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A couple of days ago I blogged about Qwitter, a service which informs you when someone quit following you on Twitter.

In the last week I received five emails, where Qwitter informed me about people no more following me.

You know what? All of them started “following” me just not long ago, maybe “waiting” for me to follow them back. Since this hasn’t happened, they unfollowed me. The point is that their only aim was to increse their followers’ number, without really caring of my tweets. Their only aim was to catch my attention and to make me follow them back.

Unfortunately, as stated many times, I follow people I really care about. If you follow me but I don’t think I can be interested in what you write on twitter (with all my respect, of course) I will never follow you back. At the same time, if I follow you it’s because: 1) we know each other personally (well, in that case I would appreciate if you follow me as well) - 2) I care about your thoughts and I don’t care if you follow me back.

It’s great how Qwitter gives me a confirmation about this bad behavior by “marketing-only” twitter accounts. Here is an example for all, Mr iphone reviews unfollowed me after just a couple of days he started (on October 21st) following me, “much interested” in my thoughts and opinions:

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Technorati Tags: luca filigheddu, qwitter, Social Media, twitter, Web 2.0

In the last couple of weeks I received a lot of friend’s requests on Facebook from people I’d never have thought could have joined Facebook. Schoolmates as well as old friends, many of them finally discovered Facebook and joined it. Moreover, the driver who led them to join was to stay in touch with people, new and old friends, colleagues, classmates, relatives.

This is a clear sign that something huge is happening and that there is no doubt Facebook is more and more going mainstream.  That said, I started looking at this phenomena from a different standpoint: is Facebook capable of behaving like an operating system? If you look, for example, at the new Facebook iPhone application, everything you need from an operating system is there: messaging, IM, applications, microblogging, presence, live feed, photos, videos…

In my opinion Facebook could potentially be used for 99% of your time as a central dashboard from which you perform any activity on your computer and your mobile phone, but there are five important features that are currently missing.

1) Address Book - I mean the ability to add people in your “Friend’s List” regardless of whether they are subscribed to Facebook or not.

2) Mail Client - Currently Facebook’s messaging service is rather poor and is not ready to become a fully functional mail client. What if Hotmail would be integrated into Facebook? After Live Search, another move to better integrate Facebook with Microsoft’s services.

3) Documents - If I were Facebook, I would buy a service for online documents management as Google did a couple of years ago with Writely which was the basis for Google Docs. This application, together with the powerful mail client mentioned above, would be a killer feature for me.

4) Web Browser - It would be great if I could open any web page from within Facebook itself, leveraging its powerful sharing capabilities. A wordpress/typepad/… blog editor? A Wordpress.com Facebook application is available already, but a similar app for personal wordpress installations is still missing.

5) Calendar/PIM - 30Boxes is already offering it and it seems users like it (about 24.000 monthly active users) even if it’s still a little percentage of the whole FB population.

What do you think? What should Facebook add to become a real operating system? Can we expect to see a new mobile phone “F1” sometime soon? I look forward to your comments.

Technorati Tags: facebook, Google, Google Docs, iphone, luca filigheddu, operating system, Web 2.0

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Sometimes I asked myself if Google, a company founded in 1998 (times of web 0.1), could be considered a Web 2.0 company.

According to WikiPedia, this is the definition of Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 is a buzzword describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users.

Recently I started thinking whether the big web giant, Google, could be considered a so-called Web 2.0 company or not. Despite some of its services strictly follow the principles mentioned above, I found out that in many cases there is a lack of innovation in their applications and services. I’m not saying “web 2.0″ necessarily means innovation but there are some principles of this “paradigm” that Google is definitely not applying.

One example for all is the popular email service Gmail. Even if they recently launched the “labs features“, some new experimental options anyone can activate in their web email client, they are not, let me say, “life changing” and they are far from being focused to increase the productivity of Gmail users. Moreover I want to remind you that version 2.0 of Gmail just arrived a couple of months ago, almost 3 years after the launch of the first version of the service.

According to the Web 2.0 paradigm, new options/services should be launched very often, getting users’ feedback then coming back to make those features even better. I can’t find this approach with Gmail and I rather find as if there were a very slow process behind any new feature release.

All that being said, the most deluding Google application I’ve tried so far is GMail for Symbian S60 mobile phones. They launched the new version 1.5 some months ago but I never succeeded in using it for more than one week, since I usually have to come back to version 1.1 due to the inability to load it anymore. They introduced some very useful features like the ability to save “drafts” or to include the self-promotional signature “Sent from Gmail for mobile” (wow, what innovative set of features!) but they still haven’t figured out how to solve the problems of a client that is incredibly buggy.

Why? I already mentioned this problem in this blog but it seems no one takes care of users’ feedback within the mobile Gmail team. After some days of intensive usage version 1.5 becomes unstable and it takes more than one minute to load on my Nokia N95. Maybe I am the only unlucky user experiencing this (I doubt..), but I also tried to hard reset my phone and install it again without any evident improvement.

Coming back to the web version, there are tons of new feature-requests by users every day. Some of these features have been implemented by third party developers through Greasmonkey scripts (you can download them here) but they only work under Firefox and some very useful ones are not working with Gmail 2.0 anymore. Where is the preview pane? Where is the ability to include HTML signatures?

Don’t get me wrong, everyone can try the wonderful Gmail user experience and incomparable speed and I am a huge fan of this service as well as a power user, but sometimes I get frustrated by the lack of simple but powerful features which could improve my productivity. Just to name one, Google reader has a powerful preview pane for any news item, why not Gmail?

Gmail is just an example, but other services, in particular those which became part of Google after an acquisition, suffer of the same kind of problems. Jaiku as well as Feedburner are two examples where the innovation stopped as soon as they entered the Google empire. For GrandCentral the story is similar, even if in this case I know for sure that there is much going on behind the scene. Anyway the truth is that I can’t barely remember when a new feature was added to the service (Craig, I know you are working hard, guys…).

In conclusion, we can’t surely say Google is not an innovative company and everyone can easily agree that any new service launched by Google is innovative, usable and becomes widely used very quickly. In addition, the upcoming new Google browser Chrome should be the right move to consolidate all their services into a well integrated environment very easy to use for the final users. I’ll stay tuned for this.

Anyway the aim of this post is trying to make the Google team aware that there are many power Gmail users out there (as well as Jaiku, Feedburner, Grandcentral..) looking for more, like a stable v1.5 mobile Gmail  and the introduction of many new features that can really improve their productivity and make Gmail (and the other services I mentioned here) even better. Am I asking too much?

The risk here, is that power users can start moving elsewhere.

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Technorati Tags: gmail, Google, luca filigheddu, Web 2.0