Sarah Lacy over at Techcrunch has suggested that those complaining about how the social web does or doesn’t work are actually using it incorrectly. She has received a varied reaction and, while I may not see eye to eye with the full post, I would be inclined to agree that some have lost sight of what they set out to achieve on the social web.

As I posted recently, the value you get from social networks is very much determined by your usage scenario. To all those who say that the social web does not work for them I would say that the 500 million people happily sharing, updating and playing games on Facebook don’t seem to be complaining. What have they achieved that others have not?

They have found themselves.

It may sound a bit zen and esoteric but your average user on Facebook is there for a specific purpose and the service itself fits that purpose perfectly. They are there as a private individual sharing photos and updates, catching up with their friends or playing games. Usage is casual and many are actually following their “flesh and blood friends” and relatives.

The complications occur when social media is used for business and those involved are not differentiating between business use and their personal activity. We need to decide who we are and why we are using the social web. We need to ask ourselves which hat are we wearing at any given time as our goals and expectations will differ.

Personal or business

For the vast majority, personal use is just for fun – there is no pressure. Conversations are purely ad-hoc and genuine, there is no pretention or sales pitch distorting how they communicate. Value is quickly achieved under these circumstances as expectations are simple and easily met.

Business users will also not have problems when a specific purpose is defined; be it brand management, monitoring the competition or a customer service channel. The goals are set and results clearly identifiable.

Ideally, we should be in a position where we can segregate our usage based on the role we are undertaking – the easiest way to achieve this would be to create a different account for each purpose. Separate accounts, however, are not always possible especially for those in startups or for those people whose persona IS their work - this is why the announcement of the new group functionality in Orkut caught the imagination.

Too much

Those crying foul tend to be the new media revolutionaries, the mavens, the gurus who are trying to do everything and be all things to all people. It is impossible for these people to separate business and private use as the two are intrinsically woven. By necessity they are spreading themselves across the social web – an all ecompassing brand – but are being spread too thinly. The ability to interact efficiently can be lost; the balance between broadcast and engagement skewed until, eventually, the audience can become embittered.

Constantly riding the crest of the social wave can only be achieved by allowing the avenues of least effect to ebb away. Attempting to maintain the flow across all services will only result in the wave crashing beneath us.

Image by m kasahara

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

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.

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”.

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.

“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

For Google to become a verb is a great achievement and really gives a brand loyalty and, perhaps, even misguided sense of ownership over the search service because of the simple familiarity – everyone knows what you mean. To “Google” something entered our vocabulary but if their “Facebook killing” offering in the social space really is going to be called “Google Me” then it will redefine the term completely. Will people adjust or just become confused?

Currently, to “Google me” means to search for me in their search engine – in future it will mean to interact with me on their social service – those who do not “get” social media will be speaking a different language to those who spend their time between the Facebooks and Twitters of this hyper-connected world.

Up for the challenge?

If anyone has the ability and size to challenge Facebook then Google is probably the only company that could pull it off. Most of the components are already there in some form or another but the problem is that there is no cohesive strategy (presumably where Vic Gundotra comes in to play) and no glue to hold it all together.

As I have already said, before all of the talk about Google Me became the topic du jour, Google needs to link things together to provide an holistic service. We have the status updates (Buzz), videos (YouTube), photos (Picasa), productivity (Docs) and so on but there is nothing to link them together into one easy to use service – hence my feeling that Google profiles could become the gateway to a new combined offering.

We see the beginnings of cohesion with the integration between Buzz, Reader and Gmail but this does not go far enough or allow enough control.

Eric Schmidts recent comments that Buzz is just an extension of GMail do not make good reading unless you extrapolate and reach the conclusion that GMail itself will become part of the cohesive strategy that is Google Me – just another avenue for communication all linked in under the umbrella of your Google (Me) account. On these terms Buzz doesn’t need to become a standalone service but DOES need an easier point of entry than being a folder in GMail. That point of entry will be the profile page which should become more like your Facebook page. The profile page could do everything we need with a public view for our news feed, activity and shared items etc. and private view which lets us get to all of our stuff: GMail, Social network etc.

The longer we have no noise from Google on what is going to happen the more we will lose faith in the process and, ultimately, the end product. Obviously, they are not in a position to give us specifics and warn the competition but a few nods or pointers to plans and timescales would not go amiss.

Change

Not only will the googling public need to rethink the way they refer to the service but Google itself will need to rethink how it launches, promotes and supports any new service. Google Me will not work if it is merely opened and left to fend for itself relying on word of mouth; “build it and they will come” will not work in this instance. People must be given a full explanation of what the service can provide, how it can benefit them and what it does differently to the competition (i.e. Facebook). They must be sold on the new offering by comprehensive campaign and, once joined, kept up to date and supported fully.

Google cannot rely on gaining traction simply because the service is an extension of Gmail, or whatever, instead Google Me must be marketed completely and effectively as a viable alternative to Facebook to entice in more than just the curious Gmail user.

There is a huge, and rapidly growing, market for Google Me in Android users and Google simply HAS to take advantage of this. The integration of existing Google apps into Android is seamless but Google Me must go even further – even, perhaps, becoming the core of the Android experience in the future.

How much is too much?

Chad Catacchio over at The Next Web makes a good point that Google can utilise its experience with location to “hit Facebook where it is weakest”. Social location applications such as Foursquare, despite having a lot of users, have limited appeal with many not seeing the point of “checking in” – perhaps this is because they do not go far enough.

Twitter now recommends who you might like to follow but a location based recommendation engine for people, places, services and more could be a big win for Google if they managed to pull it off.

Any location based functionality in Google Me would have to be a very sleek implementation or the service could run into difficulties with trying to achieve too much in many diverse areas – everything to everyone – and the focus could drift.

Roll up, roll up!

Without a doubt, the biggest challenge for Google will be to penetrate the market and just relying on their name will not help (killing off Wave shows this is the case). Google Me must be easy to use with functionality that is obvious to the layman and sufficiently differentiated from the competition to overcome the apathy of those not wanting to up sticks and switch to a Facebook clone.

Google must hand out the flyers and shout from the rooftops about their new offering targeting luddites, enthusiasts, Facebookers and developers alike; engaging many groups on many different levels and persuading them to buy a ticket when the circus rolls into town will be a gargantuan, but necessary, task.

Many are genuinely excited by the potential of Google Me but there is the possibility that it could either make or break Google. The search giant already has its detractors because of their apparent throw it at the wall and see how much sticks approach to product launches. This combined with them looking to build a social empire by acquisition could spell danger if those acquisitions are not properly integrated and the whole does not become more than the sum of its parts.

On the other hand, rather than being the circus clowns, if Google get it right they can finally prove themselves as the ring masters.

Image by on1stsite

Robert Scoble brought to the attention of his Buzz followers a new service called Chum.ly which has been around for a little while but is now really starting to take shape.

There is no doubt that Twitter and Facebook hold the dominant positions in the social web but they can co-exist quite happily as they cater to different markets; other true micro-blogging services just couldn’t compete with Twitter not because they weren’t as good but because they didn’t have enough differentiating features to tempt users away. Creating an account elsewhere is easy, persuading your social circle to do the same and rebuild your network elsewhere is not.

Friendfeed was a geeks paradise providing extensive aggregation and allowing for in depth conversations without the restrictions of 140 chracaters. It unfortunately lost steam due to the buyout by Facebook and little (if anything) has changed since. Personally, I see Google Buzz as a direct replacement for Friendfeed. As I have said before, the feeling at Buzz is very similar to Friendfeed in its early days and this type of site – especially with the resources that Google can potentially throw at it – can also survive as, again, it serves a different demographic from the “big two”. It is even preferred if Buzzers do not stream their tweets as the two communities are disctinct and serve different purposes.

Queue Chum.ly

Chum.ly is described by Scoble as a “next-generation microblogging service” but I envisage it really as a direct competitor for Buzz. With the functionality on offer it goes beyond the simple status update and becomes more of a “discussion community”. Again you are not restricted to the 140 character limit elsewhere so can go in depth. The inteface and user experience is currently in its infancy but the core of functionality is already there and is working well.

Chum.ly already has some nice features to differentiate itself from the competiton. I like the way draft posts are handled; not only are they held within a separate “folder” but also retained in situ in your timeline so that you can see them in the context with which you were writing them, surrounded by other posts. In fact “in context” plays a big part on the site. Replies and comments can be seen “in context” where the whole conversation they relate to is displayed in a separate timeline – although a “top-down” view would be nice so that it is easier to read the thread chronologically.

Welcoming

The developers of Chum.ly are an incredibly welcoming lot who are always on the watch for questions you may have about the service and even keener to hear your feedback. They are also very willing to explain why certain features work as they do and, perhaps, not as you might have expected them to. Google may have the vast resource pool but the guys at Chum.ly have an obvious, and infectious, enthusiasm which can go an incredibly long way.

Will Chum.ly be looking to compete with the likes of Twitter and Facebook or will it be aiming to find that niche that remains to be effectively filled by Buzz? Personally I think it is better suited to the latter. There is an emphasis on integration with the likes of Twitter but you have more control over how that integration operates which can only be a good thing.

I think there are good things ahead for Chum.ly and, with the right direction, it could quickly become a major player.

It was only natural, therefore, to move to the Windows Mobile platform as my smartphone of choice – starting with the Orange SPV550 and moving through a few other phones and OS iterations. Coming from that background I am obviously used to being able to install apps from anywhere so I resisted moving to the iPhone on a point of principal – the closed system with all applications needing to go via the App Store just seemed an unnatural barrier which you shouldn’t need to rely on jailbreaking to get around.

There is not doubt that the iPhone (and now the upcoming version 4) was a gamer changer and a great device but one which didn’t fit my needs or way of doing things. When my HTC Touch Dual finally died (after many, many flashes of custom ROMs) I spent a year with the Nokia XM5800 which, in all fairness, is a great phone but a bit bulky in the pocket so, the time came to move on – Gravity by @janole, however, is an absolute MUST for anyone with a supported S60 device.

Step up Android

I’ll admit that I’m late to the party as far as Android is concerned but maybe that’s for the best. I’ve entered the fold with the OS at v2.1 so never experienced life without multi-touch or the app drawer; instead I have the great looking Sense UI and a very stable, mature operating system at my disposal.

In a way the HTC Sense UI is almost like a homecoming having used TouchFlo/Manilla on Windows Mobile so my new HTC Desire was instantly familiar straight out of the box (OOTB).

Android v iPhone

With the inpending arrival of the iPhone 4, the debate over whether iOS or Android is better has been raging just as furiously as the Mac v PC argument ever did. Nowhere has this been highlighted better than Robert Scoble’s post on Buzz. Robert has been extoling the virues of the Android OOTB experience: “all my contacts, apps, calendar items, and other things automatically synched without hooking it up to anything” but (despite using a gmail account for years) having all of my details in Outlook I did not experience this.

As you would expect, the integration with the key Google applications is pretty much flawless and all achieved by just entering your GMail account details as part of the device setup. Even those apps in beta are seamlessly linked to your GMail account – take Google Listen as a great example.

I’m a big @scottsigler fan (an original junkie) so setting up his podcast in listen was my first priority; after doing so I was surprised, nay, delighted to find that Listen had automatically added it to a “Listen Subscriptions” section in Google Reader. How cool is that?

All change

It is this flawless integration that has prompted me to change the way I do things. I have converted all of my contacts to Google Contacts and – wait for it – completely dumped Outlook as my email client; I just don’t need it any more. Sorry Microsoft!

It really is something to say that a phone has altered my behaviour but there it is. There are a few holes such as the lack of a native file manager but the Android Market is beginning to flourish and is populated with numerous, good quality, free applications to fill these gaps.

Android is here to stay and not just make up the numbers.

Image by scarygami

No public service of this magnitude should be expected to be without issues but the recent multiple outages are starting to become a cause for concern amongst social media types. Twitter has a history of having infrastructure issues and the current problems are becoming reminiscent of the torrid time experienced last summer. It currently seems that every time Twitter implements a new feature something else breaks.

Trust

Last year, it took Twitter a long time to re-establish trust in the service after a summer of the Fail Whale. At the time many users were considering leaving and never returning – the feeling that the service could no longer be relied upon was that great with many feeling that they could no longer justify investing their time in something that would just let them down.

If Twitter wants to attract advertisers and become a viable platform for both promoted tweets and for selling spots in trending topics then they need to retain trust and prove that they are stable and that we are not heading back to another summer like last year. No-one wants to risk investing in an advertising platform that will not give a decent ROI due to service down time. A failure to get it right first time will almost certainly kill Twitter’s chances of being given a second bite at the cherry.

What next?

Twitter needs to be completely open and honest about the issues they have been experiencing. This is one area where they do, at least, have the edge over some other services. They are normally pretty quick with an admission that they screwed up – honesty goes a long way but they also need to show that they are learning from their mistakes.

They also need to publicly demonstrate the steps they are taking to increase both capacity and resilience, not just to meet current needs but to also future proof the service considering the current rate of growth and the potential for further impacts due to new functionality.

Finally, Twitter has to demonstrate effective, intelligent decision making; there has been a issue in the past with Twitter’s ability to handle the load from large events – well, they don’t come much bigger than the World Cup. Is it wise to roll out new features during such a time when you have already been exhibiting problems coping?

Too big to fail?

Twitter is being quite aggressive with updates and feature rollouts of late, perhaps a more softly, softly approach might be in order for a while. Implement one thing at a time and let it bed down for a while before thinking about the next thing.

As the other contenders and pretenders fell by the wayside (identi.ca, Plurk etc.) Twitter became the de facto standard for micro-blogging and short status updates. Celebrities reveal their inner most (ofttimes vacuous) thoughts, election campaigns have been staged and fought, and global corporates have been brought to task. Just like the banks Twitter has become too big to fail and, as a company, needs to do everything it can to prevent that from happening.

He advocated targetting successful bloggers and his tips included reading their blogs to learn their post style and attending conferences where they are speaking. While, at their root, they were common sense tips I took issue with the way they were presented: becoming what he calls a true fan.

Doing your research is a must but I’m not sure I would couch it in the terms “Memorize the Song Lyrics”; listening to someone talk at a conference can be beneficial but “Attend Every Concert”? I think not. In my comment at the time I referred to the post – somewhat tongue in cheek – as “A social stalker’s charter.”

Discussion & Debate

Steven Hodson, interestingly, wrote of Social Media the day after I made my comment:

It has become a swampland of branding , buzzwords, and self-gratifying back-slapping. The fact is people don’t want to hear dissenting or differing viewpoints that attack their favorite social media totems

He went on to say that if you weren’t willing to “big up” the current social superstars then you will remain anonymous. Whilst I agree with his initial sentiment to a degree I believe that you don’t have to be sycophantic to exert influence.

The social web has – over time – lost most of the initial impetus; there has been a shift in mindset since the halcyon days of the early adopters striving to understand where social media would take us – everyone is now very much accepting of the status quo. The social web has achieved ubiquity (which is what we were all striving for) but now seems to have stagnated. Everyone is thinking ‘how can I use what I have’ rather than ‘how can I get more’ – the thought leaders are now just followers and it seems many of the original ideas have died.

The discussions and debates have been largely replaced with how to crib sheets and social media bibles – my way or the highway, but we need to get back to questioning the current position instead of trying to become clones of the so called experts. Instead, finding our own voices and exploring all other avenues.

Au contraire

You don’t have to be beligerent and disagree out of spite – we all have our opinions. It is the differences which make our social discourse interesting, valuable and fruitful. Even if you may disagree you still need an indepth knowledge of that with which you disagree in order to be able to understand it and better present your own argument. A contrary position is not necessarily a derogatory or aggressive one but, merely, a different opinion.

Social types and bloggers positively encourage comment and must welcome contrary standpoints. Why? They make us either re-affirm our position by having to argue our case or even to persuade us that we were wrong; we must not be afraid to admit this whether we are small time or a six figure blogger.

While we all like to have our egos stroked from time to time the Super Influencers can, just as readily, promote the little by way of intelligent discourse and a back and forth exchange even if you do not see eye to eye.

We do not discover unless we question.

Image by Johnny Grim.

Yesterday, I entered Matthew Gain’s competition to win a copy of the Problogger book

This was no ordinary competition, there was no right or wrong answer; he asked for our “most successful blog post and explain why” it was the most successful. This got me thinking.

What is “success” in this context? Is it simply the number of page views, or the amount of comments it spawns? Is it about re-tweets or Facebook likes? It could be, if that is what you are after, but I consider success to be the “impact” it has made.

Simple can be effective

My choice was (probably predictably) The 5 C’s of Social media – my post from almost two years ago in which I laid out a simple framework for explaining what social media is: the five base opportunities it affords us.

Did it generate the most page views? No.
Did it spawn the most comments? No.

So why was it successful?

Yes, it was a “list post” and it had a number in the title – two common ways to draw in readers – but I believe the post was successful because of the simplicity of the idea. An idea that resonated, took hold and grew beyond its original intent because of the input of others. An idea that is still relevant today so, with a minor tweak, has demonstrated a longevity beyond anything I could have imagined.

The 5 C’s has been re-used by bloggers, social media “experts” and trainers in one form or another in their own posts or materials over the past two years and continues to have an effect due to simple common sense.

I frequently write long, wordy posts but at the core of everything is usually just an idea – how well that carries over varies. We can get bogged down in complexity and the message is lost but a simple idea well communicated if often most successful.

So why the strange post title?

Sally, my wife (@SallyWalker), was hosting the latest edition of her Socially Sally web TV show and the topic was blogging tips – one such tip was to make an impact, both with the post title and the contents, and not to use titles like “I Just Bought a Loaf of Bread from Sainsburys”.

Out of the blue an idea formed, a challenge for all those attending to actually write a post with exactly that title – a form of viral posting which, perhaps, can have an impact of all its own. As Sally says: “sometimes the crazier the idea, the more it works”.

Image by bufivla.

Twitter argue that a third party ad network may put impressions ahead of the host service itself, thus diminishing the experience and, potentially, leading to a smaller audience as users stop visiting the site.

I am reminded of the argument given by Apple to justify why all iPhone applications must be approved and supplied via the app store: to ensure that the iPhone platform remains stable and free from potentially exploitable flaws.

But how similar are they really?

At first glance there seems a huge gulf between the two philosophies but there is the potential for Twitter to become a much stricter task master, especially when Fred Wilson – a major investor in Twitter – remarked that third party applications are filling gaps in the Twitter ecosystem that Twitter should have filled from the beginning or should be looking to build into the experience.

Twitter are not currently making money from the service but are looking to protect the future; the long tail is where they see the money being recouped but it will be a long hard slog. Reading Dick Costolo’s post on the Twitter blog it would seem that they are just looking to maintain the integrity of the part of the service that they truly control: the timeline, beyond that is pretty much fair game. They are committed to the APIand want to encourage developers to build ‘around’ the timeline but, if we listen to Wilson, for what roles?

Control

Apple, it could be argued, are just looking to control the ecosystem in order to ensure they get a cut of everything. Is it ‘really’ about stability of the platform or just having the power to exert total control? The iPhone world is very much a siloed operation with Apple having the final say and the ability to block anything that threatens their dominance or revenue. Business is business so you can understand that to a point but how far is too far? How many potential customers are put off by the closed system?

At present, the key difference is that advertising comprises only a small part of the Twitter ecosystem and they are NOT looking to prevent ads _outside_ of the timeline, only reserving their right to control what occurs within it. They are not stopping developers making applications and they are expanding the API all the time. On top of all this Annotations are arguably the biggest invitation to third parties you could currently wish for so, the garden looks rosy.

The thing we have to consider, however, is once Twitter start realising an income from promoted tweets will the money start painting a different picture with regards to openness? Are Fred Wilson’s comments an indication of direction or just shooting off at the mouth? When a means to recoup your investment is shown to be working will there be a push to build on it?

As has already been pointed out, Twitter are to introduce their own native link shortener and drop bit.ly as the default option. Twitter has also bought the Tweetie client for iPhone and rebranded it as the official iPhone Twitter application. The interesting point here is that both of these areas were highlighted by Wilson as areas that Twitter should not be leaving up to third parties. What else could be on the hit list, a photo upload service?

On the face of it, if you are looking to provide extended value from your system then do you leave core functionality in the hands of others? Do you risk third parties folding and instantly knocking out part of the ecosystem? Common sense would dictate otherwise but, with a history of unreliability when things get busy, has Twitter learnt from the issues of scale in the past? Could they reliably provide a photo upload service or would we again get a fail whale?

The user

Twitter must, obviously, ask what impact would taking functionality in-house and ‘killing off’ third parties have on the end user? There will always be a high proportion who wouldn’t care as long a they can tweet their friends – just like with the facebook privacy issues. Joe public often doesn’t look beyond the basics. They won’t be concerned with the technology (especially if it is good enough and functional enough) – people adapt.

There would no doubt be a backlash from developers and some of the tech elite; you can picture the #imleavingtwitter hashtag already – but the numbers here, just like with Facebook, are insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Twitter will not go to the wall over a small developer rebellion should it decide to exert a greater degree of authority.

Best intentions

Looking in from the outside, Twitter seems to have always been operated with the best of intentions. There are numerous ways that the service could have made a quick buck but opted to retain the integrity with which it was founded. Best intentions can sometimes only go so far and you have to question whether, with investors exerting pressure, whether those intentions could ultimately conflict with the need for the service to survive. It can be a bad sign when the money men start dictating policy and control the direction – let’s hope we never reach that point.

Update

The API Terms of Service have been updated and go further than was indicated in Costolo’s post yesterday. He originally stated:

Companies are selling real-time display ads or other kinds of mobile ads around the timelines on many twitter clients, and we derive no explicit value from those ads. That’s fine.

We now, however, have what appears to be a contrary position in the Terms themselves:

IV. COMMERCIAL USE
2 (a) We encourage you to create advertising opportunities around Twitter content that are compliant with these Rules. In cases where Twitter content is the basis (in whole or in part) of the advertising sale, we require you to compensate us (recoupable against any fees payable to Twitter for data licensing). For example, you may sell sponsorships or branding around gadgets or iframes that include Tweets and other customized visualizations of Twitter.

Two days and two seemingly conflicting pieces of information but, as has been pointed out, the terms do seem particularly vague. We will have to wait to see exactly how they are applied but it illustrates a willingness on the part of Twitter to start setting their sites further afield.

Image by Bala

His reasoning is that as the number of users on Twitter increases and we all start following more people your tweets will get lost among the noise.

What is marketing

Dan defines a marketing platform as “a mass communication tool that allows you convert subscribers (readers/fans) into leads” but goes on to say “It’s not about brand awareness or customer support”.

In the book “Principles of Marketing” marketing is described as “a social and managerial process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and want though creating and exchanging products and value with others” but in a business context it involves “building profitable, value-laden exchange relationships with customers”.

It is interesting to note both the words “social” and “relationships” in those definitions. So, to say Marketing is just the process of converting an audience member to a customer is so narrow-minded.

It would appear Dan views marketing as merely the sales pitch but the social web is not, in and of itself, an advertising platform and the usual rules about the promotion of your business or product do not directly apply.

As I said a couple of years ago in my post “Social media marketing – it’s not about the hard sell”

Businesses should not be trying to push their products via these avenues so should not be seeking the best way to market a product via social channels. By creating a relationship with their customers they will instead develop a feeling of trust which itself will lead to initial sales and repeat business.

Simply bombarding potential customers with what amounts to advertisements will not work.

No time like the present

Dan’s article advises moving away from Twitter to “higher conversion platforms” but the thinking is all wrong. A social marketing strategy should encompass as many avenues as possible and be consistent across all of them. Abandoning any given communication channel is to be avoided, especially in these times when we have more choice about how we interact than ever. There are those who do not have a Facebook account or those who will not sign up to mail shots.

There are more Twitter users than ever and the take up is growing at a fantastic rate. As 50% of users are no more than four “friends” away and nearly everyone is covered by 5 steps it is easy to see that word of mouth reports of good customer service etc. can travel far and wide very quickly.

It was argued that “promoted tweets” would be unpopular with a much higher proportion of negative feedback on Twitter following their announcement. This was, however, based on a sample population of only 14 people – hardly conclusive proof. The same query from Twitter Sentiment – at the time of writing – showed a swing to a positive response but with still only a sample population of 38.

When conducting a brand search in Google you expect the results to be ordered by relevance with the primary site for that brand at the top of the list. It makes sense, therefore, that a similar search on Twitter would result in a tweet from that brand (albeit a promoted one) appearing at the top of the results here – how can people have too much of an issue with this?

Direct v Indirect

The social web should be full of people connecting, communicating and contributing – not products, pitching and pressurising; we need to keep the balance and indirect marketing is far more effective in these channels. Word of mouth has already been mentioned but also consider building brand loyalty though openness and approachability as well as conversion via engagement.

Twitter could now be developing into just the right place for enagagement with the proposed functionality of Annotated tweets. Having the ability to embed more into a simple tweet can only serve to enhance the experience.

As part of a comprehensive, consistent social marketing campaign Twitter can be a very important tool in building those all important relationships with customers (both existing and potential) providing you are willing to put in a bit of effort (10 to 20 tweets a day will not be a sufficient investment). Ignore it to your detriment.

Image by jamie.silva

A lot has been made of the changes to the privacy policy at Facebook and the choice of opt-out by default. As I have mentioned before, the real issue is the lack of communication surrounding the change and not providing a notification to check your settings immediately when the changes occurred. Things have come to a head and Facebook have been forced to call an all hands privacy meeting to, at least, show they are doing something and taking the issue seriously.

Privacy is only one side of the coin, however, the other being security. You can hold back all of the information you want but if your PC is not secure any online vigilance could be for nothing.

Warning

I was very surprised yesterday to log into my GMail account and see a warning that it appeared my account had been accessed from the US.

Checking the IP address (67.202.31.60) returns ec2-67-202-31-60.compute-1.amazonaws.com – so, why would an Amazon Web Services machine be trying to use my GMail account? At the time this resolved to “Usage Statistics for community-maps.org”.

I don’t currently follow a large group on Google Buzz but it transpired that three others had also experienced a similar issue being presented with warnings about suspicious activity on their accounts; one accessed from New York when they are in Florida, a second accessed from Egypt when they are in Canada, and the third accessed from Brazil when they are in Italy.

Is this some kind of concerted effort to gain entry to GMail or mere coincidence?

Responsibility

Yesterday, I tweeted:

What did I mean by this? That if you lay everything out online don’t be surprised if it comes back to bite you.

Ultimately, we all have a responsibility to look after our own information on the web – whether that be by only sharing the information we are willing to be made public or by ensuring that our computers are fully protected. We live in a time where virtually our whole lives are played out online and while we entrust certain information to third parties (credit card details etc.) it is up to us to ensure that we draw a line in the sand that we are comfortable with and then not overstep it.

It seems that some are blinded by the bells and whistles of Facebook and the reputation of Twitter (built by sheer longevity) and so believe that Buzz is just another also ran – it is too early in the game to make that call.

A post by Shannon Wills at TechShali.com claims that Buzz “has failed to stake a claim in the world of social media” giving 3 reasons why this is the case. The first argument is that Google are too late to the party to have an impact. I say we need to ask if they have arrived after the nibbles have gone and people are making their way home or, are the just fashionably late, know how to make an entrance then capture the imagination of the other guests with their witty repartee – the perfect riposte to the braggado of other networks?

Buzz may not have made the entrance it was hoping for but there is a very solid base. With a bit more work and some additional features Buzz could soon be a major player with the andecotes to wow its fellow party goers.

Gmail, to be or not to be bundled

As Buzz is bundled as a part of GMail there was always going to be a tight integration between the two services which can be a good thing if managed correctly. There have been complaints about inboxes filling up with notifications and this was also given as a reason why Buzz will not succeed; taking control of the settings and muting old threads can cut down on the number of notifications received while still keeping you up to date on the items you are following.

Should Buzz be contained within GMail or a standalone app? I say both. If you are Google you don’t want to disconnect from the millions of potential users already sitting in GMail but it would be nice to use Buzz as a self contained application for those who want to. We can view and comment on our buzz data in our Google Profile outside of the confines of GMail and the mobile page is standalone so the main app needs to follow suit whilst still sticking to it’s roots.

The need to have a GMail account in order to use the service has also been criticised but, considering the integration, it is probably the best way to go. If Buzz could be used as a standalone service, however, then it would also make sense to have a “Buzz only” account which could, perhaps, be registered against your existing, external, email address.

Buzz v Facebook

My previous post prompted some good discussion via a share on Buzz itself. Parvez Halim raised an interesting point:

I think one of the things that makes FB so appealing is that you have different services within one web app. You have microblogging, photo album, chat, and games. Non-techies don’t have to think too much because everything is there in front of them.

I agree that holding all the different facets in one place is indeed nice for those that use them all but what about those who only want to perform specific actions? What if you only want to upload your photos?

I feel that, with some careful work, Google could build on its Profile system and integrate the services you use into one coherent offering despite them being independent applications. If you only use a single app then great, that’s all you are shown but for those using multiple services everything would be held in one place – a tab for each. Keeping each of Google’s services independent is a distinct advantage in my opinion.

Control

With a service such as Buzz we must remember that users want control over what they see. The search and filtering functionality suggested by Robert Scoble, as mentioned before, is a natural progression for Buzz and I can imagine a number of his suggestions being implemented before long. The ability to find all items that a particular person has commented on or to ignore items from a paticular source (e.g Twitter) would be ideal additions and vastly improve the usability of the service.

Historically, Google have struggled when it comes to the social web. Orkut was a failure and development on Jaiku was abandoned. With little consistency between offerings there appeared to be no central strategy to really succeed in the social space but, with Buzz, things are starting to change.

A paradigm shift within the company is evident now that Google have announced they are seeking to employ a “Head of Social”. They are only too aware that they are late to the game but seek to mount a second half fight back. It is clear that individual areas working on their own products need to be brought together under one “social” banner to promote consistency and interoperability. With the right person leading the way Google should be able to regain control and create a comprehensive social policy and – with the technology, resources and extremely knowledge user base at their disposal – turn Buzz (or a decendent) into a world class offering.

Image by squeaks2569

In light of recent events the most obvious thinking is that people are migrating to Buzz as a backlash against the changes made by Facebook and that is perfectly understandable.

While, not for the same reason, a similar thing happened to Twitter when it was experiencing major performance issues a couple of years ago and we all saw more of the “fail whale” than was good for us. Users went off in search of other homes on the web including Plurk and Identi.ca, for example.

Friendfeed also experienced a huge upsurge in usage at around the same time and it was Friendfeed that I immediately thought off when jumping in to Buzz for the first time – Friendfeed from back at the beginning when it was simpler: likes, sharing, comments and aggregation.

Just as with Friendfeed items in Buzz jump to the top of your timeline when they receive updates and the whole service just feels like stepping into a time-warp. Perhaps this is part of the attraction: just stripping things down to basics and letting the conversation take over. It is simpler than Facebook, in a good way: no games, no ads.

Community

Maybe it’s because the social media early adopters remain essentially the same people but even the community on Buzz is an echo of the past – the likes of Robert Scoble, Louis Gray and Thomas Hawk are all very popular, just as they were on Friendfeed. In fact Scoble has drawn up a wish-list of features which virtually mirror a lot of the functionality Friendfeed users have become accustomed to including real-time search and filtering.

Louis has said in a recent post: “I thought that answer was FriendFeed … But momentum on the site dragged, and the sale to Facebook pretty much confirmed what many thought – that it would never achieve its potential.” He also mentions that Buzz has the same potential as Friendfeed “but is driven by a company that appears committed to making it succeed. There are regular updates to Buzz. I have seen some of the sharpest engineers on Google working to make this a success” – the same, however, was said about Friendfeed in it’s early days – it was, after all, staffed by many ex-Googlers and the commitment was just as great.

Friendfeed’s technical success was, without a doubt, the reason it was acquired by Facebook. Rapid development (often in response to user demands or suggestions) and the first real time search made Friendfeed the leader of the pack so it was unavoidable that the service would suffer after acquisition – this was a buyout of technology, people and know-how. Friendfeed already had a large social network (the largest) why would it need another? To save reinventing the wheel.

Development on Friendfeed has all but stopped but what is to stop Google going the same way? With the “always in beta” philosophy they have previous form when it comes to dropping projects that don’t quite work. Hopefully Buzz will not follow that route.

Wise choices

Google have made two key decisions while developing Buzz:

• including it as an additional tab within GMail
• having mobile support from the beginning

Those such as Scoble may be crying out for Buzz to be a standalone app (I am inclined to agree) and not be contained within GMail but including the new offering directly within the most widely used web mail service on the planet (over 175 million at the end of last year) provides the type of exposure that most startups could only wish for. If even just a small percentage of GMail users investigate Buzz then this is still a sizable number.

Friendfeed had a big failing in not having it’s own in house mobile solution, it came down to Benjamin Golub to develop the excellent third party solution fftogo.com which contributed to him being employed by Friendfeed full time. Google have a long history with mobile devices and really see the importance in getting this right from the outset.

Can it succeed?

The biggest thing in Buzz’s favour is, obviously, the huge weight that Google can throw behind it – it is already a trusted name and an instantly recognisable brand. Google, undoubtedly, has the technology required to provide and scale up a huge network with minimal down time. Add to this the wealth of experience of the Jaiku developers who are still on board since Google absorbed Jaiku in 2007.

The ready made user base of an existing means on communication, as I have already mentioned, is ideal for the launch of a social network; Buzz is a natural extension of the combination of GMail and Google Reader and an ideal opportunity to share your pictures from Picasa thereby increasing the visibility of that service as well.

The one thing Google should really try to capitalise on is the bad feeling towards Facebook – nothing boosts success like the failure of others. By extolling the virtues of Buzz – as a contrast to the apparent vice of Facebook - Google could stand to boost both the number of users and sheer amount of usage as people migrate.

As others have already said, we do not want a web where we have just one dominant short status update service (Twitter) and one dominant social sharing service (Facebook) – competition breeds innovation and that can only be good for the consumer.

Image by mrjoro

Where does a network’s responsibilities lie? Should it be looking after the interests of users or giving developers what they want an ever expanding playground.

Semantic web

The advancement of the Semantic web has taken a great leap forward with the recent announcements from the two major social networks: Facebook & Twitter. Facebook have controversially released the open graph and Twitter have annotated tweets which should be rolled out in the not too distant future.

What both of these have in common is that they are essentially geared geared towards developers; the open graph allows developers to extract data about Facebook users and their networks and annotated tweets allow for developers to build in to their client applications ways to add additional metadata to individual tweets. Both systems were announced at developer conferences with little information supplied to the end user.

Others have comments that Twitter are leaving the decision on how to implement annotations up to the developers but this creates the possibility that we will experience walled gardens within a single service with only specific apps able to access some of the data. Surely, Twitter should enforce a standard or commit the developers to an agreement or they run into a similar problem to Facebook: openness. Non-standardisation will allow client developers to corner their share of the twitter app market; unless they work together to standardise the format of annotations twitter clients could undergo their own Betamax v VHS or HD-DVD v Bluray battle.

Are annotations going to be available via the Twitter web site?

Where does the responsibility lie for development? With the service provider or with the surrounding eco-system? The eco-system can organically grow enhancements but shouldn’t the provider choose the main path?

Ultimately, developer input can increase the utility of a service but is the functionality provided by social networks, as far as the end user is concerned, reaching a peak? Do services provide all they need to or do we have a way to go?

Functionality v convenience

How far can social media go and is any new development really providing us with additional functionality or merely providing the user with added convenience - easier access to things you can already do. Twitter, for example, have given us hovercards which we can add to our own sites via @anywhere. They are a nice touch and provide a significant increase in ease of use but they are just providing convenience – there is nothing there that you cannot get elsewhere albeit with a lot more clicks.

The concensus is that the open graph is primarily there to benefit Facebook themselves and then developers who might be collating data but, how much will the end user benefit from annotations or will they, too, just become the plaything of the developer – a means to gather statistics and identify patterns.

Where next for the consumer?

The main networks seem to be intent on empire building whilst forgetting that those empires are built upon us, the user. Whether it be an issue with functionality, data collection or privacy it needs to be remembered that we are the life force which keeps the services running; where will they take us and at what cost?

Image by kprogram

…this is complex and requires a lot of organisation. It unfortunately takes someone with the size and power of Google or facebook to be able to pull it off.

The problem with any such initiative is that it needs the backing both from site owners and the end consumer. An established company such as facebook already has a high number of users so, while they may not all agree with the changes, a decent rate of uptake should be pretty easy to achieve. The question then becomes should it be an opt-in or opt-out system and four US Senators have even written to facebook to demand that the open graph implementation should indeed be changed to opt-in.

The interesting point here is not that the Senators consider the system as an invasion of privacy as of itself but that “users have less control over private information, and it was done without the users’ permission” and, therefore, once you have agreed to using it that there is not a problem.

Facebook, obviously, disagree and consider the behaviour to be fine as it is and you can see their point of view; it is only natural that they are going to want as many people as possible using the new tools or it will be a waste of time developing them. The aim here is to become the ‘de facto’ standard for web identification which will not happen if no-one enables it.

The position is different for web sites: as it’s base level the site merely adds the social plugins of their choice – many are already using facebook connect to manage logins; the problems occur when the site owner is also a facebook user and is concerned over the privacy issues. The benefits of having your site given, essentially, free advertising on facebook are immense but, as Steven Hodson points out, those site owners who are worried about the open graph could be effectively held to ransom over whether they install the plugins or not. The promise of the potential extra traffic a site may receive “is huge and that is very hard to turn away from”. This is a dog-eat-dog world and people will do just about everything they can to get an advantage over their competitors. It may not win me any friends but I have added the like button as I feel it can be of benefit.

Communication

The biggest issue with anything like this is communication. The open graph protocol was announced at the f8 developers conference and immediately implemented – perhaps there should have been a bigger lead in time and more communication detailing the changes provided directly to the end user. Personally, I do not have an issue with the opt-out nature as I am able to make an informed decision but your average facebook user does not read the same sites and, as such, is not aware of many of the issues.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and maybe facebook could have handled this differently. By all means have the new functionality as opt-out but on the proviso that the user receive the choice as to whether to allow this functionality before they are able to continue using the service – perhaps a landing page giving all the necessary information which requires a user action before it will let you get to the normal facebook page. Changes of this magnitude warrant something like this.

Their is still a great deal of naivety over what the changes entail and how it all works. For example, I have seen comments such as not being able to log in to facebook because it is blocked (because of the country they are in) and then presuming that personal data will just be shared – this type of ignorance needs to be addressed by facebook and fast.

There also appears to be a deal of hypocrisy and belligerence surrounding the whole affair. Bloggers claiming that open graph is the root of all evil then proceeding to add the plugins to their site and statements such as “I see a “Like” Button: I leave the site.” serve no purpose.

Duty of care

The age old maxim “you get what you pay for” can often be applied to web services but with something as wide reaching, and with such huge implications, as open graph facebook have a duty of care to their customers to protect their personal data from misuse and abuse beyond anything that may be laid down by data protection legislation. Facebook are now firmly under the microscope so must tread very carefully and ensure they make the right decisions or face the wrath of user, providers and the Senate alike.

Image by j / f /photos