Goggle: Now FUBAR Allegation. Yowza.
January 28, 2012
The goose is chilling. The docs have patched a webbed foot so there is some time to catch up on reading. I zipped through “Google is FUBAR” and realized that the poobahs, failed webmasters, former middle school teachers have changed. I think that the Google is pretty much the same post-2006 Google that I know and love. The FUBAR allegation underscores that the idealists and seekers of a Google campus visit are beginning to perceive Google differently.
Here’s the passage I noted:
Why is Google FUBAR, then? Because it is biting the hand that feeds it. Indexed search might have peaked, but it’s still huge, and still propelled Google to over $10 billion in revenue this past quarter. To become Facebook, Google must forsake almost everything that brought it success in the first place. It must irreparably alter its fleet of successful web properties to become more Facebooky. It must alienate users with weird, ungooglesque features. It must force Chrome and Google+ down the throats of users who are simply looking for a brilliant search engine.
My question: “What is causing the former cheerleaders to dress up like Goths and gnaw on the team?” Google is Google to me. I am happy with that. The Goths seem to have the green light for criticism which may be unwarranted.
Stephen E Arnold, January 28, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
TwitWipe Allows Room for Regret
January 25, 2012
The introduction of Facebook Timeline has made quite a few users uncomfortable. Users of such social media outlets, especially the public forum Twitter, may have second thoughts about postings and revealing their entire past.
A service created in 2009 by Aalaap Ghag is becoming popular with Twitter users. The service, TwitWipe, allows users to easily erase all of their previously posted Twitter messages. The article on Mashable, “TwitWipe Gives You a Fresh Start by Deleting All Your Tweets” tells us more:
Do you feel like everything you’ve done for the last few years is recorded by Twitter’s eternal digital record? A new service, TwitWipe, can get rid of all your carefully crafted (and less carefully crafted) 140-character messages Rather than creating a new account, TwitWipe allows you to keep all of your followers, favorited tweets and people you’re following.
However, if you’re interested, you better hurry. This may be disabled soon. Users should also be aware that all Tweets in the public Twitter timeline are recorded in the Library of Congress, anyway. Hurry. We have heard that there are moves afoot to prevent social content from deletion. Best bet? Don’t post on social media. How’s that sound, you 900 million social media users?
Andrea Hayden, January 25, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
LinkedIn and IndexTank: Open Source Flag Waving
January 23, 2012
According to the GigaOM article “LinkedIn Open Sources Code From IndexTank Acquisition” the purchase of the company is a win-win for LinkedIn and the open source community. “LinkedIn announced that the technology behind IndexTank, the search engine startup it acquired back in October, has been released as open source software under the Apache 2.0 license.
Though the IndexTank technology is impressive, “the team behind it was likely the most attractive aspect to LinkedIn.” IndexTank was started by former Inktomi engineer, Diego Basch. According to the GigaOM article “IndexTank, A Hosted Search Startup Launches” the platform produces fast yet accurate results by “looking at a document and treating constantly changing elements of a page differently from the static content. It then uses memory (and not storage) to store these changing-parts of the document.”
It will be intriguing to see how open source IndexTank is used. Host search systems such as IndexTank and Blossom which is used by Beyond Search have become an invaluable tool for both private and public websites and have become tricks of the trade.
April Holmes, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Social Media Analytics: What are Industry Leaders Doing?
January 23, 2012
Social media analytics are vital in today’s business world because it allows companies to provide personalized customer service and improves brand and reputation in easy-to-find profiles.
Text Analytics News recently partnered with Useful Social Media to publish a series of interviews with experts in the field of Social Media Analytics. The first installment focuses on digital research and what leading organizations are doing in the area of social media analytics.
Social Media Analytics Expert Interview Series: Part 1” is conducted by the Chief Editor of Text Analytics news, Ezra Steinberg. The interview panel includes: Dana Jacob, Sr. Manager of Social Media Insights & Analytics, Yahoo!; Judy Pastor, Principal Operations Research Manager, American Airlines; Tom H. C. Anderson, Managing Partner, Anderson Analytics (OdinText); Usher Lieberman, Director Corporate Communications, TheFind; and Marshall Sponder, Founder, WebMetricsGuru. A couple of intriguing questions and responses from the interview follow:
“USM: What parts of the business (CRM, Research, CS, HR etc.) do you think can benefit most from social media analytics?
Jacob (Yahoo!): ‘Every part of the business can benefit from social media analytics, but the needs and focuses vary. For marketing, social media analytics provide measurement of campaign effectiveness, brand image and association, and reactions to marketing messages. For product teams, social media could provide insights into users’ mindset as to why they use one brand or type of product versus another, and could help uncover unmet needs in the market place. For the research function, social media is becoming an important data source to compliment traditional market research.’
USM: What skillsets do you feel are most critical in a social media analytics department?
Sponder (WebMetricsGuru): I think having an industry knowledge is important to the social analytics department within an organization and here’s why: Social Data, by its nature, is mostly unstructured (some have said that 90% of the social data is ‘unstructured’) and it takes a lot of additional work to provide meaning to the data in context to what a client actually needs.’
The interview focuses on the importance of social media analytics and how to integrate, and many organizations would be benefited by considering the ideas and opinions provided by these industry leaders. The full interview can be found here and can give insight on developing a social media analytics department and leveraging social media for clients. Before gobbling the social media analytics Cheetos, be sure to check out what constitutes a valid data set.
Andrea Hayden, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
IBM Docs Beta Now Available
January 23, 2012
IBM shouts, “Me too, me too!” Well, not literally, but ZDNet reports, “IBM Readies Answer to Google Docs and Office 365.” A beta version of IBM’s cloud-based document editing tool, IBM Docs, has officially been launched. Though it is similar to Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office 365, it does have a security feature that they don’t. Writer Daved Meyer explains:
It has a feature to assign specific sections of a document to key staff for editing. . . . In addition, businesses can set security levels for certain sections of a document, so only employees with that clearance can see sensitive information. This feature is undergoing testing with one of IBM’s government customers, according to [IBM product manager Jeanette] Barlow.
IBM Docs is part of the LotusLive cloud platform, soon to be known as the IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business. Hmm, interesting change; it seems the company noted the popularity of everything “social.” I wonder how long before the word is out of vogue. A few years, tops?
The final product is expected to be finished later this year, but you can check out the beta here. The echo of “Me too” will be audible.
Cynthia Murrell, January 23, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Crowdsourcing a Taxonomy: Useful or Useless?
January 18, 2012
We vote for useless.
However, the TopCoder blog recently shared an article that breaks down Crowdsourcing into four categories and combines real world examples within the defined taxonomy they are offering. The post is called “Why the Taxonomy of Crowdsourcing Can Not Categorize Software Development.”
According to the article, there has been a push to categorize what Crowdsourcing is which can be a good thing. However, the blog found that for software developers like TopCoder this can be very difficult to do.
The article states:
As we read through the aforementioned crowdsourcing.org article, it struck us that a taxonomy such as this would have a very hard time categorizing what TopCoder accomplishes. You may or may not know what we do. Through our global competitive community of more than 321,000 professionals – we don’t often use the term crowd – we create innovative software, algorithms that optimize business and scientific solutions and graphical digital assets. The further we studied the 4 different categories presented by Crowdsourcing.org, the more we realized that TopCoder competitions fit into all four categories presented.
If TopCoder feels this way, we wonder if other companies will find crowdsourcing a taxonomy to be a flop as well. There are useless taxonomies which do little to assist findability. Then there are ANSI standard taxonomies which work just for folks who understand Boolean, take care to formulate search strategies, and enjoy “real” research. Most of the world prefers the “slap in a word” or “take what the service delivers” approach. Sigh.
Jasmine Ashton, January 18, 2012
Google Plus Desperation Marketing
January 12, 2012
The reaction to Google Plus makes clear the lack of understanding that exists about pervasive online products and services. I am cranking away on my Enterprise Technology Management column, a for fee task, but I had to take a moment to offer some observations on the hurricane of hoo-hah which is raging.
Navigate to “Google Likely to Face FTC Complaint over ‘Search Plus Your World‘”. The story does a good job of explaining the new servicer in a way that appears to make sense to a person who uses online but does not understand its imperatives; to wit:
Google calls the new feature rolling out to users of its English-language search engine “Search Plus Your World.” It blends information such as photos, comments and news posted on its Google+ social network into users’ search results. It mostly affects the one in four people who log into Google or Google+ while searching the Web. Those users will have the option of seeing search results that are customized to their interests and connections, say, a photo of the family dog or a friend’s recommendation for a restaurant. Google has been working for years to create a personal search engine that knows its users so well it delivers results tailored to them. It’s also trying to catch up to social networking giant Facebook, which, with more than 800 million users, knows its users far better than Google does. But critics contend Google, a laggard in social networking, is using its dominance in Internet search to favor its own products and take on its chief competitor.
Like many of the other posts from “experts” and pundits, a number of assumptions operate to characterize Google’s actions are controversial, limiting, or designed to have quite specific consequences for users, competitors, and stakeholders.
My view is based on the research I conducted from 2001 to 2008, the period in which the bulk of my Google work took place. If you are curious about my monographs, there are descriptions of these publications at this Infonortics’ link for the Google Trilogy.
First, once a company captures a “place” in online, the successful service acts like a magnet. An unsuccessful service in the same space pulls marginal users at first and then “pumps” those users into the primary place. Google was an early entrant in social with Orkut. For reasons which I am not at liberty to discuss, that service did not capture a “place”. MySpace did but failed to respond to the Facebook approach. As users flowed to Facebook, the Orkut, MySpace, and other social services began to amplify the Facebook service. The result was the steady expansion of the service despite its flaws. As those who have watched a service benefit from the competitors’ amplification of the dominant service, there is little which can be done to halt the growth. Facebook, like Yahoo in directory services and Google in traditional Web search demonstrated, the new service surges and then has its own life cycle. Not even shooting oneself in the foot or regulation can stop the expanding service from becoming a monopoly. Facebook has achieved that position and it will eventually decline. For now, Facebook, like it or not, is the social focal point. Google has limited choices. One of its options is the walled garden and taking tactical actions that will get Google back into a growth position in the disputed “space.”
Second, when a competitor tries to capture the number one position in a new space, the work we have done over the last 30 years suggests:
- The maximum market share which the tactical actions can yield will be about 60 percent of the leader’s market share. Usually, the share is much less. Facebook, therefore, is not likely to be significantly affected in the short and mid term by Google’s or any other competitors’ action. Facebook is at greater risk of making errors in judgment related to management, money, and technology than what Google or any other competitor does. So Google is under pressure and Facebook is cruising.
- The dominant service benefits from the added visibility to high profile tactical moves create. It would not surprise me if Facebook benefits from Google’s actions related to expanding its walled garden, getting into he said, she said arguments with services like Twitter, and its senior management making statements which throw dry logs on a raging digital marketing fire. In short, Google is helping out Facebook if our research is on the money.
Imagine how difficult it must be for Google to be largely excluded from social services. Now consider that the focus of Google is upon capturing a space which may be unobtainable. Do you expect Google’s thinkers to find a checkmate type of solution from the company’s recent tactical actions? I don’t. I think Google is trying to find a solution, not implementing a solution.
Finally, Google is now in a precarious positions. As I write this, the search services from Yandex.ru and Yandex.com are often more relevant than those delivered by Google’s service. The Yandex technology like Baidu’s and Jike’s shares some characteristics with Google’s. The shift in precision and recall at Google is a direct result of manual and automatic adjustments to the advertising imperative that keeps Google in revenue growth mode. Services which focus on precision and recall deliver results which our research indicates are more relevant when measured by traditional information retrieval yardsticks. Google, therefore, is now at increased risk of a thrust at its core business by capable, technically adept competitors. Little wonder why some have reported that Google is sending mixed signals or that Google’s management is engaged in healthy discussion about what to do a situation which simply did not exist when Google grew due to the inattention of its competitors in 1998 to 2004 and in 2006 to 2007 when there was zero significant awareness of the “legacy” of the Google method. Now the “legacy” is part of Facebook’s and other competitors’ equipment for living. Google is in an unfamiliar position. As I have learned in my own online work, the unfamiliar translates to an increased likelihood for acting with a certain blindness. One can get hit by a very loud, very large, and very slow moving bus when one is blind.
Net net: Google is at a turning point. The evidence is the discussion about Google Plus and its walled garden approach, the spectrum of commentary about what is a quite predictable, if ill considered innovation from Google, and from the comments made by Google’s competitors.
Because online services, if they grow to more than 65 percent of a particular market, naturally become monopolies. Management will take credit for this success, but it is often inevitable, not the result of a brilliant executive decision. Online monopolies chug along and then—boom—arrive and get noticed. A recent example is the Apple iTunes, iPhone, iPad situation.
I want to see how the power flows from centroid to centroid in dataspace. The physics of information permit behaviors which are difficult to predict and have unforeseen consequences. One consequence: desperation marketing. She has swept in with Google Plus I submit.
Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Is PLM Destin to Collide with Social Media?
January 12, 2012
Companies are clamoring to reach millions, if not billions, through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and their counterparts. However, there is a debate (probably on Twitter) as to how product lifecycle management (PLM) and social media fit together. The To-Increase Blog takes a look at “PLM Integation With (Wait for It…) Social Media Technology.”
The blog, which turns to Siemens’ Social Media in PLM presentation at COFES 2009 as a source, agrees that an airplane will not be designed on Facebook, but there are other social media aspects to take advantage of.
Siemens presentation goes on to discuss the concept of social computing, and how these concepts could apply to product development. For instance:
- A ‘Tweet’ could be equatable to an instant communication of a design challenge
- A ‘comment’ could be equatable to shared, public feedback on design issues or concepts
- A ‘news feed’ could be equatable to progress issues or statuses
Social media and PLM technologies really are very similar. For example, Inforbix’s technological solutions were inspired by a need to connect multiple pieces of data located in different places together. Inforbix’s ability to interconnect data and share it with people throughout the company looks a lot like the social networking structure. PLM and social media have already started to intersect – maybe because they are more similar than people think.
Jennifer Wensink, January 12, 2012
Googzilla Gets Social
January 11, 2012
I scanned the “official” line of Google’s most recent social play. I flipped through the long list of comments, views, opinions, etc. My reaction? What’s the big surprise. Here’s an anchor post: “Antitrust+,” which appeared in Parislemon. The main idea seems to be that pundits recognize Google, an outfit I called Googzilla back in 2005, is doing the beaver thing. (The notion of Googzilla originated from my research which revealed that Google believed that its “system” would provide the underpinnings for most business processes. Therefore, search was the new infrastructure. When I used this reference in a talk in London, the Googler on the panel with me said, “Cool.” Googzilla is just a big beaver, doing its beaver thing.) You may recall the adage, “Beavers do what beavers do.” Put the beaver in the kitchen of the Cast Iron Grill in Harrod’s Creek, Kentucky, and the beaver starts building a dam. Why? That’s what beavers do. Easy to predict because beavers do their thing. Here’s evidence of the Google-beaver similarity:
Google is using Search to propel their social network. They might say it’s “not a social network, it’s a part of Google”, but no one is going to buy that. They were late to the game in social and this is the best catch-up strategy ever. Given that it’s opt-out, I’m just not sure that this is all that different from Microsoft bundling IE with Windows.
Google is doing the social thing, not because Google is social. Google is doing social in order to remain relevant to the Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn users. In these systems, content from humans is perceived to be more accurate, less biased, and generally more useful than a list of results in which ads, content, red herrings, and even malware lurk. Hey, some users seem to think, the social information is just “better.” When the user is looking for a short cut, getting mis- or dis-information from a “friend” is probably a better bet than taking what a non-social system generates.
Beavers do what beavers do. Why does one expect the beaver to build a computer when beavers build dams.
My view is that most of the free content available on the Web is dicey stuff. Most users today—including recent library school graduates—lack the skills to determine accurate content in most topic areas, distorted content with bent or shaped “facts”, content with mixed semantic or sentiment coloring, and the most relevant document for a particular query.
In short, “beavers do what beavers do” applies to Google, but the adage also applies to users who take what systems give them because advertisers and other funding sources foot the bill. Ask yourself these questions:
- When I am looking for information, I consult multiple commercial databases, review a representative selection of the documents, and make judgments about which documents warrant further investigation?
- When consuming results from any free online system, do I routinely verify facts by looking for another source which can verify the data in which I have an interest?
- When accepting “hits” from predictive systems, I run the same query on another predictive system and evaluate the outputs?
I know from information gathered as recently as last week, that even among recent library school graduates that few, if any, perform these actions.
So Google is getting social because:
- Facebook and other “real” competitors are nibbling into Google’s revenue growth system. In 2006, Google had essentially zero competitors. Today, Google is in an uncomfortable position. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and even the once presumed terminal Microsoft are posing problems, big problems. Google’s management is responding with “me too” solutions in the hopes that sheer imitation will solve the competitive gap problem. The beaver is doing what the beaver does.
- Google’s gravity free run is now carrying the ballast of staff retention. With the big paydays coming to employees of pre-IPO companies, 13 year old outfits don’t have that old hiring magnetism any longer. As a result, Google cannot innovate and disrupt. Google is now in the imitate and disrupt mode in my opinion. Aging beavers do what aging beavers do; that is, look for short cuts.
- Google must push through increasing friction. The resistance is coming from regulators who can be “managed” but that takes time, mental resources, and effort. No problem but with legal hassles on every continent except Antarctica, Google finds the legal tar getting harder. Other factors bumping up the coefficient of friction at Google are the cut backs, the about faces, and the multi-front product and service wars the company is fighting. Even beavers grow careless. I saw a squashed on on the way to the post office yesterday.
Wow, I bet everyone using social media for information wishes that the traditional method of research were back in vogue. Online services reflect the user. In short, beavers do what beavers do, and today beavers don’t do “get your hands dirty” research. How inefficient! Let’s get social to find the “truth”. That works?
I find Google interesting and one can make its public search system deliver high value results. However, most online users just accept what the system outputs. When I was younger, I worried that commercial online services like Dialog and LexisNexis would manipulate results to suit their corporate purposes. As risky as placing trust in a commercial online service may be, Dialog and LexisNexis made no effort to filter the content generated by commercial database producers. In fact, the systems made it possible to run a query across multiple commercial files using the 411 command or to run comprehensive searches across a corpus of third party content. It took time and effort to grind through these outputs, but the effort would yield insights, suggestions for further research, and often make visible unintentional or factual errors. In our Business Dateline database, we went so far as to include post publication corrections to the full text article. The idea was to make it clear that even commercial publishers make mistakes, often really big ones.
Today, the online consumer is getting exactly what the online consumer wants. The content finding systems are not built to deliver accurate, unbiased results. The majority of online users want answers, not the time consuming, intellectually exhausting task of figuring out the provenance and accuracy of information. Who wants to do library research and mind numbing data analysis. I want the equivalent of ESPN Newscenter so I “know” what happened in sports. Who has time to watch the games? Why read “long form” content when one can snag information via Flipbook and Pulse?
So let’s knock off the worry about Google and its incursions into social. Put that effort into performing rigorous searching. When the users shift from taking spoon fed, baby food content to more substantive fare, then Google as well as other online services will adapt.
Perhaps this type of sign should be posted on search result pages from ad supported online research services? Image source: http://www.graphicshunt.com/funny/images/stupidity-13135.htm
Right now, Google is doing what beavers do. Users are doing what users do. Hard work, fact based analysis, and exercising judgment are not driving online. Distraction, ease of use, easy, fast, and fun information access is driving beavers into a frenzy.
Beavers do what beavers do. One can’t change Mother Nature. Complaining about Googzilla is pretty much a waste of energy which can be better spent with more rigorous research. Wow, that will be popular with today’s “average” user looking for pizza in all the wrong places.
Stephen E Arnold, January 11, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com, a Web site run by information professionals
Digimind Develops Social Media Solution for the Enterprise
January 11, 2012
Social media has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, be it personal or professional. The fact that anyone can leave a negative comment and blast it around the world in mere seconds means that companies need to engage with those individuals in an online forum.
According to the recent PR Web news release “Digimind Launches Social Media Engagement Solution,” intelligence and web based monitoring solutions provider Digimind announced the launch of a new social media harnessing agent for the enterprise called Digimind Engagement.
According to the article, Digimind Engagement enables organizations to utilize the power of social media and manage their online communities. It allows community managers, PR professionals and intelligence practitioners to track, measure and engage on blogs, forums, discussion boards and social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Patrice Francois, co-founding Director of Digimind said:
We are excited about helping businesses to revolutionize their social media strategy through a comprehensive suite of monitoring, analysis and engagement tools. Digimind Engagement is vital for companies who take their online reputation seriously and want to identify and manage risks as well as new sales opportunities. Our clients will also benefit from having on-demand access to real-time insights and analysis capabilities so they can respond quickly and effectively in the event of a crisis situation.
By finding a way to harness the previously unregulated created by social networking sites, Digimind Engagement is one of the products transforming content management as we know it. What happens if social content is filtered or censored? Interesting question.
Jasmine Ashton, January 11, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
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