John Battelle's Searchblog

The news today was still iPad driven, for the most part, with the question of whether Flash will be supported at its core. So far, the answer is no, and Adobe semi-officially chastised Apple in this post: Apple's iPad -- a broken link?. However, a site called 9to5Mac studied the iPad introduction video, and found that Flash must be working on the device, because it's used on the nyt.com, which was featured in the demo: The iPad has Adobe's Flash on Apple's video. This of course is important to marketers, as Flash is pretty much an industry standard for rich advertising. Is Apple really planning a total end around, as IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg warns in this post?

I'm not so sure. I'd wager Apple and Adobe are deep in negotiations right now, and I'd also wager part of it has to do with Flash's execution in the Mac and associated operating systems. Why? Well, it's not a secret that Flash is resource intensive and reportedly buggy on the Mac (at least, that's what developers are saying). Perhaps Jobs is using the iPad as leverage to get Adobe to focus on his platform. Or, perhaps he really is spurning the company's technology. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, a Google exec (Hal Varian) damns the iPad with faint praise, reminding us all that Google and Apple are circling each other in the mobile device market like boxers calculating their first flurry of punches. And O'Reilly Radar has what I think is the best take on the iPad I've read so far: The iPad is the iPrius: Your Computer Consumerized.

Other interesting links today:

"Mommy, Where Does Content Come From?" 11 Easy Ways to Create Great Stuff (Open Forum) Content is critical to marketing in social media, without a doubt.

Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right (Mashable) I love case studies. You'll be seeing a lot more of them at the CM Summit in NY this June.

U.S. Advertising to Rise 3.5% in 2010, Barclays Says (Bloomberg) After a year like 2009, who doesn't like a headline like that? Online, of course, will grow far faster.

Facebook Develops Conversion Tracking Tool: What's A Fan Worth? (MediaPost)

Consumers Demand Engagement (eMarketer)

The iPad announcement took two months to build up, so it's not going away in one day. Today's news is dominated by Monday morning quarterbacking around the device, and so far, the fanboys and tech blogosphere are, by and large, not pleased. The image at left represents a few of the stories I've been reading across the web. I've filed them away in a folder I call "Predictions Support", as they all seem to support my thesis that the iPad would disappoint. Time will tell. And I still want one, and I'm not convinced there isn't a counter story in there somewhere.

Meanwhile, there are a few deficits in the iPad that are material to the marketing business. First, the iPad does not support Flash. That's just silly, unless Apple really thinks it can force marketers to create purely for its own distribution channel (or envisions the iPad as an ecosystem devoid of ads, which is possible). Second, it has no camera, though I'm sure camera devices can be added to it (and probably will be added natively in future versions). Third, as I predicted, it's another orifice for Apple's iTunes and App Store, so it's not an open web device. Then there's the unfortunate choice of name, which I think will fade over time. There are many other features (or lack thereof) that folks are finding fault with, for more, check this piece on Gizmodo.

My one line summary: The iPad was designed to consume media content in the framework of the social web, and drive Apple's proprietary platform even deeper into the psyche of the consumer. Don't count it out. More: Check Mate: Apple's iPad and Google's Next Move (O'Reilly Radar).

Other stories of interest:

Google Social Search Goes Live, Adds New Features (SEL) - Watch this space, and it's the beginning of a sea change in how search works. My initial questions and response from Google: Google Rolling Out Social Search: But Does It Leverage Facebook?

Advertising: A Little ‘i’ to Teach About Online Privacy (NYT) - I am on the Board of the IAB and welcome this initiative. I only hope it becomes actually useful to consumers.

Top 10 Personal Branding Blogs (Lifescoop) - A good list of sites that help you dust off the brand that is you. One thing I've noticed is key to success in the media and marketing business is the realization that understanding your own brand is critical to helping others grow. At FM, we've helped scores of marketers get promoted, and we're really proud of that.

Vivaki Ventures Is Done Chasing Equity Deals with Startups (Clickz)

Why Most Digital Ads Still Fail to Work (Ad Age)

Forget the iPad, today Google is taking another step toward its stated goal of "making search more social." There's a lot of goodness in here, in terms of features and approach, but it's just silly to pretend you can do any of this without directly addressing the 400 million-person elephant in the room called Facebook. Put simply: I can't figure out if this new service uses my Facebook social graph. And to my mind, that's a problem.

From the blog post announcing the public beta of social search (first announced at Web 2 late last year):

We think there's tremendous potential for social information to improve search, and we're just beginning to scratch the surface. We're leaving a "beta" label on social results because we know there's a lot more we can do. If you want to get the most out of Social Search right away, get started by creating a Google profile, where you can add links to your other public online social services.

Indeed - a lot more, like make it really easy to use your Facebook social graph, the way tons of other sites and apps do. Why not just use Facebook Connect? Hang on a tick, the video giving us an overview of the service says once you create that Google Profile, you can add connections via Blogger, Twitter, and "any other online networks you might be a part of" (45 seconds in). Might that include Facebook?

OK dear readers, I'm going to do it. I'm gonna make a Google Profile, just to find out.... Well, I'm still a bit perplexed. You can add any URL as a "Link" in your profile, so I added my Facebook pages. However, once I got through the initial form (which was not simple - I had to fill out all the info I already did with Facebook and LinkedIn, and my own name is not available as a profile URL, not /johnbattelle, not jbattelle. Darn! I picked /johnlinwoodbattelle, so now you all know my middle name...) Er, anyway, there *was* a prompt to "Share It On Facebook" after all that...

Aha! Maybe this will get my Facebook social graph goodness into Google Social Search?

Not that I could tell. Just a simply "share on Facebook" implementation, declaring my profile to my FB pals. But no deep integration. As far as I can tell, my Facebook social graph will not inform my social searchin' on Google. As I understand it from reading previous coverage of the product, Google social search *will* leverage FriendFeed, recently purchased by Facebook. But as far as I can tell, it does not leverage Facebook proper.

And that, to my mind, is just silly. Silly in the main, because as a consumer, clear, direct, and transparent integration with Facebook would be a huge *win* for my understanding of Google's social searching. Wouldn't it? Or am I missing something? (Besides the competitive issues, of course...)

I've pinged Google and other sources to find out if I'm just deeply in the dark....

Update: Google has provided me an answer to my initial question:

"If someone links to his Facebook account from his Google profile, Social Search may surface that user's public profile page. These are the same public profile pages already available on a search of Google.com and other search engines today. While we're interested to continue expanding the comprehensiveness of Social Search, we do not currently use your Facebook connections as part of Google Social Search."

What I'd like to know then is this: Why not?

(image ) While the world watches the next coming of Jobs, I reflected on my gut feeling as to the iPad, and why that feeling is inherently one of disappointment (see my predictions 2010 (#5) and my post earlier this week).  

And I'll admit, this one is not entirely logical. But then again, I don't always base my predictions (or my business decisions) on pure logic. Sometimes I just go with a feeling.

So what is my feeling about the iPad? Well, to be honest, it's simply this: I want one. I want to play with it, I want it to work the way I want it to work, I want it to do everything I wish a device like this should do. I am the guy, after all, who wrote his master's thesis on the Internet-connected tablet and its impact on the media business (yes, I really did. In 1991-92).

What? Wait a minute, Battelle, you're saying you WANT one, AND that it's going to disappoint?

Yes, stay with me. Here's why: When Apple introduced the iPhone, I really, truly did NOT want one. And it became a game changing hit. I eventually caved and got one (but don't use it much), and I still have major reservations about the platform. When Amazon introduced the Kindle, I really, truly, did NOT want one. I eventually caved and got one (but don't use it much), and I still have major reservations about the platform.

But the iPad? Oh, yeah - I really, really want one.

Which, to my mind, almost dooms the thing immediately.

Why? Well, because it can't possibly live up to my expectations. I want one for entirely irrational reasons. I want one because it holds the promise of all that might be good, right, and perfectly executed in the world of computing, media, and culture. The iPad is the Obama of devices: It's all hope, inspirational oratory, intelligence, and good intentions.

But as we have seen, a year later, reality (whether business or political) often gets in the way of intelligence. It looks like the iPad will adopt the iPhone approach to apps in full, so that's one more distribution orifice created, for example.

In any case, I'll probably get an iPad. And one year from now, I'll probably be disappointed. Irrationally disappointed, but still, disappointed.

I guess we'll see. I hope I'm wrong. I'll probably be wrong. If I am, I'll cop to it (and reset my gut to boot).

A brief Signal today till I can write later in the day, running to an early meeting:

20 Metrics To Effectively Track Social Media Campaigns (SEL)

Supreme Court's Devastating Decision | Ronald Dworkin | NYRB | 26 January 2010 (Off topic, but I found this take interesting)

Social Is the Top Priority for Marketers in 2010 [STATS] (Mashable)

Yahoo CEO Eyes TV Ads, Acquisitions (GigaOm, Yahoo earnings spin: We compete with TV, not search!)

AT&T Planning To Launch Yelp-Like Site Buzz.com (SEL, Good luck with that!)

Microsoft, Hearst Join Media Consortium (Worldscreen via IWM, this is about measurement)

Oh, and Apple has an announcement, I hear. (Links)

A light day in the media and marketing world, as it seems everyone is holding their breath, waiting for Steve Jobs and Apple to drop the next shoe tomorrow with the launch of the iPad (or iTablet or whatever it'll be called). Speculation over the device dominates the news, with the NYT pondering its impact on "old media" business models (including its own), and endless rumors about its specs from the tech blogs. (including the apparently faked image at top.)

So allow me a few thoughts on Apple's entry. First off, if iTunes and the iPhone are any indication, the iPad will be a closed system, controlled by Apple. As with the iPhone, only approved apps will get to play. And as with iTunes, only those who cut a deal with Apple will get distribution on the new device.

Which means, in essence, with the iPad Steve Jobs will create yet another orifice through which value must run.

A bit of background. Five and a half years ago, before the iPhone became, well, the iPhone, Steve Jobs famously decried the carriers' business model as antiquated and anti-consumer, stating "we're not very good at going through orifices to get to the end user." I was at the conference where Jobs made that statement, and was impressed - thinking that perhaps, when Apple inevitably launched its iPhone, it'd have an open development environment mirroring the web. But I was wrong. (Steve left that tactic to Google and Android.)

Instead, Apple is playing to its core DNA, which is to obsessively control every part of the consumer experience, from the operating system and hardware design to the presentation and delivery of content. Hey, it's worked really well so far, why change now?

Well, because I think this model will lose, in the end. Apple is right to obsess on user interface and design, but over time, open wins. As Tom Evslin put it back in 2007: "Despite his genius, Job’s biggest failures come when he forgets the value of letting other brains in." Elegantly curated collective intelligence will always trump individual genius (at least on the web).

My partner in Web 2, Tim O'Reilly, has framed this discussion as a simmering "War for the Web." I think he's framed it right: everyone now understands that the web is *the* platform for business, and many are now busy applying very old school business models to this new platform: control distribution, control content, control identity, control any place where value accrues. It's the orifices all over again, with Apple leading the way.

I think this is going to be a major theme for 2010 and beyond: how will the web be controlled? Or will it? Is the era of the messy-but-open web coming to a close?

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Other links of interest:

Playing Games With Customers: Is Foursquare The Future Of Local Search? (Search Engine Land. It might be. It sure is interesting to watch...)

Google releases new Google Voice for iPhone (Reuters. Google is using HTML 5 to go around Apple's refusal to let its iPhone app through the orifice)

Apple's Tablet and the New Splintered Web (Ad Age. Points out how devices are forcing all manner of new approaches to web dsitribution)

Facebook Finally Lands "The World's Biggest Marketer" (P&G to open office in Silicon Valley. I'm on P&G's Digital Advisory Board and can attest to the company's strong instincts to reach out beyond its traditional approaches).

Apple to Sell Ads on iPhones, iPods and iTablets? (Chasnote. This, IMHO, will be Apple's undoing if they approach this wrong. It's not in their DNA. Remind me to write a post about company DNA...)

Risk Avoidance and the ROI of Social Media, Insurance, Guitars and Tires (Forrestor. Money shot: Social Media is like corporate reputation insurance. You pay premiums in the form of building relationships, listening, responding, creating widgets, and building communities. And because you’ve done so, you’ve earned protection that can help should a PR disaster strike—you have an existing group of people who have affinity for your brand and an existing channel in which to reach them.)

Quite a weekend in marketing land, with a blast from Jason C. directed at Comscore. Sunday's feeds were alive with responses (I think this summary from TheNextWeb is a good place to start), but it boils down to this: Jason fired off an angry shot at a easy target, but with a bit more nuance, one can see that this is not a simple issue. If it were as black and white as he lays it out, Comscore would have been out of business a long time ago. Measurement is not as easy as most folks think it is, and Google Analytics has trained nearly everyone to think they have more people coming to their sites than they really do. Certainly, Comscore will probably learn from this tempest and possibly change its tactics. But the company has a right to charge for its services, the market will decide if its approach makes sense. (Caveat: FM - and its partners - are Comscore customers).

Meanwhile, Comscore reported global search market trends for 2009. Money shot: The total worldwide search market boasted more than 131 billion searches conducted by people age 15 or older from home and work locations in December 2009, representing a 46-percent increase in the past year. This number represents more than 4 billion searches per day, 175 million per hour, and 29 million per minute. The U.S. represented the largest individual search market in the world with 22.7 billion searches, or approximately 17 percent of searches conducted globally. China ranked second with 13.3 billion searches...(makes one think about Google's China decision, no?).

I found this NYT post on "controlled serendipity" worthy reading, it furthers a working thesis I have about how the social web is changing search, in particular discovery of content. While the premise is a bit shopworn (we're all both creators and consumers of content!), it's nevertheless true.

Other links:

Digg to Undergo Drastic Overhaul (Mashable)

Twitter Launches Location-Based Trending Topics (Mashable)

How Google Ranks Tweets (TechReview)

Death Of TV One Step Closer -- YouTube Signs Live Sports Broadcasting Deal (BusinessInsider)

Factery Labs’ New Fact Engine: Just What Real-Time Search Needs (SEL)

Reaching Out to Conversationalists (AdAge/Forrestor)

App Usage to Soar in 2010 (eMarketer)

...for its core property, search. And it's pretty good (it's a series of well produced ads, on YouTube, natch). I've predicted for some time that Google would have to start brand marketing itself, but so far I've only seen product marketing for Adwords or Android. This is the first time I've seen a real ad for Google.com search. See it below. (I noticed this because the teaser banner, above, was running tonight on my own site through Adsense...)

Watching the series (which were uploaded to YouTube two months ago), it strikes me that Google is being pretty thoughtful here about what its brand means, and how search is changing in both its interface and its usage, and the power it has to change lives. Many Google properties are referenced, including mobile search, maps, universal search, YouTube, and more.
Update: I've now seen this campaign on the NYT as well, roadblocked. It's truly a brand campaign: Google is not selling anything here other than its own brand - that ephemeral sensibility that resides between its customers' ears.

Why Do People Follow (or Fan) Brands? (eMarketer) This link has been passed around a lot this morning in marketing circles, despite the fact that the insights are pretty thin (people follow brands to learn about deals and "learn about new products, features or services.") We're all eager to understand what it is that might lead a person into "branding" themselves online. It's certainly a new form of currency - even AdWords has products you can use to drive Twitter followers. But what are they worth, in the end? I'd love to see more substantial research on this. I think people follow brands because they feel connected to them for some reason. Same reason people engage with them in real space. And value creation creates connection. So create value for folks in the context of social media, and they'll fan or follow you. Then keep giving them value.

Twitter Changes How It Suggests Users - This is an important step, but Twitter isn't there yet in terms of really harnessing the power of its own ecosystem.

GOOG reports "strong" earnings, stock sags - Google is considered by nearly everyone as a bellweather company, as goes GOOG, so goes the USA. So even though the company reported a strong Q4, the topline revenue number did not crush Wall Street's expectations. (It only beat them). Stock's down 20 points as a result, reflecting concerns that perhaps Google can't grow as fast as folks wish it would. Notable: Eric Schmidt says Google's next huge growth business is display advertising. Always wondered what Google really means when it says that. Display does not equate to brand, mind you...

Hilary Clinton Speaks Out About Free Speech and China - Along with a number of other California based journalists, I was invited to come to DC to see this speech in person. I was eager to go, but just could not make the trip. As I have written many times in the past, I think this issue could become quite significant historically, and Google's moves only increase the odds.

An Overview of Facebook's "Brand Ads" (TBI Research) - Provides a good overview of how Facebook's direct sold ads work, what the products are, pricing, etc.

Twitter today killed its "suggested users" feature (which Ev said he'd do way back at Web 2 in October), and replaced it with a more sophisticated approach. In a blog post explaining the move, the company elaborates:

We've found that the power of suggestion can be a great thing to help people get started, but it's important that we suggest things relevant to them. We've created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences. These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists.

Yep. Back in May of last year I wrote:

It strikes me that a few more structured steps in the sign up process could really pay significant dividends for Twitter. Perhaps a "follow wizard" that asks a few questions, and makes suggestions based on input from the new user. Let us drill down by category: Business:Technology:Internet, or Health:Diseases:Cancer. The ontology isn't very complicated - mapping users to it is a bit more complex, but not impossible.

It took a while, but it looks like Twitter is doing just that and even more, if the algorithms they've cooked up prove robust. I look forward to seeing how this changes newbies' impressions of the service.

But here's what I wonder - why can't everyone do this? Is it limited to just new accounts? To my mind, it shouldn't be. All Twitter users would benefit from this new feature....so hopefully Twitter will open it up to all of us.

Update: You can use the new features by navigating here.

Media and Marketing stories that interest me today:

Kindle Will Get App Store (NYT) - I've been on about this for a while now, and finally, it seems Amazon is getting a clue. I'm guessing the impending launch of the iTablet, which certainly will have an app store (like the iPhone does), is pushing Amazon to open its doors to developers. About time. For marketers, this ideally will become a new channel into which you can extend your app-based platform ecosystem, assuming you do it in a way that adds value.

A Twitter Tracker for Jersey Shore (clickz) - What, Battelle likes Jersey Shore? Not really (though I have watched, astounded on so many levels). What I think is worth pointing out is the concept of Twitter tracking in general. Curating and adding value to conversations around brands is a skill all marketers must have going forward. Witness the first (and one of the best, I'll submit humbly), Exectweets, and one of FM's latest, Amex Open's Pulse.

The Top 10 Fastest Growing Sites on Web, 2009 (Comscore) - I'm proud to say FM is one of them. Others of interest: Kodak (!), Nintendo, UPS, Hallmark. Interesting that several of them are brands, not media properties.

Rock Band Opening Up (Mashable) - It's not quite what I predicted earlier this month, but there's 11 months to go and this is a step in the right direction.

Report: Kids and Their Screens (Kaiser Foundation) - It's worse (and better) than you thought. "Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time 'media multitasking' (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours."

One of my predictions this year (#2) focused on Google becoming a software brand. To my mind, every interaction with a brand strengthens a consumer's understanding of what the brand means. And with that in mind, this dialog box, which has been popping up every so often on my desktop, certainly screams "Google is a software brand" to me.

In the past, just two other companies have had this kind of a relationship with me: Apple and Microsoft. Whenever those dialogs pop up on my desktop, they're reminding me "Apple and Microsoft are software brands". Add Google to the list - and scratch "search, and only search" from its list of brand attributes.

.

..at the expense of Yahoo, AOL. Google also up, though less so. Release.

I've said before that search interfaces, stuck in the command line interface of DOS, will at some point evolve into applications on top of a commodity search index. I further opined that Bing, in particular Bing's limited but compelling visual search, was just such an example: search as an interactive, rich application, as opposed to search as a list of results.  

The commodity of search results is critical, but as we shift our usage to the mobile web, the use case for a list of results weakens. Instead, as this Bizweek article points out, we're using apps. On their face, these apps don't seem like search at all. Except they are.

Take the popular iPhone app Exit Strategy, for example (at left). The app helps folks navigate the NY transit system. In essence, it consolidates a subset of search queries and answers them with a combination of domain-specific structured results and an elegant user interface. The structured dataset is the NY transit map and schedule, the UI is based on the iPhone's unique ecosystem of interface. The result: No one with this app is Googling "best route Bronx Midtown". Instead, there's an app for that.

Google can't help but see this as a threat. For nearly every structured set of results, there'll be an app for that, if there isn't already. To my mind, the question becomes one of using search to find the best apps. I wonder how Google is surfacing iPhone apps as answers to questions pertinent to destroying its own query volume? For it seems to me that a very good result for the query above, if done on Google over an iPhone, would be "Exit Strategy."

Huh. Yet another reason to lean into Android, no doubt.

....driven by the need to kick Google off the iPhone? An interesting idea. Worth thinking about....

From a Businessweek article:

Some analysts believe the Apple-Google battle is likely to get much rougher in the months ahead. Ovum's Yarmis thinks Apple may soon decide to dump Google as the default search engine on its devices, primarily to cut Google off from mobile data that could be used to improve its advertising and Android technology. Jobs might cut a deal with—gasp!—Microsoft to make Bing Apple's engine of choice, or even launch its own search engine, Yarmis says. "I fully expect [Apple] to do something in search," he adds. "If there's all these advertising dollars to be won, why would it want Google on its iPhones?"

It's my sincere hope that this blows up, not over. With reports coming in that the Chinese government was most certainly behind the attack on Google and 20 other companies (and has done this before), and that the White House is now supporting Google's position, it's about time that we call a spade a spade here. What China is doing is wrong, regardless of how much debt of ours they hold. Looking the other way in the name of pure profit is a practice whose time should end.

Update: Cato has an interesting take on how the Chinese hackers got in: by leveraging infrastructure Google put in place to help the US Government do wiretaps. Thanks to reader Brandon Byers for this.

Another update: Xian Qiang, who I taught with at Berkeley and launched China Digital Times earlier this decade, has a take here.

I was stunned to learn, via Danny, that our collective tweets seem lost to eternity (or at least, to search). While the data exists, tweets can't be found via search, which means they can't be found via the search API, which means...well, they can't be found. I hope this situation is rectified, if only for history's sake.

(Danny notes that they can be found using Google or Bing, at least for now. That's a relief. But it does not bode well for Twitter's ability to scale.)

Google yesterday surprised Wall St. and its partners with the announcement that it may pull out of China (most expect it will, given the politics of making such a statement, the move is most likely assured). Google said that "hackers" had leveraged its infrastructure to target Chinese dissidents. To my mind, that means Google has discovered that China's government is using Google's networks and data, and Google realized that can't stand, for any number of reasons. (Including that US and European based activists were targeted - via phishing and other similar types of scams).  

Google further noted that at least 20 other companies were also being targeted, and it has been in contact with those companies as well.  

What's interesting and consistent to me is that Google has been here before - at the same time that Google was entering China (Jan. of 2006), the US Dept. of Justice demanded data from Google as part of a child porn fishing excercise, and Google refused to comply, and then went public, in essence becoming a leader in data rights by forcing the government's hand.

In this case, Google is again taking a leadership role, and the company is forcing China's hand. While it's a stretch to say the two things are directly connected, the seeming fact that China's government was behind the intrusions has led Google to decide to stop censoring its results in China. This is politics at its finest, and it's a very clear statement to China: We're done playing the game your way.

From the blog post:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

As I wrote in the book and here, Google was never entirely comfortable with getting into China, and used a fair amount of tortured logic to get to the point of committing resources back five years ago. From one of my posts:

There's still time to pull out, guys. I've read your rationalizations, and Uncle Bill's as well. I don't buy them. I don't buy that this is what, in your heart, you believe is right. Sure, I understand the logic. But, well....in your heart, is this what you wanted to do? No? Then why did you do it?

....I was having dinner with some dear friends tonight. They asked me why did Google do this? My answer: I think they convinced themselves it was the right thing to do. They thought themselves into it. And deep down, they aren't sure they did the right thing. At least, that's what I want to believe. Sure, Microsoft is going to go in. Yahoo and IBM are going to go in. But Google? We thought...well, we thought you were different.

Apparently, Google is.

Google has never had a great reputation for customer support - back in the "hair on fire" days of 2003-2006 the lack of a human response to search engine marketers' questions was a huge complaint.

Now the company is going direct to consumers with a major phone launch. As I wrote about a year ago (about Google Voice):

...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?

So far, the early results seem to point to what one might expect: Google is not set up to do good customer service in the complicated smartphone/network services/telecomms marketplace. From an article in PCWorld today:

If you buy a Nexus One manufactured by HTC, directly from Google's Web site, and use it with T-Mobile's wireless network--who do you call when you have a problem? Google is only accepting support requests via e-mail, and users are getting bounced between T-Mobile and HTC as neither seems equipped to answer complaints, or willing to accept responsibility for supporting the Nexus One.   

What I said about Google Voice I think also applies to the NexusOne: 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.

NB: Very interesting to see that Google is promoting its NexusOne under the keyword "customer service."

And while it ain't pretty, it's pretty important. Recall my prediction way back ten days ago about a new interface? Here's the glimmerings...

Reading coverage of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's recent commentary on his company's newly changed privacy policies, I was struck with the urge to ask all of you a question: Do you think this is a big deal? Or is this simply the evolution of our society's ongoing contract with the individual, an evolution that Facebook is reflecting?

In short, as Marshall submits in his article on RWW, is Facebook trailing public sentiment on privacy, or is he forging it? I'd love your thoughts in comments.

(Excerpted from a longer post on BingTweets, part of a series I've been writing, underwritten by Bing).

In my predictions this week I seemed unusually glum about the state of search, writing: Traditional search results will deteriorate to the point that folks begin to question search's validity as a service.

This statement did not go unnoticed by folks in the industry, and I received quite a few emails, Tweets, and comments asking what on earth I meant. Well, in the post I tried to explain:

This does not mean people will stop using search - habits do not die that quickly and search will continue to have significant utility. But we are in the midst of a significant transition in search - as I've recently written, we are asking far more complicated questions of search, ones that search is simply not set up to answer. This incongruence is not really fair to blame on search, but so it goes. Add to this the problem of an entire ecosystem set up to game AdWords, and the table is set.

Let me use this final BingTweets entry to expand on what I meant.

My statement about how we're asking "far more complicated questions of search" is a riff on the writings I've done here on the BingTweets blog, specifically, my three part series on "Decisions Are Never Easy" (1, 2, 3). In short, I find that all of us are expecting search, a technology built to answer one-dimensional questions like "capital of Yemen", to answer questions that have more than one semantic meaning ("Yemen al qaeda leadership diplomacy"). As a reader (and search entrepreneur) put it in an email to me: "When people move to complex queries (defined as two or more semantically disjunct terms), search breaks down. All it is really fit to do is deliver all the permutations. Imagine a 5-term query, all semantically disjunct. .... such as ... "green tea, life quality, life expectancy, cancer, tumor". Did you ever try and read 40,000 documents?"

Well no, none of us ever try to read all the documents search brings back - all the "permutations" that search faithfully (and rather unintelligently) renders to us. We all know by now that when we ask a complicated question of search, search will pretty much throw everything and the kitchen sink at us. And we don't want all that information. We want our answer!

I have no doubt that such an answer is coming, but before it does, we have to go through a period of disappointment. ....... (continued ...)

I remember the time when Sergey and Larry swore they'd never have ads on the homepage of Google. Last month I noted a big one for Chrome. Today there's an additional one. Now that's TWO ads! Google has its own products to market now, and it's using it's biggest firehose of attention to tell folks about them. Both are major new fronts in very large wars: Mobile and OS/Browser.    

How do you think this will effect its core brand?

Interesting how Google is spinning the Nexus One. From the release:

Google Offers New Model for Consumers to Buy a Mobile Phone

Launches Nexus One, contributing further innovation to the Android ecosystem

MOUNTAIN VIEW (January 5, 2010) - Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today unveiled a new way for consumers to purchase an Android mobile phone, a web store hosted by Google. The company is also launching the first phone offered through this new model, called the Nexus One, which combines the latest in hardware from HTC Corporation with the newest Android software.

There's way too much coverage of this event to add much here, other than to say Google is walking a fine line, and there are plenty of players looking to push it off. But spinning Nexus One as a "new way to purchase an Android phone"? Priceless.

Update: You know, I'm thinking about this a bit more, and I think I see where Google is going with all of this. They want to break up the current stranglehold of how phones are distributed, marketed, and sold here in the US. I find that commendable, as a consumer, but precarious, were I Google.

Related:

2009 Predictions

2009 How I Did

2008 Predictions

2008 How I Did

2007 Predictions

2007 How I Did
2006 Predictions
2006 How I Did
2005 Predictions
2005 How I Did
2004 Predictions

2004 How I Did

A new decade. I like the sound of that. I'm a bit late on these, but for some reason these predictions refused to be rushed. I haven't had the contemplative time I usually get over the holidays, and I need a fair amount of that before I can really get my head around attempting something as presumptive as forecasting a year.

So I'll just start writing and see what comes.

While past predictions have focused on specific companies and industry segments (like Internet marketing), I think I'll try to stay meta this time. Except for Google, of course, which is still the only company in the Internet economy that can be seen from space. For now. But we'll get to that.

1. 2010 will mark the beginning of the end of US dominance of the web. I am not predicting the decline of the US Internet market, but rather its eclipse in size and overall influence by other centers of web economies. In essence, this is not an Internet prediction, but an economic one, as the web is simply a reflection of the world, and the world is clearly moving away from a US-dominated model.

2. Google will make a corporate decision to become seen as a software brand rather than as "just a search engine." I see this as a massive cultural shift that will cause significant rifts inside the company, but I also see it as inevitable. Google, once the "pencil" of the Internet, has become a newer, more open version of Microsoft, and it has to admit as much both to itself as well as to its public, or it will start to lose credibility with all its constituents. While the company flirted with the title of "media company" I think "software company" fits it better, and allows it to focus and to lean into its most significant projects, all of which are software-driven: Chrome OS, Android, Search, and Docs (Office/Cloud Apps).

This shift means Google will, by years end and with fits and starts, begin to minimize its efforts in media, including social media, seeking to embrace and partner rather than compete directly. This is a significant prediction, as Facebook is clearly Google's most direct competitor in many areas, but Google will realize, if it has not already, that it cannot out Facebook Facebook, but it sure can be a better software company.

3. 2010 will see a major privacy brouhaha, not unlike the AOL search debacle but around social and/or advertising related data. Despite the rise of personalized privacy dashboards for most major sites, there is still no industry standard for how marketing data is leveraged, and there is a brewing war for that data between marketers, their agencies, and third parties like ad networks and measurement companies. Add in a querulous legislative environment, and it's hard to imagine there not being some kind of major flap in the coming year.

4. By year's end the web will have seen a significant new development in user interface design, one that will have gained rapid adoption amongst many "tier one" sites, in particularly those which cover the industry.

Despite nearly ten years of blogging, most publishing sites are still stuck in the mode of "post and push down," which is, frankly, a terrible UI for anyone other than news hounds. Thanks to the three-headed force of social, gaming, and mobile, I think the PC web is due for a UI overhaul, and we'll see new approaches to navigation and presentation evolve into a recognizable new standard.

5. (image) Apple's "iTablet" will disappoint. Sorry Apple fanboys, but the use case is missing, even if the thing is gorgeous and kicks ass for so many other reasons. Until the computing UI includes culturally integrated voice recognition and a new approach to browsing (see #4), the "iTablet" is just Newton 2.0. Of course, the Newton was just the iPhone, ten years early and without the phone bit....and the Mac was just Windows, ten years before Windows really took hold, and Next was just ....oh never mind.

6. 2010 will see the rise of an open gaming platform, much as 2009 was the year of an open phone platform (Android). Imagine what might happen when the hegemony of current game development is questioned - I want open development for Halo and Guitar Hero, damnit!

7. Traditional search results will deteriorate to the point that folks begin to question search's validity as a service. This does not mean people will stop using search - habits do not die that quickly and search will continue to have significant utility. But we are in the midst of a significant transition in search - as I've recently written, we are asking far more complicated questions of search, ones that search is simply not set up to answer. This incongruence is not really fair to blame on search, but so it goes. Add to this the problem of an entire ecosystem set up to game AdWords, and the table is set. Google will take most of the brand blame, but also do the most to address the issue in 2010.

8. Bing will move to a strong but distant second in search, eclipsing Yahoo in share. Of course, with the Yahoo deal, it's rather hard to understand search share, but I measure it by "where search queries originate." This is a pretty bold prediction, given the nearly 7-point spread between Bing and Yahoo now, but I think Microsoft will pick up significant share using cash to buy distribution.

9. Internet advertising will see a sharp increase, and not just from increased search and social media platform (PPC/PPA) spending. Brands will spend a lot more online in 2010, and most predictive models are not accounting for this rise.

10. (Image) This is probably a layup, but one never knows, layups are sometimes the ones you miss: The tech/Internet industry will see a surge in quality IPOs. However, at least one, if not more will be withdrawn as public scrutiny proves too costly and/or controversial. A corollary: There will also be a surge in M&A and "weak" IPO filings.

11. I'm out of my depth on this one, but it feels right so I'm going to go with it: We'll see a major step forward in breaking the man/machine barrier. By this I mean the integration of technology and biology - yes, the same fantasy that fuels the blockbuster movies (Avatar, Matrix, Terminator). I'm not predicting a market product, but rather a paper or lab result that shows extraordinary promise.

12. I'll figure out what I want to do with my book. SOGOTP, so to speak. Three years of predicting that I'll start it is getting a bit old, eh? I feel good about branching back out into more contemplative fields, with FM in a strong position and our economy coming out from its defensive crouch.

As always, thanks for reading and responding. I look forward to 2010, it'd be hard to predict anything other than it'll be a better year, overall, than 2009.