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Ripples Bookmarklet

July 20 2012 // SEO + Social Media + Technology // 30 Comments

Who shared your post and how did it spread on Google+? That’s what Ripples can tell you, allowing you to find influencers and evangelists.

Google+ Ripples

You can find Ripples in the drop down menu on public posts.

Google Plus Ripples Drop Down

But I noticed that there was also a small URL entry field on the Ripples page.

Google Ripples URL Field

Sure enough you can drop in a URL and see Ripples for any page.

Google Ripples Example

(Interesting how each of my shares of this post are shown separately.)

Ripples Bookmarklet

I didn’t want to go traipsing back and forth to enter URLs, so I created a bookmarklet.

Find Ripples

Drag the link above to your bookmarks bar. Then click the bookmark whenever you want to see Ripples for the page you’re on. [Clarification] This is for non-Google+ URLs only. Ripples for Google+ URLs are only available via the drop-down menu.

So stop wondering and find out who’s sharing your content (or any content) on Google+.

Twitter Cards Are Rich Snippets For Tweets

June 18 2012 // SEO + Social Media + Technology // 29 Comments

On Thursday Twitter announced something called Twitter Cards. What are Twitter Cards? They’re essentially rich snippets for Tweets and I predict they’re going to be essential for making your content more portable.

Twitter Cards

There are actually three different types of cards: summary, photo and player. The summary is the default card while the photo and player cards are specifically for images and videos. Here’s the example Twitter provides for a summary card.

Twitter Card Example

Yes Twitter, you definitely have my attention.

Transforming Twitter?

Twitter Cards could transform Twitter from the text based default it has languished in for years to one that will compete with the more appealing and popular visual feeds like Instagram, Path, Foursquare, Tumblr, Google+ and Facebook, the latter two most notably on mobile.

If the summary card is open by default your Twitter stream would look vastly different. It might also change the behavior of those using Twitter and cause people to trim the number of those they follow.

Twitter desperately needs to capture more time and attention to fully realize their advertising business. Transforming the feed through Twitter Cards could be a big step in the right direction.

Twitter Card Properties

All of the cards support some basic properties.

Basic Twitter Card Properties

You can optionally (and ideally) also include attribution in your Twitter Card.

Twitter Card Attribution

The summary card is probably the easiest one of the three with very few required properties.

Twitter Summary Card Properties

Note that you can only have one card per post. If you have the time, I recommend you read through the Twitter Card documentation.

Twitter and Open Graph Tags

You might be thinking to yourself, good god, I have to figure out another set of markup? Well, not exactly. Twitter will actually fall back on Open Graph tags should you already have those in place.

But the Open Graph tags aren’t comprehensive. So if you’ve got Open Graph tags in place then you’ll just need to add a few more to get the most out of Twitter Cards. In particular, you won’t get the attribution which is very attractive in my opinion.

As an aside, there’s no mention of whether Twitter will parse schema.org markup or fall back even further to standard markup like the title tag or meta description.

How To Implement Twitter Cards

I have the Open Graph tags on Blind Five Year Old but decided to implement all of the Twitter tags because I want to be certain I have full control over what is being delivered. I think portability is increasingly important so I’m not going to take any chances.

Now, a lot of what I’m going to show you is based on prior hacks and on the plugins I happen to use. So you may not be able to replicate what I do exactly, but it should give you an idea of how you can do it yourself.

Check Your Head

Check Your Head

The first thing to understand is where to put these tags. They go in the <head> of your posts. The <head> is essentially an area (invisible to the user) located before the actual content of a page. It’s where you give instructions to browsers and search engines about the page. This can be all sorts of things from the title to styling of a page. It’s also where you declare the values for all these tags.

Think of it this way, you need special glasses to watch that 3D movie, the <head> is where you’d be given those glasses.

View Page Source

You can see what’s in the <head> by doing a simple right mouse click on any page and selecting ‘View Page Source’.

View Page Source

That will open up a new tab with a whole mess of code for you to review and inspect.

Page Head

My <head> is a bit messy with all the stuff I’ve done and use, but it still works and at some point I’ll come back around to clean it up. Next, we’ll make sure these new Twitter tags show up here.

Edit Your Header

In WordPress, go to your Dashboard and select Appearance > Editor.

WordPress Appearance Editor

Next, select the header file which will likely be header.php.

Edit Header.php File

This is where you’re going to be placing your code.

Now before you go any further, copy all of the code in your header.php and paste it into a text editor. So if you happen to screw things up you can just copy back your old header.php file and start again. (Seriously, do this! I’ve broken my site so many times and it’s that backup copy I have in a text file that often saves the day.)

Drop In The Code

Now it’s time to actually put the code in place. You’re going to put it directly before the closing </head> tag.

Twitter Card Code

I’ve posted a version of the Twitter Card code on Pastebin so you can easily copy and tweak it for your own site. (Do not just copy and paste it into your own file!)

The first line is a comment and does not actually show up on the page nor give any instructions. It just makes it easier for me to see where this code resides once it’s live.

The second line starts with a statement that I only want this on posts. This is accomplished with the if(is_single()) function.

Next I declare the card type (summary) and then the creator (my Twitter handle). I’ve hard coded the creator since I’m the only author on Blind Five Year Old. If you run a single author blog then it’s easy to do this. If you run a multi-author blog or site you’ll have to build in some logic and get the Twitter handle for the author of that post.

To get the URL I simply echo the get_permalink() function. The echo is essentially saying to not only find the permalink but to put what it finds there into the code.

To get the title I echo the get_the_title() function. Yeah, that’s a pretty self explanatory function isn’t it?

For the description I echo the get_post_meta() function which is a collection of meta data about posts. I’m asking for a specific piece of that meta. In this case it’s the _aioseop_description which is the meta description I’ve entered via the All In One SEO Pack.

I sort of cheated by doing a Google search that brought me to a WordPress Support thread that contained the right syntax for this field. If you didn’t know this you’d have to go and find the name of this field in your database via something like phpMyAdmin.

You might also be able to use the_excerpt() or to echo get_the_excerpt() here but I like the specificity since I know I’ve entered something for the meta description myself.

For the image, I’ve essentially replicated what I do to get the Open Graph image but changed the property to name (swapping og for twitter) and content to value. Again, you really don’t need to do this since Twitter says they’ll fall back on the Open Graph image. But I feel better having it explicitly spelled out.

Read through my Snippet Optimization post to learn more about how to use a simple custom field (og_img) to generate a featured image for each post. Seriously, it’s not that hard to do.

After you put your code in you hit update file and then go to a post and view source. Hopefully you see the Twitter Card markup populating correctly. (Check this post for an example.) If not, go back and try again paying close attention to the syntax of your code.

At present Twitter does not have a testing tool like Facebook or Google, but it’s something we may see in the future.

(Please comment if you can improve on, see errors in or can provide additional details such as tips for other platforms or field names for other plugins. A special thanks to Ron Kuris who helped to debug my PHP code.)

A Velvet Rope?

I need To See Some ID LOLcat

It is unclear who exactly will be able to participate in Twitter Cards initially.

To participate in the program, you should (a) read the documentation below, (b) determine whether you wish to support Twitter cards, and then (c) apply to participate. As we roll out this new feature to users and publishers, we are looking for sites with great content and those that drive active discussion and activity on Twitter.

It sounds like Twitter is going to review each site and create a whitelist for those they wish to support. But I have to think that this will become an open standard in short order. So get a jump on things and implement Twitter Cards now.

TL;DR

Twitter Cards are rich snippets for Tweets. Implementing Twitter Cards could transform Twitter into a more appealing visual feed and makes optimizing your Twitter Card an essential part of social portability.

Structured Data Testing Tool Bookmarklet

February 12 2012 // SEO + Technology // 77 Comments

Did you implement your Recipe markup correctly? Is your review microformat being recognized by Google? Does Google understand your address mark-up? The best way to find out is to run it through Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Structured Data Testing Tool Bookmarklet

I used Google’s old Rich Snippets Testing Tool heavily as I helped readers diagnose Authorship markup issues. One morning I was reviewing an interesting post by John Doherty about Google Author Search. In his post he provides a handy bookmarklet.

LOLcat Lightbulb

I realized I should create a Rich Snippets Testing Tool Bookmarklet so I don’t have to continually go to the page manually. So I dusted off my limited javascript skills and after about 10 minutes half an hour of trial and error had it figured out.

This old bookmarklet worked wonders (saving me countless hours of cut and paste) but Google recently migrated the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to the more developer-centric Structured Data Testing Tool. So I quickly updated the bookmarklet to use this new resource.

Structured Data Testing Tool

Drag the highlighted link above to your bookmarks bar. Then click the bookmark whenever you want to test a specific page. It will create a new tab with the Structured Data Testing Tool results.

Google Structured Data Testing Tool Results

This makes it ultra-easy to validate any page for a variety of rich snippets and other structured data. Be careful though since there are still some false negatives within the results.

You can also find this bookmarklet on SEO Skeptic. I strongly encourage you to visit there regardless since it’s a fantastic resource for semantic search.

As always, please let me know if you find this helpful and report any incompatibility issues or bugs you might find with my bookmarklet code.

2012 Internet, SEO and Technology Predictions

December 27 2011 // Analytics + SEO + Technology // 8 Comments

It’s time again to gaze into my crystal ball and make some predictions for 2012.

Crystal Ball Technology Predictions

2012 Predictions

For reference, here are my predictions for 2011, 2010 and 2009. I was a bit too safe last year so I’m making some bold predictions this time around.

Chrome Becomes Top Browser

Having already surpassed Firefox this year, Chrome will see accelerated adoption, surpassing Internet Explorer as the top desktop browser in the closing weeks of 2012.

DuckDuckGo Cracks Mainstream

Gabriel Weinberg puts new funding to work and capitalizes on the ‘search is about answers’ meme. DuckDuckGo leapfrogs over AOL and Ask in 2012, securing itself as the fourth largest search engine.

Google Implements AuthorRank

Google spent 2011 building an identity platform, launching and aggressively promoting authorship while building an internal influence metric. In 2012 they’ll put this all together and use AuthorRank (referred to in patents as Agent Rank) as a search signal. It will have a more profound impact on search than all Panda updates combined.

Image Search Gets Serious

Pinterest. Instagram. mlkshk. We Heart It. Flickr. Meme Generator. The Internet runs on images. Look for a new image search engine, as well as image search analytics. Hopefully this will cause Google to improve (which is a kind word) image search tracking within Google Analytics.

SEO Tool Funding

VCs have been sniffing around SEO tool providers for a number of years. In 2012 one of the major SEO tool providers (SEOmoz or Raven) will receive a serious round of funding. I actually think this is a terrible idea but … there it is.

Frictionless Check-Ins

For location based services to really take off and reach the mainstream they’ll need a near frictionless check-in process. Throughout 2012 you’ll see Facebook, Foursquare and Google one-up each other in providing better ways to check-in. These will start with prompts and evolve into check-out (see Google Wallet) integrations.

Google+ Plateaus

As much as I like Google+ I think it will plateau in mid-2012 and remain a solid second fiddle to Facebook. That’s not a knock of Google+ or the value it brings to both users and Google. There are simply too many choices and no compelling case for mass migration.

HTML5 (Finally) Becomes Important

After a few years of hype HTML5 becomes important, delivering rich experiences that users will come to expect. As both site adoption and browser compatibility rise, search engines will begin to use new HTML5 tags to better understand and analyze pages.

Schema.org Stalls

Structured mark-up will continue to be important but Schema.org adoption will stall. Instead, Google will continue to be an omnivore, happy to digest any type of structured mark-up, while other entities like Facebook will continue to promote their own proprietary mark-up.

Mobile Search Skyrockets

Only 40% of U.S. mobile users have smartphones. That’s going to change in a big way in 2012 as both Apple and Google fight to secure these mobile users. Mobile search will be the place for growth as desktop search growth falls to single digits.

Yahoo! Buys Tumblr

Doubling down on content Yahoo! will buy Tumblr, hoping to extend their contributor network and overlay a sophisticated, targeted display advertising network. In doing so, they’ll quickly shutter all porn related Tumblr blogs.

Google Acquires Topsy

Topsy, the last real-time search engine, is acquired by Google who quickly shuts down the Topsy API and applies the talent to their own initiatives on both desktop and mobile platforms.

Delicious Turns Sour

December 19 2011 // Rant + Technology + Web Design // 8 Comments

In April, the Internet breathed a sigh of relief when Delicious was sold to AVOS instead of being shut down by Yahoo. In spite of Yahoo’s years of neglect, Delicious maintained a powerful place in the Internet ecosystem and remained a popular service.

Users were eager to see Delicious improve under new management. Unfortunately the direction and actions taken by Delicious over the last 8 months make me pine for the days when it was the toy thrown in the corner by Yahoo!

Where Did Delicious Go Wrong?

Delicious Dilapidated Icon

I know new management means well and have likely poured a lot of time and effort into this enterprise. But I see problems in strategy, tactics and execution that have completely undermined user trust and loyalty.

Bookmarklets

The one mission critical feature which fuels the entire enterprise falls into disrepair. Seriously? This is unacceptable. The bookmarklets that allow users to bookmark and tag links were broken for long stretches of time and continue to be rickety and unreliable. This lack of support is akin to disrespect of Delicious users.

Stacks

Here’s how they work. Select some related links, plug them into a stack and watch the magic happen. You can customize your stack by choosing images to feature, and by adding a title, description and comment for each link. Then publish the stack to share it with the world. If you come across another stack you like, follow it to easily find it again and catch any updates.

Instead of the nearly frictionless interaction we’ve grown accustomed to, we’re now asked to perform additional and duplicative work. I’ve already created ‘stacks’ by bookmarking links with appropriate tags. Want to see a stack of links about SEO, look at my bookmarks that are tagged SEO. It doesn’t get much more simple than that.

Not only have they introduced complexity into a simple process, they’ve perverted the reason for bookmarking links. The beauty of Delicious was that you were ‘curating’ without trying. You simply saved links by tags and then one day you figured out that you had a deep reservoir of knowledge on a number of topics.

Stacks does the opposite and invites you to think about curation. I’d argue this creates substantial bias, invites spam and is more aligned with the dreck produced by Squidoo.

Here’s another sign that you’ve introduced unneeded complexity into a product.

Delicious Describes Stacks

In just one sentence they reference stacks, links, playlists and topics. They haven’t even mentioned tags! Am I creating stacks or playlists? If I’m a complete novice do I understand what ‘stack links’ even means?

Even if I do understand this, why do I want to do extra work that Delicious should be doing for me?

Design

Design over Substance

The visual makeover doesn’t add anything to the platform. Do pretty pictures and flashy interactions really help me discover content? Were Delicious users saying they would use the service more if only it looked prettier? I can’t believe that’s true. Delicious had the same UI for years and yet continued to be a popular service.

Delicious is a utilitarian product. It’s about saving, retrieving and finding information.

Sure, Flipboard is really cool but just because a current design pattern is in vogue doesn’t mean it should be applied to every site.

UX

There are a number of UX issues that bother me but I’ll highlight the three that have produced the most ire. The drop down is poorly aligned causing unnecessary frustration.

Delicious Dropdown Alignment

More than a few times I’ve gone across to to click on one of the drop down links only to have it disappear before I could finish the interaction.

The iconography is non-intuitive and doesn’t even have appropriate hover text to describe the action.

Delicious Gray Icons

Delicious Icons are Confusing

Does the + sign mean bookmark that link? What’s the arrow? Is that a pencil?

Now, I actually get the iconography. But that’s the problem! I’m an Internet savvy user, yet the new design seems targeted at a more mainstream user. Imagine if Pinterest didn’t have the word ‘repin’ next to their double thumbtack icon?

Finally, the current bookmarklet supports the tag complete function. You begin typing in a tag and you can simply select from a list of prior tags. This is a great timesaver. It even creates a handy space at the end so you can start your next tag. Or does it?

Delicious Tag Problems

WTF!? Why is my tag all muddled together?

Delicious improved tagging by allowing spaces in tags. That means that all tags have to be separated by commas. I get that. It’s not the worst idea either. But the tag complete feature should support this new structure. Because it looks like it functions correctly by inserting a space after the tag. I mean, am I supposed to use the tag complete feature and then actually backspace and add a comma?

It’s not the best idea to make your users feel stupid.

Uptime

Delicious Unavailable Page

The service has been unstable, lately as poor as it was at the height of Twitter’s fail whale problem. I’ve seen that empty loft way too much.

What Should Delicious Do Instead?

It’s easy to bitch but what could Delicious have done instead? Here’s what I think they should have (and still could) do.

Filtering

An easy first step to improve Delicious would be to provide a better way to filter bookmarks. The only real way to do so right now is by adding additional tags. It would have been easy to introduce time (date) and popularity (number of times bookmarked) facets.

They could have gone an extra step and offered the ability to group bookmarks by source. This would let me see the number of bookmarks I have by site by tag. How many times have I bookmarked a Search Engine Land article about SEO? Not only would this be interesting, it maps to how we think and remember. You’ll hear people say something like: “It was that piece on management I read on Harvard Business Review.”

There are a tremendous number of ways that the new team could have simply enhanced the current functionality to deliver added value to users.

Recommendations

Recommendation LOLcat

Delicious could create recommendations based on current bookmark behavior and tag interest. The data is there. It just needs to be unlocked.

It would be relatively straightforward to create a ‘people who bookmarked this also bookmarked’ feature. Even better if it only displayed those I haven’t already bookmarked. That’s content discovery.

This could be extended to natural browse by tag behavior. A list of popular bookmarks with that tag but not in my bookmarks would be pretty handy.

Delicious could also alert you when it saw a new bookmark from a popular tag within your bookmarks. This would give me a quick way to see what was ‘hot’ for topics I cared about.

Recommendations would put Delicious in competition with services like Summify, KnowAboutIt, XYDO and Percolate. It’s a crowded space but Delicious is sitting on a huge advantage with the massive amount of data at their disposal.

Automated Stacks

Instead of introducing unnecessary friction Delicious could create stacks algorthmically using tags. This could be personal (your own curated topics) or across the entire platform. Again, why Delicious is asking me to do something that they can and should do is a mystery to me.

Also, the argument that people could select from multiple tags to create more robust stacks doesn’t hold much water. Delicious knows which tags appear together most often and on what bookmarks. Automated stacks could pull from multiple tags.

The algorithm that creates these stacks would also constantly evolve. They would be dynamic and not prone to decay. New bookmarks would be added and bookmarks that weren’t useful (based on age, lack of clicks or additional bookmarks) would be dropped.

Delicious already solved the difficult human element of curation. It just never applied appropriate algorithms to harness that incredible asset.

Social Graph Data

Delicious could help order bookmarks and augment recommendations by adding social graph data. The easiest thing to do would be to determine the number of Likes, Tweets and +1s each bookmark received. This might simply mirror bookmark popularity though. So you would next look at who saved the bookmarks and map their social profiles to determine authority and influence. Now you could order bookmarks that were saved by thought leaders in any vertical.

A step further, Delicious could look at the comments on a bookmarked piece of content. This could be used as a signal in itself based on the number of comments, could be mined to determine sentiment or could provide another vector for social data.

Trunk.ly was closing in on this since they already aggregated links via social profiles. Give them your Twitter account and they collect and save what you Tweet. This frictionless mechanism had some drawbacks but it showed a lot of promise. Unfortunately Trunk.ly was recently purchased by Delicious. Maybe some of the promise will show up on Delicious but the philosophy behind stacks seems to be in direct conflict with how Trunk.ly functioned.

Analytics

Delicious could have provided analytics to individuals as to the number of times their bookmarks were viewed, clicked or re-bookmarked. The latter two metrics could also be used to construct an internal influence metric. If I bookmark something because I saw your bookmark, that’s essentially on par with a retweet.

For businesses, Delicious could aggregate all the bookmarks for that domain (or domains), providing statistics on the most bookmarked pieces as well as when they are viewed and clicked. A notification service when your content is bookmarked would also be low-hanging fruit.

Search

Delicious already has search and many use it extensively to find hidden gems from both the past and present. But search could be made far better. In the end Delicious could have made a play for being the largest and best curated search engine. I might be biased because of my interest in search but this just seems like a no-brainer.

Revenue

Building a PPC platform seems like a good fit if you decide to make search a primary feature of the site. It could even work (to a lesser extent) if you don’t feature search. Advertisers could pay per keyword search or tag search. I doubt this would disrupt user behavior since users are used to this design pattern thanks to Google.

Delicious could even implement something similar to StumbleUpon, allowing advertisers to buy ‘bookmark recommendations’. This type of targeted exposure would be highly valuable (to users and advertisers) and the number of bookmarks could provide long-term traffic and benefits. Success might be measured in a new bookmarks per impression metric.

TL;DR

The new Delicious is a step backward, abandoning simplicity and neglecting mechanisms that build replenishing value. Instead management has introduced complexity and friction while concentrating on cosmetics. The end result is far worse than the neglect Delicious suffered at the hands of Yahoo.

Mozilla Search Showdown

November 15 2011 // SEO + Technology // 5 Comments

Mozilla’s search partnership with Google expires at the end of November. What happens next could change search engine and browser market share as well as the future of Mozilla.

The Mozilla Google Search Partnership

Originally entered into in November 2004 and renewed in 2006 (for 2 years) and 2008 (for 3 years), the search partnership delivers a substantial amount of their revenue to Mozilla. In fact, in 2010 98% of the $121 million in revenue came from search related activity.

The majority of Mozilla’s revenue is generated from search functionality included in our Firefox product through all major search partners including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, Ebay and others.

Most of that search revenue comes specifically from Google. The ‘Concentrations of Risk’ section in Mozilla’s 2009 (pdf) and 2010 (pdf) consolidated financial statements put Google’s contribution to revenue at 91% in 2008, 86% in 2009 and 84% in 2010.

Using the 2010 numbers, Mozilla stands to ‘lose’ $3.22 per second if the partnership expires. Mozilla is highly dependent on search and Google in particular. There’s just no way around that.

What does Google get for this staggering amount of money?

Firefox Start Page

Google is the default search bar search engine as well as the default home page. This means that Firefox drives search after search to Google instead of their competitors.

Browser Share

Clearly browsers are an important part of the search landscape since they can influence search behavior based on default settings. As Mozilla points out, in 2002 over 90% of the browser market was controlled by Internet Explorer. At the time it made perfect sense for Google to help Mozilla break the browser monopoly.

The rise of Firefox helped Google to solidify search dominance and Mozilla was paid handsomely for this assistance.

However, it doesn’t look like Google was comfortable with this lack of control. Soon after the announced renewal of the search partnership in 2008 Google launched their own browser. At the time, I wrote that Chrome was about search and taking share from Internet Explorer.

Browser Market Share 2011

I still think Chrome is about search and the trend seems to indicate that Chrome is taking share (primarily) away from Internet Explorer. In short, Google sought to control its own destiny and speed the demise of Internet Explorer.

Mission accomplished.

Chrome is now poised to overtake Firefox as the number two browser. That’s important because three years ago Google had no other way to protect their search share. Chrome’s success changes this critical fact.

Toolbars

Toolbars were the first attempt by search engines to break the grip of Internet Explorer. Both Google and Yahoo! used toolbars as a way to direct traffic to their own search engines.

What happened along the way was an amazing amount of user confusion. Which box were you supposed to search in? The location (or address) bar, the search box or the toolbar?

This confusion created searches in the location bar and URL entries in the search bar. Savvy users understood but it never made much sense to most.

Location Bar Search

The result? For those that figured it out there is evidence that people actually enjoyed searching via the location bar.

How many searches are conducted per month via the address bar? MSN wouldn’t release those figures, but it did say that about 10 to 15 percent of MSN Search’s overall traffic comes from address bar queries.

The company has analyzed the traffic from users who search via the address bar and discovered both that the searches appear intentional in nature, rather than accidental, and that those making use of address bar searching do so frequently.

This data from 2002 indicates that the location bar default might be very valuable. Sure enough, the location bar default is part of the search partnership Mozilla has with Google.

Firefox Location Bar Search Default

This also happens to be the most difficult setting to change. You can change the search bar preference with a click and the home page with two clicks, but the location bar is a different (and convoluted) story.

Firefox About:Config Warning

Most mainstream users aren’t going to attempt entering about:config into their location bar, but if they do this first screen will likely scare them off.

I recently had to revisit the location bar default because I took Firefox for Bing for a spin. This add-on, among other things, changes the location bar default to Bing and it remains that way even after the add-on is removed. That’s a serious dark pattern.

All of this makes me believe that the location bar might be the most valuable piece of real estate.

Omnibox

Having helped create confusion with their toolbar (now no longer supporting Firefox 5+) and seen the value of location bar searches, Chrome launched the omnibox, a combined location and search bar. The omnibox reduced confusion and asked users to simply type an address or search into one bar. Google would do the rest. Of course, the default for those searches is Google.

The omnibar seems to be a popular feature and why wouldn’t it be? Users don’t care what field they’re typing in, they just want it to work. You know who else thinks this is a good idea? The Firefox UX Team.

Firefox Omnibar

While these mockups are for discussion purposes only, it’s pretty clear what the discussion is about. According to CNET, a combined Firefox search-and-location bar is being held up by privacy issues. That was in March and the latest release of Firefox (just last week) still didn’t have this functionality.

Back in late 2009 Asa Dotzler had a lot to say about the independence of Firefox and how they serve the user.

Mozilla’s decisions around defaults are driven by what’s best for the largest number of users and not what’s best for revenue.

It’s not about the money. The money’s there and Mozilla isn’t going to turn it down, but it’s not about the money. It’s about providing users with the best possible experience.

Great words but have they been backed up with action? Both users and the Firefox UX Team are lobbying for an omnibox, the Firefox for Bing add-on is a clear dark pattern and the ability to change the default location bar search engine is still overly complicated.

Is this really what’s best for users?

Don’t Count On Inertia

If Mozilla were to switch horses and cut a search deal with Bing, they’d be counting on inertia to retain users and their current search behavior. The problem is that Firefox was marketed as the solution to browser inertia.

Before Firefox many users didn’t even understand they could browse the Internet with anything but Internet Explorer. Those same users are now more likely to switch.

It’s sort of like being the other woman right? If he cheats with you, he’s also liable to cheat on you.

With a search bar still in place users can easily change that default. Firefox would be counting on location bar searches and the difficulty in changing this default to drive revenue. You might get some traction here but I’m guessing you’d see browser defection, increased search bar usage and more direct traffic to the Google home page.

With an omnibar in place Firefox would be running a very risky proposition. Many mainstream users would likely migrate to another browser (probably Chrome). More advanced Firefox users would simply change the defaults.

You could move to an omnibar and make the default easy to change, but both Firefox and users have made it abundantly clear that they prefer Google. So how much would a Bing search partnership really be worth at that point?

Can Bing Afford It?

Bing is losing money hand over fist so it’s unclear whether Bing can actually pony up this type of money anyway. If they did, it could cause browser defection and other behavior that would rob the search partnership of any real value and put Firefox at risk.

Even if Bing pirated half of the searches coming from Firefox, that’s not going to translate into a real game changer from a search engine market share perspective.

Mozilla could partner with Bing but I don’t think either of them would like the results.

Mozilla in a Pickle

Mozilla In a Pickle

If Google is the choice of users (as Firefox claims) installing a competing default search engine may hasten the conversion to Chrome. This time around Mozilla needs Google far more than Google needs Mozilla. I’m not saying that Google doesn’t want the search partnership to continue, but I’m betting they’re driving a very hard bargain.

Google no longer has a compelling need to overpay for a search default on a competing browser. I have to believe Mozilla is being offered a substantially lower dollar amount for the search partnership.

I don’t pretend to know exactly how the partnership is structured and whether it’s volume or performance based but it really doesn’t matter. Google paid Barry Zito like prices back in 2008 at the height of the economic bubble but the times have changed and Google’s got Tim Lincecum (Chrome) mowing down the competition.

Mozilla and Google are playing a high stakes game of chicken. The last renewal took place three months prior to the expiration. We’re down to two weeks now.

This time the money might not be there.

TL;DR

The search partnership between Mozilla and Google expires at the end of November. The success of Chrome gives Google little incentive to overpay for a search default on Firefox. This puts Mozilla, who receives more than 80% of their revenue through the Google search partnership, in a poor position with few options.

Cut Up Learning

October 03 2011 // Life + Technology // 6 Comments

Is information overload a problem our new digital society must solve or are we changing how we learn?

Information Overload

We’ve gone from a handful of TV channels to more than 500; from a few radio stations to streaming music on demand; from reading the local newspaper to reading publications from around the world.

The Extracting Value from Chaos report from IDC iView provides a staggering overview of our digital footprint.

In 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes) – growing by a factor of 9 in just five years.

It’s not just digital either. We see this trend in the publishing industry where print-on-demand and self-published books have skyrocketed (pdf).

Book Publishing Statistics Graph

This does not include Audio or eBooks.

Of course, we’re also sharing all of this information at an accelerated rate.

Facebook Law of Sharing Graph

Zuckerberg’s Law of Sharing states that sharing activity will double each year.

You know that information is increasing, but you might not realize just how much and how fast it is increasing.

Curation

As the amount of information increases many have looked at ways to sift through and make sense of it all. The goal is to find signal amid the noise. Plenty of folks are trying to apply different techniques and algorithms to winnow things down to only the most interesting and relevant.

KnowAboutIt, XYDO, My6Sense, Trunk.ly and Summify among others are all trying to cull the web and deliver the ‘right’ information to your inbox.

Aggregated social curation sounds logical but I haven’t found it very valuable. I find the stuff I already read (or would have found) anyway. Maybe it works if you’re not drinking from the information hose, but most of us are doing more of that in one way or the other. I can’t imagine relying on just these services for my information.

Many believe that serendipity is an important part of information consumption, but most of the services give this lip service at best. They’re doing more of what a good brand marketer would do, cranking out extensions to a known product. In this case that product is the type of content that you and your network of ‘friends’ are reading. I think you quickly reach a local maxima where you’re not finding new things and making new connections.

Today’s curation seems more like an echo chamber.

Distraction

Info Freako by Jesus Jones

Nicholas Carr thinks the Internet is doing evil things to us and Google might be making us stupid. NPR books summarizes Carr’s thesis as follows.

Carr believes that the Internet is a medium based on interruption — and it’s changing the way people read and process information. We’ve come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and he says there’s not much of that to be found online.

Carr might be right about the distraction of the Internet. But this is but one way in which we acquire information. I watch two hour movies straight through, can read a book for hours at a stretch and still conduct lengthy phone calls. The idea that we can only process information in one way seems like an odd conclusion. It would be like saying that because we possess the ability to drive that athletic prowess will decline.

Taking it a step further, there is an assumption that we process information uniformly. Here’s where fiction helps reveal a greater truth. The Ghost In Love by Jonathan Carroll explores the division of personality. We are different people throughout our lives, day-by-day and even different people at the same time.

How can we be kind when you were so mean to that stranger the other day? How can we be intelligent when you made such a stupid mistake the other week? Many people struggle with this seeming paradox. But we’re not robots! We’re not just one monolithic entity that does things the same way every day. Not only do we evolve over time (just think about your musical tastes) but we’ll react to information in different ways on an hourly basis. Much of this has to do with context, but I think there are more complex factors at work.

So why do we persist in this notion that we can only comprehend information in one way. That’s just patently untrue.

Cut-Up Learning

The cut-up technique was made popular by William Burroughs and is performed by cutting up content and putting it back together in a different order. By doing so, it reveals new words, new insight and new meaning. It’s a type of non-linear learning.

I believe the Internet, the great distractor, is a digital version of the cut-up technique. It is actually more powerful because we can cut-up more information from a wide variety of topics and mediums.

We’re so consumed with capturing just the right thing, those few articles that will provide insight, that we miss the opportunity to piece together and make connections to a larger puzzle.

The goal isn’t to curate and aggregate the content into neat little packages but to cut up the information to unlock trends and insight.

Skimming

I read a large number of RSS feeds, a diverse blend of literature, photography, analytics, SEO, technology, life hacking, science, local, marketing, design, UX, humor and start-up related blogs. I also let the river of information flow through platforms like FriendFeed, Google+, Pinterest and Twitter.

Do I read every post word for word? No. I’m skimming a lot of the time, both in terms of the type of content that is being generated (the theme and pulse of activity) and the actual content itself. Skimming doesn’t mean I’m not getting value from that content. By skimming through a variety of pieces, topics and media I create a very different view of the data that is swirling around me.

That also doesn’t prevent me from taking a deep dive on any given piece I find. In fact, I’d hazard that I locate more of these pieces through the act of skimming.

Cut-Up Example

Live Long and Prosper by Han Solo with Malcolm Reynolds Image

So lets go from theory to practice. I believe Google is extremely interested in creating some sort of AuthorRank based on the quality of and engagement with the content that author produces. Here’s the cut-up that leads me to this conclusion.

I watch Steven Levy interviewed by Matt Cutts, and find both Levy’s mention of being outranked by Huffington Post interesting but also note the look Cutts gives someone in the audience directly after this remark. I watch this video after authorship is rolled out by Google at SMX Advanced. This is an example of how the cut-up technique doesn’t need to be linear.

I keep track of the debate around identity on Google+ and see how their inflexibility on the issue is rooted in ensuring confidence in authorship. I watch the high rate of iteration in the rel=”author” program and note who is leading those efforts. I look at which Google Webmaster Central videos in this latest series are released first. Because they record them in large chunks, so the authorship video getting to the head of the line signals a sort of priority.

I read about the acquisitions of companies that measure engagement with content. I ask questions about what Google is doing with PostRank and (repeatedly) get no response. Silence can be a very loud signal.

Those are all signals within the actual topic, though they might be in different media. But I also pay close attention to how Facebook is implementing EdgeRank and note the direction LinkedIn is going as well. Again, those are closely related to authorship and identity so it’s not going too far afield.

But there are other vectors that might seem unrelated. I listen to artists who are irate at how their work is taken and used without credit. I key in on articles that highlight the music that is most often sampled by new artists. I listen to the Rick Astley and Nirvana mashup. I laugh at the misattributed quote meme but also think about what it represents. I uncover distasteful social proof manipulation and dive into the argument about influence and whether Klout is accurate.

Alone, each of these things are of passing interest, but with access to so much information I find greater context and meaning.

Mind Hacking

The digital age allows us to peer over the shoulders of more people. A lot of them may provide little to no value but some will be intelligent and provide thoughtful commentary and links. I’ve become adept at quickly recognizing the difference. It’s reminiscent of what Gladwell talks about in Blink.

Maybe I am an outlier and my information consumption behavior is non-traditional, but given the rate in which information is accelerating I believe more and more people will adopt (or be forced into) this type of cut-up learning.

I used to scoff at the number of people Robert Scoble followed, invoking Dunbar’s Number as my defense. What I’ve realized is that there is a vast difference in social relationships versus information discovery.

I still believe in Dunbar’s Number as it pertains to relationships but not when it comes to information discovery. I doubt highly that Robert is truly friends with the 32,000 people he follows on Twitter. But he is adept at taking the stream of information those people create and gaining value from it.

Tools

Certain tools can help to make cut up learning easier, in part by simply letting you organize what you’ll skim. Google Reader is an absolute stellar resource. And no one has beaten the original FriendFeed friend of a friend functionality in delivering new and random things to my worldview. G+ is slowly getting better since I do find a diverse blend of technology, science, art and business that I can peruse.

The curation services? I’ll use them. But they’re more like an information safety net. My interaction with them is limited to no more than a 10 second skim and scroll of the content for confirmation.

But in the end, the biggest tool we’ll have is our mind and our own ability to collect and process all that information. Maybe our brains are being rewired but who’s to say that’s a bad thing?

TL;DR

I found an article the other day that opined that the way to succeed in business was to know where the customer was going, not where they were now. This was a proxy for how I felt about the difference between curation services and cut up learning. Curation can tell you where things are now, while cut up learning can tell you where things are going.

Information overload may not be a problem we have to solve but instead could lead to a new way of learning. Skimming things does not make us shallow, it may actually make us rich.

Comment Censorship

August 07 2011 // Rant + Social Media + Technology // 18 Comments

In the past month I’ve left a number of comments on blogs only to find they were never published.

Fry Meme Spam or Blog Censorship

I’d like to believe that the blog owners simply didn’t see my comment. That it fell into their spam queue which they rarely, if ever, look at. Because the alternative is that they saw the post and decided to suppress it. Now, it’s their blog – their little corner of the Internet – but this type of censorship is troubling.

Comments Content

What about the content of my comments? To be fair, in some instances I was disagreeing with some or all of the content in that post. But I did so in a constructive manner, using links to my own thoughts on the topic or to other material to help round out my argument.

I regularly publish comments on this blog that are contrary to my own opinion. One only has to look at the comments on my Stop Writing For People post for examples. I’m free to respond and defend myself, but having the debate in the open is important. It builds trust, much like having bad reviews on a product is actually a good thing.

Comments are incredibly valuable because they provide additional information on the content. They make your content better through clarification, confirmation, addition and debate.

Comments = Content.

Comments are a rich source of meta information that deliver value to both readers and search engines. This extends to links as well! Relevant links in comments help create a web of information that users now and in the future will find useful.

Yet it is those links that may be at the root of the problem.

Comment Spam

It’s like the Internet version of a plague of locusts. One of the most popular ways to combat comment spam is to screen comments that have links. This is one of the default setting in Akismet.

It makes sense since many spammers will drop a link or links in comments. But links are not the problem. Spammers are the problem.

What’s wrong with contextual links to relevant content? This is not behavior that should be penalized. In fact, it should be encouraged. In many ways, the comment spam problem threatens the link graph.

ratio of comment spam to real comments

Not only that but, anecdotally, it seems that comment spam sometimes pushes people to disable comments altogether. When the ratio of comment spam to real comments is too high, many simply give up. I understand the decision but it’s depressing that it gets to that point.

Outsourcing

Fed up with comment spam and general comment management, have we decided to outsource engagement to social networks? Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ are all happy to provide venues in which comments can flourish. Make no mistake, these venues understand the value of comments.

Is our obsession with amplification and generating social proof robbing us of the real value of comments and conversation? Certainly there is some hope that it’s like a rubber band. The content goes out, but then snaps back, drawing more comments to your content. It works to a certain extent, but by how much and at what cost is an interesting debate.

The Filter Bubble

Of course these bloggers may have seen my comment and simply decided not to publish it. Eli Pariser argues that personalization and ‘invisible algorithmic editing’ as a real danger but I think comment censorship (whether intentional or accidental) is the true menace.

I believe much of the hype around the filter bubble is FUD. Personalization is rather minimal in most cases though I do agree with Gabriel Weinberg’s view of how to deal with personalization.

Personalization is not a black and white feature. It doesn’t have to be on or off. It isn’t even one-dimensional. At a minimum users should know which factors are being used and at best they should be able to choose which factors are being used, to what degree and in what contexts.

Personalization deals with the fact that some content isn’t being made readily visible. Comment censorship excises content from the Internet altogether.

Identity

So what could help get us out of this morass? How can we ensure comments are once again a vital part of the content ecosystem? Identity.

Identity

The reason why many embraced Facebook comments was because comments are attached to an identity. Not only that, but an identity that people cared about. This obviates the need for aggressive moderation. You might run into a troll, but it’ll be a troll you can clearly identify and block.

Identity essentially stops comment spam because you can’t post as Best Miami Attorneys. Comment moderation is suddenly manageable again.

Censorship

A commenting system that uses identity removes most of the uncertainty around comment censorship. If my comment isn’t published, it’s likely because that blogger made an active decision to toss it into the HTML version of The Bermuda Triangle.

Cat Censors Blog Comments

If the filter bubble can be managed through making personalization transparent, so too can comment censorship. A third-party, identity-backed comment system could track the number of comments censored on each blog. A grade or score could then be shown to let users know how much of the conversation was being censored. In some ways it would be like Charity Navigator but for blogs.

So perhaps the blogger who touts the benefits of community actually censors 32% of blog comments. That might be an interesting thing to know.

Could this get messy? Sure. But you can build a system of checks and balances.

Reputation

Bad Reputation by Joan Jett

Joan Jett might not care about her bad reputation but you should. Whether it’s a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, number of Likes, sentiment analysis, length of comments, spelling and grammar or other metrics, a savvy comment system could begin to assign reputation to each user.

So the censorship percentage wouldn’t be flat in nature. If you blocked a known troll, no worries. If you censored someone who had a history of abusive comments full of foul language, no problem.

On the other hand, it would be disturbing if you censor someone who consistently adds value to conversations. The reputation of those you censor would matter.

Confidence

I’d like to be confident that I’m not missing good comments that wind up going into spam.

I’d like to be confident that if I take the time and effort to comment on a blog that it will be published and, hopefully, spark further comment and conversation.

I’d like to be confident that the comments I read are not biased and simply a form of self-curated cheerleading.

“Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.” – Vince Lombardi

The Internet desperately needs more confidence.

Google+ Review

July 07 2011 // Social Media + Technology // 19 Comments

(This post is an experiment of sorts since I’m publishing it before my usual hard core editing. I’ll be going back later to edit and reorganize so that it’s a bit less Jack Kerouac in style. I wanted to publish this version now so I could get some feedback and get back to my client work. You’ve been warned.)

I’ve been on Google+ for one week now and have collected some thoughts on the service. This won’t be a tips and tricks style post since I believe G+ (that’s the cool way to reference it now) will evolve quickly and what we’re currently seeing is a minimum viable product (MVP).

In fact, while I have enjoyed the responsiveness that the G+ team has shown, it echoes what I heard during Buzz. One of my complaints about Buzz was that they didn’t iterate fast enough. So G+, please go ahead and break things in the name of speed. Ignore the howling in the interim.

Circles

Circles is clearly the big selling point for G+. I was a big fan of the presentation Paul Adams put together last year that clearly serves as the foundation to Circles. The core concept was that the way you share offline should be mirrored online. My family and high school friends probably don’t want to be overwhelmed with all the SEO related content I share. And if you want to share a personal or intimate update, you might want to only share that with family or friends.

It made perfect sense … in theory.

I’m not sure Circles works in practice, or at least not the way many though they would. The flexibility of Circles could be its achilles heel. I have watched people create a massive ordered list of Circles for every discrete set of people. Conversely, I’ve seen others just lump everyone into a big Circle. Those in the latter seem unsettled, thinking that they’re doing something wrong by not creating more Circles.

Of course there is no right or wrong way to use Circles.

But I believe there are two forces at work here that influence the value of Circles. First is the idea of configuration. I don’t think many people want to invest time into building Circles. These Circles are essentially lists, which have been tried on both Facebook and Twitter. Yet, both of these two social giants have relegated lists in their user interface. Was this because people didn’t set them up? Or that once they set them up they didn’t use them?

I sense that Facebook and Twitter may have realized that the stated need for lists or Circles simply didn’t show up in real life usage. This is one of those problems with qualitative research. Sometimes people say one thing and do another.

As an aside, I think most people would say that more is better. That’s why lists sound so attractive. Suddenly you can really organize and you’ll have all these lists and you’ll feel … better. But there is compelling research that shows that more choice leads to less satisfaction. Barry Schwartz dubbed it The Paradox of Choice.

The Paradox of Choice has been demonstrated with jam, where sales were higher when consumers had three choices instead of thirty. It’s also been proven in looking at 401k participation, the more mutual fund choices available, the lower the participation in the 401k program.

Overwhelmed with options, we often simply opt-out of the decision and walk away. And even when we do decide, we are often less satisfied since we’re unsure we’ve made the right selection. Those who scramble to create a lot of lists could fall prey to the Paradox of Choice. That’s not the type of user experience you want.

The second thing at work here is the notion that people want to share online as they do offline. Is that a valid assumption? Clearly, if you’re into cycling (like I am) you probably only want to share your Tour de France thoughts with other cyclists. But the sharing dynamic may have changed. I wrote before that Google has a Heisenberg problem in relation to measuring the link graph. That by the act of measuring the link graph they have forever changed it.

I think we may have the same problem in relation to online sharing. By sharing online we’ve forever changed the way we share.

If I interpret what FriendFeed (which is the DNA for everything you’re seeing right now), and particularly Paul Buchheit envisioned, it was that people should share more openly. That by sharing more, you could shine light on the dark corners of life. People could stop feeling like they were strange, alone or embarrassed. Facebook too seems to have this same ethos, though perhaps for different reasons – or not. And I think many of us have adopted this new way of sharing. Whether it was done intentionally at first or not becomes moot.

So G+ is, in some ways, rooted in the past, of the way we used to share.

Even if you don’t believe that people are now more willing to share more broadly, I think there are a great many differences in how we share offline versus how we share online. First, the type and availability of content is far greater online. Tumblr quotes, LOLcats, photos and a host of other types of media are quickly disseminated. The Internet has seen an explosion of digital content that runs through a newly built social infrastructure. In the past, you might share some of the things you’d seen recently at a BBQ or the next time you saw your book group. Not anymore.

Also, the benchmark for sharing content online is far lower than it is offline. The ease with which you can share online means you share more. The share buttons are everywhere and social proof is a powerful mechanism.

You also can’t touch and feel any of this stuff. For instance, think about the traditional way you sell offline. The goal is to get the customer to hold the product, because that greatly increases the odds they’ll purchase. But that’s an impossibility online.

Finally, you probably share with more people. The social infrastructure built over the last five years has allowed us to reconnect with people from the past. We continue to share with weak ties. I’m concerned about this since I believe holding onto the past may prevent us from growing. I’m a firm believer in Dunbar’s number, so the extra people we choose to share with wind up being noise. Social entropy must be allowed to take place.

Now Circles might support that since you can drop people into a ‘people I don’t care about’ Circle that is never used. (I don’t have this Circle, I’m just saying you could!) But then you simply wind up with a couple of Circles that you use on a frequent basis. In addition, the asynchronous model encourages people to connect with more people which flies in the face of this hardwired number of social connections we can maintain.

Lists and circles also rarely work for digesting content. Circles is clearly a nice way to segment and share your content with the ‘right’ people. But I don’t think Circles are very good as a content viewing device.

You might make a Circle for your family. Makes perfect sense. And you might then share important and potentially sensitive information using this Circle. But when you look at the content feed from that Circle, what do you get? It would not just be sensitive family information.

If your brother is Robert Scoble you’d see a boat load of stuff there. That’s an extreme example, but lets bring it to the more mundane example of, say, someone who is a diehard sports fan. Maybe that family member would share only with his sports buddies, but a lot of folks are just going to broadcast publicly and so you get everything from that person.

To put it more bluntly, people are not one-dimensional.

I love bicycling. I also have a passion for search and SEO. I also enjoy books, UX, LOLcats and am a huge Kasabian fan. If you put me in an SEO Circle, there’s a good chance you’ll get LOLcats and Kasabian lyrics mixed in with my SEO stuff. In fact, most of my stuff is on Public, so you’ll get a fire hose of my material right now.

Circles is good for providing a more relevant sharing mechanism, but I think it’s a bit of a square peg in a round hole when it comes to digesting content. That’s further exacerbated by the fact that the filtering capabilities for content are essentially on and off (mute) right now.

Sure, you could segment your Circles ever more finely until you found the people who were just talking about the topic you were interested in, but that would be a small group probably and if you had more than just one interest (which is, well, pretty much everyone) then you’ll need lots of Circles. And with lots of Circles you run into the Paradox of Choice.

Conversation

I’ve never been a fan of using Twitter to hold conversations. The clipped and asynchronous style of banter just doesn’t do it for me. FriendFeed was (is?) the place where you could hold real debate and discussion. It provided long-form commenting ability.

G+ does a good job fostering conversation, but the content currently being shared and some of the feature limitations may be crushing long-form discussions and instead encouraging ‘reactions’.

I don’t want a stream of 6 word You Tube like comments. That doesn’t add value. I’m purposefully using this terminology because I think delivering value is important to Google. Comments should add value and there is a difference in comment quality. And yes, you can influence the quality of comments.

Because if the comments and discussion are engaging you will win my attention. And that is what I believe is most important in the social arms race we’re about to witness.

Attention

There is a war for your attention and Facebook has been winning. G+ must fracture that attention before Facebook really begins to leverage the Open Graph and provide search and discovery features. As it stands Facebook is a search engine. The News Feed is simply a passive search experience based on your social connections and preferences. Google’s talked a lot about being psychic and knowing what you want before you do. Facebook is well on their way there in some ways.

User Interface

If it’s one thing that Google got right it was the Red Number user interface. It is by far the most impressive part of the experience and feeds your G+ addiction and retains your attention.

The Red Number sits at the top of the page on G+, Google Reader, Google Search and various other Google products. It is nearly omnipresent in my own existence. (Thank goodness it’s not on Google Analytics or I really wouldn’t get any work done.) The red number indicator is both a notifier, navigation and engagement feature all-in-one. It is epic.

It is almost scary though, since you can’t help but want to check what’s going on when that number lights up and begins to increment. It’s Pavlovian in nature. It inspired me to put together a quick LOLcat mashup.

OMG WTF Red Number!

It draws you in (again and again) and keeps you engaged. It’s a very slick user interface and Google is smart to integrate this across as many properties as possible. This one user interface may be the way that G+ wins in the long-run since they’ll have time to work out the kinks while training us to respond to that red number. The only way it fails is if that red number never lights up.

I’ll give G+ credit for reducing a lot of the friction around posting and commenting. The interactions are intuitive but are hamstrung by Circles as well as the display and ordering of content.

Content

There is no easy way to add content to G+ right now. In my opinion, this is hugely important because content is the kindling to conversation. Good content begets good conversation. Sure we could all resort to creating content on G+ through posting directly, but that’s going to get old quickly. And Sparks as it now stands is not effective in the slightest. Sorry but this is one feature that seems half-done (and that’s being generous.) Right now the content through Sparks is akin to a very unfocused Google alert.

I may be in the minority in thinking that social interactions happen around content, topics and ideas far more often than they do around people. I might interact with people I’m close to on a more personal level, responding to check-ins and status updates but for the most part I believe it’s about the content we’re all seeing and sharing.

I really don’t care if you updated your profile photo. (Again, I should be able to not see these by default if I don’t want to.)

Good content will drive conversation and engagement. The easiest way to effect that is by aggregating the streams of content we already produce. This blog, my YouTube favorites, my Delicious bookmarks, my Google Reader favorites, my Last.fm favorites and on and on and on. Yes, this is exactly what FriendFeed did and it has, in many ways, failed. As much as I love the service, it never caught on with the mainstream.

I think some of this had to do with configuration. You had to configure the content streams and those content streams didn’t necessarily have to be yours. But we’ve moved on quite a bit since FriendFeed was introduced and Google is adhering to the Quora model, and requiring people to use their real names on their profiles.

Google is seeking to create a better form of identify, a unified form of identity it can then leverage for a type of PeopleRank signal that can inform trust and authority in search and elsewhere. But identity on the web is fairly transparent as we all have learned from Rapleaf and others who still map social profiles across the web. Google could quite easily find those outposts and prompt you to confirm and add them to your Google profile.

Again, we’ve all become far more public and even if email is not the primary key, the name and even username can be used with a fairly high degree of confidence. Long story short, Google can short-circuit the configuration problem around content feeds and greatly reduce the friction of contributing valuable content to G+.

By flowing content into G+, you would also increase the odds of that red number lighting up. So even if I haven’t visited G+ in a day (heck I can’t go an hour right now unless I’m sleeping) you might get drawn back in because someone gave your Last.fm favorite a +1. Suddenly you want to know who likes the same type of music you do and you’re hooked again.

Display

What we’re talking about here is aggregation, which has turned into a type of dirty word lately. And right now Google isn’t prepared for these types of content feeds. They haven’t fixed duplication detection so I see the same posts over and over again. And there are some other factors in play here that I think need to be fixed prior to bringing in more content.

People don’t quite understand Circles and seem compelled to share content with their own Circles. The +1 button should really do this, but then you might have to make the +1 button conditional based on your Circles (e.g. – I want to +1 this bicycling post to my TDF Circle.) That level of complexity isn’t going to work.

At a minimum they’ll need to collapse all of the shares into one ‘story’, with the dominant story being the one that you’ve interacted with or, barring prior interaction, the one that comes from someone in your Circle and if there are more than one from your Circle then the most recent or first from that group.

In addition, while the red number interface does deliver the active discussions to me, I think the order of content in the feed will need to change. Once I interact on an item it should be given more weight and float to the top more often, particularly if someone I have in my Circles is contributing to the discussion there.

Long-term it would also be nice to pin certain posts to the top of a feed if I’m interested in following the actual conversation as it unfolds.

The display of content needs to get better before G+ can confidently aggregate more content sources.

Privacy

One of the big issues, purportedly, is privacy. I frankly believe that the privacy issue is way overblown. (Throw your stones now.) As an old school direct marketer I know I can get a tremendous amount of information about a person, all from their offline transactions and interactions.

Even without that knowledge, it’s clear that people might talk about privacy but they don’t do much about it. If people truly valued privacy and thought Facebook was violating that privacy you’d see people shuttering their accounts. And not just the few Internati out there who do so to prove a point but everyday people. But that’s just not happening.

People say one thing, but do another. They say they value privacy but then they’ll give it away for a chance to win the new car sitting in the local mall.

Also, it’s very clear that people do have a filter for what they share on social networks. The incidents where this doesn’t happen make great headlines, but the behavioral survey work showing a hesitance to share certain topics on Facebook make it clear we’re not in full broadcast mode.

But for the moment lets say that privacy is one of the selling points of G+. The problem is that the asymmetric sharing model exposes a lot more than you might think. Early on, I quipped that the best use of G+ was to stalk Google employees. I think a few people took this the wrong way, and I understand that.

But my point was that it was very easy to find people on G+. In fact, it is amazingly simple to skim the social graph. In particular, by looking at who someone has in their Circles and who has that person in their Circles.

So, why wouldn’t I be interested in following folks at Google? In general, they’re a very intelligent, helpful and amiable bunch. My Google circle grew. It grew to 300 rather quickly by simply skimming the Circles for some prominent Googlers.

The next day or so I did this every once in a while. I didn’t really put that much effort into it. The interface for finding and adding people is quite good – very fluid. So, I got to about 700 in three or four days. And during that time the suggested users feature began to help out, providing me with a never ending string of Googlers for me to add.

But you know what else happened? It suggested people who were clearly Googlers but were not broadcasting that fact. How do I know that? Well, if 80% of your Circle are Googlers, and 80% of the people who have you in Circles are Googlers there’s a good change you’re a Googler. Being a bit OCD I didn’t automatically add these folks to my Google Circle but their social graph led me to others (bonus!) and if I could verify through other means – their posts or activity elsewhere on the Internet – then I’d add them.

How many people do I have in my Google circle today?

Google Employees G+ Circle

Now, perhaps people are okay with this. In fact, I’m okay with it. But if privacy is a G+ benefit, I don’t think it succeeds. Too many people will be upset by this level of transparency. Does the very private Google really want someone to be parsing the daily output of its employees? I’m harmless but others might be trolling for something more.

G+ creates this friction because of the asymmetric sharing model and the notion that you only have to share with the people in your circles. Circles ensures your content is compartmentalized and safe. But it exposes your social graph in a way that people might not expect or want.

Yes, I know there are ways to manage this exposure, but configuration of your privacy isn’t very effective. Haven’t we learned this yet?

Simplicity

Circles also has an issue with simplicity. Creating Circles is very straight forward but how content in those Circles is transmitted is a bit of a mystery to many. So much so that there are diagrams showing how and who will see your content based on the Circle permutations. While people might make diagrams just for the fun of it, I think these diagrams are an indication that the underlying information architecture might be too complex for mainstream users. Or maybe they won’t care. But if sharing with the ‘right’ people is the main selling point, this will muddy the waters.

At present there are a lot of early adopters on G+ and many are hell bent on kissing up to the Google team at every turn. Don’t get me wrong, I am rooting for G+. I like Google and the people that work there and I’ve never been a Facebook fan. But my marketing background kicks in hard. I know I’m not the target market. In fact, most of the people I know aren’t the target market. I wonder if G+ really understands this or not.

Because while my feed was filled with people laughing at Mark Zuckerberg and his ‘awesome’ announcement, I think they missed something, something very fundamental.

Keep it Simple Stupid

Yes, hangouts (video chat) with 10 people are interesting and sort of fun. But is that the primary use case for video chat? No, it’s not. This idea that 1 to 1 video chat is so dreadful and small-minded is simply misguided. Because what Facebook said was that they worked on making that video chat experience super easy to use. It’s not about the Internati using video chat, it’s about your grandparents using video chat.

Mark deftly avoided the G+ question but then, he couldn’t help himself. He brought up the background behind Groups. I’m paraphrasing here, but Zuckerberg essentially said that Groups flourished because everyone knew each other (that’s an eye poke at the asymmetric sharing model) and that ad hoc Groups were vitally important since people didn’t want to spend time configuring lists. Again, this is – in my opinion – a swipe at Circles. In many ways, Zuck is saying that lists fail and that content sharing permissions are done on an ad hoc basis.

Instead of asking people to configure Circles and manage and maintain them Facebook is making it easier to just assemble them on the fly through Groups. And the EdgeRank algorithm that separates your Top News from Recent News is their way of delivering the right content to you based on your preferences and interactions. I believe their goal is to automagically make the feed relevant to you instead of forcing the user to create that relevance.

Sure there’s a filter bubble argument to be made, but give Facebook credit for having the Recent News tab prominently displayed in the interface.

But G+ could do something like this. In fact, they’re better placed than Facebook to deliver a feed of relevant information based on the tie-ins to other products. Right now there is essentially no tie in at all, which is frustrating. A +1 on a website does not behave as a Like. It does not send that page or site to my Public G+ feed. Nor does Google seem to be using Google Reader or Gmail as ways to determine what might be more interesting to me and who really I’m interacting with.

G+

I’m addicted to G+ so they’re doing something right. But remember, I’m not the target market.

I see a lot of potential with G+ (and I desperately want it to succeed) but I worry that social might not be in their DNA, that they might be chasing a mirage that others have already dismissed and that they might be too analytical for their own good.

Google Scribe SEO Hints

June 05 2011 // SEO + Technology // 6 Comments

Lost in the Google +1 button launch and Schema.org announcement was the release of a new version of Google Scribe. In typical Google fashion, this unassuming product may be more important than both Google +1 and Schema.org.

Google Scribe

What is Google Scribe?

Google Scribe is one of a number of Google Labs experiments.

Google Scribe helps you write better documents. Using information from what you have already typed in a document, Google Scribe’s text completion service provides related word or phrase completion suggestions. It also checks your documents for incorrect phrases, punctuations, and other errors like misspellings. In addition to saving keystrokes, Google Scribe’s suggestions indicate correct or popular phrases to use.

Think of it as an intelligent version of Google Docs.

Language Research Lab

But what is Google Scribe really about? Look no further than the engineer working on the project.

Google Scribe Engineer

That’s right, Google Scribe is about language models, something at the core of how Google interprets and evaluates web content.

Since Google Scribe’s first release on Google Labs last year, we have been poring over your feedback and busy adding the top features you asked for. Today, we’re excited to announce a new version of Google Scribe that brings more features to word processing.

Poring over your feedback might seem like they’re reading comments and suggestions submitted by users, but in actuality I’m guessing it’s the complex analysis of usage. Google Scribe is about language research. The kind of research helping Google refine algorithmic signals.

Every time you use Google Scribe you’re helping to refine the language model by choosing from one of many text completion suggestions. Google is getting smarter about language.

Semantic Proofreading

One of the new features seems to be a direct result of this analysis: semantic proofreading.

Semantic Proofreading Example

Normal spell check would not catch the words in this example because both words are correctly spelled. Yet, the language model has learned that the word awesome is rarely ever preceded by the word quiet.

That’s quite awesome.

Good Writing Matters

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you probably know that Google is using spelling and grammar as a way to determine content quality. Any analysis of Amit Singhal’s Panda questions would indicate that grammar and spelling are gaining in algorithmic importance.

I’d recently discussed Google’s potential use of spelling and grammar on reviews with Bill Slawski. I wasn’t convinced it was a good idea.

But then Barry Schwartz reported on a Google Webmaster Forum response by Google employee John Mueller regarding spelling in user generated content.

This was noteworthy enough to prompt an official Google tweet.

Google Good Spelling Tweet

Is that clear enough for you?

Anchor Text Suggestions

This new version of Google Scribe creates automatic anchor text for a URL. That in itself is pretty interesting, but Google Scribe also gives alternate anchor text suggestions and the ability for the user to create their own.

Here are two examples using my fellow Sphinn editors: Michael Gray and Jill Whalen.

Google Scribe Link Suggestions for Wolf Howl

Google Scribe Link Suggestions for High Rankings

Clearly Google Scribe is already seeing and using back link profiles. But Google will learn about the validity of the anchor text every time someone changes the anchor text from the automated, or primary suggestion, to one of the other suggestions or creates something entirely new.

What happens when Google Scribe determines that the primary suggestion for a URL is rarely used? The implication is that link suggestions could provide a feedback mechanism on overly optimized or ‘off-topic’ anchor text.

In other words, a paid link signal.

High Quality Documents

I’m convinced Google Scribe is helping to improve Google’s ability to interpret and analyze language. But there are indications that Google could be thinking even bigger.

Google Scribe Labs Description

Sure enough the description of Google Scribe starts with that succinct elevator pitch. “Write high-quality documents quickly.” The last word tells me it’s meant to support the new digital content work flow.

Scribe Bookmarklet and Extension

You can take Google Scribe on the go using the bookmarklet or Chome extension. I’m using the bookmarklet right now as I’m writing this post.

Google Scribe WordPress Integration

It’s a bit clunky from a UX perspective but I see a lot of potential. A more refined product might help sites ensure their users are producing well written user generated content.

Flipping The Funnel

Why limit yourself to the output of content when you can influence the input of content.

The explosion of digital content has been made possible, in large part, by blogging platforms. Yet, the quality of the content has been uneven, and that’s probably being generous. So why not attack the problem at the top of the funnel? Help people write better content.

I like the idea. In fact, I like it so much I’m exploring a side project that does the same thing in a different yet complementary way.

Google Scribe and SEO

Data and Spot Star Trek LOLcat

Like it or not, Google is using spelling and grammar to determine content quality. Google Scribe is one method being used by Google to better understand and evaluate language and anchor text. It’s not about the actual product (right now) but about the data (feedback) Google Scribe is producing.

Instead of obsessing about the specifics of the Panda update the SEO community can look to Google Scribe and take the hint. It’s not just what you say, it’s also how you say it.

So if you’re responsible for content, take a few more minutes and proofread your work. Google will.

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