Google earth, Third Voice, and Facebook

Google earth, the new application Mr Choy introduced to us during the second lecture. And so I am checking it out now. It is SO COOL! Mum was standing right behind me while I was searching for a picture of my house and TA DA! I found it! “Which stalker took all these pictures?” she asked. I laughed and explained that, “This is Google earth, Mum, and how long have you been standing here?” “When I saw a picture of the Earth”. This is what she is talking about.

As I searched on and zoomed in, this was what we saw.

And soon, I found my house! (I do not want to post a picture of it up here)
Besides Google Earth, COM125 provides me with MANY interesting (not really) information. Heard of the Third Voice? It is a free browser plug-in, created in 1999 by Eng-Sion Tan and colleagues, which allowed Web surfers to share comments about websites using “sticky notes”, to induce "inline discussions" among Web users. However, Third Voice soon gathered more enemies than friends and was called the “Web graffiti”. Really, who would enjoy seeing their websites being “vandalized” by constructive or unconstructive comments and opinions of strangers? 2 years later, as expected, Third Voice finally surrendered due to financial issues, and went boomzed!

Reason for the fall: Third Voice failed to generate adequate advertising revenue to raise consumers' awareness of its free service, and it also could not generate enough consumer awareness to raise the advertising revenue it needed to stay in business. It all boils down to the lack of communication and money.

If people are not able to accept this form of “freedom of speech”, why is facebook still so hot now? Yes, I do have an account, but I still find it a complete waste of time, simply because the games are too addictive! Facebook does have its plus points; at least it gave me an opportunity to gather all my long-lost friends.

Facebook, like any other application, did face financial crisis and it actually had a net loss of $3.63 million in year 2005. However, Facebook was much luckier than Third Voice such that it received investments from several companies due to its population of more than 350 million active users worldwide. Therefore, to all entrepreneurs, capital is not the most important factor in business, the popularity of your product or service is.

To gain popularity, you need to learn how to improvise all the time. This is how Facebook does it. The Interface evolution.