I received an invite to – well, let’s just say it as it is – Google’s Facebook clone tonight. Google+ is promising, but I’m still in a stage of exploration.

I don’t have the hatred of Facebook that seems to run deep in many of the people who work in the tech world. It’s an extremely complex system, and they’ve been able to hide most of that in a fairly straightforward interface. Their Achilles’ heel is that they’ve simplified the system so much that they’ve hidden the granularity of privacy that many people (well, at least, many power users) want. There’s an incredibly extensive set of privacy controls should you care to learn how to use them, but most users won’t ever change a privacy setting, let alone build lists of friends for custom sharing.

Google has attacked this by putting their alternative metaphor for lists – Circles – front and center. It’s a smart idea, but there’s a lot left to be desired as the service stands right now. I’m going to continually update this post as I explore the system, highlighting some of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the hope that if Google+ does take off, these will all be resolved at some point. (I’m doubtful Google+ will ever be nearly as popular as Facebook, but in this case, unlike Wave and Buzz, I’m honestly not sure.)

Smart moves & great stuff

• Managing circles works incredibly well on the iPad. It’s fun, even. The animations make a tedious and boring task fun, inviting, and engaging. Love the drag and drop and the visualizations of circles.
• The overall design of the system is the best design I’ve seen from Google to date, both in layout and in usability.
• I like that you’re able to have one-way followers instead of the required double-confirm that Facebook uses.
• The notifications system is AMAZING. It’s all very functional with exactly what you want to do, all right in the nav bar. I love that it carries the notifications across Google properties, too.

Drawbacks & limitations

• Google’s biggest hurdle will be attracting people to use Google+ instead of (or in addition to) Facebook. They should make it really simple to grab friends in any way possible, but as of now they only have your Google contacts listed as well as imports from Yahoo and Hotmail. Where are imports from Facebook, Twitter, or a non-webmail address book?
• You have to use a devoted Google address to sign up. If you have a Google Apps account, you’re out of luck. My primary email address is an Apps email, but since Google Apps accounts aren’t eligible for Profiles, they are, in turn, ineligible for Google+. I can’t add my Apps address, either, because the system throws an error that the email I enter is associated with another Google account. That’s going to make it tough for people to find me. (There’s an ongoing forum thread about this issue.)
• Since the entire system is new, you’ll end up adding a lot of contacts that don’t have full profiles. That means you’ll see the default blue silhouette graphic until those people fill out their Google+ profile – if they decide to join Google+ at all. One or two of those generic images isn’t bad. But when 75% of your contacts don’t have photos, the slick visualizations for Circles don’t really help at all. Part of the appeal of Facebook is that you can see your friends at a glance (it is in the name of the site, after all).
• There’s no API. Facebook has a really robust API. Just wanted to mention that.
• Whenever you do a search in the primary search box at top, the system spawns a new window and uses a Google search style instead of a Google+ style. It’s jarring.
• It’d be helpful to be able to add circles to circles. Since circles are all about limiting what you share, there’s a pretty good chance that some of what you share will overlap. Why should you have to add a great friend to both a “BFFs” circle and a “Friends” circle?
• I think Google might run into some privacy issues of its own when people really start sharing info; since you don’t need to confirm friends, I wouldn’t be surprised if people end up sharing info publicly with the mistaken sense that it’s only being shared with those people who they’ve added to any of their circles.
• My profile URL is https://plus.google.com/u/1/113746042084088900894. I hope that shortens up a bit over time, but Google’s known for some pretty crazy URLs.

We’re just over a month into 2011, and already this year has been transformative for mobile devices. Though the mainstream media may argue that the launch of the iPhone on Verizon is the biggest story of the new year, the truth is that there’s a much broader shift taking place. It’s all about control.

Steve Jobs loves to use a quote by Alan Kay to describe the engineering philosophy at Apple:

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

That, famously, has been the crux of the rivalry between Apple and Microsoft on desktops. Those that don’t favor the Apple way of business point out that software isn’t portable to different hardware as it is on Windows or Linux, and if anything, Apple has tightened the integration of hardware and software on their devices over the years.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has built its computer business on partnerships with hardware makers. At the D5 conference in 2007, Bill Gates, seated next to Jobs in an interview, explained:

“The question is, are there markets where the innovation and variety you get is a net positive? … And then take the phone market. We think we’re on 140 different kinds of hardware. We think it’s beneficial to us that even if we did a few ourselves, it wouldn’t give us what we have through those partnerships.”

What a difference four years – or in this case, a week – can make.

On Wednesday, HP held a press event to unveil their latest generation of mobile devices. The new gadgets use webOS, the operating system HP company acquired with its takeover of Palm last year. Though it wasn’t really a surprise that HP would use webOS on their new devices, the choice moved HP squarely in with Apple on the list of companies that want to control both hardware and software.¹

And then there was yesterday.

In a joint statement with Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia phones would use Windows Phone 7. Nokia was running out of options in the expanding smartphone market, and Symbian, their previous primary OS, wasn’t stacking up to iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7.

The politics of the deal are what make it interesting. Matt Drance writes that the Nokia/Microsoft partnership, too, may be about control. The “coup,” as Drance calls it, shows that Microsoft wants hardware control, too, even if it continues to allow other companies to develop with WP7.

The battle lines of control are being drawn. Google’s taking the Windows philosophy of the past: strength is in variety of hardware. Apple’s sticking its ground of hardware and software integration, but ten years ago who would’ve thought that HP and Microsoft would champion a similar style of control?

¹ During the event on Wednesday, HP also announced that webOS will be available on desktops and notebooks at some point in the future. The landscape continues to change.

Let me get this straight. You’re saying a guy starts a major tech company. He hires an executive from another successful company to be CEO, but about a decade later, the founder takes over as CEO of his own company? And his yearly salary is one dollar? Nah, that would never happen.

Link: Google’s Page to Replace Schmidt as CEO

Every so often I like to take a bit of time and look at some data about how people interact with the web. There are a ton of opportunities to study user behavior online.

Pomplamoose: covers vs. originals

After looking through a few of the videos from Pomplamoose on YouTube, I began to notice a few patterns. The most striking trend was that the duo’s covers of famous popular songs – by far their videos with the highest number of views – tended to have a much higher ratio of dislikes to likes than their original songs. I was curious whether this was due to the videos’ popularity or whether it was simply because users liked their original songs more than the covers.

I grabbed the statistics for Pomplamoose’s videos from YouTube, plotted them, and made a couple of interesting observations.

Pomplamoose’s three most popular videos are all cover versions of popular songs (“Single Ladies” by Beyoncé, “Telephone” by Lady Gaga, and “Beat It” by Michael Jackson). Those videos also happen to be three of the four least-favorably rated videos by viewers (the fourth another cover of a popular tune, “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing“). The four videos range between 88.6 to 91.5 percent of raters that chose “like” as opposed to “dislike.” No other video by Pomplamoose rates under 95.4%.

In short, Pomplamoose’s four videos that have a less-than-95% favorability rating are all well-known covers, and none of their three videos that have crested three million views exceed the 95% mark.

It’s important to note, though, that Pomplamoose’s cover videos don’t always attract the lowest ratings on their channel. Their most-liked video happens to be a cover of Mark Owen’s “Makin’ Out.”

Another view: Julia Nunes

Pomplamoose is a bit of a unique case. They often produce cover versions that vary quite a bit from the original version of the song, and that difference may attract lower ratings from fans of the original artist and arrangement. To provide a different view of the covers versus originals question, I pulled in some data from well-known YouTuber Julia Nunes.

Julia’s videos are all over the map. Her two most-watched cover videos – “Build Me Up Buttercup” and the Counting Crows’ “Accidentally in Love” – are actually rated quite high, both around 97%. Her two lowest-rated videos are two original songs, both of which have received over a million and a half views.

Final thoughts

Using Pomplamoose and Julia Nunes as examples, it seems as though it’s difficult (but possible) to make videos that are both extremely popular and near-universally liked. In both cases the most popular videos also have relatively low view counts. There doesn’t seem to be a clear association between covers, originals, and liking, but the majority of original songs tend to be less-watched but more-liked. That may speak to the value of devoted fans that watch a greater variety of videos on a channel as opposed to people who stop to watch a cover of a song they already know well.

Before making any generalizations about popularity and favorability, remember that this is all data from YouTube. Julia Nunes’s most-liked video is a clip of her singing as the Cat in the Hat in a school play. It’s a weird crowd on the web.

Yesterday Facebook announced a new, unified messaging system. Over the next few months, Facebook users will be able to view messages, chats, email, and SMS messages sent to friends in a single place on Facebook’s site. In the tech world we tend to shrug off these sorts of “incremental” announcements: “Oh, Facebook’s including SMS and email. That’s nice,” we say. Sometimes it’s difficult to step back and see the larger picture.

This kind of announcement deserves our attention. This is how revolutions begin.

Change

Technology companies thrive on change. Tech allows us to explore new ways of doing things we already know how to do. But change isn’t easy.

Making changes isn’t as easy as it sounds. Users of a site or service become familiar with the way a feature works, and any change – even a minor one – can be a shock. Facebook is no stranger to shock; even when they change the subtlest of features on the site, a “bring back the old Facebook” group will pop up within hours.

It’s no surprise that many of the big innovations on the web are fueled by small startup companies that don’t have to worry about appeasing a large number of users. When a company starts from scratch, it can do whatever it likes. Startups face a different challenge; they need to convince users that their way of doing things is better. Startups often aren’t able to get a foothold in an ecosystem with much more established companies in the mix.

The best of all worlds

With their new messaging system, Facebook aims to overcome both challenges. With 250 million people using the site every day, everything they do is noticed and used religiously. At the same time the new system doesn’t change much within the current site; it adds to it. (For another example of a company that decided to add instead of change in a quest to improve, look to Apple.)

It seems like the engineers at Facebook looked at other services like Gmail and Google Wave and decided to truly overhaul the concept of messaging. They even went so far as to reconsider the structure of conversations; the new system is person-based instead of subject-based, allowing users to see a history of all conversations between two people. One of the Facebookers featured in the intro video notes that the new system reminds him of the box of letters his grandparents used to keep. Modern messaging is much more complicated, but the metaphor Facebook’s using is much closer to how conversations happen in person.

As an added bonus, the change is great for all parties involved. It allows users to better track conversations and unify their communication. It also keeps users on the site and encourages them to build their relationship within the Facebook ecosystem; that’s music to the ears of Facebook and their advertisers.

Facebook’s launching an overhaul of how we communicate with friends. This is how email, SMS, and chat is supposed to work. This is how revolutions begin.

Back in 2005 blogger Monica Gaudio posted a recipe for an old-style apple pie along with some commentary on a medieval recipe site. Recently she found that a small New England publication called Cooks Source had copied her work without her permission. That happens all the time on the web, unfortunately, but the story doesn’t end there; when confronted with the issue, the editor of the magazine responded that “the web is considered ‘public domain.’” Rather than contribute the $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism Gaudio requested as compensation, the editor replied that “you should compensate me” for the rewriting done to the piece before it was published in the magazine.

It’s a classic tale of copyright stupidity, but the response is what makes this incident interesting. In addition to the thousands of wall posts that have swamped the magazine’s Facebook page, a thread on the page’s discussion board has turned into a crowdsourced amateur sleuthing center to find more articles plagiarized by the publication. The list includes alleged copies from sites owned by CNN and Disney.

Link: Copyright Infringement and Me

On Tuesday the editor of three top Maine newspapers (the Portland Press Herald, the Kennebec Journal, and the Waterville Sentinel) announced that they’d no longer include the ability to comment on news stories due to the fact that comments often ranged from “insensitive” to “vicious.” The decision was heralded by many readers who disapproved of the content of comments, but some criticized the move and suggested that it’s valuable for media outlets to collect reactions to a story.

Let’s take a look at a couple of the larger issues at play: the current problems with online discussion systems and the value of providing an outlet for reaction.

The current (and ideal) online commenting atmosphere

The intent behind comment sections on articles and posts is great: engage readers, allow feedback for your work, and build a community. But as readers of popular news sites and media outlets know well, these areas often turn quite vile and, in the end, can detract from the main story. The tone isn’t (entirely) the fault of the news source; it’s largely due to the fact that comment systems aren’t adequate for the kinds of interactions people have online. An ideal discussion system must have a way to implement the concepts of value and reputation.

If an article has five hundred comments, it’s often difficult to find which really add to the conversation. That’s where value comes into play. Users need a way to mark whether a comment adds value to the conversation or whether it detracts from it. (Preferably, there should be an option to flag a comment as inappropriate or offensive as well.) While it’s an important function, it should be very simple for users to “vote” on a comment. You’ve probably actually already seen a commenting system with value built-in: YouTube’s “thumbs up” and “thumbs down.” This also allows YouTube to place the highest-rated comments right underneath the video.

Reputation is a bit trickier; it requires value to be aggregated across all of the contributions from a particular user. eBay is a simple and well-known example of reputation, with users’ scores being a good first indication of trustworthiness. By combining vote totals, both positive and negative, across all of the comments from a particular user, a system could generate a fairly accurate idea of the user’s reputation on the site. Of course, the site would have to decide whether a user’s quantity (number of comments) or quality (value of each comment) weighs more into users’ reputation values. (Cross-site aggregation systems like Disqus could theoretically implement this on a larger level, providing a “global” reputation score for a user.)

It should be noted that the ongoing discussion between using real names and pseudonyms on sites doesn’t really play a part in this system. While real names do lend some degree of credibility, commenters sometimes have valid reasons for posting under a pseudonym (privacy, security, etc.). As long as comments are linked with an individual score, reputation can be calculated either way.¹

Many papers and readers have suggested that moderation is the key to a successful environment for comments. By moderating discussion, though, the site’s readers often cry of censorship. Moderation is an important last resort, but the task of managing comments is best left to the site’s community.

Providing a place for discussion

Allowing comments on a site also provides another benefit: a centralized and somewhat controlled place for reaction to an article. It’s a benefit, no doubt, but I’d argue that a comment section isn’t the only (or the best) way. It’s important to provide a way for people to react, but this could be done through a number of ways:

• A way to provide a URL for a reaction post
• A Twitter feed of tweets that mention the story’s URL in a short link
• The ability to use trackbacks from blog posts about the article

If a site is wary about encouraging discussion on the same page as the original article, a more link-based approach can provide a bit of a compromise.

Comments on the web – especially on media sites – hold a lot of promise, but right now they seem to detract from an article as often as they add to one. Most systems for commenting aren’t at a point where they can handle the complexity of discussion with concepts like value and reputation, both of which encourage users to be good citizens on the site. Hopefully we’ll see more sites implement better systems for commenting as the web evolves, and hopefully the discussion will improve along with them.

¹ Psudonymity and anonymity aren’t the same. I’ve yet to find an example of discussion in which complete anonymity adds any value at all.

UPDATE: I’m happy to see that the Press Herald has re-enabled comments using Automattic’s Intense Debate. I hadn’t seen it used in the past, but it looks as though it’s a robust system that, indeed, incorporates value and reputation. I’m anxious to see how the discussion evolves with the new system in place.

The New York Times reports that Google and Verizon are almost all set to begin using pay tiers for different types of content on the Internet.

The charges could be paid by companies, like YouTube, owned by Google, for example, to Verizon, one of the nation’s leading Internet service providers, to ensure that its content received priority as it made its way to consumers.

Google apparently has a short memory. Back in January, they encouraged the FCC to support net neutrality and keep the Internet open:

Its open, “end-to-end” architecture means that users – not network providers or anyone else – decide what succeeds or fails online. It’s a formula that has worked incredibly well, resulting in mind blowing innovation, incredible investment, and more consumer choice than ever.

…including support of:

Adding a nondiscrimination principle that bans prioritizing Internet traffic based on the ownership (the who), the source (the what) of the content or application…

Google has to decide what it supports (or doesn’t). These new developments probably aren’t very good news for people who want to see the iPhone on Verizon’s network, either.

Link: Google and Verizon Near Deal for Pay Tiers for Web (via @jlbruno on Twitter)

UPDATE: Google says the NYT is wrong. That sounds more in-line with their philosophy. Meanwhile, CEO Eric Schmidt doesn’t seem to know how to define net neutrality in the first place.

Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering at Google, at Google I/O 2010:

If you believe in openness, if you believe in choice, if you believe in innovation from everyone, then welcome to Android.

The LA Times:

The Droid X comes loaded with several nonstandard applications for Google’s Android, most of which cannot be removed.

The Times goes on to say that one of the permanent apps is a 15-day trial; it costs $1.99 per month to use the app after that, but users can’t remove it if they don’t want to pay for the service. The new Samsung Vibrant also includes apps that can’t be uninstalled.

Android fans will most likely argue that the true choice of Android allows users to choose which handsets they want to use; if they don’t want pre-installed bloatware, they can choose a different device. But with carriers and manufacturers ruthlessly competing while trying to still turn a profit, how long will it take before most – if not all – Android devices come with software that users don’t want?

Link: ‘Junkware’ comes standard on Verizon, T-Mobile smart phones (via Daring Fireball)

The Old Spice responses campaign may have finished, but its legacy lives on. After a Reddit user asked the Old Spice Man to help build  voicemail message, the man in a towel happily obliged. Within hours of the response, a group of people had created an automatic voicemail message generator based on the audio. (He later made one for the ladies, too.)

We often hear about reuse in terms of copyright infringement. The Old Spice Voicemail Generator shows that not only is remix culture alive and well, but it can actually help raise your message to a new level. Why aren’t more companies embracing this kind of opportunity?

Link: Old Spice Voicemail Generator

(previously on ANW: An effective digital marketing campaign? No sweat)