Facebook Editions
Forbes: Facebook is getting into the news business with Facebook Editions, app versions of news outlets; http://eicker.at/FacebookEditions
Tagged: Google+ Sparks Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Differences
How the Google Plus services, Circles, Sparks, Hangouts, Huddle, differentiate from Facebook/Twitter; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusDifferences
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Circles makes the biggest difference between Google Plus and Facebook: Google Plus Circles bases on Twitter’s paradigm of non-reciprocal following, with the option to establish a closer relation like Facebook’s reciprocal friending. Additional, ‘circling’ is a must: while Facebook Friends Lists and Twitter Lists are optional, following/friending on Google Plus requires to move users to at least one circle.
Evangelos: “I have read many of the initial reactions to Google+ and most of them compare it to Facebook… Unlike Facebook, you can add someone without their permission. This is pretty much like following someone on Twitter – their public posts appear in your stream. But unless they ‘follow you back’, your updates don’t get into their stream. As soon as they add you, too, the Twitter-like following feature becomes a Facebook-like friendship relation with mutual posts in streams, depending on which circles you are in. This is a) a great way of getting a network going early on (and have a lively stream from the very beginning) and b) combines Twitter-like publishing with Facebook like media and commenting. I keep thinking this might turn out to be more dangerous to Twitter than it is to Facebook. … Now that I understood their adding mechanics, I see why there is no initial Fanpage product: It is not necessary.”
The Google Plus Stream reflects this main differentiator:
VB: “There are numerous comparisons between Google’s new Google+ social offering and Facebook, but most of them miss the mark. Google knows the social train has left the station and there is a very slim chance of catching up with Facebook’s 750 million active users. However, Twitter’s position as a broadcast platform for 21 million active publishers is a much more achievable goal for Google to reach. … When posting on Google+, it forces users to select specific social circles they are posting to, which includes ‘everyone’ as an option that mimics a Twitter-style broadcast. If not for the lawsuits and FTC settlement about Google Buzz automatically broadcasting posts, it is likely that Google+’s default setting would be public posts. … While Facebook is not sweating about Google+, the threat to Twitter is significant. Google has the opportunity to displace Twitter if it gets publishers and celebrities to encourage Google+ follows on their websites as well as pushing posts to the legions of Google users while they are in Search, Gmail and YouTube.”
But the Google Plus Stream is one of the main cons of Google Plus, too: it’s noisy! There’s a strong need to add an option to mute users or even better: +Circles. And there’s a strong need to add better ranking algorithms. Believe it or not: Facebook seems to be far ahead of Google in this place!
Mashable: “Google+ is designed to minimize noise in the stream through the use of circles, but it’s still too noisy for most users. The big issue is that posts are pushed to the top whenever there’s a new comment, something that most users think is unnecessary. There are also still issues with collapsing posts with long comment threads. … Google+ needs to stop bumping posts to the top of the stream anytime there’s a comment, and this change needs to be implemented as soon as possible. There needs to be a way to see ‘top stories’ from your stream. Yes, it’s a Facebook feature, but it’s a really good Facebook feature.”
That’s all? No more differentiators? No, not yet. Sure, there’s Hangouts – currently a Skype-clone. And Google Plus can be found on (nearly) all Google properties on the Web. But more conceptual differences? Obviously we’ll have to wait.
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Reviews
Google Plus is a technological masterpiece, but cloning Facebook is not an innovation; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusReviews
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Gerrit Eicker
BI: “Save for some minor improvements, Google+ offers nothing groundbreaking enough to drive the masses from Facebook. Almost every feature from ‘Circles‘ to ‘Streams‘ has a counterpart feature in Facebook. – The only notable exception is ‘Hangouts,’ the feature that lets you host group video chats with your friends. … All these criticisms don’t mean I think Google+ is a bad product. It’s actually well-designed and easy to use. … At the end of the day, Google+ is a solid product on its own. But it’s not rich or new enough to get people to make the switch.”
DT: “Google+ is almost a direct clone of Facebook. While it is an impressive effort, particularly on the discovery side, there appears to be little to drive you from Facebook to it. If emulation is the greatest complement, Google paid Facebook a huge compliment and the quality of Google’s offering is impressive. The problem for Google is that Facebook users seem to be relatively happy. There are concerns with regard to privacy on Facebook, which could play for Google if folks weren’t more concerned with Google’s privacy practices. Much as you likely wouldn’t be interested in an even trade for a house or car that is identical in all ways to the one you have, folks likely won’t switch from Facebook to Google+ in significant numbers. And with social networks, the big value isn’t the product, but the number of your friends that are on it.”
WP: “There are some really great features in the network worth mentioning. For one, the navigation bar, which pushes you alerts on network activity without being too intrusive, and the group video chat function, Hangouts, is way beyond any free video chat service I’ve seen. – But there are problems, too. … Getting me to switch from Facebook is going to rely on whether I can fold G+ into my daily routine. … Overall, Google + was fun to use and has a lot of potential. I could see using it in addition to Facebook, but until Google weaves more of their existing services into G+ and opens it up to include more of the people I want to connect with, it won’t become my main way to socialize online.”
AF: “To be honest, my gut reaction after using Google Plus was initially, ‘Why on earth would anybody switch to this from Facebook?’ – However, when I loaded up Google Finance as I do every morning, I suddenly realized that I was asking the wrong question. The reality is that users won’t have the option of not using Google Plus. – Google already has more users than Facebook, over one billion. They aren’t going to suddenly leave Facebook in droves, they’re just going to spend more time on all the sites in Google’s network. That big notifications box in the top right of all Google sites is the reason why. … No, Google Plus is not a ‘Facebook killer,’ but despite the company’s numerous failed attempts at getting into social media, the new Plus product gives users no other option but to accept the fact that Google is becoming exactly that: social.”
Winer: “It was after seeing how they had inserted this into search that I decided I had made a mistake by opting-in. Remembering that it was impossible to opt-out of Buzz (I still accidentally click on the link from time to time, as a Gmail user, you can’t get rid of it) I figured that it would be similarly impossible to rid myself of Google Plus. … One of my Twitter friends sent me a link to the opt-out page. … I have opted-out. In theory. I’ll let you know if it worked.”
Winer: “I don’t think Google has a choice. Their ‘social’ offerings have been rebuffed repeatedly, and they will continue to be rejected by users, no matter how promising they are, no matter what they are, different from Facebook, a Facebook clone, doesn’t matter. Why? You can’t make revolution with employees. Can’t be done. They don’t know how to do it. … So if I were Larry, I’d make the cloud to end all clouds and price it really cheap for any entrepreneur who’s willing to stake their future on being the next Big One.”
AdAge: “Facebook’s traffic will not suffer. People will keep using Facebook. But when you have a tight little group, you may find Google+ to be just right for sharing with that group. So I think Google+ will catch on with lots of groups — Boy Scout troops, book groups, college cliques, that kind of thing. It may build a nice niche out of these groups, and extend the value of Google Groups in general. It will get people to spend more time on Google. But it won’t replace or even dent Facebook any time soon. – What does this mean for marketers? First – yes, you should keep a close eye on this, and consider advertising on it to the groups that matter to you. If Google+ makes it easy for companies to create brand groups, that’s worth a look (when it happens). – But I think you can safely ignore Google+ for at least 12 months.”
RWW: “Circles are a lot like Facebook’s friend lists, a feature which Facebook has shown less support for and interest in over time. … To continually differentiate itself from Facebook, and keep Circles from becoming an organizational overhead nightmare, Google Plus needs to get smarter, quickly. Google should use its engineering brilliance to build algorithms that do relationship management for you. It should know when you change jobs (you update LinkedIn, for example) and suggest or enact a Circles change to reflect that.”
TNW: “In case you hadn’t noticed by now, demand for access to Google+ is astronomic right now, and when demand for something is exceed supply, the scammers and others looking to make a quick buck will undoubtedly come out to play. – There’s no difference here. Access to Google+ is currently on sale on eBay for prices ranging between $0.99 and $27 by a number of sellers claiming to offer ‘instant delivery’.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Jarvis: “To paraphrase Mark Zuckerberg, it is too soon to know what Google+ is. But I’ve been trying to imagine how it will and won’t be useful to news. … Google+ likely won’t be good for live coverage of breaking events… G+ should be good for collaboration on reporting. … If Google gets its synergistic act together and incorporates Google Docs – and some of the tricks from Wave – into G+, then this could be a very good collaboration tool for communities… G+ will be good for promoting content. … G+’s identities likely won’t be as reliable as Facebook’s, as it is easy to create an account and identity on there are not the social pressures for authenticity. … G+ may be a good place to find photos from news…”
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Gerrit Eicker
AdAge: “Google’s new social network Google+ may never dent Facebook’s dominance, but its entrance into the fray is scrambling the emerging market of startups billing themselves as Facebook alternatives. …They might be fighting an uphill battle if Google+ has staying power after its hype-filled limited release. If nothing else, Google just sucked a lot of oxygen out of the room, and one founder said privately that Google+ is causing a re-think on how to forge ahead. – ‘It’s going to be very hard to be a David,’ said Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group, a social media advisory firm, noting that Google’s existing user base gives it a huge advantage. Conversely, startups will have to start a relationship with people looking for a Facebook alternative from scratch.”
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Gerrit Eicker
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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
Google Plus: Circles, Sparks, Hangouts, Mobile, Huddle
Google starts its own social network Google Plus finally, the nuance and richness of real-life sharing; http://eicker.at/GooglePlus
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. … Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. – In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it. – We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project.”
Google+: “Google+ is in limited Field Trial – Right now, we’re testing with a small number of people, but it won’t be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone. Leave us your email address and we’ll make sure you’re the first to know when we’re ready to invite more people.” … +Circles: “You share different things with different people. … Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life.” +Sparks: “…looks for videos and articles it thinks you’ll like, so when you’re free, there’s always something to watch, read, and share.” +Hangouts: “With Hangouts, the unplanned meet-up comes to the web for the first time. Let buddies know you’re hanging out and see who drops by for a face-to-face-to-face chat.” +Mobile: “…Your photos upload themselves. +Huddle: “Huddle takes care of it by turning all those different conversations into one simple group chat…”
RWW: “The fundamental value proposition is around privacy: it’s the opposite of Facebook and Twitter’s universal broadcast paradigm. Google Plus is based on the Google Circles feature, which lets you share and view content to and from explicitly identified groups of your contacts, and no one else. It’s really easy to use and a great feature – but even if you’re communicating out in public, the rest of the service is very well designed, too. This is a smart, attractive, very strong social offering from Google. … Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it.”
TC: “The reality is that Google is in a better position to organize all of the social signals we broadcast online rather than to organize all of the individuals making those signals. – Instead of building another social network, I’d like to see Google focus on helping us search through all the user-generated signals and content and to help us with our search, much of which is done offline through social questions, not keyword-speak. (Although, the threaded comments approach Google+ is using in the main stream it presents to users does lend itself to friends asking each other questions and answering them). This approach would let Google focus on what it excels at, helping us find information online, especially information created by our friends and friends of friends, perhaps even in an instant. Now, that would be a huge plus.”
Mashable: “Google+ is a bold and dramatic attempt at social. There’s a reason why Google calls this a ‘project’ rather than a ‘product’ — they don’t want people to think of this as the final product, but as a constantly-evolving entity that permeates every corner of the Google empire. – Overall, Google+ is solid. But I’m not going to call it a Facebook killer or a game-changer. The last Google product I said that about was the ill-fated Google Buzz. Perhaps that’s why Google’s rolling this out slowly via invites, the same style Gmail used to release itself to the world. – If Google can persuade users to come back every day, it has a winner. But the company will have to do even more to provide a truly compelling alternative to Facebook. At the moment, Google+ cannot compete with the king of social, but Google doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to take on Mark Zuckerberg’s giant quite yet.”
pC: “It’s going to be a while before we find out whether or not this is something that will resonate with the public, and that’s actually a good thing: by launching the service in an invitation-only mode, Google will have time to discover flaws and fix bugs among a group of early adopters who are likely to be much more understanding when problems arise than the general public, which freaked out about the mistakes Google made when launching Google Buzz. Google’s taking a risk that Google+ won’t have enough users on board in its early days to facilitate connections, but it seems to have decided that erring on the side of getting privacy features right is more important than building a Facebook killer on Day 1.”
TNW: “A complete video tour of Google+ featuring Mobile, Sparks and Circles“
Gerrit Eicker 08:29 on 18. July 2011 Permalink |
Forbes: “Facebook is thinking less and less about how to grow that number and more about how to get current users to live more of their lives within its virtual walls. One answer it has come up with: asking a select number of news outlets to produce ‘Facebook editions’ – basically, app versions of themselves that can be read and consumed right there on Facebook. – About a dozen news outlets are currently participating, including CNN, the Washington Post and The Daily, according to sources familiar with the project. The first Facebook editions are expected to arrive later this year, perhaps in September. … Now that Facebook is known to be at work on a parallel initiative, however, it could change the dynamic for publishers, who may find playing one against the other gives them leverage they lacked until now.”
VB: “For years, news organizations have been using Twitter more than Facebook to get their messages out and publicize breaking news. So it makes sense that Facebook would be interested in building customized news applications and improving relationships with major news outlets. Back in April, Facebook even expressed a desire to have better relationships with journalists.”
IF: “Facebook itself has recently been on a campaign to increase its presence in the media ecosystem, which we assume this latest effort is a part of. In the past year it has hired social media marketers to help it develop and promote best practices for journalists, provided training events for media, and published guides and studies showing how to use Facebook features (especially Pages) for maximum value. Media companies, including the BBC and Warner Brothers and various musicians, have also been testing selling media content using its virtual currency, Credits – efforts that have been primarily independent, although presumably encouraged by Facebook. … The speculation around possible Credits and ads revenue here are reflections of Facebook’s oft-stated goal of being the main way that people find and share information that matters with people they care about. Without any additional revenue streams, simply getting a stronger two-way flow of content-driven traffic can help it create more value for users, and make more money from its existing ad inventory.“