Android OS Can Go Social and Replace Facebook

Today I was having my usual rants on twitter and facebook and I posted something peculiar about my observations on Google, Google Me and the whole Facebook effect.

if Android OS becomes social...facebook is going to find it hard to catch up... if I was working for Google...Android will become social

source: http://twitter.com/mambenanje/status/20547187692

But now lets see where I got my theory.

Eric Schmidt(Google CEO) has been talking recently about their Google Me rumors and he says they are not creating something to replace facebook. He said: The problem facebook is solving has been solved, we are solving something else.

I have always known Google as as company that sees a market, and sees a giant in the market...accept the giant and even promotes the giant in the market and build their own solutions that work on top of that giant system and make their own share of the money(this is what they did with MS Office and Windows. they produced Google Docs).

I also know them infamously as a company that knows how to say "if I cant beat you in the air, I will take you to water and land and my overall points from water and land will out weigh the points you get against me in the air" this is a war strategy where you expand the battle field(they did this to the iPhone and released the Droid and they are trying to get non smartphone users interested in smartphones by convincing the non smartphone phone manufacturers to get more smartphones to their clients, Droid, DroiX, Incredible, EVO 4G ).

Talking about Droid and Android...now imagine if the phone turns to become a social gadget that has a login screen when you turn it on (I guess its already using gmail accounts), and as you login you can see feeds of your Android friends network. Once you do some actions and set up your privacy and friend groups for say Co-workers, school mates, family, etc. these groups will see feeds of things you do on your phone in realtime like, snap a picture and save...and your friends will auto see a feed and see the picture and they can comment or share it (Android device to Android Device over the internet)...taking what happens on facebook right inside your phone. Other actions may include when you shoot a video, download an application, buy an application, use a website and other preying/privacy intruding things that facebook does to us now...

well thats the concept I think they might use to expand the market since facebook is king of web social networking, they will push hard and expand the field into social networking on the handset where in facebook will not be able to catch up...take facebook from its comfort zone(web) into a new zone where Google and its Android OS determine the rules and beat them like a pinata lol ;)

If you doubt my theory please see how they are taking Microsoft from Desktop Office tools into cloud office tools...Microsoft is dancing to Google's tune and following the steps of Google while they were leader in office tools, now Google determines the future of office productivity. Thats the kind if turn I can bet on. Also they are the ones deciding the future of smartphones now not Apple, because for the past 6months Apple iOS has only been playing catch up and they are not yet fully recovered lol

See the response and conversation I had on facebook with friends:

Saheed Taiye Adepoju: how should android go social?

Mambe Churchill Nanje: well the OS needs to have a friends app...that keeps your friends on their phones posted about some things you do on your phone...like I snap a new picture, the people I have added to my friends list will be notified of the picture and they can comment right from their phone...then expand it to games, apps, as I do this on an app just like facebook...my friends see a feed of some of my public actions...then they can comment or share it to their own friends...login to facebook is synonymous to login to your android phone

Saheed Taiye Adepoju: they got all that via android apps. The OS is very open and can customise it to be social. You got friendStream on the HTC UI sense which allows one to automatically update twitter and facebook and flickr. I can easily share links from within my android phone, i can pretty much do "social" thing due to the tons of apps on Android market. At the moment, logging into Gmail is same as logging onto ya android phone. If you havent got a gmail acct, the phone is pretty much useless to ya.

Mambe Churchill Nanje: cool...but I dont mean twitter, facebook...I mean ANDROID to ANDROID.... keeping facebook and twitter out of the whole scenario...friend to friend...like phone calls but now friend activities communicated to friends and they can comment and get notifications on their phones...no email, no facebook just phone and internet access

Saheed Taiye Adepoju: Ok, understood. That's just another blackberry initiative. Would be boring :).

Mambe Churchill Nanje: well nothing is boring if well implemented...

Saheed Taiye Adepoju: well i guess keeping with the android initiative of being open, someone might just implement android messaging, that wont be too hard.

Mambe Churchill Nanje: well its more than messaging...the files you save in your phone memory and apps you install, get shared with a couple of people...facebook pretty much is an os...where you have a profile, you login, you see what others are doing on their own space...so this is what I mean...what you save on your phone can be commented on by others...think pictures, videos, text, etc

Saheed Taiye Adepoju: Ok.

Tabi Tabe Ebot: ‎@mambe Google can come up with something like but the probe is will the mass be able to get phones such the nexus with it price tag? i mean here in africa not everyone can afford one.

Laurantine Endah Tatah: ok sa!

Mambe Churchill Nanje: ‎@Tabi its the Android OS that will get this feature...and when naijaborn phones, camerborn phones, encipher tablets get the updated ones...these features come into the device...and you automatically part of the social network and you start building your friends

Tabi Tabe Ebot: ‎@mambe Google can come up with something like but the probe is will the mass be able to get phones such the nexus with it price tag? i mean here in africa not everyone can afford one.

Tabi Tabe Ebot: ‎@mambe well for thats very possible to engineer, i mean you see what i'm talk Google can do it, and someone of your quality can dev that since Android is open, its very possible, i see it even possible to push data at real time, since its pure android to android. Great idea man.

Mambe Churchill Nanje: if I develop it, then I have to push it right inside the next Google Android public release...but its good as Google is asking developers to submit their products

Tabi Tabe Ebot: that will be good. then i should be eyeing an android handset then.

Mambe Churchill Nanje: ooh well...I dont have the right investment to do this...but I can push it so Google does it...I am even thinking thats Google Me

Tabi Tabe Ebot: if thats Google me then there is alot of problem for the others social media company, anywhere lets hold our hands closed and wait on GoogleMe then.

Google Adsense is not working in Africa part 2

hello, my blog is kind of scanty with fewer posts coming up lately. Men AfroVisioN Group is on the fast lane and you know how it is. Anyway no room for excuses because they don't do the job.
Last year I wrote a very controversial blog post about Google Adsense Not Working In Africa. Now I decided to come with a follow up because I noticed some improvements(++ to Google Africa).
Check out this picture then we proceed.
The picture is a screen shot from www.ubstudents.com my Cameroonian youths network for students of university of buea. I have been seeing these ads lately and I was like: Is this MTN Africa using Ad words Network ?? if so men the ads are getting real in the sense that they will make more sense to my users.
My cry about Adsense - Adwords in Africa was the fact that most of the ads were not about things African internet users could relate to in their daily lives compared to the ads they see on TV or Magazines. Imagine an ad about hotels in California on ubstudents.com, can the students pay for a hotel in USA? Hence they don't click on such ads and we make nothing form our traffic. [ Seun Osewa do you see where I was coming from ].
But with Ads like the one in picture above, Google adsense begins to make more sense to my users and it begins to generate more money. If you own an African web portal and you are an adsense publisher, I guess you might have noticed these ads from MTN. I found them on ubstudents.com and on bushfalling.com . Gradually Google adsense is working in Africa but not yet up to 20%, we need more companies to start using adwords which I am currently advocating and slowly but surely, we will be making some money from our traffic.

let the downloading begin - Google Chrome

Google or "Big G" has finally decided to own the internet by releasing the linux of browsers. Microsoft has not finished fighting linux now they have to fight Chrome. Google used the power of linux, put thousands of computers together and built what Microsoft could never be able to kick off and in other words, build what will be the internet monopoly. I don't blame them because its always said "only a Ninja can stop a Ninja", and in this case "only Monopoly could stop Monopoly". Chrome sounds very interesting for a software developer like me - multi threading with processes, garbage collection, memory reuse, many nice geeky words, and I like the fact that it has the power java had when it came in with garbage collection and memory reuse. I am very excited to learn this will be out today for download and we have to watch the number of download against that of IE8 and Firefox 3.
I cant wait to download and test chrome for the mean time I like the look from the pictures

for more pictures visit http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-02-n72.html

Google Adsense shows on Microsoft's live.com search

Today after working the whole day on www.africa2point0.com and www.afriplay.tv , I decided to play abit with Microsoft's live search www.live.com, I searched for images on keyword aeroplane just to test the usability of live.com images search. I worked on it a few months back and I must tell you the image search of live.com is more interactive than that of Google.com. So I wanted to play with it once more and feel the interactivity and usability expertise portrayed by the software giant.
What amazed me is the fact that Ads by google appeared right on the Microsoft Search engine.
So has Microsoft accepted Google as king and decided to include the famous 'ads by Google' on their search results or Microsoft did not notice that including web pages randomly from many sources on their site could also include google ads.

check the photo below and see where the ads by google appears on http://search.live.com

Google Africa - The blog

I was reading articles on www.whiteafrican.com and I noticed the Google Africa Blog , I love Google and their works. With a blog like this, I will be able to follow all what Google is doing in Africa. Lets hope they will be giving us all the info we need.

Why Social Networks / Media Sites Cannot Get to Millions of Users in Africa [ part 2 ]

I wanted to continue "why web 2.0 ventures are not making it big in africa", so I decided to drop this post. Please read on ...

There are soo many issues why a social network/media site cannot get to millions in Africa as a whole, although the number of internet users in Africa is up to 50+ million.

[Challenge: can your venture make an African who is not interested in the internet use the internet ?]

- How many Africans have access to internet at home ( luxury )?

- How many langauges do we have here in Africa ( minimum two : internationalisation starts from day one )

- How cheap is it for our users to go to the cyber everyday just to have fun on a soo called social network where they do not make any thing out of it ?

- Are the Ventures (web 2.0 sites ) having the right networks ( business , marketing, HR, IT ) to handle such growths to millions of users, and do they have the "big problem" Venture Capital ?

- How many Africans know the importance of the internet or how to use computers not to talk of your soo called social media site ?


If you are in Silicon Valley and you have a crazy idea like twitter.com, it can explode within two years but if you are in West Africa, who is ready to invest into a "war torn zone" ( as they address us ), thinking that when a war breaks all their servers will be turned to dust ??
But I think if you offer Africans a place to meet people to better their lives( jobs, marriage, career networking ) just like what we are working on with www.webyfolio.com ( still a work in progress ) or what FEE is putting forth www.kerawa.com ( classified ads - jobs 100% important to unemployed Africans) , they will come there and also tell their friends, and with time you might get the VCs coming or you might get the traffic to make some money out of.
More to that:
If I was unemployed I bet you I will visit www.kerawa.com everyday to see what opportunities God has for me somewhere in Cameroon or Africa.

My Proposed Solutioins:

- African web entrepreneurs should take some time to study software engineering and the business behind it. Remember this process will take you about two years before you can be able to build a good solution. Go to school or hit the browser to www.w3schools.com, most of us started from there

- Before starting a web 2.0 site, look at Africa, see what they value and what they dont value, what they have and what they can afford, dont build your site because its a social network, but build your solution because it has value to give to the average African no matter his poverty. Africans dont have money and they pay to access the internet, if you want them to use your site, then it should be something worth the small pocket money they have.

- Ensure that you make a bilingual solution ( kudos kerawa.com), so that most Africans can use the solution from day one.

- Market your solution via TV, Radio, Magazins, Blogs ( pay for the marketing ) else you wont get those users. Here in Africa, we watch TV, and listen to Radio and if you tell us something on Air, we will see it. You can hit MNET African Magic, and some other stuffs like Canal + horizon.
In business if you dont pay in something you wont make anything ( correct me if I am wrong ).
But if you count on online marketing: Abi we are not in Yankee (USA), and we dont want only tech savvy guys in Africa using our ventures

- While growing your web venture indulge into something else that will give you money for the time being else you will give up. You can get a regular job, which is not the best because its bad for the growth of your venture but good for the money. You can offer other services to firms in your area like build websites and softwares ( good one but very much strainous to your team), then get part of the money and experience and contacts as positive effects to your venture.

- I have realised that most internet users in Africa are mostly tech savy guys who work in the IT industry, but the guys who dont work in the IT industry need to use our sites too. Do something that can convert the non internet user in African to become an Internet user on your site [ VERY VERY BIG CHALLENGE ]

Web Gurus of Africa this is what I want you to remember:
online ventures need patience
Nairaland.com started in 2005 but its getting 200,000 users in 2008,
Facebook started in 2003 and it became big in 2007,
Google started in 1999 and it became big in 2003,
Myspace (2003 - 2006 ).
Blogger started in 1999 and Google bought them in 2005.
So don't expect to start today and in a year you get 20 million users, but you should expect a Geometric Progression kind of thing.
like Facebook was with 15 million users in 2007 and it converted that figure to 70million users in 2008. but it took them 2003 - 2007 to get 15 million users.
I think I have exhausted all the reasons why web ventures don't grow that big in our continent.

Google Adsense is not working in Africa

Google Adsense the biggest ads network on the planet, which is also known as the "Google money making machine", seems to be a total failure in Africa[IMHO - anyway thats why its on my blog...].
Dont rush to comment yet, read on to get my points.
I have been running www.ubstudents.com and its having atleast 20 unique visitors per day, with such traffic in USA I guess I will be having atleast 2 USD per day, but here in Africa I get 0.1 USD on the average per day. I have also placed adsense on this blog http://mambenanje.blogpost.com, www.bushfalling.com and www.kupexsans.com , but the overall revenue from the four sites is barely 2USD per week on the average.

I have some small explanations for this though:

- Adworks is not yet used by most African firms, so most adverts that get served to adsense publishers in Africa are mostly for international viewers which is not higly targeted for our African audience and it results to low click through rates.

- A friend of mine who owns www.webmastersofafrica.com gave his own explanation as follows: African publishers are abusing the adsense program thinking its free money and thus Google has put high restrictions to the African part of the Adsense/Adworks network.

If there is any person out there with an African venture that makes a great deal from Adsense, please place a comment so I could know if its me or its Adsense not getting it right in Africa.

For example, a big website as www.nairaland.com with 200,000 registered members and an estimated daily traffic of about 50,000 unique visitors, I guess the 25 year old owner of the site would be making about 1 million USD per annum but I bet he barely makes 500K USD per annum which can clearly justify my claim that "Google adsense is not working in Africa".

I personally think African web publishers need their own ads network which will be highly targeted to advertising African products so that the African users of our sites will get to see adverts that make more sense to them. This will lead back to my open source Adverts solutions for publishers (code named admark), which I talked about in a previous post below.

How Microsoft Can Answer Google in Six Months

Microsoft has been investing billions of dollars to catch up with Google on Internet Business.
But I think they have all the money and power to catch up but they have been doing so the wrong way. To me they are not getting it right because they have never had such a rival before.
Microsoft did not grow up with the internet, so they dont understand how to fight someone who actually made the internet valuable (Google).
I have a simple idea:
Microsoft should make Adcenta free of charge to advertisers for six months and the game will change.

What does that mean ?

What I mean is, Microsoft should make advertising on all their websites (via Adcenta) free for the next six months, alongside Microsoft should put engineers in place who will monitor the Adcenta system and the comments from the user base ( which will grow very fast in terms of users and feedback, because the ads are given out for free but still competitive).
This simply means many people will get to try Microsoft Ads even if they are using Google ads. From their comments and feedback Microsoft will then be able to improve their online advertisement targeting technology to compete with Google and even beat Google.

How Bad is it ?

The bad side is: Microsoft will get to loose soo much money from advertisers, but when the people use free advertising they will get use to the Microsoft platform. When they are asked to pay sometime in the future, users wont see any reason to leave and besides the system will be improving from their comments to suit them. This is what they did with windows some years back and this is what Google is doing with Google Apps for your domain. Is Microsoft Too Blind to see this ??

Taking Remix and Featuring from Hip Hop World to Information Technology World

I personally think, Remix and Featuring, two concepts that originated from Sean "P Diddy" Comb's Badboy Entertainment, are nice cultures that can help the Information and Technology Industry grow very fast.
For example if Google could team up with Facebook to release a social web property(hosted on a seperate domain name), all Google fans and facebook fans will use the site and the resulting solution will be a whole new web property that will generate enough revenue for share holders in both companies.
lets say Ebay teams up with Yahoo and they release a new social and marketing platform (hosted on a seperate domain name). This will employ new guys and also bring up more funds and change the way marketing (auction) and communication is done world wide within the space of two months. This is because it will automatically harvest the fan base of both ebay and yahoo.
This Remix and Featuring culture, that is helping hip hop artists make extra money by coming together to work on a song that will sell accross their fan bases is a very interesting business strategy.
Possible remix in the IT space:

Google and Microsoft - enterprise search revolution ( more money for Google, more money for Microsoft)

Yahoo and Facebook - jobs sharing community ( where all yahoo clients can login and share jobs a la facebook style)

you can come up with others.

Google does not love open source

Google the internet giant who uses open source technologies to make billions of dollars every month is actually an enemy to open source just like Microsoft.
Google embraced open source technologies that were geared against Microsoft, and trampled on Microsoft to become web King. But right now their core business (Google money making machines: - Adworks and Adsense) are not open source.
You might think Google is open source but let me make you see this clear.
Google can give you the source code of gmail , google maps, docs and the rest so that you start your own version of the solutions, but they know you will never get a better adverts provider so you will still employ them for adverts and they will make money from your business.
But if you could get a better ads provider they can not give you the codes for free and hence they are scared of open source.
Nobody on earth will have such power and make it open source, and I believe if an open source rival surfaces around the corner it will be a threat to Google’s kingdom.
I personally think if there could be some open source web advertisement solution for websites, where individuals could install the software on their sites and marketers could come and buy space right on their site and they make 100% of the money then Google’s business will drop to some extend.
Ok lets say I build Admark, a php engine (application) which you can install on your site as www.your-site.com/admark, and you put a link for marketers (ad buyers) on your site at www.your-site.com/admark/adbuyers where they can login, choose keywords or sections of your website where they can include their ads, then the Admark engine will bill them for you and then they pay via paypal or e-gold. It will be just like www.google.com/adworks but this time you market to websites that you know and believe in their traffic. For example I want to market only on cnn.com, if CNN has installed Admark; I will put my ads only on cnn.com and on a given page and it will reduce my ads spending. These way marketers will have to study websites where their adverts will make more sense and pay for ads there.
The killer is such a system will run alongside Google ads on the same site with no issues, just like Linux can run alongside windows.
You can login to www.your-site.com/admark/admin to view all the transactions, clicks and also profit you have made just like on www.google.com/adsense
Enough of the technology talks, lets get to the implications of such a system.
The system must be open source:
You know open source is always the answer to proprietary technologies like Google’s ads money making engine. Since its open source, many developers on earth will contribute to make the solution better so that they can host it on their sites, blogs or web business’ and in about a year the engine will become as good as Google’s and after some years it will be better because Google’s employees can not out smart the cloud of open source developers around the world.
The system must be written in php and run under Apache:
Php and apache is synonymous to the web, if you don’t use apache and php then you are not on the web. Php has a short learning curve and its also open source, and I believe 99% of web developers know how to code php and the best web developers are php guys who also know java. If the system is done in php, I think many developers will be able to improve the system and also build new plugins and utilities to make the system better, at that point web publishers will have what they want free or paid to improve their adverts engine.
The Admark system won’t be licensed to any company or any person. It will be an open source framework that any person can use to make money off his/her web traffic. Before you know it we won’t depend highly on Google anymore for monetizing our web traffic and in five years the Linux of Google will be finally born.
Question:
If such a system is put in place, do you think Google’s dominance on the web will still be as strong as it is?

Why Facebook cannot be productive like Google

I guess everybody on the web knows the new kid on the blog, Mark Zuckerberg and his facebook thingy. Its cool and I personally think its the best design I saw on the web in 2007. It is said that "when you build a good thing the money will follow", but its not the case with facebook.
The case of Google.com the giant, they did a cool thing (better search results) and the money followed but with Facebook( which can only be the next yahoo and not google), men I dont think it can be the same cycle.
why?:
When I visit www.google.com, I go to search for web pages. While am looking for web pages, if Google shows me related ones I will still be interested in them, because they are related to what I am looking for. But on facebook, I go there to meet people and share pictures and stuff with them, if there was a way to show me how to share the stuff in a better manner and put a price on it, then I will pay, but if you put adverts ( links: remember I am not on facebook for links like on google), I wont care about the adverts because they are not helping me in sharing of stuff and comments.
so facebook could make money if people could pay to advertise their profiles, so that when you visit a friends page, they could show related (paid) pages by his and say "this is another guy check him out". But I dont think any person will do that, why will I pay to advertise my profile anyway? So they will end up like yahoo with no real cash source... lets see in the next years.
All in all Facebook can only get to the level of yahoo, no real value is attached to the activities on facebook that Facebook Inc can sell.