The incredible power of being able to think and act big

Possibly the most important characteristic of web giant Google is their ability to think and act big. Thinking big is really hard to do but has made them the most successful web company in history. Google, the name, refers to the word Googol meaning 10¹⁰⁰ which is a huge number. The name itself suggests that Google has the ambition to index the entire web. It certainly has made them the defacto Internet search standard.

This ability to think big isn’t that rare. Most web entrepreneurs that start a new venture think that they have fond the single idea to conquer all of the Internet, to become the next Google. Most fail too. It isn’t good enough to think big. You also need to be able to see the bigger picture, to understand it’s complex nature, to see what is needed. It is also important to understand the ecology of such matters, to understand that to have a big impact you need others to do that. And once you understand all of this you then need to execute big. And that is where the power of Google lies. It has become their second nature to think that way. And doing that they can amaze us all.

If you understand this about Google then it isn’t so hard to understand what they are up to now. Google is trying to become the social glue of the entire web. They are the first to acknowledge the power of socializing every application. Most web 2.0 companies have chosen a business model that forces them to become the number 1 destination site in order to be successful. Mark Zuckerberg runs one of the largest walled gardens in the world (if you exclude the mobile operators, they hold even larger walled gardens AND, unlike Facebook, make a whole lot of revenues on them). Almost every web 2.0 business model is based upon traffic and advertisement. That business model trap puts the entrepreneur in the destination mood. He’s got to build a large destination site to become successful.

Google has taken a different approach. Thinking bigger than the rest they leave the fight for social destinations to others (except for the search engine google.com, but they have won that battle long ago) and look at the bigger picture. Instead of having one destination to be a playground, they see the entire web as their playground. And if socialization is the trend, then Google will be the one that connects everything to everyone using their OpenSocial and FriendConnect projects.

And they are extending even beyond the web as we know it. The next addition to this playground will be the mobile device. Again, instead of building one super mobile application, Google simply builds a mobile operating system called Android. They create a whole new ecology, bypassing closed, walled garden. platform developments by the mobile hardware manufacturers. Who cares about Symbian, Windows mobile, or any of the other non-interacting mobile platforms. Google will try to open up these hopelessly closed ecologies and scattered mobile developments by setting a new open standard with Google’s Android. They are in the mobile game now, shaking up the industry as no one has been able to do (with the exception of Apple of course).

Just look at a few of the strengths Google has:

1. They run the largest Internet infrastructure in the world, which includes not only huge data centers but also dark fiber connections. I doubt there are many bits traveling the web that aren’t passing Google infrastructure at some point
2. They are the king of search, both on the web and mobile space. And accompanied by that they are the king of advertisement, taking some 75% of the entire revenue stream worldwide.
3. They have Orkut, Google Earth, Google Maps, Picasa, GMail, GCalendar, Google Docs, Google Gears. And on top of that they have OpenSocial and Friendconnect, API’s to potentially unlock any popular destination site on the web. Resistance is futile, but even the mighty Facebook can’t resist this force much longer. Their feeble attempt to block Google’s FirendConnect will backfire on them.
4. They are the king of RSS, with Google Reader and Feedburner, letting a lot of content flow through their network
5. They have bought one of the best mobile teams in the world. People are always wondering about Google’s move to by Jaiku and then let the service slowly bleed to death. Let’s not forget that the early adopter crowd loved Jaiku at it’s peak, even though Twitter was way more popular. Jaiku simply had better technology and an incredible development team. And these people are now working within Google on who knows what. Best buy they have aver made probably. Who cares about Jaiku, Google has the team!
6. They have created the Android mobile operating system. It isn’t there yet, but it will attempt to dominate mobile development due to its open nature. If all developers jump on Android and the iPhone, the rest of the mobile OS’es will be buried very soon.

Does that mean the competition might as well go home? Does it suggest that Google will take it all. No, of course it doesn’t. I even doubt there was a master strategy that has lead Google to all of this. But one thing is clear to me. All of this is due to their ability to think and act big. And it is really hard to compete with that. Google is getting ready to become the next “Operating system” on the web, including mobile. They have the infrastructure, technology, the capacity, the data, and people to do it. While this is good news for the web user, it is also scary to think that one company can have such a huge impact on our on-line life.

Friendfeed a destination site, that is soooo web 2.0!

Michael Arrington writes this morning about the fast growing aggregator service called Friendfeed. After launch, just one month ago the ex-Google founders already see a steady climb of users. Most likely because a number of power users like Robert Scoble and Michael himself have joined the service and brought along their network of tech followers.

I joined Friendfeed too a few weeks ago (here) and was surprised to see its simplicity. Friendfeed allows you to import news or messages left behind by your friends. But it aggregates them(using RSS) from all kinds of different sites. Friendfeed currently allows you to import feeds from some 28 sites like Twitter, Jaiku, Digg, Google Reader, Delicious, StumbeUpon, Flickr, Youtube. Friendfeed also allows you to react or comment to things shared on other sites. So if Robert Scoble posts a Twitter and I am subscribed to his Friendfeed, then I can comment his Twitter inside Friendfeed. Unfortunately the comment doesn’t appear on Twitter, only on Friendfeed.

And that is probably precisely why I don’t use Friendfeed as often as I use Twitter for example. While it does a great job aggregating all the feeds for me into one place, it is quickly becoming a destination site. And honestly, that is so web 2.0.

I hate it when I need to go to my Friendfeed site to view all the feeds and comment on them. It sucks that my comments or ratings don’t leave Friendfeed but remain on that portal, only to be seen by those that are currently logged into the same site. And that makes Friendfeed provide us with great aggregating functionality in an old-fashioned web 2.0 destination site.

It makes me feel locked-in, puts up walls around me. Friendfeed is the most hypocritical of them all, literally feeding off the success of other sites (just look at Michael Arrington stabbing at Twitter). But when it gets interesting, when I get my chance to interact with something I discovered on Friendfeed, I don’t get to leave the Friendfeed walled garden.

So excuse me if I’m not nearly as enthusiastic as all the first mover bloggers that have written positive articles on the service. Yes, it’s a great aggregator fo feeds. Yes, it is incredibly easy to use, uncluttered, and fortunately ad free.

But they have missed the opportunity to create something unique, something that goes beyond web 2.0 thinking. They have missed the opportunity to make Friendfeed a service centered around its users, instead of centered around their own portal and database. And with the new search functionality added, they are locking in users even more to the Friendfeed site. And that is too bad.  It could have been a user-centric web 3.x service. Instead they stopped at old fashioned web 2.0.

The crazy thing about that is that if everyone is finally attracted to Friendfeed and locked into their service, there will be nothing left to aggregate from other places. Robert Scoble asks himself how many services we actually need. Well, with Friendfeed we don’t need any other right? Everyone loses, and that is too bad. So follow me on Friendfeed if you like. But for interaction, I’ll will probably also hang around other places, for example at my Twitter account

Will Microsoft and Yahoo create the biggest social network ever?

There is a lot of talk about the Microsoft takeover attempt of Yahoo this weekend. TechMeme is flooded with blog posts about the subject. I’m not so interested in the “breaking news” factor, but I am more interested in the effects this might have on the web and its users. Both Microsoft and Yahoo have great assets, which combined might even make Google become a bit nervous.

I doubt it will be in advertisement. Google is the absolute number one in that game and it will be nearly impossible to beat them at their own game. Microsoft has large aspirations in the advertisement world, and Yahoo has performed rather poorly there given all the traffic they receive.

If Microsoft wants to create more value by acquiring Yahoo I would suggest that they start combining and innovating over one of the biggest assets they jointly would have, e-mail.  There are more e-mail users worldwide than any other web service. E-mail is, although outdated, still the most frequently used communication tool. It is more popular and has more users than all social networks like MySPace and Facebook together. Consider the possibilities if e-mail was to be updated and improved to become the ultimate social network. No need to acquire new users, simply offer the hundreds of million users worldwide the possibility to interact in a network.

I said this before in a post entitled: “Dear Yahoo, Microsoft, Google e-mail: Forget Facebook, start innovating!”. E-mail could very well be the heart of a new type of social network. Tim O’Reilly makes a similar observation in his excellent post here. It would need a major redesign though to make it fit for what users really want. In my earlier post I mentioned 9 possible improvements to make e-mail the ultimate social networking environment. If Microsoft/Yahoo would join efforts in making e-mail a social networking tool then Google would have something to worry about. And that isn’t bad at all.

Google really needs competition to keep them sharp. Should they be really worried? Well, yes, a bit. But Google also has assets that could easily be combined into great social networking tools. Let’s not forget they have GMail and chat, Orkut, Google Maps, Android, OpenSocial, RSS and Jaiku. When these assets are combined the right way Google could easily facilitate the ultimate social network, with Gmail at its heart.

It will be interesting to see what will happen the next months. Will Microsoft and Yahoo create the biggest social network ever? Will Google pick up the challenge and roll out their version of a social network? Facebook and Myspace, you better watch out!

Let’s start using Twitter for what it is

A lot of talk this morning about the downfall of Twitter servers during the Steve Jobs Keynote speech. Apparently the Twitter servers couldn’t handle the traffic that build up. Especially people who were depending on Twitter to live blog the event complaint about this.

Dave Winer suggests that Twitter ought to be decentralised, to prevent it from breaking down. And at the same time he thinks it might be rebuild using the rss technology to make it more sustainable. From a user perspective this is probably a good thing to do. By decentralising it would seem that Twitter would never break down like this, allowing people to continue to use it, even during a hail storm of Tweets.

Scott Karp rightly says that the people that have invested in Twitter will not be too keen on decentralisation. The major asset Twitter, or any other web service, has is their centralised user database. And they won’t be willing to give that up so easily. If the Twitter team ever wants to be able to execute a positive business case, they need it to be centralised. The decentralised version will appear, no doubt about it, but there is another strength that Twitter now seems to have. It’s current brand strength is high. There are already other Twitter-like services around (Ponce Pownce, Jaiku), but even though these services have sometimes cooler features, they aren’t nearly as successful as Twitter.

I think that the current Twitter business model isn’t sustainable. It depends on the centralised user database and has already shown that this centralisation comes at great cost and reliability. I suspect that Twitter was designed to be bought by Google. That would make a lot of sense. Not only does it fit Google’s business model very well, I also think that Google is probably one of the few companies that could actually scale Twitter to a global level. Let’s not forget that Twitter currently has less than a million active users. It isn’t a big service. It’s users are mostly tech savvy people working in web 2.0, Internet or media companies. Bloggers make a great fuss about it, but my children, wife or family friends have never heard about it. Since they failed correct execution of their business model (get bought by Google, Google bought Jaiku instead), it is time for them to rethink what Twitter should be about. The Twitter team needs to reconsider how to start making money out of the service.

Twitter is a simple, cool, easy to use, messaging system allowing people to share their thoughts and follow other people’s thoughts anywhere and anytime. It is in that sense one of the most simple, yet brilliant, (mobile- and) web services around right now. It has enough critical mass now to scale it to much larger amounts of customers. Now all the Twitter team needs to do is start building a sustainable business model., and fix a few minor issues in the service. Not one that depends on a centralised database, but one that monetises user value. That is the only asset in the end that will make Twitter tick. They will need to find a way to decentralise it, and still make loads of money. I could imagine Twitter becomeing the new messaging system for any web 2.0 service. Why build your own, get it wholesale fromt he Twitter team. And remember, people are always willing to pay for value they receive.

I will keep on twittering and not minding it breaks down every once in a while. It is not a life depending communication service. The bloggers out there screaming in outrage should start using Twitter for what it is. A simple, easy to use, fun, and brilliant messaging system.

BTW, if you are interested, you can find me here on Twitter

We need a revolution in Mobile UI thinking

A few days ago I was fiddling around with my mobile phone (a Nokia N95) and it occurred to me (yet again) that the current mobile phone user interface just doesn’t work for me. Yes, the screens have become much bigger, it has impressive functionalities, a camera which is almost as good as a regular digital camera, it has HSDPA, WiFi you name it. But it just doesn’t work. The mobile phone interface is a phone interface with some application extra’s. It isn’t really a USER centric interface.

Just take the most basic mobile functionality you can think of (no it is not calling), messaging. I have several (technical) options to send a message to another person. But the phone forces me to resolve the technical details. I have to think about whether I want to send an SMS, e-mail or MMS (yes, I am one of those users that actually use MMS). People will obviously SMS most of the time, but with our physical and Internet world becoming connected in so many ways this will not remain to be the obvious choice. Once I have made a choice I need to wade through several menu’s in order to enter the message content, select the receiver and finally send the message away. It gets worse when I receive messages. Not only do I have several different types of inboxes (SMS, e-mail, MMS), but the notification mechanisms really suck. An SMS or MMS alert draws all my attention away from the thing I was doing. E-mail isn’t noted at all. If you don’t think this is a problem I recommend you try out Twitter and get it to send your tweets to your mobile phone for an hour or so. You see instantly why this messaging mechanisms doesn’t work. It floods my inbox and it distracts me constantly. I have to perform too many actions to read all the messages and then delete them again.

Nokia and other manufacturers are constantly working on their user interface. But they are simply improving on an old concept. Wiht the increased graphics and computing power I hoped they would not improve, but thoroughly redesign the user interface. It isn’t a phone anymore. It is my remote control of life. It needs a user centric interface where not the mobile phone functionality takes the central place in design, but the way I want to use that functionality! I want freedom, instead of being trapped into a user interface that limits my options. But they haven’t. And that is one of the main reasons I think mobile Internet will not break through to the masses yet.

I haven’t mentioned the iPhone up to this point. I don’t own one and only played with it a few times so it wouldn’t be fair to draw conclusions about it based upon a few observations. I can say that based upon first impressions Apple has done a great job in providing us with a totally new UI element when they introduced the touch screen. They have put great effort into usability. But I can’t help but think that even on the iPhone, the UI paradigms haven’t been as disruptive as I would have liked them to be, even if it stimulates mobile internet usage.

Readwrite web reports today that the mobile phone penetration worldwide increases even more than predicted, with currently over 3.3 Bln mobile phone subscriptions. I’m not surprised at that. With more and more strong developing countries now being covered by mobile networks, people in China, India, Africa and South America people fall for the very same being connected trap we all fell for. The mobile phone makes it possible to connect and be connected whenever and where ever we want.

In the article Richard McManus points us to a recent study by Nielsen that reveals that 35% of US teens (8-12 yr) now own a mobile phone and that 5% sometimes uses it for Internet. Richard feels that this is enough evidence to show that the mobile Internet is finally ready to take off.

I’m not so sure about it. The breakthrough of mobile Internet has been predicted many times. But it isn’t there yet. The most important indicator to me that it isn’t there yet is the ever increasing SMS traffic. Why use such an outdated and cumbersome messaging protocol instead of using the possibilities the web has to offer? It isn’t just price, although that is a major barrier to be resolved. I think a lot has to do with usability. Sending an SMS has become easy for people to use (even with the flaws mentioned above). Firing up the Internet anywhere (and I don’t mean just in places near a WiFi point) isn’t simple. And once on-line we are limited within the technical barriers of the mobile phone. Browsing the web doesn’t work on such a small screen.

And instead of thinking about entirely new metaphores for mobile Internet we start moving around this issue and develop solutions that aren’t really solving the problem. One way is to redefine the ENTIRE web (yeah right), by creating special mobile pages. These pages are smaller, need less data transfer and are basically optimised for the mobile phone browser. While this might sound like a good solution it really doesn’t work. First of all, it would take an impossible effort to rebuild the entire web to make it usable for the mobile phone, and secondly, it leaves the user with the task of solving complexity. Do I go to www.flickr.com (which I can remember), or do I need to try m.flickr.com. And how do I upload my picture there?

Another option is to develop a touch screen and really cool zooming and moving around functionality to handle these big pages. Apple did just that with their iPhone. They are providing us with a intuitive solution to handle big amounts of data, but they aren’t fundamentally solving the problem.

In my opinion we need a revolution in mobile phone UI thinking. A revolution that puts the user and his intentions central in user interface development. We need to understand what users do with their mobile phones. We shouldn’t be thinking in terms of releasing technical functionalities with nice graphical interfaces. We need to think in terms of the remote control of life, supporting the user in his interaction needs. If we let go of the current UI and browsing paradigms who knows what becomes possible. Let’s not rebuild the entire web to make it mobile, let’s not even come up with even better alternatives for the iPhone touch screen. Let’s first think about what the user wants to do with his phone, and then come up with an interface and a mobile web concept that supports his actions, regardless of the technology.

I’ll give away one idea for making things better. Why not get rid of the whole inbox-outbox messaging paradigm. It sucks on a mobile phone. Instead convert the entire paradigm into a life stream, similar to the way Twitter and Jaiku work. It fits human behavior much better. We don’t always want to look into or respond to every message we receive. Showing these messages as a constant stream allows me to look at it whenever I want to. It doesn’t call for my attention whenever a message arrives, but I get to decide when I wish to give the message my attention. It allows me to pick up things that are important, and it also provides me easy ways to respond to on ore more people. And it lets me ramble my thoughts to whoever is willing to listen to them. Maybe I’ll ask Chris Messina to create some designs for this particular idea. He does a pretty cool job designing nice interfaces.

We need to let go of current paradigms, and ask ourselves, what is a user going to do with his phone in this social networking age?  It opens a new world of possibilites, a world without mobile web browsing, a world of freedom for the user. So who is going to free me from the limitations of the mobile phone and give me my remote control of life? Or maybe I should start something myself, anyone interested to join?

Solving the Mobile Internet equation

There is a lot of talk going on about mobile services. Especially Location Based Services (LBS) get a lot of attention. A few posts that drew my attention:

Om Malik wrote a short overview article of the deals that have been made in this business, showing that big investments are being made now.  There is an overview of different Location Based services here.

The NY Times gave a warning in several posts about the privacy concerns in their articles “Google’s Purchase of Jaiku Raises New Privacy Issues”and “Privacy Lost: these phones can find you”.

Steve Ballmer who used the same metaphor I used in earlier articles calls the mobile phone a universal remote control for your life (I like that metaphor, obviously).

Different announcements on new services, for example, Whrrl is Yelp plus Twitter (who comes up with these names?), and BluePulse shows you how to compete with Facebook and MySpace by offering social network capabilities only for mobile.

And finally Walt Mossberg started a lively discussion in  his post “Free my phone” which he makes the following comparison:

That’s why I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.” Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them.

On a more personal experience, I watched a short live streaming show yesterday when a friend of mine send out a Twitter message in which he invited anyone to look at his live streaming conversation he had at that precise moment in a cafe in Amsterdam.

So what can we make of all this? Well, for starters, bloggers and investors like mobile. At the same time I think it will take some time for the mobile internet to become a hit. There are still many problems to be solved for mass adoption.

Why do you think SMS is THE killer data application for mobile? It is simple to use and supports a need for instant interaction to its users. All reasonable successful mobile services use SMS as their main interaction interface. And this is not just because it is simple. A major barrier for service creators to solve is the habits mobile users have. SMS has become such a major usage driver in mobile that it will be very hard to replace that with, for example, a graphical UI. In order to replace SMS as the main interface from Mobile to Internet (and any cell phone company will want that to increase ARPU=usages=$) you need interfaces that are as easy and quick to use as SMS is currently. Asking the user to change habit is very hard to do.

In that sense I am a bit skeptical about all these social network services that pop up, especially the location based services. I am not claiming they won’t become the next hit, but I do feel there is a lot of opportunism and technological innovation taking place that doesn’t really answer the “what is in it for the user’ question.

Just look at the examples that are provided to show the “convenience”of Location Based Services. The NY Times article quotes a user that when seeing her friends were too far away to make it on time to a meeting, she decided to leave later as to arrive at the same time. And she didn’t have to call her friends to tell them.

Pleazzzzzze, who came up with that being a killer app for LBS? This will never do, it totally bypasses the NEED of people to interact. How often do you find yourself in a conversation with someone on a mobile asking him where is and when he will arrive? It is the most important question being asked by voice and SMS? And now we don’t need that anymore?

Or the “if I walk around in a shopping mall I get harassed by all these great promotions of stores nearby” example. I don’t have a NEED for that. The whole reason I am shopping is that I want to take time to explore and buy things I am looking for. Without everyone screaming at me to come to their store. Imagine people physically standing in front of stores trying to pull you in as soon as you walk by (ever been in Egypt on a market?). It sucks, and I doubt many users would like it.

The problem with most startups that are in the mobile services business is that they tend to take cool technology and build all these services around them without really thinking about human behavior or needs. Forcing their high tech services onto the mass will not lead to the main stream adoption they are all looking for. And the fact that important tech bloggers like to use them is only a very small and perhaps insignificant indicator for success.

In my opinion (for what it is worth) the same thing holds for the development of mobile services as for any other. Keep it simple, hide all technological features and focus on human needs.

The need to interact with friends is BY FAR the most important one to focus on. And I don’t mean interaction in social networks perse. A simple example, I am using Twitter now and although it is meant to work as a microblogging tool, it is most fun when it becomes an interaction tool. If there is no interaction, Twitter makes me a groupie instead of a friend, and that just doesn’t work for me.

Start building open and simple to use interaction building blocks before we start focusing on browser-based mobile services. Solve the “getting my message to my friends and back” problem first, allowing not only text but also pictures and perhaps video to be send and received. MMS is not an option for this as it doesn’t work across all phones. If the problem can be solved across main stream cell phones and using open and standardised modules, then mass adoption becomes reachable.

From that, connecting the mobile phone to Internet based services, using these open and standardised modules will be the next important step. Forget about ads, or too much promotions,  as they will not work on mobile phones. Too much of an invasion of my private space as a user. Instead, think about the business models that actually work on mobile phones, that is payed services! Rolf Skyberg predicts that “free services” in the end are doomed to fail and I agree with him, although I am not sure yet how we can migrate successfully from free (ad based) services to payed services.

I do believe that privacy might become an issue with all the new capabilities. Here lies a great response for the user, but also for the service creator to protect the naive user! Revealing locations might sound like a lot of fun, but if it is not controlled by the user in a simple and effective way, the results might be disastrous (without him realising it).

So how about it? What do you think of these developments? What are the needs of mobile users and how can we support those needs in a simple and effective way?

Dear Yahoo, Microsoft, Google e-mail. Forget Facebook, start innovating!

I read an article this morning by the Wall Street Journal on social features in e-mail. In this article they state that e-mail providers are trying to gain back ground from social networking sites like Facebook  by adding social features to their e-mail platform.

I am a big fan of the concept of e-mail being at the heart of social networking. Why? Because e-mail has a lot of features that are important to me. It has a simple address book, easy interaction mechanisms, it is essentially a person’s directed tool (otherwise it is spam), and is used by a whole lot of people. Om Malik started a good discussion on e-mail being the ultimate social networking environment earlier. He states:

Given its critical role in our digital lives, I wonder if email could be the underpinning of a social environment — much less a social network and more a “relationship and interaction manager that aggregates various social web services” — that doesn’t require rewiring our brains and changing our behavior.

I think the concept of e-mail can be improved to become exactly that. It currently has flaws that need correction, spam being the most obvious one. But the WSJ article makes me wonder if the guys at Yahoo, Microsoft and other e-mail providers really understand social networking. Adding stuff to e-mail that existing social networks already have won’t be a competitive advantage (wow I can now create Yet Another Profile Page in my e-mail!!!)!

Why not focus on those things that they can do much better and get some real innovation going:

1.  Focus on interaction, not on user profiles. My profile is my interaction with others. I don’t care about pimped up profiles that do not match reality, I care about interacting with my family, friends, co-workers, interesting people I might not know. It is the interaction that defines me.
2. Create a spam free, streaming, multimedia sharing environment. Stop thinking in terms of me sending a message to you. That concept leads to overfull mail boxes and me feeling the pressure of having to answer them all. Think me sharing the things that are important to me with you. Think of a stream of thoughts, messages, content, emotions I want to share. As a receiver I might look at them, or choose to ignore them for now. Think of sharing on-line, so that my e-mail becomes a streaming messaging service. I don’t have to deal with loads of data in my inbox, the data is on-line available and more important sharable without too many storing and bandwidth constraints.
3. Think of ways that I can share the things I have just found somewhere. Control Copy, Control Paste a link or content into an e-mail message sucks from a user perspective. So how can we improve on that?
4. Think about the e-mail address book. It doesn’t handle multiple identities, e-mail addresses etc. It doesn’t have any presence capabilities. What if I want something to reach my friend who is not behind a terminal, but is available on his mobile?
5. Think about urgency. Everyone sends me e-mails using the red !, so that won’t do anymore as an urgent message concept. Urgency depends on the sender, the receiver, content, place, time, terminal etc. Broaden this concept and make it work for us.
6. Think about incorporating social search for subjects, messages, people, anything I need really. Think multimedia, think conversations, etc. Current search capabilities limit me to keywords. But how about interaction during my search.
7. Think about decentralization. Make the service USER centric, not PLATFORM centric. Integrate it in all the devices and tools I might want to use. Make it work for me, instead of me working to get it working.
8. Think OPEN, let me access the service anywhere, let me import and export anything I want to and from the service, let me have streams available on any platform, or incorporate any other service stream into this service.
9. Think about seamless integration of family, friends, contacts across existing platforms. It is such a pain for me to figure out how to add my friend on MySpace, G-mail,  MSN, Hotmail, Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook to my address book. And while doing that, think of ways I can easily decide where to land my message to a friend, or perhaps let my friend decide where he wants to receive it.

This list could easily be expanded if we were to sit down with a few creative people. So stop walking the paths every social network is walking, and start rebuilding the concept a-synchronous e-mail into something more fluid,  perhaps the ultimate social interaction tool!

Twitter makes me a groupie, I’d rather be a friend

I have recently decided to give Twitter a try. Out of curiosity, as I read a lot about it. The most compelling argument to give it a try was provided by Robert Scoble (couldn’t find the original post, sorry) who said it was the best way to interact directly with his readers. And I like interaction, as you might have gathered from earlier postings.

People either love Twitter, or don’t seem to understand why the people that love it find it meaningful. To be honest, after a month of usage (which might be a bit short for a review), I’m having a love/hate relationship with it. The usage of the service is dead simple, so that is of no concern.

Twitter is a non-stop stream of 140 character messages flowing across the world. You simply tap into this flow by starting to follow people. You need to follow the concept of information handling if you want to deal with the flow of information.

In my mind it was a mobile service first, but letting the flow of messages reach your phone is not advisable. There have been times where I easily got 20-30 SMSes in 5 minutes. Going through them (and deleting them again) is a mobile RSI enforcer.  Sending twitters from my mobile work like a breeze, but there comes another issue. In what language do I twitter? I follow (and am being followed) by Dutch people but also English speaking people. So what to do. Twittering in Dutch seems rude to the foreigners, twittering English seems a bit overkill for the Dutch. Anyone got a solution for that?

I found the best way to leverage the power and fun of Twitter is to use it from the desktop. I use TwitBin, a small Firefox add on that installs a pane on the left of my browser allowing me to follow the flow of information without the hassle of removing messages form my mobile.

So why is Twitter fun? I like it for 2 reasons:

1. Twitter is emotions. Forget the 140 character messages, forget the scoops that arise faster on Twitter than on Techmeme. I don’t care about them. But the emotions and conversations that arise after the scoop are so much fun. As an example, I got the “Jaiku is taken over by Google” scoop from a number of twitter messages. The initial WOW effect wears off very quickly this way. But the comments, analysis, congratulations, jokes, rants that followed that scoop (actually same thing happened on Jaiku). That was fun!
2. Twitter gives me a very nice picture of what people I haven’t actually met are about. It is amazing how much you can read about someone’s character, believes, hobbies, opinions etc. by simply following a flow of small messages.

So why do I have a love/hate relation with it? Well, besides the flooding of my mobile phone part if not used carefully, the one thing I hate about Twitter is the asymmetric following concept.

I can follow other people that don’t (or don’t want to) follow me. As a result of this I am reduced to a Groupie instead of a friend. I can listen to all their messages, but I can’t reply, add to them, or choose not to answer them. I follow a few people I don’t really know, but judging from the messages they twitter, i would like to interact with them on Twitter.

So here is my request to Biz, and the folks I am following on Twitter. Make follow each other the default in Twitter, the user can always block someone later if he becomes annoying. I have written about the “having to ask permission to become a friend” issue in social networks. I hate it. And if someone takes the effort of following you, why not follow him back. Who knows what great things will happen in this interaction!

10 ways to improve web 2.0 and move into an era of true interaction

I have expressed my opinions about the flaws in web 2.0 and how to correct them earlier and have gotten some very smart replies to that. I believe that in the end it is all about interaction between people. My interaction is my profile. It says more about me, about the things I find valuable, than anything I write in a profile (we all look better on Facebook than in real life right?). I also believe that current business models force service providers to put value into the network or application they build, instead of focusing on creating true user value.

In order to get out of the trap called web 2.0 we need to correct some flaws or perhaps (re-)invent some of the things to get to the point where interaction becomes the most important thing in any service. Having a need for a name for it I called it an Open Social Interaction Network, but I’m still open for anything better than that (let’s not call it web 3.0 please).

To deepen this discussion let me state my 10 personal wishes that in my opinion help us get out of web 2.0, where value seems to be put mostly into the network, into something that totally evolves around our interaction with others, thus providing value to YOU and ME:

1. I want to be able to export my friends and contact information to any other service I choose. Lets be real. The network does not OWN that data. It is mine. I have either taken the energy to find and add contacts to my friend list, have gotten it from them, or have typed them in myself. I want to be able to use that data anywhere I want. Why can I import all my data into a network, but they don’t provide me with an export function? Try it on Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Jaiku, Orkut. They are all willing to import my Outlook or Gmail contacts, but none provide me easy options to export my contacts from their service to another. Of course I am bound to privacy rules set by myself or my friends (if they don’t want me to export, I won’t)
2. Export my (multimedia) content to any other service I choose. Heck, if I want to burn a CD of all content I got or sent I can’t even do it. Twitter and Jaiki work with feeds, but Facebook doesn’t? Well, they are happy to import feeds, but I can’t export Facebook activity or content out of the network. Same goes for pictures, videos and any other content that I have kept, or that has been sent to me.
3. I have friends and contacts on many different networks. I want a lifestream service that allows me to see all of their activity regardless of the network and vice versa
4. In relation to point 3, I want to be able to message any of my contacts, without having to go to a specific network. In other words, if I know (or even don’t know) that my friend is on Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and a few other networks I want to be able to send 1 message that is delivered smartly to my friend, without me having to think which service to use. Of course, if I want to, I can make that choice in a simple and intuitive way. And equally, my friend Joe can set his preferences the way he wants to receive incoming messages.
5. In relation to point 4. I want to have presence information available over all networks. That will help me interact more efficiently with my friends. So if I know that my friend Joe is on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, Gmail, and I can see where he hangs out at the moment I might make an intelligent decision on how to contact him, or what I am sending over
6. I want to be able to write or publish content to multiple platforms in one action. So, if I write a blog entry on my blog I might also want to publish it on Facebook or MySpace, have a tinyurl published in Twitter and send a few friends an e-mail or SMS about it
7. In relation to point 6. If I get the same entry across multiple networks or platforms that’s hardly efficient. So some intelligence to make sure I get the message on the most convenient way would be nice (how about retracting all forms after I read one? So if I see a picture from a friend on Facebook, then I probably don’t need a twitter tinyurl or Flickr link anymore)
8. I want to be able to follow interesting topics regardless of where the conversation is taking place. I have a tracking facility on Google Reader, Twitter and many other platform. Let’s integrate them so that I can follow ALL conversation on that specific topic (if I really want to)
9. I want to be “on”as soon as I am connecting to the world. What do I mean by that? I want to integrate point 1-8 in my browsing experience. Not just widgets on a desktop, not just a unifying portal that I need to go to. No, when I connect to the world, it should be there with me, available when I call for it. It requires that I will be able to login automatically to any network I am part of. OpenID or anything that looks like it should be available as a standard. And personally, I would like to integrate it all into my browser so that I can explore and interact at the same time (DISCLAIMER HERE: I am involved in a (currently stealth) project that integrates cool interaction services into your web browser (more on that some other time) so I am positively biased to such solutions. Current integration on the web (take NetVibes or Facebook as examples) is not sufficient as they are essentially destination based making the destination more important than myself. And needless to say that if I am on the move I want to be connected using my mobile.
10. I want excellent and easy to use privacy controls to go with points 1-9, allowing me to set both general privacy measures as well as per item or message control.

So how about it? Am I on the right track here or do you feel its all nonsense? Do you have other wishes? Are there services that already do what I want (and I simply have missed it?). I’m interested to hear what it is you want out of next generation services.

Anyone care to implement some of this ?

Facebook will be no match for Google

After the first Twitter and blog post of Robert Scoble about Google buying Jaiku the twitter space is full of Jaiku. Its everywhere. Lots of discussion on what this means for Twitter. Robert states in a second post that the deal isn’t about Jaiku versus Twitter, but more about Google versus Facebook.

While I don’t have the excellent sources Robert has, I think he is right about this. Google understands social networks much better than Facebook does. Lets see how the jigsaw puzzle pieces might fit together to describe the Google strategy with respect to Facebook.

1. First of all Orkut is (or will be) more open than Facebook is. For example, Orkut will allow application developers to let their services run on their own servers instead of on Orkut servers. Facebook doesn’t allow that. It is much more a walled garden than Orkut is. Why?Because Facebook needs the Facebook network to be valuable, while Google needs to be the connector across the entire Internet. Orkut is just another asset in that strategy.
2. Secondly, Google doens’t have to build a social networks as its primary strategy. Unlike Facebook Orkut is simply another means to an end. Google is the connectivity on the web, and Orkut only is one aspect of that strategy. Think Gmail, think Google earth, thin iGoogle. All major Internet platforms than can easily be integrated into one compelling service for the user.
3. Google is ready to launch its Google Phone. As said in several posts the strategy here is not to attack the iPhone, it is to attack Microsoft as a mobile platform.
4. Google is building up strength in Asia, the continent where (payed) mobile services are adopted quicker than anywhere else in the world!
5. Jaiku provides Orkut users with mobile presence information, which will add value to the connectedness in the social network. Let’s not forget that the mobile phone is the most dominant device worldwide (think communities dominate brand by Toni Ahonen)
6. Jailu does rss feed aggregation well, providing Google yet another advantage. It controls the world of Rss feeds with Google reader, Feedburner, and now on the mobile platform Jaiku
7.  I saw a post earlier on Engadget suggesting that Google is also working on a Google PC, which supports again their strategy of becoming the main platform on the Internet and Mobile.

While Facebook is building walls around their service, trying to increase the value of their network (instead of value for its users), Google is becoming the major operating system om the Internet (Search, Social Networks, mail, RSS) and Mobile (Google Phone, Jaiku). Given this strategy I would put my cards on Google, not Facebook. No way they will be able to match that. The big question now becomes whether or not Google will be able to integrate all these services and still remain open as a platform thus providing more value to its users.