Is Google becoming evil?

November 3, 2011 By 2 Comments

Given the high standards Google set for itself with the aims of indexing the world’s information, and the mantra of ‘Don’t Be Evil’, it’s likely we hold it to higher standards than most companies. After all, in 2004, Joel Bakan described corporations in this way ‘As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognise nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. Nothing it its legal makeup limits what it can do to others in pursuit of its selfish ends, and it is compelled to cause harm when the benefits of doing so outweight the costs’.

Now whether or not Google is becoming evil, there are certainly much worse offenders around the world, but given the lofty ideals and the integral part that has played in the Google brand, any start down the slope to the activities of the traditional corporation could be damaging. You might somewhat expect it of Microsoft, or ignore it if you’re a member of the Cult of Apple, but when Google acts in ways which particularly hurt small businesses, publishers and potentially vulnerable individuals, it’s particularly jarring.

Google Logo in Building43

 

‘Secure search’:

The right of an individual to online privacy and security is a good thing, and difficult to argue against. The use of https by sites is a positive step and one that shouldn’t be discouraged.

But recently Google made an announcement that Google Analytics would no longer provide keyword information for users who are logged into their Google profile and using secure search. That move was done with the stated aim of privacy and currently a relatively small percentage of users are searching via the secure connection.

Two problems with that – already many people are reporting significant and growing numbers who are now hidden in terms of keyword data, and secondly, having had access to that data for years, it does not indicate in any way, shape or form who was using a specific keyword and therefore affect privacy. All I knew was that 20% of people visiting in the last month typed in ‘thewayoftheweb’ into a Google search box, regardless of whether they were secure or not, and no further information was available.

But hang on – if it really doesn’t matter to individual user privacy, could it be related to the launch of a paid Google Analytics for enterprise with a hefty price? After all, if you’re paying $150,000 for Google Analytics Premium, you’d be expecting all information.

So Google moves in a traditionally corporate way, using a freemium model to gain market share, then starting to remove features from the free version and concentrate on getting the top percentage of big users to start paying.

The people who lose out are small business and publishers, who won’t know how an increasing number of visitors are finding their site, and that number will only increase with more people staying logged into Gmail and Google+. After all, no-one can optimise for searches they don’t know are happening – although I’m not sure if the privacy still applies when I click-through on Google Adsense or Adwords advertising next to the search results, regardless of my connection.

 

‘Anti-social Google Reader’

There’s been a pretty big uproar regarding the redesign and loss of features which has been rolled out to Google Reader, despite the paltry week’s notice given to users. My concerns regarding the actual design are fairly minor, as it makes it slightly more difficult to use, but I can cope.

What’s difficult to reconcile is the loss of various features which are obviously and explicitly an attempt to shoehorn users into more activity on Google+, which have a number of negative effects for individuals and businesses.

  • Individuals can no longer have a basic sharing and following network within Google Reader. As opposed to the thousands of connections I had on social networks, there was a small group of around 30 or so I followed on Google Reader, simply because I was intently interested in seeing what they deemed worthy of curating and sharing on a tight subject list, without necessarily interacting with them about their holiday photos. And as with Twitter, it was asynchronous sharing – they didn’t have to know me or approve me, or figure out what I want then create a Google+ circle on that premise.  But worse is the claim that many users in more repressive countries were using Google Reader as social networks were blocked, and had connections of several thousand in many cases. That’s entirely lost now.
  • Business revenue is affected: Via RSS, and Google’s own acquisition of Feedburner, a business could display advertising in their RSS feed. In addition to losing control of sharing a full or partial RSS feed, the snippets shared to Google+ also conveniently remove any feed advertising – Google may lose their share of that revenue, but also completely control Google+ and any monetization that happens.
  • RSS is under threat: Consumer adoption of RSS has remained relatively small, but concentrated towards heavy and earl-adopting technology users. And of that group, Reader had a market share of about 70%, crushing most competitors and removing incentives to innovate in that area. If Google has decided RSS is redundant, what will happen to the popular Feedburner RSS service which powers many, many blogs RSS feeds? The analytics side of Feedburner has been pretty much permanently broken, but it still provides a simple and easy way to set up a feed which is compatible with numerous other places and services.
    In addition, for business use, it’s been possible to take the feed of Google Reader shared items, or utilise the unofficial Google Reader API to separate out tags to put onto business intranets or publish externally. Given that shared items is gone (Including my own 16,000+ articles over 5 years), what faith can you have in an unofficial API to support paying clients?

 

 WTF Google?

I’m certainly not against businesses making money – I’d like my own to keep earning more in the future, and my expertise is more directed towards the content and marketing side of business operations. It’s entirely possible that in such a large organisation it may just be coincidental that various changes all suggest a new self-interest which has happened just as a founder resumes control of the company and indicates more of a focus on their new social business.
I’m also enthusiastic about experimentation and change – the fact that Google Buzz and Google Wave have both been deemed failed experiments doesn’t negate the important experience and influence they may have had both within Google and externally.

But I do question whether the current focus on Google+ is causing the big G to lose some of what has made it so immensely popular and powerful. Whether that’s the influence of the success of Facebook as a walled garden which uses elements of coercion to get us to help power it in terms of advertising and brand revenue, or whether it’s just the misalignment of every non-search free product as a feeder for Google+, I can’t say.

Occupy Google+

But either way, I’m not alone in feeling unsettled by Google’s new direction, and as we’ve seen, current success doesn’t mean permanence, particularly online. Google has some security in that the integration of Gmail, Reader, Analytics, Apps for Business etc are so deep into our lives and companies that it will take a significant motivation to switch, but given the current moves from my techie friends to alternative feed readers, and the existence of established and good paid analytics alternatives, it’s not inconceivable that the move could start to happen.

And given the results of some blind search engine result testing, it appears that one of the main reasons for Google continuing to dominant search is the familiarity of the brand, rather than the results being returned in comparison to Bing – which means that losing the perception of their values may not just damage the potential success of Google+, but could also lead to a greater threat to their core search business.

Filed Under: Analytics, Branding, Google+, marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, social networks Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Everyone’s a curator now…

October 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We’ve talked for years about citizen journalism and self-publishing, but more important than the channels of distribution are the ways in which content and context are discoved via search engines and social recommendations, and the fact that theoretically this leads to any piece of content available online being indexable, findable and potentially popular.

But what’s interesting me at the moment is the rise in curation – not necessarily on a professional level (for example NPR’s Andy Carvin curating Middle East tweets to an audience of almost 60,000 followers, or the increased use of tools such as Ushahidi and Storify by journalists and news organisations), but the effect it has on ‘ad hoc’ content curation – note how I’m trying to avoid that increasingly ridiculous line between amateur/citizen and professional/establishment content production!

What I mean by ad hoc is that we’re all walking around with cameras or mobile phones, and many of us are then sharing via our various online networks – and that can range from family pictures and days out to long form writing and video. And I’m struck by the way in which my own experiences are changing, even at a family event.

How curation changes our lives:

I recently went down to the war museum at Duxford for the second time this year to celebrate a family event with my parents and my son. And as always, I was carrying my phone (a Nokia N900 for the record), and taking a mix of personal family pictures and ones which I intended to make public on my Flickr account and possibly elsewhere. All totally normal.

Consolidated B-24M Liberator

Consolidated B-24M Liberator Second World War American Bomber

Except here’s the change. The first time we visited I took a load of pictures of the amazing planes and tanks on display, and then made them public with most of them just called something like – ‘Plane at Duxford’. I’d uploaded probably 80 or so photos and didn’t really want to spend a whole Sunday cataloguing them. And the blog post it inspired was a thought about how the rise of communications technology etc seems to have sucked all the glamour and excitement from air travel.

This time I did something totally different.

Almost subsconsciously, every time I took a picture of a vehicle on display, I also snapped the information beside it about the model and historical information.

And I wasn’t doing this for myself. Occasionally I’ve snapped museum information if it’s something I want to investigate further later on, but although I quite like planes and military history, I don’t have the time or inclination to start reading up on it at the moment.

Instead, I realised I was automatically doing it becuase I knew at some point I’d have the time to make those images public, and I wanted to be able to hopefully provide the correct and relevant information for anyone seeing them, as well as potentially feeding my ego by making them more discoverable. I recently discovered that my Flickr account has had over 12,000 views, and although I know that those stats include all the times I’ve looked at my own snaps, that still leaves a lot of views from other people – some of whom have been kind enough to leave comments on the images I’ve made public (apparently 699 photos, with far less tagged and geo-located, according to the handy stats page).

Librarian in Residence 2

Considering the huge number of other people at Duxford that day armed with cameras and mobile phones, I wonder how many other images were being captured, shared and then found online, and how many other people might start doing similar things to catalogue their own creations?

How much more content is being produced already which isn’t being curated and tagged, and therefore lies undiscovered? And how many more people will start creating collections of items which interest them, using tools which are easier and more accessible than a traditional blog? We’ve already seen that to some extent with the rise of simpler tools such as Tumblr, or the amount of video and photo content which is being shared on Facebook every day, along with the immense volume of videos on Youtube. And there seems to have been an increase in tools and services which attempt to help curation, whether it’s the more established universal shopping and fashion industries, or newer ideas. But none of them have got mass traction yet – if one does, how will that change things. Is there a way, for example, for a service to help me not only collect and curate everything I might have uploaded to Facebook, but to easily let me share it outside of that particular walled garden?

It’s one reason why I use Flickr, and pay for a Pro account, along with increasingly looking at using the likes of Audioboo and Soundcloud for audio. Obviously Youtube and others such as Vimeo have video covered, and my blogs and websites do the job for text. But at some point someone will crack the way of making all of these points easy to distribute to, and more importantly, collate and curate from? (You can already do easy sharing to a number of those sites even via older phones and services – for Flickr and Youtube etc I tend to use the built-in service on the Nokia, but I know several others exist for publishing – just not for pulling it all back together). I could hack everything together myself to make a coherent lifestream, but I’ve never found enough reason to take the time, and I suspect most other people feel the same ( I do find the time if clients agree to it though, so have some experience of pulling it all together!)

It’s even more obvious with the launch of the new Facebook Timeline profiles. It shows how much time, effort and content we’ve all pumped into something which has inherent value in many ways, but also locks that content up inside itself.

Library Closed

How might it serve us, and others, to be able to set it free, and accumulate it all in the same way as Klout and Peerindex attempt to pull in our activity and interaction to assign us scores for influence? Back in June 2007 I wrote about Hasan Elahi, who created a site to which he uploaded his entire life as a response to being mistakenly put on the FBI watch list and getting detained at an airport. I’m not suggesting we auto-publish all our data all the time, and there are many privacy implications involved in that debate, but we’re all becoming auto-curators, and that could potentially lead to a second era in terms of social media and networks as that behaviour becomes part of everyday life for us all.

Filed Under: Digital Culture, Digital Publishing, Lifestreaming, Media, social networks, user generated content, Writing Tagged With: , , , , ,

WIWT launches and networks of shared interest

September 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

So fashion social network WIWT has publicly launched today after a beta period, and I’ve been checking it out after agreeing to upload at least one image of myself.

Founder Poppy Dinsey has done a pretty impressive job of publicising both the original blog and the launch WIWT (What I Wore Today) as a social network, but in case you haven’t seen it, the original blog began with her uploaded what she wore every day, with the plan of doing it for a year (I can’t quite remember if it involved a bet or a dare), and is now an open social network which allows anyone to upload photos of their outfits, and browse/follow/rate everyone else.

I’ve been following the progress fairly closely because after crossing paths online and at Twestival amongst other places, Poppy had the great idea to put a call out online and spend a week meeting up with all kinds of people working in digital and business in London, and I was able to chat over coffee. I’m pretty sure I was just one of the many people that week who thought it would be a logical and great idea to open up posting outfits and connecting/sharing in a simple and easy way. And it’s been cool to see it all coming together from the outside and observe how it’s gone.

So is WIWT any good?

Simple answer is yes. It’s pretty easy to use, although I haven’t been able to take advantage of the WIWT iPhone app. Upload 1-3 pics per day of the outfit you’re wearing, tag it, add links to buy it, and you’re done. Assuming you don’t spend ages checking out other people, following friends, and building up a list of clothes you really should buy.

I’m not qualified to talk about the design aesthetically, but it certainly works smoothly and logically from a user perspective, and probably one of my favourite elements is that every piece of text on the site comes across with great tone and character e.g:

‘Can I post more than once a day? I’ve had six outfit changes just through dinner.

No, sorry. We’re pretty strict about only one post per user per day. If you want to be a smartarse then you can take advantage of the fact that we allow three photos per post and upload three different outfits. We won’t tell you off if you do that.‘

Networks of shared interest:

What makes WIWT really interesting is that it’s built from the ground up.  It came from a very simple blog, and has grown into a social network. The idea of snapping ‘ordinary’ people on the street and publishing their outfits started in magazines years ago (including titles I’ve worked with such as Heat), but building up a community around a blog and then expanding it to allow everyone to get involved gives it a very different feel and experience. It’s not a top down selection, and although there’s one filter for ‘Editor’s Choice’ on the site, it’s forgiveable because it’s mainly based on user ratings, and you feel like Poppy herself is picking out the user outfits she really likes, rather than an anonymous member of an editorial team somewhere.

It’s why niche networks of interest can continue to thrive despite the ubiquity of the big social network giants (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc). Browsing through the site you can see almost everyone (myself excepted) has got a keen interest in fashion, and that includes a slightly surprising number of male uploaders.

Lessons for communities and brands:

  • Start small and build up – a small thriving village or online community feels like something you want to be a part of. A huge empy city or community feels like something you want to get out of straight away. Too many larger brands adopt a ‘build it and they will come’ approach, and don’t see any benefit in small numbers of highly engaged people involved.
  • Personality – Poppy’s blog didn’t particularly follow any SEO rules or marketing plan. And although she’s undoubtedly very attractive, there are lots and lots of pretty women on the internet. What worked was that her personality came across in every single post and message, and she’s genuinely personable and funny. That’s what made her posts about dressing down or having to visit a hospital as interesting as those featuring her in a glamourous and revealing dress.
  • Alignment – Many of her outfits are from the high street – that means anyone can aspire and achieve the same thing. Inspirational content is something magazines have done well for years, but personally I got incredibly fed up on men’s magazines with fashion features starting with the lowest prices for even a shirt in three figures. I’ll spend a large amount on clothes occasionally, but with a business, family and other commitments, I’m not going to want to do that every month.
  • Be clever about reaching out – Poppy made great use of a packed week in London meeting everyone she could. From a logical perspective, I’m sure she could have skipped quite a few to focus on the most ‘important’ people. And in the build-up to the beta and launch, she’s done a good job of using varius ways to keep in touch with everyone and encourage them to get involved. I certainly wouldn’t upload photos of myself to a fashion site, but felt fairly comfortable doing it on WIWT.

There’s some stuff I wonder about, and I’m sure the site will continue to evolve now it’s public. It’d be interesting to know how many people are actually including links to purchase their outfits at the moment, and whether sharing a percentage of affiliate revenue would improve that, or possibly detract from the community aspect for example.

But at the moment, I’m just thinking it might help me make more of a sartorial effort when working in the home office, and hoping that at some point, some of my favourite clothing brands in motorcycling and vintage denim etc might check it out and get involved.

And I’m reminded of this talk that I gave a shocking two years ago now…

 

Building Online Communities To Support Successful Media Brands – ALPSP July 2009
View more presentations from Dan Thornton

Filed Under: community, social networks Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Why size isn’t everything – at least for communities…

August 4, 2011 By 5 Comments

I made a note to respond to a recent post by David Cushman, in which he talks about the value formula applied to cities by a theoretical physicist, and applies it to social networks and particularly Google +.

The money quote is:

“…it can be understood by a single magic number: 1.15. Each time the population of a city increases by 100 per cent (in other words doubles) the social and economic factors scale up by 115 per cent.
“So, if you compare a city with a population of one million people to a city of two million, then instead of the larger city having twice as many restaurants, concert halls, libraries and schools, you find instead an extra 15 per cent on top of what you’d expect. Even salaries are affected by this curious ratio…”
And David then applies the same thinking to social networks, to prove that overall size is more important than growth rate in creating overall value. Which isn’t wrong exactly, but it did leave me feeling uneasy, and trying to work out why I felt the need to disagree.
And here’s why – it’s about personal perspective. If you’re a social network or community owner, then the application of the value theory makes sense, and from an overall perspective, then the rise tide lifts all your individual ships up.
But from the perspective of an individual member of that community, the value you get isn’t just tied to the economic levels of the overall group, or the overall utility of the network as laid out in Reed’s Law.

Why size doesn’t matter for the individual

So here’s why overall size isn’t the biggest factor in the value of a community or social network – a city may have an overall rise in economic growth and communal resources in line with the overall size, but there are still economic and status differences between individuals. And these tend to be centred around particular areas and neighbourhoods.

plus size skinny jeans

Photo by arimoore on Flickr (CC Licence)

And it’s the rise or fall of my neighbourhood which impacts me most – whether that’s house prices, new community services etc. Even then, my own standard of living may not rise or fall in line with everyone else .

So the value I get from an online community is normally made greater by an increase in connections, in terms of awareness of opportunities. And most social networks have allowed us to have huge numbers of loose connections beyond the magic Dunbar Number of the number of people we can generally manage to have stable social relationships with (between 100 and 230).

But I think that the size approach Dave has chosen is purely looking at the numbers of opportunities, the quantity of information, and the overall value.

It’s not taking into account depth of relationships, information and opportunities.

You what now?

Time for the plain English example to illustrate what my half-formed thoughts are getting at:

For the sake of argument, let’s peg Facebook at 640 million users, Twitter at 170 million and Google+ at 25 million (The first two figures are from Wikipedia and are being used by Dave – the final one is the latest report by Reuters on Google+).

I’ve got hundreds of connection on both Facebook and Google+ and thousands on Twitter.

And yet the highest value interactions I’m having in terms of in-depth knowledge sharing and information which provides direct results for me comes from a couple of small subgroups on each, and a couple of far, far smaller forums, dedicated to relevant topics such as SEO, or Blogging. Those are where I’m seeing really useful information being shared – normally on private and invite-only groups and forums.

It doesn’t matter if a city doubles in size and gains 1.15 times the total amount of restaurants. It matters if the city gains a couple of restaurants that specialise in the food I love, at a price that’s affordable, and most importantly, if those restaurants are places my trusted friends are recommending and visiting.

And that’s why I think his theory of communities and cities can only be applied in very specific ways – my experience of Google+ has been totally different, perhaps because I was fortunate to be invited and engaged by some very cool people straight away, which enabled me to set up and enjoy my own neighbourhood.

It’s why I always enjoy visiting London for work – I have some great clients and there’s a huge potential for more, plus the chance to go to a load of cool events, and meet up with lots of cool friends. But I also enjoy living outside of London and engaging with a great group of digital people locally.

 

Filed Under: community, social networks Tagged With: , , , ,
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