Social Media News
Mar
Why Google Needs Buzz
Kevin Rose (born Robert Kevin Rose, February 21, 1977) is an American Internet Entrepreneur who first became an on-air talent and later as a co-host working on TechTV’s show The Screen Savers (which later became Attack of the Show! on G4) until his departure from the network on May 22, 2005. Rose is known for his Internet start-ups. He is the co-founder of Revision3, Pownce, WeFollow and the social-bookmarking website Digg. Rose also co-hosts a weekly podcast Diggnation with Alex Albrecht where they discuss the top stories from Digg.com.
Google announced Buzz fed days back, a photo/videos/link/status sharing service. The big news here isn’t really the functionality of Pownce Buzz, but that Google is boldly integrating this directly into Gmail – essentially taking the product from zero to millions of users in a matter of hours. If Buzz is a success it will mean real competition for Twitter and useful real-time public data for Google.
After giving it a go for a couple hours, here are a few changes/feature requests for the Google Buzz team:
- It sounds stupid, but you need a simple url for public profiles, http://google.com/profiles/kevinrose is a mouthful. Imagine a CNN host trying to plug their profile and having to say “google dot com slash profiles slash larry king”, can we just have google.com/larryking? (side note: /profile/kevinrose should redirect to /profiles/kevinrose not 404)
- Speaking of public profiles, this entire page needs to be redesigned. Adding custom backgrounds and a design that feels a little less utilitarian would be a good start.
- This auto-friend stuff is just straight confusing. I get it, but just because I’ve emailed with someone a few times doesn’t mean I want to auto-follow them. Where is the setting to turn this off?
- Is there an option to prevent the Buzz(es?, i?) from coming directly into my inbox? When Buzz starts feeling like a task (email), that bothers me.
- Where is the ‘Compose Buzz’ link? Only within the Buzz tab? Can an email be converted to a Buzz? Having Buzz in my inbox but no way to compose a Buzz from my inbox seems odd.
Not sure where Buzz fits in my arsenal of social media tools, how often I’ll use it, or if it will eventually feel too much like unread email — but I’m happy to see Google taking social media seriously. It’s early days, let the attention/follower wars begin.
Have a feature suggestion for Buzz? Add it to the comments!
Feb
Open Thread: Is China Threatened by U.S. Social Media, or Could it Care Less?
There’s no doubting the impact of social media on our day-to-day lives in 2010. In the western world, most big brands have Facebook and Twitter accounts nowadays, many TV journalists “write a blog” about their beat every day, and services like YouTube are widely consumed. However it’s the rise of social media as a tool for social activitism that has really brought these technologies to the fore. Sometime over the past year, it reached the point where some governments became threatened by social media and started cracking down on it. China has been the most high profile example recently.
But does the Chinese government really care about Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as much as we in the west think they do?
One of the breakthrough moments for Twitter came in June 2009, when people in Iran used Twitter to protest the country’s election results. This gave Twitter a lot of exposure in western mainstream media. But more than that, other countries where democracy is tenuous sat up and took notice.
The Chinese government started to view social media services as a way for “subversive” citizens to cause trouble. The New York Times recently reported that a January 24 editorial in People’s Daily, the Communist Party of China’s official newspaper, blamed “online warfare launched by America, via YouTube video and Twitter micro-blogging” for sowing discord amongst the Iranian people. China currently blocks prominent U.S. social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
However, it’s arguable how important those services are to Chinese citizens. As digital consultant Wei Wang guest blogged on ReadWriteWeb in November, “every social media category has a Chinese equivalent that is tuned to the particular needs of the mainland Chinese market.”
Kaiser Kuo, a leading commentator about the Chinese Internet market, gave us further context in in a comment on an August 2009 article on ReadWriteWeb:
“Yes, there are some Chinese who use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services that have been blocked in China. But the overwhelming majority of people interested in SNS will use, say, QQZone, or Xiaonei (recently rebranded Renren), or the very popular SNS Kaixin001, or 51.com. Youtube is blocked, but long before that Youtube was a distant also-ran in the Internet video race, far behind sites like Youku.com and Tudou.com. Microblogging sites like Jiwai.de, Fanfou, and Zuosa — all of which, lamentably, are now out of service in the aftermath of Urumqi — all boast(ed) user numbers that dwarf the number of Twitter users in China.”
It’s clear that the Chinese government really is threatened by the rise of social media, because those services give citizens a voice in media – and that voice can potentially reach a global audience.
But let’s be realistic: how much of a threat to freedom of speech is banning Twitter in a country where other types of social media are much more popular anyway.
What do you think – are we in the West making too much of an issue of China banning Twitter, Facebook and similar social media sites? Just because they’re popular with us, doesn’t mean they’re as popular (and therefore dangerous) in a country like China. Are we over-reacting to the Chinese government’s moves against U.S. social media?
Feb
Google Buzz Warning: Force Feeding Users Can Result In Vomiting
A week ago Google launched Google Buzz. And Google’s 175 million or so wordwide Gmail users (Comscore) suddenly had this new and noisy addition to their beloved inbox.
It’s been a rough week since then. Both for the Google Buzz team, and those 175 million Gmail users.
Google continues to tweak the product almost daily to deal with the incredible backlash. That’s not what this post is about.
Another thing this post isn’t about: the fact that Google was forced to launch the product earlier than they wanted to and didn’t have enough time to test the product properly. I’m sure when the dust settles they’ll talk about the process and where it went wrong, and what they’ll do to avoid a mess like that in the future. They messed up. They know they messed up. It’ll pass (see, for example, every interface and policy change ever pushed by Facebook).
What this post is about is the powerful urge companies often have to shoehorn a new product into an old one. To ease the uphill battle all new products face with getting early traction. It seems so easy to just force feed existing users on the new product. But in every example I can think of, those users tend to vomit that new product right back up.
Some users think they’ve been hit with a bait and switch. Others simply don’t like a big change to what they’re used to. And millions more are just clueless about what’s going on, and they get angry and confused.
Examples:
In 2006 AOL, fearing the rise of Digg, launched a product that was very similar. Instead of launching it on its own site, though, they simply redirected the Netscape portal to the new product. At the time Netscape.com was generating over 800 million monthly page views. The experiment was a failure, and in 2007 AOL moved the product to it’s own domain, Propeller.com. It turned out that Netscape users for the most part didn’t know about, or care about, Digg. They just wanted their familiar news portal.
In 2008 Yahoo launched their own Digg clone, Yahoo Buzz. It was sort of a stand alone product, but the big hook was that stories could be pushed to the Yahoo home page. Yahoo Buzz is still around (I just checked), but it certainly isn’t an interesting product and has never had high user engagement. Again, it turns out Yahoo users weren’t all that interested in Digg. And Digg users certainly weren’t going to start hanging out over at Yahoo.
Facebook’s Beacon product is another good example. It launched in 2007, and Facebook users were enraged to see their names and pictures being put on “social ads.” Many lawsuits and one heck of a great April Fools joke later, Beacon stands as Facebook’s biggest stumble to date.
On the other hand, if you take the Beacon product idea and start it fresh as a new company, thousands of people flock to join. Everyone knows what they’re signing up to. No one feels screwed over.
Buzz is starting to look like Google’s Beacon moment. Even the Canadians are taking shots at them now.
Google would have been far better off launching Buzz as a standalone application. Make it invite only to start, and every single one of the early adopters would be begging to get it. A couple of weeks later give them an option of adding Buzz to their Gmail flow, and most would probably do it and call Google brilliant for thinking that one up. Then slowly bring other users on board over time, as they hear about it and want in. Fast forward a year from now and tens of millions of people may happily be using Google Buzz in their Gmail.
But the idea of jumpstarting the process and building the Google social graph right now was too tempting to Google, and they pressed too hard. Maybe some other company, seeing the results, will avoid this mistake in the future.
Feb
Google Gives $2 Million to Wikipedia’s Foundation
Google has opened up its charity wallet once again. This time, the search giant has donated $2,000,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs and maintains Wikipedia.
The donation, in true social media fashion, was announced via tweets from Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation advisory board member Mitch Kapor. Neither Google nor the Wikimedia Foundation have made an official announcement yet — it’s supposed to come tomorrow.
The donation’s definitely in line with Google’sGoogleGoogle generosity to foundations that promote a faster and more open web. However, we think it’s interesting that Google is giving money to the Wikimedia Foundation now, only a year and a half after the search giant launched its own Wikipedia killer, Google Knol.
Back then, we said it was doomed to fail, and so far Knol’s stagnation has proven us right. Is this a sign that Google’s abandoned the project and is embracing WikipediaWikipediaWikipedia as the web’s center for knowledge? Hopefully we’ll get some answers tomorrow.
Feb
Facebook Is the Web’s Ultimate Timesink
The average U.S. Internet user spends more time on Facebook than on Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Microsoft, Wikipedia, and Amazon combined. Think about that for a moment.
New numbers released by Nielsen today confirm what we’ve known for a while: Facebook (Facebook) is the web’s #1 time sink. What’s more interesting though is just how much more time we spend on the world’s largest social network today than we did 6 months ago.
Back in June 2009, Nielsen estimated that the average U.S. user spent 4 hours and 39 minutes on Facebook per month. That’s about 9.3 minutes per day in a 30 day month. In August, that number rose to 5 hours and 46 minutes, or 11.5 minutes per day.
In January 2010 though, the amount of time the average person spent on Facebook jumped to over 7 hours. Each American Facebook user spent an average of 421 minutes on Facebook per month, which amounts to over 14 minutes per day. Even if you lump together the time spent on Google (Google) (1:23), Yahoo (2:09), YouTube (YouTube) (1:02), Microsoft/Bing (Bing) (1:35) Wikipedia (Wikipedia) (0:15), and Amazon (0:22), it still doesn’t beat Facebook.
As you can see from the tables above, there are a few other interesting stats (the average number of websites people visited rose by 8.4%, while the amount of time people were on the PC went down by 8.2%), but the clear story seems to be Facebook’s still-meteoric rise.
How much more time can we sink into Facebook? Let us know what you think in the commments.
