Google+ for Dummies
Found a pretty good primer by Kendy Louwaars for Google+, the whys and whats in client-friendly language: all the salient points in one deck. Saved me a whole lot of time boiling it down.
Posts Tagged ‘google’
Introducing The Google Catalogs Tablet App
(via)
So I guess we have all probably been expecting this from Google… A Catalog app that aggregates the worlds leading brands and retailers under one little screen, providing a rich, interactive shopping experience, that will also deliver Google a whole new revenue stream
The app allows you to flip through catalogue pages as you’d expect, and extends that to detailing out each product, playing videos and other rich content, while providing a “Buy Now” button to launch the brands e-comm store or “Find A Store” button which instantly maps locations with directions.
So who’s on board so far? Urban Outfitters, Williams-Sonoma, Sephora, Macys, Bloomingdales, Crate&Barrel, Lands’ End, Nordstrom, Patagonia, UGG and many many of others!
24
08 2011
Google+ success is poppycock
Interesting read by Shea Bennett about Google+. It’s refreshing to hear some naysaying when most commentators are too risk-averse to make early calls, but generally evangelize the holy b-jesus out of Google+.
Granted, the article is posted on Allfacebook.com, the unoffical Facebook blog, but still, Shea goes as far as attacking some of Google+ most touted features, such as circles, and also blasts social media celebs such as Robert Scoble as being responsible for ruining everything, and repeating the much heard diagnosis that Google+ is just Friendfeed all over again. Death sentence.
If you haven’t had enough of Google+ articles yet, make this the one you read.
26
07 2011
Scammer impersonates Branson on Google+ to trap gullible would-be entrepreneurs
Alright, we heard some reasoning why Google+ has advantages over Facebook in certain areas. One of them is that you can follow people twitter-style, whether they follow you back or not. There are enough posts on why that is or is not a good feature.
However, I’ve spotted a great use for a nice little niche target audience: serial celebrity entrepreneurs. Richard Branson joined Google+ and posted a message that he would follow back the Top 5 responders with the best business pitch. I saw hundreds of replies last time I checked. Check it out here.
There are pitches from the outright funny such as “I put you in the men my mom would like to get with circle - you are in there with George Clooney” to the really desperate kind “i will do anything to go to space” to some serious proposals solving global warming. So if you’re a serial entrepreneur running out of places to spend cash, there you go.
likewise if you are a desperate copycat celeb hunter and you missed your shot at starring at Donald’s “The apprentice”, here is your chance.
UPDATE: Just heard from Anne Dirkse that this was a scam. Alas, I changed the title as she suggested: “Scammer impersonates Branson on Google+ to trap gullible would-be entrepreneurs”. Still, the human condition of striving is still encapsulated fairly well in all this. Maybe even more so.
13
07 2011
Making the case for observation, not prognostication (or: how the social web hype keeps us from playing)
If you’ve tried to follow all the hype about Google+, you were probably hard-pressed to try and read all the blog posts and articles. There are just too many. But what was striking about the articles was their sameness. 90% of them seem to be about the future not about the now. Little was imparted about what to do with G+, most of them where rants about what G+ isn’t or about what it should be, or about what it could be, and of course about who will win in the SN wars. The one exception I came across was an article by Thomas Hawk about how to make G+ work for you as a photographer. Other than that, I witnessed the usual hype wave, where usual suspects of social ninjas can’t help themselves and make prognostications to leave a mark, opinion-wise, so they get a share of the voice.
The problem with that isn’t the voices or prognostications, it’s that we so easily get swept away by it that we create a reality about something in our heads that we haven’t actually experienced yet ourselves. We take the time to read all this stuff, but have little time to go and innovate and experiment.
It’s been a few weeks of excitement and tizzy and dilly-dallying. Fine. Let’s move on now and speak about experience insights, experimentation and collaborative best thinking on a new platform, not the next social media weather report. There is nothing more annoying in a playground than the annoying descriptiveness of some authority figure telling us how things are, should be, could be. It stifles application and experimentation.
Alan Wolk, borrowing metaphorically from his grandmothers cookbook, makes a great point in his blog Toad Stool
What’s needed now is a lot less prognostication and a lot more observation. Let people figure out their own best way to use the platform. Before anyone starts telling them they’re doing it the wrong way.
You couldn’t be more right, and thanks for the reminder what this is supposed to be about!
13
07 2011
Social Ninja Barometer: Google+ vs Facebook.
Please participate in our quick Social Ninja Barometer polls, regarding Google+ vs Facebook.
This poll assumes you have and are using both.
Poll 1:
Poll 2:
07
07 2011
Will Google be more interesting for brands than Facebook?
A few folks have been sniggering about the fact that, yeah, there is a difference between google and facebook. Facebook’s ongoing privacy concerns aside, Google just has more of your stuff and has had track record that isn’t exactly spick and span in the consumer advocacy area.
It would seem that with this fact of much more potential consumer data, brands would love to get in bed with Google. As a result, it makes sense that our community is making first suggestions on how Google could do this. Of course, this is all assuming that privacy right outrages will all be mastered swimmingly well, and Google doesn’t yet again tank this x-th attempt at becoming more social, and Facebook doesn’t succeed in replicating some of the Google advantages.
Check out Sean Percival’s proposal for a Google brand page layout. He also explains some of the unique advantages Google+ could offer.
Seen on Gerald Hensel’s Google+ Stream
06
07 2011
Red Bull Street Art
Recently someone at W&V asked me if there were any creative uses for Google Street View, and there was only the album release of “The Editors” that came to mind.
Well, now there is more.
Red Bull Street Art lets you tag known Graffiti locations on streetview so everyone can see the best graffiti in the world. Not sure how this gives me wings, but then again, it’s a pretty cool idea.
03
03 2011
Google Art Project
Since few days ago appeared on the Google start page small pictures which really got my attention since it was not a Doodle nor any kind of advertising but Google’s Art Project.
I thought it would be like GoogleBooks but with art and paintings … I couldn’t be more wrong. Imagine that Google Street View could take you into the MoMA in New York, and well, it literally does it. You have the option to explore several museums from all around the world and see, hundreds of masterpieces with an incredible definition, plus the zoom it has is just amazing, I’m sure one couldn’t even get as close as that in an actual museum.
It also gives you the option to create your own collection and share it with your friends … definitely worth a try.
03
02 2011
Google busts Bing !
Ok, I admit it, I’m a Google fan and I have used Bing a couple of times but I don’t really like it, I have the feeling they tried just too hard to make it look nice and ended up with something fake (pretty much like a McDonald’s), anyway while reading this morning Google’s official blog I found that Bing has been using Google’s search results without giving any credit and even worse, denying it.
You can read the whole post clicking right HERE, but you can keep reading and find out what’s going on.
Everything started with a misspelling word: “torsorophy” instead of “tarsorrhaphy“, for which Google gave an orthogrpahic correction and some results. Bing at the moment offered no results at all, until some months later when the same results offered by Google appeared on Bing, but without that orthograpahic correction.
Long story short: Google made a “synthetic search” on which typing highly improbable words like hiybbprqag or delhipublicschool40 chdjob brought specific, unrelated search results like a sitting chart of a theatre. Guess what happened? After some time Bing started to give the same results for such words, proof that it bases its search in Google.
If I were Google I would be really pissed off. I’m writing my dissertation thesis and the first thing I learned even before I had a topic was how to cite and give reference to the work of others, otherwise it would be like stealing, right? Being one of the biggest corporations around doesn’t really give them the right to bend the rules, even when they might feel free of doing it.
Anyway, let see how it ends and now that I remember … wasn’t Yahoo! powered by Bing?
P.S. Today, the word “torsorophy” in Google doesn’t even give you the orthographic correction anymore, but the trend topic around this situation … isn’t it awesome having the power of inventing new words?
Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com
