Opinion Uncensored

A lot of marketing and social media experts keep on quoting numbers, statistics and all sorts of stuff about how successful Google Plus has been. The supporters say it is fastest growing social network. Strengths quoted  - 1)  API has not been released yet so there is immense potential left to be untapped 2) Google drive will and its SDK support to third party apps will give Google Plus more muscle. Hope to see the drive being released soon. 3) Google charges less commission from Game developers than facebook does leading so several gaming flag bearers like Zyga to launch games on Google Plus as well. In future we might be looking at Google plus only Games being developed, not to forget Google is an investor in Zynga. Weakness quoted - 1) Lack of clarity on how much people are actually using Google Plus. No data on average user time spent on Google Plus is available. Considering most social networks have their revenues driven by ads, average time spent is very critical aspect 2) Fa...

I recently noticed some sites going retro to the days of Radio Advertising  and applying interesting innovations in that - The two primary modes I noticed the way websites are deploying this 1) Normal - There is ad being played on the web page with Audio ad along with a static images. A user may or may not be provided with option to stop the ad. Sometimes there is an option to turn off the volume of ad and sometimes users just have to live with the voice ad. They have no option to do anything about that. However this is a very old way of advertising and is not much of innovation. 2) Stealth - These are the kind of audio ads which I recently noticed being used by the sites. They are real innovation ( dunno for good or bad) & are  embedded somewhere in the page. The moment the page loads they start playing.  Any normal user can't find the ad on the page since it is hidden. Neither can it be stopped, volume level changed. The web portal manager can guarantee the ad owner with ...

Interesting to see some different flavours of Google, long known an engineer's bastion whose focus is only to solve the problems and deliver results Google really doing great at being SOCIAL

Contextual advertising which is bread and butter of several big companies today but to my understanding is in desperate need to reinvent itself. Contextual advertising is loosing its relevance in current times. Following is an example of weird ads being displayed for dating / porn sites when I am watching a Punjabi Song  which is hailing the glory of culture in a specific province in India .  I don't understand how does context for these two things match up.  Perhaps the algorithms for rendering ads have not kept pace with the surge in possible scenarios. From Blog References Facebook , the recent darling of stock markets because of filing if its IPO is no behind and actually at some points leaves behind Google in proving my statement. Two examples of wasting ad dollars of advertisers in the image - 1) A student of NUS MBA ( information which they have by my willing disclosure) being served advertisements of another business school. What does Facebook expect me to do - leave my...