Is Google Plus Like Glass?
April 26, 2015
I remember reading that Google Plus was the new Google. I remember hearing that Googlers were induced to use Google Plus. I heard on a podcast that Google Plus was a lame duck thing, a modern Orkut.
If you are an avid social media maven, navigate to “Why Google+ Failed, According to Google Insiders.” If accurate, the write up suggests that Google’s powers of innovation are more like the power of imitation. Am I correct in recalling that Google’s ad business was foreshadowed by Overture/GoTo. Nah, that can’t be write. Imitation?
I read:
The main problem with Google+, one former Googler says, is the company tried to make it too much like Facebook. Another former Googler agrees, saying the company was “late to market” and motivated from “a competitive standpoint.” There may have been some paranoia — Facebook was actively poaching Googlers at a certain point, one source said. Google+ employees within Google were sectioned off, this person said, possibly to prevent gossip about the product from spreading. Google+ employees had their own secret cafeteria called “Cloud,” for example, and others on the Mountain View campus weren’t permitted. “There was definitely an aura of fear for a time,” this person said.
I quite like that phrase “aura of fear.” Poetic. I ran into a fear of Google. A PR distribution service would not distribute a news release with a reference to Google. No explanation, just a rejection. Interesting.
For more comments about Google Plus, read the story. I thought their might be trouble when the “+” was used in the service name. Ever try to search for a plus in the new, mobilized Google? I guess more effort went into name X Labs. Ever try to search Google for “X”?
Stephen E Arnold, April 26, 2015
Social Network Demographics by the Numbers
April 23, 2015
The amount of social networking Web sites and their purposes is as diverse as the human population. Arguably, if you were to use each of the most popular networks and try to keep on top of every piece of information that filters through the feed, one twenty-four hour day would not be enough.
With social media becoming more ingrained in daily life, it makes one wonder who is using what network and for what purpose. Business Insider discusses a recent BI Intelligence about social media demographics in the article: “Revealed: A Breakdown Of The Demographics For Each Of The Social Networks.” Here are some of the facts: Facebook is still mostly female and remains the top network. Twitter leans heavier on the male demographic, while YouTube reaches more adults in 18-34 demographic than cable TV. Instagram is considered the most important of teenage social networks, but Snapchat has the widest appeal amongst the younger crowd. This is the most important for professionals:
“LinkedIn is actually more popular than Twitter among U.S. adults. LinkedIn’s core demographic are those aged between 30 and 49, i.e. those in the prime of their career-rising years. Not surprisingly, LinkedIn also has a pronounced skew toward well-educated users.”
Facebook still reigns supreme and pictures are popular with the younger sect, while professionals all tend to co-mingle in their LinkedIn area. Surprising and not so revealing information, but still interesting for the data junkie. We wonder how social media will change in the coming year?
Whitney Grace, April 23, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
The Elusive Video Recognition
April 22, 2015
Pictures and video still remain a challenge for companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and more. These companies want to be able to have an algorithm pick up on the video or picture’s content without relying on tags or a description. The reasons are that tags are sometimes vague or downright incorrect about the content. VentureBeat reports that Google has invested a lot of funds and energy in a deep learning AI. The article is called “Watch Google’s Latest Deep Learning System Recognize Sports In YouTube Clips.”
The AI is park of a neural network that is constantly fed data and programmed to make predictions off the received content. Google’s researchers fed their AI consists of a convolutional neural network and it was tasked with watching sports videos to learn how to recognize objects and motions.
The researchers learned something and wrote a paper about it:
“ ‘We conclude by observing that although very different in concept, the max-pooling and the recurrent neural network methods perform similarly when using both images and optical flow,’ Google software engineers George Toderici and Sudheendra Vijayanarasimhan wrote in a blog post today on their work, which will be presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Boston in June.”
In short, Google is on its way to making video and images recognizable with neural networks. Can it tell the differences between colors, animals, people, gender, and activities yet?
Whitney Grace, April 22, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Informed Millennials
April 15, 2015
With the fall of traditional newspapers and aging TV News audiences, just where are today’s 20- and young 30- somethings turning for news coverage? Science 2.0 tells us “How Millennials Get News,” reporting on a recent survey from the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The joint effort comes from a collaboration arrangement the organizations call the Media Insight Project. Conducted at the beginning of 2015, the survey asked Millennials about their news-consumption habits. The article tells us:
“People ages 18-34 consume news and information in strikingly different ways than did previous generations, they keep up with ‘traditional’ news as well as stories that connect them to hobbies, culture, jobs, and entertainment, they just do it in ways that corporations can’t figure out how to monetize well….
“‘For many Millennials, news is part of their social flow, with most seeing it as an enjoyable or entertaining experience,’ said Trevor Tompson, director of the AP-NORC Center. ‘It is possible that consuming news at specific times of the day for defined periods will soon be a thing of the past given that news is now woven into many Millennials’ connected lives.’”
Soon? Even many of us Gen Xers and (a few intrepid Baby Boomers) now take our news in small doses at varying hours. The survey also found that most respondents look at the news at least once a day, and many several times per day. Also, contrary to warnings from worrywarts (yes, including me), personalized news feeds may not be creating a confirmation-bias crisis, after all. Most of these Millennials insist their social-media feeds are well balanced; the write-up explains:
“70 percent of Millennials say that their social media feeds are comprised of a diverse mix of viewpoints evenly mixed between those similar to and different from their own. An additional 16 percent say their feeds contain mostly viewpoints different from their own. And nearly three-quarters of those exposed to different views (73 percent) report they investigate others’ opinions at least some of the time–with a quarter saying they do it always or often.”
Well, that’s encouraging. Another finding might surprise some of us: Though a vast 90 percent of Millennials have smart phones, only half report being online most of all of the day. See the article for more, or navigate to the report itself; the study’s methodology is detailed at the end of the report.
Cynthia Murrell, April 15, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
A Former Googler Reflects
April 10, 2015
After a year away from Google, blogger and former Googler Tim Bray (now at Amazon) reflects on what he does and does not miss about the company in his post, “Google + 1yr.” Anyone who follows his blog, ongoing, knows Bray has been outspoken about some of his problems with his former employer: First, he really dislikes “highly-overprivileged” Silicon Valley and its surrounds, where Google is based. Secondly, he found it unsettling to never communicate with the “actual customers paying the bills,” the advertisers.
What does Bray miss about Google? Their advanced bug tracking system tops the list, followed closely by the slick and efficient, highly collaborative internal apps deployment. He was also pretty keen on being paid partially in Google stock between 2010 and 2014. The food on campus is everything it’s cracked up to be, he admits, but as a remote worker, he rarely got to sample it.
It was a passage in Bray’s “neutral” section that most caught my eye, though. He writes:
“The number one popular gripe against Google is that they’re watching everything we do online and using it to monetize us. That one doesn’t bother me in the slightest. The services are free so someone’s gotta pay the rent, and that’s the advertisers.
“Are you worried about Google (or Facebook or Twitter or your telephone company or Microsoft or Amazon) misusing the data they collect? That’s perfectly reasonable. And it’s also a policy problem, nothing to do with technology; the solutions lie in the domains of politics and law.
“I’m actually pretty optimistic that existing legislation and common law might suffice to whack anyone who really went off the rails in this domain.
“Also, I have trouble getting exercised about it when we’re facing a wave of horrible, toxic, pervasive privacy attacks from abusive governments and actual criminals.”
Everything is relative, I suppose. Still, I think it understandable for non-insiders to remain a leery about these companies’ data habits. After all, the distinction between “abusive government” and businesses is not always so clear these days.
Cynthia Murrell, April 10, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Microsoft Delve and PowerBi Make Data User Friendly
March 30, 2015
Microsoft Delve is a new part of the Office 365 package and it is similar to Facebook Graph Search or your Internet browsing history. ChannelWorld posted “Microsoft Rolls Out Delve To Office 365, Previews PowerBi And Skype For Business.” Microsoft will release Delve soon and it comes as demand for relationship-building tools grow in demand. Delve tracks information from Office 365 applications such as Outlook, PowerPoint, Bing, Word, and more. Microsoft is calling the collected data the Office Graph, showing how people interact with the software.
PowerBI is another rollout from Microsoft:
“Microsoft also announced that it has now rolled out the technical preview of PowerBI for Excel around the world, following its launch a year ago. PowerBI is designed to be a tool for non-techies to access technical data, quickly composing their own sales reports through natural-language queries against robust data sources–typing in a query like “what was our most popular product in Brazil last year?” should deliver a graph or even a map of those results. Incorporating Google Analytics, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, Acumatica, Zuora and Twilio will come soon, Microsoft said.”
Microsoft will also incorporate Skype in Office 365. Office 365’s is one of Microsoft’s most viable products and people have complained they have not done much with it in recent years. Upgrades like Skype, Delve, and OfficeBI demonstrate that Microsoft is still invested in making Office 365 a competitive, usable, and reliable product.
Whitney Grace, March 30, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Partnership Between Twitter and IBM Showing Results
March 27, 2015
The article on TechWorld titled IBM Boosts BlueMix and Watson Analytics with Twitter Integration investigates the fruits of the partnership between IBM and Twitter, which began in 2014. IBM Bluemix now has Twitter available as one the services available in the cloud based developer environment. Watson Analytics will also be integrated with Twitter for the creation of visualizations. Developers will be able to grab data from Twitter for better insights into patterns and relationships.
“The Twitter data is available as part of that service so if I wanted to, for example, understand the relationship between a hashtag on pizza, burgers or tofu, I can go into the service, enter the hashtag and specify a date range,” said Rennie. “We [IBM] go out, gather information and essentially calculate what is the sentiment against those tags, what is the split by location, by gender, by retweets, and put it into a format whereby you can immediately do visualisation.”
From the beginning of the partnership, Twitter gave IBM access to its data and the go-ahead to use Twitter with the cloud based developer tools. Watson looks like a catch all for data, and the CMO of Brandwatch Will McInnes suggests that Twitter is only the beginning. The potential of data from social media is a vast and constantly rearranging field.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 27, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
Study Find Millennials Willing to Pay for News to a Point
March 26, 2015
The article titled Millennials Say Keeping Up With the News Is Important To Them—But Good Luck Getting Them To Pay For It on NiemanLab explores the findings of a recent study by the Media Insight Project in partnership with the American Press Institute. A great deal of respondents get their news from Facebook, although the majority (88%) said it was only occasionally. Twitter and Reddit also made the list. Interestingly, millennials claimed multiple access methods to news categories across the board. The article states,
“The survey asked respondents how they accessed 24 different news topics, from national politics and government to style, beauty, and fashion. Facebook was either the number one or two source of information for 20 of the 24 topics, and in nine of those topics it was the only source cited by a majority of respondents. Search was the second most popular source of information, ranking first or second in 13 of the 24 news topics.”
In spite of the title of the article, most millennials in the study were willing to pay for at least one subscription, either digital or print. The article doesn’t mention the number of people involved in the study, but deeper interviews were held with 23 millennials, which is the basis for the assumptions about broader unwillingness to pay for the news, whether out of entitlement or a belief that access to free news is a fundamental pillar of democracy.
Chelsea Kerwin, March 26, 2015
Stephen E Arnold, Publisher of CyberOSINT at www.xenky.com
A Message from the COO Connotate
March 6, 2015
Tom Williams is the chief operating officer of Connotate, the industry leading platform for harvesting and monetizing content. Like most organizations, Connotate is looking to attract attention and connect with people on a personal level by using social media. Videos have rapidly become the favored medium, because they are easily digestible.
On Connotate’s Youtube channel, there are two videos why content is important and how Connotate can help people use it to their advantage. The first video “Tom Williams, COO of Connotate: Why They Must Evolve” explains that old fashioned information methods no longer work in today’s world:
“Information service providers find themselves ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of incorporating web data. As you look at the scale from tens to hundreds to thousands, the old stare and compare, handwritten scripts, and off the shelf tools no longer apply. These techniques have a low barrier entry, but they don’t scale.
The next video “Tom Williams, COO of Connotate: Why Consider Connotate” explains how Connotate can help organizations harness their content and make money from it. These are powerful brief messages that get straight to the point of how Connotate can help.
Whitney Grace, March 06, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Snapchat Unveils Huge Discovery
March 2, 2015
Snapchat recently made a change to its dashboard by adding a purple dot. According to Fusion this is a new way users can interact with the Snapchat app with the Snapchat Discover platform: “Snapchat Discover Could Be The Biggest Thing In News Since Twitter.” The Discover platform is a newsfeed/gossip channel, giving Snapchat users instant access to media. It’s very similar to Twitter when it first came onto the scene. Interestingly enough the article points out that when the Discover platform’s newness fades, it will still have a lot of users.
“Snapchat has (or had) something like 100 million monthly active users, two-thirds of whom reportedly use the app every day. Even if only five percent of those people use Discover, that’s still 3 million viewers a day. Unlike Facebook, there’s no algorithmic filter on Snapchat — all the channels are equally visible, whether you’re CNN or Warner Music Group.”
The Discover platform takes advantage of mobile devices’ touch screens to browse through different stories that a mix of videos, listicles, and news repurposed from publishers’ Web sites.
Snapchat Discover is a self-contained publishing platform that is a simpler version of most news sites. The stories refresh one everyday, but only short content is published. Making themselves stand out even more Snapchat is repackaging the stories by making custom animation, including voice over, and editing the text to fit the short format.
Whether it makes it or not, Snapchat Discover is creating a newsfeed without going overboard and making a unique place in the social media market.
Whitney Grace, March 02, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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