Businesses lamenting the amount of time their workers spend on Facebook last month seem to be well-founded. You see, over 13 per cent of all internet time in the UK during April was spent on Facebook according to Nielsen Online.
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Facebook tops UK web brands for April; bosses despair
Thursday, May 14th, 2009Everyone wants a piece of Google!
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
American writer Thomas Peters once said: “Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing… layout, processes and procedures.” I find it hard to disagree with the man. With regards to social media tools there is one website that stands out head and shoulders for its simplicity and sparseness in design, and its unflinching ability to provide you with instant results. You might have heard of it: Google.
Location awareness: Good Samaritan, or ad man’s dream?
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
Ever since mobiles gobbled up GPS chips and began pulling double duty as miniature satnavs, tech-heads and future-gazers have been predicting apps that’ll “let you see who’s nearby” and connect with them, whether that’s by walking in the opposite direction, or asking if they fancy a pint. Now, however, it’s becoming reality. And not just in phones. Location awareness is everywhere.
Microsoft just showed off Vine, its new Facebook and Twitter-beater in one. It’s a dashboard widget for Windows PCs designed to show groups of friends who’s in the vicinity and what they’re up to. But there’s a more serious side than simply organising impromptu pub crawls.
Google: a powerful political tool
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
Yesterday’s budget wasn’t exactly all sunshine and chocolates for the nation (borrowing nearly £200 billion isn’t exactly good news, even for the Russian Oligarchs’ club, let alone the government), but one interesting aside that came out of the whole debacle was the Conservative’s online attempt to ambush Alistair Darling’s budget speech. How? By buying up Google keywords and directing internet users to its “live rebuttal” of the Chancellor’s speech.
Now I’m no politician, but I do know social media. And this was an awesome example from the Tories of how manipulating Google can work in your favour, in this case grabbing a portion of the limelight away from the government to put forward their own policies (although, Labour’s policies are probably doing enough to send the public to the Conservative site regardless).
The idea was a simple one. Whenever a budget-related keyword was entered into Google, the reader would be directed to online ads for the Conservatives, which would in turn direct the reader to the Conservative Party website and a “live rebuttal” of Darling’s proposals.
Now politics can be a murky business at the best of times (you don’t need me to mention the smear-gate debacle of recent weeks), but this was just good media-manipulating skills from the Tories. Any journalist worth the media degree he bought online (no? just us then) knows the value of using Google to promote his stories. So why shouldn’t other professionals use it? It’s just good business sense.
And as for the budget? Well. Someone mentioned that it was nearly to the day back in 1943 that Britain scrapped the £1,000 note. Maybe we should bring that back too, eh?
Google News Timeline still isn’t enough to take on Twitter
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Outside of Gmail, Googlers don’t seem to have been doing much with their 20% time recently. Perhaps they’ve been spending one day a week looking at the fuss everyone is making over Twitter, because the big G now has something to show for its famous policy: Google News Timeline.
It’s a new feature you can test out in Google Labs now that aggregates News search results by more than just topic. You can see how headlines have evolved over days and weeks, or zero in on a specific topic or type of publication.
I mentioned Twitter though not just because it’s a web 2.0 phenomenon, but because Google News Timeline come within a tweet’s breadth of the microblogging platform’s USP: realtime news and search.
The problem with Google News Timeline is that search by the day, week or month isn’t enough. I’d like to see closer almagamation of stories, and the ability to even chart stories and updates by the second. Liveblogs are a big part of what we do on ElectricPig, and as a reader I’d like to see collection of these in Google News.
Twitter isn’t without its flaws of course. Twitter Search is clumsy compared to apps like Twitterfall. But if you’re following the right people, you can find out what’s happening first, fast. Not even Twitter’s founders seem to have figured out the direction that the service will eventually go, but right now we’ve got a wonderful mess of a community embracing it. It’s that that Google News Timeline is still missing, and Labs developers need to do more to make up for that.