Why the New Twitter May Benefit Businesses and Marketers Greatly....

Why the New Twitter May Benefit Businesses and Marketers Greatly

This week, Twitter introduced a new redesign of Twitter.com with a two-pane format aimed at providing a richer user experience, and you can easily tell by looking at it that it does just that.

Do you think the redesign will get more people using Twitter? Share your thoughts. By commentes.
 

"Twitter has always been about getting a lot in a little," writes CEO Evan Williams. "The constraint of 140 characters drives conciseness and lets you quickly discover and share what's happening. Yet, we've learned something since starting Twitter—life doesn't always fit into 140 characters or less."

Twitter has partnered with Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube to make tweeted content more useful directly from Twitter.com itself. Users will have less reason to click away from the site. 

The first pane is essentially the single pane from today's Twitter - the timeline. In the second pane, referred to as the "details pane", users will see additional info related to the author or subject of a tweet, when clicked. This pane will also display things like @replies, other tweets from that user, maps, videos, photos, etc. Users can click the @username to see profiles from the same page. 

Making Twitter more appealing to the mainstream means greater value for businesses and marketers.

Ex-Twitter engineer Alex Payne, who parted ways with the company after failing to see eye to eye with executives on the direction Twitter needed to go in, had some interesting things to say about the redesign. 

"While Twitter has been growing in mainstream significance and popularity, it hasn't managed to adopt a strategy that clearly aims the company towards mass market success," he writes. "I think #newtwitter changes that, turning the site into a rich information discovery platform, if you’ll excuse the buzzword bingo. The new design is a pleasure to use, and encourages a kind of deep exploration of the data within Twitter that has previously only been exposed in bits and pieces by third-party applications. Browsing Twitter is now as rewarding as communicating with it."

"One of the striking things about #newtwitter is how clearly it's designed to allow room for advertisements and promotions," adds Payne. "As an early employee who heard a lot of internal discussion about monetization strategies that eschewed the typical Silicon Valley ad play, Twitter's accelerating turn towards that business model is, on some level, a little disappointing. But as a stockholder and someone who wants to see the company survive and succeed, it's clearly the most pragmatic way for Twitter to capitalize on its substantial and growing network. Ads have their role in the wheel of commerce, and just as Google's text ads are more palatable than most forms of advertising, Twitter’s approach could end up being eminently tolerable, even useful."

Search and the New Twitter

Danny Sullivan has a great article about the impact the Twitter redesign could have on search. This is obviously a key element for businesses to consider. Among his points:

1. The search box becomes more prominent. 

2. More filtering options

3. "Save this search" becomes more prominent

4. Infinite scrolling on search results

5. People and company results more clearly separated

6. Tweets Near You feature

7. Tweets with Links feature

8. Searches for retweets by others, retweets by you, and your tweets, retweeted

Danny provides a detailed analysis of all of these items.

How Will Users React Once its Rolled Out?

The changes will be rolling out over the next several weeks as a preview. During this period, users will be able to switch back and forth between the new design and the old one, though frankly I can't see any advantage to using the old one. 

Redesigns typically get some amount of user backlash, and this will be probably fall in line with that tradition, but this particular redesign has some advantages. For one, many Twitter users are already using apps rather than Twitter.com anyway. Secondly, Twitter has left a lot of people wondering what the point of the service is. This has been a problem since it launched. This will help people understand its value more.

Now, if Twitter could just get those Fail Whales under control...
 

What do you think of the new Twitter? Tell us what you think.By Commentes

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Google Plans To Launch New Music Service

Google Plans To Launch New Music Service

Google is planning to launch a mobile music download service that would allow users to access songs wherever they have access to an Internet connection. 

According to Reuters, Google has been in discussions with the major labels about reaching licensing agreements.  Google has not yet signed any licensing deals but the major labels are reportedly interested in seeing a competitor to Apple’s iTunes launch.

"Finally here's an entity with the reach, resources and wherewithal to take on iTunes as a formidable competitor by tying it into search and Android mobile platform," said a label executive who asked not to be identified.

"What you'll have is a very powerful player in the market that's good for the music business."

Andy Rubin, Google vice president of engineering hopes to have the music service launched by Christmas, according to “people familiar with the matter.”

“We're cautiously optimistic because Google has great scale and reach but doesn't have a track record in selling stuff," said another label executive who declined to be named as the talks are still ongoing.

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Google Updates Privacy Policies

Google Updates Privacy Policies

Google announced that it is updating its privacy policies to make them simpler. They don't appear to have any changes involving CEO Eric Schmidt driving around neighborhoods in an ice cream truck, luckily.Google isn't actually changing any of its privacy practices. It's just trying to make the language more understandable. Google Associate General Counsel Mike Yang outlines the updates:

1. Most of our products and services are covered by our main Google Privacy Policy. Some, however, also have their own supplementary individual policies. Since there is a lot of repetition, we are deleting 12 of these product-specific policies. These changes are also in line with the way information is used between certain products—for example, since contacts are shared between services like Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Docs, it makes sense for those services to be governed by one privacy policy as well.
 2. We’re also simplifying our main Google Privacy Policy to make it more user-friendly by cutting down the parts that are redundant and rewriting the more legalistic bits so people can understand them more easily. For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads, “The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,” since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies.
      In addition, we’re adding:


* More content to some of our product Help Centers so people will be able to find information about protecting their privacy more easily; and
* A new privacy tools page to the Google Privacy Center. This will mean that our most popular privacy tools are now all in one place.
Google says the updates will take effect on October 3. The company's main privacy policy can be found here. There is also an FAQ here. We'll see what Consumer Watchdog, who is running the above satircal video in Times Square, has to say about it.
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Google introduces Call from Gmail, free calls to US and Canada

Google introduces Call from Gmail, free calls to US and Canada (update: impressions)

Rumors have been buzzing about since June, but Google just made it official -- the company's baking Google Voice calls right into Gmail today. Like the Google Chat text, voice and video chat integrated into the web-based email client in prior years, full phone calls will also be an option using VoIP technology from the Gizmo5 aquisition. Google's demoing the "Call from Gmail" service for us in San Francisco this morning, and it's looking like it's not free, but fairly cheap -- a product manager just called Paris for $0.02 a minute. Incoming calls pop up as a chat window in Gmail (and ring your Google Voice-equipped phones simultaneously) and you press a "Call phone" button that appears near the top of the Chat window to send an outbound call, at which point a dialer appears where you can copy and paste numbers or tap them in manually. Users can screen incoming calls or send them to voicemail with a single tap.
You'll be able to make calls to US and Canadian landlines completely free of charge, buying prepaid credits using Google Checkout for international landline calling at $0.02 a minute and a good bit more (We saw $0.19 to Spain) for calls to international mobile devices. Google will sell its own credits for the program (via Google Checkout), which should be available in a few weeks, but the Voice in Gmail service goes live today in the US and will begin rolling out to users immediately. Google's only committed to free calls to US and Canadian landlines through the end of the year, as paid international calls are the sole revenue stream here: "Our hope is we'll be able to make enough margin on international calls to keep offering it at that low price," a product manager told us. We're going to give some VoIP goodness a spin right now, check back later for impressions!

Update: Google Voice product manager Vincent Paquet confirmed that the service's newfound VoIP functionality does indeed stem from the Gizmo5 acquisition -- Call from Gmail is partially based on Gizmo5 technology, was developed by a team including Gizmo5 engineers, and resides in part on Gizmo5's backend. He wouldn't comment any more specifically on the technology than that. Also, that cherry red phone booth up top apparently isn't just for show -- Google's agreed to trial free calling booths at an airport and a pair of universities!

Update 2: We've just tested Call to Gmail and Skype side by side using the exact same setup, and found Google's service boasts surprisingly competitive voice quality to the reigning incumbent. When we called a fellow editor's iPhone 4 from a Gmail-equipped laptop, the sentences he spoke sounded much clearer than through Skype, with each individual word crisper and more recognizable even as volume and pitch sounded much the same. Unfortunately for Google, the inverse wasn't true -- Skype did a much better job canceling noise from our integrated laptop microphone in a crowded room.
The Official Google Blog 

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Google Buys Game Company Slide..

Google Buys Game Company Slide

Update: Right on schedule, Google has now formally announced its acquisition of Slide. On the company's oficial blog, David Glazer says:

For Google, the web is about people, and we’re working to develop open, transparent and interesting (and fun!) ways to allow our users to take full advantage of how technology can bring them closer to friends and family and provide useful information just for them.

Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we’ve already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. As the Slide team joins Google, we’ll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web.

Original Article: TechCrunch is reporting that Google has agreed to acquire game company Slide, which makes games like SuperPoke Pets, SPP Ranch, Top Fish, SuperPocus Academy of Magic, FunSpace, Top Friends, and SuperPoke. The price? A reported $182 million.

The publication says the deal isn't supposed to be announced until Friday, so I'm guessing we'll have more details then.

Google buying a game company is not exactly a surprise. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google was in talks with three more game companies - Playdom, EA's Playfish, and Zynga.
There has been a lot made of Google's plans to take on Facebook in the social media space (beyond the company's existing products), and games have been expected to be at least one part of the strategy. An acquisition like this would appear to confirm this, as Slide's games are already present on Facebook. 

It will be interesting to see just how far Google is going to take this gaming initiative - how many acquisitions in this space the company will make. 

Tech Crunch reported earlier that Google's Vic Gundotra has taken the lead in Google's social media strategy. I suspect that Android and Goosgle TV will play heavily into the company's plans - they are certainly a couple of weapons that Facebook doesn't have.

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