Posts Tagged ‘Google’
google buzz kill
18 Feb, 2010 • posts i've written • 5 comments
Google’s Testing and Launch Procedure for Buzz
Usually I’m a Google fanboy. I live inside of my Reader, store most everything in Docs, broadcast my location with Latitude, hardly touch those other search engines (or whatever silly name they’re calling themselves today), and I’ve been a Gmail user since 2006. If Google builds it, I try it.
But Buzz is threatening my fandom… because Buzz is ruining my experience in the other products – specifically, Gmail and Google Reader.
First off, my inbox is a terrible place for Buzz. I like to get shit done in there, not casually browse the pithy complaints and LOLcat attached musings of my friends from Twitter. I’ve already got an app for that, it’s called TweetDeck. My Gmail behavior is akin to a seabird plummeting from the sky to the ocean’s surface and firing away with a satiated gullet. Gmail is not a particularly suitable environment for social domesticity.
Let’s ignore for a moment that when I activated Buzz I was following dozens of people I didn’t want to follow and had many accounts already churning out content for which I’d rather not connect to my overall profile. Last night, wanting to dig around my sent mail items looking for a specific communiqué (one that I didn’t remember enough salient details to go immediately to search), I realized that my sent mail box is now full of my Buzz items – everything that’s been automatically piped through to my account. This made my hunt much more difficult and annoying. The best name for this type of emotional response is technoyed.
Then I went to my Reader for a momentary fix of interesting and was alerted that now all of my Buzz followers were followers inside of Reader – and wouldn’t I like to follow them all back in the Reader environment?
No. I would not.
My relationship to members of my social graph is predicated on context. That context, in our digital world, is often based around technological platforms as well as degrees of familiarity. And that context is not meaningless or devoid of function.
I have profiles across the web not solely because I have to, but because that varied context provides value for me (the context in which you get to know me on LinkedIn is different from that of Tumblr, and that difference is meaningful). Moreover, when a user does the work needed to find me across the web, that says something about their interest; that work is meaningful to me. And if I accept that connection, especially on multiple platforms, it says something about my relationship to that person.
As danah boyd put it,
Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention.
Or, in sandwich science terms, just because I love peanut butter and jelly does not mean I’d like you to invent a combination paste product of the two, which I’ll dub nut jelly.
The portal wars have now become the social wars – but services built to funnel our robust social graphs must learn how to preserve the heterogeneous qualities, not remove them.
What makes my relationship with you special might be platform specific, and that special quality should be preserved. The few people I share content with inside Google Reader are precious and I have no interest in diluting their awesomeness with, for that context, strangers.
I’m not quite ready to hit the eject button for Buzz, but if you are, here’s how.
tumblarity vs pagerank
22 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 1 comment
When I started blogging my thoughts most tangential to my day job in late 2006, Google PageRank was the true currency of the web.
Today, most of my colleagues and my friends don’t blog at their own .com, instead they tumble. And Tumblarity is how they’re measured.
Navigating PageRank is a lot like playing Dungeons & Dragons (or what I know of it). You work tirelessly to collect experience points, level up, and sometimes suffer a crushing blow dealt by the Dungeon Master – aka Google.
Navigating Tumblarity is a lot like playing Plinko. No two people explain their perception of the scoring alike and the score wildly fluctuates almost if by chance. From the outside, it seems entirely hit or miss.
Accruing PageRank is an exercise in empire building. Slow and complex, but ultimately possible.
You don’t seem to accrue Tumblarity. It comes and it goes – like the actual attention span of a human being. Some days you’re hot. Some days you’re not.
PageRank is obsessed with how content is connected.
Tumblarity is obsessed with how people are connected.
In fact, about the only thing both have in common is their community’s derision. Give someone something to be measured against and watch them game, accept, or reject the construct.
twitter vs the google zeitgeist
01 Dec, 2009 • posts i've written • 3 comments
A recent article from Techcrunch shows that only 2% of tweets overlap with Google search trends.
His (Vik Singh) stats came from an analysis of 10 million Tweets he crawled last summer. He looked at all Tweets, not just trending topics. When he stripped out the non-essential words, he found that the average Tweet consists of 6.28 terms, or the equivalent of a really good search query. But there is not much overlap between what people are Tweeting about and what the general population is searching for. Maybe that is because people tend to search for what they don’t know, whereas they Tweet about what they do know or think they know. Or maybe it’s just because people on Twitter are not normal.
Why do tweets not match up to search queries? Because they’re entirely different tools, serving entirely different behaviors.
From studying Twitter for the last year or so, trending conversations on Twitter seem to fall into these categories:
- Rituals/Community Customs – these are events created or appropriated by the community, a sort of test of who’s hip and who’s not
- Media fandom – Twitter is full of conversations between fans of media properties (live-airings, debuts, and opening weekends are important to watch)
- Ongoing Events – users spread updates and continued news for very large-scale, if not global, events (ongoing news events can mature into adopted hash-tags)
- Breaking Events – these trending topics are short-lived and come together within one-to-two hours in most cases
As you can see, this is quite different from the kind of behavior that leads one to a Google search box. Twitter is a social tool (the more anonymous, the more its treated like a chat-room, I’ve found) and Google is a search tool. One provides a set of possible solutions to a defined problem, the other provides social interaction (among other things).
Google Friend Connect Adds Twitter
Google Friend Connect was made available (in beta) to all webmasters last week. But most of these types of social efforts that enable portability among sites/networks have been missing one very important network. Until now.
Twitter has joined Google Friend Connect. Now if you’re using the technology to add social components to your website, Twitter users can sign in with their ID and check to see if any of their followers are also using your site.
Anyone using Google Friend Connect yet? Tell us about your experience in the comments – and if adding Twitter will be a boost to the experience.
Google Adding Advanced Voice Search to the iPhone [IPhone]
Google has created an app for the iPhone that will give the handset advanced voice recognition, reports John Markoff from the NY Times. The app can answer location related questions (Finding the nearest Starbucks), give driving directions, respond to generic questions, and even search local data from the address book.
It works by recording a soundbite, uploading it to Google’s servers, which will crunch the data and return an answer “within seconds on a fast wireless network”. Saul compared the function to that offered on Yahoo’s, and found Google’s to be more accurate, but still return junk results sometimes. AT&T and Microsoft also have handset voice recognition beyond simple dialing that many other phones offer. The app will be free and might be available to download as soon as Friday. [NYT]
