Why is Google calling itself an identity company now?
Why is David Kirkpatrick, one of the smartest journalists I know, telling the world on Forbes that a social revolution is coming to companies?
Why have I moved almost all of my available time and blogging behavior to Google+?
I just spent 40 minutes in audio explaining why. I call it the “Game of all Games.”
It is the game to addict us, to impel us to give our identities over to Google or Facebook, and what will that do.
In the audio I talk about a few pieces of the new identity stack.
First, the things about us that they need to know:
1. Our health info. Do you have cancer, like Steve Jobs has? That’s part of your identity.
2. Your family. Who are you related to.
3. Your friends. Who do you hang out with? Who would you call to get you out of jail, or to help you move?
4. Your favorite brands (and most hated). That will tell the system a lot about you. Do you fly United? Or Jet Blue. Do you drink Pabst? Or RedBull? Etc etc.
5. The games you play. Monopoly? Blackjack? World of Warcraft?
6. Your politics? Says a lot about you and the kinds of people you would probably like to hang out with. Ronald Reagan joked with his doctors “I hope you are Republicans.” It isn’t really a joke.
7. Religion.
8. Music. If I try to take you to an Eminem concert will you like that or, will you be like my producer who threatened my life for trying that.
9. Food. Sushi? Thai? Steak? Vegetarian.
10. Questions and answers. What do you answer on Quora? Did your answer get the respect of the community there?
11. Books. Romance or O’Reilly tech book?
12. Location. If you live in New York you probably have different life expectations than someone who lives in Emigrant, Montana.
13. Interests and hobbies. Are you into pottery, like my dad, or are you into Ham radio, like Leo Laporte?
14. Movies. Star Wars or Black Swan?
Then I talked about the user interfaces of this new game of games.
1. App stores. The tools to use, the games to play.
2. Notification streams. What is happening. Things you need to know.
3. Activity streams. Metadata about what everyone did in the system and who is doing it.
4. News and media stream. Who is generating media (posts, videos, photos, audio) and who is doing it?
5. Pagination displays. Flipboard is one such UI. But there will be others before we decide on who displays our content and context.
What are the verbs that everyone is using to hook these systems together? The lowest-common denominator ones are:
1. Post.
2. Comment.
3. Share.
4. Like.
5. Buy.
6. Review.
7. Tag.
8. Circle, or list, or group.
9. Read.
10. Search.
But there will be many, many others. I’ll soon have a video up with Badgeville, who are building addiction systems for bloggers (oh, sorry, you all call them gamification systems) that are tracking hundreds of verbs.
Finally I get to the meat. I talk about what this means to:
1. People discovery (finding a doctor in San Francisco, today, is what you do on Yelp, but Yelp has a “masses is asses” problem. It doesn’t know to bias your answers based on your politics, religion, health background, family background, and other stuff talked about above.
2. Content discovery. In the pre 9/11 world we went to news brands to get our news. You know, New York Times, or CNN, or Yahoo. After 9/11 RSS brought the news to systems like Google Reader or Twitter. But in the future it will come to us via notification streams on our phones. What content will come there? Your identity system will decide for you based on your context and actions you take.
Add this all up and you can see you’re soon going to have to choose between Facebook or Google for your identity systems (or, like I am, both).
How does Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, play into this? He’s carving up the “at work” identity systems and pulling them into Salesforce Chatter. I believe that for the next 18 months most people won’t think Benioff is important in this game of games, but that sometime in 2013 it will be clear that Benioff has an identity system to play the game of games with.
It’s a game for everything we do on our phones, our tablets, and on our TVs.
It is, simply, the game of games and it’s about to get really interesting to watch and participate in.
It’s why I’ve moved most of my content development into Google+. I’m playing the game of games and want a front-row look at how it’ll work out.
Add a Community to Your Blog with BlogFrog
Posted by Kat Armstrong.
I recently met with BlogFrog CEO Rustin Banks to discuss adding communities directly to your blog. Your readers want to interact with you and with each other. Adding a customized BlogFrog community to your site allows your readers to ask questions, share photos and chat live with each other - without ever leaving your site.
With comments, your readers can only leave their thoughts about whatever it is YOU have to say. They don’t have an easy way to interact with each other. Your subscribers are obviously like-minded. After all, they are each interested in whatever you are talking about. Using BlogFrog compliments whatever blog comment service you are already using. The comments section is there for people to leave feedback and additional thoughts based on what you have written. Adding the additional components from BlogFrog adds a whole new layer, allowing your readers to talk to each other and spark new discussions.
My first instinct was to ask why we should use BlogFrog. After all, we have sites such as Google+, Facebook and Twitter to discuss things on with other individuals. Rustin was quick to point out that we are limited on these sites. We only have the capability of talking with our followers. We aren’t really giving them a way to talk to each other unless they want to jump through hoops and figure out how and where to follow the other parties on various social sites.
Believe it or not, it won’t cost you anything to use BlogFrog. The beauty is that you will be getting paid to use the service in a manner of speaking. You can enable high-quality advertising and make a higher CPM in most cases than what you will be able to find on your own.
Once you have signed up with the service and chosen your elements, it’s very simple to add BlogFrog to your own site. You’ll basically add a widget to your main page. The components are platform agnostic… install your new community on any template which allows JavaScript.
My assistant Kat is fond of saying that building a community isn’t about connecting people to you - it’s about connecting them to each other. BlogFrog has created the perfect way for you to give your community the tools they need to interact with each other, build upon what they already know and perhaps change the world.