Category Archives: Web 2.0

When too much is not enough and a little is just right. Google > Yahoo

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Today a very sharp friend said that even though he uses Yahoo mail and some of their default screen navigation, he always uses Google to search. Why? Because Google is not cluttered and makes it very easy to leave Google to visit external sites. Yahoo, especially Yahoo News, he felt, tries to keep the user at Yahoo too aggressively.

A similar point about the ease of navigating to external sites was recently made by Mike Arrington when talking about Web 2.0, noting that it’s important to let folks feel they can easily leave the site for other web locations if you want return visits and credibility.

Relevancy, conspicuously, was not the concern of my friend. He just didn’t like the Yahoo search user experience. I agree and realize that for me it’s the fact that with Google I can get and visually scan *a lot more results* much faster than with normal Yahoo search. Like my friend it’s not the relevancy as much as the navigation that keeps me at Google despite the fact I own Yahoo (well, actually I own about one two-millionth of Yahoo). I don’t trust either engine to give me great results, but I know that I’ll usually find what I need somewhere in the first few pages of sites. Google makes it easier to preview a lot of sites fast.

I have stronger negative feelings about most of the travel sites. Online Travel 1.0 is a nightmarish blend of booking screens, pitches for Hawaii and cruise packages, and tourism sites all trying to convince you they are the only destination both offline and online.

It’s particulary frustrating when sites expect me to learn their navigation and nomenclature just to use their damn site, especially if I’m trying to preview dozens of websites for a trip! Most of the worst offenders are overproduced by expensive print media firms using the pretense they know about “online marketing”. In fact most big firms have about as much web savvy as an inebriated, obnoxious, and arrogant tourist and appear to be designing the sites for …..themselves.

Like most users I’d prefer a Craigslist format so I can easily jump to the information I need rather than wading through popups, pictures, video, and other nonsense when I’m trying to plan a trip. With some exceptions the mantra “just the facts please” would serve online travel promotion better than the foolish extravagances that confuse users and also search engines which struggle to find meaning in garrish flash and pages filled with 100k high resolution photos.

What will Travel sites look like as Web 2.0 shakes out? I’m optimistic that they’ll be much, much better, and hoping to figure out how before it’s obvious to everybody.

SearchMob, like DIGG, is struggling to avoid mob rule.

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One of my favorite blogs is John Battelle’s Searchblog. John provides the best and the most intelligent analysis and discussion focusing on the search industry.

So, when John (and his readers) started experimenting with a digg-like reader-controlled “SearchMob” run using the very clever Pligg community software to provide reviews and links to search related news and articles I was very optimistic. In fact I quickly became one of the top submitters and voters at SearchMob.

Although I write a lot about search issues I have avoided posting my own articles there. I don’t think there’s a problem posting a few of your own pieces, but the system becomes fairly useless if the bulk of activity is self-promotional. This appears to be a problem at SearchMob now.

Of the “top stories” listed this afternoon it appears that every single one was posted by the author. It also appears that some of these authors have several SearchMob accounts so they can vote for their own stories which pushes them to the top.

There are some easy spoofs of the current system, which does not require a log in to vote, that make it easy to push your own articles to the top of the heap, and I fear this is driving the top stories rather than reader interest. This also keeps “legitimate” stories from appearing where they can get more votes, further undermining the integrity of the system.

Solutions need to be largely spoof proof, especially in a reader community filled with SEO specialists. I think requiring complete contact information for anybody posting articles might help to make abuses easier to track. Also it may be necessary for the community to start hassling those who are using this too opportunistically via the discussion feature, though this does not seem to be the intended use of “discussion”.

Here are the top 4 stories now, all appear to have been submitted by the … author and most have questionable vote totals:

An Investment Approach to Marketing
http://googlejet.blogspot.com

Mobile Sites for Information
http://www.resourceshelf.com

A social news service for free advertising
http://targetyournews.com

Google Checkout Now Working with Froogle
http://www.oneparkavenuereality.com

Google Gadgetry and Yahoo Hackery. Welcome to the new WorldWideWebery

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It’s great to see Adam Sah’s Google Gadgetry project move ahead with today’s announcement that Gadgets can be created to work on any website.    Adam was at both Mashup Camp 1 and Mashup Camp 2 and it was neat to see how a little project had become a big project over a period of only 4 months.    It’s likely now to become a gigantic project as Yahoo, Google, and MSN vie to maximize their online presence on, within, and interacting with other websites.

This announcement suggests to me even more strongly that the browser and desktop are going to move in the direction of becoming a place populated by many different gadgets – basically mini applications – and users will organize their offline and online experience using them.

This bodes significant changes in our typical website model as people slice and dice their sites and gadgets in the coming web 2.0 world where information flows freely and according to the needs, demands, the stupid and the smart whims of the users.

Carnival of Marketing October 8th

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Carnival of Marketing

The rumors are true. The Carnival of Marketing started by Noah during a flash of brilliant inspiration moves here on October 8th and October 15th. Thanks to the many who’ve sent in articles already. I’ll pick the seven “winners” soon and post them and links to their sites on October 8th. Send your best marketing article or links to good marketing articles to jhunkins@gmail.com.

Yahoo Hack Day – you should have been there! I should have been there!

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Yahoo’s Hack Day was so successful I have yet to read anything but positive reports – in fact most are downright glowing with enthusiasm for this mashup fest down at the Yahoo mother ship in Sunnyvale. I wish I could trade my lackluster experience at this year’s Google Party for a back-in-time ticket to Yahoo’s Hack Day.

Gordon over at GetLucky.net, a Yahoo employee, provides what seems to me several key insights about Hack day, but more imporantly about why Yahoo, not Google, is the company to watch.

Of course, until Yahoo Panama gets their *ASS IN GEAR* with a high quality contextual advertising paradigm, Wall street will continue to think that they suck ….

Gordon on Hack Day:
… the stuff that we do better than our competitors may have a chance to shine in the spotlight, in front of the audience that matters most. Much of the mindshare that Google has captured through applications like the GMaps API, etc. has been held because of the nature of convenience. Once a coder builds an application on top of a specific interface, switching to another API requires some real motivation…

emphasis belongs to me, the insights belong to Gordon though I’ve written about this stuff several times as well. Yahoo could wind up “owning” 2.0., which is a cool type of ownership where the big guy facilitates millions of long tail, little guy developments and transactions and publishing enterprises. The big guy shares *most* of the revenue with the little guys but the volume creates huge wealth for the big companies and modest wealth for the smaller ones. Users are rewarded with better content, rich interactive experiences, noninvasive advertising, and encyclopedic information. When 2.0 is done right everybody plays, everybody wins.

Kawasaki on new trends in marketing

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Here is a nice summary of insights from Guy Kawasaki, clever marketing guru, about what young people are doing online and on phone.    Supports the ideas that the future is highly mobile and must be highly “permission based” in it’s marketing.

Won’t it be interesting if the new age of marketing becomes a lot like 1800 style marketing?   There, you’d go to the hardware store or the grocery and ask the retailer to hand you things.    In the new age this is becoming a trip to trusted niche sites (or Costco.com and Wal-Mart?) for information and shopping and then asking the computer to fetch stuff for you and add to your electronic shopping cart.

Yahoo Hack Day is Rocking!

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Yahoo Hack Day is already shaping up to be a fantastic event. I really hate to miss this developer campout down in Sunnyvale that is featuring hands-on developer classes today, a yet-to-be-named big time entertainer tonight, and a hack contest tomorrow.   Folks are camping at the heavily Wi-Fi armed Yahoo campus in rooms and the lawn.   Cool.

Some resources for those of us who missed this are over at Jeremy’s blog.

Yahoo! …. I finally bought the company….well…I bought a little piece of Yahoo!.

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I’ve been watching Yahoo the company and Yahoo the stock for over a year, and finally put my money where my mouth is and picked up 600 shares at 25.31

I feel the stock is really undervalued due to what should soon be a huge wash of new cash that Yahoo will get next spring from the launch of the publisher network to a wider audience.    This is Yahoo’s version of Google’s adsense which nets Google about 43% of their revenues and growing.     This is the long tail money and I think the smart money says the long tail money will eventually be the big money.   In the old days I would have thought “Wall Streeters MUST understand this process and thus the price MUST already reflect this”, but after the internet stock meltdown it was clear that Wall Street did not understand many aspects of the online economy and didn’t care about them much anyway.

Also important to my decision was that Yahoo’s been doing the best 2.0 stuff for some time.    For example today’s Yahoo Hack Day, a special event open to developers from all over, is a brilliant example of how Yahoo! wants to take back their old reputation as the coolest company and may just do it.

They deserve to be treated much better, both by online commenters and by Wall Street, because Yahoo!, far more than Google or MSN, is coming up with both simple and complex developer tools to facilitate the new internet, which is shaping up to be a monstrous, layered, interconnected, cross referenced and community-fied ocean of information where distinctions between websites and even businesses are broken down along the lines of what people need to learn and need to do.    That’s cool.

Action Buy
Symbol YHOO
Description YAHOO INC
Quantity 600
Order Type Market

The Ghost in the Machine … is a Human Being!

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Last week or so Matt was asking what new gadgets we’d see in the future. Some suggested Star Trek style devices, but I think they (and Star Trek) are wrong to suggest that we’ll continue with our current model of humans using separate function, hand-held devices. Rather we’ll soon see human integration with devices in ways analogous to the evolution from spectacle to contact lens to corneal implant. When that corneal implant can go online you can sign me up for one whether I need it or not.
Although many people cringe at the idea that we’d implant chips in ourselves and connect them to our brains they are ignoring the logical progression of biology and technology. The recent invention of a bionic arm controlled by nerve feedback is only the beginning.

Seems to me that we want to *completely* erase the physical distinction between gadgets – especially phones and computers – and ourselves. In fact I think most sci -fi treatments really miss this as an inevitability of our technologically innovative future lifestyle.

I’m Hoping to see more human/gadget interfaces so we can directly access computerized info with our non-computerized brains. This would really enhance creativity, and I’d even suggest we’ll see a lot of spin off benefits.

For example if world leaders can instantly access extensive, encyclopedic treatment of history, languages, and other topics their ability to make wise decisions will be elevated.

Well, maybe that’s too optimistic.

John Battelle’s Search Mob. Mob Rules. Rules for the Mob. Search Mobsters?

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John has launched “SearchMob”, a Digg-like story submission and review community thing where users send stories they find which are reviewed by others to attain popularily. He asked for feedback and I suggested this:

I’m somewhat confused by the voting both in terms of low numbers but also because the articles with many votes usually show only 2 or 3 names under the discussion list.

Without trying to be too provocative here I’ve wondered if the articles with high votes are simply folks who are voting for their own articles – or asking others to vote – from different machines. In this environment it’s easy to spoof interest and attain the top spot.

Based on limited data I’m now thinking that most of the people come here for John Battelle insights (ie the JB filter) and simply getting articles by other users (ie the JB Search community filter) is not stirring much interest.

Therefore instead of Searchmob, John, you need to become a Search Cult leader and hole up in a heavily armed Palo Alto Coffee Shop with your search apostles while the FBI files motions to get YOUR database of intentions.