Will the Buzz drown the Tweets??

Since the time it launched few weeks back, Google Buzz has been just doing that. Creating Buzz… While the critics are mentioning about the privacy issues (Facebook too had faced privacy issues about a year back), many have started experimenting with this new platform…

For Google, it was necessary that they integrate the Buzz with their ‘star performer’ – Gmail (search engine being the sacred cow they cannot fiddle with). Google has been dabbling in the social media space for past many years, but somehow the success has been elusive. Their strike rate in social media is close to zero. While Orkut is popular in Brazil and India… but in markets that matters, they hardly have been able to make a dent. Flickr has far more traction amongst the online users that Picasa…and Google Wave just managed to create a ripple.

Twitter, since it hit the market in 2006, has been gaining popularity worldwide. The reasons for the same can be attributed to the following:
- Simplicity: Most people are normal… nobody wants to complex things, including technology innovations
- Tweet alerts through SMS
- Rapidly growing 3rd party application using twitter platform (APIs)


For twitter to reach the tipping point it took almost one year.. Wikipedia mentions, that it was during the SXSW festival that the twitter users (tweeps, as they are called now) increased drastically… For Google Buzz launch, they had the advantage of huge base of the millions of Gmail users – ready audience to try and experience the product…

Predictably there is the initial huge traffic onto the Buzz platform...The image below shows the traffic results on both these sites (Buzz and Twitter) – with visitors Buzz and twitter website almost on par (considering that twitter has many visitors coming from mobile platforms too)




However, the below chart shows the initial reaction of people using Google Buzz… as expected, there would be a lot of people who are there out of curiosity… and many more critical to this new platform, for they find comfort in what they are experiencing now. Going by this chart the earlier chart would be very different in a month’s time.



Buzz might not be able to drown the Tweets and the reasons for the same are:
- Buzz is currently an appendage in your gmail Inbox….
- Most people use/open email inbox only infrequently (even the regulars use it only once or twice a day and that too for a few minutes)
- Buzz does not have the exclusivity factor; something that twitter had when it was launched. Even Gmail had an exclusivity factor when it was launched
- Since Buzz is part of Gmail…. 3rd party applications using Buzz would be far and few
- Last if not the least….twitter is ‘cool’

What are your thoughts? I’d like to hear from you

Cheers

Santosh

Will the Buzz drown the Tweets??

Since the time it launched few weeks back, Google Buzz has been just doing that. Creating Buzz… While the critics are mentioning about the privacy issues (Facebook too had faced privacy issues about a year back), many have started experimenting with this new platform…

For Google, it was necessary that they integrate the Buzz with their ‘star performer’ – Gmail (search engine being the sacred cow they cannot fiddle with). Google has been dabbling in the social media space for past many years, but somehow the success has been elusive. Their strike rate in social media is close to zero. While Orkut is popular in Brazil and India… but in markets that matters, they hardly have been able to make a dent. Flickr has far more traction amongst the online users that Picasa…and Google Wave just managed to create a ripple.

Twitter, since it hit the market in 2006, has been gaining popularity worldwide. The reasons for the same can be attributed to the following:
- Simplicity: Most people are normal… nobody wants to complex things, including technology innovations
- Tweet alerts through SMS
- Rapidly growing 3rd party application using twitter platform (APIs)


For twitter to reach the tipping point it took almost one year.. Wikipedia mentions, that it was during the SXSW festival that the twitter users (tweeps, as they are called now) increased drastically… For Google Buzz launch, they had the advantage of huge base of the millions of Gmail users – ready audience to try and experience the product…

Predictably there is the initial huge traffic onto the Buzz platform...The image below shows the traffic results on both these sites (Buzz and Twitter) – with visitors Buzz and twitter website almost on par (considering that twitter has many visitors coming from mobile platforms too)




However, the below chart shows the initial reaction of people using Google Buzz… as expected, there would be a lot of people who are there out of curiosity… and many more critical to this new platform, for they find comfort in what they are experiencing now. Going by this chart the earlier chart would be very different in a month’s time.



Buzz might not be able to drown the Tweets and the reasons for the same are:
- Buzz is currently an appendage in your gmail Inbox….
- Most people use/open email inbox only infrequently (even the regulars use it only once or twice a day and that too for a few minutes)
- Buzz does not have the exclusivity factor; something that twitter had when it was launched. Even Gmail had an exclusivity factor when it was launched
- Since Buzz is part of Gmail…. 3rd party applications using Buzz would be far and few
- Last if not the least….twitter is ‘cool’

What are your thoughts? I’d like to hear from you

Cheers

Santosh

Will the Buzz drown the Tweets??

Since the time it launched few weeks back, Google Buzz has been just doing that. Creating Buzz… While the critics are mentioning about the privacy issues (Facebook too had faced privacy issues about a year back), many have started experimenting with this new platform…

For Google, it was necessary that they integrate the Buzz with their ‘star performer’ – Gmail (search engine being the sacred cow they cannot fiddle with). Google has been dabbling in the social media space for past many years, but somehow the success has been elusive. Their strike rate in social media is close to zero. While Orkut is popular in Brazil and India… but in markets that matters, they hardly have been able to make a dent. Flickr has far more traction amongst the online users that Picasa…and Google Wave just managed to create a ripple.

Twitter, since it hit the market in 2006, has been gaining popularity worldwide. The reasons for the same can be attributed to the following:
- Simplicity: Most people are normal… nobody wants to complex things, including technology innovations
- Tweet alerts through SMS
- Rapidly growing 3rd party application using twitter platform (APIs)


For twitter to reach the tipping point it took almost one year.. Wikipedia mentions, that it was during the SXSW festival that the twitter users (tweeps, as they are called now) increased drastically… For Google Buzz launch, they had the advantage of huge base of the millions of Gmail users – ready audience to try and experience the product…

Predictably there is the initial huge traffic onto the Buzz platform...The image below shows the traffic results on both these sites (Buzz and Twitter) – with visitors Buzz and twitter website almost on par (considering that twitter has many visitors coming from mobile platforms too)




However, the below chart shows the initial reaction of people using Google Buzz… as expected, there would be a lot of people who are there out of curiosity… and many more critical to this new platform, for they find comfort in what they are experiencing now. Going by this chart the earlier chart would be very different in a month’s time.



Buzz might not be able to drown the Tweets and the reasons for the same are:
- Buzz is currently an appendage in your gmail Inbox….
- Most people use/open email inbox only infrequently (even the regulars use it only once or twice a day and that too for a few minutes)
- Buzz does not have the exclusivity factor; something that twitter had when it was launched. Even Gmail had an exclusivity factor when it was launched
- Since Buzz is part of Gmail…. 3rd party applications using Buzz would be far and few
- Last if not the least….twitter is ‘cool’

What are your thoughts? I’d like to hear from you

Cheers

Santosh

Twitter: Connection Generator or Content Generator

I’m sure the following scenarios would be familiar to most people… If you look carefully at what is being said or written in the Media (Television / Newspapers)… news on “My Name is Khan” – the movie, about Shah Rukh Khan’s comments and many other related titbits. Few months back it was Sashi Tharoor and about what he said (the cattle class comments), and what he was saying thereof. Another regular feature in the news channels happens to be what the latest tweets are on specific topics or current events… suddenly you see that Twitter is also about content…

The idea of Twitter was to provide a simple platform for the online users to update their status; and for their friends and followers to see and respond. The idea of keeping it under 140 characters was to make the integration with existing SMS platforms easier…. The idea has been very successful, and people have started taking on to Twitter a big way… The stats say that almost 40-45% of Twitter traffic is from Mobile platforms and the remaining from the web. The whole idea of Twitter was on ease of connecting and getting connected…. I’m sure using Twitter for content creation would have been last thing in the minds of the creators of Twitter.

The media (new or traditional) survives on content. The fresher and exclusive the content the better it is. Traditionally, media companies’ generated content mostly from internal sources (Editors, journalists, reporters etc); External (Freelancers, writers,) and Syndicated content (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, PTI, etc)… and there was a cost attached to these sources of content. With the advent of the web and specifically the web 2.0, a free source of content was discovered – User Generated Content. And when the user is a celebrity, with some media sell-able value attached…the content becomes golden; Imagine if a newspaper or TV carries free content sourced from tweets, they could easily fill up columns or minutes of prime-time news…which otherwise they would need to have filled with paid content….

The way things are shaping up – Twitter would soon become a content generator for media companies and might even be supplying most of the content… Maybe, just maybe – some sort of content syndication (or content generator) could the elusive business model that Twitter can look forward to make money ;)

It is a marriage of convenience. Content starved media feeds of the tweets; and in return Twitter gets free publicity…which would translate into more people joining the twitter platform, and more tweets being generated…thus more content being published for the media to consume…

This looks like a story that will ‘live happily ever after’ :)

Twitter: Connection Generator or Content Generator

I’m sure the following scenarios would be familiar to most people… If you look carefully at what is being said or written in the Media (Television / Newspapers)… news on “My Name is Khan” – the movie, about Shah Rukh Khan’s comments and many other related titbits. Few months back it was Sashi Tharoor and about what he said (the cattle class comments), and what he was saying thereof. Another regular feature in the news channels happens to be what the latest tweets are on specific topics or current events… suddenly you see that Twitter is also about content…

The idea of Twitter was to provide a simple platform for the online users to update their status; and for their friends and followers to see and respond. The idea of keeping it under 140 characters was to make the integration with existing SMS platforms easier…. The idea has been very successful, and people have started taking on to Twitter a big way… The stats say that almost 40-45% of Twitter traffic is from Mobile platforms and the remaining from the web. The whole idea of Twitter was on ease of connecting and getting connected…. I’m sure using Twitter for content creation would have been last thing in the minds of the creators of Twitter.

The media (new or traditional) survives on content. The fresher and exclusive the content the better it is. Traditionally, media companies’ generated content mostly from internal sources (Editors, journalists, reporters etc); External (Freelancers, writers,) and Syndicated content (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, PTI, etc)… and there was a cost attached to these sources of content. With the advent of the web and specifically the web 2.0, a free source of content was discovered – User Generated Content. And when the user is a celebrity, with some media sell-able value attached…the content becomes golden; Imagine if a newspaper or TV carries free content sourced from tweets, they could easily fill up columns or minutes of prime-time news…which otherwise they would need to have filled with paid content….

The way things are shaping up – Twitter would soon become a content generator for media companies and might even be supplying most of the content… Maybe, just maybe – some sort of content syndication (or content generator) could the elusive business model that Twitter can look forward to make money ;)

It is a marriage of convenience. Content starved media feeds of the tweets; and in return Twitter gets free publicity…which would translate into more people joining the twitter platform, and more tweets being generated…thus more content being published for the media to consume…

This looks like a story that will ‘live happily ever after’ :)

Twitter: Connection Generator or Content Generator

I’m sure the following scenarios would be familiar to most people… If you look carefully at what is being said or written in the Media (Television / Newspapers)… news on “My Name is Khan” – the movie, about Shah Rukh Khan’s comments and many other related titbits. Few months back it was Sashi Tharoor and about what he said (the cattle class comments), and what he was saying thereof. Another regular feature in the news channels happens to be what the latest tweets are on specific topics or current events… suddenly you see that Twitter is also about content…

The idea of Twitter was to provide a simple platform for the online users to update their status; and for their friends and followers to see and respond. The idea of keeping it under 140 characters was to make the integration with existing SMS platforms easier…. The idea has been very successful, and people have started taking on to Twitter a big way… The stats say that almost 40-45% of Twitter traffic is from Mobile platforms and the remaining from the web. The whole idea of Twitter was on ease of connecting and getting connected…. I’m sure using Twitter for content creation would have been last thing in the minds of the creators of Twitter.

The media (new or traditional) survives on content. The fresher and exclusive the content the better it is. Traditionally, media companies’ generated content mostly from internal sources (Editors, journalists, reporters etc); External (Freelancers, writers,) and Syndicated content (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, PTI, etc)… and there was a cost attached to these sources of content. With the advent of the web and specifically the web 2.0, a free source of content was discovered – User Generated Content. And when the user is a celebrity, with some media sell-able value attached…the content becomes golden; Imagine if a newspaper or TV carries free content sourced from tweets, they could easily fill up columns or minutes of prime-time news…which otherwise they would need to have filled with paid content….

The way things are shaping up – Twitter would soon become a content generator for media companies and might even be supplying most of the content… Maybe, just maybe – some sort of content syndication (or content generator) could the elusive business model that Twitter can look forward to make money ;)

It is a marriage of convenience. Content starved media feeds of the tweets; and in return Twitter gets free publicity…which would translate into more people joining the twitter platform, and more tweets being generated…thus more content being published for the media to consume…

This looks like a story that will ‘live happily ever after’ :)

Yup, She Is A Beader...

As I was getting dinner ready, Chloe was playing with some beads (putting them in the bottle, dumped into bin, back in the bottle - hours of entertainment)...

Peeves, the cat, was quite interested in the goings on too...


And I was able to snap this shot.

I don't know if it has been us all cooped up in the house over the last couple of weeks because of the snow, but these two have really bonded...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone