Google Plus Redesign
Google Plus redesigns for its 170M users (100M monthly): adaptive, fluid web design; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusRedesign
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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
Pinteresting
Shareaholic: Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google Plus, YouTube, LinkedIn combined; http://eicker.at/Pinteresting
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Gerrit Eicker
Shareaholic: “Welcome to Shareaholic’s Referral Traffic Report. According to our findings based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors each month, Pinterest drives more referral traffic than Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube combined. … Pinterest grew from 2.5% of referral traffic in December to 3.6% of the referrals in January. That’s impressive growth from just owning .17% of the traffic back in July. … Referral traffic from Google+ dropped slightly in January, although Google’s product set (Google news, Google images, Gmail) continues to be a top referral source. Google continues to integrate Google+ into its offering more and more, so it will be an interesting trend to watch. … Eyeing its IPO this week, Facebook continues to dominate referral traffic, with mobile traffic alone accounting for 4.3% of overall referrals. Referral traffic grew by about 1% in January, making it the second fastest-growing site for referral traffic after Pinterest.”
GigaOM: “Not surprisingly, Facebook is holding steady at the top of Shareaholic’s survey, as it was responsible for more than a quarter of all referral traffic in January. Next in line was StumbleUpon, with 5.07 percent. It bears mention that while the Shareaholic survey is global, in the United States market alone StumbleUpon has in the past unseated Facebook as a top driver of referral traffic. – It’s exciting to see a relative newcomer growing so quickly in the web space. While the web’s more established companies are quite powerful these days, the fact that a startup like Pinterest has successfully established its own foothold shows that the competitive landscape is still alive and mainstream users are open to trying things from new players.”
Solis: “Many consumer brands are also experimenting with Pinterest, using pinboards to present complementary products, ideas, and imagery to inspire consumers to visualize and remix new possibilities. From fashion to interior design and home to retail to entertainment, brands are using Pinterest to thoughtfully assemble a curated lifestyle. And, they’re packaged for the social and mobile web and optimized for driving actions as part Facebook’s new frictionless sharing ecosystem.”
RWW: “Among many Pinterest users, as well as several artists who have had work pinned on the site, a code for giving proper credit is developing. Artist Laura C. George said Pinterest has no way of knowing if links tied to images link back to the original artists’ Web site, but so far Pinterest users have been better about giving credit than Tumblr.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: Unified Privacy Policy and TOS
Google updates and unifies its different privacy policies and TOS: Sure it’s evil? http://eicker.at/GooglePrivacyPolicy
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “In just over a month we will make some changes to our privacy policies and Google Terms of Service. This stuff matters, so we wanted to explain what’s changing, why and what these changes mean for users. – First, our privacy policies. Despite trimming our policies in 2010, we still have more than 70 (yes, you read right … 70) privacy documents covering all of our different products. This approach is somewhat complicated. It’s also at odds with our efforts to integrate our different products more closely so that we can create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google. … While we’ve had to keep a handful of separate privacy notices for legal and other reasons, we’re consolidating more than 60 into our main Privacy Policy. – Regulators globally have been calling for shorter, simpler privacy policies – and having one policy covering many different products is now fairly standard across the web. … The main change is for users with Google Accounts. Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience. … Second, the Google Terms of Service-terms you agree to when you use our products. As with our privacy policies, we’ve rewritten them so they’re easier to read. We’ve also cut down the total number, so many of our products are now covered by our new main Google Terms of Service. … Finally, what we’re not changing. We remain committed to data liberation, so if you want to take your information elsewhere you can. We don’t sell your personal information, nor do we share it externally without your permission except in very limited circumstances like a valid court order. We try hard to be transparent about the information we collect, and to give you meaningful choices about how it is used… We believe this new, simpler policy will make it easier for people to understand our privacy practices as well as enable Google to improve the services we offer.”
Google: “One policy, one Google experience – We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google. – This stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service now. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012. … Our new policy reflects our desire to create a simple product experience that does what you need, when you want it to. … If you’re signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you’ve expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube. … By remembering the contact information of the people you want to share with, we make it easy for you to share in any Google product or service with minimal clicks and errors.”
Google, Privacy Policy Preview: “As you use our services, we want you to be clear how we’re using information and the ways in which you can protect your privacy. – Our Privacy Policy explains: What information we collect and why we collect it. How we use that information. The choices we offer, including how to access and update information.”
Google, TOS: “Our Services are very diverse, so sometimes additional terms or product requirements (including age requirements) may apply. Additional terms will be available with the relevant Services, and those additional terms become part of your agreement with us if you use those Services. … You may need a Google Account in order to use some of our Services. … Some of our Services allow you to submit content. You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours. – When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.”
GigaOM: “It certainly makes for a more personal experience – and really just confirms the direction Google has been heading in for a while – but it’s not necessarily a more-welcome experience. Personalizing someone’s search experience is potentially great, but potentially problematic if another user on the same device sees results they were never supposed to see. – That said, Google is making the right decision in announcing the changes up front and so publicly highlighting what the changes will be. … Google and Facebook, of course, are in a slightly different situation than are most other web companies. Both companies have settled with the FTC around charges of privacy violations, and among the settlement terms for both is that they can no longer misrepresent their privacy claims. So expect to this trend of privacy transparency – even as the sites continue to overhaul their platforms – to continue for at least the next 20 years.”
TC: “The main change, say Google, is that if you are signed into your Google account, Google will combine user info across its products to better serve account holders. As Google says: In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience. – This is exemplified, says Google, in its more personalized search product that debuted recently, and received major criticism. You’ll see Google+ posts and data in your search results, and allows for the seamless transfer of data in between other services, including Docs, Calender, Gmail and more, says Google.”
pC: “The announcement is a bit puzzling given that so much of Google is integrated already. Indeed, the company has been taking flack for weeks after forcing users to opt-in to Search Plus Your World, a feature that displays personalized search results replete with friends, photos and so on. – So why the major announcement? In a word, YouTube. – While Google’s core products are already bundled into its search results (if a user is logged in), the popular video sharing site is not. … For Google users, this means that the personalized search results will likely become more personal still with the inclusion of video. … This policy may not only represent a way to fend-off antitrust hawks but, in the long term, a potential competitive advantage for Google.”
eWeek: “Google is changing its privacy policies around Google+, streamlining identity services and paring the terms of service. The move makes opting out hard, which will raise regulatory flags. … Google’s streamlining comes as regulators in the United States and Europe have criticized Google, Facebook and other Web service providers for offering long-winded and legally gnarled privacy protocols. … The Federal Trade Commission, already looking into Google’s search business practices and which had previously ordered Google to submit to 20 years of audits after breaching user privacy with its Google Buzz feature, will certainly take notice. … Increased personalization across Google Web services will also help improve Google’s ad targeting. Google downplays this benefit, but it is a major reason why it is changing its privacy policies; it wants to refine its ad-serving features to boost relevance for each of its 1 billion search users.”
Economist: “Some of this is welcome and arguably long overdue. Too many web firms have a smorgasbord of privacy documents laden with legal jargon that appear deliberately designed to deter people from reading them. If Google’s new master policy is more accessible and concise than its existing plethora of notices – and preserves the safeguards embedded in them – then it will be a great improvement over the status quo. – But the search firm’s plan to expand the ways in which it can use data provided by someone signed into a service such as Gmail, its e-mail service, or YouTube, its video-streaming site, is likely to provoke heated debate. … Critics fret that this is a departure from its traditional habit of giving people power over their data (for instance, by letting them extract it easily from Google if they want to as part of the firm’s “data liberation” initiative).”
Gizmodo: “Google’s Broken Promise: The End of ‘Don’t Be Evil’ – This has been long coming. Google’s privacy policies have been shifting towards sharing data across services, and away from data compartmentalization for some time. It’s been consistently de-anonymizing you, initially requiring real names with Plus, for example, and then tying your Plus account to your Gmail account. But this is an entirely new level of sharing. And given all of the negative feedback that it had with Google+ privacy issues, it’s especially troubling that it would take actions that further erode users’ privacy. … So why are we calling this evil? Because Google changed the rules that it defined itself. Google built its reputation, and its multi-billion dollar business, on the promise of its ‘don’t be evil’ philosophy. That’s been largely interpreted as meaning that Google will always put its users first, an interpretation that Google has cultivated and encouraged. … This crosses that line. It eliminates that fine-grained control, and means that things you could do in relative anonymity today, will be explicitly associated with your name, your face, your phone number come March 1st. If you use Google’s services, you have to agree to this new privacy policy. Yet a real concern for various privacy concerns would recognize that I might not want Google associating two pieces of personal information.”
TC: “You Call That Evil? – There’s a nice little insider quarrel going on over Google’s just-announced privacy policy changes. A number of sites and commentators have let their fingers jump up mechanically in accusatory fashion. Google, caught red-handed being evil! – Here, I think, is a time when the word ‘bias’ is actually warranted. Everyone wants so badly for Google to do something truly evil (instead of just questionable or inconvenient) that their perceptions of Google actions are actually being affected. … What about not being able to opt out? What is it people want to opt out of exactly? The new, simplified privacy policy? What would you opt into instead – the older policy? Being tracked per-site instead of by account? Perhaps you would you like to opt into pre-Timeline Facebook as well? Maybe you’d like to opt out of Apple’s restrictions on selling your iBooks? How, specifically, are people being harmed by the new policy, and in what way can they be demonstrated to have less privacy than under the old system, under which the exact same data and behaviors were recorded, analyzed, and packaged? Google is not collecting more information, they are not selling new information, they are not changing anything but the level at which the data is collated before you are anonymized into an ad group (baseball, travel, Boston, gadgets) and exposed to ads targeted to your general type of consumer. – And of course, you can opt out of the part worth opting out of: ‘Opt out if you prefer ads not to be based on interests and demographics.‘ … The worst one can say about this change is that it causes yet more overlap between Google services that people may not have requested. If you call that evil, you’ve forgotten what evil looks like.”
Forbes: “Internet Freak-out Over Google’s New Privacy Policy Proves Again That No One Actually Reads Privacy Policies – What’s changing is not Google’s privacy policies but its practices. By combining information from across all of its services, Google will be able to better target users with ads, offer more innovative features, and, importantly for Google, better compete with Facebook. … I hate to tell you all, but Google already knew all these things about you – to get a sense of how much Google knows about you, check out the Dashboard – and already had permission to combine that info, they’re just now actually going to do that. And kudos to them for being so explicit about that.”
GigaOM: “The bottom line is that whether you see Google’s new privacy policy as evil or not depends on what you think the company’s purpose is: Is it to help users find information that is relevant to them? If so, then pooling information is probably good. But if Google’s potential distortion of that purpose with its personalized search and favoritism towards Google+ results has you suspicious about its motives, then it might look a little evil. In the end, you have to answer the question: ‘Does Google have my best interests at heart?’“
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Gerrit Eicker
Predictions for 2012
Thoughtful new year’s predictions on media, social media, analytics, S/CRM, big data; http://eicker.at/PredictionsFor2012
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Gerrit Eicker
Guardian: “Media predictions for 2012: press and digital – Press – [W]ith print sales continuing to fall and advertising revenue stubbornly refusing to grow, publishers will axe more regional and local titles. … National titles will suffer print declines too, just as they have done for five and more years. It is doubtful that any will close in 2012, but the tabloids will rue the day they brought Leveson down on their heads. … – Digital – It is one of the most hotly anticipated flotations in US corporate history; on track to be the biggest internet public offering since Google. For Mark Zuckerberg and his seven-year-old social network, 2012 will be the year when Facebook goes public. … In the digital world, 2011 will always be remembered for one thing: the untimely passing of Steve Jobs. … Having transformed digital music, smartphones and tablet computers in recent years, Apple’s next big bet looks set to be TV. Apple is reported to have fast forwarded its planned assault on the living room since Jobs’s death, with ideas focusing on software that recognises viewers’ tastes across a number of devices without the hinderance of a remote control. Expect more on this in 2012.”
Forbes: “Social Media Predictions For 2012 – Companies sometimes gripe that social media is useless as a branding tool. – For marketers, converting messages into transactions is the Holy Grail, but if they don’t quickly materialize through new media outlets, that’s no reason to throw in the towel. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other outlets are constantly evolving and experimentation is necessary to find success. – Once we accept that ‘social’ does not equal ‘transactional’ we’ll all be a lot more adept at using it in 2012. … Geo-location has been an important marketing tool for a few years, but in 2012 it will become more personal and more transactional, especially in social-media marketing. … How will that work? Look for marketers to motivate and change behavior through geo-location tools and social gaming. … There’s a reciprocal relationship between the check-in and the reward, which is what game dynamics are about-rewarding behavior through real and virtual currency. … These are ways for brands to say, ‘Believe in us, be part of our community, and when you engage with us, we notice.’ It’s that acknowledgement that creates loyalty, advocacy and drives earned-media value. … Would it surprise anyone to think Facebook will become the overlay of the Internet experience? It may not happen in 2012 but it certainly will in our lifetimes. … As marketers build the bridge to commerce through online communities, it is imperative that they do not cannibalize them for the sake of transactions. … Imagine being at a party with people you know and feel comfortable with, and then suddenly, an outside group of revelers crashes your bash. It’s not the same party anymore. You don’t want to be there. You aren’t going to stick around. … Brands in 2012 must create a social world of personalization. – Facebook has built a model for this. Its ‘pages’ function enables brands to engage customers on a virtual island and have a theme party of their choosing. … The Facebook triad of Pages-Ads-Stories is one example of how to create a loop using paid media dollars to drive earned media. … The best kind of media is organic earned media. In 2012, social media as a bridge to commerce may seem obvious, but the journey will be much more interesting-and lucrative.”
HBR: “Six Social Media Trends for 2012 – Social media continues to move forward toward business integration, a trend that I identified last year. … I was also partially accurate in predicting that Google would ‘strike back’ in 2011. They did, with Google Plus, a formidable initiative that acts as Google’s ‘social layer’ to the Web. … So what can we expect in 2012 in a world that seems to grow ever connected by the hour? Here are six predictions to ponder, in no particular order: Convergence Emergence. For a glimpse into how social will further integrate with ‘real life,’ we can look at what Coca Cola experimented with all the way back in 2010. … These types of ‘trans-media’ experiences are likely to define ‘social’ in the year to come. … The Cult of Influence. In much the same way that Google has defined a system that rewards those who produce findable content, there is a race on to develop a system that will reward those who wield the most social influence. … Gamification Nation. No we’re not taking about video games. Rather, game-like qualities are emerging within a number of social apps in your browser or mobile device. From levels, to leaderboards, to badges or points, rewards for participation abound. … Social Sharing. Ideas, opinions, media, status updates are all part of what makes social media a powerful and often disruptive force. The media industry was one of the first to understand this, adding sharing options to content, which led to more page views and better status in search results. What comes next in social sharing is more closely aligned with e-commerce or web transactions. … Social Television. For many of us, watching television is already a social act, whether it’s talking to the person next to you, or texting, tweeting, and calling friends about what you’re watching. But television is about to become a social experience in a bigger and broader sense. … The Micro Economy. Lastly as we roll into 2012, watch for a more social approach to solving business problems through a sort of micro-economy… a new future reality where economic value is directly negotiated and exchanged between individuals over institutions.”
WMG: “Social Media Analytics – A lot of the platforms I deal with in Social Media Analytics were in the process of being acquired and as I am the most connected with this space than any other, I’ll start with it… by the end of 2012, most of them will have been acquired. … Google, as I covered, will enter the space as a collection system and PR type dashboard… Google will become the market leader, forcing standards in Social Media Measurement that industry needs but lacked the consensus to enact. … As a result of the imminent appearance of Google in 2012 as the emerging market leader in SMM, the remaining independent firms will face choices of consolidation (mergers of disparate platforms) or will hurry off to sell themselves to advertising, marketing, market research or PR agencies that haven’t been able to scale social listening, successfully. … Analytics platforms will improve or incorporate mobile Analytics, which, to a large extent, has been lacking in the first and second generation platforms. … It’s not much of a stretch that as more and more people are using mobile devices, and the mobile devices are becoming more powerful, that more time will be spent generating social media, and that by the end of 2012, social media data will, for all it’s limitations, be a must have for most businesses to capture. … I think there’s a good bet that Web Analytics and Social Media Analytics will merge in 2012…”
ZDNet: “CRM 2012 Forecast – The Era of Customer Engagement – Part I – What customer engagement does mean (so there is no nebulosity here) is the company’s and the customer’s relationship is defined by the customer’s ongoing involvement with the company for their own specific reasons. The company doesn’t have to know all of them. – It does mean that it is an era where the engagement the customer has with the company is controlled by the customer – and it can be at any level. … It does mean that the company model is to provide the customer with the products, services, tools and experiences that the customer needs to make an intelligent decision on how they want to be (selectively) engaged with the company. … It does mean the provision of a measurable result when it comes to that engagement via direct or indirect impact on revenue or some other key performance indicators that show the value of the engagement to the company – and the customer. … It does mean the use of systems of engagement … which are systems that foster the interaction of the company with the customer. … The Era of the Social Customer Ends… – CRM began to morph into Social CRM, business into social business, and internal collaboration became more than just an advanced idea and was put into practice at many of the Global 2000 companies and some even smaller than that. … For the first time, we began seeing leading academicians and consultants, like Dr. V. Kumar, create a quantifiable metric for the revenue impact that social customers were having on a company that was designed to work with the traditional measure of customer lifetime value (CLV). …The Era of Customer Engagement Begins – The social customer is no longer a customer to gawk out, just a customer to deal with – like any other customer, with one explicit difference. … What defines the Era of Customer Engagement more than anything is that so-called social channel strategy is now a normal part of multichannel strategy for the company. To be clear, customer engagement means that customers are part of the company’s collaborative value chain. The customer selects how they want to interact with you, and hopefully uses your products, services, tools and consumable experiences to make that decision.”
PG: “CRM 2012 Forecast-The Era of Customer Engagement Begins- Part II – Gamification, while often over hyped and misunderstood, is a concept that has increasingly important business value. … Insight Solutions will emerge as a technology category of its own – One thing that we can’t ignore (okay, that I can’t ignore) is that if customer engagement is to work, then insights into how customers want it to work are becoming increasingly necessary. The current generation of social media monitoring tools with a few exceptions – Radian6 and Attensity come immediately to mind… There are a number of emerging players in this space which I’m calling ‘insight solutions’ who have been misplaced in or evolved from other market categories. … This is not to say that more ‘traditional’ analytics such as text and sentiment analysis, business intelligence, etc are going to be replaced or suffering. In 2012, they will be even more important than they are now. … Analytics as a whole is becoming fundamental to all business strategy. 2012 brings more of that than ever and the rise of a new category customer-focused solution that provides a combination the surfacing of dynamic information and the analysis of that behavior as dynamically as it is surfaced. … In 2011, we saw a significant shift away from the pure left-brained messaging of CRM toward a much stronger focus on customer interactions, engagement and behaviors. … Social marketing becomes an integral part of an explosive marketing automation sector – In other words, there is a recognition that social channels are now part of the mainstream and that they are additions to the channels that we’ve reached customers on traditionally. … 2012 will bring us continued explosive growth in marketing, especially social marketing because we have reached ubiquity when it comes to utilizing social channels as part of campaign planning.”
ORR: “Five big data predictions for 2012 – This year has seen consolidation and engineering around improving the basic storage and data processing engines of NoSQL and Hadoop. That will doubtless continue, as we see the unruly menagerie of the Hadoop universe increasingly packaged into distributions, appliances and on-demand cloud services. … Hadoop’s batch-oriented processing is sufficient for many use cases, especially where the frequency of data reporting doesn’t need to be up-to-the-minute. However, batch processing isn’t always adequate, particularly when serving online needs such as mobile and web clients, or markets with real-time changing conditions such as finance and advertising. … Your own data can become that much more potent when mixed with other datasets. For instance, add in weather conditions to your customer data, and discover if there are weather related patterns to your customers’ purchasing patterns. … As data science teams become a recognized part of companies, we’ll see a more regularized expectation of their roles and processes. One of the driving attributes of a successful data science team is its level of integration into a company’s business operations, as opposed to being a sidecar analysis team. … [I]sualization fulfills two purposes in a data workflow: explanation and exploration. While business people might think of a visualization as the end result, data scientists also use visualization as a way of looking for questions to ask and discovering new features of a dataset. – If becoming a data-driven organization is about fostering a better feel for data among all employees, visualization plays a vital role in delivering data manipulation abilities to those without direct programming or statistical skills.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Analytics Social Data Hub
Google opens its Social Data Hub to 3rd party social networks to integrate with Google Analytics; http://eicker.at/SocialData
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Every day, millions of people share and engage with content online. But most sharing doesn’t happen on the site where it was published, it happens throughout the social web. Marketers and publishers are looking for a comprehensive view of all interactions with their content – on and off their site – and so we’re working hard to make this happen. – To enable our customers to discover who’s sharing, voting and bookmarking their content on the social web, cross-network measurement needs to become easier. So today we’re inviting social networks and platforms to integrate their activity streams with Google Analytics. Through these integrations, marketers and publishers will be able to discover off-site engagement, optimize their engagement within each social community, and measure the impact of each social channel and its associated digital investment. … To make integration easy for social networks and platforms we’ve created a social data hub – it’s based on widely deployed, open web standards such as ActivityStreams and PubsubHubbub. A number of partners are already working with us to improve measurement of social actions – including Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Gigya, LiveFyre, ReadItLater, Reddit, TypePad, Vkontakte, and of course, Google+, Blogger and Google Groups.”
Google: “Plug your social data into Google Analytics – As the number of social networks and activities performed grows, there’s no comprehensive way for marketers and publishers to see the big picture of how social behavior really impacts their brand, let alone understand how these social actions lead to engagement or true return on investment [ROI] of their content. – That’s why we’ve developed the social data hub – so any network can integrate their activity streams – like +1, votes, and comments – into Google Analytics Social Analytics reports, which will be available next year.”
Google: “The social data hub is a free platform that social networks and other social platforms can use to integrate their activity streams- like +1, votes, and comments-with Google Analytics. – Enable your social network to be visible to marketers, publishers and analysts using Google Analytics – Promote a broad, comprehensive and inclusive picture of the global social media landscape – Advance accessible measurement of all social media platforms and activities … To integrate your social network with Analytics, you need to meet the following criteria: You operate a Social Network/Platform – You own the social data and/or are legally able to share it with Google.”
Google: “Google Analytics will provide a social reporting suite so marketers and publishers can see how their content is being shared or interacted with off their site. This will include visibility into social actions such as voting, commenting and sharing amongst other reports helping marketers tie social activity back to engagement and conversion. The social data hub will supply the data needed to enable these Google Analytics reports.”
WMG: “In other words, the platform vendors did little if anything to tie the output of their platforms with anything specific or practical enough (probably, because they couldn’t yet do so) to be meaningful. While Facebook may drag their feet implementing and interfacing with Social Data Hub, Twitter already has been using Google Analytics to track every important action, and it’s not a stretch to see Twitter adopting the Social Hub, and eventually, Facebook will have to, as well, because advertisers and publishers will demand it. – Which, as Lovett says, is good for all of us. Will it be good for the vendors? That all depends.”
SEW: “While social media integration into analytics packages is relatively new, there are a few enterprise-level analytics software that already offer users the ability to integrate not only social sharing sites, but also information about apps in their respective stores. Webtrends, for one, allows users to enter their usernames and passwords for various social sites and app stores directly into the software and data from those respective sites are seamlessly integrated into reports. … Is this a good idea or a bad idea for social networks? How would you use integrated social analytics in your day-to-day analytics reports?”
WPN: “I couldn’t help but notice that Facebook and Twitter are not on that list.“
Gerrit Eicker
Social Networking Teenagers
Pew: For teenagers having a presence on a social network is almost synonymous with being online; http://eicker.at/SocialTeens
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Gerrit Eicker
Pew: “Social media use has become so pervasive in the lives of American teens that having a presence on a social network site is almost synonymous with being online. Fully 95% of all teens ages 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites. Many log on daily to their social network pages and these have become spaces where much of the social activity of teen life is echoed and amplified – in both good and bad ways.”
Pew: “We focused our attention in this research on social network sites because we wanted to understand the types of experiences teens are having there and how they are addressing negative behavior when they see it or experience it. As they navigate challenging social interactions online, who is influencing their sense of what it means to be a good or bad ‘digital citizen’? How often do they intervene to stand up for others? How often do they join in the mean behavior?”
Pew: “This study aims to understand the social and emotional climate that teens experience in spaces where they can interact with others online. There has been considerable concern among parents, teachers, policy makers, and advocates about the nature and intensity of online social encounters among teens. In this research, we pay particular attention to teens’ experiences on social network sites, including Twitter… Do teens find these relatively new online social spaces friendly or hostile or somewhere in between?”
Pew – Teens and Social Networks: “Internet use is nearly universal among American teens; 95% of those ages 12-17 are internet users, up slightly from November 2004 (when 87% of teens went online). Internet usage is higher among teens than among adults as a whole (as of August 2011, 78% of all adults go online), although internet adoption rates among adults ages 18-29 are identical to those found among teens. … Eight in ten online teens (80%) now use social network sites such as Facebook or MySpace, up from just over half of online teens (55%) the first time we measured social network site usage among teenagers in late 2006. … Overall, Facebook is the dominant social media site among teens, as 93% of teen social media users have a Facebook account. MySpace ranks a distant second in overall usage, with 24% of teen social media users having an account on this site. (Twitter 12%, Yahoo 7%, YouTube 6%) … Teens engage in a wide range of activities on social network sites, with chatting and instant messaging, commenting on their friends’ posts, and posting their own status updates leading the way – just under nine in ten teen social media users do each of these activities. On the other end of the scale, gaming is the least common activity we measured in our survey, as half of teen social media users play games within the context of these sites.”
Pew – Social Media and Digital Citizenship: “The majority of social media-using teens say their experience is that their peers are mostly kind to one another on social network sites, but their views are less positive when compared with similar assessments from online adults. … While teens across all demographic groups generally have positive experiences watching how their peers treat each other on social network sites, younger teenage girls (ages 12-13) stand out as considerably more likely to say their experience is that people are mostly unkind. One in three (33%) younger teen girls who uses social media says that people her age are mostly unkind to one another on social network sites, compared with 9% of social media-using boys 12-13 and 18% of boys 14-17. … Nearly two-thirds (65%) of social media-using teens say they personally have had an experience on a social network site that made them feel good about themselves and 58% say they felt closer to another person because of an experience on a social network site. In total, 78% of teens say they have had at least one of the two positive experiences we asked about in our survey.”
Pew – Privacy and safety issues: “[C]lose to half of online teens (44%) admit to lying about their age at one time or another so they could access a website or sign up for an online account. When we asked a similar question in 2000, two years after COPPA’s enactment, just 15% of online teens admitted to lying about their age to gain access to a website… Websites are not currently required to verify a user’s age, and there is an ongoing debate… about whether or not such verification is technically and practically possible. … Roughly one in three online teens (30%) reports sharing one of their passwords with a friend, boyfriend, or girlfriend. … Password sharing is especially common among users of social network sites; 33% of all teen social network site users say they have shared a password with a friend or significant other, compared with 19% of teen internet users who don’t use social network sites. … Close to two-thirds (62%) of teens who have a social media profile say the profile they use most often is set to be private so that only their friends can see the content they post.”
Pew – The role of parents: “Parents in the United States are still the primary gatekeepers and managers of their teens’ internet experience. … The vast majority of parents of online teenagers have had serious conversations with their kids about the do’s and don’ts of online behavior. … Beyond simply talking with teens about online safety and civility, parents and other adult caregivers have other actions and technical tools at their disposal to help maintain their awareness of their child’s online activities. – Overall, parents are more likely to favor less technical steps for monitoring their child’s online behavior. More than three-quarters (77%) of parents say that they have checked to see what websites their child has visited. Two-thirds of parents of online teens have checked to see what information was available online about their child. … More than half of parents say they use parental controls to manage teens’ internet access; another third use parental controls on teens’ mobile phones.”
Pew – Parents and online social spaces: “Parents see the internet and cell phones’ role as a mixed blessing for their teenagers: Tech helps their kids to be connected and it can bring distressing things into their lives. … 13% of parents of online teens say they know their child has been bothered by something that happened or something they saw online. … The parents of teenagers are steeped in technology and are increasingly involved with their kids’ lives in online environments.“
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.”
Gerrit Eicker
Erwischt!
Datenschutz und Privatsphäre im Internet: eine Kolumne in der Agrartechnik; http://eicker.at/Erwischt
Gerrit Eicker 08:52 on 12. April 2012 Permalink |
Google: “More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+, enjoying new ways to share in Search, Gmail, YouTube and lots of other places. It’s still early days, and there’s plenty left to do, but we’re more excited than ever to build a seamless social experience, all across Google. – A critical piece of this social layer is a design that grows alongside our aspirations. So today we’re introducing a more functional and flexible version of Google+. We think you’ll find it easier to use and nicer to look at, but most importantly, it accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google. … Once you’ve upgraded to Google+, it’s easy to share with your circles from just about anywhere. We’re dreaming bigger, though. We’re aiming for an experience that fuses utility with beauty… Today we’re adding a dedicated Hangouts page that creates even more opportunities to connect in person… Today’s Google+ update extends beyond navigation, the stream and hangouts. For instance: there’s a new Explore page that shows what’s interesting and trending across the network. And a new profile with much bigger photos. And a new chat list that puts your friends front and center. And a whole lot more. … By focusing on you, the people you care about, and the stuff you’re into, we’re going to continue upgrading all the features you already know and love – from Search and Maps to Gmail and YouTube. With today’s foundational changes we can move even faster-toward a simpler, more beautiful Google.”
Guardian: “Google says 170m people have registered for its Google+ service since it was launched 10 months ago – and that 100m have ‘engaged’ with the service at least once in the past 30 days and 50m have engaged with the service at least once a day in the past month. … Since January, new users signing up for Google services such as a YouTube or Gmail account have had to create a Google+ profile: in the past three months, that has added 80m people, says Search Engine Watch. In all, Gmail has 350m users worldwide. … In the US, Google has pushed Google+ profiles into search results – with the effect that a search for ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ puts his Google+ page ahead of his Facebook page, a result which appeared distorted compared with previous Google search results.”
TC: “It’s interesting that Google+ has now changed its design, after its first efforts received such praise. But, after using the service for some time, it became clear that Google+’s navigational elements became a little cluttered. That ‘share a YouTube video’ feature, for example, which popped out a box on the right side of the screen, felt tacked on. … The new interface drops the static icons at the top and moves all the navigation off to the side, allowing users to reorder the icons as they wish. … Hangouts, which have always been one of the network’s main selling points, are now being better highlighted in the refreshed site, and now have their own dedicated page, featuring a list of Hangout invitations from people in your Circles, easy access to live and public Hangouts, and a rotating billboard showing popular Hangouts, and other information.”
VB: “Tough questions aside, the redesign appears to give those who use Google+ on purpose some handy new features and better visuals. First off, you’ll notice on the left side that there is a new customizable navigation bar that lets you drag apps up or down to create the best order for accessing content. You can even hide apps by moving them in and out of the ‘More’ panel. … The roll out appears to be moving slowly as many folks on Google+, including myself, are still waiting for the redesign to go live. Google expects all users to get the new digs in ‘the next few days.’”
GigaOM: “The key term here seems to be ‘applications.’ The sidebar is essentially an app launcher, and users can use it to get quick access to certain actions available through individual apps. Want to share a photo from your phone? Then simply hover the photos app and select the relevant action. … Apps can also be rearranged in one’s personal order of importance, or completely hidden from plain sight. All of this makes it easier to use the Google+ apps that are available today, including Hangouts, games and photos – but there’s really not that much of a point in constantly reorganizing a half dozen apps. Instead, this seems to be built for something much bigger.”
FC: “Google+ has failed to take off. And it’s not even necessarily a fault of the product: Facebook is the de facto social network of our time. … But that’s not stopping Google from announcing a major redesign of Google+ today. It’s better in almost every way, focused on real-time trends, customization, and playing to Google’s few advantages they have in the space. But, you know, it’s just a little too late for design alone to save the day. … A lot of what Google announced today was pure catch-up. It snagged a new ‘Trending on Google+’ function from Twitter. It now features a profile page with a top, landscape portrait that’s nearly identical to Facebook’s Timeline. But if Google is going to copy, at least they’re copying some good ideas. And at least they haven’t given up on the vast potential of the one ace up their sleeve: Hangouts.”
TC: “Instead of a traditional fixed-width design, responsive design adapts to the size of your browser window. So while your Facebook page always looks the same, no matter whether you’ve maximized your browser window or not, the new Google+ design actually changes as you resize your browser window. Right now, Google isn’t doing much with this capability, but it definitely built this redesign around this idea. … What Google will do with this space is anybody’s guess. As we’re moving to bigger and wider screens, though (which are actually rather suboptimal for the kind of news feeds that are at the center of services like Google+, Facebook and Twitter), it only makes sense for Google to experiment with wider layouts as well and to figure out how to best use them.”