Social mobile apps - just too bad

I don't understand. There are big social networks like Facebook, Linkedin or even google+ with millions of users spending a lot of time on their website. But it seems they don't understand that there are users who are not anymore using PCs for their social engagement. Especially most of us don't want to use FB or google+ on our work PCs. The only alternative is to use our mobile device, either a smart phone or an iPad (I don't care about other pads).

Starting with the smart phone. All of them have a smart phone app but the apps are so limited and somehow only designed for on the go. In Google+ is no hangout. Facebook has no ability to create groups and you can't play any of the games. Linkedin is very limited too. You are not able to see company statistics which is a really good feature online.











But the most frustrating part is that non of the apps are stable or work really well. The most stable app is google+ but maybe because it has the least features. Non of them allow to change any important user settings, you still have to go to the website to do so. Plus any notification you get via email with link will open the website when clicking on the link instead of the apps. It is really not hard to recognize the device and try to open the app if the app is installed on the iPhone. I saw this with other apps.

The iPad is a different story. There is no Facebook, Google+ or linkedin iPad app yet. Facebook is working on an iPad app and was accessible a while ago through a jail broken iPad.

Google+ will always set your iPad to mobile webpage, which is annoying because the real estate is too big for mobile layout. You can change the page to desktop but anytime you click around it goes back to mobile.




Facebook of course is limited on the iPad, because of missing flash.





And some layout looks off and the website is not build for touch. Granted Facebook will eliminate flash but still it is not build to use on a touch screen.

Linkedin has the same issues it requires flash for statistics which are not working on the iPad and it is hard to use touch only. Searching your linked in connections is almost not possible.




I can't understand that everybody is talking about social which I think is already old and standard. On the other hand everybody is talking about mobile, but it seems nobody does a real attempt to deliver really good mobile experience, which is weird.

Because in terms Apple devices there are only two form factors and much easier to optimize than for PCs (which have many different browsers and version etc.)
Of course there are many Android devices but still not impossible to develop for it.

The app store has over 300k apps and Android not much less but there are not many apps I would consider perfect, but for sure the three big social networks are just poor.

The only exception is twitter, they did their homework. They have a good iPhone app and a real iPad app.




But the funny part is that I use twitter on the iPhone to post and on the iPad to read and therefore the two apps are designed for this. It is really easy to post on the iPhone but hard to read, and it is the other way around with the iPad app.

It is really time for the companies to understand that mobile is not just a toy and that mobile devices are not just an extension to PCs. In many situation in our live the mobile device is central point of use.

We only used all the time PCs because there were no mobile devices. Using during work something to post or read unrelated to work will be not anymore our PC, because we don't want that our company can keep record on things we do. We have our phone always with us and we want to do more than just check in. I know many people who are using their iPad at home instead of a notebook, because it is so convenient to read or surf the bed or on the coach without having 50 pounds laying on our lap.

The notebook is dead. In less than 2 years the notebook sale will be decreasing by more than 60% therefore brands and social networks must invest more in mobile.
I don't want to post every year how nobody understands to build a working mobile experience. It should not be anymore a topic, mobile is standard like social.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Editions by AOL

AOL released this week an iPad app called Editions. The application is made as a magazine like NYTimes. The look is nice but very busy.
The app is free which was a reason for me to look into it.
Starting the app opens it like a paper magazine on a wooden floor.







The content of the app will not automatically updates. You have to decide when it should be updated.







When you open the cover you have a nice feature. The app shows all your appointments from your iCal calendar, Facebook friends birthdays and some twitter infos if you connected your Facebook and twitter account with editions. However be aware that connecting Facebook will allow AOL to access a lot of your Facebook data.








You can choose what topics you like to read. I chose technology, science, fashion and a few others. The settings are pretty easy by drag and drop. And can be easily changed anytime under settings.

The layout is heavy but not hard on your eyes. It is a pretty made app and somehow similar like NYTimes but more effort put into design to make it more like a print magazine. Therefore it takes time till the app starts and loads all content. It takes around 30 seconds over wifi and multiple minutes over 3G.

Other than the NYTimes, Editions displays articles from many sources like All Things Digital or All Mac.








Besides that the app does need time to load it is as well pretty slow. But the most disappointing part is, that when clicking on one of the articles will open within the app the website the article is posted.









This is pretty disturbing because these webpages have a lot of ads and sometimes flash which can't be displayed on the iPad. It is almost like a combination of SkyGrid and NYTimes. But the most disturbing part is that most of the pages are not iPad optimized. Text is too small etc. At least you are able to magnify the pages.

The only good part is that you can tag each article to get in the future articles which fit better your reading habits.

Because of the slow speed of the app to render you will encounter many crashes, because the app does not like too many clicks around during rendering.

The app allows you to mark articles for later reading or to send an article as email link, post it to Facebook or twitter etc.








Overall the app is good attempt but not more. It has some nice features but the slow load and slow page changes with the crashes makes the app worse than the NyTimes. And I don't like that the full articles are displayed in original as website.


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Please don't forget to visit my blog http://new-kid-on-the-blog.com or follow me on twitter schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

What is next?

A good friend on mine and I discussed today what is already old what will be the new trend, to define what is old was easy but what will come was not.

The last few years social did dominate the Internet. Thousands of social platforms and apps came on the market. The famous ones are Facebook, twitter, linkedin, groupon and foursquare. All these social networks have in common that you suddenly connect with people you can't remember anymore or you don't know it is all about to be connected. As a result we have so many connections that the social gets too blur.

But social is now so common that it is not new anymore. Trying to do something new in social is still possible, but difficult to have a new break through. On the other hand, it is fascinating that many investors still invest in social start ups. Localization is almost old too but at least still open for more to come.

However there is a trend of new social networks which reduces the connections just to a few people who are truly your friends. I see this the next level in terms of social. Companies who are building networks, where we easily can have small groups of people and with no big effort allow to communicate and prioritize them combined with location recognition will get the next hype.

Shazam is to watch.
Shazam is a commercial mobile phone based music identification service, with its headquarters in London, England. The company was founded in 1999 by Chris Barton (now at Google), Philip Inghelbrecht, Dhiraj Mukherjee and Avery Wang.
Shazam uses a mobile phone's built-in microphone to gather a brief sample of music being played. An acoustic fingerprint is created based on the sample, and is compared against a central database for a match. If a match is found, information such as the artist, song title, and album are relayed back to the user. Relevant links to services such as iTunes, YouTube, or Zune are incorporated into some implementations of Shazam.

Shazam has a perfect recognition software, is is really pretty fast and accurate. But the really cool part is, that shazam can bring TV ads and e-commerce together. If Shazam would be able to be build in the major smart phones then it could get big verry big.

During a show you see an ad you really like, you can now either try to read in the ad the internet address (if you see it) or try to scan from 15 feet with your phone the QR code (if they show one) - good luck with this, or try to make a picture of the ad and use google goggles to get more info about the product shown on TV. Nothing of this works really well. But Shazam can listen to the ad and then display on your phone the relevant online ad with a buy now button. Shazam did already some experience with same SciFi shows. I tried it and it worked well.

Gadgets
In the gadget department are smart phones already old. Tablets are still on the growing market but nothing really innovative. All manufactures are trying to copy the iPad. Android and iOS are so look a like that even there is not much innovation.

NFC (near frequency communication) is surely the next big thing for electronic devices. It is not a new technology but still not build into many devices. In a few years we might see NFC not only in smart phones but in many other things like toaster or running shoes. NFC will get cheaper and wider communication radius.

Augmented reality is still on my top list. We are still not at the top of the cycle. A big breakthrough will come when the processors of the smart phones and tablets will double in speed and performance.

Another big favorite of mine is gesture as input device. The Microsoft kinect is a great beginning. I can see many great innovations in this area. I believe that we are able to buy 65inch TVs in a few years under $1000 with build in kinect similar
technology. We will then replace in our master bathroom the vanity mirrors with flat screens. They work like mirrors (because of build in cameras) or as windows with scenics coming from the cloud. If we then walk in front of the screen ,the scenic will move like if we move in front of window and look outside.

In 2013, most of the consumers will buy tablets instead of notebooks. Netbooks will be dead till then. But the really fascinating part is that we, the consumers, will have always multiple intelligent devices, even if each device can do everything we need.

I remember that my friend I and discussed that in 2010 we might have only one device to make a call, shoot picture, tape a video or to surf the internet. We have been partly right. Our iPhone can already do this, but we have been wrong at the same time. We believed everybody does want to have only one device. The reality is different. The reality is that most of the electronic devices will be able to do almost everything, but we still want to have multiple devices. The reason is the form factor. I even believe (as my friend), that there is still space a device in size between a smart phone an a table. Something around 6inches screen size.

The biggest trend will be the total integration of all of them. Apple started some of this by allowing to watch a movie which is streamed to the iPhone or to play a game on the iPad which was purchased on the iPhone. And now they are going further with their iCloud for music and documents.

However the inter connection is yet not even started. The next really big trend for us is the seamlessly switching between devices without any effort and data lost.

Imagine you take a FaceTime call on your iPhone, you then go in your office to your desktop with NFC the iMac could recognize that FaceTime is running on your iPhone and ask you if you want to switch to the iMac. You could then at the same time surf again on the iPhone or even take another call.

Or you are on the phone having an important conference call, at the same time you need to take your car to pick up your son from VPK.
In the future you would be able to have your conference call on your office phone, as soon you wave your iPhone over the office phone, the call will be directed to your iPhone. When you are in your car, the call gets directed to the build in phone in your car and the sound will be played over the build in stereo.

After you picked ip your son, you need to print a presentation. You drive to Fedex Kinko's. There you hold your phone to the printer and your selected document will print.

Computers are much easier to use than 15 years ago, but then we had one device. Today we have at least 2 if not even more. I am regularly using any given day 5 different "computers" (iPad, iPhone, AppleTV, iMac, Windows 7 notebook).

Apple, Google, dropbox and Amazon are helping us to move our data (music and documents) into the cloud which helps to get better our devices synced, but to be honest not yet did I find a system which worked very well and is at the same time easy to set up.

the cloud is a buzz today but nothing really new, however faster Internet connections, the cloud and wifi everywhere will bring us to the next level. I truly believe, that in a few years most of our smart devices don't have large memory for storing data. The apps will be thin clients that a smart phone only need to have a few gigs to run OS and the Thin clients. Surely memory gets cheaper and smaller, that I doubt the memory will be reduced on the devices, but I believe most of our data will be stored somewhere but not the device.

I am not the biggest fan of Google but Google will lead this. They have already a notebook which uses chrome as OS and everything you do is in the internet using their service. The notebook sucks, it sucks pretty bad but only because we don't have all the time internet and without Internet the notebook is useless. It is like having a 3 series BMW but no gas to run it.

Even if the notebook sucks, the philosophy behind is the future. As developers we need to think more in applications which are storing the data not local and to allow seamless integration to any other device if needed. If Google would extend the notebook to allow to work on a doc offline and as soon internet is available the data would go into the cloud would be great. And as I heard they are working on this. Apple's iCloud seems to promise this for some data types.

Another trend will be projectors. They are around since ever, but with augmented reality and better technology, they will get new places not just for presentations or as TV replacement.

When I talk about projectors then I actually mean screen less displaying. The windshield in cars will be your screen. Windows will be screens and every wall can be a screen. Maybe you choose your room color by clicking a button on your iPhone and your room is suddenly red. If you don't like it anymore then you can change your room color without painting the walls.

The future is closer as we think and when my son is 18, he will lough about my blog entry from today.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Everybody talks about Silicon Valley - do you know indeed.com in Stamford, CT?

I am not on job hunt and pretty happy were I am right now. I am now almost three years at my company and not really up to date what are the best websites are to look for a job.
I remember 10 years ago, back in Germany, Monster was the big thing to post your resume and to search for a job.
3 years ago "the ladders" was the right place to go if you want to earn more than $100k a year. I unfortunately have to admit I had no luck with theladders.com. I paid a lot of money for no results and found my job through a headhunter.
If you search in bing for "theladders scam" you get 2.5 million results, this tells a lot.

Last week a friend of mine asked me if I could recommend him a website because he's is on a job hunt. I said linkedin.com. He did not like it, because there were too many IT jobs and too less jobs in Tampa.
Of course under my friends and family I am the designated Internet expert, therefore I made a research and came across of indeed.com.
If the website would not say indeed.com then I would think it is google.




It is amazing how fast the results are coming back, how easy to search, it has even facetted search. Different than all other job searches indeed.com is just like google.com. You only get results and these click away to the company which did post the job. But you can upload your resume and use it through this site.
And because it is only a search engine you can't see for which job you already applied for (I can't be sure because I did not apply for any job).
You can sign into indeed.com using your Facebook account or setting manual a new account up. Under trends you can see where your job is most needed.

I instantly liked indeed.com and was wondering since when they are around and how they are doing. I imagined they should do well because they use same method like Google.com. Companies only pay per click.

I went to Crunchbase.com:





Indeed did get latest funding 6 years ago in 2005 ($5m). On their website they claim:
Indeed is the #1 job site worldwide, with over 50 million unique visitors and 1 billion job searches per month. Indeed is available in more than 50 countries and 26 languages, covering 94% of global GDP.

They have more traffic than monster, simplyhired, theladders or yahoo jobs.





Indeed is a private company and does not disclose their revenue. But it seems to go well, no new funding and no planned IPO yet. And this company is even not based in SV. According to linkedin.com, indeed has at least 234 employees but less than 500.
However the business is growing and they have a lot of open positions.



I think (as well a few others) that indeed.com is one of secret success story. Almost no top management changes since 2004. Founders still on board in active roles. Bigger in traffic than monster and very good revenue model. If it works for google why should it not work for indeed.com.

We should keep an eye on indeed.com and when beginning 2012 the big new hype of Internet IPO starts (or better social IPO), then indeed.com might be one of the companies and if so then they will do very well.

It is fascinating how everybody talks about Facebook, twitter, linkedin, foursquare and many new start ups, but nobody seems to recognize indeed.com which is already 6 years old and eventual makes more money then all of them.

It would be interesting how much revenue per head count they make.

Let us assume indeed.com gets per click in average $4 and every search results in 0.1 click on sponsored links or sponsored jobs. The claim to have 1 billion search results a month.
1billion x 0.1 x $4 x 12 months = $4.8 billion

Almost $5 billion in revenue is surely possible. Keep your eyes and ears open for indeed.com in Stamford.

And my friend is now happy I could help him.

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Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Twitter down again

How often is twitter down? Every day? Yes I think so. But not only this now I am not able to post any tweets through 3rd parties like google blogger for over two hours.




I did find nothing on the twitter blog about this issue. And nothing yet on google search, but interesting that I get over 2 billion results when I search for twitter post not working.




He twitter folks. If you want to be a big player, then get your service under control. Get more hardware or better DBs but don't have so much issues. Why should I ever want to buy stocks from you?
Do you know that many news get less readers when twitter is not working. It impacts not just your website.

- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

What is the right social network?

Today is all about being in social networks. There are many social networks from Facebook, twitter, foursquare to linkedin, living social, Groupon and myspace.

Trying to keep up with all of them is almost not possible. At the end we need to make decision which one serve us the best. But which one is the best for us?

Let us first look to what kind group we belong to. I believe we can reduce it to three main groups:
Consumer, celebrities and brands. All three groups have many sub groups but I try to keep it simple with these main groups.
All 3 types have two ways to be social. Either reading information and make certain decisions based on collected information or to post information to influence others to make their decision.

As a consumer we gather information to make buying decisions or to express ourself to let others know what we are doing and what we like.

Facebook:
One of the most prominent platform for social media marketing is FaceBook. FaceBook was born in Harvard dorm room under the aegis of Mark Zukerberg and co- founders Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin in February 2004.

50% of active users log on to the site in any given day
People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on FaceBook
More than 35 million users update their position apiece day
More than 60 million position updates posted apiece day
More than 3 billion pictures uploaded on the site apiece month
There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, pic albums, etc.) shared apiece month
More than 3 million active pages
More than 1.5 million local businesses have active pages
More than 20 million people become fans of pages apiece day
More than 5.3 billion fans are created by Pages
Average individual has 130 friends
Average individual sends 8 friend requests per month
Average individual spends 55 minutes on FaceBook
Average individual clicks the Like button on 9 pieces of content apiece month
Average individual writes 25 comments on FaceBook content apiece month
Average individual becomes a fan of 4 pages apiece month
Average individual is invited to 3 events per month
Average individual is a member of 13 groups
More than 70 translations acquirable on the site
Top countries using FaceBook are US, UK, Indonesia, Turkey, France, Italy, Canada, Philippines and Mexico
More than 200 million active users currently access FaceBook through their mobile phones


Facebook has over 850 Million accounts and over 500 million active user. In average each user has 130 friends with 70% Facebook users outside of the US.
Facebook is the right place for keeping in touch with friends far away or to find old friends. The chances are really good to find somebody you did not hear from over 20 years. Many people are posting every day images or small status updates. But the most rime user are spending in playing games.
Facebook is a great tool for brands to engage their consumers and to learn about the consumers needs, likes and dislikes. Facebook is a great place for brands to test products before they are even on the market. Important for brands is a fan base. There are multiple ways to gain more fans. The most successful way today is to post everywhere (on website, packages and ads) the Facebook page URL with special deals which the user can only unlock if they "like" the fan page.
Brands need to post daily news on their wall and need to be proactive in communicating with the consumer on Facebook. A brand can learn a lot from their consumers but need to be aware that there will be a lot of negative comments and maybe an anti brand fan page. Negative comments and anti fan pages are good. No comments and no fans are bad. It is important to react correct to negative comments. The more brands engage the consumer to tell them their true feeling the more the fan page will regulate itself as a positive page, as long the brand answers these negative vibes in a positive way. If consumers are complaining about bad customer service then listen and change the quality of customer service. Let the fans know you changed the customer service and let them vote again how the service is now. The results sill be better than any other PR action.
Facebook is as well a good place for celebrities but as well a dangerous place to be. Many celebrities are engaging marketing firms to handle their Facebook page. The fans will find out when the voice is different than in public. A good example for a great page is lady gaga. The Facebook page sounds authentic, you feel like reading her real diary. As a result she has over 32 million fans.




Facebook is for brands a great advertising platform. No other platform can offer such targeted advertisement to such a big user base. However Facebook ads are not very speaking to the users and have a very low click rate. More users are moving to to mobile Facebook which has no ads at all.

The best addition for companies and brands at Facebook is places. We all love to check-in into restaurants and concerts etc. Brands can offer specials right when the consumer is already outside of their home and ready to spend money.


Linkedin

LinkedIn was founded in 2003. The site launched on May 5th (affectionately referred to by employees as "Cinco de LinkedIn") when the five founders invited about 350 of their most important contacts to join. At the end of the first month in operation, LinkedIn had a total of 4,500 members in the network. LinkedIn's first "real" office was on Shoreline Road in Mountain View.

LinkedIn adds a new member every second and just hit 100 million users.
52% are outside the US.
44 million users are in the US
India has 9 million and UK has 6 million users.
The avearge age of global users is 25-45 and it’s almost 60% males on there globally (compare this to Twitter which has more females). The US has the most females with 45% and the Middle East the least with 33%.
Most users are working for companies with over 1,000 employees, this is especially true in Asia. The biggest proportion of companies are active in High-Tech (16%), Finance (13%) and Manufacturing.
12% of all users say they are in a sales function. 10% are either in academia, administration or operations.
Engineering is the profession of 9% and 8% are in information technology.

Linkedin is the number one social network for professionals. It is a great place to build your network around your profession, If you are looking for a new job or for an investor. But be careful with linkedin. Most employer will look up your profile and compare it against your resume. Brands can utilize linkedin to find new talents for their company. Linkedin has over 100 million users and is a better job market than monster (in my opinion). Linkedin helps to build networks within the network. People might not use linkedin as frequent as Facebook but every entry is more powerful in good as in bad. Companies can easily build a personalty profile on linkedin entries. Connections to a certain group of people or a list of profile updates and reading list can tell stories. Your employer might get suspicious when you you suddenly get a lot of recommendations or if you connect with multiple recruiters. All these updates are showing in your status list. People tend to connect with coworkers really fast and then a job search is no secret anymore.
At the other hand linkedin can be very powerful when your are in sales and need a contact to a company. Many times we are only 2 connections away to the company. Getting introduced is pretty easy.
Linkedin helps to gather information about companies which we might not find easily through google or company websites.





Twitter
Initially, code titled Twttr, inspired by Flickr, Twitter privately appeared in March 2006. Later, in June 2006, it was launched for public with the study Twttr.com and rebranded to Twitter.com later in October the same year. Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. It is an online application that is part blog, part social networking site, part cell phone/IM tool, designed to let users answer the question “What are you doing?”. Users have 140 characters for apiece posting (or “tweet”) to state whatever they care to say. In terms of online traffic density and visit frequency, Twitter leads the breed of social media sites.

Important Statistics about Twitter

More than 175 million accounts
Number of Twitter users increases at 300,000 everyday
3 Billion requests apiece day generated by 180 million one-of-a-kind visitors
95 million tweets per day, that gives circa 640 tweets per second
Twitter’s search engine gets 600 million queries each day
Thursday and Friday are the most active days on Twitter
32% of accounts are active users
10-11pm is the most active hour on twitter
Top languages used are english, portugese, japanese and spanish
Top countries using twitter are US, India, Japan, Germany, UK, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Australia and Spain
More than 70,000 applications have been created using Twitter API
More than 67% of Twitter messages are in the form of user’s current status, private conversation and links to news and blog articles
The majority of twitter users are female.

Twitter is for most users about consuming. Twitter is right now mostly used by celebrities to post their updates. Only 24% of twitter posts are directly done through twitter website or twitter app. Most posts are generated as a side effect on webpages and blogs.
Many brands don't know yet to utilize twitter other than having a tweet button on their website. The risk with twitter is the 140 characters length of posts. There are risks to send the wrong message which can be dangerous for companies.
But twitter can be a great consumer building tool when using twitter as a real group building social platform. This can be as simple as posting a job opening and to engage the applicants to use twitter to apply or as complex as taking all new twitter posts to a topic to generate the longest song lyric in history.
Twitter is for consumer mostly to consume and not to be active. For celebrities it is the perfect tool to bind their fans. Posts are easy and fast and cam be done everywhere the cell phone works.
The top 5 twitter accounts are celebrities.



But twitter is as well a perfect tool to see trends and to learn about people. Usually people, especially business people, do only post on twitter when they do care about things, either positive or negative. Sales managers can use twitter to find out what their potential buyer like (who is he following) and what does the potential buyer think (postings by the buyer).
Companies doe good to hire data mining experts to scan and analyze twitter posts. Big international events have been faster on twitter than in the news. Facebook and twitter even helped to start revolutions like the latest in Egypt.

There are many other social networks, which can be considered and I could write a whole book, but I guess nobody would want to read hundreds of pages about social networks therefore I decided to stay with the top 3 for this post.

Coming back to the original question, which social network is the right one?
It depends on the goal, and I hope my little comparison could help to make a decision. At the end there is only one big mistake we can do and not to use any of these networks or platforms regularly.

Remember before Internet, we could have a flyer or catalog for over years with same content and nobody did care. With the Internet we learned that we had to change info weekly that our readers or consumers don't lose interest.
The social networks are forcing us to do multiple times a day updates otherwise we lose our readers/friends/followers.

- Posted using BlogPress, please follow me on twitter @schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Brooksville,United States

Social network: the interaction is involuntary

We are writing now the second year of social Internet, and I am still not clear why everything is called social, but things which are social are not called social.

Please don't understand wrong. Facebook got big, Zynga is number one Game platform for online games. Angry Birds has unbelievable success. Almost every celebrity is on twitter and having not a linkedin account is fatal if you want to get to the next professional level. And don't forget Groupon the best deals ever. They are all listed when we talk about social networking or social gaming. Together they are valued $170billion, so much money can't be wrong.

I had to surf the Internet to find a definition, to see if I get it now. Wikipedias definition of social:
The term Social refers to a characteristic of living organisms (humans in particular, though biologists also apply the term to populations of other animals). It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.

This is a start but I did want to know what social networking definition is:
Again Wikipedia was helpful:
A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide means for users to interact over the internet, such as e-mail and instant messaging. Although online community services are sometimes considered as a social network service. In a broader sense, social network service usually means an individual-centered service whereas online community services are group-centered. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks.

In a birds view Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin are social networks. But diving deeper, I got the feeling they are not social or not more social than forums which exist much longer. And what is about the dating websites like match.com or eharmony, they should be social too.

Facebook:
FB might has started as a social network, to get students together on a platform to meet and discuss when they can't meet in person. Not much is left since then. FB has over 500 million users and is now more a platform than a network, there are many restrictions and tons of 3rd party applications, everybody gets pressed into the same. FB went to a platform driven by commerce. More and more brands are using this platform to gain brand loyalty. The interactions are many times one sided. We post and hope others will read and interact. FB is surely closer to social than twitter.

Twitter:
In the highest mean of social, twitter is a social network. But it has for me the less social aspect of all. We tweet to gain followers, sometimes retweet or forward tweets. There is no real big social interaction, or otherwise how could it come that a Charlie Sheen can gain 3 million followers with not many tweets (less than hundred) and most of them useless and meaningless.

Linkedin:
It is all about with who we are connected. But to be connected does not define to be social. I know my neighbor, but I don't socialize with him. Same with linkedin. How many contacts do we have and how many of them do we interact on a regular basis.

All three social networks are for me platforms which are pretending to be social, but 90% of interaction is given by the platform algorithm. When a system decides the social part, then it is not social anymore. The definition says "The term Social refers to a characteristic of living organisms (humans in particular, though biologists also apply the term to populations of other animals)."

The platforms are software, they are not human. Imagine how less "social" these platforms would be if the user would actually need to look for somebody and Interact with this person. Sure we do this on these platforms but much less than the companies try to tell us. I get connect requests in linkedin. If I like the person profile or I think this person might be in the future helpful then i accept the invitation. This might be then the first and last interaction. However the platform let me believe we are social because I see their user profile updates. Pretty sure most of my contacts do not care, if I know what they are doing.
Look at twitter, we start following people with just one click but are we really reading their tweets all the time. If you follow 100 people, how much of their tweet do you read? But the platform let us believe we care and the people we follow do care. I don't think Mr. Sheen does even know I follow him. And I even don't know when I read the last time his tweets. He might even not tweet anymore. What is social on this?

Facebook let us see all our friends updates and wall entries, but if we are really as social as FB let us believe with all the updates posted on our page, why do we then get only feedback from few friends to some posts.

Social is intersection between at least 2 human beings and not one posting and a computer interacting by posting these infos to other pages.

A Facebook user has in average 130 friends, how can we socialize with so many?



Zynga:
7 out of the top 10 games on Facebook are from Zynga like Farmville. 3 of the top 5 applications on Facebook are Zynga games.






Did you ever play Mafia Wars or Farmville? I did, not much and good, but I get all the time game requests on FB. I accept or not, but where is the social aspect? Only because we send to somebody a request and if this person does accept it, we get more points? Do we really interact to each other? Asking questions, help each others? Maybe some people but not the majority.



Angry Birds:
I play Angry Birds I love the game, but this game has less social than any Zynga game. I can see how well I did in the rankings and the most social interaction with Angry Birds is the coffee break talk how to master level 4-14.

Groupon:
I guess most of my readers did at least get one coupon on Groupon, otherwise the company could not gave been able to generate $1 Billion in revenue and be the fastest growing Internet company ever. But I don't get the social part. Groupon is offering 50% or more discount on products and services (mostly services because it is easier to grant high discount) if enough people are willing to get a coupon. The idea is great and the concept works, but only because multiple people need to want to have a coupon does make it social?
Groupon is a platform for coupons and e-commerce. Not more or less. The most social interaction I had, was asking a friend of mine to sign up that the minimum number of requests are met, that I can get my coupon for a spa day (btw he did not, but I did still get the coupon).

Maybe I am to negative, but this is how I see it.

On the other hand we have millions of forums where people are discussing and asking questions and others are answering, full of interaction is going on and mostly around the same topic during the discussion. Why did nobody call this in the time back social network?
I guess because of the last part of the definition.
"....whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary". This let me believe that social Internet networking or gaming is based on the last part of the social definition.
"Social network: the interaction is involuntary."

I wondering who invented the social network, how we understand today the social network.

In 1995, Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant founded a company called WELL, which could be considered as the first social networking site. Or a few years later Eric Leebow, he claims he had in 1999 a college website similar to Facebook called Freezecrowd.


Finally I found something which could help me to understand why the above companies are named social networks.
The term 'social network' was first coined in 1954 by J. A. Barnes (in: Class and Committees in a Norwegian Island Parish, "Human Relations"). The maximum size of social networks tends to be around 150 people (Dunbar's number) and the average size around 124 (Hill and Dunbar, 2002).

A social network is a social structure made of nodes which are generally individuals or organizations. It indicates the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds.

Finally I get it, if you have more than 150 friends, followers or connections, then you fall outside of a social network regardless how social FB, twitter etc is.
Period. I am not a member of a social network, because I have more friends or connections than 150. But wait I have less followers. Twitter is my social network.

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And the Oscar goes to ABC - almost

Yesterday was the big day for Oscar and i decided to download for the iPad the Oscar application from ABC.



I was amazed, i really did watch the Oscar on the TV and on my iPad at the same time. The app worked impressive well. Before the show we had over days a countdown shown on the app and some video clips. Shortly before the event the app changed and we could see in the lower part the red carpet with 8 cameras. The user could switch through these cameras to see different footage. 3 of them had sound with hosts talking. When then the final event started the look of the app changed again.




With 9 different cameras like backstage cam or control room.
ABC really made it possible to watch on two devices at the same time. When I felt bored at the TV i looked at other cameras on the iPad.
2 cameras did only broadcast when commercials were running, which was great to get coverage during commercials.




The streaming was unexpected good i had no issues, which a lot of people upfront said will be there.
ABC did a great job to keep the streaming up or only a few people did stream the Oscar ceremony.
A few things i have been missing, which might come next year.
I would like to be able to stream the Oscar through my iPad to the TV to see full size movie on the TV and on the iPad only the map to switch the cameras. I missed as well integrated twitter and Facebook for postings within the app. Twitter said there were thousands of posts during the Oscar, I am pretty sure there could have been more, if this would have been integrated in the app. The app did cost $0.99 before the event and it was a good investment. Now the app is free to see other content related to the event, in case you missed the Oscar.



A good execution to combine mobile with TV, before, during and after the event.
If you don't have, download the Oscar backstage pass app and watch yourself some clips from the event or to see all Oscar winners. Interesting was that some winners used words which was not suitable for on air. On TV they took the sound out but on the iPad I could still hear the f words. Not sure if it was a technical mistake on the iPad, but I did like it.
The app was free of advertisement during Oscar but has now video ads which are not disturbing and clear identified.

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Twitter a big bubble?

Wall Street Journal reported that twitter is in low- level talks with Google and Facebook to sell it's Company. The estimated selling price would be between $8 and $10 Billion.

Let us get this straight. Only a few months ago Dick Costolo announced that twitter will be never sold.

But now they are starting talks to sell. The pressure might come from their investors but if so, then twitter is not confident it will produce sufficient revenue even close to $8 Billion.

Or twitter is gambling for an IPO. The talks are helpful to value twitter higher and up to $10 Billion.

Selling to Facebook would be a shame. FB has different audience in terms of usage. Twitter would be integrated into FB and then disappear. A lot of tweets are around business and articles. Most things in FB are about private things.

Google might be the better partner, they would keep twitter alive but integrate it better in their search. Google does not need to monetize twitter from the beginning. They waited a year before they started to monetize YouTube. Google search technology would help twitter a lot. Because search is a weak point within twitter.
Plus google has a browser (chrome), twitter could be a part of if.

Either way, if twitter get sold, then we know that twitter was a great idea but failed to generate a lot of revenue.

Maybe twitter should talk with Apple. Apple might be the best choice. Twitter could be 100% a part of iOS and instant available on all iOS devices. Apple has no Internet search engine but otherwise all what google has and more.

Siliconbeat believes Google is the best choice.

What do you think?


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Linkedin is going public - is the time right?

Linkedin is the first of the new social starting stars with over 90 million users.
Linkedin is a social met work for professionals and has a basic free service. Users cam have better search function or other services if they pay a membership fee. Linkedin is right now at a value of almost $3 billion on the second market.

Linkedin started in November to find banks for their public offering process, interviewing bankers in early November before choosing Morgan Stanley, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan Chase as its three lead advisers

Is the time right for an I.P.O?
A lot of people are waiting for Facebook, twitter and Groupon to go public. The hype for social is big and being the first to go public might boost the stock market for linkedin.
But on the other hand, many people might want to wait and see where it is going. Linkedin is much smaller in user base than Facebook or twitter and much less revenue than Groupon, and therefore the initial offering should be pretty low per stock.
It might have been smarter to wait till Facebook goes public, because many people won't want to spend $80 or $120 on a stock from FB and therefore might to buy linkedin stocks just to be in the social stock trading.

On the other hand linkedin can now need the money to expand more aggressive in Europe. Xing is still market leader in Europe as a professional social network.

It will be interesting to see how linkedin will perform on Wall Street and it will be slight indicator for Facebook and Groupon how the public and Wall Street is taking social companies.

Facebook is pretty smart to wait till a few of it competitors are public to learn from their mistakes. Facebook understood early that as a market leader it is not always the best to be the first. And nobody has yet experience with social platforms on the stock market.

Google learned in the time back a lot by watching other companies going public and chose the best time to file for IPO. Google was able to digest all what was going on and could therefore modify their approach that they even came up with a new way how people could reserve stocks.

I think linkedin could perform better if they would have wait to be the third or second one on the stock market in the US.

It will be interesting to watch. And if you have few thousand available, then buy linkedin stocks and sell them when Facebook goes public to use the money for Facebook stocks. Keep them 18 months and then in vest the winning in Apple or Asia, this is never wrong.

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Forget Facebook, Twitter and Groupon - geocaching is the real thing

We all hear about Facebook, twitter and Groupon how great these social networks are, and how much their possible market value is from 2bln to 50bln depending which one we look into it. But do they really any good for us? Groupon saves us money, but the rest?

However there is one of the older social networks which is totally underestimated. And i have to admit i did it as well. I am talking about geocaching.com. I heard about this few years ago but did not keep it on my radar till recently. I did read two months ago an article in NYTimes about geocaching and then a few weeks ago from my boss that he does geocaching, after i asked him why did he buy a GPS device.
But the real catch was when my brother in law came to visit us and told us that he is geocaching as well. We tried it out and now i am a member and my whole family enjoys it.

What is geocaching?
You sign up at geocaching. There you input your street address and then you can see were caches are hidden close to your location. A cache is a container which has at least a log paper that people who find the cache can write their handle and date down.
Some container are bigger and have items in there which the player can exchange with another item with same or higher value. The website gives you only the coordinates of the cache and some tips (sometimes only a riddle which you have to solve to get the coordinates). The user takes his smart phone or GPS device and inputs these coordinates. New GPS devices have already a geocaching plugin. Smart phones like iPhone have apps to download. The app at the iPhone costs $9.99 but which is a good investment.




With the app you search for caches and report if you found one, upload images and write logs.
The website has some more functions. To be a member is free, however if you donate $30 for a year you can get some more statistics.
There are 10 different types of caches.



Really interesting are the rare trackables or travel bugs. If you find one you can take it and put it in another cache. On the website you can see from where it traveled. My brother in law found one which did travel from Washington down to Florida.
The caches can be located in a street sign, under a fake stone, in a a fake screw or anywhere in the woods or walls. Mostly the caches are on public property but not in national parks. The website will tell you for each cache how hard it is to find and how hard it is to get there. Many of them have a piece of paper which explains why this item is hidden in case somebody finds it who does not play geocaching.
In the region we live, which is in the woods, are within 10 miles at least 500 caches. I walked at many by without knowing there is a cache hidden. It is a fun social game for the whole family. After a while you will see same handles finding the same cache like you and you start to send these people notes. There are even big caching events with over 500 people coming together.






Geocaching.com is claiming that there are over 1.2 Million caches world wide and 4 million players (did i mention that my brother in law lives in South Korea and plays geocaching there?).
The most players are in the US (it started here) and in Germany (Germans love the nature).
This is the first and only true social network which combines online and offline in a perfect way.
A perfect game for the whole family.
I don't have yet a GPS device and use only my iPhone which is, depending where i am, only 8 to 32 feet exact.
Good GPS devices can be exact as 3 feet which can be very important to find a cache.
We did find at the weekend 16 caches but had no luck with one, which we searched over hours till it got dark. Some caches you can only find when it is dark because they might have some special night color on it. For some you need to be a scuba diver to get to them. I even did hear that one is on the way to the space station.

I believe in a few years there will be more than 50,000,000 players world wide. And guess what, the company which is running geocaching is pretty small. Only 30 employees and a lot of volunteers.

Right now the company makes approx. $30 million in revenue, which is $1 million per employee. This is higher than Facebook, twitter or Groupon does.

Geocaching is very anal that their game is not used for commercial purposes. Brands are not allowed to hid caches and to reward players.

How did i come up with the revenue number?

Geocaching is claiming to have 4 million players, i assume 25% of the registered players are paying $30 a year (low enough that a lot would do to get more service). Which gives us around $30 million. Then there is the merchandise part. You can buy containers for your caches, pins, bugs, trackables, etc. Average price assumption is $6 and maybe 800.00 items sold (I bought an item and the invoice number was pretty high).
This is another $4.8 million over a few years.
The iPhone app has very high rating and over 3200 people did rate the app. Usually 5 to 10 % of people are rating. This gives us approx. 30.000 downloads or $300k gross revenue (minus Apple share).



There we go, the revenue will be somewhere between $25 and 32 million.

If this company gets some investment and the player community is growing then we have a new big social network. With some investment I could see special sub sites for brands to do their own geocaching game through geocaching.com

History of geocaching from wikipedia:

Geocaching is similar to the 150-year-old game letterboxing, which uses clues and references to landmarks embedded in stories. Geocaching was conceived shortly after the removal of Selective Availability from GPS on May 1, 2000, because the improved accuracy[2] of the system allowed for a small container to be specifically placed and located. The first documented placement of a GPS-located cache took place on May 3, 2000, by Dave Ulmer of Beavercreek, Oregon.[3] The location was posted on the Usenet newsgroup sci.geo.satellite-nav[4] as 45°17.460′N 122°24.800′W. By May 6, 2000, it had been found twice and logged once (by Mike Teague of Vancouver, Washington). According to Dave Ulmer's message, the original stash was a black plastic bucket buried most of the way in the ground and contained software, videos books, food, money, and a slingshot.

Jeremy Irish a web developer from Seattle moved the idea into a website called geocaching.com in 2000, which is now the biggest geocaching website.
Please read the full history of geocaching at http://www.geocaching.com/about/history.aspx

I love geocaching. Thank you Jeremy and your team.

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Twitter revenue less than $100 million but valued $3.7 bn?

Twitter did raise a short while ago $200 million and is now valued almost $4 Billion.
At the same time they generated last year less than $100 million. I really don't understand why we are almost back at the same situation before the big .com bubble exploded. Companies like twitter and Facebook get evaluated by their maybe potential revenue and not by their real market value.

Let us face this, i have no doubt that a Facebook could eventual generate $50 billion in revenue or that a twitter is able get revenue of $4 billion, but this will or would take time. For both at least 5 years if they grow revenue 100% consecutive in the next 5 years. But 5 years is a long time and can change a lot.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed he believes twitter will solely be funded by advertisement. Advertisement is attractive, but dangerous. Brands can only advertise as much they have money for it but the money is not unlimited. Right now twitter and Facebook are in favor for brands because it is new and we don't really know how much brand awareness and revenue it will bring to the brands. Advertising is only good as long it can produce indirect or direct sales.
We don't know if twitter is still attractive for them in 5 years, but we still bet twitter will be $4 billion big in 5 years.

Google could grow so much because the Internet grow a lot and we needed a place where we can find the information we are looking for. Google offered us the best solution and therefore their ad model did work. Facebook might work, because after almost 10 years of google we consumer understood that the ads shown on google might not help us all the time to make buying decision. But on Facebook the advertisers know who we are and what we want, brands can finally tailor personalized ads. But what if the government decides that brands are not allow to know so much about us? The prices for Facebook ads will fall, extremely. Facebook would be not so much in favor than other portals or search engines.

Let us compare Facebook to Google. Google made approx. In 2010 $25 billion in revenue and has a market cap of $200 billion. And Google is traded public. Facebook had a revenue of $2 billion last year and is valued as $50 Billion only traded at second markets. This means Facebook has 3 times better revenue - market cap ratio than Google (Google: revenue times 8, Facebook: revenue times 25). But in terms of traffic which defines at the end amount of ad revenue (when same amount of impressions) they are almost the same. So why is Facebook so higher valued? Brands, banks and consumer did need after ten years something new, something special. Google is old, it is an elephant, not so sexy anymore. The founders are older. Facebook is young, Mark is young, it is sexy, it is somehow new. It is a young playful elephant with dreams. The Google dream was "don't be evil", now Google is mature and understand that dreams not always come true. Facebook is still dreaming to make the world better. But this dream will not come true neither, because of our rights of privacy.
Note on the side:
privacy is exactly the reason why Facebook fas in Japan only 2 Million members. People in Japan don't like to open their identity just to do things in the Internet. I like it, more of us should think like them.

however Facebook will get eventual mature and a new kid is around we want to be around. Facebook will survive and will be used by more than 500,000,000 users this won't really change, because it is over the critical mass, but it will be so common that advertisement money will go away to the new rising star.
Twitter will not be one of them.

But back to twitter, it is for me really unlikely that twitter can ever make more than $500 million in revenue. Yes a lot of people are using twitter but not many do read tweets direct at twitter. Either we use a twitter app or read the tweets on other portals like linkedin. And even if there are a lot of ads, do we really want to see or even click on it?

Here is my tip to twitter, how they can make billions in revenue. Twitter should buy or start their own search engine, not the twitter search we have today. A simple page like google. I know that many people not only tweet their thoughts in 140 characters but many times as well add tiny urls with links to full articles or blogs. Twitter as well reflects more than anything else our moments of life. Which could help a lot to decide which stocks to buy, which bars and nightclubs are in or who the hottest single at high school is. Twitter just needs to find a way to harvest this for us in an intellectual search engine.
If twitter can spin off a search engine as life saver for certain situations and as a helper to find good blogs or news, then i can see value in twitter. But for now the twitter search is poor and i don't believe very well used.

Investors, either you guys do know much more than simple people like me or you just like to gamble at high stake. I would no invest $200 million in twitter right now with the knowledge i have. But i guess I know much less details than the investors.

A good friend of mine would simply say:
"Facebook, groupon and twitter investment. This shows us how less the money is worth nowadays." he might be so right.

Below is article from the Australian I did read about twitter and it's advertisement future.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/twitter-aims-for-independence/story-e6frg90o-1225984767900

Twitter chief executive officer Dick Costolo. Picture by AFP Source: AFP
TWITTER aims to become an independent company funded solely through advertising, but has not yet considered flotation, the CEO has revealed.



Dick Costolo said that Twitter's services for advertisers were enough to create a profitable business model. These include "promoted tweets", where companies pay for their messages to appear when a user searches for key words.

The remarks were the clearest indication yet that the company's strategy is to aim for a lucrative listing of shares rather than sell itself to a larger company.

Google and Yahoo! are believed to have considered bids.

"Our business model is an advertising model," Mr Costolo said.

"My sincere hope is for Twitter to become an independent company."

However, he said that the company had not yet considered a flotation, suggesting it was unlikely it would do so in the foreseeable future.


He joked that Twitter's business plan was "to continue to raise money".

"I just don't think about it," he said.

"I don't think about (flotation) on a day-to-day basis. I'm sure there will be a time when we consider it, we're just not there yet."

Companies such as Starbucks, Virgin America and BestBuy have already signed up to its promoted tweets service.

Mr Costolo said that the medium was proving increasingly attractive to brands wanting to speak directly to consumers.

Twitter was valued at $US3.7 billion ($3.72bn) last month, four years after it carried its first 140-character posting.

The valuation came after the company raise $US200 million in its latest round of fundraising, an investment led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley's best-known venture capitalists, which saw off competition from DST Global, the Russian investor in Facebook.

The fundraising round took the total amount raised by Twitter since its launch to about $US360m.Analysts believe that Twitter attracted less than $US100m of advertising revenues last year, plus fees from Google and Microsoft in return for allowing tweets to appear on their search engines.

At the time one analyst said: "It's a huge multiple, but the idea is that (Twitter's) scale can be monetised."



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Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

What will 2011 bring to us?

Happy New Year. 2011 will be very interesting. Apple will bring the iPhone to Verizon and maybe other phone providers, the iPad will get an overhaul with camera and retina display. The Macbook Pro gets a facelift and flash drive instead of a hard drive.
But besides Apple are much more companies and products around. Here is my 2011 predictions.

1. Facebook
Facebook will have an IPO mid 2011. Not that Mark Zuckerberg really did want but he got pressure from Government (over 500 share holders) and pressure from his main investors. Apple will offer 30 billion for Facebook and the only way to deny the offer and to make the investors happy is to go public. The trade will go up very fast and after 3 months FB has a value of $70 Billion. The value will go down end of the year when FB faces a few major trials.

2. Groupon
Groupon goes in April public and reaches a market value of $29 Billion.

3. Twitter
Twitter will be bought by Facebook for $1.2 Billion.

4. Skype
Skype will be available on every major mobile platform and will be number one video call application but does still not find ways to make decent money. Apple is going to buy Skype, after FB deal with Apple did not work out.

5. QR codes
QR codes get finally a break through and all major brands are using QR Codes on each product package and print ads to give more details to the product or to allow to purchase items shown in print ads.
A few new start ups with QR ideas are coming but none of them has yet the billion dollar idea.

6. Augmented Reality
Augmented reality will be the 2011 hype, everybody wants to have apps with AR. Many games will use AR, but some really useful applications will come too. Consumer can go in the store hold up the phone and can see instantly in which isle the savings are.

7. Location Location Location
This is the most important part in terms of real estate. In 2011 it will be the most important part for advertising. More and more people are surfing the Internet from their mobile device. Ads will be much more target by location then ever before.

8. Microsoft
Microsoft will have a great 2011. MS will grow extremely their mobile business and end of year 2011, Microsoft will have more apps than Blackberry and sell more mobile phones than BB in the US. Many companies will use MS 7 mobile phones as their business cell phones.
Kinect will be so successful that the first TVs will come out with build in kinect device. Instead of using a remote, the user can switch the channel with waving the hands. The TV will recognize the person in front of the TV and display the personalized screen.

9. Social TV
TVs will be more integrated in online and social. Google TV never made a success but Sony and Samsung learned from Google TV and will offer new TVs with build in Facebook and twitter.

10. 3D
Almost all new movies will be in cinema as 3D, but it does not really make it into the consumer households. Houses with man caves or cinema room will have 3D but the rest stays with normal TV. This will change in 2012 when the 3D TVs don't need glasses anymore and the prices are not much higher than without 3D.

11. Netfilx
I believe 2011 will be hard for Netflix. Netflix need to renew their licenses with Movie companies and have now to pay 10 times more than the last time. This means the costs for the users will go up. Apple, Google and Disney are fighting to buy Netflix.

12. Google
Sergey Brin will announce that he will step back from being active at Google to spend more time with his family. Eric Schmidt will replace Sergey with an former HP executive.

13. Paypal
Mobile smart phones are so common in 2011 that the consumer get used to the idea to pay groceries with the phone. We will learn the only thing we really need is our car key and smart phone. Paypal will be the number one company for payments through smart phones. Paypal will make the first time more revenue than eBay (Paypal is an eBay company).


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Two weeks experiment

You did not hear from me the last two weeks and the reason was that i did want to see what happens when I don't use my iPad or phone for being social.
I did not read news, I did not post on twitter i did not log into my Facebook. I did not write any blogs to avoid twitter or Facebook posts.

The results:
Three friends of mine did break up during this time and I did not know about because i did not read Facebook.
A friend of my sister died, which I missed because she did not tell me in person, she only posted it on Facebook.
I lost 10 followers on twitter because I did not tweet.
My blog visitors did cut down in half.

I missed that google could not buy Groupon. I missed that Mark Zuckerberg is person of the year for time magazine.
I missed a lot.

Stopping using the iPad is like not reading any newspaper, stop using the smartphone for chatting and social is like not be connected to the world.

Basically my life stopped for two weeks.

How did we survive 10 or 20 years ago. How did we communicate? Back in time we did not miss such things and we were able to write letters, calling people or visit friends.

Today the order of choice is different.

1. We go to Facebook and post to friends.
2. We log into twitter and post what we are doing
3. If we don't get the answers we are looking for, we text message to our friends.
4. We call them if they don't respond back via text message.
5. We write an email.
6. We might leave the house to see in person.
7. We DON'T write a snail letter.

Our live changed, we have now hundreds of friends in our virtual world but we almost have no friends in our real life. We know much more people, but do we really?

It is time for me to get back to my life and start being digital.

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Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Twitter now $4 billion value

Give me a break. Please come up with an idea to allow people to blog what they want but limit it to 240 characters to make it easy for them to blog. Allow them or others who don't blog to follow anybody they want.
Read in two limes of text why Tiger Woods can't grow a full beard or when Lady Gaga goes to bed. And please make it easy to allow people just to blog links to others people websites.
As a result you get 100 million users blogging something with or no sense, and gives everybody news what we are the whole day doing, because we all want to know it.
You get so much content that you can just print it in a big book and sell it as a bestseller. Even the national library will try to archive your data to keep something for the future. But don't worry too much if your servers are down or not as long you have a cute bird on the page when the DBs are down.

If you like this:




Then you like twitter and you like to be a part of something we never would have known we need it.
I admit i tweet, i admit i don't know why, i guess only because i was told i have to, to be a real social expert.
But it does not matter, it must be good because twitter is valued high.

Twitter is in the process of raising a huge new round of financing that would value the company at a whopping $4 billion, according to TechCrunch.
Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins is said to have submitted the most lucrative investment offer in the reportedly "intense" bidding, topping an offer from Russian firm DST that would have valued Twitter at about $3 billion.
The figure marks a huge leap from the social-media site's last valuation in early 2009. At that time, Twitter raised $35 million at a reported $250 million valuation.
It also demonstrates astronomical growth for a company that was founded less than five years ago and doesn't have a proven business model or, presumably, any profits to speak of.
The valuation would make it worth four times that of such entertainment-based companies as Lionsgate, TiVo and World Wrestling Entertainment.
The news comes two months after Evan Williams' decision to step down from his CEO post to focus on product strategy. COO Dick Costolo, a former Google executive, took over the CEO reins of the company.

I feel like in a time machine back in 1999 when we did hear every week about new deals of big investments in companies who spend more money than getting in.

I believe we are only 30 months away from a big social break down . 50,000 people will lose their job at end of 2012 because we figured out that social is cool but cool enough to justify Billions of investment.
The social boom will be over. A handful will survive and many new will come after the breakdown, but none of the new ones will get so much money anymore.

I think is is ok to have twitter and I like the idea, but i don't see a value of $4 billion for them. I can't see that twitter will make enough revenue to justify the value. The only thing I can imagine is to analyze the data to learn who the users are and what they are doing and what they like or don't like. This would be awesome, but i doubt it would really possible. At least not now.

My tip:
You want to get rich? Start a social company right now and sell it in 12 months before it is too late.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Photos- the next social frontier

Many of us are using flickr, Apple me, google picasa or for uploading their images into the internet to make them viewable for friends and sometimes the rest of the world. But it seems that till now advertising did not really take advantage of it.
More and more smart phones have high resolution image capture of 5MB even 8MB photos and the most important part they have geo tagging. And there are more and more pocket cameras with GPS for geo tagging.
I am imagine a new photo/travel service coming up. A portal to upload picture and for others to see them on map.
I travel a lot, i might want to upload images from my trip, maybe only images from buildings or nature. Other people can see them and maybe decide to go to a small town like Bretten in Germany because they liked what they saw. I know this is not really new, other services are already offering this.
But what if this portal is a travel portal, and we can not only upload images with geo information but as well Twitter tweets with things what we ate or saw etc. Twitter already has Geo data capturing when we use our phone for the tweets. Basically everybody can have in this portal their own travel guide with real time info and locations.
Financed is this service from local stores and restaurant and global brands. An user might upload a picture of the eiffel tower and tweet how he liked the food in Paris. A local restaurant bought ad space and the restaurant shows up in the page like in the yellow pages with current menu.
This is just a high level of the idea, but I see here a great method to get local advertisement where it makes sense.
Everybody is talking since years about better local advertisement, but nobody really found the golden egg. This is the golden egg, because the ads would reach travelers and friends.
To give this service more hype, an user would get for each uploaded photo points, enough points will give the user a coupon for a local business nearby the users current location. When a tagged image is uploaded a local business shows up and the user can rate it to get more points. Every other user who looks at the pictures and clicks on one of the shown local ads (local to image location, not local to viewer location) will give the person who clicks a coupon.
This service will have mobile version as well. On mobile devices the user can collect QR codes instead of print coupons. These QR codes are the coupons which the local store can scan to give the user discount.
These codes or always unique and only valid for one scan. As soon it is scanned the target page to redeem is not available anymore.

The user has to use his facebook account, to register on this travel portal. This helps the user not to remember another login and the portals owner can better customize and personalize the page to the users interests.

To be a member of this portal the user need to have an invitation from another Facebook user similar like rockmelt is doing.
And of course it can run as well as a Facebook app. And because myspace is coming back, the portal would show to the images the favorite songs of the person who did upload the photos.

A portal like this would combine social like Twitter and Facebook, geo tagging, QR Codes, coupons, loyalty points and local ads in one place without annoying the users.

These are all the latest trends combine in one. Why is not anybody thinking about this?

Or do i miss something why it should not work?

You want to know more about the concept? Email me and I will tell you more in details.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Let's go social

In my line of business i hear so many times from companies the words "we need to go social". But what does this mean? Just having a Facebook page or a Facebook icon on the website is only the minimum.
Social is much more it is a philosophy or methodology. Going social is changing a company.
Before we start to think about social we need to know what social or social network is and what impact it will have in a company.
Social for marketer is marketing 3.0. Marketing expert Philip Kotler and his colleagues Hermawan Kartajaya and Iwan Setiawan have identified Marketing 3.0 as a holistic approach to customers as multidimensional, values-driven people, even as potential collaborators.
Marketing 3.0-treats customers not as mere consumers but as the complex, multi-dimensional human beings that they are. Customers, in turn, are choosing companies and products that satisfy deeper needs for participation, creativity, community, and idealism.

Going social is to engage the consumer, to build trust and then get the consumer to be an advocate of the brand.

Social networks like Twitter can help to engage the consumer, give them a place where they can talk and discuss the brand, even allow them to complain. Companies should listen to tweets and react on positive as well negative tweets. Important is not to deny negative tweets. Companies can use them to get give another view or to admit mistakes.
Facebook is a a great place to build trust with the consumer. Brands need to have a fan page and need constantly post to page, have a team or a person dedicated facebook to talk about news, to read post entries and to start discussions or participate in discussions. The consumer need to feel that they are a part of the brand, that they are important, each single fan.
Don't try to sell your products on facebook, but offer special deals through Facebook which only Facebook fans can get. This builds trust and friendship. Facebook is a perfect vehicle to communicate with your consumer better than everywhere else.

Blogs are another perfect tool to get your customer informed and to build trust. As a brand you should let everybody in the company allow to blog. Don't try to run the blog through QA or only the marketing department. If everybody can blog, your company will see an interesting phenomena. You will read a lot of good things about your company. Your employees will most likely only blog positive because of fear to get trouble.
Your customer will read how great your company is and that it does not matter which position the employee has, they love their job.
There will be as well blogs about new products and how long it took till the final product was ready and how many times it failed before it worked.
Your customer will love this, they will admire your company, they want to be a part of it.

Engage your customers by asking them what they want to see next with your product. Listen to them and let them know you do. Implement their ideas and let everybody know you did.
Starbucks has since a few years their consumer idea website (http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/). Many new products are coming from their costumers.

When we as a company understand what Social means (engage, get trust, be a part) then we can start to build our social concept.

A few companies like Starbucks (consumer ideas) Burger King (sacrifice your friends), Zappos (twitter) and IBM (company blogs) are good examples how social can help to change the brand. All of them went through losing customers but turned it around with marketing 3.0

Bottom line is that this is a cultural change in the company and the social networks are only vehicles to practice the change.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.
Please visit my blog http://www.new-kid-on-the-blog.com

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States