As you quite possibly know (as you are reading this) I join lots of new services that pop up. Almost all of them, as I come by them, and if they let me in (which can be tricky enough at times). The reasons for this varies of course, but one of the main things is that when colleagues and/or clients ask me if I have heard of a particular service I prefer to have first-hand knowledge of it. Also, obviously, I don’t want to miss out on new things as people have come to expect me to know stuff about…errrr…stuff.
These last few months I have joined a bunch of things too, but these 3 currently stick out:
Google+
Google finally released its almost fabled Google+ (yep, that is the word Google, with a “+” after it), and after what felt like an eternity I got access to it. I felt like I was the last person with the latest toy, but regardless, now I am in there. Clicking around in it made me somewhat confused, so I wanted to read up on what others thought. Some screamed Facebook Killer! others screamed Twitter Killer! and lots of people screamed lots of things. By now everyone obviously has scrambled in with their opinion, and making sure it is heard, and links like these still pop up ever so frequently right now: Google+ Challenges Both Facebook and Twitter
As the dust settles, these are my initial thoughts, which may change over time (as it indeed still is early days):
- It is quite tricky to get to grips with how and why I should use Google+. Apart from it being a “fuller” version of Twitter, and with less of my “friends” on it (compared to for example Facebook) I apparently am not alone in these thoughts, and even though I see benefits with several of the features I still was a bit confused about how to work it all out, and then how to work it all. If you are in the same situation you might benefit from these links:
- Huffington Post: Your Google+ Guide: 15 Tips For Newbies
- Mashable: Google+ The Complete Guide
- This set of images, laid into a collection so it turns into something like a presentation.
- AnyAsq: I’m a technical lead on the Google+ Team. Ask me anything. Title says it all, and it’s a FAQ.
- http://gphangouts.com/ - if you want to know where to “hang out”.
- Why can’t I in a decently simple way integrate with other social networks? I mean, I right now do status updates to either/both Facebook/Twitter from Hootsuite/Ping.fm and Instagram. I really don’t need yet another place to start typing that’s for sure, I am infrequent enough as it is right here.
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I quite simply need it to be more connected from apps and services to make it easy enough for me to update Google+ when I am updating everything else. Same goes for images, which in Google+ case is handled by Picasa. Sure, fine (though I am a Flickr boy at heart), but not even Picasa is that well connected from things such as Instagram etc. This blog attests to this too, I obviously would like to enable it to send out a message to my Google+ stream that I have posted an article, without manually having to go there and type it all up.Then again, I see lots of really long articles written from the people I follow, from within Google+, so this might be a problem only I have and that everyone else is perfectly happy with how it is today. - I am really looking forward to when it can all be integrated with all the other Google services I am already using today. That should be compelling for business reasons too.
- I really would like to have my circles as “check boxes” where I choose to show my stream from circles 1, 3, 4, 5 and 9, not all of them at the same time, nor would I like to pick one circle at a time.
- You can of course find me over here, should you want to “circle” me.
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- Obviously I had to add a +1 button to the site too, which you can find in the Sharebar to your left (on most screens).
Empire Avenue (EA)
Empire Avenue is a game. I am saying this as it can sound like it is all kinds of other things depending on who you listen to, but really, it is not. It is a game. In short, you can buy shares in people and companies, and as they go popular more people want to buy shares in that company, which in turn drives up the share price. The currency is fictional “eaves”. As your portfolio goes up in value more people want to invest in you, and your price goes up accordingly. Simple.
To add to this they have added points for activity on social networks. Today any activity on Empire Avenue (doh), Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, Flickr and YouTube is counted towards your profile, but they will apparently be adding more social networks in time.
A typical example of a stock going up was the one for Google, immediately after the announcement of Google+.
My own summary (12 days in to the game):
- My social activities doesn’t really affect the game, not in eaves nor in points otherwise.
- It is surprisingly detailed in its handling like a stock market. People could learn a thing or two about economy and financials by playing the game. Srsly.
- I had to start seeing it as a game, and even more so, I had to start seeing it as a stock market from the eyes of a trader who owns a portfolio. If I want my share price to go up I have to sell off shares that aren’t doing too well EVEN if that means selling shares in my colleagues and friends (if they are dipping).
- I have actually met more people (online) and made more new contacts within the social networks mentioned since I started playing EA. This also means that even though the game mechanics doesn’t give me much benefit in-game for my social activities, my social networking has grown, and we have of course exchanged shares in each other along the way.
Summify
Summify is an aggregator of tweets that tries to make sense of them. You can find my Summify profile over here and as you see that is actually a dated link, i.e. with a date in the URL, as it shows the “edition” of that particular day.
So, summify basically trawls through my friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader, works out their posts, and if they find several posts (re-tweets etc) or repated links, it starts collecting them. Once every 24 hours it publishes the Top10 of those collected articles into a newspaper, much like paper.li does. In case you have missed paper.li, have a look at “my” paper over there called Mixed Bag Of Interesting Stuff.
One of the benefits with Paper.li is that I can pick a few topics and concentrate on aggregating tweets around those topics. That I can’t do with Summify. On the other hand, on Summify I get to see (and verify) who the sources were for any given article, and thereby I can validate them myself.
Both paper.li and Summify are stupid in the sense that it can create and publish articles in languages that I don’t understand, under my name.
I shall compare the two a little bit closer in the near future and possibly write a summary on what I think of them.
Other things
Some time ago I started comparing aggregation/curating services. Scoop.it and Amplify.com for example. I am also waiting/hoping I will get a beta invite for Twylah soon, which apparently will make sense of my tweets (a thing I haven’t managed in years myself, hehe) and will present it all nicely. Apart from that I have been looking into the difference between Facebook Groups, Facebook Pages and Facebook Apps, as I have found it all to be somewhat confusing, seeing as they overlap each other on quite a few areas, whereas they are pretty much incompatible with each other on other areas. Stay tuned if you want to know more about that.