John Battelle's Searchblog

One more piece falling into place in my five year old example of how search is changing via mobile. Snaptell. Found via the IPG Lab in LA earlier this week, though the company has been around for a few years. TC covers it back in November here.

Recently I interviewed Jason Kilar, CEO of the very hot (and very unusual) video start up Hulu. (If you want more on what Hulu is, check out his introduction of it at our CM Summit last June). Hulu is funded by NBC and Fox, and Jason comes from Amazon, and he's very clearly a product guy - and Hulu is a very good product.

In any case, when I was moderating the panel (it was at a private event), I asked Jason if the SuperBowl ad his company ran (it was part of a deal with NBC, paid for with credits) drove any significant traffic for hulu.com. Jason demured, which I surely understand. But now I got the skinny, from a very good source.

According to that source, traffic increased by about 50% to Hulu after the ad ran. (The ad is below).

That's pretty darn good.

Hulu is growing like a weed. According to other sources, it's up to nearly 30mm uniques now. More video plays than either Microsoft of Yahoo. Watch that space....

I noted earlier that Yahoo had joined Twitter, and thought out loud about a combination of those two. I've also thought out loud about Google, and this week the company also joined Twitter. It's interesting to note the differences between the two.

First, Yahoo joined earlier, but has 5200 followers, compared to Google's nearly 30K - all in the past two days. Second, the voice. Google's first post was too clever by .5:

"I'm 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010"

Sorry, I have no idea what that signifies, though I know it's binary for something.

Yahoo's:

"Hello, world. We're going to give this Twitter thing a whirl. (Hey, better late than never)"

Human, but a bit cute.

Yahoo joined mid Jun and is averaging about 300 new followers a day.

Google joined two days ago and is averaging about ten times that many a day.

Can that keep up?

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If a team at Google and at Yahoo (and Microsoft AND Facebook, for that matter) are not scraping Twitter and figuring out how to build TweetSense, they most certainly should be.

Carol Bartz seems like a pretty plain spoken woman, from what I can tell. I am looking forward to interviewing her at Web 2 this year, she's one of the first folks to agree to come, and given my conversation with Jerry last year, I think it should prove to be quite a dialog.

I'm enjoying her blog posts on Yahoo Anecdotal. Check this one out, in which she talks about "cleaning house" and restructuring Yahoo (yet again, honestly, it's like the tenth time in as many quarters, feels like):

Finally, a note about our brand. It’s one of our biggest assets. Mention Yahoo! practically anywhere in the world, and people yodel. But in the past few years, we haven’t been as clear in showing the world what the Yahoo! brand stands for. We’re going to change that. Look for this company’s brand to kick ass again.

I love the willingness to curse, and honestly, I hear it gets a lot saltier in person. Can't wait.

My Jerry interview (close to his last as Yahoo CEO):

I just noticed, thanks to my crack net admin Ken, that http://www.battellemedia.net/ (I'm not going to link to it and give it juice) is being parked, skinned, and used to make money. Yuck. Help - what do you all suggest I do about it? I must have forgotten to renew it, or perhaps I never bought it. Ick.

I noticed something interesting while Googling around today: Certain brands, and they seem to fall into a class of brands that would understand the value of this - but certain brands seem to "own" all the AdWords associated with their trademarks. IE, there are no other buyers in the auction, it seems. Now, I've covered the trademark issues in the past, they are many of them, but did I miss the ability for brands to buy out any other bidders and "own" a result?

It's the equivalent of what is called a "roadblock" in the online ad biz - also known as "100% Share of Voice."

I can't upload images right now but will get one up once I fix that.....here are the searches I've found this on:

Apple
Dell
Lenovo

BTW, this is NOT true for search on Yahoo.....ie, Apple on Yahoo.

Trust me on this one, this one will kick up some dust. Am on an airplane, will write more soon.

Here's the Google post announcing the move....nothing at all mentioned about sharing revenues with the news orgs who provide Google News its content. I cannot believe that this issue was not proactively dealt with. It must have been. Right? Readers in the news industry, speak up - any insight?

My prior coverage of this is here and here among many other places.

Registration for this year's Conversational Marketing Summit, thrice sold out, is now open. Register here!

Our theme this year is "What Works: The Case Studies." As we write on the site:

Two years ago, the first Conversational Marketing Summit made the case for a new kind of engagement with audiences. Now we have real cases to study. Join us for a chance to look back at what the creative pioneers have learned and turn that experience into great ideas for the next stage of Conversational Marketing.

Presenters this year are listed here and we already have a great early lineup, but I am now soliciting ideas, and want yours. There are so many great examples of smart digital marketing to talk about. What are your favorites?

For a quick look at some of our past speakers and insights, here's a video our conference director put together:

What? Is Battelle crazy? Hear me out. Think back when YouTube was growing like a weed, and Google snapped it up. Most folks (including me) saw this as Google "getting into the video business," and sure, that in fact was one part of the equation. But as we all know, making money from consumer driven video ain't a cakewalk, and hosting that video is really, really expensive. So why did Google really buy YouTube? My answer, which of course looks brilliant given it's 20/20 hindsight: YouTube was a massive search asset.

Afterall, YouTube now gets more searches than Yahoo, Google's closest search rival.

So think about that. YouTube was the single fastest growing new form of search on the Web, and Google pretty much outflanked (and outspent) everyone to buy it. Not to get into video monetization, per se, but to harvest and control the most important emerging form of search. In short, Google could not afford to NOT own YouTube.

So, fast forward to today. What's the most important and quickly growing form of search on the web today? Real time, conversational search. And who's the YouTube of real time search? Yep. Twitter. It's an asset Google cannot afford to not own, and also, one they most likely do not have the ability (or brand permission) to build on their own. (Remember, Google tried to build its own YouTube - Google Video - and it failed to get traction. A service like Twitter is community driven, and Google has never been really great at that part of the media business).

That means Google most likely really, really wants to buy Twitter. (So does Facebook, but we'll get to that in a second). The great twist: Evan and Biz, two of the key co founders of Twitter, have already sold a company to Google (Blogger) and most likely are not keen to do it again. Nor do they have to, given their recent funding and the money they made from pre-IPO Google options.

Add in the fact that Twitter has already said no to a $500mm offer from Facebook, and the fact that Facebook has responded quickly with by opening up its Live Feed status API, and we've got a very interesting year ahead of us in the Internet biz. I'll be watching closely.

(PS - Much speculation lately that Twitter is a threat to Google, see this Merc piece. I'll respond more to that idea later).

Update: Plenty of folks letting me know of pieces that are related, will post them as the come in. So far:

http://laserlike.com/2008/11/14/why-google-or-yahoo-should-buy-twitter/ from Mike

and http://www.jamesgross.com/facebook-will-be-open/ from James

Last year at this time I posted on the IAB conference, the first of its kind (I am on the IAB Board). It's interesting to see what has happened in a year. First off, the conference moved from Scottsdale to Orlando, which I must admit is not my favorite city but does handle conferences well. Second, despite the very deep recession, the conference was sold out, and folks actually came, about 500 or so. The crowd is good, and while it's not a party, it has the feeling of comrades in arms, which honestly we could all use more of these days.

And third, the content, for the most part, is pretty darn good. (Even, I hope, my panel on social media, which I really enjoyed and learned a lot while running).

Last year, the talk of the conference was the Yahoo/Microsoft deal, and whether Jerry Yang, who was slated to speak, would cancel due to it. He showed, with his then-president Sue Decker, but they gave a presentation on Yahoo's publishing strategy that was muddy and left many scratching their heads (including me: Yahoo Is Opening Up, But What's The Big Vision?).

This year Microsoft's Scott Howe took the stage and presented his vision of how Microsoft will work with publishers, and the early results are that he was pretty convincing, though he'll have to prove his plan with some real actions. (BTW, Howe, who is also speaking at our CM Summit in June, is becoming a dead ringer for a younger Steve Ballmer in many ways). Today Microsoft announced a new partnership with major web publishers, the very kind that it seems Yahoo was trying to bring on last year. In short, Microsoft plans to work with major publishers to build a next generation ad platform. Hmm, sounds familiar. Exactly what Sue Decker promised us last year.

But the best part of the presentation came in an anecdote. Howe was imploring the audience of mostly publishers to "not let others take the value" that those publishers created with their premium content. I happened to be standing next to David Rosenblatt, President of Display at Google. "Who do you think he's talking about?" I asked him jokingly. David shrugged and grinned, but was clearly not happy with the role of Bad Guy. Not to worry, David, we know you're one of the good ones....and David gets to take his revenge when he takes the stage tomorrow. Alas, I will not be there to see it, as I have to get back to SF for meetings, but I'll be following the action on Twitter, hashtag #iabnet.

With all the conversation recently (see here and here) around Google's role in either destroying or underwriting newspapers, this news was interesting:

Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of advertising for North America and Latin America, is underwriting a new startup called Patch, which plans to put small teams of journalists in communities all over the country to produce hyper-local news content

Patch describes itself thusly:

Simply put, Patch is a new way to find out about, and participate in, what’s going on near you.

We’re a community-specific news and information platform dedicated to providing comprehensive and trusted local coverage for individual towns and communities.

We want to make your life better by giving you quick access to the information that’s most relevant to you. Patch makes it easy to:

* Keep up with news and events
* Look at photos and videos from around town
* Learn about local businesses
* Participate in discussions
* Submit your own announcements, photos, and reviews

This is an entirely old idea, one that has been tried dozens of times by dozens of startups and newspaper companies alike. Heck, I suggested exactly this in a speech to the newspaper industry back in 2000. But then again, it's very rarely the first that wins, its usually the one with a slightly better execution who shows up at the right time. After all, Google wasn't the first search engine, was it?

The site has this to say about Tim Armstrong's role in the company:

Polar Capital Group, Tim Armstrong's private investment company, is an investor in Patch. Polar invested in Patch because Tim believes that Patch should be in every community in America, and wants Patch in his town. He wants to read local news stories done by journalists, make sure that local government is transparent and accountable, see all the ways he can give back to his community, and have his town be as interesting and alive online as it is offline. Tim is also a believer in American ingenuity and knows that products like Patch will help deliver a commercially viable way for communities to support the important work of local journalists, institutions, governments, and businesses. Tim works at Google and his family lives in a Connecticut patch.

More on Polar here.

I've been gone a week and most likely there is a lot of chatter on this, but this article is worth keeping in mind as the new administration gets non economic emergency work started (which could be years, I suppose.)

Antitrust Pick Varney Saw Google as Next Microsoft (Update2)

By James Rowley

Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Christine A. Varney, nominated by President Barack Obama to be the U.S.’s next antitrust chief, has described Google Inc. as a monopolist that will dominate online computing services the way Microsoft Corp. ruled software.

“For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,” Varney said at a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute. The U.S. economy will “continually see a problem -- potentially with Google” because it already “has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising,” she said.

Oops, went on vacation and forgot to put up a note! See you all next week....

I'm testing out a new poll widget, and to do so FM has asked me to help with some internal research we're doing to understand an industry (mobile carriers). If you are so inclined, might you take a minute to take the poll?
NOTE: We're not asking which one you HAVE, but which you PREFER, IE, think is the best.
Thanks!

And folks keep speculating that Google will buy Twitter (Facebook tried, didn't work out). I think Yahoo might see Twitter as a way to get back to the days of Flickr ...making smart moves that help the company keep its mojo and grow data and community rich services. Not sure how folks at Twitter feel about that. I do know Yahoo has cash, which is better than Facebook stock right about now (see this story as to why).

Yahoo on getting aTwitter account.

Ars covers a Pew report that says 11% of American's have used Twitter or a similar service. I find that hard to believe.

What I don't find difficult to believe is how mobile Twitter users are:

Overall, Pew observes that Twitter users engage news and technology at roughly the same rates as everyone else, "but the ways in which they use the technology—to communicate, gather and share information—reveals their affinity for mobile, untethered and social opportunities for interaction."

More on the study from Pew:

As of December 2008, 11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others.

This might mean Facebook status as well, which makes more sense (and then seems a bit low!).

I've given Google a bit of grief for boiling too many oceans, today comes news that another of their many bodies of water will be allowed to cool:

(Bloomberg) Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular search engine, announced plans to shut its three- year-old radio-advertising business and cut as many as 40 jobs, saying the investment didn’t provide enough of a payoff.

The company, which expanded into the market with the 2006 purchase of DMarc Broadcasting Inc., is seeking a buyer for software that arranges ads on radio programs. Google will stop selling radio ads by May 31 and focus instead on online streaming audio, according to a blog posting today.

Google blog post here. The blog, which I've monitored for sometime, is called "Let's Take It Offline" and covers Google's efforts in boiling the ad market ocean in Print, Radio, and TV. Google cancelled its Print program already, and now with radio "offline," the title is starting to read with a bit of irony.

However, I do think what Google was trying to do has merit. I was a big defender of the Print efforts, but the program was not supposed to be a savior, rather it was (potentially) a way to cut operating costs and increase sold pages. Radio, I don't know the market well enough to have an opinion, but I do know the folks who sold Google its radio play (dMarc), are none too pleased with how Google managed it. Navigating the waters of "old media" is not an algorithmic chess game. That much I do know.

TV, I predict, will stick around, because of all traditional media, TV is poised to more fluidly adapt its model to the web. Plus, Google owns YouTube. I think it's time for a name change on the blog, GOOG. TV ain't really offline, and in a few years, it'll be as online as any other electronic medium.

Update: Wow, as I wrote this, the radio icon literally disappeared from the logo on Google's blog. That was fast!!!

....so as to convert it into a data center. Sometimes truth is way better than anything you might try to make up.

I love my Blackberry Bold. I've had it for two months now and it's a very good phone. My only gripe is the battery life is a bit sparse, but hey, I've had Macs for years, I can live with that. But I have to say, much as I've been impressed with the Bold's speed and features, I've been equally unimpressed with the 3G network it came with.

The pitch was that the Bold's network partner - AT&T - was way faster, allowing me to do stuff like download large files, watch videos, and stream data even while on the phone. In nearly every use case I've had so far, I've found this not to be the case. Half the time, in fact, I am not even on AT&T's 3G network, but rather am kicked over to Edge, AT&T's lower bandwidth older sibling (which is actually more stable, but I digress).

Now my initial reaction to all of this was to complain about how terrible AT&T's 3G network is, but then again, that complaint is pretty uninteresting - seems everyone complains about their network, right? But a funny thing happened a couple of weeks ago. I found myself at a conference having dinner with a group of colleagues. The fellow next to me had an iPhone on the very same network as me - the AT&T 3G network (in fact, that's the only network you can get for the iPhone...a fact that makes me suspicious about what was about to happen. But I get ahead of myself....).

The dinner conversation turned to music, and we all got stuck trying to name an 80s soft rock ballad that the restaurant's rather hapless piano player was busy slaughtering. Someone across the table, who also had an iPhone, loaded up Shazam, an iPhone music app, and pegged the song on the second try (that's pretty damn cool, but not the point of this story.) Once we had the song, folks started trying to recall the lyrics (thankfully, the piano man was not singing). As the table kept guessing, the fellow next to me was busy on his iPhone. Within about ten seconds, he raised his phone up and silenced the table. There on his screen was a YouTube video of the original singer, belting out the tune.

It was a very cool search-meets-media-meets-popular-culture-meets-dinner-conversation moment, and there's a ton to be said just about that, but here's where the story gets irksome, at least to me. "Hey!" I thought to myself as the fellow next to me enjoyed the social capital of being first to find and stream the YouTube video. "I've got the cool new Bold, and I have the same 3G network! I wonder if I can do what he just did?"

The answer: A very decided no. It took so long for the video to load I finally just gave up. And no, it was not a javascript, data plan, or browser issue. It was simply speed (at least, that's how it seemed to me). Meantime, the other guy with an iPhone (Mr. Shazam) replicated my seatmate's success, streaming the same video on his iPhone within seconds.

I've tried now a few times to get YouTube videos to work, in various parts of the country, and I've come to a hypothesis: The AT&T network discriminates packets and prioritizes them for iPhones. Am I nuts here, or is something wrong with my phone?

I'll be at the other end of the interview schtick Thursday morning when Danny Sullivan puts me on the hot seat in a keynote interview at his SMX West event.

Danny and I want to know: What should we talk about? What do you want to hear me opine upon? I'll write up the interview here afterwards.

This is a placeholder of sorts, but I have a long piece in me about the idea of "contentsense" - content on a website that reorganizes itself around your declared intent - a search refer, behavioral cookie data, etc. it's close to being a reality (some argue it's here) and it's driven by a nuanced ballet with Adsense, or its functional equivalent. The idea has been with me for a long time, but a meeting earlier this week with an entrepreneur from Holland who has worked here and abroad really drove it home, as did my earlier discussions with Demand Media. More soon...

This is a fascinating post from Google on how we track data on search results.

I think we as an industry (social media, new forms of digital media) need to do a better job of proving the engagement we all know exists online. It's presumed in television (and there's tons of research to back it up). We need to do more, and a better job, of showing the impressive engagement of online.

Retweeting via blog Mary Hodder:

I asked if the person was full time or a contractor (Google has already acknowledged it is significantly shrinking its contract labor force) and she replied:

...full time eng on a critical path project. so were others.. 4-5 yr employees.

Yow.

Over and over, I've written about new interfaces to search. Google's recent introduction of Latitude gets us closer. A few snippets and thoughts:

First, the big type on Google's site says this: "See where your friends are on a map." I don't know about you, but it sure sounds like something Facebook should have done first. Maybe they have and I missed it? Just a thought.

Second, to sign up, you just put in your phone number. Neat, huh? Yes, it sure is - for Google, which wants to build a big database of mobile numbers for, oh, about a million different reasons.

Third, if you look at how the service works (see screen shot), what does it look like? Yep, it sure does look like Twitter, don't it? Sure does.

Fourth, if you don't think there is a business model here, you're not paying attention. Location + personal data + friend network + AdWords = major commerce and marketing opportunity.

Facebook, Twitter, and Google are all circling this model. First to act like a media company wins.

While I was out, much news has broken in our world. Yahoo, for example, launched an experiment called "Search Pad." From their corporate post:

(Search Pad is) a new feature we’re testing on Yahoo! Search that helps you keep track of websites and take notes whenever you do research online. It intelligently understands when you’re in research mode and, if you choose, collects information about the sites you visit. You can create research documents with saved websites, edit and reorder your personal notes, and share them with friends. No more handwritten scrawls, Post-Its or scattered documents. And you can access them from wherever you are.

More here.

Also, a Q&A with the man behind the TweetNews mashup, Vik Singh, architect of the Yahoo! Search BOSS team.

I was looking for MSFT Live search earlier today for some research. Dumb ol' me, I typed "livesearch" into my browser. Yow. I got this.

I can only imagine the purpleness of Ballmer as he trys to negotiate the domain squatter out of this domain! I wonder what the price would be?

NB: My favorite video of Steve. I loved our conversation at Web 2:

From Alley Insider:

What we're trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so.

As I said in my post Friday, amen.

Speaking at a business school, former AOL honcho Bob Pittman said:

"Television is still America's hobby. ... I don't think there's a chance that the Internet is going to replace television," he said. "It's not going away, it's still the most persuasive of all media.

"Internet video is usually about three minutes long and is either wildly entertaining or wildly informative, but it's not doing the same thing as television."

Well, no. The Internet won't kill video. It'll just eat it entirely, assimilate it, and turn it into a function of the web. Once television becomes an application of the web, it'll be much, much better. I for one can't wait.

Superbowl start time on Yahoo:

on Google:

I clicked on a few places with Google, and one site did not resolve. The others were frustrating. Yahoo had the answer right at the top.