Google+ Grows to 25m Users
Aug 3rd
There are a bunch of social networks, from the relatively tiny ones like Path to the behemoths like Facebook, and one thing that they all apparently have in common is that they’re growing. None moreso than Google’s new kid on the block Google+ though. In the first month since it’s launch Google+ has ensnared a whopping 25m users. That’s a lot of users.
Only.. is it? Clearly, 25m users in a month is impressive assuming those users are real, that they stay with the network, and they actually do something on the website. There is no indication in any of the announcements as yet how many accounts are active and how many are people signing up to see what it is and then never using it again. Perhaps it’s too early to tell.
The size of the other social networks gives the 25m number a little more context. Facebook has around 700m active user accounts. That is to say, those accounts that have been accessed at least once in the past month. After Facebook though, the numbers fall away dramatically. Oft called the second biggest social network Twitter has about 175m users, but most metrics state the number of active users of the service at a rather more conservative 50m. MySpace announced in July that they also have around 50m. Bebo has 117m registered users but very little data on how many are regularly active on the site. Likewise LinkedIn with 100m.
Facebook to Google to iPhone
May 26th
Bizarrely, getting your Facebook events sync’d on to your phone is a major hassle. It should be easy in this day and age with smart phones and web apps and webcal and caldav and all such cleverness. But it’s not. It’s a pain. Nevertheless, it can be done though, it just requires jumping through a bunch of hoops from FB to Google, to a different bit of Google, to your phone and then to your calendar. Urgh…
- In Facebook click on ‘View All’ to see all the events you’re attending. Scroll to the bottom and there’s a handy ‘Export’ link. You’ll need to copy that to your clipboard.
- Next, hop over to Google Calendar and under “Other Calendars” on the left click “Settings”. This will pull up a page that lets you subscribe to other calendars. Click “Browse Interesting Calendars” and add the Facebook link you copied using the “Add by URL” option under “Tools” on the right.
- Now fire up your iPhone and head over to http://m.google.com/sync/ in Safari. You might need to log in to your Google account. Once you’ve done that you should see “Sync to iPhone” option, click that and you’ll get a list of your Google mail accounts and, more importantly, your calendars. Once of them should be “<your name>’s Facebook Events”. Tap it to subscribe.
- Now come out of Safari and start the Calendar app. Click the “Calendars” button, wait a moment, and you should be given the option of displaying your Facebook events in your calendar along with all the other stuff.
And that’s it. Never again forget an event you’ve said you’ll attend. Yay!
The Great Spotify Scandal
Apr 14th
The blogosphere is all a-buzz today after Spotify’s announcement that it’s free and open services are to come to an end relatively soon. As of May 1st anyone who isn’t a paying subscriber to the music service will find what they have access to severely limited – 5 plays of each track, and a further limit of a total of 10 hours a month after 6 months.
Spotify was unveiled in October 2008 in Sweden, and spread across the European launch countries very quickly indeed. Soon after the service boasted 15,000,000 users with as many as 1,000,000 paying a monthly fee of £10. On the back of such subscriber numbers Spotify AB has raised approximately $150m in 3 rounds; the most recent being $100m (presumably for a big push into the USA). Company valuations hover around the $1b-$2b mark.
The usual cries foul having been bandied about with the news of the changes to the way it works. Users who don’t, or won’t, or can’t pay the subscription fee are understandably distraught that they’ll have to give up access to Spotify’s extensive bank of music, and that they’ll have to either stop listening to music or find an alternative vendor. Existing subscribers who are happy with what they’re paying for are calling for everyone to subscribe because they feel it’s well worth the money.
It’s the same, sadly all too common story. A company raises a small amount of money to offer a service for free in order to attract a large userbase. They then use that userbase to ‘prove’ the popularity of the service to late-stage investors, and raise more capital. At that point those people who helped push the company to where it is, who put up with the outages, the mistakes, who provided feedback to the developers to make the product better, and who invited their friends to the service so it could grow, are all tossed out into the cold. It’s not the best way to thank your early adopters.
Now, of course, the reality of the situation is almost certainly that the record companies who license content to Spotify don’t want to give users in the USA completely free access. It’s a big market and there’s lots of money to be made from it. As a result Spotify have to close the doors somewhat. It’s (probably) not their fault or entirely their own decision to make.
I won’t be switching to a Premium Spotify account. I’ll use the service to check out new artists, as I do now, but I’ll listen to other services for the majority of my day-to-day music. Heck, I might even turn on a radio again. I suppose I ought to learn that free and freemium web services rarely remain free forever, but I suspect I won’t. I’ll keep signing up to alpha and beta test things and keep being disappointed when they kick me back out the door when I don’t pony up any cash later.
The Early Bird Gets … Left Behind?
Feb 10th
One of the fundamental principles of agile programming, and something that’s leaked out in to other less trendy development methodologies is the notion of “release early, release often”. In a nutshell it says you should release your software product quickly and then update it when you have a new feature or two. It’s fundamentally different to the old style approach of releasing an application when it was finished and everything was complete.
On the whole it’s a great way of doing things. It limits scope creep. It allows you to get feedback very early in the project. It ensures you’re moving forward. This is all brilliant. But that’s not to say it’s perfect.
The problem with “release early, release often” is that users often expect to see more than you’re giving them. Someone signed up as a “beta user” still has expectations that the product they’re using is going to work; releasing before your feature set has the minimum number of things required to make your product useful will put off the users who are most likely to be enthusiastic adopters of the product once it’s complete.
Broken things, ugly things, even experimental things are features a beta tester will take in their stride. Missing things though, especially things that limit the functionality of the product to the point where there’s no reason to use it, mean there’s no reason to carry on trying. The user will walk away.
That’s a key problem for a start-up. Coxing users back after they’ve given up on your app is far more difficult than getting them in the first place. I’m not going to mention any start-ups by name, but it’s something I’ve seen several times in the past month, and I have given up on the app each and every time. As yet I’ve not been back. I wish those apps well for the future, but I also know that the start-up I’m a part of at the moment will be learning from their mistake.
January Beta Round-up
Feb 1st
During January I’ve played with a few interesting web apps. From small one-man developer ideas that people are building in their spare time to big VC funded sites there are some exciting things around the corner.
About.me – http://about.me – An online “business card” app. All in all, pretty good. I’ve yet to see whether or not any of these web apps really work as a useful tool but it’s quite easy to use and pretty enough to share with people. Mine is http://about.me/chrisneale
Refynr – http://refynr.com – An app that allows you to see your Twitter stream with a set of keyword matching filters applied. It’s a great idea, but as a Twitter client it lacks most of the features you’d expect. If the technology was built into Twitter.com or Twitter for iPhone it’d be fantastic.
Accelsor – http://accelsor.com/ – An online webpage design tool. It showcases what can be done with some clever Javascript but it’s not particularly usable unfortunately. Certainly not something that’s going to replace Dreamweaver or handcoding any time soon. Fun to play with and quite inspiring though.
Streak.ly – http://streak.ly/ – A to-do list manager that simplifies the process of keeping an action list. One very innovative and exciting feature is the ability to “cheer on” other users of the site to encourage them to keep working on their tasks. Unfortunately, like Refynr, it’s something that I’d like to see implemented in the tools I currently use. The app isn’t good enough to make me switch to it (yet!).
Zerply – http://www.zerply.com – Another “business card” app. This one aims to be more for professionals than About.me, and it succeeds rather well. All the expected information is presented neatly and it even does nice extras like linking to a blog. My Zerply card is here: http://zerp.ly/onion2k
Pinterest – http://pinterest.com/ – To be entirely honest, I still don’t really know what Pinterest.com is trying to be. It’s halfway between a curation tool and a link sharing website. It looks good and it’s gaining traction with a few ‘celebrity’ users but I’ve left it alone since I tried it. Maybe I’ll go back some time.
Qwiki – http://www.qwiki.com/ – Qwiki is awesome. The concept is really simple – take a wikipedia page, put the first couple of paragraphs into a text-to-speech generator, and then play the audio alongside a slideshow of pictures that have been found with a search. For something so simple though it really does a great job. It’s easy to sit and soak up information, and for as a learning tool for kids it’ll be massive. It’s not hard to see why they’ve been getting millions of dollars of investment.
GenerationStation – http://www.generationstation.com/ – GenerationStation is a web app for building an online family tree, but in a way that rather closely resembles a social networking tool. You create a profile for a dead relative to start with, and then hang living people off that. It’s strange. I can see the appeal though. Ancestry.com has been a terrific success and merging that with a social interface is a good idea.
Whoopaa – http://beta.whoopaa.com/ – A tool that lets you manage your lifestreams from both Twitter and Facebook in the same place. It does what it sets out to do but as someone who rarely posts on Facebook it’s not something I find useful.
Infinite.ly – http://infinite.ly – Infinite.ly is a tool for creating “fan pages”. A fan page is a simple website that pulls in content from other sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr, and displays them in a nice and easy to use way. I made a page that worked in a few minutes. There appears to be another side to the app called your “Buzz Feed”, but there’s no explanation about what it does. If anyone can figure it out, leave a comment.
Globified – http://globified.com/ – I love Globified.com. It’s rather similar to Foursquare and Gowalla, but for trips and journeys instead of for every day life. You do all the usual checking in and uploading images, but there’s more emphasis on where you’ve been than where you are right now. The site looks gorgeous, works brilliantly, and actually makes me want to go somewhere just so I can use it properly.
Localmind – http://www.localmind.com/ – Hanging off the back of Foursquare, Localmind enables users to ask pertinent questions of people who have checked into a place you’re interested in. For example, you could ask people who have checked into a bar what it’s like, or ask people waiting at a station if the trains are late. It’s a cool idea but it needs more users. It’s too sparsely populated to be much use at the moment.
The Next Social Step: Emotional Context Part 2
Jan 25th
Continuing from the blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago the rampant march of “emotional data” continues.
Path, the ‘limited’ social network that only allows you to keep 50 contacts in your network at any given time, have updated their app to version 1.3. The latest edition lets users tag posts with one of five smiley faces to denote how they feel about the image (or video since Path 1.2). Users get to choose from happiness, laughter, surprise, sadness or love. To get an overall picture of how much a photo is liked it’s a great update, but the lack of choice might render the system a little redundant. Time will tell. It’s certainly interesting to see emotional context being used in a mainstream and well-funded social application.
Another new start-up using emotional context data for social software is the rather odd and left-field “She Chooses“. This one is aimed squarely at the female gender as it markets itself as;
She Chooses™ is the social network application that taps the power of feelings to assist women in making choices.
The site is similar in many ways to Twitter. You post updates that are tagged as questions, updates or tools, and other users reply or empathize (which appears to be the equivalent of Facebook’s “Like”). The app’s selling point appears to be something that the creators have deigned to call “The Tool”. It’s an emotionally sensitive “expert system” where you choose the way you feel and what you’re after and it returns a list of people’s updates who might assist you. I’m not sure how useful it’ll be.
My only reservation about “She Chooses” is the “I am a woman” checkbox on the registration page. I ticked it, but I suspect you’ll be kicked out if you don’t. That’d be a step backwards in terms of equality if you are. Who knows? It’s a long way from launching; perhaps that’s just an alpha software quirk.
A long way down: Will Google survive?
Jan 21st
In the past six months the chaps at Google have been busy. They’ve been pushing products out the door like nobodies business. There’s Google TV, Google eBookstore, Google Hotpot, Boutiques.com (although you’d be hard-pressed to figure out that’s a Google project just from the site). They’re innovating and inventing exciting things at GoogleHQ.
There’s an obvious problem though. Mention any of the recent products to someone who isn’t a reader of tech news websites or Google’s blog and you’ll be met with a blank and vacant stare. People aren’t paying attention to what Google are doing any more. They’re old-hat. They’re not exciting. If anything, they’re actually boringnow.
This is not something that Google are unaware of internally. The recent change at the very top, with Eric Schmidt standing aside from the CEO job to let Larry Page take the reins is a sign that Google know that they’re having problems. The balance sheet is looking very healthy but the long-term prospects aren’t. Looking like a dull company with uninteresting and unexciting products means that Google won’t attract the best people – at the level Google operates whether or not someone wants to work for your company is down to the development challenge your products represent much more than money or prestige. As a developer with a reasonable amount of experience myself I’d be loathe to join Google; I’d much rather work for companies like Twitter or Facebook where the challenge is still current, or for a start-up doing something truly innovative.
Another issue that Google face is the fact Facebook is in the process of barricading users into their section of the internet. If Google aren’t making things that users look at then they’re not displaying adverts to anyone. That’s Google’s core business. Lose that, and Google’s other products are redundant.
To give them their due, Google aren’t down and out yet. They have an immense pool of resources that they can draw on. For an example of that you need look no further than what has happened with the start-up wunderkind Groupon. Google’s takeover offer of $6billon was turned down so Google have built Google Offers to take them on directly. Google have done that in a matter of months, and they’re leveraging their tools like AdSense and Google Local to bring in small business advertisers who might have potentially gone to Groupon if the Google hadn’t created their own service. That’s the sort of power that Google have. All they need to do now is make sure the users see those offers. That’s where Google’s ‘old school’ apps like GMail and YouTube give Google an advantage. Still, Groupon were first to market, and have a huge lead in the coupon website space, so beating them is going to be hard.
Looking to the future I hope that Google last, and continue to bring us great products like they have in the past. I think they need to focus on inventing rather than copying, and get back that reputation for developing cool tech that they once had. It’d be horrible to see them lose to Facebook.
The Next Social Step: Emotional Context
Jan 13th
Watching Amber Case’s recent TED talk, “We are all cyborgs now”, I learnt about the fascinating concept of “ambient intimacy”. As the self styled ‘digital philosopher’ explains;
“It’s not that we’re always connected to everybody, but at any time we can connect to anyone we want.”
How intimate the relationship we have with our social networks is governs the way we operate when we’re living our lives – those of us who use social networks for solely for business aren’t likely to be permanently glued to their mobile phone even when they’re out with friends. Similarly, those people with a very close and intimate relationship with their social network friends might sit in the pub with their “real world” friends and ignore them, preferring to talk on Twitter, Facebook or an instant messaging client. Neither is wrong per se, so long as you’re striking a healthy balance.
Some start-ups are beginning to pick up on the fact that the emotional connection that users have on social networks is strong but often difficult to broadcast to your friends. I recently blogged about a new social client called “Vibefeelr” that enables you to post messages to your friends with an attached “vibe” that approximates to how you’re feeling at the time. This sort of thing is likely to become more common. There are a huge number of Facebook apps that do the same thing, and once Twitter’s ‘annotations’ enable users to attach metadata to tweets I imagine it won’t be long before there’s ‘emotions for Twitter’ too.
In the mean time there’s another new social tool for Twitter called smood.it. Smood.it lets you post an emotion to Twitter with a few attached hashtags to tell people why you’re feeling the way you are. Further to that those, smood.it will watch your tweets and catalogue how you’re feeling based on which emoticons (smilies) you use. It’s quite a clever approach because it means you build up a history of feelings without having to leave whatever Twitter client you use. Unfortunately, in my case anyway, it’s woefully inaccurate because I use happy face smilies far too much. With some tweaking, maybe a hashtag like the “Selective Twitter” Facebook app uses, it could be a powerful tool for people who want to track their feelings.
I imagine the next few years will see an increased use of ‘augmented’ social networking, with additional data coming from options we choose when we post. Who knows, perhaps our current state of mind might be captured from a camera, or even from an analysis of the post itself. It’ll be interesting to see what people come up with.
Crowdsourcing Volatile Location Information
Jan 10th
Geolocation check-in apps, such as Foursquare, Latitude, Facebook Places etc, have become relatively mature in a very short period of time in internet terms. Foursquare, the market leader, has been in use for less than 2 years (although it is based on Dodgeball that was around for a few years prior to that).
As the apps grow their userbase they’re adding additional features such as photosharing (Foursquare), real time updates (Latitude), and better business tie-in (Gowalla).
While it’s nice to check in and add somewhere to a list of places you’ve visited, and perhaps add a picture or a note, those additional pieces of data are static, and frankly a bit boring in the main. Once they’ve been added by half a dozen users there’s no reason to add more. That limits the reason to check in to either telling your friends where you are or to try to win a ‘badge’. Those aren’t often reason enough to keep users checking in whenever they go out. I’ve stopped checking in to places entirely. I don’t care enough about being the major of somewhere to bother. What appears to be missing is the ability for users to share volatile information about the location they’re currently in.
Imagine if you could add things to your check-in that would be of interest to people who aren’t in your network though. For example, when you check in to a bar you could add how busy it is on a sliding scale from “Dead” to “Jammed”. People looking for a bar around your location could search for “Bars that aren’t empty”, hey presto your check-in becomes useful data. After an hour your information would be discarded because it’s no longer relevant.
If everyone go into the habit of checking in and supplying information about how busy a venue is then rather than a simple catalogue of where you’ve been a geolocation check-in service would become a must-have real-time data source for travelers.
If anyone at Foursquare is reading this you can have this idea for free. I’d find it very useful.
New toys: scoop.it and ifttt
Jan 6th
Scoop.it
Scoop.it is a new curation app that’s just opening up to Beta users. I’ve been playing with it for a little while, and I have to say it’s pretty awesome. I’ve used curation tools in the past (namely Curated.by) and while I’ve liked what they do it’s always felt like a bit of a chore. I’m not sure why. Consequently though, I’ve never curated much content.
With scoop.it though it actually feels fun; it’s a simple and natural way of sharing things. It’s not actually very different to the other services out there; there’s the usual tools on the website and a bookmarklet for curating when you’re looking at things. There’s something about it that’s just nice. As I said on Twitter yesterday scoop.it has that “it just works” factor. Plus, the curated content looks good. That’s important.
My experience with the service is still very limited but I can imagine myself sticking with it (especially if people actually watch my channels). You can follow what I’m curating at the moment here: http://www.scoop.it/t/ideas-inspiration-and-creativity
IFTTT
IFTTT (If This Then That) is a web based automation service that lets you build up tasks from ‘channels’ that work a little like Lego blocks. You take a channel, and when something happens on it a defined action happens on another channel. For example, I’ve set up a task that watches a news feed (using the RSS Feed channel) and when a new article appears an action tweets about it using my Twitter account.
There are channels for all manner of things, from the date and time to Flickr to Facebook to the weather (if you’re in the USA). You could define a task that automatically updates your Facebook page when you upload a picture to Flickr, or says “Good morning” at a particular time every day, or … well, you get the idea. There’s stacks of potential.
Whether or not ifttt will work in the long term depends on it staying available and working, and what channels are available. I hope it succeeds. It’s already proving useful.
Currently ifttt is in Beta and you need an invite to access it. Sign up on the website or ask me (at the time of posting I have 1 spare).
