Real <Time> World

LinkedIn made changes to start using your picture in advertising on their network.  After getting inundated with negative feedback LinkedIn announced they were going to turn off this feature.  

Ads With Images:

Ads Without Images:

Users can turn off LinkedIn’s ability to use your name or photo in advertising by following these steps:

1. Click on your name on your LinkedIn homepage (upper right corner). On the drop-down menu, select “Settings”.

2. From the “Settings” page, select “Account”.

3. In the column next to “Account”, click “Manage Social Advertising”.

4. De-select the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising”. 

This was an interesting move by LinkedIn.  I treat my LinkedIn profile seriously because it is a view of my professional life.  I have my CV on there, as well as using it for keeping track of business contacts.  LinkedIn is not for friends, it is for my professional life.  I don’t want potential partners or customers seeing that I endorse something that I don’t approve of.

I am glad LinkedIn acted quickly today to remove this functionality, but the bait and switch of privacy among social networks is tricky.  I dealt with this a bunch when I worked on AIM, and for the most part aired on the side of caution, but we definitely had our own versions of this happen to us.

For those that follow the blog know I work at Clearspring and I am in charge of AddThis which is the largest sharing platform on the Internet.  Our product enables over 9 million web sites all over the world to get their content shared to hundreds of services from Facebook to Google+ and Twitter.  Our sharing tool supports 70 different languages and is used by over 1 billion users per month.

The team that works on AddThis works hard but also plays hard.  We race cars, drink scotch, play with terabytes of data, get free lunch and snacks, and most importantly build products that users and publishers love.

We are looking to grow the team with really smart and energetic people.  We have a bunch of different openings, everything from a Senior Java Engineer to a Senior Biz Dev role.  If you are interested in a job or know someone who is, let me know by emailing me at greg-at-clearspring-dot-com.

You can check out all of the job openings here:
http://clearspring.com/about/careers

Google+ has been out for 3 weeks now, and what has started out as an Emerald Sea has turned into a tidal wave of excitement and opinions.  The first night Google+ opened up invites, I posted to Twitter, Facebook, and to everyone at Clearspring that I had invites, and after 2 hours had handed out over 100 invites.  I had never seen anything like that, including when GMail launched.  The fervor has not died down either, as many of our publishers have asked us what we think about +1 and Google+.  Publishers who were so skeptical of +1 and were taking a wait and see approach are now are clamoring for the button.  As a launch partner for +1, adoption was steady at first but now we see “hockey stick” growth in installs and clicks.

What does this all mean?  

I have been telling publishers that Google+ is off to a promising start.  I think they definitely got their video chat product, “Hangouts” right, and I will cover that in a future blog post.  Circles is great and the overall look and feel is awesome.  Early adopters are loving it because it is a bright shinny object, and because “it is not Facebook.”  However, it is still early and the jury is still out if mainstream users will start using Google+.  Publishers are intrigued because of the influence +1 has on search results, but it is still early here as well to know if the impact will matter.

Will Google+ kill/replace/hurt Facebook?  

Not that I can see in the near or mid term.  Nothing lasts forever in the online world of social, but Facebook is not going anywhere yet.  From what I can see, the online behavior that has changed for me the most is not my engagement with Facebook, but rather my engagement with Twitter.  I have posted less to Twitter and more to Google+, I still consume my Twitter feed via Tweetdeck, but I am more engaged with the people I follow on Google+.  The nice thing about Google+ was that it was like starting anew, where I had a clean slate of people I could choose to follow and friend.

Google+ has been an early success and for early adopters a salve to our Facebook fatigue.  The integration into GMail and other Google services keeps Google+ in the front of your mind.  I think there are many key moments ahead to see if Google can build on the early success.  One of those was the launch of an iPhone app.  The second will be support for Google Apps accounts so companies and colleges can take advantage of circles and hangouts to increase productivity.  The third moment will be when Google releases an API for Google+ and developers start building apps for the service.  It’s off to a good start, but time will tell if Google+ can co-exist in the world of Twitter and Facebook.  

Find me here on Google+:  http://gplus.to/gregcypes

Many US Internet users have never heard of a company called Spotify, but tomorrow morning that is going to change.  Spotify launching in the US is significant as it will trigger a change in the way we consume our music.  Some of us here in the US have had access to Spotify via a variety of tricks and knowing the right people.

I have used Spotify for the last 6 months and the thing I love the most about it is the simple integration of Facebook so I can discover music my friends are listening to.  This is something Apple has never gotten right with iTunes.  In iTunes I get to see what the most popular music is across the US, but I have no idea what my friends are listening to.

Spotify fixes this problem by letting you create playlists that you share with friends, and the entire Spotify network.  Being able to mix your local music with streamed music creates an endless library of tunes.  Rumors of giving Spotify a free 20 hours per month of music is generous despite the ads.  I have paid for my Spotify account from day one so I can get music on my iPhone/iPad too.

Welcome to America Spotify, our ears thank you!

When I first started using Google+ two nights ago it was a little bit of a ghost town.  With the exception of my friends who work at Google and a few members of the Silicon Valley elite, I could not find anyone else to friend.  Last night Google turned on invites which turned the ghost town into a little bit more engaging community.  The challenge is to find people you are already friends with on other social networks and add them to your Google+ circle.  Thank goodness for Yahoo (I can’t believe I just said that).

Over a year ago, Yahoo enabled importing contacts from Facebook into Yahoo Mail, and with Google+ you can import your Yahoo contacts and find your friends on Google+.  The steps to enable this are to log into Yahoo Mail, assuming you have an account.  

* Import Your facebook friends via Yahoo:

http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2010/03/facebook-friends-meet-yahoo-contacts/

* Then connect your Yahoo account to Google+ here:

http://plus.google.com/circles/find

To get your Instagram photos imported:

http://instaport.me

I could not believe how Google+ invites were flying around last night it was insane.  Google has turned them off for now.