Tag Archives: google

Single User Utility In a Social System »

December 28th, 2012

Don’t get knocked off your feet by the sheer strength of my agreement with Fred Wilson on Single User Utility In a Social System:

One of the most important lessons we took from delicious was the value of single user utility in social systems. It might seem odd that systems designed to leverage interactions between people can have (should have?) single person utility. But I strongly believe they should.

In short; single user utility is the fact that an application or service can be valuable to a single user with or without the social components like the network, sharing, etc.

Delicious is a good example of this, as Wilson describes, but there are many others. Path, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, the now discontinued Nilai, and many more have their own single user utility.

Bad examples? Google+, Instagram. Both of these would be fairly meaningless without the social components.

Social components should multiply the value of a service not be the only value of a service.

Flickr Premium? »

December 27th, 2012

Danny Nicolas has been keeping up with my Flickr commentary of late about how Flickr should create a more affordable, less feature-rich account type and he has a few things to add:

I feel as if most people currently paying for Flickr Pro don’t take advantage of all the features offered. I might even go in the other direction and have the current Flickr Pro offering become the mid-size account, and offer a more expensive Business account that doesn’t have file size or video limitations.

My main argument for why I think Flickr should make a scaled-down account is more about price than about features. I was a paying Flickr Pro user for many years, as was my wife, and we never utilized the account to the full. Though I’m sure more serious photographers do. However, in today’s market of mobile apps and the services that power them, most people will not pay $24 a year to share photos with their friends. And I don’t think the Instagram generation needs Flickr Pro. But I do think they’d pay enough to make it worth Flickr’s while to create a more affordable account with less features.

Creating a Premium account is an interesting idea and is always on the table for SaaS platforms. But I don’t think that is the right strategy for Flickr. I doubt there are many members that are pining for more features or space or video capabilities. They can go elsewhere for video. I believe there is a goldmine of brand new users that are dabbling with Instagram – to the tune of tens of millions perhaps – that would love a few extra features that Instagram simply does not provide (stats, groups, sets, etc.) and all Flickr has to do is price the account just right, and market it properly, in order to suck them all in.

Again, Danny:

Whatever their strategy for success may be, Flickr must evade further stagnation in order to be competitive. They can’t ignore and leave new markets wide open like they did with mobile. They have the opportunity to become a powerful weapon in the hands of Yahoo.

It is amazing to me that so many people see Instagram as Flickr’s failing. But it is obvious. The people that were the innovators in photo sharing missed the boat. I think the problem is that Flickr became a business very quickly after joining Yahoo! It went from being an innovative product that was really trying to solve problems to a business that needed to make money and innovation sort of was pushed to the side. And the fact that we didn’t hear anything from Flickr for years was mind-boggling. I have no idea what they’ve been doing for the last few years.

Danny nailed it when he mentioned cannibalization. Some of the things Flickr should have done over the last several years were no doubt thought of and even sketched out but perhaps decided against for that very reason. They didn’t want to lose current customers. But they may have to do just that in order to grow again.

Yahoo! needs to invest in Flickr. They need to let the team know they can take chances again. They can try and fail and try again. They need resources, talent, and a someone with a clear vision to run the entire thing.

If Marisa runs Flickr like she ran search at Google Flickr will succeed. If she runs it the way Google+, Buzz, and Wave was run she won’t. And there is a subtle difference between the two approaches. Google+, Buzz, and Wave were innovations, no doubt, but without any real value or use case that was obvious. I remember trying Wave for the first time and having no idea what it was for. The products were perhaps a little too innovative. Instagram isn’t so much an innovation as it a well-designed simple solution that brings delight to people every day. Google search is a well-designed (seemingly) simple solution that brings an amazing amount of value to people every day. Flickr should aim for one of those; delight or value. I’d pick delight.

Nexus 7 »

June 27th, 2012

The Nexux 7 is a 7″ tablet from Google.

Naturally it runs Android but it runs a version of Android that no one else has yet and, if Android’s track-record stays intact, not many older Android-powered devices will ever run.

I’m skeptical only because I’ve never seen an Android device that I’ve liked. But who knows?

Of course, Marco bought one.

Google removes 1 million links a month from search results

May 25th, 2012

David Kravets for Wired:

Each month, Google removes more than 1 million links to infringing content such as movies, video games, music and software from its search results — with about half of those requests for removal last month coming from Microsoft.

Interesting stuff. I’m surprised that number is so low. I’m not surprised that Microsoft is really out there squashing infringements.

Mahdi Yusuf spends four weeks with DuckDuckGo

May 7th, 2012

Mahdi Yusuf after spending four weeks using DuckDuckGo in place of Google for search:

This brings something very interesting to light, I have gotten really good at processing information returned from Google searches. I can quickly determine what is a useful result and what isn’t.

After using DuckDuckGo for one week I can concur with most of Yusuf’s findings. I’ve gotten so well acquainted with Google’s search results, and various other products like Images search and Maps, that I find it hard to stick to DuckDuckGo for anything other than single result searches.

In other words, if I’m looking for a particular web page I can use DuckDuckGo to find it. It works. It is quick. And it is actually less distracting than Google’s search results for the plain reason that Google now has more ads than search results per page. However, if I’m doing a lot of research on a particular topic I’m always in need of something a little more powerful than DuckDuckGo. I’ll need images, calculations, and – more often than ever before – Maps. Google has all of that.

For any search engine to come in and usurp Google’s strangle hold is going to be a really, really steep hill to climb. No matter how much I think it is time for it to happen.

Google+ still hasn’t caught on in a meaningful way

April 26th, 2012

Yours truly in August of last year on The plusses and minuses of Google+ – filed under minuses:

For any social networking service the single biggest reason they fail is lack of adoption. While Google+ has become the fastest growing site of-all-time that doesn’t mean that people are using it. In my Circles (get it?) Google+ has not yet been fully adopted. The people that have been most active are very early adopters, people that work at Google, and people that do not have accounts on Twitter or Facebook. Will this change? Will Google somehow convince people, as they did me, to use Google+ for a few days to see if it sticks? We’ll see.

It is now nearly 10-months later. How is Google+ doing? Not so well from my chair. They haven’t figured out a way, besides Circles, to differentiate themselves from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks that clearly have carved out their niche.

I think Google+ is a great product. It does a lot of things and does them fairly well (although their iPhone application is pretty unusable). If it was launched in February 2004 at the same moment Facebook was launched it would have given the now 900 million user network a run for its money.

So what’s the problem? Again, me, nearly 10 months ago:

Every social networking site was started with a particular purpose in mind. Over time those services typically find their niche (if they survive long enough to do so) whether or not it was the original reason for its inception or not.

[...]

Google+, however, goes against this “find the niche” convention. Rather than trying to fill a niche like Facebook or LinkedIn they’re taking on every level of human connection; professional, familial, social, voyeur, etc. and combining them all into one service. They do all of this by providing a different relationship model called Circles.

At the time I thought this approach would have a positive effect for Google+. I thought that nearly anyone could find a way to make Google+ useful. But it seems like it has been the opposite. Perhaps this lack of focus has made it so that Google+ doesn’t identify with very many people.

The only types of people that I see using Google+ on a regular basis are early adopter tech geeks, social media experts, and people that work at Google. Perhaps someday they’ll separate themselves from the pack somehow but until then it doesn’t seem like Google+ has caught on with any particular crowd in any meaningful way.

How Pinterest makes money

February 9th, 2012

Josh Davis:

If you post a pin to Pinterest, and it links to an ecommerce site that happens to have an affiliate program, Pinterest modifies the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. If someone clicks through the picture from Pinterest and makes a purchase, Pinterest gets paid. They don’t have any disclosure of this link modification on their site, and so far, while it has been written about, no major news outlet has picked up on the practice or its implications.

Now you know.

I don’t believe this is a bad or unethical business model – I simply think it should be disclosed. The same way we expect Twitter to disclose what a Promoted Tweet is or Google to disclose what the Ads are on the top of our search results. News like this should spread in order to put just the right amount of pressure on the Pinterest team to make this more apparent.

Jason Santa Maria stated something on Twitter yesterday that I think fits here too:

If I like the things you create, nothing makes me happier than giving you money to keep doing it.

I don’t use Pinterest (perhaps I will one day) but people seem to like the service. If they like the service they’ll likely want it to stick around. Maybe they’d be willing to pay for it. Or maybe they’d be willing to accept the fact that Pinterest is generating revenue using affiliate links. Either way, let the people decide.

Is Page listening to Jobs?

January 23rd, 2012

According to the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Jobs reportedly told Google’s Larry Page:

[figure] out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

Not a week ago Google shot a few projects directly between the eyes and the rest they are going to give to the world via open source. Is Page listening to Jobs?

Google+ has over 60 million profiles. Not users.

December 28th, 2011

I’m glad someone is finally saying it. Eric Eldon for Aol/Techcrunch:

“That’s not 62 million active users, though — a point that everyone covering these numbers seems to have missed. It’s just the number of total users. And specifically, it’s the number of new surnames that Allen’s team has tracked being created on the service.

Because Google has aggressively integrated G+ into many other properties, including its top navigation bar and the OneBox, one would expect a certain baseline amount of sign-ups from among the hundreds of millions of people using other Google products.

The real question is how many people are returning after creating their accounts, which Allen doesn’t try to answer.”

Precisely. I have absolutely no doubt that Google can get people to sign up to just about anything. They’ve marketed Google+ on all of their existing products, through commercials, by actually replacing features in existing products, etc. These are all ways to market Google+ that a competing service or startup would never be able to leverage.

Getting profiles isn’t Google+’s “problem”. It is keeping active users.

Robert Scoble (on Quora) and Chris Brogan (on Google+) seem to challenge the theory that Google+ is dead by showing that they’ve grown their “number of people who have them in their Circles number” faster than they were able to grow their networks on, say, Twitter or Facebook.  While it took X number of months to get to Y number of followers on Twitter it took far less time on Google+ to do the same or better. I don’t think that is a very good metric to determine whether or not Google+ is successful in retaining an active community. It is simply a metric to determine how many profiles they have. When you first sign up to Google+ you’re taken through a wizard of sorts to add people to your Circles. Brogan is on the suggested user list (or was). Scoble isn’t, by choice, but arguably you’d have to be on Mars to miss Robert’s posts.

Google+ is still very new. It will inevitably cut out its own user base. And I hope it is successful for Google because I think it is a pretty great product. It could be extremely valuable to some uses. But so far I don’t see it sticking for many people as their daily go-to way of sharing. In my Circles Twitter is still winning. And this is coming from someone who likes Google+.

Google Wallet

September 20th, 2011

It is about time. Paying for things using a phone has been a dream of mine for some time. I’m a debit card type of guy not a cash carrying type of guy. Being able to ditch my wallet altogether and use my phone to pay for something would make things even easier.

Google Wallet is the first real step in the right direction. Square’s CardCase application is very nice but it is very, very limited and is contingent upon the store, cab, etc. knowing about Square and being compatible. Google Wallet is built on top of the already existing credit card, pay pass, infrastructure. Wherever MasterCard’s pay pass works Google Wallet will work. I’d imagine more card companies will follow suit soon and Google Wallet will improve.

This won’t make me jump the fence to Droid but I can only imagine it will be a matter of a year or two until Apple has a similar solution (perhaps even made possible via a Google Wallet iOS app) with the iPhone.