Google says point blank, dogmatically, and in bold…
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You can make money without doing evil.
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Does Google’s shutting down Google Reader bear reflection upon the ten things that Google knows to be true?
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Shutting down Google Reader disconnects people, prevents them from sharing, and changes the game on several levels for many stakeholders. But is that evil?
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What is evil?
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Wikipedia doesn’t give an illuminating definition of evil.
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Myself, I have always considered evil as the deprivation of the dignity of a thing – especially a deprivation of the dignity of the human person. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, for example, are universally considered basic to the design and identity of a human being. That which threatens deprivation (or actually deprives us) of our good exercise of this existential property by intention, therefore, is unmistakably evil.
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Murder, theft, lies, supernormal taxes, unjust laws, unbounded ambition, and adultery are conspicuous and patent examples of evil – recognized alike by the ancient shepherd and modern cosmopolitan. Most of us (myself included) participate in evil to some degree – more often than we may want to admit to ourselves. It is unfortunate…
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But as much as is at stake in Google’s shut down of Google Reader – the deprivation of a free service (once provided at Google’s expense) does not appear to be evil. Even if the deprivation causes harm.
Untimely cancellation of a free service or feature is, in fact, the territory and culture of the proverbial free lunch.
The shut down may encourage us, however, to reflect on Google’s motives and brand.
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Googles’ decision, for example, seems to contradict other Google truths. Are these paradoxes a symptom of incompetent management (Kitchen Nightmare) or a conspiracy of brand?
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Focus on the user and all else will follow.
There’s always more information out there.
Great just isn’t good enough.
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Ultimately, if the moral arc of Google’s character is profoundly problematic, perhaps we should consider the alternatives and disempower the capricious, authoritarian throne that Google seems to pursue.
The more important lessons, nonetheless, are clear:
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Users of freeware, beware.
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Don’t build your dream, business, mission-critical process, product or service on freeware.
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If you’re not paying for it, it’s not a tangible asset. At best, it’s a hack (cheat).
“The way to gain traction on Google+ is to search for the keywords that describe your passions and then interact with those folks.”
That’s what Guy Kawasaki is saying. Why is he saying that?! What does Guy know that we don’t?
Note: This #DadChat RECAP appeared last week on Bruce Sallan’s blog.
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Is G+ misunderstood?
Is G+ enchanting?
If not now, how can it be?
Enquiring minds want to know!
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The Beatles, The Yellow Submarine
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Who is Guy Kawasaki?
Haters say Guy is the Grand Inquisitor of the new Googledom. Nevermind the haters!
Guy is the greatest of all the old school Apple fanboys. He’s the prime evangelist, a venture capitalist, an author, and the genius that conceived of AllTop before social media knew they had a need for information and news aggregation.
Google didn’t pay him to write the book, Guy explained on #dadchat – the Thursday night tweetchat hosted by Bruce Sallan.
Guy says he’s slaying the dragons (G+ hate and disinterest) for the love of it. Because it’s the best tool right now says Guy. He even wrote a book about Google +: What the Plus!
What the Plus! is also Guy’s first ebook.
You can download the free PDF of Guy Kawasaki’s first version of What the Plus! here:
Unfortunately, social games have thus far failed on G+.
Addendum
People aren’t connected on G+ like they are on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter would do better with a social game integration than Google Plus. Maybe that’s one of the challenges that G+ has to overcome: make the quality and relevance of the connection between G+ users.
I’d like to see more creative license in the profile space. It’s like what Facebook does.
Oh – what Facebook does has nothing to do with good design.
Addendum
Ultimately, Google + didn’t up the quality of the social media experience – it didn’t revolutionize the social platform standard. They have the brain power and resources to do that. Why aren’t they doing it?
An American living in Bucharest, Romania, Stan Faryna searches for better questions about who we are, what we’re doing, and how we shall better know ourselves and love others. He hopes for answers that fill the heart, lift it up, and substantiate the dignity of the human person.
The Twitter Unfollow Bug. And other social media DOHs!
by Stan Faryna
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This week, I found that five people that I follow on Twitter were not being followed by my account. I have no idea when they were unfollowed, but I know for a fact that I did not push the unfollow button. Three of those persons are friends with whom I interact with on Twitter and elsewhere: Billy Delaney, Jack Steiner, and Bill Dorman.
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WTF Twitter!
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Samuel Jackson: Ezekiel 25:17 [Clip from Pulp Fiction]
Of all the things that can own us, shame is the greatest of these. It stands in the way of opportunities, relationships, and self discovery. Shame counsels us to speak softly (or not at all) lest our ignorance become known to others, to enjoy the lawn from the sidewalk when we should be running across it barefoot, and, worst of all, to play our cards (or not play at all) or else.
Or else.
Or else what?
Most of us have seen Brené Brown’s TED talk about vulnerability and whole-heartedness. If you haven’t seen it, you can see it here. Against your and my better instincts, Brown demonstrates that vulnerability is as beautiful and uplifting as it seems terrible.
If connection is what being human is most about as Brené Brown argues, we cannot connect without vulnerability. Brown explains in her TED talk: we have to let people see us, we have to be us, and we have to feel the feelings that we feel.
Betsy Cross is herself struggling with being vulnerable in social media. She also see others struggling with vulnerability. She observes the social media game of falsified connections, superficial engagement, and an underlying desperation for people to connect to other people. The underlying desperation to connect, she notices, is an apparent contradiction to the vast and immediate opportunities provided by the various social networks.
What’s up with that?!
The most obvious problem is the lack of vulnerability, transparency, and authenticity of even veteran social media professionals and influencers. The old guard teach new comers how to do online relationships in a manner that correlate to measurement, analytics, and infographics. But what passes for social media etiquette does not fully address peoples’ need for deeper connections. It doesn’t help people build things that last – neither life-long friendships nor online communities. Betsy is right when she questions standard social media process.
I am reminded of Emily Dickinson who wrote in a letter: Friends are my estate.
At the end of my days, if I shall compare online friendship to a million silvery ships passing at warp speed among the stars (a breathtaking sight to be sure), my estate will be as cold and barren as the terrible distance between the stars.
Although a newcomer to social media herself, Betsy embraces vulnerability and speaks whole-heartedly in this guest post. She’s worried that she doesn’t have all the answers. I am honored that she is doing it here on my blog.
Hers is an act of courage and vulnerability. She wanted very much not to take this step, but she did. And I am proud of her for doing so.
According to the authoritative urban dictionary, “you can use it if there is an awkward silence.”
Bahhh! That’s what happened at Yahoo!s Bucharest Hack Party. Even perky prostitutes couldn’t get the party started. No one can prove anything, mind you – this was a cash transaction.
But if the party ended with a Bahhh! in the old city of the defunct little Paris aka Bucharest, what’s worse is that the culmination of the circle jerk was literally, a bahhh- as in the sound a sheep makes.
Beyond being morbidly GaGa over Facebook, Yahoo’s sub-genius crowd paid unhealthy homage to Zynga’s flagship Facebook game, Farmville, with a scaled-down, robotic simulation of a farm where the number of marching sheep reflect the number of your friends.
Oh – The Grapes of Wrath are spreading across Facebook Games like Kudzu
Social Games
Wildly embraced initially, Facebook games have become a huge disappointment to players. Hundreds of millions of farms have been abandoned, crops have withered, propeller capped sheep are on the verge of extinction, and farmers aren’t talking to their friends. The good news is that the flood of game-related wall spam has passed. But it didn’t just happen to Farmville. It happened across the board; Facebook games are failing to retain and entertain a restless market of 500+ Million Facebook gamers.
Game industry experts like Playdom Creative Director David Rohrl somehow got it wrong about what casual game play should be in a social game. As Rohrl himself noted, the social gaming space is not straightforward. One of the obvious fails was that social game companies fell into trap of thinking that graphics can substitute for game play. If only that were true, the economics would be unreal! On the other hand, players wanted more cuteness. They demanded it in the forums. Clicks confirmed it.
Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, however, cautioned against falling into the rut of crowd sourcing. “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse,’” observed the American industrialist. According to Jay Elliot, Ford’s caution is often quoted by Steve Jobs, founder of Apple. Read the rest of this entry »
I have a vision of the next milestone for the web. It may or may not be original, insightful, feasible, useful or amazing. I call it Social Web 3.0. It’s emerging in attitudes, ambitions and technologies. My new friend, Ben Barden, a blogger, thinks I’m mistaken. But also old friends like Mihai Fanache, Yahoo!’s ad man in Romania, believe I’m mistaken.
Triberr, a blog promotion Twitter app, may (or may not) become an app that helps us move forward to a more social web. Unlike those quick to ignore it’s potential, I’m willing to give Triberr the benefit of the doubt – until it’s shortcomings overcome it’s potential. But it doesn’t have to go down like that. JackB and I seem to agree that it’s worthwhile to see where Triberr goes. But that’s another blog post.
Before we can get into what signals Social Web 3.0 as the next milestone in the evolution of the web, let’s review Web 2.0.
Web 2.0
Try to imagine this with me: the sound of an angry (blue) bird being launched.
Below, some beautiful and exhilarating music for your reading. Polovtsian dances from Alexander Borodin’s opera, Prince Igor. Performed in this clip by the Berliner Philharmoniker and conducted by Seiji Ozawa.
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Make Lots of Money
Less than a year online, another social network platform is slotted for takeoff on the runway of success. It’s called Yuwie. Based on open source technologies used by MySpace and others, Yuwie allows users to customize profiles, import videos and pictures, blog, easily make friends with Yuwie members, make clubs, and interact with their Yuwie group of friends.
According to Alexa, the Internet traffic keeper, Yuwie is one of the top 500 most trafficked websites. But what’s driving the popularity of Yuwie is not its features and cheap dressing on an open source solution. It’s the business model. Yuwie ‘s business model is based on sharing advertising revenue with its users. Remind you of MLM? Yup. Yuwie is MLM. And the so-called unwashed masses of online users like that idea a lot.
People like it so much that Yuwie boasts almost 600,000 registered users within nine months of going online. It went online in July 2007. According to my estimates, Yuwie has about 3,000 active users on the website at any given time. If Yuwie is lucky, they have about 200 users that are so active that those users spend four hours or more per day, everyday, on Yuwie.
Revenue Sharing
Some critics are horrified by Yuwie’s seemingly indecent revenue sharing plan. Revenue sharing seems to some to be a contradiction to the spirit of social networking. Although name brand companies and rock star developers are championed on Wall Street (NYSE), Hyde Street (London), and elsewhere for the unrealistic cash value of their social networks, the same financial analysts suggest that social networking, users, and money should not mix. That it’s vulgar.
Those critics are terribly mistaken.
Yuwie has problems, but the concept of sharing advertising revenue with users is not one of Yuwie’s problems. In fact, not sharing advertising revenues may become a big problem in the near future for MySpace, Facebook, HighFive, and Linkedin. Web 2.0 without users is nothing more than Web 0.0 (game over).
Already, Yuwie is capturing on MySpace, Facebook and Youtube defections and recruitment at a rate of thousands of users per day.
Yuwie
That’s not to say that Yuwie doesn’t have all the ear marks, tell tale signs, and stink of a hustle, scam or pyramid scheme. In fact, Yuwie promises users some very abstract concepts on how users can earn money from page views. Yuwie also seems to deliver less than a little of the cash it gets from advertising. Worse, most of Yuwie’s ads represent cheap bulk ads handled by the same weasels that do spam and spyware. Despite these often discussed problems, Yuwie users seem to be more forgiving than any other user base.
By the skin of the founder’s teeth (Korry Rogers), Yuwie just barely avoids being defined as a scam or pyramid scheme. However, many suspect Yuwie to be a scam and a scheme. Using Yuwie’s website and services costs nothing; anyone can register and get started without a credit card or paypal account. In my opinion, Yuwie’s users might benefit from paid premium services. But let’s leave that rant for later.
In a BBC News feature on Yuwie, Korry Rogers seems to suggest that Yuwie users can make between 400 and 500 dollars per month. In Yuwie introduction videos, it is also suggested that it is possible for high performance users to build up to incomes as much as $5,000/month. After corresponding with active Yuwie users, I found there are very, very few people who have been known to make thousands of dollars in a single month. Most people are self-reporting earnings a lot less than they had expected.
Pyramid Principle
Yuwie earnings include earnings based on referral or downline activities. According to an article in the UK’s Guardian, earning on the downline can reach down to 10 levels of referral’s referrals. However, few users are reporting having downlines past level three at this early stage. The bigger problem, explains one active Yuwie user, is keeping the downline focused on the recruitment, mentoring, and creation of interesting content that will generate sufficient page views.
Below, some more background music. Cold Play, See You Soon.
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Yuwie Earnings
Yuwie earnings are based on pageviews lasting from three to five seconds each. These pageviews generate the ad impressions that Yuwie provides to advertisers and online ad networks. A user’s pageviews include both the personal pageviews of the user (looking at other people’s profiles and content AND those pageviews of the user’s profile and content made by others. As most realize, building a strong downline seem to be key to Yuwie earnings. Alone and single-handedly, the most hard-working user may not get $20/month for 16 hours/day of Yuwie contact building.
Best Practices
According to some of Yuwie’s most successful earners, building a successful Yuwie practice and downline requires six things:
1. Coming into Yuwie with a group of 12+ persons committed to roughly two to four hours per day through a two year effort, come hell or high water…
2. Developing ongoing insight into common issues, the big challenges, and Yuwie-user best practices
3. Converting insights into strategy, methods and practices that can be easily adopted by the group and effectively used by every level of the downline
4. An attitude of experimentation and open-mindedness to trying out new methods with the patience and understanding that most of this will not pan out as individual experiments
5. Technical support to develop scripts and other tools that will enable automatic realization of Yuwie connections, etc.
6. Determination of each individual to succeed in developing a powerful downline and their empathic ability to provide morale support for the other members of the group.
Imho, any business is likely to succeed with such a force behind it.
Case Study
Myself, I’m interested in making a case study of Yuwie and I’d like to form a group of 24 persons (ideally, half that never had any experience with Yuwie but are interested in it and half that may already be involved in Yuwie). Whatever happens will happen.
I am mostly interested in the experience of users across the long haul. Such a case study may provide me with the needed insight to strengthen a business plan that I am developing for a new kind of social network service. This doesn’t mean that I won’t participate actively in the group’s work. In fact, I can provide several of the needed factors to ensure we are doing everything we need to do for this group to succeed.
With the help of a top Yuwie user, I have set up my Yuwie profile and achieved a high level performance (1000 Yuwie friends and 16,000 page views) within 15 days with no more than two hours spent on Yuwie per day. I am told that the average user would accomplish the same results in three months with 2x to 3x the hours spent per day.
For example, I have retained a top Yuwie earner that is providing consulting to me on best practices and common problems. I’d like to get started with this next week. What about you?
If you would like to join me in this online adventure in network marketing, please let me know by contacting me through Buzzfuse or Linkedin.
If you would like to learn more about Yuwie, click here. OR read more about Yuwie in my Yellow Brick Road series, click here.
Below, some beautiful piano music. Helen Grimaud plays the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 17, The Tempest.
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Stan Faryna
April 16, 2008
Bucharest, Romania
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FEED UPON posts about moby, the electronic pop star, and me:
Mr. Faryna is the founder and co-founder of several technology, design and communication companies in the United States and Europe including Faryna & Associates, Inc., Halo Interactive, and others.
Stan Faryna is also a Global Voices author and translator. Global Voices is a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research think-tank focused on the Internet’s impact on society.
Mr. Faryna also served as editor-in-chief of Black and Right (Praeger Press, 1996), a landmark collection of socio-political essays by important American thinkers including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Copyright
Copyright 1996 to 2008 by Stan Faryna.
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