Skeptic Geek

Tracking the Google vs. Facebook Race

On February 2, 2010, In Social Web, By Mahendra

On this blog, I have been keenly observing the race between Google and Facebook towards a relevant real-time, opining earlier that Google Social Search is likely to win in the long run.

New developments in this race:

Google Social Search came out of labs into Open Beta, but made little use of your Facebook social graph.
Facebook’s response? No new features, just a simple blog post detailing how you can personalize it as a news reader. Marshall Kirkpatrick details why it’s likely to succeed.

This race is not about reading news, but whether you spend more time searching on Google or browsing Facebook. It is about whether you seek out information on the web, or prefer to consume interesting content shared by your friends.

Opinions from the blogosphere lie at both ends of the spectrum. Scoble talked about the expanding Google reef with anticipation, while Mark Hopkins asks if we should give up on Google as a social entity. Others reveal Google’s stealth social network and speculate on a Facebook phone. And while this post was being written, Scoble has discussed how Google is taking on both Apple and Facebook and is rooting for them to win.

Google’s Social Challenge

Will Google’s approach to social networking work? Will Google’s SWAT team help? See these 5 observations about the difference between Facebook and Google Social Search. As expected, when it comes to Search, Google has the upper edge in relevancy. But the problem?

Remember the iPad demo? Steve Jobs demoed Facebook, not Google Search. Engagement on social networks is affecting the search business, as Tac Anderson observed. The rest of them use computers because their friends do, and they do that to see what their friends on Facebook are up to, not to search for information on Google.

Another issue with the Google Social Circle is that Facebook and other social networks have conditioned people into adding friends. How do I add a friend to my Google Social Circle? Expect a backlash from some people: “Google doesn’t allow me to choose my friends, or friends of friends”. Google’s Social Circle is a concept that may appeal only to geeks. If users are dissatisfied with their social search results, they’ll turn to Facebook and ask their friends. That will be much simpler than trying to understand and tweak your social circle.

Google is walking on thin ice here, while Facebook is on firm ground.

Facebook’s Challenge?

It is obvious that Facebook has already won the social networking war. It is years ahead of Google in the social race. So has it won the war? Not yet.

Google is years ahead of Facebook in making money and running a steady profitable business.

Why is this important? Because Facebook and Twitter will always be crappy businesses, says the founder of Tripod, Bo Peabody, in a not-surprisingly unpopular post. Risk averse advertisers stick with tried-and-tested search advertising, and are hesitant with social networks where content is not controlled and businesses have to confront real-time negativity. Even high-profile users are complaining about obnoxious ads in social networks.

Who Will Win?

Search vs. Discovery, Seeking Information vs. Following People, are all different terms for the same two sides of the coin. My take is that both will continue to remain important and popular ways of accessing the web. This leaves room for both Facebook and Google to coexist and profit.

Facebook has a long way to go before it is a sustainable business, while Google has a long way to go in the social web. I am on Google’s side, because I distrust Facebook (for e.g. it’s non-portable data portability), and support Google’s SWAT team.

Tagged with: facebook • google

Optimize Google & Google Reader for Widescreen in Chrome

On February 2, 2010, In How To, By Mahendra

If you are using a widescreen monitor with an aspect ratio of 16:9 or 16:10, you will notice that Google Search and Google Reader waste most of the screen real estate on the right side.

Here are two extensions for Google Chrome that you might find useful.

Dual-Pane Google Search

The searchw Chrome Extension creates a partition on the right, in which you can preview the results of your Google Search. Effectively, it turns your Google Results into a kind of Table of Contents and the experience is like viewing PDF files.

searchw Chrome extn

You can open a result in a new tab and reduce/enlarge the frame sizes. It also comes with hotkey support.

Google Reader for Widescreen

This Greasemonkey script for making Google Reader widescreen-friendly was earlier made popular by Gina Trapani at Lifehacker for Firefox. With native support for Greasemonkey, it now works like a charm in Google Chrome.

Google Reader Default

Google Reader Widescreen

The best part of this script is that it works automatically in the background requiring no user interaction at all.

If you’re using a widescreen monitor, do check these out.

Tagged with: chrome • google • google reader • widescreen

What Does Google Suggest About iPad?

On January 28, 2010, In Miscellaneous, By Mahendra

It’s too early, but here’s a sign of what’s coming:

Google on iPad

Tagged with: google • ipad

The Real Tablet Revolution

On January 27, 2010, In Personal, By Mahendra

This is the slate I used growing up as a school kid. There was sibling rivalry over whose was shinier or had a larger “screen size”.

Slate

They are still used by some school children in India. Millions of them go to school today like this (image credit):

School Bags

With heavy burdens on their back, no wonder they hate going to school.

When Steve Jobs unveils the Apple Tablet in a few hours from now, I will be part of the thousands who will witness this revolutionary device remotely. But the real revolution in my mind will happen when such devices become mainstays in educational institutions worldwide.

apple_tablet

No doubt the tablet will be great for entertainment, gaming, reading, and news consumption. But no other application has a greater, lasting impact, than that which revolutionizes learning.

As Joe Wilcox describes it, a “unified content platform, mixing different media types and live information” holds tremendous potential during the formative young years of our lives.

Imagine a classroom where students had access to live information about any topic under the sun. That is the world I want my kid to grow up in. When that happens, it will be the real tablet revolution.

Tagged with: education • tablet

New RTs with @Replies and Localized Trending Topics

On January 26, 2010, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

This post is a collection of small observations that may not be individually “post-worthy”.

New Style ReTweets with @Replies

We all know that @Replies to you are visible only in the home timeline of those following both you and the sender. Thus you will not see the following tweet unless you were following both @ScepticGeek and @LayeredByte:

Now, if I do an old style ReTweet by prefixing it with RT as below, my ReTweet is visible to everyone who follows me, even if they don’t follow @LayeredByte.

But what if I do a new style ReTweet? A new style ReTweet will not prefix anything, and is effectively the same as an @Reply. The question in my mind was:

Are new style ReTweets of @Replies visible to everyone who follows you (and not only to those following both)?

Some quick searching on Google did not yield an answer. Twitter’s help on @Replies and ReTweets does not clarify this, nor does Evan William’s post explaining organic RTs. So with the help of my colleague @MadLid, I performed a quick test.

I retweeted her @Reply to me from my @ScepticGeek account, and checked if the new style ReTweet appeared in my @Palsule account from which I was not following her:

Voilà! Even if @Palsule is not following @MadLid, her @Reply to @ScepticGeek appeared in @Palsule’s home timeline when @ScepticGeek did a new style ReTweet of her @Reply.

If you’re wondering “what’s the big deal?”, there is none. This is what geeks like me who like to experiment and pay attention to detail do. I did not find it documented anywhere, hence doing it here.

Note that this is how RTs should work, and Twitter has implemented them in the correct way. When you ReTweet, you want all your followers to see it, irrespective of whether they’re following the original tweeter or not. Thus, in a way, I am also applauding Twitter’s developers for bypassing the @Reply visibility restriction when they implemented organic RTs.

I also find it amazing that people are already using what is actually a “feature”, without realizing it.

Localized Trending Topics

Last week, Twitter started rolling out localized trends. On November 9th last year, Twitter announced its Trends API. Here is what I had tweeted hours before that happened, while it was still November 8th in the US:

Disclosure Policy

Just a note that I have added a disclosure policy on the blog.

Tagged with: localized trends • organic retweets • Twitter

If You’re Removing Features, Please Tell Your Users!

On January 20, 2010, In Social Web, By Mahendra

Software companies love to announce new features with great fanfare on their blogs. This is understandable given the thirst we cool geeks have for improved functionality. What is not understandable is when they remove existing features and appear to shove that under the carpet as if nobody will notice.

I am sure this happens all the time, but recent examples led to this post. It is also interesting that these two have something in common.

“Followed People” Widget in Feedly

I have already discussed how Google Reader lacks people discovery. In the past, I used a nifty little feature in Feedly to overcome this limitation in Google Reader. When you viewed a user’s profile in Feedly, it used to show who that person was following in Google Reader. I used this to discover several good people to follow. Good people are not just great at curating content, but also in filtering people to follow. This people discovery feature essentially helps you use people you already know, to help filter whom to follow.

For the past couple of months, I fiddled around with Feedly in vain, and could not find the widget that showed who the person was following. Ultimately, I resorted to asking for support on Get Satisfaction, where Feedly confirmed that the feature has been “removed”.

“Follow People” in BackType

When someone you like comments on a blog post, you have a double-incentive for reading that post. Not only did the person read the post, but found it worthwhile to comment on it. BackType offered a great way to discover interesting blog posts, as it let you follow people’s comments around the web.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to use BackType’s follow feature in vain. I read and re-read their FAQ dozens of times, but the method explained in the FAQ just didn’t work. Again, it was confirmed on Get Satisfaction that the follow people feature has been “removed”.

Trimming Features Helps Make Great Products

Removing features can be as important as implementing new ones. It is essential to focus on enhancing the 20% features used by 80% of users, and constantly prune the rest.

Both Feedly and BackType are great products and I love them. I have promoted Feedly on the popular MakeUseOf blog. What I am not happy about is the lack of communication when removing features.

Transparency Builds Trust

Both Feedly and BackType are modern Web 2.0 apps/services. They both have a blog, which they use to announce new features in latest versions. They’re both on Twitter. Why aren’t these social media tools put to use for better communication?

I spent many hours trying to access these features in Feedly and BackType. I tried with different versions of different browsers, trying to troubleshoot the issue. A simple mention in a blog post would have saved me a lot of time. Backtype’s FAQ was outdated and incorrect, while Feedly doesn’t even have its own FAQ.

If it is perceived that removing features doesn’t make for good announcements, I think that would be very short-sighted. Since the features that are being discontinued are those rarely used, it doesn’t make any difference to the majority of your users. Those who use them are more satisfied if they are kept better informed. In cases like these, having to resort to GetSatisfaction doesn’t give me any satisfaction.

Tagged with: backtype • feedly

Is Seesmic With Ping.fm Attractive For A Twitter Acquisition?

On January 12, 2010, In Microblogging, By Mahendra

At the start of this year, Seesmic bought Ping.fm enabling status updates across 50 social networks. Mark Hopkins elaborated on why this is a threat to Twitter.

Scobleizer talks about Twitter’s declining traffic and offers suggestions for improvement, which people commenting on the post say would turn Twitter into FriendFeed/Facebook.

Seesmic’s Ping.fm acquisition had led me to wonder if that makes it a perfect candidate for a Twitter acquisition. Marshall Kirkpatrick seemed to agree.

Would it make sense for Twitter to acquire Seesmic and Ping.fm?

Does Twitter want to build its own social network and fight against Facebook? Contrary to what you might think, Evan Williams says Twitter is not a social network.

Twitter’s strategy is to be the “Pulse of the Planet”. What better way to become that pulse than be the conduit that people use across 50 social networks? This would bolster Jack Dorsey’s vision of Twitter’s success as Twitter becoming infrastructure.

When the goal of a service is to become the nervous system of the real-time web, the traffic to its website doesn’t matter. The pulse of the online world lies in status updates people make on various social networks. I am sure that Seesmic, with Ping.fm’s half a million users, looks a very attractive option for Twitter to grab that pulse.

The scenario can look gloomy for the open web, with the social graph of users in the hands of Facebook, and real-time pulse in the hands of Twitter.

Tagged with: seesmic • Twitter

Facebook’s Non-Portable Data Portability

On January 11, 2010, In Social Web, By Mahendra

A few thoughts about Zuckerberg’s revelations about changes in Facebook privacy, how it relates to data portability, and why this matters.

Facebook is officially part of the Data Portability project. Neither does Facebook allow you to backup or archive your data, nor does it permit any third-party applications to do so. If Facebook was so far using user privacy as an excuse for not allowing data portability, that excuse no longer exists. If Zuckerberg worried about his credibility at all, we should soon see legitimate ways of exporting your Facebook social graph. But obviously, we won’t.

When you own the world’s largest social network with over 350m people, credibility is not an issue.

Facebook supports Data Portability. Surprised? Facebook’s implementation of data portability is called Facebook Connect (italics mine):

These are just a few steps Facebook is taking to make the vision of data portability a reality for users worldwide. We believe the next evolution of data portability is about much more than data. It’s about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings.

We look forward to working with other leading identity providers to develop the best policies and standards for enabling the portability and protection of users’ information.

In contrast, the Data Portability Project’s vision is: “Data portability enables a borderless experience, where people can move easily between network services, reusing data they provide while controlling their privacy and respecting the privacy of others.”

By allowing Facebook to claim that it’s part of the data portability project while preventing any data from being ported anywhere outside it’s walled garden, Facebook is making a mockery of open standards. Should groups like the Data Portability Project expel Facebook from its ranks?

Louis Gray has highlighted the issues we have faced for two decades because we did not have OS and Application-neutral data, but were locked-in to the Apple/Microsoft/Google ‘big-three’ silos. In the coming decades, the data that holds the greatest wealth is your social graph data. And instead of big-three, just one company is well on its way to owning it, controlling it, and making money off it.

Tagged with: data portability • facebook • privacy

Google Reader vs. Twitter for Discovery and Sharing

On January 4, 2010, In Social Web, By Mahendra

I started using Google Reader and Twitter for discovering and sharing content at roughly the same time in April last year. I share and tweet almost exactly the same content. After about 8 months, I have over 1100 followers on Twitter vs. 133 on Google Reader.

How do these two stack against each other from a discovery and sharing perspective? As a newcomer to the social web, my experience can be illustrative of any new user of these services.

A Glace At Follower Stats

In less than a year, I have 1100+ followers and am on 130+ Twitter Lists. Neither did the #FollowFriday or @MrTweet recommendations I received lead to any increase in followers, nor did being a Techmeme Editor lead to any surge in followers. My Twitter following has increased organically, steadily, without any positive disruptive event, like a recommendation by an influencer in any blog post or tweet.

On the other hand, I have promoted my Google Reader shares on my blog in a sidebar widget, tweeted and written about Google Reader often, commented on other blog posts discussing Google Reader, and shared my Reader feed on FriendFeed earlier. The only positive disruptive event that increased my Google Reader following was when I was recommended by Holden on TechGeist (the blog is no longer active).

Geographical Perspective

The people I follow on both networks are in US/EU. Even if I live in India, most of the people following me on both networks are also from US/EU. I overcome the local limits of real-time by using Google Reader for discovery. One may expect my Twitter following to be more local and my Google Reader following to be global, but interestingly, this is not the case.

I can tell from my engagement and Retweets on Twitter that my audience is largely global and not local.

The Discovery Angle

There are two aspects of discovery: content and people. It is clear that Google Reader remains a great tool for discovery of content, especially for a non-US/EU person like me. However, Google Reader sucks at discovering great people to follow.

It is easier to find the Twitter profile of a person with a search on Google, than finding his or her Google Profile. FriendFeed remains the best bet for finding Google Reader profiles.

You can easily crawl an influencer’s network on Twitter and use Twitter Lists for discovering great people to follow. Ever tried finding out who an influencer is following on Google Reader?

The Sharing Angle

My shares on Twitter get retweeted and often lead to conversation. Some kind folks practice thanksgiving via attribution when they tweet content they discovered via my Google Reader shares. Both these lead to psychological payback on Twitter in terms of increased followers, mentions, and list memberships.

On Google Reader, my shares disappear into a black hole. I never know when my share was re-shared by others. These re-shares also appear on other user’s FriendFeed and Twitter accounts without any attribution to the curator. Sharing on Google Reader has virtually zero psychological payback, unless you are an established tech celebrity.

Closing Thoughts

Google Reader was designed as a personal RSS feed reader and social features have been added as an after-thought. I was always a skeptic of claims that Google Reader will replace FriendFeed. Google lacks a social network of people, and prefers taking an algorithmic approach to social relevancy. There is no psychological payback for sharing on Google Reader because fundamentally, Google perceives you not as a person, but as a data element whose shares can be indexed and ranked. Is this a reflection of Google’s engineers lacking emotional intelligence or simply a technical limitation? That said, it still remains a great tool for discovery of content, because of RSS.

As a result of all this, I see the influencer-ordinary user pyramid on Google Reader remaining more or less the same in the years to come. There will be a few tech influencers who will get engagement and drive traffic via Google Reader, but its opaque approach to social networking will remain its Achilles’ Heel for ordinary users. This weakness has even given rise to parallel feed-based social networks like Toluu and PostRank. The fundamental problem of monetization of Google Reader also persists.

What this also means is apps and services that use RSS and relevancy algorithms for discovery and ease sharing of content to other social networks (Twitter & Facebook) are well-positioned to diminish Google Reader’s dominance of the feed reader market. Apps like LazyFeed, my6sense, and RSSOwl are some examples. In my opinion, it would be a good strategy for apps like Feedly to disassociate themselves from the Google Reader platform.

Twitter is a great tool for discovery of content, and its transparency makes it a unique tool for discovery of people. This means that the influencer pyramid on Twitter is constantly evolving, unlike Google Reader. Lastly, Twitter rules over Google Reader when it comes to payback for sharing.

Tagged with: google reader • Twitter

A Year of Change and New Beginnings

On December 24, 2009, In Personal, By Mahendra

The year end is a good time to share a bit more about myself, about this blog, and learn more about you. Skeptic Geek started four months ago. Discounting FriendFeed, Feedburner says there are already about 100 “true” subscribers. This really is a surprise.

I come from a world of cubicle farms in the software outsourcing industry and am a complete newbie in the social web. I joined:

Twitter on April 3rd, 2009
Facebook on April 7th, 2009
FriendFeed on May 4th, 2009

My last stay in the US during ‘06-‘08 was to manage the development of a website for the largest automaker in America. The project was to provide 5 million+ auto financing customers with an account self-service website in order to reduce call-center costs. More recently, I worked in embedded software, working with real-estate developers in India to build intelligent digital homes.

My career has been in project management (requirements gathering, people management, scheduling, risk management, etc.), competitive research, proposals, business development and so on. I lived amidst J2EE, EAI, and RFPs. Two years ago, I had not even heard of Twitter or FriendFeed.

In other ways, by some standards, I am a veteran. I sent my first email in ‘89 from India when there were no ISPs here, and browsed the web with Netscape Navigator for the first time in ‘95 from Berlin. The first “computer” I handled was a Sinclair ZX-81, and the first PC in my home was a PC-XT with a 20 MB hard disk. In college, I learnt assembly language programming with the 8085 and 8086 microprocessors.

As you can imagine, this year has been a change in many ways. Taking a break from the enterprise software world, I ventured as a freelancer on the web. My experience is indeed useful to my work, but I found that I had to make a fresh beginning. You might manage a million dollar software project within budget on time, but a high-school tech enthusiast may be better informed, better networked, and write faster blog posts than you.

I started my personal blog on Wordpress.com in Apr ‘07. For the past two years, my personal blog has been an enjoyable hobby for expressing my varied interests. I was a complete stranger in the tech blogging world when I started writing for MakeUseOf.com in Apr ‘09. After a few months, I joined Techmeme. It has been a good year and I feel grateful.

The social network I am most indebted to is FriendFeed. It offered me some of the best and brightest tech minds to network with on a platter. My networking journey, if it were to happen via any other network like LinkedIn, might have taken years. FriendFeed accelerated it to a few months. I have made many good friends there and elsewhere, many of whom have kindly added me to their Twitter Lists.

Road Ahead

These are my humble beginnings this year. I started this blog as a parking lot for my thoughts about online tech developments. My writing at MakeUseOf is for a non-geeky audience, and I wanted a place to pen more insightful posts. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that there would be anyone interested enough to subscribe. While I don’t want to write blog posts under any obligatory pressure, I do want to write regularly, at a slower pace of about a post per week or ten days. At this moment, it’s a long road ahead, and I don’t know what’s lying in store after the next bend.

Are you really out there, dear subscriber? If you would be so kind to let me know, I would be obliged. Do you have any feedback about my posts so far or about the blog in general? Would it be interesting if I bring an occasional India-specific tech angle in my writing that might be amusing or interesting to western audiences? Should I continue writing at all?

Finally, here’s wishing you a Very Happy Christmas and New Year! May we all enjoy a peaceful, connected, and exciting 2010!

Tagged with: blogging • career