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Remmert Braat › Likes
Online Advertising is Largely Broken - http://www.startupeconomy.com/2009...
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Remmert Braat liked this
On Apple, Facebook, Google, Whuffie and why customer lock-in sucks - http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2009...
Remmert Braat, roel and Mike Fruchter liked this
The Time is Right to Kill Google (If They Don’t Kill Themselves First) - http://www.louisgray.com/live...
Remmert Braat, Nicholas James, Kevin Whalen and 32 other people liked this
Post by Matt Dickman: http://www.friendfeed.com/mattdic...
- Louis Gray
I call link bait! There is only one way to kill Google and that's to beat their advertising model and and THEN out innovate in something big like search. It's gonna take big $ and big ideas
- David Knight
I think someone could make a really good Feedburner alternative (if one doesn't exist already). And if it's marketed to some influential bloggers - and if they are pleased with it - it could do well.
- Kevin L
Matt, a bit of a pretentious title for a post about Google not taking care of user needs. They, like any big company are making mistakes. And these need to be corrected. But imo killing a company as big as Google will take a bit more than another company doing a few things better. We often tend to forget that Google has become way more than search or advertisement. If you are going to...
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- Alexander van Elsas
google wont die...ever. ;o) way to big
- Rob Sellen :o)
Two bad services does not mean the end of Google by far, for one Google is much more than any of those individual services. FriendConnect was written in the hope that people love Google enough to form social connections with other Google'ers, they aren't. Facebook, Myspace, etc have the social network market wrapped up currently and that isn't likely to change at least with anything coming out of Google. Also I would say that Feedburner while yes bad, isn't the company: search and advertising is.
- Justin Yost
I'm afraid by killing Google we may be killing the only power player that gets it. They're clearly narrowing their large ideologies to win one, or a few big ones. That is how it's played sadly. I'm sticking with them, until someone can tell me about another power player in regards to the net that is so close to making positive change.
- timedalkat
from twhirl
I also think the title is a bit dramatic. I like the idea thoug that although Google earns it's money with advertising, they also have to make their other services really great. No one is going to look at ads displayed next to something that isn't good. I remember when I started using Google search, they absolutely outperformed the other search engines (Altavista for me). Now there doesn't seem to much of a difference. Concluding, a big company can also make mistakes, but it's about how you set them right.
- TobiasVerhoog.com
Was replying to these in the blog comments, but I'll repost here:
- Matt Dickman
David -- Granted the revenue model they have is working for now, but it is trending down especially in this economy. Innovation can come from anywhere. Would you have said the same thing to Google about Yahoo back in 98-99? If they had listened then, they would not be where they are now.
- Matt Dickman
Kevin -- You're right. Some of their products are more at risk than others. I love Gmail, use it all the time and the switching cost is too high.
- Matt Dickman
Alexander -- I don't know if I would say pretentious, but I certainly wrote it purposefully. Companies that don't pay attention to their users are at a huge risk. You are right about their scale and they've invested in other elements of business. It's a lot of inertia to move as an upstart, but they did it to Yahoo and scalability is easier now then it was in the late 90s. It also...
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- Matt Dickman
Rob -- In this business environment anything is possible. If advertising spending drops, how else are they making money?
- Matt Dickman
Justin -- Thanks for the comment. Google is a collection of services kept afloat by advertising revenues for the most part. You're right about the idea of Google doing social networking, it doesn't really work. More than a few people have asked why they would use the service. "What does it do for me?". Right now I can't really answer them. Obviously killing Google from the outside in is...
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- Matt Dickman
with the data they have, they will know better than any of us. ;o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
timedalkat -- I don't think most of us have a choice but to stick with Google. Overall, I am happy with most of the products they offer. They are, as you said, focusing down on a couple of things and I think that's where the opportunity lies for upstarts to latch on and pick away the things on Google's periphery.
- Matt Dickman
Tobias -- I did write the title to get attention, but my goal was to get conversation going like the one happening here. Thanks for weighing in. You stated this better than I did so thank you. They have so much going on and need to focus on making things great again. Differentiation + ad revenue sounds like a great model.
- Matt Dickman
Rob -- You're right about the data. They know a LOT ;)
- Matt Dickman
yeah..and it will tell them al they need to know. :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
Matt, envision a world in which advertisement is not the premium currency ont he web, and you will find a direction in which Google can be attacked. They currently own the online search and advertisement space. Instead of fighting them head on I would create a nice that makes their methods less relevant. Search is already becoming less important, and that provides alternatives that can become as big and important as Google is now
- Alexander van Elsas
Alexander -- That's a great way to frame this. It's a shift from ad-focus to user-focus/innovation.
- Matt Dickman
Jason -- I am not saying Facebook is the solution. They have the same issues. There are alternatives to GMail and Reader. They are good, but somebody could easily build something better. There are more tools than ever and more people who have the skills. Do they all work at Google? Could anyone invent the next Reader? Absolutely.
- Matt Dickman
Matt, thx, it actually touches a theme I write about every once in a while (did it today too btw) ;-)
- Alexander van Elsas
One of the fun things about having strong guest posters is that I'm allowed to occasionally disagree with stuff on my own site! I think what Matt has noticed is absolutely true - the trust of Google has decreased as new services have rough edges, slowed response times, and invisible support. Combine that with the ads first, users second mentality and you can see why people are frustrated. But I don't think Google is going anywhere, and I want them to succeed vs. others (Microsoft for example)
- Louis Gray
marketing is probably starting to run things just like they did at yahoo, where are the visionaries?, where are the leaders? the folks that really believed that you can never be evil
- Iggy Kin
@Louis that is odd. I tend to disagree with myself all the time ;-)
- Alexander van Elsas
I'll call linkbait too, but interestingly enough I've been talking to both the FriendConnect and the FeedBurner folks recently, and feel pretty excited about what I'm hearing. I'll be the first to admit that I didn't understand FriendConnect at first, but recent conversations with that group (and OpenSocial) have me very excited.
- Matt Cutts
P.S. I'll also strongly disagree that Google as a whole isn't listening to users. This is an interesting economic environment and every company is recalibrating in different ways, e.g. Google has closed some products recently. But I think people are over-generalizing about some remaining products. And from where I sit, I see many more clued-in Googlers watching the outside world to see what we need to do better on. I love that Jeff Huber (VP Eng at Google) showed up recently to reply to some comments.
- Matt Cutts
@Matt Cutts and others: I had the option to change the proposed headline, but left it as I think Matt Dickman can answer why he feels the way he does. As for linkbait, that's a different post opportunity. I don't believe linkbait works the way it used to, so I don't believe in it. Re: FeedBurner, I'm sticking with it, and FriendConnect I'm watching from the sidelines so far.
- Louis Gray
Louis isn't kidding about his headline changing powers. I think he spruces mine up every time, and they always need it too ;)
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Very true. Some of what's happening here speaks to the common misconception that listening to customers means doing everything they say.
- James Koole
Louis -- They aren't going anywhere soon. Death by a million paper cuts is a better analogy. I think Google also lifts the industry which is why I am so frustrated to see this lack of support.
- Matt Dickman
Matt -- You can call linkbait, that's your opinion (though, isn't that passe now?). The title is the way I feel. I think service is a huge opportunity that the company is missing out on. You have a very large company, but support should be the first priority, especially with new products. People's questions are still sitting there unanswered on FriendConnect, early adopters and evangelists should be the first people who get help. I would still align service first.
- Matt Dickman
Also, Matt your engagement here shows the model that Google should be looking toward. Get your smart, passionate people out there, engaging and solving problems. Thank you for that.
- Matt Dickman
Ok, liked due to Matt's insane ability to respond thoughtfully to every comment. Google's ads can be considered a user benefit, they can be focused and personalized. Since the campaigns are tailored by humans and not algorithms they can also give you better results on search pages if you're not exactly sure what you're after. Until someone can manage to come up with a "free" revenue model that provides more value to it's users than Google does, they're not going anywhere
- David Knight
+1 David. Matt D. is doing a great job of keeping on top of the comments here. I love seeing a post take off like this.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
Thanks Daniel and David. I love these conversations too. I wanted this to get people thinking about this. David -- you're right about the ads, but when is the last time you said "man, I wish I had a better ad?" vs. "man I wish I had some support". Ads rule for Google (revenue is key especially now).
- Matt Dickman
James -- Listening to customers and doing what they say isn't productive, but not letting them know you're listening is crazy. I'll take a "we hear you and are working on it" any day of the week. Much better than silence. Thanks for commenting!
- Matt Dickman
MattD, I'm not begrudging you the title--I think the time is always right to kill Google, and I try to think every day about how I would kill Google. That way I can help prevent it by making Google better. :) But there will always be parts of a company that don't converse as much as people want--that doesn't mean that they don't hear the complaints, or aren't working behind the scenes to make things better. Talking to the FriendConnect folks about the future is getting me psyched, for example.
- Matt Cutts
I run Google ads on my site, I wish for better Ads EVERY DAY
- David Knight
MattC -- I know you're working hard as a company and I am *really* a fan. Just two things within two weeks that piqued my interest. You're smart to look for the "Google killer" and it is people like you who keep our faith in the company. We just want more ;) Thanks so much for jumping in!
- Matt Dickman
David -- That makes a lot of sense :) I see the publisher side, looking @ the consumer side. I would pay for no ads, but not better ads.
- Matt Dickman
No worries. In my ideal world, every Google property would keep an eye on what people say in the blogosphere/web and then respond. In practice, the first half (listening) usually happens, but we could still do more responding in the conversations. I think articles like this help push Google into conversing more though.
- Matt Cutts
David, do you know about http://projectwonderful.com ? I've been trying it for just a couple months so far (as an ad publisher). The jury's still out for me (see it in action here: http://bebepool.com/arthur), but it's worth investigating.
- Micah Wittman
@Micah - I've heard of, but never investigated it I'll take a look thanks :-)
- David Knight
MattC... you said..."Talking to the FriendConnect folks about the future is getting me psyched, for example"..... any chance of a hint to why...? :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
I'm with Rob. Would love to know more about FC
- Matt Dickman
yeah Matt.... be an interesting thing to hear. :o)
- Rob Sellen :o)
This is silly.
- Svartling
The more I understand about FriendConnect, the more excited I get. If you haven't seen, there's an OpenSocial hackathon at the Googleplex in February: http://socialapp.wordpress.com/2009...
- Matt Cutts
Google is the future. They have the scale and R&D/grunt to do great things everyday in everyway, particularly improving our lives. Matt, you are a lucky boy to be working there with such interesting things and people.
- Bob Sonin
How do networks sustain themselves (finanancially)? - http://beth.typepad.com/beths_b...
Meryn Stol, Remmert Braat, Matt Craven and Marc Canter liked this
Some related thoughts: http://josien.wordpress.com/2008...
- Meryn Stol
Will FriendFeed Forever Be a Niche Service? - http://mashable.com/2008...
Peter Efland, peter huesken, Jacopo Gio and 47 other people liked this
I looked at the title and I just knew it was one of Steven's posts! :)
- Mark Dykeman
oh oh .. getting to predictable
- Steven Hodson
Liked the piece Steven. I think there's more mainstream potential than you do. Commented on the blog.
- Hutch Carpenter
Steven!!! Funny, I just did a Qik video about comment duplication and Kevin Fox stuff and it hits on this big time. FriendFeed needs a new UI. I keep trying to spread it and I keep getting pushback I never got with Twitter. The people who run FriendFeed aren't delivering noise-reducing tools, either, and insist that the noise is good (duplication from one micro-node of friends to another). I don't think they've done research with real users.
- Robert Scoble
FF should steal some ideas from Digg on commenting. It should also steal some of Digg's recommendation features. I think an interesting addition would be to have most popular threads and discussions for the global FF network, among other types of recommendations.
- Charles Ju
Fragmentation and duplication are serious ills of FF - oh how I wish we could tag a conversation so we could have unified conversations around a topic; but just think how LONG the comment thread would be...wow. Rich convo but too long?!
- Susan Beebe
Robert, you "don't think" Kevin's done user research, or you asked him and he told you he didn't? Kevin, what do you say?
- Jason Wehmhoener
I agree with Robert, Friendfeed needs a new UI if it wants to go mainstream. Maybe some sort of homepage like the new facebook profile. More noise-reductions tool would be good too.
- Alejandro
Well, considering most people I talk to still wont use a feed reader, you may be right. I think part of the mainstream problem is that there are so many different services out there and friendfeed can potentially pull all of it together for them. For me, I want to be able to read blog posts, shared google reader items, digg articles, etc right here, I mean heck - there's an awful lot of screen real estate there to the right-hand side....let's have some AJAX-y fetching going on of the actual content.
- Rob Neville
I think you're incorrect, Robert: mainstream people are not as interconnected as people are in early adopter communities. I think Kevin's got a point: let's say you remove the early adopter audience. Do you think one person's friends really cares what you, or me, or potentially 50 to 100 strangers think about something? They care about what they're friends are doing. Just look to real...
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- Mark Trapp
To my point, I really don't care that 500 other strangers shared a story, or that there were 80 comments with people I don't know talking about it. I care about the people I'm following. I want to have a discussion with people I care about, not strangers. I think the reshare and fragmentation facilitates that. If say, James Ferguson shared a story, I'm interested in that, because it...
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- Mark Trapp
well then we need a feature that locks out superconnectors who have, say, more than 50 friends. Or at least locks them out for, say, a day so that a micronode conversation can happen first.
- Robert Scoble
I was watching Michael Arington's Stanford Startup School presentation and I think a good point he made was that after your site gets to critical mass, the comments start to become trolly and the community loses its close connection. I can foresee this being a huge problem for FF as it grows.
- Charles Ju
Robert, maybe even if there was a way for the content producer to say "Do not allow friend of friend on this post." So, it becomes sorta like an on-demand private feed. You can still see it, but your like and your comment doesn't expose it to 15,000 other people. And of course, there'd be some visual indicator: could even use the lock icon like it does for full private feeds.
- Mark Trapp
Mark: point taken...I suppose what I was getting at, although not articulating quite well now that I read it again is that I think the key for taking FF beyond us abnormal folks is to make it a one-stop-shop to remove the confusion of so many social interactivity services and feed readers, etc. I think FF has the capacity to do that with some tweaks.
- Rob Neville
I agree with you Robert Neville; I apologize, my response was directed towards Robert Scoble. There's a few assumptions that I think we take for granted that's lost on most people: 1) privacy is an illusion, 2) we're all interconnected, 3) we spend an acceptably large amount of time online. No matter how true those sound to us, for most people, there's a lot of pushback. Which is why,...
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- Mark Trapp
I think Kevin (and FF as a whole) is correct in realizing the value of fragmented conversations. The issue here is that super-connectors with 20K subscribers are bound to expose those fragmented conversations (that otherwise would go unnoticed by the masses, as intended) quite often - all they need to do is 'Like' whatever random item that shows up in their feed. Not only that -...
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- Aviv
Best two lines in this conversation: "We're abnormal" [Mark Trapp] & "we need a feature that locks out superconnectors" [Robert Scoble]. The rest is just noise. :P
- Brian Daniel Eisenberg
a more compelling UI would truly elevate FF...but then, that could be said about many Web apps
- .LAG liked that
on the contrary, i would much rather have a service that is up and running all the time than a fancy prettified site that is virtually useless. the past few days, facebook has crashed my browser SO many times, the only time i go on is via phone. myspace? every since their overhaul i NEVER go there anymore
- Mona Nomura
some of my favorite services are niche!
- Ross M Karchner
I actually like the FF interface in its current form. It's lightning fast ( damn facebook is getting irritatingly slower these days ) and its UI is simple much more Googlesque. It's quite unique that its social graph is not bi-directional (like many other social networks), and it gives me tons of useful links and is gradually becoming where i come for personalized information discovery....
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- Krishna Gade
Friendfeed will go mainstream when the applications that fuel it go mainstream (which might be a while). Whoever mentioned that people don't even get feed readers was right. Even among tech-savvy types (non-web), concepts like RSS and Social Bookmarking are still completely foreign.
- Steve Spalding
*sigh* niche tools are so important both digitally and in meatspace - why does everything need to become mainstream to be viewed as a success - the majority of businesses and products in the world would be considered niche and in aggregate far out weight the aggregate of what would be considered mainstream - no disrespect to you steve for writing this post but anytime i see "this will never be mainstream" sentiments i can't help but think that its a myopic view
- mike "glemak" dunn
FF depends on a whole lot of users using open services like Twitter Flickr etc. I know no one outside of tech who uses them. Most people are locked into the privacy world view and wouldn't dream of openly sharing their stuff. FF is SV/tech niche only. Sadly.........
- Sean Kelly
The well rounded website is the weakest specialist. Why try to be all things to all people with mediocre success?
- Geoff Schultz
The Long Tail and the Dip - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_b...
Remmert Braat, kamesh and phil baumann liked this
I like the break up of the tail into 3 parts. Helps clarify confusion about the intuition pump.
- phil baumann
Do we really need privacy controls in Social Media? - http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2008...
Remmert Braat, jswi_jim, Hutch Carpenter and 4 other people liked this
I like the idea "privacy bank"! Maybe when we have "data portability", we could have the "privacy bank" to protect all our data with cheap expense.
- K.D.
KD The most important reason for this metaphore to me is that it provides a feeling of security, while the controls are still with the user. The "privacy bank" doesn't have any other objective then to protect my privacy and data the way i want it, and it interfaces with any social media so that I can set these controls myself on the fly. This method would be user-centric. `the user then gets to decide how much a Facebook or any other social service can see of me. The idea is simple but implementation isn't
- Alexander van Elsas
Benjamin Wittorf says "Sadly, as most Internet users just don’t care about their privacy (and I doubt they ever will), I don’t think it’s likely for any company to implement something like this - why for, if they can make more money with more data. Being cynical on recent global developments on privacy, at least “they’re after my money, not after me” (no, I don’t want to start a political discussion)."
- Alexander van Elsas
My response was that I'm a bit more hopeful that users will find privacy controls increasingly more important as they get confronted with social media watching and monetizing on their online behavior and interactions.
- Alexander van Elsas
Christopher Parsons says " To my way of thinking, the easiest method for securing personal privacy revolves around a central change in how privacy laws presently operate - rather than requiring ‘opt-out’ clauses to most info-sharing agreements, opt-in clauses should be needed. If a user doesn’t opt-in to the various (explicit) ways that a infobank is sharing their information, that information should not be legally shareable."
- Alexander van Elsas
I responded "Privacy laws and opt-in would definitely be an improvement. But laws take time to be implemented and opt-in doesn’t solve the real problem. The underlying business model needs to change. Instead of free ad based services we need something else. Maybe payed services, maybe other ways of monetization, but that is both an investors and a user’s dilemma."
- Alexander van Elsas
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