by on February 19, 2010 Leave a Comment

How to game the game…

It’s funny, I really get the impression that there’s a bunch of kids at the Googleopolis or whatever, that just don’t give a hoot now. Maybe it’s because they’re gonna lose their free lunchtime chips.

How’s this for a topsy-turvy world…

Google unleashes their loaned Twitter firehose on the great unwashed, via their search engine.

The result? Twitter gets loads more traffic.

Google unleash Wave – noone understands it.

Google makes noises with Buzz.

And people need a user manual just to figure out how to search it.

Now here’s my thing: I’m all about deciphering the cutting edge of tech so normal folk – our Short Tail, if you like – can have a cat in hell’s chance of understanding what it can do for them.

It’s all well and good cocking a snook at this exercise in hilarity without pondering for a moment over what your mums would do with Buzz or Wave. They should use them. They should make things easier, communication swifter, relationships stronger by sharing stuff more simply. But they don’t. They just confuse, befuddle.

I guess the message that comes across loud and clear from this lesson in tech torture is this:

  • Crystallise your ideas. If it takes you an hour to write down exactly what you’re setting out to achieve with The Next Big Thing, so be it. It’s time well spent. That hour will not only help you refine what was in your head, but it will dispel all the negativities and fears you face without applying your concepts to paper or pixel.
  • Share your objectives. Ask someone what they think. Ask 100 people what they think. Don’t let it stop you, just make sure to address all their concerns and curiosities in your operations manual.
  • Make it simpler. Comes down to knowing your market. Whoever you’re aiming at now, aim at someone 10 years younger. Everything, everywhere that’s successful is a bite-size remedy to a problem long-loathed or not even understood. The quicker it sinks in, the bigger your success.
  • Understand that everyone wants better. You’re missing a big trick if you think your 8-in-1 remote control with touch screen technology is only suited to geeks with multiple av setups. My granddad would have bought one, had he been alive today. Sadly he’s not, and it wouldn’t fit in his pot home on the mantelpiece, but you get the gist. Expect the unexpected and broaden your horizons. Market to your niche, for sure, but by sharing your objectives you should have built a picture of other segments you can reach out to, effortlessly, through simplification.

Don’t Wave goodbye to your life’s achievements. Buzz me up and let me know how you’re getting on with your 2010 projects, today!

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by on February 18, 2010 Leave a Comment

Buzz, off.

Sharing. It’s what we’re all about these days. New? Hardly. But where we used to share without talking about sharing, we spend more time expressing our desire to share than we, well, share.

Such a shame. All that time spend on vapid activity rather than committing to action itself.

And just when the buzz about Twitter had started to bottom out, Twitter is all about Buzz.

Google Buzz. Can you hear the faint flutter of wings on prayers?

I’m a spectacularly open-minded kind of geek, despite what you might already think. I’m prepared to buzz around Buzz like a moth to a blazing bulb.

It wasn’t a big job to unwrap it. “Would you like to Buzz?” went the auto-invitation, echoing memories of sitting in doctors’ waiting rooms waiting for the klaxon to sound for a date with destiny.

First time, it was a hollow gesture. Click, clunk, nothing. Gmail as it was last month, last year. A premature proposition.

The second time was barely more intriguing, although by now the Buzz icon had implanted itself squarely betwixt Inbox and Sent Mail on signing into the Gmail interface.

“Share content, start conversations,” blurts Google. Wow – this is what we’ve all been waiting for! Why didn’t someone else figure this out? Why is it 2006 all over again?

Mashable claims 50% of Twitter users dislike Buzz or have ‘already done with it’. Most, I suspect, haven’t even bothered to switch it on…

There are legion anti-climactic moments in the life of a man. Growing a beard, fixing the toilet.

Buzz felt like waking up with stubble. You’d seen it before, thousands of times. In a cloak known as Twitter. Only Twitter isn’t so cumbersome. Twitter is HTML5 to Buzz’s Flash.

It feels all so… Google Wave. Lonely as a cloud. Like the UK servers after a hacked copy of Gotham Racing invaded a friend’s Playstation pre-release.

There are a few people hanging around. A few people kicking the tyres. Ooh, I can link something! Hey, look, I can type something and IT APPEARS ON MY SCREEN!

It’s a contentious perspective. Or is it? To me, Google has arrived way too late to the party.

While Facebook continues on its inexorable rise to becoming The Web, Google has dropped its HUD.

Wave flails, drowning. Steve Jobs makes a derisory private/public statement about the search titan. Microsoft, the soft and cuddly bear of tech so often these days, prepares to release Windows Mobile 7, which could crush the phone fortunes of both these companies.

There’s something distinctly derogatory about the moniker flying around for Buzz users. Buzzards, buzzing off.

It’s been quite a month for undersights. First, angry Jobs unleashes the iPad in a less than sanitary climate. Its industrial design has great bodyform. Now there’s Buzzards.

And in the fastest-moving geek scene ever known, Buzz still feels so… kneejerk.

I’ll caveat everything I just said. It’s early days. Buzz could be amazing.

But I think someone just switched off the lights.

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