Chime.in
UberMedia starts its own social network: Chime.in, a Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Facebook clone; http://eicker.at/Chimein
Tagged: Content RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: Read, Watch, Listen
Will Facebook F8 fully embrace multimedia? Read. Watch. Listen. Coming soon; http://eicker.at/FacebookReadWatchListen
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Gerrit Eicker
ATD: “Facebook will unveil its next massive initiative to socialize the Web at its f8 developer conferenceon Thursday. A key focus of this year’s annual event has been well reported: Content. – And that’s the way the social networking giant will play it at the confab, using the basic phrasing, ‘Read. Watch. Listen.‘ … Many of the implicit and explicit content sharing tools at f8 will have a precedent in those Facebook has built for gaming, according to sources familiar with Facebook’s plans. For instance, look for a live-updating sidebar of friends’ content consumption activity, just as the site offers for games, and separate from the news feed wall.”
TC: “The cat is out of the bag that Facebook is going to launchsomething big at its developer conference f8 this week. We’ve heard about the social music services that could be debuting in a few days, but as the New York Times conveyed this past weekend, Facebook is planning for ways to surface personal content better. And we’ve heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the ‘Like’ concept. We’re told these new buttons are ‘Read,’ ‘Listened,’ ‘Watched.’ The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like ‘Want‘ following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.”
RWW: “According to reports, Facebook’s f8 developer conference this coming Thursday will have the motto ‘Read. Watch. Listen.‘ Other than reminding me of a certain tech blog’s name, this motto excites me because of the promise it holds that Facebook will fully embrace multimedia. But that has some major implications, which will affect many in the Web ecosystem. In this post we highlight 3 of the biggest potential implications. … Given my recent posts about the battle between Facebook and Google Plus, the ‘Read, Watch, Listen’ services look set to one-up Google Plus. Although who better to implement their own ‘Watch’ button than the owners of YouTube? Also Google has its own services that cover reading and listening – Google Books, Google Reader, Google Music and others – so they have a great opportunity to integrate all of those into Google Plus.”
RWW: “Facebook’s recent release strategy provides a good road map. Since the release of Google Plus, almost all of Facebook’s new features have been to counter Google’s push into its territory. Those are just reactionary moves, blips in the road. Content is going to be heavily featured at f8 and the true ground shaking updates will be announced this week. … The ‘Read‘ portion of Facebook’s announcement is perhaps the most mysterious. Yet, it has themost precedent in what Facebook has rolled out in previous years and may be tied closely with the platform’s social graph. … Facebook is already one of the top destinations for video on the Web. Most of that is shared content from the likes of YouTube, Vimeo and local news. This is going to be rolled out even further and it will likely to two-pronged – content sharing from outside of Facebook and consumption from within. … While we do not know the specific details of the ‘Listen’ products, we have clues. The primary indicators are MOG, Rdio and Spotify, all of which have been tied to Facebook over the summer. ‘Facebook Music‘ will likely be a conglomeration with MOG, Rdio and Spotify that will allow users to use Facebook as an iTunes-like streaming platform. … What does this all point to? Well, a major profile redesign could possibly be in the works to feature all of this new content. Mashable is reporting that Facebook will announce a redesign at f8 and the idea is to become ‘stickier.’”
Mashable: “Facebook plans to roll out a major redesign of user profiles at its f8 developer conference this week, Mashable has learned. – Details about the redesign are sparse, but two sources familiar with Facebook’s plans (who have asked to remain anonymous) have told us that the redesign is ‘major’ and will make Facebook profiles nexuses for consuming content.
IF: “Strengthening Broad Category Interest targeting could produce big revenue gains for Facebook. As we discussed earlier today, the Facebook Ads marketplace is inaccessible to many small businesses because they don’t have the know-how to effectively use the self-serve tool, or big enough budgets to use many of the tools and services built on the Ads API. As Broad Category Interest targeting is far easier to use than Specific Interest targeting, an improvement of the feature thanks to the ‘Read’, ‘Listened’ and ‘Watched’ buttons could help Facebook recruit this long-tail of advertisers.”
TNW: “Read: Facebook is assumed to be partnering with large online publishers like Yahoo, CNN, the Washington Post andThe Daily. – Watch: The platform will be merging with several online video hosting sites, Ooyala rumored to be one of several. – Listen: Facebook Music is coming with companies like Spotify AB and Rdio Inc. publish user activity on Facebook pages. … The Google+ vs Facebook war seems more heated than ever with Facebook putting up a good fight to maintain its lead in the world of social networking. It remains to be seen how Google+ will keep up with the seemingly impressive features Facebook has up its sleeve, and we can only watch and wait to see how it all turns out.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora’s First Year
Diaspora: from 4 to >100K users, from 0 to >7K commits, from alpha to beta soon? http://eicker.at/DiasporasFirstYear
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Gerrit Eicker
Diasporial: “[September 15th] is a very special day for the Diaspora project. It has been exactly one year since the guys released the Diaspora source code! For a year now, people have been able to contribute to this project and set up pods. And so they did! Till date, 7371 commits have been made by the contributors and the four founders. In only a years time, the amount of Diaspora users has grown from 4 to over 100.000, spread over lots of pods! … It is rumoured that Diaspora will hit beta in November, on its Alpha release anniversary.”
Diaspora: “We know that if you’re not a contributor and don’t follow us on Github, it’s hard to see Diaspora grow and evolve. Now that Diaspora is moving into its second year and a new phase of development, here are some numbers on the progress we’ve made. … Our developer community is growing. Diaspora has had over 100 unique code contributors and countless others have edited our wiki and updated Diaspora’s translations in over 51 languages. We have over 4,600 followers and over 840 forks, which means that tons of developers are checking out our code. That makes us the sixth most popular project on GitHub, right behind great open source projects like JQuery, Ruby On Rails, and Node, just to name a few.”
Diaspora: “There’s been big news in the social networking world recently, and we can’t help but be pleased with the impact our work has had on two of the biggest developments. We’re proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles. And now Facebook is at last moving in the right direction with user control over privacy, a move spurred not just by Google+, but more fundamentally by you and tens of thousands of community members, as well as hundreds of thousands of people who’ve lined up to try Diaspora* – that is, by all of us who’ve stood up to say ‘there has to be a better way.’ We’re making a difference already.”
RWW: “There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it’s decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered. … Diaspora has been called the anti-Facebook for its strong privacy stance, and it had ‘aspects’ before anyone knew about Google Plus and its circles. … If Google Plus has taught us anything, it’s that normal people don’t feel like leaving the social networks where they already feel settled. … Is there anything Diaspora can do? I think so, but it’s a departure from it’s current incarnation, which is an awful lot like Google Plus (or vice versa, or whatever). It’s unrealistic to expect a mass exodus from one social network that works to another of which no one has ever heard. Diaspora’s potential is in its ability to syndicate to our other services (currently Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) while still allowing us to own our data. … If Diaspora is built as a publishing platform that lets us own our content and direct it to our existing networks – and especially if we can read from them, too – it would be an awesome, welcome tool that even Dave Winer could love. But if the launch of Google Plus wasn’t splashy enough to start a mass Facebook exodus, a later launch of a service that looks the same is not going to do it.”
TNW: “Diaspora has never pitched itself as direct competitor to the likes of Facebook – more an alternative model for how social networks could be designed. However, it’s gained a reputation from observers as ‘that quirky Facebook alternative that never quite made it.’ Whether there’s a need or desire for its product or not, it seems there’s life in the Diaspora team yet.”
Some ‘historical’ Diaspora posts here on Wir sprechen Online:
- Diaspora rockets on Kickstarter, 15.05.2010
- Diaspora gets funded with $200K, 03.06.2010
- Diaspora’s first month and first progress, 04.07.2010
- Diaspora works! 27.08.2010
- Diaspora Alpha, the developer release, 16.09.2010
- Joindiaspora.com opens its doors in private alpha, 24.11.2010
- Diaspora summary, 20.07.2011
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter Web Analytics
Twitter introduces Twitter Web Analytics: helps website owners analyse Twitter’s imapct; http://eicker.at/TwitterWebAnalytics
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Gerrit Eicker
Twitter: “Twitter Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites. Twitter Web Analytics was driven by the acquisition of BackType, which we announced in July. – The product provides three key benefits: Understand how much your website content is being shared across the Twitter network – See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site – Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration … Twitter Web Analytics will be rolled out this week to a small pilot group of partners, and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks. We’re also committed to releasing a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers interested in incorporating Twitter data in their products.”
TC: “[A]t TechCrunch Disrupt, Twitter is debuting a brand new publisher analytics platform to help sites understand data around the Tweet button and sites using the t.co wrap. While the platform is still private, Twitter says it will be launched to the public soon. …Twitter is driving 100 million clicks per day to sites across the web, with 95 percent of links on Twitter wrapped in T.co. So clearly with both inbound and outbound traffic, Twitter is seeing massive traction for sites. … But while many third-party apps have tried to measure Twitter’s traffic for publishers, the best analytics always come from the source. This new product for publishers will decipher and make sense of all the inbound and outbound traffic from a publisher sites via the Tweet button and from links. … Of course, many people use Google Analytics and other platforms for their social media analytics from Twitter, Facebook and others. Luckily, you’ll be able to incorporate these in-depth Twitter analytics from your platform of choice, as Twitter will be releasing an API for this analytics platform. – The best part – all of this will be free for publishers. A few select publishers are currently testing the platform as well.”
RWW: “In August, Twitter took a big step toward cleaning up its analytics data by turning on its t.co short link wrapper for all tweeted links longer than 19 characters. T.co is still not fully implemented yet, but when it is, content providers on any platform will finally be able to accurately measure their referrals from Twitter. Prior to t.co, publishers would see different referrers if the clicks came from Twitter.com, Twitter’s client apps, third-party apps or bounced off some link shortener first. – That’s a very long tail, making Twitter referrals hard to measure. As a result of the confusion, Twitter was often discounted and discredited as a traffic referral source. But now that all tweeted links will go through t.co first, all clicks on Twitter links will come from one referrer. In short, Web publishers are just beginning to realize Twitter’s full traffic potential. – With the launch of Twitter Web Analytics, publishers will now be able to accurately measure the impact of Twitter in both inbound and outbound directions. With over 100 million active users, a number that has grown by 105% just this year so far, publishers and Twitter users are about to find out for sure about the value of this service.“
Gerrit Eicker
Google Acquires Zagat
Zagat got googled: Google acquires Zagat Survey, restaurant ratings and reviews since 1979; http://eicker.at/GoogleZagat
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Gerrit Eicker
Nina and Tim Zagat: “Zagat got googled – We are writing to share the most exciting news in our 32 years in business. Zagat Survey has been acquired by another great company, Google. – From the beginning, Zagat Survey has empowered people by providing a vehicle for them to express their opinions. After spending time with Google senior management discussing our mutual goals, we know they share our belief in user-generated content and our commitment to accuracy and fairness in providing users with the information needed to make smart decisions about where to eat, shop and travel. – It is a testament to the knowledgeable consumers who contribute their opinions that Zagat Survey has become an internationally respected symbol of quality. Their experiences, distilled into numerical ratings and concise, witty, quote-filled reviews, will continue to provide accurate guidance for a wide range of leisure activities.”
Google, Mayer: “I’m thrilled that Google has acquired Zagat. Moving forward, Zagat will be a cornerstone of our local offering – delighting people with their impressive array of reviews, ratings and insights, while enabling people everywhere to find extraordinary (and ordinary) experiences around the corner and around the world. – With Zagat, we gain a world-class team that has more experience in consumer based-surveys, recommendations and reviews than anyone else in the industry. …I’m incredibly excited to collaborate with Zagat to bring the power of Google search and Google Maps to their products and users, and to bring their innovation, trusted reputation and wealth of experience to our users.”
pC: “Google … is expanding its push into local content with its acquisition of Zagat, which started out as a New York City restaurant guide in 1979 and now publishes guides in 13 categories and over 100 cities. It’s good news for Zagat, which unsuccessfully put itself up for sale in January 2008, pulling itself off the market six months later when there were no buyers. … Zagat has tried to develop its mobile business. Its app, which costs $9.99 per year, was one of the founding iPad apps. The company announced a partnership with Foursquare for a ‘foodie’ badge in 2010 and also partnered with Foodspotting to use that company’s data and photos. … In the past, Google has resisted the characterization of itself as a content company, but this is a major push into local content for sure.”
SEL: “This is huge news for Google (capital ‘H’) and for local. Google is a content publisher now and the content that Zagat brings arguably closes the gap between Google Places and Yelp. We’ll have to see the implementation. … Beyond restaurants, Zagat also offers ratings and revenues of entertainment venues, wine and travel. The online version of the site has developed a community as well; so there’s a social networking dimension to this acquisition as well as content that Google is buying. … I spoke with Google’s Marissa Mayer and Tim Zagat. They told me that nothing would change in the near term; Google will continue to publish the guides and maintain the subscription product. I asked if Zagat reviews would be imported into Google Places and Google’s response was non-committal. Of course they will; that’s the point of this transaction: the content.”
RWW: “The Google local apps are still relatively barebones compared to dedicated competitors like Yelp and Foursquare. Even recent additions to Google’s dominant Maps tools haven’t made it to mobile yet. But this acquisition, along with Google’s purchase of The Dealmap last month, reveal Google’s hand in the local recommendations game, and it looks like a flush.”
VB: “The move is a major blow to user-generated reviews website Yelp, which competes with Google Places and Zagat. Google failed to acquire Yelp back in late 2009, with Yelp reportedly walking away from a $550 million deal. Google further distanced itself from Yelp when it removed Yelp’s reviews from Google Places in mid-2010.”
TNW: “I see this as a much more powerful play than just local offerings. This, combined with Google’s purchase of ITA and its hotel reviews puts the company firmly into the travel business, with more offerings than almost anyone else in the business.”
Lowe: “All of the restaurant reviews on Yelp could fill 16,894 Zagat guides, and only 26% of businesses reviewed on Yelp are restaurants. Congrats?“
Gerrit Eicker
Rare
Accessibility vs. access: How the rhetoric of rare is changing in the age of information abundance; http://eicker.at/Rare
Gerrit Eicker
NYT Beta620
Beta620, a new home for experimental online publishing projects from NYT developers and readers; http://eicker.at/NYTbeta620
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Gerrit Eicker
NYT: “At The New York Times, our software engineers, journalists, product managers and designers are constantly striving to create new and innovative ways to present news and information and interact with our readers. Yet it’s often difficult to try out new inventions on the world’s largest newspaper Web site. That’s why we created beta620, a new home for experimental projects from Times developers — and a place for anyone to suggest and collaborate on new ideas and new products.”
AdAge: “The New York Times has introduced its long-delayed Beta620, a public beta testing site where web surfers can experiment with new products that could eventually take root on NYTimes.com. … ‘It’s a place that gives a permanent home to the tradition of innovation,’ said Denise Warren, senior VP and chief advertising officer at the New York Times Media Group as well as general manager at NYTimes.com. ‘And it invites our community in to help us formulate an opinion about the innovation and the new products.‘ … The Times’ public beta site has come along just a few weeks after Google said it would wind down its own Google Labs page, which showcases a very wide range of ideas, in an effort to prioritize core products and put ‘more wood behind fewer arrows.’ … The Times believes its public beta site is perhaps different because the projects being tried there bear on its core digital product, The New York Times Online.”
Nieman: “‘It’s all about spurring innovation – coming up with ideas that no one has thought of before, and having a place for them,’ says Marc Frons, the Times’ CTO for digital operations. And not just innovation, but ‘continuous innovation.’ The hope is that, in highlighting experiments as they evolve – and in providing a shared space for shaping their evolution – beta620 will be a place where developers, designers, readers, journalists, and pretty much anyone with an interest in the Times can engage in an ongoing conversation about its future. And about, specifically, the tools that will shape that future. … With beta620, the Times is taking the lessons of end-user innovation and applying them to the process of development, rather than simply the products of it. It’s trying to make experimentation something that’s open and interactive – rather than, Frons says, ‘something that’s cordoned off in the ivory tower.’”
RWW: “The Times has recognized the importance of open data for several years now, and the launch of their API in 2008 was an important step for the struggling news industry, which must now rely on the rest of the Web to make the most of its wealth of data. The Times has put considerable effort into properly categorizing its content for the open Web, and now it has begun to open its software development to the public, too. Some Web citizens have even taken to redesigning NY Times Web products without being asked. – As of now, only NYT developers can display projects on beta620, but the site has set the tone for a public forum on the future of the Times’ technology, so that could certainly change.”
GigaOM: “Can a newspaper think like a startup? New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen said on Twitter that the launch of beta620 is a turning point for the newspaper company because it means the media giant now has an ‘openly experimental newsroom.’ In an inaugural post on the new site, meanwhile, NYT staffer Joe Fiore said the company hopes it will become a place where Times developers ‘interact with readers to discuss projects, and incorporate community suggestions into their work.’ … But can a company whose financial status is still less than stellar really devote much time or resources to something like beta620? The New York Times may be a digital leader, but the reality is that the vast majority of its revenue comes from the printed product it has been manufacturing for a century and a half, because that contains the advertising that is its bread and butter – and even though many see the paywall as a success, its contribution to the bottom line remains relatively minuscule. Will the Skimmer or the NYT’s take on instant search make a difference? That seems unlikely.”
pC: “Right now, the projects on Beta620 are submitted by employees only, though anyone can comment on them or provide suggestions for improvement. Eventually, the NYT will open the site up to allow outside individuals and developers to submit their own proposals. At the moment, the best outsiders can do is send along recommendations for what the NYT R&D technology staff should be working on.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus vs. Twitter?
Scoble: Google Plus has made Twitter boring; http://eicker.at/2h vs. Siegler: Twitter is not Google Plus; http://eicker.at/2i
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Gerrit Eicker
Scoble: “For the past few days I’ve been hanging out in Jackson Hole with a bunch of geeks and one thing I’ve noticed over and over is how boring Twitter has gotten when compared to Google+. Why has Twitter turned boring? I’ve found several areas: 1. First experience. 2. Pictures and videos. 3. Control over content distribution. 4. No API, no auto pushing of content. 5. Signals are visible from who you excited and pissed off. 6. Auto flowing webpage. So, let’s take each of these areas on, and talk about what Twitter could do to make users excited again.”
Siegler: “Put more bluntly: if Twitter is batshit crazy enough to implement even half of the things that Scoble lays out, they will effectively kill their own product. … Twitter is not Google+. Nor does it need to be. If they tried to make it into Google+ on the fly, the millions of current users would rightfully throw a shit-fit. I have a feeling that Scoble would too. … The truth is that Twitter almost did kill itself a few years ago also due to scaling issues. But for whatever reason, none of their competitors were able to capitalize and Twitter emerged, stronger. … Twitter’s core concept is the extension of simple, short messages throughout the past many decades. The postcard begat the SMS message begat the IM status message begat Twitter. Sometimes the simplest ideas resonate because of the very fact that they are simple.”
Winer: “Scoble, my longtime friend, and someone whose chutzpah I admire, says that Google-Plus is making Twitter boring. – Yes, I agree – and that’s a good thing. – He says Twitter should evolve to be more like Google, but I disagree. … It isn’t until a technology becomes boring that it becomes truly useful. Because it’s the things people do with tech that are interesting. … Twitter has been interesting for far too long. What they should want now is to be used as an almost invisible, taken-for-granted but indispensible piece of the workings of the Internet. Permanent link to this item in the archive. – It’s way past time for it to be the precocious upstart. It’s used for all kinds of mission-critical communication. Reliability would be a better measure of its success over interestingness.“
Gerrit Eicker
Metered Paywalls
Newspapers can tailor their pricing structure rather than use a one size fits all-approach; http://eicker.at/MeteredPaywalls
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Statusmeldungen*
Facebook Statusmeldungen sind nicht alles, aber ohne Statusmeldungen ist Facebook nichts; http://eicker.at/FBStatusmeldungen
Gerrit Eicker 08:28 on 18. October 2011 Permalink |
VB: UberMedia CEO Bill Gross isn’t dodging the fact that his latest app, Chime.in, is a patchwork of other successful apps. – ‘It’s an amalgam of blogging and Reddit and Facebook – there’s aspects of each in there,‘ he told VentureBeat in a phone interview last week. – ‘We’re definitely borrowing those good ideas. But this is a deeper dive into their interests and intelligent conversations around [users'] passions.‘ – The Chime.in site will launch tomorrow, but the app is available now in the iTunes App Store. – As Gross mentioned, it has a lot in common with other social media tools. It gives users and brand-oriented publishers a public, online forum for sharing text and picture updates, just like Twitter. You can also share videos and polls, just like on Facebook.”
TC: “A tipster informs us that UberMedia, the company behind social networking apps like Echofon and UberSocial / Twidroyd, has unintentionally pushed its new iPhone application onto the App Store… This is plausible, because the Chime.in website isn’t accessible yet at the time of writing, although the support pages appear to be live already. – So is Chime.in the oft-rumored challenger to Twitter, which UberMedia has had run-ins with in the past? UberMedia has always denied that it had plans to launch a competing social network, so it’s a question worth asking. And the answer is no, not really. – Chime.in is described on the support pages as an online and mobile network organized around interests, or an ‘interest network’ to keep it brief. Still according to the support pages, Chime.in was ‘was created for people who are active in social media and looking for a way to engage in conversations and more deeply interact with content related to their interests’. … ‘All other social networks are all about connecting with people. Chime.in is about connecting with interests and people – it’s an interest network. It lets you tailor the content you see and search for to the topics you care about, so you aren’t bogged down sorting through posts you aren’t interested in.’”
GigaOM: “Bill Gross wants to take on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ – [H]e is launching a content-focused social network called Chime.in that will compete not just with Google’s new social platform Google+ but with Twitter and Facebook too, and link-sharing sites like Reddit and Digg as well. Does the world need another social platform for sharing content? Gross says that it does, and that his connections with content companies will help Chime.in succeed – but the odds are stacked against him. … Chime.in may not be a direct competitor to Twitter, but it is clearly a shot across the bow. According to the support pages for the service [which have since been taken offline], it will allow users to post to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ as well as to the Chime.in network, and is therefore not competitive but ‘additive to the ecosystem.’ … [T]he biggest hurdle for Chime.in is the simple fact that Facebook now has 800 million users and Twitter has 200 million or so, with Google+ in the 50 million range. Useful features aren’t always enough for a social network to flourish, especially when there is so much competition. In the end, even if you build it they might not come.”
ATD: “Serial entrepreneur Bill Gross’s latest effort is called Chime.in, a social platform for writing about and discussing common interests. What makes it different from other social network and social news sites is that Chime.in wants to pay people for their contributions. … Gross argued that the Chime.in community will police itself against gamers and crappy content – the kind of stuff that’s plagued sites like Digg and content farms like Demand Media – because users won’t recommend Chimes they don’t like. – ‘The breakthrough that’s happened is if you let people have the flexibility to share, they’ll get the message to the right people and do the dirty work for you,’ Gross said.