Twitter Lists

There's much to say about Twitter's slow to roll out but much discussed Lists feature. I'm a fan of it, in short, for many reasons. Lists is a pretty simple idea – it lets anyone make and share a list of folks on Twitter. But it's also a powerful new…

Screen shot 2009-11-02 at 7.16.01 PM.pngThere’s much to say about Twitter’s slow to roll out but much discussed Lists feature. I’m a fan of it, in short, for many reasons. Lists is a pretty simple idea – it lets anyone make and share a list of folks on Twitter. But it’s also a powerful new signal that will help Twitter solve two of its most vexing problems – first, that of discovery, and second, that of authority. Not to mention it gives everyone a chance to add value above the level of a single “follower”, more on that later.

In short, if done right, Lists will provide the Twitter ecosystem a third dimension that might just propel it beyond the hype curve and into a long term platform play. Combined (intelligently) with the new traffic coming from Google and Bing, and this could mean Very Big Things for  Twitter.

All this bears further discussion. And I promise to to that, soon. I just wanted to leave a note here that I think this is important, and hopefully, when I stop traveling and start thinking a bit more, I’ll dig in here.

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Aardvark Launches Social Search With A Twist

I'm so focused on Web 2 and FM right now I can't grok this. But you guys can – Aardvark, which I have written about in the past and will present at Web 2 next week, has launched a social search function based on their growing people-powered network. What…

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I’m so focused on Web 2 and FM right now I can’t grok this. But you guys can – Aardvark, which I have written about in the past and will present at Web 2 next week, has launched a social search function based on their growing people-powered network. What do you all think?

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Sept. Search Share Report

Just got an email from an UBS analyst with an overview of search share data from Comscore for Sept. Summary: Google increases Month/Month search share Comscore’s September US search data suggests Google took some share lost over the last few months, which gives us confidence in our Q3 paid click…

Just got an email from an UBS analyst with an overview of search share data from Comscore for Sept. Summary:

Google increases Month/Month search share

Comscore’s September US search data suggests Google took some share lost over the last few months, which gives us confidence in our Q3 paid click growth ests. (12% Y/Y worldwide). Bing’s share of US search also increased, though share gains were lower than previous months as September is typically a relatively weaker month for travel, a vertical in which Microsoft has tried to differentiate itself.

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Search Does That. Social Does This. Give Me A Reese’s Cup Please

If ever there was a strong meme in search, it’s the impact of social: Everyone is talking about how Facebook and Twitter are threatening Google for what I’ve called the “oxygen” of the web: distribution of attention.   A little background. Google rose to prominence as the absolute winner in…

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If ever there was a strong meme in search, it’s the impact of social: Everyone is talking about how Facebook and Twitter are threatening Google for what I’ve called the “oxygen” of the web: distribution of attention.  

A little background. Google rose to prominence as the absolute winner in the Internet’s distribution game. The de facto interface for knowledge navigation, Google brought signal to the noise of Web 1.0: Sure, nearly everything worth publishing was now on the web, but how on earth could you find that ONE thing that mattered to your query, NOW?

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Why Are Conversations (With the Right Person) So Much Better Than Search?

Thanks to the BingTweets program, I've been asked to opine on search and decision engines. I'm kind of proud of my third and final post, which riffs on the first two and goes a bit, well, meta. I'd love to know what you guys think of it. I'll repost the…

hal.jpegThanks to the BingTweets program, I’ve been asked to opine on search and decision engines. I’m kind of proud of my third and final post, which riffs on the first two and goes a bit, well, meta. I’d love to know what you guys think of it. I’ll repost the first half here, and link back to the whole post on the original site that commissioned the work.  

Over the past two posts I’ve outlined my hopes and frustrations around search and decision making, using my desire to acquire a classic car as an example of both the opportunity and the limitations of web search as it stands today. As an astute commentator noted on my last post – “normally a 30 minute conversation is a whole lot better for any kind of complex question.”

Which leads me to my last post in this series. What is it about a conversation? Why can we, in 30 minutes or less, boil down what otherwise might be a multi-day quest into an answer that addresses nearly all our concerns? And what might that process teach us about what the Web lacks today and might bring us tomorrow?

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Modest Share Gains for Bing Continue

Comscore's monthly ratings are out and Bing continues a slow but steady gain in share, to the slight expense of Google and Yahoo. Bing has a massive marketing push on right now, but also, I think the service is starting to gain footholds with users who see it as a…

Comscore’s monthly ratings are out and Bing continues a slow but steady gain in share, to the slight expense of Google and Yahoo. Bing has a massive marketing push on right now, but also, I think the service is starting to gain footholds with users who see it as a regular alternative to Google. I am also a fan of the recently unveiled visual search interface – I think it augurs some serious new – and useful – approaches to sifting through massive amounts of related data.

From the Thomas Weisel’s analyst coverage, sent to me in mail:

Google maintains dominance within “core search” but Bing Nudges Up m/m at Yahoo’s and Google’s Expense: Core search excludes searches conducted on video, local and map portions of the companies’ websites. Google’s U.S. query share of core search queries was down 11bps m/m to 64.6% in August but increased nearly 1.3 percentage points from August 2008. Yahoo’s share was flat m/m at 19.3% in August and decreased 39bps y/y. Microsoft’s share increased 35bps m/m to 9.3% in August and up 89bps y/y. Ask.com’s share were was flat m/m at 3.9% in August but decreased 45bps y/y. AOL’s share decreased 14bps m/m to 3.0% in August and decreased 133bps y/y.

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Watch Out Google, Facebook Is Gaining in PPC

Alex Salkever has written a post on Facebok's self service CPC platform, which has been getting a lot of traction lately and is largely responsible for the company's recent boasting about being cash flow positive. From it: I chatted with nearly two dozen people who are buying ads on…

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Alex Salkever has written a post on Facebok’s self service CPC platform, which has been getting a lot of traction lately and is largely responsible for the company’s recent boasting about being cash flow positive. From it:

I chatted with nearly two dozen people who are buying ads on Facebook. Many of them are also purchasing ads on Google (GOOG) and other online venues. The overwhelming sentiment? Facebook ads are actually more effective and do a better job of getting them in front of their target audiences.

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A Worthy Rant From Danny on Yahoo Search

Danny Sullivan over at SEL has really teed off on Yahoo's search strategy, and any time he goes off, it's worth a read. From it: USER INTERFACE CHANGES WON’T LET YAHOO COMPETE IN SEARCH Got it? Write it down, someone come check back on this in five years. If Yahoo’s…

Danny Sullivan over at SEL has really teed off on Yahoo’s search strategy, and any time he goes off, it’s worth a read.

From it:

USER INTERFACE CHANGES WON’T LET YAHOO COMPETE IN SEARCH

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Omigili Figures Out How To Hack Google For Real Time Results

Way to go dudes at Omgili! By now you probably know about the “Search Options” feature Google introduced in May. One of its features is to limit the search results by time frame. By default the available time frames are: Any time, Past year, Past week, Recent results and Past…

Way to go dudes at Omgili!

By now you probably know about the “Search Options” feature Google introduced in May. One of its features is to limit the search results by time frame. By default the available time frames are: Any time, Past year, Past week, Recent results and Past 24 hours. Past 24 hours is nice but still far away from Real-time. What Google isn’t telling you is that you can search in the past minute and even in the past second. The trick is to change a parameter in the URL that will narrow down the time frames. ….Notice the URL parameter qdr:d. I assume qdr stands for Query Date Range (sounds about right). All you have to do to search for the query in the past minute is to change the parameter to qdr:n, and for the past second to qdr:s.

Past Minute:

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