Verizon’s new logo.
Category: Technology
Everyone is a designer now, it seems.
From the Google app (Android) reviews in the Play Store today. Our newfound capabilities to instantly vent our rage over tastes and opinions isn’t helping the case for our species.
Hulu Offers Commercial Free Plan (Finally)
“Consumers are asking for more choice,” Mr. Hopkins said. “One thing that they really wanted us to do is give them some choice around advertising.”
Source: Hulu Starts a Commercial-Free Option to Rival Netflix and Amazon – The New York Times
Big month for Hulu between this and the Epix deal.
I love you, Google but that new colorful logo in the search tab is a little… much.
1 in 7 people on earth used Facebook on Monday
We just passed an important milestone. For the first time ever, one billion people used Facebook in a single day.
On Monday, 1 in 7 people on Earth used Facebook to connect with their friends and family.
A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values.
Source: Mark Zuckerberg – We just passed an important milestone. For the…
Of course, that means 6 in 7 people on earth didn’t use Facebook.
That means that there are lots of people who choose not to use Facebook in the developed world.
More critically, that means there are many people in our world that don’t have access to the internet or devices that can access the web (or Facebook if you please).
Companies are working to crack this nut for their own bottom lines but also the improvement of humanity. Access to information and the ability to communicate near instantaneously with someone on the other side of our planet (and eventually beyond) will be an amazing issue to cover in the coming decades.
It’s incumbent upon all of us now to make sure the internet is as welcoming and transformative as it should be for everyone (whether old or new user).
The Future is Messaging and Google Seems Oblivious
“Unlike other AI-based services in the market, M can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more,” Facebook’s VP of messaging products David Marcus said in a Facebook post.
Source: Facebook’s M Is Here, and Google Should Be Worried
Messaging is big in Asia. Services like WeChat in China and Line in Japan / Thailand / Indonesia are how people communicate, buy things, book things, and operate. Sort of like how we (the enlightened) are amazed that people live inside of Facebook and think of it as the internet. There are even WeChat Stars like our YouTube stars. It is strange for us in the US to wrap our heads around (or at least me).
However, it won’t be for long. I remember sitting in a presentation by a Rakuten VP (they are a large Asian marketing firm that acquired messaging app Viber last year) at a conference in 2004… they were demonstrating data associated with the rising use of mobile phones to purchase items in stores or do cross comparisons via SMS in SE Asia while using brick-and-mortar stores as showrooms. I was blown away and thought “there’s no way anyone in the US would ever buy something on a mobile phone…certainly not furniture or computers.”
I was wrong. Best Buy is the best showroom Amazon could ever hope for (at least in my personal experience).
Five years from now, everyone in America will live inside the major messaging app that we settle on. Whether that’s FB’s Messenger, WeChat, Line, Snapchat (doubtful), Viber, Hangouts, WhatsApp or something we haven’t heard of yet, we will decry this newfangled “messaging media” and “messaging marketing” and look fondly on the days when we all just had Facebook newsfeeds or Twitter timelines.
Remember ICQ and AIM? We’re going back.
Messaging apps are what comes after “social media.” Facebook gets it. Even Apple (iMessage) and Blackberry (Messenger) get it. Google seems to be dragging its feet, which is scary to me.
Google’s New Router
Meet OnHub, a new router from Google that’s built for all the ways you Wi-Fi.
Source: OnHub – Google
I run our home and business DNS through Google (along with mail, calendaring, files, pictures, phone, etc) so I may as well use their new router, right?
The specs do look impressive.
Uncle Bill’s Sliver Gripper Tweezers
Amazon.com: 2 Pack Uncle Bill’s Sliver Gripper Keychain Tweezers
Random Saturday testimonial that I had to share… I spent a good deal of time today working on our back yard (field?) to clear out some brush and undergrowth before things get too crazy with the arrival of Baby H in November. As a result, I got a number of splinters and thorns despite wearing gloves.
Luckily, I had a pair of these tweezers that I recently purchased in my beloved pack / man purse / tactical survival bag and got to put the little device to use in a big way. Some splinters were just under the skin but quite a few were embedded deeper. These tweezers really did surprise me in how well they worked.
If you do any type of work or maintenance that could result in wood or metal or plastic etc splinters, I highly recommend these over other options (including my old method of gouging out a splinter with a sharp knife… which never works well).
Google’s Affiliate Program for Play Store
Google is working on launching an affiliate program for Google Play similar to the one Apple runs for its own digital content stores, a source briefed on the matter has told 9to5Google. The affiliate program, which is said to still be in its early stages of development and could get called off or change significantly between now and its time of launch, is said to be powered by Performance Horizon Group, the same company which in 2013 began supporting Apple’s affiliate program.
Apple’s affiliate program for iTunes content has had some success for larger publishers I’ve talked to (who deal in media and music categories). However, they weren’t blown away by the results. I wonder how much Apple is seeing from the program?
It will be interesting to see if Google can make a significant push by leveraging the affiliate space. There’s so much competition now with Apple, Amazon, Spotify etc that partnerships via an affiliate program might be the way to go to increase market share.
Google has been doing lots of hiring for their physical products category on the Play Store, so maybe this is in conjunction with that effort as well.
Will Google Buy Twitter?
“Obviously, Google could continue to just pay Twitter for access to its firehose, as other services do. But now that its in-house social network has proven to be mostly useless as a social connector between its various services, it needs some other way to plug social into those services and get access to unlimited real-time data, and Twitter is arguably the best method available.”
Source: Google’s failure with Google+ makes it more likely it will buy Twitter – Fortune
I love Twitter (much more than Facebook). I know using a term such as “love” for what amounts to a social network is hyperbolic, but it’s close to being true. In 2006, I latched on to the service as my social network of choice because I was fascinated by it’s ability to deliver news, info, content, and “streams” in near real time. Plus, Twitter was very open with its API meaning that a whole ecosystem of 3rd party apps and services developed. Twitter, in effect, became a coral reef as Dave Winer described here back in 2007.
I had breakfast with a colleague at a tech conference in 2007, and the topic of Twitter came up as we were both checking our phones (pre iPhone) and comparing how we were accessing the service. We discussed our hopes for the service and the web, and decided that Twitter (or something very much like it) would inevitably become a new protocol similar to IMAP or POP (that we use for email still) and deliver us streams of information based on who we followed or “tracked” (track was a key feature of Twitter early on until the dark times) in whatever app we chose. Twitter was going to be this generation’s love letter to the open web and protocols and standards. We were wrong.
The web continued to evolve and social networks became prime motivators in Twitter’s unfortunate path towards becoming a silo after 2008. The last seven years have seen Twitter grasp for its identity as a cast of rotating leadership ping-ponged it from an open web alert service to a celebrity hashtag outlet to a news delivery system to an advertising network. Twitter never had a chance. That’s not because of a zero sum game with Facebook. The two could exist perfectly well and both have billions of users. They are very different services and have entirely different purposes and possible futures (much like Apple and Google or Microsoft and IBM).
Will Google buy Twitter?
I have a feeling they will. Google understands its best bet for the future is a web that exists with fewer silos and more users. That doesn’t mean simple data mining of social networks, but it also means more users on the web for the advertising of the future (which will not be based on clicks or tracked by cookies but function on very personal levels based on the uniqueness of human experience… see Google Now).