Facebook Search: Will BING swamp Google?
Earlier this week, it was reported by Hitwise and commented upon by Frisky Mongoose that Facebook had surpassed Google as the most visited site in the United States, capturing 7.07% of traffic in comparison to Googles, relatively static 7.03%.
This is significant for a number of reasons, not least of all, in that Google itself surplanted that rapidly declining social network in MySpace back in 2007 as the most visited site. Social networking has come around full circle again. The most significant step though is that this traffic data is supplying Microsoft, who invested $240 million USD into Facebook in October of 2007 to overlay its Bing search tech over the Facebook web technologies. Microsoft’s Bing search is shaping up to be fundamentally different to Google in that it’s search is being driven by trending data as opposed to Google’s advertising driven Pay Per Click model which awards ranking (in the main) to business which pay for the priviledge of being top of the pops. Bing’s search is different as it is driven by the influences of other media. To state simply, it references crowd dynamics and the rhythm and flow of what the community is focused upon. If people see a TV Commercial that is of interest, they will search for an answer of relevance. If people see a print commercial in a glossy magazine, they will search for an answer of relevance. People are spending time on Facebook and with 350+ million users, it is inevitable that some of these search queries will drive Facebook traffic and dialogue.
A great example that illustrates this: Consider if you ask the question “What is the best LCD TV?” to both Google and Facebook (and in turn Bing).
Google will report back blog postings, forums and advertised sponsor sites which have purchased the keywords “best LCD TV” and websites which Google’s myriad of algorithms (which change hourly) have identified as being “relevent”. This will include specific manufacturers who have paid for the privilege of being ranked.
However, if you ask this same question “What is the best LCD TV?” in your status feed on Facebook and you will get a wave of commentary from your friends – your trusted network, your go too people whose opinion and insight you value. Go one step further – What if one of your friends adds a link that is relevant to their opinion/comment? You are far more likely to click this endorsed link and look at this site, because it came from your trusted network. Recent evidence also suggests this little cherub in terms of the traffic data: Facebook’s outbound links, those that people click on via status feeds is predicted to within the next 3 years to rival the search query link summary that Google serves every day in terms of click through rates.
And Facebook being a closed garden environment – Google can’t see a damn thing on what’s happening inside, nor where the outbound traffic is flowing from unless it’s own analytics is overlaid on the end user site. Microsoft can.
Hmmm. That’s a tasty spread of trending data for Microsoft to feed into its search tech and influence the Bing search results to its users. To paraphrase Zoolander “It’s that damn Facebook! It’s so hot right now!”
Facebook: The Private Internet
Illustration: Brent Humphreys
This article popped up on Wired a few days ago and has elicited a number of spirited discussions amongst my colleagues and friends.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-07/ff_facebookwall
FACEBOOK’S 4-Step Plan for Online Domination
Mark Zuckerberg has never thought of his company as a mere social network. He and his team are in the middle of a multiyear campaign to change how the Web is organized—with Facebook at the center. Here’s how they hope to pull it off.
1 – Sell targeted ads, everywhere. Facebook hopes to one day sell advertising across all of its partner sites and apps, not just on its own site. The company will be able to draw on the immense volume of personal data it owns to create extremely targeted messages.
2 – The challenge: not freaking out its users in the process. Build critical mass. In the eight months ending in April, Facebook has doubled in size to 200 million members, who contribute 4 billion pieces of info, 850 million photos, and 8 million videos every month.
3 – The result: a second Internet, one that includes users’ most personal data and resides entirely on Facebook’s servers. Redefine search. Facebook thinks its members will turn to their friends—rather than Google’s algorithms—to navigate the Web. It already drives an eyebrow-raising amount of traffic to outside sites, and that will only increase once Facebook Search allows users to easily explore one another’s feeds.
4 – Colonize the Web. Thanks to a pair of new initiatives—dubbed Facebook Connect and Open Stream—users don’t have to log in to Facebook to communicate with their friends. Now they can access their network from any of 10,000 partner sites or apps, contributing even more valuable data to Facebook’s servers every time they do it.
Taking a step back for a moment, last year, Microsoft sunk in a hefty $240 Million USD into Facebook returning back 5% ownership of the new kid on the block, which yielded an extrapolated worth of $15 billion USD. Not bad Mr Zuckerberg. Ostensibly, this investment was a fast start to allow Microsoft to deploy its BING search technology, which is Microsoft’s latest attempt to cash in on the search market which Google & Overture (Yahoo!) have dominated for so long. As an aside, some of my colleagues have referred to BING as “But It’s Not Google” which brings a smile to my face. The creation of the private index for Microsoft’s & Facebook’s own use is what fascinates me more, as with a large pool of active users, the gathered data around trending topics and user preferences is simply staggering.
Now specifically – will it work? Will Facebook’s effort’s to create a 2nd, “closed” network of information and activity tailored on its network of users yield much needed revenue and deliver monetary value to shareholders without alienating users?
Facebook’s efforts at creating a personalised experience for its user base and deliver a complexity and depth of targeted advertising that will surpass anything that has occurred before has a big challenge ahead of it. Part of this will be the delivery to its audience that walks that fine line of not annoying them yet offers value and ultimately makes their browsing experience more enriched. The challenges Facebook has is minimising the impact on the user experience or compromising the privacy of its users – and advertisers. As the user audiences learn to adopt the baseline delivery which encompasses the above, they will become less concerned about such foibles, instead preferring to manage their information in an appropriate fashion.
The heart of this issues is our faith. We put it to blind faith that our erstwhile corporate overseers that make up the organisations like Google, Facebook, etc will do the “right” thing from an ethical and moral standpoint with our information and our online personas.
I actually don’t personally mind that in my Facebook profile, I have in my interests listed “Mountain Biking, Snow Skiing and Adventure Racing” and am getting ad served specific information around cheap snow ski accommodation at Falls Creek, MTB insurance and adventure racing sales at my favourite online store. It’s cool and relevent to me and currently doesn’t impact too much on my day to day.
What I object too is the stance that the disasterous Beacon trials went through mid to late 2007 when suddenly users are portrayed to their trusted friends network as having looked at or endorsed a product or service, which may have through natural attrition been discarded as irrelevant, unsuitable or whatever other metric we care to value judge things by.
With the steroid driven BING Search technology now mining data and being analysed to levels never seen before, trends are being spotted in real time around social clusters – the users friendship network, meaning the relevence and value it offers users is significantly increased. If Facebook starts to spam its audience in any way – whether it be email, pop ups on in the browser or larger and more imposing add space, they better be ready to receive a massive drop in their active user base.
The original appeal of Facebook in the first place was that it was a relatively austere and add free environment, to connect and stay in touch with your friends. If it becomes a newspaper of your friends lives, then, the audience will be there, but its focus and preferences will shift with the next new thing.
Then Facebook will be back to square one – how to make money?
All things considered, now that Facebook has shown the usefulness of having a network which is closed, and offers insight into what our friends are doing, thinking and their opinions, I think if I were given the option of having an advertising free experience, on a closed network which only presented me my friends updates, photos and information, I’d be comfortable paying for it.
I wonder if this is a viable option now.
Social Media at Work: Yes or No?
Even accounting for duplicate and inactive account logins, collectively, there are 750,000,000+ registered potential users (that’s 750 million for those of you that got dazed by the zero’s) that are spending time online frittering away their lives looking at what other people do and commenting about questions or circumstances that affect each of us. Or so our corporate parents within Corporate Communications, Human Resources, Management or the Executive would have you believe.
A quick snapshot of the registered users for each of the below social networks yields some serious numbers.
Facebook: 200,000,000+
My Space: 260,000,000+
Linkedin: 42,000,000+
Twitter: 25,000,000+
Windows Live Spaces: 120,000,000+
Bebo: 40,000,000+
Flixster: 63,000,000+
And these are only the ‘big ones’ as cited by Wikipedia’s Social Networking websites list on 25th June 2009.
Depending on the medium in question, accessing any sort of social networking website whilst at work is generally construed as a time waster and as such sites like this often get “blocked” by the IT Dept. And in all seriousness, your erstwhile corporate guardians do have a point, as it impinges on productivity and has a monetary cost both from internet bandwidth as well as the loss of efficiency in your staff.
However the problem is one of understanding around the use of such networks correctly, both at work and in your private time. I’m constantly taken aback by the number of people who complain about unfair treatment because they’ve blown off some steam and made a comment about their workplace, a colleague or some sort of negative reference to their place of employment, the place they are paid to do a job and act in a professional manner reflecting their organisations values. Since when was blasting out in a public forum considered an appropriate means of self expression and immune to the influence and rules which govern your workplace? You’re asked not to swear, dress inappropriately or be dishonest whilst at work, why is it any different to when you are out of work? There is a massive difference to having a whinge to your buddies down at the pub on a Friday night, verses publishing on the web for all to see, comments about the eating habits of the guy 3 cubicles up, or the appalling dress sense of the girl over in X department.
Or worse.
As @danwwilson Twittered recently: “I’m amazed that some people continue to think that twitter has a magical privacy cloak.”
Social Media sites are very important, as has been shown because of the groundswell of popular/negative opinion that can race across your screen with your friends endorsement/derision, your work colleagues recommendation/warding off all driven off just good old fashioned crowd dynamics. Doubly important in recent times, it has become readily apparent that responsible use can yield useful information and influence peoples thoughts and behaviours because of the common thread of what is a “trending topic” emerging for people to critique and access. Responsible use by everyone, both at work and privately needs to be governed by the businesses in the first place, so that employees are encouraged to elicit a sense of responsibility and ownership for their employer and their place within the organisation.
Simplistically put, if an organisation respectfully manages the staff, the staff will in turn respectfully manage the organisation.
To this end, I often advise business to articulate a clear Social Networking policy, around access, acceptable and expected behaviour with clear guidelines as to the conseqences and outcomes of misconduct. This is no different to 15 years ago when Email started to enter the workplace and personal emails were initially frowned upon. Or 10 years ago when doing online banking. Or 5 years ago when you wanted to book tickets to something. Anyone who has a computer with Internet access in the workplace is likely to have a role where there is some amount of time where they wait for something to complete, are having lunch or doing research online.
It is nowadays quite common and reasonably expected that in their lunch break, employees may do some online banking, check the online news or book a movie/aerobics class/plane flights. Access to Social networks should fall under the same umbrella, with the encouragement of responsible usage, behavior and ownership. The other side of this is with an older workforce (think the Baby Boomer or Builder Generations) having to learn the computer skills such as typing and just basic navigation around the computer, if they are encouraged to use it in a social context on their lunch break, there is a very real advantage around increasing their familiarity and comfort level with the equipment. Anyone under the age of 30 will likely use a computer naturally – type quickly, understand basic navigational functionality and key concepts like saving and archiving files. This basic concept of technology use is severely misunderstood by IT Depts and many large organisations and the result is poor productively, decreased efficiency and often cost intensive training programs and “work” endorsed and targetted training. Employers who shift the culture and thinking to use of computers as a tool for getting your job done more quickly and allow access to the spread of social networking functions will reap the benefits of a happier and more satisfied workforce.
Employees are a valuable part of your workforce – that is why you pay them. Being responsible adults, structured and clear governance of their access to such facilities with clear guidelines will be reflected in how they treat their role – with a sense of pride and ownership. The ultimate outcome will be a workforce which has less to complain about, and will have a deeper appreciation of their role within the organisation, as critically, they will be offered a sense of ownership and respect within the business.
Social Media at work? Yes.
With appropriate communication, you will have a happier and more productive workforce, who will feel valued and respected for their contributions.
My Space vs Facebook
Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch fame noted on his blog a couple of days ago the fact that My Space’s growth is stagnating compared to its arch rival Facebook .
Getting too it – why is My Space in decline?
Simply put – Usability. It sucks. I never got onto My Space because almost every time I visited it, I encountered the following problems
- Navigation moved around. One My Space site is different to the next, and the lack of consistent representation of the User Interface made it a nightmare to move through the site. I’m time poor as it is – I don’t want to spend it wading through and wrestling with navigation.
- Readability: Fonts and the use of crazy colours like white font on a yellow background (or vice versa) made it tough to read. Add to this the personalised backgrounds which varied from grim dense photos across to riotous patterns made it nigh on impossible to read.
- Rubbish: Many My Space pages I came across were rubbish. I mean not even interesting rubbish. Just rubbish.
- Profile Picture Inconsistency – Portrait, Landscape, Big, Small – your friends lists looked like a mish mash of images stacked on each other. Amateurish.
I’ve always been of the opinion that My Space’s popularity stemmed from 2 key areas – Celebrity and Personalisation. The Celebrity aspect is that Hollywood A-List types, Rock Bands, Rap Singers, Soccer, Aussie Rules all got onboard, as the benefits from a distribution point of view and the relative low cost for the publicity and doing the “in thing” were all tangible and measurable in their benefits. Everyone flocked online, as the iconisation and ability to “friend” aspect were easy, accessible and straight forward. The Personalisation side is the ability to build your own page “just so”. That’s where the “Usability that sucks” enter.
Facebook on the other hand is positively anodyne in its austere interface. I’ve been on it for about 2.5 years now and watched it go through 3 changes. The current interface leaves alot to be desired, so much so, that I barely login anymore unless I’m wanting to see what is going on with friends who are travelling overseas. On the upside, the community is cohesive and a proper closed garden if you set your privacy settings correctly. The other strengths, or they were in the past, was that the interface was relatively persistent and most importantly, it was readable, putting the content as the focus. Usability and the subsequent User Experience went up, because, well it was easy to use.
And then when Facebook released the developer API in early May 2007, all hell broke loose, as Facebook’s own way of personalisation had entered the market, driven by the hot trends of the day – beyond the walls of the Facebook employee group, who whilst smart, could never hope to compete with the groundswell of applications from the global developer community racing to commercialise the next hot idea. Smart move Team Facebook.
And look who else has done good by releasing the API – Apple. iPhone. App Store. Is Good. RIM (Blackberry), Nokia & Sony Ericsson are playing catch up.
My Space has a MASSIVE user base. Right now. They need to start utilising it to maximise revenue by creating a community within its boundaries, one that embraces the individuality. They just need to fix up the Usability for it to work.
BBC Book List
[Thanks to Kate M for this one, which landed on my Facebook page]
The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions: Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read – even those you’ve read more than once!
Make sure you delete my x’S! When you’ve finished, tag 10 people to do it too, and put your total at the bottom.
1 – Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – x
2 – The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – x
3 – Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 – Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – x (all 7….)
5 – To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – x
6 – The Bible – x
7 – Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – x
8 – Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – x
9 – His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 – Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – x
11 – Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – x
12 – Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 – Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – x
14 – Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 – Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 – The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – x
17 – Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 – Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 – The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 – Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 – Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – x
22 – The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – x
23 – Bleak House – Charles Dickens – x
24 – War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – x
25 – The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – x
26 – Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 – Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 – Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 – Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – x
30 – The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – x
31 – Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 – David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 – Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – x (all 7…)
34 – Emma – Jane Austen – x
35 – Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 – The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – x (huh isn’t this part of 33?)
37 – The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 – Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 – Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – x
41 – Animal Farm – George Orwell – x
42 – The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – x
43 – One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 – A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 – The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 – Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 – Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 – The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 – Lord of the Flies – William Golding – x
50 – Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 – Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 – Dune – Frank Herbert – x
53 – Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 – Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 – A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 – The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 – A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – x
58 – Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – x
59 – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 – Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 – Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 – Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 – The Secret History – Donna Tartt – x
64 – The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 – Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 – On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 – Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 – Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 – Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 – Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 – Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – x
72 – Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 – The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – x
74 – Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 – Ulysses – James Joyce
76 – The Inferno – Dante
77 – Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 – Germinal – Emile Zola
79 – Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 – Possession – AS Byatt
81 – A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 – Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 – The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 – The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 – Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 – A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 – Charlotte’s Web – EB White – x
88 – The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 – Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – x
90 – The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – x
91 – Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – x
92 – The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – x
93 – The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – x
94 – Watership Down – Richard Adam – x
95 – A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 – A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 – The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – x
98 – Hamlet – William Shakespeare – x
99 – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – x
100 – Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
I’ve read 41 and now have a bunch of new ones to tackle. There is a particularly strong skew towards a British style of schooling with a great deal of the English “classics” in there. I’d be somewhat impressed if half these books were even heard of by anyone from outside the United Kingdom.
A quick Google of “BBC Book List” returned back a slightly different list on the BBC Website itself, posted in 2003 BBC – The Big Read – Top 100 Books with the pre text
In April 2003 the BBC’s Big Read began the search for the nation’s best-loved novel, and we asked you to nominate your favourite books. Below and on the next page are all the results from number 1 to 100 in numerical order!
Shame there isn’t more:
- Fantasy & Adventure (Eddings, Feist, McCaffrey etc),
- Sci-Fi (Banks, Gibson, Asimov, Heinlein, Scott-Card etc) &
- Espionage (Clancy, Le Carre, Ludlum etc)
Facebook – one step closer to real life
Kiwi judge follows Australian Facebook precedent It seems our progressive Australian Court System isn’t the only one in the world wading into the virtual reality of Facebook and its 170 million plus inhabitants with virtual writ in virtual hand. A New Zealand court – the High Court no less - also deciding it was possible – and legal – to serve court documents to an individual who failed to turn up to face the music at their appointed hour. This case is following on from a landmark case which occured late 2008 in Australia as reported here in the December 12th 2008 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald – Australian court serves documents via Facebook
The old fashioned means of writing a letter, stamping the envelope and Australia Post being subpoenaed to disclose the address and contents of the recipient and sender under court order has just moved into the digital world. Emails have long been held as legally enforceable in court, it seems Facebooks ‘closed garden‘ bulletin board status is crumbling that little bit more and ‘privacy’ as most people perceive it is just that little bit less. Look out Facebook residents, your world just got more real again, as opposed to an escape.
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