Generations 2010
Pew (PDF): Key internet uses are becoming more uniformly popular across all age groups; http://eicker.at/Generations2010
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Gerrit Eicker
Apache Wave
Google introduces Apache Wave: Wave in a Box (WIAB) enters the ASF‘s incubator program; http://eicker.at/ApacheWave
Gerrit Eicker
eMail vs. the New Messaging
Cringely: eMail will never completely die, but I feel it has lost critical mass and is fading rapidly; http://eicker.at/eMail
Gerrit Eicker
Digital Distraction vs. Utilisation
Growing up digital, wired for distraction; http://eicker.at/1m vs. open ideas about utilizing technology; http://eicker.at/1n
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Messages
Facebook starts integrating eMail, chat, SMS to its in-house Facebook Messages app; http://eicker.at/FacebookMessages
Gerrit Eicker
Wyoming Goes Google
Wyoming is the 1st state in the USA to move all state government employees to Google Apps; http://eicker.at/Wyoming
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Wyoming is a state of many firsts. In 1872, it became home to the world’s first national park – Yellowstone. In 1925, its citizens elected Nellie Tayloe Ross the first woman governor of a U.S. state. Now in 2010, we’re thrilled that Wyoming is the first state in the country to announce plans to move all state government employees to Google Apps for Government. … Many other states around the country are using Google Apps, including departments in Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico. Colorado, Iowa, Maryland, New York, and Oregon are also bringing Apps to their K-12 classrooms. All these governments are saving money while equipping their employees with modern collaboration tools that carry the assurance of federal government security certification.”
Wyoming: “Moving to one system for office technologies, including email, email encryption and security, instant messaging, groups, sites, calendar and video, will enable all state employees to easily communicate with each other, something that is not possible now. ‘The change to one email system will make communications better, faster and cheaper,’ said CIO Bob von Wolffradt. … ‘The economic impacts of migrating to a single system will result in $1 million of indirect savings annually, based on the 15 agencies not needing to own servers, licensing, and maintenance contracts or provide dedicated staff to manage the system internally,’ von Wolffradt explained. … Under a contract with Tempus Nova, the State of Wyoming will pay $5 million dollars to migrate e-mail systems to Google’s hosted email, security, e-discovery, encryption, and archive services and transition some 10,000 email accounts to the new services over the coming year.”
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Freelance Website Designer
That’s insane!!
Gerrit Eicker
Effectiveness: Social Media vs. eMail
What is the most effective way to spread messages online? Facebook? Twitter? Blog? IM? Bookmark? eMail? http://eicker.at/p
Gerrit Eicker
Living Online
Comprehensive TNS study on Digital Life: Discover how the world lives online; http://eicker.at/LivingOnline
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Gerrit Eicker
TNS: “The largest ever global research project into people’s online activities and behaviour – Digital Life – was launched today, ‘digital day’ by TNS, the world’s biggest custom research company. Covering nearly 90 per cent of the world’s online population through 50,000 interviews with consumers in 46 countries, the study reveals major changes in the world’s online behaviour. … ‘This study covers more than twice as many markets as any other research.’ said TNS Chief Development Officer Matthew Froggatt. ‘It is the first truly global research into online activities, including all the key emerging markets of the BRICs and many of the ‘Next 11′. We have also researched beyond basic behaviour to provide more detailed data into attitudes and emotional drivers of that behaviour.‘”
TNS Key Findings
Globally, people who have on-line access have digital sources as their number one media channel. 61% of online users use the internet daily against 54% for TV, 36% for Radio and 32% for Newspapers.
Online consumers in rapid growth markets have overtaken mature markets in terms of engaging with digital activities. When looking at behaviour online, rapid growth markets such as Egypt (56%) and China (54%) have much higher levels of digital engagement than mature markets such as Japan (20%), Denmark (25%) or Finland (26%). This is despite mature markets usually having a more advanced internet infrastructure.
Activities such as blogging and social networking are gaining momentum at huge speed in rapid growth markets. The research shows four out of five online users in China (88%) and over half of those in Brazil (51%) have written their own blog or forum entry, compared to only 32% in the US. The Internet has also become the default option for photo sharing among online users in rapid growth markets, particularly in Asia. The number of online consumers who have ever uploaded photos to social networks or photo sharing sites is 92% in Thailand, 88% in Malaysia and 87% in Vietnam, whilst developed markets are more conservative. Less than a third of online consumers in Japan (28%) and under half of those in Germany (48%) have uploaded photos to such sites.
Growth in social networking has been fuelled by the transition from PC to mobile. Mobile users spend on average 3.1 hours per week on social networking sites compared to just 2.2 hours on email. The drive to mobile is driven by the increased need for instant gratification and the ability of social networks to offer multiple messaging formats, including the instant message or update function. When looking at how the digital landscape will change in the future, research shows that consumers expect their use of social networking on mobiles to increase more than use through PC. In the US, for example, a quarter (26%) of online consumers expect their use of social networking on a PC to increase in the next 12 months compared to over a third (36%) who will be looking to their mobile to increase usage. In Australia the figures are 26% and 44% respectively, and in Sweden they are 28% and 53%.RWW: “The study was aimed to uncover how the world’s online behavior may be shifting, in terms of both consumption and communication. And among the findings were that online consumers in emerging, rapid growth markets are more engaged than those in mature markets, with Egypt and China, for example, having much higher levels of digital engagement than Japan, Denmark, or Finland.”
Gerrit Eicker
Shareable News
CNN, Pownar study: Ongoing stories, not breaking news, make content most shareable in social media; http://eicker.at/h
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Groups
Facebook gets social finally: renovates Facebook Groups which are closed by default; http://eicker.at/FacebookGroups
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “The biggest problem in social networking is helping you easily interact with your friends and share information in lots of different contexts. … We set out to build a solution that could help you map out all of your communities, that would be simple enough that everyone would use it and that would be deeply integrated across Facebook and applications so you can communicate with your different groups in lots of different ways. … Today we’re announcing a completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups. … The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what’s going on in a group. … We’ve built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information. … We’re launching a new dashboard to give you visibility into how applications use your data to personalize your experience. … We’ve heard loud and clear that you want more control over what you share on Facebook – to manage exactly who sees it and to understand exactly where it goes. With this new Groups experience and the other tools we’re rolling out today, we’re taking a few important steps forward towards giving you precise controls.”
Facebook: “When a group member posts to the group, everyone in the group will receive a notification about that post. … We’ve also added a bunch of new features to Groups to make sharing and communication with small groups of people easier. … You can also use Groups as a replacement for mailing lists by setting up your group to send an email to you anytime anyone posts in it. … You can also use the settings to create groups that have their name and members unlisted (‘Secret’), or create groups that have more public settings (‘Open’).”
NYT: “The move is an effort to address a longstanding problem: Facebook friends often span a broad range of relationships that include relatives, classmates, casual professional acquaintances or jogging partners – and not everyone wants all of them to see his or her information. … With the new feature, called Groups, Facebook hopes to encourage users to upload more photos, videos and other information to the site while giving them new ways to control who sees what. … Some privacy advocates welcomed Groups, but others worried that it would give Facebook even more information about users, which it could provide to marketers and others. … ‘We think about this stuff a lot,’ Mr. Zuckerberg said, referring to privacy. ‘Often people don’t think we think about it as much as we do.’ … Mr. Zuckerberg said he thought the system would police itself because everyone in the group would be notified when a new member joins and would flag someone who does not belong. But Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the new service ‘double-edged.’ ‘Yes, it’s good to be able to segment posts for particular friends,’ he said. ‘But you will also be revealing information to Facebook about the basis of your online connections.’”
RWW: “The creation of groups in any set of subscriptions, and that’s what your Facebook social graph is thanks to the News Feed, is a key way to offer users an option to change the signal to noise ratio of what they are reading moment-by-moment. … Focused conversations and collaboration in Groups will differ substantially from the old Facebook experience of undifferentiated broadcast. … Pete Warden: ‘I’m still worried that they’re taking the same approach to privacy that Microsoft takes to security. Their space-shuttle control panel approach is like having lots of noisy popups, people are confused and learn to ignore them. Far better if you can have a really simple story. Even with something as simple as open/closed for groups, it’s still too much for most people.‘”
SEL: “In a bid to give users more tools and control over the sharing of information (and perhaps preempt Google) Facebook introduced a new way to create and communicate with small private groups of people. Through an API this same functionality will be extended to publishers and third party developers like Facebook Connect is today. … The absence of easy ways to share information privately with smaller groups has been one of Facebook’s perceived vulnerabilities and a potential entry point and differentiator for a hypothetical ‘Google Me.’ … The new Groups offering is live now. It should very quickly become a hugely successful product for Facebook and will create further headaches for anyone (read Google) trying to exploit holes in Facebook’s products to better compete with them.”
SB: “I was also curious about whether Groups could be used for work-related purposes, say collaboration between a team in the office. Andrew Bosworth, the company’s director of engineering, said that once again, that’s not really what the Feature was designed for, but it could be used that way. In fact, he showed me that his team was using a Group to help coordinate the wider launch of Groups. … It does sound like Facebook executives think the social design principles behind Groups are part of what sets them part, and that the ‘algorithmic approach’ might be part of why Google’s social efforts like Buzz and Wave haven’t taken off.”
TC: “Groups have an icon, and a logo.’It’s mean to resemble a human space,’ head of product Chris Cox added. – Groups aren’t replacing Friend Lists, Zuckerberg says. He doesn’t see the value in deleting what people have already worked on – but going forward, Groups is going to be the way this social element is set up. – This is a big part of creating what Zuckerberg calls ‘a pristine graph.’”
NW: “Die geschlossenen Gruppen und das Einladungssystem leisten jener Polarisierung Vorschub, die im Internet mit den sozialen Medien ohnehin und namentlich in der bipolaren amerikanischen Politik als krassestes Beispiel zu beobachten ist. – Das ist eine 180-Grad Wende nicht des Gedankens von Facebook, aber seiner Wirkung. Denn erst durch Facebook und die Schmelztiegel-Wirkung, welche die einfache Abbildung der sozialen Verbindungen mit sich brachte, sind Einblicke in Ansichten und Lebensumstände anderer Menschen entstanden, die wir vorher nicht hatten: Durch die undifferenzierte Publikation der Nachrichten und Infos im Newsstream kriegte man auch jene Seiten aus dem Leben der andern mit, die man im Gesangsverein oder in der lokalen Partei eben nicht zu Gesicht kriegte. Die vermeintlich oberflächlichen Beziehungen auf Facebook sorgten in Tat und Wahrheit für ungewohnte Annäherungen. - Diese Einsichten und Einblicke könnten durch die neuen Gruppen weggewischt werden. Denn mit dem komplexen Gefüge der realen sozialen Beziehungen hält auf Facebook auch die Segregation der Meinungen wieder Einzug.“
Seligstein, Facebook: “Today I’m excited to announce the next evolution of Messages. You decide how you want to talk to your friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages. They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn’t have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message. – We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they’re on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation. … Relatively soon, we’ll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other. We will just select friends by name and be able to share with them instantly. We aren’t there yet, but the changes today are a small first step. – We’ll be launching Messages and email addresses gradually and making it available to everyone over the next few months. Once you receive an invitation, you’ll be able to get started and also invite your friends to join you.”
Facebook Messages: “Messages has always been the place for private exchanges on Facebook, and this won’t change. With the new Messages, now you have easy access to all your private conversations with your friends in one place. – The new Messages interface not only displays the Facebook messages you exchange with friends, but it also interweaves your chats, texts and emails (should you choose to create an @facebook.com address). It’s a central place to control all of your private communication, both on and off Facebook: faster interaction, integrated communication, smart filtering, revamped search, adding people to group conversations, forwarding, unsubscribing, or removing yourself from a conversation, sending attachments … Unlike traditional messaging systems, where you have no control over who can message you once someone has your contact information, Facebook Messages lets you decide how you connect with friends and the people around you. … By default, anyone on Facebook can send you a message, and if you set up a Facebook email address, anyone outside of Facebook can send you email. Email from friends and their friends goes directly to your main Messages folder, and everything else goes to the Other folder within your Messages.
IF: “Regardless of where the message is delivered, it will appear in the thread which notifications lead back to. Users can trigger through the interface whether they want the message to be sent to a specific medium of a friend, such as SMS to their phone. Otherwise, it will be routed automatically. For instance, if a user is online when they’re sent a message, they’ll receive it as a Chat. … As for security, instead of relying on a ‘security by obscurity’ method of inbox privacy, users will have control of who can send them messages. They can change their privacy settings to bounce back messages from those they don’t want to receive messages from. … CEO Mark Zuckerberg says this is not a Gmail killer, and that Facebook doesn’t expect people to immediately switch all their email to the product.”
TC: “Facebook has created three key things: Seamless messaging, conversation history, and a social inbox. Essentially, they’ve created a way to communicate no matter what format you want to use: email, chat, SMS – they’re all included. ‘People should share however they want to share,’ engineer Andrew Bosworth said. – All of this messaging is kept in a single social inbox. And all of your conversation history with people is kept. … Right now, this system is merging four main things: SMS, IM, email, and Facebook messages. Zuckerberg said that they’d consider other tech, like VoIP in the future. But right now this is mainly about consolidating text-based messages.”
TNW: “Facebook is not calling this an email killer, it is ‘a messaging system that uses email.’ Facebook also does not anticipate people leaving their regular email accounts. However, the company does seem to anticipate that people over time will switch over more and more to Facebook messaging. Oh, and kids who get on Facebook before email? Who else wants to bet that they never get a normal webmail account?”
AF: “Zuckerberg: ‘All of this will enable simple, real-time messaging. We are also launching the ‘social inbox’. Since you have entered your friends lists and your friends have entered their friends lists, we can do some extremely effective filtering for you. While there are existing systems that filter out junk, there are various types of junk. Up until now, the primary way to handle messaging is through the development of white lists. At Facebook, you get that automatically. Not only do you get that, but you also can get messages filtered from people who are ‘friends of your friends’. The default experience is ‘high signal’ messages that are really personal to you, and then we can have another inbox which is for the lower signal content. … We want it to have IMAP support. It already speaks email protocol, however having it sync with other email systems is on the roadmap.‘”
RWW: “Zuckerberg tells an anecdote about his girlfriend’s sister – a high-schooler. Conversations with high-schoolers ‘make me feel old.’ High-schoolers say ‘we don’t use email. It’s too slow.’ … Will there be ads? The advertising will look the same as it does in the rest of Facebook. Zuckerberg says there’s a ‘huge difference’ between Facebook’s ad system and others. … Are you capturing the information about non-Facebook users? ‘Yes, in some way we do that,’ says Zuckerberg.”
TC: “Again, if you extrapolate that out, that means the end of email. It sounds as if Zuckerberg is just tip-toeing around calling for the death of a system that a lot of people currently use. Obviously, such a claim would cause a huge uproar (considering that there’s a huge uproar when Facebook changes a font size, the idea of Zuckerberg calling for the death of email is truly terrifying). – He also specifically talked about posts like ours calling this new system a ‘Gmail-killer’. ‘I think Gmail is a really good product,’ Zuckerberg said. But again, he’s essentially saying that it’s a good product that future generations are using less and less.”
TNW: “The fact of the matter is this, from where I’m looking: What Facebook did today could easily be done in Gmail with 3 Gmail Labs plugins. Oh, and then I don’t have to move over to Facebook. … Further, from the demonstration that we saw on stage, it’s simply real-time chat. That sounds suspiciously like a trimmed-down version of Google Wave, to us. Maybe Google was a bit too hasty in killing the Wave, after all? … In all, what Facebook announced today, again just appears to be a polished version of Google products… but with fewer options. If you’re already a heavy Facebook user, then maybe it’s a good thing for you. If you’re not, though, it’s likely a change that will be far too much of a pain in the tail to use… especially if you’re coming from Gmail.”