In the social media space, where Facebook and Twitter have over 500 million and 100 million users respectively, our sweet Google launched a not so warmly welcomed service called Google Buzz, earlier in February this year. As per Google’s statements, since its launch, “tens of millions of people have checked out the Google Buzz”, but they have yet not shared any exact numbers on how many people actually follow the Buzz. The company launched the service targeted at bringing the updates from various services on to one platform, but probably the consumers think otherwise for managing their updates on the social domain.
The matter came into limelight when Leo Laporte found out that his Buzz(es) are not reaching his followers since last 2 weeks. Leo Laporte has 222,820 followers on Twitter and around 19,000 followers on Google Buzz. His ‘This Week In Tech’ podcast ranks amongst one of the highest downloaded podcasts on iTunes. He found that the updates that he was putting over Google buzz in the public domain was not reaching his followers. Later, writing to Google Buzz team, he got a revert that there was a serious bug, which allowed his buzz(es) not to reach his followers if even a single one of his almost 19,000 followers deleted his/her Google Buzz account. This caused a serious problem and people started writing about this in the public domain (don’t trust me? Do a search for yourself).
Google says that the bug has been fixed this monday, but the matter of fact is that it has not been completely solved. According to the Social Media expert Louis Gray (he is also the Managing Director of new media at Paladin Advisors group), “With so many streams flowing by and so many sources and people demanding my attention, even the strong soldiers that fatigue during battle are left behind in our own self-directed charge up the mountain”.
Although Google still has very high expectations from the product. In fact, according to Gmail Product manager Todd Jackson, “It has become a core belief of ours that organizing the social information on the Web is a Google-scale problem”. I seriously believe it is a managerial issue with Google to expect to be number 1 in any business they enter, without thorough study of the consumers and their requirements. May be that is why, despite Google Buzz failing so badly in the market, they are gearing up for yet another product called ‘Google Me’. Only time will tell, what market has in store for Google’s bank accounts, but we can surely agree with marketing pundits that companies will like to spend only on the new media platforms, which take care of most possible time spent, for their target audiences.
Further Read:
1. Beware! money laundering through iTunes in UK
2. Social media, not the ‘Most Important Thing’ anymore
3. Media eating up 50% of your life?
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“Social Media is not the most important thing right now. It is the shift from computers to mobile based computing platforms”, as suggested by the digital marketing leader – WPP Group. With Facebook exceeding 0.5 Billion users, just under six years that it has been launched, many others have not done so well. Below is some ‘hard data’ to explain this. You’ll also find a number of other contenders in this extremely useful research by The Nielsen Company, June 2010. With 250 million unique audience, Facebook still has a lot to offer for all the advertisers. What do you think?
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Why is it important?
Typing ‘new media’ in your Google search gives you around 1.9 bn search results within 0.15 seconds. Typing the same keyword in Wikipedia, in dictionaries, in academic journals, in business plans give you all different kinds of meanings, terms and their relevances. Everyone in the market is talking about new media, the effect of new media, the impact of new-media, etc. But how many of these people actually know and understand what new media is and what is the benefit of using new-media instead of the traditional media, or ever replacing a fraction of your traditional media with our new-media school of thought?
Definition:
Well, ‘new media’ is the term coined to encompass the amalgamation of music, images, videos, words and symbols, etc with the computers and communication technology, mostly used in relevance with Internet and post-2000 era of media usage in our communications.
What is new media?:
With the advent of innovative technologies and their even more innovative usages, new media is growing at a much faster pace than expected. As far as time involved in the growth of new media is concerned, we can relate them, to a couple of related fields: Tim Berners-Lee, for instance, had 10 years of latitude to conceive of the Internet. Researchers from MIT, who were interested in space exploration got undefined amount of time to track signals from Sputnick, and what these people did in their time, changed the face of our today in a positive way – these experiments also led to functionality of our GPS devices.
According to Harvard Magazine(Oct-Nov 2009), “New media is changing the lives of University Students” in more number of ways then we can merely imagine. According to Kathline Carr from Harvard Business Review, to innovate in our media and regular life environments, we need to “create hunch-friendly environments”. Therefore the advent of new media technologies and applications of today leads to many folds innovative applications in our near future. Why? Because it grows on a geometric progression and not just arithmetic progression. New media relates more to on-demand content availability, which also involved interactive participation from the consumer, to make its more dynamic form and evolution cycle.
While a typical mistake from newbie’s to this terminology is, to consider digital consumption such as through a digital radio or HDTV, of a traditional content such as movie or a song to be understood as new media. In reality, this would still hold true for being a traditional media on a new channel. New media would be something like receiving a URL on your mobile phone through an MMS, where you can visit the landing page of the URL and post your comments or be a part of some discussions, would mean actual new media communication. Therefore, it is not just digitization of traditional media into computers and related technologies, but it has more to do with active content, which ever keeps on growing and modifying itself through active participation from the consumer.
Some good examples of new media would be: Websites with active content such as games, puzzles etc which involve active participation; blogs and discussion forums at some corporate websites; computer multimedia and games; softwares involving consumer participation in creation and distribution of content etc.
Read More:
1. Media eating up 50% of your life?
2. TV meets Google.
3. Online communities – The new era?
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Panasonic has been trying to do this for a while now, and has finally succeeded in doing so. Panasonic’s current Plasma TV‘s enable users to make SKYPE Video and Voice calls, access Pandora, Fox Sports and Netflix, etc. Users can also have access to YouTube, Picasa (Google) web albums, Amazon‘s VOD and Bloomberg.
Today, 17th Aug 2010 Panasonic also announced that users of their Viera series of Plasma TV’s, will be able to post twitter messages through their TV’s itself. Panasonic’s
Internet-enabled TVs include the VT25- and VT20-, G25- and G20-series. There are many more Blu-Ray players by the electronics giant, which are also expected to be upgraded to access the web for similar services.
We will keep you posted on developments on the same.
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