Facebook Timeline
Facebook’s Timeline: the story of our lives – and the perfect emotional advertising base; http://eicker.at/FacebookTimeline
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Gerrit Eicker
#NymWars
Google Plus‘ identity crises led to #PlusGate and escalated to a war for pseudonymity: #NymWars; http://eicker.at/NymWars
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Gerrit Eicker
Guardian: “Google Plus forces us to discuss identity – Google’s Real Name policy embodies a theory that states the way to maximise civility is to abolish anonymity. … Google Plus’s controversial identity policy requires all users to use their ‘real names’. … [P]roblems include the absurdity of Google’s demand for scans of government ID to accomplish this task and the fractal implausibility of Google being able to discern real from fake in all forms of government ID. … The first duty of social software is to improve its users’ social experience. Facebook’s longstanding demand that its users should only have one identity is either a toweringly arrogant willingness to harm people’s social experience in service to doctrine; or it is a miniature figleaf covering a huge, throbbing passion for making it easier to sell our identities to advertisers. – Google has adopted the Facebook doctrine… There could be no stupider moment for Google to subscribe to the gospel of Zuckerberg, and there is no better time for Google to show us an alternative.”
Gizmodo: “Google, Facebook and Twitter now all have similar products. But Twitter CEO Dick Costolo (somewhat inadvertently) made it clear yesterday that while all three have social networking features and make money from ads, they are in fundamentally different businesses. – At a very basic level, Google+ and Facebook are in the identity delivery business, and Twitter is in the information delivery business. That’s a powerful distinction. It reflects a fundamentally different conception of what’s more valuable: information or identity. It also gets at who is more valuable, advertisers or users. – Google and Facebook’s social products are committed to a real names policy. Both can serve someone up to a network of peers or advertisers with some degree of certainty about identity. – Twitter takes exactly the opposite route towards building a network. You can be anonymous, or use a pseudonym, or even impersonate someone else (as long as you indicate that it’s a parody). It will still connect you to others on its network, and allow you to both serve and receive data. And that’s working well, for everybody.”
SEW: “There has been a lot of speculation about why the push for real names on Facebook and now Google, with Google taking a much harder line than even Facebook, not allowing for even the simplest derivation of ‘nyms’ (pseudonyms). … Why is a company like Google taking such a hard line on something as simple as a name – even though there is no verification process for the ‘real name,’ so ultimately this policing is currently meaningless. … Google’s ambitions for Google+ appear to go far beyond social signals, marketing, and their efforts to make a better product. Dig a little further and you’ll find something called the ‘National Strategy For Trusted Identities In Cyberspace‘ (NSTIC). … A way to establish identity was never invented, so one needs to be. The difference is that companies will hold the real IDs, rather than the government – companies with ‘identity services,’ such as Google. … Maybe we have a new wrinkle in the reason behind the real ID movement, not the betterment of services for Google, but the government initiative into a real online ID system. … Real ID systems should be of concern to anyone who believes in the Bill of Rights and our freedom of speech and to not incriminate ourselves – to live a life that isn’t monitored by entities, ‘private’ or not. Is Google part of this? You have to be the judge.”
Boyle: “Thoughts on rel=author, #nymwars, ‘identity service’ – Over the past month or so, the ‘nymwars’ have become the thing Google+ is most known for among my circle of friends. This is a problem of Google’s own making: they are suspending profiles based on naive heuristics about ‘real names’ (actually typical two part western names), and demanding government ID to reinstate them. … This is not an effective defence against trolls as was initially claimed; they’re more concerned with ideas about G+ as an ‘identity service’ and a way to ‘improve our products’ than about the wishes of their users or the fact that they’re perpetuating the exclusion of minorities. … I recommend linking together your profile pages on other sites, rather than only linking everything to your Google profile. … [D]on’t just do what’s on the left here, because all those associations will be lost when your G+ profile is taken down. If you do something more like what’s on the right, other identity services / social networks and other search engines will have a better chance of presenting what you want them to present.”
Gartner, Blakley: “Google+ Can Be A Social Network Or The Name Police – Not Both – Google is currently trying to enforce a ‘common name’ policy in Google+. The gist of the policy is that ‘your Google+ name must be ‘THE’ name by which you are commonly known’. – This policy is insane. I really mean insane; the policy is simply completely divorced from the reality of how names really work AND the reality of how humans really work, and it’s also completely at odds with what Google is trying to achieve with G+. … A name is not an attribute of a person; it is an identifier of a person, chosen arbitrarily and changeable at will. … Google+’s naming policy isn’t failing because it’s poorly implemented, or because Google’s enforcement team is stupid. It’s failing because what they’re trying to do is (1) impossible, and (2) antisocial. … Google’s intention in moving into social networking is to sell ads, Google+’s common names policy gives them a lock on the North American suburban middle-aged conservative white male demographic. w00t.”
Botgirl: “Ejecting virtually identified people with active social networks shows that Google sees online relationships as illegitimate. When Google ejects you for using virtual identity it not only disrespects your privacy choice, but also the choices of everyone who circles you. Shunning the pseudonymous makes intolerance a community standard. – Today, most of the privacy we relinquish is volitional. But If we lose the Nymwars we all become permanent residents in a global Big Brother reality house. The expression of identity is multidimensional, aspects emerging and submerging in a fluid dance with the changing environment. … It’s ironic that those calling for authenticity want to make all the world a stage and cast us all as full-time unpaid actors.”
GigaOM: “Can gamification help solve the online anonymity problem? – There’s been a lot written recently about the issue of online anonymity, and in particular how Google believes that a ‘real names’ policy is necessary so that the Google+ network maintains a certain tone and level of trust. … It’s not so much that badges or other rewards – Slashdot, a pioneering geek community, has long used ‘karma points’ as a way of rewarding users and selecting moderators – cure bad behavior, or prevent trolls from coming to a site. What they do instead is make it easier to distinguish between what Slashdot calls ‘anonymous cowards’ and those who have gained the trust of the community. Over time, it becomes obvious (theoretically) who is worth listening to and who isn’t… Instead of simply trying to ban or exclude anyone who doesn’t want to use a real name, as Google is doing with Google+, why not try to design a system that rewards the type of behavior you want to see, and lets the users of that community decide who they wish to pay attention to?“
Gerrit Eicker
Education Gamification
Donahoo: Gamification in education; http://eicker.at/2l vs. Bogost: Gamification is bullshit; http://eicker.at/2m
Gerrit Eicker
Gartner Hype Cycle: Technologies 2011
Gartner Hype Cycle: eReaders, mobile apps, predictive analytics mainstream adopted soon; http://eicker.at/HypeCycle2011
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Gerrit Eicker
Gartner: “‘The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report is the longest-running annual Hype Cycle, providing a cross-industry perspective on the technologies and trends that IT managers should consider in developing emerging-technology portfolios… ‘Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies‘ targets strategic planning, innovation and emerging technology professionals by highlighting a set of technologies that will have broad-ranging impact across the business,’ said Jackie Fenn, vice president and Gartner fellow. ‘It is the broadest aggregate Gartner Hype Cycle, featuring technologies that are the focus of attention because of particularly high levels of hype, or those that may not be broadly acknowledged but that Gartner believes have the potential for significant impact.’ – ‘Themes from this year’s Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle include ongoing interest and activity in social media, cloud computing and mobile,’ Ms. Fenn said. ‘On the social media side, social analytics, activity streams and a new entry for group buying are close to the peak, showing that the era of sky-high valuations for Web 2.0 startups is not yet over. Private cloud computing has taken over from more-general cloud computing at the top of the peak, while cloud/Web platforms have fallen toward the Trough of Disillusionment since 2010. Mobile technologies continue to be part of most of our clients’ short- and long-range plans and are present on this Hype Cycle in the form of media tablets, NFC payments, quick response (QR)/color codes, mobile application stores and location-aware applications.’ – Transformational technologies that will hit the mainstream in less than five years include highly visible areas, such as media tablets and cloud computing, as well as some that are more IT-specific, such as in-memory database management systems, big data, and extreme information processing and management. In the long term, beyond the five-year horizon, 3D printing, context-enriched services, the ‘Internet of Things’ (called the ‘real-world Web’ in earlier Gartner research), Internet TV and natural language question answering will be major technology forces. Looking more than 10 years out, 3D bioprinting, human augmentation, mobile robots and quantum computing will also drive transformational change in the potential of IT.”
Gartner: “Many of the technologies featured on this Hype Cycle contribute to the four themes featured in Gartner’s recent report on top technology trends ‘Technology Trends That Matter’. – The connected world: Advances in embedded sensors, processing and wireless connectivity are bringing the power of the digital world to objects and places in the physical world. This is a slow-moving area, but one that is now accelerating with the growing pervasiveness of low-cost, embedded sensors and cameras. Relevant entries on this year’s Hype Cycle include the broad trend referred to as the Internet of Things; identification technologies, such as NFC payments (which will lead to broader use of NFC for other applications); QR/color code and image recognition; application layers, such as augmented reality, context-enriched services and location-aware applications; and communication technologies, such as machine-to-machine communication services and sensor mesh networks. Although this area will take at least another decade to unfold fully, many interesting and profitable opportunities will arise along the way. – Interface trends: User interfaces are another slow-moving area with significant recent activity. Speech recognition was on the original 1995 Hype Cycle and has still not reached maturity, and computer-brain interfaces will evolve for at least another 10 years before moving out of research and niche status. However, a new entry for natural language question answering recognizes the impressive and highly visible achievement of IBM’s Watson computer in winning TV’s Jeopardy! general knowledge quiz against champion human opponents. Gesture recognition has also been launched into the mainstream through Microsoft’s Kinect gaming systems, which is now being hacked by third parties to create a range of application interfaces. Other areas continue to progress more slowly, including speech-to-speech translation, augmented reality and virtual assistants, while virtual worlds remain entrenched in the trough after peaking in 2007. – Analytical advances: Supporting the storage and manipulation of raw data to derive greater value and insight, these technologies continue to grow in capability and applicability. Predictive analytics is approaching maturity, but researchers and developers continue to apply and improve the core techniques for new data sources. Image recognition is driving new capabilities in search, retail and social media, and also contributes to advances in other areas, such as augmented reality and video analytics, for customer service. Social analytics continues to take advantage of new sources and types of social information. Computational advances, such as in-memory database management systems and big data, take the scope and scale to new levels. – New digital frontiers: Crossing the traditional boundaries of IT, new capabilities are reaching levels of performance and pricing that will fundamentally reshape processes and even industries. Examples on this year’s Hype Cycle include 3D printing and bioprinting (of human tissue), and mobile robots.”
Gerrit Eicker
2D Codes Adoption
2D codes, like barcodes or QR codes, are adopted fast: 14M Americans scanned codes in June 2011; http://eicker.at/2Dcodes
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Gerrit Eicker
Wikipedia: “A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows data about the object to which it attaches. Originally, barcodes represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1 dimensional (1D). Later they evolved into rectangles, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns in 2 dimensions (2D). Although 2D systems use a variety of symbols, they are generally referred to as barcodes as well. Barcodes originally were scanned by special optical scanners called barcode readers, scanners and interpretive software are available on devices including desktop printers and smartphones.”
Wikipedia: “A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is a specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) that is readable by dedicated QR readers, smartphones, and, to a less common extent, computers with webcams. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded may be text, URL, or other data. Common in Japan, where it was created by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave in 1994, the QR code is one of the most popular types of two-dimensional barcodes. The QR code was designed to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.”
ComScore: “…found that in June 2011, 14 million mobile users in the U.S., representing 6.2 percent of the total mobile audience, scanned a QR or bar code on their mobile device. The study found that a mobile user that scanned a QR or bar code during the month was more likely to be male (60.5 percent of code scanning audience), skew toward ages 18-34 (53.4 percent) and have a household income of $100k or above (36.1 percent). … ‘QR codes demonstrate just one of the ways in which mobile marketing can effectively be integrated into existing media and marketing campaigns to help reach desired consumer segments,’ said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile. ‘For marketers, understanding which consumer segments scan QR codes, the source and location of these scans, and the resulting information delivered, is crucial in developing and deploying campaigns that successfully utilize QR codes to further brand engagement.’”
VB: “What this means for marketers and other decision-makers today is that QR codes, while rapidly evolving and gaining in adoption, are still far from being a mainstream technology. As a tool for reaching a diverse audience for a range of goods and services, QR codes have not yet arrived. Nevertheless, their popularity is growing rapidly – one report from QR company Jumpscan estimates a 1200% increase in QR code scanning during the last six months of 2010. … Around 58 percent of scans occurred while users were at home, with an additional 40 percent of users saying they scanned codes while in retail stores. As previously mentioned, traditional magazines and newspapers led the pack of QR code sources, coming in at 49.4 percent of user responses. Around 35 percent of respondents said they scanned codes on product packaging.”
RWW: “[I]t is still very early in the adoption of technologies capable of reading QR codes. This June, smartphone adoption in the U.S. was up 8% over the preceding three months, but there are still 155 million American mobile phone users who don’t have smartphones at all. The number of people unable to scan QR codes is more than 10 times the number of QR code users in comScore’s data. It’s still very early to draw conclusions about how this technology will impact the Web and its users.”
SPR: “I’m not saying don’t use QR Codes. There are a variety of applications where an element of utility, instant gratification or discovery makes perfect sense and a QR Code can be the best path to that goal – assuming your audience falls into the smart phone user/scanner profile. Don’t forget to track and analyze how the codes are being used.”
AdAge: “The spread of 2-D barcodes and icons through magazines hasn’t been matched by independent data on whether readers actually use them – until now. – Four percent of readers who noted ads with 2-D barcodes in the first half of this year actually took out their phones and snapped a picture at least once, new research from GfK MRI Starch Advertising Research has revealed. … Here are the best-performing magazine ads with 2-D barcodes in the first half of this year.”
HAD: “How to put your logo in a QR code – I’ll fully admit I geeked out a little, but in the process I figured out some of the theory behind embedding logos in QR codes. … For this ‘how-to,’ I’m going to walk through the process of modifying a Version 6 QR code.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Games Launched
Google: Today we’re adding games to Google+. The stream will remain focused on conversations; http://eicker.at/PlusGames
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Gerrit Eicker
Learnings: Games have a higher priority than business (profiles) and have definitely been on the agenda before G+’s launch. They even have a higher priority than usability fixes to the +Stream, +Notifications, +Circles. Well…
Google: “Today we’re adding games to Google+. With the Google+ project, we want to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to the web. But sharing is about more than just conversations. The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life. – [G]iving you control over when you see games, how you play them and with whom you share your experiences. Games in Google+ are there when you want them and gone when you don’t. … If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.”
GigaOM: “The first titles include Angry Birds from Rovio, Bejeweled Blitz from PopCap and most notably Zynga Poker from longtime Facebook game developer Zynga, which is preparing to go public. … The move ratchets up the competition with Facebook and gives Facebook game developers a new opportunity. Some have felt that Facebook has played favorites with Zynga, which is by far the largest developer on Facebook. Now this will give them more leverage in dealing with Facebook and another place to make some money. Google+ won’t have top Zynga titles like Cityville and Farmville because they’re exclusive to Facebook but it does show that Zynga is further branching out apart from Facebook. … I don’t know how big a deal that is, since Facebook has clamped down on some of the game notifications you see. But it’s one way that Google is trying to stand out.”
RWW: “Games are an important feature for a social network that wants to compete with Facebook for users’ attention, not to mention its gaming business. … The battle for game developer attention is likely to be heated. Tricia Duryee reported late last month at All Things D that multiple sources told her Google would try to undercut Facebook by charging developers a lower fee for things like in-app sales. – Mike Swift, a writer at the San Jose Mercury News (Silicon Valley’s paper of record), says that Facebook has already issued a call for a press conference on the topic of gaming tomorrow.”
VB: “Zynga has built its business on social games on Facebook, and it currently has more than 250 million monthly active users, according to AppData. The company has been so successful that it recently filed to go public and raise up to $1 billion, and it made $90 million in income last year. Part of Zynga’s success comes from its ability to promote games virally through notifications – something Google appears to be shying away from.“
Gerrit Eicker
My Name Is Me
#MyNameIsMe: We want people to be able to identify themselves as they wish; http://eicker.at/MyNameIsMe #PlusGate
Gerrit Eicker
Accenture Gamification
Case study: Accenture‘s social adoption driven by gamification; http://eicker.at/AccentureGamification (via @tailorable)
Gerrit Eicker
Virtual Worlds Census
KZero: The virtual worlds sector has 1.4 billion cumulative registered accounts in Q2/2011; http://eicker.at/VWcensus
Gerrit Eicker
Virtual Office
McAfee: The definition of workplace changes, dramatic increases in productivity could be ahead; http://eicker.at/VirtualOffice
Gerrit Eicker 11:02 on 23. September 2011 Permalink |
Facebook: “Introducing Timeline – Tell your life story with a new kind of profile.”
Facebook: “Since the beginning of Facebook, your profile has been the place where you tell your story. … Over time, your profile evolved to better reflect how you actually communicate with your friends. Now you can can share photos of what you did last weekend, and updates about how you feel today. … Imagine if there was an easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect all your best moments in a single place. – With timeline, now you have a home for all the great stories you’ve already shared. They don’t just vanish as you add new stuff. … Timeline is wider than your old profile, and it’s a lot more visual. The first thing you’ll notice is the giant photo right at the top. This is your cover, and it’s completely up to you which of your photos you put here. … If important parts of your story aren’t included on your timeline, you can go back to when they happened and add them. – Or go to your private activity log. This is where you’ll find everything you shared since you joined Facebook. Click on any post to feature it on your timeline so your friends can see it, too. … Now, you and your friends will finally be able to tell all the different parts of your story – from the small things you do each day to your biggest moments. What will you create? We can’t wait to find out.”
RWW: “The biggest announcement at Facebook’s f8 event in San Francisco today was a radical new profile design. Called Timeline, the new design turns your profile into a colorful, easily searchable timeline of your entire life – at least the parts of it on Facebook. The Timeline won’t go live until a few weeks, but you can set it up as a developer preview by following these instructions. This is a ‘Developer Release‘ version of Timeline, so it may be a little buggy.”
GigaOM: “‘Timeline is a completely new aesthetic for Facebook,’ Zuckerberg said. … Timeline and all its features will be viewable from any type of mobile device, Zuckerberg said, which may indicate the app is built with HTML5. … The new interface is aimed at making it much easier to get a full picture of a person by seeing more about them than just their most recent updates, Zuckerberg said. … Each user can customize his or her own Timeline, which will make each individual profile more personalized than Facebook profiles have been in the past. … Users often grumble about even the smallest of changes Facebook makes to its interface, so it will certainly be interesting to watch how the response to Timeline plays out.”
pC: “The Timeline redesign will likely be jarring to Facebook’s famously change-averse users, but Zuckerberg and Facebook director of product management Chris Cox said that the idea was to allow people to create virtual scrapbooks of their lives through Facebook. Users will be able to sort their Timelines by certain pieces of content, such as clicking on button that will display all the photos taken of you in the last year. The new Timeline will be rolling out over the next several weeks, and it will be the home for a new set of social applications.”
Mashable: “Timeline, a major re-imagining of user profiles that allows users to build what’s essentially a visual scrapbook of everything they’ve done on the site. – CEO Mark Zuckeberg showed off the new features in his keynote at the company’s f8 conference. It algorithmically organizes everything you’ve done on Facebook — from post photos to change relationship status to check in – and also allows users to fill out a ‘Way Back’ section to add details that are omitted or pre-date the social network.”
Mashable: “The Evolution of the Facebook Profile in pictures…”
TC: “Trying to display all of this content was a major design challenge, Zuckerberg noted. How do you do it all on a single page? Well, all of your recent content is shown in a new grid-view. But as you go back in time, it’s more about summarizing your content to display the most important content. The farther back you go, the less you see – it’s just the key moments. ‘This is the magic of how Timeline works,’ Zuckerberg said.”
pC: “The recent consumer trend has, indeed, been toward more personal sharing and transparency. And Facebook has been working to improve privacy controls around that. But there are also some folks growing unsettled by Zuckerberg’s share-everything mantra, wondering whether Facebook ever stops to question the inevitability of the movement. And are we already witnessing the first few signs of consumers’ social networking fatigue?”
Mashable: “Facebook Timeline sounds like a good idea. It’s your life, organized and summarized for public consumption – or as public as you want to make it. … I don’t know if anyone is ready to trust Facebook’s algorithm to decide what to show and hide as the Timeline grows. Up top is full of minutiae. Down below, it’s an outline. But what Facebook deems important: – a birth, first steps, new job – may only be the highlights… With Timeline, and to a certain extent Open Graph, Mark Zuckerberg is once again racing forward to the next big thing. Let’s hope that he doesn’t inadvertently leave his users behind.”
GigaOM: “Now Facebook isn’t doing this just to help us cherish our memories. The more data it has and the more it understands what has emotional meaning to us, the better it can target us with ads. By letting us preserve the things, activities and apps that matter to us, it gives Facebook an even better way to tailor ads that demand a higher rate from advertisers. … But Timelines can also be an opportunity to create recommendation tools for users to suggest products they might like based on their tastes and interests. … Perhaps most fundamentally for Facebook, Timeline will give people a new reason to go into oversharing mode. … This move to organize past activity is increasingly what Facebook needs to do, I think, as it exploits the opportunities in its own timeline. It is further exploring the opportunities in the future, by helping people better discover what to do from their friends.”
TC: “How To Enable Facebook Timeline Right This Second – Fortunately, enabling Timeline a bit early isn’t too difficult – but it’s not at all straight forward, either. … You probably don’t want to do this unless you’re actually a developer. Expect bugs. … Here’s how to do it…“