Skeptic Geek

Google Buzz doesn’t KISS

On February 14, 2010, In Social Web, By Mahendra

This is my perspective on Google Buzz as it exists today, borrowing heavily from other “thought leaders”, whom I admire and respect.

January 2009

At the beginning of last year in Jan ‘09, Louis Gray, FriendFeed evangelist, shared his ideas on What FriendFeed Needs to Do To Grow and Keep New Users. Among other things, he suggested a “Lite” version for new users, and a better definition of what it is and how people should use it.

The next day, Stowe Boyd responded in his blog post:

…But the average schmoe, wandering around in Friendfeedland, having not perfected either massive social popularity or the followership model will try the service out and quickly leave never to return because there is no ‘it’ to get for them. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland.

December 2009

Fast-forward to the end of the year. Louis Gray, in Dec ‘09, said Like Convergence, Aggregation Is Better In Theory:

It sounds great. But despite my excitement and evangelism around such tools, for the most part, they have not flourished. It seems that, instead, people want to enjoy the content in its native environment, or keep things simple. I…wonder, does the world need to develop a perfect aggregator, again?
It’s possible that the disappointing answer is no…but I am thinking that “aggregation” is the new “convergence”. It looks great on paper, and some people will carry a Swiss Army Knife with them everywhere, but most won’t.

2010: Enter Google Buzz

Stowe Boyd’s First Look at Google Buzz:

In my Buzz…several extremely well connected folks…(are) buzzing up a storm, with hundreds of folks chiming in…It’s just the experience that I disliked in Friendfeed: A-list pundits holding court with dozens or hundreds of acolytes jumping in…I don’t want to socialize in a world comprised of A-lister dominated chatrooms, wandering from room to room.

Fred Wilson’s Thoughts On Buzz:

Like FriendFeed, Buzz allows me to “pump my data into it”. It is an aggregator as well as a updating service. But that poses a problem in some ways. What does this service want to be?

Goal of Buzz

The goal of Google Buzz was best elucidated by DeWitt Clinton in a buzz post:

The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle. The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format.

In the comments of that post, DeWitt further says:

There are two separate challenges here — a) how do we make the Google Buzz experience the best in the world, and b) how do we make the protocols that power it completely open and transparent and non-Google specific.

Let us look at a) and b).

a) The Buzz Experience: FriendFeed 2.0?

FriendFeed aggregates lifestreams of all your friends and has sophisticated filtering and searching capabilities. The challenges of consuming all your friends’ lifestreams are well described by Mark Krynsky towards the end of his post looking at Lifestreaming in 2009.

The minority who loved FriendFeed is one of the most active in providing feedback for the Buzz team. For example, see this buzz post linking a post on 14 Things that can be improved about Google Buzz that compares Buzz with FriendFeed, which was apparently cross-posted to the Buzz team’s internal lists.

I myself have been a lover of FriendFeed. However, I also remember how FriendFeed failed to attract mainstream users. Does Google want to make the “Buzz experience” appealing only to a small minority of web users like FriendFeed did?

FriendFeeders are the most vocal feedback providers to Google because the evil, walled-garden, closed Facebook bought our darling, and now Google is the knight in shining armor who is rescuing the FriendFeed aggregation model with open standards and APIs. The problem? I do not recall anyone complaining about information overload in Facebook, which is the network mainstream users have adopted, not FriendFeed.

Instead of getting feedback from FriendFeeders on how to “improve” Buzz, Google should look to those who never liked FriendFeed.

My take: Aggregation is not going to organize anyone’s social experience. Google should not emulate FriendFeed if Buzz wants to gain mainstream adoption.

b) It’s the APIs, Stupid!

Will Buzz be disruptive because of open data standards as Marshall Kirkpatrick discussed?

…it may actually intend to be a platform – the central hub for a world of distributed social networking…Buzz users should be able to read, comment on and message to conversations with people who have never seen Buzz in their lives, simply by subscribing to their feeds. There’s huge potential for interoperability here.

In another interesting blog post, Jillesvangurp extrapolated this idea to see how it can impact Facebook:

Open APIs, unrestricted syndication and aggregation of notifications, events, status updates, etc…First thing to catch up will be those little social network sites that almost nobody uses but collectively are used by everybody. Hook them up to buzz, twitter, etc. Result, more detailed event streams popping up outside of Facebook. Eventually people will start hooking up Facebook as well, with or without the help of Facebook. By this time endorsement will seem like a good survival stream for Facebook.

This will no doubt be good for the social web in general. However, is Google ready to give up on the Buzz Experience – as a destination on the web? Google’s revenues come from ads. Do these open data standards and APIs include places for inserting ads?

Social is about People, not Data

One of the things that enthused me about Buzz was Google’s stated goal of organizing the social information on the web — finding relevance in the noise. Google’s approach to achieving relevance is data-driven and algorithmic. I had and continue to have high hopes for Google Social Search and it’s ability to rank relevance of information according to my social circle. But:

Relevance ranking works for information, not people.

From what I’ve seen in Buzz, the approach of aggregation of lifestreams is not working. It didn’t work in FriendFeed either for millions of users who found it complex and overwhelming.

What I observe in mainstream users is not a quest for intelligent auto-filtering and auto-relevance sorting of aggregated terabytes of data, published and shared in real-time across multiple networks, but a place that offers simple ways to keep in touch with their friends, see their photos, videos, comment on them, and chat with each other. Facebook fulfilled this need and is used by 400 million people today.

Conclusion: Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Buzz is not just FriendFeed style aggregation. Add email integration, violating the sanctity of the inbox. Add privacy issues because of integration with the email address book. Add location aware features. Add the complexity of the integration with Google Reader. Add new social search operators. Add more instructions on how to do this and that. Now think of why mainstream users didn’t flock to FriendFeed, which had the most well designed aggregation and search interface that ever existed.

Consider the iPad. The latest concept coming out of Cupertino didn’t add any new “features” to their earlier products. They trimmed the feature-set, keeping it simple, thus making it usable by everyone. Open data standards? 400 million are locked up in a closed network and don’t care. Nor will users of the iPad.

As a product, Google Buzz is clearly engineered, not designed, by nerds at the dance, as Mathew Ingram put it. With its current approach, the same web-savvy minority who uses Gmail is likely to adopt Buzz. Not those who are hooked to Facebook, or continue to use Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail.

For Google Buzz to be successful, Google cannot afford to forget the KISS principle. Without that, there’s no romantic Buzz this Valentine’s Day.

Google Buzz + Reader + Twitter + Facebook = Noise

On February 12, 2010, In Social Web, By Mahendra

I’m having a hard time deciding whom to follow on which network with duplicate shares everywhere. The problem is compounded further by folks who auto-share from one network to another. There is no value in following people who share the same thing on Reader, Buzz, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. Duplication simply amplifies noise and reduces signal.

This is a real problem with social media today. Everyone wants maximum likes, shares, retweets on each and every thing they share. Their hope, understandably, is that each morsel they throw into social media becomes a feast on which everyone will drool.

Well, count me out. If someone is auto-feeding the same thing on all networks, it doesn’t add any value to me to follow them on all networks. Especially if they are not engaging in conversation where their content is landing.

I have written before about why I do not use auto-tweeting tools like Reader2Twitter, because I take as much effort as possible to attribute my sources. If you are using such tools, it makes sense to auto-tweet to a different Twitter account, like some folks do. This gives your followers the choice whether to follow you on Reader or Twitter.

Enter Buzz and FriendFeed and Facebook. Each of these is capable of pulling items from multiple sources for each person. FriendFeed can further be imported into Facebook and Buzz. This is not just aggregation, it is super-aggregation or aggregation-squared. This amplifies signals to such enormous proportions that all this noise is deafening.

Each of my shares on Twitter, Reader, and Facebook are hand-picked and manual. It takes extra effort but I believe it adds value to those who follow me. I am happy not being a social media superstar with thousands of followers if even a single person likes a single share of mine in a day. My value is not in the number of retweets, number of likes, etc., but in the feedback I get from even a single @reply or comment.

Neither of the companies behind each of these social networks are working with each other to design better filters for all of us. Each simply wants us to use them exclusively. There lies the problem. We hop on to each new social network bandwagon, immediately discover tools that allow us to auto-share and auto-propagate our shared content down stream, up stream, cross stream, life stream, etc., ultimately drowning our followers in the flood.

I am skeptic this problem will go away soon. As a curator, this is a challenge. The only way I see to successfully filter the signal out of this noise is to be brutal in curating sources. Auto-sharers, auto-tweeters, auto-feeders, or whatever these tools are called, will be the first on my radar as likely candidates to be unfollowed.

As a follower, I am a human. When you auto-share, you’re not a human on that network, you turn into a bot. Bots are what we call spam.

Tagged with: buzz • curation • facebook • google reader • noise • signal • social networks • Twitter

Get Buzz with RSS, feed to Facebook/Twitter

On February 10, 2010, In How To, By Mahendra

Here’s a quick tip, courtesy @Avinio: your Buzz updates are now shown on your Google Profile, which now has its own RSS feed.

When you visit any Google Profile, you will see the RSS feed icon in your browser address bar. Click it to subscribe to anyone’s Buzz posts using RSS.

For e.g., you can check my Google Profile to see my Google Reader shared items showing up at present. The RSS icon should be enabled in your browser.

Why would you want to do this? There are interesting possibilities:

Mix and refine Buzz feeds using Yahoo Pipes
Feed your Buzz posts to Facebook Notes
Tweet your Buzz posts to Twitter using RSS2Twitter
Follow someone on Buzz without explicitly following them in Buzz
Read Buzz posts using Google Reader
and so on.

This is just a glimpse of the interoperability possible with open standards.

Note: I have not yet used Buzz, still waiting for it to be enabled.

Tagged with: buzz • RSS

Tracking the Google vs. Facebook Race

On February 2, 2010, In Social Web, By Mahendra

On this blog, I have been keenly observing the race between Google and Facebook towards a relevant real-time, opining earlier that Google Social Search is likely to win in the long run.

New developments in this race:

Google Social Search came out of labs into Open Beta, but made little use of your Facebook social graph.
Facebook’s response? No new features, just a simple blog post detailing how you can personalize it as a news reader. Marshall Kirkpatrick details why it’s likely to succeed.

This race is not about reading news, but whether you spend more time searching on Google or browsing Facebook. It is about whether you seek out information on the web, or prefer to consume interesting content shared by your friends.

Opinions from the blogosphere lie at both ends of the spectrum. Scoble talked about the expanding Google reef with anticipation, while Mark Hopkins asks if we should give up on Google as a social entity. Others reveal Google’s stealth social network and speculate on a Facebook phone. And while this post was being written, Scoble has discussed how Google is taking on both Apple and Facebook and is rooting for them to win.

Google’s Social Challenge

Will Google’s approach to social networking work? Will Google’s SWAT team help? See these 5 observations about the difference between Facebook and Google Social Search. As expected, when it comes to Search, Google has the upper edge in relevancy. But the problem?

Remember the iPad demo? Steve Jobs demoed Facebook, not Google Search. Engagement on social networks is affecting the search business, as Tac Anderson observed. The rest of them use computers because their friends do, and they do that to see what their friends on Facebook are up to, not to search for information on Google.

Another issue with the Google Social Circle is that Facebook and other social networks have conditioned people into adding friends. How do I add a friend to my Google Social Circle? Expect a backlash from some people: “Google doesn’t allow me to choose my friends, or friends of friends”. Google’s Social Circle is a concept that may appeal only to geeks. If users are dissatisfied with their social search results, they’ll turn to Facebook and ask their friends. That will be much simpler than trying to understand and tweak your social circle.

Google is walking on thin ice here, while Facebook is on firm ground.

Facebook’s Challenge?

It is obvious that Facebook has already won the social networking war. It is years ahead of Google in the social race. So has it won the war? Not yet.

Google is years ahead of Facebook in making money and running a steady profitable business.

Why is this important? Because Facebook and Twitter will always be crappy businesses, says the founder of Tripod, Bo Peabody, in a not-surprisingly unpopular post. Risk averse advertisers stick with tried-and-tested search advertising, and are hesitant with social networks where content is not controlled and businesses have to confront real-time negativity. Even high-profile users are complaining about obnoxious ads in social networks.

Who Will Win?

Search vs. Discovery, Seeking Information vs. Following People, are all different terms for the same two sides of the coin. My take is that both will continue to remain important and popular ways of accessing the web. This leaves room for both Facebook and Google to coexist and profit.

Facebook has a long way to go before it is a sustainable business, while Google has a long way to go in the social web. I am on Google’s side, because I distrust Facebook (for e.g. it’s non-portable data portability), and support Google’s SWAT team.

Tagged with: facebook • google

Optimize Google & Google Reader for Widescreen in Chrome

On February 2, 2010, In How To, By Mahendra

If you are using a widescreen monitor with an aspect ratio of 16:9 or 16:10, you will notice that Google Search and Google Reader waste most of the screen real estate on the right side.

Here are two extensions for Google Chrome that you might find useful.

Dual-Pane Google Search

The searchw Chrome Extension creates a partition on the right, in which you can preview the results of your Google Search. Effectively, it turns your Google Results into a kind of Table of Contents and the experience is like viewing PDF files.

searchw Chrome extn

You can open a result in a new tab and reduce/enlarge the frame sizes. It also comes with hotkey support.

Google Reader for Widescreen

This Greasemonkey script for making Google Reader widescreen-friendly was earlier made popular by Gina Trapani at Lifehacker for Firefox. With native support for Greasemonkey, it now works like a charm in Google Chrome.

Google Reader Default

Google Reader Widescreen

The best part of this script is that it works automatically in the background requiring no user interaction at all.

If you’re using a widescreen monitor, do check these out.

Tagged with: chrome • google • google reader • widescreen

What Does Google Suggest About iPad?

On January 28, 2010, In Miscellaneous, By Mahendra

It’s too early, but here’s a sign of what’s coming:

Google on iPad

Tagged with: google • ipad

The Real Tablet Revolution

On January 27, 2010, In Personal, By Mahendra

This is the slate I used growing up as a school kid. There was sibling rivalry over whose was shinier or had a larger “screen size”.

Slate

They are still used by some school children in India. Millions of them go to school today like this (image credit):

School Bags

With heavy burdens on their back, no wonder they hate going to school.

When Steve Jobs unveils the Apple Tablet in a few hours from now, I will be part of the thousands who will witness this revolutionary device remotely. But the real revolution in my mind will happen when such devices become mainstays in educational institutions worldwide.

apple_tablet

No doubt the tablet will be great for entertainment, gaming, reading, and news consumption. But no other application has a greater, lasting impact, than that which revolutionizes learning.

As Joe Wilcox describes it, a “unified content platform, mixing different media types and live information” holds tremendous potential during the formative young years of our lives.

Imagine a classroom where students had access to live information about any topic under the sun. That is the world I want my kid to grow up in. When that happens, it will be the real tablet revolution.

Tagged with: education • tablet

New RTs with @Replies and Localized Trending Topics

On January 26, 2010, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

This post is a collection of small observations that may not be individually “post-worthy”.

New Style ReTweets with @Replies

We all know that @Replies to you are visible only in the home timeline of those following both you and the sender. Thus you will not see the following tweet unless you were following both @ScepticGeek and @LayeredByte:

Now, if I do an old style ReTweet by prefixing it with RT as below, my ReTweet is visible to everyone who follows me, even if they don’t follow @LayeredByte.

But what if I do a new style ReTweet? A new style ReTweet will not prefix anything, and is effectively the same as an @Reply. The question in my mind was:

Are new style ReTweets of @Replies visible to everyone who follows you (and not only to those following both)?

Some quick searching on Google did not yield an answer. Twitter’s help on @Replies and ReTweets does not clarify this, nor does Evan William’s post explaining organic RTs. So with the help of my colleague @MadLid, I performed a quick test.

I retweeted her @Reply to me from my @ScepticGeek account, and checked if the new style ReTweet appeared in my @Palsule account from which I was not following her:

Voilà! Even if @Palsule is not following @MadLid, her @Reply to @ScepticGeek appeared in @Palsule’s home timeline when @ScepticGeek did a new style ReTweet of her @Reply.

If you’re wondering “what’s the big deal?”, there is none. This is what geeks like me who like to experiment and pay attention to detail do. I did not find it documented anywhere, hence doing it here.

Note that this is how RTs should work, and Twitter has implemented them in the correct way. When you ReTweet, you want all your followers to see it, irrespective of whether they’re following the original tweeter or not. Thus, in a way, I am also applauding Twitter’s developers for bypassing the @Reply visibility restriction when they implemented organic RTs.

I also find it amazing that people are already using what is actually a “feature”, without realizing it.

Localized Trending Topics

Last week, Twitter started rolling out localized trends. On November 9th last year, Twitter announced its Trends API. Here is what I had tweeted hours before that happened, while it was still November 8th in the US:

Disclosure Policy

Just a note that I have added a disclosure policy on the blog.

Tagged with: localized trends • organic retweets • Twitter

If You’re Removing Features, Please Tell Your Users!

On January 20, 2010, In Social Web, By Mahendra

Software companies love to announce new features with great fanfare on their blogs. This is understandable given the thirst we cool geeks have for improved functionality. What is not understandable is when they remove existing features and appear to shove that under the carpet as if nobody will notice.

I am sure this happens all the time, but recent examples led to this post. It is also interesting that these two have something in common.

“Followed People” Widget in Feedly

I have already discussed how Google Reader lacks people discovery. In the past, I used a nifty little feature in Feedly to overcome this limitation in Google Reader. When you viewed a user’s profile in Feedly, it used to show who that person was following in Google Reader. I used this to discover several good people to follow. Good people are not just great at curating content, but also in filtering people to follow. This people discovery feature essentially helps you use people you already know, to help filter whom to follow.

For the past couple of months, I fiddled around with Feedly in vain, and could not find the widget that showed who the person was following. Ultimately, I resorted to asking for support on Get Satisfaction, where Feedly confirmed that the feature has been “removed”.

“Follow People” in BackType

When someone you like comments on a blog post, you have a double-incentive for reading that post. Not only did the person read the post, but found it worthwhile to comment on it. BackType offered a great way to discover interesting blog posts, as it let you follow people’s comments around the web.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to use BackType’s follow feature in vain. I read and re-read their FAQ dozens of times, but the method explained in the FAQ just didn’t work. Again, it was confirmed on Get Satisfaction that the follow people feature has been “removed”.

Trimming Features Helps Make Great Products

Removing features can be as important as implementing new ones. It is essential to focus on enhancing the 20% features used by 80% of users, and constantly prune the rest.

Both Feedly and BackType are great products and I love them. I have promoted Feedly on the popular MakeUseOf blog. What I am not happy about is the lack of communication when removing features.

Transparency Builds Trust

Both Feedly and BackType are modern Web 2.0 apps/services. They both have a blog, which they use to announce new features in latest versions. They’re both on Twitter. Why aren’t these social media tools put to use for better communication?

I spent many hours trying to access these features in Feedly and BackType. I tried with different versions of different browsers, trying to troubleshoot the issue. A simple mention in a blog post would have saved me a lot of time. Backtype’s FAQ was outdated and incorrect, while Feedly doesn’t even have its own FAQ.

If it is perceived that removing features doesn’t make for good announcements, I think that would be very short-sighted. Since the features that are being discontinued are those rarely used, it doesn’t make any difference to the majority of your users. Those who use them are more satisfied if they are kept better informed. In cases like these, having to resort to GetSatisfaction doesn’t give me any satisfaction.

Tagged with: backtype • feedly

Is Seesmic With Ping.fm Attractive For A Twitter Acquisition?

On January 12, 2010, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

At the start of this year, Seesmic bought Ping.fm enabling status updates across 50 social networks. Mark Hopkins elaborated on why this is a threat to Twitter.

Scobleizer talks about Twitter’s declining traffic and offers suggestions for improvement, which people commenting on the post say would turn Twitter into FriendFeed/Facebook.

Seesmic’s Ping.fm acquisition had led me to wonder if that makes it a perfect candidate for a Twitter acquisition. Marshall Kirkpatrick seemed to agree.

Would it make sense for Twitter to acquire Seesmic and Ping.fm?

Does Twitter want to build its own social network and fight against Facebook? Contrary to what you might think, Evan Williams says Twitter is not a social network.

Twitter’s strategy is to be the “Pulse of the Planet”. What better way to become that pulse than be the conduit that people use across 50 social networks? This would bolster Jack Dorsey’s vision of Twitter’s success as Twitter becoming infrastructure.

When the goal of a service is to become the nervous system of the real-time web, the traffic to its website doesn’t matter. The pulse of the online world lies in status updates people make on various social networks. I am sure that Seesmic, with Ping.fm’s half a million users, looks a very attractive option for Twitter to grab that pulse.

The scenario can look gloomy for the open web, with the social graph of users in the hands of Facebook, and real-time pulse in the hands of Twitter.

Tagged with: seesmic • Twitter