Social media frenzy and Obama's death

So the last few weeks we've been seeing somewhat of a Social Media frenzy among Social Media users. With Google+ going live (nicely hyping it by limiting access calling it a 'beta'), Facebook reacting with its new Video chat functionality and Twitter.... Well Twitter kept silent. The only news on that front: the hacking of a Fox News account starting to proclaim Obama's death.

Still that last titbit of information intrigues me... Not because a Verified twitter account was hacked or that twitter is staying remarkebly silent about Google+ but because the 'Obama news' generally didn't cause much of a stir at all. In fact, reading the different reactions I'd say people mostly just shrugged it off.

There used to be a time that when a renowned or at least well known media source or paper would publish something everybody would simply believe it. If the morning paper or the tv-presenter said so most people wouldn't doubt that. They had limited resources to verify and generally just trusted the journalists to have done their homework.
Ok, yes I know this was more then a decade ago but still you'd be surprised how many people still believe in the integrity of journalism and regard a well known news agency, network or newspaper name as an instant proof of validity.

So when the FOX account started spewing out messages about Obama's death I kind of expected a certain part of the internet population to start blindly retweeting this, like they retweet all kind of nonsense.... It didn't happen (or at least not as blindly as I would expect it)! In fact the tweets I saw about it all identified the fact the account was hacked.
I think that's great, it proves we're starting to mature into the new age of unlimited access of information. Instead of blindly believing and following what others say or write we try to verify. We take a more sceptical approach to news and news suppliers and check up on more sources before believing it. And... we're more aware about the dangers of hacking.

I know most of you won't see this as anything special but I really think it is. Not so long ago I tutored a group of senior citizens on using a computer. This was a challenge to say the least. For their age these people were advanced as they actually were interested in learning this new phenomonon. In all truth though some of them struggled to even grasp the simplest concept of mail or internet information. Teaching them to be vigilant with what they could and what they shouldn't believe (phising, hoaxes, spam, unvalidated information) really was a hell of a job. They were used to libraries with books that had been edited, scrutenized and categorized into nice definitive catogories like 'science' and 'fiction'. So all that unvalidated info confused them.
Similarily intriguing I think is the group of youngsters, that although generally pretty well aware of the lack of validation on certain internet information still choses to believe blindly sometimes. Is it stupidity or lazyness, I'm not sure but I do find it fascinating how easliy they sometimes just take the internet info as fact.

So the lack of response to the Obama news shows we're getting there. We are learning how to digest the info that is out there in cyberspace and when a supposedly verified Social Media account starts announcing the US president's death we are critical and don't get into a frenzy.

Now if we could only do the same when a major internet company announces the hottest new Social Media network....
;-)

Google+..... Searching for the plus....

After waiting impatiently for days to get into Google+ I got in. Excited to check out all the new features I started exploring. That took me about 10 minutes. "Is that it?".... Yep that was it. Than real life caught up with me along with a major workflow project going life and a bunch of support request that buried me up to my armpits. It just lost that 'WOW!' factor, that made me jump through hoops to get in, really rapidly.

The one thing I had really high expectations of was the idea of the circles but at the same time it makes me so conscious about what I'm posting to which circle that I find myself hardly posting at all.

The same seems to be going on on the other side and the posts that I do see from my most active Social media connections seem to be mostly on Google+ itself. Another effect is that from certain people I now get only their 'business' content. Ok yes, I'm not calling them friends, most not even acquaintances but by reading not just their business content but also their quirky, personal, sometimes funny, sometimes sad messages they become alive to me. Keeping me interested and keeping me reading. Someone that posts just a lot of technical stuff I tend to loose interest in real quickly. Call me a sucker but I just love the 'social' in social media.

So am I won for Google+ ? Not exactly yet. Am I going to use it? Definitely! Probably a bit more after it gets picked up by Social Media tools like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and Yoono. Because for now I don't see myself being weaned of Twitter and/or Facebook any time soon and updating all those networks separately is just too much of a hassle.

Anyway, if you want to add me to your Google+ circles then please do (Profile) and let me know what your opinion is. I'd love to hear! Who knows. Maybe we can 'Hangout'. Haven't had a chance to test that feature out yet anyway :-)

Still no access to Google+.... Getting frustrated!

Grrr.... Everybody seems to be tweeting and blogging about Google+ and I'm still waiting for my invite to arrive (yes I finally got someone to send me one, it just hasn't arrived yet!). So I'm left waiting for Google+ to open up or the invite to arrive. And in the mean time all I can do is watch the demo..... Yeah nice.

Does give me the time to do some senseless scrutinizing of the site though... Which of course I did (love senseless scrutinizing!).

So on the demo site you can switch languages, not something I would normally do, prefer English over botched up Dutch anytime, but in this case I tried (for lack of better things to try). And the first thing I notice is that the "You" in the left upper corner is translated into "U" (formal form of 'you' in Dutch). But in the screen print on the screen itself it's called "Jij" (informal form of 'you' in Dutch).

So, what does this tell us?!?

1. Google isn't sure how to address their users in Dutch (formal or informal)

2. I desperately need to get into Google+ before I start writing even more of these idiotic blogs!

Social networking in RL

I got this link from a tweet someone sent and checked it out. Nice presentation clearly when linked to the whole Google+ hype at the moment. What I found most intriguing though was the creators little bio. It said "I find out what things people need and care about, and help other people design and build those things. Work @ Facebook. Ex-Google".

Ok! Now I expected a link with Google, wasn't expecting the link to Facebook though. So as I stated in my earlier blog I guess it won't take long for these new and exciting options in Google+ (that for me still remain to be seen due to lack of invitation!) to make their way into Facebook.
Still, this presentation really is worth checking out. Even if its over a year old!

The Real Life Social Network v2

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True colors

This has been a very strange week in many aspects. On the one hand there was this Lotus community call with the very provocative title "Is the Lotus Brand Going Away?" and on the other hand I had a very important personal engagement that absorbed about all of my spare time and therefore limiting my possibilities of following what was going on in the community.

Now I listened to the Community call as did about 200 others and more importantly I followed the chat because that was where the real discussion seemed to be going on. The reason for that was that with that title IBM stirred up a very fundamental topic about the future of Lotus as a brand that has been going on for a while in the community.  But the presentation that was given didn't even mention the word "Lotus". This brought on a storm of comments in the chat followed by blog posts and twitter remarks all week long. The 'yellow' community seemed on fire and it wasn't positive. Now I'll admit, I was disappointed by this community call as well but still the negativity in some of the remarks really surprised me. Ed Brill's explanatory blog yesterday hopefully calms things down a bit.

To be honest, I do not know what to make of it all. I mean IBM changing product and brand names isn't a new thing. I can still remember one of the first meetings we had with the Domino Document Manager Redbook team in which we actually discussed which, of the many names the product had during its life cycle, we would use in the Redbook.
And let's face it, the Lotus brand name is definitely loosing out with customers. After years of Lotus bashing by competitors and radio silence on the marketing side from IBM there's just too much negative spin around it. Even if the products themselves are great. And that makes it an easy target. It's becoming more and more about the name and less about the products. So maybe re-branding the Lotus products to benefit from the much stronger IBM brand is the best way to go.

Now of course there is the underlying question of what the future is of Notes and Domino. That's actually where the real pain is in all this. The fact that the Lotus name is so deeply ingrained in these products and the fear that with loosing the brand we will also loose these products is what really caused this stir in the first place. 
In his blog post Ed Brill took this question head on: "Some ask whether Notes/Domino have a place to fit in that story. The answer is yes". I choose believe him. These are great products and even if they wouldn't be under the Lotus brand name they definitely have a future. We just need to get out of the defensive position they've had in the last few years and concentrate on developing the radical and exciting new features that will take them into the next age. Re-branding them therefore could actually be a good thing, if done right.

Will that hurt? Definitely, especially within this lovely yellow community that has taken so much pride in promoting the Lotus brand for so long. And re-branding to Big Blue alone wouldn't be enough so I'm curious to see what is going to happen.

Change is always scary and it isn't always to the best but in this case I think it could the beginning of a new and exciting future and more importantly, I think it's needed. So bring it on, I'm sure we can handle it..!

Could I offer you; another social network?

I'll admit it, I'm really curious to see what the Google+ project is all about! No, I don't have an invitation and judging on this post I probably will have to wait a while before I get one. But when I do I will certainly give it a try!

Even though its not even fully accessible yet, opinions are already given on its merits and potential. And even though I've only seen the slick presentations and haven't had a chance to explore it myself. My first reaction is leaning towards the ones that don't really see a future for this new social platform here......

 The reason being that this market has already more or less been conquered by Facebook.
Why would a user move over to Google+ when almost everything they can do there is available (or will most likely be available shortly) on Facebook, twitter or LinkedIn? You don't want to start all over again after you spent months/years building your social network, do you?!?

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Facebook and Twitter will remain dominant in this market forever but I do think that any replacement will have to offer a lot more then some shiny new features to wean their target audience of them.

So what would it take me to be convinced to really switch over to let say Google+?
Apart from new functionalities (Hangouts, Huddles and Circles definitely look interesting!) I guess the main feature that could win me over would be a possibility of using the functionality without loosing my already existing social network. So instead of having to convince all my friends of Google+ benefits to get them to move over I would like a system that allows me to invite my existing Twitter/Facebook contacts to the new functionalities like Hangouts, Huddles and Circles allowing them to log in with their existing Twitter/Facebook credentials.

Mmm... nice for the user but how would this benefit Google+? Well, simply allow users with a foreign (eg Twitter or Facebook) account to use the functionality when invited, but build in a catch like not allowing them to initiate new Huddles, Hangouts, etc. This limits them in their usage and at the same time shows them the benefits of moving over. Then as deal closer offer them an easy registration process that copies in all the relevant data, pictures and information from their Twitter/Facebook account. Effectively eliminating their need to manually recreate their social profile. That, I think would make it a really strong contender. As said before, I haven't seen the darn thing yet, so who knows, maybe some of this is already in it. 

But even if all this was possible there's one more reason why I think Google+ could struggle:..... Its commercial.

I mean there is no illusion what Google's main purpose in life is: To sell adds. So joining a network exposing all of my personal interests and contact information to a company who's using that info to sell me goods.....I don't know......
Then again, Facebook isn't that idealogic student startup either anymore and is there really anything Google doesn't know about us already?!?

Future will tell how this will all pan out. It'll either be another Google Wave or maybe the new Facebook. Whatever it's going to be, it'll certainly be a thing to keep an eye out for!