Social Graph API. I can believe it, of course, but I’m thankful that my cynicism is still thin enough that it hurts every time something like this happens again. There are only so many more tools like this on the web left to kill, though.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus: 90 Million Sleepers?
Google: Plus now has 90 million users globally. – Stats indicate it’s a bunch of Sleepers; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusSleepers
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “‘Google had a really strong quarter ending a great year. Full year revenue was up 29%, and our quarterly revenue blew past the $10 billion mark for the first time,’ said Larry Page, CEO of Google. ‘I am super excited about the growth of Android, Gmail, and Google+, which now has 90 million users globally – well over double what I announced just three months ago. By building a meaningful relationship with our users through Google+ we will create amazing experiences across our services. I’m very excited about what we can do in 2012 – there are tremendous opportunities to help users and grow our business.’”
Batelle: “You getting that? The lead quote had to do with Google+, pretty much, not the company’s earnings, which ended up being a miss (Google is blaming fluctuations in foreign currency for much of that, and I have no idea whether that’s true, false, or silly). – But here’s my question: When is Google going to release actual engagement numbers for Google+? Because in the end, that’s all that really matters. … But can you get those folks to engage, deeply? That’d be a real win, and one I’d give full credit to Google for executing. After all, it’s one thing to get the horse to water…another to have it pull up a chair and share a few stories with friends. … Er….so you’re saying the folks who use Google+ use *Google* a lot. That’s not surprising – most of them came to Google+ because they were already using Google a lot. But what about minutes per month using Google+? I’m guessing if Google had good news on that particular front, they’d be trumpeting it in a more direct fashion.”
TC: “Does Google+ Really Have 60% Daily Engagement? Probably Not – Google+ has lots of skeptics out there (and I’ll go on the record that I’m not one of them and actually really like the product). This kind of stuff just isn’t helping it to win those skeptics over. When it comes to user numbers, saying ‘we have 90 million users’ doesn’t mean much. What matters is daily engagement. Lots of apps claim they have a million downloads on iOS, for example, but that doesn’t mean they have a million active users (or even 10,000 for all we know). Google would really help itself here if it clarified these numbers but the company would prefer to keep things vague instead, it seems.”
ATD: “I tried all sorts of nice ways to persuade Google spokespeople to clarify what exactly that means in terms of active users of the Google+ service. They told me that the text of Page’s remarks and an accompanying post by Google’s head of social, Vic Gundotra, spell it out exactly. – That is to say: Over 60 percent of Google+ users use Google products on a daily basis. Over 80 percent of Google+ users use Google products every week. … The unspoken reference here is that Facebook has said for years that half of its active user count is composed of people who log in on a daily basis. (I can’t remember a time when Facebook ever gave out a registered user count. Those hundreds of millions of people you hear them talk about all log in at least once a month.) – So nope, no apples to apples to see here.“
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Gerrit Eicker
iBooks 2, iBooks Author, iTunes U
Apple wants to reinvent textbooks and eBook publishing: iBooks 2, iBooks Author, iTunes U; http://eicker.at/iBooks
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Gerrit Eicker
Apple: “iBooks Textbooks for iPad. – Introducing an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, current, engrossing, and truly interactive. A textbook created by publishers using a new authoring tool from Apple. A textbook brought to life by iPad. … For hundreds of years, textbooks have put a world of knowledge in the hands of students. But while the way people learn has changed dramatically, the traditional textbook has stayed the same. … Today’s students have grown up completely immersed in technology. iPod, iPad, computer – these are the ways they interact with their world. They need a textbook made for the way they learn. … A Multi-Touch textbook on iPad is a gorgeous, full-screen experience full of interactive diagrams, photos, and videos. No longer limited to static pictures to illustrate the text, now students can dive into an image with interactive captions, rotate a 3D object, or have the answer spring to life in a chapter review. They can flip through a book by simply sliding a finger along the bottom of the screen. Highlighting text, taking notes, searching for content, and finding definitions in the glossary are just as easy. And with all their books on a single iPad, students will have no problem carrying them wherever they go.”
GigaOM: “Textbooks in iBooks 2 also incorporate highlighting, note-taking, and interactive Q&A sections at the end of each chapter, which also provide immediate feedback; no more hunting for a key in a separate book or appendix to see how you did. Notes and highlights are automatically turned into flashcards for study purposes. In short, it looks like Apple has taken a lot of the best aspects of services like Inkling and Kno and integrated them into its own product. – The new textbooks reside in a dedicated iBookstore category, and will offer free samples before you buy. The iBooks 2 app is free, and is available today via the App Store. Textbooks will be priced at $14.99 or less, and initially be aimed at the high school market. That’s some seriously competitive pricing, and Apple’s initial partners are Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which together are responsible for 90 percent of textbooks available, according to Schiller.”
TC: “This move is centered around reinvent the textbook. Schiller explained today that Apple sees textbooks as amazing devices, but they’re heavy, not searchable or durable. According to Apple the iPad is the perfect counter. It’s portable, durable, interactive, searchable, current and capable of containing even richer content. … This announcement puts Kno in a bad position. iBooks 2 packs many of Kno’s prime features into a native iPad app. Kno might have the edge with content, though. The company has long worked with the top education publishers and has an impressive library of textbooks. Kno, as a 3rd party app, has the advantage of being able to embrace other platforms like the web and Android where iBooks 2 will likely remain only on the iPad.”
Apple: “iBooks Author. – Available free on the Mac App store, iBooks Author is an amazing new app that allows anyone to create beautiful Multi-Touch textbooks – and just about any other kind of book – for iPad. With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could. … No need to let the blank page scare you. Just start with an Apple-designed templates. Each template has a variety of page layouts to choose from – or create one of your own. … iBooks Author makes it simple to flow in text, graphics, movies, and more, so your book looks exactly the way you want. Drag and drop a Pages or Microsoft Word document to the Book navigator to add it as a new section. Then, when you drag and drop in images, your type automatically flows around them. … iBooks Author has everything you need to create a great-looking book. Add text, shapes, charts, tables, and Multi-Touch widgets anywhere on the page with a single click. Mask images, use alignment guides – even add reflections and shadows. It’s as easy as using a word processor, but powerful enough to design more advanced layouts. … As you’re building your book, check out how it looks by previewing it on your iPad. When it’s just the way you want and you’re ready to publish, iBooks Author helps you submit to the iBookstore for purchase or free download. You can also export it in iBooks format to share on iTunes U or to give to anyone with an iPad.”
GigaOM: “iBooks Author comes with a template choose to help you get started quickly, and then you can click and drag your own media to add images, video, audio and other content to your book. You can even add things like 3-D models, which we saw demoed in the iBooks 2 unveiling earlier, as well as interactive elements like image galleries. … Amazingly, Apple’s iBooks Author is free, and is available today on the Mac App Store. This will definitely help attract content creators to the iBooks platform, and could also seriously impact the ability of competitors to sell publishing suites aimed at doing similar things.”
TC: “All the magic happens in a new OSX application called iBooks Author, which gives users a simple way to integrate different types of media in order to create iBooks of any stripe. What’s more, iBooks Author will be available today for free, so all you aspiring iBook creators can get started post haste. … That’s all well and good, but the real meat here is the ability to add interactive elements to an iBook with minimal headaches. Presentations created in Keynote can be dragged directly into iBook Author for inclusion as an interactive widget, and those who have worked with HTML and JavaScript can create more robust widgets on their own. Also included are a nifty glossary creation tool (essentially a two-click process), and the ability to publish the iBook directly into the store.”
Apple: “iTunes U – If you’re an educator at a university, college, or K-12 school, now you have an easy way to design and distribute complete courses featuring audio, video, books, and other content. And students and lifelong learners can experience your courses for free through a powerful new app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. … The free iTunes U app gives students access to all the materials for your course in a single place. Right in the app, they can play video or audio lectures. Read books and view presentations. See a list of all the assignments for the course and check them off as they’re completed. And when you send a message or create a new assignment, students receive a push notification with the new information. … The iTunes U app integrates with iBooks, iCloud, and other apps to make it easy for students to keep up with your course. For example, new iBooks Textbooks2 and other books for the course are available right from the app, where students can tap them to start reading the assigned chapter. Notes taken in iBooks are consolidated for easy reviewing in the iTunes U app. If an assignment includes watching part of a video, one tap goes straight to a specific spot in the video. And iTunes U keeps documents, notes, highlights, and bookmarks up to date across multiple devices.”
VB: “I can’t remember the last time anyone was so interested in education technology, but leave it up to Apple to whip up excitement. The company held an ‘education related’ event at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum today, where many expected it to take on the textbook industry with new, interactive e-books. … But Apple isn’t done yet. Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP of Internet Software and Services, came on stage to discuss how the company is going to help teachers ‘reinvent the curriculum’ with iTunes U, a service that lets students download lectures and other materials from iTunes. Cue says Apple has seen over 700 million downloads from iTunes U, and that it has mostly been used for lectures. … All of this is very exciting, but it’s strange that Apple made no mention of how students can more easily get a hold of iPads in the classroom. While cool, Apple’s plans to reinvent education could leave a lot of students out in the cold.”
NJL: “The day the bookshelf shook: Four lessons for news orgs from today’s Apple iBooks announcements – The focus was on education, and Apple faces some significant hurdles in getting their products into actual schools (where textbook and technology purchasing are constricted by forces bureaucratic, fiscal, and otherwise). But in truth much of what Apple announced was squarely aimed at further disruption of the publishing industry – in this case, the book publishing industry, already facing disruption from Amazon and ebooks more broadly. … How will news organizations react to that newfound ease of publishing? … In the print book era, deciding to try one of these ideas would involve estimating the potential audience, deciding whether it’s worth investing the time to design it, guessing at a print run, figuring out how to get it in the hands of local retailers, and a host of other complications. But with ebooks – if publishing those ebooks is uncomplicated, just a few more steps than hitting File -> Save As…, built around common templates – what kinds of value could be unlocked? … Once books stop being only finished, whole things – when they can also be works in progress, works in development – the possibilities for journalists open up. … I can’t imagine news organizations need any further evidence that reading is going to keep moving from big screens to smaller ones, from stationary to mobile. But judging by a lot of news sites’ abysmal mobile experiences, maybe they do. So here’s one more data point: Apple’s investing big in a creating a new kind of reading experience for a new kind of content, and they’re completely ignoring every desktop and laptop computer in the universe.”
RWW: “In his official biography of Apple’s late cofounder, Walter Isaacson revealed that in addition to television and photography, one industry Steve Jobs was hoping to revolutionize next was textbooks, which he saw as being ‘ripe for digital destruction.’ – Today’s demonstration very much echoed Jobs’ vision for textbooks, which he saw as cumbersome, heavy and slow to update. … This is not an all together shocking direction for Apple to move into, considering its somewhat recent foray into e-books with iBooks and how the iPad is already being used for educational purposes. That the tablet form factor makes for a potentially excellent educational tool is not at all a new concept, and it’s one that Apple has already been using to help sell the iPad pretty much since day one.“
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Gerrit Eicker
RWW: “It’s hard to wrap my brain around the cold cynicism of Apple’s releasing a new tool to democratize the publishing of eBooks today, only to include in the tool’s terms and conditions a prohibition against selling those books anywhere but through Apple’s own bookstore. There’s just something so achingly awful about it. … Here’s section 2b of the End User License Agreement of the new iBook Author program. ‘B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows: (i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means; (ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.’”
GigaOM: “It’s possible that Apple is planning to open up its new iBook textbooks, either by embracing the ePub standard or making it easy to move texts out of its system and into another, so that iBooks can live alongside Inkling textbooks or CourseSmart books or Kno books — but if it is planning to do that, we didn’t hear anything about it on Thursday. All we heard was how Apple wants to do the same thing to the textbook market as it has done to recorded music and mobile gaming: that is, own and control it.“
Gerrit Eicker
Dark on January 18, 2012
The Web goes dark on January 18, 2012, protesting #SOPA/#PIPA: Wikipedia, BoingBoing, many more; http://eicker.at/J18 #J18
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Gerrit Eicker
Wikipedia: “Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate – that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia. … My hope is that when Wikipedia shuts down on January 18, people will understand that we’re doing it for our readers. We support everyone’s right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression. We think everyone should have access to educational material on a wide range of subjects, even if they can’t pay for it. We believe in a free and open Internet where information can be shared without impediment. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA – and PIPA, and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States – don’t advance the interests of the general public. You can read a very good list of reasons to oppose SOPA and PIPA here, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. … On January 18, we hope you’ll agree with us, and will do what you can to make your own voice heard.”
BoingBoing: “On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in ‘going dark’ to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime and exports it to the rest of the world. Boing Boing could never co-exist with a SOPA world: we could not ever link to another website unless we were sure that no links to anything that infringes copyright appeared on that site. So in order to link to a URL on LiveJournal or WordPress or Twitter or Blogspot, we’d have to first confirm that no one had ever made an infringing link, anywhere on that site. Making one link would require checking millions (even tens of millions) of pages, just to be sure that we weren’t in some way impinging on the ability of five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers to maximize their profits.”
SOPA Strike: “On January 18th, 2012 the internet is going on strike to stop the web censorship bills in Congress! Now is our moment – we need you to do everything you can, whether you have a website or not. … January 18th is going to be amazing. Sites are striking in all different ways, but they are united by this: do the biggest thing you possibly can, and drive contacts to Congress. Put this on your site or automate it by putting this JS into your header, which will start the blackout at 8AM EST and end at 8PM EST. … On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill – PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House – to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit’s lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day.”
TC: “Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales wanted to send a ‘big message’ to the U.S. government regarding the two heinous internet censorship bills currently being considered, and after a brief period of debate the world’s encyclopedia will soon do just that. – The Wikipedia founder announced on Twitter today that starting at midnight on Wednesday, January 18, the English language version of the world’s encyclopedia will go dark for 24 hours in protest of SOPA and PIPA. With their commitment confirmed, Wikipedia will be joining a slew of websites and companies that will suspend their operations for one day in an effort raise awareness around the two bills. … Though the event is meant to raise public awareness over two critical pieces of legislation, Wales still took a moment to offer a bit of sage advice for students heading back to school: ‘Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!’“
Gerrit Eicker 08:35 on 27. January 2012 Permalink |
Twitter, 2011: “The Tweets Must Flow – The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is both a practical and ethical belief. On a practical level, we simply cannot review all one hundred million-plus Tweets created and subsequently delivered every day. From an ethical perspective, almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits. – At Twitter, we have identified our own responsibilities and limits. There are Tweets that we do remove, such as illegal Tweets and spam. However, we make efforts to keep these exceptions narrow so they may serve to prove a broader and more important rule – we strive not to remove Tweets on the basis of their content. – Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed.”
Twitter, 2012: “Tweets still must flow – As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression. Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content. – Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country – while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why. – We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld. As part of that transparency, we’ve expanded our partnership with Chilling Effects … which makes it easier to find notices related to Twitter. … One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice. We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The Tweets must continue to flow.”
GigaOM: “The company said laws around what content is legal to distribute differ from country to country, and the new system will allow it to remove tweets only for users in a specific area, rather than censoring the entire network. But no matter how Twitter phrases it, this news is going to concentrate attention on one thing: that a corporate entity, however well-meaning, controls which tweets are seen or not seen. … Of course, making it public didn’t help Twitter in its fight to resist the court order – in the latest decision in the case, a court ruled that it would have to turn over the data, which includes IP addresses and email addresses – but at least it made it obvious what was happening. … That said, however, the reality is that Twitter has just opened itself up to all kinds of conspiracy theories about what tweets it is or isn’t withholding – and on whose behalf it is removing them. … More than anything else, Twitter’s announcement highlights both how integral a part of the global information ecosystem it has become, and how vulnerable that ecosystem can be when a single entity controls such a crucial portion of it. How Twitter handles that challenge will ultimately determine whether it deserves the continued trust of its users.”
RWW: “In an email, Twitter spokesperson Jodi Olson said the company was not backing off its commitment to free expression. – ‘Just to be clear, this is not a change in philosophy and there are still countries to which we will not go,” Olson said. ‘We hold freedom of expression in high esteem and work hard not to remove Tweets.‘ – The three major, U.S.-based social networks are all currently banned in China, a country analysts all agree is crucial for future growth. While Twitter’s post did not specifically mention China, it clearly positions the company ahead of Facebook and Google+ in articulating a career policy for handling content that may rile Chinese government officials. … ‘This launch gives us the ability, when we have to, in response to a valid legal request, withhold a Tweet in a specific country and to keep that Tweet visible for the rest of the world,’ Olson said Thursday. ‘Our policy in these cases is to 1) promptly notify the affected users, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so; 2) withhold the content in the required countries only, rather than worldwide; 3) clearly indicate to viewers that a Tweet or Account has been withheld, and 4) make available any requests to withhold content through our partnership with Chilling Effects.‘”
VB: “Should you believe the company’s assertions (and we do), you can boil it all down to this: Twitter has craftily granted itself the ability to honor the requests it has to in order to remain operable in some countries and yet still simultaneously uphold its commitment to freedom of expression. – Twitter has also made a promise to be more forthcoming with members about any tweets it decides to withhold from them. The company has decided to make public a page with a record of cease and desist orders, and will attempt to let a user when his or her tweet is withheld.”
TC: “In a way, it’s a good solution: countries where it is forbidden to speak ill of God or well of Hitler will now be able to extend those restrictions to Twitter. But, on the other hand, countries where it is forbidden to speak ill of God or well of Hitler will now be able to extend those restrictions to Twitter. … The problem is that in a way, that is worse. Twitter, and the net in general, are by nature a global communication platform. National conflicts on the internet (for example, an album being released in October in the UK and December in the US) are strange and illogical. Before this announcement, Twitter was a global platform on which something was either said or not said, on a global scale. Now, Twitter’s new power to enforce censorship depending on your country both legitimizes the blocks and concedes international territory specifically to countries that ‘have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.’ This diplomatic casting of the restriction of speech, from a company that is built around the idea of free communication, is troubling. … A meta-national community like Twitter must both transcend and respect its constituent parts, and that requires some tough decisions. Let’s hope they made this decision with the promise of better global communication in mind.“