John Battelle's Searchblog

AT&T has a TOS for its customers which, implemented strictly, would be an indefensible limitation on freedom of speech (and would create a shitstorm for the company if enforced). I'm very interested to see how long it takes for AT&T to listen to the howling in the blogosphere, and revise that TOS. My take: Companies who don't listen, respond, and iterate are doomed to fail in the conversation economy.

The language:

5.1 Suspension/Termination. Your Service may be suspended or terminated if your payment is past due and such condition continues un-remedied for thirty (30) days. In addition, AT&T may immediately terminate or suspend all or a portion of your Service, any Member ID, electronic mail address, IP address, Universal Resource Locator or domain name used by you, without notice, for conduct that AT&T believes (a) violates the Acceptable Use Policy; (b) constitutes a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws) or a violation of these TOS, or any applicable policies or guidelines, or (c) tends to damage the name or reputation of AT&T, or its parents, affiliates and subsidiaries.

YouTube's AdSense integration.

Facebook's friend groups.

Changes in the wind. I am about to turn into a pumpkin so I can't comment but will over the weekend.

This Compete study was interesting to me (found on Mashable). The blog posts that summarizes it asks:

An interesting data point got me thinking recently. According to Compete data there are roughly 7.5 billion search queries performed every month by the US Online Population. However there are only about 5 billion search referrals every month. This means that roughly 1/3 of all searches in some sense go unanswered. People search for something and then don’t click on a search result. So the obvious question is which search engine is doing the best job from a “search fulfillment” standpoint?

It then answers:

Yahoo! pretty much takes the cake on this one with about 75% of searches performed on Yahoo! in August resulted in a referral. By comparison, searches on Google result in a referral about 65% of the time and searches on MSN/Live result in a referral about 59% of the time. Lower search fulfillment numbers mean that on a percentage basis fewer search queries on that engine resulted in the searcher clicking on a result link. So from this perspective one might consider Yahoo! more effective at getting consumers the results they want.

I can imagine that these results have to do with any number of contextual issues - do people who use Yahoo search exclusively, for example, have habits that Google searchers do not? For example, I wonder if folks who do tons and tons of searches each day - the most high volume, hard core users of search - might be Google users, and also might use Google the way I do - very iteratively, in other words, I try a lot of query strings till I get the one I want, then I drill down.

Just a thought. When I see studies like this, I tend to not buy the obvious conclusion. That's not to say it might not be true, but it strikes me more is most likely in play here than meets the eye.

The submissions deadline is Oct. 1 for the Launchpad, for those of you who need a gentle reminder. We've got a great group of applicants already, but the deadline is very strict, as we have to have time for the final judging process.

A reminder on the new approach this year:

At this year's Web 2.0 Summit, we are evolving Launch Pad a bit. While it’s great to be chosen to launch your new company at a conference like Web 2.0 Summit, the reality of the market is that the majority of successful Web 2.0 companies do more than just launch products. They also often pass the test of VC scrutiny— that's how the market determines who wins and loses in the world of startups. To that end, this year there is no fee for companies involved, instead, the VCs are sponsoring the program.

The New Approach
This VC Edition of Launch Pad has several adjustments to the typical judging process:

* The judging panel will be comprised of six venture capitalists who will review Launch Pad companies as if considering them for funding.
* Judges will select up to eight finalists, that will be given ten minutes each, to pitch themselves on stage, in front of the entire Web 2.0 Summit audience and the VC judging panel.
* Each company will be provided feedback on its presentation in real time, by both the VC judges and the audience.
* The VCs may, at any time, offer these applicants non-binding term sheets for financing.

Entrants no longer need to launch their company or major product/service to qualify. Instead, those that apply will be reviewed by our panel of venture capitalists. If they make the first cut, they will pitch their company in front of the Web 2.0 Summit audience – the top executives, financiers, press, and analysts in the Internet industry. The audience will also have the opportunity to vote, along with the VC panel.

I'm always on the road when loads of news breaks. Alas. But I will be back starting Thursday....

Sign up here, it starts in half an hour!

I met with Mark Zuckerberg last week. One thing he told me was this: dealing with financing and corporate development strategy was not anywhere near the top of his list.

Well, it's at the top of someone's list, as the news out yesterday was all about Facebook taking an investment from either Microsoft or Google. Money is very, very cheap to Facebook right now, and it'll be very, very interesting to see if Microsoft ends up winning this round. Mark may not be that focused on corporate strategy, but if Google does not come out on top, I doubt it'll be due to a lack of attention on his part....

I'm enjoying Justin's writing and wanted to point you all to his site, and thanks for the reminder, Frank. He's asked a good question here:

As the initial bonanza matures, how long do you think Facebook will be able to maintain its hands-off approach to the Platform economy?

I'm shorting the stock. Oh wait, I don't have any stock. But if I did, I'd short it. That would signal, to me anyway, that the company is overreaching. It's pretty close as it is, in terms of how much pasta is being thrown at walls. You can't do 25 things well at once.

What am I talking about? This rumor.

I'll be on the road all day. Lots of news but will have to round it up later...

If you're interested in that conference FM hosted earlier this month, the first batch of videos are up. Some are quite long, and take a while to load in flash, but once they do, they play smoothly. My favorites:

The Opening (yeah, it's me, but I frame what I mean by all this, if that interests you.)
Scott Cook (very thoughtful)
Steve Hayden sets up the day

More will be up as time permits, so check back if you're interested.

Mike has a big scoop on Google's plan to respond to Facebook.

In the long run, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and, as I said above, possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well. Social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.

This sounds powerful, but as Danny Sullivan points out in the comments, Google is not there yet. Worth the entire read.

(image) Om Malik is at his best writing about infrastructure and why it matters. Check this out:

In order to build this leviathan enterprise, Google will have to continue to build its back-end systems at a rapid clip, but more importantly, it will also have to keep investing a copious of money to control the oxygen of the New Net Economy: bandwidth....

....The latest news from the telecom world is that Google is now looking to get into the transoceanic cable business. Transoceanic cables sit at the bottom of the sea, using capacities that run into the terabits per second to connect countries around the world.

This is also being reported at D.

Google Hits All Time High.

The Hittail ads are back up on Searchblog. I'm fascinated by them. What I like is that I can check the ad up top to see what folks are typing into search engines that leads them to this site. Then today I saw that someone came to my site by typing "How to kill your wife" into Google. Searchblog is #4 due to a post I did about a fellow who was busted thanks to his search history.

And now I've probably made it worse!

Earlier this year Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer promised a bunch of innovation in search, and it looks like some of that is starting to roll out, in advance of Microsoft's "Searchification" event next week. More at Liveside....

Update, looks like Liveside got some early stuff that was then pulled, so the screen shots are only at Liveside. In the spirit of spreading the love, here are the shots, after, and before results:

I've never been happy with people search engines. They just are not deep enough, and if they were, I supposed I'd be unhappy for another reason - our society is not ready for that level of access/transparency. In any case, Web Worker Daily seems to agree that most people search engines are, well, not so great. They put a bunch through some testing here.

My pal Kevin's been thinking out loud about publisher driven / sell side advertising. Worth the read for sure!

A note to myself that this is worth digging into: Google Shared Stuff. I can't wait to write more about the impact Facebook and the impending issues of opening up the social graph will have on both Google and the world writ large.

You may recall in August I noted that David Recordan was going to Six Apart, and Brad Fitzpatrick was leaving to join Google. They promised to do some cool work on the concept of the social graph, popularized recently by Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Today David posted some news about work he's done:

Your lists of friends and connections on the social websites that you use, sometimes called your social graph, belongs to you. No one company should own who you know and how you know them. OpenID, which was born at Six Apart less than two years ago, was successful by embracing a similar philosophy: no one company should own everyone’s online identity. An open social graph is just as important as an open identity.

* You should own your social graph
* Privacy must be done right by placing control in your hands
* It is good to be able to find out what is already public about you on the Internet
* Everyone has many social graphs, and they shouldn't always be connected
* Open technologies are the best way to solve these problems

More on this soon...

No postin'? Yaaaaaaaaar. Twas celebratin' the day, acourse!
Honestly, I had a very full day of meetings, with my pals at Six Apart, Cnet, Current, Mark at Facebook, and more. It was good to be on the road chatting with people again. I hope to do more of it.

(image)
It's happened: Google has embraced rich media, and true to the company's history, it's taken what everyone is already doing, and added some cool twists based on innovations across the market. (This move was noted by many, including Niall).

But this is not just "ads as widgets." It's leveraging the media plan as the message (sorry, McLuhan). At FM, we've also created some of these units (our ads driven by RSS feeds, for example, won FM a Webby honor). And it's certainly true that advertisers like 'em.

I'm particularly pleased with the use of "conversations" in the release, as well as a step toward what I've termed "sell side advertising" - the idea of putting your ads out there and letting the publishers/people drive them. It's not quite there yet, but it's nice validation nevertheless. Here're the juicy bits of the release:

Google AdWords Introduces Google Gadget Ads, a New Interactive Ad Format

Engaging and flexible ad units give advertisers a new way to communicate with users online

Mountain View, Calif. - September 19, 2007 - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced the introduction of Google Gadget Ads™, a new interactive ad format that is currently in an expanded beta with a select group of AdWords™ advertisers worldwide. Gadget ads – non-traditional ad units with interactive, rich media capabilities – not only enable advertisers to target audiences in a flexible and timely manner via regular updates within the ad unit, but also allow users to engage with ad content in a way static ads haven't facilitated in the past.

Gadget ads can incorporate real-time data feeds , images, video and much more in a single creative unit and can be developed using Flash, HTML or a combination of both.

Designed to act more like content than a typical ad, they run on the Google™ content network, competing alongside text, image and video ads for placement. They support both cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing models, and offer a variety of contextual, site, geographic and demographic-targeting options to ensure the ads reach relevant users with precision and scale. Gadget ads are also built on an open platform, allowing anybody from individual advertisers to agencies to set up and run ads on the Google content network, the world's largest global online ad network. Plus, gadget ads will not command any serving or hosting costs.

Feedback from preliminary beta participants, including brand advertisers such as Pepsi-Cola North America's Sierra Mist, Intel, Honda, Six Flags and Paramount Vantage, has been overwhelmingly positive. Advertisers are enthusiastic about this fresh marketing solution that empowers them to have conversations with targeted users through rich, dynamic and engaging content.
......

In addition, users can build active communities with gadget ads by sharing them with each other and placing them on nearly any webpage, including personalized iGoogle pages. These portability and sharing capabilities simultaneously generate additional free traffic and help foster a sense of community between advertisers and users. Detailed interaction reports allow marketers to track dozens of actions within the creative unit and optimize toward their goals. To learn more about Google Gadget Ads, visit http://www.google.com/adwords/gadgetads.

It's not quite sell side advertising, yet, but it's a big step. And a long walk away from those original, cute, text based adwords of yesteryear.

The question is, as Google starts to innovate across its content network, will large publishers who have NOT adopted these kinds of units start to take Google's ads, particularly if they begin to threaten those publisher's traditional sales channels? This is not an idle question, it's a very real one. Google was not threatening to a publisher's core competencies when the ads it served were great backfill for unsold inventory. Google always pitched its network as supplementing a publisher's in house sales force. But these kinds of ads may well overcome them. Do publishers really want to outsource their relationships with their revenue to Google? Innovations like these will force the question. And the creation of in house creative/agency competencies, as noted before, will push the other side of the equation - the agencies.

Innaresting, indeed.

Read this, it's quite thought provoking. Especially for old journalists like me who actually covered Lotus 1-2-3.

And your programmers are like, jeez louise, GMail is huge, we can’t port GMail to this stupid NewSDK. We’d have to change every line of code. Heck it’d be a complete rewrite; the whole programming model is upside down and recursive and the portable programming language has more parentheses than even Google can buy. The last line of almost every function consists of a string of 3,296 right parentheses. You have to buy a special editor to count them.

And the NewSDK people ship a pretty decent word processor and a pretty decent email app and a killer Facebook/Twitter event publisher that synchronizes with everything, so people start using it.

And while you’re not paying attention, everybody starts writing NewSDK apps, and they’re really good, and suddenly businesses ONLY want NewSDK apps, and all those old-school Plain Ajax apps look pathetic and won’t cut and paste and mash and sync and play drums nicely with one another. And Gmail becomes a legacy. The WordPerfect of Email. And you’ll tell your children how excited you were to get 2GB to store email, and they’ll laugh at you. Their nail polish has more than 2GB.

Crazy story? Substitute “Google Gmail” with “Lotus 1-2-3”.

From Ad Age:

Andy Berndt, co-president of Ogilvy & Mather's New York office, has left his post at the agency to go to Google, where he will helm a new global unit dedicated to collaborating with marketers, agencies and entertainment companies.

....There has been much speculation over the past year whether Google would try to get into the agency business. The new global unit isn't being called an agency, but any unit offering creative consultation and account services could be considered one. Interestingly, Google had been trying to lure more creative talent to the company over the past year, according to ad industry executives familiar with the search giant.

Microsoft, meanwhile, recently bought its way into the agency business with its $6 billion purchase of aQuantive, parent company to agency Avenue A/Razorfish. When asked whether it would shed the agency after the purchase, Microsoft was adamant that it liked the business.

I'll have more to say about this shortly...but the trend is clear. Google is setting itself up as a full service advertising company. And that means client services and creative innovation.

Continuing my series on folks I'll be interviewing at Web 2 this year, next up is Rupert Murdoch and Chris DeWolfe, who will be our dinner guests on the first night. As previously noted (thanks for all your input), we start the day with Mark Zuckerberg, and it has a certain balance to end day one with Murdoch and DeWolfe, whose MySpace ruled the social networking roost uncontested until Facebook's rapid acension. Regardless, the purchase of MySpace still ranks as one of the smartest moves ever made by an "old media" company.

Now, MySpace is still much bigger than Facebook, but as many are quick to point out, Facebook is growing much faster (more here). Clearly one topic of conversation will be how MySpace will respond to its new competitor - will it open up to the extent Facebook has, for example? It's already well down the path of making money - in fact, it recently introduced a new self service ad platform based on six months of research into leveraging personal profile information.

This brings MySpace squarely into the same privacy conversation as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and the rest of the ad-driven world. So we'll clearly address that issue, and tons of other MySpace related questions - the future of the service, thoughts on being part of the Newscorp empire, those interesting contract conversations, its relationship with Google.

But with Murdoch in the room, there is a lot more to discuss.

As Time put it, Murdoch is one of the last true individual media tycoons, running an empire that stretches around the world with nearly every flavor of packaged goods media you might imagine, not to mention FIM, the arm that owns MySpace and various other interactive businesses like IGN and Scout. He's also very controversial, eliciting alarmist articles like this one at a rate of at least one or two a day. In fact, if we were to compare Murdoch to anyone, it might be Bill Gates at the height of his power in the mid 1990s. At least, that's a fair comparison in terms of Murdoch's reputation in the mainstream media world - it compares to Gates' reputation in the mainstream IT world ten years ago. I wonder how he feels about that? And how does Chris feel about working for him?

Then there's the impending launch of the Fox Business News Channel. The battle for Dow Jones, the case for making its properties free, among other issues. Murdoch and DeWolfe's view on the China problem/opportunity. The question of who might run the company when he is gone, and what he wants his legacy to be.

Murdoch is not without a sense of humor and a clear sense of what many think of him. Great quotes from the Time article: "When you're a catalyst for change, you make enemies — and I'm proud of the ones I've got." And this one, on changes he might make at the WSJ: "When the Journal gets its Page 3 girls," (Murdoch) jokes late one night, "we'll make sure they have M.B.A.s."

I'd love to play the word association game with both of them - asking for a one word or one phrase response to a number of topics and/or companies - Google, Facebook, net neutrality, Microsoft, Comcast...

In fact, the more I think about this interview, the more I realize I need your help. We'll have plenty of time to talk - dinner interviews are longer than the mainstage plenaries, but there are so many possible angles to take, your input will help me focus.

So what do you guys want to hear about from DeWolfe and Murdoch?

(emdot photo credit) The Google-Doubleclick merger is not yet complete. While it seems likely that the merger will go through, it's not a layup - the FTC in late May took the process to "second request" phase. And not surprisingly, in response Google has been quite active lately with regards to the policy issues that frame the FTC's decision (more on the process in my coverage here).

The most recent sign? A post on Google's public policy blog, pointing to Google's public comments on the FTC's Town Hall meeting on the subject of online advertising, to be held in early November.

The big elephant in the room? Privacy. And, FOG. (Fear of Google). From Google's post:

Of course, we continue to focus our attention on the privacy of our users, and privacy ought to be an important component of the Town Hall. We recognize that user, advertiser, and website publisher trust is critical to the success of our business, and we've taken a number of recent steps to help bolster our already strong privacy policies. We also think our acquisition of DoubleClick provides an opportunity for us to bolster privacy even further. (emphasis mine)

Well, this won't help (from ars):

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has questioned the adequacy of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Privacy Framework, the same framework Google proposed last week that should serve as the basis for international privacy standards.

This on the heels of further EPIC and other group's opposition, detailed here.

Past coverage of the story here.

Smackdown time, Google. IBM is joining the free online office suite market place with Symphony (InfoWorld), a very old Lotus office suite that has been updated and integrated with the Sun-sponsored OpenOffice suite, which released a new version today. The press is playing this as a bid to compete with Microsoft, since IBM and Microsoft were once bitter rivals, but honestly, it's more fun to consider an IBM/Google smackdown.

One of my favorite pieces of Thinking Out Loud for the last book was "From Pull to Point", in which I chided the Economist, the Journal, and others on their subscription online business models, which totally ignored the value of what I call the "Point To Economy". I would have chided the New York Times Select as well, but it was free back then. Then the Op Ed columnists went behind a pay wall, and I had reservations, but said I'd subscribe and check it out. Turns out, I didn't, and it seems not enough others did as well. Yesterday the pay wall came down, and not just for Op Ed, but for the entire archive as well.

This is a huge move to the hoop, and I think it's the right one. I love the archives, and now they will be getting all the search juice they richly deserve. Here's the reasoning, from a Times article covering the move:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

Way to go, NYT!

Eric announced this when I interviewed him on stage at the Web 2 Expo in April, the app is now live as part of a refreshed Google Docs.

Mobile Adwords, it's happening.

Yahoo is paying a ton of money for the Zimbra collaboration/email service: $350mm, to be exact. That's $39 bucks a mailbox, if you divide Zimbra's 9mm mailboxes by the acquisition price. Yow. I bet that is one hell of a multiple on revenues or profits, as Zimbra, which was featured in the Web 2 Launchpad in 2005 (scroll to bottom), probably isn't making money yet, and if it is, most likely is not making profits anywhere close to the traditional multiples software companies receive in buyouts. But this is not about traditional multiples, is it? It's about 3D future chess. And Yahoo clearly must see some leverage here. And/or, it's buying its way to the table in a market Microsoft owns (Exchange) and Google is moving into (collaboration suites). Benchmark, Accel, and Redpoint be happy investors, me think. And congrats to Satish and his team!

FM partner and entrepreneur Harry Wakefield (of Moco Loco) just pinged me with news that Praized, his blog startup focusing on the local market, which has just been funded in an angel round. Congrats Harry!

BB pal Cory Doctorow has published a short story on the theme of Google as evildoer. The opening scene imagines Google services used by the Department of Homeland Security.

The interrogator in the secondary screening room was an older man, so skinny he looked like he'd been carved out of wood. His questions went a lot deeper than shrooms.

"Tell me about your hobbies. Are you into model rocketry?"

"What?"

"Model rocketry."

"No," Greg said, "No, I'm not." He sensed where this was going.

The man made a note, did some clicking. "You see, I ask because I see a heavy spike in ads for rocketry supplies showing up alongside your search results and Google mail."

Greg felt a spasm in his guts. "You're looking at my searches and e-mail?" He hadn't touched a keyboard in a month, but he knew what he put into that search bar was likely more revealing than what he told his shrink.

"Sir, calm down, please. No, I'm not looking at your searches," the man said in a mocking whine. "That would be unconstitutional. We see only the ads that show up when you read your mail and do your searching. I have a brochure explaining it. I'll give it to you when we're through here."

"But the ads don't mean anything," Greg sputtered. "I get ads for Ann Coulter ring tones whenever I get e-mail from my friend in Coulter, Iowa!"

The man nodded. "I understand, sir. And that's just why I'm here talking to you. Why do you suppose model rocket ads show up so frequently?"

It gets far richer from there...

I'll dig more into this as the day evolves...from AFP:

AOL unveiled Monday a global advertising platform it said marked another step in a restructuring for the once-dominant Internet firm that has been losing ground in recent years.

AOL, media titan Time Warner's Internet subsidiary, announced a series of changes aimed at positioning the company "as the world's largest and most effective advertising network."

The company said the realignment of its businesses, building on its Advertising.com network and recent acquisitions, marked the final stage in its transition from an access business to a global, ad-supported Web company.

Continue reading "Reader Stone Writes..." »

As part of my preparation for Web 2, I am going to think out loud and ask for all of your help. This year's program for Web 2 includes an amazing array of leaders, and it'll be my job, along with my co-producer Tim O'Reilly, to engage these folks in conversation worthy of the audience's time.

So as I have in the past, I'll use this space as a sketch pad of sorts.

First up is Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook (stats). I'll be interviewing him in the opening slot of the show. It's not by accident. Last year the opening slot was Eric Schmidt, and this year it's clear that Facebook has diverted the Valley's short attention span from Google, at least for now.

The press is always looking for the "next (insert current fascination here)", and there is no question that Mark and Facebook are getting the Google circa 2004 treatment. Once again, a young entrepreneur has dropped out of a top school (Harvard this time) and nurtured a simple but powerful idea - harnessing the The Force of Many (that'd be us) - into a billion dollar business. (And Facebook has scale - 60 million uniques and counting according to the new conversational media report from Comscore.)

There are significant differences between Google and Facebook, of course, and as something of a historian in this field, I can't help but note them. One thing I've noticed is voice - Google tried from the very beginning to have a certain voice - quirky, fun, smart, non confrontational. Facebook's voice, such as it is, is neutral, nearly non existent. The voice is its users, not the service itself.

I'm looking forward to talking with Mark, and framing the Facebook phenomenon in the context of the Web2 world and beyond. Here are the questions/issues/ideas that come to mind as I think out loud about our conversation. Please, add your own in comments, and help me make the conversation we have worth everyone's time.

- Facebook's recent success has created many imitators - the latest being Yahoo Mash and certain, er, upgrades at Orkut and Myspace. How do you handicap the competition, and what will keep Facebook on its current growth trajectory?
- The lactation incident (among many others, including the Islam food fight) brings Facebook into the world Google has been in for some time – as arbiter of acceptable speech. How do you plan to play in this world?
- As long as it's been brought up, may as well ask: Folks have for some time been looking for the next Google. Increasingly, Facebook is being held up as a prime candidate. Your promulgation of the social graph - not unlike the Web graph which led to PageRank - only heightens the comparison. Are you comfortable with that role?
- Can you imagine Facebook as a broader search or portal company?
- Facebook aquired Parakey in July. Why? Is this the start of a trend? Will business plans be launched with the exit of "flipping it to Facebook?"
- On that subject (the Facebook economy), Facebook Platform has certainly been a hit, but some questions do arise. As an entrepreneur, I might see leveraging Facebook as a bit dangerous - the point of view of a developer or investor, what insurance do I have that Facebook won’t change its policies at some point, and my dependance on the platform becomes a liability?
- What is your companies Big Hairy Audacious Goal? Do you wish for Facebook to become "the identity platform for the Internet"?
- You are in your twenties. Do you feel a need to get a "grownup" to run the company, or at least bring in a partner, as Larry and Sergey did with Eric?
- Let's talk Facebook's business model. Many of your developers are making money via Google ads, which means Google is making money off Facebook. But you are not. Thoughts on that?
- Clearly you are already in the ad business - reportedly half your revenue is from ads you sell yourself, and the other half comes from your Microsoft deal. But how might you go deeper? Do you want to get into the ad operating system business - the domain of Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Google? How might you do that?
- Facebook seems prime territory for a test of sell side advertising. Thoughts?
- How is the deal with Microsoft going? No, really, how is it going?
- Speaking of the ad business, what did you and Walmart learn from this incident? From the new Flyer business model?
- You recently decided to leverage search by making profiles public. Let's discuss.
- What is your approach to the public markets – Peter Theil says not for 18 months - and the future financing of the company? Will you go on a hiring/new product/international tear? For example, Google has internationalized quickly. Will you? What do you make of the knockoffs?
- Did you really say no to $1billion from Semel?!
- Let's talk about the privacy issue. You have a ton of data on your users. Some are concerned about using that data for advertising, but it goes well beyond that - now you are in the world of, er, Google again. Would Facebook ever proclaim or endorse this statement: Don't Be Evil?

Whew. That's a lot. No wonder Facebook is our current fascination.

What did I miss? Looking forward to your input.

Joe Duck has had some serious issues posting comments here. Have you?

Rex Hammock calls for folks to rally around "conversational media" as a term for all that social media/user generated content/word of mouth marketing/etc. and I'm honored by his suggestion (my writings on the topic are here and here and here). He also offers a critique of the first ever Conversational Marketing Summit, noting that it was not very well covered by the Web 2 crowd (nary a mention on Techmeme). He aptly notes that perhaps the folks who attended were not, well, part of that world, and to that insight I can only concur: Most marketers are not entrepreneurs obsessed with the Valley, they are business people obsesssed with succeeding at their jobs. The CM Summit, from the feedback we've gotten so far, really helped them in that pursuit.

Now, about that URL - conversationalmedia.com - that you own....

Squidoo, from which not much has been heard lately, is getting into people search. TC has more.

Those of you who've stuck with Searchblog through the thin years (er, that'd be now) and in the thicker ones (03-05), may recall my repeated suggestions to Yahoo and Microsoft that they gang up on Google by combining their search and search advertising assets. Others have suggested Yahoo simply cede the game to Google and go back to how things used to be: In other words, let Google serve search and contextual advertising results. Eric over at Barrons reports on the latest of these, an analyst at Bernstein. From Eric's post:

Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay has some aggressive advice for Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang. He thinks the company’s current slow and incremental approach to fixing the business is actually a risky strategy; he says Yahoo’s large customer base “has been flat for some time and is starting to fray at the edges.” The danger is that moving slowly will allow Yahoo’s subscriber metrics to deteriorate, damaging the value of the business.

Lindsay’s advice: outsource search to Google, and cut staff by as much as 25%. He thinks the company could boost 2008 operating income by $565 million, and EPS by 24 cents, by outsourcing search; cutting a quarter of the staff could add another $658 million in operating income, and another 28 cents in EPS, he figures. He also contends Yahoo needs to restructure its display advertising business to boost growth to the industry average; if they can do that, he writes, the company can add another $376 million in revenue and 15 cents in EPS.

I'm not sure this is a good idea. AOL has not managed to build much on top of that strategy, at least in terms of growing profitability (it did for a while, but the trend is now not good). And Yahoo has a ton of sunk resource into its current strategy.

Instead of the typical Wall St. prescription above - cut costs, cede markets where you are a distant second - I'd say do the opposite: Declare war, rally the troops, and spend like hell to win. At least you'd go out fighting, and there's a good chance you'd win.

I still think that kind of a war could be fought by combining the armies of Microsoft and Yahoo.

Sigh. I was invited in last night. I went, I corrected the spelling of my name, I noted a few cool features (like how everything is editable), I noted a few irritating ones (the voice of the site is ....trying too hard), and then, I got SNF. Social Network Fatigue.

I wish Mash well. I really do. I just can't get up for it.

WebEx sponsored a Searchblog Live talk a while back, and it was both fun and a great chance to interact with readers. Well, they are at it again. This time I'm going to talk about what we learned at the CM Summit, and also queue up the program at Web 2. Register here!

Google today called for universal privacy standards. I applaud the call, but suspect not much will come of it (despite support for the APEC Framework), not due to Google per se, but the fact that we don't have standards for universal power plugs, much less something as politically charged as privacy. But it's great to see the company lead here. More from ars.

It was a crowded week, with a lot of news, but I wanted to point you all to this announcement from Comscore, in which conversational media gets a new and more accurate look. Finally. FM was part of making this happen, and I am very proud we were.

Coverage here and here and here.

$4.6 trillion bucks of economic benefit can't be wrong.

Look, I love Yahoo. Hell, I love em all - from AOL to Microsoft and all the G's in between. Otherwise, what's the f'ing point of spending so much time thinking about them?

But let's be honest. Yahoo, like every other company I love, has not totally embraced open, any more than its competitors have. In other words, Yahoo and its kin have a complicated relationship with open. It's the classic question: can we make enough money from being open to justify the money we might lose? (Bizweek story)

Could Yahoo do what Facebook is doing - allow anyone to build an app where *all the money stays with the developer*?

Um. No. That's really open. And that ain't happening. Any more than AT&T is going to let you build apps on its mobile network without a vig.

Two years ago I was invited to give a talk to Murdoch's senior executive team on the theme of the Internet. I suggested that the company take all the video IP it owned, and set it free - open it up, in other words.

I still think the first to do this - and CBS EVP Patrick Keane, a former Googler, said his company was totally open to that at the CM Summit this week - will win.

But true openess ain't this:

Yahoo brass say they are now taking openness to the next level. For example, the test version of the new My Yahoo lets users link to Google's (GOOG) e-mail service, Gmail. It also includes widgets—known in Yahoo-speak as "modules"—from partners such as Netflix (NFLX) and The New York Times (NYT) that let users choose to see movies and read stories from their customized homepages.

It's just not. Sorry. Don't be half pregnant. Bet the company, Yahoo. What the hell!

The news: Yahoo + Bebo.
The olds:

Google + MySpace
MSFT + Facebook.

Adam Bosworth leaving Google was interesting news, but somehow not surprising. I'm not sure why, but it struck me that Adam was never that engaged. He was the man behind much of Microsoft's future OS plans, he came to Google, and then he ended up...working on Health? Seemed like a parking spot on the way out, in retrospect.

Now comes rumors that Google might buy WebMD. If I were writing two years ago, I'd say no way. Google isn't in the content/customer service/editorial business. But now, well, I guess I could see it. Things have changed. YouTube was a major move to the "we're a media company" hoop. Though it was entertaining to hear Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of ad consultancy Denuo, and David Lawee, VP of Marketing at Google, debate the issue on stage at the CM Summit yesterday (David insisted Google is a technology company, Rishad dismissed the claim with a flourish. Or two.)

So why not buy WebMD? The company can afford it. Microsoft bought Medstory. Google's own plan for health, which Adam outlined to me months ago, is quite interesting, but might benefit from some built in content.

Strikes me, though, that in the end this would be a bad move. Why not just partner? And if you can't partner, and feel like instead you have to buy, it might be time to step back and ask - what is it that makes you not able to partner? In the end, you can't buy everything...

Still at the CM Summit all day, but two notable news items:

Adam Bosworth is leaving Google, Marissa Mayer is taking over Google Health. (SEL and Google confirmation)

Google is bringing AdWords to mobile (Silicon Alley Insider).

Yahoo apparently considered outsourcing search monetization (WSJ), but decided against it:

....over the summer, Mr. Yang did actively assess one major sacred cow: the Web-search-advertising business it built up at great expense in recent years. Under the scenario discussed by top executives, Yahoo would have outsourced that search-advertising activity -- which places small text ads next to Web search results -- to either Google or Microsoft Corp., the people say. One of these people says Yahoo raised the idea with Google.

Such a move would likely give Yahoo an immediate revenue bump representing hundreds of millions of dollars annually, because Google, for one, generates about 40% more revenue for each consumer search than Yahoo, according to Majestic Research Corp. in New York. It could also bring in additional one-time payments from any outsourcing partner and would reduce some of Yahoo's operations costs and capital spending.

But one of the people familiar with the matter says Mr. Yang concluded that Yahoo needed to be the "marketing operating system," providing advertisers with a full menu of online-ad options.

My previous "modest proposal" on the subject here.

I'll be off duty for the most part for the first half of this week, as we host the CM Summit in San Francisco. It's sold out, which is a good (and terrifying) thing.

This is one of those topics that, when things calm down later this year, I intend to dig into. But for now, read SEW's overview of the news: Google is hinting at far more varied types of ads integrated into its universal search results. Uh huh. I've written about this in the past, stay tuned.

Update, Dariusz, a reader and former honcho at AOL search, has a gif of an interesting banner on Google he found.

Update 2, never mind, was a firefox thing and not a Google ad!

Yes, I write from time to time about how I'm deeply skeptical of the US Executive Branch's current trend toward monarchical power for the Presidency, and in particular, I have written many times about how I am no fan of the PATRIOT Act. Danny does the reporting on good news:

A US district court judge has ruled that it is unconstitutional for the US government to send secret letters demanding search records from search engines. A provision of the Patriot Act has allowed for such letters to be sent to search engines, ISPs and others by the Federal Bureau Of Investigation -- and made it illegal for companies getting such FBI demands to even reveal the requests at all in general. Today's ruling found that violated free speech rights.

Previously on Searchblog on this topic.

Update: Oh, and by the way, if you think our government never overreaches when given too much power without enough oversight, read this.

Last week the world (OK, the Techmeme world) got excited because Google added search to its news reader. Huh? What? You mean it didn't have it before? I use Shrook on the Mac, and it's had search forever. Is it so hard to do in an online environment? Does Bloglines not have search? I can't imagine it doesn't.

Huh. I don't get it. I'm stunned it didn't launch with search. I mean, it's Google, right?

Yeah yeah yeah!Thanks for the link Andre!

Punishing folks for not living by rules that are not published? Bad move, guys.

More from the WaPo:

Comcast has punished some transgressors by cutting off their Internet service, arguing that excessive downloaders hog Internet capacity and slow down the network for other customers. The company declines to reveal its download limits.

With relaunching The Standard. I'll be watching from over here.

I'm very proud of the program we've put together for this year's Web 2, with Rupert Murdoch, Chris DeWolfe, and Mark Zuckerberg headlining the first night, Steve Ballmer, Philippe Dauman, and Meg Whitman on day two, and Randall Stephenson, J. Craig Venter, and tons of others rounding it out. Check it out, I'll be back later to talk through more of it...Release is here.

I love this. Love love love it. From TC:

The murmurs about new stealth search engine Cuill (pronounced “cool”), which were barely a whisper earlier this year, are gaining strength and are starting to reverberate through Silicon Valley gatherings...

...Cuill was also founded by highly respected search experts. Husband and wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson were joined by Russell Power. Patterson and Power are ex-Google search experts, and Google must be fuming that their inventions were not added to Google’s intellectual property library. Costello was the founder of Xift.

Cuill met with venture capitalists, but we’re hearing that Costello and Patterson eventually self-funded the company with a $5ish million injection of capital. They now have 10-15 employees and offices in Menlo Park.

Another rumor circulating is that Google already took a shot at acquiring the company with a very healthy offer, showing that they take this potential threat seriously.

This reminds me of another stealth search startup that Google quickly acquired: Applied Semantics. Ex Googlers who rejoined, much richer. Isn't that why Sergey started that Founders Award?!

No matter what, it's going to be hard for Google to keep its best folks, because the grass is always green where the horses aren't. Er, or something.

...can be found here on Matt Cutts blog:

So lots of people want to write independent/third-party native apps that run on the iPhone. The problem is that while Apple hasn’t squashed the development of native apps, they haven’t helped, either....

...Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t provided any documentation on the application programming interface (API) or system libraries that would allow people to write native applications for the iPhone. Luckily, dedicated people have helped to produce not only a toolchain but also to fill in documentation on the system APIs that the iPhone supports. In the same way that Apple desktop machines have a framework called AppKit, the iPhone has a user-interface (UI) framework called UIKit.

Now, why would Google's best known developer evangelist be telling his audience how to write web apps for the iPhone? Hmmmm?

It was about five years ago I stopped reading local newspapers because all they had was wire copy and some pretty lame local reporting I could get from the Internet, or from talking to friends.

This set of headlines from IWantMedia (the email version) really sums up what's going on now:

The FT has a piece today that reminds me of that other national attempt to compete with Google (that'd be France and Germany, though I understand Germany pulled out). From it:

Tokyo, alarmed by the global dominance of Google and other foreign internet services, is spearheading a project to try to seize the lead in new search technologies for electronic devices.

The push has been sparked by concerns in Japan that the country’s pre-eminence in consumer electronics has faded and value in the technology industry is moving away from hardware.

Yahoo yesterday announced its intent to purchase Blue Lithium, another ad network. We work with BL at FM, as well as Right Media, which Yahoo purchased earlier (Blue Lithium will make that purchase more valuable, as it will provide tons of inventory to feed RM's exchange).

There are fewer and fewer pure play ad networks of scale (and with some kind of "secret sauce" - ie behavioral or contextual algorithms) that can be purchased. And the numbers are coming down - BL went for $300 million. Alarm:Clock likes the deal (image is from a:c), Yahoo's own blog claims a major reason for the purchase was direct response tools.

Today Facebook is taking a big step toward leveraging one of its major possible competitors - search engines, and specifically Google - into more traffic for, well, Facebook. From an email sent by Facebook PR:

Starting tomorrow (Weds), we are making limited public search listings available to people who are not logged in to Facebook. A public search listing provides, at most, the name and profile picture of any Facebook member that has their search privacy settings set to “Everyone”. It will show less information about a person than results of a search performed by someone logged in to Facebook. We wanted to give people who had never come to Facebook, or who are not currently registered, the opportunity to discover their friends who are on Facebook.

It'll look like this when you get to facebook.com:

OK, that's nice, now you can find out folks who are on Facebook without registering. But the real kicker is this:

We will soon be indexing public search listings in external search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. to allow more people to connect with who they are looking for. We are giving users approximately one month to set their privacy options before we allow search engines to index these public search listings.

From the FAQ I was also sent:

Why and when will you be allowing search engines to index these public search listings?
Many people who are not familiar with Facebook perform searches for people they are looking for using other search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Indexing public search listings results for people on Facebook in these external search engines allow more people to connect with those they are looking for. We are giving users approximately one month to set their privacy options before we allow search engines to index these public search listings.

Can users opt out of having a public search listing?
Yes. All users have several options in regards to the privacy of their public search listings. In addition, we are informing all users that external indexing will occur in approximately one month, so they have time to adjust their privacy settings. All of these options can be accessed from the Search Privacy page.
• Users who have their search privacy set to “Everyone”: Users who currently have search set to “Everyone” will have a public search listing created for them. They have additional options to remove their public search listings from search results on Facebook’s Welcome page, to remove their public search listings from external search engine results, or to do both.
• Users who have their search privacy restricted: Users who currently have search set to anything other than “everyone” have not had public search listings created for them. Their public search listings will not appear in search results from Facebook’s Welcome page or in search engine results.

Who is indexed in these searches?
Only users who are over 18 and have the “Allow my public search listing to be indexed in external search engines” checked in their search privacy settings will appear in external searches.

Why am I on about this? Well, it'll be interesting to see how Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and AOL onebox, or don't onebox, the Facebook listings. Very, very interesting. Here's what Facebook shows as how a result for a non public search will look on the Facebook site:

Hmmm. I bet it'll look different in Google. But hey, it'd be cool to be able to poke folks right there in Google's result pages, now, wouldn't it? Hmmmmm?

From TechCrunch:

This weekend photo widget startup RockYou started to integrate Like.com results into slide shows shown on the RockYou site (example). For now, results are limited to showing shirts on sale that are similar to the ones being worn by people in the photographs. Viewers can click through and purchase a shirt that look similar to the one their friend is wearing in the photos.

I like (er, sorry) the idea of using images as search queries. Soon, well, in a decade or so, nearly anything can be a query - a photo you take with your phone, for example, a gesture you make with your eyes. I can't wait.

Last week I posted about the new LaunchPad, VC edition, at Web2, noting that submissions are open, and entrepreneurs now did not have to pay or actually launch the company - it's more of a chance to get in front of the entire Web 2 audience and show off your stuff. Since we're only going to have a month or so for submissions to be open, and no one reads sites like this one in the last week of August, I figured I'd post again. Here's my original post, here's where you can learn more and submit your company. Good luck!

I'm not a fan of the iPhone, because it's locked and chained into AT&Ts network. I also am not a fan of the Gphone, because, well, I guess I'm not a gadget head, first off, and second, who wants to be in the phone business? It's better to be in the network/platform business. And I'm going to guess that the Google Phone, whatever it ends up being, will be much more interesting at that level than at the level of the hardware device itself, which of course is what the iPhone is all about.

I hope.

In any case, more details about the phone in this Boston.com piece. It sure sounds like something is up.

Google is making a very clear decision to license and host news content. In other words, to make money from it, like Yahoo does. This is counter to Google's long standing tradition of being "switchboard" to traffic when it comes to content, and it has very significant implications if carried forward to other areas of Google's operations. Is Google becoming a true Publisher? There's really no other way to look at it. With licensed and hosted news content, Google can keep eyeballs on Google's own servers, and it gets to keep the advertising margin as well. So far, no word on when ads are coming, but this augurs it:

Josh Cohen, business product manager of Google News, said his company would consider eventually running advertising alongside the agencies’ articles.

Notably, Google's own version of the news wire story will take precedence over those running in other news outlets. In other words, Google keeps the traffic. Google explains it as dealing with a duplication problem here, but, come on now...if I were running a newspaper, I'd be livid. I pay the wire services so that I can get the eyeballs. Now Google is paying them, presumably (no comment on this in the coverage), and the inevitable result is that the newspaper outlets will lose traffic to Google's direct relationship with the wire services.

It's interesting that this news was broken on a Friday, before Labor Day. In other words, the deadest day in the news business. Yup, Google knows how to play the news, don't it?!

Tim muses on this, as does Matthew Ingram, who points to a lot of other thoughtful coverage.

I know, this is clearly a commercial post, but I am enjoying the HitTail ads on Searchblog right now. They use the HitTail service to show, in the ad, search queries which result in visitors coming to Searchblog. I love it - as the curator of Searchblog, I keep going to the ad to see what query strings folks are putting in that result in new visits to my site. It's a powerful way of showing the service's value, I think, and a neat use of conversational marketing - following the principle of adding value to the conversation on a site without trying to control it. Queries I've found that made me smile:

internet advertising model on Google brings up my Sell Side Advertising post.

importance of gilgamesh also on Google brings up my post on Gilgamesh, Search, and Immortality

hdtv from comcast on AOL brings up my rant on Comcast's terrible HDTV DVR...

and so on. It's cool.