John Battelle's Searchblog

Last week was big for Twitter. After years of speculation about whether the company was going to have a business model, Twitter announced two deals at our Web2 conference - first with Microsoft's Bing, and second with Google. Details of the deals were not disclosed, but as Google's Marissa Mayers admitted onstage, there were indeed financial terms.  

What those terms might be strike me as secondary to the fact the deals got done in the first place. Sure, they probably consist of some combination of data services fees and revenue sharing, but the fact remains that monetizing a real time search result remains an elusive art, and one that honestly, Twitter does not want to cede to either Google or Microsoft. So while the two battling search giants may toss a not-insignificant amount of Adwords or AdCenter revenue into Twitters' coffers, what really matters is the the traffic these deals potentially represent, and the validation of Twitter's role in the real time universe. That, I'd argue, is priceless.

Now, did Microsoft and Google do these deals simply to lay claim to a hot new service, or were their actions driven by the time-honored principle of "embrace and extend"? More on that in a future post, because I think the question begs consideration in light of where the culture of search and communication is headed.

The fact that both giants have validated Twitter's role in search led me to reflect on the role that Twitter plays in our culture. "To Tweet" is a verb in the process of becoming - not unlike "To Google" in 2002-3, or "to Xerox" in the 1960s. So what does "tweet" mean, really? Or perhaps more to the point, what *should* it mean?

At the moment, "to tweet" means something along the lines of "to broadcast a thought, in real time, using 140 characters of text or less." And while confining tweets to this creative box has been seminal to the service's early success, I'd argue that continuing to do so will most likely consign Twitter to the status of a verbal footnote in our ongoing cultural conversation.

What I'm struggling to say is that definitions matter. Words matter. My anthropological spidey senses are tingling right now, because we're in a cultural moment where we are redefining how we share a moment. Facebook knows this. Google and Microsoft know it as well. And we all know it - explicitly or implicitly, as a culture we are learning to share our moments in real time, irrespective of geography or traditional social boundaries.

So allow me to suggest what I believe the definition of the verb "to tweet" should become: "To share a moment."

In other words, to truly scale, "Tweet" - the verb-in-process-of-becoming, or, alternatively, the verb-that-could-have-been-but-became-instead-a-footnote-in-history - needs to be defined by more than 140 characters of text.

If you abstract what we're really trying to do with the creative box Twitter has imposed upon us, it's this: We want to share a meaningful moment in time. Sure, we don't all manage to do that so well, but I think the essence of what we're trying to do - "share," "meaningful," and "moment" - can easily be abstracted from the creative box in which Twitter is currently confined.

If you've used a tool like Brizzly, Power Twitter, or any of the many other services that unpack and contextualize your Twitter stream, it's clear that a tweet is much more than text. It can be an image, a video, an overheard snippet of speech. In short, it's a moment, captured, imbued with meaning, and shared.

As long as it remains those things, it's a tweet. And as much as I love the SMS-inspired roots of Twitter's origin, it's time for the service to branch out and embrace its essence, and not get stuck in its own creation myth. If it fails to do so, I think any number of its competitors - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or an unborn startup - will recognize and exploit that failure.

So live in the moment, Twitter, and move outside the text box.

PS - I think the same applies to the interface of search - breaking out of keyboard-driven text and more into a conversational interface. I'll have a lot more to say about this in the coming months, as I think it's starting to come together in my head - "The Moment" is a good organizing principle for where I believe things are going in search, culture, technology.

The interview with Qi Lu and Microsoft's Bing - Twitter deal announced at Web 2 last week. I'm working on a wrap post coming soon.

Big week last week for Twitter, two deals with two search powerhouses, new revenue, and new traffic will flow due to both. I asked about the pending search deals deep into the interview but Evan plays coy, the announcements come the following day.

Sergey made a surprise visit to Web 2 last week, just as he did six years ago for the first one.

Literally some of the best work I've ever been involved with, yet again, six years in. Many of you asked for the playlist I used for the show (coverage best seen at #w2s, lots of news happened at the event, including Sergey Brin stopping by).

Here's a screen shot of my playlist. I'll make it live soon. (And yes, btw, the songs and their timing with sessions often mean something. But I can't really get into what and why right now.)

Most of you probably know I'm at Web 2 this week, hence no posting. But follow the news on the #w2s hashtag, there's already been a ton, as this WSJ roundup shows....

Every month I look at Twitter's traffic, and for September, the trend continues to be flat to down. Has Twitter peaked, or is it time for the company to start showing us traffic through its API and via SMS, so we can really understand the service's growth?

Here are Quantcast and Compete's data.

The embedded chart is from Compete.

While it's fair to argue they only capture traffic to Twitter.com, it's still instructive to see that traffic to that particular domain has flattened or fallen off.

Earnings are coming in that make for happy year over year comps, and hence, a happy time in tech land. Intel, Google, IBM all

beating expectations - welcome news for an economy that has felt pretty damn terrible lately. And now the Dow has touched 10K and stayed there - something we haven't seen for a year.  

But I still worry - do you? I worry we'll over correct, and lose the perspective we've all earned over the last year of pain. I sure hope we don't. That said, I sure am happy to see the gloom lifting. We're going into winter, but it sort of feels like Spring right now....

More here.

Tim Armstrong didn't need the job, but he decided to accept Time Warner's offer to become the CEO of AOL anyway. Why?

That's the first question I have for Tim when he joins us at Web 2 next week. What do you want me to ask him?

As you most likely know, Tim came to AOL from Google, where he ran North American ad sales for years. Clearly, Tim relishes a challenge, and sees an opportunity. And, while Tim probably is too politic to discuss it, AOL will be spun out soon, and either go public or become an independent entity (unwinding the most disastrous new/old media merger in recent history).

So...what do you want to know from Tim? I've got my own list - which I've discussed with Tim already - but you all will have even better ideas, as usual...

Others we'll be interviewing (and I've asked for your help):

Shantanu Narayen

Carly Fiorina

Jon Miller

Sheryl Sandberg

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Tim Berners Lee, and more. An amazing lineup and less than one week away!

Also, remember to tweet your questions for any of the folks above with the #w2s hashtag for a chance to win a free Web 2 Summit pass - we'll be picking three at random to win...

I'm so focused on Web 2 and FM right now I can't grok this. But you guys can - Aardvark, which I have written about in the past and will present at Web 2 next week, has launched a social search function based on their growing people-powered network. What do you all think?

Just got an email from an UBS analyst with an overview of search share data from Comscore for Sept. Summary:

Google increases Month/Month search share

Comscore’s September US search data suggests Google took some share lost over the last few months, which gives us confidence in our Q3 paid click growth ests. (12% Y/Y worldwide). Bing’s share of US search also increased, though share gains were lower than previous months as September is typically a relatively weaker month for travel, a vertical in which Microsoft has tried to differentiate itself.

Google and Microsoft took share at Yahoo!’s expense

Google’s share of US core searches in Sep was up 27 bps M/M to 64.9%, almost reaching levels prior to the launch of Bing. Bing had 9.4% of US search share (+18bps M/M) while AOL and Ask were roughly flat M/M at 3% and 3.9% respectively. Yahoo! lost 50bps M/M, resulting in 18.8% share of core US searches.

Google and Microsoft’s Y/Y query growth still strong in September

Bing’s Sep. Y/Y search volume growth was +31% Y/Y from 32% Y/Y in Aug, while Google’s search volume grew 21% Y/Y, roughly flat from 22% Y/Y growth in Aug. Yahoo!’s search volume grew 9% Y/Y from 17% Y/Y growth in Aug.

I met with Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, ten days ago - one week before the annual Adobe developer's conference. He told me there'd be a lot of news about Adobe coming, and the company certainly delivered - in particular around mobile and Flash platform development.

But while the list of product and platform releases is impressive, it was Adobe's earlier announcement of its acquisition of Omniture that got folks buzzing. From my point of view, this is one more step in Adobe becoming a central platform company in the Internet ecosystem.

With 800mm installs of Flash, the acquisition of Omniture, and a multi-device strategy, Adobe aims to become the industry standard in how marketers and media companies deliver experiences to audiences and customers. And while many still view the company as the provider of end user tools like Photoshop, the reality is that Adobe is in fact Microsoft's most significant web platform competitor, which in turn makes it a significant competitor to Google in some areas (though the companies collaborate on key initiatives, like the Open Screen Project, for example, which is clearly as anti-Microsoft as they come). The difference, Narayen told me, is that Adobe does not have (nor does it plan to have) a media business, so it doesn't compete with its partners.

I'm looking forward to our conversation, and I'd love your input on what you'd like to hear from Narayen.

Others we'll be interviewing (and I've asked for your help):

Carly Fiornia

Jon Miller

Sheryl Sandberg

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. An amazing lineup and less than ten days away!

I'm very much looking forward to the tsunami of work slowing down - Web 2 is ten days away, and my partner is starting Monday at FM - because there's just so much stuff that I'd like the time to think through, and spending the weekend doing it is not that great for family life. High on my list of topics, however, is the current donnybrook between The Entire Media World and Google. Last week media titans met in China and the CEO of AP, in particular, made a point of excoriating Google (adding "blogs" and "Facebook" to the mix for good measure). I was reading up on this topic on the AP website, which is hosted by Google. Ah, the irony.

During the late 1990s and through 2005, Carly Fiorina was one of the most powerful women in technology. As CEO of HP, she developed a reputation as a respected and effective manager, doubling HP's revenue, buying Compaq in the process, and debuting as Fortune magazine's first ever "Most Powerful Woman in Business".  

Fiorina is not without her detractors in the Valley (her departure was a story in itself), but she's an indisputable powerhouse, and she seems ready and poised for her next act. According to most reports, that act will be as a Republican challenger to longtime incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer. During the 2008 election, Fiorina acted as a economic advisor to John McCain, addressing the Republican National Convention, a move often seen as a precursor to public life.

Fiorina will join us on our first night at dinner to have a wide ranging discussion about the state of technology, policy, and politics. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, and could use your help to identify the best things to discuss with her. What do you want to hear from Carly Fiorina?

Others we'll be interviewing (and I've asked for your help):

Jon Miller

Sheryl Sandberg

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Shantanu Narayen, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. Again, an amazing lineup.

If you want to come, I can still get you a Searchblog discount (for a few more days). Just ping me here.

...as pointed out in this WSJ Digits piece:

As part of the shift, Google is thinking up and tailoring more ad campaigns in close consultation with ad agencies. In May, the Mountain View, Calif., Internet giant altered its sales structure to work more closely with ad agencies and react more quickly to trends by organizing sales staff exclusively by industry, like automotive and technology. It also created a senior position responsible for improving communication with the largest ad agencies.

....The new approach is a turnabout for Google, which for years argued that advertising should be designed and priced based on strict benchmarks such as how many times an ad was viewed, rather than its emotional appeal. Marketers spent handsomely on search ads for specific uses, such as driving sales of a particular product, but when they wanted something more unique they went elsewhere, to Yahoo Inc. or other media, such as television.

If ever there was a strong meme in search, it's the impact of social: Everyone is talking about how Facebook and Twitter are threatening Google for what I've called the "oxygen" of the web: distribution of attention.  

A little background. Google rose to prominence as the absolute winner in the Internet's distribution game. The de facto interface for knowledge navigation, Google brought signal to the noise of Web 1.0: Sure, nearly everything worth publishing was now on the web, but how on earth could you find that ONE thing that mattered to your query, NOW?

A hundred billion plus dollar business ensued: we all now use Google to find that which we want to find on the web. In particular, Google is great at delivering authority on the web for those things that had already been published and ranked: In a way, Google has become the reference librarian of the web.

But...just searching a reference library is one thing. What about finding things people are talking about right now? And wouldn't it be great if you could cross index that reference library with your social graph, so that people you trusted helped you go from query to decision?

Twitter and Facebook promise that next step in search. Let's tease this out a bit.

We have different modes when we search. Sometimes we are looking for that perfect reference point - an article on how to train a dog, for example, or a how to guide on building a treehouse. But then we hit a critical inflection - we want to validate our reference material with a real live human connection. And Google can't really do that. In short, we want to cross reference what we've learned with the experience of someone we trust.

Before the rise and ubiquity of social networks, the ability to do this was pretty serendipitous - sometimes in our reference search we found humans with whom we could connect and then learn (this happened to me in 1995 as I was searching online for my birth mother, but that's another story).

But it's happening more and more online now, thanks to our ability to use Twitter and Facebook to query our social graph. Through status updates or tweets, we can ask real people that which before we asked Google. And, by reading through the lifestreams of our network, we can discover that which we might never has asked, but nevertheless find interesting.

It's late and I'm working way too many hours to do this line of thinking justice. But I will simply state it this way: Facebook and Twitter, you need to get better at mixing traditional web search with what you've already got. And Google/Microsoft, well, vicey versa. You need to get better at mixing social into your traditional web search.

Whoever does it best, wins.

Update: A new study on the interplay of search and social media can be found here.

Jon Miller has graced the Web 2 stage several times, most memorably when he was CEO of AOL, and both Google and Microsoft were competing for his company's search deal (Google won, that deal is close to expiration, and now-CEO Tim Armstrong, who helped Google win the deal back then, will be discussing, at the Summit, who he might next partner with - Microsoft or Google - but I digress...for now).

Now Miller runs digital for none other than Rupert Murdoch. I've enjoyed my relationship with Jon over the years, he's a straight shooter. He's inherited a number of seemingly intractable problems - the digital model for news, for one, MySpace, for another. But when I spent an hour with him in New York a couple of weeks ago, he was unperturbed. He's seen too much.

Since Jon agreed to submit to yet another Battelle-style interrogation, his newest report Owen Van Atta has also joined the lineup (it's so recent that we don't have him up yet on the speaker page). No matter, I'll ask both Owen and Jon what the plan is for MySpace.

But let's not forget that Newscorp is a lot bigger than MySpace. If you want to know how much bigger, pay attention to the Audience Network, a little known entity that just happens to be #2 in ad network reach after Google. Who owns it? Well, Miller and Murdoch.

This one is going to get interesting. Trust me.

So help me out, what do you want to hear from Jon Miller?

Others we'll be interviewing (and I've asked for your help):

Sheryl Sandberg

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Shantanu Narayen, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. Again, an amazing lineup.

If you want to come, I can still get you a Searchblog discount (for a few more days). Just ping me here.

As I mentioned a couple of days back, one of the folks I get to interview on stage later this month is Sheryl Sandberg, who I met with earlier this week (this post was one result of that meeting). Sheryl is Mark Zuckerberg's key partner in building out Facebook, and while she won't take credit publicly, I'd wager that Facebook's recent declarations of profitability and top line revenue growth have a lot to do with her leadership and focus on Facebook's online advertising platform, which is clearly starting to scale.

Recall that Sandberg came from Google, where she ran ad platforms, and she made the choice to move to Facebook for a reason. What did she see? Well, my own thoughts run to the trends I've been pointing out for the past year or so - the model of attention distribution is shifting in the web economy, and Facebook, along with Twitter and other social sites, are increasingly taking share from Google. Follow the referrals, so to speak. Search is still king, but it's no longer a dictatorship.

So what do you want to hear from Sandberg?

Others we'll be interviewing (and I've asked for your help):

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Jon Miller, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Shantanu Narayen, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. Again, an amazing lineup.

If you want to come, I can still get you a Searchblog discount (for about another week). Just ping me here.

Whoever is running these chattering teeth ads, cursing the Internet to another round of Punch The Monkey crap creative and all the consequences therein, STOP IT.  

But it's really all our fault, isn't it? Premium sites run remnant ad networks, and crap like this gets through faster than we can beat it back. We really do need some kind of crowdsourced feedback system so ads as annoying as this one get beat down, quickly, and never show up again, except to those who really want to see them. Who, I imagine, are the same folks who buy Chia pets late at night off infomercial programming.

Oh, wait, there is a feedback button here! But clearly, it's not being used! Why? Because it requires you fill out a multiple choice, ten question form! Which I did, but then returned an error message. That's doubly annoying - I took the time to inform CBS that this ad sucked, and my time was wasted. ARGH!!!!

Hey CBS (and all of us - including FM, which has run this ad due to our relationship with ad networks) these ads SUCK. Stop it!!!!

In the personality-driven world that is our industry, Qi Lu stands out for his relative lack of public profile. Widely respected as a technological leader while heading up search at Yahoo, Qi burst onto the industry scene when he defected to Microsoft last year and took the role of President of the Online Service division. In short, Qi is the man in charge of Microsoft's online strategy.

Our interview later this month will mark Qi's debut on the Web 2 stage. From all accounts, Qi is a very different character from his boss Steve Ballmer (who was a highlight of Web 2 two years ago). I'm looking forward to our interaction. Clearly we have a lot to discuss - the shifting sands of alliances (Facebook, Yahoo, Myspace, etc.), the rise (and fall?) of Bing, the Yahoo search deal, the future of MSN with regard to content, the role of ad exchanges and platforms (the Aquantive deal), and much more.

But I digress. What do *you* want to hear from Qi this year?

Others we'll be interviewing (and I've asked for your help):

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Sheryl Sandberg, Jon Miller, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Shantanu Narayen, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. Again, an amazing lineup.

If you want to come, I can still get you a Searchblog discount (for about another week). Just ping me here.