Still working on modifying that habit to posting here instead… :)

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Key excerpt: More proof that (c) copyrights are mostly only killing your ideas – these stats are shocking, the question is, will you heed their message and Move The Freeline?
• Excerpt: Smart take from Scoble on the coming #geo-location service wars – (Geo)-Location was all the rage at SXSWi this year, and will be for the rest of the year into the future. Are you staying on top of this?
• Key excerpt from: “Dear Google Buzz team..” + my footnotes – Google Buzz made a lot of mistakes on launch, so many that it may yet damn Buzz to obscurity. Here are some thoughts on what needs fixing YESTERDAY.
• Key excerpt from: “Twitter Ad Platform Imminent” – We didn’t get the much inticipated news on this from SXSWi, so the question of what it will look like is still the Elephant in the Room…
• My comment on: “15 Features Apple Must Build Into iPhone OS 4 -> An Amazing Mobile Ad System” – Everyone thinks a sort of gimmick will fix digital advertising (whether mobile or regular internet doesn’t really matter). The only thing that can work is…

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

THE MOST PRODUCTIVE thing I’ve done this week is to use Gmail’s “More Actions/Filter items like these” to rid my inbox of spam and bacon emails, which makes my inbox much more useable.[...] I so want this same feature for Google Buzz. Imagine if you could say “get rid of Scoble anytime he talks about Twitter.” Or, if you could filter out something like any message that includes the words “Tiger Woods.”

Wouldn’t you want this too?

I’ve been thinking about filtering a lot since I became a regular user of Twitter and Friendfeed in 2008/2009. Here is my riff on this question, expanded from my initial comments over on Buzz:

Yes, intelligent filtering is the future. If Google Buzz can pull off per keyword, per user (or per group) filtering, they will win. It is a huge flaw in Twitter that I basically still have to view all (follow) or nothing (unfollow or block) from a given user, and if I choose “all”, then everything arrives with the same priority.

This is simply not how we’re going to overcome information overload. Remember that in an information economy, attention becomes the only scarce resource. So it is worth saving and protecting your attention. On Twitter or any other social media or wider “information stream”-type of service.

(Yes, that includes Email as well. Your email is simply yet another inbound information stream you consume. Sometimes you reply to something, sometimes you forward something.)

Whoever does the best job in helping you to do this has a true business proposition, and will be rewarded by the marketplace. (Here is a nice summation of the problem by Louis Gray in slide deck format.)

Now the reverse case is also important: Per user (or per group) surfacing (“track”) of keywords, that pops items of key interest to you to the top of the heap of your inbound stream, past all others.

E.g. when Scoble talks about “Twitter Lists”, on ANY service I am aggregating, I want to know.

(For the purposes of this discussion, I am assuming for this to happen on Buzz. But it could be anywhere else as well. Buzz just happens to be in a position of being able to 1) be relatively unencumbered by ingrained user habits, since it is so new. And 2) have the assembled computing and engineering power of Google behind it.)

Now Friendfeed was getting close, but never put all of the pieces of the puzzle that they had together in a truly usable form. Specifically, it was (really is, as it’s still running, yet not being developed anymore) not letting saved searches be piped back into its “Friend Lists” (their name for their grouping of users).

And the saved searches (“filters” really if you think about it) themselves were stripping too much usable meta-information from the results items, as to then still be as useful in a “high priority inbound” stream. E.g. no Twitter avatars imported from Twitter Search keyword feeds, asf.

There is much heated discussion on Buzz right now on whether people’s Twitter streams imported into Buzz are polluting Buzz with noise. But this discussion is really missing the point, as information overload is never a failure of the sources, only of the FILTERING!

Because there are likely to be important items coming from Twitter that I absolutely do want to see right away, only on Twitter it’s still near impossible to manage that.

(Twitter has shown little interest in providing a more granular search experience, e.g. search on your friends only, or per List only. A current workaround is ListiMonkey.com Alerts, but that goes to your email inbox, hardly a real-time environment. And desktop clients like Tweetdeck are also of limited help, because their search/filter function for groups/Lists requires that you have those opened up as a column.)

Have you yourself experienced instances where you saw a link to a story days or even weeks after it was first published, and felt that you really would have wanted to see this information right as it became available? Tons of really useful stuff is floating by us, as we simultaneously complain about too much noise in our inbound social media.

EVERYTHING is potentially polluting your Buzz inbound stream, IF it has you miss some key item you really did want to see right away.

I am currently only following a little less than 200 users or so on Buzz, and there is already way too much to scroll through (even without Twitter items) to not waste a lot of time, and keep me from seeing the things I could/should be seeing instead.

Robert Scoble deserves thanks for tirelessly bringing this stuff up, he was already at the forefront of the discussion over on Friendfeed, back before that service was bought out by Facebook and for all intensive purposes “mothballed”.

I believe that Buzz itself will thrive or wither based on whether they can outdo the baseline that Friendfeed set with their attempts at filtering. And on how quickly they can move to iron out the considerable feature lag and mistakes before people lose interest.

Again, one would think Google could pull it off on the engineering side of things, as long as they listen to and learn on the social, user centric side as well.

While on the subject of filtering, productivity, and Email (since Buzz is – sort of – integrated with Google’s Gmail) that Robert raised, how would it be if key inbound emails on a per user basis would pop into your Buzz stream (e.g. your direct reports, bosses, key clients, spouse, etc.)?

It would really just be another surfacing filter as described above. Who cares that the text/images/content was sent to you via email/SMTP protocol. It could be just another Buzz source (like your Twitter, flickr image, and Google Reader RSS streams right now), only these email “posts” would have to be private.

You can already create Buzz posts by emailing them to buzz@gmail.com from your attached Gmail account, which is a standard that started with the mini-blogging services like Tumblr and Posterous. You can also click “email [this]” on any Buzz post, and while the interface is still a little clunky, your a Gmail message write box will insert itself under the post for you to send the message:

You can see that it is not very far from there to place your key emails (by surfacing filter) into your Buzz stream. The key to making things really usable is that Buzz would need to offer handling options intelligently based on what the inbound source is.

For email, show reply/forward/etc. but also maybe a “Rebuzz” (with caution, assuming it’s appropriate), asf. The latter could speed up the current lag of moving stuff from email systems back onto the Web.

That’s where Friendfeed was failing, because it didn’t have a Retweet button on Twitter items, etc. If Buzz were to become a better Twitter client than Tweetdeck or Seesmic, WITH good persistence, archiving, detailed discussions beyond 140 characters, WHITESPACE in comments (thank you Google!), and powerful search of everything you aggregate into it, then who’s going to stop them? They could run the table.

For right now, one has to improvise, e.g. with a little application called BuzzCanTweet.com to send one’s Buzz posts back over to Twitter. This kind of thing had really already become fundamental, and yet Buzz doesn’t have any outbound forwarding besides email to start. Instead, a young guy from Sweden had to set up this work-around.

OK, back to the integration issue: While we’re at it, why not have your Google Alerts pop into your Buzz stream, instead of emailing you as it does right now? (Or have a filter set to pop those Alert emails into your stream as described above.) The possibilities for integration of various Google services appear wide open.

If Buzz can keep driving deep integration with other Google services, and thereby out-innovate the competition, it will go far. Filtering and the email integration could make Buzz the near undisputed inbound stream to manage your social media attention, and really possibly most of your online attention.

For that to happen however, the Buzz team will have to put on the afterburners. Google should be able to pull it off engineering-talent-wise. The question is, will they have finely enough tuned social sensors & vision to do this?

The opening salvo of misjudged privacy issues, urgently missing features, or unthinking adoption of some of the most problematic features from Friendfeed, certainly made one wonder if Google can ever get social right. Is there a social tone-deafness that jinxed all of its previous attempts besides the YouTube purchase (Jaiku, Dodgeball, Orkut, Wave, etc.)?

Let’s hope for our scarce attention’s sake that Google can get it right this time, and apply its unquestioned engineering talent in ways that actually become truly useful to social media. Filtering will be the key.

Stop Whining About How Elitist And Expensive TED Is [Just Because] You Didn’t Get Invited
Feb. 15, 2010, 9:17 AM

>> Too bad you missed it! Larry Page gave everyone a free Nexus One.

.

via Silicon Alley Insider.

(Minor edit for colorful language.)

What is amazing about this (the subhead sentence after the headline), is not what it says about TED, but what it says about the future of content creation, and the question of charging for it.

Yes, Larry Page is a multi-billionaire who gave away free Nexus Ones created by his Fortune 500 (currently ranked #150) company, Google, to other well-to-do folks who were able to afford to pay $6,000 for the exclusive TED Talks experience. In doing so, he is following word of mouth (WOM) marketing model 101, of getting your product into the hands of key influencers, and hopefully winning them over, and getting them to evangelize your product.

But aside from all of that, he is showing what the future really holds: With ever cheaper reading & communication devices such as the Nexus One, it will become increasingly common to give those away to users, JUST to have SOME influence over what content (and thereby advertisements) they consume.

In essence, such a give-away represents A PAYMENT of the consumer for consuming content on the “gifters” platform. That is how important it is to get some, any slice of the attention pie. The getting of some of which implies that you will have opportunities down the road to do business with the “giftee” in the form of offers (ads or otherwise) that can be embedded with the content.

Note that it is taking for granted that a lot of content itself cannot be charged for. Why? …

…Because just like the devices it is shown on, much of that content is becoming commoditized.

There is an over-abundance of it, and certainly no scarcity at all. If the supply is going to infinity, and the demand is finite due to people’s limited amounts of attention, then the price is by necessity going toward Zero.

Now contrast this with the way that Old Media publishers have been trying to put the genie back in the bottle, and start charging for their content again, with so-called Pay Walls and other ill-conceived schemes.

Contrast it with Microsoft, which, when announcing the finally updated version of its mobile OS, made it clear that it intends to charge a licensing fee to handset makers, even though its market share in mobile has been languishing around 10%, and Google is giving away its Android mobile OS for free. All while Apple has built up a huge lead with its iPhone in the smart phone segment.

Silicon Alley Insider correctly points out that Microsoft’s stubbornness on this point is illogical, because even under the most optimistic scenarios, Windows Phone 7 won’t hardly be noticeable on their bottom line. It is however setting it up for failure in the race for market share and resulting mind share.

Microsoft’s question should be: How can we maximize our share of the attention pie for our mobile OS ecosystem? How can we catch, or better yet outflank, the iPhone?

Similarly, Old Media companies should be asking: How can we maximize our share of the attention pie for our news, opinion, and other content ecosystem?

Anything else is folly at this point. Once you have the attention, there WILL be opportunities to monetize, simply by virtue of people being in your ecosystem. Compare how street vendors benefit from people simply being at an event.

But you cannot choke off the oxygen and lifeblood of your ecosystem with Pay Walls, and other walls and barriers of any kind at the ENTRY point. If next to no one lives in your ecosystem, you won’t be selling very much to anyone.

And remember: The first sale is always the hardest. Why not make it much easier, and make the first sale…well…FREE. Someone taking your free offer still constitutes a sale, because they paid you with their valuable attention (time and energy).

Even better, PAY THEM to “buy” from you in the first transaction, as Larry Page has demonstrated with the Nexus One give-aways. Those cost real money, and yet it is still in Googles interest to be giving many more away.

Notice what Google has been doing all along, they have been giving away free copies of a lot more than just digital content (actually Google doesn’t create content at all): Google applications of all stripes and colors, including Gmail, Google “office” apps, Google Maps, Google RSS Reader, etc. etc.

Why? Because it keeps you on Google’s platform for a little longer, so that they might have SOME influence over what you are shown in terms of advertisements, and other offers that go along with the ecosystem.

Notice the deep misunderstanding by the parade of other companies, especially news and other Old Media companies, that have recently been trying to crucify Google over spreading their content through their search engine without reimbursement, not understanding that that content is typically lowest on the totem pole of usefulness:

The New York Times for example is still dreaming about charging for their news content, when it has about a 6 hour half-life (that’s why it’s called “old news”). Compare that to Google giving away productivity apps that can be useful to you for months and years.

What’s  your take away: Massively Move The Freeline, so that you may even have an ecosystem in which to sell anything.

Still working on modifying that habit to posting here instead… :)

Since we wouldn’t want you to miss anything important, these were the most recent offerings:

• Key excerpt on Google’s non-social DNA from: “Why Google won’t give Twitter or Facebook a buzz cut tomorrow” Google has been struggling with creating their own successful Social Media, and there is a reason…
• Scott Stratten demonstrates a potential Geo-Location Mishap in: “@Unmarketing’s 4 Point Social Media Future” Geo is only gaining in importance, but the potential pitfalls and even outright dangers should keep those companies on their toes.
• Key Twitter-relevant excerpt from Scoble’s: “Google’s two-front war with Apple and Facebook”
• Steve Moses..I mean Jobs..comes down from the mountain, and..the Tablet is busted?! Did Steve Jobs finally reach the limits of his presentation magic? Is the iPad “a bridge too far”?
• Key Moving The Freeline excerpt from: “5 Essential Blogging Tips from Confucius | Copyblogger” More validation for a concept that is the key to winning in the Attention Economy.

Read and profit. Feel free to share.

Given the overwhelming, ever-exponentially-growing flood of information in the age of the Internet, being able to perform sophisticated searches is becoming so important that it isn’t too far-fetched to call it a literacy issue. Without these skills, you are in a sense in danger of becoming functionally illiterate in this brave new world.

Those individuals (and by extension businesses) with advanced search skills will be running circles around those without, because it saves so much time to search intelligently, and because a lot of answers can be found that are simply impossible to find otherwise. In a way, this separation into the search haves and have-nots has already been occurring over the last 5+ years.

And by the way, all of this isn’t simply about Google. Not at all. In a moment, I am going to walk you through a number of examples of advanced searches, and some of the tricks and techniques underlying them. But before I do, let me stress one other thing:

Even if you do only the most simple of "everyday" keyword searches, you are already going in the right direction. In fact, if you aren’t doing it already, make it a point for the next two weeks to stop yourself at every turn and ask: "Could I be doing a search right now to speed this up?"

I think you’ll find that the answer is almost always YES, and that it will be well worth your while to develop this as a new habit (a habit takes about 30 days of repetition to form).

Simply search for everything, and avoid using "manual" searching, i.e. avoid scrolling through documents, web pages, and lists both with your mouse and visually, asf. to find passages/names/etc. you’re looking for. Search options exist in Word, in your browser, on blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook, everywhere. Yet often we don’t use them, and the authors of software/Web tools don’t put sufficient front-and-center emphasis on search capabilities/ease-of-use.

For example, in your browser, never again manually search through long Blog comment threads or other large pages/articles manually, use your browser’s "Find" function and type the first few letters of your name or keyword, etc.

Granted, Gen-Yers on average are likely far ahead of all older generations when it comes to matter-of-cause use of Google, etc., however I doubt that even they know in large numbers about the kind of in depth, advanced search I am about to show you.

General Search Operator Considerations

Let’s first consider the most important search techniques by way of the so-called search operators. These may sometimes be accessible indirectly through a Web form under the heading of "Advanced Search", but originally they represent a kind of mini-programming language for telling the Search Engines what you want them to bring back. (Search Engines from here on shall include the "Search Function" in Web services other than stand-alone search engines.)

These are the "logical"/Boolean operators you may remember from math class or Logic 101 (fun, I know, but you really want to know a leetle bit about this, at least in these practical applications). Why know about these when you could also get most of the same results from using the Advanced Search forms?

Remember, this is about LITERACY. You want to become fluent in a secret language of sorts, and true command and mastery only come from truly delving into the heart of the matter. Plus, you will find that it is almost always faster to type queries into one search box than typing bits and pieces into Advanced Search forms which tend to look a little different for each service.

So let’s get started. I have made all of the examples clickable links, so that you can study the results. All results should be very similar on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing (formerly Live):

1) Nearly any search engine will assume by default that any separate words you type into the search box are meant as a logical AND, as in "show me all results matching BOTH this word-1 AND this word-2", though it may be in any order, and the words may be quite a distance from each other in the actual text.

You can usually place an AND operator without making a difference, e.g. for clarity in reading your search query, but mostly it will just look like this:

personal branding tips

2) To get a true phrase, a FIXED sequence of several words to match, you have to use ” ” (quotes) around the multi-word search term. Note that some search engines including Google will often bring a direct hit for a phrase to the top of the results heap, even if you didn’t use the quotes. But it’s not guaranteed, so using quoted phrases is much more precise, assuming that is what you are looking for. E.g.

"personal branding expert"

vs. personal branding expert

You can verify for yourself that this is more precise, by clicking both the quoted version and then the non-quoted one in Google, and comparing the number of results returned, in this case about 12,500 vs. 10 Million results (the count is in near the upper right corner in Google):

3) To get a logical OR (also called "inclusive OR"), as in "show me ALL the results matching this word-1 OR this word-2 OR this word-3", you simply type in "OR" between the keywords, or between keyword phrases in quotes:

"personal branding" OR "social branding" OR brand

Some search engines like FriendFeed’s Search also use a "," (comma) to represent an OR. (Either way, be sure to distinguish this OR from the so-called "Exclusive OR", which in essence says: Find only those results that have either Word-1 or Word-2, but not both". As far as I know, none of the search engines support this. Basically it would be like running to separate searches.)

4) Many search engines have an exclusion function using the "-" (dash/hyphen) operator followed by the keyword, phrase, or sometimes additional operator that you want excluded from the results. This in essence says: "Find all of the results for this word-1 except for those also containing word-2". E.g.

Yahoo: branding -"personal branding" -skin

Google: branding -"personal branding" -skin

would find all results containing branding, but not those also containing "personal branding", or those likely referring to skin branding instead of the marketing related kind. This would be a good search to narrow down results to those talking about corporate branding only (though you might find more exclusion terms to refine it even further).

By the way, there is typically no limit to the number of exclusions, though there may be a limit to the overall length of the query string you can submit to the search engine.

OK, with these preliminaries out of the way, let’s dig into the finer details of various key search engines or search functions on key services. Let’s start with Twitter, since it currently has the most buzz around its "Real-time Web Search" possibilities:

Twitter Search

Twitter Search is for now referring to search.twitter.com, as the Twitter Web interface integrated version is currently still somewhat limited/buggy in the result sets it returns. You are basically searching over every single public status update ("tweet") by any user, starting from the current moment and going backward over Twitter’s timeline. (If you are unfamiliar with Twitter or Twitter Search, read up on it here.)

Twitter Search allows all of the search operators already discussed, and additionally for the following:

1) "keyword(s) filter:links" – will seek out tweets containing the keyword or phrases and 1 or more links only. Nearly the same can be accomplished by searching for “http://”, though that will miss the few live links that Twitter recognizes from “www.domain.com/extension” type links.

It can largely be assumed that a tweet containing a link is more useful than one without, more likely to be chatter, unless the tweet is so sharp/witty/deep/inspirational that it would qualify as a quote (of course sometimes you may want to specifically look at the conversational chatter only – example of that further down):

"personal branding" filter:links

2) "from:username" and "to:username" – both of these can be very useful to query over your own tweetstream by topic/keyword, e.g. to find old tweets that you know you wrote, you know you wrote to somebody (containing certain link resources, etc.). Of course you can put any username you choose, and can therefore in principle back-trace all conversations between two users (each can only be used once in a given query).

You can also see if two users have been talking via Twitter’s so-called "@ replies" at all. If there’s no result returned, there was likely no direct communication, or at least recently:

from:unmarketing to:missive

As long as Twitter keeps back-data fully available in Search (currently, Twitter is unfortunately only letting you search back anywhere from 7 to 30 days depending on server loads), you could also use Twitter as a natural form of personal bookmarking this way. Nearly all of the “tags” are applied without extra work, simply as part of your tweets. A workaround to this problem of the backwards time limit is to also use FriendFeed and import your tweets there. FriendFeed currently places no such limitation. More below.

3) Searching for so-called hashtags – a keyword prefixed by "#" (pound sign) – is a way of detecting additional intentionality about tweets. Either it serves as a point of emphasis/visibility by the author (since a common keyword like "#branding" or "#quote" would still show up in a search results even without the specific # prefix), or more commonly, if the hashtag is a unique abbreviation, it serves as a sort of code to be specifically searched for by those that know about it.

This is most commonly done for conferences (recent examples are #140tc and #twtrcon), for ongoing weekly Twitter-based discussions around a given topic, e.g.

#journchat

is for journalism discussions on Monday evenings U.S. Time, or as a meme that becomes self-replicating enough that people participate, and the hashtag gets into the Top 10 "trending" keywords/phrases on Twitter for a while.

Either way, the authors of tweets using hashtags went to the trouble of using the # symbol and/or created a hashtag to highlight something. Use that knowledge to your advantage when searching.

4) "since:timestamp" and "until:timestamp" will allow you to segment out tweets from a specific day or number of days, as needed. This can be useful if you wanted to e.g. view only those tweets for a conference that were actually sent during the duration of the conference, and leave out the chatter before or after, which is e.g. less likely to contain "twitter-casting" of the actual conference panels.

#140conf since:2009-06-16 until:2009-06-17

5) "near:city-name" – this operator will find tweets that originated from a user account that Twitter thinks is the city name you are referring to. Since this is going off of users’ self-reported location field in their profile (and NOT off of some precise geo-tagging a la iPhone location, though Twitter is reportedly working on that), which is free text, and for some contains things like multiple cities, "everywhere", "The Interwebs", asf. this is not particularly precise, but it can still work in aggregate. E.g.

#140conf since:2009-06-16 until:2009-06-17 near:sf

will find all tweets about the TwtrCon Conference that were placed by users based out of San Francisco, though Twitter has no idea (yet) whether they were at the conference in New York or just talking about it.

5) To bring it all together, and for a special tip, we should also consider the so-called Retweet convention on Twitter, a format which allows one to quickly copy & paste a given (useful, funny, etc.) tweet from another user, and forward it on to our own Twitter network of followers, while giving credit to the original author. E.g. I tweeted

"RT @mvolpe: New Blog Post: Are Your Compelling Offers Actually..Compelling? http://tinyurl.com/mlbzw4"

giving credit to user @mvolpe, and used the "RT" prefix to signify the retweet. This is actually a convention that spontaneously arose from the user base (another format uses "via @username", used most often if the tweet text is sufficiently altered, but credit for the find is still meant to be conveyed).

What this means for our searches is that we can either search specifically for "RT OR via" to find tweets that were deemed worthy of retweeting (there are actually entire third-party services set up keeping track of these counts, and thereby surfacing tweets according to their presumed repetition popularity), or, we can exclude those tweets to avoid a lot of duplicates!

So here is a great way to cut down on overly large result sets, taking out most "link-less" chatter and Retweet duplications, as well as "psychology jobs" related postings:

psychology filter:links -RT -via -job -jobs

[As an aside, though still search literacy/awareness relevant:

I use this very example query above, and then pipe the RSS feed from the result into a somewhat more permanent receptacle such as FriendFeed or a Tumblr mini-blog. Remember, Twitter might (and currently does) cut off the backwards reach of your result sets, currently during heavy daytime loads it’s at most about 7 days back. This presents a real problem for your own research/archiving purposes.

Part of the reason may be that Twitter is thinking about making long-range backward data mining a “for pay” feature that large corporate marketing agencies, etc. may pay them a lot of money for (obviously not if they could access everything for free through Search.twitter.com). Only time will tell, though I think it is definitely important for the community to be aware of this possible issue.]

Or, here is another complex example to search for the term "mashable" while excluding tweets from the username "mashable", any @ mentions (or replies to) username "mashable", and tweets with links. Remember how I said earlier that you could do exclusions on some operators? This is an example of that:

mashable -from:mashable -"@mashable" -filter:links

This could be used so that you see what people are saying about Mashable, the blog, that is NOT one of the countless retweets of @mashable, not a tweet from "@mashable" himself, and doesn’t include links to further content. In other words, what people are saying about that brand the most raw and unvarnished form.

FriendFeed Search

OK, upon writing this section on FriendFeed power search, I realized that this post was getting to be really long. So rather than overload everyone, I figured I’d push this and the section on Google search tricks into a follow-up post in a few days.

I hope you found this enlightening, and that you take the time to practice advanced search. To become "fluent" and fully "search literate", you will need to practice. I know that saying this in our ADD world is somewhat of a bummer, but the payoff, especially for your business, can be tremendous. Remember, running circles around your competition and all of that…

If you’re not on Twitter yet, you should be, if only to see what’s going on, and to grab any usernames (for your own name, your company, and your products/brands) that may still be available before someone else does.

(If you are completely new to Twitter, first watch this brief video, and click though this presentation slide deck.)

Even if you decide that you don’t have the time to invest in maintaining an active profile on Twitter, you should at an absolute minimum understand that the new "real-time Web" that is emerging due to Twitter’s popularity is changing the game in many ways:

Not only is it causing redesign changes and opening-up at Twitter’s rival social media services such as FriendFeed and Facebook. Search of Twitter’s massive real-time stream of "Tweets" (the micro-messages that users send to their follower lists), is now being called "the pulse of this society" by wine merchant turned Social Media guru Gary Vaynerchuck. And I would agree:

Should you know what 10 14 Million people (yes, it grew by nearly 50% in the last month), many of them sought-after influencers and early-adopters are saying about you, your company, your brands, your products, your market, and your business’ target keywords on Twitter?

Of course you should. Twitter’s recent geometric growth proves that it is finding itself right at the inflection point from early to mainstream adoption in these last few months. And therefore searching at Seach.twitter.com has become an absolute goldmine of marketing relevant information, one that must almost be considered indispensable at this point:

So much so that there has been much rumor and speculation lately regarding a possible acquisition of Twitter by either Google or Microsoft. In Google’s case, it would be mainly a way to preempt Microsoft or other competitors from disrupting its search dominance. In fact, I have recently argued that acquiring Twitter may well be Microsoft’s last best hope at getting back into the search game in earnest.

This is because Twitter’s so-called Timeline makes its search results extremely, well, timely and time-bound, unlike Google’s and other search engine’s authority models that can feel stale in comparison to Twitter in many circumstances (and don’t allow for a clear sorting by recency of e.g. the 1,000 top results).

A good recent example were searches for SXSW Interactive Convention  panel attendee notes: The results via Search.twitter.com taken from Twitter’s Timeline are much fresher & more pertinent, especially during and right after the conference (one caveat is that Twitter will currently at times cut off backwards results beyond 7 days, apparently due to server load issues).

Google on the other hand will serve up mostly results from SXSWi 2008, 2007, asf. due to its authority model (the pages obviously had much longer to gather links from everywhere on the net, through blog post mentions, social bookmarking, etc.).

So again, one could easily see how Google simply cannot afford to let anyone else walk away with this whole new category/aspect of "real-time Web" search, which in itself has a strong component of recommendation filtering: Twitter users mostly only pass on those items and links that they feel would add value to their followers.

That’s because in a sense their reputation is on the line with every tweet they post. They know that almost instantaneously dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people might hold them accountable if they send them garbage. Compare that to Google, where the ever-evolving practices of search engine optimization (SEO) have already greatly distorted the results that Google will spit out for most commercially relevant keywords.

In a way, Twitter is succeeding, to some extent by seeming accident, at crowd-sourced search models where the likes of Jason Kalakanis’ Mahalo and recently Wikia Search (started by Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales) have failed, largely because they could never get enough users and user buy-in to scour enough content. On Twitter, content recommendation happens naturally, as a side-effect of the ongoing conversations or (more or less helpful) "stream of consciousness broadcasting" (sometimes referred to as "life casting").

And incidentally, each tweet containing a link to further content tends to also have a good amount of semantic/meta-data accompanying that link, without much of the nuisance of formal methods such as tagging, because the descriptors are added naturally as I already mentioned.

Are you beginning to see why Twitter is so special? Why you should start running searches at Search.twitter.com today if you haven’t done so up to this point? Go do it, right now. Go there and input queries for your most important keywords.

As gary Vaynerchuck says, (rough quote) "if your business is selling soup, you should go there and monitor the pulse of soup in society"…

(A follow-up post "10 Deep Points About Twitter" is on its way, stay tuned…)

While I personally am all for that change, having been an ardent Twitter user since early last year, there has been plenty of backlash from Facebook users about the extent of these changes. And all of the usual suspects of the blogosphere are weighing in, with heavy-weights like TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble siding with Facebook’s right to basically do what it wants with the free service it provides.

Even going so far as arguing that listening to your customer too much can be counterproductive. Here is a quote from Mike Arrington’s piece "No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook.":

In an interview last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked with me about how users are willing to accept change over time, and that Facebook would continue to push things along. Suddenly, though, they surrender because a few users have a belly ache over a redesign.

If they wanted to make these changes anyway, they shouldn’t have titled their blog post “Responding to Your Feedback.” They should have just continued to ignore the ranting, and announced further changes. Showing that you’re listening to feedback just invites more of it.

Someday, if they’re not careful, someone is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace, who in turn did it to Friendster. Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner.

While I can see their point to a degree, social media represent a whole new ballgame in many ways, which it makes it harder to predict what will happen. While these “A camel is a horse designed by committee" ideas may have validity in the realm of physical product design (Scoble is using a quote from a mentor about the problems with crowd-sourcing the design of a Porsche), I would hold that things may not be so straight-forward in the digital/social media realm:

1) Facebook already had several cases where it needed to retreat in shame from changes to the Facebook platform, the biggest among them the Beacon activity-tracking system that caused such privacy concerns and general outrage among Facebook users that it had to basically be abandoned.

More recently, the above-mentioned Facebook Terms of Service (TOS) debate around changes that appeared to give Facebook almost complete, irrevocable control over a users data and images even PAST the closing of an account, brought forth a similat swift user community response, and backing off by Facebook (for now to the original TOS, with supposedly a crowd-sourced version being on the way).

So with this partial retreat by Facebook, incidentally again due to privacy concerns, they’re really batting 0 for 3. One would think that they would be wising up on the PR front by now. And so much for "Zuckerberg never backs down"…

2) Much of this is not really surprising since Facebook’s users are perfectly empowered through Facebook’s platform:

Perfect for sharing photos with your friends, and throwing virtual sheep at them, but also perfect as a virtual soapbox to… complain about changes to Facebook’s platform.

With Facebooks recent full-scale mainstreaming, bringing it’s rate of new user adoption to well over 1 Million a day, one of the side effects is that now, even if only 1% of users strenuously object to something, that’s still close to 3 Million people howling.

And after all, it is called SOCIAL media, so most controversial/high impact messages have a tendency to spread virally, aided by speed of light technologies, AND Facebook cannot come off as looking patently anti-social.

So while Steve Gillmor is arguing that inertia would tend to win out, I’d say that he may be underestimating the righteous indignation that can come with perceived violations of SOCIAL trust.

Certainly there is room for back and forth here, but at some point, if the rubber band is stretched too far, it could snap. Users could turn their collective backs on Facebook, especially since the internet all around Facebook’s so-called "Walled Garden" is always continuing to hustle, and to add to the functionality available with quantum-leap innovations all of the time, making it less and less necessary for users to be locked into Facebook.

3) Which brings me to my last point: Facebook, having started from an, admittedly elegant (especially in comparison to MySpace) but mostly static, user profile page, has already been changing in response to "the rise of feeds". First the profile was redigned to look and feel more like FriendFeed, leaving a lot of the social apps to languish and whither on a back tab when compared to before (I certainly haven’t used many anymore since that point).

Next, the meteoric rise of Twitter, and its persistent "attention hogging", especially with the "hip early adopter" crowd, prompted an attempt by Facebook to buy Twitter (though the offer was mostly in hard to value Facebook stock), and now the redesign of the user’s homepage to look suspiciously like Twitter with it’s realtime feed of friends’ updates and activities.

But the truth is that Facebook users may not be ready for this level of speed, which Twitter users have already "living and breathing" for months or years at this point. Since I’ve been piping my Twitter updates to Facebook status updates, I’ve always worried that it was overloading my Facebook friends, and have recently throttled the pass-through way down.

So the jury is out whether Facebook users are en masse willing to take it to that level, or for that matter make use of the new possibilities of opening up one’s updates to the world (and thereby to Google to index). And since everyone all around Facebook is sharing things (like photos, which Facebook already just said in its TOS attempt it wants to hoard for itself), it may be hard to both maintain the Walled Garden, as well as open up Facebook in ways that could steal Twitter’s thunder.

So no, I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg has a completely free hand to play anymore. The ghosts that the sorcerers apprentice has called may prove harder and harder to call back. The monster that is Facebook is becoming harder and harder to control.

This should be fun to watch…

In the lengthy post he argues his "basic premise [...] that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it", which due to its sweeping nature definitely warrants further examination. The post as of right now has generated well over 200 comments, on a Sunday, so it obviously hit a nerve.

Among other things, Professor Clemons makes the following points about advertising both online or via traditional broadcast media:

Consumers do not trust advertising. Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.

Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible.  Why?  If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads.

And mostly consumers do not need advertising. My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor.

While I would agree with all three points made, and would count them among important caveats for anyone choosing to advertise for anything in this day and age, I disagree with Professor Clemons’ basic premise. Here’s why:

I would argue that none of the major "Old Media" players online (or for that matter none of the "New Media" either) are anywhere close to having efficiently monetized their page views. Everyone is still clumsily fumbling around when it comes to intelligent targeting of ads, both as to offer theme, as well as to offer pricing.

(Or rather mostly lack thereof, as when trying to employ Madison Avenue "image advertising" without any clear offer being made. Which, if it ever worked on TV, etc., certainly isn’t working online. In fact, online it may increasingly create a negative image of a company/brand/product as "someone" who just doesn’t get it).

This is astonishing, when all it really takes is some common sense about selling people stuff that makes sense in the CONTEXT of what they were already doing.

First, let’s get clear on the fact that an article or opinion piece in e.g. the New York Times provides a lot more pointers as to readers’ state of mind/interest than most Google queries ever could (as do Web videos posted on such sites), so the failure to target properly is in part simply a form of laziness.

While it is true that a news reader does come with, on average, less intent to buy anything compared to the problem/solution mindset of many search engine users, the data we can glean from the readers of an article, especially the LONGER they stay on that page reading, is much richer.

They must be interested in the subject matter of the article, and will tend to approve of the author and likely his general area of expertise. They will also be in a news or opinion mode depending on the piece. So what you should offer them in this case is more news or opinions RELEVANT to the topic at hand. Make the information offered exclusive and/or in-depth, and make the offer cheap enough to ideally keep it in the range of an impulse purchase (offer a Paypal option to keep things simple and secure in the reader’s mind).

For example, German Newsmag DER SPIEGEL was selling in depth dossiers from their archives (including PRE internet!) for a few bucks at one point, not sure if they still are.

Sell books (more INFORMATION) related to the topic at hand, in fact, some newspapers ought to be able to do OK just as an Amazon super-affiliate (earning 4% or more on the referral to book or similar pages on Amazon). Especially when compared to the poorly/non-targeted ads they are now showing, e.g. I saw a comparative car insurance ad placed against a financial opinion column. That connection can only be called tenuous at best.

For another example, just earlier today I viewed a video excerpt from the Today Show on MSNBC.com about micro-blogging service Twitter going mainstream, and they served up an ad for KRAFT dressing or something like that as a pre-roll ad. Completely pointless and a waste of my time and theirs, but in reality this kind of thing is still totally common, on MSNBC.com, Hulu.com, etc. Everywhere.

Basically on all Web properties of Old Media companies (and most New Media companies for that matter). It is still the standard handed down from pre-internet TV advertising days. It’s as if content awareness and keyword-based targeting had never been invented yet…

What if they had served a super short pre-roll ad that said: "Stay tuned after the end of the video, we’ve got a major surprise relating to Twitter for you", and then in a post-roll ad try to sell me something related to Twitter, social media, smart phones (to post to social media from my phone), etc. etc.

That would make at least some marginal sense. Getting me to opt in to a list by offering a free useful/in-depth report e.g. on how Social Media is changing the world, and then try to sell me off of there would be even smarter. Remember, it’s difficult to go "from Zero to Sale" in one step, especially if the price point is outside of "impulse purchase" range.

Or better yet the ad could attempt to hand me off to the account/profile for KRAFT foods on Twitter in order for me to connect there, maybe offering a special gift/incentive for doing so. You get the point, the only limit here is your imagination guided by basic common sense and direct-response principles.

By the way, if you’re not capturing prospects’ email addresses and then marketing to that list, you are making the biggest mistake of all. Back to the opinion piece/columnist example, they should all have big, fat lists ranging in the 100’s of thousands if not millions of subscribers (and the NYT in this example could retain an "ever-green backend" commission from the columnist on any follow-up sales via such a list being built for the columnist).

Also, there should ALWAYS be a big bright ad for the columnist’s current book placed for crying out loud, and if you’re really smart you’d switch that ad out every 20 seconds or so (motion drives attention) to an offer for… the audio-book version, earlier books, "Columnist XYZ sayz…" quote mugs, T-shirts, etc. etc.

Anything will be better than what they are doing now. It bears repeating: All it takes is some common sense about selling people stuff that makes sense in the CONTEXT of what they were already doing.

The bottom line is, any online content property like the NYT simply needs to do a lot more with all of the attention that it already has. In an information economy, attention is the only scarce resource. And they happen to already have plenty of that very resource. It is a CRIME to fail to monetize it efficiently.

To bring it all the way back to Professor Clemons’ post, while I will agree that advertising may currently be largely failing online, in my view this is due not to some basic law of the internet (because there is a good number of people successfully marketing online), but to the fact that it mostly hasn’t even been TRIED, in any intelligent reading of that word, by the usual suspects of major media.

If you’ve been wondering about what Google is really up to with its forays into mobile phones with their Google Android OS (now out on the G1 Phone with T-Mobile), why they don’t care when many of their services don’t monetize (yet or ever), and why Google is interested in "stealing our voices" (?!?!), then this slide deck is for you.

I am very serious about this, spending about 10-15 minutes studying it can save you dozens if not hundreds of hours of reading tech newsy blog posts, or checking Techmeme.com every few hours. Once you understand the big picture of what Google is doing, you can create plans for your own business around them if applicable (and if your business is going to thrive in the 21st century it is almost certainly applicable), or actually model (copy) some of Google’s strategies and principles.

Study especially the explanation of how Google uses network effects starting on slide #24. Happy strategizing!

As an aside, it is extremely profitable to search SlideShare.net for presentation slides in your area of interest. You usually get highly condensed/integrated information, you can use successful presentations as templates for your own work, and possibly upload your own presentations in your own areas of expertise.

But what makes Google’s new "sponsored videos" feature on YouTube even more relevant is today’s news that YouTube searches now represent the second largest search engine in the world according to ComScore, ahead of both Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN/Live! So there should be ample room for YouTube to generate profits for advertisers and in turn for itself (Silicon Alley Insider estimates that it could add $1B to Google’s bottom line).

However, as I began to lay out yesterday, there are a number of caveats that need to be kept in mind by the internet marketer looking to take advantage of this opportunity:

1) Marketing within Social Media (vs. search ads PPC) is generally tricky due to a deeply rooted differentiation by most people between social and business contexts: People don’t like them mixed, and can react very negatively if they are (read Dan Ariely’s excellent "Predictably Irrational", chapter 4 "The Cost of Social Norms").

2) So if you are going to market in any social context, you need to get the tone and the context just right, else you are not only wasting your ads, you are likely hurting your brand. The backlash may also be much stronger than in other situations, because you will be dealing with a perceived violation of social trust.

Whatever initial offer you make needs to still fit into the "friends" context somehow, or else be so targeted that the prospect truly sees your offer as a form of "friendly service", e.g. if you are offering something that would help with a social task they are about to undertake, like offering flowers at a special price if someone is surmised to be going on a date, etc. (judging from e.g. a Facebook "action" of theirs).

3) While YouTube is overtly the least directly social (compared to say Facebook, etc.) and instead more entertainment oriented, the social aspect of sending/receiving video clip links to/from your friends is still clearly there. So to stay in tune with the viewer/prospect, you still need to get the CONTEXT just right:

If the search keyword (or individual video for that matter) is an entertainment vehicle first-and-foremost, then offer them more (hopefully related) ENTERTAINMENT products, NOT shoes or cars or deodorant. This goes for pre- or post-roll ads as well by the way, which prospects tend to gladly view IF they have something to do with the actual video content requested.

With more educational keywords/videos, there may be more latitude to offer things, though they still need to be related and represent a LOGICAL follow-up, else your sponsored video will get largely ignored/filtered out by the prospect just like most other ads (even though, as I said yesterday, Google appears to be embedding the ads very discretely, so that they don’t scream "ad" vis-a-vis the other video content).

So the formula would be, create videos that are highly relevant to your keywords, while also being disruptive enough to get attention.

In a word, Google is starting a new "sponsored videos" feature on YouTube that will follow their well proven keyword/Pay-per-click (PPC) model, only now with videos instead of the familiar (and mostly ignored) Adsense text ads. This should be a great opportunity for those internet marketers already further along with their video efforts.

It should be pretty cheap to bid on the YouTube keywords at first, due to limited competition on them (the barrier to reasonably well-produced, well-converting video is still high, a lot higher at least than for text/image websites), and the click-through rates should be high because the videos blend right in as just more video content.

Note that the appearance of the still screen shot shown for the video before play will be crucial to attracting extra attention (like a well-done display ad). But in principle, nothing about this form of "ad" will make it so that YouTube viewers will mentally block them out – which usually happens even unconsciously after a short while, because the "ads" are, well, videos, the same thing that the user was looking for in the first place.

But if done right, it can be the equivalent of an advertorial, a marketers dream…

An important caveat applies here: You want to be sure to get the context right, i.e. deliver a video that will be perceived as relevant, or even value-added to the user’s keyword search. Else you will garner exponentially negative brand equity, as users will feel betrayed.

Again, I’d say Google just changed the game today as far as their ability to monetize YouTube is concerned (which was pretty poor so far), but it also should be a great avenue for internet marketers: Instead of wasting time trying to manipulate the YouTube view rankings, or having to "viralize" the videos some other way with a high failure rate (although if you can have that built in, the effect after the initial sponsored promo phase could be multiplied!), you just buy the "in".

Of course, you’ll still have to know what you are doing in terms of direct response marketing to get prospects to convert from the video, and make the numbers work reliably for you.

Then an interview by Silicon Alley Insider’s Peter Kafka with Cuil’s CEO  Tom Costello today reminded us of everything that went wrong with the would-be Google competitor’s lauch, as well as everything that is still wrong with it.

While apparently the outages of the first days have subsided, many of Cuil’s search results are still low on relevancy, and still juxtapose seemingly random images from other websites with a given search result (prompting some cries of copyright violations).

There was much discussion over on FriendFeed involving Robert Scoble and others as to whether this "launch" was done just to position them for a buy-out by e.g. Microsoft for the technology. I tend to agree, given how obviously poorly everything was executed.

They had to have known results weren’t going to be very good, even more so about the sometimes outright embarrassing "false image" issues.

If they didn’t, this would constitute a formidable case of group think, against which one would think there should have been at least some push-back/reality-checking from the venture capitalists that put $33 Million of funding into Cuil.

Then again, they let Mr. "I’m Irish, it seemed natural enough, and works for me" Costello get away with naming the thing "Cuil".

When prompted about the questionable brand naming choice, Mr. Costello attempted a weak defense by saying "[i]t’s hard to find a four letter name…". Why did it need to be a four letter name? Were they trying to defeat Google through shortness of the domain?!?

(Incidentally, very short domain names haven’t really worked out particularly well for anyone, just ask Ask.com, Buy.com, and others.)

Too-cute-by-half "Cuil" comes across like a development code name (like "Longhorn" for Vista, etc.), not like the final product of a well-thought-out branding exercise. Which of course would lend further credence to the idea that this "launch" may have simply been a "buy us already" plea.

It gets even funnier now that a number of sites have posted strong evidence that the Gaelic word "cuil", while leaving the company open to all manner of misspellings and mispronunciations, really doesn’t mean "knowledge" (as still claimed by Costello and Co.) after all.

Given all of these "shenanigans" (sorry, couldn’t resist… and who did these guys have for Gaelic teachers anyway? :), it comes as little surprise that Cuil has now apparently lowered their target from Google slayer to Google backup:

it’s not supposd to be better than Google – just an alternative…

Another similar "crime against branding" name for a start-up recently went to the "deadpool": News personalization site Thoof.com. Their CEO probably also thought that the name was intuitive and "worked for them"…