Jason Calacanis may have been shouted down when he warned startups that Facebook could, potentially, steal their ideas but he makes a number of good points, especially when you consider recent history.

In the early years Microsoft were viewed as the bad guy: frequently accused of bullying tactics, stealing technology and abusing their power due to their shear size. Eventually, a mixture of backlash and the increasing interests of the US Department of Justice and the European Union necessitated a better business ethic (admittedly a simplified overview but you get the idea.) Much of Google’s appeal came from the “do no evil” mantra which became a direct counterpoint to how many viewed the Redmond software giant.

Fast forward a few years and, now, Twitter and Facebook are essentially being accused of the same thing. Stealing ideas and bludgeoning their way through the social web in an attempt to monopolise as much traffic and advertising revenue as they can.

Smash and grab

Both Twitter and Facebook have a demonstrable history of mistreating the third party developers working in and around their ecosystems. With growth comes an increased sense of power and entitlement. Devs have been filling holes in social media services ever since they began but the services are taking back what they now consider to be rightly theirs.

The social platforms are taking ideas from the developer community surrounding their infrastructure and modifying them for their own ends. In some instances they have purchased or absorbed the original developer but how much of this is “sell up or we’ll crush you”?

Twitter

Twitter bought Summize to integrate the excellent search functionality but has consistently reduced the value of search by making the available history smaller. Facebook bought Friendfeed and vowed to keep the site alive but it has stalled and all but died. Both, as I have mentioned in the past, were technology acquisitions for purely selfish reasons.

Twitter has had its share of controversy with the attempted killing of old style Retweets and now taking back the Tweet button from about the most successful ecosystem startup Tweetmeme. While Twitter may have partnered with Tweetmeme an licensed some of the technology powering the tweet tracking functionality you have to wonder about the outcome had Tweetmeme decided not to play ball. In any event, the Twitter Tweet Button functionality is grossly underpowered when compared to its predecessor causing some to migrate to Topsy.

Startups have been criticised for purely basing their business around Twitter but bit.ly can probably feel rightly aggrieved now that the social network has decided to implement its own URL shortening system and replace bit.ly as its default shortener. It could all, however, be irrelevant when Annotations eventually become a reality and URLs are moved to metadata rather than being part of the tweet itself.

Facebook

Facebook has been surrounded in controversy from the Beacon advertising fiasco to the privacy debacle surrounding Instant Personalisation. The attempts to make the entire web an extension of itself via likes and the social graph caused some to question Facebook’s motives.

Coming more up to date Facebook has been accused of trying to squash Quora with its Questions and Answers feature. Also, with Places, Facebook might hope to kill the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla despite supposedly being in partnership with them; although this appears to be backfiring so far as Foursquare is seeing record growth.

Size is everything

Microsoft ran in to trouble when it was considered too big and was using that size to an unfair advantage. Can we envisage a time when a social platform is large enough to attract the attention of the authorities for anti-competitive behaviour?

Will we see complaints from one service against another or will complaints come from outside the social web as other areas start to feel threatened as social platforms look for new areas to expand to beyond their traditional domains?

Image by redbike606

In my post “3 Ways…”  I mentioned the report that Facebook was driving more traffic to certain types of site than Google’s search engine. This subsequently lead to a discussion in the comments on Buzz as to the relative values of social web services.

So, what is the value of social media?

Quite simply, it depends on who you are and what you hope to achieve from the social web. The value gleaned from a business perspective differs to that of a personal one and the number of varying personal perspectives in social media are as many – and as varied – as the number of people using the social web.

At the most basic of levels the value of the social web could be as simple as A, B, C, D, E: Attention, Broadcast, Connecting, Discovery, Engaging. I may expand on this at a later date.

If we are playing the pure numbers game then, for news and entertainment portals, it would appear Facebook creates the most value – perhaps it does for those sites simply after number of hits and ad impressions.

Usage patterns from service to service differ and the links being shared may not hold value for others. Many are saying, from a personal perspective, that Buzz (and FriendFeed before it) creates the most value due to the type of content being shared and, perhaps more importantly, the discussion that follows; the comments contribute much – perhaps sometimes all – of the value on offer.

Buzz is, however, still a niche product; it is growing but still stuck squarely in the realms of geekdom. We tend to gravitate towards services that fit our usage and interests.

Diff’rent strokes

Facebook is very generic with emphasis on fun, friends and family. While brands are making good use of the service it is still full of gossip, catching up with old friends and image sharing.

Twitter has completely transformed from its beginnings as a geek handout and now has no real target demographic. People get hung up on the purpose of Twitter but it is simply all about keeping up to date.

Google Buzz is different. As buzz incorporates our shares from Google Reader it is a natural move to migrate from one to the other for our news consumption relying on social sharing rather than direct feeds from sites or blogs. We move to automatically follow the same people we have already been subscribed to – an evolutionary shift rather than a revolution, it is therefore natural that we will gain most value from buzz as it immediately includes the kind of content that we are already consuming.

The problem here is that we become blinkered to other content or uses of the service. Adoption is much wider than we suspect but our social circle and interests determine that we generally have no need to discover what else is out there perfectly illustrating that our usage case, and consequently our perceived value, is different to just about everyone else.

The medium is not the message

Predictably, the social web was buzzing (pun intended) after Leo Laporte decided he was going to publicly slate Google Buzz and the rest of social media calling it “an immense waste of time”. Paul Carr followed up with a post echoing some of Leos’ points as a further explanation of why he quit all social sites except Twitter where he locked his account at 10000 followers.

An increasing number are calling social media vacuous where anything of substance is rarely posted or, if actually posted, never found again. Why should this be?

Horses for courses

Social media is transient; it is our ever flowing streams washing the mundane flotsam out to sea. As a result we can’t hope for any permanence in the social sphere and must balance our online activities accordingly.

To achieve the best results we must use the tools that meet our needs and not just jump on the next shiny big thing and demand instant value. What works for others may not work for us and vice versa. Promoting something that is largely visual is obviously better suited to Facebook rather than Twitter; the need for conversation may be better suited by Buzz. Curating links to news is where Twitter comes in to its own. Common sense is very much the order of the day.

Social networks cannot be all things to all people and cannot even be all things to just us.

With still no indication as to when Google.me is likely to surface Google needs to demonstrate a commitment to the social web.

The longer Google goes with no visible social strategy the further it falls behind the competition both in the ability to corner a share of the market but also in public perception. Google already has a checkered past as far as the social web is concerned and many feel they cannot trust the search giant to deliver in this area.

What next?

A quick kill would probably be to integrate social search within the main results; give users the option as to whether they want to include results from your social circle by default.

Social shares integrated into search

Social results would modify traditional results showing both alongside each other – pages with more shares, tweets etc. could out rank those with a lower traditional page rank and, ultimately, bring the page rank up. Normal results could give an indication as to who is sharing them.

Does it have to stop at “your” social circle?

As more social results are gathered they should be pushing items to the fore for everyone to see (hence the need for shares, likes and tweets to affect page rank). Those without a social profile can, therefore, also reap the benefit.

What of privacy?

Any share information that Google could show from around the web would obviously have to reflect the original privacy settings at the source – not a problem when reading with a source such as Facebook. For those with a Google profile privacy settings would be directly integrated but Google could take a tip from Facebook and extend the options available for allowing your profile to be displayed within search results.

For starters there would have to be an initial opt to even include your profile when including your shares, otherwise it would be included in “and x others” with no removable link or other means identification. Obviously, details should not be shown of private accounts – there’s a reason that they are private.

Provided that you’re willing to be identifiable with search results Facebook style options could be the order of the day. Who do you want to be visible to? Friends only, friends of friends or everyone? This granularity could even he applied to those profiles that you personally want displayed in your results. Who do you want to see: just results from your social circle or from further out?

Integrating social results could perhaps start small – including shares from Google Reader & Buzz just to test the water – then expand to other social services such as Twitter and Facebook.

Learning by doing?

Interestingly, Google has now provided Orkut (the oft forgotten social network) with functionality to create different groups of “friends” for different purposes – purely context based – enable you to share different things with different groups far easier than with Facebook permissions.

Rob Diana ponders (quite logically) that Google.me will be the culmination of everything Google is (or has been) doing in the social space – what I have been saying for a while now. Others agree.

With their toes dipped in the water and the targetted acquisition of various companies it is apparent that Google are trying to build an overall framework on which to build Google.me but the timetables involved have many left thinking “I’ll believe it when I see it”.

Rather than write a full review and duplicate the good work of others elsewhere I wanted to share a few thoughts and opinions and how I arrived at them.

The journey

I’ve always been a geek and have spent (too) many an hour just tinkering and tweaking to get something just the way I want it – whether it be a self build PC, website or phone. In fact I spent a long time building custom Windows Mobile 6.5 roms for my old HTC Touch Dual before the OS was released.

When my Touch Dual died (probably as a result of repeatedly re-flashing too many roms) I was still in contract so couldn’t afford another Windows Mobile device. It was disappointing at the time but ultimately did me a big favour. I ended up with a Nokia XM5800 after being surprisingly impressed by the one my wife (@SallyWalker) had bought. Okay, Symbian is far from the best mobile OS but the ability to side load apps from any source was a blessing.

Without a doubt, the best application I have ever used on Symbian is the Twitter client Gravity written by @janole. The interface and design was a masterclass in what Symbian could achieve and should have become a template for how apps look on the platform. I strongly believe that Symbian themselves should really have looked at this and redesigned the OS itself.

Gravity was the perfect Twitter experience for me; it just felt “right”. Using accounts from multiple services, GPS, image sharing and URL shortener integration were all there and the app was, quite honestly, way ahead of the competition and really set the standard for how Twitter clients should be, and not just on the Symbian platform.

Gravity was so good that it was the single reason I was hesitant to ditch my Nokia and move to Android. Ever since I have been searching for that perfect Twitter experience on Android but never found it – that could now be about to change.

A new hope

For some reason I can’t fathom I’ve never been a fan of desktop Twitter apps, don’t ask me why but I’ve just never gotten on with them and always preferred to use the web site. I installed the Tweetdeck desktop application but very soon found myself removing it.

Twitter on a phone is different and, while I have still been using the mobile website from time to time, I believe a client is the way to go to get the best from the service. However, being disappointed with the alternatives I stuck with the default HTC application Peep – it was simple and did the basics reasonably well so why waste space installing something else. Just as with desktop clients the rest didn’t feel right; perhaps I had just been spoilt by Gravity.

I was intrigued when I heard that Tweetdeck would work in a similar way to Gravity: multiple accounts, swiping from side to side to switch between different columns etc. and I am glad to say that I was not disappointed. Tweetdeck feels so much like Gravity to use that it is almost a homecoming.

The current build may still be a beta with a few bugs and an incomplete feature set but I can honestly not now imagine myself using anything else on an Android device. Not a statement I make lightly.

As well as the overall experience fitting the way I see a mobile Twitter client working there are a number of features which instantly resonated:

• performing a search and saving the results as a new column so you can keep an eye on a topic in real time
• the Buzz notifications (I don’t have my Facebook account added but it’s the same thing) in the ‘Me’ timeline indicating, for example, if someone liked your post
• choosing either exact coordinates or a Foursquare “Place” when geotagging
• the little indications when you have unread items: the dots indicating pages and the yellow scroll bar at the side – the longer the bar the more unread items

The beta support forums are busy already and a lot of the requests mirror things I would personally like to see such as improved support for lists (I may even start using them), the ability to separate different services out to different columns and to show which tweets are geotagged directly in the timeline. Don’t get me wrong, the combined Home column works really well with the different colours for the different services you are using but it would nice to have the choice to split them into their own streams.

The single biggest problem with Tweetdeck is the inability to change the refresh times. Currently, the application update your stream every few seconds which, on a device that has known battery life issues, is not a good call and effectively prohibits you from leaving it running in the background. Fortunately, this has already been acknowledged on the support forums so I envisage there being more options in the next build(s).

The future

As long as the key issues get resolved before Tweedeck hits version 1.0 the applications is, in my opinion, streets ahead of any other Twitter client for Android and can only get better.

I have said a bit recently about how Google could be looking to implement their new social network but Mark’s comment in response to my last post really hit the mark (no pun intended):

“So, Google as a generic destination instead of just a search page?”

Google’s primary business is all about sending you elsewhere and, while they make good revenue from the advertising setup around search, there is a lot to be said for keeping visitors at your site.

So, if we are to assume that by creating a well integrated, comprehensive and well designed social offering Google can compete effectively with Facebook then just how far could they go? Social gaming may be currently touted as the key battleground, and it may have a considerable impact in adoption rates, but Facebook is not going to stand still so Google.me will need something to truly differentiate itself.

Enter Search

Google has been accused of being a one trick pony and, so far, this is probably true. Eric Schmidt even admits that Google sees Android as a part of search because of the traffic it drives. Search is something Google does extremely well so why not use it to bolster your other products.

Unknown to most, Google.com includes Social Search which gives “results from people in your social circle” which currently includes content such as:

• Websites, blogs, public profiles, and other content linked from your friends’ Google profiles
• Web content, such as status updates, tweets, and reviews, from links that appear in the Google profiles of your friends and contacts
• Images posted publicly from members of your social circle on Picasa Web and from websites that appear on their Google profiles
• Relevant articles from your Google Reader subscriptions

Recommendations

Google has the full weight of its search index to throw behind Google.me so how can social search be integrated into it? By using likes, shares and recommendations to influence search results Social Search could extend beyond the current “your social circle” functionality. Add an influence engine behind this to analyse numbers of retweets (or whatever the Google.me equivalent will be) etc. and, combined with normal search results, you can build a powerful real time trending solution which incorporates sources from right across the web rather than being limited to discussion within the status updates application (i.e. trending topics in Twitter).

It was reported earlier in the year that Facebook was driving more traffic to certain types of site than Google and this is obviously because of the social element involved. The types of sites given as examples were news and entertainment portals where, at the time, Facebook was driving 13% of all traffic compared to 7% from Google. Now, the majority of traffic to these sites is going to be direct – the reason Facebook is becoming a big traffic generator is because of the nature of social media users (and probably more so for Facebook than elsewhere) to gossip.

As such, it’s not a worrying statistic for Google but, with their own social network, they could get their hands on some of those referrals and build it into their recommendations.

Related content

Integrating search (including social search) into your stream could be utilised by providing additional, related links for those explicitly shared by your friends – some kind of “you may also like” arrangement. Would this be too ambitious or complicated to implement considering the related links must be generated immediately? If this could be achieved without too many problems then having a related content selection available a click away or via a fly-out would be a great aid to discovery. 

If the default URL shortener is Goo.gl (which it will, no doubt) then there is an ideal opportunity to perform a quick search for related content whilst generating the shortened address. It would also have the advantage of being able to immediately check the Goo.gl database for other instances of that share (much as Bit.ly and Tweetmeme already do). Being presented with a list of other users who shared the same link could be a great way to find new people to follow with similar interests.

Statistics

With a huge search index from right across the web Google would, technically, also be able to provide real time stats in-stream - whether it be stats for links others have shared or stats for your own content. Content creators already link sites such as blogs to their Google profile; imagine being able to see the number of views, shares, tweets etc. all in one place so you can keep track of who is linking to your content and where.

The popularity of links being shared by your social circle could also be gauged and, as above, by examining links from right across the web and not just within the stream. This could be incredibly powerful and could even incorporate data from other tools such as Google Analytics.

Go for what you know

It is essential to diversify your business and not to put all your eggs in one basket but if you do something and you do it well why not use it to your advantage. Google should do just this.

What are your thoughts?

Image by Jeffery Beall