As I’ve talked about before, the future of “social media’s” success formula will have nothing to do with the amount of people following you on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, your RSS feed, etc.
The future of social media success will have to do with Likes, Favorites or Thumbs Up. Companies, marketers and advertisers will scramble to produce content that will receive the most Likes possible rather than just amassing non-interactive followers.
Google Reader has made a step towards that future today by making the Shared Items feature a real-time experience both within Google Reader and places such as FriendFeed where the Like mechanism is so important for discovery and relevancy in that particular community:
We’re therefore happy to announce that Reader has begun adoption of the PubSubHubbub protocol, beginning with the publishing of our shared items. All shared item pages have feeds, and now all of those feeds will ping a hub (and there’s a element in them). This means that if you (as a web app developer) would like to more efficiently and quickly monitor Reader shares, you just have to subscribe at the hub to be notified of changes in real-time. If you want to learn more about PubSubHubbub and how it works, see the site and protocol definition.
Affiliate marketers need to start positioning their content, sites, items, feeds, etc to better integrate with the real-time and “likable” future where discovery will be dependent on the metric of Likes.
The latest salvo in the war for domination of the online video and data serving wars was fired this morning.
Google has acquired On2 Technologies, we’ve learned. On2 Technologies is best known as a video compression and codec vendor. That sounds wonky, but pay attention…
Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform. To that end, we’re happy to announce today that we’ve signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology.
Although we’re not in a position to discuss specific product plans until after the deal closes, we are committed to innovation in video quality on the web, and we believe that On2 Technologies’ team and technology will help us further that goal.
This could bring major improvements for casual web users (of course I’ve been wrong about Google’s acquisition-innovations in the past). What sort of improvements?
If would be great if Google decides to open-source On2’s VP7 and VP8 video codecs and free them up as the worldwide video codec standards, thus becoming alternatives to the proprietary and licenced H264 codecs. On2 has always claimed VP7 is better quality than H264 at the same bitrate.
Also noteworthy: Google could use the VP8 codec for YouTube in HTML5 mode, basically forcing its many users to upgrade to HTML5-compliant browsers instead of using Flash formats.
In other words, Google could surpass the need for technologies such as Adobe’s Flash or newer Air formats to not only serve video but also perform other functions that HTML 5 will bring (if you like GMail or Google Apps now, just wait).
The big loser (as seems to be often the case) is Microsoft and its interesting Silverlight play (cue Steve Gillmor).
By having codecs necessary for HTML 5 and a slew of video compression technologies, Google is rerouting Microsoft’s attempt to penetrate Google’s flank with Silverlight. Video, streaming and virtual app architecture has long been one of Google’s potential weaknesses. With the acquision of On2, Google is clearly patching up that vulnerability and making moves to position itself at the center of the evolving real-time and video-driven web.
Web broadcast god Leo Laporte, Lifehacker founder and awesome blogger / coder Gina Trapani, and Jeff Jarvis have teamed up for what has become my new favorite podcast after just 2 minutes.
This is the podcast I wish I had created.
This Week In Google 1: In Beta (54 minutes)
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, and Jeff Jarvis Topics:
* Media Talk USA with Jeff Jarvis
* City university of New York Graduate School of Journalism
* Apple Blocks Official Google Voice App, Pulls GV Mobile from App Store
I hope the level of quality stays this high (with Leo, Gina and Jeff behind the wheel, I’m sure it will).
Of course, there’s always material enough for a podcast focused on Google and their latest Willy Wonka creations that feed all of our web candy addictions.
Interesting post on GigaOm that asks the question, but there’s an even more fun discussion on FriendFeed courtesy of Robert Scoble liking the article in his Google Reader Shared Items:
Soon subscribing and following won’t matter. Publishing good stuff that people “like” will matter most with the only little advantage in having a lot of subscribers or followers will be that your good content might reach more people faster. – Charbax
Which is “worth” more? I’d say they are both pretty worthless if you’re a hack and have no idea how to monetize your followers or subscribers (*cough* Sam points finger at himself *cough*). However, their worth is totally dependent on your platform, the audience and how you interact.
Nevertheless, I think it is very telling that the conversation is much better on FriendFeed via Robert’s Google Shared Items… which got there because he “liked” the post.
With this type of activity on Google and especially on Facebook, the future will be very likable, not just subscribable.
Btw, my Google Shared Items page is here if you’d like to follow what I “Like.”
I’m going to be using Google Ad Manager for running the inevitable ads here on AffiliateHack as I’ve found them to be much more robust and easier to use than competitors offerings in the ad management space (plus, I do love the integration with Google Analytics and Google’s Web Toolkit.
The Ad Manager team released a new web interface today that I’m eager to see and try out. I’ll do a post as soon as the updates hit my account.
Here’s the email from Google:
Hi Ad Manager User,
In the coming weeks, we’ll be upgrading your Ad Manager account to a new web interface designed to make managing your inventory and ad operations faster and easier.
These upgrades, which include improvements to the Inventory and Admin tabs, as well as the creatives screens, are the first in a series of improvements that you can look forward to this year.
An overarching theme of the improvements we’re making is that the web interface will be much quicker and easier to navigate. This is thanks to the Google Web Toolkit – a Google technology that we’re rebuilding Ad Manager’s web interface on to take advantage of exciting new web-based technologies.
We hope you find that these improvements increase the efficiency of your day-to-day work and allow you to spend more time focusing on what you do best: producing great content.
The latest salvo in the war for domination of the online video and data serving wars was fired this morning. 
Web broadcast god Leo Laporte, Lifehacker founder and 
Which one is worth more? Apples and Oranges?
