Tag: social networks

Google+ – yet another social network

The rumors of a new social network from Google were confirmed yesterday with the announcement of Google+.  There are quite a few interesting ideas there.

Firstly, I’d been waiting for a proper social network from Google for ages.  Google Wave was more of a collaboration tool, which failed.  Google Buzz, even though useful, is not enough.  I am using Google for plenty of other things – search, email, news reading, instant messaging, collaboration and sharing of documents, etc – it only makes more sense to wrap it all around with a social network.

Secondly, I’m glad to see that Google is trying to solve the major problem that I have with each and every other social network in use today – sharing with specific groups of people.  I was born in one country, but currently live in another.  I speak two languages, which are not shared by most of my connections.  I have a number of different interests.  I’ve worked with many people in a few companies across several industries.  I desperately need a way to share with only specific groups of people.  I know that some social networks tried to provide the functionality – Facebook and Flickr, for example – but it’s not trivial.  I need more automation and control for that process.   Google+ has something called Circles, which looks and sounds like what I need.

Thirdly, video conferencing.  It’s been long overdue.  And the only real option there is now is Skype, which I’d rather stop using altogether.

Fourthly, group chats. Especially on the mobile.  There are a few alternatives that were developed in the last couple of years, but it’s hard to migrate all your contacts to yet another protocol.  Enough of my contacts are using Google, so this sounds promising.

Too bad, Google+ is still not available to everyone – it’s invitation only.  Hopefully, Google won’t repeat the mistake of the Google Wave, when they delayed the masses for so long that most people left before their friends joined.

If any of the above sounds interesting to you, have a look this TechCrunch article and this GigaOm post.

Every 60 seconds on the Web

We’ve all seen a gadzillion of statistics on how many videos are uploaded to YouTube every day or how many Google searches are performed every month.  While those are all interesting on their own, combined into a single overview they provide a really good perspective on how active and diverse the Web is.

Via ma.tt.

Social networks and referrer URLs

Pretty much every social network out there is building a custom front page for each user.  Such front pages are customized with preferences and previous activity of the user.  This is an excellent functionality.  But one thing such approach often breaks is a referral URL.  Have a look at something I saw in my statistics today morning (click for larger version).

This tells me that someone somewhere on Facebook linked to one of my posts.  I know which post was linked to.  But I have no way to figure out where exactly on Facebook the link is.  I’d like to do so very much – I’m interested to see the discussion and context in which my post came up.  I’ve tried Googling for the post, but that didn’t help.  I examined logs of my web server and that didn’t help either.  I think that’s broken.

And just to be clear, this problem is not specific to Facebook.  I’ve had similar issues with Twitter and other social networks.  Some of them make the discovery job easier than others.  But all of them don’t make the source obvious.  And I think they should.

Recommendation engine that finally makes sense – Google +1

I’ve heard plenty of rumors about an upcoming Google social network.  I have no idea if they are true, and really I don’t care.  I have enough social networks as it is.  But what I haven’t heard about until now is Google +1 – a new recommendation engine that Google is trying out.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAyUNI3_V2c]

At first, when I read about Google +1 and that it was yet another attempt for recommendation engine for Google search results, I didn’t think it was interesting at all.  There were a number of tries in that area – some of them long gone, some still alive.  I’m talking about results reordering via drag-and-drop, starring of result items, and others.

All of them shared the same problem – promoting items from within search results doesn’t work very well, because the user hasn’t yet visited the page itself.  He’s eager to navigate away from the results.  And on top of that, page title, description, and a thumbnail aren’t always enough to make a judgement.

On the other hand, recommendation engines are doing pretty well with social networks like Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and others.  Every other page on the web has a share button that supports one or more social networks.  And people use those.  Even though sharing pages on Facebook and Twitter might be useful, it isn’t as useful as increasing the karma of those pages in order to rank them higher in your future search results.

That’s where Google +1 comes in.  It makes perfect sense.  Now you can search Google, visit the results, and +1 those of them that you liked (and, of course, those of them that support the Google +1 sharing).  Not only it would be trivial to push those +1 to other social networks, but also now users have way more stimuli to share things, since that would improve their own search results.

Google +1 is yet available to everyone. Google will take some time to roll it out.  But if you want to try it out now, you can enable it on experimental page.