I only recently found out about this so it may have been around for a while now so you might have already heard about it, but I thought it was worth mentioning. Amongst the criticism that Google is receiving about privacy it appears that they have started making in-roads by releasing the dashboard where you can find privacy settings for each google service that you use. It also has links next to each service that take you directly to the privacy settings for that service. It’s interesting to see an overview of everything that you have on Google and it just makes you think about how much of your life they must have stored away. Anyway I recommend you take a look.

It would appear that Twitter might be considering giving away their crown jewels to Google for what I gather to be nothing. By crown jewels I mean their full stream of live tweets. Google would most definitely pay for this I have no doubt (which is why it may seem like a good option to twitter’s investors to claw back some cash) but in the long run its worth every penny to Google. Instead of people going to twitter.com to search for current stuff, they can (and will) just head to Google for everything. During this time Google could pull their finger out and replace it with a system of their own (fairly easily), further relegating twitter into the dustbin of yesteryear.

Twitter has the opportunity to find a nice solution of placing ads within streams. Damn, this could be killer for advertisers – the ability to get a presence within what is happening right now. Nothing has really offered this to advertisers before (well nothing that comes to mind anyway). Twitter’s problem is that they have left the gates wide open to competitors like facebook who have managed to put their entire service around a twittified “live feed” and will no doubt find a way pretty quickly to cash in on it. What has twitter been doing? They could have been experimenting more with monetisation ideas trying to find one that works really well – plus they could (and should) be pushing the boat out and taking a few risks of finding a great solution. You don’t get anywhere by copying the other guy (although I am sure that there are times where it works well). They could come up with something neat, unobtrusive, engaging and most of all lucrative. At the end of the day no one yet has found the perfect solution for this kind of “real time” search and there will no doubt be a better solution than keyword advertising in traditional search.

Google managed to dominate their arena – is everyone else going to let them do the same to theirs? Don’t let yourself just twitter away!

The Time Has Come To Regulate Search Engine Marketing And SEO

If your work or business depends on Search (which is almost everyone) then have a read of the above article. It just goes to show that there may be something in what he says and it backs up what I have been saying about Google for a while now. Google are not bad (no worse than any other company out there to make money) its just that they have too much of a hold on commerce on the internet. Microsoft did (and does) hold a monopoly on OS’s etc but we don’t actually need their software to conduct business (in the strictess sense). You can get other software that does the same job. Google though is the gateway of the internet for the majority of users and through their dominance of search and paid listings they basically have the power to do what they want and guide users in whichever way they see fit. They also have the power to punish those players that do not play by their rules – I am not saying that they do this but they are certainly in a position to be able to. Anyway, read it and see what you think.

As you must know by now Google have announced that they are going to release an OS aimed at the netbook market built around their Chrome browser. It’s a good move because netbook’s are one of the fastest growing segments of the computer industry at the moment. The thing is though I don’t see how Google would hope to beat Microsoft at their own game. If you remember, netbook’s were meant to be Linux machines and at first they were. Cheap and cheerful is what people wanted they said. Figures now say that ~94% of netbook’s have Microsoft Windows. Microsoft managed to completely grab this market from what is a free OS. How did they do this? Because users are more familiar with Windows. People will obviously pay a premium to use an OS that they recognize and can run their apps on. So if they managed to do this how will Google manage to grab those users back with what is afterall just another interface on top of Linux? So this leads me on to what I think is Google’s actual plans.

Google dominate the web. Microsoft dominate the desktop. But Microsoft also have a pretty strong foothold on the web as well and their newly rebranded Bing search engine is gaining more users – no where near Googles but it has still been gaining and is receiving a majority of good reviews. But what happens if Microsoft manage to gain a large enough percentage of the web? What do Google have then? They dont have a major dominance in any other software area, which is another reason why I think they created Android when they did. I believe they are just trying to distract and pee off Microsoft, just enough for them to take their concentration away from the web for a while. Just remember that while you may have all the market the only way forward is to loose users, when you have no market share the only way forward is to gain users. All the while this is chipping away at Google and they need time to sort something out properly. It’s a clever move because it may distract Microsoft’s attention and/or it may work out and they get a foothold on the desktop. The same applies to Android. Microsoft certainly are not dumb and I guess they are fuming at the news, so I am interested in what they can and will do about it.

Also remember that if Google has a cash cow, then Microsoft has cattle.

Update: Google announces hardware and Software Partners

I have just read on el’ Reg that Google has announced who they are going to work with for the hardware to run their new OS. It appears that they have all the big names on the list including Acer, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba. Strangely Dell are missing from that List. They have also announced that Adobe will be a software partner.