Month: March 2009

Notable

I am going to be offline for the next few days, heading to hear the crack of the bat in Spring training with my son. Bliss. But a couple of very notable things: – Yahoo is playing ball again. Read RWW's summary of Yahoo's FB Connect competitor. So good…

I am going to be offline for the next few days, heading to hear the crack of the bat in Spring training with my son. Bliss. But a couple of very notable things:

– Yahoo is playing ball again. Read RWW’s summary of Yahoo’s FB Connect competitor. So good to see the company back in the game.

– Googlers leaving to start social sites. Readers of this site will not find this in any way surprising. Read this quote: In her opinion, the reason former Googlers focus on community-oriented is because they, “know that it is very difficult to take on Google on a pure technology play,” and, “when it comes to community based sites, Google doesn’t do all that well. Google’s infrastructure, most of it built in-house, makes it really difficult to iterate rapidly. Google Video, a product that I worked on comes to mind. Part of the reason Google Video failed miserably against You Tube was that the team couldn’t iterate rapidly and build some of the community and upload features as rapidly as they wanted.

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Get Horizontal

As I think through the major themes of the book I hope to write over the next year, the word "horizontal" keeps coming up, over and over and over. It comes up in nearly every conversation I have with marketers. More often than not, when you get to the…

Mashery

As I think through the major themes of the book I hope to write over the next year, the word “horizontal” keeps coming up, over and over and over.

It comes up in nearly every conversation I have with marketers. More often than not, when you get to the heart of an innovative marketing program, you find a block that can be summed up thusly: “That’s not what we do.”

In other words, “We’re the marketing group. That’s a great idea, John, but it requires we work with the (customer service, IT, business development, human relations, public affairs, product development, legal) department. And while we’d love to do that, well, we’ve (have never done that, have tried it before and it didn’t work, don’t like those guys, been told not to do it, don’t have budgets that cross departments, etc. etc. etc.).”

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Facebook Shows “What’s On Its Mind” – Twitter

An AP story today about changes coming to the Facebook service is quite interesting: Facebook: Taking a cue from Twitter in sharing? The popular online hangout Facebook is revamping its home page and plans other changes so its millions of users can more easily choose the types of information…

Narcissus-1

An AP story today about changes coming to the Facebook service is quite interesting:

Facebook: Taking a cue from Twitter in sharing?

The popular online hangout Facebook is revamping its home page and plans other changes so its millions of users can more easily choose the types of information they see.

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Google Gets Real Time Thanks to A Neat Hack

Missed writing this up earlier this week, I'll point to it now: A greasemonkey script authored by Moveable Type consultant Mark Carey puts real time Twitter search results up at the top of Google. Neat….

Twittergoogle

Missed writing this up earlier this week, I’ll point to it now: A greasemonkey script authored by Moveable Type consultant Mark Carey puts real time Twitter search results up at the top of Google. Neat.

3 Comments on Google Gets Real Time Thanks to A Neat Hack

For This Vanity Search, Google is Way More Real Time

Who doesn't do a vanity search once in a while? My fixation on real time search has only heightened my otherwise occasional check into the funhouse mirror of search. What I found tonight: Google: The results are pretty up to date. The second result is my "hottest" post in…

Who doesn’t do a vanity search once in a while? My fixation on real time search has only heightened my otherwise occasional check into the funhouse mirror of search. What I found tonight:

Google:

Google March 09

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Seen In the Wild

I was reading a piece on Venturebeat, on Kutano. And this ad was at the bottom. This is an ad? Yep. Innaresting. Four years ago (God, yes, I've been writing for more than that, er, ummm….22 years, in fact…) anyway, I wrote this about Google and the need to…

I was reading a piece on Venturebeat, on Kutano. And this ad was at the bottom.

Google Ad

This is an ad?

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Poll: Google and Microblogging

A few days ago I posted about Google and microblogging, and wished I had a poll widget. Now I do. So here goes: Will Google Create a Twitter/Facebook LiveFeed Competitor? | BuzzDash polls…

A few days ago I posted about Google and microblogging, and wished I had a poll widget. Now I do. So here goes:

http://www.buzzdash.com/bb.swf?BB_id=153091

5 Comments on Poll: Google and Microblogging

The World Is Tuning Into Twitter Search

The tweet is the query. From Ad Age, which penned a good piece on the promise of Twitter search: In the future, searches won't only query what's being said at the moment, but will go out to the Twitter audience in the form of a question, like a faster…

The tweet is the query. From Ad Age, which penned a good piece on the promise of Twitter search:

In the future, searches won’t only query what’s being said at the moment, but will go out to the Twitter audience in the form of a question, like a faster and less-filtered Yahoo Answers or Wiki Answers. Users would be able to tap the collective knowledge of the 6 million or so members of the Twitterverse.

“You put a question out to the global mind, and it comes back,” Mr. Chaffee explained. “Millions of people are contributing to the knowledge base. The engine is alive. You get feedback in real time from people, not just documents.”

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The Money Quotes

I've been in journalism a long, long time. Twenty four years, to be exact. I have a pretty clear sense of how the game works, how it's changing, and how it's played. So when I read the (very) recent dustup around Eric Schmidt's quote regarding Twitter, well, I decided…

Eric-2

I’ve been in journalism a long, long time. Twenty four years, to be exact. I have a pretty clear sense of how the game works, how it’s changing, and how it’s played. So when I read the (very) recent dustup around Eric Schmidt’s quote regarding Twitter, well, I decided to take a step back and think about it a spell. Especially given my own experience on both sides of the ledger (but more on that later).

Some background: Eric was quoted widely today saying that Twitter, a service I and many others have speculated might be a fit for Google, was “a poor man’s email.”

That’s pretty incendiary, and it fits a sometimes eagerly applied characterization of Eric, who has at times be criticized as dismissive (I reported as much in The Search back in 2005). But the more I think about it, the more I think Eric was actually speaking “as a computer scientist”, which, in fact, is the preface he used before issuing the aforementioned poor man’s quote.

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