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It seems that it’s not just search that we see such disparity between Yahoo and Google–there’s a huge chasm between them in the mobile space too! Google, emboldened by the early success of Droid, is moving forward with plans to build its own phone. While its Android platform is powering new cell phones–such as the Droid–Google doesn’t design the actual hardware. That’s going to change early next year. TechCrunch doesn’t have any more details that what we reported a month back , but there’s plenty of speculation and rumor to share: We have some fairly good information that suggests Google is working with a Korean phone manufacturer on the Google phone – LG or Samsung. Samsung has multiple parts in the iPhone and could be pressured by Apple not to work with Google, which says LG is the more likely partner for Google…We’ve also heard from a good source that Google is planning a big advertising push around the device early next year – like January. Man, there are going to be a lot of deflated Droid owners come January, if this all comes true. Which makes me wonder if Android is so new, that users will hold back from buying a phone, until they see what new hardware is on the horizon–effectively creating a catch 22 situation. Meanwhile, back at the Yahoo batcave, Yahoo Go is being shuttered : Dear Yahoo! Go user, Yahoo! Go will be discontinued on January 12, 2010, at 12:00 a.m. PST, so that we may focus on simplifying and enhancing your future mobile Web experiences. After this date, you will no longer be able to use Yahoo! Go 2.0 or 3.0 from your mobile phone. We encourage you to visit the new mobile homepage from your mobile browser to access an even richer, more personalized Yahoo! experience. We appreciate your support and thank you for using Yahoo! Mobile services. For more information and customer support, please visit the help center from your PC. The Yahoo! Mobile team I wonder how much of a role the iPhone played in its failure. With thousands of iPhone apps available, mobile users simply don’t want a "one size fits all" approach to mobile applications. The recently launched Yahoo Mobile for Web will apparently live on.

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Google Phone is a “Go” for Launch; Yahoo Go Isn’t

There’s not much going on in the internet marketing industry this morning. I suspect everyone ate too much candy. While they recover from their belly aches, I’m going to do a little "belly aching" myself. I’ve noticed–as have others–that there’s a growing number of people referring to themselves as social media "gurus," "experts," and "geniuses" (OK, maybe I made up that last one). What’s interesting is that many–note, I said "many" not "all"–of these self-labeled gurus have achieved nothing more than fame for being famous. In other words, peel back that first layer and you discover that they’ve not actually accomplished much in their social media guru career. In fact, many of them remind me of Lovelace from Happy Feet. He was in the right place, at the right time, and managed to convince his peers that he was a wise and gifted seer. The same goes for many social media penguins. Sure, they have lots of Twitter follower, but that’s easy to do–when you follow everyone back. Yes, they share lots of links, they speak at lots of conferences, and are the first person to whip out their iPhone at a Tweetup. But, ask them about their business successes and all they can offer up is that they helped such-and-such to "engage" their followers, or added a 1,000 friends to Company X’s Facebook fan page. Whoop-de-doo! Where’s the increase in revenues? Point me to some of your client successes. Heck, show me where you’ve personally made money from your social media skillz! Not that there aren’t any social media experts out there. Of course there are, they just don’t go around telling others how connected they are. They simply roll-up their sleeves and get on with it. They are in the trenches. They’ve used Facebook to add actual dollars to their bottom line. They’ve created a blog that increased the number of newspaper mentions. They’ve measured a decline in customer service costs because of their Twitter account. In other words, they’re so busy making social media work for them, they don’t actually have time to care about becoming the Mayor of the local Starbucks on Foursquare. So, why am I writing this? As I said, it’s a slow news day. OK, seriously, why am I writing this? Because I see far too many people that are the real experts in social media, but feel dejected, deflated, and despondent, because they don’t have 100,000 Twitter followers, don’t speak at the latest "we’re all great social media pros" conference, and don’t get the recognition from their boss–let alone their peers. So, this is not so much an attack on social media gurus, but a pat on the back and an "attaboy" or "attagirl" to those of you that have much to show for your efforts–even if the only Twitter List you’ve made it on, is your own. You’re doing great. You’re as much as a guru as anyone else . Keep at it! As I write this, I’m fully aware that the above is in some ways no different from the "SEO snake oil" commentaries I have been quick to attack in the past. If you feel that’s the case, go ahead and attack this post. But keep in mind, if you have the time to critique this opinion piece, you might just be one of the ones that I’m talking about. Those that are truly the social media experts are busy building their business, so don’t have time for debates such as this. PS. I am not a social media expert or guru. I just try to get the job done.

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Don’t Read This, If You’re a Social Media Guru

By Joi Murugavell – Follow her @joidesign A short definition of hashtags: On Twitter hashtags act as a means to create ‘groupings’ of tweets about a specific topic. Anyone can create a hashtag on twitter by simply appending # to a word (preferably a short word). Then other people who are interested in this topic look up the hashtag and ta-da all tweets about that particular topic are in one place. A recent event using hashtags brilliantly is #marketingnow. The diverse and often opposing opinions on hashtags is what makes it a powerful learning tool. Read more about hashtags and find out how to use them here . The good Hashtags are often used by companies to form a collective knowledge-base (and pats on the back) ‘in one place’. Adobe does this extremely well. Check out this example  of multiple hashtags being used to announce Adobe’s plans to open the iPhone to flash developers with its release of FlashCS5 (huge news for developers and iPhone users). In his tweet, @mszulc from Adobe skillfully uses 3 hashtags in one tweet (and even leaves character space for retweets, that’s pretty impressive!) By doing this, @mszulc adds to Adobe’s twitter knowledge base. He also added the ‘iPhone’ hashtag in, so folks who follow the iPhone tag can view the new announcement which is getting iPhone users excited it all sorts of excitable ways! The bad The bad side of hashtags is of course its best feature – ‘transparency’. A recent hashtag born out of extreme annoyance/hatred (quite funny) is #iSnack2.0 which was then nicknamed #vegefail Here, Kraft hating demons of fire exist, completely trashing Kraft’s new brand iSnack2.0. Kraft was no where to be seen putting out fires in their hashtag (they did listen and eventually pulled the name). The passion against the name was then of course transferred to their corporate hashtag #kraft, which used to have a mixture of news, comments, good stuff but is now dominated by iSnack2.0 laments. Monitoring unstable temperatures in your hashtag You can’t control what people say on a hashtag about your company. If you look at #Adobe you’ll see a mixture of comments from “yes! well done! Adobe releases flash for iphones” (which is the hot topic as I write this) to “my illustratorCS4 keeps crashing you suck Adobe!” etc. The negative and positive (temperature) in the Adobe hashtag is at a very healthy level, with more positives than negatives (at the moment). People are hashtag trigger happy, it only takes one unhappy customer to start a hashtag. For corporates, your hashtag is definitely not something you want to leave ‘on its own’ with a ‘what will, be will be’ attitude as it could quite quickly become a very large potty where you know … potty things happen. I recently bumped into a hastag about a CMS/hosting product we use to build websites. Its a fairly new, small hashtag with a current negative temperature. It was started by someone who was annoyed their email was down. Then someone else joined in and someone else etc. If you bumped into this particular hashtag now, it would seem like its your very own little corner to whinge about this particular product. At the moment it has the unfortunate building blocks of a potty (a shame, as its a brilliant product). A predominantly negative hashtag doesn’t exactly inspire you to say good things like “this is an amazing product”. A little peer pressure comes into play here too, if everyone is whinging you kinda feel a little bit out of place if you actually want to say something nice. Negativity loves company. Quick ways to plant some roses in a hashtag potty: 1) Start by telling a select group of people about your hashtag, encourage them to leave comments and get a conversation going with your hashtag, seed it with a topic. 2) Encourage your staff to use your hashtag, posting latest events, product enhancements, accolades etc 3) If you host an event, add your hashtag to your banners or simply let everyone know what it is (get lots of noise in there) 4) Ask your clients on twitter to post a short testimonial with your hashtag. Most people who are happy with you, will be more than happy to tweet about you. These are pretty simple things you can do right away, to throw a bunch of flowers in the potty mix. Hashtag potty mouths: Think before you poo At times its enjoyable to jump on the hashtag lament bandwagon. Who doesn’t like a big ol grumpy wumpy on twitter! Unfortunately, even though twitter encourages spontaneity, most of us who are not anonymous, still have to think a little before we tweet (sigh?). Probably the worst example I’ve come across was a bunch of people putting down a product they actually on-sell to their customers – not the best sales tactic is it? – #doh. Further reading How to get the most out of twitter hashtags Finding your community within a community Tools for monitoring conversations in Twitter Hashtags are dying – here’s how to save them What the hashtag – a user edited hashtag directory [image: Torley ] © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Quick Ways to Plant Some Roses in a Hashtag Potty Related posts: Six Quick Ways to Becoming a Twitter Pariah 7 ‘Secret’ Ways To Use Twitter Search 6 Ways Twitter Can Help A Bad Memory

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Quick Ways to Plant Some Roses in a Hashtag Potty

It’s a slow news day so we’ll just enter into the realm of ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybe, kinda, sortas’ for a minute and imagine a world without barriers. Sounds nice doesn’t it? Imagine a place where you would be able to have the best possible smart phone device for you personally regardless of who your carrier is or is not partnered with. Imagine there’s no dropped calls …. it’s easy of you try. I think I may be channeling John Lennon …… Anyway, what I am imagining based on a report from All Things D is the ability to possibly have an iPhone even though I am a Verizon customer for the foreseeable future. That’s an interesting prospect for sure but one I will have to do a ‘wait and see’ on. Apple has a lot to gain by ending iPhone carrier exclusivity in the U.S. and signing up Verizon as a second carrier partner. ….such a deal could more than double U.S. iPhone sales in the near term. That said, it does have some noteworthy downsides, top among them, the end of the estimated $450-per-iPhone carrier subsidy AT&T (T) has been paying. That’s the word from Broadpoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall, who believes Apple (AAPL) will bring the iPhone to Verizon (VZ) in the second half of 2010 and forfeit AT&T’s “sweetheart” carrier subsidy as a result. With the number of iPhone apps growing at the current rate of ‘really fast’ and the B to B marketing crowd seeing the value of building apps for branding purposes this is a great bit of speculation that I hope comes to fruition. While I have thought that going “droid’ may allow for me to have the best of both worlds I have to admit that having two devices now (BB Storm or phone, e-mail etc and iPod Touch for music, apps etc.) is a pain. I am not so convinced now that having a droid device and the iPhone is a good thing because carrying two separate devices is just not a good thing. As this plays out marketers are going to have to make some hard choices as to which platforms they tie their marketing budgets to. While many look at the number of devices that Apple will sell if they were out from under the AT&T deal as weighed against the smaller subsidy the real money is in the apps. If twice as many people have an iPhone then the app sales go through the roof and Apple has a license to print money. Well, one thing this whole aura of uncertainly has created is one less droid device sale. I’m holding out to see if this Verizon and iPhone thing happens. Until then I’ll just suffer. Actually, I can’t seem to make up my mind on this one. Maybe I’m channeling Brett Favre ……

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Verizon and iPhone in 2010?

Google Wave, an instantaneous/asychronous communication app (Okay, it’s IM+email) has been in beta testing for nearly a month . In that time, we’ve seen a couple “apps” developed for it (although they were really just stripped down browsers that helped Wave to run a little faster). But these pseudo apps were so well received, apparently, that Google is ready to talk about an app store for Google Wave at the Google Wave Google Technology User Group in London yesterday. What kind of apps would they add to email+IM? Says TheNextWeb: Already, independent software developers have built and tested Wave applications that handle such tasks as teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and multiplayer gaming, but while the Apple App Store sells software only for the iPhone and Touch, a Wave marketplace could stock in-Wave applications, along with desktop applications, browser extensions and a world of devices, from laptops, phones, tablets and more with built in Wave support. Earlier this month, Wave co-creator Lars Rasmussen told Business Week , “We’ll almost certainly do a store.” That’s been upgraded to “definitely.” The Wave API has long be available, but support for a store would help developers make money off their efforts. (In the same BW article, Rasmussen mentioned revenue sharing with developers.) TheNextWeb is very excited about Google’s prospects with apps in both Wave and Android, going so far as to say, “Despite Apple’s success, it is undoubtedly Android who will win on numbers, with developers swayed by Google’s open source values and the openness of the platform as a whole. With an app store specifically for Google Wave however, the potential for something as great, if not greater then than the iPhone App Store is a distinct possibility.” It’s a possibility, of course, but as things stand now, that’s going to take some time. ComputerWorld says Android devices currently make up 2% of the smartphone market, with Nokia’s Symbian OS running on about half of all smartphones. The iPhone is currently #3 in the market, after Nokia and Blackberry. These issues of scale are currently not enough to entice most of the iPhone developers I know to learn yet another programming language. By 2012, however, they may change their tune—ComputerWorld says the iPhone will slip—oh, wait, no, remain at the #3 OS slot. Symbian will slip to 39% dominance and all of the various Android devices will just edge out Apple for the #2 slot—by 0.8% of the smartphone market share. That’s awfully precise for a 2012 prediction. (Should we pull out our “Year of the Mobile” sign again?) Considering that right now the iPhone has over 100,000 apps and Android . . . well, doesn’t, perhaps it’s a bit soon to be calling the iPhone out of the game. Who knows what Apple will do next? What do you think? Is the iPhone on the way out, and is a Google Wave App store evidence of that? What apps would you like to see for Google Wave?

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Google Wave to Get App Store, Kill the iPhone?