Google Archive

Google is currently offering “millions” of music singles for $0.49/track or $4.99/album. Usually this type of music sale is just a bunch of unwanted tracks but so far the selection for this sale is far and wide! The music is all DRM-free and can be used on any device including Apple devices (iPod, iPad, etc). To download the music, you can either do a browser download (limited to 2 times) or use Google Music Manager. The nice thing is that it appears the music will always be available in your Google Music Library and you can stream it anytime and/or download it to your device.

A warning: you will spend a lot of time browsing the millions of songs on the deal. From what I can tell, the songs on sale include every genre of music and seems to include all of today’s top hits.

Some of the artists/songs include (the whole albums are available too):

• Nirvana – Smells like Teen Spirit
• Hanukkah Music – this cd has 25 tracks so buy the cd for $4.99 – includes popular hits Dreidel and Dayenu
• Katy Perry – Last Friday Night
• Beastie Boys – No Sleep Til Brooklyn
• Rachel Stevens – Negotiate With Love
• LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem
• Vanilla Ice – Ice Ice Baby
• Other artists include: Guns ‘n Roses, Elton John and every other artist you could imagine

I am not sure how long this deal will be running for so make sure you grab the songs that interest you asap.

Most times deals are discussed as they launch or briefly before launch. On November 20th, an upcoming offer began to circulate that, from what I can tell, has generated the most discussion pre-launch of any deal since Al Gore invented the Internet. What makes this deal discussion even more odd, is that most of the specifics related to the deal haven’t even been shared as of yet.

UPDATE: DEAL IS NOW DEAD – Link removed for clarity. Looks like they sold about 100k or so max.

All we know at this point is that Google Offers will run a deal with Newegg for $20 for $40 at some point. We don’t know specifically when they deal will launch, how long it will be available for, how many deals will be offered, what the restrictions are, etc. Yet even knowing so little about the deal, it is discussed like people won’t be sleeping until the deal comes alive.

Here’s what we do know based on chatter and the promotion pages on both the Google Offers and Newegg websites (displayed below). The deal will be for $40 worth of Newegg credit for $20. I have to assume that Google will be strong on enforcing limits unlike early national deals on Groupon and Living Social. Since the promotion of this deal started over a week ago, I am going to guess that this deal will be available on Cyber Monday. I don’t have any confirmation of this but it just seems like the perfect time to run the deal and I can’t see Google wanting to pimp an upcoming deal forever. On the flip side, this upcoming deal has probably helped Google get a ton of new opt-in Google Offers members.

UPDATE: This deal will go live at 9am Pacific (Noon Eastern) so be ready!

If the deal does go live tomorrow, I think it would be comparable to the Old Navy deal that Groupon ran this weekend and should beat out the Office Max deal that Living Social ran. I am still looking forward to seeing if any of the 3 deal sites offer something better than their sub-par Black Friday offerings.

I will update this post once the deal goes live – everyone that has discussed the deal believes it will be short lived so you will need to be quick. My suggestion is to make sure your Google account is hooked into Google Offers and you test out the ordering process so you know where to click and don’t have to read a lot of text as you place the order.

This evening I received the below email from Google – they have announced that in early 2012 (no firm date provided), Google Checkout will be merged into the new Google Wallet service. Chris Ziegler at Verge posted about this announcement a few hours ago as well.

We just moved off of Google Checkout (and Paypal) at CloudContacts earlier this month. I will eventually post about why but the short version is that I found that our customers were a bit confused as to what exactly are the payment options on both Google Checkout and Paypal. Also, to use Google Checkout you need a Google account and I didn’t want any barriers to sales – not everyone has a Google account and forcing a potential customer to create one before the purchase was a big barrier. In case you are interested, we are now using Stripe for our transactions and in the first two weeks since the conversion went live, I have been extremely pleased with their service.

Here is the full email I received (URLs removed for clarity):

Thank you for using Google Checkout. We’re writing about an important change coming to Google Checkout over the next few months – Google Checkout is becoming part of Google Wallet. To help you learn more about this transition, we’ll be hosting a webinar.
Please note that space in the webinar is limited, but we’ll have a recording posted for those who aren’t able to attend.

Google Wallet is a virtual wallet that securely stores payment information and makes paying fast both online and in-store. On the web, buyers simply click a Google Wallet button to make quick and secure purchases with their saved payment information. Buyers can also use the Google Wallet mobile app to make purchases at thousands of retail store locations with just a tap of the phone.

Google Checkout buyers will now manage all Google Checkout and Google Wallet orders at (redacted). Buyers will be able to make purchases with their existing accounts at sites that accept either Google Checkout or Google Wallet.

At this time, there’s no action required from you. In early 2012, we’ll ask merchants, organizations and developers who use Google Checkout to sell items or collect donations to change any website text that talks about Google Checkout to Google Wallet. No additional integration or other technical updates will be necessary. If you use Google Checkout through a third party shopping cart, your cart provider will make any necessary changes.

If you have questions or want to learn more, please attend or view our webinar and visit our website. We’re looking forward to bringing these new Google Wallet features to your customers and will email you again in the next few months to let you know when to expect the Google Wallet button.

Another day, another battle of “Google+ is the future” vs. “Google+ is dead”. I am guessing we will see these back-and-forth posts for a long time. This week the hot thing to do on Google+ is to make circles of the same brands everyone else has and then share those circles with your followers who have probably already created the same brand circles.

One of the earliest supporters of Google+ was Edelman EVP Steve Rubel. Steve heads up the Global Strategy and Insights division for the global agency. Steve is a good speaker and I have always found Steve to have interesting insights and enjoyed our in-person conversations. He seemed to post/re-share to Google Plus numerous times every day throughout the earliest days and summer. Then slowly his postings started to become less frequent. If I remember correctly, Steve held multiple internal conferences with his colleagues to educate them about Google+ shortly after launch.

In early September, Edelman announced that they were selected as Twitter’s new PR firm. Did this new client signing influence Steve to spend more time on Twitter than Google Plus? Some of the conversations I had since the announcement seemed to think so but I am not sold on this idea because Steve’s job requires that he understand all of the networks so he can position them properly to Edelman’s staff and, in-turn, clients. Google evangelist Louis Gray noted the new Twitter-Edelman relationship when Rubel shared a post that questioned whether Google+ would be around for the long-term.

On October 20th, Rubel asked if, “Anybody Home” and he received over 20 responses including one from me. There have been no posts from Rubel until one early this morning where he posted the following message:

I have decided not to post here for the time being. I will leave my profile up. Google+ is great. I wish them luck. Really i do. But I have to make choices about where I spend my time and for me that’s Twitter, Facebook and soon Tumblr – where I will be doing more so. It’s where I get the most value for the time invested. So, adios for now. See you on one of those networks. I may change my mind one day, but right now this is my plan. See you online. / Steve

Some have asked me if this is a bad sign for Google+. I am not sure if this should be considered any sort of death sign because I know Steve is crazy busy as it took me quite a while to get on his calendar a couple of years ago. It would be interesting to hear from Steve about how he will position Google+ to his colleagues and to all of Edelman’s clients going forward. I guess I will have to find him on Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr to attempt to get the answer to this very important question.

Developer Daniel Treadwell has created a public blog using the Google+ API. What’s neat about Daniel’s test is that the content is available on the blog as real, raw cotent and HTML – it’s not just a Javascript include.

You can view Daniel’s blog here. The blog correctly links to a Google+ profile when Daniel has tagged a person.

This will eventually mark the fork in the road between Google+ and Facebook.

You can change the ID on Daniel’s blog if you want to see what your stream would look like as a blog. Here’s mine as an example – you can find your ID in the URL on your Google Plus profile page. Of course should this test go live, we probably want to make sure that someone can’t just hack the URL and make a person’s blog look very different – you can imagine the potentially evil possibilities there.

I could see blogger Robert Scoble replacing his WordPress blog with his public Google+ stream once this application is completed. (confirmed: Scoble notes, “I would love to use this on my own blog, which is based on WordPress.”) He goes on to say that he would pay $50-100 for a WordPress extension that has the same functionality.

Perhaps the right solution is similar to how Disqus handles comments – when you use the Disqus comment plugin on a WordPress blog, Disqus saves the comment to Disqus but also back to the source blog so you can remove Disqus and keep all of the comments left on your blog. The Google+ plugin could work the same way allowing you to remove the plugin but keep the content created on Google+.

In addition, considering the amount of resharing that takes place on Google+, I wonder if this type of API usage could become a competitor to Tumblr?

The big Google+ news today wasn’t that the message board service increased their traffic by 1,269%, nope, the big super huge mega news is that you can now share your circles with your circles (see what I did there?). Circles are the apparatus that Google+ uses (most services call them lists) to help you organize your people, friends, friends of friends, required marketing parties, people who are acting as brands, bloggers who you need to circle to help you get press later on, etc.

The truth is that many people will be emotionally joyous or very hurt by their status, or non-status, in a specific circle. For example, let’s say you think you are a person who is a great, news breaking, tech blogger. And one of your popular friends shares her circle called, “Great, News Breaking Tech Bloggers”, you are listed in there and are very excited. Naturally you +1 the thing straight away and re-share the previously shared circle which helps you show off how great and how news breaking you are.

I do wonder how many of the reshares of shared circles come from people who are listed in the circle – somehow I’d bet it will be a very high percentage.

But what about when you are left out of a circle that you think you should be a part of? What do you do? One person I follow on the Google Plus message board noted upon sharing one of her circles, ” If I missed you, leave me a comment so I can consider adding you!!” Oh gee, thanks, let me send you my resume and my linkedin so you can consider adding me to your circle, thank you so much for this consideration!!! I sure hope my Klout score is high enough so she will add me to the circle!

Continue reading “New CN Offering: Google+ Circle Exclusion Representation Service” »

Last night I was out clubbing in Austin…trying to get my mack on (I do a mean cabbage patch) and finally find the future Mrs. Stern. While I was standing at the bar, (no I didn’t find an iPhone 5) I noticed a piece of paper on the bar that looked interesting so I grabbed it. Turns out it appears the paper seems to be a job posting for a position with a “newly-launched” social network message board. It feels like a job posting for Google+ Suggested Users but I have been unable to confirm. Unfortunately the bartender told me he spilled Milwaukee’s Best on the paper so some parts are unreadable and my scanner is dead so I can’t post an image. Here’s what I was able to put together from the paper…

Job Title: Elite Users Wanted for (word missing) — a Newly-Launched Social Network

Job Description: Are you looking to grow your fan base on a (word missing) network?

This position is perfect for you if you have more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. (partially missing word)ogle is looking for people (or cats, dogs and other non-perishables as long as you meet the 100k+ requirement) to join our (something)+ social network. You don’t need a (something)+ account to apply and even if you don’t have a real name, we will still take you as long as you have more than 100,000 Twitter followers.

Please note that we do not actually care how you obtained your 100,000 Twitter followers – if you were given them as freebies because you are on the Twitter suggested user list, if you bought them on Canal Street, or if you worked really hard and earned them.

Continue reading “Is This a Google+ Job Posting?” »