Archive for the 'Social Media' Tag

Something really, really cool.

What you can use Messenger Connect for

Messenger Connect enables three core scenarios for websites and app developers:

• Identity – makes it easy for users to sign in and sign up to your web site using their Windows Live ID
• Social distribution – lets users share the things they do on your website with their friends. Activities appear in Messenger, Hotmail, and across Windows Live properties, and other places Messenger social is displayed (including Windows Phone 7 and the very popular Windows Live Messenger iPhone app)
• Realtime shared experiences – lets users share an experience in real time with their friends

What’s new in Messenger Connect

Many of the components that have evolved into Messenger Connect have been around for several years (Messenger Web Toolkit, Live ID Web Authentication, Delegated Authentication, and the Windows Live Contacts API), but this is the first time we’ve delivered a suite of standards-based, self-service APIs as a package. To understand how Messenger Connect works, from authorization, to the different interfaces and controls, to the emerging standards/specifications we use (OAuth WRAP, Portable Contacts, ActivityStrea.ms, and OData), check out this post.

Very cool. Read on.

Wow. This is great stuff. This post is a must read:

When done right, gradual engagement communicates the core essence of a service with a few lightweight interactions. If you can make people successful along the way—even better. Will Wright, the creator of the Sims & Spore, has a belief that games should allow people to succeed within the first five seconds. That’s a great philosophy to bring to gradual engagement. In fact, I think if you can use lightweight actions to allow people to accomplish something relevant to the core of your product within their first one or two interactions with your service, that’s gradual engagement at its finest.

…

Through their user research, Twitter found that while celebrities (and their tweets) were a big reason people came to Twitter, they did not keep them there. Instead, what kept users on Twitter was the things they were passionate about – hobbies, conversations with subject-matter experts, and friends. This was the core essence of the service that a gradual engagement approach needed to deliver.

I just recently purchased an iPad. I chalked it up to, “Well, I do user experience. I should have one.” I didn’t need one, but after hours of watching people use one in that Apple Store over on Stockton Street in the heart of Apple-dom, San Francisco…

I had to have one.

Sure, it’s over priced (well, not compared to the Kindle).

Sure, it looks like a toy.

But I’m telling you, Apple and the developers that are building applications for this device are going to change the world in a way that we can’t even dream of. I can’t even dream of all the possibilities, and I do software design for a living.

Here are my thoughts.

What the iPad is great at

Surfing the Web

Flash aside, if you want something to read web pages, the iPad is wonderful. Pages load fast, clean, and re-size to the direction you reading. The display is crisp and clear and totally makes users rethink the limitations of resolution. As much as Adobe likes to tell everyone how much content is Flash-based, I didn’t miss Flash at all.

A lot of sites now have HTML5 videos (YouTube, for one), and once site owners see how many of their users are using iPads to access their content, Flash will become less and less the only game in town.

Watching videos and listening to music

The iPod is a great portable device, but if you spend a lot of time on planes, buses or any other mode of transport where you can access the Web, this is a wonderful time waster. Netflix and MLB.tv play at such a high quality, you forget that you’re watching it over WiFi.

I bought it pretty much for time spent on airplanes. In about one week, I’m going to find a new home for my netbook, because my iPad is replacing it.

Frankly, this is the device I would have bought first before the iPod, because it’s the perfect home entertainment device. Some enterprising young engineer, or company, is going to figure out how to make this the hub of your home entertainment system, and that person will make obscene amounts of money.

Reading anything in “print.”

The NYTimes application is similar to the application they built for Silverlight with Microsoft a few years ago. Depending on the direction you’re reading the article, the page repaginates in the new direction. “Print” publishers should look at this as a completely new channel that’s not only going to extend the life of their content, but allow them to do interesting new things with that content, like include multimedia — something they would have never thought of with a strictly paper product.

I’ll make this prediction: this is the device print publishing companies so desperately needed for a subscription/advertising model, and yet they’re going to miss the opportunity because they’re more focused on losing classified ad share to Craigslist.

What it’s not so great at

Actual work

Sure, it’s a great device to take to meetings and conferences. You can take notes without a lot of effort, and the battery life fits in perfectly with an all-day conference. But it definitely lacks many things, like a mouse. The inability to make precise movements, needed for applications like Omnigraffle and Adobe Photoshop, make this a poor device for repetitive tasks required by most jobs. However, this is a great second device to take if you have a primary device like a laptop. Leave the computer at home, and show the broad strokes at meetings.

Think shiny demos, not boring presentations. For some sales professionals, this will replace the projector.

Replying to emails or any other action that requires a lot of typing

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Many iPhone users that were frequent texters developed carpal tunnel symptoms using Blackberry’s and other smart phones, mainly because the phones were keyboard-driven devices. Once the users moved over to the iPhone, the limited feedback of the “keyboard” forced users to be more economical with their typing because it took much longer. Their symptoms disappeared. The same should happen with the iPad; users will adapt and type less because the device wasn’t designed for that.

How the iPad is going to change the Web

A lot of interactions that work best with a mouse and/or keyboard are pointless in a gestural environment

Mouseovers?

Gone.

Interfaces that require a lot of typing.

Gone.

Interfaces that utilize drag and drop (think Microsoft Surface) become wonderful ways of navigating sites using the iPad, much more so than point and click methods. How many sites really use drag and drop geared toward mouses? Many applications will have to be re-thought in a way that’s going to be a harder transition than moving from command line to point and click.

Cutting out all necessary steps to sign in and personalize content will be important

A lot of websites still have long registration processes that require several steps and lots of keystrokes to maximize site content. Services like Facebook Connect, Messenger Connect, Twitter login or another other social way of registration without full registration will be very important in significant user adoption by iPad users.

If I were running a social site (Hey, MySpace, you listening?), I would figure out a way of designing an interface optimized for the iPad. That includes drag and drop, gestural interfaces that allow users to be creative in a space that’s totally different than the web. Sure, it’s a lot of work, but this is the Wild Wild West! The first website to do this is going to make a huge splash.

Saving content locally will become necessary for iPad users

I’m not the lucky few that owns an iPad that has 3G (read: Ambrose Little), and I couldn’t stomach the thought of yet another Internet service on my already expensive AT&T bill. Applications that download and cache content is something myself and millions of iPad users will be very interested in.

Applications that store a lot of content locally so users can read offline will be all the rage as the iTunes store carries more and more applications. Follow the lead of the NYTimes, for instance.

One of my friends runs an online marketing education conference. Social Media is the new hot thing. I think a couple of years ago, it was search engine optimization, and please don’t ask about my opinion on that. Anyway, his blog network is teeming with posts about Social Media. The top request for education is that newfangled “Twitter thing” and tips about “Facebook.”

I met one of the social characters at one of these events, which I thought was the coolest thing. Nevertheless, the mass market was indifferent, and still doesn’t get the whole CNN call for tweets. Whatever. Nobody cares, right?

I like posting on Facebook as much as the next social media geek. I think last Monday, I talked about my new haircut. But, I recognize that posting about what I’m going to eat on Twitter doesn’t make me some kind of expert. It just means I use it. I don’t charge an arm and a leg for my advice, and I’m still amazed at the impact of Social Media on sites even though some of my friends consider me ahead of the curve. Myself and a few of my friends have been lucky to work in some Social Media environments (MySpace, for example), and even we don’t consider ourselves experts.

Social Media and even User Experience experts shouldn’t be able to call themselves that if they’ve been on one or two panels and read a book. They should have some successes and failures behind them and grown to tell the story. The truly great experts not only know how to leverage their personal brand, but point out the obvious while doing it, for free. Here are some ways to tell if your Social Media Expert is full of crap:

Your Social Media Expert spends more time blogging than working.

Self promotion can be high art on the web. Tila Tequila? Dane Cook? I mean, who really laughs at Dane Cook’s jokes? My friends talk about all the Ringo Starrs out there. You know them; they were with one company as someone inconsequential. The company made it big and found a way to parlay it into selling several books and evangelizing ideas. They are their own personal brand.

That said, there’s a really bad sign if your Social Media Expert spends more time blogging than working. Think about this: one post of this length takes about an hour of write. It’s like the cook with the great cookies; the last thing they are going to do is tell everyone the recipe, right?

If they are spending all their time writing blog posts about how much they know about Social Media, they aren’t helping your company do Social Media.

Your Social Media Expert thinks social media started with Facebook and Twitter.

The reality is that the core foundation of social media has been around since two people talked around the campfire about inventing the wheel. It’s just moved to a different medium, and that medium as we know it, the Internet, started on October 29, 1969. A lot of us older people — you know, the one’s that had jobs before an email address — remember bulletin board systems.

Technically, my first social media message that I sent to a friend of mine on Usenet was in 1987. Seriously, that’s longer ago than the age some of the experts I’ve seen. The message took four days to get there. The distance traveled was from Irvine, California to Claremont, California.

Real Social Media Experts understand conversations, and how those conversations interact on whatever medium they are on. That could mean a letter to the editor sent via a mail carrier in the 1950′s or a page established on Facebook in 2009. It’s the conversation that’s important.

Your Social Media Expert thinks that Twitter is the start of your brand.

One of the great aspects of Social Media is that, if you do it right, your customers have the conversation for you, promote your business and make you lots of money all for the cost of good service. One of the biggest mistakes we all make is where brand starts.

What is brand? Is your your name and the experiences tied to your name. It’s not a twitter post or a blog entry or the color you have or the logo you are designing. It’s the name of your company, and how every representative of your company is associated with it.

If a stupid Twitter post goes out about how Memphis sucks or 15,000 people complain on Facebook that your company uses slave labor, that hurts your brand. Social Media conversations shouldn’t be measured in just metrics but also in quality of the conversation, because that relates back to your brand. The linked article is a good example, because it talks about the success of Comcast. Ask any of their customers.

Your Social Media Expert always has a clown in the pocket.

This a famous phrase I’m going to attribute to a friend of mine. Whenever a company was going down the drain, especially during the late 1990′s, there was always a skunk-works project that was shown off in front of the venture capitalists. This was to distract them from the fact that the company was burning $15 million a month, they were surrounded by $1,000 Herman Miller Aeron chairs, the core product still hadn’t launched, and the CEO was doing coke.

Look, online video! We can put that on our Geocities pages!

Real consultants offer some kind of road-map, including what the deliverables are, what they are going to do and what should be the result, hopefully. It doesn’t always have to succeed, and sometimes you can’t always measure it. Even the biggest agencies have a hard time generating good numbers around social media. At the end of the day, if sales go up, it’s a good campaign.

It’s about the strategy, kids. Plan. Plan. Plan, again. It’s not rocket science, and it doesn’t take a 25-year-old to tell you otherwise.

Your Social Media Expert speaks in 140 character sentences.

If the only way they promote themselves is through Twitter, fire them.

Yesterday.

Why?

Twitter is the Apple of the Internet without the cool products. Their market reach is under two percent, which is interesting because MySpace is still in the 30′s and Facebook is way, way over that in the 50′s. I look at it as the “mom test.” If my mom has heard about it, it’s gone mainstream. We had dinner a few weeks ago, and the conversation started something like, “They wanted me to get on Facebook, but I don’t see time for it. I wish they would have called me up.” Twitter never entered the conversation.

The truth is that Twitter has some great uses, including being the new RSS feed and a great way to watch conversations around specific topics or events.

Your Social Media Expert recommends Delicious and Stumble Upon for an audience of seniors.

It’s all about the audience, right? If your consultant doesn’t know who to talk to, then how can they have a conversation. That’s what blow my mind about some of the people that recommend Twitter for everyone. The first question asked should be, “Where can I have a conversation with this audience?” For example, Email is still relevant. About 46 percent of all embedded links are still through email, yet the Social Media Expert wants you to use hashtags.

Figure out where your audience is, and talk to it. For some, it’s Foursquare. For others, it’s Facebook. For other people, it’s Etsy.

For every audience  there’s a proper venue, and your Social Media Expert should know where to look.

What to do? What to do?

If you really need a Social Media Expert that is one, email me, even if the “expert” doesn’t call himself one.

From comScore:

The study found that 30.8 percent of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago. Access to Facebook via mobile browser grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347-percent jump.

“Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile. “Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser.”

All channels, all devices, baby.

• 30% of smartphone users accessed social networks via mobile browsers — this was up from 22.5% in 2009.
• Total social networking access via mobile browsers on all mobile phones rose to 11.1% — this was up from 6.5% in 2009. Most of this growth was in the uptick in smartphone usage.

How does MySpace survive if their mobile-centric audience uses their mobile site less?

All of the opinions below are mine and only mine.

On top of everything else happening in the social space (Google Buzz, everyone leaving MySpace, Facebook changes), this happens: Facebook Patents The Newsfeed. You can read the full copy of the patent here.

Now before we all have a “What the hell moment,” here are a few things to remember:

Some patents are virtually unenforceable.

Various companies have patented the shopping cart, the GIF image, the one-click purchase and the affiliate program. The one-click purchase made Jeff Bezos look like a fool for a while, especially after they went after Barnes and Noble.

If you haven’t noticed, none of the above are really enforced except for the GIF image patent, which there’s “sometimes” a $5,000 licensing fee. Unisys at one point threatened to go after every website that had a GIF image somewhere on the site.

That was popular.

A few patents, like the one-click purchase and the affiliate program, have given rise to protests and eventual defeat of a lot of the claims Amazon had over the business process. Most of those patents are violated every second of the day because they are ubiquitous and so mainstream there’s no way to enforce them.

Some patents are more for defense against large competitors.

While it doesn’t make sense for Facebook to sue everyone, I’m sure they’re thinking about what they can bring up against Google, MySpace and a few other large properties with a newsfeed.

Other places are probably thinking about how to re-architect their solutions now to avoid any patent infringement. That said, if you’re running a site that isn’t one of the top 1,000, I don’t think Facebook is going to be sending a lawyer your way anytime soon.

Some patents are for getting money out of people and for increasing market value.

One of the few points people forget about Google is that the concept of AdWords wasn’t invented by them. It was patented by GoTo.com. I’ll admit that Google does it much better than GoTo/Overture ever did, but it was enough of a threat that Google eventually settled with Yahoo!, who had purchased Overture.

The lawsuit against Google related to its AdWords service. In February 2002, Google introduced a service called AdWords Select that allowed marketers to bid for higher placement in marked sections – a tactic that had some similarities to Overture’s search-listing auctions.

Following Yahoo!’s acquisition of Overture, the lawsuit was settled with Google agreeing to issue 2.7 million shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license.

That patent was probably one of the reasons why Yahoo purchased Overture. There are holding companies whose purpose is to hold patents. However, they are selective about who they sue because lawyers are expensive. It’s an ROI equation, and there’s no point going after someone without money, right?

GigaOM says:

Friendster, which was recently bought by a Malaysian company, made much of the fact that had obtained five U.S. social networking patents, at times using the patents to scare off the competition, at least in the press.

Scary.

Some patents are declared invalid.

The U.S. Patent Office grants a lot of patents. It doesn’t necessarily mean they will stand up in court. Gibson Guitars has been on a rampage, suing anyone that produces music simulation software like Guitar Hero. Read more here.

They have yet to win.

What would happen if Facebook went after MySpace in court, and the patent was declared invalid?

What if a single social network invented before Facebook had the same implementation, and Facebook was in violation of the intellectual property of that website? Would that company win $500 million like when Microsoft was sued over the browser plug-in?

GigaOM points out:

The patent is particularly valuable because news-feed style communication has become pervasive since it was launched on Facebook. However, it’s not clear that there aren’t precedents for the technology; for instance, the social network Multiply.com had a similar interface for keeping track of friends’ actions before Facebook launched its own.

Mutliply.com suing Facebook? That would be fun.

What next?

As big as a deal as this may seem, it isn’t until they do something with it. For now, it’s just another asset they have in the universe of Social Media.

Google guesses who your friends are, including your mistress that your wife doesn’t know about – and then shows everyone.

This is such an inexact science, because anyone can figure out your email address. We receive so much spam and other garbage through email accounts (is a shopping site really my friend?) and there are conversations you want private. Those connections are now public by default, as Gizmodo points out:

• A girl you slept with in college sends you a message on Gchat, to tell you she has five beautiful children now, and she doesn’t ever think about you, ever. Ok!
• You exchange some messages and a couple of emails to be polite. You defuse the situation. You don’t mention it to your current girlfriend, because that would be weird.
• Coincidentally, you enable Google Buzz, which adds both your current girlfriend and this lady who you politely deflected.
• Your girlfriend checks out your Google profile, sees your friends list and asks you who that lady is.
• You clumsily try to explain, “Oh, it just adds people you talk to automatically,” which only makes things worse.
• Fight!
• You break up, which was probably a good thing anyway, because your relationship sounded really unhealthy. But you get the point, right?

The situation is so bad, some sites, like Lifehacker, are showing ways to turn off the contact list. Think about it, do you want every telemarketer to be your friend? Facebook has one important filter: you can deny friend requests.

It’s never, ever a good idea to create a social graph the way Google did. That’s why most of the IM clients do the double opt-in approach. The follower model is killing Twitter.

Google Buzz reinforces the power law online, which means you’ll get to see 100 photos of Jason Calacanis’s dog or promoting how he pays more than some services, but less than About.com for content

The people you want to talk to automatically become long-tail, yet the people who are endlessly self promoting always bubble to the top because they have 11,000 followers. Someone’s always going to make a comment.

Social Customer points out Buzz does two things that will simply make it unusable.

1. It shows threaded conversations and strongly highlights the initiator of those conversations and makes the comments subservient to the initial post.
2. It takes posts that have “new” comments and immediately bumps those posts to the topmost position of the viewing window.

This interface will greatly reinforce the existing power law relationships online and have the effect of greatly reducing the serendipity and interest in things like the current Twitter and Facebook interfaces.

Not that many people use Gmail and most who do are the digerati.

From twittercism:

This is also the first time I’ve noticed how few of my friends actually use Gmail. I love Gmail and recommend it to everybody, but people are often quite set in their ways and prefer to stay with Hotmail or Yahoo, irrespective of the lack of features. Looking at my address book, I’m guessing probably less than 20% of my friends have a Gmail address or even a Google account, for that matter.

Yeah, it’s mad, but it also means Buzz is already limiting my network.

Social networking is an all or nothing game; and if you only have 20 percent of your friends, do you really think the other 50 percent or so are going to create a Gmail account to see Google Buzz?

I think not.

What’s the take away? Not ready for primetime.

I agree with twittercism:

My gut feeling? Unless they make some major changes and improvements to Buzz soon, and that includes addressing those privacy issues, it’s never going to be a threat to Twitter or Facebook. It’s just another aggregator, and a bad one at that.

Everyone sees Facebook as the center of their social graph. They also see Google as the place that wants your information, which is why people won’t trust them with their social graph.

What do you think?

The running joke is that you know something has jumped the shark once Corporate America has grabbed a hold of it.

Church of the Customer predicts that this is the year Social Media really starts becoming part of Corporate America. Boring isn’t necessarily bad, because it means it’s profitable.

My prediction for 2010: social gets integrated into business functions. That means: social media policies, aligning social media strategies and tactics with overall business objectives and revenue goals, and realigning functional teams. Yeah, not as exciting as another viral video but those are as reliable as a Vegas roulette table. Social media process is hard work, so it’s time for social media to get boring! For process geeks like me, that’s pretty exciting.

From Social Media Today:

The most influential people on Twitter are either already celebrities, create their own content, or both. Who do you see most often retweeted? Major news outlets like CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Mashable. Guy Kawasaki. Robert Scoble. Of course there are many reasons these people are influential, but a very basic reason is that they are creating original content somewhere other than Twitter. They are most often using Twitter as a super-news-feed, and as a way to drive people back to their blog, web site, etc. (Scoble is an exception. He converses everywhere.)

There are a lot of wonderful reasons to have a Twitter account (mostly to promote your blog), but I think the main relevant point is that I can’t think of anyone that is taken seriously only because they have a Twitter account. Twitter is used to promote something else, and it can’t really stand on it’s own.