Lazy sightseeing and cuts out the queues at the airport for sure: Google Sightseeing blog.

Yes, this site has been around a long time now, but after spending what felt like many hours waiting for a plane back home, something to be said for err, ‘cutting out the middle man’.

Some very amusing blogposts over the years from Alex and James Turnball since launching in 2005.

Google Street Views snaps of a woman naked in Miami springs to mind! Click here to see ABC’s coverage.

Financial Times: Making use of social media for business

From the Financial Times September 17, 2011 12:44 am By Paul Taylor

Social networks and social media are confusing concepts for most companies and corporate executives. Most know that the dramatic growth of companies like Facebook and Twitter have transformed the web, but few understand what the business opportunities – and pitfalls – of social media are.

To try and answer these and other questions, I interviewed Gartner analysts Mark McDonald and Anthony Bradley, two business friendly social media experts and the authors of The Social Organization. Below is an edited version of our conversation:

Q. What’s the most common misunderstanding about social media and its
potential for business leaders?

There is a common misperception among business leaders that all you really need is a Facebook page and a Twitter account and then, voilà, your organisation is social. This is a limited and dangerous view. The vast majority of significant, even transformational, business benefits of social media come not from marketing communications, but from productive communities.

The real business value of social media is that it can be used as an enabler for communities to collaborate, en masse, to achieve otherwise impossible results. It is this mass collaboration that sets social media apart as a phenomenon.

Never before have thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of people been able to simultaneously create content, share experiences, build relationships and engage in other forms of productive work and meaningful activities.

Q. But surely there is a communications element to social media?

Of course you can use social media for marketing communications and collaboration. But we have found that “social organisations” know that mass collaboration presents a multitude of opportunities to amplify their performance and extend their capabilities.

Social organisations successfully engage communities of employees, partners, customers and prospects in mass collaboration directed at achieving their most important business goals, addressing their biggest challenges and improving the business processes that give them competitive advantage.In other words, the leading organisations do not relegate social media to just marketing. They view the communities that social media enables as strategic to their business.

Q. So what is the potential of getting it right?

Social organisations are able to tap into the collective genius of their employees, partners, customers and prospects to transform their business and drive business results. Think of your best project, team or group, the ones that seem to work together seamlessly. How much value do they create? Multiply that number by the number of teams, projects or other collaborative opportunities you are, or could be, pursuing and you have a rule of thumb for the potential energy that lies untapped.

We found that one social organisation utilised social media to deliver a 25 per cent improvement in the productivity of their 500-person engineering team in two months, simply by giving them the purpose and the tools to collaborate faster and smarter. It is easy to see the value of 500 employees doing the work of 625.

Q. In a nutshell, how did this company achieve that?

Well, you won’t get this kind of result asking people to tweet to each other. It goes to the heart of what we call mass collaboration; the ability to bring together large and diverse groups of employees, customers and partners to purse a mutual purpose that creates value. Social organisations are using this to beat their competitors.

We have all seen this in action in our own organisation. We say it’s when the ‘stars align’. You have probably seen how much better that team worked and how successful they were. A social organisation has the ability to ‘align those stars’ repeatedly.

Q. How do you measure the value of social media?

You can’t measure the value of social media. Social media by itself has no value. How do you measure the value of a hammer? Or any tool for that matter? You can only measure the value of the business results you achieve by applying social media. This means, to gain value, you must apply social media to a well-defined business purpose.

All too often during our research for the book, we saw a prevalent bad practice we call “provide and pray”. This involves simply providing access to a social media technology and praying something good comes of it. We estimate that “provide and pray” fails almost 90 per cent of the time. It fails due to lack of purpose. Purpose is the cause around which a community will rally. It is the inspiration for their participation. And it is the source of business value.

Q. Will social media impact the way everyone works in the future?

Social media and all-things Web 2.0 are technologies, and technologies come and go. What endures is the new ways of working that people perfect using these technologies. That way of working – mass collaboration – is what we found to be the value of social media. Creating mass collaboration is not luck, but rather a combination of leadership, readiness, culture and technology that when it exists together, provides employees with the opportunity to work in ways that improve and amplify individual ideas and contributions into organisation-wide change.

Leaders are already starting to work in this way. For example, Cemex, the building materials group, has turned over its strategy execution to collaborative communities. The result accomplished significant measurable change in five weeks rather than eighteen months. When we asked about this new way of working, the business leader remarked, “Now that we have done it this way … we will never go back to the old way”.

We believe mass collaboration is the way people will work in the future. Rather than bureaucratic environments that discount individual experience, limit knowledge sharing, limits recognition and curtails motivation, leading businesses will use social media to nurture borderless communities with a shared sense of purpose that delivers a more meaningful human experience and greater business results.

From Wired: Snippets and subscriptions: Google and Facebook armour up for social wars

From Wired magazine, 15 September 2011.

Companies can only compete with each other by matching the other’s features for so long. This is especially true when, like Google and Facebook, both are already giving away their product for free. With their latest updates to their social media portals, each company is playing to its strengths: Facebook has eyeballs, and Google has software.

Facebook’s new feature is called Subscribe, or “the Subscribe button.” I’m making the early bet that, as with “Like”/”the Like button,” Twitter’s “Follow,” or “friend,” we’ll soon settle on using just the short verb-only form. So let’s just call it “Subscribe.”

Subscribe tailors the Facebook feed a few different ways. Facebook engineerZach Rait’s three-part summary is helpful:

You can use it to:

1. Choose what you see from people in News Feed
2. Hear from people, even if you’re not friends
3. Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends

So as a writer, you have the option to make some of your Facebook updates available not just to friends but strangers, too, by enabling “Allow Subscribers” on your new Subscriptions page. Then for each post, you choose whether it will be visible to the public (i.e., your subscribers), friends only, or a custom subset.

This gives you somewhat more control over who sees what. It also lets you still easily share content with users who you don’t necessarily want to “friend,” opening yourself up to sharing too much information, direct messages, or status updates you don’t really want to see. It’s particularly well-suited for public figures or anyone else comfortable sharing media or observations in the open air. Facebook’s giant network offers these users a platform and an audience.

As a reader, Subscribe lets you filter what kinds of updates you receive from both your friends and users whose updates you’ve subscribed to. You can see the full firehose, a sampling, or only particular kinds of media or important life-status updates. This is particularly well-suited for family members or old classmates whose weddings or job moves you may want to track, but not their Foursquare check-ins.

So Subscribe opens Facebook up so users can read more high-quality material than they could previously access, and offers to filter out more of the banal material that drives users away. It gives bloggers and celebrities a more natural and immediate portal to share material and connect with audiences than Facebook’s fan pages. It makes Facebook a little more like Twitter, Tumblr or Google+, while still preserving (perhaps even salvaging) the “friend” distinction that shaped Facebook and its entire generation of social media networks.

Google+ missed that generation, and the hundreds of millions of social media users that came with it. Its task is to grow that number by leveraging the popularity of its other web properties and the software that powers them. If you use Google products, Google wants you to use them with its social media and identity service. That’s what +snippets are all about.

When Google+ launched, it used Gmail, Google Talk, YouTube, Picasa and Android (among others) as components. It’s since added Games, made it easier to share reading material from the Google Books library, better incorporated the +1 button (that name still gets the long-form treatment), and introduced “+snippets” to share simple content from web sites.

It’s kind of a funny name, but Google apparently is running with it. Now, Google’s expanded +snippets to include Maps.

Sharing maps, I think, is the first use case that really hints at the future potential of Google+. Google VP Bradley Horowitz explains how it works:

Suppose you’re planning a weekend trip to Napa. Your packing list probably includes driving directions, hotel information and a list of nearby wineries. Many of you visit Google Maps for this kind of information already. But with +snippets, Google+ users can easily share directions or places (for example) with fellow travellers.

Let’s say you’re a Google Maps and Gmail user, but you don’t have a Google Profile or Google+ account. Google just gave you a reason to change that. Instead of cutting and pasting directions (sometimes the same directions) repeatedly to the same group of friends and family, you set up a standing circle of party or outing invitees. Because you can send notifications over e-mail, it doesn’t even matter if they use Google+. They’ll still get the map, or a link to it. No need for separate invitations on Facebook and email (and Twitter, etc). It’s a social map for social events.

You can easily see this model metastasizing across the Google family, from Docs and Calendar, Shopping and Scholar, to the brand-new Google Flights. All of Google’s properties become funnels for Google+, each one of them adding users — even if they’re casual, rare users — and adding value to the new site.

Google has well-established media and needs users. Facebook has users, but needs new media beyond Zynga games to keep them. Slowly but surely, the platforms are moving to the same destination, but now they’re using slightly different resources to get there.

Source: Wired.com