Strategy: Google Buzz marks a strategic shift in Google’s social effort after orkut & Google Friend Connect lost to Facebook & fbConnect. Expect more subsequent integration of Google’s products.
Product: Google Buzz is a well-engineered product, but not a well-designed one in terms of product experience
Competition: Google Buzz is a better substitute to Yammer for the corporate environment where I can share with co-workers, but it has yet proved a real harm to Twitter
Social Media
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blogger, buzz, connect, facebook, google, integration, orkut, picasa, social, twitter, yammer
Beside being a Facebook user, are you a blogger? vlogger? Twitter user? Friendfeed? Tumblr?
Have you noticed that Facebook has been sucking interactions with your content from your original source into Facebook feed?
If yes, that’s how Facebook is becoming the skeleton of the Internet.
Facebook has become ubiquitous that people keep staying inside Facebook, expecting to consume information from everywhere. Facebook is doing well to satisfy this need of convenience, allowing information inflow by both implementing functions itself and providing being the platform for respective service provider to develop Facebook applications.
Results:
- Convenience for users
- Explorability of information from the world’s largest hub
- Distribution of interactions from original site to other hubs, notably Facebook
- Facebook ecology is becoming Facebook economy, centralizing human connectedness depicted by social graphs
Anything has its down side. The issues are
- Interactions within original service (Twitter, Tumblr) are always richer in essence than two actions “Comment” and “Like” on Facebook. Twitter has retrievable favorite, retweet; Tumblr has retrievable like, reblog… If people keep using Facebook and neglect the other services, this richness is not utilized to its fullest potentials
- As a result of (1), innovation elsewhere other than Facebook is gradually killed off
- As to fuel destruction of their “complementors”, Facebook has been cloning interesting nice features of elegant services including Twitter, Tumblr and swallowed Friendfeed
As for me, interactions with my Tumblr items by my connections who use both Facebook and Tumblr are now done on Facebook. More “likes” on Facebook, fewer “reblogs” on Tumblr. These posts are read, liked, then dispersed down Facebook stream. They have not been recreated and passed on by being reblogged.
By becoming the main stream of information, Facebook is depressing contents and innovation.
There’s the price publishers pay to distribute information on Facebook. There’s the price other service providers pay to spread contents hosted on them onto Facebook. The price by information consumers residing on Facebook will only be realized when real casualties have been done.
Are you a publisher or a consumer? What do you think?
Addendum
Facebook gives power to the crowd, turns innovators & trend-setters into followers of the consuming herd.
This tweet was RTed by 100+ people. I don’t get it.
1. If List had been introduced earlier, organization would have been much more convenient. Now that many tweeters have followed thousands of people. Organizing is more time-consuming it takes longer.
2. Unless List slows down posting, I don’t see a reason to complain.
3. Values may be created elsewhere. To create contents for the social media world is to create values. Besides, some users elicit information from Twitter without (re)creating information, but carry the information onward to create values elsewhere. i.e. financial observers. The benefits of getting organized by lists may not be visible on Twitter itself, but are realized in the society.
4. Lists is new and evolving, why not let people have more fun with it?
Social media begins to look less social and it need to be so because:
Major online communities usually start with a small group of smart, motivated, everybody-knows-everbody contributors. After crossing critical mass, such communities start to attract more users which is a good thing. The bad thing is that trolls also jump in. What’s more, noise and irrelevant information start to emerge from clueless or, worse, malicious posters.
Two types of community are somewhat immune to such annoyance:
- Social networks, led by Facebook , with which you determine your social graph of those you care about
- Services which you determine the content you want, led by Twitter. Others may include Tumblr, twine, squidoo. Addendum: Twitter got better with lists.
I’m sorry, Digg.
What’s the solution? Channel, possibly?
1. Google’s massive free cash flow
When time is right, a dividend would strongly boost GOOG’s stock price, strengthening their confident announcement that crisis was over.
Or a share repurchase might be useful a strategy, especially when they need more innovation.
2. Social Media is not a fad, but an evolution.
But, sub-trends exist. Where’s the opportunity?
“Social media begins to look less social” will be a good sign for ecosystem to grow. Twitter apps, Facebook apps & games for example.
“Corporations look to scale” and they will need tools. Beyond communication, think market research, CRM.
Finance
| crm, facebook, google, How Marketing is done, How to better Communication, innovation, market-research, share, social-media, strategy, twitter
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