Your thoughts on how Google+ is perceived?

June 17, 2012 By

Just a quick post as I’ve spent most of Fathers Day with my son and watching the British round of the MotoGP series, but two recent stories about Google+ have caught my eye, and neither of them are about new features Google is trying to cram into its social network to force it to become popular.

The first is that the Financial Times has reached 1 million followers, having led the figures for UK newspapers for a while now. (Hat tip Neville Hobson)

The second is that major social gaming companies are actively pulling their games from Google+, such as the Electronic Arts-owned Popcap, and their Bejeweled Blitz, which has been massively successful on all other platforms. (via Techrunch).

 

What this may mean for Google+

I’ve written a lot before about how companies greatly over-estimate the control they can have over their brand and how it is perceived. You can certainly influence it in the way it is created, and the way your company acts, but eventually it comes down to people perceive it.

The fact that business news is popular on Google+, social gaming is somewhat stagnant, and the fact my own active circles are mainly either Google employees or the SEOs that are using the value of a search-engine-owned social network makes me think that Google has ended up creating a network that sits between the features of Facebook and the focus of LinkedIn.

Maybe it’s a continuation of the social business focus of previous attempts such as Google Wave or the usage of Google Buzz?

The questions I have are whether anyone shares my opinions, and also, could this have been Google’s intention? After all, we’ve seen social tools adopted in the enterprise that have come from personal user adoption and those champions spreading the word – I’ve thinking of those people who introduced their company to Basecamp or Yammer.

Do you think success for Google+ is a long-term change to business, cloaked in a short-term attempt at the mass-market, or is that too small a prize for a company of the size and revenue of Google?

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Is the new masterpiece just a moment in time?

August 13, 2008 By

I originally posted this thought as a comment on a post by David Cushman at /message, but wanted to repost it here. Partly it’s to remind me to examine it more in the future, and partly because I’m fortunate enough to have received some very insightful comments recently, and I’m hoping the same will help me form this idea.

In the broadcast era, a masterpiece was a finished product which received a response from either critics or the general populace.

In the new era just arriving, the influential content creators will produce masterpieces, but these will be moments frozen in time in the evolution of a piece of content as it continues to evolve.

The masterpiece may not be Back to the Future, but it may be Brokeback to the Future. Which could then lead to Microsoft Goes Back to the Future. We see it already in the constant evolution and improvement to a Wikipedia article. But with the more gradual evolution of content or an idea across websites, blogs, comments, lifestreams, emails, microblogging, video and audio sites,  there will be certain revisions and remixes which stand out as most relevant or informative for each of us. And those which are adopted by influential individuals or a critical mass of groups will be retained as a classic.
Ideas have always evolved in a similar fashion, but generally Hollywood sequels and remakes are perceived as lower quality, with notable exceptions (Aliens, Dawn of the Dead, possibly The Empire Strikes Back and The Godfather Part 2). But rather than watching Sylvester Stallone or Jude Law fail to match Michael Caine in the originals of Get Carter and Alfie, or an Italian Job which takes place in America with modern Minis, we’ll get new versions every year, month or week, with different actors, different interpretations and different outcomes.

The original creator and creation will still have a venerable position as the archetype, but it’s relevance starts to fade as soon as it has been consumed, and only re-emerges once it has been reinterpreted time and time again.

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Does Google mean I’m famous?

August 12, 2008 By

Just had a boost on a wet Tuesday morning – a name search on Google has always brought me up fairly quickly – but mainly because I worked on a pretty big website within it’s niche.

But having registered www.danthornton.net, and done pretty much nothing with it, I’ve ended up with the eighth result! Take that, owner of danthornton.com, who said they would consider selling and then never came back to me!

The plan was to use that address to accumulate my many networks and conversations, but I still haven’t quite got round to working out exactly how that’s going to work. In the meantime, simply redirecting it to my About page has meant that I’ve got some personal brand presence online that’s totally within my control.

And as Jeremiah Owyang pointed out, there can be big impacts on someone’s online identity and reputation in some circumstances….

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