Alex Halliday

For the templating competition, we produced this quick whiz through of the features of socialGO. 

So we are now officially called SocialGo.com!After blood sweat and tears deciding a name we have finally got one. I am rather pleased with what we ended up with.There is a great energy around this at the moment. The whole team really beleives in what we are creating and it so great to see it all coming together!We thought it would be fun to launch a competition to find a logo for our product. On 99designs.com we launched a competition to see what other people thought our logo should be. I started the competition on a thursday morning and by lunchtime i had 50+ entries! An absolutely staggering response. In amongst the Good the Bad and the Comic Sans there where some interesting ideas and some reoccuring themes….but it certainly helped in the creative process. Being stuck developing something for 2 years doesn’t really make you the best person to come up with the brand for it.Enough gushing…..I have got a launch to prepare for. :)Check out the logo entries at http://99designs.com/contests/6024 and email me if you have a group that would like to participate in the BETA.

 I’m in AXM next month talking about what i’m up too!

We have a name for our upcoming service which will be launching in 6 weeks time.

Stay tunned! Should be able to announce it tomorrow.

Google : Don’t Be Evil*

Unbelievably China’s ever active censorship machine has decided to block access to Google News and YouTube.com over recent information regarding reporting of the riots in Tibet. If you have ever taken candy away from a kid, you will know what happens when you take something away that people love and enjoy……it just makes the problem worse. Efforts to circumvent the censors will increase and the end result can only be negative for China in the long-run. Corporate America should do all it can to encourage freedom of speech.

When Google started filtering search results in China that was the first step in the wrong direction. The internet is designed through and through to be uncensored. To try and impose restriction on what people can and can’t see goes against the very fabric of what the internet and it’s resulting connectivity is all about.

This to me is just shocking and will nothing to win China positive press in the run-up to the Olympics. If anything it was just draw more attention to what is going on in Tibet. Actively covering things up does nothing but send a strong signal that they have something to hide.

* Unless the second largest economy in the world asks you to do so….

So the blog has been neglected recently. Sad times…..But I have been busy working on the impending launch of our new service which we hope to be rolling out soon. The 10 person team putting it together are working amazingly hard to get it ready and I can’t wait to get our large-scale BETA program going. Although the core product is ready, we are busy adding help, making more intuitive and polishing of the sales and admin side of things.

So what is it I hear you ask? Well, it’s a DIY social networking service. Any group, business, society, school etc can create a completely customisable social experience for their members. We want to help the administrators and organisers of these groups have an easier time of running things and we want their members to have more tools to interact.

At the beginning of the month the whole team went off to Miami to the Future Of Web Apps organised by the lovely people over at Carsonified. It was a truly amazing experiance. We have been stuck in our office (or the programming sweatshop as it is referred to) for the past year and it was nice to meet some other people working in this exciting industry.

Highlights for me included Cal Henderson who managed to make subversion into a stand-up comedy, and Brian Oberkierch who gave us a fascinating workshop on brands and marketing web apps (i am a massive fan of his blog and podcasts). I also massively enjoyed the team from Remember The Milk and am now an avid user.

So in the next few days we should have finalised the name of our service and should be ready to roll! If anyone is interested in becoming a BETA group for us, then just drop me an email amhalliday at gggggmaaaaillll.com or twitter me alexhalliday.

I’m working on some new articles that will be coming soon………

Stand-by caller!

Compete has released a list of the biggest traffic winners and loosers over last year. Amazing growth in on-demand porn. Can’t quite believe how popular it has become……but as the old saying goes ‘Give the people what they want’…and quickly…and without needing to register……and without needing to pay……. 

The people at Apple must have been pleased as punch when the annual Keynote presentation became the highly anticipated media circus that it now is. Gone are the days of Mac customers slowly hearing about new products as they trickle through from the early adopters to their friends and family and beyond. Now, every year in January, every mac enthusiast tunes into MacRumours.com or impatiently refreshes the Apple.com homepage awaiting ‘the next big thing’. 2007 started with a bang for Apple with the launch of a truly revolutionary product that has been the main catalyst for growth for an extraordinary year which saw Apple’s share price surge and the iPhone gain a sizable chunk of the handheld market.

Followers will always be loyal to Apple as they have bought into the brand, lifestyle and personality of the Anti-Microsoft. But Wallstreet has no such loyalty. They look at markets, growth and potential . This could be why during Steve Job’s 90 minute presentation, Apple’s shareprice dropped by about $20bn or 11%. The MacBook Air represents an interesting product. But it is by no means revolutionary. The message is clear, the market is disappointed.

Personally I would have trouble buying a laptop that didn’t have an optical drive. I may be able to use TimeMachine and capsule, iTunes and remote drives to run my life but I just don’t want to. I know people who have not eaten for a month just to buy an iPhone but i don’t think anybody will be skipping dinner anytime soon to buy the Air.

Michael Raynor has an interesting book called The Strategy Paradox which talks in depth about the striking similiary between the strategies of companies (or products) that are wildly successful and those which are massive failures. Apple has a long history of placing huge amounts effort into big ‘hit’ products. This has paid off with launches such as the iPod and the iPhone. But it has also had Newton, Pipon, Lisa and Newton products which where really quite spectacular failures. I doubt the MacBook air will be a Lisaesque failure but it certainly isn’t an iPhone either.

I would say that the market’s valuation of Apple was based on an assumption that it would be able to continue to maintain iPhone standard launches year on year. Anyway, good luck to Apple for 2008. I’m sure they will continue to do amazingly well with their suite of products and I will be interested to see how the iPhone grows and develops, especially with the upcoming release of their SDK.

Final thought: now might be a good time to buy Apple stock. The huge 11% write down means disappointment from Wall Street but there are still another 11 months in the year. If the iPhone follows the iPods history of mutation and development it could be a very interesting year for its mobile market share. Just because they choose not to launch everything at the keynote, doesn’t meant the rest year

So after much distraction I have decided that it is high time that i return to my blog. It is something that I have always wanted to do (regularly) and I think that since we are close to launching our new startup, now was high time to get this going. Now i am making the assumption that someone actually cares what I have to say but I guess they wont unless I make a good go of this. So I am, right now, beaving away at my first post about Saas vs Traditional Software.