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

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.

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photo credit: EricGjerde

Flattr Target Audience

What I’d like to think about is the target audience of such a service like Flattr. Sadly, its model only motivates content-producers to sign up, as they’re the only ones who can (potentially) profit from this. Potentially because it seldomly gets in enough money to pay the flattering back, unless you have a very popular blog – but potentially is enough of an incentive to get bloggers to sign up … it’s like a lottery, where you could get lucky and maybe get some money in.

Everyone else can of course freely choose to do good to those content producers if they wish but – let’s be clear about this – nearly noone will sign up with a service, and transfer money to it, without a real incentive to do that besides of a good feeling and a clear conciousness. Becoming a content-producer so you maybe sign up for flattr isn’t all too easy. I don’t know many people that have a blog or post to it very often. And if they do, they often don’t want to have the hassle to sign up with flattr or to install plugins or even write code to include the necessary Flattr buttons. Therefore, I think people should get an incentive to use flattr with the easiest possible means, just to get them to use this service.

• The flattr-comments plugin does a first step into that direction. It makes it possible that users commenting on a blog post can enter their flattr-id and receive flattrs if some one likes their comment. I just put this plugin into place on this blog and hope that I can try out if it works if there’s some people out there who would post a comment here … hope it works. Every blogger should include this!
• Other means could maybe be put into place by a popular service like Favstar. Favstar is a Twitter-related service that will show you the best tweets – this means the most retweeted tweets and the tweets that were favourited the most – even sorted by categories. I really recommend using that thing for everyone who likes twitter! If they would implement the means to enter a Flattr ID for you and automatically Flattr the top users you retweeted or faved once a month, normal twitterers could see the potential profit in Flattr that might them make sign up with the service.
• Same thing with Stack Overflow and Quora. Let users flattr answers – please!
• One more thing I would like to see is the concept of a Flattr-Lottery. I guess there’s a lot of money that gets to be distributed to good causes (and maybe also pay Flattr’s bills). If you would take half of that money and redistribute it lottery-like under everyone who is active and Flattr’ed at least one item this month (maybe with a main prize and several small ones), I bet it would be another incentive to make usual people to use the service.

Flattr gives us the tools, and we all should extend them to make the service work better. What do you think? More ideas?

photo credit: Jose Téllez

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E-Mail

Have at least three different e-Mail accounts.

• One for work, use that on your work computer(s), but never on private machines.
• One for real communication. Keep this e-Mail-Adress as sectret as possible, never use it to register for anything (I only use it for the most trusted and important sites) and only give it to friends. Everytime you get a mail on this account, you may want to read that. If you have a smartphone, you should use ONLY setup this address on the device.
• And one for everything else (this will attract spam, so I often call it my spammail
  ). I have one mail account that I just use for everything on the web and it goes through several spam filters before it lands only on my primary private PC. Don’t check for mail on this account more than once a day.

Twitter

As with e-Mail, I use two different accounts.

• One is my main account which I use to follow everything and everyone that interests me. At this moment, I follow186 accounts, and if you’re between these, I really like what you tweet. I use this stream to feed my interest from time to time, but I won’t always read everything. Also, I don’t check in this stream when I have no time or I need to focus. Then I just switch to my private account.
• My private account only follows some few people that I don’t want to miss tweets from or that I know and that I only allow trusted people or people I know to follow. Again, on my iPhone I let this account notify me of @replies and direct messages, but not the “main” account where more often @replies come in.

Another point: Don’t set something up that pops up messages. This is distration you intentionally install. I use Echofon for Firefox on Windows and Mac and set the preference that it doesn’t pop up stuff. Therefore I can see how many tweets are waiting, but I must intentionally klick on the echofon icon to read tweets.

Facebook

I just don’t use it. It is a whole network just made for distration, so I just don’t visit it when I don’t need to. Therefore I feed my twitter account in Facebook so it looks like I’m posting there. And I set up notifications on iPhone for messages and use Meebo to communicate via “Facebook chat” if someone uses that.

photo credit: Big Fat Rat

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• All the little things & This year of my life

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

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In case you don’t know this trick, I’ll show it to you. What helps us find a contact on Twitter is … Google! Did you already guess that? Well, its not like a usual Google Search. You can also find a lot of contacts a time.

First, have a Google Account – as we need Google Contacts for this. If you don’t have one (or don’t want to mix up with your existing contacts), go, create one (more). Then enter the E-Mail you look for in Google Contacts. If you want to bulk upload a lot of E-Mail-adresses, you can use Google’s import feature, that takes properly formatted .csv files – but remember that Google only allows up to 3000 contacts a time, before you have to mass delete all your contacts and upload a new .csv-file. Should anyone have a handy script for automating this, please drop a comment.

Then head for the Twitter page. Click on Find Friends and then Gmail. Enter your (new fake) Google Accounts login and wait for the info you look for. Now all that can save your job candidate is a private Twitter account or the wise selection of a different E-Mail adress. Go get yourself one.

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