Google OS - Moving from Good To Great

Yesterday, Google announced it will be moving into the Operating System market with Chrome OS. It seems like a natural evolution to what has become part of their stable of online 'office' products like Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar.

Maybe the launch of Google Wave was meant to show integration among their products in this space.

However, the move gave me pause. It makes me think about the posts I wrote about Jim Collins' Good to Great. How do big companies maintain market dominance and leadership? Google is pretty good at it. Yet, one of the most important ideas in the Good to Great series is the Hedgehog concept.

The hedgehog concept challenges a company to define what it is best at doing. Not what it wants to be best at doing. It is a core focus and mission.

While reading a Media Post summary by Joe Mandese, it was right there - In it's biggest deviation yet from is core mission statement of "managing the world's information," not to mention its most direct assault on Microsoft, Google late Tuesday officially announced its entry into the computer operating system market.

Will the shift from Google being a great search engine and building better tools for searching and advertising via search prove to be a successful one? Or will the ambitious drive through the muddy OS waters cause the Chrome to rust. It will be interesting to watch.

Twimailer helps combat Twitter Spam

In April, I wrote a post about a Twitter application called, Twimailer. Twimailer is a service that shows you details about new followers. It includes the number people they are following and that are following them.

I thought it was a pretty convenient way I could decide if I wanted to follow someone back. What I hadn't realized at the time, is that it is a great tool to manage and block Twitter spammers.

True, if I am not following them, I won't see their posts, but I like Twitter and I want to keep the environment useful.

This morning, I had three follow request in my inbox from people whose only tweet was im into finding a nice guy , interested ? - with a link that followed.

Needless to say, I blocked those users immediately from the link provided at the bottom of the email. I also reported the users as spam - another quick link at the bottom as well.

If you are starting to get a larger amount of followers, Twimailer makes it easier to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

New Technologies to Check Out

It has been awhile since I have posted a series of links (what used to be called Monday links) of some new technologies for every one to check out. Here are a few I think are interesting.

• Askaround.me - a service that allows you to ask questions of users who are registered in the same area as you.
• Psykopaint - it allows you to quickly upload and edit a photo. It was so easy to use, I was up and running in 20 seconds.
• Versionista - Ever wonder what is being updated on your competitor websites? This tool will keep track of the pages that change and what text on them changes.
• MegaCarpool - a new service in India that matches up rides and riders based on location and route.

Will everyone ride the Google Wave?

There has been a lot of hype around the announcement of Google Wave. Rightfully so. It is the first big brand tool that addresses convergence, or web troika as I like to call it.

Wave looks to be a place where all of the current tools Google has are 'washed ashore' (forgive the pun) into one interface. According to the webite, "wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."

It is a move in the right direction, but I haven't been that entranced - YET. These are tools that Google already has and simply unified into one interface.

I feel the same way about this as I did for Google Insights for Search. Everyone raved about it. When I checked it out, I realized it was nice of Google to aggregate all information into one place, but it was all there before. Great looking mashup.

Even the wave team "kept reiterating that the product is still basically in its infancy." That is the thing that intrigues me.

As with any Google product, Wave is where its is going to start. My real question is - where is it going to go? For now, I am going to ride the wave of hype to see where it takes me.

Is Twitter Ridiculous?

Last week, I wrote a post about the demise of Twitter. I didn't say it was going to be this week or in the next month, but it is something to think about. It is easy to say the first to market will win, but history has told us it is easier to make it better than make it first.

I guess one of my biggest concerns is how frivilous the medium is becoming. Case in point, when a Cat can amass over 500,000 followers, it is time to say it has jumped the shark (which is now owned by TV guide - talk about jumping the shark).

This situation has opened up an important question for me - does it matter if half of a million people follow a cat on Twitter and only 57 people follow View from W6th?

Yes and no. Yes, it might make me feel that I could be more popular. No, I like having a small amount of people that I follow and that follow me. It helps to maintain the conversation around the topics that I find useful.

The great things about social networks is that it provides people with the opportunity to connect with others who have common interests - without regard to geographic boundaries. It just seems to me that since Twitter does not have any form of categorization, it has allowed for the fusion of work and play. I know, for a great deal of techies it is the same thing.

I just wonder how scalable that method becomes. You can see people try to impose order through self-generated categories on tools like Twellow. At some point, will Twitter just become background noise that we will want to turn off?

The Demise of Twitter and My Twitter Free Friday

My co-worker said to me "I am getting sick of Twitter" - I understood. It felt like people were twitter crazy and the spammers has already invaded. Yes, the tool has experienced a meteoric rise. According to Google Insights (see inset chart),the term "Twitter" had gone from an index of 12 in January to 100 in April.

As incredible as this might seem, the rise of Twitter seems to have met a peak and started a decline in May.

Looking at the metric I wondered about the overall decline of Twitter. Apparently, I am not the first predicting the demise of the tool. Nielsen posted an article about the subject in late April.

The article points out that: "more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent."

Even more alarming to me is that fact that there are so many new tools being built on Twitter's API. When you see Smashing magazine post an article called "99 Essential Twitter Tools" it makes me think we are already overboard. I don't have 99 essential tools. It is too much. Even worse, what will happen to these essential tools if Twitter goes away or closes their API.

There is a definite Twitter Tribe that feels like the tool is invaluable. When I suggested a Twitter-Free Friday, this is one of the responses I got from noted Visual Thinking Expert Dave Gray "@snookerwolf ha! You might as well suggest an alcohol-free Friday. Good Luck with that! :)"

It will be interesting to watch Twitter and see if it can continue the rise. If it does, who will be knocking at their door with a bag full of cash to buy the technology.

Don't get me wrong, I do like Twitter, but you won't hear a Tweet out of me tomorrow.

Social Media Mashups

Now that the internet age has started to crawl into the days of web troika, the idea of created a social mashup is an interesting one. There are so many tools that are centered around Twitter, it makes me a little nervous.

Don't worry about what happens when the servers fail, what happens if Twitter goes away? A lot of small ventures have been formed around the success of Twitter. As my boss likes to say, only 10% of people on the internet use it.

Why not created something in the spirit of Twitter. As my graduate poetry professor said, "Minor poets borrow. Great poets steal."

Why not take the qualities that made twitter popular - mobile accessibility and brevity - and integrate that into a product.

There are a few people out there doing that - and I don't mean direct Twitter competitors like Plurk. The one that comes to mind is ZapTag.com.

ZapTag is a place where you can vent your road rage about drivers. It has the same trappings of a social network, the brief messaging of Twitter, social media tagging and the integration of Google maps. A social media mashup.

It is not an important website, but some of the comments are hysterical. My current fav is "The red, octagon-shaped sign the person in the glowy vest was holding said STOP. If you can't wait two seconds to let a bunch of kids cross, try leaving your house earlier."

Some are interesting from a legal standpoint because they have busted people who hit and run - "Hit and run. Too bad he does not realize that I have pictures of him and his car."

Mostly, I like seeing that someone else built a functionality that applies brief messaging that was not built on the Twitter API.