Tagged: Microblogging RSS
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
50+ Goes Social Media
Pew: Social media use among internet users ages 50+ nearly doubled, from 22% to 42% within one year; http://j.mp/duy1in
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Gerrit Eicker
Dear Internet, We Have Diaspora Working
Diaspora is on track to launch the 1st open source version of its social network on 15th September; http://j.mp/bEcrHD
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Gerrit Eicker
Microblogging vs. Blogging
Carr: Switching back from micro- to blogging is as ridiculous as from IMing to letter-writing; http://j.mp/daPdxr
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Gerrit Eicker
Internal Microblogging
Does microblogging lead to a better employee retention? http://j.mp/9X5G4J
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Gerrit Eicker
Wave Over
Google: Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We do not continue developing Wave; http://j.mp/cogIlP
Gerrit Eicker
Buzz Monitoring
The issue of measuring the effectiveness of social, and understanding how to make real use of it; http://j.mp/caMUYz
Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Harvard Business Manager: “Acht Studenten der Hochschule Furtwangen wagten ein Experiment: Sie verzichteten eine Woche komplett auf Internet und Handy. Ihre Erfahrungen sind sehr spannend – und auch für Manager interessant. Denn der Kommunikationsstil der Generation Y wird die Arbeitswelt verändern. … [Aus dem Erfahrungsbericht] Weil ich nicht weiß, worüber die Freunde sprechen, fühle ich mich total isoliert. Seit Tagen lebe ich mit dem Gefühl, ständig etwas zu verpassen. … Am frühen Abend schaue ich seit Langem einmal wieder fern. Ich bin entsetzt über das, was mir geboten wird. … Ich glaube, Internet und Handys nehmen uns allen die Geduld. … Eine Zeit lang nicht erreichbar zu sein, ist irgendwie auch ein gutes Gefühl. Ich hatte selten so viel Zeit und Ruhe. … Ich schlafe schnell ein und träume von Facebook und wie ich mit Freunden chatte. Mir wird schnell klar, dass ich etwas Verbotenes tue, schließlich habe ich eine Erklärung unterschrieben. Ich habe im Traum ein schlechtes Gewissen. Dass es so was gibt? … Eltern sollten verstehen, wie ihre Kinder in diesem Alter kommunizieren. Dasselbe gilt für Manager. Auch sie sollten das Kommunikationsverhalten ihrer jüngeren Mitarbeiter kennen. Das ist für die künftige Gestaltung der Arbeitswelt enorm wichtig – auch unabhängig davon, was das am Ende konkret bedeuten mag.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Knüwer: “Im analogen Zeitalter war unser Leben digitaler. Also, bildlich gesprochen. – Denn vor der Zeit des Internet und der Computer bestanden unsere Verbindungen zu Menschen praktisch nur aus 1 (Freund) oder 0 (keine Verbindung). Dazwischen gab es kaum etwas. Wir pflegten unsere starken Bindungen zu unseren besten Freunden, der engen Verwandtschaft, der Familie. … Das Internet, vor allem Social Media, verändert diese Situation. Verbindungen können nun – auch wenn das schrecklich unmenschlich klingt – graduell aufrecht erhalten werden. Schwache Kontakte zu halten wird überhaupt erst möglich. … Ersetzt dies ein persönliches Gespräch, ein Treffen zum Abendessen, einen gemeinsamen Nachmittag? Nein. Das will auch niemand. Aber: Diese intensive Kommunikation ist eben für jene starken Verbindungen vorenthalten – ganz so, wie bisher. … Dieses Medienverhalten ist keine Sache ‘von jungen Leuten’, das sich erst ‘in einigen Jahren’ durchsetzen wird – es ist heute Realität. … Die Welt wird – so gutmenschesk das auch klingt – besser. … Jene schwachen Verbindungen [sind] keine Blase – sondern eine reale Veränderung in der Gesellschaft.“
Gerrit Eicker
77 Months: 500 Million Facebookers
Zuckerberg: 500 million people all around the world are actively using Facebook to stay connected; http://j.mp/cKxcd3
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Gerrit Eicker
Zuckerberg: “As of this morning, 500 million people all around the world are actively using Facebook to stay connected with their friends and the people around them. – This is an important milestone for all of you who have helped spread Facebook around the world. Now a lot more people have the opportunity to stay connected with the people they care about. … Our mission at Facebook is to help make the world more open and connected. Stories like these are examples of that mission and are both humbling and inspiring. I could have never imagined all of the ways people would use Facebook when we were getting started 6 years ago.”
Facebook stories: “Facebook is all about the individual and collective experiences of you and your friends. It’s filled with hundreds of millions of stories. Which ones inspire you? What’s your Facebook story?”
TC: “To put it in perspective: it was only five and a half months ago when Facebook celebrated its sixth birthday and hit 400 million active users – about as long as it took them to go from 300 million to 400 million. Does that mean Facebook will grow to 600 million members by the end of the year, or could it possibly be peaking? – Zuckerberg is actually quite confident they’ll hit 1 billion active users at some point – just last month, at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, he argued that it is ‘almost a guarantee that it will happen‘.”
VB: “The next 500 million will be an altogether different challenge. Facebook is running up against the sheer population limits of potential users in the developed world. To maintain its growth pace, it’s making an aggressive push via mobile phones into emerging markets where millions of people have only just begun to access the web through these devices. Here’s a run-down of its strategy to get to its first billion users.”
RWW: “Children growing up today don’t remember a time before Facebook – and that’s both scary and fascinating. Future generations will be more and more accepting of sharing their lives on the Internet, which has its obvious pros and cons. At the other end of the spectrum, when my generation grows old and wants to look back on our lives, we won’t need an old crusty photo album. We will simply use whatever popular device at the time that lets us flip through our life’s history as aggregated from decades of social sharing. Facebook has been at the forefront of paving the way for that future. – It has taken 77 months for Facebook to go from 0 to 500 million and the company shows little sign of slowing, even with many leaving the network over privacy issues. The truth is, there is no viable alternative yet, but perhaps Google or those four students from N.Y.U. can change that.”
Gerrit Eicker
Social Media
Kagan: What the F**k is Social Media NOW? http://j.mp/b8lCsN (via @Mark_Zimmermann)
(More …)
Gerrit Eicker 07:15 on 5. August 2010 Permalink |
Google: “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily ‘liberate’ their content from Wave. – Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.”
TC: “Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave.”
VB: “The announcement isn’t a huge surprise, given the tepid response to Wave as a product (as opposed to the hype that greeted its announcement). … Google has cancelled plenty of products before, but this feels like a particular letdown because it had built up Wave so much. … Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra described Wave as reinventing email, reinventing document collaboration, even reinventing communication. That kind of ambitious talk swept along a lot of fans (including me), but it crashed against the reality of Wave’s early product, which was both buggy and difficult to understand.”
SEL: “Google could potentially have simplified Wave and scaled it back, or focused it on fewer core features. And Google also probably needed to do some more outreach and education around the product. – Google has historically been reluctant to favor products or promote them, preferring instead to let them sink or swim on their own. Google’s philosophy surrounding new products is not unlike what happens when sea turtles hatch on the beach: those that gain adoption organically make it back to the water and live. Those that cannot or are intercepted by predators don’t. – Google Wave obviously didn’t make it back into the sea.”
NYT: “Wave had so many different features that it confused many users, who never figured out how it worked. Wave also has several competitors, ranging from Salesforce’s Chatter to Jive. – One of Wave’s major ideas – that the browser is replacing the desktop computer as the center of people’s computing lives – lives on at Google and is the central tenet of its Web-based Chrome operating system.”
RWW: “Why did Wave fail? Maybe because if you don’t call it an ‘email-killer’ (and you shouldn’t) then you’d have to call it a ‘product, platform and protocol for distributed, real time, app-augmented collaboration.’ That’s daunting and proved accessible to too few people. Still, with a rumored 100 Google engineers working on Wave to date, a call from Google for more engineering collaboration less than a month ago, and such high hopes – it’s a bit of a shock to see it come to an end. … Proponents of the service say it wasn’t that complicated and was remarkably powerful. Maybe this failure should be chalked up as another example of how Google ‘doesn’t get social’ in terms of user experience or successful evangelism. After an immediate explosion of hype, it never felt like Google was really trying very hard with Wave.”
TC: “When BBC reporter Maggie Shiels asked about the reasons behind the product’s demise, Schmidt noted that Google liked the UI and a lot of the technology behind the product, but it simply to take off. ‘We try things,’ [Google CEO Eric Schmidt] said. ‘Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it’s absolutely okay to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that,’ he continued.”
Gerrit Eicker 10:21 on 5. August 2010 Permalink |
Some additional thoughts from a conversation with Sam Liban (@FlightMemory):
@eicker “I think RWW is right: ‘Google ‘doesn’t get social’ in terms of user experience or successful evangelism’.”
@FlightMemory “Actually, the ‘social’ aspect (Orkut) is really a bug for Google. Maybe its just the size? But Wave was/is a neat tool. Well…”
@eicker “Without being arrogant: Wave was a great tool for us. But Wave has never been a great tool for ‘regular onliners’. Not yet. – To understand the power of Wave, you need deep understanding of concepts like wikis, IM, ‘new communications’. – Google designed a tool for 0.1% of the market. BTW: Google Buzz is facing the same problem. – And the core problem: Google is really, really bad in marketing and communications.”
@FlightMemory “Is it not always the case, that there is a gap between early adopters and ‘normal users’? I mean, look at fb, twitter and so forth. – Buzz is a clone. Clones are hard. Wave was innovation, but too high expectations by Google and media? Early adopters loved it.”
@eicker “True, but it’s not enough to have a great tool and a brilliant GUI. People need a purpose first. A problem the tool can solve. – That’s why you need to have faced the problems of wikis, IMs, eMails first to understand what Wave gives to you.”
@FlightMemory “Yes, purpose/use-case is important. But some apps develop the use case after they been launched. Could have happened with Wave… – You do remember, Twitter was a txt/sms service at start? :-) Apps can change their purpose once used.”
@eicker “The purpose is communications. And eMail works *great* for 99% of regular onliners…”
@Flightmemory “True, but 1% drives the net…”
Gerrit Eicker 11:16 on 5. August 2010 Permalink |
Guardian: “Like most people, you’ve probably heard of [Wave] but not actually tried it, which sums up the problem. What was it? The Wave idea was a centralised communications tool that combined the real-time advantages of Twitter with the aggregation of your email and chat, with collaborative documents too. Easy to dismiss as something too ambitious and far reaching, but perhaps the difficulty in describing its function was its biggest downall. Twitter managed to survive a similar fate (remember that momet of trying to describe it to a non believer?) but Wave was far more ambitious. … I’d file this under ideas that were just a little ahead of their time. With refinement, a clearer proposition and better integration with existing services, it would have stood a better chance. Wave was one stab at tackling our information overload, at providing a central hub for all the information we need to deal with every day. And it will be back, in one form or another.”
Winer: “Here’s the problem – when I signed on to Wave, I didn’t see anything interesting. It was up to me, the user, to figure out how to sell it. But I didn’t understand what it was, or what its capabilities were, and I was busy, always. Even so I would have put the time in if it looked interesting, but it didn’t. – However, it had another problem. Even if there were incentives to put time into it, and even if I understood how it worked or even what it did, it still wouldn’t have booted up because of the invite-only thing. It’s the same problem every Twitter-would-be or Facebook-like thing has. My friends aren’t here, so who do I communicate with? But with Wave it was even worse because even if I loved Wave and wanted everyone to use it, it was invite-only. So the best evangelist would still have to plead with Google to add all of his workgroup members to the invite list.“
Gerrit Eicker 07:57 on 6. August 2010 Permalink |
Google’s Graveyard:
- Answers
- Audio Ads
- Browser Sync
- Catalogs/Catalog Search
- Co-op (now Custom Search)
- Deskbar
- Dodgeball
- Free Search (then Co-op)
- Google X
- Jaiku
- Joga Bonito
- Lively
- Local (now only for Mobile Search)
- MK-14
- Music Trends
- Notebook
- Page Creator (now Sites)
- Personalized Search (now Accounts and Web History)
- Picasa Hello
- Print Ads
- Public Service Search (redirected to Co-op)
- SearchMash
- SearchWiki
- Shared Stuff
- Spreadsheets (now Docs)
- Video
- Video Player
- Voice Search (now Voice Local Search)
- Wave
- Web Accelerator
- Writely (now Docs)