Archive for January, 2011
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).
Two Years On…
Jan 5th
January 5th 2009: I joined Twitter.
It was when Twitter was just beginning to hit the media in a big way. Stephen Fry and Jonathon Ross were busily evangelising the service on BBC1. Every newspaper was carrying stories about it. My friends both on- and off-line were beginning to talk about it. So I signed up.
Since then the journey has been pretty incredible. I’ve made many new friends, met hundreds of people, found work, discovered events, and forged relationships in a series of more than 22,000 messages limited to 140 characters. Thinking back on it now it’s a little bizarre.
It’s great fun, and it’s very useful, for a consumer like me, but the most fascinating thing about Twitter is where its value lies as a business. Recent estimates (and investments) have put a figure of $3.7billion on it. Twitter has been going 4 years and it’s never turned a profit so that sounds ludicrous at first, but there’s a vast amount of as yet untapped potential in the service. Assuming just a quarter of its 175million strong userbase is active the current estimates place a value of $84 per user. That’s rather high in terms of standard advertising reach cost, but Twitter has the advantage of knowing exactly what each user is interested in. That sort of intelligence makes the users very valuable indeed. $84 sounds almost cheap.
It’s no wonder Twitter’s directors turned down a $500million offer from Facebook back in 2008.
Vibefeelr
Jan 3rd
Continuing the delightful trend of new web apps* with daft names, I’ve been trying out the beta of “Vibefeelr”. Vibefeelr is essentially the same as Twitter but with added feelings (the “vibes” in the site’s name). Each short post is limited to a whopping 421 characters and comes tagged with a particular vibe from a selection of hundreds.
Everything works as you’d expect it to. There are lists (called ‘circles’), there’s DMs (sending someone a vibe), and there’s an odd horizontal rainbow thing that tallies up the percentage breakdown of the vibes logged on the site in the previous 24 hours. That particular aspect of the site could be very interesting once there are a decent number of users – any global ‘feeling’ based on a significant event should show up very noticeably. Whether or not they’ll ever get to that number of users is debatable though. The site doesn’t really offer a great deal more than Twitter. Indeed, it offers a good deal less if you factor in Twitter’s phenomenal userbase. Vibefeelr does connect to both Twitter and Facebook to automatically post on those sites if you want it to though, so it’s something that you can use alongside the usual social networks.
This is the first in a number of new social networks/microblogging tools that are popping up in 2011 that are augmented with features that go beyond simple messaging. There are already photosharing networks (Path, Instagr.am, etc). Mood/feeling/vibe sharing is the next step. I wonder what’ll be after that.
If you’re interested in sharing your feelings, check out http://www.vibefeelr.com/, or email me for an invite. When you’re there, feel free to add me (http://www.vibefeelr.com/onion2k/) as a contact.
Group hug!
* When did we stop calling them websites?
