John Battelle's Searchblog

Remember when I wrote about the new "Search Stories" ads for Google's core search offerings?

In that post, I noted "It's truly a brand campaign: Google is not selling anything here other than its own brand - that ephemeral sensibility that resides between its customers' ears." Well I've got a pretty reliable source who is telling me Google plans to hit the branded advertising big leagues this Sunday - the source says Google's "Parisian Love" ad (below) will air during the third quarter of the Super Bowl.

Now that would be a true turning point for the brand - a brand that, for nearly ten years, dismissed brand advertising as a waste of money ("The last bastion of unaccountable spending in corporate America," in Eric Schmidt's words back in 2006), and built its entire fortune on turning the advertising model upside down.

I emailed folks at Google for comment today, and a spokesperson said "Watch the Super Bowl!" That ain't a no, folks. (It's not a yes, either, but...)

I can't find the ad in this lineup of SuperBowl advertisers, but I'd not be surprised if Google had asked CBS to keep their name out of the pre-game hype (my source was told Google was keeping this quiet). File this as a strong rumor for now, as I can't get a secondary confirmation - though Google's response was pretty telling.

Needless to say, I'll be Tivo'ing the game....Here's the ad.

UPDATE: After I emailed Google for comment, Eric Schmidt tweeted this out:

Can't wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said "Hell has indeed frozen over.")

Eric, you trying to scoop my scoop?! Who ever would have thunk it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...the concept of Google boiling the vast Oceania Vox is very, very compelling. But then again....I find it hard to trust Google is really serious about this market. For example, how many real live customer service reps does the company plan to have tasked to this product? That, to me, is a Very Important Question. It's the essential human question that drives Google. I bring it up all the time. Community. Media. People. How do you make people scale?! How does Google, a company driven by algorithms and scale, find its Voice?

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

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

What I said about Google Voice I think also applies to the NexusOne: If it's effortless, if it works without having to call someone to help me make it work, well, it's a huge, huge hit. But this is telecommunications. I have a hunch it's harder than that.

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

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

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

Google Offers New Model for Consumers to Buy a Mobile Phone

Launches Nexus One, contributing further innovation to the Android ecosystem

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

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

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

Google pushing Chrome on the home page.

Reading about this study using Facebook data (original link) gave me some hope that we may see true insights from third party academics doing high integrity fieldwork on top of the Facebook data. My wish for Facebook is that it welcome such work, create parameters and ensure privacy, but allow researchers to really dig in. Much could be learned. The linked study is internal research, however.

"I think it will be transformative," said Duncan Watts, a Yahoo research scientist who recently used Facebook to conclude that people often have inaccurate beliefs about the political convictions of their friends. "In sociology for the last 100 years, we've had the theory, but it hasn't really been possible to test it, because so much of what is important to sociology is individuals interacting to produce" families, friendships and social groups.

Everyone's doing it! YouTube's most watched came out this morning. Again, nothing that eye opening. Wish they'd dig deeper.

I wrote my first book after seeing Google Zeitgeist eight years ago. Maybe Twitter's first ever "Trends" will push me to get off the damn couch and finish my second.   

Nah. After reviewing them, it's clear that Twitter's first trends release is, well, a bit predictable. But I am sure there is really interesting data locked behind that rather obvious facade....we just can't see it. Yet.

AOL was finally set free today, years after it should have been. Congrats to the AOL team and Tim Armstrong, and I imagine, to the Time Warner folks who managed to destroy so much value by blaming everything on the merger in the first place (sure, it was a bad deal, but man, AOL was not the reason Time Inc. went south!).

Read my rant asking Time Warner to set it free back in March of 2004 here.

Google today announced a new policy in its ongoing attempt to reach detente with an increasingly querulous publishing industry. (For background, read Mashable's piece).  

A key piece of the new policy has to do with changes to Google's "First Click Free" program. From Google's announcement:

One way we overcome this is through a program called First Click Free. Participating publishers allow the crawler to index their subscription content, then allow users who find one of those articles through Google News or Google Search to see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe. The user's first click to the content is free, but when a user clicks on additional links on the site, the publisher can show a payment or registration request. First Click Free is a great way for publishers to promote their content and for users to check out a news source before deciding whether to pay. Previously, each click from a user would be treated as free. Now, we've updated the program so that publishers can limit users to no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing. If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day.

OK, I have some issues with all of this. First, why on earth do publishers need Google doing this for them? Google passes them a refer, and they can take that and do what they want with it. And they can surely create index-able "teaser pages" for their paid content as well. Publishers, stop asking Google to do the work you can and should own yourselves! Do you really need Google's help here?

But that's not what's got me scratching my head this evening. My real question comes down to the whole "First Click Free" program itself.

Google clearly created this program to appease (or OK, if you want to spin it that way, to help) the publishing industry. Now it's adding features that it says should help publishers close a loophole that is allowing Google users to get content for free.

That implies that folks are actively using Google as a tool to get free content. Is this really the case?

Perhaps, but I'd guess it's a pretty low percentage of folks who actively try to get the Wall Street Journal by repeatedly searching on Google.

The really interesting question is this: Does "First Click Free" actually deliver a decent conversion of paid customers to media companies? (Know that by traditional marketing metrics, a decent conversion is pretty damn low - IE less than one half of one percent of people who see a paid offer actually converting).

Anyone out there have an answer?

I had a birthday a few weeks ago and to mark the occasion, my wife bought me a Kindle.  

OK, yes, I'm a pretty digital guy, and despite writing my 1992 Berkeley Master's thesis on "The Future of Print in the Age of Interactivity" - a thesis that celebrated the rise of a digital tablet fed by a world wide network - I didn't run out and buy a Kindle as soon as they came on the market. In fact, I was rather suspicious of the device, with its cultish clan of devotees and its somewhat insidious approach to purchases (Whispernet is free - just use it to buy stuff!). I actively demurred my wife's consistent implorations to buy one - much to her frustration as a card-carrying member of the aforementioned cult.

I couldn't explain why, but something about the Kindle just struck me as wrong. (Well, the lack of an open development system is one big Why, but it wasn't the elusive Why. I'm getting to that....).

So when my wife handed me an Amazon box to open on my birthday...well it was awkward. I've already purchased two Kindles - both for her (she had to have the second version) - so I knew what was inside the box. But I have severe reservations about the thing, so pretending to be thrilled was difficult. We've been married over 16 years after all.

Then again, my wife was clearly thrilled with her Kindle, and her enthusiasm carried with it the whiff of a movement . Now thanks to her, I owned a ticket to Seeing What The Fuss Is All About.

So we fired the thing up, set up my account, and I began to poke around the Kindle store.

And that's when it hit me, in a very visceral and almost reactionary sense: I never, ever, EVER, want to read a book on this device, at least as the device is currently set up. Perhaps that's a bit too sweeping: Put another way, I don't ever want to read a book that I would ever want to share or keep - one that I'd want to put on my shelf in my library at home.

It was as if I was paralyzed: I literally couldn't even imagine purchasing a digital version of a book, downloading it onto this device, and then reading it there. Newspapers and magazines? Sure - I immediately got the New Yorker, the NYT, and the WSJ, and plan on happily consuming these periodicals and more as time goes by. I might even take a few blogs - but then again, it seems rather silly to pay for something that comes free over the web (wait....oh never mind.)

But books? No way.

Why?

I imagine you have probably figured it out - I was stuck in a physio-digital dilemma - my attachment to the physicality of books was affronted by the idea of digital long-form narrative.

Now, I'll be honest here and say this was a rather uncomfortable place to be, given my career as a producer of texts about the future of digital. What's wrong with me? Am I turning into my (grand)mother? Am I hopelessly out of date? Will I soon be muttering under my breath about how my kids are texting too much and failing to have "real" relationships with their friends?

Yikes. (David Byrne doesn't have this issue, so what is WRONG with me?!)

So I got to thinking about what was wrong with the Kindle, from my point of view. Now, I'll grant that my point of view isn't consistent with most (or even many) folks out there, but I think it bears airing out in any case. And as I pondered why, really, I don't like the idea of reading a novel on the Kindle, it became quite apparent it had to do with the book's physical nature, certainly, but more importantly it's social nature - the infrastructure of our culture that supports a book's social identity through its physical transport. (Countless books have been written about this mystery of the book as artifact, of course...)

It was clear to me that the Kindle breaks just about every one of the unwritten mores of how we, over hundreds of years, have honored books socially. (If this has been said before, endlessly and better by others, please forgive me, and leave a link in the comments...) And as a writer and lover of books, this makes the Kindle nothing more than a glorified Netbook - without the Net.

A few examples:

- You can't share a Kindle book with anyone else. That's just nuts. The sharing of a book is perhaps one of the most intimate and important intellectual acts between humans, ever. I'm not stuck on whether or not that sharing is physical. I'm stuck on the inability to share. It's a crime.

- You can't declare to anyone (including, importantly, reminding yourself) that you've read this book - an obstacle I'll call "the library problem." I love being surrounded by books I've read, and I love the fact that people who come to my office or my home library can see the books I've read. Yeah, part of it has to do with status. And does digital mean that status is going away? I don't think so.

- You lose the serendipity of reading in public (and judging, as well as being judged for what is read in public). This issue has famously been pointed out before, and I do find it rather compelling. A Kindle suffers from a kind of social blindness - no one knows what you're reading, unless they ask. Something important is lost when no one knows what you're reading on the subway, the airplane, or the park bench. The opening salvos of countless relationships will no doubt be lost (though I suppose any number of romances have been kindled by the exuberant declaration of one's love for the Kindle...).

Now, before you consign me to the Luddite woodpile, let me state that I don't think any of these obstacles will stand, over time. We'll figure out how to share books as digital objects, how to quicken The Book into the mercury of digital social relationships.

But I'm deeply disappointed with the Kindle's current lack of understanding of this critical aspect of a book's meaning in our culture.

And I'm pretty sure that ten years from now - perhaps sooner, if Google has its way - we'll look back at the first Kindles as important but ultimately flawed "fish with feet" in our ongoing evolution as a culture that honors what a book truly is. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying my free three week trials of periodicals. We'll see if they convert into paid subscriptions....

From Biz' post on Twitter's shift:

Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore—starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, "What's happening?"

Well, regardless of spin, this is a major shift, to my mind. Semantics matter, *a lot*, when your entire business is, well, semantics. Language is how we encode that which is essential to who we are. And there is a world of difference between "What are YOU doing" (emphasis mine) and "What's happening".

For starters, it's a rather subtle leapfrog of Facebook, which has recently mimicked Twitter with its status updates. Facebook is stuck (but there are upsides to this stuck-ness) in a personal framework. Twitter, by moving past the YOU, is declaring Facebook's imitation moot.

Will that stick? We'll see. But I love to see the evolution of the space. It's such good narrative...

Look. Sure, it's a mobile ad platform, and sure, Google wants to play there, more than they already are. OK. Fine. But really. What's the play?

Droid.

Data.

Droid.

Iphone App Data.

Droid.

K?

Data. Just to be clear. Data. About what works, on iPhone apps, so they can leverage it...for Droid.

K.

Saw this greeting me whilst on Twitter.com today (gotta love WiFi on a plane):

Nice to see Twitter rolling out so many new things, like Lists, which seems to be taking off (though I find the lack of a discovery interface vexing, for now).

Retweeting is integrated in an elegant way, tweets that have been retweeted have a little cycled arrow icon, which identifies tweets that folks you've followed have retweeted. Another signal (as are Lists) that Twitter will be able to use as core data to drive its unique value. Watch that space, it's where Twitter will win (or lose).

Twitter also added the ability to retweet any tweet from within Twitter.com, as you can see in the bottom left of the pic below. No doubt this is all already in the API, as Lists was when it rolled out.

Now, why does all this matter? Well, it helps Twitter, as I already said, by providing the company with very valuable core data about what people find worthy of attention. And signals of attention are gold in a data driven platform like Twitter. Secondly, it addresses the continuing problem of discovery - seeing what has been retweeted helps people find others who might be worth following.

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

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

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

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