Google's Community Standard #FAIL

Twice now this week my Google profile has been suspended (this means, it's a dead URL to anyone searching for you on the Internet). First time, I can see that they're trying to push out people who are posing as business users from using the personal use version. I had to nix my "mktgurl" persona which I readily use just about anywhere I want a social, online presence. I hope all this name rearranging doesn't mucky up how my blogs are configured. Second time, I got suspended for using my real name. Really now, the usability of Google+ is poorly thought out. I mean really, mixed products users are getting bumped off the grid and are complaining about it. There's even a forum thread on Google Groups about people using real names and getting blocked.

[ To prove that I'm me I have to send them a link
where this name is me, or send them a copy of a photo ID. ]

[ This is what others see when your profile is suspended. ]

So far, Google+ has only communicated one thing about its new social media site...stay away and don't sign up because frankly, we don't believe that you're really who you say you are.

Are you winning the Zero Moment of Truth?

If you're a frequent visitor at LinkedIn, you may have noticed some very brightly colored ads yesterday pointing to a newly published e-book by Google's Jim Lecinski (LinkedIn, Twitter). An engagement threshold must have been reached because the ads aren't displaying anymore.

ZMOT is "the moment where marketing happens", according to Jim, "where consumers make choices that affect the successes and failure of nearly every brand in the world."

Linked InMaps

This feature is brought to you by LinkedIn Labs and makes a graphical representation of how your network is connected. It's not surprising when I look at my own LinkedIn network how very few people cross-pollinate to other circles. Someone should build an add-in for G+ so that data junkies can see what 2.3 billion +1 transactions look like in the three months that +1 has been available.

What is interesting to note is that this visualization only takes into consideration 1st degree of separation connections. 

Color code: The upper left of the spiral (orange and purple, banking industry), bottom (green) represents colleagues from a recent employer, and the large upper right cluster (blue) are all the people I met directly through LinkedIn.

a short url for a G+ profile

Thank goodness for third party app devs. If it weren't for them, we would probably have to type more characters than normal, like whole words and real sentences.

Here is mine: http://gplus.to/mktgurl

Create your own here: http://gplus.to

Need a G+ invite? I can probably hook you up with one if the invite feature stays up. The site seems pretty fragile at the moment. Up, down, up, down. This is what happens when you rush a product out the door.

A stranger added me to his circle; although I can't tell if they are a he or she. I promptly used the "block user" feature. I can imagine that when G+ goes off beta, managing all those random circle adds will be quite cumbersome. Too bad we can't set our profiles private to just our circles or extended circle users. G+ is retiring user profiles set private. Sux0rs!

Google+ Hangout

A workaround for the 10-person limit:

I wonder how many concurrent video sessions a single user can be a part of? If a hangout session is started by one user, wouldn't it then be possible for the other nine people to start hangout sessions of their own. In effect, this could create a daisy chain of connections. I bet someone on the Net outside of Google is already testing to see if this is possible.

Google's Hangout feature, a competitive advantage?

Google+'s hangout feature is one of the few aspects of Google's attempt at social media connectivity that sets it apart from and perhaps makes it better than other competitors. You might say that it is a competitive advantage when compared to other companies that offer similar or substitute products.

Let's see what's in this space already:

• Mainstream multi-person text conferencing: Any mainframe system, internet relay chat (IRC), instant messaging (IM)
• Single point audio/video conferencing (site-to-site, peer-to-single-source-to-peer, one-site-to-many): any IM app with a video chat component, XBOX, Cisco, etc.
• Shared immersion user environments: MMO (massive multiplayer online; typically refers to games), MUDs (multi-user dungeons)

Hangout looks to be a bidirectional multi-input audio/video conferencing, but is limited to up to ten people; though this is probably a bandwidth or capacity limiter. Here are some things you might not have noticed from using the app:

• Each hangout generates a unique URL which can then be shared to invite others to a hangout; but, multiple hangouts that share the same circles of users cannot merge into a larger hangout.
• It's browser-based, so like MMORTS (massive multiplayer real time strategy games), there's no software client to download, drivers to update; except for maybe the browser plug-in that Google chat and video also runs on.
• It's also cloud-based, so having uptime, refresh rates, and latency issues like other multi-user environments are probably not an issue.

There's only one service that one-up's Hangout, and that is Second Life (and most other virtual 3-D audio/chat and motion animated worlds).

Is it sustainable? Depends on the total number of global users and who is going to pay for all that hosted bandwidth and live video streaming. Currently in the United States, the Internet is a shared cost system and everyone "pays" for it in some context. 

Will it normalize the fee-based video conferencing costs for businesses? Probably not, especially if you want to v/c with more than 10 people. 

Is it practical for mobile devices? At the moment, hangout doesn't support mobile devices. Though, if someone can create a video compression capability that can cache multiple streams of video content in a way that is cost-effective for the device user, then perhaps; but I don't think even commercially available technology is quite there yet.