Technology

KUALA LUMPUR (Nov 18): DiGi.com Bhd is partnering Google to provide Gmail short messaging service (SMS) effective from Friday.

DiGi said this latest move expanded the SMS-based Internet applications and services which would enable the telco customers to access their favourite online apps.

“This strategic partnership with Google also positions DiGi as the first mobile operator to offer the Gmail SMS service in Malaysia,” it said.

The head of mobile Internet & ADS for DiGi, Praveen Rajan said a recent Nielsen survey reported Malaysians spent an average weekly of over five hours accessing the Internet via mobile devices.

“The partnership with Google empowers us at DiGi to offer the SMS option to millions of Gmail users in Malaysia to significantly extend their chat community through real-time chat via SMS, regardless of any mobile device type,” he said.

Manwhile, Country Head of Google Malaysia Sajith Sivanandan said Google's overall mission was to make information accessible and useful to people.

“SMS has long been a common means of mobile communications in Malaysia and many Malaysians still rely on their non-smartphones. Gmail SMS makes instant communication between Gmail and a mobile phone possible via SMS,” he said.

Gmail SMS brings the popular Gmail Service to a non-smartphone easily. With Google’s Gmail SMS, people can send free text messages to their friends directly from their Gmail account. Replies and responses to the text message will appear as a reply in Chat.

For DiGi customers, the service is free of charge and requires no subscription; chat messages sent via SMS from their mobile phones are billed at 10 sen per SMS.

This strategic partnership announcement is made on the back of a global agreement between Google and Telenor announced recently.

Telenor’s intention is to roll out a global Android Market initiative in stages to stimulate further growth of the Android ecosystem in all 11 international markets, including Malaysia.

How Google+ Is Like Twitter—but Not in a Good Way

Like Twitter, Google's social network has yet to solve some challenging problems. Among them: the "noisy stream" and how to find interesting content

Tech blogger Robert Scoble, the king of the early-adopter crowd, hasposted some thoughts about what he likes and doesn’t like about using Google+, and some of his points hit home with me as well. And the more I thought about the new social network and the things it doesn’t do very well, the more similar it seemed to the issues that have also been dogging Twitter for some time. Like Twitter, the Web giant has to figure out how to solve some pretty challenging problems—including the "noisy stream" issue, the problems of search and discovery, and, of course, how to keep people from going away and never coming back.

As more than one person (including Scoble himself) has noted, he isn’t exactly the average user of social tools. As someone with hundreds of thousands of followers, who jumps on every new Web or social tool that comes along—in some cases dominating those new services to the point where they become almost unusable, as some found with FriendFeed—Scoble is definitely an "edge case." But at the same time, that makes him a little like the canary in a coal mine: He can highlight problems that may only become obvious for others much later.

THE "NOISY STREAM" PROBLEM

In his post, he mentions a couple of things that I’ve also noticed, as someone who has used Google+ since it launched, including the fact that over time a stream of activity on the network can become noisy to the point where it’s hard to follow at all. That is especially true if one follows—or "circles"—people who produce a lot of content (like Scoble). But it’s also true if you follow someone whose content gets a lot of comments, as is the case with users such as Myspace co-founder Tom Anderson, or even Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin (and yes, I don’t use Circles as much as I probably should).

My stream on Friday, for example, was dominated by Brin’s photos from his trip to the Galapagos Islands, each of which got hundreds of votes (or +1′s) and comments. That’s because Google+ moves posts that have more activity to the top of your stream, which is a way of highlighting newer or fresher content. But it can also become incredibly irritating when there is a lot of volume. As Scoble notes in his post: "Already for high flow users, like me, notifications are useless there and finding the good stuff, and good people, is very difficult (getting rid of people who don’t add value is also too difficult)."

Twitter doesn’t have this problem in quite the same way as Google+, since it doesn’t move content around in your stream based on activity, but it has been trying to identify activity that might interest you with its new tabs—which show when people favorite or retweet your messages, and also show the activity of people you follow. The idea seems to be that this will appeal to users and keep them engaged, but it could also create a noise problem. (Facebook doesn’t have as much of a noise problem because it is a "symmetric follow" model, in which you can only friend people who agree to the relationship.)

THE PROBLEM OF DISCOVERY

All of this points to what might be the biggest issue for both networks, and that is the problem of discovery. In other words, how do users find people to follow and how do they find content that interests them? Highlighting content that gets lots of responses is one way, and notifying users about this is another, but both of those features can also be irritating. Google suggests users to follow based on who is in your Circles, just as Twitter suggests people you might be interested in, but these approaches are also flawed in many ways (one user complained about Google repeatedly suggesting her ex-husband).