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Google's Social Strategy

cdixon.org

31–40 of 44 posts

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#32
IMHO, what Google need are

1. HTML5-based cloud address book app with ease of adding new friends and separating friends into few categories on any mobile phones.

2. decentralized social graph database with no personal information attached, only IDs and relationships in the graph DB.

3. lots social plug-ins which can utilize the graph DB so that any web developers can build their own little facebook for different context.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#33
post #26
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point. Flickr has a grand total of somewhere over 5 billion photos. [1] Facebook adds four billion photos to its collection every month . [2] I agree that many of the best photos will be reshared elsewhere, for now, but think ahead a little: - Facebook could just improve their photo hosting just a bit -- or add a for-pay option to do so -- and then eliminate any other photo hosting site's r…

Flickr is also pretty horrible if you're into photography. There's no systematic way to find good photos (e.g. top average rating). Both Flickr and Facebook are huge garbage dumps of photos. Facebook has absolutely no way to find great photos. Flick has some very limited functionality for it, but it could've been so much better. Neither were build to suit artists. They were designed to be garbage dumps.

Ratings suck for differentiating items on a website. "5 stars" and "1 star" have some meaning, but everything else is worthless. For this and a few other good reasons, Flickr just collapses ratings into "favorites".

Flickr has an algorithm called "interestingness" which tries to guess which photos are worthwhile by looking at social activity and other such metrics. However, I agree that it isn't nearly good enough, if you are a real lover of photography. Flickr Explore tends to be filled with cliche photographic beauty. That said, if you expect a machine to tell you what good art is, you're going to wait a long time.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#34
> Websites care a lot about their Google organic search rankings (which is why, for example, helping websites improve their rankings is multibillion-dollar industry). A button that improved search rankings would likely get prominent placement by many websites.

No way in hell this cannot be spammed to death. No way, I say, Google has these clever algorithms that make sure that all the search results have a least a link to about.com on their first page.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#35
post #4

> Facebook has become the primary place web users spend their time and create content, and is mostly closed to Google’s crawlers. Seriously? I'm yet to see any of my facebook friends to create anything interesting that google can't crawl. Every single artistic person I know has a blog or a website. Maybe it's just my friends, but the most creative thing they do is post a link from reddit or some crappy photo from a p…

You are attacking a strawman, because you misunderstood what he wrote. He never said users create "creative" content, they just create content. And it's the most personal type of content, which may not be interesting to you but is essentially a taste and emotion graph of the world. That's probably the reason cdixon, co-founder of Hunch, considers it important.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#36
post #4

> Facebook has become the primary place web users spend their time and create content, and is mostly closed to Google’s crawlers. Seriously? I'm yet to see any of my facebook friends to create anything interesting that google can't crawl. Every single artistic person I know has a blog or a website. Maybe it's just my friends, but the most creative thing they do is post a link from reddit or some crappy photo from a p…

> Facebook is such a horrible platform for creative people.

Just as an anecdote, I'll tell you what my creative wife did this weekend. She wrote 2 or 3 posts on her blog, and then she bugged me all day to tell her which one of them was any good, because she wanted to post the good ones on Facebook for all her friends to see. You could say "Hey, why don't the 200 friends she has follow her blog using Google Reader?", but that's not how things work in real, non-geeky life.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#37

Once again I ask: if Google fails to understand "social" the same way Microsoft in the '90s failed to understand the internet, what will Facebook fail to understand?

They already fail to understand Privacy - but maybe that's more of a bet that it is an old fashioned concept. Maybe they'll fail to understand Social Compartmentalization - I don't want everyone in my life to know everyone else. Maybe that's just my old fashioned ways too. But my bet - they'll fail to understand Location. The next big thing is Location, Location, Location!

Not likely. Facebook took over the location database for Foursquare some time ago.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#38
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already fail to understand Privacy - but maybe that's more of a bet that it is an old fashioned concept. Maybe they'll fail to understand Social Compartmentalization - I don't want everyone in my life to know everyone else. Maybe that's just my old fashioned ways too. But my bet - they'll fail to understand Location. The next big thing is Location, Location, Location!

Not likely. Facebook took over the location database for Foursquare some time ago.

Yep, I'm pretty sure they're aware of Location, and they may be the best placed and biggest player right now. None of that is a guarantee for the future. The possibility is a new player can come along and understand Location in a way Facebook doesn't.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#39

Actually, it is essential for Facebook to have its content crawl-able by everyone - which is why there is the constant push towards downplaying privacy. A quick look at Facebook on both Compete and Alexa says that they get ~8% of their referral traffic from Google alone (the search engine is also their largest referral traffic source) and the Google properties together contribute referral traffic in double digit perc…

Facebook downplayed privacy for advertising. The ability to target individuals for ads and price based on per-person impressions (Joey, 18, has seen this Cola ad 14 times in the last week) is their best opportunity to make Google-money. CTR is always going to be low on Facebook, but impressions are still valuable if they create brand awareness, in the same way that television ads are valuable. But the ability to track ad campaigns at the individual level sets Facebook apart, and that's why privacy had to go.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#40

Once again I ask: if Google fails to understand "social" the same way Microsoft in the '90s failed to understand the internet, what will Facebook fail to understand?

They already fail to understand Privacy - but maybe that's more of a bet that it is an old fashioned concept. Maybe they'll fail to understand Social Compartmentalization - I don't want everyone in my life to know everyone else. Maybe that's just my old fashioned ways too. But my bet - they'll fail to understand Location. The next big thing is Location, Location, Location!

Oooh, great point! I remember when location was taking off as the "next big thing" of 2010. I only wonder if it will really hit the mainstream the same way Twitter or Facebook have.
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