I believe investors and startups that are / were looking for Facebook as an easy exit were not building a company / business anyway. Such a situation is better overall for everyone - only the teams that are focused on building a real business survive and create value for everyone involved.
Investor sentiment (as irrational as it sounds) is very important. The "apparent" failure of FB IPO along with the less than impressive performance of web 2.0 companies in the public markets have casted a dark cloud in the industry. Nothing has changed in the material sense, but this narrative is a great opportunity for investors to bargain for better deals.
Just downloaded and tried it and it looks really good. It has the simplicity of Notepad which I keep going back to after trying a new app and I have tried "many". I only wish they were cloud based and had a web version to it so my lists are not stuck on my iPhone alone. Hope that is coming!
The right thing to do. However, their 2nd paragraph should have been the one starting with "We believe you should have control when it comes to sharing your personal information..."
The rest of it is a repeat of yesterday and is really not necessary.
I do want to know how I can backup by Path to a S3 or Dropbox account. Does anyone know if they support this?
This is insightful especially since we have thought about this problem and had not come up with a solution. I am assuming all the icons will be unique though, else it may lead to a lot of confusion. Also, I believe people choose icons that they best identify with and if it is not unique their association with the icon may not be as strong.
Another thing I have experimented with is if you can upload a picture and create a hand drawn painting / image like Chris Dixon's or Fred Wilson's image which I think are brilliant in creating a brand and identity.
I am assuming all the icons will be unique though, else it may lead to a lot of confusion
I think this might just be a programmer's way of (over)thinking it : "the users are unique, so the avatars must be unique, or chaos ensues". In actuality it will just be mildly confusing at best, but nothing earth shattering. You still have the name next to the avatar for reference, as well as the project, and with several dozens of them, most will be different still.
Rapportive is best amongst the products that add social profiles so this is an awesome outcome. Congratulations to the team!
I always wondered how they could turn it into a business, though. Its useful but tough to say you'd pay for it and Google and others could add it easily, which they have done.
One of my Fav tool. I hope its here to stay :)
I am not sure if its talent hire.
Rappotive can go to places where even google can't. Google People ( alternative to rappotive ) gives you info only from Google network. They are restricted in a way to go beyond their own network.
Truly a great product ! Congrats to the team.
Sometimes I wonder if its the investors who push for this acquisition. Reading though their blog it seemed Rappotive was building a premium product.
Great post and I couldn't agree more on how important retention is for web businesses. Our product, Nurture (http://www.nurturehq.com), addresses this need in a flexible fashion and is being used for exactly this requirement (User Lifecycle Marketing for improving engagement) by a few customers.
I don't get it. It just feels like they are trying to do too much too soon. I don't know any other than marketers who are building content on Google+ and I wonder what their engagement metrics look like.
Another thing is for conference calls, there are already several free and dead easy solutions out there, so its unclear who this is aimed at.
What's not to get? This is clearly the leading free multi-way video conferencing solution. My team recently ditched Skype's paid version; it was flaky as all hell, while hangouts is rock solid. This brings me and 6 other people back to google+ every day. It also got 5 of those 6 people to sign up for google+ at all.
So given:
- "hangouts" is a compelling product with early traction (anecdotal but strong)
- it drives continued engagement to their strategic product
- it accelerates google+ adoption by providing a concrete reason for people to register there, because "that's where the meeting is"
Therefore, the right thing to do is to invest more in hangouts.
If Google+ is aimed to be a utility then yes, I agree with your point of view. But if they are looking to create a competing product to Facebook then, I am not sure that creating a free multi-way video conferencing solution is the going to help. And, I feel, users who signup to Google+ to use this free service, are not likely to adopt Google+ for their social networking needs just because they are using this free utility.
I agree that Google may acquire a few new users with this but this cannot help them compete with Facebook. They need to get the core (the critical mass, social sharing dynamics etc.) right where as, I feel, they are investing in building utilities to get users which they are not getting based on the basic social networking product.
This is what I meant when I said "I don't get it".
I wouldn't say Google+ is a utility, I'd say that Google+ is about integrating existing and new services that Google offers so that the overall package is more useful and more compelling. For instance, there is integrated support for jointly watching a YouTube video or sharing and editing a Google Doc from a Hangout (though, oddly, the first requires an ordinary Hangout and the second requires Hangouts with Extras).
The reason Google+ is primarily social is that, before Google+, most of Google's services were, at best, poorly integrated from a social perspective (if they were socially integrated at all). That naturally encroaches on Facebook because they provide a number of social services, but the more I look at it, the less I think Google+ is about "beating Facebook". I think it is more about addressing weaknesses in Google's service portfolio that Facebook (and Twitter, etc.) have highlighted. And that can be done without "beating" or "replacing" alternative social services.
For example, one thing Google+ is very good for is for interacting with Google engineers and product teams. That's a part of Google+ that has nothing to do with Facebook (or Twitter, etc.), but is still social and very valuable to Google.
What OS and browser are you using this on? On Mac OS X 10.6.x and Safari 4(?) Google Hangout would consistently crash after a few minutes of use. We use video and audio conferencing a lot, so an alternative that actually works to iChat and Skype (hate the new Skype UI) would be very welcome.
I love the way the new Path app looks / works but not a big fan of the fly out menu. It adds an additional click versus having a simple bar of the actions appear at the bottom of the screen. Does anyone else feel the same? Just curious.
A constant bottom bar would take up screen real-estate reserved for the feed, which is where most of the user's time will be spent (mostly consume vs create content)
And even if there was a bottom bar, Path offers 6 different posting options. Putting all of them on one bar, or hiding them somehow with a slider, would make it seem awfully crowded.
More importantly, the bottom bar is for switching tabs, just like tabs in a browser. It doesn't make sense for performing actions.
A tab bar would be a worthwhile replacement for the slide out left menu, which adds friction to switching sections, and lacks discoverability. If you want people ever visiting those sections, it's worth the screen real estate you lose.
