Google Plus Hangouts
Google Plus challenges Facebook, Google Plus Hangouts aims for Skype, videoconferencing in general; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusHangouts
Updates from June, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Huddle
Huddle adds group messaging to Google Plus, turning different conversations into one group chat; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusHuddle
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Coordinating with friends and family in real-time is really hard in real life. After all, everyone’s on different schedules, in different places, and plans can change at any moment. Phone calls and text messages can work in a pinch, but they’re not quite right for getting the gang together. So Google+ includes Huddle, a group messaging experience that lets everyone inside the circle know what’s going on, right this second.”
Google+: “Texting is great, but not when you’re trying to get six different people to decide on a movie. Huddle takes care of it by turning all those different conversations into one simple group chat, so that everyone gets on the same page long before thumbs get sore.”
Outsource House: “Group messaging is cool and was made prolific by Blackberry. Now that Blackberry is going downhill really fast, where are we going to get our group messaging from? Well if Google has anything to to say about it, then it will be Google plus Huddle. I even like saying it. “We will Huddle.” Rather than… “We will BBM”. This, if done well good take market share from BBM, whatsapp, Skype, and all the other players in this arena. This will also allow people who have never liked Blackberry (like me) to be able to have a conversation with all my friends no matter what phone they might have.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Sparks
Strike up a conversation, about pretty much anything: Google Plus Sparks an online sharing engine; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusSparks
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Healthy obsessions inspire sharing, and we’ve all got one (or two, or three…). Maybe it’s muscle cars, or comic books, or fashion, but the attraction is always the same: it comes up in conversation, we immediately jump in, and we share back and forth with other fans. Often for hours. The trick is getting things started, and getting over that initial hump. Fortunately, the web is the ultimate icebreaker. – The web, of course, is filled with great content—from timely articles to vibrant photos to funny videos. And great content can lead to great conversations. We noticed, however, that it’s still too hard to find and share the things we care about – not without lots of work, and lots of noise. So, we built an online sharing engine called Sparks. – Thanks to Google’s web expertise, Sparks delivers a feed of highly contagious content from across the Internet. On any topic you want, in over 40 languages. Simply add your interests, and you’ll always have something to watch, read and share – with just the right circle of friends.”
GigaOM: “Sparks … is a new feature that allows you to create topics of interest and use them as source of information and then share it with various different groups. For instance, I could share results of Top Gear with my ‘petrol head’ friends. These ‘interest’ or ‘topic’ packs offer a lot of content and not surprisingly YouTube videos. Circles, Hangout and Huddle are about personal sharing and personal communications. Sparks on the other hand is devoid of that connection and stands out as a sore thumb. … Google needs this social effort to work – it needs to get a lot of people using the service to create an identity platform that can rival Facebook Connect. It needs the people to improve its search offering. Of course, the Google’s biggest challenge is to convince people to sign-up for yet another social platform, especially since more and more people are hooked into Facebook (750 million) and Twitter. I don’t feel quite compelled to switch from Facebook or Twitter to Google, just as I don’t feel too compelled to switch to Bing from Google for Search. – I can easily see services such as Hangout and Huddle get traction, but will that be enough to get traction with hundreds of millions of people?“
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Circles
Share what matters, with the people who matter most: Google Plus Circles focuses on privacy and relevancy; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusCircles
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Not all relationships are created equal. So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food – wrapping everyone in ‘friend’ paper—and sharing really suffers: 1. It’s sloppy. We only want to connect with certain people at certain times, but online we hear from everyone all the time. 2. It’s scary. Every online conversation (with over 100 ‘friends’) is a public performance, so we often share less because of stage fright. 3. It’s insensitive. We all define ‘friend’ and ‘family’ differently – in our own way, on our own terms—but we lose this nuance online. – In light of these shortcomings we asked ourselves, “What do people actually do?” And we didn’t have to search far for the answer. People in fact share selectively all the time – with their circles. – From close family to foodies, we found that people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks. So we did the only thing that made sense: we brought Circles to software. Just make a circle, add your people, and share what’s new – just like any other day.”
RWW: “The fundamental value proposition is around privacy: it’s the opposite of Facebook and Twitter’s universal broadcast paradigm. Google Plus is based on the Google Circles feature, which lets you share and view content to and from explicitly identified groups of your contacts, and no one else. It’s really easy to use and a great feature – but even if you’re communicating out in public, the rest of the service is very well designed, too. This is a smart, attractive, very strong social offering from Google. … Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it.”
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Gerrit Eicker
RWW: “Circles are a lot like Facebook’s friend lists, a feature which Facebook has shown less support for and interest in over time. … To continually differentiate itself from Facebook, and keep Circles from becoming an organizational overhead nightmare, Google Plus needs to get smarter, quickly. Google should use its engineering brilliance to build algorithms that do relationship management for you. It should know when you change jobs (you update LinkedIn, for example) and suggest or enact a Circles change to reflect that.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Circles makes the biggest difference between Google Plus and Facebook: Google Plus Circles bases on Twitter’s paradigm of non-reciprocal following, with the option to establish a closer relation like Facebook’s reciprocal friending. Additional, ‘circling’ is a must: while Facebook Friends Lists and Twitter Lists are optional, following/friending on Google Plus requires to move users to at least one circle.
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus: Circles, Sparks, Hangouts, Mobile, Huddle
Google starts its own social network Google Plus finally, the nuance and richness of real-life sharing; http://eicker.at/GooglePlus
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. … Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. – In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it. – We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project.”
Google+: “Google+ is in limited Field Trial – Right now, we’re testing with a small number of people, but it won’t be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone. Leave us your email address and we’ll make sure you’re the first to know when we’re ready to invite more people.” … +Circles: “You share different things with different people. … Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.” +Sparks: “…looks for videos and articles it thinks you’ll like, so when you’re free, there’s always something to watch, read, and share.” +Hangouts: “With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let buddies know you’re hanging out and see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat.” +Mobile: “…Your photos upload themselves. +Huddle: “Huddle takes care of it by turning all those different conversations into one simple group chat…”
RWW: “The fundamental value proposition is around privacy: it’s the opposite of Facebook and Twitter’s universal broadcast paradigm. Google Plus is based on the Google Circles feature, which lets you share and view content to and from explicitly identified groups of your contacts, and no one else. It’s really easy to use and a great feature – but even if you’re communicating out in public, the rest of the service is very well designed, too. This is a smart, attractive, very strong social offering from Google. … Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it.”
TC: “The reality is that Google is in a better position to organize all of the social signals we broadcast online rather than to organize all of the individuals making those signals. – Instead of building another social network, I’d like to see Google focus on helping us search through all the user-generated signals and content and to help us with our search, much of which is done offline through social questions, not keyword-speak. (Although, the threaded comments approach Google+ is using in the main stream it presents to users does lend itself to friends asking each other questions and answering them). This approach would let Google focus on what it excels at, helping us find information online, especially information created by our friends and friends of friends, perhaps even in an instant. Now, that would be a huge plus.”
Mashable: “Google+ is a bold and dramatic attempt at social. There’s a reason why Google calls this a ‘project’ rather than a ‘product’ — they don’t want people to think of this as the final product, but as a constantly-evolving entity that permeates every corner of the Google empire. – Overall, Google+ is solid. But I’m not going to call it a Facebook killer or a game-changer. The last Google product I said that about was the ill-fated Google Buzz. Perhaps that’s why Google’s rolling this out slowly via invites, the same style Gmail used to release itself to the world. – If Google can persuade users to come back every day, it has a winner. But the company will have to do even more to provide a truly compelling alternative to Facebook. At the moment, Google+ cannot compete with the king of social, but Google doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to take on Mark Zuckerberg’s giant quite yet.”
pC: “It’s going to be a while before we find out whether or not this is something that will resonate with the public, and that’s actually a good thing: by launching the service in an invitation-only mode, Google will have time to discover flaws and fix bugs among a group of early adopters who are likely to be much more understanding when problems arise than the general public, which freaked out about the mistakes Google made when launching Google Buzz. Google’s taking a risk that Google+ won’t have enough users on board in its early days to facilitate connections, but it seems to have decided that erring on the side of getting privacy features right is more important than building a Facebook killer on Day 1.”
TNW: “A complete video tour of Google+ featuring Mobile, Sparks and Circles“
Gerrit Eicker
eReaders
Pew: 12% of American adults own an eReader (doubled between November and May!), 8% own a tablet computer; http://eicker.at/eReaders
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook EdgeRank*
Der Facebook EdgeRank: Algorithmus zur Ermittlung der Gewichtung von Facebook Statusmeldungen; http://eicker.at/FacebookEdgeRank
Gerrit Eicker
Demopark 2011
Die demopark 2011 ruft: http://eicker.at/demopark – Für Gezwitscher von der #demopark2011 einfach @GEicker folgen…
Gerrit Eicker
Google Goes FTC
Google responds to FTC: Supporting choice, ensuring economic opportunity; http://eicker.at/GoogleFTC
Gerrit Eicker
Microsoft and Facebook vs. Google
Williams: Why the Microsoft-Facebook-alliance really is a threat to Google; http://eicker.at/MicrosoftFacebook
Gerrit Eicker 08:30 on 30. June 2011 Permalink |
Google: “Just think: when you walk into the pub or step onto your front porch, you’re in fact signaling to everyone around, ‘Hey, I’ve got some time, so feel free to stop by.’ Further, it’s this unspoken understanding that puts people at ease, and encourages conversation. But today’s online communication tools (like instant messaging and video-calling) don’t understand this subtlety: They’re annoying, for starters. You can ping everyone that’s ‘available,’ but you’re bound to interrupt someone’s plans. They’re also really awkward. When someone doesn’t respond, you don’t know if they’re just not there, or just not interested. With Google+ we wanted to make on-screen gatherings fun, fluid and serendipitous, so we created Hangouts. By combining the casual meetup with live multi-person video, Hangouts lets you stop by when you’re free, and spend time with your Circles. Face-to-face-to-face.”
Google+: “Bumping into friends while you’re out and about is one of the best parts of going out and about. With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let your mates know that you’re hanging out and see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat. Until we perfect teleportation, it’s the next best thing.”
GigaOM: “I don’t think Facebook has anything to worry about. However, there is a whole slew of other companies that should be on notice. Just as Apple put several app developers on notice with the announcement of its new iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion, Google+ should give folks at companies such as Blekko, Skype and a gaggle of group messaging companies a pause. I personally think Skype Video can easily be brought to its knees by Google Plus’ Hangout. And even if Google+ fails, Google could easily make Hangout part of the Google office offering.”
iCTI: “Google Plus’ cool factor may or may not wow the typical user, but what about rolling it into the enterprise along with other Google services, specifically applied in unified communications? Contact management, enhanced? Check (Google Plus’ Circles feature). Email management? Check (Gmail). Document management? Check (Google Docs). Voice (over IP) communications? Check (Google Voice). Instant messenging? Check (Gtalk). Videoconferencing, even with a group? Check (Google Plus’ Hangouts feature). Mobile chat? Check (Google Plus’ Huddle feature).”