The Google+ phoenix rises?

Over the last couple of days, I’ve spotted a few articles on the web that talk about the impending rise of Google+.

‘What?!!’ I hear you say.

Yes, Google+. And I actually believe them. Google, somewhat quietly, launched a feature called Google Author Rank a few months ago. That means that when you search for something on Google, if the author/journalist’s Google+ profile is verified and links to a relevant article, her link will show up first. This is obviously very useful not just for the writer herself but for the general public – verified and more relevant content is given priority above link-baiting sites, which is exactly as it should be.

Google is also slowly, incrementally adding new features that are improving the utility of the site: Communities, for example.

Lots of people, including me, are getting fatigued with Facebook. In the end though, it’s Google’s renewed business focus on search (experiments like Wave being retired as they fall by the wayside) that might lift them above Facebook, because that is what is going to boost usage of Google+. It is a philosophical pivot for them, but has rock-solid business motivations. As this article says:

Google doesn’t own social networking, but it does own search and email (and surprise! new Gmail signups automatically get Google+ accounts). With Author Rank, it’s outsmarting SEO spammers while forcing content producers to use Google+. They may not like it, but the alternative — risk losing influence, isn’t much better.

Google is smart. Very smart. Now if only they could renew the once-vibrant Google Reader community by bringing that back in to the fold.

On @pinterest and points of view

This is pretty interesting: if you type the words ‘thinspiration’ or ‘thinspo’ into the search box on Pinterest, it shows you a warning about eating disorders as below. It is supposed to extend to any words related to anorexia but I tried ‘anorexia’ itself as well as ‘thin’ and they both work. As this article says, clearly they are responding to the increase in the number of people looking for anorexia-related images on the site, but is a half-way house better or worse than going all the way and not showing any images like that at all? I suppose it’s a subjective thing: what’s thin to me may not be to you and so on.

In general though I think sites do have a social responsibility to their users: Google took a stand against piracy and Facebook against employers who request access to prospective employees’ passwords, amongst other things. If services don’t take a stand and have a strong POV on issues they feel strongly about, then they become facilitators, which is much more dangerous both ethically and as a brand.

Story via Mansi Trivedi.

On Facebook’s shaky future..or not

Thought-provoking post on why Facebook, like all networks, is doomed to fade (was their recent drop in US and Canadian traffic the first step?):

Networks have more than a utility based on connections; they also have a shelf life. Our fundamental insight is all those connections can grow or diminish in value at once — based on the context of the network vs. its competitors. Yes, networks rise in value and build gravity to draw masses to their center. But like a planet teeming with life that begins to pollute its own atmosphere, eventually all users long for a fresh start.

Nevertheless, Facebook seem to be continuing to try and innovate: they have a photo-sharing app in the works, and even I was floored by their COO Sheryl Sandberg recently!

The one where I was contacted by a Seinfeld bot

The other day, I randomly tweeted a link about Jerry Seinfeld’s collection of Nike sneakers.

Looking forward to seeing Seinfeld soon, but in the meantime a complete guide to his Nikes (via @kottke) http://bit.ly/fEtmzj—
Anjali Ramachandran (@anjali28) May 25, 2011

Imagine my surprise when a minute later I saw this in response:

@anjali28 I'm sorry, but I can't be with someone whose protege is a hack.—
Seinfeld Tweets (@hellooooonewman) May 25, 2011

I then did a bit of investigating, and discovered that it was a project by Neil Kodner, who built a Seinfeld bot (amongst many other characters!) that auto-responds whenever anyone tweets anything Seinfeld-related. He’s a data geek, and mines everything available to generate a whole host of data related to these bots. Here’s more, from one of the FAQ’s on his site:

For example, since @HelloooooNewman has already sent out over 170,000 replies, I have at least that many incoming tweets mentioning Seinfeld in my logs.  I am able to tell who’s tweeting about Seinfeld, when people are talking about Seinfeld, what they’re saying, and so on and so forth.  I can even tell if certain events, such as the release of a box set or a new event have resulted in an increase of Seinfeld tweets.  For examples of some of the things I’ve done with the twitter data, check out this analysis of Seinfeld Tweets“…

He’s currently looking for Seinfeld quotes for his Newman bot to use, so if you’re a fan then do contribute.

Fascinating stuff. Entertaining too, but you get my point!

President Obama’s Facebook Town Hall

President Obama is conducting a Facebook Town Hall on Wednesday – very cool.

Joke of the day

This is hilarious – an American Democratic Congressman says the iPad “is now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of American jobs.”

Via The New Yorker.

A thought on Twitter

I know the whole point of a public Twitter account is so that anyone can follow you, but I can’t help thinking now and then that it would be interesting if I had the option to fill in a ‘why do you want to follow this person’ button right after I click ‘follow’, so that the person being followed would have some idea of how I got to know about them in the first place (did I chance upon their blog, see them speak at a conference, meet them in person, at an event, and so on). It would also make people more likely to follow me back (and vice-versa, more importantly).

YouTube: how does it make money?

I was wondering how much a masthead (a rich media 970×250 panel) on YouTube would cost the other day.

According to this Business Insider article, the cost for a day is $375,000, based on 45 million views a day. Which makes cost per impression about 0.1 cents. There’s no room for a profit mark-up there, in my opinion, unless you don’t use the CPM calculation criterion.

The company made $1 billion in revenue in 2010, which was up seven-fold from 2007, and 5 years on from its acquisition by Google for $1.65 billion is finally close to breaking even (this recent Fast Company piece is very detailed). I wonder if the $375,000 number factors in the cost of people working on an ad at YouTube (design/coding), because if so that would affect the profit figure (assuming they are by now making a profit). As a colleague of mine said today when we were discussing it though, YouTube gets 45 million views a day irrespective of whether people or brands advertise on it or not, so in a way all of it is profit.

It’s an interesting model. Brand channels, for example, are free, but brands have to spend a minimum of $40,000 (£25,000) on advertising on the site (there are different ways to split this cost: advertising on AdWords and the Google Display Network for example).

Also, there must be a tiered way of calculating the cost of an ad depending on the size of the ad and its location on the page, just like, for example, a mall would charge different stores based on whether it’s in a prime location in the front or tucked away at the back.

It really looks like the monetization team at YouTube is hard at work behind the scenes though. Today, they’ve announced YouTube Next and Next New Networks to drive profitability as much as they can through partner relations, and just a couple of weeks ago, there were rumours (promptly quashed) that they were planning to test a movie-streaming service in the UK.

I’d love to look at the operations from the inside!

User engagement

I use Google Analytics a fair bit at work, and have been mulling over the question of how we can really define user engagement for ages. Today I found a rather good answer on Quora, funnily enough by one of their own Product Designers. My own answer typically is time spent on site, but I realise that isn’t good enough because you can have a page open and not really be interacting with it much; indeed you may be looking at another open tab. Whereas if you see multiple visits over a sustained period of time, that’s a much better indication of whether someone is really motivated to visit your site or not, and therefore engaged with it, even if he or she does not leave comments and so on.

If I had to live with just one user engagement metric, it would be Visitor Recency.

Visitor Recency measure how frequently your visitors return to your site. Specifically in Google Analytics, it looks at what percentage of your visitors come back each day, every other day, each week, etc. The reason I like this metric is that it’s crucial for building a meaningful web product, and it’s almost always a positive signal. If someone comes back to your site regularly each week, or even better each day, it means you’re becoming a regular and important part of their life. The problem with any other single metric is they can be the result of positive or negatives changes to your product:

Visits & pageviews are susceptible to all sorts of external factors, like SEO, SEM, press, seasonal traffic swings, etc. Bounce rate is dependent on the type of traffic you recruit, going up with things like SEO/SEM and down with directed traffic. Time On Site and Pages/Visit are good, but will oscillate with design changes, e.g. paginating long text articles will increase Pages/Visit without being any better for your site.

Ultimately the best indicator I’ve found of creating a truly great experience is whether people want to do it again. And again. And again and again as part of their daily routine. Visitor Recency is the best way to measure that.

*A number of caveats: Of course, to get a full idea of a site’s engagement you need a battery of metrics, not just one; My answer is for sites that don’t sell products, so I’m ignoring anything like “Conversion to Purchase”; I’ve restricted my set of choices to those available in Google Analytics, so as not to give some crazy, derived, business-specific metric, though that may be right for you…

As Joel Lewenstein points out, I’m not saying this one measure in Google Analytics is sufficient to track user engagement, but without getting into a complex equation, I think this is a good solution. I’m not the biggest fan of quantifying user engagement in terms of page views and unique visits due to the potential to skew results with SEO and the like, and this to me is a suitable middle path.

How to build an online character

Been meaning to post this for a while now. Marcus wrote up a case study of how he went about building @JacktheT. I feature in it. Yup. It was a very memorable day, as Marcus said – he freaked out my whole office, who thought I was in mortal danger. Ah, the joys and weirdnesses of digital media!

View this document on Scribd