Tag Archives: Internet

Will Google+, Twitter or Facebook survive?

What defines social connections online? When you exchange details information not everyone else has access to and have the possibility to communicate, you have some form of connection with another person. But this is already the case with a lot of services, beginning with LinkedIn and XING and including address-books as found in most e-mail services. I would not define this a social connections, because I believe that social connections are defined mainly by the communication you do with other persons.

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In my definition, only a few services fit in. Those, that most fit in are obviously Facebook, Twitter and Google+, because you instantly communicate as you login, when you see the newest posts that others have written, and additionally usually always communicate when you do anything with the services.

Creative Commons License photo credit: premasagar

Who will survive?

All other services, be it the business contacts networks, specialized networks for other specialized groups as well as forums and the like of not-arrived-in-the-present-services, will over time perish, as the big three technically replaces them and it’s just a matter of time till people won’t pay for business networks and instead have their business connection in one of the other big three. The nature of those big three (although Google+ is not even a week old, I would call it one of the big three) is competitive, as they more or less all do the same thing.Beyond competitors, the metagame can be analysed. This is an old term from the time I played Magic – The Gathering, where always approximately three top strategies were around and you could outweigh their respective pros and cons, as well as which strategy won against which other strategy.

Facebook

Facebook does most, as it tries to be the one service to rule them all. Broadcasts, bookmarks, instant messaging, video, pictures, games, apps, interests, groups, and soon even videochatting? Check this for Facebook. Additionally, it has it’s own ad-system, product and company offers and even it’s own virtual currency. It is omnipresent and the strongest of the big three if you take into account that even your parents might be using this service. The usual homepage was replaced by a facebook-profile, and even usual websites begin just updating their facebook-page instead of their own HTML-website. Facebook as compelling support for 3rd party apps and native clients on all platforms – some smartphone even have a facebook-button built in their hardware.

Google+

Google+ tries to battle Facebook’s overwhelming power with a different approach. More configurability with circles gives you the power to share stuff only with that group of people you want to share it with and additionally, you can explicitly only read certain updates, for example those of the people you put in “Interesting People”. Additionally, it’s white and clean and not filled with ads and distractions like “have a look at the latest pictures of Adam!”. The other services like Google Talk, Youtube and Picasa are all well-included for good. “Sparks” is like a newsfeed for everything tagged with the tag you choose and the new hangout feature is a fantastic killer for IRC and Skype. As the service is really young, it’s missing all the native clients that could be used to get notifications and relies on it’s web interface and e-mail for notifications only, which is certainly going to change soon.

Twitter

Not getting Involved
Twitter is the most minimalistic of those services and only focuses on communication only without all the other crap attached. It’s communication is mainly broadcasting and limited to 160 characters, and it has a rudimentary direct messaging service and simple bookmarking (‘favourites’) included. It has clients on every platform and is deeply integrated into iOS. It’s the most used link-to service, if you look at the various news articles that show stuff like “tweeted by 300 persons, shared on FB by 53 persons and +1′ed by 30 persons”.

Creative Commons License photo credit: TarikB

Prediction

This is the point where I predict which of the services won’t survive: None of them. This was the point in the metagame of Magic back then, the big three are the ones that remain and kill off all the other small services that try to do something else differently. Even if one seems dominant and/or has the best technology, the best system or the best philosophy, there’re always enough people that want to differ and use the not-best-alternative. And as a Google-Plus-API will go public, there will be enough plugins and services to feed your info into the other services, so that you can use your favourite of the big three, while the next person will use his favourite. Only one thing is sure: there won’t be any more competitors than the big three, as those three services do enough for everyone.

We need a “Delete old Documentation Day”

DODD - Delete Old Documentation Day 15 feb
Old documentation in maven and ServiceMix caused much trouble for me, and I know for many other people. And I’m sure these are not the only projects that have a lot of meaningless, deprecated documentation around doing nothing than confusing people. Then people always cheat and say they are to busy to update documentation everytime they add a new feature or they fix a bug or something else changes; as documentation is nothing more than time waste, right?

You know, we have Google. If all the wrong documentation were gone, we would either find the correct documentation or the programmers would realize nobody can use their software and had to write new, up-to-date documentation.

Therefore, I propose DODD! Let’s make a Let’s make a “Delete Old Documentation Day”, once a year, where everyone just deletes old stuff that is misleading or inaccurate to make the whole average documentation clear and concise?

What do you think? How about 15.02.? The day after Valentine’s we should have enough love for everyone else and the outdated documentation they need to read.

The Driver’s License Way of Registration

There are many ways to make people register themselves, for example the Safe Route or the Doodle Way. But on many sites, you can just login using Google or Facebook or Twitter, beyond other means, nowadays. This is the Driver’s License approach, where you make users login into one of those services, and the service tells you who that is and that he’s logged in.

April 7: Awesome Jersey hair
This way, you can more or less identify users. This has a positive result for you and the user, as you don’t have to store their password – and you don’t have to deal with password hackers that hack sites like Gawker and steal the users passwords. On the other hand, you can’t adress those customers directly as you also don’t know their e-mail adress necessarily – and this is why this method is often not used too much. Being dependant on the service is also a problem of course – what happens when Google is down, for example? :-)

For users, this way of registration is great. They can login easily, and don’t have to invent a new username or password for your site. You’ve just NOT complicated and cluttered the internet even more.

Creative Commons License photo credit: gwen

The Doodle Way of Registration on the Web

In Doodle, you don’t need to login and can freely edit everything without loggin in or registering. No locked doors as in the Safe Route of Registration.

Closed for business
Someone who organizes an event (where people with limited time want to meet) sets up the title for the event and clicks together the points of time when the thing possibly could take place. He sends the link to the poll to everyone would should attend the event.Everyone can click the link, enter their name, and click on the times they have time. The page makes it easy to find out when to meet.

If in “Desperate Housewives” the girls would organize a meeting in their neighborhood using Doodle, this would never work. Someone would frame someone else, delete or change the other persons times or put someone else on the list who didn’t want to come. Nevertheless, the Doodle website is very successful to organize meetings for everyone else. How can that be?

Well, Doodle has an optimistic approach: They just think users won’t do this. And as no critical data is entered, it works for them. And if some Desperate Housewives use this to hurt each other, it’s 99% happy users and 1% unhappy users. Maybe this model should be used much more. Next: what about an OpenID, Facebook Connect, TwitterIDs and GoogleIDs? Should we use those?

Creative Commons License photo credit: maistora

The Safe Route of Registration on the Web

As I’ve just begun watching Desperate Housewives and like the TV series a lot, I wonder if people should be perceived as inherently evil or inherently good. Deperate Housewives seems to say “all people do stupid things and have questionable motives“, and this is what many people think. I guess it’s based on fear that you expect everyone to be a threat you have to protect yourself and others from.

30. Susan Mayer - Desperate Housewives Season 1
This thinking also inspires most websites. I also made a login-enabled website for my company lately, where I decided the safe route so that no people can harm other people without us able to kick them out – and where we would have the fewest administration time possible. With my implementation, people have to go through the process of registering with E-Mail and password, getting a registration email, clicking a link within a certain time to confirm their account and then login again with email-password combo to make it pretty safe that nothing could go wrong. I would call this the safe registration route.

That nearly nobody does. When I look at page views vs. registrations, it becomes clear that nearly nobody will do the many steps needed. And the backend functionality for logged-in users took some time to develop that basically seems to be wasted development time.

So to at least draw some conclusions of the failiures involved, the next few days I’ll be looking at ways how I should have done it differently and how you should do it, if you have the same problem. And I’ll write about different approaches than the Desperate Housewives inspired safe registration route, namely the approaches that Doodle, Stackoverflow and the average Twitter or Facebook-login enabled site use.

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