Zuckerberg head for the iceberg

“All that bubbly good feeling that erupted through the investment markets as Zuckerberg rang the bell on Wall Street on Friday lasted as long as mid-afternoon. The big institutional investors stepped in to make sure that the stock price didn’t actually fall below the opening trade of $38 per share, costing them money just to save face.”

I wrote that sentence on Friday night, and in the days since (while this post has been in draft) the price has continued to drift down – currently touching $31 a share as I write now.

I’ve said before that the dotcom bubble is still here but FB’s feeble open day showing on the NASDAQ perhaps indicates that investors are maybe wiser than I give them credit for. Why do I think Facebook is a fail?

Taking Myspace as a template for Facebook is maybe a bit facile. The actual numbers for Facebook are phenomenal in direct comparison:

Regardless of size, there are some interesting comparisons.

For all the interest, the hundreds of millions of active users and an unparalleled depth of profiling information, FB have still not found a way to make realy money from their users. Google’s business model had money-making baked into it from the start. While their recent attempts to diversify into the social sphere have been dismal, the core operation of Google continues to print cash for the company at insanely profitable levels. Why? Because their model is, uniquely, based around intent.

A core component of Facebook’s money comes from third parties such as Zynga – whose games often encourage people to buy “Facebook credits” to access feature sets unavailable to players of the otherwise free games they offer. How are they doing through their use of the Facebook platform? Well over the first quarter of 2012, they posted a cool $85,000,000 in losses.

It’s obviously not unknown for companies in the tech sector to take a long time to reach profitability, but permissable timescales aren’t what they were. Back in the 00s with lax financial markets and phantom growth from hedge funds and CDSs swilling about, people were happy to punt on tech as a long term bet. In today’s environment of a shaky economic backdrop and advertisers looking for direct ROI from their marketing, FB as an advertising channel just doesn’t cut the mustard.

While it might be suitable for people who can afford to punt on demographics FB is an option (just as advertising during Coronation Street is) it just isn’t a viable route to market for most businesses. Partly this is because of FB’s woeful advertising. Whether it is due to the FB platform itself, or incompetent advertisers I can’t recall ever seeing an ad I wanted to click. Sorting this out has to now be Zuck’s top priority, and the only conclusion is that the user experience will start to suffer. The truth is (as GM pointed out) that a free FB page for a business is as good a channel – in fact probably better than – the advertising that FB is banking on.

So Zuckerberg, for all his Harvard smarts, is in a stupid place.

Now Facebook is half publicly owned, the pressure will start to grow on Zuck to produce the goods, money-wise. After Google floated, the pressure on them grew to do “other stuff”, which has led them into terrible decisions like Google+, while knocking on the head the science-y fun stuff they used to do. Next in line: Twitter – who surely will face pressure to float from investors looking for a return.

Twitter Debuts in Google+

Logged into Google+ today and found a new button alongside Home, Profile, Explore etc. This button is for Twitter and lets you add your Twitter stream so you can check it from within Google+.

Here’s an exciting screenshot.

What else do you notice? Yep – ads.

Interestingly, it seems that these ads are nothing to do with Google themselves. They are not served by AdSense or AdWords or anything else normally associated with Google, but rather a company called AutoTweeting – one of these companies that is there to serve people looking to automate the running and promotion of their Twitter accounts.

I find this all very odd, and further evidence that Google has no clear vision of what Google+ is supposed to do within the broader framework of the internet. If you could include Twitter feeds directly into your timeline then it could make some sort of sense. As it is, it is thrown in on a separate page within your Google+ account.

Presumably Google have noticed that people spend more time on Twitter than they do on Google+ and so this is a kind come-hither flirtation with Twitter users. But the implementation is just really odd. I can view my Twitter stream in Google+, but I don’t know why I would when I’ve got Twitter open in another tab like most people in the universe.

I was initially sceptical of the value of Google+. While I’ve thawed slightly towards it as it has been redesigned, it essentially feels deader and deader every time I log in. Things like this smack of poorly-executed desperation.

The other main thing Google seem to be trying to do is to use SEOs to market Google+. Links have been hit hard over the last week, and Google continue to expound the importance of activity on Google+ in every statement (and every time you speak directly to someone at Google). This is both clumsy and manipulative.

Social networks arise from the ground up because people like them, not because there’s some SEO benefit to the activity. Over the years, fads like directories and “social bookmarking” have been and gone because while there was residual SEO benefit to doing them, it was also like operating in dead space peopled by SEOs sockpuppets and automated tools. There can hardly have been a real, legitimate user of Mr Wong or Best Of The Web, just as today there are probably few real, legitimate ‘likes’ on Google+ (or Google+1, although the distinction gets less clear every day). Just a bunch of SEOs tinkering to see if they can get a kick in the SERPs by creating accounts to +1 things.

Google needs to develop a clear vision of what Google+ is supposed to offer people beyond “me too” or it will fail. That we’re still saying this 6 months after the launch is fairly damning of the marketing and ultimately, you have to presume, the very premise of the service.

 

London Mayoral Elections: Detecting BBC Bias through Google?

I don’t foray into politics on this blog, but nonetheless you can find some interesting stats using Google around the issue.

The BBC’s charter instructs it to maintain a fair balance in political reporting through the news – giving a proportional share of editorial space and coverage to all interested parties. Famously, the BNP’s performance during the late 2000s led to appearances on Question Time for Nick Griffin as part of this remit to even-handedness.

But lingering suspicions about the corporation’s bias remain. Rare is a week that passes without some politician or other averring that the BBC shows bias against his or her side of a debate. But thanks to Google, it’s possible to do some high-level stats to test the notion of balance. A good example is the election for London Mayor* – now just days away.

Current polls for the London Mayoral elections are quite revealing. The major parties – Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems are naturally standing candidates – as  well as The Green Party, UKIP, BNP and a number of independents and small parties.

Firstly, bear in mind that by current polling figures, UKIP is expected to poll around 3% of the vote  -  around exactly that of the Greens.

So you’d expect that the BBC would be giving coverage to these parties more or less equally, right? I did some snuffling around using Google and found the following facts.

• Green Party candidate Jenny Jones received 280 mentions on the BBC website between 1st January and 30th April.
• Independent candidate Siobhan Benita received 106 mentions on the BBC website in the same timespan
• BNP candidate Carlos Cortigila received 63 mentions on the BBC website in the same timespan.
• UKIP candidate Lawrence Webb received just 58 mentions on the BBC website in the same timespan

Of the main candidates, the results are more evenly split but still indicate some imbalances

• Conservatives: Boris Johnson (884 mentions)
• Labour: Ken Livingstone (440 mentions)
• Liberal Democrats: Brian Paddick (293 mentions)

As the incumbent, it is difficult to separate election-related stories for Boris Johnson from stories that involve him in his role as mayor – Google treats “mayor” and “mayoral” as equivalents. It is likely that the number of mentions he has received in the specific context of the election is actually fairly similar to that of Livingstone, but filtering signal from noise isn’t easily done.

Despite this, some interesting facts leap out.

• Brian Paddick receives 66% of the number of mentions of Ken Livingstone does, despite only 8% of polled Londoners declaring their intention to vote for the Lib Dem compared to 41% for Livingstone.
• Jenny Jones is given almost as much coverage as as Paddick, despite only 3% of voters saying they will vote Green.
• Siobhan Benita receives fewer mentions than Jones, despite being at least equal to her in the polls
• The BNP received more coverage than UKIP despite only polling at only 1% in contrast to 3% for UKIP
• UKIP receive the least coverage of the ‘major’ parties (and by some margin) despite polling more highly than either the Greens, Independents or BNP.

Of course, this is all just fun and games but I think it’s possible to construct a view of how the BBC is covering the London Mayoral elections and it’s not one that the BBC should be proud of. The Liberal Democrats receive far more coverage than their likely share of the vote would suggest they should- and the paucity of coverage given to UKIP is pretty damning. That is nothing compared the favour shown to the Greens, who receive almost as much coverage as the Liberal Democrats, despite their even smaller share of the vote.

It must be allowed that the BBC disproportionately favours the Greens and the Liberal Democrats and almost ignores UKIP altogether, despite the backdrop of falling interest in green issues and increasing concern over the future of the EU.

*As I’m not a Londoner, and won’t be voting, none of this matters to me except in the abstract matter of how the election is being covered.

How Bad is the Google Penguin Update?

Wow. As I averred the other day, I’m aware of some awful SERPs for some particular keywords (a few people now have picked up on the fact that Viagra.com doesn’t rank for ‘viagra’, which is borderline batshit insane).

As you may or may not know, I’m currently working at Trusted Dealers, with an interest in the used car market. It’s a tough market, because there are a bunch of brands who, as you’d expect, are pretty much grandfathered in at the top of the rankings for pretty much everything: Autotrader, Exchange and Mart, and Motors.co.uk, followed by a raft of big national names in motor retail – including manfacturers, franchised dealers and some very good affiliates.

Penguin didn’t leave much of a ripple in the market (which is part of the reason I have half an inkling that it was targeted at particular verticals) but even so, here’s a site that’s suddenly ranking on page 2 in the UK for “second hand cars”, which is a reasonably competitive term in this vertical.

Seriously, Google? A peek at some of the referring domains hardly suggests someone putting in the hard work at the coal face of link building either.

There’s a few other sites that have crept into the first couple of pages that really have no business being there – plastered in AdSense or linking to this kind of shit – which is some kind of awful low-rent affiliate program, I guess:

So while the industry as a whole is relatively untouched, there’s definitely a chill around the nether regions.

So what to make of it? It’s war on the SEO industry – or at least the linkbuilding part of it. In a way, that’s the logical conclusion of what Google has been moving towards over the last few years: reward brands. Reward social signals. Punish content farms. Go after spun content and made-for-AdSense sites.

Dave Naylor probably had it right a few days ago: Google have decided to start dropping the hammer, and are prepared to countenance compromising the quality of the SERPs in the short term in the name of what they perceive to be a greater good.

So what does this tell us about the future? Is not link building the new link building? Will you have to be a brand? Should you work on legit social signals. Probably yes, but if that’s news to you, you’ve been asleep too long even before this update.

Google “Webspam” Update

At places as diverse as Traffic Planet, Webmaster World and Search Engine Land there’s a hell of a lot of chatter about Google’s most recent update – almost all of it despairing cries of woe from webmasters who’ve seen their sites trashed overnight in the SERPs.

As ever, there’s a lot of rune-reading going on, and the guys who are doing well out of the update will be quietly chortling to themselves  rather than transmitting their woes on forums.

None of this is new – you can search back in time to find similar threads that followed pretty much every significant Google update ever.

That being said, I still follow some rankings in some verticals in which I used to work (no current commercial interest to me) and I can see what they’re saying – with some major slaps being handed out to what are/were legitimate sites. On the other hand, sites that were de-indexed/banned a fortnight ago are suddenly sitting pretty at the number 2 slot for their money term.

I’ve followed ‘viagra’ results for a long time as a marker for what Google is rewarding, this being a notoriously rich hunting ground for short term spammers). It has to be said that the UK SERP for ‘viagra’ for example, suddenly looks terrible – with any number of horrible, dated, non-authority sites making up much of the top 10. That suggests a big follow on from the link/blog network clear up from a couple of weeks ago and the Webmaster Tools warnings that came shortly afterwards.

Google misstep? Perhaps. They closely monitor user interaction with the SERPs and if results have got ‘worse’ for users they can pretty quickly be rolled back. Anyone who’s followed SEO for long enough will know that this happens.

My feeling is (given the nature of the SERPs I’ve been looking at and Google’s own statement that this will affect 3% of all searches) is that this is a vertical-specific slap – and probably targeted at affiliates in those markets.

More thoughts tomorrow when the dust has started to settle.

Sergey Brin on the Internet: He Has a Point, You Know

Google founder Sergey Brin has some interesting thoughts to share in his interview with the Gaurdian today. His primacy concern is around the future of what he calls ‘the open internet.’

By this, he means the internet as it was originally conceived and built: a series of independent websites which provided information and were accessible to all. It is this model, as he notes, that allowed for Google to build a searchable index of content.

He sees the threat to that model coming from a variety of places. On the one hand you have companies such as Apple and Facebook who are “walled gardens”, hosting information either in applications or behind logins through which web crawlers such as Google can’t go and therefore can’t index. On the other hand, governments are increasingly trying to use the internet as a means to track their citizens and the things that they are doing. He cites the usual suspects like Iran and China, but under recent regulation or proposed legislation he could as well have added the US and UK to that list.

In these cases he has a point. In the case of Government

As for the “open internet” he espouses? That is a little thornier. Anyone has the ability to deny Google (or any search engine) access to their site with the addition of a tiny text file and a couple of lines of instructions. This is part of the long standing convention of the internet and its relationship with privacy: you may wish to publish things and share only with a small number of people for a huge number of reasons.

Secondly, some people would prefer you to pay for their content. And why not? Few people would write and produce a novel and give it away for nothing (as ever, there are outliers) – most would expect to get paid. Rupert Murdoch may or not be foolish for placing The Times behind a paywall, but it is his right as a publisher to demand payment for what his organisation has produced.

Finally, there is an element of privacy. A platform such as Facebook does offer you control over your privacy to some degree. Facebook employees and their software can mine the shit of everything I’ve ever done for sure, but in terms of the lay public, I’ve got my privacy settings maxed out so that only people I’m happy to can see what I’m doing, who I’m married to, where I live and so on. Again, for many reasons I may not want that information out there on Google where it can’t be controlled.

This is before we get even get to the huge parts of the internet which operate below the horizon and off the official grid altogether, such as Silk Road (you’ll need TOR).

So the “open internet” has never been all-encompassing. It may have been part of the founding principles of the internet, but in truth – like all ideals – it was unenforceable and its erosion inevitable.

Of course, Brin has a dog in this fight, which creeps out in some of his comments: ”There’s a lot to be lost. For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can’t search it.”

By this, he means that Google can’t search it and therefore can’t monetise it.

In fact, many apps are in fact highly specialised search engines in themselves. The Booking.com app is, as I have opined before, an existential threat to Google’s search model in the hotel space. Having used it several times, the idea of going back to Google to search for “hotels in leeds” seems suddenly alien to me. The same is true for movie reviews: I wouldn’t dream of searching Google for movie reviews now I have the IMDB app. The same is true for tide times, booking a train ticket or any number of mundane tasks for which Google was once the default port of call.

Despite all this strategic weakness that Brin has revealed about Google, he also has a point. The internet was supposed to free information from jealous gatekeepers – the final step of the transmission of information from the elites to the masses that began with the printing press. In many ways it still is. The only question is: will you use Google to find that information?

The answer is not as clear now as it was 5 years ago.

New Google+ Pages Design

I’m no fan of Google+ but the new look they’ve just rolled out for pages is infinitely superior. In fact, it’s quite attractive – this is what Weird Island’s Google+ Page now looks like.

The obvious things that leaps out is the Facebook-like logo/strap treatment. Actually, I think it’s better than the Facebook layout in that regard, as Facebook’s banner images are just too damn big and unwieldy and your actual profile image too small and pokey, so hats off to the G+ designers for this.

It’s interesting to note how quickly the look has evolved. Following the ground-up reskinning of Google’s Products last year, I feared that Google was making a mis-step in aiming for the corporate vibe. This redesign of Google+ suggests that they’re actually thinking harder about how to beat Facebook than I gave them credit for.