The Social in Social Networking
How social are social networkers? Pew: The tone of life and social climate on social networking sites; http://eicker.at/Social
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Inhaltsstrategie*
Die Inhaltsstrategie umfasst die gezielte Planung, Produktion, Verbreitung, Steuerung aller Inhalte; http://Inhaltsstrategie.de
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Gerrit Eicker
Google’s Graveyard 2012
More Google shut downs: Urchin, Social Graph API, Picnik, Needlebase, Sky Map, GMC; http://eicker.at/GooglesGraveyard2012
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Here’s an update on some products that will be merged, open-sourced, or phased out in the coming months: Google Message Continuity (GMC) … Current GMC customers will be able to use GMC for the duration of their contract and are encouraged to consider using Google Apps as their primary messaging and collaboration platform. – Google Sky Map … We will be open-sourcing Sky Map and are collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University in a partnership that will see further development of Sky Map as a series of student projects. – Needlebase: We are retiring this data management platform, which we acquired from ITA Software, on June 1, 2012. The technology is being evaluated for integration into Google’s other data-related initiatives. – Picnik: We acquired this online photo editor in 2010. We’re retiring the service on April 19, 2012 so the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products. … Social Graph API – This API makes information about the public connections between people on the web available for developers. The API isn’t experiencing the kind of adoption we’d like, and is being deprecated as of today. It will be fully retired on April 20, 2012. – Urchin: In 2005 we acquired Urchin, whose online web analytics product became the foundation for Google Analytics, helping businesses of all sizes measure their websites and online marketing. We’re fully committed to building an industry-leading online analytics product, so we’re saying goodbye to the client-hosted version, known as Urchin Software. New Urchin Software licenses will no longer be available after March 2012.”
Google: “The success of Google Analytics has been incredibly rewarding and humbling, and we are very thankful for the support of our early Urchin customers and investors. The Urchin Software product has now been completely overshadowed by its tremendously popular offspring. And so, it is time that we now complete the cycle by officially retiring the Urchin Software product and focus exclusively on online analytics. On behalf of the original Urchin crew and Google, we thank you and hope that we can continue to serve you with amazing products. – Urchin has only been available during the past several years through Certified Urchin Resellers, and new sales will officially discontinue at the end of March 2012. We are encouraging Urchin users to migrate to Google Analytics, although expect that current installations of the software will continue to work fine on most systems for years to come. You can learn more about the retirement of this product on the Urchin Website.”
RWW: “As Larry Page said in yesterday’s earnings call, Google’s current focus is on speeding up its execution. To make way for its main teams, Google has been closing down and open-sourcing its less-used projects over the past year. – Many interesting projects have moved on to bigger and better things as open-source initiatives. The Android App Inventor found a home at MIT. Knol, once Google’s effort at a Wikipedia-like knowledge database, has become Annotum, a WordPress-based system. Google Body became Zygote Body, and now it, and even the 3D viewer software behind it, is open-source. Today, Google Sky Map goes open-source, and it will live on as a student-run project.”
VB: “Looks like the picnic is officially over. Google announced today on its blog that it will be retiring the picnic-themed photo editing service Picnik in April of this year. – The news comes about a week after Flickr announced it will be dumping Picnik, which now seems like foreshadowing of the news that was released today. – If you use Picnik for your editing needs, you can download your images as a zip file with Picnik Takeout for the time being. You can also move your photos over to your Google+ page until the service shuts down on April 19.”
TC: “Today’s culling follows this summer’s shut downs of Google Labs and most of the products internally developed by former acquisition Slide. While Google has long encouraged experimentation, its found itself overextended. The company needs all hands on deck fighting the wars for social, mobile, and the cloud. – Google typically reassigns employees from scrapped projects rather than fire them. The teams from Picnik and Sky Map could increase the concentration of product leaders working on Google+. With any luck they can give Google’s social network a more human feel.”
RWW: “Google announced today that it is closing a number of services that it wasn’t able to attract millions of users to without making any effort. The worst of the lot to lose are two: the Social Graph API and DIY data extraction service Needlebase. Following on the heels of the kitten-stomping-bad sunsetting of Postrank, these latest closures are really meaningful, even if the adoption of the services never was. … The worst loss to humanity at the hands of Google’s startup eating monster of late remains PostRank, which Google acquired this Summer. … It was captured by Google and refashioned as a mirror for the fairy’s hideous ogre sister Naked Self Interest, which the ogre (a publisher using Google Analytics) thought made her more beautiful and rich with pageviews, but which really only made her uglier and more vacuous every day. – I can’t believe they are killing Needlebase and the Social Graph API. I can believe it, of course, but I’m thankful that my cynicism is still thin enough that it hurts every time something like this happens again. There are only so many more tools like this on the web left to kill, though.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Pinterest
The expoding sharing and curation service, Pinterest, is first and foremost a women’s network; http://eicker.at/Pinterest
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Gerrit Eicker
Pinterest: “Pinterest is a Virtual Pinboard. – Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes. Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests. To get started, request an invite. … Redecorate your Home! Joy uses Pinterest to save decorating ideas for her new home in LA. She saves patterns, furniture, and accessories that catch her eye. … Plan a Wedding! Divya and Ben use Pinterest to plan their wedding. Their Moms can leave comments about the dresses, flowers, and ties they pin up. … Find your Style! Tim uses Pinterest to share his personal style. He pins clothing, shoes and accessories he finds while browsing stores and fashion blogs. … Save your Inspirations! Sha uses Pinterest to save design inspirations for his job. He can reference inspiring design work to share with his team at Trulia. … Save Your Recipes! Jessica uses Pinterest to discover new gluten free recipes. She always has a collection of tasty appetizers and desserts she can cook when she’s hungry and looking for ideas. … Our goal is to connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting. We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people. With millions of new pins added every week, Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests.”
Hitwise: “The social media space continues to evolve. Pinterest, a site launched in March 2010 that describes itself as an online pinboard to organize and share things you love, recently emerged as one of the top 10 websites within the Hitwise Social Networking und Forums category. The invitation only site received nearly 11 million total visits during the week ending December 17, 2011, almost 40 times the number of total visits versus just six months ago (week ending June 18, 2011). … Pinterest content has something for everyone, but the site is dominated by images featuring home decor, crafts, fashion, and food. Not surprisingly, visitors to the site in the 12 rolling weeks ending December 17th skewed female (58%) and between the ages of 25 and 44 (59%). … In fact, nine of the top ten over-indexed states for Pinterest visitors also over-index for the Hobbies and Crafts category (versus the online population) which is expected given the abundance of crafts content on the website.”
RWW: “A Guy’s Guide To Pinterest – Once I had added a few people and pinned a few images, the second thing I noticed is that my main feed resembled the walls of the college apartment I shared with three other guys in the mid-nineties. We barely had enough money for books and beer, so our decor was mainly posters thrown out by video rental stores (remember those?) and stuff torn out of magazines. … In addition to following curated lists, it didn’t take long for me to figure out ways I could personally use Pinterest. So far I’ve mainly had fun just browsing images and seeing how other people use Pinterest, but it does seem to hold some advantages over the other sites I’ve been using to store links and found items from the Internet. … Arik Hanson has interviews with 15 top Pinterest users on his Communications Conversations blog, and those seasoned users have far more ideas on how to use Pinterest than this rookie. It’s interesting to note that almost all of the respondents say something about using it to collect ideas and thoughts that interest them.”
DT: “Pinterest was launched in March 2010 and over these 20 months it has built up a large base of followers, even with its invitation-only hurdle. Hitwise points out that in just the past six months the social bookmarking site has had a surge of visits, topping out at 11 million at the end of last week- which is almost 40 times the visits it had in June. … Online pinboard sites seem to be the new social networking wave, and though Pinterest is the lead representative, we’ve previously pointed out a few noteworthy virtual collector alternatives. Pinterest basically allows you to ‘pin’ images found while surfing the web onto your virtual pinboard and organize the images into different themes, which users can then share with others.”
GigaOM: “Essentially [Pinterest] allows you to create visual collections of things that you like and find on the web… Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr – these are all services that are about a major societal trend called hyperpersonalization. … From the foods we eat, the drinks we chug, the jeans we wear, the bags we buy, the shoes we run in – they are pretty universal. As a result, we all want to stand out in this massive mass of humanity. … The online world is even worse: Everything looks so similar that we do need to do something to stand out. And you can do that by building a carefully curated image of yourself that you are trying to project onto the world. … I am sure we are going to hear more about Pinterest and other curation-centric companies in the months to come.”
Elad: “The most interesting wave hitting the social web in 2012 is social curation. This was kicked off in 2011 as Pinterest’s growth was noticed by Silicon Valley and a number of companies quickly followed suit – Snip.It launched as a social information curation platform, Quora adopted boards for a similar purpose, and Fab.com launched a structured social commerce feed. … Social Media: Evolving From Long Form To Push Button – In the evolution of social media over the last decade, the trend has been a move from long form content, which has high friction of participation (both on the production and consumption side) to ever lower requirements placed on a user to participate in a conversation. … This new affordance is currently being adopted by other sites leading to all sorts of interesting behavior including: Collecting news and information. Commerce. Social media. … 2012 will likely see an acceleration of structured, push button, social curation across the web. Why? Because most users don’t want to take much effort to produce content, and consuming content in a structured manner (especially photos) is also much faster.”
Forbes: “Pinterest And Quora: Why Facebook’s ‘Like’ Button Is So 2011 – The idea sounds simple enough to fall in the someone-must-have-thought-of-this-before category. And yet Pinterest seems to be doing very successfully what most Silicon Valley start ups struggle to pull off: It is appealing to people outside of its environs. … Pinterest asks you to create something in your liking, not just mention it scatter-shot, or worse, meekly affirm it. … Enough with this liking stuff, people. It’s time to love! … Liking, we’ll realize in 2012, was just too darn easy. … Please like this article on Facebook, pin it on Pinterest and post it to your Board on Quora. I’ll follow you on Twitter, I promise, and let’s totally hang out this summer.”
RWW: “How Businesses Are Using Pinterest – Sharing Ideas On How To Use A Company’s Products: Whole Foods is getting around the blatant self-promotion ban by creating food-porn Pinboards that clearly encourage people to use their products. Pinboards with titles like ‘Super HOT Kitchens’ and “Who Wants Dinner?” are aimed at getting people into the kitchen (via an implied trip to their local Whole Foods). … Make Products Accessible: A lot of users have been using Pinterest to share photos of dreamed-for decadence: the perfect last meal, an extravagant, over-the-top wedding or the dream vacation. Picking up on that trend, vacation rental service HomeAway has started posting photos of its properties in an attempt to show viewers dream vacations may be within reach, according to HomeAway spokesperson Jordan Hoefar. ‘The content our social media team puts on Pinterest differs from other networks because there’s a greater emphasis on the uniqueness of images in order to capture the user’s eye and help them realize their vacation fantasy can both be a reality and also affordable, which leads to them going to our website, browsing more than 625,000 vacation homes and sharing possible homes for future stays,’ he said in an email.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Twitter Brand Pages
Twitter’s relaunch includes Twitter Brand Pages: an eye tracking study predicts hard work; http://eicker.at/TwitterBrandPages
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Gerrit Eicker
SimpleUsability [PDF]: “Users were drawn to different sections of the branded pages depending on the features each employed. All pages received initial attention on the section of the page that contained imagery. Generally this was the promoted tweet, but on the Staples page the promoted tweet did not contain any visual elements so the header image initially received more attention. … 1. Header images need to work hard – Header images can communicate how users can interact with the page. … Advertising can lead to too much of a corporate feel. … Competitions and promotions can entice users and encourage exploration. … 2. Promoted tweets need to take advantage of embedded visuals – A promoted tweet featuring an image draws users in. – This can quickly convey and affect the brand values of a company. Users made assumptions about the company on whether they were either corporate or approachable from the content of the image. … Promotional tweets can reinforce other featured content. – The promoted tweet on Staples featured a link to the competition referenced in the header. The promoted tweet and the header image supported each other as they were relaying the same message to the users in two different forms, one predominantly pictorial and the other completely text based. – Embedding video in the promoted tweet instantly engages the user. … 3. Users make brand decisions based on tweets – A range of tweets on the page communicates to users the level of interaction between the company and the user. The HP page featured tweets for different types of interaction including general replies, retweets and complaints. This gave the feeling that the company was being honest and that the tweets were genuine interactions with their followers. … So while Twitter shifts to incorporating the new features to the brand pages in order to engage those who see the page, the likelihood is that many of the brand’s followers may never see the page at all. This means that the strength of a company’s following will be based on what they tweet. … Also, with regards to the header, companies should keep in mind that due to its size and position on the page, users might assume that it is a clickable banner. … When they were unable to interact with the header they were annoyed and lost interest in page. … If a brand page comes across as either too sales-heavy, it will not hold the user’s attention. Users preferred when they could see the more ‘human’ side to the brand…”
RWW: “While some initially heralded Twitter brand pages as a ‘game changer,’ that scenario may not play out. One of the major problems facing brand pages, as noted in the SimpleUsability study, is that once someone starts following a Twitter account or brand page, there is usually no reason for them to return to the page as all of the new and relevant information will show up as tweets in the followers own timeline. … Users ultimately want brand pages to show a ‘more human side’ to the company, the study said. The HP site, for example, scored well because it did not emphasize sales and advertising, and even made an effort to respond to individual followers. Some of the tweets on the page responded to customer complaints, which improved transparency and credibility as viewed by page visitors.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus + Gmail
Google adds Plus sharing, circling, contacts to Gmail: late after Search, Apps, Reader, News; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusGmail
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “We want to bring you a great experience across all Google products which, for Gmail and Contacts, means understanding what you care about and delivering it instantly. With that in mind, we’re introducing some new integrations with Google+ that we think will make Gmail and Contacts even better. … Now when you open an email from someone on Google+, you can see the most recent post they’ve shared with you on the right-hand side of the conversation. If they’re not in your circles yet, it’s easy to add them straight from Gmail. … If you’ve spent time building your Google+ circles, you can now quickly use them to filter your mail, saving yourself from having to sift through that pile of daily deal emails and newsletters. … If your contacts have a Google profile, their contact entry in Gmail will be updated with the profile information they’ve shared with you, including phone numbers, email addresses and more. … Share effortlessly without leaving your inbox… Now you can share photo attachments with one quick click. The image[s] will be uploaded to your Google+ photos and be viewable only to the circles that you choose to share with.”
TC: “With an automatically updated address book, Google is leveraging one of its key strengths – the 200 million+ Gmail users – in order to attack Facebook in an area where it struggles. Due to Facebook’s bungling of privacy issues over the years, many mainstream users are wary of inputting their contact information, like their home address and phone number, into Facebook. – Google, however, and especially Gmail and Contacts, are seen as utilities. It may be a bit creepy here too, but the benefits of an automatically updated address book will outweigh the risks for many of Gmail’s heaviest users.”
VB: “One other convenient and cool feature in the new update allows you to directly share a photo attachment from an email to Google+. You used to have to download an image and re-upload it to Google+, but now you will see a Share link next to an image that sends the image to Google+. – The updates will be pushed out over the next few days according to The Official Google Blog, so be on the look out for a new Circles list in your Gmail and all the other nifty new features.”
RWW: “So far, it doesn’t look like my Gmail account has received the updates. At least, it doesn’t have all of them. I do see the latest G+ update from some of my contacts that I follow, but none of the filtering or sharing features have appeared yet. Naturally, if you’re a Google Apps user, you’ll have to wait a bit longer to get the features. Google says that the features in Contacts won’t be available right away but that they’re ‘actively working’ to make them available. – Google has been promising to integrate Google+ more deeply into its other offerings. This seems like a major step in that direction. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?“
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Platform
Google opens Google Plus for 3rd party tools, adds photo/video API, becomes a platform; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusPlatform
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Businesses can create and manage their pages directly through Google+. We are committed to working on enhancements and innovative features to offer businesses more flexibility and power to run their pages. We also recognize that some businesses use social media management companies to manage their presence across multiple social networks. So today we’re announcing that Google+ is enabling six companies to test Google+ functionality in their management tools – Buddy Media, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, HootSuite, Involver, and Vitrue. … These companies will offer a subset of their clients the ability to manage circles, publish to Google+, and monitor usage. To learn more about their services and pricing, check out this page. – We are currently working with these companies so that we can experiment and get feedback. They were selected based on their extensive experience helping brands and businesses manage and analyze their presence on social networks. If you’re a social media management company interested in working with Google+, get in touch with us.”
Google: “Google+ is working with six social media management companies to test Google+ functionality in their management tools. These companies will offer a subset of their clients tools to manage circles, publish to Google+, and access insights. These companies were selected based on their extensive experience helping brands and businesses manage and assess their presence on social networks. If you’re a social media management company interested in working with Google+, get in touch with us.”
Mashable: “Google has launched a pilot program that will let owners of Google+ Pages manage their accounts via third-party apps such as HootSuite, Involver and Buddy Media. … While the integrations with Google+ vary, the functionality seems extensive at first glance. Hootsuite, which also announced it was a launch partner, specifically mentions that it supports sharing to different Circles, searching public Google+ posts, viewing recent user activity and managing Circle membership. The launch partners are also offering analytics for tracking the performance of an individual Google+ Page.”
RWW: “Today Hootsuite announced its new social partnership with Google+ Pages. HootSuite users can manage their Google+ circles, post public updates to select circles, search public posts and push out messaging to select circles. … Google+ Pages for brands launched on November 7. Since then, there’s been speculation over whether Google+ Pages is a true competitor to Facebook Pages. For now, Google+ has only 40 million users, which hardly compares to Facebook’s 800 million.”
HootSuite: “New Google+ Pages functionality is now in the dashboard and available for HootSuite Enterprise clients. HootSuite is excited to be selected as an official launch partner for the Google+ Pages trial and to add this functionality to the advanced social media management tool-set. … HootSuite continues to exapnd the dashboard’s functionality as a robust and comprehensive tool for social savvy businesses. The dash now includes key social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn as well as new Google+ Pages.”
Google: “Today, we’re making it easier to leverage the power of personal and professional images by releasing our first Google+ API for photos and videos. – Google+ gives users full control of their information, and we’re starting with read-only access to public albums, photos, and videos. Google also supports Creative Commons licensing, which we expose so developers can easily respect copyrights. – Using the new API, developers can get a list of public albums from a Google+ user, and list the photos and videos within each album. … Prefer videos? A quick hop over to the API reference manual explains how to use the similar methods videos.listByAlbum and videos.get. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback during our next Google+ platform office hours, helping you build your first photo-powered Google+ app on our Discussion Board, and continuing the conversation on Google+.”
TC: “Based on official blog posts that were apparently posted early (and then pulled), developers will soon be able to access some key features of Google+ via the service’s API: photos and videos. … According to the pulled blog post, this initial API will only give developers read-access to users’ content – third-party apps will not be able to upload new photos and videos yet. But it’s still an important step – photos and video are crucial to any social network (Facebook is the world’s largest photo site by a huge margin, for example).”
TNW: “We don’t know exactly when the APIs are to be released and officially announced, but we assume that it’s going to be soon, since someone had their hands on the finished blog post already. … How long can the service turn down growth opportunities with having a read and writable API? Twitter saw incredible growth when third parties started building apps on top of its service.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus + Google Apps
Google Plus is now available with Google Apps, adds sharing history with Google+ Ripples; http://eicker.at/GoogleAppsPlus
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Google Apps fans, today we’re ready to add you to our circles. Google+ makes sharing on the web more like sharing in the real world, and now Google+ is available to people who use Google Apps at college, at work or at home. – Starting now you can manually turn on Google+ for your organization. Once Google+ is turned on, your users will just need to sign up at google.com/+ to get started. For customers who use Google Apps for Business or the free version of Google Apps and who have chosen to automatically enable new services, Google+ will automatically become available to all of your users over the next several days. … Hangouts with extras, which combines multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs, lets you work together on projects even when your team can’t be in the same room. … Many students and teachers have sent us their ideas about how they can use Google+ to teach, learn, work, and play. These are a few Google Apps for Education universities from around the world that are bringing Google+ to their campuses today… For those of you who’ve already started using Google+ with a personal Google Account and would prefer to use your Google Apps account, we’re building a migration tool to help you move over. … It took more technical work than we expected to bring Google+ to Google Apps, and we thank you for your patience.”
RWW: “The day has finally come. Google Plus is now available for Google Apps customers. Apps administrators can now manually turn on Google Plus for their organizations. The welcome change will roll out in the ‘next several days.’ … Google Apps users have been crying out for Plus access since the beginning. These are the customers who actually pay Google to use its Web services for their organizations, and yet the Apps versions of Google’s tools routinely lag behind the free versions. … But ever since the public launch, Plus has had this killer feature with no clear user base: Google Docs in Hangouts. It’s an ideal way to collaborate on a project. But how often do casual friends collaborate on projects? Google Plus has had an obvious institutional use case for over a month. Now, at last, Google Apps users in college or the office can use these tools to get things done.”
VB: “While enabling Google+ for Google Apps customers is certainly a big move for the company, eventually Google plans to bring Google+ functionality to all of its various services (Gmail, search, shopping, etc.).”
TNW: “Using Google+ for Google Apps? Your admin has access to all of your data – If you’re a user of Google+ with a corporate or education Google Apps account, your administrator can access and modify your Google+ account and its postings. This information is pointed out in a Google help center topic related to the new feature: ‘Because you’re signing up for Google+ with your corporate email address, your Google Apps administrator retains the right to access your Google+ data and modify or delete it at any time.’ … The fact that an administrator has access to your accounts under Google Apps is nothing new, but this is the first time that Google has had a social network among its Apps offerings, so the privacy implications are a bit more severe.”
Google: “Whether it’s breaking news or beautiful photos, you just don’t want to miss anything. With this in mind, we’re launching ‘What’s Hot’ on Google+, a new place to visit for interesting and unexpected content… Google+ Ripples: watch how posts get shared – There’s something deeply satisfying about sharing on Google+, then watching the activity unfold. Comments pour in, notifications light up, friends share with friends [who share with their friends], and in no time at all there’s an entire community around your post. … Google+ Creative Kit: have more fun with your photos – Now you can add that vintage feel to your vacation photos. Or sharpen those snapshots from the family barbeque. Or add some text for added personality. With the Creative Kit, all you need is an idea…”
TC: “Google+ Resurrects Playback Feature From Wave, Renames It ‘Ripples’ – Last August, Google asked us all to say good-bye to Google Wave. Some said Wave was ahead of its time, some said that the platform had enough features to sink the Titanic. … And one of these features launched today on Google+ seems a throwback to one now-defunct feature of Google Wave, called ‘Playback’. … Yes, today, Google launched its new Google+ Ripples, which will let users ‘re-live’ the conversations, comments, and sharing that’s taken place over the history of their use of Google+. … In other words, Ripples is a ‘visualization tool for public shares and comments‘, which users can access by simply selecting the ‘View Ripples’ option in the drop down window to the right of the public post.”
TNW: “Google not only wants to show you what’s hot, but wants to show you how it got hot by showing you how a post was shared. The name also brings back memories of a previous Google product, ‘Wave’. … This is a pretty drastic upgrade for Google+, as until now, the only way to find posts that interested you was through its search function, or when your friends re-shared a post.”
VB: “Perhaps more interesting for the visually oriented is Google+ Ripples, a new way to watch how posts travel across the company’s set of social features and through various user’s circles. You can view the ‘ripples’ for any public post; this feature will show you all of that post’s activity. You can zoom in on specific events, check out top contributors and more.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Transparency Report
How do governments affect access to information? Google’s Transparency Report 2011; http://eicker.at/GoogleTransparencyReport
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “How do governments affect access to information on the Internet? To help shed some light on that very question, last year we launched an online, interactive Transparency Report. All too often, policy that affects how information flows on the Internet is created in the absence of empirical data. But by showing traffic patterns and disruptions to our services, and by sharing how many government requests for content removal and user data we receive from around the world, we hope to offer up some metrics to contribute to a public conversation about the laws that influence how people communicate online. – Today we’re updating the Government Requests tool with numbers for requests that we received from January to June 2011. For the first time, we’re not only disclosing the number of requests for user data, but we’re showing the number of users or accounts that are specified in those requests too. … We believe that providing this level of detail highlights the need to modernize laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which regulates government access to user information and was written 25 years ago – long before the average person had ever heard of email.”
Google: “Transparency is a core value at Google. As a company we feel it is our responsibility to ensure that we maximize transparency around the flow of information related to our tools and services. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. – We’ve created Government Requests to show the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests to remove content from our services. We hope this step toward greater transparency will help in ongoing discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests. – Our interactive Traffic graphs provide information about traffic to Google services around the world. Each graph shows historic traffic patterns for a geographic region and service. By illustrating outages, this tool visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it’s a government blocking information or a cable being cut. We hope this raw data will help facilitate studies about service outages and disruptions.”
GigaOM: “Any lingering fantasies of the web as a no-man’s land where content is free from the restraints of geographical boundaries probably should be put to rest. Google Tuesday morning released a treasure trove of data relating to content-takedown requests, and the numbers speak for themselves: requests are up worldwide and Google complies with the majority of them. … When it comes to requests for user data, all that Google and companies of its ilk really can do is ensure that requests are within the bounds of the law and notify users of requests for their data. But in the United States, at least, the laws regarding web-user data are still fairly lax and don’t require a search warrant in many instances. It’s yet another example of the web and the law not being anywhere near on the same page. – It’s easy to poke them for being too willing to bend to the wills of government officials and authorities, but web companies can’t flaunt the laws of the countries in which they want to operate, either. Otherwise, as separate Google data illustrates, the lights might go out on their services in those countries.”
RWW: “Google has updated its Government Requests tool with data from the first half of this year. For the first time, the report discloses the number of users or accounts specified, not just the number of requests. Google also made the raw data behind government requests available to the public. … Electronic communications have changed a bit since 1986. They form a ubiquitous, always-on fabric of our lives now. Fortunately, Google isn’t any happier with the status quo than privacy-aware users are. It’s among a number of major Web companies pushing for better laws. And Google and other data-mining companies take their roles in public policy seriously. Both Google and Facebook’s lobbying efforts broke records this year.”
TC: “Google Declines To Remove Police Brutality Videos, Still Complies With 63% Of Gov’t Takedown Requests – US Government requests for user data jumped, however: 5950 versus 4287 during the same period in 2010, asking for information on 11,057 users. 93% of these were complied with, ‘fully or partially.’ So while they’re making something of a stand on removing data, they don’t seem to have any trouble giving it out.”
Guardian: “Figures revealed for the first time show that the US demanded private information about more than 11,000 Google users between January and June this year, almost equal to the number of requests made by 25 other developed countries, including the UK and Russia. – Governments around the world requested private data about 25,440 people in the first half of this year, with 11,057 of those people in the US. – It is the first time Google has released details about how many of its users are targeted by authorities, as opposed to the number of requests made by countries.”
VB: “Notably, in the United States, Google refused to remove YouTube clips showing police brutality. In these cases in particular, we are seeing how relatively neutral platforms such as YouTube can have great social impact depending on the intentions of the person posting the content and the integrity of the content host in keeping that content online.”
Gerrit Eicker
Chime.in
UberMedia starts its own social network: Chime.in, a Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Facebook clone; http://eicker.at/Chimein
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Gerrit Eicker
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.
Gerrit Eicker 16:04 on 10. February 2012 Permalink |
Pew: “The overall social and emotional climate of social networking sites (SNS) is a very positive one where adult users get personal rewards and satisfactions at far higher levels than they encounter anti-social people or have ill consequences from their encounters. A nationally representative phone survey of American adults finds that: 85% of SNS-using adults say that their experience on the sites is that people are mostly kind, compared with 5% who say people they observe on the sites are mostly unkind and another 5% who say their answer depends on the situation. 68% of SNS users said they had an experience that made them feel good about themselves. 61% had experiences that made them feel closer to another person. (Many said they had both experiences.) 39% of SNS-using adults say they frequently see acts of generosity by other SNS users and another 36% say they sometimes see others behaving generously and helpfully. By comparison, 18% of SNS-using adults say they see helpful behavior ‘only once in a while’ and 5% say they never see generosity exhibited by others on social networking sites.”
Pew, The tone of life on social networking sites: “At the same time, notable proportions of SNS users do witness bad behavior on those sites and nearly a third have experienced some negative outcomes from their experiences on social networking sites. Some 49% of SNS-using adults said they have seen mean or cruel behavior displayed by others at least occasionally. And 26% said they had experienced at least one of the bad outcomes that were queried in the survey. Those bad outcomes were: 15% of adult SNS users said they had an experience on the site that ended their friendship with someone. 12% of adult SNS users had an experience that resulted in a face-to-face argument or confrontation with someone. 11% of adult SNS users had an experience on the site that caused a problem with their family. 3% of SNS-using adults said they had gotten into a physical fight with someone based on an experience they had on the site. 3% of adult SNS users said their use of the site had gotten them in trouble at work because of something that happened on the site. In addition, 13% of adult SNS users said that someone had acted in a mean or cruel way towards them on a social networking site in the past 12 months. Adults are generally more positive and less negative than teens about the behavior of others and their own experiences on social networking sites.”
Pew, The social climate of social networking sites: “White adult SNS users were more likely than blacks to report their overall experience was one of kindness in social networking spaces (88% vs. 77%), and black SNS users were more likely than whites to report that unkindness was the prevalent tone (12% vs. 3%).”
Pew, Altruism vs. nastiness: “Some 39% of adult SNS users said they frequently saw acts of generosity, 36% said they sometimes saw it, 18% said they saw it ‘only once in a while’ and 5% said they never saw it. … When it came to unpleasant behavior on SNS, adults have seen their share, but it tends to be evident to them far less frequently than it is to teen SNS users. … Some 49% of SNS-using adults said they saw mean or cruel behavior displayed by others at least occasionally, far lower than the 88% of SNS-using teens who said they had seen mean or cruel behavior at some point.”
Pew, Offensive language and images: “Nearly three-quarters (73%) said they encountered such offensive content or language only once in a while or never. Specifically, the responses were: 11% of adult SNS users said they saw people using such language and images frequently, 15% said they saw others using such language and images sometimes, 38% said they saw others using such language and images only once in a while, 35% said they never saw others using such language and images. – Minorities, women, parents of minor children, and Millennials were the most likely to encounter offensive language, images, or humor.”
Pew, Positive and negative personal outcomes: “Some 76% of the SNS users said they had at least one of the positive outcomes we queried. Specifically: 68% of adult SNS users said they had an experience on the site that made them feel good about themselves, 61% of adult SNS users said they had an experience that made them feel closer to another person. … On the negative side, 26% said they had experienced at least one of the bad outcomes that were queried in the survey. Again, adult experiences on SNS are less likely to be harmful than the teen experience: 41% of SNS-using teens reported they had at least one negative outcome. … Among adults, some of these anti-social experiences are most prevalent among SNS users in the Millennials generation. This cohort of those between the ages of 18 and 34 was twice as likely as its elders to report that a friendship had ended because of an SNS experience – 21% of SNS-using Millennials said that had happened to them, compared with 11% of all other SNS users.”
Pew, What adults do when they see problems on social networking sites: “It turns out that compared to teen SNS users, adults are somewhat more likely to stand back, not get involved, and ignore the offensive behavior. – For instance, 45% of adult SNS users who have witnessed problems say they frequently ignore offensive behavior on social network sites, compared with 35% of SNS-using teens who say they frequently ignore offensive behavior. Some 34% of adult SNS users say they never confront the person being offensive, compared with 21% of SNS-using teens who never take that step. … Unlike many other aspects of social networking site use, age does not matter when it comes to people’s personal responses when they witness mean or offensive behavior. Young and old have similar patterns of response. However, there is a split when it comes to the behavior of men and women. Men are more likely to ignore a problem they see on a social networking site and women are more likely to respond.”
Pew, What SNS users see others doing when someone comes under attack on a social networking site: “When it comes to the general tone of conversation and interactions on social networking sites, adults often see others ignoring the problems: 45% of SNS-using adults who have witnessed mean or offensive behavior say it is frequently their observation that others just ignore the offensive behavior and another 28% say that others sometimes ignore the offensive behavior. Teen SNS users were even more likely than that to say they observed that others ignored the harassment: 55% of the teens who had seen mean behavior on SNS said that was frequently the response they witnessed. … The one noteworthy demographic factor here is that younger SNS users who had witnessed anti-social behavior on the sites are much more likely to see others join in harassment of someone on SNS than older site users.”
Pew, Second thoughts about posting on social networking sites: “We asked all the online adults in our sample if they had ever decided not to post something online because they were concerned that it might reflect badly on them and 45% reported they had made that kind of decision. Interestingly enough, a greater share of online teens – 55% – had made a similar decision. – Among the online adults who were most likely to decide not to post something because of its impact on their reputation: Millennials (59%), those who live in households earning $75,000 or more (54%), and those with college degrees (51%).”