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Posted by Simon on 2/3/2012

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Save the Ta Tas: The Susan G. Komen Foundation and The Importance of Identity

As a company, or organization, you have to know who you are; this is as important to the health of an organization as it is to the happiness of a human being. The intuitive sense of what you are, who you are, what you are doing and who you are doing it for are absolutely essential when it comes to connecting to your audience in authentic and lasting ways. The holy grail of marketing, brand loyalty, lies therein.

This week we have witnessed an organization learn this the hardest of ways as the Susan G. Komen foundation, an organization dedicated to women’s health and focusing specifically on preventing and curing Breast Cancer, created a policy to bar grants to “organizations under investigation” and applied it to a single organization: Planned Parenthood. Despite the Komen Foundation claiming, repeatedly, that political leanings or beliefs had absolutely nothing to do with the decision to cut the grant eligibility of Planned Parenthood the facts, two in particular, tell a different story.

The first of these facts is the controversial hiring of a former Secretary of State for the State of Georgia Karen Handel, who had called for cutting funding of Planned Parenthood while running for Governor of the State of Georgia, only months before the decision to do cut funding was made at The Komen Foundation. The second of these facts is that the policy under which this decision was made is widely said to have been created by Handel to target Planned Parenthood specifically. The new “no investigations” rule was applied to only one organization, Planned Parenthood, despite the fact that they also provide $7.5 million in grants to the University currently under investigation for very serious child rape allegations, Penn State, to which this new policy apparently did not apply. The legitimacy of the investigation given as a reason for this is highly questionable in comparison and is called a witch hunt by most. This was widely seen as an attack on Planned Parenthood which is, by definition of it’s mission, understood as a very direct attack on women and women’s health.

In this moment The Susan G. Komen Foundation made a fatal flaw: they forgot who they are, what they do, and for whom they do it. By cutting these grants, which funded nothing more than breast cancer education and lifesaving mammography for low-income women, they stopped providing a lifesaving service at the very core of their being, attacking the essence of their identity. By cutting these grants, seen widely as a targeted attack on Planned Parenthood, they undermined their relationship with their core constituency: women. The Susan G. Komen Foundation turned its back on a long history of non-partisan, and highly productive, action in the service of women’s health to very clearly pursue a counterproductive political matter having nothing to do with their core mission and which actually went against it.

This decision did not go well for The Susan G. Komen Foundation. Much like the decision to release New Coke in 1985 did for Coca-Cola, this decision immediately raised an unimaginable uproar of fury that spread across our world of social media with astounding speed and ferocity. Within moments a hashtag game on twitter began creating #NewKomenSlogans. Calls to completely cut off support for the Susan G. Komen Foundation came from friends on Facebook as well as members of Congress of all stripes.

Executives of the organization defended the decision rather weakly, making vaguely bizarre arguments about the need to have control over funding decisions and adhere to their mission. But it is impossible to defend a decision that subjugates the core of your identity and being, in this case the health and wellbeing of women, to a new and unevenly or disingenuously applied policy.

In the end, as I’m sure they saw fundraising numbers drop off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote, the Susan G. Komen Foundation reversed it’s course. It was a good, if not inevitable, choice. You can’t raise money for something you are publicly announcing you won’t be doing; it is also a challenge when your core constituency feels you have sided directly against them. Regardless of how you stand on the issue of abortions politically it is clear from a business perspective, that is from a branding, identity and constituency point of view, this was the gravest mistake they could have made. Do not turn your back on yourself or risk the ground dissolving beneath your feet.

Know thyself, don’t stab thyself. Save the Ta Tas, nothing more and, certainly, nothing less.

Posted by Simon on 1/18/2012

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Stop SOPA and PIPA: The Blackout

In this new world of sharing and social engagement there has long been a struggle over protecting the freedom of the internet and it’s users and innovators and the rights of those who create content such as movies, images, music and written material.

Because it is a lot easier to share 100 copies of a new album today than it was when you had to dub 100 cassettes this new world of online piracy has, indeed, become a serious problem for content creators all over the world.

However attempts to cure this problem, specifically SOPA and PIPA, have serious consequences for the new world we have created and all enjoy. The world of social innovation has been built on the free exchange of ideas and content and our very right to free expression lies in the ability to share with the world.  I would go a step further in saying that access to the information of the world is a step toward creating a larger shared intelligence for humanity, however those innovations stand in danger of being revoked in the name of protecting the rights of a comparatively few copyright holders. This would place a burden on any website, including Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook etc. to assure that no pirated content of any kind is being hosted or shared within their networks or servers; it would also require that any outbound link was not to a source for pirated material of any kind, an impossible feat for sites that see billions of shares a day. It would make a world of sharing disappear in short order.

I invite you to learn more by visiting Wikipedia’s write up on the subject here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more

You can also search for your congressional Representative and take steps to help avoid passage of these bills or any like it: https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

Posted by admin on 1/9/2012

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Social Customer Service

This morning, upon entering the office and beginning my regular work day, I realized that we were experiencing strange network issues with our Comcast Business high-speed internet. We were intermittently losing our connection repeatedly and quite frustratingly.

Now, like many in today’s world, I am not a fan of taking time out of my day to pick up the phone and call a support staff. There are many reasons for this:

• Phone calls are not efficient: You will generally spend 5 to 10 minutes waiting in a cue or navigating highly obnoxious automated operators, often times with no escape hatch to simply reach a person.
• Getting lost in translation: You’ve all experienced it, the very kind but hardly fluent Service Representative based in New Dehli, India. Often times communicating basic information about your problem can be incredibly difficult because of accents, a lack of clarity on the user side, or a stubborn representative forced to follow a procedural list regardless of your level of knowledge.
• Dropped calls: Ever waited twenty minutes to talk to a Service Representative, taken another twenty minutes to explain a problem, been put on hold for another five minutes, then had the call drop? I had a close friend have that happen 3 times during one simple service call. In a world where mobile is king this is an even greater problem, and rarely do companies take your number to call you back and, when they do, that call often comes ten minutes later.
• Voice service is a waste of your businesses time and that of your clients and customers: Communication is less clear, your Representative can only manage one or two calls at a time, calls are dropped, clients are angry from wait times, etc. Time to move on.

On top of all of that we live in a real-time world where your clients expect immediacy. Given all of these clear facts, and the explosion of communications technology, why do so many companies cling to a medium invented in 1876 to serve their customers? Sure, you have your older customers that will still want a phone call, but you can change your world and likely lower costs embracing new technology. There is a better way. I, instead, reached out using social networking service Twitter.

Being that I have the patience for customer service of your typical twelve-year-old child, yes I admit it, I have a keen eye for companies that offer to save me the time and hassle that is a phone call. There are two methods, in particular, that I find save me an incredible amount of time and which likely cost the companies offering them very little to maintain as well as offer a big sales point.

Live Chat Support

In the last year I have moved to a new hosting company, given a number of moral and service level problems with my previous host GoDaddy.com, called Site5. As I have moved on to them and worked to learn some of the nuance of managing their back-end application for managing my products and services I have, of course, ran into questions and issues I was not quite genius enough to figure out on my own.

There were two methods through which I reached out the company, the second, Twitter, I will discuss in a moment but the most effective has been their offering of “live chat support.” This tid-bit of technology has been around since the last millenium yet is so sorely under-utilized as a customer service tool it is embarrassing for MBAs around the world. It is very simple, once logged into my management portal I click on the “Contact Us” button and it allows me two options, one is to call, the other is to chat live with a representative that very moment. I have solved every problem I needed to solve, and answered every question I needed to answer, within 5 to 10 minutes flat using this method. Never once have I needed to pick up a phone, and every time the chat box contains a picture of my Representative and their full name. A nice personal touch in an increasingly impersonal world. I can also save that chat for later reference, saving repeat calls for similar issues.

This method also works well for companies that outsource their customer service as it removes the, very common, language barrier that is the bane of your customers very lives.

Twitter Feedback Engagement and Support

This is a much newer medium than the last, yet has proven incredibly effective for me in matters from product feedback to solving service issues. Site5, the company I discussed above, responded when I tweeted I was taking them on as my new host and that response came directly from their CEO, who pleasantly welcomed me. There are so many things right with that I cannot begin to explain to you why. I have had a similar experience recently in seeking to provide feedback for the new Tweetdeck software, a Twitter client I use far more frequently than my email inbox. Although I did have to seek out the twitter account of the CEO, an exceedingly helpful British gentleman by the name of Iain Dodsworth, he responded and took my, quite negative, feedback and thanked me for providing it and helping better inform his company on future development. @Tweetdeck never did respond, odd for a company owned by Twitter.

That, however, is only one reason why I believe all companies should be actively engaging their audiences, customers and clients via Twitter. It is a great sounding board, yes, but it also serves a dual purpose when you turn it into a customer service portal. When you help a customer or client on Twitter it is being done on a public medium, and therefore, prospective customers see how helpful your company is. You solve your existing customers problems, quickly and effectively reassuring their purchasing decision, while advertising a value proposition for the services you offer to those they follow.

Here too I have a great example of this in action. This brings us back to my earlier story of intermittent internet access this morning. Our service is with Comcast, given my distaste for the consolidation of media companies this should frankly not be my favorite company, however their embrace of Twitter for customer service is nothing less than brilliant. Within mere moments of tweeting to @ComcastCares and @Comcast this morning that I was experiencing problems I was in direct contact with a service representative named Bill. I sent a direct message containing the pertinent account information, taking two seconds of my time after he requested it, and within about 5 to 10 minutes I had a call from Comcast to set up a service appointment for the next morning. They had already diagnosed the problem and I didn’t have to waste my time listening to hold music while they did so. Problem solved, efficiently and with little pain and time costs for everyone involved.

The Wrong Way To Do Social Customer Service

Tomorrow I will, very likely, receive a phone call from my Netsuite representative, a wonderfully helpful woman who I will not name but I want to be clear is the most helpful person we have worked with from Netsuite. She will be asking me to please not tweet or write complaints about the company, and of course channel my communications through “official” means. It has happened before. A few months back I tweeted that their hosted ERP platform was not functioning for us and we were unable to reach the data backbone of our company. I simply reported the outage, which turned out to be an odd internal DNS problem, via Twitter and asked for any help they could offer and any outlet providing the status of their servers. I did not hear a word from them, via Twitter or any other means, that day and a Google search returned no server status information for their services. What I did find is a horrifically designed company blog that proved entirely useless for my needs. Keep in mind, this is a Customer Relationship Management company. How delightfully ironic. I tweeted my displeasure with the design of their blog and, of course, kindly offered my design services.

The next day I received a call from our client representative sounding somewhat alarmed. “Hello Simon, Did someone from your company yesterday have trouble with Netsuite?” she kindly asked. “Yes, we did have some trouble yesterday” I replied. The conversation went on from there and she asked if anyone had said something on Twitter, I of course responded in the affirmative. She went on to request that in the future I should use their contrived ticketing system that was, of course, not available given the outage we experienced. “Please, only report problems through official means” or something of that nature was her basic request. I politely said that was impossible at the time, and that I wouldn’t have held back my public feedback even if it had been.

Welcome to the new world people. The most effective way to handle this problem is have a technically competent person running your Twitter account, and authorized to answer such simple questions, rather than waiting a day to call and complain about the medium through which the problem was reported. Again, I want to be clear this is not a complaint about our Representative, she has been incredibly helpful over the years and we are very happy with her service to our organization, this is a company policy problem for Netsuite. You are a customer relations company, give up control and learn to adapt to new modes of relations! I should also note that Netsuite does not even offer phone support to customers, despite requiring over $1000.00 a year, when discounted, to offer support at all. You are doing it all terribly wrong.

Conclusions

Phone communications are cumbersome and time consuming. Ticket systems are contrived and limit communications in ways that are even more frustrating for your users. Email, often times, comes with a bold warning that no one is listening to your complaints when you respond to them. It is ridiculous, the means through which we often are forced to reach the companies purportedly serving us. Don’t even try to reach Google, they don’t care.

I understand companies still need to serve older generations used to older forms of communications, however, that is no excuse for avoiding new media. New media is cheap, efficient, and has marketing potential to boot.

We are in a new world, a user-centered world where an individual can reach out to thousands to complain about your companies failures, or successes. It is also a world in which communication is brilliantly simple, cheap, fast and effective when done right. Some companies see this as an opportunity and take it on with great aplomb. Others have clearly seen it as a dire threat to their ability to control communications, a futile concern as you, frankly, have no control. All you can do is manage the tidal wave and manage it well. Which of these two paths is your company on?

Posted by admin on 1/5/2012

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New Tweetdeck: Prettier, Sure, But A Whole Lot Dumber

Let me tell you the story of how I first came to understand the true power of the Twitter platform. It was thanks entirely to a widely used desktop client called Tweetdeck. Tweetdeck was a tool that arranged the information Twitter has to provide and presented it in an incredibly helpful and efficient way. In one twenty inch LCD you could hold six streams of information without any scrolling, all updating in real-time in later versions, and monitor trends in real time as well with Twitscoop or Twitter Trends. It, arguably, created the wildfire pace of breaking news we have today.

So, on to my story. In the beginning Tweetdeck utilized a simple word-cloud tool called Twitscoop as a source of “buzzing” words being tweeted at a given time. It showed you, in real-time, what was being talked about across the world right that minute. On this particular day, as I watched, the phrase “Los Angeles” and the word “Earthquake” began to grow larger on my screen. “Oh no” I thought, as my brother lived in Los Angeles. I quickly clicked through to view tweets causing these trends, and voila, I was informed as it was happening that a small earthquake was shaking the City of Los Angeles. Within 2 or 3 minutes of it occurring I was able to call my brother to check on him. Not a single news organization I would have seen in Atlanta carried that news at all, yet because of this information tool I surprised my brother by checking on him within minutes of it occurring.

I had never seen a more brilliant information delivery system in action, and I was instantly hooked to Twitter thanks solely to this tool and, yes, my own info-mania.

This continued to be the case as events unfolded around the world making Twitter the primary news driver, in many cases, including the Iranian elections in 2009 and, later, the Arab Spring. This level of access to raw input was directly transforming that world. Tweetdeck more than anything helped make that clear.

Indeed, I had not even utilized Twitter, aside from signing up, until I found Tweetdeck. It arranged your information, made everything you wanted to know available to you with a very small number of clicks and usually just a short scroll of twenty or so streams I maintained. These streams included the regular mentions and timeline of various accounts, but also important information like “New Followers,” Twitscoop, Favorites, Trending, and Searches. While you were monitoring the immense amount of data this client made available to you, you could create a new tweet without disturbing your ability to monitor it. It made twitter a far more dynamic platform, with a huge number of preferences that you could customize to your liking, and it gave power users a highly useful management tool that could also include a host of other social networks.

Tweetdeck 1.o

This is where this story becomes a tragedy. Twitter, as I am sure most readers of this piece will know, recently bought Tweetdeck and finally released a “1.0″. We had all spent months waiting to see what Twitter would do with this powerful tool that, without question, helped make Twitter what it is today.

The first thing they did was rebrand Tweetdeck to match Twitter branding. Great, everyone likes the color blue. Second, they fundamentally changed the product into, essentially, a multi-stream version of twitter.com making it nearly useless to their core power users. I will list exactly how they did this, and specifically note which changes make it no longer a viable tool for my use.

- DEALBREAKER: The update box now opens on top of your data, disrupting you from monitoring any information while you tweet, therefore making voluminous tweeters unable to monitor their tweets a majority of the time.

- DEALBREAKER: The preferences have been limited for simplicity. So simple, in fact, that there aren’t any. You can turn off Twitter Streaming (oh thank the lordie, wouldn’t want to live in real-time!) but you cannot adjust notifications in any way, placement of the composition box, make twitter RT’s viewable, adjust size of the streams to fit more information…nothing. You can add accounts, change image and link shortening clients, and add filters and that is all. Simpler, dumber and far less useful.

- DEALBREAKER: They have limited what streams you can add to your “deck” including:

• Removing any way to monitor trends passively, such as Twitter Trends and Twitscoop. You can monitor a specific trend but there is no longer a way to monitor what is going on in the world.
• You cannot monitor your “New Followers” to see if you want to follow them back or block spam accounts.

-  DEALBREAKER: You can no longer view “Twitter Style” retweets in any way. Tell me, how does Twitter buy Tweetdeck and remove this feature that they invented? If you are into thanking your RTers or at least care to know who’s listening, as many are, it is imperative you know that it occurred.

- Tweetdeck used to provide options for each stream, now you can forget about the best of those. Notably “What’s Popular,” and “Filter This Column,”  have been removed. Finding specific tweets or filtering streams in any way are gone. Now you can only move a stream, clear it, or change notification settings.

- You can now only add Twitter and Facebook accounts. That is 1/3 of the type of accounts you used to be able to manage through Tweetdeck. Google Plus or LinkedIn didn’t make the cut, I suppose.

- Because of the new larger design you can, at best, monitor no more than five streams on a 20 inch monitor at one time.  This makes the design less compacted aesthetically, to be pretty, but makes it less efficient and cuts into the tools core purpose.

- Tweetdeck is no longer available for Linux Operating Systems.

Conclusions

Very simply Twitter has dismantled Tweetdeck as a suitable tool for power users, the core of Tweetdeck users. By taking out each feature that made this client so immensely necessary for anyone seriously needing a tool to manage their online persona, they destroyed the product and created something imminently less useful and less effective.

The bottom line is this product is no longer at all suitable nor useful for power users of Twitter. The core of the product, delivery of key information efficiently, is no longer the goal of this client apparently.

I have not yet found a single user that prefers Tweetdeck 1.0. But hey, at least it looks pretty with that Twitter bird on it, and that’s what really counts. Right?

Posted by admin on 12/20/2011

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Siri, Did You Just Judge Me?

It was only a few weeks ago that I read a little article about the political beliefs of the new iPhone 4S, a small matter in which the all-knowing Siri voice interaction app on the iPhone 4S was unable to provide guidance on abortion clinics. An immediate uproar came about proclaiming that “SIRI is pro life!” despite the odd and off-putting fact that Siri will provide you a place to stash that dead body you…found.

While it is not complete folly to believe someone might possibly have programmed Siri to judge your need for an abortion I, personally, find it rather unlikely that one of the largest technology companies in the world has all of a sudden become active in abortion politics. It would be pertinent to remember at this point that the late CEO, Steve Jobs, for whom Siri represents the pinnacle of an enormously important and creative career, has advocated his use of LSD as among the most important creative experiences of his life. Call me crazy but I don’t think this is a man that held an incredibly conservative world view, nor is it likely he advocated one in his brainchild, Siri.

Siri is in fact only a piece of software. She is programmed to do many things, and the distinctly human-esque manner in which she does so is incredibly clever. However the fact that she can not find you an abortion clinic is likely a problem with an equation deep within it’s millions of lines of binary and likely driven by a distinct allergen abortion clinics have to the political controversy surrounding their existence, and the word that describes it. In English: this is likely a product of modern search engine marketing techniques and keyword choice. However by interpreting, or attempting to interpret, your voice commands with such a high level of sophistication Siri suddenly brings the iPhone to a plain of intelligence formerly only occupied by animals with blood in their veins. All of a sudden Siri is judging us, “she” is our peer.

Therein lies the odd transition that has come to the world with Siri, a truly transformational advancement of human interaction with technology, and which is brought into distinct relief with this debate about “her” moral beliefs. All of a sudden an app is anthropomorphized to “her” and Siri begins giving us the idea of some semblance of humanity within the lines of code, of judgements and moral convictions amongst the bits of data. While this is a common human behavior, ascribing human characteristics to things we find dear, it does not actually make Siri at all human. Siri will not be endorsing a candidate for President this year, she does not notice you’ve put on a few pounds and she does not crave your attention or flowers on occasion, she’s just taught to act like she cares because you like it. You’re only human, after all.

Posted by admin on 7/11/2011

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Initial Reaction: Google+

I have long written about the distinct difference in design between what I see as the leading social networks, Facebook and Twitter, and that difference is the open or closed nature of the network.

To reiterate the basics of this discussion, the tennets of which remain largely the same despite upgrades that bring both networks closer to each other in function, Facebook was designed to foster existing social circles while Twitter was largely designed as a broadcast medium that, when left to it’s default settings, speaks to a boundlessly open community. The major function that makes the two services similar, the ability to share your life with people, is indeed mirrored by both as well as other social networks the major difference is who exactly you are sharing that information with. Google+ seems eager to bridge the divide.

Google has recently released its social media offering, Google+, in a package looking very much like Facebook but having a few notable functional differences that could give the preeminent social network something to be concerned about. Google+ is largely organized around “circles” with which you can share information. This is the most important contribution of Google+ because this arrangement better mirrors actual organization of our social lives, therefore better mirroring and adapting to real life social interactions. Like a vinn diagram, for those diagram geeks out there, you can have multiple circles and those circles overlap as social circles tend to do. Most importantly with every post you choose which circles should be informed, and which should not, allowing you to use Google+ at work and choose against informing all of your colleagues. This solves one of the greatest flaws I have long seen with Facebook: lumping everyone, from loose acquaintances to your dearest mother, into one single category of “friend.” I am well aware that Facebook has, for some time, allowed you to group your friends into various categories and manage what they can see and not see however this functionality has always seemed an afterthought and a bit tedious to manage. With Google+ the underlying assumption is that you have a complex web of relationships that call for different levels of information and from the moment the relationship is made, by adding someone to your circles, you define that relationship.

Somewhat brilliantly, by allowing you to better manage the flow of information to your acquaintances based on relationships you define, Google+ has straddled the line between open and closed social networks. The network with whom you are sharing is as large or as small as you want it. With G+ you are not asked to confirm a friend, but given the opportunity to “follow back” or not if you choose, making the creation of relationships far closer to Twitter than it is to Facebook. While it is still not clear to me after only a few days of use what the dynamics of this will be, and how information will be shared if one or the other is not “circled” by the other, it is quite clear that the process will not require a direct “approval” of a person as a contact. Twitter, in its default settings, behaves much the same way with one very large difference: there is no way to throttle information based on the receiving party. If your boss tries to follow you on Twitter, private account or not, you can only say yes or no. With G+ you can accept with an asterisk, keeping that person in a circle but keeping that circle as informed as you deem appropriate.

By the way Google Buzz has been added as part of Google Plus, making the platform a great deal like Facebook with Twitter-like Buzz built in.

There are a few other important things to note as well.

Mobile: Google+ has not yet released an iPhone or iPad app which, of course, are at the forefront of our mobile media universe and very necessary for the likes of me to access Plus with any regularity. The Android app is available already which, I certainly hope, does not surprise you. The web app for Google Plus Mobile is the dullest interface I have ever seen and reinforces my belief that HTML5 based mobile web apps are a shoddy way, at best, to reach a mobile market. While it is slightly better than nothing it is very limited in what you see and how you interact, therefore on mobile I have often simply viewed it through the desktop interface which kind of works sometimes.

Images: The display of images is gorgeous, in my opinion, and is designed to maximize use of screen space to display large thumbnail images. Scrolling over an image in the album display page is an easy way to get a clear preview of the image, though the thumbnails are already quite large. Clicking on an image brings up a huge, easily navigable, lightbox-type picture theater in your browser window that is far larger than that found on Facebook.

Basic reaction: Google+ is very much a day late to this game but it is not a dollar short. G+ improves on the functions of the two major social networks, Twitter and Facebook, while lacking a bit on mobile accessibility which, I can only imagine, will be sorted out shortly.

Google+ may have done with social networking what Gmail did for email when it was introduced: refined it very effectively. Being tied directly into the Gmail user base should give it a good boost but the question is: does anyone need another social network?

Posted by admin on 4/19/2011

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Data Breaches Spiked to New Highs in 2010

According to a new report by Verizon and the U.S. Secret Service, a record number of data breaches were reported in 2010, though the number of compromised records dropped dramatically to 4 million in 2010 from 144 million in 2009. That the “all-time lowest amount of data loss” was recorded alongside the “all-time highest amount of incidents investigated” presents a strange juxtaposition. The report conjectures that the most likely reason for the disparity is that cyber criminals are penetrating security breaches by pursuing smaller, “opportunistic” attacks rather than large-scale attacks. Read full article…

Posted by admin on 9/20/2010

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Why Tweeting Only Sounds Ridiculous

For months I avoided it. I knew it was coming, after all I am a complete addict for social media, but also knew that I might not emerge before my eyes went blind from screen-itis.

I joined the now ever-present Twitter a few months ago as an experiment. I had no idea what it was, why it was, or how it was and as a matter of fact the only thing I did know is that it was becoming somewhat obnoxiously wide spread. So, in search of my own ability to stay relevant I signed up (ok you can follow thinkingpress here) and ever so slowly I started to get it.

For those of you who might have been pulling an ostrich the last few months Twitter is a single action website for sharing things with other people. No, it doesn’t do anything else, and even on that task it limits you to 140 characters. So you may be asking yourself what on earth is the point of a sharing service that doesn’t let you share anything outside of a short sentence, what is the point is what I asked and I love my point of view enough to have a blog.

I had already missed the point, of course. Twitter is the inevitable current end point of the simplification of online communication to a remarkably simple and surprisingly effective task: sharing information. Be it an article, a thought, a picture, a video or an exclaimation people tend to want to share these days. This is important because the heart of any community is in what they share and while it used to be that, for the most part, that meant sharing a socio-economic standing and a geographical location today it means sharing information, sharing a point of view, sharing knowledge.

Sure, there are still so called “brick and mortar” communities and there always will be, but a larger more complex human community is being built every day at a rate that I don’t think we realize. I share ideas, information, pictures and conversation with people I will likely never meet or never need to meet however I have become inexplicably more connected to the world around me. Yesterday for instance, on a monitoring service for twitter called Twitscoop, I found out within 3 minutes of it occuring that there had been an earthquake in Los Angeles. Not a single news outlet covered the (low magnitude) quake, however I was clearly informed of it in enough time to call my brother in said city within 6 minutes of it happening.

Human networks are only just beginning to fruitfully use the internet as a medium, and even further behind on understanding it, but we are moving toward a world that creates clear and relevant connections between people of all races, faiths and geographical locales. We are more connected than we have ever been and the impact on our world has only barely begun to rise over our collective horizon. At my age my father remembers the first computer, an enormous punch card machine with maybe a few kilobytes of memory, where do you think we’ll be in 50 years at this rate?

Posted by admin on 8/29/2010

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Is Google Failing?

For years now I have been in awe of Google™. It is a monstrously large company with a market capitalization of 162 billion which, for a time, seemed to have innovation coded down to a science. Today, however, things seem to be changing for the enormous company and it makes me wonder about the health of the company and the outlook for its future. Now, to be fair, Google™ has plenty of successes to point to. Google™ search is still the top search engine in the United States by some measure despite intense competition from Microsoft’s newest baby: Bing. Gmail, their web based mail service, is easily one of the finest email and webmail products since the introduction of the medium and the related value added services of Google™ Calendar, and Docs remain incredibly strong competition to industry standbys provided by Microsoft Exchange/Office and Hotmail. Android and Chrome have seen a great deal of excitement and some success in capturing market share, especially in the case of the mobile market with Android as recent numbers show. But there are also significant projects that have failed, in some cases miserably, to meet expectations and these require a close look. The first of these is Google Wave, one of the most hyped web technologies this decade, which failed to meet anything close to the expectation heaped on top of it by company leaders. While it was supposed to revolutionize communications it very simply did not, it ended up answering the question nobody asked as it combined the idea of real-time with the existing ideas of chat, collaborative documents and commenting. The design was clumsy, the case for use was vague and ultimately indiscernible, and the user interface left you feeling confused about what exactly you were doing here and all this has led to the service being largely abandoned. Despite enormous effort Google simply failed to deliver. Another example of, albeit more subtle, failure was the introduction of the once all important “G-Phone” the Nexus One. As Google ratcheted up a brewing war against Apple Computer after a falling out between the two companies it invested itself for the first time in manufacturing a handset to rival the smartphone market leader: the iPhone. While the phone was indeed well reviewed upon its launch it has only been in the news recently because large carriers have dropped the device from their line (Sprint and Verizon have both canceled their plans to carry the device). While Android continues to do relatively well in the smartphone market it is quite clear that Google’s attempt to enter the handset market was simply half-assed and failed to deliver true innovation. Coming down the road we have another large scale attempt from Google to show itself as a major hardware technology innovator with its coming tablet, allegedly being being developed with Verizon, hyped as an “iPad Killer.” I would hazard to guess at this point that this product will likely not come too close to killing the wildly popular new iPad for one clear reason: poor product development. Apple, a company that has exploded in the technology world with products like the iPod, iPhone and now the iPad, has made a science out of creating highly functional and appealing products that meet or exceed incredibly high levels of hype. Google has shown that, while it may be a major hardware player one day, its product development process is far from that of the leading company and it seems to lack a certain level of innovative creativity keeping their products from reaching that soaring plateau Apple live upon. Whether Google will overcome what, I believe, is an innovation block akin to writers block is yet to be seen. It seems clear however that Google can be beat and likely will be consistently unless something within the company changes.