Tag Archives: social media

Musing

Why I don’t think Circles is Google+’s killer social feature

I firmly believe that if any company can dethrone Facebook, that company is Google. But from what I’ve seen of Google+ so far, I can’t quite imagine a MySpace-style emigration happening just yet.

I’ve recently been asking Google+ fans to give me a good reason to use it. By far the most popular answer to my question is that it provides better privacy and filtering options.

Circles is great. It’s about as simple to use as it can be, but I don’t believe it’s anything like a game-changer.

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Blog

I’ve been thinking a lot about sentiment analysis recently; for a number of reasons:

Datasift (a new product by Tweetmeme, currently in rather exclusive alpha) offers sentiment analysis as part of their streaming filters for Twitter.

Valley-based Fflick are developing their own sentiment engine via machine learning algorithms. The current manifestation of this is a movie review site, but they will be pursuing other verticals – no doubt once the tech has improved and they’ve got some $$s.

Qwiki, which I wrote about yesterday, appears to be on the artificial intelligence trail too. The task of establishing whether content is relevant/important/canonical is an incredibly daunting task to automate.

Finally [prompting this post] this morning I see a product launched by Lewis PR: Chatterscope monitors brand mentions and performs sentiment analysis – A free alternative to Radian6 and Alterian, perhaps? Monitoring and alert functionality is obviously useful, but sentiment analysis – that’s the marketing holy grail, and I’ve always been

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General

Wot no geo?

I’ve been saying to people that I’m not too excited about the announcements from F8 last week. I suppose this is because I was expecting the announcement that many were – that Facebook would launch a geolocation service. I still expect they will (even if it’s by way of acquisition). With 400 times the user base of Foursquare, just imagine how much faster they could build their ‘places’ database than the numerous firms all racing to do so; and what a valuable chunk of data that would be too.

Well, we didn’t get that announcement, but it’s taken a few days to dawn on me that geolocation is only one part of a much bigger picture – and that announcement we did get. It’s the Open Graph.

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