Entries Tagged 'Social Media' ↓
February 10th, 2010 — Social Media
(crossposted from a discussion thread at EMC)
My first thoughts on Buzz are that it fails at solving a problem I don’t really even have.
It connects me to people I send GMail to, which is great. My GMail network is a subset of both my personal and professional networks, basically people I trust enough to give my personal address to. So it’s a great selection of people for me to start connecting with. Success.
Then it lets them talk to me/eachother/the world in the same way facebook/twitter does. And frankly if those individuals want to do that, they are doing it already with facebook/twitter. Failure.
Then it lets them aggregate stuff they post in other areas, which is cool. I can see what my GMail network is reading in their Reader accounts (except if I wanted to, I could already follow them in Reader, as I do with many of my friends) and what they are posting to their Flickr and Picasa albums (cool). But…
Then it gets worse. People can bring in their twitter updates. So for the subset of my Gmail Network who are twitter-enabled, I see their stuff twice, once in my twitter client of choice, and once in Buzz. And as people comment on those twitter updates, they do so in a fragmented way, some in Twitter and some in Buzz. So if I want to see the whole conversation I have to monitor my friends twice and spend twice as much time dealing with their twitter updates. Failure.
So for twitter, it’s made my life harder, not easier, and I can’t afford that. It’s why I stopped using FriendFeed.
That’s just my first impression after a few hours with it. Maybe I’ll see more as it grows.
January 26th, 2010 — EMC, Life, Social Media
When I saw the emails start floating by about EMC’s ON Magazine’s special issue about 20 years of the web, I flagged them for later attention and promptly moved on. That may have been a mistake. Recently, I cracked open the PDF and paged through it. Something on every page caught my attention. Except for a few times, I forgot I was reading something written by people at EMC. I guiltily asked myself, “are we really this cool?”
So here, as requested by Natalie, is my version of the web at 20…
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December 15th, 2009 — Social Media
I often hear people talk about not “getting” some aspect of social media, or worse, talking about it like it’s a waste of time, an indulgence, or even a joke. The other day I was struck by how much the rules have changed in terms of communication, and why if you aren’t listening, you’re losing opportunity.
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November 3rd, 2009 — Social Media
On my drive into work on Monday, my mind was filled not with thoughts of Storage Resource Management but rather Social Search. Google recently made some inroads into this area, but I feel like we’re on the cusp of something revolutionary and nobody is seizing the opportunity to change the game.
Everything I am about to describe is achievable with today’s technology. And yet it sounds like science fiction. Here’s the world I want to live in.
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September 29th, 2009 — Social Media
I’ve been tinkering with twitter for almost two years now, on multiple accounts, trying to find the perfect way to integrate it into my daily life. And while my activity level on twitter has never been consistent, one thing has — the growth in the number of people I’m following. I realized early on that there comes a time when you have to decide whether to be lean in who you follow, or whether you have to start counting on tools to help you organize the data flow.
Never one to turn down a chance to play with tools, I’ve taken the latter approach (though in moderation; I still follow less than a thousand people). My latest twitter client is the Mixero beta, and after talking about it with a friend I decided it was time to do a little writeup. See, Mixero is almost great, but it’s the almost that is nagging at me week after week. I’m hoping that when it goes GA, we’ll see the client I know it can be….
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September 8th, 2009 — Corporate, Social Media
(Those of you old enough to remember Cheers, I’m not talking about that Norm.)
I was paging through my reader this evening and came across an article by the always-wise Jeremiah Owyang about handling your boss’s connecting with you on Facebook. You probably know where I stand on this already, especially if you’ve read my post “Five reasons to ‘friend’ your co-workers (or boss!)“. Basically, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage if you have the opportunity to do this, and don’t.
But one thing Owyang talks about that I failed to, is how to handle being the boss and entering this situation. As a manager I’ve been in this situation a couple times, and chatted about it with co-workers over lunch. The key to avoiding difficulty is knowing (and communicating) your social media norms. For reference, here are mine, as relate to mixing work and online networking:
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July 1st, 2009 — Social Media
“We fear change.”
Garth, Wayne’s World, 1992.
You can’t announce a font change on Facebook without the townspeople gathering their torches and pitchforks. Everyone loves Facebook, and wants it to remain exactly as it is today. And that’s been the story for years now. Of course, if Facebook listened to those users, it would be a little website for Harvard students and nobody else would use it. Clearly Facebook needs to know when to ignore their users and press bravely on. They’re doing a good job so far, and they’re about to take another step forward.
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June 25th, 2009 — Social Media
photo credit: freezelight
I saw a couple tweets this morning which brought back to the surface something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I won’t link the user but here is one line:
“I block most new followers”
Their next tweet was about Twitter’s “block” feature having trouble, and they had this long procedure for getting around the problem. They put a lot of work into just blocking a couple people. I felt bad for this person’s wasted energy.
Let’s go over what Twitter is and how it works, to understand what I’m talking about. I apologize for simplifying things, but this is close enough:
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June 22nd, 2009 — Corporate, Life, Social Media
Have you read my disclaimer? Over on the side of my page? These are not my employer’s opinions, I don’t speak for EMC, EMC doesn’t speak for me, and so on?
That might protect EMC if I were to go off the deep end legally. They might be able to fire me, disavow all knowledge of my actions, and prevent themselves from getting in too much trouble themselves. But if I were to do something legal but just plain stupid, do you think that disclaimer would prevent the EMC brand from being damaged in your eyes? Of course not.
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May 13th, 2009 — Social Media
One of my early and still-popular posts talks about removing a feature for what are probably good business reasons, and angering a vocal subset of your customers while doing it. We made this mistake with StorageScope, and Netflix made it with their profiles.
Netflix ended up restoring profiles, and StorageScope has been working to restore the use cases we eliminated ever since we redesigned the product.
What does this have to do with Twitter? In what they call a “small settings update” Twitter has removed the ability to see @replies to people you’re not following. This isn’t a small change, it fundamentally alters how Twitter works. Here’s the problem.
I join twitter, and I follow two people I know in real life. I watch their conversations, and I notice that they’re spending a lot of time talking to a third person I’ve never met before. I click on their name, see they are interesting, and follow them as well. My network grows slowly over time to include people my friends are talking to, so that I can talk to them too.
Now, this did get confusing at times. You had the choice to opt in or out of this additional information, and Twitter had to write extensive help documents about how it worked because people got lost. So they just removed the option, and made it so the simplest setting (you only see @replies directed at people already in your network) was the only option.
And what do you know, people are annoyed.
