Sandlines

the price of success

I’ve been twittering on and off for a while now – trying to figure out how it fits in with all my other activities – and gradually finding it more and more interesting over time. Already this year, the buzz around the microblogging service has kicked up several gears: Stephen Fry’s often witty stream-of-consciousness has been a highlight, but I’ve been gradually seeing more and more of my friends and business contacts using it.

Links back and forth with blogs (alerting to updates), Facebook, various IM and LinkedIn status messages seem to have potential.

One of my LinkedIn connections has been using his status to advise media sales people when he is in ‘buy’ mode – I’m curious to learn how this will impact the quality of his media buys.

Twitter has also gained considerably attention in mainstream media this month: suddenly DJs on Radio 1 are talking about it incessantly.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that  @gordonm’s tweet yesterday about Twitters desire to monetise their service by charging businesses for using the service in a commercial fashion was essentially a link back to the Brand Republic site.

I don’t know how many followers @gordonm has at the moment, but the suggestion of how effective this can be found in @stephenfry’s history, where his mere mention of a site can bring their servers to a standstill. Mr Fry has over 150,000 followers today.

So how long before Twitter becomes part of the marketing landscape? And how will they develop sufficient revenues so that they can improve their up-time (Twitter.com is down as I write this)?

One interesting example: on Monday my flight from Heathrow was delayed by 2 hours. I tweeted “Desperate rush to h’row this morning was futile: flight delayed 2 hrs +. Grrr.”  This from my iPhone.

Almost at once I had a response from Boarding! inviting me to post details of airport to them to meet up with other stranded travellers.

It’s going to be an interesting one to watch: can Twitter do what other social networks are struggling to do and crack the social networking revenue stream conundrum? My guess is there’s a way to make it work via mobile perhaps. AFullerView evidently has some ideas as well.

Anyone else?

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"The web organized for you"

Sandlines is slightly green (like Kosmix’s brand colours) to learn that said new search ‘explore’ engine has secured a further $20m funding, led by Time Warner. Not bad in the current funding environment.

Kosmix, for those who’ve not come across it before, is a new launch, currently in “beta-ish”, that seeks to provide inspiration, for want of a better term, for people entering search terms who aren’t looking for a specific answer, but want something less precise.

So the results pages throw up a range of sourced answers, coming from places like Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo Answers, news sources, Google search results, ebay, Amazon, Hulu… a pretty broad spectrum.

Click to go to search results on Kosmix

I checked out a Google phone ‘explore’ to see what I might find – the results are quite interesting. In many ways reminiscent of Google’s own ‘Universal Search’ project, I’m not (yet) convinced that this adds anything beyond the current web capabilities. But people are fickle folk and I don’t believe Google’s near-monopoly on search is invincible or permanent.

Of course, at the moment a lot of the results are very US centric. Hulu’s inclusion (inevitable given the funding) is of course a US only answer at the moment, and the early news feeds are very US-centric. I’ll be trying to get a view from some of my trans-atlantic pals about what their thoughts on it are.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in the future of search and the potential for where Web 3.0 might go, you should have a play. The only thing I ask is – please let us know what you think back here on Sandlines!

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I’ve posted before about better pin-pointing of location from devices on the move – and it’s a subject that has long been close to my heart. But thanks to AdViking to drawing my attention to Greg Sterling’s post last week about the inclusion of Geo-tagging in Windows 7.

It’s a natural development from Geode’s firefox plug in – and will further refine the capabilities of tools like Feedjit I noted before.

But this really is going to be an interesting one to watch on the privacy boards: if your operating system will be able to pinpoint your (fairly) precise location – and you’re on, say, a corporate network – then the implications for employers (for example) to check up on all kinds of things gets much more potent.

Now, let’s put this together with some of the commentary last week on Google’s decision to use searches related to ‘flu’ to identify areas where epidemics might arise. One of the more interesting responses came from The Register:

“The problem, (Marc) Rotenberg says, is that data aggregation calls attention to specific data stored on Google’s servers, making it that much more vulnerable to, say, a subpoena or a national security letter. “Let’s say that instead of Flu Trends, Google’s doing SARS Trends – tracking a very serious communicable disease,” he explains. “If there’s a big SARS upsurge somewhere, the government would be at Google’s door asking where did that data come from.” “

So this goes a step further: it’s not just about what you type into Google, I wonder if this could lead to any information on your computer being fed back to the authorities and then triangulated back to a pretty accurate location. What will the privacy/amnesty international take on that be? I watch with interest…

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Paul Dacre

Peter Wilby, over on the Guardian’s site, is complaining about Paul Dacre (editor of the Daily Mail and set for much grander things as he celebrates his 60th birthday this week) complaining about the BBC. Apparently Dacre’s comments are ’self serving’ (and worse).

Now there’s a surprise. Editor of major news outlet gives speech in which he says something that is true to his (and his employers’) interests. Hold the front page.

The various titles down at Wapping seem equally happy to take a poke at the BBC whenever possible too. Both the Times and the Sun (and their respective Sunday iterations) have been known similarly to attack Auntie on sometimes flimsy grounds. Witness the News of the World’s (pernicious? self-serving?) lead last weekend about the amount of money paid to top execs over at the BBC. I noted that no mention was made on the packages paid to senior execs over at Wapping – or indeed at sister company Sky.

So does Dacre have a point? The Daily Mail is part of a larger group that has a large swathe of regional papers (Northcliffe Media) who are falling on harder times at the moment, not least because of the rise of decent online content, and the BBC is investing heavily on 65 ‘ultra-local’ websites. This won’t help Northcliffe Media any – and it’ll be interesting to see what they try to do with their ‘ThisIs…’ brand website extensions to those local papers.

It is Sandlines’ view that the local markets are the next really interesting battleground online. I’ll be watching with a great deal of interest. Who knows, perhaps something will come out of it that actually helps the people these sites are trying to reach – and the advertisers who are trying to talk to them. Sandlines lives in hope.

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Over on Razorshine, my old pal Kanani has been shopping – in the real world – and hoping that Google would help him. As the organisation dedicated to ‘…organi(sing) the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” this is perhaps not an unreasonable expectation. Especially when, as Riaz says, the new Westfield Shopping Centre has linked to Google Maps to show us how to find them. Ah well.

It raises a question that someone asked me a couple of weeks ago over a pint – and which has come up several times recently: is it possible to go up against Google and win?

Privately, many inside Microsoft would say that perhaps it isn’t – at least for Microsoft.

So if you’re going into business doing anything around the ‘organisation’ and provision of information, does that mean you should pack up and go home?

No.

Google does an outstanding job most of the time – but they are not perfect, or infallible. And, for all their 16,000+ employees, they still cannot do everything. At least, not all right now. Pick the right one of those areas and you’re in business… perhaps.

Then there’s the new semantic search technologies that are touted as the foundation of a ‘web 3.0′ world. Google, of course, will play in this sandpit, but it’s a different approach to presenting information than that which is hard coded into Google’s corporate psyche, so the jury is not quite in yet as to whether they’ll rise to the challenge.

Of course, there is also the entire ecosystem that has sprung up around the way Google makes money. One friend of mine calls this ‘feeding the monster’. Shopping comparison and much affiliate marketing could be described as falling into this bucket. And it’s a healthy one, even in a downturn.

But one of the more interesting perspectives is coming from a book I’m reading at the moment – Randall Stoss has published a near-insider’s view of Google in ‘Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know” ( I link to the ebook, but you can get it on Amazon too). And it’s a compelling view. Doubtless I will mention it again over the coming days.

It’s curious in how it compares Google’s ‘open’ view of the world with the essentially closed environment that social networking (well, mainly Facebook) is once again introducing to the web.

Just as Google wins the legal battle to index the content of pretty much any published book it likes – and extend beyond the virtual world – it’s curious that its biggest threat may well come from the web itself. Food for thought.

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Is this getting too real?

I’ve been looking at a lot of research this week, and this has been one of the questions that is much discussed: the degree to which people care about the online communities with which they are engaged.

There’s some excellent insights in a report by the Center for the Digital Future’s Jeffrey Cole.

One of the questions asked is “How often do you take action offline … related to your online community?”. Turns out 14% of people surveyed do at least once a week.

Then all this began to fall into place when I read this story about a woman in Japan who faces a possible jail term for the virtual murder of her virtual husband in Second Life style game called Maple Story.

I’m not sure which is the scarier idea: that this woman logged on and killed off her ‘husband’ or that the man turned around and filed charges against her for doing so.

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Over on eConsultancy, blogger Drama 2.0 has posted an interesting look at Google’s much-heralded new browser, Chrome, and pointing to the disappointment that seems almost palpable for its lack of ‘points of difference’.

Chrome: last amongst equals?

I’ve used Chrome a bit – and I note that some Sandlines readers do, too – and somewhat more than the average figure shown in Drama 2.0’s report (which were 0.85% trending down to 0.77%).

But what does it offer that’s different? Currently, nothing dramatic – in fact, it misses a lot of the plugins that make Firefox my browser of choice (CoolIris, Delicious integration…).

There are some small nice-to-haves, but it feels more like a marker (some might say a line in the sand!) than a fully fledged competitive offering.

One thing seems sure: the enthusiastic “Chrome will take over the world” response to its initial (high) take up looks premature. Once again, substance will have to out over hype.

What I was hoping for was something to live up to the claim that Chrome would rethink the way we use the internet. It was going to unleash a new ability to support cloud computing. It was the browser built for the multiplex cinema experience the internet can be in today’s Web 2.0/tomorrow’s Web 3.0 world, rather than the hushed libraries of Web 1.0.

Maybe I’ve got the wrong prescription contact lenses, ’cause I can’t see it in the Chrome 1.0.

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Those ARE real people down there... just click and see!

Sandlines is idly pondering his No. 1 FAQ, namely “what happens next”?

I wrote a few weeks back about buzzword inflation in the form of Web 3.0, as a framework for speculation. For me, one of the key elements is going to be the increase in relevance online. And a key driver for relevance is location.
Location has long been a tricky beast to observe on the web. Local IP addresses (especially outside the US) are difficult to get right, leaving declared location (via registration data) the nearest thing we often have for an answer.

But people are pesky things, They’ve an irritating tendency (at least, irritating in this context) to move about – i.e. changing their location, therefore their criteria for relevance shifts with them…. pub vs office vs coffee shop vs living room etc.

That said, they’re pretty ingenious too. Witness the invention of devices such as the iPod Touch (on which I wrote this post) or the iPhone – or other (gasp) smartphones, PDAs, laptops, UMPCs or even the Asus EeePC. All with internet capabilities of varying levels of usefulness and usability.

And guess what? They are terrific at pinpointing location. If I use my iPod Touch with WiFi and go to Google Maps, it puts me within 500m of my actual location. And not a cellular transmitter in sight. So, an opportunity for better (ie more relevant) search results for web users; better targeting options for advertisers… a better online experience all round.

That still creates challenges: how do you generate the content that provides relevance online? It’s easy enough to get macro level local content, but the more granular stuff is much harder to obtain. Businesses old (Yell.com) and new (UpMyStreet, KnoWhere.co.uk) try, but I think it’s unrealistic to expect traditional approaches to editorial to fill the gap. You need to generate community - for communities. In other words, user generated content: reviews, listings, groups etcetera. It is happening, but there’s still a way to go.

Location is going to be critical to the Web 3.0 future. Watch this (local) space.

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So it turns out that people trust what they say to each other much more than they trust what marketers tell them. Do I hear gasps of amazement? I’m not deeply surprised.

A friend of mine recently shared some research she’d found about levels of trust in various media. It deeply re-inforces Sandlines opinions about the shift in the balance of power from marketer to consumer in forming opinions. It makes for interesting reading, I thought. Turns our that our faith in Fleet Street is a little less than we hold in what a complete stranger with no credentials tells us in a blog.

What price your banner ad now?

Now, I’m tempted to give you a PO Box number and asking you to send me money – just in the interests of updating an experiment that was tried in a newspaper in the US last century…(which worked by the way). But maybe that’s where it all started to go wrong for that industry?

Seriously though, it does re-inforce why dedicated review sites and customer reviews on retailers sites do so well…

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I drew attention to the Scrabolous/ Hasbro debacle over on Brand Republic a short while ago – and how

Hasbro/Mattel were seriously missing a trick. You might call in dis-engagement marketing.

As an old friend of mine has blogged over at the Cheeze Blog, (oh, and as discussed in olde worlde media sources too…) Scrabulous is officially game over. Jamie calls it a goalless draw, but surely own goals were scored on both sides. But the result is the same – no winners, only losers – who’ll buy a Scrabble set now?

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