Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Does Google know something Robert Scoble doesn’t for once? Today he wrote about how Google doesn’t even know how to optimize their content for their own search engine. With the release of Google Android, Google added a super long flash demo movie to their developer API page to hype up the iPhone killer. Rather than breaking the video into discreet units focused on individual features and functionality, each surrounded with rich keyword goodness, Google crammed all the content into one full length feature film. Scoble does have a valid point but maybe Google sees the future - Long Form Video. Sure Google Video is now dead and gone but YouTube reigns supreme and Google just so happens to own GooTube as it has become so affectionately known. Whether they are playing by their own rules or paving the way for the future only time will tell but their recent announcement to increase YouTube video quality tenfold could be a key indicator of online rich media’s future.

One thing is for sure internet video is here to stay. We are all accustomed to having unlimited access to short clips of “stupid human tricks” and being able to hop around from clip to clip never focusing for more than 2 minutes at a time. The success of Digg, Stumbleupon and Twitter add more weight to the A.D.D debate. But wait, there may be at least a few people on the internet capable of paying attention for more than 30 seconds at a time. A recent press release from Move Networks indicates that twice as many people watched long-form video in November than just a few months ago, with the average viewing session lasting longer than 50 minutes. My CNET podcast this morning focused on new TiVo features and the difficulty AppleTV is having in breaking into the convoluted set-top box market. So are we ready to ditch our dish and jump on the broadband wagon? I think we are very close. I have two employees (both originating in Europe oddly enough) that only watch television shows on the ineternet and have no access to conventional cable or network television. If Fox is willing to replay prime time shows on MySpace and quality issues go away as content providers follow the YouTube leader we can expect to start paying more for higher bandwidth as we ditch our T.V. for iT.V. and begin watching what we want, when we want it.

After two days I decided to check in on how my favorite Facebook products are doing - see my earlier post about Facebook product search and how it is stifling the ability to locate company product pages. Actually I have been checking in more regularly but didn’t want to bore anyone with the lack of news to report. Well the Coca Cola page is up 11% with 460 fans and The New York Times is now at 1,678 fans up from 1,400. It seems that the $1 cupcake (Today’s New Gift) is still more viral than any product page (I have read unsupported claims of users sending upwards of 10,000,000 gifts each day), or maybe everyone is too busy playing Scrabulous (459,965 daily active users) and reading Calvin and Hobbes to realize anything else exists on Facebook.

On a related note, I found Max Freiert’s Compete Blog entry rather fascinating. In his article he discusses which sites Facebook and MySpace users tend to visit in addition to their 20+ avg daily page views and 40+ avg minutes wasted invested on the Facebook social net. The site with the highest affinity among heavy Facebook users was listed as Greek9 with an affinity score of 25.65. This score indicates that in general, frequent Facebook users are 25X more likely to visit Greek9 than other internet users. Initially I thought the number looked odd but after a quick peek at the numbers on Quantcast I realized that it was indeed correct. The Facebook demographic is heavily skewed to African American users. I would be very interested in knowing more about how the affinity is calculated in addition to seeing the rest of the Compete data in this category. In general the data provided seems realistic. I believe given a list of all the sites in the Facebook and MySpace columns of Max’s graph, it wouldn’t be too challenging to match each site to the appropriate social network column.

Who is providing the search results for Facebook? It seems their search algorithm could use a little work. A search for “Coke” returns a bunch of guys with their shirts off whereas a search for “Coca Cola” returns Coca Cola Hong Kong as the #1 result. Doesn’t Facebook realize my profile is in english? I am pretty sure they know my city, state and zip code in addition to my language preference. Searching for “company” returns a bunch of groups and profiles. Searching for “soda” returns Soda Popinski from Mike Tyson’s punch out!

Of course being the Coke lover that I am (sorry Pepsi - even your great commercials weren’t enough to woo me) I must add Coke to my Facebook products. Clicking Add to My Products brought up a little dialog asking if it is ok for Coke to send updates to my Facebook inbox. Sure, why not? I click Add - “Error. You did not enter the text provided.” Weird, what text? I clicked cancel and tried again, this time the dialog displays the full dialog with a security check captcha “Associated grocery.” Finally, Facebook grants me my wish to become a fan of Coca Cola! I am approximately the 412th fan since Coke launched their Facebook page yesterday at 2:21am.

Ok switching gears a bit I thought I would try to locate another of the high profile Facebook partners The New York Times using the advanced search tool. Unfortunately advanced search is limited to searching on profile fields of your existing friends. Searching for “times” in the main search dialog brings back The New York Times News Quiz but no product page. Searching on the full company name finally brings back a valid result but it is number two in the results placement.

While on the Times page I added the product, their eNews application and their quiz. After adding each application I found there was no way to get back to the original product page. All logos and links were for the Times main web site. After all this mucking around within Facebook I decided to give Google a shot at locating the Facebook product pages. A quick search for “coca cola” site:facebook.com in conjunction with the I’m Feeling Lucky button does the trick. The Times page was #1 in the Google SERPs and it wasn’t in Chinese.

Maybe Facebook is no Google killer after all. If I have to use Google’s search engine to locate Facebook product pages how is Facebook going to successfully take advantage of this new feature? Plus there doesn’t seem to be much buzz surrounding this launch other than in the search and online marketing communities. After a full day since it was launched the Coca Cola page only had a few hundred product adds and the Times only had 1400. Considering Facebook has 24 million unique visitors a month according to Compete these sites could be doing a lot better. Maybe once the spammers arrive Facebook’s new ad network will have reached critical mass and we will have to begin taking it seriously as AdWords competition.

I text from my cell phone once in awhile depending on the circumstances but I am nowhere near the power texter my little sister is. She can crank out massively long text messages in seconds with her Blackberry and then expects a similarly long response back from me via text. Since I am often driving when I am in texting mode, I had to come up with a simpler and safer solution.

Jott is a neat little service, still in public beta, that allows you to convert speech to text and send an email. You can record up to 30 seconds of voice and send it either as an audio email attachment or allow Jott to convert it to text and send it as a plain text email. This works out perfectly.

I have found the conversion to be surprisingly accurate. There are of course words like my sister’s name that it can’t understand. Simply spell out the longer words and it will convert them correctly. Of course you need a decent cell phone with some background noise filtering or a pretty quiet place to record your Jotts otherwise you get interrupted by the canned Jott lady continuously because she can’t understand you.

Getting contacts into Jott is easy with the contact import tool. You can pull in contacts from most of the popular web email services such as Gmail and Hotmail or you can import from your Microsoft Outlook contacts using .csv format. You may need to edit your contact names after importing them to add phonetic spellings of their name. Once you get your contacts imported you can group them, allowing you to send a single Jott to multiple contacts in one fell swoop.

Hmm…importing contacts from Yahoo mail sounds great, but what about my social networking contacts? Well, Jott wouldn’t be cool if it didn’t already have that issue covered. You can add various social networking and blogging sites like Twitter, Tumblr and WordPress to Jott allowing you to voice your blog entries to the masses. Jott offers a new Jott iGoogle gadget and a stand-alone desktop application too.

Jott is a fabulous service that everyone can use. Wait, how do you use it again? Well, you simply add Jott as a contact on your phone and call the Jott service. The friendly Jott canned lady answers your calls and using simple voice commands like “myself” (to take notes - oh I love this one!) or the name of your group you can leave your message just like leaving a voicemail. For the most part the interface is hands free but there are some keypad shortcuts that will save you from waiting for the timeout like the “#” symbol to send your Jott and move on.

Did I mention that it is free? I suggest not only using Jott but also clicking-through the Jawbone ad and saving $20 on “the highest rated bluetooth headset ever!”

Wow, Google’s new OpenSocial news release marks the event horizon for the latest blogging black hole. I will gleefully join in the latest hokey pokey knowing full well my blog post will likely be sucked into the black abyss never to return.

I am not an Orkut user so I have no opinion on Googles latest updates or how Orkut could be impacted. I assume the latest Orkut release was based largely on the SocialStream project and that it paved the way for this new development platform release. I believe an open platform will be a fabulous way to unify the social networking experience, keep users on the internet longer, allow people to make more “friends” and maybe even pump a few ad dollars Google’s way but in the true spirit of openness Google has neglected to invite the biggest current player in the open developer platform to the party - Facebook. I can’t say that I am surprised to see quotes like this from Facebook personnel in response to the Google announcement:

Despite reports, Facebook has still not been briefed on OpenSocial. When we have had a chance to understand the technology, then Facebook will evaluate participation relative to the benefits to its 50 million users and 100,000 platform developers.

In the end, unification is a good thing. Microsoft managed to unify the world with their closed OS at Apple’s expense and Apple still managed to find their niche.  Guess I need to go open up an Orkut account and get plugged in to the new socialnet.