Got access to Google +1 last night and so far, I’m liking what I’m seeing – not really sure about making custom circles – but in a way, +1 reminds me of an idea I wrote about exactly 4 years ago.  A couple of months later, in August 2007, I wrote about “rungs of friendship” in more detail – seeing what I felt was needed, at that time in regards to Facebook – which really owned the “friends” department at that time.   I guess what I’m saying … is that I envisioned something that was “rules based” which would move a friend from one rung or circle to another based on their behavior, or our interaction with them.  That’s not what +1 did, but I think it’s a step in that direction.

With +1, I can make as many circles as I want and move friends into them (what I would like is some kind of rules based engine on top of it – and that would be the evolution I think we need – of course, the devil is always in the details with these kinds of things).   I’ll have to use +1 a bit more so I can really talk to it, but I noticed it builds on the rest of Google’s services, such as Gmail, Google Chat, etc.

Was reading about One Web Site, Two Audiences today at DigiDay and noted  people use channels in social media differently, or, so to speak, they chose the ones they are most comfortable using…which means your going to find different people, more or less, active in different channels, and for different reasons.

Also, Gizmodo shows an visualization of twitter traffic after the Japan Earthquake last March shows just how much ideas and needs can map to visual constructs.

Also, noticed Skype is now allowing users to create local numbers … I was thinking of creating one for London since I’m there fairly often, but then I realized they’d charge me 60 bucks a year for that (which might be worth it – as everyone someone calls the number, they’ll get me via Skype, except they already can get via Skype – still, it’s an interesting idea I may try one of these days).

And MySpace cost Murdoch over 1 Billion – but guess what?  Murdoch is an old Newspaper titan … what does he know abotu social networks? – why would he think that his knowledge about how business works would translate to MySpace or how to run…. a lot of people make that mistake of trying to repeat success in one channel in another – like successfully running PPC in Google AdWords and then thinking they can do the same thing on Facebook Advertising .. when it’s an entirely different beast.

Probably the worst thing in the world is being incorrect in one assumptions – rather than being right or wrong.

Finally Pew Research Gives Us Hints About the Impact of Social Media on Our Lives but I need to digest it before commenting.

Reading about a Stanford professor who has done research demonstrating that distant reading (searching for trends within books) may be more important, and more effective than reading the actual books, themselves!   It reminds me of Marshall McLuhan’s famous saying “the medium is the message“, that has come up more than a few times, lately.

…In fact, today someone had mentioned to me, in relation to social media, that the monitoring tools are becoming more important than the data they seek to interpret.

According to the story, which first appeared at the New York Times about the sheer mass of books that multiply at ever increasing rate and are impossible to keep up with and read all the necessary content  we may want or need to…..

(I’m quoting liberally from the original New York Times article, rearranging some of the ordering of text, while keep to and amplifying the spirit contained within).

Which raises a question: What are we mortal beings supposed to do with all these books?

Answer: don’t read them.  To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books. …..He advocates what he terms “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.

…. Let’s say you pick up a copy of “Jude the Obscure,” become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England — to mention nothing of other times and places.

….it suggests that there are formal aspects of literature that people, unaided, cannot detect (or understanding segmentations of books by looking at overall patterns within a collection of books, and not so much reading any particular book).

Then again, maybe Distant Reading is more like Doonesbury than we think….

Also, today TechCrunch had a story on  Google+ Project: It’s Social, It’s Bold, It’s Fun, And It Looks Good — Now For The Hard Part

So far, the beta is closed and I can’t sign up, due to overcapacity, to try it out for myself, so I’ll have to take MC Siegler’s word for it about Google+.

Also Twitter for Newsrooms launched and looks like a masterful stroke for Newspapers and Reporters.  Meanwhile Monster.com launched BeKnown, a social network that runs in Facebook (a few years back. Monster regretted not buying LinkedIn when it could have).

BeKnown allows the users to create professional networks facilitated by the environment created by Monster without ever leaving Facebook. Users can download BeKnown at the Facebook apps site in one of the 19 available languages.

According to an estimate by Monster around 700 million users will be able to import their professional information to the Facebook app and set up their own professional network. Further Monster’s registered users can also import their data to the Facebook app and set up professional networks there as well.

Finishing up this post, did you know that most woman will not marry and unemployed man?

It’s harsh, but seventy-five percent of women surveyed by ForbesWoman and YourTango said they would not marry a man who was unemployed. Some marriage and relationship experts say women still look towards their husband as the main provider and won’t get hitched to someone without an income. Others claim women are being prudent and realize both partners must have a job to survive in these difficult economic times.

That’s enough for tonight and a lot to think of.

I was quoted  by MyCustomer.com in a piece titled How will antitrust investigation impact Google and SEM? tonight.   In the post:

The US Federal Trade Commission has officially opened an antitrust investigation into Google’s search and advertising practices.

Last week it was speculated that US regulators were preparing to issue Google with a number of subpoenas as part of a wide-ranging formal probe into whether the internet giant abused its dominance of the web search advertising space.

I said that:

“This antitrust case has been in the making for a while; and, I wrote about it in 2008 in a post titled The Google Economy. I heard predictions that Google would be reigned by the government about two years ago, as sentiment towards the search giant has changed. But we still don’t know the impact this case will have; though, we are sure to get much more information about Google’s inner workings, including its algorithms, and that will slow the search giant down somewhat, and give a boost to Microsoft.”

Sponder ultimately predicts: “At the end of it, perhaps in another three years, we’ll probably end up seeing Google, more or less, unscathed, I suspect. My belief is Google has become such a persuasive presence in  the internet economy that taking it down would create more harm than good – and at the end of the day, Google will manage to walk away with a slap on the wrist, as usual. But… the case will also make it easier to regulate companies in the internet space (which is ultimately, a good thing).”

To be honest, I don’t expect anything much will come out of this anti-trust case anytime soon,  it will take years to play out, for sure.

In an entirely unrelated topic, I have been working with Radian6′s Insights Platform and was able to do some interesting tests on CheckIn Activity comparing Foursquare/Twitter to Gowalla/Yelp over the last month (based on checkins to Barnes & Noble bookstores):

Through my own testing, I was able to ascertain that a tweet or check-in takes about 12 minutes to show up in the River of News that is monitoring for related terms.

But in my Insights Account I’m also able to work with a topic profile Radian6 provides that has all Insights enabled, including Klout, so individuals can view the options provided by the additional information provided by Radian6.  Thought my readers might want to see some of the additional Insights so I have shared some of them, below.

Looking just at the “Conference” in the SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST topic profile, set for the last 90 days of data we can see …

For example, CRM segmentation is provided by OpenAmplify:

You would look at a River of News to find out what is actually contained in each category.

OpenCalais provides a different breakdown of on post topics than OpenAmplify, all of the topics above were focused around the word “conference”.  I believe the Insights partner is responsible for the quality of whatever is provided.

I found, perhaps, more interesting what the Klout data in the topic profile:

Weather the labels really fit the content is something that each user needs to decide.  The image below is for Facebook, from Klout data – but I didn’t see any reference to Facebook – so perhaps the selections do not mean what I think they do.

I found the OpenCalais people mentioned (at the “Conference”) interesting:

The results seemed to be spot on for Steve Jobs

Clearly, I need to look at the options Insights provides and will share anything else I find interesting and noteworthy in an additional post, soon.