Google+ Growth

The Wall Street Journal posed the question of whether Facebook is worth $100 billion. I still have no idea, but I continue to think Facebook is now facing a very formidable competitor. My initial reaction has strengthened. G+ circles are a big deal and clearly the differentiator. As for growth, technowizard Leon Haland has shared some interesting data that shows the relative growth rates of Google, Facebook and Twitter. Haland said that Twitter got 10 million users in 780 days (2.13 years), Facebook got 10 million users in 852 days (2.33 years), and Google Plus gained 10 million users in just 16 days (2 weeks). Google Plus is growing exponentially. The Christian Post reported on Wednesday that Google Plus had reached 18 million users.

Regardless of the exact numbers, I see G+ growing very rapidly becuase it has a better privacy model than anyone else, as far as I can see. With Facebook, a friend is someone for whom you have accepted an invitation. Are they really all your friends? How many friends can a person have? What is a friend? With Google+, you can establish circles for best friends, semi-friends, acquaintances, people you can’t stand, favorite people, geniuses, half-loaves, golf buddies, political cohort, heard of them, never heard of them, etc. In other words, you define your circles, you put people in one or more of the circles you create, you easily upgrade or downgrade which circle a person is in, and you are confident that none of your “friends” can see which circle you have put them in. As that notion takes hold, I think millions of people will migrate to Google+.

I currently have 169 people in my circles and there are 117 that have me in their circles. The magic is that they don’t know what circle I have them in and I don’t what circle my “friends” have me in. I may be in the “jerks” circle of them all, and I may have placed many of my connections in the “heard of them once” circle. I have seen G+ connections come in to me that show that someone has 7,000 people in their circles. That is ok with me. Someone can have 100 million people in their circle if they want. I see Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin in some people’s circles. Are they really friends of these czars? Maybe. I doubt it. My rule of thumb for “friends” is as described previously. My criteria for “industry friend” is someone I have actually met and talked to. Someone else may have a criteria of “heard of them”. It doesn’t matter. The key thing is that if you want to post a message to your family circle or best friends, you know that only this limited group of people that you have defined will be able to read your post. The point is that G+ gives you control. You define what a friend is. You can allow large numbers of people into your circles if you choose, but that does not mean that they can read your posts to “soccer moms” or “my political cohort”.

It is going to be interesting to see how the exponential growth of G+ plays out. Maybe everybody will be connected to everybody, but at least you will have the ability to share with everybody or just your “motorcycle friends” or whatever.  Stay tuned.

Tags: facebook, friend, friends, friendship, google, google plus, plus, privacy, social media, social network

Google + Facebook

The Wall Street Journal posed the question of whether Facebook is worth $100 billion. I have no idea, but the market will sort that out over time. I do, however, have a point of view about Facebook versus Google+. From what I see so far, I think Facebook is now facing a very formidable competitor. My initial reaction has strengthened. Circles are a big deal and clearly the differentiator. What is a friend?

With Facebook, a friend is someone for whom you have accepted an invitation. Are they really all your friends? How many friends can a person have? What is a friend? The Merriam-Webster dictionary says that a friend is one attached to another by affection or esteem. Would you say that about all your Facebook friends? I think of a friend as someone that I would ask for personal advice, invite to dinner at my home, borrow something from or lend something to, or discuss a medical condition with. I know most of my friend’s families or at least know something about them. I think we could all agree that there are various levels of friends.

In theory, you can establish this granularity with Facebook, but it is not easy and when you have done it, you are not really sure who can see the grouping you have established or who can read something you post to that group. With Google+, you can establish circles for best friends, semi-friends, acquaintances, people you can’t stand, favorite people, geniuses, half-loaves, golf buddies, political cohort, heard of them, never heard of them, etc. In other words, you define your circles, you put people in one or more of the circles you create, you easily upgrade or downgrade which circle a person is in, and you are confident that none of your “friends” can see which circle you have put them in. As that notion takes hold, I think millions of people will migrate to Google+.

When you and your family post to your family circle about upcoming Labor Day plans, you all will know that only family circle members will be able to read those personal and private communications. Privacy has been a highly visible issue for Facebook for a long time, but in my opinion, they have not really addressed it. Google has, and hence my optimism about Google+. I don’t rule out that a new entrant will come along and trump them all. That is the great thing about the Internet. A great idea can take hold and scale practically overnight. Stay tuned and keep an eye on your circles.

Tags: facebook, friend, friends, friendship, google, google plus, plus, privacy, social media, social network

Freedom of Communication

Happy Birthday to all as we celebrate the birthday of our Nation. I am not sure who said it, but it is a great quotation, “The greatest lesson we can learn from the past. . . is that freedom is at the core of every successful nation in the world.” Freedom of speech is a key element from among the many freedoms that millions of people–unfortunately, not all people–enjoy. The Internet has added multiple channels of communication since the early days of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail). The first synchronous communication channel was Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and it was followed by instant messaging, various Web chat services, and Short Message Service (SMS), the text communication service component of mobile communication systems (cell phones). Enter social networks, or social media, and we have a whole new layer of channels. I think of this evolution as starting with the basic communications layer, the Internet. On top of the Internet we have a great application called the World Wide Web, and it gives us multi-media content sharing, e-commerce, e-learning, e-health, and many other applications. I think of social networking as a layer on top of the Web that gives us a way to blog, collaborate, share, hangout, chit, chat, chit chat, tweet, hire, be hired, network, find investors, make deals, find a date, get married, and much more.

Will Facebook dominate the new world of social media? Who knows? Perhaps. Perhaps not. At one point it looked like Myspace would dominate. It was the most popular social networking site in the United States in June 2006, but two years later it was overtaken by Facebook. Then the company was purchased by News Corporation for $580 million, and then on June 29, 2011, Myspace was sold to Specific Media for $35 million. The unstoppable got stopped. It could happen to Facebook too. The Internet has proven many times that no one company is too big to fail. Enter the Google Plus Project. I explained it this morning around the holiday breakfast table at the Lake. Some family members are tech savvy, some not. They all were shaking their heads in the affirmative as soon as I described Google Plus Circles. You can have a family circle, a boating circle, a friends circle, an acquaintance circle, a new mothers circle, a hospital board circle, etc. When you post something to the family circle, you know exactly who is going to be able to read it. This is the issue with Facebook–when you post something, you are likely not sure who is going to be able to read it. There are privacy controls but nobody seems to quite understand them. Let me cite LinkedIn to make the point. I have 304 “Connections” at LinkedIn. These are people I actually know. The 304 connections link me to 7,487,410 other people, not counting the 76,856 new people that were added to my network since June 27. If you are looking for a job, having friends of your friends’ friends know about you may be a good thing. When you are writing a personal reflection about something to share with your friends, do you really want the network effect? Perhaps not. With Google Plus, when you post something to your friends circle, you know exactly who is going to be able to read what you had to say. The war over social network market share is underway. Based on what I see so far, I would not rule out Google. If key influencers begin to shift allegiance, the momentum for Facebook could change very quickly.

The bottom line is that we should be thankful that we can communicate or not whenever we want. It is one of our greatest freedoms. Let us be mindful of the many millions of people who have no freedom to communicate. Stay tuned and have a nice 4th.

Epilogue: This story appears in the blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

Tags: facebook, google, google plus, myspace, news corp, news corporation, social, social media, social networking, specific media, twitter

Fax Spam

There are many posts here in this blog about spam, in particular from a public policy point of view. I have always opposed laws to regulate spam because of a belief that they don’t work. My view has been that technology can solve the problem. This has mostly turned out to be true. Since I have been using gmail, I get almost no spam. Spam email, that is. Now a new phenomenon has surfaced — fax spam.

Yellow-Pages-USA is offering to create a Facebook page for me listing whatever services I may have to offer. They send their offer via fax. I have been using eFax for nine years and find it a very good service. I wish there were no faxes–I have not owned a fax machine since I got eFax–but sometimes they are essential. If you have to fax something to me I give you my eFax number and the fax comes into my email inbox as a PDF file. If you have to get a fax, this is the way to get it. Somehow Yellow-Pages-USA got my eFax number and has been sending me unsolicited offers on a regular basis. They request that you fax your personal information back to them to set up the Facebook page they are offering. I have faxed them several times asking them to please remove me from their list and confirm they have done so. Not surprisingly, they do not respond.

Tags: efax, fax, fax spam, ftc, spam

Apple Event – June 2011

The annual Apple worldwide developer conference opening keynote drew a crowd of 5,200. It would have been much larger if the auditorium had the capacity. The extraordinary video is a “must see” if you are interested in either the Apple products or the marketing that surrounds them. The two-hour video is an exemplary model for how to communicate. Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you told them. Not a new idea, but executed by the Apple executive team with incredible precision, enthusiasm, and clarity. They also added an important element to the classic three-element communications model. Demo it to them. You get the feeling that the executive team knows exactly what they are talking about and are passionate about it.

Next month we get to see Lion and I for one can’t wait. It sounds like Apple is really listening to what customers want. For the iOS 5 update, we will have to wait until “the Fall”, but it also has a large number of exciting features. The big one is integration with iCloud. The immediate question many people have is what does iCloud mean for Dropbox? There are many unanswered questions. Google, Apple, and Amazon are at war to win our hearts, minds, and bits for their clouds. Some will say that iCloud is a makeover of MobileMe but I believe it is much more than that. iCloud will be continuously streaming billions of bits to all of our Apple devices — songs, photos, emails, web page and reading material bookmarks, calendar updates and reminders, contact information, tweets, and much more. While Google, Apple, and Amazon will strive to get our more and more of our loyalty, there are many parts of our digital lives that they don’t touch.

Every Saturday morning, I update my Quicken data on the MacBook at the kitchen counter. After I close Quicken, the file is immediately updated at dropbox.com. A bit later, I head into my office and access Quicken on the iMac. All the data is there, updated and ready to use. The same file is also on the iPhone and iPad and a handful of ThinkPads that are scattered around the house. Cloud computing does not mean putting everything in the cloud instead of on your computer — it means putting data in the cloud so that it can be replicated to all your devices. Your data is no longer where you PC is — your data is where you are. Some photo afficianados will prefer to use Picasa instead of iPhoto. Some will use Google Docs instead of Apple Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Some will use Amazon for their music. For me it will be Pandora. I plan to try iCloud as soon as possible and will surely use it for my purchased music, probably for photos, and probably not for documents. Definietely not for Quicken and various specialized files like my web site content, GPS data, etc.. All the boards I serve on distribute materials via pdf files. When I receive those by email I detach them to dropbox.com folders. I then synchronize Goodreader with dropbox on the iPad so that all the pdfs are local on the iPad for use at board meetings. I am enthusiastic about iCloud but I do not see it taking over my digital life, at least not yet.

Tags: amazon, apple, cloud computing, dropbox, google, icloud, imac, ipad, iPhone, lion, mac osx, twitter

Conversational Marketing Summit – 2011

Attending conferences is the best way I know of to stay on the edge of what is happening in the world. Reading content on the Web and exchanging messages is vital but there is no substitute for attending a few conferences per year where you can talk to people at meals and breaks plus interact with sponsors and speakers. This was my second year to attend the CM Summit, a conference run by John Battelle. John has a long history in journalism and the media industry and is founder and chairman of Federated Media, an Internet advertising company which appears to be prospering. John brought together a good set of sponsors and 32 excellent speakers.  The conference included news and views from some of the industry leaders in digital marketing. The two days included thought provoking case studies, insights, and conversations with major brand advertisers, agencies, and digital media companies.

The conference started bright and early Monday morning in the Hudson Theatre at the Millennium Broadway Hotel in Manhattan.  A full stream of the confeence is available here, but I will touch on a few highlights — mostly things I tweeted about (@johnrpatrick) from the iPad during the conference. Conversational marketing is all about a dialog between consumer, marketer, and publisher.  You could also say it is the new advertising model.  Major brands like American Express, P&G, Sony, Visa, and General Motors all talked about how they are morphing from traditional advertising to developing digital conversations between their brands and consumers via the social media. You could say it is a matter of survival. Laura Desmond, CEO of Starcom Mediavest, a multi-billion agency summed it up by saying that “business is not what it was”. She talked about how advertisers are more willing to consider new channels such as content, conversations, and real-time communications between a consumer and a brand. “Everyone will have an IP address”, is the advertiser’s way of saying that they want to connect directly with individual consumers. A lot of the presentations had to do with targetting. Advertisers really want to send a custom advertisement directly to our mobile phones based on the then circumstances of you and their products. I did not hear one of the presenters question whether consumers are happy about that. The privacy issue is getting a lot of attention, as it should. The new phrase is online behavioral advertising (OBA), and a new icon to signify OBA on compliant web sites will provide a link to a page to learn who is targeting you and where data about you is collected. It will also show your cookies and what they contain and enable you to opt out. People want transparent brands that reveal their intentions and actions. OBA will help make that happen.

Rob Cicone from AMEX said that 44% of small businesses use Facebook and 15% use LinkedIn. Your Buzz is a new Amex tool to help small biz manage their presence across all the major social networking tools. Their goal with the free service is to build a relationship with the small business that will eventually lead to the business accepting the Amex card. David Karp, Founder of tumblr, talked about how they have built a place to post things, customize your web page, and build a community. They claim to be the 26th largest web site with 7 billion pageviews per month, 80 million unique visitors per month, and 45,000 new users per day. Facebook has no guarantee to be the biggest and best social media in perpetuity.

A Finnish company called GetJar has an app store for mobile. They said the app industry is $30-50 billion with 50 billion app downloads projected for 2012 and said apps are media, not content. Not sure that is a significant distinction. I do agree with them that apps are in the early stage; like websites 15 years ago. With Apple’s new Lion and iOS 5, they are sure to get the Lion’s share. Adam Bain from Twitter discussed the new deep integration of Twitter with iOS 5, which means you can tweet from within an app. Could be profound. Hope it is not an exclusive arrangement. I have always thought of Twitter as a protocol for the Internet.

Pepsi talked about real-time marketing. Lady gaga walking down street with a Pepsi. Someone at Pepsi notices and minutes later, tens of millns of people see an ad based on a Pepsi tweet. I thought most significant was that Pepsi and GM and the other big brands were represented by young “with it” marketing execs. I am sure they are not the “chief” marketing officers. Some had weird titles like global director of brand awareness and innovation. A mouthful but important that the major companies are trying hard to figure out how to capitalize on the new social media, because it is really big. Guy from Yahoo! wav very bullish. Head of sales for Facebook said that they reach more people everyday than American Idol. They are running 30 billion status updates per year.

The highlight of the conference was William James Adams, Jr.,  better known by his stage name will.i.am or as  a member of the hip hop group The Black Eyed Peas. He had an uncanny saavy about marketing and innovation. I was greatly impressed with his focus on philanthropy and helping inner city kids with education and housing.

Tags: advertising, battelle, black eyed peas, brand, cm summit, conference, database of intentions, digital media, facebook, google, hudson theatre, marketing, social, social media, social networks, tumblr, twitter, will.i.am, yahoo

Brain Tweet

It seems everybody is talking about twitter. Does twitter matter? What is a tweet? The way I think about it, twitter is just another channel of communication. In the beginning the only channel was face to face. Then over time we had smoke signals, cave drawings, parchment, the Pony Express, teletype, ham radio, telephones, cell phones, email, instant messaging, mobile text messaging, and blogs. Now we have hundreds of social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Twitter is also a social network that is effectively a combination of instant messaging, sms text messaging, and blogging. When some "tweets" they are sending out a short (up to 140 characters) message that usually includes a link to a page somewhere on the web. Followers of the tweeter all receive the tweet. The tweet might contain a link to a profound story or it might just let followers know that "just got on the bus" or "having dinner at the pub". (When I post this story to my blog I also send a tweet with a link to the posting). Numerous tools such as TweetDeck are springing up designed to enhance the twitter experience, tie it to Facebook, or organize your tweets in some way.

Many people may say "who cares" about twitter and tweets, but millions of people do care. They want to know what their friends are doing, not for the summer but right this minute. Millions of others give a priority to telling their friends are doing. News stations now use twitter to send out headlines. Why? To create another channel that might get people to visit a web page and see some advertising. There are many motives but the bottom line is that twitter is another channel. Some people are content to visit a favorite blog or web site once a month or when the spirit moves them. Others want to be notified by email when there is a new story posted. Others want to know instantly. Each to their own. The big picture is that social networks are evolving to the point that the entire World Wide Web is likely going to become the Social Web.

A social network is a structure consisting of nodes (people or organizations) that have a common interest or increasingly a dependency. The tie that binds us can be one or more of many things: values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, food likes or dislikes, buy or sell trading, links to each other’s blogs, epidemiology, or airline routes. The resulting ontologies are very complex. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families to countries. The use of the networks is beginning to be a key tool in collaboration to solve problems, how people achieve their goals and even how organizations are run.

In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all the relevant ties between the nodes (people). One of the first social networks was Linkedin and I have been a member of it from nearly the beginning. Hardly a day goes by without an invitation to join some network — often from a person I never heard of. To gain the real "network effect" I recommend being selective in dealing with these invitations. Otherwise you end up connected to everybody which is as valuable as being connected to nobody. There are many people who are looking for people to send press releases to or to throw you into a recruitment pool or just be able to say they "know" someone or is their "friend" because they saw your name in the paper or saw you at a conference. The real power is not in the numbers per se but to really know someone who knows someone who knows someone and to have the credibility with the person you know such that they are willing to help you to connect to someone else. I have 225 trusted friends and colleagues in my Linkedin network. Two degrees away — friends of friends; each connected to one of my connections — there are more than 86,000 people. Three degrees away — members who can be reached through a friend and one of their friends — is 6,137,500 people. If you are discerning about it you can develop considerable social capital.

There are many issues in the social networking space. One of them is that there are so many networks. If you take a look at the end of this story you will see
– and if you like the story and click, you can send an email link to the story to friends. A second choice is that you can post the story to your own blog. Perhaps most important is the third choice which is to post the story at one or more of your favorite social networks.

How many social networks should you belong to? Certainly not forty. I belong to Linkedin, Facebook, and twitter but . Three is enough for me. But is it? There are many niche networks — such as A Small World — that will be of interest to many. But do you want to create a profile of your personal information at each of the networks you choose? And keep them up to date? And tell your connected friends what you are doing and exactly where you are (latitude and longitude) and what music you like or even what song you are listening to at the moment? To me the glass is half full. I am hopeful that protocols will emerge such as OAuth, OpenID, and OpenSocial that will level the playing field. We will be able to use one single "sign-on" for all our web sites and create *one* profile and have control over which networks and which parts of the profile it appear in. For example, it would be nice to create a comprehensive profile that is encrypted and totally under the user’s control. You may choose to have your favorite songs be accessible through Facebook but not your medical records from Google Health and your Google Health electronic medical record to be accessible to your primary care physician and your hospital but nobody else. The application you create for your consulting business or a new game you created could be available through *all* the social networks.

Social networking is the next turn of the crank of the Internet. By combining networks, such as a mobile phone networks, mobile payment systems, the Internet and a network of people all sharing a common cause, a viral effect can take place resulting in a lot of money or assistance flowing to the need — political, emergency response or (hopefully) humanitarian. There are surely many security and privacy issues with social networking but I am optimistic they will be solved.

Meanwhile, University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam Wilson recently posted a status update on Twitter by just thinking about it. The target is people who cannot move but have normal brain function. The brain-based twitter communication system represents one of the first uses of brain-computer interface techniques in conjunction with the Internet.

Tags: facebook, linkedin, social media, tweet, twitter