Posts tagged doesn’t
Surprise, Surprise: Amazon Doesn’t Say How Many Kindle Fires It Sold
Jan 31st
Amazon is notorious for sharing very little information about how its products and business units perform. Its new Kindle Fire tablet is no different.
Amazon just reported its fourth quarter financial results, and, shocking no one, it doesn’t disclose how many Kindle Fire tablets it sold. Or even how many total Kindles it sold.
Instead, Amazon just shared a few statistics designed to make it seem like the Kindle business is doing really well, without actually proving it.
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Specifically, Amazon said that “millions of customers… purchased the Kindle Fire and Kindle e-reader devices this holiday season.” And that Kindle unit sales, including the Kindle Fire and Kindle e-ink readers, grew 177% over last year during the 9-week holiday period ending Dec. 31, 2011.
So, the new Kindles helped Amazon more than double, and almost triple, its device sales. But unless Amazon makes a bold move and discloses more on its earnings call tonight, that’s about all we’ll know officially.
Apple, meanwhile, announced last week that iPad sales during the fourth quarter grew 111% year-over-year to 15.4 million units.
Of course, Amazon doesn’t have to disclose how many Kindles it sells. It’s actually probably to its benefit to keep that information secret. Still, it would be interesting for those of us who keep score to have real data and not just estimates. It could also be useful for mobile app developers to know what the potential market size for Kindle Fire apps is versus iOS apps.
Overall, Amazon’s fourth quarter sales actually came in below expectations, a bit of a surprise, actually, given all the recent talk from retailers about pricing pressure.
For the first quarter, Amazon now says it may even lose money. It didn’t specify why, but giving away millions of Kindle Fire tablets near cost, or at a loss, can’t help.
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Why Social Media Doesn’t Mean Business – Huffington Post
Jan 5th
 PR Web (press release) |
Why Social Media Doesn't Mean Business
Huffington Post Social media can work for profile-raising, SEO, inbound links, customer research in order to change your service offering, and monitoring mentions and sentiment. If engagement is the key, then you have to be engaging. If you want to attract business, … The New Role of Social Media in Public Relations & Online SEO Services An Indiana SEO Company is Helping Small Businesses Get off on the Right Foot … SEO Marketing Media Elite Has Improved Their Facebook Page |
View full post on SEO – Google News
If Social Media Doesn’t Change Voter Behavior, Will Joining Instagram Help Obama Win?
Jan 4th
Amidst all the Iowa noise from last night and today’s announcement about the end of Michele Bachmann’s presidential bid, something else happened: President Obama quietly joined social photo sharing app Instagram. Obama joined with the username @barackobama and has since posted two photos. The first one is of him speaking via videoconference to Iowa caucus-goers. The second is a photo of people watching the videoconference and is captioned “You guys inspire me every single day.”
This is yet another instance of the president using social media to reach and engage with the younger demographic that helped him get elected four years ago. With the GOP edging in on social media, however, will this same strategy help him win in 2012?
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Every presidential candidate is active on social media. Obama was late to the Google+ game, waiting until November 23, 2011, to create a brand page. His campaign team did not bring him onto Google+ when only profile pages were available, whereas GOP candidates Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Herman Cain did.
An older Republican gentleman named Ron Paul rode the viral wave last night. If social media could have accurately predicted the Iowa Caucus, Paul would have won. The Wall Street Journal reported that Paul was “drawing heavy support from younger voters, particularly those under age 30.” In the end, that wave crashed and Mitt Romney won, drawing backing from older voters ages 50-and-up.
A 2010 study from the academic journal Mass Communication and Society, looked at college students’ use of social media for political purposes in the 2008 election. Data collected from a Web survey of college students found that “attention to social media was not significantly related to political self-efficacy or involvement.” Online expression, it found, was situational. This sort of situational online political involvement accounts for viral video hits, buzz on Twitter and super-sharing on Facebook. But does it translate to action?
In the case of Ron Paul at the Iowa Caucus 2012, it did not. Romney’s not-as-social media savvy voter based turned out to win it for him.
In 2008, Obama used social media to connect with his audience and win the collective Web mindshare. As he surged ahead and won the 2008 election, his number of MySpace friends and Twitter followers skyrocketed. Obama had discovered a new market, tapping into what was then thenot-as-utilized world of social media to win the election. Today, that world is overflowing with information.
If Barack Obama is going to win, he will have to create the trends that everyone else follows, just like he did in 2008.
At the time, the demographics of Obama’s voters were in line with social media users who were, at the time, mostly Democratic and young.
Fast-forward four years to 2012, and things look a lot different. As we saw in the Iowa Caucus race yesterday, if social media is indicative of anything, it’s that certain candidates are better at creating buzz than others.
If Obama is going to win, he will have to create the trends that everyone else follows, just like he did in 2008. Is he game?
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Why Doesn’t Google+ Allow AutoSharing?
Dec 1st
Today Google rolled out the latest of its Google+ integration projects. This time it was YouTube, which at the same time launched a snazzy new design. The redesign is not only visually more colorful and appealing, it also promotes sharing in a big way. YouTube is enabling you to autoshare to four different social networks: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Orkut. But wait… notice anything missing there? That’s right, Google+ is not included in the autosharing.
On the face of it, this makes little sense. Now I can ‘like’ a video on YouTube and it automatically shows up on my Facebook wall and Twitter feed. That’s actually very cool. It saves me having to manually share things, yet I still control the autosharing (as I have to click the ‘like’ button in YouTube). Indeed this is frictionless sharing the way it should be – the user is in control of what gets shared, but it’s made much easier for them. So why on earth isn’t Google+ part of the autosharing?
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To clarify, the integration between YouTube and Google+ mainly takes the form of a new menu option on your YouTube homepage. Clicking the G+ logo in the left-hand menu enables you to see which YouTube videos your Google+ friends shared. You can do the same with your Facebook friends (the menu option directly below Google+). What I’m asking in this post is: why doesn’t Google enable autosharing of YouTube content to Google+ itself? Because it does allow that for Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and MySpace.
Here is how it works in YouTube as of today. Go to your YouTube settings page. To set up autosharing, check off some or all of the options in the middle column (“On connected accounts”) and then connect each social network you’d like to send videos to.
To test this, I ‘liked’ a Noel Gallagher video. Sure enough, it automatically got published to my Facebook wall, Twitter feed and MySpace account.
There are quirks in YouTube’s design – for example, after liking that video I was still prompted to share it to Facebook (see the Facebook button below the video in the screenshot above). Other than that, the process works as advertised.
So why can’t I automatically send this Noel Gallagher video that I liked to Google+? If I want to show that video to my friends on Google+, I’ll need to manually share it. And, as Noel himself might say, I can’t be arsed doing that.
A Delicate Balance
What Google appears to be doing is trying to entice people to spend more time on YouTube, browsing videos that their friends (on G+, Facebook and more) have recommended. That certainly ties into Google’s strategy of making Google+ less of a standalone social network and more the social glue over all of its products. Google doesn’t want to highlight Google+ too much as a place where you can watch cool videos.
It’s a delicate balance, but it comes at the cost of inconvenience to Google+ users. You have to manually share a video to Google+, a process which takes a few clicks and precious Internet minutes (admittedly a #firstworldproblem). Whereas you can share videos you like to Facebook and Twitter with a single click of a button on YouTube.
AutoSharing Rant
This has been one of the frustrating things about Google+ from the start, that you cannot autoshare things to it. On Twitter and Facebook, there are ways to share content from external services automatically. Indeed, Facebook is increasingly headed in that direction with its so-called frictionless sharing features – which admittedly may have overstepped the line between useful sharing and over sharing. But for example, on both Facebook and Twitter you can automatically share content from your blog via RSS. I think that’s a good thing, because it makes it easier for people to share what they think will be of interest to their friends.
It’s understandable that Google+ wants to avoid spam. OK, what people consider to be spam varies widely (one of my brothers once accused me of “spamming” him on Facebook because I autoshare the RWW posts I write). But surely sharing a YouTube video that you like to your friends on Google+ isn’t spamming. In any case, you can manually share a YouTube video on Google+. So is making that process easier really going to cause spam issues on Google+? I highly doubt it.
What do you think, should Google add its own social network – Google+ – to the autoshare options in YouTube? I vote yes, but let me know if you agree.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Gimme Bar: Link Saving With Dropbox Integration, Screenshots & an API – If This Doesn’t Work, Maybe Nothing Will
Nov 14th
5 Days of Gimme Bar is what they’re calling it: the extended roll-out of a beautiful new service for saving links of interest from around the web. After nearly two years of development, starting today and for the next five days, San Francisco design firm Fictive Kin is letting new users create accounts on Gimme Bar.
What is it? It’s a visual bookmarking, text snipping, whole web page archiving, public/private link saving and sharing service with Dropbox integration, a (submitted) iPhone app and a developer platform for integrating Gimme Bar features into other applications. It’s pretty remarkable – but is it good enough? The web is full of social bookmarking apps, a lot of people love social bookmarking apps – but not enough of them seem to love it for startups like this to thrive.
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The Long Line of Contenders
Delicious beat a thousand social bookmarking apps to become the king, until it languished inside Yahoo and was drowned in misunderstanding by the YouTube co-founders that bought it this year. StumbleUpon added an element of mystery and drove huge traffic to web publishers. Pinterest looks like it’s cornering a part of the women’s market in fashion and craft bookmarking.
But nobody’s really won over hordes of everyday people to their link saving service, despite countless attempts. Maybe most people don’t really want to save links forever. Maybe the tools have been too unfriendly for non-geeks to use. Those are the dominant theories, anyway.
New services like this launch almost every day, albeit generally with a twist.
Ramy Adee, a key engineer in the creation of Microsoft-acquired $800 million voice platform TellMe recently raised high profile venture capital to build a social bookmarking app called Snip.it. That app lets users save and share links with a special emphasis on their own short editorial comments on the links they share. Adee believes that the future of news consumption lies in social curation with crowdsourced and friend-based commentary and context.
Last month Jori Lallo, a developer at faltering web message board startup Convore relaunched a side project called Kippt. It’s real simple but people loved it for its simplicity.
I’ve been using a service called Pearltrees lately to save my links. Its web interface is Flash and that’s awful but on an iPad it’s a dream come true. It’s a swirling sea of interlinked glassy spheres containing links to articles from around the web. Users can pluck each others’ pearls and put them into trees of their own, subscribing to updates and reading annotations. It’s great – but it will be better when there is an iPhone version and search on the iPad. Pearltrees has convinced me that a good social bookmarking app needs to have a compelling reading and sorting experience on the iPad, because that’s where I do most of my casual and catch-up reading.
I’m pretty satisfied with Pearltrees right now, but Gimme Bar looks strong as well.
As a disclosure, I should mention that I own a small amount of equity in a related service called Iterasi, which archives links for enterprise customers and was a consulting client several years ago.
Can Features Win an App Battle?
All those other social bookmarking apps are cool, but some of Gimme Bar’s new features could well become must-have offerings for any social bookmarking app.
The ability to save all your links up into a cloud storage service that you pay for yourself, in this case Dropbox, is terrific. It’s not a back-up option for power users, or an account deletion option if you decide you don’t like Gimme – it’s just part and parcel of the service. That’s the kind of data portability that honestly every app ought to support.
Giving users the option of saving entire pages on the web as a snap shot image is great. For truly important archives, you don’t want to suffer from link rot. That the archive is an image and not live HTML seems like a nod towards respect for the original publisher, though.
There are little User Experience elements that people may like a lot about Gimme, too. For example, when you find a page or a snippet of text or an image you want to save, you can drag and drop that down to a tray at the bottom of the page separated into either public or private collections. (That’s the Gimme Bar.) When you start typing in a description of the item, if you choose to do so, you don’t have to save the description text when you’re done – you just click out of the pop-up saving box and all your data entered is saved automatically. That’s the way things ought to work.
Finally, Gimme has an API at launch. It clearly aims to build a marketplace of 3rd party applications that read and write from the web using its archiving and sharing technology and its saved content. Give me an integration that grabs all my favorited Tweets (usually on my mobile Twitter client), archives a snapshot of them in Gimme and then pushes them over to a corresponding account in Pearltrees so I can read and organize them with multi-touch on my iPad. Please! That’s just a fantasy but this Gimme Bar to Tumblr integration is real.
Those are just the features rolled out so far, on this the first day of Five Days of Gimme Bar. What will be unveiled (or perhaps just highlighted) over the rest of the week? We’ll have to wait and see.
A lot of people will no doubt love this service, many already do. But will enough people love it for the service to thrive? Gimme has already hired one sales person, according to the company’s LinkedIn page. Launching with monetization in mind from the start is smart. It’s not clear whether it’s the application platform, private bookmarking, or perhaps corporate use and archiving that will be monetized.
In the meantime, if social bookmarking, link and media saving and sharing is ever going to catch on – the feature rich experience being built over at Gimme Bar seems like as strong a contender as I’ve seen yet. Hopefully all kinds of other applications will be built on top of and connected to it and hopefully its Dropbox integration will make all kinds of people feel safe and secure using it for saving important content.
If Gimme Bar doesn’t work, then I’m not sure what is going to win the hearts of a large number of social bookmarking service users.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
What To Do When Your Brand Message Doesn’t Match How People Search – Search Engine Land
Aug 24th
 Search Engine Land |
What To Do When Your Brand Message Doesn't Match How People Search
Search Engine Land SEO is all about words. Which words people search with; how to use them; and where to put them. Choosing the right keywords is imperative to the success of any SEO campaign. Unfortunately, selecting these keywords isn't always as simple as it would … Titan SEO Honored for Second Time on Inc. 5000's Annual List canada.topseos.com Ranked First Page SEO at #3 in Search Engine Optimization … SEO India Services Tops Around The Globe for Its Proven Results |
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HubPages CEO on Google’s Panda algorithm: SEO doesn’t work – ZDNet (blog)
Aug 24th
|
HubPages CEO on Google's Panda algorithm: SEO doesn't work
ZDNet (blog) Summary: Is Google's Panda algorithm the end of SEO as we know it? Something is different about its latest search algorithm. And Google is minting money… I met with Paul Edmondson, CEO of HubPages, … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Why Doesn’t Facebook Just Buy Zynga?
Jul 19th
Zynga added a 600-plus-pages addendum to its IPO filing yesterday and it turns out that Zynga and Facebook are intertwined so tightly that it is hard to tell where one company ends and the other starts. The best example is two agreements that the companies came to in May and December of 2010 that reveal the depths of the Zynga/Facebook relationship. What it boils down to is that Zynga and Facebook work so closely together that Zynga might as well be the official game-maker for Facebook. Yet, that is not the case nor will it be. It makes one wonder why Zynga is bothering to go public at all as opposed to just being subsumed as a division within Facebook.
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Under the developer addendum, Facebook has agreed that it will not make any “Facebook games.” If Facebook does create any games for its site or its platform (including mobile or other Facebook properties), Zynga has the right to terminate the agreement. As Facebook has relationships with other social game developers, this clause is probably a standard Facebook policy covering any type of gaming. This is a testament to how much Facebook relies on the third-party application ecosystem and Zynga specifically. The more Facebook’s ecosystem grows, the more Facebook grows and Zynga is the primary player in the environment.
That leads into revenue sharing and growth targets between Zynga and Facebook. The developer addendum makes mention of targets and vesting options when Zynga hits certain monthly active user levels but the specifics of the agreement have been struck from the public versions of the document. As reported in the initial S-1 filing, Zynga has 146 million unique monthly active users, almost all of them on Facebook, with 232 million monthly active users between all of Zynga’s games.
What is mentioned is that Facebook and Zynga have a mutual advertising relationship where Facebook helps to provide the ads for Zynga games within the Facebook ecosystem. It is a smart move by Facebook – it helps Zynga advertise games on the platform and split the revenue from Facebook credits used to by virtual goods within the games.
Why Doesn’t Facebook Just Buy Zynga?
There are a variety of reasons that Facebook does not simply absorb Zynga and the addendum sheds light on why. Foremost, it turns out that Google is indeed an investor in Zynga, as AllThingsD points out in its analysis of the addendum and TechCrunch reported could be as high as $100 million last year. Zynga has raised nearly $1 billion in its venture capital rounds and it has a lot of masters to answer to when it comes to an exit strategy. As it stands right now, Facebook gets the benefit of having Zynga under its thumb without having to pay the acquisition cost of buying the platform which, in essence, would be paying off Google (and a multitude of other investors), probably at a significant premium.
At the same time, Zynga keeps its options open for future partnerships across multiple platforms. Google will eventually release an API for Plus (in theory, at least) and would probably like to see developers add on t the platform, games included, the same way they do with Chrome and Android. Hence, it is better for Zynga to go public and have a complicated relationship with Facebook than subsist entirely within the social giant’s ecosystem, precluding its own platform strategies such as with mobile or other social networks.
The developer addendum goes into great length about other types of relationships between Facebook and Zynga, such as what happens when Zynga acquires third-party games, a variety of stipulations on mobile development and acquisition, who owns the data created and so on.
The new details make for an intriguing mix. Investors will certainly weigh Zynga with their wallets come October (or so) when the six-month “quiet period” after filing an S-1 is lifted.
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4 Reasons Your Boss Doesn’t Care About SEO – Business Insider
Jun 24th
 Search Engine Watch |
4 Reasons Your Boss Doesn't Care About SEO
Business Insider A lot of our readers fight the good SEO fight in-house. They're working their butt off, dodging politics and doing everything in their power to make a case for why the company needs to invest more (or at all) in search engine optimization. … The Value of an In-House SEO |
View full post on SEO – Google News
