Best of the Internetz 14
Google gets +1
In a direct move to combat Facebook’s “like” button, Google have introduced the “+1” button. The button will appear on articles, websites, etc for you to click and give your “public stamp of approval” towards. While I love the idea of “+1” as it taps into an already well-used terminology and acts as more of a indication of agreement, be it good or bad, rather than the positivity of a “like”, when I stop to think about it, the possibilities that come with this (if it takes off) are actually quite worrying. Let’s not beat around the bush here, Google already know everything about your internet habits. But what they don’t properly understand is the sentiment around your habits. By introducing this button, every time you click +1 Google will be able to build up a more accurate profile of you in order to better target ads and search results to you. More so though, this is actually a really smart move by Google. As the US prepares to introduce a “do not track” option for web browsing, Google will need other ways to play big brother…and this is it. Let’s just hope they remember their tagline is “don’t be evil”.
Get more info here:
Facebook announces profiles can become pages
If you are one of the many confused brands out there that is struggling to manage a business page when people keep trying to friend your profile page instead, you’ll be happy to know some changes are coming. Profiles were set up to operate for people only, however as pages became more popular for brands, many companies were setting up profiles for their employees to work from to manage the brand. The double up of pages vs profiles confused users and many were friending and fanning both, resulting in information overload. Now businesses who have built up a big friend base don’t have to worry about losing them and can convert their profile into a page and administer the page via a business account. I’m still investigating whether profiles can be merged with existing pages – fingers crossed! Stay tuned.
Amazon Music and Cloud
Best known as book sellers, Amazon have moved into music. Better still though, Amazon have launched a cloud service so you can stream your music from anywhere. You can upload 5GB of music for free and an extra 1GB for $1 per gig. It will be interesting to see how this picks up. As the first major player to offer this functionality, they will surely make huge inroads, but as they are not known for their music, will people think to use them? And is Apple just letting them go as a test before they launch their own category smashing product? Regardless, cloud music is the next big step for the music industry and one I can’t wait for!
