Archive for the ‘social’ Category
Monopolies of the Crowd: Our Near Future
Written by Zealus on June 10, 2009 – 1:22 pm -Various federal commissions are keeping tabs on companies in order to prevent them from turning into monopolies. But the onerous “web crowd” might overpower them with ease by creating de facto monopolies.
Starting with my own area of expertise – web site creation. If your web site isn’t on Google’s first couple of pages for your search terms – you’re effectively off the market. Why? Because no matter what FTC would do, we, the people, will “google it” first. Google didn’t just buy those 80% of search market – we handed it to them on our own.
If your video isn’t on YouTube – there’s hardly any substitute on that. Recent TechCrunch post on percentage shares of US video streams confirms that. I don’t remember YouTube stalking me with a bat to make me use their services.
Next – social networking. While MySpace/Facebook/Ning leave some room for competition, Twitter is the only game in town so far and so are Flickr, Last.fm and LinkedIn (to a point).
It’s not that these companies are brutal in extinguishing their competition, something Microsoft did to Netscape back in the old age of browser wars. Also, there are alternatives - technically speaking. But there is no real competition in terms of services’ social population and amount of interaction one would encounter. Heck, the reason Twitter crumbles every now and then because there is no competition, so there is no other place to tweet. It’s just that after we played with most social web sites out there, we tend to come back to one or two most populated, since being where the social action occurs is the whole point of exercise.
Tags: social networks, user experience
Posted in internet, social | Comments Off
More Gadgets, Less Fun
Written by Zealus on August 20, 2008 – 1:08 pm -As I have posted before, gadgets make great conversation pieces. However, therein lies the problem.
More often then not I catch people being deeply into their Blackberries (mostly), Sidekicks or other smarter-then-average phones. People reading something. People zealously typing away. People so drawn into their gadgets that they hardly notice anything around them.
On the express bus I am taking to work sometimes it takes two or three “Excuse me” to make a person move their feet away from the very narrow passage between rows of seats. And last night I missed my stop because I was reading something off my PDA.
By being drowned into small PDA screens (around 2 – 3 inches on the average), we develop a tunnel vision, ignoring anything that happens not directly in front of us. Usually this leads to a lot of non-efficient decisions, inability to think outside of that tube of attention. TV has similar effects on people’s attention span.
What I essentially want is a larger screen on my smart phone. Heck, I’d go for a screen of a flexible size.
Tags: cell phones, PDA, technology
Posted in social | 1 Comment »
Rate Your Recruiters
Written by Zealus on July 2, 2008 – 4:36 pm -There’s good old saying – if you want something done right, you do it yourself. We decided that it is indeed a way to go, so we present you our new project: Rate My Recruiter – a recruiter rating web site.
Share your experiences, share a word about this web site. Welcome.
Tags: job market, job search, recruiter, recruiters
Posted in services, social | Comments Off