John Battelle's Searchblog

I'm traveling this week, and most likely quiet on the site, though one never knows. .... follow me on Twitter if you want the blow by blow, I'm in NY for an Amex small business event...I'll post more on Twitter once I have details.

Fridays have become days where I catch up on all that I've missed during a hectic week of travel and focused meetings with the team at FM and tons of really interesting partners.

The past week has been particularly rich in travel and meetings, which means I've not noted nearly all the things I'd like to here.

So in no particular order, here are a few thoughts about things I've seen lately.

First, I've been talking with Richard Rosenblatt at Demand Media quite a bit, he has a model that is really gathering momentum. A caveat, we share an investor in Oak, but it wasn't Oak that created the lucky coincidence of Richard and I sharing a flight from LA to San Jose earlier in the week. Demand is based in LA, and like many successful companies there, is often overlooked up here in the Valley or out in New York. But Richard and his team are quietly building a major media company in the flats of Santa Monica. I won't give away all of Richard's secret sauce, but he has a content strategy that really groks search and social media (you can see on example of it here, with YouTube, and get a sense of what he's all about here, in his talk at Web 2 last year).

Next, I met with the CEO and CTO of Aardvark this week. There is a really, really, really long post in that company and its platform, and how it changes the framing and the game in terms of mixing conversational interfaces, out-of-the box approaches to scale, and more. A few big ideas: leveraging the deep knowledge that is buried not in the web, but in each of our heads (real time, conversational search platform); building a service that is not in any way dependent upon becoming a destination; giving someone your email is the equivalent of allowing them to add something to your To Do list; the implications of the data that this service creates; and much more. My spidey senses go off about once every year or two. They are off the chart on this company.

I spent a good couple of hours at HP this week as well. FM has done business with nearly every division of HP over the past four years, and it's remarkable to spend time simmering in the culture of a company that is, in just about every way possible, Really Grown Up. HP has more than 300K employees, but it was founded on the base principles (and with the base narrative) to which nearly every Valley startup aspires. Every time I visit I am struck by the sterility and grayness of the company's initial appearance, and then how warm, innovative, and driven the people working there turn out to be.

Which leads me to Google. I've been getting a lot of feedback from folks about troubles and growing pains there, and have done a fair amount of thinking about it. I've been sort of hard on the company of late, but there is a much longer thought piece to be written along the lines of themes I've been all about for the past five years - how does the company become, well, more like HP? I met this week with Katie Stanton Jacobs, a former Google who is now Director of Citizen Participation at the White House. (How cool is that title?!). Our conversation reinforced my thinking about the pros and the cons of working at Google now. The company has a very hard transition to make, to my mind, in terms of talent retention and management style. But that's not endemic to Google, it's endemic to any great company that has reached the lofty position in which Google finds itself. And by the way, what Katie is doing - leaving a very good job with tons of stock to work for the government and try to really change the world - well that's just really, really inspiring.

I gave a keynote earlier in the week at the OMMA conference, and then sat on a panel about social media. OMMA was pretty well attended, just as IAB was in February, reminding me once again that our industry, while deeply impacted by this recession, continues to be optimistic and focused on investment in the future.

While in LA I met with several large clients, including an auto manufacturer, a major New York agency and brand, and representatives of several large entertainment brands. I can't say much about the meetings other than to report that while the economy may be in the dumper, there is still a lot of spending, a lot of innovation, and a lot of excitement about the future.

Earlier I met with the founders of Livescribe and am currently testing their Pulse pen. This device initially seems like a "nice to have" gadget but the implications are profound. Like Aardvark, it pushes the web and computing out of the boxes we are comfortable with. Ideas to note: the paper Internet; capturing the investment of hundreds of years of writing culture (in all its manifestations as reflective of our minds and fingers); binaural microphone and privacy/social implications; "pencasting" and the concept of "authoring a flash movie using pen and paper." Mind bending. Both companies will be at our CM Summit, FWIW.

Speaking of Summits, I did a lot of work on both the CM and Web 2 Summits this week. The lineups for both is really coming together. I don't write much about how I do this kind of work, but it's a lot like reporting - I make a lot of phone calls to a lot of people, and brainstorm about who might have something to say that will resonate with the program. This was a particularly fruitful week on both conferences, we're nearly through blocking out the entire CM Summit program, and we're very close to announcing the theme and initial line up of speakers for Web 2. Stay tuned, as they say.

Oh, and it was a big week for innovation with Twitter. With our partners McCann and Microsoft, we launched a first - ExecTweets, an experiment in collaborative publishing that reflects a lot of innovative (and ongoing) thinking - big props to Marc Ruxin at McCann and his partner at Microsoft Bill Capodanno, who both had the vision to lean into this program in a way that works for the Twitterverse, and are committed to ongoing iteration and learning.

We launched a second Twitter program yesterday as well - MarchTweetness, which is focused on college basketball, as you might expect, and big props go out to AT&T for also seeing the value of adding value to the Twitterverse.

Now, on to more writing, thinking, and Friday-ing. Hope yours is going well, and have a great weekend.

Have confirmation that Google is laying off folks today, including at Youtube, more at Twitter (irony alert)

I have been thinking about this a lot. How we are finally taking technology and making it serve our evolution, the two major breakthroughs of being human - our fingers - finely tuned gesticulation as a reflection of our minds - and our voices - again, finally tuned expression of our minds.

This post is really a bookmark of sorts, for more thinking that I've been doing about how this relates to search, real time search, and interface.
Props to Jeff Kravitz (among others) who reminded me how important this is. Jeff is a wonderful photographer, check out his work here.

Thanks to the hard working folks at Six Apart and Ivan at FM, Searchblog now lets you comment using your Facebook login. This makes it a lot easier to leave comments if you're already on Facebook. Now, if I can only get the Facebook comments on my tweets of these posts to populate on this blog (hint hint, Facebook), the loop will be complete!  

Our annual event in New York, The Conversational Marketing Summit, has just announced its initial lineup. It's going to be very, very good. I host this event each year in New York and this year we are focusing on answering a simple question: What Works?  

Speakers include:

Fred Wilson, who I can't wait to talk to about his investments in Twitter, Comscore, Tacoda, Boxee, Clickable, Etsy, Tumblr, and tons of other really intersting CM companies.

Bonnie Fuller, the world's most successful women's interest editor, who is striking out on her own, a la Arianna Huffington.

Speaking of which, Betsy Morgan, CEO of HuffPo, will also be on hand to discuss that property's extraordinary growth.

Representing the majors will be Mike Hoefflinger, who left Intel (where he ran $1 billion of partner marketing programs) to head up product marketing at Facebook, and Eileen Naugton, who directs brand initiatives across Google.

Magid Abraham, CEO of Comscore, will give us insight on measurement, and we've got a pride of senior agency and media folks: Sean Finnegan, President and Chief Digital Officer of Starcom, Marc Ruxin, EVP and Chief Innovation Officer of McCaan, Richard Kang, EVP at MTV Networks.

And major brands will be well represented: Lou Paskalis, VP Global Media at American Express, Jen Walsh, Global Director of Digital Media for GE, Lucas Watson, Global Team Leader for Digital at P&G, and many many more.

And of course you know I love innovative companies, so joining us will be Max Ventilla, CEO of Aardvark, Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, and Seth Goldstein, CEO of Social Media.

And that's just a taste. Join me in New York, to kick off Internet Week, June 1-2. Register here !

Another note in the ongoing opera being written as folks leave Google, this one quite declarative. From a designer leaving Google and blogging about it:

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

If this sounds familiar, it's because it sounds like the very cultural rift I predicted in January would keep the company from being a truly media (and human) driven player (not that it has to be, mind you, just that it's in the media business and will struggle with this dichotomy).

I've often compared the paths of Google and Microsoft, so his closing quote caught my eye as interesting:

Google was a massive aircraft carrier, and I was just a small dinghy trying to push it a few degrees North.

I love this piece in Ad Age if only for the way it characterizes Google's results, at least in the eyes of a troubled traditional media world:

Major media companies are increasingly lobbying Google to elevate their expensive professional content within the search engine's undifferentiated slush of results.

Many publishers resent the criteria Google uses to pick top results, starting with the original PageRank formula that depended on how many links a page got. But crumbling ad revenue is lending their push more urgency; this is no time to show up on the third page of Google search results. And as publishers renew efforts to sell some content online, moreover, they're newly upset that Google's algorithm penalizes paid content.

"You should not have a system," one content executive said, "where those who are essentially parasites off the true producers of content benefit disproportionately."

Where "true producers," of course, are media companies that make packaged goods content. On the other hand, there is a point here. And the piece is worthy of the read.

This morning marks the launch of ExecTweets, a platform my company has built working with Microsoft, its sponsor, and Twitter. I'm proud of the work here, it reflects a lot of thinking about how to use conversations like Twitter to fuel what I hope is a value-added experience. In this case, we're filtering for business-realated content from senior execs in various industries, like retail, healthcare, government, and more, and we've created a platform for community conversation, voting, input, and recommendations. (FM blog post here).

It's a first effort, and we're already working on the next iteration. Microsoft has been a great partner because they understand the concept of marketing as conversational media, not just as "campaigns to be flighted." And it's been great to work with Twitter, which in its blog post announcing ExecTweets notes: "our focused commitment to Twitter itself means we don't have much time or resources to build these interesting topical experiences. It turns out the folks over at Federated Media have both the resources and the expertise. So if you're a major brand and you want to sponsor a topic-focused social media experience with Twitter, we suggest Federated Media—they'll fix you up right."

Appreciate the shout out. And yes, as Mashable notes, this is partially a business model for Twitter, but it's not one of the major legs of the stool, (directionally, it is for FM, but it's not a cornerstone for Twitter - more of my thoughts on TweetSense and other Twitter models here). Twitter has a history of promoting applications and projects they think are interesting, relevant, or valuable regardless of any financial arrangement. Federated Media felt that Twitter should share some of the revenue associated with ExecTweets since this project is made possible using their open platform.

We hope to do a lot more projects along these lines, please let me know what you think, and how we can improve them.

It's Twitter's third birthday, and there's been lots of chatter about Twitter's growth lately, so I thought I'd try to find some context.

Google (officially) launched in Sept 1998

Three years later it had nearly 18mm US uniques (comscore)

Facebook launched in mid 2004

Three years later it had nearly 27mm US unique users (comscore)

Twitter launched in March 2006

Three years later it has (roughly) 8 million US uniques users (compete)

Interesting to note the velocity of growth in Twitter's chart, it's clearly picking up. But even with a much larger Web audience than Google had back in 1998-2001, Twitter is not yet tracking to Google's (or Facebook's) early growth. But if it keeps growing like this, it just may.

Also worth noting: Twitter is a distributed service, leveraging a lot of "instances" of Twitter (Tweetdeck, Twhirl, SMS users) and I have heard that nearly half of its "users" don't even hit the main site at any given time....

I should add, the numbers are not all from the same source, Comscore's Google numbers come from old Media Mextrix info, and I could not find any current Comscore info on Twitter on the Comscore site. If you have better numbers, leave em in comments and I'll add to the post!

The Neiman Journalism Lab has gotten its hands on a forum with the Publisher of the NYT and the-then Editor of Digital for Time Inc., in which they struggle with the question of how the Interwebs were going to impact their print biz.

It's fascinating reading.

From the overview, written by Zachary Seward:

But the transcript is also notable for how little distance some of these debates have traveled in the intervening years. Time Inc. is, in fact, still experimenting with online subscription models, and The New York Times Co. is still trying to figure out how to make money on the Internet.

Many terms of the debate, meanwhile, had already been set by 1995: Sulzberger indicated awareness that online competition would force newspapers to focus on unique and and in-depth reporting over easily replicable content. And he was already calculating, albeit with highly optimistic figures, the production savings in moving away from print.

The most significant difference between this conference and so many similar summits being held today was a lack of urgency. The Times had recently struck a deal to make its content available to users of America Online and planned — with a hesitancy that seems poignant in retrospect — to post every front-page article on the Internet for free. The Times Co. and Time Inc. still had thriving business models for their print products, and no one was prepared, as Clay Shirky wrote last week, to think “the unthinkable.” Sulzberger was forthrightly uncertain about the Internet’s implications for his business but at the same time, blindly confident.

My former partner at the Industry Standard has been building something important out in the expanses of Montana (caveat - I am a very minor investor - the only such investment I've ever made - and sometimes offer my counsel to Jonathan). It's called New West, and for the past four years he's taken what he's learned over more than 20 years as a journalist and entrepreneur and applied it to the same "problem" that has elicited so much hand wringing in the traditional print world. He wrote a great piece today about his experiences. From it:

We started this company in 2005 partly on the premise that the news business would be changing in profound ways, and that would create opportunities. We were also very interested in what we considered a very big story - the dramatic transformation of the Rocky Mountain West from an under-populated, resource-dependent region to a dynamic, fast-growing hub of the emerging “amenity” and technology economies. We thought the story was regional in scope, but at the same time we were very conscious of the fact that people relate most closely to what’s most local, so we established NewWest.Net as a regional online magazine with local sites in key markets.

The editorial model relies on a combination of professional journalism (currently two full-time and four part-time professionals, as well as a number of freelancers); what we think of as semi-professional journalism (talented writers or subject-matter experts who do something else for their day job); and citizen journalism (bloggers and others who contribute on specific topics, sometimes for small sums of money). We don’t have copy editors, but rather copyedit each others’ stuff. We’re direct and conversational in our style, which is actually easier and quicker once you get used to it, and more appealing to readers than old-style newspaper formulas.

We have a very active photo group on Flickr, and get great feature photography from that. We mostly use Google for fact-checking - not fool-proof, but it works. We use Twitter and Facebook and RSS to push our stories out into the world. We do great video-driven stories when we can, and happily link to others’ videos. In fact, we happily link to a lot of stuff, sometimes in combination with our own reporting and sometimes not. We have lively comment threads, which we manage with as light a hand as we can and which are often additive to the stories in addition to being entertaining. We have very active event calendars in our local markets - separate from our main sites but well-integrated, and with a dedicated editor. We’re experimenting with a new social media site in Missoula, and we’ll see where that goes.

Our coverage is far from comprehensive, and we rarely write about sports or TV or movies (except when the big documentary film festival is in town). Big investigative projects are few and far between. We’re not a “paper of record,” and we’re not (or at least not yet) a replacement for local newspapers. Still, if you ask people around here where they go for smart coverage of growth and development, land-use issues, local food, regional politics, and community culture, a lot of people would say NewWest.Net. On some big stories, such as the boom and bust of the regional real estate market and the bankruptcy of the Yellowstone Club and other high-end resorts, we have been way ahead of the pack.

I mention this because I've written quite about about the "death of journalism" (see here, here, for example) and have always had in mind pointing to the work Jonathan and his team has done. Now he's written the piece for me!

I'm a student of history. OK, maybe more like, I am a getting-older journalist following a youngish history, of companies like Apple, a company I covered in the 80s, Microsoft, (late 80s to present), AOL, Yahoo (mid 90s to present), Google (late 90s to present), Facebook (early 2000s to present), and on and on (yes, Twitter is my most recent obsession as a story).

So when I saw this tweet today, well, heck, it brought me back. To this. I first saw the Google Master Plan whiteboard when I went to Google in early 2002 to meet with Eric Schmidt. Love the idea that Twitter now has a whiteboard with its revenue plans, and prominently declared is that wonderful mandate we've all written in the corner; DO NOT ERASE!

Yes, that's a good idea. Don't erase (see my previous post on why).

PS - Google's Master plan also had a "Do Not Erase" in the top left hand corner. So did the "Don't be evil" whiteboard moniker put up across campus in the early days.

The Times runs a piece today citing a media analyst at Sanford Bernstein claiming:

...monetizing Twitter “would be difficult at best and likely unsuccessful.” People who sign up for free services tend to resent a company for trying to wring revenue from the business later. Subscription fees are out of the question, they said, and advertising-based revenues don’t seem to have yielded enough cash flow to make a Web 2.0 property viable.

I agree about one thing - building ad platforms like Tweetsense will be difficult. But nothing valuable is ever easy. Adwords was not easy. Overture was not easy. What Facebook is building is not easy. And TweetSense won't be easy.

But that's the point, isn't it? If it was easy, everyone would do it.

To be entirely clear, Twitter has at least three major potential revenue streams.

1. Tweetsense - AdWords and AdSense like platform for Twitter. This has major scale potential.

2. Branded licensing. This is stuff like Stocktwits, where Twitter could promote and perhaps gets licensing fees.

3. SMS/carriers - deals with carriers to split revenue driven by mobile tweeting.

And there are plenty more.

Analysts who write stuff like this are clearly not thinking very hard about the potential of services like Twitter, nor do they understand the appetite for risk the venture capitalists backing such ideas have. Check this quote:

"Whoever buys Twitter, they wrote, “will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool Web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more.”

Utterly ridiculous on so many fronts it's hard for me to summon the energy to refute it. The idea of the tweet as the query, the idea of brands wanting to have a commercial "response" to searches (and tweets) on Twitter, these are not small ideas. The idea of real time search, conversational and social search, real time "AdWords" - these are not minor new wrinkles. They are here to stay. Twitter is a very promising service directly in the center of these trends, trends the "analysts" at Sanford Bernstein clearly do not grasp.

(Oct. 2008)

(This week)

Much buzz about this, but ... Twitter's been promoting things it finds worthy since at least last Fall...what I find interesting about this is the promotion of Twitter search, which I've been on about for a long time as a really, really big deal.

Much buzz early this week on the launch of Cloudera, for its focus (distributed platform computing), its philosophy (best described as Not Google Or Anyone Else For That Matter, based on Hadoop, a Yahoo-driven open source competitor to Google's MapReduce), and its team (from Yahoo, Oracle, Google....).

Very worth keeping an eye on.

Cloudera's launch post. SEL's coverage. NYT coverage.

Previous coverage of Hadoop and Doug Cutting on Searchblog.

You knew this was coming - Google has added AdWords to Picasa. What's next?! They might add advertising to search results!!! (More on that here)

I just logged into Facebook for the first time since The Change.

And I have to say, it's totally a Twitter experience. Except...that's not why I am going to Facebook. I find myself wanting all the simplicity and tools of Twitter, and they are not there. (Except I like the threaded conversations, which are nice, however, I wonder if and how folks know you've "replied?"). As a heavy Twitter user, I find the experience a bit...lacking.

However, I have said this over and over and will say it again - I am NOT a typical Facebook (or even Twitter) user, so I cannot judge. What do you all think?

I've had the chance to poll a few folks in the industry - all of them very senior executives who are now, have recently, and/or will again run very large Internet companies. Their reactions, in no particular order:

1. This showed how badly Time Warner needed to shake up AOL's management, both because "Rondy" (the term used, derisively, to describe the top two departing AOL execs) was not working, and because TW needed to show a big shift in order to convince investors it's worth backing a spin out of AOL.

2. Armstrong was not going to get any bigger job inside Google, they're all taken. And he really wanted to do something bigger.

3. This was an "upgrade" for sure, but unwinding AOL and then finding its footing is very hard, so there were doubts remaining as to whether Armstrong is up to it.

4. Related - major doubts as to whether AOL has a path back to relevance and real growth.

5. Armstrong is getting "an undermanaged company with great assets at a low price."

This I find quite worthy of comment. More after breakfast...

AOL is getting new leadership again, just two years after the outgoing executives were chosen to turn around the struggling dial-up and content company.

Google Senior Vice President Tim Armstrong will take over as chairman and chief executive, replacing Randy Falco, said Time Warner, AOL's parent company. Ron Grant, AOL's president and chief operating officer, will leave with Falco after a transitional period of a few weeks.

Kara has an interview here. In it, Tim says:

“For me, it is a great opportunity to go to what I consider a top-five Internet brand...I am looking forward to taking what I have learned at Google and seeing what I can bring to really help AOL.”

One of the things Armstrong might bring is a spin out, Kara writes, and that is certainly something I'd welcome. (Type "set AOL free" into Google, and see why. I wrote that FIVE years ago).

But Tim's leaving Google strikes me as yet another signal of how much Google as a company has changed. Good people, whether engineers or top executives, are leaving the company to do other things, regardless of how wonderful the place is, how wealthy it made them, or how hard the company strives to create a culture that encourages retention.

I've had several discussions with folks who've left Google lately. Here's a direct quote from one of them, who is starting a new search related company: "It's very hard to take risks at Google."

I bolded that statement because it strikes me as poignant, and telling. I pressed as to why that is, and the founder told me that Google is probably "the best large company in the world to work for" but that it is driven by its current search and Adwords businesses.

Does that sound familiar? It should, if you are a watcher of the IT industry. Replace "search and Adwords" with "Windows and Office."

Around ten years into Microsoft's existence, good people starting leaving the company (and, not surprisingly, about five years after its IPO...). Not because Microsoft was a bad place to work, quite the contrary was true in fact. But because the company was too big, or too slow, or too indifferent to the ideas they had. It's not a rap on large companies, it's a fact of being a large company - you can't run in every direction your employees might want to go.

It's been five years since Google's IPO. The company is big, and despite all of its efforts, it's getting slow. It has to, in order to protect that which brought it to greatness. (For background, read my piece from 2005 about the worm turning. In it I write: Can the company shift its culture and avoid the fate which ultimately hobbled Microsoft? That, more than anything else, will define the next chapter in the company's fascinating story.)

Instead of trying to retain great talent, perhaps Google should encourage them to leave. Start a different kind of founder's award - one that seeds new startups. Given all the talent and all the interesting new companies springing up from the fertile soil of ex-Google land, I'd wager that fund would do damn well.

I could not make the event, but FM had two participants. Chas summed it up this way: "the format is like a reality TV show: A contest among groups of digital marketing experts, Apprentice-style, in an effort to tap social media tools to sell Tide t-shirts for charity."

It was a fun night, from what I've heard, and $100,000 was raised for charity, which is really cool.

But I really liked what Peter Kim said about how it was an important event not just for charity and team building, but also for P&G as a company, learning to become more social. Just like with Comcast, here's another example of a massive company learning new tricks. From Peter's post:

At the end of the evening, P&G's CMO Marc Pritchard remarked that in the future, all employees should get involved in activating connections similar to what had just been witnessed.

The significance of that idea is staggeringly huge. This is a company with 138,000 employees starting to realize the value from having all of its constituents connected and activated. They're also learning about new tools to change the process of engagement. Events like "Digital Night" help recalibrate the company's mindset.

P&G is taking steps to make social business a reality.

Sure, it also meant a massive promotion for Tide. I don't have any problem with that. I got shirts for all of FM's staff. And it felt good to do it.

This is very interesting (from the NYT):

Google will begin showing ads on Wednesday to people based on their previous online activities in a form of advertising known as behavioral targeting, which has been embraced by most of its competitors but has drawn criticism from privacy advocates and some members of Congress.

Perhaps to forestall objections to its approach, Google said it planned to offer new ways for users to protect their privacy. Most notably, Google will be the first major company to give users the ability to see and edit the information that it has compiled about their interests for the purposes of behavioral targeting.

I've been writing about this for years. See my post on a "Data Bill of Rights."

Way to go, Google.

Google post on this here. And the policy post is here.

This is going to be a very big deal. Or forgettable.

I am not sure which.

I had a conversation with a NYT reporter about this today. (Story here, but I was not quoted). It made me think. First off, this product was not launched by Eric, Sergey, or Larry. So who knows if this is a Big Deal Inside Google, or Pasta Against the Walls?

You all know how much I love the idea of the Conversation Economy. It's where my nose is taking me these days. So the concept of Google boiling the vast Oceania Vox is very, very compelling.

But then again....I find it hard to trust Google is really serious about this market.

For example, how many real live customer service reps does the company plan to have tasked to this product? That, to me, is a Very Important Question.

It's the essential human question that drives Google. I bring it up all the time. Community. Media. People. How do you make people scale?! How does Google, a company driven by algorithms and scale, find its Voice?

It can't be all algorithms. Things that Work Perfectly Because You Get How To Make It Work Even If Your Non Technical Pals Can't don't scale. Things that Really Do Work Without Customer Service can (this is Google search, or Amazon, or....etc.).

I just wonder if Google Voice is one of those disruptors. If it's effortless, if it works without having to call someone to help me make it work, well, it's a huge, huge hit. But this is telecommunications. I have a hunch it's harder than that.

I for one very much want it to work. I love the idea of Google Voice.

I just wonder about the execution.

(By the way, compare Google search to Twitter search for "Google Voice." Innaresting.)

Just off the phone with the folks behind Aardvark, a (relatively) new service that will most likely be the talk of SXSW this week. I'll have a longer riff on the company shortly, but suffice to say, I find it fascinating. The service rides between your social network(s), search, and the web, cleverly leveraging each to provide a platform for asking and answering the kinds of questions for which traditional search usually fails: the kinds of questions you ask a friend (or a friend of a friend, the real sweet spot here).

Many things make this company worth watching, its backers, its model, and its approach. Particularly noteworthy to Searchblog readers: a large group of the founders are from Google.

More soon.

Found in this Wired piece on Comcast:

Thanks to Famous Frank (here's Searchblog's interview), Comcast began thinking about going even further. The weekend that the company published its response to the FCC—outlining how it managed its network and how it planned to change—one of Roberts' lieutenants suggested something even more radical: having ordinary company engineers go on message boards to answer questions. It was the kind of proposal that violated every tenet of the old cable code of business, and the matter could be settled only at an executive board meeting on the 52nd floor.

Roberts, sitting with his back to the window, listened to both sides. Then he declared it was time to be a bit more transparent. He finally got it. He was turning a page. "I think we should do this, but we all have to have thick skins," he said. "People are going to vent. But that's all right."

Comcast is joining the conversation, and that is a major, major shift for Big Business. It won't be an easy shift, it'll be way easier to go back to old habits. But it's encouraging to see Really Big Companies making the transition to the Conversation Economy.

(Hat tip, @TheJames)

I will never forget that quote, from Alta Vista founder Louis Monier, as he bemoaned the devolution of his creation into Yet Another Portal. He was devoted to the idea that Alta Vista would do one thing - search - and do it well. But Alta Vista was instead turned into a bawdy image of Yahoo, AOL, Lycos, Excite, and all the other portals of the late 90s.

And along came Google, which by 2000 had gained a reputation as the Best Search on the Web. And Yahoo, eager to appropriate all things Best on the Web, was more than happy to give Google what Netscape had given Yahoo in the mid 90s: a font row seat to Becoming the Next Big Thing.

Oops.

This is all a throat clearing to Think Out Loud about Twitter and Facebook. (Like I've been doing anything else lately.)

The folks at Facebook are not ignorant of web history. As many of you have noticed, and I have posted about earlier, the relationship between the two companies is not exactly bidirectional. Sure, your tweets can show up as Facebook status updates. But can your Facebook status updates show up as Tweets? Nope.

Why not? Well, if you could use Facebook as an instance of Twitter, well, that would feed the Twitter ecosystem, would it not? It'd validate Twitter and drive Twitter adoption and traffic. Just like Yahoo's adoption of Google did back in 2000-2002, or Netscape's adoption of Yahoo did back in the late 1990s.

Facebook has realized it has an ambient awareness problem. And instead of cutting a partnership deal, Facebook first looked to simply buy Twitter. We've seen that movie before, a few times - Yahoo tried to buy Google before eventually buying Inktomi and Overture, for example.

Unfortunately, Twitter said thanks, but no thanks. In response (and quite quickly, to its credit), Facebook last week announced, in essence, that if it can't buy Twitter, it's going to outcompete it.

But I'm not sure that's going to work. Why?

Because Twitter is a pencil. Facebook, on the other hand, is Photoshop. There's so much you can do with it, the pencil function gets lost. It's not a primary use case. (Yet.)

Back in 1997, Yahoo was a pencil to Netscape's Photoshop. In 2000, Google was a pencil to Yahoo's Photoshop. Today, Twitter is a pencil as well.

Will history repeat itself? That, I think, is one of the more interesting questions of the year.

I'm still looking for comparative statistics to help answer that question - the relative size and growth rates of each party at the time of the deals would be really, really interesting. Any researchers out there who want to take a look with me?

Tonight I've wanted to find out information detailing the backstory of how Google initially powered Yahoo search back in the early 2000s. I know, I know, it's in my book, at least, it's in the notes and interviews I did for the book, but damn, that was a long time ago. I am lazy, I want to simply ask Google. But I can't date-range my search, dammit. If I could, I'd ask for results for "google powers yahoo search" from 2001-2004." That would give me a treasure trove of early blog posts, Cnet articles, and the like, and I'd be off to the races. But instead, the damn time axis is polluted by whatever has been most popular in the past few months.

Give me a Web Time Axis, gosh dang it!

Mondays are not always easy. But today some news about my main work at FM makes me so happy I have to tell you all - Federated Media has been named "Publisher of the Year" by Ave A/Razorfish, along with Yahoo and the New York Times. I'm beaming!

This is priceless: (via Boing Boing)

At San Francisco's Pizzeria Delfina, they know how to own their pain. Rather than wringing their hands over Internet sourpusses who give them one-star Yelp ratings, they've printed up tees with excerpts from the most scathing reviews ("This place sucks") and given them to the staff to wear.

I call this practice "conversational jujitsu" - take the negative force of complaints, embrace them, and use them to your advantage. Just wait until really large companies start to do this. Then we'll see remarkable change in this economy.

More as ... I write the book.

Search, and Google in particular, was the first true language of the Web. But I've often called it a toddler's language - intentional, but not fully voiced. This past few weeks folks are noticing an important trend - the share of traffic referred to their sites is shifting. Facebook (and for some, like this site, Twitter) is becoming a primary source of traffic.

Why? Well, two big reasons. One, Facebook has metastasized to a size that rivals Google. And two, Facebook Connect has come into its own. People are sharing what they are reading, where they are going, and what they are doing, and the amplification of all that social intention is spreading across the web.

This is all part of the shift from static to real time search. Social is the fundamental element of that shift. What are YOU doing? What is on YOUR mind? Who do YOU want to SHARE it with?

Social search has been predicted (and funded) for years. It's finally happening. The conversation is evolving, from short bursts of declared intent inside a query bar, to ongoing, ambient declaration of social actions. Both will continue, but it's increasingly clear why Google's obsessed with Facebook (and Facebook with Twitter). And they are not alone.

I am going to be offline for the next few days, heading to hear the crack of the bat in Spring training with my son. Bliss. But a couple of very notable things:

- Yahoo is playing ball again. Read RWW's summary of Yahoo's FB Connect competitor. So good to see the company back in the game.

- Googlers leaving to start social sites. Readers of this site will not find this in any way surprising. Read this quote: In her opinion, the reason former Googlers focus on community-oriented is because they, “know that it is very difficult to take on Google on a pure technology play,” and, “when it comes to community based sites, Google doesn’t do all that well. Google’s infrastructure, most of it built in-house, makes it really difficult to iterate rapidly. Google Video, a product that I worked on comes to mind. Part of the reason Google Video failed miserably against You Tube was that the team couldn’t iterate rapidly and build some of the community and upload features as rapidly as they wanted.

Welcome to Being a Big Company, Google. A Big Company that is Not That Good At that Community (ie Human ie Media) thing.....

As I think through the major themes of the book I hope to write over the next year, the word "horizontal" keeps coming up, over and over and over.

It comes up in nearly every conversation I have with marketers. More often than not, when you get to the heart of an innovative marketing program, you find a block that can be summed up thusly: "That's not what we do."

In other words, "We're the marketing group. That's a great idea, John, but it requires we work with the (customer service, IT, business development, human relations, public affairs, product development, legal) department. And while we'd love to do that, well, we've (have never done that, have tried it before and it didn't work, don't like those guys, been told not to do it, don't have budgets that cross departments, etc. etc. etc.)."

But marketing is, in its essence, a horizontal practice. (I wrote more about this on the American Express Open Forum site.) Every customer interaction is marketing. Every partnership is marketing. Every employee is a marketer.

And all your data, well, that's marketing too.

Case in point: Mashery. I had a good conversation today with Mashery's CEO Oren Michels. Mashery has a smart (and very Web 2) model: It provides API infrastructure for enterprises looking to turn their businesses into platforms. In other words, business who are smart enough to realize they need to join the conversation economy.

But joining the conversation economy means more than skinning your corporate website with Twitter search results (though I commend Skittles for doing it). It means taking your core assets - the data that drives value and knowledge inside your enterprise - and offering it as fuel for the collective intelligence of all your partners - your channel, your vendors, and, ultimately, your customers.

What does that look like? Well, Mashery has plenty of examples, including the New York Times and Best Buy. It's late and I wish I could write a lot more, but let me sum it up this way: Companies that create platforms which enable customers to leverage internal data with collective intelligence will win. Those that don't, will lose.

Oren had a very telling insight, one that plays to the issue of "horizontal versus vertical." Most enterprises see his services as "IT", and push him to "talk to the CTO." But most CTOs don't care about creating new channels of distribution, new business rules, and opening new markets. They see their job as servicing that which already exists. That's a recipe for epic fail.

Mashery is not an IT play, it's a business development play. Smart companies understand that.

More on this soon.

An AP story today about changes coming to the Facebook service is quite interesting:

Facebook: Taking a cue from Twitter in sharing?

The popular online hangout Facebook is revamping its home page and plans other changes so its millions of users can more easily choose the types of information they see.

Perhaps taking a cue from Twitter, the rising service for letting people express themselves in 140 characters or less and keep up with what celebrities have to say, Facebook said Wednesday it will let users follow public figures like President Barack Obama and swimmer Michael Phelps, bands like U2 and even institutions like The New York Times....

....Beginning next Wednesday, Facebook will also launch a redesigned home page that lets users receive continuous updates from their friends instead of every 10 or 15 minutes....

...Facebook will also tweak its central feature, the status update, which now invites people to broadcast to their friends a response to "What are you doing right now?"....Facebook's new question, "What's on your mind?," may encourage people to dig deeper into their subconscious and post more entertaining updates

OK. So here's how it seems to be shaping up.

Microsoft, still the biggest company in the space, is obsessed with Google. Google is obsessed with Facebook. Facebook is obsessed with Twitter.

So what is Twitter obsessed with?!

At this point, my guess is - Twitter. Or rather, just building the company, hiring the right folks, keeping the service up, and fighting back all the inbound requests for a piece of their mojo. Twitter is tiny compared to Facebook, which is tiny compared to Google, which is small compared to Microsoft. Oh, if only I had some Illustrator skills, I'd make me quite a graphic...

(Update, this image sort of does it for me, if you like it, buy the postcard on Zazzle.)

Missed writing this up earlier this week, I'll point to it now: A greasemonkey script authored by Moveable Type consultant Mark Carey puts real time Twitter search results up at the top of Google. Neat.

Who doesn't do a vanity search once in a while? My fixation on real time search has only heightened my otherwise occasional check into the funhouse mirror of search. What I found tonight:

Google:

The results are pretty up to date. The second result is my "hottest" post in recent days. Only one ad, however. (Update: Today the hottest post is my 2009 predictions. Innaresting.)

Yahoo:

Note the other suggested searches. Also, second result is a far longer fuse on "hot post" - my predictions from a year ago. Lots of ads!

Microsoft:

Love all those images! Also doing the suggested searches. Especially love the image at the far right. But alas...no ads. Sigh. Pretty consistent with revenues, I must say. Oh, and the idea of "xRank" is new to me (I am sure I missed it earlier), it's a ranking of "notable people". It's moved from 103 to 56 this morning. Hmmm.

Conclusion: For this blogger, it's clear Google is paying attention to getting as close as is realistic to real time search.

But mark my words: The real target in real time search, for Google anyway, is Facebook. That is an opening for Twitter.

I was reading a piece on Venturebeat, on Kutano. And this ad was at the bottom.

This is an ad?

Yep. Innaresting. Four years ago (God, yes, I've been writing for more than that, er, ummm....22 years, in fact...) anyway, I wrote this about Google and the need to market its products:

As I think about Picasa, Google Desktop, Print, Keyhole, Blogger, and Google Groups come to mind, as does Google's long held aversion to consumer marketing. And I've come to the conclusion that Google can no longer afford to avoid consumer marketing. In order for these services to really scale, to get to where they need to go, Google will have to start promoting them. It's unavoidable - even if you do have the best product in the world, you need to tell people about it before they get locked into other options...

Of course, in Google's case, it's nice to have so much cheap inventory to work with. Oh snap, did I say that about AdSense? I guess it must be late....

Just read the transcript. It's worth it. Thanks to SAI.

The tweet is the query. From Ad Age, which penned a good piece on the promise of Twitter search:

In the future, searches won't only query what's being said at the moment, but will go out to the Twitter audience in the form of a question, like a faster and less-filtered Yahoo Answers or Wiki Answers. Users would be able to tap the collective knowledge of the 6 million or so members of the Twitterverse.

"You put a question out to the global mind, and it comes back," Mr. Chaffee explained. "Millions of people are contributing to the knowledge base. The engine is alive. You get feedback in real time from people, not just documents."

I've been in journalism a long, long time. Twenty four years, to be exact. I have a pretty clear sense of how the game works, how it's changing, and how it's played. So when I read the (very) recent dustup around Eric Schmidt's quote regarding Twitter, well, I decided to take a step back and think about it a spell. Especially given my own experience on both sides of the ledger (but more on that later).

Some background: Eric was quoted widely today saying that Twitter, a service I and many others have speculated might be a fit for Google, was "a poor man's email."

That's pretty incendiary, and it fits a sometimes eagerly applied characterization of Eric, who has at times be criticized as dismissive (I reported as much in The Search back in 2005). But the more I think about it, the more I think Eric was actually speaking "as a computer scientist", which, in fact, is the preface he used before issuing the aforementioned poor man's quote.

It seems that Eric has not studied Twitter deeply, or, quite possibly, he has, and this statement was the equivalent of a studious head fake. Either way, I'm not going to jump on the band wagon and declare this incident proof of Google's arrogance. Eric went on to praise Twitter for its growth and community, and then take the view that Twitter is an interesting development worthy of notice.

Sounds like the right point of view for Google to have at this juncture. Keep paying attention...and pounce in one way or another when the time is right.

Somewhat related (insofar as quotes can be read in many different ways), I was quoted in a story about Google's Marissa Mayer in the New York Times this past Sunday. My quotes, which are spare, come late in the story, but they don't lack punch:

“She clearly has what it takes to be a great manager at Google, but I don’t know if that translates into being a great manager at Hasbro.”

and

“You get comfortable being wealthy, getting attention, living in the bubble,” Mr. Battelle said. “It will be interesting to watch at which point they declare ‘who am I?’ by their definition, not Google’s.”

Well, through a couple backchannels, I've been told those quotes are not sitting well over at Google. And I can understand why. After all, I spoke to the reporter, who I like, for nearly 45 minutes, and the conversation was boiled down to those two quotes, neither of which are particularly gushy.

That said, I think each has a point, albeit not elaborated upon in the piece. On the Hasbro quote, well, it's pretty self explanatory. I'm not sure Marissa would ever want to manage a team at Hasbro, a point that probably did not translate - tone of voice is usually not reflected within quotations. I picked Hasbro because Meg Whitman worked there, but my point was more broad: Marissa (and many others) have worked at just one place their entire career, a place that, to be blunt, is very unlike nearly any other company on earth.

Which leads me to the second quote, in which I was talking about a class of folks at Google, and not Marissa in particular. (I was in the back of a car driving to an appointment when the reporter called, and I'm not sure exactly when I said this). My point was not that executives who have been at Google a long time are out of touch (they certainly are wealthy), but rather, that at some point they will look up from their work and ask the question: Who am I outside of Google? I've watched this happen with a number of executives who were early leaders at Google, and I think it will happen with Marissa, if it's not already happening.

When you work inside a bubble, and working at Google is certainly that, an essential skill becomes being able to see outside of your own work. I worked at two fast-growing companies that lived inside bubbles, and I lost that vision - briefly - twice in my career - first at Wired, and second at the Industry Standard. When I realized I was living in something of a reality distortion field, I quickly moved outside of it, and on to the next thing. Perhaps that's not the case with Marissa, and perhaps I'm wrong about the same kinds of forces being at play at Google as have been at play at companies like Wired, Netscape, AOL, Microsoft, or even today's darlings like Twitter or Zappos.

But for the record, I don't think so.

A considered guest post on TC has kicked up a conversation around whether Google is a monopolist, and whether the DOJ will take action. This of course is one thing that must keep top folks at Google awake at night - it's OK to be a monopoly, it's not OK to leverage that monopoly to the detriment of the ecosystem you control.

There is clearly and argument to be made that Google already has a monopoly, the author makes that case and concludes:

I believe the Department of Justice will be able to establish monopoly power and the abuse of that power.

As covered earlier, at least one established prior monopolist has strong opinions on this issue - Microsoft.

I'm Thinking Out Loud about Blogger and Google and......Twitter. yeah, I'm writing about Twitter a lot, but hell, it's the most interesting thing in search in a while, and things keep popping up that spark my mind. This post from Google, for example. It's titled "Blogger connects to Google Friend Connect", which isn't exactly a barn burner of a headline.

But it got me thinking. As the post notes, back in the Fall Google added a "following" feature to Blogger, which I sense doesn't work quite as well for blogging (not real time) as it does for microblogging (real time).

However, the addition of Friend Connect to Blogger is a clear response to the success of Facebook Connect in the blog world. I'm planning on adding FB Connect to this site (I have to upgrade my platform first), mainly because I've seen how much easier it makes it to let you all comment, as well as the amplification of those comments into Facebook.

What I'd wonder is this: Do you all think Google, through Blogger, will (re)introduce a microblogging service to compete with Facebook Live Feed and Twitter? (Oh, the irony...)

I missed this last week, from Yahoo's Search blog:

Starting today, Facebook enhanced results will automatically appear in search results. This means users can add a friend, poke, send a message, and view a person’s friends from the deep links on the search results page. Facebook shared the structured data for this SearchMonkey app by adding semantic markup to their public profile pages.

I'd post an image but my Ecto is busted, working on fixing that.

...remember, YouTube = 25% of Google's search. Hence, Yahoo's move makes sense.

Kara has screen shots of Microsoft's upgrade to Live search. From her post:

The long expected upgrade to the Live Search product from Microsoft (MSFT) is being tested for a public rollout later this year.

The blogosphere was a-twitter, literally, after a Twitter post by Powerset co-founder Barney Pell this past weekend, about a rebranding and updating of the search offering. (Microsoft acquired Powerset last year and Pell works on search strategy.)

As part of a partnership with HP, I'm writing over at their new Small Business Marketing Guide. Longtime readers know I always am transparent about these deals, as I was with my work at American Express. I love this work, because it lets me write longer form, and never tells me what to write about.

Here's an excerpt of the piece:

We humans are all wired for a great story. We love narrative, it’s how we relate to each other and the world. Over the course of the past 20 years I’ve been involved in naming a lot of new things - from the early days at Wired (more on that in a minute) to Web 2.0, to my current work at Federated Media. And as I review all the names and brands I’ve been involved in starting or advising, one thing becomes crystal clear to me: the best names are ones that have a great story buried inside.

It’s often said that a brand is a “vessel waiting to be filled.” In other words, you can call a new product or service anything, and after a while, if your product is successful, that brand will come mean whatever experience it ends up delivering. While I generally agree with the thesis, I’ve found that having a great story is a very good way to jumpstart a new brand, and a great way to help sell it and keep defining it in the long term.

Read the entire post here.

Love this:

http://skittles.com/

The home page is literally a Twitter search for "skittles". That's a brand embracing the conversation. Well done.

(Thanks Matt J)