DreamGrow Social Media

HUGE: Google Will Go For Social Media With GMail

Google is becoming irrelevant. Facebook is where people send increasing amounts of their online time. As we have pointed out earlier the main thing that is working for Google is search. Their social pushes with Orkut and Google Wave haven’t had much success.

Facebook on the other hand is having a search component missing from internet domination. Facebook’s search sucks. It is really really bad even finding their own pages and giving relevant results to users. This could be solved with Bing. Facebook’s part owner Microsoft could lend its declining to be used as a search engine inside the social network.

The Facebook’s interface update last week hints at this possibility as the search box was promoted to the prominent position in site’s header. Now Facebook has a lot going on for them and snatching search from Google doesn’t seem really far fetched. With its user-base over 400 million and growing at a rate almost 20 million a month Facebook is the biggest threat Google has ever faced.

Now Google is throwing it all in. Trying to convert GMail with its 150 million users to a social site seem to be their last countermeasure against Facebook. As they can’t break the user experience for the whole user-base the changes couldn’t be too great. The other obstacle, Mashsble points out, is that you probably have thousands of email addresses in GMail and only fraction of those are people you would like to share your status updates with.

So, we have to wait and see what the coming week reveals. Tuesday is the day if Mashable is correct. I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical and I think that Google’s chances against Facebook are really slim.

But what if the sun comes out?

I have been using cloud services for some time now. The most important of which is the Google Applications for Domains. GMail can be automatically backed up to your computer via POP3 or IMAP but what to do with Google Docs, wikis, Flick, Youtube and other services? In Youtube and Flickr you can archive the originals. So Google Docs is most problematic for me as the documents get created in the cloud, the cloud is the original. The same goes for social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, etc.

Naive as I am, I assumed that the big players (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others) actually back up their data. Now, in the light of the T-Mobile and Microsoft loosing users personal data (contacts, notes, calendars, etc. ) it seems that we can take Linus Torvald’s advice on back up:

Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it Torvalds, Linus (1996-07-20). Post to linux.dev.kernel newsgroup.

If Facebook would lose user data then it would be a permanent loss because there is no way to back up you account. Even if you would make a copy of everything you put on Facebook then there’s no way to restore it after the loss. The time and effort that has gone into building the profiles and communicating with peer would be gone forever.

A lot of our stuff is in the cloud. But what if the sun comes out? What is the probability that Facebook, Google or others would loose user data permanently. What would be a good way to protect yourself?

Web Analytics Vendor Tools Comparison by Avinash Kaushik

This video from Avinash Kaushik dates back to 2007 but I think it still helps to get a general overview of the analytics tools.

Avinash writes – Here is what the video contains: Brief introduction to the talk & Avinash Kaushik. Overview of how clickstream data is collected. One big problem (and three challenges) that are driving vendors in new directions. Comparison of web analytics vendors / tools (Omniture, WebTrends, CoreMetrics, WebSideStory / Visual Sciences, Indextools, Unica, ClickTracks, Google Analytics & Microsoft). Parting thoughts: a call to action, standards rock.

And here are some caveats: Running time is 47 mins 44 seconds. If from the tone of my voice it sounds like I made the video in one sitting in the middle of the night then it is true. 0127 hrs to be precise, I am sure you’ll forgive the lack of quality production. You might not agree with some, or all, of it. I request you to give it a listen and you know where to find the feedback/comments form.

via Web Analytics Vendor Tools Comparison (And One Challenge) | Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik.