Browser Video Chat via WebRTC
Mozialla demonstrates WebRTC based video chat integrated in Firefox; http://j.mp/IkQJHW #WebRTC http://j.mp/WebRTC
Tagged: Video RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Machinima Rules YouTube
YouTube’s content king? Machinima dominates the scene; http://j.mp/GGcQLc #Machinima http://eicker.at/Entertainment
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Gerrit Eicker
Mobile!
Pew: 87% Americans own a cell phone, 35% own a smartphone, 19% a tablet, 19% an eReader; http://eicker.at/Mobile
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Gerrit Eicker
Messages
Apple released a public beta version of its new Messages app for OS X: the final days of SMS? http://eicker.at/Messages
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Gerrit Eicker
Apple: “Download Messages Beta and get a taste of what’s coming in OS X Mountain Lion. When you install Messages, it replaces iChat. But iChat services will continue to work. And Messages brings iMessage to the Mac – just like on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch running iOS 5. Here are the features you can expect with Messages: Send unlimited iMessages to any Mac, iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Start an iMessage conversation on your Mac and continue it on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Send photos, videos, attachments, contacts, locations, and more. Launch a FaceTime video call and bring the conversation face-to-face. Messages supports iMessage, AIM, Yahoo!, Google Talk, and Jabber accounts.”
Apple: “Mac keeps the conversation going. Messages does everything iChat does, and so much more. For starters, it comes with iMessage. And just like iMessage in iOS, it lets you send unlimited messages to anyone on a Mac or an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5. Send photos, videos, documents, and contacts – even send messages to a group. You can see when your message has been delivered and when someone’s typing a reply. Turn on read receipts, and they’ll see when you’ve read a message. With end-to-end encryption, your messages stay safe and private. And you can start a conversation on your Mac and pick it up on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. So nothing is left unsaid.”
VB: “In addition to the announcements about Apple’s next operating system Mac OS X Mountain Lion, the company rolled out a beta edition of its iMessages chat app today. – Apple previously launched its iMessages for the iPhone and iPad as an answer to RIM’s popular BlackBerry Messenger Service. The app lets you send text, pictures, contacts, and video over 3G and Wi-Fi connections to anyone with an Apple ID or one of the other third-party messaging services. One big perk to using Messages is that it doesn’t charge you for each individual message, similar to the way wireless carriers do with SMS. Now, Apple wants to bring this functionality to the desktop in an effort to bridge the gap between conversations on mobile devices. … People who never use instant messenger but frequently send texts will probably end up using this app. It’s also likely that far fewer SMS messages will get sent over the course of time, especially if you consider the rising cost of texting plans. That’s a good thing for Apple and a very bad thing for wireless carriers, who draw a large amount of revenue through texting services.”
GigaOM: “When I tried Messages out this morning, replies to an iMessage chat showed up in Messages on my Mac, but also appeared as notifications on my iPhone sitting next to me on the desk. I could switch back and forth between the two devices and continue the conversation on either one. The entire conversation was visible on both my Mac and my iPhone and the entire experience was completely seamless. … The importance of this seamless transition between devices for me is the ability to keep the context of the entire conversation in front of me, no matter where I chose to pick up and continue with my next reply. I might get some iMessage ‘texts’ on my iPhone, but when I get back to the office, I can open my laptop and continue right where I left off. … One nice detail is that the repeat notifications on the iPhone are muted when you read the message on your Mac. … The area that might require a little more polishing is that, when the message is unread on the Mac, it still appears to mute the repeat notification on the phone. … Overall, I am pretty positive about the new features. I think Messages for Mac will actually be a big help in my professional and personal life and will make text/IM even more convenient. As for the big picture, I think the overall theme of Mountain Lion (including this beta of Messages for Mac on Lion) is not so much that iOS features and apps are coming to the Mac, but that the apps will work across both iOS and Mac in a completely seamless experience.”
TUAW: “6 cool Messages tips and tricks – It’s just arrived in beta, but Apple’s next chat app is intriguing. Are you looking to spice up your Messages skills? Here are a half dozen tips and tricks for you to start with.”
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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
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.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Search
Google: Another look under the hood of search – the evolution of Google Search; http://eicker.at/GoogleSearch
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Over the past few years, we’ve released a series of blog posts to share the methodology and process behind our search ranking, evaluation and algorithmic changes. Just last month, Ben Gomes, Matt Cutts and I participated in a Churchill Club event where we discussed how search works and where we believe it’s headed in the future. – Beyond our talk and various blog posts, we wanted to give people an even deeper look inside search, so we put together a short video that gives you a sense of the work that goes into the changes and improvements we make to Google almost every day. While an improvement to the algorithm may start with a creative idea, it always goes through a process of rigorous scientific testing. Simply put: if the data from our experiments doesn’t show that we’re helping users, we won’t launch the change. … In the world of search, we’re always striving to deliver the answers you’re looking for. After all, we know you have a choice of a search engine every time you open a browser. As the Internet becomes bigger, richer and more interactive it means that we have to work that much harder to ensure we’re unearthing and displaying the best results for you.”
Google: “Following up on our video on how we make improvements to search, we wanted to share with you a short history of the evolution of search, highlighting some of the most important milestones from the past decade-and a taste of what’s coming next. – Our goal is to get you to the answer you’re looking for faster and faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between your questions and the information you seek. For those of you looking to deepen your understanding of how search has evolved, this video highlights some important trends like universal results, quick answers and the future of search. – For more information, go to Google.com/insidesearch”
SEL: “Google released a short video today highlighting some of its key milestones in search over the past decade. It’s both a fun blast from the past and a worthwhile reminder of how much things have changed over the years. The video is also a nice follow-on to the look under the hood of search that Google released in August.”
TC: “One anecdote centers on the attacks of September 11: in the wake of the attacks, many people were searching for ‘New York Twin Towers’ and related queries as they attempted to get the latest news – only to find that Google’s index didn’t have any relevant news stories because it was weeks old (Danny Sullivan has written more about this failure). Google’s quick-fix was to post links to relevant news articles on its homepage, and its stumble eventually led to the launch of Google News.”
ATD: “So, what would be a hard query that Google wants to answer in the future? Complex questions that take reasoning, says Google Fellow Amit Singhal. ‘In my ideal world, I would be able to walk up to a computer and say, ‘Hey, what is the best time for me to sow seeds in India, given that monsoon was early this year?’‘ Singhal says in the video.”
RWW: “4 Big Trends in the Evolution of Google Search … Univeral Search – Google’s introduction of universal search in 2007 was the beginning of a trend away from separating Web search results by type and toward putting it all in one place. … Google Goes Mobile and Local – Before long, Google was deep into the business of local commerce. With the rise of Android, Google had an end-to-end business of finding location-based results for local businesses, restaurants and destinations. … Google Search and Time – Google has changed the impact of time on search, as well as place. It has tweaked the way timeliness of content appears in search multiple times, and its latest update calculates when a search is probably looking for recent results rather than historical ones. … Google+: Google’s New Identity – Identity is the final piece of the puzzle. Google has personalized results for a while using Web history and sharing data. But with the launch of Google+, Google has introduced a form of social SEO. Social activity is now a fundamental part of how search results appear for users logged into Google’s ubiquitous Web services.“
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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
Diaspora #NewHere
Joined Diaspora 3 months ago (#62659). Now there are more than 150,000 saying: #NewHere Join! http://eicker.at/DiasporaNewHere
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Gerrit Eicker
Some ‘historical’ Diaspora posts here on Wir sprechen Online:
- Diaspora rockets on Kickstarter, 15.05.2010
- Diaspora gets funded with $200K, 03.06.2010
- Diaspora’s first month and first progress, 04.07.2010
- Diaspora works! 27.08.2010
- Diaspora Alpha, the developer release, 16.09.2010
- Joindiaspora.com opens its doors in private alpha, 24.11.2010
- Diaspora summary, 20.07.2011
- Diaspora’s First Year, 18.09.2011
- Social Freedom, 29.09.2011
- Diaspora Communications, 02.10.2011
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.”
Pew: “Currently, 87% of American adults have a cell phone, 57% have a laptop, 19% own an e-book reader, and 19% have a tablet computer; about six in ten adults (63%) go online wirelessly with one of those devices. … Among cell phone owners, 42% own a smartphone as of May 2011. This means that 35% of all American adults own a smartphone. … The financially well-off and well-educated – 59% of adults living in a household earning income of $75,000 or more are smartphone owners; 48% of those with a college degree own smartphones. Those under the age of 45 – 58% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 now own a smartphone as do 49% of those ages 18-24 and 44% of those ages 35-44. … 87% of smartphone owners use their phones to access the internet or email, with 78% of these users saying that they go online using their phone on a typical day. … As of August 2011, half of U.S. adult cell phone owners (50%) now have apps on their phones. … The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period. … Texting and picture-taking are the most common mobile phone activities – 73% of cell owners engage in each of these – followed by sending photos or videos to others (54%) and accessing the internet (44%).”