Google Buzz Gmail Fails Against Facebook & Twitter
Google’s recent attempt to crack the social networking market comes courtesy of an ill-conceived service titled Google Buzz. The idea is that that Buzz provides similar status updates, and shared links, and so on, right inside of your Google email account. Of course, it is this very concept that dooms Google Buzz to failure, and casts a wide shadows of doubt upon the company’s once legendary ability to understand what users want and deliver useful innovation to the web.
Google Buzz Flaw
The primary flaw with Google Buzz is, ironically, the feature that the company is most proud of, it’s tight integration with Google Mail.
The privacy advocates have thrown up a hundred red flags as Google rolled out Buzz, and the company seemed a bit unprepared for the backlash. More tellingly, it seemed to be completely caught off guard by the problems that were pointed out, as evidenced by the numerous changes it made to the platform just days after it was unveiled.
The only explanation is that Buzz was built by Google, inside of Google, by Googlers, who are advanced and dedicated users of all things Google. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, except for when that it means that "within Google" is no longer in sync with the world outside of Google. Of course, a ten-year Google employee has no problem linking together all of his Google services. He’s probably been doing it through other means for years. Likewise, he is only too happy to have another way for friends, family, and co-workers to find all of this stuff that he put out there on the Internet for all to see.
However, out here, in the 99.99999999% of the world that is not inside of Google headquarters, we have lives that are not universally linked. Most people have families, friends, co-workers, co-workers who are friends, colleagues who are acquaintances, but not necessarily friends, bosses, ex-girlfriends, and ex-boyfriends, and ex-wives and ex-husbands. Some of us have kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids. Likewise, some of us have parents, grandparents, and maybe even great-grandparents. For each of these groups of people, there are undoubtedly sub-groups, ranging from conservative to liberal, political to non-political, religious and not, those who enjoy British humor and those who think it is stupid, and on, and on, and on.
The point of all this is that in our lives we are not interested in blending all of these layers together. The Wednesday drinking buddy would laugh hilariously as the cartoon we found, while the dad from our kid’s play dates would be horribly offended. Surely, this is the point of lists and groups, but there is more.
Email vs. Social Networking or Gmail vs. Facebook
Which brings us to the fundamental misunderstanding that makes Buzz a non-starter. Who we email, and who we tweet, update, and share with, are not the same.
The super-techie types and the super-marketing types may insist that the power of social networking websites like Facebook and services like Twitter comes from being able to interact with your whole network all of the time. However, the vast majority of those of us who make up Facebook’s 400 million users are neither.
We only link to certain friends and contacts. We shudder when our Great Aunt Matilda sends us a friend request. We don’t want our contact list to be our friends list.
In other words, while my Google Address Book bursts at the seems with people I met at a conference two years ago, and who from time to time, I do send emails too, I am not interested in those people seeing pictures of my kids, my new barbeque, or where my tickets are for Buffs home games. Frankly, I’m not interested in hearing about those things from them either.
If Google wants to play in this space, they have to acknowledge what everyone else has already figured out. The web is not all just one big thing. That’s why social networking is often called Web 2.0. It is different than the "regular" Internet of websites, searches, and emails, and we like it that why.
Incidentally, if it is any consolation to the search engine king, this same concept is why, for all of its attempts and numerous re-designs, Facebook search and Facebook email is doomed to failure for anything outside of the Facebook environment. While I might love to hear what my buddy Frank has to say about his new high-definition LCD TV, I don’t care what he thinks about the benefits of knee surgery, spas in Crested Butte, or where to take my children for their birthdays.
Facebook and Google, social networking, and the regular Internet are all different, and never the two shall meet.
Delicious Social Bookmarking and Link Spam
We’ll consider this a micro-blog for now, as I don’t have the time here right at the month end for my freelance writing business to sacrifice the time to a longer post.
How easy do you think it would be for Google and / or Delicious themselves to segregate users based upon how many links they add to their bookmarks that there are zero other users having favorited?
Think about it. Innumerable SEO experts and backlink building strategies all use Delicious and other social bookmarking tools to build links to their own websites, or to their client’s websites. Of course, when 99.9% of those bookmarks are first submitted that particular user is the only one to have submitted that particular favorite webpage.
In order to filter out those throwaway profiles that exist for no reason other than to build self-serving backlinks to their own online pages, a simple algorithm that checked to make sure a specific percentage (say 30% if you were looking to just weed out the worst abusers, or 50%+ if you were looking to really separate the wheat from the chafe) of favorited sites were also favorited by at least one other person (or maybe even 10 other people) would eliminate virtually all of the users who just create a profile in order to link their own stuff.
That would allow you to crawl sites like Delicious without having to worry about giving too much credit to spammy links while at the same time being able to capitalize on the giant crowd sourcing power that runs sites like Delicious.
Of course, you would have to keep such an algorithm secret, which Google, at least, is good at doing, in order to avoid having sneaky Internet Marketing types throw in a good good link every 2 or 3 junk links.
Does Google do this?
How would I (or anyone else) know?
All I know is that it is probably worth it to send in a favorite from time to time that I know has a lot of other favorites out there already in order to make sure I don’t look like one of "them."
It isn’t that I’m particularly spammy, it is just that I don’t really use services like Delicious (Firefox + Xmarks = all the portable bookmarks I need without the lag of being online) and I don’t think that I necessarily should incur any sort of penalty for that fact. So, if you stumble upon (another example of a site that this would work good for) my Delcious bookmarks or Stumble Upon profile, rest assured that in addition to links to a lot of my writing around the web, you will also be sure to find plenty of other links that are used by a lot of people out there.
The best part is, that there is no deception necessary. I only think to links, favorite, bookmark, or stumble my best resources anyway, unless I’m in a feisty mood. So, end the end, I guess it is a win-win for everyone involved.
Phew, 508 words. I guess it isn’t a micro-post after all 
SEO When SEO Wasn’t Cool
Google has forced us to change a lot of what we do. In particular, writers and marketers were forced to dance to a different drummer, one who asked us to do things in a way that was inferior to what we used to do. Convoluted titles (plus title tags with the right keywords) and silly domain names are a couple of examples of things that Google hath wrought.
Another involves branding. Any company that hopes to be successful for the long term needs to think about branding. Branding means distinguishing yourself from others who do, or claim to do, similar things to your company. That is why it is Coke vs. Pepsi, not Great Cola Soda vs. Tasty Cola Soda. Both of the latter would be regarded as cheap generic knockoffs, not high-end brands.
Incidentally, this is one of the best ways to distinguish an ongoing concern with concern for the long-term future from one that just hopes to make a splash on the Internet. Trabach Motors (or whatever) is probably a lot more serious about their future in making cars while Best Top Motor Cars is probably a lot more serious about their website generating cash flow in any way possible.
However, in the last few days, I’ve noticed some things that are search optimized even though they were created before there was such a thing as a search engine, or at least before anyone cared what the search engines were looking for. This post, is dedicated to them.
Search Optimized Brands – Accidentally SEO Ready Brands
- Pur – The water purifier brand kills a handful of birds with one stone. First, it’s very name catches the most probably typo or spelling error. No need to register another domain for that. Also, "pur" is part of the word pure. No doubt, this counts at least a little bit when both pur and pure show up in the website text in a way that seems both natural, and like it exists thanks to "stemming." Finally, pur.com (somebody beat them to it) or even purwater.com would be great domain names, especially if they had been savvy enough to grab pure.com and purewater.com too.
Others Coming
Yes, I have others. I just have to find that notebook. It would help if I developed better organizational skills.
Bing Webmaster Tools Down
Update: The Bing Community has an update. Apparently there was a "glitch" that wasn’t site-wide or global. I guess that means it wasn’t a big deal. Whatever. Maybe someone should monitor their own forums so they know when there is a problem.
Maybe Microsoft isn’t really ready to take on Google yet after all.
After making a big splash with the new search engine Bing, Microsoft has added a few new features, such as the much hyped visual search. Many writers and news stories have declared that Bing’s search results are good. Some have stated that Bing’s results are as good as Google’s search results, though I have yet to find anyone who has said that they are better.
However, there is more to running a search engine than headlines and splashy result. The algorithm that ranks and displays search engine results, often called SERPs, is complicated and in need of constant refinement. The tweaks to the algorithm are necessary both to stay ahead of the so-called black hat SEOs, users who use "tricks" to rank higher than their page deserves, as well as to keep up with the fast every changing state of the Internet. Content displayed on webpages is seldom static and with each new innovation comes newer and often tougher things to index and rank.
The only help a search engine can get in this area comes from the willing participation of the community of webpage developers and website managers in the form of what is often termed white hat SEO. The so-called white hat SEOs cater to the search engine companies by ensuring that certain elements that are useful for indexing and cataloging the web are present on the websites that they run.
Microsoft acknowledged as much when it published a multi-part article on its Bing Community website outlining what elements the company would be looking for in its search algorithm. Much of what is written on this Bing SEO article series is old news because it is very similar to much of what Google already has already stated that it looks for in its SERP rankings. These elements are things like keywords in the title tags, and proper use of semantic web design and coding, like putting other important keyphrases in header tags, preferably in descending order of importance.
But, in the end, doing the right things to help out the search engines can be tricky business. Many helpful elements, such as a website’s sitemap, are technical files that can be ruined by even the smallest of typographical errors. For this reason, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have long provided a set of "webmaster tools" that allows the developers of websites to track various elements of how the search index robots, the search algorithms, and even the search results are affected by the actions they take on their sites.
Microsoft wisely rolled out it’s new Bing Webmaster Tools right away. Unfortunately, they are broken.
That’s right. The most basic of tools provided to webmasters are not functioning on Bing’s search engine. A thread posted in the Bing forum is piling up with webmasters who can’t add their websites to Bing webmaster tools, not because of access issues, or security issues, or anything of the sort, but rather because clicking on the "Add Site" button brings up an error saying the file cannot be found.
In other words, the Bing Webmaster Tools need to use the Bing Webmaster Tools to find out they have a broken link on the Bing Webmaster Tools.
It would be irony, if it wasn’t so stupid.
*
*
