Category: First Take

Finally, after many mis-starts and social media product debacles, Google gets their social networking offering down right. The downside is, there’s no reason to call this a “Plus”, it’s just catchup. Google has learned from failed attempts Historically, Google has been complacent when it goes to social networking, not having realized how quickly Facebook was going to grow many years ago, innovation in this category was lackluster. Amid several attempts most have failed (see the chronology of failed Google attempts), there is hope with yesterday’s announcement. In previous launches, their efforts were mere copies of Facebook’s (+1 vs Like) or struggled with too much complexity (Wave) and privacy woes (see my additional analysis on Google vs Facebook vs Twitter). Yet … Continue readingFirst Take: Google+ Gets Features Right –But Offers No Reason to Leave Facebook

Acquisition of ‘Powered’ Grows Social Software and Services Footprint in Enterprise Companies. Austin based Dachis Group, who has a war chest from Austin Ventures, has been on a buying spree and has pre-briefed me in their acquisition of Powered, a social and marketing platform with strong social media services, who they recently acquired, including Crayon, Stepchange and Drill Team (read my analysis). To date, Dachis Group has acquired seven firms such as Xplane digital management and change management orginization, the adoption council 2.0, a user community, and many of my former team mates from Forrester’s social computing research group. Dachis, An Enterprise Contender, Threatens Incumbent Consulting Firms In this mornings post (coincidentally timed) I released data how social media boutiques, … Continue readingFirstTake: Dachis Group Clinches Powered, Threatening Incumbent Consulting Firms

By Industry Analysts, R “Ray” Wang @rwang0 (Enterprise Strategy) and Jeremiah Owyang, @jowyang (Customer Strategy) both founding partners at Altimeter Group Community Platforms Evolve to Social Business Category Having tracked the social business category for some years now, and have been watching the category grow, and expand into other niches.  At first, the community platform space (like Jive) was insular, focused on only on enterprise communities, but has now grown into Social CRM, Application Platforms, Social Media Management Systems, Brand Monitoring, corporate email systems and eventually to deliver a customer experience that’s native to the customer. It may be social, it may be mobile, it may take even radical forms in including in store displays. The Situation – C Round … Continue readingFirst Take Analysis: Jive Fills Warchest, Ready to Battle Enterprise Software Giants, IPO

Left: Inline with the Google style guide of primary colors, Google launches a new logo for Google Buzz, using familiar “chat bubble” iconology. Google launches status update features Google launches Buzz, which many will find similar to Friendfeed now part of the Facebook family.  Google Buzz will enable content to be aggregated, and then prioritized based upon the people you already email with, which Harry McCracken and I call this a social graph based on history, “Historical social graph” or HSG. Secondly, this Google Buzz feature will rate and rank content based on activity and interaction within your social group. Users can choose to publish the Buzz in public, which will display on the Google Profile page. They also announced the … Continue readingFirstTake: What Google Buzz Means