Archive for the ‘2.0’ Category
August 15th, 2010
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Author: It’s becoming increasingly clear that Google cannot create successful social media applications.
I linked to this article by ifindkarma in July, but it’s worth revisiting now that Google has announced the closing of Google Wave.
Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications…
…“With Google applications we return to the app to do something specific and then go on to something else, whereas great social applications are designed to lure us back and make us never want to leave.”
…
“The primary purpose of a social application is connecting with others, seeing what they’re up to, and maybe even having some small, fun interactions that though not utilitarian are entertaining and help us connect with our own humanity. Google apps are for working and getting things done; social apps are for interacting and having fun.”
…“So, to summarize: Google is responsible for Orkut, Wave, and Buzz. Ex-Googlers are responsible for Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter. Discuss.”
You can find more Google failures here.
Infographic by WordStream Internet Marketing Software
Posted in 
It’s becoming increasingly clear that Google cannot create successful social media applications.
I linked to this article by ifindkarma in July, but it’s worth revisiting now that Google has announced the closing of Google Wave.
Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications…
…“With Google applications we return to the app to do something specific and then go on to something else, whereas great social applications are designed to lure us back and make us never want to leave.”
…
“The primary purpose of a social application is connecting with others, seeing what they’re up to, and maybe even having some small, fun interactions that though not utilitarian are entertaining and help us connect with our own humanity. Google apps are for working and getting things done; social apps are for interacting and having fun.”
…“So, to summarize: Google is responsible for Orkut, Wave, and Buzz. Ex-Googlers are responsible for Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter. Discuss.”
You can find more Google failures here.
Infographic by WordStream Internet Marketing Software
If you’re interested in social media let me recommend the following post – Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications…
“So, to summarize: Google is responsible for Orkut, Wave, and Buzz. Ex-Googlers are responsible for Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter. Discuss.”
If you’re interested in social media let me recommend the following post – Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications…
“So, to summarize: Google is responsible for Orkut, Wave, and Buzz. Ex-Googlers are responsible for Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter. Discuss.”
I’m a big fan of Dr. Jay Parkinson and his efforts at Hello Health. I posted about the project a little less than a year ago. Here’s Jay at the Gov 2.0 Expo talking up his new initiative The Future Well.
“Healthcare simply isn’t designed from the ground up to be a pleasant experience for the patients. It needs to be. And in this talk, I outline how to think about designing that experience leveraging technology and standards the government could create.”
It’s a testament to our dysfunction as a society that our health care reform debate centered on imaginary “death panels” rather than the excellent ideas Dr. Parkinson is promoting.
Craig Newmark chimes in on the recent effort to fact-check the Sunday morning political talk shows.
He includes a lot of great links in that post, including a link to a longer meditation of his about trust- and reputation-systems.
“People use social networking tools to figure out who they can trust and rely on for decision making. By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots.
“This shift is already happening, gradually creating a new power and influence equilibrium with new checks and balances. It will seem dramatic when its tipping point occurs, even though we’re living through it now.”
This essay is jam-packed with great ideas, but there’s an awful lot to unpack. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.
This Matt Jones talk at TechnoArk introduces the idea of Mujicomp, the widespread use of simple, interactive, and social gadgets. It’s a speculation about where the future of hand-held devices might be heading. Jones offers some examples of items that are almost there, but doesn’t really offer a good idea of what the object might be that would really be mujicomp. Fon is close, but not quite what I think he has in mind. (Muji is a popular Japanese retail store that is now global. They sell inexpensive, popular consumer goods and stuff for your house).
While tracing the history of ideas that led him to mujicomp, Jones touches on the 60s-era architectural group archigram, Guy Debord’s theory of psychogeography, smart cities, and how people moving through the urban space create their own information architecture (we just don’t capture that information very well). An example of the latter is the Open Street Map project.
It’s an interesting talk, full of nifty ideas, and one of his examples of a social artifact prompted a speculative social object of my own.
Jones talks about his company’s Availabot, which seems destined to never make it to market, but is a nice representation of what he means by social object. The availabot is a little toy avatar that plugs into your USB port. It represents your friend, and when your friend is available to chat, the availabot stands up, and when your friend is not available to chat the availabot lies down. Simple, clever, a physical manifestation of your online world in real life.
Of course, who wants just one availabot for one friend? I want dozens, maybe scores, and I want them to look like cartoon versions of my friends and I want them to be wireless. I don’t have enough USB ports for all my friends.
And then, since 3D printing has been floating around in the back of my brain, wondering how it can be useful, I realized that this might be a perfect object for 3D printing. I want a 3D printer that prints toy avatars of my friends, that are then animated by the open source hardware arduino chip and connect wirelessly with my computer. I want a homebrew version of the availabot.
I can see them now, all standing on my desk, scores of little animated cartoon avatars of my Facebook friends, rising and falling as friends log on and log off.
For the next generation of these social network avatars (social information appliances?) each availabot would have a unique pattern that interacted with my augmented reality spectacles and produced a cloud of information above the avatar, perhaps a speech bubble representing their status update and our chats.
This Matt Jones talk at TechnoArk introduces the idea of Mujicomp, the widespread use of simple, interactive, and social gadgets. It’s a speculation about where the future of hand-held devices might be heading. Jones offers some examples of items that are almost there, but doesn’t really offer a good idea of what the object might be that would really be mujicomp. Fon is close, but not quite what I think he has in mind. (Muji is a popular Japanese retail store that is now global. They sell inexpensive, popular consumer goods and stuff for your house).
While tracing the history of ideas that led him to mujicomp, Jones touches on the 60s-era architectural group archigram, Guy Debord’s theory of psychogeography, smart cities, and how people moving through the urban space create their own information architecture (we just don’t capture that information very well). An example of the latter is the Open Street Map project.
It’s an interesting talk, full of nifty ideas, and one of his examples of a social artifact prompted a speculative social object of my own.
Jones talks about his company’s Availabot, which seems destined to never make it to market, but is a nice representation of what he means by social object. The availabot is a little toy avatar that plugs into your USB port. It represents your friend, and when your friend is available to chat, the availabot stands up, and when your friend is not available to chat the availabot lies down. Simple, clever, a physical manifestation of your online world in real life.
Of course, who wants just one availabot for one friend? I want dozens, maybe scores, and I want them to look like cartoon versions of my friends and I want them to be wireless. I don’t have enough USB ports for all my friends.
And then, since 3D printing has been floating around in the back of my brain, wondering how it can be useful, I realized that this might be a perfect object for 3D printing. I want a 3D printer that prints toy avatars of my friends, that are then animated by the open source hardware arduino chip and connect wirelessly with my computer. I want a homebrew version of the availabot.
I can see them now, all standing on my desk, scores of little animated cartoon avatars of my Facebook friends, rising and falling as friends log on and log off.
For the next generation of these social network avatars (social information appliances?) each availabot would have a unique pattern that interacted with my augmented reality spectacles and produced a cloud of information above the avatar, perhaps a speech bubble representing their status update and our chats.
For those of you unfamiliar with Chatroulette (possibly NSFW) here’s Kottke’s perfect summation:
“I spent about 30 minutes on Friday night on Chatroulette (very NSFW). You push the start button and you’re instantly in a video chat with some random person. During my session, the average “chat” lasted about 5 seconds and I observed several people drinking malt liquor, two girls making out, many many guys who disconnected as soon as they saw I wasn’t female, several girls who disconnected after seeing my face (but not before I caught the looks of disgust on theirs), 3 couples having sex, and 11 erect penises. In a Malkovichian moment, I was even connected to myself once…and then the other me quickly disconnected. In short, Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now.”
It’s a bit of frivolous Internet fun destined to go the way of 2 Girls 1 Cup reaction videos.
But, wouldn’t it be nice to have a Chatroulette-esque web app that had some sort of reputation filter in place? Or that could be used for reinforcing the social bonds of people that belong to the same social network? Imagine a Chatroulette for only the people in your particular online social community; people you know online, but not in person. Some examples -
You’ve joined a Facebook group for a particular political interest and you hold a Chatroulette conference to meet fellow travelers and share ideas.
You’re a grad student attending your first conference and two nights before the actual conference you participate in a Chatroulette with other attendees to form some weak social ties before you actually arrive.
You have an alumni group that meets once a month for Chatroulette happy hours.
Chatroulette, or something similar, could actually be a lot of fun, and beneficial in building weak social ties, if it had some constraints on participants and perhaps some reputation software to vote candidates up or down.
How about a TEDxChatroulette with reputation ranking software. Every Monday night groups of people get together to share their “idea worth spreading” and people vote ideas up or down. The “winners” get invited to share their idea at TED.
Over at Shareable Rachel Botsman interviews Casey Fenton, founder of CouchSurfing.
Rachel Botsman: One of the themes I explore in my forthcoming book is how collaborative communities quickly form “trust between strangers.” How did you create trust from the outset within the CouchSurfing community?
Casey Fenton: Right from the beginning, we wanted people who had never met each other (and who lived far away) to be able to trust one another. The question we tackled was, “How can we can create that trust via the Internet?” — not a perfect translation from how we would create trust in the real life.
We were not exactly sure what would work, so we implemented different trust features on the site.