Is there a Buzz about Google's Social Networking?

For some reason I'm becoming a fan of the instant impression! My iPad post came hot off the heals of Mr Jobs' comfy sofa seminar and now, less than 24 hours after Google launched Buzz I find myself itching to comment!


In short Google Buzz is Google's attempt to move into the social media scene. I'm somewhat confused by my own statement as a few year's ago now I remember having an account with a site called Orkut that I never used and only signed up to because Google had just bought them. Orkut on the face of it is a social networking site, but I didn't really hang around to find out anymore than that.


So back to Buzz. A lot of people have made a lot of noise about Buzz and a lot of the noise has tended to be negative. That seems to be the trend with new technology. Dismiss it out of hand because it is different. To me, it's precisely because it's different that I often find myself enthusiastic.


My first 'buzz' strangely seems to capture my initial thoughts (it wasn't supposed to!):

I stand by my thoughts that it won't be a flash in the pan because Sergey Brin publicised it (although not necessarily for those reasons) and also my thinking that it will never be able to compete with Facebook because it wasn't around when Soical Media needed defining. Facebook was and as such became the standard bearer (in the same way as Hotmail did for web-based email).


However I think Google Buzz will settle down into a popular and effective Social Media tool in time. As my brother commented (a reply via email rather than a 'buzz', which I found strange):

It appears Google has gone for a Social Media aggregator rather than a separate networking or community environment. The feature that stands out most for me is the ability to add 'connected sites' to your Buzz feed. 

The premise seems to be that you connect all of your web based sites where information is dynamic and of interest to other people (the list also includes Blogger, YouTube, Google Chat although crucially not Facebook), and when you change your status on these sites, they are updated through Buzz. The idea being you no longer need to check countless sites to see the latest information, although presumably you need to log into countless sites to update your own status!


If Facebook were added in time this would be a distinct advantage. I can't see Buzz drawing huge amounts of new users to Gmail but I can see it being beneficial to existing Gmail users. My concern would be that this was not the intended outcome Google had in mind when they created Buzz. 


I will probably post again once I've had the chance to use Buzz a bit more, see if my experiences change my initial thoughts.
   


~~ update ~~


This piece has a bit more perspective around the security aspect, something I haven't got round to looking into but would appear important!


http://charman-anderson.com/2010/02/11/google-buzz-not-fit-for-purpose/

BlogPress Lite comes to an iPhone near me!

I've just noticed that there's an App in the App Store that officially supports Blogger.com for the iPhone. Blogger.com is the company Google acquired some time ago and is considered one of the better blogging facilities (in the interest of fairness WordPress is also suposedly very good, but i've never used it).

This post is something therefore if a test, to see how it works and how I can incorporate it into my posts.

A couple of initital thoughts: the most obvious thing to note is length; posting will need to be short and to the point as my finger already aches! [I should learn to use more than one on this device!]. Also I can't immediately see how to add hyperlinks. Even if you could, it's fairly obvious it work take a long time. Finally, I can't easily research and provide references as I try to do when posting online.

However I think it could be a useful feature, certainly one I've been waiting a while for!




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Who tweets the Twitter demise?

I was about to post something else and wanted to check a quick reference on Twitter. However, it's down! As Twitter has broken some of the biggest stories of the past 12 months and thus gained a reputation for breaking news quicker than anyone else, who breaks this one? status.twitter.com is presumably located on a separate platform but how many people know it's there?

Who tweets the twitter demise, that's what I want to know!

Last.fm: Interesting idea, just not sure about it

Another quiet session in the office and this time I've gone for a bit of Last.fm. I signed up a while ago and then a friend recommended Spotify, which was getting all the media attention at the time. I was put off by Spotify as it wasn't a web-based service. I found that a bit strange in this age where almost anything that is being developed seems to be adhering to Web 2.0 and beyond! Anyway, clearly when signing up to Last.fm I'd duly inputted my favourite artists and it has formed a radio station just for me.

This is what it's played thus far:

• Stereophonics
• Louis Armstrong
• Belle and Sebastian

Unfortunately I can't be more specific other than to say Louis sang A Wonderful World, as that was the only track I recognised. There doesn't seem to be any feature to look at what has just played, or what is coming up. I find that a little odd. Maybe it's just me, but I like to have some control over what I listen to. I'm naturally suspicious of my 'own radio station' and the first couple of tracks bore that suspicion out. They didn't really seem to fit, complement each other, or follow on from each other. The Belle and Sebastian track (Electric Renaissance) is a better fit with A Wonderful World I suppose. I probably shouldn't compare it with iTunes' Genius which creates a playlist of music that complements each other, but I am!

As this post is something approaching real time (radio playing in the background) we've now moved on to The Magic Numbers and This is a Song. That follows on from Belle and Sebastian quite well.

So, what to make of it all? Having listened to a handful of chosen songs I'm quite impressed: I haven't disliked anything I've heard and it has fitted in with the mood I wanted (background music to work and blog to!). I can see it's potential as a social networking site too. It would be easy to share and recommend music between friends and follow music friends are discovering as well as discuss and debate new music. The problem seems to be that I have to search for each friend! That puts me off a bit. There is a message to suggest that finding friends through Facebook, Gmail etc. is coming soon, but is said that months ago too!

Until there is a general consensus on how to create a single social networking profile for everyone to use across all the different platforms and sites, I think social networking can only flourish if its easy to find your existing friends (and I suppose new friends if that's what you want from social networking).

...

We're on Stevie Wonder and Higher Ground now. Normally Stevie would be an excellent choice. Unfortunately I several years ago I used Higher Ground as an alarm call and I've never really recovered from hearing it! Not really Last's fault though so I won't complain!

The more I listen the more I'm impressed. I will hold off judgement though until I've had a bit more of a play. For example, can I select an entire album to listen to, or stream a style of music such as Cool Jazz? These examples would add a lot to the site for me.

A guilty pleasure to sign off with: Dixie Chicks and So Hard. Each to their own I guess!

Nimbuzz leads the way in Aggregated Social Networking / Chat

It's so simple it's almost genius! The RSS reader of the chat-based world. 10 years ago if you wanted to read an article on a website, you more than likely typed the URL into Internet Explorer and off you went. Today, my Google Reader handles hundreds of feeds from all types of internet sites, organises them and displays them in an easy to read, share and digestible way. So the chat world is following in its footsteps.

For someone who has previously boasted to not really 'do' internet chats, I have an account to do the very same thing with Skype, Google Talk, MSN (or whatever they are called now) and even Facebook has an offering! I use Skype the most although to a limited amount of people, and then Google Talk and occasionally Facebook. Not a heavy user but enough to keep on top of!

A while ago I became aware of a service called Beejive. It basically aggregates your chat logins into a single application, loads your contacts (I can't quite bring myself to say 'buddies') into a screen and you chat to them over the relevant networks, but from the same, single interface. Almost revolutionary! Although it did cost. Not being an excessive user I decided against it.

Now though I have found Nimbuzz and in the short space of time I've been using it, also seen ebuddy which is the same thing. Nimbuzz has one edge over Beejive: it's free on the iPhone! This morning it updated to include push notifications (although not for Skype yet, which is a shame).

This new approach and functionality helps me so I'm sure it will other people! It also seems to be a continuation of transparency being the new driver in innovation. Twitter I believe is the first hugely successful service to let almost anyone and everyone have access to their data. Their own website isn't the number one interface to twitter! Yet this has almost made it successful. The brand and the infrastructure are the value in twitter, how people get there is not. The same can be said for a lot of the chat programs. Skype make their money through calls (which you can do using Nimbuzz too). Therefore it does make sense to make the process of calling as accessible as possible. I haven't used all of Nimbuzz's offerings yet as I've concentrated on the iPhone app but I struggle to see where they make their money from? Maybe they take a cut of skype and other programs calls? I did notice that Skype seem to have a financial interest in Nimbuzz.

Whatever the intracies of the financial model of this new approach, I do believe as a strategy it is probably the right one to follow and will lead the way in the future: organisations opening themselves up to increase their exposure and therefore revenue whilst at the same time making their service more accessible for their users is a pretty good idea to me!

Sky+ for the iPhone. Now we're talking!

I've posted before about the ability to remote record by Sky+ box from the iPhone. Then it was using Tioti.tv's application and I did wonder why Sky weren't getting in on the act. Well now they have and although a basic offering it's impressive!

What makes it an instant favourite is how similar it is to the actual Sky+ menu. You select your category, scroll through the listing, click on what you want and then press record! It looks and feels like your Sky+ box. It can hold listings for the next seven days and the further you look into the future, the longer it takes to download the programme listings: again like good old Sky+! It's also a free app which helps too!

Comparing Sky's offering to Tioti.tv's is interesting: Tioti beats it hands-down for functionality, yet in my view loses in the overall stakes. This, mainly because I've never really got to grips with Tioti.tv, other than to use its remote record function. My concerns as described here were well founded! I tried to use the social networking side of Tioti.tv on their website, but just couldn't see why anyone would. Maybe at a stretch, if it was a concept built into something like Facebook it would have more success. Again, I think it comes down to audience: there just isn't the volume and level of interest to make what people contribute to discussions on their favourite TV programmes worth reading. 

Coming back to Sky's first iPhone experience, there's a good grounding for future development. I've used the remote record on their website for a while and thought a logical development would have been to create a view to manage what's recorded on your Sky+ box. I think the same would fit well into the iPhone application. It's one thing being able to record programme on the move that otherwise you might have missed, but that old episode of the vaguely interesting TV show you keep meaning to watch or football highlights where no team scored that are taking up vital space and will cancel your last minute request I'd like to be able to delete remotely as well. 

With more and more services along the lines of the BBC's iPlayer coming online the importance of Sky+ will probably diminish slightly, but you can't beat the ease and comfort of recording on the move, then watching on your tele whenever suits. The iPlayer on the laptop is a life saver sometimes but it's not quite the same!

  

Social Networking: Does it need an audience?

I have a theory. Unfortunately for me it's not a fool-proof theory to deliver the Premiership title to Liverpool (I'll leave that to Benitez...for now!) but nevertheless one that I've spent as much time pondering as the league title challenge - for the vast majority of people, social networking does not need an audience.

Over my limited use of social networking site, primarily restricted to Facebook but evermore increasing to include Twitter, Last.fm and to some extent Delicious, I've started to gain an insight as to why social networking is popular. In short my observations are that social networking is popular because it allows people to:

• Talk about themselves without anyone having to listen
• Peer inside a network to which they don't need to belong 

The second observation is not necessarily a new one. For generations now people have been

partaking in such behaviour in a variety of different forms. The 'soap opera' springs to mind. Peering through the curtains to see what's happening in the world (or the street) was a reality in streets up and down the country in the post-war era where paid for entertainment was in short supply. Moving on through the decades and the same interactions were happening utilising new advances in technology that had made it to the mainstream: elder sisters hogging the landline (they were simply phones when I was younger!), chatting on MSN in the more recent past to social networking in the hear and now.  It seems to me that technological advances determine how we gossip and live our social lives. Social networking is just the latest iteration of the theme. 

Emerging through this timeline is another constant theme. For people to engage in such behaviour, from the curtain peeking and coffee morning gossips to MSN and Facebook, the subject in question need not be affiliated to those taking an active interest - talking about people behind their [virtual] backs! 

The opposite to the gossiping and observation is the person who constantly updates their status but seems uninterested in any further interaction. The person who likes to talk about themselves but doesn't need anyone to respond. Although I'm referring to the 'individual' in this context, such an observation could also be leveled to organisations that use social networking as a means of advertising (and who aren't bothered with the feedback). 

The social networker who promotes themselves without need of interaction I think can survive without an audience to target. The passive networker who is content to be entertained by the networking of others also does not need their own audience. This leaves a final social networker, an active person who interacts with others. Do they need an audience? It's fair to assume the passive networker needs them, but I suspect the active networker does not need them as an audience. 

It's quite confusing really, and in an unintentional way it all works. Everyone gets enough of what they want to thrive. Interestingly, as I was contemplating how to document my theory I looked briefly on the web for any other points of reference and game across this study of social networking by Ofcom. Skimming through the Executive Summary they also categorised social networkers into groups. I was quite surprised how close I'd got! They defined their groups as:

Social networkers differ in their attitudes to social networking sites and in their behaviour while using them. Ofcom’s qualitative research indicates that site users tend to fall into five distinct groups based on their behaviours and attitudes. These are as follows:

• Alpha Socialisers (a minority) – people who used sites in intense short bursts to flirt, meet new people, and be entertained.
• Attention Seekers – (some) people who craved attention and comments from others, often by posting photos and customising their profiles.
• Followers – (many) people who joined sites to keep up with what their peers were doing.
• Faithfuls – (many) people who typically used social networking sites to rekindle old friendships, often from school or university.
• Functionals – (a minority) people who tended to be single-minded in using sites for a particular purpose

I'd say my three fall into Alpha Socialisers (active networkers), Followers (passive) and perhaps Functionals (self-indulgent). As an over-arching disclaimer for my 'theory', I'm not an academic and although I've tried to reference what I've found, it is based on personal experience. Of that experience Facebook has to account for the vast majority. Therefore I don't expect to stand up to academic scrutiny. However I do think social networking is an interesting concept to debate. It has a lot to offer as a medium for communication, and it has its place on the conveyor of communications throughout the years. I still remain skeptical to an extent and belive the technology will ultimately aid business communications rather than social, but that's a post for another day.

Tape It Off The Internet

When I began some simple research into this post, I'd reckoned about a 10 minute exercise to review one of my favourite iPhone Apps would be just around the corner. I was wrong! As I'm increasingly finding with so much of the content available to the iPhone from the App Store, what I've been happily using on my phone appears only to scratch the surface of what's available when taken in a wider concept. 

In a nutshell, and according to their own site, Tioti is...

...a social media aggregator for television - what does that mean? We use the web to put together all sorts of information about TV shows, and let you the audience edit and add to that. We let you see what's hot, what other people like and where you can get it from.

However if you'd asked me a couple of days ago what TIOTI was, I'd have raved about the TIOTI TV+ application for the iPhone which lets you remote record onto your Sky+ box! For the past year now Sky has provided a free service (TIOTI TV+ is £1.79 from the App Store) to remote record TV programmes onto your Sky+ box through text messaging or the Internet. There's a bit of faff involved with registering your mobile and then making sure you have a username and password for the Sky website but after that it's plain sailing! (the service is limited to 10 remote records a day and has been very stable, even from day one).

My only criticism of Sky's service is that it won't work with Google Chrome (Sky's web-based TV guide seems to think it's an old Safari browser! I read a Lifehacker blog that noted Google having to pretend Chrome is a Safari browser in order to access Hotmail, so maybe it's related!). For me, this is where TIOTI TV+ came in! As it's a dedicated iPhone app, it's much quicker to find the programme you're after and record them than opening up another web browser and starting the process all over again. The major benefit it brings as you might suspect is the ability to remote record anywhere!  

Being able to record at will for me is all part of the Sky+ revolution! Had I been blogging when I first got Sky+ then I think all entries would simple proclaim 'Sky+ has changed my life'. Incidentally my only topic of conversation for the following months was just that! I find with Sky+ that you become less governed by TV (in particular TV scheduling) and having Sky+ promoted the transition to watching quality TV at anytime, from watching crap just because it's on right now!

The simple, user-friendly experience with TIOTI for recording programmes, saving favourites and customising the application to feed channels and programmes that appeal to you is the cornerstone of why I like TIOTI TV+. It's clear from my little google-based research that there's more to TIOTI than that, so perhaps I'll go away and spend some time on the website looking at the social networking and TV downloading aspects that are discussed in the Guardian and Mashable to name but a few. I'm not sure in my own mind yet where I stand with regards to Social Networking on the whole so I'm not sure what I'll get out the web version. I like Facebook and Twitter but tend to arrive late to the party. It's not necessarily the technology I'm wary of, as much maybe the people you interact with. I like imdb.com but find the social networking features primitive and discussions often childish! The same I would probably say for YouTube too!

The one thing that I can't really get away from, and that has started to bug me a little, is that from a branding perspective TIOTI is about taping from the internet [grammar please!], which is the main purpose of the iPhone App. However taping from the internet seems a lost concept on the TIOTI website.  

Maybe I should just look with an open mind and report back!

Out with the old, in with the new!

My debut (new) blog, outlining my (also) new website with screen shots from old site and a brief explanation of the differences between the two.

Main differences are:

• CMS-driven using Joomla! (not quite ready)
• New Blog..technology, music and no doubt sport reviews 
• My Twitter feed (@benchadwick)
• ShareThis feed

The main objective for the new site is to update my experience for creating websites and web content. The old site was very much an exercise in learning HTML and as such was developed in notepad using a basic HTML editor. The result was a much improved knowledge of HTML but a dated and frame-based site that looks like and 11-year old created it! [That's probably insulting to 11-year olds, I take it back!]

     

Not exactly a work of art, but a good learning experience. My old site introduced me to the concept of inserting features from other websites into mine. I played around with Google's Picassa, You Tube and an RSS tool to create richer content than what I could have achieved on my own. 

I also wanted to have keep my bookmarks online, so I could access them from any PC. However my database skills weren't up to the task and I ended up not being able to add bookmarks effectively. I've since discovered Delicious which does this for me now!  

I'll continue to update content and add more features to the new site using the old-fashioned bit-by-bit approach!!!