May 13, 2008

Google stumbles into the social networking crossfire

In one corner, weighing in at a respectable $15 billion, the reigning champ, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook!

And the new challenger—we’ve all heard his name on the streets and he actually helped us discover Zuckerberg—weighing in at a hefty $150 billion, the ad-toting, search-optimizing, float-like-a-betafly Eric Schmidt of Google!

Let’s get ready to rumble!

Wait a minute—what’s this?  It looks like Schmidt and Zuckerberg are not fighting, they’re tag-teaming!  And there’s Ramu Yalamanchi of Hi5, David Glazer of OpenSocial, and Kevin Rose of Digg coming up to join them!

Will the whispered Yahoo, Microsoft, MySpace giant allegiance challenge them next week?  Only time will tell…

What am I talking about?  The cage-match between Google’s new product offering, Friend Connect, and the answer that will come in the next few months from their competitors and adversaries.

Last night Google released their cure for the internet’s social networking addiction:  universal integration.  Wait, what?  That’s right, Google has found a way for the average website owner to integrate social networking capabilities into their sites without doing any coding at all!  Pretty soon you will see your favorite (currently static) how-to-age-cheese website integrating social networking options like comments, uploading pictures, friends, and updates of your activity on their site sent to your favorite social networks (Facebook, hi5, Orkut, etc.).   All they have to do is sign up through Google Friend Connect and choose the little applications they want to add to their site.  Google takes care of the rest!

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a game changer.  Suddenly po-dunk Bar-B-Que Shack’s one-page website can integrate comments about their latest BBQ recipe, have their regulars upload pictures from last night’s wrangle-fest, and connect with BBQ lovers all over the country.  It seems dumb, but then again so did searching for information on a computer when you could just find it in your local library.  This, my forward-thinking friends, is a serious game changer.

Wanna see it in action?  Check out these sample sites that Google created and watch the video introduction.

So there you have it, Google is entering the Social Networking arena with guns blazing.

But what does this mean for the general internet community?  In my opinion, all good things.  I have a few websites, and I would love to have user comments, user-generated content, and user connections all happening in the background—without me having to moderate, code, or otherwise handle the implementation.  It’s actually kind of like a dream come true—in theory.

But so far, from what I have seen in the example sites and the videos, this first go-around of Google Friend Connect is—in a word—clunky.  You can tell that the idea behind it is beautiful and full of potential, but that the coders forgot to pass it on to the make-it-look-sexy people before they released it.  To give them credit, it is still in the very, very early stages.  I just can’t wait until this can be used in sites all over the web.  I’ll stumble upon a random karate-by-cats website and I can immediately connect with other people who love the board-chopping meows as well—and my activity on karate-by-cats will be automatically posted to my Facebook profile!  And keep in mind, this is just the first iteration of this new functionality—the real gold lies at the end of the Google rainbow (somewhere over in California, I’m sure).

Look forward to lots of news about Google Friend Connect—great work Google!  Now, about those karate chopping LOLcats…

May 12, 2008

Internet killed the Television Star...

How distant is the downfall of cable television?  How far away are we from the day when no one subscribes to cable anymore because every ‘good’ show can be found online, at any time of day or night, in HD quality?

Not as far as you might think.

In fact, last night for Mother’s Day my family and I sat down together after we leisurely finished dinner and watched The Office—courtesy of the Internet, my laptop, a small conversion cable, and our family TV.

If you are a TiVo owning, flat-screen hanging, digital cable receiving, 250 channel man then you’re just one step away from canceling that Comcast cable service and bookmarking your favorite IPTV sites.  Think not?  IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television (here is the wiki about it).  With products like TiVo, AppleTV, and SlingBox we are inching closer and closer to the edge—a couple more steps and we’ll be soaring away from the old days where programming was chosen by millionaires sitting in offices in LA and NY and heading towards that beautiful land where we choose what we watch, from whom we watch, and when we watch.

I’d like to introduce you to a friend of mine:  Hulu.com.  Officially, Hulu.com states that its mission is “to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium video content when, where and how they want it.”  And though this is true, I want to hone in on one specific word from that statement:  premium.  As its website proudly boasts, Hulu.com is the best place to go if you want to see shows “from more than 50 content providers, including FOX, NBC Universal, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros. and more.”  Those content providers, I’m assuming, are the ones who have attained the status of ‘premium content providers.’  Hulu.com is—in my experience—the first truly user friendly TV-on-the-Internet website ever.  Watching shows on ABC.com or NBC.com or FOX.com or tv-links.co.uk or pop-vids was like, to put it mildly. having the worst migraine of your life and being forced to sit in a bright room with 4 lagging commercials repeating indefinitely forever.  Yeah, it was something like that.  But Hulu.com really gets it right.  The shows are good quality, they load quickly, the ads are timed and vary from show to show, and the user interface is accessible and understandable.  I’m happy with that.

But something about that word, premium, still gets to me.

Who’s to say that shows produced by NBC or FOX or Sony are any funnier than the clips you can find on FunnyOrDie, CollegeHumor, or SuperDelux?  Sure, they might be filmed with better cameras, in a studio in LA, tested against hundreds of focus groups for humor quality and demographic receptiveness, and all assuredly politically correct (enough)—but my question is: does the fact that they were produced by a big name inherently entitle them to the status of premium video content?

Of course, my answer is a big fat n0.

The Internet video stars are becoming more famous, more quickly, than the television stars of today.  Videos like Pearl the Landlord and the dance for Soulja Boy Crank That have swept the Internets from left to right, top to bottom, in just a few weeks each.   It’s hard to argue with the power of viral videos on the internet.

It is also hard, though, to see a future marriage between viral video style Internet clips and ‘premium’ video content from the big names.  How will we see them living happily together on the same site, or better yet, integrated into the same programming systems?

When we find the answer to that question, hopefully with the help of sites like Hulu.com, you can be sure that your cable service provider will have already made the arrangements for the funeral of their cable programming, and the upgrade for their Internet bandwidth offerings.  You’ll also probably get a colorful, laminated announcenment in the mail from about 300 different start-up IPTV companies.  Ya can’t teach an old medium new tricks…

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch 30Rock.  It comes on at 1:28 PM on Hulu.com.

April 29, 2008
I am highly involved in the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia.  The logo here is a link to an article that describes my Capstone project- a semester long project during which we worked with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Verizon Wireless to use cell phones to produce Personal Public Service Announcements.  These PPSA’s, as we called them, were all shot by students who traveled to Atlanta from all over the southeast and were produced and edited by professional producers who flew in from all over the country.  The event was more satisfying and rewarding than we ever could have hoped, take a look!
I am highly involved in the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia.  The logo here is a link to an article that describes my Capstone project- a semester long project during which we worked with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Verizon Wireless to use cell phones to produce Personal Public Service Announcements.  These PPSA’s, as we called them, were all shot by students who traveled to Atlanta from all over the southeast and were produced and edited by professional producers who flew in from all over the country.  The event was more satisfying and rewarding than we ever could have hoped, take a look!
Mobile Media Movement

The Mobile Media Movement is a website that I created with my Capstone class in the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia.  We aimed to establish standards for the creation and distribution of mobile media, and we produced some how-to videos to help new users get their content out there.  We hope that in the future of the New Media Institute many more projects will be born from our hard work with the Mobile Media Movement.

 And yes, that’s me in the videos.  :)

NMI Nation
NMI Nation is a weekly webcast that I created with my friend Zack Goulet.  We modeled the show directly after Diggnation, my favorite podcast.  Every week Zack and I discuss technology articles that are assigned by Dr. Scott Shamp, the director of the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia.  We love to have a good time, so we often have a couple beers and take our time with the episodes—it’s a lot of fun, check it out!

Contact me

If you’d like to get in touch with me, please send me an email at kileydorton@gmail.com—I’d love to hear from you.