Posts tagged Next
Facebook Turns Adults into Adolescents; Is Google+ Next?
Jan 26th
Today Google+ announced that it is now open to users ages 13+ (in all countries except for Spain, South Korea and the Netherlands). Until today, Google+ had been 18+. When Facebook began in 2004, it was open to college students only, most of whom are 18+ years old. Facebook now allows any users who are 13+ to register.
A study published last year by researchers at the University of Guelph in Canada looked at how parents acted on Facebook. Their study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. They discovered that parents revert to adolescent behavior, which suggests that there’s something inherently adolescent about social media.
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“The online environment influences people of all ages,” Emily Christofides, a PhD psychology student who worked on the study with doctoral student Amy Muise and psychology professor Serge Dsmarais, told Science Daily. “Both parents and teens share and show more about themselves than they might in other social settings, and the same psychological factors underpin that behavior.”
The researchers found that popularity was a key factor in discerning how much information the user disclosed.
“The people who are the most popular are those whose online identity is actively participated in by others,” said doctoral student Amy Muise. “So the more you share, the more others respond.”
The study found that adults were less conscious of the consequences of sharing personal information on Facebook than their adolescent counterparts.
Will Teenagers Flock To Google+?
Google+ just added “favorite individuals” and organizations to the community, many of whom already have millions of fans on Facebook. Teen pop star +Selena Gomez boasts more than 26 million Facebook fans. +Teen Vogue has 1 million Facebook fans. Teen TV network +Nickelodeon has over 4 million Facebook fans. Will they migrate from Facebook to Google+, now that all their favorite stars are there?
A study from Alexander Interactive surveyed 2,000 teens ages 14-17 nationwide, and came away with some surprising results. Teens were actually interested in switching from Facebook to Google+, saying that Facebook was more news-oriented whereas Google+ actually felt more social. Teens were frustrated by the clutter of Facebook, especially the news ticker a.k.a. “scrolling stalker.” They did love Timeline, however, which could keep them on Facebook.
Facebook isn’t going to give up on its ultimate dream: To become a mall. And everyone knows who hangs out at the mall.
Will Google+ follow in Facebook’s footsteps, becoming just another cluttered social network for the adolescent and “young at heart”? Or will those adolescent behaviors stay on Facebook where they belong?
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Why Does the Next Xbox Need Discs At All?
Jan 26th
If the next generation of Microsoft’s Xbox gaming system will be designed to bring us well beyond 2020, why would it still rely on last century’s technology – spinning discs – for games?
Videogame blog Kotaku reported yesterday that the next Xbox – still not yet announced by Microsoft – will support Blu-ray discs, and may incorporate some sort of technology that prevents users from playing used games.
Isn’t a more future-thinking move to skip discs altogether and switch to an Internet powered game store?
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As Apple’s iOS App Store has shown, there’s huge interest in downloadable games – both on behalf of consumers and developers. You can bet that if Apple’s living room devices – either a proper Apple television set, or today’s Web set-top box – ever support gaming, there won’t be discs involved. And Microsoft itself even already supports some downloadable games for the Xbox today – and Windows 8 apps tomorrow – plus plenty of streaming video.
So why not move the entire Xbox platform in that direction? That would give Microsoft complete control over game sales and distribution: No more dealing with physical disc inventory, dingy game retailers, or the pesky used-game market at all. That’s the way the movie industry is moving, the PC industry, and the handheld gaming market. So why not consoles?
if the next Xbox really will rely on Blu-ray discs for games, my guess is that the reasons are bandwidth first, storage second, and movies third.
Regarding bandwidth, Kotaku notes that Blu-ray discs can contain 25-50 GB worth of data, versus 9 GB for DVDs. Over the average U.S. home Internet connection, that could take several hours – or even days – to download. At that point, running out to the local game store is actually faster than downloading the game, especially if it’s a brand new game and you want to play it soon after it’s released.
And if more ISPs eventually start limiting how much bandwidth you can consume per month, or charging by the gigabyte downloaded, Microsoft could also hedge against that by using discs for games.
Then there’s the storage issue. If you have 5 or 10 games sitting around, taking up 25-50 GB each, that’s a pretty big hard drive you’d need to include in the standard Xbox 720, or whatever they’ll call it. Storage is getting cheaper, but it’s still a cost to figure into the pricing equation.
Plus, the addition of Blu-ray support would make the Xbox a better movie machine, perhaps the main advantage the PS3 has enjoyed over the Xbox 360. While streaming movies are the future, and even today’s Xbox is set up to take advantage of that, Blu-ray isn’t a total flop: Some 33.5 million homes in the U.S. had Blu-ray at the end of September 2011, up 50+% year-over-year, according to DEG, a trade group. That’s about half of the roughly 70 million U.S. households with HDTVs. Blu-ray disc sales also grew 58% year-over-year in Q3 2011.
Some combination of these reasons could end up encouraging Microsoft to support discs – specifically, Blu-ray – for at least the next generation of videogame console. The future is probably downloadable or streaming games, but until we get better bandwidth, it’s not practical for everyone yet.
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[UPDATED] Source: Next Xbox Won’t Play Used Games
Jan 26th
An unnamed source is telling video game news site Kotaku that the next version of Microsoft’s Xbox will not play used games.
The person, identified as a “reliable industry source” also told Kotaku that Xbox 720 will be able to play Blu-Ray discs, an option not offered on current versions of the Xbox. The next generation of Xbox is expected to be released later this year or early in 2013.
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We’ve asked Microsoft for confirmation and comment. We’ll update if they get back to us. So far most speculation about the new machine is just that, as Microsoft hasn’t even confirmed if the new system will be called Xbox 720, or when it will be available.
Update: “As an innovator we’re always thinking about what is next and how we can push the boundaries of technology like we did with Kinect,” said Microsoft spokesperson Allison Milton. “We believe the key to extending the lifespan of a console is not just about the console hardware, but about the games and entertainment experiences being delivered to consumers. Beyond that we don’t comment on rumors or speculation.”
It was unclear how Microsoft planned to thwart people from playing used games on their consoles. Game publishers have long complained that the used game market erodes their bottom line, but users, who are expected to pay more than $300 for the new units, may bristle and turn to systems on which they can still play second-hand games.
Other rumors tied to Xbox 720 is that it will mark the debut of Kinect 2, Microsoft’s highly-praised hands-free sensor. The newer version of Kinect would contain an on-board processor to better detect user motions, according to Kotaku.
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Source: Next Xbox Won’t Play Used Games
Jan 25th
An unnamed source is telling video game news site Kotaku that the next version of Microsoft’s Xbox will not play used games.
The person, identified as a “reliable industry source” also told Kobatu that Xbox 720 will be able to play Blu-Ray discs, an option not offered on current versions of the Xbox. The next generation of Xbox is expected to be released later this year or early in 2013.
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We’ve asked Microsoft for confirmation and comment. We’ll update if they get back to us. So far most speculation about the new machine is just that, as Microsoft hasn’t even confirmed if the new system will be called Xbox 720, or when it will be available.
It was unclear how Microsoft planned to thwart people from playing used games on their consoles. Game publishers have long complained that the used game market erodes their bottom line, but users – who are expected to pay more than $300 for the new units.
Other rumors tied to Xbox 720 is that it will mark the debut of Kinect 2, Microsoft’s highly-praised hands-free sensor. The newer version of Kinect would contain an on-board processor to better detect user motions, according to Kotaku.
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Groupon’s Next Step Into Social Shopping
Jan 23rd
Andrew Mason wants to know what your friends like to buy.
Groupon is expanding its Goods section with last Friday’s purchase of Mertado, a Silicon Valley-based social shopping start-up focused on letting consumers buy products through social networks such as Facebook. Mertado’s goal is create shopping experiences that “build bridges between content, commerce and community.”
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Groupon has been working on personalizing its daily deals since going public back in November 2011.
“Mertado has shown a great level of innovation in the social commerce space–for example, the launch of Mertado TV, combining lifestyle video content and product selection,” a Groupon spokeswoman tells the Chicago Tribune. The Mertado website will officially shut down on February 28, 2012.
This announcement comes right on the heels of Facebook’s addition of 60-plus social apps to Timeline, which include shopping sites eBay, Payvment, LivingSocial and Fab.com.
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Webcasts next week: Social Media Analytics (Wed) + Pay Per Call Advertising (Thurs)
Jan 19th
Search Marketing Now will host two webcasts next week. On Wednesday, January 25, Jill Whalen of High Rankings and Horst Joepen of Searchmetrics present will present “Measuring Social Media Marketing Success Using Analytics Tools.” They’ll look at emerging social media analytics…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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When Does 500 Million Equal A Lot Less Than 500 Million? When Twitter Hits Its Next Milestone
Jan 19th
Much is being made out of projections by Twitter tracking service Twopcharts’s projections that Twitter will activate its 500 millionth account next month, but a closer look at the microblogging service’s growth shows anything but a steady rise.
Twitter passed the 200 million mark last February and then, on May 18, it reached 300 million accounts. That’s 50 percent growth in roughly 90 days and the milestone gave Twitter stock as one of the Big Two (at the time) social networks.
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But something happened on the way to 400 million accounts. It would be 162 days before Twitter reached the 400 million account mark on Oct. 28. Depending on what day in February Twitter reaches 500 million users, it will have taken the company 95 to 124 days to add 100 million users: better than the climb from 300 million to 400 million, but still not as fast as growth 200 million to 300 million.
Milestones like this tend to be arbitrary, but they’re especially so in Twitter’s case. The company only counts accounts that have been opened and does not factor in accounts that have been closed by Twitter or the user. By Twopchart’s estimates, about 12% of all Twitter accounts ever opened have been closed, meaning that by the time the 500 million number is reached, there may only be about 440 million existing Twitter accounts.
Facebook is expected to surpass a billion users in August, which is all the more staggering because of the company’s strict policy requiring people to register under their real names. Twitter, on the other hand, lets users open multiple accounts, and even spoof accounts or accounts for services.
There are other layers of complexity in figuring out Twitter’s reach: by its own estimates, the service has 100 million “active” users, but it’s safe to say the majority of accounts are inactive or rarely used. Twopchart has an interesting blog post full of data, including an analysis of what has happened to the 400 millionth account.
@AdenMo has tweeted just once since becoming the account number 400 million, has just three followers and is only following one account. That’s a fairly typical account, based on Twostory’s analysis and their estimate that only about 20% to 25% of new Twitter accounts convert into active Twitter accounts.
“The vast majority of new accounts only has a limited amount of followers and following, and based on the amount of tweets sent, and the submission date of last tweets, probably only a maximum of 20%-25% convert to active new twitter users, with only about 10% accounts that actively send tweets,” Twopchart said in the blog post.
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Twitter Buys Summify for the Next 500 Million Users
Jan 19th
Twitter has acquired Summify, a service that digests the links in one’s Twitter feed and produces a daily email of the most relevant stories. The developers will join Twitter’s Growth team, and their work will still “explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news.” As Twitter nears 500 million users, it needs new ways to teach them how the service works.
It’s hard to learn to use Twitter, and users give up easily if they don’t get it. Summify can help Twitter show new users why they should use the service. Twitter’s latest changes are all about discovery of new people and content. Summify isolates the most meaningful stuff in one’s Twitter feed, which helps users get value out of it.
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Making Twitter Easier
Starting today, Summify has disabled new account registrations and some features. Summaries can no longer be public and profile pages and influence pages are gone. Summify used to auto-tweet for a user after generating a summary, mentioning the people whose links were featured, but this feature is now disabled.
Existing users of Summify will still get their private summaries via email and the iPhone app, but “at some point,” the team says, “we will shut down the current Summify product.”
Summify picks out key stories from a Twitter stream by scanning the user’s contacts and social networks. It looks at shares of a story on Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader, and it considers the story’s popularity within the user’s own network as well as globally. The constant stream of Twitter updates can be too much to digest, so Summify built a way to automatically discover the most interesting stuff.
Discovery is Twitter’s key problem to solve. If it wants users to stick around, it needs to help them learn to find the things that interest them. That’s what Summify’s core technology does.
A Moment of Op-Ed
I’ve got to say “good riddance” to Summify’s auto-tweeting. This might have been a nice feature for some, but for people who write lots of blog posts, I found it really annoying. If you tweeted a lot of links to enough people, even if they weren’t your links, you were bound to end up in a few of these a day.
I had to scour the Summify website to find out how to stop it. The only way to opt out of being mentioned was to manually ask the team, and I had to do it a bunch of times before it worked.
Twitter users should think carefully about services they allow to tweet for them, especially when they mention others. When an automated service mentions someone all the time with the same stock tweet, it is bound to annoy them. I’m glad Summify is done doing this. Now I’m looking at you, Paper.li.
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The Next Weapon in the War For TV Viewers: Original, Web-Only Shows
Jan 16th
When it comes down to it, the value offered by services like Netflix and Hulu is primarily in their content offerings. Sure, they provide an on-demand, convenient way of consuming that content from a multitude of devices, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the television shows and movies available on each service. Historically, the premium video content that streams online has consisted almost entirely of material originally produced for another, older medium. In 2012, that’s slowly beginning to change.
After what turned out to be a pretty good year in 2011, Hulu announced last week that they are planning to invest $500 million in new content initiatives. That will undoubtedly include more pricey agreements with traditional content providers, but today the company revealed another place it plans on spending that money: on original programming.
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Hulu’s first scripted, original television show, titled “Battleground,” will air next month, following “reality” and documentary-style programming that Hulu launched in 2010 and 2011. The series will be joined by the second season of Morgan Spurlock’s “A Day in the Life,” which debuted on Hulu last year. More original programming is expected to land on the popular streaming service later in the year.
A week before the debut of “Battleground,” Netflix will be airing its first installment of original programming as well. A mobster drama called “Lilyhammer” is expected to be the first in a series of Netflix-only shows to launch over the next two years. Next year, the canceled-yet-beloved series “Arrested Development” will be making its triumphant return to screens of all sizes, not through the Fox network on which it originally aired, but exclusively through Netflix.
Web-Only Premium Content: A Disruptive Force?
As early and unproven as this Web-first model is, it may well represent the next phase in Web TV and pose a tangible challenge to traditional content distributors. Such a challenge would come despite the predictions of people like Mark Cuban, who recently wrote a blog post outlining why the television business as we know it isn’t going anywhere, despite advances made in the online streaming industry.
Cuban, himself the chairman of a cable network, touts the immediacy and timeliness of the traditional TV model, as well as its inherent value to advertisers, who he says prefer to have their messages reach viewers within a shorter timeframe.
Still, if Web-only series such as those premiering on Netflix and Hulu do particularly well and spawn more like them, that will be one less reason for many people to keep their cable subscriptions, if they ever sign up in the first place. With the arguable exception of live sports and certain popular, premium cable programming, the incentive for subscribing to cable continues to decline, especially as prices climb.
Long the go-to source for LOLcats and viral, homemade videos, YouTube is getting serious about premium content as well, with Google actively seeking more progressional video content and redesigning the site to help better showcase that content. This push for premium video comes as Google TV is being revamped and added to more connected devices and television sets.
Cable may not go extinct overnight, but if what we saw come out of CES last week is any indication, the future of TV is very much connected to the Web and far more interactive than ever.
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Q&A: Former HuffPost CTO Paul Berry on Scaling to 1.7 Billion Pageviews and What’s Next For Mobile
Jan 13th
Paul Berry, the Huffington Post’s CTO since 2007, is one of the best regarded tech leaders in New York. After helping build one of the biggest news sites in the world, Berry announced this week that he’s leaving AOL soon to focus on two new ventures: A social startup called Rebel Mouse and an incubator called SoHo Tech Lab to goof around with a bunch of different ideas and see what works.
I caught up with Berry this week to learn more about his experience growing HuffPost and what he’s planning for his new projects. Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
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ReadWriteWeb: I think a lot of people don’t realize how big Huffington Post is and what a technical challenge that can be. What’s a current snapshot?
Paul Berry: We’re 120 million unique visitors a month, 31-day view by Google Analytics. We’re at 1.7 billion pageviews, still growing fast. To give an indicator of the velocity, at acquisition [about a year ago], we were 55 million uniques and about 700 million pageviews. So just by sheer volume of traffic and audience, those are big numbers.
The other piece is the complexity of my CMS, and sort of how wide and deep the technology is. The team that I was leading as CTO of the Huffington Post Media Group, I had product, design, and engineering for the Media Group. There are a bunch of domains that are powered by the technology. When I started at Huffington Post, it was metaphorically day two. We were 3 million unique visitors and 70 million pageviews a month and there were three of us in the tech team. The team that Tim Dierks takes over as the new CTO is about 220 people.
Paul Berry at Google I/O, 2009. Image by David Newman, ipadportraits.com.
And these 220 people are…
That includes a lot of designers and product and project managers. The core of Huffington Post… we had some innovations in how we would put the team together that were built out of a combination of our own character and culture and out of necessity. I was born in Mexico City, my wife is Bulgarian. International, I always knew, would mean a great deal to me. And in the last ten years and in previous jobs, I started to work out: How can you truly put together a dynamic global team? That was vital to Huffington Post.
The election year growth was driven by figuring that out. It was pretty stressful – we had no money. I couldn’t just buy another server. And we had so much to accomplish. And what everyone wants from their tech team is to pull an all-nighter every single night. But you know that’s not sustainable, so you know as much as you want it you can’t have it. You can actually do it by playing that timezone game and passing batons. That was insanely vital to all of our growth at HuffPost. Literally HuffPost has people on every continent in every time zone. Eastern Europe and Latin America, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Philippines.
What were some of the technical challenges you had to deal with?
Scaling was always a point of pride that we never talked about. And we never talked about security. If you’re spending a lot of time talking about security, it’s because you’ve gone through a horrible Gawker hack type of moment, and it’s terrible. You do internally talk about security, and you have a security team, and you do a lot to make it happen. But at the board or ops level, if you’re talking about security or scalability, you’re generally suffering. It’s a point of pride that that was never a big topic at ops or board meetings. We had very, very few moments of actual downtime.
It’s CES week: Are there any personal technologies that you’re excited about?
The emergence of mobile and the emergence of HTML5 together is what’s really interesting.
Personally, I think people are making a lot of mistakes in developing everything as native apps completely, when you can have a thin shell as a native wrapper around HTML5 plus responsive web design. And now you solve the problem. This really drove me crazy at HuffPost. We had so much to do, and then all these tablets kept on launching with different screen sizes and different OSes, and everything we did was native because at the time that was the way everyone was doing it.
And now what I think key companies and developers are realizing is that HTML5 and responsive web designs solves for whichever dimension and whichever OS. And you have to get really, really, really good at it before you can pull that off and still have it be a smooth app. But that’s where our focus will be.
The most interesting stuff to me was how could we keep up, how could we push the whole industry farther than it was.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter were all fairly frustrated with the media landscape – how slow media companies were to implement stuff, how slow they were to be creative and to push the envelope. And that became the roadmap pillars: Editorial efficiency and pushing the envelope with partners. A lot of the stuff that I plan to take into the incubator and into the new company is that culture of pushing those limits.
So what are these new projects?
There’s two parts to it. Both, unfortunately, I have to remain a little stealth about, or I guess a lot, annoyingly. Part of my contract with AOL allowed me to work on things during this transition. So I’ve actually had a team working on Rebel Mouse for a while. I’m really excited about releasing some alpha and beta stuff in recent months.
Rebel Mouse is the startup company that’s well defined – it has its name and its logo and it’s a really well-defined concept that we’re deep into. The incubator is a way to give us space to throw a lot of stuff up on the wall. It’s not meant to be a 500 Startups thing, where there’s a ton of companies. It’s going to be much more sharing a technology stack and a social approach. And it will be social, web, and mobile that defines the companies that we end up creating. What we’ll be doing is trying with a very small but elite and awesome team to take things into prototypes that start to gain real traction and go viral, and at that point, fund those into companies that we build into really big businesses.
My definition of viral is: We don’t spend on marketing and ads. And that was another point of pride at Huffington Post. We never spent on SEM, it was always SEO. We never went and bought Facebook ads, we just did really well at social. These things have to have their own organic growth, where they hit this mark where you see them growing by themselves. Then you realize we have something now that we can double down on and go raise money and built that toward a big business.
Are there any specific technologies that have been particularly useful to you at HuffPost?
When I started with HuffPost about six years ago, there was still debate about whether open source would win or not. I think that has been answered. The open source stack – whichever you end up using – you have tremendous potential. It’s crazy how much has been built out the last five years. The trick has really been to keep up with those sorts of things the way you keep up with a Facebook, or a Google, or a Twitter, and their product releases.
One of the surprises has been that MySQL – when Oracle bought MySQL, everyone thought it would die – and it’s actually very much alive. We use Redis (“sort of a database alternative”) a lot at Huffington Post, for example. There are some of these core technology stacks and open-source libraries and etc. that we’ll definitely be using at the incubator.
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