John Battelle's Searchblog

I was going to post...

...That Twitter had been sold, for 1.75 billion, to Google (who would pay that, I'd reckon).

...That MySpace had been sold, for 250 million, to Viacom (who would pay that, just to rub it into Murdoch's face).

...That Google had announced it was only kidding about China, and was ready to play ball again with the PRC.

...That Facebook had made all public actions available in its API (oh wait, that's going to be true!)

....That Foursquare announced it was no longer doing high profile deals and instead was going to focus on its product.

....That Yahoo and AOL were merging.

....That Microsoft had won the iPhone and iPad search business

...That Apple was opening up the iTunes store to web crawling, made peace with Adobe, and was launching an effort to create an SDK that ported iPhone/Pad apps to Android

...That Amazon had launched a payment business to compete with PayPal

...That eBay had bought Skype, again.

....and that Nokia had bought RIM.

But...April's Fools is so boring now, ain't it?

Cross posted from the FM Blog:

...For today’s Signal topic, I’d like to talk about marketing as a portal to understanding your business.

Now, before you roll your eyes and click away, stick with me for a minute. If you’re reading this post, chances are you are in business. And chances are also pretty good that business is media or marketing, because that’s the focus of Signal, after all.

So, what business are you in? Or, more to the point I’d like to make: What is your business?

You’d might be surprised at the number of folks I’ve met with in the past year who pause when I ask that question. Because, in the main, that number is exceedingly low.

Allow me to explain. While it might seem, from a cursory review of my career, that I’m fascinated by media and marketing, what really gets me up in the morning (or more accurately, wakes me up in the middle of the night) is business. I love the puzzle that is connecting a great idea with a great market (that’s the entrepreneur in me), and I love learning how Really Big Companies work. In fact, over the past decade or so, I’ve gone pretty deep in both: Starting several small businesses based on Big Ideas, and spending a ton of time with very engaged folks deep in brands like HP, American Express, Walmart, P&G, Intel, McDonald’s, and countless others.

And without an exception, I’ve found that asking interesting questions of senior folks responsible for marketing at large companies has led to exceedingly smart insights on how those businesses work. It’s sort of like Clift Notes for Big Biz – if you want to understand the company behind major brands, start with the folks who run marketing.

An example. Earlier this week I sat down with an SVP responsible for marketing at a major retailer. Because I don’t have his (or her) permission, I’ll keep my source – and the company – anonymous. But know this – this company has a top 25 e-commerce site, a national brand, a major catalog business, and several different divisions, all of which are high-end and are sub-brands in and of themselves.

As we dug into our conversation, we quickly dropped any pretense of our dialog being about marketing, at least in any traditional sense, and quickly got to questions that had to do with the business – what products sold when, where, and why; what kinds of data were gathered to support business decisions; which customers were most profitable, most elusive, and most difficult to convert; what role the founder’s DNA played in what had become a major enterprise’s business decisions (and why it was crucial to respect that); how the competition was playing its cards and what response to take to those moves; what institutional blocks were impeding innovation in the business; and on, and on, and on.

I could spend hours and hours, and days and days, in conversations like this one. In fact, I’m honored to say that for the most part, doing just that is pretty much my job these days.....(more )

...but it will build the equivalent of an app search engine. It's crazy not to. In fact, it has to. It already has app discovery via the iTunes store, but it's terrible, with no signal that gives reliable results based on accrued intent.

What Apple needs is a search engine that "crawls" apps, app content, and app usage data, then surfaces recommendations as well as content . To do this, mobile apps will need to make their content available for Apple to crawl. And why wouldn't you if you're Yelp, for example? Or Facebook, for that matter? An index of apps+social signal+app content would be quite compelling.

What Apple will NOT do is crawl the entire web, which is what's implied by this headline. Apple has already shown a general disdain for the open Internet, anyway, and I don't see the company spending hundreds of millions of dollars in capital expense to play a game it can't win anyway.

Google, on the other hand, already has web search well in hand, and most likely will also create an app engine. Unfortunately for us all, the two will most likely not share data. And that is bad for everyone.

(Image at left is how ABC News illustrated the story I'm criticizing. Really).

Guys, you don't come here to hear me rant, do you? Do you? Especially on topics entirely orthogonal to my stated mission of "the intersection of search, media, and technology...and more." But then again, maybe this falls into "and more."

OK, so if you don't want to hear me rant on about how simply awful network news, and in this case, ABC News, has gotten, move right along.

But every so often, I just can't help myself. Yep, it happened with the Comcast DVR (and despite my renewed respect for the company, the DVR interface is still awful), and it happened with United.

Tonight was one of those nights. At least it only happens once a year or so.

My wife was a producer at CBS News back in the day, when network news meant something, and journalists didn't excuse themselves for pandering to the lowest common denominator because "the Internet undermined our business model."

This means she still watches the nightly news, much to my opposition. I find network news broadcasts to be, in the main, derivative, unintelligent, and sensational. There are good pieces in there, and there is good work most certainly, but as every year passes, it's clear network news has lost its way - no one is taking risks, and everyone is chasing a fractional rating point around the damn drain.

Anyway, tonight my wife was watching ABC World News with Diane Sawyer. This is the same program that I ranted about last week - the same program that sent two extremely intelligent producers to my office to spend an hour taping what became a five second clip with no context, no content, and no value. Anyways.

Tonight the teaser story - the one that producers promote throughout so as to keep an audience till the very end of the broadcast - was called "Science Sheds Light on Christianity's Biggest Mysteries." Well, that's how it was posted to the web, but on air, the piece was boiled down to pretty much this: "We Have Computer Generated Pictures of a Bloody Jesus and We're Not Afraid to Show Em!"

I can't find the actual clip on the web - because ABC News' website is truly awful (no really, look at what it's featuring tonight, image at left). It has several pieces from tonight's newscast up, but not this one. Why? Who knows. But the story goes something like this: A new show from National Geographic explores various tenets of Christian belief, including the Shroud of Turin, a cloth reputed by some to have been laid over the corpse of Jesus. The show includes computer animations illustrating that a bloody body may have lain under the cloth. The animations are, well, bloody. And hey, it's a computer animation of a recently murdered Jesus Christ!! Or at least, it could have been, right? Now THAT'S GOOD TELEVISION!!!!

Well, who knows. ABC News at least raised the question that carbon dating done in the 1980s found the cloth was only 600 or so years old. Barring time travel, it's pretty certain that Jesus didn't lay under it. But no matter, because ABC News found someone who claims the carbon dating findings were wrong.

And his proof? Well, as far as I could tell from the piece, which we recorded and watched several times to ensure we didn't get this wrong - his proof was this: He found a painting that shows there was a shroud covering Jesus, and that painting was dated some 68 years earlier than the earliest carbon dating of the Shroud!

So see? See? That proves it, right?

Ummm.....excuse me but WTF? Erhhm...how exactly does a painting of a shroud being laid over the corpse of Jesus disprove carbon dating?

Well never you mind, the ABC News piece just keeps on keeping on, because after all, the point of it isn't to get to the truth, or to bring the facts to bear, or to shed light on an important issue. No, the point of the piece is to hook the viewer in the beginning of the newscast with teasers about how new technology has brought us tantalizing new proof of Christ's death! And then roll the video - there's a house on fire somewhere, we gotta show it, regardless of news value!

Nowhere in this piece did I see any evidence of journalism. And honestly, if you want to trace the decline of broadcast news, you should probably start there. Stop blaming the Internet and start looking at your own product. It's a disgrace.

Dale and others have made some good points on what would make the iPad a better development environment, in particular, Dale recalls HyperCard, which was Apple's version of a weblike development environment, before the Web existed. I covered HyperCard for MacWeek back in the late 80s and early 90s, and I also covered the CDROM market (remember that?).

Both are dead now, and the Web is king.

Dale writes:

What's missing today is HyperCard, or an equivalent tool that can be used to create a new wave of applications for the iPad..... Making it easy to create content and increasing the number of people who can create applications for the iPad could be very important to its long-term success. The web has made producers of us all. If the iPad is just another consumer platform for consuming and not creating content, then it will just be another way to watch TV or listen to music or download information...

There's a very easy way for the iPad to do what Dale suggests, and it doesn't involve creating another HyperCard. It just involves the iPad becoming a world class Internet client. So far, from all I've heard, it sounds like it won't be, and if you want to make anything that works great on the iPad, you have to make it in Apple's proprietary authoring environment - just as you did for the iPhone. I think that's a classic Apple mistake.

Don't bet against the web. You'll lose.

This weekend I finished a the first draft of a new series on publishing, not unlike the three part series I wrote more than three years ago on conversational media. I've posted the draft over on the FM blog, as it's been FM that has inspired my thinking on these topics. From the post:

Ask most media professionals to define “publishing” and they’ll most likely resort to something akin to the standard dictionary entry: “The business of issuing printed matter.”

By that definition, publishing ain’t much of a growth business.

But here at FM, we’d like to recapture what we believe is the essence of the term. To us, publishing means something far more than putting words and images to paper. Back when paper and printing presses revolutionized how humans communicated, we ended up conflating two very important concepts. One was the message – what was being said, and in what context. The second was the medium – the transport for that message. The two became seen as the same thing in printed matter, and the traditional definition of publishing was born.

It’s not an accident that we identified the message (what is being said) with the medium (how that message gets into our minds). After all, before print, all we poor humans had as a medium was our voices. Back then, with apologies to McLuhan, the medium truly was the message.

Think of publishing as speaking – a conversation – it’s clear that publishing means far more than printing. Publishing means connecting a community through the art and science of communication. And nowhere is publishing more vibrant – and conversational – than through the medium we’ve come to call the Internet....

My daily Signal is up over at FM, in which I break down the Nestle dust up. From it:  

Musing on the recent Nestle Facebook “debacle” (which I do not believe is, or needs to be proclaimed a debacle), Joshua-Michéle concludes: If Nestle neither wishes to change or defend itself on the merits – then they shouldn’t be operating in social media.

Well, yes and no. Yes, in that the sheer beauty of social media is that it forces questions to the fore, and thus forces companies to respond to those questions. But no, it’s not OK, as a strategy, to “not be operating in social media.” I sense, perhaps, that Joshua-Michéle was making the same point in a roundabout way.

My reasoning? Because all of our customers are already operating in social media. You can’t pretend otherwise. And it’s better to engage, make mistakes, admit those mistakes, and move on, than to not engage at all. I call this “conversational judo,” and suggest we all practice it, daily. Twice on Sunday, perhaps....

Google today introduced a "Search Funnels" feature for its AdWords clients, a feature that will help serious advertisers tune their AdWords campaigns for increased conversion and profitability. For a very good overview of the service, head to SEL.

It's clear Google put a lot of thought into how this new feature would be exposed, both in terms of a searcher's privacy, and how an advertiser might use the new data. It's clearly limited, and for good reasons.

But what Funnels belies is a more fundamental truth: Google itself has access to all the conversion patterns surfaced by this feature, and more. In the SEL article, Barry Schwartz notes:

Until now, Google would only show you the last keywords that led to a conversion. In many cases, searchers will go through a searching process that includes research that might not lead to an immediate sale but may assist in a sale after a few more searches....

... Funnels are created by noting when someone clicks on an ad at Google. That links their search activity from that click to a particular advertiser for 30 days. If they do other searches in that period after the initial click, even if they don’t click on the advertiser’s ad each time, Google will still track that the advertiser’s ad showed for that searcher and what keywords it showed for. If they eventually click again on the advertiser’s ad and convert, only then is a funnel report created — and only if the advertiser also uses the AdWords conversion tracking code.

This means that no “natural” clicks are logged and reported in the funnel (a potential weakness for those fully trying to understand the research process). It also means that no keywords are reported as part of the funnel unless the advertiser has an ad showing for those keywords — so again, some part of a research process might go missing.

In other words, Google knows a lot more than either its advertisers or its users do. Now, we knew that, but Funnels is a reminder of just how sophisticated the company's knowledge can be.

Yesterday a crew ambled into my FM offices from ABC News, setting up quite an array of lights and equipment to shoot an interview. The topic was Google and China. Now, I'm a veteran of these situations, as is my staff, and fortunately the commotion was limited to my office, and the 45 minutes or so of set up happened while many of us were in a meeting.  

When they were ready, I sat down for the conversation and enjoyed my talk with the producer, who was piped in via mobile phone. We talked about many of the nuanced issues involved in this particular story. The crew in the room with me also seemed keen to have an informed dialog. I sensed the piece would be pretty intelligent.

But....instead of nuance, we get a story framed as "a battle of titans" - Google v. China, the death match! "Game on!" is how Diane Sawyer opened the piece. "Who will fire the next shot?!" the reporter asks in conclusion. I'm quoted somewhere in the middle, saying that China employs a large number of Internet police, a well-known fact that I mentioned more as a set up to another point. It all begs the question of why they bothered sending the crew in the first place, but .... at least the major networks are paying attention to the story.

And in a way, that's really the story here. A private company has pushed a very public and political issue into the minds of several significant constituencies. First and foremost, Google's move has forced China's hand, and given those inside the country who may disagree with China's own policies a clear example of their own leadership's shortcomings. As the NYT points out today:

China also does not acknowledge to its own people that it censors the Internet to exclude a wide range of political and social topics that its leaders believe could lead to instability. It does not release information on the number of censors it employs or the technology it uses for the world’s most sophisticated Internet firewall. Its 350 million Internet users, many with fast broadband connections, are assured they have the same effectively limitless access to information and communications that the rest of the world enjoys.

Google publicly challenged that stance in January, and reinforced its ideological opposition to China’s policies by finally pulling the plug on its mainland search engine after a failed round of talks with Chinese officials. That forced Chinese leaders to defend their control of the Web...

Thanks to Google's move, thousands, if not millions, of Chinese now understand the extend to which their own government has been duping them. And those who already knew have a new ally, and perhaps additional courage to continue change from within.

A second significant constituency is the US public. To my mind the US has been lured into complacency about China, forgiving China's violation of core human rights as a cultural matter best swept under the rug. The main reason? Business! Profit! Huge markets! (Oh, and the massive number of US dollars now controlled by our pals in Beijing). It's a classic conflict of American values: We are society built on freedom of speech and religion, both of which are brutally controlled by the Chinese government. But we are also a society built on capitalism and the profit motive. It's clear which one had won in the court of US public opinion - until Google made a decision which forced all of us to think about it in a new light.

A third constituency, related to the first two, are the governments of both the US and China, as well as the executives who run major corporations based in the US. As public awareness and opinion unfolds in both countries, I can imagine shifts in both policy as well as practice in both public and private spheres. We now have an administration whose reflexive approach to China's moral conflict with American values isn't to sweep it under the rug, for one.

And if you are running a company that competes with Google in the US, chances are you find yourself in a pretty uncomfortable place this morning - answering to employees, shareholders, and consumers this question: Why can Google practice a values-based approach to business, but you cannot?

Come to think of it, that's a question that the US government should be asked as well. And inside the government, you can bet it's already come up.

Meanwhile, news breaks today that Google's main site was hacked, with its management bio page turned into Chinese characters (see image at left). Hmmm. Petty retaliation? I doubt it. But yet another strange twist to an ongoing tale.

The broadcast is here, you can watch the piece starting at around 9.15. I tried to use Hulu's vaunted sharing features to embed just a clip, but the company seems to have caved to the TV overlords and disabled it. That'll be a subject of another rant.

My latest Signal is up over at the FM blog. I had a fun day. From it:  

...As readers know, I’ve declared the “check-in” as the latest field in the Database of Intentions. “Where I am” is a powerful signal, in particular if where you are is a local business that might answer that signal with an offer that engenders loyalty, purchase, or both.

But I’m starting to think that we need to expand the concept of location to more than physical spaces. Why can’t I check-in to a website? An article? A state of mind? An emotion? Or…an object?

Over at FM, we’ve been thinking about that very question, and have been busy turning theory into practice (more on that later). But I got a glimpse of where “the check-in” might be headed today when my pal Seth Goldstein came over to give me a tour of StickyBits.

StickyBits started as a way to attach digital content to physical objects – “tagging” them with a physical sticker emblazoned with a barcode. A slick iPhone or Android app makes it easy – you just slap on the sticker, take a photo of it, and connect the sticker to a web media object in the cloud (for example a video of your kids). Then anyone who sees that sticker can scan it, and see the same object. It’s a great idea for, say, a greeting card company.

But a funny thing happens when you put technology into the hands of real people. Stickbits launched at SXSW, and as William Gibson famously said, the street finds its own use for technology. In the case of StickyBits, people figured they could scan any bar code and attach annotations. And it turns out, there are a hell of a lot of barcodes in our lives every day. And it also turns out, StickyBits supports the use of any barcode as a tagging location.

Cans of coke, bars of chocolate, boxes of Kleenex or breakfast cereal – the tagged items starting pouring in. People were actually checking into brands through the use of that brand’s product....

Today Google Labs posted news that it was playing around with showing hotel prices on Google Maps. From the post:

Google Maps is often one of the first stops travelers make to find and compare hotels. Today we started experimenting with a new feature, visible to a small portion of users, to help make that process even easier by showing specific prices for selected hotel listings.

With this feature, when you search for hotels on Google Maps you'll be able to enter the dates you plan to stay and see real prices on selected listings.

I can imagine any number of reasons why Google might be "experimenting" with this. As anyone who uses Google knows, hotel listing spam - well OK, not spam, but arbitrage and gaming - is pretty out of control in the main Google listings. Going direct to the hotels and brokers themselves to get pricing data cuts out all that organic result spam, and could create a better experience for Google searchers. Of course, if not done right, it could freak out one of Google's largest category of AdWords advertisers, the travel industry.

I wonder how they are feeling today upon hearing this news? I have some emails out to find out.

From my rant over at the FM Blog:

Now Microsoft is pushing to become a third major player. And to my mind, the company has a choice to make. No one – not even folks at Microsoft – will dispute the fact that Windows Phone 7, due out in the Fall, is a reboot of sorts, and a clear attempt at creating the kind of platform that Android and iPhone already enjoy. While the system is not yet out, the early buzz is good, but Microsoft stands at a crossroads. In essence, the choice comes down to this: Will Microsoft ape Apple’s approach, or will it take the path of Google?

I fervently hope it will do the second.

Why? Well, we’ve seen this movie before, haven’t we? It didn’t end well for Apple, in terms of market share, when it took a vertically integrated, precious approach to operating systems back in 1984. After Apple changed the computing market with the Mac, Microsoft took the best ideas in Apple’s OS, integrated them into Windows, opened it up for any hardware maker to use, and the rest is history. Apple sued Microsoft, but to no avail. (HTC, anyone?!)

Right now, Google is taking the same approach in phones – Microsoft’s approach! So imagine this observer’s dismay when early news leaked out that instead of out Microsofting Google, Microsoft instead was parroting Apple in its approach to the Windows Phone application store. As far as I can tell, Windows Phone 7 won’t support Flash, either– though the company is promising to fix that later….

The hand is being played out (paidcontent), more as more develops...

Background: Google's Tortured History With China

Here's the link for those of you who like to keep up with my media/marketing reading over the weekend.

Each year at the Web 2 Summit, Tim and I try to focus our program on an overarching theme that we believe best sums up the year ahead. This is never easy to do - the event is still eight months away. But this year I feel better than I ever have about our focus, because it's a return to our roots, as it were.

If you know my work, you know I'm fascinated by the interplay between the entrepreneurial culture of our industry and the giants who have emerged from within it - Google, Facebook, Microsoft, to name a few - as well as those who have joined it from other industries - Comcast, GE, and Newscorp come to mind.

For 2010, Web 2 will focus on the chess game in which all of these companies are now engaged, a battle to gain the upper hand in crucial "points of control" across the Internet Economy. The idea sprang from Tim's "War for the Web" post last Fall, but we're taking that riff and broadening it, identifying chokepoints on an increasingly crowded chessboard.    

Fifteen years and two recessions into the commercial Internet, it’s clear that our industry has moved into a new competitive phase – a “middlegame” in the battle to dominate the Internet economy. To understand this shift, we’ll use the Summit’s program to map strategic inflection points across the Internet landscape, identifying key players who are battling to control the services and infrastructure of a websquared world.

The stakes are high. As the Web and the world intertwine through mobile and sensor platforms, the decisions we make – as leaders of this industry, as entrepreneurs, and as consumers – will determine the fundamental architecture of our society.

Will distribution, for example, be locked in, or left open? While the Web was once considered to be an open distribution platform, access to content is increasingly becoming a key point of control. The rise of iTunes and Hulu, the vertical integration of the iPhone and iPad, and the promise (or threat) of paid content have brought the model of free media into question.

Another battle is brewing for control of the social graph. While we’d argue that no one "owns" your social graph, Facebook may beg to differ, at least in practice, and Google has clearly laid down its own gauntlet in the form of Buzz and social search. Related, of course, is control of identity services – will Facebook become the one ring to rule them all? And is that a good thing?

Throughout the program, we’ll be talking to leaders, upstarts, and unexpected new players in these and many other key “points of control.” Payment systems, location services, voice recognition, hardware and mobile platforms, content management, data transport, commerce and advertising ecosystems: We’ll unpack them all.

We’ll look at the calculus behind entrenched platforms like Google, Facebook and Microsoft, of course, but we’ll also feature companies who are changing strategy and moving into new fields of battle. Apple as an advertising channel? Comcast as a content network? Cisco as a social network? Adobe as an online marketing company? And of course, as we do every year, we’ll feature the insurgent upstarts and disruptors who hope to replace them all.

I'm proud of the role that the Web 2 Summit plays, once each year, in gathering leaders of the Internet Economy to debate and determine business strategy. With this year’s program we’re redoubling our focus on this critical discussion. I hope you'll all join Tim and me this November 15-17 in San Francisco – we look forward to the conversation. Early registration for those of you who have invitations can be done here. If you want to come, simply fill out a request here. See you there!

From my Friday Signal over at FM's blog:

....It’s a very big year for Microsoft, in terms of the initiatives the company is launching, in particular in the consumer space (its business/commercial space is already cranking out tons of products, but the company’s focus on consumer products has hit a tipping point). Natal, Bing (updated version is coming soon), Windows Phone 7, Office 2010, the company’s cloud initiative (which has sigificant consumer angles)…it’s quite a lot.  

...Recall three of the major trends that I predicted for 2010: One, that someone will create an open gaming platform; two, that Microsoft will take second place in search share (from Yahoo); and three, that we’ll see a major advance in the user interface of the web.

Here’s how Microsoft might address those opportunities, in order: Xbox, Bing, and Natal (not to mention Pivot and stuff like PhotoSynth). Now, imagine how these all might work together. Xbox is more than a gaming platform, it’s a major portal to social networking and engagement in the living room (there are more than 20 million users of Xbox Live, for example). Combined with Natal, you’ve got a new gestural interface to the digital world. And there is no reason why you can’t use Natal to surf the web on your TV (and, in time, your PC), given the right UI and apps. Were Microsoft to decide to open up a web-savvy API and SDK into the Xbox and let its legions of developers innovate on that interface, imagine what might occur. And, of course, Bing would be the search engine of choice for this living room environment, driving share. Sounds like a stretch? All the pieces are there. It’s now about whether the company can take many hands, and make great work. (more)

Over at SEL Gord Hotchkiss has published an interview with me on the future of search. From it:

We’re going through a shift in how folks are understanding what search really means to them. And what it means to them is “I have a need and I need it fulfilled, and I’m going to use the online medium to fulfill it in some way.” We had a very, very basic, well-understood use case for 10 years, which was Google or “like Google”—you put in a couple keywords and you get a response back. And that framework of searching and coming back with the best document to answer a query is morphing. People are asking far more complicated questions now and they’re demanding far more nuanced answers, simply because they know they’re out there....

...Search as an application where your first search isn’t the search itself but rather the search for the right application is a very, very different use case. You have the market influence and dominance of one player splintered into tens of thousands of players. You or I sitting in our office over the weekend could come up with the absolute best structured search application for determining who should be your arborist to cut your trees. And that’s a threat to Google Local Search. If the best application to determine a plumber is the plumbing app on an iPhone—you download it and it automatically pulls all the local results from Yahoo!, Bing, and Google, then pulls all the reviews from Yelp and Angie’s List, then cross-compares that with complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau and Diamond Certified—if that’s the app you use, where’s Google in all of that, right?

....is the topic of my Thursday Signal over at the FM blog. From it:

....the architecture of "apps" is broken, and marketers can have a role in fixing it.

Broken? But it's just getting started, right? Well, yes - and no. Apps are great, but they lack any number of characteristics that we've come to expect from a truly "Web 2" world. First (and certainly foremost), apps are not connected, in the main, to other apps. They are single use-case driven - a fact that often makes them compelling. But however useful a focused app may be, it can only get more useful if it could communicate with other apps, the way that great web services do. After all, a core tenet of the Web 2 movement was APIs and web services. YouTube would never have become a signal service of the web without being embeddable onto blogs. And blogs would never have risen without RSS.

Second, apps, for the most part, live in "AppWorlds" that are closed and vertically integrated (at least for Facebook and Apple). That means they don't live in an open, market-driven environment, and are taxed by the owners of distribution channels even before they reach the consumer. That's not an ecosystem that will drive second and third orders of innovation.

Third, apps live in a world of clutter..... (more)

Two Apple and one Microsoft posts are begging me to be Thought Out Loud, and yet I am so damn busy I can't write. yet. So here they are in shorthand form.

....Apple is creating a closed advertising and distribution system that taxes all publishers and retards the Internet. Discuss.

....Apple leveraged open development operating systems - in particular Windows - to get iTunes into a position of distribution lockin. Ironic? Discuss.

....The only company that could execute a defensible acquisition of Foursquare is Microsoft. Discuss....

Now if I can get some time to write, I'll unpack each of these...

Over at the FM blog...forgive me the light posting here this week. A lot of offline writing and travel keeping me busy. Stay tuned for more regular posting shortly....

From my FM column: Tuesday Signal: Get Ready for a Real Conversation About Privacy, Publicy, and Social Media

I've long said that I'm a fan of social networks and media, of course, but I've also pointed out that most of it is artless and ingenuous in comparison with the sophistication each of us has when it comes to "being social." So far, our technologies lack the instrumentation each of us employs when interacting in the simplest social situation. We have the benefit of hundreds of thousands of years of social evolution - not to mention millions of years of biological evolution. Yet as social creatures we flock to technologies that allow us to express that fundamental need, even if it fails to truly reflect our nature.
What's heartening is how our culture has begun to ask interesting questions about what this all means - for our businesses, as marketers, as citizens, and as individuals. As Danah Boyd states in her opening keynote at SXSW: "ChatRoulette may be a fad, but the idea that publicity and privacy will get mashed up in new ways will not be."
Tens of millions have flocked to ChatRoulette - and while it may well be a fad, the impulse which sent so many to "only connect" is not. Understanding who we are as private and public beings will be a fundamental component of what it means to be literate in a modern society. And marketers who make a practice of understanding this will succeed over those who do not.
I predict a punctuation mark in this conversation over the coming months, in the form of Facebook's public data firehose. Expected at their F8 developer conference this June, the Facebook firehose will allow developers to create all sorts of unexpected applications and services which leverage Facebook status updates, wall posts, and more. Twitter should get the credit for pushing this open architecture, but Facebook's implementation of it will be revelatory - and not necessarily in ways that might be positive. I predict one of the first applications created will be a site publishing Really Stupid Pictures You Probably Should Not Have Posted To Facebook, for example. Cue media frenzy and....well you get the picture.

I've posted Monday's Signal over at the FM blog. From it:

What I find interesting is the media's response to the iPad (and I include tech blogs in the category of "media"). Overwhelmingly, the media wanted to believe that a hip magazine like Wired (caveat, I was a co-founder) would, natch, have the hippest iPad demo, a demo that, natch, would prove the viability of ... the media's own threatened business model!

The truth, however, is a bit more complicated.

The Wired demo was pretty much the starting gun for a month of media frenzy about how great the iPad is going to be. Wired's own posting about its demo is titled "Wired Magazine on the iPad".

However, the truth is this: This demo was made using Adobe software (not available in native runtime on the iPad) and run off a Dell laptop. I've confirmed this with Adobe. Also true: the software used to create the demo will absolutely NOT create or compile apps that work natively on the iPad. And this is due to decisions made by Apple. Yes, there is a kludgy workaround that Adobe has authored, but it's handicapped, to say the least. As much as the Apple would like to claim it has banned Adobe for technical reasons, by all accounts outside of Cupertino, Apple has banned Adobe due to control and economic issues: It simply doesn't want developers able to create software from which Apple won't profit.

Today's Signal is brought to you by the letter B. For Baseball. Every year around this time my son and I head out to Scottsdale, where our beloved SF Giants play Spring ball. We play hooky for a Friday and see a few games. It's bliss.  

So despite a few interesting bits of news about location services, Signal will be a bit weak today - back at you strong on Monday. Here are some links worth perusing:

In stock nearby? Look for the blue dots. (Google Blog) Local is the new black. In this case, Google closes the loop between local, mobile, and commerce. Great idea, but it needs scale and participation from major retailers. Lucky for Google, it has AdWords. Which nearly every major retailer uses. Watch this space.

What's Happening—and Where? (Twitter blog) As I said...location location location.

Foursquare and Starbucks Team Up to Offer Customer Rewards (Mashable) Foursquare is the new black of location for marketers.

AOL Launches Lifestream As New Standalone Product. This Is What Google Buzz Should Have Been (TC) Mike likes him some AOL.

Who Are We Really? And Why Marketers Should Care (AdAge) Smart commentary on our multicultural reality.

Google Is Bing’s 4th Largest Referring Source (SEL) Google is the heart pumping the oxygen of attention around the web (at least, it is for now.) So this isn't that big a surprise. But it is kind of fun.

I'm not claiming to be deeply informed about the app marketplace, which Google stirred up today (and, to my mind, the market could use a few more spoons). But I do use apps. At least, I use enough of them to feel like a nearly typical member of the species (as compared to a few of my peers, who are so deeply involved in AppWorld that they have - just maybe - lost a bit of perspective.)  

So, here's my beef with AppWorld. In short, it reminds me of computing back in about 1987. Yeah, 24 years ago, back when I was a cub reporter for MacWeek, I covered the burgeoning world of Apple and Apple developers. And trust me, I'm getting a pretty strong sense of deja vu. I guess being old counts for something.

Back in the late 1980s, folks who developed applications for the new Macintosh OS had two very strong sentiments about Apple. One, they LOVED the company and its Macintosh development environment. They loved it for what it was, for what it could be, and for the opportunity it presented to them - a newly fallen bowl of virgin powder, into which clever and entrepreneurial programmers could strap it on and push off to lay fresh tracks. Imagine the possibilities! A program that let you paint with your mouse! A program that let you visualize otherwise mute spreadsheets! A program that taught you how to type by watching actual fingers move on a keyboard on the screen! Holy cow, the possibilities were limitless!

But then there was the second strong sentiment. I'll sum it up in a phrase: F*cking G@#$%damn Apple! The company was impossible to work with, utterly controlling, miserly with its developer tools, overbearing in its demands, myopic in its decision making. In fact, an entire organization sprung up, the Macintosh Developers Network (I think, not the current MDN, which is a UK org), seemingly driven by its members need to console each other in the face of the inscrutable Cupertino. (Apple never did really embrace the MDN, though I found in its members some very good sources...).

So let's fast forward to today. Once again, Apple has created an extraordinary new environment for developers and entrepreneurs, and once again, it has fostered pretty much the same two sentiments.

But unlike the late 1980s, this time the world is different. It's connected. It's web-driven. The Web is the World, and the world demands connections.

But so far, what I've noticed most about apps in AppWorld is that they are, for the most part, all about themselves. They're not connected to the greater web, and they don't encourage you to move seamlessly from one app to another, depending on your intent.

And that, to my mind, can't stand.

Just a thought. Now, onto some good linkage:

Google Launches the Google Apps Marketplace (Mashable) As I said....

comScore Reports January 2010 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share (Comscore) Because you can't get enough datapoints about something that confuses us all.

Engage your users to survive, Google tells newspapers (Guardian) Google, lecturing publishers on engagement. The world is truly upside down.

Gen Y Goes for Online Banking (eMarketer) Take heed. Are you offering your services online? Why not?

ARM sees over 50 new iPad-like devices out this year (Computerworld) Thank God.

Why MySpace Co-Presidents Aren't Worried About Growth (PaidContent) Well, I doubt that will last.

FTC Said to Ask Google Rivals for Statement on AdMob, May Signal Challenge (Bloomberg) My my. Hmm. My.

Corporate Branding Goes Rogue (AdAge) "Social media is not just another tactic to be tacked onto the proverbial backside of a corporate identity system. It needs to be recognized for what it is -- the disruptive technology that radically changes the game. So much of what operated in the old corporate branding model simply does not apply anymore."

RealNetworks' Rob Glaser on why Apple's model must be stopped (TechFlash) ....and as long as I'm on the hobbyhorse...comScore: Android Shows Strength As Mobile Web Usage Grows (SEL)

Announcing The Fifth Annual CM Summit: Theme and Initial Lineup (FM blog) I had to remind you of this, didn't I? Great lineup....

Ad Publishing Tool Bridges Traditional And Online Media (MediaPost)

Google Gains Traction In Display-Ad Push (WSJ via ATD)

I'm writing this at around 36,000 feet, on a United Airlines flight between New York and San Francisco. That's not so unusual - anymore - Wifi had been on planes for over a year now, and I've grown accustomed to the service.

Why? Well, because my family also has Wifi, and my kids can now gather around any one of our home computers, fire up iChat, and BAM! they can see me even as I zip across the Nebraska sky at some 400+ mph.

Except tonight, as I was chatting with my lovely wife and two lovely daughters (much to the amusement of my seat mates, using Bose headphones and my MacBook's built in microphone), the very nice steward - who I must note brought me extra nuts even though he didn't have to - told me I had to quit my video chat.

"Security. Cameras not allowed!" was the response. There was clearly no argument.

I protested, but not too loudly. I don't want to end up stripped searched in a cold basement cell below SFO, after all. I told my family I had to quit the video chat. My girls were not pleased - today my oldest got a new bed and REALLY wanted to show it off (and let me tuck her into it from an airplane. I mean, how cool is that?! Isn't that what Cisco makes the commercials about? Or AT&T back in 1994?! You Will? Until someone tells you that you won't!). My wife spent three hours putting it together, and she wanted me to see it too. (Well really, she wanted me to see the look on our daughter's face when I saw it, anyone who's a parent will understand...)

So what's a curious guy to do? To the Internet! Which is exactly what I did. Responses starting pouring in. Including one from a pal at the State Department, who echoed my basic goal: To use video chat to tuck my kids into bed isn't a crime. Or at least, shouldn't be.

Anyway, this is clearly a wonderful charlie horse. The flight attendant just showed me the United policy manual which prohibits "two way devices" from communicating with the ground. However, the PLANE HAS WIFI. To combat this, not unlike China, United and other airlines have blocked Skype and other known video chat offenders. Apparently, they missed Apple iChat. Oops.

DOH! It's a conundrum! More on this as it develops. My pal at State is working on it....

At least I can still write a post from 36,000 feet. Kids, you'll have to wait for the tuck-in...for now. (Despite my son and wife's attempt at busting me by repeatedly inviting me to new video chats...)
(image credit )
Update: My pal at State says she can't find any government rule against video chat on a plane. She did point me to this FAA fact memo, which says the reason Skype et al are blocked are to stop chatty folks like me from bumming out their seatmates. Not exactly the same logic used by my otherwise stellar United flight attendants...

(cross posted from FM blog )

I’m very excited to announce the theme and line-up for our fifth CM Summit, to be held in New York June 7-8 (it's the kickoff conference to New York's annual Internet Week).

We’ve got a lot to talk about this year - our theme is “Marketing in Real Time.”

2009 was the year the web went real time. Twitter grew five fold and became a major online player, tens of millions of us learned how to live out loud in public. Facebook responded by changing its approach to user data, making its more than 400 million user profiles publicly searchable. And Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo began integrating Facebook and Twitter’s real time signals into their search offerings, creating an ever-circulating ecosystem of conversation across the web.

2009 was also the year the web went mobile and local. The “broadband of mobile” – 3G – became ubiquitous. As Apple’s iPhone consolidated its grip on the smart phone market, Google and its partners introduced the open-platform Android, Palm introduced its Pre and Pixi, Verizon its map, and AT&T responded in force, kicking off what is sure to be a multi-year, multi-party marketing war. “There’s an app for that” became a cultural catchphrase, and even Intel prepared to become a player in the new app economy, driven by the rise of a new class of devices, including netbooks. By year’s end, Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker had predicted that the mobile web will far exceed the current web in scope and opportunity.

Mobile, local, real time, social – in its second decade, the web has matured and taken a central position in our culture, one that no longer relegates the Internet to role of “other.” The web is now a part of every aspect of our lives, and as marketers, we must integrate this fact into our strategy and our execution. That means rethinking what we’ve grown accustomed to calling “traditional media” and imagining new ways to blend offline and online. It means developing the skills and practices of a publisher, and taking a platform-based approach to connecting with customers. And it means rethinking some of our “best practices” – including measurement, research, and the agency-client relationship.

So what can we learn from the past year as we enter a decade where the real time web will become ubiquitous? What worked, what failed, and why? What platforms have emerged as steady new partners? What startups are lurking in Silicon Valley’s wings, poised to once again change the game and offer new channels of communication with our customers?

At the CM Summit you’ll hear cross-platform case studies from senior marketers at brands like Starbucks, AT&T, Adobe, Paramount, and many more. You’ll meet the leaders of platform companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Bing, and Yahoo. And as always, you’ll discover the next wave of disruptors – companies like Foursquare, Boxee, and AdMob.

Here is the initial 2010 speaker lineup - expect more announcements in the coming weeks. Register now (while the early bird price is still in effect!), and I look forward to seeing you in New York!

Omar Hamoui – Founder & CEO AdMob

Ann Lewnes – SVP of Corporate Marketing and Communications Adobe

Chris Schembri – VP Media Services AT&T

Henry Blodget – EIC The Business Insider

Avner Ronen – CEO boxee

Ken Wirt – VP, Consumer Marketing Cisco

Deanna Brown – President and COO Federated Media

Dennis Crowley – Co-founder foursquare

Rob Norman – CEO Group M North America

Bradley Horowitz – VP, Product Marketing Google

Susan Wojcicki – VP, Product Management Google

Dennis Woodside – VP, Americas Operations Google

Arianna Huffington – Co-founder & Editor-in-chief Huffington Post

Joel Lunenfeld – CEO Moxie Interactive

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. – Chairman The New York Times Company

Amy Powell – SVP, Interactive Marketing Paramount Pictures

Bob Lord – CEO Razorfish

Chris Bruzzo – VP- Brand, Content& Online Starbucks Coffee Company

Dick Costolo – COO Twitter

Hilary Schneider – Executive Vice President Yahoo

The CM Summit thanks its sponsors:

Premier: Adobe Diamond: American Express Platinum: Blend Interactive, Intel Gold: Dell, HP, Verizon Media Partners: IAB, Internet Week NY

PS - If you're interested, follow us on Twitter, fan us on Facebook and join our Linked In Group. We look forward to shaping this conference together.

(Cross Posted to the FM Blog, where Signal will have a permanent home soon)

Mobile. It's on everyone's lips, but no one knows what the hell to do about it. At least, that's what I hear from every single marketer I talk to, and I've made it a point to talk to a lot of you in the past few months.

It's a source of significant frustration: Everyone's saying mobile is the next thing, but no one has a solution for how to market in the space in a way that delivers the four pillars of brand marketing: Scale, Safety, Quality, and Engagement.

Sure, you can now buy banners across ad networks in mobile, and lord knows that ability has paid off handsomely for AdMob and Quattro (acquired by Google and Apple, respectively, for very large multiples of very small revenues), but honestly, we all know that's not an endgame. More like an opening gambit in a chess match where nearly everyone feels like they're playing checkers. (Except Steve Jobs, natch. He's got it ALL figured out).

OK, forgive me the snark, but if Apple has this figured out and the rest of us are consigned to tithe at the church of iPad/iPhone, we're well and truly screwed.

Ditto for the strategy of "I'll get me a cool app", which feels about as innovative as "Get me a viral video" did back in 2007. I'm not saying having a good app isn't part of a great mobile strategy (I love what Oakley has done for surfers, for example), but one good app don't a solution make.

Earlier in the Signal, I wrote about MOLRS, my entirely non-viral and made-up acronym for Mobile Local Realtime Social. My point was this: Mobile is not a singular use case. Mobile is related to an ecosystem of local (where I am), realtime (what I'm doing right now), and social (who I'm with, who I want to tell about what I'm doing, etc.).

I sense the answer to a truly quality, scaled marketing solution in the "mobile" environment has to do with understanding this broader framework. It's a complicated landscape with way too many middlemen at the moment. But my Spidey senses are tingling, and something's about to happen, I can feel it. If only I knew what it was....

Meanwhile, here are some links to chew on, much of it MOLRS related. It's better than eating your phone. (image credit )

Internet Services: Mobile Advertising: The Hype, The Hope, And The Financial Reality (Weisel - pdf download) This is a research report sent to me by Thomas Weisel's Jordan Rohan. I'll probably get in trouble for posting it. Maybe.

Foursquare Introduces New Tools for Businesses (NYT) Analytics so businesses can figure out what they want to do with Foursquare. Smart.

Just In Time For The Location Wars, Twitter Turns On Geolocation On Its Website (TechCrunch) As I said earlier, expect Twitter and Facebook to play for the Checkin signal in the Database of Intentions.

Facebook Will Allow Users to Share Location (NYT) Hey, wait, on the SAME DAY! Seems *everyone's* MOLRS are coming in at once...

US online ad spend set to overtake print (Guardian) Well of course it is. About time.

Bingo! Microsoft's Search Numbers Keep Going Up (Paid Content) Bing gains, Yahoo! loses.

10 neglected interactive marketing best practices (iMedia)

Just got this report in my mail and wanted to share it. Seems worth a read: Inte030810-231050.pdf

Well, it's Monday night, but I'm in NYC, and I am pretty sure Tuesday is going to be a blur. So here are the links I read on the plane out here (love that Wifi). Expect news from me soon on the themes and lineup for FM's annual CM Summit (this week I hope) as well as the annual Web2Summit. Meanwhile:

Internet Access Viewed as Fundamental Human Right (AllThingsD) Our culture is coming to a conclusion that makes a lot of sense to me - connection is a human right.

Time To Take The Internet Seriously | David Gelernter | Edge | 4 March 2010 (Edge) Hard to follow, but the fundamental argument is one he's made for years: Lifestreams are coming, the old web structure is ... old.

CMOs to Ramp Up Hiring, Budgets; Double Social Media Spend (MarketingProfs) Are you kidding me? What's not to like about this story?

How Do You Keep Mass Influencers Engaged? An Example from TripAdvisor (Forrester) Ya'll know I love case studies.

All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple: The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement (EFF) I am not feeling warm and fuzzy about the business constraints Apple places on its own ecosystem. It's rather like the Patriot Act. Open up, Apple. Open = more profits in the long run.

Don't Blame Your Community: Ad Blocking Is Not Killing Any Sites (TechDirt) A counterargument to the Ars post I noted yesterday. TechDirt is an FM author and the programs he notes are FM programs.

Statistics for a changing world: Google Public Data Explorer in Labs (Google Blog) Google creates a visualizer for public data. Do more of this, pretty please, Google.

MediaForge Ads Charge Only When People Interact And Buy (ClickZ) Interesting model. Good luck with that....

There are many, many signals in the Database of Intentions, as my readers have pointed out, but the one I feel compelled to add to the chart I created Friday is the Commerce signal. This signal emerged before search, really, and has remained a constant, though honestly it has yet to become a signal that others can truly leverage into an open ecosystem (unlike the signal of search, or status update, or the social graph). I expect that to change, and shortly. So here you go, an updated version of the chart, for the record. I expect this chart may well evolve into a pretty complicated ecosystem in its own right, over time....

  

Monday's Signal round up is light. The news was a bit boring over the weekend, and I'm OK with that. We all watched the Oscars and enjoyed the suspense of disbelief. I tweeted that it feels like, as a culture, we're closing in on One Big Mass Media Event each month. Oscars, Super Bowl, New Year's Eve....What's the next one?

Meanwhile, I am doing a lot of writing/producing right now. The theme for Web 2 this year is really, really interesting (it centers on points of control and strategy across the Internet), and we're also a few days away from unveiling the new CM Summit site (the theme this year is "Marketing in Real Time" - and the speakers are extraordinary). Not to mention some deep stuff I'm working on for FM and the future of its business (off to NYC this week for more on that). Oh, and yeah, I want to update that Database of Intentions post I did last Friday. Lots of great input from all of you - in comments, Facebook, Twitter - and I've decided that for sure, we need to add a Signal for Commerce. Health, Music, others - I am not sure about yet. More on that soon.

Meanwhile, the links I did find worth digging into over the weekend:

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love (Ars Technica) Finally, a publisher (one who was with FM until our pals at Conde Nast purchased them) sounds off about ad blocking. Ken, the founder, created a program that blocks content from folks who block ads. He didn't run it for long, but read the piece. He learned a lot, and engaged with his audience as a *publisher*. Well done. I love that Ken did this, and can't wait to read all 1400 comments. Money quote: "Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn't pay. In a way, that's what ad blocking is doing to us."

Drafting a New Blueprint for the Client-Agency Relationship (Jones&Bonevac) This topic ain't going away, it seems, in fact, it's coming to a head.

Clorox App Gives Consumers Content They Want (eMarketer) All marketers are publishers. Who said that?

Monopolies, Retransmission Fees, and Screwing Customers (AVC) Fred puts one more story into the ongoing narrative of traditional media coming to terms with the Internet.

18 Use Cases That Show Business How to Finally Put Customers First (MarketingProfs) Always a sucker for case studies....

Way back in November of 2003, when I was a much younger man and the world had yet to fall head over heels in love with Google, I wrote a post called The Database of Intentions. It was an attempt to explain a one-off reference in an earlier post - but not much earlier, as the "DBoI" post, as I call it, was just the sixty-third post of my then-early blogging career. (This is the 5,142nd, by comparison...)

I had, in fact, been ruminating on this concept for over a year, driven by an Holy Sh*t moment in late 2001 when Google introduced its first ever Zeitgeist round up of trending search terms. Scanning the lists of rising and declining terms, I realized that Google - not to mention every other search engine, ISP, and most likely every government - had in their grasp a datastream that, were they to just pay attention, could quite possibly be the most potent signal of human intentions in the history of the world.

Zeitgeist, it struck me, was proof that Google was indeed paying attention. I went on to write The Search, and Google went on to become, well, Google. My study of Google also led me to start Web 2, with Tim O'Reilly, and Federated Media, which I positioned as a media company that leveraged the impact of The Database of Intentions.

But over the past few years, as I've labored in the fields of digital media and marketing - mostly through my work at FM - I've come to revise my concept of what The Database of Intentions truly is. In my initial description, I limited the concept to web search and web search alone:

The Database of Intentions is simply this: The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result.

At the time, that certainly seemed like a big enough idea. No such artifact had ever existed, and its implications were massive. In my 2003 post, I continued:

This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind - a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion.

Search was a pristine signal, an eruption of oxygen in the anoxic ocean of the early web, and an entire ecosystem grew in its bloom. The first implication was already manifest: Google had launched AdWords and AdSense, Overture (later to become Yahoo Search Marketing) was thriving, and a burgeoning paid search ecosystem was in the early stages of becoming a multi-billion commercial expression of the Database of Intention's power.

But as anyone who's been reading this site already knows, web search as a pure signal has been attenuating of late - overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of data on the web, for one, and secondly by our own increasingly complicated expectations.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the Internet. In the past year I've come to the conclusion that "web search" was just the first of many fields in the Database of Intentions. For those of you who are not database geeks, and to further pad the metaphor, a field in a database is colloquially defined as a specific type of information in that database. Sets of fields are called records, and sets of records make up the database.

My mistake in 2003 was to assume that the entire Database of Intentions was created through our interactions with traditional web search. I no longer believe this to be true. In the past five or so years, we've seen "eruptions" of entirely new fields, each of which, I believe, represent equally powerful signals - oxygen flows around which massive ecosystems are already developing. In fact, the interplay of all of these signals (plus future ones) represents no less than the sum of our economic and cultural potential.

By now you've probably already guessed what these new signals might be. I've made a rudimentary chart, but to narrate:

(NB: i've updated the chart here with a field for commerce...)

The first signal, of course, was The Query. A query was a declaration of a very particular intent: What I Want from the web. Sure, it has many permutations - navigation, commerce, informational, etc. etc., but in essence, the goal was to find something you wanted. Hence the name search, after all.  

The next signal to emerge is The Social Graph. With this signal we've declared not only Who We Are, we've also declared Who We Know. Both are powerful intent-driven declarations, and both have deep interplays with search. By manifesting who we are and who we know, we can find and be found by others.

The third signal emerged almost simultaneously with The Social Graph - The Status Update. This is a personal declaration of what we deem important, noteworthy, shareable: What's on our minds, what's happening, what's worthy. Again, a powerful search signal, in particular in real time.

The latest signal is The Check-in - or Where I Am. This is a crowning declaration of intent, in a fashion, because it connects the physical to the virtual, securing the Database of Intentions to the terra firma of the Real World. As with the other three fields, the check-in - which I expect will soon become automatic via our mobile devices - is a vastly powerful signal of intent: "I am here. So what you got for me?"

Taken together (and honestly, there's really no other way to think about it, to my mind), these signals form a Database of Intentions that is magnitudes of order larger, more complex, and more powerful than my original concept back in 2003. And while the current players in each category are clear, what's also clear is that the battle is on to control each of these critical signals. Google, if you include its Local services, already plays in all of them, and I expect Microsoft will as well. Facebook may never play in "The Query," nor will Twitter, but expect both to play in The Check-in, and soon. The newcomers? Well, most of us expect them to be acquired. Then again, that's what we thought of Google in 2000, and Facebook in 2005. Why should Foursquare in 2010 be any different?

All of this begs a new definition of Search. I've often said that Search should not be defined by web search, but rather, by what a search is in the abstract. To my mind, each tweet or status update is a search query of sorts, as is each check-in and even each connection in the social graph. A more catholic definition of search would allow for a reconciliation of all these fields in the Database of Intentions. Regardless, it's ever more obvious that while "traditional search" is reaching a plateau of sorts, at least in regards to how we understand its potential, when you add the new signals of social, status update, and check-in, we're still in the very early stages of a distinctly punctuated phase of the Internet's evolution.

I'm on the lookout for new Signals. I'm quite certain we're not nearly finished creating them.

-------

NB: As a creator and publisher of media, one very strong conclusion can be drawn from all of this. If you're not viewing your job to be a curator, clarifier, interpreter, and amplifier of the Database of Intentions, you're soon going to be out of business. The Database of Intentions is the fuel that drives media platforms, and as I've argued elsewhere, every business is now a media business.

NBB: My thanks to the folks at Adobe and Omniture for the forcing mechanism of my keynote earlier this week, where I first organized the thinking above.

(image) Today I'm not going to write a piece and then append links. You've been giving me a lot of feedback, and you miss my in depth stuff. Honestly, I'm doing a lot more of it - both recently and in the intentional near future. Much of it has been at the top of Signal pieces. But Fridays are different, it's when I will write the equivalent of a weekly column. I have a piece in me that will come, ideally, after this round up post. Meanwhile, as I perused the news of the last day, I was struck with how much of it involved Google, and the pure breadth that involvement spanned. Behold, Signal, the at-least-half Google edition:

Google Makes A Bid For More Premium Display Dollars With 'Above The Fold' Ads (PaidContent) Look, publishers, one chip at a time, Google is doing stuff that means you have to raise your bar. Sell stuff they can't. If you want tips, email me.

Stars make search more personal (Google Blog) Google is adding a star rating system to its search results. Amazon, anyone? or Twitter?

In three years desktops will be irrelevant - Google sales chief (Silicon Republic) Bill Gates would be spinning in his grave. But he's not dead yet.

Search your Android phone with written gestures (Google Mobile Blog) Another search innovation from Google.

Google Research head dubs holy PageRank ‘over-hyped’ (The Register) PageRank? Overhyped? NEVER.  

Google To Begin Indexing The Internet In Real-Time? (The Next Web) This story was all over the web Thursday. In short, it's a new way for Google to get (more) real time signals. But honestly, not a huge deal. I don't think. Correct me if I'm wrong...

Getting to Know You, You, You, You (MarketingProfs) A recent Nielsen study found that global consumption of social media increased 82 percent from Dec. 2008 to Dec. 2009 in the 10 countries surveyed, with users spending an average of 5.5 hours on their sites of choice per month. Hello!

Adobe On Its Way To Being A Role Model For Interactive Marketers (Forrester) I met with Ann an hour before Shar did. I'm an Ann fan.

Sit. Walk. Slouch. Communicate. Create. Consume. Why the iPad will be a hit (Denuo) Rishad has a good point, and given my rant on the subject, I'm very open to different points of view. He states the iPad will be a hit because "it is about a state of stature and a state of mind, not a state of technology." Yes, but when I slouch, do I cease being a social, web connected being? I think not. Don't tell me what I can and can't do with a digital device, Apple! In particular, if something strikes me, and I want to go from "slouch" to "stand" or "Sit", well, WTF?

Mobile Users Want Personalized Services (eMarketer) ...two-thirds of mobile users around the globe are interested in “smart” services that would feed them information based on personal preferences, location, time of day and social setting. YES.

The New Commandments (Vanity Fair) WTF, Battelle? Look, guys, it's Friday. Aren't you paying attention? I always throw an odd one out on Friday. Money quote: Thus we are fully entitled to consider (the Ten Commandments) as a work in progress....What emerges from the first review is this: the Ten Commandments were derived from situational ethics.

Today in Signal we take a walk down memory lane, of sorts, because sometimes such a journey helps us prepare for what lies in the path ahead.  

Early last week I ran into Susan Wojcicki, VP of Product Management for Google. Now, Susan is more than just another Google VP, she's also on Google's operating committee. Oh, and the person in whose garage Google was founded, not to mention Sergey's sister in law. If Google were a family, Susan would be something of a matriarch.

Susan had just gotten off stage at the annual IAB conference, and I caught up with her as we were both leaving. We got to talking about all things AdSense, and I mentioned a story I had heard recently - without divulging my source, the story went that some at Google believed AdSense had been rolled out too early, before it was ready for primetime.

Now, nothing will provoke the ire of a product person more than a charge such as that, and I'll admit my own ignorance of this fact even as I spoke. Susan disputed my story, and then responded that if Google was too late on anything, it was putting a cookie into AdSense. "We didn't do that until late 2008!" she reminded me - and did so only as part of integrating DoubleClick into the Google Content Network. And the company didn't really commercialize that cookie until March of last year, when it implemented the Ads Preferences Manager, a sets of controls that I noted at the time was industry leading (and I've been a pretty harsh critic in this area, as you may recall.)

All this stopped me short. Somehow I missed this story - I just assumed that AdSense dropped a cookie on all of us, and had done so since the service was launched back in 2001. After all, Google has been Keeblering the web for as long as I could remember, as a fair share of critics had already pointed out. I figured AdSense was just integrated into the master Google cookie - one Oreo to rule them all, right?

Wrong. Turns out, there was quite an internal debate within Google about whether adding a cookie to AdSense constituted a breach of consumer privacy. Early on, a decision was taken that it might, and for years, AdSense had no cookie at all. This severely limited AdSense's ability to create competitive marketing products - putting Google years behind other ad networks in the race to provide behavioral and interest-driven audience segments to its customers. (One could even argue that early decision augured the acquisition of DoubleClick itself, but that's pure speculation.) I mentioned to Susan that given all the scrutiny it recieves, Google probably doesn't get enough credit for demonstrating such sensitivity. She concurred.

But the story tugged at me. Here was another historical anecdote about Google, oft the subject of privacy ridicule, once again struggling with a question that, to be honest, just about every other company on the web had already settled (and yes, my company FM also sets cookies.) I then pinged Google PR to get a bit more background. From a spokesperson's response:

We didn't launch this service until we had developed the Ads Preferences Manager, which allows users to view and edit the interest categories we use. We also developed browser plug-ins (link) to make the opt-out from the cookie persistent. Today, each week tens of thousands of users visit the Ads Preferences Manager. For every person who decides to opt out, 4 people edit their preferences and 10 do nothing.

Why do I tell this story? Well, for once, I just wanted a record of it somewhere, so I could point to it as I report on other privacy and marketing data related issues. And secondly, as a reminder of what's at stake as we, as an industry, begin what is certain to be a very long dialog with Washington and others about the role of data in marketing. Google delayed implementing industry standard technology for years because it feared a backlash amongst consumers, a backlash that never came. And it's important to think about why. To my mind one reason is the Ad Preferences Manager. It's not perfect, but it's an important start, one that others (like Facebook) have come to mimic. The more our industry acknowledges that instrumenting consumer controls - what I have called the Data Bill of Rights - is critical to the success of their platforms, the easier our dialog with government will be.

Keep this in mind if you're a regular reader of this site. Remember the Database of Intentions, my first "meaty" post back in 2003? I'll be updating it soon, and the issue of rights to that data has never been more important.

Onwards to today's linkable bits:

Sorrell questions rush to social media (FT via IWantMedia)

Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology (The Onion) Just kind of funny, in an unfair but to be expected way.

Sony Readies Gadgets to Rival Apple (WSJ) Oh God, please, please Sony. Please do this right. Please make it an open system, not vertically integrated? Pretty please? With sugar on top?

The Internet of Things (McKinsey) Watch this space.

Turn your skin into a touch screen (Conrad Lisco) Watch this and then ask yourself, are we really going to be tapping into iPhones in ten years? Didn't think so.

Facebook and Twitter Access via Mobile Browser Grows by Triple-Digits in the Past Year (Comscore) More proof of the undeniably obvious link between Mobile and Social (oh and Local and Realtime...yeah, MOLRS, baby.)

Today will be light, I'm preparing for a talk at the Omniture Summit. Outside my window are majestic peaks capped in snow, it's hard to be here and not even have time to go outside, much less hit the slopes. But time is precious, so let's get to the news of the past 24 hours:

Apple Eyes HTC in Latest Patent Lawsuit (Mashable) Unquestionably the biggest news of the past day, and another salvo in the ongoing war for control of the mobile marketplace. Apple v. Google is starting to make Apple v. Microsoft or Microsoft v. Google look like small stakes. Sure, Apple sued HTC, but HTC makes Google's most popular Android phones. It's something of a proxy.

Facebook Analytics War Heats Up (ClickZ) Announced here at the Omniture Summit, a deal between Facebook and Omniture to help marketers leverage Facebook's advertising platform. More also here: Facebook And Omniture Deepen Their Ties For Analytics And Marketing

Live from the Omniture Summit: The New Principles of A Successful CMO (Forrester) Coverage of Ominture chief's keynote.

How Companies Are Using Your Social Media Data (Mashable) I had dinner last night with someone who makes a practice of paying attention to publicly available data in unique ways, then profiting from it. We are all wise to remember how much data there really is out there, and how many patterns might be found in it if we only ask interesting questions.

Social Capital: The Currency of the Social Economy (Brian Solis) I think adding gaming and social currency to publishing is a Next Big Thing.

Off to Salt Lake later today for the Omniture Summit. I've been spending a fair amount of time studying marketing platforms of one kind or another, and will be spending a lot more time on it in the future. I've got a few theories as to where they're headed, and the role technology plays in the future of marketing. What I find important about tools like Omniture is that they allow marketers to act like true publishers online (among other things of course). More on that in coming Signals. Today, however, is a bevy of shorter items. To wit:

DSPs Stir Up Drama (MediaWeek) Along the lines of my ongoing fascination with platforms. "Demand side platforms" are created by agencies looking to consolidate buying power and add their own value on top. Premium publishers don't like them much. From the piece: "DSPs, such as VivaKi (Publicis) and Cadreon (IPG), were a hot topic last week at the Interactive Advertising Bureau annual confab in Carlsbad, Calif., with publisher sentiments ranging from wariness to downright paranoia. And conversations with publishers revealed a sentiment that premium sites should opt out of selling this way. Said Brian Quinn, vp/gm, ad sales for the Wall Street Journal Digital Network: “If people want to buy from us, we want them to call us.” On the flip side, many agency execs doubt that publishers can hold such a tough stance as online buying becomes more automated."

I'm going to go back to Chicago and New York in the coming two weeks to investigate this and form a stronger POV.

Understanding the Participatory News Consumer (Pew) This research sparked a bevy of news items. Everyone read it a bit differently, but the main conclusions: people go to lots of places to get there news, they consume it offline and on, mobile is a growing market, and we are very participatory (37% have contributed in one way or another to a news site). Big news: The Web is bigger than newspapers now for delivering the news.

Google, Microsoft Spar Over Antitrust (WSJ) This drama won't go away soon.

Foursquare wants to be the mayor of location apps (O'Reilly) Interview with CEO of Foursquare. He'll be at the CMSummit this June in NYC.

No Lie! Your Facebook Profile Is the Real You (Wired) Money quote: "Facebook is so true to life, Back claims, that encountering a person there for the first time generally results in a more accurate personality appraisal than meeting face to face, going by the results of previous studies."

Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force (NYT) I've always believed this, and with the Internet, I believe this process is speeding up. This is why I write about the intersection of tech, culture, media.

Striving to Map the Shape-Shifting Net (NYT) Do you know what a yottabyte is? You will.

Marketing Budgets Spiral Toward Social (eMarketer) Spiral?!

4A's Roundup: Yahoo's Bartz Talks Data; Huffington Beyond The Paywall (PaidContent)

Adobe Opens Up About Apple, HTML5 and Flash [VIDEO] (Mashable)

Consider this the *early* Monday Signal, as I'm already deep in writing this morning, then off to staff meetings the rest of the day. So these are notes from my weekend readings, for the most part. Besides a rant on the iPad that I wrote in something of a hurry (and elicited a very strong response, I'll admit), here's what I found interesting, and why:

Redrawing the Route to Online Privacy (NYT) If you are in marketing, you should read this. From it: "....the next round of online privacy regulation needs to proceed carefully, policy experts warn. They say that online data collection and analysis is an economic imperative, and that the Internet industry of the future will involve adding value to the free flow of information — much of it created by individuals and their browsing activity." And if you're not sure privacy is a big deal, please also read The Eternal Value of Privacy (Bruce Schneier) As I've said before, I don't think we as a society have had a full throated conversation about this topic, and we're heading into a potential privacy pileup that could retard all of our growth - the marketing industry's certainly, but also the breadth and depth of services that the web can deliver to us overall. This will get far more complicated before it resolves.

The synaptic fluid of social business (Anne McCrossan - Visceral Business) Two weeks, old, but worth a read. Inspired by a debate about private communities, but I like this post for the last paragraph: "Old business models are yielding fewer returns. Generative listening is an antidote to the velocity of today’s overloaded information flows. The action potential contained within committed, visceral and trustworthy human relationships, that’s at the heart of the social connections, has never been more important. It’s the synaptic fluid of social business."

A special report on managing information (The Economist) The stories are listed on the right, halfway down the page. Many good ones here, including Information is changing business and How internet companies profit from online data.

Tapping The Entire Online Peer Influence Pyramid (Forrester) Describes "the Peer Influence Pyramid, which describes and shares recommendations about three types of online influencers: Social Broadcasters, Mass Influencers and Potential Influencers."

The 10 Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Monitor (SocialTimes) A bit obvious, but then again, sometimes obvious is ignored.

The Raging Septuagenarian (New York) Fascinating profile of Murdoch and his battles with the NYT, Google, and his own family.

Small Biz Doubles Social Media Adoption (eMarketer) And it'll double again soon.

The 4As (American Association of Advertising Agencies) has its annual conference in SF this week. Welcome folks!