John Battelle's Searchblog

I've been complaining that nearly no search engines surface real time data (for now, that's Twitter, but Facebook is coming soon enough, and there will be tons more). In fact, I complained to Microsoft about this well before the launch of Bing, and then complained some more when Twitter results were not surfaced in initial beta versions of the service. Man, I'm grumpy lately, eh?

Well, that's changing. Sort of. From a Bing blog post today:

There has been much discussion of real-time search and the premium on immediacy of data that has been created primarily by Twitter. We’ve been watching this phenomenon with great interest, and listening carefully to what consumers really want in this space. Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest. Starting later today, when you search for these folks names in association with Twitter, you’ll see their latest Tweets come up in real time on Bing’s search results.

Oh boy! I wonder if maybe...I'm one of those folks? Sigh. No such luck. Although, to be honest, I can't seem to make it work for anyone, including Danny and Kara. Maybe it's not working yet in my area.

In any case, what DOES come up is my and everyone else I tested's Twitter account, at least when I add "Twitter" to the query. That's a major step forward from where Bing was even at launch. That said, there is NO reason to make folks put the word "Twitter" into the query. None. That is a failed use case. Commit, or don't commit, but don't ask users to specify Twitter to know what someone might be saying in real time. Better to indicate that the query has real time results, and offer them if a searcher wants them. Or figure out some other clever UI solution. Real time is here to stay, may as well design to it, and not ask users to do it for you.

After all, with the whole Websquared thing, we'll soon be leaving real time trails all over the globe, and we may well want them surfaced by our favorite search engine, no?

But good on ya, Microsoft, for dipping your toe into the water. Google, your ball.

UPDATE: It works now. I'm one of the chosen ones! Oh joy!

Seen in my feedreader just now.

I dunno, it just struck me, Google can't do a helluva lot to help you, Newspaper Industry.

There's quite a wonderful authorial kerfuffle happening between Chris Anderson, whose recent book "Free" has been the target both of plagiarism charges (from Wikipedia, of all places, oh the wonderful irony, one might think Chris actually planted the whole damn thing...) and Malcolm Gladwell, who never met a clever anecdote he couldn't convert into a well turned (and dammingly entertaining) book of his own.  

I won't go into the whole thing, because, honestly, I just don't have the, er, free time.

However, I do find it noteworthy that Chris's much-linked to riposte to Malcolm's initial evisceration comes on Wired.com, where, shock of all shocks, advertising is prominently featured. Free, of course, doesn't come without a business model.

..which I've been talking about for some time...from the piece:

Having humans, not software, supply the advice is important. Max Ventilla, who formerly was at Google and is now Aardvark’s chief executive, said, “Often the most useful answers don’t answer the original question. Example: ‘You don’t want to go to the Caribbean now — it’s the rainy season — you want to go to Hawaii.’ ” ONCE you try Aardvark’s service, you can’t look at Yahoo Answers, the current leader in questions-and-answers, without feeling pity for its now-manifest limitations.

Many folks have asked me when CM Summit videos would be posted, several are up now. They include the opener, above, in which I give a short overview of the state of online marketing from my perspective - start at about 6 mins in if you want to miss the throat clearing of setting up the show and thanking folks I've worked with. Perhaps the key thoughts: People Don't Join Ad Networks, and Publishers Are Communities of Mind.

It's taken a while, but I finally have time to rewrite the post I wrote this morning about Facebook search. For some reason my blog editor ate the post, something that has never happened to me and really threw me off.

In any case, this morning I noticed a post on Mashable about Facebook's new "superfresh" search plans - in essence, a plan to make the Facebook newsfeed searchable, and most impressively, to filter that through your social graph. In short, this is a Twitter search competitor with a Facebook twist, and while I think it's a fine move, it's nowhere near where Facebook needs to be in terms of search, and it seems a bit myopic: Facebook is way more than its newsfeed, and its search play is key to proving that value, and extending it.

First, a minor rant. Facebook search circa 2009 is akin to Alta Vista search circa 1994, or Ebay search circa 2004: very dumb and entirely lacking in structured, intelligently parsed data. In fact, it's worse that those two examples. It's clear that there are almost no intelligent signals in the way Facebook does its internal search, and I can't imagine anyone is happy with it. A few examples:

Here's a search for "john battelle status" as of today. There are no results. How on earth can that be? Not even a referral to my status updates? The engine clearly doesn't understand the concept of "status" which on Facebook, seems a crime.

Here's another one:

This is a search for "graffiti application". It does not find the popular application, Grafitti, which has more than 10 million installs and over 2 million active users. Whaaaa?

I could go on and on, but that's not the point. The point is, Facebook search could get a lot better. And I am *sure* the company is deep in planning on how to take its search to a new level - no small feat, given the size and scope of its service. No doubt building Facebook search today is akin to building Google ten years ago - bigger, most likely, in terms of data, algorithmic, and platform challenges.

So given the company is working on it, let's give them some input. What do we want it to be? Here are a few ideas I have, I'd love to hear yours:

- Leverage the social graph in search. When people search for other people (most likely the highest percentage use case on Facebook), show me that person's friends. Linked In does a very good job of search features like this, and is only getting better at it.

- Rethink how results are presented. Currently, it's all about pages on Facebook. Why? Why not think about search results in a similar manner to how we all understand search - multiple results, easily scanned, with short descriptors of what the link will bring us? There's a lot of room to innovate on top of this interface, but it's table stakes at least.

- Make search social. Show me what others are searching for, trending searches on the service, popular "found" items. Search is a signal, use it!

- Make search results linkable. When I do a search on Google, I can link to it. Here's a link to a Google search for "graffiti application," for example. And yes, the first result is the right one...

- Give me image search. I want to see pictures related to the results - Facebook is a highly visual service, so surface that!

- Integrate Facebook Connect. How cool would that be, to see results from websites that have integrated Facebook?

These are off the top of my head (for the second time - I had others that I cannot recall...), but you get the picture. What do you want to see in Facebook search?

This video, of a lone guy starting a flash dance mob at a festival, is bouncing all over the web this week. I love it. Then I wondered, is this really spontaneous? It's too perfect! But it's really compelling either way. It plays on how we humans are wired. One guy alone dancing alone is weird. But when the tipping point happens, everyone wants to join. I wonder what happened when the music stopped.

Of course, I love that fact it's one of my new favorite artists who is playing, Santigold's Unstoppable.

For the past few days I've been focused on a final draft of an essay, co-authored with Tim O'Reilly, focusing on the theme of this year's Web 2.0 Summit. It's rewarding work, reminiscent of the early days of Wired, when I'd regularly edit or write long form pieces focusing on big ideas and the future, but grounded in real world examples from today.  

But writing and editing this kind of stuff is also challenging work, and I often procrastinate, as I am right now, by writing a blog post or skimming the web for interesting tidbits. And boy, did I find a funny one today. According to CNN, the term "Web 2.0" is not only now an "official word" in the English language, it's also the millionth one, of all things. (This according to the Global Language Monitor, a website that uses algorithms to determine when words enter the language.)

Too funny!

The theme for this year's conference is "Web Squared," a very real nod to the idea that "Web 2.0," five years in, needs to be refreshed. From the draft Tim and I are working on:

The Web is evolving so quickly, it’s clear the “versioning” terminology that we borrowed from the software industry – Version 1.0, 2.0, etc. – no longer captures the pace and impact of the Web’s true nature. The web opportunity is no longer growing arithmetically, it’s growing exponentially. Hence our theme for this year: Web Squared.

We plan to post a draft of this paper soon, and will be asking for all your input in making it better. Meanwhile, it's kind of cool that a term Tim and his partner Dale Dougherty coined way back in 2003 has made it into the history books. I wonder if and when "Web Squared" might make it in?! I guess we'll know in five or so years...

Seth has a funny interpretation of what "Bing" stands for: But It's Not Google. This is a week old post, but I was just catching up on my reading. The rest of his post, however, strikes me as not quite right. In it he says:

The problem, as far as I can tell, is that it is trying to be the next Google. And the challenge for Microsoft is that there already is a next Google. It's called Google.

I actually don't think Microsoft is trying to out-Google Google with Bing. I think it's trying to build a different kind of search application, one that sits on top of commodity search and helps people make decisions in a new way. Done right, this totally breaks the AdWords model that has driven search so far. To me, that is a very big step in a new direction, and one that Google cannot afford to make.

Eleven years ago or so a small team of us created a prototype issue of what became the Industry Standard newsweekly magazine. Matt McAlister, an original team member, is posting images of the prototype on flickr. It's not all there yet, but here's a great start!   

Many, many folks who were at the CM Summit last week asked me what music we were playing, and after a few false starts, I found a service that lets me make and share playlists.

Each conference I organize has a soundtrack, I pick songs for a reason. I don't overthink it, but I do like to have a soundtrack for each show's vibe. The CMSummit last week had a great vibe, I think. Here's that playlist:

CMSummit 09

That's Carol Bartz, Yahoo CEO, who I swear I heard say the opposite (read about 2/3rds down) just a week ago at the D Conference. Perhaps she's finally putting the ghost of failed negotiations behind her, or, perhaps she's just furthering them. What do you all think?

In its often overly clever way, Google became a brand television advertiser this month. Here's the ad:

Now, why do I say backed into? Well, this video was created by some Google employees in Japan (so it's not an effort by the main company, see?!), and it was an promotion to show off how cool Chrome was (not designed to be an ad, see?!). It was released on the web first (see, not debuted on silly old school TV!), and when the ad got some pickup, Google decided to run it on its fledgling Google TV Ads service, the sole remaining attempt by the company to do Adsensify old media (see, we're not really doing a traditional media buy!). But none of this really matters. At all. Because at the end of the day, consumers watching TV are going to see this ad, and judge it as that, an ad. That means the company, no matter how cleverly it's thought itself into this execution, has to consider itself a brand advertiser, and act like one as well. Question is, can it do that?

(image) The way some folks' numbers are blowing up on Twitter, it seems to me perhaps we might create two types of Twitterati - those who have purely "earned" audience base, and those whose base has been wildly inflated due to their inclusion in Twitter's suggested users feature, which I wrote about earlier last week.

I'm not usually one to talk about this stuff, but for whatever reason, it's been bugging me. I remember when I started this site, and it started to get noticed by people whose opinion I respected. Then concentric circles of folks found out about it, and it built organically, to the point of being one of the largest blog sites focused on tech and media (that was 04-05, before I abandoned covering news and started pointing folks to Danny and Mike). That felt good - I had earned the respect of an important audience, and my numbers showed it. The same is true of Fred at A/VC, Mike at TC, and many, many others.

But that's not how it's playing out on Twitter lately. I've spoken to a number of folks whose Twitter numbers have recently skyrocketed, and they all have said the same thing - followers may have increased dramatically, but engagement - folks who reply, or click on a link in your tweet, or Direct Message you - increased only marginally. In other words, the system is creating what we used to call, in the magazine business, "junk circulation" - numbers for numbers sake, without a lot of value.

That's a game many have played, and continue to play, in our Comscore obsessed Internet world, but it never ends well. Ever.

And I don't think that is in any way good for the Twitter ecosystem.

Just my two cents.

First two headines from IWantMedia today:

Here are the actual stories:

Google May Add Twitter-Like Features

Twitter to Expand Search Functionality

I dunno, do you jump the shark when the venue used to deny you're for sale is The View? A couple of years ago, I'd have said yes. But honestly, why not go on The View right when your product is breaking mainstream? And I like what @biz had to say:

"We're just getting started.... The company is two years old, we have so much to do, so much product stuff to fix, and so much growing to do."

Predictable? Sure. Possibly disingenuous if a large cash offer is put on the table? OK. But it rings true to me.

The speculations about a rumored sale of Twitter are getting pretty loud. The funniest one is Apple might buy the company. Newscorp makes a lot more sense to me, as I've said before.

I just don't get the Apple rumors, the companies couldn't be further from each other in culture and approach. Most of the folks I know at Twitter use Macs, but...not sure that makes for a $700mm deal. Newscorp, on the other hand, has a real issue with Myspace, which missed the real time train and needs to get back on track.

And Google, well, we all know why Google (or Microsoft) would be interested. Both, however, are wondering whether the monetization efforts they currently have for HTML search would scale to real time search, and both are surely testing that first, with uncertain results, from what my sources tell me. The build/buy calculators are out in force over at each of these company's corp dev departments.

Then there's dark horse Yahoo. It'd be a real stretch for this company to win the heart of Ev and co, but I wouldn't rule them out.

For now, I think the reality is that Twitter is focused on boiling its own ocean. It's a major task, but why not keep trying? Sure, there's always a price, but so far, it seems that price ain't high enough to keep Twitter's team from focusing on the tasks at hand.

I missed this, but after some detective work with sources inside Facebook, I've confirmed that Facebook now lets third party applications create live links inside Facebook. This has been one of my principal complaints about how Facebook interacts with the "rest of the web" - and now it's resolved.  

For example, I use the Twitter application on Facebook to update my Facebook status. Everything I tweet ends up as a Facebook status update. There's certainly no love lost between these two companies, and I've pointed out in the past that links in my Tweets are not live in Facebook, so my Facebook friends can't click on them and see what I'm talking about.

As of sometime a month or so ago, Facebook now makes those links live. As this populates the service, there's a huge search opportunity (all those links can be crawled, FaceRank can be calculated, etc...)

I think this is huge for the company, and is a major step toward an "off domain" strategy which will let it truly embrace and extend the web. Now, if I could only Tweet from inside Facebook....

...seen as arrogant. Regardless of whether that charge is true, or sticks, or is fair, this is what will end up in our national "paper of record."

The Federal Trade Commission has begun an inquiry into whether the close ties between the boards of two of technology’s most prominent companies, Apple and Google, amount to a violation of antitrust laws, according to several people briefed on the inquiry.

At the end of my book, and the beginning of a new phase of this site, I suggested that Google's largest issue will be its "failure to fail." I also compared, and continue to compare, the company to Microsoft in the late 90s, when it struggled with anti-trust investigations that ultimately proved hobbling, if not in profits, at least in its quest to be the most innovative and fastest growing company in the technology sector.

If any lesson is to be drawn, perhaps prematurely, from all this, it's that no company - or two companies - can lead a culture for longer than half a generation. After that, the culture starts to distrust the companies' motives, regardless of whether they are pure or well intentioned.

I've spent a bit of time going back in time lately, at least as far as Twitter is concerned. In short, I created a new account, as if I had never used the service before.

Why? Well, as Twitter hits inflection, it struck me that there was something really, really important that had to happen, in terms of how the service works. As millions of new users try the service, it's crucial that they find something useful when they arrive. If they don't, well, they'll leave.

And leaving they are, if this report from Nielsen is to be believed. Widely picked up last week in the Twitterverse, the report does the math and finds that 60 percent of those who try Twitter abandon the service within a month. That means no matter how steep the inflection, Twitter will soon burn through its available fuel (new user attention) and could fail to hit escape velocity (where escape velocity = a scaled platform at the level of Facebook, Google, or Yahoo).

That got me thinking. What do new users do when they first log into a service like, say, Facebook? Why, they search, of course.

For old friends, for the names of their colleges or high schools, for any kind of social connection that might make sense of the very large universe that is Facebook.

So when Twitter integrated search last week, it was, as I said, a very big deal.

But to my mind, it's not enough.

To explain my point, let me go back to the experience I recently had of creating a new account - going back in time, so to speak, and pretending to be a newbie to Twitter. The service is very easy to sign up for (see the screen shot at left). Once you pass this screen, you can check to see if

your friends are on the service. This is a pretty standard email database lookup, and I have no idea how many folks go through it. I don't have email at any of those services (at least, none with any real contacts), so I passed. (I'd be interested in how many folks do use this service, and how many hit the button to skip this step. If it's a high percentage that use this step, I'd also be interested in what

the experience is like in terms of making Twitter more useful, but I'll have to be blind to it for

this post. I think my conclusions will be valid in any case....).

Next comes the step that I find most interesting, and in its current iteration, most frustrating. This is where the new user gets a

list of folks that Twitter suggests he or she might follow. It's a pretty random list of interesting folks, including (as I write this) John McCain, Fred Durst, Chris Anderson, Oprah, John Legend, and so on. It changes from day to day, but anyone who's ever made it onto the list reports that their followers skyrocket - sometimes by an order of magnitude.

Why? Well, turns out most newbies to Twitter simply hit "follow all" and end up with the list of twenty or so suggested Tweeters as their first set of folks they are following.

Therein lies the problem. Ah, the dinner bell is ringing, when I come back, I'll explain why, and suggest a better way. I'm sure many have already thought about this, but I never claimed to be original, just persistent. And...I really want Twitter to get

escape velocity...because every time a rocket makes it out of the Valley and into the Rest of The World, it feels like the work we all do is worth it.

(Back from Dinner). So why is following twenty or so interesting people a problem? Well, while I am sure these folks are chosen for their general interest and lively tweets (for more, see Twitter's blog post on suggested users), it turns out that it's simply not very

compelling, in the main, to watch these guys tweet. It's certainly not as addictive as finding an old friend on Facebook, for example. It's neat, but it's not going to get folks to come back, over and over again.

What *is* interesting, or could be, is watching folks tweet who you care about. Perhaps they are friends, or family, or leaders in your line of work, or entertainers you love. For whatever reason, they are *your* leaders, and finding them, at least during the sign up process, is entirely too hard.

But it doesn't have to be that way. It strikes me that a few more structured steps in the sign up process could really pay significant dividends for Twitter. Perhaps a "follow wizard" that asks a few questions, and makes suggestions based on input

from the new user. Let us drill down by category: Business:Technology:Internet, or Health:Diseases:Cancer. The ontology isn't very complicated - mapping users to it is a bit more complex, but not impossible.

And encourage folks to put in the names of their friends via search - that's magic when you find a friend who's already on Twitter, and might act as a sherpa of sorts.

There are already a lot of third party services that help users find folks worth following, but new users are never going to find them in their initial interaction with Twitter. incorporating this kind of a service into a newbie's initial experience - even if it's very, very simple - could pay huge benefits in turning around that 60% abandonment number, and soon.

In short, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and right now, Twitter's initial impression does not add enough value. But with a few tweaks, it most certainly could.