Twitter Sucks

Really. If it was me, I'd be asking for my $15M back.

Google Search Quality

Late yesterday, Udi Manber, VP of Engineering for Search Quality over at Google offered up a post on the Official Google Blog titled - Introduction to Google Search Quality. What drew me in was this quote -

This blog post is part of a renewed effort to open up a bit more than we have in the past.

Having high hopes I read on, hoping for some insights into the (largely) black box that is search relevancy. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The post dedicated a fair amount of time to detailing just how hard the job of the Search Quality team is, and how every second they have to handle hundreds of queries, parsing billions of documents to pluck out and order the relative few. And how they have just milliseconds to do so. Some time was also spent on the structure of the group, internationalization efforts, and some past history.

That's all great, but it feels like a setup to me. Frankly, this post did nothing to "open up a bit more" and even reiterated the point of why they need to be so secretive -

We are, to be honest, quite secretive about what we do. There are two reasons for it: competition and abuse. Competition is pretty straightforward. No company wants to share its secret recipes with its competitors. As for abuse, if we make our ranking formulas too accessible, we make it easier for people to game the system. Security by obscurity is never the strongest measure, and we do not rely on it exclusively, but it does prevent a lot of abuse.

So in one blog-breath Google tells us their opening the door a crack while at the same time applying a few more dead bolts. It smells of PR to me and not a genuine desire for transparency.

I was also surprised to see this item receive fairly sparse coverage around the blogs and news sites. I don't go crazy with my RSS subscriptions like lots of folks do, but I've got 40 or so relevant ones in Google Reader and I've only seen this bit from SearchEngineLand - and that's nothing more than a recap  without any commentary.

Perhaps I'm being too quick to judge. The post is, after all, labeled as the first in a series. So far, nothing has been revealed, but I'll be watching that spot in Google Reader closely over the next few weeks.

Related Posts: The Expanding Web

The Future of SEO

Last week's entertainment included a post and follow-up by ShoeMoney in which he prophesied the demise of SEO as we currently know it. As posts of this type will, it raised the ire of the SEO community at large, including this ridiculous, and thankfully brief, commentary by Sage Lewis. Let's put aside Mr. Lewis's apparent reading disability (he stumbles over quite a bit of his script - perhaps a retake was in order) and focus on this statement he makes:

SEO is all about optimizing for the visitor. You make the visitor experience great and you will be paid off in your search engine ranking results.

Unfortunately, this is mostly incorrect. Here's why:

Back-Links - SEOs spend vast amounts of time generating inbound links. Inbound back-links have zero capability to make the experience better for the site visitor.

The Algorithm - You can hardly read a semi-intellectual post about SEO without mention of "The Algo." Frankly, the search engine algorithms don't care about the visitor experience. They count keywords, look for on-page markup, and use other factors gleaned from the scraped page in an attempt to determine if said page is relevant to a particular search term. Here are some examples of how the algorithm really doesn't take the user experience into account and at times can be directly counter to a good user experience -

• Rewriting the URLs of a dynamic site so they look static does nothing for the user experience.
• Modifying site copy so that it's more keyword rich has no direct benefit for the user. In fact, any site that brings it's own voice and style to content creation often has to make editorial sacrifices in order to achieve a highly optimized piece of content. This directly results in a degradation of the user experience.
• Meta Description / Keyword / Title tags have little impact on the user experience.

Mr. Lewis might bring up the concept of good site architecture, and how a highly silo-ized site benefits both SEO and the site visitor. I'll agree on this point, but let's also remember that information architecture has been around much longer than SEO. Making a site intuitively navigable has been best practice in site creation for many hears and has nothing specific to do with SEO, other than the fact that the search algorithms need intra-site links to find content.

It's a bit presumptuous for Mr. Lewis, and the SEO community, to co-opt good site design in the name of search engine optimization. It's as if with one fell swoop they've made sites findable and been what site designers and IAs have been looking for all their lives.

The final irony here is, of course, that SearchEngineGuide has dedicated time to ShoeMoney's post. Here's what Mr. Lewis has to say -

... our industry falls for this every single time when somebody criticizes it, comes out and bashes it, and it comes out and links right back to the person. Which I find funny....This ShoeMoney character is not worth our time.

Of course, Mr. Lewis's post is free publicity for ShoeMoney. Now that's funny.

Related Posts: Spammers, All

Google Friend Connect

Yesterday Google announced a private beta of FriendConnect - a standards based (OpenID, oAuth, and OpenSocial) collection of widgets that can bring social networking type functionality to any site or blog. The announcement has garnered its fair share of coverage (Mashable, Yahoo!, SearchEngineLand, Outside the Lines) so instead of simply rehashing what's already been written about FriendConnect, I'd like to look a little deeper.

With the CPC contextual text link model, Google opened up online advertising to the masses. With AdWords, even the smallest web site could bid on keywords and arbitrage traffic - effectively eliminating all barriers to entry. With FriendConnect, we will see the same effect. Any web site, no matter how small, will be able to add social networking components. Initial availability will include user registration, invitations, member galleries, message posting, and reviews, as well as OpenSocial applications.

This is again Google's long-tail approach to the web. Commodotize a feature set once controlled by a small number of vendors, and in so doing reach the vast potential of 100+ million web sites out there. With FriendConnect, Facebook and MySpace lose their prominence as social media platforms and the web itself becomes the platform. Consider how the game changes when your OpenID follows you from site to site and you know which friends are active on which sites. Combine this with the data portability movement and suddenly the web begins to resemble, well, life. Walk into any room, see whos there, recognize your pals and, wherever you go, you're the same person.

Google Toolbar PageRank Gone

On the heels of a highly isolated StumbleUpon disappearance, my string of internet anomalies continues. The PageRank has gone missing from the google toolbar. As of this morning, for every site I visit, my google toolbar in both IE and FIrefox has lost the little green progress bar. Upon rollover, I get the following message "No PageRank information available."

I checked a few other computers in the office and we're all seeing the same thing. Anybody else out there seeing this?

Spammers, All

How many Friends do you have?

Not on Twitter or Digg or anywhere like that. I mean Friends with a capital F - real ones. Now, compare that number to how many social media "friends" you have. My guess is that, if you practice SEO for a living, your online friends out number your real world friends by at least one order of magnitude.

A couple of days ago, rebecca over at SEOMoz complained that Digg Shout-Blocked her. When she attempted to send a shout to her entire fan base, she was first asked to narrow down her list of friends before selecting which ones would receive the message. She didn't like this and points to her Digg usage stats as evidence that she's not a spammer and thus Digg should allow her to do what she pleases. She has 568 friends and says:

I mean, all I do is befriend people who become fans of me. The whole point on having friends on Digg is so that you can share stories with each other, and the Shout feature allows you to share stories with a large number of friends vs. having to contact them all one-by-one. Why then would Digg penalize me for having too many friends? Did I hit some mysterious "max number," like once you get to 500, it's too many?

Blindly befriending everybody who becomes a fan of you on a site like Digg is evidence enough that you're not using the site to truly find like minded internet jockeys. And, blindly sending shouts to hundreds of your friends is not "the whole point of having friends on Digg."

As professionals, we should be honest with ourselves. Sending a story to 500 mostly anonymous people on a social bookmarking site is spam. You're doing it with the hopes of garnering votes, most of which will come from folks who never even read the story.

So, the next time you're having an identity crisis, count your friends both real and online. The bigger the multiple of online friends to real, the bigger spammer you are.

Related Posts: Google, SEO and the Ruination of the Internet

StumbleUpon Down?

Is StumbleUpon down?

Last night I was attempting a stumble and here's what I got:

Okay, so it was late and I decided to pack it in for the night. Early this morning, I visited StumbleUpon again and got the same message. I found a quick NSLookup tool online and ran a query, to find:

What stands out here is the expire time on the DNS record, which seems to be set to 604800 seconds, which equals 7 days !?! Could StumbleUpon have planned a server move without adjusting thier TTL first? Is anybody else seeing this? I'll try to check some other name servers when I get to work.

UPDATE: Okay, so, it works fine from home. I suppose it could be an issue with my ISP at home. Still curious is anybody else say any issues.

Going Viral

I've heard this phrase far too much in recent weeks. It's usually come in two phases. I like to call them Viral Desire and Paid Popularity. Here's how they work.

Viral Desire
A traditional print media company begins to dabble in the digital world. Having a voice and distinct editorial style they figure their content will play well online, just as it has on the newsstands. A new Digital Team is hired and a framework is established to leverage content online and drive organic traffic growth. Within three months, traffic from natural search results has doubled and continues to grow steadily. This, however, is not enough for the Men In Charge. They want more, and they want it faster. "Let's Go Viral," they say.

Of course, to the reasonably intelligent among us this is a ridiculous statement. Far too often the Men In Charge believe that something will happen simply because they say it will.

The Digital Team explains that Going Viral requires, above all else, quality content. "Videos!" demand the Men In Charge. And so non-trivial sums of money are spent on editing stations and high definition video cameras and expensive paid-hourly editors. The video is shot, and edited, and transcoded, and uploaded, and YouTubed, and the Men In Charge say - Let's Go Viral.

And, guess what? Nothing happens. That is, the content created is fine but not exceptional and it's received online as such. Some people look at it. Most don't. It's certainly not viral.

Paid Popularity
The internet, with all it's wonders, has truly been a boon to mankind. We are living in the midst of a revolution, driven by technology and a seemingly bottomless pit of entrepreneurs. As with any period in history where the rules of the game have changed at such a rapid pace, there are those who seek to subvert the system and profit from the gaping holes that technology's advance leaves behind. Here are some examples from the Internet Era in which we live:

Overpriced HTML - In the early-mid 1990's, when the World Wide Web was freshly spun and corporate America was racing to get online, services companies sprung up by the thousands. These firms would hire freshly minted philosophy majors, bestow upon them the lofty title of Web Master, and bill them out at $150 / hour to create brochure-ware websites. And they made a lot of money doing it, too - that is, they did until 2001.

Earnings-Free Startups - Bubble 1.0 was infamous for new companies whose cost model far exceeded their revenue model, and most of them never found a way out of that hole. Bubble 2.0 has solved this problem by eliminating revenue all together, and so far it's worked. Twitter, anyone?

AnyHat SEO - I liken the modern day SEO to the Aristotle toting Web Master of 1995. Nobody's really sure what she does, but they're willing to pay large sums to get it done. The greatest part about this swindle is that the SEO guarantees nothing - except that they'll try really hard to improve rankings.

UPDATE: Case in point to the above - Expensive SEO

One of the fastest growing segments of this exploitation set are purveyors of popularity. Just as SEO has become an over-hyped beauty contest and relevance reduced to a function how many inbound links a site can generate, the notion of online popularity is further blurred when you consider the following services are available for hire:

• Paid Diggs - Going rate $1 - $2 per Digg
• YouTube Subversion - Ever seen a "Featured" video play while you're tinkering with that new Facebook application you just added to your home page? $25,000 will buy you 100,000 embedded YouTube video views.
• Paid Links / Blog Posts - Old Faithfuls, I know, but worth mentioning.
• StumbleUpon CPC - A legitimate offer from SU, for $0.05 CPC you can have as much traffic as you want. Seems harmless at first glance, but consider that the stumbler who gets the page served to them has no idea it's paid placement.

In this world where popularity can be had for a price, how can we trust any story that lands on the front page of Digg, or any site served from StumbleUpon, or any video that has Gone Viral?

Related Posts: Web Page Spam Definition, SEO Dirty Tricks

Aggregation for the Mainstream?

Mashasble has published an article today asking the question -

Will Aggregation Ever go Mainstream?

It's a valid question. In considering the issue, they reference recent posts from Louis Gray and Corvida, but the main point made and the potential death knell for these services is:

I think it isn’t that these sites aren’t cool and fun. I think that it’s just for folks who aren’t news junkies or folks who don’t make their hobbies and livings being up to date on the news have other things to be doing.

In an earlier post considering lifestreaming services in general, I wondered aloud (well, in blog-print) who has time for all this hyper-connectivity and in the end opted out of my FriendFeed account.  The reality is that the early adopters who have put the weight behind the initial splash of these services is a finite set. Eventually, growth will slow and the public at large will be looking for something more. My guess is that the common internet user doesn't have hundreds of RSS feeds and thousands of social media friends. For those folks these services simply aren't useful.

While the problem of Information Fragmentation is a real one, for most of the population it's manageable. I think of my wife as the perfect example. She has one email account, one social media account (facebook), reads the NYTimes online, mostly ignores her Twitter account, and has no idea what RSS means. Sure, she's got a few places to visit in order to collect her daily dose of digital information, but something like FriendFeed would be an unneeded layer of abstraction.

The articles referenced above cite the need for added functionality to allow a service like FriendFeed to be viable for the masses. You can break down these potential functional additions into two categories:

Added Functionality Generates Service Specific Data
If a service like FriendFeed generates additional data specific to the use of the service, then the service itself simply adds to the problem. That is, it ceases to be just an aggregation point and so as competing services evolve it becomes likely that either users will need to join multiple aggregation services or the aggregation services will need to inter-operate. Both of these scenarios seem pointless and I'm fairly certain there's an endless loop involved in inter-operable aggregation services.

Added Functionality Does Not Generate Service Specific Data
If these services do nothing but allow you to interact with your social media data from afar, then they're resigned to be the bastard step child of the sites for which they aggregate. For the average user, there's no reason to participate in FriendFeed when it's just as easy and more straightforward to participate in Facebook.

So the jury that is me remains undecided on the fate of these services. For an incredibly small segment of the population they present a solution to a daily problem, but to the internet user at large they're not very compelling. I'll report back when my wife activates a FriendFeed account.

Related Posts: LIfestreaming

ThinkPad X300 Ad

This is brilliant -