The Downside

I’m taking a break from my usual criticisms tonight and actually complimenting someone. Ask.com of all companies. I must be coming down with something.

Specifically, I was impressed by Ask Local, or Ask City as they call it. Head over there and check it out. In particular, check out the following:

• When you first load the page, you’ll see several slots along the bottom where you can take a snapshot of the current map. This would be very useful to remember where places are, create routes, save your favorite restaurants in a visual format, and perhaps most importantly, allow you to share those maps with friends. Google’s tools are competitive, but not quite as polished, and I couldn’t figure out how to *clear* what I had created on my Google MyMap, so now I’m stuck with a bunch of self-inflicted gibberish on my Google Maps experience…oh well.
• They offer a solid setof tools for marking up a map (similar to Google maps), including text labels, shapes, lines, pins, etc. You can quickly save a set of locations, such as your favorite sushi restaurants, and easily save it and share it with friends.
• Something I never thought I’d go to a search engine for: Events. You can either look for genres of music, like local blues clubs, or see what events are coming to your area soon (you can choose how far in the future.)
• Also cool: movie times all in one list, with a map, sorted by distance from your current location.

While for restaurant listings, I’m still more impressed with Google’s Yelp integration, those guys over at Ask really seem to be paying attention these days. Well done, guys - it’s nice to see the underdog really trying make a statement.

Who cares about comments on a blog? Answer: No one.

Think about it. How many times have you read a blog and actually read the comments on that blog? Maybe one time out of ten? Now, think about how many times you’ve read a blog and actually left a comment. Maybe one time out of 20? 50? Yeah, if you’re like the vast majority of internet users, you comment on a blog almost never.

So why are we now seeing all this activity around blog comment systems? You’d think that blog comments are the Friends List of 2007, at least to hear Techcrunch go on about them. Of course, TechCrunch tries to make everything sound interesting so they can justify all the articles they churn out every day despite the fact that there are only one or two Web 2.0 happenings that are actually important enough to write about on any given day.

But back to my point: blog comments just aren’t that important. In the big scheme of things, no one really cares. Read through the sites that have the most active commenting community like Digg and Slashdot, and you’ll see that most commenters:

1. don’t know what they’re talking about
2. don’t bother to read the other comments
3. are illiterate
4. can’t assemble their thoughts into a coherent point

The blog commenters have become victims of their own enthusiasm. These trolls who reside under the most-frequented bridges of the Internet have so much zeal that they ignore common rules of composition, grammar, and logic, and have therefore doomed themselves to irrelevancy. These trolls make up less than half a percent of the visitors to these sites (source: my flawless intuition), and they never click on ads, so they do little to actually contribute to the sites they comment on.

So, why do we need four companies (mentioned in TechCrunch’s article) devoted to helping us keep track of our comments? Why does the tiny, tiny fraction of people on the ‘net who comment frequently need such powerful tools to organize the dreck they serve up daily to the rest of us?

Of course, they don’t need them. No one needs them. These services exist because we’re in a bubble again, and any idea remotely related to social networking — or the new buzzword: conversations – can raise VC money and hope for a buyout by a company that makes a valid, useful product. And these companies are only buying because they’re also sucked in to the Web 2.0 hype, and they think they need some of that Ajaxy hawtness to justify their valuation multiples.

These comment systems are trying to exploit bloggers into sharing user data with them so they can because big all-powerful comment aggregators.  Perhaps they’re trying to take over MyBlogLog’s market position?  If so, they’d better focus more on what they can offer the bloggers and less on what they can offer the commenters.

So stop it, guys. Let’s make products for people who really need them. And for God’s sake, don’t comment on this blog.

So, I already blogged about Facebook’s Platform and how it will generate new business models and economies on the web. But today brought news of Facebook’s future plans to change the face of the Internet altogether with an online operating system. Facebook, in their first corporate acquisition, bought Parakey, makers of an online OS that is still under wraps.

We’ve been hearing rumors of an “online operating system” for years now, mostly in the context of Google acquisitions, but this is the first time we’ve heard it from a major social network. What exactly is an online operating system, you ask? Well, the definitions vary, but from what is known about Parakey, it looks like they will allow users to do a variety of unique things.

The most important functionality this presents is the ability to directly access files on your hard drive from within a web application. This would let you edit documents, photos, and movies from your hard drive using a web-based application (no more buying and installing software?), and then you can publish your work directly to the web (or your Facebook profile) with a click or two - the software takes care of moving the file from your hard drive to a web server, and it synchronizes the files on your hard drive with your files on the web. It’s possible that the platform would be open as well (it seems like Facebook’s style), allowing other companies to build applications for the online OS, so you could choose which one you wanted to use to write your documents, mix your MP3s, edit your baby videos, etc. etc.

If any upcoming technological development has the capacity to bring user-publishing and user-generated content to the masses, it’s this. Of course its success will depend on the execution and the actual ease of use, but this technology, plugged into a social network that already counts as members a huge number of the people in a demographic that is likely to be interested in publishing their own content, has the potential to revolutionize how we use the web.

For those of us who are already savvy enough to publish our photos and movies to the web, this could offer a different paradigm shift. I blogged a while back about my orgasmic scenario of not having to rely on my home computer and its hard drive, and of keeping all my files online (with automatic backups) so that I could access my MP3s, my movies, and my documents, from any device, at any time. An online OS takes this model one step further - not only can I access my files from anywhere, but I can work with them - I can view them, edit them, and share them - from any device that supports the online OS, be it my computer, a computer in a library, a kiosk at the airport, my Xbox or PS3, or potentially even my phone. Then we would be able to truly unplug. What would be better than that?

How do you manage a business when the very thing that makes money for you hurts your profits at the same time? This is the dilemma that Google has been struggling with several years now, and it’s not likely to go away soon.

Imagine if you will that you are a content publisher, say, an online magazine. Now imagine that you have your “A” articles that your writers spent a lot of time on and that are very in-depth, and that your readers love. Now imagine that you have your “C” articles that aren’t so good, but because they suck, your readers are much more likely to click on the ads on those articles. Believe it or not, if a page has lousy content, users are indeed much more likely to click on an ad. I’ve seen seen sites with lousy content get up to a 12% clickthrough as compared to high-quality content that gets 1-2% CTR.

Now imagine that you get paid per click.

Which articles would you promote at the front of your magazine? A article or C articles? The A’s are great, but they just don’t pay the bills, let alone pay for themselves. The C’s pay well, but get no repeat traffic.This is exactly the paradox that Google faces every day. They can send their users to quality sites with great articles like Creating Passionate Users or uncov, or they can send traffic to sites with questionable content where users are more likely to click on ads because there’s nothing else to do like Associated Content or Squidoo.

Google runs their AdSense ads on virtually every content site on the web these days, so they make money when they send their traffic to the sites that have the best clickthrough rates.

So what is Google to do? They should certainly try to avoid any perception of impropriety. Apparently they’ve started penalizing pages on Squidoo in order to do just that. But going forward, how do they draw the line? How do they look impartial? How do they assure us that the brick wall between editorial (in their case, search) and sales that every good publisher must have is still in place? How do we know that they’re sending us to the best sites and not the ones that make the most money for them?

The answer is, we probably won’t know until someone starts giving better search results than Google.

If you’re up-to-date in the tech industry, you’ve surely heard of the new Facebook Platform. It’s already been covered pretty extensively, so I won’t belabor the point except to say that I believe this is a turning point in the evolution of the Internet. It’s a brilliant move by the developers at Facebook. And if you’ve read much of my blog, you know this sort of praise is rare.

I now understand why Facebook didn’t sell to Yahoo for the $1B or $2B pricetags we’ve been hearing about. At the time, I thought they were either fools or arrogant not to sell for such a rich price, but they knew that this Platform was coming. They knew they had something special up their sleeve. Now that I’ve seen the Platform, I realize they would have been fools to sell to Yahoo before releasing it. They’ll surely be worth 5-10 times more in the next year or two, and will pose a real threat to MySpace.

Now that the Platform is public, Facebook has a community of hundreds and soon to be thousands of developers making their site better every day. A new marketplace is going to spring up around Facebook, much the way MySpace ushered in the age of widgets and Everquest popularized the exchange and auction of digital goods. It will give life to companies that create products for them, just like MySpace enabled YouTube to grow exponentially.

It isn’t often a paradigm shift happens overnight, but that’s exactly what the Facebook Platform has done. Most paradigm shifts happen gradually as a phenomenon grows to become dominant (AltaVista, Yahoo, MySpace, Google, Everquest, World of Warcraft), but this one is happening in the blink of an eye. Don’t blink.

If you’re old enough, you may remember a little web directory called Yahoo. Yes, back before it was a search engine in the current sense of the word, and long before you could “google� anything besides your Math 1B T.A. Yahoo’s web directory was assembled by “surfers� who theoretically spent the day scouring the web for new and interesting web pages, and when they found them, they’d add them into an enormous taxonomy Yahoo created, so people could find them easily. It was great, and it made a lot of sense. Back then.

If you were paying attention to your history, you may remember that when Yahoo’s directory and its taxonomy became too big for human editors to maintain and human users to navigate, Yahoo’s search proved to be much more useful than their directory, so people stopped using the directory. Eventually, the directory even disappeared from Yahoo’s home page entirely. If directories were so great, we’d all be using dmoz instead of Google today.

The problem with directories is that they can’t live up to their promise if they’re only maintained by a small set of internal people. A Web Directory promises to be:

• Comprehensive
• Authoritative
• Current

A small set of editors simply cannot keep on top of enough subjects on the web to keep this promise. They will either:

• Not cover enough topics to satisfy users
• Not have enough expertise to recommend the best links
• Not be up-to-date

And most likely, all three of these will be true. It’s the nature of the beast.

And this makes me (and uncov) wonder why Mahalo.com has been brought into existence. Despite describing itself as “human-powered search�, it really is just a directory, just like the old Yahoo directory, like Dmoz, like the old Zeal.com, like the old Looksmart, or a dozen other directories that failed. Note the similarities in the screenshots of Mahalo and Yahoo circa 1997 below. At least Yahoo works in Firefox…

Mahalo will never be really important because it will never be comprehensive enough, it will never be authoritative enough, and it will never be current enough. They claim that their editors will cover tens of thousands of topics in the coming years – 25,000 by 2008 — but what good will that do? How many unique search queries do you think Google gets in a day? I’d bet it’s in the millions, and there’s no way Mahalo will ever cover millions of search queries in an authoritative manner. The long tail is what has made Google successful, and anyone who tries to compete in the search space has to serve the long tail just as faithfully as the most popular search terms, or people just won’t rely on it.

Mahalo claims that they let users suggest links for inclusion in the directory, but unless those links get automatically processed and vetted by the masses, why should we trust their editors to choose which links are useful and which are not? Can their team of 40 editors really know what the best links are for tens of thousands of topics? Despite TechCrunch’s positive spin job, I don’t think so.

Where have the lessons of Web 2.0 gone? While many Web 2.0 sites are just Ajaxy hype, the really good things to come out of this generation of web development are sites that take advantage of collective wisdom, but Mahalo has ignored this lesson and is trying to re-hash a model that failed a decade ago.

I mean Mahalo no ill will, but good luck, guys. And very smart move partnering with Techcrunch on the TechCrunch20 conference.

Over the past ten years we have witnessed an evolution in web search. The first-generation search engines like AltaVista, Excite, and Yahoo all indexed the web and gave back results primarily based on the words that were on a web page. If you searched for “lemurs�, these engines would look for pages that had the word “lemur� on them, and return those to you.

This was all well and good until the spammers came. It wasn’t long before the spammers figured out that if they stuffed a page full of the phrase “lemur�, the search engines would send people who searched for lemurs to that page. So, if these spammers happened to be selling lemurs, they could use this method to drive a lot of people to their store even if that store had no information about lemurs or the lemurs they sold weren’t very good. They could get traffic if they just had the word “lemur� on their page enough times (this example is simplified for illustrative purposes.)

Then along came second-generation search: Google. Google’s search was smarter because it looked at pages that linked to pages. If you owned a site about lemurs, Google would scan your site and know that it was about lemurs, but it would also look at other sites, and if they linked to your site with the word “lemurs� in the link, Google would figure that your site about lemurs was pretty important, so it should show up high in a Google search for lemurs.

Again, this was fine and dandy until the spammers figured it out. The early spammers just set up a lot of cheap sites with links to their main site, and built authority in Google’s index that way. Over time, they had to get smarter, so they set up link exchanges among reputable sites, or started buying text links on reputable sites.

Then the spammers set up companies like PayPerPost.com that pay people to write something (anything) about lemurs and link to discountlemurs.com in their blogs. While any human would read these blogs and dismiss them as marketing hooey, to Google’s algorithm these blogs look perfectly valid and they lend authority to discountlemurs.com. Of course, these ersatz bloggers are actually just shills, writing marketing copy for a living – their blogs don’t get much traffic (or they’d have real advertisers), but by posting articles that look real, Google’s algorithm is fooled into thinking the sites they point to (discountlemurs.com) have some authority.

What people outside of the Search industry don’t realize is that Search is hitting a brick wall. The second-generation algorithms, including Google, are constantly struggling to stay one step ahead of the spammers. Just read through a few of the Search Industry sites Webmasterworld.com, SearchEngineRoundup, SearchEngineWatch, SearchEngineLand, and you’ll see the trends soon enough. Google has to update their algorithm all the time to combat spammers, and it’s hard to say who’s winning.

My bet is on the spammers for one simple reason: people are still smarter than computers. If someone can program a search engine to give authority to webpages that match a certain criteria, someone else can figure out how to simulate those criteria. Only recently have computers started to beat the chess masters, and that’s a game with simple rules; the search optimization industry has no rules, so it will be a long time before computers can surpass human judgment when it comes to determining which sites are really important..

This is why I believe it is just a matter of time until Search becomes social, and Google Search starts to fade away. Some may argue that Google’s weighting of links from other sites is already social because those links are placed by people, but we’ve seen that this linking can easily be gamed and/or automated. A truly social search is one that takes user trends and preferences and uses those to tailor its results. It can look at user click behavior, or it can look at the ratings that users give to various sites, or even better a combination of the two. It is true that this can be gamed, but if one puts the proper requirements and safeguards in place, abuse should be relatively easy to detect. If done correctly, it will be too costly for marketers to pay enough people to promote a site, or for someone to create enough bogus accounts to sway the indexing in their favor, and if a site somehow does promote itself artificially, the masses will vote it down immediately, promoting the sites they think are truly important. This is the only way for Search to evolve.

We’re already seeing versions of social search in smaller applications like Digg, Flickr, Delicious, Yelp, and other sites. It’s just a matter of time until someone adapts these techniques to Search itself, and unseats the Google’s algorithm. Ask.com sure isn’t going to do it – who will?

Over the past couple of years, it has become increasingly clear that Google is no longer in the search business. Sure, Google.com is a search engine, but the real business at Google is no longer to provide the best search engine. Its mission is no longer “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.â€? Google has become a pure advertising network.

First, let’s look at their history. Google search was extremely innovative for its time and there’s little argument that it delivered the best results. But Sergey and Larry just couldn’t make any money with search until they plugged in a brilliant system to display ads alongside their search results. In a world that had been dominated by “CPM� ads that gave advertisers no guarantees of a return on their advertising dollar, AdWords required that advertisers only pay for clicks, and it weighted ads based on their performance so users saw the most relevant ads. AdWords revolutionized online advertising just as Google had revolutionized online search.

So what does a company do when they have such a brilliant ad serving tool? They syndicate it. Google released AdSense to let other websites benefit from the performance-based ads that were already doing so well on Google.com, and they took a cut of every click purchased through their system. Another brilliant move.

The ads then spread to Gmail. A few paranoids complained of privacy invasion, but eventually everyone got used to ads next to their (free) email, and everything went back to normal. Google had yet another channel in which to deliver their ads, and the cash flowed in faster than their Money-Counting department could keep track of it.

So what do you do when you have more money than you know what to do with, and your founders are true tech geeks? You develop or acquire companies that do anything you consider “cool.� Have you seen the list of products that Google offers lately? If not, check it out here. Item after item, most of these make no money and have no plans of making money. Gtalk, reader, catalog search, notebook, co-op, code, calendar, docs & spreadsheets… and don’t get me started on YouTube.

But what a lot of people don’t see through the plethora of product releases and purchases is that Google’s only real business is ad serving, and they’re aggressively moving to dominate (I stop short of the word “monopolize� here) online advertising and expand their control of ad delivery into other mediums. Google is adding pay-per-action ads to AdWords which is surely devastating news to other CPA affiliate programs like Commission Junction. With their recent purchase of display advertising market leader DoubleClick, Google has gobbled up even more territory in the online advertising landscape, and now they’re moving to do the same thing by extending their AdWords architecture offline to TV ads, radio ads, and newspaper ads (so far with little success.)

One might ask, “Why is a search engine getting into TV, radio, and newspaper ads?� The answer is this: Google is no longer a search engine. They are an advertising network. Google search is simply a distribution channel for their advertising platform, just like the thousands of other sites that use AdSense. The other Google projects like Gmail, Reader, Maps, and the rest, are all either channels for Google advertising or tools to build brand loyalty.

Is this a Bad Thing? No, of course not. There’s nothing more American than trailblazing and profiting from it. But Google’s mission simply is no longer to organize the world’s information. Selling ads on TV networks, in papers, and on the radio surely has little to do with organizing information. Google’s real, updated mission is to provide the best value to advertisers and the best experience to consumers. This is a noble or at least honorable mission in itself, if not as philanthropic is their original one.

And yes, this means that all those brilliant MBAs and PhDs they’ve shipped in to Sunnyvale are pretty much just working either on new ways to deliver advertising or new venues on which to serve it. If you could figure out a way to make PhDs return 100x their salary as revenue, you’d hire them, too.

It’s a very smart move, really. Google surely realizes that their search may not always dominate. For the past few years it seems that their only updates have been to defeat Google-spammers and aggressive SEO techniques. They know someone will beat their search eventually, particularly as social search gets better. But Google knows that it doesn’t matter. They aren’t in the Search business. As long as they control the delivery of advertising, they make money. Every company they buy and every technology they develop, is either directly tied to creating ad inventory or just building loyalty to Google.

Mind you, I don’t fault Google for any of this. A company has to make money, particularly a public one. But let’s just call an ad network an ad network.

About Anna Nicole Smith, who was today found to have died from a drug overdose: “clearly this is a woman who led a very troubled life - a lot of highs, a lot of lows.”

There are lots of ways to help people navigate a website. My all-time favorite has to be the “tag cloud.”

If you’re not familiar with the tag cloud, it is a navigation tool that has gained prevalence with Web 2.0 and the abundance of user-generated content sites. Many of these sites realize that people are too lazy to categorize their pictures, movies, links, whatever, into a sensible set of categories, so they allow their users to just type any old word in to describe their content. Perfect for today’s ADD crowd. Then, these sites take the most popular words, and throw them in a big, steaming heap, and bump up the font size of the most popular ones, giving you the “tag cloud”. Examples from Flickr and Technorati:

Spend a minute browsing these images. Aren’t they beautiful? They give the user a visual workout, forcing them to scan line by line, looking for the big, important tags that are of interest. They help the user practice basic size-recognition as they try to figure out which word is in a larger font than the next, and they help them build those left-to-right reading reflexes that we all so desperately need to hone.

If there’s one thing we don’t see enough of these days, it’s navigation that really makes people use their head. There are far too many of these “ordered lists” that make it easy to distinguish which items are most important. If you want to do your users a favor, help them hone their visual recognition skills by presenting them with new and different navigation techniques that don’t follow traditional practices. Users love that.

Let’s say you’re Technorati, and you have the choice of showing your users a tagcloud or this:

Most popular topics:

1. Life
2. Blogging
3. Weblog
4. News
5. Music
6. Entertainment
7. Personal
8. Books
9. Friends
10. Religion and Philosophy
11. Blog
12. Writing and Poetry
13. Travel
14. Diary
15. Sports
16. Survey
17. Quiz
18. New and politics
19. Romance and Relationships
20. Jobs

Now wouldn’t any self-respecting user find this “list” patronizing? “Oh look, this site thinks I’m so simple-minded that I need my lists ordered by importance. Maybe they think I need a way to get back to the homepage from anywhere, too.” Never underestimate your audience’s intelligence or their desire to be challenged.

Let’s take a look at a site that needs a tag cloud: Billboard’s Top 40 Singles. Now, if these guys had any sense or knew what users liked, they’d show their Top 40 like this:

Akon Augustana Baby Boy Da Prince Beyonce Daughtry Diddy Dixie Chicks Fall Out Boy Fat Joe Fergie The Fray Gwen Stefani Gym Class Heroes Hellogoodbye Jim Jones Jon Mayer Jonas Brothers Justin Timberlake Lloyd Ludacris Mims My Chemical Romance Nelly Furtado Nickelback Omarion Paula DeAnda Pretty Ricky Red Hot Chili Peppers The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus Rihanna Robin Thicke T.I. Unk Young Jeezy

Much better. Billboard: this time the design advice is free; next time I charge you for it.

So keep using those tagclouds, guys. After all, they’re cool, they’re trendy, they’re so Web 2.0, and there’s nothing users appreciate more than a website that isn’t afraid to challenge their sense of logic and order!