This morning I noticed something new in Gmail – Google Buzz. Think along the lines of your Facebook News Feed. First thing you need to do is look at your privacy settings. By default it seems to share Picasa pics, your shared Google Reader items and status updates from GTalk and it’s linked to your Google Profile.

Your Google Profile has now also been expanded with some additional features that are linked to Buzz. Easy ability to share content, links, interests and a personalised URL. I just don’t like the fact that your static URL is not customisable and it uses your email address (the part before the @ sign) as URL.

It seems like a mixmatch of things that starts to compete with Facebook, but it’s not all available in once place. So you’ll ask, what’s the point? Is it Google trying to increase the amount of information they already have about their users (cue conspiracy theory)? Or are we going to see a Facebook competitor one of these days?

At first I thought Google brought Google Wave into Gmail. It might have been an interesting match by adding some additional features to Gmail, but in my opinion Google Wave is a failure. It might be one of those cases that the average Joe just doesn’t get it, and in cases even tech savvy users, but I have just not seen the value at all.

Google has the money to play around with lots of things and this is probably just another foray into looking at tools that might gain traction (especially when their features are very similar to what users are used to with Facebook). I think small things like these, lead to big things and believe me a lot of analytics will go into these new features to see how people adopt it.

The question is, do we need another Facebook and can Facebook be bettered? Will anyone even care?

I say competition is healthy, let the games begin!

New startup Me2Everyone seems to be buzzing It landed in my inbox a while ago, referred from a friend, and I’m interested to see what the main concept will be when it fully launches.

From their brochure:

“It’s a cool new virtual world where you can meet friends, chat, shop, play, watch videos, create an art gallery, launch your own record label, open a virtual newspaper, plant a tree, buy a virtual house, play the free inworld lottery and makemoney from your own online store!

You and everyone you know make the decisions, shape the world, create real incomes and hare in the profits. There’s nothing to download, and it’s not a game. It’s a new place where you come and interact. Meet new people or invite your friends. Learn new skills or expand your business. Find the love of your life or help the planet.

me2everyone is a place on the web where your ideas will be heard, where you can start a new business and see the real world through new eyes.”

Sounds like a Web 2.0 version of Second Life…

Click here to check it out!

If you want results, it’s time to jump on this bandwagon, because 2009 will be a big year for online video and what it can bring you. There are various techniques in optimising your video content. It’s important to categorise your video content correctly, whether by tagging, titles or keywords and even transcriptions. There are numerous ways to ensure that your video content is indexed correctly and it can possibly bring a huge amount of traffic to your website. Talk to us to find out more!

I’ve recently discovered this social network through a friend that does business coaching in the UK.

Click the banner to join and look me up as a contact! Within an hour of joining I have had several requests to join interest groups and make international business contacts.

This looks like a mixture of Facebook and Linked-In and even though the interface is a bit confusing, I think once you get to know the social network there would be a lot of potential.

Let me know what you think!

It’s great to see some API competition for FaceBook Apps, in fact Google’s Open Social looks to give strong competition with the fact that it’s a shared API, meaning multiple sites will be using it, increasing distribution of the app.

What is OpenSocial?

As stated on the home page: “OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”

The question is just, is there something like critical mass on this kind of viral marketing? Obviously apps can be absolutely anything, from business tools to quirky viral ‘zombie bites’. It’s just important to remember how information is shared with these apps. Information that is very valuable to potential marketers, so don’t just install any app.

Facebook on the other hand has rolled out some social business tools that should keep things alive and well in Facebook land and some major players have already signed on. Companies can soon have their own Facebook profiles. Would be interesting to monitor over the next few months. I’ve been talking for almost a year about leveraging Facebook as business tool and it seems it’s the next logical step for them.

Exciting times!

I presume it might be a case with likeness to the electric car vs oil giants. Not so much social media, but internet marketing as a whole. BUT we’ve managed to prove otherwise with traditional online advertising. We’ve proved that there does lie real value in online marketing and as with all new technologies, the early birds will catch the worm.

The problem comes in where companies make use of service providers that don’t really know how to utilise the power of social media marketing / Web 2.0. And it doesn’t work for everybody I might add. But  when implemented correctly these strategies can add immense insight into your consumer markets. Especially where we’re talking of large corporates with big databases that have responsibility to maintain a good profile on the CRM side of things.

I agree that social sites will come and go (like with all fads), but the principles and application thereof will live on and surely it is also up to the owners of such sites to innovate and improve their offerings to keep their subscribers happy? The fact that there’s such large buy-in to new media like video (YouTube), Photos (Flickr) etc opens up new avenues of marketing at much lower budgets than traditional advertising. And to top it off we have the advantage of real time stats with return on investment. Tracking is what makes online advertising so popular, plus the market is growing by the day.

You might ask the question, where does the value lie in social media and its marketing principles?

Well, it’s measured in different ways, but you can look at the following (to name a few):

• Brand Loyalty/Awareness Building
• Word of Mouth Marketing
• Consumer Generated Content
• Consumer Data Profiling
• Advanced CRM Principles
• Viral Marketing Aspects
• And More…

The problem will always be implementation and finding service providers that understand the methods and can implement those principles to drive social online strategies for clients.

It guess it’s true that the early adopters will pay some school fees and that the corporate world is sitting back to see what happens, but dead, it’s truely not…

This is quite an intruiging new KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) type blogging platform. It’s called Tumblr.com. Seems to have been built on a WordPress platform, but very simple to use. Quite interesting…

Is the news media ready for web 2.0? In a perfect Web 2.0 world we should be able to get word from the proverbial horse’s mouth. It’s a grand concept, that we can have the latests news as it happens from the people that were involved, but there are also some issues with content aggregated like this.

There is a large group of users among the general public that argues some thing must be true (or factually correct) since they read it on the Internet. I’ve had long debates with people saying something like ‘They said this, and they said that.” It’s something that’s been happening long before the Internet, but with the ease of publishing to the Net, it’s a great cloud out there (as my lecturer first explained it to me) and for the leeks among us sometimes low, foggy clouds.

Who are they?

Are they experts? Are they the advertising media (conceptually glorifying their portfolio of brands). Have they got an E-Book (does that automatically qualify then as an expert)? The point I’m trying to make is that I’m not sure whether the news media is ready to go Web 2.0 with regards to user generated content. I do however think that there could be some synergy around the concept. The problem is how valid the information is. With a proper moderation process, who knows?

In the end, usable content will prevail. If readers find it interesting and captive, they will reward it with good review. If it’s a controversial topic, the advantages of interactivity online will help people to voice their opinion and in the end, users can make their own conclusions. There I think lays the advantage. Should it be governed? Probably, if a news channel wants to claim it as ‘official news or content’. Or if they label it as off-beat news (like Ananova likes to do), it could well be a great drawing card for readers.

It will be interesting to see where this goes in the future and how content on the web will be rated as fact or fiction.

I say tomatoe, you say tomatoe

Is real butter good for us? Is ritalin a good solution for ADHD / ADD? The opinions keep on changing. Research is a fickle thing. Like law, it sometimes comes down to interpretation or personal taste. I guess sometimes you have to take things with a pinch of salt?

Please feel free to comment with your opinion on this!