Twitter: For the Poor, the Downtrodden
March 4, 2009
If this post is accurate, Twitter is “the poor” person’s email. I read this and thought of the Statue of Liberty. Not sure why. Twitter may be like the arrival from another land who showed up, worked hard, and defined a category of search; specifically, real time search. The story “Google CEO: Twitter A ‘Poor Man’s Email System’ by Dan Frommer strikes me as accurate an eerily authentic. For me the key segment of the article was:
I think the innovation is great. In Google’s case, we have a very successful instant messaging product, and that’s what most people end up using.
If Mr. Frommer had not labeled this as a statement attribute to chief Googler Eric Schmidt, I would have hooked the statement to a Microsoft executive. Several comments:
- I don’t use Twitter but I use http://search.twitter.com. It is useful and it beats Google to the news punch on certain topics by minutes and many times by hours.
- The demographic of Twitter users strikes me as similar to what Google’s user base was prior to the consumerization of search after the Google IPO. In short, Twitter has to be viewed as an important service, and it is an important service attracting high profile people who talk about the Twitter service.
- The assumption that Twitter users will switch to Google’s system is possible, but I think Twitter has some decent legs. Is Twitter perfect? Nope. Is it important? Yep.
Google is starting to sound like Microsoft. Google, like IBM and Microsoft before it, is showing that it has lost its ability to think and act with the agility it possessed just a few short years ago. Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, March 4, 2009
Shift in Online Behavior May Be Evident
March 4, 2009
Enid Burns, ClickZ, wrote “More Time Spent Online Communicating than Getting Entertained” here. I think the data summarized in her article may be harbingers of a shift for some demographic sectors. You can read her article here. She summarizes a report from Netpop Research, so I don’t want to recycle her analysis. The most important point for me was this statement:
Time spent communicating online went from 27 percent of time online in 2006 to 32 percent in 2008. Communication, in the survey, includes activities such as e-mail, instant messaging, posting to blogs, and photo sharing. “We’re really looking to create personal relationships and communicating with people,” said Josh Crandall, managing director of Media-Screen Crandall.
Three observations:
- The Internet technology is absorbing broader human and communication functions. The pace will accelerate and saturation will occur in the foreseeable future in developed nations. Landlines are goners and the new net-based comm modes will ignite considerable change and innovation
- The demographic push on organizations means that social functions of those connected will move to cyberspace. Implications and consequences are difficult to pinpoint. I think the impact will be significant, leaving some traditional online companies behind quickly unless these outfits adapt.
- These services will want to coalesce into what I call a natural monopoly. This too has significant implications for users, regulators, and organizations competing in this emergent ecosystem.
In short, if these data are accurate, the next revolution is underway. Save the Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo T shirts. These items may become collector items if these firms don’t adapt to the traffic speeding down the information superhighway. Think roadkill.
Stephen Arnold, March 4, 2009
Beyond Keyword Search
March 4, 2009
An interesting tie up between LinkedIn and Twitter caught my attention. The story appeared in Search Engine Journal. Dev Basu’s “LinkedIn Teams Up with Twitter through Company Buzz” reported here that the networking service LinkedIn and the micro blogging service Twitter have teamed to offer an enterprise service. Mr. Basu wrote:
Every second thousands of people are sending out messages about topics and companies through twitter. Company Buzz lets you tap into this information flow to find relevant trends and comments about your company. Install the application and instantly see what people are saying.
This is an interesting development. Confusion about the meaning of the term “search” is commonplace. In a telephone conversation yesterday, two people on the conference call used the word “search” to describe what their organization needed. I asked each to define their understanding of the word “search”. One said, “We need to find specific data in our research reports. Not the whole document. Just the pertinent chunk.” The other said, “We need to know who knows what about a specific topic.”
The word “search” is used without much thought given to what different people mean when they throw the buzzword around.
This deal between LinkedIn and Twitter comes close to what quite a few people in the last couple of months have been describing as “search”. Key word retrieval has a place, but users want more. Will LinkedIn and Twitter dominate this market space? Hard to say. I think the deal is one to watch.
Stephen Arnold, March 4, 2009
MapReduce in a Browser: A Glimpse of the Google in 2011
March 4, 2009
I have no idea who is behind Igvita, but I will pay closer attention. You will want to read “Collaborative Map-Reduce in the Browser” here. When I read the write up and scanned the code, I thought, “Yep, this is the angle the Google is taking with Chrome, containers, and a bunch of other Googley patent documents’ “inventions”. I won’t spoil your fun. For me, the most important information in the write up is the diagram. A happy quack to Igvita. Heck, have two quacks.
Stephen Arnold, March 4, 2009
Autonomy IDOL Metrics
March 3, 2009
I was updating my files and noticed that the company had added metrics to its IDOL write up. You can find the information here. Among the information I noted were these points:
- Support over 470 million documents on 64-bit platforms
- Accurately index in excess of 110 GB/hour with guaranteed index commit times (I.e. how fast an asset can be queried after it is indexed) of sub 5ms
- Execute over 2,600 queries per second, with subsecond response times on a single machine with two CPUs when used against 70 million pieces of content, while querying the entire index for relevant information
- Support hundreds of thousands of enterprise users, or millions of web users, accessing hundreds of terabytes of data
- Save storage space with an overall footprint of less than 15% of the original file size.
These metrics are quite amazing. To buttress the argument, the company quotes a number of consultants. Happy customers include Satyam, a firm that has been in a bit of a swamp. The write up about Autonomy IDOL’s security support is equally remarkable. I did a calculation based on public data about Google. You can find that write up here. Notice that Autonomy’s system processes more queries per second than Google’s, if these data are accurate. If you have other metrics about Autonomy or any other search engine, feel free to post these data in the comments section of this Web log.
Stephen Arnold, March 3, 2009
SEO: Good, Bad, Ugly
March 3, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to the February 20, 2009, article by George for Insiders View: Insurance Blow here. “More and More SEO Scams” made the statement:
It seems that there are few whitehat agencies these days. I always advocate some gray hat to stay on top and some blackhat to determine what others are doing. But this is getting ridiculous. The economic climate has pushed people out of the city so instead of brokering toxic investments, they’re now brokering SEO services.
Strong words. I had seen the About.com posting “How to Avoid Being Taken by SEO Scams and Bad SEO Companies” here, but I was not sure how widespread the problem was. Dave Taylor here made this comment in his “SEO Company Promises Top Three Positions: A Scam?”:
Of all the aspects of the Internet, none seems to be so full of con artists and purveyors of dubious businesses than so-called search engine optimization companies. The reason for this is that the basics of SEO (which I’ll call it for simplicity) are simple and can be explained in five minutes. Heck, Google even has a free guide to SEO best practices.
Image source: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_jhSlOGUoB5k/R-1-flxJm0I/AAAAAAAAE40/y1pVNDBfyXE/s400/scam.jpg
Several thoughts:
- As the economy slides toward a financial black hole, some companies hope their Web sites can be a source of sales leads and revenue. Managers turn to their marketing advisors and Web professionals to deliver a return on the Web investment. Pressure increases.
- The dominance of Google in Web search means that a company not in the Google index does not exist in some cases. A company whose product or service does not come up on the first page of Google results may not get much traffic.
- The quality of Web sites (content, coding) becomes increasingly important. But quality takes thought, time, and effort.
When one mixes these three ingredients together, search engine optimization becomes a must. If a company can afford to buy Google AdWords, then the Web site must have compelling landing pages and the technical plumbing to make it easy for the person landing on a link to take the desired action.
A Wrinkle in the Government Procurement Envelope
March 3, 2009
Government agencies buy quite a bit of hardware, storage, and systems to deal with digital information. I avoid Washington, DC. I went to grade school there. I fought traffic on I 270 when I worked in the city for a decade after getting booted from a third tier university. I then did the SDF to BWI run on Southwest for five or six years when I was hooked up with a government-centric services firm. I don’t know that much about procurements, but I do know when what looks like a trivial event could signal a larger shift. You can take a look at the ComputerWorld story “DOJ Accuses EMC of Improper Pricing” here. If I were writing the headline, I would have slapped in an “allegedly”. Keep in mind I am reporting second hand news and offering a comment. I am not sure how accurate or how much oomph this DOJ (Department of Justice) matter has. The thrust of the story is that DOJ is sniffing into payments and tie ups. Now most folks in Harrods Creek, Kentucky don’t pay much attention to the nuances of Federal acquisition regulations. Let’s assume that this is little more than a clerical error. But in my opinion this single matter signals a tougher line on how companies that manufacture or create hardware and software deal with the government. Some organizations sell direct to the government and others take the lead and turn it over to partners. The relationships among the manufacturers and the partners and the government is a wonderland of interesting activities. Why is this important? Search vendors operate in different ways and some systems trigger significant hardware acquisitions. With a massive Federal deficit, I wonder, “Is this single alleged action a harbinger of closer scrutiny of some very high profile companies’ business dealings?” My hunch is, “Yep.” Some companies will want to tidy their business processes. When rocks get flipped over, some interesting things can be spotted. One major search vendor does not sell directly to the US government. The vendor deals through partners. Some partners are loved more than others. My thought is that if I were investigating these tie ups, I would prefer to see partners treated in an equitable way with documentation that backs up the compensation, limits, and responsibilities with regard to the US government and the source of the hardware or software. If the system is “informal”, I would dig a little deeper to make sure that US government procurement guidelines were followed to the letter. Just my opinion. I might come out of retirement to do some of the old time procurement fact finding when spring comes.
Stephen Arnold
Mysteries of Online 9: Time
March 3, 2009
Electronic information has an interesting property: time distortion. The distortion has a significant effect on how users of electronic information participate in various knowledge processes. Information carries humans along much as a stream whisks a twig in the direction of the flow. Information, unlike water, moves in multiple directions, often colliding, sometimes reinforcing, and at others in paradoxical ways that leave a knowledge worked dazed, confused, and conflicted. The analogy of information as a tidal wave connotes only a partial truth. Waves come and go. Information flow for many people and systems is constant. Calm is tough to locate.
Vector fields. Source: http://www.theverymany.net/uploaded_images/070110_VectorField_test012_a-789439.jpg
In the good old days of cuneiform tablets, writing down the amount of wheat Eknar owed the king required specific steps. First, you had to have access to suitable clay, water, and a clay kneading specialist. Second, you needed to have a stylus of wood, bone, or maybe the fibula of an enemy removed in a timely manner. Third, you had to have your data ducks in a row. Dallying meant that the clay tablet would harden and make life more miserable than it already was. Once the document was created, the sun or kiln had to cooperate. Once the clay tablet was firm enough to handle without deleting a mark for a specified amount of wheat, the tablet was stacked in a pile inside a hut. Forth, the access the information, the knowledge worker had to locate the correct hut, find the right pile, and then inspect the tablets without breaking one, a potentially bad move if the king had a short temper or needed money for a war or a new wife.
In the scriptorium in the 9th century, information flow wasn’t much better. The clay tablets had been replaced with organic materials like plant matter or for really important documents, the scraped skin of sheep. Keep in mind that other animals were used. Yep, human skin worked too. Again time intensive processes were required to create the material on which a person would copy or scribe information. The cost of the materials made it possible to get patrons to spit out additional money to illustrate or illuminate the pages. Literacy was not widespread in the 9th century and there were a number of incentives to get sufficient person power to convert foul papers to fair copies and then to compendia. Not just anyone could afford a book. Buying a book or similar document did not mean the owner could read. The time required to produce hand copies was somewhat better than the clay tablet method or the chiseled inscriptions or brass castings used by various monarchs.
Yep, I will have it done in 11 months, our special rush service.
With the invention of printing in Europe, the world rediscovered what the Chinese had known for 800, maybe a thousand years. No matter. The time required to create information remained the same. What changed was that once a master set of printing plates had been created. A printer with enough capital to buy paper (cheaper than the skin and more long lasting than untreated plant fiber and less ink hungry than linen based materials) could manufacture multiple copies of a manuscript. The out of work scribes had to find a new future, but the impact of printing was significant. Everyone knows about the benefits of literacy, books, and knowledge. What’s overlooked is that the existence of books altered the time required to move information from point A to point B. Once time barriers fell, distance compressed as well. The world became smaller if one were educated. Ideas migrated. Information moved around and had impact, which I discussed in another Mysteries of Online essay. Revolutions followed after a couple hundred years, but the mindless history classes usually ignore the impact of information on time.
If we flash forward to the telegraph, time accelerated. Information no longer required a horse back ride, walk, or train ride from New York to Baltimore to close a real estate transaction. Once the new fangled electricity fell in love with information, the speed of information increased with each new innovation. In fact, more change in information speed has occurred since the telegraph than in previous human history. The telephone gave birth to the modem. The modem morphed into a wireless USB 727 device along with other gizmos that make possible real time information creation and distribution.
Time Earns Money
I dug out notes I made to myself sometime in the 1982 – 1983 time period. The implications of time and electronic information caught my attention for one reason. I noted that the revenue derived from a database with weekly updates was roughly 30 percent greater than information derived from the same database on a monthly update cycle. So, four updates yielded a $1.30, not $1.00. I wrote down, “Daily updates will generate an equal or greater increase.” I did not believe that the increase was infinite. The rough math I did 25 years ago suggested that with daily updates the database would yield about 1.6 percent more revenue than the same database with a monthly update cycle. In 1982 it was difficult to update a commercial database more than once a day. The cost of data transmission and service charges would gobble up the extra money, leaving none for my bonus.
In the financial information world, speed and churn are mutually reinforcing. New information makes it possible to generate commissions.
Time, therefore, not only accelerated the flow of information. Time could accelerate earnings from online information. Simply by u9pdating a database, the database would generate more money. Update the database less frequently, the database would generate less money. Time had value to the users.
I found this an interesting learning, and I jotted it down in my notebook. Each of the commercial database in which I played a role were designed for daily updates and later multiple updates throughout the day. To this day, the Web log in which this old information appears is updated on a daily basis and several times a week, it is updated multiple times during the day. Each update carries and explicit time stamp. This is not for you, gentle and patient reader. The time stamp is for me. I want to know when I had an idea. Time marks are important as the speed of information increases.
Implications
The implications of my probably third-hand insight included:
- The speed up in dissemination means that information impact is broader, wider, and deeper with each acceleration.
- Going faster translates to value for some users who are willing and eager to pay for speed. The idea is that knowing something (anything) first is an advantage.
- Fast is not enough. Customers addicted to information speed want to know what’s coming. The inclusion of predictive data adds another layer of value to online services.
- Individuals who understand the value of information speed have a difficult time understanding why more online systems and services cannot deliver what is needed; that is, data about what will happen with a probability attached to the prediction. Knowing that something has a 70 chance of taking place is useful in information sensitive contexts.
Let me close with one example of the problem speed presents. The Federal government has a number of specialized information systems for law enforcement and criminal justice professionals. These systems have some powerful, albeit complex, functions. The problem is that when a violation or crime occurs, the law enforcement professionals have to act quickly. The longer the reaction time, the greater the chance that the bad egg will tougher to apprehend increases. Delay is harmful. The systems, however, require that an individual enter a query, retrieve information, process it and then use another two or three systems in order to get the reasonably complete picture of the available information related to the matter under investigation.
The systems have a bottleneck. The human. Law enforcement personnel, on the other hand, have to move quickly. As a result, the fancy online systems operate in one time environment and the law enforcement professionals operate in another. The opportunity to create systems that bring both time universes together is significant. Giving a law enforcement team mobile comms for real time talk is good, but without the same speedy and fluid access to the data in the larger information systems, the time problem becomes a barrier.
Opportunity in online and search, therefore, is significant. Vendors who pitch another fancy search algorithm are missing the train in law enforcement, financial services, competitive intelligence, and medical research. Going fast is no longer a way to add value. Merging different time frameworks is a more interesting area to me.
Stephen Arnold, February 26, 2009
Microsoft Trumps Google, Dismisses Its Enterprise Services
March 2, 2009
Microsoft seems to be returning to its glory days as vanquisher of the weak and destroyer of the newcomers. Phil Wainewright wrote “Microsoft Pumps Cloud, Trumps Google with GSK.” I must admit the GSK threw me. It is the insiders way to refer to Glaxo SmithKline, a pharmaceutical giant. The comment that stuck in my beak was:
Not only that. Ron Markezich, corporate VP of Microsoft Online Services, was scathing of Google’s efforts to make headway in the enterprise market. “Google we really do not feel is ready for the enterprise,” he said in a call briefing bloggers on the announcement an hour ago. “They’re offering three nines SLA and they’ve missed three of the last six months,” he added, referring to last week’s Gmail outage and earlier incidents. In a sideswipe at Google’s offer of a 15-day credit for last week’s outage, he went on to add that Microsoft maintains its services at four-nines availability, while backing up its three-nines SLA with financial penalties: “We don’t just give service credits, we give hard dollars if we miss an SLA.” [Emphasis added]
My take on this announcement includes these thoughts:
- Looks like each Google announcement will trigger an aggressive response from Microsoft
- Microsoft is sending a signal to Google and probably to any other company that it intends to protect its customer base. Good cheer and happiness may not be part of the response
- Google must have landed a kaisho (open hand strike). Microsoft’s statement (cited above) suggests to me that Google is not an annoyance; Google is a threat.
More from the battle front as reports arrive.
Stephen Arnold, March 2, 2009
YAGG Update: PageRank Tweak or Bug
March 2, 2009
If you are mesmerized by things Google, you will want to navigate to Search Engine Roundtable and read “Google March 2009 PageRank Update or Glitch?” here. The article provides links to a couple of posts that identify what may be a potential glitch or goof as in “yet another Google goof” or YAGG. I know the acronym annoys Alex, a potential Googlephile. The article quotes a Googler who uses the phrase “some kind of glitch”, which may be old news if you were bitten by the Gfail issue a few days ago.
Stephen Arnold, March 2, 2009
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