Quick review on Google+

Well, since everybody & their dog friend seems to be getting onto Google+ today ... and since in spite of the heavy supply of accounts there seems to be an even greater demand as evidenced by people selling invites to Google+ on ebay ... may be because someone joked (I think) that having a Google+ account increases your chances of getting laid by 30% ... I am writing my own initial thoughts about it.

(No, I don't think @madmanweb was right ... actually @beastoftraal was probably more closer to reality!)

So, what are my initial thoughts? Google is trying to stay in the game, not beat/kill/depose/extinguish/squash/frag Facebook by doing (attempting?) somethings right for a change. Somebody already wrote what Google+ learnt from Wave and Buzz. Google+ might actually be a great platform for the internal social networking needs of organizations. If they have it on Google Apps.

On a personal level, I got all excited after I got an invite (thanks Manu Prasad) and could finally get in after a harrowing commute to the office between the time I got the invite and the time I created my account ... I clicked around, added friends to circles upon circles, fooled around with settings, etc. for about 45 minutes and I lost steam a bit.

After adding 45 people to various circles I definitely got tired! And only 8 people had added me to their circles. So evidently my network of friends (both IRL & online ones) had not yet gotten into Google+. Not so cool until the network is in there. So I have to wait till more people join in. And I have yet another set of friends data.

 I sent a feedback, which is refreshingly via a form that is different from the ugly bug reporting tools developers & testers use. Well, if you want to know, I want to be able to mute/mute a person, so I don't see their updates on my timeline temporarily. That's the feedback I sent.

What I liked though is that I can export all my data on Google+ to a zip file and have it with me. Unlike Facebook.

Now the wait for Google+ to open up for developers.

Social CRM is dead, long live Social CRM?

The King is dead, long live the King!

Bob Thompson, Editor of CustomerThink.com and a friend who graciously threw a dinner party for me at a fabulous Italian Restaurant last year when I was in San Francisco area for the first time ever, has a very intriguing post that has got the knickers of many in knots. Well, it is titillatingly titled

"Social CRM" is Dead, Long Live the Social Customer Experience

where Bob definitely does a great job figuring out a pattern from a spate of events that have happened in the recent past in the product vendor market around Social CRM - they are all moving crabwise around the term Social CRM.

Of Pigs, Elephants & Hives - Social CRM and Big Data

Source: siliconangle.com

After a long gap I make a comeback into pure play technobabble. But I promise I will try to keep it as simple as possible.

In a post titled “Social CRM – ETL of Social & CRM data?” I had posited over two years ago that semantic, sentiment analysis & other NLP techniques and data mapping would all be required to varying degrees for data integration in a Social CRM system. What I had missed mentioning back then was what is now being hyped as Big Data.