Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, guys - honestly, there just haven’t been a lot of interesting developments in the digital media area lately. So, I’ll just tackle a few smaller topics today.
Pointless Twittering: According to a study by Pear Analytics, 40% of Tweets are “Pointless Babble” with another 38% being “Conversational” (which I suppose is a step above Pointless Babble. A small step.) Only 3.6% of posts were classified as news, confirming my assertion that Twitter is more of a communication tool than a source of information. If you’re in the market for pointless babble or conversation, now you know where to go. On a side note, I love the use of the term “pointless babble” in serious research.
Celeb name power: The social media press should stop talking about Hunch.com just because it was started by a Flickr founder. It’s not interesting and it’s not (as the press keeps calling it) social Q&A; it’s social polling, more akin to Sodahead or even the old-school Coolquiz than Yahoo! Answers or my baby. With social Q&A you get to ask a question any way you want and let other people answer your question. On Hunch, you can’t ask a question at all - you have to search for decision-making wizards that other users have already created. And even then, it’s only good for making decisions like whether you should mow your lawn or whether you should renew your World of Warcraft subscription. If you want to know why the sky is blue or what sights to see in Istanbul, you’re out of luck. Yawn. The initial burst of traffic they got from the press is fading, although not as precipitously as Wolfram Alpha’s.
Dumb, smart!: Radio Shack is smart to try rebranding as The Shack because they have nothing to lose. Their old brand stands for irritable, aggressive salespeople, batteries, and out-of-date, no-name electronics devices, so they could stand to shed some of that. Pizza Hut, on the other hand, is nuts to drop the ‘Pizza’ and call themselves The Hut. They will forever be associated with Jabba, and there was nothing terribly wrong with their brand as it was. The Hut says they changed the name to allow them to broaden their menu, but I say if Burger King can sell salads, you guys can sell just about anything short of sushi. Don’t get me started on Syfy.
Microyawn: I suppose the whole Yahoo-Microsoft deal is big news, but for the average web user, it just won’t mean anything. Yahoo search results will look different. Big deal.
Wake me when Google Wave comes out. It’s way too overblown to gain any mass-market acceptance, but at least it’ll be a fun toy for tech geeks like myself.
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Posted by
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Categories:
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Social Q&A | Tagged:
google,
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wolfram alpha,
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yawn |
According to the laboriously-named Participatory Media Network, 99% of 18- to 24-year-olds have profiles on “social networks,” but only 22% of people in that age group use Twitter. In their press release about the survey, the PMN concludes that Twitter “has yet to catch on” with Gen Y’s, and Cnet’s Caroline McCarthy parrots the PMN’s press release in her post “Young adults haven’t warmed up to Twitter.”
In what alternate universe does a service that after just over two years in existence already has a 22 percent market share count as something that has yet to catch on? This is exactly what happens when market researchers trained in the 60’s are allowed to research things they don’t understand. Any new online service would be thrilled to have a 22% market share of Gen Y, particularly a service that requires them to actually post content publicly to participate, rather than consuming content or having private conversations as they do on most social networks.
PMN is showing that they are hopelessly out of touch by positioning Twitter against the entire social networking space at large - it’s like saying “90% of adults 18-24 have cars, but only 20% are Toyota - Toyota has yet to catch on!” Yet again I am severely disappointed by market researchers, as well as the press who mindlessly regurgitate these releases.
Google today announced the impending release of their new…product, Google Wave. I hesitate when describing it, because it’s actually pretty tough to categorize. Techcrunch has a thorough writeup of the functionality and Mashable has a brief of their own, but neither does much analysis, so let me try to summarize.
Google Wave is:
- Like email, but won’t work (navtively) with existing email
- Like IM, but it isn’t an application
- Like Facebook messaging, but without Facebook
- Like Facebook’s application platform, but without Facebook
- Like Twitter, but without a public-facing feed
- Like IRC, but less temporal
Does that help? Maybe not.
Let me try to sum it up in a positioning statement that I’m making up based on the proposed featureset:
Google Wave is a web-based messaging system that helps people communicate, share, and collaborate with friends, family, and business contacts both in real-time and asynchronously.
If we look at it in these terms, Google Wave is not only extremely ambitious but is also set squarely against Facebook.
You may consider this comparison invalid because Google Wave has so many features that Facebook doesn’t and Facebook has a ton of features that Wave doesn’t, but users don’t look at features, they look at problems the product solves for them. Is it filling a need that isn’t met right now, or is it filling the need better than existing services? It’s unlikely that people would give up Facebook for Wave, so the question for Google comes down to: will they use both? You can ask the same question about Wave vs. email, IM, and Twitter.
In order to think Wave will be successful, you have to think the problems it solves are important. Here are some of the problems it purports to address:
This is just a start of what they want it to do. One of the creators, Lars, said of Wave,
“My vision is to have the one communication tool. I want all the use cases to be covered. We made up ideas of what Wave could be used for — negotiating contracts, writing articles. Lots of things.”
Is it trying to do too much? Very likely.
I fear that Wave breaks one of Google’s own product development tenets: fail often, fail early (or maybe fail early, fail often, I don’t remember, but I know there was a lot of failing involved.) This project has been in development since 2007 and has 50 developers working on it, and it already has a plethora of what we product managers call “would-be-nice” features. I encourage Google to make sure the core features work and release this thing as soon as possible to see if people like it at all. If they like it, THEN add the silly extras like real-time wiki-style collaborative editing that lets you see what other people type as they type it.
I do like the concept behind Wave in how it aims to unify communication, but I want to see that happen in a way that simplifies my life. Read through the comments on the TechCrunch article, and you’ll see that most people think it looks too complicated. As a contrast, no one who saw the iPod or iPhone unveilings thought either device would complicate their lives - they are both beautiful in their simplicity, and that’s why they sell by the boatloads. Google will have an uphill battle marketing this product until they can show an average user how it will simplify their lives. If they clear this hurdle, Facebook needs to watch out.
In a recent blog post by industry veteran Dave Winer, he opines that Google is falling behind by not paying attention to the search opportunities opened up by Twitter and other microblogging services. His point boils down to:
Once Twitter is delivering the news search that Google can’t, it will be way too late. This is probably what the Google management doesn’t understand because they aren’t using Twitter themselves.
C’mon, Dave. Someone’s been drinking the Twitter Kool-Aid for too long now. Twitter is not the answer to everything. Let’s get off the more-plugged-in-than-thou soapbox and look at real value propositions.
First of all, “news search” is not something Google is focused on because that’s not how they make their money. If someone else were to come along and make a much better product than Google News (and one might argue several companies already do), Google’s management and shareholders wouldn’t notice a thing.
Second, I’m doubtful (as is Valleywag) that Twitter could ever provide a usable news service. When major events happen, there may be witnesses who are Twittering what they see, but how can Twitter parse the useful, factual tweets out of the millions of related tweets? It’s an impossible task. The best Twitter can do is say “a plane crashed”, but they’d be hard pressed to say which tweets are authoritative. (Google Trends tracks memes like this already.)
To complicate Twitter’s job, spammers are already exploiting Twitter hashtags, so as soon as that #planecrash meme gets momentum and people start watching live Twitter search results for details, I guarantee a good number of those posts will look like “#planecrash Buy viagra here! http://supersmallurl.com/blah.”
Lastly, news searches probably account for less than 5% of searches across the web, and “real-time” news search surely represents far less than 1%. Google can afford to ignore this segment because they rock at the other 99% of searches, typically for more mundane topics like “cheap digital camera” or “paris hilton nude pics.” And those digital camera searches will monetize much more effectively than news about the latest plane crash.
Twitter is a great trend- or meme-tracking tool, but it will never be a real news source, and even if it is, Google won’t care, nor should they.
The blogospehere has been all atwitter lately about Nielsen’s latest survey stating that 60% of new Twitter-ers stop using the service after one month. Many people doubted the number and ribbed Nielsen for perhaps overlooking the fact that many Twitterers use third-party apps to access the site. But Nielsen checked their math and they’re sticking with their original assertion: 60% of Twitterers leave the site after one month.
I suppose it might be hard to believe that a site that’s growing as fast as Twitter only retains 40% of new users for more than a month, but if you’ve ever run a user-generated content site, you’ll know that 40% retention is fantastic, and most sites would kill for retention like that. Most users who start a Wordpress blog, a Flickr account, a Delicious account, or an account on just about site, try it out for a day or two and never come back. It’s the nature of the beast. Further, most users are consumers, not producers, and while that trend is changing over time with the rise of the over-sharing Millennial generation, most users just don’t feel like sharing their stories, pictures, or current status with the world, so they try it out and then move on.
So congratulations, Twitter! 40% retention is awesome, so keep up the great work!
