Google Says ‘Good-Bye’ to Google Wave

August 6, 2010 by

After a little more than a year, Google is waving “good-bye” to Google Wave.

Google Wave was supposed to be the hot new social networking platform and for a time you were considered special if you had been one of the lucky ones to receive an invite. The only thing is many people, including me, couldn’t find a pratical “real work” use for it.

With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical waves. Waves are kind of a cross between chatting and threaded discussions on a blog.

Google said on its blog on Wednesday that it is halting Google Wave development. 

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

That means after 2010 Google Wave will be kaput. I, for one, will be sorry to see it go—I did see a lot of potential in it—but I’ll be so busy following conversations on Twitter (what I found to be the hot new social networking platform) and tweeting to miss it.

What do you think killed Google Wave? Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , ,

Video Clip of the Month: ‘Guy Walks Across America’

August 2, 2010 by

My August 2010 video clip of the month is “Guy Walks Across America,” a viral video on YouTube illustrating how social media is changing advertising.

The video, funded by Levi’s jeans (which is featured prominently at the end of the clip), has racked up more than a million viewers since its debut on YouTube July 20. It features actor/model Michael Johnson wearing Levi’s jeans and a plain T-shirt on a 14-day cross country trip past American landmarks both major and minor. The video is popular because of a unique visual effect created by a combination of stop-motion and time-lapse video.

The actual cost of the video hasn’t been released, but producer Blake Heal told ABC News that the project was created on a shoestring budget and edited in an RV along the journey. It will be interesting to see how this presumably small investment translates into Levi’s sales.

The recent Old Spice Guy commercials on YouTube increased sales of the Old Spice brand by 107 percent. Like “Guy Walks Across America,” they didn’t shove the actual brand—Old Spice—down viewers’ throats and were incredibly fun to watch. More importantly, every viewer wanted to watch them (they weren’t interupting anything), and they were completely free to broadcast (not hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars). 

Indeed, social media is changing advertising, and we’re only just beginning to see how dramatic that change will be.

What kind of social media advertising campaigns do you predict will grow out of this precedent? Please share your ideas in the comments section below.

Filed Under: Communications Tagged With: , , , , , ,

A Match Made in Twitter? Discovering Who to Follow

July 31, 2010 by

Twitter is rolling out a great new feature called “Who to Follow” that offers users personalized recommendations for people to follow on the microblogging service. If you’re one of the Twitter users selected early for the roll out (like me!), you’ll find the new feature on the top right of your homepage at Twitter.com (when you’re logged into an account).

Twitter introduced the new “Who to Follow” feature in a blog post yesterday:

The algorithms in this feature, built by our user relevance team, suggest people you don’t currently follow that you may find interesting. The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow.

The new feature is a little bit like Facebook’s “Friend Suggestions,” which uses your information to recommend people you are likely to know personally who you can “friend” on the social network. Twitter’s “Who to Follow” feature, however, finds strangers with similar interests whose tweets you might never have found otherwise.  After all, Twitter has more than 100 million users, so it’s impossible to just run across all relevant people. 

I’ve already used the feature to find dozens of Twitter accounts I’m interested in following. Just about all the recommendations have been solid (I suspect, though, this feature might not work so well for people who are not already following people who discuss topics they find interesting). The only downside I see is finding enough time to check out all the matches made in Twitter  … and still have some time left to tweet!

Have you found any interesting new people to follow using the new feature? Please share your experiences below.

Filed Under: Technology Tagged With: , , ,

Facebook Stories & Statistics: A Huge Impact

July 17, 2010 by

I am still in awe of the latest Facebook statistics:

  • More than 141 million unique visitors in the United States in June 2010.
  • More than 500 million users worldwide.
  • If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world.
  • 50 percent of mobile Internet traffic in the United Kingdom is on Facebook.
  • Facebook tops Google for weekly U.S. Internet traffic.

If those statistics and my July 2010 video clip of the month, Social Media Revolution 2, left you wanting to know more about Facebook’s impact, visit Facebook Stories, a website recently launched to commemorate Facebook hitting 500 million users. The site contains a user-created collection of anecdotes on how Facebook affects people’s lives, including an interactive Bing-powered map you can zoom into different parts of the world to click on stories (represented by blue icons).

Filed Under: Miscellaneous, Technology Tagged With: , , ,

‘Special Sauce’ for Online Contest Success

July 15, 2010 by

The special recipe networked nonprofits use to win online contests was revealed in a video the Case Foundation posted on its website last week.

The video features Beth Kanter and Allison Fine, authors of The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Changet, with research on the successful social media strategies of contest winners. It also features Scott Beale from the Atlas Service Corps, a nonprofit which has won five online competitions and over $400,000—all with a staff of only five people!

Filed Under: Causes Tagged With: , , , , ,