Akkam’s Razor

Via Journalist Fight Club:

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YouTube Direkt

If only our liberal media could somehow find the strength to channel this vibe…

It started with an announcement that Google was going to delay the announcement of their social networking plan so as to not get lost in the noise surrounding Facebook's pending debut of their advertising (and AdSense) competitor for their own platform.

The Wall Street Journal (via Mashable ) later announced that Google was actually about to announce their plans for the gPhone (previously), with other rumors indicated Verizon (US) had been courted, along with British carrier '3' and German carrier T-Mobile, as well as Chinese hardware manufacturer e28 (who produces handsets for LG and HTC - you'll recall an earlier rumor that Google was going to supply 50,000 units produced by HTC to developers around Christmas-time).  e28 most recently has had a GSM-WLAN-VOIP Linux-powered phone, the R2821, before the FCC for approval.

Also of interest is the focus on inter-operability between the various Google Products, and the possibilities as to how they may converge in the mobile space (think Picasa + Talk + Maps + Docs + Gmail + Open Social). 

The keystone of their plan may be that of Open Social implementing a bundle of open API (application programing interfaces) for interoperability between several networking platforms (such as Marc Andreeson's Ning, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster) and related services (such as iLike, Plaxo, and Slide).  This new platform, codenamed "Maka-Maka" as reported by TechCrunch (more links via Buzzfeed) will tie these services together and more importantly, as stated by GigaOm, provide a common authoring language to make application development easier.

I just saw a screencap of an online mapping application and I started thinking…

Online map providers know starting addresses, destination addresses, and the route that the driver subsequently printed out.  There's some good marketing data in there, especially if one wanted to make a heat map for advertising locations and such.

Maybe that's why Google is involved in automobile mapping solutions… 

When I worked for Saturn (at a local retailer) I was dismayed by the Automobile Dealers' idea of successful marketing.  The typical ploy went like this - go to your marketing firm, pick a geographic area, set a range for desirable credit card scores, refine the population list by score, design and drop a mailing, and go.  The typical mailing promised some kind of schmeeke, where you got some worthless trinkets or a chance at winning a car (which I'm sure was run in a fair and transparent manner) and maybe, maybe, some small percentage of the people walking through the front door would buy a car.  See, the point of the advertising wasn't to find people who want to buy a car - the point of the advertising was to increase floor traffic.  The standard maxim is that you can close (get someone to agree to buy 33% of the time).  So, if you get 300 people through the door, you should sell 99 cars.  If you want to sell more cars, you need to get more people through the door.  Supply side economics at it's finest.

The whole arrangement seemed wasteful to me, and I was sure the better information was available that could be used in different ways.  In my position as Financial Services Manager, I maintained my own databases, and often manipulated the data to reveal trends that might normally escape notice.  In looking at these, comparing it with what I had observed in my interviews with customers, viewing credit reports, and aggregated loan and credit bureau information, an increasingly clear profile of our customers became clear.

The Class of 2008 is the first graduating class that has always had Facebook (well, at least since February 2004).  How is Facebook, or more appropriately, Social Networking as a whole, changing youth culture, and what will the affect be on the business world. Example questions…

• What will happen when "Rate my Professor" mutates into "Rate my Employer", or "Rate my Health Plan", or "Rate my 401K", or "Rate my Boss"?
• What happens when the ad-hoc networks that can form online between employees rivals official hierarchies (for effectiveness or legitimacy) from the Organization Chart or if it counters the official message or strategy?
• What will happen when employees become their own "digital deep throat" airing semi-anonymous dirty secrets and underlying assumptions that the Organization would best leave unsaid?
• What will happen when the innovation and entrepreneurship exhibited by some of the online creative class bumps into the rigid structures of the modern organization.  Will they comply, or route around them like data packets on the internet to their eventual destination?
• What will happen when the new graduate finds that their access to information and what they can do to it become severely limited in the workplace, as compared to what was available online?
• How will eBay's reputation model effect workplace acquisitions and business-to-business transactions?
• How can the positive network effects of online collaboration be harnessed in the modern enterprise?

I don't know that anyone has tackled any of these questions, but based on what I've heard in the media, the outcome has consisted of doom-and-gloom about people getting fired for something they did on MySpace. 

Knowing the sheer amounts of resources and insanely talented people online, isn't it also possible that there could be very positive outcomes as well?

The internet, and the processes, applications, and technologies that have followed have been both pervasive and disruptive.  For much of the modern world, the internet HAS changed everything, from how we communicate, learn, and connect to others to how we are entertained.  How could those those be combined for the best outcome?

I've added a goodly number of apps, primarily to see what they do (with the F8 developer network) and get some insight as to how Facebook and their partners are going to monetize them. The moves Facebook is making at the least makes them a serious threat to MySpace, and possibly even to bigger targets like Yahoo. No, really.

Anywho, here are the apps I've installed:

digg
del.icio.us
Games
iLike
Last.fm
Meebo
The Compass
upscoop
Files

Have you found anything cool, or wish for something that isn't here yet?

Just off the top of my head, I'm thinking a resumé application, something maybe off the back of LinkedIn; a weather widget that cycles through various places; a webcam widget that shuffles through various webcams, a blog discovery widget, and the killer app of all, maybe even better than Google, would be Facebook Office.

Note: One big concern - there are no privacy setting for apps - this is something that warrant fixing ASAP.  There also some discussion on the internets about the ownership and intellectual property rights granted to developers.

So let's say one takes the model I power my blog with, pulling in data from delicious, digg, bloglines, flickr, etc., making "my database".  If many people did that, and you had a service that allowed you to take people you know (using your email addressbooks), cross-checking them with a variety of social services, and then allowing you to build a custom database of "your stuff" and "your friends stuff" or your people with the same interests or locality.  It's reasonable that you may get more meaningful results, although you would lose out on valuable contrarian sources and eclectic sites.

In envisioning a community-driven site, users could voluntarily add their blogs, photoblogs sites, music sites, forums, etc., and create a custom search engine (and index).  How relevant would those results be?  Would they be valuable to the end-user?   So, for example, I've used the Google Co-Op to create a custom search engine which aggregates my blog, my Flickr account, my "dugg" items on Digg, the PhillyFuture aggregator, and my del.icio.us account.  You can play with it here. 

Via Waxy.org.

I just realized something horrifying…

I practice "Naked Blogging", as defined by Sandy Kemsley:

"Naked blogging" is a term that's applied to living your life transparently on the web through your blog and other social media, like Flickr, del.icio.us, Skype, LinkedIn, Library Thing and Facebook. [If] you're going to get benefit from the network effects of Web 2.0, you need to contribute every bit as much as you expect to get back.

I assure you, I am wearing pants.