I believe that unstructured text represents the biggest problem and opportunity in Big Data, yet both are poorly understood by many consumers of text analytics.
The problem with both Facebook and Twitter is that they haven’t completely figured out the role of 3rd party developers. They may say they embrace the development community, but they don’t really respect the community. Companies like Salesforce and Google have figured this out, mostly because they are committed to helping 3rd party developers make money as a way for themselves to make money.
Google+ seems to be all the rage these days, with wildly divergent views among social media practitioners and users with respect to the viability of the social network. Personally, I’m still on the fence with regards to the current value of Google+ to brands and marketers
I thought I’d share with you my high-level reflections on Facebook’s new product announcements and what they mean. Bottom line is, while the changes that Facebook announced at F8 created more ways to connect with consumers, reaching those consumers may be more difficult due to a higher ‘noise’ level and competition for user’s time and attention.
Today Facebook announced a very interesting new feature; the subscribe button. It’s designed to allow individuals to make their public updates available to other individuals, aka “subscribers” without requiring a reciprocal friend relationship.
If this sounds like Twitter, it’s because it’s very much like Twitter. I suspect Google+ will follow suit soon with a similar concept.
I think this is a great feature, and would be even greater if it was available to Pages.
However Facebook will probably not make this available to Pages for a simple reason: Facebook doesn’t want to give marketers a short-cut into their Fan’s Newsfeeds. That’s what ads are for.
Lets see if Google is more business friendly.
Sometimes it takes a lot less effort to validate assumptions about your product-market fit than one might think. You can come by customer feedback earlier and with less effort using Lean Startup methodologies.
Google Plus is hot right now, but neither Google nor its users have completely found out what to use the network for yet. Google+ may go down like a lead zeppelin (or Google Wave). Who knows. That said, here are my predictions on how Google+ may evolve in pursuit of market share.
It seems to me that mobile SMS, a.k.a. “texting” has had a profound impact on business communications etiquette. In particular, it has changed email, which increasingly seems to fall into the shorter-is-better category. While there’s a case to be made for the efficiency of short emails, there isn’t always one to be made for effectiveness, which I hope the following two examples will illustrate.