Google’s Project Glass augmented reality glasses begin testing | The Verge
This is pretty much the only hope Google has left, to get people to ‘share things to their circles’.
Google+ and thoughts on the future of social.
You don’t want to be a service, or a destination. You want to be a protocol.
Google+ has been incredibly valuable, mostly due to forcing us to reconsider the value of social networking, without the benefit of newness or an established personal / impersonal network of connections. And it has led me to a simple conclusion.
Facebook is a destination, and a platform. They tie a pile of services together, but it is something to be interacted with on their own terms, with little pellets ejected into the wider web, in the form of Like Buttons and Social Widgets. Facebook is a collection of activities that live offline and offsite, glued together by the social gravity of everyone you know being there, and easy of use due to integration into other sites.
Tumblr is an ecosystem. It is both a CMS and hosting service, but also a content discovery service. There are social elements, but Tumblr is best conceived of as the next evolution of what Livejournal was - a place to curate a private or public online presence, and stay abreast of a widening network of changes.
Twitter trends more towards being a protocol. (Yes, this is an oversimplification of the definition of protocol. I know.) Like RSS before it, the twitter experience is miles beyond the limitations of twitter.com, or even of the approved twitter functionality. Twitter is a great element that I’ve seen chopped and screwed into dozens of very different experiences. You could make the same argument for Foursquare - it is on the cusp of being more than a service, or an app. It’s becoming part of the architecture of the wider social web.
To be remixable is to achieve the digital equivalent of immortality.
Out of the three top line examples, the one I like most is Tumblr. The one I expect to survive the longest is Twitter. Facebook is in an odd middle space - the need it has for control, to be able to generate income and maintain its valuation, will cripple it from becoming part of the fabric of the evolving social web.
Tumblr is focused on remaining tumblr, and refining that use case and identity. Twitter is expanding outward, and getting integrated into new ideas and new communication concepts. Facebook is doing its damnedest to pull other experience online into itself; everything from blogs, to games, to unified messaging across all channels.
Google is trying to build a Facebook, I think, with the functional mask of Twitter. Google+ is mostly about tying activity everywhere to the same user profiles, and giving Google Search access to that data to refine its product.
You either want to be part of social behaviour online, or you want to make social behaviour online part of your product. I know where my bet goes as to what will be a success.
Facebook vs Google.
Facebook is betting everything on the marketing / advertising value of your projected persona, your own assessment of who you are, what you like, and how you classify yourself in front of your social circle.
Google is betting everything on your actions as an indicator of your intention and identity. Dissecting you via the totality of your emails, searches, YouTube views, RSS items, etc.
The question isn’t which is accurate in depicting your identity; both are. The question is, does your projected identity, or your demonstrated identity do a better job predicting consumption behaviour?
Answer that, and you know who owns the next decade online.
Today’s Apple event marks an important tipping point – it marks the point where Android starts to surge past Apple the way Windows surged past Apple in personal computers back in the 1990s. Moreover, I also believe that Jobs knows this, and doesn’t care. I think he’d rather have a small share of the market where he can exert complete control and create beautiful products that look exactly the way he wants them to look. Thus we have the new iPhone 4, which will cost a little more but will have pretty icons, pretty ads, and a cool video chat feature that only works if the person you’re talking to has the same Apple phone that you do. If you want to buy into Apple’s world, and you can deal with AT&T as your carrier, you’ll probably be very happy.
This has been my stance on Apple vs Android for a while. Google is the champion of owning a market, and collapsing it into a smaller one owned entirely by google. Apple, on the the hand, has spent the last decade building integrated experiences that Apple controls all aspects of, and gets paid at every transaction point of.
If I had to bet on who was going to make the most money in the long run, the smart bet is Google. But remember what Jobs said to John Sculley: “do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?” Apple is focused on a different end game than selling the most phones. It would much rather sell the most important phone.
brit:
Google announces real-time search! Get instant updates from people on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Friendfeed, and more - right in your Google search results.
It will be rolled out over the next day or so. To try it right now, go to Google Trends, and look under “Hot Topics”.
Not to be too Google heavy today, but this is big. Google fills what was becoming a gaping hole in it’s usefulness, and search.twitter.com is probably going to be shown to be woefully inadequate.
This is beautiful (found via Blankanvas, which you should read obsessively)
Google crafted an ad that is entirely narrative based, and is focused on demonstrating the uses and benefits of their service. This is about as perfect as it could be.
Google Sucks at New.
I’ve been talking at length about the launch of Google Wave. As a product, I don’t feel I can judge accurately yet. As a (soft) launch, I feel very comfortable labeling it a failure.
It’s a failure for a few reasons, the first of these being that Google has never really done anything new before. And unsurprisingly, new is a hell of a lot harder than better.
*Deep Breath.*
Google search wasn’t new. Everyone knew what to do with a search box when they came across it. It was just better - better results, better algorithm, simpler design. GMail was similar - email was a defined entity, Google just let you have as much space as you wanted, then bridged the gap between email and IM with Gtalk. AdWords, though a new implementation, was just advertising automated and made relevant. This was not the first time people had seen a link that would take them to a product for offer. It was just more relevant. Better.
Google is very good at better. Wave, however, is new.
Creating something new also requires that you create a definition. The key issue that Wave has, is the lack of a one sentence answer for ‘what is it for’. The best response I’ve seen came from this post by Daniel Tenner, where the value of Wave as a collaborative tool for business uses was brought to light. Which would be great, if there was any conceivable way for that to be how Wave was going to be used at launch.
If I look at Wave as a tool for crafting a collaborative document, like a complex proposal, it definitely has a home in the work life of many people I know. But a private, invite only beta (the exact same launch strategy as Gmail, recall) is not going to create situations that benefit this use case.
Google’s completely lack of marketing strategy on this one is painful. And it answers the question that keeps coming up: Does a big company that generates buzz passively need marketing, or advertising, or PR?
Yes. It does. Because making something cool IS NOT ENOUGH, if you can’t get people to understand WHY it’s cool.
If I’d been in charge of the Wave launch? It would have launched in a private beta, but for entire startups. Let people who enjoy cutting edge collaboration technology figure out the ups and downs of the product. The same people who are using Google Docs as the main office productivity software would love to use this tool to do what it is apparently exciting for - collaborative document creation.
The benefit to doing this? Startups of the type we’re discussing would happily talk about the good, and the bad, of the product. This feedback would allow Wave to turn into something useful, both as a service, and as a set of practices. Instead of a cute little video, Google could have actually sent HUMANS to explain why Wave was meaningful, so the handful of startups in the beta. Once they had it down, the knowledge, and the anticipation for a general release, would flow.
[This is the idea I had by myself, in ten minutes. I guarantee with a few people to bounce ideas off of, and a greater understanding of the technology myself, I could do better.]
Having never really done anything new before, Google assumed they could just release this into the wild, and it would catch on. All this tells you is that despite an army of geniuses, and despite a great track record in improving the math behind experiences, Google doesn’t understand marketing.
And that is why, every time the ‘is marketing/PR/advertising dead?’ meme pops up for another round, I will point to Google Wave, and suggest there is more to communications than being able to get people to look.
[Thanks to Peter Flaschner for suggesting I blog about this, and for bringing up the AdWords example.]
