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New Social Media Startup Launches, Shuts Down Within 45 Minutes: Full Report
If I didn’t see it on The Onion, it wouldn’t have been a slam dunk that this was an Onion story.
social
Showing 22 posts tagged social
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Albumatic, At Last
Everyone now has a camera in their pocket at all times. That camera is connected to the internet at all times. That camera is capable of being utilized by hundreds of thousands of apps. Those apps all have social graphs that allow you to connect with other internet-connected camera-carrying friends. It’s almost inexplicable that there isn’t a killer social photo album service yet.
And yet, despite many (many, many, many, many) failed attempts, there isn’t. So perhaps I’ll sound foolish thinking that Albumatic is going to be the one. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like it is.
Want To “Bang With Nobody”? Use Google+
Steve O’hear for TechCrunch:
When your product idea turns into a meme, you’re probably doing something right. I’m referring, of course, to Bang With Friends. It’s the controversial Facebook app that lets you privately nominate those in your Friends network you want to hook up with and alerts you if they feel the same way. This in turn gave rise to Bang With Professionals, a site that takes the same concept and applies it to LinkedIn.
And, not to be er, left out in the cold, today sees Google+ get the Bang With Friends treatment with the appropriately named Bang With Nobody.
Well played.
Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30?
In the age of “social”, it’s easy to forget about the hardships of being actually social. Interesting post by Alex Williams for The New York Times.
[via Steve Greenwood of Brewster]
The engagement level for both your FB and G+ posts are the similar.. (Similar number of likes and comments.) However what does not make sense is you have 265K subscribers in FB and 1.5M in G+. 6 times the followers in G+ but the same level of engagement !! I can think of only 2 explanations.. Huge Fake/Spam followers and a poor G+ engagement. !! ~ Arun
Asked by Anonymous
Right. And also the fact that very few people relative to Twitter and Facebook actually click through on links to read the content being shared. There’s some lightweight social activity basically masking a network that isn’t there.
There's No Avoiding Google+
I’m going to break my rule of not linking to The Wall Street Journal because it’s 2013 and I’m in the forgiving mood. Also, because I find this story by Amir Efrati sort of fascinating.
The article really doesn’t say much, but what I find interesting is how far it goes out of its way not to plainly state the obvious: Google+ is a turd.
I’m not sure why everyone seems afraid to admit this. I think it’s similar to the reason why some seem reluctant to call Windows 8 a turd when it’s already abundantly clear: people are scared that such a bold statement could come back to bite them in the ass. But it won’t. Both are clearly turds.
Google continues to try to cram Google+ down people’s throats, but it just won’t stay down. People are gonna keep puking it right back up. The only compelling feature of Google+ is Hangouts; everything else is a carbon copy of some social activity that people can (and already do) do elsewhere. Google simply made a bad call and started chasing the wrong thing (social) far too late.
If you talk to a number of people inside Google and even those formerly inside the Google+ team, you get the same refrain: it’s just not working. I have over 1.5 million followers and actively share the same posts to Google+ that I share on Twitter and Facebook and even though I have a tiny fraction of the following on those networks, the engagement is night and day.
I wonder how long it will take Google to admit defeat here? I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of the shoving of Google+ in our faces first — Chrome, you’re next. But I really wish Google would take all the energy being put behind this dog and use it to blow out their truly interesting and innovative products, like Google Now.
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Facebook’s Snapchat competitor is called “Poke,” confirming what we already knew: The word “Poke” is innuendo for sexy time.
Fascinating just how close to Snapchat it actually is.
There’s no question that the UI/UX is better here, but I’m not sure how much that will actually matter with the teenage Snapchat demographic. Many teens seem to use apps that look and may even perform awful, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is the graph — that their friends are using it.
And you might think, “but everyone is on Facebook” — sure, but that also doesn’t matter if the use case is different. Maybe teens are using Snapchat specifically because it’s not Facebook.
Anyway, I’m not going to pretend to really understand Snapchat anyway. Compelling social, fun idea (the self-destructing message) — but high potential to be faddish. But I’m sure I’m missing something.
I’m more interested here in Facebook’s continued march to make stand-alone apps. This seems like it should be a part of the Messenger app, but it’s not. And the deep iOS integration makes this approach really shine (“Sign in as MG Siegler?”).
I also can’t help but wonder if maybe this is a message from Facebook: don’t want to come work with us? Fine, we’ll clone your service in a couple weeks and ship it to a billion users.
At the very least, Poke is a fun attempt to make use of an old part of Facebook in a way that actually makes some sense in the modern, mobile world.
Google's Lost Social Network
Rob Fishman for BuzzFeed:
On the last night of October, the Google+ integration went live. For days after, Readers kept browser tabs and mobile apps open, like voicemails from a deceased relative. With a single refresh, Google Reader as they knew it would be gone.
A fascinating, comprehensive background on Google Reader and how Google fucked it up with Google+. Also, I had no idea “Sharebros” existed.
Under The Influence Of Klout
As an outsider, my view of Klout has mainly been a bit of fascination about why it pisses some people off so much. I’ve been in conversations where it gets brought up and someone will visibly cringe. As best I can tell, at a fundamental level, it boils down to this:
People don’t like to be ranked — unless they have a high ranking. But if the ranking is too high, it’s better to pretend like you don’t like that ranking so as not to piss off the people below you who have helped give you such a high ranking. In other words, people are pissed off at the bottom *and* at the top of the scale. A rock and a hard place.
This feeling is exacerbated by the fact that this is the internet. The great unifier. Here, everyone can truly be equal. Except that’s not really true.
Google+ As California City
An interesting analogy by Alexis Madrigal:
But by most accounts and third-party research, the service is growing its number of users but not their engagement. People are “on” Google Plus, but they are not really ON Google Plus. The infrastructure is there. The street signs are there. People own plots of land. But there’s nobody actually visiting town. To make it obvious: Google Plus is the California City to Facebook’s Los Angeles.
This is an elaborate way to argue what I have before: Google+, while a pretty good product, isn’t taking off because it’s unnatural. It was set up to succeed except for one problem: it was set up.
Madrigal also has a compelling way to get Google’s social efforts back on track: scrap Google+ and focus on how people are actually using Google products. As he writes:
I think Google needs to stop looking across town at Facebook and look within itself. Google is riddled with invisible social networks surrounding a wide range of products. Even better, Google’s homegrown social networks tend to be built around Google’s core strength: organized (and organizing) information.
In other words, stop trying to build a weird Facebook/Twitter hybrid on top of Google products and instead focus on the individual (and natural) social elements of the already-in-use products.
Obviously, that’s much more easily said than done. And it doesn’t really get at what this is all really about: unified, cross-pollinated data. But it would be much more natural.
The Google+ "Dickhead" Problem
Wil Wheaton:
Just let me thumbs up something, without forcing me to “upgrade” to G+, you dickheads.
The problem, as Wheaton points out, isn’t that Google+ is a bad product — with the latest redesign, it’s actually pretty well done — it’s that Google is being way way way way too aggressive in shoving it in everyone’s face.
I imagine they see it as the product being good so why not leverage their massive properties to drive usage? The problem remains that this is not natural. Creating a “better” Facebook or Twitter has always been the wrong way for Google to go about social. That battle was over before it began. For the millionth time, it’s just like Bing versus Google in search.
Nobody Gives A Damn About Google+
Ouch.
A quote from that site I refuse to link to:
Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between last September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage.
3 minutes versus seven hours. I mean, 3 minutes!
The sad thing is: I bet when mobile usage is counted, the gap is actually worse.
We keep hearing over and over how Google+ is on the up-and-up — from Google. 10 million sign-ups here. A billion more there. So many fucking sign-ups.
The reality of the situation sure seems to be the opposite. The only people I know that use Google+ regularly are people who work at Google (and Robert Scoble).
It’s just not working. For fundamental reasons. Millions more in TV ad spend won’t fix that.
Zuckerberg's S-1 Letter
The most interesting part:
By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.
Which reads suspiciously like: “Dear Google, suck it.”
