Steve Jobs: 1955 to 2011

Steve Jobs passed away earlier today, succumbing to that bitch: Cancer. Twitter has been going off tap, exploding in reportedly the heaviest load since it launched, causing the site to experience outages. News and tributes are flowing in from around the world. This is a quick snapshot of the sites I visit regularly and how they are handled this sad event in the first 2 hours after the news broke.

Apples influence on my life?

• Apple IIE at Primary School in Grade 4
• Apple Mac at High School in Year 7
• Apple Macbook – my future wife's, 2004
• Apple iMac, 2006 – my fiance's end of work present, before our first child
• Apple iPhone 3 – my wife's toy (I use a Blackberry, but played with her phone – alot) 2007
• Apple iPhone3GS – replacement for hers that was stolen – 2009
• Apple iPad – launch day, we were out shopping and chanced upon one: May 2010
• Apple Macbook Air 11" – launch day, my new work laptop, October 2010

Ashton Kutcher summed it up most aptly for the masses:

Apple's own Home Page, www.apple.com

With the click through going to a simple tribute:

On Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg's Status:

On Twitter: Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft & Philanthropist

On Twitter: Lance Armstrong, 7 Times Tour de France winner and full time cancer fighter.

Boing Boing, changed its entire site to reflect Apple's Macintosh's original interface:

Googles Home Page, had a subtle, tribute, linking straight to Apple.com, their arch rival.

Wired's Home Page, is probably the most dramatic change, devoting its entire homepage, in place of its diverse blogs and news feeds:

The Cult of Mac, has an extensive collection of posts, historical archives and tributes:

April Fool’s Day

I really like April Fool’s day, as it gives frustrated marketers around the world the chance to show some creativity and let their hair down.

The granddaddy of April 1st pranks in the digital space has to be Google, as listed out here on Wikipedia. Google’s past April Fool’s jokes have included:

• 2007 Gmail Paper
• 2007 TISP – Toilet Internet Service Provider
• 2008 Google Custom Time
• 2008 G’day with MATE
• 2009 CADIE – Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

2010 Looks like a Community Jail is going to be created by the guys at the Googleplex as reported by Fast Company

You Tube (owned by Google) has also got into the spirit of things since 2008 by Rickrolling everyone with the featured vids across the website. 2009 saw a continuance of the frivolity with their New View Experience

BMW UK has announced the creation of an interchangable badge – or roundel – for their vehicles as reported by http://f1photos.org/

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.

The great wall of Facebook: The Social Network’s Plan to Dominate the Internet – and Keep Google Out.

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.

Google shows analytics API

I can see this announcement by Google in recent days about releasing the Analytics API to developers creating a whole new cottage industry overnight:

• Custom tailored and tracked analytics targetted, triggered and monitored at discretion by customers directly.

The dev team at the Areeba offices think this is very cool, as it opens up whole new ways to metric user behaviour and monitor site statistics in meaningful ways which have business relevence. Watch this space, we’ll have it connected to RedDot errr Open Text Web Solutions Suite, Umbraco & Drupal in a flash.

• Desktop widgets will start appearing that are designed to communicate when pre-determined benchmarks have been met i.e. number of visitors post a campaign period; number of transactions in a period; average period of time for the website as a snapshot. A refinement of this could include a summary of the most visited pages of a particular type i.e. latest product, product support, legacy products; service type; location.
• tailored search result presentation will come to the fore, based on prior user data influencing the representation of search results and its relevence.
• Connecting to the cloud inversely, you could run a search of the terms in your particular industry and then compare it against your own website to see if your competitors have the jump on you for particular marketing drives, campaigns etc. In effect, it would be RSS on steroids because you could set up alerts which actively scan for terms you yourself are marketing for and be much more intertwined with the data being fed back to you, which would allow immediate response to market conditions…..

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/04/attention-developers-google-analytics.html

How cool are Google for allowing direct access to the API? Heh – 50 years from now, there will be churches and a religion for Google, in tribute to their data mining philosophy. They own it all. Or will. Soon.