How I suddenly like Google+: the iPhone miracle

May 14, 2012 //
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As you know, I wrote very hard lines about Google and his social strategy around Google+. But now they have done something I like, and I like it hard. The new Google+ iPhone app is simply gorgeous. It’s like if Google suddenly had an enlightenment about the importance of the content to make the difference in the fractionated social market.
With this app, Google had merge 2 important assets of any success app in the social world:

  • Content: They finally focused on the content instead of the features (what it’s more difficult to monetize at this stage of the game). Content, in my opinion, is what makes twitter and others networks strong. Google had focused wrongly in the past on competing with Facebook on features, what’s a nonsense when you haven’t got users. Their past content strategy was, as well, backwards. The +1 button was basically to improve the search engine, without any contribution to the social network (oh yes, a column hidden after 3 clicks… brilliant!).
  • Design: Good content has to be accompanied with good design. The way Google had designed their last Google+ iPhone app is brilliant. They haven’t such many content, so they can let the content breath, which make the discussion more likely to go on.

In fact, I think relations and empathy are based on content, you trust in people who have knowledge and data, and this is finally pure content. Letting the content have the importance it deserves is the best way Google can improve their social network once they have the users to convert them in active users. For me, the conclusion, in a Santa’s letter way, is:

  1. Google has to focus on content and design the same way they did with the iPhone app,
  2. They need to improve the social importance of the +1 button, bringin this content to the homepage of Google+.
  3. And, please, make a decent API to let developers do great stuff around the social network like they do around the other ones…
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Categories Social Media

What LinkedIn has to learn from Facebook

May 7, 2012 //
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I love the way Facebook understand international relationships: no matter where you are from nor what your language is, you can be friends with people from anywhere having just to click the translate button to know what they’re saying.

LinkedIn had made an approach to internationalization allowing users to translate manually their profiles to the languages they want, having different versions for each one. This is really great to control totally your professional brand, but becomes more difficult when we are talking about recommendations and messages.

I mean, I can control what I say in my different profile versions, but I can’t ask people, for example, to write their recommendations in different languages, obligating to pick a language for them or having a Babel Tower style of profile (like mine is).

In this way an automatic translation of this kind of content would be great for me and the people who visit my profile. I think it’s a simple feature that makes LinkedIn more useful and facilitate professional international relationships.

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Categories Opinion, Social Media

Entrepreneurs and pirates: the new counterculture of ideas

May 2, 2012 //
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There was a time of hippies, punks and variegated urban tribes who played with electronics an other “grown-up stuff”. This generation was a major enhancer of what nowadays is Silicon Valley. They were those who in one way or another, faced giants like IBM (II), HP or FBI itself. They were the forerunners of a more open society that shares more and in which culture is about to be a common good. They were the counterculture of their time, they created this.

Now times have changed, we live in what they created: an ideal environment to create, develop and learn. We live in a real human boom, where borders are increasingly blurred and has pushed on the accelerator in the evolution of technology and ideas. It’s now several industries caught the witness for IBM, HP and other past organizations to maintain a status quo in which they are comfortable, where they have power.

That’s why our job as entrepreneurs, as ‘change makers’ is rebelling against them, is to be the necessary counterculture. It’s our responsibility to create new frames and new ways of business that make the world evolve. And yes, it’s our job to be out of the system to create a new one for this new frenetic world of creation, of ideas, can continue evolving and not be restrained by new deciduous laws such as ACTA or SOPA, because there will be many Lamar S. Smith’s more and we are the guerrilla, who are going to make those who consider themselves our enemies have what to eat in the very near future who refuse to accept.

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Categories Entrepreneurs, Opinion

Gamestorming companies to commit Open Innovation

April 26, 2012 //
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Today we were visiting Workz, a Danish company that does consultancy about involving people in company’s innovation through games. It was one of the most interesting and inspiring visits we did in the Copenhagen trip. While the people of Workz told us how their company works and what is the product they’re selling, I was taking so many notes, not so much of their duty but what the potential of their duty might be. In this post I’m trying to put my thoughts in order to share with you some of them:

  • Storytelling + gamification makes the change easy to adopt and understand.
  • Involvement is important to make the people be the change.
  • Role playing, simple gamestorming make strategy and processes more easy to understand.

20120426-132319.jpg

Seeing what they do, I though of how we use games to communicate in social media. Games that used to be just to communicate to customers the brand values and changes in social media, may be used to engage and involve all the stakeholders of the company, making the brand, the campaign and the company more on the wave and preparing them for future changes. This is the beginning of an open ecosystem, which is the management global trend for the next decades.
Maybe the way to make open innovation to the next level is gamificating it to implant this culture into the head of management, employees and customers.
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Open Innovation processes are, nowadays, too primitive. The concept is pretty clear and clever, but the process to achieve that objective is kind of artificial. Human is a social animal, and games are the most human form is socializing, as we can learn fom the book ‘Gamestorming’, by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo. Inviting all stakeholders to the innovation process, making it “seriously funny” is, in fact, the best way to let ordinary people (like employees and customers) be a part of it. The way social media can help in that process is unmeasurable.

What do you think about it? Are games the next door for open Innovation?

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Categories Opinion, Social Media

The #newTwitter and why I love it but still won’t use it

December 12, 2011 //
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I love the new Twitter. It gets the interface so much closer to the average user and makes the web and the apps so much more consistent. It’s a pity, because we realize that behind it there’s taken many hours of work, but they have forgotten to make the guts consistent. I mean:

I use Echofon from the ‘I can’t even remember when’ days for one simple feature, a feature that all of the other social networks have, what I believe is an essential feature: Sync. I hate to read a message somewhere and, when login in on other devices, for it to appear as unread. Seriously guys, you have to solve that!

I said I love the new interface but… I lied. I know my criticism is less than small, because they did a fantastic work over there, and that it would be solved by getting used to it, but… Why do I have to click twice now to get my @mentions or Direct Messages? It’s a simple change but it gets people, my friends, further away from me and I don’t like it. I think there is a better way to introduce these essential features in the new Twitter’s paradigm without making me click and click, and click again. Isn’t there?

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Categories Opinion, Social Media

AppleID and Apple’s new opportunity to do the social thing right

November 2, 2011 //
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Apple’s AppleID was introduced a long time ago, to cover necessity of its online store. Later, the same ID could be used to buy songs on the iTunes Music Store. Since then, Apple has launched more AppleID based services . It has one big pro and one unbelievable con:

  • The pro: A universal login ID for all the Apple networks and services is useful and comfortable for the user.
  • The con: The only common ground between services or devices is the login.

FaceTime and iMessage

Seriously, Apple? Let’s put an eye on FaceTime, the video-calling service for Apple Products. In FaceTime you can have various email accounts to receive calls, and a list of your favorite contacts to call to. Let’s suppose that I set up my iPhone and I can receive calls to 3 different email addresses. Now I’m doing the same thing on my new iPad 2: We could suppose that, after the Apple login, the system would sync the account preferences from the other devices, couldn’t we? No, Apple only adds the principal email ID from all the emails i’ve added to my AppleID. Why, Apple?

Now Apple has launched iMessage, a free Apple-to-Apple messaging service. This service works like FaceTime, using different IDs to receive messages while you only have an AppleID login. However we have the same problem when we set it up. It’s nonsense!

Furthermore Apple have, at least, 4 other AppleID based social features: Ping, Game Center, Find My Friends and iTunes Store.

Ping, Game Center and Find My Friends

Ping, Game Center and Find My Friends have a very similar performance. In all of them I can add friends to share content (songs, albums, etc in Ping; games, scores, etc in Game Center or my location in Find My Friends) but they’re not interconnected so I have to add each friend in all networks each time. As well, none of these networks have the capability of searching for friends through the contact list or through Twitter (to which they are already connected). So in order to add contacts I have to know who is at Ping, Game Center or Find My Friends, their username and I have to have three different contact lists. All of this when I have a single AppleID in the epicenter of all my digital life.

The opportunity

We have enough ingredients to do it right: A universal ID (AppleID), a contact list (in the iPhone, or iCloud) and a Twitter connection. Apple should apply some sense to their social apps.

Taking AppleID as the center of the digital life (much more now with iCloud on the scene), we could use it to sync a user’s different IDs, this way it will be easier for the user when setting up his account for FaceTime and iMessage in different devices and to his/her friends when they’re looking for him in the different Apple networks. Twitter’s also in the equation, so when looking for our friends we should be able to find them by simply scanning our address book or our twitter following list.

Once we have chosen which friends we want to add to our Apple networks, all of them should share the same contact list (AppleID based) in which we should be able to ban some friends for a single network (Find My Friends, for example).

Having several accounts linked to a single AppleID, we should be able to, in addition, give any iTunes Store content as a gift so when sent to a secondary email address (which Apple already knows is mine) it’s redirected to the main address. Wouldn’t it all make much more sense?

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Categories Opinion, Social Media

Myspace beats Google+ in world social networks ranking

September 27, 2011 //
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Three months ago Google+ was launched as the Facebook killer social network. The first weeks it was full of people sharing the same things as on Twitter and Facebook, adding the same friends they already had… Now, for first time from then, Google+ is in the Top10 of social networks… behind Myspace. Seriously? Google+ has become a unknown people adding more unknown people talking abou how Google+ rocks and sharing the same things they are sharing in other social networks.

Is this the best Google can do? Are you saying that it took three months to be behind MySpace and this is an achievement?

Another question we can have is, is this the result of a lineal or exponential grow? Well, no, it isn’t. Last week Google needed to put a massive arrow in their frontpage to attract all that traffic and it became a 1268% grow and a #54 to #8 place in the global ranking. So, yep, as we could deduce, this was a desperate movement to avoid another Google fail as Google Wave or Google Buzz.

Sources:
Google+ Is Now In The Top Ten Social Networking Sites (Business Insider)
Google Plus Traffic Went Up 1269% Last Week (ReadWriteWeb)

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Categories Social Media

Google+: another Google fail?

June 28, 2011 //
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The social Internet race began years ago, and Google was lazy by this years. When they had the opportunity buying Jaiku, they left the project until it was useless. Orkut, an earlier social project, and the only considered an achievement, was leader only in Brasil and a few other countries. Then came Google Wave, a huge, only by invitation, launch, an impressive creation that was… So early for all of us, the mere mortals. Another Google Fail. Buzz, the last try of the big ‘G’ is going to be much more of this story.

Now Google is introducing Google+, a great idea on paper: Simplicity, friends segmentation and video… But the problem here is that this strengths aren’t what the normal user is demanding at the moment. Facebook launched, more than a year ago, the capacity of choose the privacy of each message by groups or people, and the users aren’t using this feature. Offering features users cannot handle with is a poor advantage to win positions on the race (much more when the race is near to the end). The video properties aren’t much useful neither, in an asynchronous world, let people to virtually hangout doesn’t look like a mass feature. In fact, it isn’t such an important feature to sell it in the front page. It’s like Google trying to merge what other successful companies already did. t

I’m not a Google hater at all, I’m a hard user of Gmail, Gdocs, Google Reader, etc, but in the social world, Google doesn’t look like a winner party.

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Categories Opinion, Social Media

Tech project discovery: Lukkom

June 17, 2011 //
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We all think there are too many 2.0 projects on the table, we can think also that we can’t be surprised anymore. Until a project like Lukkom cross with you. I’ve thinking about the idea of a superlocal networking platform for executives, and here we are, not much later seeing how other people took this idea to reality. Lukkom is just that, a superlocal, geolocalizated social network for professional interests.

You know that moment you’re in the airport or the hotel, thousand miles from home and you didn’t meet anyone in town yet (or they have no time at this moment). You turn on your Lukkom on your phone, find someone else around your hotel with similar interest (f. ex. I’m looking for an investor and there is a business looking for entrepreneurs to meet near me), send him an invitation, when accepted call or mail him and meet each other at the lobby.  That’s a gorgeous idea!

Oh well, privacy. Your private data (like your phone number or email address) are totally private until you accept to share it with your ‘on the go partner’. You can see other people interest, the business school in which studied, their company… A totally accomplished fast meeting network.

From this blog, I just can wish luck to their founders, whom I met tonight at Bilbao, with this ‘more than networking’ network

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Categories Entrepreneurs, Social Media

White fear

April 4, 2011 //
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As published on March 1, 2010

titanic-drawing-scene

A few days ago, well, actually a few months ago, I was talking to my friend Maite, high school art teacher . I told her that I’m a fatal drawer, I just can draw sketches and puppets. She explained me that many adults have this problem and this is something quite usual, since in the transition to adolescence more hours are devoted to “useful” subjects like history, physics or language than to the artistic expression subjects like music or art. That’s why many adults are still drawing like when they were 12. They haven’t returned to exercise the creative side of their brain! She argues that when someone say “I cannot draw”, like me, is usually lying to himself.

This led me to think about the entrepreneurship (and I speak not only about create a company, but to launch a new product or service in a company as an employee, or a volunteer organization). Start as entrepreneur is like drawing: you find yourself in front of that “white-promise” colored paper and that fear to failure that is always with you when you’re thinking about something new. Many times this something new may be a copy of something that isn’t, like when at the primary school the teacher told you to copy a famous painting with your crayons. Other times that something new will be something more ambitious, like when Picasso began his painting “The Dressmakers“.

The white color has that problem, but incite cleaning, electricity, virginity… is as well the color fo the phantoms, a color that can even symbolize the mourning (in Russia or China). The white is a color that is scary for all it involves. And when you have to start something new, it always begin with a white paper, Excel or Powerpoint document. And, as I said, once painted can be a blur that we should discard or a Monet that worth million by the time.

picasso_guernica

The fact is that fear can not be sufficient reason not doing it. I refer to the most recent history when not so long ago the companies that were unable to adapt to new economic trends and management, crashed in a short time. Not so long ago, a few airlines, with a new kind of business model, managed to make a loss on the classic companies that runned for years and knew “how to run the business, son”. Less time ago, we could see as a misguided risk policy has put the world upside down.

Nature is adaptation, like those first mammals which gradually turned into monkeys, then learned to walk, and then engineering … What happens now runs much faster, and we can not expect those millions of years to make the changes a reality, even those few years old wearing a viability study. These changes are happening right now and while we are self-pitying o denying the reality, another is using this opportunity. The change is now and white is the color of opportunity.

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