Tag Archives: social

I guess someone agrees with me…

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Forrester on social/lifestyle apps:

He believes that the current crop of trendy social businesses like the location-based, check-in social network, Foursquare, are “nonsense” — and they will eventually be swept away in a new “post-social era”. This is because these services require more time of users… time that users cannot give.

Colony says that people in the Western world are “using social” more than they are volunteering, praying, using the phone, emailing and exercising. In fact we are using social just a little bit less than shopping and childcare.

“We believe social is running out of hours. We’ve reached the limit of hours that people can give to social,” he says.

 

I agree, as I mentioned earlier, that we do not have space nor time to check-in to 3 – 4 different apps. I still struggle with seeing Facebook take this one. Mobile is about simplicity and ease of use. I’d argue Facebook is not good in either.

Does your phone know more about your lifestyle than you do?

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In the past few weeks I have been playing around with a number of interesting new mobile apps on my iPhone. I have started calling them “Lifestyle apps” for a number of reasons. First of all they are primarily mobile and as such I have them always with me – ready to be used when I whip up my iPhone. Second, they have a very basic and simple use  case – they collect information about how, were and with whom I spend my time. Third, they are inherently social – I can share the above mentioned information with my friends, family and anyone else who cares. They may have different approaches to how they do this but one way or another they know more about my lifestyle than anyone else. So what are they?

OINK
This is a little new app from a company called Milk, started by entrepreneur and investor Kevin Rose. The main idea of Oink is to allow you to rate anything, anywhere. You go around places and Oink stuff. Slowly you build up credibility in certain areas (I am going after hamburgers and coffee) and with the amount of Oinks growing, your opinion matters more and more in rankings of products, services, etc… I guess what the creators are trying to build is a universal ranking system for any experience by mining the user generated Oinks (sounds dirty). The app is beautiful and rather easy to use. There is not much content in it yet (in Europe) so I wouldn’t go there looking for recommendations just yet. But the experience is great and I think they are on to something.

Path
If there was a contest for the most beautiful app on the iPhone (now that I think about it, there probably is) I’d vote for Path. The user experience and design on the new 2.0 version of Path for iPhone are amazing. The core job of Path is to track your life via different types of content you share with the app. At any point in time you can open the app and take a picture, share your location, say who you are with, just write a note and other things. This content is placed on a simple timeline with date and time tags that track you better than the FBI. The idea attracts me because it is much more personal in a sense that you are collecting this information for yourself as a kind of journal. You could in theory go to the app in 20 years and track where you have been and scroll through your encounters and experiences. I don’t see any rankings, recommendations or algorithms that would hint at a business model for the company which actually makes me feel better about the app.

Foursquare
I guess most people have heard of Foursquare by now. If not, know just that it is the first successful location based app that won the contest for THE check-in app against Gowalla (acquired last week by Facebook). This app takes a different approach to your lifestyle than the others – it is about gamefication. You check-in at different locations, score points for various things (100th hamburger joint in 100 days,…), leave tips about them and share with friends. The point I guess is to be the go to place for location. What attracts most people is who leads in the rankings of most check-ins and points, which to be honest is not that big with me. I do check the app for interesting tips when I am traveling though.

Instagram
The last of the apps I will mention may seem more of a photography app than lifestyle. But don’t be fooled – Instagram is one of the most popular iPhone apps because it combines a classy design, artsy feel and easy to use user interface. Taking a picture with it and making it look great is very easy and many people use it as a consequence. But most people don’t realize that an important part of Instagram is the fact that you share your location (if you want) when taking a picture and that you are sharing it on Facebook, Twitter and others. As such Instagram has a trail of where you have been and what did you experience in the form of a beautiful stream of pictures shared on social networks.

So why did I just spend a lot of your time with a simple description of these apps?

Once you start using them you will realize that there isn’t space for 4 of them and trust me there are a lot more of them on the App Store. I felt ridiculous at dinner today, checking in with 4 of them, taking pictures with each and writing different statuses. And I don’t think people want to take a picture, write some text and share their location with each service in the same way. They want a specific simple experience of tracking their lifestyle and sharing it with friends. So I think we will experience a boom of these lifestyle apps in the near term after which there will be consolidation in the market and we will have a few winners and a lot of losers (Gowalla was maybe the first to go, though being acquired by Facebook isn’t bad I guess).  What I do find interesting is the different approaches the four I mentioned have to tackling the same problem. Will the less complex single use case apps like Instagram beat the more sophisticated ones like Path or Oink?

What do you think? Do you track your life in an app?

One more thing: I found really surprising is that I did not use Facebook to check-in, take a picture or write a status update. For me Facebook is not a mobile app. It is too cluttered, crude, generic and confusing. Maybe it is just me but I don’t use it to create content, I just feed it from the other apps. Should that worry Mark Zuckerberg? Maybe, maybe not – he always said Facebook is a platform for sharing and connecting.

Google+

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On wednesday Google did what many expected for quite some time – they launched a Facebook competitor.

In the beginning the web was about static content. While that was fine as long as the web was small, people started to have increasingly issues finding things efficiently. First search engines popped up and companies like Yahoo or Ask emerged as the first ones to try and help the user. But the company that brought order to the chaos was not Microsoft (sorry for the Borg joke) but a new up and coming company – Google. They brought about the first real consumer web. Information accessible within seconds all over the world. 

But this freedom to find anything and create content in seconds led to another issue. With the web proliferating everywhere we find ourselves today overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available. Now when searching for specific things you still get thousands and thousands of results. How is a normal consumer supposed to wrap his head around this. Add to this demand based content and search spam and you get a massive problem. 

But it turns out this problem can be solved by a basic idea – curation. We realize today we need our friends, colleagues and experts to curate information on the internet for us. Each of us can contribute to curating the web so that when searching for specifics we find what we need by asking them. Hence social and the success of Twitter and Facebook.

Google cannot index Facebook (well only public stuff) and so they needed a way to capture the connections and relationships between users and get that into the algorithm. Google+ is an ambitious project to revolutionize Google's index and in turn improve search. With Circles people will not only make their relationships with others available to Google – they will also handover the nature of those relationships. A clear pattern will show itself in time – who are my friends, who are colleagues, who are the people I respect and follow, who follows me and so forth. These can be used to sort shared links, +1 items and more.

While I do not think Google+ is yet ready – there are clear omissions in the first iteration – Facebook should watch very carefully. The simple and beautiful UI, definitely inspired by some of the stuff Apple does, interesting relationship management tools and Hangouts  are compelling features at least for me.

I will be watching Google+ carefully, now I just need my social graph to join. Google has 700 million users to catch up to.

Why Twitter is more valuable to me in the long run than Facebook

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Today I read an interesting guest post on Techcrunch in in which Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin argued why Twitter is undervalued compared to Facebook. Their arguments try to compare the position of both companies towards capitalizing on their respective grasp on your social graph. Now I do not want to talk about monetary valuation of the companies, I'll leave that to the experts but I want to talk about value the services provide.

On Friday I had an interesting session on Networking at Vlerick with Jan Vermeiren, an expert on Networking. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that in fact the power of your personal network is actually in the second degree. What this means is that the first degree – people you actually know directly – are not really the point of building a network. The point is actually to get to the second degree, the people they know. You will need people outside your network to achieve your goals more often than not and therefore the second degree is very important.

Now how does this go together with Twitter and Facebook? Your social graph on Facebook is by default private to you and so most people actually interact only within their network. From the beginning the rise of Facebook was powered by people wanting to reconnect with old friends while still maintaining their privacy and not interacting in public. On Twitter the situation is reverse. Everything is public by default and I can actually see what most people are discussing, I can search through the stream of information and access almost any of it. While some people choose to hide their tweets, in my experience the majority is public. This means that via Twitter I have potentially access to all degrees of my network and can therefore grow my network. Long term I think this will provide me with much more value, although those people I'll meet and befriend I'll probably add as friends on Facebook.

In the end we have seen Facebook trying to lure people towards opening up on Facebook and making more information public. From my personal perspective that goes against why I am using Facebook. That is the place where I am connected with my real friends and not the place where I want to leverage my network. Twitter on the other hand is like a personal publishing platform for the whole public. If I have interesting stuff to say there is a lot of people listening.