Author Archives: Kristen Nicole

It’s been a long time coming, but the era of location-based mobile apps may finally have arrived. At least for advertisers. Location-based mobile apps and services have really taken flight over the past year, due in part to the expansion of the smart phone market and its permeation through our consumer market. Though well-integrated smart phone apps have done well in Asia for years, its the global reach of the location-based app industry that is helping to drive profits expectations in coming years.

TechCrunch reports that a Juniper study suggests location-based mobile apps and services could rake in over $12 billion by 2014. That’s something really exciting for advertisers, marketers, mobile app developers, publishers and platform providers, as it means those consumers out there will be more readily monetized in the next few years. It suggests the changing face of advertising as well, seeing as the push towards convenience and direct consumer interactions is the wave of the future.

It’s something many mobile app publishers and advertisers have been hoping for for some time now, with Juniper’s study showing more promise than ever for the growing industry. And at this point, things seem unstoppable. Mobile apps continue to gain market share, and they lend an additional stream of revenue for all parties involved. Apple is a leader in the standards being created around the mobile app industry, as it forces other related industries such as music, television and film to change their distribution methods.

Yet that’s the beauty of location-based products. They enable the distribution shift to occur, generally for the better. At least, that’s what consumers will be most concerend about. As we’re seeing, particularly in 2010,is an ongoing trend towards incorporating GPS location-awareness into a plethora of devices.

Toys, cameras and navigation devices are just some of the objects that are being used as portals for location-based services, increasing the usability and connectivity of the devices themselves. This will only add to the market’s ability to monetize the consumer use of location-based services, as the option becomes more standard in the next few years.

Ultimately, the usefulness around location-based apps and services wil boil down to its consumer usage. As with social networking, the concern around consumer safety and privacy will become of increasing importance, though this will balance out to a certain degree when it’s all said and done. Finding new ways of using GPS and providing location-based apps and services to the masses will be a primary goal for many industries in the near term.

Google and MySpace have forged a new deal, primarily for real-time search results. The search engine company has confirmed the rumors that the two companies have been in talks regarding an SEO deal, and Google will begin including MySpace content in its real time search results.

Despite issues between Google and MySpace in the past, MySpace may be able to provide some value still to the large search engine company. As Google looks to build out its real time search options, MySpace is being leveraged towards providing relevant and immediate search results for added context.

Real time search has largely turned to social media content for the past few months, highlighting social media’s ability to add another layer of context to th data we receive in the form of search results. For a given query, we can gain a certain level of instant gratification based on content published from user-generated sites such as MySpace, moving away from the validation process required by more trusted news sources. As the content from social media outlets is also rather plentiful, the ability to pull from all that time/date-stamped data has been a low-hanging fruit tempting search engines for quite some time.

Twitter helped to bring real time search into the mainstream, with Facebook and MySpace quickly following suit. For Google, the deal with MySpace means that the search engine can expand its real time search offerings, potentially improving the context behind such social searches. This goes along with many of Google’s other initiatives on the social front, including socially-oriented search results that now appear for signed in users. Along with Google Buzz and a few other social efforts, Google is clearly moving towards a more inclusive format regarding its real time search.

Whatever Google ends up doing with MySpace content for its real time search products, we’re likely to see something more useful than what other search engines have provided. Jumping head first into real time search has been something other search engines have done in the past year or so, while Google already has a founation upon which real time, socially-generated search results can be provided. Nevertheless, Google has had a harder time incorporating real time search into its established methods, especially when it comes to forging certain deals in order to access social media outlets.

Facebook has been another large database with a great deal of potential towards the real time search efforts of several search engines. For the time being, Microsoft has a better standing with Facebook regarding the use of its increasingly public interface towards real time and social search content. Google’s deal with MySpace may help overcome some of the shortcomings of its deal with Facbook, especially as it looks to stay competitive with the likes of Microsoft Bing.

For MySpace, the social network has been losing ground to Facebook for quite some time now. Having become a trend passed, MySpace has spent the past year or so rebuilding its company and its network. Returning to the basics of user-generated content and social networking, MySpace is also looking for a way to get back into the game. A real time search deal with Google may be a good outlet for MySpace, given its intentions towards its own marketing efforts.

Many of MySpace’s former users have migrated to Facebook over the past couple of years. Could RootMusic cause a similar push for music industry artists and bands? A new tool called BandPages is being launched by the startup, creating an automated process for creating a Facebook fan page. Artists and bands can use the new tool to quickly establish a Facebook presence, with just a few clicks. RootMusic plans on launching the full BandPages service some time next month.

BandPages works by letting you sign in with Facebook Connect, eliminating the need to create a new or separate account just for RootMusic. Use photos you already have in your Facebook albums, and set up your public fan page for yourself or your band. This only works, of course, if you already have a Facebook profile established, with photos already uploaded to your account.

The idea behind BandPages is that there’s no need for much hassel to go into the creation of an extended web presence that promotes you as an artist, or your band. The tools you need are most likely already online, so why not tap into those? As Facebook is already well-adopted across the world, there’s a good chance you already have your content here as well. If you’re looking to create a public fan page to better promote your music brand, what better place to go than Facebook?

The migrating of music professionals to Facebook also indicates the ongoing demise of MySpace, as the previously dominating social network struggles to return to its core competencies. While MySpace still has a large user base and a great deal of attention that’s still directing traffic to its users’ music profiles, the business of social media marketing can be archived in different ways with the use of Facebook.

When it comes to marketing, Facebook makes the leveraging of social media that much easier for users. While MySpace has been developing tools similar to Facebook Connect for this very purpose, Facebook continues to reign as far as its social media platform goes. The standards Facebook has established keep things like sharing information relatively streamlined and effective forms of communication amongst users.

The simplicity of a tool such as BandPages also draws on the need for products to take their own overarching approach to making things easier for end consumers. BandPages is looking to address a growing need for a specific industry, one which is turning to the web for the bulk of their marketing practices. The automation of this particular process by RootMusic is even one that can be applied to a number of niche groups, many of which would plan on marketing their brand via Facebook as well.

The next step for RootMusic’s BandPages product would be the development of analytics, to demonstrate how a fan page is performing and how it can be made more effective. As far as Facebook limitations are concerned, there is only so much RootMusic would be able to offer in the analytics department, but this is a growing interest for several third party apps. We’re likely to see the market develop in the coming year, for Facebook and other platforms as well.

Online networking privacy is a huge concern right now, especially for Facebook and Google. Both companies have been facing a good amount of backlash for some of their recent product launches, including the new Facebook and Google Buzz. With all the ado about privacy concerns, both Facebook and Google are taking steps to regain user trust and deal with the can of worms they opened.

Facebook, which revealed a new set of default privacy settings late last year, has spent the last few weeks amending the rather open sharing policies that the new site features. This week, the social network has updated the privacy settings around third party apps, letting users determine settings for individual apps. Before, you could set the privacy settings for all third party Facebook apps, essentially making them all equal in how they’re shared throughout your social graph. Now, you can manage settings for each individual app, indicating how you want each app to interact via your Facebook profile.

The change is quite similar to what Facebook did with profile postings, which first had overarching settings as well. Now you’re able to have a more detailed set of options for individual posts shared on your profile wall, meaning each item shared comes with its own privacy settings. In all, it appears that Facebook is reverting to a more customizable approach to sharing on Facebook, creating standards around each item shared instead of the standards being focused on your relationship standing with other users.

Combining the two major facets of socializing on Facebook, users are able to manage their relationships through their sharing activity, which is more fluid and realistic to the way in which our relationships play out in life. It’s a tight rope walk, for sure, but it’s Facebook’s thing. Returning to that principle is likely a good move for Facebook.

Hopefully Google Buzz can learn a lesson or two from Facebook’s recent mistakes. The public default settings have caused a huge uproar and even a class action law suit, which Google now has to deal with. Google has already made changes to the way in which Google Buzz interacts with your email contacts, though it may have a few additional tweaks to make in order to reach a happy medium for its own objectives and the desires of its users.

That happy medium is what makes things to tricky to navigate for the likes of FAcebook and Google. In pushing out new features that will help the companies reach their ultimate goals and achieve higher monetization, th consumers are sometimes left wondering why things have changed so drastically and with what seems to be little regard for their own concerns.

Facebook knows first hand how this can affect a company’s relationship with its user base, as its news feed feature first received a great deal of backlash but soon became a primary means of communicating the stories of our personal lives. Figuring out when a company knows better than its consumers is a tough problem to work out, so we’re likely to see ongoing changes made to Facebook and Google’s integrated Apps as users continue to recognize the compromises they’re making for the convenience of centralized social networking activity.

Google Buzz may have had a lot of expectations attached to it, as Google attempted yet again to make its existing apps more social. Unfortunately for Google, the company saw a great deal of immediate backlash from the sharing process around Google Buzz. Apparently the socialization around your email contacts isn’t something most people want automated. Fancy that.

Google was quick to respond to the backlash, changing the process for auto-follow and recommendations just days after launching Google Buzz to the public. Yet the level of backlash Google Buzz received only reminds us of consumer influence and the way in which companies need to consider consumer privacy and needs before releasing certain features and functionality.

Admittedly, I only used Google Buzz for a short while after its launch, primarily responding to comments others left on my Buzzed content. I like the concept, especially as I already use Gmail for work-related communication on a daily basis, bookmarking, scheduling, managing my Twitter, and just about everything else you can possibly think of. And I didn’t mind the auto-follow process, as I already used Google Reader and Gchat to such an extent that the people active in my Google Buzz were the people I already corresponded with on a regular enough basis.

Yet I can understand how the automated process would bother others, and even myself in the long run. Even with all the things about Google Buzz that I liked or didn’t mind, I still haven’t gone back to use it since its launch. And now that the auto-follow standards have changed, I see even less activity in my Google Buzz as it pertains to things and people I’m interested in.

I’m sure the whole “auto” thing was something Google was really banking on for the adopted use of Google Buzz, but things don’t work that easily when it comes to the social sharing of content. Many of your Gmail connections weren’t selected or approved of as “friends,” but as people you communicate with on a relatively regular basis. Perhaps it’s more difficult than we thought to create a social network around these kinds of contacts.

I expect the privacy backlash to become even more of a concern as we move forward with various social networking initiatives. Companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter are destined to push their boundaries, testing the consumer to see where the line is drawn. Consumers will, in turn, push back when they feel they’re being violated. We may never reach a happy medium, but instances such as the one we saw with Google Buzz indicates that consumers are beginning to pay attention once again to their social networking privacy standards.