iThoughts » Internet

Will Google+, Twitter or Facebook survive?

Akku — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 16:01:07 +0000

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.

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.

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

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”.

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”

Akku — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 07:22:51 +0000

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

Akku — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 06:00:18 +0000

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.

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.

photo credit: gwen

The Doodle Way of Registration on the Web

Akku — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 05:50:26 +0000

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.

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?

photo credit: maistora

The Safe Route of Registration on the Web

Akku — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 15:30:58 +0000

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.

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.

photo credit: ฿lαcĸouт14*

Get over your media collecting habits

Akku — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:44:57 +0000

In order to understand the problem I want to picture here, I need to tell you what I mean with media. I should also add that I don’t want to criticize collectors of certain media types – which is more of a hobby that not connected to the problem. This post might be a little mixed up, but if you know this blog you also know that I’m not the best writer in the world. Not yet at least ;-)

What is Media

You think media means music, videos, TV and the newspapers, and thats true, but there is a lot more out there that you oftentimes don’t recognize as media. Media is a either a more or less unlimited channel of content (TV, internet in general, radio, a library) or a set size of content (a music album, a book, a video, a videogame, a magazine, a blogpost, a newspaper). The “content” is what’s tickling your fantasy, mind, interests, thirst for knowledge, imagination, anxiety, … or just lets your brain consume stuff so it is freed from the hard work of thinking itself. You could even argue that other people talking to you are a stream of content and therefore media. All these contents influence you and your ways of thinking.

photo credit: dearsomeone

The Problem

Technically, oftentimes you’ll find digital media bound to storage like CDs, DVDs or a lot of dead trees (formally known as paper). I never understood people hoarding their music-CDs, and their videos, be it on tape, VHS casette or DVD ar BD – even if I know a lot of people who do that. As a kid (when you watch movies dozens of times) I might have liked that myself, but since the dawn of digital media, I don’t see the point anymore at all.

The advantage of having collections of media around is that you can show off what you have, and what you’re interested in. It’s like wearing a T-shirt or your favourite movie or band: everyone instantly recognizes that interest of yours – that you’re into something. The opposite is like saying you’re a fan of Star Wars without having action figures, T-shirts or lightsabres around: people don’t instantly know.

Books are media too. I also didn’t understand why to keep books around that you have read before, if it isn’t non-fiction books you might need to cite from or look up from time to time. Same thing with magazines. Nobody would hoard all of their daily newspapers, but some are keeping magazines. And with fiction books, its the same as with movies: you just don’t read or watch them more than once. And if you do, you would most likely get off cheaper if you rented them twice instead of buying them once.

The point of keeping books around that you might need for reference also diminishes quickly: you can keep digital versions of books and read them on screen, on your ePaper device or even your smartphone. Reusing music is common, but stories, news and movies are also not used much more often than maybe once or twice.

photo credit: jm3

Availability

Music is available through a multitude of services: either you rip them from your CD and keep it on a harddrive (or even in the cloud), sharing it with you game console and all your other household networked things. Or you buy them via iTunes and just stream them from there to anywhere. Or you use Pandora, Last.fm and all the other free music stations in the net, or the usual old radio stations which are all available digitally streamed.

Apart from music, nearly everthing else is available for download, be it in a paid version as with rented movies, music tracks or eBooks or in a free version as with a limitless source of information in form of blogposts or news. Having media bound to physical objects needs to to have them around in one place and to carry their weight if you need them somewhere else.

Prices

Buying movies on disc isn’t too cheap. If you get a cheap 3 for 1 BD box, you might be paying 20€ if you’re lucky, but usually it’s more expensive. As opposed to renting it in a video renting service for 2,40€ per movie you can rent a movie for 2,99€ via online renting (and therefore not paying for fuel and use less time to get it) in iTunes, Playstation Network or a lot of other services I didn’t even try out.
Buying music digitally is basically the same price as buying them in the real store. But here you can get the two songs you really like instead of the 12 tracks you don’t really want much cheaper. And you already have all the metadata included. I mean I don’t see too many people still walking around with “discmans”, so to get their stuff on their custom media player, they’d need to rip it and add all the metadata in a time consuming way.

(Many people say they’d miss the artwork and booklet on the digital thing. To me, this is stupidity. Yeah, I also read the booklets back then, but times are changing. Enter the World Wide Web. Just head to the artists website, we’re not in the eightees anymore. There you’ll find much more artwork than you can ever hope to fit into some paper booklet. Oh, and you’ll find the lyrics there too.)

Buying eBooks isn’t more expensive than buying a “real” book. Here the market still didn’t finish converting to the digital medium as often fiction books are still not avaible in open ebook formats, but you can see it happening faster and faster, and soon the rainforests can rejoice when all people have Kindles and iPads around and can easily obtain digital versions.
News and information basically cost nothing. You can of course buy well researched or well authored stuff, but those authors have to fight the free price you get though the free news websites.
Games are same price online or offline, if you can get them online. But games are a special case, because most of the publishers still stick to the old distribution model. If you’re looking at the Apple appstore, digitally distributed games might even be much cheaper than games bound to boxes, discs and paper, but that will soon be known when the Mac appstore becomes tested and when Microsoft copies the concept.
(TV and Radio was always distributed in a way that wasn’t bound to physical objects other than the receiving machine. Not much change there, other than the quality of non-paid TV broadcasts diminishes while paid services are like a flatrate for content.)

And there’s another price people don’t think about: either you spend time getting your analog media, or you pay for postage and packing that wouldn’t be necessary if you downloaded the digital versions.

Conclusion

Digital Media does not rot. After about 10 years, a CD or casette might even be unreadable and thereby broken. Digital media can be copied an infinite number of times and you can create as many backups as you want.

The main point of this post is that analog media is written on three dimensional stuff that just takes up a lot of space. For that space, you usually pay rent (or pay interest on loans in my case). Therefore, your media should pay a part of your rent. But it doesn’t. So please understand that media is about content, and not about collections of paper, CDs, DVDs and such. The digital versions are much more economic, overall cost less time and money to obtain and are better for the planet’s ecological environment.

photo credit: purplemattfish

How to tell people to do Twitter?

Akku — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 07:12:46 +0000

I was amazed with Twitter pretty early,but especially here in germany, only few people reach out to new stuff on the internet and just try it out. Instead, they fear the new stuff could take over their life and in case of Twitter most people I heard say “I don’t wanna read what you had for dinner, thanks. And I don’t wanna waste all my day telling people irrelevant stuff.”

I bet if you use Twitter, you heard that too. In the 185 people I follow, not a single one tweets about food, and I seldomly see irrelevant tweets. But people not using Twitter just cannot get that. Therefore, we have to transport the experience into their world. The best analogy I could find was the following:

(Short version)

Understand Twitter as TV, and everyone can design 5 minutes of one channel every day. Either, you can use those 5 minutes to show the most impressive and interesting things you’ve seen, experienced or felt today – or you can talk about your breakfast, lunch and supper. And now guess which channels the other viewers will be watching.

(Extended version)

Not the “I had fish today” stuff – and if you don’t experience anthing worthwhile in your days, you should maybe not tweet too much, but you can still watch the other channels. And all the people out there do their TV channels in a different style, there are funny ones, newsstyle one, channels about one person (made by the person him-/herself) and lots of experts of a certain topic. For every topic, there are at least 100 people doing channels on it. Even for a topic that interests you. And using up 5 minutes of your day to get the best and most interesting experiences about everything that you care about is worth it.

(If they didn’t already drop you as lunatic and stopped listening to defend their life against the limitless possibilities)

Well, and this doesn’t even mention that you can connect to those experts, and you can keep up with friends and you can even directly message celebrities. You can have other people see what youre doing or what you’re inspired in or what music you like or which YouTube video is the really funny thing you laughed 10 minutes about. In the blink of an eye. And if you watch a channel that is boring, you can just switch it off. Oh, and you can install the twitter app on Facebook, so you don’t need to update Facebook anymore – it gets auto-updated.

photo credit: x-ray delta one

iThoughts » Internet

Will Google+, Twitter or Facebook survive?

Who will survive?

Facebook

Google+

Twitter

Prediction

Related Posts:

We need a “Delete old Documentation Day”

Related Posts:

The Driver’s License Way of Registration

Related Posts:

The Doodle Way of Registration on the Web

Related Posts:

The Safe Route of Registration on the Web

Related Posts:

Get over your media collecting habits

What is Media

photo credit: dearsomeone

The Problem

Availability

Prices

Conclusion

photo credit: purplemattfish

Related Posts:

How to tell people to do Twitter?

Related Posts: