Google: making big social media moves

I’m a little confused. This was you a short while ago: “But, remember eBay? Remember how dozens of competitors tried to get into the eBay space? (and still are?)

Why aren’t they succeeding? Because eBay is NOT about the technology. It’s about the community and unless you have something that’ll convince the buyers and sellers all to switch all at one moment you’ll never be able to take eBay’s market away. Translation: it’s too late and eBay has huge defensibility around its business because people won’t move away from it even if you demonstrate 5x better technology.

Same with Facebook. I’m not moving away from it. Why? I have 5,000 reasons why (and another 500 already who want to be included in my Facebook network). Unless you can convince them all to move I’m not moving. This is why LinkedIn isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, even though I like Facebook’s approach a lot better. It’s also why MySpace isn’t going anywhere. My son says his friends are all on MySpace. My brother’s bar is on MySpace. They aren’t moving no matter how hard I evangelize Facebook.”

“Post a link on Twitter, Jaiku, or Pownce, then after indexing catches it, Google the name of company linked to and watch how high it appears in SERPs. Like #1 or #3 in many cases.”

Yeah, I’ve noticed that. Sure hope that doesn’t change for my Twitter link posts now that Google’s picked Jaiku.

I’ve just spent a little time on Jaiku, but like Pownce it just lacks the simplicity of Twitter. I’m sure there’s ways to make a more feature-rich service while retaining a simple interface, but they’re not there yet.

If the interface isn’t really simple, it won’t be fast, which is essential to how I use Twitter. Of course, it’s also easier to display the service on a basic phone, but I guess those are going away soon w/ iPhone, gPhone, and who knows what else!

I started to use Jaiku, However, Its text phone number is Finnish which means international roaming charges here in the UK. Twitter used to use a Channel Islands number (Now Isle of Man number) which are ‘free’ on UK Orange texing plans.
Maybe Google didn’t buy Twitter after buying Blogger from Evan

Isn’t the 5,000 friends limit there because Facebook was designed to graph your actual real world social relationships, not your online entourage (your real friends vs your virtual friends)? People aren’t able to have real relationships with more than about 200 people at a time anyway–5,000 is being generous. If you are a business or org you’re supposed to start a group … or join MySpace

Google is not competition for FB. Google cannot do everything. I got news for you. There is no FB killer. It doesn’t matter what Google has or can do. Its about community and Google does not have this in terms of Socnet. Google will always be known for search and FB will be known for socnet.

Orkut limits your friends to just 1000

Bill: no. The engineers at Facebook tell me the limit is there because Facebook doesn’t scale when you get thousands of friends. It has nothing to do with some evil plan to get you to only add your “real” friends, whatever those are.

Bill Streeter: you are particularly clueless about how important Facebook and other social networking tools are in replacing my contact list. I have collected more than 4,000 business cards in the past six years. Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of Activewords, has 12,000 people he KNOWS in his Outlook Contact list.

Who are YOU to tell me that I can only possibly know 200 people? That’s bullshit.

Mike: I have 5,000 reasons to love Facebook and 500 to hate it. Heh. But, yes, you are right. I’m probably not moving off of Facebook no matter how cool Google’s thing is.

It also explains why nearly everyone in Brazil who is on the Internet is also on Orkut.

If Buzz B. never slept and spent 43 minutes with each on his 12,000 contacts he could make it through the entire list in one year.

43 minutes a year talking to someone, that’s not really KNOWING them, is it?

Twitter deserves to be “killed”. They don’t listen to user feedback, no improvements, lying error messages, downtime, etc.

@Gordon R. Vaughan – No worries. Simply configure your Jaiku page to receive feeds from Twitter. Then all your Twitter messages will automatically become Jaiku messages, too. That should help SEO a lot.

And remember Twitterphiles: Jaiku has solved the threaded conversation problem by enabling comments to be added to any Jaiku message.

Twitter’s “in reply to” goes to the most recent message, not a specific tweet. That’s ridiculous.

@Michael Bailey aka Mobasoft – Love your definition of Socnet Friends:

We should probably just call it the list of “People who I target my message at”.

I wonder if the Google acquisition is about the Social network of Jaiku or maybe building an active contact list for the rumored Gphone? The Symbian s60 client shows the presence of your contacts. All Jaiku needs to beat Twitter is a US SMS number and a private message option.

Orkut limits the number of friends to 1000.

I just posted the comic that sums it all up. I heard about this new from tweets on Twitter. And heard about this specific post from tweets on Twitter.

Robert,

How is Jaiku about presence? I don’t understand Tim O’Reilly’s comment.

To me Twitter is just a copy of Jaiku.

Thanks for your thoughts.