Today, I was driving in San Francisco with a couple of other SEO-types and we spotted a prominent billboard for Google’s 411 service.
Every community operator knows that it takes different kinds of participants to be successful. Some people come looking for answers, others come to help. Some like to expound at length, while others say little. Some are lurkers, others are prolific contributors.
No company in modern corporate history has developed a more cultlike, devoted customer base than Apple. I’ve often cited them as an example of what other firms strive for, or should strive for, in bonding with their customers.
“Release no smartphone before its time” seems to be the slogan of both AT&T and Verizon. My romance with HTC slide-style smartphones began all the way back in March of this year, when I tested the Verizon XV6700.
Online community builders love to toss around gross numbers - twenty thousand members, two million posts, and so on.
A key aspect of Web 2.0 is letting users create or enhance a site’s content. This sounds great, but in practice can be hard to achieve. The Web is littered with dead forums, unreviewed products, spammed-out wikis, and other failed attempts to build user-created sites.
Every company is interested in online community and Web 2.0 functionality today, and retail giant Sears is no exception. After seeing a post by Bill Green at Make the Logo Bigger about the retailer’s first effort in this area, I can only conclude that Sears outsourced their community development to their corporate legal team. Signing up for the My SHC Community requires agreeing to an ultra-lengthy privacy policy that Green concluded didn’t offer much privacy.
The tech world is buzzing with rumors about a Google phone. The Wall Street Journal ran an article today, quoted at SearchEngineLand, that provides some details of the development process. Apparently, Google is taking a two-pronged approach: developing their own handset, but at the same time opening up the specifications to allow other manufacturers to offer compatible phones. And, unlike Apple’s iPhone, the Google Phone (GPhone?) should be available from multiple wireless companies.
My fellow FutureLab blogger, danah boyd, wrote an interesting and controversial essay about the social network migration of high school students: Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace. (Boyd blogs at Many-to-Many and Apophenia about social networking and related topics.) She sums up her point:
The pageview is officially on its way out the door as a web site performance metric - Nielsen is dropping page view measurement in its Web traffic reporting. Instead, they will report the time visitors spend at sites.
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