Bradley Howard's Blog

Understanding Pinterest

Feb 16, 2012 at 10:24am

So the latest social network, in fact the best social network since Facebook, is now Pinterest. Barely a day goes by without a top headline story from the likes of LinkedIn and Mashable promoting the increasing take up of Pinterest.

I’ve been using Pinterest for a few weeks now. Since then it’s been interesting to see more people joining and following my ‘boards’. It’s principally the same group of early adopters who keep signing up to the latest new social websites in search of the next big Facebook.

Pinterest is a super-simple concept. If you see something interesting on the web, you ‘Pin’ that content to Pinterest, which inserts a good looking graphic from the interesting page on to a virtual cork board.

In the past, this type of site was called a bookmarking site and would have competed with Digg, Delicious and a thousand other startups which have been acquired by the big .coms (and then spun out again).

Pinterest seems to make bookmarking interesting again through a few simple new concepts:

Grouping ‘Pins’ together as interest groups
Keeping it simply to Pin items to Pinterest
Adopting the ‘following’ principle of social networks

It’s the user interface that’s the knock out factor. There are some key aspects of the site that sets Pinterest apart from other sites, and we’ll start seeing the usability features on other sites.

One of these features is how the site horizontally scales so well. At home I have a large widescreen monitor. I can easily fit a browser window next to a Word window, and Skype or Yammer around those. Looking at Facebook when a browser window is maximised looks ridiculous – a thin sliver of content among a wide, white page. However Pinterest constantly fills the entire screen, adding more content as the browser window expands vertically and horizontally.

There’s no doubting that Pinterest has been growing very, very quickly. The site is still very fast at loading and rendering, despite most of it’s content being graphics.

I don’t think Pinterest is the killer app for bookmarks.

I still use Delicious, mainly because I’ve been using it for several years and have hundreds of bookmarks, but also because most of my links are stored because the content was interesting, not just a graphic on a page.

And I still use Flickr for all my images because BT gave me a Pro account with my broadband package and it stores the graphics in such high resolution.

If I see an interesting graphic on a page, such as an infographic, I typically put it on Twitter and if I need to find it again, I’ll search my tweets.

As for Pinterest, I’m not that sure where it fits in. Most of the boards seem to centre around fashion and food. So maybe Pinterest will end up as a niche site for these industries. Until the next big social network comes along.

tags:

Facebook, design, innovation, social media, trends, usability,

1 Comment

Review of my 2011 predictions

Dec 22, 2011 at 10:51am

Back in January I made 12 predictions for digital media for 2011. I did the same for 2010 - i.e. I made the predictions and then analysed them in December, and faired well. How did I do this year?

1. Rapid demise of Flash

Bang on here. We're witnessing HTML5 rapidly overtaking Flash, mainly because users want to view sites on their iOS devices, which don't support Flash. Flash for mobiles has been dropped in favour of Adobe Air - the problem with Air (an irony in the product name) is that it's too heavy for downloading over mobile: Adobe Air apps are very large. HTML5 is both very powerful and not linked to a specific vendor, which is exactly the type of technology web developers embrace quickly.

Prediction rating: 10/10

2. Local local local

The use of Google on mobile devices is increasingly rapidly, and one of Google's most powerful functions is to provide local results on mobile devices. Facebook Check In and FourSquare will continue competing in the future, providing more relevant functionality which is only good for end consumers.

Prediction rating: 10/10

3. LinkedIn to IPO

Yes, LinkedIn IPO'd in the summer at a market capitalisation of around $6bn. At the end of the first day of trading, shares were selling at over $94. They are now worth just under $65. The actual variance has been from $55 to $122. Personally I think the future is very bright for LinkedIn, as long as it sticks to it's core, professional-only values and steers cleer of Facebook.

Prediction rating: 10/10

4. More "paywalls" will increase the expectations of having to pay for content

I predicted that we'd see at least six mainstream publications start charging for online content. What was very difficult to predict was that this was going to be made possible via the iPad. The iPad has been the saviour of global newspapers by offering a simple charging model for content owners. Many newspaper websites are still free, but most apps charge for content. The main point is that user now expect to pay for content, but it took the shift to a new platform to illustrate this.

Prediction rating: 8/10

5. Financial Services move into social networks

Banks have had other things to worry about this year, and whilst many are dipping their toes into the water with Twitter and Facebook, I'm not aware of any doing it particularly well. Searching for the popular high street banks on Facebook returns a rather fragmented list. I expect this to change in the near future.

Prediction rating: 2/10

6. Facebook to follow Compuserve even more

Try and name a brand that isn't on Facebook. In January I said that we should expect a Skype messaging style interface and in July, we got Skype inside Facebook. I predicted we'd have a billion users by the end of the year, although this is unlikely to come true because in September, Facebook announced they'd broken through 800 million users - still an amazing feat.

Prediction rating: 8/10

7. A clear leader will emerge in Interactive TV

Interactive TV is now firmly called Smart TV, and no, a clear leader hasn't emerged yet. The remotes all look different, and operating systems are different, and with the latest XBox release, Microsoft is putting up a decent fight to use your games console as the Interactive device.

Prediction rating: 0/10

8. Rapid rise in CPC

I said that CPC rates would rise, and noted the cost of some terms. Here they are:

keyword	Cost in December 2011	Cost in December 2012
ebook	£0.55	£0.74
sandwich	£1.00	£1.05
drink	£1.00	N/A
laptop	£1.25	£1.31
paper	£0.75	£0.76

I estimated costs would increase at least 50% over the next year however they have mostly gone up a much smaller amount, with the exception of the highly competitive ebook market.

Prediction rating: 2/10

9. A $50 A5 eReader

I was $10 out - Walmart are selling an eReader for under $60. Bearing in mind there was nothing available for less than $120 at the start of the year, this demonstrates how mainstream eReaders have become.

Prediction rating: 6/10

10. App stores will decentralise, leading to confused customers (again)

The term app store has become abused. Now everyone has an app store whereas a year ago their product had an 'add-on'. If you go into a car showroom I'd half expect the optional extras to be available from an app-store! Fortunately the market hasn't become decentralised as predicted - to the benefit of end users.

Prediction rating: 0/10

11. The economy will continue to splutter

Obviously this has come true. I predicted that companies would need to start demonstrating clear revenues, including Twitter, and this has materialised as $140million this year.

Prediction rating: 10/10

12. Chrome to far exceed Firefox market share

Perhaps 'far exceed' is an exaggeration, however in early December Chrome overtook Firefox for the first time, and it's here to stay. I'm a big fan of Chrome for a number of reasons (all the settings are stored centrally "in the cloud", it auto updates seamlessly and it's very fast), and hardly use Firefox any longer.

Prediction rating: 8/10

So there we have it. Overall I was reasonably accurate with the predictions. I'm working on 2012 predictions, which feels more difficult at this time. Maybe it's the economy/ general outlook. Any help would be appreciated!

Photo courtesy of lacomj on Flickr

tags:

Adobe, Facebook, Firefox, Flash, Google Chrome, Kindle, LinkedIn, TV, advertising, apple, banking, ecommerce, economy, finance, iPhone,

4 Comments

The future of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+

Nov 15, 2011 at 9:37am

I haven’t written about social media that much recently after a few readers inside and outside of work criticised this blog for talking about it too much. Lo and behold I was in a meeting recently and asked “I don’t see where Google+ fits in with Facebook and LinkedIn, what’s Google’s strategy?”, of which the answer was worth recapping here.

Facebook background

Facebook started as a platform to link people (“friends”) together. As people used it more and more, messages became more popular, and then businesses started moving in, realising the power of recommendations between social groups.

The problem Facebook has is that everything on Facebook is (or at least feels) quite personal – not private per se, and not necessarily rude, but the kind of stuff I don’t want my business colleagues, customers or suppliers to be reading. I don’t bring in printed photo albums into meetings to share with them, so I don’t want them looking at my holiday snaps on Facebook for the last few years either.

So when I’m investigating a new website for a customer, and I see a ‘Facebook Connect’ signup process, 99% of the time I avoid using it, and fill in the forms separate to Facebook.

One final note on Facebook – we all have tens if not hundreds of “friends” on Facebook. Think about the question that if you wanted to categorise them all into groups, such as “close friends”, “acquaintances”, “work colleagues” and so on, how long would it take? Hold the answer…

LinkedIn background

LinkedIn started as a platform to connect business people together. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is as a job hunting tool; it’s a huge job board full of candidates. It’s one of those perfect balances between supply and demand – lots of people looking for a job and lots looking for a candidate.

The second use is as a sales tool, literally to network with contacts to find out who works within a specific organisation. It’s the ultimate tool to stop the “If only you would have told me you wanted to know someone who works for Company Y, I’d have told you” conversation from happening after spending hours of cold calling.

LinkedIn has stuck to its core focus since day one. It’s remained targeting professional users and staying away from the social (traditional definition) side.

Google+ background

Google have some key advantages with their social network. On the one hand, they have a fantastically high number of users who log in – some 260 million Gmail account users.

As a quick aside – this shows how undervalued Yahoo! are, with 310 million email users. Hurry up, buy Yahoo! and convert these huge traffic figures into massive revenue.

Back to Google+ again – Google has tried and failed a few times (which gives it an immediate experience advantage) to create a social network, and has now launched Google+.

And due to the maturity of the web, and especially some HTML coding techniques, has managed to create an environment which from day one allowed users to setup all their contacts into distinct groups. I asked the question above of how long it would take you to organise your “friends” into groups – and I haven’t met anyone who can be bothered to do so.

So Google has cracked the Facebook (social) and LinkedIn (professional) overlap. It’s very easy to have content which is only visible by social contacts and/or professional contacts. It also has dozens of brands committed to using the platform as well. And don’t forget – advertising agencies spend billions of pounds a year with Google’s advertising platforms. Having the agencies on board from day one is a major advantage.

Summary

In truth I think all three networks are here for the medium to long term. They are not mutually exclusive, and there are tools to link them together. I think brands should be building apps and brand pages for each of the networks –obviously adopting a different approach for LinkedIn compared to the other two.

Photo courtesy of US Embassy New Zealand on Flickr

tags:

Facebook, LinkedIn, google, social media, trends,

0 Comments

Heinz personalisation

Oct 12, 2011 at 9:59am

I am always surprised about how I seem to learn a new buzzword or new type of technology that I've never heard before, and then I seem to hear it several times in the next couple of days.

I started reading about personalised labels in the middle of last week. I'd like to say that it was in depth industry research however the truth is that an article about 'Get Well Soon' soup in the NMA news feed caught my eye because Mrs H was feeling rather poorly last week. The warm weather has subsided and it seems half of Britain has caught a cold, Mrs H falling into this category.

So I thought I’d be nice and order a personalised soup for her. The Facebook app and checkout process was super slick, although one particular issue knocks out the entire campaign logic – it takes 4 days for the soup to arrive in the post, by which time Mrs H’s cold had (thankfully) cleared up and I suspect most people’s colds are gone by 4 days plus a Sunday to make it 5 days for delivery.

One other minor observation – although I doubt most other consumers would notice – is that the agency who have implemented the campaign, We Are Social, are branded on all emails, and part of the checkout process.

Anyway, I ordered the soup on Wednesday and it arrived on Monday. Mrs H’s cold had all but gone by Monday but she thought it was a nice surprise getting the personalised soup in the post. Will we eat it? Probably not, but it looks really good in the kitchen.

I’d never bought a mass produced, personalised food product like this before Wednesday however on Friday I was asked by a customer about personalised labels and again on Monday and Tuesday by other clients!

To finish, on Monday I was in a totally unrelated meeting when the prospective customer said that they print personalised labels for a variety of customers. This was completely unprompted, at which point I started to laugh at the coincidence of the last few days!

tags:

Facebook, application review, f-commerce, personalisation, social media,

0 Comments

The pace of technology isn't what you think it is

Sep 9, 2011 at 10:00am

We all think that the pace of technology speeds up all the time - that the mobile phone and Internet were only launched in the last twenty years. However I think that technology has always been moving at this speed.

Today marks a special event exactly 100 years ago to the day: the World's first piece of air mail took off from Hendon air field.

We often focus too much on recent technology, and fool ourselves into thinking that we are smarter than our ancestors because we developed the mobile phone and the Internet in recent history, so technology must be accelerating faster.

I don't think that last point is true.

Let's go back to flight. The two world wars brought a massive amount of technology in a very short period of time. We went into World War 1 with biplanes and 34 years later we came out of World War 2 with mass produced jet engines.

Let's look at medicine. It changed beyond recognition in the early 1900s - with the introduction of antibiotics (penicillin), x-rays and anaesthetics.

In 1961 the first human went into space and in 1969, man landed on the moon. Or to put into context, in the time that the public first watched man take off into space to land on the moon, it's taken Facebook to launch and get to where it is today. Is that a faster pace?

We need to make science and engineering exciting again. It starts with education. Stop teaching combined sciences because we need to specialise, not generalists. And besides, I hated biology but loved physics. Combining the two with a bit of chemistry would have put me off studying physics at A level.

We need to tone down the whole business studies and the oh-so-overused word 'entrepreneur'. Everyone leaves school wanting to be an entrepreneur these days, but without new inventions and pushing technology forward, we're going to become a nation of imitators.

It seems obvious - we need to increase the appetite for pushing technology forward, by encouraging young people to produce new ideas. Only then will we get back to the 1960s pace of technology.

tags:

Facebook, space, technology,

1 Comment

Identity crisis

Sep 7, 2011 at 12:51pm

The photo above was taken eight years ago and shows my parents and my identical twin daughters Shelley and Natalie. I'm pretty certain that it's my dad on the left and my mum on the right, however I can't tell which baby is Shelley or Natalie.

Before I joined IMG I worked for a Finnish telco company called Sonera. At Sonera we enabled consumers to use mobile phones to 'sign' - to prove their identity. We used the SIM card in the phone as a secure, unique system. At the time (late 1990s) the system was designed from the ground up to be secure enough to sign mortgage papers.

As the Internet has matured over the last few years, the issue of identity hasn't gone away, however it has changed subtly. It's now possible to create an anonymous Twitter user, build up a few hundred followers and start a malicious rumour. This is why I find it hard to digest newspapers who reference Twitter for their news content.

It is quite secure for consumers to run a Google search for a product, land on a site they've never seen before, and hand over their credit card details. The main reason for this security is that your card issuer (bank) will provide a level of reimbursement if the website fail to deliver the goods.

However we are soon going to find that it's necessary for end users, the consumers, to have a valid identity.

We've read how some of the people accused in the British riots have been banned from using their Facebook account (which is ridiculous because they probably phoned someone as well, yet their mobile isn't being revoked, but I digress). There is nothing to stop that person from creating a new Facebook account straight away. In fact, Facebook's friend suggestion tool is so accurate that it will help recreate all that user's friends as well.

In order for the Internet to truly grow up and allow us to vote online and perform all the duties we've previously done in the Post Office, we need to sort out digital identities. Digital identities in the UK have always been seen in a negative light, despite the irrational xenophobic fear whipped up by some of our national newspapers. However we're going to need to jump over this fear if we can issue these digital identities.

These digital identities will be used to sign into most websites and will work across mobile, web, TV and anything else that springs up.

In order to apply for a digital identity, financial services organisations will require stringent checks - just like a passport, but probably with someone physically checking the photos and documents face to face. This is why Facebook Connect isn't the right platform for an Internet-wide ID platform.

The Internet is truly global, and the identities will need to work globally too. They will probably be government run, although it's feasible for some of the larger financial services companies to run them.

Like so many technology vendors, Sonera was doing the right thing, just at the wrong time - about 15 years too early.

tags:

Facebook, digital media, ecommerce, identity, legal, mobile, payment,

1 Comment

npowerclub72.com site review

Aug 9, 2011 at 2:34pm

This week npower, who secured the naming rights to the Football League from the 2010/11 season for three years, jumped on the bandwagon and launched a Football League social network - www.npowerclub72.com.

The agency behind the website clearly had some good intentions, some of which I agree with:

Don’t use Facebook Connect for everything, because unless you’re a unique level of Superbrand, all the consumer data that you’ll be collecting will be owned by Facebook. I agree with this and at Endava we call this On Portal and Off Portal. Off Portal are social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. where the brand has no permanent rights to consumer data, and On Portal are brand-owned social networks where all the data belongs to the brand.
Badges are good. I also agree with the philosophy that when users have used the site for long enough, reward them with badges. This idea has been around for a long time (Xbox or even Gold/Platinum credit cards and airline points cards). Badges cost nothing to distribute (they are only pixels), and instantly provide a level of loyalty to a website where users want to return to earn the next badge. On Npower’s website, users earn a badge for visiting/ claiming to visit a Football League club’s ground.
Football and social networks. It’s been a long time coming – with football the most popular sport in the UK, and social networks so successful here as well, it’s natural to create a network for football fans.

So far so good.

The design is OK, nothing too fancy, and then again, it probably doesn’t need to be – neither Facebook or its twin brother Google+ are going to win any creative design awards.

Here’s what I’d have done differently if we ran the site:

Badges are overused. In fact, the only thing to do on the site is earn badges. No other user generated content exists, and there’s no moderation on the site to you claiming all the badges. This defeats the loyalty aspect completely.
No Facebook integration at all. The site should update Facebook (and Twitter, etc.) when users earn badges (once they sort out the badge issue).
The visit-a-football-ground should be extended to upload pictures when a user visits a ground. This will provide a level of self-moderation.
There’s no mobile support. In 2011, all sites should include mobile browser support and then include [iPhone and Android, etc.] app support. The mobile support should include mobile photo uploads and GPS, to provide FourSquare style ‘Check-In’ functionality to grounds.
There’s little content links to the Football League. I would expect at least a league table and results ticker.

Back to my point above – a social network for football fans has been a long time coming, and I still think the opportunity exists for someone (probably a sponsor) to produce one.

tags:

Endava, Facebook, FourSquare, User Generated Content, design, football, loyalty, site review, social media, sponsorship, sport, website production,

0 Comments

How fickle the Digital Media industry can be

Jul 6, 2011 at 6:47pm

Today Facebook held a live session to announce their integration with Skype to enable video calling between users, presumably as a quick retaliation against Google+'s advanced video calling technology.

There were a few twists in the online session (around 54,000 people were simultaneously watching) delivered by Mark Zuckerberg and Tony Bates (CEO of Skype):

Half of all Skype traffic is video. This is misleading because video traffic is about 50 times the size of audio traffic (the number of kilobytes across the network). It would be more interesting to know how many calls are video calls compared to audio calls.
Facebook chose to partner with Skype because companies are only good at what they focus on, rather than being able to do everything. A direct strike against Google. The first question after the presentation was about Google+ (just someone trying to be smart - it really wasn't a clever or memorable question) and Zuckerberg just answered that Skype would enable hundreds of millions of users to video call one another.
The integration with Facebook is... unknown. When asked how Facebook will look when someone tries video calling you, Zuckerberg answered "you go to the page and something pops up". Hmmmmm.
When asked what's the financial incentive for Skype, Bates dodged the question and just answered that he wants a billion people on Skype. That's useless if none of them are paying anything though.

When the camera panned to the audience - all the audience were on their laptops, presumably tweeting. And nothing annoys me more than people who constantly tweet at conferences. How do they listen to (and understand) what is going on?

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most influential people over the course of the Internet, and his live audience in the room weren't even looking at him - see the photo above. Six months ago when Mark Zuckerberg spoke, the room paid him 100% attention and thought he was the greatest thing since the Google search engine.

tags:

Facebook, Skype, google, video,

0 Comments

What’s good and not so good about Google+?

Jul 3, 2011 at 10:01am

On Friday I received an invite to Google's new social networking platform, Google+. This spread through the Endava office like wildfire, and previously planned productivity nosedived whilst we all played with the latest website phenomena.

As a general rule, I try not to write about mainstream topics on this blog. There are plenty of other websites out there which cover these mainstream areas better than I can. I try to review the latest happenings, or to record opinions that I have been asked during the day which have caused some debate with a client or colleague, or both. In fact if you've never experienced our corporate culture of having debates in front of clients, I would highly recommend it. However three days on, a lifetime in Digital Media, the reviews of Google+ on the web are appalling, and focus on the wrong areas. So I’m breaking my own rule and covering Google+ as a record.

What is Google+?

Firstly, what is Google+? Most people in the press and blogosphere over the last few days have been touting Google+ as Google’s answer to Facebook. Google have tried launching social networks before. Orkut was a fully-fledged social network; OpenID was Facebook Connect – a single sign in across the web; Google Friend Connect was a bunch of widgets for website owners to use which was ‘convert’ their own sites into a social network; Buzz was as close to Twitter as you could possibly get; and there are probably a few more initiatives out there.

So it’s clear that Google have wanted to build a social network for a while – and I’ll come back to this point later.

Google+ is a giant sharing platform. On Google+, you can share pretty much anything from your Search results, webpages, photos and videos, thoughts and so on.

The key difference with Google+ and Facebook though, is that Google have realised that the one major problem with Facebook is that most users don’t want to share the same thing with their friends as they do with work colleagues. And you probably want to separate your friends into friends, acquaintances and the people you go to Church with. Think of the times that you’ve said to someone “I share this with people on Facebook and that with people on LinkedIn”. Google calls these different groups ‘Circles’ – and you can setup any number of these Circles very easily.

What’s good about Google+?

The first thing that hits users on Google+ is the speed. It’s as fast as using an installed application (e.g. Word) on my computer. There are some new types of interactivity on the user interface – lots of dragging and dropping – so the iPad gets a very standard mobile interface. And it’s all very, very fast at loading and using.

Talking of the interface, it’s nice. It’s also identical to Facebook. Absolutely identical. Toolbar along the top, chat on the left, recommendations on the right, activity in the middle. Lots of white space. A rigid template. Lightboxes for images and video. Well done to Facebook for the usability – it’s so good no one can improve it.

The whole Google+ experience is about sharing. On Facebook, when you update your status, it’s like making a quick diary entry and that’s it. You don’t consciously or even sub-consciously think “my friend Fred is going to see this” or “my boss is going to see that”. You write the status and move on. The same happens when you comment on someone else’s photo or status. On Google+ though, everything you do needs to be proactively shared with a someone/ a group of people. If you don’t actively say who you want to share it with, you can’t update your status.

Google+ is also setting a new level of functionality for Internet video. You can now make group video calls using Google+. You can do this in Skype, as a premium (paid for) function. On Google+, it works inside the browser for free. It’s very clever technology, and this will be a key function for signing up new users to the platform.

One of the main things I like about Google+ is how it links together all your activities on Google’s products – from +1 to PicasaWeb into one interface.

Other fringe points – the entire application uses SSL (HTTPS), to head off major security concerns from the start.

What’s not so good about Google+?

For a start, it looks and feels identical to Facebook. I showed Google+ to my nephew, who like all 15 year olds is a Facebook Power User. He asked why he’d want to use Google+. He didn’t see anything obvious jump out at him that Facebook doesn’t do.

Google have so many products, that some of them that you would expect to integrate with Google+ have been left behind. I use Google Docs quite a lot with friends and work because of the collaboration/ sharing functionality. But Google Docs’ sharing functionality hasn’t changed, i.e. sharing a document doesn’t offer you the same Circles you setup in Google+.

Whilst Circles is a key function of Google+, and it makes sense to choose who to share your latest status with, it doesn’t feel right. Anyone who runs an e-commerce business knows that for every additional step you ask the user to do, it reduces the goal completion by x%. So site owners reduce the number of steps and increase the conversion rate. Google+ does the opposite – it requires an additional step – “Who will I share this with?” for everything, and you start thinking twice about making the update.

Summary

Firstly, if I was a competitor, I’d be more worried if I owned Delicious than Facebook. I can’t see people lowering their use of Facebook, where over 400 million people are already part of a huge network. I still see new friends from the past appearing because they’ve tagged me on one of those embarrassing school photos, and we have a quick chat on Facebook.

I don’t think I’ll be using Delicious for much longer though. It’s just so easy to save a web page by +1’ing it (much easier than saving a bookmark to Delicious) and then sharing it with a few people.

I find it interesting watching Google’s roadmap unfold. Every year we look at Google and the description of the company changes. First it was only a (bloody good) search engine; Gmail made it one of the web’s preferred email applications; by releasing Google Docs it became a personal IT organisation which backed up all your files for you; YouTube made it the number one video website; Google Chrome made it the preferred browser for millions of people – quickly knocking out Firefox; Google Maps is the defacto mapping application for millions of people, and has even replaced paper maps in many households; Google AdWords and AdSense is still the ultimate advertising platform – brings advertising opportunities to the masses, whether you want to spend a pound a day promoting your song, or millions of pounds a day advertising on the YouTube homepage for your latest video game. And I still haven’t covered Google’s other products such as phones, cars, checkout, groups, sites, news and a couple of dozen more!

Google+ is the 2011 release to demonstrate Google can produce pretty much anything.

I think Google+ will be a major hit with users because of how it will bring together so many of Google’s products. I think it’s a natural progression from Google’s search engine – to share the places on the web that you visit after using the search engine. And with Google still owning such a massive market share of search, even a small percentage of search users that adopt Google+ will make Google+ a hit.

tags:

Facebook, Google Chrome, digital media, google, ipad, social media,

2 Comments

Digital Media pace accelerating

Jun 29, 2011 at 1:17pm

The pace of Digital Media is still accelerating in what has always been a fast moving industry.

This week’s highlights (and it's only Wednesday!):

New Google styling across their apps (basically it’s all gone darker and neater - it now looks like it’s been designed as a suite of tools, rather than cobbled together by a developer who has a passing interest in web design). I suspect the new styling is all part of the preparation of the Google Chromebooks
And while talking of Google, Google+ has been launched. And they've also launched What Do You Love – a mashup of different Google Searches. WDYL is nice, but it's not immediately obvious how I'll use it usefully
Zynga has announced it will IPO for around $2 billion, valuing the company at $15 billion. Zynga produce a number of online games including the hugely popular Farmville. $15b is a huge amount of money, however Zynga’s revenue is already $850m and as a parent of young children, I can see the industry has got lots more potential
GoDaddy.com, of Domain Name fame is just about to be sold for $2 billion. GoDaddy were also going to go the IPO route a couple of years ago on revenues of $800m but have preferred the route of private investment companies

In other news:

The clocks are ticking for a number of high street retailers with Thornton’s, Carpetright, Jane Norman and TJ Hughes all either making some massive cutbacks or shutting down altogether. Carpetright are blaming the recession – that people don’t want to buy big ticket items at the moment, but that wouldn’t apply to Thornton’s or TJ Hughes and Jane Norman who are clothing retailers. I think it’s more to do with customer’s shopping habits because clothing website ASOS is growing at the same time that the others are shutting down tens of shops.
National Insurance cards are going to be phased out. From now on we’ll get a letter instead. What were the cards ever used for anyway? And why not replace the cards with emails or a mobile app? It’s about time the government hired a CIO from industry and let loose with a clear remit on improving ROI.

I’ve been asked by some other sites to write some blog posts – check out Technorati and Endava's new posts, and I’ll let you know when Sitecore and CMSWatch both publish my articles too.

tags:

Facebook, High Street, business, google, government, news, retail, technology,

0 Comments

Tags

Understanding Pinterest

Review of my 2011 predictions

The future of Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+

Heinz personalisation

The pace of technology isn't what you think it is

Identity crisis

npowerclub72.com site review

How fickle the Digital Media industry can be

What’s good and not so good about Google+?

Digital Media pace accelerating

Bradley Howard

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