Google Currents
Google wants to go Flipboard/Zite with Google Currents… but misses the opportunity; http://eicker.at/GoogleCurrents
Tagged: Feed Readers Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus + Google Reader
Google Reader gets redesigned and plusified: Google Plus now on Search, Blogger, Google Apps; http://eicker.at/GoogleReaderPlus
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Today we’re rolling out the new Reader design, and the Google+ features that we mentioned just over a week ago. Before the day’s over, all Reader users will be able to enjoy the following improvements: A new look and feel that’s cleaner, faster, and nicer to look at. The ability to +1 a feed item (replacing ‘Like’), with an option to then share it with your circles on Google+ (replacing ‘Share’ and ‘Share with Note’). … Updates to Google Reader on the web are rolling out gradually and should reach all users by end of day. A new Android application will follow soon. If you have questions about today’s announcements, please check out our Help Center.”
RWW: “After announcing on October 20 that Google Reader would be annexed by Google Plus, Reader has gotten the ol’ +1 today. Google is rolling out the new, clean Plus theme that has already come to Gmail, Docs and elsewhere, and it is replacing the Reader ‘Like’ function with the +1 button. Sharing from Google Reader now produces a +snippet. I guess we no longer need that nice workaround. … For anyone who doesn’t use Google Plus, there are some amazing RSS clients that use your Google Reader as the back-end but let you share however you’d like. And you know you can still add all your preferred sharing services to the ‘Send To’ tab, right? The same settings we showed you before to add Google Plus as a Reader service will let you add anything else, too.”
RWW: “Google has made very clear over the past month that Plus will be integrated into all of Google’s products over time, so this wasn’t a surprising move. However, rather predictably, there has been a user backlash anyway. … I believe that comment was a little disingenuous from Gray, because he knows that Google dominates what’s left of the RSS Reader market. There are always alternatives, but the reality is that relatively few people will use them. What’s more, most of the alternatives rely on Google Reader for content. … The RSS Reader market has declined because reading content is a very fragmented experience these days. … Even despite all of the changes in the way people consume content on the Web, Google Reader had been the holdout as a specialist RSS Reader product. It has (had?) a passionate community of RSS Reader fanatics.”
TNW: “The new look falls in line with the rest of the changes that we’ve seen from Google over the past few months, specifically after the launch of Google+. You’ll see a new preview pane that shows you all of your stories, with subscriptions along the left in a list like before. – Sharing in Google Reader is now considerably different than before. Instead of having a network in and of itself, anything that you share is now going to happen via a +1 to Google+, as detailed in a blog post last week. Google says that it has done this in order to ‘streamline Reader overall’, but the changes aren’t as welcome by everyone. … Ultimately it doesn’t take away from the usefulness of Google Reader as a product, and it’s not the first time that Google has pushed its way into your social life, either (remember the launch of Buzz?). At the end of the day it will be up to users to figure out if they want to share content via a +1, but chances are that Reader fans aren’t going to be adversely affected overall.”
TC: “As expected, Google has ignored the cries of the niche community of Google Reader sharing enthusiasts [as well as what seems to be the entire online population of Iran], and has pushed forward in its plans to remove Google Reader’s native sharing features to promote deeper integration with Google+. While the ability to share with Google+ is an obvious important step forward for Google’s social agenda, it will be disappointing change for at least some of the Google Reader community – a community that even went so far as to create a petition to save the old features. The petition is now pushing 10,000 responses.”
Blogger: “In fewer than 4 months since its launch, more than 40 million people have joined Google+, making it a living, breathing space for social connections and sharing to thrive. – Today we’re excited to announce the first way you will be able to leverage Google+ – by making it possible to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile. – In addition to giving your readers a more robust and familiar sense of who you are, your social connections will see your posts in their Google search results with an annotation that you’ve shared the post.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Winer: “People should know that there is more than one way to do an RSS reading app. Google Reader is one approach. A thousand flowers should bloom to fill the gap it’s creating in the market. There is a way to do plumbing that’s open, that people can subscribe to, independent of Google. That does what Google Reader just stopped doing. I would try to make it work as much as I could without inventing new formats. … I love when people like Richard put awful ideas out there like the one he did. You’re trapped inside Google’s silo, even for something that was open from the start like RSS. Well I think there are a lot of people who are smart enough to know that that’s not true. Those are the very people I want to work with.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Tablet News Reader
Tablets and news are a perfect match: Google and Yahoo are going to add more reader apps; http://eicker.at/TabletNewsReader
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Gerrit Eicker
ATD: “Memo to Flipboard, as well as Pulse, CNN’s Zite and AOL’s Editions: You might want to make some room in the already-crowded news and social reader space, because you’re about to get some bigfoot company. – Next Wednesday, according to sources close to the situation, Yahoo will finally officially unveil its offering, called Livestand. – And perhaps as early as next week or soon after, Google will also weigh in with its version of the genre – code-named Propeller – which also might be the product’s name. Another moniker under strong consideration: Currents. As I have previously reported, Google Propeller is an HTML5 reader for the Apple iPad and Android – essentially a souped-up version of similar apps such as Flipboard, AOL’s Editions, Zite (which was just bought by Time Warner’s CNN) and Pulse. … Yahoo and Google PR declined comment.”
RWW: “Livestand is Yahoo’s take on the personalized reading app for tablets, which ousted CEO Carol Bartz announced earlier this year. Sources tell AllThingsD that the app is expected to be released next week. It was originally slated to be launched on iOS and Android during the first half of 2011. … More than Flipboard and Zite, Livestand looks and feels like AOL’s Editions app for iPad. … It’s a natural extension of Yahoo’s efforts to become a company that specializes, among many other things, in digital content. … Also in the pipeline is a project from Google, code-named Propeller. Less is known about how that app will look and function, but it’s generally understood to be the search giant’s answer to Flipboard, which Google unsuccessfully tried to acquire. … Even with the cross-platform advantage and enormous development resources behind it, products of this nature from Google and Yahoo could simply fail to catch on. The iPad has been in existence for nearly two years and applications like Flipboard, Zite and Pulse have proven very popular among consumers. To compete, the big players will need to offer something truly unique to readers, publishers and advertisers alike.”
VB: “The tablet readers from two of the Internet’s largest technology companies has the potential to disrupt a landscape that has previously been dominated by small, nimble companies such as Flipboard and Pulse. Google previously tried to buy Flipboard, which was valued at more than $200 million in April, which is still chump change for the search giant.”
pC: “Companies like Flipboard, AOL, Zite, and Pulse have found a lot of interest in their apps, which organize Web content through custom filters or by hooking one’s social-media feeds into the app. But given how new tablets still are to the vast majority of the population, and how as a result usage habits have yet to really settle into any established pattern, there’s still a lot of opportunity for both big companies and small startups to attract users.”
Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora Communications
Diaspora social communications: superusing Diaspora, the federated Web, the early days; http://eicker.at/DiasporaCommunications
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Gerrit Eicker
Diasporial: “One of the first things I fell for in Diaspora was its neat marriage of two posting methods: a unidirectional ‘blasting’ option to reach the general public and a two-way ‘sharing’ model for more intimate exchanges… sooo basically a Twitter and a Facebook. Through the proper use of aspects, posts could now either spark a conversation among select friends or publish a message to the entire Internet. … With the recent introduction of Markdown formatting, I’ve noted a increase in longer, well thought-out posts more resembling blog entries than status updates begin to appear in my activity stream, which tickles me pink… You can actually use this system to pre-publish a thought and gather comments on it before full out blogging about it… ‘But I’m a famous celebrity. What does this mean for me?‘ The benefits are surreal. You don’t have to rely on some lame ‘fan’ or ‘group’ pages: people can connect to the real you, and you can control what your subscribers see simply through carefully watching what you post as ‘Public’. Your real friends can be put into their own specific aspects where you can tell them all about your new yacht or perfume line, while the rest of the Internet will receive your public updates about book signings or that new charity you’re promoting.”
Diasporial: “I’m pretty sure that everyone on the Diaspora platform has their own story about how they found Diaspora, made friends, and got into the network. Some of us have enjoyed it more than others. Regardless, the fact of the matter is that this is a very opportune moment for a community to come together and really shine. … [T]he biggest thing about Diaspora is not its features, but the community that surrounds it. Several times a day, I’ll check in and notice great conversations going on by people that originally didn’t know each other at all. In fact, I’ve made a good handful of friends there, from all walks of life. The best part is that it’s not just a bunch of Linux nerds. There are people there that are passionate about film, technology, art, philosophy, literature, you name it. It is a community of passion, and it continues to grow on a daily basis.”
Diasporial: “The early days of Diaspora – a personal story – While writing this I realise how hard it is to put the pre-alpha experience into words. I am sure that those who were there with me at the time feel the same nostalgia and the same enthusiasm as I feel. Having been an early adopter on pre-alpha Diaspora is definitely something I am proud of. The whole look and feel of Diaspora was just great and the people I met were all very kind and loving. The software iterated with the speed of lightning and every time your account got reset you just knew that something had changed. Rather than feeling bad about the data loss, you would just sign up again as quickly as you could to find out what’s new.”
- Follow Diasporial: via RSS, on Diaspora, on Twitter
jo jmatic
»[T]he biggest thing about Diaspora is not its features, but the community that surrounds it. Several times a day, I’ll check in and notice great conversations going on by people that originally didn’t know each other at all. In fact, I’ve made a good handful of friends there, from all walks of life. The best part is that it’s not just a bunch of Linux nerds. There are people there that are passionate about film, technology, art, philosophy, literature, you name it. It is a community of passion, and it continues to grow on a daily basis.”«
Sehr gut gesagt. »Gefällt mir« :)
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Gerrit Eicker
Indeed, Diasporial is definitely a must read. ;)
Gerrit Eicker
RSS is Not Mail
1. RSS is not mail. 2. RSS is not mail… Use Fever to effectively filter your filters; http://eicker.at/RSSIsNotMail
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Gerrit Eicker
ARS, Cheng: “On the surface, RSS seems great for those of us who want to keep up on everything happening on the Internet—and I mean everything. … Twice in as many weeks during the month of August, I was forced to go without my precious RSS feeds. … Dare I say it, but the quality of my life and work improved when I went without RSS. And I think it might for you, too. … Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you’re constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task. Even if it’s a brief task, the very act of breaking your concentration means it will impact the focus and flow of whatever got shoved to the background, and it takes longer to resume that task later when you’re done with the RSS scan. … Forrester Research told Ars that, according to its most recent RSS usage numbers, only six percent of North American, Internet-using consumers used an RSS feed once per week or more. … I highly recommend taking a break for a few days to find interesting content the “old fashioned” way. You might find that RSS is slowly nickel and diming your time away, one feed at a time.”
Arment: “RSS is a great tool that’s very easy to misuse. And if you’re subscribing to any feeds that post more than about 10 items per day, you’re probably misusing it. … RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites: sites that you’d never remember to check every day because they only post occasionally, and that your social-network friends won’t reliably find or link to. – I currently subscribe to 100 feeds. This morning, I woke up to 6 unread items: one each from 6 of my feeds. Granted, it’s a Sunday on a holiday weekend, so this is a pretty low-activity day. On high-activity days, I usually wake up to about 25 items.”
Winer: “I read yet-another article about how RSS readers do it wrong, and reward people for using Twitter as their feed reader. This pains me, because it’s not RSS’s fault, it’s the fault of people who designed RSS readers to work like mail programs. RSS is not mail, and when you try to make it mail, you make something that doesn’t work. … If you miss five days of reading the news because you were on vacation (good for you!) the newspaper you read the first day back isn’t five times as thick as the normal day’s paper. And it doesn’t have your name on the cover saying ‘Joe you haven’t read 1,942,279 articles since this paper started.’ It doesn’t put you on the hook for not reading everything anyone has ever written. The paper doesn’t care, so why does your RSS reader?”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Sparks
Strike up a conversation, about pretty much anything: Google Plus Sparks an online sharing engine; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusSparks
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Healthy obsessions inspire sharing, and we’ve all got one (or two, or three…). Maybe it’s muscle cars, or comic books, or fashion, but the attraction is always the same: it comes up in conversation, we immediately jump in, and we share back and forth with other fans. Often for hours. The trick is getting things started, and getting over that initial hump. Fortunately, the web is the ultimate icebreaker. – The web, of course, is filled with great content—from timely articles to vibrant photos to funny videos. And great content can lead to great conversations. We noticed, however, that it’s still too hard to find and share the things we care about – not without lots of work, and lots of noise. So, we built an online sharing engine called Sparks. – Thanks to Google’s web expertise, Sparks delivers a feed of highly contagious content from across the Internet. On any topic you want, in over 40 languages. Simply add your interests, and you’ll always have something to watch, read and share – with just the right circle of friends.”
GigaOM: “Sparks … is a new feature that allows you to create topics of interest and use them as source of information and then share it with various different groups. For instance, I could share results of Top Gear with my ‘petrol head’ friends. These ‘interest’ or ‘topic’ packs offer a lot of content and not surprisingly YouTube videos. Circles, Hangout and Huddle are about personal sharing and personal communications. Sparks on the other hand is devoid of that connection and stands out as a sore thumb. … Google needs this social effort to work – it needs to get a lot of people using the service to create an identity platform that can rival Facebook Connect. It needs the people to improve its search offering. Of course, the Google’s biggest challenge is to convince people to sign-up for yet another social platform, especially since more and more people are hooked into Facebook (750 million) and Twitter. I don’t feel quite compelled to switch from Facebook or Twitter to Google, just as I don’t feel too compelled to switch to Bing from Google for Search. – I can easily see services such as Hangout and Huddle get traction, but will that be enough to get traction with hundreds of millions of people?“
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter Mobile
Pew: 13% of online adults (up from 8% in 6 months!) use Twitter, half of them access mobile; http://eicker.at/TwitterMobile
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Mobile Acquisitions
Facebook goes mobile: acquires Snaptu (apps) after Rel8tion (ads) and Beluga (messaging); http://eicker.at/FacebookAcquisitions
Gerrit Eicker
News Relations
Armstrong: News remains important to the consumer, but where they get it from is not; http://eicker.at/NewsRelations
Gerrit Eicker
Rush of News
Winer: News is episodic. Each story has small value. It is the rush of news. No story is an institution; http://eicker.at/Rush
Gerrit Eicker 07:46 on 12. December 2011 Permalink |
Google: “Today we’re expanding our content offering with the introduction of Google Currents, a new application for Android devices, iPads and iPhones that lets you explore online magazines and other content with the swipe of a finger. … We’ve worked with more than 150 publishing partners to offer full-length articles from more than 180 editions including CNET, AllThingsD, Forbes, Saveur, PBS, Huffington Post, Fast Company and more. Content is optimized for smartphones and tablets, allowing you to intuitively navigate between words, pictures and video on large and small screens alike, even if you’re offline. … Alongside Google Currents, we’re also launching a self-service platform that gives publishers the flexibility to design, brand and customize their web content. … Great content needs a great audience, which is why Google Currents is integrated with Google+ so users can share articles or videos they’ve enjoyed with their circles. … Google Currents is now available for download in Android Market and the Apple App Store for US users.”
RWW: “Google Currents is to Social Media as Justin Bieber is to the Beatles – Google Currents is a new tablet app launched today that makes reading of syndicated web content easier, faster and more enjoyable than almost any other interface you can imagine. It’s like Flipboard but for RSS feeds. People are going to love it. That’s the nice way to describe it. – You could also call it the sterilization of the social web. Just like today’s new Twitter redesign makes things nice and pretty for non-technical users – Google Currents is infinitely friendlier and more accessible than any RSS reader – even Google’s own Reader. Unfortunately, in the current application that ease of use comes at a great cost: Google Currents does away with many of the best parts of the social web. … Google Currents doesn’t let you do that. If you’ve got a Google Reader account from the hard old days you can add one subscription at a time to Currents, but if you discover something new out on the web at large – clicking the RSS icon does nothing. It’s like an empty smile – not a portal into a world of potential learning and fun – just a dead link. It’s a violation of an important universal law to kill an RSS link, but that’s what Google Currents has done. … Back in the old days, all that clicking around, free subscribing, commenting and reading comments – that was the stuff that gave new little blogs a reason to live. … Take that away from them and just put the best big blogs in a pretty box and what have you got? The death of blogging is what you’ve got.”
Forbes: “Unlike RSS readers, like Google’s very popular Google Reader, Currents is designed with aesthetic qualities at the top of the design totem pole. Instead of incorporating web standards like links Google treats sites more like an old-fashioned magazine. It all looks great, but you can’t click a link and hop on to your browser. You don’t see comments on posts and you can’t subscribe via RSS. … Google, you’re not Apple okay? You’re never going to be Apple no matter how hard you try. Apple does its own thing very well already. The closed universe of apps and proprietary everything is Apple’s domain. The last thing Google should try to do is imitate Apple’s success. The future of the internet is a mixture of closed and open models. I don’t think apps will rule the world, or that proprietary software and hardware designs are the only way forward.”
GigaOM: “[W]hile Google Currents is superficially similar to these other services, there are some important differences that make me wonder whether Google really understands how media has changed and is changing. For a company that’s usually so forward-thinking, Currents as it stands now is more than a little disappointing. … Unlike both Flipboard and Zite, it doesn’t pull in your Twitter lists or streams from those you follow, or content from your Facebook social graph. In other words, you can push content out to these networks, but you can’t pull content in from them and view it inside your news reader. … The second element Google Currents seems to be missing is recommendations or some form of smart filtering of content, apart from the limited amount that appears in the ‘trending’ section. … Currents feels about as innovative as your garden-variety app from a traditional magazine – in other words, not very innovative at all. More than anything, it feels like a giant missed opportunity.”
RWW: “We’re not out of the woods yet, but Web publishing is starting to hit its stride. Product offerings are getting smarter, prices are getting better and, most importantly, the content is getting more interesting. We might not even be half way to the future of publishing yet, but the industry is picking up steam. – There are new ways to read, new ways to write and new ways to advertise. Publishing is a rapidly changing high-tech business now, so the tools change the content and vice versa. … Reading was the first thing that had to change before the business of Web publishing could change. … But the new rules in publishing are empowering independent content creators, too. Social media have created a new class of publishing, in which content created by everyone gets stitched together into a narrative. … The do-it-yourself publishing platforms have also become more powerful. It’s a great time to be a WordPress publisher, because it’s creating revenue streams for independent content creators and developers alike. … New publishing tools are great, but what publishing really needs is new business models. … Fortunately, things are looking up on that front, too. For one thing, thanks to WordPress and its partnership with Federated Media, ad revenue streams are now available to independent bloggers, not just mainstream sites. But there is also a whole new kind of advertisement on the horizon, one that takes advantage of the new hardware and the touchscreen sense of control. As devices get increasingly powerful, the limits on Web publishing fall away.“