Google and Multi-Community Content
January 15, 2011
I found Google’s patent application US20110010384, “Multi-Community Content Sharing in Online Social Networks” for two reasons. First, the inventors scattered across three Google offices. The participation of the Beijing engineer was interesting. Microsoft also seems to be tapping China for some of its ideas. Second, the invention points to social content federation. Here’s the abstract:
An online social networking system (100) can be used to distribute content within an online social network. The product comprises code for carrying out a method that begins with receiving content to be posted to a host community. Labels (420) are also provided to associate with the content. The labels (420) are used to identify communities in the online social network to which to post the content. Code is generated that, when executed, displays the content on a webpage of the host community, and displays the content on a webpage of each of the identified communities. The content may comprise one or more events, images, forum and topics.
Facebook does; Google describes. Which company has social momentum?
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2011
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Facebook and Social Services Value
January 6, 2011
BusinessWeek is raining on the Facebook / Goldman Sachs’ parade. My view is that whatever Goldman Sachs does is about money. Some folks forget that in my opinion. “Facebook at $50 Billion Looks More Like Tencent Than Google” is a pretty clever write up. First, the title makes the casual reader think of a cheapo metaphor. Tencent is a company, but I am not sure how many folks in Harrod’s Creek know that. Second, BusinessWeek thinks that the $50 billion valuation and the general hoo-hah about the Facebook / Goldman Sachs “deal” is “Buzz, Bloom, Hype.”
I don’t want to hop on the bandwagon. The more I think about deal, the more I think that the two best friends are taking steps to make sure that there is a big pay day. In addition, I think the BusinessWeek story and the other write ups are unlikely to do much more than fan the flames of excitement over Facebook.
The economic climate still troubles me. Bank types need deals. Facebook needs to keep rolling and grabbing mind share. I am not sure Facebook can pull off a deal with China. Russia already seems to be slipping away.
Get the money while the getting is good. The tactics unfolding now are tailored to the present economic climate. I am not sure there is much more to the valuations, the chatter, or the tie up beyond money. I will know if I am right or wrong soon enough.
The Facebook / Goldman Sachs’ affair may end up benefiting other social network services. Compared to the so so news from the consumer electronics show, at least the Facebook / Goldman Sachs’ tie up is interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, January 6, 2011
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The Facebook – Goldman Sachs Tie Up
January 5, 2011
The pundits are on the move. The cattle prod was the deal between Facebook and Goldman Sachs. Sure, a Russian outfit had its beak in the bird bath, but the real action was Goldman’s alleged $450 million. You can read “What Everyone Seems to Miss In Facebook’s Private or Public Debate…” and learn the real secret behind the deal: Accountability to its customers. Okay. The Reuters’ take is that the New York Times’s analysis is wrong headed. Interpretation of SEC rules, guidelines, and letters is a tricky even when the SEC tries to explain a point clearly. “Why Facebook Won’t go Public” makes the deal an exercise in fortune telling.
The view from Harrod’s Creek is different. Facebook is hot. Goldman Sachs wants a piece of the action and to be in a position of control or at least to have a shot at control. The reason for the deal is money. Mr. Zuckerberg and his band of Xooglers understand Goldman Sachs’ magic when it comes to money.
Customer care, SEC prose, and other explanations of the deal are groupthink. Why make more of the deal than it is: A deal about money for Facebookers and Goldman Sachs. What about the other investors? Maybe.
Stephen E Arnold, January 5, 2011
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Facebook Gouges Google TV
January 4, 2011
The basic information about Facebook’s TV service is set forth in “Reality TV for the Rest of Us.” The idea is that TV listings recommended by friends is better than slogging through lots of channels or, even worse, recommendations generated by a numerical recipe with thresholds that may or may not deliver what you expect.
This service is a fresh approach to finding. The method ignores the brute force indexing of some companies and relies on recommendations. The significance is that brute force search is not in the leadership position in terms of a social walled garden like Facebook’s.
The shift is going to be dismissed by Google. Google will attempt to slot social content recommendations into its services. Who knows? Maybe Facebook will implode. Google would then have a shot to get back in the game. I think that this “reality TV” thing is going to be as painful and damaging to Google as a world champion fighter getting a thumb in the eye and then losing vision in that eye.
Why?
First, lightweight. Recommendations are just less hassle than brute force search. Humans do the work. Volunteer work.
Second, relevance. What are friends for? People trust referrals from friends. Word of mouth works. Different and better than a numerical recipe. (Go ahead. Disagree.)
Third, fits core demographics’ established behavior. For those hooked on Facebook, having Facebook spit out TV shows when one is listening to music, texting, and doing homework is a really nifty attention deficit disorder service. I might be driven crazy. For Facebook’s users, the new service is likely to be a must use function. Habitual behavior means a big win for Facebook.
Google may have to go through its social life with one eye operating at 50 percent. Upside? Maybe Google won’t see all those Android devices using Facebook to find content on the vast wasteland?
Stephen E Arnold, January 4, 2010
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Facebook Productivity Tip
December 31, 2010
Listen up, Facebook users. Bogged down by the number of links shared by your Facebook friends? Well fret no more, TheLikeWall is here in an effort to save you time. Simply visit the website and login with the same details used for your Facebook account. The Like Wall will take tally of all the links your Facebook friends are sharing and rank them by the reactions other people have already recorded. So the most popular links are seated at the top of the list, allowing the less important ones to fall to the fray, thus saving you countless hours by knowing what isn’t worth looking at. There is not much to this… literally. Visit the website for yourself and see.
This service sounds useful enough. I’m afraid I cannot report I have conducted any tests or offer a proper review; I don’t have a Facebook account. My personal solution to wasting less time on Facebook is to never visit Facebook, but that’s just me.
Sarah Rogers, December 31, 2010
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Does Audience Size Matter in Digital Media?
December 27, 2010
“CBS Audience Five Times Bigger Than Facebook” reports that despite the social network’s internet dominance, that plain old ordinary television still has a much wider viewership. My favorite snippet from the article: “If Facebook was measured as a TV network, it would be comparable in size to PBS. PBS? Yes.”
But don’t relegate FB to the margins just yet. PBS, and CBS, and even ABC and HBO do not have the targeting that social networking does. Television ads are still passive, business to customer one-way interactions that DVRs have started to make obsolete. Even product placement within shows is still throwing it at the wall and seeing what sticks. Facebook, on the other hand, is built around targeted ads and interactions that pull rather than push. Facebook is hipper, sleeker, and infinitely more personalized than television. Five times bigger, sure. Five times more successful? No way.
Alice Wasielewski, December 27, 2010
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Facebook and Its New Trend Report for 2010
December 24, 2010
Short honk: At this time of year, trends appear in many articles. Poobahs, pundits, and pontificators relish the opportunity to identify the Top 10, 100 Biggest, and 500 Products. My recollection of making these lists is that some are generated by running a query against logs or other data sources. Others are just made up by a group having lunch together. Either way, the lists are quite popular and some companies just keep a permanent list of “top” somethings alive year round.
The Facebook Memology 2010 report is different. Since I don’t use Facebook myself, I enjoy reading about what’s popular in the social, member-centric walled garden that appears to be the principal conceptual hook for Facebook and its users.
The workings of Facebook users is as hard for me to figure as my deducing the purpose of the Antikythera mechanism.
You can see the Facebook Memology 2010 report at this link. What I found fascinating about the list of top items was that some of them made absolutely zero sense to me. This addled goose had absolutely no idea what “HMU” references. The write up explains that the HMU acronym means “hit me up.” Okay. The article explains that the number nine trend “airplanes” is from a popular tune from a group called B.o.B.
With more than 650 million people as members, Facebook is an important online destination and service. The look into the “minds” and “needs” of Facebook users is like my trying to figure out how the rusted Antikythera operated. If Facebook creates a search engine based on Web sites cited by Facebook users, the index will be an interesting one for me to use.
Stephen E Arnold, December 24, 2010
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Two Interesting Signs for Google in 2011
December 20, 2010
I am perched in an airport ready to head south. Way south for some work and relaxation. In the secure area of the terminal, I noted two news stories that the poobahs see as unrelated events. Some pundits may sense these events which I shall document are connected but “real” journalists often leave dots as Donne-like islands. I am enjoy connecting dots, a privilege for those over 65 and mostly unemployed and ignored like other senior citizens.
Dot one: “Mark Zuckerberg’s Beijing Adventure.” The story in Gawker points out that Facebook’s wizard is going to visit Baidu, the number one search system in China. My take: If these two outfits find common ground, the relationship will have some repercussions for the Google. A Facebook – Baidu chat is interesting to me.
Dot two: “Google TV Faces Delays as CES Turns into a No-Show for New Products.” This story makes clear that Google’s TV play is not ready for prime time. Great dot, and you can see one possible reason by reading the draft chapter for a monograph I am sitting on until the TV dust settles. Google needed technology from a company with pretty good tie ups in the media world. The deal did not happen, and it is one reason why other services are scoring lay ups and the Google is tossing in shots from the parking lot. Here’s the link and the info is offered as is in rough draft form. Google has made a series of significant investments in rich media and, well, the linked story provides some color on the “no show” angle.
How does a 66 year old connect these two. Straightedge, pencil and an infinitely Euclidean long line pointing to Trouble Lane in Orangeburg, SC, not a place many Googlers want to be in 2011. I don’t recall Orangeburg as a hot bed of social and rich media activity for Google. Maybe I am wrong? Heading out.
Stephen E Arnold, December 20, 2010
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Yolink from TigerLogic
December 16, 2010
TigerLogic offers a number of data and content solutions. The company (originally named Blyth Holdings, then Omnis Technology, and then Raining Data) uses proprietary methods to normalize data. The company refers to its method as Pick Universal Data Model (Pick UDM). The Pick UDM is a component across the XDMS and MDMS product lines. The approach looks similar to those used by other XML-centric transformation and access methods.
The company’s newest product is a Facebook user’s solution to the problem of aggregating FB content in one display. PostPost, a real-time Facebook newspaper, described this way on the TigerLogic Web site:
PostPost enables users to quickly skim relevant passages of text shared by their Facebook friends and sort shared content by type. To access PostPost, users simply login using Facebook Connect, and in a matter of seconds, all shared links, pictures, videos, articles from their Facebook friends will populate the front page of their personal paper.
You can see a video and obtain more information at www.postpost.com.
We learned about the firm’s Yolink product this summer. Yolink extracts information from behind links and inside documents. On the Yolink Web site, you can see examples of outputs from the system. The content sources includes Craigslist, Google Patent Search, and Wikipedia.
Wikipedia included this comment sourced from CNet.com:
Yolink searches within the pages of your engine’s results to find your search terms in context. Go beyond the links. Search Web pages and discover information conventional search tools may have never revealed. In addition to mining content on a webpage, yolink will mine all of the links on that page for information relevant to your search. Yolink highlights information in the context of its original Web page and on the right side of your browser. Eliminating the need to bounce between multiple windows. Share your findings effortlessly by clicking on the save and share link. An email message containing your valuable information and the original Web page address is instantly created and ready to send, or save in folders for future use. Go beyond conventional search and find commands. Yolink allows you to search lengthy reference manuals, PDFs, legal documents, contracts, and news sites quickly and effortlessly. Yolink is especially helpful with a multi-word search, because it can extract all of the relevant content surrounding any of your search terms and display it all at once.”
Yolink is a unit of TigerLogic. The company develops software and solutions for creating and improving software applications. In addition to Yolink, the company offers XML Data Management Servers (XDMS), Multidimensional Database Management Systems (MDMS) and Rapid Application Development (RAD) software tools.
We think that the emergence of Facebook centric content aggregation tools is an interesting development. Search without navigating to a FB page is part of the “search without search” shift some vendors are advocating.
Stephen E Arnold, December 16, 2010
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Facebook and Its Facebook Nation
December 14, 2010
I found the “World Map of Social Networks Shows Facebook’s Ever Increasing Dominance” startling. I am not a Facebook denizen. If you poke around, you can locate a Beyond Search Facebook page which a software robot maintains. But the map is an eye opener. I suppose this is what was behind Microsoft’s alleged buy out offer for Facebook a couple of years ago. There’s not much to say about a map, but there are several data tables and these are revelatory. Facebook is number one in a selected list of nine countries. Russia is Facebook resistant which is no big surprise. Google may want to get on its scooter to get in this Facebook game. If the data in the tables are accurate, LinkedIn might be a potential target for Google or Microsoft.
Stephen E Arnold, December 14, 2010
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