Thoughtpick: A unique perspective of the Web and social media...
A unique perspective of the Web and social media...

March 8, 2010

Is Twitter Finally Choosing a Business Model?

Ever since Twitter secured as much as $100 million dollars funding last year, speculation went wild on what kind of business model they will adopt. In November, Twitter COO Dick Costolo confirmed that the first piece to fall into place is the Ad platform which he described as “fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it… It’s going to be really cool.

What We Know So Far?

Now we are getting closer to the day when this Ad-platform will be introduced publicly and it maybe as soon as next month during the South by Southwest Conference. According to the Wall Street Journal, the long awaited Twitter platform will look something like this:

  • The ads will be tied to Twitter search, displaying only the ads that are relevant to the search term.
  • The ads will be 140 or fewer characters, 3rd party applications will have the option to display the ads and Twitter will share revenue with them if they do.
  • Twitter will work with ad agencies at first but will move to a Google like self-serve model later on.
  • Non invasive and will be clearly marked as “sponsored” tweets

What we already know about the Ad-platform leaves a lot of speculations running in everyone’s head in relation to how it will work and what impact it will have on Twitter’s ever expanding user base.

What Will the Ads Look like?

An Ad.ly ad

An Ad.ly ad

Will the ads be clearly labeled like ad.ly’s In-Stream ads? Or will they be more like “I am having the new Italian burger at McDonalds” and “My favorite Chips is so-n-so or the direct in your face kind of “Click this link and 20% off of your next purchase”.

[read full article >>]

December 20, 2009

Facebook Apologizes for their Privacy screw-up… kind of!

I just got an email from my system with a screen shot of a message she just got on Facebook. The message stated:

Worried about search engines? Your information is safe.

There have been misleading rumors recently about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. That is not true. Facebook created public search listings in 2007 to enable people to search for your name and see a link to your Facebook profile. They will still only see a basic set of information.

Facebook Search Engine Privacy Message

Facebook Search Engine Privacy Message

NOT a rumor…

What Facebook is calling a rumor is documented by hundreds of posts around the web. About 2 weeks ago, Facebook’s “new and improved” privacy settings were announced. When you click next you get a screen to update your privacy settings (see image below). Many of the defaults on this page are to open your profile information to “everyone“, which includes search engines – and Google.

[read full article >>]

December 15, 2009

HOW TO: Create an Untouchable Market, the Google Way!

I blank out when it comes to writing intros, so I’m diving into my thoughts straight ahead. Everyone talks about Google’s “far into the future” vision and how it’s one of the most brilliantly run companies ever. Reading the latest news about Google Goggles, Favorite Places, image search advancements and so on, got me thinking: I am imaging that a few Google employees sat down one afternoon, just before Christmas 2004 and one of them said:

“We’re Google. Let’s create a new market that no one can follow us into!”

And that’s what they’ve been doing for the past 5 years; creating a new market share that no one can compete with them at. Think about the timeline:

[read full article >>]

December 11, 2009

Seven Things We Now Know From 2009’s Search Results

Although 2009 is almost one month short of being over, Google has already published its yearly Zeitgeist, charting the year’s most popular searches, and subsequently charting the mindset of the world, as reflected digitally. Naturally, Yahoo and Bing followed suite.

It probably doesn’t come off as a surprise that Michael Jackson is the world’s biggest winner in 2009, even when it comes to search engine queries. He topped the internet charts with no competition, and even archenemies Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo agree together on that. Not to risk sounding insensitive, but death was definitely Michael’s best career move.

Aside from the King of Pop (as well as King of Search, apparently), the three search engine giants do not agree on the rest of 2009’s most popular search queries.

How do their lists compare? And what does it say about their users?

Legend:
Red: Pop Culture
Blue: Social Media

Google’s Year-End Zeitgeist List:

Google Search Query Breakdown

Google Search Query Breakdown

  1. Michael Jackson
  2. Facebook
  3. Tuenti
  4. Twitter
  5. Sanalika
  6. New Moon
  7. Lady Gaga
  8. Windows 7
  9. Dantri.com.vn
  10. Torpedo gratis

(Sanalika is a Turkish Second Life with a network, Dantri is a Vietnamese news site, and Torpedo Gratis is an online SMS service in Brazil).

[read full article >>]

November 19, 2009

Android, Gizmo5 & adMob: The Scary Thought of Google As My Mobile Operator

The Google Leviathan has been on the move lately, engulfing several smaller fish on the internet. The latest “victim” being Gizmo5 a VoIP service a la Skype.

Google Voice, your next phone company

Google Voice

Google Voice

Gizmo5 coupled with Google Voice has the prospect of being a very seductive concoction. Users will sign up to Google Voice and get a phone number that will forward all their calls to all their other numbers. It will also provide them with free conference calling and free voice mail to email services among many others. The service will also offer them ultra-cheap outgoing calls. If Google adds support for SMS and MMS, it will allow the customer to completely circumvent the mobile operators per minute tariff and, in general, it might do to mobile operators what the mobile did to the land line.

Now Google seems to have delinquently tried to steer the regulators away from branding Google Voice as a replacement for landlines, since you will still need a phone number to direct all those calls to. So does that mean Google will be the next AT&T?

[read full article >>]

October 31, 2009

HOW TO: Build a XHTML Valid Wordpress Blog with DISQUS Plugin

The last couple of days, I was reading about how to get your site to rank higher in Google. There are many tweaks you can do to insure that your site is Google friendly. One of the controversial topics was whether having your pages XHTML/HTML valid helps in SEO ranking or not. It’s clear that if your site has made a mess out of the HTML code, a search engine spider might have a tough time reading and parsing your page, which might lead to errors and in turn lower ranking. So, I decided that it’s better to be safe than sorry, and started converting the entire blog to XHTML 1.0 Transitional valid.

Thoughtpick Valid XHTML

Thoughtpick Valid XHTML

Let’s start…

The main issues targeted by this post

On the Thoughtpick blog, we have a few plugins that were causing XHTML validation issues. Mainly:

  • DISQUS Commenting System: At least 4 or 5 XHTML validation errors were generated by this plugin. The solutions are listed below.
  • Wordpress 2.8+ “role” problem, and how to fix it.
  • Youtube and Vimeo embed object issues: the <embed> tag is invalid for XHTML 1.0, to fix the issue, I wrote a small function.

[read full article >>]

October 13, 2009

Fact: Real-time Search Satisfies 40% of User Queries!

An interesting white paper published at OneRiot’s blog claims that 40% of users’ search queries across major search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask are best satisfied by real-time search results. That is, indeed, quite an impressive number that shows the huge potential market for real-time search engines. It also – somehow – explains the huge buzz around Twitter and the continuous talk about the potential threat it poses to other traditional search engines, especially Google.

Real-time search engines fail to gain market share

Aside from Twitter, other – recently emerged – real-time search engines are finding a hard time proving their business model and gaining market share, in spite of the potential huge market. We, here at Thoughtpick, have been monitoring this market since our coverage of 9 real-time search engines a few months ago. Unfortunately, according to compete stats, there has been no major gains in the last 3 months, on the contrary, most services showed a decline in numbers of visitors. In fact, OneRiot which is the most successful in this category, with 150k more visitors than its second competitor Twingly, shows a drop of 100k visitors in the last 3 months.

Oneriot.com, Twingly, Collecta, Socialmention and Scoopler traffic [compete.com]

Oneriot, Twingly, Collecta, Socialmention and Scoopler traffic

[read full article >>]

June 29, 2009

50 Top Noise-free Twitter Tips & Links in Marketing, SEO, Design & Writing!

Wouldn’t it be just great if you could find the most useful tweets and links about the hottest most interesting topics online, all in one place? Wouldn’t it be just convenient if you could link that valuable information to the tweeple who posted it so you can have continuous access to his/her tweets by following him/her accordingly?

Well, I for one would love to have such a collection of valuable information at my disposal, not TweetMeme or Twitturly style, rather ThoughtPick style!

Below you will find a specialized well researched list of 50 Top Twitter Tips and Links divided into 5 distinctive categories: Social Media & Marketing, Design, SEO & AdSense, Writing and Motivational.

Award Winning Tips & Links

Award Winning Tips & Links

1. Top Social Media & Marketing Tips and Links

[read full article >>]

May 29, 2009

9 Real-Time Search Engines Which Go Beyond Twitter

In the recent months, the real time search engine market has been firing-up. There are many services around trying to gain some market share in this newly found area. We did some research, read many articles, and covered up most of what’s out there (if we missed any service, please let us know in the comments).

Twingly Search Filter Sidebar

Twingly

We followed a simple criteria to pick services and build our list: Any service must be (1) Real-time and (2) NOT limited to Twitter search results. Here we go:

  1. Twingly’s microblog search: It covers Twitter, Jaiku, Identica, Bleeper, and a few other services. It’s dedicated to microblogging and offers a RSS subscription option for your searches. While being dominated by Twitter results, it gives you the option of filtering it out by un-checking a box on the side of the page. This makes Twingly one of the most customizable realtime search services covered in this article.
  2. Social Mention: Social Mention covers 80+ social media services including all of the major players (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc). While it has one of the neatest and most clean interfaces among the services we covered, it seems to be the slowest one – showing a list of flashing stars for up to 1 minutes sometimes! We like the various options it provides: the tab options, alerts, RSS subscriptions, the ranking/trending system, and the option of exporting your search results into CSV/Excel file, but slow speed is a deal-breaker! On the other hand, for social alerts and comprehensiveness, it’s one of the best.
    SocialMention - Comprehensive but slow!

    SocialMention - Comprehensive but slow!

    [read full article >>]

March 27, 2009

Is it time for Google to start tweeting?

Since Twitter introduced their new search engine the tech world has been debating the new introduced concept of a live streaming search engine and what does it mean in terms of how we perceive search in general and its effect on Google in particular? While some people argue that Twitter is not even a search engine, others give reasons of why Twitter’s is the future of web search.

When I tried Twitter’s search myself, I felt a sense of novelty and excitement that I haven’t felt about search for a long time. While aggregating live streaming gives you the latest updates of what you are looking for, the sense of having people say it in a relevant sentence gives a whole different dimension of credibility. No matter how smart Google algorithm can be, we – as people – still put out trust in other human predicaments. There is an Arabic proverb that says “Ask an experienced not an expert”.

On the other hand, Twitter’s search is limited in many ways. It doesn’t cover the areas Google search covers today. It is only an aggregation of live stream interactions where the most recent appears on the top, it doesn’t cover any popularity heritage, indexing or ranking methods that Google reside to in order to come up with better search results.

Of course, both of these search methods serve different search needs, but like many people, I prefer an integrated medium that offers both searches in one place. While I can’t see how Twitter would ever possibly offer Google’s search engine functionality due to their current business model, I can see it easily happening the other way around. Google has been trying to infiltrate the social networking arena through its Friend Connect service. They give people the tools to turn any website or blog into a social networking medium easily. If Friend Connect gains the needed popularity, it can be the right tool to build Google’s Twitter-like database. If it fails then maybe Google should consider buying Twitter?

Some people have already started working on integrating both searches. Consultant, Mark Carey, came up with a browser add-on that displays the 5 most recent Twitter search results on top of Google’s search results page.


It sounds like a good solution for now, but I prefer my own version of such implementation of having the whole set of Twitter’s search results to the side of Google’s search result. That would elemenate precendecy of search results giving both search methods equal space, and allows more search results from Twitter to appear directly without the need of further clicks. WebMynd extension offers such layout option of adding a Twitter search, along with other widgets, to the side of Google’s search results, but I think it is better if Google offer their own service and build their own micro-blogging database.

It is cool to try both searches! I can’t help but wonder: will Google create a micro-Blogger.com? What tricks will Twitter pull out of its hat? In 2015, do you think the current Google search can cut it? Let’s hear your opinion, comment below…