Google Isn’t God and Buzz Won’t Kill Facebook or Twitter

Posted on 10-02-2010 | By: Alex Priest | 

Category : Google, Opinion, Social media, Twitter

Tags: , , , , , ,

The Google rhetoric is getting a little ridiculous. Yesterday, they announced Google Buzz, a FriendFeed-Facebook-Twitter sort of mash-up built right into gmail. I just read a mini-review of the service by Jason Calacanis. He began with:

BREAKING: Google Buzz is brilliant. Like ground-breaking,
game-changing brilliant.

He then went on to suggest “Facebook has just lost half its value,” that “this could actually derail the Facebook IPO” and even said “If Google adds social gaming to Google Buzz Facebook is 2012′s Pointcast.”

Not in a million years. Here’s the deal, people: Google is not God. They are not a perfect company, and they’ve had plenty of failures. Just like Apple, who proved two weeks ago even they can produce disappointing products (*ahem* the iPad), just because Google slaps their name on something doesn’t mean it’s going to be a winner.

Google Buzz might have potential, but from where I’m sitting I’m not terribly impressed. Several reasons for this.

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Apps and Analytics–Time for Something New?

Posted on 08-02-2010 | By: Alex Priest | 

Category : Opinion, Social media, Twitter, monitoring

Tags: , , , , ,

Quickly reading this article on TechCrunch about the new Tweetdeck update (my absolute favorite Twitter client), one section caught my eye and got me thinking:

You can now view more photos and videos inside TweetDeck, meaning that for some users Tweetdeck is going to start being the way they interface with rich media. Clicking on links to Youtube videos will now show the video in a TweetDeck preview window. Flickr image links will also now open in a preview, along with pictures from Posterous, Mobypicture and Twitgoo. Users can also upload to Mobypicture.

In other words, heavy Tweetdeck users are going to start finding they use their browser less to upload media to Twiter [sic] apps.

My question for the Web is this: how will this affect analytics? I know that on my blog, I can detect if a person is referred to my site from a client, but how will YouTube, Flickr, and even Twitter itself calculate analytics for content that comes from the API, instead of the Web site?

Now clearly, I’m not an analytics guy, by any means. But I do know that all the talk about Twitter peaking has gotten people talking about whether Twitter is a unique case of people actually accessing the site far more from third-party clients than via the actual Web interface. Perhaps people are simply using clients now, the argument goes, so hits aren’t showing up in site analytics. I dunno, kind of makes sense to me.

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We’re All Teachers (of Social Media): Three Steps for Doing It Right

Posted on 03-02-2010 | By: Alex Priest | 

Category : Advice, Social media

Social media isn’t like most other topics. You can’t learn it by reading about it, hearing lectures, or researching scholarly work. And you can’t teach it by using those, either.

As a student I’ve had multiple communications professors try to “teach” social media in the classroom. They’ve tried to explain it with little descriptions, brief tutorials of the Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr interfaces (Facebook is pretty much a given, these days), and describing potential applications. But rarely do any of them come close to accurately describing the nature of the medium, because these professors aren’t using these services themselves. I’ve got three steps to fix this. Check below the cut for the full list.

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