Smart idea Facebook!

mobile.accuracast.com

Given the recent growth in mobile Internet usage, a number of businesses are now looking to tap into this growth. This new sub-domain allows business owners and marketing professionals to order simple, straight-forward, sleek mobile websites that suit their requirements.

tools.accuracast.com

Our four main tools – the Search Ranking tool, PPC Cost Estimator tool, Monthly Ranking Report and International Search tool – all now have a new home in this sub-domain.

AccuraCast France

The French section of our site has now been moved to its own dedicated .fr domain, and has a slightly different design from the English website. Warning: The website is written only in French (of course!)

AccuraCast India

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Middle East will now be served from our Indian office. The Indian site is markedly different from the UK and French sites, and so are the service bundles we offer in the sub-continent. Please note that the service bundles offered on this site are not available to European and North American customers.

AccuraCast Mobile

Unlike the mobile sub-domain, AccuraCast Mobile is a lone-standing mobile site that provides a quick introduction to our business and our services, in a mobile-friendly format. This is just a (relatively) static, information site targeting our mobile audience. It is also one of the best ways to view the Search Daily News headlines from your mobile phone.

SEO-London.info

Perhaps the least obviously related site, SEO-London.info was launched last year to cater to small businesses and start-ups. The site provides bare-bones SEO and PPC services for companies with extremely limited budgets – sort of like a no-frills SEO / PPC agency.

As always, I welcome any comments and feedback from our regular readers, clients and visitors to the site. You can either drop a note in the comment box below, or tweet me directly @AccuraCast on Twitter.

Best wishes,
Farhad Divecha

coComment allows users to keep track of all the comments and discussions they are participating in or observing on the web. Users get notified when someone adds to their comment stream or discussion. And, if they’re bloggers, the users can display the comments they make elsewhere back on their own blog.

Farhad Divecha: Let’s start with a quick introduction of what coComment is all about…

Matt Colebourne: Certainly, we are one stop shop to track, manage, share,and explore conversations on the Web. We can keep track of all the conversations that an individual is having, and so they can place comments on 50 different sites, local forums and whole bunch of different places. We will follow all those conversation and they will receive updates. We would also allow them to share those conversations with other people via, say their Facebook profile or any other profile for that matter. Currently we have about fourteen and a half million that we are tracking on a thousands of different sites.

Farhad: So could you essentially pick conversations from a number of places and syndicate or show them on any other place that you wanted to?

Matt: Yes, exactly. And all of your conversation will show up on your profile page on coComment.

Farhad: Can users then decide who can see these conversations and who cannot or is everything just public information?

Matt: Users can decide. The new version gives users the opportunity, should they wish to control who can see everything they say.

Farhad: Let’s talk a bit about the social aspect of this. I find this concept quite interesting because one of the problems that I personally face, and in fact quite a few of the people I have spoken to recently also face, is the problem of too much social variety. We all have profiles on a number of different networks and blogs that we visit regularly.

You start talking in one place about one thing; you like the discussion there and you might share it with a few friends by then starting a new conversation elsewhere about the same topic. A little bit down the line you see somebody else talking about the same topic, and you pipe in there. Soon you have participated in a conversation on the same topic in 10 different places with 10 different people, and you start losing track of what you have said. How does coComment’s offering tie in that social aspect and does it rely in some ways on everybody who is conversing with you also using it?

Matt: No not necessarily; because you can bring people in the conversation using a range of third-party tools such as Twitter but I think what makes a great conversation the first thing is the topic should be something that the audience is interested in, and the other thing is that people who participate in the conversation. For example you could visit a cathedral and just have a look around, which isn’t the most exciting thing for me. However, if the tour guide I appointed was absolutely mesmerising and told me the history of the place and really brought it to life, I would have had a different experience and enjoyed the same activity thoroughly.

For us the question was therefore, if that is what makes a good conversation, how do we bring this model online? We are not trying to build a social network. What we are doing is allowing the natural conversational behaviour to operate on the Internet, allowing people to share stories and getting others to participate.

Farhad: In some ways, though, that still leaves one slight problem unsolved … if you have these conversations in 10 different places, and they might be conversations around a really interesting topic and in each of those places you have two or three really interesting participants with whom you want to carry on the conversation, you still have to go to 10 different places to carry on that conversation, or somehow get all of them to converge in one place.

Matt: Bear in mind that all of those conversation are tracked in a single location, so you are only ever 1 click away from each one. What the system will also do is tell you who your neighbours are, and so therefore point out to you that they are commenting on the four different blogs that you’re commenting on, and therefore you should possibly connect to them. What coComment cannot do is take the user away from the site. So while you can’t bring the conversations together, what you can do is view them all in the same location so that it becomes much easier.

Farhad: That’s good because it does take the pain away to a great degree.

Now let’s talk a little bit now about the reason we actually got in touch in the first place. A post that we published in mid-January talked about the Government of India’s plans to regulate blogging and whether that was a good idea. Also, in recent times we have had a lot of different stories come up in the news from countries like Russia, China and Iraq where people do not enjoy freedom of speech as we do. People in these countries use blogs to voice their opinions and use search engines like Google to find information.

In countries like Iraq where people are not typically connected, even now, to the World Wide Web, and the newspapers are controlled by the government or the dictatorships, people use blogs and the Internet in general to voice opinions that otherwise would never be heard.

How is coComment changing that, or making it easier to give a voice to individuals from the various parts of the world where normally one would never have heard their opinions?

Matt: Firstly the biggest one, probably, is access to a larger audience. What could have been a small cry lost in the wilderness could now be heard by millions if what the individual was saying was relevant.

There is also the bigger issue of freedom of speech. What people who oppose that individual’s freedom of speech tend to use as defence is the disruption created and the impact on other individuals. What we’re doing here is saying “let’s turn things round a little bit.” What we say to people is “let us not impinge on what people want to say,” we say this to publishers, brand owners and corporations as well, “because if the users don’t say it here, they will say it somewhere else, and you may never know about it.”

Rather than censoring on behalf of individuals, we let the other individuals react and take the first person down. We should treat bloggers and their visitors as adult. Users then think about the social consequences of saying something and that makes each user choose what they do or not say. This is a far, far better solution than trying to get an employee or officer or a censor board to moderate on behalf of individuals.

I think we support the freedom of the individual to say what they want and we also support the freedom of the reader to choose what to read.

Farhad: Just playing the devil’s advocate here, one could make the argument that a system like yours could also work very well for those who want to stifle freedom of speech.

Instead of having to monitor a hundred thousand different venues where a person or a dissident could go and speak. Now all they need to do is to come to one place and monitor all the conversations. In some ways, this system is making it easier for dictatorships or governmental regimes who do not advocate freedom of speech and try to thwart it.

It becomes so much easier for the government of China or a dictator or a Communist President to pinpoint who the particular dissident is and where they are voicing those opinions and shut them down by whatever means. And what’s worse is that the means these guys use tend to be a lot more drastic than just banning conversations or user profile or giving them lower trust ranks.

What would your response be to that sort of a counter argument, I mean, it is making things easier, isn’t it?

Matt: We did not make things easier. To be honest with you we do not do anything that could not already be done. We just present conversations in a way that benefit the end user. We have not built anything that can be employed by people who want to abuse freedom of speech to do something they cannot already do.

Farhad: Yes absolutely, you are right there. You have not made it possible, but you have made it easier

Matt: Well we have made it slightly, but bear in mind we certainly mitigated the very small potential for misuse because we don’t require the users to tell us who they are, we don’t require them to be registered for three days and can use the guest id for that period, but also we don’t assume any ownership of the content; The content either belongs to the site that hosts it or to the end user, and what that means is that we believe the content is the user’s content and we will protect their rights to it, and to do whatever they need to with it without heed to any kind of oppressive government.

Farhad: Alright, could you tell me a little bit more about the data privacy aspect. You touched upon this yourself when you said that users don’t need to identify themselves on your website but very often most other websites do require users to identify themselves before they start placing comments also most comment systems will very easily track the IP Address etcetera. So is there some way that users could use the coComment system to hide their identities?

Matt: I wouldn’t say they can actively use it to hide because obviously they’re still commenting on the site and not on coComment. They can essentially use something called meta conversations where the person can write a comment on any website anywhere in the world and it looks like it’s on the site, but actually it is hosted on coComment. Now if they do that those conversations can be public or private. If it’s public, any other coCommenter can see it. If it is private, only the people that you select will see it.

Farhad: When people can see your comments, though, would they also be able to run a backwards check or who is and figure out where you are coming from?

Matt: The point is, that they won’t even see the conversation unless you’ve chosen to let them see it. They won’t even know the conversation is there.

Farhad: But you see, at times with people who want to voice their opinions, they want to share their views but not necessarily be found. Someone who is against the Russian Premier right now, or against the Iraqi government, would want everybody else to hear what his thoughts are but still not necessarily be want to be found.

Matt: In which case this would be perfect. They would set up the system to make the comments public to coComment, make that available to a limited audience, such that those people who are interested get notified and then select whom they want to allow to participate.

Farhad: It would be interesting to know how many people are aware of such things in the third world, and can use it. And with knowledge of such a system whether countries like India and China would even be having debates about regulating blogs because they would then realise that they can’t do much, since there is always going to be a way around it.

Matt: Yes, it is quite a neat way around it, because even though the content appears to be sitting on the site, to end users and the search engines, it is actually sitting on our servers and getting sent direct to the end users.

Farhad: I now have just two last questions – what is the future going to hold for coComment and what do you think is the future of blogging, conversations and social networking online? Which way are we headed? Which way are you guys headed? And which way is the entire blogosphere and the Internet headed, in your opinion?

Matt: Our opinion is that the whole aspect of commenting or conversations is going to become bigger, because essentially Web 2.0 is about interaction, people interacting online is becoming ubiquitous – even my 70-year old mother is going onto website and commenting rather than writing letters. This space is absolutely exploding, and rightly so, because what it does is it enables people to find out more information, to say what they think about it and defend there views publicly in front of thousands, in a way that was never possible before. That can only be a good thing.

Farhad: Well, it has been very interesting talking to you. I think the conversation has touched upon some very interesting topics. For us here it does not seem as much of a minefield as it does out in the East right now. We take this freedom for granted. I would have been shocked if the UK government or the US or Canadian government ever even considered regulating blogs or any other form of social networking, but there are people out there who see blogging as the only venue to air their views. I hope that this right is never taken away from them.

Screenshot of a coComment user profile

Ever since Facebook opened its social networking site to third party developers interested in building applications for it in May 2007, they have been battling deceitful and abusive practices. The main irritants are self promotion features in applications such as bulk unsolicited emails and intrusive message displays.

Facebook has gained immense popularity as a platform for sharing content through the social graph / news feed. They have gradually opened up the limits on notifications, requests and email communication.

However as with all new technologies there are those who choose to abuse the system for their own benefit, in this case by sending notifications to users for an application that the user has not installed via another application installed on the user account.

Other application developers have deceive users by putting links in the Facebook news feed, notifications and notification emails that lead to the installation of a different application in a similar way, thereby tricking users into installing an application that they did not intend to.

In the New Year Facebook has made a “resolution” to block all such abusive practices. This of course is not a foolproof system, as friends can still send silly invites to each other. The safeguards will however reduce the amount of spam, and hence will win Facebook back some points with the privacy police, points that they had recently lost due to their over-ambitious Beacon advertising program.

According to Nick O Neil at AllFacebook.com, “Facebook has imposed a number of restrictions and has slowly clamped down on spammy activities available to application developers. The new announcement by Facebook underlines their continuing dedication to battle spam both within applications and elsewhere on their site.”

PayPal and Google Checkout are both services provided by eBay and Google respectively to enable online shoppers to pay for their shopping easily. While PayPal has been around for a long time, Google Checkout was launched only in April 2007.

While PayPal has the advantage of a wider user network it is not without its fair share of customers complaints. The main grievances customers have with PayPal are their high fees and their policy of freezing customer accounts, without calling or trying to understand the nature of the clients’ business, on usually flimsy grounds.

EBay users and other online vendors have looked for alternative payment methods for long now, and are extremely hopeful that Google Checkout will at least cause PayPal to wake up and correct their arbitrary practices and become more customer friendly.

According to Heather Dougherty of Hitwise US, alternative payment methods have been growing in popularity, at the expense of established players such as PayPal and Google Checkout. Leading this group is newcomer Bill Me Later, whose ‘buy now, pay later’ and ’90 days same as cash’ options have propelled its traffic up 271% up from last year.

While the Google Checkout and PayPal are direct competitors, their manners of functioning are slightly different and their main client bases come from widely different sources. PayPal sources its clientele mainly from its parent company eBay and a few other email and social networks, with only about 2.2% of their customers coming from non-auction shopping and classified sites, while 45.3% of Google’s customer base is retailers.

It is expected that Google checkout will gradually incorporate a few new features in its services, which will make it a real threat to PayPal’s dominance of the market, especially through the much wider user base of its parent company, Google.

So what does News Corp gain with this acquisition? If the rumors are substantiated, this acquisition could be used to retain and regain both users as well as readers. This is possible through an integrated incorporation of news content in LinkedIn and layering its network’s features on the online site of Wall Street Journal. The declining business classifieds of Wall Street Journal and its other newspapers can also be bolstered by this acquisition. News Corp’s move has quite an advertising potential.

News Corp is recently attracting marketers with the launch of more in house ad network tools through its acquisition of MySpace.

Social networking sites are fast becoming one of the most sought after media distribution channels. In this light, the integration of Wall Street Journal and LinkedIn by News Corp can be a positive step forward.

LinkedIn would definitely gain more mainstream attention through this merger. However comparisons are inevitable with that of the acquisition of MySpace. To begin with, LinkedIn users are not as active as those of MySpace and the traffic is less. But on the other hand, the users of LinkedIn belong to a select professional group with steady incomes. All in all, in order to cash on this new acquisition and give some competition to Facebook, News Corp should think of technologically upgrading LinkedIn. A few more social features will be a nice idea, because there might be more potential in a site that offers more than just an educational and professional background of a person.

Henry Blodget, a former Wall Street analyst and blogger on The Huffington Post sparked off a rumour based on Kevin Johnson’s speech. According to Blodget, the only way Microsoft can achieve this ambitious market share growth is by buying some other company that already has a 20 percent share of the online search market – Yahoo!

Fuelled by the rumour of an impending acquisition shares of Yahoo! (YHOO) closed up nearly 6 percent on Friday. While the reality of a Microsoft acquisition might spell disaster for some at Yahoo! Wall Street seems to look at the prospect very favourably.

This is not a joke. The actual Google maps page in the UK (maps.google.co.uk) currently sports this logo. Though, Google Maps US still uses the old logo.

Google is loved for the “fun” image it has cultivated. Employees at the search giant are known for their sense of humour. They often change their logo to mark special occasions such as Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day, Halloween, St. Patrick’s Day and even off-beat occasions such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday, Persian New Year, Earth day and Bloomsday.

View more Google holiday logos

Many of those one-off logos, though, seem to be better thought-out than the new Google Maps logo!

Over the past few months the blogosphere has been buzzing with rumours about Google’s next foray in the mobile market. While most knew the announcement would go far beyond just another mobile search feature, speculation ranged from Google introducing a revolutionary piece of hardware, nicknamed GPhone, to launching special software that would run on mobile phones.

Google have ended all speculation by finally confirming that they have founded the Open Handset Alliance, in partnership with over 30 mobile and technology industry leaders. Members of the alliance are committed to creating an open mobile ecosystem, allowing companies to innovate and be part of the astonishing growth in mobile device adoption.

Official Google Blog Announcement – Where’s My GPhone?

Android^TM is the first result of this alliance – a complete set of software for mobile devices: an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications. A Software Development Kit (SDK) will be made available on November 12, to allow developers to build rich mobile applications. Handsets based on the Android platform, however, will only be available in the second half of 2008.

Android^TM

This open platform strategy is no different than the OpenSocial strategy that Google have adopted for social media, and will probably benefit them in the long run in the same way – by making it easy for developers to include Google AdWords mobile ads onto their applications.

While most of the world’s mobile phone owning population of 2.7 billion people might never use Android, Google have nevertheless made yet another strong move towards expanding their target market from 850 Million PC users to an audience that is three times as large.

Founding members of the Open Handset Alliance include the following companies:

• Broadcom
• China Mobile Research Institute
• Deutsche Telekom
• Ebay
• Google
• HTC Corp.
• Intel
• LG
• Marvell Semiconductor
• Motorola
• NTT DoCoMo
• Nuance Communications
• NVIDIA
• Qualcomm
• Samsung
• Sprint Nextel
• Telecom Italia
• Telefónica
• Texas Instruments

Introducing Android – A word from the founders

Google now accounts for more than 85 per cent of all searches in the country. Their market share is still growing, and it continues to do so at the expense of all three of its competitors.

The chart below shows the latest UK Internet search data from Hitwise for the four week period ending 20 September 2007 compared to four weeks ending 26 May 2007:

Source: Hitwise UK

Ask, Microsoft and Yahoo! have clearly lost market share to Google, in spite of each of their individual efforts to win UK search clicks. Ask has invested in an ongoing television and billboard advertising campaign in the UK. Yahoo! has tried to generate a lot of publicity around their Panama platform, and Microsoft has rebranded and tried various half-hearted and wholly unsuccessful tactics.

Google’s lead has gone beyond the point where quality alone will win back users. Ask’s current search interface is far superior to Google’s Universal Search. It still has not won back any market share, partly due to poor quality of the main text results, but also because hardly anyone has even bothered to try using their improved interface.

Similarly, an improved advertiser experience alone will not win search traffic away from Google. Microsoft and Yahoo! should focus on winning search traffic before trying to woo advertisers.

AdMob hired Facebook’s Vice President of Engineering back in February of this year. Todaym they have become the first platform to provide advertising on Facebook Mobile, hardly a week after Facebook Platform for Mobile was launched.

Application developers can integrate mobile advertising from AdMob into any application developed for Facebook Mobile. AdMob provide developers a sample application called AdMob Footprints, based on Facebook’s own developer resource called Footprints. The tool, which is coded in PHP, can be used as the starting point to build apps that have the mobile advertising function already included.

The best way to monetise Facebook and other social networks at present seems to be by tapping into their application developers. Yesterday’s news from Google about Open Social seems to indicate this and so does AdMob’s strategy. When Facebook launches its own advertising platform, though, it could end up competing with other ads from outside its own network, which could very quickly lead to ad fatigue among users if Facebook is not careful.

A magnifying glass icon, located alongside each keyword in the Google AdWords Ad Group detail view under the Keywords tab, allows advertisers to whether the keyword was triggering ads or not. The functionality of this little tool has been expanded to also provide information on the keyword quality score.

Quality score indicators for keywords can still be viewed by adding a new column to the Ad Group details view. The same indicator is now also visible, along with the minimum CPC bid for that keyword, when an advertiser passes the mouse over the magnifying glass. Clicking on the “Details and recommendations” link leads to a Keyword Analysis page.

Depending on the ad quality, the Keyword Analysis page will provide instructions to the advertisers to help them improve ROI. Keywords with a “Great” quality score are told to keep up the good work. Keywords with an “OK” quality score are given tips to improve the ad performance.

Keywords whose quality score is “Poor” are given the option to delete the keyword from the analysis page itself.

The Keyword Analysis page also contains a tab for ad diagnostics, that provides information about whether the keyword is triggering an ad or not, and if not, what the possible causes and remedies are.

http://apps.facebook.com/googlenews

Most Facebook apps are targeted at winning space on the user profile page. Visitors to a profile often pick up apps that they like and post them to their own profiles. The smartest way that most apps spread, though, is by prompting users to invite their friends at the time of installation.

Inviting friends to use the new app on one’s profile makes sense. Most apps require the user’s friends to interact by commenting, selecting values or posting photographs etc on the user’s profile. In order to interact with an app, the friends are often required to install the app themselves, which creates a great viral push for the app, and its associated brand.

Google News’ app takes a more docile approach. Once a user installs it, there’s a good chance he/she might never see it again. The problem is two-fold:

1. The app is designed as a stand-alone page
   Unlike most Facebook apps that go on the profile page, the Google News app is meant to be a stand-alone news page that features a user’s favourite news topics and top stories. This means that the app in itself cannot be placed on the profile page for everyone to look at. Only profile visitors who see the Google News icon snuck on the side in the list of apps might realise a user is subscribed to the app.
    
2. Sharing the app is not automatically prompted
   When a Facebook user installs Google News, the program does not automatically prompt the user to share the app with friends. In fact, the only prompt to share a story is located on the top right of each story in the “Share” link, which then gives the option to send the story to a friend or place it on the profile page.

Social networks just don’t seem to be Google’s forté. Orkut is nowhere near as successful as they’d like it to be. And now their official foray into Facebook has floundered at the very beginning. Perhaps a few more big acquisitions might solve that?