As reported in Mediapost today. Here's my New Year's Day post on Google Wave, predicting what they're calling Buzz. Interesting, bit not surprising -- no FB integration.

As reported in Mediapost today. Here's my New Year's Day post on Google Wave, predicting what they're calling Buzz. Interesting, bit not surprising -- no FB integration.
February 09, 2010 in Search, Social Software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
A few people asked me recently what I thought of Google Wave. Like others, I've struggled to answer this.
In the past few days I've been following the news about the failed attempt to blow up Northwest 253 on Christmas Day, and the finger-pointing among various agencies that's followed it. More particularly, I've been thinking less about whose fault it is and more about how social media / collaboration tools might be applied to reduce the chance of a Missed Connection like this.
A lot of the comments by folks in these agencies went something like, "Well, they didn't tell us that they knew X," or "We didn't think we needed to pass this information on." What most of these comments have in common is that they're rooted in a model of person-to-person (or point-to-point) communication, which creates the possibility that one might "be left out of the loop" or "not get the memo".
For me, this created a helpful context for understanding how Google Wave is different from email and IM, and why the difference is important. Google Wave's issue isn't that the fundamental concept's not a good idea. It is. Rather, its problem is that it's paradigmatically foreign to how most people (excepting the wikifringe) still think.
Put simply, Google Wave makes conversations ("Waves") primary, and who's participating secondary. Email, in contrast, makes participants primary, and the subjects of conversations secondary. In Google Wave, with the right permissions, folks can opt into reading and participating in conversations, and they can invite others. The onus for awareness shifts from the initiator of a conversation to folks who have the permission and responsibility to be aware of the conversation. (Here's a good video from the Wave team that explains the difference right up front.) If the conversation about Mr. Abdulmutallab's activities had been primary, the focus today would be about who read the memo, rather than who got it. That would be good. I'd rather we had a filtering problem than an information access / integration problem.
You may well ask, "Isn't the emperor scantily clad -- how is this different from a threaded bboard?" Great question. One answer might be that "Bboards typically exist either independently, or as features of separate purpose-specific web sites. Google Wave is to threaded bboard discussions as Google Reader is to RSS feeds -- a site-independent conversation aggregator, just as Google Reader is a site-independent content aggregator." Nice! Almost: one problem of course is that Google Wave today only supports conversations that start natively in Google Wave. And, of course, that you can (sometimes) subscribe to RSS feeds of bboard posts, as in Google Groups, or by following conversations by subscribing to RSS feeds for Twitter hashtags. Another question: "How is Google Wave different from chat rooms?" In general, most chats are more evanescent, while Waves appear (to me) to support both synchronous chat and asynchronous exchanges equally well.
Now the Big Question: "Why should I care? No one is using Google Wave anyway." True (only 1 million invitation-only beta accounts as of mid-November, active number unknown) -- but at least 146 million people use Gmail. Others already expect Google Wave eventually will be introduced as a feature for Gmail: instead of / in addition to sending a message, you'll be able to start a "Wave". It's one of the top requests for the Wave team. (Gmail already approximates Wave by organizing its list of messages into threads, and by supporting labeling and filtering.) Facebook, with groups and fan pages, appears to have stolen a march on Google for now, but for the vast bulk of the world that still lives in email, it's clunky to switch back and forth. The killer social media / collaboration app is one that tightly integrates conversations and collaboration with messaging, and the prospect of Google-Wave-in-Gmail is the closest solution with any realistic adoption prospects that I can imagine right now.
So while it's absurdly early, marketers, you read it here first: Sponsored Google Waves :-) And for you developers, it's not too early to get started hacking the Google Wave API and planning how to monetize your apps.
Oh, and Happy New Year!
January 01, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing, Media, Online Communities, Online Marketing, Search, Social Software, Structured Collaboration, usability, Viral Marketing, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 10, 2009 in Mobile, Online Communities, Social Software, Technology, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
November 18, 2009 in Analytics, Application Design, ecommerce, Media, Online Communities, Social Software, usability, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
This morning via TechCrunch I read Sean Parker's Web 2.0 Summit presentation materials, in which he says that the future belongs to "network services" that connect people, like Facebook, and not to "information services" that connect us to data, like Google. My experiences at Contact Networks taught me to think of email patterns as proxies for social networks. So, the following idea occurred to me.
Google has Gmail. Google allows people to publish profiles. What if Gmail had a button that allowed me to "recognize" a recipient by linking to his / her public profile when I send an email to him / her?
If I have a public profile and the recipient has one too, by pressing this "recognize" button I would make our relationship "provisionally acknowledged" (like a "friend request"); the link would become "acknowledged" if the recipient agreed. Further, either side (with mutual agreement) could choose to "publish" this relationship in multiple social nets they participate in: Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut, or they could even make it fully public.
The more two-way email traffic there is between the two users, the stronger the link is assumed by the service to be. Note that this wouldn't be scored in a linear way. Probably some sort of recency and frequency considerations would be involved, just as we had at Contact Networks.
Taking a page out of PageRank (pun partially intended), the scoring algorithm could also consider the popularity of the URLs I associated with my Google profile to consider the "centrality of my node" in the uber-network, and therefore the "value" of my "acknowledgements", when given. Link-love could be configured by each user to be given by-the-message or by default to different email recipients. Recipients could also "transfer" this link-love, with permission, to their other web presences (e.g., blogs).
The idea isn't limited to the major mail platforms, either. Any media firm with an online community has a latent social network that could be defined by the response patterns in forum posts. Users wouldn't experience the pain and inconvenience of joining YASNS, just a minor modification -- perhaps a welcome one, if accompanied by a little extra valuable information -- to how they interact already in the communities they belong to. "Activating" such social networks through mechanisms similar to the ones described above would enhance the viral marketing potential of the communities, which would appeal to advertisers.
Since basically everyone uses email, doing this would also "democratize the social graph". What I mean is that today there are two kinds of networks. Either they are private -- owned and run by Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. -- or they are "public-but-elite", defined by the link structure of the Web. In the former case, if amigo ergo sum ("I friend therefore I am"), I exist at Facebook's whim. In the latter case, only folks who take the time to establish a public web presence and get linked to (say, through a blog, or a social net public profile) exist. (Reminds me of Steve Martin's excitement at making it into the phone book in The Jerk.) An open, more inclusive social graph mechanism than either of these currently provides would help bridge the digital divide, among other benefits.
Who's doing this? The idea isn't entirely original. Partially relevant: Facebook has just updated its News Feed to consider interactions between users as inputs for how to filter items to each user. I'm sure this must have occurred to the major portals with email services. Seems like a natural feature for Google Wave, for example, though I haven't seen it. Surely (as with Contact Networks) it's also valuable to large organizations to establish "enterprise social networks", inside and beyond.
Postscript: Gather.com CEO Tom Gerace commented they are working on a patent-pending capability they call PeopleRank that will do what I describe above in the online community section of this post. Google's been thinking about this for at least a year -- how come we haven't heard more yet?
October 24, 2009 in Analytics, Online Communities, Online Marketing, Social Software, Viral Marketing, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
I just read Clive Owen's piece in on wired.com describing the rise of search engines focused on real-time trend monitoring, as opposed to indexing based on authority. It's good, short, and I recommend it.
Building on ideas I had a while back, it provoked an idea for a web service that would allow a group sponsor to register Twitter feeds (or, for that matter, any kind of feed) from members of the group, do a word-frequency analysis on those feeds (with appropriate filters of course), and then display snapshots (perhaps with a word cloud) of popularity, and trend analysis (fastest-rising, fastest-falling). You could also have specialized content variants: most popular URLs, most popular tags. Clicking through from any particular word (or url or tag) you could do a network analysis: which member of the group first mentioned the item, who re-tweeted him or her, either with attribution or without.
The builder of a service like this would construct it as a platform that would allow group sponsors to set up individual accounts with one or more groups, and it would allow these sponsors to aggregate groups up or drill down from an aggregate cross-group view down to individual ones, perhaps with some comparative analysis -- "show me the relative popularity of any given word / content item across my groups", for example.
Twitter already has trending topics, as do others, but the lack of grouping for folks relevant to me makes it (judging by the typical results) barely interesting and generally useless to me. There are visual views of news, like Newsmap, but they pre-filter content by focusing on published news stories.
An additional layer of sophistication based on semantic analysis technology like, say, Crimson Hexagon's, would translate individual key words into broader categories of meaning from all this, so you could, at a glance, in what ways and proportions your group members were feeling about different things: "Well, it's Monday morning, and 2/3 of my users are feeling 'anxious' about work, while 1/3 are feeling 'inspired' on vacation."
As for making money, buzz-tracking services are already bought by / licensed by / subscribed to by a number of organizations. I could see a two-stage model here where group sponsors who aggregate and process their members' feeds could then re-syndicate fine-grained analysis of those feeds to media and other organizations to whom that aggregated view would be useful. "What are alumni of university X / readers of magazine Y focused on right now?" The high-level cuts would be free, perhaps used to drive traffic.
October 06, 2009 in Analytics, Application Design, Marketing, Media, Online Communities, Search, Social Software, Structured Collaboration, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
This morning I went to MITX's "The Current Digital Market and the Outlook for What's Next" event at Microsoft in Cambridge. The event was well-attended. Before the panel discussion, I enjoyed talking with Allen & Gerritsen CEO Andrew Graff, who helped us at ArsDigita, and iProspect CEO (and ex-Bain colleague) Rob Murray. Andrew reported that business was surprisingly strong, and Rob validated trends toward multi-channel attribution analysis and optimization. I also had the chance to meet Forrester's Shar van Boskirk briefly; the 5-year interactive marketing forecast of spend across display, search, email, mobile, and social she / they released yesterday, projecting digital to grow to 20% of an otherwise flat market, with social growing by a factor of five, sparked a spirited conversation on Josh Bernoff's Ad Age article about it yesterday.
July 22, 2009 in Advertising, Analytics, Events, Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Software, Trip Reports | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 21, 2009 in Social Software | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Facebook announced last week that it had passed 250 million members. Since no social network grows to the sky (as MySpace experienced before it), it's useful to reflect on the enablers and constraints to that growth, and on the challenges and opportunities those constraints present to other major media franchises (old and new) that are groping for a way ahead.
"Structured Collaboration" principles say social media empires survive and thrive based on how well they support value, affinity, and simplicity. That is,
At Kate Ehrlich's invitation, I gave a one-hour talk yesterday at IBM Research and the Center for Social Software titled "Structured Collaboration in Social Media: Design for Analytics".
