June 2011 - TheOnlyCog

Google+ hits the ground, strolling!

Jun 282011

Google today announces the launch of Google+, their effort into the Social Networking arena — think Facebook with Google searching; In fact the preview screens look a lot like Facebook. (Try not to confuse Google+ with Google +1, a button to help you share your favourite pages with other).

As with all Google launches it is invitation only to the select few with invites coming later. Good marketing hype.

It has some interesting features and tight integration with other Google services. One interesting point that jumped out was the fact that someone can sign up to receive your updates without you agreeing. The Google approach is similar to Twitter, whereas Facebook needs a two way acceptance.

There is the integration with the massive Google search beast so you can easily search while in Google+ and receive text and video links.

Google+ needs the user to have a Google Profile and interestingly anyone who has Google Domains (i.e. their own domain hosted by Google) is precluded as Profiles are yet to be supported. ’Fail’ in my book.

Google claim they are in this for the long haul and say it will take some years to embed into your social life. That remains to be seen! Remember other Google social networking flops – Google Buzz which received massive criticism for its privacy policy, or Orkut (have you even heard of this?!). Then there was Google Wave, the new email that fell apart before it was ever launched.

It will remain to be seen if Google can pull this one off. It’s clear they need something else to pull in the advertising, especially if you consider that in May 2011 180 million people visited Google sites, against 157 million on Facebook. However, Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent 231 minutes.

Dropbox Drop the ball

Security, The Cloud No Responses »

Jun 222011

I am a huge fan of Dropbox, the cloud service allowing you to sync. your files between computers and also access them via a browser.

I was disappointed to learn today that they had dropped the ball with their security. In an official blog post they final admitted that a few days earlier they had applied a system update which in effect allowed anyone with your email address to access all your files without a password. The issue lasted for around four hours.

Now, one could argue that this was unfortunate human error, however you would also assume they have sufficient checks in place to confirm the cornerstone of the login process, especially when they apply updates.

By far the worst issue, for me at least, was their blatant arrogance at not informing the user base. A re-assuring email would be all it needed but instead they eventually posted an official statement on their blog. I only found out after reading about it on another site two days later.

Dropbox say they have contacted everyone with an account accessed during the period of the security fault, giving full details on files accessed, etc. If you are concerned fire off an email to support@dropbox.com

Dropbox now seem to have a bit of work ahead to rebuild their reputation in the community; lots of people venting their frustration and cancelling accounts — be prepared to read about people storing their tax returns on line (seriously?!)

For me, I find the service amazingly useful but don’t store anything overly sensitive — it makes you wonder how secure clouding computing is as we continue to be pushed down that road.

On a side note, Dropbox have often been criticised from not encrypting the files they store for you. There are of courses steps you can take to do this yourself (one good example would be to install TrueCrypt on the PC), however using encryption means you need to have the software installed on each PC you access your Dropbox and it also makes accessing the files from the web impossible.

(in 2010 Dropbox reported a user count of over 4 million and generated over $100m of income)

When is a Tweet not a Tweet

Social Networking No Responses »

Jun 202011

Twitter is an interesting beast. It has been around since July 2006 and currently runs with around 200 million users (no figures on how many are activate users), generating around 90 million tweets per day. (190 million depending on what/where you read). Who knows the true figure!

For those not in the know, a Tweet is a short message of not more than 140 characters used to convey your thoughts to anyone who will listen (follow). It’s different from Facebook, which is more personal.

The land of Twitter can be a fascinating place and I have personally come to the party late I think. Being an avid Facebooker, the Twitter experience took some time to grasp but I am there now and Tweeting on very random topics.

There are two things which surprised me, and both are tenuously linked (I promise)

Firstly, how do Twitter make their money?

They are currently valued (or expected to float) at around $8-10bn, which is a sizable chunk of notes. Especially when you consider their forecasted sales for this year is a mere $110m, (made $45m last year).

So what are their ‘sales’? There is certainly no advertising on the site, or any of their apps. They don’t tag adverts onto Tweets and they do not appear to spam users with promotions. Ok, all that said, let’s rewind slightly. Twitter do advertise! Ever seen the yellow “promoted” tag on twitter? This simply means someone has paid to have their message placed at the top of the list. Right now I have a promoted ‘Who to follow’ user of thomsonreuters for whatever reason. So, Thomson Reuters have paid Twitter to promote their username in certain conditions (which I clearly meet) in the hope that I will follow them and start reading their Tweets.

It’s the same when you do a search in Twitter — a quick search for ‘iphone’ in Twitter gives me all the usual ramblings plus a ‘prompted by….’ yellow tag as the very first Tweet.

Clearly there is money in yellow tags.

This brings me to the second point….their searching is very hit and miss. It’s easy to see it fall over….Tweet something, or find something already tweeted by one of your followers. Now search for that Tweet (search using the hashtag if it had one; the username or a unique word in the tweet). How many times did you find that tweet?

In my non-scientific experiment I would say that in a search of ten different tweets, three of them were returned in search results. Fail!!

Another interesting observation is that results are based on what you use to do the search. As well as the web interface there are a plethora of Apps available for mobile devices. I used the official Twitter.com website, the official Twitter.com iPhone App, and the mobile.twitter.com site. Each gave me different results (which is bizarre in itself). Twitter.com gave me the most consistent results.

I fired off an email to support and waited a few days as the auto response told me they are a ‘tiny support team’. The reply gave me some pointers to web pages on the subject and also this interesting note — “Due to resource constraints, not every Tweet can be indexed in Twitter Search”

Seriously, if my whole business model is based on making money from searching, I would get it right AND capture everything if it is the basis of my income.

I’m sure they are working on their infrastructure, but is the current one worth $10bn ?!!

It’s been a while

Welcome No Responses »

Jun 152011

Morning folks — it’s been several weeks since I published my ramblings, but rest assured I have been gathering materail. That, and the fact that I was being lazy/engaged in other projects.

Watch this space….