Martin Weigert's thoughts on the social web. And life.

I have been pretty happy with my mobile operator TeliaSonera. It has Sweden's best coverage and did recently introduce relatively cheap roaming packages for other EU countries.

Nevertheless, the company has a track record of limiting P2P traffic which means that Skype calls via 3G (or 4G if you have a compatible handset) are a rather frustrating experience. 

Today ArcticStartup reports that the operator plans to charge for mobile VoIP calls as of Summer in both Spain and Sweden.

I get it: Losing regular voice minutes to VoIP is a challenge for operators since it means lower revenue. Still, charging customers extra for something they already pay for sucks big time and is nothing but an evil move. 

It's not complicated: I pay 149 SEK (about 16 Euro) for 1 Gig of data/month. That's not even a very competitive price, but ok, Telia has always been a bit more expensive than the competition, and the special roaming deals make up for it. 

BUT: I want to be able to use those 1 Gig the way I want. It's one Gig of data/month I am paying for and I don't want Telia to come and tell me "You can use it for surfing, but not for VoIP, which costs more". All data has to be treated equally, at least if I pay rather a lot for that data.

For the price of 149 SEK I expect full freedom in using my monthly data. 

Fortunately, there is competition on the Swedish mobile market. If Telia pulls through with their plan an starts to block mobile Skype calls entirely, I will switch to Telenor, "3" or Tele2. 

Hehe, this is sooo true (in my experience at least):

But you know when you go into an Apple Store, and it’s filled with sometimes scary Apple fanatics who seem to have arrived at a holy place? That’s Google+ for Google.

Imagine you need quick help with a decision or an answer to a question. You pull out a mobile app on your smartphone, type in what you want to get feedback on, and within a few minutes you have 30 to 50 replies from the community - in form of votes (thumbs up, thumbs down, neutral) or free text comments.

This is what New York based iOS and Android app Thumb has managed to accomplish. I read about it in a recent VentureBeat article which stated that the app is twice as addictive as Pinterest. First I was sceptical, but after having played with Thumb this weekend I can state that it is in fact incredibly addictive. Proof: Within 48 hours I have voted on 722 items (and I have received 16 good advice stars from other users on my comments). 

Yesterday I was at a party, and I think I made at least 6 or 7 people download the app, after I took a photo of the crowd and asked the Thumb community whether they thought the party was good or not. Seeing new replies coming in every few seconds is pretty amazing compared to the rather low engagement levels and user activities of most other social apps.

Voting on other peoples’ questions is quite entertaining. And even though some of the requests for opinions are rather silly, it’s hard to quit because one always wonders what the next question might be. That’s the most addictive part. 

Also I haven’t stumbled upon a single vulgar or NSFW question, despite the fact that they are published immediately. The company must be running some automatic filter software that recognizes and removes questionable content.

I have no idea whether Thumb will be able to keep this high user engagement up. But if they do, this app will become huge!

Last week, Oink (a recommendation app I really liked) announced that it will be closing down - less than 5 month after launch. A few days later, All Things D reported that members of Milk Inc, the company behind Oink, including founder Kevin Rose were hired by Google.

So Oink is gone and Rose and some of his colleagues will work with Google+ in the future.

I imagine that the talk between Google and Kevin Rose went something like this:

Google: “Hi Kevin. We’d like some of you guys to work for us. You get 1 to 2 million Dollar signing bonus each, and of course your investors get they money back, including a little extra”

Kevin Rose (after checking with his investors): “Nice. Let’s do. But what about Oink?”

Google: “We don’t want it. But people are becoming increasingly hostile towards our company, because of the way we prioritize Google+ and close a lot of our less popular services. So that’s why we can’t communicate the deal as us acquiring Milk and then closing down Oink. You need to shutdown Oink by yourself, before joining us. So you take the blame, not Google”

Kevin Rose “Well, ok. I don’t want to put more effort into Oink anyway, so I can live with that"

Just for the record. Yesterday over at netzwertig.com I coined the term “Kony Effect” (in the style of “Streisand Effect”).

My definition would be something like that:

The Kony Effect is an online phenomenon where a highly emotional, slightly manipulative, factual possibly not fully correct information including a call for action is spread by millions of people online within a very short amount of time - before others had the chance to validate and question the facts presented.

Let’s see if it catches on.

I had some discussions with hardcore Google+ users lately (yes they actually exist). More than once their reaction towards my criticism of the project (which is technically sophisticated but struggles to find its real purpose) was something like “You are doing it wrong, so it’s no surprise you don’t see the potential”. 

Even directors at Google use this kind of defence, as Google’s guy in charge of social, Vic Gundotra, showed at SXSW yesterday:

“The other answer popular with Gundotra was, “We’re misunderstood.” People aren’t using Google+ correctly. They don’t realize most sharing is done privately, for example, which is why many profiles look dead.”

Personally I think this is the weakest argumentation ever, because it suggests that people have an unlimited amount of time to figure out each of the thousands of social web tools and apps out there, in order to learn to understand them.

The opposite is true: The user’s time budget is extremely limited. If a new site wants to convince them that it’s worth to redistribute some minutes spent on other sites to the new contender, it needs to be able to make the value clear.

If users misunderstand Google+, then that’s Google’s fault, not the user’s.

The best thing Google can do for Google+ is to make sure people don’t misunderstand it. 

I usually don’t write about smartphone games but yesterday my friend Viktor introduced me to Draw Something, and in the second I saw it I knew this will get me hooked immediately.

Draw Something, available for iPhone and Android, lets you play with your Facebook friends (or other people). The task is to draw a picture describing a word and to make your friends guess what it could be. If they guess right, you get points. 

Here in Sweden Draw Something seems to go viral right now (almost 10.000 reviews) and judging from the 320.537 reviews in the US app store, it’s already pretty big over there. As usual (and probably due to the language barrier since Draw Something is only offered in English, although no advanced English skills are needed), my home country Germany lags behind, with only 172 reviews in total.

Try it. My username is “imartin”.

P.S. it's a bit too easy to cheat since you could simply draw the letters of the word you are supposed to describe in a picture. I think the app should get some intelligence to recognize and prevent drawings with letters in it.

...of this incredibly good track called "Moderation" by Australian producer Light Year.

It's a real masterpiece because the sound and video fit so perfectly together. I have been watching this clip now at least 10 times. It somehow touches me a lot, despite or maybe even because of the strange atmosphere it creates. 

via

What's the deal?

In a poll of 1900 people conducted by sodahead.com (via) about the new Facebook Timeline profile, only 10 percent of the participants over the age of 65 liked the new profile style, but 34 percent of those between 18 and 24. 

Despite the fact that there might be a 1000 possible factors making such a poll not very meaningful (like the assumption that there probably weren’t to many participants over the age of 65 at all), it still confirms the general theory that, the older people get, the less they are able or willing to adapt to change.

Thinking about the increasing intensity and speed with what the world is changing in the digital age, my guess is that the capability to adjust to change and to see an ever transforming environment as neutral or even positive instead of negative might become one of the most important (new) skills of human beings.

In the past, it seems as if one could have a fulfilled life without the permanent need to adapt to change. I’m not sure but I’m afraid that won’t be the case anymore in the upcoming years and decades.

Thus, becoming older myself and reaching the age of 30 in about a year, I will do everything possible to keep a positive attitude towards change. Of course, not every change is good, and the Timeline profile might actually be less useful than the old profile page. So the deal is not to appreciate any change, even it is for the worse, but to give yourself some time to evaluate and to get used to it before you make your final judgement as well as to always see the theoretical potential for improvement that comes with changes. 

One of my goals is to have a similar attitude towards change when I’m 60 as I do now. Not sure if I’ll manage, but it’s worth a try.