Big changes to Google+, Have they broken Google+ blog commenting

At 6:55 PM, May 15, 2013, Google+ blog commenting seems broken.

Feedly

The announced July 1st shutdown of Google Reader this past Wednesday sent me into a bit of a tizzy. Google Reader is a very convenient way to track web site updates. I've been using RSS, the underlying technology for Google Reader, since it was introduced in the late 1990s.

RSS originally stood for Really Simple Syndication. The idea behind RSS is to make a web site's content available for aggregation by any program capable of reading RSS. Obviously, sites may not want to syndicated full articles but only article extracts or headlines. You find all three.

RSS is an incredibly efficient way of tracking the content of multiple web sites, and Google had really invested a lot over the years improving its infrastructure to make its own tracking of RSS as efficient as possible. Google Reader was a nice side-effect of that effort.

But, the truth of the matter is that Reader's interface had become neglected over the past couple of years. Google had even resorted to ripping features out of Reader in favor of Google Plus, their flagship social network.

Google Plus doesn't really hack it for tracking website updates.

So, the past couple of days I've been evaluating non-Google alternatives to Reader. The one I like so far is Feedly. It uses Google's feed infrastructure, something that will have to change before Google shuts it down.

Here's a list of the feedly positives:

• Very fast loading.
• A compact, attractive display of headlines. It just hammers every other alternative with this feature alone.
• Great iOS apps that really facilitate skimming headlines and quickly accessing content. It's a joy to use on iOS.
• Well implemented sharing in the web interface, with a bit of an exception for Google Plus.

Here are some areas where feedly needs work:

• Sharing to Google Plus from iOS. Feedly defaults to the web interface. To be fair, Google has only recently opened up the API for doing this directly without having to go through the web.
• Sharing to Google Plus is also slightly flaky from Feedly's web interface. The text box for inputting your commentary has a tendency to flicker out.

Things any of these feed readers will have to do to attract me long term:

• Convince me they have a business model. For instance, how does Feedly make money? Unclear.
• Provide me a way to leave by exporting my feeds.

Why not a web book vs. a chromebook

This post is inspired by +John Hardy's rant today concerning something called asm.js as well as what I will only describe as long term recall of +Tim Bray's native vs. web article of a couple of years ago.

My key point is this: Google's Chromebook experiment has it right on how people spend their time on light weight laptops but wrong on what to do about it. In short, as assumed by the Chromebook team, people on light weight laptops do spend the vast majority of their time interacting with and publishing "web" content.

However, is the solution to just push everything into the browser? I'll note that much like with my mobile devices, I opt for native web clients on my macbook air when they're available. They're faster, and I have more control over each service.

I think the Chromebook would be more interesting if it more clearly recognized this fact. Perhaps Go could become the default native client language.

The pixelated cloud

I know +Sundar Pichai said that Google's new chromebook is named Pixel because we'll never have to consider pixels again once we start using it to access the cloud, but I thought it would be useful to consider what it would mean to add Pixel-like machines to the cloud.

First off, I think Google is dreaming here, but it's an intentional act of dreaming as indicated in this article shared by +Tracy L. Crawford. What currently boils down to a $1200–1500 high-end web browser is not a mass market machine. Instead, it's meant to evoke in the minds of people who can do something about it the kind of scenario where the Pixel makes sense. In a nutshell, I think that scenario is as follows:

• Most of your processing power lives elsewhere. Google engineers using the Pixel are compiling on linux workstations back at the office. They're accessing Gmail and internal Google+ hosted by Google.
• You're not hampered by legacy software compatibility needs, in particular the need for seamless Microsoft Office compatibility. It's amazing how embedded office is in the infrastructure of even new phenomena like eBooks or electronic publishing. Microsoft Word is effectively still the standard of exchange for a large part of the content production industry.

Who do I think this most closely fits right now? Students, traditional small businesses not heavily into content production, web-only content creators, and cloud software developers are a few groups who spring to mind.

Is it twitter?

Earlier today, I had an interesting conversation on +AJ Kohn's Google+ update about how businesses are cooling on Facebook. The key observation: Facebook makes it less likely users will see your updates UNLESS they heavily engage with you. Otherwise, you have to pay, per post, to guarantee reaching your fan base. For a large brand, this can come into thousands of dollars per post.

Not hard to see why businesses might be disgusted with Facebook.

More interestingly, AJ, +David Iwanow, and others seem to feel the real ascendant social network is Twitter while +Jesse Wojdylo and I are more of the opinion that the winner lately is the hashtag (# plus a word or group of words with no spaces between, for instance #facebook). Although hashtag functionality originated on Twitter, it is now built into a number of social networks (Google+, Pinterest, etc.) and allows you to easily indicate that your update pertains to a topic that many others may also be discussing. If you click on the hashtag, you are typically taken to a list of other people's posts containing that tag, often updated in real time.

So, it makes sense that advertisers have lit on hashtags as a way to generate buzz about their brands wherever the particular person may prefer to contribute. For example, during the super bowl there were 26 online calls to action that utilized hashtag calls to action and only three that mentioned Twitter.

AJ's counter is that people think Twitter when they think hashtag. After all, the hashtag originated on Twitter. He's running a survey to test this assumption. To me, the fact that AJ is even running a survey basically cedes the argument that it's about the hashtag first and any use on Twitter second.

Brands are understandably trying to reach users first on the networks they use.

hashtags in the stream

Something like 75% of super bowl ads this year had online calls to action. What that means is that they invited viewers to go online and do something like try out a web site or talk about the brand in a social network like twitter, google+, or facebook.

It took a couple of days for people to catch on that there was a subtlety in these calls to action. The specific social space was very infrequently mentioned. Instead, viewers were given a hashtag, that's a # sign followed by a word or group of words without any spaces between. Most social networks provide a search functionality so that when you click on a hashtag, you get all the posts to which people have applied the tag. Often, these searches work in real time.

A few thoughts on the hashtag strategy:

• It's network agnostic. Google+, twitter, instagram, and others support it. That way, you're not dictating to your fans where to go. They can go where they normally go.
• It's potentially very prone to spam. To be part of the stream, all you have to do is write the hashtag in your post. As a result:
• I'd expect social networks to start providing authority filters based on the poster's overall reputation.
• I'd expect marketers to start differentiating between social networks based on the quality of their signals.
• There's real opportunity here for aggregators. Many of those currently already exist with high monthly subscription prices.
• Aggregators and proprietors of social networks have fundamentally different sets of interests. Strangely, users' interests may be more aligned with those of aggregators since, in many cases, users contribute to social networks in order to be heard. This goes against what you might hear from privacy advocates.

Search, Social, and you: The question of reach

I'm in a bit of a reading frenzy these as I research my own book on search marketing. In all this reading, one book that has really caught my attention is +Rob Garner's +Search and Social. It's all about the mechanics of discovery on the world wide web.

I want to devote this post to thinking about reach. Think of reach as meaning how many people you can reach using a particular medium on the web.

As illustrated in the diagram, search has the greatest reach. It will hit people who are not connected to you in any way whether that be knowing you personally or through your extended social network. Search will also represent you in a way tailored to the person searching. This feature makes it a very arms-length method of engaging your potential customers. You have to do it on their terms and you are presented as one in an array of options.

Your extended social network has the second greatest reach. These are people who know people who know you. Again, you're likely to be presented in a more arms-length off-hand way, but there is also more likely to be an element of personal recommendation or opinion. People know the people involved and have some opinion as to their worthiness. Further, the consideration set is likely to be smaller.

Finally, there is the set of people directly connected to you. This is the smallest set of the three, but it is also the most engaged, either positively or negatively. People connected directly to you are going to broadcast out into the other layers, impacting their effectiveness in garnering you new visitors.

Often web marketing efforts, such as pay per click advertising or twitter hashtag campaigns are directed at gaining you visitors and giving them direct experience with you. Just be aware that that can be a double-edged sword.