John Battelle's Searchblog

* It's been a longstanding thesis of mine that Google's ability to reorder information in microseconds, based on our declared intent through a search query, has habituated us to expect an immediate and relevant response from nearly every website - and in particular, commercial sites. In time, I think this expectation will leak into realspace as well. In this post, I explore what that might look like.  

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Over the past few weeks I've been using what I call "The Gap Scenario" to illustrate how marketing is going to change in the next few years, in particular as it relates to the intersection of physical and digital spaces. Yes, I'm talking about Gap, the retail clothing brand, but I'm also talking about the "gap" between where we are as an industry, and where we are headed.

Yesterday I got a chance to talk on camera about the concept (it's in the first ten or so minutes), but if you're like me, it's sometimes easier to read than watch video. And to be honest, until I write something down, I'm never entirely sure I've thought it through. So here goes.

Imagine it is a few years from now. Not much has changed in your life (as much as, say, it has in the past three years. We often get a bit ahead of ourselves when it comes to thinking in the future). You happen by a Gap store, and eager for a bit of retail therapy, you walk through the door.

By walking through Gap's door, you have declared an intent - just as certainly as if you had entered "Gap clothes" into a search engine.

So what happens next? What response does your "search" elicit?*

In a few years, this is what I think will be pretty standard. First, you'll have a smart phone on you, one that is running several background processes (think of them as "ambient apps") at all times. One of those processes listens for signals coming from the environment around you, and when it finds a signal that it finds may be useful, it responds to that signal with a ping saying "I am here."

This is why, when you cross the portal into Gap, your phone buzzes (assuming you've instrumented it to buzz. It might ring, or it might stay silent, because you know as soon as you go into Gap, there'll be a response waiting for you. My point is that the response is immediate).

As you cross into Gap, you take out your phone and take a look at what Gap has to say to you. And what might that be? Well, it depends on any number of factors, but my guess is the Gap App will welcome you into the store, and perhaps ask if you are enjoying the jeans you purchased at the downtown store last month. It also shows that four of your friends have recently been in the store lately, and another three have purchased something online. Would you like to see what they bought?

Another alert reminds you that it's been a few years since you bought anything for your daughter, who must be growing up. Might you be interested in a Gap tee or scarf most favored by girls in her age group? Special 15% off applies for folks like you, who have "Liked" Gap on Facebook.

Interested, you stroll over to the Teen section and see a blouse your daughter might like. You hold your phone up to it, focusing the camera on the tag. The Gap app immediately scans the tag and provides another search result, including price, available inventory instore and online, customer reviews culled from various sources, and recommendations for related items, complete with a map icon which, if pressed, shows where those items are in the store.

But for whatever reason, you put your phone in your pocket and head for the mens department. You came in for your own retail therapy, after all. You know that if you want to buy that blouse, you've already shown an interest in it, and at any time you can complete the purchase through the app, or, importantly, by asking any Gap associate throughout the store.

And that leads us to the other side of this scenario. When you walked through the front door, you were immediately identified as a returning customer. All the data about your interaction with Gap, as well as any other related data that you have agreed can be publicly known about you, has already been sent to the store, and to the mobile devices of every Gap associate working in the store today. You know this, and further, you expect anyone you might ask a question of to know as much about you as you care to reveal. In a way, it's both comforting and empowering.

As you head upstairs to the mens department, you pass a Gap associate who smiles, checks her phone (which thanks to something like Presence has lit up with your profile) and says hello. The social action of her checking her phone as you approach is something you consider normal, and you wait for what she might say next.

And what she says next - the next turn in your conversation with Gap - will be critical. Will she be human, empathetic, nuanced? Or will she be corporate, stunted, odd?

Well, that depends, in the end, on how Gap trains its employees, and whether Gap allows them to be themselves. Does Gap hire folks with a high social IQ? Or does it hire folks who secretly hate this data-driven corporate shit, so they grit their teeth as they ask you if they can help?

An important question indeed. But this day, you've come to your favorite store, where the employees are fluent in the dance between social data, commercial intent, and real time physical interaction. Your associate simply nods and says "let me know if I can help you," smiles, and lets you pass. She reads from your face and body language that you don't want too much more than that. She was right.

At the mens department you find your favorite jeans, but don't want to dig through the piles to find your size. Instead you point your phone at the stack, and the Gap App tells you the store, alas, is out of size 34. Would you like to purchase them online, and have them sent to your home? They'll be there later today, because a store across town has them in stock, and Gap provides same day delivery within a 50 mile radius. You press "Yes", the purchase is confirmed, and, your retail desires fulfilled, you head toward the door.

As you leave, the associate you passed earlier thanks you for your purchase.

Well that was pleasant, you think, as you walk down the street. Out comes your phone again, and you bring up the Gap application again. Maybe you will get that blouse for your daughter, after all.

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Now, think about all the elements that have to work in concert for this scenario to play out. To my mind, the easiest part is the technology and the platforms for that tech - they exist already. The smart phones, the app world, the social instrumentation - all solved. What's not solved are the business processes that sew it all together. This scenario incorporates many distinct practices of traditional marketing. Customer service, CRM, direct marketing, instore and online promotions, and even brand marketing - because above the line brand work is what ties it all together by making the promise this scenario will pay off.

Getting all those pieces to work in concert is the hard part. My experience with large brands and the agencies which support them is that they have necessarily specialized, creating silos that are very good at what they do (direct marketing, CRM, etc) but not very good at working across the organization. That's going to have to change. It'll happen first with retail brands like Gap, but it'll come quickly to consumer packaged goods (who will want to answer the search even if it happens on a supermarket shelf) and small businesses as well.

Helping them make the transition is a huge opportunity. More on that in another post.

*replete with MOLRS, of course.

Pretty much don't need to say any more. Link.

This is very interesting news, but not unexpected if you've been paying attention. Note in the past I've predicted that Apple will not do web search, but will do "app search," because app search is essentially broken, if you can even call it search to begin with. It's more like directory navigation at this point.

Today Apple announced acquisition of Siri, a personal assistant app that includes voice recognition and search capabilities. As I wrote about Apple previously:

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.

And as my colleague James Gross reminded me, I also said this in a recent interview on SEL:

Look at the valuable information that you can extract from how any one of us interacts with a well-designed application, then create a dataset for that. Say I use the New York Transit application to navigate my way through New York for 3 or 4 days… all of the questions and back-and-forth that I use that app for, which is essentially a structured search session—right? Now, match that against a set of data which is the transit map. I say, “I need to go over here. I want to go over there. I prefer this route over that route,”—that becomes a dataset that should inform other searches that I’m making on things that seemingly are unrelated but may not be. That should be available as metadata for future searches. And figuring how to inform that is as important as parsing the line or the spoken phrase that I’m making in the moment.

Now, if I take that spoken phrase and go and search for “Chicago rental car” four months after interacting with that New York Transit map application, how can we take the metadata from that interaction with New York and inform the appropriate response in Chicago. Perhaps the best suggestions would be, “Hey, you know what? You don’t need to rent a car. You can use the Chicago Transit. Here’s an app for it. You can get from the airport to everywhere you want to go without having to rent a car. Plus, you’ll save $150 which we know is a goal of yours because you’ve been interacting with the Mint application and it said that a goal of yours is that you want to save $200 a month and here’s a way that you do that”?

Tying all that together, that’s the Holy Grail because then it starts to understand you. If you only parse just the query, even if you get the natural language right and the intent right, you’re missing the whole person.

It's now clear to me that Apple is very serious about being the Google of the post-HTML, app-driven Internet. But so is Google, so is Microsoft, and there are certainly going to be other players to boot. (Er...Like HP, which just bought Palm and plans on "doubling down" on the Web OS.) Game on.

Just read this: Discovering pages “similar to” ones that you like - from the Google Blog. From it:

One of the great things about the web is choice. There’s a website out there for nearly everything, and sometimes there are many sites all dedicated to a single topic. But how can you find all the sites that are related to the subject that interests you? This week, we launched a search feature that helps you easily find new websites that are similar to the ones with which you’re already familiar.

If only they'd add a "Like" button to Google's results. Oh wait....they kinda have.

I do believe Google's response to the wave that is Facebook's Open Graph and Like is going to define the company for years to come. The game's afoot in the search+social space.

Next week, as part of HP's sponsored Input/Output series, I'll be interviewed by the folks at BigThink.  

Here's the link to the webcast. I hope you'll join. I'm proud to be part of this program, as past guests have included best selling thinkers/authors like Chris Anderson and James Surowiecki. I've got big shoes to fill, and I need your help to fill em.

With my role at Web 2 and the CM Summit, I'm usually the one interviewing folks, so the tables are being turned and I'm the one in the hot seat. This is your chance to ask me anything - whether it's about my writings here, my views on key industry players, my role at Federated Media, my predictions for the year, or my favorite color for that matter. The interview is focused on a theme, one that anyone who reads this site knows well - "Marketing in the New Normal." Of course, the new normal is the real time, social, and mobile web.

So, help me out - what do you want to hear from me about? Leave your questions here, or tweet them out to me with hashtag #hpio.

I look forward to your input!

Yesterday a reporter from Cnet called and asked me a few provocative questions. He was writing a piece on Google as a marketer, and wanted my point of view. I'm not sure when his piece is coming out (or if my thoughts will be included), but our conversation helped me crystalize my thinking around Google and its brand, so I figured I best get it written down.  

Regular readers may recall one this prediction for 2010:

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).

The reporter's question let me unpack this a bit. He asked me why Google isn't doing a major brand campaign, given that most other large Internet-driven companies have - including eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, and Apple.

A few years ago, I might have answered thusly: Google doesn't need to do brand advertising, because Google's service *is* the brand builder. But today, my answer is quite different: Google isn't doing brand advertising because Google doesn't know what its brand means.

And you can't do brand advertising if you can't say what the brand means.

Think about that for a second. Up until a few years ago, it was quite simple to say what the Google brand meant. Put simply, Google = Search. Or, to add a few words, Google = The Best Search Service On Earth.

Now, is that true today?

Well, certainly you could argue that Google still means a great search environment. But the brand also means far more. It's the brand which stands in opposition to the iPhone - the Android Pepsi to Apple's Coke. The same is true in the office suite - Google Docs are the Pepsi to the Coke of Microsoft's Office. Google Chrome? The Pepsi to Internet Explorer's Coke. And there's a ton more - photo sharing, blogging platforms, social networking, ecommerce solutions, enterprise platforms, media (YouTube, Knol, etc.)....well you get the picture.

And Google = Search doesn't cover all that. Nor, honestly, does the company's corporate mission: "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." You could shoehorn the Nexus One into that mission, but it's not a comfortable fit.

Until Google figures out what its brand means in a post search world, it won't be doing any brand advertising. And given who its competing with - Apple, Hulu, Microsoft and Amazon, among many others - I'm not sure that's a good thing.

I'm pleased to announce the agenda of our 5th CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time. I'm excited about of the mix of one-on-one interviews, hand-picked case studies, and focused discussions with leaders from major brand advertisers, agencies, and digital media companies. We've also added new networking opportunities so that conversation is at the center of the conference.

Our early-bird pricing is available until this Friday April 23rd, so register today.

Details in our release here.

It's been a few days since Chirp, and I've had some time to digest all the news that broke last week. Certainly we'll have another meal this Weds. with Facebook's F8, where it's already rumored that Facebook will both reveal its new "firehose" of public data (a la Twitter) as well as new approaches to monetization (see this piece from The Next Web, for example). I doubt we'll hear that Facebook is ready to create a syndicated network on the back of Facebook Connect - a la AdSense - but one never knows, it just might.

But while we have a few days, one thing really stands out for me in Twitter's announcements last week. As you might expect, I'm going to focus on the advertising platform, though I think the annotation and othe r news will prove important shortly, when developers figure out their true power.

But let's focus on the money for now. To me the most interesting concept Twitter introduced last week was how they planned on tuning their ad platform to something Twitter COO Dick Costolo, in an interview with me on stage, called "the public interest graph."

More likely than not Dick's been talking about this for some time, but so far not many folks have picked it up. The first mentions of "public interest graph" (as related to Twitter) first appear on Google April 15th - the day Dick mentions it. On stage, I was taken aback, because the concept struck me as pretty powerful.

Dick first mentioned the interest graph when asked about how Twitter's new "Promoted Tweets" platform will determine the relevance of a promoted tweet to a user's Twitter stream. Costolo pointed out that Twitter has a lot of powerful information about each of its registered users; in particular, it knows what that user Tweets about, who he or she follows, and what the folks he or she follows Tweets about.

In short, Twitter knows who you are connected to, and what you (and they) are interested in.

Fashion that into a graph - the same kind of graph that powered Google's graph of web links, or Facebook's social graph - and all of a sudden you have a pretty powerful organizing principle for relevance in the Twitterverse.

And when you can decode relevance in what was previously an extremely noisy environment, you can build platforms that connect marketers to users in a fashion that adds value - because the ads are natively relevant. That's what AdWords did in the environment of search, and that's what Facebook Ads did in the environment of social.

That's why for me, the most important thing to watch as Twitter develops its admittedly very nascent Promoted Tweets platform are any developments around the Public Interest Graph. I'll be watching, for sure.

(BTW, I did ask Dick about whether positioning Twitter's "graph" as public was something of a shot at Facebook, which can quite legitimately claim to also have access to an "interest graph," albeit one that, until recently, was predominately considered to be made up of private information. He didn't take my bait, but if I were running sales and marketing at Twitter, I'd sure make hay on that distinction, at least at this moment.....)

Dear Apple:

We miss you.

Once upon a time, back before you got real popular, you used to take part in the public square. You may have been less forthcoming than most, but at least your employees would speak at industry events, have unscripted conversations with journalists, and engage in the world a bit here and there.

But over the past few years, things seem to have changed. You pulled out of MacWorld and began hosting your own strictly scripted events. You forbid any of your executives from speaking at any public conferences (save one victory lap with Bill Gates a few years ago). Employees blogging, posting to social networks, or offering academic papers for public comment is actively discouraged. In the words of an employee of your one of your former partners : Apple essentially bans “things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted.”

Your relationship to the press is famously combative, those who do get access start their articles with phrases like “we fanboys are pathetic, I readily confess.” Not exactly the kind of press that pushes boundaries or keeps a company honest. And that makes us honestly nervous – we’ve seen what happens when large American corporations create cultures that worship secrecy and refuse to answer to the press. It’s not pretty. (Possibly to your credit, your CEO does seem to randomly respond to emails , but so far no one at Apple will actually verify his responses. Very clever, that!)

Despite the gorgeous products and services you’ve created, we worry that you’re headed down a road that may lead to your own demise. Apple is no longer the underdog living in the shadow of a Microsoft monopoly. Increasingly, Apple is a dominant player in any number of critical network services and points of control – from mobile devices to media access, payment systems to Internet browsing and advertising platforms. In short, we believe Apple is far too important to continue its role as the Howard Hughes of our industry.

So we’d like to publicly invite you to step into the light, and join us on stage at this year’s Web 2.0 Summit. The theme –“Points of Control”- is quite topical, we believe.

Yes, this invitation is certainly self-serving, but let’s just say we’re in good company when it comes to that particular instinct, and our primary goal is to serve our industry and our conference attendees.

Over the past seven years, Web 2 has become an important platform where the Internet industry has had critical, open exchanges of conversation that move the economy forward. It’s where AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts have faced their critics and countered charges of network discrimination. It’s where senior leaders at Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter debated their battle plans around real time and social search. It’s where Newscorp CEO Rupert Murdoch defended his acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained his approach to user privacy.

In short, Web 2 is a place where the leaders of the most vibrant industry in the world interact with 1,200 or so of their most important partners, critics, and supporters, in a forum that is open to blogging, tweeting, conversation, and debate. This debate informs and enlightens our industry, moving it forward and keeping all parties honest in the process.

Won’t you join us?

We eagerly await your response.

Sincerely,

John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly, Program Chairs and founders, Web 2.0 Summit

TC broke the news today that Tynt, a search interception and user behavior data company, got a big round of funding from Panorama Capital, which is also an investor in FM. I've installed the Tynt service on Searchblog and I'd like to get your response. I think what the service does is quite clever and useful both to publishers and users. However, it does create new user experience for those of us who cut and paste on sites, and I'm interested if folks find the new approach worthy.

The service works like this: when you copy a snippet of text from a site with Tynt, you'll see that Tynt appends a unique URL into the pasted text (for example, see the graphic below where I've copied and pasted a snippet from a Searchblog post into an email).

This URL both redirects readers back to the location from which the snippet was pasted, as well as notifies the Tynt service of the actions taken. This gives Tynt a database of user behavior - a signal of intention - that could become quite valuable. At scale, this means Tynt can, for example, build a Digg-like view of the web - without ever having to create a Digg. It all works based on behavior most readers do all the time anyway.

This data is also surfaced to publishers, which can help them improve their editorial and user experience, among other things.

Tynt also has a pop up service (see graphic below from TC - I have not implemented this yet and until recently the company did not disclose this service publicly) that identifies when certain cut and pasted text is likely to be a signal of search intent. This is based on examining the string of words that is copied. Short phrases - of a few words, for example - usually means the reader is doing a search - they are cut and pasting the text into a search bar or another search browser window.

Think about that behavior - probably something you do a lot (I certainly do). What happens? Well, you are reading a story, and come across a term or word you don't understand, or want to research more. You highlight it, go to the search bar (or open another tab with Google in it), copy the text, paste it into Google, and find yourself on another page (the Google search page.)

Who wins in this scenario? Well, usually Google does (or whichever search engine is used). They get the search, and the probable revenue from that search (as we know, many folks click on paid search links!).

Who loses? Well, the publisher, because some number of folks who execute this behavior will leave the publisher's page and never return. And the publisher never sees that search revenue either, even though it was the publisher which sparked the search intention in the first place. One could argue that the user loses as well, because they often run off into a back and forth search game that distracts them from their initial focus on the article they were reading.

Tynt changes this game, in that it both keeps the reader on the page, and intercepts the search behavior (and potential revenue). This I find quite interesting (as does Google, I am sure, and Bing, which I bet would love to power those Tynt searches which otherwise might go to Google...). For its major partners, Tynt splits revenues with publishers, bypassing the search engines. The company already has deals in place with scores of major publishers representing billions of page view a month. It claims to be doing 100 million searches. That makes it a player, one the major engines will have to deal with.

One to watch.

Ev Williams, CEO of Twitter, from stage today, notes this funny Google search suggest image....Twitter clearly has work to do ...

(image from Ad Age) The NYT has broken news of Twitter's initial version of its native ad platform, which it is calling "Promoted Tweets." I will acknowledge being briefed on this news prior to its breaking, and I did promise to withhold any comment until the news had been publicly broken.

Now that the Times has provided me with a reason to sound off, here are my initial thoughts on the program.

First the details. I'll stick to what has been publicly reported, as that only seems fair. Obviously I've been thinking about this for some time, given I first theorized "TweetSense" back in 2008. But as to what the NYT has reported:

The advertising program, which Twitter calls Promoted Tweets, will show up when Twitter users search for keywords that the advertisers have bought to link to their ads. Later, Twitter plans to show promoted posts in the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user.

The news is not so much that Twitter will show sponsored tweets in search results - after all, we're pretty used to that, thanks to AdWords. The real news is the second part: Twitter will include sponsored tweets in the "the stream of Twitter posts, based on how relevant they might be to a particular user."

Read that sentence again. And think about what it means.

Let's go to the basics of marketing, which have to do with attention, message, and return on investment. First, attention. Where is the attention on Twitter? Well, truth be told, more than 70% of it is not on Twitter.com. It's on third party applications that drive traffic through the Twitter platform. Of course, Twitter has a huge amount of attention on Twitter.com, and with its acquisition of a popular iPhone app, as well as creation of a semi-official Blackberry app, it will have even more "owned and operated" attention out in the mobile world as well. But the majority will remain out in the developer ecosystem, with apps like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Brizzly. This platform will drive ads out into that previously anaerobic ecosystem. That is a Good Thing.

Regardless of where Twitter users consumer their Twitter feeds, the reality is this: Twitter's new ad platform will mark the first time, ever, that users of the service will see a tweet from someone they have not explicitly decided to follow.

And that marks an important departure for the young service. One that I think is both defensible, and, if done well, could be seminal to both Twitter and to its partners - both new (marketers) and old (developers). More on that when I come back....

(Posting this, taking a break to get kids to bed, will update soon.)

OK I am back. So I pointed out what I believe to be the major shift in Twitter's ad platform - that its users will see stuff they've not elected to follow. The key question then becomes, as it was with Google's AdWords - will that which they see be relevant, useful, valuable?

Twitter Dick Costolo responds to this question in the Times piece thusly:

Twitter will measure what it calls resonance, which takes into account nine factors, including the number of people who saw the post, the number of people who replied to it or passed it on to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on links. If a post does not reach a certain resonance score, Twitter will no longer show it as a promoted post. That means that the company will not have to pay for it, and users will not see ads they do not find useful, Mr. Costolo said.

In short, "resonance" is Twitter's quality score, its measure of whether an ad is useful (Google uses clicks on ads in a similar fashion). That Twitter is including this feature is, to my mind, crucial - it means advertisers have to add to the conversation that is Twitter, or face losing their ability to insert commercial messaging into the Twitter stream.

Initial response to this program - at least in my own Twitter stream, chock full of new media pundits and marketers as may be - is mixed. @Scoble isn't convinced, but he's open to hearing more. Others have praised it, and predictably, some have claimed they are forever done with Twitter if it forces ads into their streams.

My reaction is this: This is to be expected, even welcomed, in particular by developers. The initial program is very limited - there are only six initial advertisers - but Twitter has set some pretty clear parameters. First, the ads will be clearly marked as such. Second, the ads will have to perform - and that performance is determined by Twitter's users, as understood through Twitter's own algorithms. And third, the ads will be delivered in the grammar of the service itself, not secondary to it.

Sounds an awful lot like the parameters that made AdWords a major success, if you ask me.

I'm not predicting Promoted Tweets will travel the same path, but it sure would have been dumb to ignore the lessons of the most successful digital advertising format in the history of the Web.

Just saying.

Now, on to why I think this is good for the developer ecosystem (I'll get to whether this is good for marketers next). My initial sense is yes, this is a good thing. Twitter will almost certainly roll this system out through their API, allowing developers to run the same ads in their own curations of the Twitter firehose. And while, as with AdSense, Promoted Tweets may not allow developers to cover 100% of their costs, it sure will help. And as the system develops, and more advertisers join, developers will start to understand how much revenue they might expect from the platform, allowing them to plan for investment and value creation on top of the base dollars they can expect from Twitter.

Again, we've seen this movie before, and the web is better for it.

Now, as to marketers.

Unlike with AdWords, which launched in 2001 to minimal fanfare and with a base of mostly small business marketers (the kind who might have spent with the Yellow Pages, or the kind who understood how to game GoTo back in the day), this new system is launching with major brand advertisers who have already committed to "being in the conversation" that Twitter represents.

It's a safe way to start, free of the wild west, gray market early days of AdSense/AdWords. But to truly scale, Twitter is going to have to open up their platform to anyone with a credit card and the desire to buy their way into the dialog. That's both scary and potentially very powerful.

Twitter is already open to anyone with an account and something to say. But only those with money can buy a Promoted Tweet. I look forward to the day when the system evolves to let pure capitalism work out its kinks in real time, through the Twitter universe. The key, to my mind, is the concept of resonance. If Twitter gets this right, only "good" ads will make it into our Twitter streams. That will force marketers to mind what they say when given the privilege of being inserted into our feeds. To think hard about adding value to the conversation that surrounds their brands.

And honestly, isn't that the kind of behavior we'd hope for?

What do you think of Promoted Tweets? I'm eager to hear. Leave a comment or hit me back on @johnbattelle. I'll be listening.

It sure sounds that way, from this NYT story.:

Bill Gross, the serial entrepreneur who pioneered search advertising, is unveiling a venture on Monday that aims to make money by allowing people using Twitter to bid on key words to give their posts top ranking.

I'd say this was brilliant if it weren't for the fact (OK, not fact yet, but my strong sense) that Twitter is going to do something quite similar, soon. I've been calling this platform "TweetSense" for some time, but whatever its name, it's certain Twitter will do something along these lines, and it has a distinct advantage because it sees all the data across the Twitter ecosystem.

But just as with GoTo, nee Overture, nee Yahoo, Gross understands the power of a strong #2. I'm always rooting for Bill, so I look forward to seeing how this develops.

Several moves by Twitter in the past week have Twitter developers understandably nervous about their future. Many of them have labored for months, if not years, to create applications on top of the open Twitter ecosystem, and they've created a lot of value in doing so. They have "filled holes" in Twitter's often bare bone service, creating Twitter-reading clients, Twitter application stores, Twitter filtering tools of all stripes, even Twitter analytics tools. The explosion of Twitter apps has been a boon to the service, driving rapid adoption and a strong allegiance in the developer community toward the young company.

Much of that has been called into question after the company indicated it would start building its own device-specific clients, as it did last week with Blackberry. It followed that news with the acquisition of a popular iPhone client. And, in a case of what appears to be independently poor timing, Twitter investor Fred Wilson penned a thoughtful but inflammatory post about the role of developers which led many to conclude that their efforts may well be subsumed by Twitter's own internal efforts.   

For background on all of this, read the NYT's Sunday piece. You know the old school media world cares when the Times gives Twitter main billing in the Sunday Business section.

But in the main, I have to agree with Fred's points. Like Facebook, or the Microsoft OS, or the iPhone, there will be "core" features that the platform will develop, and these features will continue to evolve over time. But for every core asset integrated into Twitter's ecosystem, there are probably 1,000 opportunities that developers can address. Add in the Facebook, LinkedIn, Buzz, and other firehoses, and the possibilities start to go exponential.

The point is this: Two years ago, adding value to the Twitter ecosystem meant building a good reader, or a good aggregator. But the game changes over time, and if you don't keep moving, you will become irrelevant. Value now is not value then. That's the life of the startup world. If you run a startup that feeds off the oxygen of a growing platform, your job is to add value in a way that continues to redefine what's possible on that platform. Keeping running ahead, and figure out a way to get paid along the way. That's what FM does, to be honest - we're a Twitter developer too. And what we do now can't be what we did last year. It just doesn't cut it anymore.

It should be very interesting to see how this all evolves at the Chirp conference this week - Twitter's first ever developer confab. I'm "MC" for the first day, and I look forward to hearing from Ev, Biz, Dick, and various Twitter partners and developers. It should be quite a conversation.

This is simply not going to scale, Apple. It's not. OPEN UP.

This from the IAB's annual revenue report. I'm a board member of the IAB, FWIW. From the release:

Though U.S. Internet advertising revenues, at $22.7 billion for the year, showed a 3.4% decline from 2008, there are signs of an emergent recovery in the industry. The fourth quarter of 2009 hit a record quarterly high of $6.3 billion, a 2.6% increase year-over-year and a 14% increase over the third quarter of 2009.

Highlights of the report include: Search and display-related advertising continue to represent the largest percentages of overall interactive advertising spend. Search revenues, comprising 47% of the total, amounted to nearly $10.7 billion for 2009, up slightly from 2008. Display-related advertising—which includes display ads, rich media, digital video and sponsorship—totaled nearly $8 billion in 2009, showing an increase of 4% from 2008. One component of display-related advertising, digital video, continues to experience robust growth, with an almost 39% increase from 2008 to 2009. These latest revenue figures underscore the significant share shift taking place from traditional media to digital. Based on industry data from PwC from 2005 to 2009 in five key U.S. ad-supported media (television, radio, newspapers, consumers magazines and Internet), the Internet's share of combined ad revenue grew from 8% to 17%.

The full report has a lot of good charts and data, a couple below, but read it yourself .... lots to chew on.

I've been using Foursquare for a few months now, and I'm impressed with the service on many levels. But I have to be frank - the most impressive thing about it - at least in this test group of one - is what it *could* be, not what it is.

First, the caveats. I use Foursquare, for the most part, on a Blackberry, which means the app is limited by RIM's hardware and software. This means - as just one example - that when I'm checking in, the process is often fraught with poorly triangulated data (the Blackberry app uses cel towers, not GPS, to determine where you are). In plain English, that means that the app sometimes thinks I'm in Marin when I'm in San Francisco, Mill Valley when I'm in Ross, or fails to properly figure out where I am at all. Not good for a location-based service.

This also means that I want to rely on the web-based service as a backstop for much of my interaction, and, well, the web-based version of the service ain't very good. It's clearly not built to help folks like me, and, perhaps for the majority of folks, that's just fine. But for me, not so much.

Another caveat is that I'm pretty much "not in the demo" - at least as I understand it. I'm not in my early 20s, and I don't go out a lot in search of connection (despite the "Bender" badge I earned for having breakfast with my kids. Enough said there). So I get almost no value from the "Tips" that are offered on any given venue I check into - mainly because I'm not looking for tips (if there are even any to find). I check into places I know pretty well already, and if I do go somewhere I've not been before, I find the app does a pretty poor job of surfacing tips, or any other value above the ambient satisfaction of just declaring "I am here." Again, that's not a good thing. I expect more from Foursquare than just the momentary fun of checking in. To me, checking in is a search (see here for more on checking in as the newest field in the Database of Intentions), and so far, the "search engine results" are pretty thin.

Not "being in the demo" also means I'm not looking to hook up - either with a roving band of urban nomad pals, or ... well, anyone else, for that matter. For me, the biggest "hook up" that's happened due to Foursquare so far is when my industry pal Josh Felser introduced me to a fellow who had just captured what had once been my mayorship of the Bay Club Marin. It was fun to meet the guy, and yes, Byron C., I'm coming for you...but honestly, after three months, I expected a bit more...human contact. Compared to three months of using Facebook or Twitter, Foursquare just ain't doing it in the "connect me to other interesting humans" category.

Before you dismiss my thoughts as the rantings of an old man irrelevant to the Next Big Thing, recall that I'm very, very enthusiastic about this space in general. And, to my mind, if Foursquare can't make itself Deeply Useful to a guy like me, well, the chances it'll scale past the level of Mildly Interesting To A Few Million Hipsters is pretty low.

Now, let's get past the caveats. I've got a number of things I wish the service would do, but doesn't (or if it does, I'm not aware of it, and that's an issue as well). Also, I've got a number of gripes, perhaps, again, that might be resolved by my own education, but my thesis is if a web service isn't either initially self explanatory (IE, Amazon), or confusing but fascinating (Twitter) it's not worth spending time on.

So far, Foursquare has not unfolded in any particularly interesting way beyond checking in. That, to me, is both a problem and an opportunity. Now that I'm in the habit of telling my "friends" where I am - what else? To me, that's a critical problem with the service, one worthy of digging into.

It strikes me that businesses may have an answer to this question, but not at scale - yet. For example, if every X times I checked into the Bay Club, the club itself gave me some value - a discount at the pro shop, or my name in lights behind the counter (well, maybe not that, but you get the picture) - well, now that would be adding a lot of value. But getting hundreds of thousands of venues to figure out how to add value to Foursquare is a tall order, and so far, the examples of small businesses doing so are few and far between.

So what might Foursquare do, beyond just letting me compete with scores of others for the "mayorship" of the Bay Club? I'm not sure, but solving that problem should be at the top of the company's list of To Dos....right behind ....figuring out what, exactly, a "friend" on Foursquare really is.

So on to that. Now I understand I'm not a normal use case, but I currently have hundreds of pending "friend requests" on Foursquare. Most of these requests are from people I don't know. Given that I have 5000 friends and nearly 1000 pending requests on Facebook - where my policy has been "don't be a d*ck" and just say yes - it's not surprising that folks who I don't know have reached out to connect on Foursquare. (Do they do that with you as well, I wonder?)

But here's what I don't understand about the service: What's the value of a friend on Foursquare? On Twitter, I understand "followers" - they are folks who chose to read what you create. It's sort of like a more personal and connected version of this site's RSS feed. And I understand the same kind of connection on Facebook or Linked In - these are business, personal, and even "possible" friends - folks who I may one day meet and who may become colleagues or friends.

But on Facebook, I can keep folks in that third category at a distance - there's no chance that, by declaring something on Facebook, folks might walk up to my table at Picco and create a socially awkward moment (well, at least there's no chance since I made sure my Foursquare checkins don't broadcast to Facebook status updates!).

With Foursquare, however... not so much. So I've tried to manage my Foursquare friends by the simple maxim that, at any given moment, should we find ourselves checking in to the same location, I'd have a decent chance of remembering who that person was.

This means I've got a lot of pending requests on Foursquare that I'd have easily approved on Facebook (and of course on Twitter, all of this is moot. Anyone can follow you). So sorry folks waiting for a reply from me - either I'm not sure how or why I might know you, or I've not been able to figure out the Blackberry app and approve you in the first place. Either way...not a good thing.

This is a long way of saying that the service is, to my mind, poorly instrumented from the point of view of social relationships.

Lastly, for now anyway, the service is deeply lame in terms of search. Everything is instrumented toward location, so you can't search for stuff that isn't near where you happen to be. When I wanted to find the location "Federated Media" just now, so I could link to it, the service found nothing. Why? Because I was "near Fairfax, CA", and Federated is in SF. That's just a terrible user experience - one I could write an entire post about, but I won't (continue to) bore you.

And when you do find a place or a person, their checkin and other Foursquare history is not there, or it's impossible to find. Also....not good.

I could go on, but I think given it's late and your patience may be wearing thin, I'll stop here and ask you all to help me out. What do you think of Foursquare? What am I missing? Is it living up to your expectations?

The service is enjoying an early Twitter like hype, and I certainly like both its founders and its backers. Dennis Crowley will be speaking at the CM Summit in June (that is, if he's not too peeved at me for my Thinking Out Loud here), and I am, as anyone who reads this site knows, a huge fan of Fred Wilson, a Foursquare investor.

But because I see the huge potential lurking behind Foursquare, I can't help but be honest. I'm close to losing interest in the service, despite my raging optimism about the space it represents.

Well, with one caveat. I'll fight to the death to retain my nominal mayorship of FM's San Francisco headquarters, of course. Keep trying, Jonas!

My Signal post is up over at FM. In it I ranted a bit about all the iPad hype, which is particularly dense here in the Valley:

The iPad is not going to change the world this week.

The world takes a long time to change. It doesn’t happen in one machine, or one year, or even one decade. Now, what the iPad represents – new approaches to user interfaces, sophisticated, third-generation software applications that are connected to and feed the Internet – yes, this is a very big deal.

But let’s not wrap all that change, which will take time to unfold – into one device and one launch. It’s ridiculous. Think back over ten years of Internet innovation – back to the year 2000. And as much as the Web has evolved, think how long it took us to get from the Treo to Android, or GeoCities to WordPress. It takes time, folks. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves

The second installment of Toward A New Understanding of Publishing is up over at the FM Blog. From it:

... what does it mean to have a good voice? And how does that relate to publishing?

Marketers have always aligned themselves with great voices: publishers whose communities reflect the Brand’s core values and promise. Some have even taken the next step – they’ve created those communities, extending beyond making a “traditional” media buy. American Express, for example, runs a significant print publishing business that includes Travel+Leisure and Food&Wine. And P&G famously created the soap opera in the early days of television, and today its PGP arm still runs two soaps, as well as the People’s Choice awards.

Initially, the benefits of such moves were clear: profitable properties (a new revenue source), good lists to mine for direct response conversion (marketing efficiency), and a high quality environment in which to market your Brand (well-lit Brand environments).

However, not many brands want to be in the magazine or television business – even when they weren’t in decline, as they are now. There are plenty of significant operating realities that simply do not scale in those mediums, if they ever did. The impetus to creating Brand Publishing offline was strategically correct, but its true value proposition – one all Brands can and must embrace – will be found online.