Why do you own a tablet?

We’d love to hear from our readers, Twitter followers and others about why they have a tablet (or why they don’t, if you’d like). Is it for convenience? Is it a must-have? Has it changed the way you use your “traditional” computer? Please sound off in the comments.

Google announced their newest social network Google+ last year after several previous failures in the social space, which debuted to a lot of fanfare and hype. If anyone had the clout and ubiquity to pull in disaffected Facebookers and Twitter-cynics, it would have to be Google, right?

After several months of hype and some impressive initial growth numbers, Google+ seemed to fade from the collective tech consciousness. Personally, following a short trial with the service, I found myself disinterested, after which I deleted my profile. I had been uncomfortable from the start with the idea of having Google+ tied to all my other Google-related services. Just as in real life, some compartmentalization of little details is important.

At the same time Google+ seemed to hold such little relevance to me, it seemed to continue growing, and quickly, at least according to Google. In January, Larry Page claimed 90 million were using Google+, up from September estimates of around 43 million users. This is, however, where the story diverges. Our New Media Measure Q3 numbers showed 10% of social network users were active (accessed within past two weeks) on the site, while in Q4, the site took a huge leap–sideways–holding steady at 10%. And while this NMM data is only representative of the US, it would be nearly impossible for a service that originated here and has been heavily marketed domestically to stay flat while exploding internationally.

What could be causing this discrepancy between the growth touted by Page, and our flat internal numbers?

As this piece shows, Google seems to take advantage of sign ups to their various other services (gmail, youtube, etc.) to go ahead and create a Google+ profile for you. I even noticed that long after originally deleting my original Google+ profile, that Google had taken the time to create another profile shell for me. Further, given that I am a Gmail user, it would not be unreasonable to assume my Gmail log-ins are counted among the 90 million Google+ users claimed by Page.

Touting tremendous growth using the loosest definition of a user–one that would make even the savviest marketer blush–seems to be a poor long-run strategy. Unfortunately, pushing misleading and distorted “journalist SEO” seems to be par for the course, especially for tech companies. If Google+ isn’t catching on as Google had hoped, there is no shame in admitting to such, because building a well liked social product takes as much luck as it does effort.

The web has been inundated with mixed reviews. As noted by the New York Times’ David Streitfeld, some of the earlier complaints involved the fact that “there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky.”

I agree with most of these. The volume controls are difficult to access, especially when streaming through Netflix. I’ve often hit the off switch by accident. A few times the touch screen has been a little finicky, especially when surfing the web. I am the only user on my device, though, so privacy is not really an issue for me.

Despite this, none of these problems are deal breakers. Though the volume controls are not easily accessible, all one has to do is touch the screen 1-2 times to get access to it. Hitting the off switch can be annoying when streaming video, but the device is just as quick to turn back on. The touch screen can be the most annoying of problems, but this problem is most prominent when surfing the web. If you use the device mostly for reading, streaming video, or games—which are my primary uses—then it won’t be that much of a problem.

Reading both magazines and books on the device has been a surprisingly enjoyable experience. I’ve always been hesitant about the printed world’s digital migration, but I now understand why the experience is so captivating. Though I have some reservations about the tablet version of my magazine, it is specific to the actual app and not the overall Fire experience. I also must qualify this by saying I’ve never owned an actual e-reader, nor have I ever used one.

The one thing I’d add to Streitfeld’s list is the significant difficulty I’ve had using the Netflix app, which is no criticism of the device itself. Streaming videos is my primary use of the tablet. I subscribe to both Netflix and Hulu Plus, and I’ve purchased digital files through Amazon’s site many times before, which makes the integration to the Amazon store all the better (and the Amazon Prime trial is an added bonus). And while video playback from either Hulu Plus or Amazon’s cloud has been a great experience on the Kindle Fire, streaming through Netflix has been a problem since day one. The audio and video are not synced, and it seems like I’m not the only with this problem. Though apparently an app update has been issued, I have yet to see any improvement with this.

All in all, I don’t see why there was such uproar during the device’s first month in the market. It is a high-functioning tablet that has all the capabilities one is expected to have. Perhaps the problem isn’t with the device itself, but rather with the expectations audiences have. The Kindle Fire is not an iPad, and it’s a good thing it isn’t. Otherwise, consumers would have to dish out an additional $300, and as I’d discussed a few months back, this is the Kindle Fire’s biggest selling point.

By mid-summer, no less than six months after release, the Nintendo 3DS was left for dead by critics and analysts. Complaints from consumers resonated in sales numbers. The system didn’t have any games. The 3D effect wasn’t great. The battery life was terrible. Eventually, lagging sales forced the company to alter course and slash the price on the system. With the crowd hoping for a home run, it seemed Nintendo had struck out looking.

Amid the doom and gloom however, the 3DS was actually slowly beginning to build something that slightly resembled momentum. June had seen the (re-)launch of Ocarina of Time, the first major release in the 3DS lifecycle. While the release of the Nintendo 64 critical-hit was met with much of the same praise it received in 1998–when it was first released–it was not enough to excite moribund sales. The $300+ price point for system and a remake was too burdensome for most gamers in a rough economy. Nevertheless, Nintendo finally had a franchise icon they could push with the 3DS.

When Nintendo actually cut the price in the 3DS from an MSRP of $249.99 to a much more palatable $169.99, sales spiked. While the price cut was a black spot for Nintendo, and precipitated expectation of their first annual loss in decades, there was at least a silver lining. The lower price point actually worked in luring more gamers to the system (according to NMM, ownership of the 3DS surged 33% between Q2 and Q3). After nearly six months of sputtering in first gear, the leaner price made the system more broadly appealing.

Late Autumn finally saw Nintendo drop the Mario sledgehammers, releasing Super Mario 3D Land in November, and Mario Kart 7 in December. Both were released to critical acclaim, and both quickly topped 1 million in sales. More importantly, they were both engines for 3DS sales. Since the release of the two games, the 3DS has gone from laggard to leader, reaching 4 million units sold faster than even the Wii.

One of our big themes with the 3DS over the first half of its release was the lack of first-party games that are so critical to Nintendo. Failing to launch the system with compelling titles and with a hefty price tag (remember, the Wii’s launch MSRP was $249.99 as well), was enough to keep gamers away. By appealing to gamers on both price and quality, Nintendo once again may be on the road to success in the handheld gaming market.

Looking forward, the 3DS has all the tools (growing ownership base and a huge slate of upcoming releases) that should propel both hardware and software sales over the life of the system. However, a challenger approaches: Sony’s newest handheld, the Vita, looks to be a slick and well-equipped combatant with a high-quality core of launch titles. Whether the Vita can knock Nintendo off its recently acquired perch remains to be seen, but Nintendo’s head start, and subsequent lump-taking in the market, may prove to be a critical advantage.

The Vita will be available starting February 22 in North America (MSRP $249.99).

Timeline is more aesthetically pleasing than the last version of the profile page and it provides the information in an actual timeline format, starting with your most recent activity and ending with the day you came into existence. Navigating through the months and years of any Facebook profile now involves only 1-2 clicks, instead of resorting to never-ending scrolling. Also readily available are all the apps you have on your profile, along with any activities involving them (what song you listened to on Spotify, what movie you watched on Netflix, etc.). If anyone was ever curious what I do in my spare time, they could easily check my new profile and see everything I’m willing to share with the masses.

So in my efforts of trying to find some dirt on my friend, I instead found a mass of really old information that honestly did not need to be brought back to life, or at least not to the forefront where it can easily be accessed. Granted, Facebook lets you hand pick what you want to appear in your Timeline and what should remain hidden, but this isn’t all that comforting to me, and according to our New Media Measure™ Q3 2011 data, I am not alone. Over two-thirds of active Facebook users (68%) agree they are concerned about the privacy of the information they share online. And though Timeline will display posts only with the people you originally shared it with, Facebook has had plenty of privacy snafus in the past.

Likewise, over half of active Facebook users (59%) are not comfortable with websites and apps sharing their information with advertisers. Given that the layout of Timeline will likely prompt users to share more information, Facebook will be able to further personalize the ads served to each profile.

Users will eventually have to transition to the Timeline as their profile, and will therefore have to spend a few hours deciding what they want displayed to the world (users get seven days to preview Timeline before going live). The real question, though, is when company Pages will eventually also have to migrate to Timeline or to a Timeline-similar layout. This presents a potential danger to brands and companies. It would be frowned upon if a company decided to hide or delete negative comments or controversial campaigns. But it can also be perceived as damaging to have all this negative feedback readily accessible to its consumers. One way or another, the decision of what to include on a new Pages layout will bring forth strong reactions.

So as more users enable Timeline, how will they react to it? Will they embrace having all of their Facebook activity presented to them in one shot, or will they cringe at the amount of information Facebook has stored over the years and be so overwhelmed by it that they will jump ship like I did? And, when brands are eventually required to embrace a new Pages format, what will they decide to showcase on their own Timelines?

Our New Media Measure data from Q3 2011 offers a few clues to what may happen. Spotify users are much more apt to “pay extra for a service that allowed them to avoid advertising” – 51% of them agree with this statement, much higher than the 32% of the general population. Furthermore, Spotify users stream an average of 4.4 hours of music per week (not necessarily all through Spotify), which would put them over the ten-hour-per-month limit pretty quickly. So a lot of Spotify users are probably going to upgrade, right?

Well, on the other hand, our data shows that most of these users (54%) agree that “anything they find on the Internet that they can use, watch or listen to should be free.”

So will the ability to skip advertising help convince users to pay to upgrade? Are the other amenities – mobile listening, offline listening – worth the upgrade? Or will Pandora or another service benefit from Spotify’s new limits?

What will you do? Sound off in the comments.

In the early 00′s, the Battlefield series was one of the first titles to really forsake the single-player experience (which was essentially the multi-player with AI instead of human opponents). By crafting massive 64-player servers and a competitive and engaging multi-player experience, Battlefield 1942 was an early model for advancing online-FPS play. Today, owing no small thanks to the rise in highspeed broadband availability, the standard has flipped as the first-person shooter has become a predominantly online-focused experience. The multi-player experience is a huge draw for gamers, so much so, that Activision is rolling out an entire service catering to hardcore online players.

It makes sense then that well-executed online-play would drive franchises. Gamers crave a competitive online experience. Of the four franchises featured below (Battlefield, Call of Duty, Counterstrike, Halo), only Halo has delivered a consistently lengthy single-player experience with every release. Battlefield’s Bad Company series (the fifth game in the series) was the first in the series to feature an actual single-player campaign, whereas Call of Duty made its bones in WWI-era single-player before the more recent Modern Warfare iterations put an emphasis squarely on the multi-player experience.

This week’s data point of the week featured a look at how high-volume online gamers are playing some of the last decades’ most popular first-person shooter franchises. It should come as no surprise that those that play online at least an hour everyday and prefer to play first-person shooters, play Call of Duty the most. It’s become one of the top-selling franchises in video-game history and is frequently cited as one of the most played games in our New Media Measure studies. Battlefield’s newest release, Battlefield 3, drops on Tuesday, which should create a very interesting competition over the holiday season for supremacy in the Online-FPS sphere.

Click to enlarge

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of who these consumers are and how marketers can reach them. For instance, one of these segments makes a lot of online purchases, but they aren’t actually very active on social networks. Want to know more? For a limited time, the report is free with any other purchase from inchartsdata.com (just add the report and any other item to your cart).

Feel free to contact us at sales@interpretllc.com for more information, or leave us a note in the comments.

This past spring, a trio of ultra-visible tech companies launched efforts to cull users on to their digital cloud platforms. Along with Amazon’s cloud player and and Apple’s iCloud (and more importantly, iTunes Match), Google Music promises to harness the power of the “cloud” for digital music. Though the “cloud” term is in fact more marketing buzz than technical innovation, we can excuse it because what it represents for music is actually quite useful. Currently, all three services are still in the early stages, with Google Music still in Beta, Amazon counting down to the Kindle Fire release to supplement their cloud player, and Apple having yet to launch its iCloud service.

Given the relatively close release dates, similar functionality, and technological prominence of the three brands, it will be interesting to see who will come out on top. The massive retail presence behind both Amazon and Apple suggest a much higher stake in succeeding in cloud music than Google. To combat this, Google Music will need to be a dedicated and top-notch experience. Otherwise, the seemingly larger investments by Amazon and Apple will ultimately crowd Google out of the market.

I wanted to take a closer look at Google Music, and my specific focus was a web app that I could use as a de facto substitute for iTunes at work or when traveling away from my desktop PC. When asked to be an iTunes stand in, Google’s Music Manager (MM) is imperfect, but functionally capable.

The first step in adopting Google Music requires integrating your collection in to the service, which is very time consuming as it is EXTREMELY…SLOW. Leaving MM running overnight uploaded just 300-400 songs. Users are allowed an upper limit of 20,000 songs, promising a potential multi-week upload venture for large collections. This can be especially frustrating because the service seemed to be a drag on internet speeds on my entire home network. I recommend sticking to only uploading songs while sleeping.

The MM didn’t seem to have any decipherable logic while importing songs; some artist catalogs were completely uploaded at the beginning, and many others only had a couple songs uploaded as the importer jumped randomly from song to song. The ability to import and create playlists are a nice touch, especially when some of my memorable ones are 5+ years old. The instant mix random playlist is a fun feature to use and mess around with as well.

From a design standpoint, the interface does a decent job of aping iTunes. Users can sort by artist, album, genre, and song, but only sorting by song allows users to view artists in a simple list format – the rest force viewing by album cover. MM also allows the user to “rate” their own music, which I could not find any use for. Without a social aspect (integrating with Google+) or the ability to remove it from the columns, it just stands out as an awkward addition.

As a functional stand-in cloud music storage app and player, Google Music works in a pinch. It’s basic and easy to use. Once you’ve uploaded your music, you can access the files wherever you have an internet connection. The actual music quality sounds good, and I never had any audio or skipping problems due to internet connection issues. From a value and convenience standpoint, Google Music is great. The overall user experience is only average though. If Amazon and the Kindle Fire kill it in execution or Apple’s iCloud delivers a uniquely Apple experience, I would be hard pressed to find a reason to stay loyal to Google Music.

The Kindle Fire is not a direct competitor to the iPad. Its screen is roughly three inches smaller, it does not have a camera, and it is not 3G capable. However it is $300 cheaper, priced at $199. It also provides direct access to all the Amazon stores, like its app store, the Kindle book store, Amazon Instant Video, as well as the Amazon Cloud service.

Though the Kindle Fire will not (anytime soon) overtake the iPad, its low price will generate great interest and will place it as the clear number two in the market. So many of the devices released previously have been priced around the same as the iPad ($499), or even higher. This affordable price point will definitely work to Amazon’s advantage—when HP slashed the price of the TouchPad to $99 after it was discontinued, demand soared and stores quickly ran out of stock.

What’s potentially even more important is the vast access to content the Kindle Fire will provide its users. Similar to the iPad’s access to iTunes, the Kindle Fire will have direct access to the largest online retailer. Amazon’s e-book sales has for months been outselling all physical copies of books. Its MP3 store has also made headlines, with special promotions like Lady Gaga’s new album priced only at $0.99. And Amazon Video Instant has signed a fair share of deals to widen its video library. Unlike all other iPad competitors, this instantly puts the Kindle Fire at a great advantage. And what consumer does not like having a one-stop shop for all his/her online purchasing needs?

So will Amazon be successful with its Kindle Fire, or will it become another TouchPad? In short, it will be successful. Unless there is something horribly wrong with the device—and from the demo videos released so far, there doesn’t appear to be—it will be a hit. For consumers who have wanted to purchase an iPad but have held back because of its price tag—like myself—the Kindle Fire offers a reasonable alternative. And with the holiday season coming along, many, potentially even myself, will acquire one.