Entries Tagged 'Analysis' ↓

Last year when Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows hit the streets suggesting that the Internet was frying our brains (see our coverage) I asked what we could do to build a less brain damaging Internet. Since then I've been too, well, distracted to pursue that line of thinking.

Fortunately Alex Pang, a visiting fellow at Microsoft Research Cambridge, actively researches this area. Pang proposes a new paradigm called contemplative computing. Today he gave a talk on the idea at the Lift France 2011 conference and has published a PDF of it. You can also find a rough draft of his paper on contemplative computing.

So can computers actually help improve our concentration and contemplation, instead of leading us into distraction?

Sponsor

The problem, as Pang puts it, is that "Technologies that were supposed to help us think better, work more efficiently, and connect more meaningfully with others now interrupt us, divide our attention, and stretch us thin."

Pang suggests that we don't have to choose between information technology and contemplation, and suggests contemplative computing as a new way forward. He describes contemplative computing as something you do, not a product. But the principles of contemplative computing could be extending to application design. "The problem is that today's information technologies are often poorly-designed and thoughtlessly used: they're like unreliable prosthetics that we have to depend on, but can't quite control or trust," Pang says.

In his Lift presentation, Pang encourages you to study your own habits, consider how you use technology and experiment with your own mind. But in his longer paper, Pang delves into the possibilities of creating software and technology that actively encourages contemplation.

In the paper he outlines give principles of contemplative computing;

• Build awareness through DIY and self-experimentation
• Recognize that we are cyborgs, and humans
• Create rewarding challenges
• Support mind-wandering
• Treat flow as a means, not an end

You might be surprised to see "support mind wandering" on the list. But Pang makes a distinction between mind wandering and distraction, and points out the value creative value of mind wandering and day dreaming (for more on this subject, check out this article by Jonah Lehrer, though Lehrer doesn't really make the distinction between distraction and mind wandering).

Pang touches on the idea of "zenware," software that is designed to help us focus. In particular, he mentions WriteRoom and OmmWriter, full-screen text editors meant to help people write without getting distracted (we recently published a round-up of similar software).

But this approach to technology is not without its detractors. Productivity guru Merlin Mann argues that these technologies give the "misguided impression that their "distraction" originates from anyplace but their own busted-ass brain" and are actively harmful. Hence, the importance of contemplative computing as a practice rather than a product.

Never the less, I'm convinced that developers could do more to encourage contemplation within software. An excellent example comes from music software. Ableton Live, in my experience, does a particularly good job embodying the principles of contemplative computing. It supports focus and flow for activities like beat slicing, mixing and editing, but gives the user the opportunity to "noddle" by playing with different combinations of effects, rearranging loops, etc.

That said, I have no idea what a truly contemplative word processor, inventory management system or social networking application would look like.

If you want to study this further, Pang maintains a blog on contemplative computing, and recently signed a book deal.

Image courtesy of Jordan Langelier

Researchers for the Chetan Sharma Consulting group have put together a 2011 State of the Global Mobile Industry mid-year assessment and have come up with some very interesting results.

The entire global mobile market weighs in at about $1.3 trillion or close to 2% of the world's gross domestic product. Of that giant $1.3 trillion pie, about $300 billion is expected to be through data revenues. That means that people are starting to use data at much higher rates and Americans are on the forefront of data usage even as India and China are the fastest growing mobile markets in the world.

Sponsor

The report notes that mobile is fundamentally changing the way people interact with the world and is a heavy influence on how people buy goods and services. Here is the money quote concerning mobile applications in the report.

"Mobile is fundamentally reshaping how we as consumers spend from housing and healthcare to entertainment and travel, from food and drinks to communication and transportation. Mobile not only influences purchase behavior but also post purchase opinions. When the share button is literally a second away, consumers are willingly sharing more information than ever before. Mobile is thus helping close the nirvana gap for brands and advertisers who seek to connect advertising to actual transactions. The long-term battle is however for owning the context of the users. Having the best knowledge about the user to help drive the transaction is the simply the most valuable currency of commerce."

There will be more than six billion mobile subscriptions by the end of 2011. According to the report, it took 20 years of mobile development to reach one billion connected devices. The jump from five billion to six billion took 15 months.

The global market for smartphone users stands at 26% of all phones (which are a subset of total "mobile devices"). The U.S. recently passed the threshold of 50% of every new phone purchase is a smartphone and the Sharma group predicts that the U.S. will be the first market to eclipse 50% smartphone ownership (it stands at 38% currently).

Here is a graph of the largest telecom operators by revenue.

The Sharma group notes that Apple is dominant in the tablet space and that is not going to change any time soon. This, as we know, is not news and the report does not say anything that we do not already know (a Windows 8 tablet could make inroads and cheaper Android tablets will eventually gain market traction).

In terms of smartphones, the report says that the battle is now on for third place behind Android and iPhone, respectively. Nokia/Windows Phone and Research in Motion are the contenders for third place, which actually is being very kind to Nokia/Windows and bearish on RIM's prospects. HP Palm gets a nod for finally bringing products to the market but also says the "lack of an effective ecosystem means lack of traction in 2011."

When it comes to actual devices made, Nokia still has the global lead, tough its numbers are down from the last several years when the Swedish cellphone maker was absolutely dominant.

In terms of market dynamics, Sharma notes that the landscape is difficult to judge because everybody wants a slice of the pie and certain companies want certain slices where they may not have traditionally created revenue. AT&T is now going after former partner Cisco in enterprise and unified communications. Verizon and Visa have been traditionally separated from each other as market leaders in different industries but are not clashing as in the mobile payments realm. Mobile has muddied the waters of the traditional industry model. That tends to happen when $1.3 trillion (and growing) is on the line.

Cisco long has had its own exemplary in-house news site called @News. Last month they upgraded and are now rebranding it as The Network here. So what can you find there? At first blush it looks like many other Web-news portals, with a set of top stories from major tech freelancers such as Steve Wildstrom (formerly of Business Week) who has written an interview with Internet luminary Vint Cerf and another story on big data; Elizabeth Corcoran, the former Valley Forbes bureau chief, and John Dodge, someone like myself that got their start in tech journalism back at PC Week in the 1980s.

Sponsor

What you won't find is much in the way of actual breaking news, unless you are looking for particular Cisco-specific products. Yes, there are links to third-party stories, and some interesting features, too. What is interesting is that all of the top shared posts are video clips. Clicking on the most viewed stories shows that some have gotten 20,000 views or more in the month since the site went live. That's not bad for an in-house portal. Most of these are press releases, which isn't surprising given Cisco's reach and influence in the networking industry. Speaking of reach, Cisco's Facebook page has over 180,000 followers and @ciscosystems Twitter account has more than 82,000 followers.

Like any good modern Web site, readers can easily share content on Twitter and Facebook and embed a widget into their own Web site, as you can see from the screenshot below showing the article layout.

Perhaps this should best be described not as a news site, but as a community portal where customers and competitors can better keep track of what is going on in the markets that Cisco sells into: video conferencing, data center infrastructure, collaboration tools, and key networking technologies. MediaSurvey.com's Sam Whitmore, who tracks these sorts of things, says "Cisco instead invests in its own content because it can own the analytics on it. That gives Cisco the power to iterate what works and dump what doesn't -- just like publishers do." Whitmore is bullish on the new Cisco site: "Engagement is what leads to outcomes. That's Cisco's play."

Here is the blog post that announced the site last month. I think companies that have fewer resources than Cisco might take a moment to look and learn from what they are doing here. Yes, an impressive freelance budget and lineup of industry luminaries is great, and they are off to a good start with the number of comments and views. But the whole place seems somewhat soulless and unexciting. While I am not as sanguine as Whitmore as to whether they will ultimately succeed, they do show what basic elements are needed for corporate sites to be engaging to their audience and is worth spending some time there.

With the announcement yesterday about Facebook's Video chat feature, there is more interest surrounding ways that you can share the apps running on your screen as well as your mug across a video link. There are dozens of Web conferencing products that I have cataloged here and I will mention a few of these services that are completely free and can be used to set up a video link between at least two computers with a minimum of fuss and bother

Sponsor

Some of the services put limits on the number of participants (for example, OpenACircle is for three or fewer attendees, others can handle up to 10 people). Others have a basic free service with limited features and more available if you pony up to a paid subscription. There are four basic features that these products cover.

First is the ability to conduct an online meeting, sharing a presenter's screen with others who are viewing. We've all been on Webex or GotoMeetings and these products offer the same feature, although without many of the features of the paid products, such as remote control of a presenter's screen.

Second is audio conferencing. Participants use a headset and their computers, dial out or dial in with a phone bridge number/service.

Third is group text chat. This is useful for asking questions of the group or directed at specific individuals. Google+'s hangout space offers a basic version of this. Facebook also has group text chats too.

Finally is a video chat feature, whereby each participant's camera is activated and you can see who is on the call.

Some of these services we've reviewed in the past include:

• Open Circles
  
• Twiddla
  
• MightyMeeting's Present Anywhere
  

• Anymeeting can host up to 200 participants and can record the audio during the meeting as well. It probably is the most feature-rich free service out there with invitation and meeting registration tools built-in.

• Join.me is just for screen-sharing, but it is dirt simple and it will take you seconds to get a session started, as you can see in the screenshot below. You can have up to 250 people viewing your screen and there is text chat included. There are views for iOS and Android phones too. You can upgrade to the Pro version for audio conferencing. It comes from LogMeIn.

  

• Mikogo can have up to 10 participants, and requires downloaded Windows or Mac software to participate. It can do text chats and audio conferencing too.

• Vyew also handles up to 10 people per conference. There are paid versions that can handle multiple conference rooms and bigger crowds, and will also handle remote control of your desktop applications.
  

The classic rock fans in the ReadWriteWeb audience will remember the Jimi Hendrix song, "Castles Made of Sand." As someone who's been in enterprise search for decades, this song often comes to mind when thinking about data within an organization.

Individual bits of enterprise information can be compared with the grains of sand on a beach. Much like the data in your organization - both structured and unstructured - there can be quintillions of grains of sand on a beach, and no two are alike. (Indeed, The Economist reported last year that 150 exabytes of data were created in 2005. One exabyte is equal to one quintillion bytes and, according to Wikipedia, is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video.)

Sponsor

Just like the waves in the ocean, there won't be a slowdown in data proliferation anytime soon, if ever. There will be a constant ebb and flow of data and information. Your business generates an incredible amount of data every single day. E-mail, phone calls, memos, reports, spreadsheets, community forums and the like create thousands of data files housed throughout your network.

In an attempt extract value from their data, many organizations build central repositories into which they move all data, so that it can be more easily searched and organized to offer actionable insights. This sounds like a good idea on the surface, but there's a problem with that strategy: data proliferation. It requires an enormous amount of time and resources to move and organize new data into that central repository. And by the time this is complete, you've missed the negative comment in your user community from your most important customer by two days.

Think back to the Hendrix song. As the famous lyric goes, "And so castles made of sand/ fall in the sea/ eventually..." A centralized data repository is a lot like building a sand castle; the castle must be continually rebuilt and organized once a new wave of data comes in and wreaks havoc on the old.

The increased proliferation of data comes at a time when, thanks to Google, employees are accustomed to finding the information they want immediately - and your customers expect answers to resolve their issues just as fast. Searching for information in the enterprise, though, remains a challenge for most organizations. Data is expected to grow by 800% over the next five years, according to Gartner's 2010 top 10 IT issues list, and 80% of it will be unstructured. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention how unstructured data can be dispersed across multiple systems, on cloud and on-premise servers and in different geographies, depending on the size and scope of a company.

Unstructured data can be made up of any number of business tools - documents, metadata, audio and video, email, etc. - and can be spread across disparate knowledgebases within an organization. The challenge of putting this all into one place is enormous. This type of data contains extremely valuable information, but if the person who needs it can't locate it and view it within context, it's useless.

Instead, companies should look at their data in a holistic manner, as you would the grains of sand that make up a beach. Rather than try to build that sand into a castle that won't hold up to new waves crashing upon it, the better approach is to examine and recognize the value of your data where it lies.

Tools for information discovery are advanced enough to allow data to be found in its natural habitat. For unstructured data, this can provide a real benefit. Some data types are going to function best when stored in a purpose-built repository rather than being shoehorned in to a one-size-fits-all system.

Taking this holistic approach to your data will not only save you time in the long run, it will provide new value to your data in the form of cost savings, efficiency gains and risk reductions. Moving your data delays delivery of its value and hastens its staleness. Leaving the data where it resides and providing unified access to it not only helps make the most of existing IT investments, it provides a full view of the information that matters most to you, which helps you make better decisions.

Anyone who's ever watched a sandcastle demolished by the waves understands that you can't make sand retain any form or location. To get the most value out of data, we must embrace the real-time nature of ever-changing business data, and harness it where it resides.

Photo by tommco

Twitter just announced this morning that it has acquired innovative social media data analytics service BackType. The BackType team will provide data for publishing partners of Twitter about how much traction their Tweets are getting, how they are converting to other key performance indicators and other information.

Some Twitter ecosystem partners will likely call this a betrayal of Twitter's public calls to build analytics services on its platforms, instead of Twitter clients, after Twitter acquired favored client software providers. Personally, I see this as another failure of the social media economy to sustain providers of more than crude self-interested promotion and broadcast.

Sponsor

Last summer, we wrote about a rumored Twitter analytics program we believed was going to be launched soon. It appears that such a product hasn't made a big splashy launch but is being offered to some degree behind the scenes.

When companies like Twitter or Google talk about publisher analytics, they don't mean analytics that will help new media publishers more effectively listen to the world around them that they are reporting on. They mean they are providing tools for old-fashioned one-way broadcasters to optimize their message-pushing to get maximum results in a strange, new pseudo-two-way media world.

It was awesome and a great way to follow what your favorite people were saying in distributed conversations. Here at ReadWriteWeb, we took Robert Scoble's Twitter List of the Most Influential People in Tech and we scraped all their Twitter bios for homepage URLs. Then we built an OPML file of the RSS feeds from BackType for all the comments those people posted around the internet, with those scraped URLs in the URL field of the comment.

Last spring when the Activity Streams Working Group added a new type of social network update type called Action Streams to its tech spec wiki, group leader Chris Messina posted a comment about it somewhere around the web. I received an SMS notifying me of the comment (as I always do whenever Messina or a handful of other high priority people post a comment on a blog, anywhere) and was able to get a story about the news and its significance up within an hour.

When real-time feed middleware service Superfeedr added support for automatic geolocation text parsing to every feed it delivered content for last Spring, founder Julien Genestoux asked me, "How did you know we had done that?" I later told him late at night at South by Southwest that it was because he had posted a comment on a 2 year old blog post about the Yahoo Placemaker API complaining about the shortage of tech support.

When Mitch Kapor or Bram Cohen posts a comment on someone's blog, I want to know about it.

I assume this feature will be killed promptly.

Not everyone engages in competitive news blogging and wants every little whisper from a white labeled list of people sent to them in real time, but anyone could benefit from a tool for listening to distributed conversations around the Web. Unfortunately, just as was the case with Google's recent acquisition of magic listening tool turned publisher analytics provider Postrank, listening to other people as competitive advantage still hasn't caught on widely enough to be a sustainable business.

The collapse of DIY screen scraping and RSS feed creation tool Dapper into an ad network and then a Yahoo property is another example.

You keep swallowing up the sad shells of formerly great social software startups, though, you big companies and your retrograde, black-hearted, disinterested incumbent customers. You can turn their algorithms and code towards nihilistic optimization for optimization's sake that yesterday's media will pay for today - but you can't take us power users alive.

Some of us will continue loving those startups while they are still on the frontiers: optimistic, lungs full of clean fresh air and interested in what other people have to say - the promise of truly social media.

Maybe someday that model of social software as truly social will become economically sustainable. Or maybe not. In the meantime there will probably remain a fresh supply of beautiful, if short lived, visions for using all these platforms for listening, engaging, amplifying the voices of others and for building value for ourselves through adding value to others. I sure hope so.

Above, Irish designer John McDermott displays GPS data exported from the bicycling community MapMyRide in a very different way. The change of perspective confers a new feeling to the data. This wasn't just a long bike ride, this was an epic trek that deserves to be commemorated.

McDermott, who heads design at Irish interactive agency AB Brown, has removed all other map data to focus on the route itself and puts the starting and ending point in the distant background to help communicate the great distance traveled. In the bottom corner are details like the date, duration, distance, speed and a graphic representation of the weather during the ride. It's a great example of how a strong design can evoke new communicative value from the data we produce though our everyday activities.

Sponsor

The black background and thick line of the route McDermott uses, as well as the large font for the title of the ride, all give this display of location data a very chic feel. It looks like a commemorative poster for a victorious stadium concert. But it was really just a 90 minute bike ride! It does look like a pretty epic 90 minutes though, with that meandering route, average speed of 13 mph and a top speed of 38 mph.

McDermott offers a number of different treatments of different routes on his Flickr account, which was highlighted today on the design blog NotCot. Map blogger Keir Clarke points to another bike mapping visualization today called Animaps.

From Data, Much is Possible

These are just a few examples of the new kinds of value that can be extracted from data when it can be extracted from the services used to create it and manipulated by other applications. In these cases, there are elements of storytelling, multimedia presentation and emotional communication that are all made possible by working with the data.

The data we create online isn't always as easy to access though as location data is from services like MapMyRide.

One of the people working to change that is Jeremie Miller, inventor of the widely used Instant Messaging protocol XMPP and now co-founder of personal data locker startup Singly. (Here's our in depth write-up of Singly and The Locker Project.)

"When you own your data, anyone can create a new way for you use it, visualize it, experience it and share it," Miller says.

"When someone else owns your data, then new tools can only be developed with the permission of that 3rd party and tied to that 3rd party's system. For those that want to create new experiences, they have to overcome either the permission barriers, or the technological barriers, or the submit-to-a-dictator barriers before doing something great for you with (what should be) your own data. That's a lot of impedance. For every one awesome new experience that can make it past all that and/or find data that is more free/accessible, there are 10, or 100 more, that didn't overcome the barriers."

Thank goodness for freely accessible personal location tracking data; look at the kinds of cool things it makes possible. Perhaps some day all our data, from social networking to health records, will be as accessible to us who should own it to innovate on top of. That would be epic.

In a forthcoming book from Wiley entitled iPad in the Enterprise, Nathan Clevenger cites several examples where the iPad has begun to transform the way that enterprise IT departments are operating. He does copious research and cites a series of intriguing examples where companies are tolerating, using, and even embracing iPads as part of their computing strategies. Here are a couple of excerpts from his research for the book.

Sponsor

Certainly, the notion of corporate workers purchasing their own PC equipment and using it for work purposes has been happening almost since the invention of the PC itself. When I was working for a large insurance company back at the dawn of the PC era, we had people even then buying their own printers, apps, and even PCs trying to connect to the corporate network. Of course, back in the 1980s, PCs cost more than $1,000, networks were wired via coax to IBM mainframes and apps came on 5 ¼" disks. But still, the daring few persisted.

With the iPad and other consumer devices, things have changed. Within 90 days of its introduction, half of the Fortune 100 companies had them on their networks. But so what? Clevenger quotes Kate Bass, the CIO at Valspar, saying, "Personally, I think that the fact that 50 percent of FORTUNE 100 have adopted the iPad is a gross overstatement. Yes, we have iPads in the organization but that does not mean widespread adoption nor that iPads are being used for daily processes. They work great for 'consuming' information that is available to the 'consumer.' They do not work well for creating information. I do think that they introduce an imperative, however, for the ERP vendors to make it easier to 'consume' data that we have spent years locking up in Fort Knox databases and storage systems."

CIOs don't have much choice anymore, as seen in another story he cites in his book:

"The day the iPad was introduced we had some discussions about adding them into our environment; 24 hours later, we had 500 devices accessing e-mails," said Frank Modruson, the CIO of Accenture. "CIOs who resist will eventually be forced to change. Consider, for example, when the personal computer arrived on the scene. Its initial target market was the home. And then people started to recognize that PCs were very powerful tools that could be used at work. Many CIOs and procurement departments declined to authorize their purchase. So people circumvented the restrictions by saying they were purchasing a calculator. CIOs should not be asking if they should be taking advantage of the devices. They should be asking how they can take advantage."

"As we move forward into a world where cloud enabled networks are the norm," says Art Glasgow, the CTO at Ingenix, "CIOs have to accept the fact that the world has changed. Any device at any time on the network will be the norm and it will have to be done without sacrificing security and manageability. Cool matters and usability rules the day so devices like the iPad have to be not just accounted for, but designed for. The good news is that devices like the iPad aren't just cool. They are flexible, multifunction tools that are changing the way we work and create and in that sense may very well be not just an innovation themselves, but a catalyst to innovations."

One example cited in the book is the experience of media guru and NYU faculty Clay Shirky on a trip to his dentist, who "handed me an iPad to check in and update my information. The usual, horrible 'We know we've seen you 20 times, but here's a clipboard' experience was transformed. Any data they already had was filled in, so I only had to add or alter new things. Even more interesting, the app for this was the web browser -- this was a web interface to a cloud-hosted application, running via the office's local Wi-Fi.

The iPad's adoption has been like a cork popping out of a champagne bottle in part because of the pent-up demand it unleashes in other areas as well. The dental app wouldn't have worked without good web design, cloud-hosted apps, local Wi-Fi, [and] a whole host of technologies that were worth less than the sum of their parts before there was a working tablet you could hand someone and have it just work. And the real kicker for businesses is that these kinds of uses don't just act as replacements for PCs and laptops, they replace clipboards, paper, [and] local databases, and all kinds of inefficient practices get smoother and better".

He mentions that Royal Caribbean Cruises is using iPads in a dozen different ways, both for their own internal processes as well as to enhance the experiences of their guests. "So I would disagree that enterprise IT is having trouble coming to grips with the onslaught of mobile technology now available," Clevenger cites Bill Martin the cruise line's CIO as saying. "On the contrary, we're embracing it and trying to apply unconstrained thinking to find new ways to leverage it. From our perspective we say, 'Bring it on.'"

Does this mean the traditional corporate desktop will disappear? Hardly. There are still some challenges. Thomson Reuters' Mobile Technology Director Dan Bennett is more of a realist and Clevenger cites him saying that there are two in particular: "Immediately, IT must determine how to provide secure access to enterprise resources -- this is distinctly non-trivial. Longer term, the mediocre user experience of the typical enterprise app must be improved if one is to translate the gains of consumerization to business value."

The book will be available in August. Clevenger is Enterprise Editor for iPhone Life magazine, and also the Chief Software Architect at consultancy ITR Mobility.

MySpace's fall from glory is now complete; Kara Swisher reports that it has been sold off to an advertising network for $35 million, an incredible decline in value from the $580 million that Newscorp paid for the social network in 2005.

Why did MySpace fail? Why have Facebook and Twitter stolen its thunder? That will be a question for the ages, but one contributing factor may be the incredible hostility that MySpace had for outside application developers. MySpace thought, and said publicly, that all the rest of Web 2.0 was a leach, a monkey on MySpace's back. Below, an excerpt from a TechCrunch post I wrote about this five years ago. It looks pretty amazing now in retrospect and is a good reminder that today's leading companies should remember their humility.

Sponsor

The post was titled, "MySpace: We don't need Web 2.0," by yours truly and ran on TechCrunch, September 12th, 2006. I should add that Newscorp/Fox was not very happy with us for writing this post. Eight months later, Heather Harde, who ran the mergers and acquisitions team at Fox Interactive Media became the CEO of TechCrunch.

Almost five years later, can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg saying things like this about, for example, Zynga?

News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin told company investors today that, "If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Flickr, whether it's Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace." MultiChannel News is reporting that Chernin said there is no reason why News Corp. couldn't build parallel businesses, targeting YouTube in particular. "Given that most of their traffic comes from us," he said, "if we build adequate if not superior competitors, I think we ought to be able to match them if not exceed them."

What didn't get discussed in the coverage of Chernin's talk to the Merrill Lynch Media & Entertainment Conference today are the steps the company has taken that have made it more difficult for outside companies to spread their presence inside MySpace, like blocking external links in Flash widgets. Could more hindrances like that be forthcoming? [To clarify, this is the context in which Chernin's comments were made, he did not discuss blocking other company's widgets.]

While competitor Facebook won accolades for opening an API to outside developers, it's understood that there is probably zero chance of such openness from MySpace.

It's unclear what more MySpace could do by way of features alone to compete with YouTube. The MySpace video player has embedding, related videos, top videos and viewer comments. Chernin said that MySpace's video efforts have been small so far and estimated that between 60 and 70% of YouTube's traffic comes from MySpace. That may become less the case as the YouTube community develops its own stars who use MySpace pages as static points of reference, at most.

Chernin also said that the company was looking to put more of its own commercial video on MySpace. "You're going to see us starting to play more aggressively on the entertainment side of that site," he said. Commercial video on YouTube has been a big gamble, with some of it well received and some of it eliciting a very hostile response from users.

To summarize: the COO of News Corp. says that Web 2.0 is leaching traffic off of MySpace, that they can build their own services to compete with any of it and that there's going to be an increasingly aggresive commercial push on the site. That sounds both dangerously arrogant and like a real validation of fears that MySpace dependency is too risky for outside developers.

I thought I'd type up some notes after an evening of using Google's new social network, Google Plus. This is a really big deal, a super ambitious effort involving scores of engineers over months of near total secrecy. (Though some helpful sources and I scooped the core Circles part of all this three months ago.) The service is really, really well done. Will it be good enough? I have no idea, but I have felt drawn to keep using it all night long.

The fundamental value proposition is around privacy: it's the opposite of Facebook and Twitter's universal broadcast paradigm. Google Plus is based on the Google Circles feature, which lets you share and view content to and from explicitly identified groups of your contacts, and no one else. It's really easy to use and a great feature - but even if you're communicating out in public, the rest of the service is very well designed, too. This is a smart, attractive, very strong social offering from Google. Below are some notes after a few hours of use.

Sponsor

Above: Anil Dash on Plus. Below, Circles curation.

Big picture take-away: Google has built an attractive, intuitive, intelligent service that's fun to use and speaks to a deep human need for contextual integrity of communication. There is not just public/private, life is more complex than that. This need, unmet by almost any other social network today, is where Google is aiming to win the hearts of users. The app the company built towards that aim is smooth and pleasing to use.

• The list, group or Circle creation interface is interesting and really easy to use. You drag peoples' contact cards into big circles at the bottom of the page and those people are added to that group, or Circle. It's full of fun little animations (try deleting a circle or grabbing multiple contacts) and if there is anything that will make people want to manually organize their contacts, this could be it. This is really important because as I've argued for several years, groups are the secret weapon of the social web. Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it. List creation on competing services has been a mixed bag. It's undervalued at Twitter and suffocated on Facebook.
• When hovering over a username, you can see a set of Circle titles that can be checked off to add people to groups as well. It is a shame that there aren't any recommendations for people that ought to be grouped together automatically into a common Circle. Google could do that, but perhaps like Face Recognition they worried it would set people aBuzz with eerie privacy concerns.
• The ability to toss a contact into a Circle with typing and autocomplete make it even easier to organize contacts.
• Photo sharing is really smooth and easy. I don't have an Android phone so I haven't been able to test the Instant Upload feature that's reminiscent if not better than Apple's forthcoming iCloud for photos (or Windows Mobile's existing feature), but the desktop drag and drop uploader is very, very nice. The ability to drag things right into the share box at the top of the newsfeed is nice, too.
• Photo viewing is a little less elegant, but it's ok.
Above: XKCD tells it like it is.
• The mobile web app is very good, though because of an error right now you can't moderate comments as promised. That's how high the expectations are set though!
• The mobile web app makes it easy to check in to locations, though in typical Google style (Plus being a radical departure!) there's not a lot that happens when you check in.
• Google Plus One buttons off-site don't flow into Plus one but they probably will in time.
• Circles aren't public and at launch can't be. The company says it was concerned about making public/private as clear as possible, but the curation of interesting topical Circles and then subscription to other peoples' Circles has huge potential. Much like Twitter Lists.

• The Notification and Comments thread drop-down interface (pictured above) that now sits on top of Plus and every other Google web app, from Search to Gmail to Docs, is really nice. It's ever-present and fully functional. It's a great way to stay engaged with the service and was a very important addition.
• The Sparks feature, like a topic-based feed reader for keyword search results, is the least developed part of the site so far. Google Reader is so good, this can't possibly stay so bad for too long. It's not bad, the user experience is pretty good, but the content is sparse and there doesn't seem to be as much quality control as there ought to be in what gets displayed. Too few, mediocre news updates on a topic aren't exciting, but Sparks does make those updates easy to share and discuss.

The end result? So far and on balance, a very compelling experience. Google Plus invites will roll out to users over time, the first stage is being called a Field Test, in which feedback will be collected before expanding participation.

Have you had a chance to use Plus yet? What do you think of it? Can you imagine hundreds of millions of people leaving Facebook for this and sticking with it? That's a very tall order.