Google’s latest foray into social media arose the day before yesterday with their announcement of Google Buzz, a feature that tacks right onto a GMail user’s inbox. It’s Google’s belief that organizing social information on the web, or “finding relevance in the noise” is a huge problem. So they decided to do something about it with the introduction of Buzz. A social media sharing service, Buzz integrates with your blogs, photo sharing platforms, Twitter, YouTube, and other sharing sites.
Microsoft and Yahoo then released announcements that they offered similar services years ago, notably Microsoft’s Windows Live service and Yahoo Profiles. So there, Google.
Google Buzz is found in your Gmail account, and automatically follows those you follow the most. However, if you are only using Gmail as a tool to sign into AdWords or AdSense, like I am, then you don’t have many Gmail connections. Not to worry. Google will suggest new friends for you, plus you can interact with Twitter on Google Buzz.
To be quite honest, another social media tool to organize my existing social media tools isn’t such a great thing. I can’t keep up with the flood of information hitting me right now. How will Google Buzz make my life different, or more organized? It won’t. Relevance is subjective, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found something “relevant” and wanted to get the news out to the social stratosphere only to find my excitement waning as time passed. After all, there is a point where the number of social tools I use will eclipse the time I need for truly relevant affairs…such as work. Read the rest of this entry »
With the much anticipated release of invites to 100,000 people eager to try Google Wave, many want in as soon as they can. Currently there are a few ways to get your foot in the door of Google Wave. Some of the ways are:
- Signing up previously for a Google Wave account on Google.
- You are a developer and have access to Google Wave to learn the ins and outs of the application.
- You get an “invite” from someone else who already has access to Google Wave.
So what are you to do if you are not getting in from any of the above listed methods? Sure you could repeatedly hound your friends to send you an invite…but sooner or later you might appear as really desperate! Read the rest of this entry »
So, there I was, sending a message on MySpace (please quell your laughter) to a friend. I was ready to send it off, hoping that the user would check his account before the end of 2009 when, lo, a small icon labeled DotSpots popped onto the screen suggesting that I create a “Dot” of the message content. Earlier in the week I’d downloaded the program (currently available in beta version via the FireFox browser), wondering if this was the fourth coming of the ancient Project Xanadu. To test my theory and out of sheer curiosity, I figured that it was time to take the Dots for a test drive.
DotSpots, under the wing of co-founder Farhad Mohit, formerly of BizRate and Shopzilla.com, was first launched at the TechCrunch50 in 2008 to rave reviews. The Dots of DotSpots are annotation devices that can be distributed to equivalent copies of semantically similar text on the web. In many tech and social media forums, the format has drawn comparisons to Snipd and Diigo, both services in which the public can link and annotate existing subject matter on the web, but lack semantic matching capabilities. Mohit strongly believes that the purpose of journalism should be to frame issues, investigate issues from all sides, and to provide eye-witness accounts in investigative reporting. Unlike the aforementioned services, Mohit and company intend to enrich news media content by getting a few thousand high quality citizen journalists, bloggers, and activists into the fold as early adopters. This will allow them to enhance formidable news sources using Dots, causing mainstream media outlets to address those three areas. When this occurs, the DotSpots team will approach news publishers with a server side solution to turn DotSpots on for everyone, without the need for the plug-in which is now required to use the service. Read the rest of this entry »
